Here's what's happening on the church and culture front today...

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Aug 16, 2019

A United Methodist group proposes a denominational breakup

Aug 16, 2019

The plan would allow the United Methodist Church to create a new, fully independent body for more conservative or traditional churches while preserving the current denomination as centrist/liberal in orientation. Each would have its own structures, policies and finances but share a common Methodist heritage. (Shimron, Religion News Service)

Aug 16, 2019

How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War

Aug 16, 2019

Gamergate jumped out of the obscure fever swamps of the internet and into mainstream consciousness, in part because its arrival coincided with a peculiar online moment in which social media platforms were becoming more mainstream. (Warzel, The New York Times)

Aug 16, 2019

The Lonely Burden of Today’s Teenage Girls

Aug 16, 2019

Amid our huge, unplanned experiment with social media, new research suggests that many American adolescents are becoming more anxious, depressed and solitary. (Pipher & Gilliam, The Wall Street Journal)

Aug 16, 2019

Aug 15, 2019

Twitter will offer option to follow interests rather than people

Aug 15, 2019

Twitter users will be able to follow interests, in addition to people, by the end of the year, the company has revealed. It is already testing the feature and plans to focus on sports topics first, with interests ranging from skincare to television series to follow. Users will begin to see a “follow topics” prompt and any topics they follow will be visible on their profile. (Murphy, The Telegraph)

Aug 15, 2019

News Archive:

Featured

A United Methodist group proposes a denominational breakup

rug-related deaths in England and Wales are the highest they have been since records began more than a quarter of a century ago, official figures show. There were 4,359 deaths from drug poisoning recorded in England and Wales in 2018 - the highest number since records began in 1993, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said. (The Telegraph)

The Boy Scouts of America was hit last week by a lawsuit from a firm that claims to have more than 800 new clients who say they were preyed on as Scouts. The newest allegations came Wednesday among hundreds of lawsuits filed under New York’s Child Victims Act, which opened a one-year window for lawsuits from child sexual abuse victims previously barred by the statute of limitations. (Kelly & Kwiatkowski, USA Today)

The township in northern Indiana is the site of a so-called Safe Haven Baby Box, an incubator-like device that can be found at a growing number of firehouses and hospitals around the country. Installed on an exterior wall, the devices function like a return slot at a library. An anguished mother unwilling or unable to care for a newborn can open the door from the outside and deposit a baby into the device, triggering a silent alarm and locking when closed. (Gershman, The Wall Street Journal)

"It is very exciting to be able to excavate the material signature of any given historical event, and even more so regarding an important historical event such as the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem," said Rafi Lewis, a co-director on the project. (Robinson, CNN)

Christian printer case moves forward

Blaine Adamson is headed to the Kentucky Supreme Court to defend his right to decline to print T-shirts for a gay pride festival in Lexington, Ky. The festival happened in 2012. Court arguments are scheduled for Aug. 23. (Aldrich, World)

A major study of nearly 10,000 teenagers by University College London (UCL) and Imperial College London, has found that using sites multiple times a day increases the risk of psychological distress by around 40 per cent, compared to logging on weekly or less. (Knapton, The Telegraph)

The NFL has struck a broad alliance with Jay-Z in which the rapper will both help the league with one of its thorniest problems—smoothing out continuing tensions with players over social-justice issues—and expand the NFL’s entertainment offerings, including the Super Bowl halftime show and other creative projects. (Beaton, The Wall Street Journal)

In no state in the U.S. does even one-quarter of the population say abortion should be illegal in all cases, a new survey shows.The study’s researchers found that more than three-quarters of Americans surveyed said their opinion about abortion had remained unchanged over the last five years. (Banks, Religion News Service)

James MacMillan, Scotland’s most famous living composer, is about to make musical history. He has written an entire piece inspired by the Holy Spirit, the first person ever to do so. MacMillan feels it’s the right moment to tackle it, given that we are now living in a post-secular age with a renewed hunger for the spiritual aspect of life. (Hewett, The Telegraph)

The new art of dying

Today, the funeral industry is worth $17 billion ($). Businesses are innovating on traditional practices, and more people are taking control of how they wish to die and be buried — in unconventional, surprising and even extraterrestrial ways. (Li, Axios)

A recent poll from YouGov, a polling firm and market research company, found that 30 percent of millennials say they feel lonely. This is the highest percentage of all the generations surveyed. (Resnick, Vox)

One in seven Americans say they personally use cannabidiol- (CBD-) based products, which have proliferated since last year's passage of a federal law legalizing this hemp form of cannabis. (Brenan, Gallup)

Reverend Canon Andy Bryant, the Cathedral’s Canon for Mission and Pastoral Care, said the idea came to him when he was visiting the Sistine Chapel in Rome, Italy. “The fun comes in the shape of a helter skelter,” he said. “The serious comes in creating opportunities for reflective, God-shaped conversations. It is playful in its intent but also profoundly missional. (Swerling, The Telegraph)

The dominance and influence of the current crop of social media platforms tends to distort our memory. It’s hard to remember a time when Facebook wasn’t a behemoth – but it did exist and wasn’t all that long ago. (Booth, The Next Web)

Our study of the online reviews of the Grand Mosque indicates they may be unreliable. Reviews of Mecca’s accommodations, clothing stores, eateries and transportation options all have much higher ratings than can be reasonably expected: Mecca’s sites average 4.96 TripAdvisor stars out of 5, while Europe’s 200 best-rated tourist destinations average 3.96 stars. (Laer & Izberk-Bilgin, CityLab)

Last year there were 1,187 drug-related deaths in Scotland, a record, and a staggering increase of 27 percent from the year before. Overdoses are more common in Scotland, by some measures, than even in the United States. (McCann, The New York Times)