How about a break from the inane kabuki theater that Washington politics has turned out to be? Besides, by the time you read this there is hope that some sort of political compromise will have been reached to deal decisively and realistically with the government shut down and debt ceiling limit. Consider instead this report from the engineering company Boston Dynamics.

They say the young Pakistani sixteen year old, Malala Yousafzai, has an inside track to the Nobel Peace Prize this year. We’ll know in a few days. If she wins this much heralded prize, she will become the youngest recipient in its illustrious history. And why not?

It’s not like we haven’t been here before. Those who can remember back to 1995 recall that the government was shut down in November that year by our perennial two-party squabble. The reason I remember is because I happened to be in Honolulu for a prayer conference, when the morning news announced that the U.S. government had entered a financial stoppage of sorts. But the world didn’t end.

Our Tokyo 13 mission completed, yesterday Karen and I were two thirds of the way up the world’s tallest tower, the Tokyo Skytree. At 634 meters (2080 feet) the Skytree is only exceeded by Mt Fuji in the hazy distance. The highest point visitors are permitted to ascend (by an elevator that travels at 10 meters/second) is 451.2 meters (1480 feet).

There is a crisis quietly unfolding far away from the headlines of Syria’s chemical attacks, North Korea’s erratic leadership, California’s raging wild fires, and this nation’s economic unraveling. The crisis concerns the land of my birth, the Land of the Rising Sun, Japan. While the international news media are focused on hot spots elsewhere, the sobering reality is that Japan has simply been unable to recover from the devastating earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.

For days now America has listened and relistened to the fifty year old black and white video rendition of Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” impromptu homily on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. As the culmination of that peaceful march on Washington in protest over the segregation and inequality that Negro Americans were suffering in this “land of the free” five decades ago, King stood to speak.

The news bulletins out of Syria this week have cast a desperate pall over the already bleak Middle East. Observers on the ground in Damascus reported that the Syrian government launched a major WMD (weapons of mass destruction) attack on its own hapless citizens in the suburbs of that ancient city. Early rumors placed the nerve gas death toll at over 1300 victims.

Here at summer’s end they’re now telling us that brushing our teeth and washing our hands are threatening our prized Great Lakes. And let’s be honest—what would Andrews University be without Lake Michigan? (Union College, of course!) What’s up with this headline? Turns out that beauty product manufacturers have discovered we rather enjoy the gritty feel of that toothpaste on our teeth and the sensation of scrubbing our hand soap gives us (good-bye little germs).

On the occasion of this farewell for the first woman pastor to serve the Pioneer Memorial Church, I would like to digress from the usual focus of this Fourth Watch blog and reflect on the pastoral ministry of Esther Knott and the journey of women in ministry during her sixteen years of spiritual leadership in this congregation. I first met Esther, when she was a graduate student here at Andrews University. I was still new in the Pioneer pastorate, when she stopped by the church office for a visit.

The South Bend Tribune ran a fascinating cover story this week on the Museum of Biodiversity housed on the campus of Notre Dame University. Closed to the public, this climate-controlled museum features a priceless 150-year-old collection of plant specimens from around the globe. The entire herbarium collection is now numbered at 280,000 specimens.  But the goal of the university’s scientists is not simply to enlarge the specimen collection.