Christian Wiman is a poet about whom, until a few months ago, I had only heard bits and pieces. This story on Wiman in The New Yorker introduced me to more of his life, his struggle with cancer, and his poetry (the link is to a PDF of the article). Then, a week or so ago, a friend pointed me to a talk he gave at Wheaton College; the talk is very stimulating and I cannot say enough good about it. Allow 1.25 hours to watch/listen on youtube, at the link. It’s a wonderful talk.
In my lifetime, the churches I’ve known have for the most part presented themselves as “family churches,” which, if one stops to think about it (and almost no one did), obscures or simply leaves out a significant portion of the population. JS pointed me to this article by an Aussie Christian who notes just how pervasive the problem is. Pure utilitarianism is destructive.
You may agree or disagree with portions of David French’s essay on the immigration crisis—he says the biggest problem is the asylum crisis—but this is one of the clearest and least sensational articles I’ve read on the problem. It’s worth your while to read. (Gift link.)
Using modern technology to read previously unreadable ancient documents is undoubtedly a good thing. Perhaps you’ve heard of the papyrus scrolls that were charred at Herculaneum when Mt. Vesuvius erupted in the first century A.D. Now one of those badly damaged scrolls has been “read” using computer technology and a form of A.I. You can read about it in this article at Nature. But there’s a screamer of an error in the article when it says “[t]hese lumps of carbonized ash — known as the Herculaneum scrolls — are the only library that survives from the ancient world. . . .” Uh, no! Emphatically, no! There are quite a few other libraries that have survived from the ancient world, such as, for example, Ashurbanipal’s, in ancient Mesopotamia.
An American historian I’ve followed, off and on, for several years, John Fea, had a piece in The Atlantic in which he argues that some recent historical works by evangelicals don’t emphasize enough the positive things that evangelicals have contributed: he sees these works as too negative (link is to a PDF you can read). This generated quite a bit of “yes, he’s right” and “no, he’s missing the point” on social media. One of the persons whose work Fea considers to be bad historiography is Kristin Du Mez, and she responds here. My own comment is that the world is gray (not black-and-white) and so is all of our work here; we fail to acknowledge this at our peril.
I’m going to stop here for now; a bit shorter perhaps than usual, but it’s better not to let these items get too old! Thanks for reading.