Leadingchurch.com

The Atlantic

This is an interesting piece because

a. It recognizes that marriage is a social structures that provide real services to people, often services they don’t anticipate when they’re making a decision to marry or not to marry.

b. The decline of it leaves people who either didn’t get in or got out to be vulnerable to poverty, health needs, etc. and suggests that the government should pick up the slack.

c. The article does not, however, find a way to figure out how to pay for this during a wave when entitlements are expected to recede even for services that are already considered vital.

So, do we are left with the common American conflict: do you create a government economic and well-being incentive to create a non-cash system to meet needs (family) or do you institutionalize the need-meeting with cash.

The Atlantic

• Update to the DSM-5
• NIMH abandons DSM

The Atlantic

Third hand here via the excellent blog “Grateful To the Dead”

And a summary of the ten myths exposed by Ken:

Stewart discusses, with ample evidence and thorough explanations, four myths Calvinists should not be circulating (but are):

1. One Man (Calvin) and one City (Geneva) are determinative
2. Calvin’s view of (double) predestination must be ours
3. TULIP is the yardstick of the truly Reformed
4. Calvinists take a dim view of revival and awakening

And six myths non-Calvinists should not be circulating (but are):

1. Calvinism is largely antimissionary
2. Calvinism promotes antinomianism
3. Calvinism leads to theocracy
4. Calvinism undermines the creative arts
5. Calvinism resists gender equality
6. Calvinism has fostered racial inequality.

• Evangelical outpost’s roundup: I’ll include many of the links below
• Atlantic Piece on Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss
• A Joe Carter glossary and history on LGBTQ terminology on TGC
• Another Joe Carter piece on “When Did Christianity Become Compatible with Idolatry?”
• Matthew Lee Anderson works the SSM question in the light of pro-life movement

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/30/opinion/luhrmann-belief-is-the-least-part-of-faith.html?hp&_r=2&

The role of belief in religion is greatly overstated, as anthropologists have long known. In 1912, Émile Durkheim, one of the founders of modern social science, argued that religion arose as a way for social groups to experience themselves as groups. He thought that when people experienced themselves in social groups they felt bigger than themselves, better, more alive — and that they identified that aliveness as something supernatural. Religious ideas arose to make sense of this experience of being part of something greater. Durkheim thought that belief was more like a flag than a philosophical position: You don’t go to church because you believe in God; rather, you believe in God because you go to church.

In fact, you can argue that religious belief as we now conceptualize it is an entirely modern phenomenon. As the comparative religion scholar Wilfred Cantwell Smith pointed out, when the King James Bible was printed in 1611, “to believe” meant something like “to hold dear.” Smith, who died in 2000, once wrote: “The affirmation ‘I believe in God’ used to mean: ‘Given the reality of God as a fact of the universe, I hereby pledge to Him my heart and soul. I committedly opt to live in loyalty to Him. I offer my life to be judged by Him, trusting His mercy.’ Today the statement may be taken by some as meaning: ‘Given the uncertainty as to whether there be a God or not, as a fact of modern life, I announce that my opinion is yes.’ ”

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/06/03/seeing-calvinism-from-the-inside/