I held onto AKMA’s “Faithful Interpretation…” for a week or so. It was tough reading. I bristled and groaned. I grumbled and moaned. Dr. Weinberger suggested I start with AKMA’s 1995 volume, “What is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?” I ordered that book too.

Saturday we had twenty adults and six children here for a Quakerly retreat, a lengthy period (two and a half hours seated in silence) of silent worship, a wonderful lunch, and an afternoon of “worship sharing” — a few more hours with each of us reflecting on a couple of queries regarding faith, religion, and community.

I had an interesting exchange with a Friend from Dubuque. It was complicated and I can’t do it justice here, but my friend suggested that knowledge and common understanding are not absolutes, that the word a-p-p-l-e is not an “apple” and that it doesn’t mean “apple” the same way biting into a crisp and juicy McIntosh does, and in fact that each of us experiences that in a subtly different way. I thought he would enjoy AKMA’s book.

Toward the end of the day most of us went out into the drizzly gray afternoon and walked the labyrinth. Molly played football with the kids. Then we all came back together in the living room, centered again into silence, thanked each other for a wonderful day and went each our own ways.

So, I gave away my copy of “Faithful Interpretation…” to the Dubuque Meeting, and after our friends had departed I went to the mailbox to collect Saturday’s mail. There was “What is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?”

Six months ago, or more, the US government banned importation of the vile ’stryne substance known as Vegemite. Thanks to Cory Doctorow, this news is now wide… ummm spread. The Vegemite problem is solved. Now what will the FDA do about kimchi?

George W. Bush must be apprehended and tried. Where do we begin? A Democrat congress is only a start. He must be apprehended before he can flee the country and avoid extradition. How do we get the soccer moms and dads, the NASCAR ass-hats, out of their mini-vans and SUVs and into the streets?

President Bush: Yet with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few. Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously? And did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?

Olbermann: Does he understand the irony of those words when taken out of the context of this particular passage or of what he perceives as the war against terror, and that, in fact, the threat we may be facing is the threat of President George W. Bush?

Turley: Well, this is going to go down in history as one of our greatest self-inflicted wounds. And I think you can feel the judgment of history. It won’t be kind to President Bush.

But frankly, I don’t think that it will be kind to the rest of us. I think that history will ask, Where were you? What did you do when this thing was signed into law? There were people that protested the Japanese concentration camps, there were people that protested these other acts. But we are strangely silent in this national yawn as our rights evaporate.