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Weekly Meanderings

Weekly Meanderings

Last updated on: October 30, 2010 at 11:12 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings 2010-10-30T11:12:09-05:00 Scot McKnight

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Hey, where’s summer gone?

Joseph Epstein, who calls himself a “media vegan,” on news: “What, you might wonder, do I do with all the time I don’t spend in endless swamp of ephemeral news? Well, I’ve made a little rediscovery of a marvelous invention called books, which I’m told are going out of style but which give a satisfaction much deeper than any other means of communication I know. You might want to turn off your computer, trash your newspaper, flick off your television, and give them a shot.”

Jim Martin on the spiritual checkup. Rob’s undoing the Fall.

Karen on the discipline of reading: “I’d like to tell you he’s the first bookstore manager I’ve met this year who doesn’t read. In fact, he’s the third one. All were men. All had backgrounds in retail. And all three of them are running bookstores that cater to the Christian marketplace. I think there’s a message embedded in there somewhere but I haven’t decoded it yet.”

JR Briggs exploring discipleship. Ted explores godliness … Eugene Cho, good on you!

Jamie Arpin-Ricci on volunteerism: “As I’ve dug deeper, I began to see a common thread: we all too view our involvement in missional church community through the lens of volunteerism. In other words, we love the vision and reality of ministry and want to be involved, as long as it fits. We have discipled entire generations of Christians to see missional engagement as a voluntary opportunity they can add to their lives when it works or isn’t too demanding. This isn’t to say that many people don’t live sacrificially, but rather that the general trend reflects an attitude of optionality.”

John Stackhouse takes on Mark Driscoll. Skye takes on ambition. Roger Olson takes on “evangelical theologian.”

Michael Kruse on textbooks.

It appears to me that Darrel Falk did what was right; the ID folks shouldn’t have expressed themselves as they did. Sad, really.

Meanderings in the News

1. Living la vida locavare: “Josh Smith is the executive chef of Local Roots in Roanoke, Virginia – and the restaurant is just as its name implies. The farm-to-table eatery supports and utilizes locally-sourced produce and meats to crank out modern American cuisine with classic Virginian touches. (Did someone say pimento cheese?)For Smith, the local food movement has taken root. He’s livin’ la vida locavore and encourages you all to do the same.”

2. Amy Gardner, on the Tea Party: “But a new Washington Post canvass of hundreds of local tea party groups reveals a different sort of organization, one that is not so much a movement as a disparate band of vaguely connected gatherings that do surprisingly little to engage in the political process.”

3. Charles Blow inveighs against Democrat complicity in programs that promote arresting minorities: “How can such a grotesquely race-biased pattern of arrests exist? Professor Levine paints a sordid picture: young police officers are funneled into low-income black and Hispanic neighborhoods where they are encouraged to aggressively stop and frisk young men. And if you look for something, you’ll find it. So they find some of these young people with small amounts of drugs. Then these young people are arrested. The officers will get experience processing arrests and will likely get to file overtime, he says, and the police chiefs will get a measure of productivity from their officers. The young men who were arrested are simply pawns…. This wave of arrests is partially financed, either directly or indirectly, by federal programs like the Byrne Formula Grant Program, which was established by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988 to rev up the war on drugs. Surprisingly, this program has become the pet project of Democrats, not Republicans.”

4. Charles Murray on the New Elite: “That a New Elite has emerged over the past 30 years is not really controversial. That its members differ from former elites is not controversial. What sets the tea party apart from other observers of the New Elite is its hostility, rooted in the charge that elites are isolated from mainstream America and ignorant about the lives of ordinary Americans. … The more efficiently a society identifies the most able young people of both sexes, sends them to the best colleges, unleashes them into an economy that is tailor-made for people with their abilities and lets proximity take its course, the sooner a New Elite — the “cognitive elite” that Herrnstein and I described — becomes a class unto itself. It is by no means a closed club, as Barack Obama’s example proves. But the credentials for admission are increasingly held by the children of those who are already members. An elite that passes only money to the next generation is evanescent (“Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” as the adage has it). An elite that also passes on ability is more tenacious, and the chasm between it and the rest of society widens.”

5. I think Juan Williams’ comments were unwise, but Rich Lowry thinks otherwise: “I often find NPR informative and enjoy my occasional appearance, but with this decision, it has chipped away at the country’s shrinking common ground for discourse. Let the record show that it wasn’t Fox News that severed its relationship with Williams because he said unacceptably liberal things, and it wasn’t Fox News viewers who agitated to have him dumped over his appearances on NPR. It’s the self-consciously tolerant people who behaved illiberally, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last.”

6. Anita Singh .. so Jane Austen had an editor, who took her homespun prose and made it more delicate: “The reputation of no other English novelist rests so firmly on the issue of style, on the poise and emphasis of sentence and phrase, captured in precisely weighed punctuation. But in reading the manuscripts it quickly becomes clear that this delicate precision is missing. This suggests somebody else was heavily involved in the editing process between manuscript and printed book,” Prof Sutherland said.

7. Jonah Goldberg asks what I think is a very important question: “All of these [France, England, Greece] countries — and many more — are going through painful retrenchments because they spent too much money, made too many promises, and expected too little from their citizens. The era of European austerity is upon us, because the Europeans — or at least those in charge — understand the mess they’ve made of their economies. This should present a real problem for Barack Obama and the vast (though shrinking) chorus of experts, editorialists, and activists who support his agenda. In broad terms, all of the policies Obama and the Democrats have pushed are the sorts of policies the British, the French, and other Europeans had for years, even decades.As far as I am aware, no one has asked President Obama a simple question: If your philosophy is so great, how come the countries that have embraced it for generations are so much poorer than we are?” [Instead of “poorer” I might prefer “worse shape.”]

8. An argument for thrifty.

9. Microsoft, once mighty empire: “NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) — Consumers have turned their backs on Microsoft. A company that once symbolized the future is now living in the past. Microsoft has been late to the game in crucial modern technologies likemobile, search, media, gaming and tablets. It has even fallen behind inWeb browsing, a market it once ruled with an iron fist.”

10. Nick Kristof, on pot ban: “But those burdensome regulations are already evaporating in California, where anyone who can fake a headache already can buy pot. Now there’s a significant chance that on Tuesday, California voters will choose to go further and broadly legalize marijuana. I hope so. Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did, and California may now be pioneering a saner approach. Sure, there are risks if California legalizes pot. But our present drug policy has three catastrophic consequences.”

11. Julie’s wasting her time writing about such nonsense. Who cares?

Meanderings in Sports

World Series time is always an ode on a Grecian urn for me: sad part is that it will end, and we’ll have to endure a month or so of the NBA’s war of the big gods wrestling before real basketball, ahem NCAA, begins. Yes, I know there are some, not many, who really do enjoy the NBA. All I can say, some enjoy root canals too.

Weekly Meanderings

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