One of America’s most apocalyptic weeks in its 200+ years of history, but I hope your day can begin with some good coffee (or your breakfast drink) and that some links will give you something to ponder today.

That’s some serious social distancing:

To leave society behind was a wedding vow Wendell and Mariann spoke only to each other. It was a solemn one, though, and to save for it Mariann spent only $66 on her bridal gown. Once they were married on that winter day 35 years ago, they just started driving.

Wendell and Mariann Hardy had lived most of their lives in the fast-growing southwestern city of Tucson, Arizona. But each was drawn to solitude. Mariann began distance-running into the mountains on high desert trails. Even before they met, both relocated to log cabins up on Mt. Lemmon, the 9,157-foot peak in the Catalinas range that overlooks Tucson. Still, city types came up to party there on the weekends. It wasn’t isolated enough.

Wendell took a job installing windows at Mariann’s cabin. Shy at first, the two got to talking about how they weren’t made for crowded places. One afternoon, Mariann offered him gin and tonic. Just how far, Wendell asked her, would she be willing to go?

The question, open-ended and thrilling, marked the beginning of a union between two people who sought solitude – and instead found a life alone together.

Decades later, a pandemic has thrust the concept of social distancing into the daily lexicon and lives of Americans. As the nation’s death toll from COVID-19 tops 100,000, a new reality has set in: With few effective treatments and no vaccine, maintaining distance from others in society is the only sure method of stopping the spread.

Few people are as accustomed to the rigors, or rewards, of sheltering-in-place as Wendell, 75, and Mariann, 69. Soon after their 1985 church wedding in Tucson, they started exploring the wildest reaches of the American West for a place to be on their own.

A jack of all trades, including driving race cars, Wendell had a knack for fixing up vehicles like their salvaged pickups and a 1978 Jeep. They’d load one up and scout out Arizona’s parched borderlands to the south, and its ponderosa pine forests up north.

You can tell something by how couples sit on bench seats in old pickup trucks. Some sit apart, at either window. Others, like Wendell and Mariann, sit close together, behind the steering wheel.

Their search ended in Catron County, New Mexico. It is among the most rural in the United States, bigger than some U.S. states. Elk outnumber people 4 to 1. Traffic is so sparse, the county doesn’t have a single stoplight. Some children wait for the school bus in wood and wire cages. These serve as a precaution, against the wolves.

Beautiful 1st Century mosaic uncovered in Verona Italy

Thanks to Italy’s rich history, if you dig a little bit you’re sure to find something special—even in unexpected places. This was made clear in Verona, where the city has been excavating a privately owned vineyard since the fall. And now, their hard work has paid off as archaeologists have uncovered a pristine mosaic floor dating back to the 1st century CE.

It’s an incredible find in an area that’s long been recognized to house treasures from ancient Rome. In fact, according to local sources, the land was known to sit on top of Roman artifacts since at 19th century. Some mosaics, which are on display in a city museum, were already excavated from the site in the 1960s.

The work, which started in October, has been slow going. Though archaeologists were able to delineate the lines of the ancient Domus—a house occupied by the upper class—they hadn’t discovered any noteworthy treasures. That all changed recently when the excavations unearthed incredible mosaic floors from the home.

The small sections that have been revealed look pristine, and now the archeologists have the arduous task of excavating the entire floor. At the same time, city officials are working with the landowners to make the site available to the public, though this could be a long process due to the funding that would be needed.

Roman mosaics are commonly discovered in Italy. Given Verona’s history, it actually comes as no surprise that another artifact has popped up. Verona, which is located in northern Italy’s Veneto region, was an important settlement during ancient Rome, as it was strategically located at the junction of four major roads. Many of Verona’s ancient monuments have been preserved throughout history, including its impressive Roman amphitheater. Known as the Verona Arena, it’s still used today for concerts and opera performances.

We will miss Wes Unseld (from Wikipedia):

Westley Sissel Unseld (March 14, 1946 – June 2, 2020) was an American professional basketball player, coach and executive. He spent his entire National Basketball Association (NBA) career with the Baltimore/Capital/Washington Bullets. Unseld played college basketball for the Louisville Cardinals and was selected with the second overall pick by the Bullets in the 1968 NBA draft. He was named the NBA Most Valuable Player during his rookie season and joined Wilt Chamberlain as the only two players in NBA history to accomplish the feat. Unseld won an NBA championship with the Bullets in 1978. After retiring from playing in 1981, he worked with the Bullets as a vice president, head coach and general manager.

Unseld was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1988 and the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame in 2006. …

Unseld's wife, Connie, opened Unselds School in 1979. A coed private school located in southwest Baltimore, it has a daycare program, nursery school and a kindergarten-to-eighth grade curriculum. Connie and daughter Kimberley serve as teachers at the school. Unseld worked as an office manager and head basketball coach. He was the godfather of Cleveland Cavaliers all-star forward, Kevin Love, as Kevin's father Stan Love was a teammate of Unseld's on the Baltimore Bullets. His son, Wes Jr., became a basketball coach with the Denver Nuggets.

Marcos Ortega ponders the complementarians:

Somehow, in the upside-down world of evangelicalism, a conservative writer [Aimee Byrd] from the OPC has become public enemy number one for a large company of complementarians. For an observer from outside that combative world (I am an egalitarian that serves in a denomination that accepts both egalitarians and complementarians), it all becomes very confusing.

For the uninitiated, let me explain my confusion. Byrd is a member in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, a confessional denomination that does not permit women to be ordained into any office. Byrd herself has, on numerous occasions, affirmed a male-only ordination standard. She has also made clear that she believes in the headship of men in the home. …

To recap: Aimee Byrd does not believe in women’s ordination, affirms male headship, celebrates a biblical standard for human sexuality, and advocates holiness as produced by the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

Sounds pretty orthodox and conservative to me.

So why have critics labeled Aimee a poster-child of third-wave feminism and a paragon of gender-ignoring liberalism (okay, maybe that’s a bit hyperbolic…a bit)?

It is because she has repeatedly criticized the gatekeepers of the evangelical gender conversation, the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (CBMW).

Byrd’s criticisms of CBMW are by no means new. In fact, one could say that her criticisms became most pointed during the now-infamous “Trinity Debate”, an intramural scrum that saw conservatives at each other’s throats. This time the debate centered around one of Christianity’s most sacred truths: the Trinity. God is One in Three Persons.

While church history has provided a wealth of careful theological reflection and language for describing our God, certain leaders in the Biblical Manhood and Womanhood school of thought began using “Eternal Subordination” language (ESS or EFS as shorthand) to describe the relations between the Father and the Son. Doing so enabled them to locate the ground for the subordination of women not in biblical commands or creational mandates, but in the very being of God himself.

Unfortunately for proponents of ESS, their view of the Trinity leans closer to the ancient Arian heresy than it does the biblical witness (though it is not strictly the same as Arianism). When Byrd and many others pointed this out, an uproar broke out that remains unresolved today.

Neil Carlson FB

This will help. When social scientists, especially sociologists, speak of "social structure" and "structural change," many laypeople roll their eyes and assume there's some kind of leftist-only collectivism behind the concept. But that's not true; communitarian republicans (note, small "r") have similar perspectives.

Legislation is a central form of social structure. The social structure of police departments and the cultural role of police changes when the local armory includes military weapons, and training includes battle tactics, and the entire pattern of funding includes increased upstream accountability for using government resources well to solve problems.

If I give you a tank and tell you to reduce the drug problem, you've been invited to use the tank to solve the drug problem, whether that's explicit or not. Now we're seeing the result of treating domestic civil protest as if it were confrontation with an external enemy, with the Secretary of Defense urging governors to "control the battle space." But it's not a battle space, and we should be seeking de-escalation, not "domination."

Custom makes use. In the comments, see evidence that military veterans in the police force are around twice as likely to fire their weapons as non-veterans. The traditional challenge for veterans in the police force was to adapt to the demilitarized nature of policing. We're not making that easy by surrounding military veterans with military culture and equipment.

I like this by Greg Carey, and I want to up him one (and he’ll agree):

What if the coronavirus and violence against African Americans are demonic teammates? What if it’s not just “one thing after another,” but a revelatory moment?

Coronavirus statistics are notoriously slippery, but it’s beyond doubt that black and brown Americans suffer disproportionately from the pandemic. African Americans are dying from the coronavirus at nearly twice the rate of other Americans. And it’s not just health: African Americans are disproportionately hurt by the economic fallout. They’re more likely to have lost jobs or businesses in the past few months.

The coronavirus is “a racial pandemic within a viral pandemic,” in the words of Ibram X. Kendi. The coronavirus is new, but adverse health outcomes for black and brown people are not. The life expectancy gap between neighboring communities can range over thirty years, a discrepancy often tied to race. The pandemic’s effects on black and brown communities uncover a violence woven into the fiber of our society.

SMcK: “It’s a racial pandemic within an unemployment pandemic within a viral pandemic.”

SBC numbers declining, by Kate Shellnutt:

The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) lost 2 percent of its membership last year—the largest drop in more than a century, according to its annual report.

Certain state conventions did report increases in baptisms and church growth, including in places outside the SBC’s Bible Belt strongholds. But overall, the denomination’s Annual Church Profile—released today by LifeWay Christian Resources and capturing 2019 statistics—shows a trajectory of serious decline and a sharp challenge for leaders concerned about evangelism and retention.

The loss of 288,000 church members last year brings total SBC membership to 14.5 million, down from its peak of 16.3 million in 2003. Average worship attendance remained relatively stable at 5.2 million.

Total baptisms, a landmark metric for the denomination, fell by 4 percent to 235,748—the lowest number since World War II. Giving was down slightly to $11.6 billion, after two years of increases. SBC churches spent $1.1 billion on missions.

Last year, researcher and statistician Ryan Burge—analyzing other survey data about Southern Baptist identity for CT—found that fewer children who were raised in the SBC remain in the denomination as adults, suggesting that the bigger factor behind the SBC’s decline isn’t the struggle to gain new converts; it’s keeping their own.

Evangelical identity has held steady at just under a quarter of the US population over the past decade, with nondenominational Christianity growing as Protestant denominations experience decline.

The SBC statistics rely on church data compiled by state conventions, representing about 75 percent of churches this year, similar to years past. But without full participation, the annual release totals get challenged by those who say the findings are not representative.

Ron Sider ponders white racism:

African-American men are 21 times more likely than white men to be shot by the police. One national poll asked people if they thought that today in most cities, the police treat blacks as fairly as whites. 47% of white respondents said yes. Only 6% of blacks said they were treated as fairly as whites by the police. Another national poll asked if the local police treat minorities more harshly than whites. Only 19% of white people said yes. 54% of blacks said yes they are treated more harshly.

Month after month, year after year, there have been new stories of white people (the police and others) killing African-Americans. We all know that African-Americans continue to experience a wide range of disadvantages. Inner city, urban (largely minority) schools spend less money per capita and have education inferior to much better funded white suburban schools. One in every three African-American men go to prison but only one in 17 white men do. In the current COVID-19 epidemic, African-Americans have been dying at twice the rate of white folk. The average white family has 13 times as much wealth as the average black family – – a gap that was wider in 2015 than in 1983! Year after year, the black unemployment rate has been double that of the white unemployment rate.

We know – – we have known for years!-- these and many other indicators of continuing structural racism. We all know that racism is America’s original sin – – a racism that has crushed African-Americans for 400 years.

But what began to churn in my mind – – and compel me to to write this blog--was my reflection on the failure of white evangelicals to deal with white racism. Indeed it’s much worse than that! White evangelicals have too often participated in, and even led, that racism.

It was white evangelical Christians in the South (helped by northerners) that passed the laws and organized the violence that effectively squelched the progress made by African-Americans in the first two decades after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. It was white evangelicals who led or tolerated thousands of lynchings for about 100 years. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision ending “separate but equal” school segregation, it was white evangelicals who organized segregated private “Christian” Academies so their white children would not have to go to school with black children.

Writer ponders Major League Baseball owners’ money calculations:

In other words, the owners’ proposed salary-reduction scheme looks like a clever sleight-of-hand designed to cause a shortened season — in the midst of a

life-changing pandemic for millions of Americans — to essentially give them the same profit as they made during a full season in the midst of a baseball boom. Unless we think baseball teams were just barely breaking even last year (despite record revenues and even the small-market Kansas City Royals selling for $1 billion), it’s hard to believe the owners aren’t trying to live by the words of former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.”

Trouble is, everyone else stands to lose under this tactic. The players face the choice between taking a massive pay cut — and handing owners an undue profit — or making themselves the villains in the public’s eyes, potentially catching the blame for a lost season. The fans would lose a source of joy at a moment when those are sorely needed. And as ESPN’s Buster Olney wrote Sunday, the future of the game itself could be at stake if MLB misses an entire year to bickering over money in the middle of a recession and pandemic.

Although it still seems like all parties involved have too much to lose not to come to a compromise, it bears questioning why MLB owners would let the future of the sport hang in doubt to preserve their own profitable status quo in the short term.

Image: Article cited

I’d do this.

A man in Lyons, Colorado very cleverly attached tiny plastic feeders to his eyeglasses in order to attract hummingbirds. The birds happily chirped as they fed on sugar water while flapping their delicate wings. The man stood very still while getting a close-up view of everything.