Weekly Meanderings, 29 December 2018

Another year of Meanderings, usually close to 52 times a year, comes to its last post. I hope you had a good 2018 and a blessing on your 2019.

Goodreads and Reading in 2019:

This suggests to me that this reading challenge thing isn’t working for quite a number of people. I would propose, instead, thinking about the number of minutes a day you want to read and figuring out where you will set aside that time in your day. A rough guide is that for every minute you read, you will read that many books in a year (15 minutes, 15 books; 60 minutes, 60 books; etc.). That might vary based on length of the book and the type of book.

The real point is figuring out where in your life you will make space for reading, if you share my belief that reading is a valuable, life-enriching activity. It might mean something as simple as deciding to read a book for the twenty minutes of your mass transit commute each day instead of flipping through your phone. I get 30 minutes of reading in on my Kindle each day while on my treadmill. Hopefully some of your time is in a comfortable chair with your favorite beverage.

Mortimer Adler is reputed to have said, “In the case of good books, the point is not to see how many of them you can get through, but rather how many can get through to you.” It seems to me that the only benefit of any of these number games is to set us up for books to get through to us. If that isn’t happening in our number games, it might be better to abandon them, or at least ask ourselves why we are reading. What good is it to read 52 books if we can’t express what the value of any of these was to our lives? By the same token, a single book that changes our mind, that captures our imagination, that informs a critical choice, that gives us hope, or that inspires by example counts for more than all those forgotten books.

What it comes down to for me is that I don’t want to read more; I want to read well. I hope that for you. My reviews started and continue to function as a way of helping me read well, by trying to capture the essence and significance of a book. At least some times, that seems to be helpful for others, in figuring out what is worthy of their time and attention.

So, my hope for all of us in 2019 is that we read well, however few or many books we read. It seems to me that this is what the precious gift of literacy is all about.

And here’s a good read: [HT: LNMM]

If you were wildly in love with church as a kid, it’s a confusing and painful thing to grow up. Over time, I learned that some of the teenagers I idolized in my childhood church dabbled in drugs and at least one deacon dabbled in adultery. As an adult, I am cognizant of the broader church’s sins; I now know about the Crusades and colonialism, about sex scandals, abuse, racism and oppression. I learned about American churches that supported slavery and Jim Crow. I’ve experienced sexism and misuse of power among church leadership. I’ve met two pastors who shocked me (and made me cry) with their meanness and narcissism. I’ve stuttered in embarrassment over the antics of the religious right and winced at the smugness of the religious left.

Yet I still can’t shake my love for the church, in its variant and frail forms. This love eventually led me to seminary and, after a long process of discernment, to ordination as a priest. Over time, I came to understand that the church—with its grape juice and fried chicken, with that basketball hoop and fellowship hall, that Bible and baptism—was not just a place I went for friendship or family ties. The church was, and still is, making me. What has kept me in it is not nostalgia about good people and potlucks, but rather that my understanding of the world—my whole life—has been shaped by the story I learned there. …

At the heart of the church is either total folly or the mysterious power and love of a dying and resurrected God. If it’s the former, as Paul said, Christians are “of all people most to be pitied.” In other words, we are total idiots, and you should feel sorry for us for wasting our short lives on a fiction. And if it’s the latter, however I define the church, then there is a remainder; something that can never be summed up by scientific or sociological account. According to Pope Paul VI, the church is not a rational experiment but “a reality imbued with the hidden presence of God. It lies, therefore, within the very nature of the Church to be always open to new and ever greater exploration.” As post-Enlightenment Westerners, we are in the habit of speaking of mystery as if it’s a code to crack, the true-crime novel we haven’t finished yet. For Christians the world is a different kind of mystery, one crackling with possibility and saturated with God’s goodness. As Elizabeth Barrett Browning puts it, “Earth is crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God.”

Hiding in church as a child, I felt I was part of something: a story, a family, a global alternative polis, a forgiven people. I had friends there and good food and ritual and music and meaning. But beyond all that, there was something more. Just as I could tell you all about me, yet there’s some mysterious life—some essence of me—that can’t quite be pinned down or summed up, so there is the mysterious power of the Trinity forming, humbling, remaking, and sustaining this creature called the church. That holy and mysterious remainder is, ultimately, why I embarked and remain on my crazy mission to stay forever in the church, living on treasure chocolates and the off-key descants of the saints.

A commitment for 2019?

Twitter is merely an extension of our tongue, with an influence and reach beyond our wildest or nastiest dreams.

And what makes it worse is how social media extends our excarnated worlds.  We increasingly inhabit a world in which flesh and blood, the “meat” of a human being, is no longer in view when we hurl insults.

At a time when we rejoice over the Incarnation, we are living at a time in which we can say the most outrageous things to others on social media; things we would never say to their faces, and blithely dismiss it as not counting because it was not to their face.

Well we don’t say it to their faces yet, but the more we become at ease with how we insult people on social media, the more we will be trained to doing so face to face.  We have shaped our technologies and now they are indeed shaping us.

Empty words: Spoken, written, emailed, tweeted.  Surely it’s all the same for a God who by his own Word can judge the thoughts and intentions of our hearts.

That’ll teach him!

OZARKS, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri poacher has been ordered to repeatedly watch the movie “Bambi” as part of his sentence in a scheme to illegally kill hundreds of deer.

David Berry Jr. was ordered to watch the Disney classic at least once a month during his year-long jail sentence in what conservation agents have called one of the largest deer poaching cases in state history, the Springfield News-Leader reports .

“The deer were trophy bucks taken illegally, mostly at night, for their heads, leaving the bodies of the deer to waste,” said Don Trotter, the prosecuting attorney in Lawrence County.

Berry, his father, two brothers and another man who helped them had their hunting, fishing and trapping privileges revoked temporarily or permanently. The men have paid a combined $51,000 in fines and court costs — but the judge ordered a special addition to Berry’s sentence for illegally taking wildlife.

Court records show he was ordered by Lawrence County Judge Robert George to “view the Walt Disney movie Bambi, with the first viewing being on or before December 23, 2018, and at least one such viewing each month thereafter” while at the county jail.

MacDonald’s sneaking in a new burger:

You knew the day would come.

You just didn’t know when it would be and what it would feel like.

It’s worse, though, when you don’t even realize it’s happened.

After all, a few McDonald’s around the world have already been graced with the concept. The U.S., though, isn’t always in the forefront of everything.

So here, without any fanfare, is the first vegan burger to appear in a U.S. McDonald’s.

It’s called the McAloo Tikki burger.

Now what does that name conjure for you?

Might it be “a combination of a potato and peas patty with special Indian spices coated with breadcrumbs, served with sweet tomato mayo, fresh onions, tomatoes in a regular bun?”

Well, that’s what it is.

And it comes not from Indiana, but India.