Daily Archives: June 1, 2020

As a Christian who believes in the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and even wrote two books about it, I often feel like I should be full of hope, peace and joy at all times. Yet as I tried to explain in my three year anniversary reflections the truth is the last years have been a struggle to not let go of all three of those things. It is a battle we all face. But it is a battle that can sometimes be especially hard for a Christian because of this expectation we put on ourselves that we should be able to rise above all our problems gliding on some kind of celestial magic carpet!

If we believe in the resurrection of Jesus it does give us an eternal hope that at the very least takes the edge of our pain. But it sure doesnt eliminate it for me. Years ago I wrote a post on the subject of grieving and explained that hope doesnt take away grief it just changes it. I have, like many others with blood cancer, been grieving the loss of my old life. But there has been much to be thankful for and so I have been sorrowful yet always rejoicing.

The resurrection does make a difference though. And our belief as Christians in both our own resurrection and that of Jesus Christ is what marks all of us, no matter what denomination or wing of the Church, out as different from every body else.

In my first book I offered the following definition of a Christian:

A Christian is someone who believes in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ and lives in light of the implications of that event.

Adrian Warnock, Raised With Christ How the Resurrection Changes Everything

But when asked whether he actually believed the tomb was empty Jordans answer was fascinating and encouraging. He admitted this was something he struggled with and that actually the Bible seems to be full of people who struggle with God. In fact the very name of the people of God in the Old Testament was Israel and it means one who struggles with God. He argued the in reality nobody can be 100% sure of anything and that is what faith is all about . . . READ THE REST

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Jordan Peterson on the Resurrection | Adrian Warnock - Patheos

GLENDALE, AZ Conversations about mental health are difficult to have, especially as a family. How do you get children, young and old, to express how they are feeling?

"People's routines have been significantly changed," said Jordan Peterson, a community liaison with Aurora Behavioral Health .

Even for those who have not struggled with mental health issues before, the pandemic may have paved the way for depression and anxiety.

However, the team at Aurora Behavioral Health says pandemic-onset depression is something everyone is going through together.

"People are kind of breaking down those walls and barriers a little bit and having [a] more honest conversation," Peterson said.

That is why the facility knew their work had to continue, despite the coronavirus.

"We've had some videos of just kind of creative things around the house that have therapeutic value to them," Peterson said.

Aurora has carved out a section on its website to host some of their in-person mindfulness activities online, in a section they're calling 'Wellness at Home.'

"One of them we even put together was the therapeutic benefits behind playing board games as a family," Peterson said. "You learn a lot of things from a developmental end."

Another activity, mindful grooming, only requires the family pet, or even just a stuffed animal.

Mindfulness means being aware and focused on the present moment or task at hand. Experts say mindful activities decrease stress and increase mood.

"Coping skills might look very different and some people may be like, 'I don't know about this one,'" Peterson said. "But just trying it and seeing what works for somebody else it gets you out of your comfort zone."

Aurora is also offering a way to send that positivity someone else's way during this Mental Health Awareness Month. Visitors to their website can order pre-stamped postcards that include messages like, "I'm rooting for you."

They believe sending a card could make all the difference for someone feeling isolated right now.

"It's kind of nice just to send a quick message of 'Hey, I'm thinking of you,'" Peterson said.

For more information on the postcards, the family-friendly videos, even telehealth services, click here.

This story was originally published by Megan Thompson on KNXV in Phoenix.

See the article here:

Here are some ways your family can manage the stress of the pandemic - KGUN

Many are optimistic about what the Arizona Cardinals can do in 2020. However, no one appears to be more publicly bullish about the team than cornerback Patrick Peterson.

He already recently declared that this roster of players is the best team, at least on paper, he has been on in his almost decade in the league.

After four postseason-less seasons and only eight wins combined in the last two years, he is putting no limits on what this team can achieve.

The sky is the limit for this football team, he said in a video conference with the media this past week. I truly believe we can go as far as we want.

Both in a previous interview he gave on a podcast and in this meeting with the media, he emphasized how it is on the players to perform and that they must have a common vision, trust each other and commit to the goal to be able to be as good as they can be, but he isnt shying away from giving lofty expectations for the potential of the team.

It started with the offseason, he said.

The offseason has been great for us. The draft has been great for us, he said. We really hit all areas in this offseason to give not only the fans something exciting to look forward to but also putting us in the best opportunity to win. I definitely think this is a championship-caliber team from top to bottom.

The trade to acquire receiver DeAndre Hopkins got Peterson excited. General manager Steve Keim started with a bang.

The acquisition of DeAndre, that was huge for us, Peterson said. To add a top-two receiver to your roster, that just doesnt happen. That just doesnt fall in your lap. For that trade to be pulled off, I thought (it) was a great sign and a great start to the offseason.

So what makes this team so potentially special?

He described both the defense and the offense.

He began with the defensive backfield, where he plays.

The youth we have in the back end, I believe that speaks for itself, he said. We have young talented players that love the game that can cover sideline to sideline, that can be the enforcer. I believe that is very important for a football team.

Peterson himself returns for a full season after missing six games to suspension. Cornerback Robert Alford comes back after missing the season with a broken leg, which is going to be huge, Peterson said.

At safety, they have Budda Baker and Jalen Thompson. He called Baker the enforcer and a Tasmanian Devil. He raved about how Thompson played late in the season when he saw Thompsons confidence go through the roof.

He then moved to the defensive front seven, noting the presence of linebacker Jordan Hicks, the addition of rookie linebacker Isaiah Simmons and the pass rushing of Chandler Jones.

With the signing of Jordan Phillips, the return of Jonathan Bullard and the selection in the draft of Leki Fotu and Rashard Lawrence, youve got pass rush, youve got D-line, youve got rotation now.

Then, on offense, he spoke of quarterback Kyler Murray.

I believe its going to be a huge year for him, he said. We all know he hasnt even scratched the surface yet.

With running backs Kenyan Drake and Chase Edmonds, Murray has a great backfield to help him out.

Then, with the addition of Hopkins to the receiver room with Larry Fitzgerald and Christian Kirk, the Cardinals have three receivers that you pretty much cant double.

Kylers going to be like a kid in a candy store, Peterson added. Hes going to be able to pick whatever candy he wants. Youve got the opportunity to throw touchdowns to red-zone Fitz, take shots with DeAndre, anddownfield shots with Christian as well.

When you look back at the teams that Ive been a part of, thats everything we had, he said, thinking back to the seasons from 2013-2015 when the Cardinals won 10 games or more a year. But I believe the only thing different in this group is were a little bit faster and we got younger and having that youth in this day in age is big for us.

It isnt a prediction for what will happen, but it is a declaration of what is possible.

If we all come together, focus on our one goal, we can take definitely take it the distance, he said.Im very optimistic about where we can be at the end of the year, but right now were just a good team on paper.

It gives Cardinals fans a reason to get excited.

We have everything that you need, and if youre trying to build a championship-caliber football team, we have the players, he said. This is that type of roster.

Listen to the latest from Cards Wires Jess Root on his podcast, Rise Up, See Red. Subscribe on Apple podcasts or Stitcher Radio.

Ep. 267

Ep. 266

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Patrick Peterson sees 'championship-caliber team from top to bottom' in Cardinals - Cards Wire

In April 1936, three years before his death, WB Yeats received a letter from the writer and activist Ethel Mannin. The 70-year-old Yeats was a Nobel prize-winning poet of immense stature and influence, not to mention Mannins former lover, and she asked him to join a campaign to free a German pacifist incarcerated by the Nazis. Yeats responded instead with a reading recommendation: If you have my poems by you, look up a poem called The Second Coming, he wrote. It was written some sixteen or seventeen years ago & foretold what is happening. I have written of the same thing again & again since. This will seem little to you with your strong practical sense for it takes fifty years for a poets weapons to influence the issue.

Yeats was justified in taking the long view. Written in 1919 and published in 1920, The Second Coming has become perhaps the most plundered poem in the English language. At 164 words, it is short and memorable enough to be famous in toto but it has also been disassembled into its constituent parts by books, albums, movies, TV shows, comic books, computer games, political speeches and newspaper editorials. While many poems in Yeatss corpus have contributed indelible lines to the storehouse of the cultural imagination (no country for old men; the foul rag and bone shop of the heart), The Second Coming consists of almost nothing but such lines. Someone reading it for the first time in 2020 might resemble the apocryphal theatregoer who complained that Hamlet was nothing but a bunch of quotations strung together. Whether or not it is Yeatss greatest poem, it is by far his most useful. As Auden wrote in In Memory of WB Yeats (1939), The words of a dead man / Are modified in the guts of the living.

As the world is wrenched out of joint by the coronavirus pandemic, many people are turning to poetry for wisdom and consolation, but The Second Coming fulfils a different role, as it has done in crisis after crisis, from the Vietnam war to 9/11 to the election of Donald Trump: an opportunity to confront chaos and dread, rather than to escape it. Fintan OToole has proposed the Yeats Test: The more quotable Yeats seems to commentators and politicians, the worse things are.

Turning and turning in the widening gyreThe falcon cannot hear the falconer;Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhereThe ceremony of innocence is drowned;The best lack all conviction, while the worstAre full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;Surely the Second Coming is at hand.The Second Coming! Hardly are those words outWhen a vast image out of Spiritus MundiTroubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desertA shape with lion body and the head of a man,A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,Is moving its slow thighs, while all about itReel shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again; but now I knowThat twenty centuries of stony sleepWere vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The first stanza is a series of punchy declarations about a crisis of authority, almost as if Yeats were an op-ed writer in full thunder. The oracular second stanza asks why this is happening and imagines what might follow the phase of anarchy: the second coming will be a reversal of the first.

Yeats began The Second Coming during the tense, eventful month of January 1919. The first world war was barely over and the Russian Revolution, which dismayed him, still unfolding, while another war was brewing on his doorstep. On 21 January, the revolutionary Irish parliament met in Dublin to declare independence while, in a quarry in Tipperary, members of the IRA killed two officers of the Royal Irish Constabulary. The birth of Yeatss daughter, Anne, in February was also freighted with danger. During her pregnancy, his young wife Georgie Hyde-Lees had been stricken by the Spanish flu that was burning through Europe. Events conspired to put Yeats in an apocalyptic frame of mind.

He found the metaphors to express it via hundreds of automatic writing sessions, during which Georgie convinced her husband that she was channelling the wisdom of Controls and Instructors from the spirit realm. From these sessions, Yeats constructed an elaborate, world-explaining System, which he eventually laid out in bewildering detail in A Vision (1925). Crucial to The Second Coming was the symbol of the gyre (a cone or spiral) and Yeatss conviction that history moved in 2,000-year cycles. The age of Christ (twenty centuries of stony sleep) was coming to an end and a new era antithetical to progress and reason would begin with the birth of the rough beast in Bethlehem.

Early drafts of the poem illustrate Yeatss dedication to universalising his message, as he deletes specific references to the French Revolution and the first world war and replaces terrestrial images of judges and tyrants with figures from dreams and myths. This productive vagueness, says David Dwan, an associate professor of English at Oxford University, is what makes the poem ever-relevant. Evident, too, in the drafts is Yeatss painstaking refinement of each line. All things have begun to break and fall apart is distilled into Things fall apart; The centre has lost becomes The centre cannot hold. The beast that has blandly set out for Bethlehem slouches instead. In the final version, every phrase has vigour and weight. The poem is built to last.

The Second Coming was published in both The Nation and The Dial in November 1920 and then in Yeatss collection Michael Robartes and the Dancer (1921). Yet it did not attain what Dwan calls its problematic ubiquity until some time after the second world war. By 1963, the aphoristic couplet about the best and the worst was enough of a cliche to irritate the critic Raymond Williams. The lines are regularly used as rhetorical tactics in the defence of anybodys sanity against anybody elses enthusiasm, he complained.

One reason for the poems booming popularity was its supporting role in two influential masterpieces. Chinua Achebes Things Fall Apart (1958) enshrined it in the vocabulary of African independence. By 1971, the Guardian observed, the title had become an African catchphrase. Joan Didions essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) had a similar effect in the US at a time of stomach-churning flux. Didion opened her book with the poem because its lines had reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.

After Achebe and Didion, lines from the poem popped up with growing frequency in coverage of China, India, Africa, Indonesia, Northern Ireland and Britain. There was apparently no geopolitical drama to which it could not be applied. In 2007, after the Brookings Institute called its report on Iraq Things Fall Apart, the New York Times claimed: The Second Coming is fast becoming the official poem of the Iraq war. You could find similar claims being made regarding the financial crisis, the Arab spring and, now, the age of rightwing populism. In August 2016, as Trump slouched towards Washington, the Wall Street Journal declared: Terror, Brexit and US Election Have Made 2016 the Year of Yeats, after the research company Factiva found that phrases from the poem had already notched up more appearances in the press than in any other year in the previous three decades. Since then, the poem has been invoked by Jordan Peterson and Slavoj iek, ransacked for anti-Trump song titles by Moby and Sleater-Kinney, recited in the season finale of Alex Garlands Devs, and quoted six times in parliament.

The post-2016 turn to Yeats is no surprise, because the image of the centre not holding has long made the poem a touchstone for anxious centrists. Shortly before running for president in 1968, Robert F Kennedy warned: Indeed, we seem to fulfil the vision of Yeats. In 1979, Labour grandee Roy Jenkins quoted it at the climax of his celebrated Dimbleby lecture about the radical centre, a speech that paved the way for the launch of the SDP.

Yeats himself was not exactly SDP material. With his taste for autocracy, contempt for the masses and fascination with fascism (at least in its first decade), he would have been surprised to find his poem deployed as a spur for the defence of liberal democracy. As late as 1934, he privately admitted in reference to Irish politics: I find myself constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes as the only end to our troubles. The following year, he recalled that when he was a young contrarian in the age of Victorian optimism, everybody talked about progress, and rebellion against my elders took the form of aversion to that myth. I took satisfaction in certain public disasters, felt a sort of ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin.

Enough of that youthful appetite for destruction survives in The Second Coming for readers to be divided over whether Yeats fears the rough beast or welcomes it. But surely the two emotions are entangled. Just as dystopian authors get a kick out of dramatising their worst fears, great apocalyptic art has a dreadful vitality, its pulse quickening in proximity to catastrophe. The dynamic ambivalence of The Second Coming, mingling horror with excitement, explains its embrace by popular culture. Offering the reader mayhem, terror, suspense and a mysterious nemesis, it is a kind of disaster movie for modern civilisation. A lot of money has been made from inspiring ecstasy at the contemplation of ruin.

In pop music, artists as diverse as the Roots, Zomby and Cristina have released records called Things Fall Apart. On television, shows including The West Wing, Battlestar Galactica and Babylon Five have riffed on The Second Coming. In the final season of The Sopranos, reading the poem leads an anguished AJ Soprano to attempt suicide, prompting his mother to ask: What kind of poem is that to teach college students?!

So many allusions in mainstream entertainment cannot be intended solely for the amusement of their writers. When Gordon Gekko quipped, So the falcons heard the falconer, huh?, in the film Wall Street (1987), it must have been assumed that more than a few viewers would clock the reference. In Stephen Kings colossal bestseller The Stand (1978), in which a weaponised superflu wipes out most of humanity, one character says: The beast is on its way. Its on its way, and its a good deal rougher than that fellow Yeets [sic] ever could have imagined. Things are falling apart. Some knowledge is also required to appreciate the parodic final line of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchetts Good Omens (1990), in which the Anti-Christ is seen slouching hopefully towards Tadfield.

It would be unwise to claim that The Second Coming is more relevant than ever because that has been said so many times before. If it feels especially potent now, perhaps it is because we have become painfully accustomed to the idea that progress is fragile and it is all too easy to fall back. In an age of shocking reversals, Yeatss theory of historical cycles day & night, night & day for ever, as he once put it rings true. The only consolation the poem offers is the knowledge that, for one reason or another, every generation has felt the same apocalyptic shudder that Yeats did 100 years ago. Thats why it is a poem for 1919 and 1939 and 1968 and 1979 and 2001 and 2016 and today and tomorrow. Things fall apart, over and over again, yet the beast never quite reaches Bethlehem.

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'Things fall apart': the apocalyptic appeal of WB Yeats's The Second Coming - The Guardian

Myth and Mayhem: A Leftist Critique of Jordan Petersonby Ben Burgis, Conrad Hamilton, Matthew McManus and Marion Trejo(Zer0 Books, 14.99)

JORDAN PETERSON is the Canadian so-called intellectual guru of the alt-right, whose 12 Rules for Life, a self-help primer with a conservative subtext, has sold over three million copies.

In this response to his significant influence, four leftist US intellectuals provide an overview of Petersons work, an analysis of his strictures on the left and, in a final section, discuss Peterson on feminism and reason.

In the book's foreword, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek gets to the gravamen of the overall case against Peterson: He is most critical [about] postmodern neo-Marxists. The issue is that nobody would describe themselves thus post-modernism and Marxism are incompatible.

Yet it is typical Peterson. He creates a caricature enemy embodying all that he dislikes as a threat to the Western Judaeo-Christian legacy and then attacks that straw man with the same lack of intellectual rigour with which he created the imaginary enemy, one he created to slake the hatreds of his paying audience rather than shed enlightenment.

Attacking a caricatured position characterises his work on the left, Marx in particular, and the book makes it clear that he knows little about Marxism.

His misconceptions are dealt with effectively point by point and his ignorance is understandable given his admission that of all Marxs works he has only read the Communist Manifesto and that four decades ago. Yet he still feels able to offer criticism and demand that he be taken seriously.

Marion Trejo, in her contribution on Peterson and feminism, contends that it is bordering on absurd to equate demands for equality before the law, respect, the right to live free from violence and exploitation and the right to be addressed by ones preferred pronoun with a tyrannical, almost totalitarian, desire to remake man and woman.

His criticism of those longing to restructure the human spirit in the very image of the feminists preconceptions alludes to his hostility to using pronouns preferred by transgender people, the issue that propelled him to global fame.

It encapsulates Petersons schtick of taking a feature of something he hates, extrapolating that feature to absurdity, and then attacking the outcome of that speculation rather than that which people have actually said they believe.

An informative book, Myth and Mayhem is nevertheless a largely abstruse exerciseaimed at a left-leaning audience familiar with philosophical discourse, and Im not convinced Id give it to someone I wanted to dissuade from following Peterson. An objectionable charlatan he may be but he gets his point over well and engages with his following on an emotional and intellectual level.

This take on Peterson begs the question of how we break out of addressing each other and connecting with those outside the tent. To quote Fyodor Dostoyevsky, one of Petersons favourite writers: It takes something more than intelligence to act intelligently.

Continued here:

BOOKS Preaching to the converted? - Morning Star Online

By: Nick Piastowski May 28, 2020

Jordan Spieth greets fans during last year's Charles Schwab Challenge.

Getty Images

A revised Texas state order will allow fans to attend outdoor professional sports events during the coronavirus pandemic, including the PGA Tours first tournament after a three-month hiatus, the Charles Schwab Challenge in Fort Worth.

The Tour said right now it is sticking to its plan to not allow fans.

Last Friday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued a revised proclamation allowing spectators at outdoor events up to 25 percent of the venues capacity, though it was not publicly announced, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. The revision came four days after Abbott announced pro sports may resume in the state, albeit without fans.

The medical team advising Abbott on reopening Texas unanimously approved allowing fans, an Abbott spokesman told the Star-Telegram on Thursday.

It was brought up again in another call with the doctors, and the medical team said that they could move forward with 25 percent capacity, John Wittman told the Star-Telegram.

The Tour wont at the moment.

A Tour spokesman told the Star-Telegram that our focus right now is playing the Charles Schwab Challenge, from June 11-14 at Colonial Country Club in Fort Worth, without fans. Brad Townsend, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, tweeted Thursday afternoon that the tournament director, Michael Tothe, said the proclamation wont affect the tournament. No changes. No fans. Too late to change, Townsend tweeted Tothe as saying.

In announcing its revised schedule in April after ending play after the first round of the Players Championship in mid-March, the Tour said it would play its first four tournaments without fans. Thursday also revealed it might be longer.

News of Texas allowing fans comes on the same day that the Tour announced that the first tournament to allow spectators, the John Deere Classic in Silvis, Ill., would not be played this year due to local- and state-related challenges related to gathering restrictions. Illinois reopening rules would allow for gatherings of only up to 50 people by the time the tournament would be played in mid-July.

The Tour said it would replace the John Deere Classic with a new tournament.

Because of the ongoing health and safety concerns related to the coronavirus pandemic, the difficult decision was made to cancel the 2020 John Deere Classic, John Deere Classic tournament director Clair Peterson said on a release on the Tours website. While we considered several alternatives for the Classic, this was the choice that made the most sense for our guests, the players and the Quad City community at large.

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PGA Tour: Colonial right now wont have fans even though Texas says it... - Golf.com