Month: November 2004

Tripp points to recent sermons by Susie and Rev Ref, and I (in turn) have to link to Jane’s sermon from chapel yesterday. It’s a remarkable bunch of sisters and brothers among whom I’m honored to serve.
As for me, I realized that the sermon I have in the can, as it were, is not for Hugh of Lincoln but for Robert Grossteste, so I will in fact have to come up with a sermon de novo. More later; I have course prep for the best day of class all year (in Early Church History, the day we talk about Augustine’s de Doctrina Christiana), write a bunch of letters of recommendation, visit Laura, and work on my Hauerwas response.
The behind-the-scenes repair work is on-going (sigh), and the hand-coding is tiding me over for the time being.

As it turns out, I’m preaching tomorrow at the feast of Hugh of Lincoln. I’ve drawn Hugh before in the rota, so I have a sermon in a file that only the faculty might remember (and not all of them). But because I have a stubborn streak, and do feel as though I ought not simply recycle all the time, I’ll probably try to work up a new sermon in between course preps and writing up my response to Stanley Hauerwas for the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting.

Yes, I’m responding to America’s Best Theologian, my former teacher and Margaret’s present teacher; it was supposed to be a response to his commentary on Matthew’s Gospel, but Stanley didn’t get the commentary close enough to readiness, so instead I’m responding to one of his meditations on the Seven Last Words, the only one drawn from Matthew’s Gospel, which draws on wording first reported in Mark. So if you think there’s something a little off-center about a Matthew guy giving a response to a theological ethicist about a reflection on the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as they appear in Matthew, even though the identical phrase appears in the New Revised Standard Version of Mark, also, then you’re probably on target.
But first things first: a sermon for Wednesday, for which the readings are
Psalm 112:1-9, Titus 2:7-8,11-14, and Matthew 24:42-47; I’ll probably preach on Titus, I think. I’ll post the result here when the dust clears.

Welcome to the shambles! Especially, welcome to visitors who may have come here from having listened to David Weinberger talk about this page in his talk at the Library of Congress on CSPAN. It’s not usually hand-coded here; this Saturday, I ill-advisedly decided that I should upgrade my Moveable Type installation on my own, without any counsel — how hard could it be? Micah upgraded Seabury’s installation — so I proceeded to perform the upgrade flawlessly (so far as I could tell) until I went to log in.

It quickly became clear that I had done something very, very bad. “How bad?” Let’s put it this way: if you noticed the Internets running somewhat slower over the weekend, it was because the high-level maintenance talent that should have been speeding packets to their destinations was poring over my database trying to figure out what on earth I had done. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of dollars worth of person-hours are going into repairing the breach in the diigtal space-time continuum that my blunder, whatever it turns out to be, caused. That’s the one consolation, as a matter of fact; at least I didn’t do anything trivially stupid. I mucked it up royally.

So, anyway, I’ll try to get back to you as soon as we figure out what to do with the database. Don’t try permalinking to this, or commenting, or anything (that’s the silver lining — no comment spam for three days! Of course, we had to kill commenting, and updating, to eliminate it, but still. . .).

Oh, I was told to ask around to see if anyone has a handy script for scraping archives to reconstruct an MT database, or some other such panic-level utility. Or oil of healing for a database. Where’s Miracle Max when you need him?

Dorothea’s in danger of landing a gig that entails entering some polytonic Greek (Modern Greek does fine with a greatly-simplifed system of accents compared to classical-Hellenistic Greek; “polytonic” refers to the fully-accented text that classical texts rely on). Of course, I’m pleased — the more polytonic Greek in the world, the happier I am — and especially pleased that it may draw Dorothea further into the world of Unicode Greek. But don’t keep a secret, Dorothea; what’s the new-and-improved method?

For those who find my persona wearisomely, hyperbolically solemn — and justly so; I take everything too seriously — I offer the following morning scene.
 
Picture a tall but, ahem, padded middle-aged guy down in the basement pedalling furiously on his stationary bike, perspiring copiously, reading a monograph about the “Gospel of Peter,” singing along to the falsetto parts of “Number Nine Dream.” No photo- or audio-recording would do the ludicrousness justice.
 
But I’ll be ready to go for Diocesan Convention today, and for the Adult Forum at St. Augustine’s Church, Wilmette, tomorrow morning.

I should have blogged today — technically, I had time and everything — but I didn’t even though I owe responses on the Druid clergy dust-up, Dave “used to be Time’s Shadow, now Groundhog Day, but not Connect & Empower-Music Alert” Rogers’s blog about the politics of “life,” and the Cobb County creationism brouhaha.
 
I just didn’t feel like it today; during the time I had free to write, I preferred to chat with friends, orfiddle with the redesign of the Seabury website, or just plain take it easy. I have an Adult Ed class to prepare for on Sunday, I’m going to Diocesan Convention tomorrow, and I have to put together a response to some of Stan Hauerwas’s writing for the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting next weekend. I’ll get back to these IOUs, but today, tonight, I’m putting them off another day or so.
 
But while I’m blogging about not blogging, I was repelled by the gall of Bill “I gambled away more than you’ll earn in two lifetimes” Bennett in pontificating about moral values in the aftermath of the election. Moral values my ear!
 
And a few days ago, Jeff wrote about his fascination with composition. Yes, exactly!

My colleague Paula had a last-minute appointment come up, so I’m suybbing for her at tonight’s Community Eucharist in commemoration of St. Martin of Tours. I haven’t had much time to mull things over, but will clutch at a few homiletical straws from the neighborhood of Matthew 25:34-40, Isaiah 58:6-12, and Psalm 15.

I’ll post the sermon below, when I found out how it ends. . . . .

Continue reading “Happy Martinmas, Unexpectedly”

As I was clearing a spate of uninvited comments today — yes, I should get around to the MT upgrade, who has time to do that as carefully as I would need to? — Margaret pointed out that seventy-two of these messages ended up appended to my post that linked to Alasdair MacIntyre’s essay on not voting.
 
So, do unsolicited drug advertisers feel a special attraction to Aristotelian-Christian theologians? Or was a spambot just caught in a loop?
 
Whatever the case, if you came to this blog looking for online pharmaceuticals, you’ll have to keep looking in some other place. I cleaned them out, again, for now.

For the past six weeks or so, I’ve been keeping my eyes open at the grocery store for a cup of banana yogurt. They’ve had strawberry-banana pretty regularly, and countless exotic new flavors such as key lime pie and strawberry shortcake, but no plain old banana.
 
I don’t even remember how banana yogurt tastes — but it figures in a Proustian moment.
 
I first tasted banana yogurt, first considered any yogurt worth eating, when I went on a date with another Bowdoin student. We went on a picnic out in a field somewhere outside Brunswick, and she suggested that we each have a yogurt. My taste was governed by the prospect of making a good impression, and she could have said “Let’s each have a bowl of worms,” and I’d have been inclined to say yes. I chose a banana yogurt in the waxy cardboard cups Dannon used to sell, with the cardboard discs on the top.
 
The day was lovely, the picnic pleasant (and entirely cordial), and to my surprise the banana yogurt was tasty. I never went out with her again, don’t recall her name (it was a few weeks at least until I would meet the one true love of my life), but since then I have liked yogurt, and I would have liked to have tasted banana yogurt once again. from a waxy cardboard cup — but that train has left the station.

I’ve spent a little time around hospitals lately, so when I heard (at Tom’s place) that Mena had popped her kneecap, I felt a pang of sympathy — but the story and photos make the whole matter much more compelling.
 
Best wishes for rapid healing, Mena, and honest — we believe you can catch us. No need to prove anything.

I was marking some papers tonight when what to my wondering eyes should appear but a ten-year-old goddess of wisdom, with her familiar owl. What wisdom tries to evaluate essays on Arianism when it might gaze in adoration at such regal beauty? Specially when she’s your daughter. . . .

Tom Matrullo calls our attention to the most extraordinary success that the Republican ticket attained in Florida — or, more precisely, in those counties in which the votes were tallied by optical scanners (not touch-screen devices).

Isn’t that an amazing bit of luck for Bush!