Why Evolution Is True

Cinematic Storytelling: The 100 Most Powerful Film Conventions Every Filmmaker Must Know by Jennifer Van Sijll (2005) – I’m a film snob. Nerd. Whatever. I love books that help me understand the artform and history of film better, and Van Sijll’s book, while simple and short, provides some excellent information. So much is happening in a film frame that the majority of viewers are completely oblivious to. Understanding basic visual film theory goes a long way toward better understanding the story and emotions the filmmaker is trying to convey.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (1831) – I really started to enjoy Hugo’s classic (and very long) novel after about 300 pages when something finally happened. I read Herodotus unabridged a few years ago and I think it had fewer tedious details than the first third of Hunchback. Still, once the plot took off and the characters starting rounding out, the book became riveting. In Claude Frollo, Quasimodo, Esmerelda, Pierre Gringoire and Sister Gudule Hugo gives us stunning and vividly realized characters that speak to us of human isolation and longing from across the nearly two centuries since their creation.

The Sacred Way by Tony Jones (2005) – In this book Emergent guru Jones walks through a number of spiritual disciplines and prayer practices and provides the historical origin and tradition for each and also guidance for living them out in the modern world. I found several chapters of the book to be very helpful and enlightening, particularly those that dealt with physical prayer practices such as icons, walking labyrinths, and the stations of the cross. The parts of the book that dealt with more internal practices like the Jesus Prayer felt repetitive and stretched for length at points. Overall I enjoyed the book but found it to be less than what I hoped it would be. Still, it’s a good resource for someone looking to learn more about some of the older spiritual practices being revived in the modern church.

L’abri by Edith Schaeffer (1969) – I never threw it across the room, which is something. I didn’t count on being so incredibly frustrated with this book. I have always held L’abri in my mind to be a semi-magical place of free dialogue rooted in the ancient spiritual tradition of Christianity. Several things I’ve read recently, this book included, have changed that impression for me. The book gives one too many simple answers, and one too many accounts of Francis launching into lecture mode every time someone comes to him with a simple question. Francis Schaeffer was a brilliant man, and contributed a great deal to the depth of the Christian conversation during a time of social and cultural change. But whatever his impact was for that era of the church, so many of his words now seem to fall flat for me. I barely finished this one.

Sink the Bismarck! by C.S. Forester (1958) – I’m kind of a sucker for military history, especially anything related to naval or air conflicts. It’s a geeky interest I indulge periodically with a book like this one, which was short enough to be read in a weekend. I had no idea just how close to disaster the Atlantic naval situation was for the Allies prior to the sinking of the German battleship Bismarck on its maiden voyage. Basically, if they hadn’t sunk it when they did, the entire European war would have swung in favor of the Axis, with supply convoys across the Atlantic in constant jeopardy.

What have you been reading recently?

We left our church last summer. We haven’t replaced it yet. We’ve visited some good ones, and we still hope to find one we can attend on a regular basis for worship and to connect to this ancient tradition we can’t seem to shake even when it makes no sense. But we haven’t yet found a community of Jesus followers with whom we feel we can fully live the Christian life in the freedom, honesty, doubt and beauty in which we believe it can and should be lived. For the last four months we’ve been working on a plan to start just such a community.

In October, Melinda will be leaving Chicago and moving into our home here in little old Greenville, Ohio. For a while we will just work on doing life together and adjusting to the new living arrangement before moving forward with anything more involved. For all our book and blog reading, all our planning and list-making, all our scheduled interviews with church leaders and authors from around the country, all our praying, our idea still doesn’t have a definite long-term shape, and that’s not an accident. We want to be flexible and allow for this to develop organically.

If you're wondering why I'm making that face, it's because I hadn't slept in a long time and only marginally knew where I was. I have no idea why Yosi was holding her nose. And yes, that is our 44th president dangling from our friend's ears.

Our basic idea is to bring in a few more core members and start an intentional community. We would have meals together and meet weekly for discussion and prayer. Eventually (and again, we are are making no deadlines or inflexible plans), we would like to create a community that would be a safe place for religious outcasts to come and know acceptance and grace and love and freedom, a spiritual triage center for the ecclesiastically disillusioned, the doubters, the questioning, the cynical, the fearful, the sarcastically-defensive-but-can’t-stop-believing, the gay, the straight, the humbly fervent, the sincerely agnostic, the apologetically or unapologetically unbelieving. But for now, it’s just my wife, my daughter, my best friend and I turning off the smooth path we’ve been walking and taking a few simple steps to walk a new one in the name of truth and love and beauty and grace.

In an email a couple months ago Melinda was discussing this project and asked me to regularly remind her we are embracing the crazy. That we aren’t apologizing for doing something unusual, and we aren’t living in fear. We are looking at a crazy means of living the way of Jesus and choosing to embrace it rather than make it safe and normal. You’re weird Lyndie’s sister said when we told her the plan. Yes, yes we are. And we plan to stay that way. And as Embrace is my word for 2012, Embracing the Crazy has become an unofficial mantra as we look ahead.

Over the coming months you will hear plenty about our plans and preparations for October and after. Melinda will be here on the blog a whole bunch to discuss this with me, and I’m pretty sure I can convince Lyndie to join in and share her wisdom and perspective also. I’m about as excited for this plan as I’ve ever been about anything, and I want to share that with you.

As I plan for how to arrange the coming posts and what to be sure to discuss, I would love to hear your specific questions and thoughts on all this. I’d also love to hear your recommendations on favorite books, blogs and sites on intentional community or anything related. And of course, we’d love your prayers. Thanks for reading.

O God, who before the passion of your only-begotten Son revealed his glory upon the holy mountain: Grant to us that we, beholding by faith the light of his countenance, may be strengthened to bear our cross, and be changed into his likeness from glory to glory; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

I prayed it over and over, and then read the Psalms for the day, which spoke of a God who commands both fire and snow, and before whom both young and old may dance. I prayed the collect again, and committed it to memory to return to during the week. I took a deep breath, and when I got back up from my chair, I felt at peace, rejuvenated, ready to face the coming hours.

Every Sunday I read the collect for the week, and I try to meditate on it, but some weeks the words just don’t seem to reach me. Some weeks the words are so powerful, I write them into my notebook and return to them for months.

When you find yourself in this place of needing to recenter your spirit, to quiet all the voices (and I say that in the least crazy way possible) and allow your soul to hear God, are there specific prayers you have come to rely upon to speak truth and peace to your heart? Is there a prayer book or liturgy you try to use on a regular basis?

Different, like everyone else – In which I introduce the topic of dealing with comments from strangers about Yosi’s race.

Different, like everyone else (continued) – In which I explain why I don’t always feel generous towards strangers who are trying to be nice but say something stupid.

Brown child, white town – In which I explain what it’s like to raise a Latino child in a small town with little racial diversity.

Questions and a book – In which I recommend the best book I’m aware of on this topic and offer to answer any questions you have.

Friday Five: confessions of a transracially adoptive parent – In which I call myself on my own shit.

1. Yes, sometimes I think we’re better than you because we adopted. Hey, as long as I confess it, you can’t get mad at me, right? Listen: I know it’s not true, and I almost always remember that. Really. Yes, I think more couples (and Jesus-followers, I’m looking right at you) need to be adopting. Yes, I think if you’re outspokenly pro-life but haven’t at least considered adoption, you need to stop talking now. But there is nothing special or superior about us because we adopted. There are lots of ways to build families, and lots of ways to love the orphans of this world. Adoption is one of them, but far from the only one. And I really do know that.

2. There have been times when I’ve carried my brown child as a badge of my cultural awareness. I did this a lot early on. It wasn’t on purpose, but I was definitely aware of it. It was validating to be seen with my Latino child. Having her on my hip told any room I walked into I am all kinds of cultured and progressive, in the same way that wearing Toms projects the image you give a shit about poor people (the image, mind you). It was understandable, but not okay. She wasn’t a badge of anything besides my parenthood.

3. I have my own set of stereotypes. On any given day I can be guilty of assuming one or more of the following things: people who fit the description of white trash are less intelligent than I am; very politically conservative people are uncaring; religious conservatives are closeminded; men in authority are assholes; kids with giant racing spoilers on the backs of their Honda Civics are idiots. Okay, that last one is actually true, so it’s a bad example. But you get the point. I assume things about people I’ve never actually met, and it affects my perceptions of them, and I think that’s called prejudice. I need to work on it.

4. I don’t know nearly enough about my daughter’s birth culture. Oh, I know a fair bit, don’t get me wrong. I’m nothing if not a reader, and I’ve read a lot on Guatemalan politics and twentieth century history and ancient mayan history and culture. I’ve read the Popol Vuh and I, Rigoberta Menchu, and with a little brush-up I can limp my way through survival Spanish. But I don’t know enough to help my daughter understand what it means to be born into that culture. We’re trying, but we have room to improve.

5. I say boneheaded things sometimes too. When I was a teen and young adult, retarded was an all-purpose junk word among my group of friends for use in a wide variety of circumstances. A computer that locked up was being retarded, a friend throwing wads of paper at me needed to stop being retarded, and I wished I didn’t have to fill out the retarded tax forms. I was not in any intentional way being derogatory toward people with mental handicaps. It was just a word. Until I said it in front of a mom I care about who has a handicapped child I also care about. I instantly felt about 2 inches tall. It went from being harmless slang to harmful slur in the space of 10 seconds. Lyndie and I set to work cutting it out of our vocabulary immediately. The point is, as progressive and sensitive as I might like to think of myself, I still have blindspots of stupidity. We all do. Let’s show each other grace while we learn, yeah?

I’m Chocolate, You’re Vanilla: Raising Healthy Black and Biracial Children in a Race Conscious World by Marguerite A. Wright – This is without question the best book I’ve read on helping children understand race and diversity. As the title suggests it specifically addresses families with black or biracial children, but the information and advice Wright provides is applicable to families representing any race. Even if every child and adult in your family is white, this is still a wonderfully helpful and encouraging book for helping your children understand diversity and race.

We’ve covered a lot of ground this week on the issues of race, prejudice, and transracial adoption, and yet it feels like we’ve barely scratched the surface. I would love to give you an opportunity now to ask anything you want to in relation to these topics. Don’t be embarrassed or feel like you’re going to end up in some future post as an example of what not to say: you have permission to ask whatever is on your mind. Want to know how to phrase certain questions or comments to adoptive parents? Have specific questions about international adoption and/or our adoption specifically? Curious about how we handle explaining adoption and ethnicity with Yosi now? Are there things I’ve expresssed as important in these posts that you don’t understand? Anything at all, I’ll do my best to answer (some questions might require more time and thought, so be patient). And of course, if any of my wonderful readers would like to step in and help answer with me, that would be awesome.

Ask away!

If you live in a larger city it will be difficult for me to explain to you just how white a place can be. Allow me to make a few factual statements that will help you understand: I literally cannot remember the last time I spoke face to face with a black person in Greenville. The only times I have ever spoken to a Latino person in this town (who wasn’t my daughter or my best friend) have been at the Mexican restuarant. I talk to a Chinese family a couple times a month…when I order carryout. Indians? Arabs? Japanese? Be serious.

The 2010 Census revealed Greenville to be 96.7% white, 1.4% Hispanic, 0.9% black, 0.7% Asian, 0.2% Native American. All other races were either non-existent or statistically negligible. In the year before we brought Yoselin home, another family we know in town also adopted from Guatemala. I did the math – these three children increased the Latino population in our town by almost 2%. 

When we aren’t able to spend time around a people group who aren’t like us, it’s difficult to hold an accurate, healthy image of that people group in our heads. We may want to, and we certainly can if we try, but it’s tough. A town with racial homogeneity ends up with subtle, latent prejudices that would counterintuitively decrease if the objects of those prejudices were actually present in greater numbers. Some people are prejudiced because they can be and have never had to confront why they shouldn’t be.

A few years ago in a Bible study a man in his thirties said to me I hate it when I see these illegal immigrants driving around. For once, I wasn’t tongue-tied in a situation like this. Yeah, I said, and since they have Illegal Immigrant written on the back of their cars so you can know for sure, it’s like they’re taunting you. He chuckled, saw the look on my face and realized what was going on, and the smile faded from his.

This is what I need you to know: that man? He’s one of the best men I know. He isn’t racist. He and his wife are foster parents, and they’ve had black children in their home, and he has loved them as his own. He believes God loves every human being on this earth. If a Latino person’s car broke down in front of his house, I have no doubt he would spend the entire afternoon helping the person fix it, and feed them dinner, and go out of his way to be kind, and probably have his own heart changed in the process. He is not racist. He had just allowed an assumption, educated by popular stereotypes and unchallenged by regular experience in his daily life, to be influenced by his political convictions and, because there were no social pressures to prevent it, he spoke out of that ignorance. I love this man. He’s a good person.

In the absence of racial diversity, it only takes the smallest seed of prejudice, conscious or subconscious, to lead a person to hold unhealthy opinions of other people. We do this about more than just racial differences, all of us. When I see people who fit the stereotype of being “white trash”, I assume they are uneducated and narrowminded. Oh, the irony. We all carry a certain amount of tribal defensiveness, whether our tribes align along racial, religious or cultural divides. And if we aren’t regularly bumping shoulders with people from the other tribes and having our sharp edges worn off, we think stupid things, and we say stupid things.

Yesterday one of my readers, Vicki, asked why on earth we were choosing to raise Yosi in this town. She is half-Mexican and grew up in a similar setting and shared the frustration she felt growing up. I appreciated her heart on this, and my own heart aches at some of the alienation and awkwardness Yosi is going to experience. Lyndie and I have considered many times moving to an area with more diversity. Ultimately, we made the decision to stay.

We felt Yosi would benefit more from have an extended family and community around her than being in an area where she might belong more ethnically but lack those things. Her race and ethnic cultural heritage are important, and we want to do all we can to provide opportunities for her to identify with those. Ultimately though, when faced with the choice, we felt it was more essential to her sense of identity and belonging to grow up in a network of close family and friends who love her, cousins to play with, grandparents to spoil her, people we trust who can help raise and nurture her. She needs people who look like her, yes. And we need to do better about seeking them out and providing those situations. But it’s not the only thing she needs. She needs love, and she has that here.

Yosi was 12 months old.

In our experience interacting with people who don’t know how to handle race topics (which is most people in a predominantly white small town), we’ve made two consistent observations:

1. People can be shockingly stupid.
2. The majority of people mean absolutely no harm when they’re being shockingly stupid, and usually even intend good.

Yesterday I gave three examples of people who have made careless statements about Yosi’s ethnicity, and we discussed the varying perspectives on how to handle situations like these. All three of the “guilty” individuals from yesterday’s post, and the girl in the above example, meant well, and we weren’t really offended. Annoyed, but not offended. These individuals were acting out of ignorance, not malice. Should they have known better? Yeah, probably, but they were actually making an effort to demonstrate they were okay with, even affirming of, Yosi’s ethnicity. They did it clumsily, but we recognized the intent.

Several of the commentors on yesterday’s post recommended seeing this intent for what it was and not embarrassing the person by correcting him or her. We should allow people their clumsiness in encountering those differences. I certainly agree we need to show grace in these circumstances, but figuring out what that means is tricky, because we’re not talking about someone pointing out my differences and exposing me in that way; they’re doing that to my four year old. She’s not a cause, she’s not an object lesson. She’s a young girl who’s a little shy, quite energetic, and perceptive as hell. She doesn’t miss the way strangers react to her, and she senses tension with startling clarity. A little while after the woman I mentioned yesterday told Yosi she looked like Dora, my friend Melinda, who is of Mexican heritage, took my daughter to the bathroom. After a minute she sent me a text: “Yosi just said to me, The people here think you’re my mom.” Perceptive as hell, I tell you.

Yosi is going to grow up in a town that is 97% white. Her family, church, school and neighborhood will be almost entirely white. She’s going to have her fair share of identity issues to work through in relation to that, and that doesn’t even include the ways in which being an adopted individual will affect her and need to be continually worked through. Do I really need to allow total strangers to put her on the spot now, to point out her differentness, however innocently, when they haven’t received any permission whatsoever to do so?

There is also the issue of innocent meaning different things to different people. One man we know thought he was being charming and funny when he told our one year old Latino child, Now you be sure to get a job if you’re going to live here, okay? He’d clearly been working on that one for a while and had a smile plastered on his face. Miraculously, I didn’t punch him. Was this man racist? I happen to know he wasn’t, not in the full sense. He recognizes the other races are equal to him in personhood and are loved by God. He’s just ignorant and cluelessly insensitive and probably a little too personally connected to his political convictions. It’s very likely he wouldn’t even understand how his words could be considered racist at all. Take a joke, right?

But my child is not a punchline to some “harmless” joke, and she’s not an illustration in some perspective-widening cultural education project my wife and I are teaching free of cost to every well-meaning housewife we run into at the supermarket. She’s a four year old girl. She’s smart, naive, strong, fragile, beautiful, breakable, trusting, strong-willed, creative, sensitive, nurturing, needy, and mine. She is not someone’s opportunity to feel cultured by pointing out they can tell her skin is brown and they’re okay with that. I appreciate the effort, but show me you’re okay with that by treating her like a normal kid. She’s not going to miss that she’s different, and she’s not going to miss out on the all the ways that’s going to affect her reality in Hicksville, USA over the next 15 years, believe me. And I’ll be damned if I protect your feelings over hers, good intentions or not.

I want to show grace. I don’t want to embarrass someone who really is trying. I don’t want to start an argument with someone who thought they were being supportive. But I do have a responsibility to protect my daughter’s sense of self and security until she’s old enough to understand what those are and are not based upon and protect them herself.

A couple months ago I had Yosi at the playground, and the mom of one of my friends was there with her towheaded grandsons. She couldn’t stop talking about Yosi’s beautiful black hair. Just look at it. Look how black it is. It’s gorgeous. So black. Love it. Love her black hair.

Last month my friend Melinda and I were sitting in a booth at The Coffee Pot, and Yosi had just made a new friend, a blonde girl somewhat younger than she. The girl’s mom was one of those blessed individuals who has never not found herself charming, and has never had any reason to believe that isn’t shared by everyone around her. She talked loudly and for the exclusive benefit of her audience, in this case us. She made a show of telling Yosi how pretty she was, and how she looked just like Dora. She said it at least three times. You look just like Dora. Mel and I looked at each other, said a number of things silently we didn’t actually say, and waited for the woman to leave.

Above: a completely normal family. Probably.

Lyndie and I live in a small town that is almost entirely white. People are nice, but…well, the town is white and Yosi isn’t. And it comes up occasionally.

There are two perspectives on how to react and handle this kind of thing with transracially adopted children when a stranger says something potentially offensive without meaning to. The first is that positive racism is still racism and should be headed off at the pass and politely corrected in the moment. Telling my daughter she looks like Dora isn’t endearing, you’re going a little far out of your way to compliment a relatively common hair color, and it’s not appropriate to ask what race my child’s mother is. The other perspective is that if the person’s intent is affirming, engage them based on that intent and use it as a chance to give them a positive view of your mixed family. Don’t create a problem where one doesn’t exist, don’t correct if the person wasn’t malicious.

I can see both sides, and while my conviction lies with the first solution, my practice usually falls into the second. Honestly, I never feel prepared when it comes up, and sputter through a reaction in my head before just smiling and walking away.

Kristen at Rage Against the Minivan wrote about this topic last week, and she gave some excellent tips for navigating these conversations. Regardless of whether you live in a family of mixed race, I’d like to hear your thoughts on how you think one should handle situations like this. Which reaction would you lean more towards and why?

2. We never call people freakshow, right, Dad? Every father hopes he’s teaching his kid the right things about life. Like never calling people freakshow, for example.

3. We’re not allowed to touch scorpions unless a grown up says it’s okay. But as long as you have permission, it’s all good.

4. I need to catch a lot of ladybugs, cause I’m kinda like a teenager. Unless “catching ladybugs” is some kind of drug reference I’m not aware of, I feel pretty safe about my daughter not emulating teenagers for a while.

5. We’re girls. We have uteruses. And sharp minds. And strong hearts. And inspiring talents. But yes, it’s true, uteruses.