Category: Weblogs

David Ord: Becoming Real with Each Other

A friend of mine (actually my book editor) picked up on an off-hand illustration that I used in a sermon recently about why Christian marriage is a life-long affair and fleshed out the reasoning that undergirds my thinking.

He writes, in part:

“When we become serious about someone and in due course enter into a committed relationship, we are still hiding a large part of ourselves. We are hiding because we can’t believe some parts of us are lovable. We even try to hide these parts from ourselves much of the time.

But as time goes by, if our authenticity is allowed to grow and we show more and more of who we are to the other person, we find that this person has always known we are the very person we think we have been hiding—and they have loved us as this person we have been trying to hide.

It’s now that we can finally relax into loving ourselves.

Commitment isn’t about two people propping each other up, covering for each other, pretending together that their flaws and weaknesses don’t exist. It’s not about keeping masks in place. It’s about becoming increasingly authentic, and thereby learning to accept all the parts of ourselves into ourselves and at last own who we truly are.”

Read the full article here.

David has a lot of interesting things up there. He’s even gotten me to finally read “The Little Prince”. Enjoy.

Photos of our Cathedral by Eric Brimhall

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Eric posted some of these shots online earlier today. I’d not seen them before. He’s done a great job of giving folks a sense of what the main worship space feels like at the Cathedral.
See the photos here.
Note that this set does not have pictures of the new pulpit that was just installed. We’ll have to get them added soon hopefully.

2008 Advent Calendar

The Episcopal Diocese of Washington is continuing their Advent tradition and has a 2008 version of their online calendar.

From the website:

“Featuring daily meditations from Episcopal Café, videotaped interviews with the young people of the Bokamoso Youth Program in Winterveldt, South Africa, and opportunities to support Bokamoso and the Diocese of Washington’s other ministries in Southern Africa. A new window will be available each day during the month of December. “

The calendar goes “live” on Dec 1, but in the meantime there are videos to watch and links to follow.

Bookmark the calendar here.

Maybe you can set up an Advent homepage through Christmas?

Yay for Jawbones

My good friend Jan Nunley, one of the finest religious journalists I’ve ever known, has set up new digs for herself over at Jawbones.

Not sure what she’s going to do with the site since it’s just getting started:

“…oh my goodness yes. See, I’ve got Google Reader set up to capture feeds from most of the blogs over there on the left side of your screen (if yours isn’t there yet, it’s probably because you haven’t posted this morning and I haven’t added you yet, so calm down) and a lot of others in various areas of interest to me. The needle on the chatter meter is pegged, and that’s without you Left Coasters having had a decent cup of java yet.”

Read the full post here.

But it looks like she’s going to continue the sort of meta-commentary on reporting that she was doing initially at Episcope before she stopped being the one posting there.

If that’s true, then this is definitely a blog you’re going to want to keep an eye on. Jan knows journalism and will point out good reporting and bad as it happens.

Nice to have her voice in the mix again.

I’m still here…

It’s been pretty quiet on this blog. I apologize for that. I’m still here and still trying to find some time to write.

I suppose it’s good news that I haven’t found time to say anything. We’ve been so busy at the Cathedral this fall with a large increase in new members (especially in our spanish-language congregation) that we’re all scrambling to keep a lid on all the pots that are wonderfully boiling over. Between that and getting ready for diocesan convention, there’s not been a whole lot of time to do much thinking, and even less writing.

And besides all that, I’m probably doing the same thing a whole bunch of you are doing; watching the stock market meltdown and worrying about what the coming year is going to bring for those of us in the non-profit world.

And now we are one!

Jim Naughton, the editor in chief of Episcopal Café posted this on the “Lead” blog this morning:

“We are celebrating our first anniversary today. We actually began operations in this incarnation on April 19, but we’ve decided that today is easier to remember, and probably represented the first day we had most of the bugs worked out and were getting a relatively clean read on our Web statistics.

We’d like to thank all of our visitors, especially those who make us a part of their daily routine. You make doing this work seem worthwhile.

[…]In our first year, we received about 1.36 million visits and 3.36 million page views. Our biggest sensation was an essay on a Japanese tourist begin kicked off a train for taking pictures, which drew nearly 60,000 visitors to the site in November—not quite double the 30,000 visitors (and 125,000 visits) per month we’ve been averaging since then. More people visit The Lead, our news blog, than any of our other offerings, but all of the blogs receive an average of at least 250 visits per day.

While people visit to keep up with the Anglican controversies and news of the Episcopal Church (and to read rip-snorting essays like this address by Marilyn McCord Adams to the Chicago Consultation), we’ve also had some off-beat hits like this April Fool’s piece on the Episcopal Church being named the official denomination of Major League Baseball and Carol Barnwell’s interview with one of the students portrayed in Denzel Washington’s recent movie The Great Debaters.”

Read the of his post here.

If you’d like to give some money to support some rennovations we’d like to do to the site (to make it more user friendly) Jim has posted a link over there that you can use to do that.

Fixin’ me software

Hi all.

Today’s my day off. I’m sitting here at the house doing my chores (laundry, gardening, cleaning) and I remembered that I’ve been having problems with one of the programs (MacJournal) that I prefer to use for writing longish posts and essays for this here.

I’ve had it for so long, and mucked about with it’s internals that it’s managed to get itself completely confused about how to communicate as a client with the Typepad server.

So today I just went plowing through the various journals, archiving the ones that were no longer active and fixing the ones that I was regularly updating. If all the maintenance bears fruit, then this should appear with proper categories, and the formatting intact.

If not, then apparently I’ve got to dig a little deeper into the internals.

Update after posting…

Yay. Looks like I was able to fix the issue. (For those who care, it appears that MacJournal stores the server information in each journal that’s configured to post to the web. I had to nuke journals one at a time until I found the ones that were problematic. The problem was more on my end than that of the software author (Dan Schimpf). I’ve been running every beta he’s ever posted – and somewhere along the line something broke in my installation. But it seems to be working now.