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<\/a><\/p>\nLarry Hurtado<\/a><\/strong>\u2018s fine sketch of a hermeneutics of love.<\/p>\n A good report about Rowan Williams and his new book on C.S. Lewis<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cThese are surely questions the head of the established church must ponder. His interventions in live controversies \u2013 saying that aspects of Islamic sharia would inevitably become part of British law, or describing the Big Society as \u201caspirational waffle\u201d \u2013 show he is unafraid of disturbing the mainstream. But I wonder whether his statements on the temporal issues of the day may have drowned out his spiritual message. His role might be in part a political one, but he is more provocative when he tackles the deeper questions.\u00a0He leaves his position as Archbishop at the end of this year to become Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge \u2013 C S Lewis\u2019s old college. Doubtless he will return to his academic interests, but it would be a shame if he retreated to speaking only to other theologians. In\u00a0The Lion\u2019s World\u00a0<\/em>his sometimes knotty prose style relaxes into an inspiring clarity. The ideas stay with you long after you finish the book, and his parting words on Lewis could apply equally to him. Great writers, he tells me, provoke you into looking beyond yourself. They seem to say: \u201cDo you recognise that? Does that ring a bell? Something is moving in on you \u2013 well, getting its claws into you.\u201d<\/p>\n TSK on taking time<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cThe two brothers from The Holy Transfiguration Monastery just left us. Its been a great three days. This morning we had our final breakfast and chat with them and we all shared what we learned.\u00a0As for me, I was impressed with their perspective on\u00a0time<\/strong>, their patience to wait for God\u2019s timing, their reluctance to hurry or conform to the world\u2019s rushed schedule that caters to the idolatry of NOW and the cult of youth.\u00a0One example: They talked with\u00a0Brother Roger<\/a>\u00a0from Taize about opening up to new people and he suggested they wait twenty years. Which they did. It gave them time to develop a deeper spirituality and core rhythms. \u00a0A lot of new church plants wait until they can run a good worship service before they open up to the public. There is little talk about whether the community has the spiritual depth to receive and disciple newcomers. \u00a0It reminded me of some other voices in my life\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Excellent set of observations about pastoring by John Frye<\/strong><\/a>, at Jesus the Radical Pastor: \u201cI believe these affinities are deeply and relationally transformative when the person who preaches\/teaches the Word of God to a congregation is the one who visits them in their homes, in the hospitals, in the nursing home facilities; when the person who faithfully broadcasts the\u00a0King Jesus Gospel Story<\/a>\u00a0also holds the baby in baptism, who prays and weeps at the grave side, who pronounces the husband and wife union; who walks in the shadow of death with the weary and confused. I wouldn\u2019t trade being a\u00a0pastor\u00a0<\/em>for being the\u00a0mega-church communicator<\/em>\u00a0who by all measurements doesn\u2019t know but a small percentage of the stories and characters of the attendees of a massive crowd. When pastoring is reduced to primarily preaching which is what happens to \u201clead\u201d pastors by necessity in mega-churches, in my opinion something very significant is lost. I could be wrong, but I think there are subterranean\u00a0relational trade-offs<\/em>\u00a0in the mega-church pastor model.\u201d<\/p>\n Ira Brent Diggers reviews Tom Wright\u2019s book<\/strong><\/a>\u00a0How God Became King<\/em>: \u201cThere is indeed a sense in which, methodologically speaking, Wright himself has \u201cstarted with Scripture\u201d (conceding this oversimplification for the moment), and there is no doubting that this approach has yielded some insights into the Jesus of the Gospels. I would contend, however, that the severing of Scripture from creedal tradition, for the purposes of setting Scripture above (or \u201cbefore\u201d) that tradition\u2014as a normative hermeneutical hierarchy\u2014is the more recent move in the history of scriptural exegesis. It establishes a kind of unidirectional approach that is, despite its great popularity in much of modern Christianity, simply untrue, both in intention and practice, to the ancient church that formulated the creeds. Irenaeus of Lyons exemplifies the ancient logic in his insistence that we read Scripture in accordance with the \u201cRule of Faith,\u201d the Rule being a\u00a0scripturally-derived<\/em>\u00a0\u201cdeposit\u201d of the apostolic tradition, on the one hand, but\u00a0the necessary hypothesis<\/em>\u00a0for the unveiling of Scripture\u2019s overall unity, on the other.\u00a0This sounds very much like the \u201ccreedal hermeneutic\u201d that Wright disparages as altogether innovative. In reality, however, the ancient church followed this kind of logic as the Rule evolved into more linguistically-fixed creeds.\u201c<\/span><\/p>\n Good post by Jon Acuff:<\/strong><\/a>\u201cOver and over again, these first disciples witness Jesus doing some absolutely wild things. Having witnessed these things first hand, it only makes sense that in Mark 4, when a storm threatens their boat, they immediately proclaim \u201cNo problem! We\u2019ve got Jesus with us! Any boat he is on is like a Carnival Cruise!\u201d\u00a0Actually, they freak out. They wake Jesus up and instead of just saying, \u201cHelp, we\u2019re going to drown!\u201d they go with the far whinier, \u201cTeacher, don\u2019t you care if we drown?\u201d They manage to actually sound selfish in their cry for help, which is a difficult thing to do.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanderings in the News<\/p>\n Merriam-Webster\u2019s code of silence<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cThe office of Merriam-Webster has existed in essentially the same spot, in Springfield, Massachusetts, since 1831. While the building has changed both inside and out in the many decades following George and Charles Merriam\u2019s\u00a0establishment of their\u00a0\u201cprinting and bookselling operation,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0the location\u2014and much of how the editors work\u2014has not. When\u00a0I arranged to speak by phone to\u00a0Peter Sokolowski<\/a>, Merriam-Webster editor-at-large, for this piece, he emailed that he needed to move to a conference room for our call. \u201cWe work in a silent office,\u201d he wrote.\u00a0\u201cA silent office?\u201d<\/em>\u00a0I marvel, when we speak. According to Sokolowski, there was at one point an official code of silence in place, though it may have only been held as \u201claw\u201d in the \u201950s and \u201960s, when the staff was larger and worked without cubicle walls between them. There remains, however, \u201ca powerful culture of silence in the office,\u201d he explains. \u201cBefore email, communication was\u00a0encouraged\u00a0through a 3\u00d75 pink piece of paper that would be carried from desk to desk\u00a0(with the recipient designated by initials in the upper right-hand corner)\u00a0by\u00a0the secretarial staff.\u201d While such quaint traditions have gone away with the advent of email, in-person meetings are held behind closed doors, and the overall atmosphere is \u201cvery library-like.\u00a0All you hear are keystrokes on computers, or very hushed conversations,\u201d among the 40-some editors who work there, Sokolowski tells me. This is practical as well as traditional, as \u201cwriting a dictionary is like taking the SAT.\u201d Sokolowski, who joined the company in 1994 when there was just one computer on the editorial floor, has essentially taken the SAT multiple times weekly for 18 years.<\/p>\n Joyce Carol Oates\u2019 review of Claire Tomalin\u2019s new biography of Dickens<\/strong><\/a>. \u201cThe vicissitudes of Dickens\u2019s visits to the United States are tracked in detail in Tomalin\u2019s biography, suggesting a curious admixture of innocent authorly vanity, a shrewd desire to make as much money as possible, and what comes to seem to the reader a malignant, ever-metastasizing desire for self- destruction. Dickens\u2019s delight in his large and uncritical audiences shifts by degrees to an addiction to public performing; like Mark Twain, he quickly came to see that public performance paid more than writing, and was much easier, at least in the short run. Dickens\u2019s need for the immediate gratification of public performing is both tonic and masochistic; consumed by vanity, the celebrated writer is consuming his very self.\u201d<\/p>\n 7 Annoying Body Problems<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n From The Environment Blog at The Guardian<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cIt\u2019s time to come clean: climate change\u00a0is a hoax. And the moon landings were faked, 9\/11 was an inside job, and the CIA is hiding the identity of the gunman on the grassy knoll.\u00a0It might seem odd to lump climate change \u2013 a scientific theory supported by thousands of peer-reviewed papers and hundreds of independent lines of evidence \u2013 with conspiracy theories like these. But\u00a0new research<\/a>to be published in a forthcoming issue of\u00a0Psychological Science<\/a>\u00a0has found a link between the endorsement of conspiracy theories and the rejection of established facts about climate science.\u201d<\/p>\n The French are trying to reduce rudeness<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cSuch rituals of rudeness have long been accepted by visitors as part of the price of enjoying such a beautiful city as Paris. But it seems the French themselves, who over centuries have turned rudeness into an art form, have become fed up with their own incivility, according to recent polls and publicity campaigns.\u00a0There\u2019s a fabled history of French rudeness from Napoleon, who called the English a \u201cnation of shopkeepers,\u201d to former President Nicolas Sarkozy, who infamously snarled at a voter: \u201cGet lost, poor jerk.\u201d\u00a0Now, bad manners and aggressive behavior top the list of causes of stress for the French, even higher than unemployment or the debt crisis, says pollster IPSOS. A total of 60 percent cited rudeness as their number one source of stress in a survey last year on social trends.\u00a0\u201cWe\u2019re so rude,\u201d admits 34-year-old French teacher Stephane Gomez, as he comes out of a Paris metro station. \u201cFrance lacks the civic sense that you find in Anglo-Saxon countries.\u201d\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s so easy to be polite, but we don\u2019t do it,\u201d says 30-year-old Zahia Sebahi. \u201cI never see someone give up their seat for an elderly person.\u201d\u00a0But Paris\u2019s public transport authority is leading the fight-back in a summer-long publicity campaign against rudeness.\u201d Not a problem in either Iceland or Denmark, who are high on the list of both civility and hospitality.<\/p>\n Lobster is cheap this year<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cA combination of warm weather and good conservation techniques has led to what could end up being a record lobster harvest across Maine waters. The glut is particularly noticeable here in Stonington, a fishing village on an archipelago by the Atlantic Ocean that has more lobster \u201clandings,\u201d or catches, than anywhere in the state.\u00a0But the bounty has come with a downside for fishermen. A relatively warm winter prompted soft-shell lobsters to appear in June, about a month early, and their abundance turned into an overabundance.\u00a0That caused a huge backup in the sea-to-table supply chain. And for the fishermen, the law of supply and demand has forced the price down to a 40-year low.\u00a0At one lobster cooperative here, the price that fishermen received for lobster last week fell to $1.35 per pound (plus a 70-cent dividend per pound, to be paid later in the year), down from about $3.80, and in some cases $4, at the same time last year.\u201d<\/p>\n Exoplanets<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cFinally, astronomers studying a star known as Kepler-30 have found something that looks reassuringly familiar: one, two, three exoplanets, orbiting in a plane, just like we do. And as reported in\u00a0the current issue of\u00a0Nature<\/em><\/a>, it\u2019s not only the discovery itself that\u2019s cool, it\u2019s the way the researchers went about making it.\u00a0Exoplanets are typically discovered in one of two ways \u2014 and neither involving simply pointing a telescope in the right direction and looking. At solar distances, the planets are just too tiny and often too washed-out by the light of their suns to be spotted visually. Instead, astronomers look for wobbles in the star itself, indicating that something nearby is tugging on it gravitationally. More recently \u2014 especially since the 2009 launch of the Kepler Space Telescope \u2014 they have relied on the slight dimming in luminosity that occurs as a planet passes in front of its star, blocking a bit of its light. Even that wasn\u2019t terribly easy with Kepler-30, a relatively faint star 10,000 light-years distant. Says Joshua Winn, a co-author of the\u00a0Nature<\/em>\u00a0paper and a professor of astrophysics at MIT: \u201cWe don\u2019t have a [good] picture of this star.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>Scott Holland<\/strong><\/a>, on how they decided to become parents: \u201cI don\u2019t recall how the subject of having children came up, but I am sure of a few things. One: We were still in Minnesota. Two: She started it. Three: I was taken completely by surprise.\u00a0Like a lot of big topics in the course of our time together, Kristie had been thinking about the subject for at least a few days, if not longer, before actually saying something. I, conversely, was busy wondering if the Cubs would make the playoffs. Jumping ship on the five-year plan was no more on my radar than matching tattoos or skydiving lessons. This from the half of the couple who, even in the first six months of dating, was adamant about one day being a dad. Emphasis, though, on\u00a0one day<\/em>. As in five years after the wedding, not 13 months.\u201d<\/p>\nCaffeine levels in the ocean<\/a>.<\/p>\n