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Waking up early this morning, I finished packing and set out to the airport where I successfully found my beloved Margaret (I thought I knew how much I missed her before I saw her — how foolish of me!), and we made our way to the departure gate. There we re-enacted the annual ritual; of meeting a sizable proportion of the theologians in the area. When we were in Princeton, we’d see all the Greater Philadelphia area; when in Florida, a much smaller gathering of Tampa/St. Pete scholars. Located in Chicago, in one of the highest concetrations of theological academics outside Rome, I’d guess, one sees the familiar faces of faculty colleagues from other institutions, year after year. This time, about a quarter of the Seabury faculty (John Dreibelbis, Paula Barker, and me) is on our flight, along with various other North Side, Hyde Park, and Western Suburbs scholars.

My response is coming along fine; I mostly have to balance the background information that give the response intelligibility with the actual criticism. Margaret’s paper will, of course, rock.

My full day today included working on my response to the Hauerwas paper, various appointments and errands, writing letters of recommendation (about which I try to be scrupulously honest and careful, so they take me ages), and the disputatio between the Augustinians and the Pelagians in my Early Church History course. The judge (in the center) added to the memorable quality of the event by wearing a real judicial wig — a first, in my class.

I’ve been asked to comment on Andrew’s post and Jonnybaker’s reponse about Emergent Church and the Renaissance and Reformation. I owe my emergent friends — or, more precisely, my friends in the emergent movement — careful enough attention that I can’t write that out just now, but I’ll take a look, maybe on the airplane tomorrow, and see what I see. Thanks for asking!

One of Seabury’s “plunge” teams went to Christ Church, New Haven, where I served in my first parish staff positions. Si was baptized there, and he and his brother Nate have always referred to the the grand font there as “the Baby Crusher.” You can see why, from this photo (courtesy of Corinne).

Well, I was in that frame of mind when I looked at the readings. Here’s this morning’s sermon, not concealed this time in the “extended Entry” field; sorry, I’m not hand-coding that one, at least not till I get the new regular database working.
Continue reading “Hugh of Lincoln Meets de Doctrina”

At this point, it seems as though we’re going to give up on the corrupt MT database — translation: “the database that I garbled irredeemably” — and start the Disseminary websites over again. I’m only slightly miffed that it turns out that Trevor had backed up the Limature database a mere few hours before I munged the file. Please be patient, and we’ll start up a shiny new backend which we hope you won’t be able to detect (except that you may miss the comments that point to opportunties for exotic photos, arcane pharmaceuticals, and Bill Bennet-style resorts).

Heartfelt, intense thanks to Jim, Chris, Boris, and everyone else who wrestled with the results of my technical carelessness.

David Weinberger has generously pointed to the Real Media version of the CSPAN webcast of the first John Kluge Lecture at the Library of Congress, wherein David alludes to me (the real reason everyone was watching, David) at. . . well, I haven’t come to the part where he mentions me, but Josiah phoned last night to tell me that he was watching David talk about me even as he spoke to me on the phone.

Ooops, there it is! Forty-four minutes in. What kind things David says — he’s right about so many other things, how can he be so wrong about me? Oh, and my forgiveness blog (followed up here, here, here, and here) has fallen out of the top page of Google entries for “forgiveness,” unless a whole flock of people begin linking to it again to support David’s “knowledge” rap.

Tripp points to recent sermons by Susie and Rev Ref, and I (in turn) have to link to Jane’s sermon from chapel yesterday. It’s a remarkable bunch of sisters and brothers among whom I’m honored to serve.
As for me, I realized that the sermon I have in the can, as it were, is not for Hugh of Lincoln but for Robert Grossteste, so I will in fact have to come up with a sermon de novo. More later; I have course prep for the best day of class all year (in Early Church History, the day we talk about Augustine’s de Doctrina Christiana), write a bunch of letters of recommendation, visit Laura, and work on my Hauerwas response.
The behind-the-scenes repair work is on-going (sigh), and the hand-coding is tiding me over for the time being.

As it turns out, I’m preaching tomorrow at the feast of Hugh of Lincoln. I’ve drawn Hugh before in the rota, so I have a sermon in a file that only the faculty might remember (and not all of them). But because I have a stubborn streak, and do feel as though I ought not simply recycle all the time, I’ll probably try to work up a new sermon in between course preps and writing up my response to Stanley Hauerwas for the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting.

Yes, I’m responding to America’s Best Theologian, my former teacher and Margaret’s present teacher; it was supposed to be a response to his commentary on Matthew’s Gospel, but Stanley didn’t get the commentary close enough to readiness, so instead I’m responding to one of his meditations on the Seven Last Words, the only one drawn from Matthew’s Gospel, which draws on wording first reported in Mark. So if you think there’s something a little off-center about a Matthew guy giving a response to a theological ethicist about a reflection on the words “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” as they appear in Matthew, even though the identical phrase appears in the New Revised Standard Version of Mark, also, then you’re probably on target.
But first things first: a sermon for Wednesday, for which the readings are
Psalm 112:1-9, Titus 2:7-8,11-14, and Matthew 24:42-47; I’ll probably preach on Titus, I think. I’ll post the result here when the dust clears.

Welcome to the shambles! Especially, welcome to visitors who may have come here from having listened to David Weinberger talk about this page in his talk at the Library of Congress on CSPAN. It’s not usually hand-coded here; this Saturday, I ill-advisedly decided that I should upgrade my Moveable Type installation on my own, without any counsel — how hard could it be? Micah upgraded Seabury’s installation — so I proceeded to perform the upgrade flawlessly (so far as I could tell) until I went to log in.

It quickly became clear that I had done something very, very bad. “How bad?” Let’s put it this way: if you noticed the Internets running somewhat slower over the weekend, it was because the high-level maintenance talent that should have been speeding packets to their destinations was poring over my database trying to figure out what on earth I had done. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of dollars worth of person-hours are going into repairing the breach in the diigtal space-time continuum that my blunder, whatever it turns out to be, caused. That’s the one consolation, as a matter of fact; at least I didn’t do anything trivially stupid. I mucked it up royally.

So, anyway, I’ll try to get back to you as soon as we figure out what to do with the database. Don’t try permalinking to this, or commenting, or anything (that’s the silver lining — no comment spam for three days! Of course, we had to kill commenting, and updating, to eliminate it, but still. . .).

Oh, I was told to ask around to see if anyone has a handy script for scraping archives to reconstruct an MT database, or some other such panic-level utility. Or oil of healing for a database. Where’s Miracle Max when you need him?

Dorothea’s in danger of landing a gig that entails entering some polytonic Greek (Modern Greek does fine with a greatly-simplifed system of accents compared to classical-Hellenistic Greek; “polytonic” refers to the fully-accented text that classical texts rely on). Of course, I’m pleased — the more polytonic Greek in the world, the happier I am — and especially pleased that it may draw Dorothea further into the world of Unicode Greek. But don’t keep a secret, Dorothea; what’s the new-and-improved method?

For those who find my persona wearisomely, hyperbolically solemn — and justly so; I take everything too seriously — I offer the following morning scene.
 
Picture a tall but, ahem, padded middle-aged guy down in the basement pedalling furiously on his stationary bike, perspiring copiously, reading a monograph about the “Gospel of Peter,” singing along to the falsetto parts of “Number Nine Dream.” No photo- or audio-recording would do the ludicrousness justice.
 
But I’ll be ready to go for Diocesan Convention today, and for the Adult Forum at St. Augustine’s Church, Wilmette, tomorrow morning.

I should have blogged today — technically, I had time and everything — but I didn’t even though I owe responses on the Druid clergy dust-up, Dave “used to be Time’s Shadow, now Groundhog Day, but not Connect & Empower-Music Alert” Rogers’s blog about the politics of “life,” and the Cobb County creationism brouhaha.
 
I just didn’t feel like it today; during the time I had free to write, I preferred to chat with friends, orfiddle with the redesign of the Seabury website, or just plain take it easy. I have an Adult Ed class to prepare for on Sunday, I’m going to Diocesan Convention tomorrow, and I have to put together a response to some of Stan Hauerwas’s writing for the annual Society of Biblical Literature meeting next weekend. I’ll get back to these IOUs, but today, tonight, I’m putting them off another day or so.
 
But while I’m blogging about not blogging, I was repelled by the gall of Bill “I gambled away more than you’ll earn in two lifetimes” Bennett in pontificating about moral values in the aftermath of the election. Moral values my ear!
 
And a few days ago, Jeff wrote about his fascination with composition. Yes, exactly!