Category: Uncategorized

Do you think these glare-prevention scarves will catch on? Laura thought I should see. . . .

Margaret, who cheerfully and painstakingly is reading proofs and constructing the index for my Fortress book, looked up from her labors to wonder what the index for David’s book Everything Is Miscellaneous will look like.

Yesterday morning, I received a video iChat invitation from Pascale, who wanted to show off her new roommate Ariel. I, in turn, brought Beatrice to the computer, and we exchanged pet stories and pleasantries.

Margaret called from the kitchen that the flat of strawberries she had bought for Saturday’s trip to Ravinia was not disappearing as fast as necessary, and wouldn’t Pascale like some? Pascale answered that what we really ought to do was make Strawberry Sauce. Margaret pooh-poohed the notion, but I queried Pascale for more details, and she explained how brain-dead simple it was (if it hadn’t seemed brain-dead simple, I wouldn’t have remembered it). And when Margaret left for her morning’s writing work at Peet’s, Pippa and I snuck into the kitchen and stealthily whipped two quarts of strawberries into sauce.

We tested it on our lunch waffles, and agreed that it was pretty good. When Margaret came home from Peet’s, we surprised her with the jar brimful of intoxicating strawberry essence. We served vanilla ice cream for dessert, topped with our own Strawberry Sauce (top secret recipe), and the afternoon of setting and refrigeration had turned our pretty-good strawberry sauce exquisite. Thanks, Pascale!

Several people have wondered what I think about the election of Katharine Jefferts Schori as the next Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, and the short answer is, “I don’t know.” I’ll certainly pray for her and her family, for the leadership infrastructure of the Episcopal Church, and for new health for the Anglican Communion as a whole.

But I haven’t seen any reliable sample of her theological reasoning, and at this time we need sound, deep theological reasoning more than just about any other characteristic.

I hear reports that she has a lovely, gracious, attentive, focused personality. She has a pilot’s license and flies her own airplane. To state the obvious, she’s a woman, and there is good in U. S. Episcopalians not assuming that a Presiding Bishop must be male.

At the same time, if she can’t back up her winsome character traits with weighty theological reasoning, all the positives won’t add up to enough to preserve even marginally cooperative relations with the Anglican Communion outside the U.S., nor to bolster the theological integrity of the Episcopal Church. For a variety of cultural reasons, the Episcopal Church in the U.S. can’t quite believe that anyone can (or should) take theological truth seriously, and tends to settle for lo-cal substitutes (convention conflict as “Less Filling!” vs. “Tastes Great!”); the vital (and I mean that word emphatically) importance of theology for the church remains in inconvenient truth. I hope I’ll learn that Bishop Jefferts Schori can handle that aspect of her new calling.

The family honored Father’s Day today with cards and gifts — Si sent me the card above, which Pippa drew for him. It’s a whale of a card, for a whale of a Dad, and Si added a kindly appreciative message on the inside.

Pippa herself gave me a small bag of goodies, including a bouquet of silk flowers that she had made (more in the realm of imaginative flowers than the exact reproduction of familiar floral forms), which hung over my place in the dining room. She added a card of her own, on which she transcribed the definition of “father” from the

Random House College Dictionary

she picked up at the most recent library Book Sale.

Best of all, she suspended her recent abstinence from graphical endeavors to produce a pastel for me, a wonderful picture of three brilliant tomatoes on a bright blue background. What a wonderful family — I’m very proud of all of them, and blessed that I got the assignment of being “father” among such remarkable, gifted souls!

This afternoon, we’re heading north to Ravinia to see A Prairie Home Companion — the live show, not the movie (Pippa’s a big PHC fan, loves Guy Noir). I’ll post some observations here after the show, but for now we’re gathering our forces, mapping out food and supply strategies, and devising our plans for reconnaissance and deployment. More later.

I observe that my dictionary software permits using the traditionally transitive verb “expound“ as intransitive: whereas I was taught that one expounds a position, a claim, the Scriptures, or a proposal, the Oxford American Dictionary (on which Apple’s Dashboard software relies) allows us to “expound on” a topic. The Oxford editors do not, however, approve the widespread use of “advocate” with an indirect object. Even in this fallen day and age, one advocates a cause, one does not advocate for that cause.

Just so you know.

And since I’m blogging about academica, I will belatedly point to Alex Halavalais’s now-famous post on ways students could cheat better. It’s not the kind of thing I would have posted — I can’t do anything to make my job harder — the post and some of the comments deserve attention.

Can you tell I’m grading papers and exams?

The PDFs of my Fortress Press book arrived yesterday, and I take bemused delight in one of its features. In a book which includes at least two essays that broach the topic of how typography affects interpretation, Fortress has set the headers in Antique Olive, one of my very least favorite typefaces in the world. At least the body copy is set in a sturdy Janson-family typeface.

In other news, I seem to have succumbed to the cold Pippa developed two days ago. She has seemed pitiably uncomfortable since then, so I’m not looking forward to the rest of the week.

Since I posted yesterday, I’ve been flooded with semi-intuitions that the problems I care most about (theological, hermeneutical, ethical, and all) find a common determinant in the character of time. I hesitate to blog any one of the notions that’s crossed my mind — they aren’t that well-developed yet — but if I were a character in an Edwardian novel, I would set out for a cottage in a remote location (say, France, or the Cotswolds, or even Scotland) and spend a year or two working out the connections. As it is, I’ll mull them over in the gaps of my days, and if anything noteworthy comes to fruition, I’ll let you know.

In the meantime, in ecclesiastical news, it turns out that Barbara Brown Taylor is not an “ex-priest,” but has stepped down from parish ministry. Sadly, the noteworthy story here is not that the USA Today got its facts wrong in a headline, but that she feels comfortable claiming that “Jesus knew the Hebrew Scriptures, and he departed from them. He was not faithful to the Scripture of that time. . . .” When celebrities such as she advance foolishness like this, the job of teaching wisdom to the church just gets harder and harder.

And since I noticed all this through Kendall Harmon’s site, I ought to complete a bizarre convergence of parties by noting that here I repudiate Brown Taylor’s claims, and endorse Al Kimel’s resistance to Paul Zahl’s unnerving theological hybrid of Luther and Zwingli.

But that “time” stuff — so much to think about, from Augustine to Heidegger. . . .

The Episcopal Church’s triennial General Convention starts its work this week, as even totally uninterested newswatchers will have been informed. We can anticipate a great deal of heat, and a good deal less light, and a sizable number of dissatisfied Episcopalians, no matter what the convention decides.

Some observers have offered pre-emptive strikes against the use of “weasel words” about issues that demand firm, clear, unambiguous verdicts. I’m not so het up about this one — my acquaintance with Anglican history suggests that the strength and weakness of the Anglican tradition depends to a great extent on keeping as many people as possible on board. To the extent that carefully worded resolutions (that may be read in more than one sense) contribute to sustaining broad participation in the church, I think that they reflect one of the defining characteristics of this stream of Christianity.

I’m not defending vagueness, but rather precision — about matters on which there is not a clear, distinct agreeement. That’s not a vice, but a virtue.

On the other hand, I see so little clear, precise writing that I sympathize with partisans who doubt that official church pronouncements aim not so much at precision as at empty but congenial sonorousness.

On a separate but related topic, I finally edited and added the sermon from Paula Harris’s ordination, and on another separate but related topic, Kevin points to the eerie convergence of catholic and agnostic sensibilities.

Yesterday afternoon, Margaret and I sang the hymn“Come, Labor On,” one of those resonant theological classics of sacred music. The fourth verse includes the admonition, “Redeem the time; its hours too swiftly fly. The night draws nigh.”

Twenty-four years ago today, we sang “Praise, My Soul, the King of Heaven” and “Come Down, O Love Divine,” two more of those classics; we stood up in front of Margaret’s home parish, of family and friends, standing among saints and angels. We offered to one another and to God and church our willingness to bind our lives together; we promised to stick together through thick and thin, as a testimony to love’s power to harmonize and unite different characters, a tentative witness to God’s love’s ultimate reconciliation of the differences by which this mortal world has been constituted — when earthly passions turn to dust and ashes in the heat of God’s love consuming.

As we begin a twenty-fifth year of life together, we can’t afford to take for granted even a minute of the time we share. We’ve somehow put together two dozen years of affection, care-giving, parenting, support, growth, endurance, surprises, patience, and in all things, praise of God. Who could ask more? Yet we promise one another, our beloved family, our dear friends, and all with whom our lives have become intertwined, to rejoice in each new day, to acknowledge the tremendous gifts we’ve received (and, at our best, shared).

And to Margaret, my love: All this that you have given me far exceeds anything I could ever ask. Thank you, my dearest, for loving me, knowing me, and keeping close very moment — I’m with you, all along, always, all ways.

But Pippa was honored at St. Luke’s Annual choir banquet, with a joke award for her punctuality (the Eastern Standard Time Award, for always arriving an hour early). She also received the Attendance Award (shared with our family’s friend Kaethe Wright Kaufmann), and also with the Rector’s Award as the chorister who exemplified the Christian ideals of the choir. She was mentioned as Honorable Mention for most improved, too.

That’s after she had a lovely, short solo during Saturday’s memorial service.