Common Places

Bread, books, and the nature of Things

2012-01-12T18:54:00.000-08:00

That last post was not what I meant to say when I sat down to write it.
But I'm trying to discipline myself to be less disciplined about my writing, especially here -- to remember that thoughts can be worthy of a place in a conversation without needing to be fully developed into arguments -- so when my thoughts started wandering off in a different direction than I originally meant for them to go, I followed them there.

What I meant to say was something like: isn't it interesting how increasing the availability and decreasing the level of artisanal investment in a Thing by introducing mechanized production leads to fundamentally new ways for the end user to relate to those Things?

Like, it's hard to imagine someone eating communion hosts by the handful out of a bag while watching Downton Abbey when communion hosts were only available from convent bakeries supplying local parishes that they knew by name. But once you're selling communion hosts as an undifferentiated food product available for order over the internet, it seems almost inevitable, even if you're not marketing them as a snack food.

I've been reading about how the evolution of the book arts, particularly the introduction of movable type, revolutionized Western culture in the last half millennium or so. When all books had to be copied by hand, the only books worth copying were Very Important Books (principally, THE Very Important-est of Books), so that was mostly what people (who could read) read. Once you can PRINT books, however, you can print all kinds of books -- not just Bibles -- and so you can read all kinds of books for all kinds of reasons, "rac[ing] through all kinds of material, seeking amusement rather than edification" (Darnton 1990, p. 133). Which is not to say that there were no such things as trashy novels before print and widespread literacy, but the share of reading taken up with trivia and tripe can only have gone up once the production means abounded.

With both books and bread, the possibility of mass production led to the desacralization of the Thing.

I'm trying to figure out how to think about this without over-romanticizing the past, suggesting that bread or books ought to be treated as especially sacred in and of themselves and that this sanctity ought to be protected by keeping them rare. I think it's a good thing that books and bread are widely available for almost anyone who wants them, for whatever reason they want them; I think the world needs more, not less, books and bread. And yet, at least for those of us who have more than enough of books and bread, that overabundance is something of a loss, isn't it? Is there a way for us to get back in touch with the Things that have become commodities, while not turning our back on the potential that modern technology and economics hold for making the blessings of these Things available to people who might not otherwise have them?

The Lord's Snack

2012-01-11T12:33:00.000-08:00

A friend who is something of an expert on the relationship between technologies of food production and American sacramental practices drew my attention to a fascinating essay at Killing the Buddha about the evolution of communion wafers as a mass-produced consumer product. Evidently, a confluence of factors that are in themselves positive developments -- an upswing in the frequency of communion in many Protestant churches, a directive by the luminaries of Vatican II to make communion bread "more bread-like," a desire to take some of the pressure off overworked and under-resourced baking nuns who were struggling to keep up with the demand for altar bread for local parishes -- led to a state of affairs in which, contra generations of practice, most churches that use wafers for communion no longer purchase them from religious communities for whom baking is a form of prayer, but from a mass producer that makes its wares available off the shelf, in catalogs, or over the internet.

The author notes the similarities of the production process to that of ubiquitous snack food products, and comments that in some areas the hosts have even been marketed as a low-fat snack. Conceptually, theologically, there's nothing really wrong with this -- everyone involved agrees that, until it's been consecrated, the communion wafer is just bread. Still, it seems odd to employ the same substance at the two extremes (and only at the two extremes) of the scale of mindfulness with regard to eating.

Snacks are a sort of food (or edible foodlike substances) that are designed to be consumed mindlessly -- that's part of the reason low-fat or low-cal snacks are desirable, because we can inhale them without doing too much damage to our waistlines. Communion-wafers-as-snacks certainly aren't being marketed for the flavor, as they have none. I think they have to be sold as a vehicle for the tactile experience of eating, not for nourishment or for savoring.

Communicants at the Eucharist, on the other hand, are encouraged to be supremely mindful of their consumption; to prepare for their reception -- ideally with confession and fasting; to examine themselves and beware of consuming the bread unworthily or without discernment. Maybe not concentrating on the flavor or the bread and wine per se, but still, a radically different mindset from the mindless consumption of snack food.

Most of our eating lies somewhere in the middle -- neither mindless nor intensely mindful, neither empty of nutrition nor overflowing with spiritual significance -- the meals that sustain our bodies and punctuate our days. Most of the churches of which I have been a part over the years have used some sort of everyday bread, not a specialty product, for their communion observance, and although it sometimes seems like a dry snippet of plain sandwich bread is not special enough for the enormity of what we observe when we observe communion, I appreciate the way this practice connects the ritual eating with the rhythms of daily life.

I have a draft of a poem that's been incubating for about a decade, built around the observation of an adolescent member of a former congregation that the size of the portions shared at communion make the title "The Lord's Supper" a bit strange -- "this isn't the Lord's Supper," he declared, "it's more like the Lord's Snack." Perhaps his words were only the flippant observation of a teenage boy with a bottomless pit of a stomach, but I've found them illuminating. Can snacking be redeemed? What's the difference between a snack, an appetizer, and a meal? What is the significance of leaving the table still hungry? There's an awful lot of meaning in a tiny bit of bread.

Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa

2012-01-05T22:54:00.000-08:00

This webcam makes me furiously happy.

Now, if you're a normal person and you follow that link, you're probably thinking something like, um, what? It's a road with water behind it and occasionally random vehicles. I'm not sure why anyone would think that's worth pointing a 24/7 camera at, much less why you should get excited about it.

And you're probably right. But this bridge and I have a history, so it's a little like running into an old friend you haven't seen in years.

See, when I was in high school, I was a big fan of The Little Hawk, the student newspaper of City High School in Iowa City, Iowa. The Mazama High School Lance, of which I was co-editor, participated in a newspaper exchange with a few dozen other high schools around the country, and The Little Hawk was the best of the lot. I always read the new issue of The Little Hawk when it came out, admiring their graphic design and shamelessly ripping off their coverage ideas. One of the things that stuck in my memory from The Little Hawk was a euphonic line from a student column (sadly, I have forgotten the name of the columnist) regarding what was possibly the most redundant place on earth: "the Iowa Avenue bridge over the Iowa River on the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City, Iowa."

So when I went to college in suburban Chicago, my parents, in an act of love and lunacy, DROVE me two-thirds of the way across the country to install me in my dorm and attend orientation. (Two years later, when my brother began at the same school, they also came out for his orientation, but had learned their lesson: that time, we all flew.) When I realized that our intended route took us straight through Iowa City, I insisted we get off the freeway and try to find the Iowa Avenue bridge. And we did. Somewhere in our family archives, we have a picture of me standing on the Iowa Avenue bridge over the Iowa River on the University of Iowa campus in Iowa City, Iowa.

(About seven years later, when I realized that the intended route for another family road trip was taking us within 20 miles of Carthage, Missouri, I insisted we get off the freeway and go find the Precious Moments Chapel. And we did. My family members are either as crazy as I am, or to be commended for humoring my odd ideas of what make worthwhile pit stops. Either way, these are the things of which memories are made, people. Good times.)

So then, just the other night, I was watching The Colbert Report (another thing that makes me furiously happy) and heard Stephen declare that he was covering the Iowa caucus with "the most complete coverage I could get from free webcams." He then showed some prime examples of Iowa webcams, including "a highway cam of I think that is the Iowa Avenue bridge over the Iowa River; they're a creative people." But I knew immediately that Stephen didn't have the half of it when it comes to how creative Iowans can be. That's not just the Iowa Avenue bridge over the Iowa River; that's the Iowa Avenue bridge over the Iowa River on the University of Iowa Campus in Iowa City, Iowa!

Graduate school should come with warning labels

2012-01-03T21:14:00.000-08:00

When I requested an application packet for graduate admission from the Georgetown University department of philosophy (Eek, I'm old -- when I applied to grad school for the first time -- not even college, but grad school! -- there were still such things as PAPER application packets. Wow. Also, I no longer have the faintest idea of why I was ever interested in attending Georgetown.) it arrived with a cover letter from the American Philosophical Association to the effect that, even if I got into a Ph.D. program in philosophy, and even if I excelled in that program, they could not promise me a job on the other side.

At the time, I was a bit taken aback by this overt discouragement to a potential applicant. Do they think I don't know that? I wondered. I paid attention to the world of academia. I knew what I was getting myself into. It seemed a little paternalistic to try to warn me away, frankly.

Now, though, I appreciate the honesty of the Georgetown philosophy department and the APA. Because not everyone who thinks about applying to graduate school in the humanities does know just how f'd up the job market is for college-level instructors in the liberal arts. And even those who do know probably don't really get it. Because if you're the kind of person who is in a position to even think about pursuing a Ph.D., you're the kind of person who's spent your whole life being exceptional, and it's difficult to imagine ever reaching the point where all of your peers are so exceptional that none of you are exceptionally exceptional anymore. So you read the warning and assume it won't really apply to you, personally. (At least, that's what I did.)

That doesn't mean the warning shouldn't be offered, though. If you do go to grad school, especially for an academic degree in the humanities, you need to go in with your eyes as wide open as you can manage. You need to know what you're signing up for. You need to know, for instance, that it's a bad idea to go into debt to get a degree that might not be sufficient to get a good job to enable you to pay back those loans. Because you can't make wise choices if you don't have a realistic perspective on your ambitions, and because in the event you go for it and it doesn't work out, the process of re-entry into the non-ivory tower world will be a lot less painful if you knew from the start what you're up against. There are a LOT of embittered ex-academics out there, and I think one of the major reasons that I'm not particularly bitter even though I did wash out of academia is that I had some notion going in just how badly the odds were stacked against my success.

So now I believe that every institution of higher learning that accepts applications for M.A.s and Ph.D.s in the humanities ought to have a link to a warning similar to the one I got from Georgetown prominently displayed on the application website. Most applicants won't read it, and most who do won't take it to heart, but it's still worth putting out there -- if only so that, when students and alumni inevitably face the reality of the abysmal academic job market, they might remember that it's a numbers game, and not necessarily a personal failure, that they can't find the position they've just spent their whole adult life preparing for.

I also think these websites need to have an additional, but not unrelated, warning link: (1) beware -- this will take years of your life at subsistence-level wages with no guarantee of a career when you're done, and (2) beware -- graduate school can be bad for your mental health. I'm not saying that graduate school causes depression -- if you're the kind of person who goes to graduate school, you know well enough to be suspicious of the idea that correlation implies causation. But for me, at least (and, from reading the Chronicle article linked above, it appears that this isn't just me), the pressure-cooker conditions of graduate school created the perfect storm to trigger the major depressive disorder to which I am genetically predisposed.

The point isn't that you should avoid graduate school, even if you know you are vulnerable to mental health issues, but awareness is vital. Grad students should know that they are at elevated risk for mental health issues and know what kind of resources are available to them and how to take advantage of them should the need arise. They should also know that getting out of academia altogether is a legitimate option and, for some people, the best (or only) choice.

I have been grieving vicariously for a woman I never actually knew, but whose story has strong resonances for me. She didn't make it out of academia alive, and some of her friends, bewildered and heartbroken by her death, have wondered whether she would have survived if she had escaped the profound pressures of academe and the academic job market. Of course, none of us can know; none of us can claim to understand the depth of her suffering. While I experienced severe and sometimes debilitating depression in graduate school, the one major depressive symptom I did not experience was suicidality (well, that and insomnia), so I certainly can't claim to know what she went through.

Still, as I wept for Sarah and those who loved her, I also wept with gratitude for the advisers who helped me reach the conclusion that it was time to get out, and assured me that there was life on the other side of the academy. They were right. And I breathe a prayer for those among the next generation of aspiring scholars who may face similar struggles, that they will have the understanding of mentors and friends and access to the help that they need to find a path that leads to life.

The long shadow of Modesto

2011-06-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

Gina Dalfonzo at Her.meneutics drew my attention to Michael Hyatt's recent blog post on the importance of guarding one's marriage, in part by setting specific boundaries regarding one's interactions with members of the opposite sex other than one's spouse. To which I have to say, basically: what Gina said. Yes, yes: guard your marriages, but be cognizant of the costs that certain self-imposed boundaries may have in a world where work is no longer a man's domain.

I add this: every evangelical man who sets restrictive limitations on his private interactions with women other than his wife (like the boundaries mentioned by Hyatt) is being influenced, whether he is aware of it or not, by the Modesto Manifesto -- an agreement made between Billy Graham and several close friends and colleagues in 1948, wherein they, after prayerfully considering the temptations that had destroyed the ministries of other travelling evangelists, committed to each other to go above and beyond in order to shield themselves from occasions of sin or even the appearance of scandal. The covenant extended not only to marital fidelity, but also financial accountability, honesty in reporting the results of their outreaches, and the avoidance of division within the body of Christ.

This attention and concern is most laudable, and clearly had a lasting legacy in the integrity with which the BGEA has carried out its ministry for most of a century. But might I suggest that, just because certain measures were appropriate for the patron saint of American evangelicalism to undertake more than sixty years ago, it does not necessarily follow that they are appropriate for evangelical men in a variety of personal and professional contexts today.

Graham and his partners were aware of the heightened vulnerability that they faced by virtue of the public nature of their ministry -- they had seen too many others fall prey to the spiritual pride that can infect successful religious leaders to consider themselves immune. They probably also realized that long weeks of travel, separated from their wives and families, might lead to the fatigue and loneliness that could overcome good judgment and character in a moment of weakness. Further, on at least some accounts, they seemed to be somewhat paranoid (although perhaps not unjustifiably so) about being set up -- they knew that a simple allegation of misconduct could ruin a reputation, even if there were no truth in it, and so they took pains to avoid even the circumstances in which such allegations could arise.

Graham et. al. were also ministering in a cultural context in which an innocent interaction between a man and a woman-not-his-wife could be a cause of scandal -- a situation that, as Dalfonzo's treatment implies, no longer obtains. In fact, the opposite is the case: a Christian man's unswerving refusal to ever be alone with another women, whatever the mitigating circumstances, now has the potential to discredit the faith, as atheist blogger Hemant Metha's stunned reaction to John Acuff's treatment of the topic a couple years ago illustrates.

To his credit, Graham himself eventually relented to the persistent appeal of one Hillary Rodham Clinton for a personal meeting and agreed to share a meal with her in a public restaurant, recognizing that the pragmatic commitments of his early ministry did not match the pastoral needs of the late 20th century. This was, I am convinced, no compromise of his principles, but a sensible accommodation to changing circumstances.

How do I know about the meeting between Graham and Clinton? One of Graham's biographer's told me. This biographer also happens to have been one of my mentors -- a man who, to my ongoing gratitude, did not fear to meet with me behind closed doors, to offer me much-needed professional and personal support, just because I am a woman. I owe a great deal to my relationships with other women's husbands, and my life would be deeply impoverished if any number of godly men of my acquaintance had believed it necessary for them to eschew the company of women other than their wives. I am thankful for many married friends who have cultivated strong marriages that can not only endure, but strengthen -- and be strengthened by -- relationships that reach beyond themselves to a broader circle of friends, male and female.

This is what I ask of my brothers: when it comes to establishing boundaries for yourself beyond those dictated by scripture, please do not uncritically adopt those described by role models, whether they be Graham, Falwell, Haggard [shudder!], Hyatt, Acuff, or your own beloved pastor. Search the scripture, and search your own heart, your own marriage, and your own vocation. Choose the boundaries that make sense for your life and your situation. Discuss them with your wife. Be ruled by neither fear nor complacency, but by wisdom.

In turn, I pledge: I will not take your marriage for granted. I will not assume that, as long as my own intentions are chaste, I have no responsibility for the welfare of your marriage. If I am a friend to you, I am a friend to your wife and to your marriage. I will always honor her primary claim on your loyalty, especially in her absence. I will do what is in my power to build up your relationship with each other. If ever, for whatever reason, whether temporarily or permanently, the welfare of your relationship with her demands that you limit or avoid contact with other women (or just me in particular), I accept that without recrimination, shame, or subterfuge. I hope that you will continually devote yourselves to growing in your affection for and understanding of one another, and I thank you both for cultivating the bonds of trust that enable you to share your lives with others.

Patience

2011-04-08T23:52:00.000-07:00

This YouTube video is making the rounds on Facebook, where I ignored it the first couple of times it popped up in my feed because it's a COMMERCIAL and I can't be bothered to voluntarily devote three minutes of my time (more like 5-6 minutes with buffering) to watch an ad, especially for a product that I'm not going to be in the market for for a couple more years.

When I finally watched it, the experience was something like reading poetry -- a blessed compulsion to slow down the rush of life and breathe in beauty and gratuitous creativity. Who has time to watch a three minute commercial? One in which the action doesn't really get started until somewhere after the 30 second mark -- i.e., the point at which most commercials are over? Who, for that matter, has time to engineer, and then set up, an elaborate instrument like this, in celebration of music, of nature, of the simple element of wood?

I don't read enough poetry. But I'm thankful for a few minutes of delight, courtesy, of all things, a Japanese cell phone commercial.

Old spice parodies

2011-04-07T15:15:00.000-07:00

As an aspiring theological librarian (who evidently has no time to blog during the school year), I am amused that there are clever parodies of the viral hit Old Spice commercial featuring both sides of my new profession. The library video has been making the rounds since last summer, but the preacher video is rather new. Enjoy.

Resurrection is not child's play

2011-02-07T22:34:00.000-08:00

A column in yesterday's edition of my local paper raised my hackles before I even read it, because the headline and the pulled quote that adorned it situated the author squarely against depictions of resurrection in movies aimed at children. Now, I happen to believe that a resurrection is the most important thing that ever happened in the whole history of everything, and that it is therefore profoundly important to have our imaginations shaped by the transformative power of that event -- so my default position is to think that resurrection absolutely should be portrayed in the cultural products that inform our imaginations. When a columnist whines about public displays of resurrection with the words "and don't even get me started on Aslan," I get ready to come out swinging.

But then I read the column. And it turns out she's right.

Roshell cites a 2005 paper from Omega: The Journal of Death and Dying in which researchers traced the depictions of death in classic Disney animated films, finding that the absurdly high frequency with which dead characters fail to stay dead could be a source of confusion for young viewers. She makes clear that it's not the depiction of death to which she objects in kiddie flicks, but the psychological whiplash of a lethal psych-out:

But why put our kids through it all for naught? Herding them through the gut-twisting, hand-wringing exercise of grief, only to retract the sad facts minutes later with a jaunty "just kiddin'," is lazy storytelling that only serves to make the inevitable — and irreversible — expirations of goldfish and, I'll just say it, grandmas that much harder to fathom.

This is exactly right. The inexplicable undoing of death as a plot device/emotional cheat is lazy storytelling, emotionally manipulative, and irresponsibility inattentive to the developmental needs of the target audience.

The resurrection I care about isn't important because it means (contra certain trends in funeral homiletics) that death is no big deal; it's important because death is a very big deal -- such a big deal that it took the fundamental overthrow of the entire cosmic order to bring it down. Resurrection only matters if it's anomalous. Resurrection only matters because it subverts the normal order of things, and the normal order of things is that dead people stay dead.

If more than a quarter of deaths depicted in classic children's movies don't "take," resurrection hardly comes across as the big deal that Christian faith declares it to be. If people can magically come back from the dead for no better reason than the convenience of a lazy film-maker, maybe death isn't such a profound enemy after all.

N.T. Wright is fond of pointing out, against those who contend that the New Testament resurrection accounts were the product of a prescientific worldview that has been thoroughly debunked by modern breakthroughs, that the permanence of death is hardly a modern discovery. If anything, our first-century forebears would have been more aware, not less, of the permanence of death, given their more-frequent personal encounters with it and the inability to outsource funeral arrangements to a professional class. The idea of someone not staying dead would have been just as scandalous in Jesus' day as our own.

Describing the ancient pagan Greek perspective on resurrection, Wright makes the telling observation: "Not even in myth was it permitted" (RSG, p. 33). Homer and his ilk saw clearly that undoable deaths violated the fundamental order of the universe. They wouldn't go there; not even in the world of fiction. Perhaps our modern storytellers could stand to learn something from the narrative discipline of the ancients.

[Are SPOILER ALERTS still necessary when talking about Harry Potter? If so, SPOILER ALERT. And READ THE BOOKS ALREADY.]

J.K. Rowling exhibited a laudable faithfulness to metaphysical verisimilitude when she insisted, amid rampant speculation during the interlibrum between the penultimate and final installments of the Harry Potter series, that Dumbledore definitely would not "do a Gandalf;" that the magical world she had created was still governed by certain unassailable laws, and one of them was that dead people stay dead. (She had already made this perfectly clear within the world of the books themselves through an interview between a bereft Harry and Nearly Headless Nick, the Ghost of Gryffindor Tower, at the end of Book 5. But given the evident willingness of children's writers to bend the rules of nature to the breaking point, one can't blame even careful readers for speculating.) The Harry Potter books are chock full, from stem to stern, with resurrection symbolism, but even in the climactic sequence of the hero laying down his life for others only to take it up again, Rowling does not violate her commitment to be honest about the terrible finality of death. The result is a much richer and more powerful depiction of death and life than a cheap-stunt death reversal could ever offer.

Not that I'm saying I agree with Roshell that depictions of resurrection never have a justifiable place in children's entertainment. I must insist that Aslan is a special case. The resurrection of Aslan just is The Resurrection. Go ahead and make whatever arguments you like about the cultural and literary merits of so transparent a Christian allegory and/or the adequacy of a particular cinematic depiction of the event; I'm never going to concede that Aslan belongs in the same category as the now-they're-dead-now-they're-not switcheroos Roshell complains about. The magic that brings Aslan back from the dead is not ordinary magic, it's "deep magic from before the dawn of time."

If you're going to depict a resurrection, it's got to go that deep. It has to be the climax of whatever story it's a part of, not a bit of storyteller's sleight of hand. It has to do more than unbreak a few broken hearts; it has to turn the whole world upside down.

Because Roshell is absolutely correct: "Dramatic devices are one thing. Resurrection is another entirely."

Amen. Preach it, sister.

Notes for ALA Midwinter

2011-01-13T12:47:00.000-08:00

Just back from the American Library Association's annual Midwinter Meeting, the first such event of my new career. I had a bit of impostor anxiety walking around wearing a name tag with my new school listed under my name when I had been enrolled there for all of TWO DAYS when the conference started, but I'm not one to decline such a gift as this -- namely, a major professional conference taking place practically in my own back yard. I did not have as much fun as I do at major conferences in my old field, which have the distinct advantage of being places where it is impossible to walk down a corridor without crossing paths with people I love, but it was still well worth my while.

Observations and reminders to self re: future library conferences:

1) The Midwinter Meeting actually has very little going on in terms of formal programming.
If I had been paying closer attention, I would have figured this out before I registered, but as it was, it was a little puzzling to sit down with the conference schedule and try to sort through what was going on. Why does everything seem to be a committee meeting or a discussion group?

Well, it turns out, committee meetings and discussion groups are what ALAMW is all about. If you want to attend presentations of the sort that you would normally expect at a big conference, go to ALA's Annual Conference, which is held in the summer. That's also the one to go to if you want to witness the bookcart drill team world championships. There are a few plenary-type events at midwinter featuring famous authors with books to hawk, and there is a big press conference announcing the annual youth media awards, including the Newbery and Caldecott Medals, but for the most part, Midwinter is bureaucracy in action.

But all those committee meetings and discussion groups are after all an excellent way to get plugged in to the life of the Association -- probably better than attending a slate of formal presentations. I didn't actually go to any committee meetings, even though my understanding is that most committee meetings are open to any interested attendee and that newbies are encouraged to sit in on the meetings of the committees that are of interest to them. The discussion groups that I attended were very colleagial and informative experiences. In the largest group I attended, I was able to sit back and observe the frank and thoughtful exchange of ideas among practitioners in a branch of librarianship I am interested in pursuing; in the two smaller groups I attended (fewer than 10 people in each), my input was solicited and respected, even after I introduced myself as a rank neophyte.

2) SJSU SLIS throws a kickass party.
Probably the thing I was most looking forward to in the entire weekend was the chance to attend the reception hosted by my new school and actually meet in person some of my fellow students and even some faculty members. By the time the reception time rolled around, I was utterly dead on my feet and not a little irritated at my school for selecting an off-site location for it's party, but there was no way I was skipping out.

Good thing I didn't. It was an excellent spread, an excellent venue, and an excellent opportunity to schmooze with SLIS students past, present, and future. (Faculty turnout was rather low, but I did get to meet a couple of instructors.) I have been told that the reception at the summer conference is even more fabulous. The next time it comes around to California (Anaheim, 2012), even if for some reason it doesn't work out for me to attend the entire conference, I think I will make a point to travel down to the O.C. just for this party.

3) Notes from the exhibit floor:

Only pick up the ARCs you are actually interested in reading. FREE BOOKS! I anticipated swag, but not the extent to which it would come in book form -- at other conferences, you have to buy the books. That is also true at ALA, of course, but publishers also use the Exhibit Hall to curry interest in forthcoming titles, significantly by handing out Advance Reading Copies to people who might be in a position to order the official version for their libraries and/or recommend it other readers.

I think I would have been more disciplined about accumulating books from the outset, except that, a couple minutes into the opening reception, I was passed by a young adult lit. aficionado who already had her arms FULL of free books, which experience triggered some kind of shortage anxiety in my mind: must grab books! What if they run out?

Here's a tip: they don't run out.

I mean, okay, sure, they may/will run out of particular titles, but there will be no shortage of book-acquiring opportunities throughout the conference, and as long as you swing through the exhibit hall with some regularity (I suggest making at least two passes a day), you are unlikely to miss the opportunity to pick up the one or two titles that you really want. (For me, the coup of the conference was an ARC of Mary Doria Russell's latest, Doc.)

You don't need to bring an extra tote bag. Other than books, the most prominent form of swag was free tote bags. (For hauling around all your other swag. Natch.) Followed closely by badges, ballpoint pens, bookmarks, and those stress-relieving squeeze toys. Some publishers were even offering bags with zippers on them, which were particularly useful for hauling all the free books I couldn't resist home on the train without spilling them all over the luggage rack. My household is pretty well set for reusable grocery bags for the foreseeable future.

You do need to bring business cards and self-addressed address labels. Okay, not need, but these things would be useful. A lot of exhibitors hold drawings (this year, the prize of choice was some variety of ebook device), and if you want to enter, you can save yourself considerable time by having a sheet of return address labels ready to slap on the entry forms.

4) You know you're a library geek when you go absolutely gaga over a page-turning book-scanning robot.

5) I wish I had an iPod touch.
I'm not sure how useful it might be to have such a device at the rest of the conferences I plan to attend this year, since most conference venues are not blanketed with free Wi-Fi. But since ALAMW was, it would have been supremely handy to have a lightweight, uber-portable, app-enabled device ready to hand. I refuse to get a smart phone (at least until I have a real job), but I was lusting after my sister-in-law's iPhone-without-the-phone at several points over the weekend.

The Christmas Invitation

2010-12-23T20:49:00.000-08:00

My churchy friends across the Western world and I are gearing up for the Big Event tomorrow night, which preparation includes getting ready to welcome with true hospitality and not a smidge of resentment the multitudinous not-so-churchy friends who will nevertheless be darkening our doors this one night out of the year.

In thousands upon thousands of churches pastors will make little welcome speeches, and in thousands upon thousands of those speeches the welcome on Christmas Eve will include words to the effect that first-timers or irregular attenders would also be most welcome should they come back on Sunday, because "you may not be aware, but we do this every week!" or "if you like tonight's music, you won't want to miss what our choir's up to in January!"

Like that's going to happen.

Granted, there will be some vanishingly small proportion of Christmas Eve visitors who just are at just the place in their spiritual journeys that the retelling of the Christmas story and the music and the candlelight and whatnot will prompt them to consider taking the next step in exploring the claims the church makes about this precious baby, and maybe that next step will involve showing up at church again a couple days hence.

But the thing is, I'm pretty sure that the handful of visitors who are in that boat would be fully able to figure out on their own that they can come back to church on Sunday, without hearing a pitch that the pastor surely intends as a word of welcome but that the listener who hasn't crossed the church's threshold since last Easter at the latest can't help but hear as a guilt trip.

Besides, even if someone were so enthralled by the beauty of the Christmas Eve service that they decided to come back the next week, if the artistry and emotional experience is what draws them, they're going to be disappointed. Because there isn't a church in the world that performs on the Sunday after Christmas up to the same level that they do on Christmas Eve.

There may still be a few candles lit, but nothing to match the ambiance of an evening sanctuary bathed in the soft glow of a hundred wax-dripping fire hazards. They probably won't be hearing from the regular preacher, but from some less-experienced associate or intern or lay person (cough, cough) who is stepping in while the more experienced homilist takes a well-deserved rest after the rigors of Advent. The choir may be off altogether; at the least, they're down a few voices and either reprising one of the pieces from two nights ago or pulling out something notably less ambitious. If there's a worship band, it might be missing the bass player or the drummer and a couple of the vocalists, because the young leaders of the church -- if the church is fortunate enough to have young leaders -- haven't yet gotten back from taking the kids to see Grandma and Grandpa, or figure that they've already done church this weekend and have earned a good lie-in for one Sunday out of the year. Add to that the people who have been soldiering on through the past couple of weeks even though they're battling seasonal illnesses of one sort or another who are finally going to give themselves permission collapse into bed, and the church is almost certainly going to be operating on a skeleton crew the Sunday after Christmas.

Which is fine, because the point of Sunday morning worship is not to match the emotional and spiritual intensity of Christmas Eve. I'm just saying that pastors should perhaps be careful about making hyperbolic promises on Christmas Eve that their congregations can't deliver on in the clear light of a few days later.

And this is why I think that the tack taken by Solana Beach Presbyterian Church is nothing short of brilliant.

Rather than urge their visitors who attend their special Christmas services to come back the following Sunday -- which they're almost certainly not going to do, and even if they did, they would likely find it less than compelling, since if they were the kind of people who saw the value of weekly gatherings for worship and instruction they probably would already be attending church on a more-regular basis -- Solana Beach Pres invites them to come back in a couple of months, when the church holds its annual Community Serve Day (link is to the not-yet-live page for the 2011 event -- here's last year's page).

They aim for higher than 100% participation in their big one-day outreach and service blitz, by promoting it within the congregation as a fundamental expression of the church's identity in its community, and by promoting it beyond the congregation as an opportunity for others in the community -- whether church members or not, whether Christians or not -- to do something worthwhile for their neighbors in need.

Rather than invite visitors to return and passively consume a religious performance, after which, if you stick around long enough, we might eventually work up the nerve to ask you to do something, Solana Beach Pres gets about the business of being the church and invites inquirers to come be a part of it.

Now, I do believe that worship and the Word are the very heartbeat of the church -- so much so that, as enamored as I am with Solana Beach Pres's Community Serve Day, I can't quite embrace their decision to hold it on a Sunday and in lieu of their normal worship services. While I concede that doing so gives a nice rhetorical opportunity to emphasize ad nauseam that they are not "cancelling church," but being church in dozens of locations across the city, and that there is probably no better way to communicate the importance that the church leadership puts on community service than to cede the prime time church slot to it, ultimately I am more comfortable with the Great Day of Service my former congregation holds annually -- on a Saturday, including a time of worship, even if that means they never get the participation level that Solana Beach Pres achieves.

But as vital as I believe worship and the Word to be, I don't suppose that they must be the entry point for the unchurched into the life of the church. Many people who are not active in a church community want to find a way to "give back" to their communities. They also think that works of service are the kind of thing that churches ought to be doing more of. So it makes all kinds of sense for a church that wants to demonstrate the relevance of its creed to the lives of outsiders to get involved in service and to invite those outsiders to come along in that process. We don't need to demand that people become insiders before they can take part in the good that the church is doing.

The outsiders who volunteer alongside Solana Beach Pres members may quite naturally find themselves building relationships with the church folk who serve a common cause. (Asking someone for help is a far more powerful means of deepening your relationship with them than offering help.) They may, through these relationships, become interested in the spiritual motivations behind their friends' service. They may in time come to see the vital place of worship and the Word in their friends' lives, and eventually seek it out for themselves. They may come to church through the back door, in work boots and dirty blue jeans, rather than through the front door, decked out in their Sunday best.

Or maybe they never will. Maybe they will dig a ditch or plant a tree or paint a day care center and go on their ways. Presbyterians believe in common grace -- the goodness of God to and through every person, whether or not that person ever becomes a believer. Inviting nonbelievers to be their fellow workers in serving their city is an expression of that faith.

When we tell the story of Christmas, we tell about a God who came into a broken and brokenhearted world to make a difference, "to proclaim good news to the poor. ... to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim freedom for the captives and release from darkness for the prisoners." The invitation that we extend to our guests at Christmas time is ultimately not to come be a part of our particular club, but to come be a participant in what this God is still doing in the world. Solana Beach Pres has found a creative and compelling way to do that, so that when they spread out through their city in a couple of months, it will be the natural continuation of the song they may be singing tomorrow night: "Come and worship, come and worship, worship Christ the newborn king."

* * *

I learned about Solana Beach Pres's Community Serve Day in a workshop at last year's Santa Barbara Mission Conference. This year's conference will be on January 15 at First Presbyterian Church in Santa Barbara; advance registration continues all the way to January 5. This is a national-caliber event. If you live in the greater Santa Barbara region, you should come. If you live beyond the Santa Barbara region, you should check out your travel options.

Ebook Devices, Part IV: Essential Websites

2010-12-18T13:04:00.000-08:00

I know, I said this was a three-part series. Call this my increasingly inaccurately named trilogy of posts.

* * *

If you get an eReader, of whatever design, there are some sites about which you really must know. Collectively, they will greatly enhance the quality of your life as an eReader user.

1. Calibre

I previously mentioned Calibre and Sigil. If you get a Sony Reader, you must, lest you imperil both your sanity and your sanctification, download Calibre. Calibre works with all manner of eReader devices, so I highly recommend it whatever device you get.

I never got around to testing out Calibre with Dad's Nook, because the drag-and-drop method of loading material from the PC to the Nook worked just fine. But Nook users should still get Calibre, because (trust me on this) you'll really want your documents to have accurate metadata, given that Nook has no mechanism for organizing said files. A lot of files that you self-generate and/or get for free online will have incorrect metadata, so you'll need to use Calibre to fix them. (Metadata = the tags within a file that tell you the title, author, etc. It's what displays in the eReader's menu. If it's wrong, you're not going to be able to find anything.)

2. MobileRead Forums

You can take this to the bank: when (not if) you have problems with your device, your fellow users will always, ALWAYS be more helpful than the help desk staff of whatever corporation sold you your device. The fine people at the MobileRead Forums provided me with elegant and effective solutions to sticky problems with both my Sony Reader and Dad's Nook. Hooray for teh interwebs!

MobileRead Forums are also a good place to start if you want to do some hardcore comparison shopping to find the device with the array of features that best matches your needs.

3. InkMesh

The store associated with your device is not necessarily always going to provide the best deal on the particular book you want to read. If you've got a Kindle, you're stuck buying from Amazon (which, as the 500-pound Gorilla of the publishing industry, pretty much always has the lowest price anyway); if you've got anything else, an easy way to comparison shop is to go to Inkmesh. It's like the Bookfinder of the eBook world. Their search is not comprehensive (at this writing, it does not yet include the Google eBookstore), but it's pretty thorough -- sure beats having to separately click around to a dozen different independent eBook seller sites. It's also a good source for links to FREE eBooks.

4. Speaking of FREE eBooks...

Google Books is of course primary (although now that they've integrated their eBookstore into the feature, I'm having trouble figuring out how/if you can limit your search to free eBooks only), followed closely by Project Gutenberg. ManyBooks has a very nicely curated collection. University of Chicago Press puts out a different free eBook at the beginning of each month -- if you sign up for their mailing list, they'll send you an email telling you what it is. (N.B. a lot of free eBooks have formatting problems; a lot of formatting problems can be cleaned up a fair bit using Calibre and/or Sigil. But you have to decide whether it's worth your time.)

Ebook Devices, Part III: Nook vs. Sony

2010-12-17T13:04:00.000-08:00

This is the third post in a three-part series on eReader devices:

Do You Want an eReader?
The eReaders My Family Didn't Get, and Why
A Comparative Review: Barnes & Noble Nook vs. Sony Reader Touch

* * *

The perfect eReader does not yet exist. It probably never will, but the technology is still new enough that the different vendors have not really even begun to converge on a basic set of features to meet the needs of a serious user. If you want to avoid frustrating lacunae in the feature set of your device, you're best off waiting a few more years before you buy one.

My claim is based on my experience with two devices: the Sony Reader Touch Edition that I've had for about a year, and the Barnes & Noble Nook that my father bought a little over a month ago. There are things about the Sony that drive me crazy, and it was with those particular shortcomings in mind that I recommended the Nook to Dad. Upon playing with his Nook, however, I discovered that there are things about the Nook that drive me crazy that the Sony gets right. So you have to pick your poison, I guess.

This review will be principally negative. Sony and Barnes & Noble offer some of the best eReader devices available (especially if, like me, you have philosophical objections to Amazon's business model that prevent you from even considering a Kindle). If, despite the inherent shortcomings of the technology, you have decided that you want an eReader, these are two of the devices that you should definitely consider. For the sake of differentiating between the two, however, I will concentrate on the flaws of each.

Things that suck about the Sony Reader Touch Edition

1. The Sony Reader Library Software

I didn't think it would be a big deal that the Sony Reader doesn't have Wi-Fi (the only Sony product that does costs about twice as much as the comparable devices from B&N and Amazon) -- and it wouldn't be, if the software that you use to load books from your PC to your device was any good. But it's not.

I can't count the times I had to reinstall the Sony Library software in the first three months I had my device -- and every time I had to reinstall it, I had to reorganize my entire digital library. I learned after a while to EXPECT that what should have been a simple 60-second task of adding a single new book to my device would routinely turn into a several-hour ordeal of fighting with the software.

Among other problems, there is no way with the Library software to add and remove single files from your device -- it works by "syncing" your entire library to the device, and it does this automatically every time you plug the device in, with no way to override the function. Again, this would not be a major problem if it worked properly, but it doesn't. It can't handle even a moderate-sized collection of books, but gets hung up mid-sync and freezes. The help desk personnel recommended syncing a smaller selection of books to the device -- which worked, but defeated one of the primary points of having such a device, viz. to be able to carry around a large selection of books at once. (Because "syncing" involves DELETING FROM THE DEVICE any books not included in the sync, not just adding the particular books that are included.)

The problems with the Library software are so legion that I might have given up on using the device altogether had I not discovered the glorious secret: You do not have to use the Sony software to connect your Sony Reader to your PC. Instead, you can download Calibre for free. Calibre is as good as the Sony software is bad. It allows you edit the metadata on your eBook files and even translate formats (except for DRM-protected files). I now use the Sony software only to manage the few books that I have purchased from the Sony store, and Calibre for everything else.

I have also downloaded Sigil, which allows me to edit and create documents in ePub format. This, combined with Calibre, greatly enhances the utility of my Reader.

You still have to plug your Sony Reader Touch into a PC and transfer files, which is more cumbersome than the instant gratification of the Nook's Wi-Fi access to the B&N store. But it is really not that much of a hassle, as long as you don't rely on the horrible software that Sony provides.

2. Glare.

The big selling point of the Sony Reader Touch Edition is (surprise) the Touch Screen, which is great for navigation and especially annotation. The trade-off that they don't tell you about is that the touch screen produces a glare, which pretty much cancels out the readability advantage of the E Ink screen. E Ink is supposed to allow you to read for long stretches at a time even in bright sunlight without any more eye strain than you would get from ink on paper; this simply is not the case with the Sony Reader Touch. I'm not even sure that it's not worse than a backlit computer screen.

3. Limited Selection and Higher Prices

The Barnes & Noble store does a better job of matching Amazon's selection and rock-bottom prices on eBooks. Most books cost a little bit more at the Sony Reader Store than they do at the leading competitors. Moreover, the Nook supports books purchased from the Sony Reader Store, but not vice-versa.

Things that suck about the Barnes & Noble Nook

1. The Touchpad

This is the trade-off with the glare issue of the Sony Reader: the display on the Nook is far crisper and easier on the eyes, but the cost is that navigability suffers compared to the Sony. You WILL have "fat-fingers" trouble using the Nook touchpad, especially with the keyboard. I expect that this is the kind of thing that most users will get used to as they gain familiarity with the device, but it's all too easy to hit the wrong spot on the touchpad, and it's not always easy to simply "undo" your last action and make it right. Annotation with the Nook is supremely cumbersome compared to the Sony, to the point that you will only want to bother with it when it's really important to you.

Another feature of the Sony that I didn't fully appreciate until I found it missing from the Nook was that it remembers your past searches. When you start typing a search on the Sony, it offers up a selection of your recent searches starting with the same letter, and you can just click on one of them if you want to repeat it. On the Nook, you have to retype the entire search from scratch. This is all the more troublesome because the Nook keyboard is more difficult to use than the Sony keyboard.

I understand from some reviews that the Nook Color overcomes the reability vs. navigability issue between the regular Nook and the Sony Touch, but I can't comment from direct experience.

2. No Folders or Tags

This stunned me, because it's such a basic feature it didn't occur to me to imagine that B&N wouldn't provide it: there is no way to organize your content on your device; it's just a flat list. For your "library" -- the content that you purchased from Barnes & Noble -- you can at least search your content and find your books that way, but for your "documents" -- everything you load onto the device from any other source -- you can't even do that; you can only scroll through the list. Obviously, the more files you put on your device, the more of a burden this will be. I rely heavily on the tag function on my Sony Reader to allow me to pull up books quickly and easily, and am not sure how I would manage without them. There is some cause for hope that a future firmware update will correct this appalling oversight in the functioning of the Nook; in the meantime, I suppose Nook users will have to adopt some personal content management strategy to get around this problem.

3. The "LendMe" Feature

You can lend out some of the books you buy from Barnes & Noble for your Nook -- but you can only loan each book one time, to one person (only another Nook user, of course), for 14 days, and then you can never lend it again. This is beyond stupid. All it does is highlight the rights you give up by selecting digital books over the ink-and-paper variety. If being able to share your books is important to you -- and it should be -- do not be deceived by the way B&N touts this as a selling point into thinking that the Nook protects your right to share your books in any meaningful way. It does not.

So Which One Do I Recommend?

Because I'm cheap, and the Nook has the price advantage both at the original point of purchase and on the majority of subsequent content purchases, and because the thing an eReader is BEST for is simply reading eBooks straight through from start to finish, and the display on the Nook is superior for that function, and because I like to play a little sudoku, I say: all other things being equal, go with the Nook. That said, having used a Nook, I find that I appreciate the features of my Sony that are better than the Nook so much the more. If you know that being able to organize a large number of files and/or make extensive annotations to your digital files are going to be important features for you, the Sony will serve you better.

Ebook Devices, Part II: The Also-Rans

2010-12-16T13:04:00.000-08:00

This is the second post in a three-part series on eReader devices:

Do You Want an eReader?
The eReaders My Family Didn't Get, and Why
A Comparative Review: Barnes & Noble Nook vs. Sony Reader Touch

* * *

I am now a member of a two-eReader family, so my next post will be a discussion of the two particular devices with which I have first-hand experience. First, though, I thought I'd tell you why we didn't really consider (or considered, but then quickly dismissed) the other contenders in the market.

Why we didn't get an iPad.

It costs too much.

iPads are awesome. But they do too much -- the wide variety of apps available would serve as a distraction for a user who primarily wants to read digital books -- and consequently cost significantly more than a dedicated eReader. Someday I would like to have a cool tablet computer, but I'm not going to spend that kind of money to be able to read books on a screen.

Why we didn't get a Kindle.

Amazon's device is indisputably the industry leader, and it has a lot going for it -- it probably has the best technology, the deepest selection of available books, and the lowest prices on those books. But there are a number of deal-breakers associated with this device, and they all boil down to one thing: Kindle doesn't play well with others. To wit:

1. Proprietary Format.

You're going to have DRM and interoperability issues with any digital reader you choose, but Amazon is far and away the worst offender. It's the only producer that has not embraced the ePub format for documents, and you are restricted to only buying from Amazon and only reading your Kindle books on a Kindle or Kindle App. Rather than pursuing customer loyalty by creating a superior product, Amazon seeks to insure loyalty by locking customers into a closed system.

2. No Page Numbers.

Kindle uses "location numbers" to designate positions within a book, which are absolutely useless when talking about a book with anyone using the book in any other format. ePubs at least have the possibility of retaining the print book pagination scheme. I am aware that ePub pagination does not necessarily correspond to print edition pagination, so it is still necessary to check citations against a print copy or print copy facsimile (e.g., ironically enough, Amazon's Look Inside feature), but it still gets you a lot closer to having a useful reference point than Amazon.

3. Not Compatible With Library eBook Programs.

Amazon wants to force you to BUY all your eBooks. Most of the other major eReaders allow you to participate in eBook borrowing programs available through a growing number of local libraries. (Check your local listings for details.)

Why we didn't get a minor brand device.

We were too lazy to do the amount of research necessary.

These days, it seems like every drugstore and novelty shoppe has its own version of an eReader on offer; the selection can be overwhelming.

For all I know, one of these devices from a minor player in the eBook game may just have the perfect combination of features at an excellent price. If you find one that you love, by all means let me know.

Nevertheless, I am wary about the bargain devices for a number of reasons.

In the first place, none of them are that much of a bargain. The industry-leading Kindle and Nook are so competitively priced, all other things being equal, I would prefer a device with the backing of a major corporation that is vulnerable to a PR nightmare if something goes horribly wrong with their product. I am fairly confident that Barnes & Noble will continue to update the firmware for the Nook; I have no such expectation for a product from a company I've never heard of before.

If you do choose to investigate the choices from the lesser-known providers, here are a few things to keep in mind:

1. Kobo is actually an established player in the field. I would give them a closer look than many of the drugstore brands.

2. Be careful about a color screen display at a bargain price. If possible, check it out before purchasing. My understanding is that one of the reasons the Nook Color is significantly more expensive than the minor brand color devices is that the display is qualitatively better. Cheaper color screens have glare issues, which can be a headache, literally, on a device that a person wants to use for extended reading. I'm pretty sure a high-quality E Ink display would be a better investment than a low-quality color display.

3. Decide whether the ability to annotate your books is important to you. Many of the budget devices have no provision at all for marking text or making notes. Annotation on the Nook is supremely cumbersome, but at least it's a possibility.

4. Check carefully the availability of content for the device you are considering. If it supports books from Barnes & Noble, you're probably good to go; if not, you may find that the value of your device is diminished by the limited selection and/or higher prices you will end up paying for your eBooks. The Google eBookstore and the various other independent or semi-independent eBook sellers do not (yet) have the catalog depth to compete with the devices (e.g. Kindle and Nook) that support their own catalog.

Ebook Devices, Part I: Do You Want One At All?

2010-12-15T13:04:00.000-08:00

As a general rule, I am a late adopter of new technologies. For the most part, I don't get on board with new standards in media until they actually stop producing content in the obsolete formats (audio cassettes, VHS, what have you). So it was a little disconcerting to be on the leading edge of a new type of gadget, which is what happened to me when I received an ebook reader for Christmas last year. ("It's like a Wii for nerds," I explained to my sister-in-law as she craned to see just what I found so jaw-dropping astonishing about the package I had just opened.)

The devices, of course, have absolutely exploded in 2010, which means this Christmas is probably going to be the year that many readers/gift-givers who weren't comfortable getting out in front of the trend finally get their first such device. Indeed, I suspect that if there is someone on your gift list who (1) loves books and (2) doesn't yet own an ereader device and (3) has not declared themselves philosophically opposed to such a thing, then you have probably already ordered them a Kindle for Christmas, and this series is coming too late to be of any help. Sorry about that.

But, just in case you or your book-loving loved one are still on the fence about whether or which ebook reader to buy, I have a few thoughts. More than a few, actually, which is why this post is the first of a three-part series:

Do You Want an eReader?
The eReaders My Family Didn't Get, and Why
A Comparative Review: Barnes & Noble Nook vs. Sony Reader Touch

(If you don't have time to read/wait for the whole thing, here's the executive summary: If you think you'd like to have an eReader and you'd like my advice on which one you should buy, get a Nook. But be prepared for some annoyances.)

So: First up: Do you really want an eReader?

Maybe.

There is a camp of people who think that eReaders are the best thing since Gutenberg, and there is a camp of people who swear they'd never consider forsaking books of the dead-tree variety.

I think both camps are wrong.

eReaders are great for some things. They are markedly inferior to simple paper-and-ink books in many other ways. The best discussion of the limitations of the format that I have seen is this talk by Classics Professor James O'Donnell. It's kind of long, but worth listening to if you're interested in the utility of these new technologies, particularly in an academic context.

For additional discussion of the significance of emerging technologies for the experience of reading, I recommend Alan Jacobs' Text Patterns blog at the New Atlantis.

I believe that an eReader would be most useful to users in the following categories:

1. You travel a lot (and/or move frequently).
Books are much more portable in digital format than ink-on-paper, which makes packing a breeze. (But you can't read your eReader during the take-off and landing portions of a flight.)

2. You buy a lot of newly-released books at full price in hardcover and read them front-to-back.
I tend to buy most of my books on the secondary market, which means that I can still get an ink-on-paper copy of most books I want to read for less than I would spend for a digital copy. But if you need to be on top of the latest releases in whatever area of publishing interests you (as long as it's not too obscure), you can save money in the long run by getting most of your books digitally.

Plus there's the instant-gratification thing of not having to go to the store or wait for your package to arrive.

3. You're in a field where you need to read a lot of documents that you download in digital format.
Most scholarly journal articles, for example, are available these days as full-text downloads if you have access to the appropriate databases. Over the course of a graduate degree, one could conceivably save enough money on printing costs alone to justify the cost of an eReader.

4. You like gadgets.
A shiny new eReader is a fun digital toy. If you're into electronic toys, by all means, enjoy.

* * *

Despite the utility of an eReader, I find that I still buy most of my books in ink-on-paper format. These are my principal reasons:

1. Transferablity.

This, for me, is the single biggest liability of the digital book revolution. I place great value on the capacity to loan, sell, or give away my books, and am willing to pay a premium for the right to transfer books to others after I have used them. The Nook's "LendMe" feature is a pathetic joke that only illustrates the limitations of the owner's transfer rights.

During the early months of my eReader ownership, I was also worried about transferability between devices -- what if I build up a digital library, but then my device fails? Am I locked into having to buy the same brand device forever in order to keep my content? This is less of a concern now than it was then, especially with the evolution of computer/smart phone apps to correspond with pretty much any type of eReader device, but I am still careful about buying books that I might have trouble accessing in the future.

2. Navigability.

One of the things that O'Donnell points out in the video above is that eReaders are actually a giant step backwards in terms of the convenience of finding your way around a text: they are more like SCROLLS than CODICES. If you're just reading straight through a book from front to back, it works just fine, but for just about any other use of a book, an ink-on-paper version works better. See this AP article about the limitations of travel guidebooks in digital format for just one example of how this is so.

I never noticed how important it was to me to be able to flip forward and backward in the book I'm reading until I couldn't do it. Finding a particular passage in the Bible or Book of Common Prayer takes FOREVER on my device compared to an ink-on-paper product.

You might think that the ability to search an eText would be a navigational advantage, but it really doesn't come close to making up for the disadvantage of unflippability. When you combine the primitiveness of the search function built in to the typical eReader device with the slowness of the refresh rate of the E Ink display, you end up with a tool that is far less useful than even a mediocre index in a printed book.

* * *

I do like my eReader device. It is very useful for some things. (I never would have guessed this in advance, but it turns out the main thing I use mine for is knitting patterns. Probably in itself not a good enough reason to buy a device, but it has been quite handy in that respect.) And I enjoy the gadget-ness of it, and the opportunity to learn by experience about the promise and perils of the evolving technology. But I don't think ink-on-paper books are going to disappear any time soon, and I am glad for that.

Standing up for the Little Guy/Gal/God

2010-12-06T17:00:00.000-08:00

I really and truly LOVE LOVE LOVE this story about Theodore Roosevelt.

Even if it ended after the first sentence, it would be utterly swoon-worthy:

When President Teddy Roosevelt was a college student, he taught a Sunday School class for elementary school children.

Wow. Just picture that: the historical figure who perhaps most embodies the American mythic ideal of the manly man teaching elementary-aged Sunday School. When I contrast that with our present situation, in which a greater proportion of American children are growing up without fathers, and yet young men showing an interest in caring for other people's children have become so rare that they are automatically suspect, it makes me want to cry.

And he didn't just teach elementary Sunday School, he did it when he was a college student. At the exact age when so many young adults today -- even the devotedly Christian ones -- check out of church altogether, Teddy not only kept attending church, he served it in one of its most important undertakings: the Christian education of the next generation. Phenomenal.

If you introduced me today to a man who had taught elementary-aged Sunday School when he was in college, I would agree to marry him on the spot without needing to know anything else about him.

Ah, but the story doesn't stop with the fact of Teddy teaching Sunday School. It's how he came to stop teaching Sunday School that's the crux: he gave a dollar (A whole dollar! That was a lot of money back then!) to a kid who beat up a bully who had been picking on the girls.

Perhaps the feminist in me ought to be affronted by the patriarchalism inherent in encouraging a boy to defend the defenseless girls. Why not teach the girls to stick up for themselves? But the thing is, there's nothing feminist about failing to stand up for victims of abuse. I love that Teddy saw the broader moral context in which the fight took place and defied the convention of simply punishing any and every instance of childhood brawling in order to teach a lesson about looking out not for one's own interests, but the interests of others.

But I also love the fact that the church called him out on it -- that the congregation was not afraid to exercise discipline over those who taught its children, but removed the perhaps-overly-bellicose young Sunday School teacher from his charge because they did not want their children to be taught that violence is a proper Christian response even to objectionable behavior.

I withhold judgment on whether Teddy or the congregation was correct in their evaluation of the boy's behavior -- I don't have enough information about the particulars of the situation, and deep down I suspect that they were both at least partly right, and also perhaps partly wrong. Perhaps Teddy was too eager to associate Christian virtue with a sort of chivalric vigilantism; perhaps the congregation was too devoted to a sentimental notion of a "gentle Jesus, meek and mild" to respond effectively to the very real problem of childhood bullying. This is part of why I love this story; it encapsulates without resolving an important, enduring conflict in the life of the church.

The story is offered in the context of retelling a lesser-known legend of the Saint whose feast is celebrated today: Bishop Nicholas of Myra, better known for depositing dowry-money into the hung-to-dry stockings of certain poor and vulnerable girls, is also reported to have gotten so incensed at Arius' arguments at the Council of Nicaea that he walked over and slapped him across the face. You gotta love someone who cares so deeply about getting the Gospel right that he can't hold back a passionate response when he hears it under attack.

But I also love the fact that the other bishops present were so scandalized by Nicholas' behavior that they stripped him of the office of bishop and ejected him from the council. Their censure clearly conveyed: this is not the way we settle theological disputes. God's honor is not so fragile that he needs us to hit people in order to defend it.

Nicholas, the stories tell us, was restored to the office of bishop by Jesus himself, who knew that the slap was a manifestation of Nicholas' love for him. (Whether Nicholas first repented of his outburst depends, it seems, on whether the person retelling the tale approves of a saint going Chuck Norris on a heretic's face.)

I've been thinking a lot lately about Christian faithfulness in a violent world -- how to hold together the conviction that there are things that are worth fighting for with devotion to being a follower of the One who laid down his life for his enemies rather than fight back against them.

I'm far from having it sorted out, but I'm finding that stories are essential to puzzling through the tensions -- both to help me make sense of the questions, and to help me keep from making sense too easily of questions that are really difficult. I need the witness of my brothers and sisters who have stood up to evil with violence, and those who have stood up to the evil of violence. So I love these stories, and pray for a world in which the question of violence will finally be answered once and for all. Amen; even so, come, Lord Jesus.

I am thankful...

2010-11-25T11:46:00.000-08:00

(1) That I probably never have to read Milbank.
(2) For the culinary inspirations of my facebook friends.
(3) That Jason and Jessica wanted to host Thanksgiving dinner. Otherwise I would be probably be approaching the apex of a three or four day modified stationary panic right about now.
(4) For the provocations of Amy Laura Hall.
(5) For the privilege of preaching, because the astonishing richness of the Word is never so present to me as when I interrogate it for the Good News it has for me to proclaim to this people, this week.
(6) For other blessings too numerous to list.

Story Time (Or: Quick takes on the new Harry Potter movie)

2010-11-20T13:03:00.000-08:00

My capacity to absorb narrative is under some strain. Just as I was in the middle of reading A Study in Scarlet for the sake of better appreciating A Study in Pink, the new Harry Potter movie was released AND I got the notice from my library that the copy of Mockingjay that I had reserved was now available. Such fun! But my head is starting to spin.

(Re: the Sherlock Holmes references: if you missed the Masterpiece Mystery presentations of the new modern adaptation of Sherlock on PBS in October and early November, you should know that you can watch them on the PBS website through December 7, and that doing so is a very, very good idea. They are GREAT FUN.)

Saw HP7.1 yesterday afternoon; finished ASIS last night. Now then, to protect my poor head from any more story overload, I'm going to record my initial impressions regarding HP7.1 here before diving into Mockingjay.

Regarding SPOILERS: If you haven't read the book yet, you have only yourself to blame. I don't think the following gives away anything important about the movie per se, but if you want to watch it free from the mental clutter of other people's opinions, well then you probably don't want to read ANYTHING about it before you see it, do you?

-1-

I was not nearly as disappointed with this movie as I was expecting to be. I want to see it again.

Splitting the novel into two parts evidently gave screenwriter Kloves the breathing room he needed to develop an essentially faithful yet appropriately innovative screen adaptation. There seem to be somewhat more deviations from a strict retelling of the book than there were in earlier installments, which is a good thing: a movie is a different medium, and making a good movie out of a book requires respecting the differences between the media. I was frequently delighted to notice points that were different from the book, but that were well chosen and cleverly executed.

-2-

One of my chief complaints about the HP movie franchise as a whole is the dialogical pacing. Scenes in which it would be natural for the characters to be reacting immediately are instead laden with pauses which I suppose are supposed to be pregnant but in fact are just annoyingly slow; scenes where it would be natural for the characters to need a moment to take things in are instead rushed without so much as a beat to absorb their gravity. This movie still has some of those pacing problems, but it is not as bad as most of the previous installments.

-3-

One departure from the book actually represented a correction of a mistake in the original text, and I would not be surprised at all if JK herself were to adopt the movie's "reading" in future editions. The opening sequence of the movie shows the three central characters soberly preparing to depart on their quest, including a very moving image of Hermione wiping her parents' memories of the fact of her very existence. When the trio encounter Death Eaters in a London cafe several scenes later, Ron references the earlier spell by suggesting that Hermione should wipe the Death Eater's memories, since she's the best at it. In the book, when Hermione performs the spell on the Death Eaters, she claims that she has never done a memory charm before.

-4-

I only noticed a couple of key events that I thought were really important in the book that got left out of the movie: First and foremost, Harry's use of expelliarmus in the flight from Privet Drive. I do like what the filmmakers did instead, but it's at the cost of the rich symmetry between the first and last battles in Deathly Hallows.

Second: the cost of Wormtail's mercy was an important moment in the arc of the books, so I was disappointed not to see it in the movie. But upon reflection, I suspect that the necessary antecedents are missing in the film version of the Potterverse, which would make the depiction at this point superfluous. It's been a long time since I've watched the film versions of Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire, but I think they lack the set-up for this moment to make sense in the film. Also, the whole Harry/Wormtail thing is such a blatant rip-off (or should I say homage? that sounds better) of/to Frodo/Gollum that I'm ultimately content to leave it to LOTR.

-5-

I know the book so well that I can't help fill in the exposition and backstory that are missing, which leaves me mystified as to whether the movie would make any sense at all to a viewer who is not already familiar with the story. In this sense I am woefully unqualified to review to movie, because I am simply not capable of considering the movie on its own terms. I must rely on non-fan viewers to tell me whether and how it works without 759 pages of commentary read a dozen times over.

Unfortunately, I very quickly get very annoyed at reviews and commentary by writers who clearly have not read the books. (No, "fans" will not be "amazed" to find that Hogwarts doesn't figure in 7.1; fans read the book three years ago and already know that Hogwarts doesn't come into view until the final battle.) If they could stick to the film itself I would be pleased, but I find transparent displays of ignorance to be irritating. This article, for example, was evidently written by a reporter who saw an advanced screening of the film, then described one scene from the film incorrectly to several knowledgeable Potter pundits who had not yet seen the film in order to get their reactions. If the reporter had been sufficiently familiar with the book, she may have been able to give a less confused description, or if her "experts" had actually seen the scene in question, they would have been able to give a more reasonable responses. As it was, however, the entire exercise is a piece of rubbish and a waste of time for everyone involved, including the reader.

-6-

I can't help thinking that director David Yates is intentionally trying to make the relationship between Harry and Hermione more ambiguous than it is in the book, and I can't quite figure out why he made that choice and whether it, in any sense, works. The scene where Harry cheers up a dejected Hermione by drawing her into a playful dance is a sweet interlude and a nice tension break, but some of my fanfriends are correct to point out that it, combined with Harry's failure to reassure Ron after his epic fight with the Horcrux that he "love[s] her like a sister," (HP&DH, 378), leaves the question of Harry and Hermione's feelings more open than Rowling ever meant it to be.

I wonder if perhaps Yates is somehow trying to inject the romantic tension of an implied love triangle for the sake of film-only viewers without making it so overt (e.g., by having Harry move in for a kiss after the dance, as you almost always see in such sequences on film) as to raise an outcry from us purists. But again, I can't fathom what the point of that would be. Does this film need more tension? (I know, some argue that it does -- which I really don't get -- but if so, is this the tension it needs?) Or can our imaginations really not handle the depiction of a genuinely platonic friendship? It's confusing and mildly disappointing, but not really that big of a deal.

-7-

A really minor point: as a hardcore Tonks/Lupin shipper, I was disappointed that more of their appearances didn't make it into the movie -- although, artistically speaking, I think almost all of these cuts were the right choice. Given these cuts, I was pleased that the filmmakers threw fans like me a bone by having Tonks almost, but not quite, announce her pregnancy to Harry at the beginning of the Seven Potters scene.

Enough already. Those are my major reactions on a first viewing, although of course there's plenty more that could be said. But I have a new YA novel to read, so TTFN.

P.S. Oh, yes: the animation on the Tale of the Three Brothers was awesome.

For All the Saints

2010-11-07T16:06:00.000-08:00

We observed All Saints' Sunday this morning, which I LOVED LOVED LOVED; we had communion, which should always be part of the All Saints celebration, and we sang my favorite hymn, "I Love Your Kingdom, Lord," and of course "For All the Saints," which I can never get through with dry eyes, and my voice cracked when I led the congregation in the acclamation from Revelation 7, "Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them, nor any scorching heat...." It was beautiful and thrilling and bittersweet to remember and thank God for our own loved ones who are in the church triumphant and for those from this very congregation that have gone home in the past year.

And then I went back for our second service, which doesn't really follow the church year at all (except for Christmas and Easter), and which ended with an altar call and time of prayer. And the names that came to my mind to pray for during the time of prayer at the end of the service were people whom I haven't seen or spoken to in years, but who -- as far as I know -- are, like the word of God itself, still living and active in this world. And it seemed particularly appropriate on All Saint's Sunday to be praying for brothers and sisters whom I have no real expectation of seeing again this side of heaven, but who are still part of the great communion of saints who will one day be gathered together for the great wedding feast of the Lamb. Just as it is appropriate this day to look back and remember the lives of the faithful departed, it is appropriate to look forward and pray with hope for the work that God's people are continuing to do in this world, and how we each are to be a part of it.

And I came home and put this song on the stereo and turned it up LOUD:

Sara Groves has turned on its head the way I hear the words "When the Saints Go Marching In." I've always heard the classic spiritual as being about heaven and personal salvation, but Sara reminds me powerfully that saints also go marching into hell on earth. Saints don't sit around hoping they'll be part of the heavenly number; saints lift a hymn to God in the here and now by taking action to set aright some part of the brokenness of creation.

Because there are not two churches. There is one (holy, catholic, and apostolic) church. And we who are the church on earth can and should and must be militant precisely because we are already triumphant, because Jesus is triumphant, and we are his Body. "I see the Man of Sorrow and his long troubled road / I see the world on his shoulders and my easy load / And when the saints go marching in / I want to be one of them."

Alleluia, alleluia.

That's what they said

2010-11-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

My favorite quotes from the press conference following the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear (NB I wrote the previous post before I watched the press conference clips):

Jon: “We do television shows for people who like them, and we just hope that people continue to like them so that Comedy Central can continue to sell beer to young people. And as long as they do that, we’re allowed to continue to do our shows.”

Stephen: “For me, one of the greatest surprises was the joy of seeing the audience out there; like, how many people came, and when the Mythbusters [Jon chokes on his drink] got them to all jump at once to create an earthquake, [Jon: “I loved that.”] … I nearly levitated backstage, with joy, at how joyful, and on a certain level, kind of how stupid it is to try and create an earthquake, and that the audience so clearly were It-Getters, they were there to have fun, they were there to play a game along with us, and then we knew, well, let's just go out there, and try to play our game as hard as we can, and hopefully they'll enjoy our intentions.”

Yup.

Here's the piece about "all the hand wringing" over the Rally that got mentioned at the press conference. Again: Yup.

And now, for something a little less sycophantic: I concur with those who find it disconcerting that one of the featured artists at the Rally is someone who has publicly called for the execution of a man for writing a novel that offended his religion and has never retracted or apologized for those statements (although he has denied having made them in the first place). Salman Rushdie's reported responses to the appearance of Yusuf Islam seem exceedingly sane, and it's disappointing that Stewart said nothing more substantive than the standard non-apology apology "I'm sorry if you feel that way." But I dissent from the shrill critics who insist that the solitary misjudgment of including the Artist Formerly Known as Cat Stevens demolishes the credibility of the entire event and everything Stewart does or says. Reasonableness ought to compel us to denounce -- or, better yet, ridicule -- preposterous statements like those Yusuf Islam once made about Rushdie; but it also must refrain refusing even to listen to anyone who associates with anyone who echoes anything that a crazy person says, or discourse is going to collapse pretty durn quick.

What I Saw at the Revolution

2010-10-31T23:50:00.000-07:00

I’m pretty sure I had more fun at the Los Angeles satellite event for the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear than I would have had at the real thing. It was more low key, more manageable in scale – several hundred people rather than a couple hundred thousand – so there were none of the huge-event problems with transportation, finding parking, getting close enough to see, etc.

My cousin and I are the kind of people who don’t like to draw attention to ourselves, are a little uncomfortable interacting with people we don’t know, and don’t like to have our pictures taken – but we brought these things upon ourselves by bringing signs and masks. And honestly, we did get a kick out of the positive attention, even as we felt a bit awkward about it. (Sorry I don't have pictures; not generally liking having my picture taken, I forgot to bring my camera.)

Nathan even gave an interview to an alternative media site while wearing his Sarah Palin mask, and acquitted himself quite well, I thought. After he stumbled over a question or two about the 2012 election, the interviewer switched topics to California’s initiative to legalize recreational marijuana use, regarding which Nathan gave his own true opinion on the matter: that we should reject the ballot measure because it doesn’t go far enough and would entrench in law burdensome regulatory system, standing in the way of true and complete pot legalization. He incorrectly stated the number of the proposition in question, and when the reporter corrected him, he replied, “well, I’ve been known to make a few blunders in my time.”

The highlight of the morning was the Colbert-Stewart duet on "Greatest, Strongest Country in the World," both because sing-alongs are always fun, and because apparently the only city in the western United States that easterners can think of is Los Angeles, which gave those of us actually gathered in L.A. several opportunities to raise a cheer and feel like we were involved in what was happening.

The whole thing was more a large-scale outdoor TV watching party than a political rally – which is not a criticism. The Rally was first and foremost an entertainment event, staged by an entertainment company that is in the business of fostering viewer loyalty so that they can sell our eyeballs to advertisers and make a profit. The satellite rallies around the country could be likened to the parties thrown by die-hard fans of television shows with cult followings to communally experience, say, the series finale. We came together to be entertained, and to participate in some small way in the creation of that entertainment, whether through costumes and signs or chanting and singing. It's not the seed of an epic social movement, but it's good clean fun.

I'm sure there's already been plenty of criticism of the rally both for politicizing a comic event and for making a mockery of a political event, as well as criticism of my entire generation and the one after us for being more enthusiastic about a faux event orchestrated by a basic cable channel than we are about activism that might actually make a difference in the world.

Pshaw.

People put a lot of money and emotional energy into attending rock concerts or professional sporting events, and the communal experience is an important part of those forms of entertainment. We don't hear this kind of fretting about such events being a wasted opportunity or a confusion of public discourse; we accept them as valued parts of our culture.

Improvisational comedy is likewise a worthwhile part of our culture, a source of entertainment and an art form. The best description of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear, including all the grass-roots spin off events across the country that were not sponsored by Comedy Central, is as the largest-scale improv comedy sketch in history. The thousands of people who turned out for the rally were not simply an audience, but players in the drama.

One of the fundamental principles of improv is simply expressed as "yes, and." "Yes, and" means that you must never reject an idea or an action contributed by your acting partners, no matter how ridiculous it is or how contrary it runs to the direction of the scene as you are imagining it in your own mind. Rather than saying no, you must say "yes, and" -- accept the contribution, and add to it to move the scene forward. To have a successful game, each participant must cede control and work together by practicing radical acceptance.

So if you plan a rally as a form of political satire and also as a venue for a comedy and music performance, and the pundits that provide most of the fodder for your satire interpret it as a cynical plan to "activate the youth," you take that and run with it. If people like Arianna Huffington and Oprah Winfrey and the President of the United States interpret it as a sincere call for a new era of social discourse, you accept that, too. You don't waste your breath trying to tell people that's not what you meant, or that they don't get it, or that they're not welcome at your rally if they don't sign on to your exact vision of what "sanity" (and/or "fear") is -- you say, "yes, and" and welcome it all.

I admit I had a little trouble applying this principle at the L.A. rally when, moments after Stewart issued a stirring and sincere call for civility and tolerance of people whose viewpoints are different from one's own, the local speakers took the stage and launched into a series of diatribes poorly disguised as comedy routines that assumed that the entire audience was completely on board with a progressive political agenda and displayed open hostility to religious faith of any kind. (This was not true of the entire local line-up -- Dylan Brody in particular was a shining exception to the rule -- but it was the character of the majority of the short, live performances that followed the feed from D.C.) It was disheartening to watch so many of the official participants of the event who didn't seem to get its basic premise.

But the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear is big enough to accommodate a range of visions of what constitutes sanity and/or fear. And when I look through the pictures of signs from the various rallys around the country, I feel reassured that the great mass of participants did in fact get it -- even if we "got it" in slightly different ways. Moreover, the fact that the belligerent blowhards don't get the joke is itself part of the joke. I may be exasperated by the way some of the speakers expressed themselves, but it's easier to accept even that when it's wrapped in a context of civility and cooperation.

Books like Sam Wells' Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics or Patricia Ryan Madson's Improv Wisdom (second item in the linked post) articulate how the principles of improv comedy have wisdom and utility beyond the comedy club stage. I believe the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear was Important, not because it transcended comedy and became a real political movement, but because Improv is itself a force for good.

7 Quick Takes

2010-10-28T23:05:00.000-07:00

-1-

I have nothing against the use of vending machine technology by libraries to expand their services in an economical way. But the headline on this WSJ article is just so, SO WRONG! (And I'm not just saying that because I'm about to start training to be a librarian.)

People will always need librarians. And they will always need libraries.

-2-

Only one day left until the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. I can't make it to the main event in D.C., but L.A.'s MacArthur Park is totally doable. I still have to make my protest sign and figure out what to wear, what to take with me, how to get there, and how early I'll need to leave to get there by 9 a.m. Better get cracking.

-3-

Back in May I had the epiphany that I do not have to keep books just because they were on the reading list for the prelim exams I am never going to take. Today I finally got around to starting to purge the theology books I never intend to read again. It felt good.

-4-

Back in May, when I realized I didn't need to own books that are important to the career I'm no long pursuing, I cancelled my order for a complete set of the Church Dogmatics. My friends who did not cancel their orders began taking delivery on the books this week. Some of them are doing little happy dances. I am happy for them. I am also happy not to be trying to clear space on my overloaded bookshelves for 14 volumes of Barth.

-5-

I really need to stop learning about conferences that I want to attend. I doubt it's realistic for me to get to two conferences in California, two in Chicago, and one in Puerto Rico within in the next year. But I'm going to do my darndest to get to three, or maybe even four, of these.

-6-

Absolutely random dinner table conversation: My grandfather does not approve of Taylor Swift's eyebrow plucking regimen.

-7-

The pineapple guavas, a.k.a. feijoas, are ripe. I don't know where they came from -- last year we had a very weak harvest, and all summer the tree didn't seem to have much fruit on it, but these days, every time I go out there, I get two buckets full. I've been making fruit leather, and may try some wine.

For other quick takes, see Jennifer's blog, Conversion Diary.

Save Democracy. Read to a Child.

2010-10-19T15:44:00.000-07:00

That's going on the sign I'll be carrying when I attend the L.A. satellite event for the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in a week and a half. I've decided I like it better than my previous top choice: "Obey the Pirate Squirrel, or the Terrorists Win" (which may yet end up on the reverse side of my sign).

Here is my perfectly reasonable train of thought that links reading to children with restoring hope for the future of our society:

My friends who teach college freshmen tell me that one of their greatest challenges is getting students to engage with texts rather than simply regurgitate them. As I was rhapsodizing about reading aloud in my last post, I couldn't help thinking that the advanced literacy modeling that is a natural part of such reading must be an invaluable preparation for this fundamental competency of a liberal arts education.

This competency, in turn, is a basic necessity for civil public discourse, which is so lacking in our current media environment. The inability to understand the critical difference between engaging and regurgitating a text is evident in absurd aspersions against two of my almae matres published in the right-wing media in the last year. (If anyone knows of an example of someone making a similar claim about Duke and/or SJSU, please let me know; I'd love to have a complete set.)

Sandy Rios: Wheaton College promotes violent revolution and the destruction of capitalism because students in the education department sometimes read theorists like Paulo Freire and Bill Ayers.
The American Spectator: Yale Divinity School teaches witchcraft because it has, at some point in time, offered an elective on the history of witchcraft and witch hunts in North America.

These accusations are so fundamentally ridiculous that it saddens me that top officials at both schools felt the need to offer responses instead of simply dismissing the charges for the nonsense they are. But that is the state of public reasoning in our world today.

The funny thing is that Jeffrey Lord of the American Spectator, despite his transparent failure to grasp how higher education works, nevertheless stumbled upon a surprising truth. See, I wasn't supposed to tell you this, but since the secret is out and they are going to have to redo all the Muggle-repelling charms anyway, I suppose I can admit it: Yale Divinity School (and not, as many have supposed, the Salem Witches Institute) is the North American counterpart to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

The crucial evidence of this is found in one of the early descriptions of Hogwarts on page 98 of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone:

There were a hundred and forty-two staircases at Hogwarts: wide, sweeping ones; narrow, rickety ones; some that led somewhere different on a Friday; some with a vanishing step halfway up that you had to remember to jump. Then there were doors that wouldn't open unless you asked politely, or tickled them in exactly the right place, and doors that weren't really doors at all, but solid walls just pretending. It was also very hard to remember where anything was, because it all seemed to move around a lot.

I worked on campus at YDS during the summers of 2001 and 2002, the height of a comprehensive renovation project transforming the entire campus. In an effort to keep all essential facilities accessible even as the remodeling was underway, the construction crew would sometimes reroute corridors and stairwells, such that I never knew when I showed up to work whether the path I had been taking to the library archives for the last several weeks would still be open or not. I almost literally encountered all of the permutations highlighted in bold type above. (Okay, I think it was a Monday rather than a Friday that the stairs led somewhere different. Close enough.)

Lord simply didn't dig deep enough. Offering students a chance to learn about the social history of witch scares and witch hunts in our country is innocuous. Buildings with a mind of their own, however...

An added bonus of the lifetime love of stories fostered by those childhood read alouds: when I did find myself working in a building with a mind of its own, I had the imaginative resources to view it as a source of delight rather than frustration.

On reading aloud

2010-10-18T22:34:00.000-07:00

Katharine Eastvold offers a spot-on analysis of the recent NYT article on the decline and fall of the picture book market. Her observations and hunches about the economics, art, and developmental psychology of picture books are worth reading.

I was particularly struck by her suggestion that the decline of picture books reflects a broader decline in the practice of parents reading to their children -- she points out that classic picture books can demonstrate rather advanced sentence structure and vocabulary even as they have relatively few total words; they are designed to be read TO, rather than BY, young children. I had never made that connection, but I don't doubt that it's true.

Considering the subject of reading to children more broadly than as applies to picture books, I would be dumbstruck if someone offered me evidence that it is not in decline. I suspect that the growing necessity of two-parent incomes to maintain the lifestyles to which we have become accustomed and the ubiquity of communication technologies could not but cut into the practice of reading aloud, even among families that value the practice.

Even in my own childhood -- I recall a conversation with some of my high school peers -- my fellow high-achievers, which is to say, kids from the kinds of families where you would expect that they had been read to as they were growing up -- in which I was surprised to learn that I was the only one whose parents had continued to read to me after I had reached the point of being able to read for myself. (They, in turn, seemed surprised to even hear of such a novel practice -- once a kid can, and does, read for themself, why would a parent bother?)

And that was before we had the world wide web in every household and DVD players in every minivan.

At the end of the American audiobook production of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince there is a blurb promoting the use of recorded audiobooks as a substitute for reading to the children in our lives, since "few of us have all the time we would like" for such activity. It includes the claim: "Listening to an audiobook has the same educational value as it would if someone were doing the reading in person." Every time I hear that, I have to resist the impulse to talk back to the invisible narrator and demand scientific evidence for this claim, since it is far from obvious to me that this would be the case.

Indeed, the irrationality of my impulse to talk back to the audiobook narrator is basic evidence of the inferiority of the audiobook experience to hearing a book read aloud by a live reader: there is no possibility of engaging with the narrator. You can't ask or answer questions. At best, you can go back and listen again to a section that was particularly puzzling or moving, but even that is more trouble with a recording than with a real person.

Katharine notes that there is more to the educational experience of reading (or being read) a picture book than absorbing the literal meaning of the words on the page -- interpreting the artwork is an integral part of the process. Likewise with read-alouds that lack illustrations; when adults read to children, they can guide and model engagement with the text that goes beyond following the words on the page. This doesn't require long conversations or nitpicking dissection of each reading -- even occasional brief comments on the reading can serve this purpose in a natural way.

I recently began studying Spanish. So far I am relying almost entirely on computer-based tools, which are great for getting a handle on grammatical basics and a core functional vocabulary. But it is already very clear to me that it would be impossible to become fluent in a second language without communicating with actual human beings. Even the most sophisticated language-study software could not respond to my attempts to construct meaningful statements in a foreign language with the kind of feedback a learner needs: first and foremost, whether I have successfully communicated my intention; and secondarily, whether the way in which I did so is technically correct (and if not, why).

To become fully literate in our first language, we need similar feedback to that required for becoming fluent in a second language. Audiobooks and other mechanized forms of storytelling just can't provide that, but real people can do it without hardly trying.

And that's not even taking into account the attention differential between listening to a recording and listening to a real person. When my friend Sarah recounted with an air of astonishment how her younger son sat with rapt attention listening to the opening chapter of Little House in the Big Woods, she was certainly describing the power of a good story. But I can't imagine that the story would have held such sway if she (or someone else close to Theo) had not been the one reading it to him. We don't attend to devices the way we attend to people, because we don't have relationships with devices.

(As an aside: I suspect that the odd behavior some of my teaching friends observe in their classrooms is a symptom of a disorder whereby students fail to recognize that their instructor is not an image on a screen, but an actual flesh-and-blood human being who is in the same room with them and can see what they are doing.)

Now don't get me wrong: I love audiobooks. They are one of the great pleasures of my adult life, and I remain deeply grateful for the way that my imagination was shaped by a few select recordings that I listened to ad nauseam when I was a child. If the point of the blurb on my audiobook was to suggest that recordings are a worthwhile supplement to adults reading to children, then Yes! Absolutely! But to claim that audiobooks are the equivalent of reading aloud is simply absurd. In fact, even if someone were to present me with the evidence I keep on demanding from the relentlessly unresponsive recording of Jim Dale's voice, my immediate reaction would be not to accept it, but to look for flaws in the study's design.

I frequently read with concern, if not alarm, reports of the various experiences the current generation of children are missing out on: from opportunities to foster self-reliance to experiences of nature to instruction in penmanship. I have no statistics on the decline of reading aloud, but if my (and Katharine's) hunch on this is true, it is at least as worthy of dismay as these other hand-wringing-inducing trends. Would that every child had at least one grown up in their life who read to them, and kept reading to them, and then read to them some more after that.

Unsolicited advice for the young seminarian

2010-10-14T01:19:00.000-07:00

Melissa, the always-insightful proprietor of one of my favorite blogs, has evidently had some highly irritating encounters with some of the arrogant young punks among her classmates, prompting her to offer seven points of advice to "You 23-year old, straight-from-undergrad, ain’t never known nothin’ but school and your mama MDiv student at Princeton Seminary."

I was once just such a student (not at Princeton, but at a comparable school, and I hope I wasn't too much of an arrogant punk, but I was certainly young and never knew nothin' but school and my mama). Now I am -- or will soon be -- Melissa's counterpart -- a student returning for a second Master's degree,* older and wiser-enough to know better than to call myself wise, still pursuing the elusive target of becoming whatever it is that I am going to be when I grow up, while also getting used to the idea that I already am who I am going be when I grow up.

So what would I say now to my younger self and her peers, just starting seminary or divinity school more-or-less straight out of college, from the safe vantage point of not having to actually interact with any of them?

1. Relax -- you don't have to have it all figured out by the time you graduate.  You are probably in a big hurry to get a start on "real life," while also being somewhat afraid of it -- which may be part of the reason you're in grad school. (Not that I blame you. I don't envy anyone trying to find their first real job -- or any job -- in this economy.) Three more years of schooling feels like an eternity before you can get on to the next thing you're going to do, but at the same time, you may feel like you're already behind.

Take a deep breath. It's going to be okay.

Your first sermon doesn't have to be an oratorical masterpiece. You don't have to have the perfect words of solace and wisdom the first -- or the thousandth -- time you try to offer comfort to someone in distress. You aren't hopelessly behind the curve because you haven't yet read the book that everyone else seems to know (or rather, you are hopelessly behind, in the sense that you'll never get around to reading all the books you could read, but we are all hopelessly behind, even your professors, and somehow we all still manage).

You got to where you are now be being a striver, and that's good, to an extent. But keep that perfectionism up in ministry or the academy or wherever you're going next, and it's going to be the death of you. Give yourself, and those around you, a break. You'll have all the time you need to get to where you need to go.

2. You may not get into that Ph.D. program.  If you do win the academic lottery and get into a good Ph.D. program, you have a very good chance of not completing the degree. (Ahem.) If you do complete the degree, you have a very good chance of not ever getting a tenure-track job at a college, university, or seminary.

You don't necessarily need to know right now what your plan B is going to be, but beware of putting all your eggs in the doctoral basket. If ministry is your plan B (and it is perfectly okay for ministry to be a plan B, although if you find yourself thinking of it as a last resort, you might not be cut out for it), take that preparation as seriously as that for your desired academic career. If you don't have any idea what your plan B is, read "So What Are You Going to Do with That?"

3. If you think you want to get married someday and haven't done much dating yet, now would be a really good time to start.  It's easy to think you'll have time for fun or frivolous stuff like dating once you're done with school, but (1) dating isn't frivolous, and (2) life never gets less busy. Moreover, finding people to date when you're a pastor is really tricky. You think it's tough to find a date now? Try finding one when you're living in a town with a population under 10,000 where just about everyone you know thinks of you as a spiritual authority figure and is ethically off-limits. So open your eyes, put down the books, and get out there.

This advice is not intended for those who have attached themselves to an almost uninterrupted string of romantic partners since the age of 14 or so -- for you, this might be a very good time to take a break from dating.

This advice is also not intended to rub salt in the wounds of those who have been seeking a partner without much success. If you need to step back from the pursuit for a while and concentrate on your studies, that's a legitimate choice. It's better to be comfortable with your singleness than desperate for a partner.

If you just really haven't given much thought to dating, though, realize that it doesn't usually just happen like a bolt out of the blue. Go to social events, meet people, allow (encourage!) your friends to set you up, accept invitations, ask someone out, don't be afraid that you don't have the time or emotional energy: this is worth doing.

Full disclosure: I dated more in seminary than in the entire rest of my life combined, which still amounts to hardly at all. My dating track record in seminary is distinctly underwhelming: a few first dates who never called again and one brief and disastrous relationship. But you know what? I'm glad I did it. Even the parts I wish I had handled differently, I learned about myself and how to relate to others. See #1 above: I didn't have it all figured out. And that's okay.

4. Learn to master, rather than be mastered by, your technology.  I don't quite get how your minds work -- it seems like you're always on, always reachable, always plugged in. It may be much harder for you than for previous generations to read difficult texts and contemplate complex ideas. Learn to disconnect from the grid enough to connect to great ideas and real human beings.

5. Pray with other people.  Seminary can wreck havoc on your spiritual life if you let it. Private prayer can become more difficult when you spend most of your time thinking and talking about God and/or when your internship has you constantly leading other people in prayer and worship. So, don't limit your prayer life to private prayer. Go to chapel religiously. Find a prayer partner or group. This is the most important piece of advice I can offer you. My prayer group was my lifeline -- particularly in the aftermath of the brief and disastrous dating relationship mentioned above. If you can find friends like the praying friends I found, you will be blessed indeed.

6. Be kind. Particularly to those who seem to think you're just another arrogant young punk. You may find they have a lot to teach you.

*I guess maybe I haven't mentioned here yet that I'm going back to school -- I announced it on facebook, but I forget that not everyone who can see this blog is my facebook friend. So: I'm going back to school. And I'm quite happy about it. More on that another time.

Harry Potter and the Mediocre Film Adaptations

2010-10-06T21:18:00.000-07:00

I'm just coming up for air after roughly three and a half weeks immersed in a complete re-read of the entire Harry Potter saga -- which, for those keeping score at home, works out to approximately 35 hours of Harry per week, if you include the time I spent re-viewing movies five and six. With regard to that figure, I have just two things to say:

I actually did get some other things done in the last three weeks. Honestly. Some things...
I never claimed to have a life.

So obviously I either started my re-read too soon or proceeded through the books too quickly, since there's still more than a month left before the next movie comes out. But I'm not too fussed about it, because I've realized that the chances of me actually liking the movie are next to zilch. I will of course go to see it anyway (although perhaps not at the midnight opening), out of curiosity over the choices the makers made in translating the story.

See, as I was re-reading the sixth of the books (HBP to those in the know), it dawned on me that the forthcoming movie is number seven, and yet I had no recollection of having watched movie number six. I racked my brain and dredged up a memory of driving to the theater to watch the movie, and of driving home from the theater after the movie, but nothing about the movie itself. Further mental effort yielded a fuzzy image of Jim Broadbent as Horace Slughorn, but still nothing of the action of the movie. The scenes I thought I recalled from the movie actually all came from the previous installment, Order of the Phoenix (OotP).

I was puzzled at this lacuna in my memory, so of course I watched the movie again, and promptly discovered why I had entirely forgotten it: It is eminently forgettable. The adaptation of the story manages at once to be so slavishly bound to the book that it fails to hold together as a work in its own right, and yet at the same time introduces departures and abridgments that at best fail to advance the storyline and at worst are incoherent. Much of the dialog is painfully wooden. In sum, I think, the rich imaginary picture that I had of this story from multiple readings of the book simply overwrote the enfeebled version that the movie offered, obliterating the latter from my memory as surely as Gilderoy Lockhart's self-important shenanigans on the wrong end of a malfunctioning wand.

It turns out, the only movie adaptation of the Harry Potter books that I thought was any good was the fifth one, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, which also happens (not coincidentally, I'm afraid) to be the only one not adapted for screen by Steve Kloves. Kloves seems to be too fearful of the ire of the book's legion of fans to actually write a movie out of his source material. At least Michael Goldenberg, writer for OotP, managed to give the story a thematic unity and a comprehensible through-line that enable the movie to stand on its own -- all the more remarkable an accomplishment seeing that the book version of OotP doesn't really stand on its own. (I love the whole HP canon, but I think the only installments that work as stories in their own right are the first three books -- parts 4-7 really only work as steps in the broader seven-part story arch.)

So, alas, I expect I am bound to be disappointed by the final two movies in the series. But, loyal fan that I am, I will continue to make JKR and Warner Bros richer by going to see them nonetheless. Besides, I can't really complain about an excuse to re-read the books. (Note to self: you can never again make fun, even in your own head, of your friends who re-read The Lord of the Rings on an annual basis.)

Speaking of adaptations of classic seven-part children's fantasies laden with Christian symbolism and written by British authors, this is one movie I genuinely am looking forward to seeing this season. Given that both the source material and fan expectations are of a more manageable scale than the HP franchise, I suspect that these filmmakers will have an easier time making something worth seeing.

Quick takes on the cancellation(?) of the Qur'an burning in Florida

2010-09-09T19:04:00.000-07:00

Regarding the sensational plans of the obscure Dove World Outreach Center to burn Qur'ans this weekend, my friend Sarah said it best: "[I have] many pressing things to do and feel annoyed that [I] might reasonably be expected to say something in opposition to the incendiary plans of a very, very small group of [my] co-religionists. Which is exactly how [I] suppose millions of Muslims have felt for years."

The more religious and political leaders called upon Pastor Terry Jones to renounce his plans, the more I expected him to dig in his heels -- the sort of people who burn other people's holy books in protest tend to be the sort of people who imagine themselves to be a persecuted minority with a spiritual obligation to stand up for TRUTH in the face of mighty opposition. So I did a double-take when I read the headline this afternoon announcing that the thing was off.

Upon reading past the headline, some reactions.

(1) Hooray! While part of me is a little nervous that he's going to come back tomorrow and say "Psych!", the fact that the book burning is apparently off is good news. ***EDIT: In the time it took me to write this, Jones has apparently retracted the cancellation, calling the event "suspended" instead.***

(2) This stuff Terry Jones is saying about brokering an agreement to get the Park51 project (erroneously described as the "Ground Zero Mosque") cancelled or relocated is nonsense.

(3) If Jones feels the need to hide behind a nonsensical claim to have brokered an agreement to move Park51 in order to save face as he backs out of his hideous plan to burn Qur'ans, I really don't have a problem with that. I admire Imam Muhammad Musri's willingness to even speak with Jones and his ability listen to Jones in a way that made him feel like his concerns were taken seriously. (As far as Musri and Jones give different accounts of the conclusions of their conversations, I'm more inclined to believe Musri.)

(4) I really hope that Jones decides to quietly disappear, even once he realizes that the Park51 project is going forward.

(5) Even if Jones decides to proceed with a Qur'an burning at a later date, it is a good thing that it is cancelled now. The anniversary of the 9/11 attacks makes the symbolic actions all the more inflammatory (sorry about the pun). Plus, the news media's chronically short attention span makes it possible that, if he tries this stunt again in the future, it will get the attention it deserves, i.e., none.

(6) It is unfortunate that Jones seems to believe that he needed a sign from God to justify cancelling the event. This is a symptom of a way of thinking that is all too common in evangelical Christendom, whereby we abdicate our own moral judgment in favor of what we deem -- often on highly questionable grounds -- to be direct instruction from the divine. Would that Jones had been able to see, and say, "upon further reflection, abundant wise counsel, and much prayer, we have concluded that our previously announced plans to burn copies of the Qur'an would not advance the Gospel to which we are devoted. We have changed our minds." Alas, "we have changed our minds" are some of the most difficult words in the English language.

(7) Nevertheless, since Jones evidently did need a sign from God to justify his change of mind, I am glad he was able to conjure one that he finds acceptable. The original plan to burn Qur'ans was based on ignorance and bad theology. The decision NOT to burn Qur'ans, it appears, was also based on ignorance and bad theology. The key difference is that the original plan was wrong. I am devoted to the unity of orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right behavior), but in practice, I think 1 for 2 is a vast improvement on 0 for 2.

Public Service Math for Harry Potter Nerds

2010-09-07T20:10:00.000-07:00

The movie Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part One opens in 72 days.

The complete series of Harry Potter novels on audiobook (American edition) runs approximately 116 hours, 20 minutes (4.85 days).

If you are the kind of insanely hard-core Harry Potter fan who plans to attend a midnight screening of the movie on November 19 and plans to re-listen to the entire seven book series in anticipation of the movie release, here is when you need to start listening based on how many hours per week you expect to be able to devote to the audiobooks:

20 hrs/week: October 8.
15 hrs/week: September 25.
10 hrs/week: August 29. (You're already behind! But don't worry; you can catch up!)

Notes:

1) Twenty hours a week sounds like a lot, but it's totally do-able if you combine listening with routine household tasks and errands and you don't watch a lot of TV. (It also helps if you don't really have a life.)

2) These dates assume you own your own complete set of the audiobooks. If you have to check them out from your local library, allow extra time, especially as the date approaches, since the release of movie versions of popular YA novels tends to cause a run on the library copies of said books. In fact, if you're relying on library copies, it may be advisable to listen in reverse order and start with book seven now -- it's probably available this week, but by early November the waiting list for that volume in particular may extend into 2011.

3) Yes, I know this level of devotion to a popular children's series is absurd.

If it's Monday, it must be a funeral

2010-09-04T16:04:00.000-07:00

This will be the first Monday in three weeks that we haven't gone to a funeral at my grandparents' old church.

Two weeks ago we went to a service for Chester Black, a man whose children had grown up with my mother and her siblings. His widow Ruby had left a message on the answering machine, so we went to show our support to her. Several generations sat on the front row while Chester's grandson preached a tear-punctuated homily and his granddaughter-in-law (with some help from other relatives) tried to keep infant twins and a toddler quiet enough that they could remain in the service as much as possible, slipping out and back in to the sparsely populated sanctuary as her son's attention span demanded. GrandDad found it somewhat distracting to have small children moving about on the edge of his field of vision, but their presence seemed to me to be a fitting acknowledgement of what Chester and Ruby clearly considered their greatest legacy: their children (including a son who had predeceased Chester by several decades), grandchildren, and great grandchildren.

Last week we went to a service for Rolland Rork, a 99-year-old widower who had no children of his own. A relative had noticed the obituary in the local paper and called to make sure we knew, so we went to pay our respects, and to contribute to what we supposed would be a rather small congregation of mourners. The obituary named two surviving siblings, but both lived thousands of miles away -- would they be able to attend? Who comes to mourn for a man with no children, whose wife has been gone for a decade, who has outlived most of his peers?

Rolland and his wife, Martha, had invited one of my aunts and another young woman from their church to accompany them on their annual summer trip to Belgium some forty years ago. Sharon and Marilyn were the oldest daughters of the two largest families in the congregation. Both families were comfortably middle-class, but with five and four younger siblings, respectively, each girl had certainly by then gotten used to a bit of scrimping and foregoing some of the opportunities that might have been available to their peers with greater means or smaller families. The Rorks invited them to travel with them as their own daughters, escorting them around Europe for a memorable six weeks.

Neither woman was able to attend the funeral -- both were busy with obligations to the next generation: Sharon caring for her newborn granddaughter; Marilyn, a teacher, unwilling to call in a substitute during the critical first week of class. I'm sure Rolland would have approved.

Again and again at the funeral I heard similar stories of how Rolland and Martha had invested in the lives of other peoples' children, from a summer job that gave rise to a lasting connection to a kind word outside a Sunday School classroom week after week. A niece whom I met in the receiving line (several were there, as well as Rolland's sister and brother-in-law from Georgia) described how the Rorks had been like second parents to her when she was growing up. The collected mourners indeed formed a meager group, but it was evident that Rolland's memory extended beyond that small assembly. He had no children who were biologically or legally his, but he was not therefore without a heritage and a legacy. It was deeply inspiring to me to hear the testimony of how this childless couple had participated in the parenting of several generations of the young people in their church. Rolland did not have a grandson to preach at his funeral, but his life produced an eloquent sermon nonetheless.

Manual Competence

2010-08-08T00:16:00.000-07:00

The grass growing along the walkways framing the back lawn is getting kind of long.

There's an edger attachment that we could use with GrandDad's lawnmower, but it's one of those ones that uses a plastic cord to cut the plants, and it can't really stand up to the tough St. Augustine grass that marks this yard.

There's a bulky old metal edger with a gasoline engine that my mother remembers from when she was a little girl. It's got a nice sturdy blade, but the engine doesn't start properly. GrandDad told me what he thinks is wrong with it, but I didn't really understand.

My ideas for solving this situation: (1) Hire someone to come trim the edges of the lawn -- someone who will bring his own edger. Barring that, (2) Buy a whole new edger. I remind GrandDad that he has a gift card to Sears burning a hole in his pocket, and I'd be happy to drive him there whenever he'd like to go.

GrandDad's idea for solving this situation: Remove the gasoline engine from the ancient metal edger and replace it with an electric motor.

He has several electric motors lying around. Because he saves motors. Because you never know when they might come in handy some day. The one he selected as the most suitable match came from a refrigerator.

Turns out, swapping out a gas engine for an electric motor that you just happened to have lying around is a fairly involved process. Since the new motor was in no way engineered to fit the new application, there are several little adjustments that must be made for it to work in its new home. So it's an intellectual puzzle to figure out how to this, with the least unnecessary work, using tools and supplies on hand as far as possible.

I've been sought out for my skills as a lifter of moderately heavy objects onto the workbench at several points in the process. At dinner each evening, I get the update on the day's progress. I listen carefully and nod intently, but I only have a very general idea of what he's talking about. Suffice to say that I wouldn't have clue one how to replace an engine on a small household appliance.

But it's an interesting challenge for an electrical engineer. He consulted some of his college textbooks (from the late 1930s) to get back up to speed on some of the details of wiring small motors. He experimented with a fix that didn't work, then figured out why it didn't work, then came up with an alternative solution to the problem.

This morning he asked me about the provenance of a metal tube he had found, to make sure it was okay to cannibalize it for a part he needed to attach the new old motor to the edger. I told him to help himself: It used to be the handle of cheap household dustmop that I had purchased a year or two ago, which broke on practically my first attempt at using it. After a failed attempt at repair with superglue and duct tape, I had thrown the whole thing in the trash bin, whence GrandDad had salvaged the handle, because, presumably, it might come in handy someday.

Today he finished the wiring job on the new old motor. He used a power cord from an old microwave.

This afternoon I started listening to the audio edition of Shop Class as Soul Craft by Matthew Crawford. I downloaded the WMA files from my public library website over a security-enabled home wireless network, the workings of which are even more a mystery to me than those of an internal combustion engine. Crawford makes an extended case for the intellectual satisfaction of skilled manual work and the psychological value of being the master of one's own stuff, but I don't need a book to tell me that. I just need to look down the hallway to the workshop in our garage.

Fiddling Accompli

2010-07-31T15:36:00.000-07:00

Good news! I survived my template transition with no pulling out of my hair! This is all the more remarkable since tweaking my new template to my own specs involved some editing in CSS, and I have NO IDEA what I'm doing when I work with CSS. So it could have been a complete fiasco.

There are still a few things that I haven't worked out to my own ultimate satisfaction. (Like those tabs up at the top of the page that say "About" and "Archives"? I haven't figured out how to get them to, you know, work.) But I have to tell myself, it's a freaking personal blog. With a readership of, like, five people, four of whom are my immediate relatives. It does not have to be perfect.

And anyway, isn't it so much prettier than before? It makes me smile. So, thank you: BloggerStyles, for hosting the template for free, Smashing Magazine, for publishing the theme in the first place, and Gosublogger, for translating it for Blogger. I have these grand ambitions of someday designing my entire blog template from scratch, but in the multi-year meantime, this is a nice change of scenery.

Warning!!!

2010-07-31T13:23:00.000-07:00

Fiddling with blog template commencing immediately. Please be prepared for wonky layout, missing sidebars, broken links, and an increasingly cranky blog proprietor. Your patience is appreciated.

Man Church

2010-07-31T12:51:00.000-07:00

CCJ posted a link to this on Facebook, where I proceeded to offer such long-winded analysis in the comment thread that it seemed good to me to move my musings to a more suitable venue, i.e., here, where I can be as long-winded as I want to be.

FINE PRINT: First, a couple of caveats.

(1) I am responding to this particular instantiation of "Man Church," not the entire phenomenon of hyper-masculinized Christianity. Amid ministries offering Cage Fighting for Christ, Cornerstone's hard-sell of coffee and donuts sounds positively tame. I admit that alarms go off for me when I encounter ministries that emphasize manhood as their organizing theme, but I refuse to dismiss the particular ministries out of hand (okay; maybe the cage fighters).

(2) That said, I know very little about this particular instantiation of "Man Church" -- I have no first-hand knowledge of Cornerstone's men's ministry, other than what appears on their website. So what follows is based on the copy from the website linked above, coupled with a bunch of assumptions based on the history of American evangelicalism and my own lifetime experience in that movement. I could be totally wrong about what actually goes on in the meetings of "Man Church" or in the minds of its leaders. But since a website is the public face of a church, I think it's a legitimate basis for evaluating the message a congregation sends to the community/world before anyone ever walks through the door.

Now then, about Man Church a la Cornerstone Chandler:

First Observation: This seems like nothing so much as the application of a form of contemporary trendy advertising copy to a thoroughly conventional ministry. There's a set of highly restrictive stereotypes about what "real men" want/like/do, which I encounter almost exclusively in commercials. (I suppose they probably also show up in certain TV shows/websites/magazines, which I never watch/surf/read, because I am so not their target audience. And also I don't get cable.) Whoever wrote the description for this ministry cribbed liberally from the kind of language I usually see being used to sell deodorant and hamburger.

The line about "Man Church" being "not like any other church you have seen" is a particularly egregious bit of marketing hyperbole. There are a lot of churches that host early-morning men's groups. They generally don't have any singing, women don't attend, and "time to talk with other guys" is the order of the day. Coffee and donuts abound. I take it that any sermon at all is not a conventional feature of such a gathering, although if a leader offers a devotional reflection or leads a Bible study, that could certainly be described as a "short sermon." In other words, far from being "not like any other church you have seen," this is exactly like what is happening at thousands of other churches around the country. The only difference is that they've slapped on a cute name, "Man Church," instead of a more conventional label like "Men's Fellowship Breakfast."

It's almost as if someone read an article or book about what men want in a church service and thought, Hey! That sounds a lot like our Thursday morning breakfast group! We don't want to repackage our regular weekend worship service to fit this narrow vision of what supposedly attracts men (since, after all, we men who are leaders of the church like expressive worship music and preaching longish sermons), but if we relabel our Thursday group as church for men, maybe we can have it both ways!

(Reminder: I have no idea what regular weekend worship is like at this church.)

Second Observation: The application of shallow and jokey stereotypes about what constitutes "real manhood" to a description of a men's ministry is a symptom of the upheaval of gender roles in society at large.

Eighty years ago, when the first Christian Business Men's Committee was created, or even forty years ago, when the majority of American women still did not work outside the home, the ministry needs and opportunities of American families were different than they are today. Gail Collins' book When Everything Changed chronicles just how rapid and radical was the transformation that created the cultural environment women of my generation take for granted.

In, say, the 1950s, SAHMs were a major labor pool for the work of the church, but men who worked long hours as the sole breadwinners for their families had limited time for Christian activities beyond Sunday morning church attendance. In this context, an early-morning weekday meeting that focused on encouraging men to bring their faith to bear on their work and allowed them to get to the office by 8 a.m. was an ingenious discipleship strategy.

Times have changed. If you were to start an early-morning pre-work discipleship group today and limit it to men because work is a man's world, you would quite rightly be accused of discrimination. Thus, if churches are going to continue having men-only groups, they can't be about men qua business leaders, or they're going to miss out on offering appropriate support to large and growing segments of the adult population -- both women who are in business/professional lines of work, and men who are not.

Which is not to say that all church ministries must be coed. There is certainly a place for gender-specific ministries, and it would be unreasonable to demand a fully articulated theology of gender every time a church announces an event targeted at one gender or the other. And it's a good thing, too, because that's getting harder and harder to do. Cornerstone seems to struggle a bit with what constitutes its vision of Christian manhood: "The topics of discussion will have a definite manly focus - being the best possible husband, father, employee, leader - being a real man." Surely one can be a real man without being a husband, father, employee, and/or leader. But with gender roles in such flux, it's hard to fault the copywriter for throwing out a few of the major roles that may apply to members of this constituency. It's easier to engage in stereotypes (Men don't like to sing. Men have short attention spans. Men like coffee and donuts.) than to describe in positive terms what a group of Christian men have to offer each other in a distinctively male context.

When it comes down to it, my disappointment about the description of "Man Church" offered by Cornerstone Chandler amounts more to rhetoric than to practice. Go ahead and have a group where men meet for fellowship and Bible study -- more power to you. Go ahead and call it "Man Church" if you like; discipleship, discussion, and fellowship are as much a part of the life of the church as our formal worship gatherings. But please beware of describing such a gathering in a way that is demeaning to men, demeaning to women, and consequently demeaning of our life together as brothers and sisters in Christ.

Demeaning to women: In describing a vision of church "the way a man expects it to be done," the copy suggests that there is something wrong, or at least unappealing, about normal worship with its supposedly-feminine features. Worse, it invites disdain for the company of women by suggesting that "the way men want to do church" is with "no women present." This is where Man Church, as described here, fails to be church. I don't actually need to trot out Galatians 3:28, do I? It's one thing to offer ministries that target specific populations within a church, it's another thing to suggest that church would be better if a majority of its members would just go away. Now, I don't imagine for a moment that the leaders of Cornerstone's men's ministries actually mean that -- their website copy has clearly mixed up descriptive content ("no women present") with value ascriptions ("the way a man expects it to be done"). It would be nice if they fixed that so that their public presentation matches the values I presume they hold.

Demeaning to men: The stereotypes evoked in the marketing copy for "Man Church" (short attention spans; preoccupation with donuts) make the typical man sound like Homer Simpson. When I described the description to one of the men in my life, he was disgusted: "They should call it what it is. That's not 'Man Church,' that's children's church."

Worship on the Fourth of July

2010-07-03T12:24:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a sermon, so I'm not going to take the time to write a full post on this fascinating subject. But I would like to solicit your prayers for all pastors and preachers who are preparing for worship tomorrow, especially those who are new to their congregations (which apparently applies to hundreds of Methodist pastors around the country).

It can be very hard to get the balance right between pastoral sensitivity and prophetic proclamation, between expressing appropriate gratitude for the blessings of our society and avoiding the idolatry of blind patriotic boosterism. It's even harder if you don't have an established relationship with the congregation you're addressing.

You can pray for me, too, if you like. My assigned text is Obadiah, which, it turns out, is one of the most rabidly nationalistic texts in the Old Testament. Somehow I've got to find a way to preach that on the Fourth of July, while also connecting it with the communion table (first Sunday of the month, after all) and making it "family friendly," because we don't have a separate children's program during the summer, so everyone over the age of four is going to be in big church.

(To my surprise and delight, I've actually got a preliminary outline that manages to cover most, if not all, of these bases, without straying too far from my set text. This is what I love about preaching -- it forces you to spend enough time with the text that the things you would never notice otherwise finally emerge. Sermon writing is much less about creation than about discovery.)

Anyway. Some pieces I've come across in the last few days about ministering effectively on this national holiday:

Civil Religion: The Liturgical Season is Upon Us at crux probat omnia
Follow-up to the above: July 4: Baby Steps away from Civil Religion
What to do About the 4th? from Duke's Call & Response Blog
A creative call to celebrate interdependence from the Englewood Review of Books
Be Careful What You Worship on July 4 from Out of Ur

Back to the sermon prep. Happy 4th of July, everyone.

Real Absence

2010-06-28T22:34:00.000-07:00

The thing that took the most getting used to, when I moved into my grandparents' house a couple years ago, was how very palpable was the absence of my late grandmother.

I had been here a couple of days after her funeral nine years before; I had sat with my relatives around the kitchen table while we hashed out what would go on her grave marker. I had visited several times in the intervening years, including one trip the express purpose of which was to clean out her sewing room (now my bedroom).

But somehow she didn't seem so irrevocably, completely gone in all of those times I had spent in her house. Perhaps the memory of how active and outgoing she was played a part -- it always seemed like she might just be out visiting friends. Perhaps the presence of my own mother was a buffer. Of course I never forgot that she had died, but that knowledge didn't confront me in a powerful emotional way just by being in her home. I was more likely to get choked up singing "For All The Saints" in a church on the other side of the country than sitting in my grandmother's house.

But then I moved in, and as I got used to life with my grandfather, I discovered: he still misses her, every single day.

Of course. I loved her, but I didn't live with her every day, so her sudden absence from my life was a different thing entirely than it was for the man who had loved and shared his life with her for half a century.

Yesterday was my grandparents' 63rd anniversary. This morning GrandDad heard a radio interview in which the subject spoke of the death of his wife as the worst thing that had ever happened to him. GrandDad is not an especially expressive person, but in our mealtime grace he confessed to God that he had had a "horrible day" with those reminders of his loss. He then thanked God for the years he had shared with his beloved, and expressed his faith that God knows what he's doing, even when it doesn't make sense to us.

I wish I knew the words to make it better, but I suspect they don't exist. There is grace, though, I trust, in being a witness to the deep love that lies beneath such heartache.

More notes for FFW 2012

2010-06-09T14:01:00.000-07:00

Yeah, it's been almost two months since I got back, but I've been meaning to add a couple more notes for next time I go to Calvin College's Festival of Faith and Writing:

1) Bring a highlighter.

(Only because that's my preferred way to mark the sessions I'm considering attending in the program. I'm sure that a pen would have worked every bit as well if my obsessive tendency hadn't chosen that moment to manifest itself.)

2) Do not try to knit lace.

Or, more to the point, do not try to teach yourself to knit lace.

I imagine that if you knew what you were doing, and the lace pattern was highly repetitive, it would be no problem. But I made the mistake of supposing that because the lace pattern I was working with was relatively simple, it would be suitable for keeping my fingers busy while listening all day to various presenters.

Turns out, even a simple pattern that involves counting the stitches between repeats is remarkably easy to mess up while you're paying attention to something else. I had to rip out and redo the first row of diamonds on the cute little dress I was working on TWICE. Ah, me.

I did eventually finish, though. See?

The incredibly clever and well-described pattern is available here to download at a very reasonable price.

I was surprised not to see more people knitting at the conference -- in my mind, a conference is a prime knitting opportunity. There are some situations were knitting in public is just not appropriate (job interviews, most church services, etc.), but when I'm anticipating being in a situation where I'll be part of a large group of people listening to someone talk, I bring yarn and needles. And I know there's a significant overlap between literary types and knitting types, so I was expecting to see at least a few other knitters. I didn't.

I do know there was at least one other knitter present (also working with pink yarn, probably in the same session I was attending), because Joshilyn Jackson mentioned it on her blog after the fact.

Oh my, friends, Jackson was HILARIOUS. I must read her books.

Thoughts for a beginning biblio-blogger

2010-06-07T14:36:00.000-07:00

A brilliant young librarian of my acquaintance is considering taking up biblioblogging (by which I mean blogging about books, not necessarily blogging about The Book, which is how many of my Bible Scholar friends use that term), which would be a swell thing. She did not ask for advice, but that is not going to keep me from dispensing it (free, and worth every penny).

Get Yourself an Amazon Associates Account

I suggest this more for the convenience of linking than for the minuscule kickback you're eligible for if anyone buys from a link through your site -- I've earned a whopping 4 cents in three years of having an account, since even I forget to click through my own link onto Amazon's site when making purchases. The nifty little Amazon Associate banner on the top of your Amazon page makes it super easy to stick a link and cover shot of whatever book you want to discuss in your posts, and rumor has it that Blogger's rolling out integration options that I don't understand yet.

Turn On Comment Moderation

When you're just starting out blogging, it can be a little scary to open yourself up for comments, particularly if you really just want to camp out in your own little corner of the internet, but are fully aware that anyone and everyone could read your blog and have an opinion about it. But if you turn off comments altogether, you miss out on a lot of the fun of blogging. Comment moderation is a kind of middle ground -- you get e-mails about each comment that comes through, and you can decide on a case-by-case basis whether you want to let them be published or not. Once you get used to the normal flow of comment traffic, you may decide you're comfortable opening up the comment stream a little more. (You can always go back and delete comments you don't like, at any time, for any reason. It's your blog, so don't feel bad about practicing all the censorship you want.)

Unless you blog about something particularly controversial and get picked up by people who have Google Alerts set for all their pet issues, or actively cultivate commenters by going around and commenting on other blogger's sites, your comment traffic is liable to stay quite light. My experience has been that the overwhelming majority of my comments have been from people I know personally, very few comments have been critical, and none have been nasty (knock wood). So don't be shy about inviting conversation with your readers through the comment section.

Organize Your Book List on a Third-Party Site

I'm kind of overwhelmed with the variety of book-centric sites out there, and haven't figured out how to make the best use of them, so please don't take my practice as a model to follow, but as a starting point to consider your options. If your blog is going to concentrate principally on books, it's nice to have a sidebar summarizing your reading -- current, recent, and/or anticipated. You can code this yourself fairly easily, or you can use a widget provided by a third-party site, which may be easier to keep up to date.

I love LibraryThing, which I use to keep track of the books I actually own. (I own enough books that it has been a huge help more than once to be able to look up on my computer whether I own a particular book before scouring my library to find it.) I use GoodReads to keep track of the books I read and want to read, which is a list that only incidentally overlaps with the books I own. I'm not wild about the GoodReads interface, though, so I'm not sure if I'm going to stick with it or find something new. Either of these (and many more, I'm sure) could be easily linked to a blog for a richer display of book information.

Just Post It

I find the book review to be a particularly challenging form of writing -- if I have nothing critical to say, I feel like it's not worth saying anything, but if I do have something critical to say, I fear that I'm being mean, or that I'm being unfair, e.g. criticizing the book for not being the book I want it to be, rather than accepting it as the book it is. I feel like a review should give proportional treatment to the major subjects of the book, but it shouldn't get bogged down rehashing the book's contents, but it should provide enough of a summary to be meaningful to someone who hasn't read the book ... So often, I finish reading a book, think that I have something to say about the book, but then I so overthink the task of responding to the book that I never get it finished or posted.

Months later, though, I find that I appreciate having a record of what I thought about a book immediately after reading it -- and I generally find my old reviews to be more useful and balanced than I feared they were when I wrote them. As for the books that I don't get around to writing about, I always assume that I will remember what I thought about them, but of course I don't. So just for my own sake, if not for anyone else's, I'm trying to be more disciplined about actually writing a response to books as I finish them -- at least the books that are worthy of such a response.

If you have similar hesitations to mine, it might help to tell yourself that your response is a "response," or "thoughts," rather than a "review." Give yourself permission to post your reaction to a book, even if it isn't as comprehensive as you might wish.

Get Free Books!

If you blog about books, you can find opportunities to get copies of books from publishers or authors in exchange for posting a review. Two programs that I am aware of are LibraryThing Early Reviewers (no books currently on offer, but they generally post a batch every month) and ChristianAudio Reviewers. I know there are others if you look for them. Some programs give preference to reviewers with an established track record of reviews (and perhaps a demonstrable readership); others more or less cast books into the blogosphere and hope to generate enough buzz to make it worthwhile.

If you score any free books to review, be sure to note that when you post the review -- the FTC is kind of twitchy about such disclosures. It's also a good idea to disclose your Amazon Affiliate Account, and any other such arrangements in which you could conceivably reap some benefit from what you say on your blog.

Have Fun!

Because there's really no point in doing this if it's not fun.

Welcome, Hobo Mama Readers!

2010-06-07T09:53:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Lauren, for the linky-love. I am humbled by your kind words.

Readers (all two of you) who didn't come here by way of Lauren's blog, go check it out. She writes about adventures in parenting her just-turned-three-year-old son. (Happy Birthday, Mikko!)

Moving on

2010-05-29T13:30:00.000-07:00

It finally occurred to me last night, nearly three years after deciding to leave graduate school, that I do not have to keep the books that I only own because they were on the reading list for the preliminary exams that I am never going to take.

I purged hundreds of books from my library before I moved, but few if any of the books from my reading list. I even shoved three boxes of books into the back of the closet at my new home, and only in part because there wasn't enough room on the shelves. There was too much emotional baggage tied to the stuff I was studying shortly before I decided to quit. But I still cared about the subject matter -- I wouldn't have stuck it out so long if I hadn't -- so I thought I might want to have those books in the future, once I had recovered a bit from the relentless years of study.

It made me melancholy to even think about divesting books from my reading list, like that would be what makes it really final that I'm not getting a Ph.D., even more than writing the letter of withdrawal or getting in my car and driving to the other side of the country. I never intended to leave the door open to going back -- I was DONE -- but the books feel like a security blanket of sorts, a way of holding on to what I've left behind.

But I don't even like some of these books. Some of them are tedious and boring. Some of them make my head hurt when I try to understand them. Some of them I only forced myself to read because I had to. And now? I don't have to! I don't have to pretend like I care what they say because someone on my committee thought they're important.

There are plenty of books from my prelim list that I do want to keep, but I'll keep them because I value them for themselves, not because I need to demonstrate expertise in a field where nobody cares whether I have expertise or not.

Suggestions for slowing down

2010-05-23T14:47:00.000-07:00

I am a person in a hurry in a world in hurry. I can sing the praises of slowing down; doing it is another matter. Hurrying seems to be a fundamental part of my way of being in the world; even when I have no deadline and no one is waiting on me, I quickly get impatient with anything that keeps me from doing whatever I'm doing as quickly as possible.

I'm learning, though.

Here are some ideas for my fellow students of slowness.

To read slowly:

-- Read aloud.

It can be an entirely different experience than reading silently. It is even better to read aloud with/to other people, but don't neglect to read aloud just for a lack of partners. Seriously. Try it.

Some kinds of texts are particularly suited for reading aloud. Most of scripture, for most of the history of the church, was experienced by most Christians as something they heard read to them rather than something they read alone by themselves. My adopted godfather has found that hosting group readings of large sections of scripture can be a profound experience. (The entire New Testament can be completed in one grueling 19-hour day, if you're really ambitious.) It's the extreme sports version of Bible reading, and thus can have a special appeal to young people who like a challenge.

Shakespeare should never be read silently. It's actually a massive waste of time to even try to read Shakespeare silently, because your brain has to work much harder just to understand what's going on in the archaic language if you read it silently. The gist of what's going on in the play -- if not the exact meaning of every word -- is much more accessible, with less effort, simply by hearing it aloud. I can't say why, but it works.

Dr. Suess should also never be read silently.

-- Read poetry.

Speaking of scripture, Shakespeare, and Dr. Suess: a major part of the power of poetry is the way it forces the reader to slow down. If you're going to read poetry like you read prose, you might as well not read it at all. It's the one chance you have in your own language to dwell with the richness of the language itself.

--Read in a language other than your mother tongue.

Evidence that I am part of a peculiar tribe of geeky evangelicals: I've known plenty of people who have taken to showing up to church with a Bible in a language they're just starting to learn. It's a clever strategy for practicing your target language, but I now suspect that it can be just as useful for enhancing our understanding of the book we're reading. I also suspect that it doesn't much matter which language you use. If you've studied enough of any language in school that you can stumble along with it, that's the language to try reading.

-- Turn off the screen.

Our minds process words differently on screens than on paper. E-book readers may occupy a kind of middle ground, but this reading you're doing right now on the web? Not slow. Go pick up a real book. And when you find things online that are particularly worthy of deep reading -- say, an essay by Marilynne Robinson, do yourself a favor and print them out. You're not going to singlehandedly destroy the world by occassionally defying the paperless society.

To live slowly:

-- Spend time with the very young or the very old.

Leave your agenda behind. Give yourself permission to go at the pace of a dear one who is not yet or no longer captive to the pace of modern life, and see what you learn.

-- Take music lessons.

There are few better ways to combat the hurrying sickness, both in the long and short range. Long range: proficiency is the product of the discipline of daily practice over months and years. Short range: chronic hurriers have to fight the impulse to speed up the tempo and skip over the rests. Music helps train our ears and fingers to recognize that faster isn't always better.

-- Experiment with extravagant inefficiencies.

Our world is in such a hurry that one of the few areas of life where it is still generally considered okay to be slow is in the realm of hobbies. So make the most of it. Knit. Garden. Cook from scratch. Homebrew beer or wine. For heaven's sake don't become hostage to the notion that there's some great moral virtue in doing everything the hard way, but find one or more practice that you actually enjoy and work it into your life.

-- Run.

Ironically, the impulse to hurry can often be exaccerbated by the nervous energy that builds up when we live a sedentary lifestyle. So get some exercise and get the need to rush out of your system. If you don't run, that's okay; walking can work just as well.

-- Pray the Rosary.

Or the daily office. You don't have to be Catholic, and if you have a problem with Hail Marys, there are other prayers you can use. We can't help but let the busy-ness of daily life invade our prayer lives, but we can draw from long-established practices of the Church to quiet our racing minds and seek the Lord. If the idea is new to you, here are a couple of thoughtful sites to consider and a nice little book.

Do you have any suggestions to add? How do you fight the need for speed? How has slowness blessed your life?

Slow food, slow text

2010-05-22T14:10:00.000-07:00

Once when I was in college I gushed about how AMAZING it was to read the Iliad in "the original Greek."

A friend swiftly shut me down: "I don't think any work of literature is really that much better in 'the original language.' I think people just need to tell themselves that to justify all the work they put into learning the language in the first place."

I wasn't sure then, and am even less sure now, that he was correct, but the notion rang true enough that it has stuck with me, causing me to second-guess any time I encounter, or make, a claim that a labor-intensive experience is really that much better than the more accessible means to a parallel end. Are hand-knit socks really that much more comfortable? Are home-grown tomatoes really that much better than the ones at the supermarket?

I can't say about the socks, but I am highly confident that home-grown tomatoes (on average) are demonstrably better tasting than supermarket tomatoes (on average). I believe that a double-blind taste test would bear this out. Supermarket tomatoes, after all, have to be cultivated for shelf-life and ease of transport, not just taste, so it stands to reason that a fruit that can be plucked at the height of ripeness and only has to be transported a few yards before it is consumed would have superior flavor.

But are they that much better? Are they better enough to justify the months of care that a backyard tomato gardener must invest in a plant before it bears a single fruit? Or do we just tell ourselves that so that we don't feel like we've wasted all those hours?

An economist of a certain bent might try to calculate the value of a home-grown tomato in terms of the labor taken to produce it versus the reported pleasure of eating it and tell us whether it is really worth it to grow our own or whether we would gain more happiness by hitting the farmer's market on our way home from Disneyland. But I suspect that there is something fundamentally wrong with such an approach.

Any such calculation is predicated on the assumption that the work involved in producing the labor-intensive result is a liability that must be counted against the worth of the thing, rather than an integral part of the thing itself.

A backyard tomato probably tastes more better to the person who grew it than it does to the person who they invite over for dinner, and the difference has everything to do with the experience of having cultivated the plant. But that does not make the experience false. It really does taste better, in a way that doesn't plug neatly into an equation.

It's not that all those hours of tomato-tending were themselves a barrel of laughs, but neither were they sheer tedium or agony. They were creative work that defies the binary distinction between the lucrative and the leisurely (c.f., e.g., Margaret Kim Peterson, Keeping House: The Litany of Everyday Life on the inadequacy of this division). Such things are worth doing, and have tangible results, but the worth of the work is not reducible to the tangible result. The work has value in its own right; indeed, it adds to the value of the result, rather than subtracting from it.

So with my reading of the Iliad. It is simply true that my experience reading sections of the Iliad in Greek was vastly richer than my earlier experience of having attempted to read it in English. My friend was just wrong to insist that there was no real difference. But he was probably on to something when he declared that the difference did not boil down to some magical property of the Greek text in itself.

Over years of studying Classical and Koine Greek, I have come to the conclusion that, for me, the most valuable thing about Greek as a tool for biblical study is precisely my non-fluency. It is not that knowing Greek gives me access to some lexical treasure trove with gnostic insights into what the words "really" mean, or even that parsing the sentence structure and grammatical niceties can give more precise understanding of a text's argument. It's that working through a passage in Greek forces me to slow down and consider every word. No matter how hard I try, I cannot get myself to read in my native language with this level of attention. (Except for some technical philosophical texts which are so abstruse that they might as well be in another language.) But working with the Greek text, I can't not do it.

This was probably a major factor in my experience of reading the Iliad. I had mastered the language just enough that the translation exercise was no longer entirely focused on the technical details of vocabulary and syntax. I was finally attending the story that these strange words were telling, but that story was unfolding with exquisite, even excruciating, slowness, as I picked my way through the lines of poetry. There was no racing ahead to find out what happens next, and at the end of the section, I was breathless at the emotional power of the scene I had just witnessed.

Was it worth three years of vocabulary memorization and grammar drills just to get to the point of spending an hour or more haltingly stumbling through a fifteen-line section of ancient poetry and having a more profound emotional reaction than I would have had reading a translation? Maybe not. But I don't think that's the right question.

Is slowness, in at least some parts of our lives, a gift to savor, and a source of gifts we can't properly anticipate in advance? To be sure.

The ghettoization of childhood: a rant

2010-05-13T16:15:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the powers that be in the City Next Door believe that children should not be allowed to associate with adults who are not either (a) their parents or (b) properly credentialed and compensated professionals until they are 18, at which point, I guess, they magically become capable of functioning in adult society, despite having been shielded from it their whole lives.

You say I'm being ridiculous. I say, try reading the papers.

In just the last week, I have learned from our local newspaper that the entire second floor of the main downtown library has become off limits to adults unaccompanied by children¹, and the campuses of our community colleges have become off limits to children, accompanied or not.²

When I first read about the library thing, it didn't seem like that big of a deal. Misguided and over-reactionary, sure, but not beyond the realm of reason. But taken together, along with the dismaying attitudes betrayed in many of the comments on the stories on the newspaper's website, these policies seem to represent a thoroughly warped perspective on children. It would seem that children are so fragile and vulnerable that they need to be aggressively protected from every worst case scenario however vanishingly small the risk, and at the same time children are so disruptive and annoying that the adults who have exercised the responsibility to keep parenthood from happening to them need to be protected from any exposure to or inconvenience from other people's kids.

Give. Me. A. Break.

Have we forgotten that children are people? Yes, parents need to exercise common sense; yes, there need to be developmentally appropriate limits on what children are exposed to and what independence they are entrusted with; yes, some library patrons make some parents uncomfortable and some parents take advantage of public facilities when better arrangements for their kids are available. But is the best answer really such sweeping age segregation?

(I find it particularly ironic that the first thing that comes up when you Google our community college district is the boilerplate: "Ventura County Community College District does not discriminate on the basis of age..." Right. Unless you are under 15 or so and want to step foot on campus.)

When I was a little girl, I briefly believed that no children lived in Ventura, California. I think we must have read a story at school in which the protagonist visited her grandparents in a retirement community, and I, in a rigorous application of kid logic, extrapolated that all grandparents live in retirement communities, therefore any community in which grandparents live is a retirement community, therefore any kids present in a community where grandparents live are only visitors, never residents.

This ironclad conclusion was demolished when I discovered that there were indeed children living in the house right next door to my grandparents. (Playing in their own front driveway! Unsupervised!) But now it's starting to seem that at least some residents would prefer that Ventura -- or at least its public spaces -- become the child-free land of my childish imagination. Let's tuck all the underaged away in their own restricted designated areas, so that we mature adults who can't handle even the possibility that a child might act like a child while out in public don't haven't to deal with them.

How childish is that.

↩ 1. Yes, I'm being a bit hyperbolic here. Adults can still enter the second floor to obtain materials from the children's area without a child escort; they're just not allowed to linger. It is unclear how much browsing will be tolerated.
↩ 2. Again with the hyperbole. There are exceptions. But you get the picture.

Further on the parenthood of all believers

2010-05-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

Last year, Tony Jones waded into the blogosphere buzz about the death and/or decline of the Emergent/ing Church movement with a post titled, "So, You're Disappointed with Emergent..." Part of his response was this:

Third, I bet you're not disappointed with Shane Claiborne. That's because, to this point, Shane has made the very noble decision to live a chaste life, and he has committed his whole self to an irresistible revolution. Meanwhile, most of the founders of emergent are raising children and paying mortgages and coaching YMCA t-ball. Martin Luther King didn't coach t-ball; neither did Ghandi. Start a revolution if you want, but that's not a price that I'm willing to pay.

This paragraph left me feeling inexplicably depressed.

It wasn't until months later that an aphoristic comment from Amy Laura Hall crystallized for me what had troubled me about Tony's post. I can't do justice to Amy Laura's exact words, but it was something to the effect that not only will The Revolution not be televised, it will be the very thing we do while/by taking care of our kids and households, not the thing we must put those concerns aside in order to pursue.

Maybe we can't all by Martin Luther King, or Ghandi, or Shane Claiborne. But must we really choose between t-ball and revolution?

Maybe caring for children is the epitome, rather than the antithesis, of the revolution to which we're called.

Maybe revolution starts at home.

Granted, coaching t-ball can be, often is, a distraction from kingdom work, when it represents a retreat into the concerns of one's own nuclear family to the exclusion of the world around us.

But then, only the very worst t-ball coaches concentrate purely on the one player that is their own child. So even an activity that is motivated by the needs of one's own child redounds to the children of others.

In any event, any revolution that has no place for children is a revolution that is not worth being a part of.

My brother recommends Wess Stafford's book Too Small to Ignore: Why Children are the Next Big Thing. I haven't read it yet, but from what I've read about it, the message resonates: God cares about the poor and the vulnerable, and a huge proportion of the poor and vulnerable in the world today are children. We cannot claim to be faithful to Him if we don't keep faith with them.

For those of us without children of our own, being a part of the child-friendly revolution means being mindful of the welfare of kids and putting that thought into speech and action, in any of a million ways. Loving the kids already in our own lives, and acting for others through such things as charity and advocacy and involvement in our local schools and churches. Maybe even coaching t-ball.

For those with children, it means including our kids in our efforts to change the world, or our little corner of it. It doesn't mean protecting our kids from the realities of life, but bringing them up as revolutionaries in a world in need of revolution.

Some families do this in a radical way, defying the commonplace orthodoxy that a parent's first and foremost responsibility is to do whatever is "best" (read "safest") for her own children, and choosing instead to live with their children in neighborhoods or nations that the average middle-class American might fear as "unsafe" in order to minister incarnationally among the neighbors they love.

Many families do this in far more ordinary ways. Whether it's sponsoring a child, or participating in operation Christmas Child (or, better yet, a similar program in their own community), or planning as a family gracious ways to respond to the needs we see in our cities, or many, many, other actions, the revolution that starts at home must not also end at home. Children should not be a barrier, much less an excuse, for indifference and inaction to the needs beyond our homes. Indeed, children are often more sensitive than adults to such needs. Let us love them well -- well enough to allow them to participate in the change we hope to see in the world.

Poetry for Mother's Day

2010-05-10T15:40:00.000-07:00

The Lanyard

(Thanks, Pastor Ted, for reminding me of this poem by reading it in yesterday's sermon.)

In Rama Sat Rachel Weeping,

with Wilfred Her Husband

(From the beautiful little book linked here, sadly, but predictably, out of print. It's worth your while to track down a copy, even if you don't generally read much poetry. An excerpt:)

... For several months in 1953
they took a turn at toddler care (the walls
were bright and signs proclaimed The Manger Room)
until a woman new at Prince of Peace
in thoughtless haste removed a squirming child
from Rachel's fumbling efforts with a pin
as if to say, "Here, this is how we do
it if we've had our own." Then once again
it fell to Fred, while coarse tears seared her face,
to carefully explain that they, years past,
had once a son whose life was lost at war. ...

(Mark A. Noll, 1997)

Mothers' Day

2010-05-09T15:30:00.000-07:00

May is a tough time for liturgical purists, second only to December. Two of the holiest holidays of the American civil religious calendar fall on weekends in May -- Mother's Day at the beginning of the month and Memorial Day at the end -- and many American Protestant churches have stronger traditions of observing these dates than of observing the Church's own calendar. Those who would insist on giving pride of place to Pentecost, the major Christian holy day that typically falls during May, or even suggest that the civil holidays might not have a proper place in Christian worship at all, face an uphill battle in many church cultures.

It's not that I find the emphasis on mothers at church one Sunday out of 52 to be deeply personally distressing. Motherhood is honorable, and so often unsung; it's hard to object in principle to celebrating mothers.

And yet I cringe on Mother's Day, in solidarity with the women I love who skip church that day rather than face the emotional onslaught, either because it twists the knife of their own childlessness, or because it amplifies the absence of their own dear mothers, or because it reminds them too painfully of their broken or even abusive maternal relationships. At the very least, I believe that whenever we honor mothers, we need to honor and pray for these women also.

Really, if I'm honest with myself, it's not just disinterested solidarity that makes me cringe. My childlessness is not always before me, as it is for women who are all too aware, month by month, of their bodies' stubborn refusal to bear life, or for those whose children have died. Because my pain is less pronounced than that of many of my sisters, and because the position of advocate is so much more comfortable than the position of sufferer, I generally downplay my own sensitivities to mother-adulation. As indeed I just did in the last couple of paragraphs of this post.

It surprises me, frankly, the extent to which such things do bother me personally. I did not expect to be as relieved as I was, this morning, when the men and kids distributing flowers to the "mothers" in the congregation explicitly offered a flower to every adult woman present, sparing me the awkwardness of feeling like I should refuse a flower if it was offered to me or feeling like I was being left out if it was not. I did not expect to be as shaken as I was, some months ago, when I was put on the spot at a church women's gathering and asked to answer before a group of strangers a somewhat personal question the phrasing of which betrayed an assumption that all churchwomen either already are or will soon become mothers.

It's that surprising discomfort that lies behind my impulse to solidarity/advocacy. If I -- who am for the most part content with the direction my so-far-childfree life has taken, who find satisfaction in other forms of care-giving and life-nurturing, who still have hope that I will someday have the children I wish for, and who never did imagine motherhood as the principle fulfillment of my adult vocation -- if I am made uncomfortable and melancholy by the forceful reminder that I do not yet have the children I always thought I would have by now, how much more the women whose longing for children is not so mitigated? And how many of them can't, or won't, speak up -- will just skip church, without ever telling anyone why?

(Let me just say that I absolutely think that skipping church is the right thing for some women to do on Mother's Day, however sensitive their congregational leadership tries to be. To those who have come to that conclusion: more power to you. Have a lovely weekend, and we'll look forward to seeing you next week.)

My friend Lauren recently wrote at length about her first miscarriage on her parenting blog. I didn't learn about her miscarriage until months after it happened (living on the other side of the country and all), and I didn't learn about the extent of her grief until years later. It reminds me that the women most in need of support are often least equipped to seek it out. There may be nothing we can say to make Mother's Day easy for a woman who is powerfully confronted by her lack of a much-wanted child. But we can pray for her, and try to make a space where she might know that her pain will be embraced and tenderly cared for should she choose to speak it, and bring her cookies.

As for the other 51 weeks of the year, I concur with Melissa that we need to break down the distinction between mothers and non-mothers and collectively be the village that it takes to raise our children. What I want for Mother's Day is a Church in which women with children are not left feeling isolated and overwhelmed, and women without children are not left feeling excluded or uninvolved. Jill Lepore points out the intriguingly recent advent of the notion that some adults are "parents" and others are not. Retrieving a culture of collective responsibility for children may be a lost cause in society at large, where reliable birth control and the marginalization of families has reduced the raising of children to an expensive hobby, but in our churches perhaps it is not too late to embrace the idea that we are all parents, whether we have children "of our own" or not.

A major responsibility for creating such a culture must rest with those of us who do not have children, or who do not now have children living at home. Our friends with kids are busy; inviting us into the lives of their families is one more thing on a to do list that never gets all the way done. Besides that, they have been taught by our culture that adults without kids of their own generally find other people's kids to be more of a nuisance than a pleasure. Unless we explicitly tell them otherwise, they have every reason to suppose that we'd rather not hang out if it means that one or the other member of the adult couple we're visiting is going to be perpetually preoccupied with the very short attention span of the toddler in tow or the primary topic of conversation is liable to be options in cloth diapering, breast pumps, and infant daycare. It's up to us to take the initiative to be involved with the families around us.

Likewise at church, I'm sure many children's ministries directors have given up on even seeking volunteers among the non-parents in a congregation because there is such a low rate of response. I used to get a bit huffy about this, interpreting to mean that we who are childless are not valued as potential members of a childcare team. Now I suspect that it was fear of rejection and/or lack of precedent that was behind this oversight.

I must wrap up this overlong and rambling missive with words of thanksgiving for my parent-friends who have, despite their busy-ness, welcomed me into the lives of their families. Thank you for sharing your kids with me. Thank you for not not inviting me over because there are toys everywhere. Thank you, Steve, for responding three years ago to the news that I was suffering a renewed bout of depression with the invitation: "Do you want to hold my baby? She's better than Prozac." (Indeed; she is.) I don't have a fully worked out theory of the place of mess and distraction and disruption in my eschatological vision, but I know that some of the sweetest foretastes of the Wedding Feast of the Lamb have involved a fellow feaster who had spread her meal all over herself and her high chair and the floor, or who had exhausted his capacity to sit still in his booster chair and taken to exploring the imaginary cave under the table.

unspeakable

2010-05-07T13:52:00.000-07:00

I had a hard time reading all the way through Wess Stafford's reminiscence of the abuse he suffered as an MK (missionary kid) in boarding school decades ago; it made me so angry I could hardly see, so distraught I could hardly breathe.

A degree of personal connection heightened my distress. I have family who work and live at a missionary boarding school -- one that, like the one where Stafford was tortured as a child, is located in West Africa and is connected with the C&MA. To know their passionate devotion to the physical, emotional, and spiritual welfare of their students makes it almost inconceivably infuriating to read about others in parallel positions of responsibility who so perverted their vocation.

I think I understand better now the anguish that faithful Catholics have expressed over the scandals that have recently rocked their church. Child abuse is horrible, any time, anywhere, but there's a dimension of personal betrayal, even if you're not a victim, when the abuse comes from within an institution that you love and trust and identify as your own.

Stafford describes his abusers as disgruntled and disaffected would-be evangelists who somehow didn't measure up to the rigors of "real" missionary work and so got stuck with "the least desirable task on the field: taking care of other missionaries' children." This could not be more diametrically opposed to the perspective of the missionaries I know who do such work today. For them, caring for these children is not a necessary evil that makes the real work of missions possible. The task of missionaries is to make disciples, and the children of parents who seek to minister in cultures not their own are as much in need of discipleship as the national populations of the countries where they are guests. Those who teach and foster MKs are mentoring future leaders and nurturing young souls through a challenging season of their lives. If anything counts as front-line ministry, this is it.

I am grateful that Stafford and others have told their stories, as difficult as it is to hear them, because the truth must out -- both for the healing of past victims and the protection of current and future generations of children.

Stability

2010-04-26T15:33:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was "Older Adult Sunday" at our church.

We recognized those people who had been members of the church for 50 years or longer.

There were 28 people on the "Golden Members" list, including one who had been a member of the church for 76 years.

This is all the more remarkable when you consider that the Greater LA Metro Area isn't exactly the kind of place where I think of many people putting down roots.

The indigenous population of this region has long since been decimated by European disease. The long history of the connection between a people and this bit of real estate has been all but obliterated.

The existing settlement of this location, in contrast, is of remarkably late origin. Although the mission that served this area dates back to 1782, Our Fair City wasn't founded until 1903. The 76-year member of my church is, I believe, a son or grandson of one of the founding families. So even the longest-established heritages in the community go back a mere century.

And most of us, of course, have been around for a much shorter time than that. The mythos of California is that it is the place that you go to when you run away from home. From Forty-Niners seeking their fortune in the gold rush to Okies fleeing dust bowl poverty to would-be starlets chasing fame and fortune, California in general and the Los Angeles region in particular has beckoned aspirants to an new and better life.

But if California is the place you go to when you run away from home, how can it also be home? Generations of Americans have come to California to reinvent themselves. And then, as their children grow up, they do so with a normative narrative of adulthood as a time when it is appropriate and necessary to run away from home (not the least because they can't afford housing in their hometowns). Even more so than other parts of our highly-mobile society, this seems like the kind of place that one passes through, not the kind of of place where one settles down.

And indeed, most of the Golden Members of my church have children and grandchildren scattered around the country, if not the world. And yet, here they are -- 50 years, and more, in one place.

And not just in one place, but in one church -- outlasting trends in church music, shifts in ecclesiastical policy, and several pastors. This is their church, and they remain loyal to it.

Only God knows what the future holds for this congregation, where all too often we whisper worries about the ever-increasing average age of our worshipers (ever Sunday is "Older Adult Sunday," to be frank). But I can't help thinking it is some kind of miracle to have 28 people in one small church who have stuck it out, through thick and thin, for 50 years or more, and I have faith that that faithfulness will be rewarded, both in the lives of the individuals and of the church that they love.

FFW 2012 Notes, Addendum

2010-04-26T15:23:00.001-07:00

About those books you are inevitably going to purchase:

Assuming you are flying, and assuming that airline baggage regs are not going to shift again in the next two years, and assuming that you're trying to avoid the fee to check baggage and so are bringing one carry-on bag and one "personal item" (voluminous laptop bag, backpack, or the like) on the plane ...

Put as many of your new books as will fit in your "personal item," which will go on the floor under the seat in front of you, rather than in the carry-on bag, which must be hoisted into the overhead bin. This is less convenient for walking around the airport, but is worth it for that all-important moment of lifting the bigger of your two bags up over your head.

When you do hoist said carry-on into the overhead bin, take the time to lift with your legs and balance the load between both arms. Do not feel so rushed by the repeated PA announcements urging you to step out of the aisle and let other passengers through that you fail to practice good body mechanics.

Should you forget this advice, or for all your care still manage to pull a muscle in your back, Advil and a heating pad are wonderful things.

Don't ask me how I know this.

It only hurts anymore when I first wake up.

Notes for Festival of Faith and Writing 2012

2010-04-19T04:27:00.001-07:00

Just finished a whirlwind weekend at one of the premier Christian literary conferences, Calvin College's biennial Festival of Faith and Writing. Great fun. While it's still fresh in my mind, I'm going to record my suggestions for participants attending the next FFW.

Attire

Pack for the fickleness of West Michigan springtime. I checked the weather forecast before I packed, and was not uncomfortable. But I might have been more comfortable if I had come prepared for both warmer and colder weather than I actually anticipated. On the first day of the three-day event, a sundress would have been appropriate (high 70s). One the third day, mittens (mid 40s). On the second day it almost rained, and I did not bring an umbrella. So: think layers.

Business casual is an appropriate level of formality if you are looking to make professional connections. If you're coming as an avid reader, jeans are fine.

It should go without saying that comfortable shoes are a necessity, but in case it doesn't: comfortable shoes are a necessity. Calvin's campus isn't that big, but the conference center where they have registration and exhibits and the arena where they hold the keynotes are roughly on opposite ends of it. One can expect to crisscross the campus a half dozen times each day. There was a shuttle available, but, meh. Besides, you spend enough time sitting at an event like this that it's good to have the opportunity to move between sessions.

Stuff to Sign Up For

Keep an eye on the website/newsletters leading up to the conference -- beyond the conference proper, there are several options that require additional advanced registration.

A small minority of sessions are workshops that require preregistration. If you're a writer who is interested in that sort of thing, pay attention so you don't miss the deadline.

Sign up for a Festival Circle if you can find one that interests you -- these are small groups that meet a couple of times during the event (over meals, so they don't conflict with scheduled sessions) for informal discussion of a common interest. Especially if you have a personality like mine -- gregarious in small groups, even of strangers, but withdrawn in large crowds -- it's a great way to make some insta-friends for the weekend. I didn't sign up for a Circle because I thought, introvert that I am, I would need the downtime, but it turns out they build plenty of downtime into the schedule, so you're not rushed even if you do join a couple additional meetings over meals. I was invited to crash a Circle for their second meeting, and only regretted not getting in on the full experience.

Food

Boxed lunches/dinners are available by preorder, and are the most convenient way to go for meals. Especially on the first day, while you're still getting your bearings on campus, they're worth the price. Most other options on campus will run you as much or more than the boxed meals. There's not really time to go off campus for lunch, but it's definitely a live option for the long dinner break, especially if you bring a car or can make friends with someone who did.

If you order boxed lunches, pay attention to the distribution time windows. There's plenty of time to pick up each meal, and the location is conveniently centrally located, so getting your hands on the food you've already paid for shouldn't be a problem. But -- for example -- this year, the distribution of lunch on the first day overlapped with the opening plenary session, and if one had assumed that lunch would be available after the session, one might have missed out.

There are snacks at the morning and afternoon coffee breaks, so if you're trying to do the Festival on a shoestring, you can use the pretzels/fruit/muffins etc. that you already paid for in your registration fee to supplement a small a la cart meal. (Heck, if you pilfer an additional banana or bagel from your hotel's continental breakfast spread and combine that with the snacks offered at break, you probably won't need to buy lunch at all.)

Books

Be sure to leave room in your luggage for the books you will buy. You will buy books. If you are the kind of person who can resist the siren song of books, why are you even considering dropping hundreds of dollars to attend a literary conference?

Consider bringing along your own copies of books by Festival authors if you want to try to get them autographed.

Be cagey about buying from exhibitors/the festival bookstore. Some publishers offer deep discounts at the conference; others, you can get the same or better price by ordering after you get home. Some exhibitors are running low on stock by the end of the event, so if you delay, they might not have your title available any more. Others might slash prices even further on the last day. But don't stress about it: if you miss something, you can almost certainly order it later; if you pay a few dollars more for something than the best possible deal, you're helping to support the book industry that we all love.

More poetry

2010-04-06T00:28:00.000-07:00

Death is strong, but Life is Stronger

Did the grass sing?

2010-04-05T12:48:00.000-07:00

In last year's children's Easter pageant, the role of the risen Christ was played by the father of one of the little girls in the cast. At the point in the play when he emerged from the tomb, all of the children -- mostly costumed as various woodland creatures -- were supposed to dance for joy to the jubilant music that accompanied the moment.

Four-or-so-year-old Lucinda, dressed as a flower, seemed a little bit shy about that dancing part. But when Jesus/Daddy came out of the "tomb," she ran over and threw her arms around him.

That unscripted instant was my favorite part of the whole production.

It brought to mind the chorus of the Sandi Patty anthem from the '80s, Was it a Morning Like This?

Did the grass sing?

Did the earth rejoice to feel you again?

Other than that song, I don't remember hearing this message very much in the branch of evangelicalism in which I grew up: The resurrection of Jesus Christ is GOOD NEWS, not just for all humanity, but for ALL CREATION.

I learned well the catholic reach of the Gospel -- Good News to every tongue and tribe and nation -- but not that that was just the tip of the iceberg. The redemption that the resurrection enacts applies not just to one species on one planet, but to every atom in the universe. "[C]reation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God" (Rom. 8:21).

This is what I love about the "Mad Farmer" poems I've linked in the last two posts: they get the absolutely cosmic scope of Easter, and how that has meaning for how we treat the most mundane stuff imaginable -- dirt itself. God is making All Things New, and we have the privilege not just to sit on our hands and wait for it to happen, but to go out and participate in the transformation.

Practice resurrection.

More poetry

2010-04-05T11:35:00.000-07:00

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Easter Poetry

2010-04-03T23:26:00.000-07:00

There are of course no words adequate to express the Most Important Thing that Ever Happened.

But I suspect that the least-inadequate words would have to be poetry.

Two new-to-me poems I just discovered today, and one classic:

A poem for Holy Saturday

Easter Ode to the Mad Farmer

Seven Stanzas at Easter

Free and Cheap Christian Audiobooks

2010-03-30T08:55:00.000-07:00

ChristianAudio.com offers a different free audiobook every month, plus a variety of free podcasts all the time.

This month they have a bumper crop of deals: THREE free audiobooks, plus several attractive sales.

All of these offers EXPIRE TOMORROW, MARCH 31, so don't delay!

(NB: Once you order any Christianaudio book, you have an entire year to actually download it, so if you're short on time you can always do that later. This is convenient because some of these books come in about a gazillion parts, which makes downloading them kind of annoying. But hey, who am I to argue with a good deal?)

Free books:

The Cost of Discipleship by Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die by John Piper

The Pilgrim's Progress (Retold for the Modern Listener) by John Bunyan, ed. James Baldwin

Cheap books:

Anything else by or about Bonhoeffer ($4.98)

Anything else by John Piper ($4.98)

Other select Christian Classics (Including Paradise Lost, The Divine Comedy, The Religious Affections) ($2.98)

Imaginary Jesus by Matt Mikalatos ($0.98)

That last deal is part of a periodic promotion Christianaudio offers to their Facebook/Twitter followers, so if you claim it, please subscribe to their FB page or Twitter feed so I won't feel guilty about publicizing the "secret" deal (and so you can find out about future special sales and sweepstakes).

And check back here on Thursday for the free audiobook for April.

* * *

Speaking of John Piper, did you hear about his Leave of Absence? I tend to find Piper, by turns, infuriating 75% of the time (divine whirlwinds, anyone?) and inspiring 25% of the time. This falls firmly in the 25%.

Speaking of speaking of Piper, I just discovered that he's put a bunch of his books online for free. A fine resource, especially if you have an e-reader that supports pdfs, even if you do find Piper 75% infuriating.

Viva La Revolution

2010-03-22T21:35:00.000-07:00

There's a moment in the "sneak preview" episode of the new ABC reality/philanthrotainment show Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution in which Oliver, after reviewing the typical diet of a family in dire need of a nutrition makeover but before commencing the lessons on a new way of thinking about food, steps into the backyard and turns over a patch of sod with a shovel. I was completely expecting (and hoping for) a Michael Pollan-esque message that a healthy diet at best involves growing at least some of our own food, but Jamie didn't go there -- at least not yet.

Instead, he conducted a funeral for the family's deep fat fryer.

He asks the mother of family to say a little prayer as they bury the abomination. He is kidding. She is not. Her kids reverently join hands and bow their heads as she utters a sincere prayer of consecration. It's one of the clearest portrayals of repentance I've seen on mainstream TV, ever. (Starts at about 25:38 in the episode.)

The episode indulges in one of the standard tropes of "reality" TV, the exaggerated conflict, depicting the entire city of Huntington, West Va., as being up in arms against Oliver's "British invasion." But I loved the fact that the one ally they show is Pastor Steve Willis of the First Baptist Church in neighboring Kenova. Evangelicalism's abiding temptation to gnosticism leads too often to neglect of concerns relating to the body (with occasional pendulum swings into a legalistic association of thinness with sanctity). So it is brave, and counter-cultural, and deeply faithful, for Willis to invite his congregation and his community not just to change their individual eating habits but to work together to create a culture of right relating to our food.

Grandpa-sitting

2010-03-03T22:42:00.001-08:00

I'm at my parents' house this week providing respite care for my Grandpa Jim so that Mom and Dad can have a few days away. It's not a difficult charge -- mainly preparing meals and dispensing medicine -- but the relentless everydayness of it can be draining, so it's nice to be able to give them a break.

My Dad describes his Dad as living in a five-minute window of time (sometimes less). Yesterday Grandpa and I had three interesting conversations. We had each of these conversations eight to twelve times in a row.

On each pass through the exact same subject matter, a little bit more would come to mind. He couldn't remember that he had already told me seven times that when he was a child delivering newspapers he always carefully placed each newspaper on the front steps of the house, unlike the paperboys for the competitor who threw the papers into the middle of the yards. But each time he recounted that memory, a little more detail came with it:

The paper he delivered was the Fort Worth Star-Telegram; the competitor was the Press.
The Star-Telegram was a morning paper with a Sunday edition; the Press was an afternoon paper that didn't publish on Sundays. (Sure enough.)
The Star-Telegram had better coverage of national/international events; the Press was more of a hometown paper.
Many households, including his parents, took both papers.
He had arrangements with some of his disabled customers to walk right into their houses and set the newspaper at a convenient spot for them, so they wouldn't even have to venture as far as the porch.
In one such instance, he walked in on the customer and her guest, who was quite alarmed that this young man would enter the house like that uninvited. The customer told her friend, "that's just Jimmie, bringing the paper. You mind your own business!"

That evening we heard a teaser on Fox News about a ludicrous and ineffectual cussing ban before the California legislature. Grandpa opined that people seem to swear less today than they used to, because use of such language is considered in polite society to be a sign of ignorance.

Nevermind that the primary reason that Grandpa doesn't hear as much bad language anymore is that he DOESN'T HEAR, period. Or that his primary exposure to pop culture since retirement is Fox News, which isn't exactly representative of society at large. Or that even people who use obscenity and profanity in their daily lives tend to avoid it in front of their pastors, which he was for over fifty years. He would affably agree when I would suggest alternate explanations for his lack of exposure to bad language in the last twenty or so years, then immediately loop back around to how swearing seems to be on the wane, because people think it's a sign of ignorance.

After a half dozen or so go-arounds on this theme, I drew a parallel to smoking, which prompted him to go off on another loop about how his father had enjoyed cigars until he joined the Gideons and became convicted about having something in his life that he couldn't do without. This was a more interesting topic to me than a counterfactual decline in offensive language, so we spent some time reminiscing about my great-grandfather's civic involvement, from the smoke-filled American Legion post to smoke-free Gideons and CBMC meetings. He also recalled going to basketball and football games in his childhood and seeing the stands light up like so many flitting fireflies, only to be enveloped in a haze over the course of the contest. "You don't see that anymore."

Music I Forgot I Had

2010-02-23T21:40:00.000-08:00

So late last week I went flipping through my CD collection to put together playlists for my music discipline, and I discovered a cache of albums I purchased last summer, only one of which I had gotten around to listening to yet.

Two Cheers for Prexy Ryken

2010-02-21T15:07:00.001-08:00

Since I opined on the process before, I'm now going to indulge in the self-flattering exercise of imagining that anyone at all cares what I think of the news that Dr. Philip Graham Ryken will be the eighth president of Wheaton College:

Two Cheers

The two things that Wheaton most needs in a president is an intimate familiarity with and commitment to the college's identity and heritage and an irenic spirit for relating to the varied constituencies of the college. Ryken is an excellent choice on both counts. I am confident that he will serve the college well.

In his teaching ministry at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia, Dr. Ryken encouraged his congregants to think Christianly about the whole of life, as demonstrated in his long-running Window on the World feature. This thoughtful engagement with current news and culture exemplifies a commitment to the "integration of faith and learning" that is Wheaton's hallmark.

While I find his claim to be evaluating the various phenomena addressed in these brief monologues from "THE Biblical perspective" -- as though there were only one -- somewhat rankling, I appreciate the charitable interpretative stance he employs. In a reflection on the Emerging/ent Church from 2006, for example, he voices serious misgivings about the movement, but without the kind of defensive dismissiveness that characterizes many mainstream evangelical critics of emergent. This temperament is going to be a tremendous asset in his new job.

More of the Same

In selecting Ryken, the Trustees of Wheaton College have clearly indicated their desire to stay the course charted under the Litfin administration. Again, we have a scholar with an Oxford D.Phil., but whose immediate previous experience is pastoring a church, named to lead the college. Indeed, Ryken has significantly less professional experience in higher education than Litfin did when he assumed the post (unless you count growing up in a professor's household as experience, which I actually sort of do). Again, we have a new president whose personal convictions represent the right wing of the evangelical spectrum that Wheaton serves.

Those of us who were hoping that a new administration might adopt a somewhat broader perspective on who is included in Wheaton-brand evangelicalism, and thereby not deprive the next generation of Wheaton students of the wisdom of fine faculty members like Alex Bolyanatz and Joshua Hochschild, are almost certain to be disappointed. Wheaton students will still be able to get a fine education with a solid Christian foundation, and Wheaton professors will still be able to carry out their work of mentoring and scholarship (although some of them may end up doing so with anxiety and self-censorship), but they will have to look outside the walls of the college for some of the richness of the wider Christian tradition.

Things About Which I am Not Particularly Worried

In the day or so that this has been public, I've witnessed some predictable internet grumbling about the pick. Obviously, there's no such thing as a perfect presidential candidate, and I have sympathy with many of the concerns of my friends who are uneasy about this choice. But I think some of the main worries I have encountered are probably not going to be as big a deal as some of us think they will be.

1. The Demographics of Privilege. I signed the petition urging the committee to make every effort to recruit a woman and/or a member of an ethnic minority to the post. But I knew last year that there was really no way they weren't going to hire a white guy. And it's not because the committee is blatantly racist. It's not Ryken's fault that he's a white guy. It is quite arguably the fault of American society and the evangelical subculture that there was a lack of non-white-guy candidates for the position, but that doesn't make Ryken an unfit leader.

2. Nepotism. Actually, the traits that are causing some to raise eyebrows on this count are things I would count as strengths. The Wheaton trustees selected one of their own, an alumnus, and the child of a celebrated career professor. So yes, that does look like institutional inbreeding. But as much as Wheaton needs the "fresh blood" of faculty that come to it from other institutional backgrounds, I believe that a president who was an outsider would be facing this challenging job with a pronounced handicap. Not only does a long personal history with the institution generate an understanding of and sympathy with the mission of the college, a leader with a multigenerational connection with the school is uniquely positioned to lead it forward in innovative ways because of the inherent bond of trust that comes when other stakeholders know that he really knows the school.

3. Women's Leadership and Evolution. These subjects in particular have been raised by some who worry that Ryken's opinions do not bode well for Wheaton's future capacity to prepare women students for leadership in the church and the world or to effectively teach biology. The thing is, as far as I can tell, Ryken's convictions on these matters are identical to Litfin's, which means that the college has already endured 17 years of of such leadership without disaster. Those of us with more liberal views on these things may have hoped for a new president who would move the college a few steps to the left, but since we didn't get that person, I don't think we need to assume that the new president will necessarily move the college further to the right. Ryken is certainly aware of Litfin's ill-fated attempt to impose greater discipline on the faculty with regard to the range of acceptable interpretations of the historical Adam and Eve, and is unlikely to repeat the mistake. (Granted, the "don't ask, don't tell" status quo is hardly optimal, but at least it seems sustainable.) He is also certainly aware that arguments like those of Gilbert Bilezikian for an egalitarian perspective on the sexes are as much a part of Wheaton's theological tradition as his own complementarian conclusions. Unless and until he proves otherwise, I choose to trust that Ryken will exhibit graciousness in leading a community of inquiry that includes a variety of evangelical perspectives, not all of which must match his own.

... And the One Thing I am a Little Nervous About

That said, I must confess that Ryken's conservative Calvinist bona fides give me pause. Of all the multifarious groups that make up the coalition that is Billy Graham-style evangelicalism, it's the Reformed conservatives that seem most inclined to inflate the range of convictions considered "essential" to the faith. This is a product of the tradition's admirable commitment to the application of reason to their faith -- it's just that when their reasoning brings them to certain conclusions, it also tends to bring them to the conclusion that their conclusions are the only ones that faithful Christians can legitimately hold. The result is a remarkably coherent system of doctrine and an impression that the entire gospel stands or falls with every point. And when you honestly believe that the entire gospel stands or falls with any number of points in your doctrinal system, how can you not strive to enforce conformity with that system?

My limited exposure to Ryken does not suggest that he is of the only-conservative-Calvinists-can-be-true-evangelicals camp, but it wouldn't be out of line with his position in the Reformed subculture to draw such a conclusion, and if he did, and imposed it on the college, Wheaton would be the poorer for it. I remain hopeful, however, that he will demonstrate that a bigger theological tent is appropriate for the governance of a nondenominational college than the leadership of a denominationally-affiliated church. The tent probably won't get bigger than it already is under the next administration, but I hope that it won't get smaller.

Godspeed Wheaton College and its new president.

More about Lent

2010-02-18T14:49:00.000-08:00

Julie Clawson: It's not about giving stuff up
Rachel Held Evans: 4o ideas for the 40 days
LaVonne Neff: African Lent
LaVonne Neff: The Lenten Experiment (a.k.a. the Foodstamp Diet)
Margot Starbuck: Giving away, not giving up
Steve Lansingh: Public hunger

Christine Sine from MSA and Jan Richardson of The Painted Prayerbook are also worth a look, but as the whole WordPress edifice seems to be down right now (thank you, Twitter, for confirming that it's not just me and that Wordpress is aware of and working on the issue), I can't link to them.

ETA: Here are the blogs just mentioned. (Links are to the front page, since each has multiple relevant posts.)

Stigma

2010-02-17T16:30:00.000-08:00

Bring Change 2 Mind, an advocacy campaign that seeks to make life better for people with mental illness by battling misconceptions and fear in the general public, announced this morning on its facebook feed that the idea of the day was "stigma and what all of us can do [to] eliminate it."

Stigma.

It's Ash Wednesday. Millions of Christians today willingly receive a literal stigma -- "a mark of disgrace or infamy; a stain" -- in the form of ashes on our foreheads. Those who went to a service in the morning and went about their days with the mark on their face may have experienced some negative reaction. But we get to wash it off at night.

Those who experience the stigma of mental illness don't have the luxury of removing the perceptions of others and the implications of those judgments on their lives.

For all false judgments, for uncharitable thoughts toward our neighbors, and for our prejudice and contempt toward those who differ from us, Accept our repentance, Lord.

Suffering and Silence

2010-02-17T10:52:00.000-08:00

A wise facebook friend passed along an observation about the peculiar luxury that Western Protestants, in particular, have of being able to choose the kind of suffering they undergo during Lent, when so many people have no option but to suffer, and not just for forty days.

It was an apt and sobering reminder that any solidarity we have with Christ's suffering must also attend to the suffering of his beloved in the world today, especially the "least of these" who have no choice in their suffering.

And it made me a little chagrined to have chosen, and announced, a Lenten practice that seems on the face of it to contravene the spirit of the season. Listening to music hardly counts as suffering, unless it is the product of an under-rehearsed junior high band, and even then it is only the most trivial sort of suffering. Indeed, there are churches and religious communities who pare to the bone their use of music in worship during this time. So why am I taking up the very thing that this tradition counsels giving up for this time?

Since I already went into the reasons for this odd choice last year, I won't rehash it now. But I'll add one thing:

Music is, for me, a step in the direction of Silence.

The richly imagined demon mentor who narrates The Screwtape Letters contrasts Heaven, "the regions where there is only life and therefore all that is not music is silence," with Hell, where "all has been occupied by Noise--Noise, the grand dynamism, the audible expression of all that is exultant, ruthless, and virile--Noise which alone defends us from silly qualms, despairing scruples, and impossible desires. We will make the whole universe a noise in the end .... The melodies and silences of Heaven will be shouted down."

It is my default practice to fill my world with Noise, mostly in the form of information. I get rather frustrated when I manage to leave the house without a charged-up mp3 player loaded with audiobooks and podcasts. And while I by no means want to suggest that public radio is diabolical, I believe that I sometimes use it to drown out the silence from which I could learn much more than what the Dow is doing today.

Observing real Silence during Lent would indeed be quite difficult for me -- less difficult, of course, than the real difficulties faced by so many -- and yet more difficult than I am prepared to take on this year. But Music offers another alternative to Noise, something to listen to, not something to fill a sonic vacuum.

I suspect that as I grow more familiar with music I may become more ready to live with silence.

And I hope that both music and silence will train me to better hear both the glory and the pain of the world.

Philippians 1:3

2010-02-14T14:39:00.001-08:00

The deepest, purest, sweetest experience of in-love-ness that I have ever had was not with a person, but with a church. I have loved several churches in my life, but the way I felt about my college church can be compared to nothing so much as the head-spinning delight of fresh infatuation.

I suppose that part of the reason I have more pleasant Valentine's-type associations with a church than with any person is that it feels a lot safer to love a church. My track record of rejection makes being in love with a person a terrifying experience. But the thing is, I know full well that a church can break your heart just as surely as an individual.

Which is not, in either case, a good reason not to love.

In any event: the reason I am a Presbyterian today is not that I am convinced that the Reformed Theological tradition is the best framework for understanding and communicating the truth of the Gospel. I am a Presbyterian because, when I have been most profoundly aware of my need for it, God has used Presbyterians to show me his love.

I believe this is a good reason to be a part of a church, even if it is not a particularly Presbyterian reason.

(Having listened to these lovely lectures on the pastoral heart of John Calvin [for which you need iTunes], however, I am now inclined to think that this is a more Presbyterian reason than I previously supposed.)

Pantipalooza

2010-02-13T22:40:00.000-08:00

The Valentine's Day feature in our local alternative weekly started out with this taxonomy:

As the holiday of love approaches, singles everywhere are doing one of four things: 1.) pouting, saying such a celebration is only about commercialism; 2.) ignoring it and acting as though it’s just another day; 3.) wondering if there is a possibility that an ex will come back; or 4.) looking for love — be it on the Internet, out on the town, in the office (eyeing attractive co-workers) or right here in the VCReporter.

They missed an important option:

5.) using the day as an excuse/opportunity to show love to others, especially those who might not find the holiday a happy occasion.

Although the title of the event makes me cringe, I'm switching from observing Valentine's Day to observing Pantipalooza, an annual celebration hosted at Mindy's blog. It is based on and named for the founder's practice of donating panties to a women's shelter in gratitude for the oft-taken-for-granted comfort of fresh clean underwear, but she invites participants to customize the event: "choose some woman, women or a women's group that can benefit from something you can donate or do [and then] do just that!"

One week notice

2010-02-10T12:27:00.000-08:00

I had an Ash Wednesday scare the other day.

I missed mid-week worship with my Episcopalian friends. A couple days later, it occurred to me that I had no idea when Lent starts this year and no mechanism in my life that would automatically alert me other than the mid-week worship that I had just missed. So for all I knew, I was already several days into Lent without having noticed.

It was a false alarm: Lent starts next Wednesday. Which means you can give up chocolate for Lent and still enjoy Valentine's Day, and that we've got a week left to consider whether and how to observe the season.

In addition to my observations from last year, here are a couple more ideas for your consideration:

Living Water International and Lifewater International both have Lenten resources that invite us to use this season to act in solidarity with the one billion human beings without access to clean water. I like the idea of a fast from beverages other than water, although, as my pastor and I both noted, it's not going to happen for us without a coffee dispensation.

I noted last year the popularity of the Web 2.0 fast (i.e., social networking platforms of various sorts). Some of my friends went on a complete web fast, or a complete web fast with Sundays off; some fasted from social networking sites like facebook, but not Web 1.0 (not-so-interactive information and entertainment venues). One friend reported what struck me as a novel twist: he fasted from Web 1.0 but not Web 2.0. That is, he continued to use facebook and read his friends' blogs, because he considered it an important part of maintaining relationships, but he avoided other web-surfing. I like the way that he thought about the place of the internet in his life and what various types of online activity meant to him and tailored his chosen discipline accordingly.

I don't think I mentioned last year, but I found this practice fruitful enough that I observed it for several years in a row: I gave up fasting for Lent. Which is to say, I made it my discipline not to skip meals. When a person routinely skips meals out of busyness or laziness or misguided efforts to lose weight, the invitation to fast can be a spiritualized excuse for an existing bad habit. It seemed better, to me, to eat mindfully rather than not to eat -- to practice the discipline of self-care, of having enough foresight to plan ahead and pack a lunch or at least carve out enough time and set aside the money to go get a meal and not just another cup of coffee.

(The first time I did this, the dining hall employees at my school went on strike the second week of Lent. I was miserable at complying with my chosen discipline that year.)

Me, I'm doing my music thing again, having found the practice valuable but my resolution spotty last year. Since it helps to be specific in defining one's goals, here is what I intend: for six and a half weeks, I will listen to at least 30 minutes/one album's worth of music -- any music -- every day, preferably before dinner (lest I end up staying up past my bedtime to fulfill my resolution). Sundays are not excluded, because listening to music is an especially suitable activity for a feast day.

The Holy Spirit is my Interior Decorator

2010-02-05T23:34:00.000-08:00

A friend of mine received a wedding gift from a family member: a green wall hanging* with a note that went something like this:

"As is my daily practice, I talked

with the Holy Spirit about

what gift to buy for you, and

He told me to buy you this

wall hanging. I realize that the

color and style do not really

go with anything on your

registry, but I am sure that if

you pray about it, He will show

you how He wants you to

use it in your new home."

There are so many things wrong with this.

It removes responsibility for decision-making from the gift-giver.

Normally, it would be a faux pas to give a gift that you know full well does not fit with the recipient's taste. But if you attribute the choice to God, you can deflect the inference that you are inflicting your own taste on the recipient while at the same time establishing yourself as an Especially Spiritual Person. Because who wants to argue with God?

It takes the Lord's name in vain.

Blaming God for your tastelessness and tactlessness is surely a greater misuse of God's name than a profane exclamation.

It engages in the impiety of wasting God's time.

Quite frankly, the Creator and Sustainer of the Universe has More Important Things To Do than help you pick out wedding presents.

Granted, the Eternal One has all the time in the world and then some. But we don't. So perhaps it would be better to put it like this: it wastes our time with God.

I can imagine the objection: But I have to go about the mundane responsibilities of my life, including shopping for wedding gifts -- I don't have the luxury of spending all my time contemplating the great things of God. And the Bible tells us to pray without ceasing. So why *shouldn't* I talk with God while I'm buying presents?

To which I would respond: By all means, talk with God while shopping for a wedding present! That would be a wonderful time to pray for the couple for whom you are shopping and for their upcoming marriage. But even then, you really don't need to ask God for divine intervention in selecting a present. You have access to a text every bit as authoritative for buying wedding gifts as Scripture is for living a Christian life: IT'S CALLED A REGISTRY. As long as your loved ones haven't registered for immoral items and you don't obtain them in immoral ways (say, by stealing), you really can't go wrong with any of the items on the registry. Just pick something, and save your precious, precious time for talking with God for something that's really worth praying about.

* * *

Since hearing about my friend's wedding present, I have taken to using the phrase The Holy Spirit is my Interior Decorator as a shorthand reductio ad absurdum argument against the sort of spirituality that expects God to routinely speak directly to the believer and interprets hunches, impressions, and/or personal preferences as the voice of God.

Now, though, I am forced to repent of the smugness with which I have insisted that it is ludicrous to cast the Holy Spirit as an interior decorator. While I still maintain that the giver of the green wall hanging was misguided in their insistence that the object in question was God's idea, my friend Carrie tells this lovely story that leads me to strongly suspect that the Holy Spirit does indeed dabble in interior design.

But note these important differences between the case of the green wall hanging and the case of the yellow prayer shawl:

In the one instance, the giver knew full well that the gift they were giving did not correspond to the recipient's taste, and asserted that God was responsible for the discrepancy. It would never have occurred to the recipient to attribute the odd object with which she now had to deal to divine intervention.

In the other instance, the giver had no idea of the color scheme of the recipient -- didn't even know who the ultimate recipient would be when she started the project -- and yet, as she undertook the project with a prayer, not that God would show her the right color to use, but that the result would bring comfort to the recipient, it turned out that the color matched perfectly. The recipient did not need to be told that this was a God Thing; she freely drew that conclusion on her own.

I have no reason (other than the gift-giver's assertion, which I am not inclined to accept at face value) for believing that Holy Spirit desires my friend to be placed in the awkward situation of having to compose a thank you note and determine a disposition for an object that she is in all honesty not particularly thankful for.

I have every reason to believe that the Holy Spirit desires Carrie to be comforted in her loss and reminded that she is deeply loved.

I believe, as Carrie states, that God is in the details and can use the insignificant things of this world to signify his love for his children.

I also believe that it is no sin against the Holy Spirit to re-gift a green wall hanging that does not coordinate with your decor, no matter how strongly the giver believes that it is God's will for you to have it.

*Identifying details have been changed; the object was in fact neither green nor a wall hanging.

More than just a building

2010-02-05T19:09:00.000-08:00

It's a fact of life in the ongoing upheaval in the American Protestant church: the sad tales of bitter battles over property between congregations that believe they can no longer endorse the theological direction in which their former denominations are moving and the denominations that legally hold the church property in trust and refuse to cede it to the dissenters. Everyone seems to interpret the side with which they disagree as heartless money-grabbers; the whole thing becomes an ugly mess.

I have known churches that have chosen to walk away from beloved facilities for the sake of their convictions rather than engage in such fights, and they strike me as noble and brave.

In college, I belonged to a church that met in a community college auditorium. I had been attending there for some time before I learned that my church had once had a building of its own, but had left its denomination, and a remnant congregation that continued on in the old building, when, after a season of prayer and study, they reached the conclusion that God does give women the gifts and vocation to serve in the office of Elder.

(I spent two years not knowing the joyful noise with which my church family worshiped -- only after we finally moved into our new sanctuary did I realize that the theater-style auditorium where we had been meeting was acoustically engineered to maximize the audience's ability to hear what was happening on stage and minimize their ability to hear each other. Toward the end of the ten-year sojourn in a rented space, a friend commented that some members were so tired of not having a church building that their judgment about the building process was impaired -- they were ready to do anything, including unwise cost-cutting or unreasonable debt, to get into our own building that much faster. In retrospect I can't but think that the auditory limitations of our rental hall exacerbated that impatience -- how could the acoustical deadening not have a spirit-deadening effect? But I digress.)

Some years later, I visited a church in my city for Easter Vigil, only to later learn that I had been present for one of the last acts of worship by that congregation in that place. The next day, they walked away from their denomination, their building, and even their church name, and founded a new parish in which they believed they could be faithful to their convictions about scripture and human sexuality. Looking back, I feel like I was an unwitting witness to a sacred moment -- the painful leave-taking of a people saying goodbye to something they valued for the sake of something they valued more.

As much as I admire these churches for having the strength to walk away from their buildings when they were convinced they could no longer stay in their denominations, I am by no means convinced that this is the obvious right choice for any congregation in such a predicament, as many of my evangelical brethren and sistren seem to think.

(FWIW, I'm most sympathetic with the congregations that choose to stay and bear witness within denominations they fear are headed to hell in a handbasket, but that's not really the point of this post, so enough about that already.)

"It's just a building," insist the advocates of walking away. These believers -- many of them members of churches that meet in converted warehouses or rented cineplexes -- bear witness to the church's status as aliens and strangers in the world. But can lack first hand knowledge of the deep sanctity that can attach to a particular place. It is not mere sentiment that gives gravity to the rooms that have held the prayers of generation, to walls and windows erected through the sacrifice of our own forebears in faith. When they insist, with good reason, that every place is sacred, they can miss the power of a place long recognized as sacred to open the eyes of people so easily blinded to sanctity of any kind. A building that has been loved and used for God's glory may well become what the Celtic Christians called a "thin place," where the seen and unseen realms are especially close.

In situations like these, the statement "It's just a building" sounds like "It's just a body" spoken with regard to a person who has died. Poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch recalls the swift and furious rebuttal of a bereaved mother offered to the supposedly comforting bromide, "It's just a shell": "'I'll tell you when it's "just a shell,"' the woman said. 'For now and until I tell you otherwise, she's my daughter.'"

We don't believe that the earthly remains of our loved ones are "just" a body; nor should we. There's a reason we honor the bodies of our dead with Christian burial, and it's not just a moot ritual that we go through to help us adjust to our grief. Human bodies are integral to our identities, created and loved by God. We believe in the resurrection of the body; we believe that God cares about creation, about the material world.

We believe that a person whose body dies yet lives, but that bodily death is still a real and grievous loss. In an analogous way, we might say that a congregation that loses its building certainly still lives, but has lost something precious. It is not simply rank materialism that leads people to be attached to their buildings. To live is Christ and to die is gain, but we do not believe it denies his Lordship to avail ourselves of medicine in order to prolong life. Likewise, we can believe that all of a church's assets ultimately belong to God while also thinking it might be proper to take steps to preserve the use of these particular assets for this particular family of faith.

On the other hand, sometimes the better part of faithfulness might just be to release a building to a whole new life of ministry.

I read with interest in USA Today (via Duke Faith & Leadership) about the efforts of Mary Our Queen Catholic Church to relocate the decommissioned St. Gerard's Church from Buffalo, New York to greater Atlanta, Georgia. At first glance, the idea seems sort of ridiculous: couldn't they build a whole new church building for less money than it would take to dismantle, move, and reconstruct an antique church from 900 miles away?

In short, yes, they could.

But as you read how Father David Dye and his congregation came to the point of considering this move, you can see how the idea grew on them. It will cost more than an economy-model new church, to be sure, but substantially less then it would cost to build an edifice of comparable quality out of new materials. They get to do the good work of saving a well-loved work of art that served other generations so well. Maybe they're even being green. (I don't know the comparative carbon footprints of recycled vs. new church construction.)

And then there are the little serendipities: the amazingly close match between the footprint of St. Gerard's and the original design commissioned for Mary Our Queen; the fresco of the coronation of the queen of heaven gracing the ceiling of St. Gerard's, visually invoking the patron of the adopting parish (alas, there is no way to transport the fresco intact -- it will have to be recreated at the destination); even the presence of a woman who grew up in St. Gerard's as a current member of the choir at Mary Our Queen.

While some Buffalonians are resisting the removal as a sort of cultural piracy, the former pastor and parishoners of the church are supportive; some even plan to travel to Atlanta to attend the first Mass in the new location. The last pastor of St. Gerard's told USA Today: "This church is a testament to the people of this neighborhood. They realize times have changed. Their faith will be alive in another setting."

Among the artifacts to be transfered with the building is a plaque on the back wall of the church honoring the members of St. Gerard's who died in World War I. This could be seen as a false appropriation of someone else's history, or it could be seen as a visible reminder that the worshipers at St. Gerard's in the twentieth century and those at Mary Our Queen in the twenty-first are all part of one communion of saints. Moreover, they are linked not only by a common faith but by a common building.

Moving an entire church building 900 miles so it can have a new life with a new parish is at least a little bit crazy. But to me it seems that it is also a testimony to resurrection.

Fighting bad music with good

2009-12-07T12:01:00.000-08:00

Many people just love Christmas music.

I am not one of them.

This is not to say that I do not love certain particular pieces of Christmas music. Let's just say that I take extra care to always have a fully charged, fully loaded (with audiobooks and podcasts) mp3 player with me whenever I leave the house during November and December.

There are several reasons for this.

First, I have a violent antipathy to one particular song that turns up with some regularity in the shopping-mall Christmas mix, and so I prefer to take what steps I can to limit my exposure to that song. The line "from now on our troubles will be out of sight" from the song "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" has struck me as a cruel lie ever since I was ten or eleven years old, and the mere mention of it tends to leave me cross and cranky.

I now understand, I think, that the counterfactualness of that line is the very point of the song -- it appeals to a nostalgic wistfulness, a sense of "gee, wouldn't it be nice if hanging a shining star upon the highest bough really would drive all our troubles away? Like it did when we were eight or nine, before we grew weary with the weight of the world?"

Whatever. By this point, my aversion to that song is deeply engrained in my personality.

Second, so much Christmas music is so AWFUL. And it pains me to hear a good rendition of a good song sandwiched amid the dreck, because it gets sullied by association.

Third, there's my anxiety about music (especially recorded music) in general.

I tackled this last reason last year for Lent -- a practice that did me good, as far as it went. But I wasn't especially disciplined with my chosen discipline, and so it did not transform me such that I kept it up into Easter and Ordinary Time. Now that we're back to what some observe as "little Lent," and at a particularly music-saturated time of the year, it seems suitable to revisit it. This season, then, rather than drive out the Christmas muzak with non-music, I will be driving it away with good music. Not necessarily only Christmas and Advent music, but as 'tis the season, I might as well tackle that particular aural anxiety while I'm at it.

I have no objection, in principle, to playing Christmas music during Advent. (Or rather, I do object in principle, but since it's a completely lost cause, and since taking a posture of perpetual protest and resentment against the culture in which I find myself does little to enhance my observance of the season, it seems wiser to accomodate my practice to reality.) But as my temperment is more tilted to Advent than Christmas, I prefer my Christmas music with an Advent tinge to it.

As I am not the sort of person who loves Christmas music, my personal assortment of such is in short supply. Basically, it's Michael Card's The Promise and a very excellent mixed CD given me by a friend (thanks, Kristy!) a few years ago. So I figured it's time to supplement. The other day I downloaded:

Both Over the Rhine Christmas Albums. (How can you NOT love this cover art?)
Tidings by Allison Crowe. (True story: I went looking for a single track, her cover of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah," thinking it would be the one non-Christmas piece in the mess of music I was fixing to download. Turns out, it was on her Christmas album. So I downloaded the whole thing. Love It. You can listen on the webpage linked.)
The Dawn of Grace by Sixpence None the Richer (Jury's still out: Leigh's voice is just SO sweet, which works for somethings, but Christmas music doesn't really need any additional sugar. This may be one Christmas album too far for me, but I had a free album coming to me, so I thought I'd give it a spin.)

Also listening:

Sufjan Stevens' Songs for Christmas, streaming live until Christmas Day at xmas.asthmatickitty.com

I'll probably also buy Andrew Peterson's Behold the Lamb of God based on numerous recommendations. It wasn't available on eMusic, where I got the previously mentioned assortment.

St. Nicholas vs. the Slave Traders

2009-12-06T12:01:00.000-08:00

In his 2007 NYT op-ed and Union Seminary inaugural lecture, John McGuckin outlines the good bishop of Myra's enactment of God's love for the poor, especially those vulnerable to enslavement.

Few Americans are familiar with the figure of Zwarte Piet, still popular (though controversial) in the low countries of Europe. While the racial history of our culture makes a black-faced assistant to a nordic Santa a non-starter, McGuckin suggests that the eclipse of this tradition is not an unalloyed good, for it cuts us off from an important part of Nicholas's hagiography, in which the saint raided a slave market and liberated a young man, who then entered the church's employ and devotedly assisted the bishop, a type of Onesimus.

We are much more likely to know of the story of the origin of the Christmas stocking tradition: how Nicholas cast gold into the hung-to-dry stockings of certain dowry-less girls. "Charming though it sounds," McGuckin tells us, this tale "reflected a deplorable custom." Without Nicholas's intervention the alternate fate these young women faced was not spinsterhood but sexual slavery.

In honor of this most remembered and most mis-remembered of saints, it seems especially appropriate on this, his feast day, to turn our minds and hearts to those who today suffer the exploitation that we prefer to imagine is a part of history. The Not For Sale campaign chronicles the blight of human trafficking, intensified of late by the growing global economy, and offers resources for prayer and activism.

Far be it from me to suggest that shopping is a solution, but given that shopping (in particular, our insatiable hunger for cheap goods) is a part of the problem, I commend to your attention the store section of the website. If you are acting as Saint Nicholas's agent in procuring gifts for your loved ones this Christmas, wouldn't it be great if at least some of those gifts came from organizations that fight the same exploitative behaviors that Nicholas fought in his earthly life?

Almighty God, who through your servant Nicholas brought liberation to the oppressed, grant that we may not be blind to the slavery in our own age. Give courage, endurance, and victory to the abolitionists and strength, liberation, and dignity to the enslaved and vulnerable. In the name of Jesus who sets the captives free, Amen.

On getting ready to get ready

2009-12-05T18:15:00.000-08:00

Those of us with depressive or depression-vulnerable temperments often have a special affinity with the penitential seasons of the church year. Advent, in particular, we may find to be a much-needed refuge from the relentless manufactured cheeriness of the commercial "holiday season." We take solice in the collective expressions of longing and expectation, mourning and repentance (or the wallowing in self-condemnation that we are tempted to substitute for true repentance). The minor key music of the more reflective season seems more in line with the posture of our own souls.

The trouble is that these seasons come to an end. The holiday at the end of the tunnel feels like a bright light shining straight into eyes accustomed to candlelight. Last year I found myself entering Holy Week not with the impatient expectation that I have chided myself for in the past -- being so eager for Easter that I wished to catapult over the intermediate observations, especially the quiet waiting of Saturday -- but instead with a sense of frantic unpreparedness: "It can't be Easter yet! I'm not ready to rejoice!" Bishop N.T. Wright in Surprised by Hope quite rightly calls upon the church to celebrate the season of Easter with at least as much creative exuberance as we observe Lent with self-denial. Yet I would just as soon go back to Candlemas, see my own shadow, and hunker down for another six weeks of Lent. Seems I may need to repent of a undue attachment to seasons of repentance.

Because this is the grace of the liturgical year -- like time itself, upon which it imposes a sacred order -- it is relentless. It keeps coming around, year after year, season after season, with another opportunity to repent and another opportunity to celebrate. We are never ready for the seasons of preparation; we never find ourselves fully ready even at their end.

I have found comfort in this first week of Advent in the admission of more than one thoughtful blogger that they all too often slip into the pew on Christmas Eve thinking, "Okay, NOW I'm ready for Advent to start."

Some years we may be more ready to reflect and repent, some years we may be more ready to celebrate. But mother church invites us to do both, year after year, in whatever imperfect way we can manage. It's okay that we're not ready to repent -- let us repent anyway. It's okay that we're not ready to rejoice -- let us rejoice anyway. Let us not dread the season nor its coming to an end, but receive both as the gifts they are.

The world is not as it should be

2009-11-30T12:36:00.000-08:00

Companies take customers' money and fail to provide the service promised. Customer service phone numbers lead to impenetrable decision trees that lead to waiting on hold that leads to an agent who promises that the problem is fixed. It is not.

People invade other people's property and steal their stuff. In broad daylight.

Electronics suddenly stop working for no apparent reason.

Family celebrations spread viruses.

Businesses are closed when one needs their services.

The ants keep coming back.

Trees grow roots in inconvenient places.

And United Breaks Guitars.

Yesterday's sermon was on Acts 13:32-39. Pastor pointed out the recurrence of the word "decay": three times in four verses, Paul reiterates that the raising up of Jesus means that he did not see decay. The world in which we live, in contrast, is beset with decay: creatures, products, institutions, relationships, public morals, our own bodies -- all break down, all disappoint. All creation groans. The good news has been fulfilled, yet we still await its consummation.

It's Advent. In those churches that don't rush headlong from Thanksgiving straight into Christmas, we use this season to grieve that the world is not as it should be, to express and embrace the longing for a fully redeemed world. As we prepare to celebrate Christ's first coming, we look with hope to his second. My little problems may not amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world, but it's still a comfort to practice a religion that acknowledges that there's something wrong with the way things are.

Maranatha.

Leading with Women's Bodies

2009-09-30T12:37:00.000-07:00

A couple of weeks ago, the Faith and Leadership Project at Duke Div posted an essay by Fred Bahnson, which I commend to your attention. Our choices about eating have implications not just for the health of our own bodies but for our relationship with the whole created order, and church leaders are in a position to help their congregations reflect and act in ways that promote health and wholeness on both a personal and cosmic scale.

Hear, hear.

There is one thing about the article that bugs me, though.

First, a church leader can lead with her own body. She can model the kind of health she expects in those she serves. But more importantly she can lead our corporate body -- the church -- toward a more holistic, sacramental way of eating so that its members’ bodies can thrive.

Now, most of the time I'm all for the use of feminine pronouns when writing about a generic individual. And I'm sure the author's word choice here only intends to acknowledge and affirm the reality of female leaders in the church.

But when the subject under discussion is food and bodies, the gendered language is loaded.

The church, in general, continually exhibits symptoms of being more anxious about the bodies of its female leaders than those of its male leaders. It seems that congregants -- both female and male -- are more aware of the wardrobe and weight fluctuations of their women leaders, and more inclined to make judgments about the person's credibility and authority based on her appearance. There are all kinds of cultural and historical explanations for this that I'm not going rehash here; suffice to say I wouldn't be making a big deal out of a couple of pronouns if they didn't call to mind a much broader pattern.

Granted, in this case, it would also have been problematic to describe our hypothetical clergyperson with masculine terms. But there's a reason God gave us plural pronouns. Calling the church leaders "they," or better yet, "we," would have been a simple change, and would have stripped the essay of any hint of a male expert telling women clergy to watch what they eat.

I'm of two minds about the heightened attention to a church leader's body that seems to accrue when that body happens to be female. Part of me resents the unfairness of it, and wants to challenge what seems to be latent sexism. Would you have made that remark about your pastor's weight gain if your pastor were a man? Really?

But we would miss out on so many teachable moments if we tried to get people to forget that women clergy have bodies. I treasure the work of women theologians on the subject of bodies; the church would be deeply impoverished had they chosen to avoid this topic because it's stereotypically "feminine." Likewise, the church may be enriched when women pastors are comfortable and confident enough to address body issues with their congregations, whether in the pulpit, the classroom, or the coffee-and-doughnuts line.

2009-09-02T20:18:00.000-07:00

Sunsets and hummingbirds, praise ye the Lord!

Respirators and check-engine lights, praise ye the Lord!

Fig trees and compost heaps, praise ye the Lord!

Visas for foreign trips, praise ye the Lord!

He has done marvelous, marvelous things!

I, too, will praise him with a new song.

Burglar alarms and ice-cube trays, praise ye the Lord!

Dorm rooms and history class, praise ye the Lord!

E-mail and Fed'ral Express, praise ye the Lord!

Bicycles and barbeques, praise ye the Lord!

He has done marvelous, marvelous things!

I, too, will praise him with a new song.

Gotta love the rural midwest

2009-08-16T06:58:00.000-07:00

Spotted along the major highway through Edmore, Michigan (pop. 1244):

[Sign with arrow pointing left]: HIGH SCHOOL

[Sign with arrow pointing right]: DRAG STRIP

Book Review: Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must be Reinvented in Today's Church

2009-07-14T22:54:00.000-07:00

Singled Out: Why Celibacy Must Be Reinvented in Today's Church by Christine Colon and Bonnie Field (Brazos Press: 2009).

Who should read it: Thoughtful single evangelicals and anyone interested in ministry in a society that is rapidly approaching population parity between married and single adults.

(Edit: a reliable source just told me that we have passed the parity point in the U.S.: there are now more single adults than married.)

The word "Why" is in the subtitle for a reason. This book does not, nor does it claim to, offer a Reinvention of Celibacy for Today's Church. It offers a plea for such reinvention, together with some preliminary suggestions of what that might look like. The book is not a definitive resource, but an invitation to a conversation that is essential for the future of the evangelical church's mission in modern culture.

In this respect, the book reminds me most of Mark Noll's now-classic (if I can say that of a book written in my lifetime) The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. The stance of the authors is as follows: "I am a committed evangelical. And I am also [an intellectual; a single adult]. The evangelical subculture makes it very hard to be both. This is not only difficult for me personally, but possibly tragic for our collective calling, and needs to be addressed." The authors then spend the bulk of their books analyzing the problem, and make gestures in the direction of a solution in the closing chapters.

This can be frustrating to readers, since the person most likely to pick up either book in the first place is probably already on board with the author's project. We don't need to be convinced that this is an issue; we want to know what to do about it. But of course, understanding the problem is a critical first step to finding a way forward. Colon and Field offer a thoughtful analysis of attitudes about singleness in evangelical and secular culture, as well as an exploration of the resources in scripture and the Christian tradition for a vision of celibacy for the contemporary church.

The primary population addressed in this book is the one in which the authors find themselves: 30+ straight, never-married adults -- a group often overlooked by the evangelical church, which, when it does address singles at all, tends to assume that they are either young 20somethings who will soon be married or single again due to divorce or widowhood. While they acknowledge that this is only one of many states of life in which singleness is experienced in our culture and churches, they rightly point out that a positive vision of the state of life of a life-long single adult can provide the church with a healthy foundation for addressing the pastoral needs of other subsets of single adults.

Perhaps I am projecting, but I imagine that the authors found it cathartic to commit to print their critiques of some of the resources available within evangelicaldom, particularly Debbie Maken's atrocious book Getting Serious About Getting Married. Single Christian readers who have been frustrated by even some of the better materials available to them will find encouragement in the clear-headed analysis. Yet the book is anything but an extended gripe session -- the authors are honest about the challenges of being single in the church without being whiny, and spend considerably more effort mining evangelicalism, secular culture, and the broad Christian tradition for a positive understanding of the single life and its place in the church. (The exploration of positive images of celibacy from secular culture is a bit of a stretch, but an interesting project nonetheless.)

The key call of this book is for evangelicalism to embrace and offer a positive vision of celibacy that applies to all singles. Rather than reserving the label of celibacy for the super-spiritual and/or asexual minority who are able and willing to accept a vowed state of non-marriage for life, the dignity of celibacy should be afforded to and expected of the growing population within the church who continue to hope for marriage over years or decades of single adult life, but are unwilling to make the pursuit of a spouse the entire focus of their lives. By honoring the discipleship of such individuals within our churches and including them wholly in our common life, the church can nurture not only them, but the next generation of young people growing up in a world utterly confused about sex and relationships, as well as any outsiders who (we can only pray) might look to us for an alternative vision of human flourishing.

ETA: I wonder how this book might have been different with a male co-author. Unlike many books for/about Christian singles, this book is not addressed exclusively or primarily to women, and I don't detect any obvious gender bias. Still, I would be interested to hear from single men which parts of the book rang true or false to them and what their experiences might add to the discussion.

bon anniversaire, cher Jean

2009-07-10T09:26:00.000-07:00

Get the John Calvin birthday clock at Calvin 500

(I'm sure I've messed up the French somehow. Please forgive me.)

I forgot to mention the grapes

2009-06-30T11:49:00.001-07:00

Grandparents' houses ought to have mysterious and magical nooks and crannies that invite a child's imagination into another time or place.

This house fills that obligation in spades.

The most magical part of this household is the avocado tree, with a canopy that cuts out the outside world and a network of branches that easily become a house, a fort, or a pirate ship.

Less suitable to play, but still marvelous in its otherworldliness, is the Rock Room: so called, I believe, because its original purpose was to house my grandmother's lapidary equipment. It's a lean-to built off the side of the garage with fiberglass sheeting for walls. The rock equipment is still there on a lower shelf, but now the room functions mainly as a potting shed and catch-all for garden odds and ends. Besides the chairs hanging from the ceiling, which always reminded me of the floating tea party scene from Mary Poppins, there is an antique push-mower (which only seems mysterious and special if you don't have to use it) and a bullhorn-style speaker hanging in the corner for no apparent reason.

The best thing about the Rock Room is the way the grape vines growing around that side of the house have wound their way inside, giving it the air of a tropical greenhouse. While the Rock Room grapes get less direct sunlight than the outdoor grapes, they get more warmth, and so mature faster. They outside grapes are still green, but those dangling from the ceiling of the Rock Room have turned deep purple.

Garden notebook

2009-06-27T12:39:00.000-07:00

I haven't updated about our garden yet this spring. Much has happened. Come see.

Alas, no apricots this year. Neither tree bore particularly well last year, and we chopped down the less-healthy of the two after the end of the season. This spring, the one remaining apricot tree failed to blossom. GrandDad hypothesizes that it is badly in need of pruning (see above), so plans to have it aggressively whacked back in the fall.

The plum tree, on the other hand, more than made up for the shortfall in apricots. The plums ripened three weeks earlier this year than they had last year (May 13 or so, versus June 3). And they kept coming. I think there was a solid week in which I collected over 100 plums every day, with at least two days breaking the 200-fruit mark. At the peak of the harvest, we had about five buckets of plums in the refrigerator, which didn't leave much room for anything else.

There are just a few late plums left on the tree now, but the harvest is pretty much done.

The blackberries are also nearing the end of the season.

I have six varieties of tomato growing in the area of the yard where the second apricot tree used to be. The big monster plant in the middle, a cherry tomato, produced its first ripe fruit a week or so ago. The others have a ways to go yet, although the pineapple tomato has really shot up in the last few weeks, and the Greek tomato has a couple green fruit visible.

Most of my tomatoes are transplants from the garden center, but I did manage to start a couple from seed this year. The first few seedlings I transplanted out, in early spring, didn't make it -- they turned pale and sort of sickly-looking for the first week after transplant, and then, as soon as they seemed to be recovering and starting to grow again, something ate them! So I kept a couple more of the seedlings inside a little longer and nursed them along in pots on the sun porch until they were about 6-8 inches tall and better able to fend for themselves. We transplanted them out in early June, and they seem to be doing okay so far.

Squash are easier than tomatoes to start from seed, because the seeds are so much bigger. I got ridiculously excited when the seedlings broke up through the dirt where I had planted them.

The first squash of the season is partly visible in the picture above, if you know where to look.

It's 4 or 5 inches here. Will be ready to pick in a day or two.

We also have zucchini and a mystery variety of winter squash (from a seed envelope GrandDad had, marked simply "squash").

It's also been a good year for avocados. We got the first ripe ones in March and have had a steady supply since then. Avocados don't finally ripen until after they're removed from the tree, which means that you can store them on the tree until you need them. We had a couple of heavy wind storms in the spring that knocked down a bunch of the fruit, but most of them are still up there.

Next year's avocados are coming along, as well. Our avocado bears on a two-year cycle and tends to alternate heavy and light years, but the current evidence suggests that next year's crop should be healthy, as well.

ETA: Grrr! Blogger ate my photos! Not that they're that much to look at, but still. I think I've set it so they won't just disappear this time...

ETA: WYSIWYG my foot.

I didn't throw the damn rice hard enough

2009-06-26T09:57:00.000-07:00

One of my earliest memories -- perhaps the earliest memory, if you account for the fact that my other earliest memory is indubitably shaped by hearing my parents' retelling of the event, whereas this one is mine alone -- is of a wedding. Or rather, a snippet of the reception -- I actually have zero recollection of the wedding proper, and quite possibly wasn't even there.

What I remember is that a little girl, a little older than I was -- I think she may have been the youngest sister of the bride -- took it upon herself to make sure that I wasn't left out of the big send-off, in which the collected guests would pelt the happy couple with rice (this was back in the day when they still used rice for this kind of thing). So she took me to her mother, who poured a small quantity of rice into my cupped hands. I carried my precious little mound of rice around for what seemed like forever but was probably just a couple of minutes. Since both of my hands were involved in holding my rice, I really couldn't do anything until it was thrown. My nose almost certainly started to itch. Finally, we all gathered along some kind of walkway for the grand exit, and as the bride and groom came by, I threw my rice ...

... and completely missed my target.

The marriage that we were then celebrating is now disintegrating.

If I were superstitious as well as neurotic, I think I really would be bemoaning my inadequately developed small motor coordination lo those decades ago. The throwing of the rice was for luck, right? And where is the luck now?

The thing is, it takes more than luck...

I went to a healing service at a nearby church the other day to pray for this family. But I got there late, and the service was tucked away in a side chapel with no rear entrance where I could sneak in without being inordinately disruptive, and I didn't know anyone there and so felt doubly awkward, so I decided to just stay in the courtyard and do my praying there.

The church has a labyrinth laid into the courtyard floor, so I quickly decided to walk the labyrinth on behalf of this family I have loved all my life, praying for each member in turn as I wound my way through the circuits.

On the other occasions that I have walked a labyrinth, I've always gotten distracted by wondering how far I was from the center. This is part of the nature of the medieval-style labyrinth design, which takes the walker in and out as they move through each quadrant. You find yourself walking right next to the center when you're still only a fraction of the way into the path, then walking along the outer edge when you are in fact almost to the center.

This time, though, these near-constant reversals of direction did not pull my attention away from what I was praying. Rather, it seemed especially suited to my prayers for loved ones who are travelling a path that they never expected or planned to be on, for which there is no clear and obvious way forward to -- what? It's hard to even know what to hope for when a family is in crisis like this. To hope that things go back to the way they were before seems impossibly naive, yet my imagination fails to provide an alternate good future.

The only bit of distraction came when I found myself in the center sooner than I had expected. Had I really wound my way through the entire pathway already? I wasn't even halfway done with my prayer. It was actually a bit jarring to find myself already having reached my goal.

Turns out, the walking was as much a prayer as the words I breathed. May God give my loved ones peace, focus, and an assurance of his presence, through a process that stands to be frustrating, confusing, and much longer than anyone wants it to be. And may he bring them home -- whatever that is going to be -- sooner than any of them dare to expect.

Top photo: "attempt 363" by ollily, used under CreativeCommons Attribution-Noncommercial license.