Calamity!
So there I was in bonnie New Zealand. For two weeks. Drove all over the North and South Islands, covering 4,000 km (2,500 miles)!
And spent Christmas in balmy Auckland, 70°. Said I to self:
Self, you are such a smart guy to escape the big freeze back home in ye olde continent of North America.”
Well, the long and short of it is that “self” was wrong. Very wrong. Horribly wrong. Nope, I did not miss the freeze when I got home two days after Christmas. In fact, I got
Carols?
Every Noise At Once is an explorable, listenable acoustic map of over 1300 genres of the world of music. It is related to Spotify and last year they analyzed Christmas carols/songs.
As Christianity Today reported the other day:
Jesus is the reason for the season. But he doesn’t show up much in the top Christmas songs played on Spotify.”
Daniel Silliman, journalist, historian, and news editor for the magazine reported that the most-played Christmas song around the world
Fiction?
The other day, writer and journalist Daniel de Visé of The Hill made a pronouncement:
America’s readers may be tiring of reality.”
And they are choosing fiction over fact, apparently. At least in their reading.
Fiction book sales in the USA have gone up by 45% since pre-pandemic 2019, and nonfiction sales have slipped by 2% percent. Though in absolute numbers nonfiction book sales remain high, the slippage of percentages is significant.
New works for former Vice President
Parenting!
Did you know that parenting affects your brain? No, I don’t mean the insanity you inherit from your kids (which, of course, is true).
Wrote authors in an article published last week in Nature Communications, “Mapping the Effects of Pregnancy on Resting State Brain Activity, White Matter Microstructure, Neural Metabolite Concentrations and Grey Matter Architecture”:
There are selective pregnancy-related modifications in brain structure and function that may facilitate
Judges 6:1–7:22
Faithful trust in God, without pridefully taking credit for divine action, leads to blessing.
After the lofty praises sung to Yahweh in Judges 5, we are brought down to terra firma with an unmistakable thud: the Israelites returned to their evil ways (6:1).
Usually, at this juncture Yahweh would be raising up a deliverer. Instead we have a detour—a round of deserved divine excoriation of the nation’s behavior (6:8–10). Israel had chosen to fear and obey not Yahweh,
Salt?
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), they say, are the leading causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide: 17,800,000 deaths and 35,700,000 human-years of living with disability. The economic burden is considerable, over $200,000,000,000 (that’s $200 billion), just in the USA alone, and predicted to increase.
So prevention is at the top of every cardiovascular health scheme devised by mankind. Of these schemes, reducing high blood pressure is at the top. And with regard to
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.