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Weekly Meanderings, 3 January 2015

Weekly Meanderings, 3 January 2015

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:59 pm by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 3 January 2015 2015-03-13T21:59:22-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Our first Meanderings of the New Year! [Image credit]

Kris nabbed a bundle of links for me this week. And a hat tip, too, to Lukas.

Tim Suttle begins the New Year aright:

I was recently asked to contribute practical suggestions on what might make for peace in the coming year. After careful consideration, I decided that I know of only one suggestion I could make: Worship.

I don’t mean worship as in singing a bunch of Chris Tomlin songs with two thousand of your closest friends. The kind of worship I’m recommending cannot happen in a mega church, or any church that is obsessed with church growth. Theologians Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon once wrote, “Bad liturgy eventually leads to bad ethics. You begin by singing some sappy, sentimental hymn, then you pray some pointless prayer, and the next thing you know you have murdered your best friend.” Hyperbole aside, Hauerwas and Willimon are alluding to the close connection between worship and peace.

I’m talking about a different kind of worship: participation in the life of a local church that is so rooted in a neighborhood, in the scriptures, and in the traditions of the Christian faith that they become hospitable to those they would otherwise leave out.

I’m talking about worship that includes those living on the margins of society.

Let’s begin the New Year with prayer for the many Christians suffering in the Middle East, including those featured in this story about Midyat Turkey:

MIDYAT, Turkey—On most afternoons, Mor Barsaumo, a honey-colored, fifth-century stone church nestled in a warren of slanted streets, draws a crowd. In the narrow courtyard, old men smoke cigarettes and drink coffee, while children kick a soccer ball across the stone floor. In a darkened classroom, empty except for a few desks, a teacher gives private lessons in Syriac, derived from Aramaic, the language of Christ.

And now, the refugees also come.

Advised by relatives or other refugees, newcomers to Midyat often make the steps of the church their first stop. Midyat and its environs—known in Syriac as Tur Abdin, “mountain of the servants of God”—are the historical heartland of the Middle East’s widely dispersed Syriac Orthodox Christian community. Now the region has become a haven as the fighting in Syria and Iraq has forced Christians to flee their homes.

“All Syriac Christians come here. Most of the aid is delivered from here,” says Ayhan Gürkan, a deacon at Mor Barsaumo and a member of the Tur Abdin Syriac Christians Committee, set up to look after Midyat’s Christian refugees.

Many of us sit at a desk daily — and some all day long. Take a good look at this article about how to help yourself physically if you need to sit much of the day.

Emily Badger:

A couple of years ago, the city of Chicago started a summer jobs programfor teenagers attending high schools in some of the city’s high-crime, low-income neighborhoods. The program was meant, of course, to connect students to work. But officials also hoped that it might curb the kinds of problems — like higher crime — that arise when there’s no work to be found.

Research on the program conducted by the University of Chicago Crime Lab and just published in the journal Science suggests that these summer jobs have actually had such an effect: Students who were randomly assigned to participate in the program had 43 percent fewer violent-crime arrests over 16 months, compared to students in a control group.

That number is striking for a couple of reasons: It implies that a relatively short (and inexpensive) intervention like an eight-week summer jobs program can have a lasting effect on teenage behavior. And it lends empirical support to a popular refrain by advocates: “Nothing stops a bullet like a job.”

Carl Trueman’s excellent essay on being medieval — when it comes to individualism and social obligation to justice:

Siedentop’s central thesis is provocative and plausible, though inevitably in need of further documentation and argument. In essence it is this: Christianity, by stressing the equality of all human beings before God effectively undermined previous categories which divided up or stratified society. Family, polis, and social hierarchy were all ultimately relativized in the light of the concept of a universal human nature.

Perhaps the key figure in Siedentop’s narrative is Duns Scotus who carefully distinguished between the freedom of the will to act and the notion of justice. Freedom to act was a necessary condition of moral behavior but not a sufficient condition: Acts also needed to be in conformity with what was just. Scotus thus gave conceptual clarity to the relationship between the individual human agent and the common standards of moral action rooted in shared human nature.

Largely unknown Native American music from the 60s and 70s.

Alumapalooza!

JACKSON CENTER, Ohio — Bob Wheeler still gets the question sometimes when people find out he runs the company that builds those shiny aluminum campers: “Airstreams? They still make those?”

Not only are the retro-looking silver-bullet travel trailers still being built by hand at the same western Ohio site that has produced them for 60 years, but the company also can’t roll them out of there fast enough to meet the demand.

The instantly recognizable silver bubble design — inspired by airplane fuselages — hasn’t been tweaked much since the first Airstreams took to the open road in the 1930s on the way to becoming an American icon. The polished campers have cameoed in Hollywood movies and quarantined the Apollo 11 astronauts when they got back from the moon. They also have inspired a legion of devotees who socialize with one another at Airstream caravans and rallies around the world — including an annual Ohio jamboree known as “Alumapalooza.”

Good advice on putting down the smartphone.

The Monarch butterfly is endangered:

In an interview with the Washington Post earlier this year, Brower said that the “most catastrophic thing from the point of view of the monarch butterfly has been the expansion of crops that are planted on an unbelievably wide scale throughout the Midwest and have been genetically manipulated to be resistant to the powerful herbicide Roundup.”

Brower also mentioned two additional negative factors on the butterflies’ population: severe weather over the past few years, and illegal deforestation in the overwintering habitat for the adult butterflies in Mexico. Their habitat, the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, is protected, but still threatened by illegal loggers. The satellite imagery at right gives a good visual representation of the continued erosion of the habitat.

If the monarchs go extinct, Brower said, it would be “just like going into a museum and pulling a rare painting off the wall and destroying it.” In the petition to protect the monarch, its advocates write that the monarch “has played a unique and prominent role in the imagination of our country, especially so for an insect.”

What is this world coming to?

Lesson for winter from Chris Mooney: idling your is not needed (though the author seems to ignore the desire to get into a warmer car):

Idling in winter thus has no benefit to your (presumably modern) car. Auto experts today say that you should warm up the car no more than 30 seconds before you start driving in winter. “The engine will warm up faster being driven,” the EPA and DOE explain. Indeed, it is better to turn your engine off and start it again than to leave it idling.

So idling does nothing for your vehicle, but it does have several big (and avoidable) costs: Wasting fuel, and giving off greenhouse gas emissions and other types of pollution.

On saying goodbye to football — and its culture — by a big fan.

This study by Brad Wolverton is why sports must be disconnected from educational institutions — an alarming revelation:

Fifteen miles from his home, tucked in a corner of a 10-by-10 storage unit, under an antique table, is a gray filing cabinet. Locked inside he keeps the test answers for more than a dozen online courses.

Among his files is a pink steno pad of names, covering the front and back of 80 pages, that includes some of the biggest stars in college sports. Next to the names are credit-card numbers and PINs, log-ins, passwords, Social Security numbers, and addresses.

The handwritten notes, by a onetime academic adviser and college-basketball coach, are part of an elaborate scheme. Over the past 14 years, he says, he has used test keys to cheat for hundreds of athletes, helping them meet the eligibility requirements of the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

For some players, he says, he did their work outright. For others, he provided homework answers and papers that the students would submit themselves. At exam time, he lined up proctors and conspired with them to lie on behalf of students.

On Mark Twain, by Andrew Levy — a review:

Levy argues that while the 1885 book is certainly reflective of Twain’s powerful but complicated feelings about race, it is perhaps even more a book about childhood and especially boyhood, conceived and written at a time when the American mind was preoccupied with panic over dangerous and violent boys and with vigorous debates over the proper role of public education. Levy’s bracing thesis is that close attention to both the race aspects and the childhood aspects of both the book and Twain’s authorial approach lead to the same conclusion: that things change less than they seem to.

Twain, Levy argues, was tweaking those who worried then (as they do now) that boys were suddenly being turned violent by popular media (then, the dime novel; now, the violent video game). And despite frequent arguments about whether the book is racist or anti-racist, neither Twain nor the novel is easily placed along an arc of steady progress in racial enlightenment — an arc Levy argues is mostly illusory. Through those two lenses, he says, we can see in Huck Finn the way history – as Twain is widely quoted as having said, whether he did or not – may not quite repeat itself, but frequently rhymes….

As hard as we may try, we cannot substitute scholarship and sophistication for the perspective that time, and interaction with its passage, will place on Katniss – and The Sopranos, and The Simpsons, and Madonna – in 130 years. We will offer the best analysis we can for now about what one book or one show or one film means about The Way Things Are. And the irony, Levy would perhaps argue, is that the more time passes, the less The Way Things Are will seem different from The Way Things Always Were.

Robert Alter on the new Moses movie:

On what he thought of the film

Well, the first thing I would say about the film is that it’s fun to watch. That is, it’s not exactly Exodus; it’s panorama and pageantry, which is what film does — and why shouldn’t it do it? And I would say it’s a little bit like a Clint Eastwood Western. Moses is a military hero, he wields a sword instead of a rod, and it works.

On how close the film’s portrayal of Moses is to the Bible’s portrayal of him

It’s pretty far. [In the film,] he’s really the leader of an insurgency of Hebrew slaves. Before the 10 plagues, he trains them to be archers, to attack the Egyptians. He also has a certain distance from God that the biblical Moses doesn’t, which I thought was theologically interesting. When God is about to carry out the killing of the firstborn, Moses [in the film] says, “No, I’m not going there with you.”

First Air, Canada, has this in its grip:

First Air, a Canadian airliner, flies across some of the most remote and sparsely populated areas on the continent, with routes going as far north asResolute Bay, in the Arctic Circle. Its planes are often beyond the reach of conventional radar. They are also nearly disappearance-proof.

That’s because of a six-pound tracking system, about the size of a hotel safe, installed in the planes’ electronics bays. When flights proceed normally, the system never snaps into action. But if something goes wrong — a sudden loss of altitude; an unexpected bank; engine vibrations — the system begins transmitting data to the ground, via satellite, every second. That six-pound box spits out reams of performance data, as well as the basics necessary for a search-and-rescue: coordinates, speed, and altitude.

The technology hardly sounds cutting edge, given our access to cloud storage, satellite communication, and real-time data tools. But First Air is an outlier. Most commercial airlines, when in distress, have no comparable safeguard; as seen in the case of AirAsia Flight 8501, they can crash into the sea without relaying any information about their last minutes or seconds of flight.

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