Thursday's News & Ideas - 1/26/2023

With pierogies and artillery shells, Scranton fights back in Ukraine*
The New York Times: On a chilly Sunday morning, a Ukrainian Catholic Church holds a bake sale to buy winter coats and other supplies for soldiers, while ammunition is forged at a nearby factory.

Faculty gender imbalances yield biased student ratings*
Inside Higher Ed: Another study adds to the litany of concerns about student evaluations of faculty teaching. It says men and women are both at risk from bias in gender-lopsided departments, but women more so.

New book spotlights influence of Pentecostalism on California’s Mexican farmworkers
Religion News Service: ‘Sowing the Sacred: Mexican Pentecostal Farmworkers in California’ recounts how ‘divine healing’ was seen as a pragmatic way to care for impoverished workers who lacked regular access to medical care.

Members of Florida church required to sign ‘biblical sexuality’ statement or be removed from membership
Baptist News Global: All members of First Baptist Church of Jacksonville are required to sign a form that indicates their agreement with a Statement on Biblical Sexuality adopted by the church last fall.

David Bentley Hart’s apocalyptic view of tradition*
Christian Century: Hart believes that John Henry Newman and those quick to invoke him rely too much on a gaze backward into the past.

The Spark

You can’t write about nature without writing about people
The idea that Black people can write out of a personal relationship to nature* and have done so since before this nation’s founding comes to many as a shock, The Atlantic says.

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