Some of my favorite pictures from last week's Colorado vacation.  

Locations: Estes Park, Rocky Mountain National Park, New Belgium Brewery in Fort Collins

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Word is going round the blogosphere that HarperCollins will be releasing a new Green Bible this coming October.  According to Amazon, this Bible will be printed on recycled paper with soy-based ink, with a cotton and linen cover.  Passages highlighting God's care for and interaction with creation will be printed in green.  There will also be inspirational poems and essays interspersed throughout, as well as a green-focused index.

I have very mixed feelings about this Bible.

On the one hand, I am thrilled that there will be a sustainably made Bible on the market!  And I am overjoyed at the opportunity for evangelism this Bible could be - and I mean evangelism that goes both ways.  It could both be a tool to get environmentally-minded people to spend some time in the Bible - yay!  AND it could be a great way to show Christians that creation care is an important and essential aspect of living our Christian faith, which is unfortunately often a message that is shamefully hard to get across to them.

Nevertheless...

First, I am sad and disturbed that it is a secular company that is the first to create a sustainable, green Bible.  It seems to me that ALL Bibles should be green.  It's a perfect example of Christian myopia and failure to be moral leaders in the area of the environment that Bibles continue to be printed on paper and ink that create incredibly toxic pollution and do not come from recycled materials.  I could come up with a dozen quotes from Francis Schaeffer as to why this is a shame and a sin, but instead I think I will just encourage you to go read Pollution and the Death of Man.

Secondly, I am bothered by this line that comes from the publisher (italics added for emphasis):

Essays from leading conservationists and theologians on how to read the Bible through a green lens as well as a green topical index and Green Bible trail guide for personal study will be paired with teachings throughout the ages to show people how caring for God's creation is not only a calling, but a lifestyle.

I am not sure what that last sentance really even means.  I am afraid it means something like "we are green first, and therefore fit our Christianity to our green way of thinking."  Which is terrible, it HAS to be the other way around!  Jesus is the Truth, and the Way, and the Life - and our care for the earth flows from that.  That might be reading too much into that last sentance, but it does cause concern.  Additionally, the use of the word lifestyle, especially juxtaposed with the word calling, smacks of pandering to trendy thinking.  I guess I have a prejudice agains the word lifestyle, but it sounds too much to me like reducing both Christianity and being green to another self-improvement fad.

Will I buy one?  I don't know.  I don't really need a new Bible, so buying one would go against my efforts to resist consumerism.  And yet, I bet it is a well-made Bible with a cover that will last a long time.  Plus, considering my professional interests, it would be very useful to have those essays and passages highlighted for my quick reference.  We'll see.

(Tip)

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I have no comment, these commercials speak for themselves.

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We have pretty much just let our garden do its own thing since we planted it.  Well, the weeds were taking over, so it was time to do some maintenance.  It was also abundantly clear that some of the plants needed to be rearranged as we misjudged how tall they would grow.  Here is a picture of when we planted, for comparison purposes.

Well, here is what our garden looks like today. 

Yeah, the Marsh Milkweed, Blazing Star and Stiff Goldenrod have grown like gangbusters!  Ignore the fact that the plants look unwell - it was about a billion degrees today, so they were pretty droopy.  The Goat's Beard totally did not make it at all, so that was removed.  I also don't think the Crested Iris survived, but since there was still a little green, I left them in for now.  I am sorry we don't have more blooms.  There are a few left on the Purple Poppy Mallow - a couple weeks ago there were probably 2 dozen flowers.  We also got one coneflower.  But that's it so far. Compared to some of the neatly manicured gardens around us, ours looks pretty homely.  But I think it has more character and uniqueness.

Oh, and I almost forgot....while transplanting the Marsh Milkweed, I saw crawling up the stem a tiny Praying Mantis!  Eep!

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Lately I have been thinking a lot about clothing, modesty and fashion.  For the most part, I dress very modestly (though this has a lot to do with my poor body-image, but that is another subject).  Personally, I prefer clothes that just so happen to be more on the modest side of things.  To be honest, if it were up to me, women would still be dressing like this:

But since I don't care to look like I just got back from a Jane Austen Fan Convention, I guess I won't be wearing dresses like that anytime soon. <sniff>

Since modesty is something that comes naturally to me, it is something I have not given much thought before now.  And trying to look at it from a Christian perspective, I find that it is a bit more complicated than I would have thought. I did a Google search for "modest clothing" and started scanning the websites that came up.  One of the first websites I looked at had this dress:

I am wondering if this is what St. Paul (or Jesus for that matter) would have considered as modest?  (I forgot to save the link to this dress, so if you know where it came from, let me know so I can link to the seller.)  Compared to what some people are wearing these days, this is certainly modest - there are sleeves, no clevage, and the skirt falls below the knee!  Practically Victorian! 

Still - that dress is still rather figure-enhancing and quite trendy.  Does this mesh with the Bible's admonitions to be in the world, but not of the world? What about the instruction to women not to adorn ourselves outwardly, but let our beautiful adornments be in our innermost heart (1 Peter 3:3-4)? How far are we meant to take these principles?  If we take it as far as people like the Amish or Mennonites, it seems to me that would make us stand out.  The thing that makes me uneasy with those types of communities is that while they are obviously not of the world, they aren't even in the world either.  They have pretty much isolated and separated themselves too much. 

And yet, when I look at how sexualized our society has become in its clothing, I wonder if maybe they aren't wise to separate themselves.  "If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out."  In other words, if trendy clothes cause lust and idolotry, why not just avoid it all together?  Because immodesty is everywhere, even in the stores and movies and tv shows aimed at kids.  The other night I was at a brother-in-law's house, and his kids were watching the Disney channel or something like it, and I have to admit I was appalled...there was a music video with a certain very popular young singer and tv show star, and well, she was being way way way too provacative for the targeted age demographic!   The word prostitot comes to mind - it cracks me up, but it also makes me a little ill that such a slang term even had a reason to come about.

Anyway, I don't have any solid answers, except that I know for sure what ISN'T modest.   I didn't even get into the whole issue of whether or not women should wear some kind of head covering. Goodness! Still sometimes I think it would be nice if women would dress even more modestly then we usually do - bring back some of the mystique and allure of a beautifully covered woman.

Oh, one last note...not surprisingly, a lot, but not all, of the websites I visited had some religious connection - mostly Conservative Christian, Mormon, Muslim and Jewish.  Here are some representative outfits:

Mennonite (PlainlyDressed)

Jewish (Tznius)

Muslim (Shukr)

No apparent religious affiliation, I just really like this dress!  (Christa Taylor)

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I've seen this on a few blogs now.  Very crafty!

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I went to see The Dark Knight this weekend (along with everyone else in the world practically). I am not sure if I could say I enjoyed it, but I would say that it is definitely worth seeing.  I did not think it was as good as Batman Begins, but I did think it was a worthy sequal.  The movie did an excellent job of exploring important themes of human nature, order and chaos, faith, evil.  And it did so without giving any easy or stupidly false answers, like so many movies do.  I do wish they would have spent more time on Bruce Wayne and the conflict he was going through.  Christian Bale definitely did not get enough screentime.  And what was the deal with the super short appearance of the Scarecrow at the beginning?  He was an awesome villain, and I think he was shuffled off too quickly.  Such niggles aside, Gary Oldman was terrific, as was Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman.  As much as I hate when characters change actors, Maggie Gyllanhall was an improvement on Katie Holmes - though neither really convinced me as lawyers.

[On a personal note, the older I get the more intolerant of violence I become. I don't mean things blowing up, or car crashes, or even people getting shot (though all those things are violent).  What I can't bear to look at anymore is anything that involves knives, breaking bones, eyes, teeth, etc. And if there is a chance of something like that happening, even if it doesn't actually turn out to be gruesome, I cover my eyes at the hint of possible violence.  I guess I just can't bear to have that kind of imagery seared into my memory. And I think that is a good thing.]

There was a strong sense of sadness in me as I watched film, which only grew as the film went on.  I was not a Heath Ledger fan before, but I was strangely saddened by his sudden death in a way that most celebrity deaths have not affected me in the past.  Nothing profound, it just really made me reflect a lot on life and mortality.  Anyway, I think we really lost one of the finest actors of our time.  He was obviously capable of an incredible range of characters, and I think that the best actors are what I call chameleon actors - I would place him in the company of the likes of Gary Oldman and Daniel Day Lewis.  I thought Ledger's portrayal of The Joker was captivating and astonishing.  He was the most terrifying Joker - not a cartoonish madman, but a completely sane and completely evil man.  The force of chaos that wants to tear everything down, just because he prefers destruction to creation.  A true satan (which in Hebrew means "adversary").  Anyway, I am very sorry that we have lost the opportunity to see what else Heath Ledger could have done.

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It is like they looked into my mind, and figured out exactly what would make me most happy.  Thanks to this most marvelous of websites, DailyLit, I am able to read a bit of a good book everyday!!!

From the website:

We created DailyLit because we spent hours each day on email but could not find the time to read a book. Now the books come to us by email. Problem solved.

You can read your installments wherever you receive e-mail/RSS feeds, including on your Blackberry and iPhone. Installments arrive in your Inbox according to the schedule you set (e.g. 7:00am every weekday). You can read each installment in under 5 minutes (most folks finish in 2-3 minutes), and, if you have more time to read, you can receive additional installments immediately on demand.

Uhhhh, brilliant?!  Yeah, so I am currently into chapter 3 of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I have been meaning to read for years but never found (made) the time.  There are lots of websites that offer tricks and tools for which I really have no use whatsoever (*cough*twitter*cough*).  But this...well this is one web application which has found a permanent place in my daily life.

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My garden is totally dead.  Well, all except for the Marsh Milkweed, which has gotten so terrifyingly huge I am beginning to fear it is going to envelope our whole house and crush it to the ground.  I guess rearranging the plants was a bad idea, since even the ones that were doing pretty well turned brown and shriveled up shortly thereafter. On a pathetic related note, I just killed my indoor basil plant too.  And the rosemary is not looking so hot either. 

I officially quit at gardening.

I am convinced that some people can grow plants, and other people cannot.  It has nothing to do with skill or care or soil or tools.  It's personal.

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Dr. Horrible is my new favorite.  If you've yet to see the series of short films that comprise Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, well you are missing out.  I cannot get this song out of my head, in a good way.

On a related note, I also found a youtube video of Neil Patrick Harris as the Shoe Fairy on Sesame Street.  Embedding was disabled, so go here if you want to see it.  First of all, HOLY CRAP Gordon and Maria are still on Sesame Street!!!1!  Secondly, who knew Doggie Houser was so freakin awesome?

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edit:  Sleepy-headed Amy thinks it SHOULD be Friday.

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