Each Friday we compile a list of interesting links and articles our editors find from across the web. Here’s what’s catching our eye this week.
A story about the town without wi-fi:
The residents of Green Bank, West Virginia, can’t use cell phones, wi-fi, or other kinds of modern technology due to a high-tech government telescope. Recently, this ban has made the town a magnet for technophobes, and the locals aren’t thrilled to have them.
TOJ contributor Wesley Hill discusses the new “new” orthodoxy at First Things:
Almost three decades ago, theologian Ronald Goetz spoke of the rise of a “new orthodoxy” in Christian thought. He was referring to twentieth-century theology’s enthrallment with the theme of the suffering of God. By the time Goetz wrote, that theme—of God hanging there on the gallows with the innocent sufferer, in the timeless image Elie Wiesel offered in his book Night—had come to dominate many forms of Protestant theology. Dietrich Bonhoeffer had written from a Nazi prison that “only the suffering God can help.” Jürgen Moltmann, in the wake of the revelation of the full extent of the Holocaust, had authored a book called The Crucified God. And figures as diverse as the process theologian Alfred North Whitehead, who characterized God as “the fellow-sufferer who understands,” and the Japanese Lutheran Kazoh Kitamori, who spoke of “the pain of God,” had ushered in a way of thinking about divine majesty and power as God’s ability and will to share in human misery. Across the spectrum, from both pulpits and pews, the “new orthodoxy” came to reign: God suffers in God’s own nature.
How Michael Lewis’ work depended on the Oakland Athletics’ success:
The other day I was watching Moneyball (yes, again) when a singular question occurred to me: Without the Athetics’ 20-game winning streak and Scott Hatteberg’s climactic home run, would there have been a wildly bestselling book? An Oscar-nominated movie? Before thinking about this for too long, I e-mailed the author of the bestselling book…
Has sexual education changed that much over the years? The Verge reflects:
If you went to high school in America, chances are your school offered a curriculum that looked more or less like the ones taken by your peers across the country – give or take a lesson on evolution, anyway. But there’s one essential topic that’s anything but standardized: sex education. While some students receive thoughtful, comprehensive, and science-based sex education; others learn only to abstain from the evils of intercourse until marriage – if they learn anything at all. At present, just 22 states require sex education in schools; only 19 require that sex education is medically, technically, or factually accurate.
A new Sufjan Stevens album drops at the end of March:
Sitting in a coffee shop this morning I looked out the window and I saw two women, a mother and a daughter, holding hands, and even though they were buttoned up in their overcoats and little hats, and the sun was cold and beating down on them in a way that didn’t make a difference to anyone, let alone the frigid winter air, it made a difference to me because the sun, such as it was, illuminated the intimacy of their gesture; there was nothing performative about it.
The terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo has Tom Carson of Grantland asking, “Where do we go from here?”
In photographs, the staff of Charlie Hebdo who got massacred in Paris last Wednesday looks like a happy crew. The atmosphere of exhilarated, jauntily scruffy mischief-making is familiar to me from my own alt-weekly days, and the feeling of intimacy was unsettling.
Should we use wine or grape juice in the Eucharist? This blogger argues for wine:
For some of you, the argument over wine versus grape juice in the Lord’s Supper is entirely foreign. You grew-up Roman Catholic or Lutheran or Greek Orthodox or Anglican or similarly “high church.” You can read this post as an observer on the outside, curiously looking in. But here in NASCAR country, we do our drinking at the track or pretty much anywhere and anytime, unless it’s Sunday morning at church and it’s time for Communion. So, this is a lively debate still. Here is a brief run-down of how I understand the issue.
NASCAR driver Kurt Busch has claimed his ex-girlfriend is a “trained assassin”:
Former NASCAR Sprint Cup Champion Kurt Busch told a Delaware court that his ex-girlfriend, Patricia Driscoll, is a trained assassin who travels the world as a hired killer. “Everybody on the outside can tell me I’m crazy,” Busch said, “but I lived on the inside and saw it firsthand.”
And, again from Grantland, a review of Selma:
Movies have become very good at assembling armies. Good software and skilled technicians are often all you need. The ensuing chaos of battle tends to resemble a cartoon of war. What’s human grows indistinguishable from what’s not, and making a distinction between the two sides seems beside the point. Whether the battle is any fun becomes a more pressing concern than its outcome.
There’s a giant dome in Hawaii where NASA is simulating life on Mars:
Zak Wilson lives on Mars. Or, at least, that’s what he sometimes imagines. “My life is about as close to living on Mars as is possible on Earth,” he says. “At times, it’s easy to forget where I actually live — the view out my window is undeniably otherworldly.” For the last three months, Wilson has been living with five other people in a 1,500-square-foot plastic dome on the barren slopes of Mauna Loa, Hawaii. They subsist entirely on freeze-dried or dehydrated food, put on plastic “space suits” every time they want to step outside, and endure a 20-minute delay on virtually all communications with the outside world — to simulate the time it’d take to send a message from Earth to Mars. The six of them will be in this lab for eight months in total — and will never see any other humans.