The three-point shot, for much of its history a novelty or minor part of teams’ strategies, has become an essential component of almost every team’s offensive attack. As recently as 2012, the average team took about 1,200 threes over the course of a season; last year, that number ballooned to over 1,800.
.. They’re more dangerous the further they are from the basket, and they have little use for certain common player types. Their most effective grouping, unofficially and enviously known as “Death Lineup” or “Nuclear Lineup,” features no player taller than 6’7” and achieves a state of delirious ball and player movement that resolves in an open long-range shot almost as a matter of course.
You Were Wrong – Priscilla Lopes-Schliep is Clean
I learned there that people with rare diseases may have seen more people with the disease in their own family than most or any researcher has, ever. They become visual experts, the same expertise that baseball players develop for recognizing pitches unconsciously. So I guess none of the individual components of Jill’s feat felt impossible to me, but I absolutely just doubted that they had all come together in this woman who heard me yammering on Good Morning America about sports and genetics and decided to send a letter. I mean, the angle with Priscilla, that seemed pretty fanciful when I first saw it.
.. And, by the way, she did want to tell me that her local physician in Gowrie, Iowa—Dr. Adam Swisher—kept encouraging her. He wasn’t by any means a specialist in these rare diseases, but apparently recognized that she had developed some special knowledge, and just encouraged her to keep going. I think that meant a lot to her, and it came from her local doctor, not some of the national and international experts who had told her she was on the wrong track.
A Progressive Vision of the Benedict Option: Part 5, Sabbath as Resistance
“You’re right,” I said, “you have to make that commitment if you want your kids to be successful at soccer. But the question I keep thinking about is why we don’t care as much about our kids becoming successful Christians?”
.. The discussion about how youth sports affects church attendance is a perfect illustration of this dynamic. Wanting our kids to be successful and fearing that our kids will fall behind their peers, we push our families to a point of exhaustion where we no longer have the time or energy for Christian community and spiritual formation.
.. At the end of my last post I said it’s time for Christians to start opting out of the rat race of modern, capitalistic societies. And that’s what I think should be at the heart of a Ben Op “withdrawal.” By withdrawal we mean opting out.
.. Theologically, a better word might be renunciation. If Christianity is going to become a locus of resistance to Empire we have to be formed into people who renounce–opt out, psychologically withdraw from–the way Empire defines success and significance. In the empire I live in that means opting out of the American Dream.
.. In the sermon I gave at ACU’s Summit last year, I shared the story of a young man who left a prestigious educational institution to teach history at a poor, inner-city high school. That’s opting out of the American Dream. That’s resisting empire, pursuing a very different path toward success and significance.
.. And notice how the opting out in these two examples–youth sports and career choices–face the exact same challenge: social shaming and stigma, the fear of “falling behind,” the neurotic anxiety about not being successful. If we opt out of youth sports we fear that our kids will not be successful or will fall out of step with their peers, making them odd and weird. If we say no to a prestigious career opportunity to pursue more servant-oriented work we fear looking like a loser or a failure to our peers, neighbors, colleagues, families, and even, in our heart of hearts, to ourselves.
In short, to opt out of empire is to experience shame. Which means that we have to become shame-resilient if we want to resist empire, individually and collectively.
And that’s why we need the Ben Op. Shame-resiliency.
.. In our own contemporary context of the rat race of anxiety, the celebration of Sabbath is an act of both resistance and alternative. It is resistance because it is a visible insistence that our lives are not defined by the production and consumption of commodity goods.
NFL Teams Threaten to Leave over Stadium Subsidies
The N.F.L. owners voted this week to let the billionaire owner of the St. Louis Rams move his team to just outside Los Angeles, a move consistent with this league’s tear-’em-up, toss-’em-out ethos.
The players know this drill. Fall out of favor with a coach? Take too long to recover from an injury? Unless you’re an N.F.L. star, you have a problem.
Garry Gillam, a behemoth of a man, offered a stirring story as he went from an undrafted player to starting at tackle for the Seattle Seahawks. He signed a three-year, $1.5 million contract.
However, if in the next game he misses a few blocks or gets nicked up and his coaches tire of him, Seattle could release him and pay just the guaranteed portion of his contract, which is to say $12,000.
.. The N.F.L. has baroque rules of self-governance, not the least covering how it splits revenue. Owners all share in television and general ticket revenue. But luxury boxes are pure gold, and a team’s owner doesn’t have to share a penny of that revenue with the owners of other teams.
This has led to an arms race, as owners seek to build ever-grander stadiums with ever-more-luxurious boxes.