The followers of Christ have been called to peace. … And they must not only have peace but also make it. To that end they renounce all violence and tumult. In the cause of Christ nothing is to be gained by such methods. … His disciples keep the peace by choosing to endure suffering rather than inflict it on others. They maintain fellowship where others would break it off. They renounce hatred and wrong. In so doing they overcome evil with good, and establish the peace of God in the midst of a world of war and hate.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
links to 10 items worth your time
1. Can Israel and Jordan cooperate to save the dying Dead Sea
“… the Jordan River isn’t the only biblical-site-turned-environmental-disaster.”
“Seduced by scientism, distracted by materialism, insulated, like no humans before us, from the vicissitudes of sickness and the ubiquity of early death, the post-Christian West believes instead in something we have called progress — a gradual ascent of mankind toward reason, peace, and prosperity — as a substitute in many ways for our previous monotheism. We have constructed a capitalist system that turns individual selfishness into a collective asset and showers us with earthly goods; we have leveraged science for our own health and comfort. Our ability to extend this material bonanza to more and more people is how we define progress; and progress is what we call meaning.”
3. How N.T. Wright Stole Christmas
“As it turns out, Wright is no Grinch. He didn’t steal Christmas. What he stole was a false Christmas, a de-contextualized and apolitical Christmas. But we shouldn’t have bought that Christmas in the first place, and should have been embarrassed to display it so proudly on the mantle. Good riddance, and Bah humbug.”
4. Gun-shy About Committing to Church
“Surviving spiritual abuse means I’ve had to learn to balance my wariness (especially if I sense a leader is practicing those familiar old power games) with a commitment to remain vigilant about allowing bitterness to take root in my soul. I don’t try to silence my internal critic during a church service or gathering, as this voice serves an important role in helping me to remember where I’ve been and what I’ve learned. However, I work to listen for the things that harmonize with that critic by seeking to worship God in community, be present with others he’s placed in my path, and serve without feeling the compulsion I once did to say ‘yes’ to every request.”
5. Becoming Poor and Finding Friendship on the Margins
“We assume God’s friendship is enough as we seek to make friends with God’s people: the poor, the suffering, the lonely, and all those who cry out from their hearts for mercy. This is how we live out Christ’s good news on the margins.”
6. Resilient Kids Come From Parents Who Do These 8 Things
“… resilience is a behavior learned through explicit lessons and examples, one that teaches kids how to, among other things, better handle stress, understand that rejection is not a comment on their entire existence, and view setbacks as things that don’t need to sideline them for good.”
7. ‘A Witness That They Were Here’: Los Angeles Honors 1,457 of Its Unclaimed Dead
“They are the forgotten people of Los Angeles — 1,457 people, to be exact. Old, poor, homeless, babies born premature and abandoned. They may have died alone, but they were buried together, in a mass grave, and were honored together this week in an interfaith ceremony that has been an annual ritual in Los Angeles for more than a century.”
8. Attention is not a resource but a way of being alive to the world
“… conceiving of attention as a resource misses the fact that attention is not just useful. It’s more fundamental than that: attention is what joins us with the outside world. ‘Instrumentally’ attending is important, sure. But we also have the capacity to attend in a more ‘exploratory’ way: to be truly open to whatever we find before us, without any particular agenda. …
“So, as well as attention-as-resource, it’s important that we retain a clear sense of attention-as-experience.”
9. Millennials experience work-disrupting anxiety at twice the US average rate
“Nearly one in five US workers are debilitated by anxiety or depression, and the rate only climbs when you zoom in on younger generations.”
10. How Modern Technology is Bringing Ancient Writings to Light
“Powerful imaging tools are enabling researchers to see inside scrolls too fragile to unroll and recover texts too faint to see, making thousands of illegible manuscripts readable again.”
links to 10 items worth your time
1. ‘No creed but Christ, no book but the Bible’
“In the assurance of eternal life given at baptism, let us proclaim our faith and say: I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary. Suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and was buried. He descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again. He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy catholic church, communion of saints, forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and the life everlasting. Amen.”
2. America Is Addicted to Outrage. Is There a Cure?
“Outrage has become the signature emotion of American public life.”
3. Mall’s end
“What will retail look like without stores? … enclosed-mall construction has all but stopped. … a question looms: what will happen to all this commercial real estate?”
4. Screening the human future: YouTube, persuasion and genetically engineered children
“Listening to He [Jiankui] is more like being yanked down a slippery slope.”
5. Genocides
“If we had lived back when our ancestors did, would we have spoken for justice? We do live in a time like our ancestors. … If you hold back from rescuing those taken away to death, those who go staggering to the slaughter; if you say, ‘Look, we did not know this’ — does not he who weighs the heart perceive it? Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it? And will he not repay all according to their deeds?” (Proverbs 24.11-12 NRSV)”
“The Book of Proverbs and women. What it says about and by women surprises.”
7. Climate change: Where we are in seven charts and what you can do to help
“… how warm has the world got and what can we do about it?”
8. Meet Zeno, the Tiny Sub Discovering the Secrets of Israel’s Coasts [very interesting!]
“…the Archeosub – an autonomous underwater vehicle, or AUV, called Zeno. It’s a tiny unmanned submarine that will be able to discover, survey and monitor large areas of the seabed.”
9. Levels of Literacy in the New Testament World
“… at least in urban settings, some meaningful levels of literacy were much more common that some have previously asserted.”
“Gels, ballpoints, rollerballs, felt-tips, and fountain pens — we tried them all.”
quote: on Christmas and submission
Who among us will celebrate Christmas correctly? Whoever finally lays down all power, all honor, all reputation, all vanity, all arrogance, all individualism beside the manger; whoever remains lowly and lets God alone be high; whoever looks at the child in the manger and sees the glory of God precisely in his lowliness.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
quote: open-minded & teachable
Don’t confuse being ‘soft’ with seeing the other guy’s point of view.
George H. W. Bush
links to 10 items worth your time
1. Now Streaming: The Entire Catalogue of ‘Sesame Street’ Songs
“… new ‘Sesame Street’ music will soon be released on a consistent schedule, for the first time in more than two decades.”
“… I have no magic formula for dealing with disobedient and unruly children, and certainly in a world where some children’s behavior has been malformed almost from the very start, we should not underplay the difficulties and frustrations parents face. But surely we also want to place the bond between parents and children within that circle of deeply personal relationships.”
3. Why you need a little resistance in your life
“We need the rain and the occasional storm.”
4. Why Did Early Christians Prefer the Codex to the Bookroll
“When we say ‘book’ today, we generally mean a tome of bound pages. Known as the ‘codex,’ this common book form has always (over the past two millennia, anyway) looked the same — like any book on your desk. While the origins of the codex are not sufficiently explained, evidence shows that the preserved early Christian manuscripts are more often codices (plural of codex) than the then-established bookrolls. Why?”
5. Science and Theology: Two Witnesses to Reality
“… we generally have it backwards in how we think the reasoning process works. We tend to think that we work out our conclusions through the process of reasoning about the topic. But the controlled studies show pretty clearly that most of the time we already have a conclusion based on our instincts and that our process of reasoning is employed to justify what we already think. And it’s not like the smarter you are, the more open you are to other possible conclusions. The higher your IQ, the better you are at producing reasons to support your views; you’re no more likely to change your views than people with lower IQs. This might be depressing to those who have an exalted view of the human intellect, but it sure explains the inability for rational discourse to move us closer together, even when the facts are overwhelmingly on one side.”
6. Archaeologists map centuries of history beneath world’s oldest cathedral
“So far, that data has helped create a 3D digital reconstruction of what the basilica would have looked like in the 4th century. And Haynes and his colleagues are also trying to understand what it would have sounded like. Using the laser scans and information from earlier excavations, they created a simple 3D model to reconstruct the acoustics of the original cathedral.”
7. The Costs of the Confederacy
“‘It was like we were not even there,’ she said, as if slavery ‘never happened.'”
8. ‘Prosperity preachers’ like Joel Osteen can cause risky financial behavior, university report says
“The University of Toronto recently released a report saying preaching the ‘prosperity gospel’ — which centers around the belief that material wealth is part of God’s will — can lead to unrealistic optimism and risky financial behavior. The report used Joel Osteen of Lakewood Church as an example of a televangelist who touts this belief.”
9. The 25 Healthiest Foods You Can Buy for $5 or Less
“… cooking your own meals and having snacks on-hand will drastically cut the amount of money you spend on food throughout the week.”
10. The Steward of Middle-earth
“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 [J.R.R. Tolkien]. It is the concluding public act of … the last member of a club that became a pivotal part of 20th-century literature: the Inklings. It is the end of an era.”
quote: on Jesus & God’s character
Jesus is what God looks like when there are no clouds in the way. … Jesus is the total content of the Father’s revelation to us.
Greg Boyd
