For much of this week and for the next several days, I have been and will will be "base camped" at a motel in Duluth, MN while my wife remains hospitalized following a scheduled surgery which will, hopefully and prayerfully, bring some closure to the condition that resulted in the two month hospital stay during the summer of 2011.

While "in camp," I have kept up with my ritual early morning walks. Rather than the streets and fringe areas of my current hometown, I have been enjoying the early morning quiet of Superior Street and London Road. This morning, I took the opportunity to access the Lake Walk as a change of pace and environment. The Lake Walk is a spectacular piece of urban environment. The local media frequently and rightfully sings the praises of this attraction. On one side, there is the lake--at 5:00AM this morning no more than rippled like frosting on an enormous sheet cake with a salmon colored ribbon of morning sky marking the boundary of lake and sky. The lake's surface holds a laker at anchor and supports a pair of pleasure crafts heading out to a day of sport fishing (I surmise). The other side of the path, there is ample evidence of man's tinkering--everything from an aerial lift bridge, to modern shoreline inns, to remnants of Nature destroyed and/or abandoned harbor structures, to weighty retaining walls built either of local stone or poured concrete. This multiple colored ribbon of park-like environment marks the boundary between lake and land and, in its own way, is respectful of both.

The section of Lake Walk, where I spent some time this morning, also includes the Northland Korean War and Viet Nam War memorials. The latter includes the names of the 25 individuals, who called Northwestern Wisconsin home some 40 years ago, and who then ventured far afield returning later to stay under very different, but not wholly unexpected, circumstances--evidence of man's tinkering.

This past week I often found myself thinking about an upcoming anniversary. Today would have been Dad's 100th birthday. This is one of the mental ramblings that I have from time to time and have reservations about blogging about. What changed my mind or convinced me to give it a try? Here goes.

Yesterday was Woody Guthrie's 100th birthday. It is interesting to make note of the peers of one's parents. Okemah, OK is a far distance from Becker, MN, but one only wonders if many of the same forces may have been in play in both settings leading up to the dust bowl in the Great Plains which, one can only surmise, may well have reached into the sand country of central Minnesota. Woody and Dad shared a common socio-political-cultural America during a substantial and very tumultuous period of the 20th century. A cursory review of their individual biographies reveals very different responses to those environmental forces. I wonder if a closer read would reveal some quite unexpected similarities? The big events in history don't just happen to the men and women, who get to be named in history books or have their births commemorated by their hometowns, it also happens to those, who pass their lives with considerably less notoriety and have the anniversaries of their births and deaths noted only by immediate family members.

This week I have been reading Wendell Berry (Life is a Miracle). Happenstance, I can only presume. Woody's This Land Is Your Land is a heartfelt plea from a slightly different perspective than Berry's central question: "How can one become genuinely and honorably native to one's place?" The search for place continues from one generation to the next. Or is it that members of each generation must mount his or her own struggle to become native, that is, to become "at home?"

The Pine Island Paradox has been a great read. The paradox of islands is, on one hand, they are "symbols of isolation and exile" and, on the other hand, they are "highpoints in the continuous skin of the planet" evidence of "the wholeness of being" and "intricate interdependencies." I can certainly say that this isn't the philosophy of my youth (read undergraduate years), even though the author certainly knows that philosophy well. The author, Kathleen Dean Moore, is a philosopher (PhD in the Philosophy of Law) and chair of the Philosophy Department at Oregon State University. In her youth, Dr. Moore called Ohio home, has won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award, visited Aldo Leopold's farm on the Wisconsin River, and has her books published by Milkweed Editions of Minneapolis, MN; she has midwestern roots to accompany graduate work in Colorado and an academic career in Oregon. I came away from her book with a sense that really big water--the open Pacific Ocean--and the mountains of the Oregon, Washington, Canadian, and Alaskan coast can get a grip on a person with a squeeze that one feels to his/her mutually shared core. In a more modest fashion, the Great Lakes region with big water, heights of land, and indeterminate boundaries between land, water, and sky can have a similar hold on a person. Then there are also memories of sitting on the sand at Cam Rahn Bay and looking out over the South China Sea.

Dr. Moore re-introduced me to some concepts, such as, ecological philosophy, and introduced me to some new ones, such as, moral ecology, ethics of care, and ground-truthing. After reading and rereading Archbishop Chaput's homily given on July 4th marking the closing of the Fortnight of Freedom, I am left with the question: can this gap ever be bridged? How do we even communicate across it? No wonder nations go to war and folks come to blows as they shout across from one real or imagined canyon boundary to another in a language unintelligible to one other and yet spoken in the same dialect. The gap unseen by so many is in the underlying philosophy: How we think about who and what we are as human persons? What is our connection and relationship to this physical world? How we know what we know?

More later. Maybe. Maybe not.

I have been thinking of making use of my Amazon account to purchase a couple of books. The total cost of the two just exceeds the $25.00 minimum to qualify for free shipping. (The double purchase is, in effect, a cost saving measure.)  During the past couple of weeks, there seems to have been a coming together of various bits 'n' pieces from varied sources. I will try to walk through my perception/thinking process without tripping or getting lost.

The two books are: The Presidents and Their Faith by Darrin Grinder and Bad Religion by Ross Douthat. One of D. Grinder's premises is that experience, rather than affiliation with and participation in a faith tradition, determines the moral choices made by an individual, even presidents. R. Douthat's premise is that the American Christian tradition is largely responsible for its own demise.

A few weeks back, Chris Hayes had Jonathan Haidt as a guest. He is the author of Why Good People Are Divided. He speaks about the concept of "confirmation bias." Intuitions precede reasoning. All of us look for and develop a rationale for our positions after we have effectively "decided" upon those positions. Let us acknowledge "justification after the fact;" increased civility will likely ensue. I prefer to think of it as "affection" rather than "intuition." We fall in love with or become aware that we simply like something. We then go about selectively gathering data and establishing a supporting rationale to intellectually legitimize where our "hearts" have taken us in the first place.

The Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act and Chief Justice Roberts' role gets tossed into this mix as well. The long term consequences and equally unintended consequences of this decision are yet to unfold.  And finally, the appointment of Bishop Gerhard Mueller by Pope Benedict to head the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith appears to be another one of those "sit up and take notice" events. Just when everything seems to point to a return to 1567, the Pope picks an individual for a crucial position, who is considered a heretic by the traditionalists in the Church. Is the Spirit at work or has the Pope acted on his affection for a long term associate?

We aren't out of the woods just yet--reference the article reporting on the recent re-ordination of six former Episcopal priests within the personal ordinate for those Anglican/Roman Catholics. One of the newly re-ordained is quoted several times citing the reason for his decision to affiliate with Rome, that being his desire for an absolute authority. I am not so sure that absolute certainty in any area of human knowledge, as well as in faith and morals, is within the capacity of the well formed human intellect. From a religious perspective, there would be no need for faith, if there was absolute certainty or a legitimate expression of absolute authority within the sphere of human activity.

Where does all this end up? Did I trip up or trip you up? Am I lost or did I get you lost? For me, I come away with a good deal of optimism. Or is it just my own confirmation bias? If it is, that's okay too. For now, I will continue reading The Pine Island Paradox by Kathleen Dean Moore and take comfort.