My Favorite Preacher Unexpectedly Reminds Me Why I Miss Him

Kyle 2 Comments

[First, a guarantee: I will post something about my life and not about church very soon. Probably when I get back from the Brewers-Twins series this weekend!]

I remember reading at the beginning of the school year some article in which the author claimed, “Good preaching changes lives.” I know that statement is true when it comes to my life, and no one has changed it in that way more than Alan Jones, whom I’m profoundly lucky to have been introduced to during my discernment year.

I listened in Central Park today to an old sermon of his, one I’d never heard before. The text, I presume, is from Jeremiah 18 (the potter’s house), but from the sound of his voice you’ve got to assume he was riled up enough about some personal or news-reported incident that it wouldn’t have really mattered what the text was. His subject is authority, in particular the challenge of interpreting scripture and the peril of bringing it to bear on our lives without proper care, perspective, and–most of all–humility.

The sermon got me thinking back to one of the last late-night patio theology sessions that I was a part of before I headed north (yes, this is what seminarians do in their free time, which I’d despair of if I didn’t have a record of how I spent my free time as an engineer). I said a lot that night about why I think the Anglican ethos gives us answers to how to be a functioning church without resorting to sola scriptura disengagement from the world’s present realities or to a reliance on theological witch hunts to defend orthodoxy. Unsurprisingly, Jones sums up what I was trying to get at rather gracefully:

We are not without resources. We’re not floundering around. We look to the cross; we share in this Eucharist; and surely we see a trajectory in scripture and history, the trajectory of inclusion and justice. That’s our pilgrimage together.

Anyway, I highly recommend this gem from the “master of the serpentine sermon” (thanks, Gary). It has greatly lifted this exhausted liberal-centrist seminarian’s spirits. I can’t find a direct link anymore, but you want the 9/10/07 sermon that seems to be available here.

In other news, I watched the VTS commencement ceremony today. Brian McLaren, who I’ve never read but had assumed I would dislike, gave a great address (full disclosure, though: I missed the last few minutes to take a phone call and haven’t had a chance to catch up yet). You can check it out here.

Spring Update

Kyle

Well, that’s a wrap for the first year of seminary. Man, did it go fast. If you want the short version, it was a challenging but formative and faith-deepening experience. On the whole, very positive, very blessed. Click below for some more details and information about my new gig in New York for the summer.

250 Words About My Favorite Bible Verse

Kyle 1 Comment

When the LORD restored the fortunate of Zion *
then were we like those who dream.
(Psalm 126:1, BCP Psalter)

Our hope as Christians is for restoration with God, our neighbors, and ourselves, through Christ. I can think of no better way to describe the joy of that restoration than to note that, when we experience it, we are “as dreamers.” As a trained and duly pragmatic engineer, I need this verse’s insistence that we should not be content with a small-potatoes promise; God’s abundance extends beyond all that our most wild and reckless dreams can come up with. At the same time, I find it possible to trust this verse so deeply because of what we learn from it in the wider context of the psalm. We live and minister in a kingdom that is already here and has not yet fully arrived, and so it should resonant deeply when the psalmist goes on to call for God’s re-restoration of Zion. When the verb tense changes in verse 5 (thank you, Dr. Ferlo), reminding us that our earthly fortunes will always be like the rhythmic waxing and waning of “the watercourses of the Negev,” the imagery from verse 1 makes even more sense. The LORD is also with us in our deprivation, and in those decidedly darker dreams it produces. For me, the sustaining witness of this verse is that in most moments of our lives, all our joy and thanksgiving (“O LORD, we are restored!”) intermingles with all our hope and even regret (“O LORD, restore us!”), and God declares the whole lot good.

On the Marq, Finally

Kyle 1 Comment

A while back, I lamented all the difficulties involved in establishing a paperless seminary workflow. Lots of people chime in, but in the end we didn’t locate an ideal way to do the main task: mark up PDFs (with highlighting, marginalia, etc.). During that process (though not on the comments–perhaps via Twitter?), someone told me about Marqed.com, and online service that provides tools for doing most of the things we had discussed. To my great frustration, however, it was really buggy (perhaps just on my system–Firefox 3.0.17 on Ubuntu 9.04).

However, highlighting at least seems finally to be working well enough to make this a legit go-to tool for now. You get ten PDF uploads per month with the free version, or you can upgrade to unlimited. (The paid account allows you to upload MS Office documents as well, though don’t ask me why you’d want to involve a Web tool to edit a document that can already be marked up natively. Maybe for read-only files?) Of course, I’m not wild about being dependent an Internet connection in order to view my files, but all our classrooms here at VTS have Wi-Fi, so I guess I can deal with this for now. Anyway, I feel like I can finally recommend it. Check it out at www.marqed.com.

In other news, we got some beautiful snow last night here in Northern Virginia. I posted a few quick pictures to Facebook here.

Football Photos, Thomist Thoughts

Kyle

You could probably do worse for an update on what I’ve been doing at seminary the last couple weeks than to check out two digital snapshots.

The first is actually a collection of snapshots. The VTS Fighting Friars went 1-2 at the Luther Bowl in Gettysburg a few weeks back, ending our season 2-2. But we went 2-0 “in conference,” after adding a win against our fellow Anglicans at Trinity School for Ministry (aka the Pittsburg Kneelers), who were by far the best sporstmen (and sportswomen) and the cleanest team we played on a day of startlingly hard hits for a flag football tournament. Anyway, you can check out the pictures here, including this highly embarrassing one of me running with the ball after our goal-line zone won us an interception:

The other tidbit is a response to one of the several comments I got on my Twitter post about enjoying Thomas Aquinas. A friend wanted to know what I’d liked about him, and this is what I wrote:

I guess what I appreciated about the excerpt of Aquinas that we read was the motivation and methodology. I like this notion of saying, in effect:

“There’s some unity to this huge mass of literature the Christian tradition has accumulated. Of course, there is some genuine disagreement, but more often than not the much of the conflict either evaporates completely or at least diminishes if you look at it closely. If we borrow a little Aristotle and go through the careful (if at times a bit tedious) exercise of very clearly defining and categorizing this vast repository of theology, we realize that the story is a lot more harmonious than we might have guessed.”

I just really admire the care and precision that goes into the whole thing. Plus, the implicit and rather bold claim that logic and analysis can be deployed meaningfully to help us navigate among this collection of hundreds of isolated claims, plucked (almost at random, it sometimes seems) out of the Scriptures and patristic literature, is just endlessly fascinating when you watch it being deployed. The effort feels very rigorous and worthwhile even if the underlying epistemology seems a little naive by modern standards. [Response from my church history professor to my follow-up question about this final issue: “It’s what scholastics do.”]

Hope you’re all having a lovely weekend and that the weather wherever you are is better than on this dreary day in Northern Virginia.

Travel Day: Harlem to VTS, Via Media

Kyle

Navigate past vesting choir members to leave apartment at St. Mary’s, Harlem, (126th between Amsterdam and Broadway) at 10 a.m. Take southbound C train to 34th. Walk to Madison Square Garden to get in line for Megabus. [Romantic interlude.] Take Megabus to 30th Street Station, Philadelphia. Take R3 SEPTA train to Media, PA. Walk to Christ Church to attend installation of Adam Kradel as new rector. Change out of suit at Christ Church rectory and walk back to Media station. Take R3 back to 30th Street Station. Take Amtrack 165 Regional to Union Station, Washington, D.C. Trains are shutting down for the night, so take final Red Line train from Union Station to Metro Center, transfer to the Orange Line and ride to Roslyn, then transfer to Blue Line and ride to King Street. Take taxi from King Street Station to VTS and arrive at 12:45 a.m.

Fall Break Update

Kyle 2 Comments

Sorry for my month-long absence; it’s been a wild month or so here at VTS. I hope to make up for it by putting off my final Hebrew studying to tell you a bit about first quarter and share a few photos. Enjoy!

The weather was a lot like it was at Crazylegs 2009 in Madison.

Lined up for a blitz, I think. See the rest of the really excellent pictures (by my friend Cayce Ramey) here.

Second-quarter books! (With Kermit, for scale. Special thanks to Trinity Church for helping me pay for them!)

There are some beautiful fall colors just out the back door of Price Hall (yes, this Price, who apparently wrote one of my favorite prayers in the ’79 BCP).

Kristie and me by the WWII memorial on a beautiful afternoon over Columbus Day weekend.

The Ongoing Pursuit of a Paperless Seminary Reading Workflow

Kyle 7 Comments

In seminary, we read a lot. Like, probably more than we do anything else–including playing intramural sports (a surprising but deeply rewarding time sink), praying (though we’ve received tremendous support in this respect), sleeping (at least it feels that way), and complaining (a necessary thing sometimes, let me tell you).

And–as any humanities major knows but us engineering students are always too busy with problem sets to notice–retaining even a small fraction of that reading is a matter of no small challenge or importance. The old middle school “reading notes” model is an almost laughable prospect due to the shear number of pages we’re talking about here. The highlighter, I’ve been told, is my friend. I have come to agree whole-heartedly.

However, because this school thankfully realizes that part of being good stewards of God’s creation is to learn to use less paper (and because–let’s be honest–who reads paper copies of anything these days, except maybe for actual books?), I find myself with a quandry: how do you highlight PDFs?

You may know that this is a maddeningly difficult question to answer. Trying to do so may be the one thing I’m spending more time on than the actual reading. The problem, as I see it, is that it’s impossible to justify spending the money on programs like Adobe Acrobat or Foxit Editor when all you want to do is highlight some text in any damn document you please. I’m not an expert in digital copyright or fair use, but I really don’t think this is too much to ask.

In a move we’re apparently supposed to interpret as magnanimous, Adobe now allows Reader users (people like me who aren’t willing to pay for Acrobat) to do some basic markup on files with “document rights…enabled.” The problem–and surely the people at Adobe know this–is that I have never, ever, been given a PDF course reading with document rights enabled. Again, some of this may be a matter of legitimate intellectual property concern. But if these files are being used for educational use (and clearly that’s why my professors are allowed to distribute them as PDFs via course management software in the first place), it seems like merely applying a “highlight filter” to a local copy of the document ought to be fair game. Am I off base here?

Anyway, enough complaining…let me tell you what I’ve converged to and then put out a plea for anyone who finds this post and has a better solution to please help me out. After playing quite a bit with PDFedit and finding it summarily difficult to use (or maybe the Ubuntu distribution is just buggy?), I’ve settled on the more user friendly but still unsatistfactory flpsed. Basically, this program lets you do text annotation. As you can see in the screenshot below, the text manages to remain persistent even if you view the re-converted PDF in a program like Evince, which is handy. But this workflow still requires a lot of typing, when all I really want to be able to do is highlight. I’m encouraged by early experiments with Scribus, but I’m still fighting the learning curve.

Am I overlooking a simpler free (or cheap) solution? It wouldn’t be the first time. If so, please enlighten me. Is anyone else as perplexed as I am about this stunning lack of obviously useful functionality?