Meanderings 18 September 2021
Good morning friends! Back to school we all go!
Photo by Joseph Pearson on Unsplash
LINCOLN UNIVERSITY, Pennsylvania -- The story of how a Lincoln University college professor ended up holding a baby during class was life-changing for a 21-year-old student who was finally able to take notes.
"I've always wanted to go to an HBCU. So, I decided what's better than the first, so I chose Lincoln," said Imani Lamarr, who is now a senior at the Pennsylvania university.
Two years ago, she was taking a class with Dr. Aqeel Dix in the health sciences department.
She had just come back to school from taking a semester off after giving birth to her son prematurely. Lamarr's son had to spend months in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU).
"It was really hard. Every day going to the hospital, seeing him and not being able to help him, it was hard," Lamarr recalled.
Christopher Murphy, who Lamarr had named for her father, had become her world and her schedule revolved around his.
When she told Dix she had to miss class because she couldn't find a babysitter, his answer was no.
"'No.' He told me no. And I was just looking at him like, no I can't miss class? I don't have nobody to watch my baby," she said.
"I'm not going to have one of my students miss my class because they have no one to watch their child. That's just not an option for me," said Dix.
Instead, he told her to bring her son to school.
"That's my character. I don't mind helping my students wherever they need me," he said.
Lamarr had reservations about bringing her baby to class. How would he react? Would he be a distraction to other students? Would she be able to focus? But when Dix started lecturing, something changed for Lamarr, she realized she could do this.
Sad to read about: (keep those lights on)
NEW YORK (AP) — Hundreds of birds migrating through New York City this week died after crashing into the city’s glass towers, a mass casualty event spotlighted by a New York City Audubon volunteer’s tweets showing the World Trade Center littered with bird carcasses.
This week’s avian death toll was particularly high, but bird strikes on Manhattan skyscrapers are a persistent problem that NYC Audubon has documented for years, said Kaitlyn Parkins, the group’s associate director of conservation and science.
Stormy weather Monday night into Tuesday contributed to the deaths, she said.
“We had a big storm and sort of weird weather and lots of birds, and that’s sort of the perfect combination that can lead to bird-window collisions,” Parkins said.
Sad and in need of empathic pastoral theology:
I love the church, and I have loved the church for a long time.
I’ve led worship 600+ times in local congregations. I’ve preached dozens of times across several countries. I served as an overseas missionary in Southeast Asia for 8 years. I’ve been in “church work” in one capacity or another for over 20 years.
In fact, I still serve with a church planting mission organization, providing pastoral care and coaching to missionaries around the world. My day job is walking alongside of hurting people who also love (and are serving) the global church.
I still love the church, but I’ve got a problem.
Watching the American evangelical church for the last several years has been devastatingly hard. Initially, I watched as a sort of outsider, living and ministering in a developing country that had a proud and boisterous autocrat as a leader. And now since COVID led to an early repatriation in March of 2020, I’ve watched from a more comfortable spot in the rural Midwest.
During all of this, I’ve desperately wanted to change the church. I’ve shared articles and written Facebook posts trying to convince people to behave differently, to care differently, to love differently.
I’ve needed the church to behave differently so that I would be ok, so that I wouldn’t be embarrassed, or ashamed, or angry. As it turns out, that’s not very loving or healthy.
I’m beginning to realize that there’s a difference between loving the church and being enmeshed with it. There’s a difference between being grieved at her sins and being so emotionally devastated by her sins that I want to scream at people. One is healthy and vital, while the other is evidence of codependency.
American colleges and universities now enroll roughly six women for every four men. This is the largest female-male gender gap in the history of higher education, and it’s getting wider. Last year, U.S. colleges enrolled 1.5 million fewer students than five years ago, TheWall Street Journal recently reported. Men accounted for more than 70 percent of the decline.
The statistics are stunning. But education experts and historians aren’t remotely surprised. Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s—every year, in other words, that I’ve been alive. This particular gender gap hasn’t been breaking news for about 40 years. But the imbalance reveals a genuine shift in how men participate in education, the economy, and society. The world has changed dramatically, but the ideology of masculinity isn’t changing fast enough to keep up.
For decades, American women have been told that the path to independence and empowerment flows through school. Although they are still playing catch-up in the labor force, and leadership positions such as chief executive and senator are still dominated by men, women have barnstormed into colleges. That is the very definition of progress. In poorer countries, where women are broadly subjugated or otherwise lack access to regular schooling, girls enjoy no educational advantage whatsoever.
Still, gender inequality on something as important as education presents problems, no matter what direction the inequality points in. While men are more likely to go to college than they were 10 years ago, something seems to be restraining the growth of male enrollment. In 1970, men accounted for 57 percent of college and university students. Two years later, Congress passed Title IX regulations that prohibited sex-based discrimination in any school that received federal funding. “The fact that the gender gap is even larger today, in the opposite direction, than it was when Congress determined that we needed a new law to promote equal education seems like something we should pay attention to,” says Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution senior fellow who is writing a book about men and boys in the economy. “I’m struck by the fact that nobody seems to understand why this is happening.”
Looking back but pressing forward, the historic Sixteenth Street Baptist Church will commemorate the 58th Memorial Observance of the church bombing on Wednesday, Sept. 15, at 10 a.m.
The Carlton Reese Memorial Unity Choir will provide musical tributes. The church bells in downtown Birmingham will toll at 10:22 a.m., the time that the bomb exploded. A memorial wreath will be laid immediately following the service.
The Rev. Dr. Charlie Dates, Pastor of The Progressive Baptist Church of Chicago, Illinois will give the reflection. The church was bombed on September 15, 1963 killing Carole Robertson, age 14; Cynthia Wesley, 14; Addie Mae Collins, 14; and Denise McNair, 11. In addition, many other individuals were injured.
The church also continues to receive federal funds to maintain its role in the national’s Civil Rights history most recently a grant of $500,000 from The National Park Service. The grant is the second out of five previously awarded funding initiatives towards the current restoration of the church and its historic parsonage, resulting in $2.8 million overall in funds.
The parsonage played a pivotal role in Birmingham’s civil rights history in the 1950s and 1960s, serving as a hospitality center for leaders planning Civil Rights marches that emanated from the church.
“We count it a privilege to continue to show the world God’s redemptive power in the midst of human struggle and the tragedies endured here in Birmingham during the Civil Rights Movement”, said Rev. Arthur Price Jr., pastor of the church.
Nothing quite like a MooLoo and potty training bovine:
Turns out cows can be potty trained as easily as toddlers. Maybe easier.
It’s no bull. Scientists put the task to the test and 11 out of 16 cows learned to use the “MooLoo” when they had to go.
Just like some parents, the researchers used a sweet treat to coax the cows to push through a gate and urinate in a special pen. And it took only 15 days to train the young calves. Some kids take quite a bit longer.
“The cows are at least as good as children, age 2 to 4 years, at least as quick,” said study senior author Lindsay Matthews, an animal behavioral scientist at New Zealand’s University of Auckland who worked with colleagues on the tests at an indoor animal research lab in Germany.
What started with a half-in-jest question on a New Zealand radio talk show about the very real problem of livestock waste resulted in a serious study published Monday in the journal Current Biology. And it wasn’t just a “wow, this could be fun” academic question. Massive amounts of urine waste is a serious environmental issue, Matthews said.
Urine contains nitrogen, and when mixed with feces becomes ammonia, which is an environmental issue with acid rain and other problems, Matthews said. It can also taint the water with nitrates and create the airborne pollutant nitrous oxide, he said.
And cows do pee a lot. A single cow can produce about 8 gallons (30 liters) of urine a day, Matthews said. In 2019, nitrous oxide comprised 7% of all the U.S. greenhouse gases, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.