Monthly Archives: October 2008

Last week, Pippa and I put a fair amount of time into car shopping, calling around, test driving, even a little passive haggling, and we finally bought a 2006 Toyota Corolla LE, in deep red. Pippa ruled out the beige … Continue reading →

I’m having a great time at Duke, but today I had to send in applications for three jobs that would pick me up for next year. It’s a difficult process under the best of circumstances, and when there are so … Continue reading →

I know I have an All Souls Day sermon kicking around my hard drive somewhere, but I can’t figure out where, which is a nuisance since I’m preaching an All Souls Day Mass next Monday morning.

One of the benefits of having two professors in the family comes when we read to one another from the answers on the exams we give. For instance: this morning I learned about the story from Luke’s Gospel in which … Continue reading →

Margaret and I were musing, this morning, about great events of the past — Pearl Harbor (for our parents’ generation), the Cuban Missile Crisis and JFK’s assassination for ours — and the extent to which we were aware of them … Continue reading →

I don’t know what Apple University is either, but if they’re looking for faculty, I know a biblical scholar-cum-technologist/semiotician/Mac loyalist who’s casting about for a job…

Pippa and I went to the Toyota and Hyundai dealerships today, where we spent most of our time looking at a 2006 Corolla (on one hand) and a 2009/08 Aspect (on the other). We may go look around at some … Continue reading →

Pippa wants to know if there’s a term for the rhetorical device of establishing a rhyme scheme, then departing from it by substituting a non-rhyming synonym (or related word) for a word that would complete the rhyme scheme? Something such … Continue reading →

It seems pretty clear, at this point, that no one will offer me an administrative position; I’ve been turned down for an embarrassingly large number of such positions. In cover letters and interviews, I typically underscore the vital importance of … Continue reading →

It turns out that if you let your email inbox slide for a few days, all those messages to which you need to respond accumulate and multiply. After months of keeping my inbox around three items, I’ve ballooned to twenty … Continue reading →