aching
How deeply I hurt over hurricane Katrina's destruction and especially over the way the United States government treated (not!) the poor and the poorer folks who lived in the storm's path and the surrounding area. Over on my theology blog I've posted several times about Katrina:
a bit of my own backstory
Returning way back into the deep, deep South of this United States, my grandfather of William Faulknerian-style Mississippi upbringing told me he (meaning me, as well) had an ancestor who was a circuit rider, eons before I was born...probably most of my readers know circuit-riders were guys, always guys (but weren't there a few notorious exceptions?) who rode across the terrain evangelizing with a horse and Bible. Maybe you've heard, "When the Presbyterians wanted to evangelize they sent to Scotland for a scholar who came to this country and established a college; when the Baptists wanted to evangelize, they gave a guy a horse and a Bible and sent him off..." though another interesting tidbit is that during the 19th century the highly intellectually theological Lutherans had a renowned horse-borne circuit rider in Henry Muhlenberg--so go figure! Nonetheless, one of the strange things about my grandfather was he not only grew up Southern Presbyterian, he was raised Southern Presbyterian (another note to my readers, Southern Presbyterian refers not to churches of the now-former PCUS in the American South who organically belong to today's PC(USA) but to the current member churches of the Presbyterian Church in America); I'll make a radical assumption and call that church body conservative to the point of reactionary. From everything I can figure, it was a Southern Church far more than a Reformed Church, meaning it was ethnic! Over on Desert Spirit's Fire I recently posted about ethnic congregations and hope to continue thinking and writing more about that subject.
But again regarding Katrina, I was born in Mobile, Alabama and lived in Bay Minette and Stapleton--check out this map of the area, before moving to Starkville on the Mississippi Delta...it's been a long, densely longing time since I've been in the American deep South, but once a Southerner, always a Southerner! Here's a blog I did for sun tree river on October 26, 2005: The New South.
That's all for now. May you know the love of God expressed in community; may you forever be safe and feel safe. Please be well!
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