Here’s a warning: Don't see this movie if you can’t stand violence or want clarity about who the good and bad guys would be in a potential civil war. Do see the movie if you can stand the disturbing violence and if you care not to let our country descend into civil war. In an appropriately disturbing way, the new movie is a wonderful warning - for two reasons. First, it is masterfully constructed and shot. All the actors are effective. The soundtrack is clear…
Left, right. We used to just walk and talk. It's all messed up lately. The left is a losing label. It can mean left behind, left out. The left is the non-dominant side of the body in most people, the weak, inept side. Meanwhile right is called right, correct, approved, and moral. It’s the strong side. I’d like to be called right, but I’m left moping for the losing side, the naïve idealists, the bleeding hearts. In my life, I’ve seen the right as usually…
Last moments of the year, late in life, I confess to my readers how spent and irrelevant I’ve become. I try to come up with something interesting and useful every month. Posting here at EarthlyReligion has become the echo of my earlier rounding up pertinent issues and images to codify into a twenty-minute sermon rooted in the larger context of the Sunday Service and the community hosting it. I devoted myself to that as a UU minister, doing the best I could with the limits…
Progress for me recently was buying a used 2012 Mitsubishi MiEV. Regress is the miserable direction our world is headed politically. I'll address both here. Regular readers here know I am a proponent of appropriate technologies such as electric vehicles. They are unquestionably better for our environment - simpler, peppier, and less expensive to operate. They are environmentally, economically, and ethically better for us. That's why I used my electric bike for three years around town instead of my big Taurus V-6. I like my…
Uneasy I had a dream the other night where I had taken a corner too fast on a sharp curve and went over the edge, trying to steer down a cliff-like drop. It reminds me of our country lately, especially my part in this. (Sorry, readers, this post appears to be current when in fact it appeared in 2016. Blue Host (publisher of my web site) attached the current date to it, and I don't know how to fix that.) The half-way decent Republican we…
A valued congregant once complained that I talk about sex too much. I sympathize with her. It’s a “touchy” topic. It stirs our hurts and hopes, our anxieties and arousals, our loneliness and lovingness. Is it the best of life, or is it what Andy Warhol quipped, “the biggest nothing there is”? Fair warning: I won’t settle these stirrings. Because I get a weekly report from Mailchimp on how few or many open and read this site, I know hardly any do. It takes days…
How we view our history and future can be skewed, or even screwed if we don't see either well. I promised my readers I would review the Oppenheimer and Barbie movies, and I will, but on the way, I read three books and had a bike crash, all six of which can lead us to lessons. I hope you enjoy this grand sweep of history. I hope it helps place our lives in a larger context leading to more hopeful, realistic visions. The featured image…
“Do you ever think about dying?” asked Barbie. I do. Do you? I'm on the eve of my 78th, luckily still alive. I think about dying, but not in a morose way. I stumbled into death at age 18 when I worked for a funeral home that also ran the community’s ambulance service. We’d take the big “S” off the side of the Oldsmobile hearse, put the bubble light on top, and clamp in the stretcher. Sometimes we’d deal with accidental or old age death;…
