The article reviews ‘the national report card.’ At the press conference where the report was released James Billington, the librarian of congress, noted, “The sentence is the biggest causality and to what extent is student’s writing getting clearer?”

Writing is a national education/cultural issue. Keep working at it at Covenant.

I recently read the The Oxford Tutorial, edited by David Palfreyman, in which Oxford notables from different disciplines defend and examine the Oxford tutorial process. Their educational process is based on the 1,000 word – roughly two pages –essay students submit every other week. The essay is marked, not graded. The goal of marking is not to give the work a final grade but to improve the work. Marking defines the central relationship between the tutor and student. The simple version of the technique shown in the movie “A River Runs Through It” shows the Presbyterian minister father home schooling his two sons in writing – sending them away to cut the marked essay in half, again and again.

I still work at my writing as a chaplain. I married my “marker” when we attended Covenant. My wife, Celeste, has taught writing for much of her adult life, not only to students of all ages, but to me as well. Clear, analytical, focused, concise thought expressed in sentences united in paragraphs is a learned skill that prepares anyone for a life time of markings.

You are certainly right that many teachings of Scripture have been twisted to mean all sorts of things the authors did not intend, including those addressing the complementary aspects of the husband-wife relationship. Shame on those who have read into these particular verses any sort of domination! And you are correct as well that v. 21 leads naturally into the verses that follow, inasmuch as the word for “submit” is not found in v. 22 in the Greek. The fact remains that the NIV/TNIV rendering of v. 21 as a stand-alone, one-sentence paragraph has been used and is regularly used to throw the shadow of identical reciprocity over the verses that follow, thus obscuring the careful and important distinctions that Paul is making between the different and complementary ways in which husbands and wives submit to one another. My point in the footnote is that the correct grammatical rendering of v. 21 makes this common error less likely.

Of course the internal logic of vv. 22-33 should make the matter clear enough: Paul intentionally uses different phrasing for the shape this submitting takes for wives and husbands in order to communicate the essential distinctions he intends. The analogy with Christ and the church provides the larger, confirming theological framework, as it would be a stretch for anyone to construe that relationship in terms of identical reciprocity.