I went to a conference last month and got a tote bag full of crap, better known as swag. Useless promotional material — I glanced at most pieces before tossing them into the recycling — and plastic doo-dads branded with a company I don’t care about. (I do like promotional flash drives, especially the one’s [...]
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Category Archives: Sustainable living
Making the church building pay its way, part 0
There’s a charming old picture of the hoary Universalist church in Oxford, Massachusetts with retail space on its ground floor and the meeting-space above. Wise, that. Empty churches — by which I mean the buildings — are bad stewards no matter where or when they are, and these days a bad steward might kill the [...]
Is the M.Div. too much?
I didn’t get a Ph.D. because I didn’t want one. I got an M.Div. because everyone said I needed one to follow my call — which I hear differently now; it isn’t extinguished — into the ministry.
Looking around at the talented people I know — who have between them a knack for making connections, [...]
Four bucket dishwashing system
Nancy McLauchlan (Words few and savory, seasoned with Grace) included this tidbit in her review of western Friends meetings. (Broad-brimmed hat tip: QuakerQuaker via Twitter)
Redwood Forest Meeting (Santa Rosa, CA) has adapted a “Four Bucket” system of dishwashing to hygienically wash the dishes and not waste water.
This is church administration at its most basic: getting [...]
My new blog on plastic use reduction
I’m hoping to hone this blog and other interests by giving them distinct voices. For instance, I suspect an Ubuntu Linux, or perhaps a more general free and open source software blog is coming.
But for now, I’m working on my growing interest in reducing the use of plastics. See the details there –
Low Plastic
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Making do with Mennonites
I haven’t been blogging since Hubby and I took a vacation this week to Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Ah! the food! Chow-chow, kraut, apple dumplings . . . and more meat than I’ve eaten in the last six months.
But people are drawn there also for watching the plain people — a distasteful act, I think, [...]
“A Practical Wedding”
That’s the name of a blog I just started reading. (HT: Get Rich Slowly) No, I’m not getting married again. But the “wedding industrial complex” has bothered me for years, and I’ve seen the ideal of the perfect wedding get in the way of what it seemed the couple (or at least one half the [...]
Will we recall the oil decline beginning like Georgia, N.C.?
My friend Katharine has commented on her own LiveJournal on the gasoline that cannot be found in metro Atlanta. Other reports I’ve read note great anxiety in western North Carolina with spot shortages in other Southern locations.
The word is that these shortages are due to hurricane-hampered refinery production, but new refineries aren’t going to be [...]
Reading roundup: August 16
Whew — five days without a blog post. I’ve been ill and Hubby and I are buying a condo, so you’ll excuse my absence. Working on a couple of larger posts, but I’ve also been reading widely and found a few things of interest on the ‘net worth sharing in the meantime.
I don’t follow 304 [...]
New ethical certification for kosher food
Religious life and ethical consumption are two of my interests. Non-Jews might miss growing story in the Jewish and secular press, so I want to mention Hekhsher Tzedek, a new kosher certification that includes the ethics of production in parallel with religious regulation. (For news about it, it’s easier to follow Rabbi Morris Allen’s [...]
