Weekly Meanderings, 24 March 2018

Weekly Meanderings, 24 March 2018 March 24, 2018

The Columbine Generation speaks with bodies:

WASHINGTON — The threat of mass shootings is the defining fear for the generation that has grown up in the shadow of Columbine, a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds. Now more than one in three young people nationwide say they plan to join the March For Our Lives protests on Saturday in person or via social media.

The survey of 13- to 24-year-olds — including more than 600 middle-school and high-school students — shows both the depth of anxiety that school violence has fueled and the way a movement has spread across the country in the weeks since a rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., left 17 people dead.

On Tuesday, another school shooting in Great Mills, Md., left the alleged shooter dead and two other students wounded.

“I watch over my shoulder because you never know,” says Justin McDonnall, 17, a sophomore at North Central High School in Hymera, Ind., who was among those polled. Even in his small town, which he describes as being in “Nowhere USA”, police officers spent two days at his school to deal with verbal threats of gun violence that a fellow student had made. With the marches, he said, “We’d like to be heard, and not just ignored.

Eighteen percent of the young people polled, including 21% of those 13 to 17, say they will participate personally in the marches. If they do, it would mean the most massive student-led protests in American history, dwarfing even the anti-war demonstrations of the Vietnam era. Another 24% say they will participate using social media.

“I think the protesting is … really great because it’s showing younger kids that you need to stand up for what you believe in,” Madeline Meyers, 14, an eighth-grader at Nikolay Middle School in Cambridge, Wis., said in a follow-up phone interview. “If you believe that armed teachers is not the answer, if you believe that guns in school is not the answer, then you need to show that.”

The USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll is unusual because it included not only those 18 and older but also those from 13 to 17. Parents were required to give their permission before the minors could participate.

Gun control, not gun carry:

Nearly three-fourths of U.S. teachers do not want to carry guns in school, and they overwhelmingly favor gun control measures over security steps meant to “harden” schools, according to a new Gallup poll.

The nationally representative poll of nearly 500 K-12 teachers was conducted earlier this month, after the Parkland, Fla., shooting and student protests brought national attention to the issue of gun violence.

Some of the poll was released last week. In that portion, 73 percent of teachers opposed training teachers and staff to carry guns in school. Of those, 63 percent “strongly” opposed the proposal. In addition, 7 in 10 teachers said arming teachers would not be effective in limiting casualties in a school shooting.

Neat-freak Gorilla in Philly:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A male gorilla at the Philadelphia Zoo is taking a stand against dirty hands by opting to walk on two legs.

Apparently, 18-year-old Louis is a clean freak.

When Louis has his hands full of tomatoes or other snacks, he walks upright like a human to keep food and hands clean, rather than the typical gorilla stance of leaning forward on his knuckles.

Michael Stern, curator of primates and small mammals, says workers had to install a fire hose over a mud puddle in the yard. The nearly 500-pound, 6-foot-tall primate crosses it like a tight rope to avoid getting dirty. [HT: JS]

Beth Allison Barr:

Which is why it really struck me that Sunday. This particular pastor preached for wives to submit, he preached that women were eternally subordinate to men (more on Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudem about this in a future post), and that women’s primary calling was that of home, family, and obedience. Women’s role in both church and society was to submit to the authority of their husbands. The preacher used an example from a once-popular movie (you may have seen it), My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The matriarch of the family consoles her daughter that even though the husband is the head of the family, the wife is the neck and she can turn the head anyway she wants. The pastor was quick to point out that this was an unbiblical perspective that subverted God’s designated hierarchy of patriarchal authority.

My grandfather shook his head. He looked over at my sister, patted her knee, and whispered (loudly), “You don’t believe any of this stuff, do you?”

80 years listening to Baptist sermons. 80 years, and still the hard complementarian message my grandfather heard that Sunday unsettled him. He didn’t believe it. He was unfamiliar with it. It seemed different.

This is my point. The hard complementarian message today that argues women are ordained by God to be subordinate to men and that this excludes them from most leadership roles in churches (teaching, preaching, serving as deacons and elders, etc.) is different. Yet it has so permeated evangelical culture–through Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology that is so pervasive in seminary culture, through John Piper and Wayne Grudem’s Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhoodthrough Desiring God podcasts, through the popularity of the Acts 29 movement, through Focus on the Family–that most Christians don’t even blink during a sermon on female submission and male headship. I would surmise that many Christians would think it heretical to NOT argue for male headship and female submission. It is the divine order. Right? [HT: JS]

Sad, sad, sad:

The world’s largest collection of ocean garbage is growing.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of plastic, floating trash located halfway between Hawaii and California, has grown to more than 600,000 square miles, a study published Thursday finds. That’s twice the size of Texas.

Winds and converging ocean currents funnel the garbage into a central location, said study lead author Laurent Lebreton of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-profit organization that spearheaded the research.

First discovered in the early 1990s, Lebreton said the trash in the patch comes from countries around the Pacific Rim, including nations in Asia as well as North and South America.

The patch is not a solid mass of plastic. It includes some 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic and weighs 88,000 tons — the equivalent of 500 jumbo jets. The new figures are as much as 16 times higher than previous estimates.

Who was Larry Norman? [HT: JE]

Who was Larry Norman? He’s one of the fathers of spiritual rock music, “the Forrest Gump of evangelical Christianity”—which puts him on the front lines of America’s culture wars, though on whose side it’s hard to say—and the subject of Gregory Alan Thornbury’s fantastic new biography, Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music? The book, titled after one of Norman’s best-known songs, draws extensively on Norman’s personal archives, where he was thoughtful and introspective about his beliefs, work, and doubts, giving Thornbury’s work a level of insight and intimacy that’s all too rare among recently published artist biographies. When it comes to telling the story of an artist, what makes a good biography is not the fame or even the talent of the book’s subject, but the complexity of the figure and how that manifests itself through their life and work. Norman’s story has this in abundance. Why Should The Devil also serves as a primer on Christian rock, a critical analysis of the genre, and a compact history of Christianity in the latter half of last century, a period where Jesus went from a counterculture hero to all outcasts to a cynically deployed tool of the religious right.

John Piper, unfortunately saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, is challenged by Rachel Held Evans:

That’s because contrary to Piper’s argument, patriarchy isn’t about protecting women; it’s about protecting men. It’s about preserving male rule over the home, church, and society, often at the expense of women. …

Patriarchy is not counter-cultural. It has for centuries been the norm. What’s truly counter-cultural is imitating Jesus, who, “being in very nature God,” surrendered his power and privilege to become a human—one birthed, nursed, protected, befriended, and BELIEVED by women. 

A book, it’s physical, and that matters for reading:

Unfortunately, considerable evidence suggests that Americans are both reading less and reading with less intensity. It’s not unusual to hear well-educated adults who once read regularly now lament the decline in their bookish habits. In a widely circulated 2015 Medium article (“Why Can’t We Read Anymore?“), Hugh McGuire, who founded Librivox, which distributes public-domain audiobooks, highlighted the frenetic nature of digital life as the primary reason for why he was “finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters.” According to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, the typical American adult now reads only four books a year. Twenty-seven percent didn’t read a single book in 2015, and a 2016 report from the National Endowment for the Arts found that reading had dropped, as the Washington Post summarized it, “to at least a three-decade low.”

As the art of close reading—a finely grained analysis of a text—has declined, a cohort of experts has emerged to reverse the trend and encourage stronger reading habits. Their solution has a kind of old-school simplicity to it: We need to allow the physicality of the book itself to lure us back into the pleasures of reading. …

“Reading,” says Steve Mannheimer, professor of Media Arts and Science at Indiana University, “doesn’t occur without some fairly specific and concrete combination of physical objects, environment, and purpose.” So one technique is to focus on the book as a book. “Intuitively, I would say that the paper book invites far more physical manipulation with at least the fingers and hands,” he says. “All that finger/hand fidgeting is part of the cognitive process, or at least reinforces the cognitive process of reading.”

There’s other evidence that a traditional book, rather than an electronic tablet, makes for a more engaged reading experience. During research for a paper published in 2014, Anne Mangen, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Stavanger in Norway, compared the reading experience of iPad users and paper traditionalists reading the same material. She found that readers felt less transported by the writing and less able to resist distractions when reading on an iPad than on paper. “When you read on paper you can sense with your fingers a pile of pages on the left growing, and shrinking on the right,” she told the Guardian. Such a “tactile sense of progress,” she suggested, helps readers better follow the storyline.

Kristin du Mez: [HT: JS]

All this gets at a larger issue. There is a reason why a recent LifeWay survey found that only 25% of African Americans who ascribed to the four points of evangelical belief actually identified as evangelicals. This is not the case of a simple misunderstanding. Black Christians have long resisted embracing the evangelical label because it is clear to them that there is more to evangelical identity than four statements of belief.

There may be merit in using a theological rubric to compare and contrast different groups of Christians across the globe. In doing so, however, one would do well to examine whether different groups understand statements of belief in the same light, or whether significant differences in interpretation render meaningful comparison moot. But if our goal is to understand contemporary American politics, it makes sense to take at face value a movement with which a large number of Americans—white evangelical Christians—identify. It is a group that has been remarkably consistent over the past two years. Consistent in their support of Donald Trump.

Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2018/03/defining-evangelicalism-and-the-problem-of-whiteness/#oxKjJ5JGutuO9C0E.99

Go church!

Lack of sleep is one of the most critical health issues for the homeless.

An average of 225 homeless people seek safety and rest on the pews in the sanctuary of St. Boniface church in San Francisco every day, thanks to The Gubbio Project.

The Gubbio Project was co-founded in 2004 by community activists Shelly Roder and Father Louis Vitale as a non-denominational project of St. Boniface Neighborhood Center located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood in response to the increasing numbers of homeless men and women in need of refuge from the streets.

“No questions are asked when our guests walk into the churches; in an effort to remove all barriers to entry, there are no sign-in sheets or intake forms. No one is ever turned away; all are welcomed, respected and treated with dignity,” the project’s website states.

While the church uses the front 1/3 of the sanctuary for church-goers to celebrate daily mass at 12:15 p.m., the Gubbio Project uses the back 2/3 of the sanctuary.

“This sends a powerful message to our unhoused neighbors – they are in essence part of the community, not to be kicked out when those with homes come in to worship,” the non profit organization says. “It also sends a message to those attending mass – the community includes the tired, the poor, those with mental health issues and those who are wet, cold and dirty.”

In addition to a place to rest, the church offers warm blankets, socks, hygiene kits, and massage services.

Nathan Robinson tore into Jordan Peterson, and here’s but two paragraphs in a lengthy (and worthy-of-reading) essay:

Having safely established that Jordan Peterson is an intellectual fraud who uses a lot of words to say almost nothing, we can now turn back to the original question: how can a man incapable of relaying the content of a children’s book become the most influential thinker of his moment? My first instinct is simply to sigh that the world is tragic and absurd, and there is apparently no height to which confident fools cannot ascend. But there are better explanations available. Peterson is popular partly because he criticizes social justice activists in a way many people find satisfying, and some of those criticisms have merit. He is popular partly because he offers adrift young men a sense of heroic purpose, and offers angry young men rationalizations for their hatreds. And he is popular partly because academia and the left have failed spectacularly at helping make the world intelligible to ordinary people, and giving them a clear and compelling political vision. …

This much should be obvious from even a cursory reading of him: If Jordan Peterson is the most influential intellectual in the Western world, the Western world has lost its damn mind. And since Jordan Peterson does indeed have a good claim to being the most influential intellectual in the Western world, we need to think seriously about what has gone wrong. What have we done to end up with this man? His success is our failure, and while it’s easy to scoff at him, it’s more important to inquire into how we got to this point. He is a symptom. He shows a culture bereft of ideas, a politics without inspiration or principle. Jordan Peterson may not be the intellectual we want. But he is probably the intellectual we deserve.


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