Meanderings, 31 August 2024

Good morning on this the last day of August, what might be called the last day of summer. We are experiencing morning and evening darknesses that are in a slow dance away from the windows. So the seasons shift. What’s not shifting is our Meanderings through stories that caught our interest. Please know that Kris and friends pass most of these on to me.

Photo by Wade Lambert on Unsplash

The problem is that hippos, as we all known, can be hungry, hungry hippos:

Romero, a solid man with black-framed spectacles and a pink camouflage shirt, scanned the river and pointed straight ahead. Near the opposite bank, 300 yards away, three pairs of gray ears flicked, and beady eyes darted above the water line. The boatman circled cautiously, then winced when Wilson, the jujitsu champion, suddenly launched an aerial drone and banged on the boat’s gunwale to get the animals’ attention. One animal raised a gigantic, bulbous head and opened its mouth, exposing a sharp set of canines. “Tourists think that this is cute,” Romero told me in Spanish. “But it’s a sign of aggression.”

You might not expect to encounter wild hippopotamuses, the huge, semiaquatic mammal native to sub-Saharan Africa, in the rivers—and ponds, swamps, lakes, forests and roads—of rural Colombia. Their increasingly ubiquitous presence here is an unlikely legacy of Pablo Escobar, the infamous drug baron from Medellín. Decades ago, Escobar spent part of his vast fortune assembling a menagerie of exotic animals, including elephants, giraffes, zebras, ostriches and kangaroos, at his hacienda outside Doradal, a town about ten miles west of the Magdalena. After he was shot dead in Medellín by Colombian police, in 1993, local people poured onto the property and tore apart Escobar’s villa in search of rumored caches of money and weapons. Afterward, the hacienda sank into ruin. In 1998, the government seized possession of the property and eventually transferred most of the animals to domestic zoos. But several hippos—most sources say three females and one male—were considered too dangerous to move. And that’s how Colombia’s current trouble began.

Federal judges are aging and aged:

WASHINGTON — At the age of 97, Judge Pauline Newman is the oldest full-time federal judge on the bench, but despite concerns about her ability to do the job, her colleagues are struggling to get rid of her.

For more than a year, she has been locked in a legal battle with her fellow judges on the Washington, D.C.-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, who have tried to pressure her to step aside. Newman fought back and is still contesting a decision that bars her from hearing cases.

Appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1984 to the court that among other things handles appeals in complex patent cases, Newman was sanctioned after she refused to take a neurological test as part of a judicial disability investigation.

“It’s been devastating to me,” Newman said in an interview with NBC News. “It is as if my entire lifetime, a good deal of which has been devoted to this business, is of no meaning.”

When Democrats decided after President Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance that he was no longer fit to serve at the top of the ticket, a multifaceted pressure campaign was able to convince him to step aside.

But federal judges, as well as Supreme Court justices, have lifetime appointments and there is no easy process for easing them aside.

With people generally living longer, a lifetime appointment can now last many decades. The average age of a federal judge is 69, according to a recent study, and there is no clean way to force someone to step down.

“That’s a feature, not a bug,” said Greg Dolin, a former Newman law clerk who is now working as her lawyer. “There’s no way to get rid of a judge, but I don’t think that’s something to amend. That’s something to celebrate.”

Life and writing, writing and life:

I received an email on Friday that had me thinking about my life and vocation over the weekend. It was from the publisher of my book, No Little Women, published in 2016. 2016. That’s also the year that I provoked what is now known as “the Trinity debate” by inviting a male pastor/academic to write a guest post on my blog about the unorthodox doctrine saturating our churches, Christian books, conferences, and parachurch organizations known as Eternal Subordination of the Son/Eternal Functional Subordination of the Son (ESS/EFS). I had more hope back then, even as I was beginning to see behind the curtains. And the more I got behind them, I saw all kinds of low-handed under-workings from the evangelical industrial complex.

But Friday’s email did more than trigger this trip down memory lane. It was sent to inform me that they were running low on copies of No Little Women, the sales now do not justify another printing, and it will soon be officially out of print. They offered me a deep discount for the 8 copies left, should I want them, and thanked me for the 8 years of partnership with the book.

Wow. The surprise of this notification wasn’t so much that No Little Women was going out of print, but all that there was to reflect on from the publication of that book and the 8 years following. Where was I then, and where am I now? My books serve as a sort of bildungsroman of my spiritual life. I began writing because I saw no direction for spiritual formation as a woman in the church and I was desperately looking for conversation and tools to help nurture my theological vigor and thirst to “adult” as a follower of Christ. What does that look like? What do our marriages look like? How do we affect culture? How do we raise our kids? Women’s ministries seemed to be kept at arm’s length from the rest of the church. And I found the books marketed to us to be sentimental, fluffy, and full of error. It all seemed infantilizing, and I was trying to be an adult.

By the time I wrote No Little Women, I decided to be a bit more direct about this—to say it out loud. I wanted to address not only women about our honor and responsibility as believers, but ministers as well. Why were our pastors so content, and maybe relieved, to have us at arm’s length away in our own wing of the church, with our own inferior resources, meagerly invested in theologically, and certainly not considered a valuable resource for men to learn from? Were we not to grow alongside one another, sharpening one another? Instead, there was an unspoken understanding that women are to be managed.

Want an example of grace, here you go:

A 4-year-old boy accidentally smashed a Bronze Age jar at an archeological museum in Haifa, Israel.

The ancient artifact, which experts say was at least 3,500 years old, was on display without a glass case near the institution’s entrance at the time of the incident.

In a statement emailed to CNN on Wednesday, the Hecht Museum defended its decision to present certain objects without protective glass, adding that its founder Reuben Hecht had emphasized making artifacts accessible to the public.

“The museum believes there is a special charm in experiencing an archaeological find without any obstructions,” the statement said, adding that the institution would “continue this tradition” despite the incident.

Speaking to the BBC, the child’s father said his son had “pulled the jar slightly” on a visit to the museum last Friday because he was “curious about what was inside.” The man added that he was shocked to see his son beside the broken artifact and had initially thought, “It wasn’t my child that did it.” …

Speaking to Israeli news outlet Ynet Tuesday, the museum’s head Inbal Rivlin invited the boy and his mother, who was also present during the incident, back to the museum for a private tour.

“The museum is not a mausoleum but a living place, open to families (and) accessible,” she told the news outlet, adding: “We are appealing to parents: Don’t be afraid. Things like this happen. We will fix (the jar) and put it back.”

On closing down Christian colleges:

The last few years have also seen closures by Christian institutions including programs at Trinity International University, Alliance University (formerly Nyack College), Goddard College, and Clarks Summit University. Even longer is the list of institutions, like Cornerstone University, that haven’t closed yet have ruthlessly cut programs, often in the humanities, in a desperate attempt to reinvent themselves and remain afloat. Some of the institutions on both lists have been struggling for years, and, in many cases, the pandemic accelerated their troubles.

This is all depressing, especially if you are a professor or a student or one of the alumni of the affected institutions—oran ex-professor like me. CT’s Emily Belz recently highlighted the challenge involved in records keeping for alumni of shuttered institutions. But what we’re seeing now is only the beginning; we should expect much more of these closures over the decade to come. 

The single biggest reason for this is not unique to Christian schools. It’s the long-predicted “demographic cliff.” US birthrates dropped to an all-time low during the Great Recession and never bounced back. Next year, in 2025, we’ll be 18 years past that initial plunge, and our national birthrate remains below replacement level. 

All things being equal, this means that every year for the foreseeable future, the entering freshman class in colleges nationwide will decline. Harvard will probably be just fine. Tiny Christian colleges without a national reputation, not so much. Even Wheaton College, the “evangelical Harvard,” had to make adjustments for this reality in late 2022.

Going forward, nearly all Christian colleges will have to plan to shrink, merge, or close. These difficult choices will be unavoidable and necessary. But, to get back to the question I posed at the outset, how college leadership approaches these decisions matters, and how Christian college leadership does it should be recognizably shaped by Christian ethics.

The biggest part of that how is when. The boards and other leadership of schools headed for cuts and closure must give faculty and staff the earliest possible notice that job loss is a possibility. For faculty, I’d argue that one year’s advance notice is the minimum that compassion requires.

True, in many other workplaces, a two-week notice is customary and sufficient. But higher education works differently because of its quirky annual hiring cycle. With very few exceptions, academic jobs are posted in the fall and early spring. Hires are concluded by late spring, and new positions begin in August. That means faculty need at least a full school year to have any chance of continuing to work in their field—not to mention to place a house on the market or finish out a lease and make plans for required relocation without losing a lot of money in the process.

The placebo effect de-mystified:

When someone receives an inactive sugar pill for their pain, the expectation of benefit often leads them to experience some level of pain relief. Researchers have long known that this placebo effect is a very real phenomenon. However, the brain mechanisms underlying the placebo effect for pain have been difficult for researchers to understand.

Now, findings from an intriguing NIH-supported study in mice published in Nature offer insight into how this powerful demonstration of the mind-body connection works in the brain. Furthermore, the researchers identified a previously unknown neural pathway for pain control and suggest that specifically activating this pathway in the brain by other means could one day offer a promising alternative for treating pain more safely and effectively than with current methods, including opioids.

The findings come from a team led by Grégory Scherrer , University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill; with colleagues from Stanford University, Stanford, CA; the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Ashburn, VA; and the Allen Institute for Brain Science, Seattle. The researchers knew from earlier human brain imaging studies that the placebo effect activates certain brain areas, including the anterior cingulate cortex, which is involved in emotion, attention, and mood. By conducting a series of more detailed studies in mice, the team sought to learn more about the specific brain activities involved.

Philip Jenkins on empire and religions:

In recent years, American historians have reached a fair consensus that their nation’s history must be considered in terms of its being an empire, and from its earliest era. As such, we should apply to that history the insights of the modern study of empires, which is a very lively field of study. In this series of posts, I have been considering the implications for the specific theme of religion. Today I will be describing several critical aspects of that story, including such foundational matters as American attitudes to religious freedom, and the structure of its greatest churches and denominations.

In my recent book Kingdoms Of This World, I listed multiple factors common to empires in any time or place, which together constituted what I termed their “empire-ness.” These included, for instance, their construction of lengthy lines of communication, of new trade routes, of imperial cities, and the dispersal or migration of large populations. Empires mix population groups from previously unconnected parts of the world, and crucially, they spread common languages. All of these factors contributed to the spread of religions, which might or might not represent the approved creeds of the empire in question.

For those who want to explore the dating of the Gospel of John, Ian Paul has a wonderful sketch of some scholarship and a recent paper arguing for an early date. I, for one, am skeptical of our capacities to date the Gospels.