Lent:

In the words of John the Baptist, "He must increase, but I must decrease." (Jn 3:30) ~ I have decided to take this season of Lent and fast from the blogosphere until Easter...

Rob Bell

"Go into any church office and ask the leaders, “Is this sustainable? Are you more rested and ready to go than you were a year ago, or is this thing gradually killing you?” Just this week I asked a seminary student, “What day of the week do you not answer email? When do you take a Sabbath to remind yourself that you’re not a machine, you’re human?” And he said, “I don’t know if I can do that right now.” I was like, “Well, if you can’t do it now in seminary, what happens when you have a real responsibility?”"

from Leadership Journal, Winter 2010, p. 31

Leadership Journal, Winter 2010

4.2 stars
The winter edition of the journal is given to the topic of preaching - if you stand in front of others and share the word of God this is well worth your time. As George Fox said of the preacher's task: "I took men to Jesus and left them there." Here's a few articles I appreciated:

* Elemental Preaching by Mark Labberton
* An interview with Rob Bell
* Unscripted: preparing to preach is not writing a speech by Dave McClellan
* Twitter and worship
* Facing Fears by Max Lucado
* Soul on Display by Gordon MacDonald
* Enough of Me Already: It's time to find other ways to illustrate sermons than me, me, and mine by Mark Galli

get a free trial issue here

check out the Leadership blog: Out of Ur

Grandma Moses: 25 Masterworks, Jane Kallir

4 stars
Anna Mary Robertson Moses or "Grandma" Moses began painting in her mid-seventies. A self-taught American folk artist she lived to be 101 (1860-1961)! I first came across her paintings in high school and was struck by her simple and enjoyable style. I picked up this small book and was inspired once again - a great Saturday afternoon read & viewing. I found myself lost in her simple and colorful pastorals of a time without the distractions of blogs, email, facebook, and cell phones. In her own words,

I like pretty things the best. What's the use of painting a picture if it isn't something nice? So I think real hard till I think of something real pretty, and then I paint it. I like to paint old-timey things, historical landmarks of long ago, bridges, mills, and hostelries, those old-time homes, there are a few left, and they are going fast. I do them all from memory, most of them are daydreams, as it were. (p. 36)

The book includes a short biography and then takes you on a visual tour of 25 of her 1,000+ paintings that she did in her later years. Here's one quote from the opening biography of this book by Kallir: "Fame is a strange commodity, and it sometimes difficult to determine whether it is due more to luck or merit." ~ Grandma Moses had both...I highly recommend her obituary link below.

see her obituary here

see some her paintings here

olympic:

The fire of human devotion and discipline.

Rose was so tired of her frenetic ways and longed to simply be still so the muddy waters of her mind might settle...

Illustration Friday prompt: muddy
"muddy water, let stand, becomes clear" ~ Lao Tzu



one-line pen & ink drawing w/watercolor pencils

identity:

The ITY DENT I put on this spinning globe.

Very troubling when one turns into a carrot right as a ravenous rabbit appears...

two, one-line drawings (pencil & colored pencils)

Unfortunately Edwin misunderstood when he was told to sit in the corner and keep his eyes glued to the wall.

Illustration Friday prompt: focused



one-line pen & ink w/watercolor pencils

The Mindful Brain: Reflection and Attunement in the Cultivation of Well-Being, Daniel J. Siegel

3.8 stars
This is definitely an academic book but if you have any interest in the topic of mindfulness (particularly as it pertains to the field of neuroscience and the functions of the brain) this book will not disappoint. I found it a very fascinating read and though much of it was beyond my understanding or interest it has many take-aways with regard to how one might practice mindfulness and live fully in the now. Siegel is the master of the acronym and writes with great passion about his topic.

for more on Siegel & his work click here

William Butler Yeats

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

Happy Birthday OED...

This is from The Writer's Almanac for today - thought it was a fun and interesting read...

It was on this day in 1884 that the first part of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. It covered from "A" to "Ant."

The Philological Society of London had conceived the idea for a new dictionary almost 30 years earlier, back in 1857, and then in 1879 they worked out an agreement with Oxford University Press to publish their ambitious project. The Society felt that the English dictionaries that existed at the time were "incomplete and deficient," and they wished to write a new dictionary that would take into account the way the English language had developed from Anglo-Saxon times.

The dictionary, they proposed, would take 10 years to complete, fill four volumes, and amount to 6,400 pages. They were halfway (five years) into the project when they published the first volume on this day in 1884, and they'd only completed from "A" to "Ant." In the end, the dictionary took 70 years (not 10) to complete, and it filled 10 volumes (not four) and it was 15,490 pages, more than twice as long as they'd originally estimated to their publisher. The last volume of the first edition of the dictionary was published in 1928. It defined more than 400,000 word forms, and it used 1,861,200 quotations to help illustrate these definitions.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a Supplement to the OED was published in four volumes. And then, in 1989, a big Second Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. It's the one you're most likely to find in a library today. Its 21,730 pages fill up 20 volumes, and it weighs nearly 140 pounds. There are more than 615,000 definitions for words in this edition, which also contains 2,436,600 quotations.

The longest entry in the 1989 edition is the word "set" in its verb form: There are more than 430 listed ways the verb "set" is used. The entry for the verb "set" is 60,000 words long, the equivalent of a modestly sized novel. The Bible is quoted more than any other work in the Oxford English Dictionary, and Shakespeare is quoted more than any other single author. Of Shakespeare's works, Hamlet is quoted the most — there about 1,600 quotations from Hamlet alone in the OED.

In 1992, a CD-ROM version of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. Now the dictionary is online, where it's constantly under revision.

Many of the facts found in this entry about the Oxford English Dictionary — and more information about it -— can be found on the OED's own site