April 2011
21 posts
2 tags
No Woman is an Island
I’ve been catching up on the late, great HBO series Deadwood recently. One of the themes, probably the primary theme, that runs through it is that of community as an organism, the idea that everyone, righteous and unrighteous, respectable and disreputable, privileged and disadvantaged, has an important and specific part to play in the functioning of an all-encompassing body. In fact, 1...
“I was raised up believing
I was somehow unique
Like a snowflake distinct among...”
– Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues
A song for Good Friday
Buy Soul Art →
I’m generally wary when people ask me to support/ raise awareness for their ministries, but when certain people ask, I will do it without hesitation. My friends Phil and Stephanie Shepherd run a church in Ft. Worth, TX called the Eucatastrophe. They aren’t out seeking to cannibalize the well-heeled and already churched from amongst other congregations, and they aren’t trying to...
1 tag
“What girl
Now reads in her bosom as clear
As Rebekah read, when she sate
At...”
– From The Future, by Matthew Arnold. (I was struck by this verse, of course, because it has my name/namesake in it, but also because it describes a state of being I strive for.)
“I need to be able to vent my feminist anger once in a while. Otherwise it will...”
– Rebekah Berndt
“I would argue that fiscal conservatism has nothing to do with the deficit, and...”
– Amanda Marcotte on the fight over Planned Parenthood
3 tags
Saturday of the Fourth Week in Lent
At the beginning of Lent, I said I was going to take a twitter and Facebook fast. I wanted to take some time to slow down my brain, pause, and reflect, something that becomes difficult to do when I’m immersed (thanks to my iphone) in a milieu of constant feedback and distraction. As a teenager I read long, complicated novels- Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Hugo. I can now scarcely find the attention...
“I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because...”
– Healing, by D.H. Lawrence. (I came across a reference to this poem a few days ago, and today someone quoted it to me)
“The belief that we are all sinners gives us excellent grounds for forgiveness...”
– Marilynne Robinson
Interesting fact: When disaster strikes the nation, preachers claim it is God’s judgement for the sin of homosexuality. When famine struck the Massachusetts colony in 1743, Jonathan Edwards claimed it was God’s judgment for failing to do justice to the poor.
“Great theology is always a kind of giant and intricate poetry, like epic or...”
– Marilynne Robinson, on Dietrich Bonhoeffer
