Author: AKMA

We’re intensely thankful for all the prayers, well-wishes, helpful suggestions, cheers, and all that have greeted our exodus from Seabury and our advent in Durham (and Margaret’s in Mystery City, which we’ll specify as soon as her contract is signed). We keep saying to ourselves, “But it’s only for one year, we have to go through this all again next year!” — but your enthusiasm helps remind us how marvelous this arrangement is, and we are pretty eager to throw ourselves into it.

Looks like we’re on a roll — this afternoon Margaret got the phone call that our application for a lease on a Durham house was accepted. We now have mailing addresses in four states: Evanston, Princeton, Durham, and Mystery City. Supply lines are getting longer and harder to maintain, as George Carlin said.
 
We have a home on Gregson Street, less than a mile from the bus stop that will take me to West Campus to the Divinity School, and just across the intersection from Margaret’s grad-school compatriot Sarah. We have a manageable time for getting goods from Evanston to Durham, and — granted (for the first time in our marriage since I started seminary in 1983) the two incomes that we’ll have once Margaret’s contract kicks in — a reasonable rent. We have wonderful friends in the area, and I have a good (if temporary) job. Now, if I can only bear down on the writing front. . . .

Yesterday afternoon, I received my contract in the mail. For the coming academic year, I will serve as Visiting Professor of New Testament at Duke Divinity School. It’s a wonderful opportunity for me to reconnect with my doctoral alma mater, for Margaret to have a base in Durham while she finishes up her dissertation, for all three of us to spend a year among wonderful friends, and of course it’s among the top two or three theological schools in the country.
 
I expect to be teaching all exegetical courses — a marked change from Seabury, where I rarely had the chance to teach exegesis and mostly taught intro courses. On the other hand, it means immersing myself in John’s Gospel, Romans, Luke, and 1 Corinthians (unless there’s an unanticipated change). No committee or administrative work, and I’ll probably look into the possibility of participating in a hermeneutics reading group, if there’s any interest.
 
Now, we have to get Margaret’s contract squared away, and find a place to live. But next year’s destination is set.

On one hand, people want to interpret the Bible literally, as opposed to figurative or abstracted readings; the literal sense provides a bulwark against caprice and an assurance to humble readers. On the other hand, people want to distance themselves from literalists, who read the Bible too literally. As a result, interpreters devise elaborate defenses of what counts as “literal” (in a good sense) that’s nonetheless different from what’s literal (in a bad sense); they ascribe figurative force to the literal sense (“at this point, the literal sense is a metaphor”) and locate the determinative qualities of this literality in the text, even though the literalist is making the same appeal to “the text itself.”
 
It needs to be this way, because such readers insist that it can’t be that the Bible’s meaning is underdetermined, that the communicative gestures represented in a Bible might plausibly be apprehended differently by different readers who weight the different aspects of the representation (and indeed, “different representations”) differently.

The Stereotypist’s commentary on signifying, and (family favorite) fainting goats.

For a while, it looked as though iI might be headed toward a non-academic vocation (that looks very unlikely now); at that time, I looked forward to never again grading somebody. Our family’s homeschooling has long involved the happy premise that we did not need to characterize our children’s learning with the rough tools of four or five alphabetical short-cuts, and I lobbied heartily at Seabury against institutional structures that depended on grading.
 
So I read with interest Bob Sommer’s essay in Inside Higher Education which seems to speak with two minds about the subject. On one hand, “For me personally, grades are a secondary and derivative issue at best, an anguished responsibility at worst”; on the other, Sommer seems sufficiently unperturbed by the avalanche of problems he cites with the systems of grading and testing to declare, “My objection is not to all testing, only to summative (end-of-course) testing for an official record” (apparently overlooking the aspect of grading, at this point).
 
I very emphatically approve of teachers and students articulating an honest sense of progress and achievement in a given setting. Bravo! Brava! Hip, hip, hooray!
 
I’m not at all convinced, though, that letter grades provide the best possible, or even the most functionally appropriate, means for articulating that honest evaluation. Sommer notes that “In small classes one can replace grades with written narratives, if anyone cares to read them, but this will not work in large classes” — but even in small classes, narrative evaluation does not of itself satisfy the need for effective assessment and communication.
 
One thing’s for sure: Sommer’s article and the very ardent comments that hang from it raise once again the intensely important question of whether the relatively recent innovation of “grading” contributes to learning, or whether there might not be another way of assessing accomplishment that complements, rather than detracts from, the telos of teaching.

This year, the Library Falcons have four hatchlings.
 

 
Margaret has been watching them, ahem, like a hawk.

Margaret and I admire the Mothers Day op-ed comic by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki. Each of us found slightly different emphases to appreciate, but we both found this very short memoir touching and theologically-provocative.

This morning, I sent the deans of Seabury my resignation from the faculty.
 
I will miss a lot about Seabury: the labyrinthine navigation, the smell of a freshly-waxed chapel on the first day of classes, your choice of garths, the “Flaten All Boxes” sign. Please, someone, take a picture of the “Recreption Area” plaque. And especially the wonderful students who devoted so much time and effort and patience to the courses I led.
 

 
Margaret will make a trip to Evanston in a few weeks, to do the first push of boxing-up; Pippa and I will go back with her in June, after a memorial event for my father, to finish up the house and work on my office. At this point, we have a strong idea of where we’ll be, but until we get papers signed I’d rather not make any public statements. At this point, Plan A is kaput, Plan B is looking highly improbable, Plan C is presumably all set for Margaret, Plan D what we’re expecting for me, Plan E and I have agreed to continue our promising conversations for another year with no commitments either way, Plan F is probably out of the question, and Plan G wasn’t much of a chance in the first place. If all proceeds as expected, Margaret and I’ll be able to affirm our respective Plans very soon.
 
We’ve taken Step One, though.

I beg your pardon, but today was a very full day and its outcome involves several tasks for me to execute carefully and sequentially. As I get these squared away, I’ll be in a position to say more. Thank you for your patience.

On a walk back to the Center from Small World, the “Pruit Igoe” section of Koyaanisqatsi played on my iPod. I can sort of understand not enjoying Einstein on the Beach or some other Glass works, but even twenty-plus years after Margaret and I were first captivated by the film and music in a small theater in New Haven, these compositions still knock me out.

“That was depressing, even for a Finn.” — Olli-Pekka Vainio, author of Justification and Participation in Christ