![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp-media.patheos.com\/blogs\/sites\/40\/2012\/01\/ChicagoSkylineSunup.jpg\" "\\"ChicagoSkylineSunup\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nKathy Keller<\/a><\/strong> reflects on Christians marrying non-Christians \u2014 worth a good read.<\/p>\n Ann Voskamp<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cThere\u2019s a whole lifetime of memories here at the lake and how many Sunday picnics of fried chicken have we had right up there at the lighthouse? She\u2019d serve extra helpings of green coleslaw and I\u2019d pump the swing high and I could see how we might, soar straight out over the lake. There\u2019s a time when you think nothing will end.\u00a0I lean into her and she leans into me, and we\u2019re warmer like this, close. Doesn\u2019t therehave<\/em> to be more than a decade left of this? And there doesn\u2019t\u00a0have <\/em>to be anything. The waves keep breaking. Couldn\u2019t she stay until she\u2019s 117?\u00a0When you wake to losing someone, you win love. <\/strong>When you realize that what you have, you\u00a0will<\/em> lose \u2014\u00a0 you win real eyes. You win grateful joy. <\/strong>It comes across the water and I turn to face it directly:\u00a0It\u2019s only when you realize everyone you love will one day leave you\u2014 that you really begin to love. <\/strong>I reach over for Mama\u2019s hand and she does that, she squeezes mine softly and that says more\u2026 most. Someday, it is possible, I could stand here on my own 61st. I can close my eyes and almost see that.\u201c<\/strong><\/p>\n Casey Tygrett<\/a>: <\/strong>\u201cWords create.\u00a0Words destroy.\u00a0Be creative.\u201d<\/p>\n I like this from Rich Atkinson<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cI\u2019ve been a youth pastor for more than 10 years now and have watched how very easy it is to get young people excited \u2026 and\u00a0how very hard it is to make that excitement stick<\/strong>. Jesus seemed to have an idea that this might be a problem. After all, he spent a surprisingly high percentage of his time investing in 12 young men knowing full well that one of them wouldn\u2019t make it anyway!\u00a0This shows us that Jesus didn\u2019t make\u00a0conference junkies<\/em> \u2014 he made\u00a0disciples<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n David Field\u2019s sketch of Craig Evans\u2019 book <\/a><\/strong>and its value for apologetics.<\/p>\n Ben Witherington<\/a><\/strong> reflecting on the sudden and unexpected death of his daughter and belief in a good God.<\/p>\n Derek Leman<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cThe Bible is in some ways like a beach vacation. You need the vacation. As it draws near you think idealistically about the vacation. It will be heaven on earth. It will revolutionize your life. If May 30 will just get here sooner than later, if you can just be transported to that warm sand and the sound of gentle surf, life will be worth living again.\u00a0But the ideal beach vacation doesn\u2019t exist. It begins with a very real drive passing by the usual signs of the earth\u2019s brokenness. Your week at the beach has the usual drawbacks of ordinary life. Tension and fights with a family member. Insomnia in the hotel or condo bed. The sun is too hot, the water not as pristine as you would like. Sunscreen runs into your eye to remind you this is not the Elysian Fields or Nirvana. The beach vacation is not the once and for all answer to your dissatisfaction with life.\u00a0But in spite of these things, when you return to normal life, you plan to do the beach again. It wasn\u2019t all that your ideal picture wanted it to be, but it was healing.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanderings in the News<\/strong><\/p>\n In the age of Michelle Obama<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cIn a new\u00a0nationwide survey<\/a> conducted by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation, a complex portrait emerges of black women who feel confident but vulnerable, who have high self-esteem and see physical beauty as important, who find career success more vital to them than marriage. The survey, which includes interviews with more than 800 black women, represents the most extensive exploration of the lives and views of African American women in decades.\u00a0Religion is essential to most black women\u2019s lives; being in a romantic relationship is not, the poll shows. Nearly three-quarters of African American women say now is a good time to be a black woman in America, and yet a similar proportion worry about having enough money to pay their bills. Half of black women surveyed call racism a \u201cbig problem\u201d in the country; nearly half worry about being discriminated against. Eighty-five percent say they are satisfied with their own lives, but one-fifth say they are often treated with less respect than other people.\u201d<\/p>\n Mercy, this is bad news<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cSteven decided to dupe his doctor when he returned from his elite boarding school exhausted by the intense competition there. He needed an edge to help him, he felt. So through written evaluations from teachers and his parents, and by deliberately failing tests,\u00a0he succeeded in getting himself diagnosed with attention-deficit\/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and was given both his in-school tests and his SATs untimed<\/a>. Eventually Steven, which is not his real name, was accepted to a top college in upstate New York, although he no longer takes medication, nor does he consider himself ADHD. The ADHD diagnosis, and the benefits that came with it, he acknowledges, helped him beat the competition.\u00a0Welcome to the new way to get into\u00a0America\u2019s best colleges<\/a>.\u00a0ADHD is a chronic condition<\/a> that includes difficulty sustaining attention, hyperactivity and impulsive behavior. Children with ADHD also often struggle with low self-esteem and poor performance in school and can show signs of the illness through adulthood. Yet a growing number of parents want their kids labeled as having the disorder. All so that they can ace their tests and gain entry into the ivory towers of the country\u2019s best high schools and universities.\u201d<\/p>\n I\u2019m not an MD, so this is not my opinion or my advice, but this theme is becoming more and more vocal<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cBreast cancer<\/a> screening can no longer be justified, because the harm to many women from needless diagnosis and damaging treatment outweighs the small number of lives saved, according to a book that accuses many in the scientific establishment of misconduct in their efforts to bury the evidence of critics and keep mammography alive.\u00a0Peter G\u00f8tzsche, director of the independent\u00a0Nordic Cochrane Collaboration<\/a>, has spent more than 10 years investigating and analysing data from the trials of breast screening that were run, mostly in Sweden, before countries such as the UK introduced their national programmes.\u201d<\/p>\n Sara Khorshid<\/a><\/strong> gives us an insider\u2019s look at the Egyptian situation: \u201cSecularism is not my cause and sharia is not my fear but I am one of those Egyptians who are critical of the Muslim Brotherhood movement \u2013 one who made a point of not voting for the Brotherhood\u2019s Freedom and Justice party in the\u00a0recent elections<\/a>.\u00a0My cause is Egypt, the revolution, and seeing my country become a true democracy. My fear is the prolongation of military rule, of transformation to a system that gives the military special status above civil institutions, or one that grants the army and its budget immunity against parliamentary accountability.\u00a0The Brotherhood\u2019s priorities are different from mine, and their objectives have occasionally conflicted with those of the revolutionaries.\u201d And: \u201cHaving seen the Brotherhood make a series of compromising stances over the past year, I can\u2019t trust it to be capable of achieving the revolution\u2019s objectives.\u00a0Despite all that, it\u2019s absurd to find many western media outlets reducing Egyptian revolutionaries\u2019 anger against the Brotherhood to an alleged fear of sharia law. An oversimplified analysis from some western writers depicts the divide between many young revolutionaries and the Brotherhood as a secularist-Islamist clash.\u00a0What they seem not to have noticed is that the key secularist party in post-revolution Egypt \u2013 the\u00a0Free Egyptians party<\/a> \u2013 also opposed November\u2019s demonstrations. And just as protesters kicked senior Brotherhood leader Mohamed Beltagi out of Tahrir in November, they also kicked out liberal figure Mamdouh Hamza in the same week.\u00a0The protesters\u2019 rejection of the two men had nothing to do with sharia, and had everything to do with the revolution and its initial objectives, which were neither secularist nor Islamist.\u201d<\/p>\n Academic publishing<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cThis morning, I searched for an article about autism on JSTOR, the online database of academic journals. I have a child on the autistic spectrum, and I like to be aware of the latest research on the topic. I could not access any of the first 200 articles that contained the word \u201cautism.\u201d That\u2019s because, for the most part, only individuals with a college ID card can read academic journal articles.\u00a0 Everyone else, including journalists, non-affiliated scholars, think tanks and curious individuals, must pay a substantial fee per article, if the articles are available at all.\u00a0I later found one article that was available for $38. I\u2019m not sure why one twelve page article costs $38. It takes me about eight minutes to scan a twelve page article. The researcher receives no royalties. Why does it cost so much to read one article?\u00a0The answer lies in the antiquated system of academic publishing.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking of academics, the archaeologists of the UK have a discovery<\/a><\/strong>: \u201d\u00a0A recently discovered mysterious \u201cwinged\u201d structure in England, which in the Roman period may have been used as a temple, presents a puzzle for archaeologists, who say the building has no known parallels.\u00a0Built around 1,800 years ago, the structure was discovered in Norfolk, in eastern England, just to the south of the ancient town of Venta Icenorum. The structure has two wings radiating out from a rectangular room that in turn leads to a central room.\u00a0\u201cGenerally speaking, [during]\u00a0the Roman Empire<\/a> people built within a fixed repertoire of architectural forms,\u201d said William Bowden, a professor at the University of Nottingham, who reported the find in the most recent edition of the Journal of Roman Archaeology. The investigation was carried out in conjunction with the Norfolk Archaeological and Historical Research Group.\u201d<\/p>\n Indeed, out of balance, by Laura Pappano<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cIt is that point \u2014 \u201cthis commercial thing\u201d in the middle of academia, as Charles T. Clotfelter, a public policy professor at Duke, put it \u2014 that some believe has thrown the system out of kilter. In his recent book \u201cBig-Time Sports in American Universities,\u201d Dr. Clotfelter notes that between 1985 and 2010, average salaries at public universities rose 32 percent for full professors, 90 percent for presidents and 650 percent for football coaches.\u00a0The same trend is apparent in a 2010 Knight Commission report that found the 10 highest-spending athletic departments spent a median of $98 million in 2009, compared with $69 million just four years earlier. Spending on high-profile sports grew at double to triple the pace of that on academics. For example, Big Ten colleges, including Penn State, spent a median of $111,620 per athlete on athletics and $18,406 per student on academics.\u201d<\/p>\n Church weddings on the rise in the UK<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n<\/a>Some pretty good wit in this post about what JLSathre<\/a><\/strong> learned in opening a used bookstore. Like this one: \u201c7.\u00a0 If you put free books outside, cookbooks will be gone in the first hour and other non-fiction books will sit there for weeks.\u00a0 Except in warm weather when people are having garage sales.\u00a0 Then someone will back their car up and take everything, including your baskets.\u201d<\/p>\n