Sojo post

Had another piece of mine published over at the God’s Politics blog … it’s called “Are single moms the new widows?”  Check it out.

Garden / Life Update

It’s been a while since I’ve shown some update photos of the garden. I’ve thrown in a few photos from important events in our lives over the last month or so.  Enjoy!

taken in late May

late May dirt-level view

Some herbs — thyme and basil — growing nicely in the sunny window.

the garden as of June 14th

Crazy peas climbing the trellis I put up. Too bad I don’t like peas.

Damon posing in front of a gorgeous bouquet our neighbors put out in the yard.

Got to see Dave Matthews play at Fenway Park on May 30

Our campsite in Maine … unbelievable.

We took a hike on the island where we were camping, and we’d stumble upon these little hidden beaches.

One of the best meals I’ve had: freshly caught boiled lobster, campfire-grilled veggies and kielbasa, and pristine views of the Atlantic Ocean in Maine.

Another view of the spread.

We stumbled upon a farm with several acres of cultivated land in the back. So green and beautiful!

So true.

For more photos of our camping trip in ME (many more great photos than I can share here), click here, here, and here.

Redemption Day

“Redemption Day,” by Sheryl Crow

I’ve wept for those who suffer long
But how I weep for those who’ve gone
Into rooms of grief and questioned wrong
But keep on killing
It’s in the soul to feel such things
But weak to watch without speaking
Oh what mercy sadness brings
If God be willing

There is a train that’s heading straight
To heaven’s gate, to heaven’s gate
And on the way, child and man,
And woman wait, watch and wait
For redemption day

Fire rages in the streets
And swallows everything it meets
It’s just an image often seen
On television
Come leaders, come you men of great
Let us hear you pontificate
Your many virtues laid to waste
And we aren’t listening

What do you have for us today
Throw us a bone but save the plate
On why we waited til so late
Was there no oil to excavate
No riches in trade for the fate
Of every person who died in hate
Throw us a bone, you men of great

There is a train that’s heading straight
To heaven’s gate, to heaven’s gate
And on the way, child and man,
And woman wait, watch and wait
For redemption day

It’s buried in the countryside
It’s exploding in the shells at night
It’s everywhere a baby cries
Freedom

freelance happenings

I’m pretty excited about a story assignment I got today from Edible Boston Magazine (”Celebrating the Abundance of Local Foods, Season by Season”).  It’s a feature on a family-owned, local organic farm south of Boston that utilizes solely local high school and college students as labor during the summer.  A NYT article last week details the trend among some college students of using their summers to work on farms, change food policies, and escape the rigors of academia. Take a look if you have a chance.  My article is for the Fall Issue, so I hope to keep you posted on the blog as I visit the farm and do the reporting this summer.

Also, check out this piece I wrote for sojourners’ God’s Politics blog on gardening, posted today.

If anyone knows of additional writing opportunities (journalistic, marketing, Web, print, whatever), feel free to send them my way. (steve [at] thebostonwriter [dot] com)

earth and earthworm; 5 years

When I garden, earth and earthworm pass between my fingers and I realize that I am made of the same stuff. When I pinch the cucumber vine and the water drips from the capillaries to soil, I can feel the blood coursing through my body. Man is a microcosm in whose flesh resonates and reverberates the pulse of the whole creation, in whose mind creation comes to consciousness, and through whose imagination and will God wants to heal and reconcile everything that sin has wounded and put in disharmony.

- From Chapter 1 of Vigen Guroian’s Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening

—————-

Because my back was turned to the audience, every time I lifted my hand to my face, people thought I was wiping away tears.  In reality, it was a muggy 95 degrees and I was wiping sweat from my brow.  That was five years ago yesterday, May 29, 2004, and I was standing with my bride-to-be making the most important commitment of my life, after my commitment to God.

I didn’t cry then — I am easily moved, just not usually to tears — but as I sit here this morning thinking about my wife, I could cry tears of joy.  So much has changed.  I’m looking out the window of our home in Boston (which we bought last year).  Our dog, Damon, is at the groomer’s this morning.  Chrissy is spending time this morning with her co-worker who is a new mom.  Yet after five years, I appreciate now more than ever the woman I married, precisely because she is the kind of woman who spends her Saturday morning sitting with a new mom with two other children in her care.

Here’s to five years, babe.  We’re a good team, you and me.  I could get used to this marriage thing.

links roundup

First off, I’ve been doing a bit of writing of late for the Jesus Manifesto zine, in the form of two book reviews and a scriptural/cultural exegesis.  The latter has sparked quite a conversation because of its provocative nature.  My evil scheme worked!  Check em out if you want to.

—————–

I’m going to go down the list of my shared items on my feed reader and share with you all what I found interesting over the last several weeks, listed in reverse chronological order as I’m reading it off the page. (in other words, not by order of importance / significance)  Beware … this stuff is all over the map.  Enjoy.

• Review of We Shall Remain, a new PBS series about the earliest English settlers in North America. For you non-TV owners (like ourselves), the series is available online.
• Neeraj Mehta over at God’s Politics suggests that perhaps “proximity” is a better core principle for community development than the current one, “relocation.”  I’ve always liked the term proximity, and this is a good post.
• Ryan Fowler at Love is a Movement describes the milk carton drip system for garden irrigation.
• There’s a cool Instructable on how to make your own laptop skin.  Pretty cool.
• According to the Globe, Spanish-speaking folks in my neighborhood are afraid to report their neighbors that they know are committing crimes and raising a ruckus. East Boston Police are reaching out to them to build trust.
• Empire Remixed has a great post called “Healthy Sexuality and Christian Community.”  Should be self-explanatory.
• Boston po-po are apparently hard-nosed about guerilla street art. Shepard Fairey (the artist of the famous Obama campaign image) got arrested in Boston last year for some art he did here and was not impressed with the police’s reluctance to smile and look the other way when they saw him with his spray paint.
• I can now take a double-decker bus — with WiFi and a sunroof, no less — from Boston to NYC, for about $18 per person. Guess I should start liking going to NYC.
• Kester Brewin has a thoughtful post about the role technology plays in our lives, suggesting that people of faith can neither completely embrace nor completely exclude technology from their life, but that our relationship with it is a thoughtful tension. Quite relevant as I find myself outside the circle among my friends when it comes to things like Twitter, smart phones, and the like.
• Coincidentally, the next item in my reader is an audio interview at neue magazine with Shane Hipps, author of Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith.
• Shane Claiborne and Rob Bell team up to announce their new project, Two Futures, which asks the all-important question: “Who would Jesus bomb?”
• And finally, three consecutive gardening-related items: Russ Cheatham describes his rooftop Earthbox urban garden at the Inside Urban Green blog; No Impact Man rejoices that urban gardening time is here; and here’s a wonderful Instructable on how to build your own solar-powered rain barrel.

That’s all the links for now.  I’ll likely share reflections over the next several weeks on the book I’m currently reading, Inheriting Paradise: Meditations on Gardening by Vigen Guroian, which is a great little book of earthy, practical theology. We’re off to Washington, D.C. this weekend to hang out with Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and our good friends Aaron & Amy.

great story

Nice to see CNN pick up on a positive story about church/religion.  Also nice to see a church pick up on the concept that it is better to give than to receive.

Link.

(HT: Houston)

WikiChoice

[Begin Plug]

I want to tell you about a project a friend of mine is putting together, and it is pretty closely related to my post about the Story of Stuff.  So, many of us acknowledge that we have a consumption problem: we consume too much, and we often don’t know the origins of the stuff we consume.

Is your T-shirt assembled in a sweatshop?

What about your toothbrush?

How is the environment affected by the making of the shower radio you’ve had your eye on?

Enter WikiChoice, an open-source Web site that is positioning itself as the most powerful aggregator of information on the products we buy, from a social and environmental perspective. Like Wikipedia, WikiChoice harnesses the power of mass collaboration, allowing users to create content on the brands and products they use.  Over time, consumers will be able to access information on the social and environmental justice of thousands of brands — all within the framework of one site.

Right now, WC needs two things: time and money.  They need money to pay administrative costs, become incorporated, and let its founders eat.  Time-wise, they need you to go onto the site and import information about companies and products you care about.  It’s super easy, and the site walks you through the process.

As you can tell, I believe in this site, and not only because one of my good friends is one of its masterminds.  I love it because I can imagine a world where people begin to think before they buy, a simple step that will assist and relieve millions around the world. (not to mention our Earth)  So go to WikiChoice, sign up for more information, upload some information, give some money (if you have it), and use the site for your next purchase!

[End plug.]

Story of Stuff

I’ve been a huge fan of Annie Leonard’s Web-based video, “The Story of Stuff,” since it first appeared in 2007.  It lays out in a crystal clear and non-divisive (or partisan) way the impact our current process of consumption in the West has on our planet, our neighbors, and ourselves.  One valid critique of the video is that it is short on practical “what now?” information, except that which can be found on the rest of the site after watching the 20-minute video.  Nevertheless, Leonard’s mission is one of whistleblowing and education, and I believe awareness of crucial societal issues will depend heavily on the creation and dissemination of media like hers — media that present complex problems in simple, reproducible ways.

Anyway, it was nice to see a front-page nod with a picture to the Story of Stuff in Monday’s New York Times. While the NYT article gives an overview of the history of the video, its news hook is a battle that is being waged in Missoula, Montana, over the use of the SoS in a classroom.  According to the article, the school board ruled “that screening the video treaded on academic freedom after a parent complained that its message was anticapitalist.”

Anticapitalist.  Heh.

Look, I’m no raging commie and there are certainly aspects of capitalism that I very much enjoy, but I’m not sure the Big C is exactly the invincible tank we in the US once thought it was.  I’d say it’s been shown to be quite fallible over the last, oh, three years or so.  Last time I checked, everyone was talking about how many of those economic “truths” we accepted blindly are systematically crumbling around our feet.  Against a dreary backdrop of environmental devastation, economic collapse and corruption, and global poverty, we could actually use a few hundred more videos, Web sites, and books like Leonard’s SoS — media that ask the tough questions about our economic assumptions and suggest new paths forward.

Zing!

HT: The Priesthood via Steve K