Meanderings, 16 December 2023

Good morning! May your Advent and Christmas season be blessed and creative!

What a find!

Jessica Vincent fondly remembers embarking on frequent thrifting trips — at secondhand stores, yard sales, flea markets — with her mother as a child. It’s a habit she retained into adulthood, and one that on Wednesday turned into a six-figure windfall for the Richmond, Virginia native (and the art and design auction house Wright), when a glass vase she purchased for $3.99 sold for over $107,000.

Vincent told CNN she and her partner were regular shoppers at the Goodwill store in question — ”probably two or three times a week,” she said, adding that thrifting was “just a funny thing to do, or a different thing to do on the way home to decompress.”

On the day of her lucrative purchase in June, Vincent noticed the vase immediately. “People tell me I have a good eye,” she said in a phone interview. “You can put me in an aisle with a whole bunch of dollar store stuff and I can pick out the one item with a little bit of value. I feel like I’ve trained myself — I’ve watched a lot of ‘Antiques Roadshow.’”

The bottle-shaped design features a swirling pattern — elegantly blown with translucent red and opaque seafoam green glass.

“As soon as I picked it up, I knew it was a nice piece,” Vincent continued. “I had no idea it was so nice, but I just knew it was good quality. I couldn’t believe nobody had picked it up before me.”

Crucially, Vincent said she recognized markings on the vase’s base indicating that it was made in Italy, from high-end Murano glass. But one word remained a mystery to her, so once home she shared photos of the piece, and its insignia, in a glassware Facebook group. Fellow members (and those in a separate group dedicated to Murano glass) soon identified the missing word as “Venini,” as in the famed Italian glassworks company.

Why do birds suddenly … sing?! Sing it with Karen Carpenter. (But don’t tell preachers and teachers they need to be like the birds.)

Not all birds sing, but those that do — some several thousand species — do it a lot. All over the world, as soon as light filters over the horizon, songbirds launch their serenades. They sing to defend their territory and croon to impress potential mates.

"Why birds sing is relatively well-answered," says Iris Adam, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Southern Denmark. The big question for her was this: Why do birds sing so darn much?

"For some reason," Adam says, birds have "an insane drive to sing." This means hours every day for some species, and that takes a lot of energy. Plus, singing can be dangerous.

"As soon as you sing, you reveal yourself," she says. "Like, where you are, that you even exist, where your territory is — all of that immediately is out in the open for predators, for everybody."

In a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, Adam and her colleagues offer a new explanation for why birds take that risk. They suggest that songbirds may not have much choice. They may have to sing a lot every day to give their vocal muscles the regular exercise they need to produce top-quality song.

These findings could be relevant to human voices too. "If you apply the bird results to the humans," says Adam, "anytime you stop speaking, for whatever reason, you might experience a loss in vocal performance."

Thank you, Veronica:

I have been struggling lately. Grief that generally rests quietly in my heart has been swelling up at unexpected, inauspicious moments. It began at the end of Divine Liturgy on the third Sunday in November. Sorrow had filled my heart that morning, though I wasn’t sure why. When our priest came out to name those whose anniversary of “falling asleep in the Lord” occurred in November, I stiffened. Glancing in my direction, he mentioned Ana Verónica, the daughter I lost in utero four years ago. As he was yet speaking, I felt my 10-year-old entwine her fingers with mine and lean against me as if to protect me from the deluge of emotion that she knew would arise at her sister’s mention. Together, we walked to the side of the church to chant the prayers for the dead, lit candles in hand, though I could barely see through my tears, as grief, intensified by the unexpected reminder of my loss, enveloped me.

Responses to losing a child in the womb are as unique as the people who experience the loss. For those who respond with sorrow, it can be tricky, for how do you grieve someone you’ve never seen or held, and with whom the most poignant shared memory may be the traumatic moment of loss? Like many families who have experienced miscarriage, my family has developed particular rituals of grief and remembrance. When we decorate for Christmas, for example, we hang a little, misshapen felt stocking for Ana Verónica at the end of the line. Her stocking faces ours, because whereas we are marching towards Heaven, she looks down at us from above. Putting up the stocking every year is painful, but to love is to feel pain. Did not Christ give us the ultimate example?

When we set up the children’s felt Advent wreath, we place in the center a little blue box I bought in Mexico years before I married and became a mother. Decorated with an image of la Guadalupana, it contains Ana Verónica’s remains, another reminder of her presence. And in July, on the day that she was due to be born, the kids insist on baking cupcakes and singing Las Mañanitas (a traditional Mexican birthday song) to their sister. She is very much with us.

O my!

Three in ten Americans read digital books. Whether they’re accessing online textbooks or checking out the latest bestselling e-book from the public library, the majority of these readers are subject to both the greed of Big Publishing and the priorities of Big Tech. In fact, Amazon’s Kindle held 72% of the e-reader market in 2022. And if there’s one thing we know about Big Tech companies like Amazon, their real product isn’t the book. It’s the user data.

Major publishers are giving Big Tech free rein to watch what you read and where, including books on sensitive topics, like if you check out a book on self care after an abortion. Worse, tech and publishing corporations are gobbling up data beyond your reading habits—today, there are no federal laws to stop them from surveilling people who read digital books across the entire internet.

Reader surveillance is a deeply intersectional threat, according to a congressional letter issued last week from a coalition of groups whose interests span civil rights, anti-surveillance, anti-book ban, racial justice, reproductive justice, LGBTQ+, immigrant, and antimonopoly. Our letter calls on federal lawmakers to investigate the harms of tech and publishing corporations’ powerful hold over digital book access. 

This investigation is an essential first step to revive the right to read without fear of having your interests used against you. Because unfortunately, that right is on life support when it comes to digital books. 

He lost his job: Does God have something better? These are some wise thoughts.

I [the author of the post] was lamenting on the phone with a friend yesterday about the loss of both of our jobs this year.

The frustration was real, especially for him as he’s subsequently missed out on a couple of roles that would have suited him well. And here we are coming up to Christmas and he still has no job after four or five months. I’ve got a lot more social capital than he, so things seem to be slotting together well for me. Not so for him

So we chatted for a while, processing the last few months. And we kinda made this comment as we chatted, talking through the pressure and uncertainty that losing your job puts you through.

“Well if God has taken that away then he has something better for us, that’s what we have to believe.”

And on the surface, or for an instant, we affirmed that for each other. But then something kicked in – for both of us. And I like to think it was the gospel that kicked in! For we realised, pretty much at the same time as we said it, that that is not strictly true. Or at least it may not be strictly true.

The truth could be far more complex than that. Both of us liked our jobs and believed we were good at them, and they satisfied a certain number of criteria in our lives. But that does not mean that God has some better job for us in the future than those jobs were for us in the past. It doesn’t mean that’s there a more rewarding role with more financial and experiential rewards than what we just left behind.

That simply isn’t the case. It could be that for both of us we’ve peaked – at least in terms of work. I hope not, but it could be. Those roles could be the best ones we have ever had and will ever have going forward. That’s just the case. To say that God has something better for us – workwise at least – is not something we can say with any deep assertion.

And that’s why our conversation then took a different turn. A different, deeper and richer turn. I said to my friend in response to our initial assertion:

“Actually that’s not quite right. What we need to take from this is this: not that God HAS something better for us, but that God IS that something better.”

And as I said it, I think we both got it. I think we kinda knew it, but hadn’t articulated it.

You see, that’s the central point of what it means to be a Christian. And that’s the central point of the Christmas season. Not that God gives us stuff. Not that God gives us the job we want. Not that God gives us a better job than the one we had before. But that God gives us God! God is the something better. And if we just allow him to show us that, even in the tough times, it will make all of the difference.

Let’s define it even more sharply. God is not something better, he is SOMEONE better. God doesn’t desire to simply give us created stuff, he desires to share himself – the Creator – with us.

She takes Absorption Vacations, yes!

A few weeks ago, I worked hard to get everything newsletter-related in order. I polished interviews, finished essays, put together threads — and then I scheduled them to publish at a later date. I did a lot more work so that I could take time truly away from work.

This is how I take vacation now. It’s how a lot of us take vacation now. Because there is no give in the system, no capacity for a slow-down. If you take time off, the work that you would’ve done that week doesn’t disappear. It still needs to get done. It’s just a matter of when.

I’ve tried different strategies to avoid the before-vacation pile-up. I’ve kept half-attached to work. I’ve tried outsourcing it. The best strategy I’ve found is to do a lot of planning so as to spread that work out over the weeks and months before. And you know what, it works. Flexibility is a huge perk of my current self-employment, and I’m grateful I’ve been able to figure out a way to make the workload sustainable in so many ways — including when and if I want to leave that work behind for a bit.

But there’s another secret — not to spreading out the work, but to ensure that I get some time away that feels restful and restorative (and, as a bonus, truly excited to get back to my daily work). This isn’t possible with every break from work — there’s a difference, after all, between a “trip” and a “vacation,” and so much of it has to do with the presence of children, or relatives, or a packed touristy schedule, or the overarching reason for the trip. But it works for me.

I bring way more books than I could possibly read — but I still read a lot of them. I throw myself utterly into the pursuit, which morphs from a task to “what we do here.” Not because I want to “win” or be “productive” at book reading, but because I want to go deep into other worlds — and forget, however temporarily, about mine. I often read a book a day, if not more, and the vast majority of them fiction.

This sort of absorption is only possible when you’re intentional about it. You leave your phone in the other room. You don’t watch a TV show or TikTok before bed. You ignore small messes. You read. You read with your coffee, with your snacks, with your tea, with your cocktail — and then keep reading after dinner. You do it in part because you can’t do it, at least not like this, at any other time.

I’ve done this at the beach. I’ve done this in the woods. I’ve done it at a hotel. I’ve done it with close friends, with my partner, and alone. I’ve done a very close approximation of it in the space where I live, but that took extra intention: there’s always something to attend to when you’re in your own space. It works best in places where there isn’t much else to do, save maybe go on a walk. The island where I live happens to be one of those places, but there are many, many others.

People sometimes call these sorts of vacations “retreats,” but I’m talking about something far less bougie that’s never had the word “workplace” put in front of it. Back when I was in academia, I knew some professors who’d take a long weekend at a cabin for a “writing retreat,” but it was never actually about rest. It was a productivity hack, a way to escape their daily obligations so as to do more work. That can be incredibly useful. But that’s not a vacation.

Walter Liefeld Obituary, in which I am honored to have been quoted:

By Bob Goldsborough

Chicago Tribune

Walter L. Liefeld was one of the first three full-time faculty members at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, where he taught classes on the New Testament for 31 years.

“He was the ultimate relational professor — with students, with colleagues, with administration,” said Scot McKnight, a New Testament professor at Northern Seminary in Lisle. “He did not want to control, but instead offered wisdom to those with humility to listen.”

Liefeld, 96, died of natural causes on Nov. 13 while in hospice at a long-term care center in Elmhurst, said his daughter Beverly Hancock.

Born in the Brooklyn borough of New York City, Liefeld attended New York University and the former National Bible Institute, a Bible college in New Jersey, where he earned a Bachelor of Theology in Bible in 1948. He went on to pick up a master’s degree in Greek and Latin from Columbia University in New York in 1951 and a Ph.D. in Hellenistic religions from Columbia in 1967.

Liefeld taught Greek at National Bible Institute after it was renamed Shelton College, and also was a pastor at several churches on Long Island. He was a staff member for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship from 1951 until 1954.

In 1963, Liefeld took a teaching post at Trinity. He went on to chair the school’s New Testament department and served for a time as its interim dean. He later taught classes at Tyndale Theological Seminary in the Netherlands, and was the seminary’s interim president from 2000 until 2002.

McKnight, who was a student of Liefeld’s and then a colleague at Trinity, said Liefeld was an avuncular sort, likening him to children’s TV host Fred Rogers.

“On the first day, I watched and said to myself, ‘This is what I want to do for the rest of my life.’ I have been a professor for 41 years, and I am a professor because of the influence and model of Walt Liefeld,” McKnight said.

Doug Moo, a former student and later a colleague, noted that Liefeld’s pastoral characteristics led him to focus on students’ well-being.

“Walt was a good teacher and certainly had the ability to contribute to scholarly articles in the academy,” Moo said. “But he chose to focus on student needs, meeting one-on-one with men and women who were going through various struggles. Some faculty, by virtue of their writing, drew students to Trinity. Walt was one of those faculty members who kept students at Trinity.”

Liefeld wrote numerous books and Bible commentaries. In 1984, he wrote a book for pastors titled “New Testament Exposition: From Text to Sermon.”

“He was a thoroughgoing scholar in his discipline as his writings will attest. Yet he never allowed academia — notably the ‘publish or perish’ pressure — to overwhelm his desire to see the gospel made clear to everyone, and to nurture spiritual growth in others,” said Linda Cannell, a former Trinity professor.

One of Liefeld’s key areas of scholarship involved women in Christian leadership. With a colleague, Ruth Tucker, he co-authored a 1987 book, “Daughters of the Church,” which explored what they felt were the underappreciated roles of women in Christian theology, movements and growth, dating back 2,000 years.

“Walt had the courage to stand up for women in a culture that suppressed the gift of women,” McKnight said. “He had the foresight to co-author with Ruth Tucker a book that has had a long, good and influential life about women in the Bible and church.”

Cannell called Liefeld “an untiring supporter of women in leadership and ministry.”

From 1991 until 1996, Liefeld served as senior pastor of Christ Church in Lake Forest and he later became its permanent senior pastor.

Liefeld also served as a trustee for InterVarsity Christian Fellowship USA.

“Walter was extremely insightful. He could read a complex situation and bring clarity,” said former InterVarsity Christian Fellowship President Alec Hill. “He loved both truth and people. His sense of mission was always yoked in tandem with compassion and gentleness.”

In addition to his daughter, Liefeld is survived by his wife of 64 years, Olive; a son, David; another daughter, Holly Nunn; and seven grandchildren.

Services were held.

By Bob Goldsborough

Chicago Tribune

•

Published: Dec 15, 2023 at 3:56 pm

Goldsborough is a freelance reporter.