Honest Patriotism
Yesterday I finished reading Michael Medved’s The 10 Big Lies about America: Combating Destructive Distortions about Our Nation’s Past and Present. I gave the book a two star rating on Goodreads (you are a member of Goodreads, right?), and my feelings about the book really are captured in Goodreads’s description of its two star rating: “It [...]
Wendell Berry on “Conservatives” and “Liberals”
I listened to a couple more chapters of Michael Medved’s audiobook, The 10 Big Lies about America, which I wrote about yesterday on this blog. I listened to chapters on “Big Lie #5: The Power of Big Business Hurts the Country and Oppresses the People” and “Big Lie #6: Government Programs Offer the Only Remedy [...]
Patriotism…is a word which always commemorates a robbery
Food for thought from Mark Twain’s Notebook: Talking of patriotism what humbug it is; it is a word which always commemorates a robbery. There isn’t a foot of land in the world which doesn’t represent the ousting and re-ousting of a long line of successive “owners,” who each in turn, as “patriots” …defended it against the [...]
There Are No Unsacred Places
My pastor, Bob Henry, read this wonderful blog post this morning at Silverton Friends Church. The post is called “The Hill” and it was written by Mike Huber, pastor of West Hills Friends, a Quaker meeting in Portland. The blog post reminds me of something Wendell Berry wrote in a poem called “How To Be a Poet (to remind myself)”: There [...]
Guard Your Hearts
I avoid vitriolic talk radio, whether its coming from the right or the left. But recently I had little choice but to listen to a hate-filled left-wing talk show. (I was driving home late one night and it was the only thing on the radio that could keep me awake.) And now I’m listening to [...]
From “The Shaping of Things to Come”
“The contemporary traditional church is increasingly seen as the least likely option for those seeking an artistic, politically subversive, activist community of mystical faith.” This is from Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch in The Shaping of Things To Come: Innovation and Mission for the 21st-Century Church, in a section on Burning Man. What a rebuke. [...]
The Church as Memory-Keeper
On my commute, I have been listening to the audiobook of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, by Paul Greenberg. All day I’ve been thinking about the concept of “shifting baselines,” which in the fisheries world describes the decreasing thresholds used to describe “abundance” from one generation to the next. I’ve also [...]
The Taste of the Place
One of the keys to understanding Slow Church is captured in the seventeenth-century French phrase le goût de terroir, which can be translated “the taste of the place.” Carlo Petrini, co-founder of the Slow Food movement, writes often about terroir as “the combination of natural factors (soil, water, slope, height above sea level, vegetation, microclimate) and human ones (tradition [...]
The Moral Importance of the iPhone
In a 2007 interview with Arthur Boers, the philosopher Albert Borgmann makes the case that television is of moral importance. Borgmann says: “When I teach my ethics course I tell these relatively young people that the most important decision that they’ll make about their household is first whether they’re going to get a television and [...]
Brief Remarks at a Tree Dedication
The arts and craft college where I work sits on an 11-acre wooded campus in Portland’s west hills. It’s a beautiful campus, built on the site of an old filbert orchard, and it bewitches almost everyone who visits. A few years ago, the college put in two new beautiful, architecturally-significant buildings. Both buildings have been [...]
