Zwei mehr

Welcome to visitors in the past 24 hours from Kuwait and Chile!

Yes, I know, neither nation has German as an official language and so the header today ("two more" in German) is a bit perverse, but it's what popped into my head and by now y'all know I tend to post what pops into my head.
Kuwait, of course, has a very interesting geopolitical situation, being an oil-producing country nestled amid Saudia Arabia, Iraq, and Iran.

Here is a 9:37min visual tour of Kuwait City (with western music):


Chile has one of the more interesting outlines being such a long and narrow country, running along the western side of the Andes.

Here is a 4:45m video of (rapidly shifting) photos of the capital Santiago de Chile:




Chile is also one of the countries for which I have a large physical flag. My ex visited there a few times on business and I also had a colleague, the Rev. Ivan Ramírez, who is Chilean. Ivan and Elena are wonderful people who ministered in the San Francisco area. When they visited their native country there was some culture shock, especially with the Church of the Province of the Southern Cone. (Note: this was some years ago.) The Anglicans in Chile were not very Prayer-Book oriented, very evangelical and charismatic and anti-Catholic. When Ivan presided at a Eucharist, he raised his hand for the blessing but refrained from making the sign of the Cross. Afterward someone came up and accused him of almost making the sign of the Cross, which implied that he was some kind of Catholic. Much of the evangelical thrust of the Anglicans in Chile was among the illiterate indigenous; little headway was made with the bulk of the population. Ivan would have been much more at home with the Roman Catholics in terms of liturgical and theological culture--as would I. At one point a brief window of opportunity opened for living in Chile for a year or two through my partner's work. There is no question that we would have worshiped with the Catholics while there.

And that's it for stories this morning.
--the BB