Monday, September 16, 2013

Daily Links 9-16-13

Spies, bookish art, marriage as a covenant, and more in today's links.

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The beauty queen who was Winston Churchill's favorite spy and might have been the inspiration for Vesper Lynd in Ian Fleming's Casino Royale.

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Some really cool bookish art:


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Tim Keller on The Marriage Covenant:

In sharp contrast with our culture, the Bible teaches that the essence of marriage is a sacrificial commitment to the good of the other. That means that love is more fundamentally action than emotion. But in talking this way, there is a danger of falling into the opposite error that characterized many ancient and traditional societies. It is possible to see marriage as merely a social transaction, a way of doing your duty to family, tribe and society. Traditional societies made the family the ultimate value in life, and so marriage was a mere transaction that helped your family’s interest. By contrast, contemporary Western societies make the individual’s happiness the ultimate value, and so marriage becomes primarily an experience of romantic fulfillment. But the Bible sees GOD as the supreme good – not the individual or the family – and that gives us a view of marriage that intimately unites feelings AND duty, passion AND promise. That is because at the heart of the Biblical idea of marriage is the covenant.

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Tips for changing your reading habits. I think I would be a much more effective reader if I applied all three of these tips.

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Four in Ten College Grads Don't Need a Degree for Their Work

A majority of American workers have jobs that do not require a college degree, according to a new Gallup. This finding wouldn’t be particularly surprising if it were only blue-collar workers saying this, but the poll also found that four in ten college grads agreed that they don’t need a college degree for the work they do.
It’s not exactly a shock at this point that college grads haven’t been able to make the most of their degrees, but when nearly half of the country’s college students are wasting money on degrees that they believe have done nothing to prepare them for their jobs, there’s obviously a problem. These findings can’t be chalked up entirely to undergraduates’ poor choices; college degrees have increasingly become prerequisites for jobs that could easily be performed by high school grads. In many cases, employers are just looking to a college degree as a quick signifier of an applicant’s determination and work ethic, not as a sign of skills learned.

Hat tip Instapundit

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