But the goal of this fruitfulness is not just personal piety or assurance for the after life; it‘s to build a new kind of community in this world…I wonder if we’re so busy making the gospel a work of correct doctrine, we’re missing the point of its transforming relationships?
From an article by Kathy Hanson about a ministry to the marginalized where the fruit of the Spirit abound but where Jesus is never mentioned by name.
…It clearly would have been unethical to extract brain cells.
From a post on epigenetics at a graduate student’s website explaining why scientists performed experiments on the umbilical cord blood cells of infant humans rather than the brain cells used in a similar study involving infant rats.
…The doctrine of biblical inerrancy has the effect of inspiring its adherents to pay more attention to a text than to the neighbors they are called upon to love. Sometimes it even inspires them to plug up their ears with Bible verses, so that they can no longer hear the anguished cries of neighbors…
Quote from Eric Reitan at Religion Dispatches in an article about same sex marriage equality.
Fred Kaplan writing in Slate.com
But any realistic hopes hinge on understanding something crucial about the surge in Iraq—it has not yet “succeeded,” in any meaningful sense of the word.
Petraeus understands this. At his farewell ceremony as commander of multinational forces in Iraq, he said, “I don’t like to use words like victory or defeat,” and this remark did not stem from modesty. As anyone who’s read Clausewitz knows, war is fought for political aims—it is not won until those aims are achieved—and this war’s aims are not yet within sight: a stable, self-sustaining, democratic Iraq whose government is an ally in the war on terror.
This article in the Joplin Globe eventually gets to a discussion of government-funded anti-drug commercials. The take-away for me:
The skyrocketing obesity rate among young people is a much more dangerous societal problem than marijuana, but if ads portrayed young people who eat too much as negatively as they do kids who choose to smoke weed, people would be outraged.
Imagine a little boy on an abandoned street looking around for someone who isn’t there, and then a stentorian voiceover saying: “Go ahead, tubby, tell your little brother you forgot him because you were too busy stuffing your fat face. Don’t be disgusting; live above the calories.”
I’ve never done drugs but I’ve had some very public struggles with Krispy Kreme. I just wish someone had been there for me with the message, “This is your brain, this is your brain partially hydrogenated. Any questions?”
Cascading Style Sheet Specs are not interesting reading per se, but I’ve spent a lot of time searching through them while building this site.
I’m using a style sheet for the presentation elements of this weblog, but I’ve sort of neglected the cascading part. This site is designed as though CSS meant conglomerate style sheet: every part of this site points back to a single style sheet that just keeps getting bigger and bigger. That’s not the point at all, I think.
The Bleat, written by James Lileks, is one of my favorite blogs because of the way the man can turn a phrase.
For example, in today’s entry he wanted to describe the high-pitched squeak that his bedroom door makes when it’s pushed open slowly. Screech? Or maybe — if we really want to make a point — Scrreeech?
Nope, here’s what Lileks came up with: …it sounds like I?m trying to grate a cat butt-first.
There are a lot of Lileks fans out there already — it’s not like I’m first on the scene or anything — but the embarrassment of being the 3,718,932nd person to link to The Bleat is still much better than, say, …bobbing for dog turds in a chum bucket.