Seeing Old Friends
January 8th, 2007,Over the weekend I saw some old friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.
One was a friend from my freshman year of college, when I attended the University of Chicago (I subsequently transferred to the University of Minnesota). He was in town for a job interview and earlier had located me via the Internet and this blog. We hadn’t talked in more than 20 years! My family and I went up to St. Paul and met with him on Saturday. It was wonderful to catch up and find that we had more in common than ever, including marriage and children within the last five years.
He’s been living in Canada for a few years - he’s a Chicago native - and I was interested to learn from him that Canada allows for public funding of private schools. The province of Ontario, for example, funds Catholic schools, although it does not do the same for other religions. (See a Wikipedia article for more info.) This challenged some of my thinking about private schools and the government.
He was interested in learning about possible places to live, and we spent some time driving around Minneapolis, St. Paul, and St. Anthony Village, admiring neighborhoods like St. Anthony Park, Macalester/Groveland, and Merriam Park. I noted how much parts of downtown St. Paul had changed. Just as in Minneapolis, the condo boom has had a tremendous impact.
The other friends I met with were Bob and Suzanne Janssen, whom I know from my time as a member of Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church in Minneapolis. I had arranged for Bob to speak at my current church, Northfield United Methodist, on the topic of “Spiritual Ecology.”
Bob is the leading expert on birds in Minnesota. He has authored several book on Minnesota birds, including Birds of Minnesota and Wisconsin (Lone Pine Press, 2003), which I’m happy to learn was nominated for a Minnesota Book Award in 2004.
Bob estimates that in 60-plus years of birding in the state, he’s probably logged more than 3 million miles!
Bob made a good case for Christians being concerned with the health of the environment and the need to preserve the wild. He noted that the problems are with our systems as a whole, making them difficult but no less necessary to address. Over lunch after the talk, Bob noted the troubling decline in songbird populations in Minnesota, with habitat loss being a principal culprit.