• My life changes a bit this week as I become a full-time employee of the Big Box. That means benefits at a better deal than I’ve been getting with the spousal-piggyback via the ‘vixen, which is a Good Thing. (Affordable health insurance: It’s not just a good idea … it’s the law.) No longer working overnight Saturdays may also improve my dismal-of-late church attendance.
This isn’t a huge change in my schedule, since I’ve been “seasonal” full-time there March-July and in December, but the transition from a Wed.-Sun. week to a Mon.-Fri. week means that tonight will be day six of 10 in a row. Daunting, but too much work is a much, much happier problem than not enough.
• Scott Paeth has a fun discussion of a recent study attempting to measure whether “professional ethicists” are “in fact, more ethical than others.” (Spoiler: They’re not — but measuring such a thing is also pretty dubious.)
Professional ethicists, disappointingly, mostly refers to academics who teach the subject at universities. It turns out you can’t just hang a shingle reading “Professional Ethicist for Hire” and expect to make a living in private practice. I’m not quite sure what such private practice would entail, but I still wish that were a thing.
• Brian Vastag writes about becoming disabled due to myalgic encephalomyelitis, and makes a heartfelt plea to NIH Director Francis Collins seeking even meager funding for research into this MS-like orphan disease — one that likely affects hundreds of thousands of Americans. (“No one has a good count of M.E. patients in the U.S.,” Vastag writes, “the C.D.C. misspent funds earmarked for this purpose.”)
One of those many people stricken by this orphan disease is Becca Dean, who writes eloquently about faith and life with ME at her blog, Becca Is Learning. Her latest post, “Accommodating grief,” is heartbreaking.
• Here’s an article on a widely spread-and-believe Fake News Story — it’s a classic, plausible-seeming Some Guy story that proved too good to check. This story involved some credulous Christians supposedly freaking out over a hidden “666” in a grocery-store birthday cake. Why bother fabricating such a story? That’s like making up a story about somebody seeing the face of Jesus in something inappropriate. There’s no need to invent either kind of story — just be patient and some real-life variation will come along soon enough.
Again, Snopes is your friend — they quickly debunked this 666-cake story, pointing out its tell-tale flaws, just as they did with that dishonest Operation Rescue video released last week.
I’m just hoping Snopes isn’t overwhelmed in the months ahead by the Herculean task of having to write a never-ending stream of “Yes, Donald Trump really did say that” posts.
• Also from Snopes: “Chicken McNuggets from McDonalds are made from chicken, not aborted fetuses.” This outrageous rumor is an almost-artful mash-up of two classics of the genre — the something awful in a McNugget story and the something awful about Planned Parenthood story. Some people are desperately eager to believe both of those kinds of story, and put ’em together — with a seasoning of McNuggets-vs.-Chick-fil-A (“the official chicken of Jesus“) — and you’ve got conspiratorial magic for the willfully delusional.
I expect at any moment to read Ed Stetzer’s heartfelt lamentation: “Where are the Mainline and Progressive Evangelical Voices Speaking Up After That McDonald’s Tragedy?”
• You may have noticed that I’ve sunk back into my self-destructively anti-SEO, click-repellant habit of song-lyric post titles — this time working my way through the glorious discography of Patty Griffin because doing so is good for the soul.
Here’s Jennifer Knapp taking Griffin’s “Every Little Bit” to church:
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