The new alarmism: How some Christians are stoking fear rather than hope
The new alarmism seems to have bought the nonsense about the “right side of history,” just in the negative. Hunker down for a decline. But I’m reminded of a line from one of John Updike’s early short stories: “The churches of Greenwich Village had this second-century quality. In Manhattan, Christianity is so feeble its future seems before it.” Count me one of the “willfully blind” perhaps, but I would never count out a savior who rose from the dead.
No, Stay At Home Moms Don’t ‘Waste’ Their Education
I remember when a very conservative friend warned my mom not to let us girls pursue career-oriented degrees. This friend was afraid that educated women would be unlikely to stay home with children. Most feminists would decry the idea of trying to “trap” young women into any particular life path. If they are to be consistent, however, feminists—and society at large—need to recognize that education is not a trap, either. It is something that helps all women live their lives in a more fully human manner, no matter what their work may turn out to be. Even if it involves teaching children how to go potty.
The biggest threat facing middle-age men isn’t smoking or obesity. It’s loneliness.
Now consider that in the United States, nearly a third of people older than 65 live alone; by age 85, that has jumped to about half. Add all of this up, and you can see why the surgeon general is declaring loneliness to be a public health epidemic.
With The New Yorker, you can have your cake and gain insight into flowers and same-sex weddings, too
I’ll highlight three things that struck me about this story, which contemplates whether the U.S. Supreme Court might take up the case of either Phillips or Stutzman:
- The piece makes clear early — and with clarity — that Phillips’ problem was not with serving gay customers per se but with participating in a same-sex wedding.
- The report quotes both sides and delves below the surface to illustrate the complexities of the cases.
- The New Yorker does not put scare quotes around “religious freedom” or “religious liberty.”
Hermeneutics for Healthy Churches, Part One
So then, what makes a healthy church? Missiologists who consider such a question are often plagued with tunnel vision. Rightly loving and laboring to see the advance of the church into new areas, they define church health solely in terms of the church’s ability to start new churches. Self-propagation, then, becomes the defining metric of church health. In reality, many other components should be included in a discussion of church health, and to be fair, most of those components are not easily quantifiable.
The reality is that, like the Ethiopian eunuch, every church needs guides who will lead the church to interpret scripture in a way that is faithful to the original author’s intent. This is the reason why Paul told Timothy his goal was “rightly handling the Word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:14).
In a well-planned worship service there are no redundant elements. If every element is planned, every element is important, which leads to an important point of application: People who show up late are missing a part of the story. And many do. People who would never miss the opening credits of a film seem willing to miss the call to worship. People who wouldn’t skip the first chapters of a novel routinely dawdle past the assurance of pardon. Yet those who show up after the call to worship have missed the very element that consecrates the time to the Lord. Those who turn up only at the assurance of pardon have neglected the confession. Those who wander in late are robbing themselves of half the story, skipping out on half the blessing.
American Library Association Updates Its CRAAP Test for Spotting Fake News
After gauging the validity of your source, do the same for the other four markers. If the information has authority but lacks currency, relevance, accuracy, or purpose, it’s probably not worth citing in an academic essay (or tweeting out to your followers).
Woman forks out for stranger’s expensive plane ticket
She walked over to the man and asked what was wrong, and after talking for a while, she told the airline agent she wanted to pay for the girl’s ticket.
The agent said, “You know how much this ticket costs right?” and after explaining it would cost a whopping $US749, the woman said “that’s fine” and pulled out her credit card.
Overtaken By Events: Kids Burst Onto Scene Of Live BBC TV Interview
Kelly was offering his thoughts about the impeachment of President Park Geun-hye when his daughter infiltrated the live Skype interview — and in an instant, viewers who had been pondering the Korean peninsula were instead watching the pigtailed girl bop into the room, clearly pleased to have found her daddy.
“I think one of your children has just walked in,” the BBC anchor said, prompting Kelly to reach behind him to keep his daughter back from the camera.
Kelly smiled, and the girl settled onto a table in what looks to be his home office in Pusan to have a snack, and all seemed settled. And that’s when Kelly’s toddler son got into the act, bursting into the room in a rolling walker and making a beeline toward the camera.
At that point, off-camera giggles erupted from the BBC set, and while Kelly did his best to keep his composure, a woman rushed into the room to retrieve the children.