Saturday, May 8, 2010
Marvel does movies right. My
Marvel does movies right. My heart explodes in anticipation for what is coming.
It was humbling and sweet
It was humbling and sweet to see the things of Grandma's that my Mom and Aunts set aside for me.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
I have never smoked. But
I have never smoked. But if I was ever going to start it would be today. Please pray that I rely on God more.
Thursday, January 28, 2010
another attempt at interwebbing
On the extensive list of things I would like to be better with - internetting is one of them. I have been slowly easing back in, trying to catch up on the fifty years of blogs and emails I have missed ect...
I have said these things before so skepticism is understandable .... we shall see; but rather than blogging about blogging (which seems more than inane) I will talk about life a little bit.
Overall things are very good (although being the excessively emotive person that I am - sometimes moodiness gets in the way). I am in grave danger of becoming one of those people who is good friends with their little sister and I am more than ok with such a thing. She is seeking employment so she can move to the area and we can hang out even more until the next big thing happens.
Said big thing being a hopeful move towards the peninsula to work in Walt Disney World. I know it sounds crazy, but Chris and I feel like this could be a good thing so we are going forward pending big changes. The more we progress the more I am excited about actually doing something that resembles my education (even if being an official photopass photographer is something I feel like I am 'supposed' to find artistically unfulfilling - lets be honest I was never good at being the sort of artist I knew I was 'supposed' to be which is how I justified making no definitive plans on how to get money for using a camera)
Life has been pleasantly full of little weekly routines and rituals, Tuesday we have people over waffle type things, Wednesday we talk about the ramifications of who God is at another neighborhood house, Thursdays are date nights (never know what those will look like), Sundays we try to be intentionally restful in the midst of church and awesome time at the cabin learning about the big-awesomeness of God (that last bit is just me because it is a man-free zone) ... As the days peacefully melt into these patterns filled with all other manner of things (not the least of which being work for both of us and school for Chris) I think I am starting to slowly become the woman I am supposed to be, the one I truly am in Christ ...
I would ponder more but a lovely Smanly is at my door
I have said these things before so skepticism is understandable .... we shall see; but rather than blogging about blogging (which seems more than inane) I will talk about life a little bit.
Overall things are very good (although being the excessively emotive person that I am - sometimes moodiness gets in the way). I am in grave danger of becoming one of those people who is good friends with their little sister and I am more than ok with such a thing. She is seeking employment so she can move to the area and we can hang out even more until the next big thing happens.
Said big thing being a hopeful move towards the peninsula to work in Walt Disney World. I know it sounds crazy, but Chris and I feel like this could be a good thing so we are going forward pending big changes. The more we progress the more I am excited about actually doing something that resembles my education (even if being an official photopass photographer is something I feel like I am 'supposed' to find artistically unfulfilling - lets be honest I was never good at being the sort of artist I knew I was 'supposed' to be which is how I justified making no definitive plans on how to get money for using a camera)
Life has been pleasantly full of little weekly routines and rituals, Tuesday we have people over waffle type things, Wednesday we talk about the ramifications of who God is at another neighborhood house, Thursdays are date nights (never know what those will look like), Sundays we try to be intentionally restful in the midst of church and awesome time at the cabin learning about the big-awesomeness of God (that last bit is just me because it is a man-free zone) ... As the days peacefully melt into these patterns filled with all other manner of things (not the least of which being work for both of us and school for Chris) I think I am starting to slowly become the woman I am supposed to be, the one I truly am in Christ ...
I would ponder more but a lovely Smanly is at my door
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
these things make me sad
All of this seems more than counterproductive to me, this kind of prejudice just pushed moderate people to be extremists. It breeds anger and hate along completely irrational lines. How a person dresses, what buildings look like, and even our actions only point to the larger problem of having flawed and broken hearts.
The New York Times
November 30, 2009
Swiss Ban Building of Minarets on Mosques
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE and STEVEN ERLANGER
GENEVA — In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.
The referendum, which passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, was a victory for the right. The vote against was 42.5 percent. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution.
The Swiss Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the rightist Swiss People’s Party, or S.V.P., and a small religious party had proposed inserting a single sentence banning the construction of minarets, leading to the referendum.
The Swiss government said it would respect the vote and sought to reassure the Muslim population — mostly immigrants from other parts of Europe, like Kosovo and Turkey — that the minaret ban was “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture.”
Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the justice minister, said the result “reflects fears among the population of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies.”
While such concerns “have to be taken seriously,” she said in a statement, “The Federal Council takes the view that a ban on the construction of new minarets is not a feasible means of countering extremist tendencies.”
The government must now draft a supporting law on the ban, a process that could take at least a year and could put Switzerland in breach of international conventions on human rights.
Of 150 mosques or prayer rooms in Switzerland, only 4 have minarets, and only 2 more minarets are planned. None conduct the call to prayer. There are about 400,000 Muslims in a population of some 7.5 million people. Close to 90 percent of Muslims in Switzerland are from Kosovo and Turkey, and most do not adhere to the codes of dress and conduct associated with conservative Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, said Manon Schick, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International in Switzerland.
“Most painful for us is not the minaret ban, but the symbol sent by this vote,” said Farhad Afshar, who runs the Coordination of Islamic Organizations in Switzerland. “Muslims do not feel accepted as a religious community.”
The Swiss vote reflected a growing anxiety about Islam, especially its more fundamentalist forms, in many countries of Western Europe. France, for example, has been talking about banning the full Islamic veil as a way to stop the influence of the more fundamentalist Salafist forms of Islam, popular among some of the young and also converts.
Pre-referendum polls had indicated a comfortable, if slowly shrinking, majority against the proposal, after a controversial campaign that played aggressively on the same fears of Muslim immigration and the spread of Islamic values that resonate in other parts of Europe.
Media Tenor International, which monitors television coverage, said that the main Swiss evening news programs tended to report about Islam “primarily in the context of terrorism and international conflict.” Representatives of Islam “were quoted only infrequently,” said the group’s president, Roland Schatz.
“That Switzerland, a country with a long tradition of religious tolerance and the provision of refuge to the persecuted, should have accepted such a grotesquely discriminatory proposal is shocking,” said David Diaz-Jogeix, Amnesty International’s deputy program director for Europe and Central Asia.
Campaign posters depicting a Swiss flag sprouting black, missile-shaped minarets alongside a woman shrouded in a niqab, a head-to-toe veil that shows only the eyes, starkly illustrated the determination of the right to play on deep-rooted fears that Muslim immigration would lead to an erosion of Swiss values.
In a recent televised debate, Ulrich Schlüer, a member of Parliament from the S.V.P., said minarets were a symbol of “the political will to take power” and establish Shariah, or religious law.
He also claimed that Switzerland already suffered from thousands of forced marriages.
That debate prompted the government to mount a public relations campaign overseas to try to avoid a backlash like the one Denmark faced in Islamic countries after a newspaper published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, and to avoid damage to lucrative commercial and banking ties with wealthy Muslims.
Muslim leaders have tried to keep out of the spotlight and to avoid internationalizing the issue, shunning interviews with most news outlets from Muslim countries, according to Youssef Ibram, an imam at Geneva’s main mosque and Islamic Cultural Foundation.
Still, the campaign was accompanied by sporadic shows of hostility. Last week, vandals threw stones and a pot of paint at Geneva’s main mosque.
In an interview before the referendum, Mr. Ibram said that whatever the outcome of the vote, Muslims would lose out from a campaign that had played on fears of Islam and exposed deep-seated opposition to their community among many Swiss.
Nick Cumming-Bruce reported from Geneva, and Steven Erlanger from Paris.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
The New York Times
November 30, 2009
Swiss Ban Building of Minarets on Mosques
By NICK CUMMING-BRUCE and STEVEN ERLANGER
GENEVA — In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.
The referendum, which passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, was a victory for the right. The vote against was 42.5 percent. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution.
The Swiss Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the rightist Swiss People’s Party, or S.V.P., and a small religious party had proposed inserting a single sentence banning the construction of minarets, leading to the referendum.
The Swiss government said it would respect the vote and sought to reassure the Muslim population — mostly immigrants from other parts of Europe, like Kosovo and Turkey — that the minaret ban was “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture.”
Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the justice minister, said the result “reflects fears among the population of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies.”
While such concerns “have to be taken seriously,” she said in a statement, “The Federal Council takes the view that a ban on the construction of new minarets is not a feasible means of countering extremist tendencies.”
The government must now draft a supporting law on the ban, a process that could take at least a year and could put Switzerland in breach of international conventions on human rights.
Of 150 mosques or prayer rooms in Switzerland, only 4 have minarets, and only 2 more minarets are planned. None conduct the call to prayer. There are about 400,000 Muslims in a population of some 7.5 million people. Close to 90 percent of Muslims in Switzerland are from Kosovo and Turkey, and most do not adhere to the codes of dress and conduct associated with conservative Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia, said Manon Schick, a spokeswoman for Amnesty International in Switzerland.
“Most painful for us is not the minaret ban, but the symbol sent by this vote,” said Farhad Afshar, who runs the Coordination of Islamic Organizations in Switzerland. “Muslims do not feel accepted as a religious community.”
The Swiss vote reflected a growing anxiety about Islam, especially its more fundamentalist forms, in many countries of Western Europe. France, for example, has been talking about banning the full Islamic veil as a way to stop the influence of the more fundamentalist Salafist forms of Islam, popular among some of the young and also converts.
Pre-referendum polls had indicated a comfortable, if slowly shrinking, majority against the proposal, after a controversial campaign that played aggressively on the same fears of Muslim immigration and the spread of Islamic values that resonate in other parts of Europe.
Media Tenor International, which monitors television coverage, said that the main Swiss evening news programs tended to report about Islam “primarily in the context of terrorism and international conflict.” Representatives of Islam “were quoted only infrequently,” said the group’s president, Roland Schatz.
“That Switzerland, a country with a long tradition of religious tolerance and the provision of refuge to the persecuted, should have accepted such a grotesquely discriminatory proposal is shocking,” said David Diaz-Jogeix, Amnesty International’s deputy program director for Europe and Central Asia.
Campaign posters depicting a Swiss flag sprouting black, missile-shaped minarets alongside a woman shrouded in a niqab, a head-to-toe veil that shows only the eyes, starkly illustrated the determination of the right to play on deep-rooted fears that Muslim immigration would lead to an erosion of Swiss values.
In a recent televised debate, Ulrich Schlüer, a member of Parliament from the S.V.P., said minarets were a symbol of “the political will to take power” and establish Shariah, or religious law.
He also claimed that Switzerland already suffered from thousands of forced marriages.
That debate prompted the government to mount a public relations campaign overseas to try to avoid a backlash like the one Denmark faced in Islamic countries after a newspaper published cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad, and to avoid damage to lucrative commercial and banking ties with wealthy Muslims.
Muslim leaders have tried to keep out of the spotlight and to avoid internationalizing the issue, shunning interviews with most news outlets from Muslim countries, according to Youssef Ibram, an imam at Geneva’s main mosque and Islamic Cultural Foundation.
Still, the campaign was accompanied by sporadic shows of hostility. Last week, vandals threw stones and a pot of paint at Geneva’s main mosque.
In an interview before the referendum, Mr. Ibram said that whatever the outcome of the vote, Muslims would lose out from a campaign that had played on fears of Islam and exposed deep-seated opposition to their community among many Swiss.
Nick Cumming-Bruce reported from Geneva, and Steven Erlanger from Paris.
Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Friday, November 6, 2009
14 years
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