So Much to Think About

“Never wrestle with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”

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Whatever 
A new Marist poll found for the twelfth consecutive year that Americans consider “whatever” to be the most annoying word or phrase used in conversation. Everybody talks about whatever, but nobody does anything about it.

Lasting Legacy
DNA is extremely stable. It can last for tens of thousands of years. It is nowadays what enables scientists to work out the anthropology of the very distant past. Probably nothing you own right now—no letter or piece of jewelry or treasured heirloom—will still exist a thousand years from now, but your DNA will almost certainly still be around and recoverable, if only someone could be bothered to look for it.

Death
Death, the most obvious, reliable, inevitable, and predictable fact of our lives is increasingly experienced as something accidental, unexpected, and surprising. We used to joke that the only thing for certain in life is death and taxes. Today when people die we’re shocked.
…we’re increasingly reactive to death, emotionally speaking, increasingly disturbed, triggered, off-footed, shocked, troubled, and unsettled by death. So much so that death has become one of the biggest causes of modern faith crises. Someone dies–and again, everyone dies–and we lose faith in God. This is huge generational shift. 
In times past, we turned to God for consolation when we experienced bereavement. Nowadays we become atheists.
Richard Beck
http://experimentaltheology.blogspot.com/2020/12/stoicism-faith-and-theodicy-part-1-our.html

Medicine as social science
In 1848, the Prussian government sent a young physician named Rudolf Virchow to investigate a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia. Virchow didn’t know what caused the devastating disease, but he realized its spread was possible because of malnutrition, hazardous working conditions, crowded housing, poor sanitation, and the inattention of civil servants and aristocrats—problems that require social and political reforms. “Medicine is a social science,” Virchow said, “and politics is nothing but medicine in larger scale.”
This viewpoint fell by the wayside after germ theory became mainstream in the late 19th century. When scientists discovered the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, plague, cholera, dysentery, and syphilis, most fixated on these newly identified nemeses. Societal factors were seen as overly political distractions for researchers who sought to “be as ‘objective’ as possible,” says Elaine Hernandez, a medical sociologist at Indiana University. In the U.S., medicine fractured. 
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/01/science-covid-19-manhattan-project/617262/

Assumptions – By Scott Erickson
It’s assumed that Mary rode on a donkey, but the Bible doesn’t say she did. ?

It’s assumed there was an innkeeper, but it doesn’t mention one anywhere. ?

It’s assumed there were three Magi, but it doesn’t give a number of those who showed up. ?

It’s assumed there was a star overhead when Jesus was born, but it doesn’t say that either. ?

It’s assumed that Jesus was born in a stable, but all it says is that He was laid in a manger – and that could’ve been any number of places. ?

Christmas comes with many assumptions—some helpful, some not so much. ?

Spirituality also comes with many assumptions, and the ones that fail us are the ones we make about what it’s supposed to look like, who is worthy for it to happen to, and what kind of outcome it’s supposed to have for us. Assumptions like . . . ?

You should be more than you are now to be pleasing to God. ?

Your weaknesses are in the way of God’s plan for your life. ?

Your lack of religious excitement disqualifies you from divine participation.?

You’re probably not doing it right.?

Other spiritual people have something you don’t have.?

Our assumptions hinder our spiritual journey in all kinds of ways, and the antidote to assumption is surprise. The surprise of Christ’s incarnation is that it happened in Mary’s day as it is happening every day in your lack of resources, your overcrowded lodging, your unlit night sky, your humble surroundings. ?

It’s a surprise that life can come through barren places.?

Evil

For evil is not an argument: It is a thing. And the answer to evil is not logic but the cross. Alysha is an heir and a symbol of the One who took evil and suffering upon Himself, out of love for others. And I live in the hope that the cross has laid the groundwork for that Day when evil is no more, and love is perfected.

Not Logic but Love

Image of music &theology
The imagery of music, of a symphony, is quite apt when thinking about the whole of theology. There are many instruments in a symphony, each with varying shades of tonality and range of pitch. First, all instruments have to be “in tune,” so that what is “A-440” for one is the same for all. Second, comes the music itself. It is written in a single key (I’m sure that somebody has written a modern symphony with instruments playing in different keys – though, if it is taken far enough, we pass from music to pure noise). If you’re playing Beethoven’s 5th (which is written in C minor), and, fifteen measures into the performance the brass sections begin to play in E flat major, the result could be quite interesting, but less pleasant, and perhaps disastrous.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Grace and truth
The reality is grace and truth are not two things. They are one thing. They are, in fact, the love of God in Jesus Christ. They are not principles that can be learned or ideals to be held in tension. They will be lived and experienced in union or not at all; which is why they are only experienced in the living person of Jesus Christ and in a shared, loving union with him.
J D Walt

Listen of the Week
https://open.spotify.com/track/6fuyG699aYnaHEYNwQNWP8?si=Kg1VbjiIROaVm9eqY7fPIg

Still on the Journey