QOTD: Leonard Cassuto Pt. 2

Continuing on from my QOTD from last week, here is another quote from the same chapter from Leonard Cassuto ("Professionalization"), but focusing on student debt--which given the current public discourse should be very relevant:

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Jeffrey J. Williams of Carnegie Mellon University persuasively compares student indebtedness to indentured servitude. For a new Ph.D. who is lucky enough to land an intellectually rewarding job in  his or her field (whether in or out of academia), the burden of paying off student loans on a relatively modest salary means a life of poverty from which the gentility wears off like a cheap coat of paint. Economist Paul Krugman warned in 2005 that the United States is threatening to become a "debt peonage" society, in which borrowers work endlessly for creditors to service debts they can never retire.

We can't talk honestly about professionalization--or the larger meaning of being professional--without bringing debt into the conversation. Debt affects what kind of professional a student is or can be. Graduate students don't explore many of the assumptions that underlie their own professionalization, but they are unsurprisingly well aware of the onus of their loan debts. In this case, it's the professors who lack self-awareness. When professors and administrators countenance practices that maintain (or even increase) time to degree, we make ourselves complicit with a system that hurts our students' lives.
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But we can also view the time-to-degree question--and with it the idea of professionalism--through the prism of graduate student debt. When I complained in a newspaper column about how academic job searches tend to privilege candidates who stay in graduate school longer, some commenters disparaged my concern. "Who wouldn't hire a [more experienced candidate]?" asked one, while another declared, "Potential is just that" and called it a "risk" to hire a less experienced Ph.D.

But if more time in school equals more debt, then a preference for more experienced Ph.D.'s essentially adds to graduate student indebtedness. If we ask for graduate students to acquire a hyper professionalism in order to get a professor's job, we're essentially asking them to buy that training out of their future earnings--which, given the shakiness of the job market, are uncertain at best. Put simply, we're asking them to spend money that they haven't got and that they can't be sure they will ever get, to acquire a specialized skill set (how to succeed in academia) that they may or may not be able to put to direct use. And we ask those who want to try for a professor's job to do this at the expense of shaping their preparation for other kinds of work.

Viewed thus, a preference for more experienced job candidates is not simply instrumental. It's also pernicious, and redolent of malign neglect of one of our most pressing, but least visible, concerns as teachers of graduate students. We can debate the intellectual pros and cons of graduate student professionalization (hyper specialization, the utility of graduate student publication, etc.) until the next millennium; but let's not forget that money is at stake, and it belongs to the poorest members of academic society.

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From the outside looking in, there is something very disturbing about this: by creating an entire class of professors who can never retire due to debt, we are only exacerbating the situation that is the dismal job market. Because modern medicine has extended the quality of life for all (which is a good thing), people can literally work for longer number of years. And this all the more so for jobs that are less physically intensive such as the professorship. All things being equal, even without the debt, I can imagine many professors wanting to work for many decades, well past the usual age of retirement that is common (or required) in other jobs. Therefore, professors can work a longer number of years (because health and desire) but they will and must (because of debt). That means even less jobs for those finishing graduate school, which means bigger debt for such graduates, which leads them to lengthen their years of work if they make it to the other side, and on and on goes this downward spiral.

"Privileged"

The NBA presents an interesting context within which to talk about society. It is represented, by all accounts, overwhelmingly by players of color. You could watch any NBA game on any given night and this would be clear as day. Today, in The Players' Tribune, Kyle Korver, a shooting guard for the Utah Jazz published an online article titled, "Privileged." Despite the fact that most NBA players are players of color, there have been numerous incidents this year and in years past of incidents of racism toward players from fans. The most recent one might be when Russell Westbrook's team (OKC) visited the Utah Jazz where a fan said some really nasty words to Westbrook. This is all the more shocking since even the Jazz has many of players of color. In "Privileged," Korver talks about this incident, as well as another earlier one involving his teammate Thabo Sefolosha. The latter incident was especially shocking, since it was clear that Thabo being a person of color led to the altercation leading to his arrest/injury and eventual settlement with NYPD.

Korver acknowledges his own blindness to the situation at hand and wonders how he can become an agent for change/solution rather than sitting idly by on the sidelines. He charges those in positions of "privilege" (i.e. in his case, white players and/or owners) to stand up for what is right and fight for true equity among everyone involved. The article has been received very positively by his colleagues as well as other professional athletes, coaches, and analysts.

When I read this article, I couldn't help but wonder about this idea of being "privileged" even within my own sphere of influence, namely, higher education/academia. This past year and a half, I have had many discussions with friends and colleagues, and it seems to me that academia remains largely a system that benefits those with a particular profile. Various institutions talk about pursuing "diversity" within their personnel,  but too often this is just lip service and actual practices do not bear this out. Numerous theological institutions are struggling to deal with this issue. It seems rather crass to see that many schools will happily accept revenue from a particular demographic while failing to cede positions of influence within their own leadership to represent that demographic. I would liken it to throwing a few crumbs by the wayside while reserving the best for the privileged. We have seen with the recent college scandal that higher education is in dire need of serious overhaul since as it currently stands it is often those "privileged" who get into the best schools. If this is true about getting into the best schools, then this is true even thereafter: the (academic) job market. Those "privileged" start far ahead of the game from everybody else, and it leaves everyone else scrambling to catch up (if that's even possible).

If universities and theological schools want to tout themselves as bastions of knowledge, freedom of thinking, and progress, then they must consider how they have been complicit in practices that have favored the "privileged." If sports professionals can do it, then why not academics?

Public Scholarship

Currently, I've been thinking a lot about "public scholarship." I am involved in kicking off a brand new Mellon Teaching Fellowship that has, as a major criterion of approval, a component of "public scholarship" to be built into the proposed course.

The best definition of public scholarship that I could find comes from Imagining America, a national advocacy and professional institution for publicly engaged scholars:

“Public Scholarship refers to diverse modes of creating and circulating knowledge for and with the public and communities. It often involves mutually-beneficial partnerships between higher education and organizations in the public and private sectors. Its goals include enriching research, creative activity, and public knowledge; enhancing curriculum, teaching and learning; preparing educated and engaged citizens; strengthening democratic values and civic responsibility; addressing and helping to solve critical social problems; and contributing to the public good.”

I have a few friends who care deeply about engaging in great scholarship and also answering the "so what" question, i.e., the relevance of research and scholarship not only for the sake of knowledge or the academy (though those things, in and of themselves, can be valuable), but for the local or global community(s).

A few days ago, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an online piece titled, "'The Academy Is Largely Itself Responsible for Its Own Peril,'" a quote taken from the interviewee of this article. The subject is Jill Lepore, who is currently listed as the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University. All that to say, while her field is far afield from my own, she knows what she is talking about on the "scholarship" ("academic") front. On the "public" side of things, she appears to be a regular contributor to The New Yorker. What I appreciated from this interview, however, is not what she said about her academic works, as important as they may be within her guild, but what she said about the state of "the academy" writ large. She has been at Harvard for 15 years, so it's safe to say, she has witnessed the changing landscapes of higher education.

She observes an "epistemological shift" vis-a-vis knowledge, a transformation from facts to numbers to data.

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JL: That transformation … traces something else: the shifting prestige placed on different ways of knowing. Facts come from the realm of the humanities, numbers represent the social sciences, and data the natural sciences. When people talk about the decline of the humanities, they are actually talking about the rise and fall of the fact, as well as other factors. When people try to re-establish the prestige of the humanities with the digital humanities and large data sets, that is no longer the humanities. What humanists do comes from a different epistemological scale of a unit of knowledge."

Q: How is the academy implicated in or imperiled by this moment of epistemological crisis?

JL: The academy is largely itself responsible for its own peril. The retreat of humanists from public life has had enormous consequences for the prestige of humanistic ways of knowing and understanding the world.

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Q: You did your graduate work at Yale in the early ’90s in a post-structuralist American-studies department. You read a lot of Derrida and Foucault. You’ve said that you grew uncomfortable with how you were trained versus how you wanted to write.

JL: … Like any Ph.D. program, what you’re being trained to do is employ a jargon that instantiates your authority in the abstruseness of your prose. You display what you know by writing in a way that other people can’t understand. That’s not how I understand writing. Writing is about sharing what you know with storybook clarity, even and especially if you’re writing about something that’s complicated or morally ambiguous. Also, I like to write about people who are characters, who have limbs and fingers and toes and loves and desires and agonies and triumphs and ages and hair colors. But that’s not how historical writing is taught in a Ph.D. program.   

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The entire interview is worth reading but two things stood out to me here which I excerpted: (1) the retreat of humanists from the public arena; and (2) the deployment of jargon to obfuscate. I find both of these things highly frustrating and wonder about my own complicity in system(s) that perpetuate this.

I study ancient texts and ancient peoples, but if Christianity (ancient or modern) are examples of ways of "being" human in the world, I wonder if there are ways I could write essays/books or teach courses that can address these issues in my own very small way. I have more to say about public scholarship, but this will be it for now.

Historical Facts

I wonder whether those in the field of religious studies, or biblical studies more specifically sometimes feel what I feel, i.e., a sense that many people don't care about "history" the way we do. Now, I don't say this as a way to criticize others, in fact, I wonder if the problem lies within academia itself. What I mean by this is that we argue and re-argue the most minute details of some esoteric subject that it very well may be that we are just talking among ourselves while neglecting to think about just what kind of value these discussions have for the broader public (I also want to talk about "public" scholarship in a later blog post). To qualify my statement further: on one hand, I am not saying religious studies or other humanities fields need to be strictly utilitarian in their approach/aim. Specialists in any field, including something like cancer research, will inevitably get into the minutiae that only other specialists can understand or critique. On the other hand, having worked with many undergraduate students for the last three semesters engaging in natural scientific research, it is also clear that sometimes humanistic inquiry just doesn't make any sense to anyone outside of that specific discipline, at least in the way they are often packaged. This is on a very different scale than the cancer research I just mentioned: even my student in computer science and big data can understand (somewhat) and appreciate how my other student in cancer biology is engaging her research, even if he may not really understand the mechanism behind working with knockout mice and performing Western blots.

But, that does not mean of course that historical research is useless and that historical details can be blatantly ignored. The current socio-political climate reveals clearly why history matters and why facts matter. On a less serious note, I remember one time I happened to be watching Jeopardy and the answer was something about the "epistle apostle" in the New Testament from "the first century BC." Truth be told, I felt my snobbery coming out, though none of the contestants even batted an eye at this mistake.

Just this morning, I came across an article and here is a screenshot from a page of that article:

This comes from a CNN Travel article here titled, "Beautiful photos reveal Matera, the Italian city carved into solid rock" (Aug. 1, 2018). Part of it describes very old grotto churches in Matera that have frescoes of biblical scenes. The problem is the author wrote that these works "dat[e] back hundreds of centuries." This would locate these artworks into the Paleolithic period, thousands of years before Jesus was even born!


Do historical facts matter to you? Why does it matter? And if it does matter, how do we show/teach our students and colleagues (of all types of disciplines) why it matters?

Candler Centennial (1914–2014/15)

This academic year marked the 100 year anniversary of the founding of Candler School of Theology here at Emory University. In order to mark this significant milestone of Candler, the school ran a year-long program, including a conference during this spring semester (Mar. 18–20). This conference kicked off with a keynote address from my doktorvater, Luke Timothy Johnson, titled "Theological Challenges of the New Century."

I saw that Candler now has uploaded all the videos from this conference to their Vimeo website, and I thought I would share with you Luke's address:

CNN miniseries: Finding Jesus

I saw on my social media feed that one of my teachers from Duke University, Mark Goodacre, recently served as the lead consultant to a six-part miniseries airing this Sunday (March 1) on CNN called Finding Jesus: Faith, Fact, Forgery (see here). Should be interesting! The miniseries will kick off with the first episode looking at the Shroud of Turin.

For more info, see the CNN website here.

Harvard Commencement Speeches: Politics and Comedy

It's that time of the year when commencement speeches are given all over the nation, and two given at Harvard recently came to my attention. One by Michael Bloomberg and the other by Mindy Kaling for Harvard Universty and Harvard Law School respectively.

One quote from each person that sum up their agenda for the day, one a platform for politics and another a platform for humor.

Bloomberg: "Great universities must not become predictably partisan. And a liberal arts education must not be an education in the art of liberalism."

Kaling: "You will help a cable company acquire a telecom company. You will defend BP from birds. You will spend hours arguing that the well water was contaminated before the fracking occurred. One of you will sort out the details of my prenup."

Talk @ Emory

Prof. Shaun Casey who is heading up the State Department's new Office of Faith-Based Community Initiatives gave a talk here at Emory just over a week ago. Check it out:

 

Say it ain't so!

Google Reader is coming to an end! It has been my go-to website to read all the blogs I subscribe to as an RSS-feed reader... What other programs are out there that are worth using??

HELP.

HT: Google Blog

79 Years Ago

I recently borrowed from the library a newly published book, The Collected Sermons of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, edited by Isabel Best (she is part of the DBWE team, and herself involved in translations of volumes 8, 12, and 13 of Bonhoeffer's Works). One of the sermons was preached by Bonhoeffer in London on December 17, 1933, exactly 79 years ago. Especially in light of the recent tragedy at Newtown, CT, I thought an excerpt of this sermon would be fitting for this Christmas season.

Bonhoeffer preached on Luke 1:46-55:

And Mary said: “My soul glorifies the Lord  and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior, for he has been mindful of the humble state of his servant. From now on all generations will call me blessed, for the Mighty One has done great things for me— holy is his name. His mercy extends to those who fear him, from generation to generation. He has performed mighty deeds with his arm; he has scattered those who are proud in their inmost thoughts. He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty. He has helped his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors.”

"My Spirit Rejoices"

The song of Mary is the oldest Advent hymn. It is also the most passionate, the wildest, and one might almost say the most revolutionary Advent hymn that has ever been sung. This is not the gentle, tender, dreamy Mary as we often see her portrayed in paintings. The Mary who is speaking here is passionate, carried away, proud, enthusiastic. There is none of the sweet, wistful, or even playful tone of many of our Christmas carols, but instead a hard, strong, relentless hymn about the toppling of thrones and the humiliation of the lords of this world, about the power of God and the powerlessness of humankind. This is the sound of the prophetic women of the Old Testament - Deborah, Judith, Miriam - coming to life in the mouth of Mary. Mary, who was seized by the power of the Holy Spirit, who humbly and obediently lets it be done unto her as the Spirit commands her, who lets the Spirit blow where it wills [John 3:8] - she speaks, by the power of this Spirit, about God's coming into the world, about the Advent of Jesus Christ.

She, of course, knows better than anyone else what it means to wait for Christ's coming. Her waiting is different from that of any other human being. She expects him as his mother. He is closer to her than to anyone else. She knows the secret of his coming, knows about the Spirit, who has a part in it, about the Almighty God, who has performed this miracle. In her own body she is experiencing the wonderful ways of God with humankind: that God does not arrange matters to suit our opinions and views, does not follow the path that humans would like to prescribe. God's path is free and original beyond all our ability to understand or to prove.

There, where our understanding is outraged, where our nature rebels, where our piety anxiously keeps its distance - that is exactly where God loves to be. There, though it confounds the understanding of sensible people, thought it irritates our nature and our piety, God wills to be, and none of us can forbid it. Only the humble believe and rejoice that God is so gloriously free, performing miracles where humanity despairs and glorifying that which is lowly and of no account. God "has looked with favor on the lowliness of his servant." God in the midst of lowliness - that is the revolutionary, passionate word of Advent.

It begins with Mary herself, the carpenter's wife: as we would say, a poor working man's wife, unknown, not highly regarded by others; yet now, just as she is, unremarkable and lowly in the eyes of others, regarded by God and chosen to be mother of the Savior of the world. She was not chosen because of any human merit, not even for being, as she undoubtedly was, deeply devout, nor even for her humility or any other virtue, but entirely and uniquely because it is God's gracious will to love, to choose, to make great what is lowly, unremarkable, considered to be of little value. Mary, the tough, devout, ordinary working man's wife, living in her Old Testament faith and hoping in her Redeemer, becomes the mother of God. Christ, the poor son of a laborer from the East End of London, Christ is laid in a manger...

God is not ashamed of human lowliness but goes right into the middle of it, chooses someone as instrument, and performs the miracles right there where they are least expected. God draws near to the lowly, loving the lost, the unnoticed, the unremarkable, the excluded, the powerless, and the broken. What people say is lost, God says is found; what people say is "condemned," God says is "saved." What people say No! God says Yes! Where people turn their eyes away in indifference or arrogance, God gazes with a love that glows warmer there than anywhere else. Where people say something is despicable, God calls it blessed. When we come to a point in our lives where we are completely ashamed of ourselves and before God; when we believe that God especially now must be ashamed of us, and when we feel as far away from God as ever in all our lives - that is the moment in which God is closer to us than ever, wanting to break into our lives, wanting us to feel the presence of the holy and to grasp the miracle of God's love, God's nearness and grace...

When God chooses Mary as the instrument, when God decides to come in person into this world, in the manger in Bethlehem, this is not an idyllic family occasion but rather the beginning of a complete reversal, a new ordering of all things on this earth. If we want to be part of this event of Advent and Christmas, we cannot just sit there like a theater audience and enjoy all the lovely pictures. We ourselves will be caught up in this action, this reversal of all things; we will become actors on this stage. For this is a play in which each spectator has a part t o play, and we cannot hold back. What will our role be? Worshipful shepherds bending the knee, or kings bringing gifts? What story is being enacted when Mary becomes the mother of God, when God comes into the world in a lowly manger?

The judgment and redemption of the world - that is what is happening here. For it is the Christ Child in the manger himself who will bring that judgment and redemption. It is he who pushes away the great and mighty of this world, who topples the thrones of the powerful, who humbles the haughty, whose arm exercises power against all who are highly placed and strong, and whose mercy lifts up what was lowly and makes it great and glorious. So we cannot come to this manger in the same was as we would approach this cradle of any other child. Something will happen to each of us who decides to come to Christ's manger. Each of us will have been judged or redeemed before we go away. Each of us will either break down or come to know that God's mercy is turned toward us...

In eight days we will celebrate Christmas, for once really as the festival of Jesus Christ in our world. Before that, there is something we must clear up, something very important in our lives. We need to make clear to ourselves how, from now on, the light of the mangers, we are going to think about what is high and what is low in human life. Not that any of us are powerful persons, even if we would perhaps like to be and don't like to have that said to us. There are never more than a few very powerful people. But there are any more people with small amounts of power, petty power, who put it into play wherever they can and whose one thought is: keep climbing higher! God, however, thinks differently, namely, keep climbing down lower, down among the lowly and the inconspicuous, in self-forgetfulness, in not seeking to be looked at or well regarded or to be the highest. If we go this way, there we will meet God himself. Each of us lives among persons who are the so-called higher-ups and others who are the so-called lowly. Each of us knows someone who is lower in the order of things that we ourselves. Might this Christmas help us learn to see this point in a radically different way, to rethink it entirely, to know that if we want to find the way to God, we have to go, not up tot he heights, but really down tot he depths among the least of all, and that every life only wants to stay up high will come to a fearful end?...

Who among us will celebrate Christmas rightly? Who will finally lay down at the manger all power and honor, all high regard, vanity, arrogance, and self-will? Who will take their place among the lowly and let God alone be high? Who will see the glory of God in the lowliness of the child in the manger? Who will say with Mary: The Lord has looked with favor on my lowliness. My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior. Amen.

Probs. w/ abbrev.

[Context: I'm in the middle of finishing up two big research papers and staring at countless number of bibliographies brought this to my attention.]

If you're wondering what the title means, it's my way of saying "problems with abbreviations." It must be the careful attention to the little details that my professors here embody (for example, Carl Holladay is an amazingly careful and at the same time, a very charitable reader; he's been a great mentor thus far in many regards) which is affecting me, because I don't think I would have noticed this problem before. This is almost like an exercise in textual-criticism, so if you are into that kind of detail-oriented careful study, I hope you will find this somewhat interesting. Allow me to explain by way of showing you a screenshot of two bibliographies from recent works:

Do you see anything? I hope you do. It may not be a "big deal" I suppose, but I still think it's important to make sure you have the right references. If you still don't know what I'm talking about, I'm referring to how the two works refer to the same publishing house existing in two cities in the same year. So in 1977, Scholars Press existed (at least according to these two bibliographies) in both Missoula, Missouri and Missoula, Montana! Obviously Scholars Press did not exist at two places in the same year. So which one is right? Again, to go back to the analogy of textual-criticism, what is the "more difficult" reading? To put it another way, is it more likely that an author would mistakenly write "MO" for Montana or "MT" for Missouri? Without even having to search for the two cities, I chose the first option, which evidently seems to be the right choice (a search shows that a city called "Missoula" only exists in Montana).

I have not done a thorough search of the bibliographies of all the monographs, articles, etc., that are out there (I'm not even sure if this is possible), but a quick search yields a ton of secondary literature that cite "Missoula, MO: Scholars Press." While one might argue that this is all harmless, all of this is creating an entire tradition of "corruption" in terms of bibliographic integrity. My professors, when it comes to textual-criticism, preach an unyielding level of care and caution (rightly so), as not to introduce an error that further muddies the waters. In the same way, this is a message for anyone out there who is reading a book that is published by Scholars Press: Montana is abbreviated MT not MO.

[Postscript: I guess I could seriously be mistaken and that somehow Scholars Press existed also in Missoula, Missouri (simultaneously as Missoula, Montana), a city that no longer exists. I'm willing to be corrected, so if you know something, let me know.]

Boohoo

On The Guardian (in case you didn't know, a British newspaper) today, Richard Dawkins wrote an article titled, "Why I refuse to debate with William Lane Craig." And also, if you happened among the 'elite' who Dawkins claims do not know who he is at all, Craig is a research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology (see his website here and his faculty profile here). It appears that Dawkins wants to take the 'high road' and refuse to debate with someone who is clearly beneath one with such stature as Dawkins, but to me, it all just sounds like the tantrums of a crying child. Randomly, it also reminds me of how Floyd Mayweather Jr. is crying about reasons why he can't fight Manny Pacquiao. I know it's a random connection, but still, it made sense to me. Also, I'm not even sure that Craig would win or lose in a debate with Dawkins, but it is interesting to me that Dawkins continues to evade the matchup despite good reasons for having a debate between a prominent Christian philosopher and a highly regarded atheist.

My opinion? Either debate/fight the guy and "win" or just leave it be.

Good article

I just came across an insightful article by Professor Stanley Hauerwas who teaches here at Duke, and in it, he lays out a strong critique of American Protestantism, and how its own presuppositions are contributing to its possible demise (at least in its current form). I recommend you all go read the article for yourself, but here's a quote to whet your appetite:

"More Americans may go to church than their counterparts in Europe, but the churches to which they go do little to challenge the secular presumptions that form their lives or the lives of the churches to which they go. For the church is assumed to exist to reinforce the presumption that those that go to church have done so freely. The church's primary function, therefore, is to legitimate and sustain the presumption that America represents what all people would want to be if they had the benefit of American education and money. That is what Americans mean by "freedom."

Minority rules?

Thanks to my wife's suggestion, I started reading an interesting new book titled The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, by Alan Jacobs. It seems to be a semi-response (though this is only a minor impetus for the writing of this book as far as I can tell) to the classic, How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler. In it, he references a recent research conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts titled "Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Legacy" (For the full report, go here). The first conclusion found in this research caught my eye:

What surprised me was that the findings found in 2008 showed that for the first time in 26 years(!), the percentage of adult readers increased. In other words, since 1982, they conducted this survey 5 times and they have only witnessed a downward trend of adults in America who read a work of literature in the past 12 months. I suppose the advent of eBook readers may have contributed to the recent findings, but more than the increase in % readership, what intrigued me was that for the first time in almost a decade, the "majority" (by the slightest of margins; 50.2%) of Americans read some work of literature in the last 12 months.
I've been thinking about the kind of problems that the seemingly infectious aversion to reading creates in our society, and in my view, I don't know what other conclusion one can come to besides negative ones. It has shocked me more than a few times to hear some folks declare that they have not read a single book cover to cover since high school, claiming this feat as a badge-of-honor. And if not the detriment to society in general, then what about to our families and our churches? The study proved that the American-reader is now the "majority" over against the "minority" of American-illiterates, but it certainly feels as if minority rules strong in the overall American culture.

What interesting reads have you come across lately and what are some ways to battle this ubiquitous aversion to reading?

UCLA and manuscripts

Just found out today that my alma mater, UCLA, now holds the largest repository of Ethiopic manuscripts in North America. Some excerpts of this article:

he UCLA Library has acquired the largest private collection of Ethiopic manuscripts and scrolls in the U.S., given by Gerald and Barbara Weiner. Together with the library's existing collections, this gift makes the UCLA Library the leading repository for Ethiopic manuscripts in North America. A classical Semitic language, Ethiopic is used as the liturgical language of the Christian church in Ethiopia. Dating from the 18th to the 21st centuries, the collection of 137 bound manuscripts and 102 scrolls is particularly rich in elaborately illustrated liturgical texts. Highlights include a late 19th/early 20th-century version of the Gospels containing 78 miniatures; a 19th-century "lives of the saints" with 40 miniatures; a 20th-century compilation of a table blessing and miracles performed by Jesus with 37 miniatures; and a 20th-century collection of prayers with an image of John the Evangelist and 26 miniatures.

"Words cannot express our deep thanks to Jerry and Barbara — first, for building this gorgeous collection, then for giving it to us," said UCLA University Librarian Gary E. Strong. "These extraordinary items, noteworthy both for their research value and their beauty, will be of great interest to students and scholars, as well as to the extensive Ethiopian community in Southern California." ...

To see more, go to the UCLA newsroom here.

HT: PaleoJudaica.com

Angry?

NT Wright mentions briefly what gets to him at times:



How about you?

Quote of the Day

I just started reading Mark Noll's The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind because I heard it was a pretty good book, and the topic just interested me in general. I'm just about finishing up the first chapter and so far Noll paints a pretty bleak picture (though I think in a large measure an accurate one) of the state of evangelicalism and the bitter fruits that we are now reaping from its anti-intellectualistic tendencies. Noll describes his book as a "historic footnote" in support of the words of an Lebanese diplomat, scholar, and Eastern Orthodox Christian who was invited to Wheaton College in 1980 for the opening of the Billy Graham Center. This diplomat (Charles Malik) relayed some important words which I think is worth quoting here in full:

The greatest danger besetting American Evangelical Christianity is the danger of anti-intellectualism. The mind as to its greatest and deepest reaches is not cared for enough. This cannot take place apart from profound immersion for a period of years in the history of thought and the spirit. People are in a hurry to get out of the university and start earning money or serving the church or preaching the Gospel. They have no idea of the infinite value of spending years of leisure in conversing with the greatest minds and souls of the past, and thereby ripening and sharpening and enlarging their powers of thinking. The result is that the arena of creative thinking is abdicated and vacated to the enemy. Who among the evangelicals can stand up to the great secular or naturalistic or atheistic scholars on their own terms of scholarship and research? Who among the evangelical scholars is quoted as a normative source by the greatest secular authorities on history or philosophy or psychology or sociology or politics? Does your mode of thinking have the slightest chance of becoming the dominant mode of thinking in the great universities of Europe and America which stamp your entire civilization with their own spirit and ideas?
It will take a different spirit altogether to overcome this great danger of anti-intellectualism.... Even if you start now on a crash program in this and other domains, it will be a century at least before you catch up with the Harvards and Tübingens and the Sorbonnes, and think of where these universities will be then! For the sake of greater effectiveness in witnessing to Jesus Christ Himself, as well as for their own sakes, the Evangelicals cannot afford to keep on living on the periphery of responsible intellectual existence."

With thirty some years since Malik's wise words, I still wonder just how much (or little?) evangelicals have progressed (or digressed) in this regard. Having spent most of my education at great secular institutions, I personally can't say that things have changed at all since then... What do you think? Has evangelicalism shed its shell of anti-intellectualism? Are there scholars who are beginning to contribute to the wide-range of disciplines at our universities?

No such thing as "bad" publicity?

Recently, there's been some talks in the blogging world regarding the Christians' response to certain "bad" books, quotes, etc., that essentially give those very people a voice and a venue to be heard. Some have said we need to just calm down (here), another has elaborated on this issue in an article for Christianity Today, and another wonders if Christians are overly contentious and that we just love a good fight whenever we can find (or create!?) one. Just at the heels of a series of these types of blog posts and articles, I saw this post from another widely-followed blogger who comments about yet another forthcoming book, basically labeling it as heresy.

Now, don't get me wrong, I wouldn't be as naive or dishonest to think that anything and everything goes in the realm of Christianity (because I don't), but I wonder if all of this just goes to prove the old adage: there is no such thing as bad publicity.

With hundreds (maybe thousands?) of people reading these blog posts slamming this or that book or author, I wonder if it just makes people want to read them even more than had we just flat-out ignored them?

Are we free?

In our Pauline theology seminar, one issue we discussed is the notion of "freedom" and how Western, post-Enlightenment, judicial ideas of "freedom" have severely crippled the way we can properly understand what Paul was talking about with regard to freedom in Romans. What Dr. Campbell has been stressing to us in class is that true "freedom" as designed by God is not that we get to do what we want, choose what we want, etc., but rather true freedom for humanity is their proper responding to God's benevolent acts, especially as experienced through Jesus Christ. A week or two ago, he assigned to us a reading out this book by Richard Bauckham (who is in town to lecture @Duke this Thursday/Friday):

The chapter that was assigned is the second chapter (though after I read this chapter, I've decided to try to read the whole thing sometime in the near future) titled "Freedom in Contemporary Context." There was one particular issue that Bauckham addressed which I thought was thought-provoking.

Under the subheading 'The car as symbol of freedom,' he writes:

"There is no more pervasive symbol of this freedom and its destructive futility than the car. Cars are the modern sacrament of freedom; they symbolize it and promise actually to give it. We can glimpse the kind of freedom they promise in the typical television advertisement: an individual driving through open countryside, mountain ranges, and deserts with the widest possible horizons. Some also navigate nimbly through picturesquely narrow streets. Cars offer individuals the freedom to go wherever they wish, whenever they like, as fast as possible. They give independence, freedom to be entirely one's own master, not dependent on others, not even accompanied by others. They suggest the freedom of escape from any situation and of new opportunities and experiences always to be found along a new road. They give the feeling of control over one's destiny. This is why most car owners cannot imagine living without one. But, as always, this kind of freedom restricts the freedom of others. The more people have cars, the more difficult life becomes for those who cannot afford them or are too old or too young to drive; public transport decays, and shops and community facilities are no longer within walking distances. But the more people have cars, the less the car owners themselves enjoy the freedom they value. Commuters spend highly stressful hours in bumper-to-bumper, slow moving traffic. Motorways become car parks. Roads destroy the countryside the car owner wants the freedom to enjoy at the weekends. Moreover, since car ownership has become common, cities and most aspects of life in cities have developed in such a way that normal life requires constant long journeys. The freedom to travel has incurred the necessity to travel. Against typically of this kind of freedom, cars increase personal independence at the expense of the community. Many a vast residential area is for many residents no more than a place through which they drive on the way from their houses to other destinations.

All this would be true even without the ecological disaster. But we must add that cars are the single largest drain on the earth's resources and major polluters of the environment. Most cars still belong to the affluent West. As they spread inexorably to the rest of the world, the environmental consequences will be dire. What applies to the differential between car owners and others in our society applies to a much greater degree on a world scale. The planet can support the kind of freedom the car gives only for an elite. The more car owners there are, the more the freedom of others suffers. The more car owners there are, the more the quality of their own life suffers. There is no way out of this trap except by reevaluating freedom."

Zeitgeist

Nine eleven. Is there any other date in the 21st century that has been so world-changing as that day in 2001? Everyone that knows me knows that my memory is terrible, and yet I distinctly remember where I was, what I was doing, and can recall to this day watching all of it on TV in disbelief.

We just started talking about Zeitgeist in my class, which is a fancy German word for the 'Spirit of the age.' An example of Zeitgeist in the US would be the 'Sexual Revolution' of the 60s, the 'Red Scare' of the 40-50s, etc. There's been some other blogging about 9.11 by Nick Norelli and Brian LePort here, and I guess my attempt to add to that discussion is: how has that day altered the Zeitgeist of our world? Your country? Your life?

We will never forget.