Month: May 2008

Surely you’re familiar with the ways that casual remarks catch on as bywords in families and other small social groups; the other day, I had a long talk with PTS former President Tom Gillespie about an occasion when he referred to a combustible riposte that he decided not to make was “insufficiently redemptive” (a phrase that Margaret and I still use to describe plans that satisfy wrath more than grace).
 
Yesterday evening, as Pippa was getting ready for bed after a long day shopping for new eyeglasses, she came downstairs and thanked Margaret for the time they had spent at the glasses emporium (and other nearby shops, while the glasses were under construction). “But I’d like to mention. . . ,” she began, and Margaret immediately interrupted her to fend off the request for a further favor. “I just thought. . . ,” Pippa resumed, and Margaret introduced some wildly off-topic diversion. “You probably should remember. . . ,” she started again, and this time I chimed in to help Margaret. Pippa retreated upstairs to her bedroom.
 
Margaret called to PIppa, “If I keep interrupting you, will you not ask me?”
 
Pippa replied, “No! I mean, you might confuse me with your crafty grammar. . . .”
 
I have the feeling we’ll be alluding to “crafty grammar” around here for a long time.

We’re intensely thankful for all the prayers, well-wishes, helpful suggestions, cheers, and all that have greeted our exodus from Seabury and our advent in Durham (and Margaret’s in Mystery City, which we’ll specify as soon as her contract is signed). We keep saying to ourselves, “But it’s only for one year, we have to go through this all again next year!” — but your enthusiasm helps remind us how marvelous this arrangement is, and we are pretty eager to throw ourselves into it.

Looks like we’re on a roll — this afternoon Margaret got the phone call that our application for a lease on a Durham house was accepted. We now have mailing addresses in four states: Evanston, Princeton, Durham, and Mystery City. Supply lines are getting longer and harder to maintain, as George Carlin said.
 
We have a home on Gregson Street, less than a mile from the bus stop that will take me to West Campus to the Divinity School, and just across the intersection from Margaret’s grad-school compatriot Sarah. We have a manageable time for getting goods from Evanston to Durham, and — granted (for the first time in our marriage since I started seminary in 1983) the two incomes that we’ll have once Margaret’s contract kicks in — a reasonable rent. We have wonderful friends in the area, and I have a good (if temporary) job. Now, if I can only bear down on the writing front. . . .

Yesterday afternoon, I received my contract in the mail. For the coming academic year, I will serve as Visiting Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School. It’s a wonderful opportunity for me to reconnect with my doctoral alma mater, for Margaret to have a base in Durham while she finishes up her dissertation, for all three of us to spend a year among wonderful friends, and of course it’s among the top two or three theological schools in the country.
 
I expect to be teaching all exegetical courses — a marked change from Seabury, where I rarely had the chance to teach exegesis and mostly taught intro courses. On the other hand, it means immersing myself in John’s Gospel, Romans, Luke, and 1 Corinthians (unless there’s an unanticipated change). No committee or administrative work, and I’ll probably look into the possibility of participating in a hermeneutics reading group, if there’s any interest.
 
Now, we have to get Margaret’s contract squared away, and find a place to live. But next year’s destination is set.

On one hand, people want to interpret the Bible literally, as opposed to figurative or abstracted readings; the literal sense provides a bulwark against caprice and an assurance to humble readers. On the other hand, people want to distance themselves from literalists, who read the Bible too literally. As a result, interpreters devise elaborate defenses of what counts as “literal” (in a good sense) that’s nonetheless different from what’s literal (in a bad sense); they ascribe figurative force to the literal sense (“at this point, the literal sense is a metaphor”) and locate the determinative qualities of this literality in the text, even though the literalist is making the same appeal to “the text itself.”
 
It needs to be this way, because such readers insist that it can’t be that the Bible’s meaning is underdetermined, that the communicative gestures represented in a Bible might plausibly be apprehended differently by different readers who weight the different aspects of the representation (and indeed, “different representations”) differently.

The Stereotypist’s commentary on signifying, and (family favorite) fainting goats.

For a while, it looked as though iI might be headed toward a non-academic vocation (that looks very unlikely now); at that time, I looked forward to never again grading somebody. Our family’s homeschooling has long involved the happy premise that we did not need to characterize our children’s learning with the rough tools of four or five alphabetical short-cuts, and I lobbied heartily at Seabury against institutional structures that depended on grading.
 
So I read with interest Bob Sommer’s essay in Inside Higher Education which seems to speak with two minds about the subject. On one hand, “For me personally, grades are a secondary and derivative issue at best, an anguished responsibility at worst”; on the other, Sommer seems sufficiently unperturbed by the avalanche of problems he cites with the systems of grading and testing to declare, “My objection is not to all testing, only to summative (end-of-course) testing for an official record” (apparently overlooking the aspect of grading, at this point).
 
I very emphatically approve of teachers and students articulating an honest sense of progress and achievement in a given setting. Bravo! Brava! Hip, hip, hooray!
 
I’m not at all convinced, though, that letter grades provide the best possible, or even the most functionally appropriate, means for articulating that honest evaluation. Sommer notes that “In small classes one can replace grades with written narratives, if anyone cares to read them, but this will not work in large classes” — but even in small classes, narrative evaluation does not of itself satisfy the need for effective assessment and communication.
 
One thing’s for sure: Sommer’s article and the very ardent comments that hang from it raise once again the intensely important question of whether the relatively recent innovation of “grading” contributes to learning, or whether there might not be another way of assessing accomplishment that complements, rather than detracts from, the telos of teaching.

This year, the Library Falcons have four hatchlings.
 

 
Margaret has been watching them, ahem, like a hawk.

Margaret and I admire the Mothers Day op-ed comic by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki. Each of us found slightly different emphases to appreciate, but we both found this very short memoir touching and theologically-provocative.

This morning, I sent the deans of Seabury my resignation from the faculty.
 
I will miss a lot about Seabury: the labyrinthine navigation, the smell of a freshly-waxed chapel on the first day of classes, your choice of garths, the “Flaten All Boxes” sign. Please, someone, take a picture of the “Recreption Area” plaque. And especially the wonderful students who devoted so much time and effort and patience to the courses I led.
 

 
Margaret will make a trip to Evanston in a few weeks, to do the first push of boxing-up; Pippa and I will go back with her in June, after a memorial event for my father, to finish up the house and work on my office. At this point, we have a strong idea of where we’ll be, but until we get papers signed I’d rather not make any public statements. At this point, Plan A is kaput, Plan B is looking highly improbable, Plan C is presumably all set for Margaret, Plan D what we’re expecting for me, Plan E and I have agreed to continue our promising conversations for another year with no commitments either way, Plan F is probably out of the question, and Plan G wasn’t much of a chance in the first place. If all proceeds as expected, Margaret and I’ll be able to affirm our respective Plans very soon.
 
We’ve taken Step One, though.

I beg your pardon, but today was a very full day and its outcome involves several tasks for me to execute carefully and sequentially. As I get these squared away, I’ll be in a position to say more. Thank you for your patience.

On a walk back to the Center from Small World, the “Pruit Igoe” section of Koyaanisqatsi played on my iPod. I can sort of understand not enjoying Einstein on the Beach or some other Glass works, but even twenty-plus years after Margaret and I were first captivated by the film and music in a small theater in New Haven, these compositions still knock me out.

“That was depressing, even for a Finn.” — Olli-Pekka Vainio, author of Justification and Participation in Christ

• Obama has not shown that he can’t win over white blue-collar voters — he has shown that he’s not as popular as Clinton is among them. “Obama hasn’t proved he can win… white working-class voters“ — yes he has, he just hasn’t won as many of them as has Clinton. There’s a very significant difference between Obama running against McCain in a general election and Obama running against Clinton in a series of primaries whose main function is to determine the Democratic Party’s nominee. It’s possible that white working-class Democrats will support a pro-war Republican in the general election, but the strongest sponsors of the “Obama can’t win” refrain belong to the Clinton campaign’s spin factory. It would be interesting to see how many of them pontificated four years ago about how “electable” John Kerry was. Oh, and Obama didn’t suffer a “big loss” in Pennsylvania — last I saw, Clinton’s margin came in at about 9%, which (if that counts as a “big loss”) would make Obama’s win in North Carolina a “crushing demolition.” In fact, Obama seems to have made much greater gains among Clinton-favoring Pennsylvanians than Clinton made among Obama-favoring North Carolinians.
• Speaking of political figures, it was good of the New York Times to notice that Jeremiah Wright is not the only bombastic preacher who’s aligned with a presidential candidate. Of the two, I find, Wright vastly more plausible than Hagee, but the dominant media culture has defined Wright as “unpatriotic” and “controversial,” whereas Hagee has not been scrutinized and characterized with nearly the fierce (and, in effect, partisan and I dare say racist) attention. Thanks, Jennifer, for catching that.
• Cheers for the Open Humanities Press! I would wish that their numbers increase, but that’s practically inevitable; perhaps, “May your rise to prominence be swift and expansive!”
• A propos of nothing in particular, I wondered yesterday how Washington would react if the 1977 Hanafi Muslim siege took place today. Same cast of characters, same behavior — just a more intensely-charged atmosphere of fear and anti-Muslim anxiety.
• Three theological notes worth remarking. First, Jason links to Stephanie Paulsell’s apologia for academic preparation for ministry. I’m on board with both sets of observations, but I’d probably put it more strongly. A particular anti-intellectual bias has crept into church life, and those who venture to name it will be labeled “eliltists” — but I can’t escape the conclusion that if the gospel matters at all, it matters in ways that benefit from knowledge understanding, and critical reflection. To repeat myself: if you were having heart trouble, you probably would not go to a doctor just because she had a pleasant bedside manner and was open to ideas from lots of different approaches to medical treatment. Ministry involves the cure of wounded souls, with far-reaching consequences, but people deprecate learned preparation for that vocation. Sigh.
  Second, Jason points to Doug Chapin’s pointer to a survey that suggests that “fundamentalists” don”t know their biblical content as well as those whom the report’s author calls “critical” readers. The labels don’t matter much, though this comes as no surprise to me. What matters most is that “Even within highly secularized nations such as France, the U.K. and Holland, broad majorities report a positive attitude towards the Bible, describing it as ‘interesting’ and expressing a desire to know more about it” and “Broad majorities also describe the Bible as ‘difficult’ and express a need for help in understanding it – suggesting, according to the authors of the study, a ‘teaching moment’ for the churches.” This corresponds to what I’ve experienced in every situation — except those where parish or institutional leadership has inculcated the anti-intellectual mediocratism I alluded to above. The vital point isn’t that so-called fundamentalists don’t know the Bible well, but that the vast preponderance of people sense that they don’t know the Bible well, find it difficult to learn about, and want to know more.
  Third, Tripp pointed me to this post about “what the church can learn from Wikipedia,” a premise about which I’d be more positive if I didn’t see so overwhelming an anti-intellectual bias to so many quarters in church life (Left Behind and da Vinci Code, anyone?). I’d just as soon not rely primarily on ground-up Jesusphilia as nuritional guide for healthy faith.

I just received word from Seabury’s email newsletter that my [former] colleague Frank Yamada has accepted a position as Director of Asian American Ministries and Associate Professor of Hebrew Bible at McCormick Theological Seminary in the Hyde Park consortium of seminaries on the South Side of Chicago.
 
Frank will be a tremendous catch for McCormick, and his departure from Seabury will sadden everyone who continues under the Seabury banner. Congratulations, Frank (and Michelle, and Steven and Adam)!

We seem to be approaching resolution. There are ways it will be fine and good, and ways it will be hard and wearying. I expect I’ll be in a position to write about it within a week.
 

 
Margaret and Pippa spotted this luna moth on their morning walk (Pippa nearly ran into it, which would have been pretty unnerving). I’d never seen a luna moth before; it ranks up there with having seen a pileated woodpecker as exciting nature events in my life. I’m taking it as a good sign.

I just got a very bogus email purporting to be from the Internal Revenue Service. Ordinarily I just delete such emails; if I were to forward each one I get to the appropriate corporate anti-phishing address, I’d have a full-time job of it (hmmm).
 
But this seemed to belong to a different category, and I thought it worth alerting the IRS to this effort to impersonate a federal agency. So I went to the IRS fraud page to find the email address to which to forward the message, and — lo and behold — it seems that if you want to report (apparently) fraudulent activity, you have to download and print out Form 3949-A and send it by postal mail to the IRS.
 
So, I deleted the message.

When we went out to go to Evensong to hear Pippa, the car wouldn’t start. (We borrowed a neighbor’s, and I expect we’ll have the car towed tomorrow.)

There are lots of reasons I oughtn’t to say much about looking for work — so I won’t. I have been the addressee of a number of deeply touching letters, emails, and visits, for all of which I’m intensely thankful. I struggle with the up-in-the-air-ness of the job scene, but that may clarify itself in the next week or so. In the meantime, please forgive me if occasionally the clouds obscure the sunshine around here.

I’m working on what I want to say about the function of “literal” in interpretive/theological discourse; as part of that think I recalled that most people come to hermeneutics as they do to politics and religion and design, with partially-formed intuitions about what must be and what ought to be. I was wondering how to get at the relation of those under-theorized premises, when it occurred to me that the SongMeanings website provides some helpful illustrations.
 
If I teach a hermeneutics course again, I may direct students to a song each, with the assignment to examine the kinds of claim that commenters make about what the song “means,” and the sort of evidence they adduce for their claims. It may be easier to recognize some exaggerated errors in this open website than to catch them in play when arguing out a theological issue.