Posted by A few good reads to kick off your week. One should never approach Monday without a good read around.
To kick off, this piece by Kutter Callaway of Fuller Seminary really hit home with me today when I read it in a back issue of Fuller Magazine that we got at work a few months ago. (Yeah, I know, I’m behind.) He discusses the way that chronic pain distorts our view of reality, usually attacking our sense of hope the most viciously. And how Christians dealing with chronic pain gain insight into the hope offered by the Gospel. A powerful read.
Restoring Hope: Being Weak and Becoming Well – Fuller Studio
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From the same issue of Fuller Magazine come two excellent pieces about Christians and hospitality. This ancient set of practices has worn very thin in our modern age, and these scholars take time to explain why Christians should pursue hospitality even more fervently now. In fact, hospitality might create a space where Christians and Muslims can gather on common ground.
Restoring Hospitality: A Blessing for Visitor and Host – Fuller Studio
A Moratorium on Hospitality? – Fuller Studio
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Time is not just money. It’s also power. And one of the significant discrepancies between working women and working men lies in their access to uninterrupted free time to think, create, or connect.
This article by Brigid Schulte gives a name to the fragmented craziness that women experience as they try to juggle work, parenting, and marriage: leisure confetti.
While many working men are able to access blocks of uninterrupted time, most women — especially mothers — get their leisure time only in snatches, and even then it’s dirtied with the mental anxiety of carpool logistics, supper planning, family scheduling, budgeting, etc.
Confetti. You can’t build or create anything or even feel like a real human being if the only time you get to yourself comes in scraps.
Brigid Schulte: Why time is a feminist issue
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I never talk on the phone much now, and aside from my teenaged spurt of nightly phone sessions with my best friends (or calls home during my college days), I’ve never been a huge phone talker. Texting was (and is) a god-send: concise communication that people can read when they’re ready, apart from the disruption of a ringing phone.
This Slate writer disagrees, and wonders if we’ve lost something…
The Death of the Telephone Call |Slate
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This next one may make some folks mad…. but that’s not my intention. In fact, I’d like to post this as much to invite critique as suggest alliance. But I think Americans need to turn a critical (in the sense of objective / evaluation) eye on football. It’s a dangerous game – one that grinds up the bodies (and brains) of players for the violent pleasure of the masses. This bothers me.
And here, this author suggests an even more troubling link – that the US military is happy to keep Americans confusing patriotism with team loyalty, to see football as a kind of American war.
I’m not a peacenik but it doesn’t take a 60s hippie conscience to question whether Americans can tell the difference between patriotism and nationalism, between bandwagon-riding mob behavior and common sense.
How the NFL Sells – and Unabashedly Benefits From – the Inextricable Link Between Football and War |The Cauldron (Sports Illustrated)
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A powerful reminder that ministry which sees the recipients as “needy” will fail to be as successful as it should be.
“Do you want to know why we love him [another missionary]? He needs us. The rest of you have never needed us.”
What’s Wrong with Western Missionaries? | DesiringGod
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I may not be in a classroom any more (an experience that I genuinely miss pretty often), but I want everyone to read this wonderful piece directed to young teachers. It’s a great reminder of why I taught, and why I want to spend my life trying to make education better.
In The Courage to Teach, Parker Palmer suggests that we teach who we are and thus, no matter what we teach, our students judge us as “good” or not according to how we communicate who we are.
Letter to a Young High School Teacher | Comment Magazine
I’ll be back with some book reviews soon. Currently reading 2 or 3 that have been good reads for sure.
Just:Words 