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!
Smiling!
Smile. Laugh. Your life depends on it. So said researchers from Yamagata University, Japan, in “Associations of Frequency of Laughter With Risk of All-Cause Mortality and Cardiovascular Disease Incidence in a General Population,” in the Journal of Epidemiology recently.
Researchers worked with 17,152 participants aged 40 or younger and tracked how often they laughed over several years and concluded that increasing the frequency of laughter will reduce the risk of cardiovascular
Hydraulics!
Deserts and water do not usually go together, but geologists and hydrologists from a consortium of universities in France think they do. At least in this instance, they claim, in “On the Possible Use of Hydraulic Force to Assist with Building the Step Pyramid of Saqqara,” published recently in Public Library of Science ONE.
Yup, water power could have helped Egyptians build the pyramids.
They discovered a complex system of dams and channels near the Step Pyramid (or
Terminal!
Rollercoasters are not for the fainthearted. Not for me, that’s for sure.
But now for the really stout-hearted who want to end it all (so are they in reality fainthearted?), there is the Euthanasia Coaster.
Actually, you can’t ride it yet. It is only conceptual, but there’s a scale model. Both conception and modeling were the products of Julijonas Urobnas, a doctoral candidate at the Royal College of Art in London (and former amusement park employee). Here’s his
Grail?
CNN recently reported on the Holy Grail—the cup that was supposed to have been used by the Lord Jesus at the Last Supper (“grail,” from the Old French graal/greal, “cup”). It first showed up in written history more than millennium after its actual use, in Perceval, the Story of the Grail, a romance written around 1190. But now it’s part of pop culture:
Dan Brown made millions off his interpretation of the Holy Grail in the “Da Vinci Code,” in which he posited
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,
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.