Friday Summary Report, August 10

I’ve read several blogs where, at the end of the week, the author will post an assortment of links and/or random thoughts that didn’t really merit their own individual post. After resisting the impulse to do something similar for quite a while, I finally decided to just go ahead and do it.

During a given week, I do a lot of reading (both on the Web and in books), and come upon several things that I would like to share, but I hate to write posts that are just 8 words long. So primarily, these end-of-week summaries will consist of links and quotations that I thought were interesting, but will also include random items that didn’t fit elsewhere. I’m not promising to do this every Friday, but I bet it will happen frequently.

(1) Although this article has been out for a while, I just came across it this week. Basically, a couple of ethicists (apparently it doesn’t take much to be an ethicist these days) have proposed that after-birth abortions (i.e. infanticide) should be permitted on newborns, because a newborn is not a person in the sense of being a “subject of a moral right to life.” This is obviously repulsive, but not surprising, and is really just an extension of the arguments that are already made to justify pre-birth infanticide. At least these people are honest enough to admit that no great change happens in the state of the infant at birth.

(2) Here is a somewhat scary article about a tech guru who had his online identity mercilessly hacked and had his iPhone and laptop wiped clean as a result (losing all the pictures of his infant daughter in the process!). I recommend reading the entire article, but a couple of takeaways: (1) Be very careful about linking online accounts together (using same usernames and/or passwords); (2) Back up all of your computer data on an external hard drive; (3) hackers are jerks.

(3) This week, I successfully finished translating 1 John from Greek (the word successfully is used somewhat loosely here). I do feel some minor sense of accomplishment in doing this, but mostly, I feel a great debt to those who have gone on long ago and translated Scripture from original texts into the vernacular.

(4) As this post remains one of my most-read, most-commented on, and most-disputed from this year, I updated it at the end, to make my intentions in writing it as clear as possible.

(5) Over the last two weeks, I’ve been watching as much of the Olympics as I possibly can. Perhaps I will have a post related to that next week.