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Weekly Meanderings 24 October 2015

Weekly Meanderings 24 October 2015

Last updated on: October 24, 2015 at 12:09 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings 24 October 2015 2015-10-22T17:07:43-05:00 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.

Phil Hersh on the Cubs last game:

A team strong enough to buck not only its own history but that of teams that get eliminated in Championship Series sweeps.

The Cubs are the eighth team to get swept in the NLCS or ALCS since 1985, when the format was expanded to best-of-seven, and none of the previous seven went back to the postseason the following year or won the World Series within the next decade.

But please don’t hang anyone else’s baggage on these Cubs. They just ran into the wrong pitching staff at the wrong time. There’s not a lot else to be read into what happened over these last five days….

Epstein has said his regime feels an obligation to reward Cub fans for their patience — in general for the 107 years without a championship, and in particular for suffering through losing seasons in 2012-14 as the organization accumulated young talent.

That’s a common conversation between Ricketts and fans, too.

“They trusted us,” Ricketts said. “We had some lean years, some teams that weren’t that competitive, but it was always with a purpose. Our fans hung with us up till now, [and] we were able to pay them back with a really special, magical season. Now we have to pay them back with a World Series.”

They’re on their way.

Good news: Chugach Covenant Church in Anchorage:

Ken Felber, a pizza delivery driver known around Anchorage for his award-winning mustache, takes his job very seriously.

“I have to feed the people of Anchorage, that’s what I do for a living,” Felber told CBS affiliate KTVA. He’s been feeding the Alaskan citizenry for the past 14 years, using his friendly demeanor to accumulate interesting stories from the job and tips to pay his bills.

Until this weekend, the largest tip Felber had ever received from a customer was $100. That changed when he delivered several pizzas to the Chugach Covenant Church Congregation, according to KTVA. Video footage of the delivery shows Felber on stage as a crowd of church-goers watch. After asking Felber to name the biggest tip he’d ever received, pastor Dan Krause poses another question to the confused-looking delivery driver: “How does a tip of $1,900 sound?” he says. “Oh, heck no!” Felber responds in disbelief. “Oh, heck yes!” Frause replies.

It was money Felber desperately needed, according to KTVA. He was recently forced to shell out hundreds of dollars on unexpected car repairs and was unable to fill prescriptions he needed.

Black churches not following the trend:

A recent Pew Research Center survey found that Christians are losing their share of the U.S. population, dropping to 71 percent in 2014, down from 78 percent in 2007, with young people leading the exodus. But historically black denominations have bucked that trend, holding on to a steady percent of members during that same period.

As significant, the share of millennial-generation African-Americans who affiliate with historically black churches is similar to that of older churchgoers.

There are numerous reasons why some black churches retain their members, but, most prominently, the church has played a historic role in black life that has fostered a continuing strong black Protestant identity. Members and visitors at Alfred Street say the church’s holistic ministry — the preaching, the singing and the community outreach — are what draw them in and keep them there.

“I think black churches have always been very pivotal in social movements and outreach,” said Kelli Slater, 20, a Howard University student from Mississippi who was visiting Alfred Street at the invitation of her older sister. “I think black churches do a whole lot more than religion.”

Ana Swanson, on hipster use of archaic language:

Hipsters are famous for their love of all things old-fashioned: 19th Century beards, pickle-making, Amish outerwear, naming their kids things like Clementine or Atticus. Now, they may be excavating archaic language, too.

As Chi Luu points out at JSTOR Daily — the blog of a database of academic journals, what could be more hipster than that? — old-timey words like bespoke, peruse, smitten and dapper appear to be creeping back into the lexicon.

This data comes from Google’s Ngram viewer, which charts the frequencies of words appearing in printed sources between 1800 and 2012.

While hipster (former) pastor Rob Bell eschews archaic talk, by Jonathan Merritt:

Rob Bell used to talk about “God” a lot. That’s how he made a living until 2012, as an evangelical megachurch pastor in the suburbs of Grand Rapids, Michigan. But since leaving his church and moving to California, Bell, the author of What We Talk About When We Talk About God, finds himself using the g-word far less. On his 31-city “Everything Is Spiritual” Tour this summer, Bell dialed down the God talk and quoted the Sufi mystic Rumi and the Catholic thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. He lectured on love, grace, energy, and “the soul of the universe.”

Bell says his shift in focus is driven mostly by a desire for clarity — communicating what he means rather than playing into people’s preconceptions. But that’s partly because “God” has become such a muddled and volatile word. “When a word becomes too toxic and too abused and too associated with ideas and understandings that aren’t true to the mystery behind the mystery,” Bell said, “it’s important to set it aside and search for new and better ways to talk about it.”

Is Tell Hammam the biblical Sodom?

Nitin Nohria on moral overconfidence:

Moral overconfidence is on display in politics, in business, in sports — really, in all aspects of life. There are political candidates who say they won’t use attack ads until, late in the race, they’re behind in the polls and under pressure from donors and advisers, their ads become increasingly negative. There are chief executives who come in promising to build a business for the long-term but then condone questionable accounting gimmickry to satisfy short-term market demands. There are baseball players who shun the use of steroids until they age past their peak performance and start to look for something to slow the decline. These people may be condemned as hypocrites. But they aren’t necessarily bad actors. Often, they’ve overestimated their inherent morality and underestimated the influence of situational factors.

Moral overconfidence is in line with what studies find to be our generallyinflated view of ourselves. We rate ourselves as above-average drivers, investors and employees, even though math dictates that can’t be true for all of us. We also tend to believe we are less likely than the typical person to exhibit negative qualities and to experience negative life events: to get divorced, become depressed or have a heart attack.

In some ways, this cognitive bias is useful. We’re generally better served by being over confident and optimistic than by lacking confidence or being too pessimistic. Positive illusions have been shown to promote happiness, caring, productivity and resilience. As psychologists Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown have written, “These illusions help make each individual’s world a warmer and more active and beneficent place in which to live.”

But overconfidence can lead us astray. We may ignore or explain away evidence that runs counter to our established view of ourselves, maintaining faith in our virtue even as our actions indicate otherwise. We may forge ahead without pausing to reflect on the ethics of our decisions. We may be unprepared for, and ultimately overwhelmed by, the pressures of the situation. Afterward, we may offer variations on the excuse: “I was just doing what the situation demanded.”

The gap between how we’d expect ourselves to behave and how we actually behave tends to be most evident in high-pressure situations, when there is some inherent ambiguity, when there are competing claims on our sense of right and wrong, and when our moral transgressions are incremental, taking us down a slippery slope.

Finally, the books found their way home:

The two books were returned to the Portland State University library earlier this month, bound with a rubber band.

“‘Borrowed’ these books about 1963 for my high school speech class,” read a note, which was left with the books. “They have moved with me many times. It is now time for them (to) go back home. Outdated — yes — but I’ll let you decide their fate now.”

Yeah — that means that the books — “Basic Principles of Speech” and “Preface to Critical Reading” — are about 52 years overdue. The note wasn’t signed, and a news release noted that officials don’t have records from that time period.

Whoever left them in the book drop shouldn’t worry, though. There’s no fine.

“They probably were feeling bad for a long time, and I feel sorry for them for that, but I think it’s great that they brought them back,” communications and outreach librarian Joan Petit told The Post. “I would love it if they stopped by and said hello, but it wouldn’t be so we could scold them.”

Good news about St Francis:

Immediately after the death of St. Francis of Assisi in 1226 his friends began to write down the stories of his life. Later in the 13th century – when it became opportune to gloss over the more radical ideas of the saint – many of these stories were suppressed. A newly found tiny codex holds some of these first texts, later eradicated from the tradition.

A tiny codex measuring no more than 12 x 8 cm, but holding 122 densely written pages, is currently creating a buzz amongst both clerics and historians. Without illuminations and seemingly rather insignificant the find was really only discovered by accident by a professor of history at Vermont, Sean Field. He spotted the codex as it was coming up for auction in Paris and alerted his friend, Jacques Dalarun, historian and director of research at CNRS. Cursorily studying the manuscript from photos presented by the auction house he was immediately stirred by the fact that this seemed to be a manuscript with an unknown text by Thomas de Celano, friend and chronicler of francis. This text was perhaps one of those suppressed and lost in the 13th century after the final official biography was published by Bonaventura in 1263. In 1266 Bonaventura’s version was declared the only official text and all others were ordered destroyed by the General Chapter in Paris. Hence a dearth of early manuscripts make the understanding of the man beneath the saintly myth a historiographically very complicated task to undertake….

As of now professor Dalarun believes that the chronology is as follows: “In 1229 Thomas of Celano writes the first life (1). Between 1232 an 1239 he writes the second – new found life summarizing and updating the first one (2). In the same period he writes the “Legenda ad usum chore”, which is a summary of number two (3). Finally there is the life of St. Francis written by Julian of Speir, which is a mixture of one and two (4),” he tells us (personal communication).

Joanne Weir, on using all five senses when cooking:

As a cooking instructor for more than 20 years, I’ve seen a problem creep up in every single class from Morocco to Massachusetts, Tuscany to Tucson, Santorini to San Francisco: Students forget their senses when they step into the kitchen. They approach recipes as if they were robots, following instructions to a T with little regard for taste, smell, sight, hearing, touch — or the sixth and most crucial sense, which I’ll save for later. “But the recipe said. . .” is the excuse I hear over and over again.

I’ve seen students pull quivering cakes from the oven simply because the 45-minute timer had trilled; watched steaks steam rather than sear on a too-cold grill; and halted countless mouth-puckering vinaigrettes from smothering innocent salad greens. Those and so many other culinary pitfalls could be avoided if we all relied more on our senses.

Yeonmi Park!

The Langham Hotel, a swanky five-star place in central London. A former X Factorcontestant walks by. A rich American tourist. A French fashion type. Then Yeonmi Park (22) picks her way through the vast marble lobby, dressed smartly, impeccably groomed, delicately beautiful, tiny.

We sit down and order tea. And it’s hard to know where to begin. She’s wonderfully polite, and very obliging, but asking her to recall the harrowing events of her life feels like an intrusion. Or, worse, it feels like it’s forcing her to re-enter a desperate, dark and tragic place she fought so hard to escape. But that is what the 22-year-old North Korean defector has chosen to do. She has left behind the terrors of North Korea and the dictatorship of the Kim dynasty, but rather than moving on with her life in privacy – or secrecy or shame – she has chosen to speak out about the plight of the 25 million people who still live there.

“My story can only speak for myself, but I’m not the only victim of this tyranny,” she says when I ask her why she has chosen to tell her story. “There are millions of people, so many people who have not achieved their dream: to be free. We should not forget those victims.”

Jobs with good work-life balance.

Weekly Meanderings

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October 23, 2015

Peacemaker or Pain-Avoider?

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October 24, 2015 The Erosion of Biblical Certainty (by Michael Lee)

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