By Kelly Edmiston

The moment that I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, I knew that my entire life was going to change. I remember sitting by myself, on a bench, outside the sonogram room, clutching her picture to my growing belly. I was 20 weeks along as I sat there, paralyzed. I couldn’t even pick up the phone to call my husband. Because in that moment, it was just us. My heart was racing as I noticed both elation and dread rise to the surface. It was as if the two emotions held hands and took an elevator up from my uterus to my gut, into my chest and they lodged themselves in my throat. This gave new meaning to the term “lump in my throat” because that is literally what I experienced. Twenty weeks into her existence, as I sat alone on the bench, with her picture crammed against my belly, I wrote these words,

“For this moment, it’s just you and me. No one else in the world even knows that you exist like I do. It is quiet now and maybe, just for now, that is the way it is supposed to be.”

I knew two things in these intimate moments of honoring the existence of my daughter. The first one was her name. I knew that her name was going to be Ruth. And this is where the elation set in. My insides were dancing in ways I had never known before as I imagined Ruth shaping and loving and experiencing this world. And the second thing I knew was that everything was going to change. And this is where the dread came. The dread moved in and took up space in my throat because I knew that having a daughter would require change. I had served the previous decade in an evangelical church who held to a strictly complementarian theology. I had struggled, over the years, to find my place in it. I even obtained a Masters of Divinity, believing that somehow this would earn me a place at the table of input and influence. I believed wholeheartedly that if I were faithful enough, good enough, smart enough, talented enough, that the theology, (and therefore the practice), of the church would change. I believed they would adapt to a world where women run companies, host talk shows, and run for president. I was hopeful that eventually they would invite me to walk into the fullness of my gifts and affirm me as an equal partner in ministry. I had earned it, after all. Or so I thought.

Like many stories, mine did not end up that way. The theology didn’t change. But I did.

As I sat on the bench, with the picture of my daughter, I changed. Suddenly, I did not fit in this church system anymore. The stories I had formerly told myself in order to survive became empty, repetitive and annoying to me. I became more than a minister at a church who loved her ministry, I became Ruth’s protector and everything else paled in comparison to this. I decided, in that moment, that I was not going to allow her to grow up in a church that did not affirm her God-given giftedness. I determined that she would not receive negative, identity-forming messages from the spiritual authority in her life about her worth or her value. I prayed that she would never wish that she was a man so that she could be a full participant in the Kingdom of God. I never wanted her to loathe the feminine gifts that she would bring to the world. On the contrary, I vowed to myself that she would grow up seeing women leading, preaching and shaping theology on every level at her church. She won’t have to adjust to the voice of a woman speaking prophetically in a service because this will be her norm. I wanted to protect her from sexism, as far as it depended on me. I found myself adamant about this.

And then, I heard God say to me, from somewhere deep in my spirit and ever so tenderly,

This is how I feel about you, My Child. You want to hold her tight to your chest and I want to hold you tight to mine. You want to see her free and I want to see you free.

This was a moment of spiritual awakening for me. I had never before considered God’s desire for my flourishing in these areas. Until these quiet moments, the issues of women’s liberation or the “appropriate roles of women” in the church were external debates where there were good people on both sides. But on that day, and in those quiet moments, it moved internal, literally inside of me. A growing feminine soul who was 20 weeks old changed me forever. In growing and birthing my daughter, I also birthed my own feminine soul. And yea, she has changed everything.

By Ruth Tucker

In all my years of writing, I had never heard the term kill fee. Not until the news broke that porn star Stormy Daniels had been paid a large sum to prevent the story of her relationship with Donald Trump from appearing in the National Inquirer. Michael Cohen, the fixer, had worked it out. He killed the article. Only months later I submitted a solicited online article on Amy Carmichael to Christianity Today and I ended up with a measly $75 kill fee.

I had thought the piece was well-written and balanced (not as one-sided as is this short post), and I assumed it would be accepted with few changes. After all, through the years I’ve written many articles for CT, including cover stories. My editor, however, did not like my perspective. Finally, after a number of re-writes, I emailed the Editor in Chief. He wrote back: “I’m not sure what happened here–something weird.  You are an outstanding writer of history.” But the editor held her ground. He encouraged me to work with her which involved still more significant changes. I gave it my best shot—then the kill fee.

Amy Carmichael has long been the Evangelical Virgin Mary—and one of the most celebrated Protestant missionaries of all time. She served in India without home leave for more than 55 years. She founded the Dohnavur Fellowship, an independent mission (including orphanage), as well as the Sisters of the Common Life, a community of women who made vows of celibacy. In addition to all of that, she authored more than 30 books. Her most well-known—and most controversial—activity, however, was that of rescuing Indian girls from temple prostitution. This work was criticized by other missionaries and Indians alike who believed she was exaggerating the problem—and in some cases making it worse. Nevertheless, her stories inspired millions of Christians around the world.

She was born in Millisle, Northern Ireland in 1867. In her twenties, she testified to God’s call to become a missionary. She applied to join Hudson Taylor’s China Inland Mission, but was rejected. She then sought support from individuals associated with Keswick movement and at age 24 sailed for Japan as an independent missionary. With no preparation, she arrived as a stranger—no one to greet her or help her become oriented. Writing home, she complained that language learning was virtually impossible, that resident missionaries fought among themselves, and that the climate was “dreadful upon the brain.” After just 15 months, she relocated: “I simply say that I left Japan for rest and change, that when at Shanghai I believed the Lord told me to follow Him down to Ceylon [Sri Lanka], and so I came.”

Soon after that, she returned home. But in less than a year, she sailed for India, this time her work sponsored by the Church of England Zenana Mission, founded to evangelize women segregated in zenanas (female quarters). But she was not suited to work under the authority of others. She left the Anglicans and established her own mission with no oversight, organizational ties or interaction with resident missionaries. They were too lax in their work. They took vacations and joined together for celebrations. Not those at Dohnavar. Amy did not take furloughs, or holidays; neither would her workers. She made a vow of celibacy, so also her workers.

She also had strong opinions on straight-forward evangelism. Sarel, one of her faithful converts, wished to teach women to knit as a means to evangelism. The wool had been donated—no mission funds needed. But Amy was adamant. This is how other missionaries operated. The true gospel “needed no such frills.”

Amy’s own words and actions reflected her contempt for other mission work: “O to be delivered from half-hearted missionaries!” On one occasion while horseback riding, she saw ahead two Anglican bishops and “various old ladies.” They “parted with alacrity as we shot through, and we caught a fleeting glance at their gaze of astonishment and horror.” That she was amused by their horror is telling. Again, she writes: “Once I ran over a man. I did not mean to—he wouldn’t get out of the way and one can’t stop short in mid-gallop.” Although written in a style to entertain her readers back home, the account was condescending to the people—and culture—with whom she was working.

In fact, Amy seemed to purposely challenge cultural norms and at times to provoke violent incidents with Hindus. Husbands were head of the home—no marriage equality. But Amy, hoping to win another convert, wrote: “Will God move in [her] heart so that she will dare her husband’s fury and the knife he flashed before her eyes? If so, our bungalow will be in the very teeth of the storm, angry men all around it, and we inside, kept by the power of God.”

When she began her work in India, missionary candidates had long been trained to be conscious of cross-cultural ministry. Indeed, William Carey, a century earlier, made every effort to learn about native culture and present the faith in relevant terms. He preached against destructive practices but was humbled by his own struggle to learn language and customs, always conscious that he was an uninvited visitor to their sub-continent.

While Amy adopted traditional dress style, she scorned many Hindu cultural practices. On one occasion, while walking in the countryside with Sarel she noticed a stone cairn—a religious icon. Amy tells of her outrage: these stones in “honor of the false gods, in the midst of the true God’s beauty. . . . We knocked them over and down they crashed.” Such stories troubled other missionaries and short-term volunteers who worked with Amy.

The most noted supporters of Amy’s work who visited Dohnavur were members of the Neill family. Although the parents—both of whom were physicians—and their daughter stayed only a short time, the son Stephen remained for more than a year. He was Amy’s pride and joy, a brilliant Cambridge graduate (later to became an Anglican bishop, a missions professor and author). Yet the relationship soon soured and she dismissed him.

The precise reasons for his dismissal are unclear, but he had organized sport activities for boys outside the compound and disagreed with her on other issues. For him, the year-long relationship had taken a serious toll: “such darkness and suffering that it took me many years to recover . . . and the scars are still there.” Why didn’t he leave with his parents? Amy had a magnetic pull not entirely unlike a cult leader. Stephen remembered his first thoughts on meeting her—”an impression of power.” And he learned quickly that the “smallest disagreement” was not allowed. The wonderful stories about Dohnavur were, in his assessment, no more than “myth.”

Neill was certainly not alone in his criticisms. “There arose during the early years,” according to Elisabeth Elliot, “a fairly strong ‘Get-Amy-Carmichael-out-of-India’ movement among missionaries and Indian Christians.” But Amy felt she had no need to explain herself. She was absolutely convinced she was obeying God. “Our Master . . . demands obedience,” she wrote in Gold Cord. “Sometimes the Spirit of Jesus gave a direct command. . . . Sometimes an angel was sent, sometimes a vision. . . . In the end our God justifies His commands.”

Twenty years before she died in 1951, Amy was seriously injured in a fall and from that point on was bedridden. Yet she soldiered on, fully in charge of her mission to the very end. Today, a Google check of her name generates more than seventeen million results, a clear indication of her renown.

Kelly Edmiston is the Youth Pastor at the Vineyard Church of Sugar Land/Stafford. She has spent the last thirteen years in ministry to students and families in domestic and international contexts. Kelly has a passion to equip the church for works of ministry. She holds a Masters of Divinity from Abilene Christians University. Her areas of interest are feminist theology, practical theology and spiritual formation. Kelly and her husband Ben, enjoy “suburban life” with their three children. @kellyedmiston

Leaving My Church

I will never forget the year that my husband asked me about my Christmas bonus. I had been working at the same church for many years and had recently received a raise. I was the only woman on an all-male ministry staff. On this day my husband asked me if I would be getting the same Christmas bonus that I got every year. I laughed dismissively and said in passing, “Oh no. I doubt it. Look at the big raise I just got.” He looked at me sideways, “Really? You think that because now you are paid equal to others that you will no longer get the same bonus others get?” I paused. “Well, I don’t know.” I said. “I guess I could ask.”

This Christmas bonus conversation was a mile marker on a long journey that began many years earlier. The journey was one toward freedom, equality, and authenticity. Have you ever taken a journey without the resources you needed? Think about hiking Mount Kilimanjaro without hiking gear or running a marathon without athletic shoes. I didn’t have the internal resources that I needed for this journey. Don’t get me wrong. I never would have believed someone if they would have told me that, as a female minister, I was somehow less than, second class to the ministers around me who were men. I was a feminist. I had degrees. I believed wholeheartedly in the egalitarian nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the inclusion of all people gifted and called regardless of gender. And on top of all that, I reveled in my femininity. Or so I thought. All of this was on the surface of who I was, but deep down below the level of consciousness existed a deep and festering wound, a wound that had become numb. And you know what happens to wounds that have become numb, don’t you? When the sensation of pain goes away, it means death has arrived. And I was very near death—the death of my own feminine soul. Psychotherapist Ann Wilson calls this wound “the original sin of being born female.”

She writes, “To be born female in this culture means that you are born ‘tainted,’ that there is something intrinsically wrong with you that you can never change, that your birthright is one of innate inferiority.”2

Somewhere buried deep inside of me was the belief that I didn’t deserve to be paid as an equal and certainly didn’t deserve to get a Christmas bonus after the great “favor” I had received in getting a raise. Deep down, I believed that I was inferior.

Sue Monk Kidd calls these types of revelations “recognizing the feminine wound.”3 This conversation with my husband began the process of allowing this wound to fester. The numbness wore off, there was no scab to keep it hidden any longer, and it begin to stink.

When you are raised, as I was, in a white, patriarchal church, women work in the nursery, teach children, and organize potlucks. They are mostly absent from pulpits and are seldom welcome in shaping theology and church policy. In this, women are deprived of fitting their own unique experiences into a theological framework. “There is no room for you here,” we are told in thousands of overt and subtle ways. Furthermore, there is no concept of a divinely feminine God, and therefore, women are relegated to define themselves in relation to men and not in relation to the Divine.

Through this conversation about a Christmas bonus, I began waking up to this reality. I began to stare it straight in its ugly, festering, wounded face. And the more it hurt and stunk and seeped out everywhere, the more convinced I became that I would soon have to leave my church, a church where I had been raised and to which I had given my entire adult life. The reason is simple: I could not exist as an equal in a church who refused to acknowledge my equality.4

So I quit my job, moved my family, and have embarked on a completely new journey in a new tribe with a new job and new way of being in the world. My feminine wound is not healed entirely. I feel sure that will be a lifetime’s work. However, I have resources for the journey now that I lacked before.

And I can tell you that this year, in a new place, I will be expecting that Christmas bonus.

–

Imagine for a moment someone in church history you’d most like to spend time with. Ruth Tucker mentions her favorites. Let’s hear it from you.

Gotta love this kind of technological development for the benefit of others: exoskeletons:

LONDON (Reuters) – A man paralyzed from the shoulders down has been able to walk using a pioneering four-limb robotic system, or exoskeleton, that is commanded and controlled by signals from his brain.

With a ceiling-mounted harness for balance, the 28-year-old tetraplegic patient used a system of sensors implanted near his brain to send messages to move all four of his paralyzed limbs after a two-year-long trial of the whole-body exoskeleton.

The results, published in The Lancet Neurology journal on Thursday, bring doctors a step closer to one day being able to help paralyzed patients drive computers using brain signals alone, according to researchers who led the work.

But for now the exoskeleton is purely an experimental prototype and is “far from clinical application”, they added.

Good for Lauren Daigle!

When Hillsong UNITED‘s hit “Oceans (Where Feet May Fail)” reigned on Billboard‘s Hot Christian Songs chart for a record number of weeks, Lauren Daigle saw it and wished she could be a “part of something that shakes the earth like that song.”

Now the 28-year-old Louisiana native is living out that reality with her song “You Say” at No. 1 for 62 weeks now in the Christian category, days after announcing the Lauren Daigle World Tour with Johnnyswim, beginning in Australia next year and ending in Lafayette July 2020.

“I really pondered the journey of the song ‘Oceans,’ and I remember seeing the impact that song made on so many people. It was just so beautiful to me,” Daigle told Billboard after finding out that her song made chart history. “I didn’t know that would ever happen, and I had no idea that ‘You Say’ would be something that would parallel the life of ‘Oceans.'”

The song off her album, “Look Up Child,” is about identity.

In a video about the story behind the song, Daigle said “You Say” was the first song she wrote after her previous album, on the heels of her first Dove Awards Show.

“This song is just a reminder of identity. A reminder that, when I’m weak, He’s strong, so how do I change that and bring that into my everyday life?” she said. “When I feel inadequate, how is it that there’s always these moments where I feel like God just steps in and supersedes my inadequacies.”

Cormac McCarthy’s advice for writers;

The following are more of McCarthy’s words of wisdom, as told by Savage and Yeh.

• Use minimalism to achieve clarity. While you are writing, ask yourself: is it possible to preserve my original message without that punctuation mark, that word, that sentence, that paragraph or that section? Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.

• Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember. This theme and these points form the single thread that runs through your piece. The words, sentences, paragraphs and sections are the needlework that holds it together. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it.

• Limit each paragraph to a single message. A single sentence can be a paragraph. Each paragraph should explore that message by first asking a question and then progressing to an idea, and sometimes to an answer. It’s also perfectly fine to raise questions in a paragraph and leave them unanswered.

• Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.

• Don’t slow the reader down. Avoid footnotes because they break the flow of thoughts and send your eyes darting back and forth while your hands are turning pages or clicking on links. Try to avoid jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring.

• Don’t over-elaborate. Only use an adjective if it’s relevant. Your paper is not a dialogue with the readers’ potential questions, so don’t go overboard anticipating them. Don’t say the same thing in three different ways in any single section. Don’t say both ‘elucidate’ and ‘elaborate’. Just choose one, or you risk that your readers will give up.

• And don’t worry too much about readers who want to find a way to argue about every tangential point and list all possible qualifications for every statement. Just enjoy writing.

• With regard to grammar, spoken language and common sense are generally better guides for a first draft than rule books. It’s more important to be understood than it is to form a grammatically perfect sentence.

• Commas denote a pause in speaking. The phrase “In contrast” at the start of a sentence needs a comma to emphasize that the sentence is distinguished from the previous one, not to distinguish the first two words of the sentence from the rest of the sentence. Speak the sentence aloud to find pauses.

• Dashes should emphasize the clauses you consider most important — without using bold or italics — and not only for defining terms. (Parentheses can present clauses more quietly and gently than commas.) Don’t lean on semicolons as a crutch to join loosely linked ideas. This only encourages bad writing. You can occasionally use contractions such as isn’t, don’t, it’s and shouldn’t. Don’t be overly formal. And don’t use exclamation marks to call attention to the significance of a point. You could say ‘surprisingly’ or ‘intriguingly’ instead, but don’t overdo it. Use these words only once or twice per paper.

• Inject questions and less-formal language to break up tone and maintain a friendly feeling. Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn’t be too narrowly tied to a region. Similarly, use a personal tone because it can help to engage a reader. Impersonal, passive text doesn’t fool anyone into thinking you’re being objective: “Earth is the centre of this Solar System” isn’t any more objective or factual than “We are at the centre of our Solar System.”

• Choose concrete language and examples. If you must talk about arbitrary colours of an abstract sphere, it’s more gripping to speak of this sphere as a red balloon or a blue billiard ball.

• Avoid placing equations in the middle of sentences. Mathematics is not the same as English, and we shouldn’t pretend it is. To separate equations from text, you can use line breaks, white space, supplementary sections, intuitive notation and clear explanations of how to translate from assumptions to equations and back to results.

• When you think you’re done, read your work aloud to yourself or a friend. Find a good editor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work. Try to make life as easy as possible for your editing friends. Number pages and double space.

• After all this, send your work to the journal editors. Try not to think about the paper until the reviewers and editors come back with their own perspectives. When this happens, it’s often useful to heed Rudyard Kipling’s advice: “Trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” Change text where useful, and where not, politely explain why you’re keeping your original formulation.

• And don’t rant to editors about the Oxford comma, the correct usage of ‘significantly’ or the choice of ‘that’ versus ‘which’. Journals set their own rules for style and sections. You won’t get exceptions.

• Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can’t please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself. Your paper — you hope — is for posterity. Remember how you first read the papers that inspired you while you enjoy the process of writing your own.

Students, learning, sleep habits:

By Matthew Reisz
Twitter: @MatthewReiszTHE
Getting your beauty sleep can pay dividends in the examination room
It is widely recognised that lack of sleep can affect academic performance, but new research provides far more detail on the scale and nature of the link.

Jeffrey Grossman, professor of materials science and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, gave fitbits – wrist-worn devices that can track a person’s activity throughout the day and night – to 100 students in his introductory class on solid-state chemistry over a whole semester. He then tracked the data against their grades, based on nine quizzes, three mid-term examinations and a final examination. The results have now been published in a paper in the Science of Learning journal, written by postdoc Kana Okano, Professor Grossman and three others.

Along with a very striking link between the average amount of sleep a student got and their grades, the paper demonstrated a number of more surprising things. The first is that there was no point in just making an effort to sleep well the day before an exam. “It turns out this does not correlate at all with test performance,” said Professor Grossman. “Instead, it’s the sleep you get during the days when learning is happening that matters most.”

Equally unexpected was the fact that there seemed to be a sort of cut-off point around when students went to bed. For those who got, say, seven hours’ sleep, explained Professor Grossman, it made no difference to their performance whether they “go to bed at 10pm, or at 12am, or at 1am…but if you go to bed after 2am, your performance starts to go down even if you get the same seven hours. So, quantity isn’t everything.”

The research also shed light on something Professor Grossman has long noticed in his classes: women tended to get better grades than men. While earlier studies on gendered differences in academic performance have tended to focus on factors such as “self-discipline”, the new data, he said, showed that “if we correct for sleep, men and women do the same in class. So sleep could be the explanation for the gender difference in our class.” As a result of this finding, the paper suggests that, although sleep is important for everyone, “it may be especially important to encourage better sleep habits in male students”.

Speaking with squirrels:

IVCF at Iowa re-instated:

WASHINGTON – A vice president and other officers at the University of Iowa must pay out of their own pockets for discriminating against a religious student group. In InterVarsity v. University of Iowa, a federal court ruled that the University and its officers violated the law when they kicked InterVarsity off campus for asking its leaders to be Christian. A dozen other religious groups—including Sikhs, Muslims, and Latter-day Saints—were also kicked off campus for requiring their leaders to share their faith. But all secular groups and a few religious groups favored by the University got a pass. In a ruling last Friday, the court held that this discrimination was so egregious that the officers involved would be personally accountable for any money InterVarsity lost fighting to stay on campus. The court left open the possibility that the University’s president, Bruce Harreld, could also be found liable.

InterVarsity has been at the University for over 25 years. It welcomes all students as members, and only requires the students who lead its ministry to affirm its faith. In the past, the University has honored InterVarsity for its contributions to campus life. But in June 2018, the University claimed that, by requiring leaders to affirm their faith, InterVarsity was violating the University’s nondiscrimination policy. The University then limited InterVarsity’s access to campus, froze its bank account, shut down its website, and advertised that it was “defunct” for lack of student interest. As a result, InterVarsity suffered its sharpest membership decline in over twenty years. Friday’s ruling confirmed that the University’s actions violated the Constitution and ordered the University to respect InterVarsity’s right to select religious leaders going forward.

“We must have leaders who share our faith,” said Greg Jao, Director of External Relations at InterVarsity Christian Fellowship/USA. “No group—religious or secular—could survive with leaders who reject its values. We’re grateful the court has stopped the University’s religious discrimination, and we look forward to continuing our ministry on campus for years to come.”

InterVarsity USA is on 772 campuses nationwide. Its University of Iowa chapter hosts weekly Bible studies and monthly meetings for prayer, worship, and religious discussions on current issues. In upholding the group’s right to be on campus, the court noted that, just last January—in the related case of BLinC v. University of Iowa—it already warned the University against enforcing its policy unevenly. The court stated it “would never have expected the University to respond to that order by homing in on religious groups[]” like InterVarsity, while “carving out explicit exemptions for other groups. But here we are.” The court did “not know how a reasonable person could have concluded this was acceptable,” since it “plainly” doubled down on the exact same conduct the court had already held unlawful. In a hearing last week, the court described the University’s conduct as “ludicrous” and “incredibly baffling.”

“It’s too bad it took twice for the University to learn its lesson,” said Daniel Blomberg, senior counsel at Becket. “There was no excuse the first time for squashing students’ First Amendment rights. University officials nationwide should now take note that religious discrimination will hit them in the pocketbook.”

Our Cubs come to the end of the season before the playoffs begin. A disappointing season for us so we enter the offseason with hope that we can come back next season with a better showing.

Madeleine Kearns on plastics:

We’ve been thinking about it an awful lot since then. The mass production of plastic products began during the Second World War and has skyrocketed ever after. At this point, the industry is predicted to double in the next 20 years. While the benefits of plastics, from keeping food fresh to your toddler happy, are too obvious to note, its downsides — that there is currently more than 5 trillion plastic pieces weighing over 250,000 tons afloat at sea — deserve proper attention, too.

The trouble is that the West’s war on plastics has, of late been missing the mark. A couple of years ago, for instance, the vice president of the European Commission attacked “single-use plastics” — the kind that take “five seconds to produce, are used for five minutes, then take 500 years to break down again.” The problem he described has, in many ways, been replaced by similar problems.

Like paper. Did you know, for instance, that the life cycle of pulp and paper is the third largest cause of air, water, and land pollution in the United States, releasing over 100 million kilograms of toxins per annum? Or that around 10 percent more energy is required to create a paper bag than a plastic one, and around 4 percent more water? Paper is also made of trees, as you well know — which play a crucial role in absorbing carbon dioxide.

Despite this, Seattle banned plastic straws in July 2018, as have many corporate greens. Starbucks is phasing out plastic straws by 2020. MacDonald’s is moving to ban them in the U.K. and Ireland. Alaska Airlines is also ditching them. Will this change the weather and restore the climate to harmony? Not if the ban on single-use plastic bags are anything to go by.

When California banned single-use plastic bags in 2016, the state saw a reduction of 40 million pounds of plastic per year. However, a social scientist who researched that in 2019 found that it had inadvertently eliminated in-house recycling (i.e., using a plastic bag a second or third time for another purpose). That, in turn, resulted in the increase of trash bags by 12 million pounds. The study’s author added that to overlook this fact was to “overstate the regulation’s welfare gains.”

Similarly, after the Scottish government brought in a plastic-bag tax, it conducted a two-year investigation, published in 2005, comparing the life cycles of a single plastic bag with that of a paper bag. The conclusion was that a “paper bag has a more adverse impact than a plastic bag for most of the environmental issues considered.” A better response, evidently, would have been to try to encourage consumers to use plastic bags multiple times. In 2002, Ireland managed to do precisely that, reducing plastic-bag use per person per year from 328 to 21.

Emily McGowin’s take on women’s ordination is classical: what is assumed by Christ is healed, what is healed can be sacramental.

Many arguments are proffered against women’s ordination, some biblical, some theological, some historical, some even biological and psychological. Of course, there is far more to the arguments for and against women’s ordination than this short piece is able to address.

For now, due to space constraints, I choose to focus on one argument against women’s ordination that I find particularly theologically problematic: The assertion that women cannot represent Christ in the celebration of the Eucharist; the claim that women cannot act in persona Christi (“in the person of Christ”).

The argument, in short, goes something like this: Because women have female bodies and Jesus Christ has a male body, women cannot serve as a sacramental sign of Christ in the Eucharist.

To be more specific, women cannot act in persona Christi because their female bodies do not correspond to the body of the male Christ. In this view, female priests are not just not allowed; female priests are false signifiers. In their female persons, female priests lie, as it were, about the male person of Jesus Christ, who is presiding sacramentally at the altar.

And, as a result, women must not represent Christ at the Eucharistic feast.

Today, very often, though not always, this perspective is linked to a form gender essentialism gleaned from Pope John Paul II’s “theology of the body” and his recent popularizer, Christopher West.

In the theology of the body, male and female are seen as ontologically distinct, two parts of the one whole of the imago Dei. This “natural” gender division then serves as the foundation for structured gender roles.

When it comes to the function of the priesthood, then, the male sacramentally represents Christ while the female sacramentally represents the Church. Within this perspective, to have a woman priest is to usurp and upend a fundamental ontological reality of the world God has made.

But this brings us back to our christological and soteriological principle: “what is not assumed is not healed”. If women qua women are fundamentally incapable—and, according to some Christians, even ontologically incapable—of representing the male Jesus Christ in their female persons, then that calls into question whether their female persons can be redeemed by the male Jesus Christ.

But, of course, we know that isn’t the case.

All human beings—Jew and Greek, male and female, slave and free—are saved through the Incarnation of the Word (the life, death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ).

The particularities of Jesus’ person—a poor, Jewish, male, unmarried, 30-something adult living in first-century, Roman-occupied Israel—are the means by which all human persons are redeemed. And, by becoming one with Christ in our baptism, all become partakers of his Royal Priesthood.

If that’s the case, then all persons are potentially capable of serving as sacramental signs of their Savior.

Good for Satchel:

(CNN)When Satchel Smith’s father dropped him off for his shift at Homewood Suites in Beaumont, Texas, he expected the day to be like any other: He’d start at 3 p.m. and leave around 11 p.m. that night.

That was until Tropical Storm-turned-Depression Imelda unleashed torrential flooding that trapped him and 90 other guests inside the hotel.

For 32 hours, beginning Wednesday afternoon, the 21-year-old was the hotel’s only employee. But to the guests who relied on him for nearly two days, he’s a hero.

Angela Chandler, a hotel guest, praised Smith’s composure in a post on Facebook, where it’s been shared more than 13,000 times. While flooded roads kept his co-workers from getting to work, she wrote, Smith served guests alone.

For my fellow Twainiacs:

HANNIBAL (WGEM) — A signature of Samuel Clemens has been discovered in unlit passageway in the Mark Twain Cave, officials say.

Cave officials made the announcement on Tuesday and confirmed the signature has been verified for authenticity by scholars.

“We have been looking for a Clemens signature for decades,” said Linda Coleberd, whose family has owned the cave since 1923, “but with three miles of passageways, that means there are six miles of walls to examine. And with 250,000 signatures on the walls, looking for ‘Clemens’ has been like the proverbial needle in the haystack.” Prior to 1979, visitors to the cave frequently added their names using candle smoke, pencil, paint, or berry juice. Upon becoming a National Historic Landmark, signing the cave was no longer allowed.

Officials state that the Clemens signature was discovered during a special tour in July, but Coleberd wanted to wait on announcing the news until scholars had the opportunity to compare the found signature to Sam Clemens’s boyhood signature and those of his siblings.

Unfortunately, only “Clemens” was scrawled on the cave wall in pencil, although higher resolution photos revealed the name “Sam” had first been carved in the location.

The discovery occurred during the third quadrennial Clemens Conference, a scholarly symposium held by the Mark Twain Boyhood Home & Museum.

Scholars toured the cave on July 26th. Coleberd joined the last group with plans to veer off the tour with her friend and fellow signature-seeker, Cindy Lovell, who spotted the signature.

Thomas Cook, travel business, collapses…

LONDON (Reuters) – Thomas Cook (TCG.L), the world’s oldest travel firm, collapsed on Monday, stranding hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers around the globe and sparking the largest peacetime repatriation effort in British history.

The firm ran hotels, resorts and airlines for 19 million travelers a year in 16 countries, generating revenue in 2018 of 9.6 billion pounds ($12 billion). It currently has 600,000 people abroad, including more than 150,000 British citizens.

Thomas Cook employs 21,000 people and is the world’s oldest travel company, founded in 1841. The company has 1.7 billion pounds ($2.1 billion) of debt.

WHAT HAPPENS TO TOURISTS?

The British government has asked the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) to launch a repatriation program over the next two weeks, from Monday to Oct. 6, to bring Thomas Cook customers back to the UK.

“Due to the significant scale of the situation, some disruption is inevitable, but the Civil Aviation Authority will endeavor to get people home as close as possible to their planned dates,” it said.

A fleet of aircraft will be used to repatriate British citizens. In a small number of destinations, alternative commercial flights will be used.

About 50,000 tourists are stranded in Greece, mainly on islands, a Greek tourism ministry official told Reuters on Monday.

This is an image of what a Denisovan looked like (story below).

Well, maybe, perhaps, but not likely:

Researchers claim to have identified an anchor from St. Paul’s shipwreck on the island of Malta.

According to Christian tradition, the apostle was shipwrecked on the Mediterranean island during an ill-fated first-century journey to Rome.

“The ship struck a sandbar and ran aground. The bow stuck fast and would not move, and the stern was broken to pieces by the pounding of the surf,” according to the Acts of the Apostles. “Once safely on shore, we found out that the island was called Malta.”

Acts also notes that four anchors were dropped from the ship and subsequently cut loose, enabling the ship to run aground.

The Bible Archaeology Search and Exploration (BASE) Institute believes that it has identified evidence of the shipwreck, which occurred around 60 A.D.

In a post on the organization’s website, BASE says that four ancient anchors were recovered by local divers, adding that only one of the anchors has survived. “The fourth anchor was preserved as part of a deceased diver’s legacy to his widow,” BASE writes. The organization, which is led by Bob Cornuke, also believes that the shipwreck happened in St. Thomas Bay on Malta’s southern coast, as opposed to in what is now known as St. Paul’s Bay in the north of the island….

Critics, however, have said that there is a lack of evidence to support BASE’s theory, and a question mark still lingers over the wreck’s actual location. Another anchor marked with ancient inscriptions that was discovered off Salina on the northern coast of Malta in 2005, for example, has also been touted as possibly linked to St. Paul’s shipwreck.

It’s not persecution, it’s civility. Why? Because their freedom of speech is promised. It’s not a freedom of speech issue to prohibit someone from walking on to Soldier Field during a game, it’s not a freedom of speech issue to ban someone from using a loud speak to evangelize in an air plane or a car. There are plenty of places to evangelize, go there.

Last April, four Wheaton College students were distributing evangelistic literature in Chicago’s Millennium Park.  They were doing so in an area of the park that does not allow “the making of speeches and passing out of written communications.”  When a security guard told them to stop passing-out the literature, one of them began “open-air” preaching.  The students are now suing the city of Chicago because they believe that the city violated their freedom of speech and free exercise of religion.  Among other things, they want to be awarded “damages for violation” of their “constitutional and statutory rights and for the injuries and unlawful burdens it has incurred.”

Mauck & Baker, a Chicago law firm specializing in religious freedom, is defending the students.  Partner Richard Baker is a 1977 Wheaton College graduate.

Here is a Chicago Tribune story on the case.

I don’t know who is legally correct in this case. I actually appreciate designated parts of public parks that are free of political speeches, literature distribution, and proselytizing of all kinds.  On the other hand, as an evangelical Christian I am glad to see these young men sharing their faith.  I hope they continue to do so and continue to trust God to open up opportunities for them.

This case has started me thinking about the relationship between Christian persecution and American “rights.”  How should Christians balance their rights as citizens with Bible verses that encourage them to rejoice in suffering and persecution?  It seems that the Bible speaks about persecution and suffering as a spiritual virtue, rather than something that should be opposed in a court of law.  Doesn’t suffering lead us toward hope and a deeper understanding of our faith and reliance upon God?  When we are persecuted for Christ should we expect the government to provide us with damages for our emotional distress?

A powerful, a tragic, a sad, a joyous post about leaving complementarianism.

I could write a whole separate letter about the effects of complementarian theology on my marriage and our process towards spiritual health and mutuality. I briefly mentioned some of the challenges and frustrations my husband and I experienced in trying to live out what we understood to be our “roles”, however, I want to share a little more about what our process has looked like, as well as what some of my friends have learned in their marriages.

My husband and I have come to realize that in many ways, at our healthiest, we already function as mutualists. Even our decision to attend a new church came after months of talking, praying and waiting for God to unite us in one direction. Conflict arises, most often, when we force ourselves into the roles we’ve been taught to play. He feels the crushing weight of total responsibility and I feel stripped of my agency.

Another woman shared with me that she and her husband have found new freedom and health in their marriage by stepping outside the rigid confines of marriage roles. Having felt a shared call into ministry, she waited years for him to cast the vision and initiate the process. However, this “submissive” waiting, was actually putting a weight on her husband that wasn’t his alone to bear. God has equipped her to take an active and at times leading role in pursuing their calling. Her husband affirms and appreciates her leadership, and they are a team.

One other couple in our group has found healing and affirmation after leaving the staff of a college ministry, largely due to painful and unhealthy gender dynamics and teachings. While she had been advocating for women on staff for several years, they were able to find like minded brothers and sisters through our group. He is a student at a complementarian seminary, where he recently began focusing his research on the biblical theology of women.

While these stories are hopeful and God has protected our marriages, this process has been costly. Some of us have left churches, lost close friendships, and felt the very foundation of our faith shaken. Yet, there is no other path forward. This isn’t just a cause we’ve decided to take up. I really believe this is a fight for faithfulness to Christ.

Where have all the birds gone?

WASHINGTON (AP) — North America’s skies are lonelier and quieter as nearly 3 billion fewer wild birds soar in the air than in 1970, a comprehensive study shows.

The new study focuses on the drop in sheer numbers of birds, not extinctions. The bird population in the United States and Canada was probably around 10.1 billion nearly half a century ago and has fallen 29% to about 7.2 billion birds, according to a study in Thursday’s journal Science.

“People need to pay attention to the birds around them because they are slowly disappearing,” said study lead author Kenneth Rosenberg, a Cornell University conservation scientist. “One of the scary things about the results is that it is happening right under our eyes. We might not even notice it until it’s too late.”

Rosenberg and colleagues projected population data using weather radar, 13 different bird surveys going back to 1970 and computer modeling to come up with trends for 529 species of North American birds. That’s not all species, but more than three-quarters of them and most of the missed species are quite rare, Rosenberg said.

Using weather radar data, which captures flocks of migrating birds, is a new method, he said.

“This is a landmark paper. It’s put numbers to everyone’s fears about what’s going on,” said Joel Cracraft, curator-in-charge for ornithology of the American Museum of Natural History, who wasn’t part of the study.

“It’s even more stark than what many of us might have guessed,” Cracraft said.

Every year University of Connecticut’s Margaret Rubega, the state ornithologist, gets calls from people noticing fewer birds. And this study, which she wasn’t part of, highlights an important problem, she said.

“If you came out of your house one morning and noticed that a third of all the houses in your neighborhood were empty, you’d rightly conclude that something threatening was going on,” Rubega said in an email. “3 billion of our neighbors, the ones who eat the bugs that destroy our food plants and carry diseases like equine encephalitis, are gone. I think we all ought to think that’s threatening.”

Some of the most common and recognizable birds are taking the biggest hits, even though they are not near disappearing yet, Rosenberg said.

A young female Denisovan:

Denisovans are a mysterious group of our ancient relatives, unknown until a decade ago, who lived alongside Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. The hominin species is thought to have ranged from Siberia to Indonesia, and many places in between (although some researchers believe the Denisovans could actually be multiple species or groups). When these curious human cousins vanished, they left behind surviving bits of their DNA in living Melanesian and East Asian people, but not much else. So far, the only known Denisovan fossils include just a few teeth, a finger bone and a small fragment from a Russian cave, and a partial jaw found on the Tibetan Plateau.

Yet today it’s possible to stare into a Denisovan face for the first time thanks to a striking reconstruction created by some genetic detective work. Scientists used patterns of gene expression mined from ancient Denisovan DNA, which was extracted from a 100,000-year-old pinkie finger, to reconstruct the physical characteristics of a Denisovan face and skull—even though such a fossil has never been found.

Geneticist Liran Carmel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem said other groups have worked to map anatomical features from the information hidden in our DNA. But his team took a different approach, outlined in a study published today in Cell.

“We didn’t rely on the DNA sequence per se,” Carmel says. ”But from the sequence we used a technique which allows you to reconstruct gene activity patterns in these ancient individuals so we can compare the way the genes work in the different human groups.”

Solid gold:

Police are trying to recover a toilet made entirely from 18-carat-gold said to be worth around $6 million that was stolen Saturday morning from Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire, England, the stately home where former prime minister Winston Churchill was born.

The fully functioning toilet was installed as part of an exhibition by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan titled “Victory is Not an Option,” which only opened to the public on Thursday. The palace remained shut for the rest of the day Saturday, a spokesperson said on Twitter.

Solid gold toilet to land in English stately home

Dominic Hare, CEO of Blenheim Palace, said that the artwork, titled “America,” is valued at around $6 million.

Thames Valley Police received a report of the toilet’s theft at 4:57 a.m. Saturday morning. The thieves left the scene at about 4:50 a.m., according to a statement posted online. A 66-year-old man has been arrested in connection with the theft.

Detective Inspector Jess Milne said in the statement: “Due to the toilet being plumbed in to the building, this has caused significant damage and flooding,” adding, “We believe a group offenders used at least two vehicles during the offense.”

“The artwork has not been recovered at this time but we are conducting a thorough investigation to find it and bring those responsible to justice,” Milne continued, appealing for any potential witnesses to contact police.

Lemon water’s good for you.

Angela:

Sometimes giving advice to my teenage daughters feels like shouting into
the wind.

Did you know that you’d be able to concentrate better if you got more sleep?

If you put your keys in the same place every day, you’d be less likely to lose them!

Try making a to-do list at the start of the weekend. It will help you manage your time.

Shouting into the wind is, of course, part of the job description for parents, teachers, and anyone else who genuinely cares for the well-being of young people. After all, there are some things we know that they don’t.

But very often, the advice we’re dispensing is nothing new. My daughters
have already been told countless times—by me, their dad, and who knows who else—that they should go to bed earlier, establish routines to stay organized, and plan ahead.

In other words, many young people know what’s best, yet fail to act accordingly.

A few years ago, after working by my side on many failed interventions, a brilliant graduate student named Lauren Eskreis-Winkler came up with an entirely different idea: “What if, instead of telling kids what to do, we asked them to give advice to younger students?”

Lauren soon set to work on interventions that were much simpler than anything we’d done before. When young people are gently prompted to give advice to others, their own motivation and confidence improve.

In one recent study, Lauren and her collaborators found that high school students who were asked to give younger peers advice on study strategies
and other ways to succeed academically—an activity that took only eight minutes—improved their own report card grades that marking period.