![\"\"](\"https:\/\/wp.patheos.com\/community\/sites\/40\/2010\/08\/StudReadGrasses.jpg\" "\\"StudReadGrasses\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nBefore you leave the site today, go to the top left bar, above where it says \u201cJesus Creed\u201d and click on \u201cPatheos\u201d and explore a little. I think you will find Patheos to be a site rich with resources.<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n New Wineskins<\/a><\/strong> now has their series on what matters put together.<\/p>\n God does not love America<\/a><\/strong> \u2014 how\u2019s that for a way to get attention at a blog? \u00a0But God does love failures<\/a><\/strong>. Mark talks about love \u2014 realistically<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Where to put this? Prothero covers Jana Riess<\/a><\/strong>, who is tweeting through the whole Bible. I read her every tweet \u2014 or close to every tweet. Jana explains how she can be both Mormon and Emergent<\/a><\/strong> (Emorgent). \u00a0Sarah Cunningham<\/a><\/strong> provides a thoughtful reminder. A good interview with Phyllis Tickle<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Laura Boggess <\/a><\/strong>opens her heart and asks a big one: Who can you trust? Wade Hodges<\/a><\/strong> gives some wisdom to young preachers. Must read. Jim \u2014 or Poppie <\/a><\/strong>\u2014 got so excited he forgot his clothes. Derek<\/a><\/strong> ponders the difference Yeshua makes for messianic Jews.<\/p>\n Why read Wesley<\/a><\/strong>? \u00a0(HT: AB) Why read Calvin<\/a><\/strong>? Perhaps Ted asks it best: Why read the Bible with lectio divina<\/a><\/strong>?<\/p>\n From Geeding\u2019s bag of fun: Discuss<\/a><\/strong>. One of my blog reads every week is Rob Merola\u2019s blog, and one thing I like about his site is the pictures of critters<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Afterism (noun): A concise, clever statement you don\u2019t think of until too late.\u00a0 [James Alexander Thom, American author] [HT: CB]<\/p>\n Meanderings in the News<\/p>\n President Obama has ended the combat mission in Iraq<\/a><\/strong>. The decision to enter was too hasty, the strategy deployed ineffective, the result in Iraq instability, and the condition now complete vulnerability to the machinations of others.<\/p>\n 1. This is good news to me<\/a><\/strong>: we have too many McMansions.<\/p>\n 3. John Derbyshire <\/a><\/strong>is obviously worried too: \u201cHere is my prescription for a reform of the nation\u2019s education system. First, destroy all the schools. Cart away the rubble for landfill and sow the ground with salt. Abolish the federal Department of Education and all state equivalents. End all education funding from public sources.\u00a0If the inhabitants of any district then wish their kids to be educated in schools, let them raise the necessary funds themselves. Then let them build the schools themselves, like\u00a0zeks<\/a>. There should be just one federally approved model: an unheated wood-and-tar-paper structure with plastic sheeting for windows.\u00a0Any person above the age of twelve who wishes to attend school should have to stand outside the school gate for a month, in all weathers, pleading to be admitted. There should be a constitutional amendment banning any community from employing non-teaching staff in its schools at any ratio to teaching staff higher than one percent. And let\u2019s have a federal penalty of 25-to-life for anyone attempting to form a teachers\u2019 union.\u00a0Crazy, you say? No: Spending half a billion dollars you don\u2019t have on a school to educate 4,200 students, some high proportion of whom are\u00a0in the country illegally<\/a>, is crazy. Shoveling seven hundred million dollars into the public sector of a state whose private sector is withering on the vine is crazy. Pretending that by spending enough money you can\u00a0turn every child into a bookish child<\/a> is crazy.\u00a0Though I\u2019m certainly willing to let my proposal compete in the marketplace of ideas. How about a nationwide referendum: the Derbyshire plan, as above, vs. the Obama plan? The result might, as in our little local referendum here this week, not be the one the ed-biz panjandrums prefer.\u201d<\/p>\n 4. Got a title for this news item<\/a><\/strong>? Here\u2019s the last line: \u201cAmericans, now fatter than ever, are having trouble standing up from a sit, never mind a squat.\u201d<\/p>\n 6. Hoping in some hoping<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cYet even as vital signs weaken \u2014 plunging home sales, a bleak job market and, on Friday, confirmation that the quarterly rate of economic growth had slowed, to 1.6 percent \u2014 a sense has taken hold that government policy makers cannot deliver meaningful intervention. That is because nearly any proposed curative could risk adding to the national debt \u2014 a political nonstarter. The situation has left American fortunes pinned to an uncertain remedy: hoping that things somehow get better.\u201d<\/p>\n 7. Brad Wilcox, quoted in Kathryn Jean Lopez<\/a><\/strong>, about women and the workplace: \u201cAbout half of American women, says Wilcox, are \u201cadaptive\u201d: They \u201chave interests in both work and family, and . . . they seek to scale back their work when they have children in the home \u2014 especially infants and toddlers. But when they don\u2019t have children, or their children are older, adaptive women are often interested in working outside the home on a full-time basis. So their orientation to work and family shifts over the life course, and according to the needs of their children.\u201d So they\u2019re not stay-at-home moms <\/strong>or<\/strong><\/em> working moms: They\u2019re women who do what\u2019s best for them and their families at a given time.<\/strong> They \u201cdon\u2019t fit the standard conservative stay-at-home model or the liberal full-time-working-woman model. For that reason, they are often invisible in media and academic debates about work and family.\u201d<\/p>\n 8. The Info-Techno sabbath by Joe Carter<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n 9. On the closing of a Barnes & Noble<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cBut many of those same people conceded that they have not bought as many books there as they did in the past. Some said they were more likely to browse the shelves, then head home and make purchases online. Others said they prized the store most for its sunny cafe or its magazines and other nonbook items.\u201d<\/p>\n 10. It\u2019s happening more and more<\/a><\/strong>. And it happened again. They found some more<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n Meanderings in Sports<\/p>\n<\/a>2. Frank Rich<\/a><\/strong> is obviously worried: \u201cAll three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled \u201cInvisible Hands\u201d in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League\u2019s crusade against the New Deal \u201csocialism\u201d of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our \u201csocialist\u201d president.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/a>5. Yes, it\u2019s true: in many ways liberal Christianity morphed (naturally) from a social gospel into a liberation theology, and President Obama\u2019s form of Christianity is a liberation theology. From WaPo<\/a><\/strong>: \u201cBeck \u2026\u00a0said that liberation theology is at the core of Obama\u2019s \u201cbelief structure.\u201d\u00a0\u201cYou see, it\u2019s all about victims and victimhood; oppressors and the oppressed; reparations, not repentance; collectivism, not individual salvation. I don\u2019t know what that is, other than it\u2019s not Muslim, it\u2019s not Christian. It\u2019s a perversion of the gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it,\u201d Beck said. [But, but, but the best of liberation theology is a both-and and not an either-or. My favorite version remains David Bosch, pictured to the left with his wife Annemie, whom I\u2019ve met.]<\/p>\n