Category: Uncategorized

For Mac OS X users, two seasonal presents from the freeware world: Art of Illusion, a 3D rendering editor with impressively sophisticated features; and a new version of VLC Media Player, for playing those files that QuickTime doesn’t recognize. Oh, and a week or so ago, the Participatory Media Foundation released their most recent version of Democracy Player.

And you don’t have to wait two weeks to download them.

(I have not yet tried any of these out, though I’ve never had problems with earlier versions of Democracy player or VLC. Any pernicious consequences for your system are between you and the coders.)

Our family only uses organic free range vegetable broth.

I dislike Scott Simon, and I have very narrowly constricted respect for Sylvester Stallone, but this morning their interview provided a moment that made me laugh aloud.

Simon asked Stallone if there was one more Rocky movie i him, a movie in which Rocky actually (finally) adjusts to civilian life, learns to love running a restaurant, comes to terms with age and mortality. Stallone answers that No, moviegoers want to see Rocky box — Rocky 5 was a flop because Rocky was only coaching in that movie, when the fans want to see him in the ring.

At this point, the two start brainstorming, as though they were pitching a concept to studio eexecs.

“He could fight older guys!”
“In a retirement home!”
“He could beat up grandpas!”

Thanks, guys.

Yesterday was filled with preparing and administering the final exam in Church History, and caring for the sweetest invalid in town. Pippa has a cold, so I’m coddling her as best I can. She’s been on a movie spree, and has otherwise been relaxing abed and on the couch; we’re hoping she’ll be up for the activities she has scheduled for the weekend (choir rehearsal, Nutcracker, and Lessons and Carols).

Among the movies she’s watched is an Agatha Christie “Tommy and Tuppence” feature that incorporates the line that constitutes the motto of my scholarship:

You go on muttering bits of the Bible in your bedroom for years, and then suddenly you go right over the line and become violent!

Got me dead to rights; watch out world, ’cause any day now I may snap.

The exam seems to have gone well; an unprecedented proportion of the class complimented me on the exam, and several even said it was “fun.” This unnerves me a bit, since the exam was less easy than it has been in years past, but evidently in this last year that I will ever teach Early Church History, I hit a golden mean of challenging and encouraging them. I’ll miss having an excuse for hanging out with the quite extraordinary array of characters in the early church, but this way I’ll have more time to concentrate on the New Testament and hermeneutics.

But now, classes are over, I have but a few exams and papers to mark, and the holidays lie ahead with prospects of a houseful of children and their dates/partners/intendeds/whatevers. And getting Pippa well, preparing a sermon for the 17th, and cleaning house.

Yesterday, Margaret took her last class in her doctoral program (well, OK, it was a meeting with her independent study professor — but it was course credit, she turned in her assignment, and she’s done). She has only two steps, now, to completing her work. They’re big steps — exams and dissertation — but there’re still only two plateaus (plateaux?) before she’s through.

And today makes the twentieth year since I was ordained a priest. That sounds like a long time; it feels as though it’s passed in the blink of an eye. Frustrating as many aspects of church life are at the moment (and just now, seminary life too), I see more clearly every day that this vocation fits me. As I’ve said before, so I repeat now: thank you. It’ a humbling honor to be a priest among you.
Continue reading “Milestones”

My neighbor’s weird about his kidneys. He always palpates them, observes how they’re functioning.

I think he’s too renal attentive.

As soon as The End was published, Pippa and I hastened to town to obtain a copy. She read it immediately and pronounced herself satisfied. I delayed, partly as I’m even busier this year than usual (I know, I know, that is usual) and partly because I wasn’t sure Daniel Handler could make the last volume in the series succeed. He had taken the first twelve volumes to the brink — perhaps past the brink — of repetitive plot devices and rhetorical gestures. If he lived up to the grim promises from the first twelve books, the thirteenth would be an arduously bleak exercise in defying the conventions of children’s literature, and if he reneged on his promises, he’d falsify the premises he had constructed so carefully.

When, after a couple of days, I did read The End, Handler proved his mettle. The last book in the Baudelaire triskaidekalogy attains a diverse array of impressive achievements, not least of which is Handler’s perceptive critique of Ishmael’s passive-aggressive paternalism in the name of the Baudelaires’ mutuality. The book offers neither a glibly happy resolution of the series of unfortunate events, nor facile answers to the series’s difficult questions, nor the cataclysm of the main characters’ demise. Instead, Handler gives a fair treatment of how the world goes: hearts break, dear ones die, the best among us bear the wound of sin, and life goes on. I wouldn’t have guessed that Handler would make so impressive a summing-up, and I commend him highly.

I was moved to remember The End because a friend of a friend died recently. As I was meditating about this death and the dreadful loss it entails, I looked again at the last chapter of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. This chapter recounts Harry’s presence and feelings at Dumbledore’s funeral so convincingly that my assessment of Rowling as a novelist clicks upward a notch just recollecting it. Harry’s by turns distracted, subject to inappropriate mirth, profoundly grief-stricken, and filled with adolescent bravado, all in a narration that underscores the realism of Dumbledore’s death. (This chapter alone militates against my accepting the ingenious exegesis that Dumbledore is just mostly dead.) Rowling may manage to pull off a Dumbledorian resuscitation without vitating the grandeur of the funeral (at which even merfolk cried) — but that unlikely hypothetical feat aside, these two books teach well the sober lesson that our lives fall subject to forces outside our control, and at our best we can but give gifts, share gifts, with those we love. We share the gifts that have been given us first: love, and trust, and wisdom, and determination in the face of entropy, a few knick-knacks of joy and ingenuity, a song and a poem and a dance. We catch these from our predecessors and pass them to another generation, to our children and our students, and by our transmitting these gifts we testify to a light that darkness cannot comprehend. We cannot defeat death or decay, but we have the opportunity to live victoriously, nobly, under circumstances we cannot control.

In whatever name moves you to resist evil, to flourish free from fear, to beam with the joy that heals, to pledge solidarity with your sisters and brothers, to love: in that name, live, world without end.

The ESPN video clip from Greg Oden’s first game shows a player who’s already frighteningly good, in just his first college game. I’m all for staying in college four years, but if there’s a college player who looks like he’ll be ready for pro ball soon, it’s got to be Oden. In the meantime, Ohio State’s opponents will have a tough job; I remember seeing Shaquille O’Neal during his college years, and in the few minutes of Saturday’s game, Oden already seems like a more complete player.

A recent post involving Scots accents on Language Log reminded me of my delight at the way a Glaswegian information-booth staffer pronounced my children’s names. She asked who they were, and I pointed to each, saying, “Nate, Si, and Pippa.” She smiled and commented that they were lovely names, repeating (as it sounded to me), “Neet, Say, and Peppa. . . .”

Does that sound correct to any Scots readers?
Continue reading “Accent”

“Quoted,” as they say, “for truth”:

Online friends versus real friends. Online life versus real life. All these briar-fences and hedges we construct when we speak so that we don’t admit the possibility that people we meet online are, you know, people, meaning as much to us as people we meet elsewhere.

Dorothea, rock on (or limp on) — QFT.

NPR recently featured an audio montage of clips from what TV Land is promoting as “the 100 Greatest TV Quotes and Catchphrases.” Two comments: One, the list looks to me as though it’s predictably biased toward recent candidates. Two, I wonder whether there’s much point in applying the label “greatest” after the top fifty or so examples. Many of the listed catchphrases were unfamiliar to me, and I doubt that I’d be convinced of their greatness even if someone explained them to me. Even though I haven’t been a TV watcher for a long time, one would think I should be acquainted with any catchphrase that can make a convincing claim to “greatness.”
Continue reading “Not All Greatest”

Well, Jordon says “It’s ‘Jordon’ with an ‘o’ ” but he quotes Darryl who quotes Pastor Rod who asserts — correctly, to my mind — that pastors need to be theologians.

When people meet to discuss the future of theological education, they almost invariably devise plans that emphasize more and more topics from outside the classical theological curriculum. These plans laudably aim to extend the student’s competence from solely technical, academic expertise (“Pastor, should I be worried about my daughter’s incipient Apollinarianism?” “Not unless she lapses into Eutychianism, my dear; now, please polish the asperorium”) to such valuable skills as small and large group dynamics, elementary accounting and finance, the ever-popular appliance maintenance, roofing, and subclinical diagnostics and therapy. Throw in an increased emphasis on subjects in the umbral area of the classical curriculum — ritual studies, non-Christian traditions and interfaith relations, the histories and literatures of movements that the catholic tradition deemed heretical, to propose a few — and due attention to currents in the church that the dominant Western perspective has overlooked (and in some instances “suppressed”).

I think it would be swell if leaders in the church could handle checkbooks, boilers, thuribles, rabbinic Aramaic, innovative coming-of-age rites, contentious committee meetings, and synodal policy-making with equal aplomb. Oh, and could preach. I vote a very firm “yes” for omnicompetence.

Now, since few will attain that ideal (and I begin by confessing my own merely partial competence), and since we can’t inculcate everything in three years of theological education, we must face the problem of what to emphasize in three years of graduate education. I have two overlapping responses, one as an ecclesiastic (“an open, unrepentant ecclesiastic”), and one as an educator.

As an educator, I believe with greater and greater conviction that people learn what they’re ready and motivated to learn, and that some of them can fake learning what they’re obligated to simulate learning (but don’t care about). I thus advocate a more open curriculum: my proposal at Seabury would involve each professor offering a required introduction to her or his areas of interest, and all other courses would be offered as electives. Students would take the courses they care to, and if they didn’t care to sit through Early Church History or New Testament Introduction, that would be their lookout; they might be such paragons of small group dynamics that they should be accredited on that basis alone, and heaven knows I don’t mind the absence of unmotivated, resistant students.

As an ecclesiastic, I affirm Darryl’s point. However valuable all the pastoral-managerial skills are, they don’t matter if the pastor-managers don’t understand the truth that they’re proclaiming. I predictably compare the practice of theological responsibility to the practice of medical responsibility: do you really want a physician who’s a great organizer of small groups and whose office roof is watertight, who balances the books without help — but who’s a bit spotty on anatomy, diagnostics, and remediation? A pastor (whether of an established “institutional” church or an emergent coffee-shop congregation) needs to understand the gospel she proclaims. That understanding may derive from a graduate degree in theology, or from patient catechesis at the side of a sainted gramma, or even an immediate revelation of the Holy Spirit, but if you don’t know your theology, you’re treating souls without adequate understanding of anatomy and diagnostics.

This has run too long, and I haven’t adequately nuanced my polemic — but the short version runs, “Theology matters.” Well-administered, vaguely spiritual, socially congenial worship groups can get along for a while, but I’m unshakably convinced that the the church thrives where the whole congregation embodies, enacts a deep coherence that unites what they profess, how they spend their time together, and how they shape their lives outside the church. That deep coherence depends on someone understanding theology as well as a doctor understands physical health.