RaMbLeS
Welcome to RaMbLeS, a collection of weekly musings on life and Scripture. It all began in 2005 on Google’s blogspot as the aBeLOG (a name now recycled), a semi-autobiographical devotional that attempted to keep well-wishers abreast of my activities as I relocated to Scotland for a few years. Since my return, I’ve continued my RaMbLeS, and here’s its most recent incarnation on Homiletix, as random reflections usually based on current news articles and travel experiences and whatever else takes my fancy!
Charge?
A wedding isn’t cheap (and that’s not a snarky remark from a lifelong single guy). Asserted the wedding website, The Knot, after a survey of 10,000 couples who had hitched the knot in 2023:
The national average cost of a wedding in 2023 was $35,000, which is a $5,000 increase from 2022’s average wedding cost of $30,000.”
But “average” has become unsustainable for Mr. Hassan Ahmed, 23, according to The New York Times. So he’s taken the unusual stop
Longevity!
Maria Branyas Morera, an American-born Catalan lady, died in her sleep last week. She was 117 years and 168 days old (4 March 1907–19 August 2024), the oldest living person after the death of the almost-119 year-old Lucile Randon in January 2023, and the eighth oldest person in history (according the Guinness World Records). The next in line is Tomiko Itooka, of Osaka, who is 116+.
Ms. Branyas Morera was a “supercentenarian,” one who lives beyond 110 years, an accomplishment
Goal!
There was always (or seemingly always) the “purpose-driven” life by Rick Warren & Co. But a search of Amazon also revealed other p-d books relating to God himself, youth ministry, legacy, church, leadership, retirement, organization, branding, marketing, pricing, achievement, school, work, teacher, husband (didn’t find a p-d wife, but there is a p-d woman, a p-d relationship, a p-d marriage, and even a p-d teenager), as well as a p-d physician’s assistant,
Shift!
Researchers from the University of British Columbia and the University of Nottingham, recently asked a probing question: “Do Moral Values Change with the Seasons?” This was the title of a paper published in the Proceedings of the Natural Academy of Sciences.
Here, we report evidence of seasonal variation in Americans’ endorsement of some—but not all—moral values. … We report evidence that people’s moral values change with the seasons. Analyses of a decade
Musicmaking!
Yes, we are all losing our edges. “What was your name, again?” “Where are those keys?” “What did I come upstairs for?” Etc.
But there might be a way out. Say researchers at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada, in “Age and Familiarity Effects on Musical Memory,” published in Public Library of Science One the other day. They explored how age related to ability to remember melodies. Good news: when it came to recognizing musical themes, older
Gratefulness!
Besides good genes, good exercise, good eating, good health care, good sleep, etc., here’s another candidate that helps prolong life: gratefulness.
So claimeth authors from Harvard U. and the University of British Columbia in “Gratitude and Mortality Among Older US Female Nurses,” published recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association: Psychiatry.
They surveyed 49,275 “older” women (mean age 79 ± 6 years), all nurses in the USA, between 2016 and
CheatGPT?
Alan Mathison Turing (1912–1954) was an English polymath—mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He is rightly considered the father of theoretical computer science. He is well known for having postulated the eponymous “Turing Test.”
In its original form a human interrogator has a text-based conversation with two people in another room (unknown to the interrogator, one is a man and the other a woman). The
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. 