Author: AKMA

It’s hard to leave Durham, to leave my dear heart Margaret (superlatives sound cheap as Katrina’s devastation reverberates around us, so I’m holding back on modifiers concerning how hard it is). There’s work to be done in Evanston, though, and Margaret has work to do here. Time to go.

Any church — heck, any reader — who’s even vaguely interested in developing an online presence should hustle over to TextDrive where Dean is offering another limited number of lifetime hosting offers for a mere $400. Don’t hesitate. (The Disseminary is VC201 at Textdrive, although we’re also lifetime members at our regular host Cornerhost, with whom we’ve been entirely pleased and who has also offered lifetime hosting deals from time to time, of which we took advantage. This is the first time I’ve noticed one of these offers in time to call it to readers’ attention.)

David W. cites a new venture to peer-review manuscripts by hitherto-unpublished authors, in order perhaps to raise their profile and help them garner attention from acquisitions editors. I dunno, but it sounds to me like the kind of idea that Teresa and Patrick could shed some light on in a nanosecond.

Maybe you’ll believe Bart Ehrman, Prof. of New Testament at UNC-Chapel Hill. The Teaching Company is giving away downloads of two of his lectures on The da Vinci Code; I haven’t heard them yet, but I have full confidence that Bart will bring to bear his vast erudition and sober historical reasoning to the farcical fictions of Dan Brown.

We’re having perfect weather in Durham, doing a lot of walking and napping, and spending a fair amount of time offline. Still, a lot’s been going on.

Margaret met with her precept section of Prof. Berger’s “Prayer and Providence” course (that’s for Kevin). I love hanging around Durham, except that it’s so congenial an atmosphere that it’s hard just to visit. Kevin, we’re working on rebooting the Disseminary — had a small hang-up over last weekend — but I’ll get back to you as our agenda comes into focus more clearly. Right now, we’re on a first-things-first schedule.

Thursday, as I was traveling, I noted this graphic from USA Today: . It depicts the levees in New Orleans, but evidently someone got a little distracted in grouping and resizing in their illustration program, because the pumphouse in the diagram floats free of the levee wall and in the last diagram it’s floating in the middle of the lake. This isn’t exactly a Tuftean information-design problem, but it does exemplify one of the pitfalls of communicating information graphically — a sort of graphical typo, a “graph-o.”

Meanwhile, Pippa went on an art binge and executed a number of lovely drawings and collages for Margaret’s apartment, as we get ready for relocating Pippa back to Evanston. She drew the vase of sunflowers that Margaret’s friend Sarah left in the apartment to greet her, and this penguin parent-and-child collage of cut-paper, pencil, and marker. Margaret has a rattan screen that she uses as a gallery wall for Pippa art, and Pip has been filling it up impressively.

Meanwhile, Si is settling in at Marlboro, where Jennifer covered his moving-in process with an array of photos.

I’m working out my plans for the Clergy Day in Northern Indiana next week, thinking about my paper for the SBL meeting, and reveling in the company of my lovely wife and marvelous daughter, in terrific Durham. Now, we’re off to church, to pray for our sisters and brothers in Long Beach and New Orleans and all around, who’ve been battered by this week’s dreadful events. I’ll be in touch.

Nice to see that someone in that family is useful in a natural disaster.

[Later: Joe Duermer, bless him, has an unbeatable overview of the situation. “This is no time for politics,” people say, and to the extent that some of us might be about more immediately useful work, they may be right — but one useful end that some of us can serve is to point out that the past five years the U.S. government has operated in explicit repudiation of reality-based politics, and the chickens are coming home (or “homeless”) to roost. The Bush regime had no adequate plan about what to do after invading Afghanistan, none for concluding its adventure in Iraq, it specifically ignored direct, vivid, easy-to-understand warnings about short-changing New Orleans’s emergency preparedness and now feigns surprise that NO was unprepared. I fear that what Jeneane proposes as bitter satire may turn out, in some warped manifestation, to become official policy. So much for government by wish-fulfillment, fantasy, and slander — though, of course, it’s other people who have to live and die with the consequences of W’s fantasies.)

(Go to Shelley’s and download Kansas Joe and Memphis Minnie’s “When the Levee Breaks”:

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break
And all these people have no place to stay. . . .)

I woke up this morning at 4 AM to catch a cab ride to Midway, to catch a plane to Durham, to visit with my lovely wife and to pick up Pippa for our mutual return to Evanston. The travel went very smoothly (I quite like flying Southwest — I just wish they didn’t fly only from Midway). When Pippa and I escorted Margaret in to campus for the class she TAs, we ran into my mentor from my years at Yale, Richard Hays; Richard and I had a good, long conversation, then Pippa and I came back to Margaret’s apartment and I had a serious nap.

While I staggered and dozed through the day, Jordon launched Resonate, Si started his college life. Richard figured out that his home is still afloat in New Orleans (and that’s a good thing). I posted the next chapter of the Theological Outlines, Chapter Twenty-Two (The Church).

It’s still time to help in any way you can. If you haven’t already made a contribution, I endorse Episcopal Relief and Development. If you’re unmoved by the coverage you’ve seen, perhaps the reports at the Times-Picayune and Metroblogging will touch you.

Dylan urges everyone to consult the Bear’s “Blog For Relief” Day site. Instapundit and Technorati are serving as cornerstone sites (see [Technorati tags:flood aid] and [Technorati tags:hurricane katrina]).

Take a second or two to think what it would mean to be a priest the least of whose burdens is that the parish church was just washed out to sea.

[From the Times-Picayune website this report: “Long Beach: Most buildings within 200 yards of U.S. 90 disappeared …” — my emphasis.]

We’re thankful that David and his family survived the hurricane in good shape — but my mind reels at what David will be facing as the waters recede and his congregation comes to grips with what just happened among them.

[In case readers here don’t know where to make donations, here’s a link to Episcopal Relief and Development, where you can make send money designated for Katrina relief. Just don’t try to explore the site; I’ve hit a lot of 404 links there. Richard has an eerie picture up here.]

E called my attention to Metroblogging New Orleans, from which I’ve gotten a much richer sense of the situation there than I have from listening to the official news sources. She also reminded me there of how unevenly the weight of calamity (and attention) there has been distributed.

I heard from storm-affected Annie — she’s OK, hosting refugees from New Orleans proper. No report from my other friends in Louisiana-Mississippi.

I’m working on the last sheet of the starter deck of Ekklesia: The Congregating cards (last sheet now done and posted). In the shower this morning, it occurred to me that I could make up some special cards as a supplement: for instance, a “Persecution” card that beat everything except a martyr, no matter what category was chosen; a “Miracle” card, that won for the person who played it the next two cards (but then it had to be discarded — only one miracle per game); a “Council” card would require the next two plays to be determined by Orthodoxy; and so on. From there, we could begin to revisit Derek’s wonderful sketch of a game more deliberative than random.

In case you were worried about Josiah, he seems to be having a great time.

Last night I watched Hook, Line, & Sinker — back in olden times, when you couldn’t just choose to watch any movie ever made, but only had available the movies that local theaters and TV stations deigned to show, I hit a streak of Bert Wheeler/Robert Woolsey movies early Saturday morning on a Pittsburgh TV station; Netflix is now feeding my reminiscences. I’ll say this: it’s no Night at the Opera or Philadelphia Story, but I think it holds up exceptionally well (and some studio would be better served to remake this than to generate yet another puerile gross-out feature).

We made the turn into Volume Three of the Theological Outlines project (relying on a first-edition copy, much different format); Chapter Twenty-Two (“The Economy of the Holy Ghost”) is online.

I spent the day in a backwater of news updating — I rely on NPR and the Net for news (and just now I’m away from my radio). I gather that New Orleans had a severe, but not catastrophic interaction with Katrina. I hope Long Beach MS survived intact, but haven’t heard anything yet.

So New Orleans fared better than I feared last night; all through the day, I was unnerved by the contrast between the seriousness of the [possible] havoc and destruction (on one hand) and the amount of public attention (on the other). In the aftermath of a natural disaster, we can find a lot of news coverage, but in the hours yesterday when it wasn’t clear that this wouldn’t be the most devastating hurricane strike in U.S. history, I heard more time devote to pledge drives and read more web pages replete with lite chatter.

Now, my worries don’t oblige other people to change their programming (“Hey, Roone — there’s a guy in Chicago worried about the hurricane; let’s cut away for some special coverage, right?”). It did, however, heighten my attention to the discrepancy between post facto coverage and the preparatory reports (and on-going news).

I kept busy whipping up the fifth sheet of Theology Cards. Forty cards is plenty good for the game of which Scripture would say, “Naomi called its name Ekklesia: The Gathering.” I compiled and submitted a heap of receipts from the Disseminary, and got some necessary office work done. I’ll try to get to sleep early tonight, maybe catch up after a rest-less weekend.

The plan was for me to rush home after church, take an immediate nap, and get some work done this afternoon. I had gotten very little sleep — the sermon didn’t want to come together, it had been a very difficult week of homiletical wrestling. The sermon turned out all right (posted below the fold), but it wasn’t done till low-digit hours of morning that I hardly ever witness.

So after two services and a long Adult Ed classes, I was ready indeed for a nap, but I took a quick look at my online neighborhood where I noticed Shelley’s stark alert that Katrina — which had looked like a garden-variety Bad Hurricane when I had last checked Saturday night — had turned into The Worst Hurricane Ever, at least as far as New Orleans was concerned. My nap time disappeared into an afternoon spent catching up on the scale of Katrina, the vulnerability of New Orleans, and the magnitude of the possible catastrophe.

The dioceses of Louisiana and Mississippi have sent a lot of seminarians to Seabury over the last few years — people I’ve worked with, people I love, people who’ve gone back to a region they love to serve God and their neighbors. Mary, Richard, Jeff, Dave, A.J., Annie, Bill and Susan — and Andrew’s and Laura’s families — I don’t even know what to hope for, but I’m thinking of you all, and will want to know that you’re well and safe, as soon as I can.
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