One click of the mouse......back to zero!

It will be quite freeing to click "Mark All As Read." Happy Easter Season!!!

Have you had one of those conversations? You know, one of those icebreakers, in which a question is asked and everyone goes around and tells their answer? Well, here is one of the questions. What would you consider the perfect day? That question, my friends, is no longer hypothetical. I experienced one....today. We spent the morning with friends; lunch in this park (see picture above; not our picture of course.); walked around beautiful, downtown Greenville; went back to the hotel and took a nap; back out that evening to eat dinner and walk around downtown again.

The day was the culmination of a great weekend with family and friends loving on us as we prepare for our first child. We feel so full. Perhaps this is a glimpse of what it means to say, "[T]hat our joy may be complete."

I don't know why these commercials don't sit well with me. No, it's not because it is advertising a non-apple product. I think, to me, it tells a disconnected narrative. At the end of the day, this commercial is an attempt the company exerts to markets its product, which it has every right to do. The commercial is marketing technology, which is neutral. Technology is neither positive nor negative in of itself. There are things we can affirm and appreciate about how technology, in general, and this particular product, in particular, can enhance our lives. However, there are things we can challenge too. Watch the following commercial while observing what the narrative of the video is communicating. What aspects of the video and/or the product can we affirm? What aspects should we challenge?

What do you think? I wonder if such marketing is really abstracting us from ourselves......in the end, are we anthropomorphizing technology and dehumanizing people?

One thing I like about history, that is reading about the past, is realizing how close events are connected.  I'm sure every current age thinks themselves to be more sophisticated and more enlightened than previous ones; likewise, I'm sure every current age thinks themselves to be further along than they really are.

"One-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans went to war with themselves. Disunion revisits and reconsiders America's most perilous period -- using contemporary accounts, diaries, images and historical assessments to follow the Civil War as it unfolded."

One of its posts for Feb. 19, 2011 commented on Abraham Lincoln's visit to New York City on Feb. 20, 1861.  The whole article, written by Ted Widmer, is an interesting read, but I found a passing comment in the first paragraph the curious part:

"Even in the great mart of American commerce, by far the country’s largest city, Lincoln was the center of attention everywhere he went. He started his day by greeting New York’s financial and political elite over a power breakfast. Then he had a ceremonial meeting with a local nonagenarian, Joshua Dewey, a Revolutionary war veteran who had voted in every presidential election. It was a fitting historical echo: George Washington had been inaugurated just south of Lincoln’s hotel, in the old Federal Hall on Wall Street" (emphasis mine).

Can you imagine?  Joshua Dewey witnessed the birth of the United States and the pains of its Civil War.  What were his thoughts about the Founder's "intentions?"  It is foolish to think any generation is that far removed from its past.  Perhaps in doing so, it really demonstrates a breach with the past instead of progress.  

"I do not think we shall ever escape from the appalling squirrel-cage of economic confusion in which we have been madly turning for the last three centuries or so, the cage in which we landed ourselves by acquiescing in a social system based upon Envy and Avarice.  A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste, and such as society is a house built upon sand."

This question is the premise for an interesting assignment I have this semester. In a class on career counseling we are addressing various theories on career development and career counseling interventions. For this assignment, we are to write an essay on the question, "Why Work?"

It is a question I think each individual must address––either consciously or subconsciously; either actively or reactively; with engagement or avoidance. I am looking forward to the semester pondering this question.

It is such a simple question that reveals so many profound complexities. It reveals a person's motivations. It reveals a person's definitions. It reveals a person's responses to motivations and definitions. Perhaps it reveals so much more about a person's personality, character, integrity, and philosophies about life.

Why do you work?

"The fact is that we either respect and appropriate the testimony of the past, allowing it to challenge us even while thinking hard about it; or we are doomed – even while thinking that we alone have 'objectivity' and can start afresh on the historical quest – to create individualistic fantasies about the past out of the desperate poverty of our own very limited experience and imagination."

I don't have a large readership for my blog. Probably so insignificant that I shouldn't even categorize it as a "readership." Please understand I don't think you, the one reading this right now is insignificant; just the collective number of people reading the blog. If you do know me, then you know I deactivated my facebook account in January. Well, the first sign of temptation to reactivate my account has come. So soon, I know.

But the reason is not what you might expect. You see, when I post things, a link was automatically posted to my twitter feed and my facebook. It still goes to my twitter. The temptation to reactivate my facebook account coincides with the very reason I needed to deactivate––vanity and narcissistic habits such as "look at me" "I'm so popular" because "I have a gazillion friends." Since deactivating my account, fewer people read my blog posts. I would be lying if it didn't sting my pride. I am tempted to reactivate my account just so more people are exposed to my blog posts.....but for the time being I remain diligent. If you read this blog, I welcome comments and dialogue; if you follow me on twitter, I welcome any retweets (which the act of "retweeting" can be equally annoying as the word "retweet" is).

Sorry facebook. Right now no one is home but if you would like to leave your name, a brief message, I will might hopefully won't return your call......beeeeeeep.

P.S. If you are one of my facebook friends, but would like to continue fostering a spirit of friendship and communicating, please email me, call me, or write me a letter. I would love to have any updated contact info of yours so I could do the same.

"when your brand of bad becomes acceptable"

I'm loving one of my priorities for this year––reading more fiction.  I am currently reading a book call The Fiddler's Gun by A.S. Peterson.  It is the first of two books; the second book is called The Fiddler's Green.  I absolutely love it!  Here is a quote:

I am interested in the intersecting points of narrative––the convergence of a person's actions, a person's words, and a person's motivating philosophies. Read or listen to a person long enough and the points of convergence can get teased apart.

Bare action; brute fact; keen observations are often neutral. The lens we use to interpret the information reveal our philosophies, theology, motivations, etc. Facts don't compete against facts. Interpretive narratives compete against other narratives.

For example, show me the man who doesn't worship god, and it can still be observed that he ascribes glory to something or someone. Show me the man who worships god, and it can be observed that he ascribes glory to that god but not this god.

Such things are our frame of reference; it is the ribbon's loose ends, so to speak, that we use to tie into a bow. How does one tie things together? How are we trying to make sense of the world at large? How does our world fit into the large world? From what vantage point do we start?

In keeping with the metaphor of ribbon: what is your ribbon? who does the tying? what does the tied bow look like?

"Dogmatics can only exist if there is a divine revelation on whose authority it rests and whose content it unfolds.  Consciousness theology, which rejects Scripture and confession as sources of knowledge and seeks to derive all religious truth from the subject, is first of all in conflict with a sound theory of knowledge.  We are products of our environment also in the area of religion.  We receive our religious ideas and impressions from those who raise and nurture us, and we remain at all times bound to the circle in which we live.  In no domain of life are the intellect and the heart, reason and conscience, feeling and imagination, the epistemic source of truth but only organs by which we perceive truth and make it our own.  Just as physically we are bound to nature and must receive food and drink, shelter and clothing from it, so psychically––in the arts, science, religion and morality––we are dependent on the world outside of us.  Feeling is especially unfit to serve as the epistemic source of religious truth, for feeling is never a prius (a prior thing) but always a posterius (something which follows later).  Feeling only reacts to what strikes it and then yields a sensation of that which is pleasant or unpleasant, agreeable or disagreeable" (p. 80)

On of my New Year's Goals is to read more fiction this year.  I started off the year with a bang by rereading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows (Book 7).  I am now reading The Fiddler's Gun: Fin's Revolution (Book 1).  It is takes place in an orphanage in colonial Georgia right before America's Revolutionary War (1775).  The main character is a 17 year old girl (Fin Button).  Her parents already had 12 daughters, but her dad wanted a boy.  Needlesstosay, Fin began life unwanted.

Here is the last few lines of the pre-story; I think it captures a language of homewardness:

"...The Buttons left behind a bundle of red curls and unwanted promise, and Matilda-Mae uttered a silent prayer that her thirteenth baby girl would somehow know a full life in spite of her unkind beginnings.

     The Baab sisters of the Ebenezer orphanage were ready and willing to answer that prayer and see it through, but time has a way of leading a person along a crooked path.  Sometimes the path is hard to hold to and people fall off along the way.  They curse the road for its steep grades and muddy ruts and settle themselves in hinterlands of thorn and sorrow, never knowing or dreaming that the road meant all along to lead them home.  Some call that road a tragedy and lose themselves along.  Others, those that see it home, call it an adventure."