Bye bye, baseball

"It breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone."

-Bart Giamatti

Congratulations, Giants! We'll see everybody next spring.

Photo by Luanne Dietz, The Chronicle / SF

Sunday Funnies

This will make more sense if you know about this.

Two open letters on the topic of politicians and rape

As you no doubt know, the issue of rape and of pregnancies resulting from rape have been in the news. I've seen two truly excellent and thoughtful responses to this issue and I didn't want them to get lost in a Various and Sundry post.

These are both in the form of open letters to politicians, and both begin by warning that these are likely to be triggers for anyone who has experienced sexual violence. With those caveats in mind, I highly encourage you to read both of these:

The first, from the perspective of a rape survivor and theologian, is a compelling piece illustrating how politicians on both sides of the political spectrum are not helping the conversation and especially are not helping anyone who has experienced rape. I was especially impressed by the tone of the comments following the post. 

The second is an amazing satirical piece written from the point of view of a rapist. Trust me, it's worth a read.

Sunday Funnies, October 21

 Many more photos from (and I am not making this up) the 22nd annual Tompkins Square Park Halloween Dog Parade can be found here.

Various & Sundry, Education, Happiness, and two F words

A few quick items for your enjoyment and edification:

For example, students do a good job of evaluating their teachers. A company has developed a survey that seems to give pretty robust data on which teachers do a good job and which ones are struggling.

The survey did not ask Do you like your teacher? Is your teacher nice? This wasn’t a popularity contest. The survey mostly asked questions about what students saw, day in and day out. 

The results also fascinate me:

Of the 36 items included in the Gates Foundation study, the five that most correlated with student learning were very straightforward:

 1. Students in this class treat the teacher with respect.
 2. My classmates behave the way my teacher wants them to.
 3. Our class stays busy and doesn’t waste time.
 4. In this class, we learn a lot almost every day.
 5. In this class, we learn to correct our mistakes. 

 When Ferguson and Kane shared these five statements at conferences, teachers were surprised. They had typically thought it most important to care about kids, but what mattered more, according to the study, was whether teachers had control over the classroom and made it a challenging place to be. As most of us remember from our own school days, those two conditions did not always coexist: some teachers had high levels of control, but low levels of rigor.

Isn't that interesting?

Another insight I appreciated: there's nothing wrong with happiness. David Lose writes about how often Christians seem to denigrate happiness as vastly inferior to joy. But as he points out (not in these words), it's not that one is superior to the other; they are simply different things. There is no need to turn up one's nose at happiness.

Jennifer Weiner wrote an incredibly moving meditation on the F word - fat. Highly recommended.

And on another F word - fashion -, I have to admit I love this picture of Salma Hayak owning the sidewalk. You know what? It makes me happy. Enjoy.

Sunday Funnies, October 14

This made me laugh until I had tears running down my face.



If you can't see it on your feed, click here.

Forgiveness

There's too much going on for me to blog about this the way it deserves, but I wanted to post a couple of things related to forgiveness. I'm still pondering these, so not much commentary. If you have brilliant things to say to tie these together, please do!

First, an obituary for Eric Lomax, tortured by the Japanese during WWII. Many years later, Lomax found a picture of the Japanese interpreter, Takashi Nagase, who had been involved in his torture.

For two years Lomax did nothing. Then he obtained a translation of Nagase’s memoir, which explained how shame had led the interpreter to create a Buddhist shrine beside the death railway. Patti Lomax then wrote to Nagase, enclosing her husband’s photograph and suggesting that perhaps the two men could correspond. She asked: “How can you feel 'forgiven’, Mr Nagase, if this particular Far Eastern prisoner-of-war has not yet forgiven you?”

You'll need to read the obituary to find out what happens. (Or you can wait til next May when Railway Man is released as a film staring Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman.)

But I was struck by that notion that you cannot feel forgiven if the person you have wronged hasn't forgiven you.

That same day I saw a video of Brene Brown, talking about going back to church "for the wrong reasons"--to get away from pain. Instead, she found that the church was a midwife, not an epidural. She describes how the dean of her church explained that "In order for forgiveness to really happen, something has to die." She goes on to say that in her research, there are two emotions that people fear the most: shame and grief. "And so, if something has to die in order for forgiveness to happen, and people are deathly afraid to feel grief, then we just won't forgive anybody, because I don't want to feel grief."

As I said: pondering.