Erin Manning: July 2009 Archives

Rod's letting me pop in here to tell all those praying for the safe return of Luke Dillier that he has been found, alive and safe--thank you all so much for your prayers!

As I write this the most recent news was that he's in the process of returning to his family. Obviously there are many questions about this whole situation, but the important thing is that this young man will be going home.

These stories, even when they involve a runaway, so often end so badly. It's wonderful that this one has not, and that all the many volunteers helping to get the word out about Luke over the weekend can rejoice with his family that he is all right.

In his chapter titled Religion, the final chapter I'd like to discuss from Rod's book, Crunchy Cons, Rod writes the following (page 182 of the paperback edition):

To be traditionally religious, at least in the cultures informed by biblical religion, is to hold in some form a sacramental world-view. As we have seen earlier, a sacramental worldview is an essentially religious way of interpreting reality, even if one isn't formally religious, because it affirms a transcendent order beneath the surface of things. To see the world sacramentally is to see material things--objects and human actions--as vessels containing or transmitting ideals. To live in a sacramental world is to live in a world pregnant with meaning, a world in which nothing can be taken for granted, and in which no one or no thing is without intrinsic worth. If we live sacramentally, then everything we do and everything we are reflects the things we value.

I was in two very different places today with my family. The first place was a homeschooling conference; though I hadn't planned on attending the conference and hadn't signed up to hear the talks, I was able to spend some time in the vendor area and purchase quite a few of the books and materials my family will be using during the upcoming school year. When talks were in session, the area was relatively empty, and I could page carefully through the sample books at my leisure. But even when bigger groups of people entered as talks ended, and even when these groups included babies and small children, a peaceful atmosphere prevailed. No one was in a hurry. Everyone was perfectly happy to take their time looking at the items for sale, and making smart, thoughtful selections for their children's use. Frequently conversations would arise among women who didn't know each other about the merits of a particular math program, or the best books for teaching a recalcitrant fourth grade boy to write well-polished paragraphs. My family really enjoyed the time we spent there.

Because we were near a large outlet center that we haven't visited in years, my husband suggested that go there for a bit before driving home. I agreed; years ago when we'd first moved to the area we had gone to this place because it was a good place to take a walk in 100+ degree weather, and I sometimes enjoyed doing a little window shopping or even making a purchase or two. It was still being built at the time, and wasn't all that crowded in the summers back when we'd gone to it on occasion.

As we got close, we could see that things had changed. The parking lot was so crowded it might have been the day before Christmas. My husband suggested skipping our intended venture inside, and ordinarily I'd have agreed wholeheartedly, but now I was curious. What were all these people doing at a shopping mall in the middle of an economic downturn?

More:

First of all, I'd like to apologize for not posting for so long today. I planned to be out a while this afternoon and ended up being away longer than I'd intended--but then when we returned home, my husband discovered that our wireless router had died, leaving us without any Internet access. Sadly, we were just out of warranty, so our only option was to go and replace the router.

I don't usually ask for prayers here, but a situation has occurred in our local area that is just devastating a DFW Catholic homeschooling family. Their fifteen-year-old son, Luke Dillier, disappeared from outside his violin teacher's home Friday morning. Some family members of mine, who know this family, are helping with the search efforts. You can see Luke's picture and other information here.

I know that when a child of this age goes missing there are usually a lot of questions about whether he ran away, or whether he might have been taken. I'm sure the police investigating Luke's case will make those determinations and take all appropriate actions. But regardless of how he came to disappear, we all know that a fifteen-year-old is at risk if he is alone and on the streets. None of us would ever want a child of ours to be in that situation, and the family just wants their son to be found and to be safe.

Those of you who are the praying sort, I'd appreciate it if you would pray for Luke and for his whole family. Having a child go missing is one of most parents' worst nightmares, and few of us can hear of such a situation without great sympathy and concern. For my family members who know this family, the nightmare suddenly stopped being about "other people's children" and struck very close to home--and for Luke Dillier's family themselves, the pain they are in is impossible for anyone to imagine who has not been in their shoes.

This is just plain interesting:

Asthma is one of the most common ailments of young childhood -- rates among children under age 5 have risen 160% from 1980 to 1994 in the U.S. But while the list of triggers that set off bouts of wheezing and shortness of breath (allergies, pollution or strenuous exercise, for example) are well known, it's still not clear exactly how the various factors that cause asthma -- including genes, environment and exposure to pollution -- contribute to children's chances of developing the disease.

Now researchers at the University of Southern California say they have a clearer understanding. In their study of nearly 2,500 non-asthmatic children ages 5 to 9 who lived in the area, researchers found that the level of stress reported by the children's parents had a significant impact on the kids' susceptibility to other common contributors to asthma -- namely exposure to pollution from traffic and secondhand smoke. Scientists found that children whose parents described themselves as stressed and anxious were 50% more likely to develop asthma than kids with non-stressed parents -- at least when these youngsters were also exposed to pollution in a high-traffic, urban setting.

Parental stress alone did not increase the children's risk of asthma, but the combination of living in a household with high stress levels and being exposed to pollutants from traffic in the environment was sufficient to trigger the disease. The study found similar results with exposure to tobacco smoke. [...]

"The message to take away is that various factors overlap to create asthma," says Dr. Leonard Bielroy, an allergy, asthma and immunology specialist in Springfield, N.J., who has studied some of the condition's intersecting risk factors. "And whether those factors are psychological or physical, the more they overlap, the greater the chance of developing asthma."

While McConnell and his group did not specifically measure stress levels in the study's participants -- it's difficult to get a reliable reading in such a large number of youngsters quickly -- other studies have shown that parental stress translates directly with more-anxious kids. McConnell hopes that these findings will spur additional studies to investigate why, for example, asthma rates tend to be higher among lower socioeconomic groups. "There are a lot of potential reasons why poverty might be associated with asthma," he says, including that poorer families tend to live in more highly polluted, densely packed urban areas.

I think we're still just barely beginning to understand how aspects of modern living, including stress, impact not only our mental health but also our physical health. If the twenty-first century brings greater medical understanding of how the mind and body work together to promote healing, and how the mind can sometimes act as a barrier to physical healing even when the body is being appropriately treated with medicines or therapies, we will have accomplished something significant. And if we can focus in on things like stress, anxiety, depression, fear, and other things that affect both the mind and the body, sometimes in surprising and unexpected ways, we'll have made it possible for more and more people to pursue a goal of physical and mental health that sometimes, for some people, seems maddeningly elusive.

Anybody else find this pretty deplorable?

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. service sector employees who receive tips have been excluded from the latest hike in the federal minimum wage that kicked in on Friday, leaving the public to cover the cost of their healthcare, according to economists and advocates.

The federal minimum wage on Friday rose to $7.25 from $6.55. But only seven states guarantee tipped workers the minimum wage, according to a report by the National Employment Law Project, a New York-based advocacy group for low-income workers.

The minimum wage for so-called "tipped" workers has been frozen at $2.13 an hour since 1991, the report found. [Emphasis added--E.M.]

Waitresses and waiters, who comprise the majority of tip-receiving workers, have nearly three times the poverty rate of the nation's workforce, it said.

Wait staff are twice as likely to go without health insurance, partly because few employers help them pay for a health plan.

I know that real-life wages for wait staff may be higher than that minimum number in many markets, but the idea that wait staff are left out of the minimum wage is the one that gets me. Workers in high-end restaurants may be fine, but there are a lot of workers in casual dining places who probably aren't making enough in tips to make up for the difference between their wages and a decent living; and though in some areas wait staff may command more than minimum wage, in other, smaller towns and areas this likely isn't the case.

And in an economic downturn, when people cut back on eating out, order conservatively from a selection of middle or lower-priced menu items, skip appetizers or desserts, and otherwise restrain their spending, people who are dependent on tips as part of their livelihood are going to hurt even more.

I've personally never worked waiting tables at a restaurant; while I did work at a couple of mall-counter places in my college days, these weren't tip-based enterprises and I always earned minimum wage, or just slightly better. So I don't know what it's like to be dependent on tips as part of my pay.

But I do know that people gripe, all the time, about tipping wait staff and how much ought to be left. My husband is of the "figure 20% and then round up to the nearest dollar or two" sort, but both he and I have been surprised, on occasion, to be out eating and to see people put down a dollar or so per person after consuming a ten or fifteen dollar meal each. And I've seen attitudes expressed on the Internet to the effect that a ten-percent tip is perfectly fine for ordinary service, and that going "up" to fifteen or twenty percent should be reserved for extraordinary service.

Frankly, I think wait staff ought to be guaranteed minimum wage in the first place, and that tips should then help them make up the difference between minimum wage and a decent living.

In his Crunchy Con chapter titled Environment, Rod had me with the first paragraph, where he confesses to being an "avid indoorsman" who thinks of the outdoors as "...where the snakes live." I am so there. My poor husband ends...

Since people continue to be interested in the situation surrounding the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., I thought I'd bring the conversation up here. There are some interesting reports: CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- A black police officer who...

Back to our discussion of Rod's book, and the next chapter, Education. Though I'd had difficulties seeing how my family could possibly fit in the Home chapter, the chapter on education pretty well resonated with the values my family had....

Not long ago, my family and I went out for pizza. The restaurant, like so many these days, is covered with big-screen TVs--but they only play sports, and they keep the volume off, so it's not as annoying as some...

There's nothing like a little display of nude art in a shopping center near an elementary school to get parents riled up: WEST DELRAY - Think of Michelangelo's David . . . down to the last detail. The bronze statue...

When I first read Rod's book, Crunchy Cons, one chapter I had a real problem with is the next one I'd like to discuss: the chapter titled, simply, "Home." It seemed to me at the time that Rod was assuming...

I know Rod has written before about the law passed in 2007 which will phase out most incandescent light bulbs by 2014, but I found it interesting that apparently 72% of Americans don't like the idea: Washington's got another bright...

Continuing our "retrospective" (if you can say that of a book that's three years old) look at Rod's book, Crunchy Cons, we next come to the chapter on food. I think that this chapter has, in some ways, been among...

In 1983, the United States' Catholic bishops published a document titled The Challenge of Peace: God's Promise and Our Response. This document, which had a lengthy and sometimes contentious writing process, was intended to address for Catholics in America the...

At his news conference last night to discuss health care, President Obama commented on the case involving Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates: President Barack Obama, during a prime-time news conference Wednesday, said he didn't know what role race played...

I promised yesterday that I wouldn't spend the whole time I'm subbing for Rod talking about politics; I have something a little different in mind, and I hope you'll indulge me in it. It was three years ago when Rod's...

When I was writing the post below about Dr. Benjamin, I started thinking about Rod's post yesterday about food critic Frank Bruni's lifelong struggle with weight. As Bruni's article shows, it's possible to know perfectly well that one's food and...

Have you heard about the teapot-tempest surrounding Regina Benjamin, Obama's pick for surgeon general? No, it's not the fact that she's the latest in a string of pro-abortion Catholics Obama has appointed to a post in his administration (has the...

I do promise to write about more than just politics over the course of the next couple of days while I'm sitting in for Rod. But it's hard to ignore the various twists and turns in the health care debate;...

Ever since Rod's post about Evangelical culture earlier this week, I've been pondering something. I'm going to be thinking out loud, here; hope you'll bear with me. Anyone who looks objectively at the state of Christianity today, particularly in America,...

Don't know if anyone's been following the trial of evangelist Tony Alamo; truly stomach churning stuff there: Alamo, 74, is accused of taking five girls across state lines for sex between 1994 and 2005. The woman did not testify about...

So, does the First Amendment guarantee Americans freedom of religion, or freedom from religion? Depends on who you ask: MADISON, Wis. (AP) -- The nation's largest group of atheists and agnostics filed a lawsuit Tuesday seeking to block an architect...

This is a tragic situation, no matter how you look at it (hat tip: Creative Minority Report): A Spanish woman who deceived a U.S. fertility clinic about her age and become the oldest woman to give birth has died at...

The Sotomayor confirmation hearings continue, and one of the exchanges between the nominee and Senator Tom Coburn has attracted some attention: WASHINGTON (AP) -- One of Sonia Sotomayor's Senate interrogators had a joking response Wednesday when she talked hypothetically --...

Marty Peretz at his TNR blog has noticed something strange about the reaction to President Obama's choice to lead the NIH: I don't know who's behind President Obama's appointment of Dr. Francis S. Collins as head of the National Institutes...

I see that Rod has beat me to the sad story of Sir Edward Downes and his wife; I'd still like to point out this thoughtful blog post written yesterday by the UK Telegraph's Richard Preston: We've just finished our...

Good morning, all! Doing a bit of co-blogging today so Rod can concentrate on other things. Is it just me, or does some of the language being employed in the health care debate sound a little odd? For example: House...