Adoption is costly. According to American Adoptions – one of the largest domestic adoption agencies in the US – the average domestic adoption costs over $30,000. This is an average, and many adoptions are significantly less costly, especially if the adoptive family is adopting out of the foster care system, but I know firsthand how costly adoption can be: my two brothers and I are all adopted.

       If you are wondering how adoption could be so expensive, let me try to paint a picture. You’re paying for a home study, which can be as little as a couple hundred dollars and as much as a couple thousand, and which often requires updates in childproofing your home: everything from little plastic locks that keep curious toddlers out of medicine cabinets to a no-smoking on the front door. You’re paying for FBI security clearances and for classes to recertify you in first aid. You’re paying for any counseling services needed that aren’t covered by your state or the adoption agency. You’re paying for toys, because your child needs toys and often he isn’t coming with any, and actually, he may be in need of a winter coat and boots too. You’re paying all the gas money to travel to mandatory visitation sessions, mandatory training sessions, mandatory court dates. Oh, and you’re taking time off work too: if you’re hourly, that means you’re losing income every time you have to go to that 2pm court date or leave work early to attend that training event which starts at 6pm but is an hour-and-a-half away.

      The Adoption Tax Credit was the result of bipartisan efforts. The policy allows families to write off up to $13,000 of their tax liability in the calendar year in which they have adopted a child or teen. In case you aren’t paying attention to the math, this write-off is often less than half the total cost of an adoption. There is no “gaming the system” with a policy of this nature. You get paid to foster children, but you pay (a lot) to adopt a child. This policy is meant only to help offset the costs of adoption, in order to encourage more families to adopt and to help aid them in that adoption. Notice also that since this is a tax credit: it is not as if the government is tapping into its own resources to aid families. Instead, it is simply a way of keeping more of the earned income of the family in their own pockets. I should also mention that it is not as if adoptions are always completed in one calendar year: my own took three years to litigate: if the policy had been in place when I was being adopted, it would still have required my parents spend for two years with no write-off for those two years of income tax..

       In the new Republican tax plan, the adoption tax credit was initially eliminated. It was likely only the swift and fervent criticism, particularly from prominent evangelical voices such as Russell Moore of the Southern Baptist denomination, that made the House Republicans change their minds. The attempt to eliminate the credit was cold hearted and lacked any justification. No one currently loses out through the tax credit policy. But so many children in need of a “forever home” and so many families who want to adopt but can’t quite afford to would have been deeply hurt by a revocation of the policy.

      Why would the GOP try to pull a stunt like this? What was their endgame here? I don’t know and I don’t even really care at this point. Trump, Paul Ryan, and the rest of them, do not have our best interests in mind. They also don’t believe in their professed pro-life principles: if they did, they wouldn’t have tried to remove the adoption credit while continuing to fund Planned Parenthood. I want all of you to remember what they wanted to do to us, to remember who they cared about and who they didn’t. And during the next election cycle, I want that memory alive and burning when you step into the voting booth.

       Sources: American Adoptions; IRS; New York Magazine; Christianity Today

      The subtitle for a recent article in The Atlantic entitled “How ‘Evil’ Became a Conservative Buzzword” states that “the left and right rely on different moral languages in the wake of tragedies like the Las Vegas shooting.” The article’s author, Emma Green, writes that, in the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, conservatives ascribed blame to “pure evil” which cannot be “regulated” while liberals talked about the failure of government to better regulate weapons. On the surface, The Atlantic’s assessment seems correct. Consider this quote regarding the Las Vegas shooter from an article in The American Conservative: “in Stephen Paddock, the conscience was dead. He was a dead soul, a moral nihilist, a post-Christian man in a post-Christian age, a monster.” You would be hard pressed to find a liberal CNN pundit who would affirm or use such language in her commentary on the (tragedy, act of terror….?) If this is the language required to speak of evil, it seems impossible indeed that a liberal pundit could ever speak about evil. But of course, as Green helps us see, what is notably partisan here is not our belief (or lack of thereof) in evil per se, but only the language with which to speak of it.

      I want to suggest that while there are perhaps plenty of liberals who philosophically just do not believe in evil, this doesn’t seem to be the case for the majority. Sure, some might simply be utilitarians who reason pragmatically that if others have guns, their own risk of death increases. But the calls for policy changes that ring so urgently on the Left after mass shootings suggest that most liberals care very deeply about morality, which is why they believe so strongly in our moral obligations and responsibilities to pass preventive measures. So if it isn’t that liberals don’t believe in evil (immorality, lack of good, etc.), why then the partisan divide restricting speaking about it? I think one simple answer is that liberals are concerned that when conservatives pinpoint evil as the cause, it works to absolve politicians of responsibility and further cements an ideology that won’t pass gun control legislation. Consider that earlier quote from The American Conservative: if our attention is on how Paddock was “a dead soul,” what role can government possibly have in addressing this?

      Liberals are right to critique the language of conservatives as being governmentally impotent. But I think this explanation isn’t enough. Conservatives who are “traditional” have an uneasy relationship with classical liberalism, the foundation on which rests our (classically) liberal democracy. Meanwhile liberals – who tend to be more reliably classically liberal (in this area) than “conservatives” who are a spectrum of traditionalism and libertarianism (classical liberalism) – are quite cozy with liberalism as such. Thus, when a Leftist-but-not-Liberal writer like Elizabeth Bruenig writes to defend belief in the devil in her essay “The Devil We Know”, it challenges those liberals in fascinating ways. Bruenig asks us to consider the following thought-experiment: “suppose that the devil really was real, and so was evil, and the complex systems of politics and society were not morally neutral but as rife with moral intent and meaning as anything else made by human hands.” Such a thought experiment is likely uncomfortable for the classical liberal who believes in a value-neutral public square, whether he votes for Hillary Clinton or Rand Paul. It is only the traditionalist, whether the Democrat voting for O’Malley or the Republican voting for Bush, who tends toward this kind of language. But the more fundamental question that Breunig’s thought experiment asks – the question that unsettles the liberal, but also the average Bush voter, and likely even Bush himself – is this: “could our very political structure be somehow inadequate for perceiving, talking about, and responding to evil?”

      I certainly have beliefs about what our language should be concerning evil. But I don’t want to prescribe a common language, nor could I even if I wanted to. I don’t want to prescribe such a language because I think we as a society need to develop one that is the authentic result of our dialogue with each other. Partisan divides that give one group a monopoly on speaking about evil are not helpful. Instead, as a starting point for this dialogue, I suggest we all step away from stock categories like “liberal” and “conservative” or “Republican” and “Democrat” and instead begin to ask, each of us for ourselves, two questions: “does evil exist?” and “if it does, how should I speak of it?”

     Sources; The Atlantic; The Hedgehog Review

      Why did protesters threaten such violence that armed law enforcement with riot gear were needed as protection detail for conservative Ben Shapiro when he spoke at UC Berkeley on Sept. 25? Why did students at Middlebury College assault a speaker and a professor, sending the latter to a hospital in March? Why did students demand a lecturer at Yale be fired last year after she questioned administrators giving students a dress code for Halloween?

      There is a reason for the growing antagonism against liberty on campuses across the nation: Karl Marx didn’t believe in the power of ideas and neither do his Leftist worshippers. Marx, in his essay “The German Ideology,” claimed that “when reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence:” Marx is an empiricist, and his claim (one that is itself, ironically, philosophical) is that only that which is material is real. Ideas, says Marx, are just the theories of the rich and powerful used to justify their power and to perpetuate (your) subjugation. Marx can’t prove that claim, because that requires philosophical argument, the very thing he eschews, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be convinced that Marx is right. Black Lives Matter protests demand, whereas MLK convinced and inspired: the world of MLK is one where words have power, the world of BLM is largely one where the only power is physical power.  And so a vast majority of students on campuses today do, in fact, believe Marx is right: not because they have deeply wrestled with his assumptions and find them to be rigorous and compelling, but rather because they have been taught that power is the only reality. Seize the means, says Marx, and so we do.

      To the precise extent that students have been born and raised in the milieu of cultural marxism, those students aren’t interested in dialogue and argument: they don’t champion free speech as the tried-and-trued method for changing minds. In other words, today’s liberal students aren’t actually interested in being liberal. It’s classical liberalism, the child of Enlightenment liberals like Voltaire, that tells us that the free play of ideas can lead to human flourishing. The founding of America surely rested on that liberalism. What was the process of drafting the Constitution if not a long, wearisome debate on what forms of government our new nation should take? What are The Federalist Papers if not Hamilton, Madison, and Jay trying to convince the fledgling nation of the merits of a strong executive branch by means of polished argumentation? Liberal students of today have been taught that liberalism is a lie, that the only reality is power, that the best way to overcome a commentator who says things you don’t like is to drown out his voice or fight him with fists rather than words.

       The Athenians killed Socrates but we still read his philosophy today. As that great liberal comic book writer Alan Moore shows us in “V for Vendetta,” you can kill a man but an idea can live forever. I mention Moore because he helps us formulate a response to cultural marxism. The contemporary conundrum is, how do you talk to a student who doesn’t believe in talking? Marx said all art is false consciousness produced by the bourgeoisie: but even if we believe him (and I’m not convinced most of us do), we still go to see “Wonder Woman” in the theaters. Art, then, might very well become the last bastion of liberty, the last place we can defend ideas against the maxims of those who believe only in power. But however we go about convincing others that cultural marxism is a lie, it is important that we do indeed expose that lie. There might be steep costs in making that argument to an increasingly angry populace, but we must have courage, for what we are arguing for is nothing less than the preservation of our increasingly fragile liberal democracy. Let us not succumb to cultural marxism: we are Americans, after all, and the very existence of our nation is a reminder that ideas have consequences, and reasoned speech really can change the world.

      Sources: New York Times; Washington Post; Los Angeles Times; Marx-Engels Reader

      In a recent episode of Game Of Thrones, viewers watch Samwell Tarly scrub toilets, read books, scrub more toilets, read more books in a scene that lasts far longer than is comfortable. Of course we know that Samwell is going to discover something crucial that will have significance for the broader plot. We know that Samwell is actively searching for certain practical information as his service to a broken world. But we also know that Samwell is a bit of a nerd, and we love him for it, and we certainly don’t begrudge him his joys in learning even though we know most of that learning is “useless” and even though we know that Westeros is going to hell in a handbasket all around him. I submit to you that this scene is a picture of the liberal arts and shows us what Eastern University should aspire to be given that it is a liberal arts school. We ought not feel guilty that we Eastern students live in safety, security, comfort: we ought to count these things as a blessing. We ought not feel guilty if we don’t have a roadmap for how our study of dance is going to “wake up the world” or how exactly our biochemistry degree will translate directly into bettering the lives of others. We need not even feel impatient with the process of teacher or nursing accreditation, as if the journey only holds meaning in the future when we are employed as teachers and nurses. It is enough, in our four years as college students, to be like Samwell Tarly, to delight in this time of learning and the joys therein.

      You are likely not convinced. You are likely asking, along with C.S. Lewis, how can we dare devote ourselves to study, to contemplation, when all around us the poor are starving, and the earth is crumbling, and the world is hurting? But it is indeed worse than this: how dare we emulate Samwell when all around us unreached souls totter on the brink of hell? Lewis asks, are not literature and mathematics, art and biology, mere trivialities when compared to the need to evangelise lost souls? So much for a liberal arts degree. We ought to allow Eastern to become a vocational school, to dedicate ourselves only to those areas of study which are immediately useful for immediate action which address immediate needs in our immediate surroundings.

      But wait, no, here is Lewis himself defending this daring to study in his essay, “Learning in War-Time.” It is our nature to tell stories, says Lewis, and like Boccaccio, we do that even if the plague is sweeping through Europe. It is in our nature to write poetry and like Boethius, we do that even when imprisoned and awaiting our own execution. The world is broken but the thirst for Beauty persists. The world is hurting but we know that solace is found in music as well as food, that art meets a need in us just as clothing does. The question is not will there be art, but only whether there will be good art. It is a sorry view of the world, indeed, that says only the material matters, and that everything else is frivolous.

      There is a further reason from Lewis for why the liberal arts matter. He writes, “If you don’t go on thinking rationally, you will think irrationally.” Likewise, “a cultural life will exist outside the Church whether it exists inside or not.” Why study philosophy when your neighbor’s body is wracked by cancer? Precisely because “Good philosophy must exist, if for no other reason, because bad philosophy needs to be answered.” Your neighbor’s mind may be wracked by utilitarian philosophy that lies to him, telling him that what is good is only what makes the greatest number of people happy. Surely your neighbor needs a doctor, and certainly we as a university ought to form doctors, but your neighbor needs a philosopher too, a good one who is formed by reading “useless” books during an “unproductive” four years at a “liberal arts” school. In the Western tradition, there has always been a tension between “the contemplative life” and “the active life”: we need both, both are good and worthy of our praise. We need clubs that mobilize us to respond to the injustices all around us, but of course, if we are to be able to recognize injustices and to respond to them, we also desperately need the students whose study is centered on exploring the question, “what is Justice?”

     Source: C.S. Lewis “Learning in War-Time”

       On Sept. 7, Education Secretary Betsy Devos gave a speech at George Mason University on Title IX, a portion of the Education Amendments passed into law in 1972 that prohibits sex-based discrimination in higher education. The element of Title IX that Devos addressed in her speech was how it pertains to sexual harassment and violence. Specifically, her comments were a reaction to the “Dear Colleague Letter”, a non-binding directive from the Obama Administration in 2011 that outlined guidelines and procedures for school administrators in dealing with cases of harassment and assault. While Title IX does not directly speak to issues of harassment and violence, it has nevertheless had direct influence on schools in this area because discrimination is interpreted broadly enough to include such cases. Put simply, the idea behind this interpretation seems to be this: sexual harassment or violence interferes with the ability of students generally (and victims specifically) to participate fully in their education, which they have a right to, and thus if there are no preventive measures or means of recourse given to students, then discrimination has or is occurring and rights are violated. Devos says: “Title IX has helped to make clear that educational institutions have a responsibility to protect every student’s right to learn in a safe environment and to prevent unjust deprivations of that right.”

      If all of this seems like a muddled and inadequate basis for college administrators adjudicating cases of sexual misconduct, that’s because it is. And as Devos points out, the current guidelines suggested in the Letter, along with a lack of clarity surrounding how exactly to comply with Title IX, has led to bad situations for both accused and victim. The following situations have all happened: 1): a student expelled for an alleged assault (based on third-party hearsay) despite the fact that the girl he supposedly assaulted is adamant it never even happened: 2): a victim who is told by her university that she will need to prosecute the case herself (summon witnesses, submit evidence as exhibits, etc..) in order for justice to be served: 3): a student investigated and disciplined while never actually been informed as to what charges were brought against him. Thus, while Devos is clear that “acts of sexual misconduct are reprehensible, disgusting, and unacceptable,” she also argues that “the system” as it currently stands (having been informed by the Dear Colleague Letter) isn’t actually working: for everyone’s sake we need to do better.

      I hope that we will indeed be able to clarify Title IX guidelines and help colleges better navigate these issues. But I have concerns with the language of Title IX as it pertains to these issues. I do not think it, nor Devos’ speech, gives us a robust enough vocabulary to shape our moral imagination. Assault is not, in its essence, a violation of some social contract that is signaled by lack of consent, as if what it means to be an embodied person is simply that I am a carrier of legal rights, as if the reason assault is bad is because it violates these legal rights. Of course rape breaks the law, is a breach of every school’s code of conduct, and violates legal rights given to us in our democratic nation. And of course we should pursue social justice (including legal recourse). But if we do not understand that the wound the victim bears is far deeper than can be addressed in the language of social/legal status and that the perpetrator has not just breached social mores but has committed an evil act, then we have not adequately understood the issue. Law can say: “you have transgressed against agreed upon public behavior:” it takes a deeper, morally-informed language to say: “you have sinned.” Likewise, law can say “you have disregarded the rights of this person”: it takes that deeper language to say: “you have wounded a person.” Just as importantly, the law can say “your rights have been disregarded” but the deeper vocabulary says “you have suffered as a person, your suffering is legitimate, tragic, and, in itself serves as a moral indictment against the one who has wronged you.”

      I realize that in our public dialogue, we don’t often agree enough on religion or philosophy to share a specific moral vocabulary. For example, there are many who would argue that the language of “sin” has no place in these discussions. Perhaps the language of rights is the only common denominator that we can all agree upon. But if this is the full extent of our moral vision, we have an impoverished vision. As a community here at Eastern University, I would hope that we would not need to resort to the language of rights, contracts, consent (as the only necessary condition), and lawsuit in our pursuit of right relationships with one another (social justice) – although, crucially, if we must, we must. But I hope and pray that our moral vision runs deeper, that it is more distinctly Christian. I hope we see our relations to others not primarily through the lens of social norms, legal codes, and administrative policy, but rather through a Christ-informed ethic. And as Christians, I would ask that we seize every opportunity available to us to justify rights-language by anchoring it not in socially-constructed norms but rather in the Gospel: created in the image of God, we are precious, loved, full of dignity. And as image-bearers, we have absolute, unchanging moral obligations to everyone else precisely because they are image-bearers too.

      Source: Washington Post

If I were to ask you, “what makes for a good newspaper,” most of you would probably respond with words like “fair,” “balanced,” “truthful,” “and “unbiased” as part of your description of a paper that addresses relevant issues and provides timely information. I think such a description can be summed up in one word: trustworthy. Unfortunately, our collective trust in news media continues to lessen. A 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that a majority of Americans think news organizations “tend to favor one side” and while the majority have “some trust” in news media, a startlingly low number of Americans have “a lot of trust” in the news media. Regardless of our political affiliations, we should all be gravely concerned about the loss of trust in journalism.
The term “fake news” has entered our lexicon and whether its usage is sincere or ironic, the prevalence of the term warrants our attention. Fakeness is a form of dishonesty and there is a sense in which “fake news” can be (and often is) understood to mean “outright lies.” And yet fake is an intriguing word when placed in the context of trust. When we talk about people being fake, we normally mean that they’re disingenuous or inauthentic. Even absent malicious intention, fakeness in people is antithetical to building trust. There is something about authenticity, about being who you really are and not pretending to be someone different, that allows for trust to form. If the analogy holds true, my suggestion is that what we are looking for in a paper is a certain internal integrity, an authenticity in which what the paper says it is corresponds with what it actually is. And if the paper claims objectivity and if it tells its readers that it is a paper for them, then that paper is authentic if it is indeed objective and if it indeed offers itself fairly and equally to all its readers. Of course, no paper is perfect, just like no person is perfect, but trust is built when integrity is consistent.

What are we to do then in this age of anxiety and distrust? In her 2014 interview with Krista Tippett on the On Being podcast, journalist Michel Martin describes journalism as being “a bridge to people who are isolated for whatever reason.” She says that when people entrust their stories to you, they are giving a gift: “I feel that they have given me something precious. And it’s my job to protect it.” And in addition to receiving that gift, journalists also have the responsibility to do what Krista calls “bearing witness to reality.” I think this is a perfect way to understand the work we are called to do. And as for readers, I think it is absolutely crucial that we continue to provide accountability to the papers we read. It really is that simple, I think, but it certainly is not easy.

I am committed to helping our paper continue to be a trustworthy source of news, a fair source of opinions, and an authentic representation of our school and its diverse community. I know that the team of editors I am blessed to work with share this vision as well. Readers, please know that we are committed to earning and keeping your trust and please continue to hold us accountable to the vision our community has given us, to be a paper that is authentic, truthful, and consistent in its integrity. Together, we can continue to make Eastern University a place where trust enables strong and lasting relationships.

Sources: Pew Research Center; On Being with Krista Tippett

      This has been a semester of loss, both for me and for a number of my closest friends. Whether that loss came in the form of a death in the family, the ending of a dating relationship, faculty changeovers or even just the fading out of once-prominent friendships, loss routinely reared its ugly head within my community and within my own life. And as I celebrate my friends who are graduating at the end of this semester, I am painfully aware that for all the good that graduation holds, it also means yet another loss.

      A month or so ago, a professor of mine sent out an encouraging email on dealing with loss. In his email, he wrote about the classic tale of Faust’s bargain with the Devil. For those unfamiliar with the story, Faust agrees to surrender his soul if the Devil gives him one moment of such total happiness that he is contented enough to die. My professor mused that the real temptation here turns on our desire to freeze time, to possess a moment in a way that counteracts its transitory nature. Since reading that email, I’ve been thinking a lot about the greedy Faustian impulse to seize a moment with both hands, desperate to keep life from unfolding into new moments. As I think about my graduating friends, I recognize just how tempting this bargain is: Esau sold his birthright for a bowl of soup; how much more tempting is a moment of perfect happiness?

      In trying to read myself into the Faustian narrative, I asked myself, “Why not give the Devil the benefit of the doubt? Besides losing your soul, what is so wrong with the bargain?” As I reflected, here are some reasons I decided the bargain just isn’t worth it. First, the Faustian way of life means that any moment in which I could conceive of even one little tweak to add would be a moment I spurn in my quest for perfection. How many almost-but-not-quite moments would I ignore or rush through before I finally arrived at perfection? And how many people would I ignore or minimize as I sought only to seize that final moment with graduating seniors? The price of contentment with only that which is perfect means a loss of enjoyment of living life in all its imperfection. Second, I am not convinced that I can love my friends well if I am seeking to possess the moment rather than allowing the moment to be what it will be and simply remaining grateful for the time I did have once time has moved on. At the very least, it seems to me that when I’m at my most Faustian, I’m also at my most self-absorbed, so focused on trying to enjoy it all that I lose all attentiveness to my friends and their needs and desires. Third, I’m not sure that the Faustian bargain actually entails proper love for myself: after all, if my whole disposition is trying to freeze time, when time predictably continues on its way, I am left with yearning and impotent rage at my own lack of control, rather than an abiding gratitude that can look back on fond memories with thankfulness.

      The greatest Faustian sin is presumption.

      It is presumptuous to think that we can recognize perfection. It is presumptuous to think that we can or should be able to freeze time for our own gain regardless of how many good things the future holds for our friends and even for ourselves. Worse even, it is most damnably presumptuous to live without gratitude because it can lead us to think falsely that we somehow deserve these moments, when indeed every moment we have life is a gift of God.

      But if I have been guilty of presumption, which is the chief of sins, I do not despair: for even at the end of the story, Faust is not quite outside the grace of God. So I repent. I have responded to loss by being presumptuous and ungrateful with the good still in my life. But I am thankful for my friends, both those graduating and those remaining with me, and I am thankful for this school, and I am thankful for the grace that God gives to us in each passing moment. And maybe, just maybe, that thankfulness is enough. Maybe there is beauty even in loss if only we can keep our eyes wide open and our vision attentive.