Meanderings, 29 April 2023

Good morning from Nashville where Kris and I are hanging out at Kerygma conference with Lisa Harper, Lynn Cohick, Craig Blomberg, and more good folks, including some of the finest Northern students I’ve known.

Photo by Aaron Doucett on Unsplash

Church food banks:

Jimmie Hutson said that his wood stove burns the whole winter and must be fed every few hours. Living on a fixed income, he said it’s a blessing to be able to rely on free firewood courtesy of the Willow Community Food Pantry, a ministry of Willow United Methodist Church.

“They take care of me. The truckload I picked up today should get me through the winter,” he said.

Hutson is not just a recipient of the ministry, he also volunteers there, stocking pantry shelves and delivering firewood to others. After recovering from esophageal cancer, he said he spent a few years sitting at home and got bored. 

“I came here and asked if they needed help, and I’ve been here four or five years,” he said.

“Because of the food bank, I know everyone in the community. A lot of people around here really depend on the food bank; it’s quite a blessing.”

The food pantry began in 2005 out of a space the church had been using to store donated clothing. Pantry director Ola Williams, then chair of the church outreach team, said they realized there was more need in the area for food than clothes. 

“The first year, we supported 35 families a month. Now we’re up to 170-200 families a month and we’ve helped a total of 745 individuals already this year,” she said.

In addition, every Friday the pantry distributes bags to 60 students with two breakfasts, two lunches and snacks to get them through the weekend. The pantry also provides small vouchers for gas as well as the firewood.

A $35 bargain:

A $34.99 purchase got one Texas woman an unexpected piece of art from ancient Roman times.

Back in August 2018, Laura Young was shopping in an Austin-area Goodwill when she stumbled upon a 52-pound marble bust.

“I was just looking for anything that looked interesting,” Young said, and when she saw it, she knew she had to have it.

“It was a bargain at $35, there was no reason not to buy it,” Young said. She told CNN Friday she has been reselling her antique finds since 2011.

After the transaction, she knew she had to do some digging to see if the piece had any history to it.

And history it had.

Little did she know that purchase would have Roman ties and end up in the San Antonio Museum of Art (SAMA), 4 years later.

She contacted auction houses and experts to get any information she could on the marble structure.

Eventually, Sotheby’s confirmed that the bust was in fact from ancient Roman times, and they estimated it to be about 2,000 years old.

Baby names:

Baby names are a topic of much discussion for parents-to-be, but whether you're looking for classic or trendy, or even celebrity-level uniqueness, some names are more-often selected than others.

And in Illinois, it turns out things may differ from the rest of the country - at least according to a new prediction.

Names.org released its list of the most popular baby names for 2023, including a list specifically for Illinois. The ranking was based on Social Security Administration data on births within the last five years and interest on the company's website.

"Because Social Security can take quite a while to compile data on the most popular baby names for each year, we've used data on the actual births in recent years to predict the most popular baby names of 2023," the company said.

According to the list, Noah ranked as the top name for boys in Illinois, followed by Oliver and Liam. New in this year's ranking, however, was the name Jack.

For girls, Olivia, Emma and Amelia made up the top names.

According to the company, seven of Illinois' top 10 names for boys were also listed on the top 10 nationally, but three were unique to the state. Those names included Mateo, Jack and Alexander.

American Christian history and guns:

The answer, as I suggested in my lecture, is complicated. In the early twentieth century, opposition to the US entrance into World War I was arguably more widespread among some evangelical groups (especially Pentecostals) than among liberal Protestants, who often supported the war that was supposed to “make the world safe for democracy.” And in World War II and the early years of the Cold War, it was hard to find any discernible difference between liberal and conservative white Protestants in their attitudes toward the US military. Both groups supported American wars, regardless of their theological differences on other issues. And the same seemed to be true of guns. Neither group considered guns a problem worth commenting on.

The differences between liberal Protestant and evangelical attitudes toward violence first became evident in the 1960s, when the liberal Protestant magazine The Christian Century (which included Martin Luther King Jr. on its editorial board, beginning in 1960) made support for the nonviolent civil rights movement its signature cause. The magazine’s devotion to nonviolent civil rights advocacy led the editors to question the US military commitment in Vietnam and to begin openly denouncing it in 1963.

By contrast, the evangelical magazine Christianity Today was skeptical of the nonviolent civil rights movement and fully supportive of the Vietnam War. Violence against international communism was justified, the evangelicals who wrote for Christianity Today believed. So was the violence used by American police. Billy Graham, Christianity Today, and many other white evangelicals were strong advocates of “law and order” in the late 1960s.

But while these differing attitudes toward violence in various contexts paved the way for a split between liberal Protestants and evangelicals over gun laws, it was not yet apparent in the late 1960s that this would become a point of significant division between the two groups. In 1967, the Christian Century published three editorials in favor of gun control – which may have been the first time that the magazine had weighed in on the issue, since it had said nothing directly about gun legislation from 1960-1966, despite numerous editorials in favor of nonviolence during that period.

But the liberal Protestant magazine’s emerging interest in gun control was not necessarily radically different from the views of many evangelicals on the issue at the time. In 1968, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution on “Violence, Disregard for the Law” that included an endorsement of President Lyndon Johnson’s call for Congress to “pass legislation to bring the insane traffic in guns to a halt.” ….

Today white American evangelicalism is divided between groups like Christianity Today who think of guns as a dangerous tool that may have legitimate uses but nevertheless needs to be regulated and those who, like many in the Southern Baptist Convention, think of gun ownership as a constitutional right that should not be challenged. A handful of Anabaptist-influenced progressive evangelicals like Shane Claiborne may go beyond the thinking of CT and view guns as instruments of violent power that are at odds with the teaching of Jesus.

Don’t tell John this, but Stackhouse often pierces through the nonsense:

As a Canadian with a nodding acquaintance of things American (I pursued graduate studies including American religious history at Wheaton College and The University of Chicago), I have been bemused by the furore lashing my southern cousins over Critical Race Theory. Why in the world is this a thing?

As I understand the basics of Critical Race Theory, based as it is on the mid-century Frankfurt School of Critical Theory, CRT essentially looks for trouble it’s pretty sure is there. What are the odds that a group of privileged white men—such as America’s Founding Fathers—would set up a legal, judicial, economic, and cultural situation that didn’t privilege white men? CRT would say, “Zero.”

And so would every other sensible person, right? CRT seems like just another analytical tool, along with other critical expectations of sexism, classism, and the rest, that would be almost certainly useful in any serious examination of American culture.

We often miss seeing what we aren't looking for, and CRT reminds us to look for what's likely there: white Americans, who long enslaved and to this day have a vexed relationship with black Americans, fostering a legal system that advantages them by race. Sounds simply sensible.

So why are governors, legislatures, school boards, and universities up in arms over such a banal expectation? From a Canadian point of view, the controversy seems absurdly disproportionate.

But then, we Canadians don’t think all that much of, or about, our Constitution. And Americans really, really do think that much of theirs.

We Canadians, in fact, got along nicely with a British version of our constitution from the time of original Confederation (1867) until 1982. And even now most of us can’t recite a single phrase of our (new) constitutive document.

Americans, however, take oaths to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” Not to defend America per se, or the United States government, or the President, or the flag, but the Constitution and laws. …

Indeed, when CRT can make its case just that immediately, the friendly outsider worries that these disputes about CRT will not soon be reduced to mere disputes about . . . CRT. Way too much is at stake, since the very question of national loyalty has been put front and center.

Great story of patient endurance:

PITTSBURGH -- Drew Maggi sat at a hotel across the Allegheny River from PNC Park on Saturday night.

The 33-year-old infielder arrived in Pittsburgh around 7 p.m., having just been called up to the Pittsburgh Pirates from Double-A Altoona. Maggi, looking to possibly make his major league debut, reminisced as he started out at the ballpark.

"A lot of staring at the roof," Maggi said Sunday morning. "Just kind of a lot of thought, a lot of thinking about different moments, how crazy it is. From my hotel room, I can see the stadium. A lot of just sitting in the chair, looking out, just being like, 'Wow, I'm here.'"

Maggi was selected with outfielder Bryan Reynolds going on the bereavement list. First baseman Ji-Man Choi was transferred to the 60-day injured list with a left Achilles strain to make room on the 40-man roster.

The Pirates capped a four-game series sweep of the Cincinnati Reds on Sunday with a 2-0 victory, but Maggi did not get into the game.

It's been a long road for Maggi, who has played 1,155 games across 13 minor league seasons. He was selected by the Minnesota Twins on Sept. 18, 2021, but didn't appear in a game.

"I always believed this moment would come," Maggi said. "There was a little bit of me that was like, 'You know what? You love playing baseball. Keep going no matter what.' Crazy things happen in this game. So, I'm very thankful that I'm here and that I get to enjoy this. I'm excited for the day."