Five for Friday: Internet’s Favorite Book, Jeff Foxworthy, Clergy Couture

Covenanters routinely share links to social media articles and videos that Covenant News Service [...]

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CHICAGO, IL (May 27, 2016) — Covenanters routinely share links to social media articles and videos that Covenant News Service believes may be of interest to others. Each Friday we post five of them. Following is a sample of those submissions—their inclusion does not represent an endorsement by the Covenant of any views expressed.

What Is the Internet’s Favorite Book?

Hint: It’s not War and Peace or any other book you were forced to read in English class. You probably will be surprised at the answer. The writer drew from the rankings on the website Goodreads, which he admits is not scientific.

From the article: “Still, Goodreads ratings provide a glimpse into the literature that people actually like the most, and how that might differ from the critics. We know what the literati think from the variety of literary prizes and lists of books you must read before you die. But what do the people say?”

‘Clergy Couture’ Range Launched for Fashion-Conscious Female Priests

Women serving as priests in the U.K. complained that the acceptable vestments were only suited for men. Here’s one creative response.

From the article: “Women have been in ministry [in the Church of England] a long time now—25 years but there’s nothing out there that recognizes and celebrates the fact that women are in ministry, that we are feminine and not some pretend man.”

Jeff Foxworthy: The Other Side of Funny

The comedian has been transformed while leading a Bible study at one of Atlanta’s rescue missions.

From the article: “Eight years ago Foxworthy had never known any homeless people. He certainly had never had any homeless friends. ‘It’s easy to drive by somebody homeless when they’re not a person. It’s easy to roll down the window and go, “Here’s three bucks leave me alone,” but when you start learning somebody’s story, they become a human being.’”

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The Empty Brain

Metaphors and similes are by nature never exact, but sometimes they really mess up how you think. That includes how you think about the organ you think with.

From the article: “To understand even the basics of how the brain maintains the human intellect, we might need to know not just the current state of all 86 billion neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, not just the varying strengths with which they are connected, and not just the states of more than 1,000 proteins that exist at each connection point, but how the moment-to-moment activity of the brain contributes to the integrity of the system.”

Are Dams Robbing the West of Water?

What is to be done if one of the nation’s largest dams is doing more harm than good?

From the article: “In what is perhaps the most egregious failure for a system intended to conserve water, many of them lose hundreds of billions of gallons of precious water each year to evaporation and, sometimes, to leakage underground. These losses increasingly undercut the longstanding benefits of damming big rivers like the Colorado, and may now be making the West’s water crisis worse.”

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