We can’t seem to shake Old Man Winter this year. Our daily morning walk, which often begins about 7:30, has been below 20 degrees the last three days. We’re ready for Good Friend Spring to make some appearances.
Photo by Alex Padurariu on Unsplash
CHICAGO (NewsNation) — For years, Ernst Bertone Oehninger had a dream: refrigerators, plopped in front yards and public spaces, and filled with free food for anyone who wanted it.
It just wasn’t catching on in the United States.
But then came the coronavirus. During the summer of 2020, 30 million Americans said they didn’t have food to eat. Traditional food pantries and soup kitchens struggled to keep up. The “community fridge” movement picked up steam.
Oehninger helped co-found Freedge, which in 2014 started with 10 community fridges in Northern California. Now these local acts of generosity — named everything from “Free Fridges” to “Sharing Fridges” to “Food Tubs” — are across the United States in places such as Fort Collins, Colorado, Aurora, Illinois, Conway, Arkansas, and Rock Hill, South Carolina.
People go to the grocery store and on their way home stock the “freedges” with the same fresh produce or meat they’re buying for their own families. Some locations include adjacent shelves for dry goods like baby food or canned fruit. They’re checked at least daily, but otherwise left alone.
“The metrics of the success, it was really not the pounds of food,” said Oehninger, who was studying agronomy when he got involved with community fridges, but has now returned to his native Brazil. “It was like when we received a little note on the fridge saying, ‘Thanks for changing my day. I was very thirsty and I came here and there was a bunch of Gatorade in the fridge.’”
New York (CNNBusiness)Slimmed down toilet paper, fewer cookies in a bag, less conditioner in squeeze tubes.
The changes are subtle and might evade less discerning shoppers. But retail industry experts say we could see more consumer products start shrinking in size or quantity -- or both -- because of rising costs.
Record levels of inflation means households are paying more for everyday purchases and it's costing companies more to produce packaged items like paper products, shampoos as well as food and beverage products.
Companies can raise prices, and many are. Others are charging customers the same price while offering less.
Product downsizing, also known as "shrinkflation," is happening with toilet paper, said Edgar Dworsky, a former assistant attorney general in Massachusetts who is a consumer advocate and editor of website ConsumerWorld.org.
"Downsizing happens during times of high inflation because companies that make everyday products are also paying more for raw materials, production and delivery costs," said Dworsky, who's tracking how period of high inflation impact consumer products for three decades.
BELIZE -- "Who wouldn't want to buy an island?" Marshall Mayer asks above the roar of the engine as the boat cuts through the still waters of the Caribbean Sea. Belize City is fast disappearing behind, as a group of mangrove-covered islands grows larger on the horizon.
"And I don't know about you," says Mayer, "but I certainly can't afford to buy an island on my own!"
Mayer is co-founder of Let's Buy an Island, an ambitious project that in 2018 set out to crowdfund the purchase of an island. By December 2019, the group's aspirations became reality, raising over $250,000 to complete the purchase of Coffee Caye, a 1.2-acre, uninhabited island off the coast of Belize, CNN reported.
The investors weren't just buying into a share of Belizean property. They were also investing in an unusual nation-building project, because Coffee Caye, reimagined as the "Principality of Islandia," complete with its own national flag, anthem and government, is also the world's newest "micronation"-- an entity that claims independence but isn't recognized as such by the international community.
Now, in early 2022, Mayer is leading the inaugural tour to Coffee Caye, as a mixed group of investors and intrigued tourists make landfall on the world's first crowdfunded island.
Times for apologetics have changed, and Mike Bird is right:
Christians have historically believed that their Scriptures are true and trustworthy, sufficient, infallible, and even inerrant. Amen!
Moreover, I would argue that it is quite valid and even necessary for Christians to assert the truthfulness of the Holy Scriptures. As part of the church’s own internal discourse, we must explain how God’s authority is, through the Holy Spirit, mediated in Scripture; explain how Scripture is simultaneously divine and human; and explain how Scripture is authoritative and normative for Christian belief and practice.
There are different ways of doing that task and different challenges to be met in the process. As such, Christian theologians over the centuries have had to tackle different problems, with different tools, for different ends when it comes to explaining the veracity of Scripture. I mean, it is one thing to defend Scripture against Manichean claims that the Bible is full of contradictions (i.e., Augustine) and another thing to explain how a text such the Bible can communicate and carry intended meaning rather than unleash an infinite array of disparate interpretations (i.e., Kevin Vanhoozer). The Battle for the Bible is different in every age.
And that is precisely my point.
We are no longer arguing with nineteenth-century German biblical criticism.
We are no longer doing the modernist vs. fundamentalist debates of the early twentieth century.
We are no longer arguing about whether the Fuller Seminary faculty of the 1970s believed in inerrancy or not.
We are not arguing whether Robert Gundry or Michael Licona violated the canons of inerrancy by their interpretations of the Gospels.
Those debates are now history. By all means, file them away for reference, but we do not need to articulate biblical infallibility/inerrancy as if we are living in the 1920s or 1970s.
Consequently, asking someone, “Are you pro- or anti- the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy” is so 1980s that it’s like asking someone, “Do you prefer VHS or Beta for your VCR?”
The following two clips illustrate the tensions at work among complementarians.
Colin Smothers wrote a piece for CBMW about me speaking during a church service last week and titled it, That Was Then, This Is Now. He pulled up an article I wrote back in 2013 answering a reader’s question about the difference between a woman preaching and a woman writing a blog post. He must have been doing some serious digging! I should thank him for reading through my archives so intently. But he’s right…
That Was Then
That was the good ol’ days when Aimee played by the complementarian rules. She discovered that they hold the subjugation of women higher than orthodox trinitarianism. She found that they value Danvers over Nicene. They demand that she publicly answer questions made by anonymous men, or lose her job. They misrepresent her work in their “academic” reviews. They turn her out of her own denomination by enabling their leaders to openly revile her, leaving her unprotected and traumatized by the whole process of asking for help.
That was then.
This is Now
Now I’m seeing more clearly just how destructive the complementarian system is. It’s all about power and hierarchy under the guise of benevolent care. (Not everyone in it, mind you.) The Bible is read through that lens. I am free from that now. I am free from the label complementarian or egalitarian. I don’t need them. The questions are more complex than that. Relationships are richer. Service and worship in God’s church is more reciprocal. Men and women are gift.
This whole time, I’ve been writing about men and women as disciples. As I said in my talk last Sunday, I struggled to find freedom in belonging as a disciple in the church and the reciprocity that we see all over the New Testament. I wrote freaking books out of my loneliness as a thinking woman. In the church. Many resonated with my struggle.
These vocal complementarian leaders demand me to give my interpretation of 1 Tim. 2:12 as if there is no 1 Cor. 14 or Romans 16. Or Song of Songs. They want us to read all the verses about discipleship in the Bible as if they were only written for the men.
Andrew Bartlett, author of an exceptionally fair, balanced book about women in ministry, has weathered some unfair reviews from complementarians. Here is his description of one:
Don Carson, in an editorial in Themelios, characterizes my reasoning as a case of “imperious ignorance”, which is “incoherent and idolatrous”. By “imperious ignorance” he means the extreme hermeneutical claim that no one can know for sure what God intended us to derive from the books that we have in the Bible – as he sees it: “legislating ignorance in order to avoid conclusions one wants to avoid”. He says “more than once (e.g., on 1 Cor 14:34-35) the author argues for the view that the arguments are so finely balanced that it is impossible to decide one way or the other.”
In fact, there is not one instance in the book where I say that the arguments are so finely balanced that it is impossible to decide one way or the other. I do conclude that interpretations of 1 Cor 14:34-35 which have been put forward to date do not fit the context. But I do not claim that it will never be possible for anyone to come up with a viable interpretive solution. And for all the other passages which feature in the current debate concerning men and women (Genesis, Paul’s letters, 1 Peter) I reach a positive interpretive conclusion, using hermeneutical methods similar to those which Carson himself uses in his writings.
Notably, I do use the expression “finely balanced arguments” once – hypothetically. That is in the first chapter, where I disclose what my expectations were when I started writing. In regard to women’s ministry, I thought that I “might find finely balanced arguments on both sides, meaning that any conclusion on that issue could only be tentative” (p. 15). It turned out I was wrong: on close examination, the arguments against women’s ministry were much weaker than I had expected, so I arrived at a firm conclusion that calling women to church leadership is not contrary to Scripture.
When advocates of complementarianism are unable to listen carefully to contrary views, why is that so? Is it in some sense too risky for them? Might it call into question what they have written and published? Are they trapped in a group-think bubble? Is there a deeper cultural issue in play? Is there some kind of insecurity which raises psychological or spiritual barriers? Is there sometimes an Upton Sinclair problem (“it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it”)?
now
OOPS! My comments have just disappeared before posting. SIGH. Let's see if I can start over.
When someone has committed to a particular point of view, has published in its support, and has a reputation for it - then learns that that view simply is no longer tenable, it may be more convenient to continue in its support than to acknowledge its failure. I wonder to what degree some of the loudest voices are constrained to shout out support for an untenable position because to confess otherwise would not only embarrass one but might also close off sources of both praise and income. Just a thought....
Excellent newsletter, Scot. Love your writings, and your line of thinking. Just finished your book the Church of Tov, and I have to say it was fantastic. Really important, and a new line of thinking and processing for me. Thank you for your work!