Weekly Links: Ice, Oxy, Red Letters, and More!

Wow, I'm posting my weekend links while it's actually still the weekend! This is progress indeed.

Let's start with things that are either funny or pretty:

-This Icy Hair-Freezing Contest definitely falls under the "funny" category. I love it because it reminds me of my childhood in the Northwest Territories, and how my ponytail would freeze into a sharp spike while I walked back to school from the (indoor) swimming pool.

-"Mesmerizing Space Photos of 2015" - This one falls into the "pretty" category or, maybe more properly yet, into the jaw-droppingly gorgeous and awe-inspiring category.

-"Home Soil - 1:18" - aaaaaaand, back to funny. A particularly enjoyable recap from "Fashion It So" - that fake novel cover!

And, on to our more General Interest Links:

-"Standford Professor Who Pioneered Praising Effort Sees False Praise Everywhere": The "growth mindset" described here is a really helpful concept.

-"Oxy Epidemic Shows What Happens When Addictive Drugs Are Easily Available": so, yeah, maybe don't legalize everything?

And, the links specifically for my fellow writers:

-"We Regret to Inform You": Maybe this should have gone under the "funny" category, but, no. No, it's just too real.

-"Writing Your Manuscript a Third at a Time": I'll admit that I'm just linking to this one for my own sake - because it's something that I think I might want to try!

Finally, the specifically Christian links:

- "Burning and Yearning" - I appreciate the distinction the author draws in this article.

-"The Spirit of the Red Letters and 'Progressive Evangelicalism'" - There's some very useful clarity in this piece. (Pitting Jesus against Jesus is not a good idea.)

-"Before the Birds and the Bees" - And finally, this goes in the "sad but necessary" category. Fellow parents, take heed.



I hope you all have a great weekend!

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 It might be compared to discovering a trove of old manuscripts where you think one of them might be some unpublished play of Shakespeare.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.

Weekly Links: Broken Christians, Building the City, and more!

"Broken Christians":

Sure, everyone outside the church is just as ugly, just as sinning, just as broken, but the church, the bride of Jesus, is supposed to be perfect and beautiful. Or so says the world. But that’s not what Jesus says. Jesus loves the church, loves his bride, whatever the world says about her. And he is not surprised and disgusted by her brokenness. In fact, if he was, we would think he was a bad husband, which he’s not. So there you are. In everything, the reflection is always back to Christ, who is beautiful, and perfect, who loves his bride, even though she is broken down and left bereft by the wayside. He picks her up and takes care of her.

"What Is ECUSA Spending on Lawsuits?": Speaking of broken . . .

"Being a Go-Getter Is No Fun":

 Why should you do more work for the same reward, while your less capable coworker coasts along with lower expectations and work?

"The Shield Failed, the City Endures":

 It is easy to list the errors of the Christian Empire and, thank God, the Empire is not returning. We have learned much since  that time in 1453, but we have learned the lessons in part because the City saved the texts, the education, and the vocabulary that allow us to reject some of what that City did. We stand on the intellectual foundations of Constantinople behind the long intellectual walls she defended, constructed, and preserved. That City of words has never fallen and can never fall as long as one modern Christian endures.

"What Shakespeare Plays Originally Sounded Like":  Very Northern!


"Well-Planned, Hard, Sweat-Inducing Prayer and Work":

Prayer is the first and most important thing you are called to do. “You can do more than pray after you have prayed, but you cannot do more than pray until you have prayed,” John Bunyan writes.“Pray often, for prayer is a shield to the soul, a sacrifice to God, and a scourge to Satan.”

Finally, a video. I already thought Sia's "Chandelier" was a sad and haunting song, but this cover of it is just amazing:

Weekly Links, a little late!

"Progress":

One of the earliest lessons of having a special-needs child was learning to recognize his progress not by comparing him to typically-developing children of the same age, but by comparing him to his own earlier self.

"Where to Start Your Story":

One of the first things I think about when I sit down to actually plot a book is where I'm going to start. As a general rule, the best place to start your story is always wherever things get interesting. BUT (and here's where it gets cool), "where things get interesting" can vary enormously depending on your audience/genre.

"Dirty Clothes, Complaints and Contentment":

Benedict has a way of pulling the rug out from under me. I’ll feel like I’m doing alright with life (I mean I’m not setting the bar all that high, but no one is getting hurt, we are all fed and bathed and dressed at least) and then I sit down and read something like this. Now true, this is a rule of life written 1,500 years ago for monks, totally different from my life. But it gets me thinking.

"The Audacity of Cinderella":

The unflinching purity of this film is so rare that it made me uncomfortable at first, and then it made me ache, because I’m so starved for sincerity.

"The day I bought steak with my food stamps":

And they hated us anyway. Oh, man. They told us everything I had been saying to myself: freeloaders. Not willing to work. What’s wrong with America today. Culture of dependency. And all the while, we went around the house with winter jackets and three pairs of socks on, because we couldn’t afford to turn the heat above 60 degrees when it was below zero out. My kids never got a new toy, never got new clothes. They learned never to ask for a popsicle or a box of crayons. We cobbled together a bizarre school curriculum out of whatever books were 25 cents at the thrift store. My husband’s glasses were taped together at the nose, we had no auto or health insurance, and I chose my driving routes according to how many hills I could coast down, to save gas. We prioritized bills according to how threatening they were.

"The Winter of His Disbelief":

Nor­mally we would start the tour here, ski­ing the three miles of road to the sum­mer trail­head and our first mea­sure­ment course, but this year we drove the three miles instead of ski­ing them, and parked the car at road’s end. We saun­tered to the snow course at North Lake, ele­va­tion 9,300′. In a nor­mal year, we’d expect to mea­sure the equiv­a­lent of 10 inches of SWE at North Lake, but not only was the course free of snow, the meadow grasses were begin­ning to sprout, and the dis­mal real­ity of the bleak snow­pack started set­ting in . . .

"What's Going on with Family Christian Stores?":

Yes. The guy who owns the company, and who wants to buy the company from himself, also wants to be a creditor, so he gets paid before others. What a guy.

Weekend Links: Facepalm Jesus, purity, talking about race, and more!

Here's some reading for your weekend!

"Coffee with Facepalm Jesus Calling":

An earlier generation asked What Would Jesus Do? But these days, people are increasingly comfortable with skipping the hypothetical, shifting out of the subjunctive, and just telling us What Jesus Would Say, in their opinions. If he were really here, that is: if he were talking, if he were blogging, or meme-ing, or cartooning, or writing devotionals.

"Let the Battle for Purity Begin":

As a young priest in the 1970s, I served for a decade in campus ministry settings. In those years, the first fruits of the sexual revolution were already apparent. Pope Francis’s image of the Church as a “field hospital” in the midst of such wreckage would describe it well.

"On Being White (And Talking About It) – Part 1":

I have seen my students do one of two things when confronted with a glaring disparity in the real world to their beliefs about human equality – they either (1) become very uncomfortable and frustrated that their parents didn’t teach them the truth, or (2) become very self-righteous, sure that equality is real, and that anyone experiencing inequality must be morally at fault for their own situation.

And Part II can be found here.

"Murder in Los Angeles":

The Homicide Report addresses two questions every newspaper covering a major metropolis should answer: who was killed last night, and why? But most newspapers don’t do this because the logic of most newsrooms is that not all murders are sexy, grisly, or surprising enough to be written about. The Homicide Report operates on the inverse principal: Every murder gets a story because murder is inherently worthy of our attention

"Today Thomas Ken, Bishop of Bath, Died (1711)": I'm linking to this one because it contains the full text of Bishop Ken's sublime "Evening Hymn". I've long loved the version in our hymnal, and I was delighted to learn that not only does it have more verses, but that there's a matching "Morning Hymn" to go with it!

"What I’m learning about choice and gratitude from not skipping songs on my iPod":

Not having a choice about which song I listen to makes me calculate finding pleasure in songs differently. Instead of actively working to perfectly assemble the music so that it will make me happy, I derive happiness from whatever is in front of me. The switch in mindsets in the same switch you make when you go from being a shopper making a purchase to being a recipient receiving a gift. One involves feeling powerful, deciding which among a variety of items will best please you; the other involves receptivity, seeking what is good in whatever you have been given.

Links

"Guns, Football, and Fornication":

Perhaps, society should discourage sex outside of marriage and making babies outside of marriage as ideals. We all admit that many will not live up to the ideals, but that would not make them worse. Social pressure does have some impact after all.

"Semiannual Gluttony Retrospective, Pt. I":

Because one thing I've learned through the past four years is that there are eating disorders that keep you fat and eating disorders that keep you thin, but they're still disorders. There are gluttonies that keep you fat and gluttonies that keep you thin, but both are no good way to live.

"Editing the Soul":

In a way, examining your conscience is very much like being a good editor. Editors are trained to spot and ferret out what is objectively unacceptable in a manuscript. But the best editors do more than just mark up the page with red ink, noting all the errors. This is only helpful in the most limited way, and it may very well lead the writer, especially if they're the delicate genius type, to despair. Instead, a good editor will try to figure out what the author was actually trying to say when they went astray; and they help them to make corrections and draw out something better.

"Of Women and the Freedom to be Holy":

. . . but there is, at least, here in her masterpiece work, an appreciation of what Christianity alone provided women in the 18th and 19th centuries: the freedom to be human. Safie is, after all, seeking only to be allowed to pursue virtue, to learn, to deepen her soul, and to marry a man she loves. She knows that it is only a Christian nation that can provide that freedom for her.

This is a part of the Christian story, a part of the Bible itself, that I think we’ve too often forgotten to tell, bowing, in our own way, to the common modern idea that Christianity is, at its core, oppressive to women. Instead of fighting back tooth and nail we most often answer only that Christian wives and mothers are very happy, or that women want the strong manly leaders our churches encourage. And that’s really not the story we need to be telling.

on being part of "the middle class"

I'm hearing lots about "the middle class" this election cycle, and I can't help thinking: Doesn't just about everyone in the States think they're middle class? Seriously. You could be making a just-above-the-poverty-line salary, living frugally and wisely, and feel middle class. Or you could be making a million or two a year in a high-cost-of-living area, and feel middle class. But the day-to-day options and margins in those two situations aren't anything close to the same thing.

Anyway. I don't buy "middle class" as a terribly useful economic term . . . but the solidarity implied by its frequency of use among people in such diverse situations might mean that its a terribly useful social term.

It says something about Americans that we all want to claim the term "middle class". I'm not sure what it says, but it says something.

Peace of Christ to you,
Jessica Snell