faithasawayoflife

Broken Hallelujahs: more cover options--full color or B&W

Jon (who blogs cool thoughts on his blog called grapho (and it is in greek, no less) thought my cover proposal for Broken Hallelujah might be better in black and white. I realized that I had done a mix and it did look sort of odd so here are a couple more, one with the same pictures but all b&w, and another with some different pictures. I think I like the new all color best, partly because of the interrelationship of the photos, which are pretty amazing shots.  Being a photographer would be an amazing job.  My cousin, as an aside, is a bicycle photographer (and photographer of everyday life) in Paris.

[Edit: okay, another black and white below, matching the new color option.  I'll stop with these and see what Brazos thinks.]

Working on my own book cover

Up to this point, through four books, I've never had a choice in book cover.  This time, I plan to have input and I have an idea already. The idea is to have interesting photos of the artists I discuss in the book as the whole cover, in sort of a montage, with the title and author overlaid.  I got the idea from doing work with presentation zen in my work on keynote. Let me know what you think.  I'm working on this project through January, hoping to have a good draft of the manuscript to send to my Rodney Clapp from Brazos Press who are doing the book.
anon, and peace
Chris

Good morning--it is -19 outside

Holy smokes!  We have ice on all the insides of our windows (the older ones anyway) because it is MINUS 19 outside this morning!  Today's high is supposed to be MINUS 5 and let me tell you that's no high. Walter Bruggeman, speaking at our Luther Mid-Winter Convocation yesterday, said "this is the third time I've spoken at this event--you'd think I would have learned that it is too cold to come to St. Paul in January.
Anon, and peace,
Chris

Robinson to Pray at Inaguration

While many gay advocates and supports of gay rights were appalled at the invitation President-Elect Obama extended to megachurch pastor Rick Warren in the role of giver of the invocation at the inaguration, I argued that it was worth seeing it in terms of 1) Obama's purpose all along to reach out to both red and blue America and 2) his relationship with Warren going back to a conference on AIDS at Saddleback in 2006.  Still, it comes as really good news when the NYT announced today that openly gay Epsicopal bishop Gene Robinson of Vermont, whom Obama consulted on gay issues throughout the campaign, will offer the invocation for Monday's events at the Lincoln Memorial. The invitation came before Christmas but was only released yesterday in Robinson's hometown Vermont paper.  As Robinson said, "“In many ways,” he added, “it just proves that Barack Obama is exactly who he says he was and would be as president, which is someone who is casting a wide net that will include all Americans.”  This was true in his selection of Warren, and is true of his selection of Robinson as well. 
Anon and peace,
Chris

The End of the Lecture

I remember being so bored in a lecture class that I brought other work and sat in the back so I could seem to be taking notes while doing something else.  The lecture was dry and basically repeated the material I could get directly out of the text book.  Now that I'm a teacher I have pretty mixed feelings about the lecture.  The three institutions where I've taught, Emory, Yale and Luther, have all had the lecture as a main teaching mode, especially for introduction courses.  I myself now teach a big introduction course every semester.  But I have also, especially at Yale, experimented with modular learning in which students had a choice of activities and part of the class time was spent as they moved through and engaged each module.  I've also done experiments with presenting a bit, enough to share a key idea or problem, and then send the students off in small groups with a case to work on that gets at the idea or problem.  But the temptation is the lecture, the professorial performance. The problem is, that focuses on the teaching and what I'm in this for is student learning.  And research shows that the lecture is not the most effective means to help students learn.  So it was a delight to read the excellent report in the NYT about the creative revision of the intro physics course at MIT.  Of course they got a big gift to fund space renovations to make the new creative teaching possible, but cheers to them and I'm going to redouble my efforts to seek creative means to be about learning, and not just presenting information.

Standing Against Torture

In the spring semester I'm teaching a course on worship and ethics titled 'political worship' in which we'll read William Cavanaugh's great book Torture and Eucharist.  Cavanaugh's book is about the church in Chile during the 1970s under the dictatorship of General Pinochet.  I'll place that story against the story of the United States under President Bush (W), drawing on Phillippe Sands amazing new book Torture Team: Rumsfeld's Memmo and the Betrayal of American Values.  While not a book of theology, it has huge theological questions at stake, and if we have the courage, we'll ask questions about our churches during this time of fear and reactive violence perpetrated by our own government, military and funded by our taxes. 

On the cover of Sands' book is the corner of the memo authorizing torture techniques at Guantanamo.  It turns out that Rumsfield's work habit is to stand 8-10 a day working at--you guessed it--a standing desk, and through is tenure as Secretary of Defense he had a particularly solid one quite unlike the one I'm building with my father-in-law, Paul.  At the bottom of the memo, just below where he signed D. Rumsfeld in the "Approved" spot, writing in blue ink below in reference to one method  of forced standing for up to four hours, "However, I stand for 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?"  Somehow I need to mark my desk as a place to stand against torture in the name of Jesus whose tortured and crucified body was raised to new life as the final rejection of all such acts.
anon, and +peace,
Chris

Liturgy and Ethics: Writing on Gordon Lathrop's liturgical theology

I'm grateful for the opportunity to help lead, along with Therese Lysaught, a working group on liturgy and ethics at the Society of Christian Ethics.  The Society meets this weekend in Chicago and we're hosting Gordon Lathrop for a session examining the ethical thread running through his three volume work on liturgical theology: Holy Things (1993), Holy People (1999) and Holy Ground (2003).  Here's my title and introduction.  I'll post on how it goes after the weekend, and put up a link to a draft of the whole paper. The picture is of the fenced-off site of the chemical plant at the epicenter of the arsenic poisoning in Minneapolis that I draw upon as a case study.

“Things, People, Ground, Both Holy and Broken:
Environmental Justice in Dialog with Gordon Lathrop’s Liturgical Theology”

Introduction
In the comedy Arsenic and Old Lace by American Playwright Joseph Kesserlring, two spinster aunts literally put lonely old men out of their misery with a glass of home-made elderberry wine laced with arsenic.  The aunt’s nephew, who believes he is Theodore Roosevelt and keeps busy by digging locks for the Panama Canal in the cellar, inadvertently provides the burial plots. However, comedy turns to tragedy when the arsenic is spread out over a neighborhood adjacent to a chemical plant, mixing into the dirt of playgrounds and gardens, and putting a whole community—mostly minority, young, poor—at great risk. An especially potent poison, arsenic at high levels can lead to multi-system organ failure; even quite low levels cause increased chance of liver disease, cancer, and other health problems.  This second arsenic story is the story of the Phillips neighborhood surrounding my church in South Minneapolis.

Building on this particular story of broken things, people and ground, I argue for a practical liturgical theology as the next logical step to take from Gordon Lathrop’s magisterial trilogy in liturgical theology: Holy Things, Holy People and Holy Ground.   His work has, we shall see, a strong ethical thread running throughout, offering a strong basis for building a practical theology concerned God’s work in Christ through the Spirit, promising life abundant for all creation.  Yet, moving beyond Lathrop’s work proper, such a practical liturgical theology begins with descriptive work attending to concrete cries in the world, then engages these cries in theological dialog with word and sacrament in assembly, and finally returns to the broken things, people and ground we know, committed not only to a pastoral theology of reformed rites along with reformed practice of them as assembly, but to strategic practical theology reforming our very way of life in and for the sake of the world God so loves.  My paper will follow these moves—descriptive, theological, and strategic--as I move forward.

anon, and +peace,
Chris

Standing Desk

I sit a lot, as do most white collar workers and intellectuals. For a long time, especially in the afternoons, I have taken to reading standing up. I walk around, lean up against walls, find higher stacks of things to set my book on, and now, finally, I'm making the move permanent.  My father-in-law has an awesome wood shop and over Christmas break I designed and he helped me construct a standing desk.  Never heard of that?  Well, here is a picture of the standing desk used by Virginia Wolf.  Mine is a bit different in that it has a Gothic arch in the front and a bit wider plain wood top but the basic idea is the same. They have to be made for a person so that you get the height right.  So back in the day they were only for the rich and privileged and that's probably still true--I just happen to have, along with Paul, the ability to make one instead of shelling out the big dollars to buy one.
anon, and peace,
chris