The Annotated Inbox
Here are some links of interest from recent weeks from my inbox and perusal of the web:
- Speaking of Faith, “Restoring the Senses: Life, Gardening, and an Orthodox Easter,” Vigen Guroian, an Armenian Orthodox theologian and passionate gardener, experiences Easter as “a call to our senses.”
- Marina Krakovsky, “The Science of Lasting Happiness,” Scientific American, “Through controlled experiments, Sonja Lyubomirsky explores ways to beat the genetic set point for happiness. Staying in high spirits, she finds, is hard work.” Related: “The Reliability of Subjective Well-Being Measures,” NBER Working Paper No. 13027. Also Related: “The Myth of Happiness,” Zondervan.
- Joe Knippenberg, “Public support for vouchers in Georgia,” Knippenblog.
- Roger Scruton, “Better off without religion?” Right Reason.
- Gerard Alexander, “The Nonprofit Industrial Complex,” The Weekly Standard (HT: Instapundit), “The Independent Sector, which is basically the industry group for nonprofits, reports that the combined annual expenditures of all the not-for-profit organizations required to file Form 990 with the U.S. Internal Revenue Service had grown to nearly $1 trillion in 2004. (That’s about half what the federal government spends each year, not counting defense.)” Folks like Ron Sider have been saying for years that if Christians tithed, we’d have plenty of funds both to address all of the major economic and social problems and to invest more in missions and evangelism. Related: Bjørn Lomborg, ed., How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place.
- Celia W. Dugger, “Oversight Report Says U.S. Food Aid Practices Are Wasteful,” New York Times (HT: Philanthropy).
- Wolfgang Polzer, “Smoking May Damage Bible Production,” ASSIST News Service (HT: Logos Bible Blog), “The Chinese craving for cigarettes is responsible for rising paper costs in bible printing, according to the business manager of the German Bible Society, Felix Breidenstein.”
- Editorial, “Dr. Conyers, I Presume,” The Wall Street Journal. Related: Impact Malaria.
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