It’s going to be a quiet remainder of the week, I think. Work is insane at the moment: my boss is out of town, which means on top of putting out the normal fires, I’m going to be teaching his class on Thursday.
I might mention that I’ve never actually taught a class before, so I’m glad that I get to start by leading a graduate seminar on Romans.
Did I mention I haven’t read Romans in about three years?
How soon is Friday?
1) I knew life was unfair somewhere around 3rd grade. As with most major events in life, it involved a girl. She was a brunette, big brown eyes, and I had a crush. Big crush, the first of many. She told me that she’d be my girlfriend, whatever that means to a nine-year old, if I got a hit my next at-bat in kickball, which I did. That relationship lasted approximately one day, as she quickly said she was just kidding. If there’s any justice in the world, she’s met the fate of my long-time high school crush, who’s now programming computers in Reno, Nevada. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but just to say…dodged a bullet.
2) Three funny movies: 1) The Jerk. It’s just ridiculous. Steve Martin used to be really funny, and this is him at his best. 2) I have to say Super Troopers. Many will scoff, but it’s sheer brilliance. 3) Bill Cosby Himself. This one may be cheating, as it’s actually a taped concert, but it came out in the theatres, so I’ll count it. I remember rolling on the floor not being able to breathe the first time I watched this. It’s still one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen. The Cos cannot be outdone.
3) My guilty pleasure bands fall in two categories: bands that rule, and that no one else likes, and bands that really do suck, but I secretly enjoy. With regards to the first, I’ll put Blue Oyster Cult, Rush, King’s X, and the Spin Doctors. The true guilty pleasure band? Genesis. It was my first CD I ever bought.
4) One of my favorite memories involving a sibling was when I went and shot pool with my brother after he’d moved out of the house on his own. It was like the beginning of our adult friendship, and I will cherish that memory always.
5) The favorite holiday is probably Thanksgiving: it’s the time when the extended family that I never see gets together, and I get to see the Louisiana family from all over creation. Aunt Fern, Aunt Phyllis, Uncle Bob, Uncle Ronnie, Lane, Huey, and all the rest. The number gets smaller every year; the older generation is nearly all gone now, which makes me more than a little sad. But it makes it more and more important to make this every year, to remember where I come from, and where my roots are.
I’ve been tagged by Lindsay Gafford, and as such, here we go.
One book…
that changed my life: East of Eden. I’ve read it twice, and it’s blown me away both times. It’s John Steinbeck at his most inspired.
that you’ve read more than once: The Great Divorce. It’s one worth reading several times, packed with rich images and metaphors. When I was riding through the Scottish Highlands, I thought of how he describes Heaven here.
that you’d want on a desert island: The Complete John Updike Short Stories. I’d finally be able to sit down and read some of them. My brother Evan gave me this for Christmas two years ago and I’ve only barely cracked the front cover. When I get done with Soul Survivor, which has been pretending to be my bedtime reading for a year now, I’ll get to this one. I. swear. That, and John Updike is the catfish of modern fiction, swimming in the depths and absorbing the bottom of life, where most writers play in the shallow reeds.
that made you laugh: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. One of the funniest things I’ve ever read in my life. I was crying in parts. And then I was tearing up at the end.
that made you cry: A Prayer for Owen Meany. I never knew literature like this could be written after 1957. In many ways, this book began a long process of helping me to believe in providence again. There’s only a handful of books that I really mourned being done with, and this was one of the first.
that you wish had been written: The Church in the World, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He died in prison before being able to really put it all together, and we’re left debating what might have been. One of the great tragedies of theology.
that you’d wish was never written: Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Seriously: it’s a ridiculous number of pages, and no one’s seriously read the whole thing. It would give literary poosers one less round of ammo.
that I wish I’d written: The Brothers K. It’s just too good to actually be a book. Some of the chapters could stand alone as short stories. It almost makes mad to think about it. David James Duncan, where are you when we need you?
that you are currently reading: Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Slit. My. Wrists. I’m sure that in a month or three, I’ll be raving about how this book changed my life, but at the moment, it’s like swallowing concrete. Dense. Difficult.
that you want to read: The Crucified God by Jurgen Moltmann. The first book I read in seminary was by him, and it’s been an on-again, off-again affair as I try to figure out what I think about his method and results. This one’s his landmark work.
I hereby tag:
Ace
Sean
kevin–this means you have to post one more.
Vernon
Ally
You know that your reading list for the semester is rough when you look forward to reading Dante, not because he’s light literature, but because it’s the lightest thing on your plate for the semester. I spent close to three hours yesterday afternoon slogging through this book, and read maybe thirty pages. Seriously: it’s killing me. Of course, not knowing the history of German idealism isn’t helping my cause with understanding what Gadadmer’s putting forth. As my friend Dennis Tucker puts it, “it’s a chance to learn.”
Gadamer opens his magnum opus with a lengthy discussion of where the German philosophical history went wrong, in short. Somewhere along the line, after Kant, philosophers starting looking at the ideal as something which concentrated first in abstract principles, occasionally revealing itself through the bombastic statements of Hegel and Nietzsche. The point he’s trying to make is that this tradition tends to devalue what is in its particularity. In an example that C.S. Lewis will also use, he talks about the morality of trees, that a tree is not a bad tree because it doesn’t look like a tall, towering pine; some trees are meant to be shrubs. As such, it makes no sense to call that tree “bad” just because it doesn’t measure up to what you had concieved as “tree”.
This weekend, we’re having a mini-retreat at church to discuss a few little topics, and in the wake of reading Gadamer, my head was spinning. I walk into the retreat and see multiple friendly faces, give a lot of much-needed hugs, and am relieved to be out Gadamer’s shadow for a few minutes. We stand around, eat little pistachios and munchies, and eventually sing before breaking out into little groups. The first song contained the line “come build a house of flesh and bone.”
Flesh and bone? Suddenly, the fog bank in my mind rolled away and everything Gadamer was talking about took on human faces. The ghosts of his words spiraled out the front door and in slouched people with all kinds of eyes and toenails. Kant become an old woman with silver hair and a middle-aged pooch; Hegel grew a moustache and cowboy boots. When we deal with the “church”, it dawned on me, this is nothing more complicated than dealing with “people”.
Aristotle writes in his Ethics that he doesn’t see the need for a universal, because if there was one, it wouldn’t make much difference for this person or that person. In other words, if John has seven nails to put this board up, it does him no good to idealize about how to put it up with nine. Most days, I’m inclined to agree, that we are to work with what we have been given, and hope for completion. As Moltmann pointed out long ago, this is the point at which the idealists break down: they have no hope in what cannot be anticipated. God gives to us frail people that which we could not have expected, which is more than we could have wanted had we known what we wanted.
Dealing with church is no more than dealing with the vessels through whom God is working. The abstractions of “church” are meaningless apart from their concrete expressions, for only those visions given by God can provoke us, and only those gifts that hope anticipates can sustain us. And how else does these emerge but through flesh and bone? Miraculously, these things are not competitive: spirit and flesh, grace and need.
What do you know about art? I’m not asking whether you can tell the difference between a Vermeer and a Van Gogh…I mean, if you can’t tell which one used a butter knife to paint, I can’t help you.
But seriously: what does art tell you that nothing else does?
Thanks all for the kind words on the new layout. Really, I had nothing to do with it. But I kinda like the look. The bleached, parched look of the landscape in the header is appropriate for Waco, well, most of the time.
Per Vernon’s comment, to the left, you’ll note some tabs labeled “about” and “book recommendations”. Soon, they’ll be one labelled “music recommendations” and “Other places” or something like that. That’s where I can show you how cool I am by talking about books I like and music that I listen to, or tell myself I’ll listen to, or something like that. Basically, it’s all self-aggrandizing and braggadocious. Good? Good. Glad we got that cleared up.
All else will be posted in the main body, and I’m not promising I’ll update the recs more than a couple of times a year. Basically when I need to kill an hour, which won’t be often this next few months.
The Management.
Tommorrow is the first day of class. At this stage in the game, you don’t so much think about what you’ll wear the first day of class, but what you’ll be doing to survive the first day of class. In my case, it involved going for a run tonight and finishing up the 200+ pages of history reading for the first seminar. I’m not a history guy directly, but reading this afternoon about the religious history of America around the Civil War era was absolutely fascinating. I won’t go into a lot of details here, but you check out this book for a fairly good social history of what was going on in the South following the defeat of the Confederacy.
It was a little oversimplified, I think, and follows Emile Durkheim’s sociology a little too much for me, but insightful none the less. I think it’s fair to say, as Wilson does, that cultures have a “religious” sense to them, but only provisionally. While at one point, cultures may have had the cultic flavor that he wants to give to the Old South, with rituals, rites, and creeds designed to pass on a transcendent reality, cultures today are much more fluid and transient; for my generation, regional cultures don’t have the draw they once did, as we’re more apt to float from place to place, life to life. It’s hard for me to identify with the Old South, though in many ways, it’s deep in my bones. I can almost smell it when I go into the small parts of Louisiana. You can see it in the monuments, the names of hospitals, the way that people move slowly as if at any moment, the call to arms is going to be sounded.
Anyway, the semester’s starting. Tommorow. In 10 hours. Year number two. Of PhD work.
It’s a full one. Religious History in America since the Civil War. Aquinas. Gadamer. Dante. With those four, it’ll be a wild ride. There may be an audit squeezed in there, but on top of work, I’m not sure that I can handle much more than this and keep my sanity. Following my stint at the farm, it’ll be much harder to want to do some of the inane work that comes with academia. Life is too short and too rich, and God knows that there’s more to metaphysics than Aquinas. As Aristotle, Aquinas’ philosopher, pointed out, knowledge of the good is impossible apart from its practice.
Holding breath….
Who needs as many books as I’ve got? Earlier this summer, I gave up trying to sell a small mountain on half.com and let Half-Price Books of Dallas have their financial way with me. Frankly, I was grateful just to have some space on the shelves again, and I don’t miss any of the crap that I gave up in exchange for some space. But still, I struggle with where to put all the books. At present, I’m completely full up. That’s right. Not. An. Inch.
One of my roommates reminds me no less than once a month that I have what he calls “too many books”. I’m reminded of what my late mentor Chip Conyers used to say about education, that it was a matter of knowing what books to read, and in what order. And while this particular roommate is one his disciples as well, he and I differ on what exactly “the right books” are. My shelves are littered with everything from social criticism to John Irving to how to build furniture out of 2×4s to dense scholastic theology, often with the philosophy bumping up against the New Testament studies sections that are forever trying to crowd them out. I just ignore the scuffles and hope they’ll figure out a way to co-exist, sans border skirmishes that occasionally result in a journal falling over the bannister to the cold, dark floor below.
I’m beginning to suspect that the divisions between disciplines are, at best, artificial, and at worst, self-degrading. To say that any one pattern of thought can be divided from another is to say that one discipline can exist apart from another. In other words, in my case, theology can exist apart from the study of history, or of economics, or of philosophy or social criticism. Or in someone else’s case, that the study of math could exist apart from physics or biology, the means by which abstract numbers become useful. Any study falls under this rubric. What emerges are two considerations:
1) It’s all related.
2) Everything borrows.
Theology piggybacks off the insights of philosophy, history, science. Science piggybacks on the discoveries of history, religion, anthropology. Philosophy mooches off neuroscience, history, math. History sucks the blood of philosophy, sociology, linguistics, and literature. THERE IS NO PURE DISCIPLINE. To say that there is is to subdivide the complex event of living into a smaller room than it was meant to dwell in. Karl Barth may be rolling over in his grave as I write, but there is no such thing as a context-less learning or even an timeless faith. Even Jesus showed up in flesh and blood, and while the life of Jesus gives importance as the organizer of history, he was part of history. Our confession as Christians is that Jesus came and walked the earth as one of us, that we might live as God, the inhabitant of here and later, now and then.
This is the part that confounds doctoral programs: to be good at one thing, you have to be good at a number of things. If we confess that the Lord is the Lord of what is, then to reject economics because it has nothing to do with theology is to misunderstand what theology is. The question then becomes not why one wastes time with subjects “outside one’s discipline”, but why one doesn’t consider what the pig in the cage on antibiotics has to do with the triune God, the Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost, in the garden, under the moon, on our plate.
As you can see, there have been a few changes here. Bob’s webspace disappeared, and thus, the move. And in the shuffle, a few things have been misplaced, namely all the links to blogs. So, leave them here.
If this was your blog, what kind of stuff would you want to see here? Be true.
