Meanderings, 6 July 2024

Good morning and may your your morning beverage, which I hope is coffee, whether you consume at home or at the cafe, bless you.

Photo by Petr Sevcovic on Unsplash

Scroll down and you will see Yours Truly as an International Guest Lecturer.

You go Suborno!

Recent high school graduate Suborno Isaac Bari, 12, plans to start studying math and physics at New York University in the fall, but he’s already got his ambitious sights set on beginning a doctoral program.

“I hope to graduate college at 14 in spring 2026,” said Suborno, who recently became the youngest graduate from his Long Island high school.

“If I ever decide to do a second Ph.D., it will be in physics, but mainly I want to focus on math,” he told CNN.

The gifted tween, who memorized the periodic table at 2 years old and has taught lectures at colleges in India since he was 7, graduated on Wednesday from Malverne High School in Nassau County, New York.

Suborno, who says he skipped to 12th grade after completing ninth grade studies, became the youngest-ever student to graduate from the high school, CNN affiliate WABC-TV reported.

His high school uses a 100-point GPA scale rather than a 4.0 scale, says Suborno, who shared he earned around a 96 GPA for his first year of high school and a 98 for his second and final year.

Once he began the 12th grade, Suborno took on nondegree classes at several universities around New York including NYU, Stony Brook University, the City University of New York and Brooklyn College.

“That was a whole new challenge for me,” he shared. “You’ve got much more homework, much longer classes, (many) more new subjects and material and it’s all condensed into a far shorter time than in school.”

The bright young student, whose family says he’s also skilled in painting, debate and playing the piano, could also be making history at NYU when he begins pursuing his bachelor of science degree.

From Aimee Byrd.

It’s an extreme betrayal and violation of trust when the shepherds accountable before God to love and care for the sheep leave you exposed to abuse and then use the process of church order to keep you under it. It makes you wonder what these “men of God” really believe. About love. About power. About community and belonging….

And now what? What a precedent it sets for the rest of the women in the denomination. There was a protest filed, with some signatures of church officers who disagree with this ruling. But the now what is basically compliance. Compliance to the ruling. Have the congregational meeting. Get rid of the women teachers. Close the bag, quick! Don’t I know that feeling. The women continue to pick up the tab. Of the shame of their mind and voice and desire to share. The men need protected from this. The twisty tie they reclose the bag with is called “proper church order.” And everyone returns to business as usual.

Plain speaking is a good place to start.

Recently I was reading the prophet Isaiah. One translation has God chiding his people in language that could be ripped from today’s headlines: “Wicked nation!” God cries, “Destroyer of children!” Later Isaiah shares his vision of the world restored to innocence, with children and babies cavorting safely with lions and bears. “They will not hurt or destroy,” God promises, “on all my holy mountain.” Some commentators think it was this passage Paul had in mind when describing creation’s suffering in Romans 8, its yearning to be released from the consequences of men’s sins. Witnessing the horror of those consequences all the Holy Spirit can do is “sigh,” because even the Holy Spirit, says theologian N. T. Wright, is sometimes “lost for words.” 

Whether the Holy Spirit is in fact speechless looking at what we do—the pogroms, the napalm, the bombs, missiles, barbarity, terrorism, callousness, starvation and all the rest—is, as they say, above my paygrade. But I know I am. So often I have no words, not to offer others, not to say within myself. 

Maybe we need to start over, learning to speak again, with clarity and honesty. Without evasions like “casualties,” or euphemisms such as “collateral damage.” We need to learn how to name concrete truths about our world, and about ourselves. “War is not healthy for children and other living things” isn’t a bad place to start. Maybe that’s why she titled it Primer. 

Should cars add some color to our world?

(NewsNation) — When it comes to their cars, more consumers are going gray, and now, roads are half as colorful as they were twenty years ago.

Grayscale colors like white, black, gray and silver make up 80% of cars today, up from 60% in 2004, according to a recent analysis by iSeeCars.com.

The drop comes despite the fact manufacturers are offering nearly the same number of colors, an average of 6.7 colors per model today compared to 7.1 colors per model 20 years ago, the study found.

“Colorful cars appear to be an endangered species,” Karl Brauer, iSeeCars executive analyst, said in a statement. “They’ve lost half their market share over the past 20 years, and they could become even rarer in another 20 years.”

Since 2004, colors like gold (-97%), green (-51%), red (-38%) and blue (-18%) have seen their market share drop. Meanwhile, gray (+82%), white (+77%) and black (+57%) cars have become significantly more popular.

There are a few explanations for the trend. Dealers are in the business of selling cars, so it’s in their best interest to order popular options. Consumers may also lean toward those colors to preserve the car’s resale value in the future.

There’s also the issue of cost. Grayscale colors are cheaper for automakers and tend to be the default, lowest-price option. A Tesla Model Y in “ultra red” will set you back an extra $2,000 compared to the “stealth grey” base model….

The top ten most popular car colors by market share, according to iSeeCars.com:

1. White: 28%

2. Black: 22%

3. Gray: 21%

4. Silver: 9%

5. Blue: 9%

6. Red: 7%

7. Green: 2%

8. Orange: 0.5%

9. Beige: 0.5%

10. Brown: 0.4%

Yep, The Scofield Bible. Thanks Dan Hummel. I owned one, and still have it.

It is a useful fact for trivia night that Oxford University Press, one of the world’s most prestigious academic publishers, has a bestselling book of all time that it doesn’t often celebrate. That bestseller is the Scofield Reference Bible, edited by C. I. Scofield, first published in 1909, updated in 1917, and revised in 1967. In its first few decades, the SRB sold more than two million copies and, by one estimate, has sold more than ten million copies in its lifetime. It still sells in various formats in dozens of languages.

These sales have influenced an entire religious subculture in the English-speaking world. Journalist Amy Frykholm’s recollection is shared by millions of Americans: “In my mind’s eye I see my grandmother’s Scofield Reference Bible, a text from which she read every day of her life, a text that told her of the coming of the rapture” (4). Indeed, the SRB’s widespread adoption by lay evangelicals since 1909 has made it something of a driver of U.S. evangelical and fundamentalist culture writ large.

The SRB popularized the teaching of an any-moment “rapture” event (even as Scofield’s notes did not employ that term) and unobtrusively introduced readers to key teachings of dispensationalism, the theological tradition known for advancing biblical literalism, a strong Church-Israel distinction, and a sequence of distinct dispensations of God’s relationship with humanity that will end with a pretribulational rapture and a premillennial return of Jesus. …

Taking all three dimensions together, the SRB could not be what it became without a mix of continuity and originality relative to American Protestantism in 1909: the Moody movement as the dominant buying market for the Bible and the specific efforts of Scofield himself (and those he surrounded himself with).

Akenson declares that the SRB was “a successful rewriting of the scriptures… a new Bible,” (427) which seems too strong a claim given the significant lines of continuity Scofield advanced from both Exclusive Brethren and American Protestant circles. Historians R. Todd Mangum and Marc Sweetnam, on the other hand, conclude that Scofield’s theology “is characterized by (1) social conservatism; (2) irenic evangelicalism, and (3) distinctive dispensationalism” (133). This gets closer to the analysis presented here, though it was not just the theological but social, cultural, and publishing context that shaped these commitments.

Ted Gioia thinks Silicon valley is turning cultish… or something like it.

May America’s weirdness be contained, Brian Zahnd says:

Indeed American is many things and there’s an inherent weirdness in America’s many iterations. And so I learn to live with America’s weirdness. Some of the weirdness is enchanting. America sounds like Johnny Cash and Joey Ramone. It looks like Dorothy Day and Marilyn Monroe. America feels like sultry New Orleans and manic New York. It’s as real as the Rocky Mountains and as contrived as Las Vegas. This is the kind of weirdness that makes America an intriguing culture. It’s the kind of weirdness that gives birth to the blues, jazz, and rock ‘n’ roll. It gives us Flannery O’Conner and William Faulkner. Elvis and Dylan.

But when American weirdness takes up imperial aspirations or religious pretentions, that’s when I resist. I’m a Christian after all, and I’ve pledged my allegiance to Jesus Christ. My idea of empire is the kingdom of heaven, and my notion of religion is the Sermon on the Mount. I seek to be a serious Christian embracing the Great Tradition — the faith and practice of the saints for two thousand years. I’m not interested in some goofball Johnny-come-lately, hyper-patriotic, star-spangled parody of Christianity. Surely we all see the “God, Guns, and Trump” kitsch for the religious silliness that it is. It’s one thing to be a little bit weird; it’s another thing to be downright ridiculous.

So there’s a kind of American weirdness that’s endearing and there’s a kind that falls somewhere between silly and insidious. This is the weird American landscape I must navigate. I’m a stranger in a strange land and I need to keep my bearings. I try to do that by “looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith,” remembering that “here we have no lasting city, but we seek the one to come.” (Hebrews 12:2, 13:14) My earliest predecessors in the faith had to navigate their way through weird Rome, and I have to navigate my way through weird America. And we are fast approaching the weirdest time of all as America enters its quadrennial descent into the political madness of electing a president. (Lord, have mercy.)

So in the predictably weird insanity of Election Season I’ve got to try to keep my wits about me. I want to keep my soul unstained and my heart at peace. I go about this mostly through prayer. And when things get really crazy, as I know they will, I’ll try to keep matters in perspective and my heart at peace, and quietly whisper, America is weird, but Jesus is Lord.