Hoot hoot hoo-hoot!

I've been absolutely thrilled to learn about the thriving owl population in North Carolina, most recently reported in the Observer in Count of owl species encouraging. Owls are strange in so many ways - the mythology, their physical look with big eyes and rotating head, the fact that they're usually nocturnal, "owl pellets," and of course the hoot! It's been strange to have several run-ins with owls and owl lovers within the last few months.

Since early spring, I've been trying to snap a picture of the owl that lives in our backyard. Just when I got serious about taking his picture, however, s/he stopped making noise. Interestingly, I found a really big black snake in our backyard about the same time Mr. Owl stopped hooting. I'm hopeful that the snake didn't eat the owl, but instead that between the two of them they cleared out every one of the daggum burrowing critters that keep tearing up my backyard! Point being, until he gets back from his European vacation or whatever, the attached picture of some random owl will have to suffice.

Just as my interest in "our" owl reached its zenith, Emily bumped into an old friend, Cori, who is now studying owls in graduate school! She helped us identify our owl as a barred owl (strix varia), known for the diversity of their calls. The one that really wigged me out, and piqued my curiosity about our avian co-tenant, was the male-female mating call and response, though the male mating call is pretty impressive too even if it is pretty standard. One of Cori's professors at UNC-Charlotte maintains a web site about barred owls that is really cool, not only for the information that it provides but also for the fact that there's a professor right up the street from where we live studying barred owls in our neighborhood. Of course, Charlotte is home to the Carolina Raptor Center (which also has information about barred owls), but I still think it's interesting that all of this research is going on right here in little Charlotte.

Washington Post 06/04/2006 | Political pros borrow plot from `The West Wing'

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/02/AR2006060201543.html

This David Broder article resonated with my deepening political ennui. I love policy, but I find myself frustrated after the 2nd or 3rd sentence offered on most issues by any of the political leadership. I get frustrated even sooner when they're talking about the political opposition.

I used to proudly describe myself as a knee-jerk Republican, and I sure do love the starting principle of being a nation of laws even when "fairness" is unpopular. But I'm becoming deeply aware of the missing component that Republicans more than simply ignore - the party establishment is actually hostile to using national public policy to solve problems related to poverty, especially hunger and healthcare.

The Unity08 movement seems unlikely with the current lineup of likely and announced candidates, but I would be eager to find a true synthesis ticket. I'll keep my ideology, they can work on the easy stuff like national defense and the decline of American influence in the world, then in 8-10 years we'll have a country unified enough to really tackle the big problems and questions. First on my list is how can we keep our liberty and still be a loving people, so we can freely choose to share the burden of the poor.

Christians in Culture

As part of a wrestling with the appropriate role of a Christian in political leadership, Rev. Jon Shuler recommended I read Richard Nieburhr's book Christ and Culture. I'm only about a third of the way through the book, and wow is it slow going! A passage (quoted below) struck me as very powerful though, and an "Aha!" moment worth remembering. It's an insight to the fact that our experiences (of God and of the world) are structured by our culturally-constructed, or at least culturally-influenced, minds. Niebuhr makes the inevitability of engaging culture seem obvious. I don't know whether this inevitability should be approached like the inevitability of sin (certain, but not desirable), or the inevitability of God's love (also certain, but very desirable). Either way, the idea provides an element of the metaphysics of engaging culture in a leadership context.

"It is an inevitable answer [the radical desire of a Christian to withdraw from the world]; but it is also inadequate, as members of other groups in the church can easily point out. It is inadequate for one thing, because it affirms in words what it denies in action; namely, the possibility of sole dependence on Jesus Christ to the exclusion of culture. Christ claims no man purely as a natural being, but always as one who has become human in a culture; who is not only in culture, but into whom culture has penetrated. Man not only speaks but thinks with the aid of the language of culture. Not only has the objective world about him been modified by human achievement: but the forms and attitudes of his mind which allow him to make sense out of the objective world have been given him by culture. He cannot dismiss the philosophy and science of his society as though they were external to him; they are in him -- though in different forms form those in which they appear in the leaders of culture. He cannot rid himself of political beliefs and economic customs by rejecting the more or less external institutions; these customs and believes have taken up residence in his mind. If Christians do not come to Christ with the language, the thought patterns, the moral disciplines of Judaism, they come with those of Rome; if not with those of Rome, then with those of Germany, England, Russia, America, India, or China. Hence the radical Christians are always making use of the culture, or parts of the culture, which ostensibly they reject. The writer of 1 John employs the terms of that Gnostic philosophy to whose pagan use he objects. Clement of Rome uses semi-Stoic ideas. In almost ever utterance Tertullian makes evident that he is Roman, so nurtured in the legal tradition and so dependent on philosophy that he cannot state the Christian case without their aid. Tolstoy becomes intelligible when he is interpreted as a nineteenth century Russian who participates, in the depths of his unconscious souls well as consciously, in the cultural movements of his time, and in the Russian mystic sense of community with men and nature. It is so with all the members of the radical Christian group. When they meet Christ they do so as heirs of a culture which they cannot reject because it is a part of them. They can withdraw from its more obvious institutions and expressions; but for the most part they can only select -- and modify under Christ's authority -- something they have received through the mediation of society."

-- Niebuhr, H. Richard, Christ and Culture, pp. 69-70