Chris Gayle and beauty, Gilmore Guys, happiness + more

As ​Eternity ​contributor and blogger Nathan Campbell put it on Facebook this week, this article is essentially a “How not to be Chris Gayle by acknowledging the Chris Gayle within…”:
“Evangelicals like me are terrible about understanding and promoting “modesty,” and I think a major reason for this is that men don’t know how to live with beauty without owning it. Either it’s ours, or it shouldn’t exist. So, when we see a beautiful woman, it frustrates us… We don’t want to covet, we don’t want to desire to have her, but what choice do we have except to ignore? And sometimes, probably all the time, beauty doesn’t let itself be ignored. There aren’t enough burkas in the world to hide the beauty of what God has made. On one hand we can’t have all the beauty around us. It’s not ours to richly and intimately know and delight in. But we want to. We desperately want to steal images of beauty that will validate our consumption of oxygen for eighty years on earth. And since we can’t do that righteously, then, to hell with beauty.” Read the whole article>>

It’s a strange basis for a podcast: two young American men dissecting and discussing every episode of hit TV show Gilmore Girls. “The hundreds of hours Porter has spent dissecting Gilmore Girls, debating the merits of their endless movie references, or equivocating over which of Rory’s boyfriends was best, aren’t anything to be ashamed of. Rather, he said, Christians should be people willing to think deeply about what they watch and listen to.” The podcast is entitled Gilmore Guys, and can be found on iTunes.

What does it mean to be happy? In this video, produced by The Atlantic, a group of psychologists, professors and journlists talk about how they think the definition of happiness might be changing. “I do think there’s been a rise in materialistic sorts of values, and those tend to be hard to reconcile to happiness… I think a lot of us are working hard to live lives in accord with something larger than pleasure, than hedonic happiness, and really a more purpose-driven self-expression of what’s the best version of me, and how can I become that person?” says Eli Finkel, Professor of Psychology, Northwestern University.

In February 2017 a new Museum of the Bible will open in Washington DC, owned by the same people who own US-based arts and crafts retail giant Hobby Lobby. The project is not without its critics. In an interview with The Atlantic, Steve Green, president of Hobby Lobby, said that he envisages the Museum of the Bible as a place that will tell the story of a sacred book that has traveled down the centuries essentially unchanged since the time of its composition. Read more here>>