Posted 9/13/2002 05:17:14 PM

Anheuser rolls out low-carb beer

the atkins diet has a new face: steak and ultra anyone?

Posted 9/13/2002 04:36:21 PM
the conversation that happens everyday to so many of us:

someone: how are you?
us: fine. (i am tired. really, very tired.
rest is not what i need.
wholeheartedness.
sustainable.
now.)

Posted 9/13/2002 04:29:41 PM

two churchy blogs:

stories of simple churches...

thoughts along the lines of the matthew's house folks.


what is christianity?

i like the words describing this new blog:

...Gathering traces of past-orthodoxy, past-liturgy, and past-protesting into a modern way of sorting out what Christianity is in modern contexts.

let's see how it lives up to its name...

Posted 9/13/2002 09:43:01 AM

Solicited: Grants: U.S. Institute of Peace

Theme: Religion, Conflict and Peace-building

The interconnections between religion, conflict and peace are as complex as they are varied. The Institute invites proposals for research, training, education and pilot projects that promise to advance the understanding of the role of religion in conflict and peace, enhance faith-based peacemaking initiatives, and explore new approaches to peacemaking in conflicts with religious dimensions. The Institute will not consider support for activities that seek to promote religious belief or observance.

Deadline: October 1, 2002

Posted 9/11/2002 11:10:49 PM
i was just asked in an IM what dan's ideal world would look like.
it surprised me how i answered without pause:

a surprising diversity in harmony amidst disagreement

Posted 9/11/2002 05:14:35 PM
www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish - The Real Parallel

andrew sullivan begins this blog entry with a compelling quote from tony blair. he ends the entry by writing this: The advocates of inaction - or, worse, the appearance of action - seem to me to be essentially bargaining away the lives of American citizens to protect their anachronistic notion of an international order.

is the notion of an "international order" anachronistic? how else would one function where something beyond mere brute force comes into play on the international stage if not by some sense of an international order? in our time this function is played out largely in the UN and the smaller bodies of influence that organize UN member countries--NATO, the Organization of Islamic Conferences, the Group of 8, the WTO, et al. i would love to sit down and here andrew clarify his thoughts on this.

Posted 9/11/2002 02:00:32 PM
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film | Audiences cheer Eminem film


Eminem and Cusack got rave reviews coming out of the Toronto Film Festival for 8 Mile and Max respectively. 8 Mile should be out in november (i cannot wait). Max in december.

Posted 9/11/2002 01:43:53 PM
oh, btw, my cell fell into the toilet today.
my new cell that is. two have now died in 2 months.
does anyone have a gsm phone laying around the house?

Posted 9/11/2002 01:41:15 PM
jordan posted a moving excerpt from Tony Campolo's address at North Park University just after 9/11 last year.

Posted 9/11/2002 10:58:36 AM

i was planning to hold all of my posts for the day until later tonight.
it is now nearly 11am in my central time zone existence.
i have spoken. i have cried. i have listened.
life must now go on.
peace to you.
9/11/02.

Posted 9/11/2002 10:47:46 AM

ayesha and i were talking about 9/11 last night.
she looked at me with a deeply serious face,
that middle place between awe and fear,
and she said,

Did I jump out of that building, too?

later in an unrelated conversation
she told me that she wanted to be a kangaroo when she grew up.

Posted 9/11/2002 10:33:23 AM
Giving that is worthy of praise
amounts to action in the service of the poor,
done in secret, by those who themselves are of little means.
- The Prophet Mohammed

Posted 9/11/2002 10:19:36 AM

this morning we lit two white candles
and told stories
of heroes and harrowing times.

in large part we choose our roles in life.
we can be heroes.

Posted 9/11/2002 09:43:00 AM
beeow on the artistic path:

You've got to let your art go and let it live it's own life apart from your intentions. Nobody will see it the way you want them to, it will be filtered through their own experiences and attitudes. Nobody will ever understand your art, nobody will ever understand you. You've got to live and let live and give up the hope of knowing your art affected somebody the way you imagined it might.

So, set it free, to the actors who might read it, to the copy girl who wants to color it and hang it on her wall, to the studio who has agreed to distribute it, to the kid who wants to replay it on his casio keyboard. Once born, you must raise it, but if you don't let it move out of your house it is worthless to the world.

Posted 9/11/2002 09:14:35 AM
on a brighter note: Rütl '02...
thousands of swiss teens and twenty-somethings recently converged on a picturesque swiss mountainside to "recovenant with God for their nation." these physical symbols of faith solidarity are moving to me. it beats watching another rerun or coming up with the next stupid crusade to boycott or poorly copy some entertainment distraction.

Posted 9/11/2002 08:41:03 AM

sometimes i just shake my head...
who comes up with this stuff?
it is times like these that make me wish The Door was still being published...
wait maybe it is.

LOGIA: BIBLE GRANOLA

There is no better way to start your day than with a wholesome and nutritious bowl of Bible Granola!

Ban Christian Rock Music!

The Bibleman Family Cruise

Christians For Cannabis

wow. sometimes i think that i have seen it all--then i run across a site like this. it is such an ironically funny thing to see "inerrancy" used as a justification for legalizing weed. i am more concerned with the evidentialist approach and dispensational leanings of anyone who would hawk the Scofield Study Bible on their site (which CFC does) than i am about cannabis use.

Posted 9/11/2002 06:26:33 AM

Posted 9/10/2002 11:37:33 PM
Nelson Mandela: The United States of America is a Threat to World Peace

...the attitude of the United States of America is a threat to world peace. Because what [America] is saying is that if you are afraid of a veto in the Security Council, you can go outside and take action and violate the sovereignty of other countries. That is the message they are sending to the world. That must be condemned in the strongest terms.

Posted 9/10/2002 09:17:14 PM
BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Switzerland admitted to UN

can one be engaged and yet remain neutral?
is neutrality an impossibility?
switzerland has been dealing with
these and other issues for 50 years.
today they officially joined the post-WWII world body.

the only powers yet to be represented by UN membership
are the vatican and the palestinian authority.

Posted 9/10/2002 08:37:53 PM

sarah's bio is up at trust theatre now...
along with this picture of her.

there are a few other interesting pictures on the site post update.

somehow i make another appearance with a middle eastern sword...

Posted 9/10/2002 11:52:34 AM
cool. mike riddell writes on the long now on seven this month. i have blogged a bit on the long now before--here and here. i believe that there is a substantial realignment of issues, priorities and predispositions when communities embrace long now thinking. more on this later. oh, and a bit on this in the post below also. cheers.

Posted 9/9/2002 10:44:42 PM

if you are at all familiar with what we have come to call the 6th chapter of matthew's gospel you know that secrecy played a large part in jesus' teaching about living well (righteousness). so much so that i would suggest that

the way of
the kingdom
is a secret way.

not because of some initiate-only esoteric knowledge (The Secret a la the various gnosticisms the world has seen), but because of a secret practice, a clandestine outworking, an amorphous enfolding of the world into the way... a walking, a touching, a tasting, a refraining, an asking, a giving all done in secret.

we do not like this way in the world of consumer, camp spirituality.

it requires an embodied way--
a spirituality of the Long Now--
that cannot be easily packaged and marketed by the church du jour,

and it demands trust--
a ruthless trust--
in givenness and disproportionate outcomes.

an embodied way
a spirituality of the Long Now does not have hard lines drawn that demarcate the "saved" and the "lost"--judging this being an impossibility and something that should specifically be avoided. this way, when spoken of from classically christian texts and with a vocabulary that is in some fashion formed by these texts and the community that carries them, is about a loss of self--not for christianity or any other religion, but within christianity or any other religion for the express purpose of loving god and loving our neighbor.

loving the other--both the divine and the human other--is the dharma practice, the dogmatic context, the doctrinal praxis that connects us with the revolutionary in palestine who with an audacity few can muster tells a seeker who is already in the way that he lacked one thing and that to gain this one thing required a loss of those things in which his identity had become inextricably intertwined. this embodied spirituality of the long now is not so much about being right as it is about being right. it is not about a crusade for ideological and cultural global homogeneity, but about creating a way for the impossible in our communities, a space to recognize and welcome the divine among us.

a ruthless trust
the ruthless trust of the other kingdom is a trust in the defining benevolence of the creator god; a taking the side of divine abundance in this world; an active hope that puts physical success on the line with the assurance of divine sufficiency. some have lived such that the way of trust has become an ignoble thing in our time. new media religious prosperity charlatans, odd, snake handling literalists, medical knowledge eschewing fundamentalists and the like. this is not living with ruthless trust.

trust is about awakening to the givenness of the world. how we did not bring ourselves into being. how we have no real control over the matrix of our existence. how we are a mystery to ourselves. how we do not really know who we are. this recognition of life as gift is an opening to ruthless trust. the birds and grass are provided for and we will be to, even those of us with so little faith. not that we do not will and act and define and reconfigure and create--we must have the courage to do these things--but that these are now done from within the state of givenness--we act out of the awareness that we participate in a gift--both a receiving of and a regiving of that of which we could not dream in our vast night of nonbeing.

knowing that our sufficiency and creativity is in the gift we can act out with courage trusting that the father who sees what is done in secret will take the widow's small coin and make it a greater gift than the riches being showered into the temple treasury with such pomp and circumstance. we can trust that the widow and orphan will be taken care of by our meager capabilities. that our small obedience over time is in fact where we meet god. that it is in clothing, feeding and visiting the stranger, naked and oppressed that the shadow of the unknown god is for a brief moment seen.

a community of the secret: eschewing The Secret by living in secret

may we find our way forward together in peace
in secret

Posted 9/9/2002 10:09:31 PM
so what are you talking about at soularize, dan?

i have some ideas... but what do you want to hear? of the interesting and not-so-interesting things that have appeared in this blog or that we have spoken of what do you think should be developed further in a public forum? i am seriously interested. email me.

Posted 9/9/2002 10:02:00 PM

WE'RE COUNTING DOWN, FOLKS!

Only 23,999 more people need to give $1 to meet our pledge drive goal!

Our supply of Urim and Thumim have been depleted, but for those who can become Charter Readers by giving at the $1 level right now a special package of nothing will not be sent to you, postage paid, in the spirit of doing your giving in secret.

you know, folks, last time we mentioned this we received some odd looks and a comment or three wondering if we were being serious or cynical.

do we have to pick just one? peace to you.

Posted 9/9/2002 06:10:06 PM
i had to write some bios for the trust theatre site. i think that i have come to truly savor the genre of bio--reading and writing. i am considering writing a new bio every day. maybe each week. it focuses you somewhat--in odd ways. here are the three i wrote today (in the order that they were penned):

dan likes life. he thinks a good bit. he enjoys friends who can forgive him and books that can engage him. he lives in an old 3 story condo that is an off green color--that mix between mauve, taupe and olive that is so difficult to articulate with precision in english. no one without children should be able to turn the key on the nuclear football according to dan. he sometimes spouts off silly utopian phrases like, "love your enemies." dan thinks that all of life can be summed up in a look and that love is an understanding between people that cannot be contrived. he sometimes writes stuff at http://theyblinked.blogspot.com.

emily is originally from austin. she is currently attending school in arlington. emily has danced with the round rock repertory and is currently a tcc elite dancer. emily sends her shout outs to cookie monster, super grover and the letter f. {note: just to be precise my only contribution to this one would be the last sentence...}

sarah wants to go to college after she finishes the 6th grade. this seems like a realistic expectation to her. she feels marginalized by big government for not being allowed to get a job that pays real money just because she is nine years old. hollywood is her home of choice in the coming years. or maybe new york. maybe both. sarah has a sister who wants to be just like her, a cadre of friends whose lives are incomplete when she is gone and parents who are concerned about her capacity to multi-task stress like a corporate raider. if sarah checked her email you could probably reach her at snowqueen2@hotmail.com, but since she does not you better send the fan mail to theyblinked@hotmail.com.

these might eventually be up at the trust theatre site--oops, maybe not sarah's... an email from floss using aja's aol account just popped up informing me that they have found the one sarah wrote last week. it was fun anyway. did i mention buy a ticket yet?

Posted 9/9/2002 12:41:32 AM

In Memory Of Masood
d.Sept 9, 2001

Posted 9/8/2002 11:12:43 PM
go to this site and buy a ticket. sarah/zoe thanks you.

Posted 9/8/2002 09:43:24 PM
so... i went to this punk rawk church thing again today. worship there is always cool. very loud and raw.

the people there are really loving too. amazingly open and friendly (that is what compelled me to return this week).

because of how cool the people and the worship are it was profoundly disappointing when the message was brought today. a few of my notes from my journal during the message:

it seems that there are some substantial presuppositional areas that will keep me from being content with what is regularly spoken in this place.

1. a low view of god -- i would go so far as to say a non-jesus view of god. a least, perhaps, a non-Q yesh'uah view of god. god seemed to be characterized as a bad parent who has determined that their child is for some reason deserving of eternal punishment and a smart ass divine verbal barrage.

2. a low view of scripture/tradition - there is a hollow exegetical literalism masquerading as divine authority in much of what was said today. this approach to religious instruction, while perhaps typical for certain protestant/revivalist/charismatic churches, i take as naive at best and an act of maniacal ideological manipulation at worst. the irony of a person so consistently speaking out against religion as if the sources and spirit of the very thing they are preaching is other than religion is difficult for me to swallow gracefully. the deception, self-deception or simple ignorance must be addressed in some way.

3. heaven, hell, damnation and redemption - the bed rock gospel for this group seems to be a very formulaic blood-ransom message, a get-people-to-heaven methodology that is well past the fine edge of religious proclamation into religious manipulation and a crude, industrial, salvation-factory approach to "soul saving" with all of the modern evangelical, mechanistic, hyper-individual "ask jesus into your heart" religious oddities.

i was uncomfortable with my oldest hearing what was being spoken from the pulpit today. i can filter this kind of stuff against my experience and treat it like an american religious anthropology project or something. though inevitable and perhaps even a healthy inoculation experience, sarah experiencing the, perhaps well meaning but all the while ignorant, american, evangelical, roman-protestant christian religious guilt trips and ideological salvation politics from such a persuasive speaker in a welcoming environment made me feel like i was not being a responsible parent. that was an unexpected odd feeling.

anyway. that should frighten some people.
happy to talk to anyone about it. shoot me an email.

Posted 9/8/2002 12:47:01 PM
relationships: living out integrity within promises

be unwavering in your integrity, but
don't be quick to promise

Posted 9/8/2002 12:44:54 PM
it's ok
to be lonely
as long as you're
free
~r.mullins