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Weekly Meanderings, 31 January 2015

Weekly Meanderings, 31 January 2015

Last updated on: March 13, 2015 at 9:58 pm by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 31 January 2015 2015-03-13T21:58:19-05:00 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.

Education is more than for the brain, by Aleta Margolis

As an educator for the past 25 years, I’m delighted that our national conversations about teaching and learning are beginning to recognize that excellent instruction engages students intellectually, emotionally, and physically. We’ve come a long way in our understanding of the development of young minds. Yet despite research proving the lasting benefits of serious play, too many of our classrooms remain still, silent places, lacking any element of physical movement.

It’s critical to maintain time for recess and free play that builds students’ balance systems (as powerfully described by Angela Hanscom), but we also need to emphasize the important role that physical movement can and should play within the classroom. Movement is a powerful teaching tool, and when we as teachers thoughtfully incorporate physical elements into instruction, we elevate the learning experience. As part of my work at Center for Inspired Teaching over the past 20 years, I train teachers to provide this type of active, student-centered instruction because it’s how students learn best.

Richard Beck Speaks and I listen:

I’ve spoken at a quite a few churches over the last few years and have had even more conversations with ministers and pastors at churches. Most of these conversations have been about hospitality, about how we can create more welcoming and hospitable faith communities.

And over the years I’ve come to discern what I think is one of the biggest problems facing our churches when it comes to spiritual formation generally and hospitality specifically.

What is that problem?

Scarcity.

Here’s how Brene Brown describes scarcity in her book Daring Greatly, a quote I’ve shared before:

We get scarcity because we live it…Scarcity is the “never enough” problem…Scarcity thrives in a culture where everyone is hyperaware of lack. Everything from safety and love to money and resources feels restricted or lacking. We spend inordinate amounts of time calculating how much we have, want, and don’t have, and how much everyone else has, needs, and wants.

A wonderful article about Jaroslav Pelikan by Timothy George.

Another piece about Mr Cub, Mr Ernie Banks!

A species of a larger genus (have I got my terms right there?), but Jonathan Merritt is asking a dead question because he knows the answer:

When Jesus declared that mourners shall be comforted, he surely did not mean to exclude the families of deceased LGBT people, right?

Pastor Ray Chavez of New Hope Ministries church in Lakewood, Colorado, seems to think otherwise. Just minutes before the funeral of Vanessa Collier, Chavez discovered that the commemorative video included photos of the deceased woman expressing affection with her female wife, with whom she was raising two children. The pastor informed the family that the pictures could not be shown or the memorial couldn’t continue at his church. Humiliated, the Collier family picked up the dead woman’s casket and hauled it across the street to a funeral home.

It’s impossible to say how many Christian churches have treated the families of LGBT people similarly, but we know Chavez’s isn’t the first. In 2014, a Tampa congregation canceled Julian Evans’ funeral the day before the service. Pastor T.W. Jenkins made the decision after reading Evans’ obituary and learning he was gay.

Such debacles beg an important question: Should Christian churches extend not only dignity and compassion to deceased people who didn’t believe or live according to devout Christians’ standards?

The 20 deadliest jobs in America.

50 bucks, sir.

So you’re a big shot in Washington, flying about the globe, trying to deal with the explosive Middle East, attending Saudi King Abdullah’s funeral with President Obama?

Yeah, well, not worth a hill of beans in Boston, it seems.

You still have to shovel the snow at your Beacon Hill mansion when a blizzard hits town, as it did this week. If you don’t, secretary of state or not, you’re going to get smacked with a $50 fine, The Boston Globe reports. The ticket was issued at 9:45 a.m. Thursday. Also yellow tape was put up to warn folks of falling snow and ice from the top of the building.

Great idea!

America is a nation of pavement. According to research conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, most cities’ surfaces are 35 to 50 percent composed of the stuff. And 40 percent of that pavement is parking lots. That has a large effect: Asphalt and concrete absorb the sun’s energy, retaining heat — and contributing to the “urban heat island effect,” in which cities are hotter than the surrounding areas.

So what if there were a way to cut down on that heat, cool down the cars that park in these lots, power up those parked cars that are electric vehicles (like Teslas), and generate a lot of energy to boot? It sounds great, and there is actually a technology that does all of this — solar carports.

It’s just what it sounds like — covering up a parking lot with solar panels, which are elevated above the ground so that cars park in the shade beneath a canopy of photovoltaics. Depending of course on the size of the array, you can generate a lot of power. For instance, one vast solar carport installation at Rutgers University is 28 acres in size and produces 8 megawatts of power, or about enough energy to power 1,000 homes.

Just in case you needed to know this:

Slowly but surely, toilet paper rolls have been shrinking.

Toilet paper squares, the individual sheets that connect to make each roll, were once 4.5 inches wide and 4.5 inches long. That standard, however, has shifted, or at the very least loosened its grip on the industry, to a point where companies are selling sheets that are a half-inch shorter or thinner, or both.

A reader wrote in to a columnist at the Los Angeles Times saying he has noticed a roughly 26 percent reduction in the surface area of his toilet paper.

“The old standard for a single sheet of tissue was 4 and 1/2 by 4 and 1/2 inches, a nice square,” the reader wrote. “Some tissue companies have changed the length of the sheet to 4 inches, with a width of 4 1/2 inches, no longer a square.”

Speaking of education, watch colleges spread across the USA.

Weird:

One of the core premises of Invisible Boyfriend, the wildly viral new service that invents a boyfriend to deceive your pestering family and friends, is that the user will not, under any circumstance, fall in love with her fictional beau.

But I’ve been using the service for 24 hours, and I gotta wonder: How can you not fall in love with him? After all, the service — which launched publicly last Monday — takes the concept of virtual intimacy further than basically any of the lolzy fake-date apps before it.

When you sign up for the service, you can design a boyfriend (or girlfriend) to your specifications — kind of like picking the genes for a designer baby, except for an imaginary adult. You pick his name, his age, his interests and personality traits. You tell the app if you prefer blonds or brunettes, tall guys or short, guys who like theater or guys who watch sports. Then you swipe your credit card — $25 per month, cha-ching! — and the imaginary man of your dreams starts texting you.

Good for Father Najeeb Michaeel.

What happens to your [you name it] when TSA’s security checks grabs it?

The forbidden materials fall into several categories, and the label it earns determines the next step in the process. Beverages, for example, are tossed into a garbage receptacle. The officers hand over all guns and illegal substances to the local police. They might also alert the cops if the item — and its owner — flout a state or local law, such as possessing brass knuckles or billy clubs in New York City. The remaining objects, meanwhile, await their fate, which rolls up on wheels….

TSA wants to clear up a few misunderstandings.

First, the agency does not “confiscate” banned goods; the passenger “surrenders” them. Second, giving up the goods isn’t the only option. For instance, you can return to the airline’s ticketing counter and check them, run them back to your car, or hand them off to a friend who is not traveling. Some airports also have a mail service so that you can be reunited with your belongings at home. When the passenger doesn’t have the time or willpower to do any of the above, however, the only choice is to relinquish the itema non grata.

Another monster misconception: Many people assume that the officers keep the items. Not true.

24 coffee shops to visit.

Great idea: Block It Out app:

Anderson calls the drive “nerve-wracking,” and said it inspires even more worry for her parents, who sometimes ping her with texts before she reaches her destination. But the safety-conscious teen, who has been drilled on the dangers of texting while driving, doesn’t want to answer when she’s behind the wheel.

“We want our parents to know we’re safe, but we want to keep our eyes on the road,” she said.

That dilemma became the inspiration for an app prototype she and five other Governor’s School students developed called “Block it Out.” The app would automatically respond to texts and voice calls with pre-set messages like “I’m driving.” It would also block out social media apps, like Twitter and Facebook, and even silences the phone, eliminating the temptation to even glance at the screen.

Workspaces of famous people.

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