Explicit Teaching Quotes

A part of a healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are NOT strengthening her prosocial sense, you are damaging it--and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.

I’ve successfully lobbied and testified for stalking laws in several states, but I would trade them all for a high school class that would teach young men how to hear “no,” and teach young women that it’s all right to explicitly reject.

Of course, I couldn’t explain this vector calculus concept and so, slightly embarrassed in front of Rahul and the other Bengali students, I told Sanjit just that; he had cornered me, and honesty emerged as my only option. Simultaneous to my humiliating disclosure of the truth, Sanjit gradually inched toward where I was sitting. After hearing my reply, he slowly returned to his teacher stool and whiteboard, his back turned away from the class, the suspense building and his words impending, before turning around and breaking into speech, “Don’t trust your interior monologue. If you are asked something and you know it, then express or demonstrate it. Don’t just nod or say yes because then you are lying to yourself. Any ass can say yes, but not all asses can express it.” I modified my first impression: Sanjit was full of explicit aphorisms. Humbled, those words encouragingly rang between my ears for quite some time.

When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are not strengthening her prosocial sense;you are damaging it--and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.

To keep the blinders off our life-enhancing seventh sense, as with most improvements in the human condition, we must start with our children. A part of healthy conscience is being able to confront consciencelessness. When you teach your daughter, explicitly or by passive rejection, that she must ignore her outrage, that she must be kind and accepting to the point of not defending herself or other people, that she must not rock the boat for any reason, you are not strengthening her prosocial sense; you are damaging it—and the first person she will stop protecting is herself.

Whether you call it Attachment Parenting, natural parenting, or simple maternal instincts, this false "return" to traditional parenting is just a more explicit and deliberate version of the often unnamed parenting gender divide. Whether you're wearing you baby or not, whether you're using cloth diapers or teaching your four-week-old to use the toilet; it's still women who are doing the bulk of child care, no matter what the parenting philosophy. Putting a fancy name to the fact that we're still doing all the goddamn work doesn't make it any less sexist or unfair

It is impossible to live in autarchy, to make the testimony of faith, pray and fast and go to pilgrimage only, far from men and worrying about no one except oneself. It is worth repeating that to be with God is tantamount to being with men; to carry faith is tantamount to carrying the responsibility of a continuous social commitment. The teaching that we should extract from zakat is explicit: to posses is tantamount to having to share.

We have spent countless hours focused on manners, education, the perils of drugs. We teach them about stranger-danger and making good choices. But recently I’ve become aware that we must speak to our children about boundaries between the sexes. And what it means to not be a danger to someone else. To that end, we are making an effort to teach our sons about affirmative consent. We explain that the onus is on them to explicitly ask if their partner consents. And we tell them that a shrug or a smile or a sigh won’t suffice. They have to hear yes.

Too often we think the work of fighting oppression is just intellectual. The real work is personal, emotional, spiritual, and communal. It is explicit, with a deep and

Girls learn to smile early, and many cultures teach girls explicitly to “put on a pretty face.” It is a way of soothing the people around us, a facial adaptation to the expectation that we put others first, preserve social connections, and hide our disappointment, frustration, anger, or fear. We are expected to be more accommodating and less assertive or dominant. As girls’ smiles become less authentic, so, too, does their understanding of themselves.

It is now time for us to ask the personal question put to Jesus Christ by Saul of Tarsus on the Damascus road, ‘What shall I do Lord?’ or the similar question asked by the Philippian jailer, ’What must I do to be saved?’ Clearly we must do something. Christianity is no mere passive acquiescence in a series of propositions, however true. We may believe in the deity and the salvation of Christ, and acknowledge ourselves to be sinners in need of his salvation, but this does not make us Christians. We have to make a personal response to Jesus Christ, committing ourselves unreservedly to him as our Savior and Lord … At its simplest Christ’s call was “Follow me.” He asked men and women for their personal allegiance. He invited them to learn from him, to obey his words and to identify themselves with his cause … Now there can be no following without a previous forsaking. To follow Christ is to renounce all lesser loyalties … let me be more explicit about the forsaking which cannot be separated from the following of Jesus Christ. First, there must be a renunciation of sin. This, in a word, is repentance. It is the first part of Christian conversion. It can in no circumstances be bypassed. Repentance and faith belong together. We cannot follow Christ without forsaking sin … Repentance is a definite turn from every thought, word, deed, and habit which is known to be wrong … There can be no compromise here. There may be sins in our lives which we do not think we could ever renounce, but we must be willing to let them go as we cry to God for deliverance from them. If you are in doubt regarding what is right and what is wrong, do not be too greatly influenced by the customs and conventions of Christians you may know. Go by the clear teaching of the Bible and by the prompting of your conscience, and Christ will gradually lead you further along the path of righteousness. When he puts his finger on anything, give it up. It may be some association or recreation, some literature we read, or some attitude of pride, jealousy or resentment, or an unforgiving spirit. Jesus told his followers to pluck out their eye and cut off their hand or foot if it caused them to sin. We are not to obey this with dead literalism, of course, and mutilate our bodies. It is a figure of speech for dealing ruthlessly with the avenues along which temptation comes to us.

Do I agree that with privilege comes responsibility? The answer is no. I believe that responsibilities arise when one undertakes them voluntarily. I also believe that in the absence of explicit contracts, people who lecture other people on their "responsibilities" are almost always up to no good.

EVERY WEDNESDAY, I teach an introductory fiction workshop at Harvard University, and on the first day of class I pass out a bullet-pointed list of things the students should try hard to avoid. Don’t start a story with an alarm clock going off. Don’t end a story with the whole shebang having been a suicide note. Don’t use flashy dialogue tags like intoned or queried or, God forbid, ejaculated. Twelve unbearably gifted students are sitting around the table, and they appreciate having such perimeters established. With each variable the list isolates, their imaginations soar higher. They smile and nod. The mood in the room is congenial, almost festive with learning. I feel like a very effective teacher; I can practically hear my course-evaluation scores hitting the roof. Then, when the students reach the last point on the list, the mood shifts. Some of them squint at the words as if their vision has gone blurry; others ask their neighbors for clarification. The neighbor will shake her head, looking pale and dejected, as if the last point confirms that she should have opted for that aseptic-surgery class where you operate on a fetal pig. The last point is: Don’t Write What You Know. The idea panics them for two reasons. First, like all writers, the students have been encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, for as long as they can remember, to write what they know, so the prospect of abandoning that approach now is disorienting. Second, they know an awful lot. In recent workshops, my students have included Iraq War veterans, professional athletes, a minister, a circus clown, a woman with a pet miniature elephant, and gobs of certified geniuses. They are endlessly interesting people, their lives brimming with uniquely compelling experiences, and too often they believe those experiences are what equip them to be writers. Encouraging them not to write what they know sounds as wrongheaded as a football coach telling a quarterback with a bazooka of a right arm to ride the bench. For them, the advice is confusing and heartbreaking, maybe even insulting. For me, it’s the difference between fiction that matters only to those who know the author and fiction that, well, matters.

Studies show that teaching traits like kindness, compassion, and empathy, in an explicit and intentional way at a young age, can make a difference. A 2011 meta-analysis of social-emotional learning, which many US curricula have embraced in recent decades, suggested that it led to higher graduation rates and safer sex, even eighteen years later.

There is a vast difference between being a Christian and being a disciple. The difference is commitment. Motivation and discipline will not ultimately occur through listening to sermons, sitting in a class, participating in a fellowship group, attending a study group in the workplace or being a member of a small group, but rather in the context of highly accountable, relationally transparent, truth-centered, small discipleship units. There are twin prerequisites for following Christ - cost and commitment, neither of which can occur in the anonymity of the masses. Disciples cannot be mass produced. We cannot drop people into a program and see disciples emerge at the end of the production line. It takes time to make disciples. It takes individual personal attention. Discipleship training is not about information transfer, from head to head, but imitation, life to life. You can ultimately learn and develop only by doing. The effectiveness of one's ministry is to be measured by how well it flourishes after one's departure. Discipling is an intentional relationship in which we walk alongside other disciples in order to encourage, equip, and challenge one another in love to grow toward maturity in Christ. This includes equipping the disciple to teach others as well. If there are no explicit, mutually agreed upon commitments, then the group leader is left without any basis to hold people accountable. Without a covenant, all leaders possess is their subjective understanding of what is entailed in the relationship. Every believer or inquirer must be given the opportunity to be invited into a relationship of intimate trust that provides the opportunity to explore and apply God's Word within a setting of relational motivation, and finally, make a sober commitment to a covenant of accountability. Reviewing the covenant is part of the initial invitation to the journey together. It is a sobering moment to examine whether one has the time, the energy and the commitment to do what is necessary to engage in a discipleship relationship. Invest in a relationship with two others for give or take a year. Then multiply. Each person invites two others for the next leg of the journey and does it all again. Same content, different relationships. The invitation to discipleship should be preceded by a period of prayerful discernment. It is vital to have a settled conviction that the Lord is drawing us to those to whom we are issuing this invitation. . If you are going to invest a year or more of your time with two others with the intent of multiplying, whom you invite is of paramount importance. You want to raise the question implicitly: Are you ready to consider serious change in any area of your life? From the outset you are raising the bar and calling a person to step up to it. Do not seek or allow an immediate response to the invitation to join a triad. You want the person to consider the time commitment in light of the larger configuration of life's responsibilities and to make the adjustments in schedule, if necessary, to make this relationship work. Intentionally growing people takes time. Do you want to measure your ministry by the number of sermons preached, worship services designed, homes visited, hospital calls made, counseling sessions held, or the number of self-initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus? When we get to the shore's edge and know that there is a boat there waiting to take us to the other side to be with Jesus, all that will truly matter is the names of family, friends and others who are self initiating, reproducing, fully devoted followers of Jesus because we made it the priority of our lives to walk with them toward maturity in Christ. There is no better eternal investment or legacy to leave behind.

From an evolutionary perspective, parenting isn't a good model for parents and children. Caring for children, nurturing them and investing in them, is absolutely critical for human thriving. Teaching children implicitly and explicitly is certainly important. But, from the point of view of evolution, trying to consciously shape how your children will turn out is both futile and self-defeating.

God does not reveal Himself; he only reveals His way. Judaism does not speak of God’s self-revelation, but of the revelation of His teaching for man. The Bible reflects God’s revelation of His relation to history, rather than of a revelation of His very Self. Even His will or His wisdom is not completely expressed through the prophets. Prophecy is superior to human wisdom, and God’s love is superior to prophecy. This spiritual hierarchy is explicitly stated by the Rabbis.

Andrea Dworkin has written, “Creative intelligence…demands its right to consequence…always it wants recognition, influence, or power; it is an accomplishing intelligence.”54 Women who work day by day in the world with worldly integrity are the living proof that feminist thought, feminist intelligence, has “consequences.” Their work may not be the kind that is explicitly devoted to the teaching of Women’s Studies, to the campaigns against rape or pornography, or to the writing of women’s literature. However, it is work that clearly shows that women can master physical tasks, ideas, culture, and the wider world. It is an accomplishing work that has its creative roots in the world as women imagine it could be because it breaks women out of the world in which men have constricted women’s power and work. It is work that is involved in the complexity of the world through direct experience of it. Worldly integrity meets the world on its own turf, but not on its own terms.

But race in the United States is not a tidy matter. Only three of the submitted pieces explicitly referenced the future. Most of them were concerned with the past and the present. And that told me two things. First, it confirmed how inextricably interwoven the past is in the present, how heavily that past bears on the future; we cannot talk about black lives mattering or police brutality without reckoning with the very foundation of this country. We must acknowledge the plantation, must unfold white sheets, must recall the black diaspora to understand what is happening now. Second, it reveals a certain exhaustion, I think. We’re tired. We’re tired of having to figure out how to talk to our kids and teach them that America sees them as less, and that she just might kill them. This is the conversation we want to avoid. We’re tired of feeling futile in the face of this ever-present danger, this omnipotent history, predicated as this country is, founded as this country was, on our subjugation.

Great schools don’t just teach you, they change you! Equal Education moves people towards empowerment but unequal education does the reverse. Of all the divisive tools that are used to push people to go to the margins, unequal education is the most damaging and enduring. Unless there is an explicit effort to include everyone, schools will never be a remedy for exclusion, they will be a cause of it . Yet in-spite of the outstanding benefits that come when girls get an education, more than 130M girls around the world are still not in school…

Sufis like to say: “This is not a religion; it is religion,” or “Sufism is the essence of all religions,” which provides “a belief in an inner teaching beyond formalized religion.” In other words, Sufism puts spirituality first — getting to the heart of the matter, the lived experience of the Divine. Eckhart does the same; he tried to get deeper than the “formalized” version of Christianity. Sufism explicitly practices what I call Deep Ecumenism, honoring the essence of religious teaching and the lived experience of Divinity, found in all religious traditions.

(Inevitably, someone raises the question about World War II: What if Christians had refused to fight against Hitler? My answer is a counterquestion: What if the Christians in Germany had emphatically refused to fight for Hitler, refused to carry out the murders in concentration camps?) The long history of Christian “just wars” has wrought suffering past all telling, and there is no end in sight. As Yoder has suggested, Niebuhr’s own insight about the “irony of history” ought to lead us to recognize the inadequacy of our reason to shape a world that tends toward justice through violence. Might it be that reason and sad experience could disabuse us of the hope that we can approximate God’s justice through killing? According to the guideline I have proposed, reason must be healed and taught by Scripture, and our experience must be transformed by the renewing of our minds in conformity with the mind of Christ. Only thus can our warring madness be overcome. This would mean, practically speaking, that Christians would have to relinquish positions of power and influence insofar as the exercise of such positions becomes incompatible with the teaching and example of Jesus. This might well mean, as Hauerwas has perceived, that the church would assume a peripheral status in our culture, which is deeply committed to the necessity and glory of violence. The task of the church then would be to tell an alternative story, to train disciples in the disciplines necessary to resist the seductions of violence, to offer an alternative home for those who will not worship the Beast. If the church is to be a Scripture-shaped community, it will find itself reshaped continually into a closer resemblance to the socially marginal status of Matthew’s nonviolent countercultural community. To articulate such a theological vision for the church at the end of the twentieth century may be indeed to take most seriously what experience is telling us: the secular polis has no tolerance for explicitly Christian witness and norms. It is increasingly the case in Western culture that Christians can participate in public governance only insofar as they suppress their explicitly Christian motivations. Paradoxically, the Christian community might have more impact upon the world if it were less concerned about appearing reasonable in the eyes of the world and more concerned about faithfully embodying the New Testament’s teaching against violence. Let it be said clearly, however, that the reasons for choosing Jesus’ way of peacemaking are not prudential. In calculable terms, this way is sheer folly. Why do we choose the way of nonviolent love of enemies? If our reasons for that choice are shaped by the New Testament, we are motivated not by the sheer horror of war, not by the desire for saving our own skins and the skins of our children (if we are trying to save our skins, pacifism is a very poor strategy), not by some general feeling of reverence for human life, not by the naive hope that all people are really nice and will be friendly if we are friendly first. No, if our reasons for choosing nonviolence are shaped by the New Testament witness, we act in simple obedience to the God who willed that his own Son should give himself up to death on a cross. We make this choice in the hope and anticipation that God’s love will finally prevail through the way of the cross, despite our inability to see how this is possible. That is the life of discipleship to which the New Testament repeatedly calls us. When the church as a community is faithful to that calling, it prefigures the peaceable kingdom of God in a world wracked by violence.

American cold war culture represented an age of anxiety. The anxiety was so severe that it sought relief in an insistent, assertive optimism. Much of American popular culture aided this quest for apathetic security. The expanding white middle class sought to escape their worries in the burgeoning consumer culture. Driving on the new highway system in gigantic showboat cars to malls and shopping centers that accepted a new form of payment known as credit cards, Americans could forget about Jim Crow, communism, and the possibility of Armageddon. At night in their suburban homes, television allowed middle class families to enjoy light domestic comedies like The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver. Somnolently they watched representations of settled family life, stories where lost baseball gloves and dinnertime hijinks represented the only conflicts. In the glow of a new Zenith television, it became easy to believe that the American dream had been fully realized by the sacrifice and hard work of the war generation. American monsters in pop culture came to the aid of this great American sleep. Although a handful of science fiction films made explicit political messages that unsettled an apathetic America, the vast majority of 'creature features' proffered parables of American righteousness and power. These narratives ended, not with world apocalypse, but with a full restoration of a secure, consumer-oriented status quo. Invaders in flying saucers, radioactive mutations, and giant creatures born of the atomic age wreaked havoc but were soon destroyed by brainy teams of civilian scientists in cooperation with the American military. These films encouraged a certain degree of paranoia but also offered quick and easy relief to this anxiety... Such films did not so much teach Americans to 'stop worrying and love the bomb' as to 'keep worrying and love the state.

Nurture parent-teacher relationships. When students feel that parents are talking negatively about their teacher, it undermines that critical relationship, akin to the acrimonious divorce of parents, notes Suniya Luthar. Students learn best from teachers they feel close to, and teachers play an essential role in buffering against achievement stress. Show respect and appreciation when you speak about or interact with their teachers. Actively build a partnership with educators so that a child can be best supported. “Replace” yourself. Consider creating your own council of parents. Value and appreciate the adults in your children’s lives. Guard that time so that they can enjoy a wider safety net of support. You might even make it formal, as some parents I interviewed did, by creating a master sheet of phone numbers and meeting together as a group. Encourage gratitude. Help children to get into the habit of telling others explicitly why they matter. You might adopt a regular gratitude practice at home, like “the one thing I love about the birthday person.” Teach kids how to think gratefully. Point out when someone goes out of their way to find a present for them, or when they do something kind that makes your child’s life better. Researchers find gratitude is the glue that binds relationships together.

All the world’s major religions have their own form of the Golden Rule that teaches kindness to others as the essence of their message. They all recognize animals as sentient and vulnerable to us, and include them within the moral sphere of our behavior. There are also strong voices in all the traditions emphasizing that our kindness to other beings should be based on compassion. This is more than merely being open to the suffering of others; it also explicitly includes the urge to act to relieve their suffering. We are thus responsible not just to refrain from harming animals and humans, but also to do what we can to stop others from harming them, and to create conditions that educate, inspire, and help others to live in ways that show kindness and respect for all life.

He goes on to contrast his country-bumpkin client with the city-slickers who are trying to frame him, and draws an explicit contrast between the morality of the country and the lawlessness of the city: the kind of crime (patricide) that Roscius is accused of doesn’t fit with a rural lifestyle. ‘Every type of crime doesn’t come from every type of life. Luxury is created in the city. Of necessity, luxury creates avarice. From avarice, recklessness bursts out. And from that comes every type of crime and wickedness. But the country life – which you call uncultured – teaches thrift, conscientiousness and justice.’ Cicero, we should remember, loved Rome; the politics, the law courts, the power-brokers, the back-stabbers, he was born to rise through them all. But he knew perfectly well that a jury of Romans might well see the city/country divide rather differently, and he played to the crowd accordingly.

I don’t know that this mode of teaching is applicable everywhere—I don’t know that we can in all subjects be comrades. But I think many of us who are teachers and professors have forgotten that the syllabus serves the student, and all around us are teachers, administrators, and columnists who seem to believe that material should be hard for the sake of it and that education itself is best when rendered not in wonder but in force. I have never formally issued a “trigger warning” or explicitly carved out a “safe space.” But I know that all readers do not come to a text equally. Some come surviving a rape, and some come caged in their assigned bodies, and some come having spent their entire young lives in classrooms with fellow students who made mascots of them. There seems to be an opportunity here, for comradeship, an invitation to allow for a more conversational literature, to revisit accepted ideas of voice and authority, to recognize that students are humans to be challenged, not animals to be broken and tamed.

Trump's twisted 'greatness' is that he effectively acts - he is not afraid to break the unwritten (and written) rules to impose his decisions. As we learned (not only) from Hegel, our life is regulated by a thick web of written and unwritten rules, rules which teach us how to practice the explicit (written) rules. While Trump (more or less) sticks to explicit legal regulations, he tends to ignore the unwritten silent pacts which determine how we should practice these rules - the way he dealt with Kavanaugh was just one example of it. Instead of just blaming Trump, the Left should learn from him and do the same. When a situation demands it, we should shamelessly do the impossible and break the unwritten rules. Unfortunately, today's Left is in advance terrified of any radical acts - even when it is in power, it worries all the time:'If we do this, how will the worlds react? Will our acts cause panic?' Ultimately, this fear means: 'Will our enemies be mad and react?' In order to act in politics, one has to overcome this fear and assume the risk, make a step into the unknown.

It is often asserted that education is breaking down because of overspecialisation. But this is only a partial and misleading diagnosis. Specialisation is not in itself a faulty principle of education. What would be the alternative - an amateurish smattering of all major subjects? Or a lengthy studium generale in which men are forced to spend their time sniffing at subjects which they do not wish to pursue, while they are being kept away from what they want to learn? This cannot be the right answer, since it can only lead to the type of intellectual man, whom Cardinal Newman castigated -'an intellectual man, as the world now conceives of him. ,..one who is full of "views" on all subjects of philosophy, on all matters of the day'. Such 'viewiness' is a sign of ignorance rather than knowledge. 'Shall I teach you the meaning of knowledge?' said Confucius. 'When you know a thing to recognise that you know it, and when you do not, to know that you do not know - that is knowledge.' What is at fault is not specialisation, but the lack of depth with which the subjects are usually presented, and the absence of meta- physical awareness. The sciences are being taught without any awareness of the presuppositions of science, of the meaning and significance of scientific laws, and of the place occupied by the natural sciences within the whole cosmos of human thought. The result is that the presuppositions of science are normally mistaken for its findings. Economics is being taught without any awareness of the view of human nature that underlies present-day economic theory. In fact, many economists are themselves unaware of the fact that such a view is implicit in their teaching and that nearly all their theories would have to change if that view changed. How could there be a rational teaching of politics without pressing all questions back to their metaphysical roots? Political thinking must necessarily become confused and end in 'double-talk' if there is a continued refusal to admit the serious study of the meta- physical and ethical problems involved. The confusion is already so great that it is legitimate to doubt the educational value of studying many of the so-called humanistic subjects. I say 'so- called' because a subject that does not make explicit its view of human nature can hardly be called humanistic. All

For example, in Spain, the Barcelona Age Factor (BAF) project studied the effects of changing the age of beginning to teach English to Catalan/Spanish bilingual students. When the starting age for teaching English was lowered, Carmen Muñoz and her colleagues took advantage of the opportunity to compare the learning outcomes for students who had started learning at different ages. They were able to look at students’ progress after 100, 416, and 726 hours of instruction. Those who had begun to learn later (aged 11, 14, or 18+) performed better on nearly every measure than those who had begun earlier (aged 8). This was particularly true of measures based on metalinguistic awareness or analytic ability. On listening comprehension, younger starters showed some advantages. Muñoz suggests that this may be based on younger learners’ use of a more implicit approach to learning while older learners’ advantages may reflect their ability to use more explicit approaches, based on their greater cognitive maturity. She points out that, in foreign language instruction, where time is usually limited, ‘younger learners may not have enough time and exposure to benefit fully from the alleged advantages of implicit learning’ (Muñoz 2006: 33).

The Indian conception teaches liberation from the opposites, by which are to be understood every sort of affective state and emotional tie to the object. Liberation follows the withdrawal of libido from all contents, resulting in a state of complete introversion. This psychological process is, very characteristically, known as tapas, a term which can best be rendered as “self-brooding.” This expression clearly pictures the state of meditation without content, in which the libido is supplied to one’s own self somewhat in the manner of incubating heat. As a result of the complete detachment of all affective ties to the object, there is necessarily formed in the inner self an equivalent of objective reality, or a complete identity of inside and outside, which is technically described as tat tvam asi (that art thou). The fusion of the self with its relations to the object produces the identity of the self (atman) with the essence of the world (i.e., with the relations of subject to object), so that the identity of the inner with the outer atman is cognized. The concept of brahman differs only slightly from that of atman, for in brahman the idea of the self is not explicitly given; it is, as it were, a general indefinable state of identity between inside and outside.

As everyone knows, Islam set up a social order from the outset, in contrast, for example, to Christianity. Islamic social teachings are so basic to the religion that still today many people, including Muslims, are completely unaware of Islam's spiritual dimensions. Social order demands rules and regulations, fear of the king, respect for the police, acknowledgement of authority. It has to be set up on the basis of God's majesty and severity. It pays primary attention to the external realm, the realm of the body and the desires of the lower soul, the realm where God is distant from the world. In contrast, Islamic spiritual teachings allow for intimacy, love, boldness, ecstatic expressions, and intoxication in the Beloved. All these are qualities that pertain to nearness to God. (...) In short, on the social level, Islam affirms the primacy of God as King, Majestic, Lord, Ruler. It establishes a theological patriarchy even if Muslim theologians refuse to apply the word father (or mother) to God. God is yang, while the world, human beings, and society are yin. Thereby order is established and maintained. Awe and distance are the ruling qualities. On the spiritual level, the picture is different. In this domain many Muslim authorities affirm the primacy of God as Merciful, Beautiful, Gentle, Loving. Here they establish a spiritual matriarchy, though again such terms are not employed. God is yin and human beings are yang. Human spiritual aspiration is accepted and welcomed by God. Intimacy and nearness are the ruling qualities. This helps explain why one can easily find positive evaluations of women and the feminine dimension of things in Sufism. (...) Again, this primacy of yin cannot function on the social level, since it undermines the authority of the law. If we take in isolation the Koranic statement, "Despair not of God's mercy surely God forgives all sins" (39:53), then we can throw the Sharia out the window. In the Islamic perspective, the revealed law prevents society from degenerating into chaos. One gains liberty not by overthrowing hierarchy and constraints, but by finding liberty in its true abode, the spiritual realm. Freedom, lack of limitation and constraint, bold expansivenessis achieved only by moving toward God, not by rebelling against Him and moving away. Attar (d. 618/1221) makes the same point more explicitly in an anecdote he tells about the great Sufi shaykh, Abu'l- Hasan Kharraqani (d. 425/1033): It is related that one night the Shaykh was busy with prayer. He heard a voice saying, "Beware, Abu'l-Hasan! Do you want me to tell people what I know about you so that they will stone you to death?" The Shaykh replied, "O God the Creator! Do You want me to tell the people what I know about Your mercy and what I see of Your generosity? Then no one will prostrate himself to You." A voice came, "You keep quiet, and so will I." Sufism is concerned with "maintaining the secret" (hifz al-sirr) for more reasons than one. The secret of God's mercy threatens the plain fact of His wrath. If "She" came out of the closet, "He" would be overthrown. But then She could not be found, for it is He who shows the way to Her door.

Universities are fueled in large measure by what's called overhead of the grant...so if you get a million dollar grant, half or more will go to your university, right? So that's what builds the buildings and fuels the place. So the university has an incentive to get as many people to file grant applications as they can, and they have an incentive to hire people whose grant applications will be large rather than small. So this, for example, is one of the reasons that science has taken up arms against theory –that is to say, proper scientific theoreticians like me – and it has instead hired people who run big expensive experiments: Because big expensive experiments have big grants, and those big grants bring in money. But if you were a university and what you wanted was to have people writing big expensive grants who were capable of getting them, then what you would want to do is...you would want to free those people from teaching, and you would want to get people who weren't so expensive to do the work of the university...and the way you do that is: you bring them on as graduate students; and you pay them an appalling wage; you claim that they are not actually workers, that they are students; and they do most of the teaching, and they do a lot of the work of the university, for incredibly low amounts of money; they live under poor conditions; and increasingly they have to come from abroad where they are in some sense getting a deal that still makes sense. But this means that we overproduce PhDs. We give people degrees instead of money to do the work of the university, in order that people who are capable of getting the grants spend almost full time doing that job. And it's a racket. The person who knows the most about this is actually Eric, my brother. So...what he unearthed was actually that there was an explicit conspiracy to game the visa system in order to keep this system running...that effectively a fake shortage of science students was created to allow the universities to basically flood the market, to drive the wages down.

1. Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language. 2. Total Representation: The Bible represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.[11] 3. Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible.[12] 4. Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.[13] 5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. 6. Solo Scriptura:[14] The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch. 7. Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors. 8. Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching. 9. Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear “biblical” truths that it teaches. The prior nine assumptions and beliefs generate a tenth viewpoint that—although often not stated in explications of biblicist principles and beliefs by its advocates—also commonly characterizes the general biblicist outlook, particularly as it is received and practiced in popular circles: 10. Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.[15]

See especially academia, which has effectively become a hope labor industrial complex. Within that system, tenured professors—ostensibly proof positive that you can, indeed, think about your subject of choice for the rest of your life, complete with job security, if you just work hard enough—encourage their most motivated students to apply for grad school. The grad schools depend on money from full-pay students and/or cheap labor from those students, so they accept far more master’s students than there are spots in PhD programs, and far more PhD students than there are tenure-track positions. Through it all, grad students are told that work will, in essence, save them: If they publish more, if they go to more conferences to present their work, if they get a book contract before graduating, their chances on the job market will go up. For a very limited few, this proves true. But it is no guarantee—and with ever-diminished funding for public universities, many students take on the costs of conference travel themselves (often through student loans), scrambling to make ends meet over the summer while they apply for the already-scarce number of academic jobs available, many of them in remote locations, with little promise of long-term stability. Some academics exhaust their hope labor supply during grad school. For others, it takes years on the market, often while adjuncting for little pay in demeaning and demanding work conditions, before the dream starts to splinter. But the system itself is set up to feed itself as long as possible. Most humanities PhD programs still offer little or nothing in terms of training for jobs outside of academia, creating a sort of mandatory tunnel from grad school to tenure-track aspirant. In the humanities, especially, to obtain a PhD—to become a doctor in your field of knowledge—is to adopt the refrain “I don’t have any marketable skills.” Many academics have no choice but to keep teaching—the only thing they feel equipped to do—even without fair pay or job security. Academic institutions are incentivized to keep adjuncts “doing what they love”—but there’s additional pressure from peers and mentors who’ve become deeply invested in the continued viability of the institution. Many senior academics with little experience of the realities of the contemporary market explicitly and implicitly advise their students that the only good job is a tenure-track academic job. When I failed to get an academic job in 2011, I felt soft but unsubtle dismay from various professors upon telling them that I had chosen to take a high school teaching job to make ends meet. It

Burbank's power of love, reported Hall, "greater than any other, was a subtle kind of nourishment that made everything grow better and bear fruit more abundantly. Burbank explained to me that in all his experimentation he took plants into his confidence, asked them to help, and assured them that he held their small lives in deepest regard and affection." Helen Keller, deaf and blind, after a visit to Burbank, wrote in Out­ look for the Blind: "He has the rarest of gifts, the receptive spirit of a child. When plants talk to him, he listens. Only a wise child can understand the language of flowers and trees." Her observation was particularly apt since all his life Burbank loved children. In his essay "Training of the Human Plant," later published as a book, he an­ticipated the more humane attitudes of a later day and shocked authori­tarian parents by saying, "It is more important for a child to have a good nervous system than to try to 'force' it along the line of book knowledge at the expense of its spontaneity, its play. A child should learn through a medium of pleasure, not of pain. Most of the things that are really useful in later life come to the children through play and through association with nature." Burbank, like other geniuses, realized that his successes came from having conserved the exuberance of a small boy and his wonder for everything around him. He told one of his biographers: 'Tm almost seventy-seven, and I can still go over a gate or run a foot race or kick the chandelier. That's because my body is no older than my mind-and my mind is adolescent. It has never grown up and I hope it never will." It was this quality which so puzzled the dour scientists who looked askance at his power of creation and bedeviled audiences who expected him to be explicit as to how he produced so many horticultural wonders. Most of them were as disappointed as the members of the American Pomological Society, gathered to hear Burbank tell "all" during a lecture entitled "How to Produce New Fruits and Flowers," who sat agape as they heard him say: In pursuing the study of any of the universal and everlasting laws of nature, whether relating to the life, growth, structure and movements of a giant planet, the tiniest plant or of the psychological movements of the human brain, some conditions are necessary before we can become one of nature's interpreters or the creator of any valuable work for the world. Preconceived notions, dogmas and all personal prejudice and bias must be laid aside. Listen patiently, quietly and reverently to the lessons, one by one, which Mother Nature has to teach, shedding light on that which was before a mystery, so that all who will, may see and know. She conveys her truths only to those who are passive and receptive. Accepting these truths as suggested, wherever they may lead, then we have the whole universe in harmony with us. At last man has found a solid foundation for science, having discovered that he is part of a universe which is eternally unstable in form, eternally immutable in substance.

The “Tall Tree” Fairness Test We can imagine the advantages and disadvantages that shape our lives as similar to the natural environment that shapes a tree as it grows. A tree growing on an open, level field grows straight and tall, toward the sun; a tree that grows on a hillside will also grow toward the sun—which means it will grow at an angle. The steeper the hill, the sharper the angle of the tree, so if we transplant that tree to the level field, it’s going to be a totally different shape from a tree native to that field. Both are adapted to the environment where they grew. We can infer the shape of the environment where a tree grew by looking at the shape of the tree. White men grow on an open, level field. White women grow on far steeper and rougher terrain because the field wasn’t made for them. Women of color grow not just on a hill, but on a cliffside over the ocean, battered by wind and waves. None of us chooses the landscape in which we’re planted. If you find yourself on an ocean-battered cliff, your only choice is to grow there, or fall into the ocean. So if we transplant a survivor of the steep hill and cliff to the level field, natives of the field may look at that survivor and wonder why she has so much trouble trusting people, systems, and even her own bodily sensations. Why is this tree so bent and gnarled? It’s because that is what it took to survive in the place where she grew. A tree that’s fought wind and gravity and erosion to grow strong and green on a steep cliff is going to look strange and out of place when moved to the level playing field. The gnarled, wind-blown tree from an oceanside cliff might not conform with our ideas of what a tree should look like, but it works well in the context where it grew. And that tall straight tree wouldn’t stand a chance if it was transplanted to the cliffside. 19 One kind of adversity: How many white parents do you know who explicitly teach their children to keep their hands in sight at all times and always say “Yes, sir” and “No, ma’am” if they are stopped by the police? That’s just standard operating procedure for a lot of African American parents. Black parents in America grow their kids differently, because the landscape their kids are growing in requires it. The stark difference between how people of color are treated by police and how white people are treated results in white people thinking black people are ridiculous for being afraid of the police. We can’t see the ocean, so when black people tell us, “We do this to avoid falling into the ocean,” we don’t understand. But just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. How can we tell? By looking at the shape of the tree. Trees that grow at an angle grew on the side of a hill. People who are afraid of the police grew up in a world where the police are a threat. 20 Just because the road looks flat doesn’t mean it is. Just because you can’t see the ocean doesn’t mean it’s not there. You can infer the landscape by looking at the shapes of the people who grew in those environments. Instead of wondering why they aren’t thriving on the level playing field, imagine how the field can be changed to allow everyone to thrive.

Robert Askins Brings ‘Hand to God’ to Broadway Chad Batka for The New York Times Robert Askins at the Booth Theater, where his play “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday. By MICHAEL PAULSON The conceit is zany: In a church basement, a group of adolescents gathers (mostly at the insistence of their parents) to make puppets that will spread the Christian message, but one of the puppets turns out to be more demonic than divine. The result — a dark comedy with the can-puppets-really-do-that raunchiness of “Avenue Q” and can-people-really-say-that outrageousness of “The Book of Mormon” — is “Hand to God,” a new play that is among the more improbable entrants in the packed competition for Broadway audiences over the next few weeks. Given the irreverence of some of the material — at one point stuffed animals are mutilated in ways that replicate the torments of Catholic martyrs — it is perhaps not a surprise to discover that the play’s author, Robert Askins, was nicknamed “Dirty Rob” as an undergraduate at Baylor, a Baptist-affiliated university where the sexual explicitness and violence of his early scripts raised eyebrows. But Mr. Askins had also been a lone male soloist in the children’s choir at St. John Lutheran of Cypress, Tex. — a child who discovered early that singing was a way to make the stern church ladies smile. His earliest performances were in a deeply religious world, and his writings since then have been a complex reaction to that upbringing. “It’s kind of frustrating in life to be like, ‘I’m a playwright,’ and watch people’s face fall, because they associate plays with phenomenally dull, didactic, poetic grad-schoolery, where everything takes too long and tediously explores the beauty in ourselves,” he said in a recent interview. “It’s not church, even though it feels like church a lot when we go these days.” The journey to Broadway, where “Hand to God” opens on Tuesday at the Booth Theater, still seems unlikely to Mr. Askins, 34, who works as a bartender in Brooklyn and says he can’t afford to see Broadway shows, despite his newfound prominence. He seems simultaneously enthralled by and contemptuous of contemporary theater, the world in which he has chosen to make his life; during a walk from the Cobble Hill coffee shop where he sometimes writes to the Park Slope restaurant where he tends bar, he quoted Nietzsche and Derrida, described himself as “deeply weird,” and swore like, well, a satanic sock-puppet. “If there were no laughs in the show, I’d think there was something wrong with him,” said the actor Steven Boyer, who won raves in earlier “Hand to God” productions as Jason, a grief-stricken adolescent with a meek demeanor and an angry-puppet pal. “But anybody who is able to write about such serious stuff and be as hilarious as it is, I’m not worried about their mental health.” Mr. Askins’s interest in the performing arts began when he was a boy attending rural Texas churches affiliated with the conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod denomination; he recalls the worshipers as “deeply conservative, old farm folks, stone-faced, pride and suffering, and the only time anybody ever really livened up was when the children’s choir would perform.” “My grandmother had a cross-stitch that said, ‘God respects me when I work, but he loves me when I sing,’ and so I got into that,” he said. “For somebody who enjoys performance, that was the way in.” The church also had a puppet ministry — an effort to teach children about the Bible by use of puppets — and when Mr. Askins’s mother, a nurse, began running the program, he enlisted to help. He would perform shows for other children at preschools and vacation Bible camps. “The shows are wacky, but it was fun,” he said. “They’re badly written attempts to bring children to Jesus.” Not all of his formative encounters with puppets were positive. Particularly scarring: D

the five points of Calvinism were not formulated in that way by Calvin himself. Certainly we can see the five points in his theology, but he never came explicitly with five points. Calvin was not really a Calvinist, as we today often define that term.222 Where do the five points come from? They come from the followers of Arminius. We have five points of Calvinism because the Arminians had five points that needed a response. But it would be anachronistic to speak of five points in Calvin’s theology per se. That is something which develops later as a response to a particular challenge. There are continuities: the theology of the Canons of Dort definitely falls in line with the predestinarian, Augustinian, anti-Pelagian teachings of Calvin. But there are “discontinuities” as well: for example, Calvin never explicitly spoke in terms of five points relating to predestination or election. But rather than see that as a discontinuity, it’s better to describe it as a development. It’s not really a break with Calvin.

Though such an explicit contradiction is no doubt bewildering, Calvin’s final conclusion—namely, that the author of 1 John “does not speak of the essence [or the nature] of God” remains just what his overall theological perspective requires. So let us now consider the exegetical merits of this interpretation. Is there anything to be said on its behalf? Very little; indeed, there is much to be said against it. For as Packer himself pointed out, there are two other Johannine statements “of exactly similar grammatical form”: “God is light” and “God is spirit,” and the “assertion that God is love has to be interpreted in the light of what these other two statements teach.” 139 But these other two Johannine statements unquestionably are statements about the essence (or the nature) of God. In 1 John 1:5, we read that “God is light and in him is no darkness at all.” That is not a declaration to the effect that, by a happy accident, God happens to be free from all darkness, all impurity, all unrighteousness; nor is it a declaration that God has chosen to remain free from all darkness in his relationship to some fortunate people only. It is instead a declaration about the very essence (or nature) of God. And similarly for the assertion in John 4:24 that God is spirit. As Calvin acknowledged in a comment upon this very passage, “Christ himself calls God in his entirety ‘Spirit’”; and this implies “that the whole essence of God is spiritual, in which are comprehended Father, Son, and Spirit.” 140 But then, if God is spirit implies that “the whole essence of God is spiritual,” why should not God is love likewise imply that it is God’s very essence (or nature) to love?

In late 1968, Manson seized upon a new text for his prophecies: a musical training manual designed to help him create an army out of his cult—the Beatles’ 1968 album known as “the White Album.” Manson said that the Beatles had channeled his own teachings and used them to create the White Album, which he saw as a vehicle for sharing those teachings with the world. Whether Manson truly believed this fanciful idea is difficult to discern, but his starving, acid-frazzled followers believed it wholeheartedly. According to Manson, the White Album expressed the Beatles’ need for a spiritual savior and contained coded messages explicitly directed at him. Manson was, he believed, the savior the Beatles were looking for. Manson also used the coincidence of the Beatle’s song “Sexy Sadie,” his nickname for follower Susan Atkins, to prove his point and focused on the lyrics of “Piggies,” a song about class struggle, assuring his followers that they were the piggies the Beatles were writing about.

education pioneers including Horace Mann and the never-married Catharine Beecher “explicitly conceived of teaching as a job for spinsters,” an occupation that could “ease the stigma of being unwed”27 and permit unmarried women to nurture young children and thus fulfill their domestic calling, even without offspring of their own.

It is futile to pretend the problem doesn’t exist and hope that it will go away. Yet, absurdly, this has been American policy since the September 11 attacks. U.S. officials seem to believe that if they act as if Islam is a religion of peace and the Koran a book of peace, Muslims will feel themselves compelled to behave accordingly. An extreme example of this bizarre assumption came in President Obama’s heralded speech to the Islamic world in Cairo on June 4, 2009.16 Obama was extremely anxious to appear sympathetic and accommodating to Muslim grievances—so much so that he not only quoted the Koran (and did so ham-handedly and out of context, as we have seen), but also signaled in several ways, whether by ignorance or by design, that he was Muslim himself. For example, Obama extended “a greeting of peace from Muslim communities in my country: assalaamu alaykum”—that is, peace be upon you. According to Islamic law, however, this is the greeting that a Muslim extends to a fellow Muslim. To a non-Muslim he is to say, “Peace be upon those who are rightly guided”—in other words, “Peace be upon the Muslims.” Islamic law is silent about what Muslims must do when naïve, non-Muslim, Islamophilic presidents offer the greeting to Muslims. Obama also said the words that Muslims traditionally utter after mentioning the names of prophets—“peace upon them”—after mentioning Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad. Does he, then, accept Muhammad as a prophet? No reporter has asked him, but that was decidedly the impression he gave, intentionally or not, to the Islamic world. Obama spoke of a “relationship between Islam and the West” marked by “centuries of coexistence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars.” He then named three sources of present-day tensions between Muslim countries and the United States: the legacy of Western colonialism; “a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations;” and “the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization,” which “led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.” Significantly, Obama only listed ways in which the West has allegedly mistreated the Islamic world. He said not a word about the Koran’s doctrines of jihad and religious supremacism. Nothing at all about the Koranic imperative to make war against and subjugate non-Muslims as dhimmis. Not a word about the culture of hatred and contempt for non-Muslims that arises from Koranic teachings and which existed long before the ostensibly harmful spread of American culture (“modernity and globalization”) around the world. Obama did refer to “violent extremists” who have “exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims.” The idea that Islamic jihadists are a “small but potent minority of Muslims” is universally accepted dogma, born of ignorance of the Koran’s contents. The jihadists may indeed be a minority of Muslims, but there is no solid evidence that the vast majority of Muslims reject in principle what the jihadists do—and indeed, how could they, given the Koran’s explicit mandates for warfare against Infidels?

Advancing no particular theory of their own, some insist that explicit teaching of grammar, vocabulary, semantics, pragmatics, and even pronunciation is necessary because students in immersion classrooms sometimes have trouble with these features of the second language. Direct instruction, they say, is the only remedy. Such claims rely heavily on short-term studies in which older students—rarely K–12 English learners—are taught a linguistic form, such as word order, verb conjugation, relative clauses, and so forth, then tested on their conscious knowledge of the form soon after.

The literal meaning of ‘doctrine’ is “what is taught within a group as its corporate beliefs, principles or faith”52 – although “what is learnt . . .” would be more useful to us, since (6) Military cultures impart doctrine by corporate ambience as much as by explicit teaching

Basing itself upon Sacred Scripture and Tradition, [this Council] teaches that the Church, now sojourning on earth as an exile, is necessary for salvation. Christ, present to us in His Body, which is the Church, is the one Mediator and the unique way of salvation. In explicit terms He Himself affirmed the necessity of faith and baptism and thereby affirmed also the necessity of the Church, for through baptism as through a door men enter the Church. Whosoever, therefore, knowing that the Catholic Church was made necessary by Christ, would refuse to enter or to remain in it, could not be saved.

To be explicit, all teaching that grace is somehow imparted to an infant ex opere operato (automatically, by some kind of ecclesiastical magic) is rejected here as sub-Christian (indeed, as will be seen, it is sub-Jewish), and detrimental to a faithful preaching of the gospel. Water baptism does not regenerate, it does not save, and it does not cleanse.

visionaries and such ‘raving’ are at the foundation of most of the world’s great religious and philosophical traditions. Few of these traditions still explicitly claim such ideas as part of their overt teachings or practices, but a little research reveals that they were there at the beginning, in the ideas or experience or vision of the person around whom the tradition formed or in its foundational writings. Which again is an inaccurate statement, since again the idea that there was a ‘person’ as an individual entity whose individual ideas or experience were the beginning of a tradition is itself part of the illusion. So you can see that there is something of a communication problem here.

Girls learn to smile early, and many cultures teach girls explicitly to “put on a pretty face.” It is a way of soothing the people around us, a facial adaptation to the expectation that we put others first, preserve social connections, and hide our disappointment, frustration, anger, or fear. We are expected to be more accommodating and less assertive or dominant. As girls’ smiles become less authentic, so, too, does their understanding of themselves.

In the late 1800s, a mainly anglophone yoga revival began in India, and new syntheses of practical techniques and theory began to emerge, most notably with the teachings of Vivekananda (1863–1902). But even in these new forms the kind of āsana practice so visible today was missing. Indeed, āsana, as well as other techniques associated with haṭha yoga, were explicitly shunned as being unsuitable or distasteful by Vivekananda and many of those who followed his lead.

We never stop teaching our kids. And though what we are doing right now may not be resonating with them, it can teach them something in the future. Keep doing what needs to be done. Embody what you want your kids to be. Keep growing. Keep being the example they can follow. Keep teaching them, implicitly and explicitly.

David McClelland and his colleagues offer the hypothesis that nonconscious motives are rooted in early infancy, whereas conscious, self-attributed motives result from more explicit, parental teachings. To test this idea, McClelland and his colleagues interviewed a sample of adults in their early thirties, measuring both their nonconscious motives (i.e., their responses to TAT pictures) and their conscious, explicit motives (their responses on a self-report questionnaire). The fascinating thing about this study is that the participants’ mothers had been interviewed twenty-five years earlier about their childrearing practices, allowing the researchers to test the extent to which people’s implicit and explicit motives, as adults, were related to the childrearing practices of their mothers twenty-five years earlier. There was some evidence that early, prelingual childrearing experiences were correlated with implicit but not explicit motives. For example, the extent to which mothers used scheduled feedings correlated with the implicit but not explicit need for achievement in the adult sample, and the extent to which the mothers were unresponsive to their infants’ crying was correlated with the implicit but not explicit need for affiliation. Postlingual childhood experiences were more likely to correlate with explicit than with implicit motives. For example, the extent to which children were taught not to fight back when provoked was correlated with the explicit but not implicit need for affiliation, and the children of parents who set explicit tasks for them to learn were more likely to have an explicit but not implicit need for achievement.28 The nonconscious and conscious selves thus seem to be influenced by one’s cultural and social environment, but in different ways. The kinds of early affective experiences that shape a child’s adaptive unconscious surely have a cultural basis, given that childrearing practices differ markedly from culture to culture. The conscious theories people develop about themselves also are shaped by the cultural and social environment.

And we’re reinforced in this idolatry by bad preachers, by ministers with no respect for the Scriptures, by talking heads who teach out of emotion instead of texts, who tickle ears with no evident fear of the God who curses bringers of alternative gospels (Gal. 1:8–9). He owes us nothing.

Fun With all the pedagogical goals involved in a course, it’s easy to forget that the class can still be fun. On the first day of class, Bill states, as an explicit goal, that he wants everyone to look forward to coming to class each week. Well-facilitated case discussions are engaging and often punctuated by humor. Even if your personal style is on the somber side, you can still encourage participants to enjoy coming to class and emphasize that you personally look forward to class, too. If you tend to be unexpressive when you speak, then say in words how excited you are to be in this class with this group.

Research on vocabulary learning through reading without focused instruction confirms that some vocabulary can be learned without explicit instruction (see Chapter 6, Study 17). On the other hand, Jan Hulstijn and Batia Laufer (2001) and others provide evidence that vocabulary development is more successful when learners are fully engaged in activities that require them to attend carefully to the new words and even to use them in productive tasks. Izabella Kojic-Sabo and Patsy Lightbown (1999) found that effort and the use of good learning strategies, such as keeping a notebook, looking words up in a dictionary, and reviewing what has been learned were associated with better vocabulary development. Cheryl Boyd Zimmerman (2009) provides many practical suggestions for teaching vocabulary and also for helping learners to continue learning outside the classroom.

Second, we must be wary of attempts to use one mode of appeal to Scripture to override the witness of the New Testament in another mode. Niebuhr, as we have seen, engages in this sort of hermeneutical trumping of the text in “The Relevance of an Impossible Ethical Ideal,” when he argues that fidelity to the ideal of love exemplified in Jesus sometimes requires us to use violence to seek justice; thus, adherence to Jesus’ love ideal requires rejection (in practice) of Jesus’ explicit but unrealistic teaching against violence in the Sermon on the Mount. A community that has been taught to see the world through Matthew’s eyes, however, will sense that something has gone awry here. In fact, Niebuhr’s argument is finally a sophisticated dodge of Jesus’ call to costly discipleship, allowing us to call Jesus “Lord, Lord,” without doing what he commands.

In a study of 106 undergraduate and graduate nonnative English—speaking students, Schmitt and Zimmerman (2002) found that it was rare for a student to know all four forms or no form of a word. In other words, partial knowledge of at least one form was the norm. Results also showed that learners tended to have a better understanding of the noun and/or verb forms rather than the adjective and/or adverb forms. The authors conclude that teachers cannot assume that learners will absorb the derivative forms of a word family automatically from exposure and suggest explicit instruction in this area of vocabulary.

project-based learning requires that the content is significant, the inquiry is in depth, the work is question driven, the student has a voice in choosing the product, the work is shared with an audience beyond the classroom, and creativity and innovation are “explicitly taught and assessed.

In the Gospel, Christ says explicitly that it is possible to drive out the devil only by prayer and fasting. The Church cannot remain silent about such a powerful teaching. How

in the end, I found that the proportions obtain­ing in Colebrooke (British Orientalist, d. 1837)’s 1818 donation to the India Office Library generally held up. Out of a total of some twenty thousand manuscripts listed in these catalogs on Yoga, Nyaya­ Vaisheshika, and Vedanta philoso­phy, a mere 260 were Yoga Sutra manuscripts (in­cluding commentaries), with only thirty­ five dating from before 1823 ; 513 were manuscripts on Hatha or Tantric Yoga, manuscripts of works attributed to Ya­jnavalkya, or of the Yoga Vasistha; 9,032 were Nyaya manuscripts, and 10,320 were Vedanta manuscripts. (...) What does this quantitative analysis tell us ? For every manuscript on Yoga philosophy proper (excluding Hatha and Tantric Yoga) held in major Indian manu­script libraries and archives, there exist some forty Ve­danta manuscripts and nearly as many Nyaya­ Vaisheshika manuscripts. Manuscripts of the Yoga Sutra and its commentaries account for only one­ third of all manuscripts on Yoga philosophy, the other two­ thirds being devoted mainly to Hatha and Tantric Yoga. But it is the figure of 1.27 percent that stands out in highest relief, because it tells us that after the late sixteenth century virtually no one was copying the Yoga Sutra because no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts, and no one was commissioning Yoga Sutra manuscripts because no one was interested in reading the Yoga Sutra. Some have argued that instruction in the Yoga Sutra was based on rote memorization or chanting : this is the position of Krishnam­acharya’s biographers as well as of a number of critical scholars. But this is pure speculation, undercut by the nineteenth­ century observations of James Ballantyne, Dayananda Saraswati, Rajendralal Mitra, Friedrich Max Müller, and others. There is no explicit record, in either the commentarial tradition itself or in the sa­cred or secular literatures of the past two thousand years, of adherents of the Yoga school memorizing, chanting, or claiming an oral transmission for their traditions. Given these data, we may conclude that Cole­brooke’s laconic, if not hostile, treatment of the Yoga Sutra undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that by his time, Patanjali’s system had become an empty signifier, with no traditional schoolmen to expound or defend it and no formal or informal outlets of instruction in its teachings. It had become a moribund tradition, an object of universal indifference. The Yoga Sutra had for all intents and purposes been lost until Colebrooke found it.

When one speaks of faith in Buddhism, this explicitly means well-informed trust that is born from a thorough and proper investigation of the teachers and the teachings in which this trust is to be put.

A highly structured, prescriptive model of sheltering and scaffolding is not necessary for effectively educating English learners. In fact, mandating any approach that allows for little deviation is likely to be counterproductive. Just as explicit instruction encourages passive learning, tightly scripted lessons encourage passive teaching.

Yet SIOP, without advancing any explanation, puts “language objectives” on a par with “content objectives” and teaches both explicitly.

The Reformers understood justification to be purely preached when the Word is "rightly handl[ed]" (2 Tim. 2:15). A part of using the Word properly involves recognizing that it has two elements: law and gospel. The law is to be preached in all its terror, while the gospel is to be preached in all its comfort as that which the law cannot do (Rom. 8:3-4; CD, 3/4.6). Simply put, the Reformers taught us to preach Christ crucified (1 Cor. 1:23). If a church preaches any other "gospel," whether it is explicitly faith plus works or some insidious version of "get in by faith, stay in by obedience," it is not in conformity with the "teaching of Christ" (2 John 9) but with that of an antichrist counterfeit. Anything other than the doctrine of justification soles fide is what Paul termed "a different gospel" (Gal. 1:6), which brings with it an eternal anathema (Gal. 1:8-9).

Skill-building theories hold that only younger learners, and in some cases, only children younger than seven, can learn a language incidentally, that is, without intending to do so and without awareness of doing so. When it comes to LT for older children and adults (usually envisaged as in the mid-teens and thereafter), therefore, they accord dominant status to explicit learning and explicit instruction.

Ladd observes that dispensationalism’s fundamentally different hermeneutical presuppositions distinguish it from all other forms of Christianity: “Here is a basic watershed between a dispensational and a nondispensational theology. Dispensationalism forms its eschatology by a literal interpretation of the Old Testament and then fits the New Testament into it. A nondispensational eschatology forms its theology from the explicit teaching of the New Testament.

You imposed a slim majority decision on the entire nation because you have formally rejected the explicit teaching of our text. In other words, with regard to the substance of the case before you, you rejected the doctrine of mankind as created male and female, serving in this way as God’s created image-bearer. Your decision is therefore morally outrageous and is an implicit rejection of the doctrine that we have God-given rights at all. This is why your decision affirming same-sex mirage is simultaneously a decision rejecting, in principle, the very concept of religious liberty. If we have human rights, it is because we are created in God’s image. There is no other possible foundation for them. But if you have functionally denied that this image has any standing in law, then you have implicitly determined that we have no standing in law. But

In school, this explicit teaching of facts and procedures is rampant in almost every subject area. In science, it’s called “the scientific method” and often includes steps such as: Observe something and/or do research. Construct a hypothesis. Make a prediction based on your hypothesis. Test your hypothesis by doing an experiment. Analyze the results of your experiment. Determine if your hypothesis was correct. The steps vary slightly between models. However, no matter the actual words on the checklist, or how many steps are included, we teach them to children as if they descended on stone tablets. Teachers devise songs or mnemonic devices to help students memorize the rigid steps. Then students memorize the vocabulary words that go along with the scientific method: hypothesis, fair test, variables, control groups, reliability, validity, etc. Finally, students fill out worksheets to match the vocabulary words with the correct definitions and put the steps in order. This is not science. Science is about wonder and risk and imagination, not checklists or vocabulary memorization. Alan Kay laments that much of what schools teach isn’t science at all, it’s science appreciation. (Kay, 2007)

In explaining the meaning of this passage in his Chariot ofthe Tagbo Siddhas,"°" the Eighth Karmapa says that the sutras' explicit meaning that can be invalidated through reasoning is of expedient meaning. For in order to initially introduce disciples to the path and to mature their mental continua, these scriptures primarily teach seeming reality through various words and letters that are adapted to the minds and inclinations of individual persons. Thus, the explicit words of such teachings can be invalidated through reasoning, but they are nevertheless pronounced as means to guide various disciples gradually. On the other hand, the sutras' explicit meaning that cannot be invalidated through reasoning is of definitive meaning. Through the profound actuality that is difficult to see and primordially void, these texts teach ultimate reality in accordance with the wisdom of the noble ones in order that the disciples engage in the fruition and that their mental continua become liberated. These texts are a cause for the attainment of liberation, since they cannot be invalidated through reasoning and produce the realization of this profound actuality while being taught.

The Buddha himself always emphasized that trust is good but knowing is better. He explicitly put his teachings out in the open to be tested and not simply believed or accepted out of blind faith or polite respect for his sheer authority. Thus, if we really want to know whether and how these teachings work as techniques for mental transformation, we must find out for ourselves in the only suitable lab we have-our own mind.

If intrinsic motivation is high, if we are passionate about what we are doing, creativity will flow. External expectations and rewards can kill intrinsic motivation and thus kill creativity. When intrinsic motivation drops off, so does our willingness to explore new avenues and different ideas, something that is crucial at the Intersection. This means that in order to stay motivated and execute an intersectional idea, as did Prothrow-Stith and Hawkins and Dubinsky, we must be careful of explicit, external rewards. Stephen King puts it this way: “Money is great stuff to have, but when it comes to the act of creation, the best thing is not to think of money too much. It constipates the whole process.”14

Charlotte Mason was explicit about the need to educate children not only intellectually, but morally, because she shared a vision about the primary purpose of education with the teachers of the past. Modern education has been plagued by utilitarianism for a very long time, and both teachers and students have come to think that schools should teach only what will be useful in the pursuit of a career.

There are explicit statements from various quarters of the magisterium, up to and including Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, asserting the rights of the secular to remain secular, of the Jews to remain Jews, of the protestants to remain protestants, and the schismatics eastern churches to remain in schism. How is it, then, that a Catholic faithful to immemorial Catholic tradition is to be taken to task for remaining Catholic? Talmudic Judaism, masonic secularism, and heterodox Christianity need not change at all, but Catholics must change all?!? This is not merely unfair, this is absurd! Beyond its absurdity lies an utter unnecessity: Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever, and so is His Body, the Catholic Church! None who clings to Christ needs to repent his beliefs, to apologize for his beliefs, or to change his beliefs. The obedience demanded of the Catholic is permanent, therefore, the Church to which he offers his obedience must be permanent in her teaching, in her practices, and in her rituals! (page 366)

The book contains the first explicit teaching about a divine promise that wise and just persons will rise after death to a life of happiness with God (Dan 12:2). This teaching is echoed in the later book of 2 Maccabees and becomes a regular part of the faith of the Pharisee party in Judea at the time of Jesus.

When Christians affirm that Jesus is God, they are simply being faithful to the explicit teaching of the Bible. After all, the New Testament does, indeed, call Jesus Christ "God," not once, but several times. It also affirms that Jesus is "Lord," repeatedly doing so in contexts that equate Jesus with YHWH, the God of the Old Testament. In addition, the New Testament assigns a variety of other divine names or titles to Jesus (such as Bridegroom, Savior, and the first and the last). It gives Jesus all these names in the broader setting of a pervasive attitude of exalting the name of Jesus above every other name. If we are to be faithful to the teaching of the Bible, we must acknowledge Jesus Christ as our great God and Savior.

Aristotle's teaching on slavery was quoted implicitly and explicitly by the Fathers of the Church. It did not stop there. Through the collection of laws known as the Decree of Gratian (Bologna 1140), in entered into the official law book of the Church. St. Thomas Aquinas, the leading theologian of the Middle Ages, followed Aristotle. He agreed with all the pagan views, with just a dash of holy water. Slavery, he said, is 'natural' in the sense that it is the consequence of sin by a kind of 'second intention of nature'. He justified slavery in these circumstances: enslavement imposed as punishment; capture in conquest; people who sold themselves to pay off debts or who were sold by a court for that reason; children born of a slave mother.

Luther and Calvin were explicit that the intent of Scripture was not to teach natural science, and their employment of accommodation served to relieve Scripture of that task. But beginning in the seventeenth century, scholars expected Scripture to serve as a framework for comprehensive knowledge of the world, including the interests of natural science. Demonstrating scientific concord became a necessary task to prove the validity of the Bible. By the time of Old Princeton, an old earth was commonly accepted among educated conservatives, who continued the tradition of scientific concordism.

Richard Cracroft, one of the few American commentators on May’s writings, aptly summarizes the narrative structure of May’s work: “while surveying, Karl May becomes acquainted with the revolting cruelty of the American, and must frequently exert his Teutonic wisdom and strength to teach a few Teutonic manners.”31 The evil of the Americans thus only makes sense in contrast to the goodness of the Germans. For, unlike the American, the German is perceived by all as “a brother of redmen,” and indeed explicitly identified by the “red man” as his “dearest friend and brother.” Not only are May’s Germans morally superior to white Americans, they are also, unexpectedly, better cowboys and trappers. Indeed, American-born men often have to acknowledge reluctantly that native Germans are “cut out to be Westerners,” indeed miles ahead of “real” Americans in their ability to understand and master the American landscape.32

When the Royal College of Art was founded in London in 1837 – as the Government School of Design – its explicit aim was to reduce demand for foreign imports by raising the quality of domestic goods through superior design. The government wanted Britain to be an exporter, not an importer, and believed that well-designed and well-made products sell better everywhere than shoddy ones do. Teaching good design would be ultimately beneficial for the economy. This logic has informed government support for design schools ever since.

English children’s vocabulary increases rapidly during the early school years. Anglin (1993, 62) estimated that first grade English children know approximately 10,000 words, third grade pupils know 19,000 words, and fifth grade pupils know 39,000 words. The annual increase in vocabulary is estimated to be 3,000 words from the first to third grade and 10,000 words from the fourth to the fifth grade. Nagy & Anderson (1984, 20) uphold that there is “the ability to utilize morphological relatedness among words (which) puts a student at a distinct advantage in dealing with unfamiliar words”. In a later work, Nagy (1988, 46) acknowledges that: “there is no doubt that skilled word learners use context and their knowledge of prefixes, roots, and suffixes to deal effectively with new words”. In short, in addition to context, there is awareness of word-formation devices which accounts for such rapid increase in early school age English children’s vocabulary. Such high vocabulary growth would certainly be of great interest in L2 acquisition. Nakayama, N. (2008) tested the role that explicit teaching of affixes (prefixes) plays in vocabulary learning to pre- and upper-intermediate L2 learners. The participants received instructions over the contribution prefixes played in the meaning of the complex word during an academic year. L2 learners’ vocabulary was measured in the beginning and in the end of the academic year. Assisted by the instructions, L2 learners learned easier the new derived words, but, in the end of the academic year they had forgotten the derived words whose meaning they acquired through instructions over the contribution prefixes played in the meaning of the complex word (2008, 70). In the end, Nakayama, N. (2008, 68) concludes that systematic teaching of prefixes does lead to better retention of the derived word, but only with regard to short-term memory. On the other hand, it has been estimated that the only the most advanced L2 learners can acquire 3000 words a year (Bauer, L. & Nation, P. 1993); a figure comparable to that of early school age native children acquiring their L1. Hence, word-formation knowledge leads to high vocabulary growth to L2 learners, but solely to the most advanced L2 learners. We may uphold that word formation devices have to be acquired rather than learned through explixit instructions.

the late Augustinian tradition on these texts has been so broad and mighty that it has, for millions of Christians, effectively evacuated Paul’s argument of all its real content. It ultimately made possible those spasms of theological and moral nihilism that prompted Calvin, as I have noted, to claim that God predestined even the fall of humanity, and that he hates the reprobate. Sic transit gloria Evangelii. This is perhaps the most depressing paradox ever to have arisen in the whole Christian theological tradition: that Paul’s great attempt to demonstrate that God’s election is not some arbitrary act of predilective exclusion, but instead a providential means for bringing about the unrestricted inclusion of all persons, has been employed for centuries to advance what is quite literally the very teaching that he went to such great lengths explicitly to reject.

The ideal connective tissue in any story are the words but and therefore, along with all their glorious synonyms. These buts and therefores can be either explicit or implied.

The question of the teaching authority of the bishops in general was followed by that of Vatican II in particular, upon which the judgment of Fr. Pierre Marie, editor of the French Traditional Dominicans' quarterly magazine, Le Sol de la Torre, was quite severe. Proceeding in logical order, he examined first whether the Council documents come under the Church's extraordinary or ordinary infallibility - not under extraordinary infallibility, he argued, because both Pope John XXIII and Paul VI explicitly said the Council was making no definitive declarations; nor under ordinary infallibility, both because (see above) the Church's bishops were no longer scattered at Vatican II, but gathered together in such a group as to expose them to group pressures which could and did falsify their judgments; and because the bishops of Vatican II presented none of their doctrines as requiring defectively to be believed. Nor, Fr. Pierre Marie went on to argue, are these doctrines even part of the Church's authentic (i.e. ordinary, non-universal) teaching, because the bishops expressed no intention to hand down the Deposit of the Faith, on the contrary their spokesmen (e.g. Paul VI) expressed their intention to come to terms with the modern world and its values, long condemned by true Catholic churchmen as being intrinsically uncatholic. Therefore, concluded Fr. Pierre Marie, the documents of Vatican II have only a Conciliar authority, the authority of that Council, but no Catholic authority at all, and no Catholic need take seriously anything Vatican II said, unless it was already Church doctrine beforehand. Letter #148 March 1996

Reminders of the sacred were everywhere, strewn about almost carelessly, we might say. Marco Pallis reported that in the traditional Tibet that he knew the entire landscape seemed to be suffused by the message of the Buddha's teachings. "It came to one with the air one breathed. Birds seemed to sing of it; mountain streams hummed its refrain as they bubbled across the stones. A holy perfume seemed to rise from every flower, at once a reminder and a pointer to what still needed doing. There were times when a man might have been forgiven for supposing himself already in the Pure Land.' In times like those, explicit references to the sacred were hardly necessary, but those times are long gone. Today we do not live under a sacred canopy; it is marketing that forms the backdrop of our culture. The message that advertising dins into our conscious and unconscious minds is that fulfillment derives from the things we possess.

Jesus has followers among those who do not know him explicitly: `I have other sheep, that are not of this fold; I must bring them also, and they will hear my voice' On 10: 16). Jesus died, he says, `to gather into one the children of God who are scattered abroad' On 11: 52) in every age, in every race. In my endeavour to express what believing in Jesus means, I hope it will become clear that there are many `not of this fold' who are listening to his voice though they know it not, who despite this, believe in him. They cannot name him, they may even deny that the Lord of their hearts is Jesus, and this because they have only met his image and his teaching in the garbled version we have given them. The Lamb was slain from the foundation of the world and his redeemed are in every age, even before his coming in historical time. They are scattered now, unknown to themselves and to any but God.

The ‘quantitative revolution’ in geography required the discipline to adopt an explicitly scientific approach, including numerical and statistical methods, and mathematical modelling, so ‘numeracy’ became another necessary skill. Its immediate impact was greatest on human geography as physical geographers were already using these methods. A new lexicon encompassing the language of statistics and its array of techniques entered geography as a whole. Terms such as random sampling, correlation, regression, tests of statistical significance, probability, multivariate analysis, and simulation became part both of research and undergraduate teaching. Correlation and regression are procedures to measure the strength and form, respectively, of the relationships between two or more sets of variables. Significance tests measure the confidence that can be placed in those relationships. Multivariate methods enable the analysis of many variables or factors simultaneously – an appropriate approach for many complex geographical data sets. Simulation is often linked to probability and is a set of techniques capable of extrapolating or projecting future trends.

Catholic social doctrine is natural and is for the restructuring of the social order. It is for every human being, regardless of faith or philosophy. In Quadragesimo Anno, Pius XI stated many times explicitly and by implication that natural law-based Catholic social teaching is for everyone.

Americans gear all their living to a constantly challenging world and are prepared to accept the challenge. Japanese reassurances are based rather on a way of life that is planned and charted beforehand and where the greatest threat comes from the unforeseen. The Japanese, more than any other sovereign nation, have been conditioned to a world where the smallest details of conduct are mapped and status is assigned. During two centuries where law and order were maintained in such a world with an iron hand, the Japanese learned to identify this meticulously plotted hierarchy with safety and security. So long as they stayed within known boundaries and so long as they fulfilled known obligations, they could trust their world. The Japanese point of view is that obeying the law is repayment upon their highest indebtedness. In spite of the fact that Japan is one of the great Buddhist nations in the world, her ethics at this point contrast sharply with the teachings of Gautama Buddha and of the holy books of Buddhism. The Japanese do not condemn self-gratification. They are not Puritans. They consider physical pleasures good and worthy of cultivation. Buddhist teachers and modern nationalistic leaders have written and spoken on this theme: human nature in Japan is naturally good and to be trusted. It does not need to flight and evil half of itself. It needs to cleanse the windows of its soul and act with appropriateness on every different occasion. The Japanese define the supreme task of life as fulfilling one's obligations. They fully accept the fact that repaying "on" means sacrificing one's personal desires and pleasures. The idea that the pursuit of happiness is a serious goal of life is to them an amazing and immoral doctrine. Happiness is a relaxation in which one indulges when one can. Zen seeks only the light man can find in himself. if you do this, if you do that, the adults say to the children, the word will laugh at you. The rules are particularistic and situational and a great many of them concern what we should call etiquette. They require subordinating one's own will to the ever-increasing duties to neighbors, to family and country. The child must restrain himself, he must recognize his indebtedness. Training is explicit for every art and skill. It is the habit that is taught, not just the rules. Adults do not consider that children will "pick up" the proper habits when the time to employ them comes around. Great things can only be achieved through self-restraint. Japanese people often keep their thoughts busy with trivial minutiae in order to stave off awareness of their real feelings. They are mechanical in the performance of a disciplined routine which is fundamentally meaningless to them. Japan's real strength which she can use in remaking herself into a peaceful nation lies in her ability to say to a course of action: "that failed" and then to throw her energies into other channels. The Japanese have an ethic of alternatives.

Racial socialization took place in schools and society, whether done explicitly or not. The prevalence of antiblackness in US popular culture and school content made it necessary to offer purposeful and humanizing perspectives on blackness to support the healthy development of black student identities. The learning aesthetic offered through Woodson’s program presented resources that supported the development of student identities that were historically grounded, aware of their oppression, and committed to imagining and building new possibilities for their collective futures. It was enacted discursively through curriculum development, materially through decorative educational resources produced for classrooms and schools, and affectively through performances and dramatizations during Negro History Week celebrations and classroom activities. This aesthetic presented new symbols of being and belonging that were distinct to black students, all of which offered explicit critiques of the master narrative about black life shaping their Jim Crow surroundings.

There’s also a more powerful kind of insider knowledge that indicates belonging. I call it “perception.” Perception comes when members learn either from explicit teaching or from experience that certain things are not as they appear to outsiders. Access to this esoteric perception is one of the jewels of membership (formal or informal).

The problem with all of this, of course, is that it tends to leave us with little that is normative for two broad areas of concern — Christian experience and Christian practice. There is no express teaching on such matters as the mode of baptism, the age of those who are to be baptized, which charismatic phenomenon is to be in evidence when one receives the Spirit, or the frequency of the Lord’s Supper, to cite but a few examples. Yet these are precisely the areas where there is so much division among Christians. Invariably, in such cases people argue that this is what the earliest believers did, whether such practices are merely described in the narratives of Acts or found by implication from what is said in the Epistles. Scripture simply does not expressly command that baptism must be by immersion, or that infants are to be baptized, or that all genuine conversions must be as dramatic as Paul’s, or that Christians are to be baptized in the Spirit evidenced by tongues as a second work of grace, or that the Lord’s Supper is to be celebrated every Sunday. What do we do, then, with something like baptism by immersion? What does Scripture say? In this case it can be argued from the meaning of the word itself, from the one description of baptism in Acts of going “down into the water” and coming “up out of the water” (8:38 – 39), and from Paul’s analogy of baptism as death, burial, and resurrection (Rom 6:1 – 3) that immersion was the presupposition of baptism in the early church. It was nowhere commanded precisely because it was presupposed. On the other hand, it can be pointed out that without a baptismal tank in the local church in Samaria (!), the people who were baptized there would have had great difficulty being immersed. Geographically, there simply is no known supply of water there to have made immersion a viable option. Did they pour water over them, as an early church manual, the Didache (ca. AD 100), suggests should be done where there is not enough cold, running water or tepid, still water for immersion? We simply do not know, of course. The Didache makes it abundantly clear that immersion was the norm, but it also makes it clear that the act itself is far more important than the mode. Even though the Didache is not a biblical document, it is a very early, orthodox Christian document, and it may help us by showing how the early church made pragmatic adjustments in this area where Scripture is not explicit. The normal (regular) practice served as the norm. But because it was only normal, it did not become normative. We would probably do well to follow this lead and not confuse normalcy with normativeness in the sense that all Christians must do a given thing or else they are disobedient to God’s Word.

At the start of this book I presented ten things I used to believe that I no longer do. So, it seems only fitting to end with ten things I now believe that I wished I knew when I first started teaching. Students remember what they are thinking about, or attending to. Planning for achievement is more important than planning for motivation. Practice does not make perfect, practice makes permanent. Students do not think and learn differently due to their learning styles, but because of their amount of domain-specific knowledge. My choice of examples and exercises are the single most important part of my planning. It often makes sense to teach the How before the Why. Students can be struggling but not learning. Effective differentiation is best achieved in terms of the time students spend on a task, not by giving different students different tasks to do. Retrieval, predominantly through frequent low-stakes quizzing, is the key to long-term learning. Perhaps, above all, the best thing I can do to help my students become the independent problem-solvers I want them to be is to carefully and explicitly teach them.

Certain religious teachings implicitly or explicitly damn sex, damn pleasure, damn the body, damn ambition, damn material success, damn (for all practical purposes) the enjoyment of life on Earth. If children are indoctrinated with these teachings, what will the practice of "integrity" mean in their lives? Some elements of "hypocrisy" may be all that keeps them alive

The particular combination of the explicit communication of high standards and the demonstrated assurance of the teacher's belief in the student's ability to succeed (as evidenced by the effort to provide detailed, constructive feedback) was a powerful intervention for Black students...it was an exceedingly effective way to generate the trust needed to motivate Black students to make their best effort.

According to the “consciousness model“ of magic, thoughts can be objectivated and become reality. In simpler terms, both the outer life and the inner life of the human being is a reflection of one‘s intentional thoughts, and, thus, a “magician“ is a person who actively does things instead of just thinking or talking about them. Not only has quantum physics proved that, at the quantum level, matter reacts to the “observer“, namely, to one‘s thoughts, but also everyone can easily confirm that one‘s immediate environment (for instance, one‘s home, the activities that one performs, one‘s profession, etc.) is an expression of the fundamental significations and the major driving forces of one‘s inner life. Hence, from an elevated perspective, “magic“ means wisdom put into action with faith and focused thought in order to produce history according to one‘s will. This notion of magic is explicitly referred to in the Bible, specifically, in Matthew 2:11 – 12, where we read that three Magi visited and worshiped Jesus Christ, the Messiah, after his birth, bearing gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh. In principle, magic is the traditional science of the secrets of nature and of the human being. It is the old name of the subject-matter of the ancient occult initiates and intellectuals of India, Chaldea, Persia, Egypt, and Homeric Greece.

Many have argued that since the Bible doesn’t explicitly teach that we should seek experiences that involve spiritual travel, it must be wrong or evil to do so. My answer to this objection is simple

WHAT WE’RE WORKING with in basic meditation practice—and more explicitly in tonglen practice—is the middle ground between acting out and repressing. We learn to see our thoughts of hatred, lust, poverty, loathing, whatever they might be. We learn to identify the thoughts as “thinking,” let them go, and begin to contact the texture of energy that lies beneath them. We gradually begin to realize how profound it is just to let those thoughts go, not rejecting them, not repressing them. We discover how to hold our seat and feel completely what’s underneath the story line of craving or aversion or jealousy or feeling wretched about ourselves,

is difficult for many white adults to begin to speak about race openly and explicitly. We only learn to do it and get better at it through practice. There’s no way around those awkward, challenging feelings. ​There’s no special age at which point kids are ready to hear and understand the difficult truths about race and racism. They begin to work out their racial concepts and ideas long before they can articulate them. ​We start with our children’s deepest assumptions about the world: a notion of race as visible and normal, an awareness of racial injustice, and a working presumption that people can and do take actions against racism. ​ Young children should be engaged with lots of talk about difference: skin tone and bodies, and the ways different communities of color identify. Making a commitment to normalize talk about difference preempts the pressures kids experience to treat difference as a taboo. ​Be aware that using the language of race—especially with young children—always runs the risk of reducing people to labels or implying everyone who shares that identity label is the same in some significant way (stereotyping). Be specific and nuanced. ​Race-conscious parenting for a healthy white identity development must include teaching about racial injustice and inequity as much as it does racial difference. Consider experiential learning, such as protests, for this.

If anywhere in the whole New Testament teaches an explicit doctrine of “penal substitution,” this is it—but it falls within the narrative not of a “works contract,” not of an angry God determined to punish someone, not of “going to heaven,” but of God’s vocational covenant with Israel and through Israel, the vocation that focused on the Messiah himself and then opened out at last into a genuinely human existence:

Moreover, nothing less than both written evidence and recorded deeds from Washington himself will be sufficient to explain how he could simultaneously explicitly advocate Christian missionary evangelism, and yet as a Deist deny the teachings of Christianity.