This week my daughter, Laura, our youngest turns 21. Seems like some kind of marker. All our children officially adults. I told her that now she'd have to do her own income taxes, but I'll probably give her another year or now of my "daddy's dubious tax services!" She's off to Sicily this summer, an ancient history internship.
 

In Seattle people are grumbling about a new city fee on plastic bags, introduced by City Council President Richard Conlin. I think it's a good idea. No reason we can't develop the European habit of taking our own canvas bags on shopping trips. Also the Mayor is putting the kabosh on bottled in plastic water. High time. Seattle's tap water is just fine.
 

Four or five years ago Linda and I read the book The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, by Jean Dominque Bauby. The other evening we watched the movie based on the book. Bauby was the 42-year-old editor or the famous French magazine Elle when he had a stroke that left him with "locked-in syndrome," able to move only one eye, hence the diving bell image. His spirit and imagination survived as the butterfly. Lovely movie. See it.
 

Currently reading Walter Russell Mead's new book, God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of Modern World. It recounts the paradoxical dominance of the English speaking peoples in modernity. Paradoxical because they/we have triumphed in every major conflict (political, economic, military) since the 17th century and yet have been wrong every single time in the cherished conviction that our latest triumph would usher in the new age of peace and justice. This Mead, a highly respected foreign policy scholar, is the son of Alban Institute founder Loren Mead.
 

My little booklet, Seven Habits of Highly Ineffective/ Effective Churches, published by the United Church of Christ sold out of its first printing but is going into a second and larger printing. You can order it directly from United Church Resources and their number 800-537-3394.
 

In church on Sunday, at Bethany UCC in Seattle, we learned that the INS operates a detention center holding up to 1,000 detainees in Tacoma (built on a superfund site no less). I can't recall reading anything about this in local media. I'll put on my journalist hat to take a look.
 

This week I'm spending some time at Seattle's Recovery Cafe, a ministry of the New Creation Community as the basis for a future column. I thought last week's column on the upcoming "Death with Dignity" initiative would trigger some protest, but most of the comments I got were appreciative.
 

Spring 2008 is still remarkably chilly here in the Northwest. Some of our tulips are only now starting to bloom. In years past tulips would be over and done by this time. Gratefully, I'm in town this week and not on any airplanes. Upcoming trips, this month and next, are to Toronto, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and North Dakota. Wherever you are this week, may God be with you!
 

Was I wrong about Wright? Me and a lot of others. I defended Jeremiah Wright in an Op-Ed column but his antics last week were painful to behold. Not to mention another severe blow to Obama who must be muttering, "With friends like these . . ." Between Hillary's slow bleed and Wright's narcissism, Obama is deeply wounded. Mortally so?
 

In a rather spectacular way, it seemed to me that Wright embodied what I call, and have written about elsewhere, as the former pastor problem. The former pastor problem is what happens when the long serving pastor refuses to get off the stage. The former pastor who has this problem usually has had a great run, a significant ministry. But they just don't seem to get that it's over now, time to move on, time to play a different role. In the process of insisting on staying on stage they not only wreak havoc on successors and churches but diminish, if not destroy, their own reputation and legacy.
 

In a way, Barack and Hillary both suffer from this syndrome. If for Obama it really is a pastor, Wright, who has left his pulpit but insists on grabbing the limelight, for Hillary it is her husband, the former President, who likewise insists on holding the stage. In truth, Hillary's problem ought to worry the electorate more than Obama's. Wright will have no role in an Obama White House, but Bill most certainly will have a role in a Hillary White House. Meanwhile McCain too has a shadow, namely George W. As yet the media and electorate have not discovered that.
 

While all this strum and drang was pre-occupying national attention I spent last week in the San Juan islands with a group of clergy friends and the bright young patristics scholar Jason Byassee, who channeled Augustine for us.
 

Noting that people love to hate Augustine, Jason worked through most of the common complaints and accusations about Augustine before going on depths of thought not plumbed by those who use Augustine as a whipping boy. For Augustine the task of preaching, which he did daily, was to shape listeners so that they might desire the right things rightly. The point of exegesis and preaching was not recovery of the single right meaning of a text via modernist's "historical critical method," but to bring about right love of God and neighbor. Augustine had a fine sense of the apophatic tradition as in sermon 117, paragraph one, "If we can understand it, it's not God."
 

This week I am in Cleveland for a couple days, a meeting of the UCC Writer's Group I chair. A recent project of mine for that group has been writing a curriculum for adult bible study on Acts. I hope it will be available for use this fall. We are also working on a resource for pastors and congregations who are receiving former Catholics, a major source of new members for many UCC churches.
 

On Sunday, May 11, I'll be preaching at Bethany UCC in Seattle where worship is at 10:30. This year the second Sunday in May is not only Mother's Day but Pentecost. Two high holy days struggling for the same hour. Which prevails will probably be a fair indication of the nature of a congregation.