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Showing posts from August, 2008

One Year Later

One year ago, (on August 29th, to be exact) I moved to Franklin Lakes, NJ, to begin my second appointment. Today is the one year anniversary of the official beginning of my appointment here. In some ways, I can't believe I've already been here a year - the months have gone by so quickly. In other ways, I feel like this has been a long year - the first year in a new appointment is full of so much learning, meeting people, familiarizing, transitioning - this year has been so full that it seems like I must have been here longer than a year already. This is only my second appointment - my first year here has been much different than my first year in Oneida. The learning curve in a first appointment is huge. Here, I come with knowledge and experience, even if it isn't decades of ministry yet. But I'm also in a much different place and, in some ways, a much different congregation. I'm serving outside of my annual conference of membership, North Central New York , the area

new look

After almost 4 1/2 years of the same design on my blog, I decided to try a new template. I still have to replace some of my widgets, probably tomorrow. But for now, let me know what you think of the new look! (I totally am not into designing my own template, so check the link at the bottom for a link to the designer, who has several templates.)

from Fortune Magazine: "The Next Credit Crunch"

I read this interesting article from CNN's Fortune Magazine called, "The Next Credit Crunch." (by Geoff Colvin) The subtitle reads, "Our easy access to plastic is about to dry up - and with it our ability to fake living the good life." Excerpt: "For the past several years, the average inflation-adjusted total pay of American workers hasn't been increasing. That means we haven't been building a foundation for increases in our living standard. You might be tempted to say that by definition our living standard couldn't have increased, but that's not quite right. Even with stagnant real incomes, we can always live a little better every year through borrowing and pretending that our living standard is still rising, just as it was for decades" The article goes on to talk about the current economy and how now, at last, things are in a position where people won't be able to pretend. Easy mortgages won't be available, banks won't be

Review: Sex God by Rob Bell

I recently finished reading Rob Bell's short book, Sex God: Exploring the endless connections between sexuality and spirituality . This is a fairly short, very simple as in easy-to-read book. I guess (even my sentence is ambivalent) I didn't feel particularly strongly about the book either way. There were some chapters I really liked, some arguments and points of views I disagreed with, but a lot in the middle that didn't strike me as particularly inspiring or enlightening one way or another. Bell starts with the premise that "this is always about that," where something is always pointing to something else, something deeper. "This" is sexuality, and "that" is God. He says, "Where the one is, you will always find the other." (15) He begins by focusing on being created in the image of God, and what it means to love God and neighbor. "When Jesus speaks of loving our neighbor, it isn't just for our neighbor's sake. If we don

jockeystreet posts

My brother just wrote three very good posts on the same day. Nuts and Bolts is a post about pacifism - how nice it is as an ideal, but how difficult it would be to practice completely. (For Jim at least...!) And Everywhere Marked with Crosses is a post about good people and suffering and how they usually go together. And my favorite, because I lived through it as a 12 year-old watching her brother go through a lot of changes very quickly, is The Lost Religion of Jesus . It turns out at the end to actually be a bit of a book review, but is more entirely about how my brother went from a conservative Christian to a then, at least, pretty angry atheist during his freshman year of college. Makes you wonder about the power of our choices and decisions and how sometimes such small events can impact our lives in huge ways. I always wonder what would have happened if different choices in life had been made. Characters in The Chronicles of Narnia often wonder this too, but Aslan always remind