Rio de Janeiro wins 2016 Olympic Games. Madrid came in second. Tokyo came in third. Chicago–despite the presence of President and Mrs. Obama and Oprah Winfrey–got knocked out in the first round. Congratulations, Brazil. (FWS, our correspondent in Brasil, as he and Brazilians spell it, please report.)
President Obama is stumping for his hometown of Chicago in its bid for the 2016 Olympics. That’s fine. Chicago would be a good choice. Other cities in contention include Madrid, Tokyo, and Rio de Janeiro. If not Chicago, let’s have it in Brazil. South America has never hosted the games before. What do you think?
I came across this List of countries by population and found it fascinating. I did not realize that the USA is the world’s third most populous nation. Nor did I realize that there is a country with only 50 people in it. And quite a few countries smaller than my hometown of Vinita, Oklahoma.
Indonesia and Brazil come after the USA and are huge. Russia, though, is much less than half the size of the United States. Many of the European powers are quite small. Check out the list. Do you see any other interesting information?
I just got back from North Carolina, where I gave one of the annual Luther Lectures that several churches there organize. The topic was Vocation, and John Pless, David Adams, and Detlev Schultz were also on the docket. The latter is a professor at Concordia Theological Seminary in Ft. Wayne who is from Germany. Also coming down for the event were some seminary students from Finland, one a pastor working on his S.T.M. and another a soon-to-be pastor who will be ordained in Kenya.
Both are part of the mission initiated by Bishop Obare of Kenya designed to bring confessional Lutheranism back to Scandinavian nations plagued by an ultra-liberal state church. Dr. Schultz also said that Christianity is alive and well in Germany. (In a Bible class on Sunday, he told about some remarkable things the Ft. Wayne seminary is doing for missions, both in educating foreign students and in sending seminary professors to teach overseas to teach native pastors–work involving Latvia, Russia, Finland, Kenya, Madagascar, India, Indonesia, and Brazil.) Anyway, I came away from all of these conversations convinced that God is NOT finished with Europe.
Not only has the Belgian/Brazilian firm InBev bought St. Louis’s Budweiser. Now Miller and Coors have merged and are moving their headquarters to a neutral site: neither Milwaukee nor Colorado but Chicago! Read this . America’s beer cities are no more. I know, the factories will remain in those cities, but part of their identity–as well as their major civic boosters and philanthropists–will be lost.
I’m in St. Louis for the Concordia Publishing House board meeting, and the whole city is in a tizzy over an attempt by a Brazilian-Belgian company named InBev to buy Anheuser-Busch. See Critics of the Bud Buyout Are Frothing. When the South African corporation SAB bought Miller, Milwaukee didn’t get all in an outrage, and many people welcomed it. But St. Louis is worried that their local beer giant under foreign management might cut out all of their civic involvement, shut down the free Grant’s Park, cut jobs, and who knows what all.
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