Meanderings, 12 February 2022
We’re angling our bodies to face the wintry winds and cold temperatures in our daily walks around the small lake in the middle of our village. Not much for birders other than occasional red tailed hawks.
And the Winter Olympics!
PIGEON FORDGE, Tennessee -- Leave it to Dolly Parton to deliver the good news of the day.
The legendary singer's theme park, Dollywood, will begin paying full college tuition for all employees who choose to go.
The company will also cover miscellaneous fees and textbooks.
The education perk is available to employees starting on their very first day of work and will be available to all seasonal, part-time, and full-time employees. This tuition coverage starts on Feb. 24.
Dollywood has a reputation for caring for employees.
Along with the new tuition benefit, employees receive access to the Dollywood Family Healthcare Center and are provided free meals for every working shift.
There are also apprentice and leadership training programs offered through the company.
The park also pays a portion of childcare costs for employees who need childcare while they work.
Dr. Derwin L. Gray didn’t grow up particularly religious, but when he did find Jesus at age 26, something confounded him: “The nightclubs that my wife and I used to party in were a lot more diverse than Jesus’ club — the church,” he says.
At the time, it felt like he needed to chose between a white church or a Black church. Nearly 25 years later, the former BYU football star and NFL safety hasn’t finished his sermon that the body of Christ is for believers of every race and background .
“Why do you talk about race so much?” is a question he sometimes receives from parishioners at Transformation Church, an intentionally multiethnic congregation that Gray and his wife, Vicki, began more than a decade ago.
His answer is simple: “Because the Bible does.” Gray points to examples from both Christ’s teachings and countless others in the Old Testament.
His is a vision of the gospel shared by many African American worshippers. Pew Research Center data shows a full three-quarters of Black Americans say opposing racism is essential to their faith or sense of morality.
Gray is a passionate speaker, and talking with him on the phone about these issues feels like a window into one of his Sunday sermons. During our time together, Gray emphasizes an important principle: Not only should Christians oppose the sin of racism, they should see matters of race as central to the gospel of Jesus Christ itself.
(NEXSTAR) – News that the whimsical online game Wordle had been bought by The New York Times Company for seven figures earlier this week left many wondering if the free game would indeed remain free.
While the Times said Wordle will be free to play “at the time it moves to The New York Times,” fans are concerned the game could, at some point, be stuck behind a paywall like some of the newspaper’s other games. If you aren’t attached to the game enough to pay for it, you’re in luck: Users have found a way to access hundreds of days worth of Wordle.
Josh Wardle, a Brooklyn software engineer and the game’s creator, made the game a webpage, meaning Wordle can be saved like any other webpage.
Because you can save the webpage, you could save all of the roughly 2,500 Wordle games and their solutions right now. It would also cycle to the right puzzle each day and provide a “Share” button that would let you show off your score to your friends.
According to Brooks, much of American evangelicalism has become a sad morass of right-wing political tribalism, yet some people are trying to renew evangelicalism from within and invigorate their churches. The people Brooks documents are the ones doing precisely that, calling out the sins, and looking for new centres of unity.
As I see it, this new coalition of the faithful has several key characteristics:
Truth over tribalism.
Think outside the right-wing media echo chamber.
Speak truth to power, whether right-wing or left-wing.
Jesus is the only Messiah, not our political leaders.
Orthodox Christian faith rather than civil religion or cultural Christianity.
Concern for racial justice and reconciliation.
Concern for abuses of patriarchy and male-power.
Speak to people outside your circle.
Be more like Jesus!
But not everyone is convinced, for some, Brooks is very, very wrong! Al Mohler is neither impressed nor convinced by Brooks.
Each morning my son carries a school-issued Chromebook to his central Kentucky high school with a big sticker on the lid that reads, “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” He tells me that it has provoked a lot of conversations with teachers and fellow students who don’t quite know what to make of it….
But the original author of WWJD, I think, would also want us to expand our menu of moral questions. If I’m a Russian Christian, should I support an invasion of Ukraine? If I’m an American Christian, should I tolerate policies that allow the military to torture members of the Taliban? Should I pay war taxes? How am I complicit in economic, cultural, and political systems that for centuries have privileged or centered certain groups over others? Should society encourage the editing of children’s genomes?
As a teenager, I rolled my eyes at hyper-individualized invocations of WWJD. It seemed deployed primarily to throw ice cold water over my youth group’s young lusts, not to fully reckon with the rigorous codes Jesus preached on the Mount of Beatitudes. Now that I’m a parent of teenagers, I’ll gladly deploy cold water, but it still doesn’t seem like enough. Perhaps we need more WWJD, not less.
(CNN) — An English pub that claims to be the oldest in Britain is closing due to financial problems worsened by the pandemic.
Ye Olde Fighting Cocks in St. Albans, just north of London, has been in business since 793 AD, according to its website.
Now it has closed its doors "after a sustained period of extremely challenging trading conditions," according to a statement from landlord Christo Tofalli, posted on the pub's Facebook page on Friday.
"Along with my team, I have tried everything to keep the pub going," Tofalli wrote. "However, the past two years have been unprecedented for the hospitality industry, and have defeated all of us who have been trying our hardest to ensure this multi-award-winning pub could continue trading into the future."
Tofalli said trading conditions were "extremely tough" before the pandemic, but the effects of Covid-19 were "devastating" and left the pub struggling to meet its financial obligations.
"It goes without saying I am heartbroken: this pub has been so much more than just a business to me, and I feel honoured to have played even a small part in its history," he wrote.