Conduits of Conversation

Kelsey

Is there such a thing as forgiving too fast? Bill O’Reilly doesn’t work at Fox News anymore and prominent evangelicals mourned a political loss before (and maybe in place of) mourning the hurt and damage done to real women. In an opinion piece for The New York Times, Katelyn Beaty shows how shielding sexual abusers hurts sexual victims.

If conservative Christians want to protect the faith—especially in a time when they fear loss of cultural power—they must show preferential care not for the powerful but for victims.

Have you gotten your mom a card yet? No? I’ve got just the thing. The Nashville YoungLives ministry is selling four different, beautifully designed water color cards. YoungLives is a mentoring ministry of Young Life, specifically tailored to pregnant and parenting teenage girls and their children. The sale of each card is really a donation that helps send teen moms to the YoungLives summer camp where they will have the chance to relax, play, and reflect on God’s plan for their lives. This year honor your own mom and support another one.

Who are the smartest people you know? Smart women often feel like they don’t fit in, according to a new study that’s not surprising because intelligence is often associated with maleness. This isn’t new. I was just reading a commentary by John Chrysostom, and he was going on and on about how impressive the theology was of one biblical woman. His highest praise was that her spiritual intelligence made her “more manly” than some Jewish rabbis. This article by Hannah Anderson explains why seeing intelligence as a gendered characteristic is wrong, what this mentality costs women, and ultimately what it costs the church.

What’s your domestic super power? Mine is YouTubing hostessing tricks. This is my favorite one yet. Flowers can really make a get together feel special. But putting together bouquets of flowers is like brushing a one-year-old’s teeth. It’s far more difficult than it sounds. I’ll be implementing this trick for florist-like results with my $8.00 Trader Joe’s roses this weekend.

Jonathan

I’ve been doing two things with my life the past month. The first is reading. I’m back on a kick of reading. I just read Lincoln in the Bardo, The Stranger in the Woods (which sounds like a horror story, but it’s the expanded version of one of GQ’s most-read article of all time, “The Strange and Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit”) by Michael Finkel. I also just took a trip back to elementary school and read a book on most fifth grade reading lists, Inkheart. I’ve got a long list of books, but if you have any recommendations, I’d love to hear them.

The second is learning how to do animations. I’ve made a few lyric videos and some simple animations for my church. Now I know how to animate certain things, but I wasn’t very good at it. It is so complicated and I am baffled at how these animators can do the things they do and can learn After Effects so well. I thought I knew all the features of After Effects, but then I started to watch tutorials on making complex animations and I realized I really knew .000001 percent of it. It’s daunting, but fun.

Not gunna lie, I’m with Drew on the Samurai Jack trailer (below). I’ve never seen the show, but that trailer made it look like it was worth a binge.

Oh! And I’ve recently discovered the music of Tony Anderson. It’s glorious. And this amazing video makes him even cooler. 

Brandon

What does justice look like? If you’ve heard about the Google Books project—which is likely—you may not have heard about all its legal problems. Basically, Google wants to scan every book in the world, all 129,864,880 of them, and put them on the internet to be searched—but you can probably guess that publishers, authors, and libraries might raise a finger about that. My friend sent me this crazy fascinating essay from The Atlantic last month called “Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria,” in which James Somers peels back the fight between Google and the publishing industry, which raises the ever-unanswerable question “What is justice here?”

How can we be more productive? As a productivity snob—and mainly because I’m terrible at time management—I was delighted this week to stumble upon this TED talk about being more productive in our lives. Seriously, anyone who knows me knows I love finding Google products or automation apps that make our lives better, but this guy had a more human approach. He conducted experiments on himself to see what made him more effective with his time, and he found three important principles: focusing on your time, attention, and energy. I’ll let him explain the rest. (Also, if you’re interested, here’s a bonus tape of the Salesforce chief scientist talking about AI and productivity for our modern world.)

Are you an artist? Maybe you’re one of those riding the trend of modern calligraphy, and good for you, so you might enjoy a new online school to become a master penman (or penwoman, if that’s the word). It’s called Ink Academy, and they just launched this week—and we were lucky enough to grab an interview with its founder. We at Fathom love great art, beautiful lettering, and modern design, and this academy seems to draw the lines between them all.

Drew

Can Jack get back? The Emmy Award–winning Samurai Jack has returned for one final season and it is bad to the mother freakin’ bone. Y’all, it’s the coolest. I’m not even ashamed for plugging a cartoon. I loved it as a teenager and am still hooked. It is sparse on dialogue and big on emotion and artistry. Where the series had no real progression, the new season promises an ending: a final showdown between the Samurai and Aku. It has moved from Cartoon Network to Adult Swim, so be forewarned—the content is intended for more mature audiences.

Who else came back? There is an amazing documentary series on Netflix right now called 5 Came Back about the visionary directors who enlisted to serve in World War II. Narrated by Meryl Streep with commentary by Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Francis Ford Coppola, and Paul Greengrass, the series delves into how Americans heard news from the front and how the front changed the man who went on to change filmmaking forever.

Speaking of comebacks . . . This seems to be the year of the super-sequels in Hollywood, especially in Sci-Fi. We have a new Star Wars, Blade Runner, and this month a new Alien and Guardians of the Galaxy. It’s very exciting, but they all look to be very intense. What movies are you excited to see this summer?

Let us know what you’ve found.