Weekly Meanderings, 1 September 2018

Last updated on: September 1, 2018 at 12:06 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 1 September 2018 2018-08-31T20:46:27-05:00 Scot McKnight

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Wonderful wonderful wonderful week with our third MA in New Testament Context cohort. We had a blast. So much so that the troll wondered what the noise was all about!

My cohort named the troll “Gertie of Colosse” and so Gertie is the troll’s name.

It is weeks like this and last, when Meanderings is the last thing on my mind, that Kris and JS deserve even more of my thanks! So thanks to both.

Esports:

JAKARTA (Reuters) – Skinny, pale and sitting in front of a computer, Lee Sang-hyeok doesn’t look much like a traditional Olympic athlete.

But that is exactly what he and his fellow professional esports gamers could be if demonstrations held at the Asian Games in Jakarta this week prove successful.

Esports will appear at a major multi-sport event for the first time on Sunday, raising the possibility of gamers earning the same Olympic gold medals as those won by American swimmer Michael Phelps or Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt.

Six titles, starting with Arena of Valor and including League of Legends (LOL) and Pro Evolution Soccer (PES), will feature, in what could be the first step towards inclusion in the Olympic Games.

In November last year, the International Olympic Committee recognised esports as a sporting activity and it will be a full medal event at the 2022 Asian Games.

For gamers like Lee, who goes by the online moniker “Faker” this is a chance to show the world they belong among the world’s top athletes.

“Sports doesn’t mean you must sweat,” said Lee, who is the highest earning player in LOL history with a career income over $1,740,000 according to tracker esportsearnings.com.

“Gaming uses a lot of mental skill rather than physical.

“It takes a lot of mental strength and requires a lot of efforts and tough training, so I think esports could be even tougher than any other sports.”

“I think it is unfair to say that a sport depends on whether one sweats.”

[SMcK: I know these folks are competitive and they train but competition is not the same as a sport. Saying that for a friend.]

Retronyms:

A retronym is a term consisting of a noun and a modifier which specifies the original meaning of the noun. For example, organic food is a retronym: a long time ago, all food was what we now consider “organic.” Retronyms can be objects (pedal bike), experiences (snow skiing), or even places (meatspace). Most of us use retronyms all the time without thinking about it.

The oldest print usage that we know of for the word retronym itself is from William Safire’s column “On Language” in a 1980 issue of The New York Times. There, he discusses how then-president of National Public Radio, Frank Mankiewicz, collects what he calls “retronyms.”

[Like manual typewriter, British English, or whole milk.]

Skimming is not reading.

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing – a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one’s herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain. My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading.

This is not a simple, binary issue of print vs digital reading and technological innovation. As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle has written, we do not err as a society when we innovate, but when we ignore what we disrupt or diminish while innovating. In this hinge moment between print and digital cultures, society needs to confront what is diminishing in the expert reading circuit, what our children and older students are not developing, and what we can do about it.

We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs an environment to develop. Further, it will adapt to that environment’s requirements – from different writing systems to the characteristics of whatever medium is used. If the dominant medium advantages processes that are fast, multi-task oriented and well-suited for large volumes of information, like the current digital medium, so will the reading circuit. As UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield writes, the result is that less attention and time will be allocated to slower, time-demanding deep reading processes, like inference, critical analysis and empathy, all of which are indispensable to learning at any age.

Forgetting is not good history: this was the way things were with Billy Graham:

This continued, of course, in the Cold War. Billy Graham’s career coincided with the first frightening years of anxiety over Soviet aggression, and his fire-breathing sermons implicated all sorts of global movements and events. It was a cultural and political moment that encouraged an embattled, apocalyptic posture.

At a 1947 “Christ for This Crisis” crusade in Charlotte, North Carolina, Graham preached the following sermons: “The End of the World” and “Will God Spare America?” He declared that communism was “Satan’s religion,” a “great anti-Christian movement.” In 1952 Graham mailed the book Communism and Christ to every member of Congress and the presidential cabinet. Communism, it delineated, had its very own trinity: “Marx the Lawgiver, Lenin the Incarnate Truth, Stalin the Guide and Comforter.” At a 1954 crusade in London, Graham distributed calendars that read, “What Hitler’s bombs could not do, socialism with its accompanying evils shortly accomplished.” He later said it was a misprint—that it should have read “secularism—but the text did reflect accurately the evangelist’s dualistic sensibilities.

Graham, according to biographer Steven Miller, was “the quintessential Cold War revivalist. From the very beginning of postwar tensions with the Soviet Union, he linked his evangelism to the destiny of the United States and its leaders.” He was a product of his times. Fundamentalist theology combined with the brutalities and anxieties of World War II and the Cold War, perhaps making it only natural for him to scapegoat Jews in sycophantic conversations with the most powerful man in the world.

As reports surface of California banning the Bible and of this week’s White House dinner for court evangelicals, it appears that fundamentalism and evangelicalism may feature more continuity than discontinuity. History may not repeat itself (Obama is not FDR, and 9/11 is not the Cold War), but it surely rhymes.

Paul Putz, football, prayer, politics:

Before the whistle blows for the first time this year and the football goes tumbling through the air, there will be an act dripping with political significance.

It will come even before the singer takes the field and thousands stand with hand over heart, keeping one eye on the flag and one eye on the field, scanning for players who might be kneeling or raising their fist.

And it will probably come during and after, too.

That act is prayer. The participants may not think of it as political; they may be praying only for safety or inner peace or to draw near to their God. But when prayer and football intersect in highly visible ways, those moments—and the conversation around those moments—go beyond personal devotion, revealing and reflecting ongoing battles over the direction of American society and the meaning of American life.

From pre-game invocations to post-game huddles, from touchdown celebrations to protests during the national anthem, prayer pervades football. If we want to understand just how thoroughly politics and football are intertwined, looking at football’s long history with the devotional practice is a good place to start.

We can begin where American football began in the late nineteenth century: the (later-to-be-named) “Ivy League” colleges in the Northeast. At the time, many were suspicious of the new game for its brutality and its tendency to divert attention from education. But some white, male, Anglo-Saxon Protestants saw the game as a godsend. For them, football provided a way to develop the physical and moral characteristics needed to maintain their authority at home in an age of immigration and extend it abroad in an age of American imperialism. By practicing and publicizing football-related prayer, they provided the game with moral gravitas fit for future leaders.

That ethos was on full display in 1893, when journalist Richard Harding Davis published an account of the Yale/Princeton Thanksgiving Day game in Harper’s Weekly. He concluded his essay with a glimpse of the victorious Princeton locker room. “Standing as they were, naked and covered with mud and blood and perspiration,” Davis wrote, “the eleven men who had won the championship sang the doxology from the beginning to the end,” a symbol of “how great and how serious is the joy of victory to the men who conquer.”

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