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!
Empathy!
We knew it all along. Women on average are better than men at putting themselves in others’ shoes and imagining what another person is thinking or feeling. But that’s now been confirmed in a vast study across 57 countries and across all ages.
So proclaimed “Sex and Age Differences in ‘Theory Of Mind’ across 57 Countries Using the English Version of the ‘Reading The Mind In The Eyes’ Test,” published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy
Swallowed!
The most dangerous animal in the world is apparently the mosquito, killing up to one million humans each year by spreading diseases including Zika and malaria. Snakes and wolves and bears are dangerous too. But hippos? Those cute, huge, “river-horses” (which is what “potamus” + “hippo” means)?
They are. Five hundred humans are killed in Africa a year by these beasts. They spend most of their time in the water but are aggressively territorial and can attack boaters
Errors!
According to the CDC, about 136 million folks go emergency rooms (ERs) in the USA each year. That’s about 373,000 a day, 15,525 every hour, 259 every minute, 4 every second. All day, all night, all week, all year. Every year!
Overall ERs are good places to visit when you are in an emergency. But according a to a systematic review from Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, approximately 5.7% are misdiagnosed: 21,260 misdiagnosed patients every day! Wow!
Of course,
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
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. 