Skip to main content

Trying to flex my brain.

It's a windy, rainy, chilly, funky day, and Sarah and I are parked at The Temescal Cafe, the best coffeshop in our zone. When we got here, a trio of guitar and banjo playing women were singing and playing bluegrass songs, and the joint was crammed with people. The music was a great counterpoint to the weather, and the energy in the room was really reinvigorating. We worked at a luncheon yesterday at CDSP (Church Divinity School of the Pacific,the Episcopalian/Anglican school in the GTU), walking there and back from our house in Oakland, and watched the first two Indiana Jones movies in the evening. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was maybe the most exhausting thing we did all day--not the chill-out space-out we'd been hoping for. Just a boring, shrill, senseless, racist shell of a movie. I'd heard that the Indian gov't refused to let Spielberg and Lucas shoot on Indian soil, and after watching the terrible banquet dinner scene (Snake Surprise? Chilled Monkeybrains? Come on!) I could understand their reasoning. Just preposterous and unnecessary, and fundamentally insulting.

I've got to write a sermon for class tomorrow, and I'm kind of spinning my wheels. I want to write about anomie, and how community seems to be dying, or at least taking on a new form and a diminished status in our country. I'm thinking of talking about my experiences building decks in the exurbs, and how the neighborhoods felt like dead zones in so many ways, and then move on to cars and how driving (and internet chat rooms) lets people behave in ways they never would face to face. Okay, fine, but where to go from there? How do you bring back community after it's been exiled?

Comments

Anonymous said…
A sermon! pretty cool. Here is what I think about your question: You bring back community one relationship at a time, one connection at a time. By thinking of the folks with the deck in the exurbs as real people, by connection with them - as you, Andy, always do with the people around you. Love, Mom
Anonymous said…
How aboutdoing something that doesn't make sense and let the community happen.

At last week's church retreat we were talking about the exhaustion from all the headwork, and Joyce carey and I started riffing about how next year we need time to color or make potholders.

Popular posts from this blog

Three Good Things for Thursday, March 7th

No time to waste, let's hit those Three Good Things: 1. "Fifteen bucks for the whole seat but you'll only need the edge, Edge, EDGE!" An impossibly red, impossibly cute 1997 Suzuki X-90. It looks like a real-life Barbie car, a mini two-seater pickup, minus the bed and with a little spoiler on the back. Also it has a T-top. In college some buddies and I drove up to Cleveland one weekend to see the monster truck rally at the Gund Arena. Were we genuinely interested in it? Was it an act of willful irony? We were the last gasp of Generation X, so there is truly no way to know. What I remember most aside from the noise and fumes was that the promotion ran a contest in between "acts" where local schmoes could try their personal vehicles on the motocross track they'd constructed on the arena floor, with the fastest time taking home a cash prize.  One of the first contestants roared out of the gate in a huge, very obviously brand new, very obviously expensively

Family and Gender in Ancient Rome

I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household

Be true to your school now!

This is a cross-posting of a comment I left on peacebang.com's recent post about my school, Starr King School for the Ministry. PeaceBang, who is apparently a UU Minister in the Northeast, posted a few days ago an item about my school's supposed "banning" of the term, "brown bag lunch," because of the racialized connotations of brown bags.* Her post was, to my reading, haughty and dismissive, and she seemed awfully pleased with her own wit and ability to take cheap shots at others with little to no basis for her opinions. I think the comments for that post are up to 40, and it's a pretty lively back and forth. So, here is my contribution: "This may not be the ideal forum for “deep, serious conversation,” but one of the cornerstones of Educating to Counter Oppression is the importance of having deep, serious conversations wherever they happen. The status quo of “waiting for the right moment or forum” to engage with these issues too often leads to