Links for the week, early again. It is unlikely that there will be any regular programming here for the next few months, but I will try to post links at regular intervals. Feel free to share your own favourite links from the last week in the comments.
1. Which Grandparent Are You Most Related To?
2. Oliver O’Donovan in Conversation
3. Why Zimbardo’s Prison Experiment Isn’t in My Textbook
4. Why Have Young People in Japan Stopped Having Sex?
6. For Caution in the Use of Clerical Collars
7. The Skept-o-meter for Questionable Historical/Archaeological Claims
9. The New, Old Way to Tell Stories: With Input From the Audience
10. The Most Popular Baby Names for Girls Since 1960
11. How Homestar Runner Changed Web Series for the Better
12. The Shocking Power of a Word of Love
14. Sold Out – A devastating piece on British higher education.
15. Is Cessationism Responsible for David Hume?
16. 3 Videos that Show Why Identical Twins Might be Different
17. Evangelical Leader Preaches Pullback From Politics, Culture Wars – On Russell Moore.
18. The Synoptic Problem Around the Blogosphere
19. Epicureanism and Regret in Modern Culture
20. First Children Are Smarter – But Why?
21. Younger Sisters ‘Learn From Older Siblings’ Mistakes’
23. Why So Creepy? – Male Feminists and Shoddy Arguments
24. The Burden of Saying Goodbye to a Dog
25. Jealous God
26. Humility
27. Martha, Martha – Martha Stewart and the new vision of domesticity.
29. Questions for Free-Market Moralists
31. Do You Know Who I Am? – Krugman on credentials
32. Girl’s Face Ploughed into a Field
33. 10 Simple Ways to Eat Less Without Noticing
34. Thomas Edison’s Eccentric Job Interview Questions: A Cheat Sheet
35. Festschrift for Beale – From Creation to New Creation
36. Scalded by Coffee, Then News Media
37. Do You Say Among Instead of Amongst? Here’s Why.
38. Shares in People
39. The Oppressive Aesthetic of the Christian Book Store
40. Chairman Mao Invented Traditional Chinese Medicine
41. Prenatal and Postnatal Flavour Learning by Human Infants
42. How to Avoid Celebrity Derangement Syndrome: Dealing Fairly with Evans, Driscoll, and Piper
43. Let’s Stop Calling it Complementarianism and Hierarchical Complementarianism Implies Ontological Ineptitude – Very extensive discussion in the comments
44. 7 Things You Might Not Know About Calvin and Hobbes
45. In ‘Flipped’ Classrooms: A Method for Mastery
47. ‘The Barber’: A Story Flannery O’Connor Never Published
48. Managerialism and the Culture War
49. Caminito del Rey: The Most Dangerous Pathway in the World?
50. The Real, the Social, the Discursive
51. The Course of Their Lives – On using a cadaver in anatomy class
52. Who Is Veronika?
53. Star Wars: A Long Time Ago, in a Hive Far Far Away – An ingenious explanation for Star Wars’ poor performance on the Bechdel Test.
54. TV Shows For the Books of the Bible
55. Baby Naps Turned Into Fantastical Scenes
56. Saroo Brierley: Homeward Bound
57. Archbishop Justin Welby on Prince George’s Christening
58. Escher for Real
Alastair's Adversaria 
You may have posted this in weeks past but this is cool – http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/science/2013/10/this-bird-can-stay-in-flight-for-six-months-straight/
Very cool! Thanks for the link!
Does this music remind you of anything stylistically?
You might also want to check out her documentary Part of Me. It’s a promotional vehicle, but provides much food for thought on her Christian background nonetheless.
Very few people know that Katy Perry once released an album of Christian rock under the name of Katy Hudson. Indeed, her story is an interesting one.
I believe the documentary is on Netflix.
I might have to check it out.
You know, if you aren’t up to providing a links fest, you might want to consider putting up a list of books on a certain topic. Rachel Held Evans had a bunch of people put up books on sexuality recently. I’m rather dubious as to most of the titles on offer there, but would appreciate suggestions from people whose opinion I respect more. You could even ask your readers for their favourite suggestions.
(I took a dip into Brownson’s Bible Gender Sexuality, and promptly found him introducing the fact/value distinction. Oh dear. Nothing like importing modern notions into the text. I may read further in his book at some point, but life is short.)
You could pick some other topic. It’s just that that is what Evans had on order this week.
My reading list this week is dominated by Stephen Holmes’ The Quest for the Trinity, and N.T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God, both of which are very important books. Holmes’ book studies the attempts to recapture the doctrine of the Trinity over the last hundred years and argues that they have fundamentally misunderstood and distorted the classic doctrine.
N.T. Wright’s is a monumental two volume text, 1700 pages in length, the fourth book in his Christian Origins series. I have been waiting for this book for over a decade and it was released today. The earlier volumes in the series were very formative texts in my theological understanding and, while I have some areas of sharp disagreement with Wright’s representation of Paul and suspect that, as I have already read so much by him on the subject, it will hold fewer surprises, I am still greatly enjoying reading it.
I have been reading a book by an Israeli philosopher Eddy Zemach called Real Beauty, which argues, quite comprehensively, that aesthetic categories like beauty and ugliness have a real existence, and that this has some rather wide ranging implications, for science, philosophy and, I would say, theology.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Real-Beauty-Zemach/dp/0271016396/ref=tmm_pap_title_0
I’m not sure why the book is not better known. Highly recommended. (Aside from the parts where the author uses to the notation of analytic philosophy, it is also extremely well written.)
I have also started Leithart’s Against Christianity and Spufford’s Unapologetic, and am finally going to finish Smith’s Desiring the Kingdom.
Yes, unsurprisingly, I have found what I have read of Brownson very unpersuasive too. Matthew Lee Anderson is a friend of mine (on and offline) and I would echo both of his recommendations. Oliver O’Donovan is almost invariably an incredibly rewarding person to read and his Church in Crisis is no exception. He has a lesser known Grove booklet on transsexualism, which I posted a long quotation from recently. Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is also an extremely important text.
To these, I would be tempted to add something like Roger Scruton’s Sexual Desire, which is one of the more insightful texts on the subject that I have read.