Meanderings, 3 February 2023
It’s winter wonderland in Chicagoland! And, please pray for Northern Seminary, friends. We not only have some vibrant students in innovative programs, but with them we meet our own challenges.
Photo by Aaron Doucett on Unsplash
If you’ve fallen off the KonMari decluttering method, don’t worry — so has Marie Kondo, herself.
The lifestyle icon became a household name when her bestselling book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” hit the U.S. in 2014, followed by two cathartic Netflix NFLX, +1.35% series that fully embraced the adage, “Tidy house, tidy mind.” But her latest and more personal book reveals that even Kondo, now 38, has found that keeping a minimalist home filled only with items that “spark joy” (and that are stored and folded just-so, and organized by color … ) has become an increasingly unattainable goal as her family has grown.
“Up until now, I was a professional tidier, so I did my best to keep my home tidy at all times,” she said at a recent event, the Washington Post reported. “I have kind of given up on that in a good way for me. Now I realize what is important to me is enjoying spending time with my children at home.” …
And this has inspired her latest book, “Marie Kondo’s Kurashi at Home: How to Organize Your Space and Achieve Your Ideal Life,” which hit shelves in November. This even more personal tome focuses on the Japanese concept of kurashi, which is loosely translated as “way of life” or “the ideal way of spending our time.” It’s still choosing things that “spark joy” — the phrase she famously coined in her first book — but this time it’s more about decluttering what’s filling up your time, rather than what’s crowding your closet.
In fact, the kurashi portion of her site says: “The true purpose of tidying is not to cut down on your possessions or declutter your space. The ultimate goal is to spark joy every day and lead a joyful life.”
A new kind of (St) Patrick:
Patrick Rhodes, a community advocate in Tampa, Florida, works two jobs. But in his limited free time, Rhodes, also known as Patrick the Giver, likes to give back to some of America’s most deserving workers by providing them with free meals.
It started in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rhodes said he was at home, admiring the strength of frontline workers, when he asked himself what he could do to help them.
So, he reached out to a local hospital in Tampa, and offered to bring a few lunches up to them.
“It kind of snowballed from there,” Rhodes said on NewsNation’s “Morning on America.”
Between 2020-2021, Rhodes gave out over 2,600 free meals to those in Tampa and surrounding areas.
These days, Rhodes said, he delivers the food during his own lunch break, or heads out at 6 a.m. or 7 a.m.
Although he goes on his missions solo, Rhodes says he gets donations and support from other people.
13 years old is too young for social media, Amen?!
Surgeon General Vivek Murthy on Sunday cautioned that, despite many app guidelines, 13-year-olds are too young to join social media.
“What is the right age for a child to start using social media? I worry that right now, if you look at the guidelines from the platforms, that age 13 is when kids are technically allowed to use social media. But there are two concerns I have about that. One is: I, personally, based on the data I’ve seen, believe that 13 is too early,” Murthy said on CNN’s “Newsroom.”
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and other top social media platforms allow users age 13 and older to join, create their own profiles and share and consume content.
“It’s a time, you know, early adolescence, where kids are developing their identity, their sense of self. It’s a time where it’s really important for us to be thoughtful about what’s going into how they think about their own self worth and their relationships and the skewed and often distorted environment of social media often does a disservice to many of those children,” the surgeon general argued.
Murthy’s second concern is about the inconsistent implementation of many of the rules, and the reliance on children who use social media to moderate their own participation on the platform.
“We have some of the best designers and product developers in the world who have designed these products to make sure people are maximizing the amount of time they spend on these platforms. And if we tell a child, ‘Use the force of your willpower to control how much time you’re spending [on social media],’ you’re pitting a child against the world’s greatest product designers and that’s just not a fair fight. And so that’s why I think our kids need help,” Murthy said.
Is there a boost in the Humanities. We can hope.
The pro-STEM movement has gutted high school and college humanities programs — but there's some evidence of a post-pandemic revival afoot.
Why it matters: In academic circles, humanities' decades-long decline is blamed for the proliferation of falsehoods on social media, coarse political discourse, the rise in racism and the parlous state of democracy (not to mention our etiolated vocabularies).
Driving the news: When the University of California, Berkeley, reported an uptick in humanities majors this academic year, there was elation — and shock — at the prospect of a trend reversal.
The number of first-year Berkeley students declaring majors in the arts and humanities — which includes English, history, languages, philosophy and media studies — was up 121% over last year.
The number of high schoolers applying to Berkeley with the intention of studying humanities was up 43.2% from five years ago, and up 73% vs. 10 years ago.
"Students are turning to the arts and humanities as a way to make sense of our current moment," Sara Guyer, dean of Berkeley’s division of arts and humanities and director of the World Humanities Report, told the university's news service.
A handful of other schools — such as Arizona State University and the University of Washington — have also seen a rise in students declaring humanities majors.
What about that 1st Century Mark papyrus?
The “first-century Mark” saga is an unfortunate series of events surrounding an early papyrus fragment of Mark’s Gospel that began publicly in late 2011 and, at the time of this writing, is still not fully resolved. The story begins with a tweet from Dr. Scott Carroll on December 1, 2011, “For over 100 years the earliest known text of the New Testament has been the so-call[ed] John Rylands Papyrus. Not any more. Stay tuned . . . .” At the time, Dr. Carroll was working for the Green family who owns Hobby Lobby, helping them to purchase the materials that would eventually form the basis of the Museum of the Bible’s collection.
The news of Carroll’s “earliest known text” began to make headlines in February 2012, when Dan Wallace used a debate with Bart Ehrman to announce the existence of a fragment of Mark’s Gospel that an unnamed, world-class paleographer had dated to the first century. The announcement surprised Ehrman and the audience. Allegedly, this item was part of a private collection and was to be published shortly thereafter. Years came and went, and no first-century Mark fragment was ever published. Wallace could not give more information because he had signed a non-disclosure agreement that barred him from speaking about the manuscript until it had been published.
It was not long before rumors about the fragment made their way to the popular level. Apologists and scholars (e.g., Dr. Craig Evans and Dr. Gary Habermas) saw it as powerful evidence for the reliability of the Christian message. After years of speculation and what seemed like leaked information, an early fragment of Mark was finally published in the Spring of 2018 in the Oxyrhynchus Papyri series—a series of papyri owned by the Egypt Exploration Society (EES)—not a private collection.
The EES collection was excavated over a century ago in modern-day Al-Bahnasa, Egypt. This meant the new fragment was not part of a private collection but one that had been known and studied for over 100 years. As I quickly put the pieces together, it became clear that this tiny manuscript, designated P.Oxy. 5345 (or P137), was the “First-Century Mark.” The earlier dating was simply incorrect, and there had been confusion as to who owned the manuscript and how it would be published. It was not owned by the Greens and it was not from the first century after all. A great deal of the speculation was simply wrong.
[Dan Wallace did what was right.] Although he has been rightly criticized for announcing the unpublished and unverifiable “First-Century Mark” at a debate, Wallace was right to admit his mistake once the fragment was published and he was no longer bound by the non-disclosure agreement (NDA). Wallace apologized for his actions, both to Ehrman “and to everyone else for giving misleading information about this discovery.”
[So did Mike Holmes.] The Museum of the Bible has also owned its mistakes and expedited the process of returning items known to be acquired for their collection under the seller’s pretense. Claims that P137 had been offered for sale were not initially taken seriously by the EES (and not without reason). It wasn’t until Michael Holmes, acting on behalf of the Museum of the Bible, shared with them the purchase agreement for some papyri and a handwritten list describing their contents in June 2019 (first publicized by Brent Nongbri on his blog) that these claims were taken seriously.
Months of bitter negotiations between seven states that rely on the Colorado River’s vanishing water have collapsed along a clear fault line over the past week: California versus everyone else.
The multi-state talks, which have been ongoing in fits and starts for months, were focused on achieving unprecedented water cuts to save the Colorado River – a system that provides water and electricity to more than 40 million people in the West.
As less and less water has been flowing through the river and its reservoirs, US Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton last year called on the basin’s seven states – California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming – to figure out how to cut 2 to 4 million acre feet of usage, or as much as 30% of their river water allocation.
If they couldn’t agree on how to do it, Touton vowed the federal government would step in.
On Monday, six states – including lower basin states of Arizona and Nevada – released a letter and a proposed model for how much Colorado River water they could potentially cut to stave off a collapse and prevent the nation’s largest reservoirs, Lakes Mead and Powell, from hitting “dead pool,” when water levels will be too low to flow through the dams.
The maximum amount of basin-wide cuts the six states are proposing in their model is 3.1 million acre feet per year. It accounts for water conservation and evaporation and, if approved, could kick in if reservoir levels fall to catastrophically low conditions.
California – the largest user of Colorado River water – is conspicuously absent from the text and will release its own letter and model calling for more modest annual cuts of around 1 million acre feet later this week, JB Hamby, the chair of the Colorado River Board for the state and an Imperial Irrigation District board member, told CNN.
Behind the rift is a decades-long, rancorous relationship between California and Arizona that has collided with a river system in crisis due to years of overuse and climate change-fueled drought.