Gnosce Te Ipse

My blog began as outblog: I wrote for an audience, some of whom I knew. Over time my posts became more introspective, journal notes from my reading or living or thinking (if I can use the last term). This I now call inblog. My hope is to do both here. To write for myself, still; to use this as a (almost) pathologically-public version (Warhol's fifteen minutes) of the pen and paper diaries I kept for years before I began saving files on my hardrive. But also to write more reader-friendly articles, outblog; even, to indulge a bit, do a little of what I do to pay the mortgage: teach . Inblog, outblog, both are coming. It's hard. I try to limit my drafting to an hour or less here; I have so many other responsibilities! Outblogging for the (mostly) anonymous web isn't doing work for my real students, those who depend on me to teach them something about English. But it is a hobby I enjoy. Who knows, someday I may get really, really lucky and get to write or talk abou...

My wife and I are driving up the hill for two much-needed days in Tahoe. It's cooler, very beautiful, and I'm looking foward to a wonderful time. My wife is very excited. We'll eat, drink, kayak, and see the shakespeare play they do on the beach up there, right on the lake, with the moon setting behind the stage. Sometimes living is very full of life. May I have that these next two days.

I only have a couple minutes before I head out for church, but the temperatures in California continue to smash records and we now have a midwest style humidity level we almost never have. Last night it barely cooled off and tonight is supposed to be more of the same. To make things even more dismal, our refrigerator up and quit two days ago. I checked the warranty and it expired three months ago. Five years and three months. The technician I explained the 'symptoms' to told me it was probably the sealed-system...six to eight hundred bucks to repair. I might just want to get a new fridge. Or, for a hundred bucks, he can come up here and 'confirm' his diagnosis. Happy, happy, joy, joy. So we have no cool anything in the house. I can't say how much colc milk is worth, in human terms. Sure things could be worse. My wife works at a hospital and people die in front of her all the time, some younger than me. I could be in Lebanon. But still, this is a tough week...

this is what I call Problog, as opposed to Amblog, which is what I and my friends do. The articles here on the Iraq war, on all sorts of things, are the work of a true expert. Will everyone like his politics? No. So far I do, of course, but if you have time, read Glenn's posts on the building middle east war. And the war is a tragic thing. Righteous or not, necessary or not, restrained or not, children have already died. More will follow. If Israel's incursion reduces suicide bombings of their own civilians, good, but I have no idea what the result will be. I leave this one to experts; all I can do is grieve the innocents who are dying each day. *** I am building bookcases in my 'study.' At least, now with the bookcases it will look like a study, perhaps function as one. I started these, oh, a year ago. I'm not very good with this kind of project and the fact that they are turning out nice is something I'm celebrating. I used oak plywoods for the ri...

Brian has posted some powerful, and in my view insightful, thoughts on the Bush's administrations failures in the middle east here. It's the "Strength is Ignorance" series, especially the first two. Other than that, I have to go. Love to all. t

I've been doing some blog-cogging lately, and want to change my blog's name. It's a name I've had in mine for a while: Look Closer . I take that phrase from the film American Beauty , but the meaning I give the term has more than one layer. (I also want to dress up the look of MHB and in general make it more visitor friendly, but give me a little time). It's true the new moniker represents N.T. Wright's approach to epistemolgoy, what is at the center of what he calls 'critical-realism.' However, it also represents my own thinking about reality for some time, even years. I watch my own truth unfold, in my recovery for example, and see how complex all human questions actually are, how there are so many opinions on OCD, for example, most of them limited pieces of the truth, a few erroneous. The actual answer, the Path, what Bruce Lee would call 'personal truth in combat'...that takes work to find. One has to Look Closer . This is what N.T. ...

The Middle East is burning again. In a show of force which seems incongrous with the situation, certainly more aggressive than anything our own country has done in recent memory when three of its citizens, civilian or military, were held hostage in an attempted exchange, Israel is on the move. I don't know much about the middle east, but I know something about our own President's behavior, and most of what I know, as I've said before, I don't like. The current adminstration is dangerous enough, with a middle-east on the edge of war, God help us all. There is no way the Palestinians can be kept in poverty, without opportunity or a humane living environment, that we can expect this decades-long crisis to end. Both the Israelis and the Palestinians deserve a nation to live in, and I don't think either side wants the other side to have one. Certainly, Israel, with its greater resources, isn't doing much, if anything, to solve the poverty problems in the Palesti...

My online friend and colleague Sandalstraps has posted on the homosexual issue here . I've read his post, and I appreciate his humanity and open-mind. I would like to discuss his ideas and the larger issue here just a bit. As usual, I have more questions than answers at this point. As a heterosexual man I am naturally at a disadvantage. Further, I am not a sexuality expert nor am I psychologist; I do not have a gay person in my immediate family. I am sorting out my own thoughts only because the issue is a dynamic one in Christianity today and Christian attitudes and policies affect millions of real and feeling individuals, namely, the homosexual population, who are certainly as human as I am. Finally, after watching the 80's goof-flick Weird Science with my sick 14 year old son (and wincing more than once at the PG-13 content) I notice that at the end of the film, when Anthony Hall shows courage and stands up to the quasi-Road Warrior bikers, he calls them "faggots....

First, I saw this film on the independent film channel, and I don't know if netflix has it, but I highly recommend Pack, Strap, Swallow. It's a docmentary shot inside a women's prison in Ecuador; it's about English speaking women from all over the world used as mules to run drugs, caught and incarcerated, and it's deeply moving. Yeah Cars was okay, so was Over the Hedge; but if time is an issue, skip everything at the theatre this week and get a hold of this documentary. Second, the Episcopal church is in the public again for the divisions resulting from the national conference. Yes, 'we' elected a female presiding bishop; the 'apology' for Bishop Robinson wasn't quite enough. I am told, though, that the Archbibshop of Canterbury himself supports the ECUSA theologically but is obviously, and understandably, desperate to hold together the worldwide communion. I again don't have time to do this any justice, and I'm outside any area of ...