Taking a break from reading The Rise of the Creative Class, I have been reading God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. The first I’ve heard of Sojourners Magazine was in reading this book. Overall, Wallis has a much more sane perspective than his right wing counterparts. (The magazine even has an article on sprawl in the current issue.)

I did want to post one letter from a Sojo reader. Concerning the Terri Schiavo case:

David Federman writes from Narberth, Pennsylvania:

You say “the morally safer course is always to err on the side of life,” but err it is if that life is one of complete limbo and extinguished consciousness. For me, the safer course is always to err on the side of compassion, to say that there is a level below which life is no longer meaningful by any definition of the word.

When my mother was dying of lung cancer 10 years ago, I asked one of her hospice care providers if they believed in God. She told me the job has made a believer of her. “I remember the day I realized there was a higher power,” she told me. A family had gathered to say their last goodbyes to their mother who was in a coma. Each took their turn urging the mother to depart for Heaven. Then the youngest daughter flung herself on her mother’s body and begged her not to leave. She was sobbing uncontrollably. Suddenly the mother awoke, sat up in bed and said to her daughter, “Helen, shut the hell up,” and died. The family went from stunned silence to laughter. Even the daughter joined in. “It’s then that I knew there was a God,” the hospice worker told me. If Terry Schiavo could speak, I think she’d have told her parents to shut the hell up and let go.