When sending good karma on Facebook isn't enough...

A friend of mine built an online ritual for the website of the Campaign for Love & Forgiveness. Pretty neat. Check it out...

http://www.loveandforgive.org/letting_go.php

Actually, there wasn't much blood.

Just saw P.T. Anderson's There Will Be Blood over the weekend. It's an intense movie--scripted more like a play than a typical sweeping historical epic. I won't make this into a review or detailed plot discussion, but I did find the film's treatment of religion complex and fascinating.

Organized religion and godless capitalism are each skewered mercilessly, but the story pays more attention to human personality than to large impersonal systems. Both the young Pentecostal preacher and the oil baron protagonist appear sympathetic at times, but in time both are consumed by anger, greed, and pride. I'm not sure if the message is that the two systems are equally bankrupt, or simply that people are more more fragile and corruptible than their belief systems.

I am also not sure if the director is positing a universe with God in it (mind you, this is a vengeful God who curses oil drills) or a universe of meaningless chaos. I think we're supposed to be left on the fence. Sort of like real life.

Book Excerpt Is Up

So I finished the manuscript in early January...

I am going through the usual channels (query letters, etc) in search of a publisher, but in the meantime, I thought I'd put up the first chapter on the web for anybody who is interested.

Let me know what you think.

http://www.tessgadwa.com/southerncross/SouthernCrossBookExcerpt.pdf