Month: November 2006

What American Accent Do I Have?

What American accent do you have?

Your Result: The Midland

“You have a Midland accent” is just another way of saying “you don’t have an accent.” You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The South
The Northeast
The West
Boston
North Central
What American accent do you have?
Take More Quizzes

I blame my parents. They moved to California so my dad could go to school and I understand they picked up all kinds of foreign ways there.

Island Nations

I may be getting my facts mixed up, but in his best-selling book Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond describes the history and fare of several people groups located in the South Pacific. At least in that book, theirs is the story of non-ascendancy in the face of the continuous, precipitous rise of Western, continental nations. To summarize a 300 page award-winning book in only a few words, they were destined to be conquered because they were isolated. As these islands were settled, they arose to precisely the level of density that the land could support, a level too low to develop specialization, on islands too isolated to acquire technologies in the normal interactions of men. Their first contact with foreigners inevitably came in the form of invaders with vastly superior armaments.

The odd thing about these islands though, is that it was rarely as simple a situation as one nation per island. Sometimes a nation would consist of one island, but it was just as likely to be several kingdoms on a single large island, or an “empire” reaching across an archipelago. This strikes me as remarkably similar to the churches I grew up in. Continue reading “Island Nations”

Monastic

I feel a little bit right now like the boy who was told that for one day he must eat only vitamins, only to discover that his vitamins tasted remarkably like candy. I am participating in what our school calls a Soul Sabbath retreat. The principle of the retreat is to spend a day in vocal silence cum community, so we have borrowed facilities from a Catholic monastery and adopted for a day what is essentially a pseudo-monastic lifestyle: We pray and read; we eat a meal together; we write notes in our journals, but for 6 hours, we say nothing.

The irony for me is great. The monastic life, particularly one of a contemplative nature, is something which I seriously considered, and quite finally had to reject. There’s a huge appeal here: one of the main features of contemplative monasticism is the extreme tension between isolation and community. Normally, living in any tight-knit community results in a huge amount of jostling, so rules are imposed to make space for Something Else. That something else fascinates me; it’s my life bread.

My mom tells me that men don’t make friends properly anyway, because they are so object-oriented. Friendship for us consists frequently in finding ways to do work together. But I’m on the extreme end of that spectrum, because the work I find most pleasant is very difficult to do in community. Find me, I ask you, a group of men with whom I can gather in person to engage in systematic theology! Even at a seminary, their numbers are very few.

So I’m prone to making little monasteries around me. Continue reading “Monastic”

Kathleen Norris

> Mystics and poets … get to play, but although much lip service is paid to both traditions in our culture, it is largely condescension. No partent really wants his or her child to grow up and become a poet; no one in a religious house really wants to live next door to a mystic.

Also…

> It was in the play of writing a poem that I first became aware that the demands of laundry might have something to do with God’s command that we worship, that we sing praise on a regular basis. Both laundry adn worship are repetitive activities with a potential for tedium, and I hate to admit it, but laundry often seems liek the more useful of the tasks. But both are the work that God has given us to do.

From Devotional Classics: the Sacramental Life