My writings - and those of others.
"Big" History
I’ve just discovered a site called the Big History Project. Much of the content is similar to that of the film, Journey of the Universe. Both are designed to help young people and adults make sense of their world as a starting point for understanding and direction. It’s remarkably good.
The course began as a co-project of historian David Christian and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Prof, Christian began as a Russian historical scholar but became interested in a multi-disciplinary approach that would cover history from the Big Bang to the present. For someone like myself, whose secondary school history focused on Canadian and British constitutional history and expanded to European history in university, it’s a revolutionary approach. It also has real implications for young peoples’ understanding of our current world As an addition to the more serious presentation the online site has joined forces with John and Hank Green’s parallel version for the kids. While the latter is lighthearted and sometimes frenetic, it also delivers the goods.
Occasionally I am asked to teach Sunday School and I am always pleased to be at the same table with this group of kids aged six to ten. Their world outside that one hour of the week could not be more different than the one presented in a curriculum of early bible land often replete of Victorian art. It doesn’t surprise me that as soon as the kids have any ability to object to this worldview they depart. Churches spend a lot of time wringing their hands about the absence of young people – as they should. But they may be missing the point.
David Christian noted in 2010, “Over the next fifty years we will see a return of the ancient tradition of "universal history"; but this will be a new form of universal history that is global in its practice and scientific in its spirit and methods.” This is what our kids are already learning in school and it is supplemented by online learning like this project. Most religious education programs focus on a small segment of this history without realizing the wider framing that the kids are experiencing.
With assistance from Bill Gates, the Big History Project was launched with a TED talk in 2011. After comprehensive pilot testing, the course has been made available on a site here for free to teachers, students and interested life-long learners.While the course is intended primarily at the middle and high school level, adults will benefit in several ways. History starts with cosmogenesis and moves through several distinct stages that the creators term The Goldilocks effect were exactly the right conditions produce something dramatically new. When we meet the planet, we have lots of indications of how things came to be. When humans enter the picture, there are clear indications of how they live through stages and how their interactions with the physical environment affect cultural development. Unlike my own history courses years ago with too many forgotten dates and documents, these sessions are lively and relational – and focus on why things are as they are. They are also a reminder of the pace in which our young people operate. It’s sometimes dizzying – and it is also real.
Modern kids and adults now have resources and sense of scale that are totally different from those covered in any Sunday School curriculum. We also have access to disciplines that were not known to all but a few of the people of those times. We had better remember that.
Continuous Learning
The 2018 Parliament of World Religions was a life changing experience - even for someone who was simply serving as a volunteer on the extensive exhibit floor. This presentation was one of them:
I have been exploring people and organizations within my own community. My own parish encouraged our children to help raise funds for clean water in first nations communities. While the difficulties in providing good systems for small and remote communities are substantial, the reality is still shameful.
In the process of exploration, I have asked for help and received good advice and contacts. One resulted in an invitation to a recent book launch. Now I have another one and at the bottom of it is a notice about a WaterDocs Festival. Its founder was someone I knew well 30 years ago when I was an arts administrator - but I never knew her with this connection.
There are so many awful uses of technology - but the good ones redeem them.
Resolutions for the Planet
I’m often concerned about how little I am doing to combat the climate crisis and I’m reminded by a column today in Fast Company of a few practicail things. One that it doesn’t mention but one that should always be central is that we are not the only species on the planet . As writer and theologian Sally McFague observes, animals and plants were here long before us - and would survive much better without us.
But here are a few I can try.
Watch the number of bottles containing cleaning fluids - keep the sizes that fit on the counter and buy future ones in bulk sizes to refill them. I’ve already been using a concentrated detergent and one large bottle from Method will last a year. It doesn’t hurt that the laundry machines specify using less.
Washable bags for storage - I haven’t found any yet, but I do reuse the ones I have.
Recycled paper in every room in the house - I could do batter on that one.
More meatless meals - because of the crops that are needed to produce meat. It probably means looking at the vegetarian cookbook or the sections of the cookbook that I tend to avoid.
Buy things locally that don’t require more shipping whenever possible.
Never leave the house without a reusable bag to carry stuff home in - I’ve also stopped driving to the grocery store and buying more food than I need. The walking is doing me good and I’ve buying less and saving - since carrying it becomes an issue.
Wear the clothes I already have - fortunately most of them are from materials that have lasted well
These are easy and doable. Now to get on thinking about how to be an advocate.
An important anniversary
50 years ago an iconic picture from space gave us a real sense of the planet when the image Earth Rising was taken by one of the Astronats. The wonderful writer Bill McKibben has reflected on this recently in the Huffington Post and also outlined how the world has changed.
The image brought a sense of hope then., he says. It was the inspiration for the first Earth Day. The Silent Spring had been published. The Grand Canyon had been saved. Here’s what McKibben quotes Margaret Mead saying about that era:
“Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space,”
There was a brief period when the idea of limits to growth had traction - but McKibben notes that it didn’t last and quotes Margaret Thatcher’s contrasting “There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and their families.” Decades later this is an all too common prevailing view where we live off the earth instead of on it. In watching a show on Netflix recently, I was disheartened to hear a cosmologist join the voices of the Silicon Valley mega-millionaires who looked forward to space travel so that we can “colonize” some other planet. That’s madness. Read the full article from the link above. The scientists warn us - but it may have to be the poets that move us:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.Maya Angelou
There is no one but us.
Leading
The orchestral conductor, Benjamin Zander, is a frequent business speaker and famous for his TED talk. now viewed by more than eight million people. Conductors are sometimes viewed as the last of the great dictators. Zander is different. He had an epiphany some years ago when he realized that the conductor of an orchestra plays a different role.
The insight transformed his conducting and his orchestral musicians immediately noticed the difference. Now he’s a leader who asks for input in the form of written comments at every rehearsal. He understands that the musicians’ skills and experience enhance his own.
His gifts as a teacher are remarkable too and they are now shared through masterclasses for all of us on YouTube. The students perform with technical brilliance before he enters in with a consistent message – it is time to relax and let go of the kind of competitive excellence their preparatory training has provided and instead relate to their audience. Transformation happens before our own shining eyes. You can watch several of his master classes on YouTube and see him actively engaged in making the music come alive - even resorting to hair pulling - not a conventional teaching technique – but see how effectively it works in creating a totally different kind of performer).
Zander’s passion is for introducing classical music to those unfamiliar with it and he does so with incredible skill and experience in making audiences and performers connect. It’s a worthwhile example of how a leader inspires and transforms performance.
Originally published on another site in 2017