Tensegrities

From the National Catholic Reporter, news of letters sent to Congress urging them to pass the health care reform bill. I was very pleased to see Lisa Cahill, Dennis Doyle and Terry Tilley’s names on this list. Somehow I doubt it’s going to make much difference, but I’m very glad they’re trying!

I need to return to this.

An interesting take on how our culture messed with intimacy long before digital tech came along. Some excerpts:

What Broadbent recorded was that the explosion in communications technologies are instead restoring a little bit of what was simply part of life 150 years ago—constant contact with your intimates during your work day. If you’re over 30, you’ve probably marveled at how much the work day has changed because of this, and as Broadbent notes, it’s extremely different from the era when even personal phone calls were not part of life at work. (And still aren’t in many blue collar jobs.) It used to be that once you were in the office, the outside world simply didn’t exist. Huge news events could happen and you wouldn’t find out, and you were mostly ignorant about what your friends and relatives were up to during the day. Now, between text messaging, cell phones, IM, and social networking, we spend huge portions of our days keeping lines of communication with our intimates open.

In any case, I think it is the physical distance we have placed between ourselves and our neighbors, families, and friends that has contributed most to our atomization, and which has led directly to the more psychological and spiritual distances we see forming – as our children are raised either in single-parent homes or without any real connections to their grandparents, aunts and uncles, and communities in general. In some sense, then, the communication technologies we have developed allow us to compensate for this distance. Rather than blaming social networking or other communications technology for our increased atomization, perhaps we should view them as a subconscious attempt to remedy something we, as a culture, barely understand about ourselves – as an attempt to bridge the distances between one another.

Andrew Sullivan recently gave a speech at Princeton University on the topic of natural law and civil rights. I hope he posts it soon! But in the meantime, he did post this short excerpt from the Q&A where he describes why he believes, as a Catholic, that he can authentically and appropriately — and in Catholic terms — support LBGT civil rights. I agree with what he says here, and think he makes his points eloquently and thoughtfully.

Andrews’ blog is also worth reading for how it’s following the Uganda situation (there is a proposal to make being gay an executable crime in Uganda, and US Christianists have been supporting it). This report of the vivid gay rights movement in Uganda is very much worth reading.

UPDATE: Andrew has posted the entire speech at his blog.

I’m interested in keeping an eye on the vast array of adult education resources within church contexts that are popping up online. Here are two that came to my attention this week: the churchwarden site of the diocese of St. Edmundsbury in the Anglican church of England, and the Thoughtful Christian site (this last one has some free materials, but mostly carries a price), which is an ecumenical resource from a a number of Protestant publishing houses. In some ways this latter one also reminds me of MyCatholicVoice (run by a group of Catholic publishers), although MyCatholicVoice is mostly free and much more web2.0 in its interaction base.

I’m busy planning for next year’s REA/APRRE conference (follow our blog!), and in the process have started to come across some really interesting resources worth sharing. Like, for instance, this 2010 Interfaith Understanding conference to be held April 11-13 in Rochester, NY.

I’m living through some very difficult times at the moment — our amazing, wonderful, beloved, funny, mischievous, loving Oma had a massive stroke several days ago in Vienna. Eric and Nathaniel are there right now, and Alex and I may well join them soon, depending on how things emerge. Prayers are appreciated!

In the meantime, I’m not getting any blogging done. I had to pass on this one piece of information, however, the 24 hour number for street maintenance in St. Paul: 651-292-6600. I called it myself late yesterday, to report horrible potholes along my daily commute, and was shocked — in a wonderfully surprising way! — to see the asphalt repair truck out there already this morning. Kudos to St. Paul street maintenance, and keep the number handy.

A set of numbers seeking to describe the ‘net these days. (Hat tip to FreeRangeLearning)

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

danah boyd and a group from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard have published on the web their response to the FCC’s “notice of inquiry” (NOI). It’s a thoughtful, concise examination of what the best scholars know right now about how to “empower parents and protect children in an evolving media landscape.” Among other things it’s a great literature review chock full of citations, and an empowering conclusion:

With or without dedicated tools, young users will benefit from media literacy skills that allow them to access, manage, integrate, evaluate, create, and communicate content at any point, using a variety of technological formats, in order to manage the unprecedented amount and range of quality of information available online. Media literacy skills overlap with safety skills. Youth need more support and more skills to develop their own, repeatable processes for assessing credibility and reliability of information in digitally mediated environments.

A series of resources pointing out how Jewish thought abhors torture. (Hat tip to theDailyDish)