Every Wednesday I post a handful of articles, blog posts, videos, columns, books or anything I find interesting and worth your time. Ranging from thought-provoking to funny to ridiculous, most are things I stumbled upon in the past week. Hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading along!
"Short Read" = 10 minutes or less. "Long Read" = 10 Minutes or longer.
#1 - Jesus' Third Way - Walter Wink (Long Read)
Amongst the most dismissed and misunderstood teachings of Jesus are his teachings focused an ethic of nonviolence. Traditionally these teachings have either been thought of as high unattainable ideals or a call to passive complicity in the face of injustice. However, Wink challenges the common understanding of Matthew 5:38-41 to reveal Jesus' teaching to empower the marginalized and stand up to "the powers that be." Jesus' ethic of nonviolence is not a call to passivity and submission, but a call to confront evil and injustice on our own terms, and in ways that break cycles of violence.
#2 - How to Raise a Creative Child - NYTimes (Short Read)
Inherent to being a parent is the desire for your child to be successful. Whether that is in the arts, sports, academia, or professionally. However, Adam Grant's article in the New York Times discusses the failure of forcing creativity on our children. Grant argues for parents to not only encourage excellence and success, but even more so, encourage children to find joy in their work. "Creativity may be hard to nurture, but it's easy to thwart. By limiting rules, parents encouraged their children to think for themselves." It is a difficult task to allow children to create their own path, but it seems a necessary task for their development.
#3 - 2016 Distilled - The Atlantic (Election Tracking Resource)
I just came across this resource offered by The Atlantic this past week. It is a great resource to track the election as it draws near. It offers top stories about the election, an up-to-date poll tracker, detailed timeline of upcoming votes, debates, et cetera, and other interesting details all in on one page. Worth a look if you are interested in keeping up with current political stories.
#4 - Trump Exposes the Split Between Ordinary and Elite Evangelicals - The Atlantic (Short Read)
I have long been a fan of Jonathan Merritt who writes this article for the Atlantic. Using Trump's divisive public-opinion, Merritt illustrates a major divide within American Evangelicals. "American evangelicalism is not now, nor has it ever been, monolithic. There are often divisions along conservative-political lines and across generational lines. And there is now also a growing rift between everyday evangelicals and their leaders."
#5 - Should Millennials Get Over Bernie Sanders? - NewYorker (Short Read)
Two things have mystified our world in recent years: Millennials, and Bernie Sanders. Alexandra Schwartz explores the interesting and unexpected relationship between those two things. Specifically highlighting Millennials desire for "purity," she explores how Sanders has captivated the minds of younger generations. She notes that Millennials (of which I am one) have yet to be trampled by the failure of political systems and still hope for ideals. "The belief in the possibility of true purity," writes Schwartz, "might be a delusion for most voters, but it's a privilege of youth, the province of people for whom the thrill of theory hasn't yet given way to the comparative disappointment of practice."