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Weekly Meanderings, 27 September 2014

Weekly Meanderings, 27 September 2014

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 10:31 pm by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 27 September 2014 2015-03-13T22:31:16-05:00 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.

Kirsten Powers — we broke Iraq — read these sobering words:

Colin Powell famously told President George W. Bush before the Iraq invasion, “If you break it, you own it.” Well, it’s safe to say we broke Iraq.

That’s the story I heard last week from two people who live there. I met with the Rev. Canon Andrew White — “The Vicar of Baghdad” — who serves as the chaplain to St. George’s Anglican Church in the heart of Baghdad. We were joined by Sarah Ahmed, a director at White’s Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East. Ahmed was born and raised in Iraq. White has lived there for 15 years.

“I was in favor of the U.S. invasion,” White told me. “But we are literally 5,000 times worse than before. If you look at it, you can see it was wrong. We have gained nothing. Literally nothing. We may have had an evil dictator, but now we have total terrorism. We used to have one Saddam. Now we have thousands.”

Ty Grigg on children in church:

The story in Mark, if it were set in the present day, might sound like this: People were bringing the little children to the Sunday worship so that Jesus might touch them. The pastors did not want the congregation to be distracted by the noise and unpredictability of the children, so they created a separate children’s church. Or maybe…. the church was okay with the children being in the service as long as they were quiet and sat still.

We are okay with children being with us as long as they act like adults. Including difference means conforming to the culture of the dominant group, in this case, the culture of adulthood. Children are tolerated more than welcomed. Adults do not ask for their contribution to the work of the people, that is the liturgy.

Maybe we look to a few specialists to support and care for our children and then we segregate the children out of most our corporate worship time. The children’s minister becomes the proxy who receives the little ones on the church’s behalf. Except hospitality can never be experienced by proxy….

We see children as problems to be solved.

Jesus sees them as forerunners who lead us into the kingdom.

Paul sees them as indispensable members for the life of the body.

Most “Googled” universities?

Google has revealed the most popular searches for people around the world looking for universities.

This ranking of online searches is very different from the traditional map of the global powerhouses of higher education.

There is a strong interest in online courses, rather than traditional campus-based universities, says Google.

And there are five Indian institutions in the top 20 of most searched-for universities.

The top search worldwide is for the University of Phoenix, a US-based, for-profit university, with many online courses and a sometimes controversial record on recruitment.

The University of Phoenix, founded in the 1970s, comes ahead of famous US academic institutions such as Harvard, Stanford and Columbia.

Darrell M. West:

Billionaires can be fascinating — and not just because of the fortunes they amass. Theybuy islands and media organizations, experiment with space travel, and have larger-than-life personalities. They also become proxies in national political debates about economic growth, inequality, taxes and fairness. Misconceptions abound about their beliefs, businesses and influence. Let’s explore five of the most common myths.

What your children may not see in the wild:

In their losing battle with television and digital devices, conservationists have urged parents to get the kiddies to the great outdoors. But even if parents managed to pull their children away from cellphones, what would they find in America’s wilderness?

A new report by the Endangered Species Coalition, an alliance of 10 environmental activist groups, says they’ll see fewer things in nature than their parents did. Many are listed as threatened or endangered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife. Here are 10 plants and animals the groups say your children might never see.

LaSalle Street church gives money to parishioners:

A Chicago church came into some money following a decades old real estate deal. What to do with the extra dough weighed heavily on the pastor’s mind. Then she decided to do something crazy.

She wanted the church to tithe and give 10% of the money away. That may not sound so crazy, but here’s the hitch, she gave it back — all $160,000 of it–to the congregation. Anyone who is “actively engaged in LaSalle Street Church” got a sizable check. Not $5 or $50 – we are talking $500 a person. Personal checks made out directly to the parishioners to go forth and spend, invest or give away as they see fit. No strings attached.

Pastor Laura, as she’s known, is beaming–ever since she announced to her congregation of 300 back on Sept 7th that they would all get $500 from the church.

“Some started to cry,” she said. “Their mouths started to drop. I started to sweat because it sounded so crazy.”

All-time low in marriages from Pew:

After decades of declining marriage rates and changes in family structure, the share of American adults who have never been married is at an historic high. In 2012, one-in-five adults ages 25 and older (about 42 million people) had never been married,according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data. In 1960, only about one-in-ten adults (9%) in that age range had never been married.1 Men are more likely than women to have never been married (23% vs. 17% in 2012). And this gender gap has widened since 1960, when 10% of men ages 25 and older and 8% of women of the same age had never married.

The dramatic rise in the share of never-married adults and the emerging gender gap are related to a variety of factors. Adults are marrying later in life, and the shares of adults cohabiting and raising children outside of marriage have increased significantly. The median age at first marriage is now 27 for women and 29 for men, up from 20 for women and 23 for men in 1960.2 About a quarter (24%) of never-married young adults ages 25 to 34 are living with a partner, according to Pew Research analysis of Current Population Survey data.3

The evolutionary processes of notochords and our slipped disks.

Recently, Detlev Arendt, a biologist at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, and his colleagues investigated the evolution of an important but overlooked feature in our bodies, known as the notochord. It’s a stiff rod of cartilage that develops in human embryos, running down their back. Later, as the spine develops, the notochord transforms into the disks that cushion the vertebrae (and sometimes slip later in life, causing much grief).

Other mammals also develop a notochord as embryos. And so do birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish. Even our closest invertebrate relatives, such as lancelets, have notochords. All animals with a notochord belong to the same group, known as the chordates.

Unlike most vertebrates, lancelets keep their notochord into adulthood, using it to stiffen their bodies when they swim. Early chordate fossils also have a lancelet-like anatomy. So it’s likely that 550 million years ago, the notochord evolved in chordates first, and then the skeleton evolved later. In fish, the spine took over the body-stiffening job, but the notochord still had other work left to do. In the vertebrate embryo, the notochord releases chemical signals that tell the surrounding cells whether they should become nerves, blood vessels, or other tissues.

Arendt and his colleagues wondered how the notochord first evolved. Squid don’t have a notochord. Neither do clams, or cockroaches, or tarantulas. The notochord, in other words, seems to be unique to chordates. So where did it come from? Did it emerge right at the dawn of chordates, or did it have deeper origins?

Lawson Stone’s clear sketch of “beer” in the Bible:

My point here, other than to share some fascinating information with you, is simply to show that the Old Testament’s statements about wine and beer fit directly into the universal ancient cultural context. It’s appreciations of “adult beverages” mirrors directly the common feeling of all in the ancient Near east. So does this mean then that folks seeking to live according to the Bible should drop their inhibitions about alcohol, belly up to the bar and order their favorite brew?

With the Bible, things are seldom that simplistic. While wine and beer were indeed a regular part of the life of the ancient biblical characters, and while its benefits were known and celebrated, that is not the whole story. The biblical text has a dual relationship with its surrounding culture. It arises from that culture and mirrors it, but it often at times stands over against the culture in various ways. The “trick” in good biblical exegesis is to discern the cutting edge, the distinctive witness of scripture that emerges from its being both in and against its environment.

Ted Gossard on the importance of keeping gospel front and center:

Good liturgy and regular participation in the Eucharist (the Lord’s Table, or Holy Communion) weekly in our church gatherings can help us keep the gospel front and center. I need the gospel myself, everyday. I need to be not only encouraged to keep on keeping on because of that gospel, but I need to be confronted by the demands of that gospel as well, the call to regular confession of sin with the forgiveness in Jesus that accompanies that. And the call to take up my own cross and follow Christ to the end, and the many details involved in that.

The gospel is the vantage point from which I see all of life. I can’t explain everything in light of it, but I seek to view everything in its light, and I find whatever good is in anything (excluding sin) is fulfilled in the gospel to be realized in some measure now and completely later in and through Jesus.

Rachel Feltman on chimps and “grooming”:

When chimps are raised as pets, they lose their ability to form strong social bonds with other members of their own species — even if they appear to thrive in sanctuaries as adults.

It goes without saying that a chimpanzee raised to interact with humans will act differently than other chimps. But according to new research, those effects can last for decades after a chimp is moved to a healthy sanctuary — and being the pet of a loving family (which is legal in most states) could actually be worse for the animals than working as performers….

It wasn’t all bad news: Surprisingly, the researchers didn’t find increased aggression or anxiety in the chimps towards the human end of the spectrum. But they saw big differences in social grooming behavior (that is, where chimps groom each other), which scientists believe to be of incredible importance in chimpanzee communities….

For chimps, grooming is an expression of friendship and a way of getting to know new individuals. To a chimp, Ross said, a failure to reciprocate grooming behavior would be like a failed attempt at a handshake in the human world.

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