tMichaelB

Too much faith, not enough reality?

2010-08-20T12:51:00.005-05:00

A while back, the local alternative weekly newspaper ran this interesting feature about a woman who opened up a storefront Prayer Center in North Minneapolis. The article describes the center as a spiritual oasis in an otherwise rough-and-rumble part of the city. I read it and thought, "good for her," referring to Jariland Spence, the woman running place.

Earlier this week, this little item ran on a local TV station. Seems the Prayer Center fell behind on its rent and the landlord is evicting Ms. Spence. Understandable, but seems kind of sad.

I think this is an interesting story, because so often non-profits divorce themselves from financial reality. It works for a while, but reality always catches up with you.

I have been involved with non-profit organizations where the mindset was "We are doing God's work; God provides." They used that thinking to avoid developing a viable business plan -- one that limited expenses to actual revenue, or raised enough revenue to cover expenses. I would argue that we needed to work harder to match expenses and revenue, only to be accused of lacking faith. I don't really know whether my faith is sufficient, I just know that you can't outspend your revenue for very long and expect to stay in business.

So I wonder about Jeriland Spence's case. Did she not take the fund-raising aspect of her venture seriously enough? Is the landlord a bad guy for booting out someone who is doing God's work? Did Spence rely too much on faith and not enough on donations? Can you have too much faith? Is God not providing in this case? Or does He simply have some other plan for Spence and that store front?

I don't have the answers but I am fascinated by the questions.

An afternoon of college football

2008-11-28T12:08:00.003-06:00

Last weekend, my sixth-grade boy and I accompanied the 9th and 10th grade boys of Chesterton Academy to the Notre Dame football game in South Bend, Ind. The Fighting Irish lost to Syracuse, 24-23. Maybe they will do better tomorrow night at USC.

What a tremendous thing game day is on the campus of the University of Notre Dame! We arrived on campus about five hours before the 2:30 kick-off. Sounds like a lot of time, but it flew by.

Professor Charles Rice, professor emeritus at the University of Notre Dame law school, serves on the Chesterton Academy advisory board; he greeted us with donuts and shared a few kinds words.

We then visited the campus book store, which was abuzz with fans buying sweatshirts and memorabilia. The scene was as busy as Wal-mart at 6 a.m. this Black Friday. I found tranquility in the part of the store where they actually sold books. What a selection! Someday I really need to return to do some serious book shopping.

Coming out of the store, we ran into the Notre Dame cheerleaders, who were bundled up to accommodate the 26-degree temperature. They visited with our high school guys and we got a picture to commemorate the moment.

We toured the administration building, famous for its gold dome which supports a gold statue of Our Lady. Inside, the first-floor hallways are adorned with murals. I saw several depicting the life of Christopher Columbus. We visited other buildings before entering the Notre Dame Basilica, a wonder of church architecture. It is absolutely beautiful inside. Then we visited the Notre Dame grotto, located behind the church. It is a replica of the grotto at Lourdes, France. The place was buzzing with football fans, many of whom took a few minutes to kneel and pray.

We had lunch at a tailgate party, courtesy of the father of the Chesterton headmaster. A long-time Notre Dame fan, he clued us into some team history and accompanied us into the game. But before going in, we waited for the Fighting Irish marching band, which must number in the hundreds of members. We followed as they marched into the stadium from the center of campus.

My boy and I had row-six seats at the 5-yard-line in this bowl stadium that seats 55,000. By kick-off, every seat was filled. We watched a great game with Notre Dame getting out front to a 23-10 lead early in the fourth quarter. Syacuse score and then scored again with only 43 seconds left in the game to go ahead, 24-23. Notre Dame had a chance to win the game. With seven seconds left, they tried to make a 53-yard field goal but the ball missed the uprights and the Irish lost.

It was a great experience, although our feet grew cold from the snow and ice that were packed on the ground. It has snowed 10 inches the day before the game and although they had shoveled the seats off, the ground was covered with frozen precipitation. We left the game with about 10 minutes to go, running to the Basilica where we warmed up and waited for Mass to start. Apparently, they always have Mass 30 minutes after home games. What a great idea for Catholic football fans!

We slept well that night, staying in an economy hotel some 40 miles way in Chesterton, Indiana. For all of us, it was a great experience; and for my boy and I it was the source of memories we will carry with us forever.

The University of Minnesota, where I went to college, is moving into a new outdoor football stadium next season after have played more than 25 seasons at a domed stadium in downtown Minneapolis. I hope that the U of M is able to recapture some of that great football atmosphere that makes college campuses so special on fall afternoons.

Thoughts on Chesterton Academy

2008-11-18T12:38:00.003-06:00

Chesterton Academy opened in September and is off to a very promising start. The school has received a lot of attention; yesterday Chuck Colson featured The Chesterton Academy in his Breakpoint broadcast.

Here are some of the things I was looking for in a high school for my children. These are some of the key features we have built into the Chesterton Academy.

First, I wanted a school that thoroughly integrates the Catholic faith into a college preparatory curriculum. A good high school should teach teenagers math, science, literature, the arts, history, etc., and good study habits so they can legitimately apply for acceptance to any of this country’s top tier colleges. A good school should teach these subjects in the context of faith. While it is good to learn how to count when you study math, it is also important to learn what you are counting, that is, God’s creation. While it is good to study stories in literature class, it is better to study those stories in context of the overarching story of man’s relationship with God.

Second, I wanted a school that manifests that faith in a concrete way, in addition to the curriculum. For a Catholic, daily Mass and a faculty pledge of fidelity to the Magisterium are obvious manifestations.

Third, I wanted a school that is meaningful and socially relevant. I want a school that will prepare students to make a difference in the world, not merely get along in the world. Attacks on human life pose the greatest social injustice of our time. The Chesterton Academy is intended to be a shining affirmation of human life. We are preparing students to build a culture of life.

And we are preparing our students to take their knowledge and faith out into the world. Our goal is not to create a separate subculture, but to change the culture of death into a culture of life.

And, fourth, I wanted a school that teaches entrepreneurship, resourcefulness and leadership. So often people think school is the place you go to prepare to get a job. Well, I’d like to prepare students to create a job. I want a school that teaches students they can create their own future; they don’t have to look to a big company or the government to give them a future. The Chesterton Academy is a lesson in itself, along those lines. It was started by a group of parents who identified a need and figured out how to make it happen. Nothing is guaranteed; we are not getting any government funding. People can make things happen, but they have to try. I want a school that will encourage people to try.

The Chesterton Academy operates in a very modest facility. I wish it had better, but the facility it has is sufficient. The no-frills environment of the school teaches an important lesson. We live in an area where there are ample community resources. They should be used. We don’t all need our own private facilities with the latest bells and whistles. Let’s use what’s available to us, and be creative about identifying those resources.

Perhaps the biggest trap we set for our teens in today’s world is unrealistic materialist expectations. Kids are so surrounded by opulence and wealth that they get a false idea about the importance of “stuff.” By conducting classes in a modest environment, we are trying to promote gratitude, which I believe can be an effective antidote to excessive want.

The modest facility also helps us to keep our tuition relatively low, which I believe is very important. Typical schools that include Catholicism in their curriculum average around $10,000 per year, per student. For a family of four or five, relatively closely-space children, this tuition rate presents a sizeable obstacle to Catholic high school education. At Chesterton Academy, the tuition is $5,500 per year. I acknowledge that is still a sizable about of money, but at least it creates a more affordable option.

Nearly all schools offer students various levels of financial aid if their family cannot afford the entire tuition bill. This is laudable, although I have never been comfortable providing the personal financial disclosures necessary to request such aid. Furthermore, I suspect it would be difficult for parents to work collaboratively on school policy issues when, despite assurances of privacy, decisionmakers know which families have paid less to attend the school.

Every high school offers parents a set of trade-offs to consider as they decide where to send their teens. Some schools offer excellent opportunities for sports and extracurricular activities, but no catechesis. Others offer great facilities and curriculum, but at high tuition costs. Others, like Chesterton Academy, offer great teaching and curriculum but fewer amenities in the areas of facility and extra curriculars.

If you ask an eighth-grader “where do you want to go to high school,” they will typically identify a school that is pleasing to the eye, or a school to which most of their friends are going. I think parents have to consider the decision much more seriously. You only get one opportunity to educate your teenager. What lasting message do you want them to get during those high school years? You can judge relatively easily what your kids will learn from the curriculum, but consider also what they will learn from the environment of the school.

Dale Ahlquist and I started talking about forming a new high school in spring of 2006. We hired a magnificent headmaster and he has put together a stellar faculty. Several people have made generous donations to get the school going. Nine families have come together to send their kids to the school this inaugural year. Tonight, we are hosting a parents’ meeting regarding new students for the 2009-2010 school year. There are a lot of people who want the kind of school described here.

I certainly will write more about the Chesterton Academy as this venture develops. In the meantime, check out the school’s web site.

Lunch with Mr. Bernstein

2008-10-28T15:07:00.004-05:00

I had lunch with Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Carl Bernstein on Friday. He was in town to address a business group and I had the good fortune of sitting at Mr. Bernstein's table, along with 6 other people.

Bernstein said the job of a journalist is to present the "best obtainable version of the truth." With the emphasis currently on celebrity, sensationalism and gossip, he said journalism is falling far short of its responsibility.

He said the press and politics are part of a civic breakdown in this country since Watergate. The press and politics, he said, are supposed to exist for the public good. "We have seen a failure of the system, of incompetence overwhelming competence," he said. "We've had a failure of accountability, and it didn't start with the Bush administration."

He said congress has completely abdicated its responsibility to provide oversight of the presidency. He said the "biggest story of the last 25 years is the wholesale corruption of our Congress and our state legislatures."

He blamed the state legislatures for gerrymandering congressional districts so that most seats are "safe" for one party. He said that in any given election, only about 100 of the 425 House seats are truly competitive.

Bernstein noted that it costs $100 million to run a campaign for senate in a large state such as California, Florida, New York or New Jersey. "That's $50,000 per day," he said. There is a big difference between a fundraiser, which is what a politician needs to be to finance a campaign, and a leader. A fundraiser, Bernstein said, says whatever is necessary to please the group in front of him so that they will be inclined to contribute money. People who are trying to raise money don't take unpopular positions on issues. They can't afford to. Therefore, we end up with a Congress full of people who don't take solid positions on issues, people who don't provide leadership. Bernstein criticized the press for not calling politicians on this deterioration of leadership. Bernstein said public financing of Congressional campaigns would solve this problem.

Bernstein is more philosophically liberal than I am, but I greatly admire his work. He started his career as a reporter at the age of 19 and has covered just about everything in the span of several decades. In addition to breaking the Watergate story in the 1970s and writing All The President's Men, he has written a book on the life of Pope John Paul II, and a book about Hillary Clinton. He has written a memoir and a book about John McCain, in addition to several big time magazine pieces for the likes of Time, Vanity Fair and The New Republic.

Thanks for the recognition

2008-09-14T08:13:00.003-05:00

Due the the thoughtfulness of four dear friends and colleagues, I was among 10 people honored by our local Archdiocesan newspaper this past week for leadership in business. You can read about it here.

The Catholic Spirit hosted a very nice luncheon for us on Wednesday. With nearly 300 people present, MC Tom Hauser of KSTP-TV, associate publisher Bob Zyskowski and Archbishop John Nienstedt presented the awards, which were given in three categories: large company, small company and non-profit. I was one of three honorees in the small business category.

Dick, who has become a valued friend in the nearly three years we have worked together, and his wife Anne, came up with the idea to put in a nomination for me earlier this summer. They immediately approached Jackie about putting together a nomination. Jackie and I had worked together for more than a dozen years before she spun off her own business venture this spring.

At the same time, unbeknown to this trio, Christina was also putting my name in nomination. Christina has worked with me for about a year on a magazine called Family Foundations. Christina is a former Catholic Spirit reporter, so she was thoroughly familiar with the Leading with Faith awards program.

Both the nominations must have been well-written because I was notified on August 11 that I was among those selected for recognition. Within a couple weeks, Maria Wiering, a Catholic Spirit reporter, came to my office to interview me for an article. Photographer Dianne Towalski took a series of photos. I have been a reporter since my college days and have interviewed hundreds of people; for the first time, I was on the other side of the notebook. I am a bit of a ham, so I have to say I kind of liked it.

Mostly I liked it because of the story I got to tell. I have always been blessed with great employees who seem much more like friends than FTEs. Before the company can make money, everyone in the company has to make a life, and I have always been happy to help my colleagues do that, to the extent that I can. Sure, in 17-plus years of business there has been a small number of folks who didn't work out, but even those employees won my respect and best wishes for future success.

My father taught me most of what I know about entrepreneurism, and I am very grateful to him. Whatever I am in business is due to him. I also need to thank my dear friends in businesses, particularly the folks at Fredrikson and Byron, and Premier Banks, who took the extra step of congratulating me with advertisements in the Catholic Spirit. Wow. And again, thanks to my friends who took the time and made the effort to nominate me. Wow, again.

The brochure distributed at the luncheon included a statement from the U.S. Catholic Bishops' 1986 Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and The U.S. Economy. Here's what is said:

Followers of Christ must avoid a tragic separation between faith and everyday life.

The road to holiness for most of us lies in our secular vocations. We need a spirituality that calls forth and supports lay initiative and witness not just in our churches but also in business, in the labor movement, in the professions, in education, and in public life.

Our faith is not just a weekend obligation, a mystery to be celebrated around the altar on Sunday. It is a pervasive reality to be practiced every day in homes, offices, factories, schools, and businesses across our land.

We cannot separate what we believe from how we act in the marketplace and the broader community for this is where we make our primary contribution to the pursuit of economic justice.

I'd like to think that's a fundamental philosophy at our company. I am going to hang that statement on my wall in my office.

Challenges articulated by state's economist

2008-08-28T08:38:00.003-05:00

I had a chance to listen to Tom Stinson, the economist for the State of Minnesota, address a business group recently about some of the challenges facing our state. In the near term, he said he expects a bleak economy through the end of 2009. He said inflation in the third quarter of 2008 is likely to come in around 8 percent before falling off at the end of the year.

Stinson said the housing market is near the bottom, but “there won’t be any quick pick-up in housing activity.”

What I found particularly interesting, however, were his long-range concerns. The demographics of our state will create serious challenges that no one will be able to ignore. Stinson said demographic trends will result in significant aging of the general population.

While the number of people between the ages of 55 and 69 will increase dramatically by 2015, the number of people between the ages of 15 and 24 will drop significantly. “The number of people entering the workforce will remain flat between now and 2030, while the number of people retiring will skyrocket,” Stinson said.

Health care spending in Minnesota is $3,671 annual per capita, Stinson said. For people ages 55 to 64, that figure averages $6,694, and for people 65 to 74 it increases to $9,017 and for people older than 75, the figure is $9,914. These expenses, Stinson noted, will be supported by a smaller workforce. “Aging of baby boomers will result in huge increases in resources going into health care,” he said.

Stinson also expressed concern about the quality of the state’s workforce, which will have to make up for declining numbers through increased productivity. Stinson said 91 percent of the people in the state’s workforce have a high school degree; current graduation rates, however, are at 85 percent with growing minority groups averaging even lower rates of high school graduation.

“We are not replacing the workforce with people who are as educated as they once were,” Stinson said. “We are not replacing the skill level we already have in the workplace.”

The Chesterton Academy

2008-08-15T10:09:00.002-05:00

The Catholic Spirit has written a nice article about The Chesterton Academy, which is set to open in less than three weeks. Here's the link. Thanks.

Recession?

2008-07-02T12:22:00.001-05:00

Are we in recession? Yes and no.

That’s the answer offered by Wells Fargo economist Michael Swanson. He was speaking to a business group on June 17 in Rochester.

Swanson said the answer to the recession question is a matter of perspective. “A recession is two consecutive quarters of GDP contraction, and it doesn’t look as if we are going to have that,” Swanson explained. “But are we in a recession when it comes to real estate? Absolutely. … In the economy today, we are definitely going through a very tough spot for a lot of sectors but at the same time we are barely eking out growth in the economy.

“Debt markets and housing are holding back the economy,” Swanson said. “But there are some things that are going fantastically well. If you are in the energy exploration or extraction business; the mining business, or agriculture right now, you have fantastic results in front of you. It has been staggering the amount of export growth some of the companies have had.”

Swanson said the outlook for the remainder of the year is “very weak.” Growth will be driven primarily by trade expansion due to growing global demand and a weak dollar.

Although unemployment is at about 5.5 percent, Swanson described payroll numbers as good. He said as long as people hold onto their jobs, they should be able to repay their debts. And compensation, although it may not keep pace with inflation, is growing.

Inflation is running at 3 percent to 3.5 percent. Swanson said the Federal Reserve is confident about “tamping that back down to 2 percent or lower” but he said most economists think inflation will be higher than that.

“Interest rates are going to start to rise at the end of 2008 or early in 2009,” he said, “but they certainly are not going to be high interest rates.” The low rates will keep the dollar weak for three to seven years, Swanson predicted.

Long-term, Swanson was bullish on the American economy, referencing a Congressional Budget Office study which predicted per capita income, which is at $39,000 annually today, will increase three-fold over the next 50 years due to extraordinary gains in productivity.

Stein on 'Expelled'

2008-06-30T14:32:00.002-05:00

I posted earlier about the movie Expelled. Well, two weeks ago, Ben Stein was in Rochester, Minn., speaking at a meeting I was covering. I had a chance to ask him about the movie. Here is what he said:

Expelled is a movie about a serious issue of academic suppression. Every person in this room, including yours truly, would agree that Darwin’s theory of evolution explains a huge amount about how speicies evolved. It doesn’t answer some of the very basic questions such as where did gravity come from? Where did thermo dynamics come from? Where did life originate?

Darwin himself said these are questions beyond my ability to figure out. For me to try to figure them out would be like a dog trying to figure out a law of physics. In fact, Darwin said, the way I see it, some of existence was designed and some happened by accident.

But in today’s modern campus setting, you are not allowed to say that. You are not even allowed to say what Darwin said. You have to say it is all accident, random mutation and natural selection. If you say, "Look, can we go back to where Darwin started?" and ask the question on that basis, you get ostracized and lose your job.

We think that is a serious abrogation of the laws of freedom of speech in this country and we’re concerned about it and that’s why we made the movie.

Urban Adventure

2008-06-13T08:54:00.001-05:00

It was raining at 11 a.m. on Wednesday morning, when we started our urban adventure by walking four blocks to a bus stop. There were 16 of us in the group, and only two umbrellas between us. Needless to say, we hustled; thank goodness for the shelter at the bus stop.

A friend and I chaperoned 14 eighth and ninth grade girls. It was an end-of-school-year gathering organized chiefly by my own eighth grader. She asked for my help with the planning; I figured that since most of the kids live in the suburbs, they may not have had a chance to ride a city bus or the light rail train; they may not be comfortable navigating the streets and skyways of downtown Minneapolis. Let’s plan an urban adventure, I thought, and make sure the kids get these experiences.

Rain wasn’t the best way to start the trip, and the moist weather fogged up the windows on the bus, so we missed most of the urban scenery on the way into downtown. But once we got into a building and up to the second floor, the skyway system kept us dry and gave us a great view. We snaked our way from Hennepin Avenue to City Hall. I led the group, with my buddy John at the rear, making sure the girls we between us. It was crowded on the skyway at about 11:45, and there were a lot of distractions, but we stuck together and made it just fine. I think the highlight was the tunnel from the Hennepin County Government Center to City Hall, where you get to see an impressive display of falling water from below street level.

Twice each month, the Mayor of Minneapolis sets aside an hour in the middle of the day to visit with anyone who wants to come in. He calls it an open house. I had called the Mayor’s office only the previous Thursday, wondering if there was any chance we could see him the following Wednesday. It would be a long shot to get on his schedule with such short notice, but I figured I would give it a try. And boy, did I get lucky. Open house was scheduled for that day!

We visited with Mayor R.T. Rybak for about 15 minutes. I was so proud of the girls, who greeted the Mayor politely, listened attentively, and asked intelligent questions. For more on the meeting, see my other blog at www.GEOprincipleBlog.com.

It was still raining after the mid-day meeting, so we went back to the Hennepin County Government Center and ate our bag lunches in the massive atrium. It was a beautiful setting, with the fountain and reflection pool, as well as the twin towers which rise 20-plus floors, forming an “H”, which is the logo for Hennepin County.

After lunch, we took the light rail train to the Mall of America. There is a stop right in front of City Hall, and a ticket is only $1.50. The ride is smooth and this time, unlike the bus ride, we could see out the windows. The views through the city, along Ft. Snelling, and around the airport, are interesting. The city is teaming with so much life. Once we reached the end of the line at the Mall of America, the girls shopped for about an hour before getting a snack at Orange Julius and car-pooling back to my house. My wife and a friend met us at the mall with their vans to provide the rides.

As these girls advance through high school and college, my hope for them is that they will get the opportunity to travel and see places such as New York City, Washington, D.C., maybe even London or Paris. My hope is that this little trip into Minneapolis served as a decent primer. In order to understand the world, I think it is good to travel to someplace you haven’t been before, someplace outside your normal routine and outside your comfort zone. It’s a big world and God gave the whole thing to us. Let us never stop exploring.

Paid by the word?

2008-06-10T07:36:00.003-05:00

The freelancers at my college newspapers used to get paid by the inch. The pay was something like 50 cents an inch, so a typical feature that went 30 column inches was good for $15 -- which was pretty good pay for a college kid way back in the early 1980s.

Staff writers, on the other hand, got paid a (modest) weekly salary. We were expected to write at least two stories a week, although sometimes it was more if there was big news on our beat. The length of the story was a consideration only to the extent that space was limited in the newspaper.

I left college thinking the freelance gig was better. I never had a problem generating more words; clearly I would do better getting paid according to volume.

As I have been in journalism for more than 30 years now, I understand that it's not about the number of words; it's about what those words say. Give me a well-written short story any day over a long-winded story that doesn't say much. I also now know that it is much more difficult to write a solid short article than it is to write a long one.

Well, the internet appears to be turning all that around. I had to laugh at this essay about a newspaper that is actually judging the productivity of its journalists according to the number of words they write. It's a newspaper where words are apparently viewed like widgets produced at the factory. Newspapers have got enough problems these days trying to figure out how to stay relevant. If this is any indication of their thinking, newspapers are surely doomed.

SmartyPig for the kids

2008-05-29T08:36:00.001-05:00

I might just give each of my kids a SmartyPig account. This is a service dreamed up by a bank in Des Moines that sounds to me like a pretty good application of internet social networking.

SmartyPig.com is a savings account set up over the internet, which isn’t so unique. But here’s what’s new: the account holder can post a savings goal and others can contribute money to the account. So let’s say you have a high school kid who is saving money for a class trip to Chicago. The kid states his goal at his SmartyPig internet account. Friends and relatives can put money in the account on his birthday or at Christmas, or whenever they want. The giver gets the satisfaction of knowing that the money is going for something worthwhile. It is a little better than simply putting a $20 bill in with the birthday card.

There are a lot of internet bank accounts but this is the first one I have heard of that allows others to deposit money into someone else’s account.

The account has a few stipulations. First, account holders have to be at least 18 years old, but parents can set up accounts and designate a child’s saving goal so the account functions like it belongs to the kid. An initial deposit to open the account must be at least $25. Deposits are accepted as transfers from other established accounts.

Also, right now the service charges people $4.95 to make a deposit into another person’s account. The account holder doesn’t pay anything. I don’t really like the fee but I have read chatter about this account that suggests the fee will go down or go away all together. Nonetheless, if I have a niece or nephew saving money for college or a car or some other major goal, I would be willing to pay the fee in order to put $25 in their account at Christmas time.

I also think that this is a good way to teach younger kids about the importance of saving money. They all love the internet and they love using the computer, so why not marry those interests with something important like an appreciation for saving money? I can tell you that banking, otherwise, really does not interest them.

Like any bank account, the accounts are FDIC insured and they pay interest. The interest rate fluctuates, but as I write this, the rate is 3.9 percent annual percentage yield, which is not bad for a savings account.

So check it out, and let me know what you think.

The GEO Principle

2008-05-27T08:46:00.003-05:00

For the last several years, I have been contemplating the integration of faith with work. Usually, it seems like work is not the place to be thinking about God because, after all, work is about making money. But if we are called to live our faith all the time, them clearly that must mean at work. I know I spend most of my waking hours on the job.

I am convinced we are to live our faith on the job. I call this idea the GEO Principle, meaning "God in Every Occupation." If everyone lives their faith at work we would bring God to every occupation, and I know the world would be a better place. But there is a very real question in all of this -- how? What does it mean to bring God to work and how can a person do such a thing?

I have started a dialogue around this issue at a new blog: www.GEOprincipleBlog.com. I hope you will take a look at it and check back often. Even if you do not work outside the home, I hope you will tell someone who does about it. I am trying to post a couple of times a week; there seems to be enough fodder on this topic for a very long discussion. My own effort to live my faith at work seems like it will be aided by talking about it.

Faith, reason and the origin of life

2008-05-22T08:44:00.001-05:00

A movie reviewer at the Star Tribune hated Ben Stein’s film: Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. I am interested in efforts to integrate faith into the workplace so a film about the integration of faith and science appealed to me.

Let me put all my cards on the table up front here. I don’t have a particular personal opinion on the origins of life. More importantly, however, I believe faith and reason go together; the so-called “enlightenment” with separated them in modern thought was a huge mistake.

Using a documentary format, Stein explains that scientists who publicly question Darwinian evolution and suggest that God may have created the world find themselves banned from the scientific and academic arena. They lose their jobs and they lose their funding.

Stein digs deeper, however, to consider the consequences of scientific study completely divorced from faith. He states that Darwinian theory, taken to its logical conclusions, leads societies to horrible places, like the death camps of Nazi Germany. Stein talks about the social Darwinism, or eugenics, which was popular in Europe and the United States in the early 20th century. It is a notion which helped too many people grow comfortable with the idea that certain people have more of a right to live than others – the idea that the strong and the beautiful should live while the weak and the members of targeted ethnic groups should die.

The reviewer mocked Stein for linking the debate between creationists and evolutionists to the Nazi death camps. But my parish priest said something which I think makes the link clear: “If you deny that man has an origin, then you deny man has a destiny, which means he has no purpose. If there is no purpose, there are no rules,” he said. Nazi Germany certainly is an example of a society that operated as if there were no moral rules.

It is a common rhetorical trick to deny an opponent’s efforts to link the disputed idea to the next logical step. The reviewer wanted a movie that simply illustrates the creationist/evolutionist clash in the laboratory and the classroom. Stein shows that clash but goes much deeper by showing where the science-only thinking leads. And it leads someplace horrible. For me, it’s not a leap, but for the movie reviewer it was. How about you?

I'll miss you, Bud

2008-05-20T08:18:00.002-05:00

Bud Brey died on May 13; my wife and I went to the funeral yesterday. Bud was a modern-day Paul, that is, an evangelist using the tools of our time to spread the Good News. At 73, Bud died way too soon.

Bud and his wife Theresa started the Minnesota Catholic Film Society in 1981, lending and showing inspirational films for the next 25 years. The very first film he and Theresa ever showed was a film about Our Lady of Fatima. Ironic that he should die on May 13, the feast of Our Lady of Fatima.

For the last several years, Bud ran Channel 19, a local television station that rebroadcasts EWTN programming, in addition to a few locally-produced shows. It is an entirely volunteer operation, dependent upon donations from viewers. The station’s signal emanates from the top of the IDS Tower in downtown Minneapolis, so people as far away as New Prague are able to watch. Bud put a lot of his own time and money into keeping the station operating.

For a while in the mid-1990s, Bud asked me to host a locally-produced program on the station called “All Things Catholic.” We did a monthly show where we would invite three or four guests to have a discussion about current issues from a Catholic perspective. It was a short-lived effort, but I sure enjoyed it.

Bud and Theresa, coincidently, live just a block from me. I didn’t see him around so much in the last year or so, as health problems kept him home bound. I saw him at church about three weeks ago, however, and he looked pretty good. I was shocked to get the news that he died, two days after having a stroke. He was buried in Lucan, Minnesota, a small farming community, near where he grew up.

Bud did not call any attention to himself but he did big things. Many people watched inspirational television because of Bud. Many people learned more about their faith because of his work through the film society and the TV station. I’m going to miss his cantankerous personality, but his legacy lives on in all the people who are deeper Christians as a result of his work.

A few comments on Social Security

2008-05-08T10:16:00.003-05:00

Our current system of Social Security is unsustainable, given the number of people retiring relative the number of people entering the workforce. I am surprised that the presidential candidates don’t talk about this issue more.

Carl Tannenbaum is a widely respected economist who was in town earlier this week. He recently left LaSalle Bank in Chicago, where he had been chief economist; he can often be seen on the cable news networks offering commentary. The question of Social Security came up during a presentation he made Tuesday. Here are excerpts from his comments:

“Folks, our liability for Social Security and Medicare is about $95 trillion carried out over time. That is about $300,000 per person.

"Make no mistake. None of us has our own individual account in Social Security. It is basically a system where the young pay benefits for the old. We are in a numbers game and in summary you have about 80 million [retirees] versus about 55 or 60 million [in the workforce]. The imbalance just means the contribution from my kids to my generation will be pretty large. The tax rate will be very high and it will be painful.”

Someone asked Tannenbaum if he thinks the problem is fixable. “Absolutely,” he said. “As many of you know, we have already saved Social Security twice when it looked like it was going to run out of money. You can raise the retirement age or change the indexing formulas.”

Tannenbaum noted many people who collect Social Security don’t need the money. “The fact is, Social Security was founded not as an entitlement but as a baseline so we wouldn’t have people impoverished in retirement. Since then, somehow it has gotten to be this birthright that people look at.”

Tannenbaum also would like to see the presidential candidates talk about the solvency of Social Security. "I hope that one of the candidates has some good ideas to try to bring this under control," he said. "I hope all of us are realistic about the hard work it is going to take to fix this."

Best wishes, dear friend

2008-05-03T06:38:00.007-05:00

In March of 2000, I was in San Antonio covering a big industry meeting when my back gave out. I had had back trouble before, but never anything like this. I was walking out of a crowded ballroom when I collapsed in pain. I usually cover these events alone, but Jackie Hilgert happened to make this trip with me. She was in the photographers’ bay when she saw me on the floor, unable to get up. She rushed over to help.

Within about an hour, she had helped me back to my hotel room, where I laid flat on my back for the next two days. Jackie, who had made the trip to take pictures, had to take over and cover the meeting. While she worked, I recovered and by the time the meeting was over, I was at least mobile enough to get to the airport and onto the airplane. Jackie had to carry all my bags and arrange for a wheelchair to push me around at the airport.

I recall that incident because a 12-year era came to a close yesterday when Jackie put in her last day at NFR Communications. She joined the company in spring of 1996 as production manager when magazines were put together with a waxer and an X-Acto knife. She joined the company before we were using digital cameras, Photoshop or even email. She helped me put together more than 300 magazines. Over that time, she did far more than production work. She evolved into a very fine reporter, writer and editor. In fact, her May 15 cover story on volatility in the commodities market is as good as anything you will read in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times.

I will miss working with Jackie on a daily basis, but there is more to it than just the work. Jackie really cared about the company, her colleagues and me. Anyone would be very fortunate to get a chance to work with someone like that for a while, let alone for 12 years.

Jackie is spinning off her own company, called Traditions Communications. Check it out at www.historiesinthemaking.com. I wish her great fortune. I am grateful that we will have the opportunity to collaborate on some projects and I look forward to making the most of our new working arrangement. Time brings change and I suppose I would be foolish to think 12 or more years could go by without some big changes.

Best wishes, Jackie, and know that the doors of NFR Communications will always be open to you.

Home for rent

2008-04-05T12:14:00.002-05:00

If you or someone you know is looking to rent a comfortable bungalow in Linden Hills, please contact me at Tom@NFRcom.com. A neighboring house is becoming available May 1. The 1,400-square-foot home has three bedrooms, a recently remodeled kitchen with new appliances, and beautiful woodwork throughout. It is located within walking distance of two lakes, several parks, and great local shops. Also close to a bus line. $1,400 per month. We are looking for some great neighbors!

The start of Christmas season

2008-03-31T08:33:00.000-05:00

When a woman announces that she is pregnant, the whole household begins to make preparation in anticipation of the new arrival. I am beginning to make preparations today.

No, my wife is not pregnant, but today is the day Catholics celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation. That’s the commemoration of the announcement the angel Gabriel made to Mary that she would conceive and bear a son, who would be the savior of the world. The feast is usually celebrated on March 25, exactly nine months before Christmas. This year because that date fell during Easter week, the folks who determine the Christian calendar moved the date to March 31.

I love Christmas and its accompanying season. Even though they start playing Christmas songs on the radio during the middle of November, I find myself every year lamenting the season went too quickly. The spirit of Christmas is something we should carry in our hearts all year long anyway, so this year I am going to try to get serious about it. My Christmas season for 2008 starts today.

The Feast of the Annunciation comes every year, but usually it comes during the season of Lent, when I am thinking about Easter. This year, however, is different. We have already celebrated Easter, clearing the path toward Christmas. Easter and Christmas, of course, are linked. If we celebrate one, we are really celebrating both. This year I really want to be ready for the coming of Christ. The calendar gives us nine months to prepare and I am going to try to make the most of it.

Prager's sensibility

2008-03-30T11:49:00.001-05:00

Dennis Prager, the national radio personality, was in town last week and my wife and I joined another couple for seats in the audience of 600 or so. He talked for a little over an hour, touching on a variety of subjects, lacing everything with humor.

While I have great respect for his commentary, I disagree with an assertion he made about marriage. He said long marriages are mostly the result of luck. My sense is that they are more the result of hard work. Now, certainly, there is a measure of luck in the equation. One has to be lucky enough not to get hit by a bus or involved in an airplane crash to live into old age, but setting aside the uncontrollables, I don’t really see luck having much to do with it. Rough spots emerge in every marriage and it is work on the parts of both spouses that typically gets them through, not luck.

He also commented that he is greatly troubled by the level of senseless suffering in the world. Who isn’t? But I think what troubled Prager was an inability to identify any purpose in suffering. Prager, a devout Jew, was in town to participate in a debate over the existence of God at a national convention of atheists. Many atheists deny the existence of God because they look around the world and see all the suffering and ask themselves: “How could a loving God allow all this?” They conclude there must not be a God.

On this issue, I am grateful for my Catholic faith which promises no relief from suffering but does bring meaning to it. Just as Christ suffered to atone for our sins, our suffering can atone for sin, and not just our own sin but the sins of others. We can actually enjoin our suffering with that of the Lord to participate in the world’s salvation. I am not a theologian and can’t explain it much better than that, but I know there is a world of theology behind this topic in Catholicism. Christ embraced His cross and we are to do the same. Suffering is inevitable, true; but pointless? No.

Prager’s strongest point was his last one. He said he worries about our country. He noted that on coins minted by the U.S. government we find three things: “Liberty,” “E Pluribus Unim,” and “In God we Trust.” He observed that all three of those ideas are under attack – not from some hostile nation, but from within.

A growing federal government, he said, is encroaching on our liberties. Furthermore, the Latin phrase means: “from many, one,” but today diversity is the mantra of the cultural elites. And secularism is stronger than ever in this country, forcing God out of every crevice of the public sector.

Prager is on the mark. We need to work to preserve our liberty by resisting needless federalism, we need to celebrate our national identify and we need to acknowledge God as the rightful sovereign over our country.

Humility at work

2008-03-15T08:34:00.000-05:00

I have been studying business for years, and I am struck by the role of humility in successful management.

In Good to Great, author Jim Collins looks at the characteristics of really successful CEOs. In one of the biggest business books every written, Collins writes: “The best leaders display a compelling modesty, are self-effacing and understated. They are humble.” The best CEOs were not self-absorbed braggarts, Collins says. They attribute success to people other than themselves, but when things go wrong, they take responsibility.

Humility doesn’t mean walking around with your head down, responding “ah shucks” whenever anyone asks something. Being humble means admitting you don’t know everything. Collins is saying those really successful CEOs are willing to listen to others. Collins assures that no matter where you are in your career, you can benefit from listening to others. And that starts with humility.

A year or so ago, I had a chance to visit with David Gergen, director of the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard University and an editor-at-large for U.S. News & World Report magazine. He links humility with faith. Gergen said: “Humility, in my experience, often comes from spirituality … The best leaders are ones who are well-anchored …Your best leaders often have been those who have been anchored in spirituality.” Gergen should know a thing or two about leadership, having worked for four presidents (Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton).

The wisest counsel on humility comes from the Bible itself. “Conduct your affairs with humility and you will be loved more than a giver of gifts. Humble yourself the more, the greater you are, and you will find favor with God. For great is the power of God; by the humble He is glorified.” This passage is from the third chapter of Sirach (17-19). Or consider this passage from Proverbs (22:4): “The reward of humility and fear of the Lord is riches, honor and life.”

The opposite of humility is pride, and it is pride which so often separates us from God and from those around us. That same noted chapter in Sirach warns: “a stubborn man will fare badly in the end…A stubborn man will be burdened with sorrow…For the affliction of the proud man there is no cure; he is the offshoot of an evil plant.” (25-27).

Humility is an important management characteristic for anyone in business to develop. I am working on it all the time, although I admit to only marginal success. Scripture offers a surprising amount of wisdom applicable to the workplace. At least for now, I am finding this to be my favorite area of scripture study.

Broken political system fails to produce real leadership

2008-02-23T07:35:00.002-06:00

Tony Snow, former White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, spoke in Orlando at a conference hosted by the American Bankers Association on February 18. I was there covering the meeting for NorthWestern Financial Review magazine. Snow offered analysis on the presidential race and on the political envirnoment in this country. Following are excerpts from his remarks:

We’ve got a political system that is broken. If you don’t believe it, look at what’s been going on up on Capitol Hill. There are 208 appointments, many of them vital, that simply are not being filled because Democrats hate the president and they are not going to help him. It doesn’t matter if it is in the national interest. If there is a campaign irregularity this year there won’t be any investigation because there are hardly enough members on the Federal Election Commission to get a quorum. There are many judicial circuits that are now woefully short on judges. This is not what we elected people to do, but because we have a system where being elected is almost like being elected for life, members of Congress have stopped thinking about the public interest and their communities the way they ought to, and they are going after each other. It has become small and insular and very childish.

We cannot afford that as a country. We’ve got to find a way to revitalize the system, so that in all matters the individual becomes sovereign once again. The voter becomes sovereign with the member of Congress. When you think about health care you come up with a system where the consumer is sovereign. When it comes to the economy, something where we reward entrepreneurship rather than punishing it. Something where we go back to the Horatio Alger model where someone works hard and succeeds and we say “Hurrah! That’s what this country is all about.”

The other thing we are missing in politics right now is a sense of real optimism. If you take a look at what has happened in the world in the last seven years, it is absolutely extraordinary. We always hear in the press about failures, whether it is in Iraq or in our own country. Let me run you through some things that don’t get covered when it comes to this country since Sept. 11.

On Sept. 11, 2001, we were in a recession. There were a couple of tax cuts that came along but since then we have had the Enron and corporate scandals, wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we have had the costliest natural disaster in history (hurricane Katrina), we’ve had $100 oil, and the subprime mortgage mess. If I had told you in 2001 that we would encounter these obstacles you would have thought we’d be in bread lines by now.

Well, what has happened? Since 2001, despite all these obstacles, which have imposed trillions of dollars in cost on our economy, we have had 52 consecutive months of employment growth. That has never happened in the history of the United States. We still have six-and-a-half years of continuous economic growth. Yes, it’s more sluggish now but it is continuing to grow.

We also have a country where some pretty extraordinary things are happening. More people are working than ever before. They are making more money than they ever have before, and they tend to save more than ever before. We’ve got more people going to college. People are doing better in school. We have this ownership phenomenon. More Blacks and Hispanics own homes more than ever before. Those are good things.

You need to take a look at what’s going on in home and hearth: Crime rates down, youth crime down, drug use down, alcoholism down, teenage pregnancy down. You also have divorce rates down, abortion rates down.

The Pew organization conducted a poll a couple of weeks ago where they asked “how’s the country doing?” Everyone answered “stink-o.” And then they asked “how’s your life doing?” Eighty percent responded they were satisfied or very satisfied with their own lives. They understand that once you get past the America of the front pages some amazing things are still going on. And one of those things is we are still privileged to be part of the most dynamic country, the most dynamic economy in history.

If you don’t think we are awash in dynamism in this country, think about your kids and your grand kids’ Christmas lists. Do you understand any of the stuff they are asking for? … The fact is, innovation is exploding in this country. Everyone in this room probably has a PDA or cell phone, and in that PDA or cell phone is more memory and computational power that existed on all the aircraft that took every American to the moon and back. The world is generating new information equivalent to all the books in 37,000 Libraries of Congress, essentially billions of volumes per year. We are living in an explosion of information, an explosion of challenges.

We live in a dynamic economy where you cannot shelter your eyes; you’ve got to plunge in and figure out how to win. The challenge for government is to realize they shouldn’t try to protect people from that economy; they should equip them for it. Give them freedom. Give them the ability to innovate. Do not punish them when they try new things. Nobody in either party is talking in these terms about the world we actually encounter when we go to work. Nor is anyone saying: “This is a great country awash in a very special kind of success; let’s build on it.”

We need leadership that says there are dynamic new challenges ahead and it is time for the United States once again, without any doubt, to reclaim its position as No. 1 in the world.

Who's Better Off?

2008-02-22T08:29:00.000-06:00

I read an interesting book recently called “Better Off” by Eric Brende, an MIT graduate who spends 18 months living in an Amish-like community. In the book, published in 2004, he chronicles his experience living without electricity, motors or telephones. He writes about growing pumpkins and sorghum without a tractor or chemical fertilizers, about the birth of their first child at home with the aid of a midwife, and about constructing buildings without power tools.

One of the things he learns from this experience is the way technology separates people. In his 19th century village, he found community with dozens of other people living the same way. Without electricity, motors and power tools, people are really dependent upon each other; they have to work together to survive. That kind of mutual dependence builds human relationships you don’t find in the modern world where electricity and 21st century conveniences make everyone self sufficient.

Brende first got the idea to try this experiment after realizing that many people work in order to afford a car, which they need chiefly to get to work. Brende is looking to escape this kind of self-perpetuating busyness. Even in his community of Minimites, as he calls them, he questions the use of horses, which require people to plant more crops in order to feed the horses. If they didn’t have to grow food for horses, they wouldn’t have as much work and they wouldn’t need horses in the first place.

The book spurred me to look at my own life and consider how I am spending my time. If you think about what Brende writes, you end up questioning whether one form of work is a better use of time than another form of work. This is an interesting question and I have no answers. I do think Brende is on to something, however, with his observation that some forms of work join people with others in communities, while other kinds of work separate people into isolation. Personally, I like community.

At the end of the book, Brende talks about how his life settles after the 18-month experiment. He lives in a neighborhood in St. Louis where he can walk just about everywhere, or use public transportation to get downtown. His wife homeschools their four children; they don’t have a television set, nor a computer.

As I was reading his experiences in the farming community, I thought I could never live like that. But where this experience took him was a life not much different from my own. I prefer hand tools to power tools, we don’t watch much television in my home, and I am blessed to live in a neighborhood where we can walk to many destinations. Public transportation in my neighborhood is good.

Although Brende’s memoir is categorized under “science and technology” I think the book is really about human relationships. Brende’s experiment is a search for the good life; he found an ability to connect with neighbors to be essential to that life. That has been my experience as well. Ultimately, I don’t think Brende has anything against technology, per say, but he proposes that it is always a good idea to consider the broader implication of implementing technology – whether that be a iPhone, diesel engine, or television set. I think that’s a decent proposition.

(Thanks to my good colleague Jackie for lending me the book.)

Working to start a new high school: The Chesterton Academy

2008-02-20T14:43:00.004-06:00

This week's edition of The Wanderer features a front page story on The Chesterton Academy, a new high school in the Twin Cities. I have been working on the launch of the school with my good colleague, Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society. To be sure, a lot of work remains to be done, but things are on track for a fall opening. Here is the article:

The Wanderer Press 02/21/2008
In Twin Cities . . .

Lay Catholics Launch The Chesterton Academy

By PAUL LIKOUDIS

ST. PAUL — Last November, a 32-year-old attorney with the Army Judge Advocate General's Corps at Fort Drum in New York packed up his wife Annie and their five children and their belongings and headed west to St. Paul to take on a daunting new challenge: founding headmaster of The Chesterton Academy, a private, independent high school inspired by the thought of G. K. Chesterton.

"This is ridiculous," said the new headmaster's 5-year-old daughter in true Chestertonian fashion.

The new headmaster is John DeJak, a graduate of Loyola University Chicago, where he was a recipient of the Presidential Scholarship, and a 2004 graduate of the Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor. He was an easy pick for the school's founding board of Catholic parents, led by Dale Ahlquist, president of the American Chesterton Society and an internationally recognized authority on Chesterton's life and work.

DeJak has taught Latin, theology, Church history and ecclesiology at Catholic high schools in Chicago and Cleveland, worked as a legal intern for the St. Thomas More Society, and is an active pro-lifer, fully committed to The Chesterton Academy's goal of building a "culture of life."

And he is a passionate devotee of Chesterton and Chesterton's mentor, Hilaire Belloc.

Also leading the effort for the new school is Thomas Bengtson, publisher of the North-Western Financial Review and a member of the board of the Couple to Couple League and publisher of its Family Foundations magazine.

The founders of the school are in the process of settling on a permanent location for the school in the southwest Minneapolis area, and a closing date is forthcoming, DeJak told The Wanderer in a recent telephone interview.

"This is a wonderful effort by parents here in the Twin Cities," DeJak said.

"As parents are the primary educators of their children, this new academy is truly an effort that comes from the heart of the Church's teachings and what better model than G. K. Chesterton in terms of intellectual giant and culture warrior.

"Chesterton is someone who appreciated everything. He took an interest in everything and he was excited about everything and through that love of learning and the world he came to a profound love of God; through God's creation, he also came to understood how all truth is connected to The Truth, who is Jesus Christ.

"What we seek to do at the Chesterton Academy," he said, "is to provide an integrated education and to teach our students that there is a whole truth of things, and in knowing that we are happy."

The project to establish the academy, he said, began some two years ago when a group of parents started discussing secondary schools and saw the need for a high school that not only taught the faith, but taught all subjects through the lens of the faith, and how they are all interconnected.

"From my experience as a theology teacher in various Catholic schools," DeJak said, "there are too often elements in place that have the effect of undermining the faith, and this new endeavor is a chance to build up the faith and introduce it in a holistic way to our students.

"Parents in the Twin Cities are looking for a school that will be academically rigorous and will offer spiritual formation through daily Mass, frequent Confession, and an emphasis on articulating great ideas through the arts."

The board is currently recruiting students by word of mouth, giving presentations at parishes in the area, and visiting with interested families. "We're especially reaching out to the various home- schooling groups, which is quite a large enterprise out here," he added.

Strong Academics

The academic program at The Chesterton Academy is a solid, tra- ditional, liberal arts program that, over four years, will educate students in the story of civilization, as well as provide them a solid foundation in math, music, art, science, and literature.

Freshman year will cover ancient history, from the Egyptian through the Greek and Roman civilizations. Students will learn the background against which the Old Testament was written and how classical philosophy, with attention to Plato and Aristotle, developed. Sophomore year will cover early Church history through the High Middle Ages, which, said DeJak, is probably one of the most important periods in world history and yet most neglected in other schools.

Junior year will cover the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, and show students how the renaissance in art and literature was accompanied by the rise of the Church Militant.

Senior year will cover the Modern "Revolutionary" Era: the American and French Revolutions, the In dustrial Revolution, the Communist Revolution, and the Sexual Revolution (which led to the acceptance of contraception and abortion). The Catholic Church lost its temporal power but developed its religious and moral authority on a universal scale.

The study of literature will be tied closely to the study of history and the rest of the humanities.

During freshman year, students will be introduced to the classic epics of Homer and Virgil. As sophomores, they will be exposed to early English classics such as The Canterbury Tales, as well as modern literary renderings of medieval history. During the junior year, students will get healthy servings of Shakespeare. As seniors, they will read American literature, Dickens, Dostoyevski, and Hugo. And Chesterton.

Also in their senior year, students will be introduced to modern economic thought by reading Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Pope Leo XIII's
Rerum Novarum, Hilaire Belloc's The Servile State, G.K. Chesterton's The Outline of Sanity, and Joseph Pearce's Small Is Still Beautiful.

Art education will also be a major component of the academy's curriculum over four years. As the founders of The Chesterton Academy explain: "A complete education must include the development of the child's creative nature and must provide him with the tools and the technique with which to express his ideas, his feelings, and his love.

It must also include the analytical skills with which to judge a work of art and therefore must provide the continuous exposure to great art. Most importantly, the mechanical skills and the aesthetic aptitude must be put into the proper context of eternal Truth. A good artist is a complete thinker and vice- versa. Chesterton says that in order to be a good artist, one must be a good philosopher: 'A man cannot have the energy to produce good art without having the energy to wish to pass beyond it. A small artist is content with art; a great artist is content with nothing except everything'."

There will also be an equal emphasis on music. Over four years, students will learn music fundamentals (theory, performance, ear training, music analysis and appreciation) but also music history, where they will see music in the context of the times and philosophy of the period in which it was created, with special attention to the role of music throughout Church history and specifically its role in the Catholic Mass.

In science studies, freshmen will study astronomy and geology; sophomores biology; juniors chemistry; and seniors physics.

Thanks to a donor in Chicago, DeJak told The Wanderer, the new academy's library is off to a good start.

The academy is also forming a lay board of advisers, and has already attracted three big names in Catholic circles: Notre Dame law professor emeritus Dr. Charles E. Rice, Chicago's pro-life activist Joe Scheidler, and Minnesota pro-life activist Mary Ann Kuharski.

For more information about The Chesterton Academy, Wanderer readers can contact Dr. DeJak by telephone: 952-831-3096; or by email: academy@chesterton.org.Also, visit the academy's web site:www.chestertonacademy.org.

Bee Movie

2008-02-03T14:55:00.000-06:00

I saw Bee Movie yesterday and I liked it. The critics hated this movie, saying it wasn’t funny, that the story was stupid and so forth. Well, I’m glad I never bother to read a review until after I see a film.

Bee Movie has two very good messages. The first is that if you do your job well, no matter how small the job is, it can make a big difference. This lesson is repeated throughout the film, which shows us the inner workings of a bee hive, where thousands work at very small jobs, ultimately producing a beautiful product – honey.

The second lesson is about the importance of honest work for bringing meaning to one’s life. The story of the movie is how Barry B. Benson, a bee with Jerry Seinfeld’s voice, sues the human race for stealing honey from bees. Benson wins and humans are no longer allowed to take the honey. The bee population stops making honey. All the bees initially are happy with their new life of leisure. But soon, the bees begin to miss their work. More importantly, all the flowers in the world begin to die because the cessation of honey production means the bees are no longer pollinating plants. At the end of the movie, the bees decide to let humans have their honey, bringing important purpose back to their lives, and giving them a reason to fly about from plant to plant, bringing back the process of pollination. The bees are happier, all the world’s plants come back to life, and humans can once again enjoy honey.

The real message in the movie is that your work is important, even if it seems unimportant. While most of us think we would love a life of leisure, this film tells us that we really need to be doing something that contributes to the world.

Bee Movie is not a great movie, but I liked the message and I found much of it to be very clever. I also found it funny, particularly a line from a mosquito about being well suited to be a lawyer given that he already was a blood sucking parasite. And at 90 minutes, the story was just as long as it needed to be(e).

Early lessons in the presidential race

2008-01-12T10:19:00.000-06:00

While they failed to clarify the race for presidency, the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primaries taught us a lot.

Mike Huckabee's victory in Iowa over Mitt Romney shows that it is more important to connect with people than it is to be organized. Romney, the man with all the business experience, set up a highly sophisticated operation in Iowa. He was the clear leader before Jan. 3, based on the money he spent to put a professional campaign team in place in the state. Huckabee ran a much more modest operation. He didn't have nearly the money nor the organization. And he won. Whether you like Huckabee's message or not, it resonated with Iowans, and that is all that mattered when the results were tallied after the caucuses.

John McCain's victory on the Republican side in New Hampshire shows that we shouldn't pay any attention to the so-called experts. You might remember my post of April 19 last year where I reported on a presentation I heard by James Carville in which he predicted John McCain would drop out of the race before the Iowa caucuses. Carville, a political expert if ever there was one, clearly got it wrong. Not only was McCain still in the race, but he actually finished on top in one of the early states.

And third, Hillary Clinton's victory on the Democrat side in New Hampshire shows that we shouldn't pay any attention to polls. Going into the Jan. 8 primary, all the polls had Barack Obama winning handily. There was even talk about Hillary getting out of the race after her dismal showing in Iowa. But she won convincingly in New Hampshire, exposing the various polls as utterly worthless.

These lessons have application in the business arena. While it is important to have good systems in place, as Romney had in Iowa, it is far more important to have a product which resonates with potential customers. If your market is excited about your product, they will put up with minor delivery inefficiencies, but if they don't like your product, the best distribution system in the world won't do you any good.

Also in business, there are a million consultants who want you to pay them to tell you what to do. They position themselves as experts who know more than you do. Maybe some of them do, but most of them don't. If you are running a business or a department, you probably know more about what to do than anyone. People in business have to figure out who to listen to, and what expertise to pay for. But ultimately they have to make the important decisions themselves. A sure way to tank your business is to rely too heavily on the experts.

And finally, a lot of businesses spend big money on customer satisfaction surveys. I think these kinds of surveys are fine, but people in business should refrain from over-relying on them. Clinton proved that surveys provide only marginally-reliable information. Let's face it: a lot of people lie on surveys. People wrestle with all kinds of influences with they respond to pollsters or survey-takers. A lot of people simply tell the pollster what they think they want to hear to get it over with. Honest communication about anything takes a lot of time; a survey is rarely the best way to get an honest story.

Lindbergh and aviation made the world smaller

2008-01-06T10:56:00.000-06:00

Flying to Florida and back last week got me to thinking about the best book I read in 2007, which was a biography of Charles Lindbergh. Born in 1902, Lindbergh was 25 when he flew nonstop to Paris from New York in May of 1927. A. Scott Berg in his 1998 book, "Lindbergh," offers a very detailed account of the aviator's 72-year life. I also really enjoy the insight the author provides into 20th century America. A lot changed between the time of that trans-atlantic flight and Lindbergh's death in 1974.

The book gives you a sense of a country growing up. Far-away places became accessible in the course of those decades. In the beginning of the century, it seemed inpossible that things going on in Europe and Asia could have much to do with the United States, but World War II changed all that. Aviation made the world smaller and suddenly we were living in a global community, enjoying the world's blessings but also entangled in its problems.

In the early 20th century, aviation was a curiosity. It took a daredevil to fly in an airplane, let alone pilot one. But aviation quickly developed, initially proving particulary useful for mail delivery. Those mail routes paved the way for passanger service. Lindbergh did a lot of work to scout out the best routes and make recommendations about landing systems and airport design.

Aviation was a tremendous development in the history of humanity, but Lindbrergh ultimately lamented the progress. He said that during his lifetime the world changed from when "men flew airplanes to when airplanes flew men." Lindbergh was clearly a controlling personality and he wanted to control the machinery, he didn't enjoy being controlled by the machine. It's a tough trade-off for an adventurer but it was a necessary trade-off for bringing aviation to the masses.

The book offers a detailed account of the abduction and murder of the Lindbergh's first baby. We also get the story of Lindbergh's political thinking during the late 1930s and early 1940s. He desparately opposed U.S. intervention into the "war in Europe." Lindbergh made a lot of speeches urging the country to stay out of the war, a position similar to the one his father, a congressmen from Minnesota, took during the first world war.

Charles Lindbergh traveled to Germany several times during those pre-war years and people began to call him a Nazi. The book paints those allegations as being unfair. After the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, Lindbergh completely changed his sentiments regarding U.S. involvement in the war.

One of the most interesting parts of the book was the description of his relationship with his wife, Anne Morrow, the daughter of the U.S. Ambassador to Mexico who became a U.S. senator. They met shortly after Lindbergh's historic flight to Paris. She was stary-eyed and worshipped him. They married quickly and initially she traveled with Charles all over the world. As the children came, she traveled less, although Charles continued to travel frequently. He was gone for long stretches. As time passed, Anne wanted to make her own name. She was a writer who wanted to be recognized for her own skill rather than simply for being the wife of the aviator. The tension is well-described by Berg.

One of the things that is a little difficult to comprehend for a 21st century American, is the world-wide celebrity status Lindbergh gained completing that 33-hour flight to Paris. It was a celebrity status that lasted the rest of his life. Others who completed longer, more dangerous flights never knew such fame. There was something about Lindbergh that the whole world latched onto.

We have it so good in 21st century America. It is easy to forget it wasn't always like this. It wasn't always easy to get to Florida and back from Minnesota. Most Minnesotans throughout history never had a chance to fly to India. A book like Berg's "Lindbergh" helps a reader maintain some measure of perspective. And the natural result of that perspective for me is a certain measure of gratitude.

New Year's Day at Disney World

2008-01-04T17:13:00.000-06:00

My family traveled to Disney World in Orlando for the New Year’s break, along with about a million other families from around the world. As we walked the streets of the Magic Kingdom on New Year’s Day, it seemed like everyone was here. I wondered: Why do they all come here?

Maybe it’s the weak dollar. The Euro and other foreign currencies are at historic highs against the American dollar, making it a very opportune time for foreigners to visit the United States. I heard many other languages being spoken by visitors around me.

But I suspect the reason throngs of people flock to Disney World is not so logical. A Disney vacation is clearly an emotional buy. If you thought about it too much, you wouldn’t do it. It’s too expensive, too hectic, and too crowded. When it comes to non-essentials, like winter vacations, people almost always buy with their heart, not their head. Walt Disney figured this out a long time ago.

The Disney experience appeals to the heart. It pushes the emotional hot buttons. We visited four theme parks in four days: Epcot, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, the Magic Kingdom and Disney’s Animal Kingdom Park. We experienced only a fraction of what each venue has to offer, but what we saw was tremendous – from the thrill show at the Hollywood Studios, to the musical version of Finding Nemo at the Animal Kingdom, to the Buzz Lightyear ride in TomorrowLand at the Magic Kingdom. All the buildings and infrastructure looked new and authentic, whether we were in recreated villages from around the world (Epcot), or recreated scenes of classic Americana from a century ago (Magic Kingdom).

The entertainment in the parks is magnificent. The stage shows featuring the various Disney characters are very well done, with music, dancing, amazing costumes, and even fireworks. I liked the stage version of The Little Mermaid we saw at Hollywood Studios, and I liked the behind-the-scenes look they gave us at the soundstage featuring The Chronicles of Narnia.

I am intrigued by Walt Disney who created all this – not bad for a story teller. Sure, he was a businessman and movie maker, but his core ability is telling stories. And people have been attracted to his stories for decades. Often he does not even tell his own stories, but stories written by others. But he chooses good stories and tells them in a compelling fashion.

Essentially, the stories typically involve someone looking for happiness. In those stories, happiness is usually equated with finding the love of your life. Some good-versus-evil conflict often adds depth to the story. In the Disney version of the Hans Christian Andersen story, the Little Mermaid, for example, Ariel puts her soul on the line and gives up her voice for a three-day shot at the love of her life. I think the story is relevant today in a culture that regularly encourages young women to trade a valuable, un-retrievable personal asset for a chance at love.

There is something about the whole Disney experience, however, that has always rubbed me the wrong way. I used to think it was the commercialism, and gross over-exposure of the brand. But watching Mickey, Minnie and others dance on the stage in front of the Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom made me realize it is something else. The theme of the 20-minute song-and-dance was “believe in yourself.” At one point, Mickey says:
“All things are possible if you just believe in yourself.” Well, I think I have heard that before, only Mickey changed the last word. All things are possible if you believe in God. Believing in yourself is important, but useless if you don’t believe in God first. The God part of the message is never communicated. That is a sorry omission.

I liked the Disney parks, and my family will probably return at some point. People of any age can have a great time there. Disney tells a great story, whether that’s in the form of a movie, stage play or some kind of roller coaster ride. But it would be a mistake to look to Disney for theology. If you keep in mind that the theme parks are all fantasy, you won’t be misguided.

Inspiration in North Dakota

2007-12-29T06:22:00.000-06:00

I would not have expected to find inspiration in the Grand Forks, North Dakota, but I did.

I was there the day after Christmas on business. It was my first trip to the cold, wind-swept outpost on the Red River. Previously, the only thing I knew about this town was what I gleaned from the news 10 years ago when the community was ravaged by floodwaters. Today, Grand Forks doesn’t look anything like those dismal images from the news footage.

It was April of 1997 and the Red River overflowed its banks by ten miles in both directions, swamping Grand Forks and its neighbor in Minnesota, East Grand Forks. Seventy percent of the people in Grand Forks had to be evacuated – 100 percent of the population in East Grand Forks had to leave. Water was standing 7 feet deep in downtown Grand Forks. As the water crested, a fire broke out in downtown, burning 11 buildings.

Pat Owens was the mayor at the time. She had been a secretary to three mayors before she decided to run for the job herself the previous November. She won with 75 percent of the vote. She is a 4-foot-11 dynamo who had to handle a far bigger job than she ever bargained for.

Owens and many other city leaders, including Randy Newman who I was meeting with on Dec. 26, worked for years to restore the community. Newman is president of Alerus Financial, which was called First National Bank back then. Newman kept the bank open, temporarily transferring operations to a Fargo office. He decided to keep the business in Grand Forks, even though the bank lost three buildings in downtown. Leaders from other communities wooed him, but he was not willing to abandon a heritage in the community that reached back more than a century.

Many of the businesses did leave, and so did a lot of the people. I am told there was a 20 percent turnover in the population. Many businesses, however, came to town, like Cabela’s, the big hunting and fishing store. Money from the federal government and insurance companies poured in and the people rebuilt. Today, downtown features many reconstructed and brand new buildings, including a beautiful six-story state office building. Hundreds of homes were repaired. Most of the homes located closest to the river were leveled. Tracts of land far from the river, today feature brand new homes where many of those displaced residents settled.

Within the last year, construction of a new dike has been completed. The huge wall combines a natural earthen barrier with decorative cement wall. In some places, panels can be removed from the wall in order to improve the view of the river when the water is at safe levels.

The other very challenging factor for Grand Forks during the 1990s, was the downsizing of the Air Force Base. The base, which at one time housed 15,000 people, today hosts about 2,000 people. Thirteen thousand people represent nearly a quarter of the town’s population, which today stands at around 50,000. The University of North Dakota, however, brings a lot of stability to the community. Gopher fans at the University of Minnesota are well aware of the school’s effort to elevate its football program to Division I, while the two have long been formidable Division I hockey foes.

To an outsider, Grand Forks looks like a success story. I feel bad for Owens, who lost her bid for re-election in 2000. Newman said she and other city leaders had to make “50 years worth of decisions in less than a year.” I am sure there were two sides or more to ever decision made; I can only imagine the level of emotional debate surrounding most of them. Perhaps it is more than even the best politician could manage.

Nonetheless, I applaud the people of Grand Forks. It is not easy to rebuild. It would be much easier to simply go someplace else. Just ask all those people who left New Orleans after Katrina. Earlier this week, I saw a pretty nice community, and I am inspired by what I know it must have taken to make it so.

Christmas is real, to this day!

2007-12-28T16:18:00.000-06:00

Christmas is meaningful to Christians everywhere, but I think the feast is particularly meaningful to Catholics.

Christmas celebrates the Incarnation. God loved us so much that He sent His Son to us. The Incarnation puts flesh on the truth. People knew God before the Nativity but with the Nativity, God gave us tangible truth. God knows how humans work; He knows how much easier it is for us to believe if we can see and touch and hear something. So He gave us His Son, for all the world to see and hear; for some to even touch.

For Catholics, however, the miracle of the Incarnation continues to this day; it does not end with the Ascension. Just like the followers of Jesus could ask Him for answers, we can turn to a living, breathing person for truth. Apostolic succession keeps the Incarnation alive so that believers can always get clear teaching on faith and morals. We do not believe that the Pope is Jesus or His equal, but through the chair of Peter, we believe that God continues to make the unambiguous truth easily accessible.

This is the way God has worked since the time of Exodus. Moses spoke with authority because he was in direct conversation with God. That’s why the Israelites went to him to answer their questions (Exodus 18:15). When Moses subsequently delegated God’s authority to others, the Israelites respected those subsequent spokesmen. This same authority remained valid all the way up to the time of Christ. At Matthew 23:2-3, Jesus reminds His disciples to do what the Pharisees say because they hold the authority of the seat of Moses. When Jesus gives Peter the keys to the Kingdom at Matthew 16, He is transferring authority from the seat of Moses to the seat of Peter. We continue to benefit from that authority to this day through the Papacy.

So you can see that for Catholics the “enfleshment” of the truth is something that remains real, even 2000-some years after the birth of Christ.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas lessons

2007-12-24T16:28:00.000-06:00

I’ve learned a few things since I heard my first Christmas song this season on November 15th, courtesy of the Twin Cities’ “official Christmas music radio station.”

The first thing I learned is that we have an “official Christmas music radio station.”

The second thing I learned is how to give a woman a Christmas gift. A friend explained it to me: “First, ask her what she wants; then, buy it for her.”

The third thing I learned is there is nothing worth buying at Southdale. I wondered through that soulless mall three times looking for something to buy my loved ones and found nothing. This year, I ended up buying most of my presents at neighborhood stores.

The fourth thing I learned is that it is foolish to wait until December 22 to shop. Every year, I tell myself I am going to complete all my Christmas shopping by Halloween, but inevitably, I find myself shopping for last minute gifts at the Super America station at 5:30 on Christmas Eve. Next year will be different.

In 2008, I am taking a new approach to Christmas shopping. I will not wait until the season to being my shopping. Throughout the year, if I see something that might make a good gift for a friend or family member, I am going to buy it and save it for Christmas. I suspect that throughout the course of the year I will see things that people might really like. If I buy when I see those things -- even if it is May -- I won’t be forced into the defensive buying spree that typically results in me giving people things they don’t want.

The fifth thing I learned is Mindy Smith sings some really nice Christmas music. I bought her “My Holiday” CD purely on spec and it turned out to be one of my best moves. Her music is my music. Go to Amazon, buy the CD and listen for yourself.

The sixth thing I learned is that not everyone in my neighborhood has the Christmas spirit. It snowed a couple weeks ago. I was out there at 5:30 in the morning to get the sidewalk cleared. But later in the day, my kids played in the snow and pushed a lot of it back onto the sidewalk. Two days later I got a notice from the City of Minneapolis telling me that if I didn’t get my sidewalk cleared within 48 hours, I would be fined $102. Someone from the neighborhood had complained. It made me mad that someone would choose to threaten me with a fine instead of just talk to me about my sidewalk; I shoveled again, nonetheless. A few days later, we had another foot of snow.

The seventh thing I learned is that it doesn’t take many sugar cookies, peanut brittle bars and fudge to put on weight. Like other highly-developed mammals, I like to put on an extra layer of fat going into the winter, but this year the Christmas goodies have given me a corpulent look beyond my comfort zone. I’ll be going back to Weight Watchers, but not until after the holidays and at least one more box of Frangos.

The eighth thing I learned is that people like to get their Christmas cards before Christmas. We send out cards every year, but often we don’t get the job done until around New Year’s Day. When a friend got our family card around Dec. 20 this year, she thanked me. “Nice to get it before Christmas,” she said.

There is always something to learn. I try to keep my eyes and ears open to pick up new lessons. The timeless lesson -- that is, the meaning of Christmas -- however, is one you can pick up by keeping your heart open. Or at least, that’s what’s worked best for me.

Support for new blood in Minnesota's Third District

2007-12-23T08:11:00.000-06:00

One of the people who traveled to India with me was Minnesota State Representative Erik Paulsen, a Republican representing District 42B, which is in the southwest metro community of Eden Prairie. We visited several times during the week-long trip, but my best conversation with him occurred on the hour-long flight between New Delhi and Bangalore, where we sat next to each other.

Serving in the State Legislature since 1994, Paulsen is focused on efforts designed to improve Minnesota’s business climate and educational environment. Part of his reason for traveling to India was to scout out partnership opportunities for the numerous high-tech companies in Eden Prairie. He sees the potential Asian partnerships offer Minnesotans and Americans. In the legislature, he authored legislation to make Mandarin Chinese language education available in Minnesota high schools; in the last legislative session, he secured funding for the Minnesota India Center at the University of Minnesota.

Paulsen was the House majority leader for four years, and has a penchant for bipartisanship. He even joked that he got more legislation passed in 2007 being in the minority party than he did when he was in the majority. Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life lists Paulsen as one of the state’s 82 (out of 201) legislators who had a 100 percent pro-life voting record in 2007.

When U.S. Rep. Jim Ramstad (R-Minn.) announced he was retiring at the end of the current term, Paulsen announced his candidacy for the 3rd Congressional seat. I live in the 5th District so I won’t get to vote for him, but I am supporting Paulsen. I like politics and I have always wanted to support someone who actually reflects my thinking. There were as many as nine Republicans expressing interest in the seat, but Paulsen quickly got the others to line up behind his campaign.

Open seat elections are special. With members of congress typically holding onto their seats for years, if not decades, open seats don’t come up that often. The Third District is particularly interesting because Ramstad is a pro-choice Republican, and the western suburbs, which make up the Third District, are gradually turning out more Democrat voters. Many of the national pundits are calling the Minnesota Third a toss-up. The Democrats feel an opportunity here and the speculation is several millions of dollars will be spent on a contentious race. That would be a marked contrast from the past several years in which Ramstad ran essentially unopposed and regularly won easily.

Now there is some talk that Ramstad is not going to resign. Reports in various publications and across the blogosphere have Ramstad holding onto his seat. Apparently Republicans figure 2008 is going to be a tough enough year as it is; if they can convince Ramstad to stay put, that is one less seat they will have to worry about losing.

I think this is a disaster. Ramstad announced he is retiring and he should stand by that announcement. Paulson has already put a lot of work into the campaign and it would really be unfair to his supporters for Ramstad to now say: “just kidding, I’m staying.”

What the Republicans really need is new blood, not the same old thing that Ramstad represents. The party is under-estimating Paulsen. He is clearly a candidate who can win. Keep in mind that the money the Democrats pour into running against him is money they won’t have to pour into other races, such as the Minnesota Sixth District where the incumbent is Michele Bachmann. If Ramstad runs in the Third, the Democrats will have more money to aim at that contest, where they believe they might be able to unseat one of the country’s most conservative representatives.

No matter who runs, Republicans are not going to win back control of Congress in 2008. My point is, Republicans need fresh blood and Paulsen is one of the best examples of that. I am going to continue to support him. I cannot get excited about more of the same, which is what Ramstad represents. He announced he is resigning and he should stand by that announcement.

School play gets the ‘Mystery’ right

2007-12-22T09:12:00.000-06:00

The school that my children attend, Holy Family Academy in St. Louis Park, put on a very powerful Christmas program on Thursday night.

The program, which involved all the school’s 200-plus students, was called “Mystery of the Manger; It’s the Gospel Truth!” It was presented in the beautiful auditorium at Hopkins High School.

I am filled with joy about this program because it so convincingly articulated the meaning of Christmas. This was not a light-hearted, feel-good holiday program. This was a compelling story of doubt, evangelization, conversion, repentance and joy – the whole human struggle summarized on a proscenium stage in a lively, 40-minute production.

The story centered around an investigative reporter, Jane Bond, who visits a convent to “get the facts” about Christmas. Skepticism pervades her questions for Sister Mary Catherine and her colleagues Sister Therese and Sister Bernice. Her brief conversation with Father Michael doesn’t seem to sway her disbelief. But something moves her to watch the convent’s depiction of the Nativity, presented on Christmas Eve. The play is so moving, she comes to see the meaning of the Incarnation. She responds by writing a story for her newspaper, the Morning Star, proclaiming the Truth of the Christmas story.

There is a brief scene which gives the “Mystery of the Manger” particular weight. After viewing the Nativity play, Jane experiences conversion and then goes to confession. The light focuses our attention on the Nativity play-within-the-play where Mary and Joseph knelt around the Christ child in the manger. But off to the side of the center-stage action, Father Michael hears Jane Bond’s confession, which she makes on her knees. It was an understated but powerful touch that brought meaning to the rest of the story.

So often we want what’s easy. We want Christ, but really we only want the Nativity, not the crucifixion. Everyone wants the Resurrection without the cross. Everyone wants forgiveness without repentance. Of course, however, they are inseparable, and this Christmas program did not miss that point. It is the first Christmas play I have ever seen in my whole life that has gotten the whole story right.

The sixth, seventh and eighth graders who acted all the different parts were incredible. The talent among this group of kids is astounding. I am very proud of my own kids who were in the show, but really I applaud all the kids who had any part in it. And, I applaud the teachers and parents who found the script, adapted it for this presentation, and worked with the kids over months to produce such a memorable performance.

The odd couple

2007-11-26T09:50:00.000-06:00

The president’s approval ratings are low; I have heard many people describe George W. Bush as the worst president this country has ever had. I even know Republicans who feel this way. David Gergen, a professor at Harvard and editor-at-large for U.S. News & World Report, said in a speech I heard a while back that he considers Franklin Roosevelt to be the best president of the 20th century.

Without commenting on the effectiveness of either the Bush or Roosevelt presidencies, it strikes me that these two presidents are remarkably alike.

Consider that they both served multiple terms, shortly after periods of unprecedented commercial prosperity. The American public had grown familiar years earlier with the names of both men in preceding presidencies held by relatives with the same name.

Roosevelt and Bush both led the country into unpopular wars following a cataclysmic attack on American soil. Neither was able to lead us out of war. And each vastly expanded the size of the federal government.

It is difficult to ignore the similarities between the institution of social security and the prescription drug benefit, both passed, at least in part, to win political favor. While both offer benefits with populist appeal, both will ultimately undermine the financial integrity of the country.

You never really understand the impact of a presidency until long after the man has left office. Years from now, as historians consider the American presidency, I wonder if more people will examine the similarities of these two leaders, who today are rarely linked.

Thanksgiving

2007-11-22T07:57:00.000-06:00

About a year and a half ago, I listened to a speech by a guy named Dinesh D’Souza. He had just written a book called “What’s so great about America.” The title is a statement, not a question. As he was describing the plight of people who struggle with real poverty all over the globe, he quipped that while we worry about cars and big houses, many people in Africa, Asia and parts of South America would “be happy to have regular bowel movements.” That line got a little chuckle but I realize now that he wasn’t kidding.

In India, I saw many skinny, near-naked people living in squalor. Some bathed themselves in muddy rainwater that collected in the potholes. Collecting trash, others picked through rubble that lined the streets. In the countryside, I saw people thrashing wheat by hand, or digging in the dirt without tools. Everywhere I went with my travel group, we saw beggars. The water they drink is not clean; the food they eat is not substantial nor particularly nutritious; their living conditions are not safe. Yes, I can understand, their bowels are probably not functioning to their potential. If they were, it would be a big deal. D’Souza wasn’t kidding.

This is Thanksgiving Day and I am not creative enough to think of anything else to do with a blog post today than to give thanks. Of course I am thankful for the really big things, like a great wife and kids, a home, work that I enjoy, faith and great friends, but lately I am finding particular joy in giving thanks for the little things.

For example, I am thankful for matching socks, and paper for writing down ideas, pens that work, pencils that are sharp. I am thankful for shoes and gloves and a warm hat. I am thankful for all those free newspapers that are available throughout the city, not that they offer particularly good reading but they tell me I am in a world full of people with all kinds of different ideas. I am glad everyone is not the same. (Oops, I think that is a big thing, not a little thing.)

I am grateful for the little restaurant where I buy my lunch three days out of five. I am grateful for plumbing, let alone indoor plumbing. I am grateful for soap and a dependable razor. I am grateful for toothpaste that tastes good and dental floss. I am grateful for Kleenex and paper towels, sugar and chocolate chips, banana bread and spaghetti.

I am grateful that someone figured out electrical outlets should be standardized, and I am grateful that someone figured out all the rules for driving on the road, and I am grateful that the parking meters in downtown Minneapolis take a rest on certain holidays, including Thanksgiving. I am grateful for my eyesight and my ears so I can drink up all the interesting things that are going on around me. I am grateful for the squirrels and all the little animals that scurry through my back yard, giving me entertainment.

I am grateful for the people who collect our trash and deliver our mail and provide police and fire protection. I am grateful for the operators who staff the 411 telephone service and the people who put together the phone book. I am grateful for the street cleaners and the cable guy and the meter readers and all the other people who do their jobs to keep the city operating.

But, oops, there I go again. These are big things. None of these things are little. Maybe there are no little things. Good health, including properly functioning bowels, is a big thing.

On this Thanksgiving, in 2007, I am particularly thankful for those people in India. I saw a lot of poor people when I was there but I didn’t see people who had given up. They were persevering. They were making the most of what they have. It seemed to me that they were holding onto hope. They must have seen potential that most of us miss. Thinking about all the things for which I can be grateful is helping some of that potential to come into view for me.

The blessing of adoption

2007-11-14T08:59:00.000-06:00

November is National Adoption Awareness Month. I wrote a memoir about adoption, something Susan and I experienced four times. This is an excerpt from Emerging Son (www.emergingson.com) where I reflect on fatherhood, the result of our adoption efforts.

Why do we have children anyway? It’s a question that seems particularly relevant to adoptive parents. Unlike biological parents, we can’t claim any child was unexpected. We took very deliberate, complicated steps to assure our place as parents. Why?

I was responding to a deep inner yearning – a yearning that almost seems in conflict with itself as I was seeking to reclaim my childhood and at the same time seeking my adulthood. I wanted that family I grew up with. Childhood was such a positive, loving, and happy time for me, I wanted it again. But I also wanted to grow up. Like any living creature, I wanted to become what I am – that is, an adult. And somehow I grew to believe that a typical man approaching 40 should know the love of a wife and kids, the security of home, and meaningful work. As a kid watching my dad, I never realized what a bid deal it was to have all this; now I know.

The same way a baby emerges from the familiar comfort of the womb into the unknown, harsh but opportunity-filled world, a man exchanges a carefree, self-centered existence for the uncertain but potentially joyous responsibility of fatherhood. I am grateful for the time I had as a single man, and for the time I had with Susan before we had children, but I am so grateful for this period. Parenthood demands love and trust and faith like no other period in life I have known. Fatherhood is helping me to replace my natural-born selfishness with selflessness. Maturity is figuring out that the whole world doesn’t revolve around me, and fatherhood is helping me to see that, and more important, to embrace that.

I found my home in fatherhood. Now my job, which could take decades, is to help my kids find their home.

I want the same thing for my children as I want for myself: I want them to work all their lives to replace their natural human selfishness with earnest selflessness.

Love that can change the world comes from a selfless heart. Susan and I will give our kids opportunity. They will go to good schools. We will show them many wonderful places in the United States and the world. And I will support them, no matter what their vocation. Their pursuit of any demanding, honest work will make me proud. But people don’t change the world by what they do, they change the world by who they are. And I pray my children grow to become the selfless heroes that the world so desperately needs.

Global business: easier than ever but still challenging

2007-10-30T09:36:00.000-05:00

Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson needed three weeks to travel across the Atlantic Ocean in the late 1700s; Charles Lindbergh took 33 hours to fly from New York to Paris in 1927. Last Friday, it took about 21 hours to travel from Mumbai, India to Minneapolis. The venture consisted of back-to-back nine hour flights, with a three-hour layover in Amsterdam.

Global air travel is routine today, but I still marvel how easy it is for 21st Century citizens to conduct business around the world. When we landed in Delhi on Oct. 21, one of my colleagues quickly picked up the score of the Gopher football game. (The University of Minnesota lost to North Dakota State University, 27-21.) And we could follow the Red Sox victories over Cleveland in the AL Championship series, and the first two games of the World Series, just as if I were in my living room at home. I was able to keep in contact with my office by email and post to my web site with absolutely no trouble.

The ease of conducting business from half-way around the globe, however, should not fool us into thinking that it is easy to do business in a foreign country. Minnesota’s disappointing experience with the Essar Group serves as an apt example. While we were in India, Essar Global of Mumbai announced it had closed a deal to purchase Minnesota Steel Industries in Nashwauk. At a cost of $1.6 billion, Essar plans to develop a specialty steel plant on the site that would represent the biggest foreign investment in Minnesota ever, bringing many sorely needed jobs to the area.

But the ink on the purchase papers was barely dry when the U.S. Department of Commerce contacted Minnesota Gov. Pawlenty to inform him of Essar’s engagements with Iran. Essar apparently is in negotiations to build a multi-billion dollar oil refinery in Iran. The Iran involvement would be a violation of U.S. sanctions against the country; Pawlenty said he could no longer support the Essar investment in Minnesota.

It is possible that Essar will back out of the Iranian deal, and even if it doesn’t it is possible that another steel company will come along and set up shop in Minnesota if Essar is barred from operating here. But what a roller coaster! Whatever happens, it will be a long time before a new steel mill is operating on Minnesota’s Iron Range.

Whenever you do a deal, you never really know what you’ve got until the deal is done. Even with the best due diligence, surprises always come up after the deal is officially closed. The significance of those surprises is typically proportionate to the size of the deal -- $1.6 billion is a lot of money; gaining a new steel plant, and then losing it in a matter of days for an area that desperately needs the jobs, is wrenching.

During our trip, we were apprised of cultural differences between Americans and Indians. Proud and formal, Indians like to assure potential clients. Sometimes they say “yes” to cover for the short term, only to back away when it comes time to close a deal. One mission delegate shared a story about contact he had with a potential Indian customer. All the negotiations went smoothly, and a deal was all but signed. In the end, the client never signed, much to the surprise of the Minnesotan.

I don’t consider any of these nuances to be significant enough to deter American business people who really want to do business in India. If you have a product appealing to middle class consumers, you really need to look at getting into this market. Rusy Kohli, who is handling distribution of Polaris in India, summarized the decision American companies need to consider about doing business in India.

“You can get in now and be the first one in, and put up with all the difficulties and barriers,” he said, on the one hand. Or, on the other hand, Kohli said: “You can wait until some of the barriers become easier to handle but then play catch up to all those others companies that got in ahead of you.”

India is the placed to be

2007-10-29T10:11:00.000-05:00

As I looked out the window from my 16th floor room in the Hilton Towers Hotel in Mumbai on Friday, I saw a city that reminded me of New York. It was busy and chaotic in Mumbai, a city that went by the name of Bombay until 1995, but the commotion seemed more understandable here than it did in the other parts of India we visited. I actually think I could live here, a comment I would not make about Delhi or Bangalore.

Renny Thomas, a consultant with McKinsey & Company, made a compelling case for India’s economic potential during a morning-long briefing. He explained India has 200 million households. Each household represents an average of 5.5 people. Three things will happen over the next 40 years: The number of households will grow, the average income of the wage earners in those households will grow, and the average number of people in those household will decline.

These trends are motivating to any company which offers household products. Nowhere else in the world is there such a large market with so much up-side potential. The average household size in China is 3.7 people and in Russia it is 2.8 people, Thomas offered for context.

Thomas noted that 30 percent of the country’s population currently lives in urban areas, a percentage that is expected to grow to 70 percent in the next 50 years when the population is expected to level off at 1.5 billion people. Currently, 700 million people or 75 percent of the country’s population, live in rural India, dotted with some 65,000 villages.

I wondered whether the country’s 9 percent annual GDP growth would mean much to those living in rural areas. A reliable source of electricity cannot be guaranteed even in urban areas, so what hope might there be for raising living standards in rural areas? Thomas said wide-area wireless networks will bring internet access to low-cost battery operated computers, which will help bring new levels of education to the country’s remotest sectors. “The country gets wireless,” he said, citing the fact that Indians are signing up for cell phone service at a rage of 6 million new subscribers per month. In a country were land lines were never particularly reliable for communication, more Indians that ever are talking to each other by cell phone.

Habil Khorakiwala, head of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce, said the proportion of people living in poverty in the country already has declined by 15 percent since the country opened itself up to economic reforms in 1992. The middle class has grown from as small as 15 million people to well over 100 million people in the last 15 years.

Thomas cited McKinsey & Company data which showed the number of “deprived” households – the poorest of the poor – had dropped as a percentage of total population from 80 percent in 1995 to 54 percent in 2005. By 2025, it is projected to drop to 22 percent. By 2025, 41 percent of the country’s population is expected to be in the middle class.

To my mind, helping hundreds of millions of people out of poverty is a very compelling reason to get involved in commerce with India. It is always gratifying to know that a business venture may bring profits, but I think it is even more exciting to consider that it will help people live at a better standard of living.

Clearly, there are a number of barriers to doing business in India – poor infrastructure, high import duties, unreliable sources of electrical power and water. But all kinds of American companies have shown those obstacles can be overcome. If you want to be a part of the biggest economic development story in the history of the planet, then India is the place to be.

Meet some of the delegates

2007-10-25T20:05:00.000-05:00

Not only am I getting the opportunity to meet many wonderful people from India, but I am getting to know my colleagues on this trade mission. Let me introduce a few of them to you:

Kim Pearson founded New Boundary Technologies in 1985, a software company with 30 employees. He said he’s made two observations during his trip here. First, the small tech companies in Bangalore are raising the standard on human resource practices. In order to mitigate rates of turnover as high as 30 percent, the small companies are adopting HR policies typically only found in big companies. “They spell out a compelling career path, and offer good training,” he said. They offer good compensation with bonuses. Pearson said they do a better job than most small tech companies in the United States. The example of the Indian companies is actually going to force American companies to adopt similar HR practices in order to compete for talent.

Second, Indian companies have done a good job of creating a knowledge repository so that when someone leaves the company, the information in their head is not lost. The company records everything and the person who takes over gets all that information and doesn’t miss a beat. With all the people who are going to be retiring as the Baby Boomers age, “we need to be doing the same thing in our companies so the intellectual capital of the company is not lost,” he said.

Erik Paulsen, state representative for Eden Prairie, Minn., recently announced he is running for the third congressional district seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is interested in India because there are a number of tech firms in Eden Prairie. He is interested in facilitating cooperative arrangements between Indian firms and those in Minnesota.

Paulsen introduced legislation last session that resulting in a $150,000 appropriation to the University of Minnesota for the launch of a Minnesota India Center. Paulsen said details for the center’s operation are being worked out by University officials, but he suspects it will offer some kind of support to businesses interested in India. It may also focus on health concerns.

A China Center was set up at the University of Minnesota in 1979, a resource Paulson tapped as he worked for legislation establishing a program to teach Mandarin in Minnesota schools.

Mark Aulik, owner of Allow Hardfacing and Engineering Co., of Jordan, Minn., spends about half his year in India, where he has been doing business since 2001. His company makes equipment for processing food, including automatic potato peelers and fruit packaging machines. He believes his company is a natural fit for India, where food is so important, yet most of its rots before it gets to market.

Aulik sells a system for rendering slaughtered animals so no parts go to waste. The system gives the animal’s owner a more efficient way to process animals and reduces land and water pollution. Aulik said he believes his company can make a big difference in India.

Megan and Dennis Doyle are founders of Hope for the City, a charity that channels excess corporate equipment and supplies to disadvantaged people. They recently shipped a carton of medical supplies to Armenia. In seven years, people all over the world have received millions of dollars in supplies through Hope for the City. The program also offers meals to disadvantaged children during the summer in the Twin Cities.

Hope for the City has a micro-loan program in India, with 75 loans currently outstanding. The loans range from $100 to $500. The money is being used to help villagers start or advance a business. On person used the money to buy an iron to start a laundry business, another used the money to buy a water buffalo.

Boris Miksic is president of St. Paul-based Cortech, which has been doing business all over the world for years. Miksic told the group that his company has just signed a deal to help an Indian state clean up its streets and give work to the poor. The state is hiring unemployed women to go around their city and pick up trash, using biodegradable trash bags made by Miksic’s company.

Miksic has published a 286-page paper-back autobiography, titled “American Dream: a guy from Croatia.” He gave me a copy of the book and I have been reading it as we travel.

Sam Roy is president and CEO of EPS Technologies of Mankato. His company has developed a technology for reducing the pollution emitted by diesel engines. The product already is in use in Thailand. As we drive about, he notes all the trucks driving by, belching out clouds of exhaust. Visibly excited about his company, Roy said the product will make the air cleaner and help the owners of the vehicles save a lot of money.

Steven Cremer is president of Harmony Enterprises in the tiny southeast Minnesota community of Harmony. His business was started by locals looking to do something to spur their economy. In the 1960s, they made the tent components to travel trailers. Now, with 60 employees, the company makes waste management products. For example, the company makes a machine which compacts cardboard, which can be recycled.

Sidney Emery is CEO of MTS Systems, which makes testing equipment. Emery said the company made a decision a few years ago to focus on China and he is here evaluating that decision. His conclusion is they made the right decision. He said the difference is China offers opportunity right now, whereas the opportunity in India is still a few years off.

Brett Shockley is CEO of Spanlink, a company that helps companies automate their telephone systems. With his company’s equipment, a customer can call an office in Minneapolis, and be seamlessly transferred to an employee in St. Paul. This allows businesses to make the most of their branch networks, Shockley explained. With all the economic growth in India, there are going to be a lot of new offices needing phone systems.

Gopal Khanna is commissioner of the Minnesota Office of Enterprise Technology. Gov. Pawlenty calls him the state’s chief information officer. Before joining the Pawlenty administration, he worked as chief financial officer for the Peace Corps, improving procedures across the organization’s international operations. Khanna, of Indian heritage, is bringing new efficiencies in information management and telecommunications to the state’s numerous departments and agencies.

Steve Korstad, chief financial officer for Coronal, is traveling with his colleague John Howard III. Coronal is an emerging company which offers a pollution-free way to incinerate waste products. Using carbon arching technology, garbage can be vaporized with heat that exceeds the temperature of the surface of the sun. The process produces a methane gas that can be used or sold. The company is preparing to set up shop in northern Minnesota near a paper mill, which will use the methane to dry its paper. Garbage from neighboring communities will fuel the operation.

A cost of doing business

2007-10-24T19:33:00.001-05:00

Business in India is predicated on licensure and compliance with various government regulations, on both the state and national level. I learned today that many businesses routinely pay local officials to expedite approvals. It seems like a major problem for American businesses that want to set up shop in India, particularly in light of a U.S. federal law known as the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which prohibits companies from paying bribes in other countries.

Naraya Manepally, CEO of an Indian manufacturer, explained that small bribes are simply part of the cost of doing business in this country. He called the demands for cash from state and municipal inspectors “obligations” and said small companies like his really have no choice but to pay them. The company has a subsidiary which partners with a Minnesota company. Together, they make filters for automobiles and industrial uses.

“We plan for obligations,” he said in a veiled reference to bribes that initially went over my head. “Obligations come on a daily level. Inspectors and others come and ask for money. You will have to pay them,” he said in a matter-of-fact tone.

Gul Iqbal, who worked 30 years for IBM, said government employees are underpaid and that is why they frequently ask to be paid on the side. “The biggest problem in India is the low-paid government employees,” he said.

Several experts on conducting business in India advised our delegation that U.S. companies should find an Indian partner if they want to succeed here. They said it is very difficult for a foreign company to come to Indian and launch a business without local help – a believable assertion given the complexity of life here, from its numerous languages, untenable logistics, and multiple layers of government.

“You have to find an Indian partner if you want to sell here, especially if you are new,” explained Mark Russell of U.S. Commercial Service with the American Embassy. “New products need licenses and you need clearances. It is almost impossible for a U.S. company to get clearances without a local partner.”

Manepally implied that local partners could take care of nuisance bribes, insulating the American company. He clarified, however, that business people considering operating in India should follow the law. “Only deal with white money, don’t deal in the gray areas,” he advised.

I asked him about the seeming contradiction. He noted that on big, federal requirements, like the payment of taxes, enforcement is strict and business people need to comply. “You will get caught if you don’t,” he said. Municipal inspections, however, are less formal although local inspectors can shut an operation down. “You should just plan in your budget to set aside some money for them,” he said.

Not everyone, however, agreed that people need to pay bribes in order to do business here. Gayatri Yadav, who works for General Mills’ operation in India, said they do not pay bribes. “The multi-nationals make it clear from the outset they will not do bribes in India. You can do business honestly in India,” she said.

Som Mittal, a senior vice president for Hewlett Packard in India, commented: “We have done six joint ventures and we never paid. There were delays, but when word gets out that you don’t pay, they leave you alone.”

When I asked other members of the Minnesota delegation what they thought about the need to pay bribes, they all said that no business person should ever consider it. Even acknowledging delays in getting licenses and other municipal approvals, they uniformly said they would never pay a bribe.

“Bribe,” of course, is my word and perhaps it is too strong. Manepally may have used the word “obligation” for more purpose that merely obfuscation. The delegation is staying at the magnificent Leela Palace and when the bellhop brought my bag to my room he held out his hand. I gave him money. Was it a tip or a bribe? Certainly if I refused him I could expect my luggage delivery to be a little slower the next time. The bellhop, like the factory is inspector, is paid a wage. In both cases, their official earnings are probably small. Is it wrong for them to ask for a little more? Is it wrong for me, the customer, to give the guy a few bucks, or I mean rupees?

The bribery issue certainly complicates the thinking a business person might put into the prospects of doing business here. If you work for a large, well-branded company, it is easy to say you will never pay a bribe. The country wants these kinds of companies so much that it is not likely to push for bribes if they run into initial resistance. A small start-up with no reputation certainly would not get similar treatment. A clerk at a license bureau just might not get around to notarizing your application until an under-the-table payment is made. Inspectors may well hold up construction approval on a new factory for such a company for months, if not years. This kind of lost time is costly and could sink the company.

Business can be messy and an entrepreneur has to decide when they embark on a new venture whether they really want to get their hands dirty, especially if they want to do business in India.

Do they really want us?

2007-10-23T21:16:00.000-05:00

While we are being greeted warmly, I am picking up little undercurrents which give me some skepticism about the prospects of conducting business in India. On Monday, a local business official expressed indifference toward on Minnesotan’s concern over high import tariffs, and yesterday a key government minister expressed little interest in helping a group of Minnesota business leaders bring their products and services to India.

About 20 members of the Minnesota trade mission delegation visited the Ministry of the Environment & Forests on Tuesday. Several delegates represent companies that produce products that could help India reduce pollution and waste, or otherwise operate in a “greener” fashion. Minnesota State Senator Satveer Chaudhary opened the meeting, while Steve Riedel, Minnesota’s international trade representative, following up. We were fortunate enough to meet with Meena Gupta, the Minister of Environment & Forests. She was accompanied by an aide R.H. Khwaja, who was educated at the University of Minnesota.

Mark Aulik, president of a Jordan, Minn.-based company that helps meat processors render typically unusable animal parts, asked for help bringing his product to India. Sam Roy, president and CEO of EPS Technologies of Mankato, Minn., sought direction for his effort to bring technology to the country which would help increase the efficiency of diesel engines in trucks and busses. “We want to know how we can get our technology to your country. Can you give us a clear vision?” Roy asked.

Minister Gupta’s answer was disappointing. “We are the ministry of the environment,” she said. “You need to visit with the ministry of commerce … This ministry will not be able to give you an answer.”

I thought it was an odd response to a group of influential business leaders who had traveled half way around the world to explore business potential in India. Even if she really couldn’t help, I am surprised that she didn’t offer a more politically accommodating response. Her blunt answers really did not make anyone feel particularly welcome.

Aulik, who has spent considerable time traveling around India, offered a suggestion about pollution control laws that Gupta utterly rejected. He suggested that the country’s current pollution standard on waste water from factories is so stringent that no one tries to meet it. He said he had tested drinking water from the tap in several Indian locations and found that even that water did not meet the requirements for industrial waste water. Aulik said that if the municipalities can’t even clean up the drinking water to meet industrial pollution standards, how can companies be expected to meet that standard?

Aulik suggested lowering the standard to something more attainable. “If people worked toward an attainable level and accomplished even half that goal, it would still be a significant improvement over current conditions,” Aulik explained.

Gupta outright dismissed the suggestion. “It would not be very politically acceptable to lower the standard,” she said, ignoring the practical implication of her position.

Also, when Boris Miksic, president and CEO of Cortec Corporation in St. Paul, explained an agreement his company just reached with an Indian state to sell biodegradable plastic bags there, Gupta showed little interest.

And, Carmine D’Aloisio, a member of the U.S. Embassy staff in charge of commercial affairs, commented that prohibitively high tariffs keep a lot of environmentally sound technologies from being imported into the country. Again, Gupta offered no response.

Gupta’s indifference matched the attitude that I picked up from Phiroz Jandrevala, head of the Confederation of Indian Industries. In a luncheon presentation on Monday, Jandrevala seemed to offer a particularly callous response to a question about high tariffs which make it difficult for many American companies to bring products into India. He essentially told the business audience to pass the cost on the buyer. He refused to acknowledge a problem with the level of tariffs. While high today, he noted tariffs were much higher 60 years ago.

Perhaps the responses from Gupta and Jandrevala are a sign of the country’s success. So much foreign business investment is pouring into the country that they don’t need to concern themselves with barriers that might be making it difficult for small and medium size companies to do business here.

In my mind, the jury is still out about whether India is a good place for American companies to do business. On the one hand, there is definitely opportunity here, and the initial country reaction to newcomers seems welcoming. But, on the other hand, when you start considering specific details, some business and government sectors do not appear overly excited about the prospects of foreign companies setting up shop here.

Getting down to business

2007-10-22T19:29:00.000-05:00

Our trade mission began Monday with a day-long seminar on the Indian economy and business environment. In Ballroom I of the Hyatt where we are staying, we got a thorough economic overview, presented by officials from the American Embassy here, and from various Indian trade groups.

While much of the opportunity here related to the growing middle class was re-iterated, the challenges of doing business also were explained. Manish Mathur, a principal with the consulting firm A.T. Kearney Ltd., explained, for example, logistical difficulties. Average ship turn-around time in an Indian seaport is seven days, compared to a place such as Singapore, where it is six to eight hours. The average ground speed of transportation is 30 to 40 kilometers per hour. “That is too slow,” Mathur said. “I see this holding the country’s growth back for five years.”

To be sure, enormous investments in infrastructure are expected. John Davison, minister counselor for economic affairs with the U.S. State Department, said $500 billion will need to be invested in the country’s roads in the next five years.

Logistical challenges, plus other factors, cause India to be ranked low compared to other countries in terms of “ease of doing business.” Based on numerous factors, Mathur said his firm ranks India 120th in the world. The United States ranks 3rd and China ranks 83rd. More specifically, India ranked 111th for ease of starting a business, 134th for licensing, and 177th for enforcing contracts.

Still, investment is pouring into the country. India currently ranks second in the world (behind China) for direct foreign investment (DFI), up from 15th in 2002. Davison noted that in the first six months of 2007, DFI was at an all-time high for India.

Holly Higgins, minister counselor for agricultural affairs with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, described the country’s farm economy. Farming is important here, making up 20 percent of the country’s GDP, although that proportion is diminishing as other sectors grow. The nation has 114 million farms, averaging 3.5 acres in size. About 120 million people depend on farming directly for their livelihood, while another 600 million depend on it indirectly.

Higgins noted that farms within 120 miles of major cities are faring the best because there is opportunity for them to bring their commodities to markets, where demand for good fresh-grown produce and farm products is strong.

I have often heard India described as a country of contrasts and I guess that aptly describes a country where 600 million people live on less than $2 per day, yet cell phones are selling at a rate of 7 million per month. In the evening, we left our comfortable hotel surroundings on a bus to visit with David Mulford, the distinguished U.S. Ambassador to India. As we drove to his palatial residence – a building which inspired the architecture for the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. – we saw what must have been thousands of people living in squalor. The roads are lined with shanties of mud, canvas tarp and scraps of metal. I had seen these kinds of living conditions in Bogota, but here they go on seemingly forever. In Bogota, they were confined to smaller areas.

I am told people are coming to Delhi to live from the countryside at a rate of 300,000 per year. At that rate, it seems the makeshift housing will only grow. Can these millions of people be lifted into a standard of living where they have sufficient housing, clothing, and regular meals? Clearly, the Indian government recognizes the challenge. The mantra of the current government is “inclusive growth.” Strong GDP growth won’t mean much if it fails to include three-fourths of the country’s population.

That’s one of the reasons the Indian government is happy to host trade missions like the one I am on. Ambassador Mulford said the United States is eager to help and noted trade missions from other states which recently had been through Delhi. Business delegations from three other states are scheduled to come through in the next month, he said.

The Taj

2007-10-21T22:36:00.000-05:00

Many of the stories I have read about India in the business press note its inadequate infrastructure. While companies can feel confident about the labor force that might built a product, it might feel uncertain about its ability to move the product from one place to another, from the factory to the port. Our first day in Delhi gave credence to such concerns.

It was 78 degrees out when our plan landed in Delhi at 12:35 a.m. on Sunday, Oct. 20. Upon deplaning, it took an hour to get through the immigration station and collect our luggage. We were greeted warmly by the staff at the Hyatt Regency, where we are staying, but it was 3 before anyone got to bed.

By 8 the next morning, we were on a bus, headed 120 miles southeast to Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal. What an education I received, simply looking out the window during the five-hour trip. I saw nine people sleeping under a bridge, wrapped from head to toe in blankets. There were lots of animals, including elephants, camels, monkeys, orangutans, oxen, donkeys and cows. Some were tethered to posts, others roamed free, but none of them seemed to move too fast. The traffic, already disorienting to this American because everyone drives on the left side of the street, was intense, with little attention seeming to be paid to road signs, including stop lights and lane markers.

A four-lane road leads to Agra and about half way there, we see thousands of people marching in the opposite direction, many of them carrying flags. They are taking up a full lane, forcing traffic on that side of the street down to a single lane. Our guide explained the protestors are marching to Delhi, where thousands plan to meet Oct.29 for a massive demonstration against the government. The issue has to do with the confiscation of their land by government for economic development purposes. V.K. Singh, of Mercury Travels Limited in Agra, gave us an example. He said the Tata Group, a large Indian manufacturing company, worked with the government to acquire land in Calcutta in order to build an auto assembly plant. The construction displaced many locals. They do not believe they were fairly compensated for their land, and so now they protesting. Apparently, this is going on all over the country.

During the bus ride, our host Gov. Tim Pawlenty, worked the crowd, stopping at each row to talk to at length. I am told this is a significant change from the behavior of the previous governor, Jesse Venture. When he led a trade mission to Mexico, he apparently never visited with any of the people accompanying him. I talked to the governor about the sister city agreement he is set to sign with Haryana on the trip. I ask what he thinks of the idea of a neighborhood, like the one I live in, arranging for a sister neighborhood relationship. Linden Hills, I commented, might be interested in such a thing. Gov. Pawlenty said he liked the idea and encouraged me to contact the India Center at the University of Minnesota to pursue it.

The Taj Mahal, or simple “The Taj” as locals call it, is spectacular. There apparently are concerns about pollution in the area near the landmark, so we get off the bus a mile or two away and get on electric buses, which take us the final distance. We are given about 90 minutes to explore. It is a cloudless, warm day, and the Taj stands magnificently on the horizon. It is built atop two platforms, which the guide said makes it appear taller than it actually is. Four towers on the corner of the building give the monument additional visual appeal. They are constructed to lean outward at a 2 degree angle so that if an earthquake ever struck the area, they would fall outward rather than onto the Taj itself.

The area is crowded, the number of people increasing the near to the Taj as I advance. We are required to remove our shoes, or to put slipper-like coverings over our shoes. I feel a little bit like an astronaut slipping the big blue cloth coverings over my black Rockports. I took many pictures of the building – probably 25 or so – and so is everyone else. They say the Taj is the most-photographed building in the world and I believe it, based on what I see.

A door far too small to accommodate all the people, lets visitors in and out of the Taj. Upon entry, however, I am disappointed. I expected more. It is dark inside, and all of the walls are white. This is a magnificent building, but inside it does not compare to the great cathedrals of Europe like Notre Dame in Paris, or St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

Time goes quickly and we have to return to the bus. Dozens of vendors approach me to buy souvenirs, mostly little wooden statues, books and jewelry. They name a price and then a lower price. Eventually they ask me to name my price. I have no interest. I am not going to buy anything here. They are very persistent, continuing to lobby for my attention through the window even after I have found my seat on the bus.

We exchange stories on the bus; a couple of people in the group saw Mick Jaggar, accompanies by a very tall women. Sam Roy of Mankato even got a picture of them.

On the way back, we stop at the home of Ararati and Vishnu Lall. They are in the jewelry business, selling all over the world. They have a beautiful home in Agra, and treat the entire delegation of refreshments, consisting of tea, other drinks and cake. Vilash Lall, the sixth generation son, tells us a little bit about doing business in India. He noted the instability of the state governments. “They last only eight or nine months,” he said. Many organizations get around the law by setting up phony “front” businesses, while the real unauthorized work goes on “in the back.” He did not provide details, but one can imagine.

He also expressed some concern over a certain amount of greediness, saying that a typical hotel room in India might cost the equivalent of $300 or $400 per night, when then exact same room can be had in other major cities around the world for $150. “People are going to find it too expensive to come here,” he lamented.

The Lalls are relatives of Gopal Khanna, commissioner of the State of Minnesota’s Office of Enterprise Technology. I asked him what he thought about the country’s prospects for continued growth. “India has three things going for it,” Khanna said. “First, the people here have a genuine interest in learning and education. Second, the people here are entrepreneurial. It is in their DNA. It has always been that way, for thousands of years. And third, the country is willing to accept people of different philosophies and religions. We are a true pluralistic society. This is the mark of a true democracy.”

“Do you think the economy will lift a half a billion people from the ranks of poverty to a middle class lifestyle?” I ask.

“It is a 100-year project,” he said.

It is about 6 p.m. when we begin our ride back. I am tired, having slept only a few hours the night before. The drive is going smoothly until 7:50 when we come to a complete stop on the highway. The two lanes of traffic going northwest are not moving, and some vehicles have cross the median and are attempting to advance on the road going the opposite way. That two-lane portion of the highway has been reduced to one lane to make way for on-coming traffic. Even with this accommodation, however, nobody is moving.

There is uncertainty about the situation. What is the hold up? How long will it last? People in other cars are getting out and walking around. Finally, it is determined that the road is being blocked by those protestors we saw on the way out. They have set up camp on our side of the road and no one can get through. We have no idea how long we will be tied up, and at one point many people get off the bus and walk over to a restaurant for something to drink. A couple of times, it looked like we were going to advance, but after a few feet of movement, those hopes were dashed.

Everyone on the bus seems good natured about it. We are told that if you plan to do business in India, you have to “roll with the punches.”

At 10:15 p.m., we finally break through the log jam and traffic starts moving again. We are 98 kilometers or about 60 miles from Delhi. I spend the remainder of the ride talking to Sam Roy, president of EPS Technologies in Mankato, Minn. His company is bringing a new product to market which will vastly increase the efficiency of diesel engines. The product already is in use in Thailand, and he wants to bring it to India. He said truck and bus owners can save big money with his product, in addition to substantially reducing green house gas emissions. He was looking forward to the remainder of the mission trip, during which he planned to meet with potential Indian partners.

At about midnight, we roll into the hotel driveway. It has been an amazing day. India is a land of great potential, I can see. But logistics are a problem. If a major highway can be shut down by a protest, how reliable is the transportation system? Companies that set up here to manufacture need to be able to count on moving their products in a timely fashion. They need to be able to rely on the road systems, train system, airports and seaports. Perhaps they can, but the delays on the highway would really concern me if I had to rely on them on a regular basis.

Travel

2007-10-20T16:30:00.000-05:00

Sitting in coach for 15 hours is not a particularly pleasant experience, although it is the price of admission to India for any Minnesotan. My journey started Friday evening at Minneapolis/St Paul airport, where more than 400 people loaded onto the Northwest airline flight to Amsterdam. The flight was oversold and when they offered people travel vouchers worth $750 to exchange their seat for the same flight the next day, I considered if for a moment. I would like to take my family to Florida this winter. Seven hundred and fifty dollars would pay for at least two airfares. But I stuck with my original plan. Going a day later would mean missing an opportunity to see the Taj Mahal.

It took seven and half hours to fly from Minneapolis to Amsterdam. I sat next to a guy who sells pipes. He said he had been to India, and that he had mixed feelings about it. He said he had a hard time adjusting the Indian cultural norms in business where for the sake of politeness, people usually say “yes” even if they really mean “no.” Like most Americans, he would rather have clarity than politeness.

The pipe salesman asked me if I was traveling to Calcutta. He said “there are a lot of beggars, many of them don’t make it through the night. In the morning you see dead bodies on the street.” No, I am not going to Calcutta, but perhaps on another trip I will.

The first people I see on the jetway coming off the aircraft are two soldiers dressed in black carrying machines guns – on has black skin, the other white. I wonder why they are there. They make no expression as I pass.

The Amsterdam airport is busy, and I immediately locate the gate where I need to catch my connecting flight to Delhi – F4. As I walk through the corridors, past the coffee shops and small stores, I notice something: people can smoke here. Living in Minnesota, I don’t think I have seen a person smoke indoors in a public building since the mid-1970s. I look out the window and see flatness. There are not mountains or hills on the horizon.

There was only an hour scheduled between flights, so I had to hustle. The line for boarding is a mile long, but there is a separate line for people who hold an “elite” flying status. A while back, Northwest Airlines mailed me a silver status membership card. Apparently it gets me into the shorter line. I actually feel a little guilty as I look back at the line that goes back and around a corner. But not too guilty. I use the shorter line.

When everyone is boarded on the KLM DC-10, we are informed of a mechanical problem. We were told we might have to change aircraft. What a disappointment! As it is, we were going to get into Delhi late, giving us only a few hours of sleep before the all-day excursion to see the Taj. Now we would be getting in even later. Some two hours later, we left. Never had to change planes. We were told they fixed the problem.

It was difficult sleeping on either of the flights. I may have gotten some sleep on the first leg, but no more than a few minutes on the second. I am passing the time journaling and reading a book by G.K. Chesterton. I had read Othodoxy 20 years ago, and I selected it off my bookshelf at home because the books size (150-page paperback) made it easy to carry in my briefcase. When traveling, you have to consider the difficulty of carrying everything. Chesterton’s wisdom is illuminating. I had forgotten most of his message, which centers on the idea that there is a God; there is objective right and wrong. We are not to make up the rules as we go; if we do, we will destroy ourselves.

Before I left home, John, my 10-year-old gave me his medal of St. Michael the archangel. “He’ll keep you safe” John said.

“You couldn’t do much better than to have St. Michael’s protection,” I said, thanking my incredibly sensitive boy. I love my wife and children. The only downside taking a trip to India for business is the extended time away from family. I will miss them. I do already. But this blog makes it a little easier for us to stay connected.

Looking for the future in India

2007-10-20T16:27:00.000-05:00

Perhaps the greatest economic development challenge of our time is India. I am traveling there this week with a business contingent of 70 Minnesotans to see for myself.

A group of people about the size of the population of the United States lives what we would consider to be a middle-class lifestyle in India, leaving the remaining 800 million people in poverty. That’s a lot of poor people but the country’s annual GDP growth rate of 9 percent offers great hope. Banashri Bose Harrison, the minister of commerce for India at the U.S. Embassy in Washington, D.C., says the ranks of the middle class are growing at a rate of 5 percent per year. At that rate, about 500 million of the country’s poor could advance to middle class lifestyles within 35 years.

Gov. Tim Pawlenty is leading the group of about 50 business leaders, six journalist, a dozen state officials and four travel professionals on the first India mission ever led by a Minnesota governor. Pawlenty wants to promote business between the countries. He says that while the population in the United States is holding relatively flat, the population in India is growing. If Minnesota-based companies are to expand their markets, they are going to have to consider selling in countries that offer growing populations.

Last month, Ashok Kumar Attri, an Indian diplomat living in Chicago, addressed the business delegation during a pre-mission briefing. He described GDP growth of 9.3 percent during the last two years, a rate that he claims is accelerating. During the first three decades after the country gained its independence in 1947, the country’s economy grew at a rate of about 3.5 percent – comparable to the current rate of U.S. GDP growth. It grew to 5.7 percent in the 1980s and it averaged 6.0 percent between 1990 and 2005. Attri says the country expects growth topping 10 percent in the coming years.

He makes that claim based largely on a robust work force – 52 percent of the country’s population is below the age of 25. Even as far into the future as 2025, the median age of the population will only be 30 years old. The total workforce, that is, people between the ages of 15 and 59 currently is 696 million people. That figure is expected to grow to 1.02 billion by 2050.

The country has a solid intellectual base on which to build. Literacy is not confined to the middle class; with a literacy rate of 61 percent, a significant portion of the country’s poor can read. And, among the country’s better-off folks, 380 universities and 11,200 colleges produce more than 50,000 computer professionals per year, and more than 360,000 engineers.

Attri identified eight business sectors that he said offer the greatest prospects for propelling the economy: infrastructure, real estate, retail, IT, pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, entertainment and automobiles. Pawlenty would like Minnesota businesses with expertise in those areas to make the most of the opportunity.

Economists, however, worry about the country’s high rate of inflation, the effects of which have been masked in recent years by the extraordinary economic growth. Rising real estate prices have fueled a good part of that growth. The same easy credit that led to the housing bust in the United States is facilitating a lot of real estate deals in India. If the country were to experience a real estate collapse anything like what the United States is experiencing, it could hurt the country’s economy.

The information packet that Minnesota delegates were given by Pawlenty’s administration noted other problems that plague the country, including a robust human trafficking industry. “India has been on the Tier 2 Watch List since 2004 for its failure to show evidence of increasing efforts to address trafficking in persons,” the state’s briefing states.

The Minnesota delegation will get a whirlwind tour of the country, beginning in New Delhi, the country’s capital, with 12.7 million people. The visit will open with sight seeing at the Taj Mahal, four hours away by bus in Agra. Monday and Tuesday morning are devoted to business in New Delhi, with a reception Monday night at the U.S. Embassy hosted by the U.S. Ambassador to India. Tuesday evening, the group travels to Bangalore, the country’s I.T. center. After two days in the city of 5.7 million people, the group travels to Bombay, which took the name Mumbai in 1995. The island city of 16.4 million is features one of the most dense urban populations in the world.

Pawlenty noted that $129.5 million of the state’s $15 billion in exports go to India, making it the state’s 22nd-largest export country. About half the state’s exports to India are computers made by IBM in Rochester. Pawlenty also noted increasing investment in Minnesota by Indian companies. The Essar Group, for example, is investing $1.6 billion in the Iron Range to open a new mining and steel manufacturing plant. .

Tony Lorusso, the executive director of the Minnesota Trade Office, said: “This trip is just a start of what I hope will be a long relationship with India.”

While the business opportunity is motivating most of the people in this trade mission, I am intrigued by the possibility of a half a billion people moving up and out of poverty over the next 35 to 50 years, grace of a robust economy. Can it really happen? What role can Minnesota companies play in developing India’s economy? More business for Minnesota companies could mean a stronger economy for Indians. One retired businessman I talked to who has been to India several times said he is skeptical. “There are so many people living in poverty, I don’t see how they can do it,” he said.

Certainly there are obstacles, but certainly there is hope. Tom Friedman writes in his book, The World is Flat, that India is the future. It’s educational system, population growth and British-based legal system give it the edge over China, another country experiencing amazing economic growth. I have some expectations about what I will see here: congested traffic, overcrowded sidewalks, beautiful new buildings next to shanty-towns. But what I am going to be looking for is the future. If the country cannot grow its middle class, then perhaps when I look all I will see is the past. But I am going to look really hard to see the future.

Goodbye to an old friend

2007-10-18T20:58:00.000-05:00

My friend Ben Haller died on Monday. He was 88.

Ben sold the Northwestern Banker magazine in 1988 to Paul Blackburn, who merged it with his magazine, Commercial West. Both of the magazines were started a century earlier, Northwestern Banker published out of Des Moines, and Commercial West originating out of Minneapolis. Upon the merger, Blackburn renamed the magazine NorthWestern Financial Review.

I was the editor at the time of the merger. I had competed against Haller and his staff the three years prior, and for the next year or so, I edited columns that he continued to contribute. He was an awesome writer. Nobody had banking industry knowledge like Ben Haller. When he wrote about something that happened in the late 1980s, he could compare it to similar events in the 1950s or the 1960s. Whenever some crisis arose that we all thought meant the end of the banking industry as we knew it, Haller would say the exact same thing took place three or four decades earlier.

I respected Haller because he seemed to know everyone in the industry and everyone seemed to know him. He started working at the Northwestern Banker upon his discharge from the U.S. Army in 1945. He eventually was named editor, then bought into the magazine, and then became the magazine’s sole owner in 1981. There aren’t very many people who stick with the same company for 43 years, as Ben did.

Ben Haller was born in 1919 in Omaha, one of 14 children. I wrote a feature on him when the magazines merged and at that time he told me about his military service. He was training with a company of soldiers, but one afternoon he tore ligaments in his knee playing touch football. The injury was so serious that he couldn’t keep up the pace of his Army training, and he was pulled out of his company and placed in the class behind. Years later, he did some digging around to find out whatever happened to some of his old buddies in that original company and he discovered that nearly everyone in the company was killed in the invasion at Normandy.

Haller had always been a devout Catholic, but this realization really got him to thinking about why God had spared his life. Clearly, he thought, God had something important in mind for him to do with his life.

Haller saw combat in World War II himself, flying 19 combat missions. At one point, his plane was shot down over Yugoslavia. The entire crew was presumed dead. Officials informed Haller’s young bride, Peggy, that he had been killed in action. Months later, the crew was discovered, rescued and Haller turned up in a hospital in Italy.

After the war, Ben and Peggy had five kids and eight grandchildren. They were married for 63 years.

I just returned from Ben’s wake; the funeral is tomorrow morning. Peggy asked about my kids. I said they were fine, adding that four kids sure keep my wife and I busy. Peggy said: “They keep you busy but you know it’s worth it. At times like these, it is obviously worth it.” Her kids and grandkids were among the many people remembering Ben at the Sacred Heart Church Parish Center in West Des Moines.

By the time a colleague and I bought the magazine from Paul Blackburn in 1992, Haller had stopped contributing columns, but we stayed in touch. I would see him annually at the Iowa Bankers Association convention in Des Moines every September. The IBA has a club for people who have worked in the banking industry for 50 years or longer. These “50-year bankers” have a luncheon at the convention, and Ben would always attend. He was so close to the group that they made him an honorary member, the only non-banker ever to be welcomed into the ranks of the 50-year banker group.

I got a little worried last month when I went down for the convention and Ben wasn’t at the luncheon. I had talked to Ben last spring. In fact, I invited him to consider contributing columns again. After taking a couple weeks to think about it, he wrote me a letter saying he’d like to do it, that he would get to work on it right away, and that he would send me the first column as soon as he was done with it. I never received a column.

At the wake, it was noted that he lived the last several months of his life in great pain. I never knew, but I should have guessed. He would have submitted a column or two if he were doing okay; he wouldn’t have missed the 50-year banker lunch if he hadn’t been pretty bad off.

I’m going to miss my friend.

Beardsley shares history of triumph and tragedy

2007-10-11T14:37:00.000-05:00

Long-distance runner Dick Beardsley is a well-known personality on the local speaking circuit and I was privileged to hear him address a business group Monday night in Bloomington. He shared the thrill of being one of the world’s leading marathoners and the agony of struggling with a drug addiction that nearly killed him. The likeable, 6-foot-2 runner invited us to support his foundation, which offers support to chemically-dependent people undergoing treatment.

After washing out of football, Beardsley tried out for his high school’s cross country team, a much better fit for the 135-pound junior. He had never run competitively before, and at the first practice of the season, he found himself walking the last mile of a three-mile run. With practice and persistence, he became a steady runner for his senior year season in 1974.

“There are no short cuts to success,” he said. “You’ve got to believe in yourself. If you are willing to put in the work, the sky is the limit.”

Beardsley graduated from high school never having run in the state high school championship. His college career, at the University of Minnesota-Waseca, did not bring him fame, although he was encouraged by his coach who repeatedly told him he “could be as good as he wanted to be.”

In 1981, he ran Grandma’s marathon in Duluth, Minnesota. He was feeling well prepared and, mysteriously, picked up subliminal messages that he would run the course in two hours and nine minutes. He recently had recorded a time of 2:12 in the London marathon. Amazingly, he won Grandma’s with a time of 2:09:36.

The pinnacle of Beardsley’s career was the Boston marathon, ten months later. Six miles into the race, running shoulder to shoulder with Cuban-born Alberto Salazar, Beardsley told himself he could win the race. He felt terrible those first miles of the race, but a quarter of the way into the marathon, he knew he could compete with Salazar, the world’s top runner at the time.

Beardsley found himself about two blocks behind Salazar with a little over three miles to go. Beardsley sprinted forward to catch up. On the last left turn before the finish line, one of four motorcycles escorting the leaders turned in front of Beardsley, forcing him to take several extra steps. The difference was too much to overcome. Salazar won the race with a time of 2:08:51; Beardsley came in about a second and a half behind at 2:08:52.

Although others said it was clear the motorcycle cost him the race, Beardsley refused to blame anyone for his second-place finish.

Beardsley’s career, which had sky-rocketed him to international fame, took a dive after that. An injury prevented him from competing in the 1984 Olympics. Then, on Nov. 13, 1989, he suffered an accident on a farm that changed the course of his life. The broke several bones in the accident, and nearly lost his leg.

Over several years of treatment, he became addicted to pain-killing drugs. He said by the mid 1990s, he was downing 80 to 90 pills per day. He said he would go from doctor to doctor, seeking prescriptions. When he couldn’t get them, he would forge his own.

Beardsley eventually was caught and locked up in a drug ward in Fargo, N.D. He went through a lengthy, painful, and expensive rehabilitation process.

“Good things can come from bad situations,” Beardsley summarized, noting the launch of his new foundation, which is accessible through www.DickBeardsleyfoundation.org.

“You can live forty days without food, seven days without water and a few minutes without air, but not one moment without hope,” said Beardsley, who would like to bring hope to chemically dependent people in need of treatment.

I got the opportunity to meet and talk with Beardsley before his presentation. He is bright-eyed and personable. He is very likable and he tells a compelling story. I am sure he will succeed in bringing hope to many people who otherwise would not have any.

Pope Benedict XVI’s book is insightful look at the life of Christ

2007-09-28T11:18:00.000-05:00

I have been meaning to write for quite some time about “Jesus of Nazareth,” the book by Pope Benedict XVI, which was published last May. I read the book in early summer and found it to be wonderful. A second reading is in my plans.

The book is a series of reflections on the Gospel stories presented in 10 chapters. The chronology of the book takes us from the Baptism of Jesus through the Transfiguration. A second volume is set to be published which will include, among other things, commentary on the infancy narratives.

Pope Benedict gave me several “Ah hah!” moments with is explanation of many Gospel stories. Chapter 2, for example, which deals with the temptations of Christ, foreshadows the Passion with a reference to Barabbas. When Pilate offers the crowd a choice between freeing Jesus or Barabbas, they choose Barabbas. Pope Benedict notes that Jesus offers the people spiritual freedom, whereas Barabbas, imprisoned for insurrection, offers political freedom. The people chose the political solution; it is the same choice people always make.

Chapter 5 is devoted to The Lord’s Prayer. This chapter has changed forever the way I will think as I recite this familiar prayer. He looks at each line. Reflecting on the phrase: “Hallowed be thy name,” Pope Benedict notes the importance of names. He notes that knowing someone’s name is the first step for entering into a relationship with them. By authorizing us to call him Father, “God established a relationship between himself and us…He enters into relationship with us and enables us to be in relationship with him.” Pope Benedict notes that the Incarnation began with the giving of the divine name to Moses. “What began in the Sinai desert comes to fulfillment at the burning bush of the Cross.”

I also like the reflection on the line: “Give us this day our daily bread.” Jesus acknowledges our earthly needs. He “invites us to pray for our food and thus to turn our care over to God.” It is so easy to think that we provide for ourselves, but this is a reminder about who really provides for us. Nonetheless, “we have the right and the duty to ask for what we need. We know that if even earthly fathers give their children good things when they ask for them, God will not refuse us the good things that he alone can give.”

Chapter 7 deals with parables. Pope Benedict writes about the older brother as he discusses the parable of the prodigal son. The older brother gives into the temptation of self-righteousness, triggering jealously toward the younger brother. Pope Benedict notes that for the older brother and others like him, “more than anything else, God is Law; they see themselves in a juridical relationship with God and in that relationship they are at rights with him. But God is greater: They need to convert from the Law-God to the greater God, the God of love.” Pope Benedict writes that the bitterness of the older son indicates the limitations of his own obedience. He would have liked the “freedom” that the younger brother enjoyed. “There is an unspoken envy of what others have been able to get away with,” Pope Benedict writes. Folks living in a manner pleasing to the father have real freedom, yet bitterness turns that freedom into slavery.

It is pretty easy for us folks who take our faith seriously to feel as if we are living by the rules. Perhaps we get a little jealous when we look at those flaunting the rules, especially if we see no earthly consequences. Pope Benedict gives us a reminder to check our heart and reconsider whether we really love God, or merely the idea of self-righteousness. Of course we should rejoice whenever someone makes a commitment to their faith, no matter what their stage in life.

Sections of this book will impact readers differently depending on where each individual reader is in their own faith journey. If you are interested in advancing on that journey, however, you can get a real boost by reading “Jesus of Nazareth.” I suspect I will be giving copies of this book at Christmas time.

A gracious host passes away

2007-09-07T16:58:00.001-05:00

In June of 2005, I got to spend an afternoon with Edward M. Gramlich, the eminent policy analyst who died of leukemia on Wednesday at the age of 68.

Gramlich was a governor on the Federal Reserve Board from November 1997 to August 2005. He hosted a group of students from the Stonier Graduate School of Banking at Georgetown University in the board room at the Federal Reserve Building in Washington, D.C., two months before he left the Fed; I was among the students. Hanging on my wall at my office is a picture of the group – Gramlich front and center, me in the back.

We talked about housing, which was his specialty. He warned of the impact of the subprime lending craze before other members of the Fed Board saw it as a problem.

Gramlich was an economics professor at the University of Michigan, where he returned after leaving the Fed.

A look at the subprime mortgage picture

2007-09-01T15:07:00.000-05:00

Foreclosures are up as the subprime mortgage market bottoms out. Politicians are weighing in, expressing concern. President Bush issued a statement yesterday about the importance of housing. Here’s what’s going on, from my perspective as a journalist who covers the banking industry.

The subprime mortgage phenomenon was supply driven. Investment firms like Merrill Lynch figured out how to sell questionable credit from high risk borrowers to pension fund managers and other typical bond buyers. Investment bankers figured out they could create a bond out of very good, or “A,” credits, mixed with questionable, or “C,” credits, to produce a bond with an overall quality of a pretty good, or “B,” credit. Pension fund managers, who typically buy B-rated bonds, showed interest after independent rating agencies blessed the new recipe. This created a new market for C credits in the form of subprime mortgages.

The investment bankers went to the mortgage brokers with the new product and the brokers sold the product like mad. You remember hearing all those ads on the radio and on television, where mortgages were promised to anyone, regardless of credit history. People with marred credit, who otherwise could not get mortgages, responded and bought homes with the easy credit. In many cases, they didn’t even have to put money down.

In the third or fourth year of this game, those C credit borrowers are beginning to show why they were C credits in the first place. They aren’t keeping up with payments and the mortgage holders are foreclosing. That’s the phenomenon that is making so much news lately. But remember, a good number of people losing their homes weren’t in homes prior to the availability of subprime mortgages, and they also aren’t losing much, if any, equity.

The people who are losing money are the people who bought the bonds made up of these mortgages. They are not likely to get all of their investment back, let alone any kind of a market rate on their principal. I feel bad for these guys, but not too bad. Investments, especially those including C credit components, are risky.

Decades ago, when someone wanted to buy a house, they went to the bank or savings and loan to borrowed money for the house. The lender held onto the loan for the life of the mortgage. The lender and borrow stayed closed to one another. If the borrower got in trouble – lost a job or incurred substantial medical expenses – the lender was there to consider the situation. They usually tried to work something out. In the absolute worst cases, the lender might foreclose, but in most cases, the borrower and lender worked something out to keep everything on track.

Today, there are many more players between the borrower and the lender. An investment banker finds a funding source. They then work with a mortgage broker, who finds borrowers. Brokers also find mortgage servicers, who handle the paperwork. The mortgage ends up being a complicated legal document which binds the borrower to the servicer, who is tied to the funder. The broker, who initially works with the borrower, is out of the picture. Consider what incentive the broker has to get the right product for the borrower when they disappear the minute the final papers are signed. The servicer rarely knows the borrower and if the borrower falls behind, the servicer usually has no option than to initiate foreclosure as prescribed by the legal agreement it has with the funder. It’s a much tougher arrangement for the borrower than the mortgage arrangement of decades ago.

But there’s no going back. Access to equity markets for mortgages has a substantial upside as well. Many more people have access to mortgage credit than did under the old direct lending system. But the downside is that over-eager players come up with shaky ideas and sell them to others who don’t look close enough at the product. In the end, it’s the way the market has worked for centuries, and overall, the market always self corrects. That is what is happening now with the subprime mortgages. The politicians really don’t have much of a role in all this.

Bridge work

2007-08-17T13:51:00.002-05:00

Two years ago this month, I covered a speech delivered by U.S. Rep. Jim Oberstar (D-Minn.) in Duluth, Minn. He is chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

Oberstar used a 30-minute speech to tell a business audience about all the money the nation was preparing to spend on highway construction and other transportation projects. He talked about safety, but only in terms of building better roads which might lead to fewer traffic accidents. About 42,000 people per year die in auto accidents. He never mentioned bridge safety.

Bridge safety, of course, in on my mind because of the Interstate 35W bridge collapse earlier this month. Officials are moving quickly to rebuild. The cost is estimated to be about $250 million and some even say the new bridge could be in place in about a year.

Two years ago, Oberstar talked about passing legislation that would spend $286.5 billion over six years on transportation – a significant amount of money but $90 billion less than Oberstar said he would like to spend.

Oberstar said $2.8 billion of the total would be spent in Minnesota. The impact of that spending would be substantial. He said for every $1 billion spent on highway investment, the state gains 47,000 jobs.

Oberstar provided these details: $448 million of Minnesota’s allocation would be used for Interstate highway maintenance, $190 million for bridge replacement, $115 million to mitigate traffic congestion, $89 million for highway safety, and $23 million to eliminate hazards at railroad crossings, and $18 million to improve border crossings into Canada. He said there would be $1 million to buy child safety booster seats, and $500,000 in motorcycle safety grants.

“All of those initiatives are going to mean good things happening in our state,” he declared. That was two years ago.

A week ago on August 8, Oberstar introduced a program to repair the nation’s bridges. He issued a statement noting that 73,784 bridges in the country are rated “structurally deficient.”

Oberstar’s program would upgrade bridge inspection requirements and create a trust fund setting aside money for bridge repair. I don’t get the sense, however, that we will ever be able to set aside enough money to improve the condition of nearly 74,000 bridges.

Oberstar said addressing this issue will be the first order of business for his committee when Congress returns from its August recess. He will convene a hearing of the committee to look at the problem of structurally deficient bridges on Sept. 5.

It's early in the presidential campaign

2007-08-13T11:54:00.000-05:00

The Iowa Straw Poll on Saturday opened the lengthy process of selecting nominations for the U.S. Presidential election in 2008. Unlike the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, which are likely to stay in the control of Democrats after the 2008 elections, the White House is up for grabs. Although President Bush’s popularity is low, the Democrats do not have a lock on the election. It could go either way.

The campaign begins early because the primaries are front loaded. The Iowa Caucuses are on January 14, a week after the nation’s first primary, which takes place in the District of Columbia on January 8. On February 5, the first Tuesday of February, 24 states are holding primary elections. During the month of February, 33 states will host primaries, meaning that by the first of March, much of the drama will be over. The front-runners at that point typically get their party nominations.

Despite the media’s fascination with Barack Obama, I think you have to assume that the Democratic nomination is going to go to Hillary Clinton. She’s pragmatic; she is the most organized; she knows this drill better than anyone. And she knows how to raise money. When the Democrats emerge from their national convention in Denver, I expect the ticket to be Hillary Clinton, with Obama as her vice presidential running mate.

The ticket is not so easy to predict on the Republican side. I think it is very likely we could get through the entire primary season without a clear leader emerging. Going into the national convention in St. Paul eight weeks before the election, I doubt it will be clear who the Republican candidate for president is going to be. Romney and Giuliani have positives but they also have negatives which will be difficult to get over. I don’t expect McCain to still be in the race at that point.

So if you are responsible for selecting your party’s candidate for president, do you go with one of the leaders, just because they are the ones in the race? Do you go with one of them just because they have weathered the primaries? Do you go with a nominee who you understand has absolutely no chance of beating a Clinton/Obama ticket? No. You have to go for something else. You go with a long shot, a name from completely out of the blue. My guess is, the Republicans will nominate someone who is not even in the race at this time – and I don’t mean Fred Thompson. I mean someone no one is even talking about at this point.

Last March James Carville suggested Jeb Bush would be the nominee (see my April 19 post). I don’t see that happening, but I do have a guess: Tim Pawlenty, Minnesota’s second-term governor who didn’t raise taxes but still managed to balance a state budget that was billions of dollars in the red. The Republican convention is in his back yard in 2008, and Pawlenty is head of the National Governors Association this year, giving him national visibility.

The unknown in this guess is the impact of the collapsed I-35W bridge. Will the disaster get pegged on him? Will opponents say he refused to spend the money to fix the state’s roads and bridges, resulting in this incident? That wouldn’t be fare but, of course, some people will make that argument. The question is, will it stick? A poll conducted by local television station KSTP found that 75 percent of people approve of the Governor’s handling of the situation. It will be interesting to assess the public’s sentiment a year from now.

Awesome reminder

2007-08-03T08:37:00.000-05:00

Authorities have identified five people who died when the I-35W bridge collapsed in Minneapolis two days ago; eight people are missing. Although we know the number of deaths will increase as the recovery process continues, the numbers strike me as mercifully low. That’s no consolation to family members of the victims, but I cannot help but think the numbers could have been far higher given the substantial volume of traffic on that bridge, particularly at around 6 p.m. when the disaster occurred.

I don’t know that I have ever thought twice about driving my car across a bridge. But I guess it is a big deal. It takes a lot of work to build a road -- a bridge is exponentially more involved. I have always taken roads and bridges for granted. I shouldn’t.

Two days after the disaster, I am discerning a reminder about the nature of work, particularly the kind of work that might be considered routine. The integrity of a bridge is dependent upon frequent and thorough inspections and timely maintenance, not to mention sound design and construction in the first place. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people are involved. Each of them have small jobs, but if any one of them misses something, takes a short-cut, okays something that is marginal or delays repair that could be done today, it can make a difference. We saw that over the Mississippi on Tuesday.

Some jobs are so mundane that they seem unimportant. Some jobs seem disconnected from anything significant. Routine, in particular, can lull us into believing that work is really just a way to pass the time. But work is important. Most small jobs are part of something bigger. Every small part is important to the integrity of the whole, whether that is a bridge, a building, a school, a company, or something else.

Reflections on the moon landing

2007-07-21T08:22:00.000-05:00

When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut. The 1960s, when I was growing up, are remembered for a lot of things but I contend one of the decade’s greatest contributions to the world was the hope it offered through the magnificent achievement of the moon landing. I remember the Gemini and Apollo missions, particularly Apollo 11, the highlight of summer, 1969.

Thirty-eight years ago today, man was on the moon for the first time. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin descended onto the moon in their Lunar Module, which was named Eagle, on July 20. About seven hours after landing, they emerged to have a look around, plant an American flag, and collect rocks.

I remember watching the grainy, black and white images of the two men, bounding around on the moon’s surface, where gravity has only one-sixth the pull it has on earth. I was 8 years old at the time but my parents let me stay up to watch the historic event. As I recall, Armstrong climbed down the ladder on the leg of the Lunar Module at about 10:30 p.m. local time. They spent less than two hours walking on the moon. By the time they returned to their space craft and blasted off to rejoin their orbiting colleague Mike Collins, it was July 21.

Of course, I was too young to contemplate the sacrifice required to get those men to the moon – three astronauts died in an Apollo 7 fire in 1967. And I really had no comprehension of the political nature of the effort. We were trying to beat the Russians to the moon. We won, although the fact that we made it impressed me enough that I didn’t really care that we beat anyone there.

As I grew into my teen years and started riding roller coasters I quickly learned I wasn’t cut out to be an astronaut. If I couldn’t handle a ride at Valley Fair, I certainly couldn’t handle a ride in a space ship. So, for a while I thought I wanted to be one of those engineers at Mission Control…one of those guys with a slide rule on my belt. But it turned out I was better with words than numbers so today I am a writer, only thinking about space exploration, not participating in it.

I learned an interesting fact about Apollo 11 recently while reading volume 2 of Bill Bennett’s America, The Last Best Hope. Surveying American history, Bennett writes about the moon landing and includes the fact that Aldrin conducted a mini communion ceremony in the Lunar Module upon their landing. He brought wine and bread with him. He poured the wine into a cup and broke the bread. He asked for silence from Mission Control so he could pray.

I Googled Aldrin to learn more. Evidently, it is a true story but nothing was said about it at the time because NASA was all ready in trouble for allowing Apollo 8 Astronauts to pray aloud as they circled the moon on Christmas Eve in 1968. I remember that space flight too. In fact, my mother gave me a plaque that displays one of the prayers the astronauts said that evening. NASA was sued by atheists who protested government dollars funding any public display of religion.

Personally, I can’t think of anything more natural upon landing on a new world than celebrating communion. That’s exactly what Noah did after the flood when the ark finally settled on land. (Gen. 8:20)

The internet research I did identified Aldrin as Presbyterian. I don’t know the theology Presbyterians bring to communion, but we Catholics call the communion ceremony Eucharist, which means “thanksgiving.” Noah was grateful for the new world, and so was Aldrin. It is a pity the lawyers prevented the ceremony from being broadcast to the entire world. Many people were very grateful for this moon landing – and all the opportunity it represented, all the hope it offered. I know I was, even to this day.

Salvation and free will

2007-07-19T11:46:00.000-05:00

The July edition of Christianity Today magazine features an editorial that attempts to explain one of the central beliefs of Evangelical Christians. (The essay is posed below.)

Catholics and Evangelicals differ on the path to salvation – Catholics saying it is a matter of faith and works, and Evangelicals say it is a matter of faith alone. I have discussed this with Evangelical friends many times. The discussion typically devolves into an argument where the Evangelical accuses the Catholic of trying to earn his way to heaven and the Catholic saying Evangelicals believe they can do anything and still get to heaven since their actions have no bearing on their salvation.

I was happy to see Christianity Today acknowledge that their version of Christianity leaves open the question: Why be good? The editors of the magazine try to answer but they ignore the notion of free will, which – at least for me – leaves their argument wholly unconvincing.

As the magazine rightly points out, for Christians, good works do naturally flow out of love for God. But the Christian always has to make a decision about whether to do good or otherwise. He always has that choice. You may be able to argue that people who are strong in their faith do good without thinking about it, but they still have a choice. If they did not have a choice, they would not be living true love for God. Love always gives you a choice. You can always walk away from it. You can always choose to reject the one you love. If you don’t have that choice, it isn’t love.

Catholics are simply acknowledging that a person always makes a choice. If a person chooses to do good, he maintains a loving relationship with God. If he chooses to do otherwise, he damages his relationship with God. Catholics say if you love God, you will show it by choosing to do good. Evangelicals say if you love God, you will do good; Evangelicals leave out the discernment component of the process.

Evangelicals have a point in the sense that if there is no discernment about doing good then those good works are meaningless; they would be no different than a movement in my eyebrow due to a twitch. But our actions are not uncontrollable. Christian or not, we all make decisions about how we are going to act. That is unavoidable. The Catholic view of salvation acknowledges that reality. The Evangelical view seems to ignore it.

Catholics do not believe they can earn their way to heaven. If we did believe that, we would say that it only takes good works to get to heaven. But we don’t say that. We say it takes faith and works. Faith is meaningless if you don’t choose to live it out some way.

Free will makes us human, and images of God. To deny free will is dehumanizing. Animals, for example, don’t have free will. That’s why the Christianity Today essay does not help me. It seems to deny, or at least ignore, free will.

Virtue That Counts
Why justification by faith alone is still our defining doctrine.

A Christianity Today editorial

Evangelicals who visit Rome cannot help but enjoy the stately buildings and stirring sense of history. A few like it so much they never leave. Such is the case with Francis Beckwith, former president of the Evangelical Theological Society. In April, the Baylor University philosopher rejoined the Roman Catholic Church.

Such defections always provoke a little evangelical soul-searching, in this case about the classic doctrine of justification. Beckwith found the Protestant view, which assumes that sanctification follows justification, inadequate.

"As an evangelical, even when I talked about sanctification and wanted to practice it, it seemed as if I didn't have a good enough incentive to do so," Beckwith told Christianity Today. "Now [in Catholicism] there's a kind of theological framework, and it doesn't say my salvation depends on me, but it says my virtue counts for something."

Beckwith, in describing his confusion, has done us a favor, giving us an opportunity to explore a question that frankly many Christians ask: Why be good?

The Virtue of Christ
Justification by faith, which gives us assurance of our standing before God, is not just a pastoral doctrine. It goes to the very core of our theological tradition. Martin Luther described it as the "first and chief article" of Protestantism "on which the church stands or falls." It is no surprise then that recent affirmations of justification have attracted evangelicals as diverse as Tom Oden and R. C. Sproul, Pat Robertson and Ron Sider. Still, don't be surprised to see more debates about justification unfolding. Next month's cover story, by British scholar Simon Gathercole, will look at how some evangelical scholars are reinterpreting Paul's teaching on justification.

So what is the "first and chief article of Protestantism"? Scripturally, it goes like this: All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23). Alienated from God, hostile in mind, we practice evil behavior (Col. 1:21). Though we offend his perfect holiness, God acquits those who trust in him and in what he has done for us through Christ: "God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God" (2 Cor. 5:21).

Theologically, we understand it like this: In his perfect life and obedient death, Jesus succeeded where Adam failed and became the head of God's new family. We belong to Christ; we belong to this new humanity. Christ is judged righteous, and we who believe are made alive in him.

The late medieval church framed its understanding of God's grace in terms of merit: personal merit was never enough, and the infinite merits of Christ were available only through the sacramental channels of the church. Luther and the other Reformers used Paul to challenge the church monopoly on merit. They rightly taught that only Jesus' merit counted before God and that only through faith could his merit be ours. God credits Jesus' righteousness to those who trust in him, declaring them just and acquitting them of their sins.

Such a radical idea has caused many to think: This is too good to be true. Surely I must contribute something to the process. But we contribute nothing. We don't even contribute faith. With God's gift of faith, we paradoxically deny the meritorious nature of human action and affirm the work of Another. It is not faith in faith, but faith in Christ.

Thus, Protestants from John Calvin to John Wesley have agreed: We have peace with God by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Flaunted Freedom
Another question that has troubled Christians since the days of Paul is this: "Why bother to be good when it seems to make no difference to our salvation?"

Paul has little patience for such an attitude, partly because it displays a fundamental misunderstanding of what happens in justification. It is not only about getting rid of personal guilt; it is also about taking on a new corporate identity. "We died to sin," Paul says. "How can we live in it any longer?" (Rom. 6:2). We have been baptized into Christ's death; shouldn't we live with him in resurrection life? As members of his new humanity, shouldn't we live like it? Paul's conclusion: "Therefore do not let sin reign in your mortal body" (Rom. 6:12).

Simply put, those who are truly justified will lead lives of holiness, knowing with Paul that "we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do" (Eph. 2:10).

Sadly, many in our churches have sold the extraordinary gift of justification for the pottage of therapeutic religion. Rather than finding assurance in Christ, some assure themselves they have done nothing so bad as to deserve condemnation.

Even worse, others flaunt their freedom, abusing the truth that Jesus covers a multitude of sins. As Paul said of people who accused him of teaching that we should sin to bring more grace: "Their condemnation is deserved" (Rom. 3:8).

Such attitudes do not exemplify trust in the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who treats holiness with deathly seriousness. They turn the old notions of merit on their heads, treating a priceless gift—Jesus' righteousness—as if it had no value.

The Bible says this type of faith—faith without good works—is as good as no faith at all. It's as dead and meaningless as the selling of indulgences.

So, Professor Beckwith, virtue does count for Protestants—it signals our understanding that Christ's virtue counts for everything, and that any good the Holy Spirit enables us to do is but a grateful response to God's gift of justification.

When the church gets that, it gets our "first and chief" message, a message that still turns people's worlds upside down.

A miracle shared at camp

2007-07-16T09:16:00.000-05:00

My family and I have just returned from a wonderful, long weekend in central Minnesota where we participate in a family camp organized by a friend at our Church. It is our third year at the camp, which is idyllic with a spring-fed lake, pine trees, and other magnificent natural accoutrements.

The get-away concludes with Mass in the log-cabin lodge at mid-day on Sunday. Perhaps one of the greatest blessings to come out of this experience over the past three summers is the opportunity to meet Father Mark Stang, who celebrated Mass last year and yesterday for us. Miracles do happen in this world and Fr. Stang is living proof. A year ago, he shared with us the miraculous story of how he became a priest.

Born in 1958, Mark Stang grew up one of 10 kids on a dairy farm near St. Nicholas, Minn. He grew up expecting to become a farmer but in his mid-20s he felt a nagging tug to the priesthood. He ignored it for a long time, telling himself that he wasn’t much of a student and probably couldn’t get through seminary. But, in fact, he enrolled in seminary and he advanced in his studies.

All the while, however, he couldn’t convince himself that God was really calling him to be a priest. He said he experienced long periods of “dry” pray. He thought about dropping out of seminary all together. He had been studying in Maryland when he decided to call it quits. He had his bags packed, ready to come home. But before going, he took in Saturday morning Mass. As he received communion, his knees buckled and he collapsed. After stumbling back to his pew, he saw a vision of himself as a priest celebrating Mass. He prayed for hours after Mass and ultimately interpreted the experience as confirmation that God wanted him to be a priest. He went back to his room, unpacked, and began to study in earnest.

After completing two and a half years of study, however, he was diagnosed with cancer. Even after undergoing chemotherapy, new tumors developed and doctors gave him a year to live, at the very most. He was close to completing his seminary studies; instead of devoting his time to an experimental treatment that may have prolonged his life, he worked toward ordination. He received permission from his bishop to be ordained early. If he was going to die soon, he wanted to die as a priest.

On August 25, 1990, he was ordained. He celebrated his first Mass on August 26 at his home parish. On August 27, he celebrated a private Mass with is family before leaving for the Mayo Clinic to recommence his treatment. But miraculously, when he showed up at the clinic, the doctors could no longer find any tumors. They examined him and could find no trace of cancer. It had completely disappeared. The doctors had absolutely no way of explaining it.

Next month, Father Stang will commemorate 17 years of the priesthood. I have heard him preach twice, and he clearly is burning with love for the Lord. Father shared this personal story with us last year, and I am so glad he did. I am inspired by miracles, which I know happen all the time. But it isn’t often that I get to hear a detailed, first-hand account of something so dramatic.

Invitation

2007-07-09T17:24:00.000-05:00

A lot of Catholics and non-Catholics alike have trouble understanding the Church’s teaching on marriage that prohibits the use of contraceptives. Patty Schneier was one of those people for 13 years. She and her husband, Larry, were doing just fine, thank you, and really didn’t need the Church to comment on the most intimate aspect of their marriage.

“I felt that the Church should just butt out,” Schneier said told an audience (that included me) last summer. “This is between me and my husband and God. And there’s no way some celibate old guy in Rome is going to tell me what I can and can’t do in my marriage.”

Schneier’s presentation was about how her attitude evolved on the question of contraception to the point where she now completely embraces the Church’s teaching. The resident of St. Louis will be in town on July 17 speaking at 8 p.m. in the John Roach Auditorium at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you struggle with the Catholic Church’s teaching on marriage and natural family planning, I encourage you to attend this free program. Schneier is an engaging story teller who uses her beautiful singing voice to communicate a touching conversion story.

If you have debt, check out Prosper.com

2007-07-06T16:22:00.000-05:00

I am intrigued by Prosper.com, the web site for borrowers and citizen lenders. Check it out at www.Prosper.com if you not familiar with it. I am writing about it, only because I think it is interesting; I have no vested interest in it.

If you are paying 18 percent or more on a substantial credit card balance, you need to look into this. The service offers a reasonable way to refinance that debt at a much more manageable interest rate.

Or if you are an entrepreneur looking for access to unsecured credit, this may be your answer. Loans up to $25,000 are available.

I think Prosper is an ingenious concept. Potential borrowers post their story on the web site, usually with a photo. They say how much money they need and what they are willing to pay for it. Potential lenders review the various borrowers and select the ones they want to fund.

Borrowers are required to sign up for an affinity group, which creates social pressure for the borrower to repay their loan on time. If the borrow defaults, others in that group have a much more difficult time obtaining additional credit through Prosper. (Grameen Bank in India has perfected this concept with micro lending to thousands of borrowers who, reportedly, rarely pay late.) Lenders on Prosper are encouraged to fund small portions of several loans in order to distribute their risk. Technically, Prosper makes the loans and sells participations to the lenders.

If you have money to invest, you might consider funding some loans. The interest rate is better than anything you will get at the bank, and you get the satisfaction of knowing you are directly helping someone. When you put your money in a mutual fund, you never get much of a sense for what that money is actually doing. Investors are so far removed from the borrower, that is, the people who are actually using that capital. The connection between investor and borrow is much more direct with Prosper.

I like entrepreneurship and this is one of the most entrepreneurial web services I have seen. The site itself is brilliant and it is helping entrepreneurs looking for investment opportunities as well as entrepreneurs looking to finance debt.

Six unstoppable trends

2007-07-04T07:38:00.000-05:00

I had the privilege of listening to Dr. Barry Asmus address a business group in Alexandria, Minnesota a couple of weeks ago. Asmus is a senior economist at the National Center for Policy Analysis. He is a patriotic, free-market advocate who is not afraid to mix his rhetoric with references to God. In his speech at the Arrowwood Resort on Lake Darling, Asmus described six, what he called “unstoppable,” trends in our culture and economy.

Demographics is the first trend. The United States has a population of 75 million people between the ages of 40 and 65 years old. These are people at the peak of their productive years and their consumptive years. Our country is unique in this regard around the world. In most other developed places, the population is shrinking, including places like Western Europe, which is suffering a population implosion Asmus likened to the black plague of the 14th century. Japan and Russia also are not replacing their populations.

Stable prices is the second trend. Inflation has not been a factor for 25 years, Asmus said. While some commodities, such as gasoline, have seen price volatility, for the most part, prices for goods across the board have been predictable, rising at only a modest rate. The impact of technology has actually been to drive prices down on many of the most popular consumer goods. With competition increasing from places around the world, access to low-priced goods is greater than ever. More people in the United States have access to products such as tv sets and other electronics, house wares and quality sporting goods, nice clothes and small power tools than ever before.

Asmus acknowledged three inflationary blips in the last two and a half decades – Oct. 1987 when the stock market crashed, a mild recession in 1991, and a post-9/11 recession in 2001/2002 – but the country bounced back quickly in each case.

Taxes is the third trend. Asmus noted little economic growth in our country between 1930 and 1980, when marginal tax rates were as high as 70 percent. He noted that President Kennedy lowered taxes slightly to provide a little relief, but it wasn’t until President Reagan lowered taxes that the country’s economic environment began to improve. Reagan reduced the marginal tax rate to 50 percent, then to 28 percent. The result was unprecedented business expansion. “Even the fairest and lowest tax causes less work effort,” Asmus summarized. Reagan was the first president in decades who seemed to understand that. Since then, the first President Bush increased the marginal tax rate to 33 percent and President Clinton increased it to 39.5 percent. The current President Bush has lowered it back to 35 percent and he lowered the capital gains tax to 15 percent. For the previous 40 years it had averaged 27 percent.

Governments in many other countries understand the impact of taxes. Eleven of the 15 former communist Eastern European countries, Asmus said, have adopted a 15 percent flat tax. Ireland has made the most dramatic progress on taxes, going from the highest taxed country in Europe to the lowest with a dramatic positive impact on its economy. Ireland lowered its corporate tax to 15 percent from 35 percent. (Thomas Friedman writes about the Irish renaissance in his book, The World is Flat.)

“When you reward economic activity, you get more of it,” Asmus said. “When you penalize it, you get less of it.”

Productivity is the fourth trend. From 1900 to 1995, productivity in the United States grew about 1.5 percent per year, but since 1995, productivity has been growing at a rate of about 3 percent per year. “We have doubled the productivity of the American labor force,” he said.

In 1990, there was a real question about which country would be the productivity growth leader of the world: Japan, Germany or the United States? Since then, Japan’s productivity is remained exactly flat, Germany’s productivity has declined, and productivity in the United States has doubled. In 1990, the U.S. gross domestic product was $6 trillion; in 2007 it is expected to come in at $13 trillion. The gross world product this year is expected to be about $37 trillion; a third of that is coming from the United States, even though we have less than 5 percent of the world’s population here.

Entrepreneurship is the fifth trend Asmus discussed. As he has traveled around the world, Asmus said he has seen places where kids at age 18 or 20 are smarter than typical American kids, but by age 30, the typical American kid is better off than that person in the other country. Why? Asmus attributed the difference to entrepreneurship. In many other countries, the bureaucratic barriers to economic prosperity are simply insurmountable.

Asmus said it is almost as if Americans have entrepreneurship in their genes, because they excel in a way that people in other countries do not. Asmus cited the example of his own father who was a dirt-poor farmer most of the first half of his life. He left the farm, moved to town and got involved with a nursing home. Eventually he bought it. Then he bought another one, and by the end of his life, he owned and operated more than 50 nursing homes. Asmus shared many other success stories, including that of an ambitious taxi driver in Pittsburgh who offered such good service that he typically got $20 tips, and he shared the story of a day care provider who figured how to offer parents other services like dry cleaning pick-up/delivery and meal preparation. The ancillary services turned the child care business into a thriving, comprehensive service for “busy parents.”

Globalization is the final trend he discussed. The United States, with no tariffs between states, is a model of free trade that the rest of the world is emulating, Asmus said. A quarter of a century ago, he said, 17 countries around the world could be considered to engage in and promote free trade. Today the number is 80 countries. Free trade is bringing economic prosperity to more places on the globe than ever in history.

Asmus clearly sees a bright future for the United States and the entire world, barring any jihadist action that could bring it all to a halt. Asmus noted that as the world closed the 20th century, most of the world’s population was poor. “Three billion people had never used a telephone and half the world’s population makes less than $2 per day,” Asmus said. As we move into the 21st century, the prospects for worldwide prosperity are greater than ever, he said. He called property rights, rule of law, capitalism, markets, free trade, and stable price levels the ingredients in the recipe for prosperity.

Freedom, government and God

2007-07-02T09:31:00.000-05:00

The nation commemorates its independence on the 4th of July, but it was on the 2nd of July that the Continental Congress adopted a resolution severing ties with Great Britain. Today, 231 years later, we still are living the great experiment known as democracy. Can a government, for the people, by the people and of the people, succeed? It remains an open question.

Certainly the answer is yes, if we remain sane. If we expect our government to solve all our problems, however, then we will fail. Many of us have ideas about what our government should do; it would be interesting to compare our expectations with those of the founding fathers.

So much political discourse today is about expanding government, giving it a bigger role in our culture. I don’t get the sense the founding fathers were interested in more government or bigger government. They just wanted more direct governance. They wanted the government to be close to the people, not across an ocean. You had to be very independent to come to America at all, so those early Americans weren’t looking for government to do more for them; they just wanted a government that would let them solve their own problems, pursue their own happiness.

Whenever I think about expanding government, I cannot ignore the words of God as recorded in the 8th chapter of 1 Samuel. The Israelites had been ruled by a loose confederation of judges since the time of Moses but as decades passed, they evolved to want something more formal, something bigger. They wanted a king. Samuel didn’t like the idea but God told him He would give them the king they wanted. But here is what God says about what it will mean to have a king (starting in the middle of verse 11):

He will take your sons and assign them to his chariots and horses, and they will run before his chariots… He will set them to do his plowing and his harvesting, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will use your daughters as ointment-makers, as cooks, and as bakers. He will take the best of your fields, vineyards, and olive groves, and give them to his officials. He will tithe your crops and your vineyards, and give the revenue to his eunuchs and his slaves. He will take your male and female servants, as well as your best oxen and your asses, and use them to do his work. He will tithe your flocks and you yourselves will become his slaves. When this takes place you will complain against the king whom you have chosen, but on that day the Lord will not answer you.

Although this warning was specifically directed at a monarchy, I think it is applicable to any government that we expect to save us, as the Israelites expected a king to save them. And the more we coronate our president, the more we resemble those Israelites, and the more this warning seems to apply to today. Certainly our government does take our sons and daughters for its military, and it tithes our property to fund its own agencies. And certainly people complain about our president as much or more than ever.

The main responsibility of a good government is to promote justice. People can make their own success in a just society. The founding fathers sought justice, which was self-governance. It was unjust for a government in Great Britain to rule a people across the ocean, to tax them without giving them a voice in the governing process. Today, a good government protects human life, property, and freedom, and enforces laws that support contracts.

A government cannot guarantee everyone’s happiness. It cannot supply everyone with food, shelter and clothing. People have to supply those things by their own hard work. The government cannot guarantee everyone’s health, education and welfare. Oh, we want government to raise our kids for us, to keep us healthy, to guarantee us a good-paying job, to guarantee us a house, to guarantee us a college education, not to mention elementary and high school education, and as of late, we want it to pay for our drugs. We want it to take care of our aging parents, protect us from all discernable risk, and provide wireless internet access anywhere and everywhere. We want, want, want and the government is trying and, of course, it cannot meet our expectations. So we complain, complain, complain.

We have a lot more laws today than we had in 1776. The additional laws, the bigger government don’t guarantee any greater level of freedom. The more unrealistic we are about our expectations for government, the more disappointed we will be. Freedom, of course, comes from God, not from government. While we can be grateful for good government, we cannot take our independence for granted. The less we trust in God and the more we put our faith in government, the more we put our freedom in jeopardy.

The Greening of America

2007-06-01T17:13:00.000-05:00

Environmentalism has grown into one of the most powerful cultural forces of our time and there are a lot of companies that are jumping on the “green” bandwagon. Along comes Dr. Jay H. Lehr, science director for the Heartland Institute; he calls it all a crock. The 71-year-old tri-athlete spoke to nearly 200 business leaders in Bloomington, Minn., on May 8.

“Global warming is the biggest scam ever perpetrated on society,” he declared. The sun, he said, controls the earth’s climate, not humans. He explained it like this: Human cultures produce CO2, but the carbon dioxide makes up just 4 percent of all greenhouse gases. Ninety percent of greenhouse gases, he said, are water vapor (“which we have no control over”). Two percent of greenhouse gas, he said, is methane from plants and animals, and the remaining 2 percent is nitrous oxide and sulfur dioxide.

He acknowledged that the human population has increased the CO2 output by about one-third, but since that chemical makes up only 4 percent of the universe of greenhouse gases, its impact is inconsequential. He acknowledged that the climate is changing, but he denied that humans have much to do with it. Computer models, he said, predict an increase in the average surface temperature of 1.5 to 3.5 degrees in the next 100 years.

Many people are leveraging the global warming cause for their own interests, he said, referring to competing nations which would like to see the United States suffer with higher energy costs, or environmental groups which use climate change hyperbole to fundraise.

With so many people concerned about the environment, Lehr said large companies are “going green” in order to drive out smaller competitors that cannot afford to change to more environmentally friendly operations. He cited Wal-Mart as an example, saying the company had adopted environmentalism in order to repair its reputation on wages and labor practices. Twenty-two of Wal-Mart’s California stores, he said, are erecting solar panels which will supply a third of the stores’ energy. The State of California offers large tax incentives for such investments. “The California taxpayer is now going to pay for part of the Wal-Mart electric bill,” Lehr observed.

Whether there are greenhouse gases involved or not, practical use of resources seems like a good thing to me. I don’t know whether the planet needs saving, or whether we can do anything about it, but I do know you can save a little money by turning the lights out when there’s no one in the room. That’s incentive enough for me. One way or the other, call it “green.”

Reading the economic tea leaves

2007-05-17T15:49:00.000-05:00

The Federal Open Markets Committee held the Federal Funds interest rate at 5.25 percent last week. My sense is the economy is slowing down lately, but the Fed continues to issue statements that indicate it is still worried about inflation. Here is what it said after its May 9 meeting:

Economic growth slowed in the first part of this year and the adjustment in the housing sector is ongoing. Nevertheless, the economy seems likely to expand at a moderate pace over coming quarters.

Core inflation remains somewhat elevated. Although inflation pressures seem likely to moderate over time, the high level of resource utilization has the potential to sustain those pressures.

In these circumstances, the Committee's predominant policy concern remains the risk that inflation will fail to moderate as expected. Future policy adjustments will depend on the evolution of the outlook for both inflation and economic growth, as implied by incoming information.

There are people who get paid a lot of money to try to figure out what the Fed means every time it issues a statement like that. One of my favorite Fed watchers is an economist at Louisiana State University named Ed Seifried. I met him two summers ago when I sat in on some economics lectures at the Stonier Graduate School of Banking at Georgetown University.

Seifried was in Lincoln, Nebraska on May 4 to address a business meeting that I participated in. Seifried told the group we have about a one-in-three chance of sinking into recession.

Seifried detailed research that describes the relationship between the yield curve and the probability of recession. He said that the greater the spread between the 10-year bond and the 90-day Treasury bill, the less chance of recession. The likelihood of recession grows, he said, as the spread narrows. The odds of recession grow tremendously when the spread goes negative. With a current negative spread of 25 basis points on May 4, Seifried said, we have a 33 percent chance of entering recession. (Since then, the spread has narrowed to a negative 5 basis point.)

“This is one of the longest inversions I have ever seen,” Seifreid said. “It is rare to have the yield curve inverted for so many months.”

Seifried explained that an annual trade deficit, currently running at about $700 billion per year, is putting a lot of dollars in the hands of foreigners. The flood of American dollars keeps long-term bond rates low. Seifried said that as the American appetite for foreign-made products remains strong, the trade deficit will remain high and bond sellers will have no need to raise interest rates. He said he does not expect long-term bond rates to increase much for a long time.

Short-term rates, he said, will decline. He cited the Taylor Rule, a mathematical equation developed by a Stanford economist in the early 1990s that accurately tracks decision making at the Federal Reserve. Throughout the Greenspan years, the Taylor Rule tracked the Fed Funds rate almost exactly. Seifreid said if you plug the numbers into the formula today, you come out with an interest rate of 5.00 percent, which is 0.25 percent lower than the current Fed Funds rate. He said, therefore, he expected the rate to drop.

“Where do I think rates will be this time next year,” Seifreid asked. “I think interest rates will be as low as 4.00 percent…Short term rates are going to have to come down. The Fed Funds rate will be 4.00 percent within the next 18 to 24 months.”

A look at charitable giving

2007-04-23T09:22:00.000-05:00

Arthur Brooks, a professor at Syracuse University, was in Minneapolis last week to deliver a luncheon presentation on his recently published book, “Who Really Cares; America’s Charity Divide.” I had read the relatively short book earlier and was delighted to get a chance to hear the author explain his research into charitable giving trends.

I can’t think about charitable giving for very long without coming up with a lot of questions of my own. Who should I give to? How much should I give? Is it better to give more to fewer charities or less to more charities? Should I give to hopeless causes, like Sam Brownback’s presidential campaign? Should I give to umbrella organizations like the United Way or the Archbishop’s Annual Appeal, even if some of the recipient organizations under those appeals offend me? Do I need to tithe? If so, do I figure my giving total according to my gross income or my after-tax income?

Brooks doesn’t go after any of these questions. He looks at who gives and aligns that data with political affiliation. His conclusion: conservatives give more money to charity than liberals. It is an interesting conclusion given the stereotype that conservatives are cold-hearted individualists while liberals are bleeding heart do-gooders.

I would have thought that the most obvious difference between those who give to charity and those who do not, is income. I assumed that low income people give infrequently and high income people give often. Turns out income has very little to do with it. Ideology is a much better predictor of whether a person gives to charity. It turns out a low income conservative is more likely to donate to charity than a high income liberal.

Brooks said there is a segment of the liberal population that believes charity is bad; people in this group don’t give anything at all. Their thinking is that the more people give to charity, the more they are letting the government off the hook for the things it should be doing. These folks want to see broad taxation, with the money used to raise the standard of living for everyone in the country to a comfortable level. This is a prevailing idea Europe.

Brooks posed this statement: “The government should do more to assure income equality in this country.” He said that the more people agreed with this statement, the less likely they were to give to charity. The more people disagreed with this statement, the more likely they were to give to charity. As I thought about it, I realized that his findings are consisted with my own experience.

I have been in discussions with liberals about a particular social problem. We will all agree that it is a problem. These kinds of discussions generally lead me to think that I need to pull out my checkbook and donate some money to help out. Or I end up thinking I need to organize a group of neighbors and undertake a solution to the problem. My liberal friends, on the other hand, always think the government needs to do something. They usually conclude (before trying) that the challenge is too great for ordinary people to tackle on their own.

A few years ago in my neighborhood, a lot of people displayed a yard sign that says “Happy to pay for a better Minnesota.” It is a sign in support of tax increases. A debate over the appropriate level of taxation is always healthy, but I do think it is worth clarifying that taxation and charitable giving are completely different. People give to charity on a voluntary basis. People pay their taxes under the threat of incarceration. If homeless people need shelter, is it better for that shelter to be provided by tax dollars or by charitable dollars? That’s an interesting debate.

By speaking and writing this book, Brooks really wants to get a public policy discussion going about the role of charity in a society. He thinks, for example, that the tax benefits of charitably giving should be made available to people who don’t itemize. This is a valid social trade-off, Brooks said, because people who regularly donate are more engaged in their communities, are more informed, and tend to take leadership roles in neighborhood activities. This kind of social engagement, he said, is what strengthens societies, so charitable giving should be encouraged, he argues.

Does being conservative make a person more charitable? Brooks says no. He said it is really a matter of religious conviction. People who are involved in their church tend to be the most charitable, and those people are more likely to be conservative. The biggest givers, he said, typically, had the example of parents who gave regulatory, attended a house of worship, and got into the habit of giving at an early age.

Presidential predictions

2007-04-19T13:36:00.000-05:00

The 2008 presidential election is about a year and a half away; will John McCain still be in the hunt a year from now? James Carville, a genius when it comes to campaigns, doesn’t think so. I was at a business meeting last month in Hawaii where Carville and his wife, Mary Matalin, shared political observations and Carville predicted McCain would drop out of the race before the Iowa Caucuses.

“When I look at him, he just looks like a guy who doesn’t have his heart in it. And it is a long haul,” Carville told us. “He strikes me as someone who is playing a role he is not comfortable in. He is 72, which is not too old, but he does not look as young as he did in 2000. It’s a long way to go, and I don’t see him making the cut.”

Carville said he expects either Newt Gingrich or Al Gore to get into the race. He said it is possible both of them will enter the race. He also said he suspects there will be a third party candidate who will get more than 5 percent of the vote.

Then he made a prediction that seems like a long shot to me: Jeb Bush will be the Republican nominee. “Why? Because the Republicans love order, and they are not going to get any of it. There is going to be disorder the likes of which you have never seen,” Carville said. “The only name I can think of that if he got in the race that would kind of quell everybody down would be Bush. I don’t think the Republican nominee is in the field” right now, he said.

He went out on a limb even further and predicted Mike Huckabee would be the Republican nominee for vice president.

Among the Democrats, he said it is all about “Obama and Mama.” Carville observed that “Mama needs more spice and Obama needs more seasoning.” He said “any good Cajun knows there is a difference between spice and seasoning.”

Carville said if Hillary Clinton can deliver her message with a little more passion, she will get the nomination; but if her message remains flat and Barack Obama improves his campaigning, Carville said the nominee will be Obama.

He predicted the vice presidential nominee for the Democrats will be Catherine Sebelius, the governor of Kansas.

Matalin explained that each party is looking for the candidate who can win the most swing states. “The question is, ‘which Red guy can pick up more Blue states, and which Blue guy can pick up more Red states?’,” she summarized. “Right now, Rudy Giuliani moves more Blue states than Hilary moves Red states. He puts more states in play.”

Although many observers think the election is in the bag for the Democrats, Matalin urged caution. “You cannot listen to conventional wisdom today,” she said. “Conventional wisdom today cannot predict the tomorrow.”

She said the notion that the Democrats will win in 2008 is based on a “very specious premise, which is the outcome of the 2006 elections. You would only predict the Democrats will win in 2008 if you thought they won in 2006,” she said. “They did not win. The Republicans lost. There is a difference.”

Another snow day

2007-03-03T07:24:00.000-06:00

They say March is the snowiest month of the year in Minnesota, and that is proving to be true in 2007. We had more than a foot of snow on March 1. Our kids were off from school Thursday and Friday as everyone shoveled out. Just about every school in the area was closed Friday, even the inner city schools, most of which hadn’t taken a day off because of whether since Gov. Arne Carlson closed all the schools in the state one very cold day in 1994.

It took me a long time to shovel the sidewalks and driveway on Friday, although I lucked out when a good neighbor offered to use his 12-cylinder snow blower to clear off my driveway. Moving snow is a big deal. I am told that earlier in the week, on the first wave of the snow storm, United Hospitals in St. Paul treated five people who suffered heart attacks while shoveling.

I get mixed impressions whenever I first look out the window in the morning after a night’s heavy snow. The snow covers many of the things I am used to seeking, like some bushes in the back yard and a bench near the garage. It is a little bit disorienting. Years ago, there was a picture in the newspaper of a guy standing in the middle of a bunch of new fallen snow. The caption under the photo had the guy exclaiming: “I can’t find my garage!” Well, it wasn’t that bad yesterday, but we certainly got a lot of snow.

Years ago, I used to start my car and let it run while I finished up my shoveling. It takes a good 10 minutes for my car to warm up to the point where a human being can sit in it on these cold days. But do you know that that is illegal now in Minneapolis? Yes, our beloved city has passed an ordinance making it illegal to idle your car if you are not in it. So now, if your car is stolen while it was idling, the first thing a Minneapolis police officer is going to do when you report the crime is give you a ticket. In an email the city sent out to residents, the police warn that if your car is stolen while you are in violation of city ordinance you may not be able to collect your insurance.

A few years ago, my office was within walking distance of our house – about a mile. At that time, I came up with an idea that I still think has merit. You know how those early morning TV news programs show a map of the highway system with blinking lights that indicate traffic levels? Well, wouldn't it be great if there was something similar on the internet for sidewalks? Rather than indicating traffic levels, the web site could provide real-time information about which sidewalks were shoveled. The same way those TV-road maps help a commuter determine the best way to work, the sidewalk map could help walkers choose their best route. The shoveled walks could be represented by a thick green line and the un-shoveled sidewalks could be represented by a red light. Perhaps there could be another color to indicate shoveled walks that remain icy.

I could look at the map, and if I saw that four houses on 45th Street had not yet shoveled, I would walk down Beard Avenue another block before turning along 46th Street. The neighbors could all pitch in to make such a system work. After I finish shoveling my own walk in the morning, I could put a call into the person maintaining the web site, or I could just send them an email. It might even be fun to bring up the web site and watch as the sidewalk in front of my house officially changes from red to green.

Furthermore, if we noticed a shoveled sidewalk still represented by a red line on the web site, we could call that in to set the record straight. I suspect people calling in to report the condition of other peoples’ sidewalks would be key to the service’s success. The people in my neighborhood are already pretty good at keeping an eye on their neighbors’ property. Last summer, there were some neighborhood volunteers who actually went around counting all the trees in everyone’s yard. It would be much easier to keep track of whether someone has shoveled the sidewalk in front of their house than to keep track of whether someone has planted a new conifer in their back yard.

Spring starts in two and a half weeks, although I am not sure that means much. In high school, I played on the tennis team and I can remember matches in April being snowed out. Either way, I love the fullness of the four seasons which we get in this part of the country. Every season comes with its own stories.

A real snow day

2007-02-25T11:20:00.000-06:00

We had a foot of snow last night. In some places it drifted and the snow is two feet or more deep. It is the first real snow we have had this winter. Of course, the weather professionals had been predicting a snow storm, so everyone was ready. I am sure that if you took an inventory of everyone’s pantry this weekend, you would find them typically stocked with soups and noodles and a varity of ready-to-heat meals.

In our house, we don’t pay too much attention to the weatherman. When I was in college I took an introduction to meteorology course. The professor told us that if every day you simply predicted that the weather tomorrow will be the same as it is today, you would be right 60 percent of the time. The professor further told us that with all of our technology and scientific knowledge, weather forecasting is correct about 80 percent of the time. In other words, all that Doppler radar and other stuff only improves our weather forecasting by about 20 percent.

Nonetheless, as people talked about the on-coming storm all week, there was a sense of surprise about it all. We have had a relatively mild winter so far and I think most of us really expected to get through the season without any substantial snow shoveling. Perhaps most of us have secretly embraced the near-term benefits of global warming. But, of course, we shouldn’t be surprised about a snow storm. This is the last week of February in Minnesota. If it doesn’t snow here, then it probably isn’t going to snow anywhere. The state high school tournaments are getting underway. That’s a sure signal that the real snowy season in Minnesota has begun. The records apparently indicated that March, in fact, is the snowiest month of the year.

I drove to church this morning and the street out in front of my house was a mess. I don’t really expect it to be plowed until Tuesday or Wednesday. I think it is amazing that it takes three days to plow all the city’s streets. It’s not like snow plowing should be a rare occurrence around here. It snows every winter. I am told the big Canadian cities get their streets plowed in a day.

As I was driving around this morning, you could feel the testosterone in the air. There were men in parkas everywhere maneuvering snow blowers over the sidewalks and driveways. Any Minnesota man takes great pride in his snow blower. The bigger the better. A man really feels like something when he can shoot a steady stream of frozen snow 15 feet in the air. I especially like the snow blowers with headlights. I once saw a snow blower that had a protective plastic casing for the operator to stand in; this machine had three headlights and chains on the wheels!

You always know when a man is feeling good about his snow blower because he gladly plows more sidewalk that his own. He keeps walking right down the sidewalk, clearing a path in front of two or three neighbor’s houses on each side of his own. The price of gas, which seems so outrageous when filling your car’s gas tank, doesn’t seem so important when it comes to keeping the snow blower operating.

People help each other out in the aftermath of a snowstorm. A car gets stuck in a drift of snow and its common for a whole crew of guys to get behind the trunk of that car and help the driver get back on his or her way. Maybe these are situations where we truly are left to our own devices. You can’t call the police or an ambulance when you get stuck in the snow. You have to rely on your neighbor. And around here anyway, the neighbors almost always seem to be there.

Then there’s me. I don’t have a working snow blower. I own an electric snow blower but the small plastic key required to make it work has been lost. I know I can write the manufacturer and get another one, but with the snow being so mild this winter I haven’t gotten around to it. So I am left to dig my way out of this snowfall with a shovel. I have one of those ergonomically designed shovels with a bend in the handle. It is supposed to be easier on the back.

I laugh as I look around me and see all my neighbors plowing with their noisy, gasoline-powered snow blowers. In a neighborhood that has a reputation as home to more environmentalists per square mile than any neighborhood east of Oregon, I am the last person who would call himself an environmentalist. And yet I’m the guy using the shovel.

Real learning requires you to weigh experience against media reports

2007-02-22T14:25:00.000-06:00

I am a big fan of learning by doing. I do not have a business degree but I feel like I do since I have twenty-plus years of small business experience. For me, it has been very effective to learn by doing; I get a lot more out of making my own mistakes than I do by reading about someone else’s mistakes.

But not everything can be learned directly by doing; most of the time, we have to accept the authority of an expert. One of my fears about our culture is that too many people look to television and newspapers for expertise. This is a mistake. Media has its place, but it is not as an authoritative teacher.

Media is big business; major newspaper publishers and network news professionals have to weigh numerous competing commercial interests whenever they make a decision about what to publish or broadcast. Most news stories are meant to appeal to our emotions, not our intellect. News programs and newspapers are first and foremost sales vehicles, and sales is primarily an emotional game. Any sales professional knows you sell on benefits (emotional appeal), not features (intellectual appeal).

The important thing to remember about anything we learn from television or newspapers is that it is only a start; it is not the final word. And oftentimes, it is only a start of baby steps. Knowledge comes about through intellectual pursuit, which requires commitment and takes time. It is more akin to getting in shape through diet and exercise than it is to fueling up with a self-service stop at the gas station.

People are the source of news so the best way to learn is to actually visit with people. Actually talking to someone is better than reading something from someone who talked to someone.

Real knowledge, of course, is knowing what’s in someone’s heart, not what’s in the newspaper. I know a lot of people who are up on the news but don’t have a clue about who their neighbor is. Too many people are happy to read the newspaper or plop down in front of the television set, but lack the initiative to engage their neighbor. I think that is really too bad – for both the learner and the neighbor.

Realistically, most of us are forced to rely on secondary sources for much information. The value of that secondary information, however, is proportional to our first-hand information. If I spend my entire day in my house, never interacting with anyone, then the news I get on TV and in the newspaper or over the radio is far less meaningful because I have no self-determined context for the information. All I have is someone else’s context, and the context of that editor or reporter or producer may not in any way reflect my own life and circumstances. However, if I am out in the world most of the day, interacting with people, observing first-hand how people behave on the bus and in the department store and in the restaurant or in church, then I have some context for absorbing stories I get from broadcast and print media.

Economists, for example, frequently make pronouncements about the condition of the country. They cite employment figures and inflation and production levels and many other factors; newspapers regularly publish these analysis. But how often do we read this stuff and scratch our heads because it just doesn’t seem to fit our own experience? They talk about full employment, but the guy in Michigan is puzzled because he hasn’t worked in a year. Or they talk about high rates of inflation and the guy trying to sell his house wonders why he can’t get any more for it than what he paid a decade ago.

Economists often use statistics gathered from across the nation. They get numbers from everywhere so that they, in fact, represent nowhere. Aggregates and averages make for easy reporting but they do not necessarily represent what is happening in your home town. So if all you did was read the Wall Street Journal and you failed to pay attention to local market conditions -- like the price of milk at the corner store, the length of time a neighbor has been out of work, and whether anyone on the block is remodeling their kitchen -- you might have a totally inaccurate idea of what’s going on.

For many years I did not have a television set so I hardly ever saw television news. When I would mentioned this to someone, they would ask: “How do you know what’s going on?” I would answer: “I live my life.”

To this day, I continue to think that is the best way to learn. Live your life. Intellectual strength is more about interacting with others than it is about absorbing facts. It is easy to learn what is in the newspaper but it takes a little more effort to learn what is in someone’s heart, even your own.

Gov. Pawlenty on education

2007-02-09T11:48:00.000-06:00

I had the opportunity to listen to Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty on Wednesday address a business group in St. Paul. Throughout his governorship, Pawlenty has expressed concern about the state’s education system. Pawlenty notes that many kids are not being properly prepared to succeed in the emerging globally marketplace. Here is was he said on Feb. 7 about education:

Just one generation ago, if you missed the educational rung or skill rung, there was still a large safety net. There was the large safety net of manual labor jobs that offered higher pay and better benefits than many of them are offering today. A lot of those jobs are gone now. They have migrated to different places.

It is more important than ever that we have as many children as possible with an education or skill that is relevant to the economy of the future, and yet we have an education system that we designed in the 1940s. We have an iPod world now. We don’t have a one-size-fits-all world. With the exception of some special needs and gifted kids, our schools work kind of like an assembly line. And that is not the world we live in anymore.

When you hear the education debate, almost all the discussion is about how much money is going in. That is one important measure. I will concede they need to get some more money in; they are getting more money in. We are proposing about an 8 percent increase for the schools in this next budget cycle for K-12; it’s well into double digits for higher education.

But in addition to how much money is going in, we are focusing on trying to get some reforms that also measure the results we are getting. Does the money align to the result? Is the money aligned to the things that are actually changing student performance? This, believe it or not, is a novel concept in government. I know it is not in business. In business you say: What is my business? Who are my customers? What measurements do we have to determine whether we are getting the results that we want? And, is the money aligned to those results?

We are just starting that, 20 years late in government. With carrots, not sticks, we are saying: Join us in a different kind of system where we pay you not just for how many years you have been around, but on whether you are getting training that is actually relevant to what you are doing in the class room. Are you willing to mentor a younger teacher who is new? Are you willing to put some time into that? If you are, we will give you some extra pay. And can you move the needle with your class, not compared to some fancy school district, but from your school district? Can you move the needle on student performance, and if you can, we’ll give you some more money for that. That’s the kind of thinking we need in our schools. And we are constructively, gently, moving that way, and it’s big cultural change.

In high school, we have some really gifted and talented kids who are doing great even by international standards. We have some children who need special accommodation.

But we have a lot of “in-betweener” students who are coasting. The academic progress of these in-betweeners has flat-lined. It is flat as a pancake. We are spending a ton of money on two or three years of high school for an experience that, for too many of our kids, is adding next to no academic progress. So we have got to get more of our kids into more rigorous programs, something that is more interesting, something they are passionate about. More AP classes, more IB classes, more post-secondary enrollment classes, more technical college, while they are in school.

We need to re-orient the high school experience. Not physically, but virtually to something very different from what it is now. Bill Gates says the American high school is obsolete… that we are preparing kids for the economy and citizenship of 40 years ago. He said preparing kids for the economy of today and tomorrow in today’s high school is like using a 50-year-old mainframe. So there is dramatic change that needs to come. There’s huge institutional and cultural resistance, but we are trying to do it constructively, but it is a very, very important reform.

Reflections on the passing of two big political figures

2007-01-04T09:29:00.000-06:00

Last month, two big-name political figures died -- Gerald Ford and Jeane Kirkpatrick. I met Steve Ford, Gerald Ford’s son, in October of 2004, and I had a chance to meet Kirkpatrick in 1990.

Ford was in Minneapolis to speak to a business group. I remember speaking to Steve about the fact that his father was adopted, something that was interesting to me as the father of adopted children. Gerald Ford was born in 1913 as Leslie King, Jr., son of a man who physically abused his mother. In the middle of the night, Dorothy Gardner King snuck away from their Omaha home with their only son to escape back to her parents in Illinois. A divorce was filed and the shame of the situation was so great that she had to move out of the area and begin her life anew. She moved to Grand Rapids, Mich., where she met a man named Gerald Ford. He married her and adopted the son, renaming him after himself.

Steve said that the older Gerald Ford “invested in my father’s life.” He praised the senior Ford, saying: “This man was not a blood relative, but he is a man who chose to invest in my father’s life, giving him the character and integrity so that he would be able to handle the presidency in a very unique time in American history. He never lived long enough to see Dad become president. It is love, not blood, which makes a difference in a kid’s life.”

In addition to being the 38th president of the United States, and a long-time Congressman, Gerald Ford was an All-American football player for the University of Michigan in 1934. Even as a college student, Gerald Ford showed great character. Steve Ford explained that the team went undefeated during the 1932 and 1933 seasons. In 1934, Michigan was scheduled to play Georgia Tech University, which was an all-white school at the time. Georgia Tech told the University of Michigan that it would refuse to play against the Wolverines because the team had one black player. The player was Willis Ward, who happened to be Gerald Ford’s roommate. Ford, a senior that year, was so upset by the racism of the Georgia Tech team that Ford said he would not play the 1934 season if Ward sat out the Georgia Tech game. Ward, however, agreed on his own, to sit out the Georgia Tech game and urged Ford to stay on the team. Ford returned to the team, although the Wolverines lost every game that season except the one against Georgia Tech.

Gerald Ford, may he rest in peace.

Kirkpatrick was the first woman to represent the United States before the United Nations. She was a member of President Reagan’s Cabinet and the National Security Council in the 1980s.

I was the communications director for the Minnesota Bankers Association in 1990 and was involved in planning the association’s annual convention in June of that year. Jim Hearon was MBA president in 1989-90 and advocated inviting Kirkpatrick to speak at the convention, which was conducted in Bloomington. So we invited her, and she accepted.

Hearon, who was president of National City Bank in downtown Minneapolis, was intrigued by Kirkpatrick’s philosophical evolution. Early in her career, she was a liberal Democrat, but over time she evolved into a tough-minded conservative. Seated together at a convention luncheon, I remember Hearon asking Kirkpatrick if she would consider a run for president.

During her convention speech, Kirkpatrick spoke about Mikhail Gorbachev and the United States’ relationship with Russia. The comments were particularly timely, as Gorbachev and his charismatic wife Raisa, had visited Minneapolis the day before.

Jeane Kirkpatrick, may she rest in peace.

Memo to lawmakers: Focus on the big stuff

2006-12-23T15:12:00.000-06:00

Christmas is the day after tomorrow and I know the state’s Democrats who recently took control of the Minnesota legislature are feeling in a holiday mood. One of the very first initiatives they identified for the session which will open next month is gift cards. They want to outlaw those pesky fees and expiration dates that accompany some of the cards. I say they are wasting their time; they really should focus on much more important issues.

True enough, gift cards are big business. In 2006, U.S. consumers will purchase $72.8 billion in gift cards. In my view, that is an argument to leave the gift card industry alone; lots of cards are being sold and used with the laws just as they are. It doesn’t seem any change is needed. But some legislators say they want to help us consumers.

However, this is not something we need any help with. Let’s face it, we give gift cards when we really don’t care what we are giving. It’s a default product we can always give to that someone we don’t know very well and really don’t expect to get to know any better. Certainly if we cared, we’d take the time to get them something unique. That’s the reality from the giver’s side of it.

Now consider the recipient’s side of it. It’s a gift. We may not have been expecting anything in the first place. We are lucky to get anything at all. What does it say about the value I place on the gift card I received if I let it sit in a drawer for a year without using it? Clearly I don’t value it all that much, and so if the merchant starts deducting fees from the card after of year, I don’t really care. Either way, I am ahead.

But lawmakers have a solution so they need to identify a problem. And the Democrats in Minnesota are not alone. Twenty-five states already have beefed up laws related to gift cards in recent years. In Connecticut, Montana and Rhode Island, it is actually illegal to offer a gift card with a fee or an expiration date.

Legislators abuse their authority when they exercise it to interfere with pricing negotiations between buyers and sellers. In most cases where the stakes are small, the market weeds out the bad players as consumers naturally migrate to the best offers. I can see where a case can be made for lawmakers to get involved in major purchases, such as a home or car, or situations where consumers are in a particularly vulnerable situation, like when they are paying for a funeral. But lawmakers don’t need to get involved in the purchase of a $50 gift card.

Bans on fees and/or expiration dates will ultimately reduce the availability of gift cards. Oh sure, the big guys like Wal-Mart and Target will continue to offer gift cards – as they do now – without fees or expiration dates. But the specialty stores and family-owned one-of-a-kind shops are less likely to offer them. At a smaller shop, the time value of money actually means something. If these merchants are not afforded the opportunity to recoup their costs for keeping a gift account open for years, then they may just decide not to offer them at all.

There’s not a legislator in Minnesota who was elected to “do something about gift cards.” Our elected officials should focus on the big things – doing something about the rising cost of health care, improving our transportation networks and bringing our schools into the 21st century. These are the issues to which lawmakers should be directing all their energies. Once the session opens next month, I hope they don’t waste any energy on something as trivial as gift cards.

It’s a Wonderful Life & Christmas – stories in humility

2006-12-11T09:31:00.000-06:00

It’s two weeks before Christmas so that means It’s a Wonderful Life will be on television soon. In fact, I see NBC is scheduled to broadcast it this Saturday night (Dec.16).

This is one of my favorite films. It is a beautifully-written story presented through the genius of director Frank Capra and first-rate acting from James Stewart, Donna Reed and Lionel Berrymore.

The movie gives us a story that particularly speaks to people like me – American men in mid-life. This is when we wonder if we have made any difference in the world. This is when the burdens of family life can get heavy. This is when we might feel like we are stuck in a rut.

If only we could all have a Clarence -- an angel who could show us what life would be like had we never been born. Most of us are too preoccupied or lack the imagination to do this on our own.

George Bailey saw that the world would be worse off had he never been born. He was on the right track all along. What tremendous affirmation!

George’s life was like the lives of so many men in their 40s and 50s. It is not a glamorous life. There isn’t a lot of money in it. It’s a life where you live with mundane things like a smaller home, an older car, close-to-home vacations, and movies at home instead of nights out at the theater. There’s always the former classmate who went on to become a millionaire or adventurer or big-time politician. They don’t really make us feel any better.

So many of us have big dreams when we are young. I wanted to get rich in international business, traveling between offices in London, Los Angeles and Tokyo. George Bailey wanted something similar. He wanted to build skyscrapers. He ended up helping people build two-bedroom homes in his hometown. I wanted to run a big newspaper; I ended up in niche publications seen by very few people.

It is not easy to transition from youth, when dreams are big and glamorous, to mid-life when reality is important but usual. For some men, it leads to a mid-life crisis. George’s crisis was precipitated by the threat of the loss of his business. Sometimes it takes a crisis to see things clearly. George saw what he really had and how important it really is. With the love of a spouse and a good prayer life, a man can often weather a mid-life crisis, emerging happier than ever.

It’s a Wonderful Life reminds me of another very good movie: Mr. Holland’s Opus, the 1995 film staring Richard Dreyfuss as a high school music teacher. Like George, Glenn Holland has big dreams when he is young. But, commitments to marriage and family tie him to his hometown where the work is mundane if not important. Holland, like Bailey, does what he is supposed to do; he doesn’t get rich in the process. He watches others go off to the big city to make their fortunes. At the end of Mr. Holland’s Opus, Holland sees what his decades of teaching has meant a lot of kids who come back to honor him. They are not giving him money, as the friends give Bailey in his crisis, but they affirm the importance of his life’s work.

I suppose all men need affirmation. We want to believe what we are doing is important. These two movies are fantasies where two men get that affirmation. In real life, there may or may not be affirmation; and if there is, it probably won’t be very dramatic. We have to believe in what we are doing, not worry about the success that everyone else seems to be getting, put our lives in the hands of God. It’s a Wonderful Life, after all, is a Christmas movie. It is Jesus Christ who brings meaning to anything we do on this earth.

If you ever wonder about the value of what you are doing, if you ever grumble about the difficulty of living the role of faithful husband and father, I think Christmas is especially for you. The Nativity affirms the unsung. The Nativity is the most humble – the least glamorous – of stories, yet it has the greatest meaning. A baby is born in a barn, among sheep and goats. If our lives are devoted to humble things life spouse and kids, and unglamorous activities, like office work and parish activities, then maybe we are in good company. If the world missed the significance of the birth of Christ, then should we be surprised that it continues to miss the importance of family and typical work?

Christmas is a great time of year and I appreciate the stories that have been created over the years to explain the meaning of the season. It’s a Wonderful Life is one of those stories.

The Nativity: See the movie

2006-12-05T21:21:00.000-06:00

We opened the season of Advent in my family by going to the movie theater to see The Nativity. I hope you get to see it before the Christmas season is over.

We all know what happens, but to see the events compiled into a movie gives one a sense for how fantastic the story really is. The virgin Mary becomes pregnant; Joseph, a righteous man, stays with her instead of having her stoned; three kings from Persia cross a desert in order to be there when Jesus is born in a cave; and an insane Herod responds by killing all the babies in Bethlehem to protect his throne.

Our culture has become so accustomed to associating Christmas with candy canes, snow, cards, lights and gift-giving that we forget the real events that took place some two thousand years ago. I am glad for the reminder this movie provides.

As a father, I was particularly struck by the character of Joseph. He is portrayed as a young man, seeking an honorable wife. His anguish is palpable when he lays eyes upon Mary when she returns from her visit to cousin Elizabeth. Mary is visibly pregnant. What scandal this brings! Joseph struggles as he searches for a dignified response. He cannot believe what has happened, nor can her parents. The matter is hardly settled when Mary tells everyone that an angel informed her she would become pregnant by the Holy Spirit and bear the Son of God. Of course, Joseph sticks with Mary, but this causes whispering among everyone they know.

The film also does a chilling job of depicting the brutality of Herod and his Roman soldiers. It must have been a horrifying time to live, especially if one was not a Roman citizen. Near the end of the film, Herod sends his soldiers to Bethlehem to kill ever male child under the age of two. Joseph senses the danger and immediately whisks Mary and baby Jesus away. The film closes with them reaching Egypt.

Joseph is doing what all husbands and fathers are called to do: protect their family. I have to ask myself, would I be decisive enough to take my wife and child out of harm’s way, even if it meant leaving everything we knew on short notice? If the culture should close in on me and my family, seeking to destroy my innocent children, as Herod’s soldiers did, would I act boldly enough? Would I seek to take them to a safe place?

I think we fathers face exactly that challenge today. Soldiers are not seeking my children, but marketers who wish to destroy them with materialism are. The popular culture is after my children and seeks to destroy them with deceptive messages about self-centered living, rebellion, and pleasure-seeking. I do have to protect my children. I do have to keep evil forces away from them.

The Nativity is a very good movie to see any time of year because the message is so timeless. It is a message of incredible faith, good triumphing over evil, and tremendous hope. Those are the things God gave to the world when He sent His only Son to become a man two millennia ago. Those are the things we have today because Jesus Christ is still with us.

What’s the meaning of taking an oath?

2006-12-02T08:42:00.000-06:00

My congressman-elect, Keith Ellison, is in the news because he says that when he is sworn into office on January 4, he will place his hand on a Qur’an. Ellison is the first Muslim elected to the U.S. House of Representatives.

Ellison’s decision is causing a lot of debate. Many people are saying elected U.S. officials should only take an oath swearing upon the Bible. My local newspaper immediately came to Ellison’s defense and called detractors “wingnuts.” It is nice to see such a sophisticated debate underway.

In fact, no book is used during the official swearing in process, but because an actual oath is sworn, this is an important discussion. If nothing else, it gives us an opportunity to think about the importance of taking an oath. What does it mean and why do people take an oath?

If I give you my word, I am staking my name and reputation on the fact that I will do what I promise. In most cases, this is good enough. If I give my neighbor my word that I will return the shovel I borrowed, my neighbor generally accepts that. If I break my word and don’t promptly return the shovel, the consequences are minimal. My neighbor has to go a little longer without a valuable tool; I reduce the chances that others will lend me anything in the future. These are minor stakes.

But in cases where the stakes are much greater, we ask for something more than a person’s word. For example, in court, when a witness is presenting testimony, we don’t just ask “are you telling the truth?” We make them swear an oath that they are telling the truth. We make them take an oath because the consequences of the things being considered are substantial. While we might be inclined to believe an individual based on their reputation, that’s not enough. So, society makes the person on the stand call God as their witness that they will tell the truth. This gives the public important assurance. We know the consequences of lying under oath -- damnation. The public can know that either the person is telling the truth, or if not, that person will face a much more serious consequence on Judgment Day. In those cases, we pitty the person who fails to respect his oath.

At the school my children attend, the teachers all take an oath of fidelity to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church on the first day of classes every year. Sure, the teachers all say they will teach the faith, but if they take such an oath they are saying that “with God as their witness” they will teach the faith. This oath gives us parents a much higher degree of comfort about what our kids will be taught in the school.

So the important thing about an oath is that it is for the people who are being served by the person promising the service. In other words, the oath isn’t so much for the witness or the teacher or the congressman, but for society, for the parents and for us constituents. An oath gives us assurance beyond the person’s word that they will try to live up to their obligations.

That’s what I find so unsettling in the Ellison debate. Everyone is acting like the oath is for him. It's not. It’s for me. It’s for us. We citizens have every right to expect that our elected representatives will back up their promise to serve with a meaningful oath. Ellison has been elected to serve us, so he should be willing to take an oath that means something to us. Like the vast majority of people in Ellison’s congressional district, I honor a Judeo-Christian God. If Ellison wants the oath to mean anything to most of his constituents, then he should swear by the God most of his constituents honor.

A little fun

2006-11-25T06:16:00.000-06:00

Here is a puzzle you can use, guaranteed to dazzle your friends -– just in time for the Holidays!

Ask someone to think of their birthday and tell them that by using math you will guess it correctly! Here’s how it works:

1) Have them think of the month number for their birthday, where January equals 1, February, 2, and so on.

2) Have them multiply the number by 5.

3) Then add 6.

4) Then multiply that total by four.

5) Then add 9.

6) Then multiply this total by 5.

7) Finally, have them add to that total the day they were born on. (If they were born on the 16th for example, they would add 16.)

Ask the person to give you the total. In your head (you have to be good at math too!), subtract 165 and you will have the month and day they were born on. (418, for example, would be April 18.) Works every time!

(I picked this up some time ago from another blog, although I can't remember where. If the originator leaves a comment, I would be happy to give appropriate credit!)

Catholic education book raises thoughtful points

2006-11-24T11:57:00.000-06:00

As the father of three children in Catholic school, I was intrigued by the publication of Steve Kellmeyer’s latest book, “Designed to Fail; Catholic Education in America” (Bridegroom Press, 2005). Although I am fortunate to have the opportunity to send our children to a very sound local school, I know most parents who want their children to receive a good Catholic education do not have that opportunity. Such parents typically spend a lot of money on parochial school tuition but receive only marginally Christian, largely secularist teaching for their children.

Kellmeyer’s book goes a long way toward describing why that is. He lays out the history of the parochial school system in the United States. It is, unfortunately, largely a reaction to the public school system. So rather than getting a truly Catholic education, most Catholic schools simply offer the same fare as the public schools, with a religion class added to the curriculum.

Kellmeyer makes a lot of interesting points. He says that the institutional school model was started in Prussia, largely to turn independent-minded farmers into soldiers who would take orders. Most of the rest of the world copied that model in order to fuel the industrial revolution. First in England and then in the United States, industrialists promoted a school system that would produce docile employees who would show up to work on schedule and do what their bosses tell them.

He also notes that the Catholic Bishops made a huge mistake turning to religious orders to provide teachers. Bishops have little control over most orders yet nuns from these orders were given free reign to teach what they wanted in the schools. Sometimes that was Catholic, but a lot of times it wasn’t. As many of the religious orders fell away from the teachings of the Magisterium, they began to fall apart themselves. Bishops could no longer rely on inexpensive teaching labor from committed religious who saw their role as vocational; the Bishops turned to professionals who needed a living wage, further mirroring the secular model. This move has hopelessly raised the cost of Catholic education to the point today where most Catholic schools are a drain on parish resources while still carrying tuitions that many parents find difficult to pay.

Perhaps most serious, however, is the charge Kellmeyer makes about the way bishops inserted themselves between parents and children as the child’s rightful teacher. Catholic teaching always clearly has stated that parents are the first educators of their children. Kellmeyer asserts that the American bishops somehow forgot that teaching and took such responsibility away from the parents. Most Catholic parents would say they are delegating certain teaching authority to the teachers at the Catholic school, not turning over the responsibility entirely. Nonetheless, Kellmeyer’s charge has got me to thinking about the seriousness of my role as the primary educator for my children.

While Kellmeyer raises several interesting points, the book has shortcomings. The main problem is he never really proposes a solution. The closest thing he offers is that parishes should close their schools and use that money instead to fund weekly seminars for adults conducted by professional speakers. It isn’t a very practical suggestion and it lacks credibility given Kellmeyer’s own status as a professional speaker.

I also think Kellmeyer is unduly hard on the American bishops, and I think he has romanticized the agrarian era in this country. He claims that pre-industrial America was a time when people learned to read on their own and everyone learned a profession by apprenticeship. This strikes me as exaggeration; I don’t think he fairly considers the numerous hardships that went along with rural living pre-20th Century.

People who are seriously interested in Catholic education will find this book worthwhile, but I think casual readers will find it tedious and hopeless. Nonetheless, I would encourage people to work through the book’s 221 pages and think about the major points Kellmeyer raises.

Gratitude has never been more important

2006-11-22T09:18:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow is Thanksgiving Day, and there has never been a country that needs a day devoted to gratitude more than the 21st Century United States of America. Gratitude is the virtue which can save us from drowning in excessive want.

Even though Americans have more stuff than any other people on the planet, we want more than most other people. From a young age, Americans are taught to want -– to want what we don’t have and to want more of what we already have. The Madison Avenue advertising professionals get at children through commercials during those Saturday morning cartoons. Advertisements in magazines and elsewhere are very influential on teens. I heard one economist say recently that the average American teenager spends $480 per month!

These kids and teens, of course, grow into adults who want more than anyone. They want bigger cars, fancier houses, better clothes, tastier food, more exotic travel -– you name it, we want it! Never mind that no one really needs any of this stuff, nor can most of us afford it. Debt levels are at record highs, yet people keep buying and buying and buying. Reason has been replaced by materialism and practicality has been replaced by consumerism. Sometimes I think we are in the process of spending ourselves straight to hell.

This is why Thanksgiving Day is so important. This is a day we say "thank you" to God for what we have. We have set aside one day a year to think about what we have instead of what we want. And most of us have plenty. Even the poorest Americans live better than most people who have ever walked the face of the earth. Typical Americans live richly blessed lives. Many of us are lucky enough to have family and friends, a home and a job, a college education, good food and simple entertainment. These are tremendous blessings.

I am convinced that the more one focuses on what they have, the less they are likely to focus on what they want. The more a person thanks God for the blessings of life, the less likely a person is to gripe about what he doesn’t have. When you take some time to think about all that you have, the idea of wanting a faster car or a bigger TV set really seems pretty silly. When you think about what a tremendous blessing your spouse and kids are, you realize that it doesn’t really matter whether you have a new set of golf clubs or the latest computer gadget.

Someone once said it is better to want what you have than to want what you don’t have. I think that is the definition of gratitude -– want what you have. Be grateful for your blessings.

Gratitude is a virtue which can be cultivated in every human heart. Gratitude does not necessarily come naturally; you have to work at it. Begin by saying "thank you" at every opportunity. Then take a little time everyday to think about all the blessings in your life. Think about all that you have. Look around you and realize that all that stuff is only there by the grace of God. We can start to do this on Thanksgiving Day. If we do this everyday, we can break out of this country’s seemingly endless, materialist, downward spiral.

Adoption in a consumer culture

2006-11-18T10:30:00.000-06:00

Should I be surprised that in this ultra-consumer culture a person can now actually buy a baby? That’s right, a baby.

There’s a clinic in San Antonio, Texas, called the Abraham Center of Life, which has started the first human embryo bank. Reportedly for $10,000, infertile couples can purchase a pair of donor-created embryos. They are shipped to the couple’s primary medical clinic for implantation. Both are implanted with the idea that only one will ultimately survive. The center boasts a success rate of about 70 percent.

The center screens donors, both men and women; it claims to accept only people with “clean medical backgrounds.” The center requires male donors to be college educated. The center apparently even grades the embryos according to some measure it has created for “quality.”

Should I be surprised that in this culture, one can purchase an embryo in pretty much the same fashion that one would purchase an automobile? Cohabitation long ago turned marriage into a consumer experience. We’ve all heard the argument: “You’d test drive a car before buying it, why wouldn’t you test out a spouse before getting married?” So I guess it should not come as a surprise that the natural fruits of marriage –- children -– should be reduced to little more than a commodity as well.

Infertility is an emotional roller coaster; my wife and I have struggled with it for years. The culture advocates a medical resolution; we can, after all, create life in a Petri dish. During the last several years, the approach typically has been to use sperm and ova from the couple. Initiate conception in the laboratory and then implant for the gestation of pregnancy. If one of those initial components is inadequate, a donor can be tapped. The Abraham Center is the first clinic in the United States that I know of to use donor sources for both components of the conception.

These medical approaches do produce children, but I really think they represent dabbling in places where man does not belong. The question about creating life in the laboratory has never really been can we do it? but should we do it? I am so grateful to the Catholic Church for its clear direction on this question. The Church teaches that a marital relationship brings husband and wife together -– physically -– for the equal purposes of loving one another and for having children. Official Church documents use the terms “procreative” and “unitive.”

When we were first considering our options for addressing our infertility, we listened to doctors explain the medical options. Most of those options violated the unitive component of marriage. In other words, they offered procreation without the actually physical union of the husband and wife. Although we wanted the experience of conceiving a child, we didn’t want to be our own church. We did not want to make up our own theology. We wanted to live the faith, given to us by Jesus Christ, through His worldwide Church. So we got off the medical path fairly early in our marital journey.

And it was the best thing we ever did. We didn’t know anything about adoption at the time, but we studied and learned. Ultimately, over a period of seven years, we adopted four children. We have beautiful children and we thank God for the vocation of parenthood that He has given us. Sometimes I have referred to adoption as our “plan B,” but of course it isn’t my plans that matter. Maybe for us, this was God’s “plan A.”

November is National Adoption Awareness Month. Today, November 18, is National Adoption Day. Tomorrow, November 19, will be the fourth anniversary of the date our youngest child was presented to us in an orphanage in South America. Adoption has been a magnificent blessing to our family. I pray for couples who are struggling with infertility. I hope more will consider adoption; the need is great. The rewards are even greater.

Election thoughts

2006-11-08T17:38:00.000-06:00

Tim Pawlenty’s re-election to governor renews my faith in Minnesotans. Generally, when an incumbent runs, we Minnesotan’s re-elect the person unless they have been found guilty of some major malfeasance.

Pawlenty has generally done a good job. When he took office nearly four years ago, the budget was $4.5 billion in the red and he managed to get us back in the black. I have many liberal friends who hate Pawlenty; they say he slashed budgets without regard for the people who rely on state funds. Those criticisms, of course, would have been leveled against any Republican incumbent; they certainly are not reserved for Pawlenty.

Governing is a tricky endeavor, requiring the careful weighing of several interests. No matter what you do, there are going to be groups of people who hate you. I have had the opportunity to be in several meetings with Gov. Pawlenty and I have gotten the impression he considers all sides; he is cordial and level-headed.

That demeanor is in stark contrast to Mike Hatch, who ran against him and lost. Hatch has coveted the governorship since the late 1980s when he was the state’s commissioner of commerce. I have had the opportunity to personally see Hatch in action and I have never been impressed. I saw him lose his temper at one meeting; he shouted at the group and walked out of the room. I am glad we did not elect this blatant opportunist.

Pawlenty, in fact, has been a pleasant break from a string of hot-head governors. Rudy Perpich, Arnie Carlson, and Jesse Ventura were all emotionally volatile and apt to lash out at reporters and colleagues with seemingly no provocation. Hatch would have brought that behavior back to the spot light had he been elected.

I found the election results for Minnesota’s Fifth Congressional district to be interesting. Keith Ellison won with about 135,000 votes, which is about 85,000 fewer than Marty Sabo got when he won two years ago. Granted, that was a presidential election year when the turnout is usually greater, but even if you go back to 2002, Sabo won with 171,000 votes. Ellison challengers Alan Fine and Tammy Lee each got about 50,000 votes. Even if you throw in the votes that went to the Green Party candidate, the challengers don’t combine enough votes to come in ahead of Ellison. It proves what local newspaper columnist James Lileks said of Minnesota’s Fifth: “The Democrats could put up a canned ham and it would win.”

Andrew Favorite, a buddy of mine, ran against Ellison in the primary for the Democratic Party endorsement in September. Andy finished well back in the pack; I don’t think many people took his candidacy seriously. But I applaud him. Andy is one of these guys who just got fed up with all the non-sense going on in Washington and decided to exercise his civic rights and run for office. Getting elected, of course, takes more than conviction. If Andy runs again for anything and takes the time to build a serious campaign, I’d vote for him again. (In Minnesota, Republicans can vote in the Democratic primary, and vice versa.)

Two other lesser-known candidates caught my eye this election cycle. Erik Thompson is from a small town in western Minnesota called Milan. He was a candidate in the Fifth District for the Congressional seat but mid-summer switched to being a candidate in the Seventh District, which includes his hometown. He is a peace activist who was running on a platform solely centered on the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. He lost in the Democratic primary in September to Collin Peterson, who won re-election yesterday. Thompson and I would be polar opposites on the philosophical spectrum, but I admire his conviction.

The other interesting candidate was Ben Powers of the Constitution Party who ran for U.S. Senate against Democrat Amy Klobuchar, who won, and Republican Mark Kennedy. Powers is brutally honest with his ultra-conservative views, but again, I am impressed by someone who speaks his mind no matter what others might think.

I was shocked by the news out of our neighboring state to the south. U.S. Rep. Jim Leach lost to Dave Loebsack. Leach was in his 15th term and is probably one of the smartest people in Congress. (He is the guy behind the internet gambling bill I wrote about in September.) Leach apparently got caught up in the title wave that washed several Republicans out of office this election. That is somewhat ironic given that Leach was one of the few Republicans to vote against the Bush Administration’s plan to go to war in Iraq in 2002.

Of course, I was disappointed the voters of South Dakota struck down the state’s anti-abortion law. But I have to believe that perhaps the timing for such a law just wasn’t right. If pro-life advocates have any hope of ever seeing Roe vs. Wade over-turned, we are going to need at least one more new Supreme Court justice. If the South Dakota law had stood and gone to the current court, it probably would have been struck down. I will continue to grieve every child lost to abortion.

Now that the mid-term election is passed, the 2008 presidential election begins. There will be special attention on Minnesota as that election unfolds with the Republican National Convention set for Saint Paul in 2008. Republican Norm Coleman, Minnesota’s other U.S. Senator, is likely to find himself in a race against Al Franken, who really hasn’t been very funny since his Saturday Night Live days. In fact, I'm not even sure he was funny then.

Thoughts a day before the election

2006-11-06T15:20:00.000-06:00

I care about the elections and, like all good citizens, I plan to vote tomorrow, but my expectations about the possibilities for government are low. My liberal friends expect government to fix a lot of problems that it simply is not equipped to fix.

Many people believe government officials lead our culture, but the truth is our culture leads our government. Elected officials are among the most reactionary people on earth. Once the culture is moving in a particular direction, expect our elected officials to reflect that direction.

Whenever I contemplate the tension between those who want limited government and those who want expansive government, I think of chapter 8 from First Samuel in the Old Testament. This is the chapter where the Israelites ask Samuel for a king. Up until that point, the Israelites had been ruled by a network of Judges, but now they want a king. Samuel doesn’t like the idea, but God tells him to give them what they want. So Samuel says they can have a king but warns them about the demands that a king will make on them:

“He will take your male and female servants, as well as your best oxen, and use them to do his work. He will tithe your flocks and you yourselves will become his slaves. When this takes place, you yourselves will complain about the king you have chosen…”

We don’t call our elected officials “kings,” (although former Gov. Jesse Ventura thought he was king of Minnesota), but I think Samuel’s warning is valid today. Government has a great price. We end up working a long time to pay for an ever-expanding government sector. And every election cycle, we complain about those we chose in the last election.

I believe in democracy; it’s the best form of government anyone has come up with. But my point is, government has its limits. It can handle some responsibilities, like fixing roads and maintaining fire departments, but it is unrealistic to ask too much of government, like arranging for universal health care and guaranteeing everyone a good job. There are a lot of things that we have to resolve on our own -– starting in our own homes, with our own families. That is the basis of our culture. And culture will always be many steps ahead of government.

Let’s redraw the map to get better campaigns, better elected officials

2006-10-31T14:13:00.000-06:00

Every year about this time, the approaching elections make me face an uncomfortable fact: I am philosophically out of synch with my neighbors. I live in an overwhelmingly Democrat area where Republican candidates for office have virtually no chance of winning. My votes are completely meaningless for state legislative offices and for the Fifth District Congressional seat. In the context of the state as a whole, my vote is meaningful, thankfully, in the race for Governor and U.S. Senator.

The race for Congress in my area pits Keith Ellison, a Democrat, against Alan Fine, the Republican. Ellison is a state legislator from north Minneapolis. Although the Star Tribune called Ellison a “flawed candidate,” he will win easily. History suggests that Fine will get about 25 to 30 percent of the vote with the remainder going to Ellison, whose views are the exact opposite of mine on most major issues.

Because the result is so predictable, we don’t get much of a campaign. And what campaigning does take place is largely ignored by the media. I would like to live in a place where there is a real race for Congress. Where door-knocking matters. Where candidates really have to articulate their views on a wide range of issues. Where we could all feel as if the winner worked for the victory. But, not in Minnesota’s Fifth.

The Fifth District is the smallest congressional district in the state in terms of geography, consisting mostly of Minneapolis and some first-ring suburbs. Minnesota’s eight congressional districts are distinct along definitions related to population density. The Fifth and the Fourth (mostly St. Paul) are inner-city urban; the Third is suburban; the Second and Sixth are exurban; and the First, Seventh and Eighth are decidedly rural. Generally speaking, people with a liberal philosophy tend to live in urban areas and people with conservative philosophies tend to live in more rural areas. I guess I am an anomaly.

The Sixth District seems to be the only congressional district in Minnesota where the election outcome is not a foregone conclusion. People in that district seem to be pretty evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, and therefore you get competitive campaigns there. Two women are fighting it out for that seat: Democrat Patty Wetterling against Republican Michele Bachmann. At this point, the race is too close to call, although the Star Tribune gives Wetterling the edge.

I wish they would come up with a new map of congressional districts for the state. I think it is a mistake to lump a vast majority of people of one philosophy into a single district so the outcome of these elections is so predictable. I think it would be good if all the districts included people from the urban core, from the suburbs and exurbs, and from rural areas. Rather than pitting residents of these geographic subdivisions against one another, I think you could get a lot more cooperation on national policy if House members had to represent some people from all these groups. It is too easy to think of “rural” districts and “urban” districts and pigeon-whole the thinking of the Congressmen who represent them. I would prefer that our representatives be forced to consider the needs and interest of people living in all these settings.

So if I could redraw the Minnesota map into eight congressional districts, it would look like the rays of the sun, with all eight districts converging in the center of the Twin Cities. It would consist of eight wedges, expanding out from the center cities all the way to the borders of the state. Since the urban core is located in the east part of the state, the wedges on the east would be short and wide, and as the map spans to the west, the wedges would become narrower and longer. Each of the districts could then include people who live in the urban core, people who live in the suburbs and exurbs, and people who live in the country.

I think this kind of mapping would result in more competitive races, where candidates would really have to campaign and really have to let voters know where they stand. I could get excited about participating in an election like that.

Dr. Sohn sees soft landing in 2007

2006-10-25T11:55:00.000-05:00

I got to know Dr. Sung Won Sohn when he worked at Norwest Bank in Minneapolis. He is a former White House advisor and associate of Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve Board chairman. Sohn worked at Norwest for many years, through its transition to Wells Fargo Bank, but left in January 2005 to become president at CEO of Hanmi Bank in Los Angeles.

I got a chance to visit with Sohn last week, when we were both in Phoenix for an industry meeting. I was intrigued to hear his optimistic comments about the economy. While the media bombards us with stories about the slowing housing market, Sohn isn’t so worried about it.

“We do not have a housing bubble,” he said. “That is a rapid increase in prices followed by a rapid decrease, and that has not happened.”

Sohn said the best way to predict the housing market is to assess the economy. “If people think the economy is going to go well, housing prices increase,” he said. “If they think it is going to do poorly, housing prices decline.” As mortgage rates decline, however, he noted that home sales generally begin to pick up, which encourages sellers to increase prices. “If short term rates fall, the yield curve will flatten. Housing will get a second wind,” Sohn said. “Despite all the bad predictions, housing is not going as bad as people thought.”

Sohn said there isn’t much discussion about increasing the federal funds rate much more, even in light of an increase in the core inflation rate (consumer price index minus energy and food costs). “The question is ‘should we be cutting interest rates or should we wait?’” Sohn summarized. “My personal prediction is the federal funds rate has topped, and will not be going up very much, if at all, in the future. So in the near future we will see the federal funds rate moving sideways.” The federal funds rate is currently 5.25 percent. The Federal Reserve's Federal Open Market Committee, which officially sets the rate, met today and left the rate unchanged.

Sohn sited the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which is indicating a drop to 5 percent or lower for the fed funds rate by June 2007. “I think the market expectations are reasonable,” Sohn said. The federal funds rate is near the top, if not at the top. In 2007, we will actually see lower interest rates. That is what the market is saying.”

Sohn noted a drop in the price of energy, which is stimulating the economy. The price of natural gas and oil is down. Sohn said that 9 percent of all goods are derived from energy – “from plastics to shoes.” Energy prices, he said, have a huge impact on the economy.

“When the price of gasoline goes down by 10 cents, it is like putting $1 billion in our pockets. It is like a tax cut.” Sohn said. “So when the price of gas drops 70 cents, it is like a $7 billion tax cut. Eventually energy prices find their way into the core inflation rate because of its impact on so many other goods. So as energy comes down, the price of these other products should begin to come down. The result is the inflation outlook improves.

Sohn warned, however, that on-going demand for energy from China and India will keep oil and natural gas prices from falling very much.

Sohn concluded: “Economic growth rates will slow, but not a great deal. Long-term economic growth is about 3 percent. I am very optimistic about the economy.”

You might find Dr. Sohn’s web site to be of interest, at www.drsohn.com.

Gergen sees one last push in Iraq coming

2006-10-24T16:07:00.000-05:00

David Gergen, the editor-at-large for U.S. News and World Report, spoke to a business group in Phoenix on Oct. 16. He spoke on a wide range of issues, but I thought his comments on the war in Iraq were particularly interesting. Gergen has worked for four presidents -– three Republicans and one Democrat. His comments are about as even-handed as any I have ever heard from a Washington insider.

“There is a sense in Washington that we are in a holding pattern until after the election,” Gergen said of the Iraq situation. “When Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) recently came back from Iraq, he said, ‘We are moving sideways in Iraq.’ He said we’ve got a couple months and then we’ve got to re-evaluate.

“There is a great sense in Washington that we are moving toward Plan B, that Plan A has not worked, and that we are going to move to Plan B. Everybody is asking, what is Plan B? It will not be cut and run, it will not be airlift everybody out of there in the next six days. Clearly this president has the inner fortitude not to do that. That would be a bad mistake, to pull the plug on this thing like that.

“But what we are doing is not working either, so you have got to find something in between. We don’t want Plan C; Plan A is not working. You’ve got to come up with Plan B.”

Gergen noted that former secretary of state Jim Baker (Republican) and Lee Hamilton (Democrat) are co-chairing a commission on Iraq. The commission includes former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

“The commission is going to come up with a set of proposals,” Gergen said. “It is widely believed that those proposals will be Plan B.”

Gergen said Baker is a master at getting people out of tight spots. The commission will quietly brings its conclusions to President Bush and the President will likely agree to them before the commission goes public. The President will say it is time to re-evaluate and he will endorse the proposals of the commission, Gergen said.

“When he comes up with Plan B, I think it is also very possible that he will suggest the architects of Plan A might want to do other things in life. That that might be a good time to change teams,” Gergen said. “That’s what Lyndon Johnson did in the Viet Nam war. He had Bob McNamara there; that wasn’t working and he sent McNamara to the World Bank. He brought in Clark Clifford as his Secretary of Defense. I don’t know whether Jim Baker would do that or not. He is 76. I don’t know whether he would be willing to be Secretary of Defense at this point. It’s a lot to ask of him. But the President could reach out to a Sam Nunn. Democrat, Georgia, that would be a marvelous choice. A really smart, smart choice.

“There is a lot of talk in Washington about Plan B requiring us to send a lot more troops. There is a lot of loose talk in Washington that we are talking as many as 100,000 troops who would go in for a short period of time, maybe six months to a year, to try to stabilize this place. The idea is if you put a lot more troops in there you can quiet everything down. That’s the idea. Problem is, we don’t have enough military. We have maybe 20,000 you could throw together, unless you drew down from future assignments.”

Gergen said he believes the American people have not completely given up on the President. “I think the President has one more shot,” he said. “I think the President can go to the country and say ‘This is not working.’ He has to eat some crow, which is not easy for him to do. He is a rightfully proud man. But he can say to the country ‘I need you,’ to the Democrats, ‘I need you. Iraq is too important to let go down the drain. Let’s give it one more shot. Let’s give it one more big push. Let’s see if we can’t succeed here, and if we can’t then we will have to go to Plan C.’ I think the president can get people to go along with him.

“When you look down into the abyss and say ‘Do you really want to let Iraq go down?’ I think most Americans will say no. Let’s try.”

A Father for All Seasons

2006-10-19T10:38:00.000-05:00

I have written in the past about the importance of ordinary people writing their stories, and one person who has done so is Bob Welch, a columnist for The Register-Guard newspaper in Eugene, Ore. Welch is the father of two kids and he has compiled a number of moving stories in a book called “A Father for All Seasons.” It was published eight years ago, but until a friend gave me a copy of the book two weeks ago, I had never heard of it. I read it, and now I want to make sure as many people as possible hear about this book.

Welch is a pretty ordinary guy with a lot of ordinary stories. But those are precisely the stories that should be told and preserved. History should not be limited to the fantastic, the horrible and the amazing. Books like the one Welch wrote present a much more accurate reflection of life than do newspapers and television news.

Welch writes about the things that are important to him and does a great job weaving in comments about his faith. So many writers are afraid to deal with religion in their work. But they shouldn’t be. Every work of memoir, in my opinion, needs to deal with the writer’s relationship with God. If the writer doesn’t have a relationship with God, then that should be discussed in the book. Welch, however, has a pronounced relationship with God and he writes about it, seemingly without effort. Welch and I might quibble over some doctrinal points, but I found his seamless integration of spiritual reality into his work to be one of the strengths of the book.

As the title implies, the stories are presented in sections named after the seasons, starting with springtime. He walks us through stories that depict summer, fall, winter, and then a second spring. He writes about his parents, the death of his father, the birth of his sons, about the death of a friend’s son, about two boys who went off to Viet Nam, about his son going off to college, and about another father and son who struggle with a drug habit. Some of it is pretty heavy stuff, but almost all of it is stuff that is common to anyone alive today.

At one point, Welch writes about a father’s role as teacher: “Better to teach our sons the selfless character of Christ than the flawed character of ourselves…” he writes. “We should not teach our sons with flash cards that do nothing but embed in their minds memorized facts. Instead, we should teach our sons to seek wisdom from the Word. We should teach them less calculation and more character. We should teach them not to blindingly follow the world, but to faithfully follow the truth.”

At another point, he writes about a boy reaching the age of 21. The only way society acknowledges adulthood, he notes, is by giving him the right to purchase alcohol. He comments: “…manhood had much more to do with responsibilities than with rights. Manhood isn’t found in a bottle. It’s found in the hearts of men, in the form of such attributes as courage, humility and vulnerability.”

There is a chapter in the book where Welch makes reference to Jon Krakauer, the adventurer who chronicled his climb to the top of Mount Everest in the best-selling book “Into Thin Air.” Welch was a classmate of Krakauer and Welch comments that while he settled into a community and raised two sons with his wife, Krakauer and his wife chose not to have children so he could travel around the world and write fantastic adventure stories. Krakauer’s life seems so glamorous.

I think a lot of fathers feel that way. We can all identify a former acquaintance who went onto glamorous living while we fathers chose a relatively conventional life involving the raising of kids, a mortgage, and relative anonymity. You don’t win any notoriety for fatherhood, of course. It’s a thankless pursuit (that is, trying to be a good parent). If you’re lucky, your kids will thank you some day. They will say you were important in their life. But there’s no guarantee. It might not work out that way. In fact, parenting is a pretty big gamble.

But that is why it is so worth writing about. That is why Welch’s collection of stories, which seem so simple, is really quite fabulous.

Sen. Hagel offers comments on fiscal situation

2006-10-11T11:33:00.000-05:00

U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) used sobering language to describe the country's fiscal situation during a speech he delivered in Omaha on Sept. 22. There is talk that he may run for president in 2008; I think his candor is necessary but he will have to frame his message in a more hopeful fashion to develop any kind of a nationwide following.

Sen. Hagel said runaway spending by Congress jeopardizes the future of the country. “Without economic power, we have nothing,” he said, stressing the importance of a sound national economy. He said the budget deficit for this year is running about $260 billion. Although that sum is lower than it was a year ago, and although many people are hailing the figure as a sign of fiscal restraint, Sen. Hagel said deficit spending is still dangerous. “This takes a toll on our currency, on our competitive ability,” Sen. Hagel said. “We are going to have to get control of our spending; when that happens it is going to get a little uncomfortable.”

Sen. Hagel said that politicians usually come home with news about all the money they have brought back to constituents. They then head back to Washington with promises about reigning in the budget. “We want to have it both ways,” Sen. Hagel said. With Congressional approval ratings coming in between 25 percent and 28 percent, Sen. Hagel commented that “the American people do not think we are doing a very good job. And they are right.”

Sen. Hagel said Congress needs to tackle the major entitlement programs if it hopes to make any progress on fiscal reform. “The entitlement issue alone hangs as heavy over this country as the threat of terrorism,” he said.

The second-term Senator cited a study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland which noted the country has $42 trillion in unfunded liabilities over the next 75 years related to Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. He said in 2016-17, the Social Security Trust Fund will begin to pay out more money than it collects. The country currently spends $380 billion per year on Medicare and $190 billion per year on Medicaid. Three-quarters of the budget, he said, goes to pay these three entitlement programs, as well as other so-called “non-negotiables,” such as interest on the debt and pension obligations. Interest on the debt alone, he said, runs about $300 billion per year.

Even more troubling, he said, is our dependence upon foreign investors to finance that debt. “You know that $2 billion to $3 billion has to come in every day from off shore to cover our debt,” he explained. “We are at a record low for savings in this country, and individuals are at record high debt levels.

“If we do not get our house in order,” Sen. Hagel said, “if we don’t make some tough decisions one of these days, if we don’t prioritize our resources and where we want to go, then we are headed for a lot of trouble.”

Articles show why I’m skeptical of the things I read in the newspapers

2006-10-09T16:42:00.000-05:00

I am skeptical of much of what I read in the newspapers because I am so often unable to determine the motives behind the publication of certain stories. The motivation to publish a page one story, for example, should be obvious to the reader. The story should describe an important, obviously newsworthy, event or issue. The gossip and speculation and hearsay should be reserved for columns appearing deep within the newspaper. But increasingly, I find that the front page is barely discernable from most poorly written editorial pages.

To provide examples, consider two front page stories that appeared over the weekend: one on Saturday in the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the other on Sunday in the New York Times.

The Start Tribune article was about domestic troubles Alan Fine had with an ex-wife 11 years ago. Fine is the Republican candidate for the Fifth District congressional seat in Minnesota. The Fifth District is overwhelming populated with Democrats and Fine has virtually no chance of winning the open seat against state legislator Keith Ellison, who is running with the DFL endorsement.

I cannot figure out why the Star Tribune ran this article. The article focuses on a 1995 domestic violence charge made by his wife at the time. She dropped the case against him, and two years ago, Fine had the record expunged. So why is an argument between a husband and wife who eventually divorce worthy of a front page story? No case was ever tried and all we have is a ‘he said, she said’ account from more than a decade ago. I would be happy to read articles about real political issues, but I don’t believe any of my fellow voters in the Fifth District care about Fine’s marital troubles.

I think, although I can’t be certain, that the Star Tribune’s reason for running the story appears in the last paragraph, where it says “Fine has repeatedly said ‘character matters’.” So I get the sense that the newspaper is calling Fine a hypocrite. But I really have to laugh at that. Of course character matters. Is the newspaper telling us that Ellison thinks character doesn’t matter? And if that’s really the point of the story, then why isn’t the lead something like: Congressional candidate Alan Fine’s comments about character mattering are hypocritical, unconfirmed events from 11 years ago suggest.

As for the New York Times, the Old Gray Lady ran a story about religious organizations getting exemptions from certain state and federal laws. It is an absolute non-story that was started above the fold on page one and jumped inside where the remainder of the copy took up two entire pages.

The article starts by describing two day care facilities in Alabama. One is subject to inspection and regulation, the other, which is affiliated with a church, is not. The tedious article goes on to note that churches get tax breaks unavailable to typical commercial businesses. There is absolutely no news here. Any commercial business that competes with a non-profit entity is well aware of the inequities.

One paragraph in the article: “These organizations and their leaders still rely on public services – police and fire protection, street lights and storm drains, highway and bridge maintenance, food and drug inspections, national defense. But their tax exemptions shift the cost of providing those benefits onto other citizens…”

Wow. Are they actually saying that it is wrong for Americans who don’t pay taxes to enjoy these services? There are thousands of low-income people in Minnesota who don’t pay income taxes who enjoy all of these things and no one has any problem with that. And if it is the fact that churches are specifically exempt from paying taxes rather than unable to because of their limited means, consider the many very profitable credit unions across the country that enjoy all these benefits and pay no income tax. Only a small group of citizens, mostly made up of bankers, complain about that.

The Times never comes out and says it, but I think they are implying that churches should not get these breaks. I think they see it as a violation of the constitution which guarantees the separation of church and state. I am not aware of anyone who sees it that way, except people who are openly hostile to organized religion. Remember, people came to North America in the first place to get away from oppressive government regimes that tried to interfere with the practice of religion.

So the New York Times story just doesn’t make any sense. Their motivation for running this story is very unclear and leaves me only to speculate. This piece just makes the newspaper look hostile to organized religion.

Economist sees slowing economy, maybe even recession

2006-10-06T11:28:00.000-05:00

The next Federal Open Market Committee meeting is Oct. 24-25. If you have a mortgage with an adjustable rate, or if you have tapped into a home equity line of credit that charges a floating interest rate, you should pay attention every time the FOMC meets. This is the Federal Reserve board committee that sets interest rates, specifically a rate called the Federal Funds rate. All other interest rates fall or rise correspondingly.

The last two times the committee met, it decided to hold the rate at its current level (5.25 percent). This is important, because the 17 previous meetings in a row, it elected to raise the rate. Some people are now beginning to say the Fed will lower rates, and the process could start as soon as the meeting later this month. Most people who watch this stuff, however, expect the Fed to hold rates through the end of the year and perhaps begin to lower rates in the first quarter of 2007.

I had an opportunity to listen to Michael Gasior deliver a synopsis of the economy on Tuesday. Gasior is an economist who founded an institutional investment firm called American Financial Services. He thinks the Fed will lower rates early next year, but he doesn’t see that as necessarily good news. He is afraid the economy will need rejuvenation and the Fed will lower rates to stimulate an economy that he sees headed for recession.

Here are the points he made about why he believes the U.S. economy is headed for recession:

*) Foreigners are financing our debt. He noted that since 2000, the U.S. government has issued $1.3 trillion in new debt and foreign investors have bought virtually all of it. Plus, he notes, U.S. private domestic investors have reduced their holdings of U.S. Treasuries by $300 billion. That means foreign investors have actually bought $1.6 trillion in U.S. debt in the last six years. Gasior says it is not a good sign that Americans are unloading their Treasury bonds and that they are not buying the bonds being issued currently.

Gasior noted the uneasiness of the country’s growing dependence upon foreign investors. If the Japanese or Chinese stopped buying U.S. Treasury bonds, bond rates would have to increase, which would make everything in the United States more expensive. This kind of pressure really handcuffs the Federal Reserve. It may want to lower rates to stimulate the economy, but if it does, foreign investors may not be as willing to finance our debt.

*) He doesn’t like the inverted yield curve. When long term interest rates fall below short term interest rates, it almost always leads to recession, Gasior said.

*) Gasior said he does not like the fact that the U.S. dollar is weaker now than it was four years ago. Today, a dollar will buy you 0.78 euros or 117 yen; four years ago a dollar would have bought you a full euro or 134 yen. A weak dollar is a plus for American manufacturers selling abroad, but it makes it much more difficult for foreign companies that attempt to sell their products in the United States. We need those foreign companies to do well, so their economies do well, so they will continue to buy our debt.

*) Gasior said he also is concerned about the contracting real estate market. Particularly troubling is the fact that the contraction is taking place during a relatively good economic period. If interest rates were to rise one or two more times, it would really send real estate into a nosedive.

Gasior concluded: “We are already slowing down, but by the first, maybe second quarter of next year, it will be very evident the economy is slowing, perhaps to the level of recession. I don’t think the Fed is going to wait that long to begin cutting rates. It will have to do something in order to keep things stimulated, to keep things from melting down.”

Law set to beef up internet gambling prohibition

2006-10-02T15:03:00.000-05:00

Rep. Jim Leach is getting his internet gambling law. (See Sept. 20 post.) The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act was tacked onto the Port Security Improvement Act, which the Senate passed late Friday. The bill now goes to President Bush, who is expected to sign it into law this week.

Although I am not a gambler and I feel for people who struggle with gambling additions, I really wonder whether this is the right approach. Internet gambling is a problem worthy of congressional scrutiny, but does the answer really necessitate the involvement of the banking industry and the credit card companies? I don’t think so.

Internet gambling currently is illegal but since most of the gambling web sites operate in other countries, the prohibition is nearly impossible to enforce. The Federal Reserve and the U.S. Treasury already have a comprehensive regulatory enforcement mechanism in place for the banking industry, so Rep. Leach proposed to tap into that mechanism to mitigate internet gambling. Good intentions not withstanding, going after the credit card processors does not solve the problem. Private industry facilitating the payments system shouldn’t be saddled with the cost of Congress’s attempt to resolve yet another social problem.

It is true that many of the credit card companies and big banks favor the new gambling enforcement rules. Those companies, however, would be far better off implementing the bill’s provisions voluntarily rather than under the threat of fines and incarceration. In fact, banks and credit card companies build a world of good will when they take on serious social ills on their own.

The thing about money is there will always be people who choose to spend it foolishly, whether it be on gambling, pornography, recreational drugs or other nonsense. As people of goodwill, we have an obligation to help others make wise decisions about living well. That is a responsibility that falls on all of us, not just those who work in the credit card industry.

Pope Benedict XVI on Faith and Reason

2006-09-29T13:52:00.000-05:00

One of the really good things to come out of the demands by radical Islamists that Pope Benedict XVI apologize for his September 12 speech at Regensburg, Germany is that the ensuing media brouhaha might actually incite some people to dig up the speech and read it. That’s exactly what I did and I hope you will too. Find the full text at Zenit.org.

Benedict delivered an absolutely brilliant speech about the inseparability of faith and reason. The great divide among God-fearing people in our world today is between those who believe God’s actions are completely random and indiscriminate, and those who believe God’s actions are in harmony with reason. Some people say God can do anything He wants, even evil. This doesn’t make any sense to me. We Catholics believe God cannot contradict Himself. God is pure love and evil does not come out of true love. Reason would require this consistency.

I am very grateful for the integration of faith and reason. If God’s actions correspond with reason, then I have some hope of knowing God and of understanding His ways. But if His ways are entirely separate from reason, then I have no way of discerning the meaning of God’s actions. I would have no way of knowing whether a particular action is godly or otherwise.

Benedict notes the Greek translation for “word” in the first verses of John’s Gospel. The Greek word is “logos,” which means both “reason” and “word.” Benedict said: “John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God…”

Although faith and reason are necessarily integrated, Benedict notes three distinct efforts in Western culture to separate them over the last 500 years. He notes, first, the Reformation of the 16th century which reduced faith to one component of an over arching philosophical system, unduly influenced by the philosopher Immanuel Kant who stated that “he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith.” The principle of sola scripture, a pillar of the Reformation, dramatically reduced the grandeur of God and His revelation to mankind.

The second effort to bifurcate faith and reason came out of liberal Christian thought developed in the 19th and 20th centuries which focused on the humanity of Jesus. The idea, Benedict said, “was to bring Christianity back into harmony with ‘modern’ reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ’s divinity and the triune God.”

The third effort, which is currently underway in some theological circles, discounts the significance of Greek culture in the presentation of the scriptures. It dismisses the word “logos” and its significance as merely a cultural phenomenon that should not have meaning in a world-wide application of scripture and theology.

Benedict states that faith without reason prevents religion from creating community because faith ends up being entirely personal. On the other hand, reason without faith offers a very narrow view of science which reduces mankind to something much smaller than God intended. The fullness of God's creation can only be understood in a context that honors the inseparability of faith and reason.

God-fearing people should be willing to have the discussion that Pope Benedict initiates with his speech at Regensburg. The radicals who threatened the Pope with death and burned his image in effigy clearly don’t want to have that discussion. Their reaction to the speech validates the importance of Benedict’s message.

While the opportunity for dialogue with Muslims may be minimal now, my hope is the opportunity is far greater with non-Catholic Christian denominations. What is the role of reason in a “scripture alone” theology? Was Kant right? Do we really need to turn off our brains before considering our faith? Pope Benedict in his speech affirmed that the Catholic Church says no.

Author, speaker shed light on gender differences

2006-09-26T18:17:00.000-05:00

I’m reading a book by Myrna Blyth, who edited Ladies Home Journal magazine from 1981 to 2002. In the publishing world, the magazine is referred to as one of the “seven sisters,” the others being Family Circle, Redbook, McCall’s, Good Housekeeping, Better Homes and Gardens and Woman’s Day. These magazines have absolutely nothing in common with the industry magazines I work with on a daily basis, but I always find it interesting to read the musings of other magazine editors.

The premise of Blyth’s Spin Sisters: How the women of the media sell unhappiness and liberalism to the women of America, is that the seven sisters exploit women by promoting unrealistic images of beauty. They also play on women’s anxieties by printing a preponderance of journalistically flimsy stories about health, stress and safety.

Blyth offers a glimpse into how major media works, but what fascinated me most was her take on the differences between men and women. It seems so politically incorrect today to acknowledge any differences between men and women. But Blyth is not worried about political correctness. She goes into quite a bit of detail about how the media (not just the major women’s magazines) prepare stories differently for men and women.

“Coverage of health topics, which provide the best fodder for frightening stories, dramatically increased during the past decade both on television and in women’s magazines,” she writes on page 125 of the hard-cover edition I’m reading. “On TV, the increase was part of the ‘feminization’ of the media, the realization by executives that more and more often it was women out there watching -– and watching everything -– including the news. Media analyst Andrew Tyndall, of the Tyndall Report, a network news monitor, who tracked CBS news broadcasts in 1968 and 1998, saw the broadcasts shift from foreign policy, military, economic, and business issues to lifestyle topics like health, education, and sexuality. In fact, measuring coverage on all three networks, he found that the news time devoted to what he calls ‘news you can use’ aimed at women quadrupled from 16 minutes to 71 minutes a month and helped transform TV news in the process.”

Blyth cites a University of Michigan psychology professor in her explanation of the different way news impacts women and men. According to Susan Nolen-Hoeksema, “women tend to ruminate, brood, and worry a lot more than men,” she writes on page 116. “Through an extensive 20-year study, she found that many women spend countless hours thinking about negative ideas, feelings, and experiences.” This finding is in apparent contrast to men.

“Gender plays a powerful role in the perception of hazards, was the conclusion of Professor John Graham, founding director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, after the center polled more than a thousand Americans to find out whether they believe in widely reported but unproven ‘hazards’ like radon and pesticide residue on food. Graham found that women were more likely to believe such scares were true by a margin of 10 percentage points or more.”

Blyth got me to thinking about a speaker I heard who addressed a group of parents in Arkansas last June. Dr. Philip Mango, the president and co-founder of Saint Michael’s Institute for the Psychological Sciences in New York City, described distinct neurological differences between men and women in his presentation at the annual convention of the Couple to Couple League. Dr. Mango doesn’t have a lot in common with Myrna Blyth but he affirmed the hypothesis that there are concrete differences between men and women, including the way they approach problems, think about things and come to conclusions.

Testosterone and vasopressin, the two primary male hormones, flood a man’s mind, affirming characteristics such as assertiveness, Dr. Mango explained. For men, maturity is a matter of harnessing these hormones.

Dr. Mango took us back to the beginning, noting that when a girl is born, her first relationship is with someone like her –- her mother, a women. This is not true when a boy is born. Initially, a boy identifies with his mother, but as his self-awareness grows at about 18 months, he becomes aware that he is not like his mother. His search to find his identity can affect his outlook for the rest of his life, Dr. Mango said. The greatest responsibility of any father, Dr. Mango said, is to love his son. A father must help his son affirm his identity.

“Most boys today are not getting that from their fathers today. Most boys are walking around hungry for their father’s affirmation,” Dr. Mango said. In the same way that God the Father affirmed Jesus at His baptism, saying “this is my beloved son, with whom I am well pleased,” (Mt. 3:17) fathers should affirm their sons, Dr. Mango said. “God gives us affirmation; when we know that the King loves us, that gives us the power to go out and do anything. That is what fathers can give their sons.” Dr. Mango urged fathers to spend time with their children and show physical affection toward them.

I can read about the differences between men and women, and I can listen to speakers explain the differences, but I can learn the most just by watching my own two daughters and two sons. My girls have magnificent feminine characteristics and the boys have the classic masculine traits. Whatever this means for the way they will approach life as adults, I only know one thing for sure. My wife and I love those kids and that love is essential to their healthy self fulfillment.

National security expert says we’re much safer

2006-09-21T10:34:00.000-05:00

The United States is a safer place today than it was five years ago, retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey told a business audience in Des Moines, Iowa on Sept. 18. McCaffrey is a national security and terrorism analyst for NBC News and writes a national security column in the Armed Forces Journal. He is the president of a consulting practice based in Arlington, Va., and he is an adjunct professor of international affairs at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y.

A year ago, I had a chance to interview McCaffrey when he was in Minneapolis. (See my November 4, 2005 blog entry.) Hearing him speak again earlier this week, McCaffrey largely re-iterated the message he delivered a year ago.

In Des Moines, McCaffrey urged his audience to review the web site maintained by the U.S. State Department, where 42 organizations are identified as terrorist groups that threaten U.S. national interests. He noted that the majority of these organizations are funded by criminal activity. One group is smuggling cigarettes out of North Carolina and selling them in New York, generating “tens of millions of dollars for a middle east terrorist organization,” he said.

The Taliban, which is operating in Afghanistan, is funded largely by its sale of opium and heroin. Last year, McCaffrey said, Afghanistan produced 582 metric tons of heroin, which is more than 90 percent of the world’s supply. “If you want serious resources as a terrorist organization, you have to get involved in the drug trade,” said McCaffrey, who noted the convergence of international crime, drug money and terrorism.

Many of the 42 identified terrorist groups, McCaffrey said, “are Islamic extremist groups who have hijacked Islam and have attempted to explain their terrible animosity and frustration with their own governments, which frequently they characterize as incompetent, corrupt and hypocritical toward Islam.” Americans are having a difficult time understanding the situation because “we don’t want to see it as a war of Islam against the West, nor do we believe that’s the case.”

The State Department web site also lists governments which it believes sponsor terrorism. Five years ago, seven countries were on the list –- North Korea, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Libya and Cuba. At the time, the United States thought five of those countries had weapons of mass destruction, McCaffrey said.

“We should understand that WMD capability is still resident in many of these states,” McCaffrey said. “There are probably 30 nations that could rapidly develop a nuclear weapons capability. Our concern is, can any of these 42 terrorist organizations gain access to that technology?” McCaffrey called North Korea and Pakistan particularly harmful due to their potential for proliferating such technology.

McCaffrey called the threat to the United States “considerable,” but described a three-pillar approach the country is using to defend itself.

The first pillar is made up of the country’s law enforcement agencies and its intelligence services. He called the CIA and the FBI among the greatest agencies in the world. Despite widespread international displeasure with American foreign policy, McCaffrey said the CIA continues to enjoy tremendous access to sensitive information. The FBI, he said, which traditionally has responded to criminal activity, is in the process of transitioning into a pro-active agency which prevents terrorist actions before they occur.

The second pillar, McCaffrey said, is the United States’ armed forces. He called the American soldiers in Iraq today the “most courageous, competent force we have ever fielded.” American armed forces, he said, are tactically nimble and very powerful.

The third pillar is the country’s domestic counter-terrorism effort. The Department of Homeland Security brought together 22 government agencies into one department of 177,000 people. Although much more work needs to be done, McCaffrey said progress has been made in many areas. “The nation’s 104 nuclear power plants are immensely better defended, and the nation’s aviation system has gone from unprotected to being pretty well defended,” he said.

Border patrol, McCaffrey said, is one of the greatest homeland security challenges. He said there are currently 12,000 border patrol officers. “Why would you think you could defend America’s 304 ports of entry with a force that is a fraction of the size of the New York City police department?” he asked. He said the border patrol needs 45,000 people.

The Coast Guard also is understaffed at its current level of 32,000 people. “That force ought to be 75,000 people,” he said. And the National Guard, he said, is not equipped to keep up with the demands that are being made of it. He said the National Guard needs more military police brigades, light infantry, engineering and medical resources and fewer F-16 aircraft and M-1 tanks.

“At the end of the day, the great question asked every 9-11 is going to be: Are we any safer? It’s a silly question,” McCaffrey summarized. “Of course we are. We have made enormous strides internationally and at home to better set ourselves up to protect us from these new forms of terrorist threat. To a large extent it’s working.”

Congressman pushes bankers to help stop internet gambling

2006-09-20T15:45:00.000-05:00

I had an opportunity to listen to Congressman Jim Leach earlier this week speak about the growing phenomenon of internet gambling. It is illegal to gamble over the internet in the United States, but internet gambling web sites are among the fastest growing category of web businesses. Rep. Leach has introduced legislation to improve the enforcement of laws prohibiting internet gambling.

I have had the chance to cover Rep. Leach for more than 15 years and I have a great deal of respect for this Republican from Iowa, who often is called the smartest man in Congress.

“The fastest growing financial industry in the world and in the United States today, probably by a quantum measure, is gambling,” said Rep. Leach. He said $6 billion per year is wagered over the internet. “In the last five years, it’s grown three-and-a-half fold; it could grow at least that in the next five years.

“In gambling, in general, there are about 2 percent who participate who become what are called ‘pathological’ gamblers, which means they absolutely cannot stop. There are about 5 percent who become ‘problem’ gamblers, which means they can hardly stop, and about 20 percent of bankruptcies relate to gambling,” said Rep. Leach.

Rep. Leach’s legislation, which was approved by the House of Representatives, would prohibit banks and credit card companies from settling internet wagers involving credit cards. “If it works it is clearly worth it. If it doesn’t work, we will all have to reconsider,” Rep. Leach said.

Rep. Leach said he hopes the Senate takes up the legislation this fall. It will be interesting to see what happens. If credit card companies stopped honoring wagers made over the internet, they could shut down the internet gaming business instantly. But most bankers don’t like the idea of being cops. Bankers already don’t like their role in the Patriot Act and other anti-terrorism measures which require them to take extra steps to look for money-laundering. While most bankers would agree that internet banking is a problem, it will be interesting to see whether any believe they should be required to do anything about it.

“I personally think bankers ought to be amazingly sympathetic to this kind of approach because of concern for your customers, and concern for other Americans in a society that wants to save rather than go for the big pot at the end of the rainbow,” Rep. Leach told a group of bankers in Des Moines on Monday.

Rep. Leach said internet gambling is a particularly serious problem among college students, citing one study that estimated 10 percent of college students gamble on line. “The number of college males who reported gambling on line once a week or more increased four fold last year alone,” Rep. Leach said. “Never has it been so easy to lose so much money so quickly at such a young age.

“Gambling through the internet has been brought to the home and to the bedroom. It’s been brought to the office, to the college dorm, and increasingly in the very near future, to cell phones and Blackberries so you can gamble to and from work or while waiting in a movie line,” Rep. Leach said. “This is a very serious phenomenon.”

Gratitude is key to living in the moment

2006-07-29T08:43:00.000-05:00

One of the big mistakes that so many people make in life is they always think about the future. They never take pleasure in the moment because they are always worried about tomorrow or next week, next month or next year. They can never enjoy the present because they are too concerned about what they are going to do later. This is a particular problem for men, who by nature tend to be goal-oriented. Women, who generally are more process-oriented, don’t seem to fall into this trap quite so often.

I am convinced that excessive want, sometimes called greed, is at the root of this problem. People who always want something are always looking ahead to when they might get it; they cannot appreciate what they have and where they are at that moment. People who cultivate a real sense of gratitude find it much easier to live in the present.

I have found this to be an important concept in my business. As a reporter, I am frequently interviewing people. In my early days, I used to worry more about what I was going to ask next than about what the person was saying. I never really listened to the person because I was thinking ahead. I wasn’t appreciating the value of the moment, because I was worried about the future.

Over the years, I have become much better at interviewing. I make a great effort to really listen to people when they take the time to answer. I don’t think much about what I’m going to ask. Often, I find, an obvious question comes out of their response. I don’t have to dream up the next question; they basically give it to me. My interviews now are much better than they were 25 years ago.

I connect with people much better today than I did 25 years ago because I really try to live in the moment with the person I am talking to. I make the most of the present. This concept has proven fruitful in my work, but it has really been helpful at home. I try to live in the moment with my wife and kids. I try to give them my attention without being distracted. I actually put the newspaper down when Susan asks me something. I look my kids in the eye when they talk to me. This is simple, perhaps silly, stuff, but it has made a big difference in my life. I am grateful that they actually want to talk to me. I am thankful that they care what I might have to say. Since I started to really value the conversations and time I have with my wife and kids, I realize I don’t have to want anything for the future because I have so much in the present.

There are 525,600 minutes in a year. I invite you to commit that number to memory. If we can easily count each minute, then let’s make an effort to really live each minute. Rather than skipping over any of those minutes, really make an effort to live each of them. This is what I learned to do when interviewing people. This is what I try to do on the job. When an employee, customer or vendor brings something to me, I really try to live in that moment with them. That means listening to what they are saying, taking time to comprehend it and think about it. And this is what I try to do at home.

So much of respecting another person’s human dignity is simply acknowledging them. That means that when they initiate interaction with you, you take that interaction seriously. You shut out distractions so you can really focus on them. If they sit down next to you for five minutes, give them the full five minutes. Relationships are built one minute at a time and we should be thankful for each minute of attention that anyone gives us.

Independence Day

2006-07-03T13:34:00.000-05:00

What a precarious thing is independence, which we celebrate tomorrow. I just finished reading “1776” by David McCullough and it really gave me a sense for how fortunate we are to have any country at all. Victory over the British in the Revolutionary war was not at all certain. The tiny, rag-tag band known as the Continental Army was badly out-numbered, under-financed, ill-trained and largely unorganized; miraculously it defeated the best military of the time, and tomorrow we will cook hotdogs and hamburgers on the grill to commemorate the feat.

McCullough describes the American victory at Boston in spring 1776, and then the string of stinging defeats in the latter part of the year. The British had Gen. George Washington on the run all the way from New York, through New Jersey and across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania. McCullough describes a dramatic turning point for the Americans with victories in battles at Trenton on Dec. 26 and Princeton a week later. They would fight another six years – 25,000 Americans would die in the fighting -- until the Treaty of Paris was signed, ending the war in 1783.

It is mind-boggling to contemplate the obstacles Gen. Washington faced. His army was almost completely untrained. He couldn’t even get an accurate count of how many soldiers he had. Every day, dozens of soldiers would just walk away, deserting their post. Others would feign illness. There were no uniforms and many didn’t even have shoes. Early in the war, there was a shortage of gun powder.

Gen. Washington had to rely on the colonies to send troops, and he never knew what he would get. At year-end 1775 and again in 1776, Gen. Washington begged his troops to stay on past their obligation because so few new troops were on the way. After 1775, most left, but on Dec. 31, 1776 he convinced many to stay only by promising them bonus pay that he didn’t even know for sure he was authorized to offer.

Reading this book, you get a sense for the loneliness of leadership. People honored Gen. Washington when things were going good, but after they lost New York, people began to doubt him. People left the army and even his own No. 2 officer wrote letters behind his back questioning his “indecisiveness.” Although this lack of confidence hurt him privately, Gen. Washington kept an optimistic public face and forged ahead. He did not give up. His surprise attack at Princeton was bold and courageous.

It is interesting, too, that when the fighting started in the fall of 1775, the battle was not for independence. Revolutionaries were fighting for representation in the British government. It wasn’t until the war got going that the cause morphed into full-blown independence. Members of the Continental Congress, most of whom had no contact with the fighting, passed the Declaration of Independence on July 2 in Philadelphia.

While some members of Congress and Gen. Washington were convicted about the need for independence, one gets the sense from this book that most Americans were uncertain. Many people remained loyal to Britain and King George III. The loyalists were key in the British victory to win New York. And when things looked bad for the Americans, many of them signed a document declaring their loyalty to the King so as not to be tried as traitors after the war.

I could not help but ask myself upon reading this book whether I would have sided with the rebels or the loyalists had I lived in 1776. What a difficult choice. For Americans living in the big cities of the day, living well and making money in the marketplace, what incentive did they have to fight for independence? Sure, there was taxation without representation but that was a small price to pay to be part of the greatest empire of the era. If you wanted independence, the odds seemed so totally overwhelming against you. How could the rebels beat the greatest military in the world? It seemed impossible.

The country was deeply divided, which gives me some perspective for today. We commonly hear that our country is divided on all of the important political questions but I am realizing that is not new. We were divided at the time of the revolution, at the time of the Civil war and today. One of the real tricks of living peacefully in any era is getting along with people who disagree with you.

“1776” is an optimistic book. It demonstrates what enormous feats can be accomplished even if you don’t have what you need, even if you don’t have supplies. Success must have something to do with will. Gen. Washington was willing to fight on Dec. 26; unlike the Hessian soldiers fighting for the British, the Americans weren’t hung over from Christmas Day celebrations; unlike the British who were waiting out winter in the comfort of New York City, the Americans were willing to fight in the snow and sleet storms, and in the end, it made a big difference.

Gen. Washington and the members of the Continental Army could not have imagined the scope of the United States of America more than two centuries in the future. What would North America look like today had Gen. Washington given up and the Continental Army lost? It is impossible to know. But we do know that we have a great country today and that that greatness has something to do with the courage and conviction exhibited by people like Gen. Washington and others throughout the last 230 years.

Reflections on being a father

2006-06-17T18:46:00.000-05:00

On the occasion of Father’s Day, I am pleased to reflect on the qualities that make a man a good father. As a man with four children ranging in age from 3 to 11, I know that spending time with the kids is very important. The kids crave my time and attention. It makes me realize what a position of honor it is to be a father.

There are so many things a man can do to be a good father, but I want to suggest that the most important two things that a man must do is love God and love his wife. If you do these two things, everything else a father does for his children will be more meaningful.

A man can show his love for God in all kinds of ways; keeping the commandments is one of the more obvious ways. Let me focus on two of the commandments: No. 1, “Love God with all your heart and have no strange gods before me;” and No. 4, “Honor your father and mother.”

Let’s look at the first half of the first commandment. One of the most important ways to show your love for God is to pray to Him. As parents, we are teachers, and one of the very important lessons that we teach our children is to pray to God, to talk to Him regularly, to develop a relationship with Him. It is very important for children to see their father praying to God. In our own home, I am pleased to lead prayers every evening for our children. In addition to standard prayers, we mention specific needs, asking for God’s grace.

Not all prayer is done in a group. I encourage each of the kids to pray on their own. Sometimes if my kids get up early they will see me praying by myself. I think it is important for them to see that for me, prayer is real. I mean it when I am talking to God, or trying to listen to Him. They see me on my knees, taking time to communicate with my Maker. There is no more powerful teacher than example and my sincere hope is that each of the kids will develop meaningful prayer habits that help them grow as close to God as possible.

It is typically said there are four kinds of prayer: praise, penance, petition and gratitude. In terms of being a father, I particularly want my kids to focus on those prayers of gratitude. We are so richly blessed, living in the United States in the early 21st century. We have a better life than most of the kings in history had. It is so easy to take our blessings for granted and this is a mistake. I really try to encourage my kids to take time at the start of every day to thank God for all that He has given to us.

While we can all work on being more grateful, I think gratitude is an attitude that is particularly important to develop in children. Media bombards our children with messages about things they should want. Those TV commercials are always telling kids they should want more. No matter what they already have, TV is pointing out the things they don’t have and encouraging them to want more. This sets a kid on the road to materialism, which never brings true happiness.

It is reasonable for a person to want the things that he needs, and perhaps a few things he doesn’t. Consider, however, that if a person allowed himself to be influenced by all the advertisements out there, he would want far more things than anyone could ever buy; he would be miserable. Perhaps adults can make distinctions about when to draw the line on more things to want, but I don’t think a kid is naturally equipped with that ability. I child will always want more and more, especially if the child is encouraged by the messages he sees and hears.

While we can shield our kids to an extent from these messages, the real antidote to want is gratitude. If a person has a healthy attitude of gratitude, those messages won’t sink in so quickly. If a child gets used to thinking about all the things they already have, they are less inclined to focus on the things they don’t have. I once heard someone say that one of the great tricks in life is to want the things you have, not the things you don’t have. That’s a definition of gratitude, and it is something I believe every good father needs to try to cultivate in their children; prayers of gratitude are one great way to do that.

The second part of that first commandment – ‘Have no strange gods before Me” – speaks particularly to fathers. We don’t typically think of false gods in today’s world. Nobody worships a golden calf anymore the way they did in the Old Testament. But in today’s world, I think men are particularly susceptible to making a false god out of their work. Many men relish their role as provider and some men get carried away. They focus all of their energy on their work and forget about their wife and kids. They justify consuming work schedules by telling themselves that they are providing for their families, but if a father can’t provide some time for his kids then the money he provides is far less meaningful.

My own house, like the homes of any family with four small children, is chaotic. For me, going to work is an escape. It is a place of peace compared to my house. It would be easy to begin to think of the office as my temple. It would be easy to begin to think of my work as my god. It would be easy to fool myself into believing that I need to work seven days a week, and that as long as I am earning money, it is okay that I don’t have any time for my family. What a mistake that would be. But I think a lot of guys make that mistake.

Work is important, but it cannot become our god. The second part of that first commandment is an admonition to keep our priorities in order. In any man’s life God comes first, then wife, then children and then work. The first commandment should help fathers remember this, even in the face of temptations to fiddle with that order.

The other commandment I really like to think about in terms of fatherhood is the fourth commandment. Of course, I like the idea that children are supposed to honor their father and mother. I make sure my kids know this commandment. I remind them of it whenever I can. But the real power behind this commandment is not what my kids should be doing for me, but what I should be doing for my own parents. Commandment No. 4 doesn’t stop when I turned 18. I had parents then and I still have parents, so the commandment still applies. I am still required to honor my parents, and I have to be mindful that my kids are watching.

One of the biggest issues for many people like myself –- people in their 40s –- is figuring out how to care for aging parents. My parents are living independently on their own at this point, but what will happen in the future if they really need my care? I need to be there for them. This means really caring for them, offering them my home if they need it. Just like being a good father means being there for your children, being a good child in adulthood means being there for my parents.

Living up to the demands of the fourth commandment is a big responsibility, and it requires planning. Where will mom and dad live in their old age? Where will the surviving spouse live after one of them dies? Although it is highly unfashionable for elderly parents to live with their children, I really think people should consider this arrangement and make plans for it as a possibility. Although thousands of people die every year surrounded by strangers at a nursing home, I can’t believe anyone really wants that. We don’t want to see our parents living in a nursing home. And I don’t believe any elderly person really wants to be there. People naturally want to be around the people they love, who typically come from their own families.

So honoring mom and dad means thinking about these end-of-life issues and making plans to deal with them in a meaningful way. Of course, this is not easy. Many older parents don’t want to talk about it. Many aging parents have judgment that is adversely affected by their pride and sense of independence. They consider themselves to be a burden rather than the gift from God that they truly are. Adult kids have to talk with siblings about this; they have to plan as best they can, and they have to be willing to consider the welfare of their parents to the same degree that they would consider their own welfare or the welfare of their children.

Children will always watch how their mom and dad treat their parents. I know I did. I was fortunate as a child to have the example of my own father who cared lovingly for his dear aging aunt. I watched as he visited her daily, took care of her affairs and brought her to our home frequently for visits. So honoring your mother and father is an important commandment from at least two perspectives. First, as adults we need to care for our parents as part of our own obligation, and second, the degree to which we care for our parents is likely to be the degree to which our own children one day care for us.

In addition to heeding the commandments, the other thing a man can do to be a good father is love his wife. I can think of at least a couple of ways to do that.

The first is to show complete unity with your wife in front of your children. When it comes to raising kids, I think it is essential that the kids get a consistent message from their parents. So when it comes to guiding the kids, Susan and I are always in agreement. We discuss differences in private, but in front of the kids, we display a unified front. Remember that natural order of priorities I mentioned earlier?… God, wife, kids, work. I think kids naturally understand this and they test it by occasionally trying to divide mom and dad. They play us against each other or try to win the affection of one parent over the other. But the best response from the parents is to show the child that mom and dad are in lock-step together. This might lead to some surface-level disappoint for the child but I think deep down, the child is actually glad to have the parents affirm a natural order where they love each other first, and then they love their kids.

I know one of the greatest ways I can show my love for Susan is to back her up in any situation in front of the kids. Most of the discipline in our home falls on Susan, simply because she is around the kids more than I am. So there cannot be any ambiguity about Susan’s parental authority. The kids need to know that what she says stands. Usually Susan’s own word is enough, but sometimes the kids press the situation and they need to hear from me that whatever Susan says goes. Again, while the kids might not like having to do what Susan asks, I think they are affirmed by seeing mom and dad in agreement.

The other way that a man can truly show his love for his wife is to think seriously about what it means to respect her human dignity. People are not things that should be used, like a good power tool. People are created in the image of God and therefore have dignity beyond any man-made object. So I cannot use my wife for my own pleasure or convenience. I have to respect the way she is made. Women obviously have a fertility cycle that differs from men and I have to respect that. Attempts to change that are really just me being selfish. It’s me saying I don’t really like the way God made women and I think I can do better for my own purposes.

Nobody likes to talk about this because marital relations are so deeply personal. Sex is a great gift from God and my own experience tells me I don’t need to try to improve on God’s plan for married people. He has given us the science to determine with incredible accuracy when we are fertile and infertile, and He has given us the will to act accordingly, if we choose. This isn’t something He gave to animals. This is something uniquely human, and Susan and I try to celebrate this Godly dignity in our marriage.

As my kids grow, I am gradually understanding more and more what it means to be a father. I understand now that fatherhood is a great gift from God, something I wasn’t necessarily clear on when we got our first child in 1995. I can see now that God is concerned about my salvation and one of the reasons He gave us kids is to help us get to heaven. We are born with natural selfishness and life’s journey is about moving toward selflessness. Children are really helping me along in this journey.

Before Susan and I had children, it was so easy to be selfish. It was so easy to focus on myself – what recreation I was going to pursue, what trips I was going to take, what I was going to buy next. None of that stuff is bad on its own, but collectively it was all about me.

Then the kids came along. All of a sudden, I am forced to think about someone other than me. I have to respond to my kids. And the more I do, the less I think about me. And fortunately, God understands my weakness and He gradually works me into the program. We didn’t get all four kids at once. With our first child, I really didn’t have to give up many of my personal pursuits. With the second child, I could begin to see that I would need to make some adjustments to my lifestyle. By the time the third and fourth child came along, I had given up most of my personal pursuits, and was now directing my energy and time to someone other than me. And this has been a great blessing… the great blessing of fatherhood.

Figuring out the purpose of work

2006-05-18T09:37:00.000-05:00

This is a column I wrote for the May/June edition of Family Foundations magazine:

With four children and a wife at home, I am very attuned to my responsibility to provide. It takes a lot of money to pay the mortgage, eat three meals a day, buy insurance and household goods, maintain two cars, send the kids to the local Catholic school and pay my taxes on time. Then I read those Money Magazine articles that tell me I need to save three million dollars if I hope to send my kids to a good college some day. And they tell me I need to save a million more if I want anything to retire on!

The weight of this responsibility was casting a cloud over my work. The more I focused on what I was earning, the less I focused on what I was doing, and that made the work less fulfilling. For a long time, I used to think that the purpose of work was to earn money. After all, I have to provide. But then, as a Christian, I know that it is God who provides. If I really believe that, then I can’t say I provide. If I claim to be providing for my family and myself, then am I really claiming to be my own god?

It took me some time, but I have resolved in my own mind the dilemma between my role as provider and my belief that God provides. With this conflict resolved, I have found it easier to focus on what I do at work, and that has led to new levels of fulfillment in my work. It was a story in Matthew’s Gospel that helped me.

You know the story. A man is going away on a journey. He gives one servant five talents, another servant two talents and a third servant one talent. When he comes back sometime later, he rewards the first two servants for doubling his money and he punishes the third servant who did nothing with his talent. If the man in this story is like God, and I am like one of those servants, then my dilemma clears up: God provides, but He still expects us to work. The man in the story provided for all three of the servants, and he clearly expected all of them to work. So the fact that God provides does not mean that I am not supposed to work.

But that still leaves me with a question about the purpose of work. If the purpose of work is not to make money, then what is it? If God provides, then why does He want me to work? My wife and kids helped me to see the answer.

Before we had children, I could spend a lot of time thinking about playing softball, taking vacations, going to movies and dining out. In other words, it was very easy to be selfish. But with the arrival of each child in our family, it became a little more difficult to remain selfish. By the time the second child came along, I gave up the softball game. With the third child, weekly nights out with the guys became a thing of the past. I found myself redirecting my energy and attention on my family. And you know what? I didn’t even mind. By the time the fourth child arrived, I had given up most of the personal pastimes that seemed so important to me years ago. Clearly, God gave me a family to help me mature toward selflessness, away from my natural born selfishness.

God could have set up the world any number of ways. He could have chosen to simply create everyone as adults. But He didn’t; God created a system of children and parents called ‘family’ that naturally draws its participants closer to Him.

It’s the same with work. God could have set the world up any way He wanted and He chose a system that requires our participation in the workforce. The point of this participation is not so we can provide on our own, but to draw us closer to Him. Just like parenting is supposed to help us grow closer to God, so is working. Interacting with those in our workplace, paying attention to details, really trying to do a good job, these are all small steps on our faith journey.

For those first two servants in Matthew’s Gospel, fulfillment came from pleasing their master more than it did from doubling their money. The possibility of pleasing God makes my work far more fulfilling than my paycheck.

Wood: Make all the time you can for your children, while there’s still time

2006-05-11T13:56:00.000-05:00

I had an opportunity to interview Steve Wood recently for Family Foundations, the membership magazine of the Couple to Couple League (www.CCLI.org). Steve has built a name for himself as a former Protestant minister who converted to Catholicism. He heads the Family Life Center International, based in Greenville, S.C., and frequently speaks at Christian men’s conferences. Steve is one of the originators of St. Joseph’s Covenant Keepers, Inc., an international network of Christian men. Wood is the author of several books, including the just published “Legacy – Handbook for Fathers.” Following are excerpts from our conversation:

How does a father parent differently to a daughter than to a son?

Certain things take on added importance with a daughter. For example, keeping your marriage together is critical for a boy or a daughter, but a daughter will always carry the image of the man either being faithful or unfaithful to her mother. And if she can’t trust the first man in her life to stick around, she will find a lifelong challenge trusting any man to commit to her for life.

In a similar fashion, it is important for fathers to spend generous amounts of time with their children. But with daughters, I have found, the time window of opportunity for doing that is far shorter. For instance, I could wake up my teenage sons this Saturday and say, ‘Who wants to go to Home Depot?’ and they would jump out of bed and join me. When my daughters were young, I could say to them, ‘Who wants to go to Home Depot?’ and they would all jump in the car with me. But if I say to my teenage daughters, ‘Would you like to go with your brothers and me to Home Depot?’ they would look at me with a funny look on their face because their interests have changed. There is a very natural separation that will happen more acutely with daughters. So if fathers are going to impact their daughters, they better not lose the opportunity of doing that in childhood.

How does a father weigh the role of disciplinarian and friend to a son or daughter?

Well, isn’t that what the Christian life is? Balance? Think of our Heavenly Father; some people want to make Him only a judge, and not a merciful father. He is both. The reason He is good at either one is that He is good at both.

I believe that a highly religious father commitment to disciplining his children needs to know how to have fun. One of my favorite examples is Saint Thomas More. Here is a man who wore a hair shirt. He got up in the middle of the night to study his faith, died a martyr and everything else. A lot of people don’t know that St. Thomas More kept a monkey in his home simply for the pure entertainment of his family. As the monkey did silly things, they could all sit there, as a highly religious family, and laugh. If dad can’t lighten up, and I am talking about the religious dads, it is a huge mistake to be so serious about your faith that you just can’t have some wild and crazy fun. A dad needs to do both.

Do you have any thoughts for fathers who find themselves in disagreement with their wife about how to raise their child, or about how to deal with a particular issued involving their child? The father has a headship role in the family. If he finds himself in disagreement with his wife should he assert his headship even if it means going against his wife?

I greatly prefer that both parents make a lifelong journey of learning about their faith, about marriage and about parenting. And rather than having two, opposite, inflexible opinions, ideally husband and wife grow together. So if my wife is reading an interesting article on discipline that she thinks has certain insights and a certain balance that might be needed in our family, I would like to look it over. And if I find something that really seems to strike home, then I ask her to listen to that. Rather than having entrenched opposite positions, you try to grow together, and the earlier you begin this process the better.

What is the most important thing a man can do to become an even better father?

I am going to mention what I believe is perhaps the most neglected thing – that’s a man being a man. That’s doing the things you love and making your children a part of that.

For instance, so many men feel that they love their sports life, their outdoor life, and they also love their children, their family life. But they keep these things as distinct spheres. I believe that men can and should pursue their sports and hobbies, their outdoor life, but do so in a way that whatever you love, you incorporate those you love in those activities. By doing so, you are building an incredibly strong relational bridge between you and your children because you are sharing something you really love with your children. A father who does that is setting himself up to be the best religious educator in the world because the strength of the faith conveyed by any religious teacher is directly dependent upon their relationship between the teacher and the student. And if a father builds these relationships in a special way –- by fishing, hunting, kayaking, backpacking, bicycling, whatever it is with your children –- then you do a little bit of religious instruction and it goes a long, long way, and it doesn’t pass away during the adolescent challenges.

Rome in Milwaukee

2006-05-05T09:59:00.000-05:00

Rome is a great destination, but if you can’t get there any time soon, you might consider Milwaukee, at least between now and the end of the month. The Milwaukee Public Museum is hosting a fantastic exhibit called “Saint Peter and the Vatican: Legacy of the Popes.” I had a chance to tour the exhibit on a recent Saturday and found it to be well worth the six-hour drive from Minneapolis.

The gold, silver and jewels in the crosses, chalices and other items on display are striking, but the most impressive part of the exhibit for me was the historical account of the popes and St. Peter’s Basilica. The story of the largest church in the world points to two very controversial periods in the history of the Catholic Church.

The first period was three or four decades after the death and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. Often, it is purported that Peter, the impetuous apostle whom Christ designated the leader of His sheep, died in 64 a.d. This exhibit notes, however, that Rome was largely destroyed by fire, perhaps set by the emperor Nero himself, in 68 a.d. Nero blamed Christians for the fire, so there is speculation that both Peter and Paul were executed at that time. Either way, the belief is Peter was crucified upside down in Nero’s circus, or stadium, and buried in a non-descript grave nearby. After the Roman emperor Constantine converted to Christianity in 312, he built a church on the site of the grave, which eventually became the St. Peter’s Basilica we know today.

Fast forward to the 20th century. In 1939, workers accidentally discovered the cemetery below the basilica. Pope Pius XII authorized exploration. They discovered monuments which appeared to honor Peter. They found human bones of a man who was ultimately declared to be Peter. The skeleton believed to be Peter was cut off at the feet, which scholars speculate is consistent with Peter’s execution. Supporters likely stole his body in the middle of the night, ripping him in haste from the cross. An ax may have been used to cut his feet which were nailed down. In 1968, Pope Paul VI declared the find to be the actual bones of Peter.

As the Milwaukee Public Museum exhibit explains, the Vatican offers a tour under St. Peter’s Basilica where one can view the burial place and the bones. My wife and I actually took that tour when we were in Rome in 1994. It is impressive, given the proximity of the find, which is directly below the high altar of the church.

But the bones are controversial. Of course there is no way to know for sure whose bones they are. Many scholars claim Peter’s tomb is in Jerusalem. And, another church in Rome, St. John Lateran, has long claimed to have Peter’s skull enshrined in its altar. People who attack Catholicism have been known to point to this discrepancy to prove the fallacy of papal infallibility. A pope’s pronouncement regarding an archeological find, however, does not carry the assurance of infallibility. The Church always has taught that infallibility only applies to papal pronouncements regarding matters of faith and morals.

The other controversial period in history highlighted by St. Peter’s Basilica is the beginning of the 16th century. The original church built on St. Peter’s burial site fell into dangerous disrepair so the construction of a new basilica was begun in 1506. Martin Luther began the reformation in 1517 when he nailed his 95 theses on the door of the castle church at Wittenberg, Germany. Luther built a following partly because of widespread ill-will generated by the collection of money around Europe for the construction of the basilica in Rome. Many people grumbled about having to pay for a church building they were unlikely to ever see themselves. (Perhaps the debate back then was a little like the one in Minnesota now about whether residents all over the state should pay for a new stadium in the Twin Cities.) Of course there were many other factors that contributed to the rise of the reformation, but the funding arrangement for the new basilica didn’t help.

History is very complicated, filled with conflicts and disputes. The history of the Church is no exception. The Milwaukee Public Museum exhibit gives us a great look back at some of that history. I would encourage everyone to go, if possible, regardless of your faith. My family went on a Saturday and it was very crowded; perhaps the crowds would be smaller during the week. The exhibit originally was scheduled to conclude today, but it has been extended through the end of the month.