Entries Tagged 'Pandemic'

Is a Church Online a Real Community?

By Timothy R. Butler | Mar 06, 2024 at 10:40 PM

What makes for genuine community? Everyone had to wrestle with that in 2020 when community as we had thought of it was abruptly severed. Four years later, we continue to grasp for the precise answer to the question in our moment.

The Middle of the Week

By Timothy R. Butler | Apr 05, 2023 at 10:17 PM

Is it just me? It feels like 2023 has been a slog so far. I’m pretty certain it isn’t just me, because as I look around, everyone looks like they are struggling. Life is full of struggles, but I don’t remember them being so palpable around most people most of the time like now. We strive and yearn and wait. Like Holy Week.

An Elegy for the Life that Was

By Timothy R. Butler | Jul 06, 2022 at 9:09 PM

I see it on the faces of everyone I talk to. The war wearied look of two years and three months since life changed. As we peer into a fall in which COVID continues to roar along and many I know who had dodged it are now catching it, life-February-2020-style feels more distant than ever.

Escapes, Both Mediocre and Great

By Dennis E. Powell | Apr 13, 2022 at 9:03 PM

The last couple of years brought us a desire to escape from the real world, maybe more than ever before. Due to the circumstance that led us to seek a hiding place, many of the refuges from reality we’ve traditionally sought weren’t available. We didn’t have movies at movie theaters. We didn’t have concerts. We lost sporting events. The attempts to provide substitutes were poor replacements for the real thing.

Rediscovering Aldi

By Timothy R. Butler | Apr 06, 2022 at 10:59 PM

When the pandemic first hit, we quickly watched various staples become hard to purchase, including — as plenty of memes gleefully remind us — toilet paper. Though less attention grabbing, meat, milk and other essentials also became harder to find and that pushed me to rediscover an old friend: Aldi.

Fast or Slow, Time Will Flow -- Even Now

By Dennis E. Powell | Sep 22, 2021 at 11:47 AM

Today is the first day of autumn. The new season begins at 3:20 p.m. Eastern time, so it’s really the first part-day of autumn. It is not by design that I’ve gone on a bit recently about the passage of time and our perception thereof. It just seems to have inserted itself into a lot of recent (how do we even define “recent”?) events.

The Way to Survive Frustrating Tech Failures (and What that Says About Masks)

By Timothy R. Butler | Sep 15, 2021 at 12:32 PM

I told my friend Dennis E. Powell that I’m starting to believe in Skynet. Over the last week, virtually everything that could go wrong with the technology I depend on for work has gone wrong, as if it has actively turned against me. Having spent a fair number of years wrangling information technology, one thing has always provided a path to survival in those times: redundancy. Redundancy masks problems in the best of ways, much like the physical masks that are such a lightning rod in our culture today.

Here's How to Get a Lot More People Vaccinated Against SARS-CoV-2

By Dennis E. Powell | Aug 03, 2021 at 11:42 AM

Here’s something that I bet you know, but that it seems our government and news media — in large measure that’s redundant — don’t know: A lot of people are afraid of shots. They head the other way when the needle comes out. You know such people. Maybe you are such a person.

Find Out if NoVax is Right for You

If Skipping the COVID Vaccine Were a Pharmaceutical Commercial...

By Timothy R. Butler | May 18, 2021 at 11:44 PM

The disease that we will likely recall for the rest of our lives as simply “the Pandemic” has been answered by vaccines that, by any pre-COVID standard, would be viewed as incredibly effective. Reduce spread, reduce severity and do so with stunningly few severe side effects? How can “NoVax” be appealing in that light?