Word Of The Week

"Absolution"
A declaration by a bishop or priest announcing forgiveness by God to those who have confessed their sins and repented.

Dear Members Of The Superior Order [The Traditional Name For The Leadership Of The Episcopal Church. Really, That's Not Sarcasm.]

As you can see from above [click to enlarge], the President of the United States has taken as strong a stand as is diplomatically possible in the case of Pastor Nadarkhani's sentence of execution in Iran.  And good for him, too.  Since it is no secret that the Superior Order favors the current president and his policies, usually through reflective Episcopal Church polity and in official statements and press releases, would you now please issue a similar statement in opposition to this potential martyrdom?  Thanks.

Your friend,
Rob

P.S. The top five stories on the Episcopal News Service as of this posting are:

1.  Building relationships helps in the fight to end hunger, poverty

2.  Jerusalem bishop's residency permit reinstated after months of international diplomacy

3.  Episcopalians advocate to feed the hungry in America and abroad

4.  Restructuring discussions continue after House of Bishops meeting

5.  Washington bishop joins effort to free imprisoned hikers in Iran

Teacher Of The Year [So Far]

Teacher penalizes students for saying "bless you"

Here's the best quotation:  "After parents complained about students losing points for saying 'bless you', Cuckovich says he decided to stop the practice.  However, the teacher says he will just find another way to discipline students for saying 'bless you' in class."

Dude, you just teach Health.  As the kids say, or used to, "Chillax".

Surfers In The News

Surfers rescue great white shark

Iranian Christian Pastor Faces Death For Refusing To Recant

Last week, I received 47 separate messages to my e-mail, voice mail, and Facebook accounts concerning the wrongness of capital punishment in the case of Troy Davis, and 2 concerning the wrongness of capital punishment in the case of both Davis and Lawrence Brewer.  [Brewer was executed on the same day as Davis, although he received far less attention since defending Brewer from a death sentence would have required a greater dose of moral courage.] Most of the messages came from ordained colleagues, including two bishops, and lay members of the Episcopal Church.

Would you like to guess how many messages to my e-mail, voice mail, and Facebook accounts I've received from those 49 correspondents concerning this approaching atrocity?  If the answer is "0", you win the No-Prize.

Please read this article from the Independent Catholic News.  [I would have linked to the story in the Episcopal News Service, but they haven't picked it up yet.]

As In Coptic Christians

93,000 Copts left Egypt since March 

A Book Of Interest

Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians: The Religious Roots of Free Societies

From the book jacket:

Not only is anti-Christian secularism wrong, it is also risky. It's wrong because the very ideas on which liberal societies are based and in terms of which they can be justified—the concept of the dignity of the human person, the moral priority of the individual, the view that man is a “crooked timber” inclined to prevarication, the limited confidence in the power of the state to render him virtuous—are typical Christian or, more precisely, Judeo-Christian ideas. Take them away and the open society will collapse. Anti-Christian secularism is risky because it jeopardizes the identity of the West, leaves it with no self-conscience, and deprives people of their sense of belonging.

Dear Mr. and Ms. Government

I have the same guitar wood in my workshop.  Some of it I even bought from Gibson. Do I rate a visit from the U.S Fish and Wildlife SWAT team?  Is it just me or are the times getting a little odd and heavy-handed?  Between this and campus police tearing down posters and police departments removing/destroying sculpture because it doesn't satisfy law enforcement's definition of art, I'm beginning to wonder about this new reality. 

The Gibson Raid: Much to Fret About

This is a good summary: "In other words, a U.S. agency is enforcing foreign labor laws that the foreign government doesn’t even think were violated."

More here and here.

Universities Now Have "Threat Assessment Teams"?

And they apparently police nerdy posters put up on office doors.  Wow, no wonder higher education costs so much, as the budget has to provide for this highly particular responsibility.

'Firefly' and Anti-Fascism Posters Get Professor Threatened with Criminal Charges on University of Wisconsin Campus

I used to put all sorts of provocative quotations on the door of my office when I was a philosophy teacher.  My students would even add some of their own to the collage.  That seems to be natural in an educational environment.  Surely, there was some more collegial way in which to address this situation.

[By the way, if you never heard of "Firefly", it was a combination Western and Sci/Fi show on television almost a decade ago that was cancelled after one season.  As is often the case, it has a very loyal following with fans still dressing as the characters when they attend the various comic book and science fiction conventions offered across the country.]

My Old Outfit Makes The Headlines

Mt. Frissell rescue took six hours to complete

When I first joined the Lakeville Hose Company [that's their official name], I was surprised at how many calls were those for rescuing the lost and injured among the various trails that intertwine that portion of the Connecticut/Massachusettes border.  I think it's easy to forget that, no matter how populous is New England, one is never very far from the deep woods.

Archaeological News

Dead Sea Scrolls Are Now Online

Well, That's Big Of Them

Veterans Administration agrees not to censor prayer at Houston cemetery

Honestly, I'm Having A Little Trouble Figuring Out Which Side I'm On

Allouez cemetery employee charged with stealing guitar from casket

I appreciate the sentiment, but why not bequeath a vintage guitar to someone who'll play it?  Imagine if the violins of Stradivarius had all been buried.  Also, stealing is wrong of course, but I think even I could mount a legal defense for this cemetery worker.

What Surfer Funerals Are Like

Bodyboarders paddle out for Eddie Solomon

Because For Some They're Synonymous

Offenders in Ala. town can choose jail or church

The Fifteenth Sunday After Pentecost

This week Ezekiel reveals the promises of monotheism, Paul bids us to work out our salvation in "fear and trembling", and Jesus, yet again, teaches radical redefinition of community.  All this plus the power of actions over words.

The lections may be found here.

Surfboard Tales, Part Twelve

It was called Dingo’s Beach Club and it wasn’t on any of the tourist maps. Actually, it wasn’t on any map at all as it existed mostly in the mind of a fourteen-year-old Mexican entrepreneur [empresario], with the help of what appeared to be a battalion of his siblings. Dingo, whose Christian name was Domingo, had claimed by right of imagination a portion of beachfront on the Costa Maya near the border with Belize where there was nothing except the ruins of what was once going to be a 3000 room hotel. As could often happen south of the border, the financial backing for the hotel evaporated, leaving a partially poured foundation that featured a phalanx of rusted rebar jutting from concrete that was cracking in the sun. When Dingo arrived on the scene, it served mostly as a home to iguana.

So, like any enterprising young person, Dingo found some discarded beach chairs and torn umbrellas [well, some may have been “found” at the hotel beaches in Playa del Carmen], arranged them in a pleasant crescent on the beach, “bought” a cooler, ice, sodas and baked goods from the local Bimbo [that’s a bakery and market chain in Mexico, just so you know], and painted a driftwood sign that simply said “Dingo’s”, with an arrow pointing towards the beach. To help generate traffic, Dingo also offered the driver of the local pollo bus a piece of the action if he would stop at the entrance to the property to “check the bus’s radiator”. “But only if he carries turistas”, Dingo explained to me.

No one came, of course, because Dingo’s had to compete with luxury hotels and well-maintained beaches from Cancun to Tulum; until the day when a couple of surfers realized that Dingo’s Beach Club was the site of one of the best surf breaks on the eastern coast of Mexico.

“Senior Whiskers [pronounced whee-skers], that was the day when my thoughts became eléctrico. That is the day when this became Dingo’s Beach and Surfing Club”.

Not having the backing, however transient, of a bank or brace of investors, Dingo harvested discarded portions of fiberglass hulls from boats in a repair yard in nearby Puerto Aventuras, cut them with an old hacksaw into the rough shape of a commercial bodyboard, sanded down the edges, and offered them for rent for a mere 10 pesos a day. Plus gratuity. The day after his first rentals, he had his sister sew pieces of old wetsuits into bands that could be worn around the hands of the bodyboarders, since Dingo’s sanding of the ragged fiberglass edges would not have satisfied any heath and safety inspection. Plus, having renters cut open their palms tended to reduce the attractiveness of renting.

“It is my own line of boards. Is it not eléctrico?” I had to agree that it was.

It was a pleasant place to surf, although one could not let go of one’s board, as it would suddenly become group property. Even if the price of lukewarm Bimbo soda was a little steep [“Twenty pesos, but tax free.”], Dingo was a good host and a number of gringo surfers would stop by, admire his organizational skills, stay away from the deadly Dingo bodyboards, surf that funky break all day long, get their pictures taken with Dingo [tax free], and enjoy some time at what was one of the last undeveloped beaches in Mexico.

Everything has a lifespan, of course. I had hoped to return to the Costa Maya the next winter, but work got in the way. The year after that, Hurricane Wilma hung around the coastline for four days and stripped the landscape of trees, the homes and hotels of their roofs, and, as I discovered, altered the sea bottom so that the wonderful surf break disappeared. By the time I returned, nearly four years later, Dingo’s Beach Club, and Dingo, had disappeared and some Mexican surfers had started to put up a small village of bungalows by the beach. They were half-built and abandoned.

No one with whom I spoke knew what happened to Dingo and his siblings, but I figured wherever he was, it was going to be eléctrico.

Excerpt from Reading Water, all rights reserved ©2011

Hmm

Atheism as mental deviance

As Bill Cosby Once Told His Little Brother, "The Police Are Your Mother And Father", Cont.

OC Couple Threatened With $500-Per-Meeting Fines For Home Bible Study

Everything You Know Is Wrong

Speed of light 'broken' by scientists

"It was Albert Einstein, no less, who proposed more than 100 years ago that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light."

This has always been my problem with the expression "the science is settled", as is often said by some members of the environmental movement.  The thing about science is that it's never settled; there are always new things to learn and newer, more accurate ways of understanding the elements of creation.  It's like saying that theology is settled, and...oh, wait a minute.  Yep, there are people who say that, too, and they are equally as naive.  [Unless they wear a purple shirt, in which case they are always right.]