All posts in February 2010

I attended a theological get-together earlier in the week, the topic of which was lay presidency at the Eucharist. Some folks in the room were for it, and some were agin’ it. Among the for-its, many advanced pragmatic or sentimental reasons. “Pragmatic,” in that there are more congregations in Scotland than there are full-time (or…

Margaret is here for a week, so if I skip a day or two, please understand that I am probably concentrating on her rather than, for instance, blogs. Shock and horror!

Relative to teaching: Thought-provoking blog (as usual) from George Siemens and chat transcript over at weblogg (ed) moderated by Will Richardson. (Unnumerated bonus, but this would make it “Five Things, Three Plus Two”: Blog from the University about undergraduate teaching.)   And Suw points to an HBR entry by Roger Martin that discusses the problem…

Tuesday, I complained on Facebook about having only fifty minutes to lecture on 1 and 2 Corinthians. Now I should own up right away that the same mind (mine) that gave fifty minutes to lecture on twenty-nine chapters of tightly-woven theological argument gave the same fifty minutes for me to lecture through the four chapters…

Because I can’t draw humans worth beans (that is, “draw… worth beans,” not “humans worth beans”; I can draw neither bean-worthy nor un-bean-worthy humans), I am contantly on the lookout for repositories of pre-drawn figuers I might use for illustration. The stick figures from signs provide an especially compelling treasury, and I was browsing around…

I’m continuing to mull over the topic of moral theology and polyamory, but before I write anything specific I wanted to set out a few preliminary premises.   First, I recognize that various readers might take offense at my raising the topic at all — whether because it is for them an integral aspect of…

Well, it’s not really Glasgow, but it had to be retold anyway. Apparently an alert foot patrolman warned a t-shirt store in Aberdeen that their “A B E” football apparel (“Anyone But England”) was racist, and asked that the ABE shirts be moved out of the front window.   “We’re certainly not being racist. We…

We’re drawing to the end of the coldest Glasgow winter in fifty years, according to my informants here. Today it snowed all day (though hardly accumulated, as the temperature was hovering around 0°). Everyone agrees that it’s an extraordinarily long, chilly, snowy winter for Glasgow; I feel apologetic, as though I’m complicit in the importation…

No, I’m not going to examine the moral-theological questions concerning polyamory; I’ve been thinking about them because of what follows, and it strikes me as a more interesting problem than my superficial moral-theological assessment (“No,” or maybe “No!”) would usually imply. For this post, I’m writing about a specific incident and its hermeneutical ramifications.  …

This morning’s sermon is one of those sermons that benefits from being preached once at the early service before I arrives for the main service of the morning. (Sadly, I didn’t preach at the early service today.) There are a number of edits I would make to tighten it up, to underscore some points I’d…

• I was overpowered by this profile of Roger Ebert from Esquire. In the middle of a very busy day Wednesday, I had to read it from beginning to end. He has made a great and beautiful life.   • “What Makes a Great Teacher?” from the Atlantic, with particular reference to the Teach For…

I talk about Scott McCloud in lectures and classes all the time (well, not as often as I talk about the New Testament or hermeneutics, but pretty often), but his weblog post today really touched me. His experience of learning how to learn pertains to the highest degree to our understanding of pedagogy and instruction,…