#BTColumn – The onus is on us (Part 1)
Article by July 20, 2021
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados TODAY Inc.
by
Adrian Sobers
“Yet you have made them [human beings] a little lower than God, and crowned them with glory and honour.” – (
Psalm 8:5, NRSV) “Glory to man in the highest! For Man is the master of things.” – (
Algernon Swinburne, Hymn of Man)
Whether interacting with scholars or the streets, Jesus grounded their misunderstanding(s) not in Scripture, but on their misunderstanding of, and/or failure to, accept them. He placed the onus on us: “have you never read in the Scriptures …” (
Now, seriously, did anyone expect this outcome?
Maddie Cole in eighth grade stopped running cross country. She’d competed the year before, but the
air quality in her native Sacramento was so bad that she got sick during a race; she soon learned she had asthma.
The next year the sky above Sacramento turned gray with smoke from
the 2018 Camp fire. Maddie and her classmates went to school with masks on. “It felt,” she said, “like a futuristic apocalypse.”
The situation has only worsened as wildfires and their devastation have become so routine that she and her classmates are “just used to it,” said Maddie, now 16 and a junior. This fall “it was just like, ‘Yeah, California’s on fire again. It’s that time of year.’”