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Weekly Meanderings

Weekly Meanderings

Last updated on: September 17, 2011 at 12:04 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings 2011-09-16T07:04:58-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Good Morning Chicago!

A collection of texts and observations by early Christian theologians on abortion, a site I’ve never seen before.

C. Michael Patton on finding trustworthy scholars. Rachel Held Evans calls out the CBMW on inconsistency and exegetical gymnastics.

I agree: Jim Wallis, in a story by Cathleen Falsani: “More than 15 percent of the U.S. population now lives in poverty — the highest rate in 18 years, according to a U.S. Census Bureau report released this morning. Poverty has risen for the third consecutive year in a row, the new census figures show, but perhaps the most distressing figure is the child poverty number, which rose from 20.7 percent in 2009 to 22 percent in 2010. “The results aren’t good,” the Rev. Jim Wallis, president and CEO of Sojourners, the largest network of progressive Christians in the United States focused on the biblical call to social justice, said upon reviewing the census report today. “After making progress in domestic and childhood poverty in the 1990’s we are headed in the wrong direction and the recession made it worse,” Wallis said. “So let’s talk about the issue of religion and upcoming election. These new poverty numbers should be the number one religious issue for the 2012 presidential election.”

A site on St Patrick, one of my favorites (even if we are not always able to decide the historical from the mythical).(HT: AM) [To your right, the world’s largest chocolate bar: 12,000 pounds.]

“If I had a daughter, a little girl, probably five-years-old by now…” When life is a blur with Ted.

Christine Scheller on parenting: “Parenting is hard, and not just because we struggle to balance work and family. The stakes are high. We parents all raise our children, hoping they will become spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, and physically healthy adults. We look for answers from pastors, pediatricians, and parenting “experts,” but we should not neglect the wisdom of mental health professionals. Healthy child development reflects God’s character and purposes, says Laity Leadership Senior Fellow Allan Josephson, M.D., and Scripture provides guidelines that children desperately need. In his 1994 paper, “A Clinical Theology of the Developmental Process: A Child Psychologist’s Perspective,” Josephson outlines eight areas of child development that not only illustrate his theology, but also offer sound parenting principles. [check the link for the eight]”

Nelson Branco at KevinMD.com: “No pediatrician can answer the question: “What’s the most important thing I can do to keep my child healthy?” without listing three of four things. I’m no different, but right now family dinners are at the top of my list. You could argue that immunizations, car seats, bike helmets, 9-1-1, sleep, or good hand washing are just as important, and I won’t disagree. But it’s hard to overlook the overwhelming research on the positive effects of family dinners on children’s diet, social development, and sense of connection with their parents and siblings.”

Chicagoland’s Out of Darkness community walk, sponsored by the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

Big and fast growing churches.

Meanderings in the News

A good story about Elisa Hallerman, a former Hollywood talent agent now doing something completely else: “And then the inevitable crash. My boss committed suicide, which amplified my pain. I had deep feelings of sadness, fear, and guilt. I kept trying desperately to anesthetize my pain. Yada yada yada. I had thought it was all so cool. I was on every list, attended premieres, the Oscars, Golden Globes, and Emmys. I operated at the highest level—packaging movies, making multimillion-dollar deals, and managing those treacherous waters you have heard so much about. Ultimately, it was someone “in the business” who broke the news to me that my life was a mess. The vortex of Hollywood is where I lost my sanity, but it’s also where I found it again. And I will never forget that. Like millions of others, I found that sobriety not only saved my life; it greatly enhanced it. I quickly realized there was more to Los Angeles than the parties I’d already been to, and like many others in this town, I found that when you leave the parties, there are a whole lot of people in recovery who used to be at the same parties! What an irony, that Hollywood can be so drunk and yet so sober…. I’ll never forget the person who first looked at me and said, “I love you, but you’re broken, you’re screwed up, you’re a mess, please let me get you help.” That level of honesty mixed with hope literally saved my life, and if I can give that level of clarity to others, then any move I could possibly make will be worth it. For one thing I’ve learned is that life is not a movie. In real life, the blood is real, the horror is real, and the death is real. But so is the miracle that finally comes, when we surrender it all and are open to what might come next.”

On the economic stimulus plan and speech of Obama: Motoko Rich: “The dismal state of the economy is the main reason many companies are reluctant to hire workers, and few executives are saying that President Obama’s jobs plan — while welcome — will change their minds any time soon. That sentiment was echoed across numerous industries by executives in companies big and small on Friday, underscoring the challenge for the Obama administration as it tries to encourage hiring and perk up the moribund economy. The plan failed to generate any optimism on Wall Street as the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index and the Dow Jones industrial average each fell about 2.7 percent. As President Obama faced an uphill battle in Congress to win support even for portions of the plan, many employers dismissed the notion that any particular tax break or incentive would be persuasive. Instead, they said they tended to hire more workers or expand when the economy improved.”

Joan Didion, on NYC: “Seven days after September 11, 2001, I left New York to do two weeks of book promotion, under other circumstances a predictable kind of trip. You fly into one city or another, you do half an hour on local NPR, you do a few minutes on drive-time radio, you do an “event,” a talk or a reading or an onstage discussion. You sign books, you take questions from the audience. You go back to the hotel, order a club sandwich from room service, and leave a 5 AM call with the desk, so that in the morning you can go back to the airport and fly to the next city. During the week between September 11 and the Wednesday morning when I went to Kennedy to get on the plane, none of these commonplace aspects of publishing a book seemed promising or even appropriate things to be doing. But—like most of us who were in New York that week—I was in a kind of protective coma, sleepwalking through a schedule made when planning had still seemed possible. In fact I was protecting myself so successfully that I had no idea how raw we all were until that first night, in San Francisco, when I was handed a book onstage and asked to read a few marked lines from an essay about New York I had written in 1967. Later I remembered thinking: 1967, no problem, no land mines there. I put on my glasses. I began to read.

“New York was no mere city,” the marked lines began. “It was instead an infinitely romantic notion, the mysterious nexus of all love and money and power, the shining and perishable dream itself.”

I hit the word “perishable” and I could not say it.

Jeffrey Goldberg, on Mel Gibson’s movie about Judah Maccabee: “The news that Mel Gibson is going to make a biopic about Judah Maccabee, the great hero of the Hannukah story, did not come as a surprise to me. Well, it is somewhat surprising that Warner Bros. — or any studio, for that matter — would sign up Gibson (not to mention Joe Eszterhas, who is writing the script) to do anything, after his serial meltdowns. But I’ve known about Gibson’s interest in the original Hebrew Hammer for several years. I’m working on a biography of Judah Maccabee for Nextbook (don’t ask me how it’s going), and so it was brought to my attention that Gibson is preoccupied with the subject. (My preoccupation is simple: Judah Maccabee led the first revolt for religious freedom in recorded history, and he is without parallel as a guerrilla fighter and as a man of faith. And he also bequeathed us a pretty excellent holiday.) … UPDATE: I see that various Jewish organizations are rallying their forces against Warner Bros. and Mel Gibson over yesterday’s announcement. Their goal is to get this movie stopped. But what they will do instead is give Gibson yards of free publicity. We’ve seen this before, with Passion of the Christ. My opinion, FWIW: I don’t care if he makes this movie or not. He’s not actually important. It’s better for these Jewish organizations to spend their time focused on Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran. These are things I worry about. I don’t worry about Mel Gibson.”

Amazon, its associates, local State taxes and California.

Nicholas Wade: “An apelike creature with human features, whose fossil bones were discovered recently in a South African cave, is being greeted by paleoanthropologists as a likely watershed in the understanding of human evolution. The discoverer of the fossils, Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, says the new species, known as Australopithecus sediba, is the most plausible known ancestor of archaic and modern humans. Several other paleoanthropologists, while disagreeing with that interpretation, say the fossils are of great importance anyway, because they elucidate the mix-and-match process by which human evolution was shaped. Dr. Berger’s claim, if accepted, would radically redraw the present version of the human family tree, placing the new fossils in the center. The new species, in his view, should dislodge Homo habilis, the famous tool-making fossil found by Louis and Mary Leakey, as the most likely bridge between the australopithecenes and the human lineage. Australopithecenes were apelike creatures that walked upright, like people, but had still not forsaken the trees.”

A courageous, even if troubled, woman.

Meanderings in Sports

Does “kicking” count? “MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — A 61-year-old Vietnam veteran and grandfather of five became the oldest player ever to get in a college football game. Alan Moore kicked an extra point for NAIA Faulkner in its season-opener on Saturday. Moore wore a square-toe shoe and kicked old-school style, not soccer style — trends that were popular when he first played college football in the late ’60s. He gave Faulkner a 25-0 lead early in the second half Saturday en route to a 41-19 win over Ave Maria, located in southwest Florida and playing its first game ever. Players one-third his age swarmed Moore as he jogged off the field smiling. Gray-bearded and tanned, Moore swapped high fives and fist bumps with teammates. Moore — with the word “believe’ written on his kicking shoe — said he was glad to get the first kick behind him. “It’s not about me, and it’s not about being old. It’s about the team,” Moore said before hugging his grandkids at midfield after the game.”

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