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RP is looking for a Managing Editor!
Are you looking for a meaningful and long-term career where you can devote your time to equipping Christians to think, speak, and act like Christ?
With thankfulness to God, the Reformed Perspective Foundation is looking to expand our team and mission with a significant new role:
MANAGING EDITOR (FULL TIME)
This new role will serve as the operational backbone of the editorial team. He or she will keep all of RP’s content moving seamlessly from start to finish. A key function will be to ensure content is published in a timely way and blesses as many people as possible through a variety of mediums. Depending on qualifications and experience, we also welcome assistance with creating content (e.g. journalism or video production).
The goal for the successful candidate is to work towards serving as the “integrator” for the RP team, as modeled in the Entrepreneur Operating System (EOS).
He or she will help enable RP to achieve our long-term goal of expanding our reach to the USA, Australia, and the broader Christian community in Canada.
We are looking for someone who is:
- Excited about devoting their life to advance our core purpose (helping Christians to think, speak, and act in Christ);
- Is fully committed to furthering our core values:
- Biblical: faithful to God’s Word and the Reformed confessions;
- Inspiring: a catalyst for action and a connecting to hearts
- Real: applying God’s Word to the nitty gritty of life
- Celebratory: Christ is LORD and has already won!
- Very organized and efficient;
- Excellent with utilizing technology;
- Comfortable with learning/managing the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS);
- A great communicator, including with people who work remotely;
- Friendly and kind while being able to ensure things get done;
- Self-motivated;
- Humble;
- Available at least four days a week;
- Looking to serve long-term (ideally a minimum of 5 years).
The position will report to the Executive Editor, Mark Penninga. Duties will include:
- Work towards managing the RP team processes/systems, including running meetings and ensuring goals are being tracked and met;
- Ensure content submissions are received, thanked, and followed-up;
- Schedule content deadlines;
- Assigns tasks and deadlines to writers, editors, designers, and fact-checkers and ensure they are kept;
- Develops creative ways to make content go further through new technology and other mediums (electronic, audio, video, etc.);
- Oversee roll-out of contests/presentations/conferences (to fit with organizational schedule);
- Tracks analytics of all content;
- As much as possible, proactively guard the organization from censorship and similar challenges;
- Depending on qualifications there is also a potential to assist with content production.
Hours: Half-time to full-time is possible, depending on the successful applicant’s availability and their skills/qualifications. If not full-time, there would be an expectation of availability most work days of the week.
Salary/wage: Open to negotiation and in-keeping with industry standards.
Location: Our office in Smithers, BC.
Deadline: March 30 (we will keep the position open till it is filled. We reserve the right to not fill the position or to extend the deadline).
Requirements: Must be a member in good standing of a confessional Reformed church in Canada or the US (a church that upholds the Three Forms of Unity or Westminster Standards). Six month trial period required.
Interested? To apply, please send an application to RP’s Executive Director Mark Penninga ([email protected]). Please include a resume, at least two references (including an elder or pastor), and a letter introducing yourself and explaining your qualifications for the position.
News
When reporting both sides is bias disguised
When Alberta's government began, last year, to respond to the problem of sexually-explicit materials on public school library shelves, it might have seemed to some that the media coverage was fair. After all, both sides were given space to have their say.
So, for example, when CBC ran the headline, "Alberta bans school library books it deems sexually explicit," it stated as fact that the government was banning books – how's that for politically-charged terminology? – but they did include, in a smaller sub-head, that the "Education minister says province's new standards aren't about banning books."
Not quite equal time, but... fair-ish, right?
In CBC reporter Emily Williams' piece "The Handmaid's Tale among more than 200 books to be pulled at Edmonton public schools" she shared the public schools' objection: "As a result of the ministerial order, several excellent books will be removed from our shelves this fall."
But Williams also included Education Minister Demetrios Nicolaides' response that his government wasn't trying to ban The Handmaid's Tale, but was instead trying to get sexually-explicit sexual content off public school shelves.
So, both sides, right?
Well, as Christian journalist Ted Byfield noted, there's not just two sides to the story. And one of the sides the media didn't report on here is telling, and much more important than what they focused on.
Williams' article included the list of the more than 200 books the Edmonton Public School (EPS) system said they were going to have to pull of their shelves to comply with the government's mandate. This wasn't a list the government made; this was the list the EPS made and then used to characterize the government's efforts as book banning – going after famed and problematic classics like Brave New World, Atlas Shrugged and, yes, The Handmaid's Tale.
Still, EPS's list was there, available for anyone interested to peruse. And isn't that what reporters do? Peruse, investigate, uncover? Well, some perusing was done, but almost exclusively in one direction. CBC and other outlets reported on the aforementioned famous books that made the government look like book banners.
But what reporters didn't do is look into how much filth there actually was on the list. The press didn't look for books that'd confirm the need for winnowing. They didn't question why the public schools were being so negligent as to expose our children to pornography. They didn't highlight the outrageous examples of available comics that had pages of nudity, graphically depicted oral sex, showed a child being stripped for abuse, and showed another being sexually humiliated. Those details were made available by the Minister of Education, but they didn't show up in any of mainstream media accounts I read.
So I did some of the work they wouldn't, checking up on the list's first 25 books as they were presented alphabetically. I discovered that 15 were clearly and wildly inappropriate. These were all books that, had they been read aloud or shown at a public school board meeting, would likely have gotten the presenting parent booted. The 15 books were:
- 9 books from Kanoko Sakurakoji’s Black Bird manga series
- Kentarō Miura’s graphic novel Berserk, Vol. 3
- Talia Hibbert’s Act Your Age, Eve Brown
- Neil Gaiman‘s American Gods
- Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho
- Daria Snadowsky‘s Anatomy of a boyfriend
- Emily Henry‘s Beach Read
15 out of 25 amounts to 60%. And that's just the titles that were clearly crazy, with secular reviewers describing them as "rapey" and "sexually obsessed." The other 10 weren't necessarily good either; it was just that in my research it wasn't as clear that they were so blaringly bad.
The mainstream media made this about the 5 or 6 "classics" at risk. I don’t know if that 60% rate would have held up, but if so, then that would have amounted to more than 100 obscene books – 60% of 226 works out to 135– being pushed on kids via the province's public school libraries. Where were the "Edmonton Public Schools own up to being porn-peddlers" headlines?
While Christians should attempt to be fair – reporting on others as we would want to be covered ourselves (Matt. 7:12) – Reformed Perspective doesn't pretend to be unbiased. We have our bias firmly in place: the Earth is the Lord's, and everything in it. And with that bias comes a different sort of way of looking at the world, where teachers and schools entrusted with acting in loco parentis – acting in the place of parents – should, like a parent, be eager to protect the children in their care. That was the story here. And that was the story that was almost entirely missed by the mainstream media.
Today's Devotional
February 11 - A childlike faith
“Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” - Mark 10:15
Scripture reading: 2 Kings 5:1-5a; Mark 10:13-16
Naaman had the death sentence of leprosy on his life until, by God’s gracious providence, a young girl witnessed to him. Although this girl was young, she had experienced excruciating trial. Verse 2 explains, >
Today's Manna Podcast
Be doers of the Word
Serving #1115 of Manna, prepared by J Huijgen, is called "Be doers of the Word".
