Would Jesus Still Have Come If…?  – Matthew 1.18-25

Matthew 1.18-25

“…You will name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sin.”

To those of you who know me, it may come as a surprise to learn that I tend to be contrary by nature.

Towards the end of my first semester at the University of Virginia, my freshman year, I was invited one Saturday night by my friend Ben to a Christmas party. The party was hosted by Campus Crusade for Christ and was held in the home of their campus pastor. Back then, I was still new in my faith and in many ways I wasn’t confident about being a Christian. Back then, Ben was the only Christian I knew at school.

As their name implies, Campus Crusade is an evangelistic organization. Of course I didn’t know that at the time and Ben had grown up in the mountains of Southwest Virginia where most of the Christians he knew hoarded guns and canned goods in their basements in anticipation of the apocalypse. An organization like Campus Crusade probably seemed tame to him. It was during my first semester, about this time of year, that Ben invited to this “party.”

Now I shouldn’t have to tell you that the word ‘party,’ to a college student, conjures particular images and elicits very specific expectations- none of which were matched by the gathering Ben took me to that Saturday night. In fact, in all my years of college and graduate school, this was the only party where I was asked to take my shoes off at the front door.

Ben and I walked there that night, in the cold and thin snow, to a neighborhood just off of campus. Walking up the short driveway to a small ranch home, I could spy through the big bay window in the living room a glimpse of the evening that lay ahead of me.

At first I thought we must be at the wrong house; this must be a tupperware party or a bridge club. Ben though assured me it was the right address. I thought about running away then and there- and probably I should have- but Ben’s a lot bigger than me and I didn’t want to aggravate him.

When Ben knocked on the door, this skinny guy with a soul patch under his lip and a guitar slung across his back answered the door. When Ben introduced me, the guy- the student pastor- shook my hand with disproportionate enthusiasm and said: ‘Jason, yeah, Jason- Acts 17.7.’ And I replied: ‘What?’ 

This must have been his secret Christian greeting and because I didn’t know what he was talking about, because I didn’t even know my name was in the bible and because I didn’t reciprocate with ‘Michael, yeah, archangel of the Lord, Daniel 12.1’ he gave me a sad, pathetic sort of look and ushered me inside.

But first he asked me to take off my shoes.

Everyone else must have drank the Kool-Aid before I arrived because I didn’t fit in and couldn’t understand how people seemed to be enjoying themselves. Once we were inside, Ben abandoned me. He mingled around the house while I stood near the dining table in my threadbare socks eating chocolate covered pretzels and looking at my watch between bites.

You can imagine how much my mood improved when Mike, the campus pastor, asked us all to circle up in the family room for a sing-a-long. I ended up sitting shoulder to shoulder on a sofa with two other people.

On my left was a girl who began every sentence with ‘The Lord just put it on my heart to ________‘ and who looked at me like I was as crazy as I thought she was.

On my right, with his arm resting uncomfortably behind me, was a 50-something man who worked in the dining hall. He had a long, scraggly beard and was wearing a Star Trek sweatshirt and had earlier over chocolate covered pretzels asked me if I thought the incarnation was a violation of the Prime Directive.

Across from me, sitting on the brick hearth, was a girl named Maria. I recognized her from the little Methodist church I tried to worship at a few times. I remembered her because every Sunday when it came time for the congregation to share their joys and concerns Maria would grab the microphone and hold the congregation hostage for 20 or so minutes while she narrated the ups and downs of her romantic life.

Unwisely, I thought, Ben sat next to her on the hearth.

We sang songs whose words I knew only vaguely and whose tunes seemed unseasonably fast-paced. Mike, the pastor, strummed his guitar and led us in a breathy, earnest voice while his pregnant wife accompanied him on a small plastic keyboard on her lap.

When the singing was over, Mike, assuming a serious tone of voice, asked us to open up our bibles. I felt like the music had stopped and I was the one without a chair. I hadn’t noticed before but I was the only one who hadn’t brought a one.

‘Luke, chapter 2’ Mike said. Everyone but me read along as Mike read aloud: ‘In the days of King Herod…’ 

After he finished the reading, Mike asked everyone to share what the passage- what Christmas and the incarnation and the coming of Jesus- meant to them. And for several long minutes people around the room said things like:

‘I’m so thankful Jesus came into the world to die for my sin.’ 

Each person’s sharing was slightly different, but they were all about Sin- about Jesus reconciling it, suffering the wages of it, dying for it.

Then for a few moments a pause settled over the room. It took me a while to realize that it wasn’t a holy silence or even a meaningful one. It was everyone waiting on me to say something. Eventually I realized I wasn’t going to be released until I offered some testimony of my own.

Okay, maybe it sounded sarcastic but with all sincerity I wondered out loud what was genuinely on my mind. I asked a question:

‘If there’d been no Fall, would Christ still have come?
If humankind had never sinned, would there still have been Christmas?’ 

From the group’s embarrassed reaction you would have thought I’d just called Jesus’ mother a dirty name. Everyone looked at me with confusion. Mike looked at me with pained sadness and Ben looked as blushed as the pastor’s wife’s red corduroy dress.

An awkward silence fell over the room until Ben summoned a fake laugh from somewhere in his belly and somehow just kept the hahaha’s going.

I suppose it was only obvious to me how Ben was hoping he could just keep laughing and laughing and laughing until we sang another song or did something. But for pastor Mike I was clearly a neophyte to the faith (or a fool) and this was what he would’ve called ‘a teachable moment.’

He slung his guitar behind his back and started to gesture with his hands like it really pained him to break it down so simply for me.

‘Jason, the reason Jesus came,’ he explained, ‘is he had a job to do: to rescue us from our Sin so that we can have a relationship with God.’ 

For a few minutes more it sounded like he was rattling off lines memorized from a pamphlet about the wages of sin.

‘But what I was wondering: If we had never sinned, would Jesus still have come?’ 

‘But Adam and Eve did sin; we do sin. I’m a sinner. I’m not ashamed to admit that’ Mike replied and did so rather condescendingly.
That’s when any hope Ben had for me to keep my mouth shut went out the window.

‘That’s not my point,’ I said. I mean…

“Is the incarnation something that comes out of God’s frustration and disappointment with us? Or out of God’s overflowing joy and desire for us?” 

“Is Christmas just the beginning of a rescue package that bails us out of our suffering and sin, or is Christmas even deeper and more mysterious than that?” 

The group just watched us go back and forth, staring at me like I was either an idiot or a heretic. The pastor’s wife was biting her lip, and where I had spent the first 30 minutes of the evening wondering how I could escape she was now clearly wondering how she could get me out of her house.

No one seemed to appreciate the budding theologian in their midst.

It didn’t help matters that the only person sympathetic to my perspective was the bearded 50 year old with the Star Trek shirt whose sole contribution to my cause was to say ‘Dude, that’s deep.’ 

Meanwhile the girl sitting next to me had placed her large KJV bible in the crack of the sofa cushions, erecting a barrier between us and making clear that she was not with me.

Finally someone said out loud: ‘Well, I know I sin all the time and I’m just grateful he came to die for mine.’ 

As if rendering a verdict, Mike said: ‘Praise God!’ Then he swung his guitar around like Church Berry and we sang another song.

For all the confusion my question caused, the answer is YES.
Would he still have come?
Would there still be Christmas if there’d been no Fall? YES.
Even though I couldn’t have articulated it back then, that’s what John’s Gospel is getting at in chapter 1: ‘In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.’

Even before he’s felt in Mary’s womb, John’s saying, before he kicks or she begins to show, HE IS. He’s before time.

Before the stars were hung in place, before Adam sinned or Israel’s love failed- before creation is even set in motion God had already chosen to one day take flesh and live among us.

That’s what today’s Gospel is driving at:

That when you talk about who God is, at the center, at the core- when you talk about who God is and always has been and always will be- at the heart of God is God’s eternal choice to become incarnate.

And maybe, maybe if we hadn’t sinned his name would’ve been different. Maybe he would’ve had a different mother. Maybe he would’ve spoken a different language or died in a different way.

But he’d still be because he was always going to be- Emmanuel, God with us.

You see, John wants you to see that Christmas is a moment that the momentum of God’s life has always been heading towards.

————————
I waited until we walked to the end of pastor Mike’s driveway before I said to Ben:

‘Well, that was an awesome party.’
And he belly-laughed, not at the evening but at me, at what he thought was my contrariness.

‘But it’s a good question!’ I growled. Ben just laughed some more, and by the time we were leaving the neighborhood he said: ‘I don’t see what difference it really makes.’ 

Back then our friendship was still new and it was governed by politeness. So I let it go. Back then I wasn’t bold enough to say what I’d say to him now, today.

That INCARNATION names a love every bit as deep and unconditional as CROSS. That you’re holy and you’re loved and you’re graced not only because God took flesh to save us but also because even before creation morning God chose to be with us.

That the Gospel’s not just that in the fullness of time God came among us to suffer for our Sin. The Gospel’s also that before there was time God decided to join his life to ours no matter what.

The Gospel’s not just that Christ died for me.

It’s also that before there was even the promise or notion of you…before you did your first good deed or told your first lie…before you made your life a success or made it a disaster…before you said your wedding vows or before you broke them…before you held your children in your arms or before you estranged yourself from them…before you first laughed or wept or kissed or shouted out in anger…before you gave your life to the Lord or before you turned your back on him…before the oceans were even born God said ‘I do’ to you. Forever.

That’s the Gospel too.
Would he still have come? Would he still have taken flesh?

Of course.

And that means the invitation for you to come to God is always there because it’s always been there.

Wow, this is some crazy stuff: fake news generated so one can denounce those who like the fake news story!

Tell me a little about why you started Disinfomedia?

Late 2012, early 2013 I was spending a lot of time researching what is now being referred to as the alt-right. I identified a problem with the news that they were spreading and created Disinfomedia as a response to that. The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly false or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction.

What got you engaged in this?

My educational background is in political science. I’ve always enjoyed the ideas of propaganda and misinformation. Then I coupled that with an interest in what makes things go viral. So that led me to finding those groups and ultimately to finding contributors. But it was just something I had an interest in that I wanted to pursue.

When did you notice that fake news does best with Trump supporters?

Well, this isn’t just a Trump-supporter problem. This is a right-wing issue. Sarah Palin’s famous blasting of the lamestream media is kind of record and testament to the rise of these kinds of people. The post-fact era is what I would refer to it as. This isn’t something that started with Trump. This is something that’s been in the works for a while. His whole campaign was this thing of discrediting mainstream media sources, which is one of those dog whistles to his supporters. When we were coming up with headlines it’s always kind of about the red meat. Trump really got into the red meat. He knew who his base was. He knew how to feed them a constant diet of this red meat.

We’ve tried to do similar things to liberals. It just has never worked, it never takes off. You’ll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out. [HT: LNMM]

Patrick Hruby:

What is right is not always popular. And what is popular is not always right.”Russell Davis stands behind a podium, hands in his pockets, invoking Albert Einstein. He looks very much like a man committing small-scale political suicide—which, in all likelihood, he is.

It’s a May evening in Las Vegas, Nevada. Davis, a 44-year-old public works employee, is holding a town hall meeting, discussing his candidacy for the Clark County School Board. He’d like to expand the school lunch program, offer more college prep courses, and explore building dorms for students who need housing. It all sounds innocuous, even boring, and none of it explains why Davis has appeared on local television and USA Today’s website, nor why a camera crew is setting up at the back of the room.

Oh, and it definitely doesn’t explain why Davis has been called a “dork,” a “pussy,” a “gay,” and a “nanny state liberal” who’s “almost as krazy as Hillary.”

No, the reason Davis has attracted attention and ire is simple: he wants to eliminate public high school football. Friday Night Lights out. No more homecoming games, sweaty August two-a-days, and afternoon-in-the-auditorium pep rallies. Adios to a beloved American tradition played by roughly 1.1 million high school students nationwide (double the participation number of the next most popular prep sport, track and field), and by approximately 3,600 students in Clark County, the country’s fifth-largest school district.

“When I decided to run, people said, ‘Don’t bring this up,'” Davis says. “They said, ‘Get elected first. And then bring it up.'”

This piece by Joan C. Williams is brilliant.

Samantha Bomkamp:

An effort to bring mobile produce markets to underserved local neighborhoods is about to expand with help from a Chicago restaurant newcomer.

Growing Power, a nonprofit that works to provide healthy food access to underserved urban dwellers, turned a former bookmobile into a produce bus last summer. The produce bus, which received support from the city, began operating weekly routes through the city’s South and West sides last summer, building up to 28 Chicago-area stops at places such as schools and health centers. The program, called Fresh Moves, has filled a gap in healthy food sales. The bus sells local produce at standard rates, while offering a discount for food stamp recipients.

This week, a former CTA bus will join the program’s fleet. The second bus was funded by a $40,000 donation from salad chain Sweetgreen, which partners with food-focused nonprofits in every new market it enters, Sweetgreen co-founder Nic Jammet said. The salad chain earmarked 100 percent of opening day sales at its River North restaurant in August to the mobile produce bus program. Growing Power supplies kale for Sweetgreen’s Chicago store.

Growing Power chief Erika Allen estimates the bus sells about 4 tons of produce a month in the most plentiful summer months. And although the program is profitable, Allen says she feels Fresh Moves has only reached a portion of its total revenue goal.

Is there just as much an alt-left?

A Big Yes for Emma and Shelly!

By Emily MassingillCorrespondent

FREEPORT — Before 8-year-old Emma Chamberlin tied a scarf around a light post in Freeport, she gave it a hug to warm it up.

As temperatures continue to drop in the area, Chamberlin and her grandmother, Shelly Griffen-Diddens of Freeport, set out to help those who might be in need of keeping warm. About a dozen scarves were tied around poles downtown and have been left for the homeless. By now they’re hoping many might be in the hands of people who need them.

Chamberlin, a third grader, set out with her grandmother Nov. 20 with her grandfather, Dale, in the driver’s seat. Almost all of the scarves were left on the block surrounding the Reed Center.

Emma and her grandmother spend a lot of time together, and when Griffen-Diddens saw on Facebook the idea of leaving warm accessories out for the homeless being done in other states, she realized it was something she and her granddaughter could do together.

That’s one intelligent decision.

First Things, Carl Trueman and transgenderism:

Notice that: Even though Lieutenant Marty has maintained female anatomy, he should be screened for pregnancy before being deployed. Perhaps it is a typo, but as it stands—in an official government document—it is simply bizarre: “O.K., (s)he is still really a woman, but (s)he might actually be pregnant as (s)he claims.” Setting that aside, here’s the thing: If we are ultimately to make no distinction between genders, then the Kantian imperatives of our contemporary political culture mean that we must ultimately start screening all soldiers (male and female) for pregnancy, for to require only those with female anatomy to undergo such would seem to me to be a sign of cissexism, transphobia, etc., etc., etc.

You say it will never happen? But this logic has already prevailed in other areas. My son had to be screened for sickle cell anemia when he ran track at college, even though it was patently obvious that he was not in any remote danger of having it. Why then did he have to have the test? Because, as his coach told him, it would be racist to require the test only from those who might actually have the disease. I still remember the comment the doctor appended to the results: “The requirement for this test is a ridiculous waste of finite medical resources for which his college should take full moral responsibility.” When it comes to the politics of identity, biology already takes a back seat to the aesthetics of the day.

I have written on transgenderism before and received the response that, as it neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg, it should not be a concern to me. But I am concerned. Transgenderism rests upon a metaphysics of personhood that will attempt to rewrite all of social reality as we know it (case in point: the Department of Defense’s Handbook). It represents the apotheosis of Philip Rieff’s Psychological Man. We have now become whoever and whatever we happen to think we are, and the world needs to be remade in a manner that plays to our fantasies.

Oh, and while we’re at it, it does actually pick my pocket, in that the convoluted government policies and their implementation are funded by my tax dollars. And while it may not directly break my leg, the bizarre culture of counterintuitive rules and convoluted, asinine procedures it has inspired looks likely to hinder the efficient performance of those who are paid to protect my leg from being broken by others.

The five most instagrammed locations in each state in the USA.

It starts here for this first weekend after the World Series, with Tom Verducci’s little anecdote about Joe Maddon’s father’s hat and Jason Heyward’s character:

As Maddon prepared to return to the dugout, he stepped out from behind his desk in the visiting manager’s office, the one with two open packages of dark chocolate bars—“For brain stimulation”—and an 8×10 picture of Hall of Fame Orioles manager Earl Weaver that he carried with him as both inspiration and totem throughout the World Series. Then he grabbed a faded periwinkle blue Angels cap—the outdated one with a wings logo—and stuffed it into the back of his waistband and underneath his hoodie.

The hat belonged to his father, Joe, or as they knew him around Hazelton, Pa., Joe the Plumber. Joseph Anthony Maddon worked 60 years at C. Maddon & Sons Plumbing and Heating, a family business begun in the 1950s by Carmen Maddon, an immigrant from Italy. Five sons followed. Much of the pipes in Hazelton were serviced by the Maddon boys. Three of them, including Joe, who often would be found with a Phillies Cheroot between his teeth, raised families in the apartments above the shop on 11th Street.

Joe the Plumber died in April 2002, when Joe was bench coach for the Anaheim Angels. Six months later, the Angels won the World Series. During the clinching Game 7, Joe would sneak back to the clubhouse and rub his dad’s hat for luck. In the ninth inning, he brought the hat to the dugout with him. He placed it on a shelf and under his scouting report binder, facing the field “so he could see the last out of winning the World Series.”

Said Joe, “I carry it with me everywhere I go. It’s always with me.”

Fourteen years later, with the hat stuffed into his waistband, Maddon returned to the dugout for the finale of another Game 7.

“It’s incredible how this all plays out sometimes,” he said. “You have to believe in order to see things, and I do believe. But it was great to have my dad there for two World Series victories.”…

Maybe to be a Cub meant something entirely new this year. How fitting that it was Heyward, a bust as far as the production he returned on the franchise’s investment in him, who pulled the team together in its moment of crisis.

“Jason doesn’t say much,” Bryant said, “so when he does, it gets everybody’s attention.”

Said Epstein, when informed it was Heyward who called the meeting, “That’s amazing—that he stayed not only connected to this team but, in the middle of everything and despite his offensive struggles, he stepped up. It speaks to his character and professionalism.”

Said Heyward, “I’m fortunate to come from great parents and a great family. No matter how tough it was for me at times this year, I think I gave something to this team with my character, and I think this team gave something to me.”…

Cub-dom, as Maddon would call this nation of the yearning, is transformed. All it took was 108 years and one of the greatest baseball games ever played.

And with Wright Thompson:

I didn’t know exactly what to do while waiting on the final game of the World Series, so I woke up early on Wednesday and went to church. The priest at the cavernous, ornate Holy Name Cathedral didn’t mention the Cubs during the homily, but his talk about suffering and faith resonated with those who came to celebrate All Souls’ Day. Yes, Game 7 was played on the same day as the annual Catholic holiday to remember and celebrate the dead, and pray for their safe passage from purgatory into heaven. You can’t make this stuff up.

The hyper-focus of camera lenses will make the last 24 hours in Chicago seem like one big explosion of joy, but that’s not really true. The whole exercise has produced its own extremes. On one hand, people have been going wild, with Eddie Vedder and Bill Murray closing down one of those 5 a.m. dive bars on Division Street — closing it down together — and fans lighting off cherry bombs near Wrigley. Yet there’s also this palpable sadness. Nobody could really be sure how’d they’d feel when it all ended, whether they’d be full of joy, or grief, or both.

A splendid opening by Howard Snyder on a Christian politics, and here are few of his lines:

The Bible doesn’t teach or endorse any political or economic ideology. It does reveal truth that should be reflected in our politics and economics. Those who use the Bible to unequivocally support a political or economic system run the danger of idolatry.

The Bible neither endorses nor condemns capitalism, socialism, or any other political-economic system of ideology. A range of options is possible so long as people’s rights are protected and the general wellbeing advanced. The ideals of both capitalism and socialism embody Christian values, but due to human sinfulness and selfishness, in practice these are often betrayed and people exploited.

People should take personal responsibility for themselves as far as they are able. The Bible teaches each person is responsible for him- or herself, yet we are also all responsible for each other. This is an aspect of being created in the image of the Triune God and of course has political implications. [HT: JS]

Wesley Hill takes on Nicholas Wolterstorff’s new statement on same-sex marriage; here is but the first paragraph from Wes Hill’s piece:

Nicholas Wolterstorff’s recent case for same-sex marriage, delivered as a lecture at Neland Avenue Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids in mid-October, bears many of the virtues we’ve come to count on from the Yale professor emeritus of philosophical theology: lucidity, an intuitive and easy-to-follow structure, a winsome recourse to down-to-earth illustrations, a light touch, and an obvious personal concern for real, suffering Christians. But one virtue it does not possess is interpretive charity. Indeed, I’m trying to remember when I last encountered an argument for changing the church’s historic view of marriage that engaged so flippantly and superficially with the Christian tradition. If, as Donald Davidson has taught us, hermeneutical charity is the effort to maximize the sense of views we oppose and to search for all possible areas of agreement whenever we engage a view whose truthfulness and coherence we doubt, then I feel bound to conclude—alas—that Wolterstorff’s lecture lacks such charity almost entirely.

Being too impressed with the impressive in the church, by Stephen MacAlpine:

When it states in Romans 12, “Do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly”, it says that as a command not a suggestion.  Why? Because our tendency still, even as regenerate people of God, is to associate with the impressive.  As if somehow the outward impressiveness of a person reveals an inner impressiveness, when it can in fact be a mask for what is less than impressive.  As if somehow the stardust will rub off on us.

We’re suckers for the impressive and the outward appearance. That showiness and grandeur seduces us.  A great CV or a great figure or a great set of financial figures still makes us go weak at the knees.

But not the Lord’s knees.

Jesus himself says to those who were impressed by impressiveness in his day: You are the ones who justify yourselves in the eyes of others, but God knows your hearts. What people value highly is detestable in God’s sight.

See that?  What Jesus says goes even deeper.  We are not simply impressed by the impressiveness of others.  We are impressed by our own impressiveness!  We set a bar of impressiveness, then we jump it and are impressed by our ability to do so!  How deceived we are!  So deceived that we would  even crucify the King of Glory.

This should make us pause.  Make us cautious.  This should make us be very careful about what we think is going to change things for a struggling church, or a struggling church culture. This should make us careful in what we believe will arrest our declining influence in the culture.

Christian movements and church planting networks should, paradoxically, value what the world hates and despises. We should view those despised things as the tools through which God will transform his world. Rather than simply aping the procedures, processes and programs of a world in thrall to the impressive, we should embrace what the world rejects. [HT: JS]

Huma Abedin doesn’t know how that stuff got on her husband’s computer. Not knowing how it got there may be as bad as it being there! This spin is dizzying, and perhaps that’s the point of spins.

Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin has told people she doesn’t know how her emails ended up on her estranged husband’s computer, according to The Washington Post.

Abedin says she did not regularly use the computer, the newspaper reported, citing a person familiar with the investigation.

David Mastio, tongue in cheek but only a little, is right:

Hillary Clinton can’t stand the thought of having to decide whether Winston Churchill’s bust should go back on the mantel of the Oval Office, so when the FBI exonerated her in the investigation into her secret email server cover-up, she doubled down on the lies, telling Fox News’ Chris Wallace,  “Director Comey said my answers were truthful, and what I’ve said is consistent with what I have told the American people.”

Not one of those words was true. I forget whether she compared herself to a “short-circuited” robot as a preview of the bold move to bolster the Trump campaign or as an excuse afterward.

Every day it’s a race to prove who wants to be president the least.

I got an email from HillaryClinton.com in September asking for money. The subject line began, “If I am being honest …” When I saw it, I thought, “Oh for God’s sake, why start now?” If Clinton had started being honest five years ago or even one year ago, the American people would be carrying her to Washington on a flag-draped litter to install her in the White House while they sing old Methodist hymns.

But she didn’t. She won’t or can’t. The only reasonable explanation left is that she will do anything, absolutely anything, to make Donald Trump president. The question is what she and Vladimir Putin have to gain.

David Mastio is the Deputy Editorial Page Editor of USA TODAY. Follow him on Twitter: @DavidMastio

Dear Whitey, we’re still playin’!

My friend at Brentwood Baptist, Mike Glenn, proposes his theory about nones and dones:

After a long discussion about the “Nones,” researchers have discovered another category of people leaving the church—the “Dones.” While the Nones are those who claim no religious faith at all, the Dones are those who still claim faith in Christ, but are no longer engaged in the life of local church. They’re DONE. The Dones tell researchers they’re just done with church. They say there’s too much bureaucracy, too much judgment and/or hypocrisy. A lot of the time, these individuals were deeply involved in their church, but after their kids graduated high school or after one of the couple retired, they started doing other things on the weekends.

But going to church is not one of them.

I have a theory. Yes, I know. Everyone has a theory. Church is out of touch. Church is too this or too that, but I think all of these other theories are wrong. Here’s my theory.

I think a lot of people stop coming to church because we never ask them to do anything great. We never call them to a vision that will demand everything from them. We never tell them to sell everything they have and go follow Jesus. We never tell them to head to the far reaches of the world and carry their casket with them because we don’t expect them to come back. We never tell them to leave everything and everyone they love to go start a church in some third world inner city slum.

We simply ask them to come to church and sit quietly. We ask them to give their money, sing reverently, but sit quietly.

Most of us want more, not less, from our faith, and if church can’t help us get there, we’ll get that “more we need” from somewhere else.

No one wants to come to church and sit.

Stephen McAlpine on cannibal sheep?

Spiritual abuse is rife.  Anecdotally, and from conversations with Christian psychologists and counsellors, it’s a settled feature of many independent churches.  And as church planting takes root, and as denominations are increasingly shunned by those in the ministry profession, it’s only going to increase.

Sexual abuse gets all the headlines.  Rightly so.  But spiritual abuse creates as much emotional, spiritual and psychological havoc.  It’s perniciousness is in how hard it is to determine.  You can’t commit just a little bit of sexual abuse.  You’ve either abused someone or you haven’t. But spiritual abuse?  Tell me when the line has been crossed.  It’s not easy.

Here’s something else about spiritual abuse that is like sexual abuse.  The truth eventually comes out.  It eventually comes out.  But, unfortunately, all too often like sexual abuse, it comes out from below, not from above.  It takes the bleating of the sheep gathering enough crescendo from below to make those further up the food chain, the shepherds, to do something.  And often that something is too late, and all too often in response to a need to be seen to be doing something lest there is blowback on themselves.

There’s no such thing as cannibal sheep, but too many sheep are getting eaten for breakfast, and the incidence is rising.

And that’s just not good enough. Especially when one day the Chief Shepherd will appear and ask why he can smell lamb barbecue.

[HT: JS]

Here is a good post about moving from anger to joy.

You may not know about this, but it is interesting for the history of evangelicalism (esp in the UK). 60 years ago Martin Lloyd-Jones and John Stott went head to head on whether or not evangelicals ought to remain in the Church of England (Stott) or form an evangelical association (Lloyd Jones). Three new blog posts, the first by Justin Taylor in an interview with Andrew Atherstone, asked about the debate and got this sketch that will enable you to see what happened:

So what did Lloyd-Jones say exactly, and why was it so controversial?

At its heart, Lloyd-Jones’s address was a call for visible unity among evangelicals to match their spiritual unity. He lamented that they were divided among themselves and “scattered about in the various major denominations . . . weak and ineffective.” But he believed the ecumenical turmoil of the 1960s presented “a most remarkable opportunity” to rethink evangelical ecclesiology along New Testament lines.

In particular, he argued that evangelicals were guilty of “the sin of schism” for remaining visibly separated from each other, while being visibly united in their denominations to people who denied the gospel essentials. “I am a believer in ecumenicity,” he provocatively declared, “evangelical ecumenicity!” Evangelicals should not be satisfied with unity merely through parachurch networks and societies, Lloyd-Jones insisted, but should come together in “a fellowship, or an association, of evangelical churches.”

This was controversial for several reasons, not least because it contradicted the National Assembly of Evangelicals’ own report on evangelical unity at the launch event! The obvious implication was that evangelicals should secede immediately from doctrinally mixed denominations.

There was also confusion about what exactly Lloyd-Jones meant by “a fellowship, or an association, of evangelical churches,” and what that would look like in practice—probably he intended a network of local independent evangelical congregations. A transcript of the audio recording of his address was eventually published after his death, in Knowing the Times (Banner of Truth, 1989), and is well-worth studying closely.

Alastair Roberts‘ appreciation of the Stott side:

Both the ecumenical movement and Lloyd-Jones’ positions arose from dangerously flawed ecclesiologies. My purpose is not to get into a discussion of their respective flaws within this post, however. Rather, I wanted to highlight one specific area where I believe that the legacy of Stott’s stand is still being felt today and, through it, to identify the value of revisiting the debate between him and Lloyd-Jones.

Looking back to Stott’s struggle with Lloyd-Jones, on balance, I am immensely grateful that Lloyd-Jones didn’t win the day. Had Lloyd-Jones won, the achievement of visible evangelical unity would in all likelihood have been a Pyrrhic victory, one that would have left us a radical marginal and insignificant group. As Matthew Cresswell wrote in the Guardian a few years back: ‘without Stott there would be fewer evangelicals in the Church of England today, and those in it would be brash, old-fashioned and a little like the church’s version of the US Tea Party.’ The state of evangelicals in the country more generally would probably have been more marginal still. Perhaps you could argue that Stott and others like him saved evangelicals in the UK from becoming fundamentalists.

The significance of evangelicals in the UK today is in no small measure due to our presence in Anglican institutions and the influence that we can exert through them. If we hadn’t fought for the institutions and legacy bequeathed to us by former generations of evangelicals in the established church, we would be a much less weighty force today.

John Stevens weighs in too:

It is somewhat ironic that none of the various trends  that contributed to Lloyd-Jones’ address to the National Assembly of Evangelicals came to fruition in the way that was expected. The ecumenical project failed, and the drive for structural unity gave way to a “relational ecumenism” that sought to establish a fellowship between churches, rather than a united church, today taking the form of Churches Together. Whilst evangelical Anglicans gained acceptance within the Church of England they failed to capture the church in the way that they had anticipated. Gaining some evangelical bishops does not produce a thoroughgoing  evangelical church.  Non-Conformists did not experience the revival they hoped for as a consequence of their separatism and search for a purer church and failed to contextualise the gospel following the massiuve changes to British society in the 1960s. Lloyd-Jones’ vision for a united evangelical church, if that was what he intended, also failed to materialise. Newly independent congregations found a place in the FIEC, but the British Evangelical Council failed to gain momentum as a “fellowship of evangelical churches” as it excluded those who were part of “mixed-denominations.” The existential threat posed by the ecumenical movement to evangelicalism soon gave way to other issues that divided evangelicals against themselves, including the charismatic movement and the emergence of a more liberal “open evangelicalism” that questioned key doctrinal convictions such as the inerrancy of Scripture, the reality of Hell and penal substitutionary atonement.

HT: JT

Two good pieces on the Bonhoeffer Moment, one by Chris Gehrz and the other by Charles Marsh.

Why we need library stacks to remain in this technology age. [HT: JS]

Syler Thomas, is this THE year or not?

And baseball is funny. People don’t want to admit it, but there’s a fair amount of luck in baseball. It truly is a game of inches, and sometimes inches separate success from failure.

Which brings us back to this year. Once again, the refrain is thrown about. “This is our year! We have the best team so it’s gonna happen!” Well here’s the deal, folks. You know how we’ll know it’s our year? When we’ve recorded the final out in the final inning of the final game of the World Series, and our team is on the field celebrating. Then and only then will we know.

And it’s way better for the emotional health of every Cubs fan to assume that this is in fact not The Year. Isn’t this the way we best enjoy gifts? The ones we don’t expect, that we don’t feel entitled to…those are the ones we appreciate the most. Sure we have a great chance to win it all, a better chance than the rest of the teams, but it’s not even close to guaranteed.

So Cubs fans, join me in basking in the glow of a historically great regular season. Wait expectantly, full of hope, for a World Series, because I believe with all of my heart that it will happen. But it may not be this year.

This is not the year. Until it is.

Love it, by Sarah Larimer:

In 2015, Norma Bauerschmidt sat in a doctor’s office.

Her husband, Leo, had recently died. And Bauerschmidt, of Michigan, was now facing a medical issue of her own; doctors had discovered a large mass, according to a Facebook post. Her daughter-in-law, Ramie Liddle, said in a phone interview that the diagnosis was uterine cancer.

But as Bauerschmidt sat in the office, ostensibly to go over the possible course of treatment — surgery, chemotherapy, those kinds of procedures — she told the doctor that she would have none of it.

“They wanted to operate and everything right away,” she later told CBS News. “I said, no! We’ll just leave it be.”

Instead of seeking medical intervention, or choosing to spend her remaining days in a care facility, Bauerschmidt decided to travel with her son, Tim Bauerschmidt, and her daughter-in-law, Ramie Liddle (and their dog), crisscrossing the country in an RV. Their journey together has been chronicled on the Facebook page Driving Miss Norma, which has more than 453,000 likes.

HT: LNMM

Archbishop Cranmer:

They shoot horses, don’t they? Much better to put them out of their misery than suffer a broken leg. If it’s compassionate to kill horses to end their pain, why not humans in the womb who are destined for a life of bitterness and squalid misery? After all, some lives just aren’t worth living. If the thing in your womb won’t be able to dance a marathon, why bother bringing it into the world at all, especially if it’s going to have a funny face, as well? That’s just not the sort of life a reasonable, loving parent would want for their child, is it?

You don’t often get TV programmes which deal with the ethics of abortion and the logical end-game of the pro-choice lobby, which is basically eugenics: screening out the deficient, deformed, brown-eyed,female or gay. Sally Phillips’ ‘A World Without Down’s Syndrome?‘ focused on the love and laughter in her relationship with Olly, her 12-year-old son, who happens to have Down’s, which is, she kept on saying, “a type of person”.

And therein lies the debate we must have: the nature of human identity and the meaning of personhood; what makes a foetus in the womb a baby? What makes that baby a person? It isn’t simply an icy matter of scientific medical ethics: it is about warm feelings, smiley faces and play-paint splattered all over. Sally Phillips discovered her son had Down’s soon after his birth. That’s too late. We don’t shoot them, but the age of after-birth (‘fourth trimester’) abortion is fast approaching. “Why does everybody behave like it’s a catastrophe?” she asks, telling the world that her life with Olly is far more comedy than tragedy. The reason, of course, is that we abort perfectly healthy babies foetuses up to 24 weeks of gestation, and the disabled can be aborted right up until the day of their natural birth. And Down’s babiesfoetuses are classified as having a ‘severe handicap’, so they can be summarily sliced up, have their brains sucked out and be vacuumed from the womb without a second question. If society permits abortion for a cleft palate or the lack of a Y chromosome, why not the presence of a third copy of chromosome 21?

HT: KM

A wonderful new program opportunity:

Americans might be able to bring a refugee to the U.S. on their own dime if talks between the Obama administration and the nation’s leading refugee advocacy group come to fruition.

The State Department is considering a pilot program that would let citizens sponsor a refugee from their country of choice by paying for airfare, housing, clothing, food and other resettlement costs. Conversations began in July and are expected to continue in the coming year, said Naomi Steinberg, director of the Refugee Council USA.

The program, modeled after a similar one in Canada, is designed to crack open new sources of funding as growing anti-refugee sentiment in Congress threatens to cut resettlement programs.

“It puts Americans in the driver’s seat,” said Matthew La Corte, policy analyst at the Niskanen Center, a Washington-based libertarian think tank that was an early supporter of the program. “It allows them to say ‘I have a spare bedroom. I was thinking of buying a new car but I’ll instead take that $10,000 and put it toward bringing a Syrian refugee over.”‘

Such a program would mark one of the biggest structural changes to U.S. refugee policy in three decades, and would allow Barack Obama or future presidents to skirt opposition by shifting financial responsibility to everyday Americans. Civil war in Syria, conflict in Africa and more open European borders have combined to displace more than 65 million people worldwide, the deepest refugee crisis since World War II.

Love it, too: Jack about Arnie:

“He was the king of our sport, and he always will be,” Nicklaus said. “Like the great (broadcaster) Vin Scully, when he called his last game Sunday night for the Dodgers: ‘Don’t be sad because it’s over. Smile because it happened.’ Today I hurt, just like you hurt. You don’t lose a friend of over 60 years and not feel an enormous loss. But like my wife always says, ‘The memories are the cushions of life.’ ”

Parents divorcing the faith of their children, by Julie Zauzmer:

Two widely recognized trends in American society might have something to do with each other.

Divorce rates climbed to the highest levels ever in the 1980s, when about half of all marriages ended in divorce.

And in the present day, Americans are rapidly becoming less religious. Since 1972, the share of Americans who say they do not adhere to any particular religion has increased from 5 percent of the population to 25 percent.

Could those two trends be related? A new study from the Public Religion Research Institute says yes. The children of divorced parents have grown up to be adults of no religion.

People whose parents divorced when they were children are significantly more likely to grow up not to be religious as adults, the study found. Thirty-five percent of the children of divorced parents told pollsters they are now nonreligious, compared with 23 percent of people whose parents were married when they were children.

Other studies on the rise of the “nones” — those who say they have no religion — have focused on millennials’ changing preferences. This study found that 29 percent of adults who were raised religious and left their faith say they left because of their religion’s negative teachings about gay and lesbian people. Nineteen percent say they left because of clergy sexual-abuse scandals. Sixty percent say they simply do not believe what the religion teaches.

“A lot of the narrative around the rise of the nones, or the rise of the non-affiliated, has focused on how there’s changing cultural preferences, that people are choosing to move away from religion,” said Daniel Cox, one of the researchers on the new study. “I think there’s also a structural part of the story that has not gotten as much attention. We wanted to focus on the way millennials were raised, which is different from any previous generation. And part of that is they’re more likely to have grown up with parents who are divorced.”

Cox said his team found that even children of divorced parents who are religious are less religious than their peers. Thirty-one percent of them go to services every week, compared with 43 percent of religious people whose parents were married when they were growing up.

HT: KKNM

Bill Clinton on Obamacare:

Speaking Monday at a Democratic rally in Flint, Michigan, the former president ripped into the Affordable Care Act for flooding the health care insurance market and causing premiums to rise for middle-class Americans who do not qualify for subsidies.

“So you’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world,” Clinton said.

Clinton, whose efforts with his wife to overhaul health care in the 1990s were stymied by a recalcitrant Congress and the insurance lobby, told the crowd the insurance model “doesn’t make sense” and “doesn’t work here.”

[Exactly! And who benefits?]

Matt Tebbe’s thoughtful analogy of the banyan and banana tree — kinds of leadership:

We face a leadership crisis today in American Christianity. Banyan leadership is the norm: we celebrate and train leaders to be experts who can command large organization and engineer ministry outcomes. We love banyan leaders.

We celebrate “greatness.” The primary way we train leaders for pastoral ministry is through a program by which we confer on people the title “Master of Divinity.”

We can be leaders now because we have mastered divinity. We figured God out and now we can use this information to manage churches to produce outcomes.

You are not to be like that

We are enamored with banyan leaders, but Jesus calls us to be banana leaders. We are enamored with masters, but Jesus calls us to be servants. We dream of being in charge, but Jesus invites us submit.

“The greatest among you must become like the youngest.”

The youngest in Jesus’ day had no power. No rights, no privileges, no way to “pursue happiness.” And they were uneducated. The greatest were the powerful, the bosses, the kings, the experts.

This statement would have seemed like nonsense to the disciples. How can the greatest become like the youngest?

Erika Beras, and the slave origins of Southern food:

Michael Twitty wants you to know where Southern food really comes from. And he wants the enslaved African-Americans who were part of its creation to get credit. That’s why Twitty goes to places like Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s grand estate in Charlottesville, Va. — to cook meals that slaves would have eaten and put their stories back into American history.

On a recent September morning, Twitty is standing behind a wooden table at Monticello’s Mulberry Row, which was once a sort of main street just below the plantation. It’s where hundreds of Jefferson’s slaves once lived and worked. Dozens of people watch as Twitty prepares to grill a rabbit over an open fire.

“Look – it’s better than chicken,” he tells the audience.

Twitty is a big guy. He loves to eat, he loves history and he loves to talk. He’s moving back and forth between the table and iron skillets over an open fire. His cooking instructions aren’t complicated.

“The technique is, I season it, I cook it and it’s done,” he tells the audience, eliciting laughter. “There you go.”

A wonderful week in Finland — Helsinki and the most of the time at the new seminary in Tampere — comes to a close, but with a life of memories. We are praying today for Simo and Helena.

Ah Chicago and bike-friendliness:

When it come to cycling, the second city is now the first, according to a leading bike publication.

Bicycling magazine is set to announce Monday that Chicago is now the best bike city in the United States, unseating New York City. This is good news for Rahm Emanuel, who had pledged when he became mayor to make Chicago the most bike-friendly place in the country.

Chicago came in at No. 2 in 2014 in the biennial ranking, after New York. Chicago has been climbing steadily, from 10th place in 2010 to fifth place in 2012.

Magazine editor-in-chief Bill Strickland said Chicago grabbed the top spot because it has emphasized building infrastructure that separates cyclists from motorists.

“Awareness of infrastructure, through separated bike lanes, is the next thing that needs to happen to really change cycling and what it means to live in an urban area,” Strickland told the Tribune.

He also praised Chicago for expanding its Divvy bike share program into less affluent areas of the city. The city also started the Divvy for Everyone program, which subsidizes bike-share memberships for low-income residents. Divvy has more than 34,000 members, and rides are up 16 percent this year, said Chicago Department of Transportation spokesman Mike Claffey.

San Francisco was ranked second-best bike city, followed by Portland, Ore.; New York City; and Seattle. Minneapolis; Austin, Texas; Cambridge, Mass.; Washington, D.C.; and Boulder, Colo., rounded out the top 10.

Micro-home as art form, and ten strategies:

A tiny scrap of land might not catch your eye.

But to Japanese architect Yasuhiro Yamashita of Atelier Tekuto, there’s nothing more beautiful.

A veteran designer of kyosho jutaku — or micro homes — Yamashita has built more than 300 houses, each uniquely shaped and packed full of personality.

All starkly different, the only thing these homes have in common is their size — Yamashita’s projects start at just 182 square feet.

Demand for small homes in Japan results partly from land scarcity, property prices and taxes, as well as the impending danger posed by the country’s regular earthquakes and typhoons.

But some residents simply prefer a smaller home, seeking a minimalist lifestyle.

“In Japan, there’s a saying (‘tatte hanjo nete ichijo’) that you don’t need more than half a tatami mat to stand and a full mat to sleep,” says Yamashita. “The idea comes from Zen — and a belief that we don’t need more than the fundamentals.”

Of course, the beauty of a well-designed micro home is that it doesn’t appear ‘fundamental’ at all.

Babies with big heads are more likely to be clever and have successful futures, a study has shown.

Research carried out by UK Biobank has strongly linked higher intelligence with large head circumferences and brain volume.

Half a million Brits are being monitored by the charity to discover the connection between their genes, their physical and mental health and their path through life.

The latest evidence is the first finding to emerge from the study that aims to break down the relationship between brain function and DNA.

Researchers in a paper published by the Molecular Psychiatry journal said: ‘Highly significant associations were observed between the cognitive test scores in the UK Biobank sample and many polygenic profile scores, including . . . intracranial volume, infant head circumference and childhood cognitive ability.’

Professor Ian Deary, of Edinburgh University, who is leading the research, said gene variants were also strongly associated with intelligence, according to The Times.

The new evidence is so accurate that experts claim it could even predict how likely it was that a baby would go to university based on their DNA.

Greetings to you from Kris and me from Helsinki. I’m here to speak at a conference on the gospel. Image

Barbara Diamond:

Many young couples spend their summer camping, or kayaking, or relaxing or vacationing. But Kristin and Adam Polhemus did none of these things.

Instead, the married couple from Hamilton Township, New Jersey spent their summer fixing up the run-down house next door. The house belongs to an older woman who, for years, lived in social isolation.

Anne Glancey, a retired teacher who grew up in that house, couldn’t afford to erase her mounting code violations. If she didn’t make the necessary repairs to her property, she faced up to $3000 per day in fines.

Notoriously reclusive, Anne had no friends or family to help her.

The paint on her house was peeling off, her grass and shrubs were growing out of control, and a rusty old car sat abandoned on her lawn.

Anne was so worried, yet she didn’t know what to do — until, one day, she walked outside and saw Kristin and Adam doing the unthinkable…

What in the world? Title to an article at USA Today: “Take your pick: Michigan football’s Jim Harbaugh denies eating booger.” Really?

“I have never eaten a booger in my entire life,” Harbaugh said. “It might have looked like that was happening. But if you rub your nose and then you bite your fingernail, that’s not eating a booger. There was no booger eaten.

“For clarity here, for the record, I have never eaten a booger in my entire life.”

Katherine Rosenberg-Douglas:

There’s no way of knowing how long it would’ve taken Fidencio Sanchez to sell 90,000 paletas, or Mexican ice pops, for $1.50 each from the paleteria he pushes around Little Village.

But online donors saved the 89-year-old man the trouble of finding out. Through $5 to $2,000 donations, 6,300-plus people collectively raised more than $135,000 – the equivalent of 90,000 paleta sales – for Sanchez in a GoFundMe campaign started by a stranger wanting to offer the older man a little relief from pushing his cart.

Crediting friend Joe Loera with coming up with the idea to start an online fundraiser, Joel Cervantes said in this case it took a village – Little Village – to make all the difference to Sanchez and his wife, Eladia.

Eladia Sanchez also used to sell paletas but now sells Mexican candies because pushing the heavy cart became too physically demanding and hurt her arm, according to the Sanchez’ granddaughter, Dulce Perez. Fidencio Sanchez has been pushing his cart in the area about 23 years, Perez said.

“A lot of people knew him,” Cervantes said of Sanchez. “After I put it on Facebook, people started inboxing me and they were like, ‘I know that gentleman, he’s always around town.’ I should’ve expected it because he sells all across the 26th Street area. If it touches me, I should’ve known it touches everybody else who sees him.”

Cervantes first met Sanchez Thursday, while the older man was pushing his cart and appeared to be struggling a bit. According to his post on GoFundMe, Cervantes bought 20 paletas and intentionally overpaid, giving Sanchez a $50. He also snapped a photo of the man, and said he thinks those 6,000 people were moved to donate because their imaginations were stirred by the photo.

Paula Bolyard:

We were all deeply moved and inspired by the brave passengers of Flight 93 who stormed the cockpit, attempting to wrest the plane from the evil terrorists who had killed the crew and were headed toward an unknown destination on September 11, 2001. By crashing the plane into a field in Pennsylvania, it’s likely they spared a high-value target like the White House or the capitol, saving the lives of thousands and preserving a national landmark.

Todd Beamer was one of those passengers, a hero whose voice was seared in our memories as he made a call to a GTE airphone operator, asking her to say the Lord’s Prayer with him before he and others tried to take the cockpit. His final recorded words were “Let’s roll!” Thirty-seven passengers, including Beamer, and seven crew members lost their lives in the attack on Flight 93.

As the country tried to come to grips with the horror of the 9/11 attacks, Todd’s widow, Lisa Beamer, was a model of grace and courage. Pregnant with their third child at the time, she spoke bravely about her grief and the Christian faith that enabled her to endure the unthinkable nightmare. She also confidently testified to husband’s faith and her certainty that she would be reunited with him again in heaven.

Now, their eldest son, David, is playing football at his parents’ alma mater, Wheaton College in Illinois. CBS Sports featured the team in the video below, describing how, 15 years ago, the Wheaton Thunder football team adopted “Let’s Roll” as their motto, and how the words—and Todd Beamer’s courage—have inspired the young men who have played for Wheaton over the years.

Kate Taylor:

New research reveals that a dangerous cornerstone of American nutrition in the 20th century was funded by the sugar industry.

The sugar industry worked with scientists in the 1950s and 1960s to downplay sucrose’s role in causing coronary heart disease and other nutritional risks, according to a paper by UC San Francisco researchers published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday.

In other words, the move to single out fat and cholesterol as the biggest problems in American diets was a coordinated effort by trade association Sugar Research Foundation, intended to increase the consumption of sucrose.

The crux of the new research is a 1965 paper that played a major role in making low-fat diets the nutritional norm in the US. The Sugar Research Foundation paid the modern equivalent of $50,000 to fund the project, which argued cholesterol — not sucrose — was the sole relevant factor in studying and preventing coronary heart disease.

However, this funding was not disclosed when the literature review was published in 1967, despite the fact that the sugar industry set the review’s objective, contributed articles, and read drafts prior to publication.

Yes, this fierce reaction on the part of the ESS crowd is about identity — who you are is about where you are in the circle of power:

Is it money?  Well, I guess some have certainly made good royalties from advocating EFS but not as many as have furiously attacked Todd and others.   Is it platform?  This probably plays into it more, as so many high-profile leaders either bought into it or have important links with those who do.  But even so, the violence of the reaction has been extreme.  Is it some theologian’s concern for his legacy?  I have been told that is the case but, if so, that is really rather sad.  A legacy is only worth preserving to the extent it is true.  Who wants a legacy of error? And to the extent a legacy is true, it is not really the property of any one person. The truth pre-existed him after all.  I do not think that any of these things account for all of the widespread anger at the whistleblowers.

I would suggest another angle: that the reaction is so strong because, unlike some other theological disputes, this one is an issue of identity.  When groups root their identity in a specific narrative, then a serious challenge to that narrative will be greeted with real hostility, for such a challenge is not simply a disagreement over details.  It is a denial of personal legitimacy.   Those being critiqued will interpret their critics in very negative moral terms, and the normal rules of decent procedure and public debate will not apply.

Barbara Diamond:

Ben Ellis is a beloved a high school Latin teacher at Christ Presbyterian Academy (CPA) in Nashville, Tennessee. In December 2015, Ellis was diagnosed with esophageal cancer that has recently spread to his lungs.

Mr. Ellis is described as the “definition of a teacher, a role model, a servant.” Despite his devastating diagnosis, Mr. Ellis remains joyful and peaceful at heart — and the student body at CPA has wanted nothing more than toreturn the love he has given to them on a daily basis.

Recently, the principal at CPA says he was approached by three different people who all saw a vision of the high school students and faculty singing words of prayer to Mr. Ellis on his front lawn. The principal was struck by the similar stories, and decided to turn those visions into a reality.

400 students and staff members loaded up their buses and cars and drove to Mr. Ellis’ home.

What happened next was recorded on camera, and a few days later, country superstar Tim McGraw shared the video on his Facebook page.

Truth be told, I’m a fan of Roger Scruton:

To Edinburgh for the book festival, where I am to explain Fools, Frauds and Firebrands to respectable middle-class Scots, who have an endearing way of suggesting to me that I, like them, am a thing of the past. They queue to buy the book, which is nice of them; however, the publisher has failed to deliver any copies, so the need to part with a few quid for politeness’ sake slips painlessly over the horizon. Only the students in the queue awaken me from my complacency. Where do we turn for comfort, they ask, when our reading lists are gibberish about which we can understand only that it is all left-wing? Is there no network, no secret society, no alternative reading list to get us through the next three years? Is there, in a modern university, no ‘safe space’ for conservatives?

I know of only one solution to leftist takeovers, and that is to start again. The decent parliamentarians in the Labour party should take note of this. When we set up the underground university in Prague, we composed a curriculum entirely of classics on a budget of £50,000 a year. We the teachers, and they the students, were volunteers; our shared concern was knowledge, not ideology; conversation, not conscription. Once the state takes over, however, and its vast resources are made available to people otherwise incapable of earning a penny, the fakes and the frauds muscle in. Chanting gobbledegook from Deleuze confers an air of erudition on even the most second-rate intellect, and since in most humanities departments teaching is no longer required and the only tests are political, there is no answer to those desperate students except to start something new. That is what we are doing at the University of Buckingham.

Source:

When seemingly perfectly healthy but overparented kids get to college and have trouble coping with the various new situations they might encounter—a roommate who has a different sense of “clean,” a professor who wants a revision to the paper but won’t say specifically what is “wrong,” a friend who isn’t being so friendly anymore, a choice between doing a summer seminar or service project but not both—they can have real difficulty knowing how to handle the disagreement, the uncertainty, the hurt feelings, or the decision-making process. This inability to cope—to sit with some discomfort, think about options, talk it through with someone, make a decision—can become a problem unto itself.

Madeline Levine, psychologist and author of The Price of Privilege, says that there are three ways we might be overparenting and unwittingly causing psychological harm:

1. When we do for our kids what they can already do for themselves;
2. When we do for our kids what they can almost do for themselves; and
3. When our parenting behavior is motivated by our own egos.

Levine said that when we parent this way we deprive our kids of the opportunity to be creative, to problem solve, to develop coping skills, to build resilience, to figure out what makes them happy, to figure out who they are. In short, it deprives them of the chance to be, well, human. Although we overinvolve ourselves to protect our kids and it may in fact lead to short-term gains, our behavior actually delivers the rather soul-crushing news: Kid, you can’t actually do any of this without me.

As Able told me:

When children aren’t given the space to struggle through things on their own, they don’t learn to problem solve very well. They don’t learn to be confident in their own abilities, and it can affect their self-esteem. The other problem with never having to struggle is that you never experience failure and can develop an overwhelming fear of failure and of disappointing others. Both the low self-confidence and the fear of failure can lead to depression or anxiety.

Neither Karen Able nor I is suggesting that grown kids should never call their parents. The devil is in the details of the conversation. If they call with a problem or a decision to be made, do we tell them what to do? Or do we listen thoughtfully, ask some questions based on our own sense of the situation, then say, “OK. So how do you think you’re going to handle that?”

Unintended Consequences of the Jesus Movement: The Big Decision By Michelle Van Loon, patheos.com/blogs/pilgrimsroadtrip, michellevanloon.com

Earlier this year, I launched an occasional series on my blog looking back on the unintended consequences of the Jesus Movement. I’ve explored topics including our hand-clappin’ praise songs, the Rapture, our voting habits, and our worship services.

Today, I’m picking up where I left off by talking about something that’s not a news flash to most reading these words: the Evangelical focus on decisions for Christ, often at the expense of discipleship. This impulse wasn’t new to Evangelicalism. Charles Finney to Billy Sunday to that other famous Billy were visible leaders in the subculture long before the Jesus Movement hit. But the urge for simplicity coupled with the urge to celebrate the dramatic testimony cultivated an unhealthy focus in our subculture on the “just pray this prayer” decision-making process.

We celebrated news of conversions of famous people as though we were cheering for a number one draft pick being drafted onto our team. (Anyone remember the excitement when Bob Dylan prayed the prayer and became an instant Christian celebrity in 1979?) On a local level, people with dramatic stories of how they “accepted Jesus as their personal Savior” were often given a bit of red carpet treatment in congregations, conferences, and meetings. While there has been a slow-growing pushback in some quarters of Evangelicalism over the “just pray this prayer” model, it is still central to the way most of us Jesus Freaks found out how to talk about faith. (Scot’s post last week entitled Rethinking: Evangelism offers a helpful way out of our “just pray this prayer” model.)

By putting these repentance stories at the front and center of our subculture, we communicated that the moment of decision matters more than anything else in the Christian life. Or at least serves as the proverbial Get Out Of Hell Free card.

Much of the writing and reading I’ve done about second half of life spirituality, coupled with the phenomenon of the Dones, highlights for me a thin understanding of discipleship in many corners of Evangelicalism. Our focus on “all eyes closed…all heads bowed…yes, I see that hand, and that one” decision has cultivated a culture celebrating spiritual sprinters crossing a finish line. Treating a decision (which might be more accurately understood as a response to God’s calling), as the pinnacle moment in a person’s spiritual life diminishes the beauty and eternal value of the mission Jesus gave us.

That finish line is the beginning of the marathon for those of us with a moment of decision story. Others in the Church have grown gently into runners, and can’t point to a day and date at which they crossed the line into faith. In every case, we haven’t been so great on the whole about honoring and celebrating endurance in the Christian life. Our real celebrities aren’t those who can describe the starting blocks of the race, but those who can teach us to finish it. The Jesus Movement made an art out of the beginning of the race in ways that haven’t always taught us to keep running when we hit Mile 21.

When a renewal like the Jesus Movement hits the church, things are bound to get messy. Some of the mess is the work of the Holy Spirit as he reanimates dry bones. Some of the mess comes when a bunch of broken human beings try to touch, help, hinder, or profit from the beautiful chaos. Most of us recognize the Church is in a state of transition in the West, though in the global South and East, she is growing like fruit-bearing kudzu. This transition is an opportunity for a bit of spiritual housecleaning in the wake of the hippie-flavored chaos of a generation ago. Part of that housecleaning might perhaps create some space for reflection on the unintended consequences of some of our choices and desires. We reap what we sow.

What we hoped for a generation ago when we focused on encouraging others to just pray that prayer:

• Individual responsibility for faith – Throughout his earthly ministry, Jesus called individual people to follow him. A “Get Out Of Hell Free” card inked with infant baptism or childhood church attendance was not the way Jesus changed lives.
• Simplicity – We could talk about faith in an easily understandable way. You didn’t need to be a theologian or a pastor to understand the message in the Four Spiritual Laws.
• Marketability – Too many of us downplayed what discipleship might cost in our excitement to invite others to join our team. (See Matthew 16:24, Mark 8:34, and Luke 9:23.) We may have done so because we ourselves simply didn’t understand the cost.

What we’re reaping today:

• Confusion – Stories abound of kids who’ve prayed that prayer dozens of times, insecure about whether they’re “in” or “out”. Others rest in the notion that they just prayed that prayer at some point, and can tuck that salvation card in their back pocket and go on with their regularly-scheduled program. A prayer of repentance is one step in the marathon. It is not the entire race.
• Frustration – Simplicity in presenting the decision was a bait-and-switch for the Christian life. “Just pray this prayer and you’ll be saved” was a gateway drug to “Just send the televangelist your paycheck and you’ll be blessed” for some. Others discovered that praying a short prayer had little to do with the challenges of lifelong fidelity to Jesus. We don’t live it alone, because God himself is with us, but neither is it easy – and may cost us our lives.
• Abandoning of the faith – Shallow roots don’t grow healthy plants. A measure of the statistical numerical decline in Christianity in recent years comes from those who once prayed a prayer and were taught this was the most important thing they could do to sew up their eternity.

What would you add to either of these lists?

By Tim Suttle

“Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.” (Martin Luther King, Jr., Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Stockholm, Sweden, 1964.)

“You have heard that it was said,” Jesus once remarked, “Love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” This short imperative is, well, let’s just say it is challenging to our American fascination with violence and guns. This teaching from the Sermon on the Mount is routinely dismissed and ignored by Christians, especially by evangelicals who seem more intent on clinging to the 2nd amendment than the Sermon on the Mount. I often wonder why that is.

American Christianity has never included any widespread adherence to Jesus’s teaching on violence. Why is the Christian peace movement so small? Why are so many Christians willing to ignore the clear command to love your enemies? Could it be that there was no other way to drive Native Americans off their land but through superior firepower? Or perhaps it is because there was no other way to control millions of black slaves without guns and whips? Maybe it is because our Christian identity is not nearly as powerful as our American identity?

In fact, the problem predates any of that. The Constantinian Shift, a term popularized by John Howard Yoder and Stanley Hauerwas, is meant to describe the impact of Constantine’s legalization of Christianity via the Edict of Milan, 313. (Theodosius made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in 380). The term names the fundamental shift that occurred within Christianity when it was officially sanctioned by the Roman Empire. Christianity very quickly moved from being a fringe Jewish sect, persecuted by Rome and by the Jews, to being a protected and even favored religion.

The Constantinian Shift meant that Christian identity would no longer be established, narrated, shaped, supported, passed on, and protected by the church, but by the state and the surrounding culture. Evidence for how thoroughly this shift has impacted American culture can be seen every time Christians insist that America is a “Christian nation.” Christians only do this when they don’t believe the church can instill Christian identity in its members. They need the state to do the work.

This conflation of church and state fundamentally changed in the nature of Christianity and the church. Christianity vanished into the realm of the invisible, the private, and the personal. For all intents and purposes the Constantinian Shift meant that Christianity had become co-opted by the state. Give your heart to Jesus, but your body belongs to Rome. Apart from the Anabaptists, the church ended up looking more like the Roman Empire than like Jesus and his first followers. Christianity became a civil religion, an apologetic for the state and the prevailing norms of culture.

Today most Christians are oblivious to the fact that the entire early church had a strict ethic of nonviolence. With The Constantinian Shift so far in the past, Christians today can cling to their guns with blatant pragmatism. And the need for violence does seem self-evident, that is, if you are not willing to take up your cross and die at the hands of other violent people.

Despite Jesus’s rejection of violence, despite the fact that he allowed the violence of others to become displayed on his body, despite his teaching that his followers do the same, most American Christians have no imagination for how nonviolence can change the world in powerful ways. Most Christians in our society cannot imagine living non-violently in such a violent world. We have no imagination for what it might mean to turn the other cheek, offer our cloak to those who demand our tunic, or go the extra mile in order to allow injustice and violence to be displayed on our own bodies.

Why Do Many Christians Trust the 2nd Amendment More Than the Sermon on the Mount? Because they simply don’t think that Jesus’s way will work.

Hauerwas has honed the perfect answer to this blatant pragmatism. He says that Christians are not committed to non-violence because they think it will be an effective strategy to rid the world of war or violence. Christians are (or should be) committed to non-violence because they follow Jesus, and thus they cannot imagine ignoring his example and instruction. Go ahead and take that sword out of Peter’s hand, Jesus, but keep your paws off my guns.

I do not think there is only one obedience. I’m sympathetic to the fact that this is a complicated issue, especially given the fact that we live in such a violent culture. Espousing nonviolence is a difficult stance to take in the face of so much fear. But Christians take many difficult stances against powerful cultural forces. We’re good at it. Why do we ignore Jesus’s call to nonviolence? Why let this pitch pass us by? Is it fear? Is it a lack of discipleship? Is it a lack of leadership?

I do pray for the imagination to try to live in the world non-violently, and it takes great imagination. I pray for courage to use my voice to speak out for those who live on the margins of our world, for this takes much courage. I pray for the strength to submit my body to injustice, as Christ did, in order to allow evil to show it’s true colors on me, and it will take so much strength.

A wholesale renewal of the Christian imagination in regard to violence is an essential step in our discipleship if we are ever going to make a real impact on the world around us, if we are ever going to bear witness to a better way. I find it impossible, after the cross, to believe Christian non-violence is an ancillary teaching of the church. If Christ was God in the flesh, and he didn’t take up arms to inaugurate the kingdom, then the only way we as Christians will ever participate in this kingdom is to live a life that is in step with this Messiah and his kingdom. We must heed Jesus’s call to love our enemies, and pray for those who persecute us. We must live nonviolently.

The Top Ten Worst airports in the USA? [SMcK: I rank the worst to be LaGuardia and LAX second. Best airport experience for us? Savannah GA.]

To hear frequent flyers wax poetic about Singapore’s Changi Airport, you would think that the airport itself was the destination. It has a rooftop pool, an orchid garden, a butterfly garden, a sunflower and light garden, a koi pond, a FREE movie theater, gaming centers, sports zones, a lounge area for sleeping, and SO much more. It is, quite simply, magical. Though it is not exactly “new,” having first opened in 1981, Changi has certainly kept up with the Kardashians in the way it has adapted to modern tech and travel demands.

You’ll never hear anyone talk about American airports in quite the same way.

Most of our airports date back to the middle of the 20th century, if not all the way back to before the Great Depression. Even as old terminals have been demolished and replaced with new buildings, the basic planning bones of these airports are 50+ years old, designed during a time of much lighter air travel (and even when they tried to plan for the future, they WAY undershot it) and on parcels of land that would soon be swallowed up by the ever-expanding cities around them. And then there is some just plain weirdness, like in Denver.

So, with help from travel experts — pilots, flight attendants, former baggage handlers, and frequent travelers — and our own experience flying through way too many of these hellholes, we ranked the absolute worst-designed airports in America.

Truth be told:

Counting only caucuses, Sanders has won 63 percent of the vote, 64 percent of the delegates and 11 of the 16 contests. In doing so, he has earned 341 elected delegates, compared with Clinton’s 195 delegates, for a margin of 146 delegates. These caucuses have had approximately¹1.1 million participants. As a point of comparison, turnout in the caucuses has been only about 13 percent of the total number of votes President Obama got in the 2012 presidential election in these states.²

Sanders has done far worse in the states that have held primaries. Counting just primaries, including Tuesday’s in Washington,³ Sanders has won only42 percent of the vote, 42 percent of delegates and 10 of the 34 statewide contests.⁴ Clinton earned 1,576 elected delegates, compared with Sanders’s 1,158, for a margin of 418. The turnout in these contests has been far higher than in the caucuses, with a little more than 24 million votes cast. That’s about 49 percent of the total number of votes Obama got in the 2012 election in these states.⁵

Now, it is fair to point out that the caucuses have taken place in states that are demographically different than the primary states. Caucus states in 2016 are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly rural compared with primary states. Still, these differences don’t come close to explaining the differences in results between the caucuses and primaries so far. We can look to Nebraska and Washington as two examples of the disparity. Of course, one could argue that because no delegates were up for grabs in those states’ primaries, the campaigns didn’t really compete for residents’ votes and therefore those contests aren’t representative of what a truly competitive primary would look like there. Fortunately, because the vote in the Democratic primary has largely broken down along demographic lines, we can use statistical models to approximate what would happen if states that held caucuses had held primaries instead.

Trump be told, and Kermit Zarley asks if Trump is hurting the PGA Tour golf:

If he is, it looks like the Tour is fighting back.

Doral was always one of my favorites tournaments on the regular PGA Tour. I’ve blogged about this before. It was at Doral Resort and Country Club, in Miami, Florida, where I had my first good chance to win a PGA Tour tournament. It was in 1966, my second year on Tour. I led wire-to-wire until I three-putted the 71st hole to go one stroke behind. On the toughest finishing hole on the American pro golf tour then and ever since to the present–the long par four 18th hole–my ten foot birdie putt for a tie for first place stopped on the right edge of the hole, with nearly half of the ball hanging over the cup. If only there had been a little earthquake.

Talk about earthquakes, Donald Trump is an earthquake these days, what with his rhetorical and volatile campaign as the presumptive Republican nominee for the U.S. presidency. Now it looks like he’s an earthquake happening to the PGA Tour.

Yesterday, at Jack Nicklaus’ Memorial Tournament on the PGA Tour being held at Muirfield Village, Ohio, this week, PGA Tour Commissioner Tim Finchem announced that the Tour’s 54-year relationship with Doral in Miami is coming to an end. Next year, the World Golf Championships held there the last few years is moving to Club de Chapultepec in Mexico City and will be named the WGC-Mexico Championship.

In recent years, there have been four World Golf Championships. Three of them have been staged in the U.S. and the other one in China. Some pro golfers, especially foreigners, think too many are held in the U.S. So, they probably would welcome this change despite the controversial Donald Trump and his ownership of Doral.

Donald Trump–an avid golfer, mega real estate entrepreneur, and now a celebrity TV star–bought the Doral resort in 2012 partly because of the PGA Tour’s long-standing tournament there. Then he sank $250 million into renovating the place, much of which went into improving the Blue Monster golf course on which the tournament is played….

Finchem revealed that Cadillac, the long-time sponsor of the tournament, did not renew its contract. He said the Tour couldn’t find any other company to take its place. What is surprising about that is that General Motors, the parent company of Cadillac, has a long relationship with the PGA Tour as a sponsor of its tournaments, especially with Buick and Cadillac. And both Cadillac and General Motors have been doing financially pretty well lately after being bailed out by the federal government during the Great Recession. Thus, it looks like Cadillac had other than financial reasons for ending its sponsorship….

Ireland’s pro golfer Rory McIlroy–who plays on the PGA Tour and recently slipped from #1 to #3 in world rankings–said of this change of venues, “It’s quite ironic that we’re going to Mexico after being at Doral. We just jump over the wall.”

Was there a Dark Ages? Ask Philip Jenkins. [HT: JS]

Let me explain the issues here. In bygone decades, historians used to look at certain eras and apply that Dark Age title to them. The classic example was Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, and especially the years between, say, 450 and 750. Familiar evidence of settlement and building all but vanished from the archaeological record: cities and villas faded into disuse. Also, written historical sources dried up, suggesting that literacy shrunk. An organized “civilized” society had collapsed, to be replaced by a barbaric order. The classic stereotype is of a roofless, ruined, Roman villa, with some filthy peasants building a fire to stay warm amidst the fading Classical mosaics. And that was a Dark Age….

Move the film forward, though, and Dark Ages became very unfashionable indeed. In more modern interpretations, there were multiple reasons to avoid the term, and to some extent they reflected new political perceptions, chiefly of a left/progressive nature.

First, to speak of the collapse of civilization suggested a judgmental approach that was elitist and even pro-imperialist. Yes, perhaps imperial authority had withdrawn, but the life of ordinary people carried on much as before. Village life endured, and was even vastly improved by the absence of centralized states and tax collectors. The decline of written sources and literacy might have affected elites, but these were always a remote upper crust. Maybe the cities are no longer reading Virgil, but those egalitarian local communities are composing their own vernacular treasures. So why was that a decline or a deterioration?

Below the level of those vanished elites, there was a thriving world of villages and small towns, trade and crafts, so which Dark Age are you talking about? Who gave you the right to say that an era with a strong state – and a strong colonial/imperial order at that – was somehow superior to what followed? These ancient “civilizations” were absolutely based on slavery. So villas disappeared, so what? Isn’t that like bemoaning the collapse of modern-day gated communities and BMW dealerships?

Seeing things from the bottom up, (in that view), Dark Ages for the rich might actually be golden ages for the poor….

So, let me offer my own definition. We can look at an era and say that it is marked bysystematic societal collapse and cultural impoverishment, reflected in collapsing population levels, and acute declines in urbanization, technology, literacy, productivity, and communications. Or, for simplicity, we can use the D word.

Hence, with all due caveats, I believe that the term Dark Age can and should properly be used. In my next post, I will look at some new insights into the term, and the processes it describes.

Tiny house for you? 

Think you could live in a 300-square-foot house?

Even if you wanted to join the trendy “tiny house” movement, you probably couldn’t live in one in the suburbs, or even park it in your driveway or backyard, because it would violate zoning laws.

However, you can buy one here. South Elgin-based Titan Home Builders — which will be featured on “Tiny House Nation” on the FYI network July 9 — is being bombarded with construction orders for tiny houses.

Most customers want them as high-quality trailer homes, which they can travel with or put on their vacant lakefront property in Wisconsin, rather than as full-time suburban housing.

As the only tiny-house builder within 800 miles, Titan Home Builders owner Bob Clarizio said he’s been working in “blitzkrieg mode” ever since he decided in January to stop doing kitchen and bathroom remodels in the Palatine area and instead focus exclusively on building tiny houses.

“It’s absolutely incredible how fast this thing has grown,” said Clarizio, 30, of Gilberts.

The company receives about 20 inquiries a day and presold more than 15 homes in four months, totaling more than $500,000 in sales, Clarizio said.

People have waited in hourlong lines to view their model homes at green expos and home shows, and Clarizio is looking to expand his business fivefold to accommodate demand.

“Our plan is to change an industry,” he said. “We feel we’re creating a product for the common person.”

Catholic sentenced to a Baptist church for twelve sermons, Chris Graves:

CINCINNATI — Judge William Mallory enjoyshanding out creative sentences from his bench at the Hamilton County Courthouse.

But one he meted out Wednesday in his Municipal Court room wasn’t even his idea. Instead of sending Jake Strotman to jail on a misdemeanor attempted assault conviction, Mallory sent the 23-year-old Catholic to a Baptist church for the next 12 Sundays.

The sentence was Strotman’s idea.

To understand how Stroman got to court, rewind to a Saturday night, Jan. 23, just after the Cincinnati Cyclones beat the Fort Wayne Kometshere. Strotman, who lives downtown, had imbibed with his buddies at the hockey game and approached a band of Baptist street preachers who were, as he puts it, condemning him.

A curious and naturally jovial guy, Strotman said he “gave them my 2 cents’ worth.

The problem with those no touching signs?

(NEWSER) – The trouble with “no touching” signs: 4-year-olds can’t read them. Such was the situation in Ningbo, China, when on Sunday a boy of that age ducked under the rope encircling a sculpture of Zootopia character Nick Wilde and knocked it over, ruining the $15,000 Lego fox, reports Shanghaiist. It was crafted by a man identified only by his surname of Zhao, who the BBC reports built the piece over the course of three days and nights out of some 10,000 pieces. The “masterwork” hadn’t even been on display for a full hour before it was destroyed, reports What’s on Weibo. While Zhao reportedly wrote of being “depressed and frustrated” in the words of the South China Morning Post, he noted that he had accepted the family’s apology and was not looking for any compensation as the destruction wasn’t intentional.

Sheryl Sandberg’s shoes got some critique this week, by Emily Peck.

The rules for dressing for the office are completely different for men and women.

Perhaps no two people better exemplify the double standard than the most well-known executives working at Facebook: cofounder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, known for wearing the same grey T-shirt and jeans every day, and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, who is typically seen perched atop towering high heels.

Sandberg is arguably the most influential female executive in Corporate America, inspiring (or pissing off) many women with her book Lean In. Her frank opennessabout dealing with the sudden death of her husband last year was both heartbreaking and admirable. She’s incredibly successful by every measure.

Yet on Wednesday, while watching her talk to Recode’s Kara Swisher and Facebook Chief Technology Officer Michael Schroepfer, I caught myself staring at her shoes. Just look at them… I couldn’t help but marvel at the fact that while Zuckerberg slomps around in super-casual clothes every day, Sandberg is smartly decked out in full corporate power garb: towering, patent leather, red peep-toe heels.

Still, their case highlights the fact that even in the tech world, where the concept of dressing down was invented, and even at Facebook, a progressive company run by a guy in jeans, women and men don’t quite play by the same rules.

Women can’t just roll out of bed, toss on yesterday’s jeans, brush their teeth and do well at work. If they do, they’ll struggle in the professional world. One woman I spoke with recently, who works at a private equity firm, told me that she wasn’t taken seriously at work until she started wearing stilettos.

In fact, women who spend more time grooming — including efforts like putting on makeup — are promoted more often and make more money than their bare-faced colleagues, according to one recent study.