All posts by Phil

Religion

Iceland Opens Pagan Temple

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Iceland has been officially Christian for 1,000 years, but according to journalist and atheist Eygló Svala Arnarsdóttir, “Icelanders have never really been strictly Christian.” She said they accepted Christianity with the understanding that that they would be allowed to quietly practice paganism. “It’s not that people necessarily believe in the old Norse gods or have secret ceremonies in their basement,” she explained. It’s just a cultural value.

Now they’re opening a pagan temple. (via Prufrock)

Fiction, Publishing

Quiz: Rejected Novels

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Author Marlon James, who won this year’s Man Booker award for his work A Brief History of Seven Killings, said his first novel, John Crow’s Devil, was rejected seventy-eight times before being published in 2005.

“There was a time I actually thought I was writing the kind of stories people didn’t want to read,” he said.

The Guardian states many critically acclaimed books were rejected at one time or another and not just by mothers who won’t surrender their children to state-issued mind-control agents. Here’s a quiz on “great rejected books.”

Non-fiction

What’s Orbiting a Distant Star Will Astonish You

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Or not.


Alien Armada by Bogwoppet on DeviantArt

Citizen scientists have been keen on a particular star since 2011 for its irregular light pattern, observed through Kepler Space Telescope. Irregular light patterns indicate object moving between us and the star, which could be planets, asteroids, tentacles of space squid, or the Borg. Any of those very realistic possibilities. The astronomers noted the star does not appear young, so debris surrounding young stars was ruled out. What could surround a mature star like this?

Jason Wright of Penn State suggested “the star’s light pattern is consistent with a ‘swarm of megastructures,'” Ross Anderson of The Atlantic reports, “perhaps stellar-light collectors, technology designed to catch energy from the star.

“When [Boyajian] showed me the data, I was fascinated by how crazy it looked. Aliens should always be the very last hypothesis you consider, but this looked like something you would expect an alien civilization to build.”

The science-side of the Interwebs has been abuzz with this news, but what can be understood from this observation? An article published in Scientific American earlier this year, which mentions Wright’s research, states nothing has been found. Writer Lee Billings explains Wright’s team’s goal.

They looked for the thermodynamic consequences of galactic-scale colonization, based on an idea put forth in 1960 by the physicist Freeman Dyson. Dyson postulated that a growing technological culture would ultimately be limited by access to energy, and that advanced, energy-hungry civilizations would be driven to harvest all the available light from their stars. To do that, they might dismantle a planet or two as feedstock for building star-enveloping swarms of solar collectors. A star’s light would fade as it was encased in such a “Dyson sphere”

Dyson himself is not discouraged by finding nothing. “Our imaginings about the ways that aliens might make themselves detectable are always like stories of black cats in a dark room,” he said. “If there are any real aliens, they are likely to behave in ways that we never imagined.”

Which means they probably aren’t hoping to eat us.

Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Reading, Religion

Stories You Won’t Want to Miss

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Here are some articles on a variety of current topics.

  1. 50 Books J. I. Packer Thinks You Should Read
  2. Refuting 5 False Theories About Jesus, including theories he was just a pagan myth or violent revolutionary
  3. 9 Truths About a Multi-Generational Church, such as the young should follow and the old should humbly lead
  4. Like bitter foods, like coffee, beer or dark chocolate? You might be a psychopath.
  5. Porn can’t be sold ethically. “The truth is that when a feminist performs the role of sex object in order to transgress and/or reclaim heteronormative constructs of femininity, her audience is excluded from the alleged meaning of her work. Men don’t go to peep shows so that they can self-critically reflect on women’s sexuality and the politics of desire. To ignore this is not an act of radical female autonomy, it’s an act of dangerous and narcissistic irresponsibility.”
  6. Porn and the Gospel, a talk by Joseph Solomon
Authors, Music

The Marvelous Burning Edge of Dawn

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Andrew Peterson just released a new album,  The Burning Edge of Dawn. It’s marvelous. He sat down with Jeffrey Overstreet this weekend to talk about it. Overstreet enthuses over the friend.

Peterson’s songs and lyrics are full of sweeping metaphors, making his songs accessible enough for people of all ages and all experiences, even as they are specific enough to speak of his own specific pilgrimage as a musician; as a novelist (his fantasy series had the same editor and publisher as mine, and was released at the same time, which is how I was blessed to meet him); as a Nashville “community organizer” . . . as a sort of folk pastor; as a “book guy” . . .

Hear some of the new music and what the artist has to say about it on Listening Closer.

Fiction

American Zombies: Enemies Next Door

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Kurt Schlichter ruminates on our current obsession with zombies. Not long ago, many mainstream stories focused on foreign threats or nuclear fallout. Today, we entertain ourselves with mysterious outbreaks that turn people into flesh-eaters.

“What does it say,” Schlichter asks, “that our collective subconscious senses less of a threat from fanatical outsiders who, in the last couple decades, have killed thousands of us via terrorism, than from each other?

. . . The foreigners are a threat, but that’s under control. What is out of control, or what seems like it is out of control, is our society itself.”

Fiction

Fantasy Dressed Up as Sci-Fi

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Author John C. Wright argues against the ‘It Ain’t Gunna Happen’ camp of science fiction with his own Space Princess camp. One side says we will never find intelligent life on other planets or build our own colonies there. The other side says, not only is there intelligent life out there, but the women are remarkably hot and need to be rescued by noble earthmen.

One side says, “Psionics is just magic wearing a lab coat.” The other side says, “Without psionics, there is no way to speak and understand the space princess when you first meet her. Learning a new space-language without psionic aid involves many long and boring sessions with philologists and translators and grammarians, which is all hogwash and humbug. Space Princesses can read minds just enough so that you can talk to them. That is settled.”

You can see where this is going.

Is this kind of argument having assumed your conclusions really that different from the supposedly serious argument put forward in this Canadian propoganda, which says Science is a political value we must all support?

Religion, Uncategorized

Learning from Black Scholars

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Dr. Jarvis Williams of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary talks about his life as a black man in a mostly white world and offers many practical suggestions for helping “some evangelicals see race and intelligent racial dialogue matters.”

For example, he writes, “white evangelicals must understand there are many black and brown intellectuals. There are many great black and brown preachers. Most white evangelicals I have interacted with never even read one book written by a person of color. Or they’ve never even heard of some of the great black and brown expositors. Ignorance will only reinforce one’s racial biases.”