Imre's Spaghetti and Salman Rushdie

John drove into Jamestown to get his bi-weekly blood draw this morning. I went to the devotion hour. Rev. Gaddy’s sermon started with the question, “Is the U.S. God’s favorite nation?” The short answer is “no.” We create a small, nationalistic, and vengeful God when we create God in our image. Isaiah said “Don’t do that.”

We’ve become acquainted with a woman who sits in front of us every morning who also plans to be part of the CLSC Class of 2011. She is a retired United Church of Christ minister and said she has been a member of the Interfaith Alliance, the group Rev. Gaddy leads, for several years. (Edited based on comment posted. Sorry for the error, Donna.)

Again, I skip the 10:45 lecture to go to the library and blog. The lecture topic today is Floating Offshore Wind and the speaker founded the Advanced Structures & Composite Center at the University of Maine. Interesting, but I’m still behind in my task. Reba went and said that the State of Maine has approved and funded a project that will be 50 miles off their coast. Promising news.

I met John at Hurlbut Church at 11:45 for taco salad then went to a seminar by the Larry Terkel, leader of this week’s Mystic Heart program. His undergraduate degree is in engineering, but his master’s is in philosophy and comparative religion. He teaches yoga and meditation. Unfortunately, he spent the greater part of the time giving his bio rather than meditation techniques but he is an engaging speaker. If I wanted to get up and moving earlier in the morning, he leads meditation every morning from 7:15 to 8:00 in the Welcome Center.





Tonight’s treat was Imre’s spaghetti. Imre has cooked spaghetti for us in England ( in Hampton Court Palace, Bath and the Lockkeeper’s Cottage), Scotland (in the Pineapple near Sterling), Holland (DeBilt), Australia (in a RV somewhere on the West Coast); as well as several places in the U.S. It’s a tradition. (Reba and I just learned that next year’s CLSC class motto is “Tradition Expanded” which we thought was not too appropriate for a book club, but maybe it fits after all.)

Salman Rushdie was speaking tonight in the amphitheater. After reading the “Enchantress of Florence” Reba and I were eager to hear him. The only thing I really knew about him was the fatwa calling for his death put on him by Ayatolla Khomeine in 1988 after he wrote “The Satanic Verses.” There were references in that book to the life of Muhammad that many Muslims considered blasphemous. Rushdie is a British-Indian who was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 2007 for service to literature. “the Enchantress of Florence” combines history with fiction and has a bibliography of over 100 sources. It connects Florence during the Renaissance with the kingdom of Akbar in India by means of one woman. (That description I got from the Daily.) He has a great sense of humor and we enjoyed the presentation. Reba skipped to the back porch of the amp before he finished the questions and answers and got two books signed and good picture of him which she gave me to use here.