Leadingchurch.com

CT

Not many blacks either but that’s not this woman’s point. Wired

Criticisms about representations of gender (or race and other diversity) are often countered in fandom by sociological or scientific analyses attempting to explain why the inequality happens according to the internal logic of the fictional world. As though there is any real reason that anything happens in a story except that someone chose to write it that way.

Fiction is not Darwinian: It contains no impartial process of evolution that dispassionately produces the events of a fictional universe. Fiction is miraculously, fundamentally Creationist. When we make worlds, we become gods. And gods are responsible for the things they create, particularly when they create them in their own image.

Alan Jacobs at the The American Conservative

In general, practicing such triage is okay — indeed, it has to be okay because there’s no plausible alternative until we live much longer, eliminate sleep, and acquire faster internal processors — but it’s the sort of thing that can easily go wrong, primarily because, as a self-justifying defense mechanism, we try to fortify our position by attacking or dismissing all the people who believe the things that we’ve decided not to investigate.

And this is what bothers me: I really dislike writing people off. In fact, I believe that as a Christian I am forbidden to write people off, or to assume that they have worse reasons for holding their views than I have for holding mine. (Didn’t Jesus say something relevant about motes and beams?)

Yahoo news.  along with 40k other terms

“Fisherman” is now a “fisher.” “Penmanship” is called “handwriting.” And “manhole cover” is, well, still “manhole cover.” Some words don’t have an easy replacement.

Others do: “His” is now “his and hers.” “Clergyman” is now “clergy.” “Journeyman plumber” is now “journey-level plumber,”

Religion Dispatches

Written by an anonymous gay faculty member at a Christian college. Also mentions CRC Synod decision.

Religion Dispatches

Huff Po

NYT

NYT

“How to be a preacher” http://feedly.com/k/122Jth4