Happy Thanksgiving weekend to you!
Photo by Daniel Andrade on Unsplash
I begin each class session by telling students that I am glad to see them. I end every session by thanking them for coming. A student asked me why. I replied, “Because every time you come to class I am honored and blessed.” “Wow,” he said, “I never thought of it that way.” Neither had I until I gained a deeper understanding of my calling as a “servant teacher.”
After 40 years in Christian higher education, I have concluded that the most important virtue for faith-based teaching is gratitude. When our hearts are bathed in gratitude, we see our students and our work as wonderful gifts. We build immunity to the cynical, critical attitudes that can infect academe, including Christian universities.
In fact, I believe that gratitude is the missing first chapter in books on Christian pedagogy. Consequentially, that’s how I open my new book, Servant Teaching: Practices for Renewing Christian Higher Education. Before we practice our instructional skills, we need to prepare our hearts. We tend to take our work for granted. Instead of seeing it as a gift from God, we might view it as a burden imposed upon us. Our work becomes more of a duty than a gift and more of a routine than an adventure.
Let’s give thanks to God for opening the door for us to serve. Let’s also thank our Lord for our students, the institution that employs us, our time and energy, our abilities, the staffs that serve us, the teachers and authors and mentors who helped us earn our academic degrees, the colleagues who support and encourage us, and even the freedom to make mistakes.
ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Firefighters in Alaska got an unusual request for assistance last weekend from the Alaska Wildlife Troopers, but it wasn’t your mundane cat-stuck-in-a-tree situation.
“They were looking for some help getting a moose out of a basement,” said Capt. Josh Thompson with Central Emergency Services on the Kenai Peninsula.
The moose, estimated to be a 1-year-old bull, had a misstep while eating breakfast Sunday morning by a home in Soldotna, about 150 miles (240 kilometers) southwest of Anchorage.
“It looks like the moose had been trying to eat some vegetation by the window well of a basement window and fell into it, and then fell into the basement through the glass,” Thompson said.
That’s where it was stuck, one floor below ground.
A biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game was able to tranquilize the moose, but the animal wasn’t completely unconscious.
“He was still looking around and sitting there, he just wasn’t running around,” Thompson said.
Once sedated, the next problem was getting the moose — which weighed at least 500 pounds (225 kilograms) — out of the house.
Improvising a bit, responders grabbed a big transport tarp that’s typically used as a stretcher for larger human patients. Once the moose was in position, it took six men to carry him through the house and back outside.
The endless permutations of five-letter words took over the internet in 2022 as the online puzzle game Wordle dominated social media feeds, pop culture and even determined the Cambridge Dictionary’s word of the year.
“Homer” was looked up on the Cambridge Dictionary website more than 79,000 times this year, with 65,401 searches taking place in one day – May 5.
The reason? That was the day it was the Wordle answer, provoking frustration from non-American users unfamiliar with the term as they attempted to secure a win by guessing the word within the game’s six-guess limit.
“Homer” is an informal American-English term for a home run in baseball, Cambridge Dictionary said in a news release Wednesday. Others might know it as the name of a Simpsons character or an ancient Greek poet.
“Many players outside the US had not heard this word before,” added the news release. “Huge numbers of players expressed their frustration and annoyance on social media, but many also turned to the Cambridge Dictionary to find out more.”
“Still angry about ‘homer,’” one person tweeted on May 31. “It’s been weeks now. Furious.”
(CNN) — Here's a fisherman's story that's no tall tale.
After a 25-minute battle, UK angler Andy Hackett caught a colossal carp, nicknamed "The Carrot," that weighed in at a staggering 67 pounds, 4 ounces (30 kilograms). The giant fish is believed to be the second largest of her type ever to be caught, according to BlueWater Lakes, the fishery in France's Champagne region where the giant lives.
With its striking orange color, the massive goldfish-like creature easily stands out as it swims below the water's surface. The Carrot, however, has proven to be a challenge to catch. Hackett landed the prized fish, a hybrid of a leather carp and a koi carp, on November 3 while visiting the lake site.
A church planting Lydia, from Nadya Williams:
I am currently in the process of finalizing revisions of my book, Cultural Christians in the Early Church, under contract at Zondervan. The story that is the subject of this essay is a theory that ultimately got cut from the book, because there simply is not enough evidence to prove it with certainty. It is, nevertheless, a thought-provoking exercise. Put simply, I think that it is possible that Lydia, whom we meet in Acts 16, played a role in bringing the gospel to the Roman province of Bithynia. The key, I believe, is her work as a well-connected trader….
But what is important for the story at hand is this: as a merchant, Lydia and her representatives had to travel on a regular basis. While she owned a home in Philippi, to which she subsequently invited Paul to stay while he was in the area, she surely maintained connections to Asia, which is why her hometown is mentioned by name. Her trading connections had to have taken her, furthermore, to other provincial centers, and as history has shown time and time again, trade routes have for millennia facilitated the spread of ideas, as well as goods and, occasionally, plagues as well.
Lydia’s strong faith is presented clearly in this passage. Although a gentile, she was already a worshiper of God when she met Paul. Once converted through the action of the Holy Spirit, she clearly became an invaluable member of the church in Philippi. It seems plausible, furthermore, that she may have played a role in planting a church in Thyatira, and through her trade travels, brought the gospel into Bithynia as well either herself or through her trade contacts.
The placement of her story immediately following Paul’s prohibition from traveling into Bithynia is suggestive evidence in favor of this theory as well. Of course, we cannot prove any of this absolutely. But whether through the direct actions of Lydia or not, Christianity arrived in Bithynia sometime in the 50s CE. We know this because the epistle 1 Peter, written ca. 62-63 CE, continues the story of the Bithynian church, together with the other Christian communities in that region of the empire. But to read my take on that particular story, you will have to wait for the book.
History is full of artifacts that later turn out to be fakes, but very occasionally the opposite can happen. New analysis of ancient Roman coins long dismissed as forgeries has found they appear to be authentic, revealing a previously unknown Roman emperor.
The coins in question were unearthed in Transylvania in 1713, and feature a portrait of a man’s face with the inscription “Sponsian.” That name doesn’t match any known Roman emperor or any other historical figure, and that, along with the crude craftsmanship and mismatched design features, led historians to dismiss the coins as poorly made fakes since the mid-19th century.
Now researchers at University College London and the University of Glasgow have investigated the strange coins’ origins more closely. The team examined one under powerful microscopes in visible and ultraviolet light, and with scanning electron microscopy and spectroscopy, and compared them to other coins confirmed to be genuine.
This comprehensive analysis revealed that the coin’s surface bore patches of minerals that were cemented in place by silica – evidence of a natural process that occurs when something is buried for a long time. On top of that is a layer of oxidation products, which occur only after something has been re-exposed to air. The coin itself also showed microscopic scratch marks, the kind of wear-and-tear expected from having been in active circulation at some point.
All of these signs point to the coins being authentic, dating back almost 1,800 years. Based on these findings, the team developed a hypothesis on who this Sponsian was, how his face ended up on coins and why we’ve never heard of him.
I believe that "homer" is a word that has sometimes been used to berate an official at a sporting event who appears to be biased in favor of the home team. But I may be wrong, but, if I am, it most assuredly neither the first nor the last time!