Shameless Graduate Student Update

As you might be able to tell from my last post, it's been a week. The bad part of it really isn't mine to tell, but let's just say that I have appreciated Derek's trial offices for the dead.

I think I was complaining a few weeks ago about being overcommitted. Well, I'm trying to clear my plate a little at the moment by the best route possible: I'm writing papers. My first first author paper is currently under review at one of the big journals of my sub-field. Today, I sent around my next paper for internal review, which hopefully will be submitted to a journal that doesn't hear much from my sub-field but has a fairly wide reach. So I just may submit two papers of my own this summer.

Monday, I learned that an abstract of mine was accepted for oral presentation at a big conference in October. To most readers of this blog, this will not mean much. But I've been submitting abstracts to conferences for more than three years now and I always have to present posters. Poster sessions frankly are depressing. They tend to be sparsely attended and repetitious. But worst of all, presenting a poster is a sign that your work is not particularly interesting. Speaking at a oral session is proof that I finally do something that a large number of people might find interesting. And that's kind of cool.

Therefore We Shall Not Fear Though the Earth Be Moved and Though the Mountains Be Toppled into The Depths of the Sea

On this day in 2005, Hurricane Katrina came ashore south of New Orleans. Here is an item from New Orleans two years later that exemplifies to me a uniquely Anglican approach to mission . The article is especially good in pointing out that the high murder rate is a pre-Katrina phenomenon. Unsurprisingly, even before Katrina, civil society in New Orleans was starting to break down.

I once went to church with a man who would pray every day (and on Sundays during the free intercessions) for all of the children in the city who had died violently.

I can't say that I do the being present with those in pain thing well. But it's something to remember when you hear about people wanting to convert the lost. What about just being with those who are feeling lost and remembering those who have passed beyond all knowledge?

Two Straight Fourteen Hour Days

Thomas Cranmer Has Left the Building

I just talked with a colleague at work, who told me he was going to "read and inwardly digest" something I sent him. He apparently is half Catholic, half Anglican... He is not going to bother to mark and learn, I guess.

So Where Do You Go To Church?

I came home yesterday to have the following conversation with my Nigerian roommate:

CS: It's hot. [ We have no air conditioning at the moment .]

MNR: Have you been indoors all day?

CS:No, I walked to church and then home and then to work.

MNR: Oh, where do you go to church?

CS: [ ILEOS ] Episcopal Church over the way [ I wave toward downtown Laodicea ]

MNR: Oh, so you are a Pentecostal?

CS: No, I'm an Anglican.

MNR: That's kind of like Catholic, right? [ Which is exactly what most Protestants say in this country. MNR is a Baptist. The Catholics I know seem to like comparing us to Lutherans. )

CS: You must be from the Catholic part of Nigeria.

MNR: Yes. Though I might know some Anglicans, I think.

CS: I've always been told there's plenty of them in Nigeria.

_______________________________________________________

The explanation for the Pentecostal guess is the use of Episcopal. MNR never has heard of Episcopalians, so he guessed it was a new Pentecostal group, being the most likely guess for something he hasn't heard of in a Nigerian context. I did not probe for name recognition of Peter Jasper Akinola, for whom we continually pray that he may not number the godly among the lawless.

The Summer Is Magic

That is, it is a giant vacuum of time. I've been working for the last couple of hours or so to push a paper toward readiness for submission tomorrow. I was hoping to submit two other papers by Michaelmas. As it is, I know I have to submit one paper (and possibly do a bit of work on another one submitted at the same time) by Grosstestetide (look that one up). Unfortunately, neither of these two papers are the ones I intended to submit at the beginning of the summer. Oh, and there's my fifth project, which is paying half my stipend at present. As one of the postdocs in a related field (and a church friend) said to me recently, "You're 100% funded and 450% committed."

While I do feel like a productive graduate student (if thin and stretched like butter spread over too much bread), I have to think of my thesis research, which feels a little too ghostly at the moment for my comfort. Some of what I'm doing is related to my topic, but part of me wants to have a clear research plan on paper. But frankly I don't have the time.

Why I Love Jude Apatow Movies

Jude Apatow may be a producer, but he's a perfect example of how a producer can have a deeper creative influence than a writer or a director. I just saw Knocked Up, a film that is foul-mouthed, bare-breasted, and drug-laced and of more redeeming social value than almost anything Hollywood makes. I thought similarly about the Forty Year Old Virgin and his television series, Freaks and Geeks (somewhat cleaner). And the reason I like his productions so much is the way they draw character out of stereotypes. In what other situation would a black bouncer after being completely lambasted by a middle-class white woman in the threshold of middle age take her aside and admit that he can't let her and her pregnant sister (Katherine Heigl) into the club because, "you're old and she's pregnant" but will also tell her that he also has to enforce the club's racial quotas, too. Or in what other movie will a little girl "google" murder and look at pictures of murder victims without quite realizing the horror and the verity of their deaths. Oddly enough, I think Apatow brings us the real world. In the real world, people do not have such spectacular scripts, but they do have to confont the very same things characters in Apatow productions do. After I watch a movie like Knocked Up, most other movies seem like fantasy, which is not a bad thing.

I also like the way these movies treat marriage. It's easy to treat marriage as the inevitable boredom and conflict after the first flushes of love, partially because the first flushes of love happen years before the typical wedding day. It's also easy to treat marriage like the picture you want the kids to see as in the early years of the television sitcom, where at worst, Mommy is an incompetent. Instead, Apatow productions portray marriage as the estate entered into by two people who grow so deeply intimate with one another that such intimacy with other people in future is likely to be impossible. And it scares them. And they act out in ways designed to maintain their independence and personhood or their sexual availability. But in the end, they decide to spend their time with the person who can drive them to their deepest emotional lows and bring them to their greatest emotional highs because the only thing that presents the illusion of a better life is chemistry, which is pathetic in the end.

OK. It's not God's love for humanity expressed in Jesus Christ. But it's a good picture of the kinds of lives we lead as imperfect creatures.

Apatow's Will Ferrell movies are pure fantasy, though.

I'm Not Sure How I Feel...

About the result of the ELCA Churchwide Assembly with respect to gay clergy. I come to this from a place a little closer to the ELCA than the typical Episcopalian in the CCM era. For twelve years of my life, I lived across from one of the ELCA's great seminaries in the city that was the birthplace of Lutheranism in America. While I never haunted the library there (despite the suggestion of one of my Rectors), I did learn to ride a bike on its grounds. When I was a teenager, I traveled to South Dakota and helped out with a joint Lutheran-Episcopal ministry in Pine Ridge, South Dakota, capital of the reservation of my ancestral tribe and the seat of the U.S.'s poorest county. I'll never forget Pastor Larry Petersen, the ebullient Minnesotan, who had been willing to minister to most non-Lutheran ethnic group in South Dakota. Pastor Petersen apparently reconciled with one of the Episcopal suffragan bishops of North Dakota some years ago after learning that one of the bishops' ancestors had killed the first family of one of Petersen's ancestors during the War of the Nakota against the Corruption of Sibley (usually called the Santee Uprising).

One of the Lutheran seminary students interned at my parish for a while, and he and I served together in a variety of capacities. I'll never forget his first time as subdeacon when I must have had a look of abject horror when he made no use of the water cruet during the Preparation of the Table. He was good-natured enough to accept the gentle correction of a fifteen year old boy. I imagine he's a great pastor now.

In college, a few of our peer ministers were Lutheran, including one who is now in a Ph.D. program at an institution a reader or two of this blog will know as their own. One so clearly called to the Ministry of Word and Table, he waits for the opportunity for a Synod of the ELCA to look past his sexual orientation to his call or more properly, he waits for some Synod of the ELCA to look at the love he has for another man and see the love he has for Christ and His Church.

And a few years ago, I found myself in a suburb of Houston, Texas for a summer and found a Lutheran church within walking distance. For ten Sundays, I worshipped happily and took Communion with them, even on the one Sunday of the month given over to the praise band. What surprised me was that even in a much more conservative part of the world, an old German-American pastor slipped quite liberal sentiments on the belovedness of gays and lesbians by God in his sermons.

Reading the resolution, I have to like part of it. I like that it refers to same-sex relationships as chaste. I like that it privileges the kind of same-sex relationships that I believe are appropriate for the Christian life and indeed best suited for civil peace. What I don't like is the limitation in it, a limitation that may be inherent in the Churchwide Assembly. It prays that the law not be enforced. It doesn't try to change the law. Maybe that's a victory. Maybe, the Churchwide Assembly is saying that these particular conduct standards for rostered ministers are a matter of positive law not divine law. But I warn my Lutheran brethren that the "no enforcement" bandwagon has wobbly wheels. The Episcopal Church has been in this situation for some years. What's good for Frisco isn't good for Fresno. I guess there was no way to say, "Well, we're going to pray and study for a decade but for that time, no one is to enforce this so we can have genuine discernment." That's too bad. All we are going to see is that the synods who had sort of openly gay clergy will have really openly gay clergy, and the synods who didn't will have some scared and closeted pastors.

Blogging Has Been Light, Will Remain Light

Last Friday, I was talking with an older friend of mine about an upcoming conference in our field (she's been attending for over twenty years). I wasn't thinking about going, because I had nothing to present. My friend was saying that I needed to go and network etc. I'm thinking that my boss is a generous soul, but I'm not wasting federal money on a networking trip, nor on presenting research that I've essentially presented at two conferences.

Fast forward to this Wednesday evening, when I am writing an abstract for this conference twenty four hours before the submission deadline. Why, you might ask. Well, because I suddenly had something new to present. So because of this new project, I expect blogging will be light.

Chapter has resolved to include Abbot Cuthbert Johnson OSB in our prayers. That is all.