{"id":20222,"date":"2014-01-14T08:59:53","date_gmt":"2014-01-14T13:59:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/?p=20222"},"modified":"2014-01-12T18:23:38","modified_gmt":"2014-01-12T23:23:38","slug":"7-9-the-doing-is-the-crucial-thing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/slacktivist\/2014\/01\/14\/7-9-the-doing-is-the-crucial-thing\/","title":{"rendered":"7 @ 9: ‘The doing is the crucial thing’"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

1.<\/strong> My neighbor Mr. BooMan cites that dreaded clobber verse from Romans 1. Except, unlike the vast majority of others citing it, he actually quotes the entire argument Paul is making in that passage<\/a> \u2014 which isn\u2019t about condemning LGBT people, it\u2019s about the danger of condemning anyone<\/em>. Kind of sad that you\u2019re more likely to find responsible exegesis on a secular political blog than on 99 percent of the largest \u201cChristian\u201d ones.<\/p>\n

2.<\/strong>\u00a0Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia<\/a>. I didn\u2019t know there was a word for that. But then given that it\u2019s longer and nowhere near as easy to remember or to say as \u201cfear of the number 666,\u201d I\u2019m not sure it\u2019s worth learning that word.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
This is a deathtrap \u2014 in 40 days and 40 nights, these animals would all be sick or dead.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

3.<\/strong> Kevin Drum notes that \u201cAmerican Cars Are Getting Older<\/a>.\u201d That\u2019s partly a sign of economic insecurity \u2014 we\u2019re keeping our clunkers because we haven\u2019t got cash. But Kevin wonders if it might also be partly due to the increasing reliability of older cars \u2014 a 5-year-old car might not be<\/em> a clunker anymore.<\/p>\n

I read that statistic with one daughter just starting college and the other one starting next year \u2014 which means I won\u2019t be car-shopping again until the summer of 2018. And my family isn\u2019t the only one in that situation \u2014 the largest ever American generation is now going through college, which now costs way more than ever before. So I\u2019m<\/em> wondering if this statistic is partly due to millions of parents still driving their my-kid-is-in-college car. (There\u2019s a reason those rear-window stickers for colleges were designed to last for at least four years.)<\/p>\n

4. <\/strong>Dianna\u00a0Anderson collected some great responses to her #PlanetCCM synchroblog<\/a> on \u201ccontemporary Christian music\u201d (which tends to be \u2014 say it with me \u2026 none of the above).<\/p>\n

5.<\/strong> The \u201cSouper Bowl of Caring<\/a>\u201d is an annual food drive organized around Super Bowl Sunday and named with an atrocious pun. Food drives are a Good Thing.<\/p>\n

Granted, cash donations are far more helpful and efficient for food pantries than canned-good drives are, but canned-good drives are an effective way of drawing attention to the need and creating the awareness and participation that will, hopefully, later mature into forms more focused on the need being served than on the felt needs of the donors. The Souper Bowl of Caring shouldn\u2019t be the final step or the only step, but it can be a good first step, and as such it\u2019s worth celebrating.<\/p>\n

6.<\/strong> Ian Welsh: \u201cThe Death Bet<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

The men and women who lived through the Great Depression always planned for the future. They built power plants which produced more power than needed, bridges which could handle more traffic, water purification plants which produced more water. They made sure infrastructure would last for decades, and then built it so well it outlasted even their specifications.<\/p>\n

Their heirs, the Silents and the Boomers, thought this was absurd. Why not party now, and let the future take care of itself?<\/p>\n

Call this the \u201cdeath bet\u201d. In it\u2019s pure form, the death bet is just that, a bet that when the bill comes due, you\u2019ll be dead. If you live a good life and die owing millions, well, what do you care?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

7.<\/strong> Rebecca Solnit: \u201cThe Arc of Justice and the Long Run<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n

Optimism says that everything will be fine no matter what, just as pessimism says that it will be dismal no matter what. Hope is a sense of the grand mystery of it all, the knowledge that we don\u2019t know how it will turn out, that anything is possible.<\/p>\n

\u2026\u00a0I don\u2019t know what\u2019s coming. I do know that, whatever it is, some of it will be terrible, but some of it will be miraculous, that term we reserve for the utterly unanticipated, the seeds we didn\u2019t know the soil held. And I know that we don\u2019t know what we do does. As Shane Bauer points out, the doing is the crucial thing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Someone actually notices that there are a bunch of verses before and after that one clobber-text in Romans 1. Clunkers for cash and my-kid-is-in-college cars. Kids today with their rock and their roll. Souper Bowl of Caring is a bad pun, but a good first step. Ian Welsh and Rebecca Solnit describe two antithetical views of the long run.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":141,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n7 @ 9: 'The doing is the crucial thing'<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Someone actually notices that there are a bunch of verses before and after that one clobber-text in Romans 1. Clunkers for cash and my-kid-is-in-college cars. Kids today with their rock and their roll. 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