fun moments on tour
In each of our cities so far, there have been some wonderful fun (and funny) moments. For example ...
In Charlotte - needing to cover the beautiful stained glass windows with gray plastic tarps so people could see the video projection. (I won't mention giving half of my first talk without realizing my fly was unzipped ... first time that's ever happened!)
In Dallas - eating the best tacos of my entire life, purchased by our hosts at (drum roll) the Buy Low Chicken Beer Taco Chevron Station taqueria.
Looking forward to what transpires in this week in San Diego, then in Chicago, Seattle, Kansas City, the Bronx, and Goshen. We hope you'll join us!
0 Comments1 Minute
tall skinny kiwi
Andrew Jones just posted an email conversation we had recently ... if you aren't aware of his website and many creative involvements, I'd recommend you bookmark his site and check back often.
0 Comments1 Minute
Easter reflection
We had a wonderful Easter - dinner with my parents and my brother's family, two of my four kids home, beautiful Good Friday and Easter services at Cedar Ridge. This morning, I finished a song that I had been working on since Christmas. I put it into a simple video ... you can find it here.
0 Comments1 Minute
New links
My South African friend Graeme Codrington recently commented on the Vatican's new statement on sins ... which now includes sins related to social justice.
Thanks to theooze.com for spreading the word about the deepshift tour and songs for a revolution of hope! And happy tenth birthday, theooze.com!
0 Comments1 Minute
Engaging with “A More Perfect Union”
Like many (I hope most) people, I was deeply moved and impressed by Senator Obama's speech on race. Almost as interesting as the speech itself have been the responses to it, which usually come in the form of opinions: the speech was good or bad or didn’t go far enough or went too far, and so on.
Opinions often don’t tell us much about the content of the speech - it's truth, beauty, or goodness; they tell us more about the perspective, bias, fears, hopes, and interests of the commentator. I hope we can go beyond talking about the speech to talking about America, and the state of race relations in America. I hope we can go beyond offering old and often utterly predictable opinions and instead, through honest engagement and dialogue about the speech, seek to have our opinions modified and improved and deepened and perhaps even challenged and changed.
We have many places for people to react and practice opinion-giving and other forms of punditry, but what we seem to lack is space for people to have a more generous and generative kind of intelligent shared reflection and consideration. So, I decided it might be worthwhile to offer some commentary on the content of the speech along with questions for conversation, so that people could download the text, make copies of it, and read it through together, stimulating potentially constructive dialogue about a truly important subject.
The best case scenario would be for mixed groups to read and discuss the speech together – gathering a group of friends from work or a sports team or a neighborhood or church. Three questions would guide this kind of dialogue:
What can we learn about America?
What can we learn about people of other races?
What can we learn about ourselves?
The goal here is not agreement, but understanding. Each participant has to desire more to understand than to be understood, and more to learn than to teach.
0 Comments55 Minutes