Kruse Kronicle

5 Things I’ve Learned in 5 Weeks Out of Church - Tom LeGrand

Perspectives: 5 Things I’ve Learned in 5 Weeks Out of Church - Tom LeGrand

Consider this official. I am issuing an apology to every member of every church that I have served over the last 20+ years. ...

... But this Sunday Sabbatical has also illustrated some things to me, particularly now that I am working a 9-to-5 (or, more like 7-to-6) day. Honestly, I’ve never had a real job before, one that occupied a truly specific time slot and required a very specific and demanding schedule. Yes, church work is intense, but the one perk is that it usually has a great deal of flexibility in the day-to-day operations.

I actually think that every pastor needs a season of the workaday world, as it would benefit both the leader and the led. It is amazing how much can be learned by living in the same mode as the people to whom you are called to minister. Here are a few that I’ve picked up: ...

Getting up for church is hard

Family Matters

Yes, It’s okay to attend church where your children want to go

A Sunday off is not a damnable offense

Meaningful relationships are much better motivators than guilt

Good reflection.

 

Religion in China: Cracks in the atheist edifice

Economist: Religion in China: Cracks in the atheist edifice

The rapid spread of Christianity is forcing an official rethink on religion. ...

... In April one of Wenzhou’s largest churches was completely demolished. Officials are untroubled by the clash between the city’s famously freewheeling capitalism and the Communist Party’s ideology, yet still see religion and its symbols as affronts to the party’s atheism. ...

... Christianity is hard to control in China, and getting harder all the time. It is spreading rapidly, and infiltrating the party’s own ranks. The line is blurring between house churches and official ones, and Christians are starting to emerge from hiding to play a more active part in society. The Communist Party has to find a new way to deal with all this. There is even talk that the party, the world’s largest explicitly atheist organisation, might follow its sister parties in Vietnam and Cuba and allow members to embrace a dogma other than—even higher than—that of Marx.

Any shift in official thinking on religion could have big ramifications for the way China handles a host of domestic challenges, from separatist unrest among Tibetan Buddhists and Muslim Uighurs in the country’s west to the growth of NGOs and “civil society”—grassroots organisations, often with a religious colouring, which the party treats with suspicion, but which are also spreading fast. ...

... Buddhism, much longer established in China than Christianity, is surging too, as is folk religion; many more Han are making pilgrimages to Buddhist shrines in search of spiritual comfort. All this worries many officials, for whom religion is not only Marx’s “opium of the people” but also, they believe, a dangerous perverter of loyalty away from the party and the state. Christianity, in particular, is associated with 19th-century Western imperial encroachment; and thus the party’s treatment of Christians offers a sharp insight into the way its attitudes are changing.

It is hard even to guess at the number of Christians in China. Official surveys seek to play down the figures, ignoring the large number who worship in house churches. By contrast, overseas Christian groups often inflate them. There were perhaps 3m Catholics and 1m Protestants when the party came to power in 1949. Officials now say there are between 23m and 40m, all told. In 2010 the Pew Research Centre, an American polling organisation, estimated there were 58m Protestants and 9m Catholics. Many experts, foreign and Chinese, now accept that there are probably more Christians than there are members of the 87m-strong Communist Party. Most are evangelical Protestants.

Predicting Christianity’s growth is even harder. Yang Fenggang of Purdue University, in Indiana, says the Christian church in China has grown by an average of 10% a year since 1980. He reckons that on current trends there will be 250m Christians by around 2030, making China’s Christian population the largest in the world. Mr Yang says this speed of growth is similar to that seen in fourth-century Rome just before the conversion of Constantine, which paved the way for Christianity to become the religion of his empire. ...

... A new breed of educated, urban Christians has emerged. Gerda Wielander of the University of Westminster, in her book “Christian Values in Communist China”, says that many Chinese are attracted to Christianity because, now that belief in Marxism is declining, it offers a complete moral system with a transcendental source. ...

... Some Chinese also discern in Christianity the roots of Western strength. They see it as the force behind the development of social justice, civil society and rule of law, all things they hope to see in China. ...

... The paradox, as they all know, is that religious freedom, if it ever takes hold, might harm the Christian church in two ways. The church might become institutionalised, wealthy and hence corrupt, as happened in Rome in the high Middle Ages, and is already happening a little in the businessmen’s churches of Wenzhou. Alternatively the church, long strengthened by repression, may become a feebler part of society in a climate of toleration. As one Beijing house-church elder declared, with a nod to the erosion of Christian faith in western Europe: “If we get full religious freedom, then the church is finished.

Learning to Fail Fast (in the church)

Lewis Center for Church Leadership: Learning to Fail Fast

"... Petrie advocates what he calls "vertical development" or the advancement in a person's capacity to think in "more complex, systemic, strategic, and interdependent ways (in contrast to horizontal development that adds knowledge, skills, and competencies). New leaders must think differently before they can act differently.

Often the qualities we see in church leaders are precisely those most associated with a low level of vertical development (dependent/conformer) — team player, faithful follower, reliant on authority, seeks direction, and aligns with others. A smaller number function at the next level (independent/achiever) — independent thinker, self-directed, drives an agenda, takes a stand for what they believe, and guided by an internal compass. But today's need is for the more highly developed independent/collaborator leader characterized as interdependent thinker; sees systems, patterns, and connections; longer-term thinking; holds multi-frame perspectives; and holds contradictions.

The new leader must be far more adaptable to changing circumstances. Collaboration is essential in order to span boundaries and develop networks. Leaders will need to be much more comfortable with ambiguity in order to be always looking for clues and patterns in the changing landscape. Just as important, this new way of leading must move beyond leaders to affect the entire organizational culture of the church. Congregations need to expect incomplete solutions, much trial and error, and a great deal of learning about themselves and their contexts. ..."

Amen. Reading this post brought to mind an article I read about Microsoft's evolving software development process. It used to be that Microsoft developed an operating system, released it, and then tried to stabilize it over the next three years. In the meantime, the next system was being designed, but you were mostly stuck with a given format for three years. It was much like building a house and moving in until you moved again in three years, and for that reason, each house had to be delivered pretty much as a fully functional operational house when you moved in. Now operating systems have ongoing updates. There are still occasional major revisions, but there is also constant evolution and correction. The church has got to think more that way as well. The article is somewhat lengthy but an interesting read: How Microsoft dragged its development practices into the 21st century

Does Socialism Lead to Moral Decay?

Social Science Research Network: The (True) Legacy of Two Really Existing Economic Systems

Abstract:

By running an experiment among Germans collecting their passports or ID cards in the citizen centers of Berlin, we find that individuals with an East German family background cheat significantly more on an abstract task than those with a West German family background. The longer individuals were exposed to socialism, the more likely they were to cheat on our task. While it was recently argued that markets decay morals (Falk and Szech, 2013), we provide evidence that other political and economic regimes such as socialism might have an even more detrimental effect on individuals' behavior.

Conclusion:

... If socialism indeed promotes individual dishonesty, the specific features of this socio-political system that lead to this outcome remain to be determined. The East German socialist regime differed from the West German capitalist regime in several important ways. First, the system did not reward work based to merit, and made it difficult to accumulate wealth or pass anything on to one's family. This may have resulted in a lack of meaning leading to demoralization (Ariely et al., 2008), and perhaps less concern for upholding standards of honesty. Furthermore, while the government claimed to exist in service of the people, it failed to provide functional public systems or economic security. Observing this moral hypocrisy in government may have eroded the value citizens placed on honesty. Finally, and perhaps most straightforwardly, the political and economic system pressured people to work around official laws and cheat to game the system. Over time, individuals may come to normalize these types of behaviors. Given these distinct possible influences, further research will be needed to understand which aspects of socialism have the strongest or most lasting impacts on morality.

On a related note, I would add that there is a correlation between trust in (and care for) strangers and the degree to which a country is market-oriented. It isn't clear whether trusting people are more inclined to engage in market exchange or market exchange makes people more trusting. One thought is that market exchange makes people interdependent and more attuned to the plight of others than does a centralized economy or a highly distributed economy where people are constrained to cooperate within face-to-face community.

Is Evangelical Morality Still Acceptable in America?

Alan Noble has a very good piece in the Atlantic: Is Evangelical Morality Still Acceptable in America? He doesn't define exactly what he means by "Evangelical Morality," but clearly, he is talking about people who hold more traditionalist views on a set of moral issues. Here are some excerpts:

"... Behind all of these charges is the suspicion that evangelicals are simply refusing to accept contemporary American mores; they are privileging their faith over the moral spirit of the age. But for many evangelicals, these beliefs are not actually a sign of retreat from public life. Instead, there is a fear that in an increasingly secularized society, there will be less tolerance for people who wish to act upon their deeply held religious beliefs, except in narrowly defined, privatized spaces. This is a fundamentally American concern: Will I have the right to serve God as I believe I am obligated to? ..."

"... To a large extent, this tension has been caused by a shift in what we think of as the domain of morality. The vocabulary we use to describe same-sex marriage and contraceptives has changed from the language of morality to the language of rights. ..."

"... Often, the Christian defense of what they believe is their religious liberty is framed as fundamental hatefulness, homophobia, and misogyny, rather than disagreement grounded in morality. Much to the shame of the faith, a few who claim to be Christian really are motivated by hate. Those who disagree with them see little point in engaging with them on these issues, which is understandable, but it's unfair and counterproductive to extend that attitude to all evangelical Christians. If the evangelical worldview is deemed invalid in the public sphere, then the public sphere loses the value of being public. American discourse will be marked by paranoid conformity, rather than principled and earnest disagreement. And our ability to prophetically speak to one another and to our nation's troubles will be restrained.

The right framework here is one of pluralism: the ability of many different kinds of people to live out their faith in public with and among those who deeply disagree with them. This is no easy challenge; it's painful and ugly and hard. But the alternative to is a thin, univocal culture, one in which the only disagreements we have are trivial. And that would be a shame."

I don't share many of the values to which Evangelicals subscribe, but that is just the point. The issue is not how I should deal with people with views I'm afraid I have to disagree with. The measure is how I would want to be dealt with if I had an unpopular view.

Why the West Progressed in Ways No One Else Had

I just read Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages by Frances & Joseph Gies. The book focuses on technological development during the 1,000 years from 500-1500 C.E. The Middle Ages was once cast as an age of regression from the golden age of Greece and Rome until the Renaissance and the Enlightenment saved the day. Furthermore, capitalism is often seen as a product of the last two or three centuries. Modern scholarship debunks these characterizations. This book does a great job at showing the cultural and technological ferment of the Middle Ages, as well as showing how many of the key components of the modern economic world (companies, risk management, double-entry bookkeeping, finance, technological innovation, labor specialization, factories, to name a few) were already coming to flower by 1500. Here are two insights from the end of the book:

… "Asian priority in a wide range of [technological] innovations is established. Asia, however, showed little inclination to borrow, and so, after giving much to others, allowed its own technology to wither, as demonstrated in the history of the two epoch-making inventions of printing and firearms. Each originated in China, but each was allowed to languish, while Europe seized them in both hands to make them major instruments of change. An authority [Timo Myllyntaus] on technology transfer in the modern world asserts that the process 'is not just a matter of moving some piece of hardware from one place to another… A material infrastructure is not enough. There must also be sufficient nonmaterial infrastructure.' In the 'nonmaterial infrastructure' of medieval Europe was a spirit of progress whose ingredients included intellectual curiosity, a love of tinkering, an ambition 'to serve God' and also 'to grow rich as all men desire to do.'

A sense of progress implies a sense of history, something missing among the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans. 'Lacking any objective understanding of the past – that is, lacking history,' says [D. S. L.] Cardwell, 'the hierarchical and slave-owning societies of classical antiquity failed to appreciate the great progress that had been achieved by and through technics.' On the contrary, the ancients were fond of looking back to what they conceived as a vanished 'golden age,' a conception the reverse of progress. The Christian Church, whose pioneering monastic orders made many practical and material contributions to medieval technology, also supplied a noncyclical, straight-line view of history that allowed scope for the idea of progress." (287-288)

The book concludes with this paragraph:

"' Technology,' says Melvin Kranzberg, founder of the Society for the History of Technology, 'is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.' It is what each age and each society make of it. The Middle Ages used it sometimes wisely, sometimes recklessly, often for dubious purposes, seldom with a thought for the future, and with only a dim awareness of the scientific and mathematical laws governing it. But operating on instinct, insight, trial and error, and perseverance, the craftsman and craftswoman, the entrepreneurs, the working monks and the clerical intellectuals, and the artist-engineers all transformed the world, on balance very much to the world's advantage." (291)

I've read a number of books on the history of technology. This is one of the best short surveys I have read, reading more like a novel than a history book.

Religion Links

1. Huffington Post: Understanding Why Americans Seem More Religious Than Other Western Powers

Many Western Europeans think of Americans as hopelessly, bafflingly, and dangerously, religious. Many Americans think of Western Europeans as distressingly, inexplicably, and unrelentingly, secular. In 2009, the German sociologist Hans Joas observed that “it is widely accepted that the United States is far more religious than practically any comparable European state.” And he noted Western European puzzlement: “The more secularized large parts of Europe became, the more exotic the religiosity of the United States seemed to European observers.” So why are Americans, compared with Western Europeans, seemingly so religious? And are we as religious as we seem? ...

2. Business Insider: Countries With More Money Tend To Be More Godless

3. Pew Research: Global Religious Diversity

4. The Atlantic: The Changing Face of Christian Politics

... Christian political engagement is changing in this country as believers seek to untangle their faith from the worldliness of partisan politics and ideology. The melding of Christianity and partisan politics has been 40 years in the making, but the costs of that entanglement have only become clear to Christians over the last decade. ...

... A Christianity that seeks to unilaterally impose itself on the nation is unlikely be fruitful, but it is similarly unrealistic and unproductive to force a secular morality on believers. ...

5. Christian Century: Religious nones may not be who you think they are

... But they may not be who you think they are. Today, nones include many more unbranded believers than atheists, and they show an in­creasingly diverse racial and ethnic mix.

Researchers say this is already making nones’ attitudes and opinions less predictably liberal on social issues.

A survey of Americans by the Public Religion Research Institute found 21 percent are “unaffiliated” (PRRI’s umbrella term for a diverse group including atheists, seculars, and people who say they still believe in God); 20 percent are Catholic; and 19 percent are white evangelical.

“Nones are dancing on the razor’s edge of leading,” said Robert P. Jones, CEO of PRRI. ...

6. Huff Post: American Bible Reading Statistics Reveal Who Is Studying The Good Book And Why

... According to a study, “The Bible in American Life," conducted by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, 50% of Americans read some form of scripture in the past year, and 48% of those read the Bible. Four in 5 read it at least once a month, and 9% of Americans say they read the Bible daily. ...

7. Religion News Service: Bible study: More people say the Good Book isn’t a God book

The study, conducted annually by Barna Research, finds:

• The most “engaged” readers — who read the Bible almost daily and see it as sacred — are now matched by “skeptics” who say it’s just a book of stories and advice. Both groups measured 19 percent.
• While the engaged stayed steady since 2011, skeptics grew by 10 percentage points — since the same survey was conducted in 2011.
• Skeptics cut into the number of folks Barna calls “Bible friendly,” those who read the Bible occasionally and see it as inspired by God. The “friendly” demographic fell to 37 percent, down from 45 percent in 2011.
• The percentage of people who view the Bible as sacred has dropped to 79 percent, down from 86 percent in 2011.

8. Faith & Leadership: Disruption and leadership development in mainline Protestantism

Mainline Protestantism has been slow to create new models of clergy leadership development that take into account the disruptive forces acting in congregations and the culture. ...

9. Boston Globe: Can the evangelical church embrace gay couples?

A new wave of thinkers says yes — and is looking to Scripture for support. ...

10. Cannon & Culture: An Antidote for ADHD Activism

Review by Jordan J. Ballor of Tyler Wigg-Stevenson, The World is Not Ours to Save: Finding the Freedom to Do Good (IVP, 2012)

Writing as a lifelong activist against nuclear weapons, Tyler Wigg-Stevenson is uniquely placed to criticize a brand of evangelical social activism that emphasizes energy and enthusiasm over patience and perseverance. Christian obedience requires all these at various times and in various manifestations, but Wigg-Stephenson detects an imbalance at the heart of contemporary Christian cultural engagement that threatens to wither the roots of the entire enterprise. He is greatly concerned about the “cause fatigue” that he commonly, and increasingly, sees among younger Christians. ...

11. Christianity Today: Aged Out of Church

Ask anyone who's hit midlife, and they'll tell you: this stage is no joke for us.

The emotional, spiritual, physical, and relational shifts that occur at midlife can lead to disconnection from old social networks and a profound sense of loneliness, which brings with it serious health risks. At this point, many also feel drained by the increasingly common occurrence of death, disease, divorce, and the changes that redefine old friendships.

And yet, rather than engage these important but uncomfortable issues that come with aging, our culture—including, at times, the church—would rather laugh it off....

12. Religion News Service: Survey finds growth, vitality in multisite church model

(RNS) The vast majority of multisite churches are growing, according to a new study, and they are seeing more involvement from lay people and newcomers after they open an additional location.

Nearly one in 10 U.S. Protestants attends a congregation with multiple campuses, according to findings released Tuesday (March 11) in the “Leadership Network/Generis Multisite Church Scorecard.” ...

13. Atlantic: Greed Is Good: A 300-Year History of a Dangerous Idea

Not long ago, the pursuit of commercial self-interest was largely reviled. How did we come to accept it? ...

14. Huff Post: Why Do People Go to Church?

... What are we doing in worship? We are sorting through our mixed motives and mysterious desires. We are learning God's story again. We are returning home so that we can go with power into the everyday world.

15. Library of Economics and Liberty: You're Not Pushing Paper Across A Desk. You're Saving the World.

In my profession as an economics professor and through churches I have attended, I've been around a lot of people who want to "make a difference." They almost inevitably equate "making a difference" with "working for a government or a non-profit organization like a church that is dedicated, at least in part, to helping poor people." Rarely do I hear anyone say "I want to work in accounts receivable for a company that makes faucets--or worse, a company that just sells faucets and other sundries."

But here's the irony: I suspect that you will probably make a bigger, albeit harder to see, difference in the lives of many by working in accounts receivable for Amalgamated Faucets than you will on your two-week summer mission trip or in your career as a relief worker. ...

16. Christian Century: TV Protestants

An episode of AMC’s The Walking Dead features a scene in a Baptist church that has a Catholic-looking crucifix. HBO’s new series True Detective includes a scene in which a fundamentalist preacher crosses himself. These are two isolated examples of how the people involved in making television shows and movies don’t know or don’t care about the differences between different forms of Christianity. ...

Economic Boom in Africa - Philip Jenkins

Christian Century: Economic Boom in Africa - Philip Jenkins

When I lecture on glo­bal Chris­tianity, I am sometimes asked whether, in retrospect, I would revise what I wrote many years ago in books like The Next Christendom. Us­u­ally my answer is no.

But in one critical area conditions are changing so quickly as to demand rethinking. Whereas I (and others) once presented Africa as a region of extreme poverty and deprivation, we now have to take account of economic development that in some regions is so rapid as to amount to a boom. We can only begin to outline the religious consequences. ...

... The main impact on Christian churches will like­ly fall into the category of “more of the same.” For some years now, older independent churches have faded in the face of competition from new de­nominations rooted in global Pentecostalism that emphasize the blessings of material prosperity. Some tailor their message to aspiring professional and entrepreneurial groups, which will become much more numerous in the coming decade. Charismatic mega­churches should boom.

Prosperity teachings never lack for critics. Nevertheless, such teachings usually in­clude important practical lessons for coping with the new globalized world—lessons, for example, in the responsible use of debt and credit. Latin American precedents suggest that these churches also provide a vital organizational focus for campaigns for social and political reform and civic improvement. Ex­pect more, rather than less, religious politics.

Other likely effects lie in the longer term. Increasingly, the demand for labor should draw more women into full-time paid employment, particularly in emerging service sectors. Expect to see more Western-style debates over issues of gender and sexuality, although framed strictly in terms of African traditions. What a pleasure it would be to see Africa’s churches en­during some of the familiar discontents of prosperity.

Interesting observations.

A Happy Life May not be a Meaningful Life

Scientific American: A Happy Life May not be a Meaningful Life

Tasks that seem mundane, or even difficult, can bring a sense of meaning over time.

Psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once wrote, "Life is never made unbearable by circumstances, but only by lack of meaning and purpose." For most people, feeling happy and finding life meaningful are both important and related goals. But do happiness and meaning always go together? It seems unlikely, given that many of the things that we regularly choose to do – from running marathons to raising children – are unlikely to increase our day-to-day happiness. Recent research suggests that while happiness and a sense of meaning often overlap, they also diverge in important and surprising ways. ...

... Interestingly, their findings suggest that money, contrary to popular sayings, can indeed buy happiness. Having enough money to buy what one needs in life, as well as what one desires, were also positively correlated with greater levels of happiness. However, having enough money seemed to make little difference in life's sense of meaning. This same disconnect was recently found in a multi-national study conducted by Shigehiro Oishi and Ed Diener, who show that people from wealthy countries tend to be happier, however, they don't see their lives as more meaningful. In fact, Oishi and Diener found that people from poorer countries tend to see their lives as more meaningful. ...

... Participants in the study who were more likely to agree with the statement, "I am a giver," reported less happiness than people who were more likely to agree with, "I am a taker." However, the "givers" reported higher levels of meaning in their lives compared to the "takers." In addition, spending more time with friends was related to greater happiness but not more meaning. ...

... It is clear that a highly meaningful life may not always include a great deal of day-to-day happiness. And, the study suggests, our American obsession with happiness may be intimately related to a feeling of emptiness, or a life that lacks meaning.

Fascinating article. It made me think of two guys talking about a friend who had bought a $1,000 tie. The first guy says, "Buying that tie won't be him happiness." The second guy says, "Sure it will ... for about 24 hours."

It strikes me that happiness is more fleeting and driven by immediate circumstances while meaning has greater resilience, not easily influenced by the immediate circumstances of any given moment. I also expect, as hinted at the end of the article, that what many of us are genuinely pursuing is meaning but mistaking happiness for meaning. I wonder if there is a role for the Church in all of this. ;-)

 

Religion Links

1. Business Insider: A Fascinating New Poll Shows That Americans Are Losing Faith In God

A new Harris Poll released today reveals that only 74% of Americans believe in God, an 8% decline since 2009.

Before today, U.S. adults had remained fairly consistent in their religious beliefs — 82% of U.S. respondents previously reported that they believed there was a God since 2005.

In another decline, only 54% of Americans are now "absolutely certain" in God's existence, a 12% decrease over the last decade. ...

2. Daily Mail: The Bible-ignorant [British] youngsters who can't tell Noah from Adam: Third of children didn't know Nativity story came from Holy Book

• One in three Britons didn't know where story of birth of Jesus could be read
• Some 54 per cent of children never read Bible stories by adults, study found
• Campaigners now fear the religion is in a state of permanent retreat

3. Christian Newswire: 92% of Americans Own a Bible but Only 16% Read it Daily

4. Religion News Service: Respect for clergy drops, but among Republicans, not so much

(RNS) Clergy used to rank near the top in polls asking Americans to rate the honesty and ethics of people in various professions. This year, for the first time since Gallup began asking the question in 1977, fewer than half of those polled said clergy have "high" or "very high" moral standards.

But opinions on clergy differed markedly by party, with Republicans viewing them far more favorably than Democrats.

Overall, 47 percent of respondents to the survey gave clergy "high" or "very high" ratings, a sharp drop in confidence from the 67 percent of Americans who viewed them this way in 1985.

Among Republicans, 63 percent gave clergy one of the two top ratings for ethics, compared with 40 percent of Democrats. ...

5. Economist: All about Adam

A furious—and political—debate about the origins of mankind ...

... A quest for certainty is an American tradition. Old World believers often inherit religion passively, like a cultural artefact. Americans, an individualistic bunch, are more likely to switch churches or preachers until they find a creed that makes sense to them. They admire fundamental texts (the constitution, for example) that plain citizens may parse for immutable truths.

At the same time, the literalist faith is in crisis. Young Americans are walking away from the stern denominations that have held such sway over post-war American life, from Billy Graham's crusades to the rise of the religious right. After they hit 18, half of evangelical youngsters lose their faith; entering a public university is especially perilous. As a generation, millennials (those born between the early 1980s and 2000s), are unimpressed by organised anything, let alone organised religion. Many young adults told the Barna Group, an evangelical research outfit, that they felt stifled by elders who demonised secular America. Young Christians are more accepting of gay rights than their elders. In a challenge to creationists, a quarter of young adults told Barna's study that their churches were "anti-science".

The seeming paradox of a strong faith in crisis is explained by rigidity: that which cannot bend may break instead. ...

6. The Dish: The Language Of Certainty In Atheism

 

7. Faith & Leadership: Mainline Protestants and disruptive innovation

Mainline Protestants can still have an exciting and life-giving future -- if they learn the lessons of disruptive innovation from the steel industry and other organizations, say three Christian institutional leaders. ...

8. Call & Response Blog: Denominational leaders as bridge-builders

... The image of a bridge was one powerful expression of the issues they face now and anticipate facing in the future. But what most struck me were the ways in which, rather than despairing of their bridging roles, these leaders accepted the challenges and articulated the issues with clarity and grace.

First, they understood themselves as being "bridgers" who manage polarity and tension between people, issues or factions in the denomination. ...

 ... Second, these leaders saw their role as being a bridge to support systems and resources for congregations that are disbursed. ...

... Third, guest Marlon Hall, Houston pastor, filmmaker and leader of the Awakenings Movement, helped the gathered denominational leaders think about the ways in which they are a bridge between "the powerful and the engaged," between the status quo and disruptive innovation. ...

9. Religion News Service: Why evangelicalism needs controversies like Duck Dynasty

10. Pew Forum: Religious Hostilities Reach Six-Year High

11. Associated Press: Evangelicals mass in Peru amid boom

... Evangelicals have seen the most growth in Lima's teeming working class districts but more and more converts are coming from Peru's highlands thanks to proselytizing radio stations emerging in recent years in the region, said Rev. Juan Carlos Perez, a local leader of the Movimiento Misionero Mundial church. ...

... Peru and its capital remain bastions of Roman Catholicism. About three in four Peruvians identify themselves as Catholics. But evangelicals are on the rise, jumping from 5.2 percent of the population in 1981 to 12.5 percent in 2007, the last year for which government census figures are available.

Perez claims evangelicals now account for at least 20 percent of Peru's 30 million people, which would give it one of Latin America's highest growth rates. ...

12. Time: It's Social Ties—Not Religion—That Makes the Faithful Give to Charity

... Having found that religion and charity go hand-in-hand, Robert Putnam and I sought to understand why.  The answer might surprise you. We initially thought that religious beliefs must foster a sense of charity—whether inspiration from biblical stories like the Good Samaritan or, perhaps, a fear of God's judgment for not acting charitably. However, we could find no evidence linking people's theological beliefs and their rate of giving—which also helps to explain why the "religion effect" varies little across different religions. The rates for charitable giving according to the Jumpstart survey are: 61 percent of Black Protestants; 64 % of Evangelical Protestants; 67 % of Mainline Protestants, 68 % of Roman Catholics, and 76 % of Jews. By contrast, only 46 % of the not religiously affiliated made any charitable giving.

Rather than religious beliefs, we found that the "secret ingredient" for charitable giving among religious Americans is the social networks formed within religious congregations. The more friends someone has within a religious congregation, the more likely that person is to give time, money, or both, to charitable causes. In fact, even non-religious people who have friends within a religious congregation (typically, because their spouse is a believer) are highly charitable—more so than strong believers who have few social ties within a congregation. ...

13. Christianity Today: Who Owns the Pastor's Sermon?

Church or pastor? When sermons become books that make millions in royalties, the answer is important.

Spoiler: Copyright law favors churches.

14. Jesus Creed: Who "attended" those earliest churches?

On the basis of a new approach at looking how to discern the social makeup of the earliest Christian house churches, one based more on housing space occupied than on ideal social types, Peter Oakes has offered to us a new way of thinking more realistically and concretely about who was in the earliest house churches. His book is called Reading Romans in Pompeii. ...

... The earliest churches, then, are not made up of pietists who wanted to study the Bible but ordinary Romans from all sorts of backgrounds, needs, yearnings, and connections — each bringing to the table different ears for the gospel. ...

... Undoubtedly, one the best books on Paul/Romans I've read in a long, long time. Oakes combines judicious historical sensitivities with solid exegetical insight, all wrapped into a proper caution that is not always observed among those who use social evidence.

15. The Bible and Culture: Social Description in Early Christianity

Here is an excellent post from Larry Hurtado reminding us that it is wrong to say that early Christianity was largely made up of impoverished slaves, women, minors, and the rural poor. This, is a complete myth. See below. ...

... Here's a sample from Meeks's now-classic work, The First Urban Christians (pp. 72-73): "the most active and prominent members of Paul's circle are people of high status inconsistency . . . They are upwardly mobile, their achieved status is higher than their attributed status." That is, e.g., people involved in trade, business, etc., whose energy and abilities enabled them to acquire a social status that they didn't inherit or have by way of being born into a traditional elite class.

There's much, much more to note. But this will do, hopefully, to steer interested readers toward a more accurate, less simplistic, view of the social makeup of the earliest circles of Christian believers.

16. Why are the virgin birth, empty tomb and resurrection controversial? - N. T. Wright

17. Euangelion: Sin and Death in Eastern Orthodox Theology

I introduced a nice book about Introducing Eastern Orthodox Theology by Andrew Louth. In the first post I was describing the Eastern tradition's view of sin, death and destruction. The two most important elements of this perspective I want to highlight now. ...

... Thus, the most significant consequence of the Fall in light of the resurrection is the presence of death. So, according to Louth, it is Christ's conquest of death in his resurrection means that death rather than sin is central to the Orthodox understanding of the consequence of Adam's disobedience (70). ...

... Second, Louth presents the story of Adam is more the story of "everyman" than a story of the "first man". While not denying the latter, he says the Father's were interested in the former. In this sense the story is mythical. ...

... The more I think about it, I'm beginning to find these to be a more satisfying explanation than my inherited tradition. ...

Me too.

18. BioLogos: Long Life Spans in Genesis

... There are 30 age numbers we can get from Genesis chapter 5—three numbers for each of ten patriarchs: the age when a son was born, the number of years the patriarch lived after the son was born, and the total number of years the patriarch lived. For example, "When Adam had lived 130 years, he became the father of… Seth. The days of Adam after he became the father of Seth were 800 years… Thus all the days that Adam lived were 930 years" (Genesis 5:3-5). We get similar accounts of Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and Noah (though for Noah we have to go to Genesis 9:29 to see how old he was when he died).

The first thing more careful observation reveals about these 30 numbers is that all of them end with the digits 0, 2, 5, 7, or 9. You might not think that is too remarkable until you realize that it eliminates half of the possible numbers. It is like seeing a list of 30 numbers that are all even. We wouldn't think that was a random distribution of numbers. In fact, the odds of getting all thirty numbers to end with just these "approved" digits in a random distribution of ages are about one in a hundred million.[1] That should make us suspicious that Genesis 5 is merely giving a historical report. Something else must be going on here. ...

19. The Cultural Cognition Project - Yale Law School: Have Republicans changed views on evolution? Or have creationists changed party? Pew's (half-released) numbers don't add up ... 

... Right away when I heard about the Pew poll, I turned to the results to see what the explanation was for the interesting -- truly! -- "shift" in Republican view: Were Republicans changing their positions on creationism or creationists changing their party allegiance?

And right away I ran into this logical inconsistency.

Surely, someone will clear this up, I thought.  

But no.  

Just the same predictable, boring "ha ha ha ha!" reaction.

Why let something as silly as logic get in the way of an opportunity to pound one's tribal chest & join in a unifying, polarizing group howl?

20. Huffington Post: Three Reasons Why Evolution Will Never Convince a Creationist

1) Evolution is not, strictly speaking, mentioned in the Bible, so a Creationist is not inclined to trust it. ...

2) People tend to assume that the two realms of science and faith must be in opposition to one another, or that when one is "right" on an issue the other cannot hold any merit in the conversation. ...

3) Starting from the "evolution" perspective is always taken to be challenging what is found in Genesis 1-3. Perhaps this seems obvious to you. But if that is where a person representing evolution starts, she or he has lost the Creationist from the get-go.

None of this way of approaching the conversation addresses the content of the Bible and the type of writings we find in them. This is, it seems to me, the central issue.

21. Spirit, Science, and Metaphysics: Scientists Claim That Quantum Theory Proves Consciousness Moves To Another Universe At Death

A book titled "Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the Nature of the Universe "has stirred up the Internet, because it contained a notion that life does not end when the body dies, and it can last forever. The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible. - See more at: http://www.spiritscienceandmetaphysics.com/scientists-claim-that-quantum-theory-proves-consciousness-moves-to-another-universe-at-death/#sthash.m65dCbI8.dpuf

A book titled "Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness Are the Keys to Understanding the Nature of the Universe" has stirred up the Internet, because it contained a notion that life does not end when the body dies, and it can last forever. The author of this publication, scientist Dr. Robert Lanza who was voted the 3rd most important scientist alive by the NY Times, has no doubts that this is possible. ...

The (Mostly) Improving State of the World

Washington Post: 40 charts that explain the world

Our friend and colleague Max Fisher over at Worldviews has posted another 40 maps that explain the world, building on his original classic of the genre. But this is Wonkblog. We're about charts. And one of the great things about charts is that they show not just how things are -- but how they're changing.

So we searched for charts that would tell not just the story of how the world is -- but where it's going. Some of these charts are optimistic, like the ones showing huge gains in life expectancy in poorer nations. Some are more worryisome -- wait till you see the one on endangered species. But together they tell a story of a world that's changing faster than at arguably any other time in human history. ...

As the author notes, we have challenges but hardly descend into a global dystopia. I think these charts give a pretty holistic view. Here are three examples.
It was commonly believed that primitive societies were more peaceful and that modern civilization gave rise to unprecedented violence. This chart compares death rates by war in primitive societies as calculated by anthropologists to those for Europe/USA in the 20th century.
And then there is this:

The graphs point to environmental protection and adaptation as the biggest problems in the days ahead. Those challenges are not insurmountable. Energy sources like natural gas and nuclear power can be used in the interim on the way to practical renewable technologies. Genetically modified crops can help to reduce water consumption, increase yield, and improve hardiness. Innovations in fields like biotechnology, nanotechnology, and 3-D printing promise to revolutionize the world economy into a less wasteful and more affordable human existence for everyone. There is work to do, but there is also much reason for hope of a better world.

 

Max Weber Was Wrong (About Capitalism)

Public Discourse: Max Weber Was Wrong - Samuel Greg

... Second, the empirical evidence disproving Weber’s connection between Protestantism and the emergence of capitalism is considerable. Even Catholic critics of modern capitalism have had to concede that “the commercial spirit” preceded the Reformation by at least two hundred years. From the eleventh century onward, the words Deus enim et proficuum (“For God and Profit”) began to appear in the ledgers of Italian and Flemish merchants. This was not a medieval version of some type of prosperity gospel. Rather, it symbolized just how naturally intertwined were the realms of faith and commerce throughout the world of medieval Europe. The pursuit of profit, trade, and commercial success dominated the life of the city-states of medieval and Renaissance Northern Italy and the towns of Flanders, not to mention the Venetian republic that exerted tremendous influence on merchant activity throughout the Mediterranean long before 1517.

Since Weber’s time, much scholarly work has been done to illustrate the advanced state of market-driven economic development in the Middle Ages. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, the Belgian scholar Raymond de Roover penned numerous articles illustrating that, during the Middle Ages, financial transactions and banking started to take on the degree of sophistication that is commonplace today. Likewise, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, by the Italian-American historian of medieval European economic history, the late Robert S. Lopez, shattered the historical claims that formed much of the background of Weber’s argument. Lopez demonstrated in great detail the way in which the Middle Ages “created the indispensable material and moral conditions for a thousand years of virtually uninterrupted growth.”

In recent decades, the historians Edwin Hunt and James Murray have illustrated just how much the medieval period was characterized by remarkable innovation in methods of business organization. They also suggest that the advent of modernity actually heralded the expansion of state economic intervention and regulation in an effort to constrain economic freedom. In a similar fashion, the sociologist Rodney Stark has gathered together disparate sources of historical and economic analysis to illustrate the origins of capitalism and major breakthroughs in the theory and practice of wealth creation in the medieval period. Central to Stark’s analysis is his highlighting of the way pre-Reformation Western Christianity saw the world as one in which humans were called upon to use their reason and innate creativity to develop its resources—including economically.

Here one could add that, before Adam Smith, some of the most elaborate thinking about the nature of contracts, free markets, interest, wages, and banking that developed after the Reformation was articulated in the writings of Spanish Catholic scholastic thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Theologians such as Francisco de Vitoria OP, Martín de Azpilcueta, Juan de Mariana SJ, and Tomás de Mercado OP, anticipated many of the claims made by Smith two centuries later.

To be sure, much of this thinking occurred by way of side-effect rather than as a result of the systematic analysis undertaken by Smith. For as commercial relationships expanded throughout Europe in the centuries preceding and following the Reformation, there was a marked increase in the number of penitents asking their confessors for guidance about moral questions with a strong economic dimension. What was the just price? When was a person no longer obliged to adhere to a contract? When was charging interest legitimate? When did it become usurious? As a result, priests looked to theologians for guidance on how to respond to their penitents’ questions. Thus, as Jürg Niehans stressed in his History of Economic Theory:

The scholastics thus found it necessary to descend from theology into the everyday world of economic reality, of early capitalism, foreign trade, monopoly, banking, foreign exchange and public finance. What one knew about these things in the School of Salamanca was hardly less than Adam Smith knew two hundred years later, and more than most students know today.

Even when we consider modern capitalism’s emergence, a direct connection between this event and Protestantism is very open to question. ...

This is a really excellent piece on the history of capitalism.

How Pope Francis Misunderstands the World

Atlantic: How Pope Francis Misunderstands the World

We're living at a far more equal, peaceful, and prosperous time than the pontiff acknowledges....

Pope Francis is Times' Person of the Year, an excellent pick in my estimation. He strikes me as a man with incredible integrity. I'm enjoying watching him live into this new calling.

The response to his Evangelii Gaudium is particularly interesting to me, with the left gleeful about his condemnation of capitalism and the right going apoplectic about the same. In our age of bumper sticker sound bites, I don't think either side is listening with appropriate nuance. I haven't read and digested the whole document, but I have read the sections that deal with economic issues. I don't see a radical departure from what previous popes have written.

Twenty years ago, Pope John Paul II wrote the following in Centesimus Annus:

Can it perhaps be said that after the failure of communism capitalism is the victorious social system and the capitalism is the victorious social system and that capitalism should be the goal of the countries now making efforts to rebuild their economy and society? Is this model which ought to be proposed to the countries of the Third World which are searching for the path of true economic and civil progress?

The answer is obviously complex. If by "capitalism" is meant an economic system which recognizes the fundamental and positive role of business, the market, private property, and the resulting responsibility for the means of production as well as free creativity in the economic sector, then the answer is certainly in the affirmative, even though it would perhaps be more appropriate to speak of a "business economy," "market economy," or simply "free economy." But if by "capitalism" is meant a system in which freedom in the economic sector is not circumscribed within a strong juridical framework which places it at the service of human freedom in its totality and which sees it as a particular aspect of that freedom, the core of which is ethical and religious, then the reply is certainly negative. (Centesimus Annus, 42)

I don't find Pope Francis saying a great deal different, although his emphasis may be slightly different. We need to remember that John Paul II ministered under the tyranny of Soviet Communism while Francis did so under the tyranny of right-wing dictatorship. These differences are surely a factor.

The part that does trouble me some, as it does with an overwhelming number of religious figures who speak to economic issues, is a distorted picture of what is happening in the world. It isn't what is said. It's what's missing. For the past century or two, we have been living through the most astonishing surge in human flourishing in history. That reality needs to be discussed every bit as much as the challenges and the injustices.

David Ropeik, in How Risky Is It Really: Why Our Fears Don't Always Match the Facts, shows that we are innately inclined to fixate on threats and negative developments. People who do so aren't stupid or ideological … they are human. All of us do it. The inclination to focus on threats is instinctive and has served humans well over millennia. But in the face of complex issues, we need to consider our concerns with more objective analysis. Otherwise, we run the risk of doing more harm than good. We need to approach problems with warm hearts and cool heads.

I have some minor quibbles with Tupy in the article, but it brings important balance. I've documented similar factors in past series like American Social Indicators and World Social Indicators, two series I intend to update next year. The challenge is to hear the Pope's important calls for the inclusion of the poor and his warning against our propensity to justify indifference. Not heeding the Pope's warnings is also to misunderstand the world. But we need to heed the warnings with an informed understanding of what is unfolding in the world. Read the Atlantic article and see what you think.

Religion Links

1. A federal Judge Declares Tax Exclusion For Clergy Housing Payments Unconstitutional. Peter Reilly makes the economic and legal case for preserving the exclusion, In Defense Of Special Tax Treatment For Clergy:

... Section 107 is best analyzed by reviewing the historical context surrounding the development of Section 107 of the Internal Revenue Code, the clergy housing allowance. Section 107 is only one part of the larger statutory framework of exclusions for employees who receive employer-assisted housing due the requirements of the job and for the convenience of their employers. See Joint Committee on Taxation, General Explanation of the Tax Reform Act of 1986, (JCS-10-87) May 4, 1987, at {54}(in amending I.R.C. 265(a) “Congress concluded that it was appropriate to continue the long-standing tax treatment…claimed by ministers and military personnel who receive tax-free housing allowances”). 

Current tax policy lightens the tax burden of the taxpayers who receive qualifying employer-assisted housing. See Sections 107 (clergy housing), 119 (general housing), 134 (military housing), and 911(a)(2) (foreign housing). Congress created these tax-free housing allowances within its discretion and to demonstrate a willingness to give tax breaks to classes of taxpayers who have little choice about their personal living space. Whether the employer provides a cash allowance or a home, each benefit serves the same purpose; that is, often the employer’s needs affect the living space needs of its employees. Many times, these classes of employees frequently relocate, thus preventing them from settling down and hindering long term close friendships. Further, the employers frequently require them to use their homes to conduct employer business. Additionally, the employee’s place of service may not be desirable. These employees must reside where their employer requires and must frequently use their residence for employer business. Some employees sacrifice amenities that most citizens take for granted, such as long term stability in one locale and privacy. ...

2. Eleven Myths About Going to Seminary

1. YOU HAVE TO BE GOOD TO GO TO SEMINARY.

2. SEMINARY AND DIVINITY SCHOOLS ARE EXPENSIVE.

3. YOU HAVE TO HAVE IT ALL FIGURED OUT BEFORE YOU ARRIVE AT SEMINARY.

4. YOU HAVE TO HAVE DECIDED TO GO TO SEMINARY EVEN BEFORE YOU WENT TO COLLEGE....

3. 10 Facts About The Transforming Global Religious Landscape

1. Religious 'Nones' Are Third-Largest Group

2. China Has Huge Population Of Religiously Unaffiliated

3. Most People Are Part Of Religious Majorities In Their Countries

4. Hindus Are Highly Geographically Concentrated

5. Most Countries Have A Majority Religion

6. Christianity Is A Majority In Over 100 Countries

7. Oldest And Youngest Religions

8. The World's Only Jewish Majority Country

9. Christianity Dominates A Majority Of The World's Regions

10. Religious Nones Still Believe

4.Who's a Jew? Few American Jews say it's a matter of belief

WASHINGTON (RNS) In the most comprehensive study of American Jews in 12 years, a strong majority said being Jewish is mostly about ancestry or culture, not the religious practice of Judaism.

"A Portrait of Jewish Americans," released Tuesday (Oct. 1) by the Pew Research Center, shows strong secularist trends most clearly seen in one finding: 62% of U.S. Jews said Jewishness is largely about culture or ancestry; just 15% said it's about religious belief. ...

 5. Christianity Spreading at Remarkable Rate Among Middle, Upper Castes and Youth in Emerging 'New India'

... The current "remarkable receptivity to Christ" across the entire spectrum of Indian society, which had been traditionally among only lower castes and marginalized communities, is one of five dominant themes identified by Indian anthropologist Prabhu Singh that define today's India and its missional challenges. ...

... "With more than 71 million claiming Christianity, India is now the eighth largest Christian nation in the world," said Dick McClain, president and CEO of The Mission Society, publisher of "Unfinished." "Yet with 456 languages and more than 2,611 distinct people groups, India still has more people groups unreached with the gospel than any other nation -- 88 percent of its population. ...

6. Study Theology, Even If You Don't Believe in God

This lost liberal art encourages scholars to understand history from the inside out.

7. Peter J. Leithart on The End of Protestantism

 The Reformation isn’t over. But Protestantism is, or should be.

When I studied at Cambridge, I discovered that English Evangelicals define themselves over against the Church of England. Whatever the C of E is, they ain’t. What I’m calling “Protestantism” does the same with Roman Catholicism. Protestantism is a negative theology; a Protestant is a not-Catholic. Whatever Catholics say or do, the Protestant does and says as close to the opposite as he can. ...

... Protestantism ought to give way to Reformational catholicism. Like a Protestant, a Reformational catholic rejects papal claims, refuses to venerate the Host, and doesn’t pray to Mary or the saints; he insists that salvation is a sheer gift of God received by faith and confesses that all tradition must be judged by Scripture, the Spirit’s voice in the conversation that is the Church.

Though it agrees with the original Protestant protest, Reformational catholicism is defined as much by the things it shares with Roman Catholicism as by its differences. Its existence is not bound up with finding flaws in Roman Catholicism. ...

8. If it is not ‘mainline,’ what is it?

Is there a better name for main­line Protestants? How about vintage Protestants? Or the VPCC—Vanishing Progressive Christian Church? Or the Legacy Church? ...

... Religion News Service took up the challenge, inviting votes and comments in an informal survey. More than 200 people voted. The comments ranged from theological to historical, serious to snarky.

“Liberal Church” led with 24 percent of the votes. Some liked the social and political connotation, but others used liberal as a slam on a church they regard as too loose on doctrines of sin and salvation. Merritt said October 15 that she preferred a different spin on liberal: “Liberationist Church,” because “it taps into the good news that our beliefs lead us to seek liberation for all the oppressed, to expand freedom for all.”

Next, at 17 percent, were those who said labels just don’t work for religious distinctions anymore. National surveys find growing numbers just want to call themselves “Christian.”

“Oldline” was favored in 6 percent of the votes. “Grandma’s Church” drew 3 percent. It has the ring of truth: mainline churches have the greatest percentage of members age 65 and older of any Christian tradition.

Most folks—46 percent—preferred their own picks. ...

 9. Sermons stretch as biblical literacy wanes

Religious literacy is declining as "nones" rise, forcing changes in how churches — and even comedians and filmmakers — relate to their intended audiences. ...

... “One of the results of biblical illiteracy is that sermons are, for the first time in centuries, getting longer,” said Brett Younger, associate professor of preaching at the McAfee School of Theology in Atlanta.

“Precisely because people have not grown up with the stories, many preachers see their job as explaining the text rather than helping worshippers experience the hope of the story,” he told ABPnews in an e-mail.

Brandon Hudson said his preaching has changed to accommodate visitors and newcomers who grew up without church. ...

 10. Watch Out, Pastors: Millennials Are Fact-Checking Your Sermons

 But the most interesting finding: Nearly 4 out of 10 practicing Christian millennials are fact-checking their pastor's sermons. Notes Barna:

The one-way communication from pulpit to pew is not how Millennials experience faith. By nature of digital connectedness, Millennial life is interactive. For many of them, faith is interactive as well—whether their churches are ready for it or not. It's an ongoing conversation, and it's all happening on their computers, tablets and smart phones. What's more, many of them bring their devices with them to church. Now with the ability to fact-check at their fingertips, Millennials aren't taking the teaching of faith leaders for granted. In fact, 14% of Millennials say they search to verify something a faith leader has said. A striking 38% of practicing Christian Millennials say the same.

 11. New Study: Three-Quarters of American Giving Goes to Religion

 Americans give a lot of money to religion—but not in the ways we usually think. ...

... Unlike previous data sets, the current study captures a wider swath of religious giving—not just that to churches, synagogues, mosques, and the like, but to religiously-affiliated organizations like Catholic Charities and the Salvation Army. When that larger group is included, 73%—almost three quarters—of American giving goes to religious organizations.

This point is significant for several reasons. First, it highlights the importance of religion in American philanthropic life. ...

Second, and relatedly, this data shows just how much of America’s tax deductions are a boon to religious organizations. ...

Third, it’s these “religiously-identified organizations” —RIO’s in the hideous acronymization of Washington—that are at the center of the current controversy over religious exemptions to civil rights laws. ...

12. Tithing, church giving dips; sign of the economy or value of charity?

Tithing and church giving in general has taken the most prolonged dip since the Great Depression. Is the economy to blame or perhaps a failure to teach that tithing and giving is an integral part of the spiritual life? ...

13. What archaeology tells us about the Bible

A contentious dig in Israel delves into the kingdoms of David and Solomon, stirring a debate over the veracity of the biblical record.

14. Biblical Credibility and Joshua 10: What Does the Text Really Claim?

... The lexical issues remain vexing and problematic, but they can be addressed. Even if we acknowledge that we have not yet sorted out the lexical details, the presence of terms such as “stop,” “stand” and “wait” gain new possibilities in light of the language of celestial omens and the fact that the context is one that is just right for an ominological application (i.e., on the brink of battle). Certainly a reading of the text in light of omens is more likely for an ancient text than a reading in light of physics.

It should be noted that the text does not suggest the astronomical phenomena were unique; instead, verse 14 says plainly that what was unique was the Lord accepting a battle strategy from a man (“the Lord listened to a man”). A Mesopotamian lamentation (first millennium) shows this same type of terminology for divine judgment when it speaks of heavens rumbling, earth shaking, the sun laying at the horizon and the moon stopping in the sky, and evil storms sweeping through the land. Joshua’s knowledge of the Amorites’ dependence on omens may have led him to ask the Lord for one that he knew would deflate their morale—for the opposition to occur on an unpropitious day.

15. Who “attended” those earliest churches?

On the basis of a new approach at looking how to discern the social makeup of the earliest Christian house churches, one based more on housing space occupied than on ideal social types, Peter Oakes has offered to us a new way of thinking more realistically and concretely about who was in the earliest house churches. His book is called Reading Romans in Pompeii. ...

... The earliest churches, then, are not made up of pietists who wanted to study the Bible but ordinary Romans from all sorts of backgrounds, needs, yearnings, and connections — each bringing to the table different ears for the gospel. ...

Capitalism and the Kingdom - Bob Lupton

I love Bob Lupton's monthly posts in Urban Perspectives newsletter. I identify with what he writes in his latest installment, Capitalism and the Kingdom. Capitalism is not "biblical" in the sense of being prescribed by God. And in that sense, there is no "biblical" economic system. All economic systems are human constructs that incorporate human wisdom and sin. This is not to say that the Bible doesn't give us insight into what constitutes shalom and insight into anthropology. We begin with those insights and work from there to discern the most shalom-filled world we can.

After spending thirty years studying and working on poverty, I am deeply persuaded along with Lupton that business, jobs, and market economies (my word for Lupton's "capitalism") are superior to other options for pursuing shalom in the world ... not biblical, not ordained by God, not perfect ... superior. That doesn't make me right, but it is an honest confession of how I have come to my present conclusions.

The curious thing about this is my inclinations and motivations are likely more similar to people who see themselves as progressive. From childhood, I've been captivated by questions about how to work for a more just and shalom-filled world, particularly as this relates to people at the margins. My graduate degrees, one academic and the other applied were grounded in understanding how society changes and how to change it. I have not come to economics out of a desire for financial success or to buttress deeply held political convictions. I've come to it from a genuine desire for understanding that informs discipleship.

The most challenging thing for me is the realization that most people want to process the issues that concern me through a political lens, first and foremost. I read recently that people are more willing to marry someone of a different religion than they are someone of an opposing political party. I suspect political affiliation may have eclipsed religion as an identity marker in our culture. Consequently, I find many progressives, or people who the Religious Right has burned, will not give me an ear from the start. Their filters tell them I am not one of them, and they need not engage, or they engage with me as the uncompromising ideologue they already know I am. Many on the right overestimate my identification with their political agenda and ambitions. And let me be clear that my mission is not to find some "third way" between extremes. The people that captivate me are those who I sense are rooted in a quest for understanding that runs much deeper than political justification. And I am especially captivated by the people who can ask good questions regardless of how closely our conclusions to date may align. I very much sense Lupton is a kindred spirit, which is why I appreciate him and identify so strongly with this article.

Capitalism and the Kingdom

I have never placed a political campaign sign in my yard. Not that I am disinterested in who gets elected to public office. That's clearly important to me. But to go public with my political biases is likely to alienate about half of the supporters of my non-profit. It's better for business, I have found, to keep my political opinions to myself, to talk out of both sides of my mouth when necessary, and keep my mouth shut when in doubt.

Some might call me spineless. I prefer diplomatic. I can usually see both sides of an issue and when I can find common ground between differing opinions I do my best to steer the conversation toward mutual understanding. When that doesn't work I try to offer some conciliatory comment and then change the subject.

But there is one subject I have always been very straight about: caring for the poor. This is a conviction. There may be disagreement about just how best to do this caring, but for me compassionate and just treatment of the poor is a non-negotiable. It is a Divine mandate. And I will go to the mat over this one.

Because I have been politically elusive, my Democratic friends often pigeonhole me as a Republican with a big heart. My Republican friends peg me as a Democrat who is opposed to entitlements. Both camps seem to think I'm an anomaly. That's probably good for keeping diverse friends and satisfied supporters.

But after forty-plus years of living and serving among the poor, I have witnessed nearly every expression of care that good people have visited upon the less fortunate – from feeding the homeless, to counseling pregnant girls to keep their babies, to patching widows' roofs, to advocating for addicts who need treatment. I have done all of these and hundreds more. And I have been joined by countless others whose hearts compel them to help those in need. Sometimes our service has made a difference (though its really hard to tell, especially in the short run). Sometimes we have inflicted unintentional harm (and that too is hard to tell, since we never quite know what is behind the smiles). One thing I am quite sure of, however: it is much safer being a supportive listener than it is being an eager helper. And another thing I have learned: when you do for others what they have the capacity to do for themselves, you are likely doing them a disservice.

After four decades of serving, the romance is gone. I am left with an unvarnished view of the realities of urban poverty. But the Divine calling imposed upon me to become a neighbor to the poor has never been lifted. And because my commitment and voice and heart remain on the side of the poor, my Democratic friends want to embrace me as a fellow liberal (who has a few right-wing tendencies!). And because I have seen the destructive effects of subsidizing poverty and oppose dependency-producing entitlements, I am accepted by Republican friends as a fellow conservative (but with a heart!). Lately, however, (ever since I came out of the closet with Toxic Charity) I fear this delicate balance I have maintained for so long is beginning to "list to the starboard" (that's tilt to the right). I have begun to publicly declare that the only thing that will enable the poor to emerge from poverty is a decent job. And the primary creators of decent jobs are business people who believe deeply in the free enterprise system. Coming out on the side of capitalism identifies me with Republicans. You see why I'm in trouble now, don't you?

In one of my recent Urban Perspectives I said:
For-profits and not-for-profits represent two fundamental divisions of our economy: wealth creation and wealth transfer. Business is the wealth creator; all others exist on the transfer of that wealth… How strange that business creators, so essential to our well-being, are so often viewed as somehow less spiritual, less compassionate than those who live off the wealth they produce! Strange, too, how we esteem sacrificial non-profit "servants" but malign as greedy capitalists the for-profit producers who underwrite their charities.

One minister friend responded:
Interesting post. I've always loved your even handed approach and refusal to tow the liberal or conservative line. But some of the language in this one surprised me. Capitalism could be baptized but it is not God's final revelation. Some of the language you use here of Ordained For-Profit sector sounds like a myth that profit-driven life will bring the kingdom.

My more liberal friends are suspect of the free enterprise system. They point out to me the excesses, the CEO's who live in opulence and cut their minimum wage employees to thirty hours a week to avoid having to provide health insurance. They say that a system propelled by greed is anything but righteous. They have ready examples of the Enron's that defraud their employees and the BP's that destroy our environment. The for-profit sector is not to be trusted, they contend. Wealth producers, if not carefully controlled and regulated, will more than likely exploit their workers, despoil the environment, cut safety corners, avoid (if not evade) paying taxes, conceal health hazards, and squeeze every penny to the bottom line.

My liberal friends have a point. A competitive economic system can indeed produce winners and losers. And without oversight it can lead to cartels and monopolies. Unchecked greed can certainly be very destructive. All true. But then a socialistic system can produce similar inequities and injustices (minus the wealth creation). Obviously, no economic system is without its shortcomings. But recent history, ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the subsequent economic struggles of many European Union member countries, it has become abundantly clear that socialism has failed to deliver on its promises. We are also witnessing the dramatic expansion of economic vitality (and poverty reduction) in China and India as they have cracked open the doors to free enterprise. With all of its potential for exploitation and excess, the capitalistic system is certainly winning the day.

Because capitalism and political freedom are so often linked together, it is tempting to connect them with Judeo-Christian values. That's what my pastor friend was concerned about when he referred to the "myth that profit-driven life will bring the kingdom." Because capitalism has worked so well for us (most of us), making us the most prosperous nation in history, it is tempting to equate it with Shalom. In Judeo-Christian teaching, Shalom, or wholeness, prosperity and peace, is the end to which all righteous people aspire, both here and in the hereafter. Associating capitalism with Shalom may be tempting, yes, but as my minister friend rightly points out: "Capitalism could be baptized but it is not God's final revelation."

I am convinced that the only thing that will enable the poor to emerge from poverty is a decent job. I am further convinced that the best chance of creating decent jobs lies with our free market capitalists. Does this mean that capitalism is the Divine design for bringing about Shalom? I suspect not. Nor is any economic system devised by flawed humanity. But in spite of its bent toward self-interest, even with its excesses and inequities, capitalism has an historic opportunity to create shared prosperity that can benefit every person on the globe. What capitalism needs in order to fulfill its promise is sanctified self-interest.

(Reposted with permission)

Social Science and Culture Links

1. 7 Cool Political Maps That Show How Old Historical Events Still Haunt The World Today

One example from Poland:

The orange regions are the Powiats (counties) won by the socialist Civic Platform, while the blue are the Powiats won by the conservative Law and Justice platform:

...overlay this map of the old border of Imperial Germany and Imperial Russia over the map, as David G.D. Hecht did for the Big Think strange maps blog:

2. Life as a Teenager in 1994, 2014, and 2034 – What a difference a generation makes! – Part 2

 Lengthy article documenting changes in the recent past and projecting the future.

3. 15 Trends That Are Shaping The Future

4. Only Half Of Americans Know Their Neighbors' Names

5. The New Golden Age of Archaeology Is Right Now

... A fellow at National Geographic and an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Parcak often tells her students, "A picture is worth a thousand words. A satellite image is worth a million dollars." She's a space archaeologist, part of a growing community of specialists who use satellite imagery and remote sensing technology to find ancient sites once invisible to the naked eye. ...

6. America's Civil War: Unnecessary But Transformational

... Was the conflict necessary to end slavery?  Writes Goldfield:  “there may have been other means to achieve that noble end.  In fact, the United States was the only country to require a civil war in order to abolish slavery.”  In every other nation except Haiti slavery was eliminated peacefully.

Why, then, civil war?  Goldfield looks beyond the conventional wisdom.  For instance, he points to evangelical Christianity in stoking America’s political fires.  He explains:  “The elevation of political issues into moral causes poisoned the democratic process.  Just as evangelicals did not distinguish between the Catholic Church and Catholic immigrants, so they did not separate the sin of slavery from the slaveholder.  In a crusade, the enemy is the infidel, and eventually both sides viewed the other as apostates to God and the constitution.”

Of course, other factors also radicalized the political debate.  But evangelical Christians split along sectional lines, many giving their loyalty to politics before the Gospel. ...

7. Libertarians By the Numbers: A Demographic, Religious and Political Profile

8. The Backfire Effect shows why you can't use facts to win an argument

"Never let the facts get in the way of a good story" isn't just a maxim for shady politicians and journalists. It's also the way people often live their lives. One study indicates that there may even be a "backfire effect," which happens when you show people facts that contradict their opinions. ...

9. Americans' Belief That Gov't Is Too Powerful at Record Level

10. American view on legalizing Marijuana

11. Turning Education Upside Down

Three years ago, Clintondale High School, just north of Detroit, became a “flipped school” — one where students watch teachers’ lectures at home and do what we’d otherwise call “homework” in class. Teachers record video lessons, which students watch on their smartphones, home computers or at lunch in the school’s tech lab. In class, they do projects, exercises or lab experiments in small groups while the teacher circulates.

Clintondale was the first school in the United States to flip completely — all of its classes are now taught this way. Now flipped classrooms are popping up all over. Havana High School outside of Peoria, Ill., is flipping, too, after the school superintendent visited Clintondale. The principal of Clintondale says that some 200 school officials have visited. ...

12. These Are The College Majors With The Smartest Students

13. First Children Are Smarter—but Why?

One mysterious finding—and seven theories

14. Top 5 Regrets of the Dying

1. I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
3. I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Religion Links

1. First the Nones, now the Spirituals

... Earlier this year, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, my colleagues over at Trinity's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, decided to find out. In an email survey of nearly 2,000 students at 38 colleges and universities across the country, they asked, "In general would you describe yourself more as a religious, spiritual or secular person? Select One."

The result, cross-tabulated with a series of other questions, is a portrait of a collective identity distinctly different from both the religious and the secular, representing (along with each of the others) roughly one-third of the college population. So who are those collegians who identify themselves as "spiritual" in America today?

1. They're more likely to be female than male. In fact, while equal proportions of the young men and women call themselves religious, the former identify as secular versus spiritual by a ratio of over three to two; the latter, as spiritual versus secular by nearly two to one.

2. They are much more likely to believe in God than the Seculars, but the deity in question is more frequently a "higher power" than a personal God. ...

Related: U.S. College Students Evenly Divided Between Religious, Secular and Spiritual, in New ARIS Study

... Among the students surveyed, 31.8% identified their worldview as Religious, 32.4% as Spiritual, and 28.2% as Secular. Within each group there was a remarkable level of cohesion on answers to questions covering a wide array of issues, including political alignment, acceptance of evolution and climate change, belief in supernatural phenomena such as miracles or ghosts, and trust in alternative practices such as homeopathy and astrology. ...

2. Unpaid Pastors May Be 'Future Of The Church' For Protestant Congregations

... Though small evangelical congregations have long relied on unpaid pastors, mainline churches haven't. They've generally paid full-time or nearly full-time salaries, said Scott Thumma, a Hartford Seminary sociologist of religion.

That's changing, however, as churches face declining numbers and look to new ministry models to make ends meet. Thumma sees more mainliners cutting back to halftime or one-quarter-time packages for clergy, who increasingly work second jobs. ...

3. Trends Among Growing Churches: Some Reflections on the Fastest Growing and Largest U.S. Churches

... On this year's lists, we noticed many of the same trends we've seen in the past. Among the recent trends, we continue to see multisite churches becoming more and more common. Among the 100 Largest churches, we find only 12 have a single campus (although one church did not report how many campuses it has). On the Fastest-Growing list, the number with a single campus is much greater—42, reflecting close to a split in the number of churches that do and do not have multiple campuses.

Some once believed this move to grow via multiple campuses was a temporary trend, but it appears to be a trend that's here to stay. While it was once the domain of only the largest churches, we now see smaller churches deploying the same methodology. What's interesting to me is the number of churches that utilize a multisite methodology and are also committed to church planting. The two are definitely not exclusive of one another. I think this may have something to do with the missionary heart of these churches. ...

4. Do we need denominations?

When people search for a church to join, one early stage decision in the process is whether to find a denominational or non-denominational church. Are denominations important? Is it good for a congregation to be part of a denomination?

On the one hand, independent, non-denominational megachurches and their pastors too often feature in media headlines, as reporters and editors almost gloat in uncovering the latest scandal. Even when there is no scandal, the retirement or death of an independent church pastor (regardless of the congregation's size) will often set that congregation on an irreversible downward glide path toward institutional oblivion.

On the other hand, conventional wisdom has it that denominations in general, and mainline Protestant denominations like The Episcopal Church in particular, are dying anachronisms.

Are denominations important? ...

The short answer is "Yes!" ;-)

5. Church Hunting? There's an App for That

... Launched in September 2011, FaithStreet is one of those brilliant innovations designed to meet a big need with simple technology. Churches fill out an online profile with key information such as location and contact numbers. Web visitors can easily browse churches near them that fit their needs. But Coughlin's web application is an unorthodox business model: FaithStreet doesn't make money unless people give to their local churches. Churches that use FaithStreet encourage attendees to give online, from which FaithStreet takes a cut. "What's great about the model is we win only when the church does," says Coughlin. ...

6. The myth of scientists as atheists

... In fact, I believe that the notion that almost all scientists are atheists is a myth. A recent Pew poll agrees with my view: 51% of polled American scientists believing in some kind of deity. While that rate is far lower than the general public in the US, it is still a majority. ...

7. The Religious Alternative To Obamacare's Individual Mandate

... The sharing ministries are not insurance: there's no guarantee that a given bill will be covered. Instead, it's like a co-op, where members decide what procedures to cover, and then all pitch in to cover the cost as group.

"It's a group of people, in this case Christians, who band together and agree that they want to share one another's burdens," says Andrea Miller, medical director for the largest Christian health-insurance alternative, Medi-Share.

She says members put aside a certain amount of money every month, which then goes to other Christians who need help paying their medical bills. Medi-Share's monthly fees vary, but that family options "average less than $300 a month."

There are a few requirements to fulfill before participating, Miller says. The first is that you have to be Christian. "Second, you need to agree to living a Christian lifestyle, including no smoking, including not abusing alcohol or drugs," she says.

To constitute as a health care sharing ministry — and therefore be exempt from the Affordable Care Act requirements — the nonprofit has to have been in existence since 1999 (Medi-Share has existed since '93). The ministries also have an independent accounting firm conduct a publicly available annual audit. ...

8. At Biologos, "Reflections on Reading Genesis 1-3: John Walton's World Tour": Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Earlier this year, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, my colleagues over at Trinity's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, decided to find out. In an email survey of nearly 2,000 students at 38 colleges and universities across the country, they asked, "In general would you describe yourself more as a religious, spiritual or secular person? Select One."

The result, cross-tabulated with a series of other questions, is a portrait of a collective identity distinctly different from both the religious and the secular, representing (along with each of the others) roughly one-third of the college population. So who are those collegians who identify themselves as "spiritual" in America today?

1. They're more likely to be female than male. In fact, while equal proportions of the young men and women call themselves religious, the former identify as secular versus spiritual by a ratio of over three to two; the latter, as spiritual versus secular by nearly two to one.

2. They are much more likely to believe in God than the Seculars, but the deity in question is more frequently a "higher power" than a personal God.

- See more at: http://marksilk.religionnews.com/2013/09/26/first-the-nones-now-the-spirituals/#sthash.mpIr5pSX.dpuf

Earlier this year, Barry Kosmin and Ariela Keysar, my colleagues over at Trinity's Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture, decided to find out. In an email survey of nearly 2,000 students at 38 colleges and universities across the country, they asked, "In general would you describe yourself more as a religious, spiritual or secular person? Select One."

The result, cross-tabulated with a series of other questions, is a portrait of a collective identity distinctly different from both the religious and the secular, representing (along with each of the others) roughly one-third of the college population. So who are those collegians who identify themselves as "spiritual" in America today?

1. They're more likely to be female than male. In fact, while equal proportions of the young men and women call themselves religious, the former identify as secular versus spiritual by a ratio of over three to two; the latter, as spiritual versus secular by nearly two to one.

2. They are much more likely to believe in God than the Seculars, but the deity in question is more frequently a "higher power" than a personal God.

- See more at: http://marksilk.religionnews.com/2013/09/26/first-the-nones-now-the-spirituals/#sthash.mpIr5pSX.dpuf

First the Nones, now the Spirituals

First the Nones, now the Spirituals

Saturday Links

 1. Population Reference Bureau has a great resource that maps their 2013 World Population Data Sheet on an interactive map. Here is one example:

2. Modern family redefined: Say 'goodbye' to the typical American family

A New York Times story looking at the skyrocketing rate of birth outside of marriage among women under 30 (now over 50 percent of such births) pointed up one of the key differences between marriages and cohabitating couples:

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.

The research, in aggregate, says that things are changing for the American family, and quickly. There may be ways for the government to address the trend: increased financial benefits for getting and staying married, for example, or a macro-effort to actively battle rising economic inequality, but systematic change will be a long hard fight. The research seems to suggest that such a fight is worth the effort.

3. The Aging of the Baby Boom and the Growing Care Gap: A Look at Future Declines in the Availability
of Family Caregivers

4. Young People Are Still Dropping Out Of The Labor Force

Kids are likely staying in school for longer (or avoiding work altogether) thanks to a tough labor market. On the other hand, the 65-and-over crowd has seen the sharpest uptick in participation. The financial crisis bled retirement savings, forcing older Americans to stay on the job for longer.

5. How Big Data Is Transforming The Mobile Industry

6. Millennials Now Bringing Their Parents Along On Job Interviews

7. Why Bigger Is No Longer Better

Every manager and entrepreneur wants to grow their business.  Get bigger and more powerful, the thinking goes, and you'll have it made. The added heft will give you the upper hand in negotiations with suppliers and the doors of customers will swing wide open.

That used to be true to a certain extent, but not so much anymore. Digital technology has markedly evened out the playing field. Startups become billion dollar companies overnight while venerable brands like Kodak and Blockbuster hit the skids.

This turn of events presents considerable challenges for managers.  While there are still some advantages to scale, the disadvantages often outweigh them.  You have lots of customers, a large workforce and stodgy institutional investors to keep happy, all of which contribute to strategic rigidity.  To compete in the new economy, we need a new playbook. ...

8. Can For-Profit Corporations Have Religious Purposes?

...Okay, some may respond (e.g., here), churches and other organizations have free exercise rights, but for-profit corporations do not.  But why would this be?  An individual sole proprietor — of, say, a kosher deli, to use Will's example — would clearly be able to press a religious liberty claim, whether or not she hopes the deli will make her rich (and whether or not she commits to donate her earnings to a religious charity).   Does this individual lose such rights if she incorporated?   Does that somehow make her religious motivations any less sincere? Any less judicially cognizable?  I can't see how.   What, then, if the deli owner formed a partnership with her equally devout brother?  Would that matter?  And, again, if an informal partnership would be okay, why would the adoption of a corporate form and limited liability matter?

The consequence of the "no religious liberty for corporations" position is that individuals who would like to go into business are penalized if they seek to go into business without any potential recourse, under RFRA or otherwise.  The choice presented by the state is go into business or stay true to your religious beliefs.  Although I suggested otherwise before, it seems to me this approach imposes a substantial burden on the exercise of religion.  Whether this burden can be justified in a given case is a separate question, but the burden is there. ...

9. Five Insights About Private Property from Aquinas

1. God designed creation to support life, especially human life. ...
2. Private property engenders good stewardship. ...
3. Private ownership supports order in society. ...
4. Private property helps maintain peace in communities. ...
5. Private property benefits the community. ...

10. Germans Revolt Against Germany's Green Energy Revolution

11. Brussels fears European 'industrial massacre' sparked by energy costs

Europe's industry is being ravaged by exorbitant energy costs and an over-valued euro, blighting efforts to reverse years of global manufacturing decline.

12. What If Roads Lasted Twice As Long?

If there were a better way to take care of roads in the Lone Star State, it would be a very valuable idea.

Enter Sahadat Hossain, an associate professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington and the man behind a new state program to shore up crumbling roads using an underground support system of recycled plastic pins.

"Just think about it," Hossain says. "You need one million dollars to repair something. Or you can use a sustainable recycling material and do it for $200- or $300,000. You don't need to be an engineer to see that."

The scheme's low price is matched by its high effectiveness. In a two-year feasibility study that concluded this August, sections of Texas Route 287 with 10-foot-long pins drilled into the roadway slope moved only one to two inches. The control sections, left unsupported, moved 15 to 16 inches. ...

... The input cost of the pins, which have previously been tested in Missouri, is less than 50 percent that of traditional highway support measures like retaining walls. And because they are made from recycled plastic—each pin contains about 500 soda bottles—the pin concept turns plastic's non-decomposition from an environmental headache to an engineering solution. ...

13. This Map Shows Which Countries Are Going To Make The World Cup, According To Nate Silver's Prediction Model

 

Learn About Tableau

14. Why So Many Articles Have Terrible Headlines Online

15. The 11 Most Common Grammatical Mistakes And How To Avoid Them

16. What would happen if your church was reviewed on TripAdvisor?

Churches spend a lot of time on the big things, like a glorious anthem and prophetic preaching. But a UMC pastor says small details matter, too, like lights that burn brightly, signs that make sense and greeters who greet. ...

Saturday Links

1. How effective has the Millennium Villages Project been?

Here is a recent Op Ed in the NYT the Millennium Villages Project by Joe Nocerra, Fighting Poverty, and Critics.

2. Global Economic Growth Has Hit A Two-And-A-Half Year High

3. What Every U.S. Family Really Needs for a Minimum Living Standard

... Computers have become nearly ubiquitous, as cell phones have replaced what was once a reliable indicator of minimum living conditions in the U.S.: the landline. Very soon we'll need to start measuring minimum living conditions in a new way. What if it's your broadband bill you can't afford? Or the computer or smart phone you actually need way more than a dishwasher?

4. The Global Decline of the Labor Share

The stability of the labor share of income is a key foundation in macroeconomic models. We document, however, that the global labor share has significantly declined since the early 1980s, with the decline occurring within the large majority of countries and industries. We show that the decrease in the relative price of investment goods, often attributed to advances in information technology and the computer age, induced firms to shift away from labor and toward capital. The lower price of investment goods explains roughly half of the observed decline in the labor share, even when we allow for other mechanisms influencing factor shares such as increasing profits, capital-augmenting technology growth, and the changing skill composition of the labor force. We highlight the implications of this explanation for welfare and macroeconomic dynamics.

5. The Myth of Part-Time America

... The scare stories are good scares, but they're not good stories, since they start at the end and forget the beginning and middle. The truth about Part-Time America is that a part of America has always been working part-time, and there's not much evidence that we're seeing a terrifically new phenomenon. ...

6. Women Want Work-Life Balance More Than A Big Paycheck

...The survey, which included more than 5,300 working women across 13 countries, asked women questions about what they would need in their careers to feel like they "have it all."

The most interesting result comes from their definition of success. Five to 10 years ago, 56% of women attributed success with earning a big paycheck, but only 45% of women think the same today. And while 39% of women previously defined success as finding the balance between work and personal life, that number has grown to 63% today. ...

I'll add that this dynamic contributes to differences in pay by gender. In aggregate, men are still more singularly focused on work and work is a more central part of male identity.

7. Men's average height 'up 11cm since 1870s'

... The researchers said the gene pool "cannot account for substantial increases in mean stature over four or five generations".

Growth is significantly affected by what happens in the first two years of life, they said.

So, a high rate of illnesses such as respiratory diseases or diarrhoeas - which caused many infant deaths - would also affect survivors' development and therefore their subsequent height.

Infant mortality rates fell significantly throughout the period studied.

Another factor taken into account by the researchers was an increasing move to smaller families - meaning fewer people to feed.

Higher income, more sanitary living conditions and better education about health and nutrition could also have had an effect, they said. ...

Economist Robert Fogel developed the term technophysio evolution in response to his study of the phenomenon. See The Escape from Hunger and Premature Death, 1700-2100: Europe, America, and the Third World.

8. US birthrate decline slowing?

The US birth rate could be leveling off after a four-years of drop:  4 million Americans were born in 2012, just a few hundred fewer than2011. Teen births are in a "stunning turnaround," and the birthrate for older moms is increasing. ...

9. What's Killing Poor White Women?

For most Americans, life expectancy continues to rise—but not for uneducated white women. They have lost five years, and no one knows why.

10. Amish Community Not Anti-Technology, Just More Thoughtful

Many outsiders assume the Amish reject all new technology. But that's not true.

One Amish man in Lancaster County, Pa., checks his voicemail about four times a day. His shop is equipped with a propane-powered forklift, hydraulic-powered saws, cordless drills, and a refrigerated tank where milk from dairy cows is stored.

The difference between Amish people and most other Americans is the deliberation that takes place before deciding whether to embrace a new technology. Many Americans assume newer technology is always better, and perhaps even inherently good. ...

11. Religion In Workplace Increasingly Diverse; Comes With Potential Pitfalls

12. The shocking un-truth about church budgets

The church’s rapidly changing role in society requires new ways of looking at the allocation of financial resources. ...

... In the past we churches thought of ourselves as the backbones of society, places where good, moral and faithful people gather to pool resources so we can go out into the world and feed the homeless and convert people in order to save their souls. Keeping administrative costs as low as possible would help us to help the needy.

While many good and righteous things have come out of this view of ourselves, the truth is that that way of thinking is a pretty arrogant self-assessment borne out of a climate of popularity and ease. ...

... What we are now is mission outposts. We are islands in a world full of increasingly adrift people. We are places of solace and hope, community and hospitality for people who are too smart to believe in God and pretty convinced they don’t need the church — until they do. ...

13. 26 Maps That Show How Ethnic Groups Are Divided Across America

14. A Point of View: Why embracing change is the key to happiness

... And every analysis of what makes lucky and happy people lucky and happy demonstrates they adapt fast and well to new situations and people, and so are defended by complex social circles and acclimatised to change. They offer and request help and are free to embrace what's positive in life's inevitable alterations. They don't try to impose stillness on a universe which is in motion. They know real security involves a degree of exposure.

Sadly, most human authorities play to our fears and offer us stasis. They build us, if you like, shark cages for our time in the ever-changing water - consoling little pens which can't protect us when something huge and horrible arrives and we end up like Richard Dreyfuss in Jaws - all at sea. They offer apparently eternal values - eternity being unchanging and therefore reliable - the brotherhood of men, the wisdom of the free market, the evil of outsiders, the true path to heaven, the rewards of obedience. An incumbent government will warn against "changing horses in midstream" and we may accept a dire status quo because of how much worse the alternative might be. ...

Saturday Links

1. Meaning Is Healthier Than Happiness

People who are happy but have little-to-no sense of meaning in their lives have the same gene expression patterns as people who are enduring chronic adversity.

2. Blacks, Hispanics more optimistic than whites

... After years of economic attitudes among whites, blacks and Hispanics following similar patterns, whites' confidence in their economic future has plummeted in the last decade, according to the analysis. Blacks and Hispanics, meanwhile, have sustained high levels of optimism despite being hit hard in the recent recession. ...

... The AP-NORC analysis of data from the General Social Survey, a long-running biannual survey conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, found just 46 percent of whites say their family has a good chance of improving their living standard given the way things are in America, the lowest level in surveys conducted since 1987. In contrast, 71 percent of blacks and 73 percent of Hispanics express optimism of an improved life - the biggest gap with whites since the survey began asking. ...

3. The Book of Mormon: Why the world’s most capitalist religion breeds so many entrepreneurs

... The Mormon religion, however, stresses more than just self-reliance. Its emphasis on hard work, staying focused, and giving back to the Church also stirs entrepreneurial inclinations. The almost-mandatory missions carried out by its young men and women before they start their careers forge an ability to withstand rejection and disappointment while also fostering communication skills that help not only with sales jobs but also in starting companies. All the while, an unrelenting focus on the family means that Mormons are incentivized to “follow the rules” and earn money to feed many mouths, while maintaining a healthy work-life balance.

And so the US is riven with examples of what appears to be a disproportionately high number of business and entrepreneurial success stories to emerge from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, whose members account for just 1.7 percent of the US population. ...

4. A Record Number Of Young Adults Are Still Hunkered Down With Mom And Dad

... In 2012, 21.6 million young adults aged 18-31 lived at home with their parents, up from 18.5 million just before the recession, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis. 

"This is the highest share in at least four decades and represents a slow but steady increase over the 32% of their same-aged counterparts who were living at home prior to the Great Recession in 2007 and the 34% doing so when it officially ended in 2009," the report says. ...

5. U.S. Marriage Rates Keep Declining

Marriage rates in America are at an all-time low. And the median age at which women say "I do" is the highest it's been in a century.

Charles Blow had these observations about Marriage and Minorities.

6. The Long-Term Effects Of Poverty Linger Even After People Become Wealthy

"Scientists find [people who grew up poor] are more prone to illness than those who were never poor. Becoming more affluent may lower the risk of disease by lessening the sense of helplessness and allowing greater access to healthful resources like exercise, more nutritious foods and greater social support; people are not absolutely condemned by their upbringing. But the effects of early-life stress also seem to linger, unfavorably molding our nervous systems and possibly even accelerating the rate at which we age."

7. The other killer. Hepatitis kills more people than HIV in most countries.

8. India’s Garment Industry Gets Respun

As cost increases in China and concerns over labor conditions in Bangladesh push manufacturing firms away, India is gearing up its own garment industry to try to capitalize on the opportunity and boost its faltering economy. India has so far failed to fully take advantage of its huge potential labor force living out in the countryside. This may soon change, with companies like Aravind Mills planning to open dormitories for workers. Additionally, the Indian government, taking a page from China’s development model, has plans to create textile parks, with space designated for worker housing. ...

9. The Missouri Table: A Response to Ethical Foodies From a ‘Factory Farmer’

... One caller to a radio show I appeared on recently desribed the people who patronize fast food restaurants as "sheeple." That kind of derision leads me to believe that the caller will only feel good about himself if he believes I eat hamburgers several times a month at a place with cheesy uniforms and kid’s meals. I’m happy to oblige, but it is hard for me to take him seriously. He’s not as interested in making the world better as he is in feeling superior to people who can’t afford to eat the diet he believes necessary to living an ethical and sustainable life. He’s not nearly as concerned about the future of the planet as he is at being noticed, approvingly, by the kind of people who worry about the proper way to boil lentils, raise a few heritage pigs in their backyard, and are always available to be interviewed by NPR and the New York Review of Books. ...

A little harsh but a lot true.

 10. The Slower Rise in Health Care Costs

The rate at which health care costs are rising had slowed down in recent years, and perhaps not unexpectedly, Obama's economic advisers have sought to draw the link that "As ACA Implementation Continues, Consumer Health Care Cost Growth Has Slowed." But an array of evidence suggests that something beyond that legislation--which after all, is mostly not yet implemented--is the cause.

1) The slowdown in the rise of health care spending was already being noted in newspaper articles back in early 2012. ...

2) The slowdown in rising health care costs since the recession is international, as a press release with the OECD Health Report 2013 explains. ...

3) There's some reason to be dubious as to whether the slower rate of growth in health care spending will persist. ...

11. ‘Saudi America’ was the world’s No. 1 petroleum producer in April for the 6th straight month

12. Efficiency Drove U.S. Emissions Decline, Not Natural Gas, Study Says

Aggressive energy efficiency efforts by households, companies and motorists led to the decline in carbon dioxide emissions from energy use in the United States, according to a recent report. The controversial finding contradicts recent studies that say the power sector's shift away from coal to cheap natural gas caused the bulk of reductions.

U.S. emissions last year fell by 205 million metric tons, or 4 percent, from 2011 levels. CO2 Scorecard Group, a small environmental research organization, says that nearly half the decline came from energy-saving measures such as retrofits and smarter appliances in homes and offices, as well as from Americans driving fewer miles, and using more fuel-efficient vehicles. 

Natural gas is responsible for only about one-quarter of last year's emissions drop, CO2 Scorecard Group asserts....

As the article notes, other reputable research disagrees, attributing most of the drop to shale.

13. Millennials and Leaving Church: Really?

... Before you either quote the reports or the responses to the reports, read Brad Wright’s book: Christians Are Hate-Filled Hypocrites…and Other Lies You’ve Been Told: A Sociologist Shatters Myths From the Secular and Christian Media.

Here are some highlights from Wright’s 3d chp, one asking if we (think we) are losing our youth.

Josh McDowell: “It is clear that we have all but lost our young people to a godless culture.” Josh’s statement is typical.

It’s also not in tune with good social-scientific data. For instance, there was a widely circulating rumor (I heard it) that said 4% of our evangelical youth will be evangelicals when they get older. Wright chased the number into bad stats. Here are some better ones:

1. Young adults are less religious, but what does this mean?
2. 12% in the 70s and 80s were unaffiliated; now 25% are. But this is the same number as with other age groups.
3. Currently, 22% of young adults are evangelicals; that’s up from 21% in the 70s but down from 25% in the 90s.
4. Negatively, unaffiliated has increased for young adults.
5. Positively, the number who are affiliated with churches has remained the same.
6. Those affiliated with Evangelicals, Black Prots, and RCC are the same as in the 70s. (Mainliners are down.)
7. No sign of cataclysmic or big changes....

 

Saturday Links

1. Mark Buchanan asks Is Economics a Science or a Religion?

2. Poverty has moved to the suburbs

I don't think this should be seen as necessarily a bad thing. A few decades ago, the idea was to "warehouse" the poor in large urban complexes. There has been an intentional effort at dispersal through various means including creating mixed-income neighborhoods.

3. Crime has plummeted in the rich world, even amid the recession.

4. 5 Charts That Perfectly Capture The Incredible Rise Of China

5. How (and why) Africa should solve its own problems

Africa cannot rely on outside people to come and feed our poor or treat our sick, says African businessman and philanthropist Mo Ibrahim. The key is good governance, in both the public and private sectors.

6. World Bank: Africa held back by land ownership confusion

Africa's economic growth is being held back by confusion over who owns vast swathes of agricultural land, according to a World Bank report.

7. Deforestation in Africa's Congo Basin rainforest slows

Tree loss in one of the world's largest rainforests has slowed, a study suggests.

Satellite images of Africa's Congo Basin reveal that deforestation has fallen by about a third since 2000.

Researchers believe this is partly because of a focus on mining and oil rather than commercial agriculture, where swathes of forest are cleared. ...

 8. Brazil's Evangelicals A Growing Force In Prayer, Politics

... Recent polls show that evangelical Christianity is the fastest-growing sect in Brazil. According to the Pew Research Center, 22 percent of the Brazilian population identifies as evangelical Christian — up from 5 percent in 1970. Unfortunately for the Catholic Church, most of them switched from Roman Catholicism.

These days, only about 62 percent of people in Brazil say they are Catholic. In absolute numbers, however, this still makes Brazil the country with the most Catholics in the world. ...

9. For Developing World, a Streamlined Facebook

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook has been quietly working for more than two years on a project that is vital to expanding its base of 1.1 billion users: getting the social network onto the billions of cheap, simple "feature phones" that have largely disappeared in America and Europe but are still the norm in developing countries like India and Brazil.

Facebook soon plans to announce the first results of the initiative, which it calls Facebook for Every Phone: More than 100 million people, or roughly one out of eight of its mobile users worldwide, now regularly access the social network from more than 3,000 different models of feature phones, some costing as little as $20.

Many of those users, who rank among the world's poorest people, pay little or nothing to download their Facebook news feeds and photos, with the data usage subsidized by phone carriers and manufacturers. ...

10. The Huge Threat to Capitalism That Republicans Are Ignoring (I don't agree with a couple of points but I think his thesis is spot on.)

11. Big Racial Divide over Zimmerman Verdict

12. The Wal-Mart Slayer: How Publix's People-First Culture Is Winning The Grocer War

Family-run Publix is both the largest employee-owned company and the most profitable grocer in America. Those two facts are linked, and they might be the formula for fending off Bentonville's retail behemoth. ...

... When a middle-aged woman asks about a box of crackers, no aisle number is blurted out. Instead, an employee races off to find the item, just as he is trained to do. At checkout, shoppers move to the front quickly, thanks to a two-customer-per-line goal enforced by proprietary, predictive staffing software. Baggers, a foggy memory at most large supermarket chains, carry purchases to the parking lot. Even Publix's president, Todd Jones, who started out as a bagger 33 years ago, stoops down to pick up specks of trash on the store floor.

"We believe that there are three ways to differentiate: service, quality and price," Jones says. "You've got to be good at two of them, and the best at one. We make service our number one, then quality and then price."...

... Publix, the seventh-largest private company in the U.S. ($27.5 billion in sales) and one of the least understood thanks to decades of media reticence, is also the largest employee-owned company in America. For 83 years Publix has thrived by delivering top-rated service to its shoppers by turning thousands of its cashiers, baggers, butchers and bakers into the company's largest collective shareholders. All staffers who have put in 1,000 work hours and a year of employment receive an additional 8.5% of their total pay in the form of Publix stock. (Though private, the board sets the stock price every quarter based on an independent valuation; it's pegged at $26.90 now, up nearly 20% already this year.) How rich can employees get? According to Publix, a store manager who has worked at the company for 20 years and earns between $100,000 and $130,000 likely has $300,000 in stock and has received another $30,000 in dividends. ...

 13. Grocery shopping online: Can it replace trips to the store?

The website mySupermarket.com compares the prices of groceries online and works to reduce shipping costs. But a limited selection means grocery store runs aren't a things of the past just yet.

14. 25 Everyday Things Made Obsolete This Century. What would you add to the list?

katmere via Flickr

Will Religious Progressives Replace the Religious Right?

There has recently been speculation about religious progressives becoming the new Religious Right. See the Atlantic, The Rise of the Christian Left in America, and Slate Are Millennials Killing Off the Religious Right? And Salon The rise of the religious left. Commonweal's Peter Steinfels offers some good insights in his piece, Religious Progressives? He is not persuaded that such a transition will happen:

... Two findings of the study itself feed my doubts. One is the low percentage of religious progressives (11%) who say that their religion is "the most important thing in my life" compared to the high proportion (54%) of religious conservatives saying the same thing. ...

... A second finding feeds my doubts about the potential impact of religious progressives. It turns out that 87% of religious progressives view religion as a "private matter" that should be kept out of public debate on political and social issues. That view may provide a negative counter to aggressive religious intervention on behalf of traditional sexual and personal norms, but it does not provide much ground for religious engagement on the kinds of issues that the study puts before us – helping the poor, maintaining the safety net, and opposing inequality. ...

 

I think he is on to something. I do not believe that most religious progressives have religion and church at the center of their lives and social networks, at least not in the same numbers as conservatives. Their religion functions more in an advisory capacity to be considered with various other inputs rather than as a guiding force. The vitality of the religious right has been based on marrying this guiding force to a particular political ideology. I don't think that will ever be the same for religious progressives. My perception is that the Religious Right is more inclined to be animated by their religious conviction to pursue political ends, while progressives are motivated by their political convictions, seeing the church as chaplain to their cause.

Some Mormons Search the Web and Find Doubt

New York Times: Some Mormons Search the Web and Find Doubt

... Around the world and in the United States, where the faith was founded, the Mormon Church is grappling with a wave of doubt and disillusionment among members who encountered information on the Internet that sabotaged what they were taught about their faith, according to interviews with dozens of Mormons and those who study the church.

“I felt like I had an earthquake under my feet,” said Mr. Mattsson, now an emeritus area authority. “Everything I’d been taught, everything I’d been proud to preach about and witness about just crumbled under my feet. It was such a terrible psychological and nearly physical disturbance.”

Mr. Mattsson’s decision to go public with his disaffection, in a church whose top leaders commonly deliberate in private, is a sign that the church faces serious challenges not just from outside but also from skeptics inside.

Greg Prince, a Mormon historian and businessman in Washington who has held local leadership positions in the church, shares Mr. Mattsson’s doubts. “Consider a Catholic cardinal suddenly going to the media and saying about his own church, ‘I don’t buy a lot of this stuff,’ ” Mr. Prince said. “That’s the level we’re talking about here.”

He said of Mr. Mattsson, “He is, as far as I know, the highest-ranking church official who has gone public with deep concerns, who has had a faith crisis and come forward to say he’s going to talk about it because maybe that will help us all to resolve it.”

Every faith has its skeptics and detractors, but the Mormon Church’s history creates special challenges. The church was born in America only 183 years ago, and its founder and prophet, Joseph Smith, and his disciples left behind reams of papers that still exist, documenting their work, exposing their warts and sometimes contradicting one another....

Saturday Links

1. Public Religion Research Institute: Survey | Do Americans Believe Capitalism and Government are Working?: Religious Left, Religious Right and the Future of the Economic Debate

2. Gallup reports Sub-Saharan Africa Is Wildly Optimistic About Its Future

3. U.S. could lead world oil production by 2017, study says

Domestic shale oil production could shoot up to 5 million barrels per day by 2017, making the United States the top oil producing country in the world, according to a researcher at Harvard Kennedy School.

4. Will Europe Hit a Demographic Tipping Point?

... In 1968 Paul Ehrlich’s doomsday tome The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation and civilizational collapse in much of the world due to overpopulation. But the more serious problem – particularly in traditionally higher-income countries – today is actually too few, not too many new people. The pivot to seeing this as the problem has come through something very basic: pension math. Across the developed world, public pension systems built on the assumption of continued population growth are now facing an actuarial day of reckoning as the bills come due while birth rates have plummeted.

A society needs a total fertility rate – that is, the average number of children born to each woman – of 2.1 just to maintain its population without immigration. Some European countries like France (2.03) and the UK (1.98) are in reasonably good shape, but they are the exception. The total fertility rate in Greece is 1.43, in Germany 1.36, in Spain 1.36, in Portugal 1.30, and in Poland 1.30. Much of southern and central Europe hovers near the so-called “lowest-low” rate of 1.3 in which the population is naturally being cut in half every 45 years.

Simple birth rates alone have caused some to posit a societal going out of business sale in Europe. However, just as extrapolation of high population growth rates in the past led to wildly alarmist claims that proved false, so today we must be careful about not proclaiming Europe is doomed. But with the population on tap to be halved every generation, the runway to turn things around is difficult to conjure. And while we’ve seen many countries make the shift from high to low birth rates, there isn’t a huge track record of success in the other direction. ...

5. Hunger Makes People Work Harder, and Other Stupid Things We Used to Believe About Poverty

The article includes this interesting graph:

6. Forget Microlending. India Needs Basic, Competent Credit Reporting - Businessweek

Development economists talk a lot about credit. Figure out a way to get it to people in a developing economy, rather than just large companies or the state itself, and you can encourage small-scale risk-taking. Microlending offers very small loans to individuals, often $100 or less. The idea won Muhammad Yunus a Nobel Prize in 2006. More recently, microfinance and mobile banking have offered ways to save and insure on a small scale, allowing people take risks with their own money. Speaking in Mumbai earlier this month, K. C. Chakrabarty, deputy governor of the Reserve Bank of India, offered an additional way to expand credit: better credit reporting. No shepherds with phones, no happy mothers of four with new sewing machines. Just credit reporting, plain old attention to detail, and administrative competence.

7. Why We Need to Treat America's Poorest Neighborhoods Like Developing Countries

The article includes maps showing life expectancy across several metropolitan areas. Here is the one for my hometown, Kansas City.

8. Racial Disparities in Life Spans Narrow, but Persist

The gap in life expectancy between black and white Americans is at its narrowest since the federal government started systematically tracking it in the 1930s, but a difference of nearly four years remains, and federal researchers have detailed why in a new report.

9. The Unsettling Link Between Sprawl and Suicide

A new scientific working paper (spotted by Tim De Chant of Per Square Mile) contends that as population density decreases, the suicide rate among young people increases. This effect becomes particularly pronounced below 300 inhabitants per square kilometer — roughly the density of San Diego County.

10. Big Data, for Better or Worse: 90% of World's Data Generated Over Last Two Years

11. The one event that destroyed the PC industry

12. Tweets that got people arrested

13. Religion & Wikipedia: The 'Edit Wars' Rage On

Scientists have analyzed page edits in 10 editions of Wikipedia to determine the topics most often fought over by editors of the open encyclopedia. The most debated topics included many religious subjects, like Jesus and God, according to research done by Taha Yasseri, Anselm Spoerri, Mark Graham, and János Kertész.

Rather than merely citing pages that changed a lot, they identified pages involved in "edit wars," that involved editors making changes that were almost instantly undone by another contributor. This proved the best method of finding controversial pages, as pages often updated could simply belong to a rapidly changing field or topic. However, pages with words and phrases constantly removed and reinserted indicated a passionate disagreement surrounding the issue at hand.

The most controversial pages across all ten editions of Wikipedia were:

• Israel
• Adolf Hitler
• The Holocaust
• God

Other controversial subjects were Jesus, the Prophet Muhammad, and Christianity.

14. The curious case of the fall in crime

... Cherished social theories have been discarded. Conservatives who insisted that the decline of the traditional nuclear family and growing ethnic diversity would unleash an unstoppable crime wave have been proved wrong. Young people are increasingly likely to have been brought up by one parent and to have played a lot of computer games. Yet they are far better behaved than previous generations. Left-wingers who argued that crime could never be curbed unless inequality was reduced look just as silly.

There is no single cause of the decline; rather, several have coincided. Western societies are growing older, and most crimes are committed by young men. Policing has improved greatly in recent decades, especially in big cities such as New York and London, with forces using computers to analyse the incidence of crime; in some parts of Manhattan this helped to reduce the robbery rate by over 95%. The epidemics of crack cocaine and heroin appear to have burnt out.

The biggest factor may be simply that security measures have improved. Car immobilisers have killed joyriding; bulletproof screens, security guards and marked money have all but done for bank robbery. Alarms and DNA databases have increased the chance a burglar will be caught. At the same time, the rewards for burglary have fallen because electronic gizmos are so cheap. Even small shops now invest in CCTV cameras and security tags. Some crimes now look very risky—and that matters because, as every survey of criminals shows, the main deterrent to crime is the fear of being caught. ...

15. By 2030, Half of All Colleges Will Collapse

 

Saturday Links

I skipped Saturday Links last week due to the holiday weekend. I'm catching up this week.

1. Faith in the Free Market

"... Selke, now 36, is part of a vanguard of young Christians who believe that God uses not only the church and formal ministry but every sphere of society, including business and free markets, to advance his work of shalom. Selke parlayed his experience analyzing companies, creating spreadsheets, and evaluating profitable opportunities for an investment bank into helping social entrepreneurs—people who create organizations in order to benefit society.

In 2010, Selke co-founded Hub Ventures, an accelerator in San Francisco investing in entrepreneurs launching companies that produce a social good. The 12-week program provides up to $20,000 in seed funding, mentorship, workshops, and access to investors in exchange for an average of a 6 percent ownership stake. What separates Selke's program from other business accelerators en vogue in Silicon Valley is the focus on "entrepreneurs building technology solutions for a better world," Selke says. ..."

2. The Global Low Fertility Panic: Just a Phase?

"...Our new book, The Global Spread of Fertility Decline: Population, Fear, and Uncertainty (Yale University Press, 2013) analyzes these trends and the demographic, political and economic consequences and uncertainties as low fertility has become a global phenomenon. Like other facets of globalization, low fertility rates are by no means universal: High fertility persists in sub-Saharan Africa and in parts of the Middle East, but elsewhere low fertility is more the rule than the exception. These underlying trends in childbearing mean that in the near future the rate of population growth both in Europe and Asia are likely to decline. The world is not on a path of unrestrained demographic growth, as some believe. People all over the world have hit the brakes.

Thirty years ago only a small fraction of the world's population lived in the few countries with fertility rates substantially below the "replacement level" - the rate at which the fertility of a hypothetical cohort of women would exactly replace itself in the next generation - normally set at 2.1 children per woman for populations with low mortality conditions. Fast forward to 2013, with roughly 60 percent of the world's population living in countries with such below-replacement fertility rates.

The consequences of these changes are striking. ..."

3. Immigration and Entrepreneurship

According to a Small Business Administration-commissioned report in 2012 by Robert W. Fairlie, an economics professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the business ownership rate is higher for immigrants than the native-born, with 10.5 percent of the immigrant work force owning a business compared with 9.3 percent of the native-born work force.

4. Graft Is On The Rise Around The World

5. Job-Stealing Robots Go Global

Asian workers have scored some victories in rising wages, but many are learning something the West has known for some time: Employers will seek out the cheapest labor on offer, and machines are even cheaper than an underpaid human. In the late 20th century, manufacturing jobs shifted from America to China, then from China to Southeast Asia, and now even those are being automated.

For America, at least, this trend shouldn't be so disconcerting. After all, it's developed economies like ours that are designing the robots Nike is now using. Low-wage manufacturing jobs are drying up, but they're being replaced by jobs in building, operating, and repairing the tech in question. Increasingly, companies will be likely to "onshore" these jobs to America, when shipping and distribution becomes much easier and cheaper. Manufacturing, it seems, will come full circle.

6. Economist Mark Perry with a provocative claim: Yes, the middle-class has been disappearing, but they haven't fallen into the lower-class, they've risen into the upper-class

 

7. Co.exist with what they see as 4 Bogus Claims About Why Walmart Can't Pay A Living Wage (I'm not in full agreement but they make they present their side articulately.)

8. Gallup Has Never Seen So Many Americans Sitting Out Of The Stock Market

9. K-State study: Arguments about money best predictor of divorce

"Results revealed it didn't matter how much you made or how much you were worth," Britt said in the university statement. "Arguments about money are the top predictor for divorce because it happens at all levels."

She said couples should seek a financial planner as part of premarital counseling, and talk about finances.

10. How the Dismal Science Got Its Name (It had nothing to do with Thomas Malthus or scarcity ... or even with students who have suffered through Econ 101 classes.)

 11. Matt Ridley writes I may follow the crowd, but not because it's a crowd

"... My friend objected that I seemed to follow the herd on matters like the reality of evolution and the safety of genetically modified crops, so why not on climate change? Ah, said I, but I don't. I agree with the majority view on evolution, not because it is a majority view but because I have looked at evidence. It's the data that convince me, not the existence of a consensus. ..."

12. Dan Lewis debunks the myth that the end of the telegraph is here: The Spread of a False Fact

13. PC sales see 'longest decline' in history

Global personal computer (PC) sales have fallen for the fifth quarter in a row, making it the "longest duration of decline" in history.

14. Time of 'Incredible Violence': Historian Gives Readers Glimpse of Medieval Life

15. Farming Got Hip In Iran Some 12,000 Years Ago, Ancient Seeds Reveal

Archaeologists digging in the foothills of Iran's Zagros Mountains have discovered the remains of a Stone Age farming community. It turns out that people living there were growing plants like barley, peas and lentils as early as 12,000 years ago.

The findings offer a rare snapshot of a time when humans first started experimenting with farming. They also show that Iran was an important player in the origin of agriculture.

16. LGBT group finds acceptance at evangelical college

"... Fuller's community standards states that "sexual abstinence is required for the unmarried" and marriage is between one man and one woman.

Nevertheless, Fuller's decision not to push back against OneTable is a critical step toward acceptance for gay evangelical students, said Justin Lee, the executive director of the Gay Christian Network, which tracks the burgeoning movement. An increasing number of young people have been coming out on Christian campuses nationwide, whether they are accepted or not, and Fuller's move acknowledges that and provides a touchstone for students who would otherwise keep their sexuality a secret, he said. ..."

17. New generation activists build bridges

A traditional organizing approach makes opponents into 'enemies,' but a new crop of union and other activists is using love and empathy to create alliances and new possibilities.

 

The Gospel According to ‘Me’

New York Times: The Gospel According to ‘Me’

The booming self-help industry, not to mention the cash cow of New Age spirituality, has one message: be authentic! Charming as American optimism may be, its 21st-century incarnation as the search for authenticity deserves pause. The power of this new version of the American dream can be felt through the stridency of its imperatives: Live fully! Realize yourself! Be connected! Achieve well-being!

Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular age defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. The latter does not make the exorbitant moral demands of traditional religions, which impose bad conscience, guilt, sin, sexual inhibition and the rest.

Unlike the conversions that transfigure the born-again’s experience of the world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and “becoming who you are” fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that required extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality defined by scarcity have largely collapsed and been replaced with this New Age therapeutic culture of well-being that does not require obedience or even faith — and certainly not feelings of guilt. Guilt must be shed; alienation, both of body and mind, must be eliminated, most notably through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing work.

In the gospel of authenticity, well-being has become the primary goal of human life. Rather than being the by-product of some collective project, some upbuilding of the New Jerusalem, well-being is an end in itself. The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn’t really require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might transcend the serene and contented living of one’s authentic life and baseline well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma. ...

Saturday Links

1. Climate change: A cooling consensus

... Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf.

Dramatic warming may exact a terrible price in terms of human welfare, especially in poorer countries. But cutting emissions enough to put a real dent in warming may also put a real dent in economic growth. This could also exact a terrible humanitarian price, especially in poorer countries. Given the so-far unfathomed complexity of global climate and the tenuousness of our grasp on the full set of relevant physical mechanisms, I have favoured waiting a decade or two in order to test and improve the empirical reliability of our climate models, while also allowing the economies of the less-developed parts of the world to grow unhindered, improving their position to adapt to whatever heavy weather may come their way. I have been told repeatedly that "we cannot afford to wait". More distressingly, my brand of sceptical empiricism has been often met with a bludgeoning dogmatism about the authority of scientific consensus. ...

2. The 40 Biggest Economies In The World

3. How the world's population has changed

4. Americans are giving less money to God

Americans donated $316 billion to charitable causes in 2012, a 3.5% increase from 2011, a new report by the Giving USA Foundation found. But while charitable donations to education increased 7% to $41 billion, religious donations dropped slightly (by 0.2%) to $101.54 billion. "Americans continue to be the most generous people in the world, despite discretionary income percentages nearing all-time lows," says Eileen Heisman, CEO of the National Philanthropic Trust. But donors are writing the checks to different recipients.

5. I'm not endorsing this analysis, but here is The Capitalist's Case for a $15 Minimum Wage.

6. Gil Press says The 'End Of Innovation' Crowd Doesn't Get IT

In one camp are economists such as Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen that tell us that we have reached "a technological plateau." We are experiencing today the waning of the economic impact of the technological revolutions of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The IT revolution, they argue, is different from earlier technological revolutions in its more limited impact on productivity growth and standards of living.

In the other camp are economists such as Ben Bernanke, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, who recently told the graduating class at Bard College:"…innovation, almost by definition, involves ideas that no one has yet had, which means that forecasts of future technological change can be, and often are, wildly wrong. A safe prediction, I think, is that human innovation and creativity will continue; it is part of our very nature. Another prediction, just as safe, is that people will nevertheless continue to forecast the end of innovation."

7. How Technology Is Changing The Future Of Capitalism From Competing To Sharing

Can't get a loan from a bank to start your business? You can create a Kickstarter and raise all the money you need from the people who'd be interested in your product in the first place.

It's amazing to see the ways people are coming up with to better take advantage of the web to collaborate on and share the things that we used to have to pay for ourselves.

8. U.S. for first time in 50+ years a net gasoline exporter

9. U.S. Sustains Support For Small Modular Nuclear Reactors

Despite the political fallout from the Fukushima crisis, the U.S. Department of Energy remains committed to commercializing small modular nuclear reactor (SMR) technologies.

10. Houses that flip and fold into place

Turns out, prefab may be the most environmentally friendly way to build a house. When a house is built in a factory there's less waste -- materials can be precision measured and cut -- plus a prefab structure can be erected within a couple of weeks -- avoiding months and months of workmen driving greenhouse gas spewing trucks to the site. One speaker at Fortune's Brainstorm Green conference earlier this year, Bill Haney -- founder and CEO of Blu Homes, cited another advantage of prefab housing: "No one can build a traditional house on time or on budget. Psychology Today cited a study that said it's more painful to build a house than it is to have a loved one die."

Haney has added a high-tech element to his prefab green houses. Applying technology developed at MIT, Blu Homes designs its modern structures using steel frames that fold on hinges much like a card table. Today, most prefab homes must be delivered at great expense on wide-load trucks that are too big to travel on many roads and have to be accompanied by escort cars. A Blue Home, by contrast, can be folded up to fit on an 18-wheeler, allowing the house to be shipped relatively cheaply and easily from the company's factory in Vallejo, Calif.

11. 71% Of Millennials Want Their Co-Workers To Be A 'Second Family'

12. Demographic Changes Impact Religious Institutions

13. A fascinating piece on Why Men Die Younger Than Women: The 'Guys Are Fragile' Thesis

14. Scientists discover why leprosy disappeared from Europe

The material they found was "a mixture of human DNA, microorganisms and contaminating DNA from other bones and surrounding soil," said Cole, but they were able to fully reconstruct a 600-year-old strain of leprosy and map its genome, only to find that it is essentially identical to living leprosy infecting people in the developing world today.

Cole told NPR, "If the explanation of the drop in leprosy cases isn't in the pathogen, then it must be in the host, that is, in us."

The scientists believe that a certain gene that makes people highly resistant to leprosy spread through the population of Europe, gradually conveying a kind of mass immunity.

15. World's last telegram to be sent next month

16. Top 10 People with Only One Known Photograph

17. Psychologist Analyzes Superheroes

18. Joel Willitts on "Storied Typology" – A possibly more biblical way of thinking about the relationship between the OT & NT

Admittedly, I'm just beginning to work this out, but if we think of Bible as Story and we read the earlier bits as indispensible building blocks in the narrative development toward its resolution than there's no need to denigrate the earlier in view of the later bits of the story. Each part has its place in the story bringing it to its final act, although even this analogy must be carefully delimited. Because "final" in this sense does not mean "The End, but a new stage of the story. So because of the earlier blocks of the story, later scenes and characters become "narratological necessities" (to quote my good friend Daniel Kirk). Furthermore, if there is something of an "incompleteness" to the earlier parts of the story, it is incomplete only as earlier scenes are incomplete without subsequent ones. It is correct then to see the Bible's story as progressive. In Stephen Wellum's words, "it is a word-act revelation that is progressively given" (Kingdom Through Covenant, 90). Instead of using the label "progressive revelation" it may be more useful in stressing the storied nature of the development to call it "storied revelation"- Scripture is a story that unfolds. All of this, of course assumes that God has generated His Story and that story is contained in the Old and New Testaments of the Christian canon.

18 Extremely Religious Big American Companies

Business Insider: 18 Extremely Religious Big American Companies

Talking about religion and politics can be dangerous among friends. It's doubly so for businesses.

That double-edged sword became crystal clear last year after Chick-Fil-A's COO made comments about the chain's opposition to gay marriage. It sparked a massive backlash from the media, gay and lesbian couples, and even the mayor of Boston.

The controversy also helped the company shatter sales records after former Arkansas governor and Fox commentator Mike Huckabee organized a "Chick-Fil-A appreciation day."

Many other big companies in America are also religious, including some that might surprise you. ...

I knew about most of the companies on the list. Did any surprise you?

Saturday Links

1. Loved this one: 22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other. Here is one example.

2. In print and on stage, the Bible makes surprise comeback in secular Norway

3. Japan enters the African aid game: Japan $1 billion aid earmarked for northern Africa

4. The Economist had a great editorial: Towards the end of poverty

Nearly 1 billion people have been taken out of extreme poverty in 20 years. The world should aim to do the same again.

5. Global Wealth Grew 7.8% In 2012, Driven By Developing Economies

BCG found that global private financial wealth grew at the impressive clip of 7.8% in 2012, besting the 7.3% and 3.6% expansion logged in 2010 and 2011, respectively.

And which countries are driving global growth? Tyler Cowen reports that China and India for half of the growth. He also lists these nations as the fastest growing:

South Sudan	32.1
Libya	20.2
Sierra Leone	17.1
Mongolia	14.0
Paraguay	11.0
Timor-Leste	10.0
Iraq	9.0
Panama	9.0
The Gambia	8.9
Mozambique	8.4

source: IMF

6. 5 Maps That Show How Divided America Really Is. Here is an example:

7. Toward a Self Employed Nation?

The United States labor market has been undergoing a substantial shift toward small-scale entrepreneurship. The number of proprietors – owners of businesses who are not wage and salary employees, has skyrocketed, especially in the last decade. Proprietors are self employed business owners who use Internal Revenue Service Schedule C to file their federal income tax. Wage and salary workers are all employees of any establishment (private or government), from executives to non-supervisory workers.

From 2000 to 2011, the number of non-farm proprietors grew by 10.7 million. Total wage and salary employment grew by only 105,000 between 2000 and 2011. Government employment, including federal, state and local, grew 1.36 million, while private employment declined by 1.26 million (Figure 1).

8. This looks like an interesting read: Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty. Christian Century writes:

For her award-winning book Living Faith: Everyday Religion and Mothers in Poverty, Susan Crawford Sullivan interviewed a diverse group of women who were living in poverty. She asked them about the challenges of parenting, working and surviving on little income. She discovered that many drew on strong religious beliefs as they struggled with everyday problems. Sullivan teaches sociology at the College of the Holy Cross.

 9. Business Insider reports that Millions Of Seniors Are Moving Back To Big Cities

10. Forbes explores How To Use Pinterest For Small Business

11. Atlantic explores Why the Boomers Are the Most Hated Generation. (I think part of it might be that we are obnoxious.)

12. RJS at Jesus Creed with another great post about the historicity of Adam and Eve: Jesus on Adam and Eve (RJS)

... There are ways to reconcile a literal Adam and Eve with the scientific data. I have posted on the question of Adam many times. See for example the last part of Evolution, Entropy, and Human Beings 2 or other posts on the question of Adam listed about 3/4 of the way down the Science and Faith index. Reconciling a literal Adam and Eve with the scientific data requires something of a stretch, but is not impossible if one feels that the theological teaching of the sweep of scripture requires Adam, Eve, and the Fall.

There are also ways to understand the sweep of scripture and the fallen nature of mankind without reference to a historical Adam and Eve. These do not necessarily diminish the inspiration and authority of scripture as witness to the work of God in the world.

This shouldn’t be a make or break issue. Rather, it is an issue where we need to spend more time and thought.

Saturday Links

1. The Atlantic says Just 27% of BA's Have Jobs Related to Their Major? Don't Believe the Fed's New Stat

2. 100 fastest growing inner city businesses

From a pet relocation service, a wine lifestyle marketer, to a scrap metal regenerator, America's urban core is home to a variety of fast-growing companies. Here's the top 100, as ranked by the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City.

3. Factory safety: Battle of the brands

... This approach has been criticised by the Workers Rights Consortium because, unlike its plan, it contains no binding commitment to help fund improvements to make factories safe. Yet it is debatable whether wealthy factory owners really lack funds to make factories safe, as opposed to the lack of incentive due to the Bangladesh government's failure to enforce its own building code. WalMart points out that the government has now started to close unsafe fatories, 19 so far (presumably because of the constant protests by locals since the collapse of Rana Plaza). It says its new approach will detect unsafe factories significantly faster than the Workers Rights Consortium's plan.

Perhaps it would be better if everyone agreed on a common approach. But if there must be competition, it is surely better that it is over how to make factories safer than the alternative.

4. Economist Timothy Taylor with some interesting thoughts on Spending on America's Pets

5. Why Rational People Buy Into Conspiracy Theories

While psychologists can't know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief. In 2010, Swami and a co-author summarized this research in The Psychologist, a scientific journal. They found, perhaps surprisingly, that believers are more likely to be cynical about the world in general and politics in particular. Conspiracy theories also seem to be more compelling to those with low self-worth, especially with regard to their sense of agency in the world at large. Conspiracy theories appear to be a way of reacting to uncertainty and powerlessness.

6. Why You Feel Smart Around Some People But Dumb Around Others

... Experiments show that when people report feeling comfortable with a conversational partner, they are judged by those partners and by observers as actually being more witty.

It's just one example of the powerful influence that social factors can have on intelligence. Research in this area should prompt us to think about intelligence not as a "lump of something that's in our heads," as the psychologist Joshua Aronson puts it, but as "a transaction among people."...

... This research has important implications for the way we educate children and the way we manage employees. For one thing, we should replace high-stakes, one-shot tests with the kind of unobtrusive and ongoing assessments that give teachers and managers a more accurate sense of people's true abilities. We should also put in place techniques for reducing anxiety and building self-confidence that take advantage of our social natures. And we should ensure that the social climate in schools and workplaces is one of warmth and trust, not competition and exclusion.

Professor Aronson calls the doltishness induced by an uncomfortable social situation "conditional stupidity." We should use that insight to create the conditions for brilliance. ...

7. Do those who doubt climate catastrophism lack scientific credibility?

8. Everything Wrong With America In One Simple Image (INFOGRAPHIC) The article is a bit over the top, but this graphic was interesting:

9. America's Declining Teen Birth Rate, Explained in 3 Charts

10. Suburbia Needs Jesus, Too Interesting piece that has caused some buzz in social media. Her point about the centrality of everyday life is something I resonate with.

11. Teenagers Are Actually Starting To Use Twitter... In Part To Escape The 'Drama' And Parents On Facebook

12. Methodists May Discourage Those Over 45 from Becoming Pastors

13. How does copyright work in space?

CHRIS HADFIELD has captured the world's heart, judging by the 14m YouTube views of his free-fall rendition of David Bowie's "Space Oddity", recorded on the International Space Station (ISS). The Canadian astronaut's clear voice and capable guitar-playing were complemented by his facility in moving around in the microgravity of low-earth orbit. But when the man fell to Earth in a neat and safe descent a few days ago, after a five-month stay in orbit, should he have been greeted by copyright police? Commander Hadfield was only 250 miles (400 km) up, so he was still subject to terrestrial intellectual-property regimes, which would have applied even if he had flown the "100,000 miles" mentioned in the song's lyrics or millions of kilometres to Mars. His five-minute video had the potential to create a tangled web of intellectual-property issues. How does copyright work in space? ...

Denominational Change in American Protestantism since 1972

Black, White, and Gray: Denominational Change in American Protestantism since 1972 (Brad Wright)

Talk about a picture that says a thousand words ...

Saturday Links

Some weeks the pickin's are thin. Not this week.

1. Asians are now the largest immigrant group in Southern California: New Suburban Dream Born of Asia and Southern California

2. Surge in unwed mothers: Deep in the stats, it's not what you think

According to the US Centers for Disease Control, 42 percent of children will have lived with cohabitating parents by the time they are 12 years old, almost twice as many who will have divorced parents. And this particular sort of family structure is on the rise, a number of studies show.

3. In a sharp trend reversal, highway fatalities rise

"The news, while disheartening, is not surprising," said Barbara Harsha, executive director of the Governors Highway Safety Association. "With the improving economy and historically low levels of motor vehicle deaths in recent years, we expected deaths to increase. Highway deaths have been declining significantly in recent years."

4. We live in a house that is 105 years old. IMO, most houses built after 1940 are boring. How Americans' Taste in Houses Has Evolved Over the Last Century

5. Are we purging the poorest?

In a new book, MIT urbanist Lawrence Vale examines the downsizing of public housing.

6. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen have been popping up everywhere promoting their new book, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. Here is a PBS interview:

Watch Google's Schmidt, Cohen Describe a 'New Digital Age' on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.

7. Love this story: Alleviating Poverty with a Washing Machine Powered by Your Feet

The GiraDora uses the principles of a salad spinner to make cleaning clothes less back-breaking and time-consuming work for millions of people in poverty.

8. Amen to this article. Good charities spend more on admin but it is not money wasted

The popular idea that charities fritter money on unnecessary admin has been proven wrong. You must spend to be effective.

9. Why US firms are turning to Mexico, leaving China behind

 ... Mexico has more international trade deals than any other country, and exports as many goods as the rest of Latin America combined.

There has always been an electronics manufacturing hub in Tijuana, but Chinese competition damaged its business a decade ago.

Now rising wage costs in Asia and a higher exchange rate are prompting many companies targeting the US market to take another look at Mexico. ...

...The new Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto wants to put a new spin on the country with the image of a booming economy and as a good place to do business.

Security and the drugs problem still dominate talks between the US and Mexico, but its southern neighbour's increasing importance in the global economy is changing the relationship. ...

10. The Manufacturing Cost Components For A Bunch Of Different Things

11. Five Innovative Technologies that Bring Energy to the Developing World

12. No-Wash Shirt Doesn't Stink After 100 Days

13. Craig Stanford, 'Planet Without Apes' Author, Says Eco-Tourism Could Save The Primates

A slice of the money that tourists pay can run $500 an hour at some of the sites in East Africa and goes to build hospitals and hire teachers." Although it's not philosophically or altruistically driven, the bottom line is the animals are more valuable alive than dead, since there's an incentive to protect them.

14. Approaching Nutrition From An Investor's Mindset

How does one succeed in nutrition when nobody seems to agree on anything? How can one get the benefits that arrive in the early stages of a diet without staying too long and compromising their health? What has worked well for me is thinking about nutrition like an investor thinks about investment opportunities.

15. The Lies You've Been Told About the Origin of the QWERTY Keyboard.

The QWERTY configuration for typewriters can be traced, actually, to the telegraph.

16. Money Buys Happiness and You Can Never Have Too Much, New Research Says

Here again we have to revisit the differences between happiness, joy, meaning, and satisfaction.

17. Baseball as a Road to God

Watch Baseball and Religion on PBS. See more from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

18. Why Older Minds Make Better Decisions

Recent research has already challenged what we thought we knew about the capability of the brain. What has become clear, says Dr. Gregory Samanez-Larkin of Vanderbilt University, one of the network's co-directors, is that despite a decline in some types of cognitive function, "older people often make better decisions than younger people."

19. Moon Landing Faked!!!—Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories

New psychological research helps explain why some see intricate government conspiracies behind events like 9/11 or the Boston bombing.

20. Scot McKnight answers the question So What's an Anabaptist?

21. Beneath the stereotypes, a stressful life for preachers' kids

22. When and Where Is It Okay to Cry?

23. 10 Reasons Why Humor Is A Key To Success At Work

24. Scientists May Be On Brink Of Major Discovery In Hunt For HIV Cure

Danish scientists are expecting results that will show that "finding a mass-distributable and affordable cure to HIV is possible."

They are conducting clinical trials to test a "novel strategy" in which the HIV virus is stripped from human DNA and destroyed permanently by the immune system.

Saturday Links

1. Research Digest reports that Students motivated by wealth are just as likely as others to help in an emergency

"... Seventy-eight per cent of the business students offered some kind of help to the stranger. Sixty-six per cent went so far as refusing to leave the stranger or giving him/her their mobile phone. The degree to which the students reported being wealth-driven was not associated with their levels of helping. Neither was their self-reported willingness to accept an illegal stock trading tip off. Being in a hurry also made no difference, neither did the content of the speech they were about to give. A factor that was linked with helping behaviour was "intrinsic religiosity" - that is, pursuing religion as an end in itself, not for the sake of status or other gain. ..."

2. American progressives are fond of pointing to the Scandinavian economic model as a model for the United States. As I've noted in other posts, Sweden has been moving steadily away from the model progressives champion for years. (for example, see Free Market Sweden, Social Democratic America and Are free markets the secret to Sweden's success? Now the New York Times reports that Danes Rethink a Welfare State Ample to a Fault.

... Already the government has reduced various early-retirement plans. The unemployed used to be able to collect benefits for up to four years. Now it is two.

Students are next up for cutbacks, most intended to get them in the work force faster. Currently, students are entitled to six years of stipends, about $990 a month, to complete a five-year degree which, of course, is free. Many of them take even longer to finish, taking breaks to travel and for internships before and during their studies....

... It is proposing cuts to welfare grants for those under 30 and stricter reviews to make sure that such recipients are steered into jobs or educational programs before they get comfortable on government benefits.

Officials have also begun to question the large number of people who are receiving lifetime disability checks. About 240,000 people — roughly 9 percent of the potential work force — have lifetime disability status; about 33,500 of them are under 40. The government has proposed ending that status for those under 40, unless they have a mental or physical condition that is so severe that it keeps them from working. ...

3. Business Insider has a slide presentation of graphs highlighting 12 Popular Myths About The US Economy. Here is one about the degree of the U.S. offshoring work to low wage countries.

4. Yuval Levin makes an excellent point about how conservatives frequently respond poorly with arguments against dependency when progressives talk about "community."

... We [conservatives] reach for the idea of dependency because of the kind of arguments we often respond to from the left—arguments that seem like calls for common action instead of individual action. But we should look more carefully at those arguments. The problem with the "you didn't build that" mindset, as becomes particularly clear if you read what the president said before and after that line, is not just that it denies the significance of individual initiative (though that's an important part of the problem, and our culture of individual initiative, which is far from radical individualism, is a huge social achievement in America) but also that it denies the significance of any common efforts that are not political. The president took the pose of a critic of individualism, but in fact the position he described involves perhaps the most radical individualism of all, in which nothing but individuals and the state exists in society. ...

 ... The utopian goal of the most radical forms of liberalism has always been the complete liberation of the individual from all unchosen "relational" obligations—obligations to the people around you that are a function of the family and community in which you live. Resentment against such obligations was a central and powerful motive in the radical late-18th century thought that gave us some (though not all) forms of modern libertarianism and the modern Left, and the defense of such obligations was central to the counter-arguments that yielded modern conservatism. ...

5. Pew Research has a report on the Public's Knowledge of Science and Technology. You can take the test here. (I got a gold star, though I confess I had two lucky guesses.) And on a related note, 4th-Grade Science Test' Goes Viral: Creationism Quiz Claims Dinosaurs Lived With People. Oye!

6. Tyler Cowen looks at two reports on Why did Cuba become healthier during the economic meltdown of the 1990s? From one report:

This "abrupt downward trend" in illness does not appear to be because of Cuba's barefoot doctors and vaunted public health system, which is rated amongst the best in Latin America. The researchers say that it has more to do with simple weight loss. Cubans, who were walking and bicycling more after their public transportation system collapsed, and eating less (energy intake plunged from about 3,000 calories per day to anywhere between 1,400 and 2,400, and protein consumption dropped by 40 percent). They lost an average of 12 pounds.

It wasn't only the amount of food that Cubans ate that changed, but also what they ate. They became virtual vegans overnight, as meat and dairy products all but vanished from the marketplace.

And this report:

During the special period, expensive habits like smoking and most likely also alcohol consumption were reduced, albeit briefly. This enforced fitness regime lasted only until the Cuban economy began to recover in the second half of the 1990s. At that point, physical activity levels began to fall off, and calorie intake surged. Eventually people in Cuba were eating even more than they had before the crash. The researchers report that "by 2011, the Cuban population has regained enough weight to almost triple the obesity rates of 1995."

 7. The Coming Demographic Crisis: What to Expect When No One Is Expecting

... A strain of anti-humanism has always run through population paranoia, a notion that human beings are a problem rather than a resource. But as Jonathan Last documents in his new book What to Expect When No One's Expecting, it is not overpopulation that threatens the well-being of the human race, it is under-population. As Last writes, "Throughout recorded human history, declining populations have always been followed by Very Bad Things." Particularly for our modern, high-tech, capitalist world of consumers who buy, entrepreneurs who create wealth and jobs, and workers whose taxes fund social welfare entitlements, people are an even more critical resource. ...

8. 21 Maps Of Highly Segregated Cities In America. I remember doing a less sophisticated version of dissimilarity analysis for Kansas City back in 1988 without the benefit of a computer. Here is the map for Detroit, the most segregated city in America:

9. Christianity Today asks Who Volunteers the Most? Answer? "Graduates of Protestant high schools, apparently."

10. In 2012, America had the most energy efficient economy in US history

11. Climate change inspires a new literary genre: cli-fi. "Cli-fi, or 'climate fiction,' describes a dystopian present instead of a dystopian future. And don't call it 'science fiction.' Cli-fi is literary fiction."

12. Organic Prices: Food Label Just An Excuse To Charge More, Majority Of Consumers Say In New Poll

13. Business Insider with Ten Technologies That Will Shape the Future

14. Atlantic Cities has a great piece on the future of the payphone: The Payphone of the Future Is Calling

15. Business Insider also had a couple of very interesting retro articles: The First Email, The First Tweet, And 13 Other Famous Internet Firsts and These Huge Brands' Early Websites From The 1990s Looked Terrible.

16. Stonehenge archaeologists reveal new theory of why monument was built. "Stonehenge may have been built on a site occupied by hunters for roughly 5,000 before its construction."

17. Consciousness After Death: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine

Saturday Links

1. What a horrific week for Boston and west Texas people. Our prayers are with the many people who have been so deeply traumatized and injured in these events. Regarding how we respond to such events in public discourse, I thought this article from Slate was especially good. Be Meaningful or Be Quiet

"... We need more restraint and less wild guessing. Free-flowing debate in the search for meaning is a part of these moments and a part of the human condition, but what I'm talking about is using tragedy for evidence shopping. That people reach immediately for their pet political theory at moments like this highlights what's wrong with a lot of political debate. But perhaps this moment also offers a useful sorting technique. If you can't shut up now, when either reason, decency, or good taste requires it, you disqualify yourself from the conversation in calmer times. ...

... Political debate about facts is fine. When the White House puts out a picture of the president in the situation room, it's fine to point out that it's propaganda they never put out on Benghazi. But a person who uses tragedy as new evidence in an existing political fight is probably incapable of keeping this window open. They can't pause to honor the solemnity of a moment of tragedy or wait until the facts come in, which means that the facts never really mattered much to them at all. These partisans are ever on alert to advance their relentless claim—whatever it is. Michael Moore immediately fingered Tea Party types after the bombing. In the hours after attack, when authorities questioned a man of Saudi dissent (who was later released), Rep. Steve King tied it to the comprehensive immigration reform he opposes. Nate Bell, an Arkansas state lawmaker, tweeted, "I wonder how many Boston liberals spent the night cowering in their homes wishing they had an AR-15 with a hi-capacity magazine? #2A" There was lots of this from partisans on both sides on Twitter. ..."

2. Are We Losing the Young? Evangelicals by Age Since 1972

3. David Murrow asks Are sermons becoming obsolete?

... So, what does this mean for the church? Is the lecture style sermon going the way of the dinosaur?

Yes and no. There will always be live sermons. But will anyone be listening?

Just as universities are re-thinking the lecture, it might be time for churches to re-think the sermon. Thom and Joani Schultz polled churchgoers and found that just 12 percent could recall the topic of the last sermon they heard. Only five percent of men credited sermons as their primary source of knowledge about God.

So if sermons are becoming obsolete, what will take their place?

Discipleship. Our generation may be drowning in ideas, but we're starving for real human contact.

The problem is, our churches are structured to deliver sermons and music. If there's any energy left, we disciple people. ...

4. First, there was this article about Self-Employment An Escape From Long-Term Joblessness For Some Older Workers. It may work for some who are out of jobs, but Hiranya Fernando warns Why You Shouldn't Quit Your Day Job To Pursue Your Dream. 

To be sure these are inspiring stories. They make us hope and dream. And I support anyone who is dissatisfied with desk jobs and corporate gigs and is now thinking of other options. But my advice is to take the time to understand your specific situation before you do anything purely because "it feels right" or because "it's a childhood dream."

And don't do it because everyone else is. Don't do it because the neighbor's second cousin and Aunt Maggie's daughter are doing it, and it sounds so easy. Even people who are relatively happy in their jobs think something is wrong with them because everywhere they go they are bombarded with "How I quit my day job and started a million-dollar leaf-raking business."

5. Walter Russell Mead Warns There's No Comeback for the PhD

Drezner says that there are really only two reasons why you might get a Ph.D. One, you're crazy; or two, you're crazy about the subject you will be studying. But even the latter is becoming a kind of luxury for those lucky few who can afford to spend several years on a degree without any guarantee of future employment. All others should heed Drezner's advice before surrendering the money, years, blood, and tears it takes to earn the right to be called "Doctor."

6. I suspect the J C Penny fiasco is going to become an important case study for business schools: Sometimes, We Want Prices to Fool Us

7. Max Baucus warns about Obamacare: Obamacare Architect Warns "Huge Train-Wreck" Ahead

8. Eric Wemple quotes Mark Lamont Hill in Gosnell case: HuffPost host says left 'made a decision' to not cover trial

"For what it's worth, I do think that those of us on the left have made a decision not to cover this trial because we worry that it'll compromise abortion rights. Whether you agree with abortion or not, I do think there's a direct connection between the media's failure to cover this and our own political commitments on the left. I think it's a bad idea, I think it's dangerous, but I think that's the way it is."

9. Mother Jones has a great piece on the social psychology of our political leanings: How Science Can Predict Where You Stand on Keystone XL

10. Atlantic Cities says The More Diverse a Metro Is, the More Segregated It's Likely to Be

11. Christian Science Monitor: Babies are conscious? Science confirms what moms know.

Babies are aware of what's going on, not just reflexively reacting to it, scientists concluded after a series of experiments on babies as young as 5 months.

12. Are e-readers hurting our reading comprehension?

13. The future of the car: Clean, safe and it drives itself. See the Economist video about driverless cars.

Yet many people already travel, unwittingly, on planes and trains that no longer need human drivers. As with those technologies, the shift towards driverless cars is taking place gradually. The cars' software will learn the tricks that humans use to avoid hazards: for example, braking when a ball bounces into the road, because a child may be chasing it. Google's self-driving cars have already clocked up over 700,000km, more than many humans ever drive; and everything they learn will become available to every other car using the software. As for the liability issue, the law should be changed to make sure that when cases arise, the courts take into account the overall safety benefits of self-driving technology.

14. University of Illinois: Small in size, big on power: New microbatteries a boost for electronics

 With so much power, the batteries could enable sensors or radio signals that broadcast 30 times farther, or devices 30 times smaller. The batteries are rechargeable and can charge 1,000 times faster than competing technologies – imagine juicing up a credit-card-thin phone in less than a second. In addition to consumer electronics, medical devices, lasers, sensors and other applications could see leaps forward in technology with such power sources available.

"Any kind of electronic device is limited by the size of the battery – until now," King said. "Consider personal medical devices and implants, where the battery is an enormous brick, and it's connected to itty-bitty electronics and tiny wires. Now the battery is also tiny."

Now, the researchers are working on integrating their batteries with other electronics components, as well as manufacturability at low cost.

15. What was old is new again: The Beat Goes On: How Vinyl Records Are Making A Comeback

"Vinyl manufacturing plants are bursting at the seams," said Kurtz. "We took a nascent industry – vinyl – breathed life into it and now we can't even handle the amount of business we are creating."

Saturday Links

1. The World's Fastest-Growing Megacities

The modern megacity may have been largely an invention of the West, but it's increasingly to be found largely in the East. The seven largest megacities (defined as areas of continuous urban development of over 10 million people) are located in Asia, based on a roundup of the latest population data released last month by Wendell Cox's Demographia. The largest megacity remains the Tokyo-Yokohama area, home to 37 million, followed by the Indonesian capital of Jakarta, Seoul-Incheon, Delhi, Shanghai and Manila.

2. Houston Rising—Why the Next Great American Cities Aren't What You Think

America's urban landscape is changing, but in ways not always predicted or much admired by our media, planners, and pundits. The real trend-setters of the future—judged by both population and job growth—are not in the oft-praised great "legacy" cities like New York, Chicago, or San Francisco, but a crop of newer, more sprawling urban regions primarily located in the Sun Belt and, surprisingly, the resurgent Great Plains. ...

... Why are these people flocking to the aspirational cities, that lack the hip amenities, tourist draws, and cultural landmarks of the biggest American cities? People are still far more likely to buy a million dollar pied à terre in Manhattan than to do so in Oklahoma City. Like early-20th-century Polish peasants who came to work in Chicago's factories or Russian immigrants, like my grandparents, who came to New York to labor in the rag trade, the appeal of today's smaller cities is largely economic. The foreign born, along with generally younger educated workers, are canaries in the coal mine—singing loudest and most frequently in places that offer both employment and opportunities for upward mobility and a better life. ...

3. Cohabitation first is new norm for unmarrieds with kids

... For almost half of women ages 15-44, their "first union" was cohabitation rather than marriage, says the report from the National Center for Health Statistics. For less than one-quarter, the first union was marriage. The report was based on in-person interviews conducted between 2006 and 2010 with 12,279 women ages 15-44. ...

"Instead of marriage, people are moving into cohabitation as a first union," says demographer Casey Copen, the report's lead author. "It's kind of a ubiquitous phenomenon now."...

4. James Taranto says the decline of marriage has a more significant impact on boys. Boys Hardest Hit

5. Hunger Games: Reporters and pundits greatly exaggerate hunger in America

... In stark contrast, the latest USDA/Census data on hunger (page 12) reveals that 1.3% of households with children had a child who was hungry at least once during 2011. The same report (page 19) also shows that on any given day, an average of 0.18% of households with children had a child who was hungry. This first measure of hunger (at least once during 2011) is 22 times lower than the "29.2 percent" figure cited by Zaimov, and the second measure (the average on any given day) is 162 times lower. ...

6. Interfaith marriage: Across the aisles

... Americans are more likely to marry someone of a different faith than someone who supports a different political party. Jews spotted the trend early, with a survey triggering alarm in 1990 when it claimed that more than half of American Jews were marrying out. Interfaith marriage remains most frequent among Jews (and rarest among Mormons, of all creeds studied). But others have been catching up, with overall rates of such unions more than doubling since the 1960s. ...

So, is this a positive sign of increasing religious tolerance or just a sign of how insignificant religion is to people's lives that they do not care what others believe?

7. Emily Temple has a list of 21 Books Written by and About Women That Men Would Benefit From Reading

8. Kyle Roberts Reflecting on "The Heavenly Good of Earthly Work" by Darrell Cosden.

9. An interesting interview with Douglas Rushkoff on his new book: Why Living in the Present Is a Disorder

We're living in the now, we no longer have a sense of future direction, and we have a completely new relationship to time. That's the premise of Douglas Rushkoff's latest book Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now, a sort-of update to Alvin Toffler's influential Future Shock from decades ago. ..

10. Annie-Marie Slaughter suggests that if women want more balanced sharing of household work, they need to discover The Immense Value of Giving Men More Control of Household Tasks

As women are experiencing the satisfaction that comes from a professional career, men should also get to know the joy of investing in home life.

11. China Is No Longer A Low-Cost Producer

12. Forbes says The Death of the PC Has Not Been Exaggerated

It really wasn't that long ago that a new computer every 3 years was a rite of passage. A fancy new chip from Intel or a nifty update to Windows sent both people and corporations out to replace PCs that felt awfully obsolete for shiny new ones. The latest data from IDC shows how things have changed: PC shipments down 14% year-over-year, despite the launch of Windows 8. While Microsoft and its fans might not want to admit it yet, Windows 8 is a flop. The failure to generate new sales is bad; the acceleration of a trend of declining PC shipments is downright awful. "At this point," IDC said, "It seems clear that the Windows 8 launch [has] slowed the market."...

13. Here is an interesting article about some really "crappy" furniture. Sustainable Furniture Made From Agricultural Waste and Poop

14. Mashable says E-Books Now 23% of U.S. Publisher Sales.

15. This was an encouraging story amidst the strife in the PCUSA: Fremont Presbyterian's schism divides congregation - but they still share sacred spaces

16. This is a great piece: FLASHBACK: This Was The Internet In 1995

Saturday Links

1. Atlantic: Could Earth's Population Peak in 2050?

"For the past two decades, demographers have generally agreed that global population growth will continue to inch steadily higher in the coming century, raising concerns about everything from pollution to housing to the world's water supply.

But a new study out of Spain suggests those estimates may be way off—we're talking several billion people off—and that the earth's population could instead peak as soon as 2050. Applying a mathematical model to global population trends, these researchers believe that there will be fewer people living on earth in 2100 than there are today. ..."

Since I started studying demography thirty years ago, low fertility estimates seem the closest to actual outcomes. People seem to be moving to lower fertility rates faster than most expected.

2. Speaking of world population, Chatham House writes about The End of Youth

"Advances in medicine and health care mean that people all over the globe are living longer, much longer. At the same time mothers in most countries are having fewer babies. The combination is a demographic timebomb. Sarah Harper looks at the challenges that lie ahead and the changes needed to cope with a grey new world."

3. Pew has published an interesting report on Demographics of Asian Americans

4. Forbes on Why China Is Finally Abandoning Its One Child Policy

"The policy was originally justified as necessary because of excess population and to promote economic development. Much has been written and can be found on the Internet about this policy and the current and long-term effects it is having and will have on China. The reluctance by China's central government to abandon the one child policy is not out of a failure to recognize its shortcomings. Rather, it is because the policy has been highly successful in achieving a principal objective, a unification of the public in support of an unelected, autocratic central government."

5. World Bank Aims To Eliminate Extreme Poverty By 2030

To reach that goal, Kim said the world need to reduce the number of people living below the poverty line of $1.25 per day to 3 percent globally by 2030, and raise the per capita incomes of the bottom 40 percent of every developing country.

The 3 percent level is a new target for the World Bank, which estimated in 2010 that 21 percent of the global population, or 1.2 billion people, lived extreme poverty.

Some World Bank estimates have put the 3 percent target at about 600 million people living below the poverty line by 2030.

6. Susan Brown writes about A 'gray divorce' boom

Until recently, it would have been fair to say that older people simply did not get divorced. Fewer than 10% of those who got divorced in 1990 were ages 50 or older. Today, 1 in 4 people getting divorced is in this age group.

7. Science reports on the prospects of One Drug to Shrink All Tumors.

8.  The Genetic Literacy Project on Monsanto Protection Act? Separating the facts from the fury

9. Dean Kalahar says Economics Is Easy, And Can Be Learned In 5 Minutes

10. Rebecca Schuman on why you shouldn't pursue that Ph.D.: Thesis Hatement

11. Facebook 'Dislike' Button Not A Good Idea, Says Product Engineer Bob Baldwin In Reddit AMA

12. Finally, we have an answer to one of the most important questions of our generation: How Many Spaces After a Period? Ending the Debate.

13. ABP News with some interesting data on the future of Mega Churches: Small is big for Millennials

14. Goal Control 4D. How referees will be automatically informed of goals in World Cup 2014.

15. For those of you who have deficiencies in your cultural education about all things Whovian, here is a primer for you: 'Doctor Who' Explained in 25 GIFs

Saturday Links

Have a wonderful Easter weekend!

1. Rewriting the story of polarized debate: He got Tea Party and Occupy to talk

Nabil Laoudji's Mantle Project puts citizens on stage to tell stories of the experiences that led them to their positions on tough issues. That's how he got members of the Tea Party and Occupy movement to speak on the same stage in a civil – and entertaining – exchange.

2. Next Reformation presents Barna's six reasons young Christians leave the church.

3. Forbes: The Happiest And Unhappiest Jobs In America

4. Mozambique: From Marxism to market

British journalist Paul Fauvet came to Mozambique in 1980 just as the country was plunged into a civil war. He has witnessed every key event since. Here he describes the transformation of his adopted country from revolutionary Marxist state to embracing the market and the exploitation of its resource riches.

5. Poor Americans Are Driving The Evolution Of The Banking System

We've reported on how people in emerging markets residents are opening bank accounts and paying for things with their mobile phones, transforming business in those countries. 

But the US Federal Reserve would like you to know (pdf) that the changes aren't all in other parts of the world.

Poor people in the US are some of the most avid users of mobile banking and mobile payment systems. ...

6. One In Four Teens Plan On Relying On Mom And Dad Till Age 27

7. Gen Y Isn't The 'Entrepreneurship Generation'

We all keep hearing that Gen Y's are the "entrepreneurship generation," but new research states otherwise. I worked with Monster.com on a new study focused on multi-generational worker attitudes to uncover the state of entrepreneurship through the eyes of different generations of workers. The report found that 41% of Gen X employees (ages 30-49) and 45% of Boomers (ages 50-69) consider themselves to be more entrepreneurial, compared to only 32% of Gen Y workers (ages 18-29 years). ...

8. Work Is More Than a Means to Evangelism

As already discussed, Matthew Lee Anderson's recent Christianity Today cover story on "radical Christianity" has been making waves. This week at The High Calling, Marcus Goodyear offers a healthy critique of one of Anderson's key subjects, David Platt, aligning quite closely with Anderson's analysis about the ultimate challenges such movements face when it comes to long-term cultural cultivation.

Focusing on Platt's latest book, Follow Me, Goodyear notes that, despite Platt's admirable efforts to get Christians "off their seats," he often "emphasizes the great commission so much, it overshadows all other teachings of the Bible."...

9. I don't know if I'm convinced, but here are The 21 Principles of Persuasion from Forbes.

10. Mental Floss with a great list of 30 Things Turning 30 This Year.

11. Few People Understand The Difference Between Risk And Genuine Uncertainty

What are the odds that your new idea will succeed?  If it does, what will the return to you be?

One of the problems that we have in business (and life!) is that we often can't know the answer to questions like this in advance.  And this drives us nuts.  Consequently, a lot of people invest a great deal of effort into reducing uncertainty.  There are two problems with this approach.  The first is that we often don't understand uncertainty very well, and the second is that profitably opportunities only exist where outcomes are genuinely uncertain. ...

12. Christopher Hitchens wants to know Has militant atheism become a religion?

... In my interactions with religious and nonreligious people alike, I now draw a sharp line, based not on what exactly they believe but on their level of dogmatism. I consider dogmatism a far greater threat than religion per se. I am particularly curious why anyone would drop religion while retaining the blinkers sometimes associated with it. Why are the "neo-atheists" of today so obsessed with God's nonexistence that they go on media rampages, wear T-shirts proclaiming their absence of belief, or call for a militant atheism? What does atheism have to offer that's worth fighting for? As one philosopher put it, being a militant atheist is like "sleeping furiously."...

13. Econbrowser has a detailed analysis of Declining U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

14. David Shukman wants to know Why such a fuss about extinction?

What is wrong with extinction? I realise this question is the conservation equivalent of a landmine - or an elephant trap. And that it is likely to ruffle a lot of fur.

But I ask because I am merely wondering whether we sometimes forget a grim reality of the story of life on Earth - that extinction has always been with us.

In fact, it has quite often been good for us. ...

15. Is Google Maps Changing Our Behavior?

... The people who used the digital navigation device demonstrated pretty good route recognition and rather poor survey knowledge. By comparison, the paper map users scored better on the survey test and almost perfect on the route test. What's happening here, Münzer and colleagues argue, is that pedestrians who use computer navigation fail to envision, encode, and memorize the cognitive maps they otherwise would have. The cost of convenience, in other words, is spatial orientation. ...

16. 18 obsolete words, which never should have gone out of style

Saturday Links

1. The Economist has an interesting graph showing that capitalism has led to greater happiness in member countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Soviet Union countries excluding the three baltic countries.)

2. AEI has an informative piece on economic mobility in the United States: How's the American Dream doing? Well, which one?

There are two ways to define economic mobility: 1) absolute mobility, whether each generation is financially better off than the one before; and 2) relative mobility, whether you can change your income rank  vs. your parents. Most Americans probably think both measures important. We want to be more prosperous than mom and dad, but also be able to change our circumstances and make our dreams come true. ...

... A San Francisco Fed study – using data tracking families since 1968 — looks at both versions of the American Dream, finding one healthier than the other. Looking at absolute mobility, researchers Leila Bengali and Mary Daly find the United States "highly mobile." Over the sample period, 67% of US adults had higher family incomes than their parents, including 83% of those in the lowest birth quintile, or bottom 20% (versus 54% for children born into the top quintile, or top 20%.) ...

3. Concerning gender income inequality, Mark Perry says 'Studies' that compare average wages by gender, without controlling for demographic factors, can't be taken seriously

4. Clive Crook thinks an ownership society may be the answer to reducing wealth inequality: Liberals Should Embrace the Ownership Society

... It's true that conservatives' standard proposals for privatizing Social Security and voucherizing Medicare would shift risk onto beneficiaries -- but this plainly isn't a necessary consequence of the basic principle. I agree with Konczal that adequate insurance against economic risk, underwritten by the government, is essential. I also agree that most conservatives aren't interested in providing that guarantee. That's exactly why liberals ought to take up the ownership society themselves.

Ownership entails risk, it's true, but insurance can minimize it. Ownership also provides control, independence and self-respect -- things it wouldn't hurt liberals to be more interested in. And when it comes to inequality and stagnating middle incomes, ownership can give wage slaves a stake in the nation's economic capital.

Done right, an equity component in government-backed saving for retirement could be the best idea liberals have had since the earned-income tax credit (oh, sorry, that started out as a conservative idea as well). ...

5. Scientific American: Massive Open Online Courses, aka MOOCs, Transform Higher Education and Science

6. Scientific American also has an interesting piece on how Brain Researchers Can Detect Who We Are Thinking About

FMRI scans of volunteers' media prefrontal cortexes revealed unique brain activity patterns associated with individual characters or personalities as subjects thought about them.

7. Gizmodo reports that Sex in Space Could Be Deadly.

Researchers already knew humans, animals and plants have evolved in response to Earth's gravity and they are able to sense it. What we are still discovering is how the processes occurring within the cells of the human and plant bodies are affected by the more intense gravity, or hypergravity, that would be found on a large planet, or the microgravity that resembles the conditions on a space craft.

8. Walgreens Building First Self-Powered Store

According to estimations, engineers expect the the store to generate around 265,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) per year. Store operation will only require 200,000 kWh, so perhaps that extra wattage could be pumped back into the grid or used to power nearby utilities.

9. CNN reports on How online ruined dating ... forever

When people can browse potential dates online like items in a catalog, geo-locate hook-ups on an exercise bike just seven feet away, arrange a spontaneous group date with the app Grouper or arrange a bevy of blind dates in succession with Crazy Blind Date, it makes me wonder if all this newfound technological convenience has, in fact, made romance that much more elusive. Now, we may be more concerned with what someone isn't rather than what they are. And as that twenty-something entrepreneur reminded me over coffee, services like OkCupid, and even Facebook, sap a lot of the mystique out of those first few dates. So, sure, it may be easier than ever to score a date, but what kind of date will it really be?

10. Interesting piece on Why Do People Use Nope Even Though No Is Shorter?

11. Is the New Pope More Liberal Than the Last Two? Why It's Hard to Tell. Emily Chertoff offers some insightful analysis.

12. Michael Bird offers this quote from Michael Goheen and Craig Bartholomew's "The Drama of Scripture" in his post The Importance of the Narrative of Scripture.

Many of us have read the Bible as if it were merely a mosaic of little bits – theological bits, moral bits, historical-critical bits, sermon bits, devotional bits. But when we read the Bible in such a fragmented way, we ignore it's divine author's intention to shape our lives through its story. All humanity communities live out some story that provides a context for understanding the meaning of history and gives shape and direction to their lives. If we allow the Bible to become fragmented, it is in danger of being absorbed into whatever other story is shaping our culture, and it will thus cease to shape our lives as it should. Idolatry has twisted the dominant cultural story of the secular Western world. If as believers we allow this story (rather than the Bible) to become the foundation of our thought and action, then our lives will manifest not the truths of Scripture, but the lies of an idolatrous culture. Hence the unity of Scripture is no minor matter: a fragmented Bible may actually produce theologically orthodox, morally upright, warmly pious idol worshippers! (p. 12).

13. Scot McKnight has a great piece on what constitutes legalism: Legalism: Old and New Perspectives

14. Thom S. Rainer on Ten Things Pastors Wish They Knew Before They Became Pastors

1. I wish someone had taught me basic leadership skills. "I was well grounded in theology and Bible exegesis, but seminary did not prepare me for the real world of real people. It would have been great to have someone walk alongside me before my first church."
2. I needed to know a lot more about personal financial issues. "No one ever told me about minister's housing, social security, automobile reimbursement, and the difference between a package and a salary. I got burned in my first church."
3. I wish I had been given advice on how to deal with power groups and power people in the church. "I got it all wrong in my first two churches. I was fired outright from the first one and pressured out in the second one. Someone finally and courageously pointed out how I was messing things up almost from the moment I began in a new church. I am so thankful that I am in the ninth year of a happy pastorate in my third church."...

Read the whole thing.

15. Joseph Sunde rates the 5 TV Shows That Demonstrate the Importance of Ordinary Work

A secular Latin America?

Christian Century: A secular Latin America?

In recent months, observers have remarked on the growing number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation (the “nones”), whose numbers are highest among the young. We can argue about just what these numbers mean, but possibly they do mark the beginning of a secularizing trend, a drift toward European conditions. Surprisingly perhaps, given our customary assumptions about Latin America, conditions in several Latin American nations mirror those in the U.S. Increasingly these countries are developing a European coloring. ...

... Whatever the causes, the European experience indicates that countries where the fertility rate falls well below replacement (2.1 children per woman) might be facing rapid secularization.

With that figure in mind, let’s look at the countries of Latin America, and especially the most economically developed ones. A few decades ago, all had classic Third World population profiles and very large families. In the 1960s, for instance, Brazil’s fertility rate hovered around 6 children per woman, alarming those who warned of a global population explosion. By 2012, though, Brazil’s figure was 1.82, far below replacement level. Chile and Uruguay both record similar rates of 1.87. Argentina is still above replacement, but the rate is falling fast. That’s a social revolution in progress—as well as a gender revolution.

In religious terms, these countries present a complex picture, with strong evidence of a continuing passion for religion. Brazil is home to some spectacularly successful Pentecostal megachurches, which Catholic clergy seek to imitate in order to hold on to believers. New evangelical churches are also booming in the other Latin nations, to the point that Protestants claim to be living through a new Reformation.

At the same time, though, signs of secularization appear that would have been unthinkable not long ago. Nine percent of Brazilians now say they follow no religion, and the proportion of nones is much higher among those under 20. Uruguay emerges as the region’s most secular country, with 40 percent having no religious affiliation. ...

Do countries lose religion as they gain wealth?

CBC News: Do countries lose religion as they gain wealth?

Poor nations have the highest proportion of people who identify as religious

The world's poorest nations are also some of its most religious – but does that mean religion can't flourish in a prosperous society?

Gregory Paul doesn't think it can. After constructing a "Successful Societies Scale" that compared 25 socioeconomic indicators against statistics on religious belief and practice in 17 developed nations, the Baltimore-based paleontologist concluded in a 2009 study that "religion is most able to thrive in seriously dysfunctional societies."

Gregory, who is a freelance researcher not affiliated with any institution, compiled data on everything from homicide rates and income inequality to infant mortality and teenage pregnancies and found that the societies that scored the best on socioeconomic indicators were also the most secular.

"The correlation between religiosity and successful societies is somewhere around 0.7. Zero is no correlation and one is a perfect correlation, so it's a really good correlation, and it's not just an accident," he told CBC News. ...

... Sociologists have argued that the social benefits of religion take on greater importance, the fewer resources and the less control people have over their own lives.

"Religion becomes less central as people's lives become less vulnerable to the constant threat of death, disease and misfortune," Norris and Inglehart write in their 2004 book, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide.

"As lives gradually become more comfortable and secure, people in more affluent societies usually grow increasingly indifferent to religious values, more skeptical of supernatural beliefs and less willing to become actively engaged in religious institutions." ...

... "The United States is one of the wealthier societies, and yet, it's still quite religious," said Phil Zuckerman, a sociology professor at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., who has studied secularization in Scandinavian countries and wrote a book about it called Society Without God.

"I think it's when you have what we might call 'existential security' — so, wealth and prosperity are part of that, but by that we [also] mean the bulk of people in society have access to housing, health care, jobs. They live in a relatively stable, democratic society without much in the way of existential threats to their lives or their culture." ...

... "Europe and the United States seem to be going in very different directions," said Marcus Noland, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, D.C., who has written about religion and economic growth.

"One of the arguments is that the United States has a much livelier and open market for religion than do, say, countries in Scandinavia, where you have established churches." [Notably Rodney Stark]

But Zuckerman and other sociologists attribute the U.S.'s outlier status to socioeconomic inequality. ...

Rise of the "Nones" is Greater for Older Americans

Black, White, and Gray: Trends in the Religious Unaffiliated, the "Nones," by Age - Brad Wright

A lot has been written recently about the rise of the "Nones," people expressing no religious affiliation. Sociologist Brad Wright offers a fascinating insight by looking at the percentage of people at various stages of life who report affiliation. Young adults are not surprisingly the group with the highest percentage, but Wright offers this chart.

Wright makes this observation:

Once again, the percentage of being unaffiliated increased in each group, but relatively speaking, it's increased most among the middle-aged and the elderly. In both the percentage of the unaffiliated more than tripled, compared to the 2.5x increase in the young. There is some lagged effect, as the elderly are catching up the middle-aged in the past decade, but overall, the rise of the religious nones is something that spans all age groups. Thus it's a societal-wide change more than just an age or generational change.

This data doesn't explain the rise, but I have a theory: Church offers little for discerning significance in life.

A few random thoughts (mostly intuitive perceptions.) There is disillusionment with church life for many older adults who grew up in the Church. Young adults interested in the Church are starting up independent congregations narrowly targeted to their particular age demographic. Older Christians feel rejected. As a traditional congregation tries to become more appealing to the younger demographic, long-time congregants experience a loss of meaningful rhythms and routines for them. With those gone, worship no longer seems meaningful. Some look for other congregations, but I sense many see integrating into a new community faith community as too much work. As the number of congregations with familiar patterns dwindles and close, they slip out the door into the ether.

Dr. Eileen Lindner, Deputy General Secretary for Research and Planning of the National Council of Churches USA, gave a presentation two years ago. She points out that fifty years ago, congregations and denominations were engaged in a whole range of work that ministered to the world. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, para-church organizations emerged to do what congregations once did ... like Young Life and Habitat for Humanity. Many of the things churches once did have been replaced by nonprofit organizations that may not have an explicit connection to faith. In one sense, the Church is a victim of its own success, having encultured values of service into the broader culture. But the downside is that it frequently feels like we are all left with squabbles about internal politics. Congregations and denominations are struggling for an identity and purpose in relating to the world.

As I've written several times, conservative congregations typically respond by offering programming directed toward therapeutic healing, personal piety, or political action to stop the "barbarians at the gates." Liberal congregations also offer therapeutic healing and personal piety but frequently include political action they discern is directed toward "social justice." Much of it appears to be a "me too" response to broader movements in the culture, hoping to leach off the meaning people find in these movements rather than the Church itself generating the meaning for congregants. Religion (right and left) becomes so captive to the categories and contours of cultural politics that theological understanding is lost. And if you want to do political action, there are far more dynamic venues than the Church.

And that brings me back to my overarching theory: Church offers little for discerning significance in life. Too much of the Church is about narrow personal piety (a niche market) while trying to make ourselves relevant to the culture with "me too" strategies from the periphery of culture. Until people see how daily life connects with God's unending mission, I think the Nones tribe will continue to grow and prosper.

Saturday Links

1. The United States had its financial bubble. Europe is having one too. Is China next? If it is, it could reshape the global economy and radically reshape the Chinese government. Here is an interesting piece about China's real estate bubble.

2. Robert Tracinski thinks we are in the midst of a Third Industrial Revolution.

... I like the idea of a breaking the Industrial Revolution into stages, but I would define them in more fundamental terms. The first Industrial Revolution was the harnessing of large-scale man-made power, which began with the steam engine. The internal combustion engine, electric power, and other sources of energy are just further refinements of this basic idea. The second Industrial Revolution would be the development of interchangeable parts and the assembly line, which made possible inexpensive mass production with relatively unskilled labor. The Third Industrial Revolution would not be computers, the Internet, or mobile phones, because up to now these have not been industrial tools; they have been used for moving information, not for making things. Instead, the rise of computers and the Internet is just a warm-up for the real Third Industrial Revolution, which is the full integration of information technology with industrial production.

The effect of the Third Industrial Revolution will be to collapse the distance between the design of a product and its physical manufacture, in much the same way that the Internet has eliminated the distance between the origination of a new idea and its communication to an audience. ...

3. Tyler Cowen has some thoughts about the impact of our technological revolution as well Are we living in the early 19th century?

... Eventually all of the creative ferment of the industrial revolution pays off in a big "whoosh," but it takes many decades, depending on where you draw the starting line of course.  A look at the early 19th century is sobering, or should be, for anyone doing fiscal budgeting today.  But it is also optimistic in terms of the larger picture facing humanity over the longer run.

4. You may have seen a deeply flawed viral video about wealth inequality this past week. I am working on my own response, but economist Mark Perry's response is here.  In response to the viral 'Wealth Inequality in America' video

5. What are the contours of income inequality in the United States? This 40-minute video by Emmanuel Saez offers some important insights.

6. Futurist Ray Kurzweil is a little too sensationalist for my taste, but this vid offers interesting food for thought about nanotechnology and the future of sports. Will we even be able to have meaningful sports competitions?

7. Atlantic takes up a frequently perpetuated myth. 'Women Own 1% of World Property': A Feminist Myth That Won't Die

8. First, there was I, Pencil. Then I Smartphone. Now "I Coke." What Coke Contains

9. U.S. household wealth regains pre-recession peak but ...

The recovered wealth - most of it from higher stock prices - has been flowing mainly to richer Americans. By contrast, middle class wealth is mostly in the form of home equity, which has risen much less.

10. When looking at decisions in your own context, Seth Godin explains why Macro trends don't matter so much

11. It's a big, fat myth that all scientists are religion-hating atheists.

Whether or not you think science is wonderful, the stereotype of all scientists being atheists is unrealistic. There is, however, a special dance.

12. I consider this good news. Old Earth, Young Minds: Evangelical Homeschoolers Embrace Evolution

More Christian parents are asking for mainstream science in their children's curricula.

13. Remember to keep Syria and Egypt in your prayers. Nearly 1 in 20 Syrians are now refugees

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/03/07/4106038/us-household-wealth-regains-pre.html#storylink=cpy

Saturday Links

1. Conventional wisdom says wearing the red shirt in Star Trek will get you killed. Not so fast. Statistical analysis in Significance Magazine disagrees. (Keep your redshirt on: a Bayesian exploration)

"... In spite of wearing a redshirt, there is only an 8.6% chance of a member of the operations or engineering departments becoming a casualty. These personnel should ensure that their life insurance plans are based on their departments and not their uniform color.

Although Enterprise crew members in redshirts suffer many more casualties than crew members in other uniforms, they suffer fewer casualties than crew members in gold uniforms when the entire population size is considered. Only 10% of the entire redshirt population was lost during the three year run of Star Trek. This is less than the 13.4% of goldshirts, but more than the 5.1% of blueshirts. What is truly hazardous is not wearing a redshirt, but being a member of the security department. The red-shirted members of security were only 20.9% of the entire crew, but there is a 61.9% chance that the next casualty is in a redshirt and 64.5% chance this red-shirted victim is a member of the security department. The remaining redshirts, operations and engineering make up the largest single population, but only have an 8.6% chance of being a casualty.

Red uniform shirts are safe, as long as the wearer is not in the security department."

 2. Interesting piece on automation in the Economist: Robocolleague

Robots are getting more powerful. That need not be bad news for workers. ...

... Historically, technological advances have been relatively benign for workers. Labour-market trends through the 19th and 20th centuries show surprising continuity, according to Lawrence Katz of Harvard University and Robert Margo of Boston University. In recent decades, for example, computerisation and automation have displaced “middle-skilled” workers at the same time as employment among high- and low-skilled workers has increased. This “hollowing out” is not new, Messrs Katz and Margo note. Early industrialisation had similar effects. Middle-skilled artisans, like trained weavers, were put out of work by industrial textile production, but the fortunes of less-skilled factory workers and white-collar factory managers steadily improved. Mechanisation’s insatiable appetite for routine work of all types has yet to create mass unemployment. Quite the opposite.

The worry is that technology now has its sights set on non-routine tasks as well as mundane ones. Yet Mr Autor notes that just because a skilled job can be automated does not mean it will be. The number of workers used to build Nissan vehicles varies a lot between Japan, where labour is expensive, and India, where it is abundant and cheap. The relative cost of different types of workers matters for firms as they choose how to deploy new technologies. ...

3. Speaking of technology and its impact on industries Technology Upends Another Industry: Homebuilding

4. Businessweek has a piece about Indie Capitalism

Indie Capitalism has three foundational principles:

• Creativity generates economic value. Creativity is the source of profit. Yes, efficiency can squeeze more out of what exists, but creativity gives us originality, which translates into a market advantage and big margins.

• Creativity drives capitalism. These past few years we have been victimized by the disastrous results of “creativity” applied to the financial sector (mortgage-backed securities, for starters). What we lost sight of is that the scaling of creativity to actually make things of value sold in the marketplace is the true heart of our economic system. It is the true generator of net new jobs, wealth, and tax revenue.

• Creative destruction is crucial to economic growth. Crony capitalism, which relies on monopoly and political power, is antithetical to entrepreneurial capitalism. A faster cycle of birth, growth, and death of companies boosts creativity, economic value, and growth.

5. Business Insider reports on Why Manufacturing Jobs Are Returning To America For The First Time In Decades

 The bottom line: For the first time in decades, several key economic drivers have created a competitive advantage for the U.S. that will encourage corporate strategic decisions on capital allocation and acquisitions for generations to come.

Here's why:

1. Cheap and abundant natural gas. ...

2. Innovation. Despite talk of a brain drain, the U.S. remains the global innovation leader, maintaining a position enjoyed for 50 years. ...

3. Rule of law. Without the means to protect intellectual property, it cannot be exploited for competitive advantage. ...

4. Human capital. The wage gap between the U.S. and China has been shrinking. ...

5. De-complexity. Western multinationals continue to struggle with management of operations in developing countries. ...

6. Public policy and abundance. The federal government appears to be seizing the opportunity to promote job growth at home.

7. Credit, currency and the coming wave of mergers and acquisitions.

6. 3-D Printed Car Is as Strong as Steel, Half the Weight, and Nearing Production.

"Picture an assembly line not that isn’t made up of robotic arms spewing sparks to weld heavy steel, but a warehouse of plastic-spraying printers producing light, cheap and highly efficient automobiles.

If Jim Kor’s dream is realized, that’s exactly how the next generation of urban runabouts will be produced. His creation is called the Urbee 2 and it could revolutionize parts manufacturing while creating a cottage industry of small-batch automakers intent on challenging the status quo. ..."

7. And more about 3-D Printing. 3D Printing On The Frontlines — Army Deploying $2.8M Mobile Fabrication Labs.

Throughout history, war and innovation have gone hand in hand, whether it’s breakthroughs out of heavily funded R&D programs or makeshift contraptions thrown together with spare parts. Soldiers are trained to use the technology on hand to get the job done, one way or the other.

But how would military operations change if soldiers on the battlefield could have the best of both worlds: access to expert engineers able to fabricate custom-designed fixes right on-the-spot and in very little time? ...

8. And how about 4-D printing? 4D Printing Is The Future Of 3D Printing And It’s Already Here

"It may sound strange and far out, but it’s actually quite simple. 4D printing is being billed as a process where synthetic objects can change and adapt themselves to the environment. In a recent TED interview, Tibbits compared the process of 4D printing to the process of natural adaptation:

Natural systems obviously have this built in — the ability to have a desire. Plants, for example, generally have the desire to grow towards light and they generate energy from the translation of photosynthesis, carbon dioxide to oxygen, and so on. This is extremely difficult to build into synthetic systems — the ability to “want” or need something and know how to change itself in order to acquire it, or the ability to generate its own energy source. If we combine the processes that natural systems offer intrinsically (genetic instructions, energy production, error correction) with those artificial or synthetic (programmability for design and scaffold, structure, mechanisms) we can potentially have extremely large-scale quasi-biological and quasi-synthetic architectural organisms."

7. The New York Times reports that Music Industry Sales Rise, and Digital Revenue Gets the Credit

The music industry, the first media business to be consumed by the digital revolution, said on Tuesday that its global sales rose last year for the first time since 1999, raising hopes that a long-sought recovery might have begun.

The increase, of 0.3 percent, was tiny, and the total revenue, $16.5 billion, was a far cry from the $38 billion that the industry took in at its peak more than a decade ago. Still, even if it is not time for the record companies to party like it’s 1999, the figures, reported Tuesday by the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, provide significant encouragement.

The Economist also posted this chart this week:

8. Teleworking: The myth of working from home from the BBC. "Yahoo has banned its staff from "remote" working. After years of many predicting working from home as the future for everybody, why is it not the norm?"

9.  Europe's Youth Unemployment Nightmare Started Long Before The Euro Crisis 

"Reasons for high unemployment among the young include ineffective education systems (the share of early school dropouts is 20% in Italy and 30% in Spain) and dual labour markets with highly protected jobs for older employees. The good performance of Germany is not least a result of the German apprenticeship system, which facilitates labour market access for school leavers by lowering the company’s costs for employing them. The OECD’s latest “Going for Growth” report recommends reforms to strengthen the vocational training systems as one of the most effective ways to fight structural youth unemployment. This would also be a reasonable starting point for the EU’s youth employment programme."

10. Benjamin Wright - Book Review: God at Work: Your Christian Vocation in All of Life by Gene Edward Vieth, Jr.

11. Rough Type: Students to e-textbooks: no thanks

"What’s most revealing about this study is that, like earlier research, it suggests that students’ preference for printed textbooks is reflects the real pedagogical advantages they experience in using the format: fewer distractions, deeper engagement, better comprehension and retention, and greater flexibility to accommodating idiosyncratic study habits. Electronic textbooks will certainly get better, and will certainly have advantages of their own, but they won’t replicate the particular advantages inherent to the tangible form of the printed book."

12. How Many Ph.D.'s Actually Get to Become College Professors?

13. Top 10 Causes of Death in the U.S.

14. ABC reports that Young Hispanics Leaving Catholic Church for Protestant Faith

The Catholic Church has struggled to bring in young members in the United States. Less than half of U.S. Hispanics between 18 and 29 identify as Catholic, compared with the 60+ percent of Hispanics older than 50.

15. Robert Jones says Don't write off mainline Protestants

The narrative of decline in the mainline church underestimates the continuing influence of its members, says a religion researcher.

16. Some interesting observations by NYU psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He says we tend to process our social world through three lenses: Social distance, hierarchy, and disgust. Conservatives tend to have a lower threshold of revulsion, while liberals, and particularly libertarians, have a higher threshold.

17. Bruce Fieler has an interesting piece in the Atlantic. Want to Give Your Family Value and Purpose? Write a Mission Statement

Saturday Links

1. Christian History magazine has an entire issue devoted to Christians in the New Industrial Economy: The World Changed, the Church Responded. It is a priceless collection of essays on how various religious traditions responded to (or failed to) the challenges of the Industrial Revolution.

Issue 104 examines the impact of automation on Europe and America and the varying responses of the church to the problems that developed. Topics examined are mission work, the rise of the Social Gospel, the impact of papal pronouncements, the Methodist phenomenon, Christian capitalists, attempts at communal living and much more.

2. Orange County Register says Don't count out mainline Protestants yet.

As flocks shrink, denominations that once defined America fight to stay relevant with new ways of reaching out.

3. The Washington Post reports that Megachurches thriving in tough economic times.

"Despite the tough economy, many of the nation’s largest churches are thriving, with increased offerings and plans to hire more staff, a new survey shows.

Just 3 percent of churches with 2,000 or more attendance surveyed by Leadership Network, a Dallas-based church think tank, said they were affected “very negatively” by the economy in recent years. Close to half — 47 percent — said they were affected “somewhat negatively,” but one-third said they were not affected at all. ..."

4. Harvard Business Review: Steve Blank on Why Big Companies Can't Innovate

... It's not surprising that younger entrepreneurial firms are considered more innovative. After all, they are born from a new idea, and survive by finding creative ways to make that idea commercially viable. Larger, well-rooted companies however have just as much motivation to be innovative — and, as Scott Anthony has argued, they have even more resources to invest in new ventures. So why doesn't innovation thrive in mature organizations? ...

... First, he says, the focus of an established firm is to execute an existing business model — to make sure it operates efficiently and satisfies customers. In contrast, the main job of a start-up is to search for a workable business model, to find the right match between customer needs and what the company can profitably offer. In other words in a start-up, innovation is not just about implementing a creative idea, but rather the search for a way to turn some aspect of that idea into something that customers are willing to pay for. ...

... discovering a new business model is inherently risky, and is far more likely to fail than to succeed ...

... Finally, Blank notes that the people who are best suited to search for new business models and conduct iterative experiments usually are not the same managers who succeed at running existing business units. ...

5. A fascinating, if sobering, look at the conflict over islands off the coast of East Asia. Trouble at sea

6. The rise of post-industrial China? (Economist)

7. New Geography thinks U.S. LATE TO THE PARTY ON LATIN AMERICA, AFRICA.

"President Barack Obama's proposed tilt of U.S. priorities toward the Pacific – and away from the historical link to Europe – represents one of the most encouraging aspects of his foreign policy. Although welcome, we should recognize that this shift comes about three decades too late and that it may miss the rising geopolitical centrality of sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. The emergence of these longtime historically impoverished backwaters has been largely missed as American policy-makers and businesses are now obsessed with the challenges and opportunities posed by the emergence of China and, to a lesser extent, India. Sub-Saharan Africa, for example, over the past decade has produced six of the world's 10 fastest-growing economies. Through 2011-15, according to the International Monetary Fund, seven of the fastest-growing countries will be African, and Africa as a whole will surpass the slowing growth rates in Asia, particularly China.

This growth has caused the region's poverty rates, still unacceptably high, to fall from 56.5 percent in 1990 to 47 percent today. Further growth will likely push poverty levels down further."

8. New Geography also asks, Is the Family Finished? Some interesting thoughts about the impact of declining birthrates in the U.S.

9. A Portrait of U.S. Immigrants

Pew Research Center has compiled key findings from a new analysis of the nation’s foreign-born population, based on U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey.

10. Marketing Daily says More Latinos See Themselves As Bicultural

With more than half the population of many U.S. cities who are multicultural and Hispanics comprising more and more of the U.S. population, when does it become meaningless and redundant to execute marketing strategy that is directed to a general market and a Latino market perceived to be homogenous?

11. Committee on Economic Development has an interesting piece looking at both the ideological and economic aspects underlying the debate about the minimum wage. Raising the Minimum Wage: “Which Side Are You On?”

"It is an easy call if you are either (a) a strict libertarian or (b) an enthusiastic advocate of the less fortunate with limited concern about the scarcity of resources.  (If you belong to both of those groups, there is little advice that I can offer.)  However, in between those poles of opinion, things become rather murky, rather quickly."

12. Being a Republican or a Democrat may all be in your head: Republican Brains Differ From Democrats' In New FMRI Study

... Comparing the Democrat and Republican participants turned up differences in two brain regions: the right amygdala and the left posterior insula. Republicans showed more activity than Democrats in the right amygdala when making a risky decision. This brain region is important for processing fear, risk and reward.

Meanwhile, Democrats showed more activity in the left posterior insula, a portion of the brain responsible for processing emotions, particularly visceral emotional cues from the body. The particular region of the insula that showed the heightened activity has also been linked with "theory of mind," or the ability to understand what others might be thinking. ...

... The functional differences did mesh well with political beliefs, however. The researchers were able to predict a person's political party by looking at their brain function 82.9 percent of the time. In comparison, knowing the structure of these regions predicts party correctly 71 percent of the time, and knowing someone's parents' political affiliation can tell you theirs 69.5 percent of the time, the researchers wrote. ...

13. Health Care Without the Doctors Coming to a Walmart Near You

STERLING, Va. - Perched by a computer monitor wedged between shelves of cough drops and the pharmacy in a bustling Walmart, Mohamed Khader taps out answers to questions such as how often he eats vegetables, whether anyone in his family has diabetes and his age.

He tests his eyesight, weighs himself and checks his blood pressure as a middle-aged couple watches at the blue-and-white SoloHealth station advertising "free health screenings." ...

... As Americans gain coverage under the federal health law, putting increased demand on primary care doctors and spurring interest in cheaper, more convenient care, unmanned kiosks like these may be part of what their manufacturer bills as a "self-service healthcare revolution." ...

14. Is this a case of marketing going too far? Young Japanese Women Rent Out Their Bare Legs as Advertising Space

15. Nanotechnology Rebuilds the Periodic Table

Recent developments in the field of nanotechnology might give new meaning to the phrase “nothing gold can stay.” Atoms and bonds developed not by Mother Nature, but by scientists, are gaining momentum as the building blocks for cutting-edge materials.

Using nanoparticles as “atoms” and DNA as “bonds,” Chad Mirkin, the director of Northwestern University’s International Institute for Nanotechnology, is constructing his very own periodic table. So far Mirkin has built more than 200 distinct crystal structures with 17 different particle arrangements. ...

16. ExtremeTech says NASA’s cold fusion tech could put a nuclear reactor in every home, car, and plane.

17. Atlantic Cities has some great maps showing the impact of railroads on travel time in the early 19th Century, thus shrinking the nation. A Mapped History of Train Travel in the United States

18. A soccer goalie's worst nightmare.

19. You might want to think twice before a game of horse with this cheerleader.

Saturday Links

1. I love maps and charts. Naturally, I was drawn to this: 36 Maps That Explain The Entire World. Here is just one example:

2. Roger Pielke, Jr., says It's Time to Bury the Easterlin Paradox.

"The Easterlin paradox suggest that in terms of human happiness -- a squishy concept to be sure -- there is a limit to economic growth beyond which there really is just no point in attaining more wealth. Further, a decoupling between income and happiness at some threshold would imply that GDP would not be a good measure of welfare, we would need some other metric.

A recent paper (PDF) by Daniel Sacks, Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers argues that the Easterlin paradox is also wrong. ..."

3. John Danforth thinks We Need Less Religion in our Politics and Less Politics in our Religion.

4. I opined about this in yesterday's post, but I'm linking it again. One of the better Salon pieces I've read. When liberals ignore injustice

"Why isn't there more outrage about the president's unilateral targeted assassination program on the left?"

5. Arnold Kling with an interesting piece on the role of Jews in the rise of the modern urbanized economic order. The Unintended Consequences of God

"In those days, most people were farmers, for whom literacy’s costs generally outweighed its benefits. However, in an urbanized society with skilled occupations, literacy pays off. As urbanization gradually increased in the late Middle Ages, Jews came to fill high-skilled occupations. Botticini and Eckstein argue that literacy, rather than persecution, is what led Jews into these occupations."

6. New Geography wants to know Is Urbanism The New Trickle-Down Economics?

"But while progressives would clearly mock this policy [trickle-down economics], modern day urbanism often resembles nothing so much as trickle-down economics, though this time mostly advocated by those who would self-identify as being from the left. The idea is that through investments catering to the fickle and mobile educated elite and the high end businesses that employ and entertain them, cities can be rejuvenated in a way that somehow magically benefits everybody and is socially fair."

7. NPR has a nice piece on mini-reactors. Are Mini-Reactors The Future Of Nuclear Power?

8. Mark Perry excerpts a quote from green libertarian John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market.

“Capitalism is the greatest creation humanity has done for social cooperation. It has lifted humanity out of the dirt. In statistics we discovered when we were researching the book, about 200 years ago when capitalism was created, 85% of the people alive lived on $1 a day. Today, that number is 16%. Still too high, but capitalism is wiping out poverty across the world. 200 years ago illiteracy rates were 90%. Today, they are down to about 14%. 200 years ago the average lifespan was 30. Today it is 68 across the world, 78 in the States, and almost 82 in Japan. This is due to business. This is due to capitalism. And it doesn’t get credit for it. Most of the time, business is portrayed by its enemies as selfish and greedy and exploitative, yet it’s the greatest value creator in the world.”

9. Economist Gavin Kennedy with some interesting thoughts on the relationship between the state and the economy in developing nations:

The problem is to achieve the right balance between a competitive market economy and an effective state:  markets where possible; the state where necessary.

10. Climate Change: Key Data Points from Pew Research. Highlights some interesting shifts in the public's priorities.

11. Great piece about yet another way family life is changing. Yes, I’m a Homemaker

I’m a guy. My wife works. We’ve got no kids. I’m a stay-at-home dude.

"... What a sweet picture this conjures: the stay-at-home dad nurturing his children, looking after the house and helping support his wife in her budding career and shelving his own big ambitions for later. Now it gets a little awkward. There is no adorable kid, nor plans to have one. No starter home that needs knocking into shape. I'm not just doing this temporarily until I find something meaningful to do. I’m actually a full-time homemaker ... not stay-at-home dad but stay-at-home dude. A conversational pause. Where do you mentally file this guy? Usually I just change the subject. ..."

12. The Atlantic reports that Women Are Often Remarkably Reluctant to Ask for Help Around the House

A new study shows that high-earning women are more likely to let their houses be messy than to hire a housekeeper or get their husbands and kids to pitch in. ...

... "You can purchase substitutes for your own time, you can get your husband to do more, or you can all just do less," Killewald says. "Whether women outsource housework in particular has less to do with resources, but whether or not paid labor is viewed as an appropriate strategy for undertaking domestic work.

Doing less housework seems to be a popular option. ...

13. Business insider reports on a finding that is no shock to me: Men Really Do Have A Harder Time Reading Other People's Emotions.

Psychiatrists have concluded that males take longer to assess facial expressions as their brains have to work twice as hard to work out whether another person looks friendly or intelligent.

14. Daniel Kirk with a thoughtful piece Homosexuality under the Reign of Christ

15. Facebook Unfriending Has Real-Life Consequences

In particular, researchers found that 40% of people say they would avoid someone who unfriended them on Facebook, while 50% say they would not avoid a person who unfriended them. Women were more likely than men to avoid someone who unfriended them, the researchers found.

16. The Future of Librarians in an EBook World

... Libraries are responding to the decline of print in a variety of creative ways, trying to remain relevant – especially to younger people – by embracing the new technology. Many, such as New York’s Queens Public Library, are reinventing themselves as centers for classes, job training, and simply hanging out. In one radical example, a new $1.5 million library scheduled to open in San Antonio, Texas, this fall will be completely book-free, with its collection housed exclusively on tablets, laptops, and e-readers. “Think of an Apple store,” the Bexar County judge who is leading the effort told NPR. It’s a flashy and seductive package.

But libraries are about more than just e-readers or any other media, as important as those things are. They are about more than just buildings such as the grand edifices erected by Carnegie money, or the sleek and controversial new design for the New York Public Library’s central branch. They are also about human beings and their relationships, specifically, the relationship between librarians and patrons. And that is the relationship that the foundation created by Microsoft co-founder’s Paul G. Allen is seeking to build in a recent round of grants to libraries in the Pacific Northwest. ...

17. 3-D Printing just gets more amazing. A 3D Printer That Generates Human Embryonic Stem Cells

3-D printers can produce gun parts, aircraft wings, food and a lot more, but this new 3-D printed product may be the craziest thing yet: human embryonic stem cells. Using stem cells as the "ink" in a 3-D printer, researchers in Scotland hope to eventually build 3-D printed organs and tissues. A team at Heriot-Watt University used a specially designed valve-based technique to deposit whole, live cells onto a surface in a specific pattern.

Saturday Links

Today is the day our advanced technological culture turns to a cute furry rodent in Pennsylvania for a weather forecast. (The only thing a groundhog foretells in my yard is that I'm probably going to need some new landscaping.) Happy Groundhog Day!

1. Strategic Planning and the "Vision Thing" -- Fire, Not Fluff.

"In the course of our strategic planning work with clients, we've identified the things that make the difference between visions that fall flat and those that turn on. Here's a no-nonsense summary of those elements that you can use as a guide when you develop your strategic plan."

2. Some good thoughts on strategies we should all consider in trying to address controversial issues. Five simple lessons from Shane Windmeyer's friendship with Chick-fil-A's Dan Cathy

3. Anticipating a move? Here's Everything You Should Consider Before Moving To A New City

4. Jordan Ballor has some thoughts on subsidiarity at Political Theology. Subsidiarity 'From Below'

"In this way a conception of subsidiarity "from below" is focused on the location of sovereignty from the "bottom up" rather than on the delegation of authority from the "top down." We see these variegated approaches to subsidiarity and sovereignty work out in diverse ways in later centuries. It is with these different lenses of subsidiarity "from above" and "from below" that we can better understand the developments of the Roman Catholic principle of subsidiarity as such and the neo-Calvinist articulation of "sphere sovereignty" in the late nineteenth century and beyond."

5. Business Insider offers 21 Surprising Facts About Illegal Immigration.

6. Sarah Posner has an interesting piece. 'New Evangelical’-Progressive Alliance? Not So Fast

"Pally's essay is framed around the thesis that these evangelicals have "left the right." But left it for what? What she describes is really another vision of conservatism: church-based charity in lieu of a government safety net; exemptions from government regulation for religious groups; federal funding of religious activities; and persistent sexual puritanism. Perhaps it's more accurate to say they've left the radical right and are in the process of creating a new religious right, stripped of harsh rhetoric but still undergirded by conservative ideology. Which is a movement worth chronicling, but not, as Pally intimates, as the new saviors of civility in our religiously-inflected politics."

7. What has the iPad meant to Apple? A picture says a thousand words. A decade of Apple' computer' sales

8. Extinction of millions of species' greatly exaggerated'

"In the past scientists have warned that up to five per cent of species are at risk of dying-out as a result of climate change, deforestation and development.

But a new analysis by the University of New Zealand found that this figure was five times greater than reality because the number of animals living in the wild in the first place had been over estimated."

9. It Turns out once the culprit in species extinction may be curled up in your lap. Cats Are Ruthless Killers. Should They Be Killed?

10. I've written before that fear is not an effective motivator for long term change. This is particularly true for some climate change and environmental activism. You need to make new behaviors fun and engaging. WWF appears to have taken this strategy to heart. (Hard to go wrong with anthropomorphized critters but maybe they should consider the article immediately above.)

11. The evolutionary plot thickens. Who Was the First Human Ancestor?

From the time of Charles Darwin science has painted a picture of our earliest ancestor in the image of a chimpanzee. Scientific American editor Katherine Harmon explains how new fossil evidence is redrawing the lines of human evolution.

Actually, I think we already know who our first ancestor was.

12. For the most part (with a few exceptions), when it comes to movies, if you can't tell your story in less than two hours, then I think you didn't edit the movie well. Hollywood would apparently beg to differ. Why Movies Today Are Longer Than Ever Before

"The average of the highest-grossing films from 20 years ago is 118.4 minutes compared to this year's 141.6 minutes."

13. More interesting findings of early civilization in the Americas. Research Confirms Massive Louisiana Mound Was Built By Archaic Native Americans In Less Than 90 Days.

14. Melissa and I love history and have always loved old cemeteries. This story makes me sad. Black history dies in neglected Southern cemeteries

15. Okay, purists, Rule Change Eliminates a Fake Pickoff. Pitchers can no longer fake a throw to third before throwing to another base. Good idea or bad?

Religion As An Activity Engaged In By Consenting Adults In Private

American Interest: Religion As An Activity Engaged In By Consenting Adults In Private

Sociologist Peter Berger concludes this article with this observation:

... But I do want to make a general observation: In all these cases the authorities accused of violating the plaintiffs’ rights operate with a definition of religion as a private matter to be kept out of public space. There is here a general issue of government overreach, as clearly illustrated by the (still unresolved) attempt by the Obama administration to force Catholic institutions to provide contraception coverage in their employees’ health plans. Beyond that, though, there is a very ideological view of the place of religion in society. In other words, religion is to be an activity engaged in by consenting adults in private. The attorney for the Judeo-Christian side in the aforementioned American case had it quite right when he compared the treatment of his client’s religion with measures of disease control. This is not an attitude one would expect to find in a Western democracy. It is curiously reminiscent of policies toward religion in Communist countries and toward non-Muslims under Islamic rule.

An aggressive secularism seems to be on the march in all these cases. It seems more at home in Europe, which is far more secularized than America. Even in the United Kingdom, it seems, the drums of the French Revolution still reverberate. But how is one to explain this sort of secularism in the United States? The “nones”—that is, those who say “none” when asked for their religious affiliation by pollsters—are a very mixed lot. One theme that comes through is disappointment with organized religion. There is an anti-Christian edge to this, since Christian churches continue to be the major religious institutions in this country. Disappointment then, or disillusion—but why the aggressive hostility? There is yet another theme that comes through in the survey data: An identification of churches (and that means mainly Christian ones) with intolerance and repression. I think that this is significant.

Let me venture a sociological hypothesis here: The new American secularism is in defense of the sexual revolution. Since the 1960s there has indeed been a sexual revolution in America. It has been very successful in changing the mores and the law. It should not be surprising that many people, especially younger ones, enjoy the new libidinous benefits of this revolution. Whether one approves or deplores the new sexual culture, it seems unlikely to be reversed. Yet Christian churches (notably the Catholic and Evangelical ones) are in the forefront of those who do want to reverse the libertine victory. Its beneficiaries are haunted by the nightmare of being forced into chastity belts by an all too holy alliance of clerics and conservative politicians. No wonder they are hostile!

I suspect he is right.

Gallup chief sees signs of religious revival

Christian Century: Gallup chief sees signs of religious revival

Despite a deep drop in the number of Americans who identify with a particular faith, the country could be on the cusp of a religious renaissance, says Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll.

Grounded in more than a million Gallup interviews, Newport’s new book, God Is Alive and Well, argues that the aging of the baby boomers, the influx of Hispanic immigrants and the links between religion and health could portend a bright future for faith in America. [The following interview was edited for length and clarity.]

Why did you write this book?

I think religion is extremely important in America today. All of our research shows that, and I wanted to get empirical data about religion out there, rather than just speculation.

We here at Gallup have had a tracking project since 2008. We do 350,000 interviews a year, which is a huge and unique dataset that nobody else has. And personally, I grew up in a religious background and always found it interesting. ...

Of course, this caught my eye ...

You write that mainline Protestants are pretty much doing everything wrong in terms of growing their churches. Why is that?

For any group to grow, whether it’s a country or a church, you have to have more people coming in than going out. For example, the Catholic Church holds its own in terms of percentage of the American population because of the in-migration of Hispanics. But there is no massive in-migration of Protestants.

Second, there’s been no evidence that they’ve been able to evangelize effectively. And third, one way you grow is to have high fertility rates. Mormons are doing that well because their theology encourages big families. But Presbyterians, for example, have fewer children on average [than other Americans]. So, if you look at all the ways churches could grow, the mainline Protestants haven’t been able to hit the nail on the head with any of them.  —RNS

Is Scientific Materialism “Almost Certainly False”?

Scientific American: Is Scientific Materialism “Almost Certainly False”?

... Some scholars, notably philosopher Thomas Nagel, are so unimpressed with science that they are challenging its fundamental assumptions. In his new book Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False, Nagel contends that current scientific theories and methods can’t account for the emergence of life in general and one bipedal, big-brained species in particular. To solve these problems, Nagel asserts, science needs “a major conceptual revolution,” as radical as those precipitated by heliocentrism, evolution and relativity.

Many pundits calling for such a revolution are peddling some sort of religious agenda, whether Christian or New Age. Nagel is an atheist, who cannot accept God as a final answer, and yet he echoes some theological critiques of science. “Physic-chemical reductionism,” he writes, cannot tell us how matter became animate on Earth more than three billion years ago; nor can it account for the emergence in our ancestors of consciousness, reason and morality. ...

... These qualms asides, I recommend Nagel’s book, which serves as a much-needed counterweight to the smug, know-it-all stance of many modern scientists. Hawking and Krauss both claim that science has rendered philosophy obsolete. Actually, now more than ever we need philosophers, especially skeptics like Socrates, Descartes, Thomas Kuhn and Nagel, who seek to prevent us from becoming trapped in the cave of our beliefs.

Dan and Me: My Coming Out as a Friend of Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A

Huffington Post: Dan and Me: My Coming Out as a Friend of Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A - Shane Windmeyer.

I spent New Year's Eve at the red-blooded, all-American epicenter of college football: at the Chick-fil-A Bowl, next to Dan Cathy, as his personal guest. It was among the most unexpected moments of my life.

Yes, after months of personal phone calls, text messages and in-person meetings, I am coming out in a new way, as a friend of Chick-fil-A's president and COO, Dan Cathy, and I am nervous about it. I have come to know him and Chick-fil-A in ways that I would not have thought possible when I first started hearing from LGBT students about their concerns over the chicken chain's giving practices.

For many this news of friendship might be shocking. After all, I am an out, 40-year-old gay man and a lifelong activist for equality. I am also the founder and executive director of Campus Pride, the leading national organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and ally college students. Just seven months ago our organization advanced a national campaign against Chick-fil-A for the millions of dollars it donated to anti-LGBT organizations and divisive political groups that work each day to harm hardworking LGBT young people, adults and our families. I have spent quite some time being angry at and deeply distrustful of Dan Cathy and Chick-fil-A. If he had his way, my husband of 18 years and I would never be legally married.

Why was I now standing next to him at one of the most popular football showdowns? How could I dare think to have a relationship with a man and a company that have advocated against who I am; who would take apart my family in the name of "traditional marriage"; whose voice and views represented exactly the opposite of those of the students for whom I advocate every day? Dan is the problem, and Chick-fil-A is the enemy, right? ...

I rarely post on anything dealing with same-sex issues at the Kruse Kronicle because my experience is that people simply cannot carry on a respectful cyber-conversation about the issue. I make an exception here because this story illustrates so well what needs to be happening more and more in our culture, especially in the church! Kudos to Windmeyer and Cathy for showing the way.

(Note: If you can't be respectful (from whatever position you hold), don't comment! I will delete the first disrespectful comment (name-calling, characterizing people as evil or idiots, etc.). I will close comments with the second. I don't have time in my life to play referee to childish behavior.)

(HT: John Armstrong)