One of the benefits of the blogging phenomenon is that you are always just a click away from something really good. Here are a few of the posts from other bloggers that I’ve been reading this week.
The Rev. Mark Daniels at Better Living is always worth reading. Mark’s interests range from history to the Cincinnati Reds to the Bible. One of the great things Mark does is to post his thinking on the passage he plans to preach on. This usually takes the form of 3 “passes” through the passage, followed by a longer post with his actual sermon text. Mark has been preaching on Ephesians and recently posted an index to all of his Ephesians studies. You really should add Better Living to your daily blog reading.
The news has been full of a new technique that allegedly makes embryonic stem cell research harmless to the embryo. It involves removing a single cell when the embryo is at the 8-cell stage, then using that single cell for experimentation. The embryo appears to grow normally after that, despite the loss of the one cell.
It’s an approach that reminds me of the story of Solomon proposing to slice the baby in half. I read two well-researched posts this week that suggest a number of problems with this idea. From First Things by Ryan T Anderson is the news that this idea is not new at all and has already been declared “unethical” because of possible harm to the developing child. And from Signs of the Times by Ken Brown is the suggestion that this procedure might be a bait and switch tactic. Sometimes the science in these debates is hard slogging (my last biology class was 33 years ago!), but this is a topic Christians need to understand.
My New Zealand blogging friend Catez at All Things 2 All has just written about her reactions to the news that a close friend is seriously ill. At such times, we struggle with what we know from Scripture vs. what we feel, and the two don’t always match. Faith is a process of discovering God by living with God. Here is a bit from Catez’s post called I’m not there yet: Living the process:
[B]eing honest, sometimes when the theological positions are cut and dried I feel set against God somehow, because I think I should be superhuman and simply line up with theory. My emotions won’t fall into place, and the theory feels like a reminder of my great shortcomings. In a way it is — I simply do not have it within myself to accept the personal reality of someone I care about who is suffering. Yet in another way I need to live the layers that make up the theory. I need to take the journey.
It is not that I am set against God, but rather that God is with me at this point — right where I am at now. I will be learning the theology by living it, understanding that faith is the evidence of things unseen.
Those are some good words.
Are there bloggers out there you wish more people knew about? Tell me who your favorite bloggers are, and why.
Update: Catez at All Things 2 All wrote about the new embryonic stem cell technique last year in a post she calls New techniques for producing embryonic stem cells. Good reading.
Thanks for the link and the compliment, Charlie!
Hi Charlie – thanks for linking my post.
On the stem cell technique, I recall posting about that sometime ago. As I remember there were two techniques. Lanza’s was the 8-cell stage one.
In my view the problems with Lanza’s were the cell source – from IVF embryos, and the fact that not all created embryos would not all be expected to develop to term. The latter is I think what you are bringing out here. I’ll have a read of the links. You’ll find my post in my Science category if it interests you.