The New York Times: Pastor, Am I a Christian?

What does it mean to be a Christian in the 21st century? Can one be a Christian and yet doubt the virgin birth or the Resurrection? I put these questions to the Rev. Timothy Keller, an evangelical Christian pastor and best-selling author who is among the most prominent evangelical thinkers today. Our conversation has been edited for space and clarity. [...]

Jesus’ teaching was not the main point of his mission. He came to save people through his death for sin and his resurrection. So his important ethical teaching only makes sense when you don’t separate it from these historic doctrines. If the Resurrection is a genuine reality, it explains why Jesus can say that the poor and the meek will “inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). St. Paul said without a real resurrection, Christianity is useless (1 Corinthians 15:19). [...]

You imply that really good people (e.g., Gandhi) should also be saved, not just Christians. The problem is that Christians do not believe anyone can be saved by being good. If you don’t come to God through faith in what Christ has done, you would be approaching on the basis of your own goodness. This would, ironically, actually be more exclusive and unfair, since so often those that we tend to think of as “bad” — the abusers, the haters, the feckless and selfish — have themselves often had abusive and brutal backgrounds.

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Bloomberg: Germany Gets Free Power for Christmas as Wind Power Set to Surge

The price of power for delivery on Christmas Day in Germany turned negative as a surge in wind generation is forecast to boost supply.

Prices may be below zero for hours or even whole days during the holiday season as German wind output is predicted to climb to near-record levels and temperatures are set to increase more than 5 degrees Celsius (9 Fahrenheit) above normal.

The negative prices are “driven by low power demand during the holiday season when factories are shut, and people go on vacation or visit their families,” Elchin Mammadov, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence said. “There are far fewer outages this year than the same time last year and wind availability is expected to be high.”

Germany’s grid operators can struggle to keep the network balanced when there are high amounts of wind generation that need to be moved from the north to demand centers in the south. Negative prices mean that producers must either shut down power stations to reduce supply or pay consumers to take the electricity off the grid.

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Vox: A law professor's warning: we are closer to oligopoly than at any point in 100 years

In the early 1900s, the biggest monopolists of the day had virtually complete control of their markets. Standard Oil. US Steel. The American Sugar Refining Company.

Today we don’t so much have single companies dominating an entire industry as much as a handful of extremely powerful ones. Over the past few decades, the number of markets consolidated by a few mega-companies has skyrocketed, according to Columbia law professor Tim Wu. [...]

Wu points to the beer industry as a perfect example. “People may not realize this, but domestically, there are two companies that sell 75 percent of the beer in the United States — Molson Coors and Anheuser Busch, both owned by foreign companies,” he says. “That is an industry that used to have five or six actors and now has two.” [...]

It is essentially a battle between the economists and the lawyers. The economists do believe we should have no sense of right and wrong, but that it’s about economic performance. The champion of this view was [conservative legal scholar] Robert Bork, and his basic argument was that a lot of what looks like evil or malicious conduct — the so-called “bad guys” — may be very economically efficient and therefore good for the economy. So [to Bork] antitrust lawyers should get out of the business of calling good or evil.

The opposite tradition I’d associate with [Supreme Court Justice] Louis Brandeis, who took the antitrust law not as merely an economic tool — though it was that — but a promotion of certain values he thought were central to the American public, like decentralization and a certain kind of virtue in business. Brandeis believed business could be a profession and pursued in a virtuous way. He also thought that the whole goal of the American Republic was to inculcate virtue and good character in people.

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Quartz: Data shows that using science in an argument just makes people more partisan

If only we would all just use our rational, scientific minds. Then we could get past our disagreements.

It’s a nice thought. Unfortunately, it’s wrong.

Yale behavioral economist Dan Kahan has spent the last decade studying whether the use of reason aggravates or reduces partisan beliefs. His research shows that aggravation easily wins. The more we use our faculties for scientific thought, the more likely we are to take a strong position that aligns with our political group. That goes for liberals as well as conservatives. [...]

Kahan’s research began as a challenge to the contention of some behavioral economists that public policy disagreements are the result of an over reliance on emotion-driven decision making—what the Nobel prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls “System 1” thinking. These researchers argued that public policy formed by experts using deliberate, analytical decision making processes (“System 2” thinking in Kahneman’s lingo) would be better and less partisan. [...]

Perhaps Kahan’s most disconcerting finding is that people with more scientific intelligence are the quickest to align themselves politically on subjects they don’t know anything about. In one experiment, Kahan analyzed how people’s opinion on a unfamiliar subject are affected when given some basic scientific information, along with details about what people in their self-identified political group tend to believe about that subject. It turned out that those with the strongest scientific reasoning skills were the ones most likely to use the information to develop partisan opinions.

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Quartz: Why do Greek statues have such small penises?

In ancient Greece, it seems, a small penis was the sought-after look for the alpha male.

“Greeks associated small and non-erect penises with moderation, which was one of the key virtues that formed their view of ideal masculinity,” explains classics professor Andrew Lear, who has taught at Harvard, Columbia and NYU and runs tours focused on gay history. “There is the contrast between the small, non-erect penises of ideal men (heroes, gods, nude athletes etc) and the over-size, erect penises of Satyrs (mythic half-goat-men, who are drunkards and wildly lustful) and various non-ideal men. Decrepit, elderly men, for instance, often have large penises.” [...]

Only grotesque, foolish men who were ruled by lust and sexual urges had large penises in ancient Greece. Art history blogger Ellen Oredsson notes on her site that statues of the era emphasized balance and idealism.

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