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Margaret — inspired by her experience at a local cafe that offers free, but unreliable, 802.11 wireless access — suggested that we refer to the connectivity at such venues as “wiffy.”

Since I recently denounced nostalgic liberalism, I should confess my own moment of that sentiment from the past week: our Gospel Mission class was discussing the 1960s, and in that context Prof. Wondra and I shared a sense of loss that forty years ago, there was something we could accurately call a “peace movement.”

It may be too much to imagine that, in the present political climate of national pathology triggered by strangers and danger, the witness of Christian Peacemaker Tom Fox might quicken the consciences of political incumbents, or inspire resistance to fear-mongering and scapegoating among the world populace in general.

Something, sometime, will make clear just how grim, how cynical, how exploitative and degraded the U.S. government’s policies have become. Evidently tens of thousands of Iraqi civilan deaths haven’t done it. Thousands of U.S. military deaths haven’t done it. I doubt that Tom Fox’s faithful witness will get enough media play to provide the occasion for repentance (maybe if he had been a young, attractive woman from an upper-middle class family); but he has contributed his life to catalyzing that recognition. The sooner, the better. Ora pro nobis, Tom — while we search our hearts for the courage and determination to look at brutality, call it by name, and refuse to comply with its advocates.

I graded and handed back the “Bible content” final exam for my New Testament II class — based on the Presbyterian Bible Content exam — and the good news is, all my students could become Presbyterian ministers (at least, as far as their knowledge of the NT epistles is concerned).

My terrific daughter arrived home last night from her sojourn in Maine; she had a spectacular time with her aunts, and now I’m delighted that she’s back to help me with the groceries, the dog, the recycling, and all the other complications that I’m liable to lose track of without her.

Jeanne posted a great cast photo from the end of the Angels performance, too:

That’s Si, as Louis, at the extreme left, next to his roommate Simon (who played Joe). I’ll add some pictures of my own later. . . .

I’ve wondered idly, for a while, whether the correct locution for those snatches of aural information was “sound bites” (which I’d always thought it to be) or “sound bytes” (which I’ve seen increasingly frequently). At first, I was sure it must be “bites,” but I realized that my confidence rested solely on that being to form I’d been approving for years — self-justifying prejudice. “Sound byte,” on the other hand, modified “sound” with a definable quantity of information, and an appropriately small one at that, so I reckoned that I ought to let go my predisposition and actually learn something about the subject.

I first checked the Wikipedia which, though fallible, offers a helpful starting point for online inquiry; it favored “soundbite” (one word), without even mentioning “byte” as a possible error. Then I ran into the eggcorn database which takes up exactly my question, and comes down in favor of “bite” over against Lou Marinoff’s sniffed dismissal, “ ‘sound-bite’ is nonsense.” The scale of evidence tips decisively when a commenter notes that the OED cites a public example from 1980 — well before the digital storage of audio information would have made “sound byte” a coherent term.

Parenthetically, the whole phenomenon of “eggcorns” opens a new horizon of linguistic fascination for me….

I’ve known Carl Conrad a long time online, and I sense that he may have said something like this before — but the remarks that jps reports put the finger exactly at a dangerous soft spot of theological education. The vast preponderance of seminarians and divinity students learn Greek in order to decode the hidden message concealed in those ominously different-looking letters (be they Hebrew or Greek), not to learn how to read well the texts written in those languages. Indeed, that sensibility of decoding a cryptogram often carries over into further dimensions of the interpretive task, so that students (and some teachers) suppose that there’s a single hidden “correct answer” to each of our interpretive problems.

It ain’t so, it can’t be so, and in order to recuperate from the delusional hope/need that reading work this way, we have to learn first of all to read rather than to decode. It ought not be too hard; we read most of the texts we encounter and interpret. Unfortunately, years of decoding-thinking (structured into the ways biblical languages are taught and into the ways Scripture is deployed in theological argument) have saturated the imaginations of at least a generation’s prominent theological spokespeople, and any recognition that reading well entails more than decoding risks being shouted down as “relativism” or “postmodernism” (in the derogatory sense).

Deep Weeds has it right: “The basic goal — improved reading aloud — seems to be coming along. More and more, I think I will begin next year’s class with at least 6 hours of mimicry, memorization, and simple commands, before getting into the written language at all.” (I think Randall Buth teaches Greek this way at the Biblical Language Center in Jerusalem, and I expect that Baruch will teach future Greek classes on that basis.) I know that the “decoding” approach to learning Greek has hampered my appreciation of that language over the years, and I wish I hadn’t written my Greek textbook before I came to the full conviction of how pernicious the conventional way of teaching and learning Greek could be. (By the way, read and appreciate Baruch’s acrostic, too.)

Flight from Hartford to Chicago scheduled to board: 6:00 PM EST

Flight from Hartford sto Chicago scheduled to depart: 6:25 PM EST

Flight from Hartford sto Chicago scheduled to arrive: 8:00 PM CST

Actual boarding time: 9:30 PM EST

Actual departure time: 10:20 PM EST

Landed in Chicago: 11:46 PM CST

Arrived at gate: 12:05 CST

Phoned taxi companies to obtain ride: 12:21, 12:34, 12:38, 12:43, 12:53, 12:54 CST

Taxi arrived at O’Hare: 1:15 CST

Arrived at home: 1:39 CST

Messaged Margaret, settled dog down, snacked to calm my stomach, fell into bed: 2:15 CST

Morning Prayer: 8:30 CST

Faculty Meeting 9:00 CST

And so on.

I’m not talking about the Duke game — grrrr — but about the Marlboro College performance of Angels in America. The cast and crew, drawn from a very small college population (Marlboro has around 350 students total), outdid themselves last night — an overpowering performance, of which everyone involved should be very proud.

I had not seen the play before; when it came out, we didn’t have practical access to any performances, and by the time it hit video or DVD I didn’t feel like stirring up the memories of those days (on the rare occasion when the family was willing to watch a Serious Movie); watching this performance really did bring back a suppressed tub of queasy, ominous, tragic feelings. I had the recurrent sense that I knew those guys, and seeing Si as one of them — he played Louis, a particularly troubling character — amplified the sense that these lives were part of my life.

All the actors were great. In contexts that might tend to invite overplaying (undergrad theatre, small campus, hyperdramatic scenario involving sometimes-histrionic characters), every player rang true. The student who played Si’s lover carried the role exceptionally well, and student who played Harper Pitt just amazed me with the subtly of her reading. Si’s roommate Simon played Joe Pitt utterly convincingly, suggesting his pain and ambivalence with nuanced departures from a baseline of stolid impassiveness.

It was hard to see Si play the part of yet another tormented unsympathetic character; someday I’d like to see him in a positive, blithe, heroic role. Knowing him as we do, when we see him portray someone high-strung, and embittered, it’s harder not to see his performance as acting. That being said, at the key moments of the play, I winced at his betrayal of love and integrity. He was great in an unrewarding role, with a terrific cast around him, and the whole night was utterly captivating.

Now, we have to clean up, pack, check out, have brunch with Si, Laura, Jeanne, and Pippa, and then travel back to our respective destinations. And Duke better win the ACC Tournament — I’m just saying.

Travel worked fine yesterday, the ’net finally came live at our hotel, we like Jennifer’s boyfriend (they drove up from NYC to see last night’s performance, which was evidently excellent). Margaret and I love New England; the topography, ecology, demographics, cultural practices, all make sense to us as indigenous, as culturally given. Jeanne and Pippa have driven in from Maine, and we’ll meet them on campus for the play. I’ve taken some pictures already, will take more tonight, and some at tomorrow morning’s group brunch (didn’t think to take any while we were with Jennifer).

Show is tonight at 7:30, opposite the basketball game on whose outcome the struggle of good against evil depends — Si couldn’t persuade Marlboro to reschedule the performance till after Duke had put Carolina away (I hate writing that kind of thing, because it just invites providence to contradict what I’ve written — but this is just the way it has to be, I guess). I’ll boast write about both the play and the game when I find out how they end.

[Later: I shoulda known better; well done, Carolina.]

From all over the country — or at least, “from Maine, North Carolina, Illinois, and Minnesota,” which is pretty good coverage — people are converging on Marlboro, Vermont, to see Josiah Adam in tomorrow night’s performance of Angels in America.

Margaret has shrewdly plotted our trravel paths through Bradley Airport and a hotel in Brattleboro, both of which offer free wifi. Still, the odds suggest a diminished online presence over the weekend. Eventaully, there’ll be pictures and stories.

[Later: Arrived safely, if ravenously. It seems as though Bradley is trying single-handedly to punish United for its recent brush with bankruptcy, but with the diligence of the truly hard-core, I found an open wireless signal.]

Ash Wednesday is not usually a festival of mirth and hilarity, but our service today was a little more solemn even than the usual, as we prayed for Dr. de Villa. Our guest preacher, Fr. Douglas Brown of the Order of the Holy Cross, gave a sermon that fit both the day and our additional observance. We remembered, reflected, prayed, and committed ourselves to a holy Lent.

For myself, the convergence of these circumstances suggested that I make my Lenten discipline a determination to spend time every day in an earnest memento mori; I suspect that some of the burdens I work with would benefit from my sizing them up in perspective to my own mortality: the things that I ought to make sure to have done, and the things no one will mind if I leave behind, obligations to my family and friends, and indifferent matters that no one cares about that much. We’ll see how that works out.

Joey’s dad died yesterday. If you knew him, your heart aches and you miss him; if you didn’t know him, then people you care about miss him so much that it makes you feel bad.

Margaret and I spent bits of the wedding weekend with him, and found him to be every bit the graceful, kind, generous, brilliant, loving man upon whom a guy like Joey might model himself. I’m presiding at Seabury’s Ash Wednesday mass tomorrow, where we will pray for him and remember that we all are dust, and to dust we shall return; yet even at the grave we make our song, “Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”