Links to Your World--Tuesday November 6

• Lord of the Rings origami: Each of these statues was made from a single sheet of paper (HT: Neatorama)

• “Building on generations of work to distribute the printed Bible, Christian missionaries said new multimedia presentations in hundreds of languages are vastly expanding the Bible's audience.” (Plugging the Planet Into the Word)

• “Feeling like playing hooky, but nervous about getting caught? The Excused Absence Network has got your back. For about $25, students and employees can buy excuse notes that appear to come from doctors or hospitals. Other options include a fake jury summons or an authentic-looking funeral service program complete with comforting poems and a list of pallbearers.” (link)

• In their cover story, “In God's Name,” The Economist says that religion will play a big role in this century's politics and asks how we should deal with it.

• One young woman’s discovery that gender differences in marriage are part of God’s plan.

• Why we like to get scared.

• Just in case there’s someone who doesn’t know the difference, there are a lot of flavors of “Baptist,” and the deeply-offensive Fred Phelps isn’t our kind of “Baptist.” I’m grateful for the GetReligion weblog and the Washington Times for pointing out the difference.

• "To says that you can't be a thinking, intellectually fulfilled scientist and embrace faith is bunk." M.I.T. professor Rosalind Picard at the University of Waterloo’s Pascal Lectures. She was raised an atheist until someone challenged her to read the Bible as a young adult. "I thought, 'OK, if I'm going to be a well-educated atheist, I should at least read the book that I think is bogus." In the process, she became a believer.

• Imagine getting a knock on the door in the middle of the night. Fire’s approaching and you have 10 minutes to leave. You close the door and consider the question that is becoming an existential ritual for hundreds of thousands of people around the world every year: What do I save from the fire?

• “I never thought there was going to be any sort of nostalgia for childhood in the 1970s, a time of skyrocketing divorce, ‘latch key kids’ and newly liberated adults who sometimes behaved rather badly toward their much less with-it offspring. Yet now, with middle age encroaching upon the girls who cut their hair like Dorothy Hamill and carried lunchboxes that sported the face of the original Bionic Woman, the seventies are coming back to life, and looking a whole lot better in retrospect.” Celebrating girlhood from the 1970s, the author says, is the solution to today’s “toxic girlhood.” (Seventies Something)

• Terry Mattingly does a good job explaining what’s behind the 15-year war for the soul of my alma mater, Baylor University, and why the outcome is so important.

Have you read the previous posts this week? They include the "Song of the Week" (A new series on hymns continues with "It Is Well With My Soul" by Jars of Clay), updates on Lori Shepard's Latvia mission trip (here and here), my review of the little film Bella, a LeaderLines report on how to minister to broken lives in our culture (fourth of a five-part series), as well as a great reaction to the LeaderLines piece.