Tag Archives: children

May 3, 2013

Friday Link Love: Doubt, Virginia Woolf, and a Real-Life Lord of the Flies

A couple of quick me-links:

Last minute, preachers, I’m at The Hardest Question this week with pieces on the gospel and Acts.

I also did a webinar on Sabbath for the Presbyterian Outlook this week. I covered some stuff that’s in the book but a lot that’s not, including how to get congregations thinking about and practicing Sabbath. You can order a DVD here.

Enough about me. Here we go!

Source: Manon Wethly, posted on Colossal. Click the image to visit the link.

The Politics of Play – Orion

A plea for a little more free-range parenting:

Some schools forbid children to play in the snow for fear of legal action in the event of an accident. We live in a litigious age, but this is about far more than that: it is about the kind of children we are creating.

By insidiously demanding that children always seek permission for the most trivial of actions, that they must obey the commands of others at every turn, we ensure that children today are not so much beaten into obedience as eroded into it. A risk-averse society creates a docility and loss of autonomy that has a horrible political shadow: a populace malleable, commandable, and blindly obedient.

The author also talks about a real-life Lord of the Flies incident… that didn’t end like Lord of the Flies:

One day, in 1977, six boys set out from Tonga on a fishing trip. They left safe harbor, and fate befell them. Badly. Caught in a huge storm, the boys were shipwrecked on a deserted island. What do they do, this little tribe?

They made a pact never to quarrel, because they could see that arguing could lead to mutually assured destruction. They promised each other that wherever they went on the island, they would go in twos, in case they got lost or had an accident. They agreed to have a rotation of being on guard, night and day, to watch out for anything that might harm them or anything that might help. And they kept their promises—for a day that became a week, a month, a year. After fifteen months, two boys, on watch as they had agreed, saw a speck of a boat on the horizon. The boys were found and rescued, all of them, grace intact and promises held.

If anyone knows more about this story, please let me know. I would love to read more. Google didn’t turn up much.

Principal Fires Security Guards to Hire Art Teachers–and Transforms Elementary School — NBC

Thanks to Marci Glass, who said, “This is what it means to live the future you envision.” Yes:

In a school notorious for its lack of discipline, where backpacks were prohibited for fear the students would use them to carry weapons, Bott’s bold decision to replace the security guards with art teachers was met with skepticism by those who also questioned why he would choose to lead the troubled school.

“A lot of my colleagues really questioned the decision,” he said. “A lot of people actually would say to me, ‘You realize that Orchard Gardens is a career killer? You know, you don’t want to go to Orchard Gardens.’”

But now, three years later, the school is almost unrecognizable. Brightly colored paintings, essays of achievement, and motivational posters line the halls. The dance studio has been resurrected, along with the band room, and an artists’ studio.

Swords into ploughshares.

How Not to Die — Atlantic

My friend Shala linked to this article on her Caterpickles blog. Not a happy topic, but an important one.

Dr. Angelo Volandes is making a film that he believes will change the way you die. The studio is his living room in Newton, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston; the control panel is his laptop; the camera crew is a 24-year-old guy named Jake; the star is his wife, Aretha Delight Davis. Volandes, a thickening mesomorph with straight brown hair that is graying at his temples, is wearing a T-shirt and shorts and looks like he belongs at a football game. Davis, a beautiful woman of Guyanese extraction with richly braided hair, is dressed in a white lab coat over a black shirt and stands before a plain gray backdrop.

“Remember: always slow,” Volandes says.

“Sure, hon,” Davis says, annoyed. She has done this many times.

Volandes claps to sync the sound. “Take one: Goals of Care, Dementia.”

As a pastor I would love to get my hands on the video series Dr. Volandes is creating.

A Prayer for Children of All Ages — Ashley-Anne Masters

Mother’s Day is coming up, and then Father’s Day. Both of these days can be very hard for folks; Ashley-Anne offers a prayer for use in worship:

God our perfect parent, we pray:

For those who will send flowers to their mom and those who will put flowers on their mom’s grave

For those who wish their children could have met their grandparents and those who will tell their parents that they will soon be grandparents

For those who will make new memories and those who will carry on old traditions

For sons named after their fathers and for those who don’t know their father’s name . . .

Apr 5, 2013

Friday Link Love: Roger Ebert, Louis CK, and Radical Generosity

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Happy Friday, everyone. What do you have planned this weekend? May you find a little space for things that are bubbly and fun, nourishing and vital. We will be celebrating the 90th birthday of Robert’s grandmother. Joy!

Here are a few items that grabbed me this week:

RIP Roger Ebert: The Beloved Critic on Writing, Life, and Mortality — Brain Pickings

I loved his writing and will miss his wisdom:

My colleague late at night, a year or two older, was Bill Lyon, who covered Champaign High School sports and became a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. … Bill and I would labor deep into the night on Fridays, composing our portraits of the [football] games. I was a subscriber to the Great Lead Theory, which teaches that a story must have an opening paragraph so powerful as to leave few readers still standing. … Lyon watched as I ripped one sheet of copy paper after another out of my typewriter and finally gave me the most useful advice I have ever received as a writer: ‘One, don’t wait for inspiration, just start the damn thing. Two, once you begin, keep on until the end. How do you know how the story should begin until you find out where it’s going?’ These rules saved me half a career’s worth of time and gained me a reputation as the fastest writer in town. I’m not faster. I spend less time not writing.

More at the link, including excerpts from his memoir and his TED talk.

Human-Tower Competition in Tarragona, Spain — Colossal

The things we human beings come up with! Amazing pictures of a swarm of humanity working together:

Kevin Ware on Louisville Teammate That ‘Touched My Heart’ — USA Today

H/t to my friend LeAnn Hodges. I didn’t see the Louisville/Duke game, but yikes. Yet horrific events can bring out the best in people:

[Ware's teammate] Hancock thought back to last summer, when he suffered a gruesome shoulder injury in a pickup game. He remembered how others were aghast. He remembered how former Louisville guard Andre McGee was the only one to rush to his side, to rush him to the hospital. He remembered how much that had meant.

So as Ware lay there in the first half of the Cardinals’ NCAA tournament victory over Duke on Sunday, scared and alone and stunned, Hancock ran to him. He held Ware’s hand and told him they would get through this together. He told Ware he would say a prayer for him.

Ware didn’t respond at first, because he was in shock. Hancock took a deep breath, closed his eyes, clenched Ware’s hand and started the prayer.

…You can’t fault the other players for their initial reaction to such a macabre moment. But you can praise Hancock, and you should.

We are wounded healers, all.

After God: What Can Atheists Learn from Believers? — New Statesman

I especially like the responses from Karen Armstrong and Alain de Botton (not too surprisingly—he’s a Blue Room mainstay). Here’s de Botton:

For centuries in the west, there was a figure in society who fulfilled a function that is likely to sound very odd to secular ears. The priest didn’t fulfil any material need; he was there to take care of that part of you called, rather unusually, “the soul”, by which we would understand the seat of our emotions and of our deep self.

Where have our soul-related needs gone? What are we doing with the material we used to go to a priest for? The deep self has naturally not given up its complexities and vulnerabilities simply because some scientific inaccuracies have been found in the tales of the five loaves and two fishes.

The loaves and fishes story is a tale that resonates beyond matters of science, but I take his point.

Louis CK on David Letterman — YouTube

Two of my favorite funny men:

The Touch-Screen Generation — The Atlantic

Young children—even toddlers—are spending more and more time with digital technology. What will it mean for their development?

Long but excellent rumination on parents’ ambivalence about their kids’ use of technology:

By their pinched reactions [to questions about how much screen time their kids have], these parents illuminated for me the neurosis of our age: as technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be doing to their children. Technological competence and sophistication have not, for parents, translated into comfort and ease. They have merely created yet another sphere that parents feel they have to navigate in exactly the right way. On the one hand, parents want their children to swim expertly in the digital stream that they will have to navigate all their lives; on the other hand, they fear that too much digital media, too early, will sink them. Parents end up treating tablets like precision surgical instruments, gadgets that might perform miracles for their child’s IQ and help him win some nifty robotics competition—but only if they are used just so. Otherwise, their child could end up one of those sad, pale creatures who can’t make eye contact and has an avatar for a girlfriend.

And on the other end of the spectrum of childhood… college students:

Addiction to Electronics Growing — Times-Delphic

“I occasionally see students using their phones during yoga or pilates, which makes me a bit sad,” Determann said. “If you can’t be unplugged for 45 or 60 minutes, that’s a bit concerning, in my opinion. I know that this has just become the way we, as a society operate, but the world will go on without you checking your notifications.”

A Religious Wake-Up Call in the Matter of Drones — Alternet

A critique against drones from a Christian perspective:

Our use of drones is only defensible on “Just War Theory” grounds, if we are able to demonstrate an immediate threat to this country that is specific and specifically premeditated with a specific objective. Unfortunately, the current administration, with its complex entanglements of secrecy and formal denials, has not been able to explain or demonstrate an immediate threat.

Our use of drones are out of “proportion” because it uses the most advanced technology in the world to assassinate people who can basically only throw the equivalent of sticks and stones back at you. Moreover, it gives these people no chance to surrender. It is like capital punishment without an arrest, a charge, a trial, or a right of appeal.

Our use of drones is not humane, because it totally objectifies the enemy by making them into a picture on a screen. There is not the faintest possibility, in the conduct of drone warfare by means of remote control, that you can regard the enemy as a fellow human citizen of the planet.

Is Giving the Secret to Getting Ahead? — NYT

Longish article about a new book, Give and Take, and its author, professor Adam Grant who, and I say this in a nice way, sounds like a freak. You might describe him as… radically generous with his time—he answers every email request for help, he spends hours mentoring students, etc. But all of this giving comes back to him in very interesting, even powerful, ways. “The greatest untapped source of motivation, he argues, is a sense of service to others; focusing on the contribution of our work to other peoples’ lives has the potential to make us more productive than thinking about helping ourselves.”

“Give and Take” incorporates scores of studies and personal case histories that suggest the benefits of an attitude of extreme giving at work. Many of the examples — the selfless C.E.O.’s, the consultants who mentor ceaselessly — are inspiring and humbling, even if they are a bit intimidating in their natural expansiveness. These generous professionals look at the world the way Grant does: an in-box filled with requests is not a task to be dispensed with perfunctorily (or worse, avoided); it’s an opportunity to help people, and therefore it’s an opportunity to feel good about yourself and your work. “I never get much done when I frame the 300 e-mails as ‘answering e-mails,’ ” Grant told me. “I have to look at it as, How is this task going to benefit the recipient?” Where other people see hassle, he sees bargains, a little work for a lot of gain, including his own.

There’s something wonderful about seeing the world in this way rather than the calculating tit-for-tat manner we are often trained to employ with one another. But I spent most of the article assuming he must be single, because what family could put up with someone who lives this way? Turns out he has a wife who stays home to take care of the kids. Which hey, more power to them. But it does color things somewhat, eh?

At any rate, I’m interested in the research on this topic. It seems like Grant’s outlook requires you to see time as an abundant resource, which I don’t. As I write in the book, I’m much more comfortable with the idea of holy scarcity. There isn’t enough time for everything we want or need to do. So how do we move as creatively through our days as possible?

Speaking of which… may you shimmy and tango through your weekend and all of its work, play, errands, and maybe, a few surprises. Peace.

Mar 29, 2013

Friday Link Love

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It feels strange to post LL on this, the darkest day of the year for Christians. But
a) maybe it’s helpful to get a picture of this wild, crazy, illogical, beautiful world that God so loved,
b) not all of you are Christian, and
c) many of you are pastors and might need a little light. And in that vein, how about a screen cleaning?

Trickle-Down Consumption: How Rising Inequality Can Leave Everyone Worse Off — Washington Post

As the wealthy have gotten wealthier, the economists find, that’s created an economic arms race in which the middle class has been spending beyond their means in order to keep up. The authors call this “trickle-down consumption.” The result? Americans are saving less, bankruptcies are becoming more common, and politicians are pushing for policies to make it easier to take on debt.

And a related issue:

Why the Rich Don’t Give to Charity — The Atlantic

The people who can least afford to give are the ones who donate the greatest percentage of their income. In 2011, the wealthiest Americans—those with earnings in the top 20 percent—contributed on average 1.3 percent of their income to charity. By comparison, Americans at the base of the income pyramid—those in the bottom 20 percent—donated 3.2 percent of their income. The relative generosity of lower-income Americans is accentuated by the fact that, unlike middle-class and wealthy donors, most of them cannot take advantage of the charitable tax deduction, because they do not itemize deductions on their income-tax returns.

In a series of controlled experiments, lower-income people and people who identified themselves as being on a relatively low social rung were consistently more generous with limited goods than upper-class participants were. Notably, though, when both groups were exposed to a sympathy-eliciting video on child poverty, the compassion of the wealthier group began to rise, and the groups’ willingness to help others became almost identical.

One hears from fiscal conservatives that if we get rid of “big government” safety nets, that individuals, charities and churches will pick up the slack. I don’t see how, but I’d like to engage with a fiscal conservative on this topic, especially the results of the study.

100 Rules of Dinner — Dinner, A Love Story

DALS is a recent discovery. A fun list for people who want to take cooking beyond the paint-by-numbers approach:

11. No need to sift. Whisking is just as effective.

12. Herbs in the salad.

13. Horseradish in the mashed potatoes.

14. Cinnamon in the chili.

Also:

37. When someone says they drink “one to two” glasses of wine a night, you can pretty much assume it’s two.

The Case for Getting Married Young — The Atlantic

H/t to Katherine Willis Pershey for this article. I agree that it shouldn’t be proscriptive, but is a good counterpoint to a lot of current conventional wisdom about waiting to marry until you’re “established”:

Interestingly, in a 2009 report, sociologist Mark Regnerus found that much of the pressure to delay marriage comes from parents who encourage their children to finish their education before marrying. One student told him that her parents “want my full attention on grades and school.” But such advice reflects an outdated reality, one in which a college degree was almost a guarantee of a good job that would be held for a lifetime. This is no longer the case. Furthermore, with so many students graduating from college with knee-buckling debt, they have worse than nothing to bring into a marriage. Indeed, prolonged singledom has become a rolling stone, gathering up debt and offspring that, we can be imagine, will manifest themselves in years to come in more broken, or never-realized, marriages.

Looking back over a marriage of nearly three decades, I am thankful that I married before going down that road. Now as a college-educated, doctorate-holding woman, I can attest that marrying young (at age 19) was most beneficial: to me, to my husband, and to the longevity of our marriage. Our achievements have come, I am convinced, not despite our young marriage, but because of it.

Our marriage was, to use Knot Yet’s terminology, a “cornerstone” not a “capstone.” …

It was not the days of ease that made our marriage stronger and happier: it was working through the difficult parts. We learned to luxuriate in the quotidian, to take wonder in the mundane, skills that have become even more valuable in our prosperous years. We invested the vigor of our youth not in things to bring into the marriage, but in each other and our marriage.

As one sociologist put it:

Marriage actually works best as a formative institution, not an institution you enter once you think you’re fully formed. We learn marriage, just as we learn language, and to the teachable, some lessons just come easier earlier in life.

Robert and I married young (22), and next year will be our 20th anniversary. Blessed be.

and more from The Atlantic:

Ogooglebar… and 14 Other Swedish Words We Should Incorporate Into English Immediately — The Atlantic

I agree with my friend Jay: “attitydinkontinens” needs to take hold, now.

From Puppy with Love — The Bygone Bureau

How daily photos of a couple’s dog helped them get through a long-distance relationship. I’m starting work on a second book, thinking about technology and digital culture from a spiritual perspective, so this is of interest:

Did the pictures somehow substitute for or distract from our relationship? And the answer is yes. And I think that’s why we’re still together when so many people think long-distance relationships are impossible. Instead of focusing on us – which in the context of distance so often means strain, effort, and unhappiness – we dote on our dog and his boundless photogenicity.

I’m not suggesting that pictures can make a relationship work. And I’m not exactly sure why dog pictures are more effective for me than Skype or the telephone or texts.

…At the same time, though, this dog — something very much a product of our ability to raise it but at the same time independent, separate, us mediated into dog-life — has made a huge difference.

Loving the contrast between labyrinth and cone of shame here:

The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit, by Sylvia Plath — Brain Pickings

Did you know Sylvia Plath wrote a children’s book and it’s charming and poignant?

The Two Epiphanies That Made Me a Better Negotiator — 99U

Let’s call this the latest installment in our ponderings about the Lean In movement:

When people are about to enter a negotiation, they see it as either a threat or a challenge. Studies show that people who see negotiation as a threat experience greater stress and make less advantageous deals. They behave more passively, and are less likely to use tough tactics aimed at gaining leverage, compared to the hard-ballers who feel negotiation to be more of a challenge than a threat.

This makes so much sense to me. My husband absolutely sees negotiating as a challenge. He looks forward to a good haggle. I do not. Reading about these studies, I realized that I have always seen negotiations as threatening, and just wanted them over with as quickly as possible, no matter what it cost me. Why prolong a stressful, threatening situation when you can throw in the towel and move on?

But why do I see negotiations as threats, and not challenges? To answer that, I needed…

Epiphany #2: There is more than one way to look at any goal.

God is With Me – Practicing Families

This is a wonderful site, full of good practical ideas for incorporating faith and Christian practice into everyday life as a family.

When my kids were small, aged 6 and 3, getting out of the house in the morning was the worst part of the day….

I decided to write a litany for our mornings, and say it with them every school day morning for the year. These were the words that I hoped would help them in the most difficult parts of their day.

Parent: When I’m scared,
Kids: God is with me.
Parent: When I’m happy,
Kids: God is with me.
Parent: When I’m having a hard day,
Kids: God is with me.
Parent: When I’m having a super day,
Kids: God is with me.
Parent: All day long, every day,
Kids: God is with me.
All: Thank you God for being with me.

You could get playful with this: When my mommy forgets to pack a dessert in my lunch… When I forget to ask ‘mother may I’ at recess…

On the darkest day of the Christian year… God is with me. And you.

Peace.

Mar 12, 2013

Link Love for Kids

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Our girls (10 and 7) got iPad minis for Christmas. We agonized over the decision. On the one hand, we wondered whether they were too young to be responsible with Pandora’s box. On the other hand, now felt like the perfect time to start teaching them good habits, etiquette and practices. They’re young enough that they actually care what we have to say and are interested in learning how to be safe on the Internet. They want to know the rules and follow them. Plus the stakes are low. The only people who email or text them are family.

And the videos they make of one another are hilarious.

I still feel mildly panicked about their access to this technology. I ask them to be in the room with me, especially when they’re online.

But it’s been fun to share links with them. Pre-tween kids love stuff like this:

Guinea pig, dinosaur costume

So in the spirit of sharing fun/educational/amusing stuff with children, here’s a special edition of link love, kid-style:

The 30 Happiest Facts of All Time — Buzzfeed

Note: BE CAREFUL WITH BUZZFEED. There is kid-inappropriate stuff on the site. But there’s also more kid-appropriate stuff than you might think. Supervise and verify. This particular link is great: otters hold hands in the water. The guy who does the voice of Mickey Mouse married the gal who does the voice of Minnie. A group of ferrets is called a “business.”

And turtles can breathe through their butt.

Macaulay Library — Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Here you will find thousands of hours of audio and video of birdcalls and birdsong. I heard about this on Studio 360, a great podcast about creativity, pop culture and the arts.

Pitch Drop Experiment Webcam — University of Queensland

Caroline is obsessed with this webcam since hearing a story on Radiolab. The drop of pitch is supposed to go any time now, and by “any time” it could be months or years, and in the meantime she has schoolwork and life and Flash doesn’t even work on her iPad but hey, this is quirky science we’re talking about!

Extreme Happiness – Aleksander Gamme, YouTube

This is an oldie (relatively speaking) but goodie in our house. Alex is a Norwegian guy who did a solo trek across Antarctica and buried food along the way for the return trip. The sheer joy expressed in this video, on day 86 when he is VERY hungry, never fails to give us the giggles.

What’s giving you the giggles today?

Mar 1, 2013

Friday Link Love: Laughing at Kids, Love Connections at Wal-Mart and More

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First of all: new author website! Woohoo! Thanks to the folks at Paraclete Web Design for their great work, prompt service, and good humor. There will be a number of kinks to work out in the days to come, but how fun to have some new digs!

Away we go:

The Saddest Map in America – The Dish

Looking for love in all the wrong places? The most popular places mentioned in Craig’s List “missed connections” feature, compiled by state:

I don’t know what’s more awesome: that Wal-Mart appears so many times, or that Oklahomans are looking for love at the state fair.

Interview with Edward O. Wilson: The Origin of Morals – Spiegel

He’s changed his position on kin selection as it relates to evolution, favoring group selection instead:

During the 1970s, I was one of the main proponents of kin selection theory. And at first the idea sounds very reasonable. So for example, if I favored you because you were my brother and therefore we share one half of our genes, then I could sacrifice a lot for you. I could give up my chance to have children in order to get you through college and have a big family. The problem is: If you think it through, kin selection doesn’t explain anything. Instead, I came to the conclusion that selection operates on multiple levels. On one hand, you have normal Darwinian selection going on all the time, where individuals compete with each other. In addition, however, these individuals now form groups. They are staying together, and consequently it is group versus group.

I’m no scientist, but the tribal thing makes sense. There are new studies out about how liberals and conservatives over-exaggerate the characteristics of the other.

And this phrase was new to me:

“Humans,” the saying goes, “have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and god-like technology”.

When the Children Make Us Laugh – Worshiping with Children

She is sitting on the steps with the pastor who asks a question. She offers what seems like a perfectly sensible answer and the whole congregation laughs. In that moment one of two things happens, either a comedian is born or a child feels humiliated. When a comedian is born, he often uses the children’s time to practice his new-found vocation, generally with beginner comedian results. He may even compete with the pastor for the attention of the congregation – especially if mom or dad is the pastor. The results can embarrass everyone – except probably the young comedian. But if the child who drew laughter feels humiliated, she often decides the conversations on the steps are dangerous.

There is surely middle ground here between a fledgling comedian and abject humiliation. But laughing at children when they are being serious is a major issue with me. It’s fine to share delight with one another, regardless of age. But I felt disrespected as a child when I made an earnest comment and adults laughed. Some ideas in this article about how to handle this in worship.

It’s Absurd – Bromleigh McCleneghan

During the Oscars, the Onion posted a vile tweet about child actress Quvenzhané Wallis. Bromleigh’s take on the incident is one of my favorites. She also has the best “About” page I think I’ve ever read in all my years of blogging.

Trust and Society – Bruce Schneier, The Montreal Review

This past weekend during book group at Tiny, we were discussing the Harry Potter series. I remarked that both Harry Potter and The Hunger Games portray institutions (such as government) as completely inept at best, and malevolent at worst. I wondered what it does to kids to receive such messages—that basic institutions are not worthy of our trust—at such a formative time in their lives. (I honestly don’t know; I mean, look at fairy tales!)

Many people piped up with variations on the idea that institutions should not be worthy of our trust, and certainly not blind trust (I agree with the latter). One person said “Kids needs to learn that they can trust their families, their friends. Not institutions.” Another brought up Watergate. I get that. But really, is it helpful and healthy to promote cynicism at such an early age?

I wish I’d had this article at the time:

In today’s society, we need to trust not only people, but institutions and systems. It’s not so much that I trusted the particular pilot who flew my plane this morning, but the airline that produces well-trained and well-rested pilots according to some schedule. And it’s not so much that I trusted the particular taxi driver, but instead the taxi licensing system and overall police system that produced him. Similarly, when I used an ATM this morning — another interesting exercise in trust — it’s less that I trusted that particular machine, bank, and service company — but instead that I trusted the national banking system to debit the proper amount from my bank account back home.

What do you think?

Sister Corita Kent’s Timeless Rules for Learning and Life, Hand-Lettered by Lisa Congdon – Brain Pickings

Thought-provoking list:

Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.

(Speaking of trust…)

Want to Give Your Family Value and Purpose? Write a Mission Statement – The Atlantic

Can mission statements be pointless wastes of time? Yes, they can. But not necessarily. I’ll admit it, I love the idea. The author quotes the Covey family mission statement:

“The mission of our family is to create a nurturing place of faith, order, truth, love, happiness, and relaxation, and to provide opportunity for each individual to become responsibly independent, and effectively interdependent, in order to serve worthy purposes in society.”

I had a range of reactions on reading this. On the one hand, I found the whole thing a little corny. It seemed cumbersome, heavy-handed, and a tad humorless. On the other hand, I kinda loved the idea. I’m corny! I also thought Covey’s idea captured something inherently true: How can we ask our children to uphold our family’s values if we never articulate what those values are?

This calls to mind some of the discussion going on in the church about teaching kids the Christian faith. For decades, we have relied on Sunday School and mid-week programs to do the job. But it’s the parents’ job, first and foremost. (Especially since the trend now is for “regular” attendees to come only a few times a month—we just don’t have time and wherewithal to the do it all at church.)

Finally we voted on a single statement (taken from a remark I made when they were born): “May our first word be adventure and our last word love.” Finally we added a series of ten statements: “We are travelers not tourists;” “We don’t like dilemmas; we like solutions.”

Or how about a family faith statement? Thank you John Vest!

We Are Not What We Were Called – The Dish

Two from Brain Pickings, two from The Dish. This is a link to that amazing movie/slam poem about bullying that’s been making the rounds. But also check out this study:

Based on the findings, Copeland and his team divided their subjects into three groups: People who were victims as children, people who were bullies, and people who were both. The third group is known as bully-victims. These are the people who tend to have the most serious psychological problems as kids, and in the Duke study, they also showed up with higher levels of anxiety, depressive disorders, and suicidal thinking as adults. The people who had only experienced being victims were also at heightened risk for depression and anxiety. And the bullies were more likely to have an antisocial personality disorder.

What Now? Advice for Writing and Life from Ann Patchett – Brain Pickings

Two from Brain Pickings this week! I guess this post is from a commencement speech Patchett did. I took note of it because I was recently back at Columbia Seminary for only the third time since graduating 10 years ago. It was a very deep, rich experience, to walk those halls and to emerge from the Harrington Center into the quad like I did some 13 years ago when I first visited the campus and thought, “I am home.”

So her remarks about going back to the pivotal spaces in our lives resonated with me:

Coming back is the thing that enables you to see how all the dots in your life are connected, how one decision leads you to another, how one twist of fate, good or bad, brings you to a door that later takes you to another door, which aided by several detours — long hallways and unforeseen stairwells — eventually puts you in the place you are now. Every choice lays down a trail of bread crumbs, so that when you look behind you there appears to be a very clear path that points straight to the place where you now stand. But when you look ahead there isn’t a bread crumb in sight — there are just a few shrubs, a bunch of trees, a handful of skittish woodland creatures. You glance from left to right and find no indication of which way you’re supposed to go. And so you stand there, sniffing at the wind, looking for directional clues in the growth patterns of moss, and you think, What now?

What now, indeed? May whatever it is be wonderful for you all.

The Blue Room

MaryAnn McKibben Dana