Lean on Me

Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg has recently been in the news promoting her book Lean In.

It may be a very good book, I haven't read it. But if I may, I'd rather use it as an opportunity to comment that it is a book by a wealthy successful person with enormous resources and a large network.

I'm nearing the end of some lectures by Professor Dorsey Armstrong on Medieval Europe, at which time well over 9 out of 10 people were peasants (serfs, or subsistence farmers if they had their freedom), and illiterate.

History has always been lived by the fatigued and depleted majority but recorded by the wealthy who don't know the majority except to utilize them in some productive capacity.

The relationship is rarely cast in those terms, and when it is, it usually invites rejoinders that reference socialism and patriotism in some sort of inverse relationship (the more you have of one, the less you have of the other).

I'm not judging it, simply observing and commenting.

All of history is this way. The works that have survived from antiquity have been the products of powerful or wealthy people or those that had powerful or wealthy patrons, with a few notable exceptions who instead of success promised eternal reward (Jesus, Buddha, etc).

[2013-03-12]

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The Charlie Prayer

For years, since he could pray, my son Charlie said grace in this way:

Dear Jesus, thank you for this food. We love you. A-men.

I don't know where he learned it. We attended a Free Methodist church when he started praying this way, and he was in the daycare run by the pastor's wife, Diane Keep, who was a wonderful, energetic, spirit-filled woman. Her husband, Dick Keep, was one of the most accepting and nonjudgmental ministers I ever met. They moved south to Florida some time ago and I've lost track of them.

[2013-02-21]

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