Meanderings, 21 October 2023

The leaves!

Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash

Beth Barr writes: — building on the essay by Jen Wilkin.

Did your jaw drop when you read Jen Wilkin’s Christianity Today recent article Honor Thy Church Mothers—With Wages?

Mine did. I read it for the first time last night, and I can’t stop thinking about it.

In case you missed it, Wilkin highlighted the recent State of Ministry To Women Lifeway research report. If you are unfamiliar with this report, it studied over “1000 evangelical and Black Protestant female churchgoers and 842 women’s ministry leaders in the U.S.” The report was conducted last spring (April & May 2023) and includes “respondents or their churches who have interacted with Lifeway in some way in the last 3 years.” Since Lifeway is the publishing arm of the SBC, it seems likely that many of these women are in churches that support SBC beliefs about women. They are complementarian, in other words. … Men are directed to provide for their families and women are directed to serve in managing the home.

Isn’t that interesting?…

In addition to positive statistics, such as 90% of churchgoing women say their church invests and equips them (with 63% strongly agreeing), it also reveals that 83% of women’s ministry leaders are volunteers or unpaid staff members.

Let me say that again. Of 842 women working in ministry in Black Protestant and evangelical (predominantly Southern Baptist) churches, only 17% receive any sort of renumeration.

The staggering implications of this percentage are compounded by the following statistic that only 5% of these female leaders reported planning together with the broader church staff.

15!

RALEIGH, N.C. -- A rescue dog is gaining national attention after having a litter of 15 puppies.

Raleigh-based rescue Perfectly Imperfect Pups (PIPs) announced the birth of Meadow's litter on Oct. 8. and said it is the most it has seen since starting three years ago.

"It's one thing to have 15 puppies, but to have 15 thriving puppies that are all doing well," said Meadow's foster mom Shari Wilson. "Everyone's gaining weight, everyone's eating, they're all doing really well."

Meadow is a 2-year-old Great Dane who had a litter of three girls and 12 boys Otis, Bailey, Fiona, Duke, Winston, Bruno, and Buster, to name a few.

"They're going to eat a lot of food. Fifteen puppies is a lot of puppies to feed," said Wilson. "Fifteen is a lot, but I've helped several litters before, so I love it. And it's... very rewarding."

She said Meadow is a trouper after going into labor Tuesday morning until 3:45 Wednesday morning.

"The vet told us to expect 12 to 14. Puppy No. 15 was a surprise," Wilson said. "He was actually born in the front yard when I thought she was going to the bathroom. And I looked down and there was a puppy."

“Terministic screens” — a bit of an obscure expression for what others might call “confirmation bias” or a kind of “betrayal blindness.” Either, way, Alan Jacobs is on it:

Twenty years ago, I had an exceptionally intelligent student who was a passionate defender of and advocate for Saddam Hussein. She wanted me to denounce the American invasion of Iraq, which I was willing to do — though not in precisely the terms that she demanded, because she wanted me to do so on the ground that Saddam Hussein was a generous and beneficent ruler of his people. That is, her denunciation of America as the Bad Guy was inextricably connected with her belief that there simply had to be on the other side a Good Guy. The notion that the American invasion was wrong but also that Saddam Hussein’s tyrannical rule was indefensible — that pair of concepts she could not simultaneously entertain. Because there can’t be any stories with no Good Guys … can there? 

This student was not a bad person — she was, indeed, a highly compassionate person, and deeply committed to justice. She was not morally corrupt. But she was, I think, suffering from a disease of the intellect. 

What do I mean by that? Everyone’s habitus includes, as part of its basic equipment, a general conceptual frame, a mental model of the world that serves to organize our experience. Within this model we all have what Kenneth Burke called terministic screens, but also conceptual screens which allow us to employ key terms in some contexts while making them unavailable in others. We will not be forbidden to use a word like “compassion” in responding to our Friends, but it will not occur to us to use it when responding to our Enemies.

Jimmy Carter’s “malaise speech” 45+ years later. Another reason to like Jimmy Carter.

Nearly 45 years ago, on July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter went on national television to share with millions of Americans his diagnosis of a nation in crisis. “All the legislation in the world,” he proclaimed, “can’t fix what’s wrong with America.” He went on to call upon American citizens to reflect on the meaning and purpose of their lives together.

Carter made several specific policy prescriptions. But in a presidency animated by spirituality perhaps more than any other in American history, this speech called more generally for national self-sacrifice and humility.

At a time when political strongmen, hypernationalism, and xenophobia have risen in the U.S. and the world, Carter’s speech offers a powerful counterexample to these trends….

Having cloistered himself for an unprecedented length of time, the President emerged from Camp David with great drama on July 15, 1979. In a nationally televised speech that was watched by 65 million Americans, Carter intoned an evangelical-sounding lament about “a crisis of the American spirit.”

He said, “In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities and our faith in God, too many of us now worship self-indulgence and consumption.”

Indeed, the President’s sermon expounded at length about excess. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does but by what one owns,” he preached. But “owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

It was a penetrating cultural critique that reflected Carter’s spiritual values. Like the writers of the New Testament, he called out sin. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, he confessed to personal and national pride.

How Arian was Arius?

If you know anything about early church theology, you have probably heard of the arch-heretic: Arius of Alexandria. His theology claims that the Son of God is less divine than the Father, in particular that the Son was of a distinct substance from the Father; that Arius believed “there was a time when the Son was not.” The story goes that this Arian heresy spread like wildfire throughout the ancient world, despite the Nicene Creed, and took a hold of the Roman Empire. So Jerome mourns the victory of the ‘Arians’ at the council at Sirmium (357): “The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian” (Jerome, The Dialogue Against the Luciferians, 19). Fortunately, there is a hero of this story—Athanasius of Alexandria—who fights this fire from the desert with his orthodox pen and his pious spirit. Or, at least, this is often the story told in basic introductions to Trinitarian doctrine in systematic theology, debates in church history, or even in popular discussions over Wayne Grudem and his theology.

The problem with this story? It isn’t true, at least not all the way through.

Now, let me nuance this provocative statement: Arius was a real person with real ideas who was embroiled in a controversy about the Son of God. It even appears that the theological statements about the divinity of the Son (listed above) are indicative of his conceptions of the triune God. Further, this controversy was so intense that is spread throughout the Roman Empire and prompted dozens of councils in the years between the councils at Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381). So far so good. Where this story breaks down is when ‘Arian’ theology is seen as a widespread movement of Arian ideas.

During what some have deemed the ‘shadowy years’, a time of confusion and debate after the council of Nicaea, many theological positions were challenged, refined, and reconsidered. If you take a peak into any survey of this period (See: Hanson, Behr, Ayers, Anatolios), it becomes immediately apparent that there are a host of nuanced views by various theological parties and positions. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be any single ‘Arian’ theology which pervades the Roman empire, but a plurality of views with varying degrees of similarity to Arius’ original conceptions. So why do we only talk about a monolithic entity, the ‘Arians’? Well, the hero of our story, Athanasius, is not only gifted in theological reflection, but in marketing.

Good news for skin grafts:

Each year in the U.S., more than 500,000 people receive treatment for burn injuries and other serious skin wounds.¹ To close the most severe wounds with less scarring, doctors often must surgically remove skin from one part of a person’s body and use it to patch the injured site. However, this is an intensive process, and some burn patients with extensive skin loss do not have sufficient skin available for grafting. Scientists have been exploring ways to repair these serious skin wounds without skin graft surgery.

An NIH-funded team recently showed that bioprinted skin substitutes may serve as a promising alternative to traditional skin grafts in preclinical studies reported in Science Translational Medicine.² The approach involves a portable skin bioprinter system that deposits multiple layers of skin directly into a wound. The recent findings add to evidence that bioprinting technology can successfully regenerate human-like skin to allow healing. While this approach has yet to be tested in people, it confirms that such technologies already can produce skin constructs with the complex structures and multiple cell types present in healthy human skin.

This latest work comes from a team led by Adam Jorgensen and Anthony Atala at Wake Forest School of Medicine’s Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, Winston-Salem, NC. Members of the Atala lab and their colleagues had earlier shown it was possible to isolate two major skin cell types found in the skin’s outer (epidermis) and middle (dermis) layers from a small biopsy of healthy skin, expand the number of cells in the lab and then deliver the cells directly into an injury using a specially designed bioprinter.³ Using integrated imaging technology to scan a wound, computer software “prints” cells right into an injury, mimicking two of our skin’s three natural layers.

In the new study, Atala’s team has gone even further to construct skin substitutes that mimic the structure of human skin and that include six primary human skin cell types. They then used their bioprinter to produce skin constructs with all three layers found in healthy human skin: epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis.