Daily Archives: April 27, 2008

General

A Flurry of Activity

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32  bar steady 30.06  0mpn NNW dewpoint 25 Spring

            Last Quarter Moon of Growing

A three day flurry of activity has come to an end.  On Friday I gave two Weber tours.  On Saturday I attended a workshop on Natural Rhythms and Time.  Today I preached at Groveland.  Now I have three days in a row to catch up on this and that.  I need it.

Kate’s been gone since Wednesday.  Life is more empty without her here, but one of the beauties of our relationship is our mutual ability to function on our own.  That makes both of us freer for family and for other things that come up.  I talked to her twice over the last two days and both times she was with Ruthie at the playground.  She comes home this Wednesday.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Friends

Deeply Skeptical of Industrializaton and Technology

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42  bar falls 30.10 3mph WNW dewpoint 22 Spring

             Last quarter Moon of Growing

Into St. Paul today.  Preached (sort 0f) at Groveland.  I say sort of because the presentation consisted of me telling jokes about Unitarian-Universalists and the group discussing their meaning as it relates to UU identity.  This comes from a technique dredged up from those long ago years in anthropology.  Joking behavior, according to anthropologists, helps determine group boundaries.  And so it did.

The discussion that ensued was better than I could have hoped.  It was heartfelt, honest, sometimes bordering on painful.  The latter emerged during a discussion of UU discomfort with faith, with the act of vulnerability.  This leaves UU’s, as the discussion went, with a blank spot when confronted with grief, crisis. 

On the way home I stopped at Cheapo on Snelling and loaded up on mindless action films, the kind I prefer to watch when I’m working out. 

During lunch I finished Princess Mononoke again.  It is a wonderful, complex and beautiful work that gives pause.  It would be perfect to show at the same as Lord of the Rings because both Tolkein and Mizasashi are deeply skeptical of industrialization and technology, yet also unflinching in representing the contradictions and trade-offs as not black or white.  Tolkein seems more either/or than Mizasashi, so I prefer Mizasashi’s take on thing.