Look at the Tears of the Oppressed

Grading the US side, 2-2 against Slovenia

2010-06-18T10:21:00.000-07:00

Agree? Disagree?

Tim Howard, Goalkeeper: B. As with the England match, the goals allowed by Howard had nothing to do with him and everything to do with breakdowns in the States’ central defense (specifically Oguchi Onyewu), leaving Howard stunned by the first and absolutely exposed by the second. Howard did make several key plays to keep his side in the match, and showed strong instincts time and again in leaving his line.

Steve Cherundolo, Right Back: B+. Not quite the factor he was in the England match, but Slovenia really hammered their attack down Cherundolo’s wing, and he gamely responded time and time again. Was not as present in the attack as he was with England, but still managed to force his mark, Milivoje Novakovic, to draw a yellow card.

Oguchi Onyewu, Center Back: C-. Even as good as Gooch has been playing in the second half of both matches, all three goals given up by the U.S. can be partially blamed on him. Against Slovenia, Gooch gave Valter Birsa far too much space and time to tee up the first goal, and he was the defender who kept Zlatan Lubijankic onside for the second goal. The problem is, Maurice Edu wasn’t a whole lot better in central defense, being more of a midfielder himself.

Jay DeMerit, Center Back: B+. As with England, DeMerit did his job well, winning headers and making a few crucial tackles to kill Slovenian attacks. Gave Slovenia a bit of a scare in the first half with a wicked header from the top of the penalty area.

Carlos Bocanegra, Left Back: B-. A slightly more sound performance from Boca in this match—it should be telling that many of the most dangerous Slovenian attacks were coming down Cherundolo’s wing and not Bocanegra’s. Boca also gave the Slovenian defense fits on set plays—Suler was actually resorting to putting Boca in a headlock on a couple of them.

Michael Bradley, Defensive Midfield: A. His goal might be the most aesthetically pleasing goal we’ve seen all tournament, which is ironic, as Bradley isn’t known for playing pretty soccer. But Altidore heads it into space for him, and Bradley volleys it to bury it past Samir Handanovic. Bradley seemed to be much more comfortable in distribution than against England, though his partnership with Jose Torres was not as strong. My vote for Man of the Match.

Jose Torres, Defensive Midfield: D. Torres did not live up to his billing today as a more technically gifted alternative to Rico Clark. Aside from one impressive free kick attempt that forced a good save from Handanovic, Torres contributed little and had problems defending, giving up gobs of turnovers. Look for Maurice Edu to take his turn against Algeria ib the game of musical chairs that is the non-Michael-Bradley slot in the American defensive midfield.

Landon Donovan, Attacking Midfield: A-. Less effective early on, Landon waited almost a split second too long on his goal, but he still came through magnificently for the U.S. by starting the second half off as strong as possible. Generally gave good service off of set pieces.

Clint Dempsey, Attacking Midfield/Striker: C+. Came close to getting booked or sent off in the opening seconds of the match, and I’m not sure he ever quite settled down. He was a non-factor for much of the game, and we didn’t hear much from him even after he moved up to striker when Feilhaber came on for Findley.

Jozy Altidore, Striker: B+. Was invisible for the first 12-13 minutes, but afterwards frustrated the Slovenian defense on several occasions, causing them to foul him pretty hard multiple times. Excellent heading assist on Bradley’s goal.

Robbie Findley, Striker: C. Even though I have come to appreciate Findley’s speed, oh how I still pine for Charlie Davies on the pitch. Findley was adept at finding dangerous opportunities, and fairly inept at making anything of them. He didn’t deserve his yellow card, but nonetheless, that means we won’t see him against Algeria, which in the grand scheme of things is not the worst thing to happen to the U.S.

Substitutes:

Benny Feilhaber, Midfielder: B-. The U.S. side enjoyed a net improvement with Feilhaber on for Findley, but he didn’t provide the same spark that Dempsey is capable of. After the Slovenians adjusted, we seldom heard from Feilhaber over the course of the second half.

Maurice Edu, Midfielder/Center Back: B+. Edu made a few dicey plays on defense, but came through in a huge way for the U.S. on a goal that was inexplicably disallowed (the official FIFA line was that Edu committed a foul on the play, but watch replays of the goal, and you’ll see he had a clean run into the ball). Deserved to be the surprise hero for the U.S.

Herculez Gomez, Striker: B. I try to bury my keeper-induced prejudice against strikers for Gomez, just because I love his story and because he offers such wonderful quotes at times. A great guy who I wish the KC Wizards had kept onto…er, Gomez had one half-chance when he volleyed a shot just wide of Handanovic’s net, but given he came on with only ten minutes left in the game, he showed he doesn’t need much time to fall into the flow of a match.

Bob Bradley, coach: A. Unlike with England, Bradley didn’t hesitate to make halftime adjustments when he saw his game plan wasn’t producing the necessary results. Moving Donovan to the right flank paid immediate dividends with the first U.S. goal, and halftime substitute Edu proved to be a force on set pieces. He earned his salary today.

Koman Coulibaly, referee: F. I didn’t rate Carlos Simon’s job as ref in the US-England match, but if I had, I would have said he did a solid job, all in all. The same cannot be said for Coulibaly, who blew two huge calls—first and foremost being Edu’s goal, and the second being Findley’s yellow card (even in real time, it didn’t look like Findley had handled the ball, much less intentionally), for which Findley will be suspended against Algeria. If FIFA lets this man ref any of the knockout stage matches, they will have shown that all the talk about improving their refs after the officiating debacles in the 2006 World Cup was all that—just talk.

Grading the US side, 1-1 against England yesterday

2010-06-13T08:49:00.000-07:00

Here’s my take on how the US side did against England on Saturday. Thoughts? Agree? Disagree?

Tim Howard, goalkeeper: A. He was blameless for English skipper Steven Gerrard’s goal—that one was on Oguchi Onyewu for pushing forward out of position towards Wayne Rooney, and on Ricardo Clark for losing Gerrard to begin with. Howard gamely gutted through, despite being bulldozed by hack English forward Emile Heskey, to make several key saves in the second half. It may be my pro-GK bias speaking, but Howard deserved being named Man of the Match.

Steve Cherundolo, right back: A-. Dolo ran circles around James Milner for the first half hour of the match, forcing an early English substitution, and was an effective presence on both offense and defense. His fairly needless yellow card for fouling Shaun Wright-Phillips prevents him from getting a straight-up A, but still the most effective field player for the US. With Jonathan Spector still not in good form, Cherundolo has to avoid getting booked again in group play.

Oguchi Onyewu, center back: B. Hats off to Gooch for being able to go the full 90 minutes, and for making some key defensive plays when Rooney finally decided to join the game, but he was caught out of position several times, resulting either in a goal (see Howard’s entry), or in Howard or Jay DeMerit being forced to save Gooch’s bacon. Also deserves lots of points for neutralizing England’s super-sub striker/traveling freak show Peter Crouch late in the game.

Jay DeMerit, center back: B+. Same with Gooch—big props to DeMerit for stifling Rooney all game, but unlike Gooch, the Watford man was seldom caught deep out of position. DeMerit didn’t make any huge mistakes aside from getting booked for a (fairly egregious) handball. Fortunately, if, God forbid, DeMerit picks up another yellow before the knockout stages, the US at least, unlike for Cherundolo, has a serviceable backup for him in Clarence Goodson.

Carlos Bocanegra, left back: C+. Bocanegra wasn’t terribly bad, but he was outpaced on a number of occasions by English winger Aaron Lennon, and he didn’t provide the same kind of threat on set pieces that we’ve come to expect from him. For being a normally consistently strong presence on the back line, Boca looked unusually nervy against England.

Ricardo Clark, defensive midfield: C-. Clark’s egregiously poor marking led to the early England goal, which might be forgivable except that clogging up the attacking midfield is supposed to be Clark’s calling card, and is plausibly why he would have gotten the starting nod over an in-form Jose Torres. Clark began to settle down after the goal, but don’t be surprised if Bradley replaces him with Torres or Maurice Edu against Slovenia.

Michael Bradley, defensive midfield: B. Bradley did exactly what was expected of him—disrupt the English attack, shepherd the ball out of the defensive half of the pitch, and to help cover whenever Cherundolo would go marauding up the right wing in attack. Bradley wasn’t flashy, but he helped make Frank Lampard a non-factor in the game, which constitutes a good day’s work for any holding midfielder.

Clint Dempsey, attacking midfield: A-. His goal will be remembered more for who gave it up and how (Robert Green’s howler on that shot should make any World Cup blooper reel) rather than for who scored it. Nevertheless, Dempsey showed impressive footwork to tee up that shot as well as for other plays throughout the game. He faded a bit towards the end, as England began pouring more and more players into the midfield and up front.

Landon Donovan, attacking midfield: B+. He didn’t have his way with English left back Ashley Cole quite like he did for Everton in the EPL, but Donovan was still a strong attacking presence in the first half (which in turn kept Cole from being much of an attacking presence himself) and gave good service off of set pieces. He was a little less present in the second half, plus, since he’s Donovan, more is expected of him, hence the lower grade than Dempsey.

Jozy Altidore, striker: B. Jozy was robbed of a potential go-ahead goal by the woodwork (and by a terrific save by English keeper Green), and even as Donovan began to disappear in the second half, Altidore stepped up to the challenge. But given the way he was walking off the pitch when he got substituted for, I’m worried that his sprained ankle is flaring up.

Robbie Findley, striker: B-. Like most people, I wondered what Bob Bradley was smoking when he kept Robbie Findley on the team at Brian Ching’s expense, but Findley is slowly starting to win me over. He made no real opportunities for himself, but he persistently made life difficult for Ledley King and especially Jamie Carragher in the center of England’s defense (and honestly, Carragher probably should have been sent off for either his late, studs-up challenge which he got a yellow for, or as a second yellow for taking down Findley deep in the England end on a 1-on-1—on the replay it looked like his elbow got in on Findley near the jaw). Like Cherundolo, Findley gets docked for picking up a relatively needless yellow card.

Subs:

Edson Buddle, striker: C+. Buddle wasn’t in long enough to make much of an impact, and compared to the speedy Findley, wasn’t really heard from in the 15 minutes or so he was on the pitch. If the goal for Bradley was to play for the win rather than a draw, Buddle didn’t help. But if the goal was to prevent Findley from earning a second yellow and a send-off, then why not substitute him for a midfielder?

Stuart Holden, midfielder: N/A. Holden came on with less than five minutes to go in regulation time, hardly enough time to make much of an impression. Helped shore up the wing with Dempsey starting to fade.

Bob Bradley, coach: B+. Bradley has a rep for being fairly predictable to coach against, but in this game, his steadfastness stood in stark, beneficial contrast to Fabio Capello’s two early substitutions. The only major complaint I have of Bradley was his waiting until the 78th minute to finally make his first substitution, and then for that substitution to be a forward for another forward (Edson Buddle for Findley). Given how England was pressuring the US defense at that point, I was hoping we might see Edu instead, and for the US to simply play for the draw over the final 12 minutes.

God of All

2010-04-24T16:33:00.000-07:00

It is worth taking the time to dust off my more neglected blog for a post in honor of today, Armenian Holocaust Remembrance Day. In past years, I have written poetry for this day, but this year, I have copied and pasted below a sermon I preached some time ago, along with a brief commentary on recent events. It is dedicated to the memory of the 1.5 million men, women, and children who lost their lives in the Armenian Holocaust. As of this writing, the Armenian Holocaust's status as genocide is denied by the governments of both the Republic of Turkey and the United States of America.

Speak truth to power.

Eric Atcheson
San Francisco, CA
April 24, 2010--Armenian Holocaust Remembrance Day

Author's note:

On Thursday, March 4, the Foreign Affairs Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, per the consensus of most qualified historians, voted 23-22 for the American federal government to officially recognize the Armenian Holocaust of the First World War as genocide. In a move disheartening to me and many other diasporic Armenian-Americans, the Obama White House subsequently pressed for this issue to not ever be brought before the full House for a vote.

As genocide is so often predicated on the malicious construction of the other, this passage from the Gospel according to Mark, on Jesus’s encounter with the Syrophoenician woman, feels to me particularly relevant, as is the lesson that Jesus takes away from this anonymous woman.

In studying for this sermon, I am especially indebted to the Westminster Bible Companion commentaries on Matthew and Mark by Thomas Long and Douglas Hare respectively, as well as the New Interpreter’s Study Bible commentary on Mark by PSR’s own Mary Ann Tolbert.

If not for the fact that I stand well over six feet tall, I would have been that kid in high school who would have been shoved into lockers by all the popular kids. I played computer games, read comic books, and enthusiastically participated in both marching band and debate. Oh, sure, I tried to balance my geekiness out with lots of sports-playing, but when I started out in kindergarten, my sports of choice were ice skating, gymnastics, and jazz dance.

Now, by the time you hit, say, your mid-twenties, it is more or less socially okay to be a geek–nerds often can be better equipped to go into the occupations that confer more money and prestige upon the person, and suddenly, people of your sexual preference can appreciate that it is touching for you to show your sensitivity, such as tearing up when watching Les Miserables. But man, during high school, it is a whole different story. Even when you think you might be running with the in-crowd, you’re still out, and as soon as you think you might be hip, you’re not only square, you’re square squared. Little wonder, then, that cliques so quickly form in that holding pen of adolescent angst, for ultimately, identity is everything.

In that singular capacity, it sometimes feels like not much has really changed between the ancient Near East and the 21^st-century American high school. For, just as in high school, your clique of friends can be all-important, so too in the ancient Near East were your nationality and ethnic identity of great import. Jesus at this point in Mark is still on the up and up–his fame and notoriety are growing exponentially in Galilee, and yet, he decides to make the journey away from Galilee to Tyre without any reason given by the author of Mark–in fact, right after this story ends, Jesus is on the move again, towards Decapolis. But what is most telling in the setting of the story is that Jesus did not wish for anyone to know He was there. One could easily think that this is simply par for the course for Jesus, for He has already performed a number of miracles in Mark that He asks not be mentioned to anyone. But this is different, because Jesus is asking that His very presence, before He had a chance to perform or teach, be kept secret. He is not on his home turf anymore, but even then, Jesus’s desire to remain anonymous smacks almost of a certain naivete–for, just as one would notice if a jock up and sat at the computer geek table in the high school cafeteria, so too will at least some people likely sit up and take notice if this Jewish Messiah suddenly and inexplicably enters a territory with a large Gentile population.

And this is precisely what happens. And the person who notices this Messiah’s presence is not just any Gentile, but a Syrophoencian. A parallel narrative of this story occurs in the 15^th chapter of Matthew, and in that version, the woman is called a Canaanite, which would be more recognizable to us as the people who were displaced by the Israelite migration depicted in Joshua. Mark’s use of “Syrophoenician” is more precise, for Phoenicia was a part of Syria in northern Canaan, but it comes at the expense of it being more difficult to understand the sheer depth of the animosity between Jesus and this anonymous woman. Mark has a habit of not identifying details that would have been seen as superfluous by his original audience–for example, Pontius Pilate is never identified by title, only as “Pilate.” So, too, then, would Mark likely have assumed that identifying this woman as Syrophoenician would be enough to produce the necessary visceral reaction of imagining such a foreigner coming to the Israelite Messiah.

And yet, still this woman comes to Him. She comes to Jesus with her desperation and her fear, but above all else, she comes to Jesus with her deep and abiding love and loyalty to her precious daughter. There is no other reason given for why the woman would have done something so out of the ordinary–to address a foreign man without being in the company of another man, and then having the tremendous courage to rebut this foreigner in the face of what is a horrific racial slur, for, when Jesus continually makes note of how He is sent to tend to the “children,” to God’s children, there can be little doubt who He is referring to when He uses the word “dogs.”

And yet, still this woman comes to Him. By this point in the Gospel, Jesus is a religious rock star. He has stilled the storm, healed the sick, cast out demons, fed the five thousand, walked on water, and brought a little girl back from the dead. For some time now, Jesus has been the vessel by which God’s extraordinary nature is revealed to humankind. This is a tremendous role reversal for the Israelites to whom Jesus belongs–whereas they are used to being pushed around by their surrounding neighbors, like the Assyrians, the Babylonians, and the Romans, with perpetual states of war with peoples like the Canaanites and the Philistines, now Jesus stands here over a begging Gentile woman with all the power in the world. That bookish nerd who is used to being bullied and beat up by the other students, that person now has all the control.

And yet still, this woman comes to Him. And here is where God is, perhaps, more human than we would ever want to believe or imagine, because God is, through Jesus, exhibiting not what is best in us, but what is worst in us. We want to believe that God will watch over us, protect us, walk beside us and love us wholeheartedly as we live as God’s children in the creation, but that simply is not what happens here. What Jesus initially shows this powerless woman is not love. Instead, God, through Jesus, is forced to learn openness and inclusive, positive love from an anonymous, faceless, nameless woman, the dog who must beg for the children’s crumbs, who must beg for her daughter’s life. But as soon as God does learn this, God does right by this woman, and in so doing, we can take reassurance in the knowledge that eventually, somehow, someway, God will do, within God’s power, what is right by God’s children, not merely what is easy or convenient.

But this was a God who was not seen as a deity to be loved by the Israelite’s enemies—and yet, God learns from a people oppressed by empire and at war with Canaan to learn to love the enemies of God’s own children. And God discovers this from, of all people, a humble Gentile mother, coming to beg for healing from a God not her own, a God sworn to protect her enemies, a God whom she was probably raised to despise herself.

And yet still, this woman comes to Him. And so too may we go to God as well. Not merely because it is right that we should do so, but because a mother’s courage has given us permission to go to a God full of grace and full of love with our own desperation, our own fears and insecurities, as well as with our own love and devotion. We might still cling to the identities which divide us, from the high school cafeteria to the ethnic prejudices of long ago, but our God no longer does. A healed daughter in Tyre was one of many miracles made manifest by this universal love, and I have no doubt that there are many, many more, still waiting to be performed.

May it be so. Amen, and amen.

Dispatches from Gennesaret, part IV: Puka Shells

2009-09-01T21:21:00.000-07:00

Friends,

My apologies for the month-long hiatus I took from blogging, but trust me when I say that it was for the best. August was a roller coaster of a month on a variety of fronts, but I am happy to say that I think I am out of the thick of the proverbial woods. Being surrounded by my seminary friends once more has already made quite a difference, as has been beginning my new job at First Christian Church of Concord.

On August 14, I completed my Clinical Pastoral Education internship at California Pacific. I still have a few ideas for posts to include in the Dispatches from Gennesaret series on my own personal reflections of hospital chaplaincy, and I am going back and forth about whether or not to actually write and post them. I do want to offer this, though--that part of my internship experience included my own apprehension towards pastoral identity, and that, as a hospital chaplain, complete strangers were seeing me as a Christian minister. I was not, and am not, quite used to this. Honestly, I think that part of my ego thought that it would be pretty neat to be seen as a pastor--to be viewed as that office of ordained representative ministry, to be seen as a person who has devoted their life to (what I believe to be) one of the highest vocational callings there is...and as far as hospital chaplaincy goes, ministering to the sick is a vocation of inarguably noble intent. I cannot say I am especially proud of that facet of myself, that facet that sees my future occupation as a means of acquiring respect, but it is who I am. I accept it.

That process of understanding pastoral identity included a summer-long question of whether or not I would actually wear clerical vestments while working as a chaplain, so that I might have the experience of having others readily identify my office immediately upon meeting me. This is a decision I continued to explore as I recently started my field education position as a Student Associate Minister at First Christian Church, as the senior pastor and I have decided that I will be wearing a preaching robe at Sunday worship services. But at California Pacific, I ultimately decided not to wear any vestments, in part because wearing a collar or similar non-robe vestments is not something Disciples of Christ clergy do a lot of in the United States. Plus, I began to notice that carrying around a Bible, as I often did, would, in combination with my hospital employee badge, have the same effect of outwardly identifying myself as a Christian cleric.

But mostly, I began to realize that I didn't want to wear a clerical collar or similar vestment because it would obscure the string of puka shells that I have worn around my neck almost every day for over five years now, ever since my younger sister Katherine gave them to me before I left for college in the summer of 2004. Earlier this year, the string snapped, and my girlfriend Libby and her father painstakingly repaired the string for me. When considering the sentimental meaning that these puka shells had for me, I felt as though I was already wearing a reverential collar of sorts--a collar acquired and repaired by two women who mean an awful lot to me.

If this conclusion only reinforces the sappy ideals of familial and romantic attachment that I am exhibiting in spite of myself, I think the point has partly been lost. I have come to believe that the signs of ministry take place in a variety of ways, and that the aura of ministry can be found wherever we take the time to see it. Behold the many ministers of God, for in them, one beholds the God Itself.

Eric

"Have you not read in the book of Moses, in the story about the burning bush, how God said to Moses, "I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob"? He is God not of the dead, but of the living!" -Mark 12:26-27

Fine dining and living it up in the city

2009-07-31T21:40:00.001-07:00

A quick break from my summer "Dispatches from Gennesaret" series of posts to say that my family is in Berkeley for a long weekend of vacation, and that while they are here, we plan on visiting some of the finer dining establishments that the Bay Area has to offer--Chez Panisse in Berkeley and Gary Danko in San Francisco, in addition to Citizen Cake (which we went to tonight, and it was quite good--more coming later) and Bistro Don Giovanni in Napa.

This is on top of the very enjoyable experience that Libby and I had dining at Fleur de Lys a couple weeks ago (and which I still have yet to blog about--but will). July and early August is shaping up to be a time of pretty fun expansion of my culinary horizons, even though I already fancied myself (probably ridiculously) as a little bit of a foodie.

I have enjoyed eating for as long as I can remember, and to me, splurging on a nice meal is as justifiable (if not more so) a use of disposable income than anything else I can think of. When I was a kid, I mostly ate to get full and to enjoy the rather unsophisticated tastes that most kids often have (lots of sugary cereal, candy, and, well, sugar in general!). I am really looking forward to this series of what I hope will be some pretty spectacular meals with my family.

Eric

Dispatches from Gennesaret, part III: Angelfire

2009-07-14T05:23:00.001-07:00

(PSR friends, not to be confused with Angels Fear...)

My feet pound against the hospital floor as I keep pace alongside the medical staff.

I am whispering prayers softly under my breath.

And pounding in my head is a throbbing headache that keeps time with my feet.

One day, one of the patients on my service is rushed down to the emergency room. I had just walked onto the floor to see the medical staff preparing to move the patient to the ER. I ask the patient if they would like for me to accompany them to the ER, they weakly say yes. I am suddenly and starkly aware of the trust that is being invested in me--it is one thing to talk to the chaplain in a laid-back setting of a hospital routine, it is entirely another to have him at your side as you are being brought into the ER.

On television shows, the ER is a place full of drama, attractive doctors and nurses, and of patients who either accomplish incredible come-from-behind recoveries, or die in the most heartbreaking manner. Television got it right in at least one respect--any death has the agonizing capacity to be heartbreaking. But sometimes, the similarities end there. And especially for family--in this case, the patient's father, who came down to the ER with us--it is a place for long waits, confusion, apprehension, and sometimes, outright fear.

Providing pastoral care, at this point, extends beyond both routine conversation as well as the typical existential or theological questions (ie, "Why me?") that chaplains often answer. We are there to explain what we can and to comfort where we cannot explain. I cannot tell a worried father why exactly his child is being taken in for x-rays, an echocardiogram, an MRI, or any other tests, but I can tell him that the x-ray setup is very close by, that they have not taken his child far at all, and that through it all, God's divine presence remains very much alive in the room. And through it all, I continue to give my own prayers, silently and spoken, as an offering to anyone, anything that was listening.

Days later, in the wake of this crisis, the patient referred to me as their angel. That meant a tremendous amount to me--indeed, I felt like it gave me far more credit than I deserved--and it was and is a powerful reminder of the impact clerics can have in a person's life, for both good and bad. While the word 'angel' often carries connotations of great personal virtue, I think that once you put aside that connotation, there is an interesting connection to be made. Just as angels are the ethereal go-betweens from heaven to earth, so too are chaplains--and, indeed, many of the hospital staff--go-betweens from a patient's fears to their hopes. We are go-betweens from a parent's worry to their child's physical presence. And, I am sometimes seen by patients as a go-between from divine presence to the tangible, physical, fragile creation, even though to me I am, quite simply, human.

But on this day, I don't think about any of that. I walk to and fro, trying to make sure nobody is alone for very long. I try to offer peace where there is dread. I try to bring presence where there is unknowingness. And I pray.

And I pray.

After the doctor arrives once again, the patient gently tells me they are ready for me to go. I say good-bye, withdraw from the ER, and close my eyes as I allow everything that has just happened to wash over me and be taken in. When I return home, I immediately take 800 milligrams of ibuprofen and collapse onto my bed, painfully, mercifully, imperfectly, wonderfully human.

After about thirty minutes, the pills begin to take effect. I start drifting off to sleep.

And I pray.

Eric

Dispatches from Gennesaret, part II: Dark Moon Rising

2009-06-29T22:32:00.001-07:00

A number of days ago, I served my first 24-hour shift as the on-call chaplain for the California Pacific Medical Center system. This meant that during the day, I would refer pages for a chaplain to the chaplain of that particular ward, and at night, I would be the only chaplain on duty and could respond to any page personally. The day was not particularly arduous, I simply passed referrals on to my fellow interns, residents, and staff chaplains. Some detective work and malfunctioning phone hijinks ensued, but nothing terribly dramatic.

That night, however, two patients died on my service. One of the two died in the evening, the other died in the middle of the night. Both times I was paged, and both times I spent a couple hours with the families. After all was said and done, I got less than four hours of sleep that night. It had taken a toll on me, if in no other way but in terms of sheer physical exhaustion.

In the days that followed, however, I wrestled with myself on how much the deaths of these two people should affect me. On a fundamental level, I feel like it should affect me because I bore witness to the extreme pain of their families in the immediate wake of such a loss. John Donne once wrote, "Because I am involved in (hu)mankind, any man's death diminishes me," and on a gut level, I connect so much to that statement. This experience had to affect me, how could it not?

But I also began to tell myself that on a certain level, I needed to be able to emotionally separate myself from what had happened. I remembered an episode of Scrubs in which Dr. Cox, in explaining how another doctor was breaking bad news to a family, said of the doctor, "He's going to tell them the patient died, he's going to say that he is sorry, and then he is going to go back to work. Do you think anyone else in that room is going back to work today?" I still went to work the next day after my night on-call, and I still ministered to the patients I normally worked with on the dialysis ward.

I've been told by friends who talk to me about their problems that part of the reason they come to me is because they think I (generally) keep a pretty level head and can offer objective advice when I need to. I would like to think that is so. But I also have realized that I have a bit of a ways to go in being able to sort out just how much I can, should, or am able to allow my instances of crisis ministry to affect me (and even this presumes that I have some degree of control over it).

And, in reflecting back on that night and how I can most constructively make meaning out of what happened, I remembered the passage from Mitch Albom's "Tuesdays With Morrie" that I read to my intern cohort in seminar on the day of my on-call. In it, Albom writes about an Arctic First Nation Peoples tribe that believes that the moon is capable to receiving the souls of dying organisms before sending those souls back to earth in the bodies of new living things, and that sometimes, the moon is so filled with the souls of the world that it disappears from view on the nights of the new moon. But, as Albom writes, the moon always returns.

June 22 marked the night of the new moon for the month of June, the first new moon after my night on call. I would like to think that at some point in time, whether on the night of the 22nd or on any other night, there was indeed something greater than us, greater than anything we ever knew, waiting to welcome these souls with open and loving arms. I would like to think that there will remain the connection I made to the families of the dead, likely sustained only by the fragile threads of memory. And I would like to think that when I expire, I will be welcomed into the moon, into the heavens, into whatever awaits me, as the world continues on, as the sun rises and sets, and as the flowers continue to bloom.

The following night, June 23, marked my next night on call. A shadow of the moon was visible through the city lights and the rolling fog.

I was never paged that night.

Eric

Dispatches from Gennesaret

2009-06-06T11:49:00.000-07:00

I just completed my first week of my Clinical Pastoral Education internship at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. It is a gig that will take up a lot of my time through August, and so if you do not see me around much (in person, online, whatever), please accept my apologies in advance. I knew going into this that it would require me putting most aspects of my life on hold while I do this. This is an important summer for me, since hospital chaplaincy is a vocation I have felt compelled towards for years.

Unlike last summer, when I documented a few of my observations and rants about being a pizza deliveryman, I won't be blogging quite so much about my experiences as a hospital chaplain, mostly because of the commitment I made to honor the confidentiality of the patients I will be ministering to.

I will say, however, that one of the reasons why I felt compelled towards chaplaincy is quickly being proven true--that it is possible for people to be at their most authentic in an environment as extreme as a hospital. This obviously isn't always the case--a person may put up walls or a mask to any stranger, including myself, but the patients I have met and worked with have been, with few exceptions, some of the most genuine people. In the hospital, where the chips are often down and people find themselves facing fear, dread, and the possibility of all manner of health concerns, humanness is an absolute godsend. Here, ministry has only an appetite for what is real. And in the voices of my patients, the words they speak and the topics we discuss, there is something both very tangible and very intangible...but still very real. And I am quickly learning that there is no word or term for that particular something. For now, authenticity will have to do.

A quick note about the title of this post--in the Gospel of Matthew (and I think in others, but I need to double check on this), Gennesaret is a region across the sea in which Jesus performed a significant amount of his healing ministry. Even before I began this job, I had seen hospitals as pieces of holy ground, where the extremes of human experience, life and death, loss and joy, are experienced in full. And as I continue to develop my theology of ministry, I pray for the same healing power for my patients as the followers of Christ found from Him at Gennesaret. In this way, the hospital is not unlike a temple, a small bit of holy ground, a burning bush, in the urban wilderness of the city.

Eric

"...and they begged him that they might touch even the fringe of his cloak; and all who touched it were healed." -Matthew 14:36

Ar Hyd Y Nos

2009-05-20T11:29:00.001-07:00

My dad had his birthday this past weekend. Happy birthday, pops.

Final papers have kept me too busy to post for the last couple of weeks, but I'm down to my last final paper before I am done with my first year of God school. One of my final papers, for my Christian Worship class, involved writing a full worship script (as one would write a script for a play) accompanied by a theological commentary. I will say one of the issues I had with how the final paper was assigned is that it generally allowed students to stay within their comfort zones in terms of a model of worship, and I was no exception--after years of Taize-style worship at both Saint Andrew in Kansas and at Lewis & Clark in Portland, I am pretty steeped in its rich tradition of contemplative reflection, and I wrote a script that relied heavily on Taize music, prayers, and trappings.

An exception to the Taize model was the music I chose for a closing song--the Welsh hymn Ar Hyd Y Nos ("All Through the Night"). Taize is a continental European tradition, coming out of the monastic Catholicism of Switzerland. But Ar Hyd Y Nos is a song I have wanted to use as a closing hymn for a long, long time, ever since Diana Butler Bass, one of the great champions of progressive Christianity, wrote about an alternative set of lyrics to the song in her book "Christianity for the Rest of Us." The version which Butler Bass chronicled ends like this:

"Go, my children, with my blessing, never alone.
Waking, sleeping, I am with you, you are my own.
In my love's baptismal river I have made you mine forever.
Go, my children, with my blessing, you are my own."

The original lyrics, even translated into English, are just as poetic, and they bear witness to a divine presence that did not stop with the creation. They speak to me, that wending, weaving, threading in and out of ourselves, God longs to live in us. Over, among, without, and within ourselves, God stays with us. And transcending time and space, God loves us. The hymn evokes a message I couldn't not include. The hymn evokes a God I couldn't not love.

Eric

"Sleep my child and peace attend thee,
All through the night
Guardian angels God will send thee,
All through the night
Soft the drowsy hours are creeping
Hill and vale in slumber steeping,
I my loving vigil keeping
All through the night.

While the moon her watch is keeping
All through the night
While the weary world is sleeping
All through the night
O'er they spirit gently stealing
Visions of delight revealing
Breathes a pure and holy feeling
All through the night."

-Ar Hyd Y Nos

My life five years ago

2009-05-02T08:37:00.000-07:00

This is probably going to be a very long, very emotional post. Consider yourself warned.

It was five years ago to the day that I came as close as I ever have to seeing God. I have never considered myself a "born again" Christian--my faith is a pilgrimage, a journey that I am always walking at varying speeds. But on this weekend, my faith didn't just walk--it sprinted..but not at first.

It was my final youth-led worship at Saint Andrew before I would leave for Lewis & Clark. I was preaching, along with Kelly Rand, one of our youth group's spiritual pillars and an all-around amazing person. At this point, I'll let what I wrote five years ago take over.

This is an excerpt of what I wrote about today, in my old blog:

Left prom early since I had to preach the next day.

Sunday: Woke up at 4:30 in the morning to the phone ringing. Was the father of one of my friends, Eric Hooks (his dad and my parents go back several years...why Eric and I have the same first name is simply coincidence). Anyways, Eric and some of his friends were out late and they got in a massive car wreck. One of them walked away relatively unscathed. Two others were paralyzed below the waist. Eric was killed almost instantly.

I still had to preach at church, which I tried to do to the best of my abilities under the circumstances. I know Eric wouldn't have wanted me to step down from preaching, even though given what had happened, I know everyone would've understood. But my sermon was about keeping faith even throughout the most difficult of trials...something I've always struggled with. At the very least, I feel like I owed it to Eric to deliver that message to as many people as I could.

After worship, I spoke briefly with Eric's dad, then went home to return my tux. Crashed after that.

Still trying to find out when the funeral services will be for Eric...

(end of excerpt)

I genuinely cannot remember much about those two worship services that morning. I remember small, almost thrown-off things. I remember the story I used to introduce my sermon, about a little boy named Reese who I worked with at Brookridge Day School in the summer of 2002 who died in a swimming accident. I remember that I quoted Emerson in my sermon. I remember Kelly coming up to me in between the worship services to give me a hug.

But I also remember at the start of my second sermon, for the later worship service, that my lapel mic wasn't working properly--or working at all. At this point, I was still running on fumes energy-wise, and my psyche was utterly shot. And I wasn't believing the words I was preaching--I was at a loss as to why an omnipotent God lets tragedies occur. So, my voice was already ringing hollow to me on several levels. I looked across the sanctuary as I was preaching to see a couple of folks checking the sound equipment and then looking back at me and shaking their heads--the mic wasn't going to work this time.

And this is the last thing I remember about that sermon--I looked up, and I saw the sunlight streaming in from the windows of the sanctuary. And whether it was because I needed something--anything--to cling to and the sunlight just offered itself up at the right moment, or because I needed to know that there was something waiting for me outside the walls of the church and the bounds of my sermon, I was, at least for a moment, put at ease.

I no longer believe that God is omnipotent. Some might think it ironic that a God experience would lead me to disbelief of divine omnipotence. But it was then that I realized that God was still so many things to me--a teacher, a creator, a parent, a friend...and a companion. None of these things I would associate with omnipotence, so why place that mantle upon God? But I have to think that on that day, God's presence grieved with me, walked with me, spoke with me, and ultimately sustained me.

I am a different person now in a lot of ways than who I was five years ago. I think that is to be expected of almost anyone, especially in people as young as me. But who I was in high school was someone so filled with so much bitterness and anger over religion. I spent so much of my time and energy being angry...I despised the homophobia and single-mindedness I saw from people I knew at school, but I also despised myself because I did not know how speak like them on behalf of what my faith told me to be true. I refused to bear witness to the revelation of an open-minded God. I thought it was not my place. I thought it never would be my place.

Until then.

Like I said at the beginning of this now excessively long post, I do not consider what happened on May 2, 2004, to be a born-again experience. It started a process that continued as I moved to Portland, and from Portland to Berkeley. My pent-up bitterness over a religion I loved was like a poison--it had to be extracted slowly and delicately, which I think Portland helped accomplish (and it is partly why I love that city as much as I do). I would like to think that process had already begun--I spent my senior year of high school trying to resuscitate the potential I had cast aside during my years of emotional depression, but senior year was just one piece of the puzzle.

But on that weekend five years ago, God came down to sustain me. In doing so, God taught me how to live by means healthier than bitterness. Who I am now is someone who I love much more than who I was at pretty much any point between 1999 and 2006.

And for that, God has my devotion.

Authentically,
Eric

Ring Out the Bells

2009-04-24T08:59:00.000-07:00

Cobbled stone plaza
Under cool walls of stone bricks
Wind-coarsened ropes fly

Melodic clanging
Knells of song emanating
Ringing out the bells

Of celebration
Of joy, worship, of mourning
Singing emotion

And…truth…where truth lies
Not hollow words of denial
Not in empty voice

But in memory
Mysterious clarity
Ringing out the bells

In sounds and visions
Truth lives. In our eyes and ears
Truth still lives

In a lost people
Scattered and sown across earth
Truth still lives

Hear the living truth
The soulfulness sung out in
Ringing out the bells

Speak the living truth
Without, within all things, ‘til
The lie is no more

…and the bells will ring.

Dedicated to the memory of the 1.5 million men, women, and children who were systematically murdered in the Armenian Holocaust. As of this writing, its status as a genocide is denied by the governments of both the Republic of Turkey and the United States of America.

Eric Atcheson
Berkeley, California
April 24, 2009--Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day

Life updates, part deux, and a question

2009-04-16T12:47:00.000-07:00

After I changed my facebook status last week to say that I had gotten the Walker scholarship, a bunch of people emailed or messaged me to say something along the lines of "Congratulations...what is that again?" So...I'll just offer a brief, mass explanation. The Granville T. Walker Scholarship Foundation is a national organization that offers grants and scholarships to seminarians who engage in pulpit ministry (ie, preaching) and who endeavor to preach sermons that are both intellectually and emotionally stimulating. Which, apparently, I can do. The Pacific School of Religion and the Disciples Seminary Foundation jointly nominated me for the scholarship, which is named for a longtime Disciples of Christ pastor and teacher who now sits on the board of trustees of the denomination's flagship university, Texas Christian University. I'm very grateful to the foundation, as well as to PSR and the DSF.

I'm also signed up for classes for next fall--
HM 2100 (Introduction to Homiletics) at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific (Episcopalian)
HS 2005 (Disciples of Christ Denominational History and Polity) at PSR
and, Field Education, at PSR and (for me) First Christian Church of Concord

I'm really torn about what to put in for my fourth and final course for the fall (overloading just isn't an option like it was for this semester--my field ed alone is going to take up about 20 hours a week when you factor in work, mentoring time, class sessions, and reading). The Introduction to Christian Ethics class is being taught this fall by Dr. Karen Lebacqz, our Professor Emerita of Ethics, and I've heard amazing things about her and cited some of her work in one of my papers in the fall semester. This would almost certainly be the only time during my tenure in Berkeley to be able to study with her.

On the other hand, the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology is offering a class on apocalyptic literature in the Bible, which, if any of you have had to suffer through me talking about my undergrad seminar thesis for more than 30 seconds, you'll know that apocalypticism is a big, big academic interest for me and is something I have a lot of passion for studying. And I don't even know if a class like this is going to be offered next year (which would hypothetically be my final year in the M.Div. program).

Both classes fulfill graduation requirements--I have to take both an introduction-level ethics course and an upper-level Biblical studies course to graduate. I'm quite torn. Fellow seminarians out there...what would your advice be?

~Eric

Eastertide water

2009-04-12T15:03:00.000-07:00

I've returned to Berkeley after spending the last 48 hours at a Zen retreat center in Marin County (for peoples unfamiliar with the Bay Area, that is the land directly north of San Francisco proper). I went there with a dozen other students in my class on death over at UC-Berkeley. It was a great experience for growth and fellowship. I'm a little ashamed to admit that I can't specifically remember the last time I went 48 hours without a phone or internet--it was probably during my trip to Africa in 2006.

The retreat center was very close to the ocean--after about a 20-minute walk, you were at the beach. I and several other students hiked over to the beach on Saturday afternoon...I mostly kept to myself for that time, in part because of the importance the Pacific Ocean has for me because of my Oregon connection. Recalling my grandpa's place by the Oregon coast brings back a flood of memories--his cooking, drinking gin with him on the porch, and listening to his plethora of stories. It also brings back the memory of the ocean off of the Manzanita beach, which remains one of the most spiritual places I have ever been to. If I had to pick one place to go on retreat to every year, it might well be that stretch of the northern Oregon coast.

And so I walked along the very end of the tide of the ocean, letting its crests wash over my legs and allowing its continual noise to serenade me. And after walking along the ocean for so long, I looked down to be surprised by seeing my feet as clean as they had ever been--which is no small feat, since I go everywhere in sandals or flip-flops.

The following morning, Easter morning, I took one final walk around the Zen center in the morning to bid farewell to the aesthetically beautiful settings that I had been surrounded by this weekend, and on the center's property is a small, sqaure garden bordered with lush, green hedges. There are four benches, each dedicated in memory of someone, that sit circularly around a wizened, twisted, beautiful tree which creates the central focal point of the garden. Even in an already extraordinarily beautiful setting, this garden might have exceeded everything else. This morning, as I walked around it for the last time, I took off my sandals to let the dew of the long grass wash over and cool my feet once more.

In the Gospel of John, there is no Last Supper with Jesus and the Apostles. Instead, we find only in John the story of Jesus washing the feet of each Apostle in turn, telling them to serve one another, just as He has served them. I often think that in the hustle and bustle of our increasingly stressed daily lives, it can do wonders to remember in how many ways the creation sustains us, in the food we eat, in the clothes we wear, and sometimes, in how the dew and ocean water of the California coast can soothe and clean someone's feet.

And then I remember that I, too, am called to serve...and in the dew of the grass and the waters of the ocean, I have caught a glimpse of the minister that I could become.

Eric

"And remember, I am with you always, to the end of age." -Matthew 28:20

Life updates and baseball's Opening Day...

2009-04-04T10:50:00.000-07:00

As I write this, the GTU and PSR are holding the Ministry as Vocation conference (which is basically our version of prospective students weekend). It is a little weird to think that I was a prospie at this event last year, and now I'm volunteering at it as a student. It was also a year ago today that I put my acceptance letter in the mail. A lot has happened in the past 365 days.

A lot has also happened very recently in my academic and professional life, most notably that I will be serving as a Student Associate Minister at the First Christian Church of Concord (Disciples of Christ) for the 2009-2010 academic year. This will fulfill the field education requirement for my M.Div. coursework.

I am also "retiring" for good from working as a debate judge as well as from informally working as an assistant coach for the City College of SF debate team. I may be around at one or two tournaments this year, but because of my new field education position, I will likely not have time for much more than that. Earning my M.Div. by 2011 is my highest priority right now, and every other side activity, including debate, is taking a backseat until then.

Finally, with Opening Day for the 2009 baseball season just around the corner, I considered composing an ode to my hometown (and perpetually underdog) team, the Kansas City Royals. But it is Saturday morning and I am feeling rather lazy, so I will instead express my hope and adulation with a haiku:

Royals often lose
But hopeful for '09's team
Contenders this year?

(in my defense, I've been busy writing papers--and am still busy writing papers--ever since spring break began)

In any case, I imagine my heart will be broken once more, because, well, they wouldn't be the Royals if they didn't get me all excited every April only to crush my far-fetched dreams of post-season glory by July.

PS: If anyone at the GTU who reads my blog is up for some pickup soccer, we have a weekly game going on the PSR quad every Friday at 4:30 pm. Join us!

~Eric

And, in anticipation of Palm Sunday (or "Cloak Sunday," if you're Rev. Mark!):

"...the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen, saying, "Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!" Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, "Teacher, order your disciples to stop." He answered, "I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out." -Luke 20:37-40 (NRSV)

Food, excuses, still more food

2009-03-20T19:39:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the month-long hiatus from blogging. March has been plenty busy and there have been more than a few curveballs thrown in along the way. Even this wasn't going to be a particularly long post, except to say that I feel the need to publicly declare my love for the restaurants here in Berkeley.

This mostly started when I was watching a recent episode of The Office online, and the commercials they streamed in during breaks were for the Olive Garden, touting some culinary institute they (Olive Garden) run in Tuscany, Italy. The commercials themselves were ridiculously cheesy--the chefs depicted in there nod enthusiastically and stroke their beards as they work in the kitchen. I'm all about stroking my goatee, but not when I'm cooking.

Point being (and this is where I start getting opinionated, so please forgive me if I offend your culinary sensibilities), I decided to read up a little on this goofy-ass 'culinary institute' since, having been to the two Olive Gardens I know of in Overland Park on multiple occasions (a fact I am not necessarily proud of, but whatever), I think that their food is adequately described as crappy crap with a side of crap. Their breadsticks are good. That is about it. I don't despise the food there, but I don't understand why anyone would eat there unless it was the only Italian-American (and I use that term very loosely) restaurant in town. But within a mile or two of my childhood home, there was Macaroni Grill and Carrabba's if you wanted chain Italian (although I do actually like Macaroni Grill a lot), and my personal favorite, Johnny Cascone's.

So, the more I think about it, the more eating at an Olive Garden is beyond me. Truly. And I've realized that the same about Berkeley, especially since I live a ten-minute walk away from the Gourmet Ghetto. That chains like McDonald's, Subway, and Chipotle thrive in Berkeley irks me slightly (more full disclosure--I actually like Chipotle a lot, and when I'm in Kansas or on the road, I have been known to eat there semi-regularly...but I've had no desire to set foot in the one by the Cal campus here). Why anyone would order a value meal at Mickey D's when they could get a much better burger and fries at, say, Bongo Burger or Amanda's for six or seven bucks is likewise beyond me.

Perhaps living within walking distance of places like La Note, Cesar, the Cheeseboard, and Saul's has made me more and more of a foodie, but really, that transformation was already taking place before I moved here--my Visa card statement used to read like a Zagat listing of Portland sushi bars. The more I learn about what makes me happy--and even at 23, I still feel like I'm getting to know myself--the more I realize that there are few things I enjoy more than a nice meal with friends. (And conversely, if I happen to be sad or pissed at you for whatever reason, restaurant recommendations are probably as sure a way as any to make me happy again.)

So, here's to the many restaurants in Berkeley that have filled my stomach and my soul while simultaneously emptying my wallet. May you continue to do both...and I'll just consider the latter to be me doing my part to increase consumer spending in our dismal economy.

PS: Oh, and that whole culinary institute of Olive Garden thing...yeah, apparently, Olive Garden just takes over some building for a week and flies over a horde of managers and "team members," not, say, chefs or kitchen staff. Chowhound actually has an interesting discussion on this from last year, and, as one of the people there points out...does Olive Garden really have to send its people to Italy to teach them how to use a microwave when "unlocking the secrets of Italian cuisine?"

But I digress. Do with this "knowledge" what you will.

Happily sipping a California Syrah as I write this,
Eric

An open letter to President Obama

2009-02-18T16:39:00.000-08:00

(Which, naturally, will be read by him personally...of course...)

Dear Mr. President,

After some days of speculation, the New York Times is reporting that you have settled on Governor Kathleen Sebelius of my home state of Kansas as your pick to replace Tom Daschle as your nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services. I'm a big fan of Governor Sebelius; she has proved, among other things, that you can take moral stands against issues like capital punishment and still cultivate widespread support, and so I absolutely love the idea of Governor Sebelius serving in such a high-profile federal office. Her eight years as insurance commissioner in addition to her six years as governor make her quite qualified for the post. I also think that in light of the PR screw-ups that were the Daschle, Gregg, Richardson, and (to a degree) Geithner nominations, you deserve to have a slam dunk nomination for HHS. But...I have to ask you to do something that I never thought I would ask when it came to promoting Governor Sebelius to the national scene...Please. Don't. Do. It.

I say that with this caveat--if Governor Sebelius has already privately assured you that she had and has no intentions of campaigning for the open Senate seat that Sen. Sam Brownback is vacating in 2010, then by all means, please please nominate her. Pretty please, with sugar/Splenda on top. She is term-limited and will be out of a job come January of 2011. But if there is any substantial chance that she would run, then I have to ask...why are you doing this to yourself?

Your political honeymoon may have been the shortest ever--as soon as the stimulus bill came up for a vote, Congressional Republicans saw the need to promptly and collectively give you the middle finger in spite of your attempts to be more bipartisan than your dim-witted predecessor. Even though you were able to sign the stimulus bill less than thirty days into your presidency, the GOP has demonstrated that nobody in its rank-and-file will give you no quarter, unless their last name happens to be Snowe or Collins.

So...if Governor Sebelius were willing to make a run for the open seat in Kansas, why would you appoint her to head HHS and thus deprive her of the chance of representing Kansas in the Senate and giving you another key ally in the Capitol? She stands an extremely good chance of winning--she was re-elected in 2006 in a 17-point landslide and consistently polls in the low-to-mid 60's in approval ratings. According to a preliminary poll taken earlier this month, she is polling ahead of Rep.'s Jerry Moran and Todd Tiahrt in a hypothetical Senate race by at least ten points each, and the Republican bench in Kansas offers no other candidates with the same level of name recognition as Rep.'s Moran and Tiahrt. In short, if Governor Sebelius were to decide that she wants Senator Brownback's seat, she has to be considered the prohibitive favorite so far. You would not only be gaining another reliably Democratic vote in the Senate, but you would be gaining one from one of the reddest states in the country.

And really, woe be it for a 23-year-old smartass in Berkeley to question your political acumen. I have never doubted that you know what you are doing. Yet, how Governor Sebelius would be a more powerful ally for you heading up HHS than as a crucial vote in the Senate is difficult to understand. And for whatever it is worth, I'm not the only one who thinks so.

But I have faith you, Mr. President. Keep inspiring us.

In solidarity,
Me

Be my Valentine?

2009-02-12T20:19:00.000-08:00

I have never liked Valentine's Day. Ever.

Okay, that's partly a lie.

Very early in elementary school (like, in 2nd or 3rd grade), I did treasure the paper cut-out valentine I received from the girl I had a crush on at the time. And by "treasure," I mean that I would do stuff like put the valentine under my pillow when I went to sleep.

I really don't know why I'm telling this to everyone who reads my blog. Maybe it is because everyone else is still busily doing their "25 random things about me" lists, and I just had to add on a particularly embarrassing #26 about me. Or, because maybe you will see it as funny and cute rather than mildly pathetic. Who knows.

But otherwise, I have never liked Valentine's Day. Really.

As a cynical teenager, I saw it as a transparent attempt by the greeting card industry (which is conveniently headquartered in the metropolitan area of my hometown) to make some extra bank off of a lemming-like population that will automatically go out and buy flowers/chocolate/cards for their significant others. But now, I think what bothered me about V-Day for so long is that we put so much emphasis on romantic affection, and then it gets forgotten pretty quickly after the day is over--sort of how there is all this hype leading up to Christmas, then the big day hits, and after it is over, everyone is already talking about New Year's. There was something vain, arbitrary, even fake, about V-Day to me.

But lest you think this is lonely Eric blogging sour grapes, I will say that ever since exiting teenager-dom years ago, I have become significantly less cynical (because, let's face it, cynicism is a bit of an impediment in a faith-based profession), and I have the friendships and connections I have forged with many, many people in Kansas City, Portland, and Berkeley to thank in no small part for that. The people I have recently met here (including one person in particular--you know who you are) continually amaze me, and I am pretty durned blessed because of that.

And so while my attitude towards Valentine's Day is still a work in progress, I would like to take this blog post to ask to the people who have made a difference in my life what might be the most ridiculously cliched question ever...

Will you be my Valentine?

Sentimentally,
Eric

Wipeout, and other life updates

2009-01-30T11:37:00.000-08:00

I was out running this morning when I received yet another cruel reminder of how having big feet can literally and figuratively be a giant, giant pain. I had just made a left turn onto a sidewalk when my left foot got caught on a small rock and I began to trip. I had almost managed to keep myself upright with my right foot, but then my left foot came back down into my right foot, sending me sprawling face-first across the sidewalk and into some person's yard. I sat up to regain my equilibrium and saw that I had cut myself in three different places on my right hand, and that my right knee was also bleeding from road rash. I started trudging back to the seminary, where I could at least clean myself up in a bathroom, before I realized that my glasses, which I was keeping in the pocket of my sweatshirt, were missing (I was wearing my prescription sunglasses at the time, and trying to see anything while wearing them indoors is a fool's errand). So, I trudged back to my crash site to comb through the ground for my glasses, which I assume had fallen out of my sweatshirt pocket. Miraculously, they were almost completely unharmed in spite of presumably being crushed by big old me, and I could go back about bandaging up my fingers, knees, and pride. My right knee is still pretty painful, but nothing popped or snapped (or crackled, I guess, but comparing my knee to Rice Krispies probably isn't a good omen), and after popping some ibuprofen, I'm starting to feel better.

It goes without saying that I'm not the most physically graceful person around (as if one can be that graceful at my size). But I can't remember the last time I wiped out quite so epically (my misadventures as a four-year-old notwithstanding).

Otherwise, it is nice to be back. Cal classes started up a while ago, and I've been working on a few side projects to keep busy until GTU classes start up for the semester on Monday. Such side projects include:

-Excessive amounts of writing, which is partly to blame for the lack of attention my blog has been getting--I've been pretty involved in the Shared Sacrifice journal lately and have been sending much of my writing that way.

-Putting together a pitch for an informal on-campus Bible study series. If I can't kick it off this semester, I'd like to do so for the start of the fall semester.

-A weeks-long quest to find the best-tasting red wine in Berkeley that costs less than $20 a bottle. There are several worthy contenders so far.

-Volunteering at the seminary's new student orientation for entering spring semester students.

-Taking advantage of the resources the Earl Lectures brought here this year, including a showing of the documentary "The Ordinary Radicals," and a free beer + pizza + theology talk at La Val's.

-And trying to figure out that if the moon were indeed made of cheese, what cheese would it be made out of? Open to suggestions, folks.

Clumsily,
Eric

Me, at twenty-three

2009-01-24T22:44:00.000-08:00

This is me…at twenty-three

I am a son and a brother, a cousin and a nephew.

I am a friend and a confidant.

I am a student of some things, a learner of many things.

I am a seminarian, an academic, a writer and a storyteller.

I am a musician and a poet.

I am a visionary, a minister, a prophet and a priest.

I am a citizen, a voter, a Christian, and a Democrat.

I was an athlete, a debater, a coach, a teacher.

I once swore by Oregon pinot noir, now I also swear by California red zinfandel.

I once sought truth, now I also make detours to discover peace.

I run and I walk, I slouch and I sprint.

I preach, I petition, I beg, and I beseech.

I listen, I question, I argue, and I reflect.

I witness, I experience, I wonder and I transform.

I am a child of God.

I am a part of the creation.

And I come to life, if only to say I have.

This is me...at twenty-three.

Eric

Madonna and Child, circa 2008

2009-01-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

From this week's devotional for Saint Andrew Christian Church:

I was sitting amidst all of the hustle and bustle of the student union when the picture showed up on my computer screen from the website of the New York Times–a photograph of an African-American mother, wearing an ordinary white shirt and blue jeans, is crumpled on the floor of the church, leaning against a pew as sobs rack her body over and over and over, and her five-year-old daughter, her own eyes deep and unblinking, reaches up to brush away the tears from her mother’s eyes. The photograph had been taken on Election Night–or, more precisely, the moment it was announced at that particular New York City church that the presidential race had just been called for Senator Barack Obama.

In the days following Senator Obama’s historic victory, I was struggling to articulate why this election meant so much to me, as a Democrat, as a Christian, or as an American citizen. I could recite all of the intellectual reasons–my disappointment with the past eight years of Republican rule, Senator Obama’s constant opposition to the Iraq war, and on and on. But I could not find a way to describe how his victory made me feel–not think, but feel–until I saw that photograph.

Father Michael, my iconography professor at Berkeley, told us on the first day of class that icons are tied to a person’s memory, and that people cling to them because sometimes, those memories are integral to our capacity to believe. And so in turn, I have clung to this photograph, in part because of how reminiscent it was of the Madonna and Child images I studied in Father Michael’s class, but also because now, mere days before Senator Obama becomes President Obama, when people ask me what his victory meant to me, I finally have an answer. I tell them about the photograph I saw on a seemingly random day in a crowded student union, and how it reminded me of one very important Election Day when the world was turned upside down, when history was made, and when I once again believed that anything was still possible.

Eric Atcheson
Overland Park, Kansas
January 14, 2009

Me and debate

2009-01-11T18:37:00.001-08:00

I just got back from spending three days judging at the Washburn/Long Beach debate swing tournament in the happenin' town of Topeka, Kansas. I got to hang out with a lot of people I hadn't seen in a while and met some pretty awesome folks whom I didn't know before. And while I wanted to use this year as a transition away from the world of college debate to the world of, well, everything else (and for the most part, I think I've been successful), coming back, if only for a weekend, reminded me of what I often miss most about the activity and why.

As a competitor, even though I enjoyed debate tremendously, I began to realize that it also brought out a lot of what I consider to be some of the worst characteristics I possess. I'm not a terribly competitive person when it comes to many things, but in debate, I was so obsessed with wanting to be one of the best at the activity that I behaved destructively both towards myself and towards others. I liked the success I had in debate, but I didn't like the person I was in debate. The stress I put on myself made me care more, but it stopped there as far as the good it did.

Now, as a judge rather than a debater, I just care a whole lot less, and not necessarily in a bad way. I still have a vested interest in learning about how my former Lewis & Clark teammates are doing, and I like seeing friends of mine do well at tournaments. But the direct stake for me is mostly gone. I care immensely about making the correct decision in rounds I adjudicate, and that is about it, unless I am also helping a team out during prep time or something. And that, obviously, makes such a huge difference--I'm way less stressed than I used to be, and perhaps it was just because I hadn't seen so many people in a while, but I felt much happier and more fulfilled by seeing my debate friends this weekend than I would have a couple of years ago.

So if this sounds like a mea culpa, it kind of is, but this is also just a stream-of-consciousness reflection on how debate shaped me and continues to shape me as a person. Debate is an intensely, and sometimes viciously, political activity. And semi-retiring from it has made me realize that I could not have continued as a competitor even if I could and wanted to. As a judge, though, I feel much more comfortable with where I am in the community, and not simply because now I have control of the ballot (because, let's face it, we gossip about judges as much as we do about debaters). The concern of how I stack up in the community has vanished, and my obsessive, slightly ridiculous need to prove myself isn't there anymore. So, I think I can enjoy what it is I do now, the occasional judging gigs and cheering on friends on from afar.

Finally, I also began to realize when I was judging high school (and especially after I became the coach of a high school team) how judging is a privilege in many ways. Students put in the time and work on their positions, and really, all I have to do is show up. I always thought it was goofy how tournament directors always said something to this effect at awards: "Y'all rock for giving up your weekends to be here," because it was taken for granted that I'd be devoting almost all my weekends to debate. As a judge, though, I am grateful for all the students who, for this weekend (and at GGI, Pacific, and so on), allowed me to watch them engage in an activity that I know means a lot to them. And because it means a lot to them, it still means a lot to me as well.

Eric

2009!

2009-01-01T10:13:00.000-08:00

Happy National Hangover Day, everyone.

I'll kick off the new year with a plug for a new project I'm involved in--the Shared Sacrifice Journal of Progressive Thought. It is a new online political journal, published weekly, that is dedicated to providing reporting and commentary on a wide range of issues from varying politically progressive perspectives, and to create dialogue on those issues. We have professors, students, activists, and many other folks contributing copy, and their work is well-researched and engaging to read. I'll be working as an editor for religion articles, and I'll also be writing a twice-monthly column, the first of which is already up. Take a minute or two out of your day to check the site out, I hope you enjoy it.

Eric

"Happy are those...whose hope is in the Lord their God, who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, who keeps faith forever, who executes justice for the oppressed, who gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets the prisoners free, the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down." -Psalm 146

2008: Year in Review

2008-12-31T12:08:00.000-08:00

Swiped this from Jessica.

1. What did you do in 2008 that you'd never done before? Graduated from college, broke at the NPTE, coached a state champion in Oregon high school forensics, entered seminary, lived in California, delivered pizza.

2. Did you keep your new years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year? I stopped making New Year’s resolutions a long time ago. I figure as a Kansas City Royals fan that coping with one endless cycle of failure is plenty.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth? A few acquaintances of mine did give birth, but nobody I’m best friends with or anything.

4. Did anyone close to you die? No.

5. What countries did you visit? None.

6. What would you like to have in 2009 that you lacked in 2008? Closer friendships with some people.

7. What date(s) from 2008 will remain etched upon your memory, and why? April 4—I mailed in my acceptance letter to the Pacific School of Religion. May 11—I graduated from college. November 4—we elected Barack Obama.

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year? Again, probably graduating from college.

9. What was your biggest failure? The psychological breakdowns I had. There were points this year where I was the most depressed I’ve been since my sophomore year of high school.

10. Did you suffer any illness or injury? Nothing major, no.

11. What was the best thing you bought? I didn’t buy it, but I received an iPod nano from my parents as a graduation present.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration? Darryl Burton, a client of my mom’s law firm, was liberated this year after 24 years of imprisonment for a murder he didn’t commit. I got to hear him speak after his release, and his lack of anger and bitterness both astounds and inspires.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Eliot Spitzer, Rod Blagojevich.

14. Where did most of your money go? Books, sushi, beer, red wine, pizza. All major food groups (except for the books).

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about? Debating the Irish National Champions at the NPDA national championships (too bad I was so sleep deprived that I barely remember it).

16. What song will always remind you of 2008? Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
i. happier or sadder? Probably about the same
ii. thinner or fatter? About ten pounds thinner
iii. richer or poorer? Richer

18. What do you wish you'd done more of? Running

19. What do you wish you'd done less of? Stressing out

20. Did you fall in love in 2008? No.

21. How many one-night stands? Zero.

22. What was your favorite TV program? Scrubs and The Office were my favorites going into the year, but this was the year when I finally got hooked on The West Wing.

25. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? No.

26. What was the best book you read? Pauline Chen’s The Final Exam.

27. What was your greatest musical discovery? I really began enjoying The Byrds this year.

28. What did you want and get? My sense of calling being affirmed by those close to me (as well as by the graduate divinity schools to which I applied).

29. What did you want and not get? Hah, there is a very long story to this. Better to ask in private.

30. What was your favorite film of this year? Iron Man, or Milk.

31. What did you do for your birthday, and how old were you? I turned 22 on January 24. I mostly stayed at home and spent the evening with a few people very close to me.

32. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? If I could somehow bring Portland down to California with me.

33. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2007? Lots of button-down shirts with jeans or chinos. I think the biggest change I made to my appearance, though, was that I cut off the ponytail and started shaving my head.

34. What kept you sane? Running, the Berkeley Rose Garden, wine shopping, D. Mark’s sermons, the Bay Area climate (meteorologically and socially).

35. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? I’ve had a massive crush on Rosario Dawson for years, but I have also begun to rather fancy Rachel McAdams as well.
36. What political issue stirred you the most? Barack Obama’s candidacy.

37. Who did you miss? Many of my friends in Portland. I also just miss Portland.

38. Who was the best new person you met? Most of the people at the GTU, all the new folks at my mom’s law firm.

39. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2008: I finally learned how hard it is to leave a hometown you love, and how to cope with that. I never cared much for the Kansas City suburbs, and when I left for college, you couldn’t have shown me the door fast enough. But when I left Portland, I knew I’d miss the town, my grandpa (who lives out on the Oregon coast), and the people I met there a lot. I imagine the same will be true of Berkeley in a few years’ time.

40. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

“To everything (turn, turn, turn), there is a season (turn, turn, turn), and a time for every purpose under heaven.” –Pete Seeger, “Turn! Turn! Turn!”, adapted from the book of Ecclesiastes

I saw a star

2008-12-24T22:46:00.000-08:00

I've always found it interesting that many Nativity scenes and Christmas trees get topped with a star, since the Epiphany story (when the Three Wise Dudes were guided by a star to Bethlehem with some spiffy birthday gifts for Jesus) doesn't happen until twelve days after Christmas, and presumably, by then Mary and Joseph had upgraded their digs from the five-star manger in the innkeeper's barn. So when you get down to it, we keep the star because either, (a) it looks nice, or (b) we wouldn't want to kick the Three Wise Dudes out of the Nativity scene, so the star stays. Both are understandable, but it is the former upon which I've been dwelling every time I saw a Nativity scene this Christmas season...because when I did, I looked up, and I saw a star.

I looked up, and I saw a star. In it, I saw light that had preceded me, that preceded my own thoughts and prayers and wishes and fears.

I looked up, and I saw the light. In it, I saw a companion to existence, bearing witness to all the chronology the light has seen and co-existed with.

I looked up, and I saw the chronology of the light. In it, I saw the history our creation has borne and experienced, the tales of wonder and sacrifice, of joy and sorrow, of happiness and grief.

I looked up, and I saw history. In it, I saw a glimpse of past and present, creation birthed and grown.

I looked up, and I saw a glimpse of all things.

I looked up, and I saw light.

I looked up, and I saw love.

I looked up, and I saw a star.

Pax Deus,
Eric

And, as always, Merry Christmas, all you dirty hippies.

Wilderness

2008-12-15T08:30:00.000-08:00

I delivered the following devotional last night at Tapestry Ministries' Advent worship service. The Scriptural text it is based off of is John 1:6-8, 19-28, which is pasted below, and the devotional follows.

"There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the light, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the light, but he came to testify to the light...This is the testimony given by John when the Judeans sent priests and levites from Jerusalem to ask him, "Who are you?" He confessed, "I am not the Messiah." And they asked him, "What then? Are you Elijah?" He said, "I am not." "Are you the prophet?" He answered, "No." Then they said to him, "Who are you? Let us have an answer for those who sent us. What do you say about yourself?" He said:

"I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord," as the prophet Isaiah said.

Now they had been sent from the Pharisees. They asked him, "When then are you baptizing if you are neither the Messiah nor Elijah, nor the prophet?" John answered them, "I baptize with water. Among you stands one whom you do not know, the one who is coming after me; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandal." This took place in Bethany across the Jordan where John was baptizing." (NRSV)

Where I’m from in Kansas City, the ignition of the Christmas lights on the Country Club Plaza is a really, really, big deal. We native Kansas City folk don’t like to brag too much about it, but frankly, we think we do a darned spiffy job of decking out our city in holiday cheer. And just like decking out the house in stockings, seeing the city decked out in Christmas lights when I was younger was enough to make me just a little giddy for the holiday season. But nowadays, if you find me giddy around the holidays, it probably means that somebody slipped something strong into the egg nog. There was a point in time where, on the first Sunday of Advent, I’d get up and think, “Forget singing about ‘preparation,’ I’m going to rock out to ‘Joy to the World,’ and nobody is going to stop me!” What happened? The easy answer to that is that, at the ripe old age of 22, I’ve begun to slow down. But slowing down doesn’t necessarily come with it less enthusiasm...it just has given me an opportunity to savor the meaning of our Advent and Christmas sacred texts and traditions, rather than just inhaling them whole. And as I read today’s lectionary reading in John, I appreciate that capacity to savor even more.

Because try as the writer of John might to record the first coming of Christ in all manner of splendor and majesty, he is either unable or unwilling to do the same for John the Baptist because of the Baptist’s own words–“I am that voice in the wilderness.” This is not a prophetic presence coming to us from, say, New York City, or London, Paris, Beijing, Tokyo, or even the Peoples’ Republic of Berkeley. This is a voice coming to us from the far reaches of our planet, places we have not even begun to picture in our minds.

And so when we try to integrate the glorious images of light provided by John with the the humble origins of the Baptist and of Jesus in Matthew and Luke, that word “wilderness” almost leaps off the page. Even if the writer of John does not offer us a birth story of either man, he still offers us the spirit of those birth stories with how the Baptist characterizes himself–“I am that voice in the wilderness.” Just as the Baptist did not come to us from New York or London, so too did Jesus not come to us from Jerusalem or Damascus–he came to us not only from Bethlehem, a town that would appear as the wilderness in comparison to Jerusalem–but from the open air of Bethlehem, with not even a proper roof over His head. That, that, is wilderness.

Two weeks ago, I spoke about the meaning of light to pilgrims like us, that it accompanies us, keeps us warm, and offers us sight. And if I were to ask myself what the light has allowed me to see, I would say that it has allowed me to see the wilderness–that place that is so extraordinary because I know so little about it, and yet so ordinary because I expect so little from it. And so if I were presented with this person, this John the Baptist, I imagine I would, like many people in Israel at the time, have to re-consider just how ordinary I consider the wilderness to be, and how what the wilderness gives us are never truly ordinary; that we have to be able to see when we have been given a prophet in the wilderness, even if we were searching for a prophet in the city.

And so it is with joy as well–that all too often search for it at earth’s top, and find it in the valleys of the deepest wilderness. The warm Christmas lights of the city light the way for us, but finding joy does not happen when we most expect it. And so we carry those lights in us for when we do find those little bits of joy as we continue living, continue searching, and continue loving.

May the voice in the wilderness come to us.

May the voice fill us with anticipation and promise, with excitement and joy.

The closer to God may the light which shines within us forever be. Amen.

Eric Atcheson
Berkeley, California
December 14, 2008

Descent from the ivory tower

2008-12-12T10:18:00.000-08:00

Now that my first semester at seminary is almost wrapped up, I have time once more to update the ol' blog with some of the more important happenings in my life...

I have been offered (and subsequently accepted) a Clinical Pastoral Education internship at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco for the summer of 2009. The internship will involve splitting my time between chaplaincy ministry on the hospital floor with seminars, supervision, and didactic classes, along with regular on-call responsibilities. It will be an intense experience, and I will probably have to put most other aspects of my life on hold for the months of June-August, but the people I interviewed with at Cal Pacific were amazing and I'm really looking forward to working with them.

Kansas friends: I'll be back in town next Monday night (the 15th) and will be around for about a month. This is the longest period of time I'll be spending in Kansas for a while, so let's hang out.

I've got a couple of holiday season saxophone gigs coming up, including one this upcoming Sunday evening (the 14th) at Tapestry Ministries in the University Christian Church building, where I'll be performing O Holy Night and Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.

On a little more trivial note, the local Safeway has started printing off coupons for me at the checkout for some pretty decent Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon wines. While I'm very grateful for the additional several bucks off, I'm pretty sure they've got me pegged.

One last paper to finish up, and my brain can check out for the semester...

Eric

"I am the voice of one crying out in the wilderness, make straight the way of the Lord." -John 1:23 (part of this week's lectionary reading)

Of Hope and Light

2008-12-04T08:31:00.000-08:00

At last Sunday's Advent service at Tapestry Ministries, I delivered the following devotional based off of the text of John 1:1-5. The Scripture text is pasted below, and my devotional follows it.

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it." -John 1:1-5 (NRSV)

When I was little, I absolutely could not wait for Advent to come around, because that meant that Christmas was just around the corner. Along with decking the entire house out in stockings and waking up my parents at 4 am on Christmas Day, I was the boy who spent every moment of December just waiting and waiting for that special day of celebration. As I grew older and became more aware of the church calendar, Advent took on a new meaning for me, because after twenty-eight Sundays of Pentecost, I was sometimes anxious for a change of pace. Every year, the Pentecost season felt longer and longer, and Advent became the light at the end of the tunnel that told me it is time to begin a new Church year. Advent became that light that said it was time to prepare for the birth of the Christ Child, for that glorious moment when the heavenly hosts come down to tell us, “Be not afraid!”

In Genesis, it is written that in the beginning, God said, “Let there be light.” And there was light. And God saw that the light was good. In His infinite wisdom and understanding, God saw that the light was not simply acceptable, or serviceable, or adequate. It was good. It is one of those phrases that I savor, that I let live in me as it rolls off my tongue. It was good.

If you’re like me and are prone to deconstructing anything placed before you, you may ask, what does it mean for an abstract phenomenon such as light to be “good?” The closest I have come to an answer is from Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, who said that light gives of itself freely. It does not seek anything in return. It does not ask whether you’re friend or foe. It fundamentally gives of itself and thus is never diminished.

We see this goodness of the light in the words of John’s Gospel, as it shines in the darkness, protecting and guiding pilgrims like ourselves along our way in preparing for the birth of the Messiah. In creating the light, God has created a source of constant unconditional lavishing of warmth and sight for Her creation.

And so I stare into the light, longing to become the light. It is through this light that I begin to see hope. I can reach out and sense it, feel it, and touch it. That mysterious yet awe-inspiring feeling that somehow in this imperfect world, where people kill one other in the name of God, where thousands of children die by the hour from starvation, we plunder the earth’s resources at a frightening rate, where we look around and feel so much despair, that this is still a world that is worth living for, that is worth working for, and above all else, that is worth loving for. And whether it is something as tiny as fueling a little boy’s giddiness at the changing of the seasons or something as soul-sized as working tirelessly to bring about a better creation, hope still lives. I see it. I see it in the light of God.

And so I stare into the light. Amen.

Eric Atcheson
Berkeley, California
November 30, 2008

Bite-Sized Pancakes

2008-11-26T23:13:00.000-08:00

On most mornings these days, I am out of bed by 7:30 at the latest, which is usually when I throw on a sweatshirt and flip-flops and head over to the campus dining hall for breakfast. At the dining hall is Don, a really big man (definitely way bigger than me, which pretty much classifies someone as giant in my book), who cooks the pancakes, hash browns, omelets, and a few other hot dishes. He has a funny sense of humor and sometimes experiments with portion size to good-naturedly mess with us. To that end, the pancakes I often get most days to go along with my orange juice have come in all sorts of shapes and sizes--sometimes I will receive a pile of small, sand dollar-sized pancakes, other times I will receive a few pancakes that are as big as my face. Or, there will be a mishmash of sizes all in one breakfast, ranging from plate-sized pancake titans to bite-sized lilliputian pancakes. All of the above scenarios elicit consistent amusement from me and give me the chance to smile to myself as I start the day.

With Thanksgiving upon us (well, almost--as I write this, it isn't quite midnight on the Pacific coast), and probably as a result of overdosing on pancakes for the last three months, I have begun to see the bite-sized pancakes I eat for breakfast as metaphors for some of the aspects of my life in my new home of Berkeley that I have become quite grateful for--the smaller, quirkier things that both stick out and are taken for granted at the same time...

Like when I go to a nearby pizza parlor, order a slice, and sit down with a book for a long time, alternating between reading and people watching. I see people talk, laugh, revel in the communal fellowship of eating together, and I feel a small swell of joy simply for witnessing it.

The way the sun sets over the shimmering shoreline of the Pacific Ocean, silhouetting the skyscrapers of San Francisco, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the cliffs of Marin County, all at once.

The potluck dinners that me and several friends share every Saturday night, to end the week with both my stomach and my soul filled. Very, very grateful.

How, between the grocery stores and speciality liquor stores, I can find almost any recent California wine I want. And many of them are on sale.

Laughter.

That drivers here are insane enough to weave in and out of highway traffic at excessively fast speeds, but on city streets still yield to pedestrians way more than anywhere else I have lived (yeah, all three cities, I'm a real nomad).

Being serenaded by a chorus of sea lions as I eat lunch at Pier 39 in San Francisco.

The impromptu study groups that form the morning of a Christian Iconography exam, and the jokes and hilarious mnemonic devices we use to quiz each other.

Rousing renditions of "As I Go Down in the River to Pray" at nighttime on a bridge at a camp in the boondocks.

The smell of dough that comes from the pastry shop I stop at after church on Sunday mornings for a croissant.

The in-class breaks my pastoral counseling classmates and I take on Tuesday mornings to debate about capitalism, rant about our classes, or crack jokes about our seminary experiences.

The way the fog rolls in from the ocean, and how it envelops me when I am out jogging in the morning or evening.

Conversations that begin as a quick hello at the lunch table and turn into long, engaging discussions about anything and everything.

And perhaps above all else, the opportunity to develop my vision to see God in all of those individual experiences which intertwine to help make up the narrative of my life in California.

So, if you were to ask me tomorrow what it is I am thankful for this Thanksgiving, I would tell you...it's the bite-sized pancakes.

Eric

And now for some shameless self-promotion

2008-11-23T20:06:00.000-08:00

To mark the start of the upcoming Advent season and the new Church year, I am writing a contemplative, Taize-style liturgy for next Sunday's (November 30) 6pm worship service at Tapestry Ministries, a small Disciples congregation that worships in the University Christian Church building at LeConte and Scenic, across the street from PSR. My part of the liturgy will not make up the whole service, though I hope it will provide a warm, inviting sanctuary for all who enter. If you are in the neighborhood as the Thanksigiving holiday weekend comes to a close and wish to stop by for some reflective worship, you are more than welcome to. Come as you are.

There will also probably be a significant summer internship-related announcement from me in the next several days, stay tuned.

And now back to your regular, not-as-blatantly-advertising programming.

Eric

"Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath." -Psalm 37

Delayed Obedience

2008-11-20T14:20:00.000-08:00

After my Christian Iconography class today, I read this story in the Washington Post about Chase Hilgenbrinck, a professional soccer player who walked away from a budding career in the US's Major League Soccer to become a Roman Catholic seminarian and a candidate for the priesthood. Human interest stories are, at best, infrequently read by me, but this is an article that commanded my attention for obvious reasons.

There is a certain amount of "why would someone in this day and age throw away a career as a pro athlete to become a priest?" sentiment in the article, which is understandable. But...for so many people who has ever received a calling to religious ministry, I think that answering that question is a no-brainer. I seek ordination because I felt so utterly compelled to do so, because I could think of no other way to feel as fulfilled by the work that I am to do in this lifetime. Coming to seminary was something I had to do just so that I could be able to sleep at night without wondering, "what if."

I would by lying if I said that I received my calling via a direct call from God in His heaven. Instead, God spoke to me in different ways, through different people. It did not happen overnight. When I graduated high school in 2004, I was all set to major in something like political science and apply to law school, ignoring the pull I felt towards religion and theology. But by a year later, law school had been forgotten. I declared a religious studies major at Lewis & Clark and began looking at different divinity schools across the nation. I haven't looked back since.

In the Washington Post article, a line from Scott Hahn's book "Rome Sweet Home" is offered as a turning point of sorts; Hahn writes, "Delayed obedience is disobedience." I will preface what I am about to say with the caveat that I disagree with Hahn on a lot of theological and religious doctrine, ranging from his belief that contraception is against God's law to his absurd notion that the "contractual" Protestant ideal of a covenant with God is closer to prostitution than marriage. But then again, this is a person who, prior to his conversion to Catholicism, argued that the Pope was the anti-Christ, so I'm pretty sure that I am going to disagree with a lot of what he had, and has, to say, no matter what his religious affiliation.

But in any case, the notion of delayed obedience to a calling is tantamount to disobedience is an idea that is not dependent on denominational affiliation, and it is a concept worth wrestling with in my case, because while at one point I considered taking a year or two off before attending divinity school, I instead arrived here straight out of undergrad.

But even in light of my own mad dash towards ordination, I am compelled to believe that waiting to act upon a religious calling is not necessarily "disobedience." There are often very real concerns, obstacles, or other issues that arise that may prevent a call from being realized in an orderly, storybook fashion. It is also such a serious commitment that many folks are understandably hesitant about undertaking. The strength of my own sense of calling is hardly immune--nine mornings out of ten, I may awake full of promise in my work towards ordination, but on that tenth morning, I may seriously question why I chose the M.Div. degree route (generally necessary for ordination) as opposed to the M.A./Ph.D. or even J.D. routes. If my God of love does not understand those challenges before us, then I probably have much bigger problems to face than this.

However, in spite of my personal doubts, the goal of ordination is one that has informed almost every major decision I have made since I was 19, when I finally publicly acknowledged that I had received a calling. My decisions have almost uniformly have been made either directly towards this end or with this end in mind, and a few of those decisions have come at a severe emotional cost, and I have had to ask myself if it has been worth it.

What I have come to realize is that while the path I am currently taking is fulfilling to me in ways that I otherwise would not have access to, fulfillment is not zero sum. There is always the possibility of working towards making the world and your life better; there is always work to be done. I chose this path not out of some fear of "disobeying" my divine Creator, but because I felt I had to and because I could not bear casting this opportunity aside. In that singular respect, I suppose I obeyed my call.

I have my work. I have it because I took it upon myself to arrive at this place so early in my life. It leaves as much of the rest of my life open for ministry as possible. But that does not mean that a delay in realizing a call could somehow de-legitimize the sacredness of it. Revelation is not convenient, it doesn't just appear to us during business hours on weekdays. I think the same is true of a calling. I answered mine anyways.

And so, I have my work.

Eric

Break bread with me

2008-11-13T21:01:00.001-08:00

Growing up a Disciple, Holy Communion was one of the focal points of my worship every Sunday. When I was little, I simply liked that part of the service because it meant I got to eat stuff and to pretend that the grape juice was really wine (in retrospect, that might be an argument for setting ages for first communion :) ). Now, it is a tangible element of what otherwise remains a fulfilling but not holistic worship experience.

I see God's presence in the faces of my brothers and sisters and in the fabrics and images used to decorate the sanctuary.

I hear God's presence in the songs we sing, the music we play, and in the voices we raise.

I touch God's presence in the sacred space of the pew, on the tiles of the floor as my feet move from step to step, and in the fragile pages of the hymnals.

Being able to taste God's presence, though, is for me mostly lacking without communion. It is a moment that I draw out longer and longer in my mind--I feel the bread crumble slowly in my fingertips, I let it absorb the flavor of the wine, and I give thanks before I place it upon my lips.

I have written about open and closed communion traditions in the past, but I would mention again that my Disciples tradition decrees that communion be offered in worship to all those who affirm Jesus Christ. It is a notion I grew up with, one that speaks so plainly to the inclusiveness of divine love that I experience.

It genuinely scares me, then, to read stories like this, where the invitation to communion may be abruptly terminated because a parishoner chose to cast their vote for Barack Obama. The calls by some dioceses for pro-choice Catholic politicians to abstain from Holy Communion have been made for years--indeed, more than once has a Church official called upon my home state governor, Kathleen Sebelius, to refrain from taking communion because of her pro-choice policies. While I oppose the denial of communion for that reason as well, there is a small difference between the two situations, which is that all of the sudden, a person's vote is now somehow reason to bar them from receiving the sacraments of bread and wine.

Four years ago, I cast my first vote in a national election for John Kerry, who, like Obama, is pro-choice (and is also Catholic, unlike Obama). I voted for Kerry for many reasons, not the least of which is that, despite his flaws, 18-year-old me was inspired by his calls for a more progressive, inclusive politics. This year, the 22-year-old me voted for Barack Obama as an endorsement of his own vision of a hopeful politics, which I believe includes a renewed commitment to abortion reductionism as a part of a pro-choice worldview that includes so many aspects of God's work--tending to the poor, healing the sick, and empowering the oppressed. I pray this be a worthy goal in the eyes of my Creator.

May my votes on behalf of creating a more better creation speak to my political passions, not to my worthiness to come before the God I love.

May my reluctance to judge people who provide or get abortions, as a part of my reluctance to judge anyone, be understood by the God I worship.

May the sinner continue to be offered the sacraments to partake of if they choose.

May I, in spite of my own sins, be humbled by the opportunity to offer those sacraments to the sinner.

And may we draw closer to God in doing so.

The table has been prepared. Come, break bread with me.

If this be against divine will, may God have mercy on me.

Eric

"Be merciful, as the Lord your Father is merciful." -Luke 6:36

Edited to add: E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post has an excellent column relating to this religious-political issue.

Yes we can, and yes we did

2008-11-07T10:29:00.000-08:00

There truly is not a whole lot more that I can add to what has already been said about our historic president-elect, Barack Obama. I imagine I will remember for a long, long time where I was when the race was called for him. However...I also remember where I was when I heard that Proposition 8 had officially passed. And that is a much less joyful feeling to have (fortunately, Prop 4 failed).

Been registering for classes for the spring semester. Because I don't have a job besides judging at debate tournaments a couple weekends a month and am generally the most productive when I'm busy, I've decided to overload and take five courses this spring. They are:

HRHS 2031: Ancient and Medieval Jewish Civilization (M 9:40 am-12:30 pm), GTU Center for Jewish Studies
NTOT 1708: Interpretation of Sacred Texts (M 2:10-5:00 pm), Pacific School of Religion
PS 2064: Advanced Issues in Pastoral Counseling (T 8:10-11:00 am), Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
LS 1201: Christian Worship (T 2:10-5:00 pm), Pacific School of Religion
Health & Medical Sciences 240: On Death (W 5:30-8:00 pm), University of California-Berkeley

Following a 48-hour or so period of burying myself at my desk, I sent off my applications for a summer chaplaincy internship to four different area hospitals last week. I've already heard back from one of the hospitals to schedule an interview. We'll see what happens.

This has been a really up-and-down week for me so far. I'll be spending the weekend in Stockton, working at the University of Pacific's debate tournament. As a competitor, debate was sometimes able to serve as a compelling distraction to whatever stuff in my life I didn't feel like dealing with at the time. That may end up being the case again.

Eric

"When the possible joy becomes actual, when the potential for richness is made real in creatures' lives, God experiences that joy." -Robert Mesle

Electoral Predictions

2008-11-03T15:26:00.001-08:00

U.S. President, Electoral College votes:

Barack Obama 338
John McCain 200

Obama states: Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Massachussetts, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Maine, and Washington D.C.

McCain states: Alaska, Arizona, Idaho, Utah, Montana, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Indiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina, North Carolina, and West Virginia.

Obama will win the popular vote by about 4.5 to 5 points, 51-46, with roughly 2-3% of the vote going to various third-party candidates. Missouri, Indiana, North Dakota, Montana, Georgia, and North Carolina will end up in McCain's column, but barely. I realize this is a conservative estimate compared to many other predictions being made, but in both 2000 and 2004 we saw the presidential race tighten up at the last minute, and I think that may happen here, but ultimately, it won't benefit McCain more than by a point or so.

U.S. Senate: +7 Democratic seats, leading to a chamber comprised of 56 Democrats, 42 Republicans, 2 Democratic-leaning independents (well, maybe one, if the Dems give Lieberman the ol' heave-ho).

The Democrats only have one remotely vulnerable incumbent Senator, Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, but she should win by 5-6 points over John Kennedy.

States flipping Democratic:
Alaska (Begich over Stevens)
Oregon (Merkeley over Smith)
New Mexico (T. Udall over Pearce)
Colorado (M. Udall over Schaffer)
New Hampshire (Shaheen over Sununu)
North Carolina (Hagan over Dole)
Virginia (M. Warner over Gilmore)

There are several vulnerable Republican incumbents who, while facing close races, will likely retain their seats. These include:
Minnesota (Coleman over Franken)
Kentucky (McConnell over Lunsford)
Mississippi (Wicker over Musgrove)
Georgia* (Chambliss over Martin)

I put an asterisk next to Georgia because under Georgia law, if no candidate receives an outright majority on Election Day (a very real possibility in this particular instance), then the race goes to a December runoff between the top two vote-getters, presumably Chambliss and Martin. If the race does go to a runoff, I think Chambliss will probably squeak out with a win.

U.S. House: + ~25 Democratic seats, give or take half a dozen. Democrats will probably lose a few seats here and there but make up those losses elsewhere.

Agree? Disagree?

Cadence

2008-10-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

Growing up, I used to go running constantly. I played club soccer until I was about 15, and I had to do a lot of running to stay match fit (yeah, I was the goalie, but I still had to do all the fitness stuff with the team). But as I became more depressed during my first two years of high school, physical exercise faded more and more into the background, and it stayed that way throughout much of my high school career. In college, I tried several times to start exercising regularly again, but none of those efforts lasted for longer than a few months at most.

About two years ago, I took up running one more time, when I decided I needed to get in shape if I was going to be playing soccer twice a week at LC, and this time, it stuck. I took that habit with me to Berkeley, which (unbeknownst to me when I decided to move here), is a REALLY hilly city, and finding new jogging routes that didn't make my knees want to go on strike took quite a bit of doing. But I also tried to chart them to take me past as much of the lovely foliage and scenery that is scattered around north Berkeley as possible.

I might take off down Cedar Street, towards the Gourmet Ghetto, and pass it on my way further west towards the Pacific Ocean before doubling back around on Vine towards the Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology, where I am taking half of my classes this semester. Or, I might jog south on Le Conte for a run through the UC-Berkeley campus, past the Campanile and up through Telegraph Avenue before circling around towards downtown Berkeley.

But more and more frequently, I find myself running a simple route uphill on Euclid to the Berkeley Rose Garden. I have begun to realize there are several reasons for this. One is that the roses themselves remind me of Portland. While I grow less homesick for Portland with each passing day, I still considered the City of Roses home for several years, and I spent a fair amount of time meditating in the rose garden on the LC campus.

Another reason is that while the route is simple, it involves some fairly steep uphill running, and it is a great route for me to pound out whatever emotions I am feeling through my feet. I'm not simply talking upsetedness or distress here, but simply passion in general, both good and bad. My feet beat out a cadence in rhythm and rhyme to whatever music I happen to have my Ipod set to at the time. Sometimes the beat becomes more painful as the hills get steeper, sometimes it becomes more gentle as the pavement levels out. But the cadence still reverberates throughout my body, and as I let my mind wander in time with the music, I begin to notice the littlest, most idiosyncratic things, like the weathered edges of a bench carved into a stone fence, or the scattered bits of soil next to a transplanted flower bed. It is moments like these where I come closest to possessing a photographic memory.

But one of the biggest reasons is the way the Rose Garden itself occupies space. It is shaped like an ampitheater, on the side of a hill, and at the top of it, nearest Euclid, are several benches at differing heights, and across from it is the treeline that frames the San Francisco Bay. At least once a week, I try to stop by there to watch the sun set as I either listen to music or allow myself to be serenaded by the metronomic sounds of tennis being played on the courts nearby. I relax and I marvel, I meditate and I pray, in the silhouette of one of the most aesthetically beautiful surroundings I have ever been blessed to find. And, at least for a few minutes, the world makes sense again.

And then a new song starts playing through my earphones, leading my mind to center itself once again. And I remind myself that I live in a world where sometimes very little makes sense, much less is just, and that I have come here out of a sense of obligation to serve the interests of the creation in which I exist. So I rise up from the bench I have been sitting on, and I turn back towards the seminary. My feet gradually pick up speed, and another rhythm is beat once more on the sidewalk's pavement as I return to my life with my soul inspired by this beauty that surrounded me.

And slowly, my body becomes the cadence once more.

Eric

Californians: vote NO on propositions 4 and 8

2008-10-22T10:53:00.001-07:00

As election day gets nearer and nearer, I have since realized that I have moved from one state (Oregon) that was already nutty for wacky-ass ballot initiatives (hereafter referred to as "WABIs") to another state that is absolutely head-over-heels in love with said WABIs (California). I wonder if it is a West Coast thing.

In any case, while there are indeed some WABIs on the California ballot that merit our support (Propositions 2, 3, and 5 are all worth voting for, and I have mixed feelings about Prop 1 and Prop 7), two WABIs this year deserve mention because of their high profiles and higher stakes--Prop 4 and Prop 8.

Prop 4 (aka Sarah's Law, a bit of a misnomer since it is being peddled as a constitutional amendment) would ban the providing of abortions to unempancipated minors (that is, minors who are still living with their parents) until 48 hours after the physician notifies the minor's parent or guardian. The life-versus-choice debate in abortion (or choice versus anti-choice, if you prefer) is a perennial one that is rooted in fundamentally different viewpoints. Despite this, however, there are a multitude of reasons for people on both sides of the abortion debate to unite in opposition to Prop 4:

Prop 4 provides no exception for cases of familal abuse--if a girl who is seeking an abortion reports parental abuse, a family member is still required to be notified per the law's statutes.

Prop 4 places the burden of proof on the minor to demonstrate enough maturity to override the requirement to notify their parents. Since minors are deemed to lack the judgement to sign binding contracts, this exception is a catch-22 for all girls who would be affected by the law.

Prop 4 places monetary punishment upon physicians for violating this law. Doctors already serve a very noble and stressful profession, and this unduly adds to their burdens and expenses.

Prop 4 is so extreme that organizations opposing it include groups respresenting teachers, school counselors, pediatricians, obstetricians and gynecologists, family physicians, and nurses.

I do write this as a pro-choice individual, who is committed to the idea that medical confidentiality extends fully to all matters of reproduction. Even if you disagree with me, I hope that California voters will still recognize that Prop 4 is not in the best interests of minors, doctors, or anyone else involved in what is an intensely personal decision.

Prop 8 would overturn, via constitutional amendment, the recent decision by the California Supreme Court ruling that same-sex marriage is constitutional. This is a fundamental fact to realize about the battle over Prop 8--non-heterosexual couples currently have the right to marry under California law. Passing Prop 8 would strip them of that right. This is NOT, as Prop 8's supporters would have you believe, about the sanctity of marriage. Unlike the constitutional amendments that passed in so many other states already, Prop 8 is unique in that it does eliminate a right for a person who has done nothing wrong in the eyes of the law.

Polling on Prop 8 has been extremely close throughout the year, and Survey USA's latest poll has the race within the margin of error, with relatively few undecided votes. Every vote will matter. Every voice will matter. A vote against Prop 8 is a vote for the affirmation of love in whatever form that love may take, in whatever manifestation of absolute humanity it may appear.

At this point, I write not as a seminarian. I have already begun to notice that people look at you a little differently when you tell them you are training to become an ordained pastor, but a moral authority I am not. I am a 22-year-old graduate student with a lifelong devotion to God and a belief in the fundamental equality of all peoples before the governments we helped create. If passed, Propositions 4 and 8 would represent great and terrible losses in the progressive journey towards true equality in the eyes of the law. Basic equality in the eyes of God, I fervently believe, was accomplished long ago. But for us, we sadly still have yet a long, long way to go.

Vote NO on Propositions 4 and 8.

Eric

Happy belated Indigenous Peoples' Day

2008-10-14T18:59:00.000-07:00

...it's what they call Columbus Day out here in Bezerkeley. Go Bezerkeley.

Eric

The McCain campaign takes one step closer towards racially charged language

2008-10-10T10:13:00.000-07:00

Or, alternatively, the obliviousness of McCain's advertising people borders on outright stupidity.

Case in point: CNN is reporting that the McCain campaign has cranked out a new TV ad that once again tries to establish the Barack Obama-David Ayers connection. This line of attack has been eviscerated as hypocritical by many liberal pundits already, and even the generally nonpartisan Associated Press has been arguing that accusing Barack Obama of associating with terrorists carries racial implications.

With this new ad, though, not only is the Ayers connection still being played up, but Obama is criticized for his "blind ambition." Consider, if only for a moment, the image of a 72-year-old hotheaded white man criticizing a rising 47-year-old African-American politician for being ambitious, and it makes me wonder if "ambition" is just a veiled refernece to something else...all one would have to do is substitute "ambitious" for "uppity," and then you have a blatant racial slur on your hands. Indeed, that has already happened this election cycle when Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, a dim-witted dipshit from Georgia who voted against extending the Voting Rights Act of 1964 in 2006, called Obama "uppity" twice just before McCain formally accepted the Republican nomination for President, and then unconvincingly pleaded ignorance as to the racially charged subtext of using that term to describe an African-American man.

In any case, this may not be as blatant, as, say, using Barack Obama's middle name to incite reactions from xenophobes, or referring to Michelle Obama as Barack Obama's "baby mama," which has been done by various McCain surrogates as well as Fox News (which I probably could have just lumped in with "various McCain surrogates," but oh well). But when there have already been many veiled and many not-so-veiled shots at Obama's race, one has to wonder if something like this new ad will simply slip under the radar or not--and I am quite worried that it just might.

And really, when combined with Palin's recent comments (per the previously linked-to AP report), it is hard to give the McCain campaign a pass on this. Either these past few days have represented a distinct movement by the McCain campaign to subtly re-introduce racism into the campaign, or his advertising people are just really fucking oblivious. But the Westmoreland defense was unconvincing a month ago, and it should remain unconvincing now.

Eric

Speak Many Voices

2008-10-08T13:11:00.000-07:00

The crowds encompass
Voices swell to a chorus
Speaking, talking voices

Pandemonium
Fills my ears, chaos abound
Shouting, screaming voices

The pain dissipates
The wind dies down, my heart slows
Faint, whispering voices

The music echoes
Across buildings, across time
Singing, chanting voices

The crowd re-gathers
Though not a sound is uttered
Silent, present voices

Shining radiance
Falling to my knees in awe
Prayerful, sacred voices

Guide me, voices.

Eric Atcheson
Berkeley, California
October 8, 2008

A moment of silence, please

2008-09-29T08:54:00.001-07:00

...in memory of Paul Newman.

That is all.

Eric

Clergy for Obama

2008-09-15T18:44:00.000-07:00

A bunch of clergy from my hometown have just recently kickstarted a new online organization called Clergy For Obama. As the name would imply, many of us are pastors, deacons, elders, and seminarians who have decided to publicly endorse and work for the candidacy of Barack Obama for President of the United States. But also (in true Disciples fashion), this group is open to all laypeople of faith who have a stake in both the Church and in a politics that lends voice to a vision of a better world.

If you believe in the empowerment of the soul, and of the soul's capacity to do incredible things both great and small...

...I invite you to walk with us.

If you speak out at the sight of injustice, and if you cry out against the degradations of poverty...

...I invite you to hold hands with us.

If you pray for peace, and if you long for a world where weapons of war only exist as displays in museums...

...I invite you to envision along with us.

If you wish to create a tomorrow where basic human rights such as education and health care are no longer privileges, but are available to all of us, the children of God...

...I invite you to break bread with us.

If you desire a country that recognizes the holiness of love between any two people, and if you rejoice in the creation of that love...

...I invite you to work with us.

If you hope for a civilization that will never subject a human to the indignities of torture, and that will testify to end the humiliation of the shackled...

...I invite you to touch the world with us.

If you hunger for a time when the people uphold the charge God gave to us to preserve and care for the creation...

...I invite you to pray with us.

And if the eloquence and grace of your soul conjures a vision within you that moves you to work for the good of the world in so many diverse ways...

...I invite you to join with us.

The candidacy of Barack Obama began as a result of the vision of one extraordinary man. That candidacy is one manifestation of that man's empowerment. Through it, so much more can be accomplished in our world, for along with it, there exists an empowerment that sweeps through entire demographics, entire populations, and that pulsates within the very core of our country. As individuals within a body, we can work to transcend the obstacles placed before us, we can work to elevate the places that others have been cast to within society, and we can work to bring about the change necessary to usher in a brighter world for all creation.

We are Clergy for Obama.

Yes we can,
Eric

Attention, Portland peoples

2008-09-12T18:01:00.000-07:00

I will be in Portland between September 30 and October 5. If you are still around and available at some point during those dates and want to hang out, let me know. I've been fairly lazy about facebook, so I don't really know which of y'all are still in Portland and who has moved on to bigger things.

That is all. Vote Obama-Biden.

Si se puede,
Eric

Dear Joe Lieberman

2008-09-02T21:10:00.000-07:00

When the Senate Democrats kick you out of their caucus on November 5th for the astounding lack of loyalty you showed tonight, don't let the door hit you on the ass on your way out.

The Democratic party lent you a prime-time pedestal--a pedestal that you did not earn--by nominating you for Vice President in 2000 despite many more strategically qualified candidates, and you repay them by moving so far to the right that you can't even get re-elected as a Democrat in a state where the Democratic brand is immensely popular.

When Jim Jeffords left the Republican party to become an independent in 2001, he did so as a matter of principle. You only left the Democratic party when it became apparent that you would lose the 2006 primary to a political newcomer whose main reason for running against you was your incessant and misguided support for W.'s invasion of Iraq. In other words--you left the party for entirely self-centered reasons in order to ensure yourself another six years of being John McCain's lackey.

We, the rank-and-file of the Democratic party, have long since recognized you for the blatantly selfish turncoat you are, and we are awaiting our day of vindication when the Senate Democratic leadership throws you out on your ass for attacking Barack Obama's principled opposition to the Iraq war and still trying to call yourself a Democrat in that exact same speech in front of the Republican national convention.

If John McCain could not change the culture of Washington after serving in Congress for 25 years, what makes you think he could do it as President?

Change is coming, Mr. Lieberman. A historical candidacy will hopefully soon become a historical presidency. A new voice, representative of the racial diversity that America is enriched by, is on the brink of becoming the new leader of the free world.

Are you ready?

Sincerely,
Me

So much stuff, so little time

2008-08-31T11:25:00.000-07:00

Once more, my apologies that I have been neglecting my blog for the past three weeks or so. Plenty has happened in those three weeks, including my move to Berkeley, which has taken up much of my time until now. So far, I am enjoying it here, it is reminiscent of Portland in many ways, except it is consistently much sunnier.

My class schedule for the upcoming semester will probably be...

The Bible in the Near East (Pacific School of Religion): M 9:40 am-12:30 pm
Spiritual Disciplines for Leadership (Pacific School): M 2:10-5:00 pm
Issues in Pastoral Counseling (Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology): T 8:10-11:00 am
Christian Iconography (Dominican School): Th 11:10 am-2:00 pm

I thought about singing in the school choir, but rehearsals are Monday evenings and Tuesday mornings, and I won't be able to make the Tuesday rehearsals because of my pastoral counseling class. I'm also taking half my classes this semester from the Dominicans, which was part of the appeal of choosing the Graduate Theological Union--I can take classes from three different Roman Catholic orders (the Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits) as well as from the Unitarian Universalists, the Episcopalians, and three other Protestant denominations (the Lutherans, Presbyterians, and American Baptists) in addition to the University of California. During the January term, I will probably be taking classes from the American Baptists and the Unitarian Universalists.

I live a ten-minute walk from the Gourmet Ghetto, a stretch of Shattuck Avenue that has some amazing restaurants (including Chez Panisse), and a short walk from the Cal campus.

And in news outside the Peoples' Republic of Berkeley, I am thrilled by the VP choices by both Obama and McCain (in no small part because I look forward to watching Biden annihilate Palin in the VP debate). Both are entertaining to listen to (Biden because he is such a loose cannon, and Palin because she is such an anti-choice, creationist, homophobic, and global warming denying whackjob), and it'll be especially interesting to see how Palin gets defined--and if sexism surfaces in the media's treatment of her or not.

And please include the victims of Hurricane Gustav, as well as those evacuating from their homes on the Gulf Coast, in your thoughts and prayers.

Eric

"The glory of God is a person fully alive." -Saint Irenaeus

Politics and Pop Culture

2008-08-06T15:41:00.000-07:00

I never thought the day would come when I would be appreciating anything that Paris Hilton had to say, but that day has arrived.

I'm generally a fan of satire when it is applied to American politics, and the ad was a combination of both satire and direct attack upon McCain and the energy policy he concocted with offshore drilling. While I remain unconvinced that Paris Hilton even knows what makes a hybrid car save all that gas, I thought the ad was a pretty funny counterstroke to the increasingly negative and infantile attack ads by the McCain campaign.

A lot has been said by pundits about the recent line of McCain ads and the ridiculous assertion by the McCain camp that Obama is trying to take advantage of being African-American (and my L&C friend Amy has a good post about it). While these lines of attack have really irritated me, I'm also hoping that McCain has already begun to feed himself the rope that he will ultimately use to hang himself as a presidential candidate. CNN's latest poll of polls has Obama up by five points going into the Olympics, and I think that number will stick until at least September, when the GOP convention ends.

Hopefully, it will stick through November as well.

Edit: A must-read for anyone who has a passing knowledge of the Darfur genocide, China's absymal record on human rights and civil liberties, or both. Joey Cheek, I am in your camp.

Yes we can,
Eric

Confessions of a pizza deliveryman, slice four: pineapple

2008-07-28T22:25:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the recent hiatus.

Returning to my blog's summer-long miniseries on working in a pizzeria, I want to return to the many of the various trappings of our profession--I've already talked about the polo shirt-and-baseball cap uniform, but there is one other very visible sign of our employment whenever we are out and about on a delivery--the triangular cartopping sign that advertises our pizzeria.

I mentioned in an earlier post that these cartoppers were awful for gas efficiency because of the way they cut down on a car's aerodynamic qualities...which is both true and wasteful, but the cartoppers are slightly more useful than simply being billboards. They bring with them several distinct advantages, chief among them being the excuse that allows us to park wherever we want when making our deliveries--in no-park zones, receiving lanes, anything. About the one place I haven't tried yet has been the ambulance lane at any of the local hospitals when I am delivering to the ER, but with that caveat, it is like being able to attach diplomatic flags to my Honda for several evenings a week.

The other benefit is more for my own amusement and edification than anything else, but whenever I am delivering to a family with little kids, the sign is like a beacon to them--more than once have I been inching down a subdivision, glancing at house numbers painted on the street gutters as I pass, trying to find the house I am looking for...and then I look up, and I see a group of little kids jumping up and down and screaming at the sight of me, at which point they start running and waving me into their driveway like they are directing airplanes on the airport tarmac. (The slightly less fun part is when I get out of my car and subsequently get mobbed by the pint-sized FAA employees.)

As any of you who have spent any significant time in my car probably know, I do keep a couple of small bumper stickers on the back of the Honda which advertise the Hunger Site and South Africa's 2010 World Cup. I was asked once (only once, fortunately) when the cartopper was up if the pizzeria approved of having my apparent hippiemobile advertising their company, presumably as though there would be some sort of tacit endorsement of the bumper stickers' messages by the pizzeria. Aside from the simple fact that no, they really don't care what is on my car, my initial thought was, "If you really think that advertising for the Hunger Site and a poverty-stricken continent's first World Cup is in any way controversial, then you need help." Unlike my first car, this car's repertoire of bumper stickers is restrained both in terms of quantity and political content, but it is interesting what some see as political or otherwise controversial enough to be worthy of comment in that way.

Eric

Hamba kahle, Jesse Helms

2008-07-08T11:08:00.000-07:00

I've been debating with myself back and forth over whether or not I wanted to comment on the death of such an overtly racist politician. Jesse Helms was a racist, homophobic prick, and while I never wished for his death, I am not overcome with grief, either. In lieu of an obituary to one of the most destructive forces in American politics during the late 20th century, I offer this link to an op-ed written by David Broder after Helms's retirement from the Senate. It is entitled, "Jesse Helms--White Racist."

The title alone pretty much sums up my view of Helms's legacy, and it is a legacy that, while being respectful to his family, should not be forgotten by all those who choose to remark upon his passing.

And as for the title of this particular post, "Hamba kahle" is Zulu for "good bye." Given Helms's vehement opposition to provide funding and support for AIDS victims, I would relish being able to send him off in one of the native languages of a continent's people he so despised, and Zulu is one of the predominant tongues of western South Africa, a region that has a very special place in my own heart. Unfortunately, I think a literal translation of "hamba kahle" means "stay well," which Helms never was.

Edited to add: Roland Martin at CNN has a column that also makes the case for why we should not sanitize Helms's racist legacy in light of his death.

Eric

Confessions of a pizza deliveryman, slice three: mushrooms

2008-06-21T19:49:00.000-07:00

I've said this in my previous posts, but delivering pizzas takes you all over the place--I've delivered to houses, apartments, McMansions, dog groomers, tanning salons, department stores, and plenty of other places in between. But every time that I've done so, it has been in our wonderful uniform, which is pretty much the industry standard--a black polo shirt and baseball cap, both embroidered with the pizzeria's name, and khaki cargo shorts. While I am fully aware that nothing quite screams "glamorous formalwear" quite like our uniform, it could be way worse--there is a Little Caesar's about half a mile from us, and I've definitely seen unfortunate employees of theirs have to dress up in their giant foam mascot and walk around on the sidewalk during the hot summer days.

But the uniform itself produces a wide variety of reactions from many of my customers, depending on the individual circumstance. More often than not, people are thrilled to see me because I come bearing delicious food. Occasionally (and this has happened usually either in Leawood or in the McMansions of very southern Olathe/Stilwell), the customer will act as though I am some sort of potential burglar and barely open the door wide enough for me to throw them their food. I'm not quite sure what to chalk this phenomenon up to, but part of it does, I think, have to do with what I feel has to be a certain level of awkwardness of not only allowing a total stranger onto your doorstep (albeit for only a couple of minutes), but a total stranger who, it is societally implied, is of a lower socioeconomic status than you.

To be clear, I've never been remotely poor, although my parents do not make much money as lawyers go. And I've wondered how much of the mildly paranoid reaction from a few of the more wealthy customers is due to my own appearance and/or uniform or just because of that general human discomfort I've noticed of having strangers so close to such an integral and intimate part of one's life as their house. In all likelihood, it is a mixture of both, but in any case, it has made me consider many of the tasks that we call upon others to do in the hospitality industry expressly for our benefit and luxury--housekeeping, janitorial work, waiting on restaurant customers, or delivering yummy pizza. The uniforms that people wear when performing such tasks is meant to call attention to them in some way (usually as advertisements), but at the same time, it causes one to become far more conscious of how other people view their role (Barbara Ehrenreich devotes a passage of her very good book "Nickel and Dimed" on this subject in regards to the uniforms worn by housekeepers).

In any case, I'm not terribly concerned with being conscious of the fact that I deliver pizzas, but if I were truly honest with myself, I would have to ask myself if that lack of concern would still be there if I were doing something that I saw as less fun or cool--which is partly where I want to end this particular post, is the image of the pizza guy as "cool," which (and I do not say this to be offensive or overly-stereotyping, this is merely based on my own anecdotal, non-scientific experience), I have noticed have fallen largely on gender-based lines, with plenty of guys asking me about what it is like working in a pizzeria, what the business is like, while women tend to be far more disinterested to the point that I have definitely received some disapproving stares from the department store ladies as I traipse through the Men's section to make a delivery on the other side of the store.

In general, my uniform has produced much more friendly curiosity, and, in a way, a certain camaraderie, from men, while this has been less the case with women. The workforce at my Sarpino's is definitely skewed towards guys, but we have a fairly substantial female minority on the payroll. The intersection of food and gender is one that I have not considered much beyond, say, eating disorders and the notion of "girly drinks," but pizza and beer is, I think, seen in the American zeitgeist as more of a guy thing, and so I can't help but wonder if there is a societal expectation for men to be more interested in the aspect of pizzamaking than women. And if that is the case, then it is particularly ironic, given the longtime feminine image/value our society has placed upon cooking and kitchenwork in general. If true, it would produce a certain inconsistency that I have yet to understand (ie, being disinterested in cooking is okay for dudes as long as they're into making pizza), but it presupposes that this duality of the kitchen--in any capacity--still belonging to the feminine domain. I would hope that we as a society have moved past that, but based on how I am often (differently) received by passersby when in uniform, I am not so sure we have even come close yet.

Obama's potential VPs, and Antonin Scalia is a flip-flopper

2008-06-12T14:14:00.001-07:00

Now that it has finally been settled that America is getting its first-ever African-American presidential nominee on a major-party ticket, everyone has been chattering away about who is VP will be. John Edwards, Ted Strickland, and Jim Webb have all said they don't want it. Hillary Clinton has said she does, but I hope she doesn't end up getting the nod--according to a Wall Street Journal poll from this week, while 22% of people say that having HRC on the Obama ticket would make them more likely to vote for Obama, an almost equal 21% said it would make them less likely to vote for Obama. Aside from pacifying her ridiculously devoted base, I'm not sure what HRC would bring to the table as VP--her home state will vote for Obama in November in a landslide, she won't win states like Kentucky or Texas for Obama, and Obama is the better fundraiser of the two.

I like Bill Richardson a lot (always have), but as my old debate coach Travis points out, he has his own affairs and scandals to deal with, which has led us to wonder how likely a candidate Kansas's governor Kathleen Sebelius might be. When the Slouching Toward Denver blog first started, I wrote a pretty long post in defense of Sebelius as a running mate for Obama--and even though the post is dated by now, I still think Sebelius would be a great candidate--as would Governor Tim Kaine of Virginia, or perhaps Gov. Christine Gregoire of Washington (I'm surprised no one has really mentioned her). I think picking a non-Congressperson is important for Obama--it keeps with his theme of changing Washington, and voting records tend to come back to bite lawmakers in the ass anyways. We shall see.

In other news, the Supreme Court made the morally sound decision in upholding the Constitutional protections that Guantanmo Bay detainees should have been afforded from the beginning. Kudos to Anthony Kennedy for joining the light side and writing the majority opinion for the court. The most shocking thing about this article, though, were the quotes taken from Antonin Scalia's dissent, in which he argues that America is "at war with radical Islamists," and that Kennedy's opinion "will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed." Blatant xenophobia aside, I think it is painfully ironic that a "constructionist" justice who never misses an opportunity to bemoan a decision that he believes was not made based on strict interpretation of the Constitution is now attempting to set legal precedent based on the fact that we are at war against an unknown enemy--my Con Law from high school is a little rusty, but I'm pretty durned sure there isn't an amendment or article in the Constitution that says that legal precedent should be decided based on whether or not the decision will make warmaking easier or harder for us (the suspension of the Writ of Habeas Corpus is for security, not warmaking, and it has only been suspended in one war--the American Civil War).

Scalia is likely a brilliant academic and legal scholar, but his intellectual dishonesty is more blatant than ever in this dissent.

PS: Discovered this (thanks to a link from Gayle) not long after making the original post, but feel this must be mentioned as well--far from being fair and balanced, Fox News is now officially racist. Could you imagine them referring to Laura Bush as GWB's "baby mama?" Jus' sayin'.

Eric

Live For Creation

2008-06-09T20:18:00.000-07:00

Sunlight streams across
Peering through the water-streaked glass
The crimson sky sings

The guitar's notes rise
Echoing across the lake
Divine light replies

Music transcending
The notes melodically
Wend through fragile ears

Composer and world
Pulsating with each other
Breathing creation

The symphony lives
The composer keeps writing
All's well in the world

Song and sunlit sky
Once in unison, no longer
Do they still take flight

The composer I
Once heard had passed away
Leaving his opus

Creation cried out
The world the composer wrote
Overwhelmed in strife

My dream would darken
I dreamed the guitar's mourning
I dreamed the sky's howl

The day stood transfixed
Unable to command the
Lightning's hand

Dancing across the sky
Dazzling the creation with
Majestic fury

Expressions abound
Creation finds no answer
Yet is one needed...

Live for creation
Embrace and sustain its love
Through each one of us

Live for creation
And someday the composer
Will create once more

Look...
Another day has begun

Eric Atcheson
Overland Park, Kansas
June 9, 2008

Confessions of a pizza deliveryman, slice two: pepperoni

2008-06-06T16:38:00.001-07:00

In my first "Confessions" post, I said that you indeed meet plenty of interesting people by delivering pizzas. And I honestly think that one of the ways you begin to find things out about your customers is through their tipping habits--something that I have wanted to write about for several days now.

Tipping delivery drivers is a much less precise science than is tipping waiters and waitresses (and even then, it is hardly a "precise science). While the 15-20% rule is generally understood as the guideline for tipping waitstaff, there is a little less established cultural mores on the tipping of delivery drivers, I think. That being said, 10% is generally used as a baseline--unless the driver has done something to grievously offend you in the two minutes s/he spends on your doorstep, 10% should be the minimum amount you should tip him or her, and a 10% tip in and of itself is nothing to sneeze at for a driver.

Of course, 10% is far from a baseline, and drivers are reminded of this every night. Part of the reason I wanted to write this post today was because my last delivery for my shift today involved driving out to Leawood--easily a 30-minute round trip from our pizzeria by the KU Edwards campus--to what was clearly a very expensive house to deliver two pizzas to a first-time customer, who proceeded to give me $1 on a $25 tab (for those of you keeping score at home, that is a 4% tip). One of my co-wokers, Will, said that he appreciates it when he sees a customer with an expensive car, because he figures that customer would be richer and more likely to tip well, but I honestly think that in many cases, the more wealthy customers tend to be the worse tippers (as was the case with my very obviously wealthy benefactor and her 4% tip). The reasons for this are probably best explained by an anthropological case study that I am neither equipped for or motivated to pursue. The best tippers, unsurprisingly, are people who themselves depend on tips for a substantial portion of their income--waiters and waitresses, hairdressers and beauticians, and the like, which represents a shared economic and emotional bond.

One of the other variables, aside from the customer himself/herself, is whether the pizzeria charges a per-delivery fee. Some do, some don't--Sarpino's does not (it's free delivery), and I actually appreciate that, because I've heard stories from friends who have worked other delivery gigs who feel like they got stiffed by some customers who thought that the delivery fee was meant to be a substitute for a gratuity (which is mildly ridiculous, since the delivery charge for pizzerias that do enforce one is seldom more than a dollar or two). One could make the argument that such customers might not tip well regardless, but that is purely speculative.

All of that being said, the substantial majority of customers I've delivered to in the past several weeks have been courteous people and generous with their tips. These are simply a few things I've considered, and that hopefully you will, during my hours of driving time on the oh-so-rugged roads of Kansas:

If possible, take into account not only the size of your bill, but your physical distance from the pizzeria, and add a little extra if you live quite a ways from the restaurant. Unless your order is so large that we need to make multiple trips, the size of your bill doesn't reflect a variable amount of labor on our part for the actual delivery (as opposed to the creation of the food, which drivers are also often involved in). But when we are in transit to your office/home/hotel/pen at the zoo, we are doing so expressly for your benefit--so you are compensating us not only for those two minutes we are on your doorstep, but for the amount of time it took traveling to and from your place. And gas prices being what they are (per-delivery fees and bumps in wages aside, most delivery drivers are on the hook for their own gas), taking geographical distance into account is appreciated by all of us.

If you have a particularly small order (some places have minimum requirements on the value of an order that can be delivered, some don't), then tipping based on geographical distance rather than size of the bill is particularly relevant.

If you told us on the phone that you were paying cash, don't throw a credit card at us and expect us to be able to do anything with it. I've had this happen to me on a couple of occasions, and it is pretty irritating, as I clearly do not carry a credit card swipe machine on me, but when you tell us on the phone that you are paying in cash, we can't print out any credit card receipts for you to sign, so it is cash or nothing at all.

That whole "drivers carry less than $20" mantra is total bunk. Hopefully this doesn't encourage you to throw a $50 bill at us and expect us to change it, but we are required to carry a minimum of $20 on us simply to make change, so any cash you hand us after that clearly ups the value over $20.

On a similar note--mugging pizza drivers is not only wrong, it is pathetic. This hasn't happened to me or any of my co-workers yet, but still--we are hardly raking in the proverbial dough. If wiping out some guy's tips for the night sounds like your idea of making a living, you're a terrible excuse for a human being.

The goofy plastic signs we are forced to put on our cars can really hinder any sense of aerodynamic efficiency our cars once had. Again, gas is expensive.

And finally, if our delivery arrives late, it often isn't our fault. Mistakes happen, computerized map systems are hardly foolproof, the kitchen may have made a mistake (I've definitely done that--I once dropped a fully-made large New York deli pizza all over the cutting station at 12:30 am one night), and punishing your driver for it is not only unfair, but is a completely ineffective method of conveying your dissatisfaction. Would that really be worth saving those few dollars? I would hope not.

But I hope this post also hasn't sounded like a laundry list of griping. And I would like to add an epilogue to all of this--there is one lady who works in an office complex that is about a 25-minute round trip from the pizzeria (a relatively long trip for us). She is a regular, always gets her food delivered, and never tipped any of our drivers (the first time I delivered to her, a couple of weeks ago, she gave me just enough cash to cover the bill and allowed me to keep the change, which amounted to a 23-cent tip). The other day, when I was about two or three hours into my shift, I checked the store computer to see what my next delivery was, and when I saw it was to her, I audibly groaned, prompting my boss to ask me what was wrong--and I told her that I was about to make no money on my next trip.

After delivering her food, I took the receipt and headed out to my car without even looking at it, figuring there was nothing there to get excited about. But when I slid into the driver's seat and took a look, I saw that she had written in a 15% tip for me. A small victory to be sure, but I'll take 'em where they come.

Eric

Confessions of a pizza deliveryman, slice one: plain cheese

2008-06-04T19:51:00.000-07:00

As many of you know, I'm spending this summer making and delivering pizza for the local Sarpino's pizzeria (they're a chain and very recently opened their first location in the Kansas City area). I've been on the job for almost three weeks now, and so far, it has been pretty fun, so I plan on having a mini-series of sorts on my blog this summer about what it is like to work at a pizzeria, which may...or may not...ever encourage you to order pizza again.

One of the things Sarpino's takes pride in is the diversity of the menu--we make plenty of pepperoni or sausage pizzas (after all, the customer is always right), but our menu also contains quite a few combinations of fairly interesting toppings, ranging from chicken strips to shrimp to pesto sauce. And the dough itself is made from scratch (also can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on the experience level of the person who is on dough that particular day :) ). For every typical order of a large pepperoni pizza and coke, there is probably a one in three or four chance that the next order will be some interesting or unusual specialty pizza or array of toppings, which makes for some interesting tastes and smells afterwards. For instance--one of our customers today ordered a no-cheese pizza topped with green olives and anchovies. The thing reeked, but it was something totally different for us to make.

In addition to pizzas, we also make calzones, sandwiches, paninis, breadsticks, wings, and salads. To the credit of higher management, our salads are made entirely with spinach or romaine--there is not a shred of iceberg lettuce in the entire joint. But ordering a salad from us isn't really ordering a salad--it is ordering a box filled with lettuce with some vegetables put in separate groups on top with dressing. In essence, we are throwing you the ingredients to make the salad, but tossing it in any capacity is something we don't get to do, making them some of the least labor-intensive items on the menu (aside from prepping the romaine lettuce, which is a chore). We also "make" tiramisu and cheesecake, but those involve slicing them in advance, freezing them, and heating them up whenever they get ordered. The tiramisu at least does taste good--I haven't had a chance to try the cheesecake yet.

A lot of this simply has to do with working in the kitchen itself, which we drivers still do a significant amount of between the meal rushes (prep work consumes quite a lot of our time, as very few of our ingredients are prefabricated). Later on, I'll start branching out with my topics to include the deliveries themselves--which are a lot of fun, if for no other reason than the sheer unpredictability of the type of people you meet.

Eric

Darfur Rising

2008-05-28T20:32:00.000-07:00

The CNN Political Ticker reported today that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John McCain have all signed statements recognizing the ethnic cleansing in Darfur as genocide and calling upon the el-Bashir government in Khartoum to cease its persecution of the peoples in Darfur, both current and displaced. Of course, those signatures won't do a thing by themselves, but it is encouraging to see that all three presidential candidates are united in the labeling of the Darfur violence as a genocide in light of what is traditionally US neutrality in previous genocides (Rwanda and Cambodia), as one tiny pinprick of light in a month that has seen plenty of devastation in the Global South, from Burma and China to the floods in Colombia that have left 100,000+ people homeless (not trying to lump the entirety of the Global South uniformly together, jus' sayin').

Closer to home, life as a pizza deliveryperson is pretty nice, even though when you get down to it, I contribute to one major social ill (global warming) in order to provide people with access to another social ill (obesity). But when I get a giant employee discount on the pizza itself, being a corporate sellout (albeit a temporary one) ends up tasting pretty durned good. And I think that as corporate chains go, I could do a whole lot worse than Sarpino's (Tim, one of our other drivers, and I talked about the widespread and massive harms inflicted upon the world by fast food burger chains and our own personal boycotts of McDonald's).

I've spent a lot of time in pretty deep consideration of my own religious views and the purpose of my life as a seminarian and future minister, but those will probably be reserved for another post when I've had more time to reflect. Having to actually write down what we believe is something that we Disciples kinda suck at. So, more later.

Eric

"All the world's forgetting the hate that filled our hearts
The times of selfish reasoning that keeps all apart
This world was meant to share, let them know you care
By making someone's life worth living"
-Kansas, "All the World"

My online commencement address (mostly to my LOHS debaters, but hey, you're welcome too)

2008-05-21T05:24:00.000-07:00

Last night, I attended the high school graduation ceremony at my alma mater, Shawnee Mission South, to watch my kid sister take her final walk. It was a time of discovery not only hopefully for the 400-some graduates, but also for me, as I realized that I still know the SMS school song word for word, even after having not sung it in four years, but that if you asked me what LC's school song was, I'd probably have to resort to telling you that it is "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds."

So, this post simply contains a few nuggets of Eric-wisdom (so they really probably aren't all that wise). In a moment of sentimentality and genuine affection, I'd like to dedicate this partly serious list to my debate kids at Lake Oswego--Ashna, Jeremy, Farryal, Alec, Vinnet, Wayne, Elmer, Marshall, Tom, Schuyler, Eric, and Jason (even though he graduated last year). I still cheer for all of you, and always will. Until any of you runs for political office.

So, what I learned in college...

Going to the campus health center for vaccinations and STI tests is usually okay. Going there when you’re actually sick probably won’t help you and will likely make you worse.

Get to know your professors. A well-written reference from a prof who knows you well is infinitely more valuable than a more generic reference written by a prof who you had for some class and happened to give you an A. On second thought, scratch that. If you follow that particular piece of advice, it might mean you would actually come to me to ask for a reference someday, and I can’t have that.

Only buy used copies of textbooks from the campus bookstore. If the bookstore does not have used copies of the book you need, buy the book online. Better yet, find a library with cheap late fees and just check the book out for the semester. You’ll still probably come out ahead.

When you list your debate achievements on your vita, be clear about what it meant to hold an office on our team (“absolutely nothing,” while potentially accurate, will not suffice). I remember reading the resumes of potential forensics students for LC and when they listed something like, “VP of Social Affairs for the team,” I had to laugh because based on my high school team, I pretty much assume that is code for “VP of Money Laundering and Inappropriate Gift-Giving.” If need be, just ask me to back it up when you come to me with that request for a reference.

Don’t hook up with one of your debate teammates, no matter how hot s/he is or how desperate you are. If and when the two of you break up, it will be super awkward. The best way to avoid this conundrum is to not debate in college, or to debate for a super-Christian school where falling in love with anyone but Jesus is functionally not allowed.

The sooner you realize you’re not in high school anymore, the better—this goes for all aspects of your life, especially your academic work. Four years later, try not to utterly succumb to senioritis, even after you get into two different grad schools with full rides. This is mostly to assuage my conscience after encouraging all of you (especially Ashna) to slack off on everything in life except debate.

Don’t become the jackass who is always drinking alcohol in their facebook pictures. Just…don’t. And if you must be that jackass, at least photoshop the picture to make it classy alcohol.

Get a job—it looks good on your resume, it allows you to not depend entirely on your parents for spending money, it builds discipline and responsibility, and it forces you to fight the anti-social tendency to board yourself up in your dorm room or apartment. But don’t apply for just any job—I took that approach while at LC, and look where it landed me.

If you’re going to grad school, study what you love in undergrad (not all med school students were bio majors as undergrads). You’ll enjoy yourself far more, and your grades will probably be better—which helps you get into a better grad school for all the obvious reasons.

Study abroad. You’ll miss your friends and family in the States, but when is the next time you can drop everything and spend a year in another country? I didn’t study abroad while at Lewis & Clark (because of debate), and a good part of me regrets that. Learn how to say “my hands are greasy, shake my wrist” in as many languages as you can while you still can.

Take your vitamins and eat right. When you’re busting your ass with all-nighters, your body will appreciate having the right nutrition, even if you can’t beat the Freshman 15.

On a similar note, the Freshman 15 isn’t a myth. Neither is the Sophomore 15, the Junior 15, and the Senior 15.

Always be reading something for leisure. And I don’t mean the latest Cosmo.

This will sound kind of cynical, but don’t expect to become best friends with your roommate. If the two of you can tolerate each other’s presence without worrying about being indicted because he sells drugs out of your room, that is good enough.

If you’re applying to grad schools and asking, “Do I want this degree, or do I need it,” get people outside the academy to help you answer that question, lest you spend years chasing an expensive piece of paper that may not improve your employment prospects.

Humanities majors are better than everyone else, if possible, be born inclined to be one.

Avoid like the clap hard liquor that comes in a plastic jug and wine that comes in a box. For most alcohol, moderation will suffice (and should be encouraged). For these types of alcohol, though, I have become in favor of an abstinence-only approach.

Without repeating the myriad of cliches that I heard last night at my sister's commencement ceremony, I will say that big scary world out there isn't as scary when you live in a submarine-like dorm room and are eating at the cafeteria three times a day. It is mildly fun. Enjoy the academy. I know I have.

Cheers,
Eric

Look at the Tears' endorsements for the Oregon Democratic primary

2008-05-10T08:20:00.000-07:00

(Y'know, in case anyone cares.)

For U.S. President: Barack Obama
For U.S. Senate: Jeff Merkley
For U.S. House, 5th District: Kurt Schrader
For Oregon Attorney General: John Kroger
For Oregon Secretary of State: Kate Brown
For Oregon House, 38th District: Chris Garrett
For Portland Mayor: Sam Adams

No matter who you support, make sure you vote regardless! Oregon's primary date is May 20, mail your ballots in by then.

Eric

Oregonians: Vote NO on Measure 51

2008-05-07T12:46:00.000-07:00

(As an aside--I finished my last college coursework when I emailed in my take-home final for the Philosophy of the Environment class...I'm officially done, and I have been ready to be done for most of this semester, really. After I completed my seminar thesis in the fall, this semester felt like mostly downhill)

Registered voters in Oregon should have received their ballots for voting on several state measures and, if they are registered with a political party, that party's primary ballot for presidential and congressional nominees. One of these votes is on a ballot measure, Measure 51, which would amend the Oregon Constitution to afford crime victims certain rights in prosecutions. Which sounds fine in the abstract--crime victims deserve protection from their offenders and assistance in getting their lives back on track. But one of the so-called "rights" that Measure 51 would provide crime victims is the right to REFUSE requests by the defendants for evidence during the discovery phase of trial. Put simply, the victim would be under NO obligation to turn over any evidence uncovered to the defendant. While it is ridiculous enough that the ballot measure would put this decision in the hands of the victim rather than a prosecuting attorney, it would mean that the victim would be Constitutionally protected if they were to simply sit on any discovered exculpatory evidence which would prove the defendant's innocence.

I won't repeat all the platitudes of the right to due process and how a fair trial is critical to American governance (all of which are true). I'm also pretty sure that if this ballot measure passed, it would be ruled unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court on Brady v. Maryland grounds. But even if that were the case (and given the number of right-wing loonies currently sitting on the bench, it is by no means a guarantee), we would still be stuck in the interim with a judicial nightmare, where innocence is no longer presumed and the bar of justice just became far closer to impregnable. In American jurisprudence, we would be that much closer to passivity beneath the head of powerful, vigilante-esque prosecution. A passive population under the strongarm of such "rights" would constitute fascism.

Vote NO on Measure 51.

Eric

On silence

2008-04-24T16:51:00.001-07:00

I think it is interesting that Armenian Holocaust Remembrance Day and the GLBTQ movement's Day of Silence occur on back-to-back days this year--both offer testimony to different forms of silence, and both attempt to co-opt what was once oppression and turn it into tools of liberation.

I've had two term papers due this week and haven't had much time to write poetry like I did for the Remembrance Day like I did last year. So this is going to be a very brief post, but the importance behind today is still worth noting, however brief, in this one corner of the internet's blogosphere.

Eric

April 24: Armenian Holocaust Remembrance Day--in memory of the 1.5 million men, women, and children murdered in a genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire and denied by the Republic of Turkey to this day.

Take, eat, this is my body

2008-04-20T18:55:00.000-07:00

I really should be spending this time finishing up my paper on the evolution (or the "intelligent design," if you're on the Kansas School Board) of Martin Luther's apocalyptic eschatology. Whatever.

For the past several weeks, I've been worshiping at an ELCA church (mainline Lutheran for those of you who are not fluent in the alphabet soup that is the list of modern Protestant denominations these days). This is partly because of the massive generational gap that exists between me and the main Disciples congregation in Southwest Portland (the beautiful sanctuary aside, I felt like I was worshiping in a Bob Evans or at an AARP rally), and partly because worship at the UCC church down the road was about as stupor-inducing as a congressional filibuster. Even though I have been attending services there for a while, today was the first time I went up to receive Holy Communion during the service. A little bit of me felt momentous at this, like any other person taking first communion at a new congregation, except unlike most First Communion recipients, I wasn't eight years old and in a white suit.

One of the reasons I was so hesitant about doing so was because I had a brief try at Lutheran worship before (to be clear, I've never had any desire to leave the Disciples tradition, but there aren't many of us in P-town, so you take what makes you happy...or as a certain esteemed Professor of New Testament might bark at me, "pay your money, take your choice!"). This particular worship, however, which took place almost two years ago, was with a congregation of the decidedly more conservative Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

One of the theological tenets of the LC-MS that I had unwittingly stumbled into was their adherence to what is known as "closed communion," which restricts access to the Sacraments to people who already belong to that particular denomination. My own denomination, the Disciples, isn't terribly big on promulgating theological doctrine in general, but to the extent that we are, one of our core beliefs is that communion be made available to anyone who affirms Jesus (which functionally means that if your ass is in the pew that particular Sunday, you're good to go for Holy Communion). I (rather naively) assumed that since the ELCA practiced open communion, the other Lutheran traditions would as well.

The effect during worship was not only stark, but humiliating. Row by row, the entire congregation, minus me, went up to the altar and formed an enclosed box around it and took communion one by one, while I alone remained in my seat--it was the liturgical equivalent of this (fast forward to 1:15 into it). And even though I realized that the open communion of the ELCA was very different than was practiced by the LC-MS, I was still phobic during the first few services of unwittingly committing some imaginary faux pas that would give away how little stock my denomination puts into floofy statements of doctrinal practice.

Saint Paul writes, "Examine yourselves, and only then eat of the bread and drink of the cup." (1st Corinthians 11:28) He discourages the consumption of the Sacrament in an "unworthy manner," but it is stated that the determination of our own worth to receive it in the first place is up to us as individuals. That many closed-communion denominations use 1 Corinthians in their justifications of that particular practice is troubling given that particular verse. Of course, the Bible contradicts itself in many ways, which is why erring on the side of inclusion is pretty durned spiffy to me.

Whatever concocted benefits there are to closed communion would, I think, be dramatically outweighed by the isolation of someone like me who happened to be visiting the congregation on that particular day. Nearly two years after the fact, that experience still left a bitter mark on an otherwise enjoyable and fulfilling worship experience. The sacred space of a sanctuary was not formed solely for the believers, it was formed for the creation. That label of "creation" belongs to all of us, and ethically, I feel compelled to believe that Holy Communion must be offered to all who approach the table, humbly asking for a piece of bread, a cup of wine, and a fleeting glimpse of divine presence.

Eric

To save a life

2008-04-16T12:49:00.001-07:00

Today, on a 7-2 vote, the United States Supreme Court affirmed the use of lethal injection as a constitutional means of execution in the case Baze v. Rees. Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented. Given that all but one state (Nebraska) uses lethal injection as the primary or only means of capital punishment, a ruling declaring it unconstitutional would have preserved the lives of almost every person on death row for many months, if not years, while states came up with new methods of killing their inmates (or, preferably, did away with the death penalty altogether).

The increased visibility of the inhumane nature of the death penalty has brought some much-needed progress in recent years, including the banning of executing juveniles or the mentally incompetent. Whether we get to a point in this generation, or this lifetime, where we are able to recognize capital punishment for what it is--a statist expression of absolute retributive violence against a helpless person--is unknown.

What I do know, though, is that redemption is not a quality we read about only during Sunday School, or invoke only during the latest political scandal. It is something that is within reach for anyone, even when it otherwise seems impossible to reach for mercy. Redemption is not always easy, nor is mercy, but were we to cling to neither, we would cease to be human. We are unique when we can consciously recognize our ability to exact the most damning of physical punishments upon our own kind, but choose not to. As long as redemption for a condemned person is still possible, it is our nation that requires a different form of redemption--to be redeemed in spite of our complicity in a system that denies mercy for political reasons and invents juridical protocol to artificially obliterate a life. Redemption at this point transcends the individual and can touch an entire people once we recognize that it must be sought for, struggled for, prayed for, and ultimately found...

...if only to save a life.

Not in my name,
Eric

"Because I am involved in (hu)mankind, any man's death diminishes me." -John Donne

A plug for some lucid political commentary

2008-04-10T08:38:00.000-07:00

Travis, one of my former debate coaches here at L&C, has just started a blog called Slouching Toward Denver (a reference to the Democratic National Convention's location this year). Myself and several other L&C debate alums are contributors, and we will probably add some more folks as time goes by. We're pretty staunch Obama supporters, but our purpose is to simply offer some commentary on the prolonged Democratic nomination process this year from at least a mildly intelligent perspective. You should check it out sometime.

And while we're on politics...I think it is hilarious...and kinda disturbing...that a candidate who is running largely on his foreign policy credentials (let's call him John McCain) does not even know the religious affiliation of Al-Qaeda (scroll down to the bottom of the article on that page).

That is all from me for now. Remember, we're America and the evildoers ain't. Protect our freedoms.

I almost typed that with a straight face.

In solidarity,
Eric

An announcement of the greatest kind

2008-04-04T15:53:00.000-07:00

I have decided to matriculate at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley as a Dean's Scholar of the Pacific School of Religion's M.Div. program, starting in the fall of this year.

The GTU is a consortium of nine unique theological schools (three Catholic, four Protestant, one Episcopalian, and one Unitarian Universalist) plus the graduate religion program at UC-Berkeley and the centers for Jewish and Buddhist studies. I'm a GTU student in that my financial aid comes from them, and I can register for any class in the consortium, but within that, I am affiliated as a student with the Pacific School of Religion (which is one of the Protestant schools in the GTU and serves primarily the United Church of Christ, United Methodist, and Disciples of Christ denominations). I was admitted through PSR and will live in their housing, utilize their faculty as my advisors, etc. It is, to highlight my dork factor, roughly analogous to being selected for a particular house in Hogwarts (where the GTU is Hogwarts and PSR is, I dunno, Gryffindor or Ravenclaw), except that instead, the admissions committees make the decisions instead of a wrinkled talking hat. And, as far as I know, PSR does not field a Quidditch team.

I've been pretty sick lately, but am feeling better and am looking forward to the LC Taize services tonight. Am also thrilled that my hometown Kansas City Royals swept the Tigers 3-0 in the first series of baseball season. I always told people that I refused to make New Years resolutions because as a Royals fan, I already had one endless cycle of failure to deal with, but if the Royals keep improving, I may have to come up with different excuses for my lack of interest in making, much less keeping, a New Years resolution.

Eric

A final bow

2008-04-01T08:31:00.000-07:00

I ended my career as a parliamentary debater this weekend at the NPDA national championships at the US Air Force Academy. Scott and I lost on a 3-2 decision in the double octafinal round against Western Washington's Adam and Susan after going 6-2 in prelim rounds. The ovation we received at the awards ceremony was really moving for me, and I was able to leave the activity surrounded by many friends.

The cliche goes, "It takes a village to raise a child," but I also think it takes a community to raise a debater. There are many, many, people worth thanking, some of whom I already mentioned in a post on the net-benefits.net forums. But there are a few others as well...

I might never have become involved in debate if not for my sixth grade teacher, Connie McCormick, and my eighth grade gifted ed teacher, Stan Stern. They introduced me to the basics of interscholastic debate through their own unique curriculum. I've always enjoyed arguing with people, but I was very very hesitant to do so in front of a crowd because of the speech impediment I had grown up with (and which would manifest itself in a number of debate rounds even now). Learning from the two of them helped me to not only overcome that trepidation, but to become entirely hooked on debate. Thank you as well to my debate partner during both years of junior high, Tom Medved. He and I go way back--all the way to first grade--and we had a blast debating with each other.

My high school assistant debate coach Scott Sowers provided tremendous amounts of encouragement to me during my policy debate days, and his guidance and support kept me from burning out in high school (in which case I probably wouldn't have even looked for liberal arts colleges with debate programs and not ended up and Lewis & Clark).

I can't say enough about my high school's director of individual events, Cathy Wood. She encouraged me in so many ways--to compete at three national championships, give a speech at commencement, to even branch out and try interp acting, and to simply make the activity far more fun for me.

Dr. Steve Hunt and the assistant coaches who have taught me at the L&C program (in no particular order: Kyle Hunsicker, Erin Farris, Travis Kennedy, Paul Bingham, Meredith Price, Dane Reinstedt, Nicky Dunbar, Ben Schifman, Ray Utech, Blaine Denton, Lindsay Saperstone, and Andrew Wilson) have made my college debate experience an incredible journey of competitive success, personal emotional growth, and a whole lot of fun.

Finally, my family came out to see me in the last tournament in my debate career, and even though I often spoke too fast for them to understand, they have supported me in this activity for many many years. I thanked y'all during my introduction in the Irish/U.S. debate (which was fun, btw, even though the American team did not quite possess the same charisma and gravitas that our friends across the pond did), but y'all weren't there to hear it, so y'all can read it here instead. Mom, that means your quotient for being mentioned in my blog has been met for at least a little while. :)

Thank you.

Eric

Yet more shameless self-promotion

2008-03-25T15:25:00.000-07:00

As reported by Emily Slavin of Lewis & Clark College Public Relations:

Senior concludes debate career with international challenge

March 25, 2008

Engaging our World

(Portland, Ore.)—Senior Eric Atcheson is one of three students nationwide who will represent the National Parliamentary Debate Association (NPDA) in an annual U.S./Irish debate. Alongside students from Colorado College and the University of Wyoming, Atcheson will take on Ireland’s top three debaters on March 27 at the opening assembly of the NPDA Nationals at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.

Coached by Professor of Communication Steve Hunt, Atcheson and his Lewis & Clark teammate, junior Scott Cheesewright, are ranked 10th nationally. [/end]

The neat thing about this, though, is that if you click here there is an mp3 podcast of an interview where I blather on and on about debate (it's mercifully only about seven minutes long). Especially at the beginning, I sound slightly...um...slow? In my defense, the interview took place at 9 am on a Friday morning. I got nothing else.

Still haven't decided on grad school yet, so people can stop asking. :)

Eric

PS: Happy belated Easter, all you dirty hippies.

"For God so loved the world, He gave His only Son." -John 3:16

Spring Break

2008-03-21T13:30:00.000-07:00

Spring Break is almost here, which has a few implications...

I get to drive out to the beach next week and try not to think about the term paper I have to start writing for my upper-level Reformation class immediately after break.

The NPDA debate championships are hosted at the end of break by the Air Force Academy. Prior to the start of the tournament, Jess Ryan, Adam Kretz, and I will have our exhibition debate against the Irish national team. I also did a podcast with a couple of the PR people from Lewis & Clark. I'll post a link to the podcast once it is put online. My family is also coming out for a couple of days for the tournament.

I finally have some time off after midterms to think about where I want to go for graduate school. It has been a three-way race between Claremont, the GTU, and Chicago for some time now, and I am no closer than I was two weeks ago in making that decision. All three places are offering me substantial funding.

In other news, my man Bill Richardson (whom I supported before he left the race back in early February) has endorsed Barack Obama. I wanted to go to the rally in Portland this morning where Richardson and Obama spoke, but classes kind of got in the way (I've already missed tons of Friday classes this semester for debate, and much as I love my senioritis, I can't miss many more).

Class now.

Eric

NPTE results

2008-03-18T09:08:00.001-07:00

Lewis & Clark AC: 7-5 prelim round record, 1-2 elimination round record. I was 19th speaker, Scott was 25th.

Got my Lutheran Reformation midterm tomorrow, and at some point this week I need to complete my take-home philosophy midterm. So it looks like I'll stay pretty busy right up to spring break.

While I was at the NPTE, one of the PSR faculty from the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley phoned to offer me a Dean's Scholarship, which is 80% of tuition. Combined with the denominational support I would be getting from the Disciples Seminary Foundation, this amounts to a full ride and then some.

Still haven't made a final decision about grad school--I have about three weeks to make it, so I'm going to try to take my time and mull it over. But the Berkeley offer is pretty sweet, not gonna lie.

Eric

"Re-taiiiiiiiiner!" -Scott, trying to explain our answers to a politics disadvantage in a prelim at the NPTE (for those of you who don't get it, watch the movie Good Will Hunting)

Debatin' at the NPTE, take three

2008-03-13T22:29:00.001-07:00

My third and final National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence is this weekend. As always, I'm jittery. This is a far different situation from the previous two years, where I was a relatively low-seeded at-large bid recipient. This time, Scott and I are seeded #7 out of a field of 54 teams, so we actually kinda need to do well this time. :) Aaron, the head coach at the University of Oregon, told me when I was a freshman that "none of it matters until nationals your senior year." So, it's go time. God, that is a cliched saying.

The wise man Apollonair took his disciples to the precipice of a great cliff and commanded them, "Go to the edge!"

But his followers balked, saying, "We can't, it's too high."

So Apollonair asked them again, "Go to the edge."

But his disciples refused, saying, "We can't, we might fall."

Once more, Apollonair demanded of them, "Go to the edge!"

Finally, his disciples crept slowly but surely towards the edge of the cliff. When they could go no further, Apollonair pushed them. They did not fall, and they did not die. But rather, they soared magically and majestically into the heavens.

(Oh, and in case y'all were wondering, Hoda and I took 2nd at the Willamette tournament so long ago...my updating has really sucked lately. That is all.)

Eric

Grad schools update

2008-03-06T07:44:00.000-08:00

In the past week, I got admitted to the M.Div. programs at Claremont and just this morning got the acceptance letter from the University of Chicago, so combined with my acceptances at the Graduate Theological Union's Pacific School of Religion and United Theological, I'm batting 1.000.

This is about the time of year where midterms and debate nationals research start kicking my ass, so my updating may be even sparser than usual until Spring Break.

And please do not mention Ohio, Texas, or Rhode Island to me unless you want me to cry. And then I'll have to hurt you.

Eric

Ryan, Kretz, and Atcheson will debate the Irish national team

2008-02-29T08:46:00.000-08:00

As reported by Brent Northup, Director of Forensics at Carroll College and treasurer of the National Parliamentary Debate Association:

Students from Wyoming, Colorado and Oregon will represent the National Parliamentary Debate Association in the annual Irish/U.S. debate at nationals.

Jess Ryan of the University of Wyoming, Adam Kretz of Colorado College and Eric Atcheson of Lewis & Clark College will debate the three Irish champions on Thursday, March 27 at 4:30 p.m. at the opening assembly at the United States Air Force Academy.

Ireland’s three best debaters, who will be chosen at the Irish Times debate final held in Dublin on Feb. 29, will oppose the Americans.

The students are all top debaters whose lives and contributions extend well beyond forensics.

All three teams are among the top 25 in NPTE’s national rankings, and two are among the top 10. Jess Ryan and partner Tony Roberts are ranked 7th, Atcheson and Scott Cheesewright are 10th while Kretz and Julian Plaza are 21st.

Ryan, 22, is a senior majoring in Communication with a minor in art. Ryan, who has his own pottery studio, has had art honored at Wyoming Art Symposiums. Ryan, who attended Lander Valley High in Lander, Wyo., was invited to the national conference hosted by the National Council on Education of the Ceramic Arts. Ryan is also a river and mountaineering guide and has spent many summers working with kids at summer camps. His supervisors praise him as “conscientious, punctual, reliable, hardworking, and accountable.”

Ryan grew up in an intercultural setting, often “attending sweats on the reservation and dancing in powwows” near Lander. He has respect for other cultures and his family raised two Native American foster children, Ryan’s sisters. His life began with outreach to other cultures, and the Irish debate provides yet another opportunity. Ryan’s roots, in part, trace to Ireland.

Ryan, who is coached by Blake Carothers and Matt Stannard, will stay at Wyoming as an assistant coach next year, after which he intends to attend graduate school in communication. Ryan has won numerous top speaker awards at tournaments such as Claremont Invitational, the Regis swing and Puget Sound’s round robin. He won the Logan Will award as top speaker at the Hatfield debates this year.

"It's a great honor to be chosen to represent the University of Wyoming as well as the American parliamentary community,” says Ryan. “ I hope that I can help make the event enjoyable for everyone and that we can show the Irish what debate in America is all about.”

Kretz, 21, is a political science major and religion minor at Colorado College who sports a 3.88 GPA. Kretz has accepted a yearlong fellowship next year at a Denver nonprofit organization, the Colorado Fiscal Policy Institute, where he will engage in public policy research on the effects of Colorado's financial policies on low-income families, and advocate on behalf of these constituencies before the governor and legislature. Eventually he would like to attend law school, with specific interest in Constitutional and Environmental Law.

Ryan has taught debate, film studies and constitutional law at a Yale summer program. Kretz serves on the Honor Council at Colorado College, which educates students on integrity and mutual trust.

He enjoys the competition but does not see himself “going into a debate like this trying to win a ballot or beat my opponent, but rather to show our greater community that the very best parts of debate are its entertaining, fun and good-natured atmosphere.”

Coached by Scott Weaver, Kretz has won numerous speaker awards and reached the semi-finals at last year’s NPDA national championship.

“I’m thrilled,” says Kretz, who serves as NPDA’s national student representative. “It's an honor to be chosen to debate alongside two of the best debaters and nicest guys in the community, especially in such a prestigious venue in front of our community and friends.”

Atcheson, 22, is a religious studies major and classical studies minor who plans to pursue a Master’s of Divinity degree at Berkeley, Chicago or Claremont, and become a minister. Atcheson’s life has been devoted to helping others in projects such as the Heart of America charity drive and in Kenya where he spent the summer of 2006 doing mission work at HIV/AIDS clinics.

Coached by Steve Hunt, Atcheson and his partner are a top-ranked team with semi-finals or better at tournaments such as Regis and Western Washington. And when Atcheson debated with Hoda Ilias at the Hatfields: same result, a final round. He’s a fine speaker, often recognized such as his second speaker award at Colorado College. He has had success in world-style debate as well, winning a Northwest Worlds event.

"From the very beginning of my parliamentary debate career, I viewed participation in the Irish debates as a tremendous honor,” said Atcheson. “It is a privilege to be offered this opportunity to share the stage not only with the Irish national champions, but also with Adam and Jess. I take a lot of pride in the chance to represent my school and my country in an activity that has meant so much to me for years."

All three debaters have high hopes they can make the debate memorable for those watching.

“I hope that Jess, Eric and I can show that Americans can be just as funny and eloquent as the best Irish debaters,” said Kretz.

"I hope that the audience will be able to share in a fun and educational exchange of ideas and that everyone can take a lot away from the experience,” said Ryan.

Atcheson hopes the debate offers some “new perspectives of the world we live in, as debaters and as students” and he hopes “the games-playing aspect of debate will take a backseat in favor of making sure that this particular debate is ultimately democratic.”

Atcheson also hopes the American’s won’t lose the battle of wits.

“Perhaps we can show that American debaters can be witty and engaging as well, even if we lack the Irish accent," he said.

2008-02-22T10:34:00.001-08:00

My last Willamette Hatfield debates are this weekend, meaning I get to look forward to Steve making fun of me during the senior roasts at the tournament banquet. I'll be debating with our other debate senior, Hoda, so that Scott can debate with his brother, Neil (who ordinarily debates for Regis University).

There should be another fairly big debate-related announcement from me pretty soon. We'll see.

I got admitted to the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley (via the Pacific School of Religion) this week. Still waiting on Claremont and the University of Chicago.

Plenty of stuff happening in the world right now, but I don't have much time to write about it, beyond simply saying, vote Obama!

Eric

"The years teach us much which the days never knew." -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Shades of tragedy, songs of sorrow

2008-02-14T22:21:00.000-08:00

Another campus shooting occurred today--this time at Northern Illinois University. Five souls are dead, including the as-of-yet anonymous gunman, and sixteen more are wounded, including two who are in critical condition.

Already, news articles are writing of the still painful memories of the Virginia Tech shootings from last spring. Already, people are asking when or if this string of shootings will ever stop. Already, the stories, narratives, and words of individuals are painting a portrait of a day where everything stops.

For now, I ask for prayers and thoughts for those whose lives were lost or are still tenuously clinging to existence.

Eric

"It is possible to provide security against other ills, but as far as death is concerned, we live in a city without walls." -Epicurus

Super Tuesday and saving me from Jesus's followers

2008-02-06T08:27:00.001-08:00

Most of the Super Tuesday results are in, and so far, the results are what I expected, but not necessarily what I had hoped. On the GOP side, I had hoped that John McCain would not do as well as he did because (I'll be 100% honest) I am more worried about him than any other GOP candidate come November. I am quite confident that either Clinton or Obama could kick the crap out of Romney or Huckabee, but I am far from confident when it comes to McCain.

On the Democratic side, I had hoped that Obama would be able to more limit his losses in California, New York, and Massachussetts (full disclosure--ever since Bill Richardson dropped out of the race, I've been supporting Obama, as has my dad, mom, and sister, all of whom got to caucus for him yesterday in Kansas). I am now much more concerned about Clinton becoming the nominee because Super Tuesday pretty much confirmed what I had been worried about for a long time--that Clinton can pick up blue states just fine, but when faced with someone who appeals greatly to independents (Obama), she is REALLY really bad at picking up red states--she lost Idaho by 63 points, Alaska by 49, Kansas by 48, and Georgia, Minnesota, and Colorado by 35...and the Democrats will almost certainly need the latter two states if they are to win in November. If there is anyone in this race from either party who can rival or surpass Obama's appeal to the independents, it is John McCain...and after Tuesday's results, I am more or less convinced that a McCain versus Clinton general election is going to be an uphill battle for the Dems, even though it shouldn't have to be.

But then again, that is what my party is good at--making elections difficult when they don't need to be.

I also got a chance to watch a very early pre-screening of the documentary "Jesus, Save Us From Your Followers," which was written and directed by Dan Merchant, a Portland-based independent filmmaker. He seeks to examine why Christianity in America has shifted focus from charity and good works to, for lack of a better term, simply trying to be right about so many political and social issues (ie, why the focus on GLBT rights or rock n' roll instead of caring for the hungry and the dispossessed?). It was a pretty interesting flick, and even though the ending of the movie had too much of a "let's all hold hands and sing kumbahyah" feel, it was still very moving, and I'd recommend it to anyone when it comes out in theaters this June.

Eric

Point Loma results

2008-02-05T09:06:00.000-08:00

At the Loma round robin, Scott and I took 3rd place in our pod after accruing a winning record. Scott was 11th speaker, I was 15th. At the regular tournament, we broke to elimination rounds but were knocked out in double octas.

Also, contingent on where I go to divinity school, I may be choosing to stay involved in the debate community as a graduate coach next year (surprise, surprise). This will likely only be the case if I go to school at Berkeley (I probably have a gig lined up if I go to Claremont), so my availability as a coach is sort of contingent on that. So consider this my shameless plug for...well, myself. I've spent the last two years running a high school debate team and have been on the faculty of a couple local debate camps, so I'd like to think that I have more coaching experience than most first-year-out's.

If you're in the California (specifically the Bay Area) parli community and are interested, or know of a team who might, backchannel me. As Bruce Springsteen sings, you can't start a fire without a spark, and this gun's for hire.

Eric

Western Washington results

2008-01-29T09:05:00.000-08:00

Scott and I took 2nd place at Western Washington's tournament this weekend, and I was 11th speaker. Our finish was pretty remarkable considering that at the start of the tournament on Friday, we were on the verge of withdrawing because Scott had become very sick, likely from food poisoning. But his body ended up bouncing back quickly. Our new junior team of Tyson and Neil did well, making it to semis, and Hannah and Ramya also broke in open but dropped in octas. Our IErs also did well--we picked up a slew of IE awards, and Scott was also awarded 2nd place overall competitor in the region at the end of the tournament (he missed 1st place by one point). Downside to all of this? Because we had to stay for all the elimination rounds, we didn't get back to Portland until 3 am on Monday (which also happened to be Scott's 21st birthday).

Point Loma's tournament is this weekend, and in the meantime, I am almost done with my divinity school applications. They will be done in the next day or so, and about half of them have already been mailed in.

Eric

Happy birthday to me

2008-01-25T08:35:00.000-08:00

My birthday was yesterday. I am now 22. It feels about the same as being 21.

I am about to leave on a roadtrip to Bellingham, Washington, with four other L&C debate teams for the Western Washington tournament. As always, should be fun.

Debate has been looking up lately. Scott and I just earned a first-round bid to the NPTE as well as a bid to the Point Loma national round robin,, which we found out about earlier this month. Both were goals of mine this year (although the Loma bid felt less realistic at the time). It is good to be having a solid year before I say goodbye to the activity as a debater.

Classes started this week. Unfortunately, I'll be missing quite a bit of class at first for Western Washington and Loma. But my profs have generally been forgiving of debate-related absences.

And my divinity school application process is almost done. I've mailed in my applications to United Theological and Berkeley. The University of Chicago's is 99% done. Claremont and Chicago Theological aren't due until Feb 15. All of the essay-writing I've done this month has made me a little kookyboots, though.

Eric

From the shores of Lake Michigan

2008-01-15T11:17:00.000-08:00

I'm blogging from my guest room in the Disciples Divinity House next to the University of Chicago, where I am doing interviews and meetings as a part of my application process to their divinity school.

Between here and my visit to UC-Berkeley and the Berkeley Graduate Theological Union (Chicago and Berkeley having been my #1 and #2 choices respectively for quite some time), I've met a lot of pretty durned amazing people, and have observed and participated in a lot of unique experiences, ranging from receiving a Eucharist of rice cakes and green tea at Berkeley to having a wine-and-cheese party followed by communal dinner at Chicago.

I know that wherever I go, I'll be surrounded by these really neat people. Lewis & Clark has been great for me academically, but I've felt a real disconnect with much of the student population because of the whole me-being-Christian sort of thing (among other factors). I've done the conservative-and-Christian atmosphere in Kansas followed by the liberal-and-secular atmosphere in Portland. I am ready for a liberal-and-Christian atmosphere for wherever I choose to go for divinity school.

So, I've been reflecting a lot about that lately. I don't always like asking God for guidance--not because I don't think She hears me, or because I think He might be wrong, but because in the back of my mind, I've always felt guilty for doing so--for demanding God's attention when there are so many other problems in the world greater than my own issues in choosing a school. But, I guess, in a way, I ask for God's guidance by asking my family and my friends, since it is hard not to see God in many other aspects of the world, including all the people.

PS: Debate has gone well over break. Scott and I had octafinals and quarterfinals showings at the two CSU-Long Beach tournaments, and this past weekend, we made it to semifinals and quarterfinals out of very large fields in the Denver-Mile High set of tournaments.

Eric

Fall Grades

2008-01-02T15:08:00.000-08:00

RELS 451 (Seminar in Early American Religion): B+
HIST 298 (Ancient Rome): B+
CLAS 200 (Classical Studies): A
HIST 141 (Colonial Latin America): A-

Semester GPA: 3.58. For the second semester, I've missed the Dean's List by a one-grade margin (that is, if either of my B+'s were A-'s, I'd be in). Oh well.

Tomorrow, I leave Kansas City for Los Angeles for the Cal State-Long Beach debate swing. Back to Portland for a few days, then to Denver for another debate tournament and then Chicago for divinity school stuff, then back to Portland for the start of the semester on the 16th.

Eric

2008!

2008-01-01T21:57:00.001-08:00

Happy National Hangover Day, everyone.

That is all.

Eric

Merry Christmas, all you dirty hippies

2007-12-24T14:14:00.000-08:00

As I sit on the futon in my family's computer room, listening to Bruce Springsteen sing "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" on my iTunes, I figured I might write a Christmas post which is slightly more substantive than my usual Christmas posts, which have usually amounted to some variation of "Merry Christmas, all you dirty hippies." It is time to change that trend.

That said, I will admit to having believed wholeheartedly in Santa Claus until the age of eight, when I saw my dad inadvertently instructed me to write "To: Mom, From: Santa" on gift tags, unaware that I had still believed in Santa Claus. This, combined with witnessing my mom buy things that later ended up in my stocking ("Santa" was pretty forgetful about removing price tags, too :) ), ensured my graduation from Santa-believer to Santa-skeptic.

This hasn't meant I never think about the idea of Santa, though, especially while I am doing my own Christmas shopping every year. I still have memories of thinking of Santa's factory on the North Pole, staffed by hordes of elves. And this year, when discussing the Santa mythos with my dad, we came to one conclusion: those poor elves need a union.

Neither of us really expect the elves to ever be unionized. Global warming pretty much ensures that Santa will have to relocate his base of operations to somewhere that isn't a sheet of ice, and I imagine the moving expenses will lead him to only using a non-union workforce. But as far as I know, Santa simply gives the gifts away--he has no revenue coming in, meaning no salary for the elves. Santa's and Mrs. Claus's cost-of-living might be explained away on account of some wise T-bill investments that Santa made many years ago, but I can't imagine how all of those elves are able to remain on payroll with nothing coming in.

Given the precedent set this autumn by the Writers Guild of America, I would encourage every Christmas elf at the North Pole to join our nation's entertainment writers on the picket line. The same would go for all the magical reindeer, except I would let the the SPCA handle their legal matters rather than a labor union. Regardless, the forcing of reindeer to pull an obscenely heavy sleigh full of gifts for good little children (while providing no grassland to graze on either...after all, this is the North Pole) is nothing short of taking advantage of eight very special animals, and I fully expect either the Humane Society to file a lawsuit against Santa, or for the Earth Liberation Front to simply chain themselves to Santa's facilities.

Please do not consider this an attempt to sabotage one of the most treasured holiday myths in America. Just think of this as...my final indulgence in the idea that there is a Santa out there, somewhere. Indeed, there probably is a Santa...whose spirit lives in each of us during this time of year. May that spirit live in us always.

And Merry Christmas, all you dirty hippies.

Eric

"For God so loved the world, He gave His only Son." -John 3:16

Wide awake at 2:30 am...

2007-12-19T02:36:00.000-08:00

...and with a final exam tomorrow, of course it makes sense that I would be blogging.

Sorry I haven't been on and blogging much lately. Schoolwork has been a major slog. In the past week, I have:

-Completed and handed in my capstone thesis
-Wrote term papers for my two Classical Studies classes (these first two were all achieved within a span of about five days or so)
-Studied for and took three final exams
-Sold most of my textbooks for a pittance, much of which I promptly blew on sushi and beer
-And neglected grocery shopping (hey, we're all skipping town in the next day or so, c'mon) to the point that I actually started eating croutons out of the bag as a snack food this weekend. It was a pretty sublime bachelor pad moment.

After taking my ancient Rome final tomorrow, it will be time to pack up for the break and hit the last Burger n' Beer night at Tryon that I will be able to enjoy for a few weeks...I'm homeward bound on Thursday. Break plans currently consist of spending two weeks at home with the family, then flying to Los Angeles for the Cal State-Long Beach debate tournament, then briefly returning to Portland for a few days, then flying to Denver for the Mile High debate tournament, and then onto Chicago to visit the U. of Chicago Divinity School, and then finally back to Portland by the 16th of January, in time to take my high school kids to the Glencoe tournament.

I guess this entry is more an update on the mundane happenings of my life than anything else...even though I am awake enough to not be remotely capable of sleeping, I am not mentally coherent enough to spout off on some political or theological rant tonight.

Eric

"The lover of money will not be satisfied with money; nor the lover of wealth with gain." -Ecclesiastes 5:10

Fallen, fallen, is Babylon the great

2007-12-07T03:01:00.000-08:00

Here I am, at 3 am, blogging when I should be thesising or sleeping. Oh well.

Debate has been a mixture of good and bad lately. Good because Scott and I won the WSU-Vancouver tournament on Saturday last weekend, which hopefully keeps us in the running for a first-round bid to the NPTE as well as a bid to the Point Loma National Round Robin. I also took 1st in both impromptu and extemporaneous speaking, and tied with Tess for second overall speaker at the tournament. But also bad because my high school students won't be able to compete at the Westview tournament this weekend because it was cancelled. But good as well because Erik and Marshall won speaker awards at our last two tournaments--Tualatin and Clackamas, respectively.

Totally switching gears into politics once more...according to new, earth-shattering reports (well, maybe not earth-shattering...maybe dirt-shivering), Mitt Romney used a landscape company of some kind to help with his home...and apparently that company had hired illegal immigrants. I used to think that "terrorists" had become the ultimate "other" in the realm of American politics post-9/11. Now...I'm not so sure. It has reached the point that we have created another "other" as well--the illegal immigrant (who, apparently, is always Hispanic...I say, build a fence up north to keep those fucking Canucks from stealing our warm weather and golf carts...but then again, my own great-grandparents who survived the Armenian Holocaust used that route...damn).

My own thesis research on the Book of Revelation has begun to influence my own distaste for otherization. Never a huge fan of it to begin with (otherization that is, not Revelation), the Johannine vision now seems to me an image of what happens when exclusion is met with yet more exclusion--from the condemnation of the Roman Emperor Domitian as a man who entertained delusions of his own divinity to the damnation of Rome itself as the Whore of Babylon, the Revelation is merciless in its majestic, poetic, and yet fearfully violent portrayal of the fall of Rome.

I read it and ask myself, who would dare risk this sort of vitriol? This sort of anger? And all for what--so that we can score political points with jingoistic nationalists? Or do we truly believe in the exclusionary rhetoric of fence-building protectionism? I refuse to believe that there is such a thing as a great Satan roaming God's creation today, but when the great Satan is a Biblical term used to refer to oppressive governments...it might be, just might be, time for the soul of America to emerge from each of us to wonder aloud whether we could find it in ourselves to carve out another space for more of God's people.

Eric

"But when great Satan's gone, the Whore of Babylon, she just can't sustain the pressure where its placed, she caves." -Bright Eyes, "Four Winds"

Shuffling towards God between a capstone defense and a debate tournament

2007-11-29T12:56:00.000-08:00

After pulling two semi-all nighters in a row (awake until 3 am, up again around 6), I presented and defended my capstone thesis paper to my religious studies seminar professor and classmates yesterday. For the most part, I think it went pretty well, especially since I was the first person in my seminar to present.

Scott and I are debating at the Washington State-Vancouver tournament this weekend after having not competed in a month. Whee.

Nick, one of my classical studies professors, spoke briefly in class yesterday about the meaning of the Greek word "Logos," which most of us would translate as "Word" in English. It is what begins the Gospel of John--In the beginning there was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. But Nick also discussed with us the multiple meanings that Logos would have in a Koine Greek context, including "reason" and "thought." Imagine if we were to read John 1:1 as "In the beginning there was the Reason," or, "In the beginning there was the Thought." Obviously, we can't know 100% for sure what authorial intent there was, if any, in order to re-create the motives of the anonymous author of John. But the allegory of the Word is a deeply powerful spiritual symbol in Christianity...we talk about "spreading the Word," and and we view the Bible as the "Word of God," not the Reason or the Thought of God.

But were we to do so, would anything have changed? I don't know. What I do know is that God has the capacity to manifest Himself in ever-changing ways. While God as an embodiment of love is unchanging, I cannot help but imagine a God who visits us as a thought or as a reason and not be drawn to the idea. The manifestations of God are as different and mysterious as we are.

And sometimes, it is the mystery that sustains us.

Eric

"I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another." -John 13:34

Why I might be leaving Facebook

2007-11-25T12:24:00.000-08:00

A quick note to offer prayers for the family of Brooks Simpson, who passed away this weekend from complications of MS. She was the mother of Erin, one of my longtime marching band and Saint Andrew friends, and Brooks was an amazing person in every sense of the word. She and her husband, John, were role models for me in high school, as John would often help out with the South band, and I would see them most every week in church. They once invited me to go with them to the Truman House and the Jazz Museum at 18th and Vine several years ago. What really hits me hardest is the fact that my mom and I were just discussing how she was doing last night on the phone, and it seemed like she had been doing relatively well...before this happened.

And on a less sorrowful note--

Annaleigh, a debate friend of mine from Washburn, posted this on the net-benefits forum last week:

http://albumoftheday.com/facebook/

And...I got pointed to a facebook group by Robyn, an LC friend (which is called "Facebook, Stop Invading my Privacy!"), which offers its concerns about facebook distributing your online purchasing information to other people. Now, while I really don't care if my friends know what I bought them for Christmas, it is still creepy nonetheless.

And the link Annaleigh put up is also really creepy in terms of the purported connections to the government. I'm not generally convinced by the "guilt by association" tactic, but this isn't the first time I've heard people voice concerns over the lack of privacy on facebook.

So, I am considering cancelling my facebook account. If I do, I'll still obviously be accessible through email, AIM, and my blog here at Look at the Tears of the Oppressed.

Just food for thought.

Eric

Tualatin results (for my high school kids)

2007-11-17T22:39:00.000-08:00

Lake O sent a couple of teams to the Tualatin high school tournament. Big result for us was Eric's 3rd place award in open public forum debate.

And to those of you who see the CX cumes from the tournament: I DID NOT SIT OUT IN THE FINAL ROUND, IT WAS A 3-0 DECISION. I REALLY AM A LEGIT JUDGE.

That is all.

Eric

New classes, travel plans, and why I never want to play bridge

2007-11-15T19:49:00.000-08:00

Registration for classes next semester was this week. So far, the schedule for my last semester of undergrad ever (cue sad violin music) looks something like this:

HIST 227 (Medieval Europe 800-1400): MWF 10:20-11:20 am
PHIL 215 (Philosophy of the Environment): MWF 11:30 am-12:30 pm
RELS 373 (Reformation from a Social Perspective): MWF 1:50-2:50 pm
RELS 274 (Islam in the Modern World): TTh 9:40-11:10 am
Aaaaaaand speech and debate: TBA

I'll be flying back to Kansas City on Thursday, December 20, and will be staying for two weeks. Katherine, since I have to leave my car in Portland, I think you should be a nice little sister and give me your car for those two weeks.

Also, venturing into the realm of the ridiculous, take a look at today's New York Times editorial on the treatment of the women on the US national bridge team (yep, we even got a national bridge team). Basically, at a world tournament earlier this week, several women wrote on their menu at the tournament luncheon, "We didn't vote for George Bush" and held it up for people to see. They have since been accused of "treason" and "sedition," (I shit you not, those are actual quotes) and the US Bridge Federation is threatening to suspend them for a year if they do not apologize. While a private organization can obviously make any rules it wants regarding free speech of people who earn money from them, I genuinely doubt that an organization like the USBF that purports to represent the ENTIRE country at world tournaments can genuinely claim similar status. Did we not get over this sort of knee-jerk jingoism with the Dixie Chicks?

I did not vote for George Bush, either. There. In case any organization I belong to wants to sanction me for my lack of patriotism, the damning evidence is right here. You know, to make your job of protecting America easier. Because God knows it is a hard job with all those liberals like me running around and hating freedom.

Eric

Freedom costs a buck oh-five.

Finishing up debate

2007-11-12T14:38:00.000-08:00

We took a bunch of people to compete at Linfield's college tournament this weekend. It went pretty well, we won a couple of IEs with Amy and Olive, plus Alix and Kate won their second JV parli tournament in a row (meaning we need to bump them to open, like, now), and we broke Hannah/Hoda and Ramya/Rachael in open parli, with Ramya getting awarded 1st speaker. I went on Saturday to hang around and help out in prep. It was fun. If you want a funny story, ask me or one of the Western debaters about the grandpa and grandma duo we ran into on Saturday afternoon.

It looks like Steve will be letting Scott and me compete at the Cal State-Long Beach swing the weekend after New Year's, which will be pretty sweet, and the two of us along with Wilson will roadtrip up to Portland afterwards. Hopefully we can clinch a first-round NPTE bid there, but realistically, we may end up on the bubble instead. And then I have just one more semester of this wretched yet beloved activity left in my career.

Sad.

Eric

What liberal media?

2007-11-09T17:01:00.000-08:00

Anyone here remember the front page headlines being made while the Democrats were busy fighting over whether or not the states of Michigan and Florida would be allowed to hold their primaries before the oh-so-meaningful states of Iowa and New Hampshire? (No offense Iowa and New Hampshire, but I never really understood why the two of you were diverse enough to act as an accurate gauge for the party.)

There was a lot of coverage, much of it framed as the Democrats being the typical disorganized party we usually are, busily shooting ourselves in both feet rather than take advantage of the fact that the White House is pretty much ours for the taking next year. This was especially true in the immediate aftermath of the declaration that Michigan and Florida would not have their delegates invited to Democratic National Convention.

Well, buried deep in the national news section of today's New York Times, taking up one-third of a quarter page at the bottom, was an Associated Press account of how the GOP is punishing their own state parties who are taking the same steps of trying to usurp Iowa and New Hampshire in the primaries hierarchy. How are the Republicans punishing their state parties, you might ask? By refusing to seat half of their delegates at their own convention. Sounds kind of like what the Democrats did, y'know.

But how much press coverage did this receive? Very little. And how much of it was framed as though the Republican central command couldn't find its way out of a wet paper bag without a flashlight and bread crumbs? None. Was this fair and balanced? I report, you decide.

Eric

"I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat." -Will Rogers

Silverton, solitude, and a Song for America

2007-11-03T22:25:00.000-07:00

Three of my Lake Oswego debate teams competed at the Silverton fall tournament today. We did quite well...Wayne was 2nd speaker, Ashna 3rd, plus Wayne and Tom (for whom this was his first debate tournament ever) took 1st in senior public debate.

My girlfriend Emilie recently wrote about Darfur becoming the new China in various veins of conversation. It was an interesting comparison to make on many different levels, given the plight of Tibetans, Uighurs, and other minorities within China to live peacefully. Much of my anger in the genocide debate currently simmers over Turkish-American relations and the Armenian genocide recognition resolution in the House of Representatives...but I (nor anyone, I think) cannot forget for a second the first genocide of the 21st century in Darfur. To do so is to sacrifice part of our souls for the sake of ignorance...to essentially get rid of our headache by cutting off our own heads. And from the rebels in Darfur to the Buddhist monks of Burma to the oppressed masses of Zimbabwe, all pounding on the doors of international compassion, begging to be let in, it is hard for me not to feel alone. Alone that in spite of the awareness and focus of many of my own peers, I wonder when we as a people will say, "Never again" and ever mean it.

In reflecting on and struggling with this destruction, I've spent a lot of time listening to pre-1982 Kansas (for those who don't know, this band is one of the few good things to ever come out of my home state). Previously, I mostly listened to Kansas because of the mixture of spiritualities within their lyrics, influenced by eastern religions, deism, and eventually even born-again Christianity. But within a fair amount of their early material exists powerful condemnations of America's collective inability to sanctify creation--not only people, but the earth as well. And I cannot help but wonder how much the two are inextricably intertwined. Until we preserve the earth we live in, will we ever act the same towards human life?

Or is it the other way around?

Or is it either way at all?

Eric

"Highways scar the mountainsides, buildings to the sky
People all around
Houses stand in endless rows, sea to shining sea
People all around
So we rule this land, and here we stand
Upon our paradise
Dreaming of a place, our weary race is ready to arise"
-Kansas, "Song for America"

Colorado College news

2007-10-29T01:09:00.000-07:00

Scott and I went 4-2 at CC's tournament and made it to quarters before losing to Air Force (who ended up winning the whole enchilada). Scott was 5th speaker, I was 2nd. I also somehow made it to semifinals in impromptu.

Our IErs also did well, with all of them breaking to semis or finals in at least one event.

And the Red Sox swept the durned Rockies in the World Series. Hah.

Sleep now.

Eric

"The price of liberty is eternal vigilance." -Thomas Jefferson (the semifinals impromptu quote that I utterly crashed and burned on)

Colorado...in debate and in baseball

2007-10-23T23:21:00.001-07:00

Taking another break from paper-writing to screw around on my blog...

Scott and I (along with Cassie, Tess, and Kee-lay) leave for the Colorado College tournament on Thursday. It has always been one of my favorite tournaments to compete at for a variety of reasons, ranging from the restaurants Kyle discovers to Konrad Hack's sock puppets. I'm really looking forward to it.

Of course, the REAL reason I am going to Colorado is to sabotage those evil Rockies as they do battle with my beloved Red Sox in the World Series. I don't know for sure yet what this sabotage will involve, but I imagine it will involve telling the Rockies players that their mothers were hamsters and that their fathers smelt of elderberries. But I think the Red Sox have it in them to win over anyone in this World Series--even Rudy Giuliani, a self-professed Yanks fan, is behind the Sox.

One other thing that I think is kind of neat are the wagers that the politicians from the different World Series state and local governments place on the outcome...in part because it is just kinda funny, but also because in many instances, the food that is won from these bets goes to charity. Which I realize is probably done in the name of good PR, but it also reassures the grumpy cynical part of me that sports, with its multimillionaire athletes and drugs and other negativity, can also be the source of positive humanitarianism, if only within a tiny microcosmic sphere.

Eric

"After the game, both king and pawn are returned to the same box." -Italian proverb

Apparating out of the closet

2007-10-20T19:50:00.000-07:00

So it turns out that Albus Dumbledore, the Hogwarts headmaster in Harry Potter world, is gay. Badass.

This is actually pretty interesting, if you buy into some of the literary analysis that has been made about Dumbledore's role in the series as a God-like figure (for instance, the analogy of Book 2's battle in the Chamber of Secrets has been made to Christianity...Harry fills the role of humankind, Fawkes acts as Christ the Son, the Sword of Gryffindor is the Holy Spirit, and Dumbledore is, of course, God the Creator).

This is also an interesting game if you're at all familiar with the 2008 presidential race. It is also strangely addictive...and it is still only in the beta phase.

Tonight is the LC Homecoming Dance. So, naturally, I am not there. My distaste for school dances in any capacity stems all the way back to my freshman year of high school, where I lasted all of twenty minutes at South's Homecoming. Part of that was likely due to how introverted I was then, but part of it was also probably because after eating six slices of the free pizza at the dance, I didn't exactly feel up to dancing.

Eric

"Wisdom is vindicated by all her children." -Luke 7:35

Let's try again...

2007-10-17T10:26:00.001-07:00

You can find Nicholas von Hoffman's column here: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071029/howl

An open letter to The Nation

2007-10-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

Dear The Nation,

It's sad, really. I always loved reading your little rag. It was so liberal, so progressive, so willing to call bullshit on whatever pipe dream the White House's current occupant happened to concoct at the time.

But not so much anymore. Or, at least, not after your publication of Nicholas von Hoffman's racist tirade on your website. Yep, I'm playing the race card. The entire column, aside from being an incoherent sarcastic rant about an incredibly emotional subject, is subtly pro-genocide denial, which in mine eyes is little more than hate speech.

Go to where Mr. von Hoffman writes, "What's next? A resolution condemning Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the slaughter visited on the Egyptians at the Battle of the Pyramids? And how about a little legislative attention for the Romans killed by Hannibal at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC. Better look into that one, too, guys."

The argument that the Turks and Armenians were at war with one another is one of the most often trotted-out assertions the Turkish government offers in its vain refusal to label the Armenian Holocaust a genocide. The counterexamples that Mr. von Hoffman offers are battles as well--the Battle of Cannae was a Hannibalic victory over a massive Roman army because of strategic errors by Roman commanders (or so my classical studies professors all tell me...they might be onto something). Napoleon committed a lot of human rights atrocities in Egypt, but his military battles were likewise often aimed at military targets--in particular the mamelukes that Saracen armies had fielded for centuries until that point. Furthermore, both examples lack the systematic use of government resources to use railways, concentration camps, and paramilitary thugs to execute a genocide against an entire people.

Here's the problem--by comparing the Armenian Holocaust to MILITARY battles, Mr. von Hoffman is lending subtle/not-so-subtle credence to the denialist argument that Armenians and Turks were warring with each other. This argument is false in almost every respect--the few Armenians who took up arms against Turkey in World War I were either mercenaries for Russia (meaning they were fighting under the Russian flag and were doing so for pragmatic reasons) or were resisting the extermination efforts of the Ottoman government, much in the same way that Jewish resistance occurred during the Jewish Holocaust of World War II. Additionally, the Armenians didn't exactly have any military targets because the Ottoman government confiscated all our arms near the start of the First World War. And even if you were to indulge these delusions and pretend that we did have military installments worth attacking, marching grandparents, women, and children into the Syrian desert hardly seems like a battle in any sort of conventional sense. In short, likening the Armenian Holocaust to a military battle only lends credence to the denial movement--and just as denial of the Jewish Holocaust is rightly considered reprehensible hate speech, so too should denial of the Armenian Holocaust.

Mr. von Hoffman's point that the Armenian Holocaust happened almost a century ago does nothing for him--if anything, it underlines the moral imperative we face to take action now, before the very last of the Armenian Holocaust survivors pass away.

It is also laughable that Mr. von Hoffman paints the Turkish voice as not having a "countervailing...lobby exist[ing] in California." California aside, the Turkish government has incredibly powerful lobbyists on its side, including the former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt, whose firm is paid $1.2 million a year by the Turkish government to lobby for genocide denial (check out the July 26 issue of The New Republic if you think I am making any of this up). The Turkish government does not lack for a voice in American politics, as is evidenced by the mass exodus of cosponsors for House Resolution 106, the symbolic genocide-affirming resolution that kicked off this whole shitstorm in the first place.

Finally, the underlying tone of Mr. von Hoffman's (and others') argument is that we should give Turkey a free pass on genocide denial because of how useful they are to us now. Way to lack REAL moral courage, folks. Lost in Mr. von Hoffman's rant is any concern for people who suffer now as a result of Turkey's denial, such as the people indicted and/or convicted under Article 301 of the Turkish penal code for "insulting Turkishness" by affirming the Armenian Holocaust as genocide (included in this group of people is Elif Shafak, who was NINE MONTHS PREGNANT when her trial occurred). This is not, as Mr. von Hoffman would have anyone believe, something that solely happened in the shadowy recesses of history. It affects us in the here and now.

Adolf Hitler, when trying to convince his generals that his reprehensible plans for Poland would succeed, was reputed to have said, "Who, after all, still speaks of the extermination of the Armenians?" If Mr. von Hoffman and his ilk have their way, the answer is...not very many.

The Nation, I'm sort of at a loss here. Like I said at the beginning, I truly enjoy reading you. But it is really difficult for me to continue doing so with the knowledge that you lend a pedestal to what amounts to hate speech and racist invective. So, we may need to take a break from our relationship, you know? I might try dating other leftist alternative newspapers and see what happens. Who knows, I might fall in love eventually. Or I may come crying back to you. Either way, I suppose we'll see.

Good-bye for now, and a sincere "fuck you,"
Eric Atcheson

L&C tournament news

2007-10-14T18:54:00.000-07:00

Scott and I went 4-2 in prelims, enough to qualify for today's elimination rounds. We byed through the double octas round, defeated our friends from Cal-Berkeley in octas, and lost in quarters to two random bums from Oregon whom I had never met before...haha. And for a change of pace, neither Scott or I received speaker awards, although Derek from UPS (who was running debate tab) told me I had finished as 21st speaker (only the top 20 get recognized at awards, so I missed out on a Derek-bestowed nickname). We were the only LC team to break to elim rounds.

Our IErs did quite well, including Scott, who won both extemp and impromptu speaking.

The tournament party (and subsequent "auctioning") of our first-years was a lot of fun.

Homework time now.

Eric

What would Freud say about grocery shopping?

2007-10-09T23:39:00.000-07:00

My senior paper proposal is done, my Latin American history quiz has been survived, and for all intents and purposes, fall break has arrived.

Well, kind of. As always, instead of kicking back and relaxing for fall break, I, along with almost everyone on the LC forensics team, get to compete at our annual Pioneer invitational tournament. And it will be my last one...As always, am debating with Cheese, plus I am REALLY branching out and doing impromptu speaking as well (which I am even taking seriously, unlike a lot of debaters who screw around in impromptu). For those of you who care (and you should ALL care), the LC team will be hosting our usual tournament party on Saturday night. Details forthcoming (or just email me if you want 'em).

Some of my high school kids competed at the Sam Barlow tournament over the past weekend. It was fun, but it was a large and brutal tournament, and everyone learned a lot. Yeah.

Amy and my other friends who are psych majors can probably read more into this than I can, but I've begun to notice that I find going grocery shopping after a long day of classes and essay writing to be incredibly relaxing. There is something about being surrounded by food, mindlessly pushing a shopping cart while searching for my favorite alfredo sauce that is a very relaxing influence on me. I even become happy inside when I can buy most of what I need either on sale or with coupons. I wonder if I am turning into my dad already.

I'm also pretty sleep deprived right now, in case that last paragraph didn't already give that away.

Eric

"Be the change you wish to see in the world." -Gandhi

Playing politics on the Washington D.C. playground

2007-10-03T09:43:00.000-07:00

The current occupant of the White House just vetoed the State Childrens Health Insurance Program bill that would expand health insurance coverage to a total of almost ten million low-income kids. Atta boy, Prez. We spend billions of dollars on weapons to create a death shower in the Middle East, but when poverty-stricken kids need health care, all of the sudden you become a fiscal conservative again. (On a far more trivial level, this also means that the politics disad that Scott and I ran for the Reed and Claremont tournaments is now nearly obsolete...we all saw the veto coming from a mile away on this SCHIP funding, but it still really bothers me.)

I've been perpetually sick since the first day of Claremont, but I think I am finally improving for good at this point.

I've finally started work on my senior thesis paper proposal. In a nutshell, what I plan to do is analyze the usage of visionary and apocalyptic rhetoric to describe the 1893 World's Fair of Chicago. The World's Fair was continually described as a "New Jerusalem," and was characterized in the divine attributes of the ancient Greek deities, and my intent is to demonstrate the links between the rhetoric used and the Biblical verses the rhetoric corresponds to as a means of exploring the religious motivations of the white upper middle-class who utilized these characterizations.

And I found out that the Oreo pizza that Domino's makes is, while appearing sweet and succulent on the surface, is a little disturbing to consider eating.

Eric

"Experience is the art of seeing the invisible." -Antoine Saint-Exupery

Claremont updates, take two

2007-09-30T23:39:00.000-07:00

Scott and I went 7-1 in preliminary rounds at Claremont, dropping only to Cal State-Long Beach in the 8th and final prelim--which was our first prelim loss all season (putting us at 13-1 so far, since the round robin doesn't count towards standings). We dropped on a 2-1 in octafinals, though. I was 8th speaker (out of 130+ debaters at the tournament), and Scott was 16th speaker.

Lots of funny stories ensued from this weekend, many of which involved either Ben's complete and utter lack of navigation skills or Scott setting off the hotel smoke detector by trying to use a space heater to dry himself off after a shower.

Insert your own jokes.

Eric

Claremont updates, take one

2007-09-29T22:50:00.000-07:00

Sorry to go from "Reed updates" to "Claremont updates" without talking about my non-debate life, but my non-debate life has been so busy that I didn't have time to update between tournaments this week.

At the Claremont invitational, Scott and I are 6-0 so far, with two more preliminary rounds and all outrounds tomorrow. Whee.

The national round robin went okay. Scott and I finished, I think, third in our pod, which isn't bad. It was my first, and probably only, round robin that I participated in, so it was a great experience for me.

More updates tomorrow.

Peace,
Eric

"When you reach the top, keep climbing." -Tibetan proverb

Reed updates, part deux

2007-09-23T21:36:00.000-07:00

Scott and I byed through doubles, won our octafinals and quarterfinals rounds on 3-0 decisions, won semis on a 2-1, and lost in finals to take 2nd place. Scott was 7th speaker, I was 12th. For our efforts, we took home really cool shot glasses emblazoned with the Reed seal and motto of "Atheism, Communism, and Free Love."

In a similar result, our novice team of Nico and Ben also made it to junior-division finals but lost as well. So LC took 2nd place in both divisions. Not bad for the first tournament of the year.

Eric

Really tired right now, so no quote. Sorry.

2007-09-22T22:47:00.000-07:00

Scott and I went 6-0 in preliminary rounds at Reed, making us the #1 seed going into elimination rounds. Two of our novices, Ben and Nico, went 5-1 in the junior division and are the top seed going into their division's outrounds as well. Unfortunately, we were the only LC teams to break to elimination rounds.

More updates tomorrow.

Eric

"When I go to the gym, I don't work out to create new muscles, I work out to strengthen existing muscles!" -Scott, explaining a topicality debate to Aaron Donaldson in round today

Reflections on Reed

2007-09-21T11:02:00.001-07:00

Last season of my debate career starts tomorrow, and I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. The Reed tournament is, for me, a sentimental and significant tournament in part because it will probably be, except for LC's own invitational, the only tournament I competed at all four years of my college debate career. It has also been one of my favorites because it uses topic areas, mutually preferred judging, has awesome awards (like frisbees and t-shirts with their school motto of "Atheism, Communism, and Free Love," emblazoned on them), and historically, I've done well there (semis last year, quarters and a speaker award my sophomore year). And I feel a little bad for Jim, the tournament director there, because he usually gets bombared by a bunch of inane questions from me because I'm the type of person who obsesses over whatever the first tournament of the year happens to be. But it will be a little sad to say goodbye to the Reed tournament.

L&C will be sending five teams in open division (our equivalent of varsity) and two teams in novice. Our sixth open team, Hannah and Alix, had to withdraw after Alix has become very very ill.

Smart Cheese and I will be there...and in all likelihood, in completely opposite mental states. Cheese will just be waking up from his slumber before his first speech of the tournament, while I'll be hyper-alert thanks to the adrenaline kick that I get like clockwork at every debate tournament I've been to since my sophomore year of high school.

Eric

"Can you smell that? There's tournament in the air..." -Kee-lay

Occupational hazards aboound

2007-09-19T19:00:00.000-07:00

My LC friends Amy and Jessica both took this goofy little 40-question career test (they put the link on their blogs, I think, and I'm too lazy to put it here...plus I really should be doing my reading for my Ancient Rome test tomorrow). I am not a big believer in these tests to provide any sort of an accurate answer, but they can be fun for entertaining purposes...and, dare I say, my top ten career choices" results were rather fun...

1. Anthropologist (no, not really...all the freaking SOAN majors running around LC pretty much turned me off from that :) )

2. Social worker (not for me...although ironically, my mom does hold a master's in social work, which she got a few years before I was born)

3. Addictions counselor (anyone who knows me knows I'd probably be the worst addiction counselor ever...I'd be like, oh, you drank again last night? What brand of beer was it? Was it good? It was? Was it on sale? Oh, it was? Where can I buy some?)

4. Profesor (now we're talking. Although to become a full professor (ie, get my doctorate) in religious studies would require learning Hebrew at the very least, and probably Latin, Coptic, Aramaic, and German as well. No thanks.)

5. Clergy (professor might be my #2 career option, but this has been #1 for some time now)

6. Occupational therapist (just so long as I don't end up like that hypnotherapist on Office Space)

7. Sports psychology consultant (no and no)

8. Psychology (see "anthropologist")

9. Art/Music therapist (maybe I could combine "occupational therapist" with this one somehow and make a killing)

10. Speech/Language pathologist (very interesting choice, especially since I grew up with a speech impediment)

Other interesting occupations that popped up on my list...

15. Historian (because millions of dead white men can't be wrong)

17. Computer trainer (how does one "train" a computer? Swat it with a newspaper when it pees on my desk?)

18. Cartoonist (I retired from that occupation at the ripe old age of 13)

22. Tour guide (hey, it's show biz, right?)

24. Fashion designer (hahahahahahahaha)

26. Dental assistant (At least I get to wear those pajama-like clothes to work)

28-31 in order: Special Ed teacher, high school teacher, elementary school teacher, teaching assistant (figured these would be higher on the list, but neat how they're all right in a row)

32. Mental health nurse (But only if all my patients look like Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind)

34. Podiatrist (I don't even know where to begin in cracking jokes about this one...)

40. Marriage Therapist (Somehow I get the feeling I'd lack the patience with this particular clientele.)

Eric

"God writes a lot of comedy... the trouble is, he's stuck with so many bad actors who don't know how to play funny." -Garrison Keillor