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Weekly Meanderings, 2 May 2015

Weekly Meanderings, 2 May 2015

Last updated on: May 2, 2015 at 12:09 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 2 May 2015 2015-04-30T17:04:57-05:00 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.

Great story by Brian Hamilton about Austin Hatch:

Austin Hatch closed his regular playing career on Monday, going from a rising sophomore guard to a role as an undergraduate student assistant with theMichigan basketball program via a medical scholarship. Somehow this seems trifling, like a decision to switch shirts in the morning or to buy a different brand of snack chips. The ability to bounce a ball and consistently float it through an 18-inch rim didn’t define Hatch before he survived two plane crashes that took his parents, a stepmother and two siblings, or before the work to get back to putting one foot in front of another, let alone perfecting a defensive stance. Considering this moment to be important strikes me as almost reductive. Hatch’s life, even outside the tragedy in it, has been about something more than a sport. This hardly feels like the end of anything.

Instead it’s part of a remarkable story, which is why everyone noticed the announcement Hatch and Michigan made via email Monday morning. And this remarkable story surely won’t be diminished by seeing Hatch in a collared shirt and khakis on the Wolverines’ bench instead of maize and blue warm-ups. In an Indianapolis hotel ballroom on the day of the national title game earlier this month, Hatch received the U.S. Basketball Writer’s Association’s Most Courageous Award. A standing ovation followed him along the short walk from his seat to the podium for an acceptance speech, and it’s safe to assume nobody had Hatch’s capacity to drain a three-pointer in mind as applause filled the room.

“Basketball has always been a huge part of my life,” Hatch said as part of his official announcement Monday. “However, it is what I play, not who I am.”

Oge Okonkwo:

Reports say that latest figures show the number of women seeking solitude solitude and silence with God has increased six-fold in ten years in England and Wales.

“Religious life is an attractive choice for an increasing number of educated and dynamic young and older women,” a Catholic spokeswoman said.

Christian Today reports that Sister Cathy Jones, the church’s promoter of religious life vocations, said: “A key reason for this increase is the growth of a culture of vocation in the Church. Young Catholics are asking themselves ‘What is God’s plan for my life?’ and they are availing themselves of opportunities to meet with experienced guides to consider their future in the context of prayer, discussion and scripture.

“It is also significant that in recent years many religious congregations have grown in confidence in proposing their way of life, both through offering taster weekends and by participating in youth festivals, enabling potential ‘discerners’ to easily encounter religious and take the first steps to find out more about religious life.”

Gotta love New Hampshire, Niraj Chokshi:

Maybe there’s a reason J.D. Salinger lived out his final years there and Robert Frost chose it as the subject of his first Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection. If a love of the written word can be quantified, nowhere is it stronger than in independent-minded New Hampshire.

There is no other state that claims more librarians or library visits per capita, according to the latest Public Libraries Survey, conducted by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Perhaps the reason is rooted in history: New Hampshire claims to be home not only to the world’s first free, tax-supported public library (thePeterborough Town Library, founded in 1833) but also the nation’s oldest state library (founded in 1717). Or maybe its love of reading is rooted in law: “There is a statute that says that we cherish learning and that public libraries are a part of that,” says State Librarian Michael York.

Whatever the cause, that affinity for the written word is reflected in the state’s youth, too: New Hampshire ranks second in its share of fourth-graders reading at or above proficiency and fourth among eighth-graders,according to the Annie E. Casey Foundation.

Gotta love green travel with Chris Mooney:

If you want to live a green and energy conscious lifestyle, then the travel or transportation choices you make are crucial. That’s because travel uses agreat deal more energy than, say, spending time at home, or cleaning, or eating.

So what should you do when Thanksgiving is coming, and you’ve got to decide whether to pack up the car or just spring for that really pricey ticket to Detroit from Washington, D.C.?

A new analysis, just out from Michael Sivak of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute, offers a surprising answer. Namely, Sivak finds that driving today is actually considerably more “energy intensive” than flying, where energy intensity is defined as “the amount of energy needed to transport one person a given distance.”

One principal reason? While airlines and cars have both gotten more energy efficient over time, one key factor in determining the energy intensity of a particular form of travel is how many people are being transported per trip. And on this score, jam-packed modern passenger planes have cars totally beat.

Gotta love Adidas by David Kirby:

Can sportswear help save marine life? Leaders of the German athletic wear giant Adidas believe it can, but some scientists are skeptical.

On Monday, Adidas announced it would start collecting plastic marine debris and recycling the garbage back into products consumers can wear. However modestly, Adidas customers could soon help to address the ocean’s growing pollution problem.

The company partnered with New York–based Parley for the Oceans, an initiative that calls itself a place “where creators, thinkers, and leaders come together to raise awareness for the beauty and fragility of our oceans.”

Starting in 2016, Adidas and Parley will be using new fibers from recycled ocean plastic in clothing products and possibly parts of shoes. It’s a familiar role for Parley, which teamed with musician and entrepreneur Pharrell Williams last year to develop a line of denim clothing created out of fibers from plastic sea garbage.

So how much garbage will the project remove?

“We do have extremely ambitious objectives,” wrote Parley founder Cyrill Gutsch in an email. “But realistically we will retrieve around 10,000 tons of plastic this year from shorelines and by retrieving discarded fishing nets, which we do in collaboration with Sea ShepherdConservation Society.”

Gotta love STEM cards:

There’s plenty of interest in creative ways to draw kids to math, science and engineering. On Tuesday, the organizers of X-STEM took a unique approach. At the event in Washington, D.C., students were handed trading cards of the scientists and engineers who spoke. The cards are modeled after baseball cards, with facts about home towns, hobbies and accomplishments.

“We’re trying to serve these folks up to these students that would normally never even know these people existed,” said Marc Schulman, executive director of the USA Science and Engineering Festival, which organized the event. “I just thought, wouldn’t it be cool if we made trading cards with all these speakers on them and the kids could take them home just like they do their favorite baseball card. It’s those types of things that you kind of have to get creative with this generation.”

The event drew 4,300 students, and 34 speakers such as inventor Dean Kamen. There were workshops and demos to promote an interest in the STEM fields.

Early report on Starbuck’s-ASU program, Amanda Ripley: [HT: LNMM]

Last summer, in an unusual attempt to reverse this trend in his own corner of the service economy, Howard Schultz, the CEO of Starbucks, announced that his company would team up with Arizona State University, one of the nation’s largest public universities, to help Starbucks employees finish college. As long as they worked 20 hours or more per week, any of the company’s 135,000 employees in the United States would be eligible for the program. Those who’d already racked up at least two years’ worth of credits would be fully reimbursed for the rest of their education. Those with fewer or no credits would receive a 22 percent tuition discount from Arizona State until they reached the full-reimbursement level. Without saying so, Schultz was acknowledging an awkward truth about working at Starbucks: no one wants to be a barista forever.

Kirsten Powers on Saint Hillary:

Here’s another idea: Let’s free secularists from their unthinking obeisance to a plot line that casts religious believers as intolerant dimwits in need of saving by not-so-benevolent ideological bullies. Let’s stop treating the ignorant stereotyping and smearing of religious believers as a noble, self-sanctifying cause.

My views on homosexuality are more in line with Bruni’s. But I also have relationships with incredible religious leaders and believers who love gay people but who also believe the Bible teaches that homosexuality is a sin. They shouldn’t be maligned as unthinking zealots. Apparently unlike Clinton, I know brilliant men and women who oppose abortion based on deeply held religious beliefs that deserve respect, not targeting for re-education.

The intolerance, condescension and ignorance expressed about religious people is troubling enough in itself. But what sends chills up the spine is the barely veiled advocacy for authoritarianism when religious beliefs clash with secular sacred cows. After all, what entity will make religious leaders “take homosexuality off the sin list”? How exactly will Clinton change religious beliefs at odds with her worldview?

Inquiring minds would like to know.

Robin Black, on a bias toward young writers:

PHILADELPHIA — MY Facebook feed clogged this week with news that Meryl Streep was funding a screenwriting “lab” for women 40 and older. I am not a screenwriter, but as the author of two books of fiction, published when I was 48 and 52, I couldn’t help but cheer.

I have an interest in the nurturing of “late blooming” writers. I have long grumbled about the conflation of the words “young” and “emerging,” and particularly about the many prizes set aside for writers in their early careers below whatever cutoff has been picked, usually 35 or 40.

Those honors — the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 and many others — carry not only financial rewards but also career-long prestige. I applaud the goal of supporting writers as they are starting out, but there is a problem when the awards benefit only young writers, usually on their first or second book, as opposed to writers of any age who are at that stage.

Perhaps I’ll be accused of sour grapes, but thankfully I have reached a point at which I care less about what people think. Partly, that is one of the true joys of middle age, and partly the Internet has taught us, if nothing else beyond the infinite appeal of cats, that someone will always think you’re being a jerk, so you may as well say what’s on your mind.

Here’s what’s on my mind: Age-based awards are outdated and discriminatory, even if unintentionally so. Emerging writers are emerging writers.

Check writing — forgetting how to perform a basic, by Christopher Ingraham:

Writing a check has always been a fundamentally strange act. There’s the fussy ceremony of writing out the amount in words and drawing the squiggly line across the remainder of the space, ostensibly to protect against a type of fraud — tampering with individual digits — that’s quaint by today’s standards. There’s the questionable business of handing a complete stranger a document with your bank account and routing number printed plainly across it.

And of course, the memo line — an open invitation to humiliate your friends and leave passive-aggressive notes to your creditors.

Today, Americans are writing fewer checks than ever. According to the Federal Reserve’s most recent study of how Americans pay for things, “the number of checks paid declined more than 50 percent since 2000.” Meanwhile, electronic and card payments tripled over the same period.

As check use declines, we tend to forget the details of that strange ceremony of writing them. And naturally, we turn to Google to jog our memories.

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