What I've Been Reading - October 13, 2019
Oct 13, 2019
My reading was a bit all over the place this week, but these were the articles I felt were worth sharing. There are so many more I tagged to read, but wasn't able to get to. Just one of those weeks.
Folks who do systems analysis have a great belief in “leverage points.” These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.
Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System - The Donella Meadows Project
Standing there, I began to believe that uncertainty can exist within faith. Eventually we will sink or swim, sink or swim, sink into the great abyss. There are times when I fall in love with doubt more than adoration. The idea of a God who allows questions and doubt is a God full of grace. I am learning to resist a God who only values happiness and unflinching faith.
The (Loud) Soundtrack to My Struggle with Faith
I weathered their emotions, I scoured their words for subtext and read their expressions as intently as a palm reader following the lines in a hand to some fictional finite end.
On Finding the Freedom to Rage Against Our Fathers
Njoku was glad that the abortion bans were inspiring people to donate and to volunteer. On social media, people were posting selfies of themselves wearing “Everyone Loves Someone Who Had an Abortion” T-shirts. Now everyone was an “intersectional feminist,” she said. But there was a danger, she thought, that people would forget the black women who had founded the movement to address ongoing injustices. “It’s not because it’s cute or because it’s sexy or because Stacey Abrams said ‘reproductive justice’ in the State of the Union response,” she said. “It’s because it’s real.”
Fighting for Abortion Access in the South
So perhaps instead of nagging women to scramble to meet the male standard, we should instead be training men and boys to aspire to women’s cultural norms, and selling those norms to men as both default and desirable. To be more deferential. To reflect and listen and apologize where an apology is due (and if unsure, to err on the side of a superfluous sorry than an absent one). To aim for modesty and humility and cooperation rather than blowhard arrogance.