The Corner

It is hard for me to imagine what that would be like.

From Roberdan

i love this quote from beth kanter, via twitter:

in god we trust, but everyone else has to bring data

From Portland's alternative newspaper, the Willamette Week:

Six Minutes With Barack

The session wrapped up with this query:

Question: "If you had a tattoo, what would it be and where would you put it?"

Obama: "Uh, I cannot imagine any circumstances in which I would get a tattoo."

Last night was really powerful, both within the community we live in and for me personally.  I am exhausted today, but there are a bunch of things bouncing around me:

• being planted in nourishing soil is a fragile gift - I am so grateful for finding that here in Austin
• there is a generation of people taking up leadership across institutions in the U.S. that are REALLY different from the Boomer/Buster constructs - yea yea yea
• singing is usually more powerful for me than some one speaking opinions or facts
• never underestimate the power of BBQ & good tex-mex

There is something going on in the creation we inhabit.  For me, it is easy to mistake programs or candidates for movements - to see thing like web 2.0 or the emerging church phenomenon or even Barack Obama as trigger of social change.  Every once in a while, when I can peek around the edges of the frame I process the world in, I can see that web 2.0 or the emerging church phenomenon or even Barack Obama are symptoms of a social & cultural change, sometimes even accelerators of that social change, occasionally even distractions from that social change.

There is also something going on in the ways we locate one another.  Most of my adult life, categories and key words served as short hand - hypelinks that unpack the coordinates of who I could imagine you to be.  In truth, these categories were shields from ever having to interact with people as...people, as a real live creation made in the image of some Creator. 

As I stood at the back of a glorious old building last night, my mind wandered to a person I admire a great deal - Will Samson.  The Samson family are pioneers in the rag-tag movement that is shape-shifting all around us.  Will is PhD student, studying social movements & how faith communities are animated/aminating so many of these movements (from defending mountains in Appalachia to living more sustainable lives to new moedls of community).  In response to the litmus test of 2008 categories (Fb), Will lists himself as:

 

For the longest time, I clung to categories, party  & denominational affiliations as the primary way I plotted out who I am and what I know.  Last night, Jim Wallis likened these categories to the gang warfare that continues to grip so much of the neighborhoods around the world, the sectarian violence that pits Shia against Sunis, Crips against Bloods, whites against non-whites.  If there had been an altar call last night, I suspect I would answered it - and laid down again my "colors", the categories I use to bound myself.

I suspect that part of what is propelling many of these movements is what Will calls post-categorical - and I am overjoyed to leap into that stream.

 

~~~ rise rally ~~~ join us @ 5 pm today

For the last few months, a groups of us here in in Austin have been planing a rally with Rev. Jim Wallis & local leaders, speaking to the hope that is rising up.  That rally - ~~~ rise ~~~ - takes places this afternoon at 5 p.m. at the Family Life Center of First United Methodist Church.

Joining Jim to speak at 5 p.m at  the Family Life Center will be Emilee Whitehurst (currently with the Rothko Chapel (Houston), formerly with Austin Interfaith)  and these local leaders:

• D.R. Dickey of Shoreline Christian Center
• Jennifer Cumberbatch of Agape Christian Ministries
• Gideon Tsang of Vox Veniae
• Neil Blumofe of Congregation Agudas Achim

We'll have great music from local artists Sara Hickman & Dave Madden to raise our hearts & souls.

We hope you can join us.

WeTheChurch twitter front-end

WeTheChurch - an easy to use frontend for Twitter, created by:

 

Chad Wright - Ideas/Design/Words
Scott Magdalein - Technical Wrangling

If you interested, follow all the updates on Twitter

spirit whispering: musing on my worship transition

It's been almost 3 years since my family & I stopped going to weekly worship gathering at an Episcopal church.  I have found so much meaning in the liturgy of the Anglican/Episcopal tradition, which tends to follow a certain consistent form.

I am still adjusting to the consistent worship form of evangelical worship gatherings:

gathering songs, children's message, personal witness, collect offering, special music, sermon

The two communities we've been a part of these past 3 years - New Hope & now Journey IFC - both live in that bubble space, between traditional evangelical & post-post evangelical.  While quite different from one another, and very different from the mega-churches that spawned them (MPPC  & Riverbend Church respectively), both New Hope & Journey tended to stay with the traditional worship form that unites most evangelical communities of faith.  Some weeks are different, a great deal is changed - but the core framework is still consistent most weeks.

I've really struggled with making this transition.  I've found myself struggling to find moments of quiet & mystery among the glorious parade.  I've missed the connection to a historical worship form that takes its outline from the 3rd century church & from Judaism.  My own experience of liturgy is that it can often be the "work of the people", while the evangelical setting can too often be very individualistic (what I thought of the sermon ?  what did I get out of the message ?).

There is some irony in the ways these two forms link.  Most sermons I have heard in an Anglican setting felt like a speech at a dinner party - most communion rituals w/in evangelical settings feel like an after-thought, like snacks served as a meal.  It may be too simplistic, but for me, liturgical settings are like meals and evangelical settings are like assemblies.  Neither is right or wrong, good or bad - just what you grew up with & where your communal feeding takes place.

I was really struck by this at yesterday's Journey IFC gathering, which was given over completely to  A Spacious Place , a wonderful ministry that has sprung out of Journey.  Kaye & David McKee worked with a wonderful board & a great set of volunteers earlier this Spring to host a series of weekly gatherings:

• Multi-media exploration of a God metaphor   20 minutes (a mix of visual arts, music and film.)
• Arts Expressions Classes   80 minutes (a choice of two arts options for each session,  including photography, mime, creative writing, collage, dance, painting, drawing, design, mosaic, bookmaking, and art from nature.)
• Sharing Session (voluntary)   20 minutes ( share with the other participants your creative work and thought.)

The worship gathering on Sunday was quite different for me in a few ways:

• the main voices speaking were female (Journey & New Hope tend to be led primarily by women, but men still hold the main voices in worship)
• the focal point was not a sermon or communion - it was stations for the gathered community to engage with
• the call to action/ benediction was much more clear

Kaye started the gathering with a preamble, framing Jesus following vs. Christendom, with imagination playing a transformative role in that battle in our time.  While it may seem like a small thing, I was struck again & again how the worship gathering spoke to a core part of what A Spacious Place seems to be trying to embody:

We feel no need to convince you of anything.

The folks who spoke & sang & expressed themselves at yesterday's worship gathering were neither excellent or unexcellent - you simply could not assess or evaluate their souls & stories under that construct.  You can evaluate whether or not a liturgy is superior, how it hues to the rubric, whether it went according to plan.  You can evaluate a sermon, whether or not is better than Pastor Skippy, how the examples clicked with your own POV.

I have been enagaging some in a conversation at Tony Morgan's blog - specifically around his question Should I pursue unexcellent?   My own sense is that a great deal of communities define themselves by their weekly worship gatherings, how excellent they were, how superior their gathered numbers were compared to last week, last year or even that church over there.  I hope - pray - believe - that we are moving past the point of excellence as the litmus test for a worship gathering, what ever form that community assume. 

Instead, I sense that the simplicity of this idea

We feel no need to convince you of anything.

is much bigger than some excellent liturgy or airbrushed PowerPoint or killer sermon. 

We gather as community to glorify, honor, praise, exalt, and please God.

image from gbenard

In our modern model, we are convinced that "if you measure something, you can manage something".  You can not measure glory, honor, praise, exaltation or how pleased God is.  You can not measure transformation or conversion or even what happens to our souls.  If, in fact, there is no need to convince - the measures of excellence become academic, distractions even.

I am struggling - and I so thankful for the spacious places that I find from folks like Kaye & the Spirit Whisperers.

Happy Pentecost !

image from Derek &...

Today in many Christian traditions is Pentecost, a day of celebration for what is though of as the birth of the church.  Quite honestly, as big celebrations at churches go, Pentecost is sorta like Gummo, the quiet Marx brother who everyone forgets.

Most days I would have a very hard time defining what exactly church is. Wikipedia, the source of stuff to know, defines a church as:

an association of people with a common set of religious beliefs, respectively their place of worship. It derives from an old Greek word and is generally used to refer to Christian meanings, though the term is sometimes popularly applied to other religions and/or buildings.

Nowadays, when people use the term church, they usually mean a building, usually run by someone paid to preach & lead worship, often assisted by a paid musician and a paid person to traffic documents & run off "those people".  Or they may mean the institution of faithful people, the large bodies of people & places that commonly are divided into denominations or worship styles or some other empty categorization scheme.

Those definitions serve their purpose, but they do not begin to even scratch the surface of what I mean when I say church.  As an example of truth being found in the oddest places, take a look at this from an anonymous commenter on this marketing blog:

If you look at an open mic session, the "audience" turns up and sometimes, somepeople join in. People start by foot tapping, after a few ales they might pick up the courage to play an instrument, sing along at a table or even grab the mic. The boundary between audience and artist is practically non-existent. They are also playing, improvising and "remixing" copyright free music. Most importantly, you don't have to do anything, just by being there you feel as if you are participating.

I love how the person uses the construct of the word folk - people as the carriers of culture, esp. as representing the composite of social mores, customs, forms of behavior, etc., in a society - to get at how the lines between "performer" and "audience" are  blurred at best, and more likely artificial.

There is a lot of resonance for me in thinking of church along the lines of folk music, as described in Wikipedia:

Folk music, in the most basic sense of the term, is music by and for the common people. The Tech Multimedia Music Dictionary defines it as "music of the common people that has been passed on by memorization or repetition rather than by writing, and has deep roots in its own culture."  According to Webster's dictionary, folk music is the "traditional and typically anonymous music that is an expression of the life of the people in a community". People play and sing together rather than watching others perform.

A tradition passed on by repetition, with roots deep in its indigenous culture, people playing & singing together - that is church for me, no matter where, how or when it takes place.

Growing up, I learn a "folk" song among the common people I was raised near, one that captures my gratitude for church and my greatest hope for what it can be:

They lived not only in ages past,
There are hundreds of thousands still,
The world is bright with the joyous saints
Who love to do Jesus’ will.
You can meet them in school, or
In lanes, or at sea,
In church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea,
For the saints of God are just folk like me,
And I mean to be one too.

Becky Garrison captures a bit of the joy of being one of these joyous saints:

Social Media Tools for Social Change – May 14

While I was in the Bay Area, I was lucky enough to go to a cople of events & training from Tech Soup,  which functions as a sort of utility for goodness among non-profits in their use of technology:

They are having a online seminar this coming Wed, which just sounds great:

Online Activism: Social Media Tools for Social Change in the TechSoup online forums.
 
Dive into the conversation with hosts Heather Mansfield, owner of DIOSA Communications and Online Community Manager for Change.org and Carie Lewis, Internet Marketing Manager for the Humane Society of the United States, as they explore the ins and outs of using social networking sites and strategies for determining how, why, and when to use different applications to broadcast your message. In discussing the dos and don’ts of effectively fundraising and promoting your cause, we’ll also look at lessons learned from successful (and not so successful) online campaigns.
 
Join us Wed. May 14, for a free, one-day online event, in the TechSoup Emerging Technologies Forum as we discuss issues such as:

* How do social networking sites fit in with other outreach efforts?
* Are the benefits worth the time needed to keep up a social networking presence?
* How can you translate online activism into on-the-ground action towards change?
*Is it ever a good idea for organizations to start their own social networking sites?

 Take part in the discussion Wed. May 14th in the TechSoup Emerging Technologies Forum  

Gnarls Barkley - Going On

this is genius

once again, jason kottke has done something genius - go enjoy

when Obama wins

I'll Take Compost Over Hubris Any Day

Beth Kanter is blogging & twittering at this week's New Politics Institute (NDN) New Tools, New Audiences Forum.  She just twittered a quote from Joe Trippi, a long-time political consultant best known as campaign manager for presidential candidate and former Vermont governor Howard Dean:

all the genius in the world can't do anything if you're running a top down campaign

A great deal of our culture has been built built on on top down assumption - smart people are at the top, they know better,  anything (from sugar water to political ends) can be packaged as a campaign.

The Greeks had a word for the confidence in genius that often exists at the top - ὕβρις.  That word - translated as hubris nowadays - is a term meaning excessive pride, self-confidence or arrogance, often resulting in fatal retribution.  In Ancient Greece, "hubris" referred to actions taken in order to shame and humiliate the victim, thereby making oneself seem superior.

When I move around our culture nowadays, a lot of these top down structures are collapsing, often under the sheer weight of their own hubris, occasionally through a rival structure or even an opposing act of violence.  I am certain we live in a both/and world (rather than either/or), so I do not expect that I will ever see a totally bottom up mindset.

What I am seeing - and expect to see for the rest of my days on this earth - is a mixture of various collapsing & decaying organic structures, campaigns & substances.  This is what the French called composte , "a mixture of leaves, etc., for fertilizing land"  - what we call nowadays compost.

image from penelope's...

Compost can be ugly to look at, even worse to smell.  There are different ways to compost, starting with layers of 'brown' and 'green' biodegradable waste mixed with garden soil. 'Brown' waste refers to old straw, tough vegetable stems and hedge clippings. 'Green' waste refers to biodegradable waste that breaks down faster, such as fruit, coffee grounds, cut flowers, and grass clippings.

Whether brown or green, table scraps or cut flowers - those ensconced in hubris, looking down from their top views, are very likely to complain about the sight & smell of the compost that surrounds.

But here is the glorious thing - compost is an outstanding growing medium, the fancy science term for the stuff that other stuff rises and grows in.   And no matter what all the genius in the world says, what all the top down campaigns shout louder & LOUDER

There is no denying that there is an abundance of new life rising from this compost heap, what Walt WhitmanThis Compost:

The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree

describes in his poem

Sara Miles: Strangers Bring Us Closer to God

I first met  Sara Miles  at one of the 7 dullest church meetings I have ever been to.  We've all been to those meetings, right ?  Where all the air is out of the room, the energy wrung out, the passion drained.  There is no color - only shades of white & gray.

Sara accidentally started talking, in the middle of one of those lllooooooonnngggg  pauses,  about an effort at her faith community - a rowdy food pantry that had gotten completely out of control & was changing people's lives.  I can actually remember the moment she started speaking- it roughly went like this:

It is funny, because I recall thinking to myself - be careful, woman who I do not know - this stuff you speak of is dangerous, life-giving magic.  I am sure that I thought "did she actually just use the word conversion in a church meeting ?".

Sara is a gifted writer, so of course she wrote a book about all this called TAKE THIS BREAD, which Anne LaMott describes as "a memoir that blew me away...The most amazing book!".

We are lucky to have Sara's voice alive in the conversation among all people who are walking in doubt & practice.  She preaches on family, reminding us that:

We are liberated from human rules about who belongs, and who has power, and who deserves to be part of a family. You could have a virulent skin disease, or be without a savings account, or be crazy. You could be a girl. You could be an orphan or an illegitimate child. And yet you are part of Jesus’ family, the one he makes over and over again as he burns up the ones we create to keep others out.
He turns his back on exclusive blood ties and replaces them with the bonds of affection.
He destroys the boundaries established by the patriarchs. He comes not to bring peace, but freedom.

This past Monday, Sara read her essay on This I Believe, a national media project engaging people in writing, sharing, and discussing the core values and beliefs that guide their daily lives. This I Believe is based on a 1950s radio program of the same name, hosted by acclaimed journalist Edward R. Murrow. In creating This I Believe, Murrow said the program sought "to point to the common meeting grounds of beliefs, which is the essence of brotherhood and the floor of our civilization."

Give yourself a gift and spend 3 minutes listening to Strangers Bring Us Closer to God - and then the rest of your life trying to make real what she (and Jesus) beckons us to.

How is Our Cognitive Surplus Being Invested ?

Clay Shirky, a professor at NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program , has a new book out:  Here Comes Everybody   ("The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.").

In this video from a recent tech conference,  Shirky contends that the rise of automation in the 20th century has resulted in an increase of free time and mental space which could be used for thinking or creating, but which we have grown accustomed to spending zoned out in front of the television screen.

A "cognitive surplus" means the total amount of unoccupied free time available (think of it as "screen hours") after the basic needs of society have been met.  This a huge deposit of waking hours lived in front of the tube, a vast expanse of free time occupied for 40 years by commercial television. We're at least starting to find the architecture of participation (Tim O'Reilly's phrase) that would turn some of those couch-born hours into sentient activity.

I am so hopeful for how this surplus is being invested, particularly on the fringes, how the answer to "where do they find the time ?" is re-writing the cultural & communal codes we rely on.

And out of the mouth of 4 year olds comes insight:

"a media that ships without a mouse is broken"

A little of the genius that is Dan Piraro of Bizarro Comics

Telling Our Holy Story: The Silenced Majority Break Thru The Gates

image from forgtnrose

SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhh.

How old were you when you heard that sound in a worship setting ?

SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhh.

Please keep your kids (or your mom or your husband) quiet.

SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhh.

Real Christians are praying or singing or preaching - so please shut up.

SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhh.

A sound as at home in a church as AMEN.

The concept of a gatekeeper is at the core of so many communities of faith & practice.  Look at a community and you'll find someone who controls access to things holy, who monitors or oversees the actions of others, who is in charge of passage through a gate that is far more narrow that Jesus spoke of.

People with power, with expressed expertise, with privilege - we get through the gate.  People who know how to behave, who know their place, who have been briefed on the rules & the covenants.

More & more, I am drawn to what Amy Goodman refers to as the silenced majority, those who  have been forgotten, forsaken, and beaten down by the powerful.  You know these people, right ?  The diaspora of people whose souls are unsettled, whose questions are uncomfortable, whose very presence can clear a room.

They have been told time & time again

SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhh

by the gatekeepers of a movement that follows a liberating King who hung out with the scum of the earth.

I was reminded of this last week when I read through a series that the inimitable Jenell Paris, Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Messiah College & host of  The Paris Project is posting called cacklings from an emergent crone (first post, 2nd, 3rd).  I will not even try to excerpt her brilliance & those of her commenters.  kudos to all for their truth-telling.

And kudos to bruce reyes chow, for his truthtelling in this post  can we agree to disagree about homosexuality, where he names the reality - that most denoms & assoc of churches just can not even agree on the terms of discussion about ordaining openly gay men & lesbians.  Both "sides" want to scream & yell that this is not the case - all the yelling in the world sounds like  SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhhing to people who see things differently.

From my experience, sensitive new age gatekeepers are usually worse than the old version - at least old school gatekeepers will admit they gatekeeping.  The web is filled with stories of legacy gatekeepers, from denom leaders to media companies to governing boards.  I want to share two from my perspective that are just as pernicious:

1. i have seen this SSSSSShhhhhhhhsshhhhhing in the emerging church phenomenon, both in the states & internationally.  hip young white males are at the center, pushing out people like  karen ward or maggie dawn or cheryl lawrie or Liz Rios or  holly rankin zaher or deb loyd...or, I could go on & on & on & on.  I saw this close up when gifted prophets like Rachelle, Karen & Jen were silenced, shhhsssshed out of the "conversation" becuz they were not appreciative enough or would not play by the rules or would not simply shut up.
2. i have seen this in the "progressive faith" vanguard, who rail against a strawman of orthodoxy.  in their rants, they too often fall into a mirror track - "we are the real people of good, they are bigots".  This happens every day in quiet ways, in the condescending way that progressives engage with savage evangelicals, talking down to them and stereotyping them without fail.  people who try to hold the tension, try to inhabit a middle space between the warring polarities are shhhsssshed into oblivion

I've spent more than my quota of time as a gatekeeper, shooting questions & proof texts as locks on the gate.  It took me a long time, but I have changed my registration to the silenced majority, rather than the gatekeepers.  I think Stowe Boyd is on target when he observed:

the edge dissolves the center

More & more, the locks have been picked, the silenced majority have moved on to a more welcoming patch in the meadow that is the beloved community, the doors  of the gate are swung open, even off their hinges.   People who have pushed the edges are dissolving what people see as the center.

The joy is that this is at the core of Jesus following story - that Jesus stood at the edges, dissolving & transforming the center, resurrecting a new boundary that mashed up what we think of as heaven & earth.

In this grand mashup, I am certain that there will be no  shhhsssshing - how about we start that practice now ?

how you know you are a hipster

image from fashion josh

ANDREW WOMACK explains how being a hipster is not necessarily a bad thing, and shows how to determine if you are, in fact, really one of them.  His list is just great - I love these:

You stopped listening to your favorite band because your Abercrombie-wearing cousin told you he likes their new single.
You wore a trucker cap into a truck stop and felt scared.
You boycotted shampoo for two years because you liked the way not shampooing made your hair look.
You hid a Jimmy Eat World CD under your bed before your friends came over.
You started a conversation with a friend talking about how glad you are to see them and ended it talking only about yourself.

Sign You Are Not A Hipster: You honestly don’t understand why anyone would ever do any of the things mentioned above.

mind grenades

it's been a while since I have posted on the meme of mind grenades:

seth godin | Avoiding the Passion Pop Gulf

Here's a new curve for you: I'm calling it the passion/pop curve.

That bell curve to the left represents acceptance by the focused/excited/tastemaking community. Those are the people who love microbeers and haute couture and Civil War memorabilia. Like all market curves, there's a sweet spot. Go too nutsy on us ($90,000 turntables, for example) and even the committed will flee. Go too pop, though, and we'll avoid you as well.

 

Leisa Reichelt | Ambient Intimacy

Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible. Flickr lets me see what friends are eating for lunch, how they’ve redecorated their bedroom, their latest haircut. Twitter tells me when they’re hungry, what technology is currently frustrating them, who they’re having drinks with tonight.

jim kuntsler | The Risk Economy

     Now we are in a strange period when those swindles are unwinding. The people who run the finance sector -- the Wall Street investment banks, hedge funds and ratings agencies, the Federal Reserve, and the US Dept of the Treasury -- in desperately trying to prevent the unwind, have rapidly ramped up another new economy based entirely on the buying and selling of risk. Risk, as a pure abstraction unconnected to any real capital activity, is all that's left to buy and sell after all other plausibly practical vehicles for finance have failed.

     While a lack of transparency in the individual risk vehicles has been an object of complaint over the past year, the system as whole is transparently absurd. The system is also abstruse enough to prevent most mortals (including many employed in the system) from understanding its operations. But the general public and the news media are virtually helpless to intervene in this last gasp racket, so the probability increases that it will do tremendous damage to whatever remains of the US economy.

amy goodman | The media is the place where we have a discussion with each other.

It’s the litany of misinformation, of lies, that really makes people afraid and turns fear into full-blown hate. I think that has to be exposed.

The beauty of community media is that we break the sound barriers, that we open up the microphones for people to speak for themselves. And then it’s harder to call people labels. I think it’s an epithet to talk about illegal aliens. They don’t sound human. You can set any kind of policy on a population when you don’t talk to them as human beings.

jeff kaplan | The Gospel of Consumption

Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg’s vision offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don’t have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip.

Of course not everybody has been able to take part in the buying spree on equal terms. Millions of Americans work long hours at poverty wages while many others can find no work at all. However, as advertisers well know, poverty does not render one immune to the gospel of consumption.

Rachelle Mee-Chapman | Abstinence, Kids, and Faith: Thoughts from the Comment Gallery

is Christianity here to acquiesce to culture or to transform culture? Yes, Jesus spoke about transforming culture. But not in the way the Christianity has tried to transform culture. Christianity has spent it’s long years trying to transform the minor issues such as drinking, smoking, swearing, gambling, and sex; while systematically ignoring the major transformational needs Jesus focused on—providing for the poor and the widow; inviting the outsider to the table; spending time with the marginalized; releasing captives; and seeking justice in the face of religious legalism and political tyranny. Sure there were and are break-through moments where Wilberforce and his community used the convictions of their faith to end the British slave trade; or where Wallis and his community got modern America to think more widely about political and economic justice. But overall, we’ve just spent a lot of time preaching to the choir while the rest of our culture was left to its own accord. As my friend Mr. Jim says, sometimes the question we should ask is not only WWJD, but WDJD—What didn’t Jesus do? Either way, it’s pretty clear he didn’t worry too much about sex.

From ale neri

Myanmar cyclone death toll soars past 22000: state radio

prayers all around the people of Myanmar (formerly Burma) and all those that are trying to help them with this terrible tragedy.  The largest country by geographical area in mainland Southeast Asia, they continue to struggle to mend their ethnic tensions.

midnight @ denny's

yesterday was powerful for me in our faith community

thru a fluke of acute viral nasopharyngitis (usually known as the common cold), I taught Bible study.  we talked about Deuteronomy 2, when Moses muses thru mementos of the journey all around the desert.  I blasted thru 8x as many media references as Scriptural - as usual, I could have really used an editor.

it felt really meaningful to stand in that space, among people of a journey, and to just start.  it did not have a plan or an outline or even a point.  it was as close to jazz as a non-musician like me will ever know.

and it's still there - even after the boom & staying far away, at all costs.  no clue what to do with that.

worship was ragged & fluid and just a smack between my soul.  stories shared, a preacher crying, communion shared in small groups.  it touched me so that tom kimmel, an artist I've come to know & adore thru journey, played softly & tenderly

dave madden shared about a new idea - a stuffuary, where you could check out what other folks in the community had & borrow it.  simple idea, but it really clicked.

after worship, a group of us grabbed lunch at  phil's ice house.  we all came to a shared conclusion - our faith community s hard to describe to people who have never been to it.  the labels & short-hand just do not bound this community, so we struggled & stretched.

then it came - one of our friends said that Journey IFC is

midnight @ denny's

that's it - a setting that is messy & gorgeous, a time that is just between then & now & tomorrow, a grab bag of journeyers who gather to drink (bad) coffee and just breathe.  all kinds of folks, taking a break in their journeyers, sharing food & their troubles and an encouragement.  splitting the bill & sharing a ride to where they are off to next.

midnight @ denny's - it was a powerful one for me.

Anne LaMott on Colbert Report

hat tip to the dude I hope the Presbyterians are smart enough to call as Moderator

The Animator by Nick Hilligoss

The Journey of Being Jesus Followers

I are really lucky to have found a group of folk that I can journey along the path of following Jesus.  I have a lot of those fellow journeyers spread across the world, some here in Texas, some who happened to have clustered themselves into a faith community 2 years ago.

Sometimes that path is a stroll, some times a saunter.

And sometimes following Jesus is a bit more like this:

New Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings Video - "Tell Me"

TAPPED: Everything really is bigger in Texas

Sad bu true, my home state would rather stick our collective heads in the sand than accept the reality that TAPPED points out:

This month's Texas Monthly reports that the state is the largest recipient of federal money for abstinence education -- more than $4.5 million annually -- but ranks first in the nation in teenage births. Almost a quarter of those births are not the girl's first delivery.

By fervently championing abstinence sex education, Texas has, perhaps unwittingly, created for itself the very problems abstinence only hopes to thwart.

Radiohead: All I Need

The greatest band around -  Radiohead  - has joined the MTV EXIT (End Exploitation and Trafficking) campaign, a partnership between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and MTV to raise awareness about human trafficking. The collaboration takes the Asia MTV EXIT campaign to a global audience, reaching as many as 560 million households worldwide.  Filmed by Oscar-winning cinematographer John Seale ("The English Patient") and award-winning director Steve Rogers, the video depicts a day in the life of both an affluent youngster and a child making shoes in a sweatshop, sending a message that everyone plays a role in trafficking and exploitation.

The New York Times Just Does Not Care What We Believe

I read the New York Times with a devotion that is hard to match.  It still is the medium by which I mark time, despite the fact that most of my time is spent online.

This Sunday, they are sponsoring this event:

Under the heading of WHAT WE BELIEVE, they have this:

4 white guys - all authors, 1/2 academics.  No women, no people of color, no pastors - no one outside the liberal elite bubble.

To be fair, I breathe a lot of air from that bubble. 

But it is awfully hard not to conclude that the NYT thinks that what we believe is just talk about belief, just analysis of what white male experts think people believe.  And the result of that worldview seeps into their media.

I suspect most other people already knew this - but just saddens me.

a person hero of mine - Ira Glass - is now on twitter:

Have I mentioned recently JUST how much we are loving being in Austin

photo by Laura Skelding AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Tibetan monks from the Gaden Shartse Monastery in India visited Barton Springs Pool on Tuesday to bless the waters. The monks are touring the country to promote peace and cultural awareness, and to raise money for a hospital in India. They will be holding public teachings and events in Austin through May 9. Miranda Waldron Curry, 10, watches the blessing ceremony.

We live 1.8 miles up the hill from Barton Springs Pool - it takes me 5 minutes to ride my bike there.

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