Psalm 27 Reflection

The Lord is my light and my salvation— whom shall I fear?

The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?
  
I was introduced to Psalm 27 as a child in the context of a Christian kids tape that centered around not being afraid. I wasn’t a particularly fearful child, so it was a while before I saw the application to my life. A while before I realized that fear could be being afraid of pain, or of being alone, or being afraid that your life is always going as messed up as it is today. It was that last bit that I found most difficult—I had enough painful experiences in my early life that I had difficulty trusting God that things would actually ever get better.  I feared that I would always be unhappy, that I would never see God’s goodness in concrete ways.

This feeling was most intense after I graduated from university and had no idea what to do with my life. I recently reread emails to friends I wrote in that period—in which I had finally decided to apply to grad school, and was rejected by every single one.  You see, although I have academic gifting I also have a learning disability which has dogged me throughout my schooling—a brokenness even in my greatest strength. There’s a strong sense of desperation in these old emails, of just barely treading water as I waited to apply again next year. I remember how little confidence I had that God had any sort of good plan for me. It was in this period of my life that I discovered the ending verses of Psalm 27:

I am still confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

Wait for the Lord; be strong and take heart and wait for the Lord.

Despite my lack of hope I clung to this promise. God would show me his goodness in this life; I wouldn’t have to wait until heaven.  It might not look exactly like what I was expecting, but I could trust him. I just needed to wait.

These verses remind me of that famous verse in Hebrews: “Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.” I think that just about sums up the Christian calling and condition. We somehow have to be okay with seeing partially, with glimpses of God’s goodness in this broken world as we wait for the renewal of all things.

Yet God does show himself in our lives in surprising ways. For me it’s been through evidence of his grace as I traveled to far away Toronto for school, had a terrible first year, found Knox, and learned to love my fellow grad students.  I have truly seen God’s goodness and I confidently expect to see more. When I doubt I remind myself: Take heart. Do not be afraid.


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Written for the Psalm series in my church's newsletter.

Happy End of Term!

This (by far the best comic that I have yet seen in the York newspaper--usually they're just terrible) is in honor of my poor history of psychology students who probably felt this way about their final. Tomorrow morning bright and early I'm off to torture...I mean proctor a make-up exam for those who missed a exam at some point in the semester, and from there back downtown to the Toronto bus station to take the Greyhound to Buffalo, and from there I fly to Chicago, and from there to LA, and from there home. Yup, I sure know how to take the direct route home. At least I'm not backtracking all the way to Boston this time!*

The upside to being a grad student is that you don't usually have scary end of semester exams--it's all papers and presentations. But the downside is that you aren't done when you finish your own work, you still have to do grading for the class you TA. So I'm heading home with 84 student papers to grade (or mark, as they call it here in Canada) as well as several unfinished projects of my own. Luckily the papers were electronically submitted, so they only take up space on my laptop, not in my luggage! At least it is an interesting paper topic: students are supposed to choose two women from the Feminist Voices website, one from the Women Past section which covers women from psychology's past and one from the Feminist Presence section, which profiles modern feminist psychologists and then write a fictional conversation between the two women about psychology, their research, their experience of being a woman in academia, or whatever! So it should be fun to see what the students have come up with. Some of the titles I've seen are quite clever (like "Hard Times at Harvard" or "Fierce Spirits Within").

If you have a couple minutes you should check out the profiles on the website. Each woman has photographs and a brief biography on their profile page, and some even have videos associated, like Psyche Cattell* (who not only has a video, but who also has the most awesome picture of her climbing a tree in full Victorian garb). Eleanor Gibson and Milicent Shinn also have profiles on the site, which I wrote. Did I mention that this website is the project of my advisor and that I've been responsible for adding most of the 'Women Past' profiles to the website? No? Ah, this must be one of the things I meant to blog about and didn't. Well, it debuted this summer at several conferences, and in the spring my colleagues will present on how to use the site in the classroom at a couple of psychology conferences. So marking the student papers is actually a meaningful task--I'll be looking to see if they understood the instructions, noting any consistent problems across papers that suggest we ought to modify the assignment in the future. But I had better get back to packing--despite the fact that I'm not carrying any student papers, I'm still having trouble closing my suitcase!

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* True story. It was cheaper. Not recommended.

* If you're marveling about the odds of a psychologist named Psyche you should know that Psyche's father was James McKeen Cattell who was an early psychologist. But he didn't think she ought to be a psychologist--for a bit more of the story, see Psyche's profile!

Chapter 7: In which Elissa gets her M.A.

It has been brought to my attention that I’ve been remiss in updating my adoring public on important life events. I hereby repent in dust and ashes and officially announce that I have completed my M.A.!

I successfully defended my master’s thesis in December and was most gratified by the positive reception I received from my thesis committee—they approved it with no revisions and even nominated it for a university thesis award! As far as statistics go, the thesis is called Eleanor Gibson and the Visual Cliff Myth: The Biography of a Scientific Object, is 151 pages long, and has 166 separate references. Whew! I don’t think it’s my best writing ever, and so don’t feel the fierce pride that I often do for my writing, however it represents a huge expenditure of time and effort. As you can imagine, I’m quite relieved and happy to have it finally finished.

What’s next for me? Well, as it turns out completing the thesis doesn’t portend huge life changes: I will stay on at York and complete my Ph.D., so about 3-4 years more. I’m happy about this, as I have gotten established in the program, have a church that I love, and feel at home in Toronto now. As for what’s next in terms of academic projects (i.e., for my dissertation.), I’m thinking I will probably leave Eleanor Gibson and her visual cliff behind and write on Milicent Shinn.

_____________

Eleanor J. Gibson _____________________Milicent Shinn

(1910-2002) _______________________ (1858-1940)

Milicent Shinn was a psychologist from California who published The Biography of a Baby in 1900, the first systematic observation of a baby’s early years conducted in America. Like my thesis, this (potential) dissertation project focuses on a woman psychologist who did developmental psychology, but I expect that, also like my thesis, Shinn’s biographical details will provide an interesting point of departure for investigating larger psychological and historical questions.

I am somewhat bemused to be choosing another developmental psychology topic, since I did rather poorly in my undergraduate developmental psychology class, and didn’t particularly like the subject matter (these two tend to go together in my experience). But it seems to have grown on me, and then again, who doesn’t like babies? If you need convincing of the charm of babies, just watch this trailer:

Eleanor Gibson photo credit: Dr. James Maas, Cornell University.

What I did on my summer vacation

the visual cliff experiment,

Sadly, it's only two minutes long and so doesn't show rats and chickens and goats being tested on the visual cliff like the complete version does, but at least you can get an idea what the apparatus looks like. If you really want to know how more about Eleanor Gibson or the visual cliff here's a fairly informative obituary and an online reprint of the original 1960 Scientific American article which first publicized the results of the study. Oh, and you can also look at some funny pictures of pigs and babies and goats on the cliff which were taken for an article in Life Magazine (click on any of the 'Related Images' to see the other pictures).

Pro-life Feminism

This fall I led a short presentation and discussion on Pro-life feminism in the feminist research group I'm a part of in grad school. Needless to say, I was in the minority in my pro-life views, however the group was gracious and didn't kill me on the spot. I learned some interesting things about the debate in our discussion, and the topic certainly deserves further coverage in my blog. At the moment however, I thought I would simply share some of the best resources I found in my research for the presentation. Check out these links--they are all well worth it.

ProWomanProLife
This Canadian blog is a good representative of the modern pro-life movement: focused on changing society's attitudes towards abortion, rather than more punitive or inflammatory approaches. Taken as a whole, the blog articulately makes the case that being pro-life is a legitimate feminist view. The nine female contributors (all with very different personalities and reasons for being pro-life), combined with the blog format, allows for a flexible, multifaceted take on various women and abortion related issues. This also means that the posts are occasionally off-topic and humorous , which I think serves to bust some stereotypes about pro-lifer's seriousness and humorlessness.

Better Homes and Children
A fascinating article from a Christian perspective which analyzes the advertising in the '50s for their cleanliness, health and progress narratives, and argues that we've internalized these in our thinking about children and mothering. Amy Laura Hall shows how this thinking has contributed to a devaluing of life-- buying into the myth of the perfect child, the perfect family, has resulted in treating children as commodities, the creation of designer babies, and the rise of abortion. People choose to kill their own child rather than suffer imperfection (either imperfect timing which might disrupt their notion of a perfect life or an imperfect child). Hall describes the societal pressure that leads to this: "Legal, efficient forms of controlling birth changed parenthood from a probable given in marriage to a task that must be chosen responsibly and performed well. Aspiring young couples today often speak about parenthood as if each potential child, each possible life, must be justified—each conception brought about only under the best timing and after obviously adequate preparation." Hall doesn't spare the church, however, and her recent book, Conceiving Parenthood, chronicles the rise of this attitude in her own denomination--Methodist. Both the book and the article make extensive use of popular culture artifacts-- advertising, photographs, church publications, etc. making them engaging reading. (Unfortunately the online version of the article doesn't include the pictures--to see the pictures, find a print version of Books and Culture)

John Piper
John Piper has preached more than his share of sermons on abortion in the course of his ministry. I found one sermon by Piper, Abortion: Shall We Listen to Men or God?, particularly relevant and encouraging. I know it must be difficult to preach on this subject as a modern pastor, and I think Piper sets an excellent example for courage in speaking out.

Life Network
This doesn't exactly qualify as a resource, but Life Network is my local crisis pregnancy center, and so is what I'm generally thinking about when I talk about pro-life action. Over the years they're really done an excellent loving and caring for both mothers and their babies. You may recognize some familiar faces in this promotional video--Jasmin and Silvia with Jasmin's two kids, telling how Life Network was there for them.

Flipsyde--Happy Birthday
Also not really a resource, but a rap song on Youtube about the effects of abortion. Enough said.

Tree or Rhizome?

In my theory of psychology class this term I read the following:

In philosophy, Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) applied the metaphor of a root in order to describe various forms of thought. Metaphysics was described as the root of a tree in which everything was derived from a single source or first cause. Modernity was characterized as favoring a fasciculate root, a system of small roots with many sources. (Teo, pg. 138)

Got it so far? I thought not. In other words, metaphysics is like a tree, where there is one main root, with smaller roots branching off, whereas modernity is like grass, which has multiple small roots.

Now, I’m not sure what exactly the justification is for saying that modernity has multiple small roots, and I don’t think that metaphysics and modernity are that distinct. If I were creating a model of thought using a tree it would go something like this: Philosophy is the root is the root of the modernist tree. Philosophy has produced a diverse body of knowledge, including the sciences and the humanities. Each of these fields of study has split into numerous specializations, however it is still possible to trace each branch back to its roots, which is ultimately metaphysics—those ancient conversations about the nature of what is. Nice, right? It’s all very neat and tidy and logical.

Teo continues:

However, postmodernity was described as a rhizome, a stem organ in which branches in the air could grow again into the soil, where old parts died out and where new branches were formed elsewhere. (pg. 138)

My response: Ugh! What a mess!

Even worse, Teo says that modern psychology may be best characterized by the rhizome, given how disunified it is. According to Teo, a postmodern approach to psychology would challenge the “logocentric” notions of cause and effect and “the idea that the person was the center of awareness, an integrated whole, and an entity that opposed other entities” (Teo, pg. 138).

Now, I’m not going to go of on a rant about postmodernism, as much as I’m tempted. I do think that it leads to a deadly epistemological chaos, as the analogy of the rhizome so perfectly illustrates, and that nothing could be worse for psychology than this sort of nonsense.

But let’s consider the tree and the rhizome for a moment, evaluating them simply on their aesthetic merits.

The tree stretches towards the sky for light, and burrows deep into the earth to find water. It has both form and flexibility, trunk and leaves. It is symmetrical. It is strong. Things can be built with its wood. It provides shade. It bears fruit. Children climb it. Birds nest in it.

The rhizome, well… its ability to grow all directions and not be killed by a single cut is pretty useful. There are a few rhizomes, like potatoes and ginger, which I would hate to give up. But in terms of aesthetics, it’s not going to win any beauty prizes. We’re talking about crabgrass here, people! Although the rhizome is certainly an apt analogy for postmodernism, it strikes me as a pretty poor mascot choice. No contest, the tree wins!

Now the only problem with this whole little exercise is that I’m not sure I really want to be chief cheerleader for modernism, or give it a monopoly on the tree. While a neat hierarchical tree is useful for describing science (or church history, for that matter), Biblical trees strike me as wilder and more symbolic. Of course there’s the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in Genesis, and the Tree of Life in Revelation whose leaves are for the healing of the nations. And there's that comforting image of the wise man as a tree planted by streams of water, which yields its fruit in season and whose leaf does not wither. No, I wouldn’t trade the biblical trees for modernist tree, despite its charming simplicity.

But perhaps a premodern, medieval tree* would do the trick?





Yes, that’s more like it. Much better than a rhizome!

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Teo, T. (2005). The critique of psychology: From Kant to postcolonial theory. New York: Springer Science.

*Tree by Tolkien.

Ghosts and Grad school

I rarely buy new CDs, generally sticking to my dear old favorites, which more often then not are classical, which limits somewhat the selection of new CDs that are relevant (how many interpretations of Bach do you actually need?). However, I have a new favorite CD! It’s is Ghosts and Spirits, by Phil Woodward, available for purchase here, or to see the lyrics or hear the music, see the CD site, here. It’s inspired by C.S. Lewis’ book The Great Divorce, and so each song corresponds to a different scene, sentiment or character in the book. For example:

• The man who refuses “bleeding charity” because he wants his good works to count for something.
• The woman who is consumed with love for her dead son, and is thus unable to accept divine love.
• The man constantly fighting the lizard on his back, who, finally surrendering the battle to another, finds the monster transformed.
• The artist who has forgotten his first love—why he began painting—and wants to paint heaven.
• The saint who, unrecognized for her simple acts on earth, is enthroned as a glorious queen in heaven.

But summarizing these more direct correspondences to book doesn’t do justice to the originality
of the lyrics. These characters, whether ghosts or spirits, merely provide the inspiration for the songs, but then are developed further and differently than in the book. Woodward ties in other Lewis references or ideas, such as one character who says about the grey town “I know it’s not good but it’s safe”, turning Lewis’s description of Aslan on its head (“Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”).

The song that most causes me to exclaim “How true, how like life!” (to quote E. Nesbit) is one that that is only loosely inspired by the book. I don’t have any evidence for this, but I suspect this song was influenced more by The Abolition of Man, Lewis’ comment on the state of education. It’s a recitative in positively Screwtapesque tones called Thirst for Water, Inquiry for Truth. You really have to hear the intonation to really appreciate it, but here are the lyrics:

Thank God (in an abstract sense) that we’ve
Mustered up the courage to leave
The battered ranks of the naïve.
Remember that angst, that earnestness,
That intellectual distress,
That accompanied our youthfulness?
My friends, ’tis clearly a priori
That cultures espouse a meta-story
A veritable intellectual quarry
From which they draw their sense of shame,
Their paradigmatic value claims,
And their institutes of praise and blame.
But we, the academic heroes, rise
Above their existential cries
For we need no answers to be wise:
For wisdom lies neither in value nor fact,
But in modesty, honesty, courage, and tact
And in confessing what our academies have lacked,
Their myopic, close-minded approach to thought,
All the unnecessary battles they’ve fought,
And their delightfully one-sided concept of God.
So, tirelessly toil we, on their behalf
And rejoice in the day when they give even half
Of the heart we so nobly put into our craft.
And together we’ll stand, amidst a whole host
Of trivial drivel, and raise high a toast
To the death of the things that matter the most.

I reproduce the text here because it is scarily close to the attitude that I've found to be prevalent in grad school. I don’t mean to single out any of my colleagues, but I think it’s a hazard that we in history of psychology are particularly prone to. Not only can we cast ourselves as “the academic heroes” in terms of the misguided Whig history of yesteryear, but we can also do so by comparing ourselves to modern empirical psychology, which we see as still in thrall to the positivist myth.

But while presentism (dismissing the past as ignorant and regarding modern views as the correct standard for judging the past) has been at least been recognized as a hazard in history, what most worries me about this view is its relativism. For all their faults, at least historians of the past were searching for an objective truth, valued fact and had a purpose for their inquiry. I think most of my professors would argue that truth, value and morality are all constructed, products of our meta-story, the metanarrative of our culture, or perhaps our particular sub-culture (Christianity, for me, of course). What we are to do as historians is uncover the metanarratives of the past, the meaning which people constructed for their lives; we cannot judge the past by modern standards, we are not looking for any sort of objective, universal truth. I could not disagree with this view more. While I acknowledge some of the insights of postmodernism and I agree that what sense people in the past made of their lives is essential for understanding their history, I am convinced that we must be able to make judgments about the truth and falsity of their views. Just because they believed something (that the four humors controlled health, for example) does not make it “true for them”, a category above criticism. Obviously this calls for a post in its own right, and perhaps I’ll do that sometime in the future. But meanwhile check out Ghosts and Spirits and enjoy some great music!





P.S. The first image in the post is the CD cover, but the others are Great Divorce-themed images that I found on the web. The second image is from this blog where someone posted photos they took of an art show and there are several other Great Divorce-themed works there. The third is from Flicker, and is the work of an artist who has many other really nice pieces, some of them of Narnia. Both are really worth a look!

Thanksgiving

Ah, America! That was my reaction upon arriving in Chicago for a whirlwind celebration of "American Thanksgiving" with my sisters. I don't have many emotional ties to the Midwest, yet I found myself inordinately fond of the quintessentially American small town of Wheaton, where Adelle goes to school. The train that goes through the middle of town, the small shops on the main street, the signs of patriotism, the friendly people, all these made me feel that I had come home. Even the aspects of America that one hardly considers positive, such as commercialism and chain stores I found endearing quirks upon returning to my homeland. Here I know the culture, understand the people I encounter and am not likely to be disgraced by something as simple as buying a meal--accidentally giving a quarter when I mean to give a Loonie.

The only thing tempering our joy at our reunion was a paper on Kierkegaard Krista had to write, but we still managed to fit in lots of time together. We toured Wheaton College, met Adelle's friends, saw her church, danced around outside when it snowed, and went on many walks around town. Thanksgiving Day was celebrated with Adelle's friends Liz and Brynna and their inimitable parents. Adelle and Co. had masterminded a full Thanksgiving meal for us and pulled it off with only a small apartment kitchen and utensils. There were 9 of us and 9 pies--so enough for leftovers for days to come!

Lots to be thankful for. What made me think of writing a post was that this time last year I meant to post on something I was really grateful for. Last November I had just retaken the GRE and improved 160 points--a phenomenal change for a score out of 1600! I didn't know whether that would be enough to get me into grad school, but I was so thankful for God's grace in helping me to improve that much. Today I am nearly done with my first semester of grad school--paid do something I love. Regardless of the challenges involved in academic life, now's a perfect time to remind myself of my gratitude to the giver of all good and perfect gifts.