About this site

---

More recently still … [specifically Aug-Sep 2009]

I’m getting better.

Incontrovertible evidence that I’m not alone (see Nov 2008) makes a heckuva difference in outlook. I’ve also been meditating for over a year — finally! — so large chunks of my previous angst, anger, unforgiveness, and other turbulence have been/are being knocked loose and flushed out, as advertised.

The idea of ever returning to church seems unlikely, though. The unholy conflation of “gospel worldview” and “conservative worldview” produces the most soul-shattering dissonance I’ve ever experienced.

So there’s no way I’m going to keep this bathwater (the conservative worldview). But I am trying to find a way, a larger framework for understanding, that lets me retrieve the beautiful baby (the gospel worldview).

---

More recently … [specifically, Feb—Mar 2005]

Motivation. Years into this new millennium, I’m still coming to grips with a United States whose words (at least publicly) point to Jesus but whose actions [largely powered by those most vigorously pointing at Jesus] point almost entirely elsewhere. This politico-theological incongruence has of course happened again and again throughout the last 2,000 years, but never before in my face like this. It’s like we’re freakin’ schizophrenic.

If what’s going on in the U.S. [2000—2008] were just politics, I could write it off as bad politics and then work for electoral change without taking the situation personally. But these [self-described conservative] maroons are trying to hijack faith, what I hold most dear, twisting it and mingling it with bad politics, selling the result as “godly government” when it’s more nearly an abomination of desolation, so damn straight I take it personally. On the upside, the situation is forcing me to wrestle with my responses, to find a way where there seems to be no way to behave in a way coherent with what, and whom, I believe.

[September 2009 insert: I’m learning not to take the situation personally. Taking others’ insane behaviors personally is its own kind of insane.]

I was knocked out of my chair on watching the extended DVD version of The Return of the King: the Mouth of Sauron character, in images cut from the theatrical release, embodies what my mind’s eye sees us looking like to the rest of the world as we mouth our words of “morals,” “freedom,” and “democracy” but fail to live them.

A false commitment to morality and right living, I infer from scripture and history, is worse than no commitment at all.

So I wrestle out loud with the situation here, looking for hope, looking for grace, pressing for change that makes our commitment true in word and deed. What comes out is nearly always too serious, and quite often horseshite, but occasionally I find in it a pearl of emergent understanding I didn’t know I had.

We can have eyes to see; we can cast off this culture of fear and retribution, this greed and deception, this myth of redemptive violence, this incoherent religiosity. We can recover our authenticity; we can find the joy again. I hear it calling.

Origins. Starting January 4, 2005, nearly all content at this domain is being presented using Textpattern (Txp), which I’m figuring out as I go with the help of some really cool people.

I’ve imported multiple years’ content from my Movable Type weblogs, which means it’s all accessible from the Txp search field. For my own archival interest, I’m leaving the content to this point accessible as originally published as …

2005-03-29 update: Taking Movable Type archives completely offline in response to insane level of incoming comment spamming attempts. All archived content is available in current Textpattern presentation via search field.

• Tread lightly on the things of earth (MT weblog, 2003—-2004)
• Tread lightly (Radio Userland weblog, 2002)
• Tread lightly: Interesting links (MT sideblog, 2003—-2004)
• Mike’s Photolog (MT photolog, 2002—-2004)
  
  

Design. Michael Heilemann made the wildly popular Kubrick design. Michael Pate ported it to Textpattern. For this the January 2005 Textpattern rollout, I’m hacking the crap out of Kubrick and leaving a lot of sawdust on the floor. Thanks for sharing your good work, guys. [January 2005]

2005-08-26 update: Refurbed this Textpattern site this time using theming ideas from Sivert Nielsen’s Easy Kubrick and infrastructural/theming ideas from Stuart Butcher’s TXP Manji. Thanks, guys.

2005-09-14 update:
RIP, Sivert. I just heard today. My heart hurts.

Plugins in use. I’m using many of these Textpattern plugins at the moment (which Ramanan has made effortless to present via his rsx_plugins_list plugin).

I extend a big Thank you! to each plugin author listed here.

(2005-12-03: Quite a few of these plugins are no longer necessary as of Textpattern v4.0.x; their functionality has been built in. I just haven’t yet scoured through my code to find which ones.)

< list output elided because, who cares? >

---

Here’s my earliest About me (2002).