Month: April 2025

Just now on Bluesky, Eric Vanden Eykel mentioned having seen somebody in an airport who squeezed a packet of mayonnaise into a cup of coffee. To that, John Lyons added that he had watched a video about the practice. My reaction was to go downstairs, brush off and wipe down the countertop, and make a cup of black coffee with no possible pollutants in sight.

I think this has something to do with keeping the Torah, but maybe it’s just that I’ve been reading James Kugel….

A frustrating two miles this morning, as I didn’t get any momentum going and paused several times, hoping that the restart would pull the trigger to release limber energy to get me home — but I got home just as stiff as when I left. Frustrating. Along the way I considered dropping the Bannister Mile on Monday week, but realised that the problem isn’t that I can’t run a mile, but that my competitive streak wouldn’t consider it worthwhile if I don’t finish ahead of someone; I realised that a 3K Fun Run might be doable (the presence of ‘Fun’ presumably signifying ‘times don’t matter’) — then understood that if I run next Monday on the ‘fun’ basis, the stress resolves itself and I needn’t get so wound up about myself. Just (as the adverts say) do it.

Then Margaret and I went to the eight o’clock, in order to have a languorous breakfast in town — oh, delicious and indulgent — and home again to relieve the ladies and to tackle marking. I should do a ‘story behind my books’ entry on What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?, perhaps if I clear marking off my desk.

Don’t say anything about the Orioles. Maybe their mediocrity is an aggravating factor in my own disheartening athletic practices.

Good-ish morning run, hot breakfast, second cup of coffee, attended (via BBC) the Holy Father’s obsequies, was concomitantly moved, then lunch, grocery shopping and marking. I was so impressed with the typography/page design of the service booklet that it gave me the idea of launching Updike awards for liturgical printing: perhaps one for regular Sunday services, one for a special event, one for typography in particular, one for layout, and one to three (max) for general merit in specific respects (for children? use of non-roman typography? for creativity? colour? the idea is that some works warrant recognition even though they may not represent a ‘category’ that should be institutionalised for annual recognition), and of course, the coveted Updike for overall Best Liturgical Printing.
‘Our Updike-winning Sunday bulletin…’
‘Once again, the Updike goes to Tipografia Vaticana, for the third year in a row….’
‘This year’s Updike for a Special Service goes to Westminster Abbey, for the service book for the Coronation…’

Think I’ll ask around about this.

Lovely dinner with Oriel theology finalists last night at Majliss — great to see our Majliss friends, too — and to return to Abingdon, and so to bed.

Two functional miles this morning — nothing special. I sense that I should ramp up my pace before the Bannister Mile on 5 May, but the Apostle’s dictum applies here as well; all very well in theory, but the flesh resists pushing. I read a little yesterday; I’ll take communion to Fr Keith this afternoon, and am hoping to refresh my investigation into the hermeneutics of the Church of England between the Reformation (and slightly before) into the eighteenth century. Or I may just throw the whole lot into one article, and skimp on details in order not to leave the later centuries just hanging (perhaps implying that I will write another essay, whereas I would really like to move on from analysis of the topic.

(No disrespect to all the liturgics tutors whom I respect, and too bad for the ones who irk me.)

On the first day, I would begin by asking (even before discussing the syllabus), ‘Why is a family car not shaped like an orb?’ After a while discussing all the myriad of reasons for non-orb family autos, I’d ask ‘All right, why don’t autos have orbs instead of wheels?’

Again, after talking through it for a while, I’d turn the conversation to liturgy. ‘Granted that orbs are good things, and it might be an entertaining diversion to imagine rolling about in orbs like the ones in a Jurassic Park film, we can probably grant that not all good things are good for all purposes. Wheels were invented millennia ago, and we continue to use them, because they are uniquely apt for the jobs we give them. A wheel and a dinner plate may be roughly the same shape, but you can’t simply substitute one for the other. (A hubcap, perhaps, but not a functional wheel. And not a hubcap for very long, I suspect.) Sometimes we hit on something that does its job so well that there’s hardly room for improvement, and it’s not stodginess or traditionalism to stick with wheels on autos — it’s optimal engineering.’

‘Some liturgical forms have been road tested by millions of congregations for hundreds, thousands of years. Acknowledging the distinctive aptness of those forms for liturgical worship needn’t be rebarbative traditionalism; it’s acknowledging that those forms have done something exceptionally well in a vast range of contexts over a staggering span of time. You may have a clever idea that nobody ever thought of before about improving liturgical communication — but that’s vastly less probable than that you will sacrifice a great range of liturgical effects in order to effect one or two deliberate ends that you’ve imagined (without attending to the losses).

‘The pertinent questions about liturgy involve not only “Do you think that your clever idea improves on the whole idea of the automobile?” but also “How does your clever idea integrate with the rest of the liturgy, the contemporary church, the historic church, the ‘chief end of man’, church doctrine in general, the world outwith the church, and so on?” If your idea works brilliantly on its own, but doesn’t engage functionally with the rest of the vehicle, it is (pardon my saying so) a non-starter.’

An optimally functional vehicle comprises a good number of different parts, each of which has to be working well in order for the vehicle to operate. Even more, though, they all have to be working well together for the vehicle to accomplish well its goal of transporting people and goods rapidly and reliably.

Likewise the liturgy: it’s not just a matter of a well-composed collect, or an apposite eucharistic prayer — it’s not a ‘one from column A, one from column B’ affair. In order for the liturgy to achieve its end, all the parts must work well on their own, and must be snugly integrated in a balance and alignment that makes for effective liturgical performance.

After all this, we would study the liturgy, its historic forms, the moments of ‘innovation’ and how they operated or didn’t, and how different liturgical forms belong to different expressions of ecclesial identity (no Solemn High Mass for my beloved brethren of the Kirk, but by the very same token no austerely reformed hymn sandwich for my catholic-minded Anglican congregations). How does it work, how does it fit?

Morning rain, so no morning run. Hot breakfast, Morning Prayer at home, then reading and odds and ends from work.

I noticed that Nijay Gupta (and based on his post, Michael Bird) is writing a retrospective overview of his publications. As part of a motivation for me to apply myself to writing more, again, I’m taking their cue to reflect on my own books and their background.

My first book (written) is, as so often for recent graduates, a refinement of my doctoral thesis at Duke. I wrote most of the thesis while I was in residence at Durham, but after a year I had to take a job to support Margaret and the boys, so during my first year of full-time teaching I would take a day or so a week to stay overnight in my office at Eckerd College to hammer out the last chapters of my thesis. Finished in 1991, I set about seeking a publisher. In those days there were fewer theological presses, especially for lightly-converted dissertations, so I turned first to the obvious place, the SBL Dissertation Series (the clue is in the name).

But the SBL Dissertation Series turned me down; after that, I don’t remember whether I submitted it to any other presses. There were some mills that would publish anything they could sell to a library, but I had hoped for at least a modicum of selectivity in my first publisher. The rejection by a dissertation series disappointed me significantly, since the SBLDS should, in principle, have been the easiest place for me to place my thesis: that was the series’s raison d’être. If it didn’t fit the Dissertation Series, how likely was it that a university press or a commercial publisher would want it? I knew it fell outside the bounds of what most presses were taking in the early 90s — biblical theology was passé, postmodern thought was not yet marketable, questioning the prevalence of historical criticism’s paramount role marked one as a minor troublemaker — and I felt uneasy about my prospects.

At the time Charles Mabee was editing the American Biblical Hermeneutics series for Mercer University Press; he also chaired the Hermeneutics section of the SBL Southeast Region, where I gave a couple of papers that he liked. After one session, I described my thesis to him and asked whether he thought it might fit in his series. Charles — very different as we are — encouraged me enthusiastically, so I submitted my ms to Mercer, and they accepted it. I needed to translate all the French and German that I’d left in the thesis (partly to make it explicit that I could read the languages, partly to avoid quibbles with my committee over better or worse translations, and possibly to avoid making it easier for them to question my reading). I wanted to make more gentle my disagreement with Leander Keck, a brilliant scholar who had shown a graciously kind interest in my studies and my work, which I had expressed more poointedly in my thesis with a view to making clear the contours of my argument. On the whole, though, it was an easy transition, and >Making Sense of New Testament Theology: “Modern” Problems and Prospects was published in 1995 as 11th book in the series of Studies in American Biblical Hermeneutics.

The argument of the book and thesis is, simply, that the felt problem with ‘biblical theology’/‘New Testament Theology’ at that historical moment (I feel very old to referring to my thirties as ‘at that historical moment’) could be ascribed to the contradictory aims of observing rigorously historical criteria (often in the name of ‘reality’) as the paramount criterion while simultaneously delivering satisfactorily theological conclusions. Scholars treated this as a matter of necessity, of the nature of New Testament theology, as self-evidently integral to responsible scholarship. I proposed, contrariwise, that there is no ‘nature’ of New Testament theology, that many of the supposed bedrock arguments in support of this model were either intrinsically flawed or derived their authority not from nature or necessity but from the cultural assumptions typical of modernity. The scholars could more readily attain their goals scholars I discussed took modernity to provide the necessity for their imperatives, while I noted that modernity constitutes only one possible array of cultural forces, and that readers who want a more theological New Testament theology should simply prepare to part ways to some extent with the cultural imperatives of modernity and identify other criteria for the soundness of their interpretations.

For various reasons, including my involvement in other projects on postmodern biblical interpretation, some readers took my argument to mean something along the line that everyone should be postmodern and not give a fig about truth or history, only being witty and confounding their neighbours. This serves mostly to confirm my argument that once you write something, however clearly, people will make of it what they will, and you just have to live with that. I admire arguments in behalf of postmodern thought where they help me puzzle out the peculiarities of the discursive worlds I inhabit, and I find those arguments tedious to the extent that they amount to casual denunciations of the ‘Words have menaings, cos you think it’s wrong to use [fillin an expletive or racial or sexual slur].’ Bore me.

So it’s not an argument for postmodern New Testament theology, or even against modern New Testament theology, so much as it’s an argument against trying to square the circle of seeking an austerely historical, richly theological New Testament theology.Prove me wrong by showing an example of a New Testament theology that historians can enthusiastically adopt without committing themselves to Christian sympathies, or a profoundly theological NT theology which rests squarely on indisputably sound historical pillars.

As a relatively small university press, MUP wasn’t in a position to promote the book. People who knew about it received it more or less positively, and it got some distinctly enthusiastic reviews. Still, it didn’t make a splash. As far as I can tell, more people knew about me from my conference papers and book reviews than from Making Sense. Still it said what I wanted to and it reached some niche audiences (I believe that David Aune used it in his classes at Notre Dame, and Keikki Räisänen — whom I criticise in the , and helped get my job at Princeton Seminary, all things for which I’m tremendously grateful. It stands up over the years; you can see, for instance, that Joel GReen’s Practicing Theological Interpretation invokes many of the same arguments, though without citing me (and although he knew my work as a reviewer; Baker Academic asked me to blurb it, though my blurb doesn’t appear on Amaon’s list of endorsements — check the back cover, though). And Making Sense has continued to sell in infinitesimal numbers.

Good-ish run this morning, coffee and fruit, and I tinkered with my gold Waterman CF (which has persistent flow problems; I suspect the feed is misplaced relative to the nib and section, either too close or misaligned). Shower, Morning Prayer at home, and in a bit I will head in to Oxford to help my finalists revise for their exams at a contemporary version of Oriel’s former-days Theology Camp. I neglected to sign in for lunch, so I’ll come directly home and spend the afternoon reading and editing Pope Francis’s Letter on the Role of Literature in Formation for the Internet Archive.

O God, faithful rewarder of souls,
grant that your departed servant Pope Francis,
whom you made successor of Peter
and shepherd of your Church,
may happily enjoy for ever in your presence in heaven
the mysteries of your grace and compassion
which he faithfully ministered on earth.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.

Walked my morning miles out of sheer laziness and weariness, after a long night’s sleep; coffee and fruit, I’ll go in to say Morning Prayer, then on to R&R for coffee out. I may skip the church’s Morning Prayer services later in the week, maybe not, but I’m on low-expectations duty after Holy Week. (Colleagues sometimes say ‘week off’, but that’s not my understanding of clerical vocation.)

Margaret and I have been hovering over the Lincoln Cathedral Falcon Cam to see how the pair’s four eggs hatch. All our best to you, Peregrine Couple and soon-to-be-fledglings!

7 March, and then 16 March, would have been my sister’s 66th and my mother’s 90th birthdays, respectively; and then 1 April was the day Holly died last year; and since then, there’s been ‘Siblings Day’ (when did someone think that one up?), and soon enough 24 June will come, the day Mom died eight years ago.

From around the time of their birthdays, I thought I should say something about them. It’s difficult, because each relationship had its own pattern of distance with fewer bonds of familial intimacy than I’d wish, than I hope they’d wish too. What words can express that honest, practical remoteness to the relationships in my family without making us sound like a horrible novel about a chilly suburban household with people acting out in various dramatic, clinical ways? We were together, no doubt, though my mother and father were drifting; we had a certain closeness, but much of the time it was more similar to a positive teacher-student relationship (to parents) or congenial but not favourite classmates.

My mother had troubles with the men in her life, and I imagine that a son with autistic tendencies (before we knew how to gather those into an explicable, clinical characterisation) must have been among the worst possible matches for her. Though we rarely clashed, there just wasn’t much mother-son affection between us. She and her then-husband knew of my old-times hacking skills and offered me a job working at their computer graphics start-up in the eighties, but we still didn’t see much of one another (feel free to point the finger at me — I didn’t go out of my way to spend time with them). When eventually I realised that as a grown-up it was my job to reach out to her, to extend myself to keep in touch, she saved the weekly notes I sent her, but I had to take Aunt Harriet’s word that she was reading and appreciating them. She was much closer to Margaret than to me; she would talk to Margaret about me in the third person, with me right there in the room. And I know, I’m sure, I didn’t live up to what she might have wanted from a son. My vocation as an academic probably pinched, since she had felt let down by her father and my father, both academics before me.

After my mother and father divorced, Holly — who had been more close to Mom in school days — gravitated to my father, and they developed a very strong connection.I had left for my undergraduate years by then, and my letters home (of which I apparently wrote many more than I would have guessed) gradually tapered off. She went off for her degree, then from a start in retail fashion in Pittsburgh during high school went to work at Vogue, Ralph Lauren, and ultimately Bloomingdale’s, where she headed men’s and children’s fashions. After Bloomingdale’s, she started a cashmere goods retail store in Greenwich, Connecticut. You can see how this plays out for me: I had no fashion sense at all, and if I have developed any since then it has been on the basis of avoiding taking fashion risks. For a very long time, if I had any clothes or accessories that looked especially snappy or sharp, they were gifts from her. Still, we were chalk and cheese, and I think she had some hard feelings comparing our lives.

This afternoon I saw a post on BlueSky showing the route of Paul Revere’s ride, with notations for the locations on his path where today he might obtain a refreshing cup of coffee and a donut from Dunkin’. I looked more closely and saw the locations of the Dunkin’ and the Trader Joe’s that I remembered from going to be with Mom during the last days of her life. And it cut through to my heart.