School Screens Are Worst for the Least of These

by | Sep 18, 2024 | Uncategorized

Halfway through fifth grade, the school district issued a laptop to our son. Up to then, his “accelerated learning” classroom had been a pretty good fit. He had a great teacher, dynamic peers, and a pace that challenged and stimulated him.

But with the laptop, our son’s learning immediately went off-track. He browsed the internet in class, played online games, fiddled around with display settings, changed his desktop photo, and then changed the photo again. His grades, behavior, and organizational skills suffered. Even after his 504 educational plan for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) was adjusted, he had less and less success in school.

Our son is an insightful kid who’s in constant motion, as prone to getting locked into classic literature as arranging his toy cars. He joined our family through foster care and adoption and is, as his fourth-grade teacher informed us, “twice exceptional,” possessing both significant capabilities and significant impairments.

I’ve long observed that children like him, with backgrounds of early adversity, develop deep sensitivities to things that others do not particularly notice. In so many cases, their responses are the canary in the coal mine, alerting us to something important that will soon affect everyone.

Classroom tech is something important—and as another school year begins, parents and pundits, organizations and educators are hearing the canary’s song on school-issued laptops and tablets. Screen-based learning, it turns out, has not proven particularly effective, negatively affecting students by interrupting their focus, decreasing their attention spans, and desensitizing their brains’ reward systems. One study found that about 13 percent of US teens have viewed pornography on a school-owned device during school. Even when conventional social media platforms are blocked by internet filters, laptops open up channels of cyberbullying through Microsoft Teams, YouTube, and Google Docs.

These realities impact all students. But for kids like my son—for the 11 percent of school-aged children with ADHD or for children suffering the lingering impacts of trauma—screens have even more severe effects. Their conditions make them more susceptible to developing the attention fragmentation, sleep deprivation, social deprivation, and addiction that psychologist Jonathan Haidt identifies as the major risks of a high-tech childhood.

Thus, screen-based learning creates an educational disparity for children who are especially vulnerable through no fault of their own. My son’s disability meant that he paid a higher price for the district’s laptop decision relative to his peers—and there seemed to be no remedy. His school was unwilling to accommodate off-screen learning for him, telling me, “It’s just not possible.”

Christians should want to address this. We’re called to cherish children, helping them avoid whatever causes them to stumble (Matt. 18:6). We also serve a God who prioritizes the needs of the most vulnerable community members (Ps. 68:5; Matt. 19:14; 25:40). By advocating for school-tech policies that accommodate disability interventions and establish loving guardrails, we take a stand against the “war on the weak.” We flourish as Christ followers, becoming his hands and feet in specific commitments to the least of these.

Our Christian advocacy on this issue also offers an opportunity to understand anew God’s enduring intention for human flourishing. Through the struggles that our son and other vulnerable children have with screens, we reaffirm something marvelous about our created human nature and the Lord’s delight over us (Zeph. 3:17).

In our son’s encounter with classroom tech, it became impossible to ignore how essentially creatural he was—how important it was for him to learn in an embodied, relational environment. Already his childhood trauma—connected to his ADHD—had led him to struggle with attachment, a word that’s always felt too sterile to describe the rich sense of mattering. Babies matter first to their parents, through eye contact and loving touch; children who experience disruption or pain during their formative years develop “disordered attachment.” That intrinsic sense of being unique, cherished, and secure within loving relationships, that inner conviction of worth and innate sense of personal security, is broken.

Screens can exacerbate this brokenness for kids who already experience it. And screens also seem to break something in all of us, exerting a pull out of our God-ordained personhood and into a nonpersoned, disembodied, and nonreal world of missing attachments.

Good learning takes not more solo time in front of a screen but rich relationships that span the spectrum of intimacy. Close family is important, but so are peer, teacher, and public relationships. Good learning means we stop scrolling and involve our full bodies, moving in space and time.

Our family had a very rare opportunity to enroll our son in a school where every tech tool is “ruthlessly evaluated” before being used in the classroom. Students have scheduled sessions in a computer lab for writing, attend classes like website development, and can use a graphing calculator for some math problems but have no access to an “under-regulated digital world.” The school makes participation in class and extracurriculars independent of individualized screens as much as possible. Our son has wrestled with his attention and organizational skills, found decent academic success, and further developed his gifts.

A retreat from high-tech learning might not be a retreat at all. It might be an opportunity to affirm that learning apart from personal interactions is bankrupt for everyone, not just students like my son. It might be a chance for God’s people to shape education that honors children’s need for attachment as they grow and flourish. In that shaping, we refer back to a God who exists in eternal relationship, a God who took on flesh in the person of Jesus Christ and who provides for all our embodied needs.

Wendy Kiyomi is an adoptive parent, scientist, and writer in Tacoma, Washington, whose work on faith, adoption, and friendship has also appeared in Plough Quarterly, Image, Mockingbird, and The Englewood Review of Books. She is a 2023 winner of the Zenger Prize.

The post School Screens Are Worst for the Least of These appeared first on Christianity Today.

Shielded from Truth at Our Own Expense

by | Sep 18, 2024 | Uncategorized

Around my sophomore year of college, I approached my African American History professor, Dennis C. Dickerson, to inquire about my performance. Honestly, I was fishing for a compliment. I spoke frequently in class and expected his praise. And since he was one of a limited number of Black professors on campus, I thought he’d flatter me as a show of solidarity given our shared identity. 

He did not. In no uncertain terms, Dickerson told me I was a poor communicator and needed to tighten up my half-cocked and convoluted arguments. 

I had to pick my jaw up off the floor. I was devastated. I was so shocked that I lost a couple nights of sleep. I’d assumed I was a proficient communicator, but he’d candidly burst my bubble. He exposed that I was more verbose than artful, more opinionated than informed. (I’m sure my detractors will say his assessment is still true.)

That was the most important and formative moment in my academic career and remains one of the most valuable moments of my life. As André 3000 said, his words were hard “to swallow. But so is cod liver oil.” 

Once the sting of the truth subsided, I saw his critique was right. His reproach has rung in my ears for years, and I’ve become determined to communicate more concisely and persuasively. I don’t believe I could’ve learned the lesson so well without his frankness. A sugarcoated message wouldn’t have had the same impact.

Dickerson’s straightforward correction was the method of many of my elders. My grandparents’ generation had a way of bluntly letting you know when you were in the wrong. It was more than tough love. It was wise guidance that demanded humility and self-examination in the listener. 

Both are necessary for self-awareness and growth. But in too many circles today, candor is frowned upon. And pointed critiques, no matter how truthful, are prohibited. We’ve expanded the definitions of concepts like harm and victim blaming to include anything that causes embarrassment or guilt. The question now is how a comment will make one feel, not whether it is right or wrong.

In some contexts, your social location can protect you from all correction. It has become acceptable to disallow candid critique of entire groups of people. 

We identify an enemy—the “woke” for some, “cisgender males” for others—and imagine them as the source of all that is mean and evil. No one from these groups could possibly have anything to contribute to our betterment, we tell each other. We’re good, of course. And even if we’re not completely good, it’s only because they’ve forced us to be bad to survive. We parade around in our façades, shouting this false narrative to exalt ourselves while ignoring or trying to censor those who dissent. 

It’s not only the commentary of outsiders that we are quick to malign. Sometimes we also scorn the unflattering appraisals of people inside our own tribes. Any conservative Christian who critiques Christian conservatism will quickly be branded a phony and a sellout—as if there’s no possibility that a culture that got slavery and Jim Crow wrong might also have more recent errors. I’ve seen the same basic pattern play out among Black social media influencers when someone questions whether an aspect of the culture is healthy or seeks in-group accountability.

This pattern is in partisan politics, too, where supporters of candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris reject even friendly scrutiny—which is not just unreasonable but undemocratic. The pushback I’ve received from fellow Christians for scrutinizing political candidates has left me to wonder, like Paul in his letter to the Galatians, “Have I now become your enemy by telling you the truth?” (4:16).

Of course, discomfort with criticism isn’t always unfounded. In America, women and racial minorities have too often been the recipients of malicious and unfair judgments. They’ve been measured by discriminatory scales and called unfit based on arbitrary norms. This is what happens when critique is disconnected from relationship and compassion, and it’s wise to be skeptical of critique from those who’ve shown us neither fairness nor love. 

Still, that very important reality does not put anyone above or below fair and constructive criticism—especially not those running for office. The Bible consistently tells us we must examine ourselves, both individually and collectively (2 Cor. 13:5; Lam. 3:40). What does good reproof look like in practice?

I’ve found a model worth imitating in Nannie Helen Burroughs, who is the subject of two books from Jasmine L. Holmes and Kelisha B. Graves. Both have given me a greater appreciation for the art of cultural critique as Burroughs practiced it. 

An advocate for civil rights and women’s rights, Burroughs was also an educator, orator, and devout Christian. She dedicated her life to bettering her people and America more broadly through social action and forthright commentary. She didn’t pander to white America, nor did she pander to Black America. 

Burroughs’s work reflected the love of Jesus, and her words could cut like a two-edged sword. She told the white American church it needed to stop using the Bible to perpetuate lies. She told Black elites to stop separating themselves from and looking down on common people. 

Burroughs would never have accepted the dangerous notion that her people—or any group—were without value or without their own cultural pathologies. She had the moral knowledge to understand that a love which only affirmed and coddled was a lesser love. She knew that when coupled with relationship and self-sacrifice, piercing words can liberate us from ignorance of our own faults. 

Burroughs earned the credibility to critique through her sacrifices for the people she was critiquing. And if she could constructively scrutinize her own people in a time of great oppression, then Christians of all ideologies and races can do the same. We must have the courage to critique our own cultures and the humility to accept the corrections of others. The people we love cannot grow and thrive without self-examination, and neither can we. 

We must “speak the truth in love” (Eph. 4:15, NLT) and reject the pride that lures us into rejecting good and fair critique—whatever its source. We are shielded from truth at our own expense.

Justin Giboney is an ordained minister, an attorney, and the president of the AND Campaign, a Christian civic organization. He’s the coauthor of Compassion (&) Conviction: The AND Campaign’s Guide to Faithful Civic Engagement.

The post Shielded from Truth at Our Own Expense appeared first on Christianity Today.

God at the Bottom of the Glass

by | Sep 18, 2024 | Uncategorized

As a child I had no formal religious training. My parents were not opposed to faith, but they did not find it particularly relevant to daily life. 

At age five, I was sent to a local Episcopal church to sing in the boys’ choir so that I could learn music. I learned to love the hymns, but the theology washed over me without leaving any discernible residue. I can still play most of those hymns by heart on the piano—yet for the most part, I have trouble remembering the words because they had little impact on me.

As a child and adolescent, I had occasional moments of a strange longing for something that might be called spiritual, oftentimes inspired by a musical experience. But I couldn’t put it into words. Much later I learned to recognize this as a potential glimpse of the eternal, something described by C. S. Lewis in Surprised by Joy. But at the time, I had no framework for interpreting such experiences. 

Going on to college and graduate school in physical chemistry, I lost any glimmers of spiritual interest and essentially became an atheist. I was unwilling to accept anything as having meaning or consequence if it couldn’t be measured scientifically. That of course denied the very possibility of anything outside of nature. 

My adopted worldview thus presupposed that materialism is all there is. That in turn rendered such questions as “Why is there something instead of nothing?” and “Is there a God?” irrelevant. In its exclusionary stance, this philosophical view was actually not science—this was “scientism,” although I did not recognize it at the time.

But then I underwent a transition in my professional plans, moving from a focus on basic questions in chemistry and physics to an interest in life science and enrolling in medical school. I found the study of the human body fascinating on scientific grounds, and it was harder to keep those deeper questions about the meaning of life at bay when I found myself dealing with life and death on a daily basis. 

I could see that many of the patients I was assigned to were facing the end of their lives and that our medical interventions were unlikely to save them for long. Some of them were angry, some depressed, but some who had strong faith in God seemed oddly at peace. 

One afternoon, an elderly woman with advanced heart disease shared her Christian faith with me, explaining in deeply personal ways how her faith in Jesus provided her with a sense of comfort as she prepared to die. I was silent, awkwardly not knowing what to say. 

But then, in a moment when time seemed to stand still, she looked directly at me and asked, “Doctor, what do you believe?” With an intense and unexpected flush of discomfort, I realized I had just been asked the most important question of my whole life. 

Struggling to provide an answer, I knew that down deep I had nothing to say. I stammered something like “I really don’t know,” saw her look of surprise, and ran from the room.

This interaction tormented me over the next few days. I still thought atheism was the only rational option for a thinking person, but then why did her question make me so uncomfortable?

I realized that I had arrived at atheism without considering whether there might be evidence for other alternatives—something that a scientist is not supposed to do. I knew a few friends and professors who were Christians. While I assumed they must all have been brainwashed about this as children, I still wondered whether there was some explanation for how such scientifically minded people could hold ideas about God in the same brains that were studying biochemical pathways or cardiac surgery. 

So, I began a search of books and people to try to understand this mystery. Through the assistance of a pastor who lived down the road, that search brought me to a little book by C. S. Lewis called Mere Christianity. 

As I turned the pages, I realized with considerable alarm that my atheist arguments were laughably superficial. One by one, they were demolished by Lewis, an Oxford don who had also once been an atheist. Lewis anticipated my objections at every turn. 

He helped me understand how atheism suffers from the arrogance of asserting a universal negative (again, something that scientists aren’t supposed to do). His logic also helped me see that atheism presents a colder, more sterile, and more impoverished view of humanity. Lewis led me to consider, for the first time, the true significance of good and evil. 

He described something I knew from experience but hadn’t really thought much about: the universal human experience of being called to be moral creatures, though we all know that we regularly fail. Purely naturalistic explanations for morality (for example, the argument that it somehow has improved our chances for successful reproduction over many millennia) seem to account for some of this, but they fail to explain examples of sacrificial actions that we humans consider truly noble—the ministry of Mother Teresa, the legions of people volunteering for the Peace Corps or Habitat for Humanity, or countless other individual acts of radical altruism. Was this a signpost to God?

Lewis also opened my eyes to considering experiences he called “joy” that I had dismissed—those rare moments, often inspired by the beauty of music or nature, when I had a glimpse of something profound, a sense of longing I could not name, a piercing ache that was somehow more satisfying than any earthly happiness but gone too soon. I recognized those in myself. Was this another signpost?

Additionally, I became aware that science itself provides pointers to a Creator. Examining the data from multiple different perspectives, physicists now tell us unequivocally that there was an initial start to our universe around 13.8 billion years ago, where out of nothingness came this unimaginable explosion of matter and energy. This so-called Big Bang cries out for answers to the questions “How did that happen? What came before that?” But I was stymied. 

Nature has not been observed to create itself. If there is to be an answer, therefore, it would seem to require a force outside of nature—a “supernatural” force. However, to resolve the dilemma of the origin of the universe, this Creator would have to be unconstrained by space and time. Otherwise, the next question would be “Who created the Creator?”

The more I looked at how our universe has been put together, the more amazed I became at the evidence for an intelligent Creator. As a scientist, I had studied and admired the elegant physical laws that govern matter and energy. These were simple, even beautiful, mathematical representations of scientific truth. But why should the universe have such properties? 

As I further explored these laws, I learned something even more stunning—that the universe is precisely tuned to allow something interesting to happen after the Big Bang. Go with me here for a minute. The mathematical laws that govern matter and energy all include constants whose actual value cannot be derived by theory; you just have to measure them. They are what they are. 

Take gravity, for instance. Gravity has a very specific, measurable, universal force. (Don’t worry about the exact number, but here it is, just to show you how specific it is: 6.674 × 10−11 N⋅m2/kg2.) Gravity made it possible after the Big Bang for matter to coalesce into stars, galaxies, planets, and ultimately us. 

But what would happen if the value of that gravitational constant were just a little different? Here’s the stunning answer: If it were just one part in 1014 (that’s 1 with 14 zeros) stronger or weaker, there would be no stars, galaxies, planets—and hence no possibility of life.

It’s not just gravity that has this knife-edge fine-tuning to allow for an interesting universe. All the other major constants—the speed of light, the strong and weak nuclear forces, the mass of an electron, and several others—that determine the physical properties of matter and energy have precisely the value they need for us (or any other complex life form) to be here.

This can’t just be good luck. Even the atheist Stephen Hawking allowed that “the remarkable fact is that the values of these numbers seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life.” Either these parameters were set by a Creator, or we are forced to consider the possible existence of an infinite number of alternative universes with different values of these constants. 

Because we are here, we are in the one (or one of the very few?) where it all worked out. Scientists tell us that it is extremely unlikely that we will ever be able to observe the existence of these other hypothetical universes. Furthermore, their postulated but unproven existence does not solve the problem of how these universes all got started and why there is something instead of nothing. Given these options, I had to conclude that the Creator hypothesis was profoundly more compelling than the atheist alternative. 

Ultimately, I seem to have lived out the predictions of a quote attributed to the Nobel Prize–winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, the author of the famous uncertainty principle: “The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.” I had reached the bottom of the glass.

Francis Collins is a physician scientist. He founded the BioLogos Foundation, led the Human Genome Project, served as director of the US National Institutes of Health, and leads an initiative to eliminate hepatitis C in the United States. He is the author, most recently, of The Road to Wisdom: On Truth, Science, Faith, and Trust.

Excerpted from the book THE ROAD TO WISDOM by Francis S. Collins. Copyright © 2024. Available from Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group Inc., New York, NY, USA. All rights reserved.

The post God at the Bottom of the Glass appeared first on Christianity Today.