Greenblade

On the 40th anniversary of the deaths of four protesting students at Kent State University, Salon published a column called Kent State and the Frisbee Revolution in which the author remembers the growth of outrage and action on his campus and its dissipation once the crisis had past. He says, “A friend wrote an editorial in one of the campus newspapers headlined, “The Frisbee Revolution.” Those of us who were trying to keep the protests alive were annoyed at the time, but he was right. Once the impetus of the big rally was over, motivation vanished and kids went back to being kids.” Read more of this post

“Greenblade strives to heal the human relationship with Creation…” The opening of Greenblade’s mission statement

“He was lecturing me on my lack of knowledge about the marine environment. I told him we were most concerned about the oil getting in the food web if they sink it with dispersants,” Shipp said. “When we started talking about the sediments and the food web, they turned off. They were all about chemical reactions and that sort of thing. They just kept saying, ‘EPA approved it.’” Mobile scientists’ warnings about oil dispersants ignored by BP, Coast Guard Read more of this post

Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ 


I’ve been over this territory before in The Sixth Day and I will go over it again. This is such a difficult passage. Many writers and thinkers are now pointing out that “dominion” does not mean we get to do any old thing we feel like doing and the word really means something more like “stewardship” but today, for me, that evades a truth. Read more of this post

OK, hang with me here: I am going to propose a theology based on food competition shows. I’ll take Chopped as an example. On that show four chefs are given a basket with a wildly improbable combination of ingredients that they have to make into a coherent dish. Actual baskets have contained strawberries, turkey and gummi bears; chocolate, mussels and figs; and – this one was for dessert – canned peaches, cherry tomatoes, pretzel sticks, and emu eggs. The chefs have to use all of the ingredients and they have to work under strict time limits. They are judged on their dishes and chefs are eliminated one at a time. Read more of this post

My grandfather, who died before I was born, was a Methodist minister. When he was first starting out he served an inner-city parish in Richmond frequented by down-and-out men, most of them drunks. The family story tells of a Sunday when he preached a fire-and-brimstone sermon about the evils of alcohol. He railed at the drink and at the men, what they were doing to themselves and their families, and generally thumped his Bible. Read more of this post

I am now reading Sara Miles’s latest book, Jesus Freak, in which she tells a story of inviting 25 challenging high school students to help out in the food pantry at St. Gregory of Nyssa in San Francisco. Because they are working, they are invited to the lunch that all the volunteers eat together before the pantry opens. The kids are blown away. “No one ever put a tablecloth on for us before.” Read more of this post