Jesus Creed
North Park University Crew
The “Jana” in this story is my daughter’s friend and played junior high school basketball with my daughter (or should I say my daughter played with Jana!?): “CHICAGO (CBS) — Eight years ago today, Steve Bartman may have helped the Cubs fall apart, but he also brought a Chicago couple together. While many Cubs fans may still harbor bad feelings, one Chicago couple is grateful for his intervention. Jana and George Balis were sitting in the same row at Game 6 of the National League Championship Series against Florida, but were perfect strangers until the end of the eighth inning. … The pair says everyone else in Row 13, Section 142 got up, out of frustration. “They were angry. The only people left in the row were George and I,” said Jana. So George used the opportunity to go talk to the attractive woman at the end of the row, seven seats away.”
Sports have been a big part of our family, and this story about the Texas Rangers features Luke’s high school baseball coach, Jim Panther who was not only a great (and hall of famer) coach but also a good man who made his players better persons.
Elizabeth Esther’s reasons for a Christian school for your kids.
JR Daniel Kirk’s good bit of advice: “With great confidence (and financial expenditure), May 21, 2011 is declared to be the day of Jesus’ return. Or the rapture. Or whatever. But, of course, it wasn’t. Neither was 1994 or 1982. When the obsession with eschatology (ideas about “the end”) produces such crazy results, it’s tempting to leave eschatology aside altogether. Let the obsessed have their little obsession while the rest of us get on with the business of real life, and real faith. But it would be a mistake to give up on eschatology altogether. The Bible is, if not properly “eschatological” throughout, always heading toward a goal, a brighter future.”
Abi, one of our students at North Park University, on the burden of white privilege.
Tim King writes up a piece at Sojourners Jackson says this: ” that examines Bishop Harry Jackson’s strong claims about Jim Wallis.“[Wallis’] ideology is not Christian,” he contends. “It is something else, and it’s being veiled and presented as though — wow, here’s a really Christian approach!” But he says it is actually a carnal, secular approach. “It is, in fact, what Paul would call the doctrine of devils [1 Timothy 4:1],” he cites. “Paul said very clearly in the last days there would come all these so-called ‘biblical doctrines’ that sound good on the surface, but they’ve been engineered in the councils of hell to try to deter God’s people from keeping with God’s Word.” Wallis doesn’t back down, saying: “C’mon, Harry. I believe the Bible’s teachings on wealth and poverty challenge both Republican and Democratic economic views which, sadly, are both often sold out to the interests of the wealthy and large corporations, when they should be focused on the ones Jesus calls “the least of these.” Can we discuss that Harry? I don’t think Bishop Jackson is offended by my ideology but by scripture itself. If he wants to toss out what the Bible has to say about wealth and poverty he might as well toss out the whole book and find a new religion in the Republican Party.” And my former student Tim King closes with this stinger: “Two thousand years ago a rich man turned away from Jesus because he couldn’t stomach what Jesus had to say about wealth. It still happens today.”
Someone needs to get to the principal parties here and get this stopped: “The third Mars Hill I know seems caught in the middle. It is pastored in Sacramento, California by a friend of mine, Scott Hagan. Scott planted another church years ago in the Sacramento area, then moved to pastor a mega-church in Michigan and is now back leading at Mars Hill in Sactown. I have Pastor Scott’s permission to share what I am going to write next. Several weeks ago, Scott and his Sacramento congregation received a “Cease and Desist” letter which came from attorneys representing the Seattle Mars Hill Church. They were told that the Seattle Mars Hill had copyrighted the name “Mars Hill” and they demanded that the California Mars Hill churches stop using the name and any logos with similar lettering.” There is only one real Mars Hill, it’s in the Bible, and everyone else is using the Bible’s language.
James-Michael Smith, at Dojo, sketches some ideas with lots of art work about the political Jesus. And a politicized Jesus is at work in the “clash of civilizations” debate, but which Jesus do we want is the question Lee Camp is asking.
Cynthia Crossen: reading vs. skimming.
Ben Witherington’s informed piece about Jurgen Habermas. John Dear SJ has an informed piece about John Howard Yoder.
Meanderings in the News
The Plague: “The Black Death in medieval Europe was more than the deadliest plagueoutbreak on record: The epidemic appears to be responsible for the cases of plague that still infect humans today. The new findings are based on bacteria recovered from skeletons found in a mid-1300s cemetery for Black Death victims in London, England. The grave excavation was undertaken by Museum of London Archaeology. Kirsten I. Bos of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and Verena J. Schuenemann of the University of Tübingen in Germany led an effort to sequence the genome of the Black Death pathogen, Yersinia pestis, recovered from the medieval grave. After examining Y. pestis samples from 46 teeth and 53 bones, the team determined that the plague hasn’t changed much, genetically speaking, in more than 600 years. The result “indicates that contemporary Y. pestis epidemics have their origins in the medieval era,” the study team writes.”
If you like Joan Didion, here’s Boris Kochka’s essay. And here is Ken Auletta’s essay on Jill Abramson.
Some early hominids were eating grasses, which might suggest to some that vegans are in our genes: “By analyzing microscopic pits and scratches on hominid teeth, as well as stable isotopes of carbon found in teeth, researchers are getting a very different picture of the diet habitats of early hominids than that painted by the physical structure of the skull, jawbones and teeth. While some early hominids sported powerful jaws and large molars — including Paranthropus boisei, dubbed “Nutcracker Man” — they may have cracked nuts rarely if at all, said CU-Boulder anthropology Professor Matt Sponheimer, study co-author.” Well, it’s awful hard on the teeth, and there were no dentists back then. The results for teeth from Paranthropus boisei, published earlier this year, indicated they were eating foods from the so-called C4 photosynthetic pathway, which points to consumption of grasses and sedges.”
Edward Tenner, observing the rise of philosophy majors: “One of the many small surprises of the recession has been a significant growth in the number of philosophy majors, according the the Philadelphia Inquirer. It has slightly exceeded the growth of enrollments in the last ten years; many other humanities and social science fields have just kept up. At the University of California at Berkeley, despite or because of the state’s economic turmoil, the number of majors has increased by 74 percent in the last decade.”
Motoko Rich, though, observes that it is the sciences, technology, engineering and math that brings the most value.
New nutrition symbols for food. My theory, let the food nutritionists arrange grocery stores into good food sections and bad food sections.
Let the kids play: “What are your memories of playing as a child? Some of us will remember hide and seek, house, tag, and red rover red rover. Others may recall arguing about rules in kickball or stick ball or taking turns at jump rope, or creating imaginary worlds with our dolls, building forts, putting on plays, or dressing-up. From long summer days to a few precious after-school hours, kid-organized play may have filled much of your free time. But what about your children? Are their opportunities for play the same as yours were? Most likely not. Play time is in short supply for children these days and the lifelong consequences for developing children can be more serious than many people realize.”
Speaking of kids, bilingualism gives advantages: “Pop quiz! Bilingualism is: a. A competitive advantage on college and job applications. b. Best acquired before the age of six. c. One area in which Americans are kind of lame. d. Full of surprising ancillary neurocognitive benefits if acquired early. Bilingual toddlers are better able to process new information, more attuned to what others are thinking and feeling, more in control of their will and attention, and four years slower, once they reach old age, to experience dementia than are their monolingual peers. e. All of the above.
Yep, it’s ‘e.’ If you’re not romantically involved, but would like to have children someday, maybe it’s time to consider an international dating site. If you’ve got a baby already, and both parents speak only one language, you could order Grimm’s Fairy Tales in Spanish or Mandarin, though a crash course at Berlitz might be better. Babies are hard-wired to attend to their parents’ voices, and can learn a second language best by interacting with them.”
Speaking of kids, yet again, Brandon Keim sketches what we know about TV and infants.
And a little older kids respond more to pleasure than wisdom: “During most of the teen years, this creates a problem. Risky behaviors feel great and are experienced as more rewarding. Impulse control hasn’t yet caught up—nor have knowledge and judgment. Thus emotion says go, but wisdom hasn’t yet said stop. How science changed my parenting There are important take-home messages here for risktaking, social policy, and our understanding of teens that I will discuss in my next post. But the first thing I took home from this reading had to do with my parenting. TEENS ARE MOTIVATED BY PLEASURE, NOT BY PAIN. Thus telling a 13 year old that he will fail a test tomorrow if he doesn’t study isn’t that effective in inducing willing compliance. He knows that. But risk avoidance is not emotionally motivating. And that video game sure is. Reminding a 13 year old how good it feels to accomplish something, how happy he’ll be when he does well, and how much more time he will have to play if he studies efficiently works a lot better. Those POSITIVE emotions activate their incentive processing center. And teens are VERY sensitive to pleasure.”
Dawkins on Hitchens: “Every day he is demonstrating the falsehood of that most squalid of Christian lies: that there are no atheists in foxholes. Hitch is in a foxhole, and he is dealing with it with a courage, an honesty and a dignity that any of us would be, and should be, proud to be able to muster. And in the process, he is showing himself to be even more deserving of our admiration, respect, and love. I was asked to honour Christopher Hitchens today. I need hardly say that he does me the far greater honour, by accepting this award in my name. Ladies and gentlemen, comrades, I give you Christopher Hitchens.”
Meanderings in Sports
OK, Joe Posnanski is a motor-worder sports machine, an EverReady bunnie for sports, but he’s probably the best going right now. This piece on the ten worst contracts is a good one.
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