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 the past two weeks.
Oliver O’Donovan’s meditations on Holy Week:
This week, I have been laying the story of Jesus’s passion alongside the story of Joseph from the Book of Genesis. Each of these two stories culminates with a trial and a judgment. The parties have to reach a decision on what the other is to them, and what they are to be to the other. We usually think of a judgment as taking the form, “A was in the right, B was in the wrong.” The “A” and the “B” are fixed entities, the parties to the controversy whose identity was determined from the beginning, and all the judgment defines is the moral relation in which this A and this B are to stand to one another.
Why email is not safe:
Last week, I received an email from the marketing bit of an NGO. This is not an uncommon occurrence, there’s a whole world of spam that exists just for journalists. This one caught my eye because it claimed to place an embargo on me, which always annoys me (You can’t force non-consensual embargoes on journalists any more than you can anyone else), and because it was from Index On Censorship, a UK-based NGO focused on freedom of expression. They’re a older and widely respected organization that supports journalists, artists, creators, and activists all over the world. This is why the next thing I noticed upset me. They’d attached a Word document for me to open.
What has climate change done to conservationism?
Last September, as someone who cares more about birds than the next man, I was following the story of the new stadium that the Twin Cities are building for their football Vikings. The stadium’s glass walls were expected to kill thousands of birds every year, and local bird-lovers had asked its sponsors to use a specially patterned glass to reduce collisions; the glass would have raised the stadium’s cost by one tenth of one per cent, and the sponsors had balked. Around the same time, the National Audubon Society issued a press release declaring climate change “the greatest threat” to American birds and warning that “nearly half ” of North America’s bird species were at risk of losing their habitats by 2080. Audubon’s announcement was credulously retransmitted by national and local media, including the MinneapolisStar Tribune, whose blogger on bird-related subjects, Jim Williams, drew the inevitable inference: Why argue about stadium glass when the real threat to birds was climate change? In comparison, Williams said, a few thousand bird deaths would be “nothing.”
Saint G.K. Chesterton?
If the Catholic Church makes G. K. Chesterton a saint—as an influential group of Catholics is proposing it should—the story of his enormous coffin may become rather significant. Symbolic, even parabolic. Chesterton’s coffin was too huge, you see, to be carried down the stairs of his house in Beaconsfield, its occupant being legendarily overweight at the time of his death, in 1936. So it went out a second-floor window. Very Chestertonian: gravity, meet levity. Hagiographers might pursue the biblical resonance here, citing the Gospel passages in which a paralyzed man, unable to penetrate the crowds surrounding the house in Capernaum where Jesus was staying, is lowered in through a hole in the roof. Or they might simply declare that Gilbert Keith Chesterton’s was a spirit too large to go out through the conventional narrow door of death—that it had to be received, as it were, directly into the sky.
The poet Christian Wiman and theologian Dr. J. Todd Billings discuss incurable cancer:
It won’t be your ordinary conversation. Western Theological Seminary is hosting a conversation between American poet Christian Wiman and the seminary’s professor of theology Dr. J. Todd Billings discussing their reflections on faith in the midst of living with incurable cancer. The discussion is set for 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 31 in the commons at Western Seminary, 101 E. 13th St.
Some American manners that international folk don’t find so polite:
Just because you’ve mastered the art of not looking like an uncultured, uncouth slob in your country doesn’t mean those skills translate to the rest of the world. In fact, many things considered innocuous or even polite where you’re from might raise (or sternly lower) eyebrows in other parts of the world. With that in mind, here are 11 behaviors that are widely viewed as acceptable in the United States but considered rude in other corners of the globe.
A take on the television show Unbreakable Kemmy Schmidt:
The poster for “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” features a background crowd of grey-clad New Yorkers scuttling along in the rain. In front of them, Kimmy (played by Ellie Kemper) — in magenta pants, a yellow cardigan and purple sneakers — is jumping ecstatically into a puddle. The tagline: “Life begins when the world doesn’t end.”
Yankees baseball players recreate The Sandlot movie:
The 1993 coming-of-age film “The Sandlot” is a favorite of baseball fans, and apparently of some baseball players, as well. On Tuesday, we were treated to a clip of several Yankees recreating one of the movie’s most memorable scenes, and one particularly appropriate for their team.
If the State of the Union address were written by a high schooler, the night before:
George Washington once wisely said, “Arbitrary power is most easily established on the ruins of liberty abused to licentiousness.” As you might know, Mr. Washington (1732-1799) was the first President of this great nation of ours, the United States of America (or “the U.S.A.,” as it is sometimes called). Washington was super-influential—not one but in fact two states (Washington and Washington, D.C.) were named after him, as was George Washington University, where, incidentally, my Uncle Rob went to school. It is now 2015, and the United States of America, the country that Americans call home, is two hundred and thirty-nine years old. While we have made great progress in some areas, there are other areas in which the grand nation that is America could do better. This State of the Union address will address the union about the state of the economy, foreign policy, and the general state of this country.
A review of Chris Hoke’s Wanted: A Spiritual Pursuit Through Jail, Among Outlaws, and Across Borders:
What happens when you give a prison chaplain an MFA and the freedom to write whatever he wants? You get soaring descriptions of topography and weather: rain-soaked fields and flights of white herons. You get a curious, cautious eye describing migrant worker camps in the Pacific Northwest, high-speed police chases with young Latinos, a gentle reflection on what it means to bless a locked-up man with your own two hands, to watch the Spirit work in ways mysterious and joyful and heartbreaking. You get a book which is not bound by the usual constraints—neither a simplistic “message” nor a collection of motivational stories. Instead, you get a collection of essays in the original sense of the word—wandering, surprising, multiple attempts to translate the story of a young man who found a God he could love and follow in the most unexpected of places.