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Thursday, November 24, 2005

Men in Aprons 


All the Eggar and Lutzker men are excellent cooks. (As are the women).

Here are Mike Lutzker and his wife Kerry Eggar Lutzker collaborating on one of the side dishes for the Turkey Feed.

Turkey Day 2005 







I spent the evening w/ the Lutzker clan in Escondido.

Kerry Eggar Lutzker is my late aunt's husband's neice. Now that we're clear on how I'm related....(iow I'm not, by blood...)

Women of the Lutzker clan, relationships given relative to newest addition:
L to R: Margie Lutzker, great-grandmother; Barbara Lutzker, grandmother, Kerry Eggar Lutzker, aunt by marriage, Wendy Lutzker Kushner, new mom, and Samantha Madeleine Kushner, newest family member (age 6 weeks; weight 9 lbs 6 oz). And on the far right, Turkey, age, post-mortem; weight, 20 lbs).

Monday, November 21, 2005

I'm a practical-theology geek 

In case anyone hadn't figured this out by now, today would have been the proof.

I sat down on the sofa for a moment, and two cats simultaneously decided I looked like a pillow. Since it's unusual for the two of them to willingly get w/in 2 feet of each other w/o hackles going up, much less to curl up only inches away from each other, I decided I couldn't possibly *move* and disturb this pacific tableau.

But I was determined not to let their furry warmth lull me into sleep. I've been sleeping too much recently. So I began looking over the items w/in reach on the coffee table. After leafing through all the Christmas catalogs, it was time for a real book.

What was the only thing of interest w/in reach? Not a romance novel, not a mystery....but Diana Butler Bass' The Practicing Congregation: Imagining A New Old Church, (Alban, 2004) which I've been meaning to read since it first came out. So I read it, and read the endnotes too, to make sure it was perfectly clear that I'm a practical-theology geek. Just as I was finishing it, the cats finished their naps. Re-energized, they swatted and hissed at each other and tumbled off the sofa in a wrestling match. Which freed me to get up off the sofa and ..... geekily check my bookshelves for the books cited in the endnotes, several of which I do in fact own....

Random things that stood out to me as I was reading....

Her story of a dispute she had as Director of Faith Formation at Christ Church, Alexandria, Va. (A position I interviewed for in 1995, ironically--DBB began there ca. 1999, after at least 2 others had cycled through the job since my failed interview)....It was a tiff between an older woman who wanted to continue to use the parish hall for the Christmas Crafts Bazaar all the Sundays in Advent, just as "we always have-it's a tradition" and Butler Bass, who wanted to use the parish hall as a meeting place for an Advent adult ed series on quiet and prayer and spiritual disciplines. I was put in mind of a discussion a friend and I were having a few nights ago about why All Souls' Christmas Arts Fair and Home Tour drives me up a tree. I come out of the exact same school of thought Butler Bass does; the women of the Home Tour are clones of the woman Butler Bass had the show-down with.

I realized that Scott Richardson is implementing at the Cathedral the exact approach Butler Bass describes, and with good effect: in the 2 years he's been in place, attendance has mushroomed and the budget has grown from $800,000 to $1.2M. The three things I see him doing quite intentionally: (1) constantly inviting folks into intentional spiritual practices--he had led the Cathedral to adopt a 5-point Rule of Life that he mentions almost weekly; (2) focusing on narrative theology and the metaphors of pilgrimage and spiritual journey, both in how he describes the life of faith and how he invites people to enter into it; and (3) beginning to create an emphasis on discernment for lay folks (cf the Listening Hearts program that he's in the process of implementing there).

I don't know if Scott has read Butler Bass and the authors and practitioners she draws on. I suspect he has, or else he has at least absorbed them by osmosis, b/c he has spent a lot of time in the Santa Barbara CA area, where several of the "practicing" congregations she has studied are.

I also realized that I was first introduced to this approach to ministry and formation in my C.E. classes at PTS, where Rick Osmer and others had us read some of the earlier works by the same cohort of folks*. I see that Rick has just come out w/ a new book himself. I will be curious to see if he has continued to develop his own thoughts in this vein or if he has headed off in another direction. Once I have money again and can buy books.

The problem w/ reading a stimulating book is that you then want to go out and read more on the same topic. So now I need to move Butler Bass's earlier work Strength for the Journey, over to the Priority pile, review her sister-in-law's Practicing Our Faith, which I've dipped into previously, and put the anthololgy Practicing Theology on my Wish List. (The intermarried Butler and Bass families seem to be to practical theology what the Miller and Brueggemann clan is to Old Testament and preaching).

*: The cohort of folks who show up in Butler Bass's endnotes includes, among others:
Alasdair MacIntyre
Robert Wuthnow
Craig Dykstra
Wade Clark Roof
Stanley Hauerwas
Robert Bellah
Howard Gardner

Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Cat Napping 


If I sit or lie down on the sofa, it's like I trigger a magnetic force that attracts Roxy immediately from wherever she is. She starts out as a tightly curled doughnut on my thighs. Then we both begin to unwind, and the scene ends w/ me asleep and Roxy stretched across my whole torso. This time Sugar came and perched on the top of the sofa to add to the tableau. I wish I'd been able to snap the moments when Roxy reached out her paws and gently patted me on the chin. Such soft paw pads, such gentle pats.

Sunday, November 06, 2005

Cats in Sinks - for all your cat and bathroom needs 

Pretty self-explanatory. And pretty darn cute.


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