If you’re following this story, Philocrites has a good update.
Category Archives: Asides
Who’s the greenest of them all? (Cities!)
Writing for the BBC, U.S. landscape architect Martha Schwartz states that the current focus on green building ignores the fact that we need a holistic approach to sustainable design. She suggests that we should focus more on well-designed cities than on individual buildings, because “the most sustainable form of human habitation is the city…. Encouraging people to live side by side more closely will help the local ecology to flourish, because the community can utilise superior water stations and sewage treatment plants, as well as improving electricity consumption patterns.” Link.
I’d be willing to bet that if you take a holistic point of view, you’d find that a LEEDS certified building that is erected in a greenfields development on the site of a former farm harms the environment far more than a conventional building in the middle of a city….
Phragwrites
Yup, you can now get a pen made out of the invasive strain of Phragmites or Common Reed, a plant which is choking out wetlands in North America. The Phragwrites pen has a body made from Phragmites reed legally harvested in New Hampshire (legally harvested means a permit was obtained, and seeds or roots were not dispersed to infest new areas). But… we’ll have to buy lots of pens to make a real dent on the Phragmites population. Via.
Sheep look up
More and more, we are hearing about an emerging world-wide food crisis. Blogger “A.” at Mundane SF has a good set of links on this crisis, including (best of all) an interactive map. Overpopulation + end of peak oil = food crisis + pollution. This should not be a surprise, right?
Photos of churches
The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) of the Library of Congress includes some photos and drawings of historic churches. The Historic American Buildings Survey produced many drawings and some photos of churches, and I found some rarities, e.g., drawings of the Marion, Mass., Universalist church. There are also many glass negatives from the Detroit Publishing Co., c.1900-1910, including quite a few churches. Great search engine allows easy searching; hi-res digital files for downloading.
Church Web sites
Nice article on administering church Web sites on the Alban Institute Web site: Link. The article identifies three main audiences for church Web sites, and discusses how to avoid the extremes of selling your church on the one hand, and ignoring the Web site on the other hand. Worth reading. (Via Bob Kelley, BCD Webmaster.)
UU professorship announced
Harvard Divinity School has announced the appointment of the first scholar to the Ralph Waldo Emerson Unitarian Universalist Association Chair of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School. Daniel Patrick McKanan, author of the forthcoming Prophetic Encounters: The Religious Left in American History (to be published by Beacon Press), will leave the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota, to go to Harvard Divinity School. It’s nice to have an endowed chair in UU studies at a theological school that produces lots of UU ministers. Link to press release. Via.
Joke
What do you get when you cross a televangelist with a Unitarian Universalist?
A television show that demands money from you for no particular reason.
Rainy day
Walking five blocks to the post office left me soaked to my underwear. Puddles several inches deep. Runoff pouring down the street. If April showers bring May flowers, this should be a bumper year for flowers.