Friday Favorites

My special thing this week was being able to take evening walks with Sheila.  Sheila's physical range has been severely limited due to her back problems in the last few weeks.  This week we were able to go out for a couple of walks together after dinner.

How about your week?

Comments

[Katherine]

Honestly, I enjoyed watching the VP debate last night with a couple of my roommates. We had a good time of it--interesting things to talk about, a bit of yelling at the TV, and plenty of laughs.

[Jennifer]

1. We moved into our new house :-)
2. Although I dont like the schedule, I'm in an amazzzzinnngggg theology class this weekend.

[Dan]

Katherine,

I watched the debate too! For me, I was looking forward to see how Palin would blow away such low expectations for her--and she did. But she clearly stayed away from "answers" that would reveal her weaknesses. Biden, was, well, Biden.

Jen,

Glad to hear you are enjoying the class!

[Estel]

On Tuesday I finished reading a book about St Innocent of Alaska, who's one of my favourite saints. He was a missionary in Alaska and eastern Siberia, and was involved in translating the bible into Aleut and Yakut and possibly some other languages. He clearly loved the people he worked with and led (as a priest and then a bishop), and I love him for it.

[Jennifer]

Estel,

My family and I were in Alaska this summer and I enjoyed looking for, and finding, the churches with Russian Orthodox buildings. I wish I would have had more time to learn about how Russian Orthodoxy works out in Alaska today...I know that Alaska has the highest concentration of RO churches outside of Russia, but I dont know what that looks like in the lives of Alaskan people today.

[Estel]

Jennifer,
I know that Orthodoxy is still strong in a lot of native communities in Alaska, but I don't think it's penetrated the non-native population of Alaska much. The Orthodox Church in Alaska has to deal with certain problems that are common in native communities, such as poverty and alcohol abuse.

I think you might like to read about Matushka Olga. (Matushka is a title for a priest's wife.) She was a native Yup'ik woman of relatively recent times (not super-recent - she died in 1979) who's coming to be honoured as a saint. She was a midwife and through that had the opportunity to minister to women who were sexually abused, a ministry that through God's grace she seems to have continued after she left this life. These articles about her also have a bit of a picture of rural Orthodox Alaskan life a few decades ago - I don't know how much has changed now.

http://web.archive.org/web/20080119212041/http://www.jacwell.org/articles/1997-SPRING-Matushka_olga.htm

and

http://oholy.net/stolga/mo_olga.html

(The first link's long because the original site has disappeared from the internet but is still available through the internet archive.)