Apparently I’m taking a vacation from blogging. There is always the archives, if you would like reading material. All comments will be held in moderation.
Much like roughly half of Californians, I thought I wanted to be a yoga teacher. The teacher-training programs have become expensive though, and now individual states are attempting to regulate yoga-training programs using a voluntary on-line registry of programs. The yoga industry is resisting regulation with claims of spirituality and the like:
The conflict started in January when a Virginia official directed regulators from more than a dozen states to an online national registry of schools that teach yoga and, in the words of a Kansas official, earn a “handsome income.” Until then, only a few states had been aware of the registry and had acted to regulate yoga instruction, though courses in other disciplines like massage therapy have long been subject to oversight.
The registry was created by the Yoga Alliance, a nonprofit group started in 1999 to establish teaching standards in an effort to have the industry regulate itself. In a recent newsletter, the alliance warned its members that nationwide licensing might be inevitable, “forcing this ancient tradition to conform to Western business practices.”
I guess you can’t regulate something spiritual. Not that we know what “spiritual” means precisely.
It’s generally accepted that women are more emotional than men, but apparently there is very little evidence for this. Here’s a recent experiment:
To see why people continue to believe that women are the more emotional sex, the scientists devised their straightforward experiment. They showed 48 men and women (college students) pictures of faces depicting anger, sadness, fear or disgust for three seconds. Beneath each picture was a sentence describing a plausible reason for that emotion—the rattlesnake or road-rage examples I gave above. The participants then saw the faces without the sentences and pressed either of two keys to indicate whether the person in the picture was “emotional” or “having a bad day.”
Both men and women attributed women’s emotional expressions more to their emotional nature and men’s to the situation—despite being given situational information to explain every face.
I’m wondering how often often I assume that women are more “emotional” at work. Perhaps more than I’d like to think. This is a pretty engrained stereotype.
I guess we should never be surprised at reality shows:
Turkish television station Kanal T hopes the answer is a ratings success as it prepares to launch a gameshow where spiritual guides from the four faiths will seek to convert a group of non-believers.
The prize for converts will be a pilgrimage to a holy site of their chosen religion — Mecca for Muslims, the Vatican for Christians, Jerusalem for Jews and Tibet for Buddhists.
A minister reflects on his resignation (and that of a colleague), and I’m reminded of the summer in between my first and second year in the MDiv program when it became very clear that there were churchgoers who were not so kind.
Although the vast majority of churchgoers, in my experience, are decent and kind, parishioners less charitably disposed can find ingenious ways to make a minister’s life miserable: criticism of everything from comportment and grooming to sermons, salary and administrative style. If you’re decisive, you’re an autocrat; if you seek to build consensus, you’re a weak leader. Late in my father’s very successful ministerial career, the board of elders in a large and affluent congregation demanded that he personally reimburse the church for the photocopies he made for church business.
Some congregants, intent on disruption, can be more devious, striking by indirection. In my case (and, as I understand it, at Riverside), dissident members leveled criticisms at the minister’s wife and family.
When this seemed like an ordinary recession, there was a great deal of advice to stay in school (college, graduate school). But is a master’s degree worth it?
I’m not convinced that measuring a degree’s power entirely on income potential is a fair index. And all master’s degrees are not created equally. But it’s interesting to read the opinions on What Is a Master’s Degree Worth?