Research

Review: Faithful Antiracism

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Faithful Antiracism, Christina Barland Edmondson and Chad Brennan, foreword by Korie Little Edwards and Michael O. Emerson. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2022.

Summary: Drawing upon the Race, Religion, and Justice Project, offers biblical and practical recommendations to engage racism personally and with one’s faith community.

The resurgence of white supremacy movements, police-involved shootings or other measures resulting in the deaths of a disproportionate number of Blacks, and efforts to suppress the history of slavery and racism in our country is, to be frank, discouraging. With the election of the first Black president, many of us had hopes that we had turned a corner in our racial history.

This book is one both of realism, rooted in the recent research findings of the Race, Religion, and Justice Project, and hope, rooted in the scriptures and the God in whom we trust. Indeed, the title, Faithful Antiracism, is a ringing challenge both to trust God and keep showing up to work against the forces that sustain racism.

The authors both come from long experiences of working with churches and other organizations in developing policies and practices fostering greater racial equity in their midst and greater effectiveness in addressing racism in society. Chad directed the Race, Religion, and Justice Project that studied the racial dynamics in U.S. Christianity, interviewing 115 leaders and experts, and involving 119 congregations with 3260 congregants. They also use research from Renew Partnerships Campus Climate Survey and Barna Research.

The first chapter of the group shares some of their research findings. It turns out that Christians often have less accurate racial views and are less motivated to address racial injustice. They attribute this to a “cultural toolkit” that emphasizes accountable freewill individualism, relationalism, and antistructuralism that hinder recognizing societal and economic differences, and embedded structures that account for disparities in things such as household wealth by race.

They then turn to scripture showing the structures of racial hostility evident in Ephesians 2 and the significance of the work of Christ in bringing both peace and justice. They survey the concerns of the prophets regarding the unjust structures in Israelite society that oppressed the poor. They note that while Christians attest to being committed to scripture, this is often qualified by the talking points of political culture which takes precedence. They elaborate a variety of principles that apply to racial justice from denunciations of greed, to making things right when we’ve benefited from unjust racial hierarchies. They then turn to biblical and historical figures who stood for justice.

They also emphasize how understanding the past is critical if we are to understand the pain of those who lived through these realities or bear the traumas of parents and grandparents who suffered them. They offer an outline of that history. They turn to the importance of understanding the present as well, pointing out key events from the 1960’s to the present, the forms of opposition, the superficial support that often covers this, and the ways political allegiance have taken precedence over biblical teaching. One of the most trenchant observations was the strategy of “label, mischaracterize, dismiss” to oppose pursuit of racial justice, calling actions of people of goodwill “a movement” (labelling), describing it as Marxist or Socialist when it is motivated by biblical concerns (mischaracterizing), and warning people to avoid such stuff (dismiss).

Often superficial efforts have focused around the “magic” of relationships, helping people become Christians, of “colorblindness, “of being welcoming, or even being “woke.” Often, these obscure deeper issues both in our own lives and in the organizational structures of our churches and other organizations. Rather, we ought take a page from a study of Acts, as the church overcame racial barriers. We also need mentors and solidarity with others beyond our own groups and should seek out coaches as we engage this work. We learn to measure change with substantive rather than superficial measures. And we learn both how to partner with those facing injustice and use our presence and economic and political resources to withdraw support from those acting unjustly.

As I mentioned at the beginning, this is a hopeful, though grittily realistic book. It grounds our efforts to stand against racial injustice in scripture while refusing superficial window dressing. But it also names practical steps individuals and groups can take. This is a handbook churches can use, with discussion questions and prayer that help bring truths before God for his illumination, leading to actions of substance instead of a world of talk.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The opinions I have expressed are my own.

Review: Working

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Working

Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing, Robert A. Caro. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019.

Summary: Less a full biographical memoir than a description of the author’s methods of researching material for his books, writing them, and the question that has driven his work.

It seems that I have been reading one of Robert A. Caro’s books from time to time since I moved to my current home town nearly thirty years ago. He has been writing them even longer. The four volumes in print of his Years of Lyndon Johnson. His massive The Power Broker on the life and pervasive influence of Robert Moses on the city of New York and Long Island to this day. He is currently at work finishing the fifth, and hopefully final, volume on the presidency and post-presidency of Lyndon Johnson. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes, one for his work on Robert Moses, and one for one of the Johnson volumes, and just about every other major book award.

In contrast to his massive volumes, Working is a thin and pithy piece of writing in which Carol describes his process, and the question that has driven all his work. From his days as an investigative reporter for Newsday, he had a passion for discovering and explaining to people how things worked in government. That led to the realization that to explain this, you had to understand how power worked. Robert Moses, a figure who never held elective office and yet who probably displaced a half million people for his freeway projects through New York, who created parks for the people of the city and roads to connect them, taught him how power worked. Then to understand the exercise of political power by elected officials, he set his sights on Lyndon Johnson, who rose from the hill country of west Texas to the White House. Along the way, he gained a mastery of legislative processes and control over the Senate and his party that has not been seen before or since.

Such figures do not give up their secrets easily, if at all. Much of Caro’s books describe his exhaustive research methods, driven by his curiosity and instincts to get the whole story. One of his early mentors told him to “turn every page.” As he did this with Johnson, he discovered a notable change of pattern in the young congressman courteously seeking favor of others, to those others, even senior figures, seeking his attention. More careful page turning isolates the turning point to October 1940. More sleuthing in files pulled out of his House archives uncovered correspondence that indicated he had become the conduit for major campaign donations from a Texas fir, Brown and Root. And so Johnson began to accumulate power.

Part of his research was to see the things of which he was writing, and invite those who he was interviewing to the site of events to describe not only what happened but to describe the scene so he could see it. Soon, memories would flow, and Caro, could then write about events so that his readers could see them. To understand Johnson’s youth and gain the trust of area residents he wanted to interview, he and his wife Ina moved to the Hill Country of Johnson’s youth for several years. He describes movingly what it was like for Rebekah Johnson, Lyndon’s mother, to live in a house out of sight of any others as night fell on the Hill Country.

He describes his determination to get to the bottom of the question of whether Johnson stole his 1948 election to the Senate, won by a razor thin margin with the ballots of “Box 13” in Jim Wells County. His research took him to Luis Salas, who he tracked for years, who finally entrusted him with a manuscript that provided the evidence that the election had indeed been stolen. He recounts in interviews the times he “had the story” and yet sensed there was more and dared to ask one more question, and discovered there was more.

In addition to describing how he researched, how he interviewed, recounting a number of those interviews, he describes his writing process. Someone has said there is no good writing, only re-writing. Caro is proof of that, moving from longhand manuscripts to typewritten copy marked up and re-typed, to corrections throughout the publishing process. He admits he would re-write the finished books if he could.

And now I understood how it has taken him fifty years to write those books, and still not be done with Johnson. He gives us an inside glimpse into what it takes to create these magisterial works: curiosity, diligence in the archives, dogged persistence in the interviews, working and re-working the material to get it right.

With investigative journalism struggling for its life, I concluded the book wondering whether I was reading the narrative of some of the last of a breed. It seems this is an important question because of the larger vision that drives Caro. The book ends with a 2016 interview in The Paris Review. The interviewer has observed that Caro hopes “the books serve a larger civic purpose.” Caro replies:

   Well, you always hope something. OI think the more light that can be thrown on the actual processes we’re voting about, the better. We live in a democracy, so ultimately, even despite a Robert Moses, a lot of political power comes from our votes. The more we understand about the realities of the political process, the better informed our votes will be. And then, presumably, in some very diffuse, very inchoate way, the better our country will be.

We need investigators like Caro to throw light on processes. Will we find ways to continue to mentor and support them and offer them platforms from which to shine their light? And when they do, will we pay them any heed? One thing Caro is right about. Our democracy depends on it.

Why I Have Confidence in the Work of Research Scientists

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banner-982162_1920The title of this blog post is written carefully. I do not trust individual scientists more or less than any other persons. I have confidence in the work they do because of the rigorous process to which it is submitted. I also particularly specify researchers, people who are testing theories, running experiments, presenting findings at conferences, and submitting papers to journals for publication. I am not speaking of scientific popularizers or those who use the cloak of science to advance ideological agendas. I also speak in the plural. Individual scientists, like any humans may err, but the scientific community has built in processes that sift out the erroneous.

I will be honest, I do not write as a scientist. I write as someone who knows scientists from work in collegiate ministry at a major research university. I write as someone who has watched people work for months setting up lab apparatus for experiments, only to get inconclusive data and start over. I’ve watched people spend hours of effort crafting research proposals for grants that are vetted by fellow researchers in a system where one in four or less are funded. I’ve listened to reports of those who report research findings in conference presentations only to have their work torn apart in question sessions, forcing them to go back and correct mistakes in their research process. I’ve observed the agonizing process of writing articles for academic journals in one’s field–articles that are sometimes rejected, at other times are returned with reviewer critiques that must be addressed before re-submission, and sometimes published only to be challenged by other researchers who cannot reproduce the purported results under the same conditions. The price for deliberate fraud is high. One is basically black-balled.

That’s what research scientists do. They are part of a scientific community relentlessly (and sometimes ruthlessly) committed to attaining ever-closer approximations to understanding the truth about the physical cosmos around us. Scientists don’t always agree on theories or the significance of research findings. Sometimes, a dedicated researcher or group of researchers will persist 40 years (basically their working life) to substantiate a theory, sometimes changing the ways scientists think about some aspect of their field. Often they replace a workable, mostly right theory, with one that works even better. It’s a process without shortcuts that takes time, and a good deal of money. But their work has yielded space shots and smartphones, cancer treatments and eradicated small pox and nearly eradicated polio.

Why do I write about this? I write because the work of these people is under attack. People are fostering the notion that these people are not to be trusted, that their reports on things like the earth’s climate and our contribution to climate conditions are nothing more than a deep state conspiracy. It is one thing to write such things when you are talking about some distant “them” you may never have personally encountered. I have friends who do this work, and they are mystified by this. Many would say they don’t have a political bone in their bodies because their research is so engrossing. There are many who share my faith. There are many others who don’t. At the lab bench and the scientific conference, it doesn’t make a difference. It comes down to how good your research is. My friends are usually among the first to cry out against those who make false claims in the name of science. Truth matters that much to them.

There are those who use science to advance political or ideological agendas. They are usually popularizers who either never wore a lab coat, or have given it up but use their reputation to bolster their claims. One may think here of ethologist Richard Dawkins who cherry picks scientific studies to support his militant atheism. One research study shows that most British scientists believe he misrepresents science. Others cherry pick science to support their particular view of biblical creation. Both approaches use science to answer questions science was not intended to answer. Most research scientists I know, no matter what they believe, want no part in any of this, except to go on the record that this misappropriates science.

It is axiomatic that when a particular group attacks a group of “them,” be they scientists or immigrants or home schoolers, we would be wise to recognize that the attack is primarily designed to garner support for that group, and to use a grain of salt in assessing their attack. I would suggest, in the case of science, that if you really care about truth and don’t want to be “faked” that you go and meet some real scientists at your local college or university. Ask yourself, “do I personally know any scientists?” Most Americans do not, which makes them an easy target.

I don’t absolutely trust science, in the way I do God. Any scientist worth his or her salt wouldn’t want me to. Most often, they present their research in terms of confidence levels or intervals, such as a 95% probability that a predicted result will occur, or results within a certain range will occur. Most of us formally or informally act with confidence even when probabilities are not that high. At what percentage of rain chances will you carry an umbrella or rain gear? At what odds will you place a bet on your favorite team?

So when scientists who have worked through the rigorous process I have described publish results and their work has survived the rigorous winnowing process of peer review, I’m willing to place confidence in the work of this scientific community. That doesn’t mean a better theory might not replace it at some point. Newton’s understanding of gravity still works pretty well in most cases, even though Einstein’s theory offers a better account. All of life is like this. But that’s a far cry from believing scientists are purposefully deceiving us. At the end of the day I’m far more inclined to place confidence in the scientists than the deniers. There is no comparable process to the peer review and criticism process for deniers who often just have to put something on the internet. So in whom are you going to place your confidence?

 

Review: The Second Kind of Impossible

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The Second Kind of Impossible, Paul J. Steinhardt. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019.

Summary: A narrative of the search for a new form of matter, first theorized, then synthesized, and then first found in a mineral collection of questionable provenance that gave tantalizing hints that it might really exist.

This is a real science detective story. It has all the hopeful leads and unsettling reverses of a detective mystery, and one where the lead character, in this case the lead researcher, finds himself in a situation far removed from the normal environs of a theoretical physicist.

It begins with the question of whether an impossible five-fold symmetry could be possible under some circumstance.  Then Paul Steinhardt, and a graduate student, Dov Levine,  began began looking for a loophole to the forbidden five-fold symmetry, and found it, suggesting the possibility for something they termed quasi-crystals. Meanwhile, in another lab, a researcher synthesized a compound that turned out to have the predicted electron diffraction pattern. It takes the two labs a couple years to find out about each other but it demonstrates that something that seems impossible can actually exist, hence the title of this book, coming from Richard Feynman’s response to a paper by Steinhardt, who had been mentored by him. It was the kind of impossible that defies known knowledge but has an intriguing logic to it.

The next phase of Steinhardt’s research was to discover whether such a quasi-crystal actually exists in nature–the quest for a needle in a haystack as it were. He and a student comb mineral collections around the world, looking for promising diffraction patterns. They strike out over and over again until they find one sample in an Italian mineral collection administered by Luca Bindi. Part two of this book describes all the tests to confirm that this tiny sample indeed has a quasi-crystal imbedded in it and all the arguments against it. Then another sample is discovered in Russia, but the scientist, a Russian official, will not share it except for an exorbitant price. Furthermore, questions arise about both samples and their provenance–until the field researcher who actually found the material is discovered and agrees to help them find the tiny stream and collect additional samples.

The third part of the book is the trip to this stream, in a remote part of the Kamchatka Peninsula. Steinhardt, who has never done this kind of field work, is leader of the team, and against all the improbabilities, the challenges of mosquitoes, weather, bears, and the terrain, they find additional samples, leading to discoveries of other quasi-crystals, and clues to how this material was formed.

One of the fascinating qualities of this book was the quest that started with a theoretical question and eventually led to a remote peninsula of Kamchatka. For those not acquainted with the life of a research scientist, this account captures something of the excitement of pursuing a really interesting research question, how one question can lead to another, and the roadblocks and dead ends researchers sometimes encounter along the way. What we realize eventually is that all this takes over thirty years, and involves collaboration with a number of researchers from Russia, Italy, and all over the U.S. It is not the only research Steinhardt works on, but imagine spending most of one’s adult working life pursuing a research question. The combination of curiosity and sheer perseverance commands a certain kind of respect.

The other fascinating aspect of this book was understanding how research science works. Richard Feynman is not the only one to declare “impossible.” Some did so with outright opposition for good scientific reasons. This happens constantly in the submission of research papers and at scientific conferences. Steinhardt enlists his opponents on his research team, forming a “red team” and a “blue team” with opposing views. The opposing teams were good at recommending all the tests that would eliminate alternative possibilities. Eventually the opposition, formidable researchers in their own right, are convinced–but that took years.

This is a good book to illustrate the skepticism, the meticulous rigor, and the self-correcting character of scientific research at its best. The other wonderful aspect that arises out of this process is the international collaboration of people willing to share knowledge, samples, and credit, to advance a shared understanding of the world, indeed the universe. In short, this is a great book to see how science really works at its best.

Those Who Can, Teach

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170px-Brack_Vocabularius_rerumThe other day, I reviewed Mark Schwehn’s Exiles From Eden, which is a defense of the academic vocation of teaching. This idea was reinforced today at the conference I’m attending, which centers around the idea of the vocation of faculty.

One of our speakers, in a moment of refreshing honesty confessed that she has experienced real frustrations in teaching at times and that her temptation is to lash out at her students. Instead, she said she had felt God saying that she needed to be a “shepherd” and then referred to the Dead Sea scrolls reference to a “Teacher of Righteousness who would be a guide in the way of God’s heart.” She works with clinicians in a helping field and sees preparing empathetic and ethical people as holy work.

She spoke as one highly proficient in her field, both in research and clinical experience. And she gave the lie to the old saw “those who can’t do, teach.” She, and others I’ve met combine research excellence with a love for students and a sense that teaching and forming students in their disciplinary work is indeed a calling, not a painful distraction from research and publication.

Universities love to talk about how much they care about teaching and the experience of students. Yet the truth is that the value system in universities still values “knowledge-making” over teaching and the formation of students, even though many of the students who matriculate do not aspire to be academics or researchers. They will pursue commerce, politics, engineering, and various forms of work that foster human flourishing.

It seems it is time and past time to re-examine how important the one who teaches is to the preparation of the next generation who will shape our society. What we don’t need, as one commentator once noted is “highly skilled barbarians.” Yet this, I think is what will result if we continue to denigrate the important, indeed sacred, role of those who teach. I wonder, can we afford that?