The Synaptic Gospel Sale and Children & Youth Ministry Conference in DC

Sorry to so shamelessly promote, but I have a special offer:  You can get your own copy of The Synaptic Gospel directly from me for $1-5 less than other venues, for $23.99 delivered.  This deal is a special promotion until Monday 2/27, and I have a limited quantity that I can offer at this rate.  Simply Paypal the funds to me (cdrodkey [at] yahoo [dotcom]) and you will soon get it in the mail; if you’d rather pay another way, e-mail me directly and I’ll make sure I reserve your copy.  You’ll note that this price is even less than Amazon’s. 

Also, while I’m at it, I’ll also mention that I will be offering a workshop on The Synaptic Gospel at the Children, Youth, and a New Kind of Christianity conference in Washington, DC, this May.  This conference is shaping up to be an interesting event; keynote speakers include Jeremiah Wright, Brian McLaren, John Westerhoff, Tony Campolo, Joyce Ann Mercer, Dori Baker, and others.

The apostrophe: A challenge

I am teaching a writing-intensive course this semester, and one challenge is how to deal with students who “aren’t good at grammar.” On the one hand, one does want to help them write in the way generally recognized as “proper.” On the other hand, there is a level at which one must admit that there is something unjust about the way arbitrary conventions are used to judge intelligence — someone who writes in a non-standard way is not regarded simply as non-conformist, but is often judged as being somehow dumb.

In reality, however, it seems that many of our conventions are not only dumb in themselves, but superfluous. For instance, take the use of the apostrophe to designate either possessives or contractions. It seems to me that these apostrophes do not actually add any information that is not already supplied naturally by the context — if you left out all apostrophes, you could still tell which words were contractions (as opposed to homographs like “wont” and “cant,” which are rare to begin with) and, even more radically, I contend that you could tell whether it was a plural, a possessive, or a plural possessive.

To demonstrate this bold claim, I challenge our readers to come up with a sentence that is (a) somewhat plausible and (b) could be genuinely ambiguous if plurals/possessives were not distinguished using apostrophes.

Lars and W. Do America: A review of Lars Iyer’s Dogma

Few writers have captured the despair and self-loathing that necessarily accompany the academic life as perfectly as Lars Iyer, and surely fewer have done it so humorously. Spurious established the tone for the trilogy, immersing us in the abusive relationship between W. and Lars, in W.’s continually thwarted desires to somehow become worthy of philosopy, and in the sheer squalor of Lars’s existence. The infamous “damp” infecting Lars’s apartment resonated with the wisdom of the ancient Israelites, for whom mildew was a matter to be handled by the religious authorities.

By now, it’s practically required by law to compare Iyer’s work to Beckett and Bernhard, and while those comparisons are surely accurate, there is also something new and intriguing in Iyer’s framing.

Lent 1 Sermon: “Neither This Nor That God”

This Sunday’s sermon is based on the Lent 1B lections (Genesis 9:8-17, 1 Peter 3:18-22, Mark 1:9-15), but focused primarily upon the Hebrew Bible reading from Genesis 9, primarily because I feel like I preach on the baptism of Jesus often for some reason even though I preached on Noah’s Ark only a few months ago, as well.  The first Sunday of Lent is one of the few times Zion “Goshert’s” UCC celebrates Communion, so the Eucharist is a theme at work here, too.  I am thankful for the great Girardian Reflections on the Lectionary website for help this week.  I’m curious to hear your impressions of my draft as I sharpen it over the next few days.

We all know the story of Noah’s Ark:  it is one of the most imaginative literary stories in the Bible—with a big boat, animals, strange weather, and a great flood.  We teach it to our children because of the vivid images of the story; in fact, one of our most popular toys for children in our church is the Little People Noah’s Ark. 

We very often forget the violence of the story.  Everyone in the world dies except for just a few people, and all but two of each species survive.  The stage of the story is set that people are sinning—and it’s worth noting that this story represents the introduction of the word “sin” in the Hebrew Bible—by focusing their attention away from God and copying each other’s behavior.  You know how it works with children, when one person starts misbehaving, the others begin to misbehave.  And over time what was once considered misbehavior is now considered acceptable behavior.

Hugo Schwyzer and the male feminist

It’s becoming clear that Hugo Schwyzer, a self-proclaimed male feminist leader, has a history of serious sexual abuse, ranging from taking advantage of several students on a school trip to an attempted murder-suicide involving his partner at the time. What’s more, he has attempted to cover up this behavior as well as his rather unseemly reflections on it over the years (including comparing the murder-suicide to a time that he endangered the life of a dog).

I haven’t followed all the debates surrounding these revelations, but it seems clear to me that Schwyzer is continuing in the pattern of his abusive behavior — in this case, he’s abusing feminism for the sake of his own personal redemption.

A Plea for Honesty in Academic Hiring

There is a serious moral problem at work in academic hiring decisions. It has nothing to do with the admittedly creepy act of interviewing candidates in a hotel room, sometimes where you have to both sit on a bed, nor does it have to do with the old boy networks that have plagued our profession probably since it’s beginning. These problems people recognize and, while there are obvious setbacks, some attempts are made to ameliorate their damage. But the moral problem that I want to talk about today is perhaps more problematic because it appears to have come about as an attempt to respond to the problem of the old-boy network. What is the problem I am thinking of? Carrying out a full hiring process when there is an internal candidate who, by all accounts including the way the ad is written, is most likely to get the job.

Shimer College’s new president

Shimer College has announced that its next president will be Susan E. Henking, currently of Hobart and William Smith Colleges. She is the first woman to serve as Shimer’s president since its founder, Frances Wood Shimer, and — in a move apparently calculated to make me feel more at home — is also a scholar of religion who has been active in the AAR, including in LGBT studies.

AUFS and theology

It seems that AUFS is regarded primarily as a theology blog. I have asked people from outside theology to participate, and they will often demur, due to their lack of knowledge of theology. I hear similar things from lurkers, and sometimes even from our already-existing contributors.

On one level, I want to reject this notion that theology is the sine-qua-non of AUFS. In my mind, we deal broadly with the humanities.

Rick Santorum and the Construction of Whiteness

I attempted to not pay attention to the Presidential election too much, but I had to educate myself when Newt Gingrich emerged as a front-runner a while ago, wondering, “What in the world is happening out there?”—and by “out there” I suppose I mean the world of Republican primaries in states that predate my own.

Now that Santorum is surging again, I am beginning to wonder if Santorum and his appeal is more than a figure for whom one might vote as a referendum against Mormonism.

Driving around doing pastoral work today, on President’s Day, I listened to right-wing radio talk about Santorum exposing the “left’s assault on religion,” evidenced by, on Rush Limbaugh’s show,  at least an hour of airtime ridiculing how Forbes magazine covered Whitney Houston’s funeral.

Hägglund lecture at University of Chicago

Martin Hägglund’s giving a lecture at U of C next week. Reportedly, it’s centered on Eliot’s Four Quartets, but he’ll also be talking about Plato, Augustine, and the incarnation.

Dying For Time: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets
A lecture by Martin Hägglund
Junior Fellow at Harvard Society of Fellows

Tuesday, 2/21, 4:30 p.m.
Stuart 102
Reception to follow