Four favorites ~ meditating on a Monday

1.  My favorite view is either from Signal Mountain looking south across the Tennessee River and Chattanooga (above) or from Lookout Mountain looking north across the Tennessee River and Chattanooga (below).  Do you see a pattern here?  I first posted the photo below in 2013.

2.  My favorite comfort food is extra crispy fried okra.  Jeff at Shuford's BBQ knows I like it extra crispy and makes it perfectly.  When I visited Chattanooga in April, Sandra asked where I wanted to eat lunch on my birthday.  Not only did I get extra crispy okra, but Jeff also took me out to his van and gave me a Shuford's shirt like the one he was wearing.  If you are in Chattanooga, I highly recommend Shuford's BBQ, now located in the old Southern Restaurant building in Red Bank.


3.  My favorite genre of music is classical music, but my VERY favorite piece is Mozart's Bassoon Concerto.  I've posted it several times on this blog, and this is a good short version.  If the video doesn't work, here's the YouTube link.

4.  My favorite theological writer is Marcus Borg, especially his The Heart of Christianity, published in 2003.  I reviewed this book ten years ago (click on the title for that blog post).  Borg, who died in 2015, often wrote with John Dominic Crossan, most of whose books are also on my shelves.  I still need to read The Search for Jesus: Modern Scholarship Looks at the Gospels (1994) by Borg, Crossan, and Stephen Patterson, that was edited by Hershel Shanks.  When I bought this book, years ago, I'd never heard of Patterson.  But now his 2018 book The Forgotten Creed: Christianity's Original Struggle against Bigotry, Slavery, and Sexism is on top of the stack beside my chair, waiting to be read.  Now both books are on the stack.