Friday Chews

Our chew items this week come from a variety of sources and interesting people...Nietzsche, Placher, Planned Parenthood and, uh, Baltimore.

Enjoy. Feel free to tell me how you feel about any or all.

1. But what if pleasure and displeasure were so tied together that whoever wanted to have as much as possible of one must have as much as possible of the other — that whoever wanted to learn to “jubilate up to the heavens” would also have to be prepared for “depression unto death”?

Friedrich Nietzsche

2. A network of 93 sensors has been mounted on streetlights and buildings in the neighborhood and can distinguish gunshots from fireworks and car backfires and immediately give police precise locations where guns have been discharged.

Police Chief of Baltimore

3. Planned Parenthood is offering GIFT CERTIFICATES for purchase this Christmas. Here's the video from CNN.com.

4. We human persons are always failing to be fully personal. As persons, we are shaped by our relations with other persons. Yet we always deliberately raise barriers or cannot figure out how to overcome the barriers we confront. When those we most love come to die, or in the dementia of old age are no longer able understand what we may most want to say to them, we realize how much there was in our hearts that we never shared with them. When we best articulate our ideas, we cannot escape the feeling that there was something there we never quite captured. When we most rejoice in sharing with someone different from ourselves, difference nevertheless scares us. The doctrine of the Trinity, however, proclaims that true personhood, however impossible its character may be for us to imagine, involves acknowledging real difference in a way that causes not fear but joy.

William Placher, theologian, who recently died. RIP.