Meanderings, 6 April 2024

This is one of our favorite weekends of each year. The Final Four and Championship games for both NCAA women and men. Surviving the intensity of this weekend, when it comes to sports, will be the long, slow rhythm of the baseball season, with some golf tournaments tossed in. All so very quiet and peaceful compared to basketball’s season-ending extravaganza.

https://www.sportico.com/leagues/college-sports/2024/caitlin-clark-wnba-draft-1234768740/

The incredible journey, which was one of all-time favorite books in grade school at Lincoln School — thanks to Mrs Uhtlaut.

A lost dog was homeward bound this week after an incredible journey took her inexplicably from her San Diego home to the suburbs of Detroit.

The tale began last July, when Mishka went missing from her owner’s workplace in California, according to an animal adoption group.

Then, on March 28, a resident of Harper Woods, Michigan, living more than 2,300 miles away, called police about a stray dog in the neighborhood. Police took the dog to the Grosse Pointe Animal Adoption Society, which found a microchip identifying Mishka’s family.

The family happened to be visiting Minneapolis for Easter, so dog dad Mehrad Houman drove 10 hours to retrieve the pet from the Detroit suburb where she had been found, the group said. A vet checked out Mishka and gave a thumbs-up for travel.

The adoption group posted a video on Facebook on Thursday showing the dog’s tail-wagging reunion with family.

“This is a tale that Hollywood would love to tell,” the animal adoption society said.

Dissidents at worship:

There are nine different worship songs in the book of Revelation (4:8–11; 5:8–14; 7:9–12; 11:15–18; 12:10–12; 15:3–4; 16:5–7; 19:1–4 and 19:5–8)1. They are placed in moments of tension, as if worship is the response to overwhelming awe and fear.

As we read them and sing them, we must imagine what it’s like to proclaim these words in the midst of persecution and oppression. For those like myself and many in my church who have only ever known the social location of privilege, this is easy to miss. But many of these words fit wonderfully in the songs of the African American traditions as they are intended to raise their eyes and their hearts above the oppression of both past and present and turn them to one who has, like them, experienced the crushing boot of Empire. …

It would be unimaginable to turn your back on Zeus — the most powerful of the gods— to worship a human.
It would be treason to turn away from the emperor of Rome — the most powerful of men — to worship a poor, wandering Jewish preacher.
It would be humiliating to worship a man whose life ended in the humiliation of public crucifixion, naked, alone, beardless (no longer even a man).

This is treasonous worship. This is dissident worship.

But Johns's story doesn’t limit the act of worship to humans; he invites them to join the worship service already in motion and continuously in motion, a service attended by all of creation.

Perhaps what the church in America has been missing in our worship is a spirit of dissidence against the powers at work all around us. To worship the lowly, humiliated, slandered, executed, risen, and ascended Christ is to turn our backs on all things lifted up in this world. It is to magnify that which the world would rather hide and turn away from. This is why Jesus taught his followers that he would be found in the hovels of the poor, the prison cell, the hospital bed, the migrant family, and the unwed teenage mother.

Worship requires choosing something to worship. And in a world that worships power, dissident worship requires turning away from the one who conquers and turning towards the Lamb who was slain.

Messages of shame:

I was in my early 20’s, hesitantly leading a women’s Bible study full of young, fabulous thinkers. One that I was asked and then encouraged to teach, when I really just wanted to be a student. We were learning and discovering so much together. Growing. My pastor would check in every now and then and that is when I’d ask him some questions I was stumped on. One time, I asked a question concerning a contradiction I couldn’t reconcile in the Systematic Theology book he recommended. When I asked, he giggled a bit, and said, “Aimee, this is the women’s Bible study…” Much was inferred with that laugh and statement.

Jesus is in the tomb with this.

I was in my early thirties. Different church. I entered with excitement to tell my pastor that a certain website I knew he read faithfully was adding me as a contributor. Letting that longing for encouragement surface. Until he responded, “Well it certainly helps to have your picture next to all those old, bald guys on the website.”

Jesus is in the tomb with this.

When I began cohosting a podcast with a professor and a pastor, the parachurch organization that hosted it received letters of “concern.” Over a woman at the table talking theology with these men. One of my cohosts got a letter from a well-respected pastor friend, which said, “It would be different if she weighed 300 pounds and had a mustache.

Jesus is in the tomb with this.

Birders and birding and counting birds:

In late 2023, 70-year-old birder Peter Kaestner was within striking distance of a goal that had never been accomplished: seeing more than 10,000 different species of birds in the wild.

Such a record had previously been unthinkable, but with new technology facilitating rare bird sightings, improved DNA testing identifying a growing number of bird species, and public listing platforms making it easier to keep track of and share findings, more super-birders are inching towards the five digits.

Just as Kaestner approached the finish line for his record 10,000 birds, though, a previously unknown competitor by the name Jason Mann flew in out of nowhere to snatch the record out from under him.

The mystery birder seemed to have uploaded a backlog of thousands of species he had seen over several decades to now-defunct birding site Surfbirds.com, listing more than 9,000 birds over the course of a few months in a move that took Kaestner and others by surprise.

“Two people break 10,000 species, and on the same day? Can it be?” one incredulous birder posted in February.

Subsequent scrutiny of Mann’s claims and drama that ensued over their veracity shook the online birding community, which revolves around a small cadre of websites but has no centralized authority. The mad dash for who could log most birds called into question whether logs should be better moderated in a competition in which sightings are largely accepted in good faith.

“On the internet, you can post anything you want,” said Kaestner, who has generally declined to comment on the veracity of Mann’s listings. “The question is, when this is not hurtful or illegal, it’s just someone making a claim, who gets to say whether any particular claim is valid or not?”

Bird observation has come a long way since the ornithologist John James Audubon announced his goal to painstakingly document all the birds in North America through physical drawings, starting around 1820. With digital cameras, birds can now be captured in high-quality photos, and artificial intelligence technology can identify birds by their calls. While in the past, birders kept lists of “lifers” – the word for a new-to-you species – in paper notebooks, most hobbyists today use online platforms to track and share their sightings. Popular apps including iBird, iGoTerra and eBird allow hobbyists to see where rare birds have been found and try their luck at spotting them.

SMcK: then there’s Merlin.

Thinking of grad school in humanities, give this a read, all of which is from the link until you get to the next link!

Yet this advice is quite different from the advice I give to young women who have similar long-term desires but are considering going not to law school for a J.D., but to graduate school for a humanities Ph.D. Good advice for budding lawyers focuses on planning ahead, but my advice for graduate students focuses on discerning for the present based partially on the realization that one simply cannot plan ahead in this field.

My usual advice to these young women (and I tell young men much the same thing) goes like this:

1. Consider how you might feel if at the end of graduate school, you cannot get a job in your field. Would you still be glad you went?

2. Are you interested only in a particular narrow topic (e.g. women’s fashion in New York City in 1842), or are you also interested in a wide field within a discipline (e.g. American history)? If the former, you likely do not have the flexibility needed for doctoral work.

3. Do you have full (even if meager) funding for your Ph.D. studies? You will likely not earn enough later as a professor to pay loans back quickly, so do not take loans.

4. Is there anything else you are just as interested in as graduate school? Completing a Ph.D. requires passion, sacrifice, and perseverance – if something else would make you just as happy but also give you more security, do that instead!

Lest this sound overly negative, let me add that if a student does have that “spark” that shows a love for the discipline, a curious and agile mind, and a sense of determination, I will enthusiastically recommend that they do go to graduate school. We need such young people as our next generation of scholars and teachers. So there is always piece of advice #5:

• If after thinking through numbers 1-4, you still desperately want to go to graduate school, then: absolutely, positively, and without a doubt, I wholeheartedly encourage you to go!

I enjoyed this from The Honest Broker.

Another one on word origins, including trivia.