Politics

Larycia Hawkins, a professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, decided to wear a head scarf during the Advent season as a gesture of solidarity with Muslims. In doing so, Hawkins quoted Pope Francis, saying that Christians and Muslims “worship the same God.”

But some evangelical Christians disagree — and Wheaton, a Christian school, responded by putting the political science professor on paid administrative leave. The college says it needs time to review whether her statement puts her at odds with the faith perspective required of those who work there.

The case also raises some big questions of theology.

Most mainstream Muslims would generally agree they worship the same God that Christians — or Jews — worship. Zeki Saritoprak, a professor of Islamic Studies at John Carroll University in Cleveland, points out that in the Quran there’s the Biblical story of Jacob asking his sons whom they’ll worship after his death.

“Jacob’s sons replied, ‘We will worship the God of your fathers’ — Abraham, Ishmael and Isaac. He is the God,” Saritoprak says. “So this God that Jacob worshipped, this God that Abraham, Isaac worshipped, is the same God that Muslims worship today.”

Christians, however, believe in a triune God: God the father, God the son (Jesus Christ) and the Holy Spirit. And many evangelicals will say that means Muslims and Jews do not worship the same god as as Christians.

“The question basically comes down to whether one can reject Jesus Christ as the Son and truly know God the Father,” says Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. “And it’s Christ himself who answered that question, most classically in the Gospel of John, and he said that to reject the Son means that one does not know the Father.”

But Christians themselves differ on this question. The Second Vatican Council, speaking to Catholics back in 1964, affirmed that Muslims “together with us adore the one, merciful God.” And Amy Plantinga Pauw, a professor of Christian theology at Louisville Seminary, says Christians can have their own definition of God while still seeing commonality with Muslims and Jews.

“To say that we worship the same God is not the same as insisting that we have an agreed and shared understanding of God,” Pauw says.

One theologian with knowledge of both Christian and Islamic doctrine is Hamza Yusuf, president of Zaytuna College in Berkeley, Calif., the first Muslim liberal arts college in the U.S. Born Mark Hanson, he was raised as a Christian and then converted to Islam. He quotes the Quran as saying that God is immeasurable, so to define God in some particular way is impossible.

“God is much greater than anything we can imagine,” Yusuf says. “The Muslims have a statement in our theology: Whatever you imagine God to be, God is other than that.”

At Louisville Seminary, which is affiliated with the Presbyterian Church, Pauw says she’s preparing her students for Christian ministries that are likely to involve work with people of other faith traditions and she says she’d like them to remember that no religious community can claim God’s favor.

“No one is in a position of saying, ‘Well, we know exactly how God works in the world, and my particular group has a monopoly on that,’ ” Pauw says.

She adds: “There are certainly Muslims who will say that. There are certainly Christians who will say that. But it’s out of my own Christian conviction that I think we have to approach these issues with a kind of humility and kind of generosity toward others, because God’s ways are not our ways.”

In its statement about Professor Hawkins’ view that Muslims and Christians worship the same God, Wheaton College emphasizes its rejection of religious prejudice and its commitment to treat and speak about neighbors with love and respect, as Jesus commanded people to do. But, the statement says, “our compassion must be infused with theological clarity.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Gov. Bill Walker’s proposed budget calls for the elimination of a $2 million pre-kindergarten program, which serves six school districts in Anchorage, Juneau and Western Alaska.

Alaska was one of just 12 states in the U.S. without state-funded pre-kindergarten when it started a pilot program in 2009.

The pre-K program is free to qualifying low-income families and, according to Deputy Education Commissioner Les Morse, has seen considerable success in its six-year run.

“There is solid data around its success,” said Morse. “We specifically looked at various different assessments on students in terms of their performance as well as the delivery by districts. It’s really been very successful. The largest problem with the program is that we really haven’t been able to grow it. So it really continues to serve the same number of students and the same dollar amount that it did during its pilot phase.”

Morse said the original plan was to pilot the program, then expand it after a few years. But according to the National Institute for Early Education Research, the program never reached more than 3 percent of 4-year-olds in the state.

About 40 of those toddlers are in the Lower Kuskokwim School District, where Early Childhood Coordinator April Blevins said the pilot program is the most accessible of the early education programs offered to low-income families in the district.

“There are other programs,” Blevins said, “but they’re grant-funded programs that the parents have to apply with these huge applications, and it usually discourages people from going that route. Whereas applying for the pilot program is very simple.”

The pre-K program is also in high demand; it serves 28 children in Bethel, five in Tununak, and nine in Akiuk. Blevins has another 30 kids on a waiting list.

And besides providing education with certified teachers, Blevins said the pre-K program fills another need in communities where reliable childcare can be nearly impossible to find.

“For 6.5 hours a day, people can go to work knowing their kid is safe and receiving some education,” said Blevins. “I’ve had parents cry, because it’s the first time they’ve been able to go back to work because they’ve been watching their child, because there is no childcare. So I think sometimes there’s underlying emotions … people don’t realize how the program affects their daily life.”

In 2014, nearly five times as many 4-year-olds in the state were enrolled in Headstart programs as the pre-K program, according to NIEER.

Three-quarters of all 4-year-olds were not served by Headstart or pre-K.

Gov. Walker’s proposed education budget would also delete $820,000 in grants for other early childhood programs, and it would reduce funding for the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program by $385,000 dollars.

To buy or not to buy? That is one of the questions the Alaska Legislative Council wrestled with at an almost 5-hour meeting Saturday in the Anchorage Legislative Information Office.

Council members were trying to decide whether to vacate, purchase or continue to pay rent at the newly renovated building.

After hearing from a battery of real estate attorneys and an executive session, the council voted unanimously to recommend ending the lease on the LIO, with an option to wait 45 days to work out a potential financial arrangement with the building’s owner, Mark Pfeffer.

“We are pleased the Alaska Legislative Council decided to gather more information before making a decision,” said Pfeffer’s spokesperson Amy Slinker in an email. “We believe there are several options that save the state money without taking the drastic step of breaking the lease and risking what others have said would be serious negative credit implications.”

Before the vote, Sen. Gary Stevens, who chairs the council, said the final decision rests with the legislature. He also said press reports about breaking the lease on the building were not accurate.

“What we are talking about, if we do move, not that we will but if we should, that we wouldn’t be so much breaking the lease as we would be taking advantage of a negotiated clause that went through a lot of discussion as the two sides negotiated a contract,” he said. “So it is taking advantage of a negotiated clause in the lease. Further, remember that what we do here today is advisory to the legislature. We don’t have the power of funding anything, and we don’t have to make a recommendation to the entire legislature to include this, whatever it is, in the budget.”

Stevens also said LIO landlord Mark Pfeffer told him Friday that he had dropped the $37 million price of the building by $1 million. That was a surprise to most council members, as did a last minute spreadsheet from state debt manager Deven Mitchell, which presented a dozen new scenarios with detailed costs of purchasing, leasing or abandoning the building through 2046.

The council wrestled with four main scenarios, three outlining different purchasing schemes, and one advocating ending the lease and moving state offices to the Atwood Building in downtown Anchorage.

Pfeffer fielded questions from the council for about half an hour. He told the council that in August 2013, the lease was 10 percent below market value, and that a purchase option was amended to it. Pfeffer said a clause in the lease makes it subject to annual appropriation, and using that clause creates a tricky credit issue.

“It is a rarely, if ever, used clause, because once it is used, it means that subsequent leases have to be looked at as though they are basically only a one-year lease,” Pfeffer said. “So you have to pay the full cost of whatever it is you are leasing basically in one year because the lessor cannot count on a longer term payment schedule. It’s virtually never used and if it is used it will have a significant effect on the way you do things in the future.”

Rep. Sam Kito III said the state has used such clauses in the past with no adverse effects.

Not many minutes had passed in Saturday night’s Democratic presidential debate before the issue that was expected to supply some drama had been raised, addressed and dismissed.

Sen. Bernie Sanders apologized for his staffer who downloaded data that belonged to the campaign of Hillary Clinton. Sanders apologized to his supporters and to Ms. Clinton, who accepted his apology. Third-wheel candidate Martin O’Malley, the former governor of Maryland, said it wasn’t an issue that engaged the average American voter. And everyone agreed to move on.

So much for the controversy that had provided great material for journalists and political junkies for 36 hours prior to the debate. Sanders’ campaign had staged a mini-rebellion over perceived favoritism on the part of the Democratic National Committee, which is part of a party establishment largely presumed to be in Clinton’s camp.

On Friday, news had broken of a Sanders staffer being fired after accessing a proprietary precinct of the data base maintained by the Democratic National Committee. The DNC shut off the Sanders’ campaign access to the database, including its own data, and some Clinton staff spoke of theft and the breaking of laws. Sanders’ camp called all this overreaction and proof of the DNC’s long-running favoritism toward Clinton.

Resentment over that perceived favoritism has motivated many in Sanders’ ambit, but he was not willing to go to the mat over it on national TV. So when this crisis was demoted to kerfuffle, you could almost hear the remote controls of America clicking over to the NFL game or the NBC re-run of “The Wiz.” And you could score one more for those Democrats who would just as soon not be having these intraparty debates at all.

Those who stuck around pretty much had to score one more for Hillary Clinton, who cruised to another dominating performance as her party’s national frontrunner in this, the third and final debate of 2015, staged by the DNC and WMUR-TV in Manchester at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, N.H.

And oh yes, you should also chalk this up as one more instance of the news media getting the pre-game analysis wrong. The data dust-up had been widely and eagerly touted as a reason to tune in Saturday. It was portayed as a potential turning point in the campaign, potentially multiplying Sanders’ supporters — or alienating them enough to keep them home in November if Sanders is not the nominee.

Instead, what ensued was a replay of the early moments of the first debate, when Sanders had not only declined to make an issue of Clinton’s private emails controversy but suggested that anyone who did so was distracting the nation from its real problems.

Clinton had been more than glad to accept that earlier gift as well. Sanders has been saluted by many for his strict attention to substantive issues, but these demurrals may also have cost him his best chance to derail the Clinton Express.

Once again the prohibitive frontrunner in two national polls released this week, Clinton was on her game again in Manchester Saturday night, especially during the lengthy stretch of the debate devoted to foreign policy. With the moderators keeping the focus on national security, the former Secretary of State often seemed to be taking batting practice, making solid contact on virtually every pitch while her two rivals were reduced to supporting roles.

One place she may have stumbled was in her assessment of the current Obama administration policy against ISIS. While she has been a critic of that policy, urging more commitment and engagement in the Syrian crisis, for example, she said at one point that “We now finally are where we need to be. We have a strategy and a commitment to go after ISIS, which is a danger to us all as well as the region.”

That prompted several Republican campaigns to respond via social media, mocking the suggestion that the U.S. is “where we need to be” with respect to fighting ISIS.

Clinton also made the claim that Donald Trump — a frequent target for all three Democratic candidates Saturday night — was “becoming ISIS’ best recruiter.”

“They are going to people showing videos of Donald Trump insulting Islam and Muslims in order to recruit more radical jihadists. So I want to explain why this is not in America’s interest to react with this kind of fear and respond to this sort of bigotry.”

Fact checkers were at least at a loss to find evidence of this actually happening.

ABC News moderators David Muir and Martha Raddatz kept a strong rein on the debaters, including a particularly insistent Martin O’Malley, who tried to answer every question whether invited to or not.

But the pair were criticized after the debate for the omission of any questions about climate change or the treaty signed this month in Paris by nearly 200 nations intending to limit the use of fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Gov. Bill Walker will unveil his upcoming budget Wednesday, and the backdrop isn’t pretty. Should the price of oil remain low, Alaska could face a deficit of $3.1 billion.

In an effort to get Alaskans on the same page, state budget director Pat Pitney has spent the past six months leading fiscal dialogues in communities throughout Alaska. Last week, she brought her talking points to Sitka, along with a wooden scale to simulate the state budget crisis.

Before a crowd of 50 Sitkans, Rep. Jonathan Kreiss-Tomkins played Pat Sajak. He stood at a spinning wheel, which represents the price of oil, and explained, “We live on risk in Alaska. Because we don’t know what the price of oil is going to be next year and so it’s literally a game show that we’re playing.”

While not as flashy as the one on Wheel of Fortune, where it lands has big consequences. Kreiss-Tomkins sets the wheel in motion. It clicks to a halt at $60 a barrel. “That would be great,” Kreiss-Tomkins said. He spins it again and it lands on $50 a barrel. “Also good.”

Lately, the price of oil has been at $40 a barrel, which leaves the state with a $3.1 billion dollar gap between revenue and spending. It’s a problem so big you have to see it to believe it.

Kreiss-Tomkins handed the microphone to Pat Pitney.

“We are almost entirely dependent on oil price and production for our budget. And at $40 barrel of oil, instead of $109 barrel of oil, that is what creates that budget gap,” she said.

It’s a message state financial officers have been taking on the road and Sitka is stop number 52. The dialogue began with a PowerPoint presentation, filled with a parade of sobering charts.

Pitney argued that if legislators don’t break the oil habit now, Alaska could drain its savings and potentially hurt its credit score.

“Everyone is afraid. This is a huge change for Alaska. Anybody that’s not 60 has never paid an income tax in this state. I mean, it’s huge. It’s a sea change,” she said.

Pitney transitioned to the wooden scale in front of her, inviting Sitkans to literally balance the books. Kreiss-Tomkins joined her in explaining how it works. Loaded on either side of the scale are blocks of different colors.

Each of these blocks represent $100 million. Together, they depict life as we know it in Alaska. On the left side of the scale is how much money the state spends: $5.1 billion dollars total. On the right side is revenue. The scale is balanced for this year, but there’s a catch.

“Our current budget is balanced on the back of our savings,” said Kreiss-Tomkins. He motioned to a pile of white blocks, which represent part of Alaska’s Constitutional Budget reserve, or rainy day account. It’s pretty big, $7 billion, but won’t last if the state continues to drain it to keep the budget balanced.

Of the CBR, Pitney added, “If we do nothing, this savings is gone in two years. Then the next choice is to go to this savings pile, which is the earnings reserve.”

The earnings reserve is the money that can be spent from the Permanent Fund. Permanent Fund Dividend checks come from here. The blocks are gold with a white dot on them, but if Alaska drains all that too, the dividend checks will stop. That is a future Pitney doesn’t want to come to pass.

“We don’t like that picture at all. We want to do something sustainable now,” she said.

Pitney couldn’t go into detail about Gov. Bill Walker’s budget. But her presentation did provide a glimpse of how the administration wants to close the gap in the long run. They’re looking at the power of the Permanent Fund, which at $51 billion is so big it earns more money on interest than the state deposits in revenue. The return on investment follows the stock market, which in general has a more consistent performance than the price of oil.

“Over the life of the Permanent Fund, it’s earned almost 10 percent, 9.75 annually,” Pitney said. “Yes, you could have a 2008 and it could be bad for a period of time, but on average over time, this is the better investment model.”

The administration calls the strategy the “Sovereign Wealth Model.” If the state can agree to funnel all new resource revenue – from oil royalties to petroleum production taxes – into the Permanent Fund, it can become a renewable pool of money to run the state. PFD checks would continue, but be cut at smaller amounts. Extra bonus if the state can create some new taxes.

Now, it’s well and good to simulate this in the game, but in her travels, Pitney has learned that not all communities want the same solutions. Southeast seems to not mind a smaller dividend check, but in the North Slope the proposal elicits a different reaction. Audience there are fine with an income tax.

“But the idea that the dividend would be less is harder to handle because they’re more dependent on it. Or you go into the Kenai area and they’re very comfortable with a sales tax, but not an income tax. Or a motor fuel tax is really problematic,” Pitney said.

Kreiss-Tomkins scans the audience for a willing participant, telling the crowd to applaud and boo just like voters do on election day. The comparison is a comical one, especially in front of a live audience. “You are a legislator and you either get thrown out like a bum, or you get the electorate’s approval and you get to do another budget,” he said.

Hahlen Barkau, a teenager, steps forward. He enacts a 2 percent sales tax, but restores funding to health and human services. The audience cheered. “Halen, you just got re-elected,” Kreiss-Tomkins said.

The event was co-sponsored by the Island Institute and the Greater Sitka Chamber of Commerce.

A few days later at the Backdoor Cafe, Blossom Twitchell tussled with the imbalance herself. The game is set up in the middle of the lunch rush.

Twitchell imposed an income tax and took a deep breath before plopping the blocks on the scale. “This is new territory for me and as a mother and an Alaskan I’d rather look into try to get revenue somewhere,” she explained.

And just by comparison, taxes on alcohol and marijuana are tiny blocks. They barely tip the scale. And that’s really what the game – designed by Gunnar Knapp and Ian Laing of Anchorage – is all about: weighing what you think you know about the budget against the working reality. By bringing the scale to the people, voters can begin to understand the magnitude of the hard times ahead.

Annika Ord of the Island Institute oversaw the game play. “Numbers don’t really resonate with me. I’ll forget them 10 minutes from when I read them. But seeing the process, you just really get to see the physical changes, which is a lot more memorable,” she said.

Ord added that not everyone is an eager contestant. “I asked a few people if they wanted to balance the budget and they’re like, ‘Well, that sounds depressing.’ And it kind of is, but it’s the reality.”

A reality that will soon be in the hands of the Legislature, when they meet for regular session in January and hold something far more precious than blocks in their hands.

Curious to try this yourself? The Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of Alaska Anchorage developed an online tool – an interactive Excel spreadsheet – that allows you to attempt balancing the budget too.  

The U.S. Senate is expected to vote as soon as Wednesday on replacing the nation’s big education law, known since 2001 as No Child Left Behind.

And President Obama is expected to sign the new version, ending an era marked by bitter fights between the federal government, states and schools.

So as it dies, we thought an obituary was in order.

Yup, an obituary. Because the law’s critics and defenders all agree on one thing: No Child Left Behind took on a life of its own.

Actually, they agree on one other thing, too: “If No Child Left Behind was a person, he or she should have died a long time ago.” That’s how outgoing U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan puts it. “It’s about time to finish it off and to bury it. And to do something much better.”

NCLB was expected to expire of old age in 2007, but Congress couldn’t find a replacement. So the law hung on.

While most folks are now happy to see it go, NCLB wasn’t always this reviled.

Here’s a No Child Left Behind eulogy from Kathryn Matayoshi, the state schools superintendent in Hawaii: “Worked very, very hard. Was often misunderstood. Wanted to do the right thing, but in the end, really didn’t get where he wanted to go.”

Let’s break that down. First, what NCLB got right.

Arne Duncan points out that, before the law required states to test students annually and report the results, “Our nation didn’t talk about, you know, how black children were doing versus white children. How Latino children were doing. It didn’t talk about achievement gaps. It hid behind averages.”

NCLB came in and told schools: No more hiding. You now have to break down your student test scores — to give an honest picture of whether you’re serving all kids. And, sure enough, many weren’t.

Sonja Santelises is the former chief academic officer for the Baltimore schools and now works for The Education Trust, an advocacy group. She says NCLB reminds her of someone many of us will spend time with at the dinner table this holiday season: “You know, the aunt that says all of the hidden stuff that no one else wants to say at the table. And got in our face about it.”

That may be uncomfortable, she says, but it was good. So, where did NCLB go bad?

“But that same aunt is just overly simplistic,” Santelises explains, “and makes these broad generalizations.”

Some of NCLB’s mandates — that all kids should be proficient by the year 2014 and that all schools can be fixed using the same small box of tools — were unrealistic.

Rick Hess studies education at the American Enterprise Institute and says that when you’re trying to help people run really complicated human organizations like schools, “you probably shouldn’t try to do it via memos and red tape from 3,000 miles away in Washington.”

And so here we are to say goodbye.

Its next of kin, the Every Student Succeeds Act — or ESSA — is ready to take over. The new kid will still be a truth-teller — the testing and student data requirements have survived.

The big difference is that much of the actual work of fixing schools will revert back to states. Does that make ESSA better than NCLB? “Yeah,” says Hess. “I think ESSA’s the kid who’s had a chance to see his old man’s failings up close.”

NCLB won’t be laid to rest until the Senate votes and President Obama makes it official. Then the clock will start on ESSA, to see if its good intentions actually make good policy.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.