Random

• It's not just the economy that is keeping people from flying. The airlines are shooting themselves in the foot through their unending nickel-and-diming fee structures. People are figuring that it is just not worth the hassle -- so they're staying home more. ~ link

• However, some continue to fly -- if the destination is attractive enough. International travel to the US continues to grow -- up 2% from last year. ~ link

• Terry Mattingly is asking for more info on the Schuller schism. ~ link

• CT has its own coverage. ~ link

• Is it uncouth to pull out the old pastoral line? -- "There's nothing wrong with this church that a few funerals wouldn't fix!" Not that I'd literally want someone to die -- it's just that some people won't be able to relinquish control until they die.

• It took a few years but Apple has suddenly noticed that there is a "worship market" out there. ~ link

• Our brains peak at the age of 39, according to new research at UCLA. I'm thinking that I might already be needing treatment to slow the process of myelin breakdown! ~ link

• The University of Queensland, just outside Brisbane, plans to build its idea of utopia -- a multibillion-dollar "brain city" designed to attract 4,500 elite scientists from around the world. Yeah, just wait until the mates over in the humanities, social science, education, and arts programs figure out that they were left out of this new Tower of Babel. ~ link

• Quotable, from Ben Witherington, who is doing a really fine series on the "architecture of the postmodern mind":

What then is post-modernity? Post-modernity, sometimes called After-Modernity neither involves a flight from reason back into faith, nor a rejection of reason in favor of faith, but rather an attempt to get beyond the impasse. It is interesting that most of the adamant and now famous atheists like Dawkins and Hitchens are in fact unreconstructed modernists, who have simply taken for granted the rationalist paradigm for analyzing reality set in motion by Descartes and his Enlightenment successors. Somehow they have not gotten the memo yet that Western culture has moved on to post-modern ways of thinking about reality and its nature. ~ link

• Evangelicals discover theosis ~ link