advent 2010

Homies,
I'm thinking about a daily post here during advent - prayers, meditations, poems, etc. If we add Swartz, Schneider, and Caldwell to this contributor list, that would make about 3 posts per person. How bout it?

CE help from you all who know how to read good

Year end reports and whatnot call for a bit of reflection on continuing education. I think, given my setting, that i'll probably try to spend some time with death & dying/end of life stuff this year. Included in that are funerals and hospice visits and so on. If any of you run across good articles/books along the way, would you send them my way?

Just as i would never write a seminary paper without calling alan, I would never develop any kind of CE without talking to you bastards. Gracias.

I've started my own blog...don't get your expectations up.

creatingdissonance.blogspot.com

recent post..."a slow death..." (sounds uplifting I know)

In Defense of Baby Worship

For those of us with kids (and those without), here is a very short, but great piece by G.K. Chesterton.http://www.online-literature.com/chesterton/the-defendant/14/

EXCERPT:

The two facts which attract almost every normal person to children are, first, that they are very serious, and, secondly, that they are in consequence very happy. They are jolly with the completeness which is possible only in the absence of humour. The most unfathomable schools and sages have never attained to the gravity which dwells in the eyes of a baby of three months old. It is the gravity of astonishment at the universe, and astonishment at the universe is not mysticism, but a transcendent common-sense. The fascination of children lies in this: that with each of them all things are remade, and the universe is put again upon its trial. As we walk the streets and see below us those delightful bulbous heads, three times too big for the body, which mark these human mushrooms, we ought always primarily to remember that within every one of these heads there is a new universe, as new as it was on the seventh day of creation. In each of those orbs there is a new system of stars, new grass, new cities, a new sea.

Baseball, the great American achievement!!!!!!!

Check out what David B. Hart has to say about Baseball athttp://www.firstthings.com/article/2010/07/a-perfect-game

Here's an excerpt:

What, after all, will the final tally of America’s contribution to civilization be, once the nation has passed away (as, of course, it must)? Which of ourinventions will truly endure? We have made substantial contributions to political philosophy, technology, literature, music, the plastic and performing arts, cuisine, and so on. But how much of these can we claim as our native inventions, rather than merely our peculiar variations on older traditions? And how many will persist in a pure form, rather than being subsumed into future developments? Jazz, perhaps, but will it continue on as a living tradition in its own right or simply be remembered as a particular period or phase in the history of Western music, like the Baroque or Romantic?

My hope, when all is said and done, is that we will be remembered chiefly as the people who invented—who devised and thereby also, for the first time, discovered—the perfect game, the very Platonic ideal of organized sport, the “moving image of eternity” in athleticis. I think that would be a grand posterity.

I know there are those who will accuse me of exaggeration when I say this, but, until baseball appeared, humans were a sad and benighted lot, lost in the labyrinth of matter, dimly and achingly aware of something incandescently beautiful and unattainable, something infinitely desirable shining up above in the empyrean of the ideas; but, throughout most of the history of the race, no culture was able to produce more than a shadowy sketch of whatever glorious mystery prompted those nameless longings.

For any one interested in a theologically informed politics check out the ResPublica site:http://www.respublica.org.uk/