First week

Hi everyone. As you may know, I've been almost completely off the map. It was my first week of work. I thought it was fun, but exhausting. I am happy to be working a 9-80, which means I get every other Friday off. Getting up at 6:00 to make it has not been easy, but I've rolled with it.

Sarah and I visited a nice evangelical free church two Sundays ago, and our visit to a megachurch yesterday was a real doozy, basically a first for both of us. I eventually just started taking notes, because the whole experience was just too much. I'll fill you in as I get time. Sarah and I went to Sam's Club on Saturday morning, and bought Harry Potter VII for half price off a pallet stacked with them. We went to the Tattered Cover first, but they weren't discounting the fastest-selling book ever (or if they were, we didn't see the sign), which was the kiss of death.

I finished What's So Amazing About Grace? again. It's a book about the Christian distinctive that means something: real unconditional love towards the unlovable. That is one definition of grace; another might be "treating people better than fairness and justice demand", or "do better to others than you would ever expect them to do to you", or "the stairway off the karmic wheel of reward and retribution", or "living beyond inertia", or "making the first move". It's a good book and it always makes me think. Spurred by Vince, I visited the USU philosophy blog, so I was thinking about ethics as I read this book. Grace is meant to be beyond ethics, I think. Ethics is about the right thing, and the fair things, and values of obligations and weighing the matter, and determining consequences. Grace is not beyond good and evil, but it lies past them; the Boy Scout's good deed for the day is what ethics means to me. Boy Scouts finish, they arrive, check it off their lists. Grace never arrives. On the bright side, grace never ends.

I got my library card, so I'm in the middle of Firestarter (Stephen King), Don't Know Much About History (a primer for those with an American History hole in their education, which somehow I got), and Come To The Quiet: Principles of Christian Meditation by John Michael Talbot. I am reading that last slowly and carefully. Talbot (a famous singer-songwriter in Catholic and, broadly, Christian circles) has written a very deep book here about quiet time with God, trying to draw out the meaning of meditation in Christianity and also meaningful parallels within other world religions. I've also got a John Scalzi space war novel, an Alice Miller book, and Einstein's biography to get to.

Stay sane, and I'll try to be back soon.