How new Scientific Discoveries are Pointing toward God

 This is a pretty in-depth look at new evidence from cosmology and from cellular biology and other fields that suggest a Divine Intelligence behind the universe and our own lives.

Carl Trueman: We Lost the Sacredness of Things

 This is a really fascinating, at times provocative discussion.  I think he is definitely onto some things here...

Calvin Robinson and Paul Kingsnorth on Christ and Culture

 Here is a fascinating conversation as Anglican clergyman Calvin Robinson (Free Church of England) interviews Paul Kingsnorth - writer and environmentalist - who converted to (Eastern Orthodox) Christianity from a kind of neo-paganism just a few years ago.  What they have to say about culture, about the monetization of the 7 Deadly Sins, about the call to steward the Creation is all worth considering.

 

Beauty will Save the Polis

In a secular-materialist worldview Beauty is merely a matter of personal opinion, rather than public good.  It is seen as a luxury which is great for those that can afford it, but truly serving no practical utility.  This is the mentality that gives us hospitals, libraries and (perhaps worst of all) schools that are ugly concert buildings in which the drive to "saving some money" always triumphed over aesthetic concerns. 

We Christians, like the ancient Hebrews and ancient Greek philosophers before us, believe that humans are not mere "meat machines", but that we have a soul, and that feeding and nourishing the soul is every bit as important to human flourishing as feeding and nourishing the body.

If we classical Christians are correct about this, it should follow that communities that actually do "go above and beyond" the bare necessities of our material existence and invest in beauty will actually be healthier, stronger, and - finally - even wealthier than communities that treat us merely as organisms needed food and shelter in order to survive.    

Like other Classical Christians I've affirmed lately my trust that, "Beauty will save the world," and here is one case where investing in beauty actually revitalized a community and created a virtuous cycle of improving the local public health, quality of life and 'commonweal.'  

Thoughts on Voting

 

"False Alarm" on Climate Change? An interview with the Author

In a year or two, I'd like to finally sit down and watch Al Gore's movie "An Inconvenient Truth" and see how many of the predictions have or have not come to pass.  I suspect the latter will more often be the case, but we will see.

Now, I must say - like the author in this interview - that I do believe in Climate Change, I do believe that at least a good portion of it is man-made, and I do believe that our public policy and our personal habits should work together to minimize its impact.  Indeed, the energy efficiency revolution, combined with lower-emission sources of energy are already having a significant impact.

But I also believe that the danger posed by Climate Change has been exaggerated to the point of absurdity, particularly by our media and politicians.  

And, I cannot help but note, they are also precisely the people who have the most to gain in terms of influence or profits from everyone believing a narrative that says "The End is Nigh!" (so read this article! or vote for this savior!).

Indeed, according to this video, surveys show that nearly half (48%) of the world's adults believe that "Climate Change is likely to cause the extinction of the human race." 

This interview is with a "climate economist" named Bjorn Lomborg, who says that the facts indeed do not support this kind of dire thinking.

I cannot help but thinking that there is something about the human spirit that has trouble seeing anything past the absolute very the worst case scenario (or worse still!).  Remember Y2K?  The voices saying "Probably nothing much will happen" were certainly not the voices most amplified in our public discourse.  But they turned out to be right.

Again, the Climate problem is real, and bad things will indeed happen if we do nothing...but humans are extremely adaptive and assuming that we will do nothing at all, as some news articles have done (which he points out in the video), is an unrealistic assumption.  

As I said, Mr. Lomborg is a climate economist, and I am always suspicious of arguments that pit economic benefits over against environmental health in a simplistic way (and then always say to go with "economic benefit").  

Mr. Lomborg has a much more nuanced and data-driven approach.  

He also points out some things that are often missed in the discussions.  For example, many of the strategies to combat climate change have a disproportionately negative impact on the lives of the poor and working class.  

As Christians are called to care for the poor and needy - and also be good stewards of the natural world - this is an especially important consideration for us as we think and pray through these issues. 

Anyways, that is enough introduction: here is the thought-provoking video.

Some more recommended articles

Higher calling, lower wages:

This article about the disappearance of middle-class clergy highlights a problem that is actually a confluence of several factors:

1) the problem of the decline of the American middle class in general - a problem which appears poised to accelerate among millennials as they mature
2) the problem of the relative decline of the Church as a major social institution in our culture, and in particular the loss of status that clergymen once enjoyed as important and respected members of society, and
3) the expanding costs of higher education in general and the seminaries' marriage to a "professional graduate school" model of preparing ministers that may not serve either denominations nor individual clergy as well as it might.  Indeed many younger clergy in my area are encouraged to commit to a 3-year continuing education program on church leadership, even after attending a 3-to-4 year seminary program precisely because the seminaries - married as they are to the latest speculative theological fads - do not often prepare us well for many of the more practical challenges of our work.

The phsycological benefits of walking in nature:

I love to hike.  Unfortunately the daytime temperature is above 90 degress for about 4 months of the year where I live, so I am unable to do so much at the moment.
I like to say I go hiking so much because "I am looking for elves."  In truth I wonder if I am not actually looking for Eden.  I wonder if that is not a deep spiritual yearning that most of us feel: to search for a primal harmony with nature (go read Genesis chapter 2) that we sense has been somehow lost (Genesis 3).  It turns out that people - in particular urban-dwellers - who are surrounded by artificial environments all day actually suffer from various mental health problems due to lack of the natural, the beautiful, and the God-given in their lives.
Hmmm...

On a related note is this:

7 Ways Electronics Quietly harm our Mental Health:

While I do keep up with mainstream news sources such as NPR and BBC and CNN, I am obviously also a believer in the alternative news and analysis found in many blogs and websites.  This article comes from a source - Off The Grid News - which is certainly alternative.  This is from the solar powered, organic farming, urban-homesteading, environmentalist/disaster preparedness, self-reliance crowd.  Whether or not you are inclined to trust the source, the 7 Reasons that our tablets, smartphones, laptops and the like are said to harm our mental health and our relationships seem to ring true to my experiences as a young person, and my experiences of working with (slightly younger) college-age folks at UL Lafayette a few years back.

The Decline (and Fall?) of Religious Freedom in America:

Most of the conversation I have heard on the topic of religious freedom since the recent Supreme Court ruling to re-define civil marriage have either come from traditionalist Christians or from secularists (who may or may not be nominally Christian - like a friend of mine who recently expressed her hope that churches would lose their tax-exempt status in order that the government should have more money to help out the poor - yes, folks, college-educated people who grew up in church are really saying this).
Anyways, this article comes from a rather different perspective: that of a Jewish author at Mosaic Magazine.  The article also includes links to a couple of responses from other Jewish authors (both agreeing and disagreeing with the thesis).  I think their perspective adds something unique to this conversation, having been a religious minority (and in many places, a despised one) since the founding of this country.

Evangelicals and the Environment

Here is an interesting piece on the rise of Evangelical environmentalism and the effects it could have on future presidential elections. 

Evangelical Christians have long been an important part of the Republican Party's electoral base, but the Republican Party has (it seems to me) generally been guilty of pitting the environment against the economny and choosing the economy every time, since that is seen as the real vote-getter.  What will happen if care for the environment and the dangers of climate change become more important issues for evangelical Christians? 

Whatever the effect of future elections, this issue has been notably absent in what passes for political discourse this year.  This year's presidential debates, for the first time since the Reagan era, included no questions about care for the environment or climate change.  That makes me wonder who gets the final say on what questions are included, as they obviously have a great deal of power over the shape of the campaign season's discourse.

Renewing deep connections

One of the wonderful websites that you will find linked on Gloria Deo's right-side bar is The Front Porch Republic. Like many of the sites I recommend, I don't check in on this one nearly often enough, but they often have fascinating articles and commentaries, generally encouraging the renewal of genuine community - and with it a more genuine politics in American life.

They have had articles celebrating the "new urbanism" that we see in many American cities - including my own city, Lafayette - in which new developments (or renewed downtown areas) include homes, grocers, coffee shops, all close together to promote walking (instead of driving) and more interaction with one's immediate neighbors. I think this is a very important and positive move towards helping isolated Americans find a more real community.

I see two other potential trends that I also believe are very healthy.
Last year Americans moved less. They stayed more. It is difficult for an individual or a family to become rooted in any community if their job frequently causes them to move to a new place. There were less movies primarily because of the poor economy, and as commerce picks up again (assuming it does) then presumably so will mobility. But hopefully the experience of staying longer in one place will convince more people of its value. Hopefully as technologies are better utilized by companies, the physical location of any given employee will become more flexible, allowing people to stay longer in a community they connect with.

The other trend I see (even in my own family, but also in television ads) is that more people are attempting to grow more of their own food - even if it is only a couple of vegetables in a flower-bed garden. There is a growing desire not to have over-processed and artificial food for health reasons, but also for reasons of environmental protection (why burn fossil fuels bringing me a tomato from California when I can grow my own) and social justice (why buy food produced by pseudo-slave labor in the Far East when I can grow my own).

There is, I believe, another positive reason to support this last trend: renewed connection to the land. For most of human history, our ancestors have felt a deep connection to the land that sustained them. This shaped they way they thought of their world, even the nature of language itself. For most of us that connection has been obliterated by a reliance on the artificial. Reforging that connection will, I believe, have many great benefits - even on a spiritual level for Westerners.

I got to thinking about all this recently thanks to this cool quote from J.R.R. Tolkien:

"[Family life must have been different] in the days when a family had fed on the produce of the same few miles of country for six generations, and that perhaps was why they saw nymphs in the fountains and dryads in the wood - they were not mistaken for there was in a sense real (not metaphorical) connections between them and the countryside. What had been earth and air and later corn, and later still bread, really was in them. We of course who live on a standardized international diet...are artificial beings and have no connection (save in sentiment) with any place on earth. We are synthetic men, uprooted. The strength of the hills is not ours."

- J.R.R. Tolkien, from an unpublished letter to Arthur Greeves, June 22, 1930.

The 'strength of the hills' may not be ours again for sometime, but the strength of the soil pot or the back-yard garden is a nice place to start.

Divorce is bad...for the environment!

Studies in recent years have shed much light and the many ways that divorce is detrimental to the children of divorced families.
Their message is clear: in terms of success in school and relationships, in terms of substance abuse, legal trouble, and pre-marital sex - divorce is bad for children. It also tends to damage the economic security of women and children more than men.

Well, according to a story in the Los Angeles Times a while back, divorce is bad for the environment as well. This makes sense if we think about it. For the same number of family members there are, after a divorce, twice as many microwaves. A light uses the same amount of power whether there are 4 people or two in the room. In fact, divorced households spend 46% more per person on electricity than married households, and 56% more on water. The production of the extra electricity causes increased carbon emissions into the atmosphere.

I suspect that as long as the purpose of marriage is seen as providing romantic happiness, then divorce rates will remain high. We in the church should teach more clearly that God has given the gift of marriage for a whole host of reasons (stewardship of creation, procreation, an arena for learning charity, proper sexual expression, companionship, mutual physical provision, embodying Trinitarian love, etc.), many of which are actually more important than romantic happiness. If what I have seen in Romantic Comedies is indicative of our cultural attitudes, this would be a hugely counter-cultural move.

Plastic bags

Here is an interesting presentation on the environmental impact of those little plastic bags that we get at the grocery stores. I try to do my part - as a Christian and as an American (which means that my part is bigger than many others') to recycle, to minimize my energy use and ecological footprint in general (since it is already disproportionately huge).

Personally, I prefer the old paper bags anyways, I would love to see them make a resurgence. Especially the really nice ones that had handles.

Evangelicals warn of Global Warming

One of the stereotypes about Evangelical Christians is that we are only concerned with saving individuals souls for an other-worldly heaven and are for that reason not concerned with environmental issues.

Unfortunately this has often been the case among individuals (some I know) who, for whatever reason, think that being conservative or evangelical (or both) with regards to their theology naturally entails being politically conservative or believing everything that they hear on conservative talk radio. But not so.

So, just to break down inaccurate stereotypes, allow me to introduce The Evangelical Climate Initiative, dedicated because of their belief in the authority of the Bible as God's Word to fighting global warming: http://www.christiansandclimate.org/ . Their statement "Climate Change: An Evangelical Call to Action" explains their position.