Banholzer defends himself over criticism of recent school prayer column.
As a frequent contributor of letters of public interest, whenever I attempt to bring something important into community awareness or start drafting a possible suggestion to help us all, in the back of my mind I’ll imagine what my harshest critic might say.
Recently I was pleased to be assigned by your gifted editor Autumn Agar the ‘pro’ point / counterpoint subject of school prayer. Right from the get-go I could see it was a tough subject and was stuck on it for a few days, until after mulling it over the midnight ethanol; when I decided to take an unconventional approach, and with the recent discovery of the God-Particle at CERN laboratories in mind, focused on examining the deep mystery of prayer and how it might actually work.
After doing so, it felt as though the article flowed better. Had I had chosen some of those bland age-old arguments about school prayer we’ve heard about so much before, my column would have been unentertaining. Meanwhile, my harshest critic said, that I ignored the question entirely, “preferring to expound on a crackpot theory of prayer that belongs with pixie dust and ruby slippers.”
To defend myself; if my harshest critic would take time to reexamine the latter part of my plainspoken letter, where I led up to the real meat of broad-minded spiritual studies; he will see that I did not ignore the issue at all. And for the record, in this valley there really are many forms of good magic to be had, if you choose not to ignore it. To start better embracing those nicer aspects of spiritualism, I suggest that folks merely make better efforts to spend more time in our great outdoors, where waterfalls, wildflowers and mountains can help heal and inspire us to become better people, which is another thing that I pray for our fine school leaders to encourage.
I did also receive some positive feedback from this article as well from Rob MacGregor who said:
ReplyDelete"Good one, Jim. The key phrase was 'broad-minded spiritual studies.' But that's a tough one to put in place, especially in public schools. Most people, unfortunately, identify spirituality with religion and religions tend to promote their own self-interests at the expense of other religions. Put paranormal studies in the classroom and you probably get people calling it the devil's class, or something like that. Nevertheless, your argument is stronger than the counterpoint, and more elevated."