Chris Burfield

An image of the stewards position below the throne in the Lord of the Rings

For the last couple years my church in Wilmington, Port City Community, has been kicking off every new year with a series that encourages everyone to rethink their new year’s resolutions. It is easy to make resolutions but harder to keep them and as my pastor likes to point out it is because we often take the wrong approach. We make resolutions that are too vague, shallow, or even worse try to fix everything instead of focusing on one thing. In order to combat these tendencies the goal is boil all of our resolutions down to one word. This will provide focus and clarity about the kind of person we want to be and more importantly the kind of person God would have us be a year from now.

It did not take me long to arrive at my word. When I started to think about it one of the first words that came to mind was steward. As I started to focus on this word it came to dominate my thinking more and more. The New Oxford American Dictionary defines steward as:

- 3rd definition for noun: a person employed to manage another’s property, esp. a large house or estate.

- 2nd definition for verb: manage or look after (another’s property).

The neat thing about my word, and something I did not fully realize until I looked it up in the dictionary, was that it could be used as both a verb and a noun.

Being a faithful steward requires one to recognize that everything one has is not technically his (Psalm 24:1-2). He is to take care of it and manage it well. I have been given quite a lot, a relatively healthy body, a very good education, American citizenship (which puts me in the top 1% of the world in terms of money), and above all I have been given the grace and mercy of God.
I did a keyword search of the bible to find references to stewards and a number of verses came up that I could use to motivate this word. I will share with you 2 passages. The first lists the qualities of a good steward and leader:

For the overseer must be above reproach as God’s steward, not self-willed, not quick-tempered, not addicted to wine, not pugnacious, not fond of sordid gain, but hospitable, loving what is good, sensible, just, devout, self-controlled, holding fast the faithful word which is in accordance with the teaching, so that he will be able both to exhort in sound doctrine and to refute those who contradict. Titus 1:7-9 NASB

The second passage is longer and I will not quote it in full. It is a parable and an explanation of the parable told by Jesus in Luke 12:35-48. Jesus tells of a faithful steward who was put in charge of some slaves while the master went away. The faithful steward keeps everything in order and is ready to serve the master when he returns. The unfaithful steward begins to believe that the master will never return and so mismanages things and abuses the slaves under him.

This passage brings to mind the best non-biblical image of a steward that I can think of. In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien describes the line of stewards that were charged with ruling Gondor after the line of southern kings failed for lack of an heir. They ruled in the name of the king, with all of the powers of a king, but never styled themselves as such. In the throne room as depicted in the films Denethor sits in a chair that is set below the king’s throne. Unfortunately, Denethor was an unfaithful steward, he gave up against Mordor and never believed that that the heir from the line of northern kings, Aragorn, was a true heir and did not relinquish power as he should have.

It is one thing to pick out a word, it is another to follow through with it. Psalm 119:5 proclaims “Oh that my ways may be established to keep your statutes!” So how will I establish my ways? I have four main goals:

- To faithfully steward my time.

- To faithfully steward my body.

- To faithfully steward my money.

- To faithfully steward the gospel of Christ.

The last did not even occur to me until I did the keyword search of the bible for the word steward and realized that many passages call for us to be faithful stewards of the message of Christ. The first and second goals will be the hardest for me. It will require the most change from my habits and ways of thinking but I plan on starting to make a habit of always asking myself before making a decision if this is something a faithful steward would do.

It will be an interesting journey and a year from now, hopefully sooner, I will be able to report what God is doing in my life through making this word a part of my character.

I’m tired.

The political coverage is already starting to get to me. I started off as just annoyed this past summer when the various Republican presidential commands started to get revved up but I was willing to indulge my unhealthy addiction to politics by watching the debates. As the number of insane things the candidates were saying became larger the only thing that kept me going was turning to comedy and seeing what SNL, Jon Stewart, and Steven Colbert were saying in response. We are still 11 months from election day and I am already starting to tune out because it is just becoming too much.

The problem is that it does not look like it will get any better for the foreseeable future. I’m not just talking about the short term, this year’s election, but the way we conduct elections in future years. Each state is trying to one up the other by moving their primaries up in the calendar in order to receive some national attention. With the way our political decisions are made this is entirely rational, agricultural and ethanol subsidies are truly bad on an economic and political level but the fact that Iowa has pride of place as the first caucus in the nation has helped to keep them in place. Each candidate dare not come out against the subsidies for fear that they lose the votes of Iowans in their caucus. Other states see this and want the same thing for their special constituencies. The parties are trying to penalize states that do this but it is not working. As a result the primaries for every major election year seem to occur earlier and earlier.

This is not good for the public political discourse either. I linked to a Glenn Greenwald piece of Salon on Facebook yesterday and I will quote here:

As I’ve written about before, America’s election season degrades mainstream political discourse even beyond its usual lowly state. The worst attributes of our political culture — obsession with trivialities, the dominance of horserace “reporting,” and mindless partisan loyalties — become more pronounced than ever. Meanwhile, the actually consequential acts of the U.S. Government and the permanent power factions that control it — covert endless wars, consolidation of unchecked power, the rapid growth of the Surveillance State and the secrecy regime, massive inequalities in the legal system, continuous transfers of wealth from the disappearing middle class to large corporate conglomerates — drone on with even less attention paid than usual.

So what can be done to fix this?

In my ideal world we would have a national primary election day in August, the political conventions in September, and the national election in November. While this would greatly shorten the election season it would create a host of new problems, not insurmountable, but none the less real. The largest problem that I see is that it would require primary candidates to campaign simultaneously in all 50 states and thus require a great deal more money than is now needed in the early stages of our current system. Right now a candidate needs to make a small investment, small relative to my ideal plan, in just a few states and most are weeded out so that serious candidates go further in the process. You may argue that campaign finance reform could fix this but most campaign finance reform that I have seen has some disturbing limits on speech that worry me.

Since my ideal plan has some problems I would be willing to accept the following. All 50 states are divided into three equal groups. 1/3 of the states have their primary elections in June, another 1/3 in July, and the last 1/3 in August, political conventions in September, and the national election in November. Every four years the group of states that went last in the previous primary elections moves to June, the states that went first in the previous election get moved to second in line, and so on in a predictable way. This way no set of states gets pride of place and is allowed to distort national policy. Of course this plan is not perfect either. While it would help shorten the election season and lessen the financial requirements of my ideal plan it would require the coordination of all 50 states and both major political parties.

It has never made sense to me that Iowa and New Hampshire who make up 1.4% of our national population and will collectively seat 40 of the 2,286 GOP delegates at the 2012 convention get to set the tone of the party debate over who their nominee will be. My plans are not perfect but they are a far sight better than our current system and I would like to think they would help reduce the insanity.

I tweeted last night that I was not going to watch the Republican candidates debate each other on foreign policy because I was not interested in watching them compete to see who could kill the most people. The only one who was not going to compete in that contest was Ron Paul and from reviews of the debate I am reading this morning he did not disappoint. Otherwise, I’m also reading that I was right to miss the debate.

If I remember correctly the last two have focused on foreign policy but the previous 9 have almost strictly been about domestic policy. It is no wonder, because it is almost impossible to see how President Obama has overturned any foreign policy precedents set by President Bush. Here is my attempt to catalogue all the policies that Obama has kept in place or expanded:

- Obama continues to back Israel’s every demand in the UN, telling the Palestinians in September that they will not get their own state.

- He doubles down in Afghanistan.

- He lobbies and fails to get Iraq to let us out of an agreement signed by Bush to pull out of Iraq at the end of this year.

- He has kept the prison for “enemy combatants” in Guantanomo Bay open.

- He has expanded drone strikes into Pakistan, Yemen, and who knows where else.

- He goes to war in Libya and when he runs out of time according to the War Powers Act he doesn’t request or receive approval from Congress and continues the war anyway.

- He has authorized the assassination of US citizens without a trial.

And that is just a list that I could remember off the top of my head. I am sure there are more. So it is no wonder the Republican candidates were so extreme last night, they have to run further to the right than Obama and even further than Bush in order to appear anti-Obama enough to the Republican base.

Foreign policy is one area in which I have changed my opinion the most in the last couple of years. We spend a vast amount of money on “defense” but I don’t see the return on investment. And no highly placed elected candidate right now seems willing to say that. For instance, many in Congress and Republicans are apoplectic that the failure of the super committee will mean cuts to defense spending. Seriously!? I urge you to look at the data put out by the Congressional budget office and put into a nice little graph by Veronique de Rugy at the Mercatus Center. Instead of a 23% increase in defense spending there will only be 16% increase in the next 10 years.

Last night Romney said that is time to bring entire cultures into the 21st century, if this is not a perfect example of Hayek’s fatal conceit applied to foreign policy I don’t know what is. We cannot change cultures at the point of a gun. We cannot continue this war on terrorism, it is a tactic and tactics will only go out of use when they stop being effective. It will continue to be effective as long as we trade liberty for security and allow terrorist attacks to get us bogged down in foreign countries.

It is time to re-evaluate our priorities in foreign policy. The only one who seems willing to do this is Ron Paul and I don’t think he has a decent shot at the nomination much less the presidency. If we don’t re-evaluate we’ll go bankrupt.

media |ˈmēdēə|

noun

1 plural form of medium

2 An industry that produces a constant source of material with which to show that the average journalist knows nothing about economics or social scientific research.

Ok, you won’t find that definition in the Oxford English Dictionary but it might as well be. A study regarding how well informed consumers of media are has been making the rounds on my facebook feed. Seemingly innocuous, it caught my attention because the headlines of the stories refer to how misinformed viewers of Fox News are. Enough people have linked to articles regarding this study that I feel the need to respond in a longer format than would be appropriate for a facebook comment. I’ll give you two articles and their headlines:

At Slate: Study Shows Fox News Viewers Less Informed On Major Stories

At Huffpost: Fox News Viewers Know Less Than People Who Don’t Watch Any News: Study

First, some disclaimers. I know these websites are left of center internet sites. I am also no fan of Fox News or TV news in general. All media, especially TV media, are prone to soundbite journalism and false controversy to drive up ratings/page views. And last, I find these stories amusing, if I didn’t know any better they would help confirm some of my own biases.

All of that said there is not much to recommend about these stories. About the only thing that could be recommended is that they provide links to the actual study so that you can read it for yourself. Otherwise they do a bad job of interpreting the results of this study.

The Slate article, while still crafting a headline that sells a false story, does the best job of providing some key details. The study used a sample of 612 individuals from New Jersey to study how well informed people are given their choice of news. At no point in the article does the author question the validity of these results or show how they may not be accurate. Instead, the author takes the study as gospel. Huffpost is almost the same except that they do not even give you the sample size.

The two issues that immediately come to mind regarding this study are the sample size and the representative nature of the sample. The press release of the study with all the details on the questions and answers of the poll reports that the margin of error for the entire sample is +/- 3.5 percentage points. While this is not bad it is not good either. When you drill down into subsamples of this data, say, examining just Fox News Viewers, the margin of error is going to be much larger. And while it may seem obvious it must still be pointed out that the people of New Jersey are not representative of the nation. If I were to craft a headline regarding this study it would be:

New Jersey Viewers of Fox News Are Less Informed, Margin of Error High

Even though it is more accurate the problem with that headline is that it doesn’t sell. Nobody is going to click on that headline or pay attention for even a minute on a TV broadcast if you are going to sell a story that way. I am sure the authors of the study did the best they could do given the limitations of their sample but they are being used. The truth loses and Huffpost and Slate are just as guilty as Fox News when it comes to misinforming their readers.

Just when everyone thinks baseball is over big, league-wide news was released yesterday. It is not unexpected news, now it is just official. The Houston Astros sale was finally completed and with it they’re move to the American League, and two new teams will be added to the playoffs as wild-cards. Since the schedule has been set for next year the re-alignment of the Astros will not occur until 2013. The changes being made to the playoffs may occur as soon as next year.

As a fan I see this news as a mix of both good and bad.

Pros:

- The move of the Astros to the American League will by necessity cause the current unbalanced schedule system to be scrapped.

- More teams have a chance at a World Series title.

- With an interleague game every night we may finally see a resolution to the DH stupidity. Either have both leagues with a DH or not.

Cons:

- The meaning of the regular season is further diluted and the playoffs are no longer about crowning the best team, they’re about who is the best in one short stretch of time.

- While the unbalanced schedule will be scrapped we will now have an interleague game every night because there are 15 teams in each league. Now the only difference between the American League and the National League will be the DH rule.

So a mixed bag, but I personally think there is more bad than good. While there will always be progress and things will never stay the same forever there needs to be some respect shown to the way things were. These moves show no respect to the tradition of the two leagues and to the meaning of the regular season. I think baseball is in the position of reacting to football and they are not truly innovating, they are imitating.

In football, both pro and college, there are not enough games during a regular season to truly determine who the best teams are and so a playoff where a large number of teams have a shot at a title is necessary. In baseball there are 162 game over the course of 6 months that do a very good job of determining who the best teams are. The playoffs should allow only the best teams to compete. With additional wild card teams we are getting closer to the point where teams that are just marginally better than .500 having a chance to knock off the best teams by taking advantage of short playoff series. Were the St. Louis Cardinals the best team in baseball in 2011? No, the two best teams as measured by regular season record, the Philadelphia Phillies and New York Yankees, were both knocked out in the first round where all it took was 3 wins out of 5 games.

Also, the tradition of the two leagues will be lost. With an interleague game every night the World Series as a battle royale between the two best teams who have not played each other up to that point will also be lost. I think it could be argued that the reason the 2011 World Series was so exciting was because both the Texas Rangers and St. Louis Cardinals had not played each other during the season. The lineups for both teams had never encountered the other team’s pitchers. They had seen film and scouting reports, yes, but actually standing in the box with a live fastball is different than a scouting report. Early in the series the pitchers had an advantage, the hitters adapted but by the time they had done so we were already into Game 3 or 4, allowing for enough back and forth between the teams to increase the possibility of a seven game series.

In the end I don’t blame the owners and general managers for agreeing to this. They are after all motivated by the financial and business benefits that will result from these moves. I just wished they had included some respect for tradition and realized they are diluting the meaning of their regular season.