Weekly Links - Holy Week edition

~ LINKS TO SOME INTERESTING READING, too late for the weekend, but perfect for a monday ~



-"Thoughts on the 'Benedict Option' - a Lament": Dr. Peters' point? Don't write a book about the Benedictines and get the monasticism wrong. 


-"10 Things You Should Know About the Trinity": This whole thing is good, but I especially appreciate point #8.


-"The Death of the Levite's Concubine":

Once having choked it down, you’re left wondering, as with the whole rest of Judges, who exactly the good guy is. 

-"Three Myths of Cohabitation": interview with a sociologist who just completed a very interesting study. A snippet:

Generally speaking, the least educated married families in Europe enjoy more stability than the most educated cohabiting families. That’s not what I would have guessed.

-"Stop Hating on Christian Popular Culture": now here's a challenge for our modern age!


-"Celebrating the Feast of the Anunnciation": I'm a few weeks late on this one, but I really appreciate this piece, and I think it's a good meditation for Holy Week:

This year I had several friends who faced the death of a loved one right at Christmas time.  They had no choice but to grieve and celebrate in the same breath. These sorts of emotional juxtapositions always be gut retchingly difficult. Yet living year by year through the liturgical seasons we are offered a foretaste of the multi-dimensional nature of our emotional life.  In following the seasons we are encouraged to explore the depths of our own souls in both joy and sorrow, to bring our hearts before God, and to align ourselves with the life of the church. When triumph is followed by disaster we have a sense of the path to take, we have walked it and we know where to fix our eyes. In the darkness of the tomb we wait for the light of resurrection.

-"Sushi Saturdays": My eldest daughter and I are the only people in the house who love sushi, and we're determined that this experiment is the perfect activity for Bright Week this year.


-"Researchers Have Transformed a Spinach Leaf into Working Heart Tissue": wow!


-"The Impossible Novel that Became IMPOSSIBLE SAINTS": I follow Clarissa Harwood on Twitter, and enjoyed reading this long version of her first novel sale, especially her honesty when she said:

In hindsight I can see that I was far too close to Novel #2 to see it clearly enough to revise it. I invested too much of myself in it, but that’s also why it was such a joy to write. It was everything a first draft should be: too long, repetitive, self-indulgent, and confusing. In other words, what was an utter delight to write was a complete nightmare to read.

I hope you have a good and blessed Holy Week!

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell

Weekly Links - All Saints' Day Edition!

My weekly* round-up of interesting reading from around the web:

-As a Christian who appreciates science (and science fiction!), I enjoyed reading this interview with the Pope's astronomer.  A highlight of it:

Rather than learning something theologically new, what I take from my discoveries is a more general sense of the “personality” of the creator. It might be compared to discovering a trove of old manuscripts where you think one of them might be some unpublished play of Shakespeare. You’d be excited because it might be a wonderful new work, or even just a window into what he was thinking while he was writing. But you also need to be sure it really is Shakespeare that you’re reading, not some other writer.

- Our family loves the show "Mythbusters", and so I enjoyed this article: "The Craziest Myths the Mythbusters Have Tackled, According to the Mythbusters".


- Now onto religion and society: "This Is Your Wake-up Call" is a sober reflection on abortion and one of the hardest stories in the book of Judges.


- Simcha Fisher on "Rogue Laughter in a Flippant Society" - I especially liked this paragraph:

. . . think of the difference between an eleven-year-old boy laughing about sex, and a forty-year-old married man laughing about sex. The grown man has probably earned his laughter; the boy can't have done so, and is laughing partly because he wants to look more experienced than he really is. True laughter, and the best jokes, come when we have some experience with the subject matter -- when we've faced something big and have survived.

- Anne Kennedy on "Celebrating the Reformation". Good, timely stuff:

The church cannot go beyond the gospel. The Christian doesn’t graduate from a saving knowledge of Jesus into something better later on. So also, the Christian cannot ascend to something higher, cannot move on to some better, fancier doctrine. From the moment of Jesus’ first infant cry, to his sorrowful and painful death, to his rising again, to his crushing of his enemies under his feet those who love him can never cry out someone else’s name for help, they can never give glory to themselves or to another, they can never be sustained by some other grace, they can never lean on and be ruled over by some other authority than Jesus’ own Word, they can never be tethered by some other faith.

-Reformation Day yesterday, All Saints Day today - and yet it's still Ordinary Time!  So, here's Anna Gissing on "Living in Ordinary Time":

. . . many Protestant Christians have been re-learning the rituals and habits of living into these churchy seasons as a way to inhabit the gospel and to structure our lives in a way that helps us remember that God is the author of time.

-Speaking of Reformation Day, I enjoyed this dense bio on "Katherine Parr: Reformation Queen of England and Ireland".


-AND, speaking of All Saints' Day, here's a lovely sonnet by Malcolm Guite for All Hallow's Eve.


- Tim Challies is Canadian, but I think his wise words are a comfort in any political climate: "I Went Away for Just 6 Days":

The temptation is not only to put my hope in politicians but to put my despair in them as well. I will be tempted not only to find too much joy in the election of the person I voted for, but also to sink too far into despair in the election of the person I did not. Either way, whether I soar too high or sink too low, I am declaring that I have put my trust in a man more than in God. I have forgotten that, ultimately, it is God who rules over and through earthly rulers.

-Finally, my friends and family and I found this article on "The Things that Drain Each Personality Type Most" scarily accurate.



Happy All Saints' Day, folks!
-Jessica Snell



*Or, if we're honest, biweekly.

"most blessed among women"

So, when you hear "most blessed among women", who do you think of?

I bet it's not Jael.

Okay, I haven't read any commentaries on this, so I'm not willing to venture any sure and certain thoughts on the significance of it, but that's what Jael is called in Judges, in the song of Deborah no less: "most blessed among women." Here it is with a bit more context; this comes right after Deborah has made fun of the tribes that didn't help in the battle, praised the ones who did, and noted the destruction of their enemies, with the Lord's help:

“Most blessed among women is Jael,
The wife of Heber the Kenite;
Blessed is she among women in tents.

He asked for water, she gave milk;
She brought out cream in a lordly bowl.

She stretched her hand to the tent peg,
Her right hand to the workmen’s hammer;
She pounded Sisera, she pierced his head,
She split and struck through his temple."

I've always liked the story of Jael. When I was a kid and had to find a Biblical costume for one of those Harvest Festivals some churchs have on Halloween, I went either as Lydia, seller of purple, or as Jael, with a homemade, red-stained, wooden peg.

But here's what I'm wondering now: given that such similar words are used both of Jael and of Mary, can I learn anything about Mary's obedience by studying Jael's, or about Jael's by studying Mary's? Or just something general about what obedience to the Lord looks like?

In both cases, it does seem to be a case of victory coming from an unexpected source. You don't expect an unarmed woman to kill a commander, nor do you expect the world's redeemer to be brought into the world through the coooperation of a young girl. In both cases, there isn't hesitation: both Jael and Mary are ready to pursue the Lord's will as soon as the opportunity offers. They must both have been in a constant state of readiness - not an anxious, tense, ready-for-action state, but in a place of openess, ready to hear the Lord when he called, ready to act when he wanted them to.

And though Jael's story involves much more cunning, you can almost hear Mary's question, "how can this be?" In Jael's case, she answered that question herself, there was no angel to tell her how that battle was to be won. But she, like Mary, was looking for the Lord's glory, had a searching mind that wanted to know how his plans were going to be accomplished. And it seems to me the Lord answered her all the same, even without the angel, by showing her immediately how to handle the opportunity that Sisera's arrival represented.


The rest of the song of Deborah is really interesting, and I don't think I'm done looking at it. But first I want to think a bit more about Jael and Mary. What does obedience look like? Though these are such different stories, it seems to me they both seem to say that it's important to pay attention, to listen, to keep your eyes open for ways to serve the Lord. You never know when Sisera is going to stumble by your tent, or an angel give you a strange salutation. And your answer to the question those sorts of situations represent should be that you'll do what the Lord wills.

What do you think - does that sound about right? I'm still thinking this paralell through, and I'm interested in hearing if anyone else sees this in there.

peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell