Weekly Meanderings, 1 December 2018

Last updated on: December 1, 2018 at 6:38 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings, 1 December 2018 2018-12-01T06:38:58-06:00 Scot McKnight

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Good morning! Another week of meanderings for your morning reading.

Jim Stump, science and faith and the conflict?

What can be done about this? My suggestion, first, is to recognize that any perceived conflict is not between the Bible and science, but between theology and science. We already understand that science is our own making, our attempt to explain and make sense of the data we find in the natural world. It is easy, then, to understand that we sometimes make mistakes in our science. How about theology? It didn’t drop down from heaven; it too is our attempt to make sense of things. The Bible is what it is: inspired, authoritative, and even use “inerrant” if you want; but its plain reading is not entirely clear and we have to make sense of it. We do so by interpreting it. We construct theories about what God has revealed to us through Scripture. It is from this interpretive exercise that we get theology, and theology is our doing, our attempt to make sense of what God has said and done. And no one, at least in our Protestant tradition, believes our interpretations are infallible.

That shift allows us to uphold the authority of the Bible, while recognizing our theology, like our science, might also be wrong sometimes. Then we can see science and theology as different human witnesses to reality, recognizing that neither tells the whole story, and that both have limitations. So we don’t have to decide between fallible human science and God’s word; we have to do our best — guided by the Holy Spirit — at interpreting God’s world and interpreting God’s Word.

Most of the time science and theology are not even talking about the same things: science has very little to say about the Trinity, and theology has little to say about electromagnetism. But sometimes they do have the same object of study: human nature and human origins, for example. And these are the cases for which we need to sort out how our scientific and theological explanations relate. To do this, I suggest, we need extended dialogue with relevant experts from both science and theology.

There will remain differences, to be sure. But what we do with those differences will say a lot about the kind of people we are. Boundary lines for institutions must be drawn, but among evangelicals there is so much we agree on already. Perhaps the remaining differences can be used to come to a better, more complete understanding, rather than creating artificial lines of who is really in and who is out. Haidt said we naturally employ our reason to support our own positions, and to debunk our opponents. That sounds like a recipe for ingrown, echo-chamber thinking – unless you have a diverse group of people all doing it together. Then something much more powerful can happen. Haidt says:

Each individual reasoner is really good at one thing: finding evidence to support the position he or she already holds, usually for intuitive reasons. We should not expect individuals to produce good, open-minded, truth-seeking reasoning, particularly when self-interest or reputational concerns are in play. But if you put individuals together in the right ways, such that some individuals can use their reasoning powers to disconfirm the claims of others, and all individuals feel some common bond or shared fate that allows them to interact civilly, you can create a group that ends up producing good reasoning as an emergent property of the social system. That’s why it’s so important to have intellectual and ideological diversity within any group or institution whose goal is to find truth.” (105)

We have a common bond in the person of Jesus, in the authority of Scripture, in the coming kingdom of God. If that enables us to interact civilly, then perhaps the current ideological diversity about science will end up allowing us as a body to produce good reasoning and find the truth. May it be so.

Food waste — one attempt to minimize food waste: Food Share.

The red plum’s presence confounds the third grader. She didn’t want the fruit in the first place, yet there it is. She doesn’t want to eat it, but she knows that tossing it into the garbage at Oakland’s Hoover Elementary School is wrong. Standing before containers for trash, recyclables, compostables, and unopened entrees, milk cartons, and whole fruit, the girl’s decision-making matches her Disney-movie hijab — Frozen.

Fortunately, Nancy Deming, the school district’s sustainability manager for custodial and nutritional services, is supervising the sorting line today. “If you’ve started eating your fruit, it goes in the compost,” she reminds the girl with a smile. “If you haven’t taken a bite, it goes to Food Share.” The girl glances at the plum, then carefully places it in the clear bin, from which students can take whatever unopened or unbitten foods they please. Anything left will either be offered the next day or donated to a local hunger-relief organization. …

Schools are a big part of the problem. The USDA’s National School Lunch Program serves 30 million kids every school day, a point of justifiable pride. But the program also wastes about $5 million worth of edible food every school day. That’s $1.2 billion in losses per school year. The price tag is bad enough, but tacitly teaching children that it’s OK to throw out untouched portions of cheese ravioli and chicken tenders may be even worse. …

Since Deming can’t alter these requirements, she’s ensured that every school in her district has a food-waste safety net: the Food Share table, with signs in five languages. When the process — which the USDA now endorses — works well, it’s elegant. During a breakfast service at Piedmont Avenue Elementary, students can choose between a muffin and cheese stick combination and an Eggo mini-pancake package. When a boy interested only in a muffin drops his cheese stick on the sharing table, an attentive girl snags it within seconds.

Deming has also established a “Take It & Go” initiative that allows students to bring unfinished fruit and packaged vegetables back to their classrooms — forbidden in many schools — and she’s working on a program that allows schools to share excess food with families in the school community. On Deming’s watch, share tables have expanded from a few schools to all 80 of Oakland Unified’s K-12 schools, and composting has more than tripled to serve two-thirds of them. Deming has become a sought-after speaker at food conferences, including this summer’s U.S. Food Waste Summit at Harvard University. Intent on helping other districts, she recently published a K-12 School Food Recovery Roadmap that guides school employees and volunteers through the often-convoluted waste-reduction process, including tips on fundraising, waste tracking, and engaging with staff.

A story fit for Flannery O’Connor.

The end of the mall, by Eric McAfee:

The retail landscape of the future may be hard to imagine at this point. Civic leaders must get ahead of the curve and contemplate a regulatory environment that gives developers the flexibility to envision a variety of solutions on existing sites. For the stable but threatened malls—the Class B spaces—zoning regulations should encourage higher-than-average density, pedestrian-oriented design, and a mix of uses to invigorate those oversized parking lots. After all, most healthy retail corridors—urban and suburban—cater to a higher density of people and a greater diversity of land uses in a relatively constrained space. Younger generations increasingly prefer to live within walking or biking distance of entertainment—a naggingly vague category that often involves food and drink but does not yet exclude shopping (though it increasingly excludes errand-running). If zoning ordinances allow only a single land-use and a restrictive maximum floor-area ratio (FAR) on a property as vast as a mall, the municipality is legislatively stifling opportunities for the kind of reinvestment that could save livelihoods, maintain surrounding neighborhoods, and protect the assessed value of taxable real estate that pays for school districts and municipal public-works initiatives.

Meantime, retailers who ignore shifting consumer tastes are committing slow-motion seppuku. The Internet is satisfying a modern craving for convenience. Therefore, the physical storefront must offer an experience that point-and-click shopping cannot replicate—possibly through aesthetics, unprecedented expertise in customer service, state-of-the-art technological diversions, or the daunting challenge of reinvigorating shopping as a sociable, leisure activity. Few businesses have found the right blend, since few can subsist on impulse purchases by lackadaisical passers-by. IKEA seems to have perfected the hybridization of a furniture showroom with an amusement park, and it remains a cherished destination, but Cabela’s attempted much the same approach for outdoor sports, to no avail; it succumbed to a merger with Bass Pro Shops last year. The niche showroom Pirch strove to replicate the IKEA model for the upscale buyer, but it receded back to its original California locations after faltering during a brief ten-store expansion. Simon Property Group is attempting to court new businesses by nudging them in the opposite direction with its new platform called The Edit: helping incubate e-commerce startups from virtual to physical space, using lease-free, pop-up, and shared space to link fledgling retailers with heavy foot traffic.

In the end, we can safely conclude only that the experience of shopping—and how the purveyors of goods release their products into the commodified wilderness—is more variegated than ever. Malls are merely the largest, most visible casualty. As in the past, the most specialized buildings—those tailored for only one use—are the most likely candidates for obsolescence and eventual abandonment. Malls may prove only marginally more adaptable than geodesic domes. If we can’t convert them to warehouses—the supreme retailing use of the modern era—then how many haunted houses, trampoline parks, or indoor hydroponic gardens do we need? If current trends continue, in which virtual malls trump actual malls, the Plaza at Woodfield Glen (or substitute any other generic name) may someday survive only as a miniature model in a glass display, alongside other relics, like a Sears catalog—or a mannequin.

Tolkien, as in Christopher Tolkien:

In 1975, Christopher Tolkien left his fellowship at New College, Oxford, to edit his late father’s massive legendarium. The prospect was daunting. The 50-year-old medievalist found himself confronted with 70 boxes of unpublished work. Thousands of pages of notes and fragments and poems, some dating back more than six decades, were stuffed haphazardly into the boxes. Handwritten texts were hurriedly scrawled in pencil and annotated with a jumble of notes and corrections. One early story was drafted in a high school exercise book.

A large portion of the archive concerned the history of J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional world, Middle-earth. The notes contained a broader picture of a universe only hinted at in Tolkien’s two bestselling novels, The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings (1954-55). Tolkien had intended to bring that picture to light in a lengthy, solemn history going back to creation itself, but he died before completing a final, coherent version.

Christopher took it upon himself to edit that book, which was published in 1977 as The Silmarillion. He then turned to another project drawn from his father’s papers, then another—ultimately publishing poetry, academic works, fiction, and a 12-volume history of the creation of Middle-earth. The Fall of Gondolin, published in August, is the 25th posthumous book Christopher Tolkien has produced from his father’s archives.

Now, after more than 40 years, at the age of 94, Christopher Tolkien has laid down his editor’s pen, having completed a great labor of quiet, scholastic commitment to his father’s vision. It is the concluding public act of a gentleman and scholar, the last member of a club that became a pivotal part of 20th-century literature: the Inklings. It is the end of an era.

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