New U.S. Religion Data

I love maps. My office walls are covered in them. And, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has a whole mess o' new maps, charts, and graphs related to American religion. For a quick taste, here is a portrait of American Evangelical churches.

There is more here that you probably ever wanted to know about religious demographics in America. You can sort by tradition, gender, income, race, region, and on and on starting on the main page.

My early favorite for weirdest question in the survey: "How often do you receive a definite answer to a specific prayer request -- would you say at least once a week, once or twice a month, several times a year, seldom, or never?"

And, Jehovah's Witness members took home the Golden Clasped Hands Award for praying the most. A whopping 89% said that they "pray daily." Mormons and historically black churches took silver and bronze. Evangelicals finished a disappointing fourth.

Seriously, this is really interesting data full of thought-provoking pieces, cultural insight, and humor. Give it a look.

Sued in the Spirit

The next time you plan to have the Holy Spirit knock you down, make sure you have a couple of big, strong, burly "catchers" nearby lest you crack your head on the floor. Otherwise, a mess of stitches, head trauma, and litigation, may occur.

From the plaintiffs complaint:

Mr. Lincoln received the spirit and fell backwards striking the carpet-covered cement floor with the back of his head and back, causing him to sustain severe and permanent injuries ...
[Mr. Lincoln accuses the church of being] negligent in not supervising the catchers to be sure that they stood behind the person being prayed for and in front of the visiting minister to assure that they could catch someone should they have a dizzying, fainting or falling in the spirit as had occurred on many occasions before.


Be careful out there, people.

How to Ruin A Marathon

From The Onion: How to Ruin A Marathon

Teaser:

"After you've been ruining a marathon for a couple hours, your body will
just take over and you won't even realize that you're spoiling the day for
everyone. I call that getting in the "ruiner's zone." It's like my arms and legs
could just keep dumping buckets of cooking oil off a highway overpass forever."

Fuel for the Gas Fire

What has driven oil prices through the roof? Well, lately, the sexy explanation has been "speculators."

BP chief executive Tony Hayward says that that theory is "a myth." He chalks it up to good ol' supply/demand economics.

Remember the mid-1990s?

The rise in oil prices has been remarkable. In 1997 the average price of a
barrel of Brent crude was $12.72. In 2007 it was $72.39. And earlier this month
it touched $137.

Can supply/demand really explain this price explosion? The story linked above says so.

The tight balance between supply and demand creates an environment in which even
minor news stories about disruption to oil fields can cause sudden leaps in
market prices.

More and more people in China and India are consuming oil like Americans have for a long time. LOTS and LOTS of folks live in those countries. Hence, it creates huge demand and it appears the supply/demand gap is very narrow right now.

So, oil up your bicycle chain...but, even that costs more than it used to.

From Stockholm, Sweden, to Brownsville, KY

When two of your favorite things overlap, you must sit up and take notice. That happened today when Justin Wolfers wrote about his Stockholm Marathon experience on the Freakonomics blog. It's hot dogs and beer at the finish at Stockholm!

And, also in the running vein, tomorrow is my first 5k of the year. In fact, due to injury last fall and marathon training all winter, I have not raced a 5k since last September on Labor Day. So, I do not have a good idea of how fast I will run. I know it's going to be HOT, so it will be a tough go.

Tomorrow's race is a fundraiser 5k for the Edmonson County High School cross country team in Brownsville, KY. I set a 5k personal record (PR) on this course last year (17.45). It's not flat, but there is more downhill than uphill. With the forecasted heat and wind, getting under that time could be difficult, but I think I'm in pretty good shape.

Genetic Limits of Obesity

The latest reports suggest that childhood obesity is leveling off. Whatever the reason, that's good news. Hopefully, it will start to decline.

But, some experts suggest that we've merely saturated the field of those predisposed to become obese at a young age. Here is a snippet, but you can read the whole piece here.

If, at 17 percent, we've hit the "saturation" point for child obesity, we're extremely lucky. There's no historical basis for knowing where the saturation point is, since our species has never before lived in an environment so full of ease and abundance. The far more dangerous possibility is that the saturation point is higher. In fact, given that we evolved in conditions of scarcity, it's logical to suspect that the tendency to seek and store fat is nearly universal. As the Los Angeles Times observes, "the idea that childhood weights have simply topped out doesn't quite square ... [One expert] said the fact that 60% of U.S. adults were either overweight or obese suggested that children had plenty of room to grow."

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

My brother-in-law gave me a book for my birthday last Monday (thanks, Jason!). A punishing, desolate, soul-crushing novel, The Road helped me further realize the beauty of life and the earth by reading about how it would be if it were all turned to gray.

Set in a post-apocalyptic world of gray skies and gray ash and gray water, this book could be veiwed as a real downer (and that would be correct in many ways). McCarthy shows us a world that has been utterly obliterated at the material level. Wildlife has been erased. Trees are but black, crispy ex-trees. There are no names of people or places anywhere in the entire book. But, the story is really about the love of a father and son, and their will to survive in a world without color, food, trees, skies, or life as we currently know it. What remains are the father, the son, a shopping cart, and an undending search for clean water, food, shelter, and safety. It is a penetrating look into what life might be like if we were reduced to living to fulfill our basic needs (the lowest level of Maslow's hierarchy). And, ultimately, this is a book about faith.

That's all I'm going to say about what happens, as I am not one to give away plot details, but I had to post something about this book and urge you to read it.

McCarthy has written ten books, including All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men, with the latter being put made into a tremendous film that became last year's Oscar darling (Best Picture). And, if the Coen brothers and/or No Country are not your style, even Oprah liked The Road. If Oprah liked it AND I still read it and liked it--well, it must be good.