There has been a dustup between conservative Eastern Orthodox pundit Rod Dreher and the more liberal Matthew Sitman over the essence of Christianity. In Sitman’s most recent response he goes for what he thinks is the juglar vein of Christianity: grace or salvation or forgiveness. He is probing what is “distinctive,” and have it any way you want and Judaism also teaches forgiveness, but what he ought to be probing is what is “characteristic.” The former focuses on unique bits... Read more

I saw this article through a link John Stackhouse posted on his FB feed. Footnotes can be found for some books at an online site. Yikes. Source: I had one such experience recently. I was working on a review of William Deresiewicz’s “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life” (Free Press), which appeared in last week’s issue of the magazine. Deresiewicz’s reasoning, which is part sociology and part steam-whistle blast, relies heavily... Read more

This [author of the post is our regular contributor, T] is our fourth post in our series on what the Church can learn from AA and related recovery groups. I am grateful to Scot for being so gracious to host this series. (The other posts, in order of appearance are here, here and here). For this post, I’d like to go a bit further with the subject of our last post, which looked at how, for both churches and AA,... Read more

Nutritional science, the most volatile of the sciences when it comes to shifting, has this on low-carb vs. low-fat diets for losing weight: Q. Not all carbohydrates are bad for you. Does the study distinguish between whole-food carbohydrates and refined carbohydrates? A. You are certainly right that the source of carbohydrates is important. Most researchers and health authorities agree that highly processed carbohydrates — sugar and white bread being the most obvious examples — have a very different effect on... Read more

Source: TV is increasingly for the old, and the Internet is for the young, according to new research by media analyst Michael Nathanson of Moffett Nathanson Research. The median age of a broadcast or cable television viewer during the 2013-2014 TV season was 44.4 years old, a 6 percent increase in age from four years earlier. Audiences for the major broadcast network shows are much older and aging even faster, with a median age of 53.9 years old, up 7... Read more

Source: It’s possible that no NFL player has ever been so relieved to be on his team’s practice squad. For Devon Still, the Cincinnati Bengals’ decision means he’ll be able to stay close to his daughter, who’s fighting cancer — and it will help pay for the roughly $1 million her fight will require. Still is a defensive tackle who was drafted by the Bengals in 2012. He says he would have understood if the team didn’t want him now,... Read more