Sunspots 752

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Christianity: (and Politics) A Christianity Today article examines the connection between Paula White-Cain and evangelicals. White was featured at President Trump's inauguration.

A Relevant writer tells about being a fat Christian.

Christianity Today reports that European students are praying for revival in 40 countries, most of which have 1% or less who say they are evangelical Christians.


Computing: A Gizmodo writer says that Google and Facebook can help you to search for your (or someone's) license plates. Note - Google doesn't seem to have been interested in our vehicles. Yours, maybe.

Environment: For the first time in 10 years, air pollution in the US  is increasing, according to Earther.

Gizmodo reports that the Trump Administration claims that the border wall helps to preserve the environment.

History: Listverse tells us the stories of 10 people whose lives were ruined for doing the right thing. Sad.

Politics: FiveThirtyEight has a crash course on Executive Privilege.

Catherine Rampell writes that the Trump Administration's "deregulation" hasn't really helped the economy much, and in some cases has hurt it.

Science: Earther reports that lightning flashes may be hundreds of miles long.

The graphic used in these posts is from NASA, hence, it is free to use like this.
 
Thanks for looking!

Excerpts from Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton, 65

I take in order the next instance offered: the idea that Christianity belongs to the Dark Ages. Here I did not satisfy myself with reading modern generalizations; I read a little history. And in history I found that Christianity, so far from belonging to the Dark Ages, was the one path across the Dark Ages that was not dark. It was a shining bridge connecting two shining civilizations. If any one says that the faith arose in ignorance and savagery the answer is simple: it didn’t. It arose in the Mediterranean civilization in the full summer of the Roman Empire. The world was swarming with skeptics, and pantheism was as plain as the sun, when Constantine nailed the cross to the mast. It is perfectly true that afterwards the ship sank; but it is far more extraordinary that the ship came up again: repainted and glittering, with the cross still at the top. This is the amazing thing the religion did: it turned a sunken ship into a submarine. The ark lived under the load of waters; after being buried under the debris of dynasties and clans, we arose and remembered Rome. If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. How can we say that the Church wishes to bring us back into the Dark Ages? The Church was the only thing that ever brought us out of them.

I came back to the same conclusion: the sceptic was quite right to go by the facts, only he had not looked at the facts. The sceptic is too credulous; he believes in newspapers or even in encyclopedias. Again the three questions left me with three very antagonistic questions. The average sceptic wanted to know how I explained the namby-pamby note in the Gospel, the connection of the creed with medieval darkness and the political impracticability of the Celtic Christians. But I wanted to ask, and to ask with an earnestness amounting to urgency, “What is this incomparable energy which appears first in one walking the earth like a living judgment and this energy which can die with a dying civilization and yet force it to a resurrection from the dead; this energy which last of all can inflame a bankrupt peasantry with so fixed a faith in justice that they get what they ask, while others go empty away; so that the most helpless island of the Empire can actually help itself?” There is an answer: it is an answer to say that the energy is truly from outside the world; that it is psychic, or at least one of the results of a real psychical disturbance. The highest gratitude and respect are due to the great human civilizations such as the old Egyptian or the existing Chinese. Nevertheless it is no injustice for them to say that only modern Europe has exhibited incessantly a power of self-renewal recurring often at the shortest intervals and descending to the smallest facts of building or costume. All other societies die finally and with dignity. We die daily. We are always being born again with almost indecent obstetrics. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that there is in historic Christendom a sort of unnatural life: it could be explained as a supernatural life. It could be explained as an awful galvanic life working in what would have been a corpse. For our civilization ought to have died, by all parallels, by all sociological probability, in the Ragnorak of the end of Rome. That is the weird inspiration of our estate: you and I have no business to be here at all. We are all revenants; all living Christians are dead pagans walking about. Just as Europe was about to be gathered in silence to Assyria and Babylon, something entered into its body. And Europe has had a strange life—it is not too much to say that it has had the jumps—ever since.

Orthodoxy, by G. K. Chesterton, is in the public domain, and available from Project Gutenberg. The previous post in this series is here. Thanks for reading! Read Chesterton.

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Note, April 7, 2016. It has come to my attention that this post has been viewed over 800 times. I have no idea of the reason for this popularity, but am grateful for it.

Sunspots 370

Things I have recently spotted that may be of interest to someone else:

Humor:  One of National Public Radio's best shows, Car Talk, will cease producing new broadcasts in a few weeks. Too bad!

Sports: Congratulations to the Oklahoma City Thunder, who are in the finals of the National Basketball Association championships, for the first time as the Thunder (the franchise used to be located in Seattle). This is the only major professional sports team in Oklahoma. There are several states with no such franchise, including South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Virginia, New Mexico, Montana, Iowa, Kentucky, Nevada, Idaho, and others.

The Arts: (sort of) National Public Radio reports on grading student writing by computer.

(and manufacturing, and computing) A blog post about the artistic possibilities of 3-D printing.

Politics:  NPR also has explained the European financial crisis, with help from George Soros.

Image source (public domain)