By: rhbaker275 on February 15, 2015
I don’t recall the exact year, somewhere in the 1950s, there was a campaign to take pride in our country. As a child I recall the promotions, with public incentives, to do our part to “clean up” the environment. There were road signs everywhere which today might be considered distasteful, and distracting but at the…
By: Richard Volzke on February 14, 2015
Growing up in the 70’s and 80’s, I remember my first home computer – a Texas Instruments TI99. It used a cassette recorder as the hard drive and the TV as the computer monitor. I spent (wasted) hours of time programming and playing games. This first computer started my journey into the “I’ve got to…
By: Dawnel Volzke on February 14, 2015
Our modern lifestyle is moving at a pace in which people often find it difficult to have and maintain healthy social structures. Bauman, in Collateral Damage, examines social inequality and the implications, or cost to humanity. We should, and must, intentionally consider the choices that we make and how they impact others. As we consume more, we…
By: Stefania Tarasut on February 13, 2015
This year will mark 70 years from the liberation of Auschwitz. In order to commemorate this important event I organized a showing of the 1993 Academy Award winning movie Schindler’s List at my church. For those of you who don’t know the movie, it tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who was…
By: Bill Dobrenen on February 13, 2015
As I read our text for the week, I thought about the now famous Apollo 13 mission transmission, “Houston, we have a problem.” The actual quote was, “Houston, we’ve had a problem here.”[1] Yes, the Apollo spacecraft had a major problem. And those of us who inhabit this earth also have a problem, and “we’ve…
By: Carol McLaughlin on February 13, 2015
This morning I ran/walked across the Narrows Bridge, beginning on the Gig Harbor side one mile later I am in Tacoma, then back again. Even with thousands of cars crossing it remains my favorite place to run and walk. Today was a pleasant trek, the wind was minimal, the sun was attempting to break through…
By: John Woodward on February 13, 2015
I remember being assigned in second grade the task of drawing a picture of what our houses would be like as our planet became overpopulated. This was 1965 and I lived in a crowded suburb of Detroit. From my limited world, overcrowding seemed inevitable. It was a scary and very real scenario that our teacher…
By: Julie Dodge on February 13, 2015
When a child is young, he or she has an innate “uh oh” feeling. Perhaps it seems innate, but it is actually learned. It is the feeling associated with fear, when something bad is going to happen. Perhaps it happens when we have when we have done something wrong. The “uh oh” alarm goes off:…
By: Telile Fikru Badecha on February 13, 2015
The dreadful multiple tragedies unfolding around the globe are truly overwhelming and too depressing to think about. The mainstream Western media play a major role in feeding our anxiety by skillfully focusing on the stories that often target certain religions, ethnicities, and/or races. People are becoming not only hopeless but also desensitized to the suffering…
By: Miriam Mendez on February 13, 2015
There have been two times in my life that I have had an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness. The first was the time after John’s death. It was a very dark, dark time in my life. I could barely breathe…I could barely live. The second time I had this feeling of hopelessness was when I worked…
By: Michael Badriaki on February 13, 2015
Macy and Johnstone’s book Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in without Going Crazy, is a relevant contribution to discussion of environmental sustainability and humanity’ on going quest peace and tranquility on earth. The search for meaning has led to interesting discoveries for some, but many people are also left with a sense…
By: Mitch Arbelaez on February 12, 2015
Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone describes “active hope” as a practice, something that we must do rather than have. Stating that this active hope is a process that can be applied to any new situation involving three steps: a clear view of reality, defining a clear direction that we would like things to move-in or…
By: Brian Yost on February 12, 2015
When I began looking over Zygmunt Buaman’s Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age, I opened the pages with great anticipation. By the time I had finished, I found myself disappointed. Bauman offered some insightful thoughts on some key issues, but I felt he missed the mark on some others. Bauman did a good…
By: Travis Biglow on February 12, 2015
The Disparity of Equality in a Socially Divided Age! February 10, 15 A very interesting book and I love some of the things Zygmunt Bauman brings out in Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age. I could have written a lot in this book because of having to experience it while growing…
By: Phillip Struckmeyer on February 12, 2015
Confession: I just contributed to the “collateral damage” of which I am a part. I bought my wife Valentine’s Day flowers from proflowers.com. I am a horrible man. I was listening to the radio and on came the commercial. It was a special like no other. If I ordered today, I would be able to…
By: Dave Young on February 12, 2015
Reading Collateral Damage by Zygmunt Bauman creates a tremendous argument for good biblically reflective public theology. In fact I would encourage a revision in the reading order for the next cohort, the trio of books on contextual theology would be a practical next step after reading Bauman; largely because this book cries out for God’s…
By: Liz Linssen on February 12, 2015
I have to admit, the past few weeks have been tough. Opening a community café has been a greater challenge than I could ever have imagined. On Monday this past week, I caught myself in the midst of negatively, “I can’t do this…I can’t, I can’t.” Staffing problems, teething troubles with menus, opening hours, finding…
By: Ashley Goad on February 12, 2015
It would have been really easy to write this week’s blog about mission teams going into Haiti. Active Hope: How to Face the Mess We’re in Without Going Crazy is made for Haiti. In a land that has been deforested beyond measure, where people have suffered for centuries, where the environment has been all but…
By: Jon Spellman on February 12, 2015
As I was getting started into the intro and first chapter of this week’s reading, I thought to myself “Great, this will be easy! I’ll just connect the dots between the ‘agora’ and ‘ecclesia’ and make this week’s post a ‘part 2’ of last week’s. I should be able to really drive home my assertion…
By: Deve Persad on February 12, 2015
The stories being written in the world this week, can seem to be ones that tells of a declining mess. Perhaps nothing sharper than the disqualification of the U.S. Little League Champions from Chicago, for recruiting violations, speaks more to that fact than any other. A team of mostly, pre-pubescent children, put together through the…
