Merry Christmas!

Wishing all of you the merriest Christmas and best wishes for a joyous New Year! Rejoice, our Lord and Saviour was born this day!

"For to us a child is born,
to us a son is given;
and the government shall be upon his shoulder,
and his name shall be called
Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace."- Isaiah 9:6

Merry Christmas from our family to yours!

Dad, you can quit sending me reminders to post on the blog!

Here's a life update for the Batch and the Holly the last few months.

We're very well settled in our house in Houston and loving it. It has a wide open floor plan and we've thrown some parties already and have two more on the books at the moment- a Baptism party for a friend's son and a Christmas Eve celebration- the Spirits will flow at both (pun intended). A big shout out to Dad and Carolyn for making the all night road trip from Starkville to Houston to be here for the first celebration, a housewarming party in October (they say 70 is the new 20, right dad?).

Holly has been enjoying her work with Christ the King Presbyterian Church and survived her first Capital Campaign which successfully secured funds to build a permanent facility for the congregation. She's in a bit of a lull there at the moment, but expects things to begin to pick up speed as we get closer to beginning construction.

I'm preparing to begin a new position at my company, much different from the consulting work I've done in the past. I'll be directing the front line customer service team for our software business, basically leading the team that is the face to many of our customers.

We had a very busy November, traveling to New Orleans early in the month for a company meeting and service project (pictures here) and at the end of the month making a trek from Houston to Jackson, MS/Birmingham, AL/Fayette, AL/Starkville, MS/Biloxi, MS and back again (not to mention that I-10 was closed between Baton Rouge and Lafayette, LA).

We've got a vacation planned soon to Turks & Caicos with three other couples from college to celebrate one of the couple's 10th anniversary. Then we'll be back home again in time for Christmas and then we're off again for a few days to catch family and friends getting married just before the new year.

Crunchy Cons

Reading a great book at the moment- Crunchy Cons: How Birkenstocked Burkeans, gun-loving organic gardeners, evangelical free-range farmers, hip homeschooling mamas, right-wing nature lovers, and their diverse tribe of countercultural conservatives plan to save America (or at least the Republican Party).

I care little about the Republican Party anymore- in my estimation it is no longer conservative (at least in the traditional sense of the word) and is only substantially different from the Democratic party in rhetoric and little in substance. However, the book does describe a 'sacramental' approach to modern life that I find compelling. Much of what the author, Rod Dreher, describes resonates deeply with me. This is his own "Manifesto" which is an extreme summarization of the points in his book:

1. We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.

2. Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.

3. Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.

4. Culture is more important than politics and economics.

5. A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.

6. Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.

7. Beauty is more important than efficiency.

8. The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.

9. We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.”

10. Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.

Read it if you're curious about a flavor of conservatism other than the typical Republican corporatist, moralist blah.

Aftermath

Heard this poem, written by by George Held and read by Garrison Keillor, on The Writer's Almanac on NPR this morning.

It resonated.

Aftermath

It's not the storm itself—wind and rain lashing shore,
uprooting trees, toppling poles and dousing lights,
flooding cellars and roads, capsizing boats—
but the aftermath—the bright calm, the pair
of drowned cats crumpled against the picket fence,
the parlor of Izzy's shack open for inspection,
the walls fallen flat on all sides, your own
roof filling the front yard, covering your car,
and your own twin daughters dazed by Nature's
petulance—that makes you reconsider
your life and weigh your possessions and the cost
of putting down stakes too near the coast
as the globe warms, and storms grow worse.