Transfigurations: Newslinks: August 3, 2024

Why is it okay to mock Christianity, but not Islam?

While ordinary Christians across the world expressed their outrage, the spiritual leader of my faith had nothing to say about the ordeal. This says a lot about how dangerously out of touch the CofE – what my husband amusingly dubbed ‘the BBC of E’ – is with its own congregation.

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The slow fade of denominational publishing

Today, Christian publishing is an $820 million industry that is in serious flux as the American religious landscape — and the publishing industry writ large — experience massive disruptions. The trajectory of U.S. Christian publishing is complex and defined not only by interconnected trends in religiosity and culture, but by the economy, technology, fads and, of course, book readership (46% of Americans read no books in 2023 — double the 2022 figure).

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The Secret Life Of Parents

Parenthood also teaches you that you aren’t the center of the universe. You can’t make decisions based only on what’s good for you. You have little people depending on you. Maybe you can’t afford to take that vacation this year, because you have school fees coming up, or something like that. Maybe you’d rather chill out and watch a movie tonight with your wife, but the kids need you to play a game with them. So you play the game with them. This is a valuable lesson to learn about life.

Parenthood also teaches you the limits of rational control. The typical educated middle-class American wants to believe that everything is theoretically controllable. It’s not. Raising children trains you on how to control what can be controlled, how to let go what can’t be, and the wisdom to know the difference.

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Girling the Boy Scouts

The Boy Scouts of America has a Chief Diversity Officer & Vice President of Diversity and Inclusion. The organization requires all Eagle Scouts to earn a badge in diversity, equity, and inclusion. It admitted girls to its program for 11- to 17-year-old boys in 2019 and changed the name of that program from the Boy Scouts to Scouts BSA. The word “boy” has been routed from the organization’s promotional materials and replaced with “youth,” as in: “For more than 100 years, Scouting programs have instilled in youth the values found in the Scout Oath.”

Does it matter, then, that the Boy Scouts of America has now extirpated the last use of “boy” found in its entire portfolio—the “boy” in “Boy Scouts of America,” the name of the parent organization? It does.

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The Unintended Consequences of CA's War on Plastic Bags

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