Weekly Meanderings

I thought I’d begin the new school year and a new blog with a shot of a NPU student studying in the middle of campus.

Before you leave the site today, go to the top left bar, above where it says “Jesus Creed” and click on “Patheos” and explore a little. I think you will find Patheos to be a site rich with resources.

New Wineskins now has their series on what matters put together.

God does not love America — how’s that for a way to get attention at a blog? But God does love failures. Mark talks about love — realistically.

Where to put this? Prothero covers Jana Riess, who is tweeting through the whole Bible. I read her every tweet — or close to every tweet. Jana explains how she can be both Mormon and Emergent (Emorgent). Sarah Cunningham provides a thoughtful reminder. A good interview with Phyllis Tickle.

Laura Boggess opens her heart and asks a big one: Who can you trust? Wade Hodges gives some wisdom to young preachers. Must read. Jim — or Poppie — got so excited he forgot his clothes. Derek ponders the difference Yeshua makes for messianic Jews.

Why read Wesley? (HT: AB) Why read Calvin? Perhaps Ted asks it best: Why read the Bible with lectio divina?

From Geeding’s bag of fun: Discuss. One of my blog reads every week is Rob Merola’s blog, and one thing I like about his site is the pictures of critters.

Afterism (noun): A concise, clever statement you don’t think of until too late. [James Alexander Thom, American author] [HT: CB]

Meanderings in the News

President Obama has ended the combat mission in Iraq. The decision to enter was too hasty, the strategy deployed ineffective, the result in Iraq instability, and the condition now complete vulnerability to the machinations of others.

1. This is good news to me: we have too many McMansions.

2. Frank Rich is obviously worried: “All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.”

3. John Derbyshire is obviously worried too: “Here is my prescription for a reform of the nation’s education system. First, destroy all the schools. Cart away the rubble for landfill and sow the ground with salt. Abolish the federal Department of Education and all state equivalents. End all education funding from public sources. If the inhabitants of any district then wish their kids to be educated in schools, let them raise the necessary funds themselves. Then let them build the schools themselves, like zeks. There should be just one federally approved model: an unheated wood-and-tar-paper structure with plastic sheeting for windows. Any person above the age of twelve who wishes to attend school should have to stand outside the school gate for a month, in all weathers, pleading to be admitted. There should be a constitutional amendment banning any community from employing non-teaching staff in its schools at any ratio to teaching staff higher than one percent. And let’s have a federal penalty of 25-to-life for anyone attempting to form a teachers’ union. Crazy, you say? No: Spending half a billion dollars you don’t have on a school to educate 4,200 students, some high proportion of whom are in the country illegally, is crazy. Shoveling seven hundred million dollars into the public sector of a state whose private sector is withering on the vine is crazy. Pretending that by spending enough money you can turn every child into a bookish child is crazy. Though I’m certainly willing to let my proposal compete in the marketplace of ideas. How about a nationwide referendum: the Derbyshire plan, as above, vs. the Obama plan? The result might, as in our little local referendum here this week, not be the one the ed-biz panjandrums prefer.”

4. Got a title for this news item? Here’s the last line: “Americans, now fatter than ever, are having trouble standing up from a sit, never mind a squat.”

5. Yes, it’s true: in many ways liberal Christianity morphed (naturally) from a social gospel into a liberation theology, and President Obama’s form of Christianity is a liberation theology. From WaPo: “Beck … said that liberation theology is at the core of Obama’s “belief structure.” “You see, it’s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don’t know what that is, other than it’s not Muslim, it’s not Christian. It’s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it,” Beck said. [But, but, but the best of liberation theology is a both-and and not an either-or. My favorite version remains David Bosch, pictured to the left with his wife Annemie, whom I’ve met.]

6. Hoping in some hoping: “Yet even as vital signs weaken — plunging home sales, a bleak job market and, on Friday, confirmation that the quarterly rate of economic growth had slowed, to 1.6 percent — a sense has taken hold that government policy makers cannot deliver meaningful intervention. That is because nearly any proposed curative could risk adding to the national debt — a political nonstarter. The situation has left American fortunes pinned to an uncertain remedy: hoping that things somehow get better.”

7. Brad Wilcox, quoted in Kathryn Jean Lopez, about women and the workplace: “About half of American women, says Wilcox, are “adaptive”: They “have interests in both work and family, and . . . they seek to scale back their work when they have children in the home — especially infants and toddlers. But when they don’t have children, or their children are older, adaptive women are often interested in working outside the home on a full-time basis. So their orientation to work and family shifts over the life course, and according to the needs of their children.” So they’re not stay-at-home moms or working moms: They’re women who do what’s best for them and their families at a given time. They “don’t fit the standard conservative stay-at-home model or the liberal full-time-working-woman model. For that reason, they are often invisible in media and academic debates about work and family.”

8. The Info-Techno sabbath by Joe Carter.

9. On the closing of a Barnes & Noble: “But many of those same people conceded that they have not bought as many books there as they did in the past. Some said they were more likely to browse the shelves, then head home and make purchases online. Others said they prized the store most for its sunny cafe or its magazines and other nonbook items.”

10. It’s happening more and more. And it happened again. They found some more.

Meanderings in Sports