It's okay, Barack. Jesus had trouble finding privacy in Israel, too.

It's hard to assess to what extent this is true, but I like to think that as a student at Duke Divinity School, I am part of a community that will hold me to a higher standard than the old "I will not lie, cheat, or steal..." of the Duke honor code. When our present community covenant was introduced in 2003, it was met with quite a bit of resistance - much of it from the undergrads on the staff of the school newspaper, who just didn't get it. (How presumptive for the school to think that it can meddle in the moral formation of its students!)

I was reminded of all this by a small story that emerged from Obama's trip to Jerusalem. He took part in the custom of writing a prayer to God and placing it in a crack of the Western Wall. A local seminary student went to the wall, found Obama's note, and shared it with a newspaper, which printed it. This is viewed as a profound desecration of a very holy place; the Duke equivalent might be if a student snuck a tape recorder into Coach K's confessional booth at church. Public confession and atonement are often necessary for these kinds of breaches. So yesterday the yeshiva student appeared (anonymously) on Israeli television to apologize. He also seems to have taken the opportunity to endorse Obama's candidacy. Whatever.

What's that smell?

Lost in all the noise surrounding the New Yorker's insufficiently satirically covered July 21 issue was an intriguing book review by Elizabeth Kolbert about the anti-lawn movement. ("How could we have missed such a hard-hitting article?" you ask.) She touches on perhaps a half-dozen different books from the last couple years that form part of this movement's growing corpus of literature. I never had stopped to wonder about the history of our classic grassy lawn. As it turns out, none of the common American grasses is indigenous to North America, and lawns were invented in the mid-19th century.

Around the time I was reading this article, I had a conversation with my host Mary Beth about the front lawn at our house here in Indianapolis. Instead of grass, they have a lawn full of thyme. Now, it's not the most ecologically noble endeavor; they wanted to grow something they could park a car on, and they put an industrial-strength plastic grid just underneath the topsoil to ensure that this would be possible. But after experiencing a summer with this thing, I can say that a thyme lawn has downsides, such as being uncomfortable as hell to lie down in, but it also has upsides: when you walk across the lawn, it smells like pork chops.

Winding down.

There will be no full-blown Summer Wrap-Up post. But it is the case that Thursday was my last day in the office, and Sunday will be my final worship services at the church. My last act as an intern will probably be on the softball diamond Sunday afternoon.

I've learned a lot this summer, including new words such as Carb Day, tornadic, and cornholing. I also learned some things about life in the church. When I consider all I've learned, and all the people I've met, May 10 (when I drove out here) feels like it was a very long time ago. At the same time, I've been saying that I really only felt like I "hit stride" out here during the final month, and from that perspective, it feels pretty abrupt to be finishing up right now.

In either case, I am ready to go, and looking forward to a little time in New Jersey, a place where we don't need weathermen with special adjectives telling us to get in the basement right now.

You could call it that.

St. Thomas Aquinas Catholic Church, N. Illinois Street, Indianapolis:

But where's Yugoslavia?

Check out this drag & drop interactive map quiz. It covers the mysterious and geopolitically insignificant area from northern Africa to central Asia.

Got this on email via Heather, via Melissa, via Jacob.

Well, we all make mistakes.

Bob Novak is having a bad week.

After starting rumors on Monday that a McCain VP announcement was imminent (a claim from which he has since backed off), the columnist apparently hit a pedestrian with his Corvette at 18th and K streets in D.C. this morning, and drove a full block before someone stopped him. Oops.

UDPATE: The bicyclist who stopped Novak at the scene is a 1982 Duke graduate.

Final week in Indy

I'm told that in past summers, the church has had their Duke intern preach on the final Sunday of the internship. I'm glad that I was able to preach on my second-to-last Sunday, so that I could focus on the sermon without simultaneously needing to focus on packing and goodbyes.

However, I'd been pouring so much of my time into preparing the sermon (and the final session of Bible 101) that I really don't have much to do this weekend. Apart from some final evaluation type things, there is nothing immediately obvious that I should be doing, and there's not much incentive to go find things to do. I feel done.

So, this is a good week for reflection & wrap-up discussions with folks here at the church, and I'm grateful to have the time to do that. I'm also looking forward to packing up the station wagon and heading back east in five days.

Speaking of offensive caricatures...

A new web site, apparently supported by some folks with interests in ethanol, is called Nozzle Rage. I missed this, but it is almost two weeks old. Included in the site is a professionally produced video that aims to portray how Average Americans seem to have no choice but to buy foreign oil, thereby financing Hamas, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban, who will extort us for more money, strangle us, and (apparently) sodomize us. Most of the web chatter I could find about this video was pretty positive.

I'm not a fan of dependence on foreign oil. (Or of domestic ethanol. Or of light-hearted references to gang-rape). But setting all that aside: don't you think this bit of puppetry might be in poor taste?

New Yorker, get back to what you do best: making fun of people who don't read The New Yorker.

I've been fairly surprised by the size of the dust-up over the Obama New Yorker cover. Most of the articles about the whole affair haven't been particularly helpful, but I did enjoy Lee Siegel's piece in the NYT this weekend. Recognizing that the cover offended or bothered a lot of people, I'd been thinking about how the same cartoon could've been done in a more unambiguous way, and I assumed it would need to be more outrageous: a gay marriage happening out the window, a placard that said "President HUSSEIN Obama," a poor person being treated by a physician, stuff like that.

Siegel says that the problem isn't that the cartoon is insufficiently outrageous. It's that "The New Yorker represented the right-wing caricature of the Obamas while making the fatal error of not also caricaturing the right wing ... But if that very same New Yorker cover had been drawn in a balloon over the head of a deranged citizen - or a ruthless political operative - it would have appeared as plausible only in the mind of that person." I'll buy that.

However, Siegel also makes a curious argument about whether the caricature of the Obamas is even viable fodder for satire. He says that since it has only been propagated by the "lunatic fringe" and "lunatic establishment" of Fox News, it cannot be satirized; satire only works when pointing out the absurdity of something widely accepted. How, according to Siegel, do when know when an idea is widely accepted? Once it has been published by the New York Times, of course.

For the record, the NYT's circulation is just over 1 million on weekdays, and 1.6 million on Sundays. Fox News averages almost 2 million primetime viewers every night of the week. That doesn't get them out of the "lunatic" category, but it does get them off the "fringe" list.

Odds & Ends

I'd call it a Monday Roundup if I had ever done this before, or ever planned to do it again.

• Reporters staked out the D.C. police office to interview the first person to register a handgun, but they missed him -- because it wasn't a man, it was a woman.
• Obama's speech in Berlin later this week is expected to draw "between 10,000 and a million" listeners. In related news, tonight's game between the Indianapolis Indians and the Charlotte Knights should attract between 5,000 and a gajillion baseball fans.
• Speaking of baseball, the Mets have won 11 out of the last 13, and are tied with the Phillies for first place. The Mets and Phillies begin a three-game series in Queens tonight Tuesday.
• Apparently in the West we have a wild horse problem, and the government is holding some 30,000 horses in federal detention centers. NPR could not confirm that a single lawyer has been able to visit with any of the horses.