Month: December 2009

I’m heartened to see the Ekklesia Project’s quick reaction to President Obama’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech. EP has put up a blog where its participant spokespeople can articulate their responses to the speech; Stanley Hauerwas offers his appreciation and dissatisfaction in the first of the columns; Tobias Winwright has prepared another response, and I anticipate further contributions to the discussion. Since the most prominent media tend to treat theological deliberation as irrelevant — instead favoring either extreme responses from animate caricatures or pre-spun sound bites from churches’ Upper Management — this rapid deployment of digital publication illustrates a best-practices use of online resources for making audible the voice of a non-mainstream constituency. Bravo EP, and Bravo Hauerwas!

Last year I celebrated Pippa Day — the annual observance of the day we first met and welcomed Pippa into the family — by the usual expression of maudlin affection and by displaying a couple of pictures of her as a much younger person, and she struck back by writing a deeply moving note about her own feelings relative to the kooks who love her so (it’s offline, now; I think I saved a version of the page somewhere, but I can’t link to it). This year, when I’ve expatriated to Scotland and she’s started down the path of independence by boarding at Interlochen, I’ll go light on the sentimentality. Instead I’ll just say: the best things Margaret and I have ever done have involved our spectacular, wonderful children, all of them. And those best things have usually seemed strange, impractical, daunting, lonely, frustrating in prospect — but I can’t underscore strongly enough how tremendously all those challenges are surpassed in the staggering marvelousness of Nate, Si, Pippa, Jennifer, and now Laura and Laura (warning, Laura: I realized this week that I don’t have enough photos of you, and I will be aiming to rectify that deficit when we visit this year).
 
Whatever else I do right, in whatever days are accorded me, I can’t imagine that they’ll amount to more than a hill of beans compared to taking part in these folks’ lives. What a gift that is to me! And Pippa — lest I miss the chance to return to the presenting occasion for today’s post — thanks for icing the familial cake for us. I can’t wait to see you all again, soon!

There are only two weeks left in December, and I haven’t really noticed what music in my iTunes collection comes from 2009 (as opposed to other years). So I’m now listening to an all-2009 playlist, in order more judiciously to name my Top Releases list. I’m hoping that I really fall for some more rocking music, because for now all my selections befit an aging geezer who is settling into a calm-music phase of his descent into senescence.

I was hoping to get some time for simple relaxation this week, but a long-delayed tsunami of curriculum-revision committee meetings and the attendant course descriptions, Personal Development Plans, intradepartmental communiques, and also exams to mark, gift shopping to navigate, housecleaning and laundry to do, it begins to feel as though I’ll be full speed ahead with tasks through my departure Monday morning.

After years of frequent participation in leading the Eucharist and preaching at St Luke’s and Seabury, I’ve gone two years with relatively rare exercise of my ministries in those departments. This morning may mark a turned corner in that circumstance, though; I preached and deaconed at the Cathedral of St Mary the Virgin in Glasgow, and later in the week will meet with the Provost and the rest of the staff to arrive at a formal understanding of whether and how I can help the cathedral staff.
 
I’ll post the sermon below the fold. First, though, let me acknowledge that I treat William Blake more superficially than he or the poem deserves. An academic member of the congregation pointed this out to me after the service, and I readily admit it. There’s only so much you can say in a sermon the point of which is not a searching literary analysis of a poem by William Blake; mine is a glancing critical observation. That said, I stand by the general point for which the poem in the “Preface” to “Milton a Poem” serves as an illustration here.
 
I erred in following the lectionary’s recommendation that Isaiah 12:2-6 serve as the psalm for this service. The Cathedral opted to use a regular psalm, so the Isaianic motifs from the sermon don’t get any traction from the readings that the congregation will have heard. I had some trouble location the sweet spot for checking the text through my bifocals, so I mixed up the word order several times, so there’s a getting-used-to process I’ll need to observe. But really, it was wonderful to have the sense once again that I might be a sharer in the ministry of a church. Everyone at the Cathedral was very positive and encouraging, and I look forward with exhilaration to taking a regular part in cathedral life.
Continue reading “Back In The Saddle”

The Divinity Student Council (students who are studying toward degrees for ministry, as distinct from students who are taking general BA’s) had its End-of-Term lunch at a Greek restaurant on Sauchiehall Street Friday. My students pronounced it “Sucky hall,” but an alternate interpretation suggested “Socky hall”; I vote for the latter on grounds of potential embarrassment and on grounds of phonetic likelihood (it seems more likely to me that an “ah” syllable might migrate toward a schwa sound than that a schwa would take on a more specific vowel sound). Either way, as I was walking home to Partick from Sauchiehall Street, fog descended on Glasgow, and the towers of my institution rose majestically through the fog, against the sunset sky:
 

 
I also took a photo of the tower seen from Partick Bridge; or more precisely, I took two such photos, one exposed for the tower and one exposed for the greenery and the river. Someday when I feel ambitious I’ll try to align them and balance out the exposure, but for now they’ll just stay separate.
 
It’s a very pretty place. I’m glad to be here.

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.