I received a Facebook message today from a friend from when I was in junior high responding to my recent statuses on Facebook. So I started to look at her blog, and found it incredibly captivating. This friend, I believe, has some awesome perspectives on faith, religiosity, politics, Jesus, and America. While a lot of my stuff has and will continue to come at certain issues from a secular perspective (other than things that relate to my theology class), it is definitely very interesting to see things played out from the perspective of a dedicated Christian living on the near-East side of Indianapolis. Her blogs question the status quo, particularly the status quo of American Christianity. She asks the hard questions and points out the failings of a Christianity founded in theology rather than service and spirituality. The posts on her blog that I read tonight will give me even more to think about, to connect with my class readings and service experiences. These connections are the hardest part of this semester, particularly when it seems I don't have enough time or patience to do that. I just hope that I get enough experience this semester to want to continue to increase my experience and to leave this semester with a sense of how much I need to keep attacking these issues in a way to figure out more about them. The fact that my friend currently lives in the area of Indianapolis that she does really intrigues me. She lives there full-time. She spends her life confronting the issues that I'm confronting this semester, and it's in a city she knows from growing up in a nearby suburb. In my Community Building class, we're reading a book called When Work Disappears. It has definitely given me a new view of the suburbs and how they have harmed the inner-city so much. Suburbs can realistically, at least to a certain extent, be blamed for drug activity and its accompanying violence in inner-city neighborhoods. That's not to say that we can blame the people who live there. But it does no good to cast blame anyway. The question is what we can do. Maybe not even what we can do, though. It's such a complicated issue, this idea of poverty and inner-city communities. I just want to point out that this is how Barack Obama's community organizing experience can really benefit his presidency if he's elected. Sarah Palin may have chosen to dismiss that experience, but I feel it makes Obama more in touch with a group of people he's supposed to be serving. A piece of flair on Facebook that I saw today pointed out that Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor. While this is a tricky comparison that I don't want to promote, it's definitely an interesting perspective. With that, I apologize that politics have found their way into this blog, but poverty is an issue that, as "Poverty in America: A Threat to the Common Good," a publication from Catholic Charities put out, only the government has the resources to handle. It is, obviously, not the only issue, but for me recently, it has become a very important issue.