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The Daily Philly: Yes, I’ve been secretly running a Philly photo blog

/ Paul Burkhart / 3 Comments

Consider this post the official unveiling of my Philadelphia Photo blog:

The Daily Philly: a picture of philly. daily. (almost)
(also on Facebook, Twitter, & Google+)

The Story

I love photography. My dad was a professional photographer for most of my life, photographing my soccer teams and conducting annual Christmas portraits with my brother and me. He’s taught photography at Community Colleges and passed down much of what he knew to me. (I’ve even started doing a personal weekend photo photo challenge on this blog)

I also love Philadelphia. It’s culture, history, feel, and rhythm speak to me in such a real and deep way. It’s big enough that it’s a “real” city: it has art, culture, museums, great food, history, business, urban politics, and even nature (yes, it does!). But, it’s a manageable city. A friend once called it “a city with training wheels”. You can walk from one end of downtown to the other in less than an hour.

So, I brought these two things together into a little web experiment.
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Chance Encounter (an Ode & Lament to Beauty) | {story#4}

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This is an original fiction piece written for StoryADay September. Read more & follow here.
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As I was walking down the crowded downtown street, I noticed a woman walking the opposite way, walking toward me. She was stunning. Long black-brown hair framed a clear face with a touch of rouge; the face contained two deep and dark eyes, ornamented with the perfect accents of eyeliner and shadow. Tall and slender, she walked with a poise and confidence that could do nothing but draw one’s eye. The cool of the coming Fall brought forth her seasonally-appropriate dark colors, layered clothes, and charming violet shawl.

My gaze was immediately arrested and mercilessly held without bond, tortured for the information I had no words to say. I had only thoughts. Only sensations. Only slight, but deep, sensual perceptions rising to an unfulfilling place of fleeting desire and longing. I felt the invitation to come, tempered only by the canyon of anonymity between us.
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A Kaleidoscope & Mirror, Both Darkened | {story#3}

/ Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

This is an original fiction piece written for StoryADay September. Read more & follow here.
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Yes, I am.

What?

I am.

Who?

Karen. From the office.

How long?

To what degree?

“To what degree?” What the hell is that supposed to mean?

I mean, “How long since what?” Since it became physical? Since we started talking? Since the idea popped in my head? Since I contemplated opening myself up to the possibility in the first place? To what degree are you referring when you ask me “how long”?

Why are you talking so calmly about this?

Because we’re adults.

No, “we” are not.
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Tomorrow | {story#2}

/ Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

This is an original fiction piece written for StoryADay September. Read more & follow here.
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It’s not until you’re laying there that you realize how different reality is from the movies–especially in this case.

That moment exposes the assumptions you had about how this sort of thing would happen, and the various details and nuances of those assumptions are really affected by the cultural influences you take in.

The biggest difference? For me, at least, it was the sound. Or rather, to be more specific, the lack of it.

Music. Squeal. Cursing. Bending of metal. Breaking of glass. Breaking of branches. Landing of body.

And then, silence.
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Semi-Sweet, Bittersweet | {story#1}

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It was from loudly sucking the last of his milkshake that Ted finally understood the way she really was. Grabbing tissues, he made the call.

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This is an original fiction piece written for StoryADay September. Read more and follow here. (Because today is Labor Day, I am following today’s writing prompt by StoryADay.org to write “Twitter fiction”: a story in 140 characters of less. Come back tomorrow for my first “full length” piece.)

Creative Commons License
This work by Paul Burkhart is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Weekend Photo Challenge: Free Spirit (a new weekly feature)

/ Paul Burkhart / 7 Comments

Today I’m introducing a new weekly post I’ll be doing. WordPress, the site that hosts this blog, has a weekly “Photo Challenge“, where bloggers are tasked with finding (or taking) a picture that captures a certain theme. See the bottom of this post for more information.

As my Facebook friends know, I do love taking pictures and trying to make them as beautiful as possible. And so, when I saw this today, I decided to begin this weekend featurette. The “challenges” are posted on Fridays, and so I will post mine over the weekend. Some weeks I might take a fresh picture, other weeks I’ll try and find an old one. I’ll post it, and tell a little bit about it.

Today’s picture is a really special one to me.
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slightly new theme on the blog. tell me if anything’s wrong.

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Hey I just switched to the updated version of the WordPress theme I’ve been using for a while. Little things are different like the header images are a few pixels thinner (I like that change) and little frames are around every image (I’m still warming up to that one). If you see any other weird formatting things I’m missing, or something is messed up, please let me know.

A Note to All Philadelphians: you CAN beat the Parking Authority

/ Paul Burkhart / 2 Comments

There are few city institutions in this country more hated than the Philadelphia Parking Authority. Despite the name, they are the private organization on contract with the city to manage parking in the city. They make the laws, set the rates, set the penalties, enforce them, and have a financial incentive to making you fail at being a responsible parker in Philly. It’s understood that parking tickets will be a regular part of life in Philly. The PPA is the primary subject in A&E’s show Parking Wars, and their relentlessness and lack of empathy is so bad, that it’s had an effect on local tourism.

They call themselves the most efficient parking authority in the country, but had to be forced to follow-through on the requirement for them to give their profits to the public school system in Philly (they did this by claiming that they were suddenly “no longer profitable”, even as they kept more than a quarter of their profits in reserve bank accounts). Since then, they’ve been forced to reform a bit, but they continue to directly ignore recent court requirements that attempt increase their fairness, because, as is known, the appeals process is extremely problematic and confusing. So are the signs (just look at that one above)!
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Leonardo diCaprio & Kirk Cameron: BFFs (Laugh of the Day) [casual fri]

/ Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

The other day, I wrote a pretty serious and in-depth post on the place of the darker things of this world in art, especially profanities. in the middle of the post, I put two rather intense videos as demonstrations of my point. They were both videos from films depicting serious husband/wife fighting. One was from Kirk Cameron’s “Christian” movie Fireproof, and the other was from the film Revolutionary Road, in which Leonardo diCaprio plays the husband. Adding to the irony, both of these movies came out in the same year.

It wasn’t until later that I was reminded by a friend that these two actually worked together early in their careers, on the TV Show Growing Pains. If you want some weird contrasts that can’t help but make you laugh pretty hard, feel free to re-watch the two clips below, as well as this clip of the two of these guys doing a scene from Growing Pains. In hindsight, it’s pretty hilarious.
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My annual beach business trip is here. So what’s changed?

/ Paul Burkhart / 2 Comments

Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about how my job was paying me to accompany some clients to the beach at Ocean City, Maryland for the week to help them grow in socialization and relaxation skills. If you remember, I wrote about sex and insanity that week (and that post caused some interesting problems for me later). On the beach reading front, at the time, I posted this picture:

Well, we’re back there again right now, and just yesterday, I found myself taking this picture without much thought:

Haha. I’m ridiculous. But at least I have good taste in over-sized classic books, right?

Here I am leading a Port Wine tasting with Fluffer-Nutter Sandwiches [VIDEO]

/ Paul Burkhart / 1 Comment

Last night, some of my best friends threw a wine-tasting and food pairing party. Some of the people closest to me presented wine and food pairings that blew my mind. I had no idea that wine could do all of that. It was the perfect way to end a very busy summer.

Above, you will find a video of me presenting my wine and pairing. I led a tasting of a Tawny Port wine and paired it with Fluffer-Nutter sandwiches (my new obsession). I hope you enjoy it and learn some things.

You can see the videos of the other wine-presenters, as well as other highlights of our evening here.

Thanks go to Paul and Natanya Ma for hosting us, and specifically to Paul for taking and posting these videos.
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The Best Bible Resource I’ve Ever Read [casual fri]

/ Paul Burkhart / 3 Comments

To do this Bible Class that has consumed the past few months of my life (and this blog–I swear I’ll stop talking about it soon), I had to read a lot of stuff, including these (as well as their New testament counterparts). I checked out stuff from the Philadelphia library, and watched a bunch of lectures from iTunesU (especially these). I looked through commentaries and websites and articles and handbooks and sermons.

In other words, I at least glanced over a lot.

But there was one resource that I found more helpful, clear, and amazing than any other Bible resource I’ve ever found. No exaggeration. No hyperbole. I’m serious.

It’s a pair of textbooks (one on the Old Testament, one on the New, one combined with both) written by a theologian I had never heard of before. his name is John Drane (here’s his painfully poor-designed website as well). Yes, textbooks. And I read most of the Old Testament one and all of the New Testament one.

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Using the Bible to Meet with God

/ Paul Burkhart / 6 Comments

Last week, I asked a bunch of you how you go about using the Bible and the study of its contents to actually nourish your soul and meet with God. I got some great responses both here and on Facebook. This week, I wanted to put up how I ended up approaching this during the class I taught at my church. It’s super short, not very deep, and much more can/should/will be said. For what it is, I hope it’s genuinely helpful and speaks to how we might meet God through the Scriptures.

How do we move from the Facts of the Bible to the God of the Bible? From knowing the Bible, to knowing the Person? From Scripture being informational to formational?

The Meeting Place of God

As I said in the first class I taught, the Bible is not the passive “Revelation of God”. It is the place through which the Holy Spirit actively “reveals God” to us. When it comes to the Bible, we should start thinking more in verbs, not nouns. The Bible is “simply” a meeting place for God and his people, where he might meet them as he desires, by His Spirit.

When we meet God in Scripture, its the convergence of four things: Us and our faith, God and His Spirit.
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Join Us for a Tour of Biblical History at the Penn Museum this Saturday!

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As a fitting conclusion to the six-week Bible Survey Class I’ve been teaching at my church, I’ll be leading a tour of The University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology of Anthropology, focusing on much of the Biblical History we covered in the class. The museum has a very rich collection of items from the regions and eras in which most all of Biblical History unfolds. We will be following the unfolding storyline of the Bible as we travel to each section, learning the context and the history that set the stage for the faith many of us now call our own.

If you’re interested, meet us at 10am this Saturday, August 25th in the courtyard in front of the main entrance (pictured above). Note: There’s a smaller entrance at street level some may confuse as the main entrance. We will be up the steps where the main fountain is.

The cost is $12 for adults and $8 for students (and well worth the price). The museum is located at 33rd and Spruce (map), right across the South St bridge. (Parking advice: park on the east side of the South St bridge in the Graduate Hospital area and then walk over the bridge). See you there!