I’ve been teaching a DMin cohort this week at Northern and I couldn’t have done these meanderings without Kris sending most of them my way … so again, thanks to Kris for your morning’s reading.

Cyberbullying, a young woman has become proactive:

“You are so ugly!”

“Go get a life, loser!”

Fourteen-year-old Trisha Prabhu of Naperville is on a mission to rid the world of such online messages.

“I knew I had to do something to stop this problem,” she said of cyberbullying, which affects roughly 50 percent of teens, according to studies she found while researching the topic. “No one deserves to be afraid to go to school.”

Trisha is 80 percent finished with coding an add-on program for the Web browser Google Chrome that she’s calling Rethink. It will provide a pop-up warning whenever someone attempts to post a potentially harmful or offensive message on social media.

Through her own research, she learned that teens, given a chance to reconsider, are much less likely to post mean messages.

New archbishop for Chicago:

The Vatican on Saturday appointed Bishop Blase Cupich of Spokane, Wash., to succeed Cardinal Francis George as the leader of the Archdiocese of Chicago.

In an announcement posted on the Vatican Radio website at about 5 a.m. Chicago time, the church announced that it had accepted the resignation of the ailing George and had named Cupich to the Chicago post, which is one of its most prominent in the U.S.

The archdiocese has scheduled a news conference for 9:30 a.m. in Chicago, and Cupich is expected to be introduced.

Cupich, like the cardinal he will succeed, opposes same-sex marriage and, in his two previous jobs as bishop, has been outspoken in his advocacy for the poor.

But unlike Francis George, Cupich is widely described as more of a moderate, a priest who is following the pastoral example of the new pope and who may come to frustrate conservative and liberal Catholics alike.

“He’s open-minded. He’s pastoral. He’s pro-life,” said the Rev. Tom Reese, a senior analyst for the National Catholic Reporter. “But he doesn’t have to be a culture warrior. He’s going to be a bishop in the image of Pope Francis.”

Check out Sarah Bessey’s “guard the gate” post, very worth your reading:

We have a few good phrases we say in our house a lot, little catchphrases or sentences that carry a lot of meaning in just a few words. They are the phrases that distill a lot of conversation into one sentence. For instance, we say “calm your heart” and “we use our words to love each other.”  This is another one: Guard your gates.

What do parents most want for their children? Amy Joyce:

A report released by the Pew Research Center this week shows that parents, despite political leanings, agree on a few traits they all want to see in their children. But of all those traits, empathy isn’t one of the top ones.

More than anything, the report found, 94 percent of parents want their children to learn responsibility, while 92 percent want to teach them the value of hard work. Helping others and having good manners were seen as especially important by 86 percent parents. Teaching kids to be empathetic is not very high on the list, with 67 percent of parents saying that is an important trait.

Rob Asgar on Mark Driscoll as manager:

With toxic leaders, there are no happy endings, no matter how hard you pray. You just have to move on. That may seem especially sad to those Mars Hill congregants who want Driscoll to undergo a disciplinary process so that that a newly mature, repentant and humbled version of himself might someday take the pulpit.

But a number of psychologists have told me that the truly toxic leaders, the ones who manage to cause trouble on the scale of a Driscoll, are tragically irredeemable as managers. Oftentimes, the disciplining process only teaches them new ways to exploit the system while pretending to obey it. (Bear in mind that Driscoll himself has been claiming for years that he’s been making progress on his shortcomings.)

Sure, there may be redemption stories for toxic leaders, but those usually involve them learning to relieve their stress through knitting, by adopting a rescue dog, or by finding some way to be of productive service without being in charge of large budgets and large communities.

Valerie Strauss, on students swiping textbooks through student uploads:

It’s hard (if not impossible) to know just how prevalent this practice is, but some college students around the country are uploading their expensive college textbooks onto the Internet so other students can download them for free and avoid the hefty fees that are sometimes more than $200 a book.

Vocativ.com has a story titled “Why College Students are Stealing Their Textbooks,” which notes that some students are even downloading them for ethics classes.

The cost to students of college textbooks skyrocketed 82 percent between 2002 and 2012, according to a 2013 report by the U.S. General Accountability Office, the research arm of Congress. As a result, students have been looking for less expensive options, such as renting books — and, now, finding them on the Internet, uploaded by other students.

A Jewish thinker, Daniel Ross Goodman, with some claps for Chik-Fil-A’s closing on Sundays: (HT: JS)

I have never eaten at Chick-fil-A, nor do I plan to. I keep kosher, and as far as I know, there are still no kosher Chick-fil-As—but with a kosher Dunkin’ Donuts in Teaneck, NJ, and a kosher McDonald’s in Jerusalem, perhaps a kosher Chick-fil-A in the Upper West Side may not be too far off. Still, when I heard about Mr. Cathy’s death, my attention was piqued by one piece of news: all of Chick-fil-A’s locations are closed on Sundays.

Needless to say, this is highly unusual—not so much because one particular business is closed on Sundays (many still are), but because an entire chain of a highly popular fast-food restaurant is closed on Sundays. Fast food is one of the most competitive and lucrative industries in the country, and the thought of closing all Subways or Burger Kings or Wendy’s throughout the country would likely prompt a customer riot—or at least a shareholder derivative lawsuit. Close all KFCs for an entire day every week? Sacrifice one-seventh of corporate revenue?! McDonalds regularly nets over seven billion dollars in revenue in every quarter alone; a fast-food chain that closes all of its restaurants one day per week literally sacrifices hundreds of millions of dollars.

Chick-fil-A’s observance of the Sabbath should be commended.

Now that’s a surprising conclusion!

Maybe there’s something in Panama’s canal water.

In a new poll, the Central American country ranks first among 135 countries on subjective well-being – not just how much wealth or health people have but how they feel about their lives.

Syria and Afghanistan rank last, and the USA ranks 12th in the poll conducted in 2013 and released Tuesday by Gallup and Healthways, a Franklin, Tenn., company that markets wellness programs.

The results are based on a new global version of the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. The index looks at how people feel about five facets of their lives: sense of purpose, social connections, community, finances and physical vigor.

Overall, countries in the Americas and Northern Europe rank highest, and those in sub-Saharan Africa rank lowest.

The brain (not quite) asleep:

The idea that during sleep our minds shut down from the outside world is ancient and one that is still deeply anchored in our view of sleep today, despite some everyday life experiences and recent scientific discoveries that would tend to prove that our brains don’t completely switch off from our environment.

On the contrary, our brains can keep the gate slightly open. For example, we wake up more easily when we hear our own name or a particularly salient sound such as an alarm clock or a fire alarm compared to equally loud but less relevant sounds.

In research published in Current Biology, we went one step further to show that complex stimuli can not only be processed while we sleep but that this information can be used to make decisions, similarly as when we’re awake.

Helmets, crosses and memorials:

JONESBORO, Ark. (AP) — Arkansas State University said Wednesday it was wrong for the school to place crosses on the back of its football helmets as a memorial to two students, but that it will allow athletes to add their own remembrances as long as they comply with NCAA rules.

Liberty Institute, a Plano, Texas, law firm, had complained that Arkansas State violated its students’ rights by modifying crosses intended to honor a player and equipment manager who died in the past year. The vertical post of the cross was removed, leaving only a horizontal bar with the pair’s initials.

Liberty’s director of litigation said Wednesday it was proper for the school to give students the right to remember the two in a fitting way and crosses would be back on the helmets before this weekend’s game against Utah State.

“This is the exact thing that we asked for. That’s what our letter asked for and that is what we’re receiving,” Hiram Sasser said.

Arkansas State said Wednesday its head coach designed the memorial without consulting school lawyers and that team managers placed them on the helmets — putting the school at odds with the U.S. Constitution and court decisions that bar a state-sponsored endorsement of a religion.

Hello from Lake Tahoe! Emily Badger’s wonderful sketch of research that confirms that where you are in 1st grade largely determines your success:

Over time, their lives were constrained — or cushioned — by the circumstances they were born into, by the employment and education prospects of their parents, by the addictions or job contacts that would become their economic inheritance. Johns Hopkins researchers Karl Alexander and Doris Entwisle watched as less than half of the group graduated high school on time. Before they turned 18, 40 percent of the black girls from low-income homes had given birth to their own babies. At the time of the final interviews, when the children were now adults of 28, more than 10 percent of the black men in the study were incarcerated. Twenty-six of the children, among those they could find at last count, were no longer living.

Good news about Henrietta Lacks:

Over the past six decades, huge medical advances have sprung from the cells of Henrietta Lacks, a poor, African-American mother of five who died in 1951 of cervical cancer. But Lacks never agreed that the cells from a biopsy before her death taken could be used for research. For years, her own family had no idea that her cells were still alive in petri dishes in scientists’ labs. They eventually learned they had fueled a line called HeLa cells, which have generated billions of dollars, but they didn’t realize until this spring that her genome had been sequenced and made public for anyone to see.

On Tuesday, the National Institute of Health announced it was, at long last, making good with Lacks’ family. Under a new agreement, Lack’s genome data will be accessible only to those who apply for and are granted permission. And two representatives of the Lacks family will serve on the NIH group responsible for reviewing biomedical researchers’ applications for controlled access to HeLa cells. Additionally, any researcher who uses that data will be asked to include an acknowledgement to the Lacks family in their publications.

The new understanding between the NIH and the Lacks family does not include any financial compensation for the family. The Lacks family hasn’t, and won’t, see a dime of the profits that came from the findings generated by HeLa cells. But this is a moral and ethical victory for a family long excluded from any acknowledgment and involvement in genetic research their matriarch made possible.

Vancouver’s majestic Stanley Park, a report:

Vancouver’s Stanley Park provides countless experiences and stories for eight million visitors each year.

But what — and who — calls the massive urban park home?

Stanley Park officially opened in 1888 and, like the City of Vancouver which grew up with it, the beloved crown jewel has evolved dramatically over the last century. New creatures were introduced to the park and cohabited with native species. Some have flourished and others have perished.

And the park is still changing. This week, The Province conducted an informal census of the 400-hectare national historic site, to take a snapshot of who and what lives there now — and to see how that picture has changed over the decades.

Dominican fellowship:

When Rafael Soriano arrived in the visitors’ clubhouse at Great American Ball Park in Cincinnati for the first game of a late-July series between the Reds and the Washington Nationals, four plastic to-go containers in two plastic bags were waiting on the chair in front of his locker. Inside the containers was enough Dominican-style rice and beans, braised chicken and fried chicken to feed a small family. Cincinnati veteran infielder Ramon Santiago, like Soriano a native of the Dominican Republic, sent over the feast. The following day, Reds starter Johnny Cueto was responsible for supplying Dominican food for the visitors’ clubhouse. This pay-it-forward tradition happens across baseball every day. Dominican players make up the largest contingent of foreign-born players in the major leagues — about 11 percent of active players on opening day — and, with baseball’s grueling schedule and travel, those players miss food from home. Do you know how hard it is to find a Dominican restaurant in Cincinnati or Minneapolis? So Dominican players — even those who don’t know each other well — take care of each other through their own version of the food network. The Dominicans on the home team are responsible for sending food to their countrymen on the visiting team. Albert Pujols (Los Angeles Angels), David Ortiz (Boston) and Nelson Cruz (Baltimore) always bring food for visiting Dominican players. Soriano’s wife or a family friend will make an extra helping of Dominican food so that he can do the same. Robinson Cano (Seattle), Francisco Liriano (Pittsburgh), Carlos Gomez (Milwaukee), Jose Reyes (Toronto) and Adrian Beltre (Texas) take part, too.

The new kind of college application?

Goucher College is offering a novel way for cellphone-savvy teenagers to seek admission if the regular application process seems too confusing or if they fear that their grades and test scores aren’t good enough.

They can skip the ACT and SAT admission tests. They don’t need to send a high school transcript. Instead, they can submit a two-minute video to the liberal arts college in Baltimore County that answers a simple question: How do you see yourself at Goucher?

In recent years, a growing number of students have begun sending colleges videos to supplement their applications. Some videos are crucial for those seeking entry to a school with a focus on performing arts.

Great story about Bob Smietana, one of my favorite religion journalists — running to live.

“Archbishop Cranmer” on the way of the cross and peace:

In the hospital, a VOM worker met John. When the worker asked John how he felt about his attackers, he replied, “I have forgiven the Islamic militants, because they did not know what they are doing.”

The words are liberating; they tell of an appalling horror over which love triumphs. Christians are commanded to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. It’s easy to preach and it’s cheap to believe – until you’re confronted by such evil that every fibre of your being cries out for retaliation and revenge, which breeds mutual hostility and creates a cycle of hatred from which there is no escape.

“You must convert to Islam or else you will die a painful death” is what many thousands of Christians and other minorities are hearing right across the Islamic abyss. How many of us would be strong enough to refuse, as John did? How many of us would refuse to renounce Christ while our hands are being hacked off?

And how many would say “I forgive you” to those who wish to torture and kill our bodies?

We can only be free when we stop allowing the enemy’s strategy and beliefs to dictate ours. We can only find peace when we end our obsession with the threat. We are all children of God, and He lets the sun rise on evil and good; He sends rain on the just and unjust. Anyone who repays evil with evil is doing as the world does. Those who repay evil with good have ceased simply reacting to oppression; they are creating light in the darkness; proclaiming the sovereignty of the Risen Christ over all creation; incarnating the love which nullifies hatred and conquers hostility. [HT: KM]

Maria Popova’s collection of Seneca’s wisdom on the brevity of life:

“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in reflecting on why presence matters more than productivity. “On how one orients himself to the moment depends the failure or fruitfulness of it,” Henry Miller asserted in his beautiful meditation on the art of living. And yet we spend our lives fleeing from the present moment, constantly occupying ourselves withoverplanning the future or recoiling with anxiety over its impermanence, thus invariably robbing ourselves of the vibrancy of aliveness.

In a chapter of the altogether indispensable 1843 treatise Either/Or: A Fragment of Life(public library), the influential Danish thinkerSøren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855), considered the first true existentialist philosopher, explores precisely that — how our constant escapism from our own lives is our greatest source of unhappiness.

The 50 most affordable Christian colleges, including my alma mater (Cornerstone University) and my former place of teaching (North Park University).

College affordability is an idea that is more helpful to quantify than simply considering the tuition of the institution of your choice.  Many universities and colleges have developed very aggressive financial aid packages and have other unique sources of funding that reduce what may be very expensive tuition costs to a more manageable level for lots of students.  With that in mind, we have put together a ranking of the 50 most affordable Christian colleges in the U.S. to help students navigate the true cost of  attending these schools.

The colleges and universities on this list had to be accredited by the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools (TRACS) or a member/affiliate of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (CCCU).  The average net price data we used to build this ranking was sourced from the latest data put out by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).  Lastly, in order to ensure the comparisons were as commensurable and practical as possible, we set a lower limit on the student population at 1,000, which was also referenced through the NCES.

While we consider which Christian colleges fit our budget, the Christians of Iraq are ripped from their homes and stripped of possessions:

Human rights lawyer Nina Shea described the horror in Mosul to me: “(The Islamic State) took the Christians’ houses, took the cars they were driving to leave. They took all their money. One old woman had her life savings of $40,000, and she said, ‘Can I please have 100 dollars?’, and they said no. They took wedding rings off fingers, chopping off fingers if they couldn’t get the ring off.”

“We now have 5,000 destitute, homeless people with no future,” Shea said. “This is a crime against humanity.”

For the first time in 2,000 years, Mosul is devoid of Christians. “This is ancient Nineveh we are talking about,” Shea explained. “They took down all the crosses. They blew up the tomb of the prophet Jonah. An orthodox Cathedral has been turned into a mosque. … They are uprooting every vestige of Christianity.” University of Mosul professor Mahmoud Al ‘Asali, a Muslim, bravely spoke out against the Islamic State’s purging of Christians and was executed.

Conservation challenged by beavers and old growth trees:

Conservationists know beavers perform valuable ecological services, creating important habitat through their dams and tree clearing. They’re charismatic animals. Their recovery in the eastern United States is a stunning conservation success.

What happens when those thriving beavers threaten old-growth hemlock groves, one of the most imperiled habitats in the East?

That’s the situation at the Conservancy’s Woodbourne Forest Preserve in north-central Pennsylvania. It is forcing conservationists to choose between beavers and old-growth trees.

To some, this is a no-brainer for a wildlife sanctuary: leave it to beaver.

After all, haven’t beavers been shaping the forests for millennia? Isn’t it natural?

The reality is much more complicated. If people and beavers are to exist and thrive together, sometimes tough choices have to be made.

One of those places is Woodbourne.

Jim Stump, at BioLogos, on Belief in God in a World Explained by Science: Part one, Part two, Part three.

Judaea Capta coin found at Bethsaida:

The 2014 Bethsaida excavations in Israel have uncovered a rare Judaea Capta coin. In an email to Bible History Daily, University of Nebraska Omaha professor and excavation director Rami Arav revealed that the coin was issued by Herod’s great-grandson Agrippa II. Minted in 85 C.E. at Caesarea Maritima, the bronze coin depicts Roman Emperor Domitian on the obverse (front face of the coin) and a palm tree on the reverse (back face).*

Judaea Capta (“Judea captured”) coins were first struck under Roman Emperor Vespasian to celebrate the Romans’ suppression of the Jewish revolt (66–70 C.E.). The revolt was effectively quashed with the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., though thereafter the Roman army continued to stamp out the last of the rebels at such hideouts as Herod’s desert fortress at Masada.

Humble bosses are best:

Bosses who yell, threaten and micromanage their way to the top, often at the expense of miserable underlings are all too common in today’s workplaces.

But the Tony Sopranos and Darth Vaders of popular culture are not the most effective CEOs in the real world, according to a new study from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University.

The best bosses are humble bosses, those who empower and appreciate their employees, are open to feedback and care about the greater good, according to the research published in Administrative Science Quarterly.

“Humility is not weakness,” Angelo Kinicki, a professor of W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, said Tuesday during a phone interview.

“Humility has its effects across levels of an organization in an empowered, uplifting way. You can’t browbeat people into performance.”

Josh Washington’s thorough and accurate study of the gospel:

From my readings I would say over this time and among these people what I’ve written is the consensus view on what the apostles handed down as the gospel. They all believed the gospel was a historical narrative of the words and deeds of Jesus. They all believed what they handed down became Holy Writ. They all regarded the gospels according to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were the foundational documents for Christianity. The only people they seemed to disagree in part with on this were heretics, and even they basically agreed with them.

Generation Z, by Annie Kingston.

Fallon’s line may be a cliché, but it echoes a growing sentiment, as the spotlight is thrust on Generation Z, the unimaginative term for the cohort following Gen Y, orMillennials. While dispute rages over parameters, Gen Z are loosely defined as those born after 1995 and who are now 18 and under. It’s a big group: two billion worldwide, and one-quarter of the North American population.

Research, though still in beta, points to the emergence of a stellar generation: educated, industrious, collaborative and eager to build a better planet—the very qualities exemplified by Makosinski. In fact, in a manner typical of the need to neatly compartmentalize generations, Gen Z is already being branded as a welcome foil to the Millennials, born between 1980 and the mid- or late 1990s, who have been typecast as tolerant but also overconfident, narcissistic and entitled. Those characteristics weren’t an option for the first post-9/11 generation, one raised amid institutional and economic instability, informed by the looming shadow of depleting resources and global warming, and globally connected via social media.

Much of the current chatter surrounding Gen Z has been generated by the 56-slide presentation “Meet Generation Z: Forget everything you learned about Millennials,” produced by New York City advertising agency Sparks & Honey. It found that 60 per cent of Gen Zers want jobs that had a social impact, compared with 31 per cent of Gen Ys. It deemed them “entrepreneurial” (72 per cent want to start their own businesses), community-oriented (26 per cent already volunteer) and prudent (56 per cent said they were savers, not spenders). Gen Z is also seen to be more tolerant than Gen Y of racial, sexual and generational diversity, and less likely to subscribe to traditional gender roles.

Grizzly bear highway:

The Heiltsuk live near the Koeye watershed—69 square miles (179 square kilometers) of temperate forest on the central British Columbia coast—and they thought about a dozen grizzlies lived in their midst. But a scientific study, led by the Heiltsuk and published in late June in the journal Ecology and Society, found that the Koeye actually hosts at least 57. That’s not your average bear density.

By comparison, Yellowstone National Park is about 3,472 square miles (8,992 square kilometers) and hosts only about 150 grizzly bears.

“It was a bit of a shock to me,” says William Housty, lead author of the study and director of Coastwatch, the research arm of the Heiltsuk First Nation.

Not that it’s surprising that grizzly bears are drawn to the area. The river that drains Koeye Lake has pink, chum, sockeye, and coho salmon, all tasty prey for bears. But neither Housty nor his colleagues expected to find nearly 60 grizzlies. (See: “Grizzly Bears Moving Into Canada’s Polar Bear Capital.”)

Mark Stricherz’s critical essay on Dinesh D’Souza, with this paragraph as the critical moment in the essay:

He has also struck a series of road bumps. In October 2012, D’Souza was forced to step down as president of Kings College in Manhattan after running afoul of the evangelical school’s sexual mores; he divorced his wife of two decades; and he pled guilty to using straw donors to aid the candidacy of Wendy Long, a friend who ran for the U.S. Senate in 2012. In the eyes of progressives, those sins and crimes made D’Souza a moral hypocrite and phony. In the eyes of critics, he trots out straw men rather than concrete arguments. But both were symptoms rather than causes of his change intellectually (and perhaps spiritually) from a generation ago. D’Souza has not so much broken bad as fallen victim to pride.

The Floe Edge, and beautiful collection of pictures:

The Floe Edge is a magical place. In simplest terms it is where the landfast ice meets the open ocean, and it is a magnet for wildlife, especially in the 24 hour light of the Arctic spring. I don’t get there every year, but I managed to spend one day there again this year. A scant 24 hours to take it in.

This June my brother-in-law and I took off to Kangiq (Cape Crauford), the western edge of of the mouth of Admiralty Inlet to Lancaster Sound. The famed NorthWest Passage, where explorers such as Franklin tried to find a passage that Inuit first traveled some 5000 years before. Traveling was relatively easy this spring, the ice mostly smooth, and the cracks small and easy to cross. Only one gave us trouble, partially hidden in the unusually deep snow pack this year, making it difficult to figure out the best place to cross safely. It was the last we had to cross and slowed down by some fog we arrived at the Floe Edge about an hour later.

 EMAS: good idea!

In an average year, about ten pilots will accidentally run their airplanes right off the end of the runway while taking off or landing. These “overruns,” as the mishaps are called, often occur on slick runways or because of mechanical problems like failed brakes. In the past 30 years, overruns have caused at least 23 deaths and 300 injuries to passengers and crew at U.S. airports. 

These errors are especially dangerous at airports closely surrounded by a city or natural hazards—like at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), where runways are bounded by the San Francisco Bay at one end and a busy highway at the other. That’s why this summer, SFO is installing an Engineered Material Arresting System (EMAS), or a bed of crushable cubes meant to collapse on impact to stop planes that may veer off course. 

“These beds are similar in concept to a runaway truck ramp that you see on highways to slow down 18-wheelers,” says Jim Chiu, a project manager overseeing the installation at SFO. “We’re trying to do that here with aircrafts.” 

A second major hole found in Siberia: explanation? Permafrost warming.

As much as I’d like to be doing a story about sandworms – or in this case, ice-worms– or definitive proof of the existence of frosty Hellmouths, the appearance of a second mysterious hole in the Yamal Peninsula of Siberia strengthens the much more mundane musings of scientists that the craters are the result of melting permafrost. While not as exciting as giant worms, UFOs or satanic sinkholes, this explanation may be just as terrifying.

Reindeer herders, members of the Nents who gave the area the name “end of the world,” found the second hole 18 miles from the first. Local lawmaker Mikhail Lapsui told the Moscow Times that it’s much smaller than the first and snow can be seen inside.

Why are scientists pointing to perma-unfrosting? For those in warmer climes,permafrost is defined as permanently frozen soil that has remained at or below 0°C for at least two years. The reason why the pictures we’ve been seeing of the areas around these Siberian holes don’t show ice or even snow is that the permafrost is below an active layer that freezes and thaws seasonally.

A tree with forty different fruits! And it’s a gorgeous tree, to boot. (Could be a hoax, but I can’t see that it is. But it definitely rivals the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Eden.)

A wonderful new blog begins about kids in faith and parenting.

Are we nurturing kindness and compassion in our children? Recommendations:

Weissbourd and his cohorts have come up with recommendations about how to raise children to become caring, respectful and responsible adults. Why is this important? Because if we want our children to be moral people, we have to, well, raise them that way.

“Children are not born simply good or bad and we should never give up on them. They need adults who will help them become caring, respectful, and responsible for their communities at every stage of their childhood,” the researchers write.

The five strategies to raise moral, caring children, according to Making Caring Common…

The Junia Project, Phebe Willets, and Charity Johnson

The 52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks campaign encouraged bloggers to devote one post a week to writing about their ancestors.  Charity Johnson, an amateur genealogist and the direct descendant of several long lines of Quaker women in America, accepted the challenge and made an interesting discovery in the process – she is not the first woman to preach in her family!

Seniors and friendship takes a creative turn:

NEW YORK (AP) — It’s not exactly “The Golden Girls,” but for Marcia Rosenfeld, it’ll do.

Rosenfeld is among thousands of aging Americans taking part in home-sharing programs around the country that allow seniors to stay in their homes and save money while getting some much-needed companionship.

“It’s a wonderful arrangement,” said the white-haired Rosenfeld, who when asked her age will only say she’s a senior citizen. “The way the rents are these days, I couldn’t stay here without it.”

She shares her two-bedroom, $1,000-a-month Brooklyn apartment with Carolyn Allen, a 69-year-old widow who has suffered two strokes and no longer wants to live alone.

Agencies that put such seniors together say the need appears to be growing as baby boomers age and struggle to deal with foreclosures, property taxes and rising rents. The typical situation involves an elderly woman, widowed or divorced, who has a house or an apartment with extra room and needs help with the upkeep.

“Our seniors want to remain part of the community they were raised in, where they worked and went to church,” said Jackie Grossman, director of the home-sharing program at Open Communities in the Chicago suburbs. “They don’t want to be just with other seniors. Maybe they love their garden, their tool shed, and they would have to give that up if they move into senior housing.”

A historical context for global warming — the Holocene Epoch.

The ten official Trappist ale breweries.

What is it that makes the monk-crafted beer from a specific group of ten breweries among the most respected in the world? Is it the quality of beer that they make or the rich, centuries-long history that informs their brewing processes? The answer is likely both — which is why we’ve taken a look at the ten official Trappist brewers and the monks who are behind these venerated beers.

The Trappists originated as a branch of the Cistercian Order, an austere Roman Catholic Monastic Order that was founded in 1098 in its namesake abbey, the Cîteaux Abbey, in the Burgundy region of France. When the Cistercians appeared to grow more lenient in their attitudes, the monks at La Grande Trappe Abbey in Normandy sought to return to their stricter ways in 1664. Their followers become known as Trappists, known for their self-sustenance, who later officially split from the Cistercians in 1892. They are now officially known as the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance.

Today, the International Trappist Association recognizes ten breweries across four countries, all of which produce beer that is made exclusively by Trappist monks. The beer sold is used only to support the monasteries and various charities.

Amongst beer enthusiasts, the Trappist label is especially sought after, with its enviable stamp of authenticity. Whether these Trappists monks do in fact make superior beer is a matter of taste, but you won’t know until you try them out.

Bog bodies at National Geographic:

Over 500 Iron Age bog bodies and skeletons dating to between 800 B.C. and A.D. 200 have been discovered in Denmark alone, with more unearthed in Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. (Read “Tales From the Bog” in National Geographic magazine.)

Much of the bodies’ skin, hair, clothes, and stomach contents have been remarkably well preserved, thanks to the acidic, oxygen-poor conditions of peat bogs, which are made up of accumulated layers of dead moss.

Tollund Man, for example, found in 1950 on Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula and perhaps the most famous bog body in the world, still “has this three-day beard—you feel he will open his eyes and talk to you. It’s something that not even Tutankhamun could make you feel,” said Karin Margarita Frei, a research scientist who studies bog bodies at the National Museum of Denmark.

In Denmark, about 30 of these naturally mummified corpses are housed in museums, where scientists have worked for decades to figure out who these people were and why they died.

Because some bear horrific wounds, such as slashed throats, and were buried instead of cremated like most others in their communities, scientists have suggested the bodies had been sacrificed as criminals, slaves, or simply commoners. The Roman historian Tacitus started this idea in the first century A.D. by suggesting they were deserters and criminals. (See National Geographic’s pictures of bog bodies.)

Link removed.

Micro-units in DC housing:

Apartment living in the District is getting smaller as local developers create micro-units in some of the city’s most desirable locations. These tiny dwellings have arrived on 14th Street NW and are planned for the Southwest Waterfront, Dupont Circle, Georgetown and even Crystal City to attract millennials with less expensive rents and trendy designs.

The “micro” studio and one-bedroom apartments, ranging from 250 to 400 square feet in size, are smaller than most conventional efficiency units of 450 to 550 square feet.

“The typical market for these units tends to be young hipsters under the age of 30 and mostly under 27,” says Charles Hewlett of Bethesda-based Robert Charles Lesser & Co., a real estate adviser studying micro-units nationally. “This is their first apartment, and they haven’t accumulated a lot of stuff yet.”

But did they really discover Herod’s tomb?

After Herod died in 4 B.C., he was buried at Herodium—but where? A few years ago, it seemed that the question was solved. Eminent Herodium archaeologist Ehud Netzer declared that he had found Herod’s impressive mausoleum. (Netzer passed away in 2010, and all of his BAR articles—including his posthumously published article on the discovery of Herod’s Tomb—are available here for free).

The Israel Museum put together the exhibit Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey around the 25-mile procession from the throne room in Jericho to the tomb Netzer discovered in Herodium. This extremely popular exhibit guided visitors around the modest tomb of the megalomaniac ruler. This discrepancy gave some scholars pause; would one of history’s most renowned builders (and, let’s not forget, largest egos) really have been interred in a simple tomb?

Hebrew University scholars Joseph Patrich and Benjamin Arubas are just as confident that this was not Herod’s tomb as Netzer was sure that it was. In “Was Herod’s Tomb Really Found?” in the May/June 2014 issue ofBiblical Archaeology Review, editor Hershel Shanks examines the evidence and weighs in as the hunt for Herod’s tomb continues.

Shanks writes, “Netzer did find an impressive mausoleum at Herodium. It contained three remarkable sarcophagi. It is located, however, on the slope of the dramatic man-made mountain that marks the site from afar.” Patrich and Arubas compare Herod’s tomb at Herodium with contemporary royal tombs of the period, and Herod’s pales in light of the others’ monumentality.

Diane Leclerc:

If we define human holiness as being sinless, we have defined it merely by an absence. But holiness is never a passive condition of having abstained from certain wrongs. It requires the purposeful desire to walk rightly. The best definition of holiness, then, is love—an active, engaged, embodied love for God, each other, and the world.

In the context of the church, holiness means living out this call of love in relation to one another. In 1 Corinthians 12, Paul outlines how a holy church should function.

First, the church’s purpose is to represent Christ on earth. We become the body of Christ in his bodily absence. We are to go where Christ would go and do the ministry Christ would do. We are to minister to the poor, the outcast, the stranger, and the vulnerable. We are to feed them, invite them in, heal them, and show them hospitality. Our hearts are cleansed by God; this impels us, as the church, to get our feet dirty in the world’s messiness. If the church is to be holy, it must fulfill its ultimate purpose as Christ’s body, with outstretched hands.

Second, the church is meant to fulfill its purpose by living with each other in a vital,interdependent way. There is no individualism in the body, no such thing as a solitary Christian. The ear or eye cannot say of another part, “I don’t need you.” Rather, every part of the body needs every other part if the body is to fulfill its purpose on earth. Although we are called to love the whole world, there is a particular love we owe to each other. When one part mourns, all mourn. When one part rejoices, all rejoice. We depend on each other when life becomes difficult. We depend on each other to lift our praises to God. If the church is to be holy, it must be characterized by relationships of mutual love and care.

Third, the body of Christ is called to value all of its parts in equal measure. This would have been surprising to Paul’s audience. “Equality” was not a concept in Greco-Roman society. Everyone had a particular part to play, but it was very clear who had value—who had power and authority—and who didn’t. Paul dares to proclaim that in God’s economy, the less presentable parts have equal value. The “disabled” parts are treated with special honor. If the church is to be holy, it must affirm that every part—every person—is highly valued, equally needed, and deeply loved.

And, of course, 1 Corinthians 12 is followed by chapter 13, the grand “love chapter.” Paul implies that all the problems he has addressed up to this point would work themselves out if only love reigned as it ought. Love is at the very center of holiness. Love is how holiness expresses itself. We could even venture to say that holiness itself is love.

Chicago Muslims call for more efforts:

A Chicago Islamic organization is joining the global outcry, calling on President Barack Obama and other world leaders to do more to help rescue more than 200 kidnapped Nigerian girls and stop attacks in the country attributed to militant group Boko Haram.

“They’re having a field day that we as members of the world community should not let them have,” said Aminah McCloud, a professor of religious studies and director of the Islamic World Studies program at DePaul University.

In a sometimes emotional press conference Thursday at the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago office downtown, Muslim leaders and educators condemned what they call barbaric and horrific mass kidnappings and other deadly attacks in Nigeria attributed to Boko Haram.

Obama’s administration announced Tuesday it would send an American team of experts to Nigeria to support the response to the April 14 kidnapping of the girls. The militant group’s leader has threatened to sell the girls “on the market,” prompting a warning from the United Nations that this would make the perpetrators liable for war crimes….

The Muslim leaders also sought to differentiate Islam from the acts of the militant group. Boko Haram’s five-year insurgency is aimed at reviving a medieval Islamic caliphate in modern Nigeria. The group has claimed responsibility for deadly bomb blasts in recent weeks.

But there is no interpretation of Islam that would explain or justify these acts, said  Dr. Mohammed Kaiseruddin, chair and co-founder of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago.

Brian McLaren responds with grace and not a little challenge, all in classic McLaren fashion:

So if my only option were to be a Christian in the way you are, I simply could not be a Christian. My conscience wouldn’t allow it. My understanding of the Bible wouldn’t allow it. My devotion to Christ wouldn’t allow it. If you want to define me as a false teacher, not a true Christian, etc., etc., you are certainly free to do that, and I don’t hold it against you. I honor you for speaking your mind, and for doing so with far more decency and kindness than some of your colleagues. You are a good man with a good heart, trying to do the right thing.

When I started on this path, I knew it would not be an easy road. I expected to lose almost all my friends, lose my ministry, lose everything. But I felt, as Paul did, that it would be worth it to risk and lose everything in order to honestly and truly seize hold of what I believed God was calling me toward.

Yes, I did lose some friends. In fact, there have been many losses. But to my surprise, there were other blessings that came. People started approaching me, often in tears, saying, “If I hadn’t found your books, I would have left the faith entirely.” Not just one or two people, but many. Many pastors have even told me the same thing. This has continued for over 15 years now, and if anything, the intensity and frequency of these responses only seems to be increasing.

I know you hope and pray that this won’t happen, and I realize this is pretty unlikely … but when your kids or grandkids are older, one or two of them may come to you and say, “Dad (or Grandpa), I’m sorry, but I just can’t believe the version of Christianity you taught me. I love you, and I don’t want to displease you, but I took this course in college, and we learned ….”

If that happens, I’m sure you’ll do your best to turn them back to the straight path as you understand it. But if that doesn’t work, if they simply can not in good conscience follow your path, I hope you’ll consider slipping them one of my books or something by the kinds of post-conservative/post-liberal writers I mentioned earlier. It will not be what you would have wished. It will not motivate them to believe in verbal plenary inspiration, absolute inerrancy, TULIP, women’s subordination, the unacceptability of gay people as gay people, or eternal conscious torment in hell. But it will encourage them to do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with God. There are worse things they could live by than that.

Latin Americans in the USA and their shifting faith:

Hispanic religion is in a huge period of flux in the United States, a new survey finds, with the share of Latinos who call themselves Catholic dropping sharply — by 12 percentage points — in just the past four years as many are drawn to both spirit-filled Pentecostalism and to disaffiliation.

Experts say the future of U.S. Catholicism depends on adjusting to Latino needs….

But Cary Funk, a senior researcher with Pew, said the movement away from Catholicism in the U.S. was “striking” even with all the spiritual browsing that Americans are doing. The survey found one in four Latinos is a former Catholic.

Fifty-five percent are Catholic, down from 67 percent in 2010. Twenty-two percent are Protestant, 18 percent unaffiliated.

“Broadly, it’s a similar level of religious switching. But the size of the change and the speed is unusually large,” she said. “What we’re seeing is a greater religious pluralism among Latinos.”

Many experts feel the U.S. church hasn’t been fast enough at responding to the growth in Latinos, and a Boston College study also released this week found only one in four parishes has an organized ministry to Latinos, even though 33 percent of all Catholics are Hispanic.

Jackson Wu and the gospel:

One should not confuse the gospel and the response. If we do, we run into a logical problem, which could either be called a “vicious circle” or an “infinite regression” (depending on how you frame the problem). Let me illustrate.

Greg Gilbert and Kevin DeYoung, in What is the Mission of the Church? make this critical mistake. When discussing Mark 1:15, they write,

 “It is wrong to say that the gospel is the declaration that the kingdom of God has come. The gospel of the kingdom is the declaration of the kingdom of God together with the means of entering it. Remember, Jesus did not preach ‘the kingdom of God is at hand.’ He preached, ‘The kingdom of God is at hand; therefore repent and believe!’ ” (110–11).

They misquote the end of the verse. It should say, “. . . repent and believe the gospel.”

Why does their misquote matter?

In short, they would have disproven their own point if they had quoted the passage correctly. Observe how the grammar proves the distinction between the gospel and our response.

In other words, the content of the gospel and the response to the gospel are separate ideas and should not be collapsed into one.

Gilbert and DeYoung assert the gospel itself includes the way we are saved, i.e. if we respond with faith and repentance, we are saved. However, if this is Jesus’ meaning, what actually is Jesus saying? We can do some simple substitution of terms.

“believe the gospel = believe [that by repenting & believing the gospel, we are saved].“

But now we run into a problem. The thing we are supposed to believe (i.e. the gospel), includes the need to believe the gospel! Accordingly, if Gilbert and DeYoung are correct, then Jesus commands something like this:

“. . . repent and believe that you can repent and believe the truth that you can repent and believe . . . .” (and so the cycle goes on).

I know that last sentence makes little to no sense. That’s the point.

(I tried to make clear what I think their misquote makes unclear by italicizing the word “that” in the quotation. I do this to signify the content that one is supposed to believe. In Mark 1:15, Jesus inserts “the gospel.” However, if the gospel is a “how-to” message, then I could simply plug in a conditional if-then statement in its place.)

What results? If we must believe the gospel is a conditional statement wherein we are saved if we believe the gospel, then we end up with a vicious cycle. We wind up with an infinite loop.

The “gospel” (as the Bible uses the word) is not a “how-to” concept expressed in the form of a conditional sentence (i.e. “If . . . then . . .”).

Instead, it is a declaration that implies a command.

The gospel is a declaration of Jesus’ kingship, implying a summons to allegiance.

Best story of the week:

Most children, Asher Svidensky says, are a little intimidated by golden eagles. Kazakh boys in western Mongolia start learning how to use the huge birds to hunt for foxes and hares at the age of 13, when the eagles sit heavily on their undeveloped arms. Svidensky, a photographer and travel writer, shot five boys learning the skill – and he also photographed Ashol-Pan.

“To see her with the eagle was amazing,” he recalls. She was a lot more comfortable with it, a lot more powerful with it and a lot more at ease with it.”…

He describes Ashol-Pan as a smiling, sweet and shy girl. His photographs of her engaging in what has been a male activity for around 2,000 years say something about Mongolia in the 21st Century.

If you are in Lake County and want to eat some good BBQ, check out Big Ed’s BBQ.

I like this part in Kermit’s post about Bubba Watson: (by the way, my friend Kermit Zarley helped start the PGA Tour Bible Study, and he’s full of stories about faith on tour).

He grew up in Bagdad, Fla., as one of the good guys: “Didn’t cuss, didn’t cheat, didn’t steal, didn’t lie, didn’t drink, didn’t do drugs,” he said. “I was doing the right things but I didn’t know what that meant.”

It wasn’t until his senior year in high school when two twin neighbor girls, from the house directly behind his, invited Watson to their youth group. He went and found a place where he belonged.

“The girls asked me to go to church,” he said. “And after a few times going I realized this is what I wanted to do. This is truth here. And I gave myself to the Lord.”

But with all the pressures of college golf, especially on the weekends, it wasn’t until 2004 that Watson became serious about his commitment to Christ at the University of Georgia. He began dating Angie Ball (former WNBA player) and the two began living for God as a couple.

“We wanted to be Christ followers,” Watson said. “We wanted to do the right thing. We started turning to the Lord for our decisions.”

The couple married in September 2004 and were both baptized later that year, the day after Christmas: “I would say 2004 was my true time of becoming a Christian,” Watson said, “and shaping me into the man I am today.”

Jeni Rogers, the kind of teacher we all want to have:

After several minutes, one of her 24 students, a boy, eased up to her the way fifth-grade boys do, looked her in the face and said, “I’m so glad you’re here. I love you so much.”

And suddenly Jeni Rogers, a teacher known throughout her school community for her ability to build connections based on mutual respect with her students, their parents and her peers, felt it all pay off.

The teacher who has built a career by building confidence in others, by knowing exactly what motivates them and how to push them to excel, by demonstrating the importance of caring, had come face to face with a student who not only learned those lessons, but instinctively knew how to apply them.

“It was,” she says now, “like a gift from God.”

Funny she should say that, because after almost 30 years in Prairie classrooms, many of the folks she has come in contact with feel Rogers is something of a gift herself.

“I cannot do justice in words to express my gratitude for the passion, commitment and excellence of Jeni Rogers,” parent Jennifer Curtin wrote in one of many emails the Daily Herald received nominating Rogers as a teacher worth celebrating.

Curtain said her son was in Rogers’ class and she hopes her daughter will be, too.

“She changed my child for the better, and we feel absolutely blessed to have had her in our lives,” Curtain wrote. “Jeni Rogers is a diamond among gems in our Naperville Unit District 203 school district team.”

William Hurlbut, at Big Questions, addresses what makes human distinct:

In the felicitous phrase of Benedict Ashley, the human person is “embodied intelligent freedom.” Conceived in this way, no single capacity or function defines the essence of human nature.  Rather, the full human person, body, soul and spirit, forms an irreducible psychophysical unity of lived experience within the dynamic journey of historical being.

Our particular form of embodiment: upright posture, free swinging arms, and fully formed hands with opposable thumb, the range and cross referencing of our senses, including our highly refined sense of sight—all of these extend our reach and realm, allowing a knowing and accurate encounter with the world and a freedom for creative and constructive action within the world.  Our furless face, with thirty fine-tuned muscles of expression and vocal articulation, provide the means of intersubjective relationality, social communication and cooperation, allowing cultural transformation and the transmission of accumulated knowledge.  And our cognitive capacities for perception, analysis, interpretation and productive imagination, allow a coherent and comprehensive rationality that penetrates to the principles of cosmic order. All of these qualities and capacities combine to make the human being a creature of a radically distinct nature, not simply a difference of degree, but a difference of kind.  Unlike animals with a limited repertoire of perception and response, we are adapted for adaptability, open in flexibility and freedom within the world.

But this embodied intelligence, and the freedom it implies, comes with a danger unique to the human species.  Sensitive and self-aware, open and indeterminate, we are acutely conscious of the ethical and spiritual dimensions of our lives.  Yet, terrified by death and driven by our natural appetites and ambitions toward an imagined ideal of perfect bodies and perfect minds, we are drawn forward by the seductive promise of technological self-transformation….

It is a beautiful development of history that the words human and humility share a common root in the Latin ‘humus’ meaning earth or soil. Fashioned from the dust of the earth, given life by the very breath of God, and rescued and restored by the free gift of grace, we are radiant with possibility.  Unique among creatures, we behold with wonder the majesty of the Creator, and bow before him in worship and praise— humility, gratitude, and abiding faith; these are the true marks of human distinction.

First female pastor and Baptists:

A North Carolina church credited with opening doors for women in ministry by ordaining the first Southern Baptist woman to the gospel ministry 50 years ago lifted its own stained-glass ceiling April 6 by choosing a female pastor.  Members of Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, N.C., voted unanimously to extend a call as senior minister to Dorisanne Cooper, currently pastor of Lake Shore Baptist Church in Waco, Texas. On Aug. 9, 1964, Watts Street ordained Addie Davis, a 1963 graduate of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary from Covington, Va., to the ministry….

Opportunities for women in ministry increased during the 1970s, and by the early 1980s Southern Baptist seminaries encouraged women feeling a call to preach. Roy Honeycutt, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, wrote a tract titled Affirming Women in Ministry in 1984.

The climate changed with a debate over the inerrancy of Scripture beginning in 1979. The Southern Baptist Convention adopted a resolution opposing women’s ordination in 1984….

The Baptist Faith and Message was amended in 1998 to declare “a wife is to submit herself graciously” to her husband and again in 2000 to clarify, “While both men and women are gifted for service in the church, the office of pastor is limited to men as qualified by Scripture.” Disenfranchised moderates withdrew from the battle to control the SBC to form the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991 around principles including support for women in ministry. Opportunities for female pastors have increased slowly but steadily in CBF churches.

Pam Durso, executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry, now lists 157 women identified as pastor or co-pastor of churches affiliated with the CBF or in state conventions located in the South. Durso said it is no longer an “oddity” for a Baptist church in the South to call a woman. She said she is particularly encouraged by the fact that female ministers like Cooper, with more than 11 years in pastoral experience, are now finding a second church.

Doug Glanville story, hold on:

It was an otherwise ordinary snow day in Hartford, Connecticut, and I was laughing as I headed outside to shovel my driveway. I’d spent the morning scrambling around, trying to stay ahead of my three children’s rising housebound energy, and once my shovel hit the snow, I thought about how my wife had been urging me to buy a snowblower. I hadn’t felt an urgent need. Whenever it got ridiculously blizzard-like, I hired a snow removal service. And on many occasions, I came outside to find that our next door neighbor had already cleared my driveway for me.

Never mind that our neighbor was an empty-nester in his late 60s with a replaced hip, and I was a former professional ballplayer in his early 40s. I kept telling myself I had to permanently flip the script and clear his driveway. But not today. I had to focus on making sure we could get our car out for school the next morning. My wife was at a Black History Month event with our older two kids. The snow had finally stopped coming down and this was my mid-afternoon window of opportunity.

Just as I was good-naturedly turning all this over in my mind, my smile disappeared.

A police officer from West Hartford had pulled up across the street, exited his vehicle, and begun walking in my direction. I noted the strangeness of his being in Hartford—an entirely separate town with its own police force—so I thought he needed help. He approached me with purpose, and then, without any introduction or explanation he asked, “So, you trying to make a few extra bucks, shoveling people’s driveways around here?”

All of my homeowner confidence suddenly seemed like an illusion.

Yasiel Puig‘s story of getting from Cuba to the LA Dodgers — this is a crazy, crazy story:

Seemingly from the moment Cuban refugee Yasiel Puig showed up at Dodger Stadium out of nowhere, arriving last June unwilling to discuss his unknown background, the talk behind the batting cages has been rife with unprintable rumors.

There were rumors Puig was smuggled out of Cuba by members of a Mexican drug cartel. There were rumors he still owed the smugglers money, and that his life could be in jeopardy. There was talk about Puig being essentially owned by a Miami businessman with a criminal record who hired those smugglers in exchange for 20% of the ballplayer’s future earnings.

Who knew that all those rumors could actually be true? According to a richly researched and chillingly written story by Jesse Katz in the May issue of Los Angeles Magazine, Puig’s journey to Los Angeles was even more harrowing than realized, and continues to be more frightening than imagined.