Jonathan's blog

Tonight we watched Walk the Line, the story of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. I've been a fan of Reese Witherspoon for a decade and half, and the film's music was of course enjoyable. It's a familiar story. I couldn't help but think of Ray. I give it 4 out of 5.

I haven't read many books this year. Make that one: The Color of Love by Gene Cheek. It was gripping, especially since it occurred in my old stomping grounds. An amazing, sad, and tragic story. I wrote a little about it here. Hopefully my list will be a bit longer next year. The lists of others: NY Times "100 Notable Books of the Year" Slate's "The Year in Books"

Francis Collins, author of "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief," was on The Colbert Report last night. The director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, Collins considers DNA "the language of God," the means He used He was profiled in the LA Times a while back. There was a debate of sorts between Collins and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins in a recent issue of Time. It was an interesting read. I'm going to read Collins' book. I certainly don't have all the answers, and I'm sure he doesn't either...but I'm interested in ways to synthesize what we observe in the world with with we observe in the Word. Here are the video clips from Colbert:

From the LA Times article:

He believes in evolution and in the resurrection. He wears a silver ring with a raised cross and works at a dining-room table painted with the double-helix of DNA... Collins considers evolution irrefutable; he has no doubt that all life emerged from a common ancestor over millions of years. But he began to ask himself whether God could have set this amazing process in motion... ...perhaps evolution is a logical, even elegant, way to populate the planet. Maybe God intended mutations in DNA over the millennia to lead to the emergence of Homo sapiens. Once man arrived, maybe God set him apart from the other creatures by endowing him with knowledge of right and wrong, a sense of altruism and a yearning for spiritual nourishment.... Polls have found that 40% of scientists believe, as Collins does, in a God who actively communicates with man. Among elite biologists, however, the figure is much lower, about 5%...

On Monday Elliot lost his first tooth. It fell down the drain, so Lisa joked that he started a new tradition. A couple photos:

Via Today's Papers, an article of the same title by Robin Shulman in The Washington Post reports on this ironically funny/sad situation:

It was an ethics exam in a journalism class, and someone may have cheated. Ironic? Yes. Unfortunate? Certainly. But what made the incident particularly notable was where and when it took place: at Columbia University, one of the premier journalism schools in the country, at a time when media ethics are much in question. On Friday, Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism convened a meeting to discuss misconduct in the final exam for the required ethics course "Critical Issues in Journalism." But the school was so wary of making specific accusations that, afterward, it was not even clear what misconduct had taken place.