1. Learning about our faith from atheists
Larry Alex Taunton writes for The Atlantic about the reasons college students walk away from religion. As he talked with members of campus atheistic groups about their journeys away from faith, he got some surprises responses about what pushed them away (and what didn’t). Interestingly, he found that these young atheists had a tremendous amount of respect for those who, in their estimation, actually believed what they claimed to believe and who stood by their convictions.

2. The future of poverty reduction
The Economist weighs in on emerging post-MDG plans to continue reducing extreme poverty:

So how realistic is it to think the world can end extreme poverty in a generation? To meet its target would mean maintaining the annual one-percentage-point cut in the poverty rate achieved in 1990-2010 for another 20 years. That would be hard. It will be more difficult to rescue the second billion from poverty than it was the first. Yet it can be done. The world has not only cut poverty a lot but also learned much about how to do it. Poverty can be reduced, albeit not to zero. But a lot will have to go right if that is to happen.

3. Christianity in its Global Context
While it may not make for particularly riveting reading cover-to-cover, there’s a lot of helpful and interesting stuff in this new report from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Seminary.

4. Common Good Edinburgh
I had a great Skype conversation yesterday with Duncan McFadzean (@DuncanMcFadzean), comparing notes about what we’re trying to do with Common Good PHX and Common Good Edinburgh, respectively. Here’s a bit about what’s happening in Scotland:

We are a group of people who care about Edinburgh. We believe that our city has very great potential for good, both as a place to live together, and in its wider effects on the world. We appreciate that lots of people are working hard to keep the city running, to solve its problems, to try to ensure everyone is cared for, and to develop new ventures. And we recognise that it is often these people, all across our communities, who are best placed to imagine and see this potential and to increasingly see it realised. We want to encourage, provoke and facilitate conversations around the ‘common good’ of the city. What would the city look like if it fulfilled its potential for good?

5. Syncopated

[Photo: Edinburgh, Scotland via gdefon.com]

– David Whyte, Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity

1. The geography of Bob Dylan
Slate put together a great map representing all the actual places that have made their way into Dylan’s songs:

Bob Dylan’s music, it’s often said, happens in a world of its own—where the highway is for gamblers and you’re always 1,000 miles from home. It’s a surreal, ethereal realm, lawless but for chance, allusion, and rhyme. And yet it is our world, because there’s another, parallel tendency in Dylan’s songs: the direct place-name reference. Once the amateur Dylanologist tries to think of some, they flood the brain… And so, to mark Dylan’s 72nd birthday and the 50th anniversary of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his breakthrough album, we present Bob Dylan’s World, an interactive map with entries for every place-name in a song written by Dylan and released on some kind of album.

2. Vocation and (com)passion
David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) on the dangers of utilitarian vocations that paradoxically serve to keep passions at a safe distance:

If you choose a profession that doesn’t arouse your everyday passion for the sake of serving instead some abstract faraway good, you might end up as a person who values the far over the near. You might become one of those people who loves humanity in general but not the particular humans immediately around. You might end up enlarging the faculties we use to perceive the far — rationality — and eclipsing the faculties we use to interact with those closest around — affection, the capacity for vulnerability and dependence. Instead of seeing yourself as one person deeply embedded in a particular community, you may end up coolly looking across humanity as a detached god.

3. Socio-economic reconciliation
The good folks at the Chalmers Center (@chalmerscenter) urge us to consider “the great divide” and where we fit in:

Take a moment to explore your city. What is the average income for your neighborhood compared to the rest of the state? Does the socio-economic makeup of your church reflect that of the community around it? If your church is in a wealthy community, are there strategically placed, effective ministries in low-income areas with which you might partner? If you want to go even deeper, examine rental expenses and income levels throughout your city. Does the relationship between rental prices and income remain roughly consistent between neighborhoods? Or do residents in particular low-income neighborhoods face equal or higher housing costs compared to residents in higher-income areas?

4. Why Kuyper matters
There has been a spate of new books published about Abraham Kuyper lately, and the American religious historian Mark Noll wrote the forward to one of the massive ones. Eerdmans published the forward on its blog, and here’s an excerpt:

The vigor of Kuyper’s convictions, along with his strenuous efforts at putting them into practice for religious, educational, and political purposes in the Netherlands — and with the significant numbers around the world who have found his ideas inspiring — makes him a figure of world historical significance. It also means that a biography like this one must be done with care, so that readers come to understand Kuyper in his own life context as well as the influence his ideas have had.

5. Churches and cities as partners
Here’s an interview with Kevin Palau (@kevinpalau), an evangelist, and Sam Adams (@PDXSamAdams), the former mayor of Portland (a city not necessarily known for its Christians) on what it looks like for churches and cities to act as partners for the common good.

[Image: readreidread.wordpress.com]

– Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

1. Beauty will save the world
Mako Fujimura (@iamfujimura) gave the commencement address this year at Messiah College. Here’s an excerpt:

You are graduating toward a world full of bullet holes. What should we, then, turn our attention to? What should we run toward? Can we, too, turn back to the flowers we have trampled upon? What does it mean to “graduate”? “Graduate” can mean to “rise above.” We are to rise above the darkened realities, the confounding problems of our time. We are to rise above the rancor of discord, above our ideological warfare, above civil wars and World Wars. We are to rise above ourselves, our selfishness, our own drive to master the world, our desire to map out our own destiny apart from God.

2. Food, famine, and aid
At the Q 2012 gathering, Gabe Lyons (@GabeLyons) facilitated a discussion with Stephan Bauman (@stephanjbauman) David Beckmann (@davidbeckmann), and Paul Weisenfeld on aid and development:

The split between the “haves” and “have-nots” is ever-apparent, but the reality of world crises isn’t always accurately depicted and the proposed solutions sometimes hurt more than they help. How can we discern the truth about global needs so we can effectively meet them? And what types of solutions are best? This Q panel convenes experts on global humanitarian crises to discuss what is behind these problems and how we should respond.

3. Putting war on trial
Danny Carroll, the Guatemalan-American biblical scholar I included in Repaso two weeks ago, has written a nuanced piece reflecting on mixed opinions about the legacy of Rios Montt, and invites Christians to reexamine our attitudes about war itself:

Decades after his rule in Guatemala, the Ríos Montt trial is an opportunity for Christians to rethink attitudes toward war. The genocide verdict should lead us to reflect more broadly on why we continue to endorse politics of violence. We must learn from that dreadful time that the political end cannot justify inhumane means for those who claim the faith.

4. Putting y’all back in the Bible
John Dyer (@johndyer) introduces Texas Bible, a software project that makes up for the second person plural deficit many of us non-Texans unknowingly bring with us to readings of Scripture. At first glance it may seem silly, but I’ve been convinced for quite a while that we misread Scripture when we read every “you” in the singular without a second thought. Here’s some of Dyer’s background on the project:

Here in Texas (and in the Southern US more generally), I tell my audience that we have a perfect equivalent to the original Greek/Hebrew second person plural: “y’all” the contraction of “you all.” This of course always gets me a good laugh. And this is not unique to the Southern US – many other areas of the English speaking world also have spoken forms of you plural such as “you guys,” “yinz,” and “you lot.” A few weeks ago, I decided to see how many times this happens. It turns out there are at least 4,720 verses (2,698 in the Hebrew Bible and 2,022 in the Greek) with you plural translated as English “you” which could lead a reader to think it is directed at him or her personally rather than the Church as a community.

5. Transcending the job description
My father-in-law Thom Olmstead was profiled by Christy Tennant Krispin (@ctk206) for This Is Our City about his 37 years of faithfulness as a public school teacher in an unglamorous school district. It makes all of us pretty proud.

[Image: nycreligion.info]