Grace to you & peace

 Between leaving full-time ministry and moving to another state, I've worshiped at a dozen or more confessionally reformed/presbyterian Churches over the last few years and have been surprised by how few include the apostolic salutation in their liturgies. For those who'd like a reminder, the apostolic salutation is that bit at the beginning of services when the preacher raises his hand in greeting and says something like "Grace to you and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ." This greeting is modeled after the apostolic practice of beginning their New Testament letters with a salutation on behalf of the God who was inspiring the epistles they were writing.

(The apostolic salutation which is most often used is the one favored by the Apostle Paul, but can have as much variety as does the benediction, or blessing, which concludes the worship service.)

Simple ignorance of the historic practice of the apostolic salutation may explain its absence, but I think another factor could be confusion between it and the call to worship. The call to worship is a sentence (or more) from Scripture which commands the hearers to enter into God's presence and praise him. For those who don't give it too much thought, this divine command may seem interchangeable with a greeting from God.

Of course, even when it's practiced, the apostolic salutation can be confused with the benediction. I have seen it described in a bulletin as "God greets us with a blessing," and many pastors raise both hands when extending it. This is a fairly obvious error, sadly: a statement of greeting is not a blessing unless it contains the word "bless" or some synonym thereof.

Now that I've rather belabored the point and tried the gentle reader's patience, said reader may wonder whether a practice so frequently ignored and so easily confused with other elements of worship really deserves inclusion in every service. It can be supported by any number of arguments, but I am compelled by the nature of the office of Word and sacrament. In 2 Corinthians 5, Paul writes of his pastoral office, which he shares with his coauthor, Timothy, when he writes,

Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. (2 Corinthians 5:18-20)

Over the years, I've come increasingly to recognize the extent to which the minister of Word and sacrament is Christ's ambassador, particularly when leading worship. In prayer, he brings the message of the people to their God, and in preaching he brings the words of God to his people. This, quite obviously, is what ambassadors do. Therefore, the apostolic salutation is the ambassador from the Kingdom of God bringing a word of grace and peace from his King to the hostile world to which Christ the King has laid claim.

This brings to the fore another distinction between the benediction and the salutation. The benediction is a proclamation of God's blessing on his people, and therefore should only be pronounced in the context of Christian worship when the people of God are gathered together. The salutation is God's greeting, and as such it may be given to anyone and everyone. In Luke 2, the angelic messengers announced peace to the world in the birth of Jesus Christ; now Christ's ambassadorial messengers bring greetings of grace and peace through Jesus Christ to the entire world.

Whenever I am acting in my capacity as a minister of Word and sacrament, I greet my hearers with grace and peace from God the Father and our Lord Jesus Christ. After all, I am an ambassador of reconciliation and would be most glad if our encounter led to their embrace of the good news of Jesus Christ and his Cross. I hope all my ambassadorial brethren will likewise return the apostolic salutation to the beginning of every worship service.

Towards a theory of Church names

 I remember the day in seminary when Scott Clark introduced the chapel speaker, a Lutheran pastor whose congregation was called "Beautiful Savior." "Why do the Lutherans have all the good Church names?" Professor Clark asked rhetorically, and I have wondered frequently. Confessionally presbyterian Churches are notorious for pulling from an extremely short list of names. Leaving aside those with geographic or numerical indicators (i.e. "First," "Greater Sandusky"), there's "Covenant," "Faith," "Grace," Trinity" and "Providence." For those hoping to project a softer image, there's "Harvest," "Emmanuel," "Redeemer" or "Hope." Honestly, that's about it. Despite literally years of my campaigning for it, there's still not one "Big Happy Rainbow Church (OPC)."

This relentless monotony makes sense when one considers the place of confessional presbyterianism in the broader ecclesiastical landscape. While that landscape is littered with Lutheran congregations, there's relatively few from the Presbyterian Church in America or one of her sister denominations. When new OP Church plants are launched, an extremely common reason given is that there are no nearby reformed congregations. While a new evangelical Church can just be itself in all its own idiosyncratic glory, any given OPC congregation feels a burden to represent the entirety of the presbyterian and reformed stream of the Protestant Reformation.

This sociological reality prompts a conservative approach to naming. Employing a "traditional" (i.e., "boring") name sends a clear, if unstated, message to the potential visitor: "You can trust us to be safe: nothing too flashy or evangelicalish here! Just good old hymns and reliable Calvinist doctrine!" Even as I've been openly crusading for more interesting names, I am suspicious of the outlier congregations which use them. Before my family recently visited "Means of Grace Church," I couldn't help wondering what they were trying to say and what potential weirdness lay ahead of us. (Thankfully, it was just as boring as any other presbyterian congregation. We all breathed a sigh of relief!)

One obvious solution is to plant so many confessionally presbyterian congregations through vigorous evangelism and discipleship that individual names won't seem so weighty. Unfortunately, that would require leaving the house and talking to people, so it will be a while until we get there. In the meantime, I suggest a new name which should immediately reassure any presbyterian looking for a new Church home: "Boring Conservative Presbyterian Church (OPC)."

The word of the day is "sherd"

I just learned from a footnote on page 83 of The Book that while a "shard" is a fragment of glass, a "sherd" is a fragment of pottery.

Now I finally understand the book of Job.

"Churches," not "Church"

I direct your attention to the Washington Post article, "The sin of silence: the epidemic of denial about sexual abuse in the evangelical church," not so we may discuss its subject, but instead so that we may discuss the way in which it discusses its subject. To wit: is there such thing as an "evangelical church" which exists in the manner that headline implies it exists? 

As author Joshua Pease writes, "Without a centralized theological body, evangelical policies and cultures vary radically…." Precisely so. There is no evangelical Church: there are only evangelical Churches.

Evangelicalism is a diverse social, theological and ecclesiological phenomenon: it includes a wide range of types of Church government, from congregational to presbyterian to episcopal. The very fact that it encompasses nearly every sort of Church government imaginable means there is not, nor can ever be, an evangelical "Church" in a manner comparable to the "Roman Catholic Church." While the "Church of Rome" itself contains a surprisingly diverse portfolio of theological views and its governing structures are somewhat more complex and sophisticated than most Protestants grasp, it is nonetheless a defined body with a clear hierarchical authority structure, and therefore one may reasonably ask, "Is there an epidemic of denial about sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church?" Bishops may or may not enforce discipline, cardinals may or may not pressure the pontiff to enact and enforce clear policies, but whatever may occur we know who is in charge and who to hold accountable. We (or at least the media and Roman Catholics) may be able to determine who to call in order both to get answers and to get something done.

Not so amongst evangelical Churches. One congregation has excellent accountability structures, while another has none whatsoever; these contrasts are found even between Churches which are nominally part of the same "network" (ex. Acts 29) or "convention" (ex. the Southern Baptists). As Pease writes, 

Diagnosing the scope of the problem isn’t easy, because there’s no hard data. …The problem in collecting data stems, in part, from the loose or nonexistent hierarchy in evangelicalism.

I'm not picking on Pease because I'm a pedant (or at least, not only because I'm a pedant), but because the headline of his article (which he may not have written himself) is only the latest example of a chronic problem to cross my transom. Particularly when discussing perceived problems within evangelical congregations, writers and speakers will refer broadly to "the evangelical Church" or "the Reformed Church," and ask why "the evangelical Church" or "the Reformed Church" doesn't do something about "x." The answer is not, as seems often to be assumed, that "the evangelical Church" is indifferent; it is that there is no evangelical Church. Accordingly, it is impossible to reform, or even change, the evangelical Church.

Next week the 85th General Assembly of my communion, the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, is to meet on the campus of Wheaton College, that famed evangelical redoubt. As a Church, the OPC can make changes (to Church government, for example) which affect every member congregation because the OPC is a Church (singular) which operates under a unified system of government. If the OPC suffers an epidemic of denial about sexual abuse (and it's not my purpose here to suggest it does), then our system of government offers genuine hope that something can be done about it.

I sympathize with those who wish to reform the evangelical Church, with regard to sexual abuse or anything else. As my own professional vocation has been, in part, to play the role of reformer in a small way, I know what the struggle is like. I have had the advantage, however, of working within clearly defined government structures as I have pursued my reform agenda. Those who wish to reform the evangelical Church would do well to recognize there are only evangelical Churches, and to ask whether the absence of a defined hierarchical government is not itself a part of the problem they seek to redress and reform.

Has man been abolished?

Our congregation's reading group recently finished discussing C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man, a collection of three lectures he delivered in 1943. In the first ("Men without Chests"), he observes how a presupposition that all values are subjective was being propagated in the British schools of his day. (And now in the American public schools of our day, where children are taught to classify "the sky is blue" as "fact," and "God is good" as "opinion.") In the second ("The Way"), he refutes the theory that values are subjective, and labels as the "Tao" the objectively real virtues which have been discovered, recognized, and taught by all cultures across time and space. In his third lecture (the titular "Abolition of Man"), Lewis explores the consequences for humanity should his society's elites succeed in their project to condition all people to believe values truly are subjective. (Spoiler alert: said consequences are not good.) While the book is a warning against a possible abolition of man, this last lecture strikes a fairly pessimistic note (at least to my ears).

The Abolition of Man is widely praised as a rigorous piece of moral philosophy, and justly so. I've always thought of it as the theoretical background for That Hideous Strength, which is hands-down my favorite of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy novels. Still, I wondered whether, seventy-some years on, western anglophone culture continues to move in the direction projected by Lewis. If anything, culture seems to be much more atomized and individualistic as the control of elites (in politics, entertainment, education, etc.) has been eroded by the media explosion birthed by the webernet’s arrival. If elites no longer dictate the culture's direction, then they cannot condition our beliefs.

Hence, I am grateful to be reading together with other thoughtful Christians. One of our interlocutors asked whether the transhumanist movement, which seeks to transcend human limitations by genetic tinkering and such, represents a rejection of humanity itself. With that, a penny dropped in the vast and vacant recesses of my mind. 

Over the last few years, I've become accustomed to reading stories in Denver's journal of record which begin with something like "Dylan was assigned as a male at birth." Give heed to that verb, "assigned." One is assigned to a homeroom class at the beginning of high school, and to a cabin at the beginning of summer camp. No one in the history of the entire human race, or of any other mammalian species while we're at it, has ever been "assigned" a gender. Rather, the gender of every single human being has been DISCOVERED by a cursory visual inspection. While gender expression is a subject fraught with tension and subject to cultural variety, in human society gender is universally controlled by one's sex, full stop.

This editorial cartoon gets the matter exactly right. If a girl can be a Boy Scout, there is no meaningful relationship between the thing and the thing's descriptor. There is, then, no way to determine what a thing is; instead, the thing's essence is fluid, undetermined, and defined only by whim. Accordingly, there's no way to determine what a thing is because it has no essence. Instead of a square knot, we have only a tangled mess.

In logic, the argument from the lesser to greater holds that if a statement is true regarding the lesser thing, it is all the more true for the greater thing which encompasses the lesser. It seems to me that in the realm of objectively discovered fact, gender identity is far more obvious, and easily discoverable, than moral truth. If our culture is now at a point of rejecting the objective reality of gender identity, then that of moral truth was long ago abandoned.

As Westminster Shorter Catechism #10 helpfully reminds us, mankind images God precisely in his moral attributes of knowledge, righteousness, and holiness (Ephesians 4:24; Colossians 3:10). If morality has no fixed content, and our bodies have no fixed identities, then humanity is not in the image of the eternal and unchanging God.

In other words, there's no point in heeding Lewis's warning that the abolition of man is coming. Man has already been abolished.

The word of the day is "nicodemously"

I learned it this morning from Zimbabwean author Pettina Gappah when she was interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition. She was explaining "Zimglish" (backup word of the day):

I'll give you one example: Because we love our Bible — we consider ourselves a very strong Christian country — so we have a lot of phrases that we take from the Bible that we think are English words. So for example Nicodemus, is a man, a Pharisee who went to Jesus at night and said, "How can a man be born again?" So to do something "nicodemously" is to do something secretly, under cover of the darkness. So you have politicians condemning the "Nicodemus machinations of the government" and you think ... What? It's my absolutely favorite Zimglish word of all time.

My doctor is trying to kill me

I have been diagnosed with "cochlear hydrops," which means there's a wee bit of fluid in my inner ear  which leads to a persistent sense of "ear fullness" (i.e., how your ears feel when you ascend in altitude just before they pop) and of very mild dizziness. Since I enjoy neither of these symptoms, I am on the only known treatment (which is 40% effective, yay!), which aims to reduce said fluid by the use of diuretics, a low-sodium diet, and avoiding caffeine; this last because caffeine can reduce  the vascular flow which might enable the fluid to pass out of my inner ear.

The eyebrows of my otologist (ear doctor; I didn't know that word, either) raised noticeably when I told him I typically drink four or more cups of coffee per day; he told me to cut way down, preferrably to none. However, "the nation's top nutrition panel" "said that consuming as many as five cups of coffee each day (400 mg) is tied to several health benefits," according to the Washington Post.  Turns out that "moderate" coffee consumption is 3-5 cups, which means I am, at my most excessive, moderate. (Full disclosure: to get through presbytery meetings, I often double my consumption; however, it's church coffee, which we all know hardly even counts.)

For once, your tax dollars are spent on a good cause: vindicating my dubious lifestyle choices. Thanks, federal government!

Slouching toward abominable neologisms

I was appalled to see the so-called word "ganjapreneur" in an above-the-fold headline in yesterday's Denver Post, the paper of record of the Gateway to the Great Plains. However, the Urban Dictionary has found a usage from The Atlantic Monthly in 2009, which means it's not quite as new as yesterday morning, but still abominable.

I foretold much doom and gloom when marijuana was legalized in the great state of Colorado, but the death of English has caught me by surprise.

The devil in green eyeshades

I have recently read two nonfiction Christian books which attempt to persuade the reader to adopt the authors’ positions, and, as is the case with so many of these books, one can’t imagine them persuading anyone but the already persuaded because their arguments are so poorly presented. It’s not that they are entirely without merit; rather, they fail to anticipate objections or consider how their rhetorical style might negatively impress their readers. Odds are very good that you’ve read such a book yourself.

This has reminded me of the great value of a good editor. I note, from their acknowledgement pages, that both these books received any amount of editorial comment from any number of readers during their manuscript stages. Thus, I should clarify that by “good editor” I mean “an editor who doesn’t much care for the author’s position or, for that matter, the author himself.”

Writers are a vain lot: they love and dote on every precious phrase over which they’ve long toiled. They need a hostile editor, one willing, no, eager to say “That makes no sense, and the fact you wrote it suggests that you yourself are utterly lacking in sense.” Writers need to see the holes in their arguments so they can be filled, to be told their style is precious and off-putting so they will write clearly and winsomely, and to be told when they've written a run-on sentence. Writers (and here I grudgingly include myself) need editors with standards so high they can’t be met by anything not directly inspired by the Holy Spirit. Writers need editors who will make them WORK, and then work harder still.

In a now-old Doonesbury strip, Garry Trudeau had a journalist call editors “devils in green eyeshades.” Indeed, and now that self-publishing has become eye-poppingly inexpensive, we need more of them.

D.G. Myers on Cancer, Dying, and Living

In a recent Econtalk podcast, host Russ Roberts interviewed the literary critic D.G. Myers, who is dying from cancer and has been writing on the subject. They begin with a lovely discussion of the reality of death and dying, deconstruct some popular euphemisms for being afflicted with disease, and then turn to literature and the field of creative writing in the universities before concluding with the Deuteronomic imperative to choose life.

Recommended.

A spelling dilemna

For the first couple decades or so of my life, I spelled it "dilemna," then felt foolish when I learned the proper spelling is "dilemma." As this website documents, however, I was far from alone: countless multitudes of English spellers around the world labor under the same misapprehension, and all for no good reason that anyone can figure out.

I can't decide if all the company should make me feel better, or if this is an example of the gross ignorance of crowds (as opposed to the wisdom of crowds).

I was alerted to said website by the excellent podcast of the Canadian Broadcasting Company radio show, Wiretap. Even though I listen to it every week, I find myself unable to turn off the universal American superpower of "Caydar:" as soon as I hear a Canadian accent, I am compelled to say to the nearest bystander, "That's a Canadian."

Because if you hear something, you should tell someone.

He gave names to all the animals

I first took an interest in design when I started living entirely on my own, and on my own nickel, after college. When faced with a choice between two or more comparable consumer purchases, I tended to go for the cheaper option. I soon realized that what I saved in cash I lost in design: the product invevitably failed to work as efficiently or smoothly as the one which cost a few dollars more. Design, how we relate to a thing, is an essential element of the thing itself, not a secondary consideration.

Hence, I now subscribe to 99% Invisible, a podcast on design. A recent show pulled back the curtain on the incredibly complex process of naming things from consumer products to theories, which requires competence in linguistics, semiotics, and ontology. The Biblically literate cannot help but wonder how much more efficiently Adam would have completed his first task had he been able to outsource it to a naming company.

At long last, relief

My globe-trotting youngest sister gave me a bar of soap for Christmas which carried this label: 

I must admit that, while I appreciate the clove scent, I'm glad to finally have done with my firmtuse.

Jackie & Me (42)

Jackie & Me (playing at the Denver Center Theatre Company's Space Theatre through December 22), is an adaptation of the second novel in author Dan Gutman's series for children in which young Joey Stoshack has the power to visit baseball greats during times past by holding a baseball card. In this installment, Joey goes back in time to Jackie Robinson's rookie year with the Brooklyn Dodgers. 

According to the production notes, the adaptation of the first novel in the series was produced by a children's theatre company, and this play clearly is intended for a similar audience. As one might expect from the genre, Joey meets a baseball great, learns an important moral lesson, and goes back to his life a person changed for the better. The trope is tired and trite, but relatively harmless when applied to Honus Wagner. In this case, it has the unfortunate effect of turning Jackie Robinson into the magical negro who is significant because of the character development he inspires in the play's white protagonist. Once again, the narrative of persons of color is mediated through a white perspective. (As part of his time-traveling gift, Joey magically becomes African-American. Yes, it was painful and slightly embarrassing to watch a white actor pretend he was black.) Set alongside the premiere of Just Like Us, Jackie & Me makes one wonder whether the DCTC wouldn't do well to attend one of those consciousness-raising seminars to which major corporations subject their executives.

Once again, I question the DCTC's production choices. While this play makes for fine children's theatre, that's not what the DCTC is. What family can afford to take their children to a show which charges $50 a seat? (I suppose I can picture such a family, which, given the close relationship of race to class in this country, probably would need a white mediator in order to appreciate a facet of the black experience.) With the fine company and excellent resources available to it, the DCTC would be better advised to choose more challenging adult fare, even if it's not from a new or minor playwright. Please don't tell me there are too many professional productions of Shakespeare or Mamet these days.

A far more thoughtful examination of the same historical period is the recent film 42 (now available on DVD). It has the decency to treat Jackie Robinson with dignity, tracing his story from his own point of view and not from that of a white interpreter. It's not a great movie, but nonetheless a worthy sports film which capably sets Jackie Robinson's rookie year in its historical and cultural context. Thereby, it demonstrates his significance for both baseball and race relations in these United States.

While we're on the subject of history, Jackie & Me features a galling moment of ahistorical nonsense. Unfortunately, in order to discuss it, I may offend some of my readers, so feel free to quit your browser now. In one scene, Jackie Robinson shows Joey a stack of hate mail, which includes several death threats towards Robinson and his young family. However, they clearly feel the worst of these letters is one which calls Robinson a "nigger," a word which young Joey is barely able to make pass his lips. (This is its sole pronunciation in the play.)

Now, I happen to have a black daughter, and that's not a word I want directed at her or any other person of color. However, "nigger" has taken on its greatest power to offend only in the last decade or so. In Jackie Robinson's time, it was an unwelcome epithet, but hardly taboo or unexpected. To import today's delicate sensibilities to an earlier era is not only silly, it destroys the ability of the past to speak clearly to the present.

Here's what I mean by that: when one reads The Adventures of Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn, one is shocked by many of the characters' racism precisely because it is commonplace, unremarkable, and, to the characters themselves, entirely invisible. A plain presentation of the past allows us to see just how alien its environment is to us. That, in turn, prompts us to reflect on the differences between our time and theirs, and perhaps even encourages us to question what atrocities are invisible to us in our day. (In all seriousness, what do you think future generations will think of the thousands of abortions perpetrated in this country each year?)

I took Thing 1, now aged 10, to this production, and he seemed unfazed by the dramatic unveiling of "the 'N' word." Believe it or not, there were warnings posted in the lobby, but he was able to accept the moment as just another element in the torrent of abuse which Jackie Robinson in particular, and all black people of his day in general, faced on a daily basis. I think my son would have been better served by an unvarnished and unsantized presentation of the full ugliness of the racism his sister's people faced in this great country not too long ago. It's a reality with which all my children will have to contend, as all our nation's people still do.

The end is literally nigh

The illiterates have won the figurative battle over "literally," according to cnn.com. In a victory for the "dictionary-as-linguistic-anthropology-as-opposed-to-a-tool-for-pedants" school, several major dictionaries now offer (what is, in effect) "figuratively" as a definition for "literally."

Congratulations, barbarian hordes. You win this round. But you're not getting my snarky superiority complex until you pry it from my cold dead fingers.

(Don't give up the fight: get the t-shirt to the right [and which represents all that is right, incidentally], here.)

Antepenultimate

Because, all day tomorrow, English will need a word for "third from the end."

Which of you people say you live in a flat?

The BBC website ran this article on the rise of "Britishisms" in America. With regard to about half of these terms, they're not so much Britishisms as slang terms which happen to be current on both sides of the Atlantic. With regard to the other half: if you're saying "loo," stop.

Right now.

A little Monday afternoon aggregating

PRI's The World in Words podcast turned me on to The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. This blog proves the oft-cite rule that it's better to laugh in mockery than to weep tears of impotent rage as one's native language slowly slips away from one's desperate grasp. (Well, it's a rule I often cite, anyway.)

And over at the First Things website, Peter Leithart provides a lovely remembrance of Ray Bradbury's writing by way of a brief review of his classic Dandelion Wine.

Betrayed by Geoffrey Nunberg?

In a May 30 piece on NPR's Fresh Air defending the AP stylebook's decision to begin permitting use of the adverb "hopefully," Geoffrey Nunberg gloriously demonstrated why he is my favorite linguist (don't you all have one?). Consider this wonderful bit of prose:

...the historian T. Harry Williams went so far as to pronounce it "the most horrible usage of our times" — a singular distinction in the age that gave us expressions like "final solution" and "ethnic cleansing," not to mention "I'm Ken and I'll be your waitperson for tonight."

At the same time, he clearly showed there's a world of difference between the linguist-as-antropologist and the style fetishist such as myself. He's right: there's no grammatical, or even stylistic, rule which could legitimately prohibit sticking "hopefully" at the front of a sentence; and for the record, I've never had a problem with that particular verbal tic, in and of itself.

What gives me the fantods is the phrase "I am/one is hopeful that...." Whenever someone utters that abomination instead of the simpler, clearer, and infinitely more vivid "I hope...," poor George Orwell, who told us good writing (not to mention good speaking) requires "using the fewest and shortest words that will cover one's meaning," rolls over in his grave. This is why "hopefully" should be avoided: it's like letting your 5-year-old pick up a cooked carrot from his dinner plate instead of using his fork. It's just one vegetable, but let it go and pretty soon he'll be pawing up mashed potatoes and shepherd's pie.

For too many, "hopefully" is the gateway drug to "I am hopeful that." AP stylebook or not, just say no.

"You are not special" commencement speech

A member of our congregation sent me this high school commencement speech delivered by David McCullough, Jr., himself a high school English teacher. Apparently, I'm coming to it relatively late in webernet terms; read the first two-thirds or so, and you'll understand why. His blunt announcement to the type of privileged high school student I came to resent not only because I taught under-privileged students in inner-city Houston, but because I was one of them, that they are not particularly unique or wonderful is a delight to the disgruntled heart of the curmudgeon in each one of us. What makes this speech great, however, is not its deliberately deflating opening, but its lovely turn towards an exhortation to live the one life we have.

In 1992, my fellow Teach for America corps members and I came early on into the program, long before it became a resumé-padder for the kind of kids graduating near the top of the class at Wellesley High School. For the most part, we joined up not because TFA was a stepping-stone to something else, but because we wanted to spend a couple years helping out under-privileged kids. It changed our lives, and McCullough offers all who hear or read his speech the opportunity to stop living their lives for a distant objective, but instead for the sake of living their lives.

And while we're at it, let's take a moment to remember that despite right-wing attempts to vilify school teachers for sucking up government funds and left-wing attempts to vilify teacher unions for blocking their typically utopian and block-headed visions for school reform, there's a countless number of them out there not only successfully communicating content, but inspiring and changing lives.

God bless the high school English teachers. They just may save the language yet.