Flotsam and jetsam (4/27)

• New York Times, Left-Leaning Tower

Why are conservatives such a minority at so many graduate schools? Conservatives like to blame liberal bias. Liberals like other explanations.

• The Bossypants Guide to Getting Ready for Sunday – or, What Tina Fey Can Teach You about Prepping a Worship Service

The gathering is a catalytic moment for the whole church. It’s meant to be an encouraging, covenant-renewing, Christ-exalting experience. It takes a discerning pastor to drift through the endless sea of voices calling for their songs, their ideas, their stylistic decisions to take center stage. Sometimes the best thing a pastor can do is discourage creativity, calling people to simply focus on the ministries of Word and prayer.

• Academicians: Avoid Being Mere Quartermasters

If you are an academic, you need to put yourself into places where, as it were, you take your place with the frontline troops from time to time. This means engaging the outside world at a personal level, at an intellectual and cultural level; it means working and serving in the local church; it means engaging in evangelism. Avoid becoming a mere quartermaster

• John Johnson, What Ministry Can Learn from Starbucks

Here’s what I sometimes wonder—how is it an entrepreneur can take something so basic (be it coffee beans or running shoes) and make it a powerful part of culture, and we in the church can take the greatest message in the world and make it so domestic?

• Pew Research Center, Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics.

• Wake Me When It’s Over – Are early morning classes really that bad?

• Parchment and Pen is starting a new series on the Top Ten Theologians. This should be interesting.

• And, here’s a list of 10 Things That Are Actually Getting Cheaper.