Letter to Congresswoman McCollum, and Senators Franken and Klobuchar:

When I became a Bahá‘í in the 90s, perhaps the second deliberate change I made (prayer being the first) was to act with greater respect and appreciation towards my parents. I have long remembered that there was a particular passage that prompted this change; the “Bahá‘í Faith” quote service on Facebook has brought that long-sought quotation back to me today:

Last Sunday I attend my first interfaith passover seder, at Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul. There were around 150 people present, from many different religions (though almost entirely white), commemorating together the Jewish liberation from Egyptian slavery. In addition to a traditional Haggadah “liturgy”, representatives from six other faith communities were given an opportunity to speak about liberation or an exodus from their religious perspectives, and at the tables we had an opportunity to speak from our own perspectives, particularly with the “questions” aspect of the seder.

A particular comment in Louis Gregory’s biography struck me as illustrating the combination of personal responsibility and material detachment in Reinhold Niebuhr famous prayer, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.”

Microsoft’s Books Online article on SQL Injection does a great job of reviewing the possible attacks against dynamic SQL statements (using EXEC or sp_executesql). I won’t re-hash their discussion and suggestions. What I offer below is a sample remediation effort for this set of statements (the @Fields and @Values variables are actually stored procedure parameters):

DECLARE @Fields VARCHAR(1000), @VALUES VARCHAR(1000), @SQL NVARCHAR(2500);
SELECT @SQL = 'INSERT INTO MyTable (' + @Fields + ') VALUES (' + @Values + ')';
EXEC(@SQL);

It was about three years ago, while attending a conference at Green Acre Bahá‘í School in Eliot, Maine, that I had the bounty of making a sunrise pilgrimage to the burial site of Louis Gregory, Hand of the Cause of Bahá‘u’lláh. At the time I knew little about him — that he was an early African-American adherent of the Bahá‘í Faith, a fantastic and tireless teacher, well-loved by ‘Abdu’l-Bahá, and thanks to the Master’s encouragement, one-half of perhaps the first black/white Bahá‘í marriage in the U.S.

A friend asked about the need for the concept of “fear of God” in the Baháí Faith. Can one be a Baháí without it? More generally, do Baháís accept that there can be compassion and altruism without this “fear”? I found the simple answer today: no (read on for the references). But as with so many concepts, it seems important to dig into the words, exploring their literal and symbolic meaning both inclusive of and apart from our pre-conceived notions.

Recently, I received a code delivery that worked on our development server but failed in unit tests on my box. The culprit was a method that transformed a List<T> into a DataTable and used that DataTable to load data into SQL Server using SqlBulkCopy. Lesson: apply column mappings.

While it was unfortunate that we were not able to see the Shrine of the Báb in all its golden-domed grandeur (covered over during on-going rehab), we had the bounty of being only the third pilgrim group to visit the restored Ridván Garden outside of ‘Akká. The Bahá‘í World News Service has an excellent article, from October 2010, on the restoration work and the history of the garden: Holy place restoration sheds light on region’s heritage.