I wrote this back in 2010 – and thought today was a good day to repost it. In 2003 my brothers, father and I began a series of tromps around western Europe. The excuse was that my brothers were both living in Europe at the time. My middle brother was planting a church in Poitiers in France and my little brother’s MASH unit was attached to the 3rd Infantry Division stationed at the time in […]
Julian Long, who always gives us a gift when he blogs, reflecting on his father’s military service and the present pandemic, writes (in a lovely longer essay): out the backroom window | commonplaces, travel, advocacy, occasional photos, at home in St. Louis . . .: [T]his memorial day I am thinking again about my father and about this very fine polemic by Marilynne Robinson in the June 11 issue of The New York Review of […]
Quick post to point people to this article in The Atlantic. Derek Thompson collects the best and most recent information about how the coronavirus is spread. He points to what South Korea learned studying a particular spreading event in an office building: Coronavirus: How Will We Ever Be Safe Inside? – The Atlantic: In its conclusion, the Korean CDC writes that the spread of the virus was almost entirely limited to the one floor “despite […]
TEOTWAWKI. “The End of the World as we know it” is an old meme. You can read countless sci-fi novels (I have!) that use a moment of cataclysmic change to frame the narrative arc of the hero’s journey (a la Joseph Campbell). Watch Star Wars, watch the Avenger’s Movie series, etc and you’ll see what I mean. So does this present season of pandemic presage a turning of the age in human history? Maybe? Likely […]
How Will the Coronavirus Change Us? – The Atlantic: When AIDS came into the world, disease researchers reconsidered, loudly warning of new pandemics. Journalists wrote books with titles such as The Coming Plague and Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic. But not many nonscientists took these warnings to heart. The American public has not enjoyed its surprise reentry into the world of contagion and quarantine—and this unhappiness seems likely to have consequences. Scholars […]
God of pilgrims and all who journey, walk beside us as we begin down the path of restoration and recovery in our communities. Help us as we transition to a new way of being your people. Let us encounter you in friend and stranger. Help us to care for our neighbor and the outcast. May all be safe and may our new life right the wrongs of the old. This we ask in the name […]
The Internet and its communications technologies are allowing us to work from home in the midst of this pandemic, to stay in touch with each other and “shelter in place” in ways that simply wouldn’t have been possible even 10 years ago. But like most technological advances, it’s become a veritable Sword of Damocles. It has developed so quickly that we simply haven’t had time to adapt completely to what it makes possible. That’s particularly […]
Every week in this pandemic, the Episcopal Church’s bishops and their senior staff have a thirty minute briefing from leaders around the wider church. Most of us tune in for it. For me the most useful bits have come from hearing observations from a woman who coordinates ERD’s disaster response teams. (ERD=Episcopal Relief and Development) What she shares comes from hard won experience responding to epidemics, earthquakes, fires, famine and storms around the world. There’s […]
My colleague (and friend) Jim Hazelwood, the Lutheran bishop of New England, posted a letter about the first steps in the COVID-19 recovery process. He’s been a key conversation partner with the Episcopal bishops in New England and what he shares here both represents a large part of my thinking and includes some helpful suggestions I hadn’t thought of. He writes particularly of the immediate stages of returning to the buildings as the state governments […]
Before we can re-open things and start the recovery phase of this pandemic, we need to know if people have had COVID-19 and recovered, or if they are still susceptible. I’ve seen speculation about issuing people who’ve recovered some sort of digital certificate of immunity. Possessing the certificate would allow the bearer to enter buildings, return to work, go to church, etc. But there’s a problem. Apparently there are a number of inadequate tests being […]
