When we were in NYC, we went to see Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" and found it to be generally convincing and disturbing. Andrew Sullivan pretty much thought the same but had some criticism for Gore that I think was well-deserved:
I finally saw the Gore movie yesterday. It's thoroughly persuasive about the reality of global warming and the contribution of carbon dioxide emissions to it. I'd recommend it strongly to anyone. Its blindspots were, however, obvious. No mention is made anywhere of the fact that Al Gore was a very powerful vice-president for eight years in a critical period for this issue. His fulminations against others' indifference would have been a little more credible if he'd at least addressed and explained his own failure to do anything when he was able to. It's also striking that Gore could have used the movie to argue for a serious increase in the gas tax - and he didn't. The movie's final recommendations - recycle! write your congressman! ride a bike! reset your thermostat! - were truly lame after the alarm of the rest of the movie. I think a serious gas tax and a tough increase in mandatory fuel economy standards in the U.S. are essential to prompting the technological breakthroughs that alone can ameliorate this. And yet Gore balked. Just like he did when he was in power.
An MIT professor's more substantial criticism is here. In the end, I would acknowledge that much more has to be learned before what is commonly believed by scientists about humanity's role in global warming can be proven. However, it's also clear that most scientists believe, despite the lack of complete proof, that humans are affecting our environment for the worse, and I tend to believe that it's better to be safe than sorry in cases like this.
The request seemed simple enough to the Rev. Hershael W. York, then the president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. He asked Georgetown College, a small Baptist liberal arts institution here, to consider hiring for its religion department someone who would teach a literal interpretation of the Bible. But to William H. Crouch Jr., the president of Georgetown, it was among the last straws in a struggle that had involved issues like who could be on the board of trustees and whether the college encouraged enough freedom of inquiry to qualify for a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Dr. Crouch and his trustees decided it was time to end the college's 63-year affiliation with the religious denomination. "From my point of view, it was about academic freedom,'' Dr. Crouch said. "I sat for 25 years and watched my denomination become much more narrow and, in terms of education, much more interested in indoctrination.'' Georgetown is among a half-dozen colleges and universities whose ties with state Baptist conventions have been severed in the last four years, part of a broad realignment in which more than a dozen Southern Baptist universities, including Wake Forest and Furman, have ended affiliations over the last two decades. Georgetown's parting was ultimately amicable. But many have been tense, even bitter. In Georgia and Missouri, disputes over who controls the boards of Baptist colleges led to prolonged litigation. In Tennessee, a clash over whether Belmont University in Nashville could appoint non-Baptists to its board led the Tennessee Baptist Convention to vote in May to remove the entire board. Belmont's trustees are still running the university, and while negotiations are continuing, the battle for control could end up in court.
Wiser discusses the trends in relation to the situation at Pepperdine and summarizes:
...I'm thankful that numerous Christian colleges and universities around the country are asking tough questions about what it means to be faithful to their respective missions. Those conversations can only make the Christian university landscape better, more vibrant, and more vibrantly Christian.
In case you haven't heard, Lisa and I are big fans of Firefly and Serenity. If you are too, then you'll enjoy the parody below. If not, then you better add them to your Netflix queue.
Our family, especially the boys, loves the Back Dorm Boys...the Chinese college students whose dorm room lip-sync videos of boy-band songs have been all the rage on the internet. Read about them here and check out their videos on YouTube here. I don't think we've watched all of them yet, but our favorite (probably because it was the first we saw) is I Want It That Way. Here it is on YouTube:
Scientists have condemned a leading Catholic cardinal's calls for those who carry out embryonic stem cell research to be excommunicated. Vatican-based Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo told a Catholic magazine such research was "the same as abortion". He said excommunication should apply to "all women, doctors and researchers who eliminate embryos"... But Dr Stephen Minger, leading stem cell expert at Kings College London, said: "Having been raised a Catholic, I found this stance really outrageous. "Are they going to excommunicate IVF doctors, nurses and embryologists who routinely put millions of embryos down the sink every year throughout the world? "It is more ethical to use embryos that are going to be destroyed anyway for the general benefit of mankind than simply putting them down the sink."
