sisters of mine, you did for me.
- In this First Things piece, a long-time friend reflects from his front-row seat on Italy’s COVID crisis.
- In this article, Eric Geiger cites a defense of corporate worship found in the comments of Dave Grohl, long time drummer of Nirvana and founder of the Foo Fighters. Grohl is not writing in defense of Christian worship per se, but as Eric Geiger points out in this piece, he makes the case all the same.
- Finally, in this WSJ piece, Peggy Noonan notes how our socio-economic status dramatically impacts our views on COVID and the government’s response.
On Our Declining Ability to Read and Think: “Scientists continue to debate the question of addiction to technology and its effects on memory and social isolation, a question transformed anew in the dozen years since the June 2007 introduction of the iPhone. But beyond the addiction debate, few cognitive scientists doubt that so-called multitasking is merely the ability to get many things done quickly and poorly. And no one doubts that heavy screen use has destroyed attention spans. But more than attention spans are at stake. Beyond self-inflicted attention deficits, people who cannot deep read—or who do not use and hence lose the deep-reading skills they learned—typically suffer from an attenuated capability to comprehend and use abstract reasoning. In other words, if you can’t, or don’t, slow down sufficiently to focus quality attention—what Wolf calls ‘cognitive patience’—on a complex problem, you cannot effectively think about it.” You can read Garfinkle’s entire piece here.
Quotes Worth Requoting:
- “Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that … those who write against it want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire to have the glory of having read it.” Blasé Pascal.
- “Arrogance and rudeness are training wheels on the bicycle of life—for weak people who cannot keep their balance without them.” Laura Teresa Marquez
- “My best skill was that I was coachable. I was a sponge and aggressive to learn.” Michael Jordan
At this time, where we are so focused on what we might breath in or out:
- I bless you—spreaders of the Gospel in Jesus’s name—with noses sensitive to opportunity, able to discern accurately where love must be applied in our churches and in our communities. May the One who gave you breath, take your breath away at the possibilities around you.
- I bless you in Jesus’s name with the easy breath of God’s Spirit, wholesome, pure, and deeply good, who comforts and drives us to comfort, who ministers and drives us to minister.
- I bless you in Jesus’s name with the wisdom for your lives—that they will be neither wasted nor left unspent. And may God, who inhabits all times both before and after safety, before and after illnesses, before and after death, advance his Kingdom. May it be a breath of healing in our world, the natural exhale of the gospel that we spread.