i thank heaven somebody's crazy enough to send me a daisy
—e.e. cummings
Someone who does not write books, who thinks a lot, and who lives in [an] unsatisfying society will usually be a good letter- [or blog-] writer.
—Friedrich Nietzsche
(March 2006) Tonight I’ll attend a screening of Over the Farm: A New Deal Resettlement and Its Legacy. This independent film takes a historical glance back to the landless African American sharecroppers who were offered forty acres and a mule in Tillery NC back in the thirties.
Then, even though I have no Final Four men’s teams left in the office pool, I plan to cheer for George Mason University because the brilliant poet Carolyn Forché once taught there.
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Meanwhile, here are the opening two sentences of Benedict Carey’s New York Times article about intercessory prayer:
Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found. And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.
Shocking that this is newsworthy, really.
Christianists were, of course, quick to respond.
First a chaplain at the Mayo Clinic announced that the study says nothing about the power of personal prayer or about prayers for family members.
“Working in a large center like Mayo,” he said, “You hear tons of stories about the power of prayer, and I don’t doubt them.”
How novel.
And let me guess, you tell those same families that it was the will of your god when their prayers were not answered.
Another Christianist reminds us that we don’t know how MUCH prayer each person received
Or if they inhaled while praying, dude.
Medea. Slaps. Forehead. Soundly. Now.
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