Month: November 2011

J.R. Daniel Kirk embraces the different Gospel accounts:

[W]hat do we do when Luke says, "Blessed are the poor," and Matthew says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit"? Is Matthew clear here where Luke is ambiguous, thereby telling us what Jesus really meant? Or are we to hear in Luke’s version his special concern for the socially marginalized? …  Make no mistake, there are tremendous pastoral issues at stake in affirming correctly what the Bible is. But one of the worst mistakes we can make, especially in a day and age where media will tell people the truth if we don’t, is to affirm a vision of a single-voiced scripture that fails to correspond to the text we have actually been given.

Brian LePort buttresses Kirk's point: 

Jesus was a 3-D character in a 2-D world, yet we seek to flatten him. He was big enough to need multiple portraits, but we shrink him. … This isn’t a call for a relativized Jesus. I don’t think the Gospels of Judas, Peter, the Hebrews, and so forth provide us with depictions of Jesus grounded in the historical Jesus. There are some limitations to the Jesus we encounter. Yet within these limitations there is great diversity. This tells me that Jesus was someone quite special.

Tony Woodlief tells stories of narrow escape to his sons:

I told them about the time I refused to go to the childcare home where my mother left me when she worked third shift. That night it burned down, and children died in the darkness there. I told them about the doctor finding cancer when I was a teenager, and how they cut it out of me.

"You’ve cheated death a lot," Caleb said.

"Not as much as many," I said.

But we all cheat death every day, don’t we? We cheat it by crafting beauty, or loving someone, or making new life; sometimes we cheat it just by leaving the gun in the drawer, the liquor in the cabinet, the hateful word in our bellies.

R.J. Snell finds freedom in "owingness": 

I am what I am in virtue of the responsibilities I bear. Insofar as I matter as a person, I am constituted not by sovereignty, but by what I owe. And only by knowing what I owe to others do I know who I am and what I’m for; ignorance of owing is to be devoid of a self. If this is true, then the ability to cultivate a sense of owingness is to become a real human being, a free human being. But almost every bit of our cultural life is stacked against our developing this sense.

"The Human Seasons" by John Keats:

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;
There are four seasons in the mind of man:
He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear
Takes in all beauty with an easy span:
He has his Summer, when luxuriously
Spring’s honied cud of youthful thought he loves
To ruminate, and by such dreaming high
Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves
His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings
He furleth close; contented so to look
On mists in idleness–to let fair things
Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.
He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,
Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

Read the whole poem here.

(Photo: Walkers pass trees showing their autumn colours on November 1, 2011 in Bath, England. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images)

New research by Harvey James found that happier people tend to be more ethical:

I found a correlation between how people responded to ethics questions and their satisfaction with life. As part of the 2005-06 wave of the World Values Survey (which examines attitudes around the globe), respondents were asked in face-to-face interviews: On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with your life? There were also four ethics questions that ask how acceptable or unacceptable they felt a particular practice is: claiming government benefits to which you are not entitled; avoiding paying your fare on public transportation; cheating on taxes; and accepting a bribe. What I found is, generally, people who believe that these particular ethical scenarios are not acceptable also tend to indicate they are more satisfied with life. That’s with controlling for other factors that scholars have shown are also correlated with happiness, including relative wealth.

David Carr explains how AA affected him spiritually: 

All along the way, in [substance abuse] recovery, I’ve been helped … by all of these strangers who get in a room and do a form of group-talk therapy and live by certain rules in their life — and one of the rules is that you help everyone who needs help. And I think to myself: Well, that seems remarkable. Not only is that not a general human impulse, but it’s not an impulse of mine. … I’m kind of a thug. I’ve done a bunch of terrible things. And yet I’m able to, for the most part, be a decent person. How is that? Do I have some inner strength of character? I think not. I think something else is working on me.

Fred Clark is reminded of Jesus’s response when asked which commandment is the most important.

Commenting on a post about dating and teens wearing too much cologne, one of TNC's readers shares his own story:

[This] reminds me how much of these experiences I missed out on as a gay teen. Never had the opportunity to do the dating thing, or get caught up in trying to impress folks. It just struck me how foreign all of these concepts are to my own history and experience. I'm a tourist in heteroland.

TNC reflects on this:

The right to, as a young person, to openly court, to craft rituals around that courting, to have touch-stones, to publicly reminisce over them, all without the threat of violence–explicit or implicit–strikes me as a rather powerful privilege. Surely there must be caveats for, class, geography and social groupings, here, but I think it's fair to say, at my high school, the space for gay kids to publicly talk about what cologne they were wearing to woo the objects of their affection was nonexistent. 

Last weekend, the lesbian couple in the above video became homecoming king and queen. Social conservatives, of course, freaked out.

In the late 1950s, researchers tested drugs called "bis(dichloroacetyl) diamines" on inmates at the Oregon State Penitentiary. It looked promising at first: 

The compounds reduced the amount of sperm in the men’s semen, and sometimes completely wiped it out. The pills didn’t affect libido, and the only reported side effect was bloating and gas. What’s more, within a few weeks of stopping treatment, sperm counts went back up. It was, perhaps, the horny grail: reversible birth control for men, no rubber required.

The problem came when the pills were tested outside of those prison walls. Unfortunately, when men taking the drugs drank alcohol, they had a violent reaction, including acute vomiting and shortness of breath. The research was quickly abandoned. "The joke there, of course, is that if it weren’t for alcohol, you wouldn’t need a contraceptive," quipped researcher John Amory …

Contemporary coverage of the male pill here, here and here.

Amy T. Schalet's new book questions American conceptions about teen sexuality:

The U.S. is very strongly tied to the model of marriage. We don’t want 15- or 16- or 17-year-olds to marry but we don’t think a relationship is love unless it’s the one and only, the person you’re going to marry forever. It’s also tied to individualism, because if you believe that intimate relationships are threatening to young people’s developments, and that you have to do things on your own first and then settle down, then everything you do before settling down is not going to be about love.

Think again:

Europeans seem perfectly comfortable cracking open a 1-euro tetra-pak of wine for guests. Germans, for example, pay just $1.79 on average for a bottle of wine. … If you and your significant other [in the US] were to drink five bottles of wine a week, at $15 per bottle, your annual wine outlay would approach $4,000. That’s more than the average family spends on groceries.