Month: April 2018
when churches commodify diversity
Duke Kwon allows the text to speak for itself in his review of The Urban Church Imagined: Religion, Race, and Authenticity in the City: This consumer orientation also has implications for the way the church relates to racial diversity and its members...
more questions than answers in the death of a journalist in South Sudan
It’s always painful to lose a colleague in the line of duty, but rarely does one find a remembrance like this one that at once carries on the work of that colleague while examining the factors that contributed to the...
ends and kinds in creation
I appreciated Matthew Arbo’s short reflections on Oliver O’Donovan and creation: “abstraction from teleology creates dangerous misunderstanding of the place of man in the universe.” The turn here is Copernican. Teleological order is no longer in creation, but is instead rationally...
the problem with values
Charlie Clark (one of the Fare Forward founders) has published a speech he gave recently at Dartmouth, and I empathize quite a bit with these lines about “values” in regards to medical education: I don’t know about you, but my...
life and death for black mothers and their babies
This NYT Mag story about a young woman who lost a baby to unrecognized preeclampsia and then had another baby shortly thereafter with the help of a doula is arresting. It highlights some of the research (discussed at greater length...
“For G-d So Loved Haiti”
There is so much here in this long essay about the controversial Pentecostal preachers of Haiti and the traditional Vodou practices: I asked [the pastor] whether he had founded Shalom to combat Vodou in the country, and he shook his...
performance improvement: if all you measure is garbage, you will get garbage
The New England Journal of Medicine has a fun little post examining measures for performance improvement. As you may or may not know, doctors are notoriously bad at following guidelines or understanding evidence. Many patients wander through the healthcare system...
spend time with poor people, be friends and neighbors
I love it when Eve Tushnet gets on her soapbox about poverty and virtue, and this great piece about the much-touted “success sequence” is no exception: The people I speak with believe they have a responsibility—there’s that word again—to achieve...
“I can’t work for justice and righteousness if I don’t have love in my heart.”
I was so thankful that my friend D.L. Mayfield wrote about the Failed Missionary podcast: I don’t claim to have all the answers figured out, but I do know that one thing I keep finding is that I can’t work...
let’s stop asking doctors to text while driving
The New England Journal of Medicine shares this perspective about how to help doctors stop burning out — suggesting that the electronic medical record (EMR) and the ever-increasing clerical workload are to blame for burning out doctors: Increasing clerical burden...