Christianity
Crazy
Wednesday, May 25th, 2011Well, if you can read this, you too have not been raptured. Turns out, nobody has. Or at least, no one whom anybody has noticed is gone missing. Which you have to grant would be discouraging even in absentia. To some, this threatened doomsday of May 21 might be old news. But I’m still thinking it’s [...]
Of Hitchkins and Christians: Debunking Bunking Faith and Reason
Monday, March 21st, 2011Recently I read a review of a new book by Terry Eagleton called Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. A very fine survey of his life can also be found here. The review of this particular volume was so compelling that I ran out and got it, and you should too. Call [...]
Of a Bridge and a Bell and Ashes Above Your Eyes
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011My daughter Else and I have settled in these last several nights to read Bridge to Terabithia. We’re approaching the end of the tale, and knowing what will happen in just a few page flips, I have my kleenex box at the ready. Last night, we read the chapter “Easter.” Leslie, the doomed girl who [...]
God, Economic Justice, and the Madison Rotunda
Tuesday, February 22nd, 2011So if I’m going to make the case that faith has relevance, I might as well throw myself into the Wisconsin fray, which has an awful lot in common with the Ohio fray, and is symptomatic of lots of frays both present and impending. So let me step up to the plate and state outright [...]
Bonhoeffer: Assassin (wannabe) and Patron Saint of Lutheran Ambiguity
Friday, February 4th, 2011Today is Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s birthday. I was reminded of this on today’s Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor. We wake up at 6:00 a.m. to classical public radio in my family, and at 6:15 Garrison lulls us right back to sleep with his tales and poetry and voice. But it’s worth your time to look up [...]
Rabbit Rabbit
Thursday, February 3rd, 2011Two days ago I learned that my friend Ellie committed suicide. I am very sad. Ellie was the secretary in the foreign language department at St. Olaf College, where I went to school. For some reason or another the work study gods smiled down on my blonde head instead of all the others on the [...]
“Injustice in Health Care is the Most Shocking and Inhumane:” MLK, Jr., Soteria, and the Push to Repeal Health Care
Thursday, January 20th, 2011Dear all, Today I’m posting something a bit out-of-the ordinary for what I’ve typically done with OMG. It’s the text of a speech I made at a press conference on Tuesday, Jan. 18th, sponsored by the South Dakota Democrats and the South Dakota wing of Organizing for America, the morphed body of Obama for America [...]
MLK, Jr., crosshairs, amygdalae, and agape
Thursday, January 13th, 2011Next Monday we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Quite coincidentally, yesterday I stumbled upon King’s words taken from “A Time to Break Silence,” 1967. Listen. Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his [...]
Bleakness and Beauty
Wednesday, December 29th, 2010In the bleak midwinter, frost wind made moan, earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, in the bleak midwinter, long ago. On December 27th, we went to the the graves of my late husband and my grandparents. It would have been my grandmother’s 111th [...]
