Thirty Three Things (v.8)

When you encounter a present-day view of Holy Scripture, you encounter more than a view of Scripture. What you meet is a total view of God and the world, that is, a total theology, which is both an ontology, declaring what there is, and an epistemology, stating how we know what there is. This is necessarily so, for a theology is a seamless robe, a circle within which everything links up with everything else through its common grounding in God. Every view of Scripture, in particular, proves on analysis to be bound up with an overall view of God and man.

A: I NEVER look. It’s none of my business. Involving yourself in people’s private affairs can lead to being subpoenaed in a lawsuit or criminal trial. Besides, I’d prefer not knowing about a client’s drug stash, personal porn, or belly button lint collection.

When I’m done I gather my tools and walk to the truck to write my invoice. Sometimes I’m out of the room before they open it. I don’t want to be nearby if there is a booby trap.

In spite of this widespread view on the historical relations between science and religion, historians of science have long known that religious factors played a significantly positive role in the emergence and persistence of modern science in the West. Not only were many of the key figures in the rise of science individuals with sincere religious commitments, but the new approaches to nature that they pioneered were underpinned in various ways by religious assumptions.

9. Fact of the Week: Earning a Bachelor’s degree entails listening to an average of 1,500 hours of lectures. The average average 70-year-old New England churchgoer of the eighteenth century listened to some 15,000 hours of sermons in his or her lifetime.

11. Quote of the Week: “The essence of the Christian religion consists in this, that the creation of the Father, devastated by sin, is restored in the death of the Son of God, and recreated by the Holy Spirit into the kingdom of God.”—Herman Bavinck, Gereformeerde Dogmatiek

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12. Animal Image of the Week: The World’s Most Menacing Bird

A forgetful photographer had the shock of his life when this soaring golden eagle made off with his knife. Dutch snapper Han Bouwmeester had been using the utensil, in Västerbotten, Sweden, to carve up chunks of meat in a bid to attract the birds of prey. But, busy with the task in hand, the wildlife aficionado clumsily dropped it in the snow.

Going back 100, 150 years, American cities were disgusting—and New York City was notorious as the filthiest and stinkiest. . . .

The money set aside for street cleaning was going into the pockets of the Tweed and Tammany politicians. Eventually, it got to be that it was so dirty for so long, no one thought that it could be any different. Imagine, on your own block, that you can’t cross the street, even at the corner, without paying a street kid with a broom to clear a path for you, because the streets were layered in this sludge of manure, rotting vegetables, ash, broken up furniture, debris of all kind. It was called “corporation pudding” after the city government. And it was deep—in some cases knee-deep.

What we call buttermilk today has nothing at all to do with butter. In fact, the stuff known as cultured buttermilk at your local supermarket—-i.e. milk that has been deliberately soured—-is a 20th-century invention, and the product of a health-food diet craze dating back to the flapper era.

“As long as people have made butter there’s been buttermilk,” says Anne Mendelson, a culinary historian and the author of Milk: The Surprising Story of Milk Through the Ages. Careful: Here, she’s talking about a byproduct of churning whole milk or cream—-the thin, white liquid that Wilder wrote about.

It is a little-known but undisputed historical fact that Johannes Gutenberg did not invent the printing press. Though the Gutenberg Bible was certainly the first mass produced printed work, it was hardly the first printed book—- nor was it even the first made using movable type. Chinese and Korean inventors had been producing printed books for centuries before Gutenberg was born.

Every polar bear alive today shares a common maternal ancestor, and it isn’t even a bear from the same species. Their mitochondrial DNA reveals a 100,000 year story of interbreeding and hybridization…and the story is far from over.

Everyone’s seen the police shows in which they shuffle suspects into a room with a mirror on the side. How do the police see in while the suspect doesn’t see out?

The mirror is covered with a light silver film. This film acts as a kind of grating. It lets about half of the light that hits it go through, while sending half back. From then on, it’s just the lighting. Inside the interrogation room, the lights are bright. That sends a flood of light to the mirror, half of which gets turned back on the people in the room. Outside the interrogation room, the lights are dimmed. Only a trickle of light makes it to the mirror, and half of that comes back.

Answer: It’s a declaration of citizenship in Christ’s kingdom. It’s a passport. It’s an announcement made in the pressroom of Christ’s kingdom. It’s the declaration that a professing individual is an official, licensed, card-carrying, bona fide Jesus representative.

More concretely, church membership is a formal relationship between a local church and a Christian characterized by the church’s affirmation and oversight of a Christian’s discipleship and the Christian’s submission to living out his or her discipleship in the care of the church.

Your morning cup of coffee may start to taste even better after a major government study found that frequent coffee drinkers have a lower risk of dying from a variety of diseases, compared with people who drink little or no coffee.

The origins of the taco are really unknown. My theory is that it dates from the 18th century and the silver mines in Mexico, because in those mines the word “taco” referred to the little charges they would use to excavate the ore. These were pieces of paper that they would wrap around gunpowder and insert into the holes they carved in the rock face. When you think about it, a chicken taquito with a good hot sauce is really a lot like a stick of dynamite. The first references [to the taco] in any sort of archive or dictionary come from the end of the 19th century. And one of the first types of tacos described is called tacos de minero—-miner’s tacos. So the taco is not necessarily this age-old cultural expression; it’s not a food that goes back to time immemorial.

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