Trying again (Yes, it's February)

This semester, the work load has lightened just a bit (read: three classes instead of two), but I'm smack in the middle of student teaching so I'm not sure how resurrecting the blog at this point in time will go.
Having said that, I just gotta blog...

GOD'S POLITICS
-I'm reading an excellent book right now by Jim Wallis called God's Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. I can't figure it out right now, but I definitely feel like I'm moving to a new place in my own life in relation to my Christianity. Call it moving to the center, or moving away from Fundamentalism, or maybe just growing up and having my eyes opened. I can't escape the fact that 21st century Christianity needs to look an awful like 1st century Christianity - that we who believe and follow are called to overtly build the Kingdom of God here on earth, by serving the poor, the "least of these," if that's how you want to refer to it. Talking and building churches for churches' sake just doesn't cut it with me anymore. Maybe that's why Danielle and I are having such a hard time finding a church to belong to around here. I'm not interested in whether or not you have a book club at your church. How about a crisis pregnancy outreach or hospital visitation?
Wallis is founder and CEO of Sojourners. Check them out here.

CHAPPELLE'S WORLD
So I'm trying to figure out the Dave Chappelle phenomenon. I really am. Somebody help me. Is he harmless? Hilarious? Racist? Avant Garde? Nuts? The trailer for his Block Party movie shows a little bit of all those things.

C.S. LEWIS ON LOVE AND ALL THAT MUSHY STUFF
So I would have read this to my kids today at school, but I probably would have gotten fired (not that I have a job, really, but...). And yes, I wore red to school today

"Being in love is a good thing but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling ... Ceasing to be 'in love' need not mean ceasing to love. Love ... is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God ... It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it."