Weblogs: March 2006 Archives

Its Friday afternoon, and it has been a busy week. Tomorrow is a board meeting, and I will be proposing that the congregations leadership must discuss some contentious issues.

1) Why they should become a fair compensation congregation.

2) Why they should develop a policy on how to handle disruptive people.

Of course neither of those topics have anything to do with my sermon topic for Sunday, "Satan Reconsidered." I just finished it.

I will be able to spend some time after the Board meeting with my packet preparation. Getting ready to move on has added to my "to do" list.

Tomorrow is the first of April, and during April I will travel to three separate cities for important meetings. And the search for an interim position will become intense.

I am getting a packet ready.  My colleagues in ministry know what that means, sorting though the photographs.  Hmmm.  Put that in.  Take that out.

I thought I would include a few pics of a younger Clyde.

Robert Parry writes that relative to reporting the truth about the war against Iraq the corporate media has proven to a failure. 

He writes: Over the past three years, as the Bush administration has unveiled the United States as an imperial power that plays by its own rules, it has dawned on more and more Americans that the old institutions - the Congress, the courts and the press - that were supposed to protect the Republic had long since crumbled into decay.

Yet, because of the lingering Watergate myth, many Americans were most shocked to find that the scrappy, idealistic Washington press corps had evolved into a careerist, courtier news media. Even well-informed Americans were perplexed over how the press had become almost the opposite of its press clippings.

He exposes the myth of a liberal media.

Where is our liberal doctrine of sin, when we need one?  How do we speak of the well intended but vain attempts of privileged and powerful to do right, and be good, without really changing the way we live our lives?  Perhaps by examining the folly of works righteousness in its most affluent and exaggerated forms.  In an article originally in the Wall Street times we read of some examples of homes built by wealthy and socially aware folk who seek to be environmentally righteous, but somehow fail by their very efforts.  Daniel Asks writes:

These houses aren't just ridiculous; they're monuments to sanctimony. If architecture is frozen music, these places are congealed piety, demonstrating with embarrassing concreteness the glaring hypocrisy of upper-class environmentalism. The sad thing is that, by pouring so much money into ostentatious eco-design, the people who built homes like this have purchased status at the cost of doing some real environmental good.

Bear in mind that merely building a gigantic house consumes an enormous amount of energy and other resources, which is why it costs so much to do so. Situating a home all by itself on a large piece of land, far from the pre-existing community infrastructure, does not make it a model of environmentally conscious design. And having a second home--which takes nearly a day of driving to reach--is unlikely to make a dent in global warming.

There is more, much more.

I have been rethinking a People So Bold, redesigning it into several different "weblogs" - one will be a blog of my personal commentary on things, the second will be a collection of sermons, essays and reports I have written,and the third will be a scrapbook of material that I think my readers might be interested in but are not by me, thus they are more a reference collection.  I will add podcast and photo albums in time.

The work of setting up the rough design went okay this morning, but there is a long way to go.  I will publish it on my own site.