Madeleine L'Engle: How 'A Wrinkle in Time' Changed Sci-Fi Forever

http://m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=66705

How 'A Wrinkle in Time' Changed Sci-Fi Forever

Madeleine L'Engle sat in front of her typewriter in the Tower, her private workspace in her family’s isolated, 200-year-old Connecticut farmhouse. It was her 40th birthday—November 29, 1958—and she was at a crossroads. Though she had published five novels since her mid-twenties, she was far from a household name, and lately she was having trouble selling her work. She considered her thirties a “total failure” professionally. “Every rejection slip—and you could paper walls with my rejection slips—was like the rejection of me, myself, and certainly of my amour-propre,” she wrote. While her career floundered, her husband had temporarily given up his acting career and started running the local general store.

Now, her latest manuscript, The Lost Innocent, was out with a publisher. Two editors were enthusiastic, another “hated it,” and a fourth was still to be heard from. At midday, her husband called. He had gotten the mail. The book had been rejected.

The blow felt like “an obvious sign from heaven,” she wrote, “an unmistakable command: Stop this foolishness and learn to make cherry pie.” L’Engle covered her typewriter, vowed to abandon it forever, and walked around the room, sobbing.

Then, suddenly, she stopped crying. In her despair, she realized she was already considering turning this moment into another book—one about failure. She would write. She had to write. Even if she never had another work published. “It was not up to me to say I would stop, because I could not,” she wrote. And the novel that lay around the corner was about something far greater than failure.

In October of 1936, an urgent message had arrived at Ashley Hall, a private girls’ boarding school in Charleston, South Carolina. It was addressed to Madeleine, a senior, and it bore the news that her father, Charles Camp, was ill with pneumonia. He’d recently attended his Princeton reunion, where he appeared the picture of health, but upon returning home to Jacksonville, he’d begun to deteriorate. L’Engle grabbed a trusty copy of Jane Eyre and boarded a train for Florida. She arrived too late to say goodbye.

Her father had traveled the world as a foreign correspondent, worked as a freelance writer and critic, and written mystery novels. The family moved repeatedly: from New York City to France, and then to Florida. At each juncture, L’Engle was sent to boarding schools or placed in the care of a nanny. “My parents had been married for nearly 20 years when I was born,” she wrote in her memoir Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, “and although I was a very much wanted baby, the pattern of their lives was already well established and a child was not part of that pattern.”

Early on, she sought company in books and writing, penning her first story at the age of 5, and at 8 starting a journal. She played the piano and lived in an “interior dream world.” At school, she was the odd girl out. A limp made her bad at sports. Classmates and teachers called her stupid. One teacher accused her of plagiarizing a poem that won a contest (her mother brought in a pile of stories from home to prove she hadn’t). Those experiences, along with her father’s death, left a rift that she would confront again and again in her fiction. From the beginning, her novels centered on teenage girls who don’t fit in. Her work abounds with lost and estranged parents, family conflict, and the trials of young adulthood.

She kept writing while attending Smith College, where she edited The Smith College Monthly (there, things got heated with Bettye Goldstein, the future Betty Friedan, who turned the literary magazine into an outlet for political debate) and published short stories in magazines like Mademoiselle and The Tanager. When asked by her first editors how she’d like her byline to appear, she chose “to be known not as Charles Wadsworth Camp’s talented daughter but rather, in a cleaner victory for her, as ‘Madeleine L’Engle’” (her great-grandmother’s name), writes Leonard S. Marcus in the biography Listening for Madeleine.

After college, she moved to New York City and published her first two novels within a year of each other. She also pursued a short-lived career in acting, winning spots in the Broadway and touring productions of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. On tour, she fell in love with a cast mate, Hugh Franklin, who, years later, would become famous as Dr. Charles Tyler in All My Children. They married in January of 1946 and lived in Greenwich Village (downstairs from Leonard Bernstein) before purchasing a farmhouse in Goshen, Connecticut. They had two children and adopted another, and immersed themselves in the community and their local Congregational church.

It seemed idyllic, but tensions were bubbling. In her thirties, facing repeated rejections from publishers, L’Engle privately wondered if her professional aspirations had compromised her personal life. “I went through spasms of guilt because I spent so much time writing, because I wasn’t like a good New England housewife and mother,” she later wrote in her memoir A Circle of Quiet, “and with all the hours I spent writing, I was still not pulling my own weight financially.” She yearned for proof that her divided attention to career and family had been the right choice. Instead, on her 40th birthday, she got another “no.”

A year later, she went on a 10-week cross-country camping trip with her family. As they drove through Arizona’s Painted Desert, an idea popped into her head. It started with three names: Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Who, and Mrs Which. “I’ll have to write a book about them,” she told her kids.

On a “Dark and Story Night” (L’Engle’s first line winks at English novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s infamous purple prose), a troubled young girl named Meg Murry can’t sleep in the attic bedroom of her family’s big, drafty farmhouse. She goes downstairs to find her younger brother, the genius, mind-reading Charles Wallace, already warming milk for her cocoa. Their father, a government scientist, has been missing for more than a year, and at school, Meg’s classmates tease her about it.

Then, out of the storm appears Mrs Whatsit, who will in time prove to be a celestial being. She shocks Meg’s mother by mentioning a mysterious word: tesseract—the method of time travel Meg’s father was working on before he disappeared. Soon, Charles Wallace and Meg, along with Calvin O’Keefe, a popular boy from Meg’s school, are dashing through time and space with Mrs Whatsit and her two pals, Mrs Who and Mrs Which. Their aim: To combat a darkness threatening to take over the universe and find Meg’s dad, who has been engaged in the same battle.

It’s a fantastical story featuring interstellar travel; alien planets; an evil, disembodied brain; and a world under siege from an unknown force. But ultimately, A Wrinkle in Time is grounded in human concerns that L’Engle knew all too well. “Of course I’m Meg,” she once said. Where the stories of Meg and her author diverge, aside from the interplanetary jaunts and interactions with mystical creatures, is that Meg saves her father. In doing so, she becomes empowered with the knowledge that she can take care of herself, even if she can’t save the world. “Indeed, the crux of the book rests on Meg’s coming to understand that her father cannot save her or Charles Wallace, or make the world a less anxious place,” wrote Meghan O’Rourke for Slate in 2007. “Part of the task she faces is, simply, accepting the evil that is in the world while continuing to battle against it.”

Editors, though, didn’t see what was special about the work. “Today I am crawling around in the depths of gloom,” L’Engle wrote in her journal after one suggested she cut it in half. Time and again, her manuscript was turned down. It dealt too overtly with evil, some editors said. Others couldn’t tell if it was for children or adults. L’Engle loved sharing her rejection story, Marcus writes, “varying the number of rejections she had endured—had it been 26? 36?— with each retelling.”

She told at least two stories about how it was finally accepted: In the most common, a friend of her mother connected her with John Farrar of the publishing company Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Soon she was signing a contract, but with low expectations: “Don’t be disappointed if it doesn’t do well,” they told her. In the second, more dubious version, Farrar was leaving the church where he and L’Engle worshipped when he noticed an envelope containing the manuscript on a pew and, in a publishing miracle, saved it. Finally, in 1962, two and a half years after the book’s inception, it was published.

The following year, A Wrinkle in Time was awarded the John Newbery Medal, one of the most prestigious honors in children’s literature. (When told the news, L’Engle responded with “an inarticulate squawk.”) She would go on to publish, on average, a book a year for the next 40 years. Financially stable from her writing at last, she also felt the professional validation she’d been craving for so long. Looking back at that fateful 40th birthday, she wrote, “I did learn ... that success is not my motivation. I am grateful for that terrible birthday, which helps me to wear glass slippers lightly, very lightly.”

Still, there’s no doubt that she felt euphoric on the night she accepted her Newbery award, even if not everyone present enjoyed the moment. After the speech, the story goes, an acquaintance went into the ladies room, where one of the many editors who had rejected the book leaned over the sink and drunkenly sobbed: “And to think I turned down that manuscript!”

The reception of Wrinkle was far from universally positive, though. It was a weird mashup of genres combining science fiction with fantasy and a quest; a coming-of-age story with elements of romance, magic, mystery, and adventure. There’s a political, anti-conformist message, and at its heart is the importance of family, community, freedom of choice, and, most of all, love. In some ways, there was too much room for interpretation in L’Engle’s themes. Secular critics deemed it excessively religious—L’Engle was a devout Anglican—but religious conservatives, who have repeatedly tried to ban it, argued it was anti-Christian.

The book, published at the beginning of the second wave of feminism, also carried a groundbreaking message: Girls could do anything boys could do, and better. A year later, The Feminine Mystique, written by L’Engle’s former classmate Betty Friedan, would emerge as a platform for the frustrated American housewife, and Congress would pass the Equal Pay Act, making it illegal to pay a woman less than what a man would earn for the same job. To some extent, Mrs. Murry in A Wrinkle in Time is already living the future: She’s a brilliant scientist who works alongside her husband and in his absence, too; later in the series, she wins a Nobel Prize. (Math whiz Meg would grow up to follow similar pursuits.) And Meg, a girl, is able to succeed where the men and boys—Calvin, Charles Wallace, and her father—cannot.

With that character so like herself, L’Engle struck back against the 1950s ideal of the woman whose duty was to home and family (the same expectations that conflicted the author in her thirties). Instead of staying at home, Meg goes out into the universe, exploring uncharted territories and unheard-of planets.

At the time, science fiction for and by women was a rarity. There was no one like Meg Murry before Meg Murry, though she left a legacy to be picked up by contemporary young adult heroines like The Hunger Games’ Katniss Everdeen and the Harry Potter series’ Hermione Granger. Beyond creating this new type of heroine, A Wrinkle in Time, along with Norton Juster’s 1961 book The Phantom Tollbooth, changed science fiction itself, opening “the American juvenile tradition to the literature of ‘What if?’ as a rewarding and honorable alternative to realism in storytelling,” writes Marcus. This shift, in turn, opened doors for writers like Lloyd Alexander and Ursula K. Le Guin. In these fantasy worlds, as in the real world, things can’t always be tied up neatly. Evil can never be truly conquered; indeed, a key to fighting it is knowing that. It’s a sophisticated lesson children thrill to, and one in which adults continue to find meaning.

When asked why she wrote for children, L’Engle would often reply, “I don’t”—her stories were stories she needed to write, for whomever wanted to read them. But she also remembered what it felt like to be young, how endless the possibilities were, real or imagined. If anyone persisted in questioning her, she would sharply inform them, “If I have something I want to say that is too difficult for adults to swallow, then I will write it in a book for children.”

Sent from my iPhone

O HOW POWERFUL IS POSITIVITY REALLY?

http://www.midlife-health.com/blog/2016/8/4/so-how-powerful-is-positivity-really

SO HOW POWERFUL IS POSITIVITY REALLY?

Surely you must have heard this before: Be more positive! Not that most of us don’t already know that life feels better when we have a smile on our face. But sometimes it’s hard, or so we are quick to conclude, to smile. When we’re overworked, tired, sick, out of luck, genuinely unhappy, lost or just feeling lousy for no good reason at all.

We think: First something good has to happen to me, so I have something to smile about. Right?

Well, not necessarily. Actually, let me be clearer: Not really, no.

During my Health Coaching studies at Atlanta’s Emory University one of the many requirements of this intense educational training program was the study, discussion and active implementation of some of Barbara L. Fredrickson’s scientific findings in regards to positive psychology. As future change agents it was deemed immensely important that we understood the profound power of positive emotions.

Barbara L. Fredrickson, Ph.D.  is Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology and principal investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. (A quite beautiful place by the way.) More so she is generally seen as the leading scholar in regards to positive psychology. In short: When it comes to the power of positive emotions she knows her stuff!

What is great about her scientific work is that she has encouraging news for her fellow humans: POSITIVITY, heartfelt positivity that is, is one of the most powerful emotions we can feel.

And for the ones of you who are tempted to give this more thought, there is more: Fredrickson compiled her findings in a truly easy to read book 'POSITIVITY' - 'Top-Notch Research Reveals the Upward Spiral That Will Change Your Life' that is not only entertaining and informative, but quite simply a practical tool-box for all of us who like to get a better grip of life; by my experience something of a priority for most people in midlife and beyond.

What an eye-opener her findings were for me! Although some of the experiences seemed familiar, as for the most part, I have always been a quite positive person. Nevertheless, as even I found out, there is much more POSITIVITY to be experienced, and even more so, much more powerful goodness and happiness to be intentionally generated, if one knows how to make positivity work for oneself.

To do so, the author shares with us the tried and proven “tricks” of how to live a positivity-filled life by making some or all of the strategies part of our routine, like ‘finding positive meaning’ or ‘savor goodness’. And trust me, when I say that the way she suggests we savor goodness is so much more powerful than I ever even dared to reward myself with before her encouragement to do so. And powerful it is!

Besides providing the readers of her book with a set of strategies for the proper pursuit of POSITIVITY, Professor Fredrickson also shares a number of tools that we can use to create the very platform on which we can then apply the strategies for a much more positive way of life for ourselves and others around us.

Lastly, especially for the ones of us, who appreciate an honest evaluation of ourselves every once and a while, there are a number of positivity tests within the book (also opportunities for a before-and-after self-evaluation) that the readers can take during her guided journey to a more positivity-filled life.

In any case, I really benefited from learning about the science behind positive emotions, and I thought you deserve to know about this easy to read scientific page-turner, too.

Finally, in case you’re interested, you will find more detailed information about this book here.

Sent from my iPhone

http://www.fox13memphis.com/news/physician-to-parents-youre-doing-it-wrong/27429538

Physician tells parents, 'You're doing it wrong'

by: Nicole Villalpando, Austin American Statesman Updated: Aug 19, 2016 - 2:32 PM

Exton, Pennsylvania - Family physician, psychologist and author Leondard Sax wants parents to know that they are “raising kids wrong.” The author of “Boys Adrift” and “Girls on the Edge” has written a new book, “The Collapse of Parenting: How We Hurt our Kids when We Treat them Like Grown-Ups.” 

“Most American parents are completely confused and going utterly in the wrong direction,” Sax said. “There’s a collapse of understanding what parenting involves.”

In his book, Sax offers a scenario in which parents and a 6-year-old child, who had a sore throat, came into his office. When he said, “Next I’m going to take a look at your throat,” the mother asked for the child's permission, saying, “Do you mind if the doctor looks in your throat for just a second, honey? Afterward we can go and get some ice cream.”

That led to the child refusing to have the doctor look in her throat to do the strep test and the child having to be restrained to get the test accomplished.

“It’s not a question,” Sax said. “It’s a sentence: ‘Open up and say, 'Ahh.'' Parents are incapable of speaking to their children in a sentence that ends in a period,” he said. “Every sentence ends in a question mark.”

Some parenting experts told adults that they should offer their children choices instead of telling them what to do and parents believed them, he said.

The hierarchy of parent over child no longer exists, he said. Instead of parents exercising their authority because they know what’s best, they are focusing on making children happy and boosting their self-esteem.

“They now see their job as facilitating whatever a kid wants to do,” he said.

Instead, Sax said, a parent's job is to teach children right from wrong, teach them the meaning of life and keep their children safe.

“In doing that job, you’re going to do a lot of things a child won’t approve of and not understand,” he said. Sometimes, you have to be the bad guy.

According to Sax, parents should focus on helping children develop skills such as self-control, humility and conscientiousness, meaning they think of people other than themselves.

Those things are the biggest predictors of future success in adulthood, he said, not education or affluence.

Sax said this is a generation of parents who are spending more time with children than any previous generation. But instead of spending time at family meals, this generation is spending time shuttling children from one extracurricular activity to the next or spending time doing their work for them.

“It doesn’t help to spend more time with kids if they are spending it in the wrong ways,” Sax said.

In his book, Sax cites numerous research studies that found that a lack of parental authority is why obesity is on the rise, why more kids are on anti-anxiety and attention deficit disorder medication, why children are have a culture of disrespect, seem fragile, and why American children no longer lead the world in education.

He offered some solutions:

Have family meals at home and make that a top priority. “You have to communicate that our time together as a parent and child is more important than anything else,” he said. One study found that for each additional meal a family had together, the children were less likely to internalize problems such as anxiety or externalize problems such as skipping school. It also helped children develop good nutrition habits, lessening the obesity problem.

Take screens out of the bedroom. This includes cell phones, computers, TVs and video games. Kids are chronically sleep deprived, which leads to poor behavior and can even be the reason why kids are getting mental health diagnosis.

Put screens in public places and limit how they are used. This generation lives life in a virtual world. Online friends can quickly become more important than the friends children see in person. They don’t know how to communicate with someone face to face or have outside interests and hobbies. Video games also rewire the way their brains work. And what they post online never goes away. Install software like My Mobile Watchdog, which will share every photo that they take or post with you.

Teach humility. Give lessons that show children that they are not the most important people in the world. They need to be able to see the world through another lens and be able to handle rejection or failure. It really cannot be “everybody gets a trophy.”

Have an alliance between the school and you. If your child did something, don’t approach  teachers or administrators with suspicion and distrust. “Parents swoop in like attorneys demanding evidence,” Sax said. Instead lessons of honesty and integrity should be enforced. That means that a brilliant kid who cheated takes the 0.

Parent what they do. No, your 14-year-old cannot go to a party with college students or to the beach for spring break. No, they will not be at parties where alcohol is served, and you will not be the one serving it. You have to think of worst-case scenarios like drinking and driving, alcohol poisoning and sexual assault, and know that these are not decisions that they are ready to make because they are not adults. They need an adult, and that’s you. And even if their peers’ parents are fine with something, you don’t have to be. “Other parents don’t have a clue at what they are doing,” Sax said. “That’s why what they are doing doesn’t have good outcomes.”

Some of those things, especially if they are new for your family, can be difficult and might be hard to enforce. Sax recommends persistence and commitment.

"Your kids will thank you, not today or maybe not tomorrow, but some day, perhaps."

© 2016 Cox Media Group.

Sent from my iPhone

A PERFECT EXAMPLE OF AN EVANGELICAL MILLENNIAL THAT HAS NOT BEEN PROPERLY EQUIPPED BY THE CHURCH

     By Henry Patino

(See article  referenced below "How Evangelicals are Losing an Entire Generation")

There are good sentiments declared in this text but there are also quite mistaken notions. She said, "But when millennials look back, we see how far our society has come. Evangelicals have warned us against the allure of progressivism, but I’m here to say that we actually like the progress. We actually like that women are on their way to equal pay, we like that you can’t make a racist comment as a public figure and go unnoticed, and we like that there are more female theologians and teachers and professors than ever before in American history. So when you try to pull us back to the “good old days,” you’ll miss us."

That statement makes clear that she is mistaking Progressivism with the word progress. It was not the Progressivist movement that began the woman's suffrage movement but evangelical Christians. It was not the Progressivist movement that led the battle against black slavery, but the evangelical Christians. The problem i have with millennials is their lack of historical knowledge.

Progressivism is not some benign philosophy that promotes progress. It is a collectivist ideology based on atheistic premises. It shall regress religious rights. It shall regress the middle class. It shall bring upon families a tax burden that cannot allow them to proceed forward financially in the future. It will stagnate the economy and keep young people from finding jobs. It does so because their entire premise is the expansion of the Federal Government to give "free stuff." to myopic people that do not understand this: the government cannot give you anything it does not take from you first. The problem is that sooner or later you run out of people to take their money from then the entire citizenry is in one economic level while the oligarchy of the financial elite continue to rake in the billions in interest from the national debt. The IRS becomes their collector and each of us are nothing more than slaves for the elite in power. Socialism/progressivism is the fastest way to fleece the flock.

I would urge this young lady to read a bit of history in order to gain some perspective at the number of human beings that were killed by the Soviet Union and China during the collectivist Revolutions and afterwards as the eliminated any who would oppose their collectivist agenda.

 But this is the fault of our generation. That young lady is an Evangelical Christian that has not been properly prepared to meet the lies of the Great Deceiver. WE DID NOT EQUIP HER WITH APOLOGETICS. She has not been taught the apologetics necessary to read through the lies that are being promoted by the Postmodernist/Progressivist agenda that is pushing for globalism. She is a typical example of why our churches have failed.

And she is correct, we are losing our young generation.

_____________________

http://amygannett.com/2016/07/29/why-evangelicals-are-losing-an-entire-generation/

How Evangelicals are Losing an Entire Generation

by amygannett

This morning I want to throw in the towel.

The morning hustle began as it always does on Friday mornings. I walked the dog, drank the coffee, cleaned the kitchen, and headed for the shower. My phone in my hand, I checked Twitter (you know, because I’m current and all). Usually, my Twitter feed is a conglomeration of Trinitarian debates, quotes by dead theologians, and cute dog pictures. But not this morning. This morning, I had no more than opened the app on my phone and there it was: Wayne Gruedem’s endorsement of Donald Trump.

Maybe you’re unfamiliar with Grudem, but most church leaders and many Christians are not. He wrote the basic systemic theology that has not only been touted among evangelicals as the primary source of Christian systematic theology for the modern day, but it is the 1200-page book that I was required to read in Bible school and seminary – not once, not twice, but three times. Grudem is the head of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, a gathering of Christian leaders that believe in a particular model of gender roles that we call conservative Complementarianism, and work to see that vision come to life in homes, churches, and society. A leader among leaders, he is the Evangelical trump card (pun intended). And this morning he released an article titled, “Why Voting for Trump is a Morally Good Choice.”

Listen, I have been fairly silent on this site about my political views, but here they are: I was raised in a Republican home by politically-aware but not politically-obsessed parents. I was raised to believe that voting was a moral decision but to put my trust and hope ultimately in God and His coming Kingdom. Through college, I, like most, wavered between the social justice of the left and the conservatism of the right. Now, I’m just somewhere in between. I’m not politically passionate, though I’m learning to take interest in local politics. I would consider myself like my parents: politically-aware but not politically-obsessed. Seem fair?

This election has brought people like me, particularly millennials, out of the woodwork. We thought Trump was a bit of a harmless joke at first. With “you’re fired” still ringing in our ears, we thought his presence on the screen would be much shorter lived than his show, The Apprentice. I kept waiting for him to trail off, but he didn’t. In fact, he somehow, mysteriously to me, gained momentum and endorsements. Despite his racial generalizations and telling women they look good on their knees, he only grew in popularity. I moved from disappointed to shocked to disgusted as he garnered the approval of Republican and Evangelical leaders.

Over the last several months, I have lost respect for the Republican party, and I honestly thought that would be the biggest tragedy of this election. But the disappointing truth is this: I’m losing faith in Evangelicals.

And this is frightening. I am an Evangelical. I hold to Evangelical theology. I have attended not one, but two Evangelical schools. But I fear that we’re going to lose an entire generation because of the actions, words, and teachings of some Evangelicals. Including Wayne Grudem.

Different hierarchies of moralism

I have watched many Evangelicals endorse Donald Trump. But Grudem did not give an endorsement. No, he gave a moral imperative. Grudem’s article argues that it is morally constraining on the Christian person to vote for Donald Trump, particularly citing things like Trump’s upholding of religious rights for Christian schools and businesses, support of traditional marriage, and pro-life support of the rights of the unborn. Grudem dismisses accusations of Trump being a racist, anti-(legal) immigrant, and misogynistic. He feels Trump has been misunderstood, quoted out of context, and the victim of an unfair media.

What Grudem effectively does, then, is sets up a hierarchy of morality. He is willing to hold some moral values (religious rights for Christian schools and businesses, support of traditional marriage, and pro-life notions) above others (the equality of races, genders, and ethnicities). All are moral concepts, all require a moral stance, and Grudem has chosen which he prefers over others.

I know he is not alone in this hierarchical approach to morality. We all have things that we prioritize over others for no reason other than the way they effect and affect our lives. But Grudem has chosen to be old guard, predominantly upholding political issues that are less felt by our generation. Now, please don’t misunderstand, it’s not that we don’t think these things are important, but we are currently grappling with other moral imperatives that infiltrate the ebb and flow of our daily lives. Yes, we value the rights of the unborn, but we want leaders that are pro-life in all areas of society. Millennials feel the daily pangs of racial tension, a deep desire for equality for all, and a propensity toward the social justice issues surrounding the refugee crisis.

Evangelical leaders like Grudem are using their political and social weight on issues close to their generation, and are neglecting the moral imperatives to seek justice, peace, and equality for the Black community, the immigrant community, and the refugee community (and a slew of others). My generation will not identify with this. We cannot call a candidate “good,” as Grudem does with Trump, who has made racist remarks. We will not call a candidate “good” who has demoralized and dehumanized women on national television. We will not buy into the hierarchy of Grudem’s proposed morals over others. Because Grudem (and others) are making this hierarchy of morality intrinsically related to the Christian life and theology, we will not stand with them.

The “Good old days” vs. our days

Evangelicals are endorsing Trump by and large because he promises to return our nation to the “good old days.” Trump promises to bring back steel and coal, to return our country to an immigrant-free land, and, with gusto, he promises to make America the world super power it used to be. His campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again,” has deeply resonated with leaders across the spectrum.

But our generation doesn’t quite know what that means. Don’t forget, we grew up during war times. On September 11th, 2001, I was in eighth grade. When the war in Iraq started, I was in high school. Graduation came and many of my high school friends enlisted. I can still remember my friend, Kyle, telling me he had enlisted and feeling this overwhelming sense that we were far too young for all of this. These are the days in which we have grown up. We haven’t known the days of peace and tranquility that older generations reminisce about and desire to return to. It’s not that we don’t think things should change, it’s just that we don’t know a different way.

But war was not the only thing the separated the “good old days” from today in many leaders’ minds. There were many “benefits” of that by-gone era for those supporting a traditionalist view. Women were in the home raising the children without complaint, the Christian feminist movement hadn’t yet touched the churches and immensely inconvenienced pastors who had not had to grapple with these issues in a long time, and the notion of being politically correct wasn’t as demanding on conference speakers, writers, and preachers as it is today. When some Evangelicals look back, they see more tranquil days simply because these things were absent. But when millennials look back, we see how far our society has come. Evangelicals have warned us against the allure of progressivism, but I’m here to say that we actually like the progress. We actually like that women are on their way to equal pay, we like that you can’t make a racist comment as a public figure and go unnoticed, and we like that there are more female theologians and teachers and professors than ever before in American history. So when you try to pull us back to the “good old days,” you’ll miss us.

Nationalism and Christian worship

I remember arguing with a dear Christian friend of mine in college over whether or not he should vote. At the time, I was the student body vice president and we were on a mission to register every student to vote for the coming election (2008). Most students didn’t think much of it, except for one student who really pushed back at the notion of voting. I pulled out my best lines, my most passionate pleas, until he hit me with a one-liner I will never forget: “I am not voting right now because I’m trying to figure out if a Christian can also be a nationalist.”

I remember turning his words over in my mind. It was a very good question to grapple with, and yet one I had never considered. Since leaving college, I find that many (if not most) millennial Christians have answered the question with a resounding “no.” Now, don’t mistake me: most of us, to my knowledge, do not believe that voting and nationalism go hand-in-hand as my college friend once did. But you will be hard pressed to find a millennial nationalist outside of the Republican intern pool. Perhaps it is that international travel is more available to our generation, or that we are living in more diverse communities that celebrate that diversity, but we don’t think America is the only great country, and we certainly don’t think that America is a Christian country.

Evangelical leaders are not just supporting nationalism, but are elevating nationalism to a Christian virtue. Many point back to the founding fathers as Christian leaders in our nation and impress upon us that we must support the constitution and protect our country because it is a Christian thing to do. We have deeply muddied the language between serving our God and serving our country. Forget the martyrs of the faith around the world, posters show us that soldiers make the “ultimate sacrifice.” As Christian millennials, we just can’t buy this. We look over our shoulders at our nation’s history and wince a little. We don’t have a lot of national pride because we are waking up to the immense on-going racism that exists in our nation’s systems, the horrors of early American history, and the tragedies around the world that happen because every country has nationalists. So when you equate nationalism with Christian virtue, we’re out.

Evangelical leaders are going to lose an entire generation of Christians in the wake of our current political and social climate. This is not an article asking millennials to leave Evangelicalism because I believe it can’t be saved, nor is this article saying that Evangelicalism is dead. It also is not a proposal of a useful way forward in this “dumpster fire” of an election. It is a plea for reform. It is a big ask of Evangelical leaders to reevaluate the stakes they have put in the ground and ask if there could be a better, more truly Evangelical way. It’s a request to leaders in our communities to speak out against the evils that surround and are supported by Trump. Because you’re losing us, and we don’t want to be lost.

Win us back, and let’s complete the work ahead together.

Sent from my iPhone

SPURGEON: THE SACRED HAS ABSORBED THE SECULAR

To a man who lives unto God nothing is secular, everything is sacred. He puts on his workday garment and it is a vestment to him. He sits down to his meal and it is a sacrament. He goes forth to his labor, and therein exercises the office of the priesthood. His breath is incense and his life a sacrifice. He sleeps on the bosom of God, and lives and moves in the divine presence.

To draw a hard and fast line and say, “This is sacred and this is secular,” is, to my mind, diametrically opposed to the teaching of Christ and the spirit of the gospel. Paul has said, “I know, and am persuaded by the Lord Jesus, that there is nothing unclean of itself” [Romans 14:14]. Peter also saw a sheet let down from heaven in which were all manner of beasts and four-footed creatures, which he was bidden to kill and eat, and when he refused because they were unclean, he was rebuked by a voice from heaven, saying, “What God hath cleansed that call not thou common” [Acts 10:15; 11:9].

The Lord hath cleansed your houses, he has cleansed your bed chambers, your tables, your shops, he has made the bells upon your horses holiness to the Lord, he has made the common pots and pans of your kitchens to be as the bowls before the altar, if you know what you are and live according to your high calling. You housemaids, you cooks, you nurses, you ploughmen, you housewives, you traders, you sailors, your labor is holy if you serve the Lord Christ in it, by living unto him as you ought to live. The sacred has absorbed the secular.

Charles Haddon Spurgeon

https://acestoohigh.com/2016/08/10/childhood-trauma-leads-to-lifelong-chronic-illness-so-why-isnt-the-medical-community-helping-patients/

Childhood trauma leads to lifelong chronic illness — so why isn’t the medical community helping patients?

When I was twelve, I was coming home from swimming at my neighbor’s dock when I saw an ambulance’s flashing lights in our driveway. I still remember the asphalt burning my feet as I stood, paralyzed, and watched the paramedics take away my father. It was as if I knew those flashing lights were a harbinger that my childhood was over.

At the hospital, a surgeon performed “minor” elective bowel surgery on my young dad. The surgeon made an error, and instead of my father coming home to the “welcome home” banners we’d painted, he died.

The medical care system failed my father miserably. Then the medical care system began to fail me.

At fourteen, I started fainting. The doctors implied I was trying to garner attention. In college I began having full seizures. I kept them to myself, fearful of seeming a modern Camille. I’d awaken on the floor drenched in sweat, with strangers standing quizzically over me. Then, I had a seizure in front of my aunt, a nurse, and forty-eight hours later awoke in the hospital with a pacemaker in my chest.

In my early forties I developed Guillain Barre Syndrome, a neurological autoimmune disorder that causes paralysis from the neck down. I found myself in Johns Hopkins Hospital, on the exact anniversary of my father’s death, in the same hospital wing where he had died, unable to move. I was a few days shy of turning forty-two, the very age at which my dad had passed away.

I recovered, only to relapse, falling paralyzed again. Many of my children’s early memories revolve around my bed, where we played board games and read books.

It wasn’t until I was fifty-one-years old that a physician sat me down and asked me the most important question of my life – one that would lead me to better health than I’d had for decades: “Were there any childhood traumas or stressors that might have contributed to the extreme level of inflammation you’re experiencing as an adult?”

My physician explained that ongoing adversity in childhood leads to a chronic state of “fight, flight or freeze.” Researchers at Yale had recently shown that when inflammatory stress hormones flood a child’s body and brain, they alter the genes that oversee our stress reactivity, re-setting the stress response to “high” for life. This increases the risk of inflammation, which manifests later in cancer, heart disease, and autoimmune diseases like mine.

As a science reporter I was shocked to discover that research linking childhood stress to adult illness began in 1996 with the Kaiser Permanente-CDC Adverse Childhood Experiences Study (ACE Study). Since then, over 1500 peer-reviewed studies have replicated these findings.

The research was stunning. Two-thirds of Americans report experiencing Adverse Childhood Experiences. These include obvious sexual and physical abuse, but also stressors that many consider to be normal — growing up with divorced parents, living with a depressed or alcoholic mom or dad, having a parent who belittled or humiliated you – or simply not feeling as if your family had your back. People who’d experienced four such categories of childhood adversity were twice as likely to be diagnosed with cancer and depression as adults.

One statistic struck home with me: women who’d faced three types of childhood adversity had a sixty percent greater risk of being hospitalized with an autoimmune disease as an adult. Similar links existed between childhood stressors and adult heart disease, diabetes, migraines and irritable bowel disease. Suffering six categories of early life stress shortened one’s lifespan by twenty years.

However, one study of 125,000 patients showed that when physicians acknowledged and discussed patients’ childhood trauma openly, patients enjoyed a thirty-five percent reduction in doctor visits. Validating patient suffering invites patients to address it at last.

Yet, despite twenty years of research linking childhood stress to adult disease, the majority of the medical community acts as if these findings don’t exist.

This August, students will begin training in medical schools across the country. They will be expected to emerge with deep-rooted knowledge about how to help patients heal. But shockingly, only a few medical schools teach students about how childhood suffering influences adult disease. The majority of medical schools leave this science out. Perhaps they fear teaching it will open the door to bringing psychiatry into the exam room.

But shouldn’t physicians consider the whole patient – body and mind – so that they can suggest behavioral health tools that will alleviate both the root causes and the symptoms of disease? When physicians help patients come to the profound revelation that childhood adversity plays a role in the chronic illnesses they face now, they help them to heal physically and emotionally at last.

All disease is multifactorial. Past trauma is one of those factors. I can’t help but think of how my own story might have been different if the medical community had been trauma-aware. What if, after my father’s sudden death, the emotional cost of such a traumatic loss had been validated, and our medical system had offered therapeutic interventions?

It’s been two decades since the research linking childhood adversity to adult illness began. But think of how much money we might have saved in our health care system since then if we considered the role that past trauma plays in one’s current medical condition, instead of waiting a lifetime for it to show up in devastating and difficult to treat diseases that ruin lives for a second time.

According to the CDC, the annual health care cost of adult patients who have a history of early trauma is $124 billion a year. Validating patients’ past trauma isn’t only beneficial for their well being, it translates into fewer tests, procedures, and health care dollars spent.

Statistics tell us that two-thirds of Americans reading these words, including physicians, will recognize that experiences in their childhood still trail after them today, like small ghosts. Fortunately, medical science now recognizes many proven interventions for recovering from trauma, even decades after events have occurred.

We are long overdue for a national awareness campaign — similar to public health initiatives on how seat belts save lives, smoking causes cancer, and hand washing prevents flu — to educate physicians and families on how childhood trauma begets adult illness. Only then can we help those who feel paralyzed by their pasts to achieve the healthy lives they deserve.

_________________

This article first appeared in the Huffington Post. Donna Jackson Nakazawa is the author of Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology and How you Can Heal. You can follow her on Twitter at @DonnaJackNak, or on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/donnajacksonnakazawaauthor.

Sent from my iPhone

I thought you might like to read this. I did. I wish I hadn't... Selah.

http://www.npr.org/2005/08/08/4785079/always-go-to-the-funeral

Always Go To The Funeral

I believe in always going to the funeral. My father taught me that.

The first time he said it directly to me, I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher. I did not want to go. My father was unequivocal. "Dee," he said, "you're going. Always go to the funeral. Do it for the family."

Nubar Alexanian

Deirdre Sullivan grew up in Syracuse, N.Y., and traveled the world working odd jobs before attending law school at Northwestern University. She's now a freelance attorney living in Brooklyn. Sullivan says her father's greatest gift to her and her family was how he ushered them through the process of his death.

So my dad waited outside while I went in. It was worse than I thought it would be: I was the only kid there. When the condolence line deposited me in front of Miss Emerson's shell-shocked parents, I stammered out, "Sorry about all this," and stalked away. But, for that deeply weird expression of sympathy delivered 20 years ago, Miss Emerson's mother still remembers my name and always says hello with tearing eyes.

That was the first time I went un-chaperoned, but my parents had been taking us kids to funerals and calling hours as a matter of course for years. By the time I was 16, I had been to five or six funerals. I remember two things from the funeral circuit: bottomless dishes of free mints and my father saying on the ride home, "You can't come in without going out, kids. Always go to the funeral."

Sounds simple — when someone dies, get in your car and go to calling hours or the funeral. That, I can do. But I think a personal philosophy of going to funerals means more than that.

"Always go to the funeral" means that I have to do the right thing when I really, really don't feel like it. I have to remind myself of it when I could make some small gesture, but I don't really have to and I definitely don't want to. I'm talking about those things that represent only inconvenience to me, but the world to the other guy. You know, the painfully under-attended birthday party. The hospital visit during happy hour. The Shiva call for one of my ex's uncles. In my humdrum life, the daily battle hasn't been good versus evil. It's hardly so epic. Most days, my real battle is doing good versus doing nothing.

In going to funerals, I've come to believe that while I wait to make a grand heroic gesture, I should just stick to the small inconveniences that let me share in life's inevitable, occasional calamity.

On a cold April night three years ago, my father died a quiet death from cancer. His funeral was on a Wednesday, middle of the workweek. I had been numb for days when, for some reason, during the funeral, I turned and looked back at the folks in the church. The memory of it still takes my breath away. The most human, powerful and humbling thing I've ever seen was a church at 3:00 on a Wednesday full of inconvenienced people who believe in going to the funeral.

Sent from my iPhone