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3 minutes and 45 seconds.  That’s the time it took from the moment the tones went off at station 10 to the moment the fire truck pulled up to the front of a home in northeast Salem. Another 8 minutes or so later, and the patient had been loaded into the back of an ambulance, and was being transported to a nearby hospital. That’s considered an above-average response time by the Salem Fire Department, who has a target response time of 5 minutes and 30 seconds for 85% of the calls within the city limits. When you dial 911, a call-taker has recorded your information — address, nature of the emergency, symptoms, age, gender, and any other relevant information — and passed that on to a dispatcher (both of whom work off-site). The dispatcher sends out tones to— or “taps out” — the appropriate apparatus; the lights in the hallways that are otherwise left off suddenly come on, and an automated voice comes over the station loudspeaker, stating the apparatus to respond, the type of emergency, and

The messes we leave tell a story about us.  Lego pieces and barbie dolls scattered across the family room floor are the happy remainders of a day well-spent in play. Pieces of Scotch Tape left stuck to the ceiling perhaps held balloons and streamers for a child's birthday party.  The baked-on crud left on the oven rack might have been the spillover from a casserole hastily thrown in the oven on a busy school night. The smudges on the wall and the stains randomly scattered in cupboards or on baseboards are proof of life. The thin layer of dust on the top of your cabinets is --well, never mind what it actually is , but this too is evidence that your home is a place humming with activity. Granted, most of us don't hold such a romanticized view of dirt, and grime, and grease. And neither should we. Left alone, a house or an office that is given a pass on cleaning day will grow, quite literally, into a place that is not just unattractive, but actually uninhabitable and even tox

Yesterday , I shared some of my observations that I've drawn over the last three months as I've been reading and reflection on the meaning of culture. I focused there mainly on how we as Christians should think about culture -- what is it, and how we ought to view view culture as faith-neutral, but fallen. Today, I want to summarize what we ought to do about that. If culture is our shared story of meaning, what role might a Christian have in the public realm? If culture is faith-neutral, but fallen, how can Christians play a meaningful role in telling and shaping this story? Christians Should Think in Terms of Influence Rather Than Transformation:  After describing four possible options for the relationship between Christ (read "Christians") and culture, Richard   Niebuhr moved on to his fifth option, "Christ Transforming culture." Although he himself did not formally tie himself to any one approach, most readers agree that this was his preferred option. C

"Culture is not only what we live by. It is also, in great measure, what we live for. Affection, relationship, memory, kinship, place, community, emotional fulfillment, intellectual enjoyment, a sense of ultimate meaning." -- Terry Eagleton Mission accomplished...sort of.  That's how I'm feeling as I wind down a three month Sabbatical. I had set out this three months wanting to learn more about how faith and culture come together in everyday life -- and to that end, this was a very fruitful summer. I read a lot, wrote some, observed different people in their everyday work, and had a lot of fun doing it. Yet I can't help but feeling that I've barely scratched the surface -- some thoughts and ideas have settled into my mind quite nicely, but there other topics under this umbrella where I feel I've barely scratched the surface (though I think that's the best possible place to be -- lots of room for new discovery and learning!). So what have I learned?

"You can see...they are hungry for fun." My friend shared this observation with me last week, as gave me a tour on the Indonesian island of Timor. I was on a two-week teaching trip that included time in both India and in Indonesia -- as well as short visits to numerous airports in other countries around Asia and Australia. Tapping the riches of any culture takes a lifetime, and so one short week in any one place is hardly enough time to begin scratching the surface of understanding a culture, but it is a valuable exercise nonetheless. I've made the case here that "culture" is essentially the shared story that we tell. It's the way that a group of people (however localized or expansive that group may be) expresses what matters, what has purpose, what is right, and what is wrong. If that's the case, then visiting another culture is a lot like listening to a story other than our own. If we pay attention to the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes

"We can at any rate say that beauty arouses a hunger and a longing which is never satisfied in this world." -- J.B. Phillips Our living room played host to an art show last week. It was a modest affair by the standards of the art world, but a worthwhile show nonetheless. Back in May, our youngest daughter -- a budding artist  herself-- sent out a call for artistic submissions to each of her family members, in anticipation of her first annual art show. Unfortunately, the timing was bad -- and this meant that her art show -- originally scheduled for June 1 -- had to be pushed back a few weeks, to just last week. That allowed time for each member of our family to create something -- a painting, a series of photographs, a drawing, or a collage. Kara opened the show with a short presentation on the importance of art: "Art is important because it is a way we can make something beautiful," she explained. Each participant then had the opportunity to share their piece, a