Jesus Creed
In our year of much travel… Kris and I on our way to Honolulu where I will be teaching “voyagers” the next weeks at Pacific Rim Christian University.
Bless her heart! By Peter Holley:
A vintage Apple I computer, one of only about 200 first-generation desktop computers built by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ron Wayne in 1976, can fetch six figures.
Assuming, that is, you know you have one in your possession.
A Silicon Valley recycling firm that specializes in computers, lab equipment, test equipment and semiconductors suspects a local woman was unaware that she had a valuable piece of tech history in her possession when she dropped off two boxes of old electronics that she’d gathered while cleaning out her garage in April.
“She said, ‘I want to get rid of this stuff and clean up my garage,’ ” Victor Gichun, vice president of Clean Bay Area, told the San Jose Mercury News. “I said, ‘Do you need a tax receipt?’ and she said, ‘No, I don’t need anything.’ ”
Gichun told the Mercury News that the woman said her husband had died several months earlier, prompting her to clean out her home. In hopes of helping her through a hard time, there’s something he’d like to give her, but he has no way of contacting the mystery donor.
I Went to Church with Bruce Jenner and Here’s what Caitlyn Taught Me About Jesus.
When I was a budding twenty-one year old I took a job at a church in Calabasas. It was a brand new church meeting in a movie theater, and as I relocated to Los Angeles for my first service I learned the Kardashian family were major supporters of the church from its infancy. At the time I had to Google their names to figure out who this celebrity family was. They had previously attended another church and met a very charismatic and prolific pastor there. He ended up leaving that church believing he wouldn’t go back to ministry.
It was Bruce Jenner that found this pastor three years later, was working at Starbucks.
Bruce searched this pastor out and told him that his wife, Kris, had been trying to find him and would love to talk with him. The Pastor kindly received the request, and upon meeting, Kris Jenner told the pastor that they wanted to start a new church in their hometown of Calabasas with him as the pastor.
If you’re surprised by this..so was I.
It’s a long story that doesn’t fully connect with the purpose of this post, and so I’ll keep it short. He accepted.
BW3, back by popular demand: counters to arguments against women in ministry:
Most of you who know me, know that I did my doctoral thesis on women in the NT with C.K. Barrett at the University of Durham in England. My first three published scholarly books were on this very subject. One of the reasons I did that thirty some years ago was because of the controversy that raged then over the issue of women in ministry, and more particularly women as pulpit ministers and senior pastors. Never mind that the Bible does not have categories like ‘senior pastor’ or ‘pulpit minister’, the NT has been used over and over again to justify the suppression of women in ministry— and as I was to discover through years of research and study, without Biblical justification. Now of course equally sincere Christians may disagree on this matter, but the disagreements should be on the basis of sound exegesis of Biblical texts, not emotions, rhetoric, mere church polity, dubious hermeneutics and the like.
So in this post I am going to deal with the usual objections to women in ministry, one by one. Some of these objections come out of a high church tradition, some tend to come from low church traditions, some are Catholic/Orthodox some are Protestant, but we will take on a sampling of them all without trying to be exhaustive or exhausting.
Doctoring — the old fashioned way — house calls!
May 26, 2015 11:29 am Sheri Porter – It’s Oct. 18, 1993, and Thomas Cornwell, M.D., a family physician not too many years out of residency, is on call at an urgent care clinic in Chicago. Unbeknownst to his colleagues, he’s also agreed to help launch a home-based primary care model in the Chicago area.
The clinic phone is ringing and, against all odds (and clinic protocol), Cornwell takes the call. After listening to the caller complain about abdominal pain, he tells her to go the ER. He still remembers her response: “Doesn’t anyone make house calls?”
Cornwell tells AAFP News he went to see the patient after he finished his shift. “She was my first patient; she averted a hospitalization.” Now, more than two decades later, Cornwell’s house call count has reached nearly 32,000 visits to more than 4,000 patients.
Defining Home-Based Primary Care
Cornwell describes house call medicine as “bringing primary care to a mostly elderly population with multiple chronic problems.”
The average age of his patients is 80, and one-third are older than 85. “About 8 percent of our patients are under the age of 65,” says Cornwell, and most of them suffer from neuromuscular diseases.
Baltimore is now paying the price for irresponsible words and actions, not only by young thugs in the streets, but also by its mayor and the state prosecutor, both of whom threw the police to the wolves, in order to curry favor with local voters. Now murders in Baltimore in May have been more than double what they were in May last year, and higher than in any May in the past 15 years. Meanwhile, the number of arrests is down by more than 50 percent.
Various other communities across the country are experiencing very similar explosions of crime and reductions of arrests, in the wake of anti-police mob rampages from coast to coast that the media sanitize as “protests.”
None of this should be surprising. In her carefully researched 2010 book, Are Cops Racist? Heather Mac Donald pointed out that, after anti-police campaigns, cops tended to do less policing and criminals tended to commit more crimes.
Obesity growing in causes of cancer:
A middle-aged cancer epidemic is being blamed on Britain’s poor diet and overly generous portions.
Leading specialists convened on Friday to issue a stark warning that obesity will soon overtake smoking as the principal cause of cancer.
Doctors said Westerners had replaced one bad habit with another, with too many people eating their way towards an early death.
They said spiralling rates of obesity meant that cancer – once seen as a disease of old age – was now increasingly being diagnosed up to two decades earlier than in the past. Their figures suggest one in five cancer deaths in Britain is caused by excess weight.
Speaking at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) annual conference in Chicago, experts said “staggering” rates of obesity were responsible for the growth of 10 common cancers. Dr Clifford Hudis, a New York breast cancer specialist, said the trends meant that young people were increasingly presenting with diseases usually seen in old age. “Being lean doesn’t mean you won’t get these diseases, necessarily, but being obese might mean you get them earlier in life,” said the former ASCO president.
“So you might get colon cancer at 60 instead of 80.” The figures suggest that around 32,000 UK deaths from cancer a year are related to excess weight.
According to the expert statement released in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, Americans should begin to stand, move and take breaks for at least two out of eight hours at work. Then, Americans should gradually work up to spending at least half of your eight-hour work day in what researchers call these “light-intensity activities.”
“Our whole culture invites you to take a seat. We say, ‘Are you comfortable? Please take a seat?’ So we know we have a huge job in front of us,” said Gavin Bradley, director of Active Working, an international group aimed at reducing excessive sitting that, along with Public Health England, convened the expert panel. “Our first order of business is to get people to spend two hours of their work day NOT sitting. However you do it, the point is to just get off your rear end.”
Bradley said the first level of activity is simply standing.
Stage Two Exile by Thomas McAlpine (and yes he quotes me, and thanks to a friend for pointing me to this piece):
That is what we must recover. Second Stage exiles do not place their hope in a city here, be it Athens or Babylon, but seek a city that is to come (Hebrews 13). Second Stage Exiles do not need the approval of the culture, neither do they need to provoke the culture in order to feel good about themselves. No, true exiles can live out their time in exile with confidence, love and hope because they trust in him “who is able to keep [them] from stumbling and to present [them] before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy.” (Jude 1:24).
Christian, Second Stage Exile is coming. Are you ready for it?
Intro to Porter Taylor’s sermon on Trinity Sunday:
Today is Trinity Sunday. Theologically it is important to wrestle through the particulars of the Trinity and how we can know God who is three-in-one and one-in-three. However, it is more essential that we come to know the Triune God and realize the invitation into his life, love and family. We experience this Triune God in worship, confession and commission. We will never fully understand the Trinity that is why we call it a mystery. We can understand our role in his family and how we are in relationship with Father, Son and Holy Spirit just as the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all in relation with one another. If you were looking for a sermon on the philosophical particulars of the Trinity then I am sorry. But if, just if, you were hoping to live life with the Triune God, based on God, and for God then I hope this is meaningful to you. Good? Good.
Bigger and bigger, America’s houses, by Mary Ellen Podmolik:
The average size of homes built in the U.S. increased for the fifth consecutive year in 2015 to a record 2,657 square feet, according to census data released Monday.
It compares with 2,598 square feet in 2013. Also setting new records were the percentage of homes having three or more bathrooms, at 36 percent, and the percentage of homes built with four or more bedrooms, at 46 percent. The average sales price of a newly constructed home sold last year was $345,800, versus $324,500 in 2013.
Homes built in the Midwest last year continue to be smaller than their counterparts elsewhere. The average size here is 2,574 square feet, compared with 2,617 square feet in the Northeast, 2,711 square feet in the South and 2,603 square feet in the West.
While home size remains on the upswing, average lot size is still going in the opposite direction. It was about 47,300 square feet last year, compared with 48,500 square feet in 2013, and more than 64,500 in 2010, according to the Census Bureau’s data.
For decades, planners designed streets, and our transportation systems, in ways that inadvertently sacrificed safety to focus on driver freedom. They focused on how to reduce congestion for commuters, often neglecting to think about the population outside of the 9-to-five workforce. The results of this strategy: infrastructure built less for peoples’ holistic needs, and more for vehicles.
“In the past five to ten years, there’s been a big shift in the way we think about designing communities and neighborhoods for bicycling and walking,” said Seleta Reynolds, the general manager of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation at New America’s annual conference. “When you look at the leadership in the traffic safety movement, there are lots of women doing transformative things because they may see transportation from a different angle or lens.”
In many ways, Reynolds said, women are “changing the rulebook for how we design streets, and how we entice more women and families out to use them in a different way.”
Wait til the historical critics get ahold of this one:
Smalltooth sawfish are on the verge of extinction. But scientists have discovered that some of the fish — perhaps in an effort to survive — have resorted to “virgin births” in the wild.
It is a discovery that has the potential to prompt a rethinking of what we’ve long believed to be true about reproduction in vertebrates.
Female sawfish in Florida estuaries were found to have produced living offspring without the help of a male. Researchers found that 3 percent of sawfish in their study were the result of this unusual reproductive strategy, according to a new study published in the journal Current Biology on Monday.
“We were conducting routine DNA fingerprinting of the sawfish found in this area in order to see if relatives were often reproducing with relatives because of their small population size,” Andrew Fields, the study’s lead author, said in a statement. “What the DNA fingerprints told us was altogether more surprising; female sawfish are sometimes reproducing without even mating.”
The God whom we encounter in the Jesus of the Gospels is none other than the God of Israel, the great I AM, the one—and only one—who could say, “Before Abraham was born, I am!” (John 8:58). He is, as Matthew quoting Isaiah proclaimed, Immanuel—“God with us” (Matt 1:23).
Unlike Marcion in the second century, the New Testament does not present Jesus as the emissary of an “alien God” but as the Son and Word of the God of Israel; the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; the God of the prophets. Jesus himself quotes the Shema (Mark 12:29) and refers to his own work as the work of “the one who alone is God,” “the only true God” (John 5:44 NRSV; 17:3). Matthew, more than any other Gospel writer, presents Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and the prophets, and his Gospel is replete with expressions like this: “Then what was said through the Prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled” (Matt 2:17); “This was to fulfill what was spoken through the Prophet Isaiah” (Matt 8:17); “So was fulfilled what was spoken through the prophet” (Matt 13:35); and “This has all taken place that the writings of the prophets might be fulfilled” (Matt 26:56). This point can hardly be emphasized too much, given the docetic and neo-gnostic construals of Jesus that still abound.
However, it is possible to go too far in the opposite direction. This happens when Jesus is so ultra-contextualized that his radical newness and uniqueness are obscured. In the early Church, it was asked, “Has Christ brought anything new by his coming?” To which St. Irenaeus replied: “Yes, Jesus has brought everything new by bringing himself” (Against Heresies, IV, 34, 1). Jesus is the new wine that bursts through the old wineskins, giving us an understanding of God that both encompasses the earlier revelation and at the same time relativizes it in light of the words and deeds of Jesus himself.
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In