Apart from reviewing a museum exhibit on the history of girlhood at my sabbatical blog, I’m largely taking a break from writing while I travel this week and next. But I’ll still plan to collect and share links like the following:
• There’s a lot to contemplate in Wendell Berry’s latest essay, but this part rang truest to this parent: “I dread to say so, but we have become a child-killing nation. The kindest way to put this is to say that we have become a society of people who cannot prevent our own children from being killed in their classrooms or in other gathering places and who do not much mind the killing of other people’s children by weapons of war that we have made and assigned to that purpose.”
• Someone should absolutely found a “John 17 Coalition” of Christians who value unity.
• What can churches offer in a post-Christian culture? Among other things, “deep contemplation, true companionship, sincere dialogue across difference, an identity beyond self-expression, tangible and profound belonging.”
• What should we make of the growing number of Americans who identify as evangelical, but rarely go to church?
• Few congregations are growing faster than a Minnesota megachurch — excuse me, “multi-site church” — that’s connected to Bethel’s denomination.
• I’ve made clear which way I think American Christians ought to vote in next month’s presidential election. But I appreciated the reminder that, “for Christians, all of politics is contingent and provisional. Christian Scripture and theology give us great resources for thinking well about the kinds of communities God intends for humans to live in, the varied ways sin can corrupt our communities, and the wisdom God gives for aiding us in addressing that sin. But our political responses to the Word of God are always imperfect experiments — we try to enact policies that will create conditions of flourishing in our communities, but we know they may fail and we’ll have to try again.”
• Happy 100th birthday to Jimmy Carter, the first former president to reach that milestone. That occasion was an ideal time for Christianity Today to publish a reassessment of Carter: a born-again Christian who lost the support of many white evangelicals.
• CT also reported on how Helene-related disaster relief in Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas is stretching Christian aid organizations almost beyond their capacity.
• What happened to cities like Asheville, NC should make us more skeptical of the notion that some places are “climate havens.”
• Among the many communities hit hard by flooding in the Southeast is Montreat College, which had to move its students off campus and remains closed. Click to help that college or its neighbors.
• Elsewhere in North Carolina, a plane crash killed five people… near the Wright Brothers memorial at Kitty Hawk.
• World War II is still doing damage in Japan, where an American bomb buried under an airport runway finally detonated.
• That conflict was extraordinarily complicated in many ways. But no, Republican candidate for Senate in Minnesota, the winners of WWII weren’t “the bad guys.”
• Much discussed in academic circles, this Atlantic report on Ivy League college students who find themselves unprepared to read entire books mostly made me appreciate our kids’ 9th grade English teacher, who started the year by having them read, discuss, and write about a dystopian novel.
• Maybe not coincidentally, employers increasingly think that college graduates aren’t ready for the workforce — in part because they lack soft skills and the ability to work autonomously.
• This has been my experience of Christian higher ed as well: “the presence of a common Christian identity encourages a student to trust that his classmates will respond with civility when he shares an opinion.”
• As a college professor who loves sports and teaches a sports history course, I think this is an eminently fair question in the age of NIL, Coach Prime, and superconferences: “what does college football have to do with college?”
• Finally, RIP Pete Rose. I wasn’t one of those baseball fans who thought he belonged in the Hall of Fame despite gambling on games, but there’s no denying his complicated legacy for a sport he loved to play.