If our public witness votes and lobbies but doesn’t testify, if it debates and protests but doesn’t forgive, if it bargains and barters but doesn’t administer justice, if it threatens and punishes but doesn’t restore, then we politick in vain.
D-Day + 9
Well this is a first. Is there a name in rummy when the deck is out and all the cards have been melded? I think this must be what the original monopoly game felt like. Everyone floats out!
My dad wrote riddles and poetry for any number of annual events growing up. And I see he has not lost the knack. This is a poem he wrote to go with some wooden stilts he made for his grandkids for Christmas, which is also featured here on the annual business calendar.
January’s kitchen table clutter • Part of an attempt to read fewer things online. I’ve been receiving Comment in the mail for years, but I rarely read from the print copies, which just get stashed in a closet with all my other good intentions 🤓
Life is complicated. It is simplifying but dangerous to have one overriding concern that makes others unimportant—rage or passion or the kind of religious exultation that seeks or inflicts martyrdom. . . . Warfare comes as a great relief to those who prefer thinking about one thing at a time.
~ Mary Catherine Bateson ~
Oh Stink/Screw the Dealer — some close scores this year!
The time for excuses is over • Gearing up for a very new year. There are a lot of dumb phone options out there — sorry: “dumb phone” options 🤓. Rather than getting stuck in the land of indecision, I pulled the trigger on the simplest option.
Signs and symptoms of a Euchre deck
Evangelical Lutheran Christmas Church, Bethlehem, West Bank (Source)
Frederick Buechner:
As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me. Just as Jesus appeared at his birth as a helpless child that the world was free to care for or destroy, so now he appears in his resurrection as the pauper, the prisoner, the stranger: appears in every form of human need that the world is free to serve or to ignore.