Leadingchurch.com

http://reason.com/blog/2018/05/10/cornell-student-underwear-thesis-chai

The student, Letitia Chai, was practicing her presentation in class while wearing cutoff jean shorts. That outfit, The Cornell Daily Sun reports, drew a rebuke from professor Rebekah Maggor, who asked, “Is that really what you would wear?”

“I do not tell my students what to wear, nor do I define for them what constitutes appropriate dress,” Maggor later clarified in an email to the Sun. “I ask them to reflect for themselves and make their own decisions.” Indeed, the syllabus warns students to “dress appropriately for the persona” they plan to present.

Maggor apologized for the remark anyway, after Chai stormed out of the class. She eventually returned, stripped down to her underwear, and continued with the presentation.

Chai stripped again during her actual senior thesis presentation, in front of students and professors. She said she “stood in solidarity with people who have been asked to ‘question themselves’ based on others’ perception of their appearances,” according to the Sun. She asked the audience to join her—and some removed articles of clothing. Afterward, she led a roundtable discussion about diversity and inclusion.

Here the sources: a) Matt Dillahunty: The Superiority of Secular Morality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq2C7fyVTA4

b) Atheist Debates – Dillahunty vs Slick – Is Secular Humanism superior to Christianity? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKlycI9ZKsY and supplementary…

c) Atheist Debates – Morality https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAQFYgyEACI

If you’re interested to find out Matt’s views about it, I would start with a) and c) to get a rough picture and watch (if at all) b) last, because it’s so much longer. You’re welcome.

https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/love-again/

http://voxday.blogspot.hk/2018/05/mailvox-answer-to-prayer.html

http://bigthink.com/videos/heather-heying-why-unintelligent-protest-may-kill-democracy

We’re chasing dopamine, seratonin, I want to be on the inside, and that requires an outside.

https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2018/05/how-u2-betrayed-rock-n-roll

To say that abortion is the slavery of the present is more than rhetoric, because each of the two in its way involves the purchasing of the convenience of one with the life of another. It is never about compassion, or health, or freedom of any kind worth the name, these being just weasel-worded pretexts. In the reality of its everyday existence, abortion is about spilling blood for money, about stamping out innocent but inopportune lives, about pretending there is no judgment, about the white death rising from smokestacks on the horizon, alien clouds with streaks of human in them.

And abortion will go the way of slavery also, when medical science identifies the child’s earliest susceptibility to pain, and posterity will look back in horror at this present moment and every shred of our reputation for human feeling will be in the dumpster of history.

http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-governors-race-gavin-newsom-affair-20180207-story.html 

https://twitter.com/sabasimorgh/status/994108084095143936

https://www.cardus.ca/comment/article/the-church-upward-and-outward-implications-of-the-ascension/

Ascension means the church possesses an institutional otherworldliness that allows it to be a counter-cultural presence in the world. Its institutional centre is located in heaven. Christ the “head,” the founder and foundation of the church, does not occupy physical space on earth. As an institution, the church is ordered to an alternative economy. This economy, the kingdom of God, takes its direction from Jesus’s heavenly location where all things have been rearranged around him.

Clearly the church takes up real institutional space in the world, but not as the kind of institution that enters into a direct competitive relationship with other institutions. If Jesus, instead of ascending to heaven, had restored the kingdom to Israel, the church would have become an institution in competition with other institutions, most notably the Roman Empire. But ascension means Jesus is the King of kings. There is no real competition between Jesus and Caesar. That would assume they occupy the same kind of space and exercise the same kind of power, but they do not. Indeed there are conflicting allegiances that arise when Christians inhabit both kinds of institutions at the same time, which they always do. Through the centuries, believers have suffered the consequences of these conflicts through persecution and martyrdom. And yet despite these conflicts, the church does not have a zero-sum relationship with other institutions. The church is not trying to replace the state or the nonprofit. It’s not vying for the same kind of power, influence, and space as these institutions. Its relevance is not determined by how well it positions itself within the needs of the institutional landscape, but rather by how well it responds to its ascended Lord in heaven who sends it to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth.