I ran across this AP article today and felt like giving the South Los Angeles City Council a round of applause. In short, they have placed a moratorium on the opening of new fast food restaurants in the area, hoping to give healthier restaurants and grocery stores an opportunity to step in.

Bravo! Studies have long shown that those living in economically poorer neighborhoods are much more obese than their middle or upper class counterparts. At first, this wouldn't make sense. If you have no money, you don't eat as much, so you'd be thinner, right? Well, in developing countries that may certainly be the case, but here in these United States, we've got these things called dollar menus, in which one can buy a whole meal for less than a tank of gas. Well, that's great for the poor, right? Cheap food is easier on the budget, no wonder poor neighborhoods are filled with fast food restaurants.

Oh, wait, one problem: the foods on those menus (and the majority of the foods these restaurants serve) aren't healthy. They're high in calories, high in fat and cholesterol, and low in nutritional value.

Opponents of the moratorium argue with this blanket conception.

I recently read a short blurb in my hometown newspaper about a local Superfund (hazardous waste) site that finally was going to be cleaned up. On one hand, I rejoiced. No longer would the neighbors of this dangerous place have to live with contaminants in the air, water, and soil. Health problems would most likely be diminished. It took residents many years to get through the bureaucracy to reach this goal, and for that I applaud them.

Then, something else caught my eye. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided that the easiest and most cost-effective way to "fix" the site is to do offsite disposal. Now, when I looked on the EPA's Superfund website, it seems that the end result is a chemical landfill.

Hold the phone: We're taking it from one community's backyard, and putting it in another's? Yup, basically. Now, there are all these technical phrases in the document's about recovery of these sites I didn't understand, having to do with chemical levels and parts per millimeter or something or other, that seemed to say they take into consideration how toxically saturated the soil is to decide how close to a residential area it can go.

See, that's the thing about stuff -- hazardous or otherwise.

Not too long ago, I was describing part of my thesis project to a colleague after a conversation about the search and call process. “It’s a prayer shawl,” I told him, “with the names and images of the women I consider to be my saints, the cloud of witnesses that surround me.”

“Whoa,” he replied. “You’re going to have to tone down that crazy feminist stuff when you meet with search committees.”

Now, truth be told, I don’t consider myself a “crazy” feminist. I am a feminist, yes, in that I feel that men and women are equal and deserve to be treated as such. Perhaps I am a strong feminist, in that I believe that men are not the “default” humans, with women being an afterthought. I believe influential women should be celebrated in the same way influential men have been for millennia. I also believe that women have the same access to God, Christ, and the Holy Spirit that men do, and the same ability to share that with a parish community. If that makes me a “crazy feminist,” then I will proudly claim that title.

So, in honor of that, here are my top ten reasons I won’t tone down my crazy feminism...

I can't seem to stop thinking about her, this woman whose name I don't know.

Last Friday, while leaving a friend's apartment, I was stopped in my tracks by an unmistakable sound: that of someone being hit.

A man yelled in Spanish, each phrase punctuated by that horrible sound. I heard her voice yell back once. His reply was that sound. As I came to myself enough to move away down the stairs, not wanting to be discovered just standing there listening, I heard him yell some more, "Que te dijo? Que te dijo?!" What did I tell you, what did I tell you.

I didn't know what to do.

So says the writer of Ecclesiastes. And I'm inclined to agree. I'm starting to see how much what shapes our world now is not so different from what has shaped other times and societies. All areas of our lives hold "memories" of what has come before.

It seems like everyone wants to try things out for a year these days, and then write a book on it: Maria Headley said yes to every date request for a year; A.J. Jacobs lived Biblically for a year. Author Barbara Kingsolver chose (with her family) to live a year focused on food -- specifically, the food that was produced near her home.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (Harper Collins, May 2007) took me on a journey through the food seasons so brilliantly described that while reading it, I could practically smell the dirt!

Kingsolver's premise is that so much of the food that Americans consume is from somewhere other than where they live. This uses up precious fossil fuels, causes the destruction of farmland (and its inhabitants), and generally leaves us with sub-par food, so that not only do we not know where food is supposed to really come from, but we don't know what it really tastes like!