name change, game changer

So.  I've decided to change the blog name.  And tinker with the layout and settings a little bit.  Hopefully it can be a breath of fresh air in this hot summer.

The pastor and the bartender was a great name for where we were two years ago.  But the bartender is no longer tending bar (and that's a really good thing).  We have relocated.  We have added another family member.  And our family just plain looks and acts differently than it did.

Have any of you read Phillip Roth's excellent novel American Pastoral?  Here's a bit of the summary from Wikipedia:   [The main character's] happy and conventional upper middle class life is ruined by the domestic social and political turmoil of the 1960s during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, which in the novel is described as a manifestation of the "indigenous American berserk."

Sounds familiar.

So, we are now nashvillian pastoral.  I'm still a pastor.  We live in Nashville.  Our happy and conventional middle class life has been reshaped in myriad ways by domestic and social turmoil.  We are the indigenous American berserk.