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.
Maybe being evangelical is gift, not a curse:
There is power in a good story. And with that in mind, a few months ago I began to write my own story of growing up in an evangelical home. Unlike the tales of Christian kids that attract the most attention in blog posts and books these days, mine has a happy ending.
The top ten baseball moments of David Letterman:
Inspired by the euphonious name and sub-Mendoza career batting average, Letterman made a running gag out of Buddy Biancalana in the summer of 1985. Contrasting the light-hitting Kansas City shortstop’s ineptitude at the plate with Pete Rose’s chase of Ty Cobb’s all-time hits record, the “Late Night” host instituted the “Buddy Biancalana Hit Countdown” as a regular feature.
The New York Times finds out the hardest place to live in the United States:
The 10 lowest counties in the country, by this ranking, include a cluster of six in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky (Breathitt, Clay, Jackson, Lee, Leslie and Magoffin), along with four others in various parts of the rural South: Humphreys County, Miss.; East Carroll Parish, La.; Jefferson County, Ga.; and Lee County, Ark.
The science behind hallucinated sounds:
The real stuff is usually what people notice first. Starved for input, our ears and brain essentially go into overdrive. Sounds that are typically drowned out in the din of modern life become, in some cases, unbearably loud. Spontaneous firings of the auditory nerve can cause a high-pitched hiss, for example.
Family detention might be coming to an end:
The bottom line is that the women and children currently being held in detention centers are not criminals. They are asylum seekers in a venerable tradition that allows threatened people to flee their countries in order to find help somewhere else. This tradition is precious and must be carefully guarded.
God can be found everywhere, even Updike country:
In the Collegeville church parking lot, Mark was telling me something about his family, how they’d been living around here since the seventeenth century. He said it the way somebody in an Updike story would say it. I looked at Mark again. You’re one of them, I thought. You’re one of the Updike people.
What’s the future of religion?
It would seem hard enough to project something as simple as population growth, but what of the mercurial nature of religious faith itself? It might well be impossible to predict the “turn of the soul” for one individual, let alone that of an entire community.
Church Dogmatics: Karl Barth’s concise thoughts on the Trinity:
As anyone who has spent time with Barth’s writing will undoubtedly appreciate, this is very nearly an impossible task. Barth wrote so much about the doctrine of the Trinity, in so many places, and with such beautifully spiraling (and occasionally exhaustingly repetitive) dialectical energy that no short summary can hope to capture what Barth had to say on the topic of the Trinity. This observation could easily be extended to almost any doctrine treated by Barth. But it is singularly unhelpful to recommend reading the entirety of the Church Dogmatics, especially to an analytic philosopher who is looking for a short answer. What to do?
Meet the Willy Wonka of Dunkin’ Donuts:
I would hazard a guess that one of the reasons rival Starbucks has never managed to overtake DD in the northeast is this: When faced with figuring out how we take our Joe on the go, we have no idea, nor do we want to think about it. Who has the time? We have the Red Sox curse and Deflategate to worry about.
Grantland gives us the power rankings of Episode 714 of Mad Men—“Person to Person”:
Stan was right. It’s annoying how much Stan was right. She [Peggy] could strangle him the way he always wanted to strangle her when they were face-to-face, he was so right.