Serving up some tasty links on a snowy day:
Thankfully, economists don’t design highways.
Who is really on the margins? A debate ensues.
The limits of neuroscience.
Another story on Protestants converting to Eastern Orthodoxy. (I’m curious whether this phenomenon is real or just one of those things that reporters keep repeating as a stock story like razors in apples at Halloween.)
Having two relatives who left Mars Hill and swore off Protestantism for Antiochian Orthodoxy it’s not just a news thing. Sure, it IS just a news thing but it’s the underbelly of “young, restless Reformed” coverage. For my relatives who converted they saw it as many converts do, as bailing on the glitz and personality cult of American evangelicalism for the truly history church. There was also the slow but steady 180 turn in deciding that Calvin was a bloodthirsty heretic instead of a champion of biblical truth. Since my brother-in-law was the ardent 4-pointer that was an interesting shift to track.
As to terms like marginalized, well, I agree evangelicals have managed to completely co-opt the language and terminology of marginalization or persecution. I don’t need to mention which pastor I heard talking about Christians forming a counterculture ten years ago for you to know which one I’m talking about. Even back then my now-Orthodox relatives and I noticed that the “counterculture” he was talking about looked suspiciously like a white suburban upper middle class “counterculture” that wasn’t really a counterculture at all. But, obviously, at the time we thought the positives outweighed the negatives. I actually know of a few people who were once at Mars Hill and bailed on it to go back to Eastern Orthodoxy or at least got as close to it as their spouses felt comfortable with.