Math is ‘the domain of old, white men’; CDC issues Ebola checklist; Porn Use Among Christians...more

Read Slowly to Benefit Your Brain and Cut Stress
Once a week, members of a Wellington, New Zealand, book club arrive at a cafe, grab a drink and shut off their cellphones. Then they sink into cozy chairs and read in silence for an hour.

The point of the club isn't to talk about literature, but to get away from pinging electronic devices and read, uninterrupted. The group calls itself the Slow Reading Club, and it is at the forefront of a movement populated by frazzled book lovers who miss old-school reading.

Slow reading advocates seek a return to the focused reading habits of years gone by, before Google, smartphones and social media started fracturing our time and attention spans. Many of its advocates say they embraced the concept after realizing they couldn't make it through a book anymore...

Teacher group: Math is ‘the domain of old, white men’
...The site, Culturally Responsive Teaching, Teach for America, says that because math is seen as a domain for old, white men, many students cannot identify with it. Therefore, educators should find ways to relate math to the lives of their students.

Judging from the math curriculum recommended, this TFA group, like all other social justice educators, wants minorities to believe that what relates most to their lives in America is racism and oppression.

For example, the site recommends “Critically Conscious Mathematics” and “Radical Math.”...

Porn Use Among Christians Higher Than Non-Christians
No sooner had I finished writing about the connection between Christians supporting homosexuality and supporting other forms of immorality and I come across a new study showing the epidemic porn use among Christians...

The Great Unraveling
It was the time of unraveling. Long afterward, in the ruins, people asked: How could it happen?

It was a time of beheadings. With a left-handed sawing motion, against a desert backdrop, in bright sunlight, a Muslim with a British accent cut off the heads of two American journalists and a British aid worker. The jihadi seemed comfortable in his work, unhurried. His victims were broken. Terror is theater. Burning skyscrapers, severed heads: The terrorist takes movie images of unbearable lightness and gives them weight enough to embed themselves in the psyche.

 

It was a time of aggression. The leader of the largest nation on earth pronounced his country encircled, even humiliated. He annexed part of a neighboring country, the first such act in Europe since 1945, and stirred up a war on further land he coveted. His surrogates shot down a civilian passenger plane. The victims, many of them Europeans, were left to rot in the sun for days. He denied any part in the violence, like a puppeteer denying that his puppets’ movements have any connection to his. He invoked the law the better to trample on it. He invoked history the better to turn it into farce. He reminded humankind that the idiom fascism knows best is untruth so grotesque it begets unreason... Don't miss this...

 

CDC issues Ebola checklist: 'Now is the time to prepare'

...While the CDC does not believe that there are new cases of Ebola in the United States, the assumption in the checklist is that it is only a matter of time before the virus hits home...

Meriam Ibrahim: 'I knew God would stand by my side'  ...
She said she was given three days in prison to renounce her faith, while imams visisted her in an "intervention" to help her recant by reciting the Qur'an to her.

"My faith was the only weapon that I had in these confrontations with imams and Muslim scholars," she said.

Interviewer Megyn Kelly asked: "Did you believe they would kill you?"

To which Ibrahim responded: "Faith means life, if you don't have faith, you're not alive."
She highlighted that there are many Christians suffering the same persecution. "I am not the only one suffering from this problem," she said. "There are many Meriams in Sudan and throughout the world. It's not just me. I'm not the only one."...