:: in a mirror dimly :: A theology and culture blog with the Bible in one tab and a news feed in the other.

Makesha found this fascinating story about a woman named Dee Willaims who lives in an 84 square foot house. From the article:

The obvious question: Why?
The simple answer:
“A simpler life, time, more money. I don’t have a mortgage. I don’t have a big utility bill,” Dee says.
Her monthly heating bill in the winter is $6, less in the summer.
“I’m able to offer money to my family if they need it, (and to) my friends if they need it,” says Dee.

Apparently there are companies who build homes such as this on the cheap. Bravo to Dee who is going against the flow.

Having recently moved into a home that is 1000 square feet and feeling like we were making a HUGE  sacrifice, I’m quite embarrassed. Sheesh, our home is over 10 times bigger and there’s only one more person.

Prosperity means we can afford to waste. In the case of a home, a wealthy family has the ability to waste space and to throw space efficiency to the wind. Large, sprawling homes allow us to buy huge pieces of furniture and hit the garage sales hard (if that’s your thing).

Since we had to downsize a little or to be creative with how we use our space (i.e. a 6′ by 2′ area for the bunnies in my office), I’ve felt like we took a step down socially. Once shopping at IKEA seemed more like a necessity for space conservation rather than a cool, trendy place to buy unpronounceable furniture, I started to feel the pinch of our “small” home.

Now, appropriately chastised, I am enjoying the vast swaths of open space in our home. Of course I thank God that it’s not a foot smaller either.

Technorati Tags: IKEA - real+estate

Julie found this show in the archives of This American Life all about prayer. The question driving the show is, “Can Christians and the secular world understand each other?” The lady in the first half of the show thinks they are able, but she meets a pastor who disagrees. During a visit to Colorado Springs and New Life Church, Ted Haggard’s church incidentally, she confronts much of what there is to love and hate about Christianity.

For my part, I believe there are certain things about Christianity and the spiritual realm that are really hard to explain to someone who is an atheist, agnostic, etc. God very dramatically healed an area of my life during vacation last week–more about that another time–and I don’t know exactly how to explain it to someone who doesn’t believe God is capable of tinkering with our lives.

During most of the show I kept feeling like some prayer warriors were going out and doing Christian-like things, but were not always connected with God and where he’s at.

There surely were exceptions, but on one occasion three Christians walk behind a school and begin praying where the drama kids used to hang out. The drama kids were . . . LIBERAL . . . they accepted “new ideas” and were “open.” I wanted to drop my head into the dish water right then (I was doing dishes while listening to the show) and end it all.

Agh! The stupidity is stifling. The prayer that follows this indictment is equally painful to hear. Thankfully the show cuts it short.

I’m not an expert on prayer and many of the people featured in this show did seem to be in tune with God and have a relationship with him, but I keep coming back to this: prayer gets us on the same page as God. Sometimes I sensed an agenda behind the prayers and that left me uncomfortable. It was a blend of marketing techniques and spirituality that left me dry and thirsty for something real.

Prayer involves pushing ourselves to God and letting him take over from there. I’m not sure if we can truly pray strategically. At some point the wheels fall off.

In the final analysis, I think the first half of this show introduces some parts of Christianity in a very accurate light. Many of the Christians display true love and desire to serve God. But sometimes when they prayed, I cringed.

Technorati Tags: prayer - this+american+life

It wasn’t until I read Barbara Kingsolver’s book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle that I discovered just how radically the food industry has changed in the past 100 years, thanks in large part to fast and cheap transportation, not to mention the wonders of refrigeration.

Somehow, since the dawn of life, people in North America managed to get by without bananas. Citrus wasn’t shipped north and even coffee, perish the thought, wasn’t readily available.

In addition to weighing the value of eating organic foods–especially milk, apples, and potatoes–I’ve been looking into the possibility of eating locally. Typically I balk at the cost of farm stands and farmers markets, especially if the food is organic.

Lately I’ve been considering other factors that go into the cheap food at our supermarket. For example, shipping apples from West to East results in all kinds of emissions. Oil is used to make plastic bags for packaging.

Meanwhile the pricey local products have most likely traveled less than 50 miles and require little packaging. If they are organic, the high price tag is due to the labor-intensive farming that goes into organic certification.

We’ll never cut ourselves off from the supermarket, but while we have the farmers market as an option, we are trying to fight off our love of money long enough to purchase some pricey, locally grown food today. Americans love a bargain, but when we weigh the cost of cheap food to our environment–and ultimately to ourselves and our children–I think it’s worth looking into other options before stocking up at the local supermarket.

• Frederica.com - Writings - - The Emerging Church and Orthodoxy
  Eastern Orthodoxy is an important contributor to church’s conversation that is often overlooked in the west. Frederica Matthews Green is one of the most accessible writers in this area.
  (tags: christian religion)

• Main Page - Emerging Wiki
  An emerging wiki to dive deeper into certain topics.
  (tags: emerging)
• 40+ Tips to Improve your Grammar and Punctuation - Dumb Little Man
  I couldn’t pass up this list. Who doesn’t need to improve his/her writing?
  (tags: reference writing)

A hot topic these days in Vermont is education reform. The system is supposedly inefficient and expensive. With young people leaving because house prices are sky-rocketing, many school populations are shrinking. The thought of allocating some tax dollars and generating revenue through development options has some towns licking their lips.

Now I don’t claim to know the best way to deal with Vermont’s education system or that of any other state (I know Maine is in a similar boat), but our language betrays us here. Most of the talk about schools comes down to dollars saved and spent efficiently.

Never mind if the life of a community revolves around a school. Never mind if the small class sizes may provide a better education. If money can be saved, then we seize the opportunity.

The same typically goes for other public services, where saving tax dollars comes before providing beneficial, if not important services. The more I think about the life of my community, the more inclined I am to happily ship my tax money away.

My Republican roots have taught me to be suspicious of inefficient government programs that are sometimes exploited by loafers, but on the whole I think our idolatry of money must be kept in check by an analysis of the public good. If keeping a school open is better for the community, but not for our wallets, then I’ll all for keeping the school around. It’s worth the money.

For more about Vermont’s education system, see Vermont Scrapwood.

Who hasn’t boasted about finding a great deal? I know some women who can’t talk about their clothes without mentioning how cheap they found it. I also swap stories with friends and relatives about finding a great deal on computer equipment or a used book at a library.

In a capitalistic, consumer-oriented society it’s not shocking that we look for a good deal. I can’t help but applaud one relative who earned bragging rights by building a better computer for less money than his friend. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a bargain.

Unfortunately we have raised finding cheap goods and services as the highest value, and forgotten how they are manufactured and delivered. While still upholding the value of thrift and spending money wisely, I’d like to spend a little time talking about the moral issues surrounding  our buying choices and other every-day decisions that receive less thought than required.

The trick to this discussion about our obsession with saving money is whether  or not every one can be held to the same level. For example, so people just need to find the best deal out of necessity. Buying a locally-made product for home at a higher price may snatch needed money for groceries. Clearly we can’t hold everyone to the same standard.

To the degree that we are able, our buying habits are desperately in need of scrutiny. We may be surprised with what we find. Perhaps we can save money without ruining our planet and our local communities. That is a topic worth considering in the days to come.

Over the past month I put writing on the back burner, save for a few projects in order to finish my home office. The amount of work has been nothing short of staggering for me, and I’ve stayed up well past midnight several times just trying to push things ahead.

The first step was removing all of our junk out of the office, since we’d been storing many of our things in there while renovating the rest of the house. The office is also home to our rabbits Eva and Evan, so they were relocated to the living room and dining room respectively.

Then I ripped out the smokey carpet and the cheap laminate plywood, and set to work on installing a laminate floor. When the floor was done, I patched up the holes in the wall and labored over the sheet rock seams: spackle, dry, sand, spackle, dry, sand, and then sponge. Then on to priming, painting, staining, and putting up a chair rail to divide the upper tan section from the lower plum section of the wall.

To my surprise my new desk took about two hours (midnight to two in the morning) to assemble, not to mention the new chair–bought at half price. In the home stretch I installed 3 4-foot long shelves and 3 2-foot long shelves on the walls, along with a bulletin board and a dry erase board. Oh, I also stocked up a 3-shelf bookcase with my emerging church and theology books and moved a shelf of Christianity books into our bedroom for lack of space.

After moving boxes of files and photographs into the closet, playing with the tangled mess of wires required to hook up a computer, and then hauling our rabbit complex back into the room, I could declare myself done.

So now it’s happy blogging. Pictures of this project and our recent vacation to Lake George are available at our flickr account. Be sure to check out my collection of sunrise pictures.

I forgot to mention that we’re on vacation this week up at Lake George, NY. I actually have internet at one of the cabins, and the wireless even reaches down to the dock. Not bad.

Still I’m going to take some time off from the blog and jump back into it next week when I’m filled to bursting with writing topics. Until then we’re reading, playing board games, kayaking, and swimming.

I saved a book just for vacation: Benedict Arnold’s Navy. It sort of fits right in with this region. Now that I’m done it I’m sort of lost. I’m filling in the gap with Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and Who Needs Theology?

Sacraments blend the physical world with a spiritual reality. Baptism is the dying of the old and the rebirth of a new life under God’s rule. The breaking of bread and consumption of wine and bread remembers the death of Jesus and the life he imparts to his united Church. These sacraments lend a glimmer of the holy to dull, everyday activities.

As part of his plan to redeem our world, God is interested in converting far more than bread, wine, and pools of water into holy portals. Far from being locked up in a church until he’s brought out for Sunday morning play time, God wants to be on the prowl with us, sharing each moment and adding his own unique message and blessing. I had this sense while digging weeds out of our flower bed.

I don’t necessarily garden because I love plants. I enjoy pretty flowers around my house as much as the next guy, but I dug huge flower beds for a more practical reason: reducing the hard areas to mow. By digging out several tight corners and dumping in flowers I made it that much easier to chop down our lush two acres of lawn.

Despite my questionable motives, I’ve grown attached to our flower beds and recently found the mass invasion of weeds in our backyard bed a nuisance. While praying on the back deck and surveying the civilization of weeds that sprouted amidst the blue, yellow, and red flowers—don’t ask me the actual names of these things—I sensed that a little sacrament was in the works.

The frantic pace of my life was allowing all manner of weeds to grow, and I haven’t taken time for regular spiritual maintenance. By weeding the garden I gave my mind a rest, stepped back from all of the household projects demanding my attention, and let God begin his work on my life again. Each chunk of weeds I dug out was in itself an act of repentance, recognition that all in my life is not how it should be.

Julie stepped outside, looked over the clean, freshly mulched bed, and exclaimed, “You’ve been working really hard on this.”

“No,” I replied, “I was just resting.”

• A President Besieged and Isolated, Yet at Ease - washingtonpost.com
  Bush is a man of contradictions who somehow holds it all together in tension. He’s a Christian who makes decisions many Christians find repulsive. He’s a conservative who supports larger government. So it goes. . .
  (tags: history culture)

I picked up NT Wright’s commentary on Romans 1-8 called Paul for Everyone at Otter Creek Bookstore last week. Besides bowing to the urge to use his name in a pun whenever I can, I always enjoy books from this insightful, chatty, and accessible series on the New Testament.

This past weekend was spent renovating my office, and during my breaks I snatched up Wright. As many fans of Wright know, he emphasizes the cultural/racial issues in the book of Romans. The unity of the Jews and Gentiles in Christ is a very important issue for Paul. Even if he’s even on theology throughout, Paul wasn’t just slamming down a heap of doctrine.

At the outset of Romans, Wright sets the stage in a way I’ve never quite thought of before. First of all, the Gospel came to Rome most likely through Peter, and a few Jews converted.

Then, all of the Jews were expelled from Rome for a few years, leaving any believing Gentiles as the only Christian gang in town. When the ban ended, the Jews returned to find a Gentile Christian church.

Enter tension.

It’s a familiar enough story-line. The parents leave, so to speak, the kids take over the house, and when the parents return there is conflict. The Jews probably returned to Rome and said, “What have you Gentiles done with this place?”

Though we mingle facts with speculation, such a context is helpful to keep in mind when reading one of the heaviest theological letters Paul ever rambled together.

Technorati Tags: Romans - Wright - Paul - Bible - commentary