We are praying for Pope Francis, and I hope you are too.

Wonderful post by Ann Voskamp on loving one another. Wonderful. Thanks Ann.

Ed Cyzewski’s pushback on being “biblical”: “There is a holy grail that evangelical Christians have been seeking. It’s a quest that has consumed much time and left many battered believers by the side of the road. I’ve sacrificed my share of time to this pursuit over the years. This is the holy and righteous pursuit of being the most “biblical.” In the evangelical world, if you aren’t “biblical,” then you areclearly influenced by your sinful desires or our evil culture. While “biblical” could technically mean “influenced by the Bible,” it has become a code word for “possessing the one and only way to interpret the Bible on a particular issue.” In our zeal to follow the teachings of scripture, we have sought a definitive, once and for all time way to read a book that has always been a work in progress. In one sense, we all want to be guided and informed by the Bible. However, the pursuit of being biblical more often turns into: “I know God’s definitive and authoritative perspective, you better agree with me, or you’re going to be unbiblical.” If I don’t agree with the “biblical” perspective being presented, then I’ve rejected God’s truth….  I don’t mean to be flip about the Bible. I read it every day. The main point here is that the Bible alone is not going to get the job done apart from the Holy Spirit in our lives. Jesus trusted the Holy Spirit to lead us into all truth, to keep us after he had gone. And while we should not neglect the teachings of scripture, an air tight system of theology does not replace the work of the Spirit among us. There is no “biblical” way of doing things. There is only a biblically informed and Spirit-led way of doing things. And that information and leading may evolve and shift over time.”

Jimmy Mellado to Compassion International.

Good story about Chris Tomlin.

From Adam A. Kline: “Do we dare?  Do I dare treat Easter like it’s a party?  Do I dare party like it’s 33 A.D.?  Like I know we are living in a time that is After. Death.  Easter Sunday should be a party, or maybe to put it another way, it’s already a party.  The only question is, am I a part of it?  Resurrection Sunday should be the biggest party of the year!  We should prepare and share the finest food and expect the greatest celebration; but we must not forget that even the most anticipated of Superbowl parties, even the most memorable of Wedding receptions, require a great deal of preparation; maybe even an entire season of it.  Resurrection is the single most climactic event in God’s story.  The Resurrection was what God’s story was building toward all along and it is the only reason the story continues today.  Easter Sunday is the reason we remember, reenact and experience the truth that He lives, to quicken all mankind.  Resurrection is the greatest of gifts at the end of a forty-day season of preparation and initiation.  Resurrection Sunday is the reason for it all, as the Apostle Paul declared, “Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.  For since death came through a man, the resurrection of the dead comes also through a man” (1 Corinthians 15:20-21). I desire to be rambunctious for the Resurrection!  It is my prayer that my excitement for the Superbowl will pale in comparison to my anticipation of Easter Sunday.”

22 rules for storytelling.

Power naps are in! Ol’ Tom Edison’d be unsurprised, eh? “ASBURY PARK, N.J. — To help its 20 employees in the office fight through a wave of afternoon fatigue, Nationwide Planning Associates Inc. remodeled an unused closet with a recliner, a fountain and a bamboo rug. Nap time these days isn’t just for preschoolers. Employees of the Paramus, N.J., investment firm sign up for 20-minute blocks of restorative time twice a week and emerge energized, as if hitting the restart button. “I don’t even drink coffee anymore because (after a nap) you don’t need to,” said James Colleary, 27, a compliance principal who helped convince management that a nap room would be worth the investment. “If you take only 20 minutes, you actually feel alert (when you wake up). You feel refreshed.” Confession time: I’m a 10-minute napper; I lean my head against my hand and doze for ten minutes, and I awake ready to go.

Our hometown made it, woot woot!

Meanderings in the News

Bloomberg’s graph about food costs… on the decline across the board:

David Brooks on Jewish Orthodoxy: “Nationwide, only 21 percent of non-Orthodox Jews between the ages of 18 and 29 are married. But an astounding 71 percent of Orthodox Jews are married at that age. And they are having four and five kids per couple. In the New York City area, for example, the Orthodox make up 32 percent of Jews over all. But the Orthodox make up 61 percent of Jewish children. Because the Orthodox are so fertile, in a few years, they will be the dominant group in New York Jewry.”

See who profits from war: “The business of war is profitable. In 2011, the 100 largest contractors sold $410 billion in arms and military services. Just 10 of those companies sold over $208 billion. Based on a list of the top 100 arms-producing and military services companies in 2011 compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), 24/7 Wall St. reviewed the 10 companies with the most military sales worldwide. These companies have benefited tremendously from the growth in military spending in the U.S., which by far has the largest military budget in the world. In 2000, the U.S. defense budget was approximately $312 billion. By 2011, the figure had grown to $712 billion. Arm sales grew alongside general defense spending growth. SIPRI noted that between 2002 and 2011, arms sales among the top 100 companies grew by 51%.

More on Neanderthal demise: “A study of Neanderthal skulls suggests that they became extinct because they had larger eyes than our species. As a result, more of their brains were devoted to seeing in the long, dark nights in Europe, at the expense of high-level processing. By contrast, the larger frontal brain regions of Homo sapiens led to the fashioning of warmer clothes and the development larger social networks.”

This will be cool: “I’m quite literally trying my hand at Leap Motion, the fascinating new motion controller peripheral for PC and Mac computers. Leap ultimately hopes to integrate its technology into computers and tablets. Consumers can get their own hands on, or more accurately above, the Leap Motion Controller that makes all this possible on May 13, when pre-orders ship. (Best Buy is also accepting pre-“orders.) South by Southwest represents the first public showing of the technology. As you hold one or both hands above the controller it senses and tracks your slightest movement or jitter, the company says. The controller can track hands that are about two feet above it or to the side, effectively creating an invisible virtual cone of detection.”

George Weigel sees a rising “evangelical Catholicism”: “Besides Father Robert Barron, which Catholic leaders in the post-Vatican II church are models of preaching for cultural change? Certainly Benedict XVI, who’s arguably the greatest papal preacher since the reign, over 14 centuries ago, of Pope Gregory the Great. Father William Joensen at Loras College in Iowa is another master-preacher. The recently named Cardinal James Harvey is a superb preacher. I could name many more. But let’s also look back at the Church Fathers, whose expository preaching is a model for Catholic homilists today, and let’s not forget that preaching is a form of teaching. Contemporary Catholic liturgists turn pale and start making choking noises when they hear this, and so do many preaching gurus; but that’s too bad. John Chrysostom didn’t tell jokes and funny anecdotes in his homilies: He unpacked the Scriptures through the tradition of the Church. And that’s what Catholic preaching must do more of today. In Evangelical Catholicism, I suggest that deacons, priests, and bishops prepare their homilies with a good Biblical commentary (often Protestant in origin) in one hand, and the Catechism of the Catholic Church in the other, always keeping in mind what they’ve read from the Fathers that day in the Office of Reading in the Liturgy of the Hours, the breviary.”

Samuel G. Freedman, on the shift at Focus on the Family: “COLORADO SPRINGS — One Wednesday afternoon last month, Jim Daly drove a couple of miles from his office at Focus on the Family to a classroom building on the University of Colorado’s local campus. Short as the trip was, it carried Mr. Daly beyond his theological and political comfort zone. Such disorientation was the whole point. As the president and chief executive of Focus on the Family, Mr. Daly oversees a Christian ministry with an annual budget of $98 million, a paid staff of 655 and a fervently conservative view of the Bible and American social issues. Seated beside a philosophy professor at the university, Mr. Daly faced an audience of about 125 students and faculty members, some carrying protest signs: “Focus Isn’t My Family,” “No H8,” “Lez Be Honest Who Am I Hurting by Loving a Girl.” For the next hour, through alternating moments of contrition and contention, Mr. Daly continued what has been the signal initiative of his term at the evangelical group: transforming an organization associated with the divisive strife of the culture wars into one that invites civil dialogue with its religious and ideological foes.”

MOOCs: “But what MOOCs may not do is lower the costs of higher ed.  In fact, an argument could be made the the rise of the MOOCs will put new cost pressures on institutions, introducing new expenses over and beyond the direct cost of producing and delivering a MOOC.  These additional costs incurred by the MOOC movement may show up in higher tuition prices. How could this be?  Doesn’t the emergence of free courses provide new opportunities for both individual learners and institutions to lower the acquisition costs of learning? Won’t colleges and universities be able to reduce the costs of offering some courses by utilizing the content and materials from a free MOOC, paying for teaching assistants and exams rather than professors?   How could something that is free end up costing us more? The key to understanding why individual MOOCs may eventually drive up costs is to grasp how innovations in one area can raise expectations, and standards, across an entire system.”

John Dickerson, on Dan Cathy’s most recent friendship: “Scripture calls believers the “body of Christ.” Meaning, we are today his physical presence in the world. If we all follow Cathy’s example, perhaps the body of Christ will behave as Christ himself would behave.”

Speaking of which, see this? Send up a Thank you God. “Just after 11 last Sunday morning at Old First Reformed Church in Brooklyn, the Rev. Dr. Daniel Meeter is starting the Sunday service as he always does. He runs through the opening salutation and the collect for the day, and then he welcomes everyone to church as he always does, introducing Old First “as a community of Jesus in Park Slope where we welcome people of every race, ethnicity and orientation to love God and love our neighbors as ourselves.” The congregation—some eighty strong on this sunny but cold February morning—is the usual mix of Park Slope churchgoing types: a smattering of journalists, a few artists, a handful of old ladies, some rambunctious children. But in the back row of the tin-ceilinged, wood-floored hall, there’s a visitor. It is Megan Phelps-Roper’s first time not only at Old First but also at any church not called Westboro Baptist. Yes, that Westboro Baptist, the Topeka, Kansas, congregation that has become famous (or infamous, depending on your viewpoint) for its strident views on sin (and the abundance of it in modern America), salvation (and the prospective lack of it), and sexuality (we’re bad, in far more colorful terms). For nearly all of her twenty-seven years, Megan believed it: believed what her grandfather Fred Phelps preached from the pulpit; believed what her dad Brent and her mom Shirley taught during the family’s daily Bible studies; believed (mostly) what it said on those signs that have made Westboro disproportionately influential in American life—“God hates fags”; “God hates your idols”; “God hates America.” Megan was the one who pioneered the use of social media at Westboro, becoming the first in her family to go on Twitter. Effervescent and effusive, she gave hundreds of interviews, charming journalists from all over the world. Organized and proactive, she, for a time, even had responsibility for keeping track of the congregation’s protest schedule. She was such a Westboro fixture that the Kansas City Star touted her—improbably, as it turns out, because a woman could never have such a role at the church—as a future leader of the congregation. Then, in November, she left.”

Eleanor Barkhorn, marriage is not a 24/7 sleepover, contrasting views of marriage.

Laura Lynn Brown’s experience of forgiveness: “He said he knew how vigilant I was over the comics and that he hoped I wasn’t the one who had missed this . . . Well, I was. And I had marked my initials on the proof, so if he had asked for that page, he had proof that it was me. I confessed and said, “I hang my head in shame.” He did a remarkable thing. He reminded me that, while we might not personally agree with a particular in-house style rule, it is still our job to enforce it. And he did not mention it to the two layers of supervision between him and me. There are many ways this man led by example, some clear to everyone in the newsroom with eyes to see, some known only to himself and whoever sat across the desk from him in a given moment. For me, it was a palpable sense of what it means to be forgiven and told,  “Go and sin no more.” That was grace, the kind that made me grateful to be treated with care I did not deserve, and that only made me more determined to do my job well, which is to say obediently and with joy.”

Terry Maples, ABP News: “Some Baptists over the past 30 years have made significant progress in calling out and embracing the gifts of women. This is coming, but we have a long way to go. Many Baptist congregations continue to exclude women from serving as deacons or staff ministers. How Baptists address the issue of women in ministry will greatly impact our future, and I believe it will likely, for some, determine our relevance. I call on my sisters and brothers to engage your congregations in conversation. Without sound theological education, I fear our churches will remain stuck with important practices unexamined. More importantly, decision-making will be driven by cultural expectations of women’s roles instead of thoughtful, informed theology.”

Biblical movies around the corner, from Nicola Menzie: “With at least 10 major movie productions based on biblical figures and accounts potentially headed for the big screen, it seems Hollywood is turning to Scripture more and more for inspiration. While certainly not all of the films scheduled for release in the next year or so are guaranteed to be hits with Christian viewers, most of the projects are attached to big Hollywood names and will likely attract an audience either way. Here’s a list of Bible-inspired movies being considered for a theatrical release…”

Slavery laws in the Old Testament and some development.

Austin Holmes and the Gospel Project.

Ted reviews Karen.

Meanderings in the News

Maia Szalavitz: “Are you reading this when you should be working?  If so, then it may be because your brain signaled that continuing to work was not worth the cost in tedium of forcing yourself to stay on task. New research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences offers insight into how people decide when to keep going and when to take a break.  That decision apparently hinges on a specific signal that at its peak— say, when your muscles are screaming that you can’t do another rep or your brain refuses to focus on the page — prompts you to quit. And when your body and brain are refreshed and ready to go again, the signal quiets down and gets out of your way.”

Kathryn Jean Lopez on Michelle Obama’s tweet about Beyonce: “I don’t want to linger on this, but last night’s Super Bowl half-time show was ridiculous — and gratuitously so. Watching Twitter, it was really no surprise that men made comments about stripper poles and putting dollar bills through their TV sets, was it? Why can’t we have a national entertainment moment that does not include a mother gyrating in a black teddy? The priceless moment was Destiny’s Child reuniting to ask that someone “put a ring on it.” As I mentioned on Twitter last night, perhaps that case might be best made in another outfit, perhaps without the crotch grabbing. It seems quite disappointing that Michelle Obama would feel the need to tweet about how “proud” she is of Beyoncé. The woman is talented, has a beautiful voice, and could be a role model. And she is on some levels — on others she is an example of cultural surrender, rather than leadership.”

Old pictures of Presidents: “The first photograph of a sitting United States president was taken of William Henry Harrison on March 4, 1841. The new executive had just delivered his inaugural speech — the outdoor address now most remembered (wrongly) for giving him the pneumonia that would kill him — and he paused, afterward, to pose for a portrait using the new technology of the daguerrotype. That photograph, much like its subject, had an unexpectedly short tenure. Harrison’s inaugural portrait has since been lost to history — meaning that the oldest surviving photograph we have of an American president depicts a chief executive after his presidency. There are a couple candidates for “oldest.” But they are, regardless, depictions of John Quincy Adams, the sixth president, in office from 1825-1829.  One is this, a sixth-plate daguerrotype made of the ex-president at the age of 76…” [see link].

Quite the non-news: “On January 31, France’s minister of women’s rights made if officially impossible to arrest a woman for wearing pants in Paris, the Telegraph reports. Previously, the law required women to ask police for special permission to “dress as men.” If fashionable French ladies ignored this rule, they risked being taken into custody. The rule originally came into being just after the French Revolution, in the early 19th century. As anyone who watched Les Miserables will recall, rebellious ladies often donned pants in defiance of the bourgeoisie. This anti pants-wearing movement was dubbed sans-culottes, or without the knee-breeches (“cullottes”) of the high class. In 1892, the legislation changed to allow women to wear pants only if she “is holding a bicycle handlebar or the reins of a horse.” That latest ordinance stayed in place until today, despite multiple attempts to get rid of it. Officials said the unenforced rule as not a problem so they didn’t want to waste time amending “legal archaeology.”

Lindsay Abrams on vegetarianism: “IMPLICATIONS: The researchers believe that the lowered blood pressure and cholesterol in vegetarians explains most of their reduced risk. They showed, above else, that diet is important in protecting against heart disease. Just as it’s possible to do vegetarianism wrong (regardless of what Congress says, pizza is not a vegetable), incorporating more vegetables, whole grains, nuts, and legumes into any diet will probably be associated with health benefits, too.”

Miriam: “Hello, my name is Miriam.  For those of you who know me, you know that I recently left my husband and the charedi (ultra-orthodox Jewish) community of Stamford Hill, UK.  In the process I lost the majority of my extensive and valuable book collection. Those books meant a lot to me, not only because many of them were quite valuable, but they were also a reflection of my journey and the person I’ve become over the past few years.”

Alessandro Speciale: “VATICAN CITY (RNS) The Vatican’s culture ministry warned on Thursday (Jan. 31) that the Catholic Church risks losing future generations if it doesn’t learn how to understand young people, their language and their culture. The Pontifical Council for Culture invited sociologists, web experts and theologians to a three-day, closed-door event on Feb. 6-9 aimed at studying “emerging youth cultures.” According to a working paper released ahead of the meeting, the church risks “offering answers to questions that are not there” if it doesn’t learn “the cultural reality of young people.”

Eric Jaffe: “After a few more experiments the researchers formulated a theory about what’s happening here. They don’t think city life actually depletes one’s powers of attention. (That’s because, on one test of straight working memory, city Himba scored higher than rural Himba.) Instead, they suspect that city attention only becomes engaged when people cross paths with something especially worthy of notice. (On other tests, city Himba did show the same focus as rural Himba when they looked at highly engaging stimuli, like faces.) So a quick summary, for those readers on the verge of losing focus: the brains of people in remote places seem ready to focus on the task at hand, while the brains of their urban counterparts seem prepared to explore the ever-changing conditions of city life. Certainly explains why some country folk find the city overwhelming, and some city folk find the country a little dull. Nothing personal — strictly neural.”

Why Mary Ingalls (in Laura Ingalls Wilder) went blind.

Essie Mae Washington, daughter of Strom Thurmond. “COLUMBIA, S.C. — Essie Mae Washington-Williams, the mixed-race daughter of onetime segregationist senator Strom Thurmond who kept her parentage secret for more than 70 years, has died. She was 87.”

Meanderings in Sports

In the mail? Yougottabekiddin’me! And she accepted it?!

Shauna Niequist’s new policy: “Why am I telling you this? Because I think I’m not alone. It doesn’t matter if you work or don’t, or have little kids or don’t, or travel or don’t.  So many of us, it seems, are really, really tired of the hustle, and the next right thing is to slow down, to go back to the beginning, to stop.  I’m adopting a ruthless anti-frantic policy. I’m done with frantic. The new baseline for me: will saying yes to this require me to live in a frantic way?  I’m saying no more often than I’m saying yes. I’m asking hard questions about why I’ve kept myself so busy all these years. The space and silence I’m creating is sometimes beautiful and sometimes terrifying.  Sometimes I feel like I’m in a cartoon airplane when the engine gets cut and the plane hovers for a few long seconds before starting to fall. But then sometimes I feel so strongly like for the first time in a long time, I’m listening to the right voices. I’m remaking my way of living from the inside out.  Publishing is all about striking while the iron’s hot. But sometimes you have to trust that the iron will still be hot later, and that there’s more to life than that iron. Sometimes you have to trust that life is long for most of us, and that there will be other irons.  My inbox is a disaster. The house is messier these days. That’s how it’s going to be for a while. I’m not powering my life with the white-knuckled, keyed-up buzz of efficiency and multi-tasking anymore. The word that rings in my mind is anti-frantic.  Sleep. Slow.  Present with my kids.  Present to my own life.  Anti-frantic.”

Post of the week (that I saw this week).

Statement of the week, from Donald Driver, retired wide receiver for the Packers: “Someone’s going to always tell my kids that their dad was a great football player. But no one will be able to tell my kids that their dad was a great dad and a great husband, so I have to be able to show them that. And that’s what the next chapter of my career is going to be.” (HT: JD)

Robert Crosby’s favorite Dorothy Sayers quotation: The Quote: “The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore – on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him ‘meek and mile,’ and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.”

Doug Ponder: “If you are a Christian, you will drink wine with Jesus one day. And you will like it. Indeed, Jesus promised that he would drink wine with his followers in his Father’s kingdom (Matt. 26:29). He was speaking about “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rev. 19:7-9), a heavenly celebration for the bride of Christ akin to a reception following a wedding. And like every good Jewish wedding in Jesus’ day (John 2:1-11), the marriage supper of the Lamb will involve wine—lots and lots of wine—just as God has promised (Isaiah 25:6-7;  Jeremiah 31:11-13). Yet that truth is troubling to some Christians. The mention of alcohol makes them nervous, upset, or angry. So instead of teaching about self-control, some teach that Christians cannot drink alcohol without sinning. For example, I grew up in a church that formally prohibited its members from drinking alcohol in its constitution and bylaws. This church was not an exception, either. There are many Christian organizations that forbid their members from drinking altogether. But if you think about it, this means that Jesus wouldn’t be allowed to host the marriage supper of the Lamb in any of these places. Doesn’t this seem odd? Shouldn’t we be concerned if we have rules that mean Jesus isn’t allowed? Here’s the thing. Alcohol shouldn’t be an issue for Christians, but we make it an issue in one of two ways: either (1) we ignore the Bible’s teachings about the good gift of alcohol, or (2) we ignore the Bible’s warnings about the real dangers of alcohol. Both of these groups of people get alcohol very wrong.”

Alister Chapman, Why I am still an evangelical, author of a fine book on John Stott: “Giving up on evangelicalism would seem easier. There are other Christian traditions I could join. But I think that evangelicals have Christianity as right as anyone, with their emphasis on the need for a personal response to a holy God who loves and their eagerness to reach and serve others. Because I believe that Christianity is true, these two driving impulses are as important as anything for me. Being an evangelical is grounded in convictions about God more than culture. So I am still an evangelical, and plan on remaining one. But it would make me happy if more people thought of evangelicals with nuance and charity — in contrast to those British people who lumped all Americans together with George W. Bush.”

Where did that Tabernacle go?

IVCF and a renewed commitment to Bible studies on campus: “College campuses in the U.S. are not generally considered bastions for Bible literacy or interest, say officials from the Christian organization InterVarsity. However, in light of a recent Barna Group study released about the most and least Bible-minded cities in the nation, InterVarsity optimistically points to thousands of Bible studies “breaking out across the country,” following commitments made at its student missions conference (Urbana 12) at the end of December in St. Louis. “In a week when the Barna organization has highlighted the most Bible-Minded and least Bible-Minded cities in the U.S., and classes have resumed on college campuses across the country, it’s exciting to know that thousands of college students are leading many of their friends into new relationships with God through Bible study,” said InterVarsity Evangelism Director Terry Erickson.” Terry Erickson is one of America’s central leaders when it comes to university-based Christian fellowship and discipleship.

A clever graphic about introverts.

(HT: Geeding for that picture.)

Meanderings in the News

Feeling down? Eat more kale. “Humans have long turned to substances—from beer to Prozac—to improve their outlook on life. But there’s another possible remedy to the rigors of existence that doesn’t get nearly as much attention: the green stuff that grows in the field, and I don’t mean marijuana (though, hey, that might help, too). A new study (abstract) from Harvard researchers found a strong association between adults’ levels of optimism and the amount of carotenoid antioxidants in their blood. Carotenoids are found in richly colored green and orange vegetables, including kale, sweet potatoes, carrots, and collard greens. The more servings of carotenoid-containing vegetables you eat, the results suggest, the brighter your outlook.”

A 100-foot wave? Wow.

Beatles fan?

Sad: Katie McDonough: “Israel has admitted that it has been giving Ethiopian Jewish immigrants birth control injections, according to a report in Haaretz. An Israeli investigative journalist also found that a majority of the women given these shots say they were administered without their knowledge or consent. Health Ministry Director General Prof. Ron Gamzu acknowledged the practice — without directly conceding coercion was involved — in a letter to Israeli health maintenance organizations, instructing gynecologists in the HMOs “not to renew prescriptions for Depo-Provera for women of Ethiopian origin if for any reason there is concern that they might not understand the ramifications of the treatment.” Depo-Provera is a hormonal form of birth control that is injected every three months.”

McCory and others: “The Republican governor also called into question the value of publicly supporting liberal arts majors after the host made a joke about gender studies courses at UNC-Chapel Hill. “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine, go to a private school and take it,” McCrory told the radio host. “But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.” The two criticized philosophy Ph.D.s in a similar manner later in the program. “How many Ph.D.s in philosophy do I need to subsidize?” Bennett asked, to which McCrory replied, “You and I agree.” (Bennett earned a Ph.D., from a public flagship university, the University of Texas at Austin, in philosophy.) McCrory’s comments on higher education echo statements made by a number of Republican governors – including those in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin – who have questioned the value of liberal arts instruction and humanities degrees at public colleges and universities. Those criticisms have started to coalesce into a potentialRepublican agenda on higher education, emphasizing reduced state funding, low tuition prices, vocational training, performance funding for faculty members, state funding tied to job placement in “high demand” fields and taking on flagship institutions.”

A photo journey through Ethiopian Christianity’s Timkat.

Six brain issues for bad financial decisions, by Dan Ariely and Nina Mazar: “We all do it: hold on to a stock when every indicator screams sell, or spend our entire bonus on a new car instead of paying off debt. A whole new area of science called behavioural economics, or BE – a blend of psychology, economics, finance and sociology – has sprung up to explain why. According to BE pioneer and Duke University professor Dan Ariely (author of the bestseller Predictably Irrational) and Rotman School of Management researcher Nina Mazar, our brains are hard-wired to choose short-term payoff over long-term gain. Here are six common mistakes investors make – and how to avoid them.”

From Steve Hendrix: “It took about six months after moving to Washington for Patty Stonesifer to find her new job. As the former chief executive of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, she had a lot of corner-office options to sift through, including a university presidency and the top jobs at a national charity and an international development agency. Her choice? She’s going to run Martha’s Table on 14th Street NW. Starting April 1, she will take over the well-regarded but decidedly local food pantry and family-services nonprofit organization.”

Meanderings in Sports

Aaron Liberman: “Liberman chose Northwestern over Georgetown and Southern California, and made the team as a preferred walk-on, meaning he was recruited but not given a scholarship. The fact that there was an Orthodox community near campus factored into his decision. Through his parents, he connected with a Jewish chaplain, and now Liberman lives in the family’s basement. “I try to stay away from the party scene,” Liberman said. “It’s not a very Jewish lifestyle.” He then motioned to his big-screen television and PlayStation 3 and added, “These are a little more college.” Northwestern has made arrangements so that he never has to fly on the Sabbath. He takes separate flights if necessary. The university is also designing special skullcaps for him that Under Armour, Northwestern’s apparel sponsor, is having made by a company called Klipped Kippahs.” Who knew?

Joseph Zucker: “A federal judge has ruled against a motion from the NCAA barring football and men’s basketball athletes from claiming a cut of past and present television revenue.”

No one is like Bubba Watson: “”It’s sad that people live and die by their sport and they have to, I guess, cheat and go around it and try to better themselves with deer-antler spray,” Watson said. “I’m not just going to take something and ask questions later. I’m not going to take deer antler-spray and find out what it is later. … I think we should check them for mental problems if they’re taking deer-antler spray. That’s kind of weird.”

Opinion: The sad implication of their use of PEDs is that athletes like A-Rod and Barry Bonds and Armstrong were great without them and that completely-legal greatness is diminished.

Jenn LeBow, gospel-shaped “submission”: “Dennis and I, a little more than fifteen years into our marriage, have disavowed extremes in many contexts: politics, religion, parenting. But one extreme we do cling to: we still treat each other more kindly than we treat anyone else. Some days, doing so requires more submission than any other task, but it’s always been a mutual submission for us. I see clearly how much patience it takes for Dennis to remain kind with me; my efforts with him don’t require nearly as much strength of will. Nevertheless, we believe it to be among the top three reasons our marriage remains strong.”

Zack Hunt is right: “It simply makes no sense when church leaders begin a conversation (which is the purpose of tweets, Facebook statuses, blog posts, etc.), for other Christians to respond to that conversation somewhere else. I don’t mean the conversation shouldn’t also continue offline. I mean the idea that seems to pop up whenever celebrity preachers like Mark Driscoll or John Piper or whoever say something outrageous, namely that Twitter, Facebook, or blogs are the wrong place to engage the conversation that started in those very same places, is utterly absurd. The world has changed. The internet is the new public square.”

Ed Moore, on sacred bundles… a post for all of us: “The pastor had insulted one of the principal relics in Granny Smith UMC’s “sacred bundle.” A sacred bundle is the collection of symbols, stories and artifacts that confers identity upon a community and establishes its social norms; every organization has one. The longer the organization has existed, the more layered and complex its sacred bundle is likely to be.” (HT: MR)

Rachel Held Evans and the scandal of the heart: “This is true to an extent. I’ve wrestled with a lot of questions related to science and faith, especially given my location a mere two miles from the famous Rhea County Courthouse where John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution in a public school.  While I no longer believe the earth is just 6,000 years old, I still live in the tension of unanswered questions about the universe, and death, and brains, and Neanderthals, and whatever Neil deGrasse Tyson’s got to say on public television about the earth getting burned up by the sun or our species going extinct after an asteroid hits.  I have questions too about history and Christianity’s emergence from it, questions about the Bible, questions about miracles. But the questions that have weighed most heavily on me these past ten years have been questions not of the mind but of the heart, questions of conscience and empathy. It was not the so-called “scandal of the evangelical mind” that rocked my faith; it was the scandal of the evangelical heart.” [Of course, the reason Mark Noll wrote about the scandal of the evangelical mind was because there was too much heart and passion and not enough mind.]

Charity Jill Erickson and the cake-eaters along 494 — at CPC!

Te’o and Catfishing: “When the show’s producers finally bring them together, Abigail turns out to be not willowy, blonde and Barbie Doll-cute. In fact, she is dark-haired, obese and deeply troubled, and her real name is Melissa. Explaining her deception to an obviously dejected Jarrod, she says she knew that if she showed herself as she really looked, she would never have attracted any man’s interest—her experience of rejection throughout her school years and young adulthood had demonstrated that. “Pretty much all of it was, you know, me—just not me,” she said. “Everything, all the emotions, you know—just a different face, I suppose.” Those words were kind of an eerie echo of Swarbrick’s description of Te’o. “Every single thing about this…was real to Manti,” Swarbrick said. “There was no suspicion that it wasn’t, no belief that it might not be. And so the pain was real. The grief was real. The affection was real. And that’s the nature of this sad, cruel game.” All this assumes, of course, that Te’o truly was a victim, and was not involved in creating the hoax of his “girlfriend.” The point is that it is not implausible to believe that he was a victim. The point is that this kind of hoax has been perpetrated many times already in the Internet age, sometimes with tragic consequences.” (HT: OY)

That Loon is priceless.

Michael Jensen, at Sydney Anglicans, observing a seeming consensus on women teaching: “Nevertheless, what is interesting to me is that there seems to be emerging an agreement from all sides in this discussion that the New Testament features women in speaking roles in front of mixed congregations to a far greater extent than is often now practiced in Sydney Anglican churches. Some of the implementation of complementarian thinking about ministry has been over-zealous, to the point that it ignores what is plainly the case in the Bible. In 1 Corinthians 11 (to take the obvious example) women prophesy in the church gathering, and there is no forbidding them from doing so. Why do we not see this more often in our church meetings? My colleague Jane Tooher from the Priscilla and Aquila Centre has been advocating and modeling this practice in the last couple of years.”

Akira Okrentand the Oxford Comma War: “The Oxford comma, so-called because the Oxford University Press style guidelines require it, is the comma before the conjunction at the end of a list. If your preferred style is to omit the second comma in “red, white, and blue,” you are aligned with the anti-Oxford comma faction. The pro-Oxford comma faction is more vocal and numerous in the US, while in the UK, anti-Oxford comma reigns. (Oxford University is an outsider, style-wise, in its own land.) In the US, book and magazine publishers are generally pro, while newspapers are anti, but both styles can be found in both media. The two main rationales for choosing one style over the other are clarity and economy. Each side has invoked both rationales in its favor. Here are some quotes that have served as shots exchanged in the Oxford comma wars.”

Dave Moore and Moore Engaging.

Mental Floss has some facts about coffee. “In 1674, the “Women’s Petition Against Coffee” said it was turning British men into “useless corpses” and proposed a ban for those under 60″ and “In 1932, Brazil couldn’t afford to send its athletes to the Olympics in Los Angeles. So they loaded their ship with coffee and sold it along the way.”

Frank Viola has  a “spiritual conversation style” map: charismatic, quoter and pragmatic styles.

Ecclesia and Ethics, an online webinar/conference with such folks as Michael Gorman, Mariam Kamell, N.T. Wright, and Shane Claiborne.

Meanderings in the News

Father Flannery doesn’t sound like a Catholic priest to me: “In the article, Father Flannery, a Redemptorist priest, wrote that he no longer believed that “the priesthood as we currently have it in the church originated with Jesus” or that he designated “a special group of his followers as priests.” Instead, he wrote, “It is more likely that some time after Jesus, a select and privileged group within the community who had abrogated power and authority to themselves, interpreted the occasion of the Last Supper in a manner that suited their own agenda.” Nor does Tom Brodie.

Worst picture of the Inaugural Day events — a door on our President’s car door so thick…

Quite the story from n+1.

Ken Jennings: “In China, for example, it’s widely believed that sitting on a seat recently warmed by someone else’s behind can give you hemorrhoids. The Brits, on the other hand, attribute hemorrhoids to sitting on cold surfaces. But sitting on that same cold concrete would lead to a different lecture from a Ukrainian mom: She’d be sure it would make you sterile. Some Peruvians are told that lingering too long in front of the fridge can cause cancer. In the Czech Republic, everyone knows that drinking water after eating fruit leads to painful bloating. Filipino kids can’t wear red when it’s stormy out, since that would attract lightning. Germans and Austrians live in mortal fear of drafts, which get blamed for everything from pneumonia to blocked arteries, so summertime commuters routinely swelter on 90-degree trains and buses rather than cracking a window through which a cooling—but lethal!—breeze might pass. In South Korea, however, the concern about ventilation is exactly the opposite. Koreans will only use electric fans if a window is cracked, because leaving a fan on in an enclosed room, it’s almost universally believed, can be fatal. The mechanism behind the threat is a little vague: Sometimes it’s said to be a lack of oxygen that kills you, sometimes it’s a chill. But either way, you won’t care. You’ll be dead.”

Mari-Jane Williams on what high schoolers need to know upon graduation.

Ireland and rural drinking and driving.

Can we bring back the Neanderthals? “SPIEGEL: Setting aside all ethical doubts, do you believe it is technically possible to reproduce the Neanderthal? Church: The first thing you have to do is to sequence the Neanderthal genome, and that has actually been done. The next step would be to chop this genome up into, say, 10,000 chunks and then synthesize these. Finally, you would introduce these chunks into a human stem cell. If we do that often enough, then we would generate a stem cell line that would get closer and closer to the corresponding sequence of the Neanderthal. We developed the semi-automated procedure required to do that in my lab. Finally, we assemble all the chunks in a human stem cell, which would enable you to finally create a Neanderthal clone. SPIEGEL: And the surrogates would be human, right? In your book you write that an “extremely adventurous female human” could serve as the surrogate mother. Church: Yes. However, the prerequisite would, of course, be that human cloning is acceptable to society. SPIEGEL: Could you also stop the procedure halfway through and build a 50-percent Neanderthal using this technology. Church: You could and you might. It could even be that you want just a few mutations from the Neanderthal genome. Suppose you were too realize: Wow, these five mutations might change the neuronal pathways, the skull size, a few key things. They could give us what we want in terms of neural diversity. I doubt that we are going to particularly care about their facial morphology, though (laughs).”

NPR and the Common Core reading curriculum.

Josh Wingrove sketches Oprah’s preparation and experience with the interview of Lance Armstrong: “Before Lance Armstrong arrived, Oprah Winfrey cleared the room, meditated and prayed. She didn’t want to pass judgment on the man soon to be before her, a 41-year-old fallen cycling legend about to deliver a staggering mea culpa. It didn’t matter if he was guilty, if he’d lied or if he’d leveraged it all to build a global brand. Ms. Winfrey had, instead, learned her lesson with James Frey, the disgraced author whose tailspin engulfed her book club.”

Meanderings in Sports

On the Cubs convention: “During a question-and-answer session with the Ricketts family, one elderly fan criticized the Cubs for having players with long hair, adding the “manager who is on TV every day looks like he slept on a park bench.” As the audience howled, Tom Ricketts replied: “I’ll put that one in the suggestion box.”

Our first Weekly Meanderings of 2013 opens with an image of icebergs in Greenland.

Karen’s testimony to Mama, about whom we learned in her After the Flag Has Been Folded. Thanks Karen.

In praise of the essay, led by Montaigne. Speaking of essayists means we speak of spelling, and ask Is “agenda” a plural or not?

Roger Olson: “In 1950s evangelicalism we memorized Scripture. Who does that anymore? Then we sang theologically rich hymns and gospel songs. Who does that anymore? Then we studied our Sunday School lessons on Saturday (if not before). Who does that anymore? Then we attended church on Sunday evening and invited “unsaved friends” to hear the gospel. Who does that anymore? Then we gathered in each others’ homes for fellowship and prayer and Bible study. Who does that anymore? Then we went door-to-door with gospel tracts and invitations to attend church. Who does that anymore? Then we knew the people we went to church with well. Who does anymore? Then we were required to give an account of our conversion before baptism. Who does that anymore? Then we had occasional “protracted meetings” (revivals that included special services nightly for a week). Who does that anymore? Then we had warm, even passionate, “altar calls” and invitations to accept God’s call to be missionaries. Who does that anymore? Then we watched missionaries’ “slide shows” and heard their stories of successes and failures “on the mission field.” Who does that anymore? Then we had “missionary barrels” in the church foyer to collect “goods” not available to missionaries “on the field.” Who does anything like that anymore? Then we had church picnics and people stayed after church on Sunday evening to talk and pray and the young people fraternized and flirted as the children played games on the lawn outside the church. Who does that anymore? Then the pastor (and often the pastor’s spouse) visited members and visitors in their homes. Who does that anymore? Then evangelical families had “family altar” at least weekly (if not daily) at home. Then evangelicals called each other “brother” and “sister.” Who does that anymore?”

Maria Popova, a consummate blogger, interviewed.

Paul Matsushima: “Perhaps the study of American racial dynamics offers a narrow, limited path by which to view the world. Not everyone, especially in their faith journeys, will travel through the ism of race as I have. But as I reflect back, it troubles me that I feel I must end with a defense that racial discourse is a legitimate area of study. I expect hesitation, even disagreements from those who read this post’s title and disregard it as unworthy of attention. But for me, and perhaps for many other Asian Americans, the area of race is where I am most deeply wounded and where I find healing. This is the avenue I learn compassion towards those unlike me, even those who reject me simply because I’m “Asian.” My hope is that evangelicals, especially Asian American evangelicals, will learn the brokenness and tragedy in America’s racial history so that they’ll be challenged to heal their wounds, confront their errors in thinking, and be moved towards racial justice.”

Krish Kandiah presses Tim Keller’s (and TGC’s) sketch of egalitarian thinking. Kandiah contends Keller and the others do not live up to Keller’s sketch of how to disagree. Here is Kandiah’s appeal: “I  contend that it is possible to have a high view of scripture and believe that women can take on leadership roles in the church. I contend that egalitarians are not all cowards – sometimes egalitarians have faced significant opposition from conservative friends and colleagues because of where their reading of scripture have taken them. I contend that the role of women in leadership in the church is not an unassailable division – if we have found a way to find unity in diversity on baptism surely we can on this issue. I have benefitted greatly from the ministry of all of the men in this video, they have produced some brilliant books and materials, its such a shame this video is not up to their usual  high standards. I would like to encourage the Gospel Coalition to reconsider its position in light of Keller’s very helpful rules of engagement and consider removing this inflammatory and insulting video. I would like to suggest a dialog between evangelical complementarians and egalitarians modeled on Keller’s rules that can genuinely engage with each other’s convictions at their best and explore ways we can find unity in the gospel rather than division on this matter.”

Bicyclists were once the worry for the pastors: “So popular was cycling in the 1890s that American church leaders feared that congregations would be dangerously depleted by those who preferred to ride rather than attend church. An 1890s clergyman in New Haven, who probably didn’t know that the first ever bicycle in America was ridden in his town, way back in the 1860s, conjured up a terrifying picture of Sunday bicyclists riding “down a glittering hill to a place where there is no mud on the streets because of its high temperature.” What is the equivalent today? Sports? Computers? Lake homes? TV?

Is this a Rick Roll? (HT: PP)

Which is your favorite gadget?

Dan Gilgoff’s lessons from editing CNN.com’s Belief Blog.

It’s got to be easier than this, folks. How about a drop down thingy that says “change channel”?!

Rough Type says the transition to e-readers is taking longer than expected: “None of this means that, in the end, e-books won’t come to dominate book sales. My own sense is that they probably will. But, as we enter 2013, I’m considerably less confident in that prediction than I was a few years back, when, in the wake of the initial Kindle surge, e-book sales were growing at 200 or 300 percent annually. At the very least, it seems like the transition from print to electronic will take a lot longer than people expected. Don’t close that Gutenberg parenthesis just yet.”

Meanderings in the News

A clever, brief discussion about academics — married and not married — and acquiring posts and who stays home.

Good news for journalists: “Good news for journalists, editors and newspapers: The New York Times‘ paywall seems to be working. After a year and a half, the paywall has helped boost the paper’s subscription dollars. For the first time, paper and paywall subscriptions from will exceed the money made from advertising, Bloomberg reports. Since the Times installed its paywall in March 2011, journalists and bloggers have disputed its value. Amidst an ever tightening budget noose publishers argued that they cannot give away free content, while the blogger crowd purported that paywalls turn off readers who are accustomed to receiving free content on the Web. Digital subscriptions will generate $91 million this year, accounting for 12 percent of total subscription sales, which totalled about $768 million. Print subscriptions continued to slip this year, but online readership increased 11 percent since last June. Web readership may soon rival print subscriptions if the trend continues.”

Twelve (almost) historic speeches.

Defending the State of Israel on campuses: “For far too many people, any mention of the words “Israel” and “university campus” in close conjunction conjure up images of doom and gloom. University students are steadily growing hostile toward the Jewish State, and the anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) Movement is gaining credibility on campuses across the United States and Canada – or so we are led to believe. In fact, the situation is not nearly so dire. There are many indications that the university anti-Israel movement is actually losing steam, due to both its inherent contradictions and the hard work of passionate Zionists on campus. Better yet, whether you’re a student, a parent or even a potential donor, standing up for Israel and for basic principles of equality and civility on campus is easier than you would expect….”

“Melinda Gates, wife of Microsoft founder Bill Gates, says her husband has banned the children from owning and/or using Apple gadgets.”

Bonnie Rochman, happily, defends recess, my favorite class: “Playtime can be as important as class time for helping students perform their best. Recess is most children’s favorite period, and parents and teachers should encourage that trend, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Recess can be a critical time for development and social interaction, and in a new policy statement published in the journal Pediatrics, pediatricians from the AAP support the importance of having a scheduled break in the school day. “Children need to have downtime between complex cognitive challenges,” says Dr. Robert Murray, a pediatrician and professor of human nutrition at the Ohio State University who is a co-author of the statement. “They tend to be less able to process information the longer they are held to a task. It’s not enough to just switch from math to English. You actually have to take a break.”

Informed Comment about the Middle East 1000 years ago: “Just for fun: What was our world like a thousand years ago? Of course, technologically very different, but Song China and Muslim Spain had made real advances in science, technology and infrastructure. If CNN had existed then, what major events would they have listed and passed around by carrier pigeon? Some of the themes salient then are still recognizable today.”

Yes, indeed, old folks can learn new things.

How “liberal arts” colleges survive: “ADRIAN, Mich. (AP) — They’re the places you think of when you think of “college” — leafy campuses, small classes, small towns.Liberal arts colleges are where students ponder life’s big questions, and learn to think en route to successful careers and richer lives, if not always to the best-paying first jobs. But today’s increasingly career-focused students mostly aren’t buying the idea that a liberal arts education is good value, and many small liberal arts colleges are struggling. The survivors are shedding their liberal arts identity, if not the label. A study published earlier this year found that of 212 such institutions identified in 1990, only 130 still meet the criteria of a “true liberal arts college.” Most that fell off the list remained in business, but had shifted toward a pre-professional curriculum. These distinctively American institutions — educating at most 2 percent of college students but punching far above their weight in accomplished graduates — can’t turn back the clock. But schools like Adrian College, 75 miles southwest of Detroit and back from a recent near-death experience, offer something of a playbook.”

Google+ is the borg? “By AMIR EFRATI Google Inc. is challenging Facebook Inc. by using a controversial tactic: requiring people to use the Google+ social network. The result is that people who create an account to use Gmail, YouTube and other Google services—including the Zagat restaurant-review website—are also being set up with public Google+ pages that can be viewed by anyone online. Google+ is a Facebook rival and one of the company’s most important recent initiatives as it tries to snag more online advertising dollars.”

Sports in the News

Bill “Walton, being Walton, reflected on the litany of broadcasters who have been mentors over the years, including retired Blazers broadcaster Bill Schonely, Clippers broadcaster Ralph Lawler, and the late great Marty Glickman. He retold the story of how Don Corsini, then Prime Ticket’s vice president of programming and production, gave him his first job in television. “Don looked at me and said, “Walton, you are 6-11, you have red hair, you have a big nose, freckles, you have a goofy, nerdy-looking face, you can’t talk, you are a life-long stutterer and you are a Deadhead. Why would I ever put you on TV?’ But Don took a deep breath, he gave me a chance, and who would have ever thought it? I am the luckiest guy in the world.”