A brilliant new book: geeks and prayer types please note

A Californian acquaintance of mine by the name of Sistertech has written a truly brilliant, not to mention humorous and touching, book of prayers.

Sistertech transmits her spiritual writings via my friend Pamela Hood, Ph.D., a professor of philosophy in San Francisco, and I recently received a copy of this Book of Uncommon Prayer. Here are a few samples from it.


1.1 Prayers for Morning

1.1.1
May The One in Charge bless us this day, keep us from evil viruses, and bring us stable wireless connectivity. Amen.

1.1.4
Dear One In Charge,
You have brought us in safety to this new day:
Preserve us and our tech devices
with your mighty power,
that we may not fall into sin,
or be overcome by phishing scams, spyware, viruses,
or other adversities;
and in all we do, direct us to the fulfilling of your purpose.
Amen.

1.1.5
A Morning Psalm for Social Media Users
Open my _____ (state name of social media program or website),
O One in Charge,
and my tweets shall proclaim your praise.
Create in me a clean cache
and renew a right spirit of updating within me.
Cast me not away from my Twitter stream,
take not your holy inspiration from me.
Give me the joy of sending tweets again.
Sustain me with bountiful followers
and plenty of content to retweet.
Amen.

1.4 Prayers for Sleep

1.4.1.
O One In Charge,
while our bodies and computers rest
from the labors of the day
and as our RAM, caches, and our souls are released
from the thoughts of this world,
grant that we may stand in your presence
with tranquility, quietness, and peace.
Amen.

1.5 Prayers Before and After Meals

1.5.5.
O One in Charge,
bless this caffeine to our use
and us to thy service.
Amen.

1.5.6
Bless the bunch that munch
this lunch.
Amen.

1.5.7.
O One in Charge, Giver of all good things,
may this food and drink restore our strength,
giving new energy to tired limbs,
and new thoughts to weary minds.
Amen.

2.0 Traditional Prayers (Fran, you will love this one)

2.2. Hail Holy External Drive

Hail, holy two terabyte storage drive,
mother of mercy,
Hail keeper of our life's work,
our sweetest digital files,
and our hope of promotion.

To thee do we cry,
poor banished children of incessant computer crashes;
to these do we send up our sighs,
mourning and weeping
in this valley of infected and corrupted files.

Turn, then, most gracious defender,
thine eyes of mercy toward us;
and after this, our exile,
show unto us the blessed repository of our files:

O clement, O loving, O sweet
terabyte drive.

Pray for us, O perfect external drive,
that we may be made worthy of thy promises of safety.
Amen.

There are prayers to various appropriate saints as well.

There is also a wonderful rendition of the Prayer of Saint Francis, but I will not reproduce it here. You'll have to buy the book!

4.0 The Collects

4.6.2.
For Those Who Offer Technical Support

O One In Charge,
we pray that your grace may always precede and follow
those who offer technical support on their service calls.
May they continually do good work
and not make matters worse.
Amen.

Under 5.4, Ministration to the Sick, there are prayers for sick computers, for the restoration of a hard drive, for computer repair personnel, and so on.

There are also Various & Sundry General Prayers & Thanksgivings including a System Administrator's Prayer for Wellbeing and a prayer For Victims of Gaming Addiction and, of course, For Tech Devices We Love.

I particularly like the Reconciliation of a Penitent, which includes the following:

Penitent:
I confess to The One In Charge,
to geeks everywhere, and to you,
that I have sinned by my own fault
in thought, word, and deed, in things done and left undone;
especially for
__________
__________
__________
__________
___________

(attach digital file if more space is needed.)

For these and all other transgressions which I cannot now remember,
I am truly sorry.
I pray The One In Charge to have mercy on me.
I firmly intend to get a grip,
wake up,
and smell the coffee,
and I humbly beg forgiveness of The One in Charge
and all tech devices,
and I ask you for counsel, direction, and absolution.

Here the witness may offer the penitent counsel, comfort, absolution or a hard time.

Witness:
Chill out.
Everything's copacetic.
The One In Charge has deleted all your sins.

Penitent:
Whew! Thank God!

And just in case one of your machines has a birthday today...

6.11 For a Birthday of a Tech Device
Watch over this device, O One In Charge,
as its days increase;
bless and guide it wherever it may be.
Strengthen it where it is turned on;
comfort it when it receives error messages;
raise it up if it is dropped;
and in its memory
may thy peace which passeth understanding
abide
all the days of its life.
Amen.

And there are, of course, Sistertech's Ten Commandments. Do not drink coffee while reading them. Especially when you read the Sixth Commandment:

"Thou shalt not kill thy laptop by spilling within it half-caf/half-decaf, 2%, extra tall, double mochas or any other fluids."

The Sabbath-keeping and no-adultery commandments are good, too.

The Faith FAQ is terrific.

Now this is a book that "prays well."

The book is on sale at 15% discount till August 15 and it is also available as an e-book in pdf form if you prefer.

I know I've posted two pieces of book p.r. in a row, but it's summer, a good time for reading. You will also need this tech-y prayer book when fall comes along, or long before that if you have anything to do with a computer. Yes, you.

Postcript to the Adorable Godson: Don't you dare buy this: I'm sending you one as a new-tech-job present.

I know you've all been dying to resolve this one

Web site or website?

See here.

There, that's settled. Or is it?

Episcopal and other resources on creation, science, and religion

A while back I posted some science-and-religion resources. They are still alive and kicking and here is the link.

Meanwhile, I am just back from Hillsborough where I met with the candidates (well, three candidates and one postulant) for the vocational diaconate, to whom I teach theology once every few weeks this fall, and I promised them I would post a link or two to the Catechism of Creation. The Catechism of Creation is one of the better efforts of our national Church and comes out of the Executive Council's Committee on Science, Technology and Faith.

So I posted the resources to the Deacon Theology blog, which is not open to the public, and was thinking of making a post here to share the resources with a broader audience.

But first, moving into web-bopping mode as one does in these distracted and curious days, I went over to my friend Paul's (Paul a.k.a. the Byzigenous Buddhapalian) and what should I read but this.

Folks, science is important to our society. If this is the way the Governor of Alaska thinks of research, we are in big trouble if she gets anywhere near Washington. How does she think her lipstick got here? That's chemistry research, Governor, and so is hair dye. And your microphone is technology. So is your SUV. So is your pap smear. Wake up and smell the fruit flies.

Oh, and here is the info I posted to the deacon theology blog. (Deacon Formation Program, Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina. October 25, 2008.) Thanks to TCR for the photos.

* * * * * * *

The Catechism of Creation was prepared in 2005 by the Committee on Science, Technology and Faith of The Executive Council of The Episcopal Church. It is a great resource.

Main resource page for the Catechism of Creation with related resources.

The home page of the Episcopal Church Network for Science, Technology, and Faith is here. The page of the Executive Council Committee on Science, Technology and Faith is here.

Text of the Catechism of Creation in pdf.

There are also links to specific sections in the Catechism of Creation via the main resource page at the first link above. You can also find related Bible studies there. It's a fine resource for Adult Forums, Youth Ministry, Christian Education, professional support and study groups, Bible study, or your own edification -- and preaching too!

Here's the Episcopal Ecological Network.

And here's the Society of Ordained Scientists!

Photos by The Cunning Runt of Little Bang Theory. Click to enlarge.

Yet another JohnieB update

Various blogger buddies have asked how JohnieB was. Being in possession of his new phone number, I called him, since he is not yet back on the intertubes. You may recall that 1) he moved; 2) his computer went kerflooey; and 3) Miz Scarlett, the cat, was having some issue.

In brief:

JohnieB bought a laptop this a.m.

He has made lamb stew and has had some wine.

He spent three hours on the phone to AT&T today and tomorrow will have visits from the phone people and the cable people. Sounds like my saga with setting up the electronics after my recent move. There are wiring problems with both his phone and his internet.

JohnieB has bought himself some "middle-class furniture" and a rug.

Miz Scarlett is doing better. Her appetite is returning. She is no longer leaving traces of her displeasure in places where she should not. No visit to the kitty psychiatrist was necessary, except, says JohnieB, for the one Scarlett has at home, namely, JohnieB.

Over and out.

Back in broadband-land

Haha! Humongous Cable Company told me I had to use its cables to get My Internet Provider Whose Address I Have Had For A Decade. Aforementioned Internet Provider initially told me there was no way to connect to the internet from my residence at high speed except by satellite, which I could not do because the dish would disfigure my landlady's nice yard and garden; also, I knew they had to be wrong. In the last week I have had at least five LiveChats with Internet Provider and several phone calls with Cable Company and Internet Provider. We at Acts of Hope are persistent. I knew there had to be a way to keep my ever faithful internet address with Aforementioned Internet Provider AND get a broadband connection, and so there was. In the end it was simple: we moved our DSL account here once we got a telephone land line.

So we're in business. Blogging from home! Woo hoo. Life is good. Also, the Right Rev. and Right Hon. Maya Pavlova and I both got lots of sleep last night, and an afternoon nap to boot.

Kliban cats website is here.

Now I have to get lots and lots and lots of work done, but at least I don't have to go into the office at bizarre hours any more to work online.

Why, you ask, do I work online so much? 'Cause we have these course websites on the college internal system, kind of like blogs really -- we use the open-source program Moodle, which is the same as the program Blackboard in other institutions -- and to simplify life and save paper and enable me to give students quick feedback online, I shifted to having all short assignments uploaded to the Moodle sites for the courses I teach.

Of course when you only have dial-up that messes up your life big-time. In addition to this, we have roaming profiles at work, and we can't get into those from home without high-speed and some kind of special software I didn't need when I was living on campus and plugged into the college network at home. So between that and the other delays occasioned by the Great Tree Disaster, I've been way behind on my work and the students aren't getting the timely feedback they need. (I got low ratings in past years in the "timely feedback" category on the student evaluation forms, so I have to work on this extra hard.)

Also, I am setting up a new blog (closed to the public, sorry) for the theology component of the diocesan deacon formation program, which I start teaching next weekend.

And there's Race, Justice, and Love, the blog for the Anti-Racism Committee, which I have neglected for the last month.

And then there's the Episcopal Café, for which I write regularly, except that I had to skip last month because of the Great Tree Disaster.

At home, though, we are also low-tech: we have no dishwashing machine or microwave and we have lots of books, and though Her Grace loves to press the buttons on the fax machine (which is not yet set up, but we'll get to it), she is a live creature and requires no buttons, beeps, wires, electric current, or ultrasound waves to purr and play.

For which I give thanks to Godde.

[photo of Maya Pavlova coming here soon.]

Disaster update, cont'd

I have ordered phone service and will have a land line by this weekend, if not before.

Internet is more complicated for reasons with which I won't bore you and which have to do with the location and wiring of the house. But in a pinch I will be able to use dial-up once I have the phone connection up and running.

Excerpt from a letter to my family:

Had an 18 hour work day yesterday. Nuts. Better today, only one class, went to get hair cut this a.m., called the massage therapist who usually books weeks in advance but miraculously had an opening for tomorrow afternoon, put out a couple of fires (metaphorical, don't worry) re: Saturday's conference, bought a chocolate swirl cheesecake (downtown near hairdresser, famous cheesecake store in Greensboro where I never go but everybody loves) as a thank-you for the Facilities staff here, drove back to campus, dropped off the cheesecake with a thank-you note, dropped by the old house (where there are workers nailing boards on the roof to protect the inside in a more semi-permanent way than the tarpaulin of the past week) and am now hiding behind a closed door at my office catching up. Still trying to figure out how to get high-speed internet at my new place, which has some quirky wiring access issues. Studying Native Americans and Puritans in the 16th and 17th centuries this afternoon in class. Then I get to go home, probably by 6 p.m. Hurrah.

Still really tired (the usual Wednesday longest-day-of-the-work-week stretched out an extra three hours) and sleep-deprived, but hoping for an early to bed night today and/or tomorrow. Certainly will have one after the conference Saturday. +Maya Pavlova still has a worried look in her eyes when she is out and about, except when she watches the new Kitty TV Channels (one channel per window) at the new house, at which point she is entranced. Lots of entertainment for her, most of it with wings. As far as I know she got her sleep yesterday, though I wasn't around to see it.

Must go online and figure out the Evil Time Warner, since I couldn't get a decent or coherent answer out of them yesterday when I reached them on the phone. I ordered phone service online, though, and it was much better. Feh. Who needs TV. Maybe I'll ignore Time Warner Cable for a while.

Note to Earthlink subscribers: the live chat customer-service staff is speedy, helpful, and coherent.

Her Grace misses home

This came in last night from the Right Rev. and Right Hon. Maya Pavlova, Feline Bishop Extraordinaire. I wasn't able to post it earlier today.

Beloved Canon to the Extraordinary and All My Friendly Humans,

I am getting homesick. You know we cats like our own turf, agile as we are in many venues. I miss North Carolina. There are plenty of laps to sit on here at Lambeth but the two-legged bishops keep getting up to run to the next event so I have to get up all the time too. There are humans everywhere and lots of hopping bunnies, so it's also hard to find a quiet corner for no-lap naps. I crept into the tent that has that nice cartoonist Dave Walker who likes cats, but he was busy giving interviews. +Clumber is tired and needs to get back to Pittsburgh and +Airedale to Fort Woof. +Rowan is fine as long as he has a place to play but even he is a little weary,and to be frank, I think he misses Lindy. It looks like we're going to come home early. I've had enough clotted cream. I'll text you from +Airedale's phone [note from Jane: where did this cat learn text messaging??] and let you know when my plane is coming in. Have the Newman's Organic Cat Food ready with a bowl of cold fresh water beside it.

I also gather from your letters that you have some more summer writing to do, and though you haven't asked, I know you do much better with a cat by your side when you are trying to think deep thoughts. My pastoral responsibilities are back with my creatures. I'll nap, you'll write, and we will both be the better for it. England was nice, but enough is enough. Besides, what else do we need to say? +Airedale has been clear as day that loving all creatures is what matters most. I've enjoyed being with my brother canine bishops. That was the best part of the trip, though I did enjoy the photo shoot with the other female bishops.

Once I am rested up, which may take some time, I intend to write a pastoral letter on the need for naps. I'm sure the two-legged bishops would be much calmer if they could nap as well as pray.

Faithfully yours, with purrs,

+Maya Pavlova, F.B.E.

What the Web Hath Wrought

Even as I ponder a blog slowdown (you'll notice I am still writing at least once a day, so I haven't exactly slowed, and +Maya Pavlova did ring from England to say yes, there will be more pictures, but not quite yet) and my need for thought, prayer, and a break from Perpetual States of Distraction, I received in the (e-) mail a perfectly timely piece.

Beloved Elder Sibling of Acts of Hope, once again, has tapped into his sister's psyche and sent in just the right thing. And he doesn't even read my blog. Or does he?

I'm posting below the beginning of the article he sent, and you can read the rest via the link to the magazine. Please read everything I posted here. Don't do what we all seem to be doing, which is skimming and jumping around.

I have been wondering for months and months, really a few years (pre-blogging), what is the internet doing to concentration? to contemplation? to reading? I even wrote about it in the New Preface by the Author which will be out, with the Old Book, in the fall.

It's not as simple as "the internet has wrecked our brains." It's much more complex and not all negative. But it does make one think, and I am thinking.

No, I'm not going to stop blogging. I am just pondering how to blog, and live, more mindfully.

Apparently I'm not the only one. My friend Chris is about to change his blogging habits.

Have a read and see what you think.

Oh, and the salsa was very good. The food co-op was out of cilantro today and said "come back tomorrow" but driving four miles just for cilantro is a bad idea, so cilantro-less we shall remain. But there was very fine basil and I bought some and there is pesto in my near future.

Speaking of distractions.

Okay, now read:

What the Internet is doing to our brains
by Nicholas Carr
Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Link to full text here.

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?" So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. "Dave, my mind is going," HAL says, forlornly. "I can feel it. I can feel it."

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I've had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn't going-so far as I can tell-but it's changing. I'm not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I'm reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That's rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I'm always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what's going on. For more than a decade now, I've been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I've got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I'm not working, I'm as likely as not to be foraging in the Web's info-thickets-reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they're sometimes likened, hyperlinks don't merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I'm not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances-literary types, most of them-many say they're having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. "I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader," he wrote. "What happened?" He speculates on the answer: "What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I'm just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?"
Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. "I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print," he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a "staccato" quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. "I can't read War and Peace anymore," he admitted. "I've lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it."

Anecdotes alone don't prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited "a form of skimming activity," hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would "bounce" out to another site. Sometimes they'd save a long article, but there's no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of "reading" are emerging as users "power browse" horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it's a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking-perhaps even a new sense of the self. "We are not only what we read," says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. "We are how we read." Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts "efficiency" and "immediacy" above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become "mere decoders of information." Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It's not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.


There's more. Read on. Link to full text here.

Computer virus break (oy)

I ran into a nasty virus on a link from +Clumber's blog, Barkings of an Old Dog (note: not from Clumber's blog itself) --see my note in the Comments there on the most recent post. [Later note: Clumber has removed that post so no one else will get infected.] I am writing this in haste while the computer is in "safe mode." Am going to the tech-y people to disinfect in the a.m. (this sounds ominous) so if I'm offline for a while, I'm in quarantine!

Note: This does not in any way indicate conflicts or schismatic rumblings between Her Grace, +Maya Pavlova, and her beloved canine episcopal brethren. It's just a nasty tech-y problem.

Tech-y question: RSS feeds

Sometime I will do some web research on this, but perhaps one of you blogger buddies out there can help me.

1. Can you explain RSS feed, what is is, and how it works?

(I do have a simple online definition, but I'd love a beginner's explanation in your words. Please include explanation of what a "reader" is.)

2. Do you have a simple set of directions to install this feature?

3. Where did you find the best explanations and directions? (Blogger, Google, some other place?)

4. What has been your experience with this piece of technological communication? I'm almost definitely going to set it up, and I am reasonably tech-y, it's just something I haven't gotten to, and since I am having a catch-up sort of summer, I thought I'd investigate now.

Many thanks.

I have no idea...

... why everything on the blog except for the last three posts is suddenly in small print instead of medium print.

I will investigate later today.

Padre Mickey needs a new camera

Padre Mickey and the Lovely Mona are on vacation, well deserved in the midst of their hard work as missionaries, musicians, and general purveyors of goodwill and generosity (not to mention humo[u]r and icons and stories of the saints).

They are having a good time except for a little misadventure involving a stolen camera, and they could use some material assistance. Details from Padre Mickey, the rockin' guitar-playin' priest, are here, with a link to a secure contribution thingie, and I encourage friends and fans to donate. I'm getting paid tomorrow, May 1, and in honor of International Workers' Day and the Month of Mary (hey who says you can't celebrate both? Mickey will agree) I am going to shell out a tiny bit myself. Go 'long now. And Mickey didn't pay me to say this. Not that he could, because have you looked at Episcopal missionary salaries recently?

Earth Day: Earth resources

A first resource here --the Earth Day Network-- but more coming soon in this space (on and off all this week), and not the ones you think! Check back in soon.


Article from the U.K. on "biodegradable" plastics.

Gorgeous Bosphorus view with a tear in the film

Or something. Not sure how this happened but it was there on the CD of the photos when I got them back from the shop two months ago, and I haven't gone back to find out whether it was the film. It makes me sad because this was the most beautiful day on the Bosphorus, as you can see.

But life sometimes feels that way: our beautiful world, with an unexplained tear (that's tear as in torn, not tear as in weeping) right in the middle of the beauty, unexplained and unexplainable, impossible to get rid of, impossible to avoid, impossible to fix.

So I decided to post the picture.



Bosphorus: Shadow and Light.

Photo by Jane Redmont, December 2007. Click to enlarge.

"A little cantata" ("Une petite cantate") by Barbara - and various grumpy updates and a senior freak-out dinner

This is one of my favorites among Barbara's sadder songs. The words speak of piano-playing and grief (at the loss of a daughter or younger person)

I'm in the mood for sad music because 1) Ralph Nader is running for President, and though I get the point (and even agree) I still think it's going to play right into the hands of the Republican Party and 2) Our chosen candidate from the three finalists at the end of our year-long faculty search has turned us down, not because s/he didn't like us (s/he did, and we would have made a great team) but because we pay much, much less than the other place that offered him/her a job. And there's more I can't discuss on that score. I am not a happy puppy.

I'm not sure what this will mean or how we will proceed, and I probably won't be at liberty to say for a while.

[Note from the technical staff at Acts of Hope: YouTube is up again and the link to the song above works. Take a listen.]

I am having a bunch of seniors over later on for what I have called the "senior freak-out dinner." (Note to non-U.S. readers: a "senior" in this case is a fourth-year college student, completing his or her bachelor's degree, the first U.S. university degree, at the end of this academic year.) I invited every senior I knew and told them to bring friends and come and spend a couple of hours here (early, before they and I all repair to our studies and libraries to do the usual Sunday night hours and hours of homework) eating soup and talking about what it's feeling like to be a second-semester senior. I remember that when I was an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college not unlike this one, this time of year my senior year was exactly when I freaked out. Endings, beginnings, life decisions, going or not going on for further study, identity crises and all the rest. So, I ran the idea past one of my former teaching assistants (a senior herself) and she thought it was dandy, and I sent out a big group e-mail and a reminder, and the little darlings are coming over in a few hours. One group is even bringing homemade cookies. I told them they didn't have to be freaking out to attend; all the better if they are feeling happy and relieved to be graduating. But there is such a mix of emotions at this time in one's life that it's good to have a place to acknowledge this.

We also have adult students (about half our students actually) but these are, except for a few younger "adult students" who are in their twenties, people in a different situation when they graduate. They usually have clear reasons, professional and financial, for getting a college degree at age 30 or 40 or older, so the issues senior year are very different -- and they are rarely full time students. So this will be a group of the young 'uns.

I'm going to go weep into my mug of organic fair-trade locally roasted coffee now.

Daily Office website is back up

Hurrah.

They were down for a day or two, or so it appeared from here.

Thanks to JohnieB for the good news.

What has happened to the Daily Office website?

I hadn't been on the Daily Office website since before Lent started and went there today, and lo and behold, they aren't there.

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*****Sunday February 1o, 10 a.m.: they're back!
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Does anyone know what has happened to them?

Somewhere I have Elisheva Barsabe's e-mail -- she's the webmistress there, or was -- and will try to dig it out, but meanwhile, can anyone check out the situation? The Daily Office people who run (or ran, sob) the site are in the Silicon Valley area, California, South of San Francisco. They have offered a wonderful service to the praying public. In fact I just recommended them to my godson and his partner and was about to send them the URL, and now it doesn't lead to the site.

I think there is another Daily Office website, but this was the best, and bilingual, too (Spanish/English), with saints' days and stories of the saints, and Rite One for those who prefer (though the quickest click leads you to Rite Two) and all kinds of other useful things.

Their site has been called Mission Saint Clare both because they are near or in Santa Clara, CA and because Saint Claire is one of the patron saints of the internet (along with Saint Isidore of Seville, but I digress and must return to my Saturday evening activities and contemplations).

Computer troubles, brief blogging hiatus (e-mail on hold too, all y'all)

Greetings, all. There's more Latin American stuff coming, and also Sunday's sermon, and a year-end roundup perhaps, but my computer is having trouble. As far as I can tell it's just the screen, and I have managed to make it work for a few minutes, but it may go dark any minute until I can go to the campus tech-y people, who thank heavens are open again for business tomorrow. Here I was going to hide out and write and do a bit of adminstrative work at home and not go near the college offices, but hey, they'll fix the computer for free, so who am I to complain.

I'm sure there's a lesson here. (As in the level of panic we reach when we don't have our computers or internet connections working.) I took a little walk outdoors to get some perspective. The weather is cold and the geese are tromping around and winter trees are beautiful.

Cheers, friendly readers.

P.S. There's plenty to read below, plus pretty pictures I put up this past week.

The year in pictures

Not really, but close, sometimes. Too close.

This cartoon is also for my spiritual sister pj The Literata.

And, of course, for The Most Excellent Elizabeth in her time of Dissertation-Finishing.

This comes to us from the fabulous Dave Walker of CartoonChurch and CartoonBlog fame (also of cute cats fame) and was the most reposted cartoon from his We Blog Cartoons site.

Long and well may he live and lampoon. Happy New Year, Dave!

Doris Lessing's Nobel speech (a few weeks late)

I missed this because I was traveling. It's a must-read. (Even if Lessing briefly disses the internet and blogging, which made our reading of this piece possible. But of course that's not her point.)

........ All the writers travelled a difficult road to literacy, let alone to becoming writers. I would say learning to read from the printed labels on jam jars and discarded encyclopaedias was not uncommon. And we are talking about people hungering for standards of education beyond them, living in huts with many children - an overworked mother, a fight for food and clothing.

Yet despite these difficulties, writers came into being. And we should also remember that this was Zimbabwe, conquered less than 100 years before. The grandparents of these people might have been storytellers working in the oral tradition. In one or two generations, the transition was made from these stories remembered and passed on, to print, to books.

Books were literally wrested from rubbish heaps and the detritus of the white man's world. But a sheaf of paper is one thing, a published book quite another. I have had several accounts sent to me of the publishing scene in Africa. Even in more privileged places like North Africa, to talk of a publishing scene is a dream of possibilities.

Here I am talking about books never written, writers who could not make it because the publishers are not there. Voices unheard. It is not possible to estimate this great waste of talent, of potential. But even before that stage of a book's creation which demands a publisher, an advance, encouragement, there is something else lacking. .....

******* Doris Lessing (age 88)

********"A Hunger for Books"

********Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech

********December 7, 2007

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And again I say: Read it.