The UmBlog

Vineyard Christian Fellowship-West :: Feasting Through Fasting has a brief, but great introduction to fasting. I'm planning on doing some more this week. And this note is very encouraging. Fasting isn’t about pain , but perspective . Fasting isn’t about renouncing the goodness of food, but recognizing the spiritual sustenance in God. Fasting will be a battle because my spiritual nature is having to press through my physical nature.

I have read another book in The Ancient Practices Series edited by Phyllis Tickle , The Liturgical Year , which I liked but had frustrations with. Scot McKnight 's contribution to this series on fasting did the same thing to me. No matter what complaint I have with this book, it did re-awaken my interest in the spiritual discipline of fasting. Scot contends that fasting is so foreign in our Christian culture because the church rejects the body's role in worship by elevating the soul or spirit. Each chapter is a description of how the body worships God in a fast as a response to an encounter with God, or repentance, or supplication, or mourning, or training, or liturgy, or social justice , or community, or eschatological hope. When he quotes from the church's fathers, he let's them inspire his readers, as I certainly was. He also quotes from less ancient, and even contemporary writers who, likewise, make me look forward to finding a rhythm of fasting. I used to fast lu...

My friend, Keith, helps refugees resettle in the Providence area. Part of that effort involves learning job skills. He and my friend Geoff have hit on the idea of selling granola made by these folks. You can order the granola by mail, and even subscribe for a monthly delivery. Please consider making a good ethical Christmas purchase and visit the Providence Granola Project .

WebMD has a new article on recent findings presented at the American Dietetic Association this week. Here are the myths, but you'll need to read the article for the explanation. Myth: Eating at night makes you fat. Reality: Calories count, whenever you eat them. Umblogger: Great, I enjoy a snack after the kids retire for the evening. Myth: Avoid foods with a high glycemic index. Reality: You could use the glycemic index to adjust your food choices, but don't make it your sole strategy for losing weight or controlling blood sugar, Rosenbloom says. Umblogger: I avoid those sugary foods unless they are laying around the hallway at work, then all bets are off on my self-control. Myth: High fructose corn syrup causes weight gain. Reality: "There's probably nothing particularly evil about high fructose corn syrup, compared to regular old sugar," Rosenbloom says. Umblogger: As I've told some friends, fructose is fructose, which is natural. HFS is concentrated. Howev...

In this review you will find reports on locations, hotels, restaurants, books, movies and history from a parent's perspective. You will find some of our trip photos towards the end when camera had working batteries. Philadelphia is an essential visit for the history and civics student. Although I was deprived of a visit there in my childhood, my children wouldn’t be. However, I wish I was a child visiting, because as an adult driving there, I found it was a city easy to enter but almost Sisyphean to exit. You can get in but you can’t get out. We entered the city shortly before noon over the Ben Franklin Bridge and took the first exit which dumped us right in the middle of history. We were warned in the guidebook to avoid driving and parking in the city but we chose the foolish path. We parked in the Constitution Park’s parking garage for too much money. We decided our first stop would be the U.S. Mint which was across the street. It was a good thing it was so close as the mint doe...

David Gracer fed me my first cicada and I've been hooked ever since. Here are the pictures to prove it and some research on entomaphagy with a link to David's page.

I really don't mind being late to trendy things. Time lets those trends percolate and refine and determine if the hype was worth it. Four years after this documentary's release, Super Size Me , is still a great view. Turns out I could have watched it a long time ago because it is entirely on-line at Google Video. However, I decided against embedding it as there are some inappropriate segments and language for all ages. In case you forgot or never heard, a healthy guy with a vegan chef girlfriend is intrigued by a lawsuit filed against McDonalds by two overweight, adolescent girls. He was intrigued and wondered if McDonalds was actually damaging their customers' health for a profit. Since the restaurants offer breakfast, lunch and dinner he figured he'd eat all three meals there every day for thirty days. In short, it was physically disastrous for his body. He gained 16 pounds in 30 days that took 9 months to lose. His physician begged him to stop early because his li...

Can a picky eater slow down weight gain? Well not if the eatings picked are full of fat and sugar. However, this past year, since Lent, I tried a reduced animal protein diet. Specifically, for Lent, I gave up meat. This was something all new for me. I never practiced a Lenten fast before. Yet, I had never been old enough before to see higher cholesterol levels in my physical. I run barefoot and I didn't have my recumbent bike then, see my ice bike story . I didn't give up fish or dairy products (or insects ). So that makes me an icthy-ovo-lacto-ento-vegetarian. In the beginning, I ate rice and beans at dinner almost every night and a whole grain cereal for breakfast such as Ezekiel 4:9 brand with almond or rice milk. I learned how to use my pressure cooker and tried all sorts of spices to provide variety. I also practiced eating when I was hungry, but only small portions at a time. I lost weight. I kept the fast for the most part after Lent, except for the roasted lamb on Ea...

in case there was any doubt that i practiced entomophagy here are the visuals... Dried Cicada and Grasshopper about to go down my gullet See my previous post on land shrimp . I consider this a conservation post, more of which can be read here . Entomophagy does not appear in other blogs that I read so it probably won't show up in my shared feeds .

update below... I enjoyed eating some land shrimp tonight from my friend Dave. What? You've never heard of land shrimp? You should read about it at Dave's website and buy some from him. I enjoyed crickets, local cicada, and spiced Mexican grasshoppers. They were dehydrated and yummy. Oh! I also had a silk moth larva. Yes, I have joined the rest of the world in entomophagy . A homeschooler has a great site called eatbug.com for more info. Dave has a blog with some pictures and explanations too. It's called Bugs for Dinner! I don't have a category for this. I put it in conservation because if we all got our protein from things other than large mammals we'd waste less. Since March I have almost completely dropped out of the meat-eating population and it's going well. I get my protein from seafood and dairy as well as nuts, legumes, and other vegetable sources. I will not be afraid to add bugs to my sources now too! Update: I now have pictures of my entomophagy !

bread. enough for today. our - of us - me and my family and my neighbors/locally, nationally, around the world. some don't have enough bread to eat. some die of starvation. more don't partake of the bread of life and they die the 2nd death in hell, forever. Jesus references the bread metaphor in John's gospel. In 6:35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst." (ESV) he continues, 47 "Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. 48 I am the bread of life. 49 Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. 50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. 51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” In 6:56 he says something so offensive it drove away most of the groupies..."Wh...

superwoman homeschools 3 and finds time to make for others chicken pot pie with home-made crusts

just learned about this from a guy at work who is cooking one for Thanksgiving. its a boneless duck stuffed into a boneless chicken stuffed into a boneless turkey. it can feed 30 people. it takes at least 14 hours to make! as you can imagine, this example of conspicuous consumption is all-american. i cooked my 20 lb turkey last night, 3.5 hrs in a bag, and will strip it down today for the community meal tomorrow. our church serves 400-500 hot Turkey dinners every Thanksgiving, so my turkey is only 1 of 50 or so. God is really good in that every year, there is enough for all who come to bring some more home, and there are always leftovers to share with the community soup kitchen on Friday.

this is indirectly related to homeschooling. we are often asked if the children get much socialization. yes they do, but definitely not as much as their peers in school. but this quote that Andrew quotes shows the flipside of this socialization "Some 93% of Italian teenagers eat regularly with their families; in the UK just 64% of 15-year-olds do the same. . . Nick Pearce, director of the IPPR, told the BBC last night the figures pointed to an "increasing disconnect" between children and adults, with young people learning how to behave from each other. He said: "Because they don't have that structured interaction with adults, it damages their life chances. They are not learning how to behave - how to get on in life - as they need to." fwiw, i don't know, i've been reading a chapter of the bible aloud at the dinner table every night. at some point i hope those Hebrews readings will click with them. boy was that tough/boring on them. but the judges an...

yesterday, i suggested that we can solve our obesity epidemic by encouraging everyone to smoke. that was tongue in cheek, a joke, silly. however, thinking more about it on this morning's bike ride, i wondered about the high concentration of Christians in this country and the neglected discipline of fasting. "Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled." Jesus, Beatitude, Mountain Sermon i know when we hear this verse we often think of it in terms of desperately craving righteousness, but it can also mean fasting in anticipation of righteousness. Jesus' statement seems like a condensed version of what God was telling Isaiah in chapter 58... 2 For day after day they seek me out; they seem eager to know my ways, as if they were a nation that does what is right and has not forsaken the commands of its God. They ask me for just decisions and seem eager for God to come near them. 3 'Why have we ...

i am not kidding when my thinking turned toward obesity on my bike ride home, partly because i was riding shirtless. and i concluded that the rest of the world isn't as fat as the US because they smoke like chimneys. anyone who comes back from Europe will assure you that our tobacco industry is not at risk of bankruptcy anytime soon. so i came home and felt i had hit on the answer. i googled obesity epidemic and smoking and this is out on the news today...maybe i have an AM transmitter in my brain. so if you don't want to be fat and don't mind shortness of breath, well obese people already have that, and risk of heart attack, oh that's the same too, try smoking...after you've tried eating less and exercising more of course. i did smoke for a year in college and quit when i had a bad cold and thought, "this is stupid." Study Suggests 10 New Obesity Causes, America’s Weight Problem Not Due To Gluttony And Sloth Alone, Researchers Say - CBS News : "4. De...

after i posted on the parallels between obesity and homosexuality i wanted to find out more about the spiritual issues of gluttony which, i've learned, sometimes but not always manifests physically as obesity. It turns out a fellow blogger at the evangelical outpost recently pondered on it also... Oddly enough, with the exception of those related to sex, American Christians tend to take an antinomian view of “physical sins.” We act as if corrupting our bodies will have no impact on our souls. Such an un-Biblical view, however, must be rejected by anyone who acknowledges that the body is the temple of the Holy Spirit . Lest we start to feel superior to the obese neighbors, we should remember that not all gluttons are overweight. I’m 5’10”, 170 lbs and though I no longer have to endure the rigors of Marine Corps PT , I’m still in relatively decent shape. But while my waistline may not expose my shame, I’m prone to overindulging in food. I eat several snacks between meals. I eat wh...

Read this story today. I love stuff like this. God bless the Freegans, every one of them.