Category: Words and Rabble

Posted on

Two Futures: Nukes or No?

A couple years ago, I ran across Tyler Wigg-Stevenson in an article he wrote, “A Merciful White Flash.” Tyler recounted the amazing story of his post-grad years, living under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge (hilariously, living under his desk) and working for an advocacy group committed to the elimination of nuclear weapons. Tyler was not religious by any means, far from it. But the evil he encountered – and the dire prospects for a world binging on nuclear weaponry – led Tyler to faith. As he said:

Before I became a Christian, I had the worst lunch breaks in the world. They went like this:
Every day I would take my bowl of rice and beans into the noonday sun and sit on the tailgate of my ’87 Ranger, which commanded a billion-dollar view. Armed with the painfully earnest idealism of a new college graduate, I had scored a job at a nonprofit organization located in a house-cum-office just off the southern foot of the Golden Gate Bridge. I’d sit there in the parking lot, humming Otis Redding, literally at the dock of the bay, watching the tide roll away. As I ate, I’d take in the bridge, the Marin headlands, Alcatraz and the East Bay, and the stunning Mediterranean sweep of the San Francisco skyline.
And every day the scenery was swept clean, in my mind’s horrified eye, by the merciless white flash of a nuclear airburst.

.
I like Tyler. I like his work. I’m thankful for his voice. We’ve traded books (you should check out his recent title on consumer Christianity, Brand Jesus). Now, Tyler leads Two Futures Project, which “dreams a noble dream of reducing and eventually eliminating nuclear weapons from our world.”

Today, he has an opinion piece in the Washington Post. I support Tyler and Two Futures and prayerfully hope for the day when nuclear arsenals will be no more.

Posted on

Double Down

So, KFC is coming out with a new sandwich, the Double Down (yes, the “bread” is fried chicken):

I wonder if they will soon be joining Ray’s Pizza in NYC and adding one of these I spotted at their cash register a couple weeks ago:

Posted on

Faux Community

In The Villages, Florida, a well-funded developer has created a planned community unprecedented in vision and scope. The Villages has been created to look historic, look quaint, look pristine. With fake historical plaques, fake railroad tracks, ubiquitous golf carts that look like Bentleys and Mini-Coopers and a population engineered to weed out the undesirables (in this case, the young whipper-snappers), The Villages population has exploded, from 8,000 to 80,000 in ten years.

Here are a few snippets from the recent NPR story:

But history means something different in The Villages. The whole place was built in a year or so, Blechman says. But it has made-up history, including a man-made lake, which is supposed to be 100 years old with a lighthouse, and two manufactured downtowns that were themed by entertainment specialists from Universal Studios…

Everything’s owned by the developer,” he says. “The government is owned by the developer. Everything’s privatized – and they’re happy with that. You know, they’ve traded in the ballot box for the corporate suggestion box.

I don’t fault anyone residing in The Villages for wanting an energetic, beautiful space for spending their golden years with friends, and I’m sure that there is much about life at The Villages to commend it. However, this is a sorrowful ode to our longing for community – we are so desperate for community that we will create a plastic version of it if we must, just to get some modicum of the real thing.

Truthfully, I think that many of us have done the same in our churches. We have put together structures and groups and hang out the shingles that say “community.” If we’re honest with ourselves, though, we have quite a facade going, and we’re shriveling up inside. We’re The Truman Show.

There is no way to get the real thing without the mess. You can’t build much of anything genuine overnight, no matter how well-funded or polished or comprehensive your master plan might be. I can’t discover a lifelong friendship without the mess and mingle of odd-hour coffees, shared experiences, boring seasons, weddings and funerals and long stretches where nothing of any consequence is happening – nothing other than living in the middle of another person’s life, and them in mine.

As one resident said, “Golf carts should look like golf carts.” Amen, sister.

Posted on

The Gospel According to Biff

Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore (3.5 Stars)

Moore has one of the sharpest, steadiest wits I’ve read. I laughed out loud more in this book than I have in a very long time, probably since Sedaris’ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim. Moore’s sarcasm is potent, which makes sense – apparently his character Biff invented sarcasm.

However, at times the book drug on for me. The last 80 pages felt a bit like he was just trying to rush to finish, and I was okay with that – I kinda wanted to be done.

This may be the most irreverent book I’ve read, and if you are a person of Christian faith and don’t have space for laughing at ourselves or just wondering what an alternate story might be like (or are uneasy with some seedy scenes), then you should steer clear. But if you want to read a humor writer who will actually make you laugh – and consistently – then you can’t go wrong.

On the faith note, one more thought – Moore intuitively gets it, that Jesus was a person of compassion and justice who would subvert every sort of earthly power. We all seem to know that Jesus was a revolutionary.

Posted on

Skylight and Starlight

Well, I’m typing this on a bus, the Starlight Express from New York City back to Charlottesville. Did you get that – on a bus! Yet another technological wonder. I was at a conference, but I needed to come home early – our house is full of sick people.

I wanted to share this piece (interview, really) I did with Kate Barton and Skylight Studios. Juli Kalbaugh (our friend, painter and current housemate) works with Kate @ Skylight.

The conference I’m leaving and this piece I’m sharing have a common theme: the hope and belief that art can (should) do good and make our world more beautiful. I’d like to say more about it, but I’m running out of electrical juice on my laptop – and that is one technological feat that has yet to be conquered. But my friend Andrew Albers is working on it…

But what about you? Any art that has made your world more beautiful?

Posted on

Let us Welcome the New Year

And now let us welcome the new year – full of new things that have never been ~ Rainer Maria Rilke

Another fresh start. The Christian year began with Advent, and now the calendar tells us of still another beginning.  We’ve purchased a new calendar for the wall – our old one finished, filled with scribbles and reminders and names, each mark reminding us of birthdays and evenings out and family deaths and dinners with friends. Reasons to celebrate and reasons for sorrow, but mostly celebrate.

And we begin again. This is one of the things I am most thankful about in the Christian way of seeing the world – we are always beginning again. The night never stays; the morning is always new – in fact I think one of the psalmists pretty much said just that. Whatever has been, good or ill – newness comes. Recently, in a distressful moment, I told Miska of my fear of an upcoming experience, fearful because of how miserably I had traversed just such an experience a few years ago. Miska looked at me with that light smile she offers to counter my overblown heaviness. “Oh,” Miska said, “isn’t it great – you get a do-over.”

Another year to see what grace holds for us. Another year of new things that have yet to be.

Top