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Göbekli Tepe and Godspots
Saturday, June 4th, 2011Göbekli Tepe appears to be c. 11,600 years old. That’s before Stonehenge. Before the Great Pyramid. Wowza. ___________ Every Thursday, I enjoy an hour-long phone conversation with an OMG-er in Texas. Interestingly, we often end up agreeing on many things, but how we get there sure differs. That’s o.k. I think that our well-considered differences [...]
Mother Jesus and Dame Julian
Friday, May 13th, 2011For people who think on such things, May 13th marks the day of medieval mystic Julian of Norwich. I learned about her in my college English class. (I like to say that at St. Olaf College, I got a major in English and an unmarketable minor in medieval women mystics. Hmm. I don’t know how [...]
Corinthian Juleps
Thursday, May 5th, 2011Ten-year old (ostensibly) Virginia Cary Hudson wrote O Ye Jigs & Juleps! in 1904. It cracks me up. She wrote it while at an Episcopalian boarding school, and as the above-linked Time article says, it had been undiscovered in a trunk for many years. Once found, it was published in 1960 and has been giving people [...]
Edgy thinking at edge.org
Thursday, April 7th, 2011It’s like OMG for empiricists! Edge will subsume you, if you let it. It’s partly Edge’s fault that I’m delayed in my more-or-less once-a-weeky blog. Dad stumbled on it after having read David Brook’s article about it in the New York Times. Actually, in his article Brooks covered only a smidgen of the inner workings [...]
Lament for Japan
Monday, March 14th, 2011“Eloi Eloi Lama Sabachthani?” cried Jesus from the cross. Never ever let it be said of Jesus that he didn’t live and die a Jew. “My God my God, why have you forsaken me?” My ears are ringing with this cry, as images of Japan flicker across the television screen and web news pages and [...]
Valentine to the Self
Wednesday, February 16th, 2011In seminary, I was introduced to this piece by Valerie Saiving Goldstein, a groundbreaking essay entitled The Human Situation: A Feminine View, written in 1960. It revolutionized my theology only on a smaller scale compared to how it revolutionized the whole field. She begins the article with these words: I am a student of theology; [...]
Focused…like a prism
Tuesday, February 8th, 2011My daughter is afflicted with a genetic disorder. Distractability. Now, she would not characterize it as such, just as her mother refuses to concede to the possibility that perhaps rather than “thinking broadly” she is really, darn it all, distracted. (For those of you familiar with the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Profile, this link will be [...]
It’s 5:00 somewhere
Thursday, January 27th, 2011This Saturday, we are taking a couple to the South Dakota symphony. And, like every Saturday evening that we take a couple to the symphony, we will raise our glasses to Walt and Jan Bouman. Walt was a professor of mine in seminary, and in most every way was larger than life. In size alone, [...]
An Epiphany about Metabolized Theology
Thursday, January 6th, 2011Monday morning I had a fortunate exchange with a friend of mine. When we run into each other, which happily occurs a lot, we immediately move beyond the weather and get into the grit of life. Really, actually, immediately. Like in the Markan sense, for whom everything happened ‘immediately.’ Go look it up. Anyway, immediately [...]
Protest and Prayer in the Magical Snow
Friday, December 17th, 2010“Let’s write words in the snow, Elsegirl,” I told my seven-year old daughter, after she had pulled me out to play in the 9° Sioux Falls nippiness yesterday afternoon. “O.K.!” she said. Then, “Mama, if Santa really can fly, I think it must be because of the snow. The snow must be magic.” “I am sure [...]
