What I'm Reading Online

I thought I'd let y'all in on a couple of things that I've come across lately that have really made me think.

First off, let me plug Slate.com. If you've never heard of it, it's a web magazine run by the Washington Post Company. It has a definite leftward tilt, but I really enjoy a lot of the commentary that gets posted.

One of my favorite features is when they invite semi-prominent people to do a week's worth of online journals, giving you a glimpse into who they really are as a person and how they think. This week Slate has had Judd Apatow, a comedy writer/director who has enjoyed recent success with Anchorman (one of my personal favorites) and The 40-Year-Old Virgin. I've found his posts to be enjoyable all week, but really liked today's musings on the state of the nation and how it relates to our fascination with celebrities. Check it out at http://www.slate.com/id/2126915/entry/0/.

Another thing that I really like is when Slate invites several prominent critics/thinkers to exchange open letters discussing their thoughts about issues in popular culture. Last week they had three women trading their ideas about how two recent books - Pornified: How Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families, by Pamela Paul, and Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture, by Ariel Levy - reflect the state of America's sexual culture, particularly as it pertains to contemporary feminism. Now, I know that many of you wouldn't think that you'd find that discussion to be interesting, but I loved how reading their comments pushed me to think about issues that I would normally ignore and to engage those issues from perspectives that I wouldn't naturally assume. The dialogue can be found at http://www.slate.com/id/2126570/entry/2126575/.

If you choose to look at either of these, I'd love to see you post comments about your thoughts.

The Long Haul

So I'm sitting here in my office, reading about the Senate's confirmation of John Roberts as the new Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, when it hits me - this man will be in charge of the Court for the vast majority (if not the entirety) of my legal career. At 50 years old, he is the youngest Chief Justice in 200 years. Life expectancies being what they are these days, we can reasonably expect that (barring some unfortunate turn of events) he'll continue to serve for at least thirty years, and even a forty-year term would not be unthinkable. That's absolutely stunning, when you really ponder it.

So what kind of issues do you think Chief Justice Roberts will have to deal with in those years? I'll award a barbeque sandwich at Shayna's birthday party to the person who comes up with the most outlandish, ridiculous legal matter that Roberts will be called on to judge.

Appreciation

Special thanks to all of you who were praying for me last week. Your prayers were effective, and I had a much better outlook through the second part of the week. God is good.

Last night I had the blessing of getting to see Caedmon's Call in concert. While I am generally highly critical of contemporary Christian artists, I love this band. They present a combination of innovative, rich music and wonderfully contemplative and poetic lyrics. And they put on a fantastic show!

I'll also tell y'all to keep your eyes open for a future edition of Washingtonian magazine, in which they list the 50 Best Places to Work in DC. We were notified at work this week that the Institute for Justice has been selected not only as one of the 50, but as one of only eight or nine of the places for whom photographs will be included. Now, I could've told you that IJ was a fantastic place to work (matter of fact, I probably have told you at some point), but it's really cool to see my own opinion validated in this way.

What is the best concert you've ever attended? What made it special?

In Need of Prayer

I don't often ask other people to pray for me. I like to think it's because I'm generally very good at keeping my life in perspective - I can recognize how phenomenally blessed I am and that keeps me from obsessing over the things in my life that I wish were different. For the past couple of weeks, however, my world has been thrown off kilter and I am at something of a loss to know how to come to grips with it all. As a result, I am finding myself jealous, angry, and resentful over a particular situation. I was briefly given the hope that one of my oldest and most sincere prayers might be brought to fruition, only to see the opportunity ripped away quite suddenly so that now it seems very unlikely that my desired outcome will come about. To be sure, I do believe that there is a valid basis for much of what I am feeling, but at the same time I recognize that these emotions are not at all characteristic of me and they are far from being appropriate for one who intends to follow Jesus. As I am proving virtually powerless to control my feelings, and as my own prayers are not currently helping this situation, I ask each of you to pray on my behalf that God will help a sense of balance, perspective, and contentment return to me.

Thanks in advance. I am not allowing comments on this post.

Turning a Good Idea Into Action

For the past several years, I've discovered that I've been losing the thrill that I once got from anticipating and receiving gifts for my birthday and Christmas. Don't get me wrong, I have been absolutely floored with the several of the presents I've gotten in the past, but more and more I realize that it really is the thought that matters to me - I so much more appreciate a really creative gift than I do an expensive one. As I've been in the process of this realization, I've also noticed that I frequently feel bad when my family goes out of their way to get me things. While we're not as financially strapped as we were when I was growing up, none of my family members are particularly wealthy in relation to the rest of our society. If you ignore the monstrous loans that I piled up in college and grad school (which are going away, little by little...), I'm in much better shape financially than my parents and most of my siblings. And so, while I appreciate their willingness to buy me stuff, I find that I'd rather they didn't because I know that that money could be going to better, more important things.

I really hadn't done anything with these thoughts until recently, when I saw Shayna's request that people donate what they would have spent on gifts for her birthday to a charity instead. The more I thought about it, the more it made perfect sense. So today I decided to put that great idea into action in my own life by telling my family (and any of you who would otherwise have planned to buy me gifts) that instead of spending that money on me, I'd like them to use it in one of two ways: 1) Donate it to Opportunity International, a Christian charity with whose work I am highly impressed ( www.opportunity.org); or, 2) save the money toward a trip to come see me here in Washington (which I think is a worthy cause of its own).

Shanksville

This afternoon I looked across an open Pennsylvania field lit by a setting September sun, with a backdrop of trees in the earliest phase of their seasonal color-shift. Just in front of the treeline was a slight depression marked by a solitary American flag.

I tried to ignore my surroundings - the casually chatty tourists, the infuriatingly cheerful government employee, and the haphazard personal memorials whose tackiness is exceeded only by the sincerity of the people who left them. Standing there silently in my suit and sunglasses, I sobbed more violently than I have in nearly four years.

Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The ending point of perhaps the single most heroic act in American history. The impact site of United Flight 93, which crashed as its passengers struggled to regain control of the plane from four terrorists who intended to destroy a target here in Washington.

I get pissed off at how blithely, arbitrarily many people (especially politicians and members of the media) offered a "Hero" label to anyone who died on September 11th. However heartwarming it might be to attribute heroism to the victims, true heroism requires more than simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Heroism exists where people choose to put themselves in harm's way for a greater good. It exists in its higest form when those who are least prepared for dangerous circumstances demonstrate valor in the face of their own certain death.

It is under that definition that the passengers and crew of Flight 93 stand alone. They didn't sign up for their fight. They had no training or combat experience. They didn't have any weapons. And yet they resolved that they would not sit idly by as the hijackers flew them into their intended target. Knowing that they had no real hope of saving themselves, the passengers gave up precious last minute phone calls to loved ones they would never see again, stormed the flight deck and forced the terrorists to down the plane, ending all of their lives in that lonely Pennsylvania field.

I wanted the field all to myself. I wanted to lay myself on the ground where the plane hit, to speak my gratitude and sorrow to the souls of those that died. I wanted to shout aloud to God, expressing passionately and violently all the feelings that were beating back and forth within me. I wanted to wail openly instead of just letting the tears roll from behind my convenience-store shades. But in the end I held the ache in my throat as I maneuvered among those pointing at this and that t-shirt left on the chain-link fence or chatting cheerfully about the lunch they'd had at the tour bus's last stop. With frustration and resent for all who seemed to regard the scene as more a novelty than a graveyard, I spun my tires and left the field behind me.

Junebug

A few days ago I had the pleasure of watching Junebug, a movie about a refined, cosmopolitan art dealer from Chicago who marries (one week after meeting him) a handsome, enigmatic Southerner. She catches wind of a talented "outsider" artist (let's just say he's obsessed with the Civil War and male genetalia) who lives nearby her husband's family in North Carolina. They decide that they will travel down together so that, in addition to trying to sign the artist, she will finally get to meet his family. The movie is about what happens when this sophisticated woman is introduced to the small-town, conservative world in which her husband grew up.

I liked the movie for several reasons. First off, its one of the few films I've seen that captures the atmosphere of small-town Southern families without being too stereotypical or condescending. I thought that every one of the characters felt... authentic. As the movie played out, I could totally see folks from back home (and sometimes even myself) fitting neatly into the behaviors and emotions that were playing out on the screen. The result was that I could really feel for these characters - each one of them in their own way. It was sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching, sometimes frustrating, but always peculiarly beautiful.

And now is the time in this post for me to be vulnerable and revealing...

Junebug illustrated one of my own personal fears. Like the art dealer's husband, I'm a local-boy-made-good that moved off to the big city. Like the art dealer's husband, I'm sometimes terrified of what the implications would be if I were to meet an accomplished, refined woman and were faced with taking her home for the first time. Don't get me wrong, my immediate family is much more cultured than many middle-class Southern folks - but we aren't world-travellers and we don't tend to rub elbows with people at the top levels of society. I know that (despite years of working up to my current position) I still frequently feel awkward speaking to politicos, diplomats, and other movers-and-shakers - so that's likely to be amplified several times over for my parents and siblings who have all stayed close to home. I imagine it would be very difficult for them (as it sometimes is for me) to know precisely how to relate to someone whose parents were enormously successful and who grew up in high society.

But - more selfishly - I live in mortal terror of meeting a woman that I think is wonderful, only to have her meet my family and decide that we're all a bunch of yokels, however sweet and well-intentioned we might be. I suppose that's my bigger concern. Not that I or my family might have a tough time relating to her, but rather that she would make a decision that it wasn't worth her while to even try to relate to us. I'm sure that this somehow provides fodder for psychoanalysis, so I'll leave it at that.

Homestar Runner RULES!

To all y'all who don't know, www.homestarrunner.com is one of the funniest websites out there. Strongbad's emails - especially the earlier ones - are absolutely hysterical.

Today I discovered that my generous appreciation for all things Homestar is nothing compared to some other folks'. Check out http://www.hrwiki.org/ for an amazing online Homestar encyclopedia.


(Strongbad is pictured at left, in all his glory.)