Daily Connector | Two book recommendations | Fred Suter
About 6 months ago my brother, John, told me about the book “Reclaiming Conversation” by Sherry Turkle. Our daughter, Leah, asked me in October what I wanted for Christmas and I said I wanted this book by Sherry Turkle. So, for a Christmas gift she gave me this book and I read it from cover to cover. It is about our current society where many people hide behind their cell phone screens possibly for a good chunk of time each day and think they are conversing with other people. Most of them are only temporarily connected (NOT conversing) and some of them, sadly, have not learned how to talk face-to-face with others. A couple years ago when I was auditing (for free) a few courses at OSU I noticed that many students have their heads buried in their hand-held machines and, I am sure they felt very connected with their
A liturgical day
After much waiting and anticipation the day has finally arrived. It took an incredible amount of work by a group of dedicated people. It faced numerous unforeseen obstacles. But we can finally be at peace knowing it’s here. A major transition in our collective life. I’m talking of course about the arrival of our Voices Together hymnals, which will be delivered to the church building today. And, oh yeah, it’s inauguration day in the US, which is also a big deal. At the intersection of these two occasions is the experience of liturgy. Liturgy is a central practice for communities – whether it be congregations or nation states. Liturgy reminds us who we are and who we aspire to be. It grounds us in a wider narrative. It invites us to be not just passive observers, but participants in the story. Liturgy is repetitive, and repetition is a key pedagogical
Daily Connector | Mentor and Mentee Trivia Night | Gretchen Geyer
The pandemic has certainly altered the ways that mentors and mentees are able to connect but those relationships continue to blossom. I’ve heard of, or participated in, many fun activities: game night, cooking lessons, crafting and more. Last Friday night was no exception. Nine mentor/mentee pairs came together for a fiercely competitive and boisterous trivia night! Lots of dancing accompanied the Disney songs that were played to introduce each round (unfortunately none caught in a photo). I was thoroughly impressed by the knowledge of all of the mentees! Questions that I considered hard (or only knew thanks to the internet) were easy as pie for many of them. Some answers weren’t known right off the bat but could be determined using what we had around us (how many teeth does an adult human have?!). Star Wars was discussed numerous times throughout the evening, which was a perfect segway into our
Daily Connector | Sarasota Sage Returns | Michele Dicke
Joe Newman was back in our news again. (I hope you recall this gentleman I introduced you to last spring who, at age 107, drove a cherry red Mercedes convertible he purchased from his dentist.) Celebrating his 108th birthday January 13, he was tracked down by the Sarasota Herald-Tribune staff for an interview regarding current events and history. Newman participated in a video interview from the retirement home he shares with his 100-year-old partner, Anita. Newman ran for Congress at age 101 against current Republican Representative Vern Buchanan. The senior gentleman’s life has spanned two world wars, the Great Depression, the assassination of one president and the resignation of another – and now our current situation. He feels history cannot go by and not record the fact that a president led an attempt to overthrow legal government. Sharing a few interview tidbits: “We have a way to overthrow a government;
Daily Connector | Discovering My Polish Roots: DNA Relatives and the Genealogy Puzzle | Larry Less
A brief recap from three blogs that I posted in October. My Polish history has been shrouded in mystery. Many years ago, I was told that my Grandfather had only one brother and that they both immigrated to America around 1905, I was not able to identify his brother. Then around 2014 while visiting my cousin on Polish Hill in Pittsburgh, he suggested that we go through a box of my Aunt Theresa’s (my Dad’s youngest sister) memorabilia together. We discovered a letter from a “Mrs. John Lesh” in Lorain, Ohio inviting my Grandfather to his nephew’s wedding over Labor Day weekend in 1946. Research of Ancestry records on this family and the stacks of the Ohio History Connection led me to John Lesh’s obituary published in the Lorain Journal in 1951. The obituary stated that he had two surviving brothers, Martin in Pittsburgh and Michael in Hamtramck; two sisters,
