Canter Bridge

This is one magnificent little solution to broken zipper pulls.

I travel a lot and my suitcases wear out. The first thing to go is usually a broken zipper pull. For some reason, it never occurred to me that this is a reparable situation (I’m slow …), so I endure years of wearing my fingers raw by reaching inside and manually moving the now pull-less zipper. I guess I just tend to categorize it as an occupation hazard that you live with, like a cold sore or a low emotional IQ.

But no more. You get ten of those very solid zipper pulls for less than ten bucks. They’re solidly built and a zip (pardon the pun) to install.

I’m sold. Fingers of the world, rejoice.

In short order Yohanna Katanacho has established himself as a thoughtful and reliable member of an extraordinary cluster of theologians who gather around Bethlehem Bible College. In The Land of Christ. A Palestinian Cry, Katanacho allows us a glimpse into the remarkable events in his own life that have made love towards all, even towards one’s enemy, his core alignment. One might even say that Katanacho’s personal narrative, which occupies the first part of the book and helpfully frames his subsequent argument about the land, drains the word ‘enemy’ of its acid. In the context from which the author writes, this is no small accomplishment and should not be confused with passivity in the face of the cruelest of facts.

Katanacho proposes ‘Three Important Questions’:

√ What are the borders of the land?
√ Who is Israel?
√ How did God give Israel the land?

Exploring a wide range of biblical passages that are often adduced to establish the modern state of Israel’s divine right to the contested space it claims, the author argues that there is a fluidity in biblical definition both of the land and of Israel. Additionally, there is a contingency in the giving of the land that makes its possession subordinate to a God-given purpose and to the ethic with which it is held. Finally, the author asserts that New Testament revelation considerably reframes the question of the land in ways that make naive citation of Old Testament texts by Christians problematic.

To his credit, Katanacho never ceases writing as a Palestinian Christian believer. The reader who will be most persuaded by his argument is the English-speaking Christian who has imagined that his or her theology provides clear and simple affirmation of the contemporary status quo. Katanacho asks this reader both to think again and to think in the light of a reasoned Christian theology of the land.

Additionally, Katanacho moves beyond the language of victimization, a courageous act in his context. Even as he writes assertively against what he can only recognize as ‘Israeli occupation’ of land that prior to 1967 belonged to others, he recognizes that all—Palestinians, Jewish Israelis, Muslims, Christians—are complicit in a situation that makes imposition and violence the default behaviors in this contested arena. Love supplants this hateful status quo usually or even only as it flows from encounter with the cross of Christ. Importantly, Katanacho does not believe a solution to the current impasse over the land’s possession will occur soon, probably not in his lifetime. Yet he holds on to the hope that it will come eventually, and he writes this work as a ‘Palestinian cry’ for disciplined, non-violent, and loving conduct (even when this conduct is ‘resistance’) in the meantime.

As is common to circles of theologians who lack the luxury of doing theology at a distance from painful and pressing realities, Katanacho is attentive to how ‘having the right theology’ changes hearts, minds, and facts on the ground. An extended quote is in order, not least for its exquisite distinction between ‘eschatacentric’ and ‘Christocentric’ eschatologies.

(H)aving the right theology transforms our psychology. The term ‘theology’ is not only associated with orthodoxy (right doctrine) and orthopraxis (right practice) but also with orthopathos. Orthopathos is the kind of human suffering that becomes a source for liberation and social transformation. In his suffering, the Psalmist thought that God had forgotten him (Ps 42:9) and even rejected him (Ps 43:2). But in fact, his ordeal make him thirst for God and promoted him to pour himself into prayer … This leads us to the second insight: having the right theology, or more specifically the proper view of God, alters the focus of our eschatology. God speaks in and through our pain. In effect, he is transforming the pain of Palestinian refugees into a divine message that reminds the world of the difference between heartless or hardhearted eschatacentric eschatology represented by some Christian theologies and merciful Christocentric eschatology. The former focuses on ‘God’s agenda’ or the so called prophetic programs, while the latter reveals God’s heart and nature.

The final chapter includes the author’s lightly retouched version of ‘The Palestinian Kairos Document’, a Christian manifesto that is worth the price of this book.

This reviewer suggests reading The Land of Christ alongside Colin Chapman’s Whose Promised Land?.

I’ve been through a few replacement sets of objective lens covers and have come to the conclusion that the thin strip between the round piece the anchors to the binoculars and the actual lens cover will always eventually break. Simply plan to replace your lens covers when it does.

Oddly, this item has become difficult to find online. I was happy to discover this Opticron product. As other reviewers have noted, it’s important to measure the external diameter of your objective lens carefully before ordering. Otherwise, your lens cover will be too small to fit or too large to stay put.

This is not a high-tech or glamour product. It simply works, and is readily available in multiple sizes. That’s enough for me.

This book is one part exhortation and … well, just one part exhortation.

The editing is abysmal and the content idiosyncratic and unhelpful.

I cannot doubt the author’s good intentions.

Don’t let Aviya Kushner fool you.

This not a book about grammar or words, though there is plenty of succulent discussion of both in this remarkable offering from a young Jewish writer and teacher.

It is principally a sustained reflection upon memory and how to remember well.

Kushner writes from a tradition that treasures remembering as the last bulwark against disaster. She is a master chronicler of the memory craft, passed on to her by parents who did not grow weary of arguing about words, the tradents of memory, the traditioners of a people, the access to a God who for all of us uncanny evasiveness both speaks and is spoken about.

From the idiosyncratic and unpromising project of laying biblical translations beside each other in coffee shops in Iowa, New York, and Tel Aviv, Kushner spins a tale of the richness of words, the promise and portent of language that yields its treasures only to those who linger long with it, and her undying affection for a family that taught her to love words before it she made her way to … well … to Iowa.

The author treats us to reflections on:

√ Love
√ Laughter
√ Man
√ God
√ Law
√ Song
√ Memory
√ How It (Never) Ends

Her ruminations are rooted in the Bible (Hebrew and English), in the commentary of rabbis (early and medieval), and in the dinner-time rows of a family that argued as it ate. About words. About God. About matters both penetrable (if you harry them hard enough) and eternally impenetrable.

The truly frightening thing about Aviya Kushner’s The Grammar of God is that it appears to be the proverbial first book from the pen of this gifted writer.

After a beginning this good, what might she get up to next?

Even as I write that this massive compendium is ‘the go-to course for the non-financiaI-professional non-profit leader’, I worry that I am damning Financial Management for Nonprofit Organizations by faint praise.

There is a strong argument that this is work around which non-financial-professionals and financial professionals in any non-profit ought to rally, to derive their shared understanding and dialect, and to establish common a financial platform for organization-wide strategic planning.

John Zietlow has been a persistent and influential voice in favor of nonprofit planning that abandons a debilitating ‘break-even’ philosophy and aims to build a tactical and strategic reserve. That understanding of a viable future for nonprofits its baked into this encyclopedic manual for nonprofit financial management.

I don’t think there is another resources that competes with this text.

Highly recommend by this veteran of the nonprofit wars.