Links for the week. An assortment of thought-provoking, amusing, mind-bending, or conversation-starting pieces. As usual, linking does not imply agreement.
1. See the World Through the Eyes of a Cat
3. Slavoj Žižek: “Most of the idiots I know are academics”
6. Unity of Act and God Beyond Substance – Augustine on incarnation and Trinity
7. Inerrancy
8. God in the Wilderness – Leithart on Rosenstock Huessy’s discussion of the importance of Anthony
10. Platonic Barth?
11. Academician as a Missionary Calling
12. Writerly Habits
13. The Mother of All Disruptions
14. Obamacare and the Task of Responsible Opposition: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
15. Inequality: The Ugly Truth
16. “Performance” and Reading of Texts in Early Christianity
17. Unity and Diversity in Preaching
18. Why Fundamentalism Often Works
19. Welcome to the Global Parish: Why Sentimentalizing Anglican Locality Isn’t Helping
20. The 29 Stages of a Twitterstorm
21. College Women: Stop Getting Drunk
22. To Prevent Rape on College Campuses, Focus on the Rapists, Not the Victims
23. Alcohol Education is Not Rape Apology
24. Jesus and Civic Masculinity
25. The Emerging Divide in Evangelical Theology
26. What Did the Declaration of Independence Do?
27. The Emasculation of Walter White – A piece I wrote for the Good Men Project. Breaking Bad spoilers alert.
28. A Theologian’s Influence, and Stained Past, Live On
29. Highest Paid Athlete Hailed From Ancient Rome
30. A Personal Manifesto for Men and Boys
31. How to Quit Mindlessly Surfing the Internet and Actually Get Stuff Done
32. Eating Popcorn in the Cinema Makes People Immune to Advertising
33. Marilynne Robinson: Christian, Not Conservative
36. TED Talks are Lying to You
37. Sleep ‘Cleans’ the Brain of Toxins
38. Blow to Multiple Human Species Idea
39. The Best Way of Getting Out of the Whole Canaanite Genocide Thing
40. Time to Admit It: The Church Has Always Been Right on Birth Control
41. 13 Things that Define the New American Centre
42. Forget About Learning Styles. Here’s Something Better.
43. Deadliest Creatures (That Are Easiest to Miss)
44. He Once Grew the Biggest Pumpkin Ever in Virginia. Now He’s Going to Change the World.
45. The Guy Who Shrunk His 1950s Hometown
46. What Happens When a Language Has No Numbers?
48. Death Doesn’t Care If You’re Sexy
50. Google’s Ngram Viewer Goes Wild
52. Will the Real Complementarian Stand Up? – Rachel Held Evans complains about the silence of complementarian critics on the questions she raises in A Year of Biblical Womanhood. I may not be representative of complementarianism, but readers of this blog will know that I have engaged with her book extremely extensively here.
53. Is the Nuclear Family the Problem?
54. Will a Chicken That’s Fed Lemons Taste Like Lemons?
55. 60+ Family Tradition Ideas
56. Twenty Easily Confused Pairs of Bible Characters
57. An eagle-eyed commenter observes that Gale Boetticher (from Breaking Bad) possesses a copy of Beveridge’s translation of Calvin’s Institutes
58. Super Clever Sunglass Illusion
59. Box
60. Lily Myers, “Shrinking Women”
Alastair's Adversaria 
On the rape debate, I’d note that a rather large percentage of rapes in developed countries, well over 50% IIRC, are committed by psychopaths or semi-psychopaths, i.e. people with greatly reduced to non-existent empathy. I never understood how exactly appealing to the conscience of people who don’t really have a conscience was going to work. In fact, giving anti-rape programs to psychopaths may even make them more effective predators. That doesn’t mean such programs shouldn’t exist. Not all rapists are psychopaths and perhaps some non-psychopaths can be reached by them. But we need to seriously think through what we are doing before we do it. Sadly, serious, sober thought in this area seems to be pretty much non-existent.
Yes, although resigning ourselves to the occurrence of rape and only addressing women with messages to keep themselves safe is highly problematic, it is hard to believe that rape will ever cease to be a danger, no matter how much we address young men on the subject. Perhaps more promising route would involve a greater emphasis upon engaging bystanders and challenging drinking/hook-up culture more generally, rather than just women’s participation within it. However, women will always need messages of how to keep themselves safe from rape, just as we need messages teaching us how to protect our houses from burglars or take responsibility for our safety when we cross the road.
“extremely extensively” – yep, sounds about right. 🙂
Lol! 🙂
I’ve said this before here, but it’s always true:
One thing that bothers me about discussions of the treatment of the Canaanites is the lack of reference to the Resurrection of the Dead. Whatever happened then, God did not annihilate the Canaanites, at least not in the way we usually use that term, since every one of them that was killed will rise again. They won’t stay dead any more than Jesus did–or any more than Isaac would have (http://bit.ly/H0ImXl). This doesn’t provide an answer (far from it!), but it does, I believe, indicate, that we are not in a position even to evaluate the events (even granting that we know what happened), since we do not have the whole story. For that, we must wait in faith till our Resurrection, when the story *will be* finished, and recognize, in humility, that we cannot offer a full answer till then.
Yes, that is an important and routinely neglected point. Thanks for bringing it up.