Memories!
Richard Pryor, the Emmy and Grammy award-winning comedian and satirist, whom Jerry Seinfeld labeled “the Picasso of our profession,” may have been on to something after all. In one of his routines, he tells the joke of a man, who, when caught by his wife in flagrante delicto betraying her, exclaims: “Who you gonna believe—me or your lyin’ eyes?”
It turns out that memory of “your lyin’ eyes” can be altered and is not as accurate or trustworthy as courtroom
Hot!
Everybody seems to be doing it. Kraft has habanero peppers in some of its sliced cheese. Bumble Bee has canned tuna with jalapeños or chipotle. So does Hamburger Helper. Kraft’s Mac and Cheese has a sharp cheddar and jalapeño version. Kind Bars has a roasted jalapeño almond bar. There’s Oscar Mayer Jalapeño hot dogs, Chipotle Philadelphia Cream Cheese spread, and so on ….
Apparently all this spicy stuff releases endorphins (from “endogenous morphine”)
Lectureship!
Dr. Mark Bailey, President of Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS), described W. H. Griffith Thomas (1861–1924) as “one of the founding minds and hearts of Dallas Theological Seminary … with a passion of a new approach to theological education, where the central text of study would be the scriptures, and where Christ especially would be honored.” You might be surprised to know the man was an Anglican; but, then again, the two other co-founders of DTS were a Presbyterian
Knowledge?
The world is coming to an end. Soon.
How else can you explain the fact that some folks have spent decades studying a single word? And especially if that word is “Huh?”
I know, that’s what you’re asking: “Huh?” But it’s true.
Mark Dingemanse, Francisco Torreira and Nick Enfield, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, recently published the fruit of their arduous work: “Is ‘Huh?’ a Universal Word? Conversational Infrastructure
Bryan Chapell: How I Preach
Bryan Chapell: And this is How I Preach …
[Few preachers have been in the forefront of homiletics as the thought-leader of the field featured in this post—Bryan Chapell. His books, blogs, sermons, and talks have all had a great influence on preaching and how preaching is thought of and taught. We shared a speaking engagement together at the Evangelical Homiletics Society’s Annual Meeting recently, and, of course, I tried to snag him in for How I Preach.
Rhythm!
Apparently, not only do we have GPSs in our systems (last week’s blog), but they say we have an internal metronome, too.
A study published last year in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine argued that the human heart quietly marks the entire rhythm of our lives, not just that of blood flow. Whether it ticks at 40–100 beats a minute, in three-quarter time, or in triplets, or erratically, it’s influencing more than the red stuff in our arteries.
In “The Heartfelt Music
Oriented!
Your brain has a GPS! Yes, indeed! Two of them. Working in tandem.
One region in the brain, when travel is commenced, tracks the straight-line, as-the-crow-flies distance from A to B. The other, during travel, computes the precise, on-the-ground distance to get to B. The brain does both!
So declareth research funded by the Wellcome Trust and published in Current Biology: “A Goal Direction Signal in the Human Entorhinal/Subicular Region.”
Hugo Spiers and his team of scientists
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.