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Art is not frivolous

I Am What I Am #6, acrylic on paper, blue and yellow

This statement was displayed with an art exhibition of mine several years ago. It was a personal statement that the venue asked me to include. It has a central idea that is very important to …

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California Fires: Finding Beauty in the Animal Evacuations

Horses with heads sticking out of their stalls.

Something Unexpected

There were two weeks in October that didn’t go as I expected.

On Monday, October 9th, my wife was following the developing Northern California fires online when she saw that they were woefully shorthanded at the large animal evacuation site near us. We decided to spend a few hours the next morning volunteering. Those few hours turned into much more.

Soon after arriving to volunteer, we were assigned to watch a barn and help care for the animals, mostly horses. The instructions to volunteers were that the horses needed water, walking, and food. But, there were a ton of volunteers and the waters were getting checked every 10 minutes and people with little horse experience were walking them. At one point, our barn had seven animals and 12 people trying to help. Everyone meant well but it was stressing the animals out. Then when a horse got stressed four people would try to calm it… which didn’t help. 

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Revisiting 2014…aka another top 10 list.

Rondall, Pamela, and the kids in a fall 2014 portrait

A little while back I had a fan of Faith on View message me on Facebook asking me to once again post regularly on Faith on View. Okay, truth be told it really was more of an internet friend teasing me for my failures. For those who follow this blog, they noticed that in September posts stopped fairly abruptly. What happened was that I had the wonderful opportunity to become a Senior Lecturer at California College of the Arts which is one of the top Art Schools in the nation. But, I had previously committed to teaching two classes at William Jessup University, an evangelical school in the Sacramento  area, and a class at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, where I am pursuing my PhD. This meant that in addition to the Theological Aesthetics course I was auditing from the esteemed Frank Birch Brown, I was also now teaching five classes at three different institutions. All that to say I was really busy and I let my writing on Faith on View slip. The good news is that this semester my teaching is reduced and I am only teaching one course at GTU and one at CCA. This should translate into more regular writing from me. I have a lot of ideas so I am looking forward to having more time to get them on “paper.”

Rondall, Pamela, and the kids in a fall 2014 portrait taken by Nicole DiGiorgio of Sweetness and Light Photography
Rondall, Pamela, and the kids in a fall 2014. Portrait taken by Nicole DiGiorgio of Sweetness and Light Photography

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Prisoners: Hinting at Grace

Movie poster from Prisoners

I’ve never been a huge movie guy. I enjoy them like everyone else but I wouldn’t consider myself a serious critic. Mostly, I see action films, with a real soft spot for Sci-Fi, and kids’ …

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