Cartoon (response to) Violence

 

23 Leading Cartoonists on Gun Violence
 

[2013-06-02]

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No Roaming Fees

The nicest thing that can happen in a marriage is for one spouse to have a dream that something terrible happened to the other. It's sort of a long-distance wake-up call without the roaming fee.

Oh, and it lasts about 18 hours. Enjoy it while you can.

[2012-10-25]

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Tomorrow will take care of itself.

There is something enormously powerful in being able to say, "This is important to me today. I'll let tomorrow take care of itself."

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When I was a child, the younger adults around me used to say "Let go and let God," which amounts to the same thing, except that you are relinquishing ownership of the consequences.

[2013-05-26]

 

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There is a counterpart to all things Baptist in a Catholic church, and vice versa.

Name something, anything.

You may not believe they are essentially the same, and indeed, on the surface they may appear very different, but they will both a) invoke the same emotional response, and b) satisfy the same spiritual goal.

In fact, there's a counterpart to every human quality, practice, belief, etc. from one culture to the next. That is because we are all human, with the same human needs, and similar ways of expressing and solving them; and religion meets some of the most basic ones.

[2013-05-30]

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Real Soylent (as in Sustenance)

Click to enlarge: A portion of the poster from the 1972 movie Soylent Green starring Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson. It was Robinson's last film. You may remember that Robinson played Dathan opposite Heston's Moses in Cecil B DeMille's 1956 version of The Ten Commandments. What a career.

I wrote over here about the niche an uncomplicated and nutritious food could fill, and today I heard an interview on NPR with the inventor of "Soylent," which is precisely that.

Yes, that's right, Soylent, as in Green, except it's not green and not made from people. Rob Reinhart, the creator, is an engineer, not a nutritionist.

Unfortunately, Reinhart's Soylent is a liquid and expensive, but he's on the right track. If you could, say, bake it into brownies, you'd have my full attention.

 

 

Rob Reinhart Talks about Soylent:

[2103-05-31]

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Facebook logo with the thumb pointing down.

Civility is a choice.

One thing enormous social sites like Facebook offer is a daily encounter with some of the least pleasant aspects of ourselves that we otherwise manage to subdue.

For every kind word there are thousands of ignorant, thoughtless and mean-spirited ones.

Twenty children are killed by a psychopath and pleas for gun control are received with laughter and spite.

Someone like the Pope - a generally good guy - starts tweeting and suddenly the Twittersphere if filled with anti-Catholic rancor.

Sites like Facebook are an opportunity to practice patience with sometimes demeaning and hateful people we will never meet. But we more often treat it like a safety valve and indulge our appetite for interpersonal destruction.

I'm no different than anyone else. I'd like to tell some people some times where to get off.

Civility is a choice.

[2012-12-16 <- note date]
 

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The right question is often more important than the right answer.

When someone leaves us, they take more than answers with them.

They also take the questions we haven't thought to ask.

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Before Dad died, Mom used to say, "I wish my dad were here so I could ask him about _________." That would have been Grandpa Grandy, called Dad Grandy by my dad. He was a smart man, VP of GTE, well-liked, kind, industrious, worked his way up from dirt.

Not too much of that any more. Working up from dirt. Few of us start our lives so close to the earth you can say you started poor as dirt and really mean it.

[5/29/2013]

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Writers write best when they write for themselves, but only if the are also painfully faithful to the words. Truth is costly. Ask Truman.

--csc

[2013-05-25]

 

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Forgive me, revrun, for ah have sinned.

The Baptist version of Penance

Last Sunday afternoon at a local family restaurant, I overheard an older man recapping the morning sermon to someone across the table from him. He said the minister was spinning plates on the platform. (I have no idea if he was Baptist, but in a Baptist church, the platform is where most of the action takes place during the service. The preaching, announcements, song leading, and often the choir, are all up there).

According to what I gleaned by my eavesdropping, the minister said everyone there was like one of those plates, and his job was to get them all spinning, but it wasn't his job to keep them spinning.

The pastor apparently went on to say that too many folks come to church expecting milk when they are ready for meat and should be feeding themselves. (There was a note of weariness and disappointment in his voice.)

I can appreciate a good motivational challenge as much as anyone else, but too often they sound just like this preacher, who'd rather grouse than encourage.

Part of my frustration is that I've been in lots of (Baptist) situations as an adult where I've seen this, so even though I didn't hear this particular event first-hand, I heard echoes of it just as if I'd been in the pew.

My comment to that pastor, if I were having coffee with him, would go something like this:

Some folks will live on milk their whole lives, will come to church every once in a awhile, say grace at dinner, sorta kinda believe in arks and floods and Egyptian plagues, and when it comes right down to it, the cross too, and heaven and angels and someone up there paying attention to what's going on down here. And they'll turn to you when they need to believe it the most, and in those moments, those once-in-a-while-folks will need you more than those that are there every week. Count yourself fortunate you have a role in which you can publicly mope a little and get away with it, because it's part of the Sunday guilt trip that cleanses the palate. For you it's catharsis. For them, it's the Baptist version of penance.

[2013-05-26]

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Click to enlarge: Dr Adrian Rogers was good at infusing a sense of spiritual need, ie, "You better listen to me, and if this is uncomfortable there's probably a good reason for that." I don't care for that approach, and when I hear it, I focus more on the rhetorical maneuvers than the content; he's pleasant enough to listen to, and sincere, but he leaves no room for deep differences of opinion. He shouts a lot too, which I don't care for. Well, shouted. He died a few years ago. Perhaps I'll take this topic up with him someday.

Many years ago, in the basement of a a GARB church that I attended as an adult, the adult Sunday school teacher, standing at the head of the class, gave an obviously frustrated plea for more involvement, dropped his bible on the podium with a loud leather thwak and dismissed us for refreshments.

(Yes, Baptists have Sunday school for adults, too.)

I was young, no family, quite busy, and wondered who he might be talking to, and if it was me, and what he might be expecting. Bring more cookies? Volunteer for chores around the church? Teach? Baptists don't like spelling things out, and I'm a terrible speller.

When Sunday becomes more work than worship, don't be surprised if people stop coming. Some of those folks that would rather not be there are just looking for an excuse not to come back.

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[1]
The gentlest pastor I ever knew was Pastor Andrus at Bethel. Dad told me (dad was a deacon) that Pastor Andrus always felt exhausted after a sermon on the devil and believed he was under attack during these times. Whether that duress was psychological or spiritual, it certainly was real.

Pastor Andrus never spun plates, nor made anyone feel bad if milk was all they could manage to get down.

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