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!
Selfie!
A few weeks ago, the Wall Street Journal ran an intriguing article that dealt with a published report late last year in the peer-reviewed Italian art journal Critica d’Arte.
Michelangelo may have secretly painted himself onto the ceiling of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel, portraying himself as God with arm outstretched to spark life in a lounging Adam. How about that?
Said the author of that journal report, Adriano Marinazzo, a curator of special projects at Virginia’s
Earworms!
No, these aren’t actually those slimy creatures with cylindrical bodies devoid of limbs or eyes.
Earworms are bits of music that keep echoing in your brain and you can’t get rid of it. AKA stuck song syndrome, sticky music, musical imagery repetition, intrusive musical imagery, or involuntary musical imagery.
A 2020 study of American college students showed that 97 percent had experienced an earworm in the past month. One in five had these creatures crawling in their
Conversation!
Yeah, we all have our smartphones and our little thumbs are texting away all the time, at work, in class, during church, in the bathroom, at the grocery store, and any other place you can think of. So we might tell ourselves that we’re getting enough social interaction, maintaining adequate interpersonal relationships. We might. But we’d be wrong. At least as far as the consequences of such interactions are concerned.
Wanna have a happier state of mind and increased
Immortality?
This guy is a smart dude: Ray Kurzweil, 75. Computer scientist, writer, inventor, and futurist. He’s done pioneering work on speech recognition, optical character recognition, electronic musical instruments, artificial intelligence, etc. Winner of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, the United States’ highest honor in technology. Member of the National Academy of Engineering. Inductee into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Twenty-one honorary doctorates.
Purpose?
There was a fad, especially in Christendom, some years ago to label everything “Purpose Driven.” It all began with Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren publishing a Bible study in 2002, The Purpose Driven Life. A quick search of Amazon revealed all kinds of titles with “Purpose Driven” in them. P-D Life of Helping Others, P-D Church, P-D Youth Ministry, P-D Marriage, P-D Innovation, P-D Leadership, P-D School, and even P-D Retirement. The fad, most
Hugs?
The other day, the Associated Press reported on an odd announcement by Mexico’s President,
President Andrés Manuel López Obrador. He made this strange remark about the crisis caused by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid trafficked by Mexican cartels, and which is 50 to 100 times more potent than morphine, responsible for the most drug overdose deaths in the USA.
The guy has called anti-drug policies in the U.S. a failure and proposes a ban in both countries on using fentanyl
Planet?
Last month, Prof. Stephen Kane, an astrophysicist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Riverside, published “The Dynamical Consequences of a Super-Earth in the Solar System,” in The Planetary Science Journal. The long and short of it? Thank God there is no planet in between Mars and Jupiter; it could have pushed Earth out of the solar system, wiping out all known life.
There is, according to Kane, a big gap in planetary science
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. 