In Your Favorite Sweater, With an Old Love Letter

Congratulations to Heidi Hipp for correctly identifying "Konstantine" by Something Corporate as the most recent song of the day. I'm pretty sure that the cosmos aligned in order for Heidi to win on the day before her birthday but I could be wrong.

Perhaps the secret is only taking 6 hours, but I think this might be the first semester in college where I am actually looking forward to the subject matter in each one of my classes. A semester studying ethics with Randy Harris and Ancient Near East and Greek Civilizations with Mark Cullum is already looking full of promise. I am sure that there will be a number of posts in the future that will be heavily influenced by the thoughts and tangents that arise in these classes.

One of my favorite features of the rising media coverage in the United States is that almost every ill-advised comment is captured by listening ears. Look at these doozies by New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin.

• "God is mad at America. He sent us hurricane after hurricane after hurricane, and it's destroyed and put stress on this country."
• "It's time for us to rebuild New Orleans-the one that should be a chocolate New Orleans...the city will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be."
  

He later attempted to diffuse those comments by telling a CNN affiliate, "How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That is the chocolate I am talking about."

I am a great theologian by no means, but I don't think God uses natural disasters to show his displeasure with countries that have aroused his ire. Well, not unless they are called Soddom and Gomorrah. Also, since when does God care about the racial composition of cities? Isn't it more important that the people who lost their homes in the Katrina disaster find some sort of stability and comfort instead of worrying that they must come back to the Big Easy in order to comply with God's desires regarding the ideal racial precentages of their former city?

Our conversations should instead be concerned with questions of why so many in our society are pushed to the edges without anyone to look out for them. Let's ask how we can give people the opportunity to build lives instead of always worrying that God might not be pleased with the new racial composition of our city. I don't have all the right answers, but maybe Ray Nagin shouuld start asking different questions.