Our first parents fell into open disobedience because already they were secretly corrupted; for the evil act had never been done had not an evil will preceded it. And what is the origin of our evil will but pride? For “pride is the beginning of sin.” And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation, when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself. This happens when it becomes its own satisfaction….The devil, then, would not have ensnared man in the open and manifest sin of doing what God had forbidden, had man not already begun to live for himself….By craving to be more, man becomes less; and by aspiring to be self-sufficing, he fell away from Him who truly suffices him.

–Saint Augustine, The City of God XIVI.12, quoted by yours truly in last week’s sermon

Saint Augustine
If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself. pic.twitter.com/3GfhP4tNEm

— Christian the Christian (@byzchristian) August 31, 2021

The U.S. is heading into Labor Day weekend with just over four times as many Covid-19 cases and more than twice as many hospitalizations as at this time last year — despite having vaccinated 62% of the American population with at least one dose.

The U.S. and the world are nowhere near where health officials hoped, and thought, we would be 20 months into the pandemic — and more than eight months after vaccines that boasted efficacy rates around 95% were rolled out.

Though the outbreak is significantly worse by most measures than 2020, setting the U.S. up for a tough fall season, the delta variant, vaccines and open schools make it hard to predict how the pandemic will unfold, doctors and scientists say.

“There is a lot more uncertainty right now. The dynamic interplay between variants and vaccine and particularly people unvaccinated, and the sort of game changer of the delta variant leads to a lot of uncertainty in terms of what the fall holds,” said Dr. Barbara Taylor, an assistant dean and infectious disease specialist at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Read it all.

The U.S. is heading into Labor Day weekend with four times as many COVID-19 cases and twice as many hospitalizations compared to last year. https://t.co/GvZ1GoG7T3

— NBCWashington (@nbcwashington) September 4, 2021

We are just getting slowly back into things after a summer break, but I have a TV recommendation for you ‘SweetTooth’; 1 person called it (I paraphrase) a charming apocalyptic–give it a little time, it’s well acted, but an even more beautiful+moving story.

A tribute comp I did for the @netflix series “sweet tooth”. A very original show with great visuals.
Uploaded to @PosterSpy
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Drawn in @AdobeDrawing fresco
.@NetflixGeeked @NetflixUK @NetflixIndia @SweetTooth @RobertDowneyJr pic.twitter.com/8ASOefj3o4

— Dustin Knotek (@DustinKnotek) August 6, 2021

His concerns about greenhouse gases, rising temperature averages, dying coral reefs, blistering heat waves, and increasingly extreme weather were informed by his training at as atmospheric physicist and his commitment to science. They also come out of his evangelical understanding of God, the biblical accounts of humanity’s relationship to creation, and what it means for a Christian to follow Christ.

“We haven’t lived up to the call to holiness,” Houghton’s granddaughter Hannah Malcolm explained to CT. “We’ve been conformed to the patterns of this world, with the desire for wealth accumulation and the desire to increase our comforts, and that’s not the demand that is placed upon us as followers of Christ.”

Houghton was born in a Baptist family in Wales in 1931. As a young man he realized he needed to make a personal decision for Christ, and he did. To the end of his life, Houghton described it as the most important choice he’d ever made.

His love for God fueled his love for science. He saw it as a way to worship.

“The biggest thing that can ever happen to anybody is to get a relationship with the one who has created the universe,” Houghton told a Welsh newspaper in 2007. “We discover the laws of nature when we do our science. So we discover what’s behind the universe and if there’s an intelligence and a creator behind it. What we’re doing as Christians is exploring our relationship with the person who is the creator of the universe. Now that’s something that is absolutely wonderful.”

Read it all.

"I’ve heard people say he had the urgency of a prophet.”

This Nobel prize-winning evangelical climate scientist saw sin at the heart of our ecological crisis: https://t.co/wPB1CPyLXn

— Christianity Today (@CTmagazine) September 2, 2021