What is the presenting problem in the Gospel?

January 10, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Religion

It is hard to separate art from the context in which it is created. It’s hard to understand great insights and leaps of imagination if you can’t inhabit the world-view of the thinker who is making them. And that’s true for the books of the Bible as well.

I believe the lessons that Jesus teaches are timeless, but they are timeless, in large part, because they explain and illuminate things that are common to all human experience. Understanding the context in which the Gospel’s are written, where the writer’s choose specific things that Jesus said to pass along to the audience of their day can help us to understand some of the most challenging and confusing things that we find in them.

So with that I share this quote from Amy-Jill Levine. It’s something that I’m more and more convinced, if we keep it in mind, we can fully understand what Jesus meant and to whom he was speaking. It is fully in line with the idea that we hear said that “God has a preferential option for the poor”.

Multiple results point to Modified Newtonian Gravity

January 10, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Science

Study of wide binary stars reveals new evidence for modified gravity at low acceleration:

Chae concludes, “At least three independent quantitative analyses by two independent groups reveal essentially the same gravitational anomaly. The gravitational anomaly is real, and a new scientific paradigm shift is on its way.”

The observed gravitational anomaly is remarkably well consistent with the MOND-type (Milgromian) gravity phenomenology. However, underlying theoretical possibilities encompassing the MOND-type gravity phenomenology are open at present, and this may be welcome news to theoretical physicists and mathematicians.

This is a big deal – assuming there isn’t something fundamentally wrong with how the multiple data sets are being analyzed by the researchers. It would mean that rather than keep on searching for dark matter, the gravitational anomalies being observed can be explained, not by some sort of deus-ex-machina, but by modifying our description of how gravity works in certain conditions.

It’s a simpler answer than invoking something that can describe the observations well but requires all sorts of hand-waving to invoke. Sort of like cosmic inflation or epicycles…

And it would mean that there’s a lot of physics that needs to be uncovered. Fun!

Why declare cows sacred?

January 7, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Reconciliation / Religion / Science

Cattle in The Earliest European Cities Weren’t Bred as Food : ScienceAlert:

Between 4200 and 3650 BCE, animals domesticated by Trypillia societies were prized largely for their poop, not their flesh, according to Schlütz and his team.

An analysis of nitrogen isotopes in teeth, bones, and soil from the remains of Tryphillia societies suggests that early farmers in Europe were mostly consuming peas, lentils, and cereal grains, like barley.

Cattle, sheep, and goats, which were kept in fenced pastures, were largely used to fertilize farmland. These animals also ate peas and grains, and their manure boosted the production of later crops.

Slaughtering the herds for meat would have depleted a vital resource after much labor raising them, collapsing the whole system.

Interesting. If your diet is primarily vegetarian, then you have a very good reason to invest resources in keeping livestock – and the less efficient their digestive tract, the better. Maybe that’s why some older cultures from that region have taboos and practices that end up providing societal protection for ungulates. 

Maybe old and “quaint” practices existed, not because of superstition per se, but because a cultic belief was the best way to keep succeeding generations from forgetting them and suffering the consequences that they couldn’t understand.

Girard’s theory that Scapegoating arose as a curb on Mimetic Desire and the rise of ritual animal sacrifice as a method to control inter-personal violence in communities seems like it would fit this idea.

God choses to be present and manifest in the everyday moments of our lives

January 6, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Sermons and audio

A small muddy river bank with reeds under a blue skyThis mismatch between the setting we think God should use, and the setting that God does use, when God is particularly manifest, like in the Great Theophany of Jesus’ Baptism, is important and needs to be kept constantly in mind.

Let’s imagine, shall we, that God hasn’t changed that preference in the years since the biblical accounts were written. We should thus still expect to see God, not in the centers of human power, or the great majestic landscapes of Earth, or in the obvious moments when numberless crowds of people gather for an event. But rather in the small every day events of a common person’s life, the sort of events we each experience day after day: making a cup of tea, sitting in a chair, quietly reading, walking along a beach, fishing in a boat, or eating with friends.

That’s when God chooses to reveal God’s self to us.

And to go a step further, it’s not the great and the powerful, the rich or accomplished that God seems to use to change things on earth. It’s the small and un-noteworthy, the elderly and the infirm, the young and the powerless, the poor and the outcast. If you would seek God, given the narrative we have, then that’s where you should start looking.

And if you think of yourself of part of that group of people, and not one of the great people of the community, then rejoice and be exceedingly glad, for it is likely that God is very near to you. The Holy Trinity itself might be manifest to you at any moment, just as it was in the events of the baptism of a young man in a backwater, on a small and reedy river in the Roman Province of Palestine.

There is a direct link to the video here.

My apologies for the unfortunate framing in the video about 1/3 of the way in from the beginning. There’s a bug in the software apparently in the iPhone that I’m using and it changes randomly sometimes when I’m filming. Grrrr. I ran out of time to reshoot it today. Someday perhaps I’ll find someone to help me out with the filming.

Please pray for PB Curry and for the medical team this morning.

January 6, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry re-hospitalized, undergoing surgery – The Episcopal Church:

Presiding Bishop Michael Curry has been diagnosed with a reoccurrence of the subdural hematoma he experienced in early December of 2023. He will be undergoing surgery this morning to treat this issue, and updates on his health will be provided as they become available.

Please be in prayer for Bishop Curry, his family, and his medical team.

This is not the news I wanted to receive this morning. Pray with me for Michael, for the medical team treating him, and for his family. God grant us a good outcome and that the Presiding Bishop recovers quickly.

The Overview Effect by Tessa Kale

January 4, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Blogging / Religion / Science

I was delighted to receive this original poem written by Tessa Kale in an email this afternoon as a response to the posts and sermons about our human place in the Universe and our relationship to it and each other:

 

The Overview Effect

Their brightness was measured:
they must be rational, logical
not subject to raptures

certainly not visions. They must be
Blake’s naked Newton,
a fierce focus on calipers and their calculus. 

But the astronauts did look up.
The earthrise—
they were flooded with emotion

overwhelmed by the Earth’s beauty,
the burst of color—that luminous blue,
swirls of white

they were in raptures
even, if it hadn’t been
for the evident fragility,

against the vast and empty dark,
and earth so
perilously unique.

 

(Shared with permission.)

Thank you!

Are we really special after all? Or are we a zoo exhibit?

January 3, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Science / Sermons and audio

After all of This Time Searching for Aliens, Are We Stuck With The Zoo Hypothesis? – Universe Today:

[D]espite decades of observation and SETI surveys, there is still no definitive evidence that advanced extraterrestrial civilizations are out there. For the most part, these have consisted of radio SETI experiments that have observed distant stars and galaxies for indications of radio transmissions.

[…]Alas, these searches have found no compelling evidence of technosignatures within our galaxy or beyond. According to Crawford and Schulze-Makuch, the “Great Silence” we perceive when we look out into the Universe can only mean one of two things. First, there’s the possibility that the Hart-Tipler Conjecture is correct, and there are no advanced ETC out there. Similarly, it may be that intelligent life (or life in general) is rare in the Universe due to the odds being stacked against its emergence or evolution (aka. the Great Filter).

If neither of these scenarios is true, we are left with only one answer: the Zoo Hypothesis is correct and advanced civilizations are keeping their distance to avoid being detected.

Go check out the full article at the link. It’s a great overview of the whole question of why we aren’t detecting any other Intelligent Life in the galaxy.

I talked about this in my sermon this past weekend. The article above lists the various proposed “solutions” for the Great Silence. From a theological perspective, it could really be that we’re just that special. (And if that’s the case, life is so insanely precious that we really need to do everything we can do to preserve every living thing we encounter.)

The music of the webs

January 2, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Science

Scientists Translated Spiderwebs Into Music, And It’s Absoutely Stunning : ScienceAlert:

A few years ago, scientists translated the three-dimensional structure of a spider’s web into music, working with artist Tomás Saraceno to create an interactive musical instrument, titled Spider’s Canvas.

In 2021, the team refined and built on that previous work, adding an interactive virtual reality component to allow people to enter and interact with the web.

[…]”The spider lives in an environment of vibrating strings,” said engineer Markus Buehler of MIT. “They don’t see very well, so they sense their world through vibrations, which have different frequencies.”

There’s a video of the output from the model at the link. It’s not something you can easily dance to, but I’ve seen people choreograph movement to less.

It’s a cool reminder that language and communication with other beings will likely have different modalities than what humans use to communicate with other humans.

Some plans for this site for 2024

January 2, 2024
by Nicholas Knisely
Blogging

I’ve been thinking for a while about being more intentional regarding how best to share things I find online and random thoughts and ideas that occur to me.

Years ago, I used this blog for that sort of thing. Then I started working on Episcopal Café, and that became my default place to post. Then came social media, especially Twitter. Twitter was perfect for sharing links and short posts. When I left the staff of Episcopal Café, that was the primary site I used for sharing neat and interesting things. For the last ten years, this has been where I’ve posted sermons and “letters” and not much else.

However, Twitter is broken now, and I’m not optimistic that it’s going to return to what it once was, at least for my purposes. I have accounts on Mastodon instances, BlueSky, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. But I’m wary of investing much time or effort into any of those, as it’s not clear, as of January 2024, which one (if any) will replace what Twitter once was.

It feels right to me to return to my roots. This is my site, and I manage it myself. I can post something here, and it will automatically be shared to other networks, sent by email to subscribers, shared via RSS, and I’ve even set this blog up as its own Mastodon instance. (That’s so, well, meta. Heh.) My plan is to move more (or all) of my posting here going forward this year.

If you want to ask a question or follow up on something, come on over to Entangled States and have at it. I might see questions or comments that appear on other networks, but I’m not going to spend a lot of time seeking them out. And consider this fair warning to the 2000 subscribers by email (and the 5000 subscribers on other platforms); your inbox may be seeing more of me. Congratulations or condolences (heh) about that, depending on where you stand on reading my musings.

I don’t have any idea what the posting schedule will be like. That will depend on my day-to-day schedule. And maybe I’ll be able to invite an additional author or editor to help out over the next year or so, which could increase the volume. My best guess is I’ll probably post something every few days. If it gets overwhelming for you, let me know, and I can help you find a better way to get the info I’m posting without feeling like I’m spamming you.

One last thing: I have no interest in monetizing anything I post here. This is fulfilling a personal need for me, and it’s a ministry. So, enjoy! (Or take warning. Grin.)

Trust in institutions is broken badly. That is a direct and immediate threat to all of them.

December 31, 2023
by Nicholas Knisely
Current Affairs

Elon Musk, X and the Problem of Misinformation in an Era Without Trust – The New York Times: (gift link)

A more clarifying take on trust is laid out by Chris Hayes in “Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy,” a book that was published in 2012 and turned out to be extraordinarily prescient. In it, Hayes describes how elite malfeasance — the forever wars after 9/11; the 2008 financial crisis — was deeply corrosive, undermining the public’s trust in institutions. This “crisis of authority” is deserved, he says, but it has also left us vulnerable. A big, complex democracy requires institutional trust in order to function. Without it, “we really do risk a kind of Hobbesian chaos, in which truth is overtaken by sheer will-to-power.”

Brilliant description of how we got to where all institutional life including the Church is now. And how hard it will be in the term to dig ourselves out this hole.