Jesus Creed
The Arab Spring — not what we hoped, by Greg Bothelo:
(CNN)It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this.
The Arab Spring was supposed to bring peace, democracy and stability to not only the nations where it took root, but also others around it in the Middle East and North Africa. It was supposed to usher in an end of violence and heavy-handed government tactics, just like it ushered out entrenched leaders. In short, it was supposed to mean a brighter future.
Not more instability, not more violence, not fewer freedoms.
But that’s what happened, even if the level of unrest hasn’t been even or universal. Some countries, such as Jordan, instituted reforms without really roiling their societies. Others, such as Iraq, never saw a popular uprising, but have seen burgeoning violence. And now, Yemen is on the brink of civil war as it battles a rebel group that has overthrown the government and seized parts of key cities.
The 100 best children’s books of all time.
When Trisha Prabhu developed a computer program to help combat cyberbullying, she was hoping she might make a difference.
The Naperville teen never dreamed her idea would make her something of an international sensation and lead to speaking engagements in several countries, an appearance in a Super Bowl commercial and a prominent spot at the White House Science Fair.
Trisha, 14, was a global finalist in the 2014 Google Science Fair for her project called Rethink, a program that prompts Internet users to reconsider potentially offensive messages before posting them on social media.
Instead of attending a typical week of honors and AP classes at Neuqua Valley High School, Trisha spent March 23 at the White House Science Fair meeting national legislators. She then traveled to New York City for a global teen leadership summit with 29 others from around the world.
Keep your eye on this blog if you are involved with public worship.
National Black Churches Initiative breaks connection with PC USA:
The National Black Church Initiative (NBCI), a faith-based coalition of 34,000 churches comprised of 15 denominations and 15.7 million African-Americans, has broken its fellowship with Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) following its recent vote to approve same-sex marriage.
The Presbyterian General Assembly, the top legislative body of the PCUSA, voted last June to revise the constitutional language defining marriage. This arbitrary change of Holy Scripture is a flagrantly pretentious and illegitimate maneuver by a body that has no authority whatsoever to alter holy text.
Rev. Anthony Evans, NBCI President noted:
“NBCI and its membership base are simply standing on the Word of God within the mind of Christ. We urge our brother and sisters of the PCUSA to repent and be restored to fellowship.”
ONE sign of a landmark shift in public attitudes: A poll last year found that Americans approved more of gays and lesbians (53 percent) than of evangelical Christians (42 percent).
That’s partly because some evangelical leaders were intolerant blowhards who give faith a bad name. Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson famously blamed the 9/11 terror attacks in part on feminists, gays and lesbians, and doctors who perform abortions. After an outcry, both men backed off.
Today, among urban Americans and Europeans, “evangelical Christian” is sometimes a synonym for “rube.” In liberal circles, evangelicals constitute one of the few groups that it’s safe to mock openly.
Yet the liberal caricature of evangelicals is incomplete and unfair. I have little in common, politically or theologically, with evangelicals or, while I’m at it, conservative Roman Catholics. But I’ve been truly awed by those I’ve seen in so many remote places, combating illiteracy and warlords, famine and disease, humbly struggling to do the Lord’s work as they see it, and it is offensive to see good people derided.
One teacher said, “Kids are becoming more aggressive. When they play games like tag, they push with great force, often hurting the other child. We had to implement a ‘two-finger’ touch rule, so that kids couldn’t push so hard.” Another teacher that had been around for 30 years, saidshe had seen an increase in aggressive behavior as well. “They can’t seem to keep their hands off each other! Kids are always getting hurt.” A local principal stated that tag had become such a problem that they had to get creative. They gave the children foam noodles to “tag” the other children with and avoid actual contact with the hands.
The problem? Due to less time in active play these days, children are not developing the senses in their joints and muscles (proprioceptive sense) like they used to. In the past, it was more common for children to help with the outdoor chores. They would assist with raking leaves, shoveling the snow, and would even earn money by mowing lawns in their neighborhood. They’d also play for hours outside – moving heavy rocks to build a dam, scaling trees to new heights, and digging moats in the dirt. All of this “heavy work” helped children to develop a strong and healthy proprioceptive system.
Steve Wasserman, and I grab only the end… of a very good article: [HT: CRT]
The ideal of serious enjoyment of what isn’t instantly understood is rare in American life. It is under constant siege. It is the object of scorn from both the left and the right. The pleasures of critical thinking ought not to be seen as belonging to the province of an elite. They are the birthright of every citizen. For such pleasures are at the very heart of literacy, without which democracy itself is dulled. More than ever, we need a defense of the Eros of difficulty.
While clearly an exaggeration, like almost everything on South Park, the episode underscores a stigma still surrounding Christian music 12 years later. The general consensus is that, when it comes to music, Christians tend to make, “devotional artifice” and “didactic crap,” at least in the words of the singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens, whose newest album Carrie & Lowell comes out March 31.
Stevens, both a Christian and musician, nevertheless stands in stark contrast to those in this category. Representing a different camp of “Christian art,” with completely different motives and characteristics, he’s distinct among other artists of faith, who tend to produce bad, kitschy work—whether heavy-handed films like Facing the Giantsand Fireproof, or the musical travesties on the Wow compilation albums. Instead of dealing directly with religious or biblical matters, Stevens’ music embodies what theologian Francis Schaeffer called the “totality of life,” as opposed some sort of “self-conscious evangelism”—an approach that turns the whole Christian-music stigma on its head.
Three links to articles about Indiana’s RFRA, all three formed in the crucible of culture wars — two supporting and one criticizing.
Religious liberty isn’t an absolute right. Religious liberty doesn’t always trump. Religious liberty is balanced with concerns for a compelling state interest that’s being pursued in the least-restrictive means possible.
But it isn’t clear that forcing every photographer and every baker and every florist to help celebrate same-sex weddings is advancing a compelling state interest in the least-restrictive way possible. Protecting religious liberty and the rights of conscience doesn’t infringe on anyone’s sexual freedoms.
No one has the right to have the government force a particular minister to marry them, or a certain photographer to capture the first kiss or a baker to bake the wedding cake. Declining to perform these services doesn’t violate anyone’s sexual freedoms. Some citizens may conclude that they cannot in good conscience participate in a same-sex ceremony, from priests and pastors to bakers and florists. The government should not force them to choose between their religious beliefs and their livelihood.
Je suis le First Amendment. Indiana shows why for social and religious conservatives, 2016 is all about the Supreme Court and religious liberty. The past few days have made someone like me, a conservative independent who has little use for either party, realize that I cannot afford to be on the sidelines in 2016. Religious conservative voters must be focused like a laser on religious liberty, right now. It’s that important.
So, let’s review the evidence: by the Weekly Standard’s definition, there’s “nothing significant” about this law that differs from the federal one, and other state ones—except that it has been carefully written to make clear that 1) businesses can use it against 2) civil-rights suits brought by individuals.
Of all the state “religious freedom” laws I have read, this new statute hints most strongly that it is there to be used as a means of excluding gays and same-sex couples from accessing employment, housing, and public accommodations on the same terms as other people. True, there is no actual language that says, All businesses wishing to discriminate in employment, housing, and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation, please check this “religious objection” box. But, as Henry David Thoreau once wrote, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.”
So—is the fuss over the Indiana law overblown?
No.
Make it four: Ross Douthat:
As I’ve said before, I don’t think the issues in the wedding industry deserve the label “persecution” that some religious conservatives have slapped on them, and I don’t think the view taken by these florists/bakers/photographers is necessarily mandated by orthodox Christian belief. But it is my very strong impression that if a religious conservative (or anyone on the right) had said, back in 2004 or even into President Obama’s first term, that they accepted that marriage should be redefined nationwide to include same-sex couples, that they further accepted that this would happen swiftly through the courts rather than state-by-state and legislatively, and that all they asked of liberals was that this redefinition proceed in a way that allowed people like Barronelle Stutzman some wiggle room about whether their businesses or facilities had to be involved in the wedding ceremonies themselves — with the mechanism for opting out being something like the (then-still-bipartisan) RFRA model – this would have been treated as a very reasonable compromise proposal by a lot of people on the center-left, gay as well as straight. I cannot prove this absolutely, and I concede that there are lots of people on the left who wouldn’t have liked the deal. But the world of liberal opinion is a pretty familiar one to me, the world of the past isn’t that far past, and I think my assessment is basically correct.
Today, though, as I said above, I think the consensus center-left position has basically shifted toward the argument offered by Garrett Epps for The Atlantic: It doesn’t matter if Stutzman or any other wedding vendor is a nice person with sincere religious beliefs, and it doesn’t matter if she or they would provide her services to gay clients in any other context; her religious anxiety about decorating a wedding chapel for a same-sex couple is no different from the objection to integration of a Southern store-owner whose preacher taught him the races should be separate, and needs to be dismissed with extreme prejudice lest anti-gay discrimination flourish and spread.
HT: KM
Neuroscientists have long tried to measure our maximum mental volume. However, what scrambles any simple reckoning of memory capacity is the astounding cognitive feats achieved by dedicated individuals, and people with atypical brains.
Many of us struggle to commit a phone number to memory. How about 67,980 digits? That’s how many digits of pi that Chao Lu of China, a 24-year-old graduate student at the time, recited in 2005. Chao uttered the string of numbers during a 24-hour stretch without so much as a bathroom break, breaking the world record.
Savants have pulled off arguably even more amazing performances, capable of astounding feats of recall, from names and dates to the details of complex visual scenes. And in rare instances, injuries to previously healthy people have seemingly triggered “acquired savant syndrome.” When Orlando Serrell was 10-years-old, for example, he was struck by a baseball in the left side of his head. He suddenly found he could recall countless licence plates and compute complex calendrical items, such as what day of the week a date from decades ago fell.
How is it that these peoples’ noodles put the average brain’s memory to shame? And what do the abilities of pi reciters and savants say about the true capacity of the human brain?
Why do Catholics become Anglicans? Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith:
Here are a few reasons why Catholics become Anglicans, in my experience:
Firstly, marriage, and in recent times, civil partnerships: Because the Anglican church will often bless unions the Catholic Church does not recognise, some people have gone to the vicar for weddings or services of blessing and then stayed with the vicar’s community.
Secondly, aesthetic reasons: I know of some who have decided that their pretty village church with its warm-hearted community is the place where they want to be. Many of these people, in my experience, have not been particularly religious. While they may consider themselves parishioners, they would but infrequently go to the Anglican Church.
Thirdly, church politics: usually when people have a blazing row with the parish priest over the positioning of the hymn board or some other cutting edge matter, they vamoose to another parish. Sometimes, though I have heard of only one case, they storm off “to join the other lot”, as they put it.
Fourthly, female ordination: some Catholic women have left the Church to join the Anglicans so that they can be ordained. Some lay people may have joined the Anglicans because they support female ordination.
Michelle Robinson Obama, our First Lady.
And then there were the academics. She took a Greek mythology course as a freshman and struggled to keep up, receiving a C on the midterm: “The very first C I had ever gotten and I was devastated.” She felt punched in the stomach again during her senior year, when a professor assessed her work by telling her, “You’re not the hottest thing I’ve seen coming out of the gate.” She responded with the discipline and determination that was already her hallmark, demonstrated on high school mornings when she rose to study long before dawn.
“I decided that I was going to do everything in my power to make that man regret those words,” she said later. “I knew that it was my responsibility to show my professor how wrong he was about me.” Working as his research assistant, she poured herself into the effort. He noticed. When he offered to write an extra letter of recommendation to law school, she knew that she had “shown not just my professor, but myself, what I was capable of achieving.”
Why Lew Alcindor became a Muslim:
I was born Lew Alcindor. Now I’m Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.
The transition from Lew to Kareem was not merely a change in celebrity brand name — like Sean Combs to Puff Daddy to Diddy to P. Diddy — but a transformation of heart, mind and soul. I used to be Lew Alcindor, the pale reflection of what white America expected of me. Now I’m Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the manifestation of my African history, culture and beliefs.
For most people, converting from one religion to another is a private matter requiring intense scrutiny of one’s conscience. But when you’re famous, it becomes a public spectacle for one and all to debate. And when you convert to an unfamiliar or unpopular religion, it invites criticism of one’s intelligence, patriotism and sanity. I should know. Even though I became a Muslim more than 40 years ago, I’m still defending that choice.
Volunteers and reading improvement:
Public schools have long relied on volunteers to manage bake sales and to chaperone field trips. But what if schools could harness and organize volunteers to do something bigger and more difficult?
They can, according to new research that suggests that volunteers could be instrumental in helping millions of American children to read proficiently.
There have been plenty of studies on small volunteer tutoring programs that reach a few dozen children at a time in individual schools. But until now, there has not been evidence that such programs can make a difference on a much larger scale, across many schools and for thousands of students.
“Bringing volunteer programs to scale is often quite difficult, so that’s really the exciting thing about the research coming out now,” said Robin Jacob, a research scientist at the University of Michigan’s education school.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In