Weekly Meanderings, 22 April 2017

Last updated on: April 22, 2017 at 12:02 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 22 April 2017 2017-04-21T11:00:25-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Go Cubs, Go!

Chicago Cubs fans continue to prove they can’t get enough championship gear — even the most expensive type.

Jostens started selling World Series champion jewelry, including rings, on April 12, and in the first full week of sales, it sold two times more title jewelry than it had for any other championship team, said Chris Poitras, who heads Jostens’ college and sports division.

“The Cubs’ championship story was a story that was like nothing else we’ve ever seen,” Poitras said. “And the fans have reacted in a truly special way.”

Most of the sales have come from rings, which start at $299 for silver metal and cubic zirconia stones and climb to $10,800 for a white gold ring with 144 diamonds, 55 sapphires and 13 rubies.

Poitras said the most common purchase is the $499 deluxe ring, which comes in 10-karat white gold or sterling silver.

Molly Worthen unfortunately chose to put the blame for our post-truth era on evangelicals while ignoring a long history that has undermined the pursuit of truth. Sad departure from her very fine study called Apostles of Reason. Darryl Hart says it well:

The question Worthen’s column raises is whether readers of the New York Times, now that they find themselves on the wrong side of history (as if history has a right side), want to blame someone for undermining reason. Is the “Christian thinking” of evangelicals really a plausible option? Did they have more influence on the political and scientific mainstream than the universities that hired Rorty and assigned Foucault? Were Donald Trump and Kelly Conway really reading Francis Schaeffer?

Evangelicalism will, of course, need to answer for many woes, both religious and political. But blaming them for our post-truth moment without noting all those forerunners to the denial of “objective truth” looks a tad self-serving for POTUS 45-deniers.

I wonder if the Commish should consider making Major League Baseball teams forfeit every game played if anyone is discovered with steroids. This would push the discipline to the team and to the players. As it is now it is a game of getting caught by the MLB office and the office turns into the goat. The goat is the cheater and who benefits the most? The team. In the NCAA an ineligible player entails forfeiting the game. Good idea, Commish.

Ana Swanson, an interview, and economic inequalities:

In “The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century,” Scheidel examines societies from ancient history to the present. He finds that most societies gradually grew more unequal over time, and where those inequalities were leveled out, they were almost always done so by violent forces — war, revolution or plague. The work contains some shocking lessons about the nature of inequality and what that might mean for our future.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How does inequality today compare with history? When have we seen inequality peak, and when has it fallen?

If you look over hundreds or thousands of years, you see a pattern of rising and falling inequality. But for most of history, inequality was either rising or stable at high levels. It’s rare for inequality to fall significantly. In that respect, the world we live in is a typical environment, in which inequality is rising or has reached very high levels in many countries.

We saw an unusually large drop in inequality during World War I and World War II. Has that shaped people’s perceptions of what inequality should look like?

It has. The postwar period, the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, has become the reference point. In that period, economic growth was strong, the middle class was expanding, and inequality was low by current standards. But since the 1980s, growth has slowed, and what growth we have disproportionately benefits the famous 1 percent, at the very top at the income distribution.

That marks a real change from the postwar period, and that is understandably perceived as undesirable. But if you look at history more broadly, it’s the postwar period that was anomalous.

When Trump said, “Make America great again,” that implies there was once a period where things were better, and in people’s consciousness it is the postwar period, where you had strong economic growth, a strong middle class and low inequality. But that’s an unusual combination, and it’s difficult to see how we would get back on that track.

The Pope on evolution:

The theories of evolution and the Big Bang are real and God is not “a magician with a magic wand”, Pope Francis has declared.

Speaking at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, the Pope made comments which experts said put an end to the “pseudo theories” of creationism and intelligent design that some argue were encouraged by his predecessor, Benedict XVI.

Francis explained that both scientific theories were not incompatible with the existence of a creator – arguing instead that they “require it”.

“When we read about Creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so,” Francis said.

“The Big Bang, which today we hold to be the origin of the world, does not contradict the intervention of the divine creator but, rather, requires it.

“Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve.”

The Catholic Church has long had a reputation for being anti-science – most famously when Galileo faced the inquisition and was forced to retract his “heretic” theory that the Earth revolved around the Sun.

But Pope Francis’s comments were more in keeping with the progressive work of Pope Pius XII, who opened the door to the idea of evolution and actively welcomed the Big Bang theory. In 1996, John Paul II went further and suggested evolution was “more than a hypothesis” and “effectively proven fact”.

Yet more recently, Benedict XVI and his close advisors have apparently endorsed the idea that intelligent design underpins evolution – the idea that natural selection on its own is insufficient to explain the complexity of the world. In 2005, his close associate Cardinal Schoenborn wrote an article saying “evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense – an unguided, unplanned process – is not”.

Wonder what the Pope thinks of this group of self-ordained nuns?

The Sisters of the Valley, California’s self-ordained “weed nuns,” are on a mission to heal and empower women with their cannabis products.

Based near the town of Merced in the Central Valley, which produces over half of the fruit, vegetables and nuts grown in the United States, the Sisters of the Valley grow and harvest their own cannabis plants.

The sisterhood stresses that its seven members, despite the moniker, do not belong to any order of the Catholic Church.

“We’re against religion, so we’re not a religion. We consider ourselves Beguine revivalists, and we reach back to pre-Christian practices,” said 58-year-old Sister Kate, who founded the sisterhood in 2014.

The group says its Holy Trinity is the marijuana plant, specifically hemp, a strain of marijuana that has very low levels of Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive compound in the plant.

Members turn the hemp into cannabis-based balms and ointments, which they say have the power to improve health and wellbeing.

More than two dozen U.S. states have legalized some form of marijuana for medical or recreational use, but the drug remains illegal at the federal level. California legalized recreational use of marijuana in November 2016.

University student shout downs find someone who loves confrontation more than they do: Ann Coulter.

Ann Coulter said no to a proposal by the University of California, Berkeley, that would reschedule her planned speech on campus — to a date when no formal classes are in session.

“You cannot impose arbitrary and harassing restrictions on the exercise of a constitutional right,” Coulter told “Hannity” on Thursday night. “None of this has to do with security.”

The conservative commentator initially agreed to speak at Berkeley on April 27 after college Republicans invited her, but the school canceled on Wednesday citing threats of rioting and other violence. Still, Coulter said she would show up anyway.

“What are they going to do? Arrest me?” she asked Tucker Carlson that evening.

By Thursday, the university announced it could round up the proper security to let her speak on May 2. The school’s academic calendar shows that it falls in a “Reading/Review/Recitation Week” after the end of formal classes but before final exams.

“I’m speaking at Berkeley on April 27th, as I was invited to do and have a contract to do,” Coulter tweeted. She also claimed she was unavailable May 2.

It was the latest skirmish in a free-speech fight involving conservative voices on college campuses across the country, including at Berkeley. In February, masked rioters at the school smashed windows, set fires, and shut down an appearance by former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos. Last week, the Berkeley College Republicans said threats of violence forced them to cancel a speech by writer David Horowitz. Writer Charles Murray‘s appearance at Middlebury saw riots last month, and Heather Mac Donald‘s speech at Claremont McKenna College was streamed online earlier this month after protesters blocked the door to the venue.

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