Our walking weather this week has been amazing for Kris and me. Warm enough mornings, delightful afternoons with some clear blue skies. But his fall’s migrations on our local lake have disappointed — not a scaup or a bufflehead or a loon or a shoveler to be seen. They must have found more pleasant places. What has also been pleasant, though quite a bit of work, have been the manuscripts I’m now writing, reading, editing, proofing, or readying for the publisher. Because of delays due to you know what, I’ve done some work on five different publications this week. One of them was merely answering a couple questions about who will do the indexing and how to do chapter key words. Still, it’s fun to see one’s work come to the publication phase.
Photo by Lyndon Li on Unsplash
Open question for you: What do you make of Elon Musk taking over Twitter?
Justin Turner, who has spent his entire stint with the Los Angeles Dodgers fervidly giving back to the community where he grew up, has been named recipient of the prestigious Roberto Clemente Award, which annually honors players for their philanthropic efforts.
Turner, the Dodgers' Clemente Award nominee in five of the past six seasons, is in Philadelphia to be commemorated alongside the Clemente family and Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred ahead of Game 3 of the World Series on Monday. Turner is the third member of the Dodgers to win the award, after Steve Garvey in 1981 and Clayton Kershaw in 2012.
The award is in many ways a culmination of Turner's time in Los Angeles. When he arrived with the Dodgers as a free agent in February 2014, he was a 29-year-old journeyman infielder struggling to carve out a defined role in the major leagues. He overhauled his swing, established himself as an every-day third baseman, made two All-Star teams, won a World Series championship and started the Justin Turner Foundation. …
Turner's foundation, started alongside his wife, Kourtney, began in 2016 with a desire to support homeless veterans, children and families battling life-altering diseases and illnesses. In recent years, Turner has become intimately involved with the Dream Center, an L.A.-based resource center focused on supporting the homeless through community outreach programs. He and Kourtney have also provided more than 70,000 toys and 14,000 bicycles to children in L.A. and have donated more than $100,000 for Children's Hospital Los Angeles, where Turner now sits on the board of directors, according to a release from MLB.
The Los Angeles City Council previously recognized Turner's philanthropic efforts by declaring Jan. 22, 2019, "Justin Turner Day."
Arthur C. Brooks on conspiracy theories and their attractions:
In these polarized times, one of the laments I hear a lot from readers and friends is that people they are close to have fallen prey to conspiracy theories. This is strikingly common; after all, some scholars estimate that, in recent years, half of Americans endorsed at least one such belief.
Perhaps you are cringing as you look toward Thanksgiving, when someone you love will explain the truth about the midterm elections, or the real origins of the coronavirus. It can be very upsetting to hear a friend or family member say things that seem to you like obvious, falsifiable nonsense—it can feel almost as if they had joined a cult.
Perhaps in the past you have tried to meet these beliefs with evidence and reason. Maybe you lost your patience and resorted to derision and mockery. Most likely, you made no progress and only strained your relationship. Fighting over the facts is very unlikely to convince anyone. The truth is that, often, the substance of conspiracy theories—the actual claims they make—isn’t why people cling to them so tightly. In some ways, these beliefs can make people happier. To those who hold them, they may bring a sense of belonging, control, and even entertainment. Understanding this can help you meet their views in a more compassionate and persuasive way….
One last point worth considering is the costs and benefits to you of focusing on a loved one’s conspiracy beliefs. Something that astonishes me about humans is our capacity to ruin things we love by focusing exclusively on what we hate. I understand this from an evolutionary perspective, of course: Survival often requires attention to the speck of threat in a vast space of comfort. I also understand it from a practical perspective: It is terrible to see someone you love in the grip of something you consider insane or even dangerous.
Beth Barr has an important essay this week:
For more than five decades, evangelical theology has been teaching an increasingly restrictive gender hierarchy, arguing that God ordained male headship and female submission. This theology, repackaged as complementarianism in the late 1980s, even became the primary understanding of biblical teachings about women and men for denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention (which currently claims to represent almost fifteen million people) as well as conservative evangelical churches more broadly. …
I remember a provocative question once asked of me in a conversation I had with theologian Lucy Peppiatt, the Principal of Westminster Theological Center in Gloucestershire, England, and the author of Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women: Fresh Perspectives on Disputed Texts. “You have to consider,” she said, “where does your theology lead?”
As I was reading the news stories about Denton Bible Church, I thought about her question to me. Where does evangelical theology lead? Does it lead to love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control, as St. Paul explains in Galatians 5:22 are the fruits of a transformed life? Or does it lead to anger, fear, hate, and violence?
I fear the evidence from too many evangelicals—who neglect to see Hagar and Sarai as victims of sexual violence and who even resist readings of Bathsheba as raped by David—suggests the latter destination rather than the former. Afterall, if people believe that God ordained women as less than men, it shouldn’t surprise us to see them treating women as less than men.
It shouldn’t surprise us. But it should still horrify us.
How much power do Christians actually have?
There’s a sense, in conversations with voters like Watson and Vasquez, that the country is in the midst of a reckoning over what it means to be Christian in America. On one side, there are the people who see Christians as the victims of a successful campaign to infuse the country with secular values, forcing Christians — particularly conservative ones — to accept values they violently disagree with. But many Americans think Christians occupy a very different role. In their version of the country’s current drama, Christians are the villains, ensconcing their own beliefs in law and politics even as their numbers dwindle. There’s a thread of unease on both sides — as if the one thing everyone agrees on is that these two ways of thinking about Christianity in America simply can’t coexist.
Alfred Hitchcock could make something of this one:
Swarming bees produce so much electricity that they may affect local weather, new research suggests.
The finding, which researchers made by measuring the electrical fields around honeybee (apis mellifera) hives, reveals that bees can produce as much atmospheric electricity as a thunderstorm. This can play an important role in steering dust to shape unpredictable weather patterns; and their impact may even need to be included in future climate models.
Insects' tiny bodies can pick up positive charge while they forage — either from the friction of air molecules against their rapidly beating wings (honeybees can flap their wings more than 230 times a second) or from landing onto electrically charged surfaces. But the effects of these tiny charges were previously assumed to be on a small scale. Now, a new study, published Oct. 24 in the journal iScience, shows that insects can generate a shocking amount of electricity.
"We only recently discovered that biology and static electric fields are intimately linked and that there are many unsuspected links that can exist over different spatial scales, ranging from microbes in the soil and plant-pollinator interactions to insect swarms and the global electric circuit," first author Ellard Hunting, a biologist at the University of Bristol, told Live Science.
Static electricity emerges when the microscopic bumps and pits on two surfaces rub over each other, causing friction. This causes electrons, which are negatively charged, to jump from one surface to another, leaving one surface positively charged while the other surface becomes negatively charged. The transfer across the two ionized surfaces sets up a voltage difference, or potential gradient, across which the charges may leap.
Will Calvin’s decision become the norm?
Calvin’s board of trustees decided last Friday to approve the Professional Status Committee (PSC)’s recommendation to retain all faculty in the “pioneer cohort” — a group of faculty who were the first to file statements of confessional difficulty in response to decisions made at Synod in June. The statements were prompted by the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRCNA)’s decision to elevate its stance on LGBTQ+ relationships to confessional status.
Synod, the CRCNA’s general assembly, voted to affirm that an interpretation of the Heidelberg Catechism used to justify the denomination’s stance against LGBTQ+ relationships had confessional status. For decades, that stance had been considered pastoral guidance, a much less firm designation.
Because Calvin is in a covenantal, ecclesiastical partnership with the denomination, that decision had implications for Calvin faculty, who are required to sign a covenant for faculty members in which they affirm, among other historical church documents, the Heidelberg Catechism. They are also required to pledge to “teach, speak, and write in harmony with the confessions,” according to the faculty handbook. For some faculty, Synod’s decision meant their affirmation of the confessions was now in conflict with their consciences when it came to LGBTQ+ issues.
Chimes granted faculty involved in the process anonymity due to the stakes of the situation and the sensitivity of the issue in the Calvin and broader CRCNA community.
I am concerned. As like many things of late, the agenda of the new owner may be the motivation rather than providing a “free” space for all ideas and conversations.