Month: March 2005

A number of times, when I’ve been asked to talk about tradition and change in the church, I have adverted to the status of usury — the lending of money at interest. I was delighted, then, to see the Slacktivist take up the topic in three powerful entries in the context of his energetic interrogation of the particular forms that “conservative Christianity,” “evangelicalism,” and “traditionalism” take at the moment.

The people of Israel set distinct limits to the scope of interest (including the jubilee year, a sort of pre-market-economy form of bankruptcy protection), and Jesus explicitly repudiated the practice of lending at interest. The church institutionalized laws against lending at interest, and only relatively recently has the topic dropped away from the church’s social agenda. Fred surveys the history of usury, then turns his attention to the exploitation of greed bill bankruptcy bill weapon of mass expropriation of wealth that the Republican Congress and the Bush administration have deployed.

Fred’s nauseated by the spectacle of lawmakers who proclaim their allegiance to “family values” and “biblical morality” rolling over to strip away the small borrower’s protection. Me too — but I’m simultaneously intrigued by the ways that some forms of “tradition” become old-fashioned and mutable, whereas others reflect timeless morality and must be upheld at all costs. The phenomenon gets even more intriguing when — as so often happens — someone takes the pains to explain what I obviously haven’t yet understood: that there’s a perfectly transparent premise in the light of which these differences are revealed to be natural and necessary. Oh, right!

Si’s drama troupe will enact The Odd Couple this evening, for their closing engagement of the winter stage season.

Actors were ready, production impressive, and they’re performing again tonight at 7, at the Edge of the Woods. Go, take your family, and buy a cookie or two. Just watch out for flying pickles. . . .

Margaret saw this on Boing Boing, so she entered my name in it.

I don’t know where that “Golf” book came from, though.

I thought I’d mentioned it before, but searching doesn’t turn anything up. Back at BloggerCon I (“when dinosaurs walked the earth,” as my sarcastic sons used to say) Dan Bricklin and I talked about seminarian bloggers; his eyes lit up as e described how wonderful it would be for a congregation (synagogue, parish, whatever) to be able to read a seminarian’s blog, to get a sense of the kind of person they were thinking about hiring. Of course, your blog would displease some people — but would you want to be working for them in the first place? Wouldn’t you accept that happily, as a correlative of the possibility that a congregation could look you up and say, “That’s just the kind of person we want around here!”

Well, Tim Bray has responded to the inextinguishable “You Blog? You’re Fired!” topic from the dominant media by writing ten reasons blogging is good for your career. (I especially endorse reason number 4: “No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.”) Yes, the tech industries differ from ordained ministry (at least, they were different when I was working in computer graphics lo! these decades ago), and yes, there are complications attendant to the benefits. But Tim and Dan have this much right: If it’s easy to find out that you’re congenial and interesting, then you’re more likely to be hired by people who want congenial, interesting employees — or to be called by congregations who want congenial, interesting clergy leadership.

The ordination process in the Episcopal Church tends to promote fear and defensiveness (not in every case, but in many), and the intense partisanship of the moment amplifies those anxieties. It’s hard to expect seminarians to see anything but danger. Danger is not, however, the end of the story, and I’m convinced that a position is more likely to work out better for congregation and clergy leader if they know as much as possible about one another. Why stake as much as relocation and full-time employment on the impression made in a relatively brief interview (conducted, often, by people who aren’t skilled interviewers)?

(At the intersection of church and tech industry, linked by Jim McGee: “Don’t Rock the Boat.” Congregational development students: identify the mission strategy implicit in this ethos. . . .)

Technotag: pippa

The planning for the Winslow Lectures has pinned down the sequence for the series, and invitations are in the mail. On Wednesday, April 20, at 7:45 my dear friend Steve Fowl will give the first lecture on the topic, “The Importance of a Multi-Voiced Literal Sense: The Example of Aquinas.” Then on Thursday morning at 11:00, Francis Watson from the University of Aberdeen will speak on “Inspiration, Word, and Text.” That afternoon at 3:00, I’ll give my talk on “Poaching on Zion: Biblical Theology as Signifying Practice,” after which Seabury will hold a gala wing-ding to install our new Dean and President (one job, two titles); the service will start at 5:00, at Northwestern’s Alice Millar Chapel. Friday morning, Kevin Vanhoozer will ask the hermeneutical question, “Imprisoned or Free? Text, Status, and Theological Interpretation in the Master/Slave Discourse of Philemon,” which will be followed by a short panel discussion.

Stephen’s lecture and mine will be held at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary chapel (second floor of the main building), whereas Francis’s and Kevin’s will be held at the Northwestern University Sheil Center. (There’s an ironic temper at work in arrangements that have Steve and me speaking in a decidedly Protestant ambiance, and Francis and Kevin in a markedly Roman Catholic setting.)

There’s still time to make your travel arrangements! Don’t miss this once-in-a-month opportunity! We have a PDF of the schedule available here, and I posted a JPEG to flickr.

I did take a picture of my new office yesterday, but neglected to post it here. This photo no longer represents the appearance of the office — Brian offered me another unclaimed bookshelf, so I moved the bookshelf on which the camera is resting to the right of my desk, and put the new shelf where the camera is sitting in this picture. I’m ahead by five shelves, in other words.

The other institutional news is that I’ve had unwelcome news on the sabbatical front. I’m eligible for one term’s leave (out of three) next year. I’d been hoping to push that back till the year after, and combine it with a grant to cover a whole year’s worth of writing. I’ve been told, however, that I will not be permitted a full year’s leave year after next, and will have to wait to see whether I’d be allowed to take a sabbatical-plus-leave in 2007-08.

Since I’m juggling a mountain of writing and lecturing obligations, that’s very disappointing news. It’ll be a significant challenge to uphold my various commitments without burning out.

Anyone care to compare the convictions and consequences meted out to Martha Stewart and Bernard Ebbers?

Anyone with an ear for underproduced (in the radiantly positive sense) roots gospel music should click over to the Tofu Hut, where John posted a series of mp3 files of the Gospel Harmonettes of Demopolis, Alabama — terrific, captivating recordings that provoke you to wonder about the value of preserving a recorded-music industry that makes some performers fabulously wealthy while it relegates others to the cut-out bins and collectors’ shops.

John puts us in touch with marvelous voices that most readers would never have heard, and I’d gladly buy a CD from the Demopolis Harmonettes if they had a distributor. I’d chip in to encourage them to regroup and record more!

Judging from my students’ papers, one of the most prominent journals in the field of biblical studies would be Bibliotheca Sacra, a publication of Dallas Theological Seminary — a source whose theology almost all of Seabury’s students would reject out of hand.

Why do they turn so frequently to BibSac for exegetical guidance, when they dissent so firmly from the authors’ presuppositions? Because BibSac got to the digital party early. The Journal of Biblical Literature, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, New Testament Studies, Novum Testamentum — the journals that Seabury students ought more consistently consult for interpretations more in keeping with their general theological outlook — all keep very low online profiles (most appear online only on a subscription/fee-per-view basis, and though our library carries subscriptions to them, students avoid the complications of searching from campus computers). Moreover, these more academically-prominent journals don’t show up in affordable packaged digital libraries, as BibSac does.

As a result, students who have no sympathy for the doctrine of biblical inerrancy opt to cite a journal written from the perspective of inerrantists, because it’s convenient. There’s a lesson in that — and it isn’t “forbid students to use a journal that espouses a different theological perspective from yours.”

Today the students who were relocating my colleague’s office evacuated her more rapidly than we all anticipated, so they promptly turned their attention to me. (Photos tomorrow.) This came at an awkward moment since I had spent the morning not commenting-out papers, as I ought to have, but responding to Jay Rosen’s response to Kenneth Minogue’s commentary, “Journalism: Power Without Responsibility.” I wrote more than was fair to send Jay, and I may post some of that material tomorrow.

Then my estimable colleagues swept me up in the exciting turbulence of relocation, from which I extracted myself just in time to take my sweetheart out for a dinner date. Now we’re settling down with an Albert Campion DVD, and if I can stay awake till the end of the mystery, I will stop trying so to do shortly thereafter.

If you’re a student serious about the academic side of your work, or a reader serious about keeping abreast of academic discourse, or just somebody who’s interested in cool ideas taking shape, you will want to register and play with CiteULike. (If I didn’t have to thank David for too many things already, I’d still be indebted to him for this one — thank you thank you thank you, and you too, Lisa, for telling him.)

If you register at the site, you can set up an account that associates your username with academic articles, books, theses, whatever, with bibliographic information and your notes on the work. It’s like an online, offboard version of a bibliographic program, free, and it evidently plays nicely with EndNotes. If the journal you rely on publishes its table of contents online, you can subscribe to tables-of-contents through watchlists or RSS, and you can establish a watchlist or RSS feed for any tags you imagine (so that if you have a watchlist for “hermeneutics” (as you should) and I tag an article “hermeneutics,” it comes to your RSS feed.). You can join a group for sharing reference material (Bibliobloggers, I’ve already staked out “NT-Interpretation,” and once that gets approved I’ll open one on the theological interpretation of Scripture. This may finally get me into the frame of mind that encourages tagging.

I can think of several students who should have established accounts before they reached the end of this post. If you think I might mean you, I probably do.