Blog, page 8

Orchard Group blog, on City Church in Lagos, Nigeria:

Lagos is a “city” precisely because it is a concentration of a large number of people, many of whom have yet to hear of God’s love for them. Planting churches in cities like Lagos enables more and more people to encounter and respond to the love of God. Many hear and read the word of God for the first time in church plants. Many learn for the first time that Christ is not merely a religious figure, but God himself who gave up everything to meet their deepest need.

This is why I love the mission of the church and church planting.

Update:Here’s more on the incredible city of Lagos.

Tim Keller for The Gospel Coalition:

You can’t doubt belief A except on the basis of some belief B you’re believing instead at the moment. So, for example, you cannot say, “No one can know enough to be certain about God and religion,” without assuming at that moment that you know enough about the nature of religious knowledge to be certain about that. Doubt your doubts.

Good, quick read where Keller cites and responds to five common “occasions for doubt.”

Via ERLC

Mark Bauerlein for First Things:

When a humanities department selects its materials because they reflect identity groups, it no longer functions as a humanities department. It becomes a project of social group affirmation. The proper criteria of selection—beauty and sublimity, wit and insight—fall behind a work’s representative value.

See also this piece from the NYT.

Luke Stamps last Christmas in an article for the ERLC:

Consider that the central claim of the Christian faith is the belief that God the Son—the eternal Second Person of the Godhead—became a human being in the womb of the Virgin Mary. As the classic Christmas carol “O Come All Ye Faithful” puts it, “God of God, Light of Light; Lo, he abhors not the Virgin’s womb!” God the Son became a human being by taking to himself a complete human nature: a true body and a rational soul (see the Definition of the Council of Chalcedon, AD 451).

Abraham Riesman in Vulture:

Only after speaking with Cuarón did I realize why I wept: not with sorrow, but with hope for my own future. Children of Men imagines a fallen world, yes, but it also imagines a once-cynical person being reborn with purpose and clarity. It’s a story about how people like me, those who have the luxury of tuning out, need to awaken. This has been a brutal year, but we were already suffering from a kind of spiritual infertility: The old ideologies long ago stopped working. In a period where the philosophical pillars supporting the global left, right, and center are crumbling, the film’s desperate plea for the creation and protection of new ideas feels bracingly relevant.

h/t @logangreer, who also urged me to watch Children of Men back in’06.

Fredrik deBoer in The Towner:

To compare a journalist revealing the real identity of a wealthy writer to domestic abuse, enslavement, and sexual assault is to disrespect the victims of those horrible crimes in the comparison. What happened to Ferrante was unpleasant, even exploitative; it was not the same as physical or sexual abuse. This distinction is necessary if we’re to preserve the status such crimes have rightfully earned as uniquely worthy of moral condemnation. Outrage is a finite resource; to attempt to generate it over and over again ensures that it will be harder and harder for it to mean anything in the future.

Cal Newport on “digital minimalism”:

Many digital maximalists, who spend their days immersed in a dreary slog of apps and clicks, justify their behavior by listing all of the potential benefits they would miss if they began culling services from their life. I don’t buy this argument. There’s an infinite selection of activities in the world that might bring some value. If you insist on labeling every activity avoided as value lost, then no matter how frantically you fill your time, it’s unavoidable that the final tally of your daily experience will be infinitely negative.

More in the full article; great to think through coming up on a new year.

Excellent conversation between Nicholas Kristof and Timothy Keller in the NYT:

Kristof: And the Resurrection? Must it really be taken literally?

Keller: Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines.

Kevin DeYoung for TGC:

As we approach the end of the year…. Some of us will put together new exercise goals. Some of us will find the right Bible reading plan for next year. Some of us will zero in on a new schedule for Bible memorization. All of these are important (especially the last two). Let me suggest one other plan for the end of the year: check in on your marriage.

DeYoung offers 15 questions to help assess your marriage. The list was instructive for Lindsay and I to talk through, and it helped us to pinpoint some good things to be intentional about in 2017. I offer some of our notes here, in the event that they might prove useful to others, just as DeYoung’s original list was for us.

DeYoung acknowledges that his questions are neither “perfect” nor “exhaustive,” and there were a couple of questions that we had to tweak to better suit our context or dispositions. For example, while we don’t really “raise our voices” (Question 11), we can still be insolent. So we rephrased the question to read: “Have you rolled your eyes or used sarcasm against one another in the past month?” Adjusting the question like this instantly prompted us to jump back to number 7 (“When is the last time we said ‘I’m sorry’ or ‘I forgive you’?”)

Question 12 asks, “Are we more eager to spend time with someone [else]… than we are with each other?” Again, for us, this hasn’t been a thing. However, exchange “someone” for “a screen” and we’ve got something worth talking about. (Number 7, again.)

But we weren’t only challenged. Happily, we also identified several fronts where 2016 has been a great year for our marriage.

Our big takeaways for 2017? Some kind of shared experience reading the Bible is important. And taking regular walks together — away from screens — to talk and hold hands, makes all the difference.

Jonathan Haidt in an interview on Mind the Campus:

So we acknowledge that if there was no discrimination at all, the field [of social psychology] would still lean left. And that’s perfectly fine with us.  We don’t give a damn about exact proportional representation. What we care about is institutionalized disconfirmation — that is, when someone says something, other people should be out there saying, “Is that really true? Let me try to disprove it.” That is now much less likely to happen if the thing said is politically pleasing to the left.

John Kass in the Tribune:

Yet even reformers go away, like Lawrence Bloom, Hyde Park’s former alderman, the face of good government who got caught up in a federal sting. So in corrupt Chicago — did I mention it’s the city that has earned the title Corruption Capital of America? — we’ve had scores of aldermen indicted since the 1970s, and some more than once. They keep sprouting, like eyes on a potato in your pantry, or a bloodthirsty many-headed hydra if you’re into mythology.

This pains me to post, simply because I prefer good news about where I live, but I am hopeful for a new future for Chicago. Our church and family (even though it provokes eye-rolling from some) fervently pray for a prosperous and just city (Psalm 144:12-14).

Excellent “story map” from ESRI that visualizes both the economic disparity between neighborhoods and the disappearing middle class in several US cities:

And for the first time in recorded history, the middle class no longer constitutes the nation’s economic majority, as upper- and lower-class households together comprise over 50 percent of the population.

But income disparity is visible on the map as well as in the stats. “The wrong side of the tracks” has long been a cultural truism; although the railroad reference may no longer apply, neighborhoods in close proximity to one another often reflect dramatic differences in economic status. And many of the boundaries between wealthy and low-income areas are shifting as cities gentrify and immigrant populations fluctuate.

A couple of years old, but good read from NYT on Instagram and FOMO:

Viewers, meanwhile, are expected to let the sumptuous photos wash over them and chip in with comments (“Gorgeous sunset!”) and heart-shape “likes,” which function as a form of social currency, reinforcing the idea that every shot is a performance worthy of applause. The result is an online culture where the ethic is impress, rather than confess.

It is as if every last image is designed to call to mind Norman Mailer’s book title, “Advertisements for Myself.”

“As ranked by a research team of mathematicians and theoretical physicists.” Of course.

City Lab:

For its study, the group analyzed maps of the world’s 15 largest metro transit networks, as determined by total stations. They considered all the trips a traveler could make from Point A to Point B with two connections, then determined the fastest possible path for a given trip. That framework aligned with behavioral research showing that people can store up to four pieces of information in their working memory at one time—in this case, a trip’s origin, its destination, and two transfer stations.

Like we needed even more reasons to pore over cool maps.