We've made it to Illinois

Today we drove from near Akron, Ohio to Gilman, Illinois, which is near Kankakee, south of Chicago. We were on the road this morning by about 10 a.m., and we arrived at our motel tonight at 7:00 p.m., Central Time. We stopped at two different Casey's, a familiar place in this part of the midwest. We had pizza for lunch and leftovers for supper. We started reading a new book in the car today - I started reading it aloud, that is. It is titled American Building: The Forces That Shape It by James Marsten Fitch. It is a very interesting book. I started the trip reading David Buttrick's Speaking Parables: A Homiletic Guide. Also very interesting, in its own way. and we have a third thing we are doing, listening to a series of lectures on Understanding the Brain. Three very different subjects for sure. The book about the parables of Jesus grew out of the Pageant of the Parablss event a couple of weeks ago at the Guilford Church, and more specifically out of the sermon I preached a week ago Sunday at Guilford, a reprise of one I preached Oct. 29, 2000, about the parables; that sermon drew a great deal from David Buttrick's book, which I had discovered back in 2000. It is a very good introduction to what was then a new and revolutionary approach to the interpretation of the parables. I found a few weeks ago that I could download the book onto my computer, free of charge, so I did, and I have been reading it from the computer. The book on American Building I found in my work on Frederick Barnes Tolles, Ellen's father. I have been gathering his publications onto my computer to make a DVD that will accompany the book I am publishing about him, and one of those publications was a book review he wrote on American Building back in 1948. I read it aloud to Ellen and we both were so intrigued by the way he described the book that we decided to look for a copy, and found one used for just $7, and got it. It turns out that the book we got was a much more recent edition - 1999, not 1948! So it is not exactly the book Ellen's dad reviewed, but Fitch says that most of the 1948 book is in the 1999 edition. It was a book ahead of its time, I think, in 1948, because it was exploring the way in which the natural world, in its totality, affects the way in which humans build buildings. That is a pretty hot topic today as humans face extreme weather forces, heat, flood, fire, etc. So it promises to be a very interesting read. Understanding the Brain is a teaching Company DVD which I discovered when I was cleaning up my study - one we bought years ago but had never opened. So I brought it along. The lectures are by Jeanette Norden, a Neuroscientist on the faculty at Vanderbilt University. By sheer coincidence, David Buttrick was also at Vanderbilt, in the Divinity School. Fitch, an architect, is perhaps best known as a founder of the Historic Preservation Program at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. So, we will be learning a lot as we drive across the country!

Prof. Jeanette Norden, Neuroscientist

Prof. David Buttrick, Biblical Scholar

Prof. James M. Fitch, architect