Jesus Creed
Gotta love Bill Murray, and this pic just may well be a good morning laugh.
Tonight, Daylight Savings:
People in the United States will feel a bit more refreshed on November 4 as daylight saving time 2018 ends. The clocks fall back at 2 a.m. ET on Sunday, ushering in three months of getting up in the dark until the winter solstice welcomes back the sun on December 22.
You’ve probably heard that Ben Franklin kind of proposed daylight saving time (also erroneously called daylight savings time) centuries before it was implemented, and that the twice-yearly switch was initially adopted to save us money on energy needs.
But if you dig deeper, you’ll find out that the daylight-hoarding tradition—which was adopted in the United States a hundred years ago—has an even more colorful history. Around the world, daylight saving time has been affecting international relations, creating nested time zones, and potentially influencing your health.
Halloween, a Christian Holiday (really?), read Beth Allison Barr:
Just last week, on October 24, 2018, Matt Chandler–Lead Pastor at the Village Church near Dallas , and president of the Acts 29 Network–posted a video addressing Halloween. The tag describes it this way: “Should Christians celebrate Halloween? Honestly, it’s up to you. But if you do choose to celebrate there are a few ways you can use the day to further the gospel.” Chandler did not condemn Halloween, stating that the holiday is more about candy and costumes than demons and witches, but neither did he embrace it. … As he said, “We are getting into the season that the Christian calendar kicks up….I don’t want to celebrate Halloween in a way that pushes out the natural church calendar and our rhythms as a family as we celebrate.”
This immediately gave me pause. Despite his insistence that Halloween was probably harmless and had a Christian heritage, he still defined Halloween as outside the “natural church calendar” and something that could distract from Christianity.
Halloween may be harmless, his words implied, but it isn’t Christian.
Except that it is.
I argued in my 2015 post Halloween: More Christian Than Pagan and my 2016 post The Modern Roots of Pagan Halloween that Halloween is rooted far more deeply in Christian history than paganism. Yes, there might be similarities with the pagan celebration of Samhain. … Likewise drawing from Hutton, Holly Scheer wrote in her 2016 Federalist article Move Over Druids: Halloween Is A Christian Holiday that there are no historically verifiable references to Halloween before the tenth century. If I can quote myself: It is the medieval Christian festivals of All Saints’ and All Souls’ that provide our firmest foundation for Halloween.
Halloween is a Christian holiday.
So why are evangelical Christians so afraid of it?
Matt Chandler’s suggestion that Halloween lies outside “the natural church calendar” gives us a clue. As a medieval historian, I know that in 837 Pope Gregory IV instituted the universal observance of All Saints Day on November 1, which subsequently made October 31 All Hallows Eve (the night before the vigil for the holy–hallowed–ones). And so it remains to this day on the Catholic and Anglican calendars.
In the aftermath of the Reformation, however, some fervent protestant groups (like the puritans) regarded holy days with Catholic roots suspiciously and condemned them as “popish invention“. Even Christmas was cancelled. Tommy Kidd has written that the only “holiday” New England puritans seemed able to agree on was November 5, the Gunpowder Plot. As he writes, “In New England, where almanac makers and many of their readers felt uncomfortable with any holidays associated with the Anglican church calendar, November 5 seemed a holiday that nearly everyone could enjoy, for it signified crushing defeats for Catholicism.”…
Do the roots of evangelical Protestant hostility to Halloween have less to do with Celtic paganism and more to do with anti-Catholicism?
I don’t think this is the whole story. But evidence suggests that, buried in protestant anti-Halloween rhetoric, a fear of Catholicism endures.
I don’t think most modern evangelicals would describe themselves as anti-Catholic. But, still, Matt Chandler described Halloween–a clearly Christian holiday with deep Catholic roots–as outside the “natural church calendar.” If Halloween isn’t Christian, then what does that make Catholicism?
I really like Philip Jenkins book title, The New Anti-Catholicsm: The Last Acceptable Prejudice. I think he is more right than most evangelical Christians realize…..especially when it comes to the roots of our fears about Halloween.
Dee Parsons challenges James Macdonald and CT’s choice to give him a platform.
Once upon a time, these fishing families were pioneers. In the 1970s and 1980s, they built summer flounder into a major catch for the region. The 15 brothers and sisters of the Daniels clan parlayed the business into a multinational fishing company, and three years ago they sold it to a Canadian outfit for tens of millions of dollars.
But for Frog Tillett and almost everyone else in these parts, there’s not much money to be made fishing offshore here anymore.
Forty years ago, Tillett fished for summer flounder in December and January in waters near Wanchese, then followed the fish north as the weather warmed. In recent years, however, fewer summer flounder have traveled as far south in the winter, and the most productive area has shifted north, closer to Martha’s Vineyard and the southern shore of Long Island.
In less than an hour, I leave for one of my favorite activities of the week–rehearsals with Capriccio Columbus. This is now my eleventh season of singing with this choral group and it continues to be one of the joys of my life. Why do I sing?
Fundamentally, singing reminds me that there is goodness and beauty in an ugly and sometimes evil world. Every time we come together to make music, we declare out loud what we intuit deeply in ourselves–that evil and ugliness cannot and will not have the last word.
Therefore, singing for me is not an act of escapism, of forgetting the hard things around us, but rather resistance, a form of declaration, of demonstration, that the deeper story of life is one of goodness, of truth, and of beauty. It is striking to me that civil rights marchers, and even those who grieved in Pittsburgh recently gave voice to their longings, their grief, and their prayers, in song.
Singing in a choral group is a living metaphor of our longings for a unity in the midst of diversity. The very nature of harmony is that different voices, different parts, when we are doing it right, blend together to make something far more beautiful and interesting than if all of us were singing the same note. If only we could figure out that a monotone society is no more interesting than a monotone choral group!
Your back, your health, and and your desk life:
Recovery is extremely important for high-level athletes, but it is also very important for the individual who is done competing and might work at a desk all day. The human body needs time to recover, whether it is from a hard workout, a competition, or from sitting in front of a computer for 8hrs a day. Elite athletes have everything from Omega Wave, Vasper, Normatec Recovery boots, hyperbaric chambers, dry needling, cold pools, and the list goes on. If we are not getting ready to compete on Sunday, we don’t necessarily need all these things and can follow a few simple steps to help maintain and recover.
There have been proven benefits by getting up from your chair every 30mins and doing 5mins of stretching, getting on a foam roller for 5mins 3x/wk, and 20mins on a stationary bike 3x/wk. They are all successful ways to help your body recover from the daily stresses you put on it.
If you work a lot at a desk or in front of a computer, here are two easy things you can do to re-evaluate your situation and give your body the best chance of optimal recovery:
- Check the height of your chair. Is it too low or too high? Most chairs are too low which causes flexion of the spine and tightness in hip flexors.
- Are you looking up or down, left or right at your computer screen? If so, this puts your neck in a poor position for long periods of time which can lead to pain and tension headaches.
Gravity is one of our biggest enemies when it comes to sitting and standing posture. We must constantly reinforce correct posture which allows our muscles to maintain their correct length. Poor posture results in some muscles shortening and getting tight and others lengthening and getting weak which usually results in pain.
Heartbreaking and empowering all at once:
On a bitter, gray Michigan morning in January, Judge Rosemarie Aquilina stood in her office, zipped up her robes over a pair of jeans and cowboy boots, and stepped through the door into Courtroom 5.
Cameras crowded into the snug, carpeted space. News had gotten out that dozens of young women, many of them gymnasts, would be speaking at the sentencing of Larry Nassar, a doctor who’d pleaded guilty to seven counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct. Aquilina, her tousled beehive hairsprayed into obedience, validated one survivor after another: “You are strong”; “you are brave.” “There were so many,” she says now. “You could feel the empowerment. You could feel the rage.” It was hard to look away as the women shared how Nassar violated them in his basement at the age of six, or on the exam table in front of their parents, or at their hotel during the Olympics. Staring him down, they explained to all those who had never listened how this man, like a dirty bomb, had nearly ruined their lives. Yet they decided to rise up. For seven days, 156 survivors spoke, the world reeled, and the case broke history.
What was easy to miss is how it took a chain of extraordinary women to make the world pay attention to this moment and to sexual violence—and to create change so all survivors can get justice.
CAPE TOWN (Reuters) – South African researchers say they have made bricks using human urine in a natural process involving colonies of bacteria, which could one day help reduce global warming emissions by finding a productive use for the ultimate waste product.
The grey bricks are produced in a lab over eight days using urine, calcium, sand and bacteria. Fertilizers are also produced during the processes. And no, the bricks do not smell.
The bricks are made using urea — a chemical found naturally in urine and also synthesized around the world to make fertilizer. The process of growing bricks from urea has been tested in the United States with synthetic solutions, but the new brick uses real human urine for the first time, the researchers said.
“We literally pee this away every day and flush it through the sewer networks,” said Dyllon Randall, a senior lecturer at the University of Cape Town’s civil engineering department who is part of the team that developed the brick. “Why not recover this instead and make multiple products?”
The bio-bricks are created through a process called microbial induced carbonate precipitation, which is similar to the process that naturally produces coral reefs.
Loose sand is colonized with bacteria that produce the enzyme urease. The enzyme breaks down the urea in urine, while producing the rocky substance calcium carbonate through a complex chemical reaction.
A brick or column of any shape can be made. The bricks are formed at room temperature, cutting the harmful carbon dioxide emitted when making regular bricks that are kiln-fired.
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