Kruse Kronicle

How Milennial Are You?

Pew Research: How Milennial Are You?

Take our 14 item quiz and we’ll tell you how "Millennial" you are, on a scale from 0 to 100, by comparing your answers with those of respondents to a scientific nationwide survey. You can also find out how you stack up against others your age.

I scored 23. Halfway between the average Boomer and average Gen Xer.

My Town of Kind!

The New York Observer: My Town of Kind!

A year ago, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, a California-based contributor to the Awl and Gawker, named 26-year-old Manhattanite Katie Baker among her favorite female bloggers in a blog post. Ms. Baker linked appreciatively to the post on her Tumblr, calling Ms. Vargas-Cooper, whom she'd never met, "a lady I luv." After that, "the lovefest continued," said Ms. Baker in a phone interview with The Observer. Ms. Vargas-Cooper commented on Ms. Baker's Tumblr post, writing, "Big fucking fan = me."

The two women began to go out of their way to link to and comment on each other's writings and communicate via Twitter, and Ms. Vargas-Cooper helped Ms. Baker—who asked The Observer not to reveal her day job, where Tumbling is frowned upon—edit some of her writing. When Ms. Baker published an essay on the Duke lacrosse fiasco on the Awl in December, her new friend was one of several commenters who took the high road in defending her against a Negative Nelly in the comments section, asserting, "ELEGANT PIECE, MS. BAKER." And the negative commenter was apparently killed by kindness: he/she staked out Ms. Baker on her personal blog to apologize: "I'm the person who wrote that dick-ish 'Nope, sorry' comment on your Awl article, and it is seriously HAUNTING me! I've never been that mean to someone on the internet, I'm super anti-confrontation and you're a pro and took it pro-ishly, but uggggh I'm sorry I'm such a dick. Really."

With all due respect to the Internet, it has not often been described as a "lovefest"; indeed, it has been better known as a forum for fire-breathing, semi-literate personal attacks. But suddenly, wide swaths of the Web have become bastions of support and earnest civility, where community-members "retweet" or "reblog" each other's bon mots, promiscuously proffer thumbs-up, help sell perfect strangers' books, drive traffic to each other's blogs and real-world events and even defend one another. ...

People are happiest at 74

Ananova: People are happiest at 74

Seventy-four year-olds are the most contented people in the population, according to a new study.

Fewer responsibilities, financial worries and more time to yourself leads to greater contentment, reports the Daily Telegraph.

According to the report from the teenage years until 40 happiness declines. It levels off until 46 and then starts to increase until peaking at 74.

Scientists from Germany and America regularly questioned 21,000 men and women how happy they were with their lives providing a scale from one to seven - seven indicated complete contentment.

Teenagers in their late teens marked themselves at around 5.5 which fell to around 5 by age 40. At 74 happiness averaged at 5.9. ...

Guess this means I've got to wait a quarter century to get really happy.

Linda Valentine Elected to 2nd Term of GAMC

Linda Valentine was elected to a second four-year term of the General Assembly Mission Council pending confirmation of the General Assembly in July. Congratulations Linda! I'm looking forward to seeing what the coming days hold.

The New Chair Elect of GAMC

This afternoon, the good folks of the General Assembly Mission Council elected me chair of the Council for 2010-2012. Thanks to all my GAMC friends. I think we have some exciting days ahead. I look forward to seeing what God has in store!

Loneliness in an Interconnected World

Futurist Society: Loneliness in an Interconnected World

The average American today has only a third as many friends as 25 years ago, and one-fourth have no close confidants at all, according to recently released data from medical researchers. The Internet may be largely to blame, says Michael Bugeja, author of INTERPERSONAL DIVIDE (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Many people have a swarm of friends on Facebook, but do they ever call? “Friending” is not the same as “befriending”—being a friend—Bugeja notes, arguing that instead of creating a global village, the Internet has distracted and distanced us from each other.

One impact is that lonely people have no one to turn to in hard times, whereas during the Depression people relied on each other. Now, when people can no longer afford the communications devices they’ve come to rely on instead of people, they become truly isolated. As a result, suicide rates may increase, even among young children, Bugeja warns.

LISTEN to the Radio Health Journal podcast.

Her Facebook status changed to "single?" Ur dumped

Reuters: Her Facebook status changed to "single?" Ur dumped

LONDON (Reuters) - Digital dumping is on the rise, according to a survey, with growing numbers of people preferring to use email and social networking Web sites to break up with their partners.

Over one third of 2,000 people polled (34 percent) said they had ended a relationship by email, 13 percent had changed their status on Facebook without telling their partners and six percent had released the news unilaterally on Twitter.

By contrast, only two percent had broken up via a mobile phone text.

The rest had split up the old-fashioned way by face-to-face conversation (38 percent) and by telephone (eight percent).

"Digital Dumping will soon take over when it comes to ending a relationship," said Sean Wood, Marketing Manager for DateTheUk dating service for whom the survey was carried out.

"It's often easier, quicker and avoids any misunderstandings."

Nielsen: Teens Sends an Average of 10 Text Messages Per Hour

ParentDish: Nielsen: Teens Sends an Average of 10 Text Messages Per Hour

They may take time out for school and (occasionally) sleep. Otherwise, American teenagers are busy sending an average of 10 text messages per hour.

Researchers for the Nielsen Company learned of the stat after looking at more than 40,000 monthly mobile bills. Nielsen is the same New York marketing and advertising research company that provides ratings for television shows.

Turning their attention to cell phones, researchers also discovered that tweens send an average of four text messages per hour.

Roger Entner, senior vice president of Research and Insights, discussed the revelations in a blog Jan. 26 on the company's Web site.

He writes that kids "text in the morning before they brush their teeth and continue late into the night with the last text messages (also called SMS) sneaked in under the covers right before they close their eyes to sleep. Until now, there has been very little firm data available about how pervasive texting has actually become among the under aged."

Entner calls the results of his company's study "staggering." ...

Parents Train Young Consumers

Marketing Charts: Parents Train Young Consumers

Marketers who target the youth market may be dealing with savvier consumers than they anticipated, according to the latest American Express Spending & Saving Tracker. Seventy-one percent of parents with children ages six to 16 say their children understand the US is in a recession, and 91% say they plan on teaching their children financial responsibility in 2010.

Top Three Savings Lessons Parents Teach Kids

The 91% of parents who plan to teach their kids financial responsibility this year rated the following three as the most important, in order of how many respondents mentioned a particular lesson:

• Understanding debt and its impact on saving and spending (30%).
• Teaching the value of a dollar through an award system like an allowance (25%).
• Basic teaching of how money is earned and used in everyday life (21%).

Kids Become Cost-conscious

Despite the reputation of kids as being selfish and not listening to what they are told, Spending & Saving Tracker results indicate that at least some American kids are hearing what their parents tell them about financial responsibility. One in five children (20%) has indicated to a parent that “maybe we shouldn’t buy that due to the recession.” Interestingly, kids of the affluent were most apt (31%) to suggest that a parent hold back on a particular purchase.

Allowances Represent Spending Opportunity

Marketers of toys, candy and other kid-friendly goods have an opportunity to capture allowance spending, according to the following figures regarding allowance habits of U.S. consumers:

• Sixty-two percent of parents in the general population give their kids a weekly allowance.
• Among the general population giving an allowance, the average amount is $12 a week, or $48 a month.
• Almost half (47%) of the general population giving an allowance expects it to be spent, rather than saved.
• Twenty-three percent of the general population giving an allowance places no restriction on how it is spent.
• Thirteen percent of the general population giving an allowance permits it to be used for non-essentials such as toys, movie tickets and games.
• Ten percent of the general population giving an allowance permits it to be used for essentials such as gas and lunch money. ...

When I was in early grade school I got an allowance contingent upon doing certain chores. One of those chores was that I had to keep books ... record my income and expenses (using broad categories.) I had to present those books to get my allowance. That didn't continue on into my teen years but long enough to get the habit of watching finances and understanding cash flow. I think I was about ten when my folks opened a savings account in my name where I could deposit or withdraw savings.

What training did you have as a kid? What are you doing to teach financial responsibility to your children?

Why (most) women like to shop

MSNBC: Why (most) women like to shop

Mall-loving behavior may be linked to our hunting and foraging past.

Our ancestors didn't shop for holiday gifts, but the way we buy may owe credit to thousands of years of evolution.

In a new study, researchers propose that our mall-visiting behaviors harken back to the days when men hunted and women foraged.

Modern men, for example, generally want to get into a store and get right back out — just like their hunting forefathers wanted to find and bring meat home as quickly as possible. On the other hand, women get back to their foraging roots by sorting through racks of sweaters on sale — as if scanning plants for signs of ripeness.

Plenty of people defy these general trends, of course, but the findings might help men and women better understand each other and limit arguments that surround shopping, said lead author Daniel Kruger, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan School of Public Health in Ann Arbor, Mich.

His new theory could also help marketers design better stores that cater to gender differences.

"Women would want to have more things to search through and to be able to experience them, touch them, feel textures and see colors," Kruger said. "With a guy, he knows the properties he wants. It may be more efficient to have a counter that the guy walks up to, says what he wants, and they go get that item from a storage room." ...

What do you think? Evolution at work or influenced by culturally created gender roles?

Innovation and Projection of the Future

One of the persistent recurring fallacies in social/economic analysis is to project the trajectories of current trends indefinitely in to the future to point where there is a collapse. Ignored is the dynamic feedback loop of the market indicating availability of resources and changes in people's preferences. Here is a an interesting piece titled, "The Cure for Manure in the Streets":

Every decade has a far-reaching cure for its ills. Around 1900 the problem was pollution. Three million horses inhabited urban America, with the healthier ones contributing from twenty to twenty-five pounds of manure each day. On every street their  presence was evident as swarms of flies circulated and pungent colors permeated the air. To add to the atmosphere, almost every block boasted stables packed with urine-saturated hay.

Four-legged pollution was no alleviated by a change in the weather. When it rained, the streets turned to a muddy manure mush. During dry spells heave carriage and foot traffic beat the dung to a fine dust which, as one contemporary put it, blew "from the pavement as a sharp piercing powder, to cover our clothes, ruin our furniture and blow up into our nostrils."

New York alone was home to approximately 150,000 horses or, pessimistically, to some ten million pounds of manure a year. The offerings of the 15,000 horese of Rochester, New York, in 1900, would have covered and acre of soil wiht a heap 175 feet high. In light of ever-increasing production, many Americans feared that their cities would soon disappear under the dung.

But a godsend from turn-of-the-century pollution was becoming available. At last, rejoiced Americans, the curtain was closing on the age of equine air. Cities would now be cleaner, quieter, healthier places in which to work and live. At last, the age of the automobile arrived .

(Published in One Night Stands With American History, 197. Originally Otto L. Bettman, The Good Old Days: They Were Terrible (New York: Random House, 1974) p. 3.)

Imagine if thinkers of the day had constrained social and economic development to horse and buggy technology because continuation of the trends would spell our doom. Where people have the freedom to make their preferences known and businesses have the freedom to respond, problems get solved. Some times government must get involved to make sure those benefiting from externalities bear their fair share of the economic costs but the solutions come from iterative feedback loops in the market. My guess is that, just as with the auto replacing the horse, market place innovation is what well bring the best green technologies into being.

Mobile phones become pocket banks in poor countries

Breitbart:  Mobile phones become pocket banks in poor countries

An Afghan police officer gets his salary in a text message on his mobile phone. A Kenyan worker dials a few numbers to send money to his family.

The rise of banking transactions through mobile phones is giving a whole new meaning to pocket money in parts of the developing world that lack banks or cash machines.

Mobile money applications are emerging as potent financial tools in rural and remote areas of the globe, allowing people with no bank accounts to get paid, send remittances or settle their bills.

"One billion consumers in the world have a mobile phone but no access to a bank account," said Gavin Krugel, the director of mobile banking strategy at GSM Association, an industry group of 800 wireless operators.

"We see it as very big opportunity," he said this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, the industry's annual four-day event that ended on Thursday.

Mobile banking began to emerge six years ago in the Philippines and South Africa, where 8.5 million and 4.5 million people, respectively, use such services.

Today, 40 million people worldwide use mobile money, and the industry is growing, according to the GSMA.

"Africa and Asia are the most active regions right now," Krugel said. "We expect Latin America pick up this year."

There are 18,000 new mobile banking users per day in Uganda, 15,000 in Tanzania and 11,000 in Kenya, he said. ...

30 Years Ago Today: "Do You Believe in Miracles?"

This evening is the 30th Anniversary of the U. S. Olympic hockey team defeating the U. S. S. R. in the Olympics. This is one of those events that is seared into my brain. Many sports experts consider this the most stunning sports event of the 20th Century. The average age of the team was 21 ... I turned 21 a month later.  The sight of these nobodies taking down a virtual sports machine was one of the most incredible things I've ever seen. As the movie "Miracle" relates so well, the larger social context of what was happening in the world greatly accentuated the event. Watching them come from behind to defeat Finland for the gold was the icing on the cake. What are your memories of the miracle on Ice?

With the exception of one noticeable error (no professional players were allowed to play in the Olympics until the 1980s) the clip below is a nice tribute. 

The Founders: How Christian Were They?

Vision and Values: The Founders: How Christian Were They?

One of today’s most contentious culture wars is over the religious commitments of our nation’s founders. Were most of them orthodox Christians, deists, or agnostics? ...

... Conservative Christian authors such as David Barton, Peter Marshall Jr., and Tim LaHaye contend that most of the founders were devout Christians who sought to establish a Christian nation. Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore in “The Godless Constitution” and Brooke Allen in “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers” counter that very few founders were orthodox Christians. They and others often generalize from famous founders, such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine, to argue that most founders were deists who wanted strict separation of church and state.

The truth lies between these two positions. Almost every major founder belonged to a Christian congregation, although a sizable number of them were not committed Christians whose faith strongly influenced their political philosophy and actions. ...

... While we must be careful not to overstate the role of religion in the founding of our nation and the Christian convictions of the founders in textbooks or public discourse, the tendency in many scholarly circles has been to ignore or discount these matters. The battle over how Christian the founders were is likely to continue in Texas and across the country. Fortunately, meticulous scholarship is providing a much more accurate picture of the founders’ religious commitments.

Leading Economic Index Rises

Carpe Diem

My Tabby's Eschatological Vision

You're no doubt familiar with Isaiah's eschatological imagery of the wolf and the lamb bedded down together. My tabby, Isaac, has a more liberationist take on eschatology ... things like Mary's song, "He has brought down the powerful from their thrones, and lifted up the lowly ..." (Luke 1:52) His imagery of the New Creation looks more like this:

Source

 

Young Americans less religious than their parents

CNN: Young Americans less religious than their parents

(CNN) -- Ministering to young adults at New York's Riverside Church, the Rev. J. Lee Hill Jr. hasn't had much success in recruiting for Sunday morning services.

But his mission trips to New Orleans, Louisiana, since Hurricane Katrina and his efforts to connect with older teens and 20-somethings -- the so-called millennial generation -- via Facebook have paid big dividends.

"Church is difficult because young people today want to engage actively," Hill said. "They just want to experience God."

A study released Wednesday by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public life appears to bear that out. On the one hand, it finds that young Americans are significantly less religious than their parents and grandparents were when they were young. But the report also suggests that many of the beliefs and faith-based practices of 18- to 29-year-olds mirror those of their elders.

One in four American millennials -- which it defined as those who were born after 1980 and came of age around the millennium -- are not affiliated with any faith tradition, Pew found. They characterize their religion as "atheist," "agnostic" or "nothing in particular."

That compares to fewer than one in five Generation Xers -- Americans born from 1965 to 1980 -- who were unaffiliated with a religion when they were in their late teens and early 20s.

Just 13 percent of American baby boomers -- those born from 1946 to 1964 -- were unaffiliated with any religious tradition when they were young adults, according to Pew.

But when it comes to many beliefs and practices -- like views about life after death, the existence of heaven and hell and miracles -- millennials resemble previous generations of young Americans. ...

Gallup: The Importance of Religion

Gallup: The Importance of Religion

Money Buys Happiness Only to a Point (About $60,000)

BoingBoing: CNN: Ten Big Ideas from TED

"Psychologist and Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman says millions of dollars won't buy you happiness, but a job that pays $60,000 a year might help. Happiness levels increase up to the $60K mark, but "above that it's a flat line," he said.

"Money does not buy you experiential happiness but lack of money certainly buys you misery," he said. But the real trick, Kahneman said, is to spend time with people you like."

HT: Beau Weston

Four pastors reflect on their first calls, search process

Presbyterian News Service: Finding their place

Four pastors reflect on their first calls, search process

GREENSBORO, N.C. — In the language of the fly fisherman, achieving the proper “balance and tension” is essential to mastering that elusive art. And, when that same fly fisherman happens to be a candidate for the ordained ministry, the same goes to finding that first call.

Mindful of the delicate balance and tension needed to reconcile what he identified as two distinct approaches to the pastoral search process, the Rev. Karlin Bilcher, a 2007 graduate of Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, approached seeking a call with a fly fisherman’s patience and determination.

“On one level, there is a business aspect to the search process, which is just how the world works,” said Bilcher, who first enrolled with the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)’s Church Leadership Connection (CLC) in July 2007. CLC is the PC(USA)’s Internet-based matching and referral system, which connects entities seeking leaders with leaders seeking a call to service. ...

Bridging the theology-economy gap - Susan Lee

NPR Marketplace: Bridging the theology-economy gap

Kai Ryssdal: The head of the Anglican Church is no fan of the global financial industry. The Archbishop of Canterbury has been stirring up controversy in England with some fairly strongly worded sermons and statements on that subject. A couple of weeks ago he brought those views to Wall Street.

Trinity Church, right on the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, held a conference on how to build an ethical economy. On stage with him was frequent Marketplace commentator Susan Lee. So we asked her to share her thoughts on the ethics of economics from her perspective as both an economist and a theologian.

SUSAN LEE: Sharing the stage with the Archbishop of Canterbury forced me to wear both my hats at the same time. And, since ethics are the common ground for theology and economics, the result wasn't as loaded with conflict as you might think.

Both theologians and economists are interested in improving the lives of all humans. Both groups agree on policy goals like low unemployment and sustainable growth.

In fact, these goals are in harmony with a definition offered by the archbishop. He said: "An ethical economy is one where we care for our neighbor by creating conditions so the most vulnerable aren't abandoned."

Well, this is a description of capitalism in the U.S. In capitalism, economic wherewithal comes from increasing rates of growth. Or, in the economist's favorite image -- a bigger pie. And the sharing of this pie with the most vulnerable is mandated through a social safety net.

Over the past six decades, our economy has enjoyed good economic growth, so we have a bigger pie. And, because of the moral consensus to protect the most vulnerable, we've given more of this pie through the social safety net.

But here's the hooker. Economists are interested in how to make the pie larger. Theologians are interested in how to divide the pie. And so many theologians treat capitalism like a Chinese menu. They pick the wealth-distribution parts and discard the wealth-creation parts.

They assume there can be: work without incentives, enterprise without income inequality, investment without market-rates of return.

But picking and choosing isn't an option. Capitalism is an integrated system. And it's this integration that creates the wealth-making, which is the basis for wealth-sharing.

Well, the Archbishop listened to me politely. But I didn't convince him. I was, however, thrilled to take my views to the top -- so to speak.

RYSSDAL: Susan Lee is an economist and a theologian based in New York City.

This is a great summary of the gulf that exists in the conversation between theologians and economists. I continue to be astounded at the huge blind spot theologians have toward the issue of production.

Ben Witherington makes this important observation in his recent book Jesus and Money:

"... In biblical culture there was both low productivity and no notable means of increasing productivity over time. ... Given these realities, ancient peoples tended to believe that the goods of life had been distributed, even distributed by God, and they could not be increased -- they were decidedly "limited." This in turn meant that if a person wanted something he or she did not have, they had to barter for it (or steal it). It was not a matter of finding some way to make "more," in order to increase one's income and spending power. ..." (46)

The book is a wonderful resource for looking at how money and wealth figured into the Christian narrative and Christian ethics. Yet when it came to the end, stewardship is cast almost exclusively in terms of consumption and distribution, just as First Century Christians would have framed the issues. Production, other than warnings against participating with unjust systems, is absent from the picture. Yet it is production that has made the ever expanding wealth of today possible.

It took from 10,000 BCE to 1750 CE for annual world per capita GDP (in 1990 adjusted dollars) to grow from $90 to $180. The world population was 790 million in 1750, which means there was a total world economy of $142 billion. Between 1750 and 2000 the per capita GDP soared from $190 to $6,600 ... this during a time when population grew more than 7 times to 6 billion! That gives a world economy of nearly 40 trillion 1990 dollars. Over human history, world life expectancy rates at birth were around 30 years. Over the last century, the global rate has extended upwards toward 70 years. From 1970 to 2006, the global  Gini Coefficient ... a measure of income inequality ... has steadily dropped from .68 to .61. (See yesterday's post.)

My point is not that limiting our consumption and being generous with others is unimportant. They are core to our personal discipleship. But if we are talking about justice for the poor, the transformation of economic production ... not simple living and generosity ... has done exponentially more to improve lives. Why do theologians persist in mindsets of low-productivity biblical-era Christians instead of a post-Industrial Revolution mindset where productivity can be radically increased? Where is the counsel that helps us process not only simple living and generosity but how to invest resources to increase productivity for individuals and society?

Harvard’s Crisis of Faith

Newsweek: Harvard’s Crisis of Faith

Can a secular university embrace religion without sacrificing its soul?

It doesn't take a degree from Harvard to see that in today's world, a person needs to know something about religion. The conflicts between the Israelis and the Palestinians; between Christians, Muslims, and animists in Africa; between religious conservatives and progressives at home over abortion and gay marriage—all these relate, if indirectly, to what rival groups believe about God and scripture. Any resolution of these conflicts will have to come from people who understand how religious belief and practice influence our world: why, in particular, believers see some things as worth fighting and dying for. On the Harvard campus—where the next generation of aspiring leaders is currently beginning the spring term—the importance of religion goes without saying. "Kids need to know the difference between a Sunni and a Shia," is something you hear a lot.

But in practice, the Harvard faculty cannot cope with religion. It cannot agree on who should teach it, how it should be taught, and how much value to give it compared with economics, biology, literature, and all the other subjects considered vital to an undergraduate education. ...

... Undergraduates with more than a passing interest in religion are pointed to the Divinity School, half a mile away from Harvard Yard, where they can take graduate-level courses about belief from people who are, by tradition, believers. This separation of "faith" from "reason" occurred in the early part of the 19th century, when the American university evolved into a secular place. Even now, in an era when a presidential candidate cannot get elected without a convincing "faith narrative," the scholars who study belief continue to reside in the Divinity School, and when the subject of religion comes up, the scholars on the Faculty of Arts and Sciences sniff at its seriousness. ...

Parametric estimations of the world distribution of income

Vox: Parametric estimations of the world distribution of income

You can purchase the article the linked post reviews from the National Bureau of Economic Reserach for $5. Maxim Pinkovskiy, Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Parametric estimations of the world distribution of income.

World poverty is falling. This column presents new estimates of the world’s income distribution and suggests that world poverty is disappearing faster than previously thought. From 1970 to 2006, poverty fell by 86% in South Asia, 73% in Latin America, 39% in the Middle East, and 20% in Africa. Barring a catastrophe, there will never be more than a billion people in poverty in the future history of the world.

World poverty is falling. Between 1970 and 2006, the global poverty rate has been cut by nearly three quarters. The percentage of the world population living on less than $1 a day (in PPP-adjusted 2000 dollars) went from 26.8% in 1970 to 5.4% in 2006 (Figure 1).

Figure 1. World poverty rates [Y axis is percent in poverty]

Although world population has increased by about 80% over this time (World Bank 2009), the number of people below the $1 a day poverty line has shrunk by nearly 64%, from 967 million in 1970 to 350 million in 2006. In the past 36 years, there has never been a moment with more than 1 billion people in poverty, and barring a catastrophe, there will never be such a moment in the future history of the world.

Both starting number and the ending number are about ten percentage points lower than I've seen with some U.N. data but the general affect is identical. The article also includes these interesting graphs.

Figure 2. World distribution of income: 1970 and 2006

 

Figure 3. World gini inequality

Check out the post for background on the data.

Knocking Holes in the Darkness - Adam Hamilton

SMU: Knocking Holes in the Darkness

The Rev. Adam Hamilton, pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in Leawood, Kansas, is the recipient of the 2010 Perkins School of Theology Distinguished Alumnus Award.

The award recognizes a Perkins graduate who has demonstrated effectiveness and integrity in service to the church, continuing support and involvement in the goals of Perkins School of Theology and SMU, distinguished service in the wider community, and exemplary character.

Rev. Hamilton was appointed in 1990 to a start-up mission in Leawood, Kansas, a southern suburb of Kansas City. He has overseen the growth of that congregation, the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, into one of the largest in United Methodism, with a membership of more than 12,000.

Following is the text of his acceptance speech. You may also hear/download a recording of the speech or read more about him.

Hamilton frames his remarks:

... But I’m going to do that by speaking of three tasks I think we must be about if we are going to be effective Christian leaders today.  We must,

 •  Preach sermons that speak to both the head and the heart
 •  Help people make sense of God in the light of their experience of the world
 •  Help churches move from an inward focus to an outward, missional focus.

Great stuff! Check it out.

I Hate it When This Happens

I thought the printer was making a strange squeaky sound.

(Courtesy of my sister-in-law.)

Neither Clergy nor Laity-- a NT Vision of Ministry

Ben Witherington: Neither Clergy nor Laity-- a NT Vision of Ministry

... The Greek word laos from which we get the term laity simply means the people of God. It is used this way over and over again in the NT, sometimes of Israel sometimes of those who are in Christ, but in neither case is it used to refer to a particular kind or class of believing persons who are set apart from the 'clergy'. And about that word clergy, it is not a Biblical word at all.  Webster's tells us it comes to us from the Medieval French word clerc (13th century), but in fact ultimately the term comes from the Greek κλῆρος - klēros, "a lot", "that which is assigned by lot" (allotment) or metaphorically, "inheritance".  So it partially has a Biblical root, but no persons in the NT are called kleroi to distinguish a class of ministers.    And there is a good reason for this. ...

...  Let us concentrate first on the fact that God gave certain persons to the church--- apostles, prophets, teachers, and so on.  And no only so, Paul means that there is something of a hierarchial order of leadership.  He says first apostles, second prophets, and so on.  Just because we are all called to do some sort of ministry doesn't mean that we are all called to do the same tasks, or that we have all been equally gifted to do any and all tasks or that we are all called to be leaders. This is false.   There will always be leaders and followers, but all of God's people are gifted and graced to do something.  ...

... What about the distinction between part-time and full-time ministry with the laity doing the former and the clergy the latter?   There is certainly nothing in the Bible that supports such a notion, and part of the problem is the way one envisions ministry.  Raising children in a godly way is a ministry.  Helping people with their finances is a ministry.  Building homes, making clothes, selling groceries is a ministry.   Any good deed, anything that can be done to the glory of God and for the edification of God's people and the world is a ministry.  Our problem is that we have defined ministry too narrowly, and then jealousy fought over who gets to do what.  

Frankly I have run into too many ordained clergy who think: 1) it is their job to do most all the ministry (though they complain bitterly they are over-taxed and under-appreciated); and 2) instead of "equipping the saints for ministry"  they have in fact disabled, discontinued, even destroyed the ministry of those who are not, like them, ordained clergy.  What is all too often put in the place of every member a minister is the pastor-American idol syndrome, the pastor super-star model, which feeds on America's love of the cult of personality. ...

... In my view, every single Christian needs Christian training, and all the more so now as our culture and even our churches become more and more Biblically illiterate.  But hear me clearly--- we are not called to dumb down the Gospel, we are called to boil up the people.  We are not called to put the Gospel cookies on the bottom shelf, we are called to tease people's minds into active thought so that their reach will extend further than their current grasp.  ...

Great post!

Ancient Greenland gene map has a surprise

Reuters: Ancient Greenland gene map has a surprise

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have sequenced the DNA from four frozen hairs of a Greenlander who died 4,000 years ago in a study they say takes genetic technology into several new realms.

Surprisingly, the long-dead man appears to have originated in Siberia and is unrelated to modern Greenlanders, Morten Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues found.

"This provides evidence for a migration from Siberia into the New World some 5,500 years ago, independent of that giving rise to the modern Native Americans and Inuit," the researchers wrote in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature.

Not only can the findings help transform the study of archeology, but they can help answer questions about the origins of modern populations and disease, they said.

"Such studies have the potential to reconstruct not only our genetic and geographical origins, but also what our ancestors looked like," David Lambert and Leon Huynen of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, wrote in a commentary.

The DNA gives strong hints about the man, nicknamed Inuk. "Brown eyes, brown skin, he had shovel-form front teeth," Eske Willerslev, who oversaw the study, told a telephone briefing. Such teeth are characteristic of East Asian and Native American populations.

He had the genes for early hair loss, too. "Because we found quite a lot of hair from this guy, we presume he actually died quite young," Willerslev said.

The man lived among the Saqqaq people, the earliest known culture in southern Greenland that lasted from around 2500 BC until about 800 BC.

Scientists have disagreed on who these people were -- whether they descended from the peoples who crossed the Bering Strait 30,000 to 40,000 years ago to settle the New World or whether they were more recent immigrants.

Willerslev's team pulled DNA from hairs found in a frozen Saqqaq site and sequenced it just as they would a modern person's full genome, looking for characteristic mutations.

"Recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies have initiated an era of personal genomics," the researchers wrote.

"The sequencing project described here is a direct test of the extent to which ancient genomics can contribute knowledge about now-extinct cultures," they added.

The DNA links Inuk to modern-day Arctic residents of Siberia. He had almost none of the mutations seen in Indians living in Central and South America.

Strike Off (Union Decline)

Economist: Strike off

The days of union power are long gone in America.

STRIKES and employer-initiated lockouts in America last year were at their lowest since records began, according to new figures published by the Bureau of Labour Statistics. Only five work stoppages involved 1,000 or more workers last year. The number of working days lost, 124,000, was trifling compared with the tens of millions of days lost annually when national union membership was strong. Fewer strikes and weaker unions may help to explain why workers are claiming a smaller share of national income than they once did, but a more flexible labour force should be a boon to the economy in the long run. In 2009 only 15.3m workers belonged to a union, or 12.3% of all employed.

Don't know that it is accurate to say that union power is gone. Recently I posted the top campaign donors over the past 20 years. Eight of the top twelve were unions. While the private sector has less unionization, government unionization continues to rise. I believe about 35% of government workers are union. Unions aren't dead.

Tech-savvy 'iGeneration' kids multi-task, connect

USA Today: Tech-savvy 'iGeneration' kids multi-task, connect

Move over, Millennials. You're not the younger generation anymore.

For the past decade, you were the ones to watch. But now, as the eldest among you are fast approaching 30, there's a new group just begging for some attention. They're still kids, and although there's a lot the experts don't yet know about them, one thing they do agree on is that what kids use and expect from their world has changed rapidly.

And it's all because of technology.

"It's simply a part of their DNA," says Dave Verhaagen, a child and adolescent psychologist in Charlotte. "It shapes everything about them."

To the psychologists, sociologists, and generational and media experts who study them, their digital gear sets this new group (yet unnamed by any powers that be) apart, even from their tech-savvy Millennial elders. They want to be constantly connected and available in a way even their older siblings don't quite get. These differences may appear slight, but they signal an all-encompassing sensibility that some say marks the dawning of a new generation.

"The current generation seems to be moving well into adulthood, and there seems to be another generation setting itself up as a contrast to it," says Neil Howe, a historian and demographer who has co-written several books on the generations. ...

Crime targets affected by drop in goods prices

BBC: Crime targets affected by drop in goods prices

Criminals are looking for different items to steal because globalisation has brought prices of some household goods down, new research suggests.

Researchers at the University of Leicester say criminals are moving from traditional household burglaries to personal muggings.

Criminology lecturer James Treadwell said that a DVD player costing £19.99 was "simply not worth stealing".

The findings came as part of research into how crime has changed over time.

Mr Treadwell said globalisation - especially cheaper electronic goods from China and the Far East - was forcing thieves to re-think what items were worth taking.

He said: "The last decade has been a remarkable one where crime is concerned, with massive changes and shifts. ...

... He added: "While we might have seen a decline in some types of crime, we have seen a rise in other forms of criminal activity, particularly young people who seem to be mugging one another," he added.

"While DVD players for example, got cheaper, certain consumer items became smaller and were very, very expensive and sought after and so the latest mobile phone, or the latest iPod, which people carry about them, have become targets for robbers. ...

The End of Intelligent Design?

First Things: The End of Intelligent Design? 

It is time to take stock: What has the intelligent design movement achieved? As science, nothing. The goal of science is to increase our understanding of the natural world, and there is not a single phenomenon that we understand better today or are likely to understand better in the future through the efforts of ID theorists. If we are to look for ID achievements, then, it must be in the realm of natural theology. And there, I think, the movement must be judged not only a failure, but a debacle.

Very few religious skeptics have been made more open to religious belief because of ID arguments. These arguments not only have failed to persuade, they have done positive harm by convincing many people that the concept of an intelligent designer is bound up with a rejection of mainstream science.

The ID claim is that certain biological phenomena lie outside the ordinary course of nature. Aside from the fact that such a claim is, in practice, impossible to substantiate, it has the effect of pitting natural theology against science by asserting an incompetence of science. To be sure, there are questions that natural science is not competent to address, and too many scientists have lost all sense of the limitations of their disciplines, not to mention their own limitations. But the ID arguments effectively declare natural science incompetent even in what most would regard as its own proper sphere. Nothing could be better calculated to provoke the antagonism of the scientific community. This throwing down of the gauntlet to science explains not a little of the fervor of the scientific backlash against ID. ...

Great article.

Easy = True (Cognitive Fluency)

The Boston Globe: Easy = True

How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel.

... One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called “cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.

Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process - even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it - can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings. ...

... Our sensitivity to - and affinity for - fluency is an adaptive shortcut. According to psychologists, it helps us apportion limited mental resources in a world where lots of things clamor for our attention and we have to quickly figure out which are worth thinking about.

Most of the time, the shortcut works pretty well. If something feels notably easy to decipher, whether it’s a piece of text or the shape of an object or the particulars of a person’s face, there’s a good chance it’s because we’ve previously done the work of processing it, and that it’s something we’ve encountered before. Cognitive fluency signals familiarity - some psychologists argue that the eerie experience of déjà vu is simply when we’re fooled by the unexpected ease of taking in a piece of sensory information, and interpret that as a memory of having been there or seen it before.

An instinctive preference for the familiar made sense in the prehistoric environment in which our brains developed, psychologists hypothesize. Unfamiliar things - whether they were large woolly animals, plants we were thinking of eating, or fellow human beings - needed to be carefully evaluated to determine whether they were friend or foe. Familiar objects were those we’d already passed judgment on, so it made sense not to waste time and energy scrutinizing them. ...

... Some psychologists suggest that much of what we perceive as beauty is just the fact that the most prototypical faces and dogs and watches are the easiest to process, because they share the most with all the other faces and dogs and watches that we’ve seen and stored in our perceptual inventory. ...

... “People are very sensitive to the experience of ease or difficulty, but very insensitive to where that feeling comes from,” says Schwarz.

One thing that fools us, for example, is font. When people read something in a difficult-to-read font, they unwittingly transfer that sense of difficulty onto the topic they’re reading about. Schwarz and his former student Hyunjin Song have found that when people read about an exercise regimen or a recipe in a less legible font, they tend to rate the exercise regimen more difficult and the recipe more complicated than if they read about them in a clearer font. ...

... “Disfluency functions as a cognitive alarm,” Alter says. “It sets up a cognitive roadblock and makes people think, and it triggers a sense of risk and concern.”

It isn’t just visual cues that have this sort of effect. Matthew McGlone, a psychologist at the University of Texas, has found that auditory cues can shape people’s perception of truth. McGlone did a study in which he presented subjects with a series of unfamiliar aphorisms either in rhyming or nonrhyming form: “Woes unite foes,” for example, versus “Woes unite enemies.” He found that people tended to see the rhyming ones as more accurate than the nonrhyming ones, despite the fact that, substantively, the two were identical. Phrases that are easier on the ear aren’t just catchy and easy to remember, McGlone argues, they also feel inherently truer. He calls it “the rhyme-as-reason effect.” ...

... And some of the more interesting ramifications of the new work come from the suggestion that disfluency, rather than fluency, can sometimes be what’s called for. Work on product marketing by Schwarz and Hyejeung Cho has found, for example, that while creating a sense of disfluency in potential consumers is likely to make them see a product as less familiar, it also makes them see it as more innovative.

And a few studies suggest that disfluency works well as a prompt to get people to think carefully and catch mistakes. Alter and Oppenheimer found that using a more difficult font can get students to do better on the Cognitive Reaction Test, a three-question test that usually trips up people answering intuitively. In another study, they found that disfluency also led people to think more abstractly. Schwarz and Song found that a difficult font can dramatically increase the number of people who correctly respond to the question, “How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?” (The answer is “none” - Moses wasn’t on the Ark.)

In other words, to get people to think carefully and to prevent them from making silly mistakes, make them work to process the question: make the font hard to read, the cadence awkward, and the wording unfamiliar. ...

... In unpublished research, Schwarz has found a similar effect with marital happiness: Couples asked to come up with a short list of good qualities about each other reported higher levels of marital happiness than the other couples in the study - but so did those couples asked to come up with a long list of each other’s bad qualities.

“Having to come up with many good things about your spouse is terrible, because it becomes difficult and then you think she’s obviously not that wonderful,” Schwarz says. “Coming up with a few bad things about your spouse, that’s bad because it’s not that hard. Having to come up with a lot of bad things, since it’s hard, it means she’s not that bad at all. The difficulty that you have tells you that there are not many such things.” ...

Churn in the Fortune 500, 1959-2009

Carpe Diem: Fortune 500 Firms in 1959 vs. 2009; 86% Are Gone

... Here's the complete database of the Fortune 500 every year from 1959-2009.

Comparing the Fortune 500 in 1959 to 2009, I find that there are only 72 companies that appear in both lists. In other words, only 14% of the Fortune 500 companies in 1959 were still on the list fifty years later in 2009, and 86% of the companies have either gone bankrupt, merged, gone private, or still exist but have fallen from the top 500 companies (ranked by gross revenue). That's a lot of churning and creative destruction, and it's probably safe to say that many of today's Fortune 500 like the ones listed above will be replaced by new companies in new industries by the year 2059. ...

10 "Needs" Advertisers Address

Advertising Age: Remember to Give Them What They Want (It's Really Very Simple)

Remember to Give Them What They Want (It's Really Very Simple). ...

So what do people want, exactly? ...

1. To feel safe and secure.

2. To feel comfortable.

3. To be cared for and connected to others.

4. To be desired by others.

5. To be free to do what we want.

6. To grow and become more.

7. To serve others and give back.

8. To be surprised and excited.

9. To believe there is a higher purpose.

10. To feel that they matter.

In Age of Friending, Consumers Trust Their Friends Less

Advertising Age: In Age of Friending, Consumers Trust Their Friends Less

Edelman Study Shows That Only 25% of People Find Peers Credible, Flying in Face of Social-Media Wisdom.

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Whom do we increasingly trust less? Us.

It's a finding that strikes at the foundation of many a social-media marketing philosophy: Tapping into peer-to-peer networks is a way for marketers to tell authentic, credible stories to consumers whose confidence in corporate CEOs, news outlets, government officials and industry analysts has taken a beating. But according to Edelman's latest Trust Barometer, the number of people who view their friends and peers as credible sources of information about a company dropped by almost half, from 45% to 25%, since 2008.

Richard Edelman, president and CEO of Edelman, believes it's a sign of the times -- and the lesson for marketers is consumers have to see and hear things in five different places before they believe it.

"The events of the last 18 months have scarred people," Mr. Edelman said. "People have to see messages in different places and from different people. That means experts as well as peers or company employees. It's a more-skeptical time. So if companies are looking at peer-to-peer marketing as another arrow in the quiver, that's good, but they need to understand it's not a single-source solution. It's a piece of the solution."

Consumers are a distrustful bunch in general -- the credibility of TV dropped 23 points and radio news and newspapers were down 20 points between 2008 and 2010. 

CEOs up

And when asked how credible they deemed the information they get about a company when a "person like yourself" serves as a spokesperson the numbers again dropped. This year 39% of those surveyed felt the messages conveyed by consumer spokespeople was credible compared to 45% in 2009, the biggest drop-off among all categories.

Conversely, CEOs -- who have of late been trotted out as public faces of their companies in times of stress, such as General Motors CEO Ed Whitacre -- saw the biggest year-over-year increase from 17% in 2009 to 26% this year. Other groups seeing increases in the level of consumer trust were government officials (22% vs. 27%), a financial/industry analyst (46% vs. 52%), NGO representative (42% vs. 44%) and academic experts (61% vs. 64%). The only other group to see the credibility of their word diminish was company employees, which saw a drop of three points (31% vs. 28%).

If consumers stop believing what their friends and the "average Joes" appearing in testimonials say about a product or company, the implications could be significant not just for marketers but for the social networks and word-of-mouth platforms selling themselves as solutions to communicating in a jaded world. The influence of peers has been considered the leading rationale for brands' shifting marketing dollars to social media.

In some cases, social networks themselves may be contributing to the decline in trust. Platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have allowed people to maintain larger circles of casual associates, which may be diluting the credibility of peer-to-peer networks. In short, the more acquaintances a person has, the harder it can be to trust him or her. Mr. Edelman believes the Facebook component has "absolutely" played a role in diluting trust levels. ...

Social Networking Rises, Especially Among Younger Set

Marketing Charts: Social Networking Rises, Especially Among Younger Set

Social networking has risen among all age groups in the past few years, particularly among teens and younger adults, according to research from the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

Pew research indicates that in 2009, 73% of online teens used social networking sites in 2009, compared to 47% of online adults. Breaking down online adults into older and younger demographics, 72% of adults 18-29 use social networking sites, compared to 40% of their counterparts 30 and older.

Facebook is Tops with All Adults

Social networking adults in all age brackets favor Facebook by a wide margin, with older adults preferring it slightly more. Seventy-three percent of all adults 18 and older who use social networking sites have a Facebook account. Broken down by age demographic, this includes 71% of adults 18-29 and 75% of adults 30 and older. ...

Several interesting charts including:

 

Engaging Economics: New Testament Scenarios and Early Christian Reception - Book Review

(This review is also being posted at Jesus Creed. You are welcome to join the discussion there.)

A variety of anthropological lenses have been used to examine the New Testament world but one lens remains relatively neglected … an economic lens. Scholars like Bruce Malina, K. C. Hanson, Douglas Oakman, and Justo Gonzalez are but a few that I’ve read that are trying to understand the economic world of the New Testament from the inside out. Now enters Engaging Economics: New Testament Scenarios and Early Christian Reception, edited by Bruce W. Longenecker and Kelly D. Liebengood.

Engaging Economics is a thirteen essay collection examining the economic dimensions New Testament theology. (Most of the essays came from the Bibilcial Studies Seminar at the University of St. Andrews in the spring of 2008.) Half of the essays examine the role of economics in the New Testament and the other half examine how Christians in the era immediately following the New Testament handled economic issues. Particularly noteworthy is that none of the contributors or editors is receiving any royalties from the book. All proceeds will be donated to World Vision.

Peter Oakes offers an opening essay that explores what is meant by economics and discusses the sources of economic evidence. One of the big challenges is the temptation to project our twenty-first century experience with a market economy back into the biblical context. What we would typically refer to as economic factors … supply and demand, utility, markets, etc. … were not categories through which the New Testament folks interpreted their world. There was no semi-distinct sphere known as the economy. Oakes writes:

“…For example, the nature of patron-client relationships ensured constant distortion of what we might expect to be market interaction. Distribution of resources was dependent much more on power relationships than on the market.” (11)

Many economists today see economics as a study of the choices that individuals and societal entities make regarding limited resources. That may work for thinking about modern economies but Oakes writes:

“… The focus on choice is problematic in a society where most economic activities are governed by custom or compulsion. I suppose it works fairly reasonably as long as one remembers that the choices lie with the powerful elite. The stress on incentives might be useful, but only if it is realized that, for most people, they were generally of an ‘offer you can’t refuse’ type. …” (11-12)

Oakes subscribes to the traditional characterization of economics as “the study of the allocation of scarce resources” to be the most helpful in analyzing ancient societies. (And if “scarce” is problematic to you in light of “abundance” theology, substitute “limited” and you will be approximating what economists have in mind.) It doesn’t presume that people have a wide array of choices.

An important issue Oakes tackles is the view that Rome was ruled by elites while 99% of the population living in abject poverty. Recent studies suggest there was more stratification than this but it is hard to be precise. While society was hierarchical, status and wealth did not perfectly coincide. Referencing the work of Steven J. Friesen, Oakes suggests stratification likely looked something like this:

00.04%  Imperial elites

01.00%  Regional or provincial elites

01.76%  Municipal elites. Includes some merchants.

07.00%?  Moderate surplus resources. Includes some merchants, some traders, some freedpersons some artisans (especially those employing others), and military veterans.

22.00%?  Stable near subsistence (with reasonable hope for remaining above min. to sustain life.) Includes many merchants and traders, regular wage earners, artisans, large shop owners, freedpersons, and some farm families)

40.00%  At subsistence level (and often below minimum sustain life) Includes small farmers, laborers, artisans (esp. employed), wage earners, most merchants/traders, and small shop owners.

28.00%  Below subsistence level. Includes some farm families, unattached widows, orphans, beggars, disabled, unskilled day laborers, and prisoners. (30)

David Horrell, in his essay Aliens and Strangers?, does further analysis of Friesen’s work concluding that approximately 80% of the population lived very near or below subsistence levels. The way society was stratified is very similar to societies in pre-industrial emerging nations today. This general construct gives us some clues about the individuals and groups we encounter in the text of the New Testament.

There isn’t space here for me to review each essay but here is brief sampling to give a flavor.

John Kloppenborg presents Agrarian Discourse and the Sayings of Jesus. He focuses on three types of reciprocity: general (exchange between close kin and friends), balanced (quid pro quo market exchange) and negative (exploitive exchange). Kloppenborg examines “measure for measure” statements like Luke 6:37-38:

 ³⁷"Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven. ³⁸Give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together and running over, will be poured into your lap. For with the measure you use, it will be measured to you."

 These are drawn directly from the world of agrarian exchange and draw on balanced reciprocity … not values of mercy or justice … to make their ethical point. That is, they draw on the self-interest of the hearer to motivate them to action.

In Is God Paul’s Patron? The economy of Patronage in Pauline Theology, David J. Downs takes on the metaphor of God as patron with Christ as broker. Examining the language and nature of the exchanges involved in Paul’s metaphors, Downs concludes that Paul’s metaphorical rhetoric has been misunderstood. Rather Paul is using metaphor’s from the context of the household and fictive kinship, where God is the father and we are God’s children, not patron to client images.

One essay is devoted to the idea of holding things in common in Acts but others touch on this topic as well. There is also an examination of the economic dimension in James.

In the second half of the book the focus shifts to how the early church fathers read the texts. Longenecker presents an interesting essay on Galations 2:10:

“All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do.”

Is Paul referring to the poor in a particular geographic area or is Paul making a broader theological statement about the poor? The former has tended to be the conclusion of modern interpreters but Longenecker demonstrates that the early church fathers had the later view.

Grant Macaskill draws us to the critique of Rome presented in Revelation, which includes critique of their economic activity. Yet the early church fathers were virtually silent about the economic issues except in peripheral ways … sometimes being more interested indentifying the Antichrist rather than the critique. Macaskill says Revelation was focused on union with Christ and, “For this reason it is not to be primarily judged as an attack on Rome so much as a challenge to potentially complicit church.” (259) He concludes, writing:

“… The trajectories of interpretation of Revelation among the early church fathers, however, suggest that full integration into the Roman economic system may not have been as troubling for the church as other aspects of Roman Life, notably idolatry. With the single exception of Tertullian, the evidence suggests a general tendency by the fathers to overlook the systemic importance of economics.” (259)

As I read this, I wanted to ask Macaskill in what sense he meant “systemic importance of economics.” Without the records and constructs by which we do economic analysis today, what would systemic analysis look like? As Oakes notes, our modern concepts of economics are very recent (a little more than 100 years old.) I wonder if we are assuming a lens that was not present to John or the early Church fathers.

Another essays looks at the development of the idea of almsgiving. Yet another explores ascetic values from the Syriac Book of Steps.

The book is a great resource for exploring the economic dimensions of the New Testament. As with any scholarly work, the essays are meticulously footnoted pointing readers to other resources for further study and, as with any collection of essays, the significance of the articles will vary according to the interests of the reader. For anyone wanting a wider ranging provocative reader, this certainly qualifies. It is great read.

(Significant portions of Engaging Economics can be previewed at Google Books.)

Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?

NPR: Why Does Time Fly By As You Get Older?

As people get older, "they just have this sense, this feeling that time is going faster than they are," says Warren Meck, a psychology professor at Duke University.

This seems to be true across cultures, across time, all over the world.

No one is sure where this feeling comes from.

Scientists have theories, of course, and one of them is that when you experience something for the very first time, more details, more information gets stored in your memory. Think about your first kiss.

Neuroscientist David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine says that since the touch of the lips, the excitement, the taste, the smell — everything about this moment is novel — you aren't embroidering a bank of previous experiences, you are starting fresh. ...

Darwin Made Me Do It: Evolution and the Doctrine of Sin

(I blogged about this several days ago but wanted to give my readers a reminder.)

The Pastor's Monthly Roundtable at Princeton well be hosting a free webinar on Feb 8 called:

Darwin Made Me Do It: Evolution and the Doctrine of Sin

"February's "PMR" lecture is titled "Darwin Made Me Do It: Evolution and the Doctrine of Sin" and will ask the question: If we take human evolution seriously, and can no longer appeal to an historical Fall and the accompanying idea of Original Sin, then what is human sin and where does come from?

Kenneth A. Reynhout is a Ph.D. candidate in Theology and Science at Princeton Theological Seminary, where he is working on a dissertation on Paul Ricoeur’s importance for interdisciplinary theology. Mr. Reynhout is a Co-Director of the Science for Ministry Institute."

A refreshing dose of honesty (Global Warming Legislation)

Economist: A refreshing dose of honesty

Maria Cantwell and the politics of global warming.

... Enter Maria Cantwell, the junior senator from Washington state. She is pushing a simpler, more voter-friendly version of cap-and-trade, called “cap-and-dividend”. Under her bill, the government would impose a ceiling on carbon emissions each year. Producers and importers of fossil fuels will have to buy permits. The permits would be auctioned, raising vast sums of money. Most of that money would be divided evenly among all Americans. The bill would raise energy prices, of course, and therefore the price of everything that requires energy to make or distribute. But a family of four would receive perhaps $1000 a year, which would more than make up for it, reckons Ms Cantwell. Cap-and-dividend would set a price on carbon, thus giving Americans a powerful incentive to burn less dirty fuel. It would also raise the rewards for investing in clean energy. And it would leave all but the richest 20% of Americans—who use the most energy—materially better off, she says.

Ms Cantwell’s bill is refreshingly simple. At a mere 40 pages, it is one-thirty-sixth as long as the monstrous House bill (known as “Waxman-Markey”, after its sponsors), which would regulate everything from televisions to “bottle-type water dispensers” and is completely incomprehensible to a layman. Instead of auctioning permits to emit, Waxman-Markey gives 85% of them away, at least at first. This is staggeringly inefficient: permits would go to those with political clout rather than those who value them most. No one is proud of this—Mr Obama wanted a 100% auction—but House Democrats decided that the only way to pass the bill was to hand out billions of dollars of goodies to groups that might otherwise oppose it. (There was plenty of pork left over for its supporters, too.) ...

... This challenges the conventional wisdom in Washington, DC, that the only way to pass a global-warming bill is to disguise what’s in it. Leading Democrats try to sell cap-and-trade as a way to create jobs and wean America from its addiction to foreign oil. (It’s about “jobs, jobs, jobs and jobs,” said Nancy Pelosi, the speaker, last year.) Focus groups say this message ought to resonate. Frank Luntz, a pollster, released a study last month showing that voters are unswayed by melting ice caps but will support an energy bill that sticks it to the Saudis and creates American jobs. In real life, though, voters hear counter-arguments. Sure, cap-and-trade will create jobs, but it will destroy them, too. If the goal is to reduce dependence on foreign energy, why not mine more American coal? The only sound reason for acting to curb global warming is to curb global warming. Ms Cantwell does not put it so bluntly, but her bill speaks for itself.

Pepsi Skips Superbowl For Social Marketing

ViralBlog: Pepsi Skips Superbowl For Social Marketing  (HT: Danny Gamache)

Pepsi knows no advertising spot is wanted as much as one on Superbowl Sunday. Traditionally all the brands advertising during the big game use every trick in the book to create the most memorable, noteworthy commercials. Pepsi has always been present on Superbowl Sunday, but not anymore from now on.

After 23 years of advertising on Superbowl Sunday, Pepsi has decided to invest the money in a $ 20 million dollar social programme.

On January 13, Pepsi will launch their programme called ‘The Pepsi Refresh Project‘. People can contribute by naming a project in their community that needs help. The projects that get the most votes will receive help from Pepsi. With this project Pepsi hopes they will create a wave of do-gooding on a smaller scale with people funding community projects themselves. ...

More US papers mull charging readers for online content

Christian Science Monitor: More US papers mull charging readers for online content

GlobalPost and the Fayetteville Observer are reportedly close to rolling out pay software called Press+.

Yesterday, The New York Times had a piece on a handful of papers that plan to retreat – or have already retreated – behind a pay-wall. (The Times recently announced it will eventually roll out a metered system of its own.) The focus of the article is software called Press+, which was invented by longtime industry insiders Steven Brill and L. Gordon Crovitz.

For a price, Brill and Crovitz will come to your outlet, and set up Press+, which takes all of your content – or a goodly chunk of it – and makes people fork over cash to see it. A hugely controversial idea, obviously, even at a time when the newspaper business is struggling to stay afloat. The major argument against pay-walls is simple: Internet-savvy people will just go elsewhere to find the treasure you're ransoming inside your digital fortress. ...

... Then there's Newsday, the long-ailing – and once formidable – Long Island newspaper. As John Koblin of The New York Observer wrote back in January, Newsday's pay system hasn't exactly opened up the paper's audience. Now before we reveal the exact number of people who have signed up to read Newsday online, we should say that the figure does not include subscribers to the dead tree edition of Newsday, who automatically get access to the stuff behind the paywall.

Ready? OK. The number is.... 35 people. But hey, maybe everyone is being too dismissive.

What do you think? Will this strategy work?

ADP employment report: Midsize firms start hiring again

Christian Science Monitor: ADP employment report: Midsize firms start hiring again

Private midsize firms hired 9,000 workers in January, the first gain in two years, according to the ADP employment report.

Medium-sized businesses are back in hiring mode.

After leading the charge in laying off workers during most of the recession, they added a net 9,000 workers last month, the ADP National Employment Report said Wednesday. That's the first employment growth among companies with 50 to 499 workers in two years.

Overall, the economy still lost 22,000 jobs between December and January, according to the ADP report. But that was the smallest decline since February 2008. ...

How to be possessive about apostrophes

Christian Science Monitor: How to be possessive about apostrophes

An online primer explains the uses and abuses of a helpful punctuation mark. ...

... I was a bit crestfallen, though, at his final bit of advice, especially since it appears in VERY BIG TYPE: "When in doubt, leave it out." That rule will probably keep some people from writing "kitten's" or "goat's." But it will probably also encourage them to write things like "teachers college," where I would fight a rear-guard action on behalf of an apostrophe. "Teachers' college" seems to me a straightforward case of plural possessive. If it's not "their" (the teachers') college, whose is it? The counterargument is that the college doesn't belong to teachers but rather produces them. So call it a teacher college!

In the Oatmeal spirit of "just enough" grammar, here are some other rules to use as editorial first aid until a professional can make it to the scene:

1. If you aren't absolutely sure about who and whom, go with who. Use of whom in the wrong place looks much worse than failure to use whom in the right place.

2. Forgo and forego are both real words; they mean "give up" and "precede," respectively. But "forego" (as distinct from foregoing) is almost always wrong. "I will forego you out of the room"? Yeah. Right.

3. Both affect and effect can be either a noun or a verb. But you could probably live your whole life without using effect as a verb or affect as a noun. Many people do – and quite happily, too.

My first extended experience with a desktop computer was back in 1984 when I was permitted to come in after hours and type my master's thesis. Was I ever thankful. I would produce one draft and give it to my committee chair. It would come back with comma's added everywhere. I'd make the corrections and send it to the rest of the committee. One of the committee members would send it back with Xs through a bunch of commas. (I think he was the same one that circled paragraphs remarking, "This paragraph reads like it was written by a first generation German immigrant.") After two or three iterations of this, I was beginning to feel a bit like Sisyphus with his boulder. Finally, I convened a committee meeting on the use of commas, explaining I didn't care what the rule was but just wanted somebody to tell me what the rule was.

I'm convinced that spelling and grammar are forms of torture developed by English professionals. It is time for a revolution. Misspellers of the world ... UNTIE!!!

How to Reach Affluent African Americans

Adweek: How to Reach Affluent African Americans

By not targeting this key segment, some marketers may be missing out.

Of all the sins marketers commit, few evoke more scorn from peers than that of "leaving money on the table." If there's a population willing and able to buy what you're selling -- if you'd only ask, in a reasonably competent way, that it do so -- then failure to reach those people is a needless blow to your brand. A forthcoming book, titledl Back Is the New Green: Marketing to Affluent African Americans, makes the case that luxury marketers are guilty of missing out on one such lucrative market. Written by Leonard Burnett Jr. (co-CEO and group publisher of Uptown Media Group and Vibe Lifestyle Network) and Andrea Hoffman (CEO of consultancy Diversity Affluence), the book also offers counsel on how to go about reaching "AAAs," its shorthand term for "affluent African Americans."

Slated for publication in March via Palgrave Macmillan, the book says many luxury brands appear oblivious to the fact there's any such thing as an AAA audience, even though such households now deploy some $87 billion in disposable income. With the image in their heads of a handful of wealthy black athletes and entertainers, these marketers overlook the existence of 340,000-plus AAA households -- headed by professionals, corporate executives, entrepreneurs and the like -- with yearly income of at least $150,000.

But there are also, as the book notes, brands that have been savvy enough to go after AAAs, though not savvy enough to do it well. One problem is that marketers often seem to adopt a hip-hop approach as their default mode in addressing black consumers, irrespective of the age or social class of the audience they're hoping to reach. Sure, interest in hip-hop has broadened over the years. "However, the reality is that the vast majority of the significant affluent African American niche is not part of hip-hop culture," the book explains. ...

... Thus, says the book, "the issues, and even the struggles, that characterized their grandparents' and parents' generations are no longer primary concerns for these successful professional people." They haven't turned their backs on what those earlier generations endured, or on the institutions that were prominent in fighting those fights. But the fact remains that AAAs have come of age in a different time. "For AAAs, the United Negro College Fund, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and other civil rights-era institutions, while still very much honored and supported, do not represent the pinnacle of either social networking or charitable giving," the book says. "A very proud heritage is gladly acknowledged, but this is not the sole platform on which the AAAs live their lives." ...

... As the book states the matter, "It's nice to see images that reflect you and your lifestyle in advertisements, but a good ad is a good ad, no matter what." Adds Hoffman: "The tone of the ad isn't as important as where the media is placed, how the brand reaches out beyond ads -- i.e., events, partnerships, giving back/philanthropy. Don't get us wrong, tone is important, but where you are is just as important. Bottom line, are your marketing efforts towards AAAs authentic?"

If AAAs suspect a brand isn't authentically welcoming of them, they'll let their peers know about it. The book notes that the AAA audience is "a tightly knit one." And that means word travels rapidly among them: "Research shows that, positive or negative, word of mouth spreads faster among AAAs than within the general market." ...

... This, too, reflects a recurring theme in the book, that partnerships with cultural institutions (as well as educational and philanthropic organizations) are an effective way for brands to align themselves with the interests of AAAs and get their attention in a positive way. "Partnering with the right cultural, educational or charitable organization can be a key in unlocking the good will of AAAs," says the book. ...

Groundhog Run attracts its biggest crowd

Kansas City Star: Groundhog Run attracts its biggest crowd

When it was just about over Sunday morning, an hour and a half after the second and final race of the day had started, race director LeRoy Unruh revealed the turnout for the 28th annual Groundhog Run.

“It’s the biggest ever,” he said, turning to another race worker for confirmation. “We’ve never had 3,000 finishers in this race.”

Nearly 1,900 runners had crossed the finish line in the 5-kilometer run, while another 1,100 had completed the 10K as runners flocked to the underground Hunt Midwest SubTropolis for an escape from the winter cold.

“It’s good for serious runners who want to do a race indoors during the winter, because you can’t do much else,” said Gina Morgan, the top women’s finisher in the 10K. “It’s very unique.”

That it is — according to its Web site, the Groundhog Run is believed to be the biggest organized underground run in the country — and that’s what keeps luring eager runners to the SubTropolis each winter. From across the metro area and beyond. ...

... The Groundhog Run benefits the Children’s Therapeutic Learning Center, which serves young children with disabilities and their families.

A little know fact about Kansas City is its underground storage facilities. I think K. C. has more underground business and storage square footage than any city in the U. S. The entrance to one of these facilities is about a quarter mile from my house. I wonder if they'll ever turn any of these cave locations into condos?

America’s hunger for gasoline falls and is unlikely to return

Kansas City Star: America’s hunger for gasoline falls and is unlikely to return

The United States used more gasoline than ever in 2007 and far more than any other country. It seemed as if America’s growing appetite for gas would go on forever.

Well, it won’t — and things may never be the same.

Gasoline consumption has been down the last two years, in part because of the recession. Even when the economy picks up, three underlying trends mean the U.S. might never use as much gas again:

•New standards for cars and light trucks, including SUVs, will make U.S. vehicles more fuel-efficient.

•The growth in the number of U.S. vehicles, after surging the last 30 years, is likely to plateau. The country now has more than four vehicles for every five people, including children.

•Alternative fuels will grow enough to cover increased fuel needs.

As a result, the federal Energy Information Administration predicts that 2007 was the peak year for U.S. gasoline demand. Even in 2035, the last year of the latest long-term projections, motorists are expected to use less gasoline than they are now. ...