newyorker:

iPhones vs. the Police

But things are different nowadays. Smart phones have cameras, and almost everyone has a smart phone. A court is therefore less likely to be ignorant of what actually occurred between the policeman and me. The policeman and I may have videotaped it. Bystanders might have, too. I am reminded of the utopia dreamed of by the eighteenth-century anarchist William Godwin, who hoped that someday everyone in the world would become so sincere and so expressive that all sides of every story would be fully narrated, and there would no longer be any need to deceive. Everyone would be his own narrator, and in the world that this sincerity revealed, perfect knowledge would include perfect forgiveness.

- Caleb Crain writes about how camera phones will continue to change how citizens and police interact with each other: http://nyr.kr/tZHROj

I tried to pray again today. I found it impossible to reflect on God’s love for me. I feel so shitty and unworthy. The gospel was Jesus’ parable of the one lost sheep. Maybe the point of the story is that God loves the wayward more than the righteous. I wonder if God prefers a challenge to boring moral conformity? Anyway, I have a tendency to experience to God’s love, grace, and mercy and reflect on how great life could have been if I hadn’t needed the love, grace, and mercy….pretty fucking stupid for a human.

Dear God,

Please help me to live in gratitude and not regret and grief.

Love,

Doug

Sometimes, just talking and crying helps.

I ran across this sad post by dc.streetsblog.org about how much people are spending on their cars. The first person mentioned spends 50% of his monthly income on his car. When I find myself forced to drive I always resent the expense and time wasted driving (I have ever since I got a driver’s license and my first car). My current commute is by bike/bus and train and takes an hour and a half each way. Hopefully, as I get more fit my commute will be almost all by bike. I never feel like I’ve wasted my time since I can relax, sleep, listen to music, read, and do pretty much whatever I feel like. Sometimes I do wish that I could get home faster after a long day, but the time on the train allows me to decompress and leave work at work. My monthly commute costs about what my colleagues who drive spend in parking alone, let alone car payments, gas, upkeep, insurance, and time lost while driving. I imagine there’s also some hit to their health as they face the daily frustration of traffic and a sedentary lifestyle.

Cars are prisons not the exciting freedom that car ads would have us to believe.

Love,

Doug

In today’s scripture reading Jesus, reminds His followers not to invite their friends, family, and equals to meals, but to invite the poor and destitute so that they are repaid not by people who can invite them back, but by God. I’ve been on both sides of the divide; I’ve been hospitable, and I’ve been in need and unable to return the favor. It’s much nicer to be hospitable. I felt forced to trust God, but I don’t feel like that I learned much. I engaged in a lot of sinful worry and fantasy. Perhaps, I didn’t do as well spiritually as I ought since there was hope of further work and advancement. I needed God in the moment, but I was pretty assured that a time was coming when I could support myself and my family with my own effort.

But the idea that I can support myself and my family with my own effort is a myth and a dangerous construct, especially in these days of difficult economic circumstances. As a nurse, I’m pretty much assured of employment in some fashion, and there’s a living wage attached to almost anything I choose to do. Our society, however, places different value on different occupations. Those who serve money make more money, but those who serve their fellow humans as artists, musicians, or missionaries, et al. have less status and less income. Those who are well-off have the illusion that they can support themselves based on their own work because they happened to engage in employment which is well remunerated by society. There are also all sorts of benefits built in for not being a minority, for being male, for being straight, etc., etc., etc. As a society we construct visions of being human and assign relative values to particular individuals based upon where they fall on society’s continuum of value for humans.

Dear God,

Please help me not judge my brothers and sisters, but love as You love.

Doug

I saw a blog post at Episcopal Cafe about monsters and spirituality. There seems to have been an increase in the popularity of monster stories in both books and film lately. I’ve been enjoying zombie stories especially. Vampires, werewolves, and other traditional monsters seem to be too fraught with problems of grace, redemption, forgiveness, etc and to be just muddled messes for reflection, save for notable exceptions. Zombies because they are “dead” provide an ontic evil for us to examine the human response to “limit situations,” what Jack London referred to as the “thin veneer of civilization.” At any rate, the current stories show humans both at their worst and at their best. Since these monster stories allow for humans to be at their best they continue to give me hope for humanity. I hope that on this all-hallows eve you are able to watch the Walking Dead prayerfully.

Chillingly yours,

Doug

beingblog:

by Nancy Rosenbaum, producer

A mass of people dress up for the Toronto Zombie Walk. (photo: Sam Javanrouh/Flickr, cc by-nc 2.0)

For some reason we’re experiencing a zombie moment. From zombie crawls across the globe to the record-breaking 11 million people who tuned in to watch…