Meanderings, 17 June 2023

My favorite seminary weeks of the year are intensive weeks with students. Our New Testament students just finished a wonderful, wonderful week and it takes a few days to get over the excitement of meeting daily with such a wonderful group of students. Cohort model education is the best.

And the students are ready now to relax and enter their summer:

Photo by Dan Burton on Unsplash

Thank you Allyson Felix:

My former U.S. Track and Field teammate Tori Bowie, who was found dead in her home in Florida on May 2, of complications related to childbirth at 8 months pregnant, was a beautiful runner. She was effortless. At the Rio Olympics, I ran the second leg of the 4 x 100 relay. Tori was the anchor. When she got the baton, I remember thinking, “it’s over.” She just accelerated. When she crossed the finish line, I couldn’t wait to run over to her to celebrate. It was her first, and only, Olympic gold medal. …

Tori was 32 when she died. According to the autopsy, possible complications contributing to Bowie’s death included respiratory distress and eclampsia—seizures brought on by preeclampsia, a high blood pressure disorder that can occur during pregnancy. I developed preeclampsia during my pregnancy with my daughter Camryn, who was born in November 2018. The doctors sent me to the hospital, where I would deliver Camryn during an emergency C-section, at 32 weeks. I was unsure if I was going to make it. If I was ever going to hold my precious daughter.

Like so many Black women, I was unaware of the risks I faced while pregnant. According to the CDC, in 2021 the maternal mortality rate for Black women was 2.6 times the rate for white women. About five days before I gave birth to Camryn, I was having Thanksgiving dinner with my family. I mentioned that my feet were swollen. As we went around the table, the women shared their experiences during pregnancy. My cousin said she also had swollen feet. My mom didn’t. Not once did someone say, ‘oh, well, that’s one of the indicators of preeclampsia.’ None of us knew. When I became pregnant, my doctor didn’t sit me down and tell me, ‘these are things that you should look for in your pregnancy, because you are at a greater risk to experience these complications.’

That needs to change, now, especially in light of Tori’s tragic passing. Awareness is huge. Serena Williams had near-death complications during her pregnancy. Beyoncé developed preeclampsia. I hate that it takes Tori’s situation to put this back on the map and to get people to pay attention to it. But oftentimes, we need that wake-up call.

The medical community must do its part. There are so many stories of women dying who haven’t been heard. Doctors really need to hear the pain of Black women.

Luckily, there’s hope on several fronts. …

Prom, a special one:

OAK BROOK, Ill. — Teens rocked their best dresses and suits as they danced, bowled and played games Saturday night while attending Advocate Children’s Hospital’s teen patient prom at Pinstripes in Oak Brook.

“Prom can be a milestone for teenagers each spring, but too often patients battling complex medical conditions miss out. We are thrilled to host a prom where our patients can relax and have fun with friends in a safe setting,” said Kevynne Dudek, child life specialist, who helped organize the special event. “Being able to share this experience with them and see firsthand how much fun they are having is very special.”

The Dunkin’ and Dancin’ ’till the Sun Goes Down Prom was held for patients, ages 13-21, with complex medical conditions that have previously prevented them from attending similar events in the past, and was the first such event to take place in the Chicagoland area.

Activities at the event included a pink carpet entrance, donut wall, dinner, dancing, bocce ball, bowling, a magician, and board games for patients alongside some of their favorite care doctors and nurses.

Thank you, pastor Tomas Sanabria:

Pastor Tomas Sanabria lives in a four-story duplex in Chicago’s Humboldt Park neighborhood and said since last summer he’s been housing migrants on the second and third floor of his private building.

“I just see it as an extension to the overall ministry that I’ve been running for years and that’s why it was easy for me to say yes,” he said.

The pastor of Iglesia del Pacto Evangelico de Albany Park bought his home in 1989. He said over the years the space has been used for ministry and outreach programs, including youth groups and now a temporary home for migrant families.

“This is a crisis that we’re all facing and trying to deal with as a nation and the churches are doing their part and I guess I’m doing my part as well because my life is ministry,” he said.

The pastor showed NBC 5 the space Tuesday afternoon and introduced a mother of two from Venezuela. She’s been staying at the private residence with her family. They have their own room and share the kitchen, bathroom, and living space with 12 other migrants. She told NBC 5 off-camera she’s grateful for the hospitality.

“We receive immigrants every Sunday since I no longer have space here then we make sure they’re connected to an agency or social services—not everybody is going to a center,” he said.

While the city is tracking the number of migrants arriving and staying in temporary shelters and police stations, a spokesperson said at this time the city is not tracking the number of new arrivals staying in private residences.

They call it “pebble accretion”:

More than 4.5 billion years ago, Earth began forming from a blend of dust and gas that was around our young Sun. Eventually, it grew larger and larger until it became similar to the planet we live on today — a process scientists now say happened much faster than they once thought. That formation, they say, also included water, a detail indicating that finding another habitable planet is not out of the question.

In a new study released in Nature this week, researchers state that Earth formed within just 3 million years. That’s notably faster than previous estimates placing the timeline up to 100 million years.

Millions of years may not seem quick to mere humans, but on an astronomical scale, it’s incredibly fast. In the 4.6 billion years of our solar system’s existence, 3 million years is like a blink. That is the equivalent of less than a minute in a 24-hour day. (If Earth had formed over tens of millions of years, that would be equivalent to 5 to 15 minutes in a day.)

“Planets can go from their infancy to the size of Earth and Mars within just a few million years, which is really, really fast compared to the hundreds of millions of years that was previously thought,” said Isaac Onyett, lead author of the study and Ph.D. candidate at the University of Copenhagen. “We can also predict that if other planets formed … by the same mechanism, then the ingredients required for life such as water, should be present on other planets and other systems, so there’s a greater chance that we have water worlds elsewhere in the galaxy.”

The authors assert that this rapid genesis occurred through a theory called pebble accretion. The general idea, according to co-author and cosmochemist Martin Bizzarro, is that planets are born in a disk of dust and gas. When they reach a certain size, they rapidly attract those pebbles like a vacuum cleaner. Some of those pebbles are icy and could provide a water supply to Earth, thought of as pebble snow. This would have led to an early version of our planet, known as proto-Earth, that is approximately half the size of our present-day planet. (Our current rendition of Earth likely formed after a larger impact about 100 million years later, which also led to the formation of our moon.)

Once again, Beth Barr shows it took a man to … :

Rick Warren, the retired pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, failed Tuesday to convince the Southern Baptist Convention to restore his church to its fold after his 2021 decision to ordain three women to the pastoral ministry. In a vote taken in New Orleans Tuesday, the approximately 12,000 messengers, as delegates to the convention are called, decided by a 9-1 margin to finalize the expulsion of one of the country’s largest Baptist congregations. The results were announced Wednesday.

Even more lopsided was the vote to formally expel Fern Creek Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky, which Linda Barnes Popham has pastored for 33 years.

It’s significant that a woman was pastoring a Southern Baptist church for that long in Louisville — literally, the backyard of Al Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and an activist against women’s ordination — and the church was only formally expelled this week. Warren’s recent about-face in favor of ordaining women pastors seemed to have finally brought her to the Southern Baptists’ attention.

Her church, along with Warren’s, was targeted for disfellowshipping by the SBC Executive Committee, and she, like Warren, made an unsuccessful appeal to the convention to remain in fellowship with her congregation. In other words, it was only because a Southern Baptist man spoke up on behalf of women pastors that we finally heard the voice of a Southern Baptist woman who has already spent more than three decades serving as a pastor. 

If you like irregular words, this is your place.

The beginnings once again:

Light is the basis for almost all life on Earth. Using energy from the sun, plants, algae and some bacteria create complex sugar molecules that serve as the foundations for most of nature's food chains. But parts of this world-feeding chemical reaction have remained somewhat of a mystery — until now. 

For the first time, researchers have observed the beginnings of photosynthesis, starting with a single photon. 

"A huge amount of work, theoretically and experimentally, has been done around the world trying to understand what happens after the photon is absorbed. But we realized that nobody was talking about the first step," Graham Fleming, a chemist at the University of California Berkeley and co-author of the new research, said in a statement. Fleming and his team described the process in a study published June 14 in the journal Nature.