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<\/a>Ann Voskamp: \u201cMy Dad had said we\u2019d never see anything like it again \u2014\u00a0not in our life times.\u00a0<\/strong>120 combines lined up around one field \u2014 160 acres of soybeans.\u00a0A harvest of less than 12 minutes. An attempt at a world record. All crop donated to world hunger.\u00a0They were calling it a\u00a0harvest for hunger<\/a>.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\nAllan Bevere has an important book on the Christian and the State, and Ted Gossard reviewed it thoroughly\u2026 here is the last post<\/strong><\/a> in the series with links to the rest in the sidebar.<\/p>\n Dear Karen<\/strong><\/a>, you are on our list! \u201cI mean what is a woman like me supposed to do when she wakes up and learns she did not make it into the list of the\u00a0Top 200 Most Influential<\/a>\u00a0Churchy Bloggers? Not that I stood a whore-at-a-revival chance of making that list, mind you. Only a few women did. Still, I write for an evangelical blog. You\u2019d think I might have placed somewhere in the bottom 190s. But then slap-me-sideways,\u00a0Ann Voskamp<\/a>, who has more followers than Mitt Romney didn\u2019t make the list either.\u00a0Timothy Dalrymple takes a jab<\/a>\u00a0at explaining the convoluted analysis that went into compiling that list.\u00a0And if all that wasn\u2019t bad enough news, I learned that I was left off the list off ofChristianity Today\u2019s 50 Women to Watch<\/a>\u00a0issue.\u201d My list on Google Reader is about 20 and you are smack-dab right there in the middle of it!<\/p>\n Josh Graves<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cBasic truth #2<\/strong>. Within his social and societal context, Jesus might not have been a total anarchist but he was certainly leaning forward toward the future<\/strong>, not backwards toward the past. He was thoroughly informed by the past (Genesis, Isaiah) but he had this vision of the city to come (Rev. 21 and 22). Say it plain. I don\u2019t believe\u00a0hierarchy\u00a0will exist in the new heavens and the new earth. That\u2019s why Jesus started to subvert the notion that someone is not as valid because of their gender. Jesus really believed it was the Spirit, not gender, that called\u00a0people\u00a0to roles and tasks in the expansion of the kingdom.\u201d<\/p>\n Derek is doing a series on the life of devotion<\/strong><\/a>.<\/p>\n Research universities in trouble<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cThey\u2019re the pride and backbone of American higher education, doing essential research and educating en masse the next generations of scientists and engineers. But a new report argues the mission of the country\u2019s 101 major public research universities is imperiled by budget cuts amounting to one-fifth of their state funding over the past decade.\u201d<\/p>\n A new blog about the historical Jesus<\/strong><\/a> worth your bookmark.<\/p>\n Meanderings in the News<\/p>\n Are Neanderthals humans<\/strong><\/a>? \u201cSchaafhausen pored over the fossils, observing their crests and knobs. He noticed that the bones had the overall shape you\u2019d expect from a human skeleton. But some bones had strange features, too. The skullcap, for example, sported a heavy brow ridge, hanging over the eyes like a boney pair of goggles. It was, at once, human and not.\u00a0The Neanderthal Man challenged Schaafhausen with a simple yet profound question: Was it a human, or did it belong to another species?\u00a0It\u2019s been over 150 years since the bones first emerged from the Neander Valley\u2014a time during which we\u2019ve learned a vast amount about human evolution. Today, scientists can even scan the genomes of Neanderthals who died 50,000 years ago. And yet the debate still rages. It\u2019s a debate that extends beyond Neanderthals, forcing us to ask what it means to be a species at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Good news for breast cancers, by Robin Roberts<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cScientists announced Sunday that they have finished mapping virtually all of the genetic mutations in breast cancer, an effort that could soon change the way patients are treated and eventually help researchers develop better treatments.\u00a0\u201cThe catalogue of human breast cancers is nearly complete,\u201d says study co-leader Matthew Ellis of the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. \u201cIt\u2019s the breast-cancer equivalent of putting a man or woman on the moon.\u201d\u00a0Among the most striking findings: One of the most lethal types of breast cancer is genetically closer to a kind of ovarian cancer than it is to other breast tumors, according to the paper, published online today in\u00a0Nature<\/em>.\u00a0That discovery could soon produce real benefits for breast cancer patients, Ellis says. Women with so-called basal-like breast tumors \u2014 also known as triple-negative cancers \u2014 would likely do better on a much less toxic chemotherapy regimen, which is currently the standard of care in ovarian cancer.\u00a0Such shifts show that doctors are beginning to change the way they look at cancers, focusing less on a tumor\u2019s organ of origin and more on the inner workings of its nucleus, down to the molecular level, Ellis says.\u201d<\/p>\n Missing children in India<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cNEW DELHI \u2014 Every six minutes, a child goes missing in India.\u00a0They are boys like Irfan, drugged and abducted at the age of 9 by two men on a motorbike as he walked home one day after playing with friends.\u00a0\u201cIt was living hell these past two years, trying to figure out where we could find him,\u201d said his father, Iqbal Ali. \u201cI used to run a biscuit bakery, but from the day he disappeared, I got so caught up trying to meet politicians, police and people who claim to do magic to get children back, that I had to shut down my bakery. I had no time for it.\u201d\u00a0More than 90,000 children are officially reported missing every year, according to data compiled and released late last year by leading children\u2019s rights group\u00a0Bachpan Bachao Andolan<\/a>, which showed the problem was far greater than previously thought.\u00a0Up to 10 times that number are trafficked, according to the group \u2014 boys and girls, most from poor families, torn from their parents, sometimes in return for cash, and forced to beg or work in farms, factories and homes, or sold for sex and marriage.\u00a0It is an epidemic that, until a few years ago, remained unreported and largely ignored by the authorities.\u201d<\/p>\n Life spans and education<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cFor generations of Americans, it was a given that children would live longer than their parents. But there is now mounting evidence that this enduring trend has reversed itself for the country\u2019s least-educated whites, an increasingly troubled group whose life expectancy has fallen by four years since 1990.\u00a0Researchers have long documented that the most educated Americans were making the biggest gains in life expectancy, but now they say mortality data show that life spans for some of the least educated Americans are actually contracting\u2026.The reasons for the decline remain unclear, but researchers offered possible explanations, including a spike in prescription drug overdoses among young whites, higher rates of smoking among less educated white women, rising obesity, and a steady increase in the number of the least educated Americans who lack health insurance.\u00a0The steepest declines were for white women without a high school diploma<\/em>, who lost five years of life between 1990 and 2008, said S. Jay Olshansky, a public health professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the lead investigator on the study,\u00a0published last month<\/a>\u00a0in Health Affairs. By 2008, life expectancy for black women without a high school diploma had surpassed that of white women of the same education level, the study found.\u201d<\/p>\n Evangelical clothing demands affecting Brazilian fashion<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cITABORAI, Brazil (AP) \u2013 Strolling down the main shopping drag in this working-class Rio de Janeiro suburb, it\u2019s not the second-skin dresses in shocking pink spandex that catch the eye or even the strapless tops with strategically placed peekaboo paneling.\u00a0The newest look can instead be found in stores like Silca Evangelical Fashion, where the hot items are the demure, long-sleeved frocks with how-low-can-you-go hemlines and the polyester putty-colored potato sack dresses.\u00a0In the birthplace of the \u201cfio dental\u201d or dental floss string bikini, so-called evangelical fashion has emerged as a growing segment of the country\u2019s $52 billion-a-year textile industry, catering to the conservative sartorial needs of Brazil\u2019s burgeoning numbers of born-again Pentecostals.\u00a0Once so difficult to procure that evangelical women tended to make much of their own clothes themselves, the modest garb is now popping up all over Brazil.\u201d<\/p>\n Talking about ourselves<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cThe Harvard researchers\u2014Diana Tamir, a grad student in psychology, and Jason Mitchell, her adviser\u2014performed functional MRI scans on 212 subjects while asking them about their own opinions and personality traits, and about other people\u2019s. Neuro\u00adimaging of this sort can reveal which parts of the brain are being activated; in this case, the researchers found that the mesolimbic dopamine system\u2014the seat of the brain\u2019s reward mechanism\u2014was more engaged by questions about the test subject\u2019s own opinions and attitudes than by questions about the opinions and attitudes of other people. The system has long been known to respond to both primary rewards (food and sex) and secondary rewards (money), but this was the first time it\u2019s been shown to light up in response to, as the researchers put it, \u201cself-\u00addisclosure.\u201d\u00a0What the study really illustrated, then, was a paradox: when it comes to information, sharing is mostly about\u00a0me<\/em>. The researchers weren\u2019t trying to answer the thornier question of\u00a0why<\/em>\u2014why, as they wrote, our species might have \u201can intrinsic drive to disclose thoughts to others.\u201d The paper nonetheless points to an intriguing possibility: that this drive might give us humans an adaptive advantage.\u201d<\/p>\n The heave and ho of politics has reshaped news media so much news must be rigorously filtered<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cIn the six months from February to July 2012, the UCS searched for the terms \u201cclimate change\u201d and \u201cglobal warming\u201d during primetime Fox News Channel programs, which consist of political commentary shows such as\u00a0The\u00a0O\u2019Reilly Factor<\/em>and\u00a0Hannity<\/em>.\u00a0The UCS found that, in 37 of 40 instances, Fox News programs misled viewers about climate science\u2014mainly, by broadly dismissing it. As an example, the UCS quotes an on-air statement from April 11, 2012:\u00a0\u201c<\/em>I thought we were getting warmer. But in the \u201870s, it was, look out, we\u2019re all going to freeze.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0(The report didn\u2019t reveal the name of the actual source.) Fox News hosts and guests also mocked and disparaged statements from scientists and drowned out genuine scientific assertions with cherry-picked data and false claims.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking of bias, Sean Carroll points out gender bias among scientists<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cNobody who is familiar with the literature on this will be surprised, but it\u2019s good to accumulate new evidence and also to keep the issue in the public eye: academic scientists are, on average, biased against women. I know it\u2019s fun to change the subject and talk about\u00a0bell curves<\/a>\u00a0and intrinsic ability, but hopefully we can all agree that people with the same ability should be treated equally. And they are not.\u00a0That\u2019s the conclusion of\u00a0a new study in PNAS<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Corinne Moss-Racusin<\/a>\u00a0and collaborators at Yale. (Hat tipDan Vergano<\/a>.) To test scientist\u2019s reactions to men and women with precisely equal qualifications, the researchers did a randomized double-blind study in which academic scientists were given application materials from a student applying for a lab manager position. The substance of the applications were all identical, but sometimes a male name was attached, and sometimes a female name.\u00a0Results: female applicants were rated lower than men on the measured scales of competence, hireability, and mentoring (whether the scientist would be willing to mentor this student). Both male and female scientists rated the female applicants lower.\u201d<\/p>\n More and more urban<\/strong><\/a>, our world is \u2014 will it wreck the environment? \u201cIt\u2019s easy to miss amid the day to day headlines of global economic implosion, Presidential campaign foibles and Mideast rage, but there is a less conspicuous kind of social upheaval underway that is fast altering both the face of the planet and the way that human beings live. That change is the\u00a0rapid acceleration of urbanization<\/a>, as more and more people in every corner of the world put down their farm tools and move from the countryside or the village to the city. In 2008, for the first time in human history,\u00a0more than half the world\u2019s population<\/a>\u00a0was living in towns and cities. And as\u00a0a new paper<\/a>\u00a0published in the\u00a0Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences\u00a0<\/em>shows, the process of urbanization will only increase in the decades to come \u2014 with an enormous impact on biodiversity and potentially on climate change.As Karen Seto, a professor of the urban environment at Yale and the lead author of the\u00a0PNAS\u00a0<\/em>paper, points out, that the wave of urbanization isn\u2019t just about the migration of people into urban environments, but about the environments themselves becoming bigger to accommodate all those people. Today urban areas \u2014 ranging from Times Square to a small\u00a0 town in India \u2014 cover perhaps 3 to 5% of global land. But Seto and her co-authors calculate that between now and 2030, urban areas will expand by more than 463,000 sq. mi. (1.2 million sq. km). That\u2019s equal to 20,000 U.S. football fields being paved over every day for the first few decades of this century. By then, a little less than 10% of the planet\u2019s land cover could be urban. \u201cThere\u2019s going to be a huge impact on biodiversity hotspots and on carbon emissions in those urban areas,\u201d says Seto.\u201d<\/p>\n David Brooks on the shift in conservatism<\/strong><\/a>: \u201cIn the polarized political conflict with liberalism, shrinking government has become the organizing conservative principle. Economic conservatives have the money and the institutions. They have taken control. Traditional conservatism has gone into eclipse. These days, speakers at Republican gatherings almost always use the language of market conservatism \u2014 getting government off our backs, enhancing economic freedom. Even Mitt Romney, who subscribes to a faith that knows a lot about social capital, relies exclusively on the language of market conservatism.\u00a0It\u2019s not so much that today\u2019s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don\u2019t even know it exists. There are few people on the conservative side who\u2019d be willing to raise taxes on the affluent to fund mobility programs for the working class. There are very few willing to use government to actively intervene in chaotic neighborhoods, even when 40 percent of American kids are born out of wedlock. There are very few Republicans who protest against a House Republican budget proposal that cuts domestic discretionary spending to absurdly low levels.\u201d<\/p>\n Meanderings in Sports<\/p>\n<\/a>I like this cartoon on introverts: click on the image to your left (link to site<\/a>).<\/p>\n