Taking Off and Landing

Vacations for academics aren’t, for the most part, time off, I’ve discovered. One of the things you inherit as you enter ‘the guild’ is a monkey who lives in your car, occasionally coming to live under a bed or a couch, but only when he decides that your back is no longer an inhabitable place to be. The monkey’s name is “legacy”.

Legacy is there when you’re contemplating picking up the new Michael Chabon book or blowing off an hour watching 30 Rock, reminding you that you are indeed turning to worm food as fast as you can type, and chances are, twenty years after you’re dead, a handful of people will be talking about you….

Unless…

Unless, you kill the unicorn that is called “scholarship”. Unless you can find that mythical creature which goes by many names, and has known many imitators in the form of shinier animals, who for a time shimmered and swayed and now lie discarded in bins called “historical-critical method” or “critical theory” or “post-liberal theology”–if you can find this creature who has glided in and out of classrooms, offering fleeting glimpses in panel discussions on the importance of aviary flu for theologians, you may very well be able to attain that which the unicorn brings: immortality.

And with that immortality, people will talk about you. They’ll talk about you when they think they’re talking about your future, more pale imitators. They’ll talk about how irresolvable your paradoxes are and how deft your writings remain. But again, you were the one who woke up, ate a bowl of cereal, and sweatily tried to deny the monkey’s existence just like everyone else.

***

Grades are in, and I’m torn between needing to read for next semester, work on the dissertation, and finish The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and Season 2 of 30 Rock. I suspect that, tonight, it’s Michael Chabon, and tomorrow, it’s class prep and cutting the grass. Vacations never truly are. They monkeys fly in and out the windows, and I might forget them for a while, but they usually return. One can only hope that they stay away long enough for me to remember that I really do love good fiction, for no other reason than an excellent novel is hard to find.

1) No matter who your students are, they will always ask for clarification on the syllabus. This will happen regardless of how much time you’ve spent on the syllabus prior to the class.

2) Never write a syllabus more than two pages. See Thesis #1.

3) Writing assignments given to students will be done one hour before class by 85% of the class. The outlier will be the student who does all of the assignments for the semester within the first month and hands them in accordingly, reeling you in like a fish.

4) The amount of coffee drunk before class is directly proportional to the clarity of the lecture.

5) The amount of time spent preparing a lecture is inversely proportional to the clarity of the lecture.

6) The most effective way to prep a lecture is to snort instant coffee and never crack a book.

7) The chances my fly will be down while teaching is inverse to the preparation I have given to class.

8 ) Never trust the markers to be working. Throw one against the wall at the class beginning for effect anyway.

9) There is no ” perfect time” of day to teach. Students will always have a limited attention span, and you will always have more material than that span.

10) There is such a thing as a stupid question.

I’ve just finished reading Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried for the first time, and as I told my wife, it’s the kind of book that’s so wonderful, I want to throw it against the wall. I want to throw it against the wall because the beauty and the sorrow in its pages are like butterflies trapped inside a hardened cocoon; if I throw it enough times, the shell will break, and the wings will spread and smear all over the wall for me to remind me every day that death too can be beautiful.

On one level, it’s a collection of short stories about Vietnam. But as the author says, this book is much, much more than that. It’s an extended meditation on storytelling as a kind of resuscitation, breathing back into life those who have been dead. But the dead only live in circumscribed parameters; they can only live as we remember them, or as we imagine them. I was mesmerized by Atonement when it did the same thing, providing the dead with the lives they can now never live without us.

And in that, the tragedy of this book really spreads its wings: O’Brien tells beautiful and tragic stories inspired by true lives, but lives who can never do what lives do, that is, live freely. The dead of his stories rise again, but only to die the same death fifteen pages later, alive only as our memories, alive only in our reflections. None the less, this book is phenomenal. Take and read.

A number of the links to the left are completely dead, or wandering off into the snow, waiting for the five-finger death punch to take effect. Thus, I’m reworking that section.

If you want your blog to be put in the links, lemme know.

As a theologian, I spend most of my life dealing with things as if there were a thing called the ‘as-is’, as if there were a realm of life that simply ‘was’ apart from people screwing around with it. Whether or not that realm exists or not is a different question for a different day, but the part I want to wrangle with is what it means for someone who spends most of their day talking and thinking about theology in clean ways to dive head-first into a world populated by dust ruffles and matching sheets.

Let me say this: marriage is wonderful in all sorts of ways. It’s home in the most profound sense. I’ve not had the sense of waking up and being completely settled in at least two years, and so waking up next to my wife and confidante is fantastic. This isn’t to say that it’s all perfect, but it’s all very good. ‘Very good’ in the biblical sense of God standing over something that was growing and breathing and calling it pretty damn nice.

So, it’s a challenge bringing together two worlds–one that deals with gritty realities of mental illness and homeless clients (her work), and one which deals with academic problems of theory and ontology and copious amounts of coffee. These two worlds need each other; air cannot exist without ground, and water needs land to call the shoreline. And love, sweet love, needs to find love to fling it back out into the world, stronger than it was and more able to love than it was before.

There was a moment prior to getting engaged when we she had just started her job, and I had just started teaching when our dinner conversation went something like the following:

She–”How was your day?”
Me–”It was crazy. This student came in and blah blah blah noxious comment complaint about student ridiculous philosophical distinction”…”And how was your day?”
She–”Well, I had to talk a guy out of his machete when I went to his house today”.
Me—(silence).

So, it’s two vastly different 8 to 5s now melding together. I spend most of my days, until the semester starts, in the same clothes I woke up in, reading, thinking, pacing the floor and muttering to myself. She gets ready and does battle with social ills, state policies, and bureaucracy. But this is where it gets good for both of us–that for theology, there is always the earth and creation, and for social work, there is always more than reacting to problems.

Faithful, Occasional Readers,

Upon consulting with my board of advisors, I’ve decided to grant this blog a stay of execution. I’m getting married in less than a month, so this is way down my list of things to keep up with. But, post-wedding, I’ve decided to give this little blog one more chance at life.

Stay tuned, and thanks for reading. In the meantime, I need ten suggestions for blog topics in the future.

Go.

I’ve been talking for a while now about my ambivalence regarding voting, political involvement, and the like. And let me say again: it’s not that going to a neighborhood meeting or pulling a lever or being a councilman is morally wrong. None of these things are bad in and of themselves. The trouble comes when these things put themselves in the position of saying that the religious life or the lif e of discipleship becomes conflated with these things. In other words, I worry about the line of reasoning that as a Christian, the political life (participation in government change) is the final goal, the apex, the summum bonum of Christian existence.

Case in point: I teach an introduction to Christian Heritage class on Tuesday-Thursday at 8 a.m. I’ve had a student ask if, in light of the inauguration, we can cancel class. My response was, “No, we’re going to have class. If you choose to watch the inauguration, that is your preroggative.” I know of other colleagues who are cancelling class for the inauguration, and that too, is their preroggative. But to that, I offer the following caveat:

Obama is not the Messiah.

Yes, I cast my vote for President-Elect Obama; yes, I think that his policies had more promise than McCain’s vis-a-vis war, energy, job creation, and host of other issues, but do I think that he’s going to be able to do all he promised? Not a chance. I think he’ll do a good job; I hope he’ll do a good job. But if the two come into conflict, I hope that Christians everywhere would have the courage to say that the church offers something that Obama does not, namely Christ, the one who establishes true polity and union, and who renders all other political life provisional at best.

There’s a ton of ways to slice up religion and politics:

–You can see the church and state cooperating toward a single common good.

–You can see the church as the conscience within the larger public sphere.

–You can see the state as the telos towards any good religious teaching, that all religion is ethics.

–You can see the state as guiding people toward the church.

These are of course, just four options. My own take is somewhere near #1, with the following provision: what the state defines as goods and what the church defines as goods are not the same. When the state promises ‘freedom’ or ‘equity’, this is a purely pragmatic definition, a detente between warring parties; one only has to look at the way that Rick Warren and Gene Robinson are both part of the festivities to see that Obama is part of this as well. But when Christianity speaks of ‘freedom’ or ‘equity’, this is an entirely radical thing, speaking of the Christ who cuts across geographic boundaries and who relativizes incomes and offers a singular vision of God. These two are not the same.

So, no, I’m not cancelling class on Tuesday, because I believe that what theology offers is not the same as politics, and that as much promise as Obama offers, what he offers is ultimately a difference of degree, rather than type, in politics. The radical Christian vision is one that can be called a number of things, but to call it quietist or sectarian because it refuses to honor civil events is to misunderstand the relationship: that politics is ultimately provisional, and can lead to Christ, but only if politics understands itself as not the ultimate end of the religious life. Aristotle, as Laura reminded me, said that ethical reflection leads to political life; my counter to that, however, is that what Aristotle has in mind here vis-a-vis ethics is only partly encapsulated by Christian teaching: there comes a point at which–as Aquinas saw–Aristotle can be a guide to Christian faith, but ultimately finds himself grasping at the meaning of life apart from the guidance of faith.

Let the church be the church.

I could resolve to make this blog more than it really is, to give it a sense of what it used to be; I could swear up and down that once again, I’ll post witty paragraphs comparing coffee to the workings of divine grace, but that’d be a lie. These days, I do well to get the writing done that I have to do, much less do the writing I’d like to be doing.

Let me back up: I do writing that I enjoy. But there’s a lot of writing that is done, in part, to pad a little thing called the “ciriculum vitae”. Mine’s looking better than it used to, and not as good as it will, but at the moment, it’s littered with a number of things that I’m doing just to have something on these sheets of paper. In February 2010, this changes, with the publication of a book that alter the landscape of how people read John Howard Yoder. At least that’s the hope.For the last two weeks, I’ve been sitting with two other guys in a very small room, for several hours a day, lightly editing a series of lectures Yoder did in the 1980s in Warsaw, which we’re titling simply Nonviolence–A Brief History. Watch for it via Baylor University Press.

But enough about the writing life, as it’s one thing, but hardly the most important. More significant is that this bachelor is, against all odds, becoming a married man in June. Sarah Marie Martin, Michigander, social worker extrordinaire, lover of Cheez-its, wearer of pink, hoper for the hopeless–I’m way out of my league. She loves Jesus and Elvis and high school football and yours truly. So, right now is wedding plans and moving out of my curent locale into a temporary–and free–living arrangement to prepare for the impending seismic shift.

Two things are true here: 1) I love this woman more than I know how to, and 2) I’m in way over my head.

***

Other than that, dissertation is coming along slowly, pastor search is still ongoing, and friends are gracious and good. There’s the run of the mill garbage that comes with people being toolbags and institutions being foolish, but what else can I say? Teaching’s a blast; my students either love me or think I’m the anti-Christ; I had four students shake my hand and thank me on the way out of their final. I’m grateful all the way around.

Busy, exhausted, stressed, but at the bottom, utterly thankful and amazed.

***

What’s to become of this blog in the future? We’ll see. For the time being, I suggest you check this out, or see which of the blogs on the left-hand side are still live ones: it’s been a bad year for the blogs that I used to frequent with a high number of casualties. My sense is that this cluster of ones and zeroes on the Internet will become an outpost for musings more personal than professional, more episodic than sustained.

See you soon.

I currently live in a house, until the first of year, with a couple who love television. I mean, LOVE: when they moved in, they brought with them their complete package of digital cable-expanded package-premium channels, and continue to pay an extra share for it to continue to be a reality in the house. I’ve never been much of a TV-watcher, but with literally 500 channels to choose from, it’s hard not to find myself sitting on the couch with Die Hard going in the background while I mindlessly grade papers.

Die Hard post forthcoming. Don’t think I won’t post on that Christmas-time gem.

***

Tonight, as I sit down to crank out some notes from the evening pastor search committee, I see Kurt Russell driving a car like hell through a deserted backroad, with Rosario Dawson in close pursuit. Obviously, I am intrigued. It’s a meeting of Overboard and Rent: what’s not to hate about this trainwreck already?

A quick look at the information on the cable reveals that this is indeed Quentin Tarrantino’s Grindhouse. For the next 30 minutes, I watch Russell drive with a bullet in his shoulder, pursued by three violent–yet mildly attractive–women until they run Russell off the road. And stomp on Russell’s face with a stilleto.

There might have been a time when I liked the Tarrantino films. I still admire portions of Pulp Fiction, mostly because it’s a highlight for both Samuel L and John Travolta, gems in an otherwise lackluster decade of films for both actors. I love the pontifications of Pulp Fiction; I enjoy the snazz of watching Uma Thurman kick ass; I really get tired of the gratuitous violence. A stilleto? To the face? Really?

One and a half Dodge Chargers out of five. Quentin, I am losing my patience.