Meanderings, 10 February 2024

Good morning!

Photo by Kaylah Matthews on Unsplash

Residential relocation and politics:

A record share of homebuyers relocated to a different metro area in 2023, and a new survey suggests politics may be one of the big reasons why.

One-third of real estate agents said they have worked with a client over the past year who decided to move “primarily because of state or local laws or politics,” according to real estate brokerage Redfin.

“State laws differ on partisan issues like abortion and gun control, with many Americans reporting they would prefer to live in a place with laws that align with their own views,” Redfin said in the report. “On a similar note, many Americans prefer living in a place where their neighbors have similar political views.”

The pandemic-driven rise in remote work has given Americans more flexibility to move, and many are taking the opportunity to find like-minded communities.

Last year, some of the most common migration routes were from blue states to red or purple states. That shift was largely due to housing affordability but also because some homebuyers wanted to live in a more conservative place, Redfin noted.

Redfin agents say they have noticed more people relocating for political reasons since the pandemic.

“I know at least 10 people who have moved away from Texas in the last year, mainly because they don’t agree with state laws,” Andrew Vallejo, an Austin, Texas, Redfin premier agent, said in the report. “They all moved to the West Coast, to blue places where the policies align better with their personal views, specifically when it comes to women’s reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights.” 

Karen Swallow Prior’s “you didn’t have to” for the SBC:

Let’s be clear: No one expects abuse to be entirely absent from the church. Abuse is everywhere. But the church should be the place where it is hardest for abusers to hide, not among the easiest.

Even more importantly, the church should be the place where abusers are dealt with swiftly and justly, where the abused have their needs more than met. The church is the place where, once abuse is discovered, that discovery should be blasted from the rooftops, from the pulpit and in every Sunday school room — in lament, in repentance, in desire to prevent further harm.

This is what you could have done. You could have been like Jesus in leaving the 99 to seek out the one, in serving persons rather than mammon, in preserving souls rather than institutional power. You didn’t have to be like the rich young man.

You didn’t have to take the widow’s mite, over and over, millions of times, in the name of the Great Commission only to use it to pay for a $1.6 million renovation of a seminary president’s home, a $2.5 million retirement home for another seminary president, espresso machines, hunting trophies, fake scrolls, lawsuits and legal settlements for evil deeds done in darkness and the lawyers who defend those evildoers.

Todd Hunter, kingdom, cross — for 2024:

Disordered desires within. The push and pull of the world around us. Both mean that our fidelity to Jesus is always challenged. And during this year’s election cycle, modern politics will fiercely test our practical allegiance to Jesus. Many people will try to pull Jesus off the cross and into their projects, campaigns and schemes. 

Gregory Boyle, founder of Homeboy Industries, describes this challenge well: 

The right wing would stare at [Jesus] and question where he chose to stand. They hated that he aligned himself with the unclean, those outside—those folks you ought neither to touch nor be near. He hobnobbed with the leper, shared table fellowship with the sinner, and rendered himself ritually impure in the process. They found it offensive that, to boot, Jesus had no regard for their wedge issues, their constitutional amendments, or their culture wars.

The left was equally annoyed, they wanted to see the ten-point plan, the revolution in high gear, the toppling of sinful social structures. They were impatient with his brand of solidarity. They wanted him to see him taking the right stand on issues, not just standing in the right place.

The Left screamed: Don’t just stand there, do something. And the Right maintained: Don’t stand with those folks at all. Both sides, seeing Jesus as the wrong size for this world, came to their own reasons for wanting him dead.

But Jesus could not find a strategy more soaked with fidelity than the one he chose—the cross.

It shocked the world when total power found its clearest expression and highest good in Jesus’ submission to brutal suffering and death on a cross. In response, Jesus invites us to soak ourselves in his ongoing cruciform movement that is healing the world, offering a different quality of life—eternal life—a life marked by love of neighbor and enemy.

To live soaked with fidelity to Jesus in 2024 requires us to understand and practice three vital concepts: kingdom, cross and eternal life. 

Marc Brettler, the Torah, and “biblical authority”:

I am an observant Jew: I pray each weekday morning while donning tefillin (phylacteries), I abstain from work from Friday evening through Saturday night, I do not eat any pork products or mix milk and meat, and a mezuzah adorns each of the doors of my house. I grew up in a traditional Conservative home, and through high school attended an Orthodox Jewish Day school where I learned traditional Jewish texts in their original Hebrew and Aramaic. Jewish observance has always been an important part of my life. I currently am a member of a modern Orthodox synagogue, but do not label myself as Orthodox, especially in terms of belief or opinion (doxa). In many ways, I am post-denominational, as different aspects of various Jewish denominations speak to me. I am not ordained and have never seriously considered ordination….

I find the phrase “biblical authority” confusing and foreign—it is not part of my vocabulary either as a practicing Jew or as a biblical scholar who happens to be Jewish. Although I consider myself relatively well read in biblical studies and in religion, I have read very few of the books cited in the seven articles on biblical authority that cover forty double-columns in the Anchor Bible Dictionary, and I find the content of many of these articles as foreign to me as studies of the medieval scientific notions of ether. The opening of Goshen-Gottstein’s essay on “Biblical Authority in Judaism” suggests that my reaction as a Jewish scholar is typical; he observes: “The issue of biblical authority has never been a question which bothered Jews.”

I can venture some guesses on why this is so. Biblical authority is a different problem for Christians than for Jews, because Christian tradition understands the Old Testament plus the New Testament to comprise Scripture, and biblical authority to some extent deals with how these two very different corpora fit together as Bible. There is no problem comparable to this for Judaism: though classical Jewish tradition may speak of the written law (the Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, or often just the Pentateuch or Five Books of Moses) and the oral law (the rabbinic interpretation of the Bible as found in rabbinic literature such as the Mishnah and the Talmud), and view the two as a package, they are not a unity in the same way that the OT + NT is in Christian tradition. They do not comprise a single work, and the oral law is recognized as a type of (subservient) interpretation of the written in a way that is fundamentally different from how the NT is traditionally connected to the OT. In addition, much of the discussion of biblical authority in Christian circles focuses on the role of Jesus as the central figure of Scripture. There is nothing comparable to this core issue in Jewish tradition.

In the final chapter of How to Read the Bible, I discuss issues that fall under the purview of biblical authority. I suggest: “The Bible is a sourcebook that I—within my community—make into a textbook. I do so by selecting, revaluing, and interpreting the texts that I call sacred.” I will clarify this statement by focusing on and expanding upon some of its core phrases, beginning from the end. My ideas should not be generalized to Judaism or even some segment of Judaism—they only reflect the thinking of one observant Jewish biblical scholar.

A clip from the bottom of a really good essay:

A defining feature of contemporary discussions of charitable giving is its focus on the motivations of the donor (altruism) and the effectiveness of the donation (social justice). To be sure, each of these factors has deep roots in the Bible and subsequent Jewish and Christian theology. But what is lacking in modern discourse is any significant role for God. When we turn to the sources that informed the structure of charity in the biblical period, however, the single most important factor was that of divine agency.

AI and translation:

Three college students from the United States, Switzerland and Egypt have accomplished something never done before, deciphering part of an ancient Roman scroll that was buried during the Mount Vesuvius eruption in 79 AD using artificial intelligence.

It was done as part of the Vesuvius Challenge, launched in March 2023, where $700,000 was up for grabs to the team that could resurrect ancient scripts lost in the ashes of the volcanic eruption.

The winning team deciphered more than 2,000 never-before-seen texts from the charred scroll.

The text was Epicurean philosophy on music and food — how those two things brought people pleasure.

“This represents a huge corpus of historical antiquities that if we could recover all of this ancient knowledge, it would almost double the amount of history that is recovered from ancient equities. I think that says a lot about the size of the challenge and the size of the potential that we can achieve by solving this,” Vesuvius Challenge winning submission team lead Youssef Nader said.

The ancient Roman scrolls are in a fragile state, but that’s where AI comes into play. The AI program has been trained to read the ink on both the surface and hidden layers.

As a result, the trio uncovered more than 15 columns of text, which is roughly 5% of one scroll.

“I believe that the goal is that we eventually have models that operate on any kind of scroll regardless of where it was stored, where it was buried or what state it is in,” Nader said.

The Vesuvius Challenge continues this year with a new grand prize. The goal is to read more scrolls using AI. The scroll that was only partially decoded is one of hundreds.

Join the tiger for a root canal:

BROOKFIELD, Ill. — While it may sound like a folk tale, the story of the tiger with a toothache nearly came to life in Brookfield this week.

Just like Androcles, who plucked the thorn from the lion’s paw, the veterinarians and animal care specialists at the Brookfield Zoo took extra special care when “Whirl,” a 16-year-old female tiger, needed a bit of dental work.

Specialists at the zoo noticed that Whirl needed help during a routine exam and sought to get to the root of the problem.

“She had her routine health exam a few weeks ago and during that exam, we noticed that she had a fractured canine tooth that required root canal therapy,” Dr. Sathya Chinnadurai, from the Brookfield Zoo, said. “So once we saw that we knew that we needed to call a dental specialist.”

Zoo specialists then called in the help of Dr. Stephen Juriga, from the Veterinary Dental Clinic.

“Our job is to focus just on the oral cavity, doing a complete dental oral exam and we’re going to evaluate those teeth to determine if they are in need of therapy,” Juriga said.