Catch-Up Blogging

We aren't still sick. I just haven't been getting much computer time. Aside from lingering coughs, which, as of today, seem to be going away, the kids are over their nasty whatever-it-was.

My book group met on Tuesday, and I had all but seven pages of the book (Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer)finished by the time we started discussing (I was still madly reading while the other ladies were having coffee and dessert). Aside from one lady, who is new to the group and who read the book completely in Spanish and most of it again in English (she is from South America and doesn't speak English very well), no one else finished the book. Most of them claimed to like it, though, and said they planned to finish it at some point. Anyway, we had a very interesting discussion. A couple of the women said they had read his Letters and Papers from Prison, and that that was an easier read, so I may look for that. The editors' "afterward," which I didn't read until today, had some interesting information about parts of the book where Bonhoeffer was addressing specific problems of the church in Hitler's Germany. I also liked the part they included of a catechism lesson that Bonhoeffer wrote, where is says,

(Student) "Matthew 5:39 seems to say that accepting the commandment to love our neighbor implies refraining from all resistance against evil."

(Teacher) "Love's intention is to overcome evil.... Where has the commandment of the Sermon on the Mount reached its limit?"

(Student) "It has reached the limit wherever its fulfillment does not overcome but instead strengthens evil."

Sounds good to me, and also answered my question about how Bonhoeffer, who argued so strongly in Discipleship for the power of a loving response to overcome evil, became involved in a plot to kill Hitler, and I wish I'd read it before the meeting, as the other women were all reading a different edition which didn't have the afterward. We are reading All Creatures Great and Small next, which I absolutely love and which has no footnotes at all!

We made our gingerbread houses today to bring to the library tomorrow for The Contest. T. finished his first. You can definitely see the influence of living through hurricanes Frances and Jeanne, especially on his roof shingles. All he is missing is a blue tarp. Ed and K. worked on theirs 'til late. Aren't they artistic?

(Yes. That is icing all over her nose and in her hair. She throws herself into her work.)(K.'s house.)(Ed's house. Isn't his landscaping nice?)