He said, She said

A combination of the ridiculous and sublime today.

First, unintentionally riffing on Homer Simpson's phrase "if the Unitarians are the one true religion, I'll eat my hat!", James "Larky" Lark -- who has elsewhere drawn my portrait (the Picasso-style rendering is surprisingly close to a realistic still life, I'll have you know) opines on the Unitarians who occupy space across from his new flat.

He writes, in part: "I knew nothing at all about the Unitarians but was curious to discover that these ones appear to spend most of their time having salsa evenings....Not that there’s anything strange about salsa per se....No, the curious thing is that the Unitarians appear to do very little else. You’d imagine that a church might house some kind of regular worship, but no – it’s salsa all the way." (Read the rest here.)

BTW, his blog has moved house as well: the link to it in my links should be switched to Talk To Rex. I wager that my mentioning this will buy me some time to actually make the change.

And on to the sublime, or rather the tragic, providing a deeply sad coda to the series of violence-inspired postings of last week, my wife lost a friend and co-worker to gun violence last week. She has blogged about it with some personal and theological reflections. There's not much else to say -- I had met Jose once or twice, and so I didn't know him personally -- without reducing him to a number or a type, in some ways robbing him of his humanity; the shooter already did that once and I don't think repeating it would do him justice.

But it is so clear to me that this is not the way things are meant to be, and perhaps those elements of society, of our world, which allow us to be blind or unconcerned or preoccupied with trivialities really are quite deeply wicked and ought to be acknowledged as such. Why are we content to allow this?