The baseball season is now up and running, the weather in Chicago has not been friendly to baseball, but the probabilities are that it will warm up and we’ll get some good weather. Probabilities is all I’ve got on this one.

During this Easter season we await Pentecost.

Worst idea yet:

A Pennsylvania school district incorporated a low-tech method of protecting teachers and students from attackers.

Millcreek Township School District in northwest Pennsylvania handed each of its teachers a 16-inch baseball bat Monday as a means to protect them and others, reports Erie Times-News. In March, Blue Mountain School District in Schuylkill County dished details of its safety plan, which includes equipping each classroom with a five-gallon bucket of rocks to “stone” a school shooter.

In the case of Millcreek, the bats are more “symbolic” but are free to be used to “fight,” district Superintendent William Hall told the Times-News and Erie News Now.

“It is the last resort,” Hall told Erie News Now. “But, it is an option and something we want people to be aware of.”

The teachers received their bats after a training on how to respond to school shootings, Erie News Now reported. The district ordered about 600 bats at a cost of about $1,800. They’ll be put in areas throughout the school, notes the Times-News.

“It’s to make people comfortable with the idea that they can attack and not simply go into hard lockdown and just hide, as we’d been told in our training up to this point,” said Jon Cacchione, president of the teachers union Millcreek Education Association, to the Times-News.

Maybe this is the worst idea, but it’s proven and proven and proven wrong. [HT: JS]

Great idea, just not timed well:

An Illinois fourth-grade student skipped school earlier this week to attend the Chicago Cubs’ home opener, arriving at Wrigley Field with a sign that read: “Skipping school… Shh! Don’t tell Principal Versluis.”

Then the student, Tucker Steckman, ran into the principal at the game.

“I saw him and I was kind of ducking down,” Wells Elementary School principal Pat Versluis told The Chicago Sun-Times on Tuesday. “I didn’t want him to see me either.”

Versluis told the newspaper that he called in sick Tuesday to attend the Cubs game with his son, a fifth-grader named Aiden. Steckman’s parents told the school that Steckman was sick so they could all attend the game, which Chicago lost to the Pittsburgh Pirates, 8-5.

Versluis told The Chicago Sun-Times that Steckman’s absence wouldn’t be held against him.

“Doesn’t bother me. He’s a great kid. He was student leader of the year,” Versluis said. “(And) I thought the sign was hilarious.”

Yes, the death of expertise is common today:

By definition, an expert is someone whose learning and experience lets them understand a subject deeper than you or I do (assuming we’re not an expert in that subject, too). The weird thing about having to write this essay at all is this: Who would have a problem with that? Doesn’t everyone want their brain surgery done by an expert surgeon rather than the guy who fixes their brakes? On the other hand, doesn’t everyone want their brakes fixed by an expert auto mechanic rather than a brain surgeon who has never fixed a flat? …

How did we reach this remarkable state of affairs? The answer to that question can be found in a new book by Tom Nichols titled The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters. Nichols is a politically conservative professor of international relations at the U.S. War College. (He’s also a five-time undefeated Jeopardy! champion, so you don’t wanna mess with him.)

First, it’s important to note, Nichols is not arguing for a slavish adherence to anything that comes out of an expert’s mouth. In a wonderful essay that preceded the book, he tells us: “It’s true that experts can make mistakes, as disasters from thalidomide to the Challenger explosion tragically remind us.” Later he adds:

“Personally, I don’t think technocrats and intellectuals should rule the world: we had quite enough of that in the late 20th century, thank you, and it should be clear now that intellectualism makes for lousy policy without some sort of political common sense. Indeed, in an ideal world, experts are the servants, not the masters, of a democracy.”

But Nichols is profoundly troubled by the willful “know-nothing-ism” he sees around him. Its principle cause, he argues, are the new mechanisms that shape our discussions (i.e. the Internet and social media). He writes:

“There was once a time when participation in public debate, even in the pages of the local newspaper, required submission of a letter or an article, and that submission had to be written intelligently, pass editorial review, and stand with the author’s name attached… Now, anyone can bum rush the comments section of any major publication. Sometimes, that results in a free-for-all that spurs better thinking. Most of the time, however, it means that anyone can post anything they want, under any anonymous cover, and never have to defend their views or get called out for being wrong.”

Nichols also points to excesses of partisanship in politics, the weakening of expectations in schools and, finally, to human nature. The last cause, he says, is particularly troubling. As he puts it:

“Its called the Dunning-Kruger effect, which says, in sum, that the dumber you are, the more confident you are that you’re not actually dumb. And when you get invested in being aggressively dumb…well, the last thing you want to encounter are experts who disagree with you, and so you dismiss them in order to maintain your unreasonably high opinion of yourself.”

Part of the problem, says Nichols, is that while the democratization of knowledge is great, it’s threatened by the strange insistence that every opinion has equal weight. That’s an idea, he rightly says, that has nothing to do with democracy:

“Having equal rights does not mean having equal talents, equal abilities, or equal knowledge. It assuredly does not mean that ‘everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s.’ And yet, this is now enshrined as the credo of a fair number of people despite being obvious nonsense.”

Nichols’ perspective is an essential one if we are to begin digging ourselves out of the hole we find ourselves in. In a complex, technological world, most of us are experts at something. More importantly, being a true expert means having a healthy dose of humility. If you have really studied something and really gone deep into how it works, then you should come away knowing how much you don’t know. In a sense, that is the real definition of an expert — knowing the limits of one’s own knowledge. [HT: JS]

John Perkins on unity:

John M. Perkins, a leading evangelical voice on racial reconciliation, thinks that 50 years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the church is not focusing enough on unity.

“It scares me. We’re not talking about togetherness,” Perkins said. “That doesn’t improve the issue.”

Perkins, a minister who fought for civil rights in Mississippi, is hopeful for the future. But he believes that for reconciliation to happen, people must first affirm the dignity of all human beings and then move forward together.

“I believe that’s the gospel,” Perkins said. “God created man to reflect his image in the world and his likeness and then he said, ‘Don’t make no other god before me.’ What we’re doing is making ourselves god before God and each other.”

Perkins, 87, was in Nashville on Friday sharing that message, which is included in his new book, “One Blood.” The roughly 200-page work, co-written by Karen Waddles, is billed as Perkins’ parting words to the church on race. …

Perkins spoke in Memphis earlier this week at MLK50: Gospel Reflections from the Mountaintop, an evangelical conference that tackled racial unity as a gospel issue. The conference coincided with the anniversary of King’s assassination, which happened April 4, 1968, in Memphis.

From the conference stage, Perkins shared his message of unity alongside Russell Moore, the president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. The two men — one black and one white, but both from Mississippi — covered a wide variety of topics, from Perkins’ life story to how Christians engage in politics today.

“We’re supposed to be witnessing to the political system instead of thinking ways this political system can help us out of it. We have mixed up political reconciliation with spiritual reconciliation,” said Perkins, in a video of their joint presentation. “We’re confused.” [HT: KKNM]

Does education work? Well…

One idea on which everyone can agree, in other words, is that schools shape society. The reason so many of us spend so much energy on school reform is precisely because we think it matters. For some conservatives in the twentieth century, teaching kids evolution was dangerous because it threatened to take away their moral and religious compass. For others, teaching kids about sex was a bad idea because it tended to unhinge their self-control. And for yet others, teaching kids socialist ideas was obviously terrible because it would lead to the corruption of their morals and of the entire society.

Last night, the Hawaii students shared stories that helped puncture those school-reform assumptions. One student, for example, reported that he came to the realization that he was conservative in high school. He was guided to that realization by his favorite teacher. At first, I assumed that the teacher was a conservative, too, and inspired the student by reading Hayek and Burke and smoking a pipe. In fact, the student told us, his favorite teacher was a heart-on-her-sleeve liberal. She taught social studies in a progressive way, one that hoped to help students examine their own ideas and decide questions for themselves. In the student’s case, that meant he came to the realization that his ideas were apparently “conservative.” The left-y teacher, in other words, didn’t indoctrinate this student into leftism, but precisely the opposite.

Another Hawaii student told a very different story. She only realized that she was a liberal when she was teaching Sunday school at her church. The goal was to help young people deepen their religious faith, but it had the opposite effect on her. Instead of becoming more religious, teaching Sunday school convinced this student that her church was full of hooey.

What’s the takeaway? Once we hear the stories, it seems pretty obvious. School doesn’t really work the way we sometimes think it will. No matter what our politics, we can’t control the future of our students by teaching them X or Y or by keeping them away from Z or A. Students are not predictable, programmable outputs. They have their own ideas and backgrounds and sometimes our best-laid plans at shaping America’s future will come out in ways we didn’t predict. [HT: JS]

Some education is evidently not working:

NEW YORK — More than one-fifth of millennials in the U.S. — 22 percent — haven’t heard of, or aren’t sure if they’ve heard of, the Holocaust, according to a study published Thursday, on Israel’s Holocaust Remembrance Day. The study, which was commissioned by The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany and conducted by Schoen Consulting, also found that 11 percent of U.S. adults overall haven’t heard of the Holocaust or aren’t sure if they did.

Additionally, 41 percent of millennials believe two million Jews or fewer were killed during the Holocaust, the study found. Six million Jews were killed in World War II by Nazi Germany and its accomplices.

Two-thirds of millennials could not identify in the survey what Auschwitz was.

“The survey found there are critical gaps both in awareness of basic facts as well as detailed knowledge of the Holocaust,” said a news release on the findings.

A majority of American adults surveyed — 70 percent — agreed with a statement reading: “Fewer people seem to care about the Holocaust as much as they used to.” And 58 percent of Americans believe that something like the Holocaust could happen again, the survey found.

The study on Holocaust awareness and knowledge in the U.S. was conducted between February 23 and 27 and involved 1,350 interviews with American adults 18 and older.

By Todd Dildine, who is a pastor at a small neighborhood church in Uptown, one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Chicago. He is most passionate about helping the church navigate the challenges of post-Christendom. Todd loves playing volleyball and he’s going to get married this summer!

A four part blog series that applies the instruments of social science to address the declining attendance rate in the American church and what to do about it!

One of the most important conversations a 21^st century Christian in American can engage in is centered around a stark reality: The church is dying. For the purposes of this series, I will only be speaking about the American church; globally, the church is doing fantastically!

The State of the Church in America

Church attendance has steadily declined 38% over past several decades.¹
59% of millennials growing up in church have dropped out.²

If the Republican or Democratic Party had stats like this, they would be freaking out and dramatically changing the way they do things. (Interestingly enough, about a year ago, the DNC Chair fired every staff member because the direction they were taking wasn’t leading to the results they wanted to see.) If the NFL lost 38% of their audience, they would completely change the way the industry is run.

Instead of reacting appropriately to the decline, the church has responded in one of two ways. Either, we ignore the decline of the church in America, because “the patient isn’t sick enough”—meaning that before people start taking things seriously, attendance must reach critical levels. Or, we propose cosmetic changes to our collapsing structures. The house has severe structural damage, and yet we find ourselves arguing over what paint we should apply to the doors.

This post aims to establish a Restoration Principle for the way forward.

First you need to know why the church is not dying. The death of the American church is not happening because churches don’t:

• Have a good enough mission statement
• Have a good enough preacher
• Have band members wearing skinny jeans
• Read their Bibles enough
• Care enough about evangelism
• Differ with mainstream culture on sexual ethics
• Have a good enough hospitality team at the front door
• Care enough about the poor
• Discuss the relationship between science and faith enough

These are all awesome things to implement and improve upon, but If you think the solution to the church’s decline is one of these, you are looking in the wrong place. These are cosmetic solutions—they do not address the structural root primarily responsible for causing the decay.

When you talk about the collapse of the American church you must also talk about the collapse of the social fabric of our American society, because they are inextricably tied.

Say what, Todd?!

The collapse of the American church and the breakdown of the American community are tied together. When you take a critical look at our society you will discover that America in 2018 is one of the loneliest and most fragmented cultures that has ever existed, and the church has been dramatically infected by this. I can’t use enough superlatives! But, it was not always like this.

Check it. This is real important stuff.

Harvard Professor Robert Putnam was the first to popularize this in his book Bowling Alone (I am unashamed to admit that this blog series is the fruit of me interacting with his work combined with my reading of scripture). Published in 2000, Putnam’s work points out that in the first two thirds of the 20^th century, volunteer-based activities were thriving and growing, and local communities were vibrant. People were voting more, churches’ attendance was on the rise, families ate together as a rule, and people hosted one another at their homes. People volunteered more in local community projects, and as much as we can quantitatively evaluate, people behaved in a more generous and trustworthy ways toward one another. But, then “mysteriously, and more or less simultaneously we began to do all those things less often.” This epidemic that has largely collapsed the American community, Putnam points out, happened in the last third of the 20^th century—around 1960.

Read that paragraph again! Then repeat.

This collapse is an epidemic, affecting a wide spread hurting all of our communities—including along the church.

Political communities

While we’ve seen a new wave of political fervor since the 2016 election, the long-term trends show that over the past several decades, the U.S. has witnessed an overall steep decline in civic participation. We are “35 percent less likely to attend public meetings… and roughly 40 percent less engaged in party politics and indeed in political and civic organizations of all sort.” (Putnam) Sociologist Christian Smith carried out an extensive study on millennials’ participation in politics in 2011, concluding that “the idea that today’s emerging adults are as a generation leading a new wave of renewed civic-mindedness and political involvement is sheer fiction.” Consider that his research was being conducted after the 2008 election and leading up to 2012. Contrary to what would be expected with freedom as a core value of our nation’s foundation, America’s citizens are increasingly less interested in participating in its politics—especially at the local level.

Family Relationships  

The decaying community is hitting where it hurts the most in America—the family. In the past two decades, the family has witnessed a dramatic reorientation away from a core tenet of fostering deep, intimate connection: Quality time. In the past 20 years, family dinners have declined 33% and family vacations have decreased 28%. Even watching TV together as a family has dropped 20% and simply just sitting and talking with each other has dropped 10%. Slowly, the American family as a unit is being dismantled.

Friend Relationships

In 2004 a study carried out by Duke aimed to identify the number of close friends Americans have on average, and the results were objectively depressing. In 1985, 10% responded by saying they have zero friends that they felt they could confide in and share their pain or joy with. Two decades later in 2004, the same survey was carried out, and this time 25% responded saying they had zero friends. This was 15 years ago, and it has been climbing. More recently, Harvard put out a study reported that 40% of adults report feeling lonely. The breakdown of community has led to a weaker social fabric, increasing loneliness. Next time you go to a bar, coffee, or a church hall, understand that 1 in 4 of the people there likely don’t have someone to dance with, hug, call on, lean on, cry on.

What These Stats Mean

This post is only intended to be a brief introduction to the topic, and as such, only presents topline information. For more detailed evidence of these trends, I encourage that you check out the authors and studies I’ve mentioned. There are many more.

But verifiably, this is where this data leads us.

The church isn’t the only community that is collapsing;

It’s all volunteer-based communities that are hurting!

If we want to rebuild the church, we have to understand its problem as part of a much broader issue—we have to identify the force in the environment that’s causing all communities to collapse. What we need to do is examine the “anti-community forces” that are threatening to pull apart all of our communities, and then we can develop strategies that resist these forces to begin cultivating strong communities of Christ again.

The Restoration Principle:

If restoration is to occur, the church must identify and address the forces that are hurting all communities.

If the church ignores this principle and attempts to take measures to repair the church by executing normal impulse solutions (cosmetic solutions), the church will continue to decline and weaken.

Popular church solutions that are cosmetic and not restorative may include:

• Buying a bigger building
• Getting a hip, young preacher
• Forming stronger hospitality teams
• Creating a stronger internet presence
• Teaching more controversial topics
• Moving the church building next to the new expensive housing developments
• Initiating a better youth program

Here’s how Duke sociologist Mark Chaves frames the Restoration Principle:

“Looking for root causes or solutions only within the religious sphere is like the man who, faced with a flooded basement, looks for the leak in his own pipes not realizing that the water main has broken and every house on the block is flooded.”

If the Church is to grow again, the water main needs to be fixed.

Until then, we can expect the collapse of the church to continue.

I hope by now you’re asking…

“What is the water main?”

“What are the forces hurting the American community, and our church?”

If you are, then you are on the right track!!

The next 3 blog posts will tackle these ACFs through the lens of the Restoration Principle. First, I will identify an ACF and then proceed to propose a practice that will address it.

1. Bowling Alone: The Collapse of the American Community, Robert Putnam
2. You Lost Me: Why Young Christians Are Leaving Church…and Rethinking Faith, David Kinnaman and Aly Hawkins

Could Beth Moore turn the tide? Will she? By Beth Allison Barr:

“Lord, I repent of ways I’ve been complicit in & contributed to misogyny & sexism in the church by my cowardly and inordinate deference to male leaders in order to survive rather than simply appropriately respecting them as my brothers. Forgive me for being part of the problem.”  Beth Moore tweeted (@BethMooreLPM) this  just last week, March 27 2018.

I almost missed it.

It wasn’t until we were eating Easter dinner a few days later when my mom (who is better on twitter than I am) brought it to my attention. “Did you see Beth Moore’s apology? Is she recanting complementarianism?” I nearly dropped my fork. As soon as it was respectably possible, I left the table and grabbed my phone, searching for the tweet. And there it was: “Lord I repent of ways I’ve been complicit in & contributed to misogyny & sexism in the church by my cowardly and inordinate deference to male leaders..Forgive me for being part of the problem.” She didn’t actually say the word complementarianism, but her language is pretty clear. She apologized for being “part of the problem” of sexism and misogyny in the church by her “cowardly” deference to male leaders.

I had to read the tweet several times before it sunk in.  I even double checked her twitter account to make sure it was real. It was only then that I allowed myself to finally start hoping. Could Beth Moore–popular Southern Baptist preacher and founder of Living Proof Ministries–help turn the tide of complementarian theology?

I’m not convinced of Vitamins — the skinny:

More than half of Americans take vitamin supplements, including 68% of those age 65 and older, according to a 2013 Gallup poll. Among older adults, 29% take four or more supplements of any kind, according to a Journal of Nutrition study published in 2017.

Often, preliminary studies fuel irrational exuberance about a promising dietary supplement, leading millions of people to buy into the trend. Many never stop. They continue even though more rigorous studies — which can take many years to complete — almost never find that vitamins prevent disease, and in some cases cause harm.

“The enthusiasm does tend to outpace the evidence,” said JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital.

There’s no conclusive evidence that dietary supplements prevent chronic disease in the average American, Manson said. And while a handful of vitamin and mineral studies have had positive results, those findings haven’t been strong enough to recommend supplements to the general U.S. public, she said.

The National Institutes of Health has spent more than $2.4 billion since 1999 studying vitamins and minerals. Yet for “all the research we’ve done, we don’t have much to show for it,” said Barnett Kramer, director of cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute.

Patristics and war, by Brandon Hurlbert:

After doing a little more digging, I decided to catalog these references and see if there was a pattern. Why was this aversion to killing, war, and military service so unanimous among the early Church Fathers? Here are a few things that I found:

1. No early Church Father approved of killing in any context. This belief was rooted in Jesus’ command to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you (Matthew 5:39-44) as it is frequently alluded to or quoted. It was both Jesus’ teaching and his example of the cross that provided the foundation for this nonviolent ethic of enemy-love.
2. The nonviolent response of Christians to persecution and defamation was seen as a fulfillment of prophecy and a major identity marker of following Jesus. (“We came in accordance with the commands of Jesus to beat the spiritual swords that fight and insult us into ploughshares, and to transform the spears that formerly fought against us in pruning-hooks.” Origen, Against Celsus 5.33).
3. The nonviolent response of Christians to persecution and defamation was often given as evidence of the value of Christianity to the Roman empire. It was argued that Christianity was making Rome more just and virtuous. This means that the enemy-love ethic had become a widespread way of living for Christians. If not, the arguments would fall flat in the face of opposing evidence.
4. The aversion to Christian military service is primarily a result of its commitment to enemy-love rather than a focus on idolatry. While the idolatry infused in the Roman military constituted by mandated sacrifices and the taking of a public oath (Sacramentum, the same word used for the Christian mystery and the sacraments), was a concern in the writings of the early Church, it was not the Violence was the main source of contention as both issues are almost always addressed together. (To my knowledge, there are only two explicit instances, Tertullian The Crown 12.1 and Clement of Alexandria Commentary on 1 Cor. 26.98, which deal with Idolatry only. Various accounts of martyrdoms occurring in the military, especially Marcellus and Julius the Veteran, also only address the issue of idolatry.)
5. Military and war imagery within the Old and New Testaments were reused and reimagined by the Church Fathers to draw a distinction between the Church and the Empire. The early Christian community really did wage war, even on behalf of the emperor, but it was done in accordance to Scripture, like Ephesians 6:11-17. Armed with the word of God, prayer, and their nonviolent enemy-love, the Church fought against the spiritual forces of evil that were the source of violence and warfare. The imagery was retained, but it was clear that the Militi Christiwas made of martyrs and those who prayed fervently for peace.

Deerfield IL banning assault rifles et al for the entire city:

(Reuters) – A Chicago suburb has banned the possession, sale and manufacture of assault weapons and large-capacity magazines in response to the massacre at a Florida high school and other recent mass shootings in the United States.

Residents of Democratic-leaning Deerfield, Illinois have until June 13 to remove any firearms and magazines that fall outside the new restrictions or face a fine of between $250 and $1,000 per day, according to an ordinance passed by the town board on Monday night.

The ban was a direct response to the Feb. 14 killing of 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida and the student-led campaign for tighter restrictions on guns inspired by the mass shooting, the ordinance said.

The Deerfield decision is likely to face legal challenges from gun rights groups that see it as a violation of their constitutional rights.

A similar ban in Highland Park, Illinois was challenged all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and upheld.

The National Rifle Association and the Illinois State Rifle Association did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

These people are sticking it out:

AUGUSTA, Georgia (Reuters) – Augusta National, home to the U.S. Masters, may be one of the most exclusive and powerful golf clubs in the world but even its mighty coffers do not hold enough money to convince two neighbouring homeowners to relocate.

A residential community once bordering Augusta National is now a free parking lot after the club, in a bid to accommodate patrons for the one week each year that it hosts the Masters, enticed homeowners with prices that were too good to turn down.

The two remaining homes in the area are modest, red-brick bungalows that sit in the shadow of Augusta National’s towering pine trees and the owners of each house have no desire to appease the interests of Augusta National.

“We will just continue to be right here and Augusta National can put no kind of money in front of us that would change our minds,” Herman Thacker, who together with his wife Elizabeth has lived in their home since 1959, told Reuters during an interview at his house this week.

“We raised our family here, and we can go out and buy a new house but we can’t buy a home. This is home to us.”

Babel’s origins?

Scientists say they have traced the world’s 6,000 modern languages — from English to Mandarin — back to a single “mother tongue,” an ancestral language spoken in Africa 50,000 to 70,000 years ago.

New research, published in the journal Science, suggests this single ancient language resulted in human civilization — a Diaspora — as well as advances in art and hunting tool technology, and laid the groundwork for all the world’s cultures.

The research, by Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland in New Zealand, also found that speech evolved far earlier than previously thought. And the findings implied, though did not prove, that modern language originated only once, an issue of controversy among linguists, according to the New York Times.

Before Atkinson came up with the evidence for a single African origin of language, some scientists had argued that language evolved independently in different parts of the world.

Atkinson found that the first populations migrating from Africa laid the groundwork for all the world’s cultures by taking their single language with them. “It was the catalyst that spurred the human expansion that we all are a product of,” Atkinson said, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Atkinson traced the number distinct sounds, or phonemes — consonants, vowels and tones — in 504 world languages, finding compelling evidence that they can be traced back to a long-forgotten dialect spoken by our Stone Age ancestors, according to the Daily Mail.

Atkinson also hypothesized that languages with the most sounds would be the oldest, while those spoken by smaller breakaway groups would utilize fewer sounds as variation and complexity diminished.

The study found that some of the click-using languages of Africa have more than 100 phonemes, or sounds, whereas Hawaiian, toward the far end of the human migration route out of Africa, has only 13, the Times reported. English has about 45 phonemes.

The phoneme pattern mirrors the pattern of human genetic diversity as humans spread across the globe from sub-Saharan Africa around 70,000 years ago.

Teaching for the love (not for the money):

(Reuters) – John-David Bowman, Arizona’s 2015 “Teacher of the Year,” considers himself lucky: he can do the job he loves without worrying about supporting his family because he relies on his wife’s salary.

Things are harder for third-year Oklahoma teacher Jenny Vargas. The divorced mother of a 6-year-old girl is leaving her home state to take a job in Coffeyville, Kansas, where she can earn $8,000 a year more and be able to make ends meet.

Stories like theirs have sparked a wave of strikes and threats of more across the country over the past month as teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Kentucky have walked off the job to protest long-stagnant teacher pay and school budgets.

Teachers in Arizona have threatened similar action if lawmakers do not meet their demands for more spending on schools.

Vargas, who teaches second grade in a Tulsa school, joined thousands of Oklahoma teachers who crammed into the state Capitol in Oklahoma City this week and others held sympathy rallies around the state. They demanded lawmakers pass a tax package that would raise another $200 million for the state school budget to provide up-to-date books and other classroom materials. The protests continued on Wednesday.

“It was never my intention to leave the state of Oklahoma,” Vargas said in a phone interview. Despite her love for her students, she laments that she made more per year working at Walmart as a student than she does teaching, and said she is moving to give her daughter a better life.

“Most days I have to ask myself, ‘Today am I going to be a good mom or am I going to be a good teacher?’” Vargas said. “It’s really hard to do both.”

The walk-outs have shone a light on states where largely Republican-controlled legislatures have slashed funding for public schools.

Oklahoma ranked 47th in spending per student, according to National Education Association data, and its average salary for a high school teacher is $42,460, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data.

Moving poo to Parrish:

Parrish Mayor Heather Hall said at one point there were 252 tractor-trailer loads of poop stockpiled in her town.

(CNN)Right now, dozens of train cars carrying 10 million pounds of poop are stranded in a rural Alabama rail yard. Technically it’s biowaste, but to the 982 residents in the small town of Parrish, that’s just semantics.

They want it gone. The load has been there for almost two months, and it’s making the whole place smell like a rotting animal carcass.

To add insult to injury, it isn’t even their poop. For the last year, waste management facilities in New York and one in New Jersey have been shipping tons of biowaste — literally, tons — to Big Sky Environmental, a private landfill in Adamsville, Alabama. But in January, the neighboring town of West Jefferson filed an injunction against Big Sky to keep the sludge from being stored in a nearby rail yard.

It was successful — but as a result, the poo already in transit got moved to Parrish, where there are no zoning laws to prevent the waste from being stored.

Bradford Pear trees smell like poo:

GREENVILLE, S.C. — All those white blooming trees you see everywhere…do you think they are pretty?   [SMcK: not funny, folks, our trees were white with snow this week.] If you knew what they actually represent, you would choke on your morning coffee and gag on your scrambled eggs. All those white blooming trees you see now are an environmental disaster happening right before your very eyes.

I’m talking about every white blooming tree right now, with only the exception of wild plums, which is a short multi-flora tree that seldom reaches over 8 feet in height. All the other white flowering trees in today’s environment are an ecological nightmare, getting worse and worse every year and obliterating our wonderful native trees from the rural landscape.

If it’s blooming white right now, it’s a curse. This dictum especially applies to that “charming” Bradford pear your dimwitted landscaper planted in the middle of your front yard. Indeed, lack of smarts is what has led to this disaster. Bradford pear is worse than kudzu, and the ill-conceived progeny of Bradford pear will be cursing our environment for decades or possibly centuries yet to come.

When Bradford pear was introduced as an ornamental in 1964 by the US Department of Agriculture, it was known then that this tree possessed the weakest branch structure in nature. Also, the tree was assumed to be sterile. Bradford pears will seldom last more than 20 years before they bust themselves apart at the seams. That’s actually the good news.

In an attempt to extend the lifespan of this despicable tree, other varieties such as Cleveland Select, etc. were introduced. These trees will live for about 25 years. That’s little consolation for the resulting disasters that happened when these other pear varieties were introduced.

After 25 years the ill effects of the steep v crotch branch structure – which all pears possess – take their inevitable course of action and cause pear limb structures to crack, split and bust. You can’t fool Mother Nature, and people who plant pears will sooner or later regret that choice. Planting pears borders on — if not crosses the line — of negligence.

However, the fact that Bradford pear trees are short lived and dangerous is not the real reason that these trees are such a disaster. The problem is that these trees are in fact not sterile. No two Bradford pears will ever reproduce among themselves, but they do cross pollinate with every other pear tree out there, including the Cleveland Select pear trees that were meant to be the salvation of flowering pears everywhere. The introduction of other pear varieties has compounded the problem to the point where it is almost too late to rectify.

Because of the cross pollination problem, pear trees have now proliferated exponentially across our environment. And, to make matters worse, the evil offspring has reverted to the ancient Chinese Callery pears which form impenetrable thorny thickets that choke out the life out of pines, dogwoods, maples, redbuds, oaks, hickories, etc.

The Columbine Generation speaks with bodies:

WASHINGTON — The threat of mass shootings is the defining fear for the generation that has grown up in the shadow of Columbine, a new USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll finds. Now more than one in three young people nationwide say they plan to join the March For Our Lives protests on Saturday in person or via social media.

The survey of 13- to 24-year-olds — including more than 600 middle-school and high-school students — shows both the depth of anxiety that school violence has fueled and the way a movement has spread across the country in the weeks since a rampage at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., left 17 people dead.

On Tuesday, another school shooting in Great Mills, Md., left the alleged shooter dead and two other students wounded.

“I watch over my shoulder because you never know,” says Justin McDonnall, 17, a sophomore at North Central High School in Hymera, Ind., who was among those polled. Even in his small town, which he describes as being in “Nowhere USA”, police officers spent two days at his school to deal with verbal threats of gun violence that a fellow student had made. With the marches, he said, “We’d like to be heard, and not just ignored.

Eighteen percent of the young people polled, including 21% of those 13 to 17, say they will participate personally in the marches. If they do, it would mean the most massive student-led protests in American history, dwarfing even the anti-war demonstrations of the Vietnam era. Another 24% say they will participate using social media.

“I think the protesting is … really great because it’s showing younger kids that you need to stand up for what you believe in,” Madeline Meyers, 14, an eighth-grader at Nikolay Middle School in Cambridge, Wis., said in a follow-up phone interview. “If you believe that armed teachers is not the answer, if you believe that guns in school is not the answer, then you need to show that.”

The USA TODAY/Ipsos Poll is unusual because it included not only those 18 and older but also those from 13 to 17. Parents were required to give their permission before the minors could participate.

Gun control, not gun carry:

Nearly three-fourths of U.S. teachers do not want to carry guns in school, and they overwhelmingly favor gun control measures over security steps meant to “harden” schools, according to a new Gallup poll.

The nationally representative poll of nearly 500 K-12 teachers was conducted earlier this month, after the Parkland, Fla., shooting and student protests brought national attention to the issue of gun violence.

Some of the poll was released last week. In that portion, 73 percent of teachers opposed training teachers and staff to carry guns in school. Of those, 63 percent “strongly” opposed the proposal. In addition, 7 in 10 teachers said arming teachers would not be effective in limiting casualties in a school shooting.

Neat-freak Gorilla in Philly:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A male gorilla at the Philadelphia Zoo is taking a stand against dirty hands by opting to walk on two legs.

Apparently, 18-year-old Louis is a clean freak.

When Louis has his hands full of tomatoes or other snacks, he walks upright like a human to keep food and hands clean, rather than the typical gorilla stance of leaning forward on his knuckles.

Michael Stern, curator of primates and small mammals, says workers had to install a fire hose over a mud puddle in the yard. The nearly 500-pound, 6-foot-tall primate crosses it like a tight rope to avoid getting dirty. [HT: JS]

Beth Allison Barr:

Which is why it really struck me that Sunday. This particular pastor preached for wives to submit, he preached that women were eternally subordinate to men (more on Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudem about this in a future post), and that women’s primary calling was that of home, family, and obedience. Women’s role in both church and society was to submit to the authority of their husbands. The preacher used an example from a once-popular movie (you may have seen it), My Big Fat Greek Wedding. The matriarch of the family consoles her daughter that even though the husband is the head of the family, the wife is the neck and she can turn the head anyway she wants. The pastor was quick to point out that this was an unbiblical perspective that subverted God’s designated hierarchy of patriarchal authority.

My grandfather shook his head. He looked over at my sister, patted her knee, and whispered (loudly), “You don’t believe any of this stuff, do you?”

80 years listening to Baptist sermons. 80 years, and still the hard complementarian message my grandfather heard that Sunday unsettled him. He didn’t believe it. He was unfamiliar with it. It seemed different.

This is my point. The hard complementarian message today that argues women are ordained by God to be subordinate to men and that this excludes them from most leadership roles in churches (teaching, preaching, serving as deacons and elders, etc.) is different. Yet it has so permeated evangelical culture–through Wayne Grudem’s Systematic Theology that is so pervasive in seminary culture, through John Piper and Wayne Grudem’s Recovering Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, through Desiring God podcasts, through the popularity of the Acts 29 movement, through Focus on the Family–that most Christians don’t even blink during a sermon on female submission and male headship. I would surmise that many Christians would think it heretical to NOT argue for male headship and female submission. It is the divine order. Right? [HT: JS]

Sad, sad, sad:

The world’s largest collection of ocean garbage is growing.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a collection of plastic, floating trash located halfway between Hawaii and California, has grown to more than 600,000 square miles, a study published Thursday finds. That’s twice the size of Texas.

Winds and converging ocean currents funnel the garbage into a central location, said study lead author Laurent Lebreton of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a non-profit organization that spearheaded the research.

First discovered in the early 1990s, Lebreton said the trash in the patch comes from countries around the Pacific Rim, including nations in Asia as well as North and South America.

The patch is not a solid mass of plastic. It includes some 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic and weighs 88,000 tons — the equivalent of 500 jumbo jets. The new figures are as much as 16 times higher than previous estimates.

Who was Larry Norman? [HT: JE]

Who was Larry Norman? He’s one of the fathers of spiritual rock music, “the Forrest Gump of evangelical Christianity”—which puts him on the front lines of America’s culture wars, though on whose side it’s hard to say—and the subject of Gregory Alan Thornbury’s fantastic new biography, Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music? The book, titled after one of Norman’s best-known songs, draws extensively on Norman’s personal archives, where he was thoughtful and introspective about his beliefs, work, and doubts, giving Thornbury’s work a level of insight and intimacy that’s all too rare among recently published artist biographies. When it comes to telling the story of an artist, what makes a good biography is not the fame or even the talent of the book’s subject, but the complexity of the figure and how that manifests itself through their life and work. Norman’s story has this in abundance. Why Should The Devil also serves as a primer on Christian rock, a critical analysis of the genre, and a compact history of Christianity in the latter half of last century, a period where Jesus went from a counterculture hero to all outcasts to a cynically deployed tool of the religious right.

John Piper, unfortunately saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, is challenged by Rachel Held Evans:

That’s because contrary to Piper’s argument, patriarchy isn’t about protecting women; it’s about protecting men. It’s about preserving male rule over the home, church, and society, often at the expense of women. …

Patriarchy is not counter-cultural. It has for centuries been the norm. What’s truly counter-cultural is imitating Jesus, who, “being in very nature God,” surrendered his power and privilege to become a human—one birthed, nursed, protected, befriended, and BELIEVED by women. 

A book, it’s physical, and that matters for reading:

Unfortunately, considerable evidence suggests that Americans are both reading less and reading with less intensity. It’s not unusual to hear well-educated adults who once read regularly now lament the decline in their bookish habits. In a widely circulated 2015 Medium article (“Why Can’t We Read Anymore?“), Hugh McGuire, who founded Librivox, which distributes public-domain audiobooks, highlighted the frenetic nature of digital life as the primary reason for why he was “finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters.” According to a 2016 Pew Research Center survey, the typical American adult now reads only four books a year. Twenty-seven percent didn’t read a single book in 2015, and a 2016 report from the National Endowment for the Arts found that reading had dropped, as the Washington Post summarized it, “to at least a three-decade low.”

As the art of close reading—a finely grained analysis of a text—has declined, a cohort of experts has emerged to reverse the trend and encourage stronger reading habits. Their solution has a kind of old-school simplicity to it: We need to allow the physicality of the book itself to lure us back into the pleasures of reading. …

“Reading,” says Steve Mannheimer, professor of Media Arts and Science at Indiana University, “doesn’t occur without some fairly specific and concrete combination of physical objects, environment, and purpose.” So one technique is to focus on the book as a book. “Intuitively, I would say that the paper book invites far more physical manipulation with at least the fingers and hands,” he says. “All that finger/hand fidgeting is part of the cognitive process, or at least reinforces the cognitive process of reading.”

There’s other evidence that a traditional book, rather than an electronic tablet, makes for a more engaged reading experience. During research for a paper published in 2014, Anne Mangen, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Stavanger in Norway, compared the reading experience of iPad users and paper traditionalists reading the same material. She found that readers felt less transported by the writing and less able to resist distractions when reading on an iPad than on paper. “When you read on paper you can sense with your fingers a pile of pages on the left growing, and shrinking on the right,” she told the Guardian. Such a “tactile sense of progress,” she suggested, helps readers better follow the storyline.

Kristin du Mez: [HT: JS]

All this gets at a larger issue. There is a reason why a recent LifeWay survey found that only 25% of African Americans who ascribed to the four points of evangelical belief actually identified as evangelicals. This is not the case of a simple misunderstanding. Black Christians have long resisted embracing the evangelical label because it is clear to them that there is more to evangelical identity than four statements of belief.

There may be merit in using a theological rubric to compare and contrast different groups of Christians across the globe. In doing so, however, one would do well to examine whether different groups understand statements of belief in the same light, or whether significant differences in interpretation render meaningful comparison moot. But if our goal is to understand contemporary American politics, it makes sense to take at face value a movement with which a large number of Americans—white evangelical Christians—identify. It is a group that has been remarkably consistent over the past two years. Consistent in their support of Donald Trump.

Read more at http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2018/03/defining-evangelicalism-and-the-problem-of-whiteness/#oxKjJ5JGutuO9C0E.99

Go church!

Lack of sleep is one of the most critical health issues for the homeless.

An average of 225 homeless people seek safety and rest on the pews in the sanctuary of St. Boniface church in San Francisco every day, thanks to The Gubbio Project.

The Gubbio Project was co-founded in 2004 by community activists Shelly Roder and Father Louis Vitale as a non-denominational project of St. Boniface Neighborhood Center located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood in response to the increasing numbers of homeless men and women in need of refuge from the streets.

“No questions are asked when our guests walk into the churches; in an effort to remove all barriers to entry, there are no sign-in sheets or intake forms. No one is ever turned away; all are welcomed, respected and treated with dignity,” the project’s website states.

While the church uses the front 1/3 of the sanctuary for church-goers to celebrate daily mass at 12:15 p.m., the Gubbio Project uses the back 2/3 of the sanctuary.

“This sends a powerful message to our unhoused neighbors – they are in essence part of the community, not to be kicked out when those with homes come in to worship,” the non profit organization says. “It also sends a message to those attending mass – the community includes the tired, the poor, those with mental health issues and those who are wet, cold and dirty.”

In addition to a place to rest, the church offers warm blankets, socks, hygiene kits, and massage services.

Nathan Robinson tore into Jordan Peterson, and here’s but two paragraphs in a lengthy (and worthy-of-reading) essay:

Having safely established that Jordan Peterson is an intellectual fraud who uses a lot of words to say almost nothing, we can now turn back to the original question: how can a man incapable of relaying the content of a children’s book become the most influential thinker of his moment? My first instinct is simply to sigh that the world is tragic and absurd, and there is apparently no height to which confident fools cannot ascend. But there are better explanations available. Peterson is popular partly because he criticizes social justice activists in a way many people find satisfying, and some of those criticisms have merit. He is popular partly because he offers adrift young men a sense of heroic purpose, and offers angry young men rationalizations for their hatreds. And he is popular partly because academia and the left have failed spectacularly at helping make the world intelligible to ordinary people, and giving them a clear and compelling political vision. …

This much should be obvious from even a cursory reading of him: If Jordan Peterson is the most influential intellectual in the Western world, the Western world has lost its damn mind. And since Jordan Peterson does indeed have a good claim to being the most influential intellectual in the Western world, we need to think seriously about what has gone wrong. What have we done to end up with this man? His success is our failure, and while it’s easy to scoff at him, it’s more important to inquire into how we got to this point. He is a symptom. He shows a culture bereft of ideas, a politics without inspiration or principle. Jordan Peterson may not be the intellectual we want. But he is probably the intellectual we deserve.

A week that draws many of us to prayer, to fasting, to yearning, to striving to make things right. I am wearied by the many who ridicule “prayers and thoughts,” as if prayer doesn’t matter, while seemingly suggesting that action without prayer is what we need. We need both prayer and action, and there’s no reason to ridicule one at the expense of the other.

A big thanks/HT to JS and Kris for links this week.

Seven things learned too late:

1. IF YOU WANT TO ‘DO WHAT YOU LOVE,’ YOU HAVE TO WORK THREE TIMES AS HARD AS EVERYONE ELSE

2. BENEATH ANGER IS ALWAYS FEAR

3. OUR EVERYDAY HABITS FORM OUR FUTURE SELVES

4. YOUR EMOTIONS TAKE PRACTICE

5. EVERYONE HAS HIS OR HER OWN AGENDA

6. ACHIEVEMENT WILL NEVER BE AS FULFILLING AS THE JOURNEY

So much was written about Billy Graham this week, but Randall Balmer’s was one of the best:

Billy Graham, by any measure the most famous religious figure of the twentieth century, died today at his home in Montreat, North Carolina. He was ninety-nine years old.

In a career that extended well over half a century, Graham took a simple evangelical message—give your heart to Jesus, and you will be “born again”—to millions around the world. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, the organization he founded to facilitate his ministry, boasted that Graham preached to more people than anyone else in history, a claim that probably cannot be verified but is almost certainly true. …

Graham briefly became pastor of small congregation in Western Springs, Illinois, and, at the invitation of Torrey Johnson, hosted a weekly radio program, Songs in the Night. Shortly thereafter, Johnson recruited Graham to preach at Saturday-night rallies in Chicago’s Orchestra Hall, part of the outreach for a new organization called Youth for Christ. In 1946, Graham joined the staff of Youth for Christ, where he met and befriended Charles Templeton, another itinerant evangelist for Youth for Christ.

Templeton and Graham became known as the Gold-Dust Twins, and many contemporaries regarded Graham as the lesser preacher. Templeton’s intellectual restlessness prompted him to apply for admission to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he was admitted despite the fact that he had never graduated from college. Then, meeting Graham at the Taft Hotel in New York City, Templeton challenged his friend to attend seminary with him in order to deepen his theological understanding.

Graham pondered the possibility at length, troubled by Templeton’s intimations that elements of the Christian faith were not intellectually defensible. For Graham, a turning point in his life—and in the entire revival enterprise of the twentieth century—occurred shortly thereafter while he was staying at the Forest Home Conference Center in Southern California. While hiking and praying there in the San Bernardino Mountains, Graham decided to set aside Templeton’s challenge, to banish his own intellectual doubts, and simply to “preach the gospel.”

He did just that, descending the mountain to conduct his famous Los Angeles revival campaign of 1949. Abetted by prodigious advance work, which would become the hallmark of Graham’s evangelistic efforts, Graham, billed as “America’s Sensational Young Evangelist,” conducted services beneath a circus tent, dubbed the “Canvas Cathedral,” at the corner of Washington and Hill Streets. Graham’s enormously successful Los Angeles crusade in 1949 brought him national attention, in no small measure because newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, impressed with the young evangelist’s preaching and his anti-communist rhetoric, instructed his papers to “puff Graham.” From Los Angeles, Graham took his evangelistic crusades around the country and the world, thereby providing him with international renown.

George Will’s was the worst and heartless.

Pete Blackburn:

The last 12 months have been a roller coaster ride for the United States women’s national hockey team, but on Thursday in Pyeongchang, that ride reached its ultimate peak — an Olympic gold medal.

Team USA defeated Canada, 3-2, in a thrilling shootout win in South Korea to earn their first gold medal in 20 years. It was the third consecutive Olympics in which the American and Canadian women faced off in the final, and this one came 38 years to the day of the “Miracle On Ice.”

For the American women, there was no miracle necessary. Thursday’s gold medal game was earned on the strength of skill, execution, perseverance, heart and fearlessness. It was a perfectly fitting way to wrap up what has been an incredible last year for the Team USA women, who have earned major victories both on and off the ice.

Last March, just weeks before the 2017 Women’s World Championships were set to get underway in Michigan, members of the U.S. team announced that they planned on boycotting the tournament over a fight for fair wages and equitable support from USA Hockey.

The two sides had privately been in negotiations for over a year and made little progress on a new deal. With Worlds on the horizon, the women saw an opportunity to make a bold statement, and they pounced. …

Just prior to the tournament, the two sides reached a four-year deal that would provide the women with annual salaries around $70,000, with a chance to earn close to $100,000 with added medal bonuses. In addition, USA Hockey agreed to provide accommodations and insurance on par with what the men received, plus more funding and support to the women’s development program.

It was a landmark victory for current and future American women’s players. …

Watching the women celebrate in South Korea, it was hard not to get the feeling that the win was the perfect storybook ending to what has been an amazing and, quite frankly, a badass year for the USA women.

This group was able to put their frustrating past to the side and create a new future through fierce willpower and an ability to capitalize on what was in front of them. They had an unwavering resolve, even in the face of pressure and resistance from their opponent, and they didn’t blink.

As a result, they found a way to become champions in the sport, both in and out of uniform.

Andy Staples, SI, and the NCAA athlete problem:

What might that new system look like? The most sensible answer is the Olympic model. You can read about it in more detail here, but these are the basics: Schools would continue to only pay full cost-of-attendance scholarships. Anyone else who wanted to pay the athletes could pay them. This would eliminate any Title IX concerns because every athlete would have exactly the same opportunity to get paid. The market would decide who got how much. Does that mean boosters would pay the players? Yep. (But they already pay them under the table now.) Does that mean agents would pay football and basketball players? It sure would. (They also pay them under the table now.) Would the players have to pay taxes on anything they make? Of course. Would this increase the gap between the haves and the have-nots? Nope. Alabama, Ohio State and the like would still sign the highest rated football recruits. Duke, Kentucky and the like would still sign the highest rated basketball recruits. (But maybe SMU, which thrived when it was paying big under the table, could become good at football again.)

Brueggemann and the Mennonite Option:

The Second Amendment enshrines a distinctly American – and, some would say, sacred – freedom: the right to bear arms. How to reconcile that with the need to curb gun violence? Michael Martin, a young Mennonite from Colorado Springs, decided the best way to approach this emotionally charged issue was to tell a different story – to counter the debilitating stream of tragic news with an alternative narrative of transformation and restoration, one tool at a time.

Martin won’t take away your rights, but if you happen to have a gun you want to be rid of, he’ll be happy to forge it into a garden tool for you.

The idea hatched back in 2009 as Martin watched news coverage of the christening of the USS New York, a battleship with a bow stem made of steel from the fallen World Trade Center. (“Notice how they bring Christ into it.”) Someone needed to counteract this rhetoric and symbolism of revenge, Martin felt. A big fan of Walter Brueggemann’s approach to the Old Testament, he latched onto Isaiah’s words, “They shall beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks.” The prophet Micah repeats this refrain and adds, “They shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid.” So, repurposing weapons to grow food as a way to drive out fear. “That’s our end goal: to get to the point where we’re not afraid of each other anymore.”

ILYBYGTH:

Al-Gharbi reviews some of the literature on the futility of culture-war shouting matches. We might think a reasoned, sensible argument will convince anyone who isn’t absurdly prejudiced. It seems the opposite can be true. Studies have found that stubbornness and intractability can increase when people are more “intelligent, educated, or rhetorically skilled.”

Why? Intelligent, informed, sophisticated people are more likely to be committed to ideas and ideologies. They are more experienced at the kinds of mental gymnastics that can help justify and rationalize seemingly illogical positions.

What can be done? Al-Gharbi suggests three general suggestions for improving real communication:

#1: LOWER THE PERCEIVED STAKES OF THE DISAGREEMENT OR CONFLICT

#2: APPEAL TO YOUR INTERLOCUTOR’S OWN IDENTITY, VALUES, NARRATIVES, FRAMES OF REFERENCE WHEN POSSIBLE

#3 LEAD BY EXAMPLE. MODEL CIVILITY, FLEXIBILITY, INTELLECTUAL HUMILITY, GOOD FAITH IF YOU WANT OTHERS TO DO THE SAME

Could these suggestions help creationists and non-creationists talk to each other more productively?

Evangelicals observing Lent?

Digging a bit, I think it’s more accurate to say that American evangelicals have been conflicted about Lent for some time now. Here’s how Christianity Today started a March 1960 editorial on the subject: (republished online forty years later)

Lent constitutes both a challenge and an embarrassment to Protestantism. Each year as the season approaches it brings with it the temptation to equivocate. We do not know where we stand because our feet seem to be stuck in both camps.

What’s more evangelical, after all, than to be drawn to a time of intentional repentance and renewal — and simultaneously to recoil from the merest hint of formalism?

While “a sense of indignation stirs within the Protestant breast, even to the pitch of revolt, at what the Church has done with Lent in the past,” those forty days remained “the most sacred season in the Christian calendar… For the minister to ignore Lent… would seem to be almost as wrong as for the minister to ignore Christmas.” In the end, CT (Carl Henry?) hoped that Lent would again “become a time when material things are put again in their proper secondary position” — so long as “the form support, not obstruct, the way of the Holy Spirit of God who brings life to ritual and free worship alike, and who turns ashes into new men.”……..

However it’s marked, I do think there can be significant spiritual value in observing this season. So if you’re among the 72% of evangelicals who don’t keep Lent in any way, consider Webber’s argument from Ancient-Future Time: Forming Spirituality through the Christian Year (2004):

For most people coming from my background, an Ash Wednesday service and Lent are quite foreign and somewhat threatening… Lent appears to be dark and foreboding. It reminds Protestants of the Roman Catholic practices—ritualism, works, fasting, vigils, and the like. Haven’t we been saved from all of that? Didn’t the Reformers free us from having to do works and pilgrimages and such things? …Preparing for Easter for seven weeks was unthinkable, ludicrous, even pagan. But now I am constrained to ask: Who is the pagan? Yes, it is wrong to go through the motions of Ash Wednesday and Lent in a mechanical, uninvolved way. But it is also wrong to ignore any kind of preparation for the Easter event. Happily there is an alternative for both Catholics and Protestants: Recover the true spiritual intent of Ash Wednesday and the Lenten spiritual pilgrimage.

Our prayers for the families of Parkland, for the friends, for the country and state and nation.

Their names, and a brief description.

Hands Free Mama on school tragedies in a family context.

Wesley J. Smith:

Each year, Gerber, the baby food manufacturer, holds a “cute baby” photo contest, the winner of which receives a $50,000 cash prize and may appear as a “spokesbaby” to advertise the company’s products. Media coverage of the contest is usually limited to sweet human-interest pieces. Not this year. The contest made huge news when Lucas Warren, a child with Down syndrome, was named the Gerber Baby of 2018.

Notably, the news about Lucas was received with virtually unanimous praise. With a few exceptions—such as the Special Olympics and Tim Tebow’s “Night to Shine” prom dance celebrating people with developmental disabilities—positive depictions of people with Down are all too rare. Those with Down syndrome are more often the victims of what can fairly be described as a “cleansing”—a concerted international effort to see them wiped off the face of the earth through eugenic abortion.

If that seems harsh, consider these facts. Iceland brags—yes, that is the proper verb—that no babies with Down are born there because of prenatal testing and subsequent termination. Denmark has been accused of establishing a zero Down syndrome birthrate as a national public policy goal, though this is denied by its government; but what can’t be denied is that only four such babies were born there in 2016. Here in the United States, about 90 percent of fetuses diagnosed with Down are aborted. Parents of these unborn babies have reported that genetic counselors often push the abortion option. The problem was so pronounced that back in 2008, politically opposed senators Ted Kennedy (D-MA) and Sam Brownback (R-KS, now the State Department’s ambassador for religious freedom) joined together to push a law through Congress requiring neutrality in genetic counseling.

Good move for dog poo:

Good dog parents might think they’re doing their part by using biodegradable baggies to pick up after their pooches. But after Fido’s feces go in the trash can and to a landfill, they release methane gas, a significant contributor to the greenhouse effect. A dog park in Cambridge, Mass., has a solution: Add in a methane digester, and let your dog waste power the streetlights, tea cart and popcorn machine.

The Park Spark methane digester, unveiled this week, only powers a streetlight for now — no poop-powered popcorn yet. But it’s a neat concept: Replace trash cans with a public methane digester, and you demonstrate how simple it can be to turn waste into fuel.

“As long as people own pets in the city and throw away dog waste, the production of energy will be continuous and unlimited,” the project’s Web site says.

The project involves three basic steps: Throw your dog’s waste into the digester, where anaerobic bacteria are ready to break it down. Stir the mixture to help methane rise to the top, and burn the methane to generate light or electricity.

Olympics to Nun:

There’s no shortage of Olympic-athletes-and-their-faith stories coming out these days and for the most part, they’re decent stories.

There’s Gina Dalfonzo’s wrap-up of Christian athletes at the event for Christianity Today; a piece on Jewish athletes from the Jewish News of Northern California; Al Jazeera’s article on the lack of an Islamic prayer room for Olympians and so on.

But USA Today’spiece on the former speed skater who became a nun isn’t one of those well-written stories. Although datelined South Korea, the locale is in northern England, which throws off most readers at the start.

PYEONGCHANG, South Korea – At a community ice rink in the northern English city of Bradford, the security attendant had a bit of a dilemma. She had already remonstrated with a group of teenage boys for larking about, skating too quickly and endangering other visitors, and now there was another speedster hurtling around the rink, even faster.

Except that this time the customer powering around the ice, executing gliding turns and weaving in and out of human traffic wasn’t joking around and carried a focused look of remembrance.

And she was wearing a nun’s habit.

Eventually Kirstin Holum, or Sr. Catherine of the Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal, was stopped by the guard and asked to slow down, which she did without complaint.

The story doesn’t say any more about this New York-based order, founded 30 years ago this year, that has attracted quite a youthful following and is growing while many other religious orders are not. That might be worth a sentence.

In 1998 at Nagano, American long track speedskating was excited about the emergence of a potential new star. Holum, whose mother Dianne won Olympic gold in 1972 and coached Eric Heiden to five golds in 1980, not only came from skating royalty but, at 17, had already shown remarkable prowess in the 3,000 and 5,000-meter events, disciplines that typically favor older performers who are fully matured. She would place an impressive sixth in the 3,000 and seventh in the 5,000, but would never lace up another Olympic skate.

Unfortunately, the story doesn’t go into much detail after that, only saying that many people didn’t realize she was a former speed skater and that she hasn’t watched much in the way of speed skating in many years. One learns that the reporter gathered the facts of the story during a phone interview while the nun was recently in the United States. The two didn’t even meet face to face.

If you wish to learn more about this nun, turn to instead this ABC-TV feature or this blog post. And this story, which says a trip to the Catholic shrine of Fatima in Portugal is what made Holum decided to take the veil. And a story in Free Republic that says it was meeting women from the Franciscan Sisters of the Renewal at a World Youth Day in Toronto that drew her to that order.

Great way to begin your Saturday:

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – A local 21-year-old wanting to provide for his young daughter would walk 11 miles a day for work.

The UPS employee’s co-workers came together to surprise him with his first car.

The employee says nearly everyday he would get up in the middle of the night and walk about five and a half miles to work. He would have to be there at 4 a.m.

Sometimes he would get rides, but most of the time he would walk. That was until his co-workers gave him four wheels.

On his two feet, Trenton Lewis walks to the UPS center in Little Rock.

“I don’t want to miss work at all,” Trenton said.

While he didn’t have a car, he had a new job.

“I wanted to be with my daughter, to be able to support her. I wanted to be a father,” Trenton said .

For about the last seven months, he would wake up at midnight and walk.

He would leave his house on Ringo, walk down Roosevelt Rd. to get to the UPS center. That’s about five and a half miles away. All this, to clock in on time.

“I made it to work. I was never late,” Trenton said. “Doing this for my daughter, that’s all.”

“If someone has that type of determination, I’d be willing to help them,”  UPS clerk Kenneth Bryant said. “We just wanted to lend somebody a helping hand.”

Trenton didn’t tell many people how he got to the office, but Kenneth Bryant found out.

“That’s a young man that wants to work and will do what ever it takes to be successful,” Kenneth said.

Kenneth started asking around to see if coworkers would pitch in and buy Trenton a car.

The myth of modern romantic love, from First Things [HT: JS]:

A collection of Einstein’s letters auctioned off in 1996 contains a list of marital expectations for his wife, Maliva Maric. The list includes daily laundry “kept in good order,” “three meals regularly in my room,” a desk maintained neatly “for my use only,” and the demand that she quit talking or leave the room “if I request it.” The marriage ended in divorce, but the list lives on as an illustration not only of Einstein’s darker domestic side, but also of assumptions commonly held about marriage in 1914.

Compared with Einstein’s requirements, modern marital expectations have surely evolved for the better. Or have they? An insightful study by Sarah K. Balstrup theorizes that as people abandon religious institutions, they start expecting romantic relationships to satisfy a host of needs that formerly were satisfied through religion. If you think clean laundry and regular meals require effort, try meeting the demands of relationship-worship circa 2018 by providing transcendence, unconditional love, wholeness, meaning, worth, and communion.

The Western fixation on romantic love creates a crushing burden for mere mortals. It engenders a powerful myth regarding love, courtship, and marriage: that a fallible human partner can not only share our passions but sate our existential yearnings. Contemporary couples expect much more from marriage than it can realistically deliver, a phenomenon noted by social psychologists. As Eli Finkel of Northwestern University observes, “most of us will be kind of shocked by how many expectations and needs we’ve piled on top of this one relationship.”

It snowed big time here in Chicago this week, and snow reminds us where we live and why (and for some how long, O Lord?).

Rules for snow in Chicago:

So what other acts of mercy can you do as part of the snow angel challenge?

Let’s start with what not to do.

— Don’t shovel your snow in front of someone else’s car or stoop.

— Don’t race past a slushy curb and pelt pedestrians with slop.

— Don’t continue to zoom around changing lanes when snow is on the street.

— Don’t honk at someone whose car is stuck in a snow pile.

— Do not curse at the snow jerks doing all of the above. Meet their bad behavior with a good deed.

When I surveyed Facebook friends Thursday for examples of snow angels in action, they supplied various ideas on how to be a good snow-day citizen.

— Shovel someone else’s sidewalk or driveway.

“My 72-year-old father always takes his snowblower to the neighbors’ driveways and clears them,” reported my colleague Genevieve Bookwalter. “My mom tells stories of him coming to bed around 2 a.m. because he was making sure everyone’s driveway was clear for work or church in the morning. He’s done this for years.”

Speaking of snow, speaking of Olympics:

In 2015, I set out to study the unlikeliest of Olympic pipelines: Norwich, Vt., a small town that has placed at least one of its own on almost every United States Winter Olympics team since 1984.

In all, Norwich, with its population of roughly 3,000, has produced 11 Olympians — including two Summer Games participants — who have come home with three medals, including one gold.

What started out as a sports book evolved into what is essentially a parenting guide as I came to realize that Norwich’s secret to happiness and excellence can be traced to the way the town collectively raises its children.

It is an approach that stresses participation over prowess, a generosity of spirit over a hoarding of resources and sportsmanship over one-upmanship. Norwich has sent its kids to the Olympics while largely rejecting the hypercompetitive joy-wringing culture of today’s achievement-oriented parents. In Norwich, kids don’t specialize in a single sport, and they even root for their rivals.

Parents encourage their kids to simply enjoy themselves because they recognize that more than any trophy or record, the life skills sports develop and sharpen are the real payoff. The town’s approach runs counter to the widespread belief — propagated by those perpetuating the professionalized youth sports complex — that athletic excellence and a well-balanced childhood cannot coexist.

It does not hurt that Norwich has poor cellular service, making its residents less tethered to their tablets and smartphones than many other Americans. Or that many of the parents work near their homes in jobs that allow them to spend time with their kids — even leaving work early once a week to ski together.

Not every community is going to be able to replicate those factors. But other towns can adopt the Norwich Way if parents commit to following a few simple principles. [HT: LNMM]

Fighting TechAddiction:

Former employees of several tech companies, including Facebook and Google, have bandied up together in an effort to curb tech addiction, therefore challenging the companies they once helped build.

What pushed the employees to create the Center for Humane Technology are the ill effects of social networks and smartphones, the same exact reason why a couple of Apple investors a while back called on the Cupertino brand to do something about excessive smartphone use by children. The group just officially launched on Feb. 4, in hopes of raising awareness about the tolls of technology, which its founders and members believe are addictive.

Internet Addiction Campaign

With the help of media watchdog group Common Sense Media, the Center for Humane Technology is also planning an anti-tech addiction lobbying effort, plus an advertising campaign — called The Truth About Tech — targeted at U.S. public schools. It’ll be supported with millions of dollars in funding by Common Sense Media. It’ll educate students, teachers, and parents about the hazards of excessively using technology, including the chances of heavy social media usage inducing depression.

The head of the group is Tristan Harris, who used to be an ethicist at Google. He dishes on company practices, hinting that they were designed to convince them to consume more and more media.

“We were on the inside. We know what the companies measure. We know how they talk, and we know how the engineering works.”

Social Media And Technology Addiction

The ill effects of social media and technology have become hot-button topics in recent months. Just last week, mental health professionals reached Facebook to gut its messaging platform specifically for kids, called Messenger Kids. Back in December 2017, one former Facebook executive slammed the social media, accusing Facebook of “ripping apart society.”

“All the tech companies profit the more attention they extract out of human vessels,” Harris told Quartz. “They profit by drilling into our brains to pull the attention out of it, by using persuasion techniques to keep them hooked.”

Harris worked for years at Google, and has been very vocal against his former employer. He also created a nonprofit called Time Well Spent, which aims to help people rethink how much time they spend online. The new organization he’s part of evolves from that and instead focuses on raising awareness about what he believes are manipulative design methods employed by, as he calls it, a “civilization-scale mind-control machine.”

Early Facebook investor Roger McNamee is also one of the members of the group, saying he’s horrified by his contributions to the company.

“This is an opportunity for me to correct a wrong,” he said. [HT: JS]

A town only for Christians, Bay View:

Tucked away in Michigan’s Lower Peninsula, somewhere along the winding roads that hug Great Lakes shores, is an idyllic town named Bay View. For more than a century, generations of “Bay Viewers” have congregated here to share in summer activities.

What started out as a modest camping ground for Methodist families 140 years ago has quietly developed into a stunning vacation spot for people who can afford the upkeep of a second home. Streets named Moss, Fern and Maple are dotted with impeccably maintained century-old gingerbread cottages. Over the horizon, residents can watch lifelong friends sail their boats across the water.

But this paradise is not open to all.

In Bay View, only practicing Christians are allowed to buy houses, or even inherit them.

Prospective homeowners, according to a bylaw introduced in 1947 and strengthened in 1986, are required to produce evidence of their faith by providing among other things a letter from a Christian minister testifying to their active participation in a church.

My friend Matt Williams, at Biola, has (re)produced a wonderful series of DVDs for adult Bible study contexts, and here is his summary of the lot:

The “Life of Jesus” in the Deeper Connections Bible study series is the fourth DVD and participant’s guide to be released by Rose/Hendrickson Publishing. Along with “The Last Days of Jesus” DVD, one has a 12-study overview of the main events and teachings from the life of Jesus, one of the most popular Bible classes in any Christian University. These studies, taught by top New Testament scholars, are now available for personal, church, and small group use. These studies are unique among many other DVD Bible studies in that they really emphasize three important aspects of good biblical teaching:

1. Historical and cultural background
2. An engaging, close look at the biblical text, and its meaning
3. Accurate, encouraging, and challenging applications of the Bible’s message to life today

Here is the list of teachers:

Dr. Darrell Bock, Dallas Theological Seminary

Dr. Gary Burge, Wheaton College

Dr. Scott Duvall, Ouachita Baptist University

Dr. Susan Hecht, Denver Seminary

Dr. Mark Strauss, Bethel Seminary

Dr. Matt Williams, Biola University

The Life of Jesus DVD and participants guide covers the first six main lessons on Jesus’ life and ministry:

1. Birthday Surprises—Birth of Jesus (Luke 2:1-16)
2. John Prepares the Way—Baptism of Jesus (Matthew 3:11-17)
3. The Victorious Son of God—Temptation of Jesus (Matthew 4:1-11)
4. Fishing with the Master—Jesus Calls Disciples (Luke 5:1-11)
5. Diseases Conquered—Jesus Heals the Sick (Matthew 9:27-34)
6. Defeating the Enemy—Jesus Casts Out Demons (Mark 1:21-28) 

Each of the lessons begins with an introduction filmed on location in Israel in order to better understand the cultural and geographical background. Then the lesson switches to a creative location in the United States that helps bring out the main emphasis of the passage. So, for example, the baptism of Jesus is filmed next to a river in Little Rock, Arkansas; Jesus heals the sick is shot in the mountains of Colorado Springs, in a location that was thought to contain magical healing waters by native Americans.

I have successfully taught these studies to groups of people from the ages of junior high school all the way up to 80-year olds. I highly recommend these creative studies for any group that you might lead—and they are easy to lead: they are truly plug and play. Let the New Testament scholars teach your lesson with all of their experience: your group simply follows along in the participant’s guide, which allows one to take notes and highlights important points. The participants guide also contain a five-day personal Bible study to help one to reflect further on each lesson during the week.

The Baptism of Jesus

The “Life of Jesus” in the Deeper Connections Bible study series is the fourth DVD and participant’s guide to be released by Rose/Hendrickson Publishing. Here is a preview of the session about Jesus’s baptism.

The baptism of Jesus is easily misunderstood. We often understand this important event as Jesus simply going into the Jordan River and being baptized just like any other human being is baptized. What we fail to grasp is the deep significance of the meaning of God’s voice from heaven at Jesus’s baptism. The biblical text tells us that, “a voice came from heaven: ‘You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased.’” Without a deeper connection with the Old Testament, we fail to see that Jesus is telling us exactly who Jesus is, and what his mission will be as the Son of God. Let me explain.

God’s heavenly voice combines three Old Testament texts to tell us about Jesus and his mission:

• “You are my Son” comes from Psalm 2:7. Psalm 2 is a Royal Psalm, first applied to King David and probably read at the coronation of subsequent Davidic Kings. When we understand this background, we see that God the Father is identifying Jesus as a Sovereign King in the line of King David, the highest ideal in Judaism.
• “whom I love” comes from Genesis 22:2. Remember when God told Abraham, “Take your son, your only son Isaac, whom you love” and sacrifice him on the mountain? As that story unfolds, Isaac is spared and a ram is sacrificed instead. When God speaks to Jesus at his baptism with these words “whom I love,” he is stating that Jesus is the unique Son of God and as the Lamb of God will sacrifice himself for the sins of the people. Jesus will be offered as a sacrifice, just as Isaac was. Jesus will die as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world!” (John 1:29). This is very important, and easy to miss if we do not grasp the Old Testament connection.
• “with you I am well pleased” – this phrase is taken from Isaiah 42:1, the first of four servant songs in Isaiah 42-53. Jesus as the Servant would accomplish his purpose through suffering, as prophesied in Isaiah 53:5: “But he was pierced for our transgressions, he was crushed for our iniquities; the punishment that brought us peace was on him, and by his wounds we are healed.”

Using these three Old Testament texts at Jesus’ baptism, the Father indicates that Jesus, the promised King and Messiah is also the Suffering Servant who will sacrifice himself to conquer sin and death. How important is that deeper understanding!! Moving out of the Jordan River waters, Jesus knows his identity and his purpose! His teachings and actions throughout his ministry try to make these two facts known to the world: Jesus is the kingly Messiah, but a warrior king, rather, Jesus will be a suffering Servant King who dies on the cross for our sins. Amazing. Thank you, Jesus!

THE TEMPTATION OF JESUS

The “Life of Jesus” in the Deeper Connections Bible study series is the fourth DVD and participant’s guide to be released by Rose/Hendrickson Publishing. Here is a preview of the session about Jesus’s temptation.

I remember asking my son after church one week what he had learning at church that day. His reply, “Jesus was tempted by….that other guy.” I laughed. That was not the deeper meaning of the temptation that we should understand in this event. While we often understand this temptation simply as Jesus defeating Satan, and thus concluding that Jesus is our role model in our own temptations, we fail to see the deeper connections.

Jesus is tempted three different times, but the main issue in all three is that Satan is tempting Jesus about power. As we learned in the baptism event, Jesus is announced by God’s heavenly voice as the King, but a King who will suffer. In the temptation, Jesus is tempted to misuse his kingly powers. And Jesus’s successful rebuttal of Satan over power is the key lesson for us today: Will we use the resources God has given to us for self or for others? Will we accumulate power or will we distribute it? Will we be a nation or a person that serves or one that conquers? This is the root of Moses’ warning in Deuteronomy 8. He says, “Beware that you don’t say in your heart, ‘My power and the might of my hand got me this wealth.’ You shall remember the Lord your God for he is the one who gives you power to get wealth” (8:17-18).

Those who have much can wrongly think that their position is their own doing. The voice of Satan echoes through everyone’s history: We can sustain ourselves, we can protect ourselves, we can rule how we wish. But this is vanity and sin and hubris all wrapped up together. The desert forces us to see our empty hands, to realize that we must learn to depend on God, and that power belongs to him—and that power that is given to us should be held very carefully.

These temptations to power represent the truest voice of Satan, and they can be heard every day. And if we are to become like Christ, we need to develop an ear for hearing those temptations, identify them as Satanic, and defeat them. As James says, “Resist the devil, and he will flee from you” (Jam 4:7); or Peter, “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. Resist him, standing firm in the faith” (1 Pet 5:8-9).

How do we defeat these temptations? Keep in mind that in each of Jesus’s temptation, his response was the same. He used scripture, Deuteronomy 1-10. This is a solid strategy since we are defeating Satan not by our own resources but by the Word given to us in scripture.   This is also God’s fight and our reach for scripture is the first evidence that we have learned our first lesson: That in temptation we rely on what God provides and not on our own resources. Like Jesus, we often find ourselves “in the desert,” but when temptation comes in the desert, we see that God powerfully stands by us, honing our faith through every one of our difficult experiences. May we, like Jesus, learn to see temptations for what they are: power encounters. And may we, like Jesus, learn to trust God in those situations, leaning upon the Scriptures and God’s power for victory.

JESUS CASTS OUT DEMONS

The “Life of Jesus” in the Deeper Connections Bible study series is the fourth DVD and participant’s guide to be released by Rose/Hendrickson Publishing. Here is a preview of the session about Jesus casting out demons.

When we begin to talk about spiritual warfare, Christians either overemphasis it, or underemphasize it. It is important to have a balanced and proper understanding of spiritual warfare, which is what the last lesson in “The Life of Jesus” tries to do in a lesson entitled, Jesus casts out demons. In this blog, I would like to quickly look at the deeper meaning of one power encounter between Jesus and an evil spirit in Capernaum, as recorded by Mark 1:21-28.

Mark tells us that a man “cried out” in the presence of Jesus, saying that the man has an “evil spirit.” Luke’s parallel says he was “possessed by a demon, an unclean spirit.” Just a few verses prior to this text, Jesus battled Satan himself in his temptations, now he battles Satan’s demonic forces. The battle takes place in the synagogue, the place where the people of God went to pray and worship God.

The demon tries to overpower Jesus in two ways. First, he says, “What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” What we often fail to understand is that this was a confrontational way of trying to get the other person to have nothing to do with you. It could be translated this way, “Go away and leave me alone!”

The demon then says, “I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” In the first century, they thought that if you knew someone’s name, you had power over them. So, it appears that the demon is trying to overpower Jesus by stating that he knows Jesus’s name. Of course, neither of these attempts works against Jesus. This demon has run into a more powerful foe.

The demon then asks, “Have you come to destroy us?” Judaism expected the Messiah to come and destroy Satan and demons at the end of the age. This demon is scared and knows he is in trouble.

Jesus takes command of the situation, “Be quiet!” said Jesus sternly. “Come out of him!” Let’s look at each of these phrases, as we can easily miss the deeper meaning.

“Be quiet!” can be translated as “Be bound.” Jesus is binding the demon from being able to do anything, including speaking. Jesus has absolute power and authority over the demonic realm.

“Jesus said sternly” was a technical phrase that was used to bring evil powers into submission. The NASB translates this phrase, “Jesus rebuked him.”

He then commands the demon to “Come out of him!” The word translated “come out” is from a Greek word from which we get the English word exorcism. While the English word exorcism often brings with it connotations of crazy possessed madmen who are foaming at the mouth (perhaps from the influence of Hollywood films), this term simply means “coming out.” So, Jesus is casting this demon out, or doing an exorcism.

Often the demons come out with no physical sign, though in this case, we see that the demon shook the man before it came out with a shriek. Luke’s parallel adds that the demon came out “without injuring him.” Jesus brings deliverance and freedom over the unseen demonic forces that bring suffering.

The text ends by saying that the Jewish people in the synagogue are not only amazed at Jesus’s authority in teaching, but also with his authority in casting out demons. Why were they amazed? Perhaps it is due to the fact that Jesus cast out the demon with a word; without using magical formula or magical “props” or calling upon other higher powers.

This exorcism is unlike other exorcism accounts known to the people of Jesus’ day: there is no long struggle between Jesus and the demon, there is no uncertainty in the outcome. Jesus authoritatively commands the demon to come out, and it did—immediately. Jesus came to set the prisoner free from demonic bondage. No demon has a chance before Jesus.

Jesus makes it clear that he will build his church and all the powers of Satan cannot overcome it (Matthew 16:16-18), but, that does not mean that Satan is powerless! To ignore him is to invite trouble. We must fight this battle by relying on prayer, tapping into the authority and power of Jesus—so that we “can take our stand against the devil’s schemes” (Ephesians 6:11).

Kris and I loved this story:

When Dade Middle School in South Dallas put out a call for volunteers to help with a “Breakfast with Dads” event, there was a fear there wouldn’t be enough dads for the students.

“We were asked to help get some extra guys to stand in as surrogate fathers and mentors for the kids whose dad’s couldn’t make it or don’t have a dad in their life,” Dade SBDM Board President Donald Parish said.

On Facebook, they put out a plea for 50 additional men to show up – and word spread quickly.

On Thursday morning, nearly 600 men arrived at the school. The crowd of volunteers came from diverse backgrounds, including dads from various parts of Dallas, men in local law enforcement, public officials and community organizers.

Each father visited and inspired in a different way. Some taught the kids how to tie a tie, an auctioneer showed them how to auction like a pro, while others offered general guidance and advice.

“Words cannot describe the impact mentoring youth can have on both you and your mentee,” Jason Rodriguez said. “Powerful to see a community of fellow men and fathers come together to wrap their arms around our young men. Thank you for having me out.”

The Bee:

NASHVILLE, TN—According to a LifeWay press release, the Christian retail giant has teamed up with Fitbit in order to release a new spiritual health tracker, a wrist-worn device that keeps track of all your spiritual activity.

From raising hands in church and turning pages in your Bible to folding your hands to pray and serving soup at a homeless shelter, the Spiritual FitBit will let you know when you’re earning precious spiritual points and when you’re backsliding like a heathen.

“Our patented technology will let you set attainable spiritual goals for yourself and then see how you measure up,” LifeWay Head of R&D Martin Friar said Tuesday. “Chart your spiritual activity and even compete with your friends to see which one of you is the godliest.”

A complete list of spiritual activities the Spiritual Fitbit can track was added to LifeWay’s website as part of the product rollout:

• Number of Bible pages turned
• How many hands you shake in church each Sunday
• How long you reflect on your sins before you take Communion
• Your heart rate during Sunday’s sermon
• How long your hands are folded in prayer each day
• How vigorously you wave your hands around like a palm tree in a hurricane during the worship set
• Altruistic activities
• Number of tracts passed out each day
• Number of words typed arguing with atheists on the internet

 

Does the Bebbington Quadrilateral work?

Historian David Bebbington has suggested that evangelicals believe in conversion (being born-again), biblicism (the need to base one’s faith fundamentally on the Bible), the theological priority of the cross (Jesus died for sinners), and activism (the need to share one’s faith with others).

Timothy Gloege writes:

When proposed thirty years ago, Bebbington’s definition was a valuable steppingstone. It pushed historians to ask new questions and research new groups. But the findings of that research also revealed the definition’s flaws. Its characteristics simply do not translate into identifiable patterns of belief and practice. (If they did, why isn’t evangelical Wheaton College’s statement of faith exactly four points?) It’s not a definition, but a prospectus for a theological agenda…..

A definition should connect to a movement’s most salient features (what sets it apart), and help us understand how they developed. Does “the theological priority of the cross” capture something uniquely evangelical? (It doesn’t.) Does it explain why white evangelicals tend to harbor a deep suspicion of the federal government and embrace free-market capitalism? Why policing sex and sexuality is such a priority (except when it isn’t)? Does it connect the dots?

The Bebbington Quadrilateral does none of these things; rather it offers theological slogans that make respectable evangelicals feel better about themselves. Rather than spur self-reflection, it lets evangelicals ignore hard questions, while the movement they helped conjure burns down the country.

[John Fea writes:] In my forthcoming book Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, I assume the Bebbington Quadrilateral is the best way of defining evangelicals.  On one level, Gloege is right.  Conversionism, biblicism, crucicentrism, and activism, when considered alone, are features that one can find in many religions and Christian traditions.  But when you bring them all together it still seems like you do have something that is unique.

NFL attendance numbers:

The raw numbers (avg. viewership):

NBC’s Sunday Night Football
2017: 18.175 million
2016: 20.323 million
2015: 22.522 million

ESPN’s Monday Night Football
2017: 10.757 million
2016: 11.390 million
2015: 12.896 million

Thursday Night Football (NBC/CBS/NFL Network)
2017: 10.937 million
2016: 12.438 million
2015: 12.425 million …

Thus, my three factors in NFL ratings declines:

1) Nobody knows what a catch is.
2) Supersaturation.
3) [Insert personal bugaboo here].”

In Florida the Iguanas are getting to cold:

On Thursday morning, Frank Cerabino, a columnist for the Palm Beach Post, woke up to 40-degree weather and was greeted by a “frozen iguana” lounging by his pool in Boca Raton.

He responded as many people probably would: He shared a photo on social media. Then he pondered, “What do you do?” he told the New York Times.

One of the strongest winter storms on the East Coast in modern history has pummeled cities with snow and sleet, forcing schools and businesses to close while grounding thousands of flights.

And in South Florida, it is “raining iguanas.”

Green iguanas, like all reptiles, are coldblooded animals, so they become immobile when the temperature falls to a certain level, said Kristen Sommers of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Under 50 degrees Fahrenheit, they become sluggish. Under 40 degrees, their blood stops moving as much, Sommers said.

They like to sit in trees, and “it’s become cold enough that they fall out.”

This is not a new phenomenon — there were similar reports in 2008 and 2010 — though it is not typical.

“The reality is South Florida doesn’t get that cold very often or long enough that you see this frequently,” Sommers said.