Meanderings, 10 December 2022
Here in our village, we got our first snow yesterday. Slushy kind of snow. Cold and wet and dark kind of day, and (as the Germans say) grausam. Speaking of snow, is there a Santa shortage in your community?
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Skyrocketing demand for Santa and fewer little helpers could have Christmas looking a little different this year.
With more-in person holiday parties and mall visits returning, Santa is being sought by many. But demand for Saint Nicholas is outpacing his availability.
Despite good earning potential - up to $20,00 per season, according to CNBC, it seems fewer people want to don the red suit.
HireSanta.com, a website where you can hire Santa for events and retail visits, says demand is sky high, and for every Santa that reaches out, there are 20 open positions.
"Heading into December we’re pretty much sold out for all weekends across the country," said Mitch Allen, "Head Elf" and founder of HireSanta.com. "We're up 30% over last year. And last year was a record itself - 120% over pre-pandemic levels.”
Peter Mohawk, a Chicago actor who loves playing Santa, says 2020 was painfully slow and during 2021, just about everyone canceled at the last minute. But this year, things are different.
Mohawk's Christmas calendar is packed!
New YorkCNN Business —
Admit it: You’ve probably either Googled the answer for Wordle, or at the very least searched to play it. Turns out, you’re not alone.
Google has revealed that “Wordle” is its most-searched term this year in the United States and globally, signifying that the five-letter guessing game owned by the New York Times still has a grip on us. It beat perhaps more newsier topics, such as “election results” and “Betty White” in the United States, and “Queen Elizabeth” and “Ukraine” globally.
In a blog post Wednesday, Google said its annual Year in Search report examines the “moments, people and trends that sparked our collective curiosity” on the search platform, noting that Wordle was the “top trending search globally, as guessing five-letter words every day became a way of life.”
Wordle is a popular online game that gives players six chances to guess a five-letter word daily. Some days, however, getting the answer is tricky, prompting people to search for hints, tips and even the result.
Josh Wardle, a Brooklyn-based software engineer formerly at Reddit, released the game in October 2021, and it quickly became a cultural phenomenon. So much so, that the New York Times (NYT) bought Wordle in February 2022 to bolster its gaming subscription business and attract new people to the newspaper.
In July, the Times partnered with Hasbro (HAS) to turn Wordle into a board game, which allows the news outlet to keep its “existing audience engaged with Wordle, and also introduces Wordle to all new audiences,” Jonathan Knight, head of games for the Times, previously told CNN Business.
Last month, the Times named Tracy Bennett the new editor of Wordle, signaling that the game is shifting away from the preselected words from Wardle and toward words that the Times has chosen. Also changing: The answer will never be a plural that ends in “s” or “es.” However, you can guess plural words to help you eliminate possible words.
No one outside The New York Times knows exactly how its best sellers are calculated—and the list of theories is longer than the actual list of best sellers. In The New York Times’ own words, “The weekly book lists are determined by sales numbers.” It adds that this data "reflects the previous week’s Sunday-to-Saturday sales period" and takes into account "numbers on millions of titles each week from tens of thousands of storefronts and online retailers as well as specialty and independent bookstores." The paper keeps its sources confidential, it argues, "to circumvent potential pressure on the booksellers and prevent people from trying to game their way onto the lists." Its expressed goal is for “the lists to reflect what individual consumers are buying across the country instead of what is being bought in bulk by individuals or associated groups.” But beyond these disclosures, the Times is not exactly forthcoming about how the sausage gets made.
Laura B. McGrath, an assistant professor of English at Temple University who teaches a course on the history of the best seller, compares The New York Times’ list to the original recipe for Coca-Cola: “We have a pretty good idea of what goes into it, but not the exact amount of each ingredient.” …
For authors with deep pockets and big egos, there are companies they can hire to maneuver their way onto the list—or at least try. According to the sources I spoke to, a company called Book Highlight is known for running these “best seller campaigns."
Book Highlight markets itself as “a performance-driven, full service agency dedicated to increasing the audience and impact of authors and their books.” Some in the industry believe that Book Highlight is actually just a rebranded version of ResultSource, a marketing firm that had a bad run of press in the 2010s for its alleged methods of pushing books, including some from the religious right, onto the list. …
In the words of Professor McGrath: “The New York Times list is just as important for what it doesn’t show us: significance. Books that make it onto the list sell a lot of copies, and fast, but that doesn’t mean that they will stand the test of time. They might not be read or remembered in five, ten, fifteen years.”
Terran Williams, a year after:
Almost a year ago I released my controversial book. What a rollercoaster of emotion and action it has been! With one amazing prize—but you will have to read till the end to see what it is.
Days before my book launch, I felt so scared. Before I even wrote it, I had obsessively studied the matter. I’d become sure—totally sure—that Scripture, read as a whole and interpreted properly, does not subordinate women to men. As I wrote my book, I did my best to dot my i’s and cross my t’s—with over 800 footnotes to show for it.
So, my fear was not the publicizing of untruth. It was “the fear of man”—literally the fear of men. What would all my friends who still believed otherwise think of me?
My book, though respectful of those with a different interpretation, was audacious. I had, after all, chosen “The End of Patriarchy” as a byline.
So I went for a walk on the beachfront and prayed, “Who am I to challenge other husbands and other pastors to reconsider the way they see their women?”
Instantly (and this doesn’t happen all that often to me) I heard heaven’s chastising whisper: “They are not ‘their women.’ They are my daughters. They are your sisters.”
And just like that, steel came into me, though I didn’t realize how much I’d need it. …
The drama in the US on the topic of female leadership is without parallel—I have watched in horror this last year as the Gospel Coalition and leading male scholars continue to attack (that’s the right word) women who stand up to male domination or make sound biblical, sociological and historical arguments against their own being marginalised and subjugated. Though I may or may not share every perspective of these godly, courageous women, Kristin Du Mez, Amy Byrd, Beth Moore and Beth Allison Barr, for example, I suspect are in for a heap of heavenly rewards!
But I have had some drama of my own in my own country.
Long-time friends in the complementarian camp mostly did not read my book. The very few that did disagreed with it evidently. I wasn’t surprised. I wrote an Appendix in my book on why I expected this—“Why facts may not change your mind.” But still, I was disappointed.
When I posted to Facebook a link to my sermon on Pastor Priscilla, a “friend” went after me with stunning, albeit misguided, confidence. “There’s absolutely nothing in the text to suggest she was a leader of any kind,” he said in comment after comment.
But the main drama was a fast-growing church group publicly marking me as a kind of false teacher.
I first realised they were onto me when one of their staff mailed me asking me what kind of heresy my book was. I suggested she read it and see. But she said she trusted her leaders too much to read it. Any way, she was very happy in her subordinate role in marriage and glad that she’d never have to carry “the beautiful burden” of church leadership. She also called me out on writing a book that appeals to broken women. That run-in shook me—call me naive, but I had braced myself for pushback from men, I didn’t expect it would come from women! But the real bomb was on the way.
Then came this church group’s “review” which was shared worldwide. Written by a pastor of a church near to mine, it tore into my book. At first, I thought to take it on the chin. But then church leaders from other patriarchal churches rallied around this review—one on Facebook said that I should consider this review as “a warning.”
I welcome critical reviews, but this one was wide of the mark. So I decided to review the review. Step by step, I demonstrated that the author had 1) profoundly missed my reasoning, and therefore severely misrepresented it; 2) repeated the same weak and well-worn arguments in favour of complementarianism, which I used to put forward myself until I studied the Scripture more closely and which I had refuted in my book; 3) failed to engage with my exegesis of the most critical texts such as 1 Timothy 2:12 as well as the presence of female leaders and teachers in Scripture, especially the New Testament; 4) and appeared to have read only about two fifths of the main body of the book and none of the footnotes or appendices.
The author responded and admitted nothing. Sidestepping everything in my review of his review, he now recommended to everyone that they watch a video by Californian Youtuber, Mike Winger, which he claimed showed up where “Terran went wrong on women leaders in the New Testament.” (Winger had not even read my book.)
This was all more heat than light, I realised. So I took some time to recoup.
This Christmas has me reflecting on Levitical purity laws. I’ve never heard a sermon on Leviticus 12 or Leviticus 15. Maybe you have. There is a lot to work through there. Just looking at chapter 12, we have the uncomfortableness of the language, the meaning behind the number of days a woman who gave birth is “unclean,” why it’s so different if she has a son or a daughter, and this matter of women being kept from the sanctuary or even touching holy things for so long. A pastor would certainly have to address the question of gender disparity here. This can’t be random; it has to have meaning. And it does. It tells a story.
In The Sexual Reformation, I touch on this, building on Richard Whitekettle’s development of a womb/wellspring homology, showing that a woman’s body, in its structure and function, corresponds to the order of Levitical sacred space. Our bodies speak, and what a story they tell! And this is why we see all those weird purity laws associated with a woman’s menstruation and postpartum discharge in Leviticus (12; 15:19–33)—her womb represents fullness of life, the inner sanctum of the divine realm. When it overflows as unbounded water, it is uninhabitable for life and a threat to sanctum, rendering her ceremonially impure for the set times (a pattern of familiar numbers) of seven or forty days.
In this homology, we see another literary pattern from Scripture of “creation–uncreation–re-creation” where unbounded water is confined, both with creation in Genesis 1 and the flood account in the second half of Genesis 7 and beginning of Genesis 8. I love how all these stories come together and the pictures God uses to delight and surprise us! You can read more about that in The Sexual Reformation. For this post, I want to follow it to Dr. Amy Peeler’s latest book, Women and the Gender of God. Let’s get back to Christmas, and more specifically, the incarnation, as it tells us something about the woman’s body, sanctuary, and access to holy things.
In her chapter on “Holiness and the Female Body,” Peeler highlights the fact that even Mary, the mother of God, is not exempt from obedience to the Levitical purity laws, as we see in Luke 2:22-24.[3] We see that Mary observes this law, refraining from sacred space for the appointed number of days after the birth of Jesus.
And yet, “God is with her.”
Let’s let this blow our minds as it should. Peeler reminds us that “the same God who set the laws for female purification and exclusion from the temple met this woman when she was existing faithfully within those laws.” Let’s behold this “radical act” God performs within his own ceremonial laws. “The separation between impure humanity and holy God has been breached.” Young Mary, experiencing all the pains, inconveniences, and uncleanliness of afterbirth like every other mother—in all the embodiment of this female, motherly experience—is outside of the temple “handl[ing] the holiest of all things. Instead of bringing her into the holy space, God has made her the holy space. In the incarnation, God has deemed the female body—the impure, bleeding female body—worthy to handle the most sacred of all things, the very body of God.” What an incredibly humbling and powerful picture!
Is your mind blown? Not only by this, but by the divine vulnerability of which the Son of God entrusts himself in the womb, breasts, and arms of a woman to bear, nurture, and care for him? There are so many implications to this.
Always fair-minded, John Hawthorne:
Surprisingly, the entire idea for today’s newsletter came from Herschel Walker. After everything that was said and done during the Georgia campaign, after the vampires and werewolves, after wondering if the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church was a real Christian, Walker said remarkably pro-democracy things in last night’s concession speech.
But one of the things I want to tell all of you is you never stop dreaming. I don't want any of you to stop dreaming.
I don't want any of you to stop believing in America. I want you to believe in America and continue to believe in the constitution and believe in our elected officials most of all.
I want you to continue to pray for them because all of the prayers that you had given me, I felt those prayers.
Walker called for his supporters to continue to believe in America. He then said to believe in and pray for our elected officials — not our party’s officials or those who agree with our side.
It was a surprisingly good speech. Maybe that shows that all of the apocalyptic rhetoric that has characterized our campaigns just wears everybody out in the end. You can’t playact anger for that long without it seeming forced. You can’t partake it in vicariously without it eventually feeling stale and empty.
Maybe, just maybe, we’ll learn from this and our 2024 election cycle will not be as soul-crushing as our recent elections have been. I’m not holding my breath but I can still hope.
It’s not just humans feeling the effects of cold and flu season this year, as a canine flu is hitting the U.S.
The highly contagious canine flu is being transmitted in doggy day cares, kennels and other settings where dogs are in close contact with each other.
Outbreaks have already occurred in Texas, California, North Carolina and Alabama this year.
Symptoms of dog flu include cough, runny nose, fever, loss of energy and lack of appetite. Most dogs recover from the illness and symptoms can take 3 to 7 days to show up.
Pet owners can help prevent spreading the illness by cleaning food and water bowls, toys, doorknobs and clothing.
Veterinarians are urging owners to get their dogs vaccinated against the flu if they spend time in social settings with other pups.