Month: September 2009

I’m feeling better about this round of visa application. Although Margaret will quickly point out that I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy, I have at least a tenuous basis for my confidence this time. When I first applied, the Embassy rejected me right away — literally the next day after they opened my file — because they spotted a defect in my application. This time, they opened my file almost a week ago and I haven’t heard a peep from them, suggesting to me that they haven’t seen any prima facie reason to turn me down.
 
And since I already have a job lined up, and since I’m such an innocuous sort of person (I have all my inoculations up to date), and since it’ll be such a pain in the neck for Glasgow if I’m not permitted into the country, and since I’ve very obviously learned my lesson about submissive compliance to immigration authorities, I do venture to think that this application will bear fruit. They’re probably just double-checking my bona fides, maybe taking my passport photo down to the Kinko’s around the corner to make me a laminated visa (is a visa even a separate card, or something? I’ve never seen one), or trying to get past the leopard in the disused lavatory in the cellar to open the locked file cabinet and obtain the triplicate copies of my application.
 

As the school year begins — even an ocean away — I’m beginning to feel like a genuine biblical scholar again, and that means a heightened interest in works pertaining to my research. Unfortunately, I can no longer take books out of Duke’s library, and all my own books are packed away; they depart Richmond for Liverpool today, if I recall the schedule correctly. Once I have access to books again, though, I’ll be adding Jonathan Pennington’s Heaven and Earth in the Gospel of Matthew, Adam Kendon’s Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance, and Bruce Ellis Benson’s essay “The Improvisation of Hermeneutics: Jazz Lessons for Interpreters,” from Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, and several other recent titles to my reading list. Richard Bauckham’s much-mooted Jesus and the Eyewitnesses pertains to the Historical Jesus course I’ll be teaching. Can’t wait to dig in.

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a few days, but my reluctance to do anything more complicated than push the “Get Mail” button distracted me: Liz Lawley and several colleagues from RIT, the Rochester Leader and Democrat, and other community leaders have prepared “Picture the Impossible,” an exciting project that engages their audience in a series of games and events. These occasions will accentuate the distinct and admirable features of Rochester’s history, thus instilling civic pride not by mind-numbing grade-school memorization exercises, but by discovery, competitive exertion, and celebration. I’m not surprised to hear that Liz is involved with so on-target a Web enterprise, but I am a little surprised at how much support she has from constitutencies that don’t usually boost such projects. Cheers to Liz, and best wishes to everyone who’s participating!

According to the Guardian, Britain’s “complicated new visa rules” have deterred numerous would-be students from traveling to the UK for their education. I don’t know the extent to which my own visa situation mimics that of student applicants, except to know that the Highly Skilled Worker system underwent a parallel revision recently, but my experience of the points-based system suggests ample basis for the story.

To get a visa, international students are now expected to show that they can afford their tuition fees 28 days before they apply, have at least an extra £600 a month and £400 for each dependant in living expenses, and to keep it all in a bank account in their own name for the first year of their study. They also need a biometric identity card and have to have received their exam results by the time they apply.

Agents who recruit international ­students for the UK’s schools and universities say these requirements are too much and take too long.

This, too, sounds familiar (save for some differences in the sums of money I’m expected to pony up). “We remain concerned, however, that the system may delay or deter international students who wish to study in the UK” — students, and faculty too, in my case. Oh well, at least I have a fuller sense of what’s going on. (Hat tip to IHE.)