there’s a burning question we’ve all been asking ourselves for a very long time:

what do you find at the convergence of soft acoustic guitar with hip-hop influenced rhythmic sensibilities and a heavy leaning on samples from turn of the century recordings of ‘sacred harp’ acapella recordings?

yes, life’s mysteries…

chances are, not only have you never asked this question, but you’re now just utterly confused.

this morning on the eikon blog, we made a particularly exciting announcement that i wanted to share here. on saturday, september 8, david bazan will be playing a show at eikon as a part of his current living room tour.

yesterday afternoon, in the relatively quiet capitol view neighborhood, two peoples’ lives came to an end while another was left with life-threatening injuries.

just after mid-day, 19-year old charles murry, jr. entered a home on thayer street and before leaving, shot the 2 inhabitants. after fleeing the home, murry was shot by police and pronounced dead shortly thereafter.

as the events unfolded live on twitter (and in subsequent local news outlets’ accounts), i found myself particularly engaged. first and foremost, this is just a few houses down from where we lived several years ago. this was our neighborhood. this was our street. this was our neighbors. secondly, it’s not so much that i can’t look away from a train wreck, but more that my ears always perk when there’s violence and crime in neighborhoods near where i live. i’ll get to why i’m so particularly interested in these incidents shortly.

a couple days ago, max brantley, on the arkansas blog, posted a list of city employees organized by place of residency (little rock or non-little rock). the most skewed numbers toward non-little rock residents—confirming brantley’s suspicions—were police and fire employees.

non-little rock fire department employees outnumber little rock employees by an almost 3 to 1 margin (295 to 110). despite the margin being more narrow, the far more troubling numbers, to me, are non-little rock police employees who outnumber little rock employees by more than 100 (365 to 252).

i’m not a walmart hater. i have many friends who are, but i’m not. at all. in fact, i think walmart is actually good for communities. there’s certainly some negatives that come with its presence, but ultimately, i think offering products at lower prices is good for lower income families.

i say that simply to establish that i’m not the type who looks for reasons to bash walmart.

but yesterday, as i entered a local walmart, i was greeted with a large sign that hung above the entrance. here’s the sign:

i think i first heard about occupy wall street, like others, on the news. my reaction was equal parts interest and dismissiveness. on one hand, the very brief reporting offered some of the reasons for the protests and they were things that mildly resonated with me. on the other hand, though, i assumed, like other protests, that this one would fizzle out after about 24 hours at best. these hippies surely couldn’t turn this protest into a movement.

but…

this past weekend, i had the privilege of spending the weekend at the arkansas juvenile detention center in alexander. i participated as the “spiritual director” for a ministry event called kairos torch (a part of an ongoing ministry called kairos).

there’s a number of stories i could share of young men (ranging from 14 to 17) who have great hearts and shared things with me that i would never expect to hear from someone twice their age. it was a humbling experience and i was glad to be a part of it once again.

but…that’s for another post.