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I am back in Amarillo at my parents' house for Thanksgiving. Hope everyone had a good one. I'm taking advantage of this being a holiday as an excuse not to do any work (I have a tidy stack of books and journal articles in the guest room (that's strange. It's one thing to leave home and go off to college and come home on holidays to your own room with your own stuff, but it's quite a different thing to take all your belongings with you and then stay in your parent's new guest room. Austin feels more like my home now (as I sit in Amarillo) than it has at any point over the last four months of living in Bat City (a nickname for Austin, based on the number of bats that live in the area (there are over 2.5 million bats under the Congress Avenue bridge alone)). I'm really looking forward to going HOME at the end of the weekend, taking the bus through my new city and sleeping in my own bed in my own appartment. It wouldn't be that strange at this point to tell someone that I'm from Austin (unless of course I was speaking in Spanish (in which case you are always FROM the place you were born (soy de (I now have 161 views of my blogger profile (beat that chumps)) Amarillo))). At the same time, I haven't really seen as much of Austin as I would like (grad school keeps one rather busy), and I am looking forward to spending some time at HOME in AUSTIN over the Christmas break. At any rate, I feel much more independent, more... grown I guess. It feels nice.)-- a combination of books by and articles on Philip Roth, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas. It's good reading, but it's all I've been reading for a very, very long time. Centuries perhaps.) I know it seems stupid to try working over a holiday break (you probably noticed that that was the last closing parenthesis, if you were paying attention), but I have two twenty-page rough drafts due next week, and I can't afford not to work at least some. Happy Thanksgiving!

Have we lost the plot?

So... I was at Bible study tonight, and come prayer time somebody in the group said that we must pray for "In God We Trust" to stay on our money, as though all good Christians should be praying for that. It bugged me a lot.

It was presented as a need for us to pray about it because it's part of a slippery slope of persecution. I don't want to see Christians in America persecuted, but I do not think that defending In God We Trust on money is a matter of persecution. Also, I think that praying for relief from true persecution is perfectly acceptable, but where do we get off thinking that the Christian life is supposed to be cushy? Some persecution might be part of God's plan for the Christian Church in America in order to strengthen it. Not that all topics of early church prayer made it in the Bible, but the prayers from the early church recorded in the Bible seemed to focus on significantly different matters than where the government allows reference to God, let alone much more significant forms of intolerance/persecution. I hate it when Christians hold the opinion that all good Christians must go along with and pray for whatever stance the political Christian right takes, while failing to pray for so many other things that we should!

In God I do trust, and happy Thanksgiving. Let the fireworks begin.