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"Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul."
"The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread." - 1 Corinthians 10:16-17
God, thank you for this earth you have created. When we look at the mountains and oceans and great plains, may we think of you. Help us to protect your creations and be good stewards of your land. Amen.
The House of Representatives just passed a law that would allow gun-owners to carry their guns through other states based on the Constitutional right to bear arms (as opposed to the right to bear legs — once global warming kicks it up a notch expect to see this one on the floor soon).
As a native Illinoisan, I’m not sure how I should feel about this bill. Illinois is one of two states (not including Washington D.C.) that don’t have concealed carry provisions. This provision would allow Missourians and Michiganders and people from Indiana to waltz right through our state with their guns as they please. I see the merit and legality to the 2nd Amendment, yet at the same time, I recognize we have a gun violence problem in America.
Here’s how dialogue around gun control goes these days:
For: Guns kill people.
Against: Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.
For: People kill people using guns
Against: And the Second Amendment?
For: Shoot… No, wait!
There is something fundamentally wrong with our education system when the draws of a huge salary and big bonuses consistently trump the aspirations and dreams that were front and center in our lives just four years earlier. Debts, a lack of job opportunities in other fields, your basic standard-issue panic — or maybe a simple absence of imagination can take hold and send us running into the arms of the recruiter with the flashy suit, a Hollywood smile and promise of a better life.
As Terkel reminds us: “Young people will continue to go work in the financial sector as long as its pay is disproportionately higher than alternative careers. It's basic human nature: Follow the money.”
But what would it look like if we didn’t follow the money? What if Wall Street paid no more than schools or hospitals?
What would our economy look like if these leading young minds chose not to work for big banks and consultants, but instead were the teachers that helped turn failing schools around, the innovators and engineers who were designing products that would create thousands of new jobs?
What needs to be done so that the finest members of the 2012 graduating class head to Main Street instead of Wall Street?
We crested the hill and there it was: a square little brick two-story that had been improved just a little, with a welcoming windowed front and a high, aerie-like upstairs. It was the cheapest house we’d seen, and because it was 2005 and things were crazy, we spent about twenty minutes deliberating and put in a contract with a modest escalation. When we found out later that the house was ours, we found out we'd beaten out another family. The house had been listed barely a day.
As we found out later, we’d put in the contract on the feast day of Saint Xenia of Petersburg, a nineteenth-century Russian “fool-for-Christ” who'd mourned her army colonel husband’s death by donning his uniform and living as a pauper in the city's streets, performing unasked acts of generous service.
It is said that at night she hauled bricks to hasten completion of a church’s construction, and on the internet you can find a copy of this wonderful icon, St. Xenia hoisting herself on a brick construction wall with her long grey hair swinging. One of the things for which St. Xenia is said to intercede is to help people in finding housing.
“The problems of homelessness and poverty are not self-inflicted, they are the result of priorities of our society and those priorities are not centered on people but on gathering more wealth for a small number of people. Many of us [homeless people] – despite the stereotypes – drew deeply on our faith and the fact that we’re all children of God and organized ourselves. We’re homeless, not helpless. That’s why our call is to work with us and not for us.”
— Willie Baptist, Scholar-in-Residence The Poverty Initiative at Union Theological Seminary
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Why do I want to be CJ Cregg? She is confident, educated and intelligent. She is not afraid to speak her mind and not afraid of conflict that may come her way. But in all of this she is respectful and elegant. And in turn she is esteemed and one could even say feared in some situations.
Don’t cross her or you’ll get “sucker punched” – not in any literal physical sense, but with her words, intellect, wit and determination. But she is also compassionate; she has such a soft core. She makes the president pardon two turkeys cause she couldn’t bare to kill one of them.
The C.J. Cregg’s are the models that we need in television and films. We should all be running out buying pantsuits, reading the New York Times and getting a political science degree.
Women don’t need to overcompensate for historical oppression and abuse by becoming those very things ourselves. We need to compensate for those things by becoming the beauty we want to see in the world.