Aftermath

A. Gene & Emily’s Advent letter is here (PDF format).

B. Emily’s Advent essay, “Zecharias tells a story,” is here.

C. Here are some photos and videos from our kids and grandkids.

You can listen to Josiah on the drums here.

Elliott and Anderson visited us one weekend this summer, then Elliott and Josiah on another weekend. Here are Elliott & Anderson in our neighbor’s pool. At our house here they are playing with bubbles.

In September, we visited a fall festival. Here are videos of Josiah jumping and Anderson, Prisca, & Elliott sliding.

In October, Emily and I traveled to Massachusetts to celebrate Dad Parke’s 95th birthday. Here are Eleanor & John Parke and with their kids.

In November we visited Tim, Elizabeth, & Simeon in Texas. Here are some memories of those days: Simeon [1] with Emily and [2] with Gene and [3] amazed that Grampa can play the harmonica and [4] experimenting with Bendaroos and
[5] with Gene & Emily dressed for church.

In December, we went on a “Santa train excursion” with Prisca and her family. Here are Anthony & Prisca & Elliott and Josiah & Emily & Anderson.1

Meanwhile, back in Texas, Simeon is enjoying [6] vacuuming with Periquito Azul watching ², and [7] Tim, Elizabeth, and Simeon at the nursery school Christmas party.³

Headlines

by Emily Parke Chase, Advent 2008

A muted shawl caressing a new mother’s head

covers hair mussed by hours of

fright

A faded kaffiyeh wrapping a father’s damp brow

a rope knotted once and then tied

tight

A woven yarmulkah clinging to a shepherd lad’s head

a boy kneeling now before a heavenly

sight

A regal turban pinned with a golden brooch

its diamond sparkling in the candle’s

light

A swaddling cloth wrapping a babe head to toe

the source of all joy on this holy

night.

Daddy’s Voice

by Emily Parke Chase, Advent 2011

“Story, Abba. Story!” Dark eyes looked up and pleaded for attention.

“You mean the story of the chicken that trapped Mama in the shed?”

“No, Abba!”

“You mean the story of how Abba fell in the mud last week on his way to synagogue?”

“No!” The little boy’s face shook fiercely from side to side.

“You want to hear your story? Again?” The man nodded his grey head and motioned for his young son to crawl up on his lap. “Of course, this story took place a long time ago. It began before you were even born.”

John wiggled in anticipation. Every fiber of his 3-year-old body seemed to vibrate.

“The week began in a very ordinary way. I was on duty at the…”

“TEM-PULL!” The boy shouted and bounced his head until the long black curls flew. His arms traced a vague path in the air that resembled the shape of a large building.

“Right! I was at the Temple, just as I had been many other times in my life. But that week was not to be ordinary, my son, not at all. Lots of priests served that week, of course, but only one would enter the sanctuary and light the incense. I took part in the lottery and as an old man, I never imagined that I might receive that honor, but that day?”

“Abba picked!” Small fists flew up and churned the air like a gladiator claiming his prize.

The boy’s father smiled and nodded. “Yes, I was picked. I bathed myself carefully and carried the incense past the sacrificial altar and entered into the holy place. And there, in the dim shadows of the room, I saw something move in front of me.”

“ANGEL!” John jumped off his father’s lap and leaped around the room. His arms waved up and down as if he himself were one of the golden cherubim flying down from heaven.

“Suddenly the whole room was full of bright light and, yes, an angel stood in front of me. He told me that Mama was going to have a …”

The boy danced over to his father’s knee and pointed to himself. “BABY! Baby John!”

Zecharias held his tired arms out and waited until his son calmed down and crawled into his lap a second time. “Now you must listen carefully, son, because something hard happened next. I confess that I didn’t believe the angel. I was old! Mama was old! How could we have a baby?”

John hid his eyes in the soft folds of his father’s tunic.

“The angel told me that because I did not believe I would not be able to speak at all.” Zecharias disentangled his son’s face from his robe and paused until he had the boy’s full attention. “And then, just as the angel said, I couldn’t talk any more!” He pretended to mouth words and gesture to the right and left.

John held his breath as he waited for the familiar words that would come next.

“A long time went by. A long long time. Mama’s tummy got bigger and bigger and BIGGER!” The father looked down at his young son. “Who was inside?”

“JOHN!”

“And when you were born, could Abba talk again?”

“NO!” John held up the fingers of his two hands in front of Zecharias’ face.

The old man gently pinched the littlest finger to represent the first day. He frowned, pointed to his mouth and shook his head. Then he pinched the boy’s second finger to represent the second day and shook his head once more. Then the third. He looked at his son and raised his eyebrows in question. John shook his head.

Slowly the father touched each finger in succession until he came to the eighth one. Once again he paused and waited for his son to speak.

The boy placed one small chubby hand on each side of his father’s face, leaned back and laughed before shouting, “Abba TALK!”

“That’s right! On the eighth day Abba could talk. And now we know that the Lord is able to do…”

“ANYTHING!”

“You are right! He can give an old man a special son named John. He can take away a voice and give it back again. God can do anything!”

Zecharias set the boy down on the floor, twisted him in the direction of the kitchen and sent him off to find his mother. The old man didn’t rise immediately. He looked down at his own gnarled fingers and whispered to himself, “Can You still do anything, O Lord? Can you keep me alive long enough to teach this son to hear Your voice?”

1. Here is Emily’s and my Advent 2010 letter.

2. Here are pictures and videos of the family:

Tim, Elizabeth, and Simeon

Simeon first with Emily (Aug. 2009) in Texas right after he was born, and second visiting his great-grandparents (Oct. 2010)

Prisca, Anthony, Josiah, Anderson, and Elliott

Josiah, Prisca, Anderson, Elliott at Lake Tobias Wildlife Park (23 Aug. 2010).

Anderson and Emily at Lake Tobias Wildlife Park (23 Aug 2010).

Elliott and Gene (27 Feb. 2010)

John and Kelly

Kelly hangs a sudoku quilt that Jan Parke made for Kelly & John’s dining room.

John and Prisca at Prisca’s house.

John turns 26, May 2010, at his cousin Heather’s house.

John juggling at Messiah College homecoming just for fun (24 Oct. 2010). John is facing the camera as the juggling video begins.

3. Here are some of Gene’s thoughts while flat on his back in January full-time and most of February through April.

I learned a lot of great spiritual lessons. Too independent, I learned to be dependent on my angel Emily who nursed me. Praying mostly by talking, I learned to practice listening prayer. I had no idea how I would respond to God in the middle of severe pain, but it turned out that I was able to see God as faithful. In the Book of Job, Job’s wife gives him bad advice: “Curse God and die.” I passed the “Job’s wife test.” A workaholic, I accepted the fact that I am loved without performance, and so I allowed a friend to lead the Christian ministry that I direct, which helped him to flourish in leadership. As a control freak, I would have found that hard to do unless it was a necessity. In short, the spiritual benefits of my ordeal far outweighed the physical benefit (losing 35 pounds, but only gaining 15 of them back).

How can I know anything? I can’t do better than to outline the ways mentioned by the Wesleyan Quadrilateral (or more precisely the Anglican quadrilateral, if one wants to get attribution right).

The four ways to “know” something are: experience, tradition, reason, and revelation. Experience includes experiment, but of course if someone else did the experiment, and we believe them, then we are relying on tradition, not on experiment. By traditon, you see, I don’t mean just church traditions. I mean books that people have written and lessons that teachers including our parents have taught us.

For example, I know that the mass of an electron is 9 x 10^28 grams not by experiment but by tradition. Most scientists know that by tradition. Very few have done the experiment. I did the experiment when I was at MIT and I got a 1000% error. So I certainly don’t know it by experiment!

On this account, almost everything I know is by tradition. On this account, everything I know is filtered through my experience. I experience revelation from God (about which more in Part 3 of this blog entry); I experience traditions.

As far as I can tell, these methods of knowing are not reducible to fewer. The logical positivists (the so-called Vienna School) originally wanted everything to be just experimentation. That’s what “positivist” means. But then they realized that they couldn’t put two thoughts together without reason, so they changed their name from “positivists” to “logical positivists.” (I’m imputing a conscious choice to an historical evolution.) Logical positivism is the reigning philosophy of science today. The aim of logical positivism is to do away with metaphysics. That turns out to be impossible, as people as diverse as G. K. Chesterton and Bertrand Russell have argued.

In 1908, responding to a distinctly American flavor of anti-metaphysics called Pragmatism, Chesterton said, “Pragmatism is a matter of human needs, and one of the first of human needs is to be something more than a pragmatist.”¹ In 1909, Bertrand Russell in responding to Pragmatism said that if we do away with metaphysics, only guns can arbitrate truth.²

When I was at MIT, I also took a few courses in philosophy. I started a course in logical positivism using A. J. Ayer’s book, The Problem of Knowledge, as text. When we had to write a paper on the topic, “Can I be mistaken when I believe that I am in pain?” I knew that I was in pain for taking the course. I dropped it. Logical positivism would like to take the observer out of consideration. This is as silly as the other extreme–solipism–in which there is no objective reality apart from the observer.

I view the Wesleyan Quadrilateral as a skewed parallelogram.

On the horizontal axis the four methods of knowing range from experience, the most subjective, to revelation, the most objective.³ On the vertical axis they range from experiment and reason–the most scientific–to tradition and revelation–the most metaphysical.⁴

In two future blog entries I plan to address each means of knowing separately, showing in particular that the Bible supports each means of knowing, and showing that each without the others can mislead us. In particular, revelation alone can mislead us. This will address a valid question that my friend Paul Tucker raised in an email today: Isn’t revelation the most subjective means of knowing of all, given that different religions have contradictory claims about what has been revealed?

As usual, I won’t know what I think about these things until I write about them and discuss them with my friends.

I was humbled to receive poor student evaluations of my spring semester teaching. Unlike those form Christmas letters that whitewash the previous year, I want to face up to the criticism.

Those of you who are not teachers (and not pastors, who teach too) may skim.

I finally screwed up enough courage to read my student evaluations for my History of Math course despite my fear at the outcome. Parker Palmer in his book Courage to Teach is the first person to voice my fears as a teacher, giving me permission to voice mine. In short, I screwed up. My spring evaluations were absolutely the worst I have ever received in all my decades of teaching at any school anywhere.

I quickly rationalized the outcome. First, because of a back injury, I was in pain teaching from a seat and laptop, not able to be spontaneous. In fact the only praise I got was that I was very organized. How thankful I was to have prepared a major chunk of my work the previous summer, and not left it to January when as it turned out I was in bed 22 hours per day. Second, because I had never taught History of Math before, I was teaching material that I was learning as I was teaching it.

I thought, “Gimme another chance!”

Contrast that with the hands-down best evaluations that I have ever received, pinning the evaluation meter against the upper end in every category. I taught Math Modeling exactly like the late Dr. Jeff Hartzler did. How did I do Modeling differently from History?

In Modeling, I used teams, I allowed students to choose the material they studied and the pace at which they proceeded, and I was highly interactive in the classroom. In History, all that I did was to lecture. In History I tried to allow students to read in advance so as to use the class to discuss the parts that interested them. But they specifically asked me not to do that; they wanted lecture. I soon concluded that they didn’t know how to ask for what they really wanted, and although I knew what they needed, I wasn’t equipped to do that while in pain.

This video explains what they need. They need application to their world, their preparing materials for others’ use, not just being sponges absorbing my “pearls of wisdom.” I might have had them create podcasts as my colleagues Anita Voelker, and Dave Richeson have done, or lessons for a math classroom (half of my 12 students were Math with Education majors). Richeson at Dickinson had a radio program on Dickinson College’s radio station, so he broadcast his students’ podcasts on the air. This gave students the added incentive to do their very best, knowing that their work would be public. Then he put them on iTunes for an even wider public.

“But,” you hasten to comfort me, “didn’t you win the Robert and Marilyn Smith Teacher of the Year award in 2002? Doesn’t that count for something?” Yes, it does. But the students who voted me in were very highly self-motivated. I’d like to be able to teach well those who aren’t as highly self-motivated. After all, the highly self-motivated almost don’t need me.

I’ve been humbled by praise for my teaching. Now I’m humbled by constructive criticism.

Good spiritual lesson: humility.

Teaching History of Math this past semester gave me an excuse to read carefully two Dover Publications books that I have owned since high school, but only skimmed then. Imagine my delight to discover that if you are given a theorem that is hard to prove beforehand, you can prove that is transcendental in just a couple of lines. The hard theorem gives many other corollaries too, corollaries that I’ve known in my gut but never had a handle on how to prove.

Here are the details, from p. 76 of Felix Klein’s book Famous Problems of Elementary Geometry. You can read it on-line at Google Books.

Theorem (Lindemann): Over the complex field, in the equation not all of the
and can be algebraic, assuming that at least one

Corollary 1:
is transcendental.

Proof:
and 1 is trivially algebraic, so is transcendental, so then also is

Corollary 2: In the equation if x is algebraic and then y is transcendental. If x is a non-zero rational multiple of then y is algebraic.

Proof: Note first that by a power series argument, for example, Therefore, If x is algebraic then, Lindemann’s theorem applied to (*) shows that
is transcendental. If x is a rational multiple of then x is transcendental in a simple proof by contradiction from Corollary 1, hence y cannot be transcendental, again by Lindemann’s theorem.

Similarly, we can show that in only one of x or y can be algebraic (excluding the y = 0 case, as Lindemann’s theorem does, because ). Similarly for all of the rest of the trig functions and inverse trig function, which can also be expressed as rational functions of exponentials.

And finally, what is the heart of the proof of Lindemann’s theorem in the first place? It rests on the fact that as a power series has factorials in denominators, making any attempt to make it satisfy an algebraic equation a failure.

There is a universal distinction in Indo-European languages between knowing about a fact and knowing personally, between

1 wissen (saber Spanish, savoir French, scire Latin) and

2 kennen (conocer, connaître, cognoscere).

“Science” from scire “to know” is analytic. The root meaning of “science” is to “cut up,” so it is about knowledge by analysis, not synthesis. In fact the word “shit” in English comes from that same root, because excrement is “cut off” from the body.

Enlightenment rationalists used experiment and reason, both of them in an impersonal non-commital sort of way, being suspicious of the mystical– divorcing as it were “experiment” from “experience.” They had important axioms: Truth should be able to be interpersonally verified, and the universe is knowable because God is good and wouldn’t deceive our senses and reason. But truth without Truth led to deism and onward down to atheism.

“I cut open the body and I can’t find the soul.”

“Did it ever occur to you that the very cutting destroyed the soul?”

Micah Tillman reminded me again of this distinction in his blog today, where he comments on the familiar fact that pisteuo in Koine Greek means both faith and faithfulness.

1. faith, of the mind, analytic, held at arm’s length intellectually;

2. faithfulness, of the deeds, synthetic, embraced personally. “Cognoscere” is to about “personal knowledge,” to use Michael Polanyi’s term, and personal commitment.

Contrast Jesus before Pilate:

1 truth, academic, according to Pilate;

2. Jesus the Truth, personal.

Hear C. S. Lewis in his essay “Is Theology Poetry?” in Weight of Glory: “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen:”

1. “not only because I see it” (analysis and experimental observation), but

2. “because by it I see everything else” (commitment).

Michael Ward has a great new book, Planet Narnia, about C. S. Lewis’s childrens’ stories. (A great review by N. T. Wright is here. ) In Planet Narnia Ward tells us that C. S. Lewis distinguished between

1. looking at a beam of light; and

2. looking along a beam of light.

(The C. S. Lewis quote is here in context.) Don’t just analyze the light; allow the light to serve its telos.

I was already prompted to think about this over the past weekend even before Micah’s blog entry. My first prompt was reading a fresh accurate translation of Exodus 20:3Exodus 20:3
English: World English Bible - WEB
3?You shall have no other gods before me.

“Thou shalt have no other gods between your face and Mine.”

The Hebrew for “before me” also means “in my face.” The traditional translation imagines (analytically) gods lined up along a line. Elohim is first; all the others rank distant seconds. This new more personalistic translation (thank you Thom Gardner) suggests that even in the Ten Words, God intended personal relationship not just legalistic obedience.

My second prompt was yesterday while I was listening to the Easter sermon at my church–a sermon on Romans 10:9Romans 10:9
English: World English Bible - WEB
9?that if you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.

1 believe in your heart that Jesus resurrected (faith), and

2 confess with your mouth (faithfulness).

In my Ph.D. dissertation in 1979, I reviewed the artificial intelligence (AI) literature to find out how proponents of “strong AI” would ever bridge the gap between “knowing about” and “knowing personally.” The best that they could come up with– the best that they still can come up with 30 years later–is that personal knowledge is “precompiled” knowledge. But precompiling “X causes Y to die” into “X kills Y” does not bootstrap us nearly far enough up the “information pyramid” from mere data to wisdom:

As St. Agustine says, “believe that you may know.”

Get Wisdom. You can only get it by personally being committed to Him, for Wisdom is a person, not a proposition.

Thanks to my son John, my wife Emily has been dragged into the 21st century with her own blog. John used the free Joomla content management system to redesign her site.

Visit Emily at www.emilychase.com.

Emily still doesn’t have time for social networking, so if you want to network with us, you’ll have to friend Gene Barry Chase on Facebook.

I was hoping to be able to include mathematics in this blog, using LaTeX.  My son John found what I think is the easiest way to do that.  Visit the site http://www.codecogs.com/components/equationeditor/equationeditor.php

For example, if I type the following as the src field when inserting an image in the WordPress editor

“http://latex.codecogs.com/gif.latex?\sin^2 x + \cos^2 x = 1″

then appears on the screen.

The site allows typing directly in LaTeX, watching the image to see that it’s right, and then cutting and pasting the URL for the image.  The site prompts for rarely-used LaTeX features that I’m likely to forget, now that I’m retired.  When I do mathematics here at Aftermath, I’ll put it on a separate page so that if you came here to read the promised philosophy, religion, sexuality, and (occasionally) politics, you won’t be distracted.  I’ll have to practice separate pages next.  Always something new to learn!