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Oct 7

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[Tripp York] Five Questions with Amy Laura Hall

Tripp recently moved his blog, Amish Jihadi, to The Other Journal.  This interview originally appeared on his page.

TY: What’s it like having double x chromosomes?

ALH: Tricky, scary, and fun. I learned during my first months in the ministry that people aren’t scared of me. People would talk to me about the mess of their lives, maybe because it was really obvious that my life wasn’t all picture princess perfect. I think also it is because I am not only XX, but short. So, God seems sometimes to use me to help people be honest with themselves about their problems — their fears, vices, desires — and this somehow can, with pastoral wisdom (which sometimes God throws my way) help lead to a bit more self-awareness and even, eventually, healing for others. Read more

Oct 1

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My encounter with a mountain lion

This is the first in a series of entries toward a book of dispatches from the strange world of divorce and dating.  I am juggling three different titles for the book — Please Enjoy the Music (While Your Party is Being Reached); Cheap, Pray, Love; and, finally, Agnes Louise and Ethel Mae’s Granddaughter gets Divorced.

I am dating a bear who goes over the mountain, to see what he can see.  When he introduced himself to me at Beyu Cafe, he told me he is a “traveler,” and that seems quite to be the case.  Preferably on foot.

I was determined to learn to hike, and to keep up.  I took on the challenge as something of a dare, and friends who have seen me in action know that I am quite the dare-devil.  But I am also not terribly keen on the great outdoors.  There are lions, and tigers, and bears, and trees that grab your clothing.  This Dorothy is better generally when perusing the streets of the Emerald City. Read more

Sep 26

[Kara Slade] Unauthorized disclosures: Unmanned aerial vehicles, aerospace systems design, and the problem of “engineering ethics,” Part 1

I wrote this paper last spring and proposed it for the annual meeting of the Society of Christian Ethics.  It wasn’t accepted, and I’m not completely sure why, but the only comment I received from the reviewers was “What about the voices of the victims?”  One of the points I was trying to make in the paper was that those voices are faintly heard, if at all, by those who design and build UAV’s.  There are many aspects to the problem of the use of drones that I don’t address here – I’m writing as an engineer who cares deeply about engineering education and the moral formation that happens (or doesn’t happen) in that environment.  I’ll be posting an edited version here as a series, in the hope that someone may find something in it useful as Christian ethics tries to speak to the increasing reliance on this problematic technology. Read more

Sep 19

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An Open Letter of Pastoral Admonition to Governor Rick Perry

Dear Governor Perry,

 

I am concerned that you are encouraging a climate of fear, and, perhaps inadvertently, participating in a culture of death.

I am a Texan (born in Graham), a Methodist, and an evangelical.  I am also, by conscience, a pro-life Christian.  I care deeply about Christian ethics, and I pray daily for the state of our country.  I am writing to you with these matters in common, hoping that my appeal to you will find a hearing.

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Sep 9

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Why I went ON and then OFF and then ON and then OFF of Facebook

Empires rarely learn in time because power tends to dull people’s capacity for critical self-reflection.

– Robert Jensen (School of Journalism, University of Texas), “The Imperial Delusions of the United States,” Al Jazeera

The royal consciousness with its program of achievable satiation has redefined our notions of humanness…It has created a subjective consciousness concerned only with self-satisfaction…It has so enthroned the present that a promised future, delayed but certain, is unthinkable.

– Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination

In the busy, teeming crowd, which as community is both too much and too little, man becomes weary of society, but the cure is not in making the discovery that God’s thought was incorrect.  No, the cure is precisely to learn all over again the most important thing, to understand oneself in one’s longing for community.

– Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love

I am writing this on Søren Kierkegaard’s feast day in the calendar of the Episcopal Church.  He died childless, having written in the language of an obscure little country.  He could’ve written in German, but he wrote in Danish.  He chose to write locally, for the people he both loathed and loved.  His neighbors drove him crazy, for their provincial views and their lack of appreciation of truly real, reflective life.  But they were also his neighbors, his kin, and he wanted to write for their confusion and edification. Read more

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