Meanderings, 19 October 2024

Good morning! It’s Fall around here, at least in the early mornings and evening darkness echoes the season’s arrival. Calendars are sacraments of time, of life, of plans, of looking forward, of remembering, of colors fading and intensifying … of what’s coming next and perhaps of a life too full.

Photo by Denley Photography on Unsplash

Enabling the whole church, from Mike Bird:

What many of you know and yet what is rarely appreciated is the fact that our churches are filled with people who are either born with a disability, acquire a disability by illness or accident, or else who age into disability. According to the World Health Organization, 20% of the world’s population, that’s 1 in 5 people, have a disability of some variety. And yet I have never heard a sermon about the topic of disability in my life and it never came up in my theological and pastoral training.

Regard for disability is all the more urgent precisely because our culture is sending mixed messages about disability. On the one hand, we have the National Disability Insurance Scheme which aims to address the many needs of disabled persons in our community, and their carers, a very good thing indeed. On the other hand, there are other aspects of our culture that sound like mid-twentieth-century eugenicists with their intention to eradicate people with genetic disabilities in utero. Or else, the pathway for disabled people to end their lives with euthanasia is becoming increasingly supported and even legal in some jurisdictions. So it is a time of both hope and despair for the welfare of people living with disabilities.

I am sad to say that a similar ambiguity exists within the church. On the one hand, the sick, vulnerable, and disabled have traditionally been in the care of the church as the church considered the welfare of such people as one of their primary areas of concern taking their cue from Jesus. As it was, Jesus who showed concern for people with infirmities and disabilities as well as teaching about the necessity of caring for the least of these. The church’s care has often been the only healthcare people with disabilities ever received. But on the other hand, much of this work is now relegated to the charities sector, even to faith-based charities, and partitioned away from the work and worship of most Christians. No one would deny that such institutions are not necessary and do good work, but it meant the disabled became a domain of the charities sector rather than the church community life. It meant that the disabled were in effect quarantined from the regular life of the church in many instances. Instead of being included, the disabled have become invisible, and this made it more comfortable to be in our auditoriums, foyers, and pews without them.  Tragically many disabled people feel more tolerated than loved, and object of charity rather than belonging, and such things must change if we are to embody the ethic of Jesus and ecclesiology rooted in the Christian tradition.

James Ernest — right to the point!

A meme quoting René Girard is circulating on social media. The quotation—“The God of Christianity isn’t the violent God of archaic religion, but the non-violent God who willingly becomes a victim in order to free us from our violence”—is from Girard’s book  Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture.

The person who created the meme added: “ . . . until Jesus’ followers ditched him for the cult of Christian nationalism. René of Mimesis, pray for us!”

Well, that takes the bull by the horns, doesn’t it?

But I endorse this message.

Here’s the thing: the Bible is a large library of books that are diverse in genre, method, and message. The Christian faith treats the whole as canonical scripture—as divine revelation that is meant to regulate what we believe and how we live. But the diverse, wild jungle of stories, law codes, prayers, laments, prophetic oracles, letters of instruction, etc., can only function as canonical Christian scripture if one central, nonnnegotiable rule governs every reading of every text: it all must be read, always and only, in light of the life, teaching, death, resurrection, and promised return of Jesus Christ. Christian teaching has been clear in this point from the beginning. And by “the beginning” I mean the teaching of Jesus himself, as represented, for example, in Luke 24, where Jesus opens the scriptures to two disciples in the road to Emmaus; and the teachings of the early, scripture-writing apostles, as represented, for example, in Romans 15:4, 1 Corinthians 10:11, Galatians 4:24.

Too many contemporary Christians, not having been adequately trained by their pastors, or failing to heed the instruction of their pastors, commit one—or ironically but very frequently, both—of two errors: (1) not reading the whole of scripture attentively and repeatedly, so as to be intimately acquainted with all of the content of the books contained therein; (2) failing to read every line of scripture in the light of the central, final, absolutely governing revelation, namely, the incarnation of God in the birth, life, work, teaching, death, resurrection, and promised return of Jesus Christ as expounded, through the gift of the Spirit who guides into all truth, by the apostles who wrote the books of the New Testament.

The future of historians who are professors:

But it was also evident that the historical profession is changing in ways that are unpredictable and often frightening.

On the one hand, CFH 2024 still included dozens of scholars like me, tenured (or tenure-track) professors who spend most of their time teaching courses for a single four-year college or university that also supports, to varying degrees, their work as researchers and writers. Whether they serve religious or nonsectarian institutions, that type of historian has been in leadership of CFH since the organization began in the late Sixties.

But I caught myself wondering how rare my type would be in twenty years, or even ten. As a few colleges close, more cancel or consolidate their history programs, and virtually all “right-size” their faculties (e.g., not filling retirements), CFH 2034 or 2044 seem destined either to continue with many fewer participants or a more diverse array of historical careers represented.

I suspect it will be option B. Which means that the future of the CFH probably looks less like me and more like some other folks I met: a community college professor who teaches almost entirely online and has to make his own time for research; adjunct instructors who piece together larger teaching loads from several universities and have the security of neither tenure nor benefits eligibility; K-12 teachers, archivists, public historians, and other professionals who don’t fit the college professor mold but can tell their own stories of trying to do good history amid economic fluctuations; graduate students who faithfully followed their calling into advanced programs of study much like the one I completed in 2002, but don’t know where that path will lead them.

Speaking of futures, how about the future of bacteria?

Proteins are vital to our bodies. They serve as structural building blocks for our tissues and organs and are responsible for their functioning in both health and disease. Genes, like recipes, contain instructions for making proteins. Usually, each essential protein is produced from a single gene. Now, new research shows that some bacteria can actually produce two or more proteins from a single gene by “flipping” underlying stretches of DNA.

While scientists have long known that DNA inversions can occur in bacteria, this study is the first to describe these inversions, or “invertons,” within individual genes. What’s more, the findings, from research supported by NIH and reported in the journal Nature , suggest that this flipping happens more often than scientists suspected.

The findings, from Ami S. Bhatt at Stanford Medical School in Stanford, CA, and her colleagues, may have important implications, not only for bacteria, but also for human health. For example, bacteria’s ability to flip genes and alter proteins on their surfaces may restrict the ability of our immune systems to recognize and effectively respond to infectious microbes. Invertons also likely play roles in how our microbiomes, the communities of microorganisms that live in and on us, develop and change within our bodies. Our microbiomes influence our metabolisms, immune responses, and more.

Scientists have long known that Salmonella bacteria, a frequent cause of food poisoning, can undergo phase variation and change proteins on its surface by flipping a certain stretch of DNA. In the new study, Bhatt’s team, including Patrick West and Rachael Chanin, wanted to learn more about how widespread this kind of flipping might be. They combined their expertise in data science, computational biology, microbiology, and bacterial genomics to develop a software tool they call PhaVa, which analyzes DNA sequences to find likely invertons.

Petra discovery:

Archaeologists have unearthed a hidden tomb containing the remains of 12 ancient skeletons at the historic site that served as one of the filming locations for the 1989 blockbuster “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.”

The discovery was made earlier this year beneath the iconic Treasury building in Petra, Jordan, a “lost city” named one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. It was recently featured in the season premiere of the Discovery Channel’s “Expedition Unknown,” according to a news release.

The Treasury, also known as Al Khazneh, is a rock structure that was hand-carved by the Nabataean Kingdom more than 2,000 years ago, as noted by the Smithsonian Magazine. It’s one of Petra’s most famous and visited monuments.

While the site has long-fascinated visitors, its true purpose has remained a mystery, the release stated. This prompted a team of American and Jordanian researchers, led by professor Pearce Paul Creasman from the American Center of Research, to start digging.

The ancient tomb they found beneath the surface not only contained skeletal remains, but a trove of artifacts made from bronze, iron and ceramic, CNN reported.

“We were absolutely stunned by the revelation of this hidden chamber,” said adventurer Josh Gates, of “Expedition Unknown,” in a statement.

Where was Plato buried? Check this:

Historical accounts vary about how the Greek philosopher Plato died: in bed while listening to a young woman playing the flute; at a wedding feast; or peacefully in his sleep. But the few surviving texts from that period indicate that the philosopher was buried somewhere in the garden of the Academy he founded in Athens. The garden was quite large, but archaeologists have now deciphered a charred ancient papyrus scroll recovered from the ruins of Herculaneum, indicating a more precise burial location: in a private area near a sacred shrine to the Muses, according to Constanza Millani, director of the Institute of Heritage Science at Italy's National Research Council.

As previously reported, the ancient Roman resort town Pompeii wasn't the only city destroyed in the catastrophic 79 AD eruption of Mount Vesuvius. Several other cities in the area, including the wealthy enclave of Herculaneum, were fried by clouds of hot gas called pyroclastic pulses and flows. But still, some remnants of Roman wealth survived. One palatial residence in Herculaneum—believed to have once belonged to a man named Piso—contained hundreds of priceless written scrolls made from papyrus, singed into carbon by volcanic gas.

The scrolls stayed buried under volcanic mud until they were excavated in the 1700s from a single room that archaeologists believe held the personal working library of an Epicurean philosopher named Philodemus. There may be even more scrolls still buried on the as-yet-unexcavated lower floors of the villa. The few opened fragments helped scholars identify various Greek philosophical texts, including On Nature by Epicurus and several by Philodemus himself, as well as a handful of Latin works. But the more than 600 rolled-up scrolls were so fragile that it was long believed they would never be readable, since even touching them could cause them to crumble.