Month: December 2009

In the curriculum alteration that’s coming up here at the University, the ministry track will have a first-year class with a component that draws on my work on meaning and practices, roughly the terrain I covered when I offered “Meaning and Ministry” as a course at Seabury. The only catch is that I’ll have only a third of a term in which to do it. Now, I’ll probably be contributing to other ministry courses into which I could weave subsequent materials — so if there’s material that follows from my premises, I can take care of that later.
 
The puzzle, though, is what the best, most economical way would be to make a convincing case for my semiotico-, hermeneutico-, ethico-theological understanding of “signifying practice.” I wil have a limited book budget — I oughtn’t to ask students to buy more than one book, two if they’re cheap. So: if I get, say, a three- or four-week crack at persuading my first-years to look at the world as I suggest (and thankfully, the other ministry faculty have indicated support for the premise), what among the kinds of thing I typically foist on students (such as the readings we discussed on the Beautiful Theology page) would win the most buy-in?

I just took forty-five minutes working on the web version of my “Theology and Popular Music” talk at the SBL. On a moment’s whim, I navigated over to another site, thinking that I was doing so from another tab in my browser.
 
Nope.
 
I had clicked over to a Google search, leaving behind the forty-five minutes of carefully-polished prose, and returning to an empty text field. Now it’s time to make dinner, and I’m not sure I have the energy (or the heart) to start over. Maybe I’ll work on it tomorrow while I’m invigilating the Bibs 2B exam.

Note: it’s hard to use Facebook and to blog at the same time, especially (I suspect) for us long-time bloggers. Especially at the end of a tiring term. Especially with various writing obligations pending. Especially when my metabolism is still adjusting to intercontinental life. But mostly, I’d bet, because of Facebook.
 
When I write for my blog, I’m addressing a broader, vaguer readership. I’m not thinking about keeping things short and punchy, light and noncommittal. When I write for my blog, the data is stored on my server space, and comments are under my watchful eye. When I write for my blog, I can hyperlink the way I choose, and make connections to topics I’ve blogged earlier (such as “Glasgow”). I can change the look of my blog (even though I haven’t for years), I can use CSS and tags and put tags on the posts, make categories, and so on. And did I mention all the data is on my server, not Mark Zuckerberg’s?
 
I’ll try to keep blogging, try to work it up to a more regular, more substantive pace. And I’ll be posting status updates on Facebook steadily, too.

My colleague in New Testament studies at Glasgow, Ward Blanton and his wife Amy yesterday became parents of a daughter Sophia Elizabeth (hence, Zoe became a sister, too)! Word is that everyone is well. Loving best wishes to them and all who join in rejoicing at this good news.

I’m still with Tom and Jeff and other critics of the NYTimes’ management and practice — but I have to give props to their new web interface (hat tip, Daring Fireball). Clean, functional, and if you’re using a standards-compliant browser, the headline typefaces correspond to the print edition’s.

The bureaucratic jargon over here can be hard to puzzle out sometimes. Either I’ve been issued a National Health number, or I’ve been drafted into MI-5 with a license to inflict paper cuts.

(I tried to post this last week, but I couldn’t effectively copy-and-paste the YouTube link.)
 
All the fountain pen lovers are exuberantly tweeting and linking to this video of the Japanese Prime Minister swapping out his Mont Blanc for a Pelikan. While I like both families of fountain pens, my chagrin (for the laid-by Mont Blanc 149) and glee (for the triumphant Pelikan 800) are all attenuated by the likelihood that the Prime Minister had just run out of ink, or had a momentary dry nib — and that can happen to anyone, with any pen, especially if the user isn’t as preoccupied with pen maintenance as are some of us. Frankly, I think it’s a good thing that he has more on his mind than refilling his Mont Blanc; if I were Prime Minister, people would have the right to grouse about my spending time filling, polishing, flushing, repairing, and browsing for fountain pens.

When I was preparing for the SBL, I decided that if ever there was a paper that cried out to be delivered on the Goodacre model, it was this. I therefore did not have a handy, full-formed manuscript of my talk available to post right away when I got back from the meeting — just my prompts. I’ve finally transcribed the prompts in the order in which I think they work best, fleshed them out with some of what I might have said,and now present it as the raw material for what might turn out later to be an article or a chapter. I’ll leave the placeholder text from the earliest version of this posting in the block-quote below, and the presentation itself begins after the jump. Eventually I’ll look into links and embedded video for the music to which I refer; oh, and I use curly-braces to designate something that would be a footnote, if only simple HTML were conveniently agreeable to rendering footnotes.

(This is really just a placeholder post. I have to submit copy for a Call For Papers, and I want to make a pointer to the place where I’ll have posted the paper — so I’m leaving this post here, and will come back to put the paper here when I have tim to hammer it into postable shape. At that time, I’ll delete all this stuff and substitute an introductory explanation in the main post, with the draft of my paper in the “below the fold” part. I’m making headway on these things, honest, although people keep popping up with new meetings and tasks that need to be done right away.)

 
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