The Seven Worst Ways to Give to Charities during the Holidays

Vanessa L. Small, The Washington, Post, November 24, 2013

As we approach the holiday season you might find yourself feeling more grateful, compassionate and charitable than at any other time of year. Now is the time when people eagerly donate that load of clothes taking up space in the basement, or employers begin hosting food drives. But is it possible for such a generous act of goodwill to create more harm than good? When it comes to holiday giving, charities sometimes find themselves overwhelmed by volunteer requests and donations. So before you are overtaken by the giving spirit, there are a few things charities and nonprofits are dying for you to know.


No Dirty Clothes?
Tired of looking at those burgundy corduroy pants you haven’t worn since high school? You may be thinking that now is the time to finally give them away to your local charity. Or perhaps you want to donate the broken toy that your kid outgrew. Think again. Charities say that undesirable items are the most frustrating donations to receive. While charities are grateful for the act of kindness, it can put the organization in an awkward position.

“People think they’re doing you a huge favor by giving you dirty furniture or a beat up car,” said Eric Salmi, spokesperson for Catholic Charities. “But the quality of stuff is really important because we’re passing things off to people who we want to feel dignified.”

In some cases, says the Salvation Army, the gift is not only undesirable but not resalable. Jennifer Dean, manager of volunteer engagement at Miriam’s Kitchen, remembers a rather unpleasant experience. She received a donation of clothes so soiled that the case managers were “tied up for an hour picking through them, with masks and gloves on, ultimately having to discard everything.”

Chef John Murphy, also of Miriam’s Kitchen, says it’s common for him to receive half-eaten loaves of bread and jars of peanut butter from college students eager to clear out their minifridges before heading home for holiday break. Staff at Sasha Bruce Youthwork, a shelter for homeless teenagers, say that they tend to receive unfashionable clothes that many young people would not want to wear for fear of getting picked on at school.

People tend to give away items that they don’t want, but charities say it’s best to give a gift that you would use or wear again. Before you think to give away your worst possessions, think about giving your best.

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Why the Filibuster Vote Did Not "Humiliate" Anyone

From The Atlantic blog, Conor  Fredersdorf, November 22, 2013

Senate Democrats ended the filibuster for most presidential nominees this week in a move that's been dubbed "the nuclear option," despite the fact that, even metaphorically, it shares virtually no characteristics with the detonation of a nuclear bomb.*

"President Obama will get a short-term lift for his nominees, judicial and otherwise," the New York Times states, "but over the immediate horizon, the strong-arm move by Senate Democrats on Thursday to limit filibusters could usher in an era of rank partisan warfare beyond even what Americans have seen in the past five years." That article goes on to state that "for the foreseeable future, Republicans, wounded and eager to show they have not been stripped of all power, are far more likely to unify against the Democrats who humiliated them in such dramatic fashion."

Now hold on just a minute. 

Perhaps there are Republican Senators who feel humiliated by this move. If so, there isn't anything wrong with the newspaper reporting that (preferably with evidence). But if this really is regarded as a "humiliation," then there's a more important story that needs telling. To humiliate someone is to make them feel "ashamed and foolish" by "injuring their dignity and self-respect." It would be totally irrational for Senate Republicans to feel humiliated by this loss of leverage on nominees. Dignity and self-respect are not implicated in party-line votes on Senate rules. Anyone who thinks otherwise is a muddleheaded narcissist with entitlement problems whom political journalists ought to expose: 

Senator X acknowledged today that when the majority party stripped him of the ability to block majoritarian votes on judicial nominees last week, he regarded it as a personal affront to his dignity that also diminished his self-respect. Asked why Senate colleagues pursuing rule changes would have the capacity to humiliate him, despite the fact that their actions have nothing to do with him personally, he explained that he's spent too long in an insular world that irrationally personalizes all manner of things to the determinant of the country, and that the political press uncritically adopts that frame in its reporting.

Informed that most people would find it far more humiliating to constantly call people on the phone and ask them for money, pander to the lowest common denominator of the public at large, and cater to moneyed interests rather than the public good, he smiled with whitened teeth offset by artificially tanned skin and shrugged. 

Now that would be an awesome article.

_____

*What are they going to call it if the filibuster is ever done away with entirely, the global-nuclear-holocaust option? Asteroid apocalypse? Efilibusterbola?

Christ the King Sunday, November 24, 2013

Originally published as "They Say There's Another King, One Called Jesus," by Dan Clendenin, The Journey with Jesus blog, November 18, 2013

    For Roman Catholics and churches that follow the Revised Common Lectionary, this last Sunday of the liturgical year honors "Christ the King." It's a relative newcomer to the Christian calendar. Pope Pius XI introduced the feast on December 11, 1925 with his encyclical "Qua Primas" (In the first). That papal letter summarizes the Bible's teachings about the kingship of Christ.

           According to Pius, Christ the King rules not only over the church, but over all the whole world — if not now, then at the end of time.

Jesus's Triumphal Entry, Medieval Syriac manuscript.

           Doesn't this feel like a setup for liturgical failure? For the worst sort of triumphalism? If so, blame Paul and not Pius.

           Today the language of kingship is outmoded and offensive. There are good reasons for this. We don't live under kings, so the metaphor feels irrelevant. And we're rightly repulsed at how the reigns of kings meant a reign of terror for most subjects — massive wealth and power attained by cruelty and exploitation, which was then passed on by birthright to people who did nothing to deserve it. 

           Nonetheless, the language of kingship is embedded in the Christian story. The earliest followers of Jesus, and especially his detractors, used the language of kingship to describe who he was, what he said, and what he did.

           Unless you want to follow Thomas Jefferson, and snip and clip the parts of the Bible that you don't like — creating a Bible in your own image, we're left with the language of kingship.

           As in the game of golf, we're better off to play the Scriptures where they lie. The question then becomes what kingship means.

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Speed-dating was the idea of a rabbi

When we came to write our first volume of facts – 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off – last year, we set ourselves the goal of producing 1,000 nuggets of information that seemed to us unforgettable. We pooled 10 years of extraordinary comparisons (there are 1,000 times as many bacteria in your gut as there are stars in the Milky Way); astonishing statistics (a single male human produces enough sperm in two weeks to impregnate every fertile woman on the planet); unexpected truths (the Bible is the most shoplifted book in the United States) and memorable absurdities (Richard Gere’s middle name is Tiffany), and then counted up what we had. It turned out we had a file of 1,227 facts, which seemed both more interesting and more appropriate than the 1,000 we’d originally targeted.

In the course of editing and arranging that material we discovered something surprising: the facts seemed to have a mind of their own. Far from being inert bits of trivia, they behaved much more like molecules, bristling with energy and a desire to form strong attractions with other facts to make longer and more meaningful sentences. All we had to do was keep trying the best combinations.

As well as being deeply satisfying, this process of fact-matching also meant we needed to create a much deeper pool of truth in which to dip our editorial spoon. And, before we’d finished, we realised that this new pile of strange and wonderful facts we hadn’t been able to sequence was already forming the core of a new book: 1,339 QI Facts To Make Your Jaw Drop, published this week.

Once you are in the Fact Zone, everywhere you look, astonishing new facts seem to demand inclusion. And, to adapt a line of Groucho Marx: if you don’t like them, we’ve got others....

The offspring of a polar bear and a grizzly bear is called a pizzly bear. Or sometimes a grolar bear.

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The first private detective agency was started by a criminal.

A baby pterosaur is called a flapling.

All the mountains on Saturn’s moon Titan are named after peaks in The Lord of the Rings.

Women look their oldest at 3.30pm on Wednesdays.

Agatha Christie was a keen surfer.

The Express, the Telegraph, the Economist, the Times, the Star and the Independent were all London-based stagecoaches in the 1830s.

There is enough carbon in your body to make 9,000 pencils.

On an average day, Britons spend 14 hours and 39 minutes sitting down.

Americans eat 10 billion doughnuts every year.

Speed dating was the brainchild of a rabbi.

Lord Kitchener had four spaniels called Shot, Bang, Miss and Damn.

Stephen Stills, Glen Campbell and Charles Manson (right) all failed auditions for The Monkees.

The Moon is shaped like an egg: it only looks round because the big end points towards Earth.

In Britain, spiders outnumber people by more than 500,000 to 1.

The vampire spider is attracted to the smell of human feet.

If a dead whale is found on a British beach, the head belongs to the king and the tail to the queen.

According to English folklore, if a woman feeds her husband roast owl, he will become subservient to her every wish.

At any one time, 45 million people in the world are drunk.

North Americans account for less than a sixteenth of the world’s people, but more than a third of their weight.

A garden snail would take three years and two months to make its way from John O’Groats to Land’s End.

Buckingham Palace is built on the site of a brothel.

The Beatles classic Yesterday was originally entitled “Scrambled Eggs”.

Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the judges at the world’s first-ever bodybuilding contest.

There are six villages in France called Silly, 12 called Billy and two called Prat.

Dublin, Glasgow, London, Petroleum, Coal, Wax, Goforth, Stay and Jump are all towns in the state of Kentucky in the United States.

Since 1990, more people have been killed by sandcastles than by sharks.

Wordsworth had no sense of smell.

A group of kittens is called “a kindle”.

Sixty per cent of Premier League footballers go bankrupt within five years of retirement.

The Arabic word for hamster translates as “Mr Saddlebags”.

Rodents prefer peanut butter to cheese.

Eton College was founded to provide free schooling for poor boys.

David Cameron is a great-great-great-great-great-grandson of King William IV.

Samantha Cameron is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles II’s mistress, Nell Gwyn.

In Denmark, Laurel and Hardy are known as Gog and Cokke; in Germany, they’re Dick and Doof.

Earthworms have five hearts.

Your eyebrows renew themselves every 64 days.

If Jane Austen hadn’t broken off her engagement, she would have been known as Mrs Harris Bigg-Wither.

40 million people in China live in caves.

Sgiomlaireachd (pronounced “scum-leerie”) is a Scots Gaelic word meaning “the kind of friend who only drops in at mealtimes”.

Albert Einstein claimed that his second best idea was to boil his eggs in his soup, thereby saving on washing up.

We dot our I’s, but Shakespeare “tittled” his.

”Son-of-a-bitch” stew was a cowboy dish made from the internal organs of a whole cow and an onion.

There is one Kalashnikov assault rifle in circulation for every 70 people on Earth.

There is only one sneeze in the Bible.

In Norway, stripping counts as an art form for tax purposes.

In Armenia, chess is a compulsory school subject.

A person who illegally exports sheep is called an “owler”.

More reverse-charge telephone calls are made on Father’s Day than any other day.

In the movie Titanic, the location for the ship’s engine room was a pumping station in Cricklewood.

Piranhas enjoy beans and other vegetables.

In Canada, Santa has his own postcode: HOH OHO.

The small pocket in the front of a pair of jeans was intended for a pocket watch.

The largest millipede in Tanzania is called the wandering leg sausage.

One in ten women cares more for a fictitious male character than her actual partner.

Tarzan’s ululating cry is a registered trademark in the US.

Science students who wear white lab coats perform better in tests.

All the houses in Glasgow are worth less than all the houses in Elmbridge, Surrey.

Galileo’s middle finger is on display in the Museo Galileo, Florence.

In the Polish version of Scrabble, Z is only worth one point.

The guillotine was last used in France in 1977.

The French word for “hashtag”, coined this year, is Motdièse (“sharpword”).

The only member of ZZ Top who doesn’t have a beard is drummer Frank Beard.

The Russian team arrived 12 days late for the 1908 London Olympics because they were still using the Julian calendar.

Air trapped inside hedgehogs can make them blow up like a balloon. They should be carefully deflated with a syringe before they burst.

Costa Rica is home to the world’s only sloth orphanage.

Twice as many forks as knives are sold in the UK.

Sliced bread was originally marketed as “the greatest forward step since bread was wrapped”.

The electromagnet driving the particle accelerator at CERN in Switzerland weighs more than the Eiffel Tower.

The average woman spends 16 months of her life crying.

The horsefly Scaptia beyonceae is so named for its “bootylicious” abdomen.

The first country to ban foie gras on the grounds of cruelty was Nazi Germany.

80 per cent of men born in the Soviet Union in 1923 were dead by 1945.

“Flak” is an acronymic abbreviation of Fliegerabwehrkanone, “flyer-defence-cannon”.

Silent letters in words such as “knife” and “psychic” are called aphthongs.

The dinosaur noises in Jurassic Park were made from recordings of tortoises having sex.

Abraham Lincoln was inducted into the Wrestling Hall of Fame.

Babies are born with no bacteria in their bodies.

The Marianas Trench in the Pacific is so deep that a coin dropped into it would take more than an hour to reach the bottom.

The most-read publication in the UK is Tesco magazine.

Splenda was an insecticide that became a sweetener when a lab assistant misheard an instruction to “test it” as “taste it”.

Chewing gum costs 3p a stick to buy, but 10p a blob to remove from the pavement.

Half of British adults don’t believe in evolution.

The remains of birds hit by aeroplanes are known as “snarge”.

90 per cent of guns in Mexico are smuggled in from the USA.

Danny DeVito is a qualified hairdresser.

Plants grow more quickly if you talk to them in a Geordie accent.

The Norwegian word på˚legg means “anything that could conceivably be put in a sandwich”.

Only one shot was fired in the “Kettle War” of 1784, between the Netherlands and the Holy Roman Empire. It hit a kettle.

Two-thirds of British children aged 5-13 can operate a DVD player, but fewer than half can tie their shoelaces.

The Arabic word for “nipple” is buzz.

Anglerfish have black-lined stomachs to stop them giving themselves away if they eat something luminous.

Only one dog has ever been to both North and South Poles.

Johnny Cash became addicted to painkillers after being attacked by an ostrich.

Shark Bay in Australia is now called “Safety Beach”.

In London today, twice as many women over 40 as teenagers are giving birth.

Hewlett Packard printer ink is 20 times more expensive than 2003 Dom Perignon.

A Vintage Movie on Glass and Jazz

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What Would Jesus Do?

Based on Dissident Discipleship, David Augsburger
Brazos Press, 2006

Disciples in a believing community follow Jesus in different ways. Our experiences have been diverse. We are loyal to different traditions, or different interpretations of the same tradition. We ask different questions.

In its simplest form, discipleship is expressed by asking, "What would Jesus do?" The question is inspired by Charles M. Sheldon's 1896 novel, In His Steps. It fosters an imitation of Christ in personal life according to whatever image of Jesus the follower may have. Ethical and relational decisions are linked to particular teachings or actions of Jesus. If the disciple becomes stuck, she may reflect on a more basic question.

"What did Jesus do?" This question pushes us back to the Gospels to re-explore the actual behavior of Jesus. His story is affirmed as the revelation of ultimate goodness which judges all human values by enduring values. The disciple may then have the tools to explore the subsequent question.

"What would Jesus have me do?" This is the question of theology, or faith seeking understanding. It introduces new dimensions into the simple desire to imitate Jesus. What Jesus embodied in the ancient Near East is reformulated into the language of contemporary culture. In the process, Jesus inevitably gets translated, usually adjusted, often adapted, and sometimes co-opted to face the "hard realities" and bless what we consider necessary and inescapable. Sometimes the disciple is moved to look for the presence of Jesus in the present moment and ask the next question.

"What is Jesus doing here and now among us?" Now the disciple seeks Jesus as a contemporary presence in a believing community. He looks to the liturgy, to mystical experience, to ethical discernment, and to outreach to the least, the last and the lost. Every encounter with human need is re-visualized into an opportunity to serve Christ himself. In those moments we may discover a deeper question.

"What do I do with Jesus?" a question which offers the privilege of reaching out and touching Jesus in those we encounter in daily life, not just the needy. Instead of seeing those encounters as irritations in our important schedules, we see them as divine interruptions. Instead of being preoccupied with ourselves as followers, we shift our focus to concern for the other. Then we ask the question of Paul when he realized he was in the presence of Christ.

"Jesus, what do you want me to do?" We become the ones doing the listening, not the questioning. We let go of control of the conversation. All of the previous questions have been helpful, of course, but we cannot walk away until Jesus has a chance to speak for himself, to our circumstances, according to our spiritual maturity and our ability to truly listen.  

Schlesinger's letter to Jackie on night JFK was assassinated

Schlesinger was sipping cocktails before luncheon with Katharine Graham, John Kenneth Galbraith, and the editors of Newsweek at their Manhattan office when a man entered in his shirtsleeves and said, a little tentatively, “I think that you should know that the President has been shot in the back of the head in Texas.” Schlesinger thought momentarily this was some sort of ghastly office joke. Then he knew it could not be. Soon, he was on a plane bound for Washington. It was the saddest journey of his life.

November 22, 1963
Washington, D.C.
Friday evening

Dearest Jackie:

Nothing I can say can mitigate the shame and horror of this day. Your husband was the most brilliant, able and inspiring member of my generation. He was the one man to whom this country could confide its destiny with confidence and hope. He animated everything—he led with passion and gaiety and wit. To have known him and worked with and for him is the most fulfilling experience I have ever had or could imagine.

Dearest Jackie, the love and grief of a nation may do something to suggest the feeling of terrible vacancy and despair we all feel. Marian and my weeping children join me in sending you our profoundest love and sympathy. I know that you will let me know when I can do anything to help.

With abiding love,

Arthur

from a collection of Schlesinger's letters to political leaders, published this week by Random House. Quotation from The Atlantic blog, October 30, 2013