THE WELL OF GRIEF

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface of the well of grief
turning downward through its black water
to the place we cannot breathe
will never know the source from which we drink,
the secret water, cold and clear, nor find in the darkness glimmering
the small round coins
thrown away by those who wished for something else.

By David Whyte from Close to Home

I found this here.

A note on the teaching authority of the church

1 John 2:26-27 says, "I am writing these things to you about those who are trying to lead you astray. As for you, the anointing you received from him remains in you and you do not need anyone to teach you. But as [Christ's] anointing teaches you about all things, and as that anointing is true and is not a lie, just as it has taught you, remain in [Christ]."

Colin Kruse, in his commentary The Letters of John (p. 111-12) deals with the following question: who or what guarantees correct belief among church members? "Is it the teaching authority of the bishops (so Irenaeus), or the inner illumination of individual believers by the Holy Spirit? Protestants and Catholics have been divided over this issue for centuries."  Kruse cites three good answers to this question.

1. Inner instruction agrees with outer instruction.

"One resolution of the problem, the conclusion reached by Augustine of Hippo, is that there are both inner and outer forms of instruction. Outer instruction, given to all by the teachers of the church, is not enough. There must also be inner instruction, given by the anointing of Christ, the Holy Spirit, otherwise the external instruction will be understood only externally, and that is not enough."

 2. Awareness of the truth unites the whole church.

"[Johann] Michl believes that such an approach is too subjective because it allows people to adopt whatever teaching impresses them. He argues rather that an awareness of the truth is given to the whole church, including those who hold the teaching office and the congregation of the faithful. These stand in an organic union and complement one another. The general faith consciousness of the members and the proclamation of the teachers, through the power and help of the Holy Spirit, lead to an infallible possession of the truth to which it bears witness without error."

3. The Holy Spirit confirms the Good News.

"Perhaps the question here is wrongly framed. As far as 1 John is concerned, the question is not between the Holy Spirit and the teachers of the church but between the Holy Spirit and the gospel message as it was heard from the beginning (2:24). The role of the Spirit is primarily as a testimony to the tradition, not as a source of new revelation. Admittedly the tradition is handed down by the witnesses, and to that extent the Holy Spirit confirms the testimony of (true) teachers."

Just think about what this means... although our pastors are there to teach us to abide in the truth, it is not their job to keep us in the faith... the Holy Spirit does it. And when we hear them preach something we've heard before, we don't just say, "I've heard it before," but we respond, "Yes! That's the same thing the Holy Spirit taught me! Let's do it."

What is a library for?

I just took a survey for a county library system in Oregon. The most interesting question it asked was "What are the top three roles of a library?" I put down (1) a resource to browse/borrow books for children, (2) a place to conduct research, (3) a quiet place to study.  What would you put?

The Birth of Christ in Greek

Yesterday I watched the Christmas story narrated in Greek. You can see it too; it's in a Youtube video called ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ ΓΕΝΝΑΤΑΙ ΔΟΞΑΣΑΤΕ. Don't be surprised by the interspersed chant... welcome to praise and worship as Greeks have known it for two thousand years. Read along with the subtitles and realize the phonetic variation of time and region that's possible in a language that's actually used. Also notice that you pick up more liveliness in the words than if you were poring over the text at your own pace.

Hagiographers and Iconoclasts and the Third Way

The following quote about A.B. Simpson, founding guru of the Christian & Missionary Alliance, typifies the response we ought to have not only to our higher life, holiness movement forebears, but also our fundamentalist or Restoration Movement forebears, and especially our fundamentalist, higher life forebear who lives in Oak Brook. Without our heritage, our prior experience and identity are uprooted. But without honesty and the will to reform, our brains and consciences turn to mush. Take and heed, take and heed.

Gordon T. Smith, Conversion and Sanctification in the Christian & Missionary Alliance (1992).

We tend to have two kinds of people within the C&MA -- the hagiographers and the iconoclasts. The iconoclasts see little if any good in the heritage of the C&MA when it comes to theology. [A.B.] Simpson and his contemporaries are viewed as incompetent in both biblical exegesis and in theological method, and thus as having little to contribute to a modern discussion. They are even, perhaps, a bit embarrassed by our founders. The unstated assumption is that the sooner we can move on and distance ourselves from Simpson, the better.

The hagiographers, on the other hand, feel the need to refer to the founder of the denomination as Dr. Simpson, which is the Alliance equivalent of saying Saint Simpson. In this perspective, Simpson did no wrong, especially when it comes to exegesis and theology. These folk would seem to have us defend every aspect and perspective that Simpson brought to the question of sanctification.

We need an approach to this discussion that affirms tradition along with the authority of Scripture. We need to affirm the strength and vitality of our theological and spiritual heritage, and the power and significance of Simpson's insights, while also acknowledging that Simpson was neither a good exegete nor a good theologian. He was a preacher, prophet, and leader. We can affirm his strengths, and recognize that he was a product of his age. He was a giant in the religious movements of the late 19th century. But he also had some glaring weaknesses, notably those that we find so difficult to accept: weak biblical exegesis and poor theological method.

Yet, it is possible to develop a theology of sanctification and of Christian experience in general, that reflects careful attention to Scripture while also affirming the insights of the heritage. This contemporary perspective on sanctification, then, will reflect the strengths, wisdom and insights of the denominational founders. We stand on the shoulders of giants. But it would also seek to formulate our theology with attention to biblical exegesis and theological method. Our contemporary statement will be with different language and probably a new paradigm by which we capture the biblical message and the insights of our heritage.

Study of sanctification

I've got a big-time intellectual curiosity right now on the topic of sanctification. It seems like the pietistic way I hear so often isn't satisfying enough for my mind. But I still need sanctification like I need a doctor. It's ugly.

I've been following threads in John Piper's book Future Grace and the various materials by Andy Naselli analyzing the Keswick theology of sanctification. I've made up my mind to read Phoebe Palmer's book from the 1840s, The Way of Holiness, which seemed to spark off the Methodist Holiness movement in the US, which spread to England and became the Keswick conference... the party includes Fanny Crosby, Amy Carmichael, Andrew Murray, and Dwight Moody.

Here's an interesting survey of some of these life-connections in the Higher-Life movement, which reached even C.T. Studd, Billy Graham and Bill Bright.

The things I'm disturbed about are anti-intellectualism, passive quietism, and unrealistic, superstitious assessments of self and spiritual realities -- in short, a stereotypically feminine approach to dealing with sin. It emphasizes faith (let go and let God), but the faith is the sort you need for falling, not for climbing.  I really don't know what to make of the accusations being lobbed back and forth, especially when I read about Phoebe Palmer's life and the emotional demands of revivalism that she was responding to. So... if you understand it well and it works for you, great. But I'm in search of a more comprehensive model. As I said in an earlier post, I'm looking for an openeyed faith that is realistic and robust. I'm sure others have gone in the opposite direction for equally valid reasons. I'm not.

It's been a worthy distraction, though. And I finally found the passage I was looking for, that both Piper and Naselli refer to: J.I. Packer's testimony of "deliverance" from an unrealistic pietist view of sanctification.

Read below, from Packer's introduction to Triumph over Temptation, an abridgement of John Owen (pp. 31-37).

Sincerity in evangelism

I rediscovered this essay from my blog of five years ago. I was probably even more of a scared, cloistered elitist bookworm then than I am now. But this piece amazed me, and the sentiment convicted me.  I even remember trying to narrate it to a friend. I can see images all mixing in from Phil Garvin, John Bunyan, "Jerry West", and G.K. Chesterton to be squeezed into the four corners of a reflection paper for philosophy class. Enjoy.

Sincerity in evangelism

How is the disciple to act as a “commercial fisherman” rather than a “sport fisherman” when spreading the good news? Most undesirable is the pushy salesman attitude who wants above all else to lead his friend in some fideistic “sinner’s prayer”. Also undesirable is the one who starts out with an intellectual apologetic, meets unbelief and turns into a small-mouthed apologetic intellectual. Both these lack a sincere, pure heart that is supremely interested in the interests of God and of his friend. Part of this is comes from self-reliance, not devoting oneself to prayer and the Scriptures. Another part of it is not being frank about one’s own sin.

Moving on from fishing, another analogy of the sea is the rescuer of a shipwreck. Bits of treasure, gold coins, fallen timbers scattered on the shore. The treasure is the problem of pleasure. Smashed shivers of timbers, the chill of the waves, are the problem of pain. The shipwreck is the world. It is civilization, nature, and the natural Mansoul. Drowning in sin. This shipwreck is the whole reason for the gospel.

And now, when I awake and find myself picking through debris on the beach, imagining if this might have been Admiral Drake’s galleon, forget both that it actually was, that his Patron is at this moment in Portsmouth, designing and financing a new vessel – and that my comrade is still unconscious, trapped in the sinking bilge.

This is the amnesia of the disciple. It is not that I merely believe the Resurrection; I am convinced of it. My weakness of heart, my iniquity, my amnesia, is as much a proof of the cause of the shipwreck and the certainty of my mate’s doom as is his own heedlessness to belief. He doesn’t see the danger because he cannot. I must remember what I was convinced of, so as to “rescue” him and myself for the service of the Patron, on the future Galleon. Don’t expect him to believe, expect to convince him of the danger.

Here we're at.

Worried as hell. Wormwood the result of worms of anticipation and dread slugging their way through my soul. Ugh.

I'm settled into a host family here, the Cai Jia. Last night I had beef hotpot with my host family and my coteacher Danette. Then played basketball with them and the neighbors. Mostly got whupped except for my height. I don't play hard against girls, and I haven't practiced making baskets in a long time.

The day before yesterday I cleaned a dorm room, read the first chapter of Millard Erickson's book on eschatology, and was taken out for hotpot with the KaiShiuan school staff.  I'm blessed.

I'm worried that my sister is going to die, and I can't do much about it.  I'm cursed.
Spending time researching her medical condition awakens my research gene and puts my teaching gene to sleep. Blink.
Help is on the way, and none too soon. Soon I can tell more. We can never rezar too much.

I'm worried because payday and transportation are not conveniently known and close.

I'm worried about what I can do to get my C1 class to understand and pay attention in class. Every time I teach them, I have them for multiple periods, and the first one their Chinese teacher is always gone. They don't listen, because they don't understand me. And because I start them out in the big auditorium, the ones in the back talk among themselves, and the ones in the middle fight or clown around, and the ones in the front get the brunt -- unless I walk around, in which case the ones in the front can't turn around and see me because the seats are so high.

This is the price I pay for acculturation. Those who wish for language immersion don't notice this price.  An openeyed faith is not part of this price, but it is the gratis sine-qua-non that I hope is rapidly growing.

I'm a little annoyed, too, that all my kids call me Naifen, a nickname that means powdered milk. Don't laugh, you'd be annoyed too, after a while. Guess I'll have to get used to it.

Every once in a while, my little friends trip through the office and cheer me up with "what's your name!"

How to make the jump from no English to enough English to converse? I've made it a principle not to use Chinese myself during class, unless it is to suggest something to someone, to talk to the Chinese teacher, or repeat something someone else says.  So, my expectations might be too high, and they might need to stay there. I will use lots of real objects, and tell some picture stories. I will go through the book as quickly as possible for them to pick up the vocab and still not feel lost. Do some games along the way... and mark out time for the following items:
(1) Telling stories with big-picture books.
(2) Free-writing. I "very very like" (in my host-sister Susan's words) this article on early EFL writing in Taiwan's 1st-grade classrooms.

My previous experience with English camps and the Taoyuan English Village has prejudiced me against noise and against understanding learner native-language talk in a positive way.  That has got to change a little bit. Read the EFL writing article above, pp. 5-6, to see what I mean.

I got encouragement today from Quin and Merv's posts. God is good.
It seems easier to find good things lurking when full of worry than when full of okness. It keeps me from imploding.

I saw my more prolific self in a mirror yesterday. (His name is J.K. Gayle) Stroll over and look before he quits blogging next month.

I have two new heroes:
Kurt Eichenwald, a New York Times reporter who persuaded a young webcam performer to leave his business and become a federal witness.
Lloyd Reynolds (1902-1978), a self-taught calligraphy enthusiast from Oregon who mentored Barbara Getty and Inga Dubay, who wrote the Getty-Dubay Italic Handwriting Series published by Portland State University, the handwriting curriculum that I sort-of learned from growing up.

Goodbye.

Humboldt on Language Learning

I posted this on Facebook this summer while I was reading Noam Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (MIT, 1965). It's a strange, mystical quote with a lot of reassurance. It also humbly approximates the findings of psycholinguistics.

From page 51:

Applying this rationalist view to the special case of language learning, [Wilhelm von] Humboldt (1836) concludes that one cannot really teach language but can only present the conditions under which it will develop spontaneously in the mind in its own way.

Dropping some lines from Kinmen

Hi from Kinmen. 

I neglected to post that I was coming here, so now you know. I'm part of a new bilingual program at a small school in Kinmen, ROC. Basically, I'm here to teach first-through-sixth graders and give them the motivating conditions for learning to listen, speak, read, and write in English. Students who have exposure to only ten-or-so foreigners within a distance short of boat or plane. That's a big, and cool, task, which my friends who have volunteer-taught here for years have prepared them for in some ways, but such an intensive program of English (8-10 hours per week per classroom) is breaking really new ground here.

I just arrived yesterday about noon, settled in with my hosts, the Tsai family, within walking distance of the school. Most of all, I'm overwhelmed with the nice place they've got for me. It's a new 3-story house with granite floors, I have a good-size room on the first floor. The family has 2 girls and a boy... the eldest girl, Yicheng, and the boy, Bingcheng, are in Jr. High, and had a math tutor and an English tutor over last night from the college. The youngest girl, Susan, is one of my students. She's really outgoing, and is the most willing of any of them to communicate in English.  Mr. Tsai is a roofer and a carpenter; he builds roofs for temples and such, and he also makes or installs doors, and makes furniture out of wood.  Mrs. Tsai is really welcoming, too.

The kids at school don't speak hardly any English at all... most are at a first-grade level of English. They're a lot of fun in Chinese, though, once they know you understand some of what they're saying. Most of the girls are telling me I'd look more handsome if I shaved my beard. Hmmm.  And now they were just making fun of my because I was tilting my head to one side while I was typing. "Hold your head straight!" (in Chinese) haha

I visited Teresa yesterday afternoon. She, and everyone there on the team, was very sleepy from such a stressful week last week. She's looking pretty skinny, but she's eating and that's the important thing.  She was happy to get the health-food I brought in my suitcase, since she's become allergic to so many things. It was really natural, and still really a welcome thing, to see her for the first time since this spring.

I start teaching tomorrow, so I've got to get some lesson-planning done. Catch ya later!

Joe Dallas, Answering the "Gay Christian" Position. Christian Research Institute, Article DG238.
Highly, highly recommended. 

unknown | nwonknu

I just realized, thanks to an ad for American University's College of Arts and Sciences, the origin of "wonk".  The ad read, "wonks know art... wonks know education... wonks know social sciences... be in the know." Merriam-Webster's says the origin of "wonk" (1954) is unknown. That might be truer than they know.

Wonk is know spelled backwards.

David Brooks on California's golden age

David Brooks, in a New York Times editorial, recasts the California of 1911-1960 as a city on a hill for the state to follow today.  A restoration to pro-market progressivism in support of immigrant entrepreneurs is his way to prosperity and salvation from government bankruptcy.  He does a really good job of it, too, since most of his readers won't remember the old California except from the old Hollywood movies like John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, which he references in the title: Tom Joad Gave Up.  At that time, thousands streamed into California to find work. Now, thousands stream out of California to find work. What changed?

Conduit or liaison

Right now I'm taking an online course in ethics for paralegals. This question came up in one of the quizzes. Notice the similarity and difference between the two words "conduit" and "liaison", and how they are used to frame the issue.

What do you consider the difference between a conduit and a liaison?

Lyonnet on 1 John 3:8

Usually, when a good writer uses block quotes, it's for a good reason. I'm not talking about someone like Voline, who quotes chapters of another author because it's his only source. I'm talking about someone like Colin Kruse, who in his commentary on 1 John quotes the following paragraph from Stanislaus Lyonnet.


Colin Kruse, The Letters of John pp. 122-123.

Just as a Christian lives under the influence of God living in him, so do sinners live under the influence of the devil and allow themselves to be seduced by him. Consequently, just as he who is born of God and in whom God dwells does what God does, or concretely, 'lives the same kind of life as Christ lived' (1 Jn 2:6), that of a son of God, so the 'children of the devil' can only do what their 'father wants' (Jn 8:44), those very deeds which the Son of God came to undo. (1 Jn 3:8)

 1 John 3:8 says "He who does what is sinful is of the devil, because the devil has been sinning from the beginning. The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil's work."

Da Vinci on human worth

Here's what Leonardo Da Vinci wrote on the back of one of his drawings. Notebooks p. 1140. The link has his notebooks transcribed and syndicated by RSS, if you're looking for a genius to add to your reader.

And you, O Man, who will discern in this work of mine the wonderful works of Nature, if you think it would be a criminal thing to destroy it, reflect how much more criminal it is to take the life of  a man; and if this, his external form, appears to thee marvellously constructed, remember that it is nothing as compared with the soul  that dwells in that structure; for that indeed, be it what it may, is a thing divine. Leave it then to dwell in His work at His good will and pleasure, and let not your rage or malice destroy a life--for indeed, he who does not value it, does not himself deserve it.

 I'd put the same argument to someone who kills to steal great art, to someone who ignores his family responsibilities while writing a blog post, or to someone who tells his mistress that the Mexican Revolution failed and it's not his fault.

Lakoff video on politics and cognitive linguistics

George Lakoff is a cognitive linguist at UC Berkeley. He, like his old teacher and erstwhile enemy, Noam Chomsky, has had a lot to say about politics. Here's a link to a ninety-minute video where he introduces his book The Political Mind: Why You Can't Understand 21st-century Politics with an 18th-century Brain. It deals with political narratives and metaphors from the perspective of neuroscience.

In recovery!

Cross-posted from Straubs4Christ:

Dear Family, Friends, and Fellow Prayer Warriors,

Thank you for your prayers on behalf of Teresa.

Today we received word that she felt the best she has in a long time. That is a direct answer to
many prayers. Praise be to God, the great healer. He is to be praised!

We do not know what her situation will be long term or how long of a road she has to full
recovery, but we know that God answered our prayers and performed a miracle today. Praise the
name of the Lord.

She went from being too weak to sit or stand, to being able to sit up and eat pain-free.

She is currently under the care of a doctor in Taipei. She is being treated for a serious bacterial
infection in her stomach, as well as inflammation in her intestine. It appears she also has some
severe allergies to certain foods.

We count it a blessing to have you praying for her. Will you continue to lift up Teresa in prayer?

All because of Jesus,

Tim & Janet Straub

Messrs. T

I can't seem to keep straight A.T. Robertson, John A.T. Robinson, and N.T. Wright.

One was, one now is not, and the third is hurrying to catch up with them. Does initial prestige fade with ambiguity or does it increase when one's identity is merged with someone a little more famous?

Kaczynski

I wish I had the patience to read the Ted Kaczynski's Unabomber Manifesto. It, and his life, looks fascinating.

Update on Teresa

Since yesterday, Teresa has reportedly gotten much better.  She is a lot more comfortable and happy, in answer to all your prayers. I'm still waiting to hear the results of more tests, and hoping that she will get lots of rest and take in plenty of nutrients and water. Praise God.

Urgent prayer needed for Teresa

Dear Family, Friends and Fellow Prayer Warriors,

Will you join us in praying that God would intervene in Teresa’s health?  Some of her basic organ functions are shutting down.

Here is a note from a fellow teammate who flew with her to Taipei to seek more advanced medical help.

All Because of Jesus,

Tim & Janet Straub

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Straub,

I am Teresa's teammate and friend, Bekah. I am sure you are aware that we are in Taipei doing some tests and trying to find out what can be done to bring about her healing. In the past few days it has been brought to our attention just how severe her illness is and that something must be done immediately to help her. 

Because of the intense pain in her stomach, she hasn't been eating or drinking, and this has been over a very long period of time. As a result her body has slowly started to shut down some basic organ functions, simply from a lack of nutrients and enzymes. Also because she has not had food in a long time, her body doesn't know how to handle food and her digestive system is not functioning at top notch. 

She has been severely dehydrated, and we gave her an IV for that, and we have found a few foods that we are experiementing with to see if maybe we can build back her body's strength and give her the nutrients and enzymes needed to fight the infection in her stomach and intestine....

She is a very sick girl but we are seeking our Father's help and healing. I believe that He is going to help us find some answers. I will do my best to keep you updated as I learn new things.

His

Bekah

Spence on the research-writing balance

Jonathan Spence wrote one of my favorite books:To Change China: Western Advisers in China, 1620–1960 (Little, Brown, 1969). He has been at Yale for more than fifty years and due to his prolific writing for trade presses, has become known outside the academy as a leading scholar in the history of modern Chinese civilization. Nicholas Basbanes interviewed him for a history of Yale University Press.

Nicholas Basbanes, A World of Letters: Yale University Press 1908-2008. Yale 2008. Pp. 184-185.

“I think the Press is always aware of the presence of some kind of audience, or the lack of one,” he stressed in one of the first interviews I conducted for this book. “They do need to have people read their books, after all, and if possible to buy them, maybe not on the scale of trade books, but even nonprofits have to break even in some way or another.” One way of assuring this is to have “two or three titles each year which can carry a lot of much lower-selling monographic studies,” he said. Yet for all that juggling of material, Spence added, “scholarship is still very hard to gauge,” and he cited his own work as an example. Around the time that Yale published his first book, Ts’ao Yin and the K’ang-hsi Emperor: Bond servant and Master, in 1966, Spence said he began to consider writing for a broader audience, especially as a number of trade publishers approached him with invitations to write for them.

“I got interested in the interconnection between scholarship and the more general readership. I used to ask myself why scholarship had to be arcane. That may be the wrong question to ask, but that’s how I phrased it myself. My feeling was this: that instead of spending years and years on the research and then just trying to write it up and get somebody to take it, supposing you spent half the time on the research and half the time on the writing? Just really concentrate on that; just shut yourself away and go on and do it — and then see who wants to publish it and who wants to read it. That’s what I did. I got involved in a different world.”

Shouldn't our presentation be just as careful as our preparation?

Related post: From Monograph to Gem of Scholarship (Aug. 24, 2010).

Mounce on the new NIV and accuracy

Bill Mounce, a Greek scholar who worked on the ESV Bible translation committee, is now on the committee for the revision of the NIV. In this post he blogs about "What constitutes an accurate translation".

Go over and read it!


HT: Better Bibles Blog

Migratory coconuts

Over the course of today, I've confirmed my personality orientation as primarily INTP, not INTJ. To celebrate, I submit to you a conversation I would love to have been in on, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.




Aspects of the INTP personality in the tower guard:
1) Seeing straight through facades
2) Picking up on irrelevant details
3) Hammering a random topic to death or distraction

McHugh on the introvert identity

At SIL-UND this summer, introverts vs. extraverts was a big topic -- mainly since we introverts were in the uncomfortable majority. A friend named Allison introduced me to the Myers-Briggs personality test, which became a minor passion of mine (since I'm an INTJ).  Keith Slater gave a very candid talk on being an introvert in overseas ministry.  Then, yesterday I noticed a post by Jon Winslow on a book called Introverts in the Church (IVP, 2009) by Adam McHugh.  The following paragraphs are clipped from an interview of McHugh on Crosswalk.com.
 

What are the qualities of an introvert that may be overlooked?
Put bluntly, I think most qualities of an introvert are prone to be overlooked!  In our extroverted society, we value aggressive, action-oriented, gregarious people, and  I think this extroverted bias has bled over into some of our churches, where often the "ideals" of faithfulness are strikingly extroverted. We praise people who are social and expressive, eager to participate in a wide variety of activities, have an overt enthusiasm, share their faith with strangers easily, assume leadership positions quickly. But introverts do not usually fit this profile, and our lives of faith may be a little slower, a little quieter, a little more solitary. We are often calm, thoughtful, reflective types who may be invisible to others if they are not looking or listening.

Yet I think that introverts have tremendous gifts to bring to others. In the book I start with our listening abilities. Because introverts process internally, we can offer people a non-judgmental presence that helps others open up to us. There is also something about being intimately connected to our inner worlds that produces a great deal of creativity. Many introverts are gifted writers, artists, musicians, and even actors. I also think that having a rich inner life lends itself towards a deep compassion for others, something I have seen in many introverted pastors and chaplains I have worked with. Further, we are capable of an insight that is borne of self-awareness and listening, a peacefulness that spreads to others, and a servant mindset which is often expressed in behind-the-scenes service.

How can introverts be evangelists?
As I was exploring this topic, I had someone ask me whether an "introverted evangelist" is an oxymoron.  But I firmly believe it's not that introverts are ill-suited to evangelism; rather, many of our common strategies for evangelism are ill-suited for introverts.  Even though teaching on evangelism is (thankfully) changing, there are still some prevailing models that are very difficult for many introverts. One of those models is the spiritual salesmanship model, to borrow an image from evangelism professor Rick Richardson. We must be fast talking experts, armed with answers to all the questions, able to persuade others and "close the deal." Or another common mode of evangelism is debate - we need to prove that our worldview is superior to that of others. Most introverts will struggle with these methods, since we're not naturally aggressive or chatty and our internal processing slows us down in situations of conflict or debate.   I think there are different methods and images for evangelism that are more suited for introverts. One of the things I suggest is that introverts, instead of radically stretching themselves to initiate with strangers in uncomfortable situations, should start with the people who are already in their lives and ask how God is already at work in them.  Evangelism is always a response to what God is already doing in people, as he works on people's hearts in ways that transcend even the most profound words we can muster. We can come alongside of our friends and partner with God in teaching and embodying the gospel of Jesus. And we can use our gifts as introverts - especially listening and compassion - to demonstrate the love and the presence of God. By listening to people, and really giving them space to express their questions and doubts, we ensure that when we do speak we are addressing the real needs and concerns of a person.     

         

What is the gospel and how can it specifically be applied to the main issues you raise in the book?
This isn't a comprehensive definition, but I would start by saying that the gospel is the reality that in the person of Jesus Christ - in his life, death, and resurrection - God has reclaimed the world as his own and has broken the powers and strongholds that ensnare and divide people. In Christ we have been adopted as God's beloved children - our new foundational identity - and God is rescuing us from the false identities we have constructed and freeing us to be the people he created us to be. The body of Christ is comprised of unique, diverse members who have different gifts and strengths, and we are intended to work together, bringing all that we have, for the glory of God. We are of different cultures, genders, social status, and temperaments. My book explores in depth the introverted temperament, and how the church doesn't always value what introverts bring to the table. People who fall on the introverted side of the personality spectrum can love God and love others authentically, bringing their God-given gifts to bear on their communities.   

On defending Muslims

Ms. Khakpour, an Iranian-American, captures well the experience of protecting people while disagreeing with their ideology. Her editorial was published in the New York Times yesterday, on the anniversary of the day a group of Muslims plotted to wreck the World Trade Center in New York City.  Her example of taking up someone else's reputation can apply to Muslims, Amish, Mormons, ATI-ers, Democrats, Tea-Partiers, or anyone. It also dignifies un-anonymous (onymous?) relationships, where you know you're talking to a real person who knows how to blush.

Porochista Khakpour, "My Nine Years as a Middle-Eastern-American." New York Times, September 11, 2010.

The hilarity started to curdle at the moment I was also feeling the most euphoric: during Mr. Obama’s bid for the presidency. It was around then that I began murdering whole days on the Internet, and not just on the Internet but in its dirty basement, the comments sections of blogs. There, an angry tribe of fake names spoke in misspelled obscenities and declaimed the true, evil nature of Middle Easterners and their intentions in this country. This is silly, I’d tell myself, these trolls aren’t representative of my neighbors or of Americans.

Then I’d go on Facebook, and engage in more online warfare with friends of friends, real flesh-and-blood people with real-life names, who a bit more politely and grammatically stated the same. And there was me — a non-Muslim, who has publicly criticized certain Islamic practices — flaccidly battling for Muslims worldwide. It got to the point that I was telling people I didn’t even know that their opinions were making my life downright “unlivable.”

It reminds me of how I used to experience so many mixed emotions when I’d see women in full burqa in Brooklyn: alarm at the spectacle (no matter how many times I’d seen it), followed by a certain feminist irk, and finally discomfiture at our cultural kinship. And then it would all turn into one strong emotion — protective rage — when I’d see a group of teenagers laughing and pointing at them.

Porochista Khakpour, the author of the novel “Sons and Other Flammable Objects,” is a professor of literature at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

My newest reading

Here's a summary of my newest reading in books, which doesn't include articles and blogs.

Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Fortress Press, 1976.
(Stendahl was bishop of Stockholm, Sweden, and dean of Harvard Divinity School.)
I'm reading this with my youth pastor, Bill Douglas, and we're planning to discuss it soon. Stendahl argues that we missed something by extracting our theology from Galatians and Romans without making the relation between Jews and Gentiles a major feature and motivating factor as it was for Paul. Thus we applied the law to make our own consciences guilty and the gospel to make them clean and then to fight off the legalists, while Stendahl thinks Paul was more interested in Church unity and growth, or something. Because the Jews are now outsiders and Gentiles are insiders to the Church, we forget what the New Testament was about, and have a hard time repositioning ourselves into the first readers' view and thence to a responsible modern application. Stendahl is severely handicapped because he rejects Ephesians and the Pastoral Letters as genuine letters of Paul. This means he can't interact with "by grace are you saved... so that no one can boast". (Eph. 2:8-9)

Paul Nation, Learning Vocabulary in Another Language. Cambridge, 2001.
(Nation teaches applied linguistics at the University of Victoria, Wellington, NZ.)
Very interesting discussion of how many words are present in English. Nation goes through strategies for learning, remembering, testing, and using vocab in classroom and individual second-language settings. Most of all, it's fascinating in the scope of research, outlining the vastness of the language we grew up swimming in and shining into the depth of any new language we would start to learn.  Its biggest weakness is that it's grounded in lexicography, corpus linguistics, and classroom applications while remaining intellectually beyond your average teacher who would use it. Second, it sticks to the surface of memory and ignores research in the psychology of the mental lexicon or the "long road" of true participation in a host community.

Jean Aitchison, Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon. 3rd ed. Blackwell, 2003.
(Aitchison teaches language and communication at Oxford.)
A lucid book that I only started, and then flitted to something else. It's a step backwards from Nation's book, but it's more easily understandable. Aitchison does a good job of integrating psycholinguistics with reader-friendly illustrations.

Rod Ellis, The Study of Second Language Acquisition. 2nd ed. Oxford, 2008.
(Ellis teaches applied linguistics at the University of Auckland, NZ.)
An enormous book reviewing all the research on language learning from the last 50 years. I like it especially for the glossary, which answers my questions on terms I've picked up from scattered readings in SLA. I also like its encyclopedic quality, where I can pick it up and open to a chapter on any aspect or theory in the field, and get a satisfyingly deep discussion.  The many tables and charts orient you on the different experiments and movements in the field of Second Language Acquisition research. Confession: I use it sometimes just for the bibliography, to search for potential mentors.

James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World. Oxford, 2010. (Kindle for PC)
(Hunter teaches about cultural institutions at the University of Virginia.)
I first read about this book in Christianity Today this summer. Finally it is out in Kindle for instant download, which I promptly did last night. Hunter paraphrases our dominant Christian strategies of cultural engagement in America: change the individual mind and heart, then influence politics and society. This is fun, seeing Adventures in Odyssey, Worldview Academy, Family Research Council, Jesus For President, and Sojourners side by side. Then he says conservatives, liberals, and Anabaptists have all three let themselves be defined by politics (or rejection of politics). The problem, he says, is that politics is such a narrow strip of life. Furthermore, individuals and big ideas are subordinate to the social networks that support them. So, he wants us to calm down and work on networking and participation with culture at the centers of influence in a way that gives off a "faithful witness". He wants us to be faithful and make for broad-based transformation rather than an election. It's a great call for reorientation. However, it ignores and writes off the work some of our favorite Christian groups and writers have done in exactly this direction. As Andy Crouch says, Hunter will need their impetus if he wants to have a lasting impact. In my opinion, motivation and understanding don't always come in the same breath. This is one hard look in the mirror at the efficacy of motivational groups I've hung around with for years. It's also fun to watch the liberals and Anabaptists squirm. To get what he's saying, you have to read the whole book, not just this interview and the responses in this issue of Christianity Today.

C. John Sommerville, The Decline of the Secular University. Oxford, 2006.
(Sommerville is professor emeritus of history at the University of Florida.)
This is a thin book I picked up off the back corner of the bargain shelf at the University of North Dakota bookstore. It addresses doubts I've had about integrating faith and academics. It says the state universities are fading in relevance to public thought, because they exclude discussion of religion on science and only wanly poke at comparative religion with a scientific perspective. Academics study how to improve human life without agreeing on what makes life good or what makes us human. Thus, religiously motivated students are alienated, and others let knowledge go in one ear and out the other, settling for a credential and getting relativism in the bargain as a substitute for wisdom. The solution is to let religious discourse in as one voice among others, in order to carve science a meaningful place in a worldview rather than trying to insert religion into a narrow scientific view of life. Then, Sommerville looks forward to professors and students taking time in campus worship centers to pray and reflect on the implications and directions of their work.

Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-critical Philosophy. Corrected ed. Routledge, 1962. (Kindle for PC) 
(Polanyi was a medical doctor from Hungary who taught chemistry, economics, and philosophy at the Universities of Manchester and Oxford.)
I first read about Polanyi in Francis Schaeffer's He is There and He is Not Silent, where Schaeffer crowed that this book blew positivism out of the water. His only complaint was that he remained a closet or almost-Christian and didn't come right out and build certainty of knowing on divine revelation after demolishing positivism. Sommerville also recommended this book in connection with Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), which stole some ideas from it. I downloaded it from Amazon last night, and read through the first chapter. It does seem to deal with important ideas, chief of which: scientists look at the world through theories, and sometimes make discoveries through intuition and "tacit knowledge," those skills and understandings that are caught more than taught. Theories stick when they delight the mind with their orderly pictures, and they persuade via peer pressure among scholars. So realizing the faith commitments your knowledge rests on, respect your personal observations, and try to develop them.

Charlie W. Shedd, Letters to Philip: On How to Treat a Woman. Spire, 1968.
(Shedd was a doctor and also wrote Letters to Karen, selling a ton of copies.)
My mom left this on my nightstand. :) Boy, I have a lot to learn, in spite of what she and my six sisters try to tell me. In these short 'letters' to his son, Shedd dispenses handfuls of marriage and dating advice in the teen-lingo of the sixties. He inspires confidence in the powers of kindness and genuine leadership of the kinds thought to have died in the sixties, to build mature man-woman relationships.

So there you have it! My browser crashed a couple times in the middle of drafts, which makes my reviews (thankfully!) shorter, and I kept noticing other books lying about my room to add. But if I'm learning anything in communication, it's that girls start the conversations and boys control the topics... yes, that, but what I was going to say was, saying something is better than saying everything. Because you can't say anything until you've said something, and you can't hear anything if you're saying everything.

What about you? What's on top of your current reading list?

A new metaphor for integrity

David Phillips Hansen, in a book review from 1988, gave me a new metaphor for integrity. That of a bone reconstruction.

David Phillips Hansen. Book Review: Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics, by Oliver O'Donovan. Theology Today, Vol. 45, No. 1 (April 1988), p. 117.

The structure of a moral life, [O'Donovan] argues, depends on an ordered moral field of action and on an ordered moral self. The unity of the law, which orders the field, ensures the unity of the moral agent who respects it. The summary of the law is the double commandment to love God and neighbor.

Pray for me, because my integrity and follow-through is very immature right now.
HT to Matt Lee Anderson for sparking interest in O'Donovan's book.

From monograph to gem of scholarship

John Donatich, director of Yale University Press, admits that funding for scholarly monographs is getting scarce. And with the advent of the internet, who reads them anyway? Thus, he shares what makes the occasional monograph into a gem worth reading.

John Donatich (2009). Why books still matter. Journal of Scholarly Publishing, 40.4 (July 2009), pp. 329-342, 338-339.

The marketplace demands we ask ourselves the question, What needs to be a book? In particular, what needs to be a scholarly monograph? Aside from tenure and career advancement issues, what does a university press have to publish? And what is a monograph, anyway? Webster’s has an inelegant definition: ‘a written account of a single thing.’ The chair of our Publications Committee, David Bromwich, once defined it as ‘a work of scholarship that will not sell many copies until it does, at which point it becomes a gem of scholarship.’ While there was certainly a twinkle in his eye, his distinction has actually become a useful one, and even prompted a spirited conversation at a recent agenda-less Publications Committee meeting.

We started by thinking about what qualities the scholarly monograph and the gem of scholarship might share:

• original primary research
• blindness to fashion; a love of the ignored and the arcane; providing the culture a way of keeping its neglected history ‘warm’
• rigorous methodology
• compound argument, capable of advancing a dozen or more layers of argument
• scholarly apparatus that not only amplifies the text but enables the reader to reconstruct and replicate the original research, to test the author’s conclusions, or to use the same material to different ends

Where, then, might the two part company? How could a monograph be cut to reveal its lapidary and gemlike qualities?

• The research demonstrates a passionate commitment, an almost athletic joy in uncovering and managing masses of material.
• The structure invents a new model of managing complexity.
• The prose contributes terminology to the lingua franca of the discipline. It challenges yet can be understood by educated nonspecialists. As Einstein is supposed to have said, ‘Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.’
• The book crosses disciplines with ease; it listens to its own internal echoes.
• While perhaps narrow in scope, the book feels close. You can feel the breath of the intellect on the page.

You all know what I’m talking about. I’m sure of it. You have all been entranced by the seamlessness of a narrative and dazzled by the marshalling of dozens of arguments in service of a grand theory. You have been transformed within the alchemy of literature. You have been moved by a book.

Through the Church, wisdom

 "[T]hrough the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places. This was according to the eternal purpose that he has realized in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have boldness and access with confidence through our faith in him. So I ask you not to lose heart over what I am suffering for you, which is your glory." Paul, Ephesians 3:10b-13

Whooooo are they?

The following paragraph is from Tony Perkins's newsletter Washington Update. The article is about a bill introduced into Congress to permanently ban the federal funding of abortion procedures. Read down to the yellow-highlighted sentence, and tell me which of the blue-highlighted phrases is the referent of "they". 

This push is especially timely given that a group of pro-abortion Senators are trying to open the doors to abortion on military bases. Meanwhile, HHS officials and other abortion proponents still insist that the new health care law won't fund abortions--despite an independent analysis from Congressional Research Service, which reported that there's nothing stopping the agency from covering the procedure in its high risk pools. Regardless of what Americans think about the legality of abortion, they object to paying for it by overwhelming majorities--which could explain why the Smith-Lipinski bill has such broad bipartisan support. Any member who claims to be moderate on abortion knows that they have to vote for this legislation to prove it. Passing the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act is the only way to make pro-life policies permanent and apply them across the federal government. Even the Left should have no trouble supporting a bill that they insist is the status quo. Encourage your member to co-sponsor the Smith-Lipinski bill. Click here to contact them today!

What helped you decide who/what "they" were?
(Writing the title reminded me of the Cheshire Cat's query to Alice, in the old Disney animated feature: "Whhoooo aaaaare you?")

Sophisticated

Is a sophisticated mind, one that belongs to a recently converted sophist?

Sex ratio in language studies and missions

I was reading the list of students enrolled in the Second Language Studies PhD program at Michigan State, when I was struck by two things: first, most of them are Asians. Second, most of them are women. Try 22 females to 10 males.  Are all the men camping out in the grammar department?

Anyway, that reminded me that I have spent a lot more time over lunch with girls here at my summer linguistics program than with guys. So, I went over the phone list. Turns out, there are roughly 26 single young men, and 49 single young women... although there technically are more if you count the girls who are currently engaged or the ones in their thirties and forties. No wonder.

Which brings me to the Mormon church. How do they deal with this reality of more mission-minded females than males?


Gary Shepherd and Gordon Shepherd. 1998. Mormon passage: a missionary chronicle. Univ. of Illinois.p. 31

Fn 3 As recently as January 1994, LDS bishops and stake presidents were instructed in a statement from church headquarters that "a young woman should not be recommended for a mission if it would interfere with a specific marriage proposal... Though capable and effective, young women do not have the same responsibility to serve full-time missions as do young men who hold the priesthood"... 

Embry quotes Apostle Thomas S. Monson as saying that missionary work for young women is "optional"; if they wish to serve, "we are happy to have them," but "we do not wish to create a program that would prevent them from finding -- or place hardships in their way toward finding -- a proper companion in marriage, because that is their foremost responsibility" (1997, 4)

 Fn 6  Unlike Mormon males, young women must wait until they are twenty-one before they can receive a call to serve a full-time mission, a rule that suppresses rather than stimulates female missionary enlistments. To our knowledge the official rationale for this gender discrepancy in age eligibility has not been stated publicly. We have been told informally in interviews with church officials that young women are called at a later age than young men in order to maximize their opportunities for marriage. 

One latent consequence of these gender-based age rules is the creation of a larger pool of marriage-eligible young LDS women available for Mormon males when the latter return home from their missions while simultaneously encouraging a traditional Mormon courtship pattern in which returned male missionaries marry somewhat younger females.

In addition, waiting until they reach the age of twenty-one before calling single women to missionary service maintains an imbalanced sex ratio of younger males to older females in the field. These age discrepancies are believed by LDS officials to reduce the likelihood of distracting mission field romances between sister missionaries and their male counterparts.

If marriage is, theologically, the foremost responsibility of the female, then policy can find a way to make it happen. What an economic twist! The Botkin sisters would be proud.

Bonhoeffer's "Who Am I? They often tell me"

This poem was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer from his prison-cell in either 1943 or 1944. It was probably smuggled out of prison by a guard he befriended.  Today I am getting caught up with my TA work, and feel chained to my desk, and overwhelmed like him at the difference between what others know of me and what I know of myself.  The words I can imagine from someone reenacting his ordeal, but that he actually wrote them himself, and they survived, is a gift.

Who Am I?

Who am I? They often tell me
I stepped from my cell's confinement
calmly, cheerfully, firmly,
like a Squire from his country house.

Who am I? They often tell me
I used to speak to my warders
freely and friendly and clearly,
as though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me
I bore the days of misfortune
equably, smilingly, proudly,
like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really that which other men tell of?
Or am I only what I myself know of myself?
Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,
struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat,
yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds,
thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness,
tossing in expectation of great events,
powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,
weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,
faint, and ready to say farewell to it all.

Who am I? This or the Other?
Am I one person to-day and to-morrow another?
Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,
and before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?
Or is something within me still like a beaten army
fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.
Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!

(Translated by J.B. Leishman. From Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship. Rev. ed. London: SCM Press, 1962. p. 15)

My new bike

Update from SIL-UND

So, I've been here in Grand Forks, ND for three weeks now. Had a lot of victory in my actions this week... and working on my thought life. There was a prayer group started among some of the guys living on my floor of the dorm, on Tuesday. Skit night was on Friday night, and it was a blast. There was a "linguist's confession" video during the show, and part of it showed me leaping onto a table and yelling, "I'm really an extrovert!" I will not live it down.

I'm a TA in a class called LING 480 Learner-Directed Second Language Acquisition. There are eight of us TAs: Me, Amy, Amber, Sallie, Lydia, Lesa, Bob, and Becky. Greg is the professor, and his wife Angela is manager of the lab sessions and TAs (us).

Up to now, we've been using Angela's lesson plans for the first two weeks (I got here a week before classes started). Now, we have to plan one lesson a week, and let the students each plan and lead one lesson a week. I have eight students, four in each group. The lab groups meet from 2-3 and from 3-4 every weekday. We're learning Kirundi, a Bantu language from Burundi, Africa. And our nurturer is named Pascal.

Beyond that, I'm taking a class called Ethnographic Methods in Field Linguistics (LING 535). It's a challenging amount of reading and writing. The current prof, Doug Fraiser, has inherited the teaching materials from Tom Headland, who made it very rigorous. I've been reading about ethnocentrism, the reputation of missionaries, the reputation of SIL, structures of family units around the world, kinship terms... and writing a summary of just about every article I read. It will be good to look back on, and it makes me reflect quickly on what I've been reading. It just takes a lot of time.

Been making lots of acquaintances. First of all my students. It's always beneficial for an introvert to expand his circle.

The forehead of a whore

I felt the desire to flip open Jeremiah 3 this morning. It says,

"By the waysides you have sat waiting for lovers,
like a nomad in the wilderness.
You have polluted the land with your whoring and wickedness.
Therefore the showers have been withheld,
and the spring rain has not come;
yet you have the forehead of a whore,
you refuse to be ashamed." (Jeremiah 3:2b-3)

I have done this too often... at least twice a week... where I would imagine my way into a sinful situation, often while listening to a Christian book on my ipod. Then once the idea is realized, I would mb. Later in retrospect, I would rationalize it as not sinful. Refusing to be ashamed forestalls repentance. Be ashamed and repent. Then you won't be ashamed.

Pachelbel Rant

This week I've been practicing a version -- make that three versions -- of Pachelbel's Canon in D to play at my cousin's wedding. We're combining two violins, a flute, and a guitar.  The flute can't play the high notes, so now we've transposed it to Canon in C.  And because Canon in C doesn't have the fancy, complicated violin melodies, we decided to cut it in the middle and I'd improvise some of them for a minute, and then come back so we could play the last few bars and end together on the same chord.  Almost every time we play it, though, Mom tells me I should study the part by myself and figure out what I'm going to play, so I don't lose everyone.

I took her advice, and found this hilarious rant. (Watch out for foul language at the end.)



Then I found this, and it made me happy to know that someone successfully modified the Canon for the poor cellists.

Salvo Mag: Seam Redeemed

It's a weird title, I know. I wanted to highlight Salvo Magazine's feature article this month, "Seam Redeemed," a theological interpretation of The Learning Channel's fashion reality show "What Not to Wear".

Read on to find out why the clothes matter, and how a wardrobe transformation mirrors salvation.  Here.

Bonhoeffer on vocation

Bonhoeffer's book The Cost of Discipleship is now on my summer ordering list. I need grace, and I also need to understand it in a way that will make me stop sinning and change the way I work. Bonhoeffer goes through me like the north wind in that regard.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Works Vol. 4: Discipleship (Green & Krauss tr.), Fortress, 2001. p. 49

For Luther, on the contrary, a Christian's secular vocation is justified only in that one's protest against the world is thereby most sharply expressed. A Christian' secular vocation receives new recognition only to the extent that it is carried on while following Jesus.

Relish broken words

George Steiner, After Babel: aspects of language and translation, Oxford Univ. Press 1975, p. 398. Quoted in Paul W. Kroll, "Recent Anthologies of Chinese Literature in Translation," Journal of Asian Studies 62.3 (2002), p. 99. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3096353

We must not trust the translator whose words are entirely 'unbroken.' As with a seashell, the translator can listen strenuously but mistake the rumour of his own pulse for the beat of the alien sea.

Copula

I never before realized the intimate relation between the words 'couple,' 'copulate,' and 'copula'.

Couple (noun): two persons paired together. (From Middle English, pair, bond, from Anglo-French cuple, from Latin copula bond, from co- + apere to fasten. It entered English in the 13th century.)

Copulate (verb):  to engage in intercourse. (From Latin copulatus, past participle of copulare to join, from copula.  It entered English in 1630.)

Copula (noun): something that connects: as a : the connecting link between subject and predicate of a proposition b : a linking verb such as "to be". (From Latin, bond. It entered English in 1619.)

And I thought 'copula' was a dry, technical word from syntax.  

With English getting such interesting words from Latin at this time, it's no wonder John Donne, who lived from 1572 to 1631, had so much fun writing poems.  Even if the copula between him and his subject was a small insect. It's a good thing Donne didn't write Shakespeare's The Tempest or else he might have made the sprite Ariel say, "Where the flea sucks..."

(Definitions and etymologies are from Merriam-Webster's dictionary.)

Capstone Complete

After working on my capstone project since writing the proposal in February, it's finally turned in.  You now, if you so choose, can have the pleasure of reading it.

Nathan_Straub_Prior Ages Essay Final


And now some thoughts about the challenges, successes, and advice for newbies embarking on a capstone project.  Can you tell that writing carries me away when I'm excited?

A. What successes and challenges did you encounter in completing the project and other work for this course? 

At the outset, we were given a lot of flexibility on the format of our project and the scope of our research.  I
"cheated" in my proposal by choosing a huge project which I started to realize I would never be able to fully accomplish, but then wording the proposal so vaguely that I could later narrow down the focus to the parts I found easiest or most interesting. 

I was excited to do some original research with wordlists. On the other hand, it was easy to get bogged down when the wordlists printed out totaled six lists at 23 pages each!  Another place where I got bogged down was in researching the etymology of 'to be' in the OED online... it was so complicated that I left off researching the etymology of the rest of the verbs for a few days.  John and Prof. Wall continually pulled me back to earth with their comments about keeping human interest at the center. 

At first it was a challenge to find prior research on my topic, and it was an even bigger challenge to find a usable digital text of Queen Elizabeth's translation of Boethius for my quantitative analysis.

B. How would you address these challenges? 

With the proposal, I asked for Prof. Wall's advice and then made some quality guidelines for myself.  I also looked online got some ideas from the honors thesis guidelines at Harvard. 

To make the work manageable, I had to narrow the scope more than once.  When writing the proposal, I initially thought of comparing the syntax and the vocabulary of the two translations of Boethius, and I also thought of comparing them with King Alfred's translation. I dumped King Alfred because I can't read Old English. Then I reluctantly jettisoned syntax because it has been done before, and because it would take a lot more analysis and diagrams.  I was honestly surprised that a proposal dealing only with vocabulary was accepted, especially because I hadn't taken classes on lexicography or semantics, and I had only taken one class on the history of English, in addition to whatever studying I did for the GRE English Literature test.  But it was accepted, with the proviso that I include a focus on rhetorical analysis.  I think this rhetorical aspect was helpful in maintaining human interest and demonstrating the literary aspect of my degree.

I had to narrow down the scope a second time once I printed out the wordlists.  Out of 5000 words per translation, I chose to work with a macrocosm of around 200 words, using the words occurring in the text 20 times or more. This meant that I was dealing with similarities between the two translations rather than their differences, but it also meant that a table could fit on a single page while still being very representative of the text as a whole.

When I got bogged down in the dictionary, I took a break, and a couple days later, picked back up with the etymology of another word. All the words on my list were easy except for 'to be' at the top, so I left that one for last, and finally gave it a quick summary in line with what I'd done for the rest, with a note to the reader for further research. This "capping the dead-end pipe" technique was very valuable in several other places.

To find prior research on my topic, I looked through the bibliography in my copy of Chaucer's works, did a lot of searching on JSTOR, went to local community college library and thumbed through old literature indexes, and used the ProQuest Dissertations database. Then, armed with a list of possible sources, I took out interlibrary loans.  My time with these interlibrary loan books expired before I was through with the project, so I made copies at home of the title pages, introductions, and any other chapters that I would need later on. These copies went into a folder along with my JSTOR articles.  Over the course of the project I would read an article, underline the important parts, and eventually incorporate a quote or a citation into my essay.

There were a couple really fun research finds: one was Tim William Machan, who wrote an entire dissertation on the grammar, vocabulary, and translation style of Chaucer's Boece. Throughout his life he has added to the project, producing books on Chaucer's translation technique, the sources of the Boece, and a new critical text of the Boece.  Needless to say, I couldn't read everything by Machan, but his research was helpful on specific topics.

Another fun research find was Jacob Zeitlin's review of John Samuel Kenyon's book on the syntax of Chaucer's infinitives.  I was peering over the edge of the abyss -- that is, of analyzing why Chaucer used two different forms of the infinitive -- and then I found out Kenyon had done a dissertation on this very thing and published it in 1909!  Add this to the fact that I have a book on types of poetry from my grandmother that was edited by Zeitlin, and that he wrote that ridiculous comment about "every serious student of Chaucer" having to give Kenyon a careful reading, and it was enough to make my day.

It took me a long time to get a usable digital copy of Queen Elizabeth's translation. This is partly because it hasn't been published much. There is an edition on Google Books from 1899, but I would have had to edit it myself to get rid of the OCR typos.  Fortunately, two different publishers (U. Chicago and ACMRS) came out with new editions of Elizabeth's translation last year.  I got the printed books through interlibrary loan, but didn't want to type it up myself. So I emailed the editors for each of these editions, begging for a digital copy.  They were sympathetic, but said I'd have to talk to the publishers.  A staff member at one of the publishers was happy to help, but it turned out that according to company policy I would have to buy the book ($64!). I didn't have much of a choice, but I bought it and they emailed me the pdf. Another two weeks of editing the plain-text file I extracted from the pdf because of run-on line errors, and I was off and running.

C. What recommendations would I make for students who are about to embark on their capstone experiences?

1. Choose a topic you're interested in, that you won't mind researching to death.  Try to find something no one has ever done before. 

2. Skip or gloss over tough parts rather than procrastinate.

3. Use your online resources and a physical college library to the fullest extent.  Use your people to the fullest extent, too.

4. When you have your sources together and need an extra push to get over the data-crunching, go to a quiet spot for a few days. I spent a week at my grandparents' house for this: three days to complete the second draft, and the rest of the week visiting with them.

5. Start out with a good outline before you drop data into the essay.  I wrote my proposal, gathered my sources, and then constructed a mindmap using a computer program called Freemind, to figure out all the topics I needed to cover and how to organize them.

6. Ask people to read your drafts, and listen religiously to their advice. Most likely, you already know the answers to their questions, and most likely, you think what you chose to write down was more important than those answers, but the essay can't exist as an organic whole in your mind alone.  It has to be communicated.

7. When the research and the bulk of the writing is finished, print out your last draft and mark it up in pencil, and then give it to someone else, and have them mark it up again.  Give it a once-over for spelling, a twice-over for formatting, use the find-and-replace function for consistency errors.  Then re-read your original proposal, and where your current essay lacks the fire of youthful curiosity burning in your proposal, put it back in. 

8. In this final re-write, spin new webs of "thesis, summary, transition" to guide the reader through every step of the way. Break up every long paragraph that would be a stumbling block. If your readers can tread lightly, they will breath in deeply.

9. Use technology as creatively as you can to cut down on work and make your project shine.  I confess that I never actually read the whole book of The Consolation of Philosophy which I was supposed to be analyzing.  (The project was a linguistic and rhetorical analysis of the translation based on select samples, not analysis of the whole text as a literary work.)  Instead, I listened to it on my iPod from Librivox.org, read summaries, and dipped into the texts here and there as I needed.  I used a computer program called KWIC (key word in context) to generate my wordlists from plain-text files, and to do quick concordance searches for word usage.  And at the end of my project, I used Wordle.net to create word-cloud graphics to show off in the appendix.


Thanks to my classmate John Crews and professor Beverly Wall for their constructive criticism, and my parents and grandparents for space and motivation. Thank God that I'm done!