Link love

John wonders whether it might not be better to start a sermon with application.

Failure to understand Black Swans leads to fallacious thinking (Black Swans are the low probability, high impact events that are excluded by most forecasting models).

"12 million hectares of arable land – roughly the size of Greece or Nepal, enough to harvest 20 million tonnes of grain and feed six million people per annum – are lost to desertification each year."

Painting your roof white to cool the planet. Crazy? Not entirely.

Jason ponders forgiveness and eucharist with Williams and loneliness and prayer with Stringfellow.

Sisyphus revisited.

The Jordan river is too polluted for baptisms. The Nile isn't looking so great either.

Climate science in 1979.

Habitual thinking and the fragility of new ideas

I have often had a thought, say, in the middle of the night or in the shower (that most productive of thinking time) and tell myself "I should write that down". Being unable to, I then usually think, "If it's a good enough thought it will stay with me. It will soak into my consciousness and come back to me at a relevant moment."

But it never does.

I realised recently just how frequently this occurs and how many thoughts were dissolving in the quotidian grind. Old familiar thoughts have the inertia of repetition to make them normal, and so they easily recur when one faces a similar situation again. Thought gets into habits, follows grooves worn by the drip of previous thoughts. But new thoughts are fragile. They have to be nurtured or lost.

Moral: write it down.