Weekly Meanderings

Last updated on: October 8, 2011 at 12:13 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings 2011-10-05T20:44:05-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Have you seen this e-mail panic cartoon? (HT: JT)

This guy, Vogt, is trying to get the Catholic Church to use social media: “Vogt estimates that the Catholic Church is “a good two to three years” behind most Protestant communities in using new media and when it comes to the secular world, “we’re a good half decade behind.” In writing his groundbreaking new book, Vogt said he wanted to use his own expertise and that of other online Catholics “to help the Church as a whole to engage this digital revolution.” The book outlines what Vogt calls the four main uses the Church should have for new media: evangelization, faith formation, community building and mobilizing for the common good.” Ted says King Jesus knocks him back on his heels. (And we all ought to be.)

See you Monday Jim — and this is a good one brother.

Coveting World Book — I really liked this piece by Patti Smith. And this pic by Rob — awesome.

Thoughts on growing up with famous pastor parents, by Laura Ortberg Turner: “Clearly, we seek a freedom different from the kind Wallace fought for. But it is similar insofar as true freedom is the same at its core across time and context. Something deep inside of each of us longs for freedom, hopes for freedom, was created to live in freedom. A freedomthat claims us in Christ regardless of what our parents do for a living, that releases us from the need to be perfect, to maintain a certain image, to become the person that God has made us to be. Throughout our growing-up years, and now, well into our adult ones, one of the greatest gifts my parents have given to us is that freedom. That absence of pressure to be a certain kind of kid, to behave in a certain way, to meet the standards and expectations of people whom we didn’t know and who had nothing to do with our family. That has been one of the most shaping forces in my life. In any church, regardless of size, it’s not uncommon for people to have certain expectations of the pastor’s children. Our parents protected us from that, through their commitment to let us grow into the people we were, pelvic thrusts and all. Where there is true freedom, there is God. Freedom here does not mean an absence of rules or boundaries, because of course only through obeying God do we experience true freedom. I am not a parent, and though I hope to be one, I still don’t imagine this is an easy gift to bestow upon your children. But as the product of parents who worked hard to give it to me, I can tell you that it is a gift worth giving; a heart-altering gift that mirrors the gift of God to all of us.”

The First Church of Twitter. (The first church split occurred over Hootsuite or Tweetdeck.)

Jenell Paris, with Veritas Riff: “But what if this very thing that is the source of so much contention, this thing called “sexual identity,” doesn’t really exist? Or what if it doesn’t exist, at least, in the way that we Christians have been brought up to believe? How would that change how we wrestle with these conflicts? Jenell Paris, a cultural anthropologist teaching at Messiah College, has posed these questions and provided her own answer in her recent book, The End of Sexual Identity. Her book makes the historical argument that the very concept of a homosexual versus heterosexual identity is a relatively modern invention.”

OK folks, I opened my Google Reader Wed PM and over half of those I follow didn’t even post this last week. Who has some suggestions either for why this is the case? (Are folks ceasing blogging?) Or do you have some blogs I need to follow?

Meanderings in the News

Flat-out ubercool!

Discovery of the earliest Christian inscription: “Researchers have identified what is believed to be the world’s earliest surviving Christian inscription, shedding light on an ancient sect that followed the teachings of a second-century philosopher named Valentinus. Officially called NCE 156, the inscription is written in Greek and is dated to the latter half of the second century, a time when the Roman Empire was at the height of its power. As translated by Snyder, the inscription reads:

To my bath, the brothers of the bridal chamber carry the torches,
[here] in our halls, they hunger for the [true] banquets,
even while praising the Father and glorifying the Son.
There [with the Father and the Son] is the only spring and source of truth.”

Folks, coffee is good for sports activities. See this by Matt Fitzgerald? “A number of studies have shown significant performance increases in various endurance disciplines, including running, following caffeine ingestion. In one study, elite runners improved their time in a treadmill run to exhaustion by 1.9 percent with caffeine. Caffeine boosted time to exhaustion in a cycling test by 15 minutes in another study. And in a study involving swimmers, caffeine was found to enhance performance in maximal-effort swims of up to 25 minutes’ duration.”

A good sketch of Richard Dawkins. “You walk out of a soft-falling rain into the living room of an Oxford don, with great walls of books, handsome art and, on the far side of the room, graceful windows onto a luxuriant garden. Does this man, arguably the world’s most influential evolutionary biologist, spend most of his time here or in the field? Professor Richard Dawkins smiles faintly. He did not find fame spending dusty days picking at shale in search of ancient trilobites. Nor has he traipsed the African bush charting the sex life of wildebeests. He gets little charge from such exertions. “My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side,” he says, listing the essential questions that drive him. “Why do we exist, why are we here, what is it all about?”

Stephen Joel Trachtenberg on college/university expenses: “Universities are labor-intensive institutions: faculty and staff salaries comprise the highest proportion of the budget. Maintaining the physical plant is the second highest budget item: keeping the lights on, constructing, furnishing and cleaning classrooms, laboratories, gyms, dormitories, student centers and libraries; and supplying books, blackboards and IT. In order to control costs, adjustments to those two items must be made.”

Adelle Banks on church attendance decrease: “(RNS) American congregations have grown less healthy in the last decade, with fewer people in the pews and aging memberships, according to a new Hartford Seminary study. But there are also “pockets of vitality,” including an increase in minority congregations and a surge in election-related activities at evangelical congregations. The findings coming from the new Faith Communities Today (FACT) survey are based on responses from more than 11,000 Christian, Jewish and Muslim congregations in 2010 and more than 14,000 congregations in 2000. In the first decade of the 21st century, the median worship attendance at a typical congregation decreased, from 130 to 108. “It means we have a lot more smaller congregations,” said David Roozen, author of the report, “A Decade of Change in American Congregations, 2000-2010,” and director of the Hartford Institute for Religion Research. The percentage of congregations with average weekend worship attendance of 100 or fewer inched up from 42 percent to 49 percent over the decade. More than a quarter of congregations had 50 or fewer people attending in 2010.”

And then this little jab at mainlines in that article: “In many cases, congregations are seeing not only fewer people but older ones in their pews. At least one-third of members in more than half of mainline Protestant congregations are 65 or older. The pews have gotten so gray in mainline Protestant churches, he said, that “oldline” is now probably a better descriptor.“Half of oldline Protestant congregations could lose a third of their members in 15 years,” he said. “And that’s about triple the rate for any other religious family.”

George Will gives it to Elizabeth Warren: Warren: “There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there — good for you. But I want to be clear. You moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. . . . You built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea — God bless, keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.”

Will: Warren is (as William F. Buckley described Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith) a pyromaniac in a field of straw men: She refutes propositions no one asserts. Everyone knows that all striving occurs in a social context, so all attainments are conditioned by their context. This does not, however, entail a collectivist political agenda.

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