Donald Trump’s invective has disrupted the character of US politics. It will be hard to change.. Meanwhile, John Kasich, the governor of Ohio, and ultimate insider, last week said that the US should set up a federal agency to promote Judeo-Christian values. Until Mr Trump, most Republicans rejected the “clash of civilisations” view of the world. Now it is normal.
.. Father Charles Coughlin, the Trump of 1930s America, said: “When we get through with the Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.” Mr Trump talks of Syria’s huddled refugees as “Trojan horses” for Isis.
The Grace of Grit
recently read an essay about the first black regiment to see combat during the Civil War. An army surgeon recorded how the men of the 33rd United States Colored Troops refused to report to him after being injured because they wanted to stay in the fight. They remained at their posts with bullet wounds in their necks, backs, and even skulls. Those forced by their commanding officer to seek treatment amazed the doctor. Battlefield surgery was more like Medieval torture than medicine, but the soldiers of the 33rd were “perfectly quiet and cool.”
“Another soldier,” the surgeon wrote, “did not report himself at all, but remained all night on guard…having buckshot in his shoulder.” He finally “persuaded a comrade to dig out the buckshot, for fear of being ordered on the sick-list.”
The soldiers of the 33rd United States Colored regiment had a seemingly supernatural ability to persevere through pain; a sticktoitiveness that overcame every obstacle. The surgeon saw many brave men during the Civil War, but concerning the 33rd USCT he concluded, “Braver men never lived.”
.. Millennials lack the grit necessary for religious obedience, and the church lacks the tools necessary to cultivate it.
Sometime in the last century, the church embraced the unbiblical notion that mature disciples of Jesus could be formed painlessly.
.. We are not to try to get in a position to avoid trials. And we are not to ‘catastrophize’ and declare ‘the end of the world’ when things happen.
Stanford marshmallow experiment
A 2012 study at the University of Rochester (with a smaller N= 28) altered the experiment by dividing children into two groups: one group was given a broken promise before the marshmallow test was conducted (the unreliable tester group), and the second group had a fulfilled promise before their marshmallow test (the reliable tester group). The reliable tester group waited up to four times longer (12 min) than the unreliable tester group for the second marshmallow to appear.[11][12] The authors argue that this calls into question the original interpretation of self-control as the critical factor in children’s performance, since self-control should predict ability to wait, not strategic waiting when it makes sense. Prior to the Marshmallow Studies at Stanford, Walter Mischel had shown that the child’s belief that the promised delayed rewards would actually be delivered is an important determinant of the choice to delay, but his later experiments did not take this factor into account or control for individual variation in beliefs about reliability when reporting correlations with life successes.[13][14][15][16]
Ideology and Integrity
No, what you should really look for, in a world that keeps throwing nasty surprises at us, is intellectual integrity: the willingness to face facts even if they’re at odds with one’s preconceptions, the willingness to admit mistakes and change course.
And that’s a virtue in very short supply.