Monday, March 23, 2009

Dealing with Poverty


I am old-fashioned. I think that I largely brought my problems on myself. Nevertheless, this helps me relate to people suffering in our society at the moment of crisis.

Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Personal Note




Not working is causing me considerable problems. I need to work again but I hope part-time. I am having trouble mainting.


Image is from a hike I got to make in 1997 in Wyoming. One of my favorite days in life.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Current Debates


Current debates and discussion of our economy intrigue me. I just don't enough to comment of them. However, we live in an interesting moment. Clearly, what is happening is important to us.

I am reading the newspapers and other sources for comments about this mess in which we find ourselves.


My own current sense of events is summarized in this way: We built our economy of the myth of market forces regulating themselves, misguided monetary policies for years from the Federal Reserve, application of inappropriate mathematical models to financial policy, short-term profit taking in businesses as opposed to long-term business planning, failure to provide for proper social safety nets, bizarre credit instruments, illusion, and a lot of greed from all sectors of our society (including my own greed).

Welcome

In this my personal Christian blog, I hope to be discursive and now and then critical. What I write here is tentative and tensive. I post thoughts, feelings, and observations somewhat randomly and often in immediate response to current events and posts on other blogs.


"Serendipitous Creativity" from Gordon Kaufman

"I suggested that what we today should regard as God is the ongoing creativity in the universe - the bringing (or coming) into being of what is genuinely new, something transformative; …

"In some respects and some degrees this creativity is apparently happening continuously, in and through the processes or activities or events around us and within us(…) is a profound mystery to us humans(…) But on the whole, as we look back on the long and often painful developments that slowly brought human life and our complex human worlds into being, we cannot but regard this creativity as serendipitous …

"I want to stress that this serendipitous creativity - God! - to which we should be responsive is not the private possession of any of the many particular religious faiths or systems …

"This profound mystery of creativity is manifest in and through the overall human bio-historical evolution and development everywhere on the planet; and it continues to show itself throughout the entire human project, no matter what may be the particular religious and or cultural beliefs."

Gordon Kaufman, Mennonite Life, December 2005 vol. 60 no. 4

Melville is a rational man who

"Melville is a rational man who wants God to exist. He wants Him to exist for the same reasons we all do: to be our rescuer and appreciator, to act as a confidant in our moments of crisis and to give us reassurance that, over the horizon of our deaths, we will survive." (John Updike)

And that is a problem for me.

Fragmented Notions

Fragmented Notions
Copyright © 2007 Jean and Alexander Heard Library, Vanderbilt University

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