Weekly Meanderings

We’re back from Israel and so we’ve got yet another edition of Weekly Meanderings for our Saturday readers. At the north end of Masada, and actually descending down the mountain, Herod the Great built a palace. Here are some ruins from that palace.

Robert Crosby on the day Jesus shouted. Christopher Gehrz has an excellent blog on Pietism. Wander around a bit on his blog for some good learning. Must-read by Mark Roberts on what “successful” worship is.

Youcef Nadarkhani: “The Iranian Supreme Court has upheld the death sentence of a pastor convicted of apostasy and accused of evangelizing Muslims. Pastor Youcef Nadarkhani, 34, has been in prison since October 2009, and the appeal of his death sentence was rejected by the Iranian Supreme Court on June 28, 2011. He is to be executed by hanging. If the death sentence is carried out, it will be the first court-ordered execution of a Christian in Iran in 20 years.”

Susan Orlean: “The fact is that the reason I like being on Twitter is precisely what this meme seems to scold about: hearing people air their little grievances and glories, because it’s a chance to get a genuine sense of what their lives are all about. If not, why would you want to even bother with social media? If you really don’t like it, just remember: there are people in the world who don’t even have computers. #twitterproblems”

Patheos has some stuff to be read. Tim Dalrymple is doing a series on homosexuality: part one, part two, part three. Tim also explores the “go the f*** to sleep” book.

What happens to our theology if life is found on other planets?

Capernaum synagogue to the left, but it’s not the 1st Century one: the earlier version is under this one.

Prison Fellowship: “Ron Nikkel, PFI’s president and CEO, said that this year’s meeting is focused on life after prison. “One of the biggest issues is answering the question, ‘What happens to a person when they come out of prison,’” Nikkel told The Christian Post. “They’ve just come out of the most illogical of all society’s institutions. You can’t expect someone who has just hung out with a bunch of criminals at the university for crime to have a changed behavior.”

I agree with Tullian in this: “Many of us, in other words, think about spirituality exclusively in terms of personal piety, internal devotion, and spiritual formation. We focus almost entirely on ourselves and our private disciplines: praying, reading the Bible, and so on. That, we conclude, is what spirituality is first and foremost…The gospel causes us to look up to Christ and what he did, out to our neighbor and what they need, not in to ourselves and how we’re doing. There’s nothing about the gospel that fixes my eyes on me. Any version of Christianity that encourages you to think mostly about you is detrimental to your faith–whether it’s your failures or your successes; your good works or your bad works; your strengths or your weaknesses; your obedience or your disobedience.”

John Piper on the NYC same-sex vote.

Michael Hyatt: “everal years ago I went through a fairly significant examination of life, work, family, art and where it all was headed. I had just ended a pretty intense season in which I found myself spread thin and a little over-extended, and I knew that I couldn’t sustain the pace indefinitely. Still, it was a critical juncture in my life and career. I was looking for some insight on how to stay engaged and keep moving forward.  During that season, I was in a meeting in which a South African friend asked, “Do you know what the most valuable land in the world is?” The rest of us were thinking, “Well, probably the diamond mines of Africa, or maybe the oil fields of the middle east?” “No,” our friend replied, “it’s the graveyard, because with all of those people are buried unfulfilled dreams, unwritten novels, masterpieces not created, businesses not started, relationships not reconciled. THAT is the most valuable land in the world.” Then a little phrase popped into my head in such a way that it felt almost like a mandate. The phrase was “die empty.” While it may sound intimidating, it was actually very freeing because I was suddenly aware that it’s not my job to control the path of my career or what impact I may or may not have on the world. My only job—each and every day—is to empty myself, to do my daily work, and to try as much as possible to leave nothing unspoken, uncreated, unwritten. I made a commitment that if any given day were my last I wanted to die empty, having completely divested myself of whatever insight or work was in me to share on that day.”

This kerfuffle was fun to follow…

Meanderings in the News

1. On hanging on to food labels, by Linda Mihalik: “In January, food industry giants launched a new food label for the front of packaged foods—Nutrition Keys (above)—which was widely seen as an attempt to influence or divert the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s ongoing efforts to create better labeling. That’s a problem. In an opinion piece published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, says that the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute’s label is a “unilateral, unscientific, preemptive approach taken by the food companies.” Brownell was even more blunt when I called him: “The industry has been given a chance to police itself and they’ve failed.” In other words, it can’t be trusted.”

2. Say it ain’t so! Fernanda Santos on the demise of librarians: “Budget belt-tightening threatens to send school librarians the way of the card catalog. The schools superintendent in Lancaster, Pa., said he had to eliminate 15 of the district’s 20 librarians to save full-day kindergarten classes. In the Salem-Keizer school district in Oregon, all 48 elementary and middle school librarians would lose their jobs under a budget proposal that faces a vote next week. In Illinois’s School District 90, which spans several rural and suburban communities in the southern part of the state, parent volunteers have been running the libraries in the district’s seven schools since September, in what the schools superintendent, Todd Koehl, described as “a last-ditch effort” to avoid closing their doors. And in New York City, half of the secondary schools appear to be in violation of a state regulation requiring them to have a librarian on staff, with the city currently employing 365 licensed librarians.”

3. John Gray does not like David Brooks’ new book: “For what Brooks is attempting to sell the world is his brand of positive thinking, a vision of the power of the individual as an emotional being with the capacity to lead the “good life,” all the while bettering himself and those around him by empowering his mind with the definitive knowledge of what it means to be “moral.” Presented in the form of a life history of two fictional characters, Erica and Harold, it ends with Harold’s death and a capsule version of Brooks’s message. Harold reaches the end of his life on earth satisfied that he “had achieved an important thing in his life. He had constructed a viewpoint. Other people see life primarily as a chess match played by reasoning machines. Harold saw life as a neverending interpenetration of souls.” Despite its pretensions to realism, Brooks’s account of Harold and Erica’s journey is a morality tale of the most transparent—and unconvincing—kind.”

4. Speaking of reviews, Elizabeth Gumport doesn’t like them. Here’s a taste of her review of reviews: “Forced to smuggle thoughts of value into the small spaces between plot summary and biographical detail, reviewers accomplish next to nothing. Nobody tells them the truth, which is that compromises cannot be unmade and that every book read is another left unread. If more experienced authors admitted that reviews were pointless and boring—as unread as they are unreadable—who would review their books? Like hazing, reviewing is inflicted by the old and popular on the young and weak, who are told that before they can succeed at their chosen pursuit they must endure certain traditional trials.”

5. We see reports like this quite often these days, but what do they really tell us? (about the reporter)

6. Where do we get our calories? Wow: “A quarter of Americans’ daily calories are now consumed as snacks and drinks between meals, according to researchers at last week’s IFT expo in New Orleans. US consumers are snacking more than ever before as busy lifestyles lead to on-the-go eating and drinking, blurring the boundaries between meals and snacking. “Between 1977 and 2006, snacking in the American diet has grown to constitute ‘a full eating event,’ or a fourth meal, averaging about 580 calories each day,” said professor of foods and nutrition at Purdue University Richard Mattes. Half of those snack calories were consumed as beverages between meals, he said.”

7. For those who need some amygdala stimulation.

8. iPad magic: “The magical nature of the iPad lies in the intuitive grasp of its operation by almost anyone who touches it. It’s in the way that it does simple things very quickly. The way that, using the full screen, it transforms itself into hundreds of different tools at the tap of a finger.”

9. Hip babushkas: “In Russian culture, one iconic image is the elderly woman — in Russian, you call her a “babushka” — sitting on a roadside, selling vegetables from her garden. One group of babushkas from the village of Buranovo, 600 miles east of Moscow, is blowing up that stereotype. The dozen or so women – mostly in their 70s and 80s – have become a musical sensation, charming audiences across Russia. They sing Beatles tunes and songs by iconic Russian rocker Viktor Tsoi. They fly around the country for concerts. They made it to the Russian finals of the Eurovision music contest. And they have a Facebook page. These women are sending a message loud and clear: It can be hip to be a babushka.”

10. George Weigel’s salty comments on NY voting for same-sex marriage: “What the gay lobby proposes in the matter of marriage is precisely the opposite of this. Marriage, as both religious and secular thinkers have acknowledged for millennia, is a social institution that is older than the state and that precedes the state. The task of a just state is to recognize and support this older, prior social institution; it is not to attempt its redefinition. To do the latter involves indulging the totalitarian temptation that lurks within all modern states: the temptation to remanufacture reality. The American civil-rights movement was a call to recognize moral reality; the call for gay marriage is a call to reinvent reality to fit an agenda of personal willfulness. The gay-marriage movement is thus not the heir of the civil-rights movement; it is the heir of Bull Connor and others who tried to impose their false idea of moral reality on others by coercive state power.”

Meanderings in Sports

Mariano Rivera: “New York Yankees closing pitcher Mariano Rivera, along with his fellow congregants from the Spanish-speaking church, Refugio de Esperanza, have agreed to fix up and buy a century-old church building in the city of New Rochelle, N.Y. The church, which was built in 1907, reportedly once housed the largest Presbyterian church in the county of Westchester, but has been owned by the city for years and has fallen into disrepair. Rivera’s congregation will lease the building and restore it, at no cost to the city, and then buy it for a total price of $1. The Associated Press reports that the building had become such a safety risk that the city had to remove its bell tower last year. Some reports say that restoration costs could end up totaling about $3 million, but Rivera wants it nevertheless.”

The least exciting player ever: Adam Dunn. (I’m sure glad the Cubs got Pena and not Dunn.)