Archive - June, 2012

Joseph, can you take a message for your wife?

This post is part of the Rachel Held Evans synchroblog event “One in Christ: A Week of Mutuality.”  You can follow this event on Twitter by entering #mutuality2012 to read the entries by participating bloggers. 

Isn’t it telling which accounts from the Bible we use to shape our understandings of God, ourselves and our place in the world?

Earlier this week, author and blogger Rachel Held Evans made the point that “when it comes to womanhood, many Christians tend to read the rest of scripture through the lens of 1 Timothy 2:11-15 rather than the other way around.[1]

11 A woman[a] should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man;[b] she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner. 15 But women[c] will be saved through childbearing—if they continue in faith, love and holiness with propriety.

I was just reading the first few chapters of Luke. The angel Gabriel visits Zechariah and tells him that Zechariah and Elizabeth will have a child (improbable because of their advanced age). Then a few months later, Gabriel visits Mary and tells her she will carry the Son of God. Continue Reading…

Cheating… just a little

In his new book The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, Duke University Professor Dan Ariely explains how his experiments with 30,000 show that “only a few people cheat a lot, but a lot of people cheat a little.”

In a June 4 interview on NPR, Dr. Ariely describes an experiment he conducted where people were asked to self-report the number of math problems they answered correctly. They received $1.00 for every correct answer.  People generally responded that they got six questions correct, when, on average, they only got four problems correct in the time allotted.

“Across all of our experiments, we’ve tested maybe 30,000 people, and we had a dozen or so bad apples and they stole about $150 from us. And we had about 18,000 little rotten apples, each of them just stole a couple of dollars, but together it was $36,000.”[1]

Do you cheat … “just a little”?
I was amused by the radio segment on the drive home – the stories were funny and Dr. Ariely seemed to have a good pulse on human nature. Continue Reading…

Interviews: with Me!

In the past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to be the interview subject myself. Check out a few articles: