Magic Statistics

A Christian student intern was fired from her job for witnessing to fellow employees during lunch breaks and after hours.  Jacqueline Escobar of Costa Mesa, California, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against California State University at Long Beach (CSULB) and Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services (DCFS), alleging wrongful dismissal in violation of constitutionally protected religious freedoms.

While completing an internship with DCFS, Escobar came under scrutiny for sharing her faith with co-workers during lunch breaks and after-hours, and for changing into a shirt with the vaguely religious message "Found" after signing out for the day. Escobar received the internship in part because of her straight-A academic record, and while at DCFS, she was regularly complimented on the quality of her work.

Based on these incidents, DCFS collaborated with CSULB to draft a "Performance Contract" that directed Escobar to refrain from sharing her faith, even during breaks and after work hours. Escobar could not agree to such a sweeping prohibition that included her religious practice during non-working hours. When she declined to sign the document, DCFS terminated Escobar from her internship.

Ms Escobar is represented by attorneys affiliated with Pacific Justice Institute.

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Literary theorist Stanley Fish may be a postmodernist scholar, but he clearly understands the essential issue of religion: It claims to know and teach the truth about God and man.  Without truth claims, religion is pointless.

The truth claims of a religion — at least of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam — are not incidental to its identity; they are its identity.
. . .
The difference between the truth claims of religion and the truth claims of other academic topics lies in the penalty for getting it wrong. A student or a teacher who comes up with the wrong answer to a crucial question in sociology or chemistry might get a bad grade or, at the worst, fail to be promoted. Those are real risks, but they are nothing to the risk of being mistaken about the identity of the one true God and the appropriate ways to worship him (or her). Get that wrong, and you don’t lose your grade or your job, you lose your salvation and get condemned to an eternity in hell.

Of course, the “one true God” stuff is what the secular project runs away from, or “brackets.” It counsels respect for all religions and calls upon us to celebrate their diversity. But religion’s truth claims don’t want your respect. They want your belief and, finally, your soul. They are jealous claims. Thou shalt have no other God before me.

An important corollary of "jealous claims" is that the truth claims of major world religions contradict each other.  At most, only one religion can be right.

What a contrast between that clear-minded and forthright statement and the wishy-washy pronouncements issued by some Anglican church leaders.

h/t: Albert Mohler, who says Fish’s column is behind a subscriber wall; but I found a free posting here.

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Sociologists Paula Fomby and Andrew Cherlin of Johns Hopkins University have found that children who go through frequent changes in family structure are more likely to have behavioural problems than are children raised in stable families, possibly including even lone-parent families as well as two-parent families.

Fomby and Cherlin note that with each breakup, divorce, remarriage or new cohabitation, there is a period of adjustment as parents, partners and children establish their places in a new family setting. Studying a nationally representative sample of mothers and their children, the researchers found that children who go through frequent transitions are more likely to have behavioral problems than children raised in stable two-parent families and maybe even more than those in stable single-parent families.

Looking at children's scores on a mother-reported assessment of behavior problems with a mean of 100 and a standard deviation of 15 (similar to how an IQ test is scored), the authors found that a child who experienced three transitions would have a behavior problems score about six points higher than a child who had experienced no transitions. Experiencing multiple transitions was also associated with children's more frequent delinquent behavior, including vandalism, theft and truancy.

The researchers also found that changes in family structure had a greater impact on white children than on black children. Two possible explanations for this were offered.  First, black children may be able to rely on extended family to a greater extent than white children.  Also, the study included only children born to mothers aged 21 through 38, and black mothers tend to have children at a younger age than do white mothers.

For both white and black children, Fomby and Cherlin found a persistent association between living in a mother-only household during the child's first four years and mother-reported behavior problems and, for white children, reading recognition.

The paper, entitled “Family Instability and Child Well-Being”, has been published in the April issue of the American Sociological Review.

h/t: LifeSite

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Jack Johnson of Seward, Alaska, became a hero of Israel in 1947, when he served on the crew of the Exodus, a ship carrying 4500 European Jews to British-controlled Palestine.  After the British violently turned the ship away and deported the passengers to France, Mr Johnson thought the mission had fallen short.

The Orthodox Russian Christian originally from Kodiak had witnessed the horrors of a Nazi concentration camp, he said last week, and he wanted to help Jews any way he could. He signed on to crew aboard the Exodus, a ship that attempted to move some 4,500 refugees and in so doing is widely credited with evoking the world's sympathy toward formation of Israel.

But the British, who governed Palestine at the time and responded to Arab fears about immigration, turned the refugees back while killing one crew member and two passengers. For all these years Johnson thought his mission was incomplete.

"I figured we failed," Johnson said . . .

But Israel does not think so.  Last February, on his first trip back since the aftermath of World War II, the 80-year-old retired seaman was thanked by former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other leaders.

His reunion with Exodus captain Ike Aharonovitch, now 84 and living outside Haifa, received widespread coverage in the Israeli press, which Johnson initially found baffling.

"I couldn't understand it at first," Johnson said. Then those who praised him told him they considered the Exodus ship a crucial point in securing United Nations support for Israel. The Holocaust survivors trying to reach Israel didn't make it immediately, but their plight reached the world.

Johnson says his trip has opened his eyes to the importance of the events he took part in.

The story of the Exodus inspired the 1958 novel by Leon Uris and the 1960 epic film directed by Otto Preminger and starring Paul Newman and Eva Marie Saint.

The first letter in the April issue of Anglican Journal is an eye-opener.  The writer, Roy Inglangasuk of Ft. Simpson, Northwest Territories, is an aboriginal Anglican who questions the wisdom of instituting a national indigenous bishop.

I feel my church has erred in creating an indigenous ministry; we should be praying with each other rather separate from each other.

I agree as aboriginal people we have suffered during our Christianization. However, as a Christian I expect, through prayer, that God will heal our pains.

Mr Inglangasuk suggests that the new bishopric arose from a desire to implement multiculturalist policies rather than a genuine ministry need in the church.  In his view, authentic Christian unity will suffer as a result.

My church decided on my behalf with “consultations” with indigenous Anglicans to create a separate ministry. As a Christian I expect my church leaders to tear down walls and not build them. I wish that racism and prejudice were only distant memories, however, they remain constant and my church has decided to keep them alive and functioning.

In future, he hopes that our leaders will be more willing to defy trendy policies.  Consultation would be nice, too.

Mr Inglangasuk’s letter is a sobering contrast to the self-congratulatory article in February’s Anglican Journal that breathlessly recounted the press attention generated by the appointment of the national indigenous bishop. 

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