Your weekly installment of things we’ve been reading around the web.
Video of the Week
This is an intriguing TED Talk (from a neuroscientist) about how central ignorance is to the practice of science.
“Science, we generally are told, is a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world, for gaining facts, for gaining data, that it’s rule-based, that scientists use this thing called the scientific method (and we have been for 14 generations or so). The scientific method is a set of rules for getting hard cold facts out of the data. I’d like to tell you that’s not the case.”
Stuart Firestein: The Pursuit of Ignorance
Articles of the Week
How Do Christians Decide What to Obey and What to Ignore in the Old Testament? Tim Keller. It’s a common (albeit unfair) accusation: Christians are completely arbitrary in the OT rules they keep and the OT rules they ignore. But as it turns out, the New Testament itself shows us how to read the Old Testament—even the bits about shellfish and lepers.
Can Women “Have It All” . . . With Effortless Flair? Courtney Reissig. “In God’s economy, there is no perfect woman who always has it all together, not because God has failed us but so we would learn to depend on him for every single breath. If our lives were always lived effortlessly we would fail to look to him for the strength we need for today, I know I would. Admitting our weakness, imperfection, and difficulties with getting it all done is a daily confession that he is God and we are not.”
How Long Does It Take To Prepare a Sermon? Well, that all depends on who you ask. This brief article shares the number of hours many well-known preachers today spend on sermon prep. It’s a wide range—from 1 to 35 hours a week.
Safety Is Not a Virtue, Mollie Hemingway. “If you’re teaching your kids more about safety than you are about honesty, kindness, respect for others, responsibility, gratitude, integrity, cooperation, determination, social skills, enthusiasm, compassion and manners, you’re doing it wrong.”
On The Lighter Side
How There Was Almost a Bay of Carolina – A recently declassified U.S. Army report discloses that a 4-megaton hydrogen bomb almost exploded when the plane crashed in North Carolina in 1961.
