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Tuesday, May 27, 2003 |
Christian prayer is not my default interface with the eternal, but I feel it when I’m in the midst of it. Dr. Harris’s funeral this morning was at First Pres. A full house, which is saying something for that big place. The stained glass windows (including one with a Star of David in it, facing across Greene Street toward Temple Emanuel), the 85-foot ceiling, the whole Fortress Gothic thing --I don’t know what their flinty Scots ancestors would say about it, but the well-heeled Presbyterians of Greensboro built themselves a sanctuary that has the feeling of a sacred space. I’ve been to lots of weddings there, and since moving home as an adult to quite a few funerals, too. This morning it was a sad funeral. That’s not redundant, not all of them are, but Carlton Harris at 79 seemed like he had a ways to go.
5:48:31 PM 
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Papists can sit on juries in Colonial Williamsburg, says Eric Muller, but a nice Jewish law professor like the writer of IsThatLegal felt excluded. I have a call in to CW public relations to find out what’s going on up there. How do black and Hispanic visitors like this policy?
Lisa and I were just discussing our own childhood trips to Williamsburg. We agreed that the scrubbed and spotless history of the place made it kinda dull for kids, although the movie with Jack (Five-0) Lord in colonial drag was pretty fresh.
4:27:13 PM
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Ellis Cose in Newsweek: “Such things were not supposed to happen in America.” The Greensboro Truth and Community Reconciliation project gets some national publicity.
Cose: “(I)f competently conducted, it can help people to understand that the history so many in Greensboro wish to “get over” is as important as the triumphs America so eagerly celebrates. For only by reminding ourselves of how easily and unwittingly we can go astray do we, in the end, ensure that we don’t.”
2:40:41 PM
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Stephen Dulaney on weblogs as investments in social capital: “Weblogs as a new technology for communication are changing the nature and process of opinion formation in the public sphere.”
Reading this essay takes a little investment itself, but it’s interesting stuff. Part of his discussion keys on something I’ve discovered with my own site -- weblogs can be much less ephemeral than their format might suggest.
Another key point: “(T)o make your views show up in this public sphere you must have made the choice to become an active participant, in short you need to blog…It is a clear example of an individual choice to invest in one's personal stocks of social capital.”
2:36:44 PM
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Out this morning for the funeral of Dr. Carlton Harris. One of the good guys. His son, also named Carlton, who died in his twenties of leukemia, was one of the nicest people and best athletes in our cohort growing up in Greensboro.
10:17:25 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Ed Cone.
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