Work of Memory

Right after Margaret and Pippa and I left Pittsburgh, my sister Holly mailed me a stack of old family photos. Most of them involve just the regular gang from around here, but a couple included my grandfather and Del (his second wife), some included my mother and relatives on her side of the family, and a very few included my father. I took a little time to scan them today, along with a scan of his obituary, and posted them to Flickr after a little retouching.

DGA at Chatham Graduation

Oddly Familiar

This morning’s reading from 1 Peter rang a bell with me for more than just the usual reasons. This week begins the sequence of three weeks (one, two, three) for which I wrote preaching helps for the Epistle lesson from the Revised Common Lectionary, for the admirable Working Preacher website, where Frank preceded me last fall (I believe).

Two Down

I sent off an essay to the Yale Divinity alumni/ae magazine yesterday, and am reviewing the editor’s proposed version today. I sent off a book review that’s so late I can hardly think about it. And Margaret is away today, making arrangements for a job that I hope to be able to announce later today or tomorrow.
 
The sun is out, the sky is clear, the temperature is comfortingly warm. Progress.

Backlog Stromateis

  • This morning, I finally went to the dentist to repair the tooth that I broke several weeks ago. If my life were a Symbolic Novel, this would count as a turning point toward restoration and renewed energies. Which I wouldn’t object to — I’m just not counting on anything at the moment.
  • We do love Princeton in the spring.
    Princeton In The Spring
  • The Rt. Rev. Dr. Krister Stendahl, Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Divinity Emeritus of Harvard Divinity School (and parishioner of St. Paul’s Church, Nantucket), died Tuesday. I don’t have much to add to the HDS and NYT obituaries except that his essay “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” was a vitally important precursor of the revolution in Pauline studies that bore fruit in the 80’s and 90’s in the “New Perspective” articulated by Sanders, Wright, and many others.
  • In response to Apple’s releasing a font-face CSS-compliant web browser, FDI fonts.info has made available Graublau Sans Web regular and bold for CSS embedding. I’m impressed with the faces, with the offer, with the terms of the arrangement, and would like to experiment with Graublau on this site (maybe someday). I’d be interested to learn whether Yanone Kaffeesatz is also licensed for web embedding — that one’s a beauty, too.
  • In another type-related story, a post on the Typophile boards pointed to the Ascender Eco-Friendly Font Pack, which includes several quite usable types with some templates and images in a bargain package. I don’t know what makes this particularly eco-friendly, but it seems like a good deal if you’re looking for inexpensive typefaces. I’m saving my pennies for the OpenType versions of Nick Shinn’s Paradigm, a typeface that has utterly captivated my imagination. Nick has devised an ingenious pricing scheme: only $9 per typeface for the “basic” version, which still includes ’most everything an amateur will need, but $59 for the Pro OpenType version. Although I doubt I would use the Pro features more than once or twice in the normal course of events, it would be hard for me to pass up the fuller set of designs. Either way, it’s very lovely to look at, and to imagine as the stylish-but-not-outlandish house type for a congregation or school.
  • This is very reassuring. I’m not the only one.

I’ve Said It Differently But

Maggi appositely cites Dorothy Sayers:

You would be ashamed to know as little about internal combustion as you know about Christian beliefs. I admit, you can practise Christianity without knowing much theology, just as you can drive a car without knowing much about internal combustion. But when something breaks down in the car, you go humbly to the man who understands the works; whereas if something goes wrong with religion, you merely throw the works away and tell the theologian he is a liar.

Now I have to track down the specific source of the quotation.
 
Ah! Paul has reproduced the whole letter (which I find less convincing, alas, than the excerpt) and duly notes the uncertainty regarding its provenance. And it turns out that Fred has more context, and a more satisfying rationale for the peremptory tone.

Richard T Herzog

Major Richard Thorburn Herzog (ret.), Ph.D., died back in January; I just heard about it from a round-robin email that some of our classmates from Bowdoin were circulating. Zog was one of the legendary figures of the fraternity to which we both belonged at Bowdoin College, the now-defunct Alpha Rho Upsilon (founded with Greek initials to correspond to “All Races United”) (we were PC before PC was a label).
 
Zog didn’t leave much of a trace on the Web, so I’m tracing his name on the wet concrete of my blog, here. Maybe someone will come across it and leave a reminiscence, or just remember him fondly, or wish they did. In the years since we graduated, Zog found a home in the Episcopal Church; speaking as a friend and as a priest, I offer the words from the prayerbook:

He that raised up Jesus from the dead will also give life to our mortal bodies, by his Spirit that dwelleth in us.
 
In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our brother Richard…. The Lord bless him and keep him, the Lord make his face to shine upon him and be gracious unto him, the Lord lift up his countenance upon him and grant him peace.

And speaking as a drinking buddy, I will lift a glass to Zog, to Charles Paisley, to the hockey teams of the U.S. Olmpic Team 1976 and of Bowdoin College, and to friends absent and ever-present.

Copyright Panic

Evidently I missed out on a wave of hysterical nonsense about copyright and “orphan works” from an animation columnist. At a time of vocational tumult for me, this sort of fustian tempts me to go to back to school to get a degree in intellectual property law (for the time being, I’ll leave that option to Nate). We can be thankful that Meredith Patterson dispelled the obfuscatory hyperbole — but honestly, when will creators wake up and come to terms with the reality that they only just recently obtained the far-reaching copyright extensions they now enjoy, that practically everything they do is copyrighted? That, in short, they’ve never had things better?
 
Someday, some one will file the lawsuit that breaks the back of common-nonsense over-reaching on copyright, and in response the Congress and courts will institute a regimen that permits fair use, that limits the duration of copyright for the sake of the commons, and that encourages creators to concentrate their efforts on lifetimes of productivity rather than on the possibility of riding a one-shot lottery ticket of fame to dreamlands of wealth. Someday, but not for too long, I expect.

Neurons Tingling

I’m in a two-day symposium at CTI, discussing the past 30 years (it was founded in 1978) and the coming 30 years of theological inquiry. The wireless signal doesn’t reach the conference room, though, and it’s Chatham House Rules — so I may post general impressions later, but live-blogging is right out.
 
Short summary: smart theologians, interesting discussions.

Weekday Update

The plateaus between valleys of sadness are getting longer. These are not the high ground of joy and gladness, but they’re navigable terrain with occasional sloughs of despond. We have generous friends and relatives keeping us keeping on.
 
Among our friends at the Center we number Nico Koopman, who has given me a new nickname (for the first time since college, really). Evidently “AKMA” wasn’t short enough for Nico, so he calls me “Aks” or “Ax” ( aural evidence doesn’t give me a basis to discern which). This interjects an odd delight into my day, for which I give thanks.

On Probation

I’ve cut or nicked my hands three times (accidentally) since last Tuesday, so Margaret’s keeping me away from sharp objects for a while.

For Bill and Don

A long time ago, when Blogaria was experiencing its first population explosion, Halley sat with her dad through his dying. That was April 9. Back then I blogged one of my favorite poems for her, and for her father: Robert Herrick’s elegy for his friend, Ben Jonson. This afternoon I’m repeating it, for my own Dad.

An Ode for Him

Ah Ben!
Say how, or when
Shall we thy guests
Meet at those lyric feasts
Made at the Sun,
The Dog, the Triple Tun?
Where we such clusters had
As made us nobly wild, not mad;
And yet each verse of thine
Outdid the meat, outdid the frolic wine.
 
My Ben
Or come again,
Or send to us
Thy wit’s great overplus;
But teach us yet
Wisely to husband it;
Lest we that talent spend,
And having once brought to an end
That precious stock, the store
Of such a wit the world should have no more.

                  — Robert Herrick
 
For Bill Suitt and Don Adam