Jesus Creed
It is cold in many parts of the world today, but none as cold as the coldest town on earth, Oymyakon, and Amos Chapple’s photo piece tells the story. (Chapple’s a Kiwi, by the way.)
Meet Malcolm Butler.
Meet James Robertson, 21 mile per day commuter by foot:
But as he steps out into the cold, Robertson, 56, is steeled for an Olympic-sized commute. Getting to and from his factory job 23 miles away in Rochester Hills, he’ll take a bus partway there and partway home. And he’ll also walk an astounding 21 miles.
Five days a week. Monday through Friday.
It’s the life Robertson has led for the last decade, ever since his 1988 Honda Accord quit on him.
Every trip is an ordeal of mental and physical toughness for this soft-spoken man with a perfect attendance record at work. And every day is a tribute to how much he cares about his job, his boss and his coworkers. Robertson’s daunting walks and bus rides, in all kinds of weather, also reflect the challenges some metro Detroiters face in getting to work in a region of limited bus service, and where car ownership is priced beyond the reach of many.
But you won’t hear Robertson complain — nor his boss.
CNN updates the story to report funds have poured in to buy James a car.
Meet Rosa Parks.
Meet Bertrand Russell.
Hreinsdottir and her colleagues identified this change by examining 20 years of GPS data from more than five dozen points around the country. The height changes they identified, which are concentrated in central Iceland, correlate almost perfectly with the loss of ice documented by glaciologists, Hreinsdottir said. As Iceland’s glaciers continue to melt — the island loses about 11 billion tons of ice per year — the already-rapid rebounding process will accelerate. Relieved of their frozen burden, parts of the country could rise as fast as 1.6 inches per year by 2025 — growing at nearly the same rate as an elementary schooler.
This height change isn’t noticeable to the average human observer, but its consequences will be. Iceland sits atop one of the world’s most active volcanic hot spots, roiling with molten magma. The pressure reductions caused by the melting glaciers and rising land could create conditions that would cause mantle rocks to melt, further feeding Iceland’s already well-supplied volcanoes. Bárðarbunga, a volcano in the center of the island, has been spewing lava uninterrupted since August.
A group of professional caddies has reportedly banded together to file a $50 million federal lawsuit against the PGATour. The focus is on the bibs they wear during events, which generate revenue that isn’t shared by the Tour.
John is a hero of mine and of many who was given a terminal diagnosis nine months ago: his cancer had returned with vigor, having spread into his lungs. He had already journeyed nine years with cancer, endured seven surgeries and multiple rounds of chemo, and at this juncture he felt the quiet, stirring invitation to choose quality of life over further medical intervention which, at best, could only delay his death. A physician himself, John said yes to living the fullness of life on behalf of those he loves, for however many more weeks and months he is granted.
The unilateral support of the Palestinians is an imbalance among so many Christians, and this essay by Laurie B. Regan might be a good jolt from the other side:
Last week, pro-Palestinian protestors disrupted a New York City Council meeting yelling slogans and brandishing a Palestinian flag. The demonstration was particularly offensive given that it occurred as council members were voting on a resolution commemorating the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz….
Greenfield’s point is critical. Those who attack and demonize Israel for its imperfections in the face of the atrocities committed by its Arab neighbors are not just hypocrites. There is only one explanation for their irrational condemnations: hatred of Jews. And there is no difference between protests by pro-Palestinians and protests that regularly emanate from the White House.
Incomprehensibly, while Israel is unquestionably our most strategic ally in the region, the administration is taking great strides to fundamentally transform the Middle East. By aligning itself with Iran in its undeclared war against Sunni jihadists, Obama has distanced America from traditional allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia. Obama is empowering Iran under the auspices of shared interests and green lighting its development of military infrastructure on Israel’s borders — through which threats and attacks have already begun.
Pre-school, ONLINE, by Valerie Strauss!
It was only a matter of time. Online school classes for toddlers and preschoolers are here.
VINCI Education is offering what it calls a “groundbreaking virtual school” for youngsters, which was featured by by Dr. Gadget®, the nationally recognized TV and radio personality, on CBS’s “The Talk” late last month.
VINCI Education, according to its Web site,”is a pioneer in providing Blended Learning Curriculum, Assessment Tools and Data Analytics for the Early Childhood Education.” It operates preschools and day-care centers in Los Angeles, Ottawa and Beijing, which use technology and blended learning strategies to, the Web site says, “strengthen the main developmental areas of a child’s mind.” The company won the CODiE 2014 award (given by the software industry) for Best Game-Based Curriculum.
If you like grammar, you’ll like this by Keith Houston:
Finding the obelos to be necessary but not sufficient to the task at hand, Aristarchus took Zenodotus’s dash and created an array of additional symbols to aid his work. The obelos reprised its role of marking spurious lines, but Aristarchus allied it with a new symbol called the asteriskos, or “little star.” Alone, the dotted, star-like glyph (※) called out material that had been mistakenly duplicated; together with an obelos, it marked a line that belonged elsewhere in the text at hand. Lastly, Aristarchus placed diples alongside lines that contained noteworthy text, while the diple’s dolled-up sibling, the diple periestigmene (⸖), or “dotted diple,” was used to mark passages where he differed with the reading of other critics.
But wherever it came from historically, God appears to want it. He wants us to live and choose in his created world, though not since the Fall in the Edenic part. To put it economically, God wants us to face scarcity. He wants it not because he is a trickster who is amused by seeing us struggle with disease and the law of gravity in our pain-filled and finite lives. He so loves us that, after Eden, he wants us to have the dignity of choice. That is what free will means.
Denys Munby said to me once, “In Heaven there is no scarcity and in Hell there is no choice.” In the created world there are both. The dignity of free will would be meaningless if a choice of one good, such as apples, did not have what the economists call an “opportunity cost” in, say, oranges. If we could have all the apples and oranges we wanted, “living in idleness,” as Paul put it, with no “budget constraint,” no “scarcity,” we would live as overfed pet cats, not as human beings. If we have free will, and therefore necessarily face scarcity, we live truly in the image of God.
Scarcity is necessary for human virtues. Humility, said Aquinas, answers among the Christian virtues to the pagan virtue of great-souledness, or magnanimity, which Aristotle the pagan teacher of aristocrats admired so much. To be humble is to temper one’s passions in pursuing, as Aquinas put it, boni ardui – goods difficult of achievement. To be great-souled – which, in turn, is part of the cardinal virtue of courage – is to keep working towards such goods nonetheless. No one would need to be courageous or prudent or great-souled or humble if goods were faciles rather than ardui.
The virtue of temperance, again, is not about mortification of the flesh – not, at any rate, for Christian thinkers like Aquinas (there were others, descendants of the Desert Fathers, who had another idea). On the contrary, this side of Christianity says, we should admire the moderate yet relishing use of a world charged with the grandeur of God.
It is the message of the Aquinian side of Christian thought that we should not withdraw from the world. On the contrary, as Jesus was, we should be truly, and laboriously, and gloriously human.
Delaware would be the first in digital drivers licenses, by Mark Berman:
You can pay for groceries by scanning your phone. You can board a plane after scanning your phone. You can check your bank account balance and order dinner and show proof of insurance and buy pants and watch a movie and do essentially anything with your phone, because your phone is always there. Your phone is always in your hand, and even when it isn’t in your hand it is in your bag or your pocket, ready and waiting, secure in the knowledge that you won’t be able to wait long before compulsively checking it again and again.
So if the phone has replaced the credit card for many, and if the phone has replaced and consolidated so many other things, it stands to reason someone would ask: We’re always carrying around driver’s licenses, so is there a way our smartphone could replace that, too?
This idea is being considered in a few places across the country, states that could function as test subjects to see if such an idea can catch on with the broader populace. The Delaware legislature passed a bill last week asking the state’s Division of Motor Vehicles to “study and consider issuing” digital driver’s licenses that could replace the traditional plastic ones.
Shmuly Yanklowitz, explaining why halakhah is needed for morality in Judaism:
Why should private morality be any different from societal order? If we are serious about our personal moral and spiritual lives, then we need systems of law to protect the core values we hold most dear. There is too much at stake to violate our most cherished ethics.
Judaism, as a religion, contains one of the most powerful mechanisms to uphold these core values. Jewish life is not merely confined to specific moments such as holidays or particular life-cycle moments or spaces such as synagogues and community centers. Instead, Judaism contains an all-encompassing philosophical extension of the most relevant precepts that permeate our entire lives. This is what halakhah (Jewish religious law) is for. As Rabbi Soloveitchik explained: “The Halakhah is not hermetically enclosed within the confines of cult sanctuaries but penetrates into every nook and cranny of life. The marketplace, the street, the factory, the house, the meeting place, the banquet hall, all constitute the backdrop for the religious life” (Halakhic Man, 94).
Ben Myers on procrastination as a way of life:
Because I am an uncommonly lazy and disorganised person, I have made productive procrastination one of the rules of my life. Some members of the human race, I know it, are able to get things done simply by planning and discipline. I respect those people. I admire them from afar. I bless their creator for making them so well. Not that I blame God for making me into such a slovenly specimen of humanity. His ways are not our ways, and that is all right with me. But there came a point in my life when I saw that there were only two roads before me. Either I could achieve nothing for the rest of my days, or I could become a better procrastinator. A dismal crossroad, reader, but there you have it.
So I chose productive procrastination as my path in life. Don’t call it a bad habit; I prefer to think of it as a vocation. If you get really good at it, there is even a kind of poetry in it. That is what I’m striving for: procrastination as a work of art.
Ben, what happens when you procrastinate on your procrastination principle?
With shoppers, businesses and investments pouring into urban areas, many suburban malls are dying. Experts predict that as many as half of America’s malls will be torn down or reconfigured.
“My view on enclosed malls is that there are 100 malls in this country that will always be dominant shopping destinations,” said Don Wood, chief executive of Rockville-based Federal Realty Investment Trust, owner of 17 million square feet of open-air U.S. shopping centers. “It’s Tysons Corner and Pentagon City in our area. It’s heavily populated, affluent areas. But there are 1,000 other malls in this country, and the future for those is bleaker.”
John Dehlin started a popular podcast and website calledMormon Stories as a space for people to question Mormon teachings. Next Sunday, he’ll face a disciplinary hearing where he expects to be officially excommunicated from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Dehlin is charged with apostasy for publicly supporting same-sex marriage, the ordination of women, and for questioning church doctrine.
Dehlin tells NPR’s Rachel Martin that 15 years ago, when he started studying the church’s history, he found what he learned about founding prophet Joseph Smith “deeply disturbing.”
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