Weekend Links 2-9-18

It's a cornucopia of interesting links this week.

This is interesting: 16 facts about Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. This makes me want to go read the book.

Articles like this make it harder to enjoy football. There was a time when I was truly interesting in watching it. Not anymore.

If you are a football fan enjoy it while you can because the sport is doomed.

Thomas Boswell was right - baseball is better than football. There's also this from George Carlin.

Spring training starts next week. Here are the report dates for every team.

One of the best shows currently on television is the Inspector Morse prequel Endeavour (shown on PBS here in the United States). This is a fascinating interview with Russell Lewis, the series creator and sole writer.

America is at her greatest when she accomplishes great things. Just ask Elon Musk. (As a side note, I am currently reading a second book on the Apollo space program and find myself longing for the days when we dared to do difficult things).

This seems to fall more in the category of "don't try this at home". However, I know of at least one person who does one of the things on this list regularly.

How Groundhog Day (released 25 years ago!) shows we are "stuck with virtue".

Quote of the week:

Abide is an old fashioned word. It simply means remain, stay, or dwell.  The challenge is for us to continue to be immersed in, satisfied by, surrounded by, empowered by, protected by, and infused with Jesus.

Read the whole thing.

Some interesting thoughts on The Post and the current state of the press. Lots of stuff here to think about.

This is an amazing article written by a long-time photojournalist. The story - about one man and a photograph - is pretty remarkable.

This article from WORLD Magazine on the current turmoil at Moody Bible Institute is incredibly detailed and provides a pretty comprehensive account of the challenges facing the college.

Recommended reading: The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown.

This book wasn't on my to be read list at the beginning of the year but I ran across it a library book sale and couldn't resist. I had seen it recommended several places and now I understand why it was getting such tremendous endorsements. It's an amazing account of a group of working-class boys who fought theri way through the Great Depression to defeat the heavily favored German team in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. It's a terrific read and well worth your time.

Incidentally, pay particular attention to the prologue of the book. I love the story of how the author stumbled onto this tale. It made reading the book even more enjoyable.

Why Federal Education Programs Fail

The answer lies in the concluding paragraphs of this column by Joel Belz on recent proposals to extend federal education oversight into preschool and daycare programs from the current issue of World Magazine (subscription required):

I've said before in this space, and it needs to be said during just about every presidential campaign, that there is something much more potentially terrifying than to watch the government continue to fail in its efforts to prop up education in this country. Much worse than such a continuing failure would be to watch the government succeed.

Shaping the minds and the value system of our children is simply not the proper function of government—almost certainly not at any level, but especially at the distant federal level. (Emphasis added)

If your child's school chooses never to mention what Jesus calls "the first and great commandment of life"—to love the Lord our God with all we have—all the rest of that school's education will be as hollow as it is shallow. And even worse will be the effort, so often attempted (and sincerely so), to address some expression of the second great commandment—"loving your neighbor as yourself"—without having dealt seriously with the first one. The first provides both skeleton and heart for the second; the second is impossible without the first.

Society needs to understand, and so do evangelical Christians, that the real problem with state education today (and even with much private education) has nothing to do with teachers' salaries or funding levels or phonics or curriculum or how many months of the year or hours of the day children go to school. All those things have their significance and are worth discussing at the right time.

But the right time for that is always after settling what education is really about. Until educators get that straight, they're not going to get anywhere with "education reform." And they have no business talking about stretching the federal government's reach into preschool and daycare—where the best they will ever do is to compound their present clumsiness.

Well said.