My time with the incredible finds from Dura Europos at the Yale University Art Gallery are some of my fondest memories…
Walking alongside the shelves, one can step from intricate African sculptures to ancient Greek vases to Chinese porcelain to a collection of Picasso ceramics. Opposite the entrance and behind glass display cases are a series of white, metal sliding shelves. They are filled with, among other things, wooden staffs, tea cups and wall fragments excavated from Dura-Europos, Syria.
Merianna and I released a new episode of our rebooted Thinking Baptists podcast last night reflecting on our own personal feelings about the CBF’s Illumination Project as well as our own viewpoints regarding church policies at the institutional and local levels…
The Rev. Merianna Neely Harrelson and The Rev. Sam Harrelson break down this week’s release of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship’s Illumination Project report from their own perspectives.
Good reflection by Julia Pennington-Russell here on the CBF’s Illumination Project work as well as moralism, legalism, and theopolitics regardless of denomination:
And many, maybe most, CBF churches are so anxious about jeopardizing a fragile harmony that they avoid even the mildest conversation about human sexuality, even as their LGBTQ brothers and sisters suffer outside the gate. What is the Spirit saying here?
Source: Illuminations: The Healing Space between “Good” and “Bad” | CBFblog
Here are results from the 18-month long Illumination Project that the CBF launched to address its controversial anti-LGBTQ hiring policy back in 2016.
Thomas and I did an episode of Thinking Religion last night to share some thoughts if you’d like to know where I stand.
To reflect the practice of most of its congregations, the procedure states: “Among other qualifying factors, CBF will employ persons for leadership positions in ministry who exhibit the ideals set forth in our hiring policy, have gifts appropriate to the particular position and who practice a traditional Christian sexual ethic of celibacy in singleness or faithfulness in marriage between a woman and a man.” For other positions on the CBF staff in Decatur, applicants will be considered who meet the qualities set forth in the new hiring policy, including Christians who identify as LGBT.
Dr. Thomas J. Whitley and The Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss beards, Life on Mars, and the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship's hiring policy (and past, present, future).
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“He wondered what aliens might think if they ever came across the Roadster drifting through space. After all, SpaceX packed other weird items in the car, among them a small toy Hot Wheels Roadster (complete with a miniature Starman) on the dashboard.
“Maybe [it will be] discovered by an alien race, thinking, ‘What were these guys doing? Did they worship this car? Why do they have a little car in the car?'” Musk said. “That will really confuse them.”‘
Source: Elon Musk’s Tesla Roadster Is Headed to the Asteroid Belt
This has made for a fun morning with our many client sites that are running WordPress…
In an unfortunate turn of events, WordPress 4.9.3 was released earlier this week and it included a bug which broke WordPress auto-update. Millions of sites auto-updated from 4.9.2 to WordPress 4.9.3 and it broke their ability to auto-update in the future.
via Wordfence
Dr. Thomas Whitley and The Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss toxic masculinity and compare Trump with Jesus, Apple's woes, and voice assistants.
James C. Scott is one of the scholars I always enjoy reading. I was introduced to his work Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts while in a (wonderful) seminary class on the Parables. The insightful connection that our beloved professor made between Jesus’ acts and words in his performance of the parables with the essence of what Scott described as “public” and “hidden” transcripts still resonates with me today anytime I read the Gospels.
I’m excited to read this work as well. Although it seems to have a similar topic as many scholarly takes on the how’s and why’s civilizations collapse, (anyone else notice how both academic works, as well as the entertainment world, is fascinated by dystopias and doom-and-gloom in this Age of Trump?) one of my ongoing fascinations and points of interests is the rise of civilization in Mesopotamia as well as the later “Sea Peoples” of Egyptian history. It looks like both of these topics make an appearance in Scott’s new work:
What if the origin of farming wasn’t a moment of liberation but of entrapment? Scott offers an alternative to the conventional narrative that is altogether more fascinating, not least in the way it omits any self-congratulation about human achievement. His account of the deep past doesn’t purport to be definitive, but it is surely more accurate than the one we’re used to, and it implicitly exposes the flaws in contemporary political ideas that ultimately rest on a narrative of human progress and on the ideal of the city/nation-state.
Source: Steven Mithen reviews ‘Against the Grain’ by James C. Scott · LRB 30 November 2017
Realizing that the origins of colors in Mesopotamia are found in the idea of brightness and saturation allows us to dispel the notion that Akkadian has a poor and imprecise color vocabulary. Rather than look for equivalents to English words like red, blue and purple, we should understand how colors were imagined and experienced by ancient [hu]man[s] under the conditions of [their]his own speech community. Only then can we begin to appreciate the use of color in his art and poetry.
In the Easter sermon at my own church, the priest commented that Jesus was killed by the 1 percent, in the form of an empire that exploited its citizenry for the sake of profit and growth. While this sentiment might not be surprising where I live in liberal Northern California, it’s also present throughout the Bible. President Trump, whose own religious beliefs remain puzzling, vague, and nearly impossible to parse even among theologians and religion journalists, has repeatedly pushed policies that are the opposite of many of Christ’s messages even in his short time in office.
Source: Do We Really Want Our Government Run Like a Business? | Sojourners
I’ll freely admit that I didn’t make it through this without some tears…
I don’t think it’s saying too much to suggest that Bowie helped Benj discover his humanity. Like all of us, the parents, the therapists, and teachers, he was drawing the child’s spirit out into the light of relations that could sustain it. But the opposite is true too. Bowie the wild man, the extravaganza, the extraterrestrial—he was, as he always knew, in desperate need of being humanized, of being understood as merely, fully, human. Everything he did was about its being all right to be yourself—that’s what Benj heard and, in the mirror he held to himself, allowed Bowie again to be.
Source: How David Bowie helped my autistic son become himself.
Dr. Thomas J. Whitley and The Rev. Samuel B. Harrelson play HQ Trivia and go to The Good Place to discuss Squab Goals.
“My name is Kierkegaard and my writing is impeccable. Check out my teleological suspension of the ethical.”
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In the shadow of Amazon’s offices in downtown Seattle, people enter a tiny grocery store, take whatever they want, and then walk out. And nobody runs after them screaming. This is what it’s like to shop at Amazon Go, the online retail giant’s vision for the future of brick-and-mortar stores. There are no checkout clerks, or even checkout stands. Instead, a smartphone app, hundreds of regular and infrared cameras on the ceiling (black on black, so they blend in), computer-vision algorithms, and machine learning work together to figure out what you’re picking up and charge you for it on a credit card connected to your Amazon account.
Source: Amazon’s Checkout-Free Grocery Store Is Opening to the Public – MIT Technology Review
We’re all suffering from something and we should all be able to admit that without feeling the need to keep on performing for people. It’s a serious deficiency of our American culture that we elevate fake stoicism.
But gosh, I do love some Tom Petty music. Sad read but maybe it’ll help at least one person seek some help:
ON THE DAY HE DIED HE WAS INFORMED HIS HIP HAD GRADUATED TO A FULL ON BREAK AND IT IS OUR FEELING THAT THE PAIN WAS SIMPLY UNBEARABLE AND WAS THE CAUSE FOR HIS OVER USE OF MEDICATION.
Source: The Official Website of Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
So frustrating. How do people like this climb the ladder to be something like head of AmeriCorps?
“Trump appointee resigns as public face of agency that runs AmeriCorps after KFile review of racist, sexist, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBT comments on the radio”
http://www.cnn.com/2018/01/18/politics/kfile-carl-higbie-on-the-radio/index.html
This is going to put me at odds with many of my more liberal friends, but I do see the justification for the argument here as well as “The Case Against Education.” Education is big business and we’re not educating our children (or adults) in the US in a way that best suits their future or the future of our republican democracy.
So what is really going on? Caplan offers plausible evidence that school functions to let students show employers that they are smart, conscientious, and conformist. And surely this is in fact a big part of what is going on. I’ve blogged before one, and in our book we discuss, some other functions that schools may have served in history, including daycare, networking, consumption, state propaganda, domesticating students into modern workplace habits.
When Adam dalf and Eve span,
Who was thanne a gentilman?
John Ball
Almost everything else about the song is baffling in a way that may alienate some fans, but potentially exciting to those of us who think the old shtick is a little tired. Most importantly, after his occasionally torpid second solo album Lazaretto, on “Respect Commander,” White sounds like he’s having fun again.
Source: Review: Jack White – “Connected By Love” & “Respect Commander” | SPIN
Weird – but I like.
Dr. Thomas Whitley and the Rev. Sam Harrelson discuss quantum hacks, the evolution of reality TV and its impact on our Gen X lives, and why 2020 will be a different political landscape than 2016.
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