“This goes against all three pillars of the Northern Kentucky Tea Party, which are fiscal responsibility, limited government and free markets,” said Willie Schadler, the organization’s president. “It is fiscally irresponsible to continue with this study.”

Fiscal responsibility? Boone County is one of the fastest growing counties in Kentucky.  It’s responsible to plan for parks and recreation now, rather than waiting until property values make it cost-prohibitive. Could New York City build Central Park today?  It would be impossible: the land is worth billions on the open market.

Photo by hubertk via Flickr

Your Tax Dollars at Work: Idlewild Park

Limited government? How about good government? As Boone County grows, families will need places to walk and play.  Too much of Northern Kentucky is already plagued with sprawl, poor planning, and traffic congestion.  Right now, Boone County’s residential areas are islands separated from one another.  We have great parks, the county fairgrounds, historic buildings, all within a mile or two of my home, and I can’t walk with my children to any of them.  Our roads were built for farmland: narrow, two-lane highways with deep ditches and no shoulders.  Those roads make no sense in residential areas.

Free markets? Free markets require structure. We couldn’t have private property rights without property laws, county records of deeds, or government maps and surveys.  None of our county roads were built by free markets. Boone County has zoning laws in many parts of the county limiting how the property can be used. Heck, we have laws that tell certain types of criminals where they can and cannot live. The question is whether we have “free markets.” The question is how do the common interests of the people intersect with the private interests of individuals.

Here’s why greenways are so important.

Paula Brehm-Heeger, who has lived in Hebron since 2002, applauded county leaders for trying to plan for the future.

“When we planned to move, we looked at Loveland (Ohio), which has the great bike trails, the Miami Whitewater area and Boone County,” Brehm-Heeger said. “Those were all communities that were looking forward and we wanted that.”

She said a recently installed sidewalk near her home was teeming with activity almost as soon as it was completed.

I have no idea what the Northern Kentucky Tea Party is so angry about in this case.  Greenways are a no-brainer: a low-cost way to dramatically improve the quality of life for our community and our children. This is an investment for the future.

But what to do with these backup copies? Well, I have a Dropbox account (that’s my referral link) that I can use for safekeeping. Dropbox is a great app that lets you synch files and folders on your hard drive with an online file-sharing service, even keeping files synched across multiple computers if you want. You can share files and folders with others, so, for example, your wife and you could use it to work on your Christmas letter. Each time one of you made a change, it would be synched across all computers. It’s great for larger documents or things that are more complicated than Google Docs can handle.

So I have a place to store my WordPress backups, but I don’t really want to manually save the new backups every time they arrive. How could I make this process automatic and invisible?

After several failed attempts, here’s the process I created.

When new backups arrive, I’ve created a rule in Mail.app that shuffles them into their own folder, so that I never have to see them. That was easy, because all of the emails are from “Wordpress” and include the word “Backup” in the subject.

I tried to create an Applescript to save the attachment to my Dropbox folder, but Applescript doesn’t work too well with Mail.app attachments. Instead, I created a new Application in Automator that would:

1. Find mail messages in the new “Wordpress Backups” folder I created.
2. Filter those messages to deal only with any messages that arrived today.
3. Save the mail attachment to my Dropbox folder

This is important: I saved this Automator workflow as an application, so that iCal could open it. Here’s a version you can use. Just change the mail folder and the destination folder, and save it as an application.

Last step: I created a recurring event for every evening at 11pm. In iCal, you can set the alarm to open an application, so I just set it to open and run this new, hyper-specific application each day. (I also use this application-as-alarm feature to automatically open Skype or iChat if I have an online meeting scheduled with someone.)

In theory, I should never have to worry about my WordPress backups. Even if something happens to my computer, they’ll be accessible from “the cloud” via Dropbox. The backup files are very small (less than 1 MB), so Dropbox ought to be able to hold as many as I need. I let you know in a few weeks if it seems to be working correctly.

Of course, the movie isn’t all “down with Middle America.” The cause of Big Bird’s Midwestern exile? Miss Finch, an overeager social worker who thinks Big Bird needs help finding a “real family,” whether he wants it or not. She decides Bird’s fate in a Boston board room, alongside the rest of her philanthropically-minded friends. So perhaps it isn’t Midwesterners that CTW looks down upon: just non-New Yorkers.

A quick rundown of the Dodos and their town:

• The Dodos are idiots (as in “dumb as a…”). They fail to recognize Big Bird, even asking Bird if he has seen a large yellow bird on his plane.
• They live in “Ocean View,” with no ocean within 1,000 miles.
• The Dodos live in a bland suburb, with every house identical (except for theirs – it’s identical to the others, but hoisted up on a pole like a giant birdhouse).
• The Dodo kids (”Donnie” and “Marie”) have no imagination – literally. When Bird says, “Let’s pretend I’m Snow White,” Donnie replies, “But you’re bright yellow.”
• The Dodos are kinda racist. When Bird gets a postcard from Snuggy, they “tisk tisk” his choice of a non-bird best friend.

In other words, Dodos complete the list of Midwestern stereotypes: dull, small-minded, uncreative. Anyone with talent or tolerance has long ago flown the coop, so to speak.

Eh, who cares? It’s an awesome movie. Go watch it immediately. Here’s a small mushroom-flavored taste.

This past Tuesday, I traveled to Louisville to meet with InterVarsity’s campus staff team for Kentucky. They serve on campuses across the state – the Universities of Louisville and Kentucky, Bellarmine, Berea College, Eastern Kentucky University. I shared with them ESN’s vision of raising up the next generation of Christian professors, gave them some tips on identifying and working with potential ESN members, and suggested key books that they can read with their students. We also talked about Christian professors they know on campus.

Bonnie Lecompte, who works with international students at UofL, gave me a new insight about the importance of Christian professors: they bring credibility to the Gospel. Most international students are working on PhDs or Masters degrees, which brings them into close contact with professors, and most of them come from cultures that give a great deal of respect to elders, scholars, and people in authority. A professor who is also a Christian carries a lot of weight with them when they are considering the Gospel.

Over the next few months, I’m going to be working with these campus ministry staff to connect the professors they know with ESN and to introduce them to the ESN faculty on their campuses. On November 17, I’ll be making my first trip, to Berea College, to speak with students and faculty there about ESN.

Please pray for these trips to be successful in building strong partnerships between Christian professors and campus ministers around Kentucky. Pray also for “divine appointments” as InterVarsity staff and I meet with Christian faculty and staff.

Here’s how the Times begins its discussion of Collins’ faith:

First, there is the God issue. Dr. Collins believes in him. Passionately. And he preaches about his belief in churches and a best-selling book. For some presidential appointees, that might not be a problem, but many scientists view such outspoken religious commitment as a sign of mild dementia.

The irony, in my view, is that Collins believes in evolution, supports embryonic stem-cell research, and even supports therapeutic cloning, a process by which human embryos are created for the sole purpose of using them of medical treatments. He has pledged not to let this religious beliefs influence his scientific work. What, exactly, is the concern of his opponents?

As far as I can tell, their sole concern is that Collins is an evangelical Christian. No one disputes his ability as a scientist or administrator. No one disputes that he is eminently qualified for the position. His critics cannot point to a single instance in which Collins’ private religious beliefs negatively affected his research or other work, yet they oppose his appointment. Collins’ views are clearly controversial from a theological or philosophical standpoint; I can’t even begin to imagine why they matter with regard to science or medicine.

If Francis Collins – one of our country’s premiere scientists, the man who decoded human DNA, someone who has proven his qualifications again and again – faces this kind of criticism, just imagine the pressure Emerging Scholars Network members face. Simply by admitting that they believe in Christ or think that the Bible is true, they open themselves up to all kinds of threats to their career. Many university departments have the good sense to realize that people from a variety of religious backgrounds can do excellent academic work. But the threat is always there, and that threat is usually enough to keep Christian academics “in the closet” regarding their faith. Several of the faculty I met at Vanderbilt admitted that they kept very quiet about their Christianity until they received tenure.

Few things are more damaging to one’s faith than sealing it off so that it doesn’t affect the rest of your life. Please join with me in praying for the careers and spiritual growth of ESN members. Pray especially that they will have the courage and wisdom to be open about their faith in the appropriate manner. And, if you would like to make a financial contribution to support my work with the Emerging Scholars Network, click here.

One of the faculty I met, Dr. Ward, had taught French literature and humanities at Penn State, Wheaton, and Vanderbilt, succeeding in both secular and Christian environments. She told me that, when she first arrived at Vandy, some other professors had viewed her with suspicion because she had come from a Christian college. She won them over by proving her ability as a scholar, but also by treating her fellow faculty with respect and integrity, even when they disagreed with her on important issues.

The humanities have one of the lowest rates of Christian faculty of any academic discipline, but there are signs of hope. Several years ago, leading postmodernist Stanley Fish declared that religion would be “the next big thing” in the university. Dr. Ward sees more openness today for professors who want to bring religion into their research.

Gatherings of Christian faculty like this one help build community among Christians on campus. Several of the faculty told me that they knew few, if any, Christians in their department, and getting together with fellow Christians is a great encouragement to them. For others, a dinner like this can the first step toward joining a campus Bible study, becoming an ESN mentor, or thinking more seriously about their faith. Since the early church “breaking bread together,” eating with fellow Christians has been used by God to build up his people.

Pray for these Christian faculty at Vanderbilt as they work on their teaching, research, and service. Pray especially for faculty in “besieged disciplines” like the humanities for openings to bring their faith in Christ into the classroom and their scholarship.

Spring Grove after the Windstorm

I delivered this devotional at this past week’s Christian Marketplace Network meeting.

What were you doing a year ago?

I was walking through my neighborhood, amazed at the damage caused by those incredible winds from Hurricane Ike. Our house was lucky, but other houses on my street looked like, well, like they had just been through a hurricane. My parents lost nearly 30 other trees on their property.

Photo: Spring Grove Cemetery after the windstorm by elycefeliz

Before the winds came, I could not have told you which trees would fall and which would stand. The Bible often uses this image of wind as a test that reveals our relationship with God. A person might appear to be strong and mighty, but when the winds come, we find out what they’re really made off.

Psalm 1 says that a righteous person is “like a tree planted by streams of water.” “Whatever he does prospers,” writes the psalmist.

Not so the wicked!
They are like chaff
that the wind blows away.

What distinguishes the righteous from the wicked? Why does one stand and prosper, while the other one blows away? The Arbor Doctor could tell you what you need to prepare your trees for a long and healthy life. This psalm tells us how to prepare ourselves. The righteous person loves the word of God. Verse 2 tells us:

…his delight is in the law of the LORD,
and on his law he meditates day and night.

This Hebrew word “law” – torah – isn’t just a list of rules that God wants us to obey. It’s more like the teaching that we receive from a parent or a good mentor. The righteous person listens to that teaching, day after day.

God’s word is the food, water, and fertilizer we need to grow deep roots. None of us can predict when trials will come, but they will always come.

By spending time with God, though, and filling ourselves with his word, we prepare ourselves to stand firm on that day of trial.

Me with a booklet I just made

I love books, and I’ve had fun making my own from time to time. If you have a duplexing printer, or if you can turn stacks of paper over, you can create quick booklets out of PDFs. Not only does it save paper, but it’s also an easy way of carrying long-ish documents with you. Throw on a cover made from a cereal box, and you’ve got a nice little book that’s much easier on the eyes than your computer monitory.

If you have a Mac, just download this free Create Booklet service. It will add a “Create Booklet” option to your print window.

For Windows, or if you prefer web-based options, use the free website BookletCreator.com. This online service provides a few more options. For example, it will let you set a maximize number of pages for your booklets, in case you are printing a very long document and need to break it up into smaller pieces.

Happy reading!

Every three years, just after Christmas, over 20,000 college students gather for Urbana – InterVarsity’s student missions conference. Missionaries, missions agencies, and Christian leaders from around the world share their vision for bringing the Gospel to the world world. Every year, students commit their lives to Christ for the first time, renew their commitments to God, and hear God’s call to join the mission field.

This year, at Urbana 09, the Emerging Scholars Network will be calling students to a different kind of mission field: the university.

Urbana offers dozens of different seminars tailoring to students’ interests and passions. These are grouped together as “majors” to help students find the topics that fit their concerns. For the first time, one of the seminar majors will be In the Workplace & In the Academy, featuring seminars about following God’s call in, well, the workplace and the academy. Christian professors and professionals will be sharing their own experiences of living out the gospel in their daily lives. Speakers will also help students understand that the Bible speaks to the whole of their life, and that Jesus claims ownership over every realm.

I’ll be leading a seminar called “Serving Christ as a Professor: 10 Things You Need to Know.” I offered this seminar in 2006, and about 300 students came to listen. Many of these became new members of the Emerging Scholars Network. Because these are undergraduates, my talk leads them through the very basics – like how to know what God wants you to do with your life – and the practical steps of applying to graduate school, finishing a PhD, and finding a job as a professor.

Please pray for my preparations in the next few months, and pray especially for the students thinking about coming to Urbana. Pray for God to provide the funds and freedom to attend this important conference. Pray, too, that they will come to the conference with an open heart and a readiness to follow God’s call wherever it leads them.