Our local high school’s football field seems occupied each day at various times, though most are ignoring the red tailed hawks atop the light poles looking for unsuspecting critters. Instead, the band is learning how to be a band during a football game and the football teams are practicing and various school groups are meeting up. At times now the parking lots are mostly full. Projects around the school are now completed. These sounds and sights always kick off the year for us, as both of our fathers were high school teachers and coaches. We await announcing the play by play of the first home football game.
Photo by Ashley Levinson on Unsplash
A clip about Ron Sider by Chris Gehrz:
Inspired by Pelikan, Roland Bainton, and the pioneering Dutch scholar Heiko Oberman, Sider joined a wave of historians committed to revising conventional interpretations of the Protestant Reformation. For his dissertation (published by Brill in 1974), he studied the thought of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, the fiery theologian who first supported Martin Luther and then broke with him when Luther proved insufficiently radical. One reviewer praised Sider for providing “a needed antidote to [the] ill-concealed contempt” that some Reformation historians still had for Luther’s rival, while avoiding “the other extreme of heroic exaggerations… Sider shapes his Karlstadt strictly according to available evidence, so that whatever his picture lacks in lively caricature it gains in credibility.”
But the arc of Sider’s long career was probably shaped more by his experiences living in an African American neighborhood of New Haven than by his time studying history at Yale. Teaching classes on poverty and racism at Messiah College’s satellite campus in Philadelphia helped lead the new professor further into social activism and away from his original career aspirations. He did edit a collection of Karlstadt’s papers in 1977, as he took a position teaching theology and ministry (not history) at what’s now Palmer Seminary, just before he published the book that brought him to wider attention: Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger.
That influential work set the tone for many of its successors in drawing from economics and other social sciences, public policy, and biblical theology to frame the problem and propose solutions to it. While Sider alluded to the role of European colonialism in causing global economic inequality and the Enlightenment in fostering the values of laissez-faire capitalism, most of his illustrations and explanations were contemporary. If he turned to earlier eras for guidance, it was almost always the biblical past: the principles of Sabbath and Jubilee in the Torah, and the “new social order” inaugurated by Jesus, whose first followers experienced “redeemed economic relationships” that could still be a model for modern Christ-followers.
(NewsNation) — In some of America’s biggest cities, there are a growing number of schools with a shrinking number of students.
For now, COVID-19 relief money is helping to subsidize operations, but that will not always be the case.
One of the more pressing issues this creates is that most of these schools were not originally designed to be small, leaving some educators afraid that the future will bring tighter budgets.
The problem is pronounced in the second largest school district in the country, as 20,000 students are now missing from the Los Angeles Unified School District roster.
The L.A. superintendent says he personally called about 50 families and was told in some cases that children are staying home to care for younger siblings. In other cases, he reports that some kids are working jobs to help the family.
Public school systems across the U.S. were already shedding a large numbers of students as families relocated amid the pandemic, with some frustrated by in-person learning policies seeking alternatives such as home schooling and private schools.
NewsNation spoke with a Florida Gulf Coast University professor of education who says she believes the answer will be public school listening to the needs of parents and reflecting their desires.
That includes topics regarding safety in school, curriculum, learning styles and parents having a say in choosing school leaders.
Keep your eyes on John Hawthorne’s newsletter:
It’s a sad reality that the criminal justice system responds differently to rich white men compared to working or lower class black people. As Bryan Stevenson wrote in Just Mercy, “we have to reform a system of criminal justice that continues to treat people better if they are rich and guilty than if they are poor and innocent.”
What accounts for this differential treatment?
It’s an easy out to simply assert that law enforcement and the courts are racist by design. Many have made this claim and there’s something to it. But that is too easily refuted by a “not all cops” claim and FaceBook pictures of black officers playing pickup basketball with neighborhood kids.
I suggest that there are four contributing factors that are even more important than overt or implicit racism. They are Power, Respect, Expertise, and the Doc Ock problem.
It’s been a week. I accepted an invitation to preach on the Song of Songs to a wonderful Evangelical Presbyterian Church congregation. I was met with much hospitality, encouragement, and engagement there. And for that, I am also met with much vitriol on the internet. It’s a lot to hold together in your heart and in your head.
I wrote a response to the first wave of accusations after accepting an invitation, and CBMW published a piece about me, hoping that those who disagreed with me would at least see where I am with things and move on with their lives. But that is a pipe dream. On top of the vitriol, there is the subtle shaming. It is surreal to read a backhanded subtweet and then learn from the comments and retweets that it’s about you:
Certain people’s theological or spiritual declension should be less a cause for a sense of vindication than sorrow and shame for any whose unchristian behaviour played a part in pushing them from the truth. We can challenge people without giving orthodoxy a toxic reputation.
While he seems to be addressing toxic behavior, do you see the toxic framing there? Whomever he is speaking of…she which shant be named…is in theological and spiritual declension, pushed from the truth. So I just want to clarify that I am confident that I have been pushed, but God catches his own and I am closer to the truth even as I have much, much more to learn.
The theological and spiritual declension I see going on in the church is not because a woman gave an invitation to beauty based on Song of Songs 3:11.
Despite the accusations, I didn’t have an ambition to preach. I just wanted to have some conversations with the preacher. Because I was so moved by the gospel. And what that meant for reality and life. I wanted in—where it mattered. Into the beautiful. Into the magic of it all. Oh, the questions I had! Who else shared in these inquiries? And this draw into the invitation? I didn’t see myself as a leader, but merely a responder.
But in responding, over and over again—and in asking those inquiries (oh, the curiosity and wonder!)—I found myself an oddity. The gospel response seemed to be different for women. Every time I thought myself to be penetrating into the conversation, I learned I was but a prop.
The accusations that arose from my wanting to simply have space for women as disciples where there is true co-laboring—reciprocal, dynamic discipleship in the church with all members: women, minorities, disabled, children—were vilifying.
Mike Bird’s Substack newsletter has another interesting post about politics:
The world is becoming increasingly divided between liberal democracies and autocratic regimes.
You might say that it’s a divide between the USA, India, Australia, and Europe on the one hand and China, Russia, Iran, Bolivia, and Venezuela on the other hand (yes, you could add more to both lists).
The idea that China would become more liberal, free, and open as its economy advanced has been disproved. China is a technocratic surveillance state, with a belief in the racial superiority of Han Chinese, and has two tools in its diplomatic toolbox comprised of bribery and punitive measures.
Of course, the west is not immune to imperialism, whether it is military interventions in the middle east, exploitive relationships with former colonies, or failing to assist developing democracies in their economic growth and food security. Even in liberal democracies, religious nationalism is a problem, in the USA, Israel, Indonesia, and India. Plus, many western democracies can fail to evenly distribute their wealth, they get bogged in intractable debates about clime change and gender fluidity, and reach the point of either political inertia or civil war by digital means.
In such a world, what should a Christian view of politics, power, and public engagement look like? What is a Christian response to an age of democratic delinquency and ascending autocracy?
It is hard to be prescriptive because every context is different, whether we are talking about Christians in China, Syria, South Africa, New Zealand, Russia, Finland, or America.
Sometimes we need to have a Romans 13 attitude and cooperate with the state for the public good. Other times we need to have a Revelation 13 attitude and pray for God to destroy an evil empire root and branch. …
I’m of the mind that whatever our cultural context, political climate, or church-state relationships, there is something inherently right about the notion of freedom.
I’m not talking about a radical Christian libertarianism, to the effect, “It’s my God-given right to not wear a helmet, pay taxes, or get immunized.” That is because all freedom carries responsibilities, whether that is participation in a republic’s democratic institutions, acting responsibly towards others, or contributing to the public good. There is no absolute freedom because we are not free from the consequences of each other’s actions.
We should value the freedom to pursue one’s own happiness, to practice one’s own religion, to follow one’s own conscience, and the freedom to be different without fear of reprisal.
Collectibles marketplace Goldin announced on Thursday that a T-206 Honus Wagner has sold in a private sale for $7.25 million, a record amount for a sports card.
The figure eclipsed the $6.606 million fetched for another T-206 Wagner almost a year ago to the day.
The version of the Wagner that sold recently was graded a 2 out of 10 by Sportscard Guaranty Corp., or SGC; the 2021 record-breaker received a 3 from SGC.
I had not heard of necrobiotics, but now I have:
Spiders, it turns out, do not move their limbs via opposing muscles, but instead use a system more akin to hydraulic pressure. Which a laboratory at Rice University has realized that spider corpses can be injected with air and used as a tool for grasping small objects. While this may sound creepy, the research group explains in the video below that the field of soft robotics explores using non-traditional materials, and at the very least, these are likely the most biodegradable robots yet conceived.
No shortage of meaningful thought-markers here! Equality, fairness, etc., all fueled by Jesus-perspective thoughts! The four markers of power to Doc Ock are fantastic!
Thank you!