We leaped over Spring this week and landed smack-dab in the middle of July’s heat. As I began this newsletter — on Wednesday — it is mid 80s and sultry. Who knew?
Saw our first Cedar Waxwings (image source) this week:
What we do know is that we’ve got some fun meanderings for you:
“I have no idea” (perfectly normal comment until you realize you’re talking to a pilot who is asked where he is and is about to land)
TAMPA, Fla. (WFLA) — A passenger with no flying experience made a successful landing at Florida’s Palm Beach International Airport after the pilot suffered an apparent medical emergency.
The plane, a Cessna Caravan, took off from Leonard M. Thompson International Airport in the Bahamas on Tuesday and was over the Florida coastline when the pilot became incapacitated. The unidentified passenger took over the controls and radioed for help.
“I’ve got a serious situation here. My pilot has gone incoherent. I have no idea how to fly the airplane,” the unnamed passenger said, as heard in audio captured by LiveATC.com.
“Roger. What’s your position?” Air Traffic Control responded.
“I have no idea,” the passenger said. “I can see the coast of Florida in front of me. And I have no idea.”
The air traffic controllers told the man to keep the wings level and continue up the coast until they were able to find his plane above Boca Raton. They also asked for the passenger’s cellphone number, to better communicate while he was at the controls.
Robert Morgan, one of the air traffic controllers, was outside the tower reading a book when he was called in to assist.
Although Morgan had never flown a Cessna Caravan, he was able to guide the man to land safely by looking at a picture of the cockpit.
The aircraft touched down at approximately 12:30 p.m., the FAA confirmed.
“You just witnessed a couple passengers land that plane,” one of the controllers said over the radio.
Years ago, during Vacation Bible School, I learned a little song based on Jesus’s words to his fisherman-followers. It went like this:
I will make you fishers of men,
Fishers of men,
Fishers of men.
I will make you fishers of men
If you follow me…
Men, men, men, men. Four times. I must have unconsciously internalized that, because I heard this: the male Jesus told his male followers to go find other males and invite them to follow the Lord.
These words of Jesus to which I’m referring are recorded by Matthew (4:19). The English Standard Version (ESV), published by Crossway in 2001, translates Matthew’s Greek this way: “And he [i.e., Jesus] said to them, ‘Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.’” But after the last quotation mark in this version, a little footnote appears adding, ”The Greek word anthropoi refers here to both men and women.”
Wait. What? Why for the sake of holy love if they knew women were included did they add us only as a footnote?
You recognize the word anthropoi, right? It’s the word they translated as ”men,” and it’s the root from which we get anthropology, the study of people. Humans. And human people include, but are not limited to, men.
Since the time I learned the little song, I have spent decades mentally flipping the English ”men” in other places to “men and women” when the Greek is inclusive, but I missed it on this one. Only recently did it occur to me that Jesus had women in mind too.
I wondered what other passages with male-leaning words in the English I needed to re-learn. Below are a few of interest.
A recent graduate from suburban Wheaton College put his thrifting skills to use, flipping an unlikely find into a fortune.
On his way out of a Chicago-area Goodwill in September, 22-year-old Terrelle Brown said he spotted an ashtray on which was painted a unique cartoon character locked away in a cabinet.
"I didn't know how I recognized it, but I knew I recognized it from somewhere," Brown said. "And just like my gut feeling was like, 'hey, like, can you like, let me into the cabinet?'"
Brown purchased the ashtray for just $10, then said he quickly ran to his car for fear the Goodwill workers would realize the value of the item.
"I ended up purchasing it almost like ran to my car, because I didn't want them to be like, 'oh, like wait, come back. Like we actually know what that is,'" Brown said.
Once inside his vehicle, Brown said he immediately began looking up the artwork on the ashtray and verified it was a piece by Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara, who has made a splash in the market over recent years -- particularly growing in popularity due to vintage shoppers posting videos to TikTok.
It turned out to be Nara's original "Too Young to Die" work from 2002.
Bird story of the week, and that’s not counting seeing a chestnut sided warbler this week (image source):
SCHAUMBURG, Ill. — This is a story about how an orphaned bird found a new home on Mother’s Day.
In a busy Chick-fil-A parking lot near the intersection of Barrington Road and Schaumburg Road in Schaumburg, a six-year-old Hawk Commerford noticed a chick alone while out with his father.
“Me and my dad looked for his mom but we couldn’t find them,” Hawk said.
Hawk said he tried to keep the bird in one spot to keep it from going in the street.
While Hawk kept the chick safe, dad called the Willowbrook Wildlife Center for advice.
“You need to know that you’re not going to leave a baby that doesn’t accept it. You’re not going to put a baby with a family that has different size babies. Geese are very welcoming and good parents as far taking in and adopting other family members,” Annette Prince of Chicago Bird Collision Monitors said.
They swiftly scooped up the gosling and drove it around, finally finding a goose family with other babies.
The geese ran to the gosling and eagerly took it in with the rest of the family.
“It’s a wonderful thing to watch and see him be out in the wild where he belongs and hopefully have a safe and happy life,” Prince said.
When Sarah Riccardi-Swartz moved from New York City to a small Appalachian town in West Virginia in the fall of 2017, she was searching for an answer to a puzzling question. Why had a group of conservative American Christians converted to Russian Orthodoxy?
"It's typically an immigrant faith, so I was really interested in that experience and why it spoke to converts," said Riccardi-Swartz, a postdoctoral fellow in the Recovering Truth project at Arizona State University.
Riccardi-Swartz's study focused on a community of mostly former evangelical Christians and Catholics who had joined the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia (ROCOR). The West Virginia location, in addition to having a church parish, was also home to the largest English-speaking Russian Orthodox monastery in the world.
Over a year of doing research, Riccardi-Swartz learned that many of these converts had grown disillusioned with social and demographic change in the United States. In ROCOR, they felt they had found a church that has remained the same, regardless of place, time and politics. But Riccardi-Swartz also found strong strains of nativism, white nationalism and pro-authoritarianism, evidenced by strong admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin.
A pair of ospreys that nested near live electrical lines atop a northern Indiana utility pole now have a safer home thanks to a utility crew that moved their nest.
Indiana Michigan Power workers installed a new, stand-alone pole Thursday near the nest the raptors had built on a utility pole inches from live electrical lines in the Noble County town of Avilla.
The crew then carefully moved the ospreys' nest to the new pole, which was outfitted with a nest support platform and wooden perches for the lovebirds.
By Friday, the nesting pair had accepted their new nesting site, which is not far from their original nesting location, WPTA-TV reported.
Indiana Michigan Power posted several photos on Facebook of the nest-moving effort, which it called “Operation Osprey"
“We’re happy to report the osprey have been seen in their new home, safe and sound!” the utility said in its posting.
Osprey females typically lay three eggs between mid-April and late May. They incubate for about five or six weeks before they hatch, the station reported.
When the Supreme Court issued its landmark abortion-rights decision, Roe v. Wade, in 1973, the most intransigent opponents of the decision were not the legislatures of southern Bible Belt states such as Mississippi and Oklahoma. Indeed, doctors in many southern states—including Arkansas, Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Virginia—had been performing legal hospital abortions for at least a few carefully defined “therapeutic” reasons for years before Roe. The state legislatures that presented the strongest defiance to legalizing abortion were those of the heavily Catholic states of the Northeast. Barely 10 percent of Massachusetts legislators supported legalizing abortion in 1973, according to an archival American Civil Liberties Union document. Instead of permitting the procedure up to the point of viability (about 28 weeks at the time), as the Supreme Court mandated, the Massachusetts state legislature responded to Roe by passing a bill prohibiting abortion after the 20th week of pregnancy. Rhode Island’s statehouse presented even stronger opposition: It kept abortion clinics out of the state until 1975, when its anti-abortion law was overturned by a federal court.
Today, of course, Massachusetts and the rest of New England are in the vanguard of states that will protect abortion access if—when, as it now appears—Roe v. Wade is rescinded. And many of the southern states that liberalized their abortion laws in the late 1960s and early 1970s are now at the forefront of the movement to restrict abortion.
This was not merely a geographic shift, trading one region for another, but a more fundamental transformation of the anti-abortion movement’s political ideology. In 1973 many of the most vocal opponents of abortion were northern Democrats who believed in an expanded social-welfare state and who wanted to reduce abortion rates through prenatal insurance and federally funded day care. In 2022, most anti-abortion politicians are conservative Republicans who are skeptical of such measures. What happened was a seismic religious and political shift in opposition to abortion that has not occurred in any other Western country.
Before the mid-1970s, active opposition to abortion in the United States looked almost exactly like opposition to abortion in Britain, Western Europe, and Australia: It was concentrated mainly among Catholics. As late as 1980, 70 percent of the members of the nation’s largest anti-abortion organization, the National Right to Life Committee, were Catholic. As a result, the states that were most resistant to abortion legalization were, in most cases, the states with the highest concentration of Catholics, most of which were in the North and leaned Democratic.
This fit the pattern across the Western world: Countries with large numbers of devout Catholics restricted abortion, while those that were predominantly Protestant did not. Sweden—where Catholics made up less than 1 percent of the population—legalized some abortions as early as the 1930s; Ireland did not follow suit until 2018.
If the United States had followed this script, opposition to abortion probably would have weakened with the decline of Catholic-church attendance rates. Like Canada and England, where the leading conservative parties are overwhelmingly supportive of abortion rights, the Republican Party in the United States might have remained what it was for most of the 1970s: a heavily Protestant party whose leaders generally leaned in favor of abortion rights.
But in the United States, the anti-abortion movement did not remain predominantly Catholic. Southern evangelical Protestants, who had once hesitated to embrace the anti-abortion movement in the belief that it was a sectarian Catholic campaign, began enlisting in the cause in the late ’70s and ’80s. Motivated by a conviction that Roe v. Wade was a product of liberal social changes they opposed—including secularization, the sexual revolution, second-wave feminism, and a rights-conscious reading of the Constitution—they made opposition to the ruling a centerpiece of the new Christian right. When they captured control of the Republican Party in the late 20th century, they transformed the GOP from a northern-centered mainline Protestant party that was moderately friendly to abortion rights into a hotbed of southern populism that blended economic libertarianism with Bible Belt moral regulation.
The reporting in that NPR story, while not exactly false, is very misleading. The people being discussed are an extremely small number in an extremely small Orthodox jurisdiction. Every group has people on the fringe, and in this country there are probably more non-Orthodox admirers of Putin than there are are Orthodox of that bent. All the ROCOR people I know, on line and in real life - for that matter, all the Orthodox people I know - deplore what Putin has done. Orthodox teaching specifically calls out phyletism as sin. Makes me wonder what exactly NPR is up to.
Dana
Hi Scott, I know this isn’t germane to today’s blog, but I’m stuck in a muddle regarding the issue of Judas’ presence at the Last Supper when Jesus passed the bread and cup. What do you think? Thanks for your help!