seminaries

I went to an interfaith event the other day. Its general theme was "Religion in the Public Sphere," and the participants were drawn from New York's various ordination programs*. There were quantities of Catholics there, which was fun, since I haven't met very many trained Catholics.

The evening was discussing various people's versions of prayers for the government, and following on from that, whether it's Quite Nice to pray about politics. The main point of interest was that the Jews on our table had nagging feelings that asking God to be nice to the Jews is rather particularistic, and that perhaps the Reconstructionists have it better - they ask God to be nice to everybody impartially - whereas the Christian prayers we saw didn't ask about the Christians specifically, even in the most orthodox texts. And, furthermore, the Christians interpreted the Jewish prayers as saying "please be nice to the Jews" with the implication "and obviously anything you do will be good for everyone because you're God, after all, and when you do good it's always good for everyone," which subtext the Jews definitely didn't have, reading the text more as "please be nice to the Jews" along with "and bugger everyone else, we're having a hard time down here and we're the chosen people after all." The Jews weren't so happy with this implication, but that was the one they thought it had.

* I wasn't invited. W was. So I went anyway cos it sounded interesting and dammit, I should have been invited.

another chapter in the visa saga

The Jerusalem consulate have finally agreed to issue my visa.

But they will only issue it if I am standing in front of them.

So I'm going to Jerusalem next week.

Task Manager

It's rather annoying when Windows helpfully informs you "Use Task Manager to close an application that is not responding" to find that Task Manager is itself not responding. This is not tidy.