Weekly Meanderings

This will be our last Weekly Meanderings at Beliefnet. Next week it will be at our new site at Patheos.

Jay Phelan has some insightful words about the internet and civility.

Anne Farley-Rollé, who pointed me at Jay’s post, jumps from my parables series into some concerns of her own. 

Some parallel evangelical trajectories among Messianic Jews.

Meanderings in the News

1. Wedge issues and the political process: “The current ruckus over building an Islamic center and mosque near ground zero, calls to change the 14th Amendment and other so-called “wedge” issues are roiling up each party’s base, but they’re turning off independents, analysts say. This is party politics as usual with respect to all of these wedge issues,” said Jacqueline Salit, president of independentvoting.org, a national strategy and organizing center for independents. “I think there’s more and more of a steady recognition that these kind of wedge issues and political manipulation, sensationalism and opportunism is exactly what is degrading the American political process and our democracy.” Salit, who is also the executive editor of The Neo-Independent magazine, said that people are having a hard time understanding what’s happening with the economy because of partisanship. “I think people can’t tell what’s going on because the political environment is so polluted by partisanship,” she said. “The parties are trying to change the subject from things they think can inflame voters on and win elections on. How does that help the country? That hurts the country. And that’s what independents are deeply concerned about.”

2. Reading material at Gitmo.

3. On the mysteries of consciousness by David B. Hart: “Most attempts to describe the mind entirely as an emergent quality of the brain, or as another name for the brain’s machinery, not only fail convincingly to bridge the qualitative distance between sensory impression and coherent thought, but invariably bracket out of consideration a great deal of what any scrupulous phenomenology of consciousness reveals. Certainly they do not seem to explain the “transcendental” conditions by which consciousness is organized: that primordial act within and prior to all our other acts of mind and will; that constant mediation between thought and world that we both perform and suffer in advance of all experience or volition.”

4. I agree with Karl Giberson in his criticism of Al Mohler, but this article is a classic example of overkill: all we needed was three paragraphs. Here’s all he needed to say: “In this talk Mohler made false statements about Darwin. He apparently wanted to undermine evolution by suggesting that it was “invented” to prop up Darwin’s worldview, rather than developed to explain observations in the natural world. He said, “Darwin did not embark upon the Beagle having no preconceptions of what exactly he was looking for or having no theory of how life emerged in all of its diversity, fecundity, and specialization. Darwin left on his expedition to prove the theory of evolution. Because Darwin was constantly journaling, keeping careful notebooks, and writing letters, historians have established beyond all doubt that Mohler’s summary is simply false.”

5. New kind of honeymoon: “(CNN) — It’s common for newlyweds to honeymoon abroad. It’s less common for them to fix kids’ bikes during their trip — but Aaron and Kristen Berlin did just that two days after saying their vows.The Massachusetts twentysomethings got married in October and spent five days volunteering at an orphanage in southern Thailand before exploring Bangkok, northern Thailand and Cambodia.”

6. Wowzers, this guy’s incredible: “Khan has his skeptics in the education business. They don’t doubt he means well and is helping students, but they question the broad impact of any tutorial that doesn’t test performance or allow student-teacher discussion. “It’s a solid supplemental resource, particularly for motivated students,” says Jeffrey Leeds, president of Leeds Equity Partners, the largest U.S. private equity firm specializing in for-profit education. “But it’s not an academy — it’s more of a library.”

7. And David Brooks on mental flabbiness: “The ensuing mental flabbiness is most evident in politics. Many conservatives declare that Barack Obama is a Muslim because it feels so good to say so. Many liberals would never ask themselves why they were so wrong about the surge in Iraq while George Bush was so right. The question is too uncomfortable. There’s a seller’s market in ideologies that gives people a chance to feel victimized. There’s a rigidity to political debate. Issues like tax cuts and the size of government, which should be shaped by circumstances (often it’s good to cut taxes; sometimes it’s necessary to raise them), are now treated as inflexible tests of tribal purity.

 To use a fancy word, there’s a metacognition deficit. Very few in public life habitually step back and think about the weakness in their own thinking and what they should do to compensate

.”

8. Solar energy.

9. The Top 18 Best iPhone Apps.

10.

Chicago’s Bean

Meanderings in Sports