John Blake’s article on C.S. Lewis, the man you never knew, is simply not news for anyone who has ever cared to know. Furthermore, the essay lacks perspective in the direction and change in Lewis’ own life. Tell a man’s story true, but tell it fair.

(CNN) – He looked like a “red-faced pork butcher in shabby tweeds,” lived secretly with a woman for years and was so turned on by S&M that he once asked people at a party whether he could spank them.

We’re talking, of course, about C.S. Lewis, the Christian icon and author of classics such as “Mere Christianity” and “The Chronicles of Narnia.”

Christena Cleveland on singleness:

Since married people are the ones calling the shots, they remain central to the life of the church.  Meanwhile, single people are relegated to the margins.[ii] Whether this is intentional or not, this “married people monopoly” results in a Christian world in which single people are often misunderstood, ignored, overlooked for leadership positions, caricatured, equated with immaturity, and little more than a punchline or an afterthought. To me, it makes sense that churches and Christian organizations have a poor track record when it comes to honoring single people. How can pastors/leaders who got married in their early-to-mid-20s possibly understand the complexities of singleness or how to honor the image of God in single people?

After interacting with the church, many singles start to wonder:  Is there something wrong with me? Is God working in my life? Am I as valuable (to God, to the church) as married people?  Does God love me as much as he loves married people? Does God have good things in store for me as a single person?

The church has done such a number on single people that one singles minister knew that before he could even begin to address God’s call to single adults in his book God’s Call to the Single Adult, he needed to debunk the widely-believed myth that “singles are half a cookie.”

In a Church that was founded by a single guy, singles are terribly marginalized. There’s something wrong with this picture. So without further ado, here are my tips on how church people (pastors, leaders and other influencers) can turn this barge around and begin to create communities that honor the image of God in single adults.

These ibexes are very, very agile.

Jon Merritt, quoting Ingrid Schlueter, producer of Janet Mefferd’s show, on the Driscoll case:

I was a part-time, topic producer for Janet Mefferd until yesterday when I resigned over this situation. All I can share is that there is an evangelical celebrity machine that is more powerful than anyone realizes. You may not go up against the machine. That is all. Mark Driscoll clearly plagiarized and those who could have underscored the seriousness of it and demanded accountability did not. That is the reality of the evangelical industrial complex.

Michael Quicke on downsizing his library:

Downsizing is rarely easy but I confess how hard it has been to give away books. I have always loved having books around and for years have enjoyed collecting and reading an ever-growing library. In the past, large rooms for studies and offices have positively encouraged hoarding!  Since coming to seminary I have been treated to a constant stream of publisher’s donations,  sometimes for endorsements, which have jostled alongside new books purchased for particular preaching foci.  However, last year I began the painful process of thinning out books and I have since given away over a thousand books.   I will greatly exceed that target by the time I have finished. In fact, my future limited shelving space in Cambridge means that over 90% of my library will go.  Oh, it has been painful saying goodbye to so many volumes which had become friends.

And saying goodbye sometimes comes with cruel reality checks as I realize I cannot possibly read all that I once hoped to delive into.  For example, I have collected books on particular subjects that I was going to dive into,  that I even imagined that I could write books about, but I now realize time is running out! I remember an athletic deacon in my first church saying that he had suddenly realized that certain things would never happen for him, like playing cricket for England. I remember being amused, but then realizing he was being serious.  (I appreciate US friends would not likely take this seriously anyway!)   Yes, what once seemed limitless pastures are now ring-fenced.  I am grateful that I shall still be able to graze but I can see a fence.

Joel Willitts affirms egalitarian/mutuality in male-female relationships, a position toward which he has been moving for nearly a decade.

Hagia Sophia to become a mosque?

Pope Francis and his predecessors:

ROME, December 3, 2013 – In the voluminous apostolic exhortation “Evangelii Gaudium”  made public one week ago, Pope Francis has made it known that he wants to distinguish himself on at least two points from the popes who preceded him.

The first of these points is also the one that has had the greatest impact in the media. And it concerns both the exercise of the primacy of the pope and the powers of the episcopal conferences.

The second point concerns the relationship between Christianity and cultures….

John Paul II and Benedict XVI after him judged the average quality of the world’s bishops and of most episcopal conferences to be modest. And they acted accordingly. Making themselves the leader and model and in some cases – as in Italy – resolutely intervening to change the leadership and marching orders.

With Francis, the episcopal conferences could instead see a recognition of greater autonomy. With the foreseeable repercussions exemplified recently by Germany, where prominent bishops and cardinals have been clashing publicly over the most varied questions, from the criteria of diocesan administration to communion for the divorced and remarried, in this latter case anticipating and forcing solutions on which the double synod of bishops of 2014 and 2015 has been called to debate and decide….

n maintaining this, pope Bergoglio seems to be reaching out to those who hold that the proclamation of the Gospel has an original purity of its own apart from any cultural contamination. A purity that should be restored to it, freeing it mainly from its “Western” trappings of yesterday and today, allowing it to “inculturate” itself each time in new syntheses with other cultures.

But put in these terms, this relationship between Christianity and cultures  overlooks the indivisible connection between faith and reason, between biblical revelation and Greek culture, between Jerusalem and Athens, to which John Paul II dedicated the encyclical “Fides et Ratio” and on which Benedict XVI focused his memorable talk in Regensburg of September 12, 2006….

Speaking of the Pope, this report from the Netherlands is not good:

Dutch bishops visiting Rome this week have given Pope Francis a dramatic snapshot of the steep decline of Roman Catholicism in its European heartland.

Both Catholic and Protestant Christian ranks have shrunk dramatically across Europe in recent decades, and hundreds of churches have been sold off to be turned into apartments, shops, bars or warehouses.

In the Netherlands, churches have been closing at a rate of one or two a week. The bishops told the pope in Rome on Monday that about two-thirds of all Roman Catholic churches in the Netherlands would have to be shut or sold by 2025, and many parishes merged, because congregations and finances were “in a long-term shrinking process”.

Miz Shelby gets schooled at church:

Miz Shelby had not been home in nearly a year. Not since Christmas last, when that awful phone call about grandmama dying interrupted the gift-giving.

So she came home this weekend. Miz Shelby and her momma got facials, did a little shopping, made Rice Krispy treats and generally hung out, talking girl things.

On Sunday, after a breakfast of bacon and omelets, Miz Shelby and her momma went to church. Miz Shelby had never been to this particular church before.

Miz Shelby goes to one of those churches that meets in a cavernous auditorium.

Her momma goes to a church where the timbers form an A-frame roof over the Cross….

Her momma goes to a church where ladies with silver curls take up the offering and speak openly before God and man.

Odd, isn’t it, that this church is really the more progressive one? her momma noted.

Miz Shelby nodded.

Us old people get blamed all the time for the gender inequalities, her momma said. But in many ways, you young people practice it more than we do.

Miz Shelby winced knowingly. It’s true, she said.

Maybe when people get to a certain age, they don’t care so much about all that anymore, her momma said. Maybe people outgrow gender inequalities. Maybe they are simply content to minister alongside each other instead of bickering about power and position.

A tribute for a wonderful pastor, Jim Martin, whom I am honored to call friend.

Speaking of church, Steve Cuss fires up his blog with a post on church unity:

Unity between churches is challenging and time consuming but is also at the center of Jesus’ prayer in John 17.

As a general rule of thumb, if Jesus prayed for it, we want to be part of it.  Collaboration between churches is exciting and powerful, but if you’re not there yet, here are two easy-peasy steps any pastor can take toward true unity with other churches.

2 minute unity: Take 2 minutes in your church service to pray for other churches in your city by name.  We’ve been doing this for a few years now.  We invite people to pray for a local church they know and we offer a few suggestions if they don’t know of churches.   We pray for the mega church down the road, the smaller recovery church downtown and the lutheran church near us, among others.  Most of all, we mean it.  We sincerely pray for their blessing and well being.

25 Minute Unity:  Meet with other pastors and pray for each other, for each other’s churches, for each other’s people.  Because we’re wild and crazy, we pray once a month, 6:30am on Sunday mornings, but you might choose a less biblical more convenient time  As pastors, we pray and worship together on a Sunday before going separately to pray and worship in our churches.

Do famous authors intend symbolism? Read this. (No, mostly not.)

Our friend and colleague, Michael Quicke, has resigned as professor of preaching at Northern Seminary … we will miss him.

8 foods you’ve been eating wrong — including apples and PB&J.

From Carl Trueman (HT: DGM):

The Mefferd-Driscoll controversy points to another aspect of celebrity culture: celebrities are routinely allowed to behave in ways which would not be tolerated in ordinary mortals.  For example, being drunk on the job and hurling abuse at an employer would make one unemployable in the real world.  Not for Charlie Sheen. A conviction for rape would be enough to have you characterized as a monster in the real world who had forfeited the right to sympathetic media exposure.   Not for Mike Tyson or Roman Polanski (just ask that champion of women’s rights, Whoopi Goldberg).   In short, normal rules do not apply to celebrities in the same way as they do to others.

The same is true in the celebritydrome of the evangelical subculture.   Driscoll is a classic case in point. For example, he has claimed that God gives him explicit images of the sexual sins of other people.  He has embraced prosperity teacher and denier of the Trinity, T. D. Jakes, as a brother. He has written an explicit book on sex. Most recently, he engaged in a cringe-inducing publicity stunt unworthy of a spoiled teenager. For most of us, any one of these things would have ended in church discipline and (in the Jakes’ case) removal from office.  Yet in all of this, the fan base and those with a vested interest in capitalizing on his success grant him free pass after free pass.

So the fall-out from The Janet Mefferd Show has been interesting even as it has been entirely predictable.  The fan base and those with a vested interest in Driscoll’s reputation rally around their hero while excoriating Janet Mefferd.   In so doing, they ironically demonstrate why shows such as Janet Mefferd’s can be so very important: if the conservative evangelical world continues to be increasingly dominated by one or two huge media-style organizations, the conversation will be corralled and controlled, the hard questions will not be asked, and the leaders of such organizations and those over whom they choose to extend their patronage will not be held to account.

Discovery of a 10,000 yr old home in the Holy Land.

Sexism in sports journalism, a veteran female journalist, Andrea Kremer speaks up:

Kremer: The definition of sexism is: “discrimination or devaluation based on a person’s sex, as in restricted job opportunities.” I believe that in the sports media, it’s still “easiest” to be a white male. Sadly, I think there continues to be a high percentage of viewers, listeners and readers who want their sports news and information delivered solely from men. The double standard still exists. If a man makes a mistake, he misspoke. If a woman errs, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Thankfully, there are more women employed in the sports media than ever. I don’t think they’re viewed as such an anomaly anymore, but there are times it feels like women are token hires and not there based on knowledge and ability. And pity the poor woman saddled with the moniker “high maintenance.” That can be a job killer. There is much greater tolerance for that among men than women. This is an area where stereotypes creep in and can be tough to overcome. And trust me — I’ve seen just as many men fret about their hair and overall appearance as do women! When executives overemphasize women’s looks I believe it encourages the talent to emphasize their personal branding and not their work and accomplishments.

Pope Benedict XVI’s response to an Italian atheist.

I found this story fascinating — people who lived for a long time in various forms of isolation.

When is the best time to drink coffee? Here’s the science:

If you’re anything like certain members of the Fast Company staff, then you feel more or less undead until you have your morning cup of brains coffee. However, insight into the way our attention rises and dips throughout the day suggests that we can get more precise about the way we caffeinate–and thus become more productive.

How so? Because, as Steven Miller, the man behind brain blog NeuroscienceDCsuggests, the way coffee affects your body is shaped by a few key factors. Those being:

• Caffeine is a drug
• Your body has rhythms, hormonal and otherwise
• To use a drug wisely, you fit it to your rhythms

How do those points combine? To understand, Miller asks us to consider the insights of chronopharmacology, the study of the interaction between drugs and biological rhythms.

Your body has many rhythms: there’s the circadian one that drives your sleeping habits (and gets messed up by over-zealous snoozing), the ultradian one that tells us to unplug every 90 minutes, and most interestingly for our caffeinated purposes, the rhythm of the release of cortisol….

The savvy coffee drinker, then, will enjoy her brew when her natural alertness levels are low, like between 9:30 and 11:30 am–that way you can get the most bang for your cup.

Want to hear what the ancient Greeks were hearing with their music?

[Ancient Greek] instruments are known from descriptions, paintings and archaeological remains, which allow us to establish the timbres and range of pitches they produced.

And now, new revelations about ancient Greek music have emerged from a few dozen ancient documents inscribed with a vocal notation devised around 450 BC, consisting of alphabetic letters and signs placed above the vowels of the Greek words.

The Greeks had worked out the mathematical ratios of musical intervals – an octave is 2:1, a fifth 3:2, a fourth 4:3, and so on.

The notation gives an accurate indication of relative pitch.

Listen here.

Jon Merritt interviews Joel Baden on what David was “really” like:

JM: Enough beating around the theological bush. Let’s get to the $100,000 question: Who did you find David to be? Any surprises? 

JB: Depending on what perspective we start with, there will either be many surprises or relatively few. If we begin with the familiar cultural portrait of David, then there is plenty that will be new and perhaps even somewhat shocking. You described David quite correctly as an “ambitious power player.”  That’s quite right. For someone coming only from tradition, or even from the biblical text, this is a surprise indeed: the Bible goes to great lengths to show that David was anything but ambitious, that the kingship was given to him through no efforts of his own. For someone reading David in light of his ancient context, however, there’s no great shock here: no one in the ancient world simply fell into the monarchy, especially from outside any established royal descent.

There is no value judgment here, nor do I want to propose any. David did whatever was necessary to attain and retain the throne in Israel, to amass and wield the power that came with the crown. If he hadn’t, the world would be quite different today. But the biblical presentation of David as always in the right just doesn’t turn out to be quite right. Without giving too much away, suffice it to say that the David I think walked the earth did a lot of things that we would find morally, well, difficult. There was adultery, to be sure, but also royal insubordination, murder, in various flavors, and even something that looks a lot like treason. Perhaps most surprising for me, and perhaps most problematic for many readers, was the realization that the entire notion of the “Davidic” dynasty– both as a royal line in Israel and as a family line leading to Jesus–is thrown strongly into question.

David, as I understand him, was an astonishingly successful man, just as the Bible suggests. But I think that he came to that success via means that would make most of us who claim David as our ancestor rather uncomfortable. Which is really only to say that David was a man of his times, not ours–and it is in his times that I am trying to understand him.

For the psychologists amongst us.

A good interview with Karen Swallow Prior by David Moore:  Moore Engaging: What can literature teach that systematic theologies can’t?

Prior: Humans are logical, rational creatures. Systematic theologies allow us to seek and find truth through our intellect. Logic and facts constitute one kind of approach to knowledge. But humans are also imaginative, interpretive creatures. We are driven to create and find meaning through not only the intellect but also through our senses, our emotions, and our imaginations. Literature allows us to find meaning in ways that replicate the way we create meaning through our interactions and activities in real life.

Have you seen the Blue Footed Booby? One of the least alert (to humans) birds of the world.

Ten myths about airplanes — some fun reading.

“When the only contemporary means of self-transcendence is orgasm, we Christians are going to have tough time convincing people that it would be nicer if they would not be promiscuous” (Hauerwas and Willimon, Resident Aliens, 63).

10 things you should never let your kids do!

Catholics and Baptists in conversation: the document and a commentary by Fr Thomas Baima.

Probing why males have more affairs: “I suggest that one overlooked reason that men find themselves in the midst of an extramarital affair is that men don’t talk! (1) Thanks to their biology, neurophysiology, culture and psychology most men rarely express worries, emotions, sexual issues or physical concerns about themselves, to friends, family, or colleagues, much less to their partners. (2) As the show, “ Married Men Don’t Talk” suggests, men will talk about everything from kids to sports but they don’t discuss marital issues. (3) In their research on men who stopped seeking sex from their partners, Bob and Susan Berkowitz, report that 44% said they were furious, felt criticized and insignificant in their marriage; but would not or could not talk about it with their partners. (4) M.Gary Neuman found that 48% of the men he interviewed reported emotional dissatisfaction as the primary reason for cheating. The men reported feeling unappreciated and wished that their partners could recognize when they were trying. They did not talk to their partners about this.”

Oh, many can sympathize: “When I first defended my graduate dissertation three months ago, I was sure there would be a robust reaction from policymakers, journalists, and the public at large. Now that a little time has passed, however, I’m starting to think that maybe—possibly—my dissertation is not getting the attention outside of academia I was expecting upon publication. In fact, it appears that nobody except my thesis advisor and my mom has read the whole thing, entitled Studies in Asymmetric Exponential Distribution, Positive Excess Kurtosis, and General Econometric Computation Using Data on Race and Gender in the United States from 1996 to 2011 at all.  I blame the lack of reception on a poor outreach strategy. It definitely wasn’t the title—the original title was longer, but I trimmed it to make sure that it was more readable. And it couldn’t have been the amount of work I put into it; I’ve been writing it since 1997. Thus, the clear hypothesis is that I simply failed to properly get my ideas to the world. I sent an excerpt to the New York Times for publication in their “Opinion” section, though maybe I should have sent it to their news desk instead because, if you think about it, it’s also news. Sometimes it’s really hard to tell who’s supposed to cover what these days in the media. I also sent it to President Obama, but rather than invite me to discuss ways to incorporate my research into his second-term agenda, he just sent me a form letter. “Dear Joshua,” someone in his correspondence office wrote. “Thank you for your letter.”

I believe in mental reverie — so I have to regroup on Sunday morning when Jay or Amanda get behind the pulpit: “Once accused of being absent-minded, the founder of American Psychology, William James, quipped that he was really just present-minded to his own thoughts. Most recent studies depict mind wandering as a costly cognitive failure with relatively few benefits (Mooneyham and Schooler, 2013). This perspective makes sense when mind wandering is observed by a third party and when costs are measured against externally imposed standards such as speed or accuracy of processing, reading fluency or comprehension, sustained attention, and other external metrics. There is, however, another way of looking at mind wandering, a personal perspective, if you will. For the individual, mind wandering offers the possibility of very real, personal reward, some immediate, some more distant.”

What our ancestors sounded like 6000 years ago.