new sermon

I'm preaching again this week, so I thought I'd put my sermon up, in case anyone has any feedback before I preach. I'll be revising it tomorrow, so any comments are appreciated.

new essay

I wrote a new essay today about the struggles of living in-between the academic and creative worlds. I'm not sure it's one of my best, but it's something I needed to write.

new website

I'm gearing up for the release of my book of poetry (the first one ever!), so I've worked up a website for it. I need to add information to how one buys the book, of course, but that will come in the next few weeks. In the meantime, any comments are appreciated, especially if something doesn't work.

great video

Here's a great video about shopping at your local, independent bookstore. It's in the style of a 1940s-1950s ad. Of course, my local bookstore is not "just around the corner"; it's 45 minutes away, but at least it exists.

more benefits to counting calories

It seems that taking in fewer calories can help prolong one's life. Note that there's nothing here about the quality of those calories or the breakdown of fats, proteins, and carbs. It's just that fewer calories help one's longevity. Of course, more research will be needed, but more and more studies on this subject are coming out these days.

where to shop?

It seems that none of the box stores, including IKEA, are good places to shop these days. Of course, one could try the radical idea of not buying very much (see quote about cereals from previous post).

quotes on death and religion

I've finished reading Kathleen Norris' The Cloister Walk and Julian Barnes' Nothing to be Frightened Of in the past week or so; thus, I thought I would post a few quotes I found particularly insightful. Here they are, along with one from James Baldwin that I read in The Sun:

“But Jeremiah reminded me that the pain that comes from one’s identity, that grows out of the response to a call, can’t be escaped or pushed aside. It must be gone through. He led me into the heart of pain, forcing me to recognize that to answer a call as a prophet, or a poet for that matter, is to reject the authority of credentials, of human valuation of any kind, accepting only the authority of the call itself.”
--Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk

“…a sense of call in our time is profoundly countercultural.”
--Walter Brueggeman in Hopeful Imagination quoted in Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk

“The artist's responsibility to his society ... is that he must never cease warring with it, for its sake and for his own.”
--James Baldwin in The Sun

“Perhaps the fact that God is incomprehensible is the strongest argument for His existence.”
--Jules Renard quoted in Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened Of

“The notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque.”
Julian Barnes in Nothing to be Frightened Of

“We talked God down from being the Vengeful One and rebranded Him the Infinitely Merciful; we changed Him from Old to New, like the Testaments and the Labour Party. We levered up His graven image, put it on runners, and dragged it to a place where the weather was sunnier.”
Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened Of

“Be regular and ordinary in your life, like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.”
Julian Barnes’ Nothing to be Frightened Of

“One year at the American Benedictine Academy convention, an abbot, speaking on the subject of ‘The Monastic Archetype,’ suddenly dropped all pretense to objectivity and said he was troubled by the growing number of cereals made available for breakfast in his community. ‘How many kinds of cereals do we need,’ he asked, ‘in order to meet genuine health needs without falling into thoughtless consumerism?’”
--from Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk

“A prophet’s task is to reveal the fault lines hidden beneath the comfortable surface of the worlds we invent for ourselves, the national myths as well as the little lies and delusions of control and security that get us through the day.”
--Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk

“In our relentlessly utilitarian society, structuring a life around writing is as crazy as structuring a life around prayer, yet that is what writers and monks do.”
--Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk

“Poets believe in metaphor, and that alone sets them apart from many Christians, particularly people educated to be pastors and church workers.”
--Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk

“Like prophetic language, the images of apocalypse are meant to make us uncomfortable. That is their value to us, especially in a culture that has come to worship comfort.”
--Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk

“Ceremony forces a person to slow down, and as many of us live at a frenzied pace, encountering monastic prayer, or a traditional monastic meal--eaten in silence while a passage from scripture or a religious book is read aloud--can feel like skidding to a halt.”
--Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk

“We remain all the time against one another, grinding one another down . . . Each considers himself right and excuses himself . . . all the while keeping none of the Commandments, yet expecting his neighbor to keep the lot!”
--Dorotheus in Kathleen Norris’ The Cloister Walk

“A monk in his early thirties once told me that he’d come to the monestary not realizing what a shock it would be to suddenly not have to compete for the things that young men are conditioned to compete for in American society--in his words, ‘a good salary, a cool car, and a pretty girlfriend. When all of that was suddenly gone,’ he said, ‘and held of no account, I felt as if my whole life were a lie. It took me years to find out who God wanted me to be.’”
--Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk

“Any life lived attentively is disillusioning, as it forces us to know ourselves as we are.”
--Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk

“I am most interested in monastic dress as a form of renunciation, a sign that one is not preoccupied with fashion and possessions.”
--Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk

“‘Thank God for the things I do not own,’ said Teresa of Avila. I could suddently grasp that not ever having to think about what to wear was freedom, that a drastic stripping down to essentials in one’s dress might also be a drastic enrichment of one’s ability to focus on more important things.”
--Kathleen Norris in The Cloister Walk

experimental living

I'm fascinated by people who do experiments on themselves (think Morgan Spurlock's Fast Food Nation), so I was glad to run across this story of a man who lived for a month on airplanes. It doesn't provide any interesting insights, but it did help him deal with his fear of flying.

more evidence of Americans' lack of knowledge

I'm not sure if I'm more disturbed by the fact that less than half of Americans are unable to name even one Supreme Court justice or if most of them can name Clarence Thomas. Here are more disturbing statistics.

some new writing of a different sort

I'm preaching at our church next Sunday, so I thought I'd put the sermon up, in case anyone wants to read it and give me some feedback.

Also, I've been working on a project that deals with what English majors do after they graduate and how that might affect what we do as professors, especially in the introductory course to the major and advising. Here's a long paper that shows what I've come up with so far. As always, comments are appreciated.

moving reading

I'm not one to get emotional about anything patriotic, but the reading of the Declaration of Independence by the NPR folks actually affects me every year. It's especially effective when Nina Totenberg reads about justice or some other connection, especially when the complaints about King George sound remarkably like complaints we have about our government, no matter who's in charge. It's worth a listen.

they may survive nuclear war

At least cockroaches are just as vulnerable as we are to bad nutrition. Perhaps if we fatten them up, they won't be able to get into our homes as easily. Of course, I don't think that was the point of the study.

great library advertising

Now here are pictures of great ads for the library. Of course, I love the Captain Ahab's Fine Seafood, but they're all clever.

you think you have debt

A man who wants to be a lawyer is being denied from doing so, despite passing his bar exam, because he owes too much to student loan companies. How he is supposed to pay back those loans without being able to work puzzles me, as well. By the way, he owes $435,000.

when living longer is not a good thing

It seems that Larry Haubner is fanatical about taking care of himself, and he's done a good job, as he just celebrated his 107th birthday. However, he has run out of money once, and he's in the same predicament again. I just hate that someone made him move out of his apartment, as if he can't take care of himself.

bad lunches at Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut has been advertising their new $5 lunches, and they certainly more than compare with something like Subway's footlong sale. If you order the new Panormous Personal Pan Pizza, for example, you can take in 1100 calories and 2400 mg of sodium. And that's just for the cheese pizza. You can also get the stuffed pizza rolls, as they'll only run you 920 calories and 2360 mg of sodium for the four of them. I'm not a fan of Subway or any other fast food, but almost anything is better than this.

comics fun

I'm a big fan of Keith Knight's work, especially The K Chronicles. Here's his advice to his son on his first Father's Day. My favorite relates to hip-hop, of course.

leave me alone

I think I like Garrison Keillor's articles for Salon more than anything else he does, though the skits on Prairie Home Companion work for me most of the time; there just aren't enough of them, as he still feels compelled to sing, which I don't understand. This article works especially well, as I'm a fan of solitude when it's needed, and I need it a good deal.

vocabulary lesson

Have you ever wondered which words people look up when reading The New York Times. It seems that they gathered data from their online version and have released the findings. I felt pretty good, as I at least knew most of them, though sui generis always throws me, and I have to figure it out by context (again) or look it up (yet again).