Back River - Veterans Day weekend 2014

Jesus and the Modern Man - James Carroll - NYTimes.com

Reading the Gospels with fresh eyes - to reject the anti-Jewish vision of Jesus who taught no such thing.  - gwc

Jesus and the Modern Man - NYTimes.com

by James Carroll

[I]n addition to intellectual barriers, there are moral obstacles to faith in Jesus, too — not just the blatant sins of the church like sex abuse or misogyny, but also sacrosanct core traditions of Christianity that turn out to be grotesque distortions of who Jesus was.

Chief among these is the way in which the full and permanent Jewishness of Jesus was forgotten, so much so that his story is told in the Gospels themselves as a story of Jesus against the Jews, as if he were not one of them. Against the way Christians often remember it, Jesus did not proclaim a New Testament God of love against an Old Testament God of judgment (which girds the anti-Jewish bipolarity of grace versus law; generosity versus greed; mercy versus revenge). Rather, as a Shema-reciting son of Israel, he proclaimed the one God, whose judgment comes as love.

Imagined as a zealot who attacked the Temple, Jesus, on the contrary, surely revered the Temple, along with his fellow Jews. If, as scholars assume, he caused a disturbance there, it was almost certainly in defense of the place, not in opposition to it. The narrative denouement of this conflicted misremembering occurred in the 20th century, when the anti-Semitism of Nazism laid bare the ultimate meaning of the church’s religious anti-Judaism.

The horrified reckoning after the Holocaust was the beginning of the Christian reform that remains the church’s unfinished moral imperative to this day.

Most emphatically, that reform must be centered in a critical rereading of the Gospel texts, so that the misremembered anti-Jewish Jesus can give way to the man as he was, and to the God whom he makes present in the lives of all who cannot stop seeing more than is before their eyes.

Such retrieval of the centrality of Jesus can restore a long-lost simplicity of faith, which makes Catholic identity — or the faith of any other church — only a means to a larger communion not just with fellow Jesus people, but with humans everywhere. All dogmas, ordinances and accretions of tradition must be measured against the example of the man who, acting wholly as a son of Israel, eschewed power, exuded kindness, pointed to one whom he called Father, and invited those bent over in the shadowy back to come forward to his table.

It was the table, I suddenly recall, that brought me here in the first place. The lights come up, the people arrive, and I stand.

James Carroll is the author, most recently, of “Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age.”

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Denver to Durango - Jim, Barbara, and Bono on the Denver Trail

Jim, Barbara, and Irish rocker Bono's 4-legged namesake hiked the Denver Trail - 485 miles from Denver to Durango this past summer.  Below are a few shots.  HERE is the album.

12,050 approaching the end of the high ground.
It was downhill from here

Because it's there I guess

Best Of Colorado - James Cunningham - Picasa Web Albums

Our neighbors Jim and Barbara did a couple of months hiking in the Rockies.  Here's a taste of canyons and mountains. - gwc

Best Of CO - James Cunningham - Picasa Web Albums





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Wet, cold, miserable and awesome | Day 21 onboard Dongfeng - YouTube

Wet, cold, miserable and awesome | Day 21 onboard Dongfeng - YouTube:


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Eric Clapton - Tribute to Jack Bruce

Jack Bruce, singer, bassist, composer (1943-2014)
Founder of Cream
Wrote and sang lead on Sunshine of my love
Eric Clapton's tribute to his band-mate

In Our Own Backyard–Shelter Cove

by Phyllis // Attainable Adventure Cruising

In Our Own Backyard–Shelter Cove: "It seems that the weather gods are blessing our fall mini-cruise of the Nova Scotia Eastern Shore: brilliant sunshine, enough wind to keep us hopping—but not so much that the sailing becomes uncomfortable—and, so far, it’s blowing in the right direction for heading east—we’ll see what happens when we want to head back west, into the prevailing winds.

One of the nicest things about this cruise is that we are taking the time to explore a part of the coast that we have sailed along for over 20 years but usually when we are in a hurry to get north or in even more of a hurry to get south!

The first place we have chosen to explore in-depth on this cruise is Shelter Cove, an aptly named anchorage on a non-road-served Nova Scotia Nature Trust protected peninsula about 50 nautical miles east of Halifax."



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Belfast Harbor

Wrong way at the boat ramp

Star North Americans - champions regatta

A Star at the 2011 Centennial Regatta, Larchmont, NY

No purist, I loved the outrageous speeds and athleticism of the Americas Cup catamarans - once they got the rigs under decent control.  But I strongly disapprove of the Olympic Committee's rejection of the Star Class after a hundred years.  As Paul Cayard explains, check out the lineup for this weekend's North Americans in Oxford, Maryland.  The world's best sailors races Stars. Shouldn't they be in the Olympics?

As we have come to expect of International Star Class Championships, this event will be attended by a uniquely elite and diverse group of sailors with several of the top athletes not only in the Star Class, but in each of their respective regions and in the sport of Sailing in general. Among the competitors this week are 2 WINNING Volvo Ocean Race Skippers, 3 Former Americas Cup Participants, 7 Olympic Champions in the Star including 2 Olympic Medalists, 3 International Star Class World Champions, 10 International Star Class Silver Star Champions, as well as 15 International Star Class District Champions, just to name a few although this barely covers 1/4 of the Fleet's full list of cumulative achievements.