Monthly Archives: October 2010

General Introduction
- Reunited and it feels so good
- Some talk about offices
- What’s on the blog?

Etymology
- Mental? Mentos?
- Turning to the Greek
- Why it’s wrong to say “mentee”
- Divinity enters in
- A relationship between unequals
- Grubbs goes allegorical

Paul and Timothy
- A new kind of mentor
- Apostolic succession
- Distinguishing mentor from friend
- Put me in, coach
- Mr. Miyagi and Daniel-San
- Teachers and pastors
- About the Stone-Campbell tradition

Our Stories
- Personal mentors
- Michial’s discomfort with literature changing lives
- Nathan’s crushing guilt
- Girl trouble!
- David’s tribute to his fallen mentor

Authors as Mentors
- Can a person you’ve never met be a mentor?
- Walter Brueggemann and Stanley Hauerwas
- Walker Percy
- C.S. Lewis, of course
- Gods do answer fan mail

How Do You Get a Protégé?
- You beg, obviously
- Don’t major in English!
- Being yourself
- Getting mentored by the prof-bots
- The frustrations of the major university
- Why it helps to have no social life
- Is it better to be young or old?
- Oh, snap!

Forcing or Facilitating Mentors
- Can you require it?
- Faculty advising
- “Barnabas Groups”
- Eating with the students
- A notice to Christian colleges re: hiring
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Brueggemann, Walter. Journey to the Common Good. Philadelphia: Westminster John Knox, 2010.

Hauerwas, Stanley. Hannah’s Child: A Theologian’s Memoir. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2010.

Homer. The Odyssey. Trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Lewis, C.S. The Discarded Image. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.

Percy, Walker. The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, and What One Has to Do With the Other. New York: Picador, 2000.

Smith, James K.A. Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism? Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2006.

Wood, Ralph C. The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists. South Bend, Ind.: U of Notre Dame P, 1991.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 17 October 2010 (21st Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

Jeremiah 31:27-34 and Psalm 119:97-104 •  Genesis 32:22-31 and Psalm 121 •  2 Timothy 3:14-4:5 •  Luke 18:1-8

In the modern era, the name of God is more accessible than Jacob could have imagined.  I don’t mean all the people who say “Oh my God!” upon seeing their new houses, wardrobes, or other loot on reality TV shows (though that does irritate me).  I’m not talking about people who use the modernized pronunciation of the Anglo-Saxon word God when they whack their extremities with hand tools.  (I’m more understanding of that.)  I’m not even talking about every American politician’s sudden interest in professing the divine at every turn.  (Don’t get me started.)

I refer instead to the Hebrew tetragram, the name with the vowels for the common noun adonai in the Masoretic text and which I tend to transliterate, when I transliterate it, as YHWH.  When I drive to work I pass at least two temples of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  I know well the scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian in which a crowd sets out to stone a man who’s said “Jehovah,” only to turn on the priest leading the mob when the priest recites the accused man’s crimes.  I can think of praise-and-worship songs that so grossly misuse (and overuse!) “Jehovah” and “Yahweh” that I find myself in my grumpier moments wishing we could have more such mobs.

My point here is not to rail on my own pet peeves (though I’m not above that) but to note the strangeness that Genesis 32 sets before the 21st-century reader.  Jacob, at the end of the episode, never utters the word mal ‘ak (that we English readers get as the transliterated Greek “angel”).  He never has a moment of metaphysical angst wondering how Spirit or Being had somehow engaged with his muscles, bones, and skin, much less how he’s managed to hold on to ‘elohim all night with only a bum leg to show for it.  And he does not think twice of demanding that his fellow-struggler offer him a blessing.  But when he asks the figure’s name, nothing comes forth.

I don’t have any grand ethical conclusion to draw from such things–if anything, this is another of those stories that Kierkegaard might have settled on had he not focused his early work on the sacrifice of Isaac.  The best I’m going to offer this morning is that, in the tradition of Kierkegaard and Barth and Brueggemann, I’ll advise caution in the face of the text of Scripture, a reticence to systematize at the expense of the strange particulars.  There’s more in heaven and on earth than what a system can contain.

May our faithfulness to our strange God leave room for God’s freedom, and may our faithfulness embrace the strange among God’s creation.

• Gain some perspective on the sizes of things in the universe.
• Gain some perspective on the relative volumes of communications traffic.
• The Kindlings Muse has another great lecture from one of my (MF) personal heroes, Dr. Harold Best.
• Alan Jacobs ponders the disregard for complexity and truth on the Internet.
• Tracey Rowland on the reactions against “sacro-pop”
• James K.A. Smith suggests some new vocabularies for discussing the phenomenon of “Christian hipsters”
• Tony Jones agrees with William T. Cavanaugh that the eucharist is always a political act.
• NPR’s Intelligence Squared USA takes on the question of terrorism and enemy combatants in a refreshingly honest debate.
• Chris Heard opines briefly on Wikipedia and the glaring lack of students’ confidence in their own abilities to read Biblical texts.
• Are mime shows ever amusing?  Nate Gilmour thinks this one is (just watch it in the little window; the compression makes it look horrible  for full-screen):

Coffeehouse Theology: Reflecting on God in Everyday Life.
By Ed Cyzewski
233 pp. NavPress. $14.99.

I have to admit that I enjoyed reading an optimistic book, even one whose optimism I don’t always share.  In the closing pages of Coffeehouse Theology, Ed Cyzewski, a seminary graduate who apparently read all the same books I did while he was in seminary (I found myself guessing at the further-reading list as each chapter progressed and usually guessing right), issues the following two-statement manifesto about the study of theology: “Theology isn’t about constructing an arsenal of knowledge that we can use to shoot down the beliefs of our ‘opponents.’  Theology is about loving God and one another more perfectly” (214).  Along the way to that hopeful rallying call, Cyzewski provides a nice introduction to missio dei as a framework for doing Christian theology and lays out a theology simultaneously conservative and willing to hear from those outside of traditional evangelical circles.  In short, he has distilled the experience of attending a relatively traditional seminary for the Sunday school teacher, the youth minister, or the person in the pew to enjoy, and the ride is a smooth one.

Cyzewski’s project in Coffeehouse Theology is to render in readable terms what literary types (like me) call the hermeneutic circle: the assumptions that one brings to the text affect the way that one reads the particulars of a text, but then that text’s particulars stand to alter the assumptions that one carries away from the text.  Cyzewski, though I don’t remember his using the word hermeneutics at all (he might have, but I don’t remember it), discusses this circle in terms of culture and conversion.  Every reader brings the assumptions of the reader’s culture to, say, the letter to the Romans, Cyzewski argues, but the text of Romans does not (or ought not to) leave the reader unaltered but itself asserts a certain sort of world that the reader must embrace, reject, dismiss, or otherwise incorporate into what was there prior to the text.  Along the way Cyzewski notes repeatedly that the Scriptures ultimately stand as uniquely inspired texts, that although listening to the voices of global and historical Christianity are crucial to a full understanding of these sacred books, the books themselves stand as authorities over church history and over global Christian thought.  Since Cyzewski does not offer any extended discussion about how those relationships between texts, readers, and communities operate, I won’t speculate or attribute theories of such things to him.

The book, of course, has its strong runs and weak runs: especially helpful was Cyzewski’s discussions of the split between modernists and Fundamentalists in the nineteenth century (118-120) and the vocabularies that Christians bring to bear on questions of faith and understanding (122).  His section on the nature of Christian faith (102) is not nearly as strong, but overall the book asks interesting questions about living in a late-capitalist world (I hesitate to call it “postmodern”) and does not attempt to answer those questions without the struggle that such things require.

Throughout the book Cyzewski does a good job of introducing these sorts of questions to a literate but non-specialized reader, and I would recommend the book heartily for small group Bible studies, Sunday school settings, and personal reading.

For the sake of disclosure (since I’m usually far more venomous than this), I did receive a copy of this book as part of the Ooze Viral Bloggers book review program, but the receipt of the book did not affect this review.

General Introduction
- Where’s David Grubbs?
- A change in plans
- Listener feedback
- Forgive our pink noise (it goes away quickly, I promise)

Reading Being and Time
- The heady days of spring 2009
- Why we’re both incompetent

Heidegger’s Position in Philosophical History
- Gilgamesh and death
- Finitude as definition of everyday existence
- Augustine, Heidegger, and curiosity
- The order of human existence
- Bracketing eternity
- A new kind of destruction
- Heidegger, existentialism, and phenomenology
- Truth as not-ignoring and margin-walking

Our Relationship to Our Own Histories
- …And in this corner, the American dream
- Our existence in history
- Thrownness and tradition
- Why you must both contribute and break
- Sartre takes it further
- Religion as a dirty word

Heidegger’s Rejection of Descartes
- Cogito or Dasein
- Equipmental and systematic being
- Choosing one’s own being
- How obvious is this?
- Heideggerian linguistics
- Hubert Dreyfus and his robots

Being-Towards-Death
- Life lived in the face of death
- Why you can’t live every day like you’re dying tomorrow
- The difference between “Everyone dies” and “I will die”
- Teenagers should read Being and Time
- What about the afterlife?

Heidegger’s Grand Sin
- Yes, he was a Nazi
- Who’s tempted today?
- Show me the Nazis
- Why are philosophers so horrified?

How Can Christians Read Heidegger?
- A chilling portent of things to come!
- How humanism can help with this question
- Heideggerian truth and why it’s important
- Theology in the Heideggerian tradition
- The Emergent concern with authenticity

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Augustine. Confessions. Trans. R.S. Pine-Coffin. New York: Penguin, 1961.

Bultmann, Rudolf. New Testament and Mythology. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1984.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1991.

The Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson. New York: Harper Perennial, 2008.

Macquarrie, John. Principles of Christian Theology. New York: Scribner’s, 1977.

Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. Trans. Hazel Barnes. New York: Citadel, 2001.

Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology, Volume One. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1951.

Revised Common Lectionary Page for 10 October 2010 (20th Sunday after Pentecost, Year C)

Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7 and Psalm 66:1-12 • 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15c and Psalm 111 • 2 Timothy 2:8-15 • Luke 17:11-19

I know I should cherish the fact that some people in the world think well of me, but sometimes the compliments people pay make me wonder what exactly I’m doing wrong.  In those cases I realize that something about the way I conduct myself resonates with something that my interlocutor deems valuable, and if I’m uncomfortable with that resonance, I should probably do something about it.

I won’t get into some of the more embarrassing compliments I’ve been paid in this stream, but one that consistently puzzles me is when people, fairly often my students, say that I’m “apolitical.”  Now I know one of the narratives that informs this strange praise: when one story that governs the world of college learning is that of the abrasive agenda-pushing professor (either of the sort that AM radio types talk about or in the form of the idiotic urban legend about the philosophy professor and the chalk that won’t break), students rejoice when they find a teacher who encourages students not to opine but to argue, and who values arguments as part of common life, and who rewards students not for agreement but for articulation.  I think that’s just a misconception about college life that happens to fall in my favor.

But sometimes my colleagues at the University of Georgia would say the same of me, and I was not their writing teacher.  I’ve come to believe that my relatively equal disdain for the DNC and the GOP have lead some to think that I simply have no politics.  Such an impression could not be more wrong: I care deeply about the politics of republics and of congregations and of classrooms; I simply do not wish to throw my hat in with one of the big-money factions.

If I had to start theorizing about Christians’ political lives, I could do worse than to start in Jeremiah 29.  The writer of Hebrews is fairly clear, and Paul hints, that we Christians do well to imagine ourselves as exiles as Israel was in exile in the days of Jeremiah.  Because the Church is a community that by definition exists across international lines (as the Jews lived in Egypt and in Babylon in Jeremiah’s time), so the Church is in the world, in all the world’s geopolitical diversity.  And because we have our own ways of being a polis together among and across international lines (Yes, I do read a fair bit of Stan Hauerwas.  Why do you ask?), we do not kill in behalf of this or that geopolitical power entirely precisely because its enemies might well include our sisters and brothers in Christ.  On the other hand, because they are our neighbors, we do love and pray for our neighbors-among-the-nations, and we indeed function as a city on a hill when we live together as ekklesia as we should.

So when I read Jeremiah 29, I see a way for Christians to live in the world and even love the world as God loved the world–as YHWH tells the Jews through Jeremiah, their shalom rests with the city’s shalom, so to work for the shalom of the city is no betrayal of YHWH but an acknowledgment that YHWH has put one in the city.  There’s no sense that the Jews should start calling Babylon the new Israel or that they should murder anyone who threatens Babylon, but there’s also no call for anything like absolute withdrawal.  Instead, the people who once had farmland should plant gardens, and the folks who built in Palestine should now build in Chaldea, and the business of raising families should go on here as it did there.  In other words, participation in the life of a place does not start and end with the city of Jerusalem; to work for the good of Babylon is to work for the good of the Jews who live in Babylon.  Obviously this adds to rather than takes away from the complexity of what people mistakenly call “church and state” disputes (a carryover from when there was a political force in the world coherent enough to call “the” church), but if nothing else it offers a starting point for reflection as the two big-money factions jockey for “the evangelical vote.”

When Jesus sends the ten (former) lepers to be deemed clean at the temple, he recognizes that, in certain and limited ways, their horizons do overlap with Jerusalem’s.  But when he tells the grateful Samaritan to go on his way, he at least implies that the horizons of a Samaritan can also be faithful, so long as he makes disciples of the King of all kingdoms as he goes.  May we likewise work for the city where we sojourn and march ever on towards the city where our true desires await.