Daily Archives: September 21, 2006

Who is to blame for the tainted spinach?

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I have to thank Leafy Green Sewage - New York Times for getting me to ponder whether someone other than spinach farmers are at fault for the unedible spinach:

    California’s spinach industry is now the financial
    victim of an outbreak it probably did not cause, and meanwhile,
    thousands of acres of other produce are still downstream from these
    lakes of E. coli-ridden cattle manure. So give the spinach growers a
    break, and direct your attention to the people in our agricultural
    community who just might be able to solve this deadly problem: the beef
    and dairy farmers.

Another article (A Stopgap for the Spinach Lover) answers a question that I've been wondering about -- can't we just cook our spinach?:

    The Food and Drug Administration has advised
    people not to eat any fresh spinach at all, not even cooked, although
    sufficient cooking (160 degrees for 15 seconds) kills E. coli O157:H7,
    the bacterium that has sickened scores of people around the country,
    including at least 18 who are critically ill, and killed at least one.
    The agency is concerned that even if the spinach is cooked, bacteria
    may have been left behind on a countertop or a knife, which could then
    contaminate another food being served raw.

At any rate, I worry about the future of salads of uncooked vegetables
in general. What's to stop other vegetables from being tainted in the
same way?

Inspiring Calvinism?

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I hope that "Young, Restless, Reformed" in the current (September 2006) issue of Christianity Today will be available online so that you all can read it too. (Keep an eye out at Christianity Today Magazine - September 2006)
Collin Hansen writes about the resurgence of Calvinism among American
20 and 30 somethings. The article has stuck in my mind because I
couldn't quite sympathize with the heavy-duty emotional resonance that
new Calvinism was supposed to be generating among young folks -- even
though I have been a long-time Presbyterian (whose heritage is
Calvinism) and serious student of theology. When I read the
accompanying explanation of the TULIP acronymn that is often used to
summarize the essentials of Calvinism, I found myself questioning
whether the TULIP is what I actually believe. Is that what I'm supposed
to believe as an elder in the PCUSA?

This morning, I started down the road of investigating figuring out the precise relationship among Calvinism, TULIP, (aka The Five Points of Calvinism) , Arminianism, debates about TULIP (e.g., An Examination of Tulip), what the PCUSA has to say about sin and salvation, predestination, etc., etc. Of course, lot of this stuff is very complicated, as William Bouwsma wrote in Calvinism (Encyclopædia Britannica):

It is important to note
that the later history of Calvinism has often been obscured by a
failure to distinguish between Calvinism as the beliefs of Calvin
himself; the beliefs of his followers, who, though striving to be
faithful to Calvin, modified his teachings to meet their own needs;
and, more loosely, the beliefs of the Reformed tradition of Protestant
Christianity, in which Calvinism proper was only one, if historically
the most prominent, strand.

Does all this matter? I think some of this matters, even though I'm not clear on what matters and what doesn't.