An Introduction: Big Talk

Back in the spring before we left Texas a couple of Rice University students asked me to participate in a project they called Big Talk. This project would bring together six or eight people from different religious (or non-religious) traditions to talk about some of the big question in Religious Studies. As one of the participant I was asked to submit a biography and the answer to the first question, What is God?

After submitting my responses I got involved in moving cross country and haven't heard anything more about the project. So I assume it's died. (That often happens with student projects, especially when they depend on a bunch of non-students who have no real incentive to complete the project--that is, aren't getting graded.)

Since I still have the information I put together, I thought I'd post it to this blog in an effort to more the blog from a personal diary to a forum for thinking about some of these kinds of issues. My biography is below. It's framed specifically for the Big Talk project so it emphases some things and ignores other--as all biographies do. As my family and friends you will probably know a bunch of this stuff about me but I'm betting everyone will learn something new.

In a couple of days I'll publish my answer to What is God? In the meantime, feel free to join me in this conversation about the Big Questions.

Update I just uploaded this on Friday and on Sunday I got email from the students putting together the Big Talk project. Instead of dying the project has been picked up and funded by the Boniuk Center for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance, and an Envision Grant from Leadership Rice. They've put together the beginnings of a website and hope to release it on 8/1 with an official project launch on 8/29 during the first week of school.

Consequently I've deleted the introduction from this posting and encourage everyone's who's interested to check out their website at www.betweenaduck.com and to watch for the first release the end of Aug.

Sold! For Real This Time!

The sale of our former home in Houston was final last week and the money electronically transfered to our checking account. Yesterday we used part of those funds to pay off the mortgage on our current home in Prescott! So this morning we should be mortgage free! Yea!!!

Although the housing market in Houston is still strong we had a few stumbles along the way (see my posting from April 23). But that's all behind us now. Someone else is the lucky owner of the little house on Deal St. I hope that have a good of a life there as we did.

Selling the house cuts our final tangible ties with Houston. That doesn't mean we won't come back to visit once in a while but we're not Texans any longer. That's kind of sad as we had a long and fulfilling time there--over 20 years! We've made good friends and good memories. Now we're working at making the most of this new period in our lives. Manzanita Village is all that we expected and more. The folks are wonderful and there's plenty to do both work and play--so we're never at a lost for "something to do". We've joined the local UU church and are becoming active there. Those were two good ways to become involved in this area and there's lots of overlay between the two communities since many of our UU friends live here at the Village and many Villagers are members of one or other of the local UU churches. Other connections will come with time but we've got a good base for the rest of our lives here.