Well, being here is what I do. The rockpile on top of the “mountain” is a very rough rock circle 15 feet across. It has broad divagations from coherent circular form. I favor the notion it was made by Boy Scouts.
Thanks for your interest!

Beth, oh that is such a difficult question. In my experience, no, Jewish people do not feel we “Christians” are from the same tribe at all – we are “goy.” And I wonder if any practicing Jew who knows their history has any real trust of Christianity. I can’t imagine it. My approach to Jewish people, and I have been very close to some Jewish people, including a Rabbi, as I mentioned earlier, is absolute sensitivity. I think, outside of the holocaust, the most painful thing for Jewish people has been the times when they’ve had to pretend they were Christian to survive, crypto-Jews or conversos- it is speculated that even Christopher Columbus may have been a hidden Jew. They have been persecuted for many centuries; their tightly bound culture is a result of that persecution- it is actually forbidden for Jewish people to be outside of community of their own kind. As a religion that defines and coheres a people, I feel it is much stronger than Christianity. What Jewish person doesn’t attend High Holidays? What Jewish male is not circumcized? Who doesn’t celebrate a coming of age with Bat or Bar Mitzvahs?
We are like two different races living in the same culture. We think ‘they’ are like us; ‘they’ know they are absolutely not like “us,” and would never want to be like “us” either. They co-exist alongside us, but consider themselves very separate from our Christian culture. They are high achievers in every area. Without Jewish intelligence, nay genius, our culture would be much poorer indeed. They are an ancient race composed of very complex and often brilliant people.

Brenda – you point to something quite fascinating – we Christians (Anglicans, anyway) often act as if we have a love affair with the Jews, and as if there is such a deep kinship between us. But like you, I don’t find that to be the case at all. I think most Christians would be quite shocked to hear how many Jews feel about Christianity – this only began to be clear to me when I began to look at monotheism and the relationship of the various holy books more closely after making some close Muslim friends. I don’t mean that there is enmity, but that the sense of being “of the same tribe” is not shared. I’d be interested in exploring that more deeply, here or on my own blog, and would like to hear more from your experience.

I certainly didn’t think I was attacking Brenda personally, and am sorry if she feels attacked. To me, it’s all about the conversation. When I express strong views, it’s with the expectation (often disappointed) that someone will challenge me, so I sort of assume other commenters here will have the same outlook.

Brenda, my remark about Jewish femisnist theologians was simply a “by the way” remark. I have the sense here that because I differ with you on one or two points of emphasis, you assume that I mean to disagree with everything you are saying. That is very far from the case. I imagine we can agree, for example, that a good poem trumps a book of theology or literary criticism every time! I’ve often thought that organized religion is poetry gone bad.

Thanks for taking the time to transcribe that fine poem. It’s as good as any of the poems I see in Christian Century magazine (worth a look sometime). The mention of “the dark prince” makes me curious to see what else she has written in this vein. I loved Lucille Clifton’s Lucifer poems.

Bill – There’s something definitely appealing about a wilderness area named after a rockpile! It sounds like a terrific place. I’m impressed by how well you seem to know your area.

As for peaceful and other non-Western societies, I do feel that works of ethnography should be part of everyone’s standard education in the humanities. How can we ever really generalize about what it means to be human if we haven’t familiarized ourselves with at least a sample of the amazing diversity of cultures on the planet?