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Weekly Meanderings, 30 August 2014

Weekly Meanderings, 30 August 2014

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 10:35 pm by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 30 August 2014 2015-03-13T22:35:17-05:00 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.

Occasionally I need to remind readers of this blog that I include topics, angles, points of view that are not my own, without comment, and often with a question — designed to create civil conversation. At times, far less often, I opine but one cannot infer from the presence of a topic what I necessarily think or believe. And this regular set of links on Weekly Meanderings is a good example.

Will shifts in sexual ethics increase attention to the gospel and attraction to the church? Alexander Griswold says No:

By now, we’ve all heard the refrain that U.S. churches need liberalize their teachings on sexuality and homosexuality or rapidly decline. The logic behind the argument is simple: more and more Americans are embracing homosexuality and same-sex marriage, including growing numbers of religious Millennials. So long as churches remain the face of opposition to gay marriage, those churches will shrink into irrelevancy when gay marriage (inevitably, we are told) becomes a settled political issue.

These arguments often see church acceptance of homosexuality as a carrot as well as a stick. It isn’t so much that denouncing homosexuality will drive people away from church, but that embracing it will also lead people into church. LGBT individuals and their supporters, many of whom hold a dim view of religion after a decades-long culture war, will reconsider church if denominations remove their restrictions on gay marriage and ordination.

But a number of Christian denominations have already taken significant steps towards liberalizing their stances on homosexuality and marriage, and the evidence so far seems to indicate that affirming homosexuality is hardly a cure for membership woes. On the contrary, every major American church that has taken steps towards liberalization of sexual issues has seen a steep decline in membership.

So true: what college (and seminary) professors do not like.

Louisiana is being swallowed:

In just 80 years, some 2,000 square miles of its coastal landscape have turned to open water, wiping places off maps, bringing the Gulf of Mexico to the back door of New Orleans and posing a lethal threat to an energy and shipping corridor vital to the nation’s economy.

And it’s going to get worse, even quicker.

Scientists now say one of the greatest environmental and economic disasters in the nation’s history is rushing toward a catastrophic conclusion over the next 50 years, so far unabated and largely unnoticed.

At the current rates that the sea is rising and land is sinking, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists say by 2100 the Gulf of Mexico could rise as much as 4.3 feet across this landscape, which has an average elevation of about three feet. If that happens, everything outside the protective levees — most of Southeast Louisiana — would be underwater.

Mark David Chapman, murderer of John Lennon, on his faith in Christ and his ministry.

(RNS) The man who murdered John Lennon wants only one thing now — to tell others about Jesus.

Mark David Chapman, 59, told parole examiners he was no longer the man who sought notoriety through killing the Beatles rock star in 1980.

Now, he said, he’s sorry, “forgiven by God” and eager to spend his days — in prison or out — ministering to others.

Mr. Fred Rogers.

OK, so school begins too early for the circadian rhythms of our youth, but are schools doing anything about it? Why not?

Parents, students and teachers often argue, with little evidence, about whether U.S. high schools begin too early in the morning. In the past three years, however, scientific studies have piled up, and they all lead to the same conclusion: a later start time improves learning. And the later the start, the better.

Biological research shows that circadian rhythms shift during the teen years, pushing boys and girls to stay up later at night and sleep later into the morning. The phase shift, driven by a change in melatonin in the brain, begins around age 13, gets stronger by ages 15 and 16, and peaks at ages 17, 18 or 19.

Does that affect learning? It does, according to Kyla Wahlstrom, director of the Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement at the University of Minnesota. She published a large study in February that tracked more than 9,000 students in eight public high schools in Minnesota, Colorado and Wyoming. After one semester, when school began at 8:35 a.m. or later, grades earned in math, English, science and social studies typically rose a quarter step—for example, up halfway from B to B+….

Studies also show that common arguments against later start times ring hollow. In hundreds of districts that have made the change, students do not have a harder time fitting in after-school activities such as sports or in keeping part-time jobs. “Once these school districts change, they don’t want to go back,” Wahlstrom says.

Even “the bus issue” can work out for everyone. Many districts bus kids to high school first, then rerun the routes for the elementary schools. Flipping the order would bring high schoolers to class later and benefit their little sisters and brothers; other studies show that young children are more awake and more ready to learn earlier in the morning.

If you are going to Sweden, read this before you go.

On taking notes: laptop or by hand? (By hand is better for learning.)

Using technology in the classroom can produce fabulous results, but for note-taking, it may pay to keep it old-school and stick with pen and paper.

Students who take longhand notes appear to process information more deeply than those who take notes on a laptop, according to a studypublished this year in Psychological Science. Using the newfangled method generally produces more raw notes, researchers say in the study, “The Pen Is Mightier Than the Keyboard,” which was published in April. (The study was resurfaced this week by Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, as students return to school.)

But students using laptops tend to do worse than longhand note-takers when answering conceptual questions about the material.

Researchers from Princeton and UCLA conducted several experiments with college students watching TED Talks and other video lectures. In one, longhand note takers wrote down fewer words than those typing on laptops. But the two groups performed about the same when answering factual questions about the lecture material, and students who wrote longhand did much better than laptop note takers on conceptual questions.

What gives? Students using laptops tended to write what they heard verbatim rather than processing the information; that resulted in a sort of “shallower” learning, the researchers said.

If you remember the great baseball player, Dick Allen, here’s his story.

Is Greece becoming more tolerant?

Greece (MNN) — Even though Greece has a long, rich history connected to the early Church, things haven’t exactly been easy for followers of Christ there.

In 1938, laws restricting freedom of religion were passed in Greece and have never been repealed. Unchallenged, the Greek Orthodox Church grew dominant (95% national affiliation). Proselytizing is illegal unless it is an attempt to convert a person to Greek Orthodoxy…..

AMG’s Fotis Romeos first noted a proposal in his July report. Romeos co-founded the CosmoVision Center on the outskirts of Athens, Greece. He works with AMG’s Eastern European ministries and serves as the Greek representative at the European Evangelical Alliance and the general secretary of the Greek Evangelical Alliance.

Romeos wrote, “We are facing a new law, which is proposed by the Ministry of Religion in Greece regarding the legal status of evangelical churches in Greece. We have been literally fighting for many years for such a law and now the time arrived.”

Moleskine and Livescribe have a new kind of Moleskine — and I like it. I was big with Moleskine until the age of iPads.

Inspiration is fleeting and great ideas need to be captured before they vanish back into the ether. When it comes to getting ideas down quickly, old-fashioned pen and paper still wins over digital technology, but a new collaboration between notebookmaker Moleskine and ‘smartpen’ companyLivescribe has combined the pleasures of using pen and paper with the advantages (think saving and emailing your notes) of digital technology.

Who is playing video games? You just might be surprised:

Let’s blow up some stereotypes.

There is a popular and enduring image of what a “gamer” looks like: mostly male, mostly juvenile, mostly white. That image is false, and has been for a long time now.

According to a survey from the Entertainment Software Association, there are significantly more adult women playing video games than adolescent males—just like there were last year. Why does this matter? Because the “gamer culture” propagated by industry marketing and perpetuated elsewhere does not reflect reality, and it has created an environment that is unwelcoming to anyone who does not fit this “norm.” As Kill Screen notes, the status quo that is pushed out into the world is one that caters to men, both teenage and adult. It shows in industry events and in the places where games are made. It shows in the ways games are marketed to us. It might even show in the comments section beneath this article.

Here’s the exact breakdown: Of the 59 percent of Americans who play video games, 36 percent are women aged 18 or older. Boys 18 or younger, whom are highly sought after by marketers, only make up 17 percent of the gaming population in the U.S. When not broken down by age, the split between genders is almost even: 48 percent of American gamers are female, while 52 percent are male.

It was not easy to choose, but of these pictures of the world’s most magnificent bookstores, I’d have to choose the one on Santorini. How did they manage not to include Blackwell’s in Oxford?

In an interview, Cornel West takes on (yet again) President Obama’s non-progressivism:

I also remember, and this is just me I’m talking about, being impressed by Barack Obama who was running for president at the time. I don’t know if you and I talked about him on that occasion. But at the time, I sometimes thought that he looked like he had what this country needed.

So that’s my first question, it’s a lot of ground to cover but how do you feel things have worked out since then, both with the economy and with this president? That was a huge turning point, that moment in 2008, and my own feeling is that we didn’t turn.

No, the thing is he posed as a progressive and turned out to be counterfeit. We ended up with a Wall Street presidency, a drone presidency, a national security presidency. The torturers go free. The Wall Street executives go free. The war crimes in the Middle East, especially now in Gaza, the war criminals go free. And yet, you know, he acted as if he was both a progressive and as if he was concerned about the issues of serious injustice and inequality and it turned out that he’s just another neoliberal centrist with a smile and with a nice rhetorical flair. And that’s a very sad moment in the history of the nation because we are—we’re an empire in decline. Our culture is in increasing decay. Our school systems are in deep trouble. Our political system is dysfunctional. Our leaders are more and more bought off with legalized bribery and normalized corruption in Congress and too much of our civil life. You would think that we needed somebody—a Lincoln-like figure who could revive some democratic spirit and democratic possibility….

And we ended up with a brown-faced Clinton. Another opportunist. Another neoliberal opportunist. It’s like, “Oh, no, don’t tell me that!” I tell you this, because I got hit hard years ago, but everywhere I go now, it’s “Brother West, I see what you were saying. Brother West, you were right. Your language was harsh and it was difficult to take, but you turned out to be absolutely right.” And, of course with Ferguson, you get it reconfirmed even among the people within his own circle now, you see. It’s a sad thing. It’s like you’re looking for John Coltrane and you get Kenny G in brown skin.

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August 29, 2014

S.J. Creek, RNS and Ferguson's Churches

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August 30, 2014 How to Respond to Middle East Tensions? (by Michelle Van Loon)

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