From Lindsay Abrams: The blight was first detected in June 2002, when the trees in Canton, Michigan, got sick. The culprit, the emerald ash borer, had arrived from overseas, and it rapidly spread — a literal bug — across state and national lines to Ohio, Minnesota, Ontario. It popped up in more distant, seemingly random locations as infested trees were unwittingly shipped beyond the Midwest. Within four years of first becoming infested, the ash trees die — over 100 million... Read more

Andy Stanley preached in DC to the President and a select audience before the Inauguration. CT’s Mark Galli interviewed Andy about the event: In the sermon, you referred to the President as “Pastor in Chief.” That phrase has caused a great deal of anxiety among people. First, I understand the anxiety. If I had read that in isolation, it would give me concern as well. So I don’t fault anyone. Apparently there was one pool reporter in the room, because... Read more

Christians show a mixed bag of thinking about the church and the state or the Christian and the state. Most seek in some way to anchor their thoughts in what Jesus said. What did he say about the state? Political thinker Alan Storkey, in his Jesus and Politics: Confronting the Powers, proposes a four point summary of how Jesus challenged the state, and I wonder if it figures large enough in how Christians — both Left and Right — posture themselves... Read more

From Angel: Even if you are generally a happy person, take a look at these seven habits to determine if any of them are keeping you from experiencing greater amounts of joy. 1.  Playing it too safe. 2.  Continuous self doubt. 3.  Obsession with control. 4.  Setting unrealistic expectations. 5.  A bad attitude. 6.  Slacking on exercise. 7.  Overindulgence of a good thing. As Oscar Wilde once said, “Everything in moderation, including moderation.” Eating too much makes you fat.  Spending... Read more

This works both ways because both parties are at work on such projects, but this is the latest version of GOP revisions. Republicans have a new strategy for 2016: Change the rules of presidential elections in order to swing the electoral college in the GOP’s favor. On Wednesday, Virginia’s Republican-controlled legislature became one of the first to advance a bill that would allocate electoral votes by congressional district. Last week, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus endorsed pushing through similar proposals in other states... Read more

From an Anonymous reader: My daughter is 17 going on 18 and is a senior in high school.  We have raised her in conservative evangelical churches.  Presently she is ambivalent, at best, about what she calls “religion.” She is now working on a school project in social studies on contemporary issues.  The issue she chose was “gay rights.”  My wife and I, and our church, are “traditional” on the “marriage” question.  Neither my wife nor I have ever been hostile... Read more

All Bible readers are tempted to make Jesus in their own image, and a study I mentioned in The Blue Parakeet: Rethinking How You Read the Bible makes a solid social-scientific case for that very observation. We all tend to toss onto the Bible’s texts our projections the way we project onto the Rohrschach inkblots. Some of it is innocent, some if it is neither innocent nor dangerous, and sometimes it gets dangerous. Sometimes this “in our own image” becomes... Read more

By Amy Hauptman, and at the link there’s much more: Listening is an unglorified activity. We all want to be heard. We all want to be understood. But whotruly wants to sacrifice their time and energy to simply listen to someone else? We can pay professionals to listen to us (on an hourly basis). We can get our pseudo-therapeutic community to “listen” to us via Facebook and Twitter. But when was the last time you were intentional about sitting with a... Read more