Notes from Chicagoland: We’re in a hot spell — in the 90s or close to it every day. Kris has made great progress in healing from her wrist injury and has begun physical therapy. The All Star baseball game has never interested either of us so this has been most a week break from baseball. And our wood duck family is growing from little ducks into mostly mature ducks, which means they’ve learned to be spooked by humans. We treasure spotting them on a log on the north side of our village’s lake. A red tail hawk family, with two juveniles, thinks it’s an out-of-tune choir most mornings. On our morning walk the juvies are often screeching for someone to bring them some food. Friday AM we saw one of them with something to eat below it, walking around it seemingly wondered how one eats is own meal.
Photo by Erin Minuskin on Unsplash
AUSTIN, Texas -- Former sports superstar Bo Jackson helped pay for the funerals of the 19 children and two teachers killed in the Uvalde school massacre in May, revealing himself as one of the previously anonymous donors who covered costs for families after one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history.
Jackson, whose rare success in both the NFL and Major League Baseball made him one of the greatest and most marketable athletes of the 1980s and 1990s, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he felt compelled to support the victims' families after the loss of so many children.
"I don't know if it's because I'm getting old," said Jackson, a father of three and a grandfather as he nears 60. "It's just not right for parents to bury their kids. It's just not right.
"I know every family there probably works their butts off just to do what they do. ... The last thing they needed was to shell out thousands of dollars for something that never should have happened."
So where did we get “O.K.”? Read this:
Despite plenty of space, there was an abbreviation fad in newspapers of the time that might remind one of our own time. Perhaps a friend has sent you an electronic message containing brb, for "be right back"? Or maybe you've assessed an article as TL;DR? Let us present for comparison the 1839 New York newspaper report of a fashionable young woman remarking to her male friend "O.K.K.B.W.P.": her alphabetic litany was answered with a kiss and reported to translate as "one kind kiss before we part." Take that, Internet.
The 1820s and 1830s shared another linguistic fad with today: an appreciation for deliberate misspellings. (Kewl, rite?) This trend, which had humorists adopting now-cringey bumpkin personas with ignorance manifested in uneducated spellings, turned no go into know go and no use into know yuse (lol). Abbreviations were not immune, and no go became K.G.. So too all right became O.W., as an abbreviation for oll wright. And all correct became o.k., as an abbreviation for oll korrect.
OK?
Saw one in our back yard Friday, but this is sad news for a beautiful butterfly:
The monarch butterfly, chosen in 1975 to be Illinois' State Insect, fluttered a step closer to extinction Thursday, as scientists put the iconic orange-and-black insect on the endangered list because of its fast dwindling numbers.
“It’s just a devastating decline,” said Stuart Pimm, an ecologist at Duke University who was not involved in the new listing. “This is one of the most recognizable butterflies in the world.”
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature added the migrating monarch butterfly for the first time to its “red list” of threatened species and categorized it as "endangered" — two steps from extinct.
The group estimates that the population of monarch butterflies in North America has declined between 22% and 72% over 10 years, depending on the measurement method.
“What we’re worried about is the rate of decline,” said Nick Haddad, a conservation biologist at Michigan State University. “It’s very easy to imagine how very quickly this butterfly could become even more imperiled.”
Haddad, who was not directly involved in the listing, estimates that the population of monarch butterflies he studies in the eastern United States has declined between 85% and 95% since the 1990s.
In North America, millions of monarch butterflies undertake the longest migration of any insect species known to science.
How long should a sermon last? Mike Bird weighs in.
Over at TGC-Australia, there has been a great discussion about sermon length with Rory Shiner arguing for shorter but better-prepared sermons, and then with Mikey Lynch arguing for slightly longer sermons. Both guys make some good points!
So how long should a sermon be? Well, it is hard to say, and there’s no single correct answer.
I used to work with a Roman Catholic Chaplain who told me that in his seminary he was told were told that homilies (i.e., sermons) should last no longer than eight minutes because eight minutes is the normal period between adverts on television.
However, I also once talked to a missionary from East Timor who told me that people in his region can walk up to three hours to get to church, so when they arrive, they don’t want a ten-minute pep talk. They expect three sermons of about 30-40 minutes each interspersed with worship, prayers, and community notices.
The famous Scottish preacher, William Still, typified the Puritan style by offering a Bible reading that went for 20 minutes, what we’d call a reading with exegetical notes, followed up with a sermon that was largely an exhortation or reflection based on the Bible reading that went for 45-60 minutes. I’m told that if you heard William Still preach that you would hardly notice the time fly by.
Me, personally, I tend to preach for about 25 minutes, because I find that after 25 minutes of my own preaching, even I’m bored.
6 billion tons, think of that:
Pituffik, Greenland (CNN)The water off the coast of northwest Greenland is a glass-like calm, but the puddles accumulating on the region's icebergs are a sign that a transformation is underway higher on the ice sheet.
Several days of unusually warm weather in northern Greenland have triggered rapid melting, made visible by the rivers of meltwater rushing into the ocean. Temperatures have been running around 60 degrees Fahrenheit -- 10 degrees warmer than normal for this time of year, scientists told CNN.
The amount of ice that melted in Greenland between July 15 and 17 alone -- 6 billion tons of water per day -- would be enough to fill 7.2 million Olympic-sized swimming pools, according to data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center.
Put another way, it was enough to cover the entire state of West Virginia with a foot of water.
"The northern melt this past week is not normal, looking at 30 to 40 years of climate averages," said Ted Scambos, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center at the University of Colorado. "But melting has been on the increase, and this event was a spike in melt."
Every week, I talk to and hear from people who feel alienated, lonely, uncared for, and abandoned. I get emails detailing it. We talk about it constantly in the Discord. Parents, elders, people in their 20s, single people, partnered people, disabled people, able-bodied people — the consistent line is that people have care that they need, and care that they have to offer, and don’t know how to find the apparatuses, routines, or infrastructure to ask for or offer it.
In the past, so much of that care work was distributed through established infrastructure: through synagogues and churches and mosques, through chapters of national organizations like the NAACP and the PEO, through ‘fraternal’ organizations like the Elks, the Black Elks, the Moose, the Sons of Norway, and dozens of others that often provided mutual aid insurance plans for immigrants and people of color (many, for example, would help care for widows and their children) and facilitated vibrant social calendars.
For various overlapping reasons, participation in those systems has dwindled, and the infrastructure itself has atrophied. If your grandparents lived in the United States in their adult life, they were almost certainly a “joiner” in one of these organizations — but your parents? Maybe not. You might not have had any model of how to be part of a community growing up, or your parents might have been part of a lot of different communities (religious orgs, first-generation immigrants, garden clubs, rotary, etc.) but none of those feel accessible or meaningful to you.
So how do we rebuild those ties? I’ve written about this a lot — how it requires bravery, and vulnerability, and intermittent tolerance for people being annoying, and practice. Like, you just have to keep doing it, and doing it, and eventually it just feels like the thing you do, the people you’re near, the community you’re a part of. So many people have lost this skill or never had it modeled for them in the first place — and, depending on your identity, you may occupy spaces that are actively hostile to its development. (White bourgeois America is one of those spaces!)
So for this newsletter, I want to start with the smaller building blocks of community: the inter-personal relationships, both weak and strong, that serve as the conduits of care. I wanted to think about the nitty-gritty of how we show up for others, even and especially when their everyday lives don't mirror our own.
To the length of sermons….20 minutes is Ideal. I also would relish the East Timor experience of a day long service. It takes time for the glory of the Lord to touch us and fill us. He doesn’t operate in fits and starts or by our clocks and calendars.
Thanks Scot, for your blog. Read it every day and have relished reading Austin’s book along with you.
Scot, thanks for doing this each week. It’s fun, but I’ve also picked up some good sermon content from these meanderings.