06.29.05
Walter the Prophet Man
One of the few things that assured me Xavier was the right place to go for my masters was the first email correspondence I had with Brennan Hill, the Graduate student advisor.
I inquired about the Brueggeman Center for Dialogue (one of the other assurances) and whether or not it had anything to do with Walter Brueggemann. I hadn’t noticed the spelling difference and his response was perfect: “No, the Brueggeman center is named after Fr. Edward Bruggeman, a loved ecumenist who taught here for many years. It is unrelated to Walter the prophet man.”
I’m not sure there is any excuse for a scholar of Christianity or Scripture or Theology that would excuse having not read Walter Brueggemann. Our library owns only one of his books (for now): An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination.
I just got it today. NT Wright is on the way in the mail. What am I going to do?
06.24.05
Boy So Fat, Afraid to go to Circus
The title above is the title of a newspaper article in the Springfield Sun-Times in May of 1908:
BUCYRUS, Ohio, May 28th
With nearly every other boy in town packed into a big circus tent, Wilbur Huston stayed at home feeling miserable. No circus for Wilbur, and all because he is so fat.
Wilbur is eleven years old and weighs 196 pounds. He wanted to go to the circus the worst way, but was simply afraid. Though coaxed and urged to go with the other boys, he stayed lonesomely at home, choking back the sobs.
The secret of the boy’s misery is that he is afraid of the slideshow – is in the deadly terror that he will be captured and exhibited if he so much as shows his nose in the circus.
I’m not sure what to say about that.
06.23.05
Music
There’s a lot of music I like. My interests have expanded quite a bit in the last few years. And every now and then I feel like I just got punched in the gut and spend the rest of the song trying to catch my breath; that’s how good the opening lines are. Here are a couple examples:
Mother don’t worry, I killed the last snake that lived in the creek bed
Mother don’t worry, I’ve got some money I saved for the weekend
Mother remember being so stern with that girl who was with me?
Mother remember the blink of an eye when I breathed through your body?
From Iron & Wine’s “Upward over the Mountain”
This is how we multiply; Pity that it’s not my wife
The friction and skin; The trembling sigh
This is how bodies move; With everything we could lose
Pushing us deeper still; The sheets and the sweat
The seed and the spill;The bitter pill yet undiscovered
From Pedro the Lion’s “Rapture” – Every song on the ‘Control’ Album knocks the wind out of me
I have a friend, he is made mostly of pain.
He wakes up, drives to work,and then straight back home again.
He once cut one of my nightmares out of paper.
I thought it was beautiful, I put it on a record cover.
And I tried to tell him he had a sense of color and composition so magnificent.
And he said “Thank you, please but your flattery is truly not becoming me.
Your eyes are poor. You are blind. You see, no beauty could have come from me.
I am a waste of breath, of space, of time.”
From Bright Eyes’ “Waste of Paint”
Don’t speak.
Words come out your eyes.
You’re wet with this nightmare.
Like thorns you hold these secrets to your breast,
your slender fingers closing into fists.
From Over the Rhine’s “Etcetera, Whatever”
Be afraid
While I’m obviously happy the boy made it home, the rest of the story makes me sad.
I’m not sure what has gotten into people. We have so trained ourselves and our children that people are so inherently evil that we must absolutely fear them above anything else. Do not put love first. Do not put trust first. Do not put acceptance first. Put fear and distrust first, above all. That is what will keep you alive! And insulated, I might add, from everything that makes us human. While we may admit that some people are good and will not kill/abduct/molest/beat/mug us, we have to make sure to train others around us (and our very formative children) that for the most part, people will do those things if given the chance.
What does this do to us and our children? It turns us into paranoid people, living in fear constantly. We do not know freedom and we absolutely do not know forgiveness, “He did that? Well I don’t want him living in my neighborhood! Give him a license plate and an ID card!”.
Our children grow up believing they are always only one step away from danger. There is always a door lock to be checked and double checked, a mace can to be attached to our keys, a club to be put on the car, and a gun to be kept in the drawer.
The kid in this story had been so trained by his parents to fear everyone that it literally almost cost him his life. The child is lost in the woods and believes it is less dangerous to wander around for days and days with no food and water than to make himself known to a stranger. How many more days would he have lasted? What if he were to have been delirious off the trail rather than on it?
Many of you are saying that it is very important to train our kids to fear. But i wonder how you’d feel about this story if the kid had indeed died because he wouldn’t talk to strangers.
What’s your neighbor’s name?
06.22.05
NT and the People of God
Sorry Missy.
Money is tight this month (very normal), but I couldnt pass up this purchase today for 13.99 with shipping. Next week I’ll be reading it.
Oh, I also just checked our catalog at the library and we now own New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God, and The Resurrection and the Son of God. I wonder who suggested that?
06.19.05
Indy
This is me in Indianapolis after helping Curt load in all the display stuff for general assembly.
More thoughts to follow after I finish writing a paper.
06.15.05
Phil Storer
I have to say many thanks to Phil Storer. For showing me the Adirondacks, for introducing me to Maddox, for creating a website for Grenada pro bono…and finally today for showing me this:
“In the Eastern Congo alone, the casualties of war on each single day equal the number of deaths of September 11th in New York.”
Phil is also the one who initially told me about The Corporation, which I still think he hasn’t seen.
I’ll link the new Grenada website in a couple days.
Everyone who lives in Columbus, please take Phil out for doing the design work for me. We didn’t have money to pay him. Blake, Mike, Eric, Palmer, Kelly, Fez, Blinn and The Bells should all take him and his wife out or some other nice thing. If you’re not on this list and you know Phil, take action! Or just bug these people about taking action.
06.14.05
sam beam
sam beam
Originally uploaded by Brandon Sipes.
From last night:
God, there is gold hidden deep in the ground
God, there’s a hangman that wants to come around
How we rise when we’re born
Like the ravens in the corn
On their wings, on our knees
Crawling careless from the sea
God give us love in the time that we have
God, there guns growing out of our bones
God, every road takes us farther from home
All these men that you made
How we wither in the shade
Of your trees, on your wings
We are carried to the sea
God give us love in the time that we have
