Weekly Meanderings

Got anything for me?

Help your parents — or someone who needs it — to be more tech savvy. Fun. And Parents, encourage your kids.

Speaking of parenting, April Diaz openly and honestly expresses her struggle of going back to pastoring after an eleven week journey to get her two orphan children, bringing them to the USA and learning to be a mom.

Steve Cuss, the Multi Hat Pastor, on a spiritual retreat. My friend George Guthrie interviews Michael Card on lament … a good listen. And my friend Mike Glenn on how he reads the Bible.

Walking off grief with Christine.

Ted Gossard’s pastor, Sharon Garlough Brown, has a new book and Ted gives a sketch and invitation to read it. Speaking of women (ahem) (non-but-all-but)pastors, Karen has a wonderful piece on Beth Moore: “Linda, my sister, has long been a fan of Moore’s. Over the past decade, if Moore was within a day’s driving distance, my sister was in the audience. To be honest, Linda’s rabid devotion for all-things-Moore annoys me. My sister waited four months before ordering my most current book. If Moore releases a new book, Linda has it ordered within four minutes. Hundreds of thousands of women share my sister’s affection for Moore and her teaching ministry, but as usual, I’m late to the party.”

A wonderful image for a Jesus’ ministry of uprooting. A wonderful spoof of an interview with Satan about Rob Bell’s book.

Straight from the classroom. Straight from the sacred texts. Straight from the preacher. Straight from the professor.

And straight from Roger Olson about his experience with neo-fundamentalists in the evangelical tent. “There comes a point when one has to give up and say “Okay, have it your way.  We’re not part of the same movement anymore.”  I am saying that.  They may go their way and I and mine will go our way.  We both use the label “evangelical,” but it is too general to cover all of us without qualification.  To me, they are behaving like fundamentalists, so that’s what I’ll call them with “neo-” in front to distinguish them from Carl McIntire and the older, separatistic fundamentalist movement (that still exists but does not participate in evangelical endeavors).”

Meanderings in the News

1. Five myths about why the South seceded.

2. This isn’t a myth: “SPRINGFIELD — The chief executive of Caterpillar wrote a letter to Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn raising the possibility the heavy equipment company could move out of Illinois because of concerns that the direction the state is heading isn’t favorable to business. In a letter to Gov. Pat Quinn obtained Friday by The Pantagraph of Bloomington, Doug Oberhelman said officials in at least four states have approached Peoria-based Caterpillar about relocating since Illinois raised its income tax in January.”

3. Baseball fraternity, proves grace yields grace: “Reporting from Tucson — The season is long, and the road is lonely. The fraternity of baseball lifers bonds in creaky old ballparks and chain restaurants, scouts and coaches leaning on one another when the comforts of home are far away. P.J. Carey gave his adult life to baseball, more than three decades of working with young players from Casper, Wyo., to Spartanburg, S.C. Carey was working in the Dodgers‘ front office last year, as an advisor in the minor league department, when he and his wife each were diagnosed with cancer. The baseball fraternity rallied behind Carey, led by a Dodgers scout and longtime friend. The scout collected autographed jerseys, bats and baseballs from his contacts across the major leagues, for an auction last fall that would help the Careys cover medical expenses. This is how baseball lifers treat one another, and not for a spotlight that seldom shines on them anyway. Little did the scout know that the baseball world, and a larger world, would rally behind him just two months later.”

4. Bob Herbert: “The U.S. has not just misplaced its priorities. When the most powerful country ever to inhabit the earth finds it so easy to plunge into the horror of warfare but almost impossible to find adequate work for its people or to properly educate its young, it has lost its way entirely.”

5. George Will: “Still, the college admission process occasions too much angst. America is thickly planted with 1,400 four-year institutions. Motivated, selective students can get a fine education at any of them — unmotivated, undiscerning students at none. Most students love the schools they attend.”

6. Amanda Paulson on big time school reforms: “As part of the transition to the new school, Chicago school officials dismissed all the Phillips teachers. Little hired back only two of the original faculty, both ROTC instructors. He also mandated the wearing of uniforms – navy blue pants for both boys and girls, and shirts color-coded by grade. On top of that, he instituted a dress code – no shirt, for instance, could be untucked. Students had to wear visible ID tags, and carry clear backpacks so security guards could see what was inside them. Little altered the schedule to keep freshmen at school an extra hour each day, and instituted a tougher grading scale. He enforced a zero-tolerance policy on discipline. He removed iron gates in the stairwells that he thought made the school feel like a prison. “If students come back, and it looks like it did when they left, then right there you’ve started off on the wrong foot,” says Mr. Little.”

7. Matt McMillen: “Science has finally confirmed what anyone who’s ever been in love already knows: Heartbreak really does hurt. In a new study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have found that the same brain networks that are activated when you’re burned by hot coffee also light up when you think about a lover who has spurned you. In other words, the brain doesn’t appear to firmly distinguish between physical pain and intense emotional pain. Heartache and painful breakups are “more than just metaphors,” says Ethan Kross, Ph.D., the lead researcher and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor.”

8. From JF Ptak: “These images present an excellent invitation to understanding the size and scope of one section of the opium industry in India.  I found these pictures in the 29 July 1882 issue of the Scientific American, which in turn had reproduced them from the Bengal Commissioner Lt. Col. Walter S. Sherwill, who published them as color lithographs in 1850 and which (again) found their way into print in The Truth about Opium Smokingby Benjamin Broomhill¹(1882).  They are iconic images of a devastating trade and were frequently reproduced over many decades–mostly not for the “devastating” part of what I just wrote, but more for the industrial/business appreciation end, as was the case with this article in SciAmerican.   The British interest in the trade stretched back two cneturies earlier, and of course the use of opium bends far back into Neolithic times.”

9. NYTimes digital subscriptions, etc: “As I have said previously, the introduction of digital subscriptions is an investment in our future. It will allow us to develop new sources of revenue to strengthen our ability to continue our journalistic mission as well as undertake digital innovations that will enable us to provide you with high-quality journalism on whatever device you choose.”

10. Ruth Marcus: “It’s time to retire the false choice. As a rhetorical device, particularly as a political rhetorical device, the false choice has outlived its usefulness, if it ever had any. The phrase has become a trite substitute for serious thinking. It serves too often to obscure rather than to explain. President Obama has employed the false-choice device in assessing financial reform, environmental regulation, defense contracting, civil liberties, crime policy, health care, the deployment of troops in Iraq, Native Americans, the space program and, most recently, the situation in Libya.”

Sports

Top 32 baseball players — and not one Cub? Maybe that’s our problem.

A great story. (HT: LNMM)

Tyler Smith, a friend of our family, was interviewed by ESPN about his experience playing basketball in Japan when the earthquakes and tsunami hit.