Tuesday, June 26, 2012

A little poem

Showered: A True Story

Clothes washed in a bucket
brown hands, dunked in suds

Again by the afternoon rain
while stretched out on the line

Later drenched with sun
the brightness, the birdsong

Tomorrow awash in clean
holding in warp and weft
smell of rain, warmth of sun
hint of song

Monday, January 9, 2012

2011 Top Ten Reads

I just thought I would review my year of reading... a varied list of books ranging from ecology to theology, poetry to prose, discussions about Judaism, Islam and Christianity. Authors were scholars (both Old Testament and New), Western and some African (from South Africa and Kenya), men and women, mothers, journalists, academics, activists and farmers. I covered some great territory.

A quick glance and I could easily point to the top ten that have stayed with me in one way or another:

Speaking Christian by Marcus Borg
Fatal Embrace by Mark Braverman
Testimony to the Otherwise by Walter Brueggemann
Begging to be Black by Anjte Krog
God is not Christian by Desmond Tutu
The Bible Makes Sense by Walter Brueggemann
Getting Involved with God by Ellen Davis
Half the Sky by Nicholas Kristof
A Spirituality for the Road by David Bosch
Mark: The Whole Story by Richard Horsely

(three of the top ten are written on South African soil... something about that place and the people shaped by it speaks to me deeply.)

So more for my own record than anything else, there are the 2011 reads that stick.