Woe to us if we lose our way

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One of the axioms of life in my family is that we are convinced our mother understood the deep and true nature of Thanksgiving turkey stuffing.  All other efforts to match my mother’s culinary masterpiece are vain attempts at best and heretically sacrilegious at worst. And it is not just questions about stuffing that vex us – think about the local, never-ending debates here in Tampa about what constitutes a Cuban sandwich – and that is before we even get to the question of which one is the best. We might be willing to compromise our positions on turkey stuffing and Cuban sandwiches – but what about religion? Religion and what constitutes right and true religion is as troubling a question – and that is before we consider what that religion demands of us. And woe to us if we lose our way on the question of Religion. Continue reading →

Cornbread Wars

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In religious circles, there is always a lot of talk about orthodoxy and orthopraxis – believing rightly and doing in accordance with those beliefs. Some would say that is only the concerns of theologians and pastors, but this measure of the integrity of being concerns far more than the loft musings of the things of faith.  It pervades our life (thank you Melissa Banseiver for the story of “Cornbread Wars”)

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Jumping the Shark

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Recently Gov. Ronmey pollster, Neil Newhouse, asserted that fact checking groups (FactCheck.org, the Washington Post “Fact Checker”, Tampa Bay Times “PoliticFact”, etc) have “jumped the shark.” The specific context was the Romney campaign’s advertisement  that the Obama Administration had gutted welfare reform. The various fact checker groups have basically rated this as “mostly false”, “four Pinocchios” or – so it seems to me – intentionally misleading. Gov. Romney has also been subjected to this kind of “spinning” when his remarks about “liking to fire people” were taken out of context.  Seems to be the state of political advertisement.

Have political fact checking groups “jumped the shark.”  As my friend Angie Holan (disclaimer: works for PolitiFact) says: cue the Jaws music.  These groups are invaluable to today’s landscape (or seascape?).

Here is the state of things: I mostly hold judgment on any political ad until it has been fact checked.  Seems to me political ads have jumped the shark

The Solemnity of the Assumption

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Much of our religious consciousness is affected by art; we have inherited specific images that are more artistic than biblical.  For example, we always imagine St. Paul being knocked from a horse on the Damascus Road.  There is no mention of the horse in scripture.  Is that a bid deal? Perhaps not.  But when Caravaggio placed Paul on the horse, a sign of privilege or royalty, he removed Paul from the midst of Corinth, the hard-scrabbled sea port town, from among the drunks, slackards, ner-do-wells, and people who sorely needed salvation. Continue reading →

Generosity Beyond Our Imagination

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The sun is extraordinarily generous, giving huge parts of itself away every second. How much? Well if you remember that energy and matter are interchangeable, then every second the equivalent of 4 million elephants are being transformed into light. The sun is giving itself away. If this generosity should halt, all energy would eventually lose its source and everything would die and become inert. We, and everything on our planet, live because of the generosity of the sun.

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Come Away….

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“Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” (Mark 6:31)

We hurry too much, pure and simple. Our days are filled with things to do, people to meet, calls to make, emails to return, kids to drop off/pick up.  Doesn’t it feel like sometimes we just live our lives behind schedule? So much unfinished “stuff.”  We are behind, getting “behinder” and are always hurrying.  What’s wrong with hurrying?

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