Day: December 12, 2017

Waiting for Jesus to enter into the world

JOSHUA JOHNSON of NPR, ‘This Week’ Transcript, 12-10-17

JOHNSON: I feel like the evangelical Christians who are supporting [Republican US Senate candidate for Alabama] Roy Moore have a very strong impetus to show up because of the platform that he’s put forth. I’m almost more interested to see what happens with evangelical Christians, particularly with all the issues important to evangelicals that have come up in 2017, and whether this affects the way they view themselves not only as voters but as Christians.

This Week co-anchor MARTHA RADDATZ:… What is your general feeling about it?

JOHNSON:… I can’t stop thinking about this verse from the book of Mark chapter 8, [verse] 36. “What does it profit a man to gain the world and lose his soul.” There have been a lot of issues important to evangelicals this year from the naming Jerusalem as the capital of Israel or the Johnson amendment or Roy Moore’s candidacy, or Joel Osteen in Houston not opening Lakewood Church to victims of Hurricane Harvey that a painting a picture of evangelicals as a key of President Trump’s base.

And I wonder at what point a reckoning comes, if any, where evangelical Christians say, we may be getting what we want in Congress, but is God pleased with our sacrifice? Is this who we want to be as a community of Americans whose primary purpose is to make more Christians. Is this who we are?
***
From Jim Reisner, former pastor of Westminster Pres in Albany, now in Maryland:

Has the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel the teachable moment for the church to make the distinction between Christians and Dispensationalists; between the followers of Jesus, and the followers of John Nelson Darby; between those who take the lessons of Jesus seriously, and those who dismiss what Jesus said as moral lessons intended for another era than our own?

And in this season of Advent, can we make a distinction between Christians who are waiting for Jesus to enter into the world and Darbyists who are waiting for him to destroy it?
For my non-religious friends, I want to let you know that we Christians aren’t all [guano] crazy.

Why W and K for US radio and TV stations?

“It was only in late January, 1923 that the K/W boundary was shifted east to the current boundary of the Mississippi River.”

One of those mundane questions I’ve long wondered about, but never bothered to look up, is why virtually all the radio and television stations in the US start with either the letter W or K.

From Primer Magazine: “In 1912, several countries attended a conference centered on the subject of ‘International Radiotelegraphs.’ One of the biggest things to come out of this gathering was the assignment of certain letters to certain countries, to identify their radio signals – America was given W, K, N, and A (fun fact: Canada got ‘C’ and Mexico got ‘X’).”

But why those particular letters in the US has seemingly been lost. (A for America?)

“While N and A were chosen for American military radio stations, W and K were designated specifically for commercial use. Stations were allowed to choose the letters that followed the K or the W, and the combination was allowed to be three or four letters in length.”

Initially, the K stations were to the east and the W stations were to the west. Thus one can find early radio stations such as KDKA out of Pittsburgh, PA, established in 1920. By 1926, the Federal Communications Commission codified the idea of having four letters, but stations with three didn’t need to change.

From Early Radio History:

“The original K/W boundary ran north from the Texas-New Mexico border, so at first stations along the Gulf of Mexico and northward were assigned W calls. It was only in late January, 1923 that the K/W boundary was shifted east to the current boundary of the Mississippi River. With this change, K’s were assigned to most new stations west of the Mississippi; however, existing W stations located west of the Mississippi were allowed to keep their now non-standard calls.”

This page has more information on the topic than most mortals would want to know, such as the K/W exceptions and other trivia. For instance, some break the rules by owner requests -examples: WACO in Waco, Texas; WMT (Waterloo [Iowa] Morning Tribune). The page was compiled on 1 January 2017, so it’s quite recent.

For ABC Wednesday

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