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The science behind the blue/yellow black/white dress
Posted in Daily Links and Notes
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Can You Save the World From Oscar’s Podium?
Oscar Speeches
Oscar speeches have a predictable pattern:
- Be humble: express your surprise and elation at receiving this award
- Role the credits: Name all the people who were involved in the film that you received the award for.
- Promote a cause
Notable Speeches from 2015
- Graham Moore: “Stay weird, I promise you when your time comes to be on this stage encourage the next person…”
- Patricia Arquette: Women have been doing for others, its our time to demand income equality (camera zooms to cheering Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez)
- Common and John Legend: Gave probably the most articulate speech saying “the fight for justice in the civil rights movement must continue”
They are saying some very good things
- We shouldn’t ostracize people because they are “different” or “weird”
- Equal pay for equal work
- This world is unjust. Things are not the way they should be and we should work to change that.
Posted in On the way to Sunday's sermon
Tagged Jennifer Lopez, John Legend, Lent, Meryl Streep, Oprah Winfrey, Patricia Arquette
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CS Lewis from Penitentiary Prayer
“he chose, on that night to plumb the depths of Christian experience, to resemble not the heroes of His army but the very weakest camp followers and unfits;”
Posted in Daily Links and Notes
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Cities Increasingly Segregated by Class
“It is not so much the size of the gap between the rich and poor that drives segregation,” they write, “as the ability of the super-wealthy to isolate and wall themselves off from the less well-to-do.”
The interesting pattern: By income, the wealthy (households making more than $200,000 a year) are more segregated than the poor (families living under the federal poverty line). By education, people with college degrees are more segregated than people with less than a high school diploma. By occupation, the group that Florida has coined the “creative class” is more segregated than the working class.
New York, San Francisco and Boston may attract diverse populations: people working in high tech and low-wage retail, workers with master’s degrees and GEDs, parents pulling in six figures and minimum wages. But in these cities, mounting evidence suggests those people aren’t living anywhere near each other. Which is to say that they may be experiencing the very same city in very different ways.
Posted in Daily Links and Notes
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CS Lewis on the Obstinacy in Belief
We believe that His intention is to create a certain personal relation between Himself and us, a relation really sui generis but analogically describable in terms of filial or of erotic love. Complete trust is an ingredient in that relation— such trust as could have no room to grow except where there is also room for doubt. To love involves trusting the beloved beyond the evidence, even against much evidence. No man is our friend who believes in our good intentions only when they are proved. No man is our friend who will not be very slow to accept evidence against them. Such confidence , between one man and another, is in fact almost universally praised as a moral beauty, not blamed as a logical error. And the suspicious man is blamed for a meanness of character, not admired for the excellence of his logic.
There is, you see, no real parallel between Christian obstinacy in faith and the obstinacy of a bad scientist trying to preserve a hypothesis although the evidence has turned against it. Unbelievers very pardonably get the impression that an adherence to our faith is like that, because they meet Christianity, if at all, mainly in apologetic works. And there, of course, the existence and beneficence of God must appear as a speculative question like any other. Indeed, it is a speculative question as long as it is a question at all. But once it has been answered in the affirmative, you get quite a new situation. To believe that God —at least this God— exists is to believe that you as a person now stand in the presence of God as a Person.
Lewis, C. S. (2002-11-04). The World’s Last Night: And Other Essays (Harvest Book) (p. 26). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
Colossian Forum: Jesus, Evolution, the Fall and Max the Confessor
If Jesus reveals the eternal Logos to be the action of love that unites and harmonizes creatures, then the Fall refers to an a-logical, irrational, unloving way of being in the world. Maximus says as much in his Commentary on the Our Father: “the Word is the uniting of what is distant…and unreason (alogos) is the division of what is united.”[2] The Fall, in other words, refers to a condition in which relationships between creatures are beset by struggle and strife so that creatures are unable to realize all that God wants them to be. To be in a fallen state is to be frustrated in your ability to realize the potential that God intends, and prevented from living in harmonious relationship with others, the world, and with God.
Is it crucial for us to identify the “Fall” with a particular couple (Adam and Eve) in a particular place (the Garden of Eden) at a particular time (roughly six thousand years ago)? Perhaps. Perhaps not. But it certainly is crucial to appreciate that the disordering of relationships (which is a denial of the eternal Logos and a distortion of each creature’s own logos) is something that happens in time and in creation, and that it has effects that touch all creation. Is it reflected in the development of a certain kind of self-consciousness or a particular way of standing in the world? Of course, we would dearly love to know exactly how and when the Fall came to be, but scripture is not interested in explaining something like the origins of evil or the Fall. What scripture does is describe the nature of our predicament, and then lead us into the ways of redemption and peace.
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