From Joe Yonan: How about you? How many evening meals do you cook at home? We do 5 — Sunday through Thursday. Throughout the book, Pollan reminds us how much cooking matters. The food industry, he writes in one example, was all too happy to step in when women started working outside the home and couples were at risk of arguing over who should get dinner on the table. “In the end, women did succeed in getting men into the... Read more
I agree with Paul Campos, a routine line of thinking — and a right one: So how should the authorities treat political crimes of this sort? While of course every case is unique, it would be good to keep a few basic principles in mind. First, giving politically motivated criminals more publicity than necessary is giving them exactly what they want. It’s important to remember that the Tsarnaev brothers were a couple of nobodies, whose only real power came from... Read more
Chapter five of Daniel Harrell’s book, Nature’s Witness: How Evolution Can Inspire Faith, begins with a joke (p. 69): A scientist tells God that he’s figured out how to create life from the dust of the ground, just like God did in the beginning. Consequently, the scientist says, he’s shown that God is no longer a plausible hypothesis for the origin of life. Impressed, the Lord tells the scientist to do it again; he’d like to watch. So the scientist... Read more
We all know the experience of the irresistible nature of yawning — when someone we loves yawns we yawn right back. Somewhere I read that those with good skills of empathy yawn when others in a room yawn while those with low skills in empathy don’t yawn back. Yawning, then, is a starting point to explore Andrew Root’s 8th chp, “Can I read your mind?” in his new book, Relational Ministry. Personhood is about relationships. Empathy is about our ability to... Read more
From Casey Chan: It’s nice to be a grandparent because you can enjoy spending time with your grandkids without worrying about the minutia of parenting. Plus, it’s your second go around with little rascals so you get to have fun with it. Like Steve and Jeri Wakefield, two grandparents who are having so much fun at being awesome grandparents that they built their grandkids this amazing tree house mansion. I don’t think kids have ever dreamt of tree houses this... Read more
[Source: U.S. Census Bureau] Read more
Many of you recognize the intelligence of so many of our commenters, an illustration of which is the exceptional comment from Lise last week on the post about singles. So good was it that it deserves a post by itself: DeGroat wrote about the importance of safety. I think that is all any of us want from a ministry – that and authenticity. The problem with singles’ ministries is that they do tend to feel like a pick up joint... Read more
Poverty, homelessness, AIDS — how should the Christian help? How should the local church help? What is the “help” done by Christians to be called? (This matters to me; some don’t care what it is called.) David Fitch and Geoff Holsclaw, in Prodigal Christianity, play off of two tendencies but here is where they will end up: “Falwell and Wallis are two sides of the same coin” (138). “Wallis was arguing for a Christian nation … just as Falwell and Dobson... Read more
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