Let the Good Times Roll!

Last weekend, my husband Jimmy and I spent five days in New Orleans at the Tennessee Williams Festival. We live in the metro area of the Big Easy – north of Lake Pontchartrain, 20 minutes from the city over the causeway. But we stayed at the Royal Sonesta in the French Quarter, where the festival was headquartered because there are parties and plays and all kinds of things going on at night during the festival as well as daytime–music, plays, dress-ups at the New Orleans Historic Collection museum on Royal Street.

It was colder than usual, but beautiful sunshiny days. There were street musicians everywhere, so you almost had to dance down the street. Flowers, balloons, red and white lucky dog carts, crazy hats, mimes, weird costumes. A random food festival popped up all down Royal Street with booths and samplings from every great restaurant in town. We even have the coolest police station in the middle of the Quarter. It’s the only police station I’ve ever seen that has an outdoor cafe attached to it so you can rest and do some people watching, and blues drifting from a speaker in the courtyard, and sometimes BBQ’s and boiling pots of seafood outside!

The Shroud of Turin: Picture of the Resurrection?

It seems beyond coincidence to me that just at this moment with turmoil swirling around us–joblessness, the situation in Iran, the economy in general, corruption in politics–that so much new evidence emerges that the Shroud could be…and maybe was…the burial cloth of Jesus. Here we are the day before Easter and it’s possible to believe that we’ve been given the greatest gift of all, an image on a linen cloth from 2000 years ago showing us the face of the Messiah! Proof that the resurrection occurred–that life extends into eternity!

Last week the History Channel showed an astounding documentary on the three-dimensional aspect of the Shroud. Scientists and photographers and computer experts worked together on a project that proved the image on the Shroud was not created by any technique known to science, and that it is not only a negative image (as in a photograph) where others are positive, but it is also three-dimensional, unlike any other in the world. A photograph of the Shroud was studied using sophisticated instruments that created a topical map of the distance between each part of the body image to the cloth covering it when the image was formed– sort of a mathematical map.

God and Haiti

I’m looking at the devastation in Haiti and thinking about that old question – why do such terrible things happen in this world? How is it that some of us are lucky enough to be born in a country like the United States of America, and others are born in places like Haiti, Somalia, Sudan? Sometimes there’s a rational answer that seems to fit–the fact that since the first days we’ve been given free will and the responsibility to make our choices and take the consequences. And that makes sense even when the consequences are remote, distanced from the choice. A personal choice often impacts other people, and can turn into something bigger and bigger and bigger, like a snowball rolling down the hill. I can understand that.