2013-08-31T09:40:27-05:00

Last updated on: August 31, 2013 at 9:40 am   By

Jack Levison on sending kids back to school: “My mother used to say, without fail, that she hated to see autumn come around. She always felt melancholy when the kids went back to school. Us too. We’ve never wanted them back in the drudgery of yellow buses and seven hours of sitting. So much of school seems to consist of teaching kids to listen for hours on end. Instructing them in the art of large group compliance. Training them to relent. Kids should be relentless–not behaviorally modified to relent, to give ground, to concede and cave. Education should train them to be insistent, curious, inquisitive.”

Do women really make 77 cents on the dollar men make? Just hold on.

Stories of conversions from Brian Chilton, including three atheists-now-apologists: “One of the amazing things about God is how God is able to transform a person from one pathway to a completely different pathway…a better pathway.  I recently spoke to an individual who told me of an inspirational pastor.  This pastor was originally from California and was actively involved in gangs.  However, the one-day pastor would have an experience with God through Jesus Christ and would experience a complete turn-around.  The individual now ministers in West Virginia and has adopted children born in tough circumstances to give them a better life.  This should not be surprising, because God has an amazing capacity of turning something good out of something bad. It should not be surprising to hear when someone is transformed to a different mind-set either.  There are in fact many individuals who are now Christians who once were agnostic or of an atheist mind-set.  There are three examples that we offer to show how God can transform the mind, as well as the heart….I close with this thought: it could be that many who are angry atheists now will become the leaders of the church tomorrow.  This is well within the realm of possibility.  God can transform a heart that is bitter and fill it with forgiveness.  God can transform a heart that knows only hate to a heart that is open to love.  This is well within the power of God.  So for the Christian, I would simply say: don’t become angry with those who are antagonists to the faith.  Pray for them.  They may very well be your colleagues in the faith very soon.  It could be that the next great evangelist, like Billy Graham, has not come to faith yet.”

Kittens are the culprits: “Two kittens ran onto subway tracks in Brooklyn Thursday, and the MTA halted trains on two lines for about an hour as workers in reflective vests tried to corral the felines, witnesses and officials said.  But as it turns out, NBC 4 New York can confirm that herding cats is a difficult feat. Video obtained by NBC 4 New York shows the kittens — one black, one white with gray stripes — racing up and down the tracks near the third rail, darting around empty bottles and other debris, at the B/Q Church Avenue station in Prospect Lefferts Gardens around midday.” (HT: LEMB)

A good sketch of the rise of evangelical progressivism: “During the first decade of the twenty-first century, scholars of American religious history showed an increasing interest in the evangelical left–particularly younger scholars with some affinity for that brand of evangelicalism.  Brantley Gasaway, for example, recently completed a dissertation on contemporary progressive evangelicalism that will soon be published by UNC Press.  Further, fellow Anxious Bench blogger, David Swartz, has penned Moral Minority (2012), the best work on the topic to date.”

How much does it cost for our soldiers’ health?

America’s food flag — hot dogs!

A good sketch of American evangelicalism’s eschatologies.

Puffer fish pastors: “When a predator approaches, a puffer fish can expand to several times their normal size.  It’s a defense mechanism to keep him safe. In 1 Corinthians 8:1, Paul warns a group of Christians that knowledge puffs up.  Today, it’s not just knowledge that cause pastors to puff up.  We puff out our chests about the size of our church, the number of baptisms, the health of our team, the model of ministry we’ve chosen, and the list goes on.  Too many of us are like puffer fish, blowing up to keep ourselves safe, when other pastors come near. We are puffer fish pastors.”

Need to delete some account? Find it difficult? “It was after marveling at some fed-up users’ tweets about how incredibly difficult it is to delete a Skype account that a U.K. developer named Robb Lewis decided to lend a hand. So he built a website that takes the adventure out of account-deletion. It’s called “Just Delete Me,” and it’s as simple as Skype’s account-deletion procedure is convoluted.

  1. Go to justdelete.me and find the service from which you want to delete your account.
  2. Click on the service’s name and follow the instructions on the screen to delete your account.

Step three is optional: If the instructions on the site itself aren’t clear, you can click “show info” on the Just Delete Me page to learn in plain English exactly how to delete your account. Never again will you be forced to wonder, after 20 minutes of clicking around fruitlessly in your Evernote app, whether it’s even possible to delete your Evernote account. (It isn’t, though Just Delete Me will take you to a page where you can at least deactivate it.)”

Italy’s food flag:

Starts with a “bang” but the immensity boggles. “The farther away we’re able to look, the more galaxies we’re able to see. As far as our instruments have ever taken us, we’ve always found more and more galaxies filling up the darkest depths we’ve ever been able to peer into. Even the darkest, most devoid-of-light areas we can find, if we look for long enough, will eventually reveal these island Universes to our telescopes….”

2013-08-10T17:51:41-05:00

Last updated on: August 10, 2013 at 5:51 pm   By

Among evangelicals one can find a number of views on how to read Genesis 1-2: the literary approach and the literal approach are two typical approaches, though behind them all is one simple question: Historical or not? And then this one: In what senses is it historical or non-historical? The big problem here is that one’s conclusions enter into the polemics of evangelicalism where some think anything less than “historical all the way down” (including light before the sun) throws evangelicalism under the bus while others think there’s plenty of room for other considerations (and honestly hold to evangelical convictions in all other regards).

For me a problem enters when one view contends it alone is faithful while the others have caved in, and it is even more problematic when the principal evidence and scientific discussions are ignored or denied. This is the case with Todd Bealls’ contribution to J. Daryl Charles, Reading Genesis 1-2: An Evangelical Conversation. After we read a perfectly reasonable sketch of how to read Genesis 1-2 in a literary reading with clear historical referentialism at work by Richard Averbeck, Bealls chooses to do polemics against everyone else’s readings but his “literal” (more below) reading. A big disappointment because I’d like to read an honest sketch of his reading — all the polemics dropped — of Genesis 1-2, but my disappointment was shared by the responses by the other authors in this multi view volume. Some observations and these are more or less found as well in the respondents, though I jotted these down before I read their responses:

1. He opens playing the Elijah, or victim, game. Like Elijah in wilderness Beall claims his view alone is faithful and the rest are caving in and that he’s persecuted for it. Skip his first two paragraphs and go to his first question.

2. He asks if one should have two different hermeneutics for Genesis 1-11 (or 1-2, or just chp 1) than for Gen 12-50. He says they are the same, the hermeneutic should be the same, that it should be literal. He’s got some good points here; I’m not sure it as water tight as he’d like and most readers of Genesis 1-2 don’t agree with him. Yes, these chps are narrative prose; but how does one know when “narrative” is “historical referentiality” vs. the non-historical and literary? (Point 5 below touches on this.)

3. Which raises for me an observation. Beall has a colossal hermeneutical blunder: he equates a “literal” reading with “historical referentiality” without a shred of evidence or defense. The fact is that a literal reading can be fully literal and the text itself not at all be concerned with historical referentiality (John Collins’ response points this out too). Here’s an example. Luke 10:30 has Jesus responding to the man’s question about who is my neighbor: Jesus says, “In reply Jesus said: “A man was going down from Jerusalem to Jericho, when he was attacked by robbers. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him and went away, leaving him half dead….” I know of almost no one who thinks this isn’t a parable yet most think it is a parable. There’s no indication it is a parable — it doesn’t say “And then Jesus told this parable…” It just says “A man…” and if one takes it as a parable, it could be pure fiction; if it is not a parable, it could refer to a historical referent. My point is this: Most think it is a parable because it comes off that way though there’s not a shred of evidence in the text that is a parable or an imagined story. In Beall’s logic we’d have to take this as a historical referent story and not a parable. This is the problem for Beall’s logic: How do we know when a narrative is historical or fictional? He doesn’t spell it out and for me it ruins this chp.

4. Another question he addresses: is Genesis 1 from an ANE worldview? This, by the way, is one way to answer the historical referentiality question but Beall gets too polemical here. Because the text is from God it doesn’t have to be — or isn’t — an ANE worldview. “Why would God have used ANE myths to reveal truth to Moses…?” (52). One could ask “Why not?” He says instead it is polemics against the ANE worldview, which is almost a way of saying it partakes in the ANE worldview. I could go on: the point I’d make is that this text emerged in the ANE, it was for people who lived in the ANE, it has parallels and differences from the ANE, and all texts emerge from and speak into and against their cultures. Denying a text’s cultural embedness is a colossal hermeneutical blunder. Every text reflects its culture. Historical conditionedness is part of the human condition so when God chose to speak he did so in space and time, and that space and that time is not the same as ours today.

5. How do NT authors approach these texts? This is a more fruitful approach for someone who wants to deny the importance of the ANE context. Yes, I would agree that the NT writers assume the text of Genesis 1-2 (and beyond) when they speak: Jesus, Paul, et al.. But I’d like to see him address one question: Does the authority of a biblical worldview rest on that worldview being historical? Let us say that Jesus is saying “the two, as the Bible says, became one.” Is his view based on the fact that his worldview is rooted in that worldview or because the text of Gen 1-2 is historical? In this section I think Beall assumes that “literally” can only be “authoritative” if “literal” means “historical.” Is that compelling?

6. He then says those who are opting for literary readings of Genesis 1-2 are accommodating themselves to theistic evolution. Maybe, but I’d rather not question the motive of Tremper Longman and Pete Enns and John Walton and believe that they really do think Genesis 1-2 needs to be read in a more historically nuanced way so that it is more in tune with ANE culture, something that is simply not characteristic of the tradition that developed leading to the view Beall now defends. As we have become both more aware of science and the ANE texts we need to listen and learn.

He then sees this all as a slippery slope, his terms. This is a scare tactic and not logic. Slippery slope logic is unworthy of intellectual rigor.

2013-08-03T06:27:16-05:00

Last updated on: August 3, 2013 at 6:27 am   By

Kris and I were in Vancouver for seven days where I was teaching at Regent College in the mornings, and we spent the afternoons visiting a number of places — what a beautiful city! — but more about Regent and Vancouver on another day. All this to say, not much when it comes to Meanderings… sorry. But here’s four choice items.

Pamela Wood: “On Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a previously untold story of free African Americans is being told through newly discovered bits of glass, shards of pottery and oyster shells. Piece by piece, archaeologists and historians from two universities and the local community are uncovering the history of The Hill, a part of the town of Easton believed to be the earliest community of free blacks in the United States, dating to 1790. It also could have been the largest community of free blacks in the Chesapeake region. During the first census in 1790, about 410 free African Americans were recorded living on The Hill — more than Baltimore’s 250 free African Americans and even more than the 346 slaves who lived at nearby Wye House Plantation, where abolitionist Frederick Douglass was enslaved as a child. Free African Americans in Easton lived alongside white families, said Dale Green, a Morgan State Universityprofessor of architecture and historic preservation who is working with the University of Maryland‘s Mark Leone on the Hill project. “It’s not just a black story. It’s an American story,” Green said.”

Olivia Laing, on the alcoholism of great writers, a long essay worth your time: “In order to understand how an intelligent man could get himself into such a dire situation, it’s necessary to understand what a glass of champagne or shot of scotch does to the human body. Alcohol is both an intoxicant and a central nervous depressant, with an immensely complex effect upon the brain. A single drink brings about a surge of euphoria, followed by a diminishment in fear and agitation caused by a reduction in brain activity. Everyone experiences these effects, and they are the reason alcohol is such a pleasurable drug; the reason why, despite my history, I too love to drink.

But if the drinking is habitual, the brain begins to compensate for these calming effects by producing an increase in excitatory neurotransmitters. What this means in practice is that when one stops drinking, even for a day or two, the increased activity manifests itself by way of an eruption of anxiety, more severe than anything that came before. This neuroadaptation is what drives addiction in the susceptible, eventually making the drinker require alcohol in order to function at all.

Not everyone who drinks, of course, becomes an alcoholic. The disease, which exists in all quarters of the world, is caused by an intricate mosaic of factors, among them genetic predisposition, early life experience and social influences. As it gathers momentum, alcohol addiction inevitably affects the drinker, visibly damaging the architecture of their life. Jobs are lost. Relationships spoil. There may be accidents, arrests and injuries, or the drinker may simply become increasingly neglectful of their responsibilities and capacity to provide self-care. Conditions associated with long-term alcoholism include hepatitis, cirrhosis, gastritis, heart disease, hypertension, impotence, infertility, various types of cancer, increased susceptibility to infection, sleep disorders, loss of memory and personality changes caused by damage to the brain. More stress, of course: to be drowned out in turn by drink after drink after drink.

George Will on Detroit: “Here, where cattle could graze in vast swaths of this depopulated city, democracy ratified a double delusion: Magic would rescue the city (consult the Bible, the bit about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes), or Washington would deem Detroit, as it recently did some banks and two of the three Detroit-based automobile companies, “too big to fail.” But Detroit failed long ago. And not even Washington, whose recklessness is almost limitless, is oblivious to the minefield of moral hazard it would stride into if it rescued this city and, then inevitably, others that are buckling beneath the weight of their cumulative follies. It is axiomatic: When there is no penalty for failure, failures proliferate.

This bedraggled city’s decay poses no theological conundrum of the sort that troubled Darwin, but it does pose worrisome questions about the viability of democracy in jurisdictions where big government and its unionized employees collaborate in pillaging taxpayers. Self-government has failed in what once was America’s fourth-­largest city and now is smaller than Charlotte.”

Nikki Toyama-Szeto:”How do we as women steward power well?

For one thing, I think it is really important for women to embody their leadership. Because so many of our leadership models are male-based, women don’t necessarily embody it in their own selves. They try to dress differently. They try to, in a sense, operate cross-culturally, the culture being cross-gender, in order to be effective. And I think sometimes that is appropriate, but I really appreciate work such as  MaryKate Morse’s work on women and embodied leadership, knowing the space you take up, knowing the impact your space has on other people. I think that’s all part of power, understanding and knowing within your own self what is the power that you have, and also the source of that power. Some of it is God-given authority, some of it is positional authority, some of it is authority that we’re given because of our education, our economics, our fluency in English, etc.

And then, I think, trying to grapple with how you steward it. I have come to understand that leadership is more about other people’s experience of my presence, and the impact that my presence has even when I’m not there. I think a good litmus test for someone who is using power well, as reported in Lean In, is when you’re gone, do people feel less oppressed, a greater sense of freedom, or — the language I like to use is — does my presence bless people? Or is my presence a hardship?

There are also cycles of power we need to recognize. It’s very interesting to look through a Christian lens — there’s having power, there’s giving up power, and then there’s claiming power. Some of it depends on where you are in that circle, what the faithful response to power is. So in some cases, if you have power, the faithful response is actually to relinquish power or to use your power for somebody else. And then in other cases, when you’re disempowered, the faithful response is actually to step and to claim power. For example, trying to step into Shalom. Our world is broken and you might actually need to step in and say, this isn’t right. It is important for women in power to understand what of the power they have is theirs to give away, where do they need to take that power and step in and claim more– possibly for their own self or for a greater thing such as the health of their organization — and where do they just need to steward the power that they have.

 

2013-07-11T18:31:43-05:00

Last updated on: July 11, 2013 at 6:31 pm   By

Nine traits of intelligent leadership. “The model is based on an enneagram, a nine-pointed diagram within a circle that dates to 2500 BC in Babylon. These days, it is used for charting personalities, with each element corresponding to a distinct way of thinking, feeling, and behaving. It correlates with other well-known personality and behavioural systems, but Mr. Mattone believes it provides more granular details about leadership development. The circle divides evenly into three groups of leaders: Heart leaders, head leaders, and gut leaders. If you stalled on trying to place yourself in that schema, there’s a reason: Everyone is guided by their heart, head and gut. At the same time, everyone has a tendency to predominantly rely on one of those aspects of their being in their leadership. In turn, each of those three forms of leadership breaks down into three possibilities. Heart leaders tend to be helpers, entertainers, or artists. Head leaders tend to be activists, disciples or thinkers. Gut leaders tend to be drivers, arbitrators, or perfectionists. In the end, one of those nine traits is your predominant behaviour, but the other eight are still part of your composition. As you mature, you evolve between traits.”

Shauna Niequist’s very honest lessons on dealing with criticism.

Speaking of criticism, read this post by Kathy Escobar, which is a testimony to the fortitude of women in ministry:

We have to stand up every time we get knocked down.
We have to stand up when we feel like maybe we were meant to crawl.
We have to stand up when shame flushes our face.
We have to stand up when we hear a voice in our head that tells us we are supposed to sit.
We have to stand up even when our legs are so very tired.

Because there are far more pressing issues for women in this world than whether or not we can preach from the front of North American churches, and we need an army of women who will get off their knees and stand up for dignity, equality and restoration in this broken world.

Brain exercises: “To keep their bodies running at peak performance, people often hit the gym, pounding away at the treadmill to strengthen muscles and build endurance. This dedication has enormous benefits—being in shape now means warding off a host of diseases when you get older. But does the brain work in the same way? That is, can doing mental exercises help your mind stay just as sharp in old age? Experts say it’s possible. As a corollary to working out, people have begun joining brain gyms to flex their mental muscles. For a monthly fee of around $15, websites like Lumosity.com and MyBrainTrainer.com promise to enhance memory, attention and other mental processes through a series of games and brain teasers. Such ready-made mind exercises are an alluring route for people who worry about their ticking clock. But there’s no need to slap down the money right away—new research suggests the secret to preserving mental agility may lie in simply cracking open a book. The findings, published online today in Neurology, suggest that reading books, writing and engaging in other similar brain-stimulating activities slows down cognitive decline in old age, independent of common age-related neurodegenerative diseases. In particular, people who participated in mentally stimulating activities over their lifetimes, both in young, middle and old age, had a slower rate of decline in memory and other mental capacities than those who did not.”

Mary Bowser, the internet, and careful research: “The story of the mistaken Mary Bowser reveals how an interest in history, especially women’s history and black history, can blind us to how much about the past remains unknowable. The paradox of the information age is that our unprecedented access to information feeds an expectation that every search will yield plentiful — and accurate — results. But the type of evidence that our 21st-century sensibilities most desire may be the least likely to exist. Uncovering the past is arduous work: Compare the ease with which an Internet search turns up the falsely labeled, cropped image of Mary Bowser with the number of sources I persistently contacted over a period of several years before locating the original cabinet card. Alas, in the age of the Internet, it may prove nearly impossible to curtail the use of that image as an avatar for the elusive slave-turned-spy, despite the definitive proof that it isn’t her.” (HT: CB)

The real money is in teaching: “Software programming? Yeah it’s an okay way to  make a living. But the real money is in teaching. Or at least that’s the recent experience of Scott Allen, a programmer and teacher the tech-y online education platform Pluralsight.com. Allen has earned more than $1.8 million through fees and royalties from Pluralsight over the last five years. He says each monthly royalty check has increased in size over that period — the smallest increase being 10 percent month-over-month. That far outdid his expectations when he started making educational videos for Pluralsight. “It’s amazing,” he says.”

Harper Lee — a report: “Who would have predicted that, in her late 80s, Harper Lee would have to file suit to get the control of “To Kill a Mockingbird” returned to her? According to a lawsuit filed in May, Lee, in failing health, had been “duped” into assigning the copyright of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to her literary agent, a lawyer. That’s no small thing: A half century after its publication, “To Kill a Mockingbird” still sells more than 750,000 copies a year. In one typical six-month period in 2009, its royalties amounted to more than $1.6 million.”

The burrito pillow.

Church of England’s Bishops meet to discuss the church in England over the next two decades. “Bishop Steven Croft told Synod members the Church of England needed a “more outward focus” that implied action as well as reflection. He welcomed the rise in the number of younger vocations to ordained ministry, to 113 candidates under 30 in 2011, the highest figure since 1992. However, he said there needed to be more diverse vocations and more from different ethnic backgrounds. The bishop admitted the area of growing the Church and of making disciples was the “most challenging” out of the three goals. “The Church all over the world is having a similar conversation about the challenge of passing on the Christian faith in a global secular culture,” he said. “We urgently need to deepen that conversation in our own Church.” He urged the Church to pursue serving the common good, transforming ministry, and making disciples “with passion, with hope, with resources, and with courage”. “We need to recover the simple, deep disciplines of learning and teaching the faith to make disciples in annual rhythms and patterns in every parish throughout the land.”

Last words of 38 presidents.

Edmund S. Morgan, one of America’s best Puritan scholars, dies. “As a historian of colonial and revolutionary America, he was one of the giants of his generation, and a writer who could well have commanded a larger nonacademic audience than I suspect he received,” said Pauline Maier, a professor of American history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “He characteristically took on big issues and had a knack for conveying complex, sophisticated truths in a way that made them seem, if not simple, at least easily understandable.” Professor Morgan’s book “The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop” (1958) was for decades one of the most widely assigned texts in survey courses on American history. His “Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea” (1963) showed his unmatched talent for mining primary sources to illuminate an important concept, in this case the change in understanding among New Englanders of what it meant to be the member of a church.”

History of bread: “By the beginning of the Middle Ages the preference was to eat white bread made from wheat – medieval physicians also recommended it as being the healthiest – but poorer peoples would bake darker breads with oats or rye. If one needed too, people could also add rice, peas, lentils, chestnuts, acorns or other foods into the mixture. In medieval France, most people would eat a type of bread known as meslin, which was made from a mixture of wheat and rye. Writing from Baghdad in the 10th century, Ibn Sayyar al-Warraq, gives his thoughts on the best kinds of bread to eat:

Wheat bread agrees with almost everybody, particular varieties made with a generous amount of yeast and salt and allowed to fully ferment and bake well. Such breads are lighter and digest faster. Jizmazaj (thin bread with tamarisk seeds) and ruqaq (very thin bread) are by comparison less nourishing and digest much faster. Bread baked in malla (pit with hot ashes and stones), tabaq (large flat pan) and any other similar varieties that do not ferment or bake well are hard to digest and cause stomach aches. Only people used to strenuous labor can eat them more often.

Terrence Scully notes “that bread was the basis of the medieval diet” and the amount that people ate throughout Europe was remarkably similar. He finds that records from England, France and Italy that workmen, soldiers and even patients in hospitals were supposed to get about two pounds of bread per day.”

How to talk like a founding father, and one way is to use this word: “mickle (n.): a large sum or amount, chiefly used in the proverbs “many a pickle makes a mickle” and “many a mickle makes a muckle.” In 1793, Washington referenced the Scottish adage that “Nothing in nature is more true … [than] many mickles make a muckle.” Predecessors of mickle include the Old Saxon mikil and Middle High German michel.”

Great article on Larry Doby. Speaking of baseball, John Rawls, eminent thinker about justice, totally understands it.

The Pine Tar Incident of George Brett now clarified.

2013-06-27T19:57:23-05:00

Last updated on: June 27, 2013 at 7:57 pm   By

Supermoon …

Quote of the week, from John Wertheim about Wimbledon’s historic Nadal first round loss: “When the score [of Nadal’s loss] was shown during Andy Murray’s simultaneous match, the Centre Court crowd gasped collectively as though someone had used the wrong fork.”

Andy Crouch, post of the week: “There is one other consistent position that Christians can hold, though we will hold it at great social cost, at least for the foreseeable future: that bodies matter. Indeed, that both male and female bodies are of ultimate value and dignity—not a small thing given the continuing denigration of women around the world. Indeed, that matter matters. For behind the dismissal of bodies is ultimately a gnostic distaste for embodiment in general. To uphold a biblical ethic on marriage is to affirm the sweeping scriptural witness—hardly a matter of a few isolated “thou shalt not” verses—that male and female together image God, that the creation of humanity as male and female is “very good,” and that “it is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18, NRSV). Sexual differentiation (along with its crucial outcome of children, who have a biological connection to two parents but are not mirror images of either one) is not an accident of evolution or a barrier to fulfillment. It is in fact the way God is imaged, and the way fruitfulness, diversity, and abundance are sustained in the world.”

Observation of the week: 35 NFL players arrested this year. Alarming.

Scientists seeking resolution to ten mysteries.

Suzanne Moore is, sadly, right: “As the vigil continues outside the hospital, we don’t know how close to the final freedom Nelson Mandela is. But after the strange denials that this old, sick man is dying I want to talk not with pity but of his power. Before the pygmy politicians line up to pay tribute to this giant, I want to remember how he lived so much for so many. Part of my memory is that he was not a living saint to the very people whose staff will now be writing their “heartfelt” speeches. Really, I have no desire to hear them from leaders of parties who described his organisation as terrorist, who believed that sanctions were wrong, whose jolly young members wore T-shirts demanding he be strung up. Of course, not all Tories were pro-apartheid, but I can already feel the revisionism revving up. So we must recall how it really was. The struggle against apartheid was the one thing that unified the left. I came to it accidentally. Isn’t that how politicisation happens sometimes? Via extraordinary people, unlikely meetings, chance encounters?”

Adrian Warnock’s twenty types of tweets.

Are your children reading? Are you? “Today’s children are reading less than seven years ago as their time is taken up with other activities, research suggests. It is not just novels that youngsters are turning their back on – the study found that children are also less likely to read comics, magazines and websites.While many said they enjoy reading, almost a fifth said they would be embarrassed if a friend saw them with a book.”

David Swartz sums up Rich Mouw with a fitting tribute to a great man.

To quote Andre Agassi, image is (still) everything: “Now, business school researchers reportthat what you’ve always sensed is true: the workplace isn’t much more hospitable to unattractive people than high school. In a study published in the journal Human Performance, professors from Michigan State University and the University of Notre Dame found that people who are considered unattractive are more likely to be hassled or tormented by their colleagues than those peers who are considered better-looking. The study claims to be the first to link attractiveness with cruelty in the workplace.”

Read more than the introduction to this post, though it’s funny.

The Sahara and climate change. “Stefan Kröpelin is an archaeologist from Germany who wanted to find out. He and his team ventured out into the unexplored desert every year for decades, looking for clues. They tracked the locations of these cave paintings, and along the way they began to discover signs of what the Sahara had been like thousands of years ago. In massive, dry valleys they found shells and fish skeletons. They found remnants of trees and traces of pollen. They realized that what they were witnessing was a history of climate change in the region. A once-fertile land of rains and lakes had dried up into a Martian landscape in just over 10,000 years. And as the rains moved, so too did the people.”

Good interview with Dan Wallace about photographing manuscripts throughout the world.

The fight for young black men: “But first, a few words about the world Joe comes from: the world of low-income black men. Why talk about this world? After all, it’s simple enough to ignore. We can safely tuck these men away in our inner cities and allow them to interact largely among themselves. We can rush past them in front of the gas station, murmur silently when the nightly news tells us of a shooting across town, or smile when we meet a nice, inspiring man like Joe. We can keep them in these places. It’s safe and easy for us. Yet if we’re honest, we’ll have to admit that when one single group of people is conspicuously left behind, it never bodes well for society as a whole. In many ways, black men in America are a walking gut check; we learn from them a lot about ourselves, how far we’ve really come as a country, and how much further we have to go. I spent the past few months talking to dozens of experts who are working to address the crisis among black men. It was clear from these conversations that the reasons for this crisis are complex—as are the solutions. But it was also clear that the fight for black men, which is currently being waged by activists, politicians, celebrities, and everyday people alike, can indeed be won.”

Maria Popova on the history of the pencil.

Glad they found Rusty. (That’s not Rusty, that’s just a red panda.)

Recent wise piece from Jim Wallis: “Night after night, people would come into the events, in book stores, universities, churches, and town halls, with what felt like a very deep hunger for what we call the common good — that our life together could and should be better. And they wanted to know how they could help make that happen, which is what the book is all about. But, virtually every night, I would also feel from those who came, along with that hunger, a very deep cynicism about social change even being possible. And when it came to Washington or Wall Street, the cynicism was overwhelming. Virtually no one trusts either our political system or marketplace to be fair, honest, moral, or even open to doing the right thing. Most Americans seem to believe that the primary institutions of our public life completely lack integrity. And sadly, that cynicism, for many, even extends to their churches or other religious institutions, which they don’t regard as playing an independent leadership role for the common good that could hold other institutions accountable.”

Which of these is your favorite?

CNN’s “New Day” does not appear to be the ticket. “Though ratings have improved in recent months, CNN’s morning programming ranked third in viewership in 2012, averaging just 239,000 viewers per day, compared with 452,000 for MSNBC’s Morning Joe and 1.13 million for Fox’s Fox and Friends, according to Nielsen Media Research. Other parts of the day look no better. Continued declines in prime-time viewership, considered the most critical time for cable news, placed the channel third behind Fox and MSNBC for three years straight. In 2012, it fell to third place in daytime viewership for the first time.” I have a theory: CNN caters to the Democratic side of the news; that side of the news is more represented by young adults (20-35) than older adults; that age demographic does not favor  TV news but social media; CNN either changes its politics or breadth of politics or it will simply have to accept the older folks are over at FoxNews or MSNBC.

Ten bizarre phenomena for physicists.

2013-06-21T06:52:03-05:00

Last updated on: June 21, 2013 at 6:52 am   By

So, we are now ready to ask, What did Jesus think of women and How did Jesus treat women? I provide a series of questions for your consideration.

A good place to begin here is with D.M. Scholer, “Women” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels or with B. Witherington III, Women. (These items can be found in the first post in this series.)|inline

My recommendation: list all the evidence about women in the Gospels and sort out according to the above categories and then ask the following questions. Be fair with the evidence: do not be disrespectful of Judaism’s attempt to follow the Torah or with the Jesus movement’s Jewish origins.

10.1 What are the similarities of Judaism and Jesus in how they treated women?
10.2 What are the dissimilarities?
10.3 Did Jesus “liberate” women? If you think so, examine all the data in the light of the above outline, and specify how and to what extent Jesus “liberated” women.
10.4 Did Jesus have “women disciples”? Why or why not? If so, describe the nature of their following of Jesus. Were they apostles? were they preachers? were they healers? were they teachers? What roles did they perform?
10.5 What is the impact of Jesus’ healing of women?
10.6 What does Jesus say about motherhood? about the family? about children?
10.7 Did Jesus “liberate” women from Jewish purity laws? Did he expect females connected to him to follow laws for menstruants?
10.8 Did Jesus join his followers in regular table fellowship? Was this offensive to Jewish society?

Primary evidence:
Mark 1:29-31; 6:17-29; 7:9-13; 7:24-30; 9:33-37; 10:13-16, 19; 12:40-44; 12:18-27; 15:40-41, 47-16:1;
Matthew 1:1-17; 5:27-32; 8:14-15; 9:18-26; 12:46-50; 13:33; 19:3-9, 10-12; 21:31; 23:37-39; 24:41; 25:1-13; 27:55-56; 27:61-28:1;
Luke 1:26-38, 41-45, 46-56; 2:36-38; 4:26, 38-39; 7:11-17; 7:36-50; 8:1-3; 10:38-42; 11:27-28; 13:10-17; 15:8-10; 17:35; 18:1-8; 23:49; 23:27-31; 23:55-24:1
John 2:1-12; 4:4-42; 7:53-8:11; 11:1-44; 12:1-11; 19:25-27; 20:1

I’ll give now a review of a major book about Jesus and Women. The following is a review of Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger’s important book, Transformative Encounters, and was not published. It was written to be read at an SBL meeting, and then the session fell through and I was left with this review. Somewhere out there in cyberspace this review appeared earlier.|inline

“From Jeremias to Ilan: Jesus and Women”
1.0 From Jeremias to Ilan

Because Tal Ilan’s Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine has become somewhat of a consensus report of how women fared at the time roughly contemporary with Jesus, and because Joachim Jeremias’s appendix to his Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus was Ilan’s monograph’s John the Baptist, I want to set the context of Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger’s edited book, Transformative Encounters: Jesus and Women Re-Viewed into what has happened since the study of Jeremias. TE is a reflection of our day as much as Jeremias was of his day; and Ilan’s study belongs to our day. Furthermore, I have been requested to examine only Part Two: Historical Re-Construction and Contextualization and to do so as a historian. So, I am asking the following: since Jeremias, has our knowledge of Jewish women at the time of Jesus become clearer? do we know more now than we knew then? and has scholarship improved since Jeremias? if so, how?

First, in preparation for this paper I sat down and read Ilan’s book cover-to-cover and then I read Jeremias’s appendix. I was surprised how little a difference there was between the two in substance. I was disappointed that Ilan did not cover “motherhood” as a separate chapter but neither did Jeremias and I wondered if Ilan let Jeremias’s categories shape her own. More importantly, over and over the two studies came to the same substantive conclusion, citing often the same evidence (though Jeremias frequently has no more than a reference when Ilan cites the texts in full). For example, when it comes to issue of the seclusion of Jewish women in their homes, both contend that while the rabbinic texts but especially the Alexandrian texts evidence some strong statements about seclusion, that evidence is not realistic for the common Jewish woman. If Jeremias gives the Alexandrian evidence more attention, more than it ought to for understanding women in Jesus’ world, he backs away from that evidence for a more realistic description of women as participants in Jewish society, publicly. For a second example, Jeremias and Ilan examine the evidence about the married woman in nearly the same categories, citing most of the same evidence. Here we have a litany of statements about age of marriage, marrying relatives, betrothal, conjugal duties and rights, polygamy, divorce and levirate marriage. With varying nuances of emphasis, especially Ilan’s emphasis on the “female body,” the two walk the same path and depict a very similar Jewish woman. A third example surprises if it also excites scholarship: both Jeremias and Ilan carefully warn about the use of rabbinical evidence when in search of information about common Jewish women. Both assign much of the evidence to the “upper class” and dismiss their rigid categories (say, for instance, about divorce or polygamy since they are more options for those who could afford such procedures) as unrealistic for the common Jewish woman.

Nuances, however, give way to some distinct differences and these highlight some of the changes that have emerged as a result of serious attention to women in the ancient world. Besides the fundamental embarassment of the role women were given in biblical scholarship at the time of Jeremias’s work, there are at least two items that need to be placed on the table. First, Ilan has been able to dig out more evidence for the participation of Jewish women in the “religious life” than Jeremias, and her study of this material will shape future studies. Jeremias looked over too much here; further, he shaped what he saw in light of his overall negative depiction of Jewish women in Jewish society. Second, methodologically, Jeremias’s work is famously eclectic in its approach to evidence, though in this appendix he is less prone to cite the Amoraim and later midrashic texts. However, Ilan’s work is methodologically admirable: she stratifies the evidence – from Ben Sira, the Maccabean writings, and Josephus, to the tannaim where she neatly separates the tannaim from the amoraim as well as halakhah from the aggadic traditions. For me, it was disappointing that the substantive conclusions changed no more than it did after such methodological rigor. (Perhaps my surprise emerges from Gospel criticism where slight tradition-critical differences can lead to either a Dom Crossan or to a Marc Borg or to an EP Sanders or to an NT Wright!) Some might criticize Ilan maximalist approach for not assessing the historical veracity of each tannaitic tradition but I think much of the evidence she cites would endure most tests.

If methodologically there has been a significant shift in our studies of women in the ancient world, no doubt in the wake of Jacob Neusner’s critical works, apologetically and functionally the differences since the time of Jeremias are dramatic. Jeremias concludes his appendix with three major functional conclusions: first, that women following Jesus was an unprecedented action in Judaism; second, that Jesus made women equal to men in Jewish society; and third, that Jesus’ view of divorce was “entirely new.” And precisely here is where Amy-Jill Levine, and those who preceded her study, has the eagle’s nest in her hands: description is often not as important as use of that description. Jeremias uses the negative depiction of women to lionize Jesus as a hero of emancipation. I am not sure attachment to a Jewish teacher for a woman was unprecedented; I am less sure that Jesus made men and women equal; and it is simply wrong to say that Jesus’ view of divorce was “entirely new”; those connected with the Dead Sea Scrolls believed nearly the same thing. A similar point from a different angle: if we do discover that Jesus differed from the tannaim does that indicate (1) that Jesus was unlike Judaism or (2) like Jews from the lower classes? Without taking us too far afield, it is not inappropriate to wonder if Jesus’ so-called strict statement about divorce, now embedded in Q 16:18, is really nothing more than a critique of the Herodians and upper-class Jews who could afford divorce. Both Ilan and Jeremias recognized that divorce was expensive; the poor in many situations could not afford it; thus, perhaps the strict logion of Jesus was as much social critique as it was halakhah. And I am not denying the latter.

In brief, then, I am saying this: Jesus distinguished himself, as Bruce Chilton has recently argued, within Judaism not over against Judaism. Consequently, we don’t need to lionize Jesus at the expense of his Judaism for it was as a Jew that Jesus did what he did; his differences from other forms of Judaism were precisely that: differences within Judaism not departures from Judaism. And here is perhaps the telling point: no one in the Jesus traditions questioned women following Jesus, no one said the women who came into contact with Jesus should be back home, and no one said menstruants ought to be bottled up in female quarters. Criticisms of Jesus were aplenty; most of them had to do with his associations, but so far as I know no one criticized Jesus for permitting women to listen to him, for traveling with him, and for approaching him for healing. Put simply, Jesus’ associations with women were entirely within the spectrum of Judaism. If Jeremias and Ilan are basically accurate in their depiction of Jewish woman, their use of that material are at opposite ends of the spectrum.

And at Ilan’s end of the spectrum we find all the essays collected in TE. To these we now turn.

2.0 Jesus and Women Re-Viewed in View

It would be unfair to each author or tedious to my audience to summarize and evaluate each essay; instead, I want to corner my remarks to general, methodological, and substantive points.

First, the essays are methodologically diverse, though the use of the social sciences comes to the fore: this can be seen in the essays by Sean Freyne, Marianne Sawicki, and Carmen Bernabé Ubieta. This diversity, however, does not lead astray from a general conclusion of a feminist orientation: women were more significant in Jewish society than the texts let on. Thus, a leitmotif is that if methodological rigor is applied we can find more about women than we previously knew. I think here of Sawicki’s claim that Susannah and Joanna, women mentioned in Luke 8:1-3 as followers of Jesus, were business partners who had previously hired Jesus as an exorcist for visitors to the royal administration in Tiberias. Elaine Wainwright’s essay, even if it moves rather illogically from women as healers to women as healed, nonetheless uncovers details about the important social function women played in ancient Greece and Palestine as healers and so were attracted to Jesus the healer.

Second, claims about the importance of women in the early Christian movement are trumpeted and their clarion call needs to be heard even louder. Tal Ilan begins these notes with a subtle contention that it was the women who “conjured up” the notion of Jesus’ resurrection and so at the very foundation of the Christian movement that emerges from the Jesus movement is the witness of women. Marianne Sawicki chimes in at the same note: women were the key witnesses, and those who were moving information from one side to the other, in the early Christian belief about resurrection. If these women witnesses played such a crucial role, I would like to add a note of my own. For nearly fifteen years I have taught in my classes the following scenario: Joseph probably died when Jesus was young; Jesus was deeply influenced by the piety of his mother, and I take the Magnificat as a credible, even if constructed much later, testimony of what he would have learned from his mother Mary; and, if these two be correct, then some of the fundamental motifs of Jesus’ vision for Israel were shaped by his mother: social reversal, the covenant faithfulness of Israel’s God, and the ever-continuing mercy of God on the poor. One ought not to criticize a book for what it does not do, but I would have liked something about Mary in a book that seeks to look at Jesus and women. I think her influence on Jesus has been deeply underappreciated. Protestants at least have a feeble alibi.

Third, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of listening to the sharp if at times rapier-like in its points of Amy-Jill Levine’s critique of Christian scholarship, both feminist and otherwise, for its unintentional but nonetheless real polemical statements and overall approaches to the Jesus traditions. She has amassed a virtual list of unintentional conclusions and approaches to women in the Jesus traditions that result in anti-Semitism or anti-Judaism. I quote one thunderous part of a paragraph: “The suggestion that Jesus was the only Jewish man to treat women with compassion is at best ahistorical-apologetic; the connection between ‘friend of women’ and ‘friend of sinners’ is at best overdrawn. The implication that the Jewish system tortured women is slanderous” (pp. 334-335). Jesus was a wonderful man; Jesus permitted women to follow him; Jesus seemed to permit women to eat with him and his followers in the evening; Jesus healed women. These are nice things Jesus did. But these actions don’t make Jesus non-Jewish and they don’t suggest at all that Jesus was breaking boundaries in Judaism. Perhaps he got some Jewish males all cranky about it but the record of such doesn’t survive. In short, Levine reminds that we don’t need to lionize Jesus by demonizing Judaism. Jesus stands on his own as a son of Abraham; he doesn’t stand as a solitary, emancipating man. We are accurate in pointing out that Jesus differed from the Pharisees and probably from the Sadducees, perhaps even with the Essenes, but that doesn’t push Jesus over the edge of Judaism. It would be fair to say that most Jews differed with these groups! Differing makes Jesus a Jew among other Jews, and maybe even in the majority. Furthermore, and I merely echo what has been said before: that Jesus differs from the rabbis does not always say that much. I find this tendency in both Jeremias and Witherington. I am not sure either intends it but both at times suggests that in differing with the rabbis Jesus is taking a new stand over against Judaism.

More could be said, in fact. In particular, what Levine’s article makes me acutely aware of is this: we, whether we are Christian or Jewish, don’t need to find in Jesus the fountainhead of all of our causes. Jesus did treat women kindly; but he didn’t call them to be apostles; he didn’t send them out into the Galilean villages to announce the arrival of the kingdom; and he doesn’t appear to have empowered any women to heal though they were, if the studies of Ilan, Sawicki, and Wainwright are accurate, part and parcel of the Jewish social system of healing. Jesus falls short of what our sensitivities want; historians say this; apologists claim too much for Jesus in this regard.

Fourth, I would like to point to what I think is a noticeable gap in TE. Many would contend that for Jesus’ table fellowship was a central medium of his mission, especially in its inclusionary nature, and in the practice he embedded his social vision for Israel. One doesn’t have to agree with all the particulars that have been raised in these discussions to think that table fellowship was important for Jesus. A question not asked in TE was this: “Did Jesus permit women to dine with his male followers? Was the table truly open commensality – for one and for all? And what was the context for Jesus’ inclusion of women at meals?” Last year I asked Kathleen Corley about this and have since read her very nice study of women and meals in the Synoptic tradition: her evidence for women dining with males is not overwhelming. The archaeological evidence from Machaerus reveals two dining rooms, one for men and one for women (Corley, 69); the evidence from Philo, as she says, reflects the customs of upper class aristocratic women in the Diaspora as they attended banquets. Ben Sira 9:9, however, sounds an important note: “Never dine with another man’s wife, or revel with her at wine; or your heart may turn aside to her, and in blood (Gk: ‘by your spirit’) you may be plunged into destruction” (9:9). This suggests that women and men did dine together; but almost certainly it reflects upper class customs and it probably reflects banquets rather than common meals. The evidence, in other words, is hardly compelling though the Jesus traditions are a little clearer in this regard.

There are two facts I would like to lay before you and then suggest a possible way of approaching that evidence: first, there is evidence that Jesus and his followers dined with women. The entire Mediterranean had opinions about the participation of women in banquets; Corley argues that Jewish women would have accompanied their husbands to banquets and that they would have participated in the Seder. Thus, we are led to think of meal participation with Jesus as possible, especially if his meals took on a celebratory nature. What about common meals, the kind Jesus would have enjoyed in the cool of the day? What is the evidence? I think here of Luke 7:36-50 (when Jesus was anointed by a sinful woman); 10:38-42 (Jesus dining with Mary and Martha, though we are unaware that others were present); Matthew 11:19 (only if ‘sinners’ indicates sinful women); and the parabolic Matthew 25:1-13 (the ten virgins, only five of whom entered the banquet). The last can be ignored since it reflects the customs of an unusual meal, a marriage banquet; the dinner with Mary and Martha shows at least that Jesus ate with women – and this is seen in an interpretation that favors hospitality (JB Green), contemplation over distracted service (traditional), or in egalitarian ministry (Schüssler Fiorenza); the evidence is not clear enough when it comes to the term ‘sinner’ for an implied ‘prostitute’ so I would dismiss Matthew 11:19; and clearly Luke 7:36-50 implies the presence of women at a meal with Jesus. If the first fact is that Jesus ate with women and included them in his meal, the second is this: no one seemed to be upset that Jesus did this. In other words, we don’t have evidence that Jesus was criticized for eating with women per se; for permitting a ‘sinful woman’ to anoint him, yes. But what ought to be noted is that this meal took place at a Pharisee’s home and that the woman was permitted to enter; the eruption occurred only when she decided to anoint Jesus (Luke 7:36-50). Let us assert here that it is hard to imagine a Pharisee permitting a ‘sinful woman’ to enter his home; if we then contend that the scene is historically unrealistic, we can at least contend that at the literary level no one thought it improper for a ‘sinful woman’ to enter a Pharisees house – and I, for one, am not so sure there is all that much difference. I consider it possible that a Pharisee somehow agreed to let the ‘Jesus people’ have a night at his house and that meant letting all them join in, including ‘sinful women.’

Now if we, as is customary, compare Jesus to the rabbis, his practice looks innovative and shocking and paradigmatic and emancipating. Christian scholarship has made much of this comparison. Rabbinic evidence indicates that a woman’s role in meals was to serve, not to eat with and dine alongside and recline next to the men – and not to join in on the theological discussion. But this functional use of rabbinic evidence precisely illustrates where we have come since Jeremias: this approach is polemical, unhistorical, and results in an unfair representation both of Judaism and Jesus. The volume we are examining in this session illustrates the benefits of this methodological shift. And I have a few pieces of evidence that just may shift the historical context of Jesus’ meal with women away from the rabbinic toward a more believable and geographically-proximate source. I am suggesting that women ate with Jesus on the model of the Roman meals that were transferred from Rome to Galilee through the administration at Sepphoris. While we don’t have to think of Petronius’ famous meal at Trimalchio’s home when we think of Roman meals, such a party description places before our eyes some realistic details we might otherwise not know, even if it also reveals details that lead to the debaucheries of one like the Marquis de Sade.

Here is a source of evidence we might consider; I have not seen him cited in any of the literature on this question. Valerius Maximus, in his Facta et Dicta Memorabilia, says this: “Women used to dine seated with their reclining menfolk” and he then adds, “a form of austerity which our age [the time of Jesus] is more careful to retain on the Capitol than in its houses” and then adds laconically “no doubt because it is more important to the commonwealth that discipline be maintained for goddesses than for women!” (2.1.2). The implication is that household meals involved less hierarchy. Later Valerius Maximus says that the Roman youth would inquire who was eating at a meal so that they would not recline prior to the arrival of their seniors; and when the meal was done the seniors were permitted to leave first; and their talk was dignified by the status of those with whom they dined (2.1.9; cf. 2.1.10 on elders role in providing an example for the youth). This concern echoes the humorous parable of Jesus about rank at meals (Luke 14:7-11). Again, he says the “men of old” took their meals in the open air and ate simple meals (2.5.5). Meals, according Valerius Maximus, became a medium of reconciliation (4.2.3) and the example of Cicero and Crassus, as told by Plutarch (Cicero 26.1); meals were as well as a place of powerful criticisms (Val.Max., Facta 5.1.ext. 2b) as well as the setting for some famous ‘speeches’, as David Aune has demonstrated. Perhaps some of Jesus’ strongest words were mediated by those who heard him in the quiet symposium after a meal. Dennis Smith, for instance, has argued that the posture of ‘reclining’, which is Jesus’ when mentioned, accords with the Greco-Roman customs.

Perhaps some will want to argue with this use of Roman and Greek evidence; or that there is counterevidence that indicates women were not part of the common meal (but cf. also Corley, “Women,” p. 493 n. 36); or that Valerius Maximus is not a good source. Without disrespecting such views, the recent studies that Jesus worked in Sepphoris, or at least knew what was going on there, have much in their favor; and that at Sepphoris Jesus would have encountered a blend of Roman and Greek culture first-hand through the Herodian presence; and that surely the Roman customs of meals were actually present in Sepphoris. Since Jesus’ parables show an occasional hint of knowledge of such practices, as can be seen in the Parable of Ranking Guests (Luke 14:7-11), I think it can be suggested that Jesus may well have learned the value of the presence of women at meals from this Roman presence in Galilee. He probably also knew about the kind of behavior described in the meal of Herod Antipas and Herodias (Mark 6:17-29). The liberal spirit of these meals gave him courage to include women in his meals, though without the dancing girl! – and perhaps he needed little courage for the Galilean Jews before him had already been permitting women to join in meals with male guests. Rabbinic evidence might lead some to think of Jesus’ innovation here; a broader sweep of evidence, not to mention common sense, leads to Jesus doing what came natural for any Jew of first century Galilee. In fact, maybe the practice was established in Judaism prior to the hellenic spirit. I know more work needs to be done. Kathleen Corley, in fact, thinks the meal practices of Jesus and the early Christian movement, with respect to the role women played, were indistinguishable from the surrounding contexts, Greek, Roman, and Jewish. She says they were each marked by “convivial inclusivity” (Private Women, p. 185).

This sort of conclusion is represented in the essays of TE. Here we find essays that are not restricted by rabbinic categories, not limited to Jewish evidence, and not fenced in by old-fashioned traditional conclusions. The essays are challenging, always refreshing, and at times daring. Sean Freyne said something in his essay that we need to remind ourself of: “It is noteworthy, though perhaps predictable, that the role of women in the Jesus movement has received relatively little attention in recent writing, despite the remarkable resurgence of historical Jesus studies in the past decade or so” (p. 162). Anyone who looks at recent books that deal with the life of Jesus will notice that he is right. Should we name them, or should we all ask our role in this neglect? I am suggesting that it is the term “inclusion” that tells the real story. Women are, by using the term ‘inclusion’, seen in functional terms: they are used as evidence that Jesus was a liberator and that means they are assigned to the sections of books where you find other Jewish undesireables as learned from rabbinic categories. How Mary influenced Jesus is a silent chapter; John the Baptist usually gets plenty of attention. Which is more determinative for Jesus? And how women shaped the Jesus movement a mute section; but the apostles and the early Christian preachers find a significant presence. Kitzberger’s collected essays are a first step toward the recovery of women in the Jesus movement.

2013-06-15T06:33:37-05:00

Last updated on: June 15, 2013 at 6:33 am   By

Rand Paul:

Making the case against excessive American engagement overseas, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) reminded social conservatives Thursday that Jesus was anti-war.

“I can recall no utterance of Jesus in favor of war or any acts of aggression,” Paul said at a kickoff luncheon for the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference. “In fact, his message to his disciples was one of non-resistance.”…

Paul stressed that America needs a strong military but that it should be used sparingly.

“I believe individuals and countries can and should defend themselves, but I simply can’t imagine Jesus at the head of any army of soldiers and I think as Christians we need to be wary of the doctrine of preemptive war,” he said. “We must and should stand with our fellow Christians in the Middle East and around the world, but that does not necessarily mean war and it certainly does not mean arming sides in every conflict.”…

The libertarian also warned that the John McCain-led push to send aid to Syrian rebels is “misguided” and will probably do more harm than good. [He did not mention the Arizona senator by name.]

“Before the Arab Spring, Christianity flourished in small outposts, like the Coptic Christians in Egypt,” he said. “I had hoped that the Arab Spring would bring freedom to long-oppressed people throughout the Middle East, but I fear the Arab Spring is becoming an Arab winter.

The speech is the latest effort by Paul to package his leeriness of U.S. intervention overseas in a way that can appeal to as many conservatives as possible.

Some of the loudest applause for Paul came when he said Egypt should get no money from the United States until the new government recognizes Israel’s right to exist.

“You are being taxed to send money to countries that are not only intolerant of Christians but openly hostile,” he said.

 

2013-06-17T06:02:03-05:00

Last updated on: June 17, 2013 at 6:02 am   By

To go along with my course at Northern on Women and Ministry, which begins this morning, I want to pull out a week long series on women in the world of Jesus. Much is said about “women in the Jewish world” and much of it uninformed. This entire series is rooted in Tal Ilan’s important book, Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine (Hendrickson, 1996) and her second book, Integrating Women into Second Temple History (Hendrickson, 2001). There is no attempt to be complete and I would like to add all the details from Lynn Cohick’s fine book Women in the World of the Earliest Christians but I did not have time … and there is only a short bibliography at the end of this post. Alongside Ilan’s survey of the facts, comments will be occasionally made.

What I hope from this series is to provide each of us with a basic “state of the art” on what we know about women at the time of Jesus and the early churches, and at the same time, a counter to some of the stuff that is being said about women at that time.

In today’s post, I will look at two questions: how do we look at the evidence about women that has survived? And, what have the scholars been saying about Jewish women at the time of Jesus? Answers to both of these questions have a profound impact on what Christians say today about women and ministry.

How do we approach the evidence from the ancient world?

First, we need to respect the diversity of Judaism for it was a heterogeneous society and in each sector different understandings of women emerged. We cannot pretend that what one group thought or practiced another group also thought or practiced. Here are some variations to keep in mind: Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, poor vs. aristocrats, Jesus movement, am ha-aretz (common people unobservant of Pharisaic laws). In addition, the Diaspora (those living outside the Land of Israel) evidence about women reveals another set of variations.

Second, we need to be aware of our sources: most of the evidence that survives about women derives from the upper class and frequently expresses upper class, Pharisaic ideals rather than common person realities. There are no videotapes of life for women, nor are there records that survive about common women’s perceptions of their treatment. What we have is stuff that comes to us from a variety of sources, much of it from upper class males.

Third, there are various kinds of evidence. Many of the statements about women are in halakhic statements (legal statements by rabbis but which, though stated has binding, are not necessarily a reflection of reality) and in haggadic accounts (stories illustrative of halakhic statements but which frequently form tension with other halakhic material). The haggadic material frequently divulges a more realistic portrait of women. What this means is this: if you find a legal ruling that assumes something about women (that men were not to talk with women in public), you cannot just assume that everyone observed that ruling. In fact, it is highly likely that this was not the case and that such rulings were often given to counter behavior that was not liked.

Fourth, we need to remind ourselves of this: all texts reflect their context and the ideas of the author; there is no necessary correspondence between the text and reality. This could be expanded in many ways, and I’m not suggesting a neo-Marxist distrust of all powerful statements, but I do want us to be aware that what we read is not necessarily what was going on.

Fifth, we have a special problem when it comes to rabbinic literature. Regardless of how much information can be found germane to this topic, rabbinic literature shaped by two orientations that distort the realities of first century Galilean Jewish life: (1) the evidence pertains to the upper class or at least the “rabbinic followers” and (2) the evidence that survives mostly does so because it was important to legal concerns of the rabbis. Hence, while incidental details emerge of value, the concerns are always legal. This legal emphasis must not be equated with the emphases of real social life.

What has been said about women at the time of Jesus?

First, some Jewish scholars have debated whether the Bible (Christian Old Testament) or the rabbinic sources (e.g., Mishnah, Tosefta, Talmuds, and midrashic writings) is more liberating.

Second, some Christian scholars have consistently exploited the Jewish sources as a foil to Jesus and the NT: the Jewish sources are oppressive but the Christian ones are (more) liberating. Much of the claims made here are tendentious and unhistorical. It is simply untrue that Jewish men were mean-spirited and that Jesus and the early Christians set women free.

Third, feminist scholars tend to read the ancient sources, both Jewish and Christian, with a hermeneutic of suspicion: the sources were written by men and support the power of men; the sources depict women as passive and receptive. Christian feminists align themselves consistently with the second view but have had a different agenda. The most distinctive and radical Christian feminist voices are Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza (In Memory of Her) and Bernadette Brooten (Women Leaders in Ancient Synagogues).

Some Jewish feminists have argued that Christian feminists are anti-Semitic or anti-Judaism (see esp. Levine, “Lilies of the Field” [“The suggestion that Jesus was the only Jewish man to treat women with compassion is at best ahistorical-apologetic; the connection between ‘friend of women’ and ‘friend of sinners’ is at best overdrawn. The implication that the Jewish system tortured women is slanderous” (334). And: “There is no need to highlight a negative Judaism. Jesus can remain the liberationist Christian feminists want without being removed from his Jewish context” (351, italics added). See also Rosenblatt, 148-150.

Fourth, historical Jesus scholars, mostly Christian, have argued consistently that Jesus liberated the Jewish woman from oppressive Jewish laws. The most influential voice of the previous generation was Joachim Jeremias (Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus, 232-250; Ilan’s book is an update of Jeremias’ famous chapter).

Daughters: here is a basic categorizing of the evidence that survives.

First, the birth of a daughter: some (no doubt) males find the birth of daughters to be a disappointment because they do not carry on the line of the father ( Ben Sira 22:3; Genesis Rabbah 45.2). The command to “be fruitful and multiply” can be thwarted.

Second, what about relations between father and daughter? For many Jewish fathers, daughters were a concern lest they become impregnated before marriage (Ben Sira 42:9-11) but many Jewish sources in haggadic material reveal affection between father and daughter (e.g., Song of Songs Rabbah 1.9.5; 3.7.1; 3.8.2; 6.12).

Third, on naming a daughter: daughters were named at birth after parents, grandparents, relatives, and great Jewish leaders. The most popular names are Salome, Shelamzion, and Miriamme/Maria (these three names account for 46.5% of known names in Palestine); they may reveal idealization of the Hasmoneans. Daughters were identified by the father: “Miriam the daughter of X.”

Marriage: what do we learn about marriage in the ancient Jewish sources?

First, Jewish males were to marry but marriage was not idealized; it brought stability to a young man’s life (Ben Sira 36:30) and one rabbi threatened eternal separation from Heaven for not marrying (bPesahim 113b). R. Yose said since creation, “God sits and makes matches, assigning this man to that woman and this woman to that man” (Genesis Rabbah 68.4). [John’s and Jesus’ celibacy were, therefore, not extraordinary.]

Second, rooted in Proverbs 31, there is a regular praise of the Virtuous Wife : the idealized wife was obedient and beautiful. Ben Sira believed in four virtues for a wife: intelligence (25:8; 40:23), silence (26:16-17), wisdom (26:26), and beauty (26:13-18; 36:27).

Third, there are some reflections on what it means to be a Bad Wife: Ben Sira mentions nagging (25:20; 26:31), drunkenness (19:2), unfaithfulness (26:11-14). The rabbis said: “Who is deemed a scolding wife? Whosoever speaks inside her own house so that her neighbors can hear her voice” (mKetubot 7:6). The rabbis also said: “It is a duty (a mitzvah) to divorce a bad wife” (bEruvin 41b).

Fourth, unbeknownst to Dan Brown, there is evidence for valuing singleness: the more hasidic fringes of Judaism accepted and even idealized asceticism and celibacy (Essenes: acc. to Josephus, Ant. 18:21; War 2:120; cf. Matthew 19:10-12). Some men chose this as an option but the evidence for women choosing this option is negligible. (Maybe it is because they didn’t get to write the texts that survived!)

Fifth, at what age did marriage occur? The general rabbinic halakhah is that girls were married at 12 (cf. bSanhedrin 76a; mNiddah 5:6-8; bNiddah 45a says a daughter can be given in marriage at 3 years and one day!) in order to assure virginity. Boys were frequently just as young (Ben Sira 7;23; Lamentations Rabbah 1.2). However, there is evidence of later marriages as well. [How old was Mary? Probably she was a teenager.]
Sixth, social connection was integral to many marriages: marriage, mostly for the upper classes, was all about social status. So, it matters what your “class” was. [When Jewish Christians began to mix with Gentile Christians, this “status” element came to the fore.]

There are ten classes in Judaism according to mQiddushin 4:1: priests, levites, Israelites, impaired priests, converts, freed slaves, mamzers (bastards), netins (descendants of Gibeonites; cf. Josh. 9:27) shetukis (silenced ones), asufis (foundlings). [Gentile believers in Jesus were probably classes as “converts” by many — hence Acts 15’s ruling about expected levels of obedience.]

Later the rabbis graded classes more academically: daughter of a scholar, daughter of a great man, daughter of the synagogue leaders, daughter of a charity treasurer, daughter of an elementary school teacher (bPesahim 49b). Laws of incest applied (Lev. 18:6-18; cousins, uncles and aunts were permissible marriage partners in certain cases – tQiddushin 1:4 says “a man should not marry a woman until his sister’s daughter has reached maturity”).

Seventh, how did one choose a husband: the halakhah (oral law) ruled that parents chose marriage partners and love was the result of wise choices by the parents. But reality permitted greater flexibility: widows and divorcees found their own husbands and among the poorer classes there was even greater freedom to find a partner. The daughter could repudiate a husband if the father died before she reached maturity and had already chosen a husband for her.

Eighth, what about polygamy? Two legal practices prove that polygamy existed. The practice of yibbum (levirate marriage: when a husband died the husband’s brother was to take in the widow) and halitzah (the legal renunciation of yibbum). However, Judaism frowned upon polygamy as can be seen in the Dead Sea Sect (11QTemple 57:17-18) and the later rabbis who idealized monogamy. But, polygamy was often an economic issue: the poor could not afford more than one wife.

Ninth, here are the basics of the Marriage Process:
It begins with a legal betrothal (Qiddushin): nominal fee; legal arrangement.
There was an official marriage contract (Ketubbah): monetary arrangement in the event of death or divorce that ensured the maintenance of the woman. Divorce was expensive; customs varied (sometimes the woman sometimes the man had control of the funds).
Third, there was a marriage ceremony: the bride was taken ceremonially to the house of the groom.

Bibliography and Abbreviations
All Jewish sources can be found in the library in English translation; for rabbinic sources, I recommend the translations of Jacob Neusner whenever available. The easiest source to use is the Babylonian Talmud.
m is for Mishnah, followed by the tractate.
t is for Tosefta, followed by tractate.
b is for Babylonian Talmud, followed by the tractate.
y is for Yerushalmi Talmud, followed by tractate.
Other sources include the rabbinic midrash, OT Apocrypha, OT Pseudepigrapha, Jewish historians (like Josephus), and the Dead Sea Scrolls; each be found in the library in translation.
Rachel Biale, Women and Jewish Law: The Essential Texts, Their History, & Their Relevance for Today (New York: Schocken, 1995).
S.J.D. Cohen, “Menstruants and the Sacred in Judaism and Christianity,” in Women’s History and Ancient History (ed. S.B. Pomeroy; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 271-299.
S. Freyne, “Jesus the Wine-drinker: A Friend of Women,” ,” in Kitzberger, Transformative Encounters, pp. 162-180.
T. Ilan, “The Attraction of Aristocratic Jewish Women to Pharisaism,” Harvard Theological Review 88 (1995) 1-33.
T. Ilan, “In the Footsteps of Jesus: Jewish Women in a Jewish Movement,” in Kitzberger, Transformative Encounters, pp. 115-136.
T. Ilan, Jewish Women in Greco-Roman Palestine (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1996 [=1995; based on a Ph.D. dissertation at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in the late 1980s]).
J. Jeremias, Jerusalem in the Time of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1969).
Ingrid Rosa Kitzberger, editor, Transformative Encounters: Jesus and Women Re-Viewed (Biblical Interpretation Series 43; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000). [A collection of essays by women about Jesus and women; the book is divided into literary, historical, and actualization essays.]
Amy-Jill Levine, “Lilies of the Field and Wandering Jews: Biblical Scholarship, Women’s Roles, and Social Location,” ,” in Kitzberger, Transformative Encounters, pp. 329-352.
S. McKnight, A Light Among the Gentiles (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1991).
S. McKnight, “A Parting within the Way: Jesus and James on Israel and Purity,” in B. Chilton, C.A. Evans, James the Just and Christian Origins (SupplNovTest XCVIII; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1999) 83-129.
Gerbern S. Oegema, “Portrayals of Women in 1 and 2 Maccabees,” in I.R. Kitzberger, Transformative Enounters, 245-264.
Marie-Eloise Rosenblatt, “Gender, Ethnicity, and Legal Considerations in the Haemorrhaging Woman’s Story: Mark 5:25-34,” ,” in Kitzberger, Transformative Encounters, pp. 137-161.
Marianne Sawicki, “Magdalenes and Tiberiennes: City Women in the Entourage of Jesus,” ,” in Kitzberger, Transformative Encounters, pp. 181-202.
D.M. Scholer, “Women,” in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels, 880-887.
Carmen Bernabé Ubieta, “Mary Magdalene and the Seven Demons in Social-scientific Perspective,” ,” in Kitzberger, Transformative Encounters, pp. 203-223.
Elaine M. Wainright, “ ‘Your Faith Has Made You Well.’ Jesus, Women, and Healing in the Gospel of Matthew,” ,” in Kitzberger, Transformative Encounters, pp. 224-244.
B. Witherington III, Women in the Ministry of Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

2013-05-07T06:22:58-05:00

Last updated on: May 7, 2013 at 6:22 am   By

Isaiah 7:14 announces that a “young woman” will give birth to a child, a promise that God will be faithful and there will be a next generation. Fair enough. Matthew 1:23 says a “virgin will give birth to a child” and while this might suggest to some readers that God remains faithful, there’s some far more significant in that one word difference. Matthew has just told us that Mary conceived without Joseph and that the child was of the Holy Spirit and this leads Matthew back to Isaiah 7:14 but why did he translate a “virgin” instead of a “young woman”?

Therein lies a far deeper story. In Warren Carter’s exceptional Seven Events that Shaped the New Testament World is an introduction to the Greek translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, and that Greek translation is called The Septuagint (the accent is on “Sep” so say SEPtuagint not SepTUagint). The Septuagint is usually abbreviated as LXX (or 70, which is a distracting story since the oldest story of the translation was that it came from 72 translators, six from each tribe).

What does the use of a translation for the early Christians say to you about the Bible? 

The original story, now found in The Letter of Aristeas, of the translation was around 25o BCE, when Eleazar the high priest sent 72 translators down to Alexandria so there would be a copy of the Pentateuch in the library and there are some important Ptolemy names, like Ptolemy I and II and Demetrios, but the facts in Aristeas are a bit garbled and don’t matter in this context. The big issue is that the LXX translation happened and the story is legendary and the translation was a process with great significance for the earliest Christians.

First, Aristeas shows that the Bible could be translated into the language of the powerful in a way that showed the cultural significance of Jews, and it could at the same time show that Jews could sustain their distinctiveness. They had their Bible, which sealed their identity, but they had a respectable translation in the language of those outside Israel. So diaspora Jews had a  Bible the way each of us — English speakers, Danish speakers, German speakers, Swedish speakers, I could go on but won’t — have the Bible in our own language.

Second, the authors of the New Testament by and large used The Septuagint and not the Hebrew Bible. There are a number of elements at work here, with variety in each instance, but it shows the earliest Christians were Greek-readers and wanted to communicate the New Testament message in one of the languages of the Roman Empire.

Third, it gets interesting. The earliest Christians read the Bible messianically, or in the words of Warren Carter, with their “Jesus-glasses on.” That is, they saw Jesus in the Old Testament where others had not seen him or a Messiah. It gets even more interesting. Sometimes, as in the example above from Matthew 1:23, they saw Jesus in the Old Testament on the basis of a Greek translational preference instead of the original Hebrew. Thus, the LXX of Isa 7:14 has “virgin” and not simply “young woman.” To be sure, “young woman” could be a virgin but almost certainly was not in Isaiah. So, Matthew finds Jesus in the translation of the Hebrew into Greek.

I had a student in my office one time who made quite the deal out of “brothers and sisters” and since the Bible said “sisters” were teachers that meant anyone who denied women were teachers was denying the Bible. The issue was that “and sisters” was an explicitation of the Greek text in a more inclusive rendering and the original Greek had only “brothers.” I agreed that “brothers” was inclusive so this wasn’t so much a difference but an instance of seeing more in one’s own translation than was present in the original, which is what Matthew sees in the LXX of Isa 7:14.

Fourth, the language of the LXX became the language of Christian “theologizing” about what God did in Jesus.

2013-04-26T07:07:05-05:00

Last updated on: April 26, 2013 at 7:07 am   By

Chicago’s flooding… this might be the original MacDonad’s, no?

Speaking of Chicago, this from my student and friend, Phil Jackson, at Lawndale Community Church: “If you have never held a mother, father, or crying child who has had to bury a family member because of gun violence, you might not understand the need to make the tough changes. If you have never seen the eyes of a student looking to you for hope as life seeps from their body or sat with a mother asking God why her child is gone — why her child had to die — I doubt you will understand the pain and the effect of what guns are doing on the streets of Chicago. If you have never had these experiences, you might not understand my sense of urgency when I say that I want to see the end of cheap and plentiful guns in my neighborhood. There is a passage in Luke 7:11-16  in which Jesus stops a funeral and heals a child from death, brings him back to life, and gives him back to his mother. How I dream of that moment. But, I also believe I can work to stop the funerals in the first place and bring our young men and women back to Christ, back to their families, and back to their communities. This means working for personal transformation of young people’s lives. But it also means looking at the structures we live in and asking how they can change to make our streets a safer place to grow up.”

Karen on John Paulk: “After John’s apology was made public this week I had a discussion with a clinician who sees first-hand the damage inflicted on the LGBT community: I live in Colorado Springs and in my therapy practice I have worked with a number of LGBTQ clients who underwent the “reparative therapy” John and Focus so ardently supported. I am glad John is coming to peace with this sexual orientation and mourn the pain he has endured over all these years. I am praying for the day when Christianity can move past demonizing LGBTQ people and their relationships. The pain and anguish I have witnessed in my therapy room is indescribable, and I firmly believe God weeps over how “his people” treat gays and lesbians. Thankfully, God hasn’t abandoned me over the years. He’s put me in relationships that have forced me to reconsider my preconceived and wrong-headed notions about the LGBT community.” Step one, love. Step two, friendship. Step three, let God.

TM Luhrmann and how church helps people to be more healthy: “ONE of the most striking scientific discoveries about religion in recent years is that going to church weekly is good for you. Religious attendance — at least, religiosity — boosts the immune system and decreases blood pressure. It may add as much as two to three years to your life. The reason for this is not entirely clear.”

Kate Figes, on the impact on children of an affair and divorce: “‘The children are too young to understand what’s happening,’ they reason. ‘In any case, it doesn’t concern them. And children are resilient.’ All of the evidence points to the contrary. People don’t just betray their partners when they shatter family life with a serious affair — the sad truth is that their children grow up believing their parents have been unfaithful to them, too. There is substantial research on the short and long-term effects of divorce if it isn’t handled well.  For children, these include low self-esteem, a sense of being abandoned, poor performance at school, anti-social behaviour and the heartbreak of simply missing the absent parent. Separations provoked by an affair tend to be the most acrimonious. Each parent shoves the blame for the split on to the other, sometimes forcing the children to take sides by supporting his or her version of events. By tearing a child’s loyalty in two, parents can inflict profound damage. To make matters worse, research has shown that around half of all fathers lose contact with their offspring within two years of the separation.”

Mary DeMuth: “When a man brags about his wife’s looks, body, or smoking hot prowess, we may consider his remarks loving compliments from a husband to his better half, but when I hear a man say those things, I bristle. Especially if he’s a pastor, a man apportioned by God to shepherd not only the men in their congregations, but the women too. Wounded women. Tired women. Abused women. Women with so many “godly” expectations thrown at them that they’ll either break under the weight or bootstrap themselves, try-try-trying harder, experiencing burnout, and never quite living up to anyone’s expectations.” And then Zach Hoag digs in from the male side: “It resonated because, as I’ve mentioned before on my blog, I was once a part of the segment of evangelicalism that fosters this kind of attitude — the kind that makes leaders go on and on about their wives’ hotness as if it’s some kind of requisite modern virtue. And, full disclosure, I bought into the smokin’ hot talk for a while, if only to be one of the guys, part of the team. Of course, underlying all that rhetoric is a strong complementarian view of gender roles in the church and home, where men are the heads and women submit, where men are the shepherds and women … submit, where men need lots of sex because that’s how God created them and women … submit. You get the idea.”

Prayer and the Nones: “Prayer, it seems, can function as a marker of religious and spiritual uncertainty and possibility even for those who see themselves as largely unconnected to the institutional traditions that have shaped its theological meanings and lived practice since ancient times. It has both a personal and a cultural capaciousness that allows it a contemporary significance that has been mostly drained from other typical measures of “religiosity”—attending worship, studying scripture, even believing in God. For people put off by the religious and political rancor they see in organized religions, or who are repelled by financial and sexual scandals across religious groups, prayer is an experiential reminder that there might be “something else out there,” something “more than just me.” Prayer may also be a lingering reminder to churches and other religious institutions of the many other ways religion has been and can be organized for meaningful common and personal practice—an Easter lesson, perhaps.”

Top 200 jobs, and at the top? Actuary! “Pete Rossi can count on one hand the number of weeks out of the year that he works more than 50 hours. But the rest of the year, his job as an actuary with the Department of Defense, provides a good living with a minimum of stress. That partly explains why actuaries have the best job in the United States, according to a new survey by CareerCast.com that will be released Tuesday. Biomedical engineer was No. 2 and software engineer, the top job of 2012, came in at No.3. Careers that ranked the lowest included enlisted military personnel, lumberjack and newspaper reporter. (Click here to see the full ranking of all 200 jobs.)”

Four lies about introverts by Amie Patrick.

The Onion: “The English Department administration at Ohio State is taking a hard look at Rothberg’s performance in the wake of Berner’s poor evaluation. “Students and the enormous revenue they bring in to our institution are a more valued commodity to us than faculty,” Dean James Hewitt said. “Although Rothberg is a distinguished, tenured professor with countless academic credentials and knowledge of 21 modern and ancient languages, there is absolutely no excuse for his boring Chad with his lectures. Chad must be entertained at all costs.”

Meanderings in the News

Are Universities liberal? Yes. But why? Because liberals go to universities! “So, academia is indeed more liberal than America, just as other professions, such as the clergy and the military, are dens of conservatism. But where conservatives get it wrong, Gross says, is in their simplistic assertions that academia’s leftward lean is a result of bias or discrimination. Rather, he argues, academia is liberal because… it has been attacked for being liberal. Gross’s analysis concludes that the ivory tower’s well-known political reputation has encouraged a kind of self-selection effect, where conservatives gravitate away from it, and liberals towards it. That would mean it’s precisely backwards to claim that universities discriminate against conservatives in favor of the godless and liberal. Rather, people who are godless and liberal tend to flock to universities—and stay there.”

Writers on reading.

The curious case of stolen books at Lambeth by Martin Vennard: “London’s Lambeth Palace, home to the Archbishop of Canterbury, also has a leading historic book collection. The palace’s library was the scene of a major crime that stayed undiscovered for decades. A sealed letter that arrived at one of Britain’s most historic libraries in February 2011 was to leave its staff stunned. The letter had been written before his death by a former employee of Lambeth Palace Library. Forwarded shortly after he died by the man’s solicitor, it revealed the whereabouts of many of the library’s precious books. Staff had known since the mid-1970s that dozens of its valuable books had been stolen. But they had no idea of the true extent of the losses until the letter led them to the man’s house in London.

Concerns about Asian carp in Lake Michigan.

Mega-restaurants. “Strong and swift servers have become even more of a necessity in the past three years, with the opening of several mega-restaurants in the area. Carmine’s, which seats 700, opened in 2010, followed by the 1,000-seat Hamilton in 2011. Last October, Sterling’s 500-seat Bungalow Lakehouseopened its doors. And while its 260 seats (plus 50 more outside) are dwarfed by those behemoths, Stephen Starr’s Le Diplomate, which opened this month, is a huge addition to the 14th Street corridor. During that same period of time, some of the city’s smallest restaurants — the 12-seat Minibar, the 27-seat Toki Underground — also have opened. “Restaurants of size go in and out of cultural fashion,” said Clark Wolf, a New York restaurant consultant. “You’re more matured as a restaurant city than you’ve ever been, which includes a mix of size.”

Way to go LHS!

Uncle Ruslan. “In the next few minutes, the uncle to Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, and Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, the alleged Boston Marathon bombers, accomplished something that 11 years of post-9/11 press releases, news conferences and soundbites by too many American Muslim leaders has failed to do on the issue of radicalization and terrorism: with raw, unfettered emotion, he owned up to the problem within. Instead of being silenced by what they did, he openly said that his nephews had brought “shame” on the family with their actions. This is the same kind of “shame off,” as one admirer later called it, that protesters to the gang rape in India have to win: Are we shamed into silence? Or do we confront the serious issues that shame us?”

The origins of the Mayan civilization.

Meanderings in Sports

A long but sadly interesting article about Iverson: “But Iverson isn’t a basketball player anymore. This is something most everyone but Iverson has accepted, and for years a question worried those closest to him: What happens when the most important part of a man’s identity, the beam supporting the other unstable matter, is no longer there? For the past three years, as Iverson chased an NBA comeback, his marriage fell apart and much of his fortune – he earned more than $150 million in salary alone during his career – dissolved. Now, those who once ignored past signals have recognized that basketball may have been the only thing holding Iverson’s life together. “He has hit rock bottom, and he just hasn’t accepted it yet,” says former Philadelphia teammate Roshown McLeod.

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