Elsewhere, August 8, 2010

Elsewhere: A collection of interesting links and articles that I’ve come across in the last week or so. Follow me on Twitter for more of the same.

If you can make it through Atul Gawande’s “Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?”, you’re a much stronger person than I.

I once cared for a woman in her sixties who had severe chest and abdominal pain from a bowel obstruction that had ruptured her colon, caused her to have a heart attack, and put her into septic shock and renal failure. I performed an emergency operation to remove the damaged length of colon and give her a colostomy. A cardiologist stented her coronary arteries. We put her on dialysis, a ventilator, and intravenous feeding, and stabilized her. After a couple of weeks, though, it was clear that she was not going to get much better. The septic shock had left her with heart and respiratory failure as well as dry gangrene of her foot, which would have to be amputated. She had a large, open abdominal wound with leaking bowel contents, which would require twice-a-day cleaning and dressing for weeks in order to heal. She would not be able to eat. She would need a tracheotomy. Her kidneys were gone, and she would have to spend three days a week on a dialysis machine for the rest of her life.

She was unmarried and without children. So I sat with her sisters in the I.C.U. family room to talk about whether we should proceed with the amputation and the tracheotomy. “Is she dying?” one of the sisters asked me. I didn’t know how to answer the question. I wasn’t even sure what the word “dying” meant anymore. In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.

Sin, Suffering, and the Fall by Scot McKnight:

Both of these comments thoughtfully highlight a significant issue as we wrestle with the nature of God and the nature of our faith, considering both the gospel and the Christian hope of new creation. Does acceptance of an evolutionary creation change the meaning of suffering and does it mean that evil, death, tumors and blindness are part of God’s design? Does this have a significant theological impact?

There are a number of important questions here. As we think through the issues I would like to pose a thought experiment. These are the kinds of things that I think about while considering the theological significance of an evolutionary creation.

The U.S. military is co-producing a manga series entitled Our Alliance — A Lasting Partnership to celebrate the 50-year alliance between the U.S. and Japan.

Brandon Kelly’s excellent, in-depth article on ExpressionEngine’s custom fields and the growing irrelevance of field groups:

In my book, Custom Fields are ExpressionEngine’s strongest feature. They’re right at the core of what defines EE. And they’ve been bustling with innovation lately, from the add-on community as well as EllisLab.

But I don’t think we’ve seen their full potential yet, and I think Field Groups are partly to blame.

Collis Ta’eed asks “Is Technorati still relevant to bloggers?”

But for me personally, I don’t understand how a site that claims to be the fourth largest social media property in the world can do such a poor job of their core purpose.

(For what it’s worth, I can’t remember the last time I check my Technorati status.)

Christine Rosen asks “What Is Reality TV Doing to Us?”

Real life is a great deal messier than the predictable narratives of the “real” worlds we find on our television screens, and it presents ethical and social challenges that seldom intrude on the lives of pampered, self-absorbed suburban housewives. We are long past the point when anyone expects television to be edifying, but we still might pause to consider how the “flickering images” of reality TV are something more than an innocent diversion.

“Fire On The Earth: God’s New Creation and the Meaning of Our Lives” is a nice summation of the “story” of Christianity, as laid out in the Bible.

There’s nothing tepid or routine about a real encounter with Sacred Scripture. In his Narnia tales, C.S. Lewis warned that Aslan is a good lion, but he is not a “tame” lion. Likewise, God’s Word is profoundly good, but it is never “tame.” Augustine thought Christian Scripture was vulgar, inelegant, and shallow — until he heard it preached by St. Ambrose; then it grabbed him by the soul, and turned his world and his life inside out. When Jesus said “I came to cast fire on the earth, and would that it were already kindled” (Lk 12:49) he spoke not as an interesting moral counselor, but as the restless, incarnate Word of God, the Scriptures in flesh and blood, on fire with his Father’s mission of salvation.

Scripture is passionate; it’s a love story, and it can only be absorbed by giving it everything we have: our mind, our heart and our will. It’s the one story that really matters; the story of God’s love for humanity. And like every great story, it has a structure. Talking about that structure and its meaning is my purpose here today.

A simple way of understanding God’s Word is to see that the beginning, middle and end of Scripture correspond to man’s creation, fall, and redemption. Creation opens Scripture, followed by the sin of Adam and the infidelity of Israel. This drama takes up the bulk of the biblical story until we reach a climax in the birth of Jesus and the redemption he brings. Thus, creation, fall, and redemption make up the three key acts of Scripture’s story, and they embody God’s plan for each of us.

Twitch’s Todd Brown reviews Scott Pilgrim vs. The World:

Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim Vs The World is a great many things. It is a love story for the comic book age. It is the story of a slacker forced to grow up. It is a kick ass fight spectacle. It is a nostalgic glance back on the golden age of eight bit video games. It is a blazing soundtrack brought to vivid life on screen. It is a coming out party for a cadre of young stars. It is arguably the most unusual and unlikely big studio film since The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension. It is director Wright’s chance to prove himself as a formidable talent all on his own, removed from the comfortable environs of the UK, his own original source material and his cozy working partnership with Shaun of the Dead and The Hot Fuzz collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. But, most of all, it is one of the greatest graphic novel adaptations ever to hit the screen, an absolute blast from start to finish, a film that sets the bar for itself almost impossibly high and then hits every single mark along the way.

Also regarding Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Josh Hurst tweeted that it’s “this year’s Juno, Speed Racer, American Splendor, Ghost World, Eternal Sunshine, and Kill Bill all rolled into one.”

What the Great Recession Has Done to Family Life, via Russell Moore:

Our nostalgia for the Depression speaks volumes about how we feel not just about the past but also about our lives today. A craving for a simpler, slower, more centered life, one less consumed by the soul-emptying crush of getting and spending, runs deep within our culture right now. It was born of the boom, and not just because of the materialism of that era but also because of the work it took then to keep a family afloat, at a time of rising home prices and health care costs, frozen real wages and the pressures of an ever-widening income gap. As the recent Rockefeller report showed, for most families the miseries of the Great Recession don’t represent a break from the recent past, just a significant worsening of the stresses they’ve been under for years and years.

That the Great Recession could then bring hope for a major recalibration — a resetting of all the clocks — is not surprising. Unfortunately, though, it’s not happening in any meaningful way. The poor are getting poorer, and the rich, despite stock-market setbacks, are still comparatively rich. The most devastating losses in household wealth over the past two years have been suffered by the middle class. And families are fraying at the seams. The Pew poll showed nearly half of people who had been unemployed for more than six months saying their family relationships had become strained, and a New York Times/CBS poll of unemployed adults last winter found about 40 percent saying they believed their joblessness was causing behavioral change in their children.