All posts by ariah
“Safe” Is an Interesting Word
In our recent search for a neighborhood and place to make home, the term “Safe” has been thrown around quite a bit by others. Those who say it are usually very genuine and well-intending: “Now that you have a baby, you’ll want to make sure you find a safe area of the city,” or “I’m sure you’ll be able to find a nice, safe neighborhood to purchase a home in.” I find it extremely difficult to respond to statements like these because of the layers and layers of underlying assumptions behind them. Let me try and break this down a little bit.
What do they mean by ‘safe?’ I think the most obvious is that they don’t want us living where the feature crime stories on the evening news are located. Physical safety is their obvious concern and there is certainly some validity to that. Unfortunately, our major indicator of ‘safety’ is the evening news, which tends to categorize it’s media in interesting ways, and it continually reinforces our stereotypes. First, the news covers mostly negative stories, ‘if it bleeds, it leads.’ Second, the news, and people, tend to categorize in ways we understand; so a large geographic area, falls into one categorization (just like a large people group or income level). What you end up with is that ‘safe’ means living anywhere other then the area of town where the poor, and many minorities, have been isolated to.
I guess I would like to start by asking different questions, and having different concerns then ‘safety.’ Shane Claiborne touches on it well:
“People sometimes ask if we are scared of the inner city. I say that I am more scared of the suburbs. Our Jesus warns that we can fear those things which can hurt our bodies or we can fear those things which can destroy our souls, and we should be far more fearful of the latter. Those are the subtle demons of suburbia.
As my mother once told me, “Perhaps there is no more dangerous place for a Christian to be than in safety and comfort, detached from the suffering of others.” I’m scared of apathy and complacency, of detaching myself from the suffering. It’s hard to see until our 20/20 hindsight hits us—but every time we lock someone out, we lock ourselves further in.” [via]
As I am trying to follow, I think the first question in deciding where to live is to ask, “What does Christ call me to?” I think a quick reading of Scripture would make it quite clear we are not first called to physical safety. Christ himself spends time with the poor and the oppressed, the ‘desperate and dangerous’ people of his day. He lives amongst the unsafe and ‘unclean’ and he speaks out to his followers to do the same, addressing injustices along the way.
Finally, as it relates to children, there is a strong lead in the Bible to teach your children to follow the faith. The goal is not to keep your child ‘safe’ above all else, but rather to lead your child to truth. Having children does not mean you forsake your values in an effort to preserve their physical longevity, it means you hold that much more strongly to the truths and convictions that you know to be true, that you might properly serve to point them toward the truth.
Looking for Jesus
If you want to know what Following Jesus looks like.
The Shame Of The Nation By Jonathan Kozol
Keeping on the topic of education for a little bit, I thought I’d share a video with Jonathan Kozol, an amazing author who has for years tried to make known the inequalities of the public education system known. This 9 minute interview with Mr. Kozol helps give some quick insight and understanding to what his books discuss in further detail.
Why this Matters.
A lot of people, especially many in the church, applaud our country as being of ‘Land of Opportunity’ and we celebrate it’s freedom and equality. We are not however a country of free and equal opportunity. Our education system has been grossly unequal ever since the days of slavery, keeping and oppressing generations from ever having the opportunity to a fair chance at rising up. The Bible is filled with verses concerning justice from oppression, like in Isaiah:
10:1 Woe to those who make unjust laws,
to those who issue oppressive decrees,2 to deprive the poor of their rights
and withhold justice from the oppressed of my people,
If you believe this is authoritative, then your church should be doing something about the injustice of the land that you live in. If you don’t believe the Bible as fact, then at least tuck this verse away to challenge Christians that you meet to actually follow the Bible they claim they follow.
Can’t Read? Let’s Build You A Prison Cell!
A long time ago I had heard the comment thrown out that they look at illiteracy rates for third grades and build prison cells based on those numbers. It was an interesting correlation, but learning about the school system, and the struggle it is for kids to catch up, it isn’t surprising that they would look at those statistics. In school students spend up to third grade “Learning to Read” and after that they must “Read to Learn.” If your not on track and reading at third grade it is likely you will struggle for years to catch up, likely you will drop out, and likely you will get in trouble with the law.
I put up a series of quotes I found online a while back acknowledging this correlation and usage of reading rates to base prison cell projections on. That post has seen quite a few readers lately so I thought I would update things here with a video from one of my recent readers.
At about 4:30 into the video you have Dr. Russ Whitehurst, Director, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education saying essentially the correlation is obviously there and the ‘need for jails.’
Here are some other quotes from around the net on the same subject.
Indiana’s former governor has stated that determining the number of new prisons to build is based, in part, on the number of second graders not reading at second-grade level.
From Dialects, Teaching Reading and Literacy to Dialect Speakers: Educational CyberPlayGround™
In California they plan how many jail cells they will build in the future by how many children are not reading on grade level by third grade.
From Democracy and Equity: CES’s Tenth Common Principle
“Based on this year’s fourth-grade reading scores,” observes Paul Schwartz, a Coalition principal in residence at the U. S. Department of Education, “California is already planning the number of new prison cells it will need in the next century.”
From Evidence Based Education Science and Learning to Read
David Boulton: We were interviewing Lesley Morrow, the Past-President of the International Reading Association, and she made a statement which flabbergasted me. She said this was a fact: that there are some states that determine how many prison cells to build based on reading scores.
Dr. Grover (Russ) Whitehurst: Yes. Again, the predictability of reading for life success is so strong, that if you look at the proportion of middle schoolers who are not at the basic level, who are really behind in reading, it is a very strong predictor of problems with the law and the need for jails down the line.
Literacy for societies, literacy for states, literacy for individuals is a powerful determinate of success. The opposite of success is failure and clearly, being in jail is a sign of failure.
People who don’t read well have trouble earning a living. It becomes attractive to, in some cases the only alternative in terms of gaining funds, to violate the law and steal, to do things that get you in trouble. Few options in some cases other than to pursue that life. Of course reading opens doors.
From ReadFresno:
Several states, including California, use reading achievement levels of students in the third grade as a basis for projecting the number of future prison beds needed.
I’m looking into more statistic as well, so if you have any please let me know. I’ll update this post as we find more. This needs some serious consideration and reflection. Any thoughts?
Back and Better Than… Well, Just Back
Alright folks, today officially marks the end to my blogging break here at Trying to Follow. I wish I had some grand insights to share with you about my experience, but I don’t really. Mainly, we’ve gone through some major transitions lately (baby, moving, job and home searching) and so I figured a break from this would help me to sort of focus on those other things. I did make some cool post banners though.
I had a plan to continue to write daily, in hopes that I could begin to build an honest collection of thoughts on faith. I figured this would be a good thing to do for a couple reasons. One, writing down your beliefs is good practice in general. Two, with a new child and the responsibility of parenting, I figured collecting my thoughts would better prepare me for intentionally instilling my values in my children. Three, not that I have all the answers, but having been on a faith journey for a significant part of my current life, my thoughts might prove useful to others on their journey. I say all that, and yet I failed miserably at doing that consistent writing and only really got started about a week ago. I’m still plugging along, but I needed to start writing here again as an outlet for all the other thoughts banging around in my mind.
I mentioned trying to change the format of this blog, but I’m not sure that I will yet. At the moment, this is simply my personal blog that serves as an outlet for me to write and dialog with others about a wide range of topics. I do think this will become a bit more ‘faith’ oriented in nature as I’m really making an effort to flesh out what I believe in a way that makes sense to others. That isn’t to say that you need to be on the same ‘faith’ journey as me, I would really appreciate the dialog from others who don’t share my faith beliefs. I think what I might do, especially when I cover topics that might not seem related to my belief system, I’ll try and add a little blurb that makes explicit what Bible verses or values compel me to care about this issue or that. If I start slacking on doing that, just ask me and I’ll respond.
Asides: Just a quick note of some additions. Be sure to check out my ‘Who I Read‘ page. It’s a long list but I subscribe to every one of those websites and I highly recommend most of them. If your not on there let me know and I’ll add you. Also, I’m going to take down Comment Love for a little while. I’ll keep you updated on our donations, but I don’t think it was really helping facilitate further conversation. Also, I’m adding my YouTube channel to the sidebar and I’ll be posting more ‘asides’ exclusively at the website, not on the feed. Alright, peace.
Enjoy your Visit
Hey there, this is Ariah Fine, the author of the blog here. It’s not being updated regularly at the moment, I’m actually trying to move from a blog format to something that looks a little more like a conversation. Feel free to search and browse around and chime in with a comment on any of the old posts you find, I’ll be sure to comment back and engage in some conversation.
For you regular readers, I thought of a neat diagram to convey why I’m trying to take a break from blogging (Your probably saying this post and the others doesn’t really qualify as a break). I think you can understand the diagram so I won’t try and explain it.
I also spent a little bit of my creative time creating some banners for some of the better posts that I’ve written. Hopefully these will come together in some sort of worthwhile form.
I’m also planning on beginning to podcast again, just short 5-10 minute deals, maybe a couple times a week. You can bookmark my podcast page or subscribe, or just check them out here:
Update: I’ve also added my YouTube Favorites Channel for your viewing pleasure. Check back regularly as I’ll be adding new videos constantly.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Flashback: Interview with Justice Clothing Owner (podcast)
I’m going to link to the original post for this one, you’ll want to check out the audio and show notes from this interview.
I had the wonderful opportunity this morning of interviewing Eric Odier-Fink of The Justice Clothing Company. Eric graciously gave me a bit of his time to answer some questions about Justice Clothing, Sweatshops, Unions and Fair Trade.
A Brief Explanation
Thanks for the input everyone on my considering taking a blogging break. I figure I should give a bit of an explanation so you understand why I want to take a break (and so I can sort of figure it out myself). There’s a lot of reasons, here’s just a few…
Mostly, I’ve been trying to spend most of my waking hours with my beautiful baby in my arms, which has been good for all of us, but not good for my typing abilities. My focus has changed quite a bit too, and I’m thinking a lot more about the baby and being a father and not so much about all the other issues that usually consume my thoughts. So, lack of time/attention is the first reason.
The second thing is that we as a family are going through some major changes (baby, parenting, jobs, moving, etc). Definitely things I want to write about, but not necessarily blog for the world. It’s also giving me space to reconsider what activities/projects/blogs I’m giving my time to.
I’ve considered trying podcasting a bit, because it doesn’t require two hands to do. I’ve thought about doing web design as a side job. Once we move and the baby is a little bigger, I definitely plan on getting out more and getting involved in some community projects. I’d love to write a book or some other writing projects, rather then blogging, but maybe both.
Anyways, that’s enough for now. I’ll put another post up here later highlighting some of my favorite old posts on here, and maybe linking to a podcast or some other things. Alright, that’s about it.