Meanderings, 23 June 2023

It’s summer. It’s hot. We’ve got a drought of sorts, the kind we get in Chicagoland. Flowers are blooming. The birds that reside here and summer here are making their sounds. The Guardians are playing better.

Photo by Ray Hennessy on Unsplash

I once heard of a library in the UK where new books were shelved in the order of their arrival instead of according to either the old Dewey Decimal system, which I still know pretty well. Others use the Library of Congress, but The Onion has another idea. Sort of like that UK library, eh? Speaking of which, How do you organize your books? (Waiting.) All mine are in the Dewey Decimal system, except for some collections of books which were used for a book or research. Those are the books I can never find.

SEATTLE—Debuting a new, streamlined classification system, librarians at the Seattle Central Library announced Wednesday that they have officially dropped the Dewey Decimal System in favor of organizing all titles under “B” for books. “This is going to make things so much easier for staff, as well as for patrons who may not know the intricacies of the old proprietary system,” said head librarian Margaret Grady, gesturing toward a giant pile of thousands of books under a piece of computer paper printed with the letter “B.” “Once you get the hang of it, it’s really simple—they’re all right there in one place. It’s far more intuitive, too. Now, no one who wants a book on, say, analytic geometries has to remember that those are all under classification 516.3. They just come in, think to themselves, I am looking for a book—I’ll look under ‘B’ for book, and they’re off to the races. Not to mention, it makes reshelving a breeze. We’re hoping the ALA will consider making this the new nationwide standard.” At press time, Grady was overhead informing a patron that the DVDs had all also temporarily been filed under “B” until they thought of another place to put them.

Seaweed for compost, yay!

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (NewsNation) — In an effort to address the abundance of seaweed along Florida’s coastal communities, the city has implemented a composting method, transforming it into dirt.

A 5,000-mile-long mass of seaweed, part of what’s called the Great Atlantic Sargassum Belt, stretches from the Atlantic Ocean and into the Caribbean. It started washing up Florida shores in April.

However, the City of Fort Lauderdale is taking the smelly problem on its beaches and repurposing it. Instead of buying soil, workers are repurposing the seaweed into nutrient-rich soil, saving the city thousands of dollars.

“We save on landfill space and on disposal cost,” said John Saavedra of the Fort Lauderdale Park and Recreation.

The seaweed is dropped off in a landfill, which the city views as a valuable source. Each load delivered by the truck will eventually accumulate into a significant mound of soil with a potential value reaching hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Saavedra estimates potential savings of about $300,000 to $350,000.

Good for LeBron James:

LeBron James' impact in the Akron, Ohio, community he grew up in has been just as significant as his Hall of Fame-worthy NBA career.

The Los Angeles Lakers superstar has continued his charity work in Akron by opening an affordable housing complex through his I Promise Program. The I Promise Housing complex features 50 apartments with modern amenities.

The apartment complex comes with community and fitness rooms and is also equipped with fiber-optic WiFi. Some of the apartments are also customized for those with mobility and sensory needs.

Gloria James, the mother of LeBron, was in attendance for the complex's ribbon cutting earlier this month.

"LeBron always says leave a place better than when you found it. This is a way of not only doing that but inspiring all of our families and everyone to do the same," Gloria James said. "Today, we say welcome home."

On pronouncing and mispronouncing the names of authors. And spell their names right, too. Like Scot with one T, please.

Is tribal complementarianism coherent?, Mike Bird asks and answers.

Now, unless you have a clear and well-defined version of Complementarianism that you are setting up (e.g., Danvers), then you’ll have some very different versions of Complementarianism floating around your tribe or network.

You will have churches and leaders who:

• Prohibit women from being elders, pastors, and teaching or preaching to men.

• Prohibit women from being elders and pastors, but permit women to teach men outside the pulpit.

• Prohibit women from being elders and pastors, but permit women to preach to men under the supervision of a senior pastor.

• Prohibit women from being elders, but permit women to occupy the role of “pastor” in women’s ministry, counseling, or children’s and youth ministry.

I have to ask, given that diversity, what is the one thing that these views have in common?

Well, it’s this. They prohibit women from doing something. It doesn’t matter what that something is, but as long as there is something women are not allowed to do, you are allowed in the circle.

[SMcK: Poof!]

Welp, this sure looks like the SBC is becoming the SBD, the Southern Baptist Denomination. With soul competency gone, that is. Katelyn Beaty interviews Beth Barr.

KB: The most headline-grabbing news last week came from Rick Warren. Warren was at the meetings this year after Saddleback had faced backlash for ordaining three women as pastors in 2021. He said, “I am asking you to act like a Southern Baptist, who have historically agreed to disagree on dozens of doctrines, in order to act on a common mission.”

Warren is saying that women’s ordination is not an issue that needs to prompt disfellowship. But 88 percent of messengers voted to disfellowship. So what does this vote mean, given the SBC’s non-hierarchical fellowship approach?

BB: I think it’s a fundamental change in the Baptist identity of the SBC.

This is something that folk have been arguing about since the beginning of the Conservative Resurgence in 1979, where pastors had been saying, “If we go this route, we will be denying these Baptist tenets of local autonomy of churches as well as soul competency.” Which are two basic tenets of Baptist churches, what they agreed upon: we’re going to function as a community of churches that agree in cooperation, we agree about believer’s baptism, we agree about the significance of the Bible, we agree about soul competency, and we agree about the local autonomy of the churches.

KB: And what is soul competency?

BB: It’s essentially: local autonomy of churches for local autonomy of individuals. The only people we answer to is God, God calls us, and our salvation comes only through our relationship with God, we make that choice, and we also follow God’s call on our lives wherever it will be. Individuals have that freedom to discern the calling on their lives. And local churches have the freedom to discern the calling on their church, including pastors. And the SBC doesn’t have any authority over the autonomy of a soul or of a church.

KB: That’s fascinating. Going back to SBC churches ordaining women, we might think soul competency would allow freedom for churches to do that according to what they believe God is calling them to do without recourse from the larger fellowship.

BB: That’s exactly right. All of the language up through 2000 agreed on this. Even the folk pushing for the changes in the Baptist Faith and Message. Al Mohler, who was so visible in the 2023 convention, said, “Yes, we believe the Baptist Faith and Message that women should joyfully submit to their husbands and that the role of pastor is qualified for men.” But at the same time, he said, “Churches don’t have to agree with this. We’re Baptist. We’re not going to force any local church to adhere to this.”

Adrian Rogers said something very similar. Rogers was the first conservative president of the resurgence. He was voted in at the 1979 Houston SBC convention, and his election is considered the mark of the beginning of the conservative resurgence. And he also emphasized local autonomy of churches.

This language has started to disappear. Where they say, “Yes but if you’re going to be in friendly cooperation with us, you do actually have to agree on these things. If you want to pray with us, you have to agree with us.” I would say it’s a fundamental change.

KB: Even within Al Mohler, it sounds like?

BB: Al Mohler’s hard to figure out. He’s a politically savvy person, and I think he reads the room really well. And in 1993, when he became president of Southern Seminary, he moved really fast, but he also read the room that he couldn’t push Baptists beyond local autonomy yet. So he stopped at that. At the Baptist Faith and Message 2000, he also read the room, that there’s still enough support of local autonomy of churches that we’re not going to go there yet. To be in friendly cooperation with us, this is a secondary issue.

On ghostwriting — any opinions?

To be a ghostwriter is to enter into a particularly intimate relationship, akin to being someone’s criminal defense attorney, their tax accountant, or their therapist. You get to know them, warts and all, as you help them craft a book that tries to present their best selves to the world. You even learn to write in their voice. So the cardinal rule of ghostwriting is simple: Never make the client look bad.

Moehringer has broken this rule in spades lately, starting with cryptic tweets about errors that appear in Spare and, more recently, a lengthy airing of grievances in The New Yorker. The piece troubled me from the very first paragraph, which describes a moment in which he was arguing with Prince Harry while working on the book, who then jokes mischievously that he likes to get Moehringer worked up—a scene that, it seems to me, he did not have Harry’s permission to describe. This, to me, would be like opening a magazine to read your doctor describing an argument with you during a checkup, including your name and personal details about your medical history. (Imagining, of course, that you and your doctor’s relationship is bound by good faith rather than HIPAA.) How could you trust any doctor again?

To be fair to Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, the temptation must be great. Everything to do with the royal family is picked apart in the British tabloids, and ghostwriting a juicy tell-all from one of its most obsessed-about members is an especially ripe topic. But within the industry, the informal code that ghostwriters follow (in theory) demands that we let the book speak for itself and stay out of the limelight. Our role is more or less invisible—we’re called ghostwriters, after all. …

Even without the issue of acknowledgement, it’s still important for ghostwriters to avoid criticizing their clients. My own clients tell me about their lives in extensive detail. I sometimes have to convince them to open up about some of the most difficult situations they’ve faced and the lowest points in their lives. Many times, a client will hesitate, take a breath, and say to me, “I’ve never told a single soul this, not even my priest.” What follows is often an incredible story that can make the book.

My job in that case is to take care to tell that story in a way that’s good for the book and good for the client, to share their experience in a way that’s empowering and enlightening. And at times, I’ve even found that, while it’s a great story, it simply doesn’t belong in the book. Those stories I keep with me, locked away. Maybe they’ll end up in the client’s next book, or maybe they won’t, but they’re not mine to share, and certainly not in a public forum. …

It can be hard to stay offsides. Every ghostwriter has a story to tell about a particularly difficult client or the peccadilloes of a famous person they observed up close. But while our job may be to tell stories, there are some we should keep to ourselves.