Tom Shakely
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  • January 25, 2015

    National Catholic Schools Week

    Today marks the start of National Catholic Schools Week. I remember Catholic Schools Week being a big deal during my time in grammar school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania.

    It was a time for open houses to invite parents, parishioners, and visitors into the school to get a sense for what the place was like. It was a time for celebrating Mass with the special intention of recognizing Catholic education as a distinct social good that stands apart from the larger culture. Essentially, it was a time to recognize that Catholic education, at its best, can be transformational for both its direct participants and the larger culture.

    While Catholic education played a big role in my childhood institutionally, it was my grandparents John and Marion Shakely who played the most significant roles in my life after my mother. John taught social studies at Central Bucks High School for nearly 30 years, but he and my grandmother made the decision early to equip their children with a Catholic experience of education. That eventually trickled down to my experience, and so by the time I entered school I already felt like part of a larger community in time because of the shared Catholic experiences of my family. It continues to root our identity.

    It’s a much different world today from when my grandparents sent my aunts, uncles, and mother off to learn. Then, tuition was practically free for many years because parishes were able to cover costs. Later, it was something like a few hundred dollars in the first years of Archbishop Wood High School. As institutional Catholicism has changed, access to a Catholic education has become more challenging, too. A year’s worth of tuition at Archbishop Wood after fees stands at more than $7,000 today.

    The challenge of access to Catholic education is something my grandmother has sought to address in the years since my grandfather died in 2001. Yet a source of frustration for her has been the lack of institutional investment and distribution solutions for Catholic philanthropy. We were thrilled to learn about the founding of the Catholic Foundation of Greater Philadelphia, which enables anyone to create permanently endowed funds to institutionalize things like scholarship support, program funding, and grants. Recently I created the John & Marion Shakely Charitable Fund to perpetuate my grandparents’ tradition of support for access to Catholic education. The fund will support scholarships for Archbishop Wood students.

    We’re starting small, with an initial gift of $5,000. I’m hoping this Catholic Schools Week to raise an additional $1,000 that will be matched dollar for dollar. As the fund grows, scholarship support for students grows. It’s my hope to eventually build this fund to the point where it can provide substantial support for the Catholic Foundation’s competitive grants process, perpetuating a tradition of charity while enhancing opportunities for young people.

    Gifts are 100% tax-deductible and the process is simple. Visit the Catholic Foundation’s Donate page to contribute. Be sure to select “John & Marion Shakely Charitable Fund” as the designation when processing your contribution. Also, consider subscribing to my newsletter for the fund. I share a few updates each year on the state and impact of the fund, so you can see the impact of your support.

  • January 24, 2015

    Scarcity to abundance

    After reading Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures for many years, I started also reading his partner Albert Wenger. He doesn’t blog as often as Fred, but when he does it’s at Continuations and its typically super insightful.

    Albert’s writing helps provide insight into where we’re heading at the highest levels of society. The air can get a bit thin where Albert operates, but what he’s writing and thinking about are things that seemed destined to trickle down into mainstream social discussion and eventually the public policy arena.

    His talk from the DLDconference gets into some of the themes he’s been writing about for a while. The biggest theme is that we’re transitioning from a world of scarcity to a world of abundance. In other words, from a world where “whenever you wanted more of something there was an additional cost” to a world of zero marginal cost.

    He also touches on how transitioning to a world of abundance will intersect with public policy, specifically the idea that with fewer things to physically make, it might be necessary to “decouple income from work” through a basic income guarantee.

    The lingering ethos of the Protestant work ethic might make this concept extremely difficult to implement here. But it might also be a much saner way to approach social security than the current hierarchical, bureaucratic central government model we rely on.

  • January 23, 2015

    Agile storytelling

    I wrote recently about how students can create platforms for storytelling in their communities through technology. After seeing this post from Om Malik I’ve been thinking along a similar thread, which is using technology for more agile storytelling.

    We’re inching toward the 10 year mark since the birth of the iPhone and true mobile computing devices. There are still some industries that haven’t successfully transitioned into the mobile arena. Relative to most content creation, it’s still extremely difficult to create, produce, and package quality audio content on a mobile device. This impacts the relevancy and impact of audio as a form of media because the harder it is to get it into the world, the more likely it is to be stale when it arrives.

    In terms of a platform addressing the problem of storing audio and making it accessible, SoundCloud is the emerging standard. I really hope it can become for audio what YouTube became for video. If you remember the world before YouTube, video on the internet was pretty much a complete mess. In so many ways, that’s still the case for audio. Easier to create than it was a few years ago, still very difficult to produce and distribute.

    As Om points out, it looks like Shure’s forthcoming Motiv 88 and accompanying iOS app will help address this. It launches this spring, will cost $149, and is the first condenser mic that I’ve seen that plugs directly into an iOS device with a companion app for recording and production:

    Designed to capture clear, high-quality stereo sound on the go, MV88 directly connects to any iOS device equipped with a Lightning® connector. The microphone element is mounted to a 90-degree hinge with built-in rotation that offers flexible positioning options, even in video applications. Access five built-in preset modes for voice and instruments using the ShurePlus™ MOTIV Mobile Recording App, which also offers real-time adjustments to gain, stereo width and EQ with 24-bit / 48 kHz recording.

    We’re planning for the Penn State Media Alumni Interest Group to purchase at least one of these for the student broadcasters at The LION 90.7fm in State College. And I’m planning to use one to record and produce an audiobook version of Conserving Mount Nittany, which was already one of my planned projects for this year.

    We tend to be transfixed by video, but we’re often more transported by audio. As a medium, it tends to be more intimate than any other because it’s often piped right into our heads through earbuds or noise canceling headphones.

    Creating or capturing great audio will get easier because Shure and others will get better at miniaturizing the technology and creating a better software ecosystem for its production and distribution to the platforms that matter. As the production technology becomes more mobile, the impact of the content it enables will grow.

  • January 22, 2015

    March for Life 2015

    Yesterday I wrote about the concept of the Culture of Life at a pretty high level, and today I want to bring that to a practical level. I’m in Washington today for the March for Life, the annual day wherein people of pro-life persuasions gather from across the country to hear remarks on the National Mall before starting their cold march to the steps of the Supreme Court.

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    Like so many social reform movements in America, the March for Life has an overwhelmingly Christian anthropology. There’s no getting past the fact that the pro-life instincts of so many are rooted in their understanding of what Christianity has to say about human dignity. So in that sense, the March is a fascinating thing to witness in a time when it’s fashionable to divorce “personal beliefs” from public expression.

    I’m here today not for the March itself but rather to meet with Pennsylvania Sens. Bob Casey and Pat Toomey. Each of them hosts constituency receptions as part of the March. With Gov. Tom Wolf having just taken office in the Pennsylvania, I think there’s a special chance to echo the worth of Gov. Wolf’s proposed moratorium on the death penalty in the state. So I’m here in the hopes of echoing the worth of that in whatever small way to Casey and Toomey as well.

    Even more than that, I think Pennsylvania Democrats and Republicans can and should work together to be bolder by enacting a constitutional ban in Pennsylvania on the death penalty. We would be something like the 19th state to do this, and enacting a true ban rather than a temporary prohibition, Gov. Wolf would be following a national trend while making history for the state.

    It’s the right thing to do, and it’s also an unusual area of opportunity for bipartisan action on a pro-life issue. I hope it happens.

  • January 21, 2015

    Culture of Life

    Culture of Life

    It wasn’t long after Pope Francis’s ascent to the leadership of the Catholic community that he sat for an interview with America, a Jesuit magazine. In the course of the conversation with America he made some remarks that the New York Times and others reported on more widely. It seemed that Pope Francis was essentially repudiating Catholicism’s Culture of Life framework on challenging issues like contraception, marriage, abortion, etc.

    That’s the way the New York Times reported the story, and that narrative persists. Pope Francis “made waves early on saying the church was placing too much emphasis on abortion and other divisive issues.” That’s the narrative.

    As someone inclined toward the Culture of Life framework, and specifically as a board member of the Pro-Life Union of Greater Philadelphia, I follow Culture of Life issues and paid considerable attention to Pope Francis’s remarks. What he says:

    “We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

    “The dogmatic and moral teachings of the church are not all equivalent. The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed insistently. Proclamation in a missionary style focuses on the essentials, on the necessary things: this is also what fascinates and attracts more, what makes the heart burn, as it did for the disciples at Emmaus. We have to find a new balance; otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and fragrance of the Gospel. The proposal of the Gospel must be more simple, profound, radiant. It is from this proposition that the moral consequences then flow.

    Translation: Catholic social teaching is rooted in the context of the Gospel and the moral theology that flows from the Gospel. This “context,” as Pope Francis describes it, explains why he warns against advocacy of “disjointed” aspects of moral theology by divorcing social issues from one another, or worse, into the arena of jocular political competition that minimizes the concrete impact of policy on the human person.

    There very well may be “too much emphasis on abortion and other divisive issues”—but the question is, “too much emphasis” in relation to what? And Francis answers, “in relation to the Gospel and the moral theology that grounds guidance on divisive issues.”

    There is a similar purpose in the holistic, comprehensive Culture of Life framework—to root a diversity of social issues within the context of moral theology that can be coherently expressed through philosophy and policy.

    It’s worth distinguishing here between the concept of the “Culture of Life” framework and a person being “pro-life.” They’re not always synonymous. “Culture of Life” describes a comprehensive framework, rooted in moral theology, for the value of human life from conception to natural death. But a person might be “pro-life” in the sense of only supporting one aspect of the Culture of Life—for instance, opposing the death penalty while supporting abortion access.

    There is obvious friction in our culture on the issues that the Culture of Life attempts to harmonize. This friction arises because there are competing visions for the sort of policy that is in the public interest.

    Very broadly speaking, one vision elevates liberty, while the other elevates mutuality. The former is about absolute freedom of the individual apart from the wider social order, while the latter is about relationship and responsibility to one another as the foundation for social order in the first place.

    Nothing here is meant as a personal apologia for my own Culture of Life perspective. In the future I might write about some of the basis for my support of the Culture of Life framework. But I’m writing on it at a high level here because I don’t see many people trying to explain some of these specific nuances of the wider cultural conversation to normal people.

    I’ll leave it at this for now: I support a holistic Culture of Life framework for society because I think it is the most humane approach toward sustaining a healthy culture. I’m Catholic, and I think its moral theology basis for the Culture of Life framework is a logical, consistent, and elegant way to respect the grace and dignity of every person.

    Yet the Culture of Life contains a philosophical approach that is accessible to anyone. When someone asks why I’m on the board of the Pro-Life Union of Greater Philadelphia, it’s because it’s an organization that embraces the comprehensive Culture of Life framework. And some of that framework is expressed specifically in supporting and advocating for things like:

    • protections for the life of the preborn child;
    • support for the life of the mother, father, and child ideally within the context of an intact family;
    • greater sophistication toward human sexuality and the value of chastity as a practice of self-governance;
    • an instinctual hostility toward human commodification in all its forms, from trafficking and slavery to exploitation through porn and prostitution;
    • antagonism toward the death penalty and policies that elevate the state above the person;
    • more human approaches toward infirmity, incapacitation, and old age with the goal of natural death with grace.

    If you’re fascinated by the Culture of Life, these are some of the specific attitudes of that culture. If you’re inclined to agree with any of these attitudes, you can think of yourself at least in a limited way as pro-life.

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