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Weekly Meanderings

Weekly Meanderings

Last updated on: April 16, 2011 at 12:01 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings 2011-04-15T10:20:48-05:00 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.

It’s been a busy week around here and my links are not as plentiful as I’d have liked. But this little feller says “Good mornin’ to you!”

April and Brian working on co-parenting and full-time working mom.

An important reminder on the value of finding time for thinking by Jim Martin. On hiding “spring spheres.” And I would urge all pastors to read this post, and weigh in … good topic for discussion.

Karen on “Bull what?”: “Thankfully, the high school is located on the same street as Hermiston’s very fine and capable police department. These are boys and gals who grew up watching the mutton-busters at the Farm City Pro Rodeo. They know a thing or two about bulls. Like how to chase one down.”

Donald Trump: “Potential GOP presidential contender Donald Trump opened about his faith during an interview with a Christian network, saying he is a Christian and that he’s a “Sunday church person.” And …“I believe in God. I am Christian. I think The Bible is certainly, it is THE book. It is the thing,” Trump told Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody. And then: “”I’m a Protestant, I’m a Presbyterian. And you know I’ve had a good relationship with the church over the years. I think religion is a wonderful thing. I think my religion is a wonderful religion.” And on church attendance: “”Well, I go as much as I can. Always on Christmas. Always on Easter. Always when there’s a major occasion. And during the Sundays. I’m a Sunday church person. I’ll go when I can.” [Mr Trump, I’d suggest Redeemer Presbyterian.]

Emotion and emotionalism.

Brad Wright on passing forward the gripes: “At the gym, I was getting dressed after going for a swim, and Person A walked in and launched into a several minute diatribe about some injustice that he perceived during his workout. Apparently he was walking around the track, and another walker, Person B, asked him to walk in slower lane. He felt that he was going fast enough to merit being on the faster lane. It didn’t sound like that big of a deal, but by the time he got to the locker room he was spewing. He left the locker room, and Persons C and D, who listened to the rant, started griping about how much he was griping. They complained about several minutes about it.”

Christine Scheller interviews Will Graham.

The order matters: read this one from Mike Glenn. And Chaplain Mike reflects on One.Life and love.

Photographers: check out this context.

Skye Jethani on a new kind of radical: “So I’ve come to embrace the reality that my place as a church leader is not to get people to do more for God. Rather, I believe my responsibility is to give others a ravishing vision, rooted in Scripture and modeled by my own example, of a life lived it communion with God. And there, as they abide in him, calling will happen. The Lord of the harvest will call and send workers. And he will call others to live quietly and work with their hands. Some may be butchers, and others lawyers, and some he will even call to be suburban moms. And all of their work will be holy, good, and, if rooted in communion with God, truly radical.”

Crosby, Stills and Nash: top ten.

I don’t know how they rank blogs, but this one is cool for us.

Meanderings in the News

1. Tom Boswell, the best writer in sports, on Tiger: “Perhaps his grim expression muted his followers. Maybe a couple of mild curses early in the round signaled that it wasn’t his day. But as he moved from hole to hole, and marched down fairways, there were so few “Let’s go, Tigers,” and “Make a charge, Tiger” that, on the entire front nine, I could count them on fingers and never had to use a toe. Masters crowds crave a hero. Give them an excuse and they belong to you. But, for the moment, they don’t trust Woods. They are no longer sure they know him as a person. And they are disoriented as to whether they grasp who he is as a golfer, either.” Tom spoke one day too soon. The crowds went nuts on Sunday.

2. Dana Milbank: “In banishing Beck, about whom I wrote a critical book last year, Fox has made an important distinction: It’s one thing to promote partisan journalism, but it’s entirely different to engage in race baiting and fringe conspiracy claims. Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity may have their excesses, but their mainstream conservatism is in an entirely different category from Beck. Fox has rightly, if belatedly, declared that there is no place for Beck’s messages on its airwaves, and Beck will return to the fringes, where such ideas have always existed. Because his end-of-the-world themes will no longer be broadcast by a mainstream outlet, there will be less of a chance for him to inspire off-balance characters to violence.”

3. Ben Yagoda: “We all know that words change their meanings all the time, sometimes glacially (the prescriptivists have long been fighting on behalf of the “impartial” sense of disinterested) sometimes relatively quickly (that nonplussed thing snuck up on me). But this fact raises a question (it doesn’t beg the question—that means something else): How long should we hold on to a word’s old meaning?”

4. Jonathan Tasini and the class action lawsuit against HuffPo: “Blogger, author and former political candidate Jonathan Tasini filed a class action lawsuit (PDF link) against Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post and AOL. The suit includes an estimated 9,000 bloggers and seeks damages of “an amount to be determined at trial but not less than $105 million.” He explained on his blog: “We live in a time of unrelenting class warfare. We are the richest nation on earth—yet that wealth is flowing into the hands of the few … The Huffington Post was, is and will never be, anything without the thousands of people who create the content. Ms. Huffington is acting like every Robber Baron CEO—from Lloyd Blankfein to the Waltons—who believes that they, and only they, should pocket huge riches, while the rest of the peons struggle to survive. ”

5. Joe Nocera: “I asked Stacey Osburn, an N.C.A.A. spokeswoman, how a player could be held responsible for something done without his knowledge. I asked her why Jones had to sit while Cam Newton, the star quarterback at highly ranked Auburn, was allowed to continue playing after it was discovered that his father had tried to auction off his son’s talents to the highest bidder. I asked her why five players from Ohio State were allowed to play in the lucrative Sugar Bowl this year after they had been caught selling O.S.U. paraphernalia and pocketing the money — and why their coach got only a two-game suspension, even though he knew what they had done and said nothing. She wouldn’t give me a straight answer. “Every situation is different” is the best she could do.”

6. Elizabeth Landau: “This dog-sized, ferocious-looking critter is called Daemonosaurus chauliodus, which means something along the lines of “buck-toothed evil lizard,” says Hans-Dieter Sues, lead author of the published research describing this dinosaur, and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.”

7. Nicholas Wade: “A researcher analyzing the sounds in languages spoken around the world has detected an ancient signal that points to southern Africa as the place where modern human language originated.”

8. NR editors on budget cuts: “We initially supported the deal House Speaker John Boehner cut with the White House to cut $38.5 billion from the rest of the fiscal year 2011 budget. It was only a pittance in the context of all of Washington’s red ink, but it seemed an acceptable start, even if we assumed it would be imperfect in its details. What we didn’t assume was that the agreement would be shot through with gimmicks and one-time savings. What had looked in its broad outlines like a modest success now looks like a sodden disappointment. All the cuts in the deal aren’t equal. The ones that matter most are the cuts in discretionary spending that reduce the budget baseline in future years. Even with more the details of the deal released early yesterday morning, the exact numbers are still shrouded in confusion, but it is clear the cuts are much less than meets the eye — the gimmickry is not merely around the edges.”

9. Susanna Daniel: “In 1999, I moved to the Midwest—a place where I’d never before set foot—to pursue an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I assumed I’d spend summers and vacations back in New York, where I’d lived since college, but it was all of one week before I knew that wouldn’t happen. I can’t explain it to people who’ve never left the coasts, so I don’t try, but there is something about the Midwest that felt like home to me.”

10. Gilbert Meilaender, always thoughtful: “Aging might be said to be natural for human beings in the sense that it happens to all of us (unless, of course, we die before getting a chance to age). And while few people seem to relish growing old, even fewer want to die young, without the opportunity to age. Nor is aging natural only for human beings. All mammals age, and, with only rare possible exceptions (such as the sea anemone), so do all living organisms. We grow, we experience puberty, we mature—and we age. That is the course of a normal, healthy life. If we do not think of the other, earlier stages of our development as problems to be overcome, and if aging itself is not a disease, then why think of it as a problem that needs solving?”

Meanderings in Sports

Joe Posnanski does it again.

Weekly Meanderings

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On Hiding "Spring Spheres"

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