ICYMI Thursday

by Tom Goodman

Conservatives feel they have to remain closeted in the Bay Area high-tech world.

 

Just looking at sick people primes your immune system

 

What was Samsung going for with their default ringtone? I’m guessing an over-caffeinated whistler. Please. Make. It. Stop.

 

Last Sunday’s “Forecast” was the best Mad Men episode yet. “This is supposed to be about my job, not the meaning of life,” Peggy says as Don Draper critiques the sufficiency of her plans for the future. “So you think those things are unrelated?” he replies. This episode was about what future one ought to want, and whether it’s even worth thinking about (“I just wanna eat dinner,” Sally said, probably best capturing the short-term goals of most people in the show). Reviews by Wired, The Atlantic.

 

“A strong new body of science, developed during the last decade to what we now consider to be a level of certainty, demonstrates, first, that any sort of spirituality becomes a source of health and thriving for kids and, second, that the lack of spirituality in families and youth culture can be a big source of suffering.” Lisa Miller, for TIME.

 

What sets Austin apart from everywhere else? Austinites weigh in in the Zandan poll.

 

In discussions about same-sex relations, someone will inevitably say that Jesus never said anything about it. I suppose that is supposed to imply that Jesus was indifferent to the matter, or that only the “red letter” words of the Bible (the words of Jesus that some Bible publishers print in red) are significant. But Scot McKnight suggests that Jesus, like any first-century Jew, would have had Leviticus 18 in mind when opposing porneia (“sexual immorality”) in several of his statements. And Leviticus 18 included same-sex relations on the list of prohibited sexual activity.

 

Besides, even if Jesus made no reference to homosexuality, does that imply that he would have been at odds with everything else in the Bible? Are the “red letter” statements more significant than the “black letter” statements? Karen Swallow Prior: “All of the words of Jesus come through the narrators of the Bible. If the black letters of the narrators are reliable, so too are the red letters of Christ. If the narrators are unreliable, however, then the words of Christ they convey are untrustworthy as well. The only way to the red letters is through the black letters….It’s as impossible to be a Biblicist without being a Christ follower as it is to follow Christ without the Word… all of it.” Specifically, she reacts to the weaknesses of an opinion piece by Marv Knox of the BGCT’s Baptist Standard.

 

Without religious liberty protections, Matthew Lee Anderson wonders when militant voices demand that “religious colleges and universities like Biola, or Liberty, or Wheaton, or any others [like my Baylor] that maintain sexual behavior standards for students and faculty that prohibit same-sex sexual activity should lose their tax-exempt status…and their federal funding (via student aid).  For most institutions, losing both would be a death blow: but if our progressive friends are serious about ending an intrinsically and structurally discriminatory regime of sexual mores (on their view), wouldn’t they have every reason to pursue such measures…? Why should we leave any social space (much less ecclesiastical space!) for those who disagree…? Same-sex marriage will lead to a soft-despotism because it has to.”