Hi hi! This week has been all school (or school-prep) all the time, so I'm looking forward to a couple of down days this weekend! Hope yours is lovely.

Table inspiration

Conversation-starter alert!!! Professor David DeWeil has gone mildly viral for asking new students to share a boring fact about themselves. We tried this with a mixed-age group of friends this weekend, and it was an enormous hit! Unsurprisingly the boring facts were fascinating: someone only eats whole, not pieces of, potato chips. Someone else (my son, unfortunately) "used to" complete his kitchen-sweeping chore by just redistributing the mess, not cleaning it up. People, man!

Good thinking

I don't know why this hit me like it did: maybe because it's just brief and true. Introductory words from liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, from his essay Saying and Showing to the Poor: "God Loves You":

Theology has, from the beginning, been in dialogue with both the practical and theoretical elements of contemporary life.

If a theology (or political philosophy or whatever) cannot be in dialogue, or cannot move with flexibility and muscle on both practical and theoretical fields, miss me with it!

I LOVE A GOOD MATRIX.

And Randall Munroe is such a smart, delightful weirdo. What not/to do in emergency situations:

from xkcd

Hey! Stop it!

xoxo, m