Egregious Reader

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a prodigy who grew up in the upper class of Berlin during WWI and decided to study theology and become a pastor. He traveled extensively and was deeply impacted by his year in NYC at Union. While there, he spent a lot of time in Harlem working with Abyssinian Baptist and reading the literature of the Harlem Renaissance. He was one of the few early voices warning about the danger of the Fuhrer Principle and of Hitler specifically. He, with others in his family, eventually became part of the attempted coup against Hitler. This led to his death by the state just before Germany surrendered.  One of his famous writings is a longer letter called After Ten Years that he wrote to friends and some fellow conspirators. It is an essay that explores their work and their country with encouragement to not see all their efforts as wasted.  One of the sections is called On Stupidity. He is not using the word in the normal bully put down way, like “Look at the blackboa...

So I really enjoyed the On Being this week which interviewed a composer named Mohammed Fairouz and his newest album is called Follow, Poet which is a line from an Auden poem, but the whole thing begins with Kennedy speaking to a college a year or so before his death saying:  When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power narrows the area of man's concern, poetry reminds him of the richness and diversity of existence. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses. In that characteristic Kennedy voice that is so recognizable even though I have never heard the speech before. In the interview they are discussing how Kennedy and Anwar Sadat are heros and guiding lights for Mohammed and he makes this point: These figures, who appear to the people of their generation as tragic figures, become guiding lights to the people of the next generations and the generations to come. And you know, Krista, it absolutely proves the violence that some peo...

Last part! I didn’t think my meditations on evil would be complete without some discussion of death. To do this I re-read a very short meditation by Nicholas Wolterstorff called  Lament For A Son . His son, Eric, died in a climbing accident at 25 and these were his meditations and reflections during that time which 10 years later he decided to publish in hopes of helping others to share their feelings in times of loss and lament.  I couldn't help thinking of others I have known who have lost like this. My friend Brit drowned in the red sea while free diving. He was the oldest of five.  ​Silence. 'Was there a letter from Eric today?" "When did Eric say he would call?" Now only silence. Absence and silence. When we gather now there's always someone missing, his absence as present as our presence, his silence as loud as our speech. Still five children, but one always gone. (14) ​​I also think of a two different parents I have known who had to b...

I have been working on this for a few days and know it is really long! This was my attempt to approach the evil inside us and continue on with that idea from Wright (and Solzhenitsyn) that the dividing line between good and evil runs through each of our hearts. Or the Arcade Fire song that says: "Now the preachers they talk, up on the satellite; If your looking for hell, just try looking inside." ​ 1 - Two Understandings of the Cross In a book of sermons by Reinhold Niebuhr I read the sermon The Son of Man Must Suffer . This is what I spoke on Monday in our discussion when I said that when we equate Christianity with certain knowledge we no longer need Jesus. He says there are two major ways Christians have looked to the cross for meaning: On the one hand, the death on the cross means an heroic effort of self-regarding men, whose inveterate self-love is the root of all historical evil, to transmute self-regard into self-forgetfulness, into “sacrificial love” or...

This is really an exploration of an essay by  Ellenore Stump and this entire four part post is from emails I was sending to fellow  book club on this topic prompted by something we read in the book. (Of course, I don't think its normal to write four part emails to fellow book club participants ... Sometimes I can't help myself and I wanted to revisit all these writings anyway). Stump begins with a question. "If the is an omnipresent, omniscient, perfectly good God, how can it be that the world is full of evil? This response to evil is normal and healthy." But instead of trying to philosophize about this: the problem of evil; she describes evil, the evil we see in the newspapers and around us as a mirror, reflecting back to us our world and ourselves. "We ourselves--you and I, that is--are members of the species that does such things." She quotes Ecclesiastes: ​I observed all the oppression that goes on under the sun: the tears of the oppressed with none...

I was looking through my daughters work from last year (3rd Grade) and thought this was worth sharing with everyone.

On Friday coming home from work I caught this interview on NPR: ( here ) Its an interview with the Atlantic Writer Ta-Nehisi Coates about his cover article "A Case for Reparations." This question and Coates answer really stood out to me and point to the clearly larger and more complex issues that get lost in focusing on individual conscience issues: CORNISH: MTV had this survey on millennials and their attitude toward racial inequality and one of the things they found that millennials overwhelmingly see racism as a problem for older people, right? And then they aspire to colorblindness. Are you essentially trying to introduce this idea, which has like come and gone in many iterations over the decades to the Obama generation? COATES: Yeah, that makes me very, very sad. I think what happens is that those young people are the inheritance(ph) of an unfortunate idea, and that is that what really needs to happen to solve the - quote-unquote - "race problem" is to ...

Really awful story about the really awful things men do to those who are weak or different: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/12/victimised-blind-body-worn-cameras-abused It was supposed to be the start of a new life, but after moving to Stevenage Old Town in Hertfordshire last November, I found myself a target of haters and abusers in public. I still don't know why.  It began with a group of young lads attempting to guide me in to a lamppost before laughing and running away. Not long afterwards, the situation grew worse, with groups of mainly younger males circling me, swearing, and in one harrowing case, telling me they were filming for YouTube as they urged me to "trip over the curb you blind b@!%#" and "f@$% off back to blind land". Tom Waits sings in his song "God's Away on Business": There's a leak, there's a leak in the boiler room The poor, the lame, the blind Who are the ones that we kept in charge? K...