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Showing posts from October, 2008

On having an accent

Back in the olden days, when it was a major undertaking to get from, say, Bristol to London, or even Bristol to Weston-super-Mare, and so most people didn't bother, it is said that you could place people within 10 miles or so by their accent. Now that we've built motorways and everyone spends their days whizzing up and down them, you have to go a bit further to get your accent noticed, but moving 3700 miles from Bristol to Texas certainly does the trick. Of course, I don't really have an accent - I speak quite normally, thank you very much, but everyone else talks funny around here, so naturally I stand out as different. It's been a strange experience to be marked out the minute I open my mouth. About the second thing everyone says to me is, "You're not from around here" or, "Where are you from?" Even though we talk the same language (well, almost), the way I speak says I'm a newbie, a stranger, something exotic. Fortunately the thir

A Tale of Two Churches

Yesterday was my first Sunday off work for several weeks, and I was looking forward to going to a church service. We strolled over to a local Lutheran church for its 11am service only to find they were all out doing good works in the community - extremely admirable, but we rather wished they hadn't chosen that particular Sunday. So we settled for a megachurch we'd been to before, which has several "campuses" around the DFW metroplex. The trappings are certainly impressive: state-of-the-art sound system, huge screens, slick video sequences, funky banners reflecting the theme of the latest sermon series. Which on this particular Sunday turned out to be about politics. OK, not my number one topic for a sermon, but it's obviously topical right now, and the Bible certainly has plenty to say about kings and leaders. Could be an interesting talk on our responsibilities as Christians and how to interact with our government, and I know the preacher is a good communi