Books: (not in any particular order)

Anything by Flannery O'Connor.

The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky; Emily Dickenson's poetry; War and Peace, Tolstoy; A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole; Middlemarch, George Eliot; anything by Jane Austen (she's so funny); Love Medicine, Louise Erdich; anything by Maya Angelou; As I Lay Dying, Faulkner; Gilead, Marilynne Robinson; theologian James Alison; Dakota, Kathleen Norris; anything by Kevin Phillips (he's a non-fiction writer); Luther's Small Catechism and The Bondage of the Will; Book of Mark and Paul's Epistle to the Romans (Bible).

Film: pretty much anything disturbing and beautiful like Pulp Fiction or American Beauty; just about any art-circuity, indy film (even if it's bad, someone tried), the first Billy Jack with Tom Laughlin.

Billy Jack                                              Jack Black

Fellini films, especially as they move between the breakdown of individualism and the rise of post-modernism; Tommy Boy, any film with Jack Black, though I'm not so sure about this King Kong thing; and the best film of the 20th century Gates of Heaven (This is a smaller film. On one level, it's a documentary about a pet cemetery in California that needs to be moved because a new freeway is going in. But in a whole other way, it's really about death, immortality, meaning, American culture, and how crazy and quirky we all are).

Music: I think it was BB King who said, "There are two kinds of music: good music and bad music." It's pretty much the truth. No matter what musical style - jazz, blues, rock and roll, rap,  pop, folk, country, classical, it doesn't matter - there are artists who really create good music, and artists who leave a black mark on the genre. That being said, I still miss Sex Pistols and what they did to music in this country.

 Video Clip of the Sex Pistols

 Monkey washing cat

 Sound clip of nubian goat in heat

 Knight Rider Intro

Other things I love:

Jesus 

 Gerhard Forde

OK, Gerhard Forde was grumpy. But he was also brilliant and witty. Moreover, he is the only man I know whose stubborn adherence to grace and the theology of the cross could make it all a little sexy. Which begs the question "WWFD?"

Of course, family and friends. There really is no place like home.

Spending time with my dogs.

All my cooler, PC friends say it's wrong, but it tastes, mmm, so good.

The good men and women of the Luther maintenance crew. The most FAB secret in town.

Pumping iron. Dial it up. And finally....

We all know how dangerous they can be, but safely done and carefully supervised, it's really just physics.