From Next Nature: The story of Detroit is a familiar one for anyone living in the so-called rust belt of the USA, where the once-mighty automotive manufacturing industries have left many towns and cities shadows of their former selves. Now bankrupt, Detroit’s population has halved over the last fifty years. No one actually knows just how many buildings are abandoned, but it is estimated at over 1/3 of all structures. In the midst of this urban decay, farming has started... Read more
From WaPo: Granted the month is still young, but this sounds like it will be high on the list for the month’s dumbest ideas hatched at a school: An elementary school in Canada has decided to forbid kindergarten students from touching each other at recess as a way to prevent injuries from, well, playing. Say goodbye to tag. CTV News reported that Coghlan Fundamental Elementary School in British Columbia sent out a letter to parents announcing the new policy which was instituted... Read more
From Conor Friedersdorf: Can we at least agree that the American people deserve the truth? That governing ourselves requires getting accurate information from the people who we elect? That their function is to represent us? And that they have no right to lie or mislead? Opposing mendacity ought to be a no-brainer. What I see instead is a mainstreaming of the notion that it isn’t a big deal for a political candidate, an elected official, or an appointee to lie... Read more
One of the more interesting books of the Old Testament is the book of Jonah. Children from preschool on study this tale. It is short, shorter than most of my posts (a mere four chapters, 1200 words in the NIV – substantially shorter than this post). It contains foolish disobedience, a great fish, a storm, obedience, repentance, more foolishness … what more could you want in a Sunday School lesson or as material for a sermon series? Even chapter four,... Read more
NT Wright, in his Paul and the Faithfulness of God, examines Paul’s theology as a mutation or reframing of classic Jewish monotheism themes (alongside election and eschatology), including who God is. This has led for centuries to the question If Jesus is God or if he is not God. The framing of that question, though, is often backward or sideward and often enough not — in fact, Wright would say rarely — from the ground level of 1st Century Jewish Christians.... Read more
Explore more infographics like this one on the web’s largest information design community – Visually. Read more
A letter from a reader, and I wonder what you would advise her? Hello Dr. McKnight! I’ve been following your work recently at the recommendation of a friend, and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed what I’ve absorbed so far. In fact, I was one of the questioners during the Q&A [at an event I spoke at some time back]. I can only find three clear passages (in Romans, 1 Cor, and 1 Tim) that speak to homosexuality but have no advice in... Read more
Power, Andy Crouch claims, is a gift, and power is our “ability to make something of the world” (Playing God: Redeeming the Gift of Power, 17). Or, as he goes on to say, “the ability to participate in that stuff-making, sense-making process that is the most distinctive thing that human beings do. All of life, he says, requires power — or a space in which it/we exert will. So power is about the physical world and meaning-making. When powerlessness results... Read more
On the basis of a new approach at looking how to discern the social makeup of the earliest Christian house churches, one based more on housing space occupied than on ideal social types, Peter Oakes has offered to us a new way of thinking more realistically and concretely about who was in the earliest house churches. His book is called Reading Romans in Pompeii. First, the big picture. Oakes, a lecturer in New Testament at Manchester, has studied the evidence of... Read more
Leo Tolstoy: I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine. John Updike: I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. From Daily Rituals, 169, 196. Read more
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