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Today was a catch-up day for responding to email, and when I caught up with enough email for one day it was “make some headway on the Polycarp project” day, which is a lot more fun. If I still owe you an email, (a) your message may have gotten caught in one or another spam filter, or (b) I’ll get to you soon.

The Lego (R) Early Church History project is a blast; Pippa and I composed and shot our whole life-of-Polycarp sequence. The edited photos are online at Flickr; I’ll add captions and dialogue later. The arrest and martyrdom photos will go up soon, perhaps as early as tomorrow, though I have to buckle down and finish off some grading before Margaret and I head out on our anniversary trip.

Yes, we’re taking a honeymoon to celebrate our twenty-third anniversary, and Margaret’s first year of doctoral work. The twenty-third anniversary (this is a little-known fact) is the “Accordion Anniversary,” so we’re heading to Accordion City for a long weekend of hotel room, wifi, and. . . well, what else would we need? I guess we’ll go out for coffee and tea, but really? Anyway, I have to break the back of my spring-term grading before we leave, and I have another of Seabury’s trademark all-day faculty meetings tomorrow, so grading will probably edge out the arrest and death of St. Polycarp. That’ll come soon, though, I promise; this is too much fun to put off indefinitely.

Graduation happened; all my dear senior students successfully received their hoods and degrees, and although we faculty members had to stand up all the way through the honorary degree citations, Doctor of Ministry in Preaching degrees, Doctor of Ministry in Congregational Development, Masters of Divinity degrees, Masters of Theological Studies degrees, the Certificates of Advanced Theological Studies, Certificates of Studies, and probably a few miscellaneous special degrees — we survived, no one fell asleep on her or his feet. I didn’t get weepy till near the end.

Then I spent the afternoon yesterday scrambling to polish up a sermon for the Evensong (I’ll post it in the “extended” section). I’d had no more time to rehearse than you’d guess from my week, so I was a bit concerned that I’d drift off-key, lose my pitch, and generally ruin the annual big-deal service before the Choir Banquet. Luckily, none of those things happened, although early on I gave a false cue that confused choir and organ. Sadly, the service and sermon seem not to have been recorded (sorry, Jeneane); the choir was terrific!

Josiah gave a Senior Speech at the banquet, and he did admirably (if I do say so myself). The food was excellent, the wine was delicious, and we were utterly exhausted when we got home.
Continue reading “Summer”

Since I’ve evidently not had enough to do with my time, today has assigned me two whopping big events: Seabury’s graduation, and St. Luke’s Evensong and Choir Banquet. At the former, I merely stand around and get weepy as dear students graduate, but at the latter I’ll be leading the (sung) service and preaching. I’ll see if the sermon gets recorded as Sunday sermons usually do so that we can offer Jeneane a down payment on her wish.

Of course, before then I have to prepare to sing the service, and write the sermon. After graduation, before rehearsal at 4:30.

Oh, and Trevor’s here for graduation (yes that’s a hyperlink associated with Trevor’s name; he has blogged on each of the last two days).

I’ll post the sermon text, even if it’s not recorded; and if someone records it, I’ll link to that, too (it would be cool if you could hear the whole service, but I don’t think St. Luke’s will splurge for that much bandwidth).

We found two more bins of Legos last night, so much sorting lies ahead of us — but luckily for me, these two seem to include more minifigs with hair, and fewer with space helmets.

To clarify yesterday’s post, the waistline of a Lego is more, of course, than fifteen millimeters — that’s the width (of the one I measured, which looked like a regulation standard-issue person to me). The waistline would be somewhere around forty-five millimeters. Glad we cleared that one up.

For some reason, this blog has become a highly-ranked search result for people who want to know the plural of the word “impetus.”

According to Oxford, it’s “impetuses.” We aim to please.

That’s the standard waistline of a Lego person. Why do I know this? Because, inspired by the Brick Testament, I’m thinking over the possibility of depicting some scenes from early church history in Legos.

Yesterday, Pippa hauled the three-children’s-worth collection of Legos upstairs from the basement, and we started taking a census. It turns out that we have a lot of Lego people (“minifigs,” in the jargon of Lego). Unfortunately, many of them are missing significant body parts — arms, hands, heads, you know, minor stuff such as that — due to a phase Pippa and her friends Monica and Emily went through, wherein they totally disassembled every Lego person and lost as many bits as you’d expect. Moreover, the Lego people in our collection form a demographic uncharacteristic of any segment of early church history with which I’m acquainted. We have space people (Voltron and Blacktron, mostly), Robin Hood characters, knights, doctors, police officers, and especially pirates (I could use some of these to illustrate the dominical saying, “If your right eye offends you, pluck it out,” I guess).

I figure I’ll use some of the full-page sticker paper to print templates of a Lego torso, to cover up the painted-on adornments. That’ll leave mostly the difficulty of the missing limbs.

When Margaret tackled the prosthetics problem (are they properly called “prosthetics” when both the original limb and its substitute are the same plastic?), she discovered the thriving market in Lego parts. We’re trying out BrickLink; when our orders for Lego hair, utensils, and other elements come through, I’ll be sure to report on how the service was. And in the meantime, if you have Legos that you want to contribute to this noble effort to record in jointed plastic the events of the first 600 years of the church, feel free to let me know!

The Archer and Beth have already pointed this out, but in case you missed their blogs, here’s the online edition of the recent Anglican-Roman Catholic ecumenical statement on the Virgin Mary.

Si is probably too busy rejoicing to blog this, but it seems as though (as of Monday the 13th) he will have a job. Indeed, someone in our family has finally found a way to extract money from Apple Computers, which constitutes a small redress of the grave balance-of-trade deficit between the Adam household and Cupertino’s finest export.

Congratulations, Si, and buy lots of presents for the family you love!

As I promised, I’ve uploaded some images from the catalogue of the exhibition in which my mom’s, grandmother’s, and grandfather’s works appear. I don’t have the time, just this week, to work out high-quality scans — but the catalogue industry is probably just as happy. This is my mother’s photograph from the exhibition; you can find my grandfather’s etching, my grandmother’s painting, and the newspaper story at my Flickr site.

And Jeanne has been working on a Flickr archive for Kindred, where you can go to for a glimpse into her life with Jeanne and Gail.

For a variety of reasons I won’t spell out here, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that this is true: “[M]ost incompetent people have no idea they’re incompetent. On the contrary, the researchers found that the incompetent are ‘usually supremely confident of their abilities, more confident, in fact, than people who do things well.’ ”

And given that, I’m inclined to suspect that AntiPixel is correct, too: “Their cunning is often inversely proportional to their talent, and it is this, sycophantically applied, upon which they rely.”

Well, if Tripp is quoting him accurately, Benedict XVI will never appoint to the cardinalate an unreconstructed rocker such as I. “[R]ock music is. . . completely antithetical to the Christian concept of redemption and freedom, indeed its exact opposite.” Though I’m not hesitant to mull over the ethical implications of enjoying rock and roll (several students and I were discussing this very topic just Friday), I won’t back down from contending that rock and roll can bespeak God’s glory. So this is one mark against the Benedict’s theological position — unless you want to get into a question-begging game of “Well that isn’t ‘rock music’ in the sense in which he’s using the term.” Clearly, Benedict made this pronouncement long before he became infallible. . . .

Today, a friend from church congratulated me on my article in the latest issue of the Christian Century. I know an editor there, and we’d been talking about my writing something for them, and someone there read what I posted a couple of weeks ago about when I wear clericals, and why. They liked it, edited it a little, slapped on the jazzy titled “Collared” (wish I’d thought of that), and wowie zowie, now it’s in print. The issue in question isn’t online yet, though there’s no urgency to checking there for it since my original version remains available here. If you like it, though, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt for you to drop ’em an email or something.