Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Praying for Obama

Apparently these shirts are no longer for sale. It was a nice way for conservative Christians to show their support for President Obama, unless you happened to look up Psalm 109:8.

Which is Greener: Paper or Digital?

The answer may surprise you. From an interview posted on ZDNet.com:

“Other than pushing the ‘cool’ factor, one of the main selling points being made by marketers of eReaders is that they are greener than print. It is little surprise that the common view held by consumers who don’t know the backstory is that going digital means going green and saving trees. Many are in for a rude awakening. When subjected to ‘cradle-to-cradle’ life cycle analysis, eReading is not nearly as green as many naively assume it is.”

“There is no question that print media could do a better job of managing the sustainability of its supply chains and waste streams, but it’s a misguided notion to assume that digital media is categorically greener. Computers, eReaders, and cell phones don’t grow on trees and their spiraling requirement for energy is unsustainable.”

“Making a computer typically requires the mining and refining of dozens of minerals and metals including gold, silver, and palladium as well as extensive use of plastics and hydrocarbon solvents. To function, digital devices require a constant flow of electrons that predominately come from the combustion of coal, and at the end of their all-too-short useful lives electronics have become the single largest stream of toxic waste created by man. Until recently, there was little, if any, voluntary disclosure of the lifecycle ‘backstory’ of digital media.”

“Sadly, print has come to be seen as a wasteful, inefficient and environmentally destructive medium, despite the fact that much of print media is based on comparatively benign and renewable materials. In addition, print has incredible potential to be a far more sustainable medium than it is today…

I was watching CBS News last night and watched a segment about the hottest toy this Christmas: Zhu Zhu Pets. A small 16 person company in St. Louis came up with the electronic hamster idea and Toys R Us picked it up and they can't keep them on the shelves. So now they are ramping up three more factories - in China, of course - to keep up with demand. If they can get them onto the shelves they are projecting $50,000,000 in sales. Not bad for a 16 person company.

Where were these when our kids were little. We had so many living, breathing, pooping hamsters and dead hamster horror stories. Battery operated ones would have been great.

Everything Is Already Made In China

Nobel Prize winning economist/NYTimes columnist Paul Krugman has been arguing that the Chinese government is severely undervaluing its currency and that this is contributing to the worldwide recession. Krugman says, among other things, that the unbalanced flow of cheap Chinese exports to America would be balanced out with more American goods going to China - if the Chinese currency were fairly priced. I don't pretend to understand all of the economic arguments here, but I was reading a rebuttal in Forbes.com by a Chinese businessman and Forbes contributor Shaun Reign and was amused by this response:

Krugman believes appreciation would allow the Chinese people to buy more American exports. But what American exports? Everything is already made in China. America exported its manufacturing jobs years ago.

Good Housekeeping

Via Rod Dreher I came upon this very good speech by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams on the economy. Here is a sample:

'Economy' is simply the Greek word for 'housekeeping'. Remembering this is a useful way of getting things in proportion, so that we don't lose sight of the fact that economics is primarily about the decisions we make so as to create a habitat that we can actually live in. We are still haunted by the dogma that the economic world, 'economic realities', economic motivations and so on belong in a completely different frame of reference from the sort of human decisions we usually make and from considerations of how we build a place to live. And to speak about building a place to live, a habitat, reminds us too that we look for an environment that is stable, 'sustainable' in the popular jargon, a home that we can reasonably expect will be an asset for the next generation.

Economics understood in abstraction from all this is not just an academic error: it actually dismantles the walls of the home. Appealing to the market as an independent authority, unconnected with human decisions about 'housekeeping', has meant in many contexts over the last few decades a ruinous legacy for heavily indebted countries, large-scale and costly social disruption even in developed economies; and, most recently, the extraordinary phenomena of a financial trading world in which the marketing of toxic debt became the driver of money-making – until the bluffs were all called at the same time.

If we are not to be caught indefinitely in a trap we have designed for ourselves, we have to ask what an economy would look like if it were genuinely focused on making and sustaining a home – a social environment that offered security for citizens, including those who could not contribute in obvious ways to productive and profit-making business, an environment in which we felt free to forego the tempting fantasies of unlimited growth in exchange for the knowledge that we could hand on to our children and grandchildren a world, a social and material nexus of relations that would go on nourishing proper three-dimensional human beings – people whose family bonds, imaginative lives and capacity for mutual understanding and sympathy were regarded as every bit as important as their material prosperity.

Practically speaking, this means that both at the individual and the national level we have to question what we mean by 'growth'. The ability to produce more and more consumer goods (not to mention financial products) is in itself an entirely mechanical measure of wealth. It sets up the vicious cycle in which it is necessary all the time to create new demand for goods and thus new demands on a limited material environment for energy sources and raw materials. By the hectic inflation of demand it creates personal anxiety and rivalry. By systematically depleting the resources of the planet, it systematically destroys the basis for long-term well-being. In a nutshell, it is investing in the wrong things.

The whole speech given as a keynote address at an economics conference in London is a good read. I must admit that I am somewhat torn on the issue of what kind of economic growth we need. On the one hand I think it is beyond dispute that if the rest of the world grew in the manner that the US economy has grown it would mean the environmental degradation of the planet. On the other hand lots of people are out of work right now including friends of mine. We need some kind of economic growth to put people back to work.

I read lots about small-scale, environmentally friendly, self-sustaining, economic growth and it all sounds very attractive and ethical. I am all for stepping off of the mindless, dispiriting consumer train of endless addictive growth that also despoils the plant. But how a better way gets implemented on a large scale that avoids massive unemployment and dislocation isn't clear to me. On the other (third?) hand, our current way of living is no guarantee that we won't see massive unemployment and dislocation. So maybe it is time to give "another way of living" a try.

Victory Gardens

Last night fellow church member Veda Kanitz and I attended a workshop on community gardens at Dakota Tech. The Dakota County Health Department is making grants available next year to organizations to start or expand community gardens. It is perfect timing for us at Open Circle as a community garden is one of the next phases of our landscaping overhaul at church. I would say based on what I heard last night that we have an excellent chance of getting a grant.

During last night's presentation mention was made of Dowling Community Garden in Minneapolis, one of the few continuing Victory Gardens in the United States. When this was said a man sitting next to me, just slightly younger than me, asked: "what is a Victory Garden?" The older-than-me man sitting on my opposite side replied that he was "too young to know."

Well, I am too young to remember Victory Gardens, but I have been using a Victory Garden Cookbook for more than 20 years, and used to watch the PBS show regularly as we once upon a time had a large vegetable garden.

Victory Gardens were begun during World War I and it is said that during Word War II there were nearly 20 million Victory Gardens in the country that provided more than a third of the produce the nation consumed.

Like many Americans our family is rediscovering the virtues of vegetable gardening. As our home yard is full of perennials and shrubs, we have been gardening on a small plot at church, as have a few other families. The community garden would allow us to open this up to the neighborhood. In particular we would have a chance to offer plots to some of the lower income families who live in the neighborhood around the church.

We need Victory Gardens again. A home or community garden not only provides fresh produce, but it cuts down on dependence on food that is shipped from across the country and world. It saves oil. It makes us more self-sustaining. It gets our hands dirty in a good way. It builds community. If that isn't a recipe for Victory I don't know what is.

Parents Who Yell

The NYTimes has an article today about today's parents who don't spank; instead they yell:

Many in today’s pregnancy-flaunting, soccer-cheering, organic-snack-proffering generation of parents would never spank their children. We congratulate our toddlers for blowing their nose (“Good job!”), we friend our teenagers (literally and virtually), we spend hours teaching our elementary-school offspring how to understand their feelings. But, incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells.

“I’ve worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking,” said Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, which teaches parenting skills in classes, individual coaching sessions and an online course. “This is so the issue right now. As parents understand that it’s not socially acceptable to spank children, they are at a loss for what they can do. They resort to reminding, nagging, timeout, counting 1-2-3 and quickly realize that those strategies don’t work to change behavior. In the absence of tools that really work, they feel frustrated and angry and raise their voice. They feel guilty afterward, and the whole cycle begins again.”

Been there; done that. Although there is an apocryphal story that my son Ryan loves to tell about me once chasing him around the house with a wooden spoon, we weren't spankers when our kids were little. There were a few pops on the butt when they were toddlers (and apparently, according to this article, we stunted our kids emotional development when we did that - sorry kids) we mostly used time outs and loss of privileges and tried to teach about natural consequences.

But there a few times - maybe more than a few - when I yelled. I will only speak for myself here. I can still remember what it felt like to be at my wits end and lose it with the yelling, and then feel absolutely mortified afterwards. I can remember Meagan especially bursting into tears once after I yelled at her because she so rarely pushed my buttons. Ryan was a little better at knowing where they were.

There comes a point when your kids get old enough and they begin telling you about what a bad parent you are, and you just say "you can take it up with your therapist." And then they go off to college and you look back fondly on helping with homework and the lunches and reading to them and all the hugs and kisses that so often made things better. There are a few things, though, that I would just as soon forget about. It's funny how those are the things that come up around the dinner table now when we are all together.

Leadership Conversations

Sometimes it takes 15 years to get it right.

We have never done much in the way of formal leadership training at Open Circle. We are a relatively small congregation and our structure has been pretty fluid through the years. Leaders have just stepped up and into many positions; for certain positions we have a congregational call process where we ask the congregation to identify the people who best represent the values of our community. Mostly we have been blessed with hard-working, gifted people who have stepped up to get the work done. But not too long ago we had a bad "match" that ended badly and we realized that it would be helpful to have a structure in place to have intentional conversations about leadership with current and prospective leaders in order to get to know prospective leaders and to better match gifts with needs.

Two books we found very helpful in this regard are Bruce Sanguin's The Emerging Church and Anna Christie's Evoking Change. Both talk about the importance of paying attention to the emotional and spiritual health of leaders and both have suggestions for how to better equip leaders.

So we are 5 weeks into a 7 week session on the spiritual and emotional foundations of leadership. It has been a great experience with the group we have. Each week we begin with a meditation; each meditation is led by a member of the group. That person is also responsible that week to share something of their creativity. We have had baking, crafts, writing and journaling thus far. Then there is the information part that includes: spiritual practice, meta-narratives of scripture, faith sharing, self-definition, boundaries, and staying connected across differences. We will close with a session on group dynamics. We have had great conversations about our roles as leaders at church, in families, at work. The benefit of this kind of gathering for getting to know leaders, learning from each other, and better matching gifts with needs is readily apparent.

Two weeks ago we had a very interesting session on faith sharing. Faith sharing is something we don't do much of in progressive churches. We know what we don't believe, and many of us are fairly uncomfortable in settings where people are sharing their faith. But it seems fairly important for leaders in a progressive church to have moved beyond "I don't believe this anymore" to be able to comfortably talk about what they do believe. So the group had a week to do their homework and everyone came with a written statement of faith. None of them sounded anything like the Nicene Creek - Thank God! We are learning something here - but each was well-thought out and articulated a positive statement of that person's faith. It was a great exercise.

It's never to late to learn from your mistakes and change the way you do things.

The Perfect Church

Posted today on a COB listserve:

It strikes me as reasonable that none of us can ever really know exactly what a church is like, until we enter it ourselves, until we become a part of it. And then, of course, that church is "like" what it is like, at least in part, because we have joined it!!

Its kind of the ecclesiastical "Uncertainty Principle." You cannot both know "the perfect church" and be a part of that church, yourself. By joining the church, we make it imperfect! All of us. . . . . .

Running in the Snow

My favorite time of year to be out running is in the fall when the air is cool and the leaves are in color (at least the colors I can see!). But my second favorite time of year to be running is when snow is falling. Today was one of those wet, snowy days - no ice yet - that was perfect for running. I try very hard to avoid being "preachy" about the benefits of exercise, but it is one of the simplest ways I know to feel better immediately with that endorphin high, and long term from being in shape. Why everyone doesn't get that I don't understand.

Headlines That Make Me Laugh

Limits on exec pay cause worries of brain drain

That's the headline from an MSNBC article. Would these be the same brains that led these banking and auto giants into the mess they, and we, are in right now?

Spong's Done Arguing About Homosexuality

I haven't read anything by John Shelby Spong recently not because I find him disagreeable but because I don't really think he has said anything knew in a while. But a friend sent me Spong's recent email posting and I found it interesting:

I have made a decision. I will no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. I will no longer engage the biblical ignorance that emanates from so many right-wing Christians about how the Bible condemns homosexuality, as if that point of view still has any credibility. I will no longer discuss with them or listen to them tell me how homosexuality is "an abomination to God," about how homosexuality is a "chosen lifestyle," or about how through prayer and "spiritual counseling" homosexual persons can be "cured." Those arguments are no longer worthy of my time or energy...

I make these statements because it is time to move on. The battle is over. The victory has been won. There is no reasonable doubt as to what the final outcome of this struggle will be. Homosexual people will be accepted as equal, full human beings, who have a legitimate claim on every right that both church and society have to offer any of us. Homosexual marriages will become legal, recognized by the state and pronounced holy by the church...

Spong deserves enormous credit for the pioneering leadership he provided on this issue. Long before mainstream Christianity had joined the battle for glbt equality Spong was up to his keisters in the struggle. So it is good to hear him say that the battle has been won.

Is he right? Is the battle over? I think it is. I stopped arguing with conservatives about this issue several years ago for the same reason. The final outcome is no longer in doubt and I see no purpose in arguing with the "flat-earthers" who can't seem to see that they are making the same kind of arguments once made by Christians who defended slavery. Whatever the Bible may say about homosexuality, followers of Jesus should be welcoming homosexuals with open arms and celebrating their out, open, and married presence in the church.

It's one of the (but not the only) reasons I don't do denomination stuff anymore. We are still fighting the battle there and all the while the denomination dies. And the conservatives don't care; they are going to take the ship down. So be it. I have more than enough to do welcoming those wounded by these church wars and figuring out together how we move forward and live into a new and liberating vision of what it means to be a follower of Jesus.

So bully for Spong!

Witches in Africa

Apparently it has become something of a competition between some Christian groups in Africa to identify and punish witches:

The idea of witchcraft is hardly new, but it has taken on new life recently partly because of a rapid growth in evangelical Christianity. Campaigners against the practice say around 15,000 children have been accused in two of Nigeria's 36 states over the past decade and around 1,000 have been murdered. In the past month alone, three Nigerian children accused of witchcraft were killed and another three were set on fire.

...Sam Itauma of the Children's Rights and Rehabilitation Network said it is the most vulnerable children — the orphaned, sick, disabled or poor — who are most often denounced...

"Even churches who didn't use to 'find' child witches are being forced into it by the competition," said Itauma. "They are seen as spiritually powerful because they can detect witchcraft and the parents may even pay them money for an exorcism."

I hear evangelicals in my denomination and others speak glowingly about the growth of Christianity in Africa and how this is the hope for the future of the church, and a haven for those in this country wanting to find a more comfortable adjudicatory fit.

We stopped burning witches in this country hundreds of years ago and have made continual , if slow and hard-fought, progress in human rights for minorities, women, and gays. And this is the Christianity they want to take us back to. (And no I am not saying any one I know endorses this kind of behavior, but this is the spirit of much of the celebrated African Christianity - ant-gay, anti-Muslim, anti-woman, anti-witch.)

Hummers Still Around

For the last couple of days I have been watching a hummingbird at the feeder. On Friday morning we had our first hard freeze and I woke up early in the morning thinking about the glass feeder I still had outside, worrying that it might be frozen and cracked. So I got up and brought it inside; the contents were frozen but the feeder hadn't cracked.

As it was getting light I watched outside and saw the hummer buzzing around where the feeder was supposed to be. I took the feeder back outside and shortly thereafter the hummer was feeding.

I shared this on Sunday morning with a woman at church whose spouse is an avid birder. He called me up in the afternoon and wondered if he might come and watch for the bird. He was at the house for about half an hour when it showed up. He identified it as a female Ruby-throated hummingbird; I thought I had been seeing some red on the neck but his picture and his better eye than mine didn't see any. In any case he said this was the latest confirmed report of a hummingbird in MN. (Update: On reflection I wonder if he said that if it had been a male it would have been the latest... I will have to find out.)

This morning we woke up to another fresh snowfall of several inches. I went out and cleaned off the feeder posts before light but then didn't watch the feeder until later in the morning. It didn't take long for the bird to show up and it has been in and out of the feeder every half hour or so.

Obama Wins Peace Price

President Obama has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Unfortunately, he hasn't done anything yet to deserve it. And I am an Obama supporter. It isn't his fault that he won, of course. In fact, if I am correct nominations were closed for the prize shortly after he took office. So the Nobel Committee was really awarding the American people the prize for moving the country in a different direction.

It will be interesting to see how Obama responds. I hope he either declines it or accepts it on behalf of the American people. If he accepts it he has big shoes to fill to live into its meaning. If we get mired down even further in Afghanistan or Iraq, or the Middle East blows up, or we get hit with a big terrorist strike, this prize will be prime material for political commercials in the next election cycle.

Evangelical Christian Changes Mind on Homosexuality

Evangelical Christian Brent Childers explains in Newsweek how he changed his mind on homosexuality:

So what it is that would bring someone from a place where he once declared himself a "Jesse Helms Republican," a man who condemned homosexuality as a threat to children and society, told his own son that being gay is a ticket to hell, to travel from Hickory, N.C., to the West Lawn of the Capitol building on Oct. 11, 2009? How can one travel from the seemingly impossible road of bigotry to one of acceptance and love for our LGBT brothers and sisters? The answer is one that I hope religious leaders such as Pat Robertson and James Dobson (and most importantly, their followers) will hear.

It's because something deep inside told me that I needed to step out in faith onto a bridge of knowledge and understanding. I didn't know where this bridge would take me but something was telling me it was a path I needed to walk. My own mother challenged me in 2003 to look at my beliefs and the true intent behind the teachings I held in blind faith. "Do you think your views are Christ-like?" she asked me. Her question was dead on: once I walked away from the Church's teachings of rejection and condemnation, my relationship with God transcended to a higher spiritual plateau. I realized an unparalleled sense of spiritual clarity when I opened my heart and mind to a genuine expression of love, compassion, and acceptance of all sexual orientations and gender identities.

This new voice—Christ's voice—became the core principles of my faith: love, compassion, and respect. That voice I now realize was desperately wanting to be heard, a voice no longer comfortable with the place in which I had chose to confine it for so long—a place of bigotry, prejudice, fear, and misunderstanding.

Childers has left the SBC and is now worshiping with Pentecostals and at a non-denominational church.