Worship!
Star Wars: The Force Awakens has been doing incredibly well in the box office. They expect the second weekend of its opening to generate about $160 million. This Disney film is now the fastest to have crossed the $500 million mark—in just 10 days (Jurassic World took 17). Unless something unexpected happens, Star Wars: tFA is destined to top Avatar to become the biggest-grossing movie in the U.S. ever, crossing $1 billion this weekend.
But this hit has had an impact on
Reality!
Arnold Schwarzenegger, the former governor of California, returned to the screens this summer in Terminator Genisys as the Terminator. But in real life he was scary.
To support the After-School All-Stars program (that helps keeps children “safe and healthy, to graduate high school and go to college, to find careers they love and then give back to their communities”)—and, likely, to have some fun—our man AS donned his Terminator costume and makeup, and roamed the
Duane Litfin: How I Preach
Duane Litfin: And this is How I Preach …
[Author, pastor, professor, and seminary president—he was the seventh president of Wheaton College—Duane is an authority on all matters related to preaching. He taught at Dallas Seminary for several years, and currently serves on the Seminary Board; so that makes him one of my bosses! With a couple of doctoral degrees in the rhetorical aspects of preaching, Duane’s thinking on homiletics needs to be tapped into by every preacher.
Lifespan!
A 50-year-long study has recently shown what we all knew already: unhealthy lifestyles can reduce our lifespans.
Inadequate exercise, imprudent diet, and inadvisable smoking, potentially resulting in heart disease, diabetes, and stroke, can diminish the length of life. If you are a male in your 40s, being stricken with all three conditions will bring your life expectancy down from 78 to 55 (if you are a female, your reduction would be 20 years). If you were in your 60s,
Virtuous?
Stanley Milgram (1933–1984), American social psychologist, is best known for analyzing connectedness—the “six degrees of separation” that links all humans. But while teaching at Yale in the 1960s, he also conducted some notorious experiments on obedience. Jewish, himself, he was perturbed by how lower level Nazis, during the Holocaust, could perform acts of great cruelty and inhumanity in blind obedience to orders from above.
Students in his experiments were ordered
Genesis 24:1−25:18
Mature faith trusts God to accomplish his purposes through his inscrutable design and through human action.
This pericope forms a sort of epilogue to the whole Abraham narrative. The patriarch’s exhortations to his servant regarding his desire for his seed, his son, to marry from among his own, form the last recorded words of Abraham (24:1–9). He twice mentions “Yahweh, the God of heavens” (24:3, 7). In these later days of his life, he is still confident in Yahweh’s
Leptodermis?
Leptos = thin
Dermis = skin
Scientists at the Department of Biophotonics and Laser Technology at Saarland University, in Germany, used high-resolution skin imaging tomography to study the skins of astronauts before and after their space journeys. The technology uses lasers: apparently the resolution is a thousand times better than that produced by any other device.
Said Professor Karsten Koenig of Saarland:
So now you get the information without taking biopsies; normally
Abe Kuruvilla is the Carl E. Bates Professor of Christian Preaching at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary (Louisville, KY), and a dermatologist in private practice. His passion is to explore, explain, and exemplify preaching.