Mid-City Christian: Is Bernie Sanders Religious?

Old myths die hard, which is the reason articles like this one in The Guardian have to be written time and again. Author Giles Fraser begins,

The so-called "masters of suspicion," Nietzsche, Marx, and Freud, all thought that religion would wither and die in the 20th century. Others enthusiastically backed the secularisation hypothesis. Intellectually, the enlightenment had punctured it below the waterline and it was sinking. ... In 1900, the year that Nietzsche died, there were 8 million Christians in Africa. Now there are 335 million. And the growth rate continues to accelerate. God wasn't dead. God was reborn.

Aside from divine intervention, there is a sociological reason: "From the favelas of Brazil, to the Mothers' Union of the sub-Saharan Bible belt, to the archipelago Islam of Indonesia, the poor go for God."

On Children, Gorillas, and Parenting

I trust it is not too controversial to side with the zoo officials who shot the gorilla who was dragging a three-year-old who had fallen into his habitat. I'm in disbelief that some are trying to shame them for this. I'm in also disbelief, and a little outraged, that many are shaming the toddler's mom for not paying sufficient attention. My gosh, have none of them had toddlers? You can't keep them on a leash. It is every parent's and grandparent's greatest fear that in a blink of an eye, when our attention is diverted elsewhere, they are going to do something dangerous. Because they do. By God's grace, most of the time nothing comes of it.

In this vein, Sara Condon at Mockingbird reminds us, "You Are One Day Away From Being Tabloid News: Why We Are All the Gorilla Pit Mom." She writes,

Our kids are always falling into gorilla pits. There may not be a camera there. And people may not be Internet shaming you. But every single day mothers (and fathers) make terrible parenting decisions that have the potential for dire consequences. Did you text your friend back with your kids in the car? Car accident. Have you ever panicked about the dosage on Children's Tylenol? Liver failure. Have you ever said the F, D, or (my personal favorite) S word in front of your little one? Your kid is prison-ready. If you have never helplessly watched your child narrowly escape imminent death, then you must not have had children.

Which is why Gracy Olmstead at The American Conservative asks people to "Give Grace to Moms."

The Brain Is Not a Computer

Always on the metaphor alert, I bring you "The Empty Brain," this week's long read, which reminds us that the various metaphors we use to understand how the brain works—like a machine, or more recently, a computer—actually confuse as much as they explain. As author Robert Epstein puts it:

We don't store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them. We don't create representations of visual stimuli, store them in a short-term memory buffer, and then transfer the representation into a long-term memory device. We don't retrieve information or images or words from memory registers. Computers do all of these things, but organisms do not.

And he asks, "Given this reality, why do so many scientists talk about our mental life as if we were computers?"

Is Bernie Sanders Religious?

In our ongoing series on the faith of the presidential candidates, we now have a piece on the Jewishness of Bernie Sanders. He doesn't wear his Jewishness on his sleeve, but he is deeply Jewish in a very real, if not religious, sense.

Grace and peace,

Mark Galli
Editor, Christianity Today

P.S. Father's Day is around the corner. This year, order dad a Father's Day Gift Box including Andy Crouch's new book, Strong and Weak, plus a year of CT magazine: OrderCT.com/giftbox