FPC, Roland Purdue, sermon, faith and spirituality, worship, Soren Kierkegaard: Rev. Purdue referenced “Prompters in worship” from Kierkegaard … so I had to look it up.
Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), a great theologian, was born in Copenhagen in the early nineteenth century. He graduated from the University of Copenhagen and then spent two years in Germany before he returned to Copenhagen, where he lived the rest of his life. Although his writings covered many areas of the Christian faith, he was particularly outspoken on the subject of worship.
He was quite critical of many churches whose worship had become “user friendly.” He developed the idea that Christian worship was a drama. He had come to the conviction that many churches also believed that, but that there was an inappropriate redefining of what that meant. What he observed was that in the drama, God was to be the prompter, the liturgical leaders (musicians, readers of the scriptures, preachers and celebrants) had become the actors in the drama and the congregation had become the audience in the drama. An elitist class of leaders had implicitly modeled that they were better equipped to be the performers in this drama and that it was best if those in the congregation just watched as onlookers. This understanding of worship is still maintained and taught in many churches in America today.
Kierkegaard taught that this understanding of our worship of drama was totally wrong. People were taking on the wrong rolls. The liturgical leaders (musicians, readers of the scriptures, preachers and celebrants) were to be the prompters in worship. All of us, the congregation as well as the liturgical leaders are the actors in the drama of worship and God alone is the audience for the drama.
culture, Southern culture, Flannery O’Connor , Eudora Welty, eccentrics, LOL: I wonder which I am … an O”Connor or Welty eccentric. I’m definitely Southern!
… at almost forty, I’m learning being from the South doesn’t make me stupid, it makes me Southern. And I own that, by God. As my friend says, “That which you once mocked, you now embrace.” She usually says that about something like caftans or yard gnomes, but it works here too. I have embraced the Southern Woman inside me and she would like to talk to you about your lack of calling cards. I fully intend to age gracefully into a caftan-wearing, yard gnome-loving, giant beaded necklace-wearing Southern Eccentric Woman…of the Flannery O’Connor persuasion.
I like to classify Southern eccentrics into two groups: Eudora Welty eccentric or Flannery O’Connor eccentric. If you are a Welty eccentric, your sister is called something like Cattie Paw because her name is Katherine and she walks quietly. If you are O’Connor eccentric, your sister is called Trampasaurus Oceanus because she gets around during Fleet Week. Welty eccentrics may leave a family dinner to go sit in the woods and sketch lichen. O’Connor eccentrics leave a family dinner after announcing they’ve ended the affair with the Methodists’ choir director to move to Hilton Head with the Piggly Wiggly produce manager and his spiritual guru.
old news, human trafficking, slavery: This astounds me … I, too, believe that freedom is a basic human right.
There are 27 million slaves in the world today — more than ever before in human history. Kutcher continued, “One could make an assumption that it’s a global problem. The CIA estimates that there are a million slaves in the US today. I think if Abe knew that, he’d be quite upset.”
A year ago, the couple came to CGI with the intent to educate themselves as much as possible about the issue: the modern day abolition movement. The more they learned about it, however, the more they realized there was no way they could continue living in the world and not do something about it. Among their education, they went on an exploratory trip to the Mexican-US border. Kutcher details one of their encounters, “We met a girl who told us how she was trafficked into the US, taken into a field by her pimp and raped by 30 men on a trash bag. That’s the day we started the DNA Foundation.”
Over the past year, Moore, Kutcher and the DNA Foundation have been gaining momentum and street-cred among the philanthropic, social action and social media communities. This new, holistic campaign takes them one step closer to making their mission — that freedom is a basic human right — a reality.
Ever since Thomas Edison (pictured) created the phonograph after five days and nights hooking up his ears to rubber tubes, the world’s been grooving to the oldies thanks to the miracle of recorded music. But way before there was ever anything remotely resembling an iPod, listening to a particular recording meant listening to a victrola, gramophone, or phonograph, which could sound awfully staticky to our MP3-spoiled ears. Still, there’s no reason not to break out the old LPs every once in a while and crank up that old-timey music!
travel, 1%, first class/business class: I had no idea about international first class … business class is very nice.
The gap between first class and coach has never been so wide.
Carriers on international flights are offering private suites for first-class passengers, three-star meals and personal service once found only on corporate jets. They provide massages before takeoff, whisk passengers through special customs lanes and drive them in a private limousine right to the plane. Some have bars. One airline has installed showers onboard.
The amenities in the back of the cabin? Sparse.
So as domestic travelers take to the skies for the holiday season, most will be in cramped cabins, their food is likely to be bland and they will have paid for it, along with any fees for slightly more legroom or checked bags.
But even as they have cut back on domestic service, including first-class accommodations, the airlines have been engaged in a global battle for top executives and the superwealthy on their international routes. Though only a privileged few can afford to pay $15,000 to fly first class from New York to Singapore or Sydney, the airlines are betting that the image of luxury they project for the front helps attract passengers to the rest of the plane. That includes a growing business-class section with offerings once solely the preserve of first class.
Gugghenheim Museum, apps, Maurizio Cattelan: I think this is great!
Enjoy unique access to Maurizio Cattelan: All with this interactive, multiplatform app, which features dramatic views of the museum’s unprecedented site-specific installation along with extensive documentation of Cattelan’s artworks, actions, and other projects.
In short videos, filmmaker John Waters introduces the app and its sections. Exhibition curator Nancy Spector offers an illuminating presentation of Cattelan’s oeuvre, while exhibition engineers and artwork conservators offer a behind-the-scenes look at putting the show together.
quotes, Collette, history: I liked the quote, but had no idea who Collette was …
“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.”
— Colette
…
Colette (1873-1954)
Colette was a writer known for her novels in which women were depicted as full sexual beings. Her husband published her first works under his own name. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette married twice and was involved with women and men outside her marriages. One of the most famous adaptations of Colette’s work was the play and movie, Gigi.
on this day, The Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, kith/kin: My great grandfather, JJ Denard, attended the Exposition, and my sister has a copy of his pass which had his picture on it. Send it to me MS 🙂
September 18, 1895
The Cotton States and International Exposition opened in Atlanta.
The most ambitious of the city’s cotton expositions was staged in 1895. Its goals were to foster trade between southern states and South American nations as well as to show the products and facilities of the region to the rest of the nation and to Europe. These objectives found expression in the official name of the event—the Cotton States and International Exposition. There were exhibits by six states and special buildings featuring the accomplishments of women and blacks. Also showcased was the latest technology in transportation, manufacturing, mining, agriculture, and other fields. Amusements such as the “Phoenix Wheel” and an early version of the motion picture were set up as part of a midway to attract visitors.
On opening day, September 18, military bands played, followed by speeches from political, business, and other leaders, including the prominent African American educator Booker T. Washington. In a speech that came to be known as the “Atlanta Compromise“ speech and that was greeted enthusiastically by white advocates of the New South, Washington did not challenge
the prevailing ideas of segregation held by advocates of the New South; putting aside all claims to political power and social equality, he urged blacks to make progress as agricultural and industrial laborers. In spite of lavish promotion, fewer than 800,000 attended the three-month exposition, which was plagued by constant financial problems. The Cotton States Exposition did showcase Atlanta as a regional business center and helped to attract investment. Although most of the 1895 exposition’s buildings were torn down so that the materials could be sold for scrap, the city eventually purchased the grounds, which became the present-day Piedmont Park.
USPS, stamps: Earthscapes are beautiful. Am I the only one that loves commemorative stamps?
The U.S. Postal Service plans to release a set of 15 “forever” stamps in October 2012 that will celebrate the American landscape. The set, called Earthscapes, features aerial photographs of a variety of scenes.
DC earthquake , natural disasters, National Cathedral, earthquake damage, DC: Why so much damage? “It is made of stone, and it is very, very tall.”
When a 5.8-magnitude earthquake struck the Washington area last month, what seemed like one of the city’s strongest buildings turned out to have some of the worst damage: the National Cathedral.
Several slender carved pinnacles on top of the cathedral, which are 45 feet tall, were cracked or damaged. “It’s hard to see, but a lot of them just rotated,” said Joe Alonso, who manages the cathedral’s stonework.
One four-ton section of a pinnacle fell onto the roof of the cathedral’s 301-foot-tall central tower, as did several finials, which are pieces at the very top of a pinnacle. All the pinnacles on the main tower will have to be removed and fixed, Alonso said.
Why the cathedral?
Throughout the city, the damage caused by the earthquake was fairly mild. But the cathedral is different from your house in two important ways: It is made of stone, and it is very, very tall. Both of those factors exaggerated the impact of the shaking earth. The Washington Monument, another tall stone structure, was also damaged by the quake.
“The cathedral is a big, heavy building, and it’s stiff — it’s not made to be flexible,” said Bill Leith, a seismologist (earthquake scientist) with the U.S. Geological Survey. “Modern skyscrapers and steel buildings are made to be flexible . . . and not be damaged” by most quakes. Work on the cathedral began in 1907 and was completed in 1990.
The Blue Bottle setup is temporary — there’s a pipsqueak GS3 for espresso drinks, a drip bar for brewed coffee – but it’s a preview of things to come. Blue Bottle signed a lease for the room and will open a coffee shop later this year to be designed by Hiromi Tsuruta and Swee Phuah, the team behind Design & Construction Resources. Tsuruta and Phuah are known for elegant minimalism executed with slender budgets: the two are behind Blue Bottle’s coffee shop and roaster in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where cheap floorboards are used to great effect as wall paneling, and the Blue Bottle kiosk on the High Line, which is down the block and up a flight a stairs from Milk Studios. The plans for the loading dock call for a stripped-down room, a serene space on a street heavily trafficked with forklifts and Town Cars.
2012 Presidential Election, politics, libertarianism, health care: Was any one else shocked during this part of the debate?
In 2008, his campaign manager, a healthy-but-uninsured 49-year-old, died from pneumonia and left his family with $400,000 in medical debt.
I want to be delicate in how I write this post. Kent Snyder was a friend of Paul’s, and a remarkable organizer on behalf of the causes he believed in. His early death was tragic. But I want to make a policy observation that applies to millions of cases just like Snyder’s.
Health-care services are somewhat unique in that they’re a rare form of consumption that you often get and get charged for, even if you haven’t asked for them. If you collapse on a street, an ambulance will rush you to a hospital. If you get into a car accident, you’ll wake up in intensive care. If you start suffering from dementia, your family will ask the doctors to help you.
Perhaps you would have preferred that it was otherwise. Perhaps you believe so deeply in personal responsibility that you would sacrifice your life to demonstrate that individuals must suffer for their bad decisions. But it may not be up to you, and whether you get billed or your family gets billed or society gets billed, someone will pay the bill.
It’s all well and good to say personal responsibility is the bedrock of liberty, but even the hardest of libertarians has always understood that there are places where your person ends and mine begins. Generally, we think of this in terms of violent intrusion or property transgressions. But in health care, it has to do with compassion.
We are a decent society, and we do not want to look in people’s pockets for an insurance card when they fall to the floor with chest pains. If we’re not going to look in their pockets, however, we need some answer for who pays when they wake up — or, God forbid, after they stop breathing — in the hospital. And though it sounds nice to say that charities will pick up the slack, any hospital system in America will tell you that even with Medicare and Medicaid assuming much of the burden for the most intractable and expensive cases, charities are not capable of or interested in fully compensating the medical system for the services needed by the un- or underinsured.
Maj. Heather “Lucky” Penney, 9/11, follow-up: Wow, this gives the story another perspective.
When we chronicled the little-told Sept. 11 history of Maj. Heather “Lucky” Penney, one of the first fighter pilots in the air over Washington that morning, we knew that she and Col. Marc Sasseville had been ordered airborne out of fear that a hijacked plane was heading to the capital. We knew that in the scramble, they had to launch without live ammunition or missiles. We knew they were prepared to ram that 757, at the likely cost of their own lives as well as those of everyone on board.
The Washington Post’s Anqoinette Crosby talks with reporter Steve Hendrix about one of the first fighter pilots to scramble after the attacks of Sept. 11. With no ordinance on board her jet, she was faced with the possibility of ramming her plane into one of the hijacked passenger jets.
With solemn gestures, Americans across the country mark the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the Pentagon in Virginia, the World Trade Center in New York and the plane crash in Shanksville, Pa..
What we didn’t know until Penney’s mother e-mailed us, with a request to mail a copy of the story to her in Colorado, was this additional Penney-family fact about that day: “We were thankful that Heather was able to put her emotions aside and not even consider that her father might have been flying on United 93,” Stephanie Penney said as an aside in her e-mail.
How’s that?
“Yes, John [Penney] was a captain for United Airlines at that time,” she elaborated later by phone. “He flew 757s and had been flying trips into and out of the East Coast the month before. Heather would not have known for sure that her dad wasn’t the captain on United 93.”
No, Heather Penney hadn’t mentioned that the extraordinary “kamikaze mission” she was ready to execute that day might well have been directed at a plane that carried the man who had once tucked her in, driven her to school and taught her to love fast airplanes.
zombie genre, movies, Shaun of the Dead: Anyone heard of this one? Maybe I will get it from Netflix before I give up the DVD service.
Shaun of the Dead is a 2004 British romantic zombie comedy directed by Edgar Wright, starring Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, and written by Pegg and Wright. Pegg plays Shaun, a man attempting to get some kind of focus in his life as he deals with his girlfriend, his mother and stepfather. At the same time, he has to cope with an apocalyptic uprising of zombies.
The film is the first of what Pegg and Wright call their Blood and Ice Cream Trilogy with Hot Fuzz (2007) as the second and The World’s End (TBA) as the third.[1
James Carville, advice, President Obama: I don’t like Carville, but I do like his candor.
This is what I would say to President Barack Obama: The time has come to demand a plan of action that requires a complete change from the direction you are headed.
NASA, Deep Space Exploration System: The dream continues.
NASA is ready to move forward with the development of the Space Launch System — an advanced heavy-lift launch vehicle that will provide an entirely new national capability for human exploration beyond Earth’s orbit. The Space Launch System will give the nation a safe, affordable and sustainable means of reaching beyond our current limits and opening up new discoveries from the unique vantage point of space.
Snap photos and instantly make them memorable by personalizing them with stickers, swipes, captions and frames. Then share with family and friends – and enjoy their reactions!
Few people will mourn publishers’ losses from increased price competition and new technology like e-readers. The question is whether these trends undermine the quality of books which are being published, by breaking a business model that has let firms focus on variety and range. Publishers have good reason to shiver at the decline of traditional bookshops. To fund the discovery and promotion of new authors, they have relied on books that sell steadily over a number of years. Yet mass retailers stock a few hundred new blockbusters.
At first sight there is no reason for concern. New works are abundant—40% more titles came out in Britain in 2010 than in 2001. But this obscures a starker trend: “mid-list” titles are selling in smaller numbers in America and Britain. This matters for cultural life, because most literary fiction and serious non-fiction falls into that bracket and much of it could become uneconomical to publish.
The two families met because of a bank — a time bank, where the unit of currency is not a dollar, but an hour. When you join a time bank, you indicate what services you might be able to offer others: financial planning, computer de-bugging, handyman repairs, housecleaning, child care, clothing alterations, cooking, taking someone to a doctor’s appointment on the bus, visiting the homebound or English conversation. People teach Mandarin and yoga and sushi-making. Castillo-Vélez earns a credit for each hour she spends tutoring José. She spends the credits on art classes.
A time bank is a way to make a small town out of a big city.
Time banks — more than 300 of them — exist in 23 countries. The largest one in New York City is the Visiting Nurse Service of New York Community Connections TimeBank.
It has more than 2,000 members and is most active in three places — Upper Manhattan (Washington Heights and Inwood), Lower Manhattan (Battery Park City, Chinatown and the Lower East Side) and parts of Brooklyn (Sunset Park and Bay Ridge). Members come from all over New York City, but exchanges are easiest when people live in the same neighborhood — like Castillo-Vélez and José.
There is something old fashioned about a time bank. Home repair, child care, visiting shut-ins and taking someone to the doctor are now often commercial transactions; a time bank is a return to an era where neighbors did these tasks for each other. But a time bank is also something radical. It throws out the logic of the market — in a time bank, all work has equal value. A 90-year-old can contribute on an equal basis with a 30 year old. Accompanying someone to the doctor is as valuable as Web design.
The idea comes from Edgar Cahn, a legendary anti-poverty activist. (Cahn and his late wife, Jean Camper Cahn, established the Antioch School of Law to train advocates for the poor, and were instrumental in founding the federal Legal Services Corporation.) In his book “No More Useless People,” Cahn writes that time banks were a response to cuts in social programs during the Reagan years. Cahn wrote: “If we can’t have more of that kind of money, why can’t we create a new kind of money to put people and problems together?”
Time banks also owe much of their development to Ana Miyares, who in the 1980s gave up a lucrative position in international banking to join the time bank movement in its infancy. She has founded time banks in various countries, and today is the manager of the Visiting Nurse Service’s time bank. Miyares sees time banking a little differently than Cahn does. “I would like to see social justice — but in a different way, using social capital, energizing social capital to be responsible citizens,” she said.
news, heroes, motor cycling accident: Watch the video … there are still heroes!
CBS News correspondent John Blackstone spoke with Wright’s girlfriend, Michelle Fredrickson. She said there is no doubt he’ll ride again.
“We couldn’t stop him if we wanted to,” she said Thursday. If the accident didn’t put him off motorcycles, “nothing will.”
Wright said he was aware of the entire accident, from when he started to slide under the BMW to the moment people pulled him to safety. He vividly recalled the color of the shirt worn by a rescuer, who was talking to him during “the scariest moment, when I didn’t know if I would live or be paralyzed.”
Wright, who hasn’t yet spoken to any of his rescuers, said they need to get used to being called heroes.
“That car could have blown up at any time,” Wright said. “They’re very brave.”
Wright has multiple fractures in his right leg and pelvis, burns on his feet and a “pretty gnarly road rash.” But he didn’t suffer any head injuries, and doctors said he will likely make a full recovery within a few months.
The troubled Postal Service — facing losses that may top $10 million by the end of the month — proposed new cost cutting measures Thursday, including the closing or consolidation of more than 250 processing facilities and the slashing of hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Letters of Note, a Web site that gathers interesting letters throughout history, gave some insight today on how far the USPS has come from its good old days. (Read: late 19th and early 20th century.)
For one, post offices were open seven days a week until 1912. Religious leaders put the kibosh on the Sunday post when post offices became busier than churches.
Even better, there was this: At least two children were sent by parcel post service after it was introduced in 1913. The children rode with railway and city carriers, with stamps attached to their clothing, to their destination.
When the Postmaster General found out about the young cargo, he was furious, and on June 13, 1920, the U.S. Postal Service ruled that children may not be sent via parcel post.
The United Nations is launching its first education and outreach app for the iPhone on Thursday in an effort to streamline its mobile presence and encourage users to take action on key global issues.
Aaron Sherinian, a UN Foundation spokesman, said that point of the app, called UN Foundation, is to help users “learn, act and share.”
The app pulls in information from the UN’s many social media feeds and campaigns and combines that with social media aspects and action items — such as ways to donate money to your pet causes — all in one place.
Users can organize feeds by region (e.g., Latin America or Africa) or by issue for a more tailored experience, and easily share news they see with their friends. The app will also incorporate elements of gaming, with a daily photo scramble called “Pieces of Peace” that will feature a photo related to a UN Foundation issue.
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