Daily Office:
Tuesday
Morning
¶ Verdigreen: Two stories in this morning’s Times sound a retro-green note. Kim Severson writes about locavores who want to grow their own produce but can’t — or oughtn’t to — do their own gardening.* And John Tagliabue reports on the windmill revival in the Netherlands.
Noon
¶ Communion: Communion is a good thing, generally, but in the case of the Anglican Communion, I think it’s time for a sundering. (Not that it’s any of my business.)
Night
¶ Disguise: War criminal Radovan Karadzic has been arrested in Belgrade, after years of disguising himself as me. “For Bosnian Serb, a Life of Hiding in Plain Sight.”
Oremus…
Morning, cont’d
§ Verdigreen. The Nederlander government has committed $80 million to the restoration or construction of 120 windmills. Now, why did that take so long?
Then, on the Op-Ed page, Verlyn Klinkenborg concludes a complaint about social networking sites thus:
There is, of course, a pleasure in sharing the things you love. But the greater pleasure will always be secret sharing. You find a book you love, you tell your best friend about it and the two of you share the secret. Something is ruined if your friend tells someone else about the book. Surely you remember this from fifth grade. I hope there will be room soon for some anti-social Web sites — places on the Web where you can go to be alone, to hide from your “friends.” Perhaps that is what real life is for.
Mr Klinkenborg is one of those writers whom I can count on to express view that are the contrary of my own when they are not actually incomprehensible to me. This bit about secret sharing falls somewhere in between. But I don’t splutter. The world is big enough for anti-social Web sites.
Noon, cont’d
§ Communion. It can’t be a good idea to take the unenlightened step of reversing decades of right recognition simply to make a clutch of archaic patriarchs happy. Garret Keizer’s meditation on Bishop Robinson and the Africans, in June’s Harper’s, still rings in my ears:
Lead us not into temptation. But I can’t help finding it bitterly funny that the entire Anglican Communion is tied up in knots about whether it is just to withhold the “minor sacraments” of Holy Orders and Holy Matrimony from a person on the basis of his or her sexual orientation but is quite content with restricting a person’s access to the “major sacraments” of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion and other riches of our beautiful tradition based on the demography and economics of his or her neighborhood. It’s about theology, right? I know of certain “progressive” Episcopalian clerics who will argue strenuously that the canon requiring someone to be baptized in order to receive communion is too “exclusive,” but I don’t know any who would argue that the canon requiring that a baptized person be ordained in order to celebrate communion is also exclusive—even though the first stricture mostly affects the casual visitor while the second stricture mostly affects the people who don’t head for the door every time a homosexual priest is or is not elected bishop. I suppose that’s about theology, too.
Night, cont’d
§ Disguise. D’you think the beard thing will work for Dubya?
* Remember: the difference between gardening and farming is a tractor.