I have chosen the crabapple tree in the front yard as my inspiration theme for this Sunday. I just love watching things come back to life after a dormant cold season. The horses across the street are wintered someplace else. This was the first week they were back. Continue reading An Inspiring Spring Day
October 2007 – Milwaukee Art Museum. This crazy looking piece of glass art is in the crazy looking museum. We very much enjoyed our visit there… Continue reading Crazy Glass…
This is the true purpose of satire: to mock power. It is, truly, the language of the powerless. From the biblical prophets, to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to Swift, to Twain, to Orwell to our beloved Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, satire works best when the targets are the powerful and elite—be they institutions or people. Jesus’ sharpest comments were always directed toward the politically or religiously powerful. Always. Indeed, you could argue that Jesus’ entire life—from being born in a barn in the midst of a genocide, to hanging out with prostitutes and drunks, to healing on the Sabbath and … Continue reading Christians and Humor….
“The Republican Party is not really a party. It doesn’t stand for anything except re-electing itself,” Stockman, who directed the Office of Management and Budget under President Ronald Reagan, tells Newsmax. “The neocons are only oriented to an aggressive, imperialistic foreign policy of big defense establishment and suppression of our civil liberties. That’s bad. “The tax cons want to just cut taxes — any time, any day — regardless of the fiscal situation,” Stockman adds. “That has gone to an absurd length. The social cons, social policy people — the right-to-life issue and gay marriage and all of that — … Continue reading A Reagan Apostle On The GOP
One of the underlying assumptions is that money from the offering or tithe belongs to the church. But the Scriptures consistently teach that the offering is God’s instrument of redistribution and that it belongs to the poor. Giving to the poor should not make its way into the budget; it is the budget. One could argue that small portions of the Israelite offering (no more than 10 percent) was given to the Levitical priesthood (Neh. 12:47), and that in the early church an even smaller contribution could be given to the church’s itinerant evangelists, who, incidentally, were themselves poor (1 … Continue reading Embezzling God….
HOUSTON — As school districts across the country consider placing more police officers in schools, youth advocates and judges are raising alarm about what they have seen in the schools where officers are already stationed: a surge in criminal charges against children for misbehavior that many believe is better handled in the principal’s office…. Such criminal charges may be most prevalent in Texas, where police officers based in schools write more than 100,000 misdemeanor tickets each year, said Deborah Fowler, the deputy director of Texas Appleseed, a legal advocacy center in Austin. The students seldom get legal aid, she noted, … Continue reading Fodder For Our Prison System??
“The minute a thing is long and complicated it confuses. Whoever wrote the Ten Commandments made ’em short. They may not always be kept, but they can be understood.” – Will Rogers, 17 March 1935 What is even more amazing it that Jesus turned those ten into just two. Love God and Love each other. How could it be simpler than that. Continue reading Long and Complicated…
Attorney General Eric Holder says he will not need to furlough any Justice Department employees in the current fiscal year. The attorney general says he will be able to avoid furloughs because of additional money in the recently enacted legislation, combined with aggressive steps to freeze hiring and cut contracting and other costs Source: Holder: No furloughs at Justice Department – CBS News. I’m sure the purpose of this article was to show how well the Justice Department was run. They brag that they don’t need to lay off workers because they found the necessary 10% budget cuts elsewhere. … Continue reading A Test of Leadership….
Couldn’t have said it better. Continue reading Priorities Around the Sequester….
Emergent congregations are especially well equipped to live creatively in the newly post-Western Christianity. They are careful not to confuse the life and message of Jesus with the “Western” elements in which it has been packaged. They try to assign equal weight to both the message and the context so that a new version of the old story can take shape. They strongly underline “living the message” rather than simply proclaiming it. They experiment with settings, like cafes, in which two-way exchange rather than one-way preaching is possible The Future of Faith (Cox, Harvey) The words above are one of … Continue reading Living The Message….
We’re often told that our liberties are under assault. The right warns that our Big Government nanny state is plotting to seize our guns and our Big Gulps, while strangling our economic freedom with taxes and regulations. The left rails against our Big Government security state—the drone warfare, indefinite detention and electronic surveillance that make the war on terror sound like an Orwellian nightmare. The National Rifle Association had just finished bellowing about background checks violating our Second Amendment rights when the American Civil Liberties Union started shrieking about the FBI violating the Boston bombing suspect’s Miranda rights…. In the … Continue reading Tread on Me, Please….
NEW YORK — A sharp decline in the price of oil this month is making gasoline cheaper at a time of year when it typically gets more expensive. It’s a relief to motorists and business owners and a positive development for the economy. Source: Drivers benefit as oil prices drop sharply – Business on NBCNews.com. I don’t know about where you come from but it seems that gasoline prices around here jump $0.30 a gallon in an afternoon. Most of the times that happens in Friday mornings. Friday is one of the mornings I drive 40 miles round trip … Continue reading The Gasoline Conspiracy…..
I never behold the heavens filled with stars that I do not feel I am looking in the face of God. I can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist. but I cannot conceive how he could lie looking up into the heavens and say there is no God. When any church will inscribe over its altar, as its sole qualification for membership, the Saviour’s condensed statement of the substance of both law and Gospel. “‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and … Continue reading Abraham Lincoln’s God…..
They had turned the way of Jesus, I felt, into the club of the Pharisees, and they didn’t speak for me, even though their spokesmen dominated the dialogue night after night on cable TV. The terms “Evangelical” and even “Christian” had become like discredited brands through their energetic but misguided work. I increasingly understood why more and more of my friends winced when the name “Jesus” was mentioned in public. It wasn’t due to a loss of respect for Jesus, but for those who most used his name. In spite of all this, few of my fellow pastors and leaders … Continue reading Those Who Use Jesus’ Name….
June 1989 – This is a picture of a long time friend taken at the Indy Zoo. Of course it has been “artified” by me. I am trying to get into this type of thing again. Continue reading Artsy….
A new golden rule BY CHUCK JAFFE, MARKETWATCH It has long been a rule of thumb that typical investors should have 5-10% of their portfolios in gold. But watching gold’s swoon on Monday had to make you wonder: Really? Source: Online Trading, ETFs, Mutual Funds, IRAs & Retirement – Fidelity. Leave it up to the financial gurus to pollute the golden rule with things about money. I really got a kick out of this one. It seems Mr. Jaffe has a very short term memory. Yeah the price of gold dropped significantly on Monday but year over year it is … Continue reading The Golden Rule….
For example, let’s say we approach the Bible with this question: How should we treat our enemies? Matthew 5:44 tells us to love them. Romans 12:17–21 tells us to do good to them and never seek revenge against them. First Peter 3:13–17 tells us to suffer at their hands and set an example for them. Psalm 137:9 says we should joyfully dash their infants against a rock. Psalm 139:19 says we should hate them. Deuteronomy 7:1–6 says we should destroy them utterly and show them no mercy. If we want to call down fire on them, we can reference 1 … Continue reading The Old vs. The New….
In his first major policy speech Wednesday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel signaled he will be taking a hard look at the way the Pentagon spends its money and at whether the US military needs quite so many officers…. That’s because too often the weapons systems that Pentagon officials buy “are vastly more expensive and technologically risky than what was promised or budgeted for.” And the hard truth is that the most pressing problems the world faces “do not necessarily lend themselves to being resolved by conventional military strength,” he said. “Indeed the most destructive and horrific attack ever on the United … Continue reading Finally Some Sanity???
Staying away from the news feeds today. Too much celebration of the Bush years. I am just not ready for that yet. Too many young lives lost and too many retirement pensions ruined during those years. Maybe when I am old and senile I can look upon them differently….. Continue reading Too Much Celebration….
I had to discover a passion for retirement because I had worked all my life at something that I was not passionate about. I understood that in order to discover a passion I had to understand who I am. Figuring out who I am was not complicated, but it required time and effort. It took a lot of mental work, the hardest kind of work. It took a lot of experimenting and trial and error, the scariest kind of work. But almost anyone can do it. You don’t have to be a monk, priest, philosopher or psychologist. You don’t … Continue reading Discover Your Passion: Know Who You Are
I try not to post about the events like the Boston bombing until more of the facts are known but there is one related thing that always bothers me about such events. While I along with most mourn the four lives lost in this tragic event I wonder why we don’t also mourn the 150 or so lives also lost that day and every day to violence around our obsession with guns? I wonder why don’t we also mourn the 3,000 or so lives lost each day to hunger? Were those four lives more precious than the 150 or the … Continue reading Loss of Life….
RJ's Corner - Having My Say 