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Questions for Laura

Feb21

1. What are all the languages you are studying, and how did you learn them all?
2. How would you know that someone new you met was a “kindred spirit”?
3. Te gusta leer en espanol? Cual libro espanol es tu favorito y quien es el autor? (I don’t know how to do Spanish stuff like accents and tildes on my computer; maybe you can teach me someday.)
4. What is your favorite book of the Bible and why?
5. What do you plan todo after you graduate?

You can go to Laura’s blog, buscar la verdad y amar su belleza (to look for truth and to love its beauty) and see her answers. Maybe you’ll want Laura to interview you. Note: She’s not impressed with the profound wisdom she’s seen lately on church signs.

Interviewed By Amy

Feb21

Carmon at Buried Treasure started this interview game/tag todayat her blog party. I asked Amy at Amy’s Humble Musings to interview me, and these are her questions for me:
1. What kind of engineer is your husband and do you understand anything about what he does? Engineer Husband is an electrical engineer, and he does something with the communications system on the space station, I think. He talks a lot about S-band and KU-band, whatever that is.

2. Chocolate or vanilla? Vanilla. I like chocolate, but as an accent, not too much. So vanilla with chocolate on top.

3. Do you know HTML? Hmmm. No, not really. I know a couple of tags, but if it gets complicated I run to Computer Guru Son and yell, “Help!”

4. What math program (if any) are you using for your karate kid? We use Miquon Math in the primary grades and Saxon starting with 5/4. Karate Kid just started Saxon 5/4, but he’s still finishing his last Miquon book, too, because he wanted to do both.

5. Link me to your favorite post you wrote. Romanticizing Sin Actually, there are so many that I couldn’t choose, so I asked Eldest Daughter. She chose it.

Now if you’d like to play along, I’m offering to interview the first five people to respond to this post However, I have to go to the grocery store, so I may not do the interviews until this evening.

1. Leave me a comment saying “interview me.”
2. I will respond by asking you five questions here on my site (not the same as you see here).
3. You will update your blog/site with the answers to the questions.
4. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post.
5. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Any takers?

Can Anything Good Come Out of San Angelo?

Jan28

I found this meme on Amanda’s blog The Living Room. She asks us, for her Thursday Thirteen (yes, I’m a day late and a dollar short, as usual) to “name thirteen places in our hometown that you would take the rest of us to if we visited, and why.” I live in Houston, but my hometown, where I grew up, is in West Texas. San Angelo, Texas, The Wool Capital of the World. Many people think that there is nothing in San Angelo worth visiting or seeing. I’m about to prove them wrong.
1. Central High School. This is the high school I graduated from. It is also one of the first high schools in Texas to be built in a campus style, multiple buildings spread out over an acre or so of land, back in the 1950’s. It even has trees.
2. Fort Concho.

“Established in 1867, along the banks of the Concho River, Fort Concho was built to protect frontier settlements, patrol and map the vast West Texas region, and quell hostile threats in the area.
In June 1889, the last soldiers marched away from Fort Concho and the fort was deactivated. After 22 years Fort Concho’s role in settling the Texas frontier was over.
Today, Fort Concho National Historic Landmark encompasses most of the former Army post and includes twenty-three original and restored structures. Fort Concho is a historic preservation project and museum which is owned and operated by the City of San Angelo, Texas.”


3. Zentner’s Daughter Steak House or Zentner’s or DunBar Cafe or . . . Why is it that there are so many restaurants in San Angelo where you can buy an excellent chicken fried steak with cream gravy and so few elsewhere? Those frozen things that are mostly crust with some kind of ground up meat inside are NOT real chicken fried steak.
4. Cactus Hotel. This 14 story hotel was Conrad Hilton’s fourth Texas hotel built in 1929, and it was disentegrating as I was growing up. However, it’s been restored and is used as a cultural center and has a children’s art museum on the first floor.
5. Concho Riverwalk. We go here to prove that San Angelo does have water and beauty.
6. Santa Fe Crossing. A railroad museum, shops, and a senior citizens center.
7. Sunken Garden. In West Texas, you have to cultivate flowers and water them—frequently. Another beauty spot.
8. M.L. Leddy Boot and Saddlery. I don’t know what the in crowd carried at our high school, but when I was in junior high everybody who was anybody had a leather notebook with their name hand tooled on the front. And the notebooks came from Leddy’s. I want to see if they still have them. You might enjoy the handmade boots and saddles.
9. Lake Nasworthy. Again, we are showing you that water is available in West Texas. Plus, there’s a park where we used to drive really fast over this dirt road, and if you did it just right your car would fly over the low places in the road. No, we were not any more hard up for entertainment than teenagers in any other place!
10. Tom Green County Library. I used to work there, and I like libraries.
11. Hudman Drug Store. It has a real old-fashioned soda fountain, like you see in the movies.
12. San Angelo Fat Stock Show and Rodeo. The San Angelo version is not all glitzy with big name singing stars like the Houston one. But if you want to see a rodeo and a lot of animals, San Angelo is the place to go around the beginning of March.
13. Harris Avenue Baptist Church. The last time I visited, my home church was still a Southern Baptist church with hymnals and sermons and a choir and a piano and an organ. Even if you don’t care for that sort of worship, everyone should participate in at least one 1960’s style Southern Baptist worship service soon because they’re an endangered species. Oh, and as far as I can tell, Harris Avenue Baptist Church doesn’t have a website. No surprise there.

Holy Days and Holidays

Jan9

We are not Catholic. We are Southern Baptists who recently joined an Evangelical Free Church. I was raised in a church that did not celebrate any holidays except for Christmas and Easter. However, a long time ago I read two books by Martha Zimmerman, Celebrate the Feasts and Celebrating the Christian Year. These books changed my whole perspective on holidays and celebrations. Jewish holy days were meant to be teaching times, reminders of what God did for the nation Israel and of his continuing mercy, and the Christian liturgical year and the holy days celebrated in connection with that calendar were instituted for the same purpose. I love celebrating and remembering amd learning, and I don’t mind borrowing from the Jewish calendar or from the Catholic or mainline Protestant liturgical calendar to do so. I believe God can use these special days to remind me of his everlasting goodness. So this year I added both Jewish holy days and Christian liturgical feasts and holy days to my iCal calendar And I’ll be sharing some of those with my blog readers–in addition to authors’ birthdays which I see as more occasions for celebration and remembrance. We can celebrate The Great Story, as C.S. Lewis called it, and the many stories that are pale reflections, but nevertheless reflections, of the creative power of the Living God. And it behooves us to learn to celebrate and remember for that is what we are called to do for all eternity as Christians at the Great Banquet of our Lord.

My Favorite Luddite

Dec18

Eldest Daughter is fast becoming a (nonviolent) Luddite. She says I make fun of her, but I actually think she has some good ideas. However, she might want to keep in mind who the original Luddites were:

The original Luddites claimed to be led by one Ned Ludd, also known as “King Ludd” or “General Ludd”, who is believed to have destroyed two large stocking-frames that produced inexpensive stockings undercutting those produced by skilled knitters of the time. The movement spread rapidly throughout England in 1811 with many wool and cotton mills being destroyed, until the British government harshly suppressed them. The Luddites met at night on the moors surrounding the industrial towns, often practising drilling and manoeuvres. The main areas of the disturbances were Nottinghamshire in November 1811, followed by West Riding of Yorkshire in early 1812 and Lancashire in March 1812. Pitched battles between Luddites and the military occurred at Burtons’ Mill in Middleton, and at Westhoughton Mill, both in Lancashire. It was rumoured at the time that spies employed by the magistrates were involved in stirring up the attacks. Magistrates and food merchants were also objects of death threats and attacks by the anonymous General Ludd and his supporters. “Machine breaking” was made a capital crime, and seventeen men were executed in 1813. Many others were transported to Australia. From The Free Dictionary

Tolkien, Caedfael, and Lewis make much better role models. And Middle Earth is a place worth being homesick for.

Homespun Symposium V

Dec16

*What do you believe is necessary for true racial reconciliation to take place in American society?
*Does your solution involve coercive governmental remedies?
*Do you believe that Churches have an important role to play in this process?

This is the Homespun Bloggers‘ question posed by Marc at Hubs and Spokes this week.

My answer is fairly simple. I don’t think we’ll ever have “true racial reconciliation” until we lose the useless concept of “race” altogether. The word is essentially meaningless. I looked it up in the dictionary and got this definition:

1. A local geographic or global human population distinguished as a more or less distinct group by genetically transmitted physical characteristics. 2. A group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history, nationality, or geographic distribution: the German race. 3. A genealogical line; a lineage. 4. Humans considered as a group.

A more or less distinct group? A group of people classified together? Humans considered as a group? Well, that’s as clear as mud. My race is Baptist, I guess. Or if we’re talking about physical characteristics, then I’m a member of the short race.
The government and churches can both help in this process by refusing to classify people by physical characteristics, except for the obvious male/female classification. That’s the only meaningful or useful physical distinction that I can see between different kinds of people. When asked for my ‘race” on forms, I write “human.” And I teach my children to treat all people as humans.

This is not just a semantic discussion. As long as we continue to classify people by skin color, even with the best of intentions, we say that there is some essential meaning to “being Asian” or “African” or “Hispanic” other than country of origin or ancestral origin. And we tacitly continue to perpetuate the myth that dark-skinned people are somehow different from light skinned people. Middle Earth (a fictional place) had races: dwarves, humans, elves, and hobbits, among others. These groups were different kinds of beings with essential diffenences that went way beyond skin color. In our world, there are only humans. The sooner we all learn that fact the better. After that, we can begin to discuss cultural differences between people of different backgrounds and how those can be bridged, understood, or tolerated.

Natalists?

Dec7

David Brooks calls us “natalists,” people who are having three, four and even more children.

All across the industrialized world, birthrates are falling – in Western Europe, in Canada and in many regions of the United States. People are marrying later and having fewer kids. But spread around this country, and concentrated in certain areas, the natalists defy these trends.

They are having three, four or more kids. Their personal identity is defined by parenthood. They are more spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes than in any other sphere of life, having concluded that parenthood is the most enriching and elevating thing they can do. Very often they have sacrificed pleasures like sophisticated movies, restaurant dining and foreign travel, let alone competitive careers and disposable income, for the sake of their parental calling

And he says, “People who have enough kids for a basketball team are too busy to fight a culture war.” Not quite. I believe I am fighting a culture war every day as I raise my children. I am doing my dead level best to teach them to be “spiritually, emotionally and physically invested in their homes” and to “sacrifice pleasures” for the greater good of the kingdom of God. I pray for them, nurture them, teach them, and love them every single day, and this is how I “fight a culture war.” Culture is made up of people, and a Godly, Christlike culture is made up of people who are committed to living out the life of Christ in all areas of culture. Together we “natalists” can change the culture–peacefully, non-violently–but it’s a struggle nevertheless.

RSECVV: Exhibit 2

Nov15

From an opinion piece by Aly Colon o
of The Poynter Institute:

The “moral values” voter has become a popular way of identifying a segment of the population that played a key role in the re-election of President Bush. But who are these people? What “moral values” do they hold? How do their values play out in their lives? The term usually gets pinned on people who oppose same-sex marriage, abortion, and stem cell research. Reporters use such terms as evangelical, religious, Christian, and conservative to describe them. And often, journalists use these terms interchangeably. But what do they know about the topic? And what do they need to know?

Mike and Cindy live down the street. They have two daughters, and they also homeschool. (Hey, I know a lot of homeschoolers.) Mike is a quiet guy who likes to cook and work in his yard in his spare time. Cindy likes to shop and play and drink tea with friends when she’s not homeschooling. Mike and Cindy both are “values voters,” but one or both of them may have slipped a couple of Libertarian votes in with the Republican votes because they’re concerned about the war in Iraq. They’re pro-life, pro-marriage, and generally supportive of GWB. However, they’re not sure we need to be in Iraq at all, and they want us out as soon as possible. They felt “safe” voting Libertarian to send a message since this is Bush country, Texas. Mike and Cindy are active in their Southern Baptist church; Cindy teaches first graders in Sunday School. They don’t own any guns, but they believe you have a right to do so if you want. Cindy likes to watch Oprah..

Are these scary people?

Rugby

Oct20

Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was born on this date in 1822. In addition to writing the definitive fictional treatment of the boys’ public school experience in Victorian England, he also, according to information on this website, started a Utopian community in the mountains of Tennessee called Rugby, named after Dr. Thomas Arnold’s school for boys that is the subject of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

It was to be a cooperative, class-free, agricultural community for younger sons of English gentry and others wishing to start life anew in America. At its peak, some 350 people lived in the colony. More than 70 buildings of Victorian design graced the East Tennessee townscape.

Thomas Hughes

I am quite interested in intentional comunities, even those of the nineteenth century which rarely seemed to last as established communities. In fact, we were discussing these types of communities and the religious groups that started them in our American Literature discussion group today as we discussed Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists. See this post for more on intentional communities. I would like to do a study of Utopian and planned communities and what causes them to fail or succeed or perhaps become manipulative cults.