Wednesday Link List

The interior of an abandoned church is seen on September 5, 2013 in Detroit, Michigan. From the Huffington Post link below, click through to see 14 more abandoned churches.

What you see each week are the links that ‘survived.’ You don’t get to see the rabbit trails which led nowhere, which can tie up the better half of an hour before I realize they aren’t yielding anything worth publishing.

• The place for Christian humor and satire: First he wrote this post about 10 Shocking Bible Verses. But apparently, some people took it seriously.
• At Huffington, a story about different types of gatherings meeting in unusual locations. “The church steeple in the American town square hasn’t gone, but it’s got some company.”
• Big sins, little sins: A former Evangelical turned Catholic, with part one of a look at the RC distinction between mortal sins and venial sins.
• Quotation of the Week: “The big secret in the LGBT community is that there are a significant number of gays and lesbians who oppose same-sex marriage“.
• Biomedical ethics: In China, research on editing DNA. “Advances in technology have given us an elegant new way of carrying out genome editing, but the strong arguments against engaging in this activity remain,” [Francis] Collins said. “These include the serious and unquantifiable safety issues, ethical issues presented by altering the germline in a way that affects the next generation without their consent and a current lack of compelling medical applications.”
• Church Real Estate: In the face of declining attendance and giving, it turns out that Baptists are just as attached to their church buildings as Anglicans and Catholics.
• Lost news story: Not all the reports of African American young men dying while in police custody are deemed important enough for the network news. This one, from over a month ago, is about a young man who was pulled over for a minor traffic violation while dealing with a personal medical emergency. He was denied access to an inhaler and died. He was the son of a pastor.
• Put away the flutter-boards: You can dispense with the mental image of the tablets having McDonald’s-type arches, because the original Ten Commandments were probably rectangular.
• Church membership trap: You’ve done something wrong and find yourself in an authoritarian congregation under church discipline which you think is unjust. Well, it’s a church; you can always just walk away, right? Well not if you signed a “clause, contract, covenant or membership agreement that limits your right to leave a church while you are under discipline;” or “mandates mediation instead of seeking legal protection by the courts.”
• Christian clichés: Okay, it worked out well, and maybe it was “a God thing,” but perhaps it’s also a God thing when things go wrong.
• Demographics: Even ABC World News Tonight mentioned the latest Pew Research survey about the downturn in Christian identification in the U.S. 
• Human Resources: Maybe there are several population segments that Wal-Mart simply shouldn’t assign to manning the checkouts.
  
• Studying Satan: A lot of what we think we know about Lucifer is from passages in Ezekiel and Isaiah, but this author contends there are other ways to read those sections.
  
• You read a news story, but you probably don’t critique it. The website Get Religion looks behind the written words and notes what’s missing, as in this story about sports chapels in the NBA.
• Leadership results can take years: “Yet if leaders give in to supporters’ or critics’ short-term thinking, we end up focusing our evaluation on the day-to-day work. We end up spending more time counting how many events we’ve held or meals we’ve served. We end up being micromanaged, with supporters and critics telling us how to do the work, without a clear picture whether anything we’ve done is transformative.”
• Update from Saeed: A family member who visited the imprisoned American pastor in Iran forwarded a letter.  “The American Center for Law and Justice, which represents Abedini’s wife, Naghmeh, and the couple’s two children…has been campaigning for the release of Abedini and three other American citizens imprisoned in Iran, but has criticized President Barack Obama’s administration for abandoning the Americans in the nuclear deal agreement with Iran.” President Obama has previously promised to do all that he can to see Abedini released.
• Essay of the Week: A reprint of a 1999 article that ran several months after Columbine.
• Our once-a-decade link to a symphony orchestra video: The Czech Television Studio Orchestra performs Tim Hughes’ “Here I Am To Worship” conducted by Keith Getty in Prague.
• Muslim egalitarianism: A proposed ‘women-only’ mosque in England. “The plan seeks to provide women with a platform where they can play a larger role in the religious life of their community, a role that would include women leading prayers on Fridays and the introduction of female imams.”
• Rachel’s dirty laundry: Peter Enns excerpts and praises the new book by Rachel Held Evans…
• …While another look at RHE’s book by Tony Jones raises questions for the Mainline church to which Rachel was attracted.
• Name change: A fixture in Canada since 1922, Prairie Bible Institute now becomes simply Prairie College. But far from taking the Bible out, the institution is actually increasing core Bible curriculum in its various programs.
• It’s not cheating if you get divine help: Ben Carson claims he aced a college chemistry exam because God gave him the answers in a dream.
• Another faith-interest movie releasing this month, Brother’s Keeper is about wrongful imprisonment…
• …While on the small screen, ABC-TV is making a movie about King Saul. 
• We didn’t have time to come up with a closing image so we figured we’d just run a picture of homeschool idol Jordan Taylor from Blimeycow but then, as it turned out, there was something newsy here, as Jordan has a new YouTube channel, which actually doesn’t have much on it right now.