Illusions of Publishing and Permanence

I had a great meeting with my colleague who’s in charge of helping with grant developments and applications the other day. The best part was the he recognised the project, and said ‘by the second paragraph I was thinking, “This is really exciting”’. He has abundant intriguing suggestions for where to go with the project,…

For Friends

My turn to preach came up this week, so I buckled in yesterday and — despite interruptions from Olympic bicycling, swimming, and gymnastics — hammered out a sermon. There were several biblical-theological themes on my mind, and also the situations of a parishioner who recently died, and several of my long-time friends who are caught…

Vital Signs

A couple of my recent ecclesiastical posts have attracted a lot of attention, thanks (on one hand) to the convergence of digital activity around the time of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church in the USA and related areas (which I’ve dubbed, for shorthand purposes, ‘ECUS&’ — not out of disrespect for the non-USA…

Law, Axiom, or Whatever

I don’t know if it counts as a Law, an Axiom, a Maxim, or any other sort of anything — nor do I know if someone has formulated it before (this is one way of finding out). However, in case no one has, I herewith promulgate the following predictable correlation: The longer you possess a…

On ‘For A Reason’

Last year when the Mountain Goats came through Glasgow, John Darnielle performed the (unreleased) ‘Sign of the Crow 2’ (link to an earlier performance) with specific reference to my attending the show (‘There’s a guy who wrote a religious paper about my band’s last album I think maybe is here, and I know that he…

Another LazyWeb Suggestion

There are skillions of disparate resources for eliciting and saving bibliographic information on the web, but there isn’t the right one. The Right One is just a webpage with a search window, comparable to Google’s old interface. Enter as much as you know about a publication, and the page responds by listing the most plausible…

This, and This

Here’s a shocking news flash: my boss at the Cathedral and I disagree about things. Shock! Horror! We disagree about things, and we go ahead with life and serving God, and he doesn’t try to stifle me, and I don’t try to undermine him. And as far as I’m concerned, we get along fine.  …

Pride By Association

One of the majestic blessings of my years studying in Duke’s graduate program came from spending time in seminars, in the grad lounge, and generally to and fro with a great man and a great theologian, Willie Jennings. I don’t think I’ve ever studied with someone alongside whom it was more fun to learn. Whether…

Reception History Resource

Once upon a time, scholars had to resort to all manner of ingenuity to scare up research sources — among them, ‘word of mouth’, our professors’ casual allusions, and the library circulation cards that we used to have to sign when we withdrew books from our libraries (ask your parents, kids). One of the resources…