I learned today from our local news that today is the beginning of the fall on the calendar (but not astronomically). I like that. Our mornings have been cooler of late but we’re looking for some serious heat this weekend. Fall or not, good morning! And welcome back to the school year! And to football season!
First, an announcement. My daughter, Laura Barringer, will be speaking at this year’s Restore conference.
Whether you're a survivor, ministry leader, or an or an advocate for truth and justice Restore 2023 will be an encouraging transforming experience. Join people from across the US and Canada for sessions from inspiring advocates, authors and experts in psychology and academia. Each leader has truths to impart about surviving abuse and preventing it.
Speakers: Mary DeMuth, Lance Ford, Dr. Lainna Callentine, Wade Mullen, Lori Anne Thompson, Laura Barringer, and many more (see full session schedule at the link below).
The caring leaders convened for Restore 2023 have unique expertise with up-to-the-minute insights for what the church is facing today. Based on a firm belief in live in-person incarnational ministry, Restore will not have an online attendance option. Please check the event website for details including special hotel rates available near the venue.
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (WATE) — Guinness World Records has awarded the title of “World’s Longest Competitive Mullet (female)” to a woman from Tennessee, who says she started growing out her hair more than 30 years ago.
Tami Manis, a public health nurse in Knoxville, and her mullet measuring 5 feet, 8 inches long will appear in the Guinness World Records 2024 according to a news release shared by the record-keeping publication.
Manis shared in the release that her hair’s official birthday is Feb. 9, 1990, which is when she began seriously growing it out after watching the “Voices Carry” music video by ‘Til Tuesday.
“The [singer] had a rattail and I really wanted one of those,” she said. In the music video, the singer defends her hair and look after her boyfriend makes comments and controlling gestures about it, eventually shouting the chorus of the song while in a crowded theater and embarrassing him. The theme touches on self-empowerment and staying true to one’s look.
A mullet is a hairstyle in which the hair is cut and styled shorter in the front of the face and on top and sides of the head, but is longer in the back of the head; it’s also described in hit movies such as “Joe Dirt” as a “business in the front, party in the back” hairstyle.
It’s a breath of fresh air to think it took thirty years. By herself she could resolve the longhair/shorthair problem in ancient Corinth. (Smile)
CNN — Authorities raced to capture five million bees released yesterday after a truck carrying several crates of hives fell onto a roadway in Ontario, Canada, Halton Regional Police Constable Ryan Anderson told CNN.
Halton Regional Police received a call shortly after 6 a.m. Wednesday, after the straps attached to the crates of beehives became loose and created a spill, releasing the millions of bees onto the roadway in Burlington, Anderson told CNN by phone.
Burlington is south of Toronto. The city is located on the shores of Lake Ontario between Toronto and Niagara Falls, according to its website.
After police shared a social media post warning residents and vehicles to stay clear of the area, about six or seven local beekeepers volunteered to help get the bees back to safety, Anderson said.
“Within a couple hours, the majority of the bees were safely back in their hives in their crates, and were safely loaded back on the trailer,” Anderson said.
When you want to build in Italy, you never know what kind of temple you may find:
Sarsina is a sleepy, rural town of barely 3,000 residents straddling the pristine Apennine mountains in Italy’s Emilia Romagna region, surrounded by stunning views and grazing sheep.
While it has a glorious past, as a strategic defensive outpost for the Roman Empire and the birthplace of the famed playwright Plautus, today there’s not much to do beyond hiking and birdwatching.
And though both locals and holidaymakers would agree that a rustic, slow-paced lifestyle is part of Sarsina’s charm, its residents were nonetheless excitedly awaiting the construction of a development including a new supermarket, fitness center and playground. But it was not meant to be — at least, not as originally planned.
That’s because workers at the site on the outskirts of town in December 2022 unearthed the ruins of an ancient Roman temple — or ‘capitolium’ — dating back to the first century BC.
In early July, a first look at the underground treasure came to light: a single imposing structure of horizontal sandstone blocks and marble slabs, 577 square meters wide, which researchers have identified as the podium above which the columns and walls of an ancient temple were built.
And what has come out of the ground so far could be just the tip of the iceberg.
Tim LaHaye, evangelicalism, conspiracies, and the apocalypse:
Evangelicalism has an apocalypse problem. Of course, the way you or I read that sentence depends on how you or I define “evangelical” and “apocalypse”. But what if we add “Tim LaHaye” to those words? What changes?
Apocalypse simply means unveiling, or disclosure. In the apostolic tradition, apocalypse is not so much the end of the world as it is the beginning, the disclosure of a new creation ushered in by Christ.
But with LaHaye we find a more conspiratorial and paranoid apocalypticism which continues to both shape and determine not just evangelicalism but wider swaths of our political climate.
It is nearly impossible to understand evangelicalism today apart from LaHaye’s influence. And it’s not just evangelicalism. LaHaye’s ideas have shaped the present political climate in the United States in profound ways. But in order to see it, we have to move beyond the books for which he is famous, Left Behind.
LaHaye’s influence on evangelicalism normally focuses on the commercial success of Left Behind. It’s true, LaHaye’s Left Behind series was not insignificant. The commercial success of the books (over 80 million sold) is only exceeded by their lasting influence on evangelicalism and broader popular culture. We may not enjoy the books or advocate the theology they dramatize, but in reducing LaHaye’s contribution to the crisis of evangelicalism to the books alone, we ironically reflect Jerry Falwell’s endorsement of the books: “In terms of its impact on Christianity, it’s probably greater than that of any other book in modern times, outside the Bible.”
Left Behind was only part of LaHaye’s legacy, one which shaped not just evangelicalism but broader American culture. In Daniel Hummel’s analysis, the Left Behind novels—with their dramatization of the Rapture and totalitarian “end times” political orders— primed Americans, not just evangelicals, for the QAnon conspiracy universe. My research into evangelicalism and conspiracy theory sides with Hummel on this point.
Still, there’s more to LaHaye than Left Behind. We lose this “more” whenever we opt to define evangelicalism as something like a cast of characters. In this approach LaHaye becomes the man who took dispensationalism to the market, and cashed out. But LaHaye’s apocalyptic theology (and the politics it generated) found expression beyond the books. …
Conspiracy theory was a feature, not a bug, of LaHaye’s apocalyptic theology. In fact, I’d like to argue conspiracy theory is a sort of apocalyptic discourse within evangelical spaces, one which continues to shape the social and political world with great effect. Left Behind series is merely an ideological concentration and commercial distillation of all LaHaye believed theologically and worked for politically. It continues to be diffused and refracted.
SMcK: evangelicalism has often needed a conspiracy and someone to fight. More on that some day, but not today.
I wondered when this might happen. It’s happening. From CNN’s Reliable Sources, sent to me by a friend.
While a shot has yet to be fired, some of the nation's largest newsrooms are actively taking defensive measures to safeguard their content from ChatGPT, the groundbreaking artificial intelligence chatbot that is seen as a potential aggressor to an already struggling news industry.
A multitude of leading newsrooms have recently injected code into their websites that blocks OpenAI's web crawler, GPTBot, from scanning their platforms for content. The Guardian's Ariel Bogle reported last weekthat CNN, The New York Times, and Reuters had blocked GPTBot. But a Reliable Sourcesreview has found several additional news and media giants have also quietly taken this step, including Disney, Bloomberg, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Axios, Insider, ABC News, ESPN, and the Gothamist, among others. Publishers such as Condé Nast, Hearst, and Vox Media, which all house several prominent publications, have also taken the defensive measure.
The deep archives and intellectual property rights of these news organizations are immensely valuable — arguably crucial — to training A.I. models such as ChatGPT in efforts to provide users with accurate information. As one news executive, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on behalf of his company, told me on Monday: "Most of the internet is garbage. Traditional media publishers, on the other hand, are fact driven and offer quality content."
Despite the posturing behind the scenes, none of the outlets that have taken the preventive measure of blocking GPTBot offered an on-the-record response when I reached out for comment on Monday. But the move to insert code disallowing OpenAI from drawing on their large libraries of content to train its ever-learning ChatGPT bot reflects the degree to which news organizations are spooked by the company's technology and are quietly working to address it.
The Corinthian hair joke was worth the price of admission today. Haha!
Always look forward to your Saturday meanderings.