Jesus Creed
It can sometimes feel like we’re barely hanging on, but some rest and relaxation might help. Grab your coffee and sit a spell and enjoy some links.
John Ortberg: to change you have to want it. Jamie Arpin-Ricci on the four-fold pattern in Franciscan prayer. David Lamb on the enemies of blogging, a good example of love your enemies.
S. Michael Craven: “I think many in the American church know God in the same way they know the president-they know some facts about him, where he lives, what he does, and so on-but they do not have a relational knowledge of the actual person who is president. This could be described as a cultural theology. A biblical theology is more akin to the relationship between a child and a good parent. The child in this sense has a much more intimate knowledge that, through time and maturation, transmits the character and expectations of the parent. Experience only confirms this knowledge, producing trust, which in turn fosters obedience.”
What do you think of Dan Reid’s idea about that “ATA”?
How serious of a movement/issue is this New Apostolic Reformation? Speaking of serious.
TSK’s advice on learning to eat south of the poverty line. On why folks aren’t going to church.
Andrew Brown on science and creation: “Now, if you are an atheist who takes the Paleyite view – that the existence of God is a question to be settled by an enquiry which is simultaneously and inextricably scientific and moral – then anyone who disagrees with you will appear to be a “creationist” in a sense much wider than the first one. But the mainstream, orthodox, Christian position is not in fact Paleyite. It doesn’t claim that the purpose of life can be discovered or shown by scientific enquiry; only that this purpose, discovered or known by revelation, is perfectly compatible with the results of science. This is also a position which can be described as “creationist”, but I would never do so, because that muddles an enormously useful and important distinction. The orthodox Christian view cannot be refuted scientifically. It is therefore irrelevant to science classes, unlike the first sort of “creationism” which is actively hostile to science teaching.”
Meanderings in the News
Just in case you didn’t see this, or pay attention, Wednesday was one great day for true baseball fans, and Adam Sobsey tells a great story of that day.
David Kerr, on the Pope’s visit to Luther’s monastery in Erfurt: “The Pope did not shy away from praising certain aspects of Luther’s life and work. “For him theology was no mere academic pursuit, but the struggle for oneself, which in turn was a struggle for and with God,” said the Pope, observing that Luther constantly asked the question – ‘how do I receive God?’ “The fact that this question was the driving force of his whole life never ceases to make an impression on me,” said the Pope. He also expressed admiration for Luther’s attempt to put Christ at the center of his thinking and spirituality, which Pope Benedict called “thoroughly Christocentric.” The Pope noted that Luther had always asked the “burning question” of “what is God’s position towards me, where do I stand before God?” The Pope said that he did not want his qualified praise of Luther to simply “be an attempt to talk our way past the urgent problems” in ecumenical relations between the Catholic Church and other Christian bodies. At the same time, Pope Benedict emphasized the importance of remembering “just how much we have in common, not losing sight of it amid the pressure towards secularization – everything that makes us Christian in the first place and continues to be our gift and our task.” One “error of the Reformation,” he said, was that Christians “could only see what divided us.” The Pope was also candid in his assessment of what threatens Christian unity, pointing to two current challenges. His first concern was about new forms of Christianity that are currently “spreading with overpowering missionary dynamism” and yet have “little institutional depth, little rationality and even less dogmatic content, and with little stability.” The second challenge he warned of was “the secularized context of the world in which we Christians today have to live and bear witness to our faith.”
Benjamin Reiss gives Joseph Epstein an earful.
I would add “RJS” to this list: “There’s an animated discussion in the making about female science bloggers. It started in the wake of an excellent session on women bloggers at ScienceOnline 2011, and has led to several thoughtful posts on the issues that they face, self-promotion, dealing with sexism, and more. So this is a list of women bloggers who I think you should read, with specific reasons why I think you should read them, and some of my favourite posts of theirs to get you started. And note, this is not a list of top female science bloggers; it’s an all-female list of top science bloggers.”
Is the three-square-meals a day the healthiest option?
Tim Blanning’s excellent review of Craig Kolofsky’s study of the changes about “night”: “In 1710, Richard Steele wrote in Tatler that recently he had been to visit an old friend just come up to town from the country. But the latter had already gone to bed when Steele called at 8 pm. He returned at 11 o’clock the following morning, only to be told that his friend had just sat down to dinner. “In short”, Steele commented, “I found that my old-fashioned friend religiously adhered to the example of his forefathers, and observed the same hours that had been kept in his family ever since the Conquest”. During the previous generation or so, elites across Europe had moved their clocks forward by several hours. No longer a time reserved for sleep, the night time was now the right time for all manner of recreational and representational purposes. This is what Craig Koslofsky calls “nocturnalisation”, defined as “the ongoing expansion of the legitimate social and symbolic uses of the night”, a development to which he awards the status of “a revolution in early modern Europe”.
Nice article on cocoa beans and chocolate.
Brains and obesity: “Stice’s study seems to support the Goldilocks theory of obesity by providing rich brain imaging and genetics data in a prospective research design that allows us to begin teasing out the causes vs. consequences of obesity. Using fMRI, his team scanned the brains of adolescent girls with differing BMIs while they viewed pictures of appetizing foods and imagined eating what they saw. Stice’s group also genotyped these young women to determine whether or not they possessed variant alleles of two genes (DRD2 Taq1A A1 and DRD4-7+) that have been linked with lower dopamine activity and, in some studies, obesity. They then followed these young women for one year and measured changes in their BMI. Overall, they found that adolescent girls with greater BMI showed increased reward region activation in response to food images. They also found that girls with greater reward activation gained more weight. A victory for the ‘increased reward activity’ camp! Not so fast. Remember the genetic testing? The study’s results suggested that girls whose brains showed less reward system activation to foods also gained more weight — if they had the DRD2 Taq1AQ1 or the DRD4 7+ repeat alleles. So perhaps people whose genes incline them toward low dopamine activity are at particular risk for a subtype of obesity stemming from low food reward.”
This is a very long article on “Wheat Belly,” but it is worth your effort if you are interested in the accumulation of carbs in our diet and health.
The Meaning Machine: “The Meaning Machine takes all of your inputs at one end — photographs, status updates, game plays, song listens — and transforms them into meaning that’s organized and designed. The Meaning Machine is what happens when we apply statistical methods to human lives. Run regressions on your experience of the world and this is what you get. Right now we call it Facebook Timeline, but it will have many forms over the coming decades. The Meaning Machine relieves you of the struggle to examine your experience of the world. You only need to post status updates and photos. Just live life and record it in social media. The Meaning Machine takes it from there. Feel the algorithm!”
The Polish ministers pray for EU unity.
Some fun with The Simpsons.
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