Here and Now

No, this isn't about the cleansing of the Temple.  Yes Jesus got really mad that day, but this is another time.  I'm reading the Gospel of Mark today and I come across this verse in Chapter 3: He looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored. So the religious leaders want to trap Jesus and there's this guy with a "shriveled hand" in the synagogue and Mark says they're watching Jesus closely to see if he'll heal on the Sabbath.  Do you think about Jesus getting angry?  I guess I don't.  Too many images of the Jedi-Jesus - you know, no emotions, always calm and cool and spouting wisdom. But here it's almost like he's baiting them.  Doing what he KNOWS will upset them...because he's upset.  But here's the thing - he's mad for all the right reasons.  "...deeply distressed at their s

I happened on this quote the other day: The head of the Vatican Museum has warned that dust and pollution from tourists visiting the Sistine Chapel could endanger its priceless artworks. 'Such a crowd... emanates sweat, breath, carbon dioxide, all sorts of dust,' he said. Vatican Tourists 'Ruining Sistine Chapel'; The Independent (London, UK); Sep 10, 2010.  So...we should sequester the artwork (which was painted to be seen and experienced, right?) away from people because the very fact that they are people is destroying the artwork...  Um...  really? On the other hand - we've live in a time when we could create a near perfect reproduction of the work - I mean, it's already  available online   (and it's very cool, btw) - to the point where (with enough money  of course) it could look, sound, even smell like the real place.  Or we could go digital.  Imagine a huge ceiling that is a video screen projecting the that Michelangelo masterpiece - and

Okay, I had a post up the other day - but when I went to check it, I got a malware warning and so, thinking the picture (yes, it WAS a Star Wars pic) was somehow the cause of the warning, I pulled the post, looked at the html (which I know very little about) and cut all the imported html (losing the quote that had been the basis of the post - a quote that I can't find again now -  thus rendering the post useless...argh) only to discover that it wasn't anything I did that caused the malware warning.  Well, except that I trusted a bunch of people that I really don't know. Not Blogger. United Methodists. Yeah, okay, here's the thing, when I checked things with Google Tools (yeah, Google owns the internet) I discovered the problem.  I had on the side of my site a Western PA UM Blogroll.  It listed a bunch of UM (that's United Methodist for those of you who landed here accidently and for some inexplicable reason are still reading) blogs that I like to read once in