Other "Lose, Vague, and Indeterminant" Terms

Along the line of trying to determine the best name for what I'm currently calling "Millennial Social Thought," there are other instances of confusingly similar terms in this area. For instance, some people use the terms "religious economics" and "economics of religion" interchangably, while others view them as two different things. I'm probably in the "two different things" camp: to me religious economics is when economics is influenced by religious views, while the economics of religion is applying economic principles to religious actions. If you give some of your income away because of a religious principle you are practicing religious economics, but if you theorize that actions in testimony meeting can be explained with a signalling model you are practicing the economics of religion.

Similarly, the term "consecration" just means "to make holy" to most people, but to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints it means "the dedication of all resources." To some "stewardship" might mean nothing more than princple management, but to certain groups of Christians it implies a future reckoning with God about how the resources were managed.

Hypercycloids and Circles

When I was younger my brother taught me how to use straight lines on graph paper to draw the things that comprise the Pittsburgh Steelers logo (which I learned much later are called hypercycloids). I thought it was awesome and I did it all the time. It was my version of that dumb angled S thing that everyone else drew when they were 10 years old.

I have often wondered if the circular shape you get out of such a drawing is, in fact, a circle. So I decided to figure it out.

A Simpler Name

Several months ago, Steve commented and suggested perhaps a name like "Consecrated" or "Consecrationist Social Thought" might do the trick for what I have been thinking of as "Restored Christian Social Thought." That's not bad, except that many people who think about these things already think of Catholic Social Thought as CST. But then this week I had this idea: what about "Millennial Social Thought" as a name? I think it captures the idea with a new term that isn't going to be confused for something else, and it helps move the idea beyond one religion's viewpoint, since several religions have ideas about utopian societies. So I'll be moving forward with the term "Millennial Social Thought," or "MST."

Inspiration

I don't remember how I first became aware of Seth Godin or his blog, but my Feedly account has included him for a while now. I appreciate his posts because they are usually short little jabs to go be awesome, and I need jabs like that.

Two weeks ago he had a post about how hard it is to produce content when feedback is missing. It motivated me to recommit to blogging about Restored Christian Social Thought. So here I am, recommitting.

Thanks, Seth.

Birmingham Football Deserves Its Own Wikipedia Page

I took my two oldest boys to the USFL semi-final playoff games in Canton, OH, this past weekend. It was pretty close to us and pretty cheap. While we were there, we got to wondering about just how long long-suffering football fans in Birmingham have been suffering.

It turns out this is their TENTH football team. They had the Birmingham Americans (1974) and the Birmingham Vulcans (1975) in something called the World Football League, the Alabama Vulcans (1979) and the Alabama Magic (1982) of a minor league called the AFA, the Birmingham Stallions of the Original-Recipe USFL (1983-1985), the Birmingham Fire of the World League (1991-1992), the Birmingham Barracudas of the Canadian league (1995), the Birmingham Thunderbolts of the Original-Recipe XFL (2001), the Birmingham Iron of the AAF (2019), and now the back-from-the-dead Stallions, who will be in the championship game this coming weekend. In the past 50 years there has been professional football in Birmingham for 13 of them, more than 25% of the time. That's just somewhat better than Los Angeles, Saint Louis, or Nashville.

My sons enjoyed the games and I think they want to go back for the championship game. We'll be rooting for Birmingham--they're due.

If You REALLY Cared About the Planet You'd Have Two Desserts

What is the connection between obesity and climate change? Well, here's how I got there.

A few years ago I heard two scientist colleagues discussing the fact that when a person loses weight the mass actually exits the body as carbon dioxide. To go along with that, I live in the modern world where our combination of diet and lifestyle has created a prevalence of obesity. And the current state of public affairs has me not necessarily convinced of the imminence of the collapse of complex society but at least not surprised if it happened over the course of an upcoming weekend.

To bring it all together I walked past a moderately overweight person on my walk to work this morning. (That's not a subtle boast that I walk to work--I was walking from the parking garage to the building and it often is the worst part of my commute.)

Then my brain went like this: "When society collapses this person and millions of others will be dumped out of the modern obesity-producing lifestyle, resulting in widespread weight loss which will release a massive carbon sink thereby exacerbating climate change."

I think climate activists would find a lot more sympathy among climate-change skeptics if they presented their plan as an all-dessert diet. I know I'd become a freaking eco-terrorist, bombing vegetable processing facilities like nobody's business. Anything for Mother Earth.

Preliminary Reading List

A few years ago I found some websites with advice on starting an intellectual project like a think tank. One suggested a place to start is to read all pertinent material and take notes and write reviews. In reflecting on what counts as "pertinent information," I figured I should start with the reading I've already done. That will constitute my initial to-read list.

• Arrington, Leonard J. Great Basin Kingdom: An Economic History of the Latter-day Saints, 1830-1900.
• Bushman, Richard Lyman. Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling.
• Lucas, James W. and Warner P. Woodworth. Working Toward Zion: Principles of the United Order for the Modern World.
• Maxwell, Neal A. Of One Heart: The Glory of the City of Enoch.
• Nibley, Hugh. Enoch the Prophet: The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 2.
• Nibley, Hugh. Approaching Zion: The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 9.
• Nibley, Hugh. Brother Brigham Challenges the Saints: The Collected Works of Hugh Nibley, Volume 13.
• Spencer, Joseph M. For Zion: A Mormon Theology of Hope.
• Tolstoy, Leo. The Kingdom of God Is Within You.
• Turner, John G. Brigham Young: Pioneer Prophet.

I also have another book that I haven't read yet but I should have:

• Arrington, Leonard J., Feramorz Y. Fox, and Dean L. May. Building the City of God: Community and Cooperation Among the Mormons.

I will look through the bibliographies of these works to see where I should go next. But this is my jumping-off point.