The Carter project

Our Indiana county is the site of this year’s Jimmy & Rosalynn Carter Work Project, an intensive building campaign by Habitat for Humanity. Later this week, Karin will help to build one of the houses.

I wanted to peek at the Carters, and so, yesterday, Karin & I attended the “project launch,” which was held inside Notre Dame’s basketball gym in front of thousands of people. I thought Jimmy Carter might say a few words about the Bible. Alas, what transpired was an hour of mutual congratulation by the local bigwigs.

I did learn that one of the dignitaries – an architect named LeRoy Troyer, the designer of the main building of the Ark Encounter – had long worked with Habitat for Humanity, and that he’d been inspired by the Amish practice of raising barns.

David Letterman told a few jokes and introduced the Carters. Jimmy Carter said very little. Even so, he was the night’s best speaker. As the proverb has it: when you reach the end zone, you should “act like you’ve been there before”; that was what Jimmy Carter did.

Idolatry … and the ark

“I feel that there is this moral high ground in higher education that is just sitting vacant.”

So laments one interviewee in The Hunting Ground, a documentary about the rape epidemic at colleges and universities across the USA.

When I heard that line, I rewound the video and listened to it again.

It seems to me that the moral high ground is indeed vacant. The schools pay lip-service to it, but do they actually dwell there?

One test is: What do they promote more? A self-sacrificing culture, or a self-serving one?

The movie depicts the horror of campus rape. Even more vividly, however, it details the idolatry – that’s the Christian term for it – of big-time higher education. The viewer is subjected to wave upon wave of athletic pageantry, of architectural pomp, of student servility. A poignant initial sequence shows highschoolers reading their acceptance emails, overjoyed to tie themselves to these lofty institutions.

This was my own feeling in 2000 when I was admitted to the University of Notre Dame.

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I dodged that bullet. I ended up going to Bethel College, a rather campy school. Not long ago, Bethel’s homepage proudly showed a photo of the Ark Encounter in Kentucky, which a Bethel graduate helped to design.

Noah’s ark, of course, rests upon the highest ground of all.

The end of camp-time

Brianna is quite the little Queen Bee. She has so many friends at Brown City Camp that they have to compete for her attention. Sometimes she and just one or two of her friends come into our cabin; but then the others locate her, and our cabin is filled with teen-aged girls (the boys are too polite, or too shy, to join us).

Inevitably, feelings get hurt. There’s only so much of Brianna to go around, and she doesn’t always distribute herself most equitably and lovingly.

This is a difficult thing to manage. It’s difficult for adults. It’s even harder for the young. They’re only beginning to grasp that personal relationships come with duties as well as benefits – that more is expected than a spontaneous reaction of the heart. It’s painful to watch Brianna charm people but not fully embrace all who are charmed.

Still, her uninhibitedness serves her well during a Q&A session about creation vs. evolution.

“Good Christians disagree about this subject,” begins the pastor, and then he spends the rest of his time explaining why Young Earth creationism is clearly the right – the righteous – option.

Brianna is his sole dissenter.

“My name is Brianna,” she says, “and my grandparents are _____ and _____, who have been coming to this camp for many years” (there is a murmur of approval). “And I just want to say that I don’t believe in Young Earth. But when I get to heaven and see Jesus, if he says, ‘The world was created in six days,’ I’ll say, ‘Praise God!’ And if he says, ‘The world was created through evolution,’ I’ll say, ‘Praise God!’” (The pastor glares.)

Her mother and Karin & I are very pleased. I’m reminded of myself, of my own youthful outspokenness. (Whether I was equitable and loving, I don’t recall.)

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The next day, Karin & I return to South Bend. We listen to the Twin Peaks soundtrack, to Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and to my playlist-in-progress, “Stalker Songs,” which has melodic, soft music and vaguely unsettling lyrics. (And not all of its songs are about stalking: some are about mugging, or about being mugged.)

When we go into our house, Jasper is very happy to see us. He meows and meows and eats half of Karin’s sandwich and dashes around the house for about an hour.

Karin goes to the Social Security office and changes her last name. It’s her decision. I’m glad she’s doing what she wants, not what I want.

I love Karin better all the time. It’s a delight to wake up next to her.

And I love Jasper, who this morning did the waking up.