Meanderings, 16 October 2021
Good morning, friends!
Photo by Timothy Eberly on Unsplash
Which coffee maker do you use?
When it comes to single-serve coffee machines, shoppers are often drawn to their convenience. The machines allow you to brew a cup of joe in seconds — they’re a quick and easy way to get your caffeine fix if you’re rushing out the door or are between meetings while working from home. Many people use them at home, but smaller machines can also be useful in dorm rooms or on desks in the office.
In recent years, single-serve coffee machines have become increasingly popular. In a survey of 1,526 coffee drinkers 18 years old and above conducted by the National Coffee Association this fall, 23 percent of respondents who drank coffee in the past day said they used single-cup brewers, up from 15 percent in January 2013.
“Popularity of single-serve machines has been on the rise over recent years, also leading to more variety of machines on the market,” said Jessica Rodriguez, certifications program manager for the Specialty Coffee Association, a nonprofit coffee trade organization. “Innovation and new technology from manufacturers have led to machines that have a variety of single-serve options, from espresso to hot coffee to iced coffee and even tea.”
We talked to experts about the pros and cons of single-serve coffee machines and features you should consider when looking to purchase one. Using their advice as filters, we also rounded up highly-rated options from brands like Keurig, Nespresso, Hamilton Beach and more.
The skills of players and broadcast of pro pickleball tournaments have improved exponentially over the last couple of years. Gone are the days of watching a single, static feed with no commentary from the baseline at much too high of an angle and having no idea what the score is. The pickleball associations have invested resources to produce much more attractive online feeds, complete with insightful commentators and attractive on-screen graphics.
A recent tournament in Texas was one such feed that I enjoyed watching, and it culminated with the following match point in the mixed doubles final: [video]
It was an incredible point with all sorts of action and variety, and as an amateur, it was the sort of skilled exchange that made my jaw drop!
While we’re not apt to have such incredible drawn-out points such as this, I did get thinking about how much we, as amateur players, can learn from watching the game's top pros and then apply some of these skills to our own game. I came up with a list of 4.
Scot McKnight and his daughter Laura Barringer are the authors of A Church called Tov, a book that helps church to identify toxic systems and leaders and to move into goodness (tov).
JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli archaeologists on Monday said they have unearthed a massive ancient winemaking complex dating back some 1,500 years.
The complex, discovered in the central town of Yavne, includes five wine presses, warehouses, kilns for producing clay storage vessels and tens of thousands of fragments and jars, they said.
Jon Seligman, one of the directors of the excavation, said the wine made in the area was known as “Gaza” wine and exported across the region. The researchers believe the Yavne location was the main production facility for the label.
“This was a prestige wine, a light white wine, and it was taken to many, many countries around the Mediterranean,” he said, including Egypt, Turkey, Greece and possibly southern Italy.
Seligman said wine was not just an important export and source of enjoyment in ancient times. “Beyond that, this was a major source of nutrition and this was a safe drink because the water was often contaminated, so they could drink wine safely,” he said.
The antiquities authority said the complex was uncovered over the past two years during excavations being conducted as part of the development of Yavne, a town located south of Tel Aviv.
Nope, we didn’t see it but would love to:
MUNDELEIN, IL — A rare hummingbird, reportedly seen only once before in Illinois, was spotted at the backyard bird feeder of a Lake County Forest Preserves employee in recent months.
The Mexican violetear, known as a Colibri thalassinus, was first spotted by the husband of Jeanna Cristino, a graphic designer and editor of Horizons magazine for the forest preserves, in August. Jason Cristino noticed the bird on a red feeder filled with homemade nectar on Friday, Aug. 20.
Referring to himself as a "casual bird observer," Jason knew that there was something special about the hummingbird and did some research to identify it.
A longtime family friend, who is knowledgeable about birds, confirmed that it was indeed unusual to see this bird in Illinois and notified his birding network. The hummingbird, which averages between 3.8 to 4.7 inches long and is much larger than the common Ruby-throated hummingbird species in the area, flew from nearby oak trees to Cristino's feeder throughout the day Saturday.
That weekend, the Cristinos decided to open up their backyard to allow others a rare glimpse at the bird. More than 100 birders ended up making their way to the Lake County backyard with viewing scopes and cameras with long lenses to catch a glimpse of the coveted vagrant hummingbird.
Samantha L. Miller on pastor complaints about pastoral theologians:
Last month I came across a complaint on the internet. It was pretty standard as internet complaints go, but it stayed with me because it was a complaint I have heard often from pastors and students, and it gets to the heart of what I understand myself to be doing as a theologian and teacher.
The complaint was about an interview published by Christian Century this summer, a conversation between William H. Willimon and Stanley Hauerwas about the work of pastoral care. The complaint I saw was not one of the lengthy critical comments on the Christian Century page but a comment on Twitter. The author, a pastor, wrote that academic theologians talking about pastoral care was invalid. The sense of the statement was that academics don’t have the experience of doing pastoral care and therefore should not talk about it. I understand the complaint in one way: Pastoral care is a practical thing, and to only theorize and never practice puts one in a category of less expertise in the area than someone who practices it. I also understand that Willimon and Hauerwas are challenging the current practice of pastoral care as they see it. Pastors who are in parishes and other ministries doing pastoral care may feel they and their ministries, their vocations, and in some cases their identities, are being challenged or even attacked.
At the same time, I wonder about this complaint. If practice is the only thing that matters, then why do we send pastors to seminary at all? Why don’t we just treat pastoring as an apprenticeship or on-the-job training? As an academic theologian, I feel my own vocation challenged by this complaint.
The complaining pastor assumes that anyone who practices pastoral care automatically has more expertise than anyone who has not practiced, whether or not they have studied theology, including practical theology, at a theory level. Leaving aside the issue that Willimon has served churches (and is a professor of practical theology), there is a category distinction here. Practical and theoretical expertise are both important, and they are not the same kind of expertise. Indeed, each kind needs the other.
Anne Helen Petersen responding to a question about the meaning of trauma:
I find myself deeply compelled by the way you describe and define trauma in your work. Can you talk a bit more about your approach, and what’s been lost in previous understandings more tied to medicalization?
I came to my approach toward trauma from a place of my own suffering. I was pretty sick for a long while and one of the things I found myself resisting in my own experiences with doctors and therapists was this relentless push to a fix, which felt coded as a return to a normal, mostly able body. Even when professionals didn’t use that language explicitly, there was this sense that we were always building momentum to some hypothetical, mythical space where the circumstances of my trauma and the effects of it would just be fixed. This didn’t track with what I was seeing around me and feeling in my body, so I tried to dig in.
I was diagnosed with a rare, benign brain tumor in graduate school and I needed ten craniotomies to manage it. Some of the effects of my tumor simply could not be fixed, it left permanent side effects, but more relevant, so many of my symptoms sat firmly outside of what I was perceiving as medical problems that had clean treatments. I did need medical treatment and I wanted that, I just also found that the medicalization of trauma meant that the treatment I was being offered in the barrage of tests and surgeries was not capacious enough to help me manage the ways my experience of trauma suddenly disabled and thus marginalized my body.
I really believe that when bodies are traumatized they are othered, and depending on your other embodied identity markers, this marginalization requires more than just medical intervention, it requires social intervention as well. It was in working with a trauma therapist myself and reading about trauma that I came to a definition of trauma, building from folks like Ronnie Janoff-Bulman and Didier Fassin.
Janoff-Bulman talks about trauma in terms of what she calls “assumptive worlds” (here is the article) which are these spaces of strongly held beliefs about the self, the world, the day to day. These worlds are built socially and so our assumptions are confirmed by our experiences out in the world. Then, if something happens, a traumatic rupture, or even a series of smaller traumatic events — like what we’ve seen with the relentless nature of COVID, climate change, global geopolitical violence — we start to see people have to confront what Janoff-Bulman calls “anomalous data.” Our assumptions about the world just don’t track anymore. This then causes anxiety and a sense of helplessness and a whole host of other embodied experiences that make life harder.
These embodied experiences then exist in a world that Didier Fassin and Richard Rechtman describe in their book The Empire of Trauma: a world where it becomes natural for people to articulate trauma, and that the social response — which is often therapy — is thought to be a signal of progress. Within this sort of universalizing understanding of trauma, we can’t really address trauma without really conforming to the social systems in which we’re embedded. Put differently, no matter who you are, you understand your trauma through the social systems that help you understand who you are.
To me, medical understandings of trauma is just one part of the traumatized person. Recently I listened to an episode of the Moth in which a woman named Jennifer talks about her contentious relationship with her body. But by the end of the story, which is sort of a coming to terms with her own body, she shifts from “I have a body” to “I am a body.” The medical definitions of trauma are like the first category: I have a body and it is part of my job in taking care of it to control it, fix it, normalize it, and return it to status quo definitions of it and boundaries around it. The more social definition of trauma, the one that demedicalizes it and situates it alongside other experiences that are inflected by power, politics, pop culture, social structures — that version of trauma is like the realization that, I am a body. That understanding makes room for more kinds of suffering and more possibilities for coping, for hope, and for progress outside of the assumed medical, therapeutic progress.