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Weekly Meanderings, 5 September 2015

Weekly Meanderings, 5 September 2015

Last updated on: September 5, 2015 at 12:05 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 5 September 2015 2015-09-04T14:55:26-05:00 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.

Meet the musical Kellys! By Dahleen Glanton:

The family’s morning routine begins at 5 a.m. in a vacant lot across the street. Dressed in T-shirts and shorts, the children line up for a CrossFit exercise session, using kettle bells, old tires and ropes. Their father sits on a wooden box nearby, making sure that everyone takes a turn.

They are back by 6 a.m. for music practice. The family gathers downstairs for a spiritual devotional at 7 a.m., followed by breakfast at 8 a.m. In a typical week, they consume 10 loaves of bread, six dozen eggs and 10 gallons of milk.

Then it’s time for chores: taking out the trash, doing the dishes and tidying their rooms.

During the school year, classes start at 9 a.m. The children attend Chicago Virtual Charter School, so the classroom is downstairs in the dining room. They share seven laptops and one desktop computer.

The younger kids are in bed by 8 p.m.; the high school kids by 10.

In the summer, the entire day is devoted to music. The eight youngest participate in a weekday camp at the Chicago West Community Music Center, a program that teaches string instruments, song and dance. After School Matters provides financial assistance.

When school is in session, all the children participate in the center’s more intensive Saturday program. The high school kids also attend an after-school program weekdays at the center.

It requires a strong commitment from the parents, but persistence has its benefits.

“We don’t hear that screeching noise at 6 a.m. anymore,” La Shone Kelly said, referring to the time the kids were just beginning to play. “That was a lot to endure.”

Wonderful story.

Carl Trueman on the Kentucky clerk:

If the ‘I am a Christian’ strategy is to carry any force at all, churches need to start taking marriage seriously. They need to start taking pastoral and, if necessary, disciplinary action against adulterers, against spousal abusers, against trivial divorces. Only then will the statement ‘I am a member of a church so have a high view of marriage’ start to appear plausible to the outside world. And in a week where an evangelical superstar is back in a role of ecclesiastical influence within weeks of being defrocked for adultery and filing for divorce, and others have fallen after playing with fire on the Ashley Madison site, it is clear that churches find it a lot easier to talk about the importance of marriage and fidelity than to uphold them in practice.

We already have nothing to say to secular people on this issue because they are not listening anyway. If we continue in practice to treat marriage abuses and breakdowns as of little more moral significance than a parking violation or a spot of jay-walking, we will continue to have nothing to show them either. The world is no fool. It knows cant when it hears it. [HT: JS]

More three-day weekends? Yes, says Melissa Dahl:

A glorious three-day weekend has arrived for (most) “knowledge workers,” that euphemistic term for those of us who spend our days hunched over a keyboard, eyes locked for hours at a time on the screen ahead. But here’s the thing: The bulk of the research in medicine, sleep, cognitive science, and organizational psychology overwhelmingly suggests that a shorter workweek should be the norm rather than the holiday-weekend exception.

Many companies in the U.S. have already picked up on this, according to a recent report from the nonprofit Families and Work Institute, which found that 43 percent of the 1,051 employers surveyed offered compressed workweeks to at least some employees. During your three days of freedom this weekend, Science of Us suggests that you spend part of that time pondering the arguments for why more of us should be working fewer hours.

John Rawls’ theory of justice and political liberalism exposed for what it is by Matthew J. Franck:

Rawls’s bad faith is demonstrated by the exceptions he makes. Although John Finnis, for instance, has offered natural law arguments against homosexual conduct that are perfectly accessible to reason and grounded on no theological presuppositions, these arguments provide Rawls with his one and only example of a secular “comprehensive doctrine” that must be classed with religion as beyond the pale. Because arguments of this kind are expressions of “moral doctrine,” they “fall outside of the domain of the political”—the domain, that is, of public reason. This distinction between the domain of the moral and the domain of the political seems utterly arbitrary, especially since the entire project of Rawlsian public reason is, on its own terms, an attempt to construct a moral framework for political life.

The other notable exception made by Rawls is for the Christian motivations of the abolitionist and civil rights movements. Religious discourse such as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s is permissible, Rawls says, “when a society is not well ordered and there is a profound division about constitutional essentials,” such that “nonpublic reasons” are thought to be “required to give sufficient strength” politically to “the ideal of public reason.” This exception appears to have been introduced to rescue Rawls from the embarrassment of condemning Reverend King. For what did King and his adversaries represent but a deep conflict over deep principles, resolvable only by choosing between two competing comprehensive doctrines?

Rawls disapproves of arguments against homosexual conduct, and approves of arguments in favor of equal civil rights regardless of race. He cannot, it seems, resist the urge to permit one of those arguments despite its being religious, and to exclude the other despite its being non-religious. This is not philosophy, but political base-stealing.

These kinds of calculations are why professors of theology don’t teach economics and shouldn’t run colleges and universities.

Speaking of justice, how about revenge? Tim Suttle:

America is a revenge culture: Revenge the television series, revenge porn, revenge games in sports… vengeance is a mainstay of foreign policy and a thematic obsession for film, television, and female pop-musicians.

Oscar winning director Quentin Tarantino has made a career of capitalizing on our lust for revenge. Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Reservoir Dogs, Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained, these are all formulaic revenge films.

Step 1: show an innocent (or beautiful) person being horribly wronged.

Step 2: build the audience’s self-righteous anger to a fever pitch.

Step 3: give the victim some kind of weapon (exotic is better).

Step 4: let the victim kill any and every person who has wronged them.

Step 5: list to the audience applaud… paycheck.

It’s an effective formula for pop film success. But it’s a tired script, and not a very redemptive story to tell.

Where does the desire to take revenge come from? It stems from an innate desire for justice. When someone has been wronged we want to see the scales tipped back in their favor. An appropriate disincentive given to the offending party seems fine, but the offended party usually takes things too far, and the disincentive turns into full-on revenge.

Splendid short article on Queen Elizabeth and monarchy:

Ice cream that doesn’t melt so easily, by Brandon Griggs:

(CNN)Portable and refreshing, an ice cream cone is a perfect hot-weather treat. Until it starts dripping all over your hand.

Now scientists in Scotland say they’ve licked the problem.

Researchers at the Universities of Edinburgh and Dundee have discovered a naturally occurring protein that can be used to create ice cream that is more resistant to melting. The protein binds the air, fat and water in ice cream, creating a smooth consistency that stays frozen longer.

And, scientists say, it won’t affect the taste.

The protein, known as BslA, occurs naturally in some foods and works by adhering to fat droplets and air bubbles, making them more stable in a mixture. Researchers at the two universities say they’ve developed a method of producing BsIA in so-called “friendly” bacteria, which have positive health benefits.

Problems on the Appalachian Trail:

BAXTER STATE PARK, Maine (AP) — When Jackson Spencer set out to tackle the Appalachian Trail, he anticipated the solitude that only wilderness can bring — not a rolling, monthslong frat party.

Shelters where he thought he could catch a good night’s sleep while listening to the sounds of nature were instead filled with trash, graffiti and people who seemed more interested in partying all night, said Spencer, who finished the entire trail last month in just 99 days.

“I wanted the solitude. I wanted to experience nature,” he said. “I like to drink and to have a good time, but I didn’t want that to follow me there.”

Spencer, or “Mission” as he is known to fellow thru-hikers, confronted what officials say is an ugly side effect of the increasing traffic on the Georgia-to-Maine footpath every year: More people than ever causing problems.

At Maine’s Baxter State Park, home to the trail’s final summit on Mount Katahdin, officials say thru-hikers are flouting park rules by openly using drugs and drinking alcohol, camping where they aren’t supposed to, and trying to pass their pets off as service dogs. Hundreds of miles away, misbehaving hikers contributed to a small Pennsylvania community’s recent decision to shutter the sleeping quarters it had offered for decades in the basement of its municipal building.

With last year’s release of the movie “Wild,” about a woman’s journey on the Pacific Crest Trail, and what experts call a growing interest in outdoor activities, the number of people on the Appalachian Trail has exploded. And the numbers are only expected to climb further after “A Walk in the Woods” — a movie based on the 1998 Bill Bryson book about the Appalachian Trail— hits theaters this week.

More than 830 people completed the 2,189-mile hike last year, up from just 182 in 1990, according to the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, based in Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. At Baxter, the number of registered long-distance hikers grew from 359 in 1991 to more than 2,000 in 2014.

Jonathan Merritt on why Trump is attractive to evangelicals:

As USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers notes, Donald Trump is no dummy. She argues that he is scamming Christians in an effort to win over the critical Republican voting bloc. This seems plausible. But if Trump’s political views and religious commitments are so far from most evangelicals’, why are these Christians going along with it?The answer seems to be the growing anti-establishment sentiments held by many evangelical Christians. (After all, the Tea Party movement draws “disproportionate support” from their ranks.) Not only are conservative Christians solidly Republican, they are also fierce traditionalists who feel that their values are increasingly under assault by modern society.

They like a candidate who will stand up to “the media”—whether Jorge Ramos or Megyn Kelly—because they feel reporters don’t give them a fair shake either. They are drawn to a candidate who hails from outside the Beltway—even if his hometown is the elitist island of Manhattan—because they think the Washington establishment has abandoned them. And they appreciate someone who makes no apology for using politically incorrect rhetoric—even if this includes a bit of profanity or misogyny—because they believe society is increasingly intolerant of many of their sentiments, too.

Pasta be gone!

Behind closed doors, dinner tables are getting less doughy. Grains, still ubiquitous in diets around the globe, are losing favor as a result of a growing fear that they might be adding inches to our guts, or discomfort to our stomachs. And there is, perhaps, no better example of this phenomenon than what’s happened to one of the world’s favorite foods: pasta.

Simply, people are eating less of it. The data show that the cheap and easy meal hasn’t disappeared from diets, but diners aren’t consuming it with the gusto they once did.

The trend can be seen in the North America, where sales of dried pasta have fallen by 6 percent since 2009, according to data from market research firm Euromonitor. A report published in April by Mintel projects that the U.S. decline will continue through at least 2019 for the pasta category.

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