Category Archives: Random

New Café Piece

I’ve got a new post up at the Café. Given the state of things I’ve found it difficult to collect coherent thoughts, so this is more of a spur-of-the-moment reflection based on a bit of NPR. Since I was driving to and from storage with stack of boxes, I heard the report twice and each time noticed myself yelling the same things at the radio—so I decided to write it down…

Posts containing more substance are in the works.

Random Encounters of the Best Kind

The girls and I are settling in at Church of the Advent. We love the community, the liturgy, the preaching and are looking forward to pitching in and doing what we can to help the place thrive! Lil’ G in particular insisted that I speak to Father this morning about getting her trained to be a boat-girl!

At this morning’s Solemn High Coffee-Hour I spied a familiar face I hadn’t had a chance to talk to in a while and had a nice chat with Fr Griffith of hypersync whom I hadn’t seen in the flesh since M and I left General. He was filling myself and other parishioners in on the latest news from the emergent world and his Red Hook Project.

RBOC: Low Week Edition

  • Took some time off to get away with M and the girls—back to the grind today, however…
  • M ran a great time in the Cherry Blossom 10 Miler on Sunday; I ran a local 5K and finished a minute slower than last time. I need to hit the pavement more seriously. The main goal at the moment is my first half-marathon at the Baltimore Running Festival.
  • Oddly, one of the things that keeps me motivating with regular running is scanning the news at the Oil Drum. The idea of declining medical facilities as I age suggests that the time to get serious about being healthy is now…
  • More on kalendars after other fires get sorted out—there were lots of good comments below I haven’t gotten around to addressing yet.

Easter Even Update

Triduum has come and gone and we stand in the Great Fifty Days. As usual at this point, I’m quite tired from life around the house and now have 95% of Easter dinner cleaned up.

The girls and I spent the liturgical portion of the week at Church of the Advent which delivered tremendously. It’s a pleasure to see a community in the area that embraces a robust Anglo-Catholic sensibility within the Rite II idiom. It reminds me of Smokey Mary’s more than any parish I’ve been to recently. (And that’s always a good thing in my book.)

I’ve not been near the computer much except to dash off the previous installment on the kalendar; I still have yet to find the perfect Easter image for the breviary—I need to at least put up the adequate if not the perfect… If you’re late to the party like me, you need to get over and read Christopher’s piece at the Cafe. It’s a challenging item that ties together several different issues from a variety of angles. I’m still reflecting on it.

The girls received The Princess and the Frog as an Easter present from my in-laws and I watched it for them tonight. Suffice it to say that American Studies majors have a decade worth of dissertation topics dissecting Disney’s latest engagement with issues of race, class, and gender.

I’ll continue to be more off than on over the next several days as life continues to occur.

Public Service Announcement: Automotive Safety

Having a jack and a spare tire in your trunk are really handy when you get a flat. Not having a tire iron to remove the bolts, however, reduces the other items to rather useless bits of metal.

This would be a really good time to check and make sure that in your trunk(s) you’ve got:

  1. a jack
  2. a tire iron
  3. the handle thingie to raise the jack if it’s not the tire iron
  4. flares or reflective triangles
  5. a fully inflated spare tire (sure you’ve got a spare—but is there sufficient AIR in it?)

Luckily when I hit some large, low, metal object in the road and blew out my tire, I was less than a mile away from my sister-in-law’s house and could jog there to get some assistance from my awesome brother-in-law.

Of course, it had to be the one night I didn’t have my phone on me—which made me wonder… Can’t you now get some little cheapie pay-as-you-go cellphones for not too much? And wouldn’t they be a good thing to have tucked into your emergency car kit?

And while we’re in public service announcement mode: Don’t forget to back up your data!

It’s Here…

Things have been really crazy here with work, the conference paper I’m trying to finish up, M’s very successful first half-marathon over the weekend (2:02!), and all the usual activities with the kids…. (I have e-mails waiting from some of you that I swear I’ll get to in the not too distant future…!)

You know that family in the neighborhood—the one with the obsessively anti-bacterial mother and despite that (or perhaps because of it), one or both of the kids is almost always sick? Both of the boys—the girls’ friends—have high fevers with vomiting. We’re pretty sure that the swine flu has come to our little cul-de-sac. I’m just praying the girls don’t catch it too.

Couple of Things

First, the pondering I was pondering concerning the intersection of Scripture and the world has also struck the prior of (Chicago’s RC) Monastery of the Holy Cross from a slightly different angle.

Second, go read Marshall on a church for adults. I’m totally feeling him here… As a child we “technically” were not required to attend church after Confirmation. Functionally, we were obligated to go unless sick unto death. It didn’t see to have hurt me at all—but doesn’t seem to have taken in my brother’s case. I agree with bls; some of us are more hard-wired for the spiritual than others.

RBOC: Busyness Edition

  • Haven’t had much time lately for teh internets. Busy with work and academic obligations. (Still rather behind on that second one…)
  • I’m turning into a Martin Thornton junkie! After Christian Proficiency, I’m now reading English Spirituality, and his Spiritual Direction is next in line. He’s one of those people who confirms a lot of the things that I’ve been thinking about history and spiritual movements—but extends them in new and interesting directions.
  • Thornton’s section on the Victorines reminded me of a theme I’d wanted to expand on that sees the Scriptures and Creation as intertwined twofold revelation of God’s creative and redemptive work. I think this line of thought is absolutely key in balancing the proper relation between the too frequent rhetorical division between reason and revelation and the impact of those on our theological thinking.
  • Also on tap is Martin Smith’s Reconciliation which I probably should have read a long time ago.
  • But I’m also re-reading Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere which is an outstanding read…
  • Not that I’m biased or anything, but the current Roman kalendar seems rather overloaded with saints from the Counter-Reformation.
  • And what happened to the Saturday after Ascension being “Mary, Queen of Apostles”? All I can find on the Bishops’ kalendar for 2009 is the”Queenship of the BVM”, a memorial on Aug 22. That seems a rather different concept than Queen of Apostles if you ask me…
  • We ran out of coffee a few days ago and have been living without. Our inability to get things done has been—well, I’d say eye-opening but they’re not really open… On one hand, we could treat this as a “wake-up” call to return to a lifestyle less dependent on chemical stimulants. On the other, we’ve decided it’s a sign that we need to go out and buy more coffee.
  • I hope to get back to some posts of substance in the not too distant future.