Meanderings, 5 October 2024
Good morning.
You're invited to join me in a panel discussion in Nashville, October 29 6-8pm CT at Otter Creek Church in Brentwood, TN. I've shared in this newsletter (Flipping Their Votes and What are They Deconstructing) that deconstructors are uncovering serious weaknesses in today's church--a renewed fundamentalism, toxic leadership, and legalistic thinking among them. My co-author, Tommy Preson Phillips, and panelists Sean Palmer, and Sara Barton will offer insight and honest discussion moderated by Josh Graves. Everyone who attends (virtually or in person) will have the chance to submit questions to the panel. If you can't attend in person, you can join the live-stream, but only if you pre-order. So don't miss the opportunity to join the stream! You only have until Oct 15! Tommy and I want to make sure the voices of the deconstructors are heard and understood. This is an important event and an important book with that goal in mind. Pre-order and join the stream HERE. RSVP to the in person event in Nashville HERE.
From a 1000 year old seed to a new tree:
Botanists have grown a long-lost tree species from a 1,000-year-old seed found in a cave in the Judean Desert in the 1980s.
The researchers involved in the project say they believe the tree species, which is thought to be extinct today, could have been the source of a healing balm mentioned in the Bible and other ancient texts.
Unearthed during an archaeological dig in the lower Wadi el-Makkuk region north of Jerusalem, the ancient seed was determined to be in pristine condition. But the scientists conducting the new research weren’t able to identify the type of tree from the seed alone. The team, led by Dr. Sarah Sallon, a physician who founded the Louis L. Borick Natural Medicine Research Center at Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, planted the seed to further investigate more than a dozen years ago.
Sallon said it was possible that the tree could be the source of the biblical “tsori,” a medicinal plant extract associated with the historical region of Gilead north of the Dead Sea in the Jordan Rift Valley, a mountainous and forested area that was intensely cultivated and is now part of Jordan.
The team’s findings, described in a study published September 10 in the journal Communications Biology, unlock some of the secrets surrounding the origins of this enigmatic specimen, which Sallon nicknamed “Sheba.”
Not long after, the tree began to sprout leaves. Sallon shared images of the tree and its leaves with botanists around the world. One expert suggested it belonged to the genus Commiphora. The group includes around 200 species of tree primarily found in Africa, Madagascar and the Arabian Peninsula.
Sallon next shared a sample from the leaf with study coauthor Dr. Andrea Weeks, an associate professor in the department of biology at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. Weeks sequenced the tree’s DNA, confirming the preliminary identification. However, the sample didn’t match any of the known Commiphora species in her database.
With its unique genetic fingerprint, the unknown Commiphora species most likely represented an extinct taxon once native to the region surrounding the Judean Desert, according to the study.
However, the tree, which is now more than 14 years old and almost 10 feet (3 meters) tall, has neither flowered nor borne fruit. Without these more easily identifiable features, it’s not possible to identify the cryptic species with certainty, the study added.
But regardless of what their college curriculum addresses, individual students today can still make the choice to transcend the demands of their particular areas of study and seek answers to the larger questions. Like 19th-century students, they can decide that college is about more than merely learning how to write and process information – as essential as those skills are. In the process of learning those skills, they can also take a cue from their late 19th-century counterparts and cultivate an ethic of civicmindedness and service to their community. That might mean cultivating respect for democratic institutions, developing a willingness to sacrifice one’s own preferences for the good of others, and – what seems to be in especially short supply in our polarized political age – learning how to listen well to others and respect those who hold differing political views.
But today’s college students can also learn from the students of the early 19th century that there is something even more important than perpetuating American democracy. They can learn that no college education is complete unless it trains students to ask the right questions about the relationship between their empirically based studies of the world around them and larger transcendent principles – including principles about God, the meaning of virtue, and the basis for objective truth.
If students don’t ask these questions, they’ll likely graduate from college with some excellent skills, but without the framework that equips them for a meaningful life. But if they do ask these questions, they will not only have the tools to see the connections between everything that they have learned but they will also gain the ability to apply that knowledge for something more meaningful than merely a personally enjoyable or financially lucrative career.
Hamas according to the Gazans:
Most people in Gaza—my home until I moved to the United States as a 15-year-old exchange student and where my immediate and extended family continued to live—do not want to be “martyrs” on behalf of Hamas and the Iranian-led “Axis of Resistance.” Gazans dream of the prosperous lives that were robbed of them.
One of the biggest obstacles to recognizing this, however, has been the infamous polls by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR). Led by the prominent Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki, the PCPSR has long been considered one of the few supposedly reliable sources for assessing Palestinian public opinion. Its surveys have painted an inaccurate, dehumanizing, and disturbing picture: Allegedly, a majority of the Gaza Strip’s population supported the October 7 attack against Israel and continued Hamas control of the enclave.
Unsurprisingly, Shikaki’s polls were used to present the people of Gaza as intrinsically supportive of a nihilistic and suicidal terrorist organization. Many within Israel, including military leaders, have attributed support for Hamas to radicalization and brainwashing among the Gazan public. As a result, traditional counterinsurgency campaigns focused on winning hearts and minds were dismissed as ineffective given Hamas’ deep-seated support. In part because of the PCPSR polls, Israeli decision-making and war planning opted for mass destruction and acceptance of a civilian death toll in Gaza that even Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu conceded in May was above 15,000.
But last month, the IDF alleged it found documents that showed how Hamas was falsifying and manipulating the results of the PCPSR polls, overstating Palestinian approval of the October 7 massacre by some 40 percentage points. “These documents are part of a systematic process,” the IDF claimed in a statement, “the purpose of which is to disguise the collapse of [Hamas], and the collapse of public support for it.”
The findings should not have been surprising. Through my work in the coastal enclave, I’ve long seen how Hamas has, directly and indirectly, manipulated public opinion to manufacture the perception of widespread support, whether through the use of trolls, social media groups, or counterintelligence agents. But common sense alone should have been enough to see through Hamas’ facade of widespread popularity. How could a population continue supporting the very organization that has made their lives a living hell? After all, Hamas has brought unprecedented death and destruction upon Gazans, not to mention 15 years of failed governance, poverty, a blockade, and unemployment. The Islamist group is so deeply despised by the majority of the population—including, in recent months, by those who may have historically supported the group.
Pete Rose died this week at the age of eighty-three. His death has given new life to the ongoing debate over whether or not he belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Rose is one of the greatest baseball players to ever put on a uniform. His performance on the field speaks for itself.
But he also diminished the integrity of the sport by gambling on games while he played for and managed the Reds in the 1980s. Major League Baseball declared him “permanently ineligible” for induction into the Hall of Fame. This week we learned that his “permanent” ban from baseball will outlast his life.
Over the last decade I stopped hating Pete Rose. Now I just feel sorry for him. Anyone who followed Rose during the last few decades witnessed a man who believed that validation from Major League Baseball was his only path of salvation, the only real marker of a life well-lived, the only way to secure a legacy in this world. He pursued reinstatement as hard as his feet-first slide into Harrelson. Baseball was all Pete Rose knew. Too bad he never learned that the gods of baseball do not offer redemption to those who commit the most sacrilegious of sins.
Should Pete Rose be in the Hall of Fame? I do not have strong convictions either way. But I do know that his career is now in the hands of historians. Perhaps the historical debate over monuments that raged during the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020 might help us make sense of what to do about Rose’s mixed legacy. I am leaning toward inducting him posthumously, with no ceremony or celebration, and let Cooperstown tell the complex story of his life on and off the diamond.
SMcK: Pete Rose served for Bart Giamatti as an example, a precedent. He paid for all the gamblers who never got caught betting on the game.
You have probably seen leaf-cutter ants carrying bits of plants, maybe in a nature documentary, at a science museum or in the “Circle of Life” song at the beginning of the 1994 Disney animated film “The Lion King.”
Those ants don’t eat the leaves — instead they bring them back to their nests to feed a garden of fungi, which produce food for the ants.
Researchers have now used DNA analysis to uncover just how long ants have been farming fungi, now described in a study published Thursday in the journal Science. It turns out these insects have been some of the world’s tiniest farmers for 66 million years, thanks in part to the asteroid that struck Earth and set off a chain of events that led to the demise of the dinosaurs.
Fungi are a kingdom of life more closely related to animals than to plants, and many of them consume decaying plant matter. Some fungi make fruiting bodies that we know as mushrooms as part of their reproductive cycles, but they also produce a branching network of threadlike structures called hyphae. Exactly 150 years ago, scientists first discovered that leaf-cutter ants were cultivating gardens of fungi inside their nests, feeding the fungi bits of leaves and in turn eating the tips of the fungal webs.
“Ants practice agriculture just like humans,” said lead study author Dr. Ted R. Schultz, a research entomologist and curator of hymenoptera at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC. “They have small brains, and yet they manage to carry out this complicated suite of behaviors.”
A better understanding of ant farming practices that have benefited both the insects and the fungi for ages could also one day help humans develop more effective agricultural methods, according to Schultz.
Thank you Scott I appreciate your Saturday morning meanderings