The Sunday Refill – 7 Links for Your Weekend (3/2/19)

Seven up…

1) Why Are Young People Pretending to Love Work? – There can be something of a fetishisation of productivity, and maybe that’s inevitable in a hyper-connected age.

2) The Whole Counsel of God – Oli Tucker has done some number-crunching on which parts of the Bible are preached most often in evangelical churches across the UK. In other words, to ask the question in reverse, where are our Bible blind-spots and our apparent ‘no-go areas’. The results make for interesting – and sometimes surprising – reading.

3) Foreign secretary launches Christian persecution review: The launch of this review is surely a positive development, conducted by the Bishop of Truro who noted that Christians are on the receiving end of 80% of religious persecution. That said, others have lambasted the Government for ensuring the review will effectively be ‘toothless’.

4) The train wreck that was the New Atheism – Interesting take on Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris & co., from a self-identifying atheist.

5) Digital millennials and the Bible – Haven’t got my teeth into this yet, but this free-to-download report from Bible Society, Barna Group, and the CODEC Research Centre at Durham University will make for a decent read.

6) The State of Meetings – Doodle, i.e. those nice website people who help us communicate with each other about when we have free time in order to arrange to fill it with new meetings, have interviewed over 6,500 professionals across the UK, Germany and the USA and produced a report on what makes meetings work and what makes them not work. Some of it’s hardly rocket science, but there’s much in there that’s an important reminder.

7) Giant Mirrors. Ocean Whitening. Here’s How Exxon Wanted to Save the Planet – For something a bit different, this is kind-of-commendable-kind-of-crazy. A group of Exxon scientists came up a with bunch of fairly bonkers ideas to end climate change (none of which included reducing our dependence on fossil fuels). Full marks for creativity…