Change
The word change normally refers to new beginnings. But the mystery of transformation more often happens not when something new begins, but when something old falls apart. The pain of something old falling apart—chaos—invites the soul to listen at a deeper level, and sometimes forces the soul to go to a new place.
Richard Rohr
…the ways we view and treat other people.
Do we view them through the lens of sacrifice — that is, with a purity filter that sets boundaries, excluding and even expelling those we deem “unclean”? Or, do we use the filter of mercy, which follows the impulse to welcome, leading us to cross boundaries, to set aside our natural “disgust” for that which is outside our bounds of “acceptable” and to invite the other to participate in relationship with us?
Chaplin Mike
Communications Technology
The communications technology that was to become the concourse and meeting of all the world, bringing the longed-for peace to all the world, becomes a weapon to break the world in pieces.
Sabbath Poems – Wendell Berry
Apple Store conversations
I look around the store, packed with products that promise connection, and remark that it looks and feels like a temple. Turkle nods. She surveys the airy space, streaked with sunlight, bustling with people, and thunderous with the din of human voices. “Everybody’s talking,” she muses. “And nobody’s talking about anything except what’s on the machines.”
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/01/the-eavesdropper/355727/
Feelings
I suspect that feelings always played a bigger role in policymaking than we might like to think. I mean, FDR set the price of gold based on what numbers he thought were lucky.
Jonah Goldberg
Sunflowers
The sunflower, that plant which in shadow turns its head relentlessly toward the sun, is the patron saint of those in despair. When darkness descends on the soul, it is time, like the sunflower, to go looking for whatever good thing in life there is that can bring us comfort.
Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope
Grasping
If we did not grasp so tightly, it would not be so difficult to let go, true, but in the end it is not the grasping that is the problem. It is the inability to relax, to detach, to disengage long before this present debacle that takes us down. We have centered our lives in impermanence and failed to call it fleeting. We make one thing the definition of the self and when it goes, the core of us goes with it.
Scarred by Struggle, Transformed by Hope
Grief
twelfth-century Persian poet Jalaluddin Rumi put it this way: I saw Grief drinking a cup of sorrow and called out, “It tastes sweet, does it not?” “You’ve caught me,” Grief answered, “And you’ve ruined my business. How can I sell sorrow when you know it’s a blessing?”
Decline of Religion in America
By any measure, religiosity in America is declining. As this report will show, since peaking in 1960, the share of American adults attending any religious service in a typical week has fallen from 50 percent to about 35 percent, while the share claimed as members by any religious body has fallen from over 75 percent to about 62 percent. Finally, the share of Americans who self-identify or report being affiliated with any religion has fallen from over 95 percent to about 75 percent.
Promise and peril: The history of American religiosity and its recent decline.
Low Point
The lowest point in American religion, in terms of affiliation and church attendance, was in 1780.
Promise and peril: The history of American religiosity and its recent decline.
American Christianity
American Christianity makes salvation a personal commodity. It’s something you acquire through invocation–say the right prayer and you’re in. It places certain social and moral expectations on us, but it doesn’t infringe upon our liberty. No one can place expectations upon us. It’s an insurance policy we purchase that allows us to pursue the American dream without fear of our eternal future.
Jayson Bradley
Patriotism
All that patriotism requires, and all that it can be,
is eagerness to maintain intact and incorrupt
the founding principles of the nation, and to preserve
undiminished the land and the people. If national conduct
forsakes these aims, it is one’s patriotic duty
to say so and oppose. What else have we to live for?
Wendell Berry
Opinions
We now have pocket-sized megaphones for our self-righteousness. The sheer number of opining voices confronting us on any given day is fathomless.
Around three billion of us globally are on social media. In the U.S., people spend an average of two hours per day on networking platforms — a total of one month a year, scrolling through catfights and cat photos.
Straw man Fallacy
The “Straw Man” fallacy is one where someone “deliberately misrepresents another person’s argument, re-frames it as something extreme and ridiculous, and then attacks that “Straw Man” instead.”
Winner of Sand sculpture contest
SO MUCH TO THINK ABOUT