Terra Extraneus 2006 January

Yesterday I posted my review of 16 Oklahoma blogs (the “A’s” on the Blog Oklahoma directory). One that I recommended was A Disciple’s Journey by James McMahon, a Tulsa seminary an OCU graduate student. In that review I encouraged James to open up a little bit and tell us more about himself as he comments on the Scriptures and faith.

James responded today by writing:
A year ago, I was diagnosed with a neurological disease that on my good days only manifests itself in some numbness in my feet and occasionally my fingers, but on the worst days almost completely robs me of my ability to walk without a cane. At almost 30 years old, and being someone who for most of my adult life has enjoyed labor intensive jobs like landscaping, roofing, and carpet installation, it has been difficult to accept that those things I enjoyed doing are no longer physically possible for me to do.
How’s that for opening up!

Posted by Terry Hull on January 31, 2006 to We welcome our recent stream of visitors from two distinct areas: Dallas, Texas, and young people from throughout the British Commonwealth of Nations.
Our article, (Jan. 26, 2006), which provides a brief report on a church split in Dallas, has attracted about 30 readers to Terra Extraneus from the Dallas area in the last 48 hours.

We offer our greetings to the members of Valley View Christian Church and Cornerstone Christian Church. Rod and I pray for God’s best for both of your churches. I know enough about both churches to know that if anyone in the Dallas area is looking for a good Christ-honoring, Bible-believing church to attend, either church would be a good choice.

(Here’s more information about . If anyone has a website address for Cornerstone, please send it).
Meanwhile, Terra Extraneus also has been inundated lately with visitors from several foreign countries: Canada, Cyprus, India, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom.

Why in the world is TerraX suddenly of such interest to people of those nations? Here’s the riddle wrapped around that enigma: Those visitors have all come to TerraX by plugging into search engines some combination of the phrase “hard to keep a secret.”
Google it for yourself.

You will see that Terra Extraneus comes up No. 1 in the world on the search engine list for that particular phrase. Those searches are hitting on an article we published about the completion of TerraX s first month online ( Jan.

23, 2006).
But why are people all over the world searching on the phrase “hard to keep a secret?” That’s a very good question which had me stumped for a few days.

But I’ve cracked the code. The British Commonwealth of Nations, headed by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II herself, is composed of 53 nations that were formerly British territories. The six countries listed above are all Commonwealth nations.

A little noodling around has led me to the discovery that the Queen sponsors an annual essay contest for people 18 years and younger. The contest has been going on for more than 100 years. The deadline for this year’s entries is March 1, just in time for Commonwealth Day on March 12.

Contestants are divided into four age groups, and each group has a choice of five essay topics. Guess what one of the topics for 12- and 13-year-olds is? “How hard is it to keep a secret?

”
So, to the boys and girls of the Commonwealth, welcome to Terra Extraneus. I have a granddaughter about your age who is very special to me. I’m sure each of you is special, too, and I wish you luck on your essays.

The fact that you found me and I found you back certainly proves how hard secrets are to keep these days.
It’s a strange world. A girl in Battaramulla, Sri Lanka, doing research for her Commonwealth essay, finds her way via the World Wide Web to the blog of an attorney and a writer in Oklahoma, United States – 9,498 miles away.

When those Oklahoma bloggers wonder why a Sri Lankan girl came calling, one of them takes a trip via Google to the office of the Queen of England, and learns on the Queen’s website about the essay that Battaramulla girl is writing. Just 15 years ago, the words website, Google and blog did not exist, and the World Wide Web had just been invented. I don’t know your name, young lady of Battaramulla, but I hope you win the contest.

There aren’t many secrets any more – whether for students in Sri Lanka, or bloggers in Oklahoma, or churches in Dallas. Perhaps it has always been true, but it has never been more true than it is now: the things we do and say have a ripple effect that can reach all the way around the world. That can be a good thing, or bad.

Guess that depends on what we do and say.

“No one after lighting a lamp covers it over with a container, or puts it under a bed, but he puts it on a lampstand, so that those who come in may see the light. For nothing is hidden that will not become evident, nor anything secret that will not be known and come to light.

” (Luke 8:16-17).

Everything we do, as individuals and as churches, will eventually come to light. We are sometimes surprised or distressed when something becomes more public than we ever expected that it would.

We have the very human thought, “What will people think?” But the much more pertinent question is: What does God think? There are no secrets from Him.

As individuals, we are entitled to some privacy. For churches, however, it is almost always a good thing to get things out in the open, subject to the scrutiny and feedback of others. What one church does ripples through to affect every other church in the body of Christ, as well as our collective witness to the world.

No church or church leader has the right to ever forget that. Posted by Terry Hull on January 30, 2006 to Recently we listed Terra Extraneus on the directory, which lists 301 blogs written “in or about Oklahoma.” Terra Extraneus’ focus is news, morality, law, and faith.

As our category list reveals, our concerns include the health of the church, religious freedom, and events in the Middle East. In our first 50 articles, we have mentioned Oklahoma only three times.
However, Rod and I are Oklahomans, so I guess that makes TerraX an Oklahoma blog.

Rod has lived here since he was 5 (except for out-of-state grad and law schools); I was transplanted here from Southern California as a teenager. Both of us choose to live in Oklahoma now because there is no place we would rather live. I decided to get acquainted with the other 300 blogs on the Blog Oklahoma list.

That’s a lot of blogs, so I began with the first 16 (the “A s”).
First on the list (because its name begins numerically rather than alphabetically) is . Jared Ozvath is a 28-year-old Best Buy computer tech in Midwest City who describes himself as an atheist, Buddhist, Democrat and “proud liberal.

” On his homepage, Jared makes it amply clear that he is anti-Bush, anti-war, anti-Intelligent Design, and anti-Walmart. It is a stroke of comic genius that Jared is first on the list of Sooner bloggers, representing Oklahoma to the world.
Jared hasn’t posted to his blog since Nov.

14, 2005. That’s typical. A found that two-thirds of all blogs have not been updated in the last two months.

As a matter of fact, about one out of four blogs are “one day wonders.” Of the remaining abandoned blogs (those that posted more than once but have not been updated in the last two months), the average depth of the archive is just four months. The point: consistent quality blogging takes a lot of time, a lot of hard work – and something to say.

The majority of bloggers run out of steam quickly and leave their blogs dangling in the Internet wind.
(Rule of thumb: When visiting a blog for the first time, check two things: the date of the most recent post and the depth of the archive. Time weeds out most of the amateurs.

If a blog has been posting for more than a year and has been updated in the last few days, it is much more likely to be worth reading.)
Most of the blogs I perused were “dear diary” types about dating, dieting and such. James McMahon’s is a couple of cuts above the rest.

James, who describes himself as a “conservative Christian,” is an MDiv student in Tulsa. He begins all his posts with a Scripture, and his categories are sections of the Bible. He has an emphasis on spiritual formation – an emphasis most of us desperately need in our lives.

James, one suggestion, if I may. Unlike the mass of blogs, you are certainly not a “dear diary” site. Thank you for that.

But you go too far in the other direction. You reveal absolutely nothing about yourself. You love the Lord and you love His Word.

But if you want to increase our interest in what you have to say about the faith, let us get to know you a little bit in the process. (Of course, if you achieve your dream of becoming an academic, scratch everything I just said).
Carrie Goertz is a UCO senior studying English, with the plan of an editing/publishing career.

In other words, she is a fledgling writer. Her blog, , is a well-designed site, and Carrie makes great use of images (something most of us bloggers have not mastered). She writes mostly about literature, and is quite earnest.

I hope she succeeds.
The best blog by far among the Oklahoma “A s” is Brian Stone’s . Brian has been publishing his blog faithfully since October 2003, and An Audience of One received the 2005 Best Inspirational Okie Blog Award.

Brian, 44, is the academic dean of a Tulsa middle school. His blog is mostly personal, with some politics, sports and rock and roll mixed in. What Brian didn’t know when he began his blog in 2003 was that he would end up creating a poignant online journal about an agonizing event many of us have endured: the end of a marriage.

On June 7, 2004 ( ), Brian wrote:
I related in this blog recently about the romantic weekend my wife and I had in Leavenworth. What I didn’t tell was that the weekend retreat was something of an effort to save our marriage. Now it looks like that has failed.

… [My son] is mildly autistic (Asperberger s Syndrome), has A.D.H.

D., is emotionally immature for his age, makes a lot of messes around the house, and does many inexplicable things. He was a major cause of the breakup of my first marriage and is the major cause of this one as well.

… I’ve poured all of myself into this relationship and I don’t think I ll ever get over it. I love her very much This is going to require some changes in my life. I’m here in Washington without a network of family and friends and have two young children to raise by myself.

So I plan to move back to Oklahoma this August. … I think it was Thoreau that said, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Is that what my life is to become?

Or will I find something to bring me peace and happiness?
Curious to read more? I thought so.

During the rest of 2004 and all of 2005, Stone chronicles coming to terms with the failure of his marriage, breaking the news to his children, saying goodbye to his wife, the cross-country move back home (to Oklahoma), starting his life over again. It sounds like quite a soap opera – and, of course, it is – but Stone never turns maudlin. He keeps his posts brief, honest, and heartfelt.

He has a gift for understatement, like the example above: “This is going to require some changes in my life.” Brian’s blog does not read like the work of a would-be writer with an inch-deep life, but rather, like a person trying to make some sense of a complicated life, who takes a few moments each day to write about it.
Brian was raised a Baptist, but he doesn’t talk much about his faith.

Brian s blog is inspirational, not because he elaborates on matters of faith, but because of his optimistic view of life, no matter what life keeps throwing at him. Not that Brian gushes power-of-positive-thinking aphorisms, but he keeps moving forward, always an eye on the future still hopeful that tomorrow holds something worth showing up for.
Despite the name of his blog, Brian draws about 175 readers a day.

Make that 176. I’m adding An Audience of One to the TerraX blogroll.
Terry Hull is working his way through all 300+ blogs listed on the Blog Oklahoma blogroll.

For other reviews of Oklahoma blogs, see:
The election of Hamas to the government of Palestine is both terrifying and intriguing. “Binyamin Netanyahu, the Likud Party leader and former Israeli prime minister, said Israel shouldn t be surprised by the Hamas victory - the establishment of Hamastan, he called it,” reported by .
Hamas, an acronym which in Arabic also means “zeal” or “ardor,” was founded in 1988 and quickly adopted as the military arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine.

, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (Indiana 1994), at 694, et. seq. It was financially supported by Saudi Arabia and others.

Hamas’ charter of thirty-six articles makes it clear that nationalism and religious faith are intertwined such that for that reason no territory in Palestine may be left in the hands of non-Muslims. Further, Hamas’ charter spells out that there can be no solution to the Palestinian territorial claims except through Jihad. Hamas must engage in and promoter terrorism and warfare against Israel to fulfill its charter.

The election of Hamas to the government of Palestine will permit the international community to directly address Hamas’ commitment to warfare as the sole solution it will consider to its claims on Israel’s territory. Further, actions by Hamas can now be laid directly at the feet of Palestinian government and accountability might be more easily achieved. By going legitimate, Hamas might be forced to divorce its actions from its rhetoric in order to remain in legitimate power.

However, it is possible Hamas will drag the Palestinians back down the path of warfare and humiliation that have plagued those Arab nations with implacable designs on the territory of Israel. Those Arab nations were defeated by Israel in 1948, 1967, 1973 and throughout the 1980s and 1990s. After each conflict, the Arab nations that participated in warfare with Israel lost their military establishments, lost territory to Israeli occupation, and were humiliated.

Israel has incrementally vacated territory taken in these wars in exchange for peace with those Arab Nations. Hamas, on the other hand, arrogantly believes it can better the record of those Arab Nations and refuses to face the fact that if its theology is true, Allah’s will has been clearly announced.
If Hamas fails to go legitimate, if it embroils the Palestinians in another military confrontation with the Israelis, Hamas is more likely to set back Palestinian aspirations for another century, and maybe, irreparably.

If Hamas continues to bring about confrontation with the United States, Hamas may be forced to join the Taliban in the twilight of history.
Posted by Rod Heggy on January 28, 2006 to reported that inquiries are being conducted about possible incursions into the United States by either regular Mexican military personnel equipped with Humvees and fifty caliber machine guns or by imposters yet similarly equipped. If the military hardware is owned by the Mexican government, then it is either stolen or rented under very loose terms, uniforms included.

Moreover, the military appearing Mexican troops appear to be escorting illegal drug convoys.
I have no doubt that there are those that believe our porous southern border is hopelessly so. But, it seems more likely it is a matter of money.

In the 21st century, we should be able to place satellites in geosynchronous orbit capable of monitoring our southern borders. We should be able to afford to fly squadrons of A-10 Thunderbolts, better known as Warthogs, up and down our borders from several air bases in Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. If the Warthogs can find and destroy tanks, escort troops and have a range of 800 miles, coordinated with squadrons of helicopters, they could close the border, if need be.

A couple of squadrons of Abrams M1A1 tanks running up and down the border on live fire training exercises might tighten things up, too. The point is deterrence. Most likely, a couple of shots over the heads of these invaders would likely end the problem.

Photographing them would also assist conventional law enforcement.
The U. S.

Border Patrol is not trained or equipped to confront foreign military units, especially rogues, nor military weapons. The Patrol is not large enough to protect our northern and southern borders, nor the coasts, from penetration by any determined group. The Patrol should have the support of the military and the military budget would only need to be increased incrementally to sustain such an effort.

The U. S. Border Patrol has more than enough to do regulating entry by individuals.

Our thousands of miles of border can only protected by the military. That is the only source of technology, weapons and trained manpower necessary to deal with the issues created by terrain, rogue military incursions, and terrorists traveling enmass supported by foreign militaries.
The alternative is to ask conventional law enforcement forces to under take major new investments in equipment, weapons, technology and training.

While it is true we do not want to try and use our military as policemen, we do not want to be forced to convert our para-military police forces into actual military units. Not only is that not cost effective, it has other negative implications, as well, in confusion of mission and tactics.
Posted by Terry Hull on January 27, 2006 to A French man was fined $262,700 this week for attacking a urinal with a hammer.

Must be some urinal! You bet it is. A porcelain fixture manufactured by J.

L. Mott Ironworks of New York in 1917. The urinal, now on display in a Paris art museum, has an estimated value of around $4 million.

Fountain is the most beloved work of French artist Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp, a leader of the Dada school of art, bought the urinal, scrawled the signature “R. Mutt” on its surface, and submitted it to an art show (it was rejected).

In 2004 declared Fountain the most influential work of art of the 20th century. (Here s a , in case you ve never seen one).
Earlier this month Pierre Pinoncelli took a hammer to the urinal, cracking it slightly.

A handed Pinoncelli a three-month suspended sentence and the stiff fine. It’s not the first time Pinoncelli attacked Fountain. In 1993 he urinated in it.

What’s Pinoncelli’s problem with Duchamp’s plumbing masterpiece? Pinoncelli says he doesn’t have a problem with Fountain at all. Pinoncelli, 77, is a performance artist who says he was paying tribute to the work by participating with it.

“I wanted to pay homage to the Dada spirit,” Pinoncelli testified at his trial. Pinoncelli s argument is that his attack on Fountain constitutes another work of art.
Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) was a Frenchman who spent most of his life in New York City, creating “ready-made” art works (every-day objects which become art by being declared to be so) and playing chess.

Duchamp called his art “anti-art” because it mocked traditional art and art standards. Dada “anti-art” is absurdist art and an early cousin of abstract expressionism. Other famous Duchamp works include The Bicycle Wheel (1913), which is – well, you know – a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, and In Advance of a Broken Arm (1915), which is a snow shovel.

Another Duchamp masterpiece, L.H.O.

O.Q. (1919), is a reproduction of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, with the addition of a moustache and goatee.

When the letters of the work’s title are pronounced out loud in French, they form a phrase which refers lustily to Mona Lisa’s derriere.
In other words, Pinoncelli has been found guilty of vandalizing the art of an artist who has been hailed for creating art which the artist himself called anti-art because it mocked art by, for example, imagining the vandalization of traditional art. It’s a strange world.

By the way, the Fountain on display in Paris is not the original. The original has long since been lost. Duchamp did the world a huge favor in 1964, at age 77, by creating several reproductions.

That’s right, the urinal in Paris, worth several million dollars, is only a reproduction of the original urinal masterpiece.
What would Duchamp himself say about Pinoncelli’s attack on his beloved Fountain? The artist once wrote:
The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

Sounds to me that, were Duchamp alive today, he might be quite content with Pinoncelli “adding his contribution.” If not, of course, he could just reproduce another one. There’s always another urinal waiting to be declared a masterpiece.

Pinoncelli said he will appeal this week’s court decision. The world breathlessly awaits the outcome.
If only Frances Schaeffer were alive to see this.

Posted by Terry Hull on January 26, 2006 to Cornerstone’s pastor, Ron Key, who was formerly the senior minister of Valley View, had his 15 minutes of fame in October when President Bush nominated Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. Miers is Key’s long-time friend and attends his church, so many journalists contacted Key in an effort to ferret out Miers views on abortion and other issues. Many of those reports (like in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram) mentioned the church split.

I found those reports interesting not so much because of Miers as because of Key and Valley View. I am acquainted with Ron Key and have relatives and friends who have attended the Valley View church. Valley View is an “independent Christian church,” part of a loose-knit fellowship of several thousand non-denominational theologically conservative churches.

Rod Heggy and I have both participated in the independent Christian churches all our lives. Valley View is well-known as one of the largest such churches in this part of the country, so its progress has been of interest to us. (More info about the Christian churches is available and ).

Ron Key joined the Valley View staff in the early 1970s and served in several capacities before becoming the senior minister in 2001. However, in 2004, the church hired Dr. Barry McCarty as their “preaching minister,” while keeping Key on as “senior minister.

” That unusual arrangement wasn’t likely to last long. Last year Key’s tenure at Valley View terminated, and Valley View experienced a split, resulting in the formation of Cornerstone Christian Church.
What the new church didn’t expect was that just as it was getting started, one of its members would be nominated to the Supreme Court, bringing the church – and the church split – more publicity than it may have wanted.

Many of the news reports about Miers offered some details about the Valley View split, mostly echoing in the Dallas Morning News:
The Cornerstone group broke not because of politics or theology, but because of concern about how Valley View Christian was being run, including staff changes and changes in worship style aimed at attracting more young people.
The other day I thought about Ron Key and his new church and decided to search for any new reports about how Cornerstone is progressing. I can’t find a Cornerstone website, but I did come across this letter, reportedly written by the pastor’s wife, Kaycia Key, to Sundquist.

In her letter Key lays much of the blame for the church split on implementation of the Purpose Driven model. Sundquist said he has Key’s permission to publish her letter online. Here are excerpts:
December 14, 2005 and January 9, 2006
Our newly founded church, Cornerstone, is doing very well, has such a sweet spirit.

We have over 250 members and we are meeting in facilities provided by Dallas Christian College. …
I am so grateful to you for identifying [in Sundquist s book] some of the causes of my fear and concern for the Lord’s church. … His [Warren’s] theology is definitely skewed.

… Many who left Valley View Christian Church did so in great part because the leadership had developed an irrational and irrecoverable rupture in our common faith, belief and vision of Christ’s church after we studied and implemented the Purpose Drive Life by Rick Warren.
The church had been experiencing problems between the elders and the congregation and people were quietly (and some not so quietly) beginning to leave. When the elders brought in a new preaching minister people grew more unhappy and then after we did the Purpose Driven programs the rift developed into the rupture of faith and our vision for Christ’s church to the point of “re-visioning” even the foundational charter.

The elders … asked Ron to resign … or be fired. Ron … [said] they would have to fire him. … Ron Key did not, as some may have thought (or been erroneously told) start a new church, but was asked to become the minister of the new church, once it was founded.

Since then the church has grown to about 275-300, several of whom were refugees from other churches in the area who were also leaving because of many of the same issues with leadership that had developed in their respective congregations after Purpose Driven Programs. We are also now being able to share in love with more people about the perils of Warren’s programs. …
Many believers feel uncomfortable when a Christian challenges a well-known Christian leader publicly.

Perhaps one imagines that we should pull Rick Warren aside, maybe meet him for a coffee at Starbucks, to discuss our concerns. Unable to do that, some think perhaps we should just say nothing at all. Meanwhile, using mass media, Christian leaders are able to influence millions of believers and tens of thousands of churches all over the world.

Modern Christians and churches especially seem eager to be carried along by every new wind that blows through the church. The anthem of the 21st-century Church could be “Blowing in the Wind.”
When we become convicted that the “the latest new thing” seriously misses the mark of God’s Word, we are right to speak up.

And when the Church Gurus disseminate their ideas through the mass media, the only effective way to discuss or disagree with them is also through the mass media. We should do so in love and with respect, but there is usually more cowardice than honor in remaining silent.
I am not a fan of The Purpose-Driven Church, which has played a pivotal role in turning church worship services into marketing events (see my previous post, ).

I was disturbed by The Purpose-Driven Life, which, as many critics have pointed out, handled the Scriptures recklessly, with numerous out-of-context Scriptural quotations, often relying on loose paraphrases that distort the true meaning. I have never voiced those concerns before in any public way, but am prompted to do so now by the Dallas story.
In researching this article, I discovered that one of my favorite Bible teachers, John MacArthur, published a book last year that includes at least one chapter on the Purpose Driven movement.

The book is , and I look forward to reading it. MacArthur’s modern classic on the seeker-sensitive movement is , written in 1993, two years before Warren’s Purpose Driven Church was published. I heartily recommend Ashamed of the Gospel to all church leaders and anyone else concerned about the health of his or her local congregation.

UPDATE (Jan. 31, 2006): Readers from the Dallas area, please see this special message just for you:
UPDATE (Feb. 2, 2006): Rod Heggy has written a strongly worded opinion piece on church splits in general, and the Valley View Christian Church split in particular.

Church splits are as old and nearly as common as church picnics, but rarely are they discussed as openly and as analytically as Rod has done here. See:
UPDATE (Feb. 15, 2006): Dennis Slaughter, minister emeritus of Valley Vew Christian Church, has written a response to this article.

See:
Posted by Rod Heggy on January 25, 2006 to 10. Test number ten: Are music specials about beer, pickups and unfaithful sweethearts sung as reverently as The Old Rugged Cross?
9.

Test number nine: Do the members drive yuppie larva mini-vans or pickup trucks, especially the evangelist?
8. Test number eight: Are worship services and classes cancelled for the Super Bowl, deer season, quail season or good lake weather?

7. Test number seven: Does any Elder in the church successfully compete for money in Elvis impersonation contests?
6.

Test number six is an ink blot type of test: Does Franklin Graham remind us of the big hair era of TV evangelists?
5. Test number five: have the Elders passed a rule requiring sports analogies in the sermons?

4. Test number four: is four wheel drive an option or a theological issue?
3.

Test number three: does anyone in the congregation know a girl named Bubba? (In Oklahoma, it would be pointless to ask if anyone knew a guy named Bubba.)
2.

Test number two: no one in the congregation thinks feeding five thousand people by fishing for catfish is any big deal.
1. Test number one: does the evangelist wear a cowboy hat while preaching?

[List limited to ten by author; there are actually hundreds.] Posted by Terry Hull on January 23, 2006 to Terra Extraneus is one month old today. I believe Rod Heggy will agree that our first month of blogging has surpassed our expectations by every measure.

Our original plan was to put TerraX out there but keep it our little secret while we spent the first month or two getting it to look they way we want it to, and building some content. We imagined that nobody would know about it until we took some intentional steps to promote traffic. However, Rod put up our first post, on the topic of intelligent design, and less than two hours after Terra Extraneus went public, we had our first visitor and our first comment.

It’s been that way ever since.
So far we have done nothing to promote TerraX, but the world has somehow found out about us. We have had readers from Brazil, Canada, England, Ireland, Sweden, Finland, Australia, Japan, and China – and a majority of the 50 states.

Someone from the Palestinian Territory read a post of mine in which I respond to Pat Robertson’s comments about Israel, and a couple of days later I received an invitation to participate in an online discussion group of Palestinian Christians. TerraX has given Rod and I instant access to people literally all over the world. Amazing.

During our first month, we have had 311 visitors. (Our tracking software counts a visit as any number of page views by the same visitor with no more than 30 minutes between page views. In other words, if you come to our site and stay for several hours, that’s one visit.

If you leave our site and come back an hour later, that’s two visits). That computes to an average of 13 readers a day, almost 100 a week. Rod and I have posted a total of 47 articles, and 11 readers have posted comments in response.

One measure of success that the top hitters in the blogosphere watch is links how many other websites and blogsites link back to something we have posted on our blog. That has happened one time, when a pastor in California referred the readers of his blog to our review of George Barna s book, Revolution.
How have people found us?

One way is through search engines. The single biggest draw has been our review of Barna s book. That has brought dozens of people from all over the world to our site.

Another significant draw have been searches on the movies we have reviewed or commented on. Regarding many visitors, we don t have a clue what brought them our way.
Terra Extraneus is still far from what we envision it becoming.

If we had our way, TerraX would still be our little secret, in the pre-launch stage. But the world and the Internet haven’t cooperated with that plan, so we are hurrying to make many of the improvements we have in mind during the coming weeks.
If you are reading this, you are probably one of those 311 readers who came to visit during our first month.

Thanks very much for taking an interest. From the start, Rod and I have imagined Terra Extraneus as a conversation not just with each other, but with you. We welcome any suggestions you have.

If you are visiting TerraX for the first time, welcome to the conversation. It’s a strange world, but together, maybe we can make some sense out of it.
UPDATE (Jan.

31, 2006): Visitors participating in the Commonwealth essay competition, please see this special message just for you:
Posted by Rod Heggy on January 21, 2006 to is a Roman Catholic institution of higher learning governed by the Jesuits and in its mission statement, claims to be called to “promote a more just society.” Even as a non-Catholic, I have always been intrigued by the Jesuits and not a little awed by their history and accomplishments. That makes the present controversy impossible to fathom.

reported that LeMoyne College dismissed a graduate student from the graduate school of education because he wrote a paper favoring corporal punishment, spanking, as part of a program of discipline in an “ideal learning environment.” Litigation followed and a New York state court held that LeMoyne College violated its own handbook by failing to allow the student to appeal from the adverse decision. LeMoyne College has decided to appeal, according to the news report.

By the way, the paper earned an “A-“ and the student’s grade point average was above 3.7, so the dismissal could not be cloaked as academic failure.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (“FIRE”) has posted the results of their work in the matter to their website, which included the in favor of the student and ordering the school to follow its own handbook.

The opinion is only three pages long and does not mention the separation of church and state or distinguish LeMoyne College as a private religious institution, but merely ruled on generic contract principles. FIRE’s letters and the college’s original dismissal letter are also posted.
This is my first chance to review FIRE’s work and it was impressive in this case to this point.

For many years I have followed the work of Jay Sekulow, Esq. and even his opponents publicly recognize the quality of his work. FIRE may be playing a niche role with similar competence.

The private church run school was clearly wrong. But, are we happy to see a successful intervention by a secular court, even on secular contract grounds? However, without seeing the briefing filed by the college, it is impossible to know whether the school claimed its decision was based on religious views.

Equally troubling is that UCLA, clearly a leading educational institution in this nation supported by taxpayer funds, plans legal action against an alumnus that founded an organization targeting “political radicalism on campus,” according to , and presses its views through a website that identified “radical professors” and then rated them according to their views and efforts to convert their students to those views. UCLA’s cease and desist letter was based on trade mark violations. The website dropped all trade marks and disclaimed official affiliation with UCLA, but a UCLA spokesperson indicated legal action was still being designed to silence the website.

The lesson to be learned here is that even in California, where First Amendment freedoms have historically been cherished, there is a certain amount of hypocrisy about academic freedom. The professors have it, the students are the unwilling victims, and even a graduate of the school must not speak of it.
In both of these instances, the institutions of higher learning have become so afraid of the written word, even an unpublished term paper, that they have felt compelled to lash out and destroy the authors.

Or worse, are these institutions so flush with cash that arrogance has replaced intellectual honesty? Oklahoma institutions of higher learning would never consider such ridiculous actions, and I suspect it is because they are too busy making ends meet to waste time or energy, or highly paid personnel and legal fees, on such. Insofar as the public record yet demonstrates, there has been no accusation of defamation or violence against the authors to be silenced.

On both coasts, it appears, academic freedom and intellectual debate of some persons, but not those in some privileged class such as the professors, can be attacked consistent with the mission statement of these institutions. This is sad and frightening if it is a representative trend.