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Courtesy of Charles Schultz...

Courtesy of Irish theologian Bono... “That there’s a force of love and logic behind the universe is overwhelming to start with, if you believe it. But the idea that that same love and logic would choose to describe itself as a baby born in shit and straw and poverty is genius and brings me to my knees, literally.”

Courtesy of German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer... "We are talking about the birth of a child, not the revolutionary act of a strong man, not the breathtaking discovery of a sage, not the pious act of a saint. It really passes all understanding: the birth of a child is to bring the great turning around of all things, is to bring salvation and redemption to the whole human race. What kings and statesmen, philosophers and artists, founders of religions and moral teachers vainly strive for, now comes about through a new born child."

Purely by coincidence, this morning I came across two stories concerning churches and their handling of parishioners who have HIV or AIDS. The first concerns a pastor in a rural South Carolina town with a disproportionately high population of people with HIV or AIDS: Pastor fights HIV stigma in Southern town I can only imagine the stigma that people with HIV or AIDS face in the rural Deep South, people like Tommy Terry, who is quoted in the article. Tommy Terry has a love/hate relationship with religion and the pastors who preach it in Dorchester County. A faithful man, he attends Byrth's HIV/AIDS meetings as a tribute to his partner, Michael, who died in 2005. The couple spent 10 years together. Terry could do nothing as he watched Michael fade away, losing weight and friends at an equal rate. Sitting on the concrete porch outside the Bibleway Holiness Church, Terry struggles to keep tears from falling as he talks about the last few months of Michael's life. Terry ...

In my Hebrew class a few weeks ago we had the good fortune to experience a guest lecture from a visiting rabbi. He brought with him a Torah scroll. The Torah is the Hebrew word for the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, or the Christian Old Testament. It literally means "instruction," as it contains all of the Mosaic law. This particular scroll was nearly 100 years old and had somehow managed to survive the Holocaust. You can't tell from the picture below, but the scroll comprises hundreds of individual sheets of calf skin joined together. Each sheet contains meticulously copied, handwritten scripture. Once a single letter fades and is no longer legible, the entire scroll, not just the particular sheet, is removed from the synagogue and buried. The highlight of the lecture was when the rabbi unfurled the scroll, slowly unwinding it around the entire circumference of the classroom. The length of the scroll was such that he had to continually enlist students to hold i...

I'm not a regular poetry reader, at least not since I finished my last literature class in undergrad. Yet every autumn I find myself turning to one of my poetry anthologies. Autumn is somehow conducive to reflection. As the leaves, like fireworks, explode in color and then quietly fade, and the cool air pushes summer into memory, I want to turn back the pages of my memory as though flipping through a well-worn photo album. The particular poem I have in mind is one with which you're probably familiar: O Me, O Life! by Walt Whitman. If you've seen Dead Poets Society --and it's one of my favorite films--it's the poem that Robin Williams recites just after he has the students shred the introduction of their poetry textbooks. He crouches in the center of the classroom and has the students huddle around him as he shares with them his love of language. For the past few weeks I have found myself pondering the answer to that question, "What good amid these, O me, ...

Seeing as I go to the movies roughly once every two years, I'm not really qualified to offer movie reviews. I think the last film I saw in a movie theater was Paranormal Activity --the first one, more than two years ago. Last night, however, I saw The Muppets with a group of people from Broadway--children and adults. I didn't harbor expectations one way or the other. And honestly, if the tickets had not been free, I probably wouldn't have gone. That would have been a huge mistake. The Muppets is a very clever reboot of the TV show from the late 70s. We get to find out what the various Muppets have been up to since the cast disbanded some 30 years ago. Through the newest Muppet, Walter, who was raised with a human family that includes leading man Jason Segel, we also see the Muppets through fresh eyes, as Walter is starstruck at meeting his childhood idols. As usual, the Muppets are very self-aware, and there are several jokes that reference the fact that they are maki...

This brief news clip from CNN, Why All of South Korea Went Silent , takes an amused, lighthearted tone to a Korean cultural phenomenon that strikes us in America as literally foreign--a 9-hour exam for which students begin studying as infants while still in the delivery room and which will determine their future college, occupation, and (to the extent that it elevates or confines their social class) their future spouse. I understand why we might look at all of this with amusement. Police escorts to an exam? Grounding all flights? No squeaky shoes in the classroom? But there is a disturbing side to this story as well. What about the kids who don't do well? Not only have they brought shame to their parents (another mostly foreign concept to Americans), but they think that they've doomed themselves to a lifetime of mediocrity. When I first began teaching Bible study to Korean-American high school students back in 2007, on the very first day I was peppered with questions about...

They may not have been angry, but I have dispensed with the birds that were flying past the blog title. The previous layout felt very 1997 to me. I may still make some tweaks to the new layout as I experiment with the many design options within Blogger. Bear with me. If you don't like the default Magazine layout, feel free to click on any of the other tabs and see if there's a layout that you prefer.

The dearth of posts of late was inversely proportional to my coursework, field ed, and responsibilities to the multiethnic ministry. There's been somewhat of a lightening of the load, so expect more frequent posts in the coming weeks. I just took a Hebrew exam this afternoon--the second of three. All I have left is the final. Unlike the first exam, which I finished with only a minute to spare, this time I finished about 10 minutes early. Also, during the first exam, I experienced a brief episode of panic when I was initially unable to identify the roots of two words in a section of the exam that was devoted to identifying roots. The panic subsided and I eventually was able to come up with the correct roots, for the most part. This exam was all translation and pretty straightforward. Here are some interesting Hebrew tidbits: 1) the word for "she" is pronounced "he"; 2) the word for "he" is pronounced "who"; and 3) the word for "who...

In approximately one hour from the time I'm writing this, spring registration will be open on the registrar's Web site. Registering for popular classes can be like purchasing U2 concert tickets. You'd better have a fast Internet connection, be a quick typist, and also possess some luck. I need to take Intro to Preaching, along with half of the middler class, and I want to take it with a particular professor on a particular day. Getting into that section may require the use of two browsers functioning simultaneously. In preparation, the laptop is fully charged and ready to hit the information superhighway. For the spring short term, I'm still deciding between one of four courses: 1. Missional Hermeneutics of 2 Corinthians (the course description is more interesting than the title may sound) 2. Reformed and Lutheran Confessional Theology 3. Poetry and Prayer 4. Intro to Narrative Preaching I'm leaning toward Narrative Preaching since it's a skill I nee...

To all my friends in and around NYC, I'll be giving the sermon this Sunday at Broadway Presbyterian Church, where I'm serving until May. This will be my first time preaching before the full congregation (I gave a children's sermon a few weeks ago). I chose this Sunday specifically because of Halloween, so you will receive a themed sermon titled "The Mask of Christ." Come for the sermon or to see me in my alb, which doubles as my Halloween costume. Broadway and 114th Street at 11:00.

I came across this video a few days ago. It's of a baby trying to manipulate a magazine as one would an iPad. She appears baffled that the images on the page don't respond to the movement of her fingers, which her parent finds endearing. The video is of course cute, but the person who posted it seems well aware of the larger point that his or her child is being hardwired to think of words and pictures as things that move. Will this young girl ever fully appreciate that words and pictures also exist as ink on a page? Does this even matter? I wonder whether, had I been a contemporary of Guttenberg, I would lament the lost art of the scribe's pen and parchment that the printing press rendered obsolete. And while I enjoy the peculiar ambience created by watching a silent film (I recently watched the 1932 German film Vampyr on Netflix), there is no arguing that "talking pictures" ushered in a superior film experience. Similarly, as a music obsessive, I welcome th...

Recently I was given the opportunity to begin a new ministry with a group of friends and fellow seminarians from Princeton. One Table Fellowship, as we call ourselves, is an intentionally multiethnic ministry that heeds the gospel's call for unity in Christ in spite of diversity in race or any other real or perceived barrier (e.g., ethnicity, age, income, sexual orientation, denominational background, belief in God, tattoos, body piercings, Mac or PC, or sports affiliation--yes, even Yankees fans are welcome). Convicted by Martin Luther King Jr.'s observation that 11:00 AM Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America, OTF seeks to bear witness to Christ's healing and reconciliation within individuals, within the church, and throughout the greater community. We also take our cue from scripture, for in his Epistle to the Galatians, Paul reminds the members of the church that despite their outer differences, they share a unity in Christ: “So in Christ Jesus you are ...

This post isn't as timely as I would have liked, but I needed to get to it before I am Out of Time [gleefully accepts rotten fruit thrown in his direction]. The news came out several days ago that REM were disbanding after some 30 years of playing together. My initial response was like that of hearing that a celebrity that I long ago assumed to have died had, in fact, just recently died. REM had ceased to be relevant to me by the mid 1990s. The last album of theirs that I purchased was the excellent Automatic for the People in 1992. While they were no longer relevant to me, I don't think it's fair to say that I outgrew them as much as they outgrew me. I respect the fact that their sound continued to evolve throughout the 90s, even if it evolved in ways that I didn't care for. Additionally, I stand in awe of a band that can stay together for as long as they did. Between their first album--1983's Murmur --and their last-- Collapse Into Now , released earlier this ...

One of the more intriguing courses offered at PTS--although so far it's been disappointing--is called The Face of the Other. The reading list is phenomenal--Sartre, Camus, Levinas, Dostoevsky--but what we've read thus far has been covered in class in only the most cursory manner. The class involves a lot of journaling and navel gazing, which I wouldn't mind if they were supported by more detailed lectures and in-class discussion. Anyway, our first assignment was to answer the question, "Who is the Other to you?" “If there is a theme with which I am particularly concerned, it is the contemporary failure of love. I don’t mean romantic love or sexual passion, but the love that is the specific and particular recognition of one human being by another. The response by eye, and voice, and touch of two solitudes. In short, the democracy of universal vulnerability.” The above quote is from the Bostonian poet Isabella Gardner. I first came across it in the biographical ...

I spent nearly eight years at a Korean church, leading Bible study, playing drums, presiding, and occasionally preaching, but I never once read scripture before the congregation in Korean. I've been serving at Broadway now for all of two weeks, yet today I was asked--about 15 minutes before service--to read a passage in Korean. It wasn't totally random because today is World Communion Sunday. In addition to Korean, other languages were incorporated throughout the service (Spanish, Urdu). While me reading scripture in Korean is amusing, funnier still is that I noticed a Korean family seated in the back--mother and father with a pre-teen daughter and a son who looked to be about college age. My guess is that the family were either visiting the son, who may be a student at Columbia, or the parents were checking out Columbia as a prospective school for him. I'm sure they were just attending the closest church to Columbia, but I wonder what they thought when they heard John 6:...

Those two weeks of blissful rest sandwiched between the end of summer Greek and the start of the fall semester seem like a distant reverie. Since September 2, I have: 1. Taken (and passed) the Bible Content Exam (the first step in the PCUSA ordination process) 2. Begun my field ed assignment at Broadway Presbyterian Church (10 hours a week) 3. Begun co-leading a new multiethnic ministry in Fort Lee, NJ, with some fellow seminarians 4. Been teaching SAT writing every Saturday for 6 hours at Pilgrim House in Palisades Park, NJ 5. Been taking a full course load at PTS, including Hebrew, because you can never take enough languages I do intend to post quite a bit more in the coming days because I have a backlog of posts I want to put out there. Just give me a little more time. In the meantime...

Ten years ago today, at approximately 8:45 AM, I was standing in the Rector Street subway station in lower Manhattan waiting for the 1/9 train. Unbeknownst to me and the rest of those on the platform with me, hell was being unleashed about two blocks north and 90 stories up. Despite the chaos occurring just north of where I was, I actually made it to work in Midtown by taking what was probably one of the last trains to pass directly below the WTC. Thus began the day's odyssey of simply trying to get back home, which would prove impossible since the entire neighborhood of Battery Park City, where we lived, had become a war zone. When I eventually was able to meet Sandy at a friend's apartment after the madness of that day, I posted my thoughts on the politics forum of a financial Web site that I frequently visited in those days (the post is still there): I live three blocks south of what was the World Trade Center. The subway I take to work passes directly under it. Until a fe...

Every second-year seminarian at Princeton is required to serve a year of field education, which is basically an internship in a church, hospital, or prison, wherein we serve as pastor, counselor, administrator, teacher--or more likely--some combination of all of the above. My field ed placement begins officially on September 18th, but I began attending the church last Sunday. The church is Broadway Presbyterian, which is on Broadway (appropriately enough) and 114th Street, right across from Columbia University. Broadway is an old (built in 1912), small (100 or so members), multiethnic, liturgically formal but theologically progressive church in an urban setting--pretty much the exact opposite of what I've experienced the last eight years--not that there's anything wrong with that (Tom's Restaurant, of Seinfeld fame, is two blocks away). Last week the liturgy began with a meditation--three lines from a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Earth's crammed with heaven, ...

I was in such a daily rhythm these last 8 weeks with summer Greek. Now that it's over, I'm not quite sure what to do with this free time I have before the fall term begins. Maybe get a jump start on Hebrew.... The grammar book for my Hebrew class, which I'll be taking all year (I'm not masochistic enough to take summer Hebrew [say "Ow"!]), was written by a professor in the Biblical Studies department. In addition to being a brilliant scholar (he wrote the book when he was 25), he's also my faculty adviser and hosts ice cream socials for his advisees at his house, which is practically on campus.

Much of Englewood, including my house, has been without power since early Sunday morning. Aside from having to drink more milk than I have since I was in elementary school, having no power for one day was not calamitous. Actually, being incommunicado was refreshing. Plus, I found wandering around the house by candlelight to be quaint, even romantic. However, each successive day without power leads to further inconveniences (e.g., cold showers, spoiled food, a garage door that won't open). Unfortunately, last night I had to leave Sandy in the dark (literally) to head back to Princeton for the final week of summer classes. Luckily, my Princeton apartment has power. My phone and laptop are charged, the light comes on when I flick the switch, and the water is even uncomfortably hot, but I have to ask myself, what will I really do with all this power ? *Yes, I believe that is a poster of a young Kim Jong-Il (or one of his sons) in the second scene. And sorry, but this song has be...

All of my tenants (as well as Sandy) are riding out the hurricane by watching TV in their respective rooms. I'm sitting in the dining room flipping through my Greek lexicon trying to translate 1 John from Greek into English in preparation for next week's daily translation quizzes. A small part of me is hoping that the power goes out so that I can continue by candlelight for that authentic early second century experience.

Unless you've experienced at least 35 or so revolutions of the Earth 'round the sun, or you're a fan of the Baltimore Orioles (or both, as I am), you probably have never heard of Mike Flanagan. He was one of the Orioles' best pitchers back when the Orioles were one of baseball's best franchises. This was the late 70s/early 80s, when my interest in baseball was at its peak. Last night I was listening to the Orioles game on MLB.com when word broke that his body was found outside his Maryland home. The news grew worse today when it was revealed that he apparently took his own life. It hasn't been easy being even an intermittent Orioles fan for the last 14 years, but it became even harder yesterday.

One year ago today I resigned from my office job to go on this quixotic seminary experience. (In my writer's paranoia, I had to look up "quixotic" to make certain that it fit precisely what I want to say--"exceedingly idealist; unrealistic and impractical"--yup, that about captures it.) Honestly, I haven't regretted for a nanosecond that decision, although I do have a fond remembrance of those bimonthly paychecks.

I recently watched the 1998 Coen Brothers film, The Big Lebowski , and it immediately became one of my all-time favorite comedies. While not a huge hit at the time of its release, this film has become a cult classic. Only yesterday I heard a few fellow seminarians quoting from it (and Arrested Development , another classic), which caused me to search YouTube, where I found this synopsis from the New York Times (leave it to the NYT to stitch together the few minutes of film that did not contain any swearing). I think the reviewer hits the nail on the head in identifying my own reasons for liking this film--the combination of Raymond Chandler and Don Quixote, as well as the soft underbelly of these rather gruff characters. As I said, the film remains popular, especially with audiences who were too young to see it in 1998. This very night--in fact, this very minute--there is a cast reunion taking place at Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC, which is being streamed online.

On July 19, 1997, my life, which had been going pretty darn well, took a turn for the even better. Along with my roommate and bandmate Jeff, I cohosted a Regressives "fan appreciation party" on the roof of my apartment in Hell's Kitchen. In fact, I still have a copy of the invitation, which promised an "early morning dogpile on John Schneider" (unless I'm confusing that with one of our New Year's parties). I'll spare you the details since this is a family blog, but suffice it to say that at approximately 7:15 PM, a petite Asian woman wearing expensive sunglasses, a dayglo lavender miniskirt, and 5-inch platform shoes knocked on my apartment door. Already feeling in good spirits, I opened the door with a sweeping, dramatic gesture and proclaimed, "It's the woman from the deli!" She must have been wondering whether she had the right apartment because I was the only one there; everyone else was up on the roof. In retrospect, I'm amaz...

Alas, while the calendar shows July, my summer--for all intents and purposes--is over. I began summer Greek last week. Summer Greek condenses an academic year's worth of Greek into 8 weeks. Each week is basically the equivalent of a month of Greek taken over two semesters. We have a quiz every day and an exam every Friday, except for last week. So the first exam is this Friday. On the PTS Web site the school discourages students from working while taking a summer language, and I completely understand and agree with the suggestion. I thought I studied a lot last year, but each day requires a good five or six hours of studying (I opted to take the class for a grade rather than the recommended pass/fail). Greek is unlike any foreign language I've studied (the others being Spanish and Korean) in that virtually every particle of speech--articles, subjects, objects, adjectives--must agree in gender, case (i.e., nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, and vocative), and number (...

As remiss as I've been in posting this past month, I couldn't let today go by without acknowledging my father. Of course, I sent him a card (which I hope arrived on time), but this blog gives me the opportunity to acknowledge in public things about my father that I've only shared in private, and not even necessarily with him. To begin with, my father is a much more fascinating individual than he would ever let on. It's easy for me to imagine him emerging from the womb with a pair of thick-framed glasses and neatly combed hair, but that would be an exaggeration. I don't think he needed glasses until he was two. If you look up "conservative" in the dictionary, you'll find a photo of George M. Schneider: oldest of three children and father of five, tax accountant, staunch Republican (until recently), and even stauncher Catholic (until even more recently). In short, the Establishment's ideal conservative. But you'll have to read the fine print ...

I've been on summer break since May 17. Despite my best intentions of using my break to catch up on the course readings that I was not able to get to during the semester (or getting a head start on summer Greek), I have barely turned a page of that small stack. Rather, my productivity has been thwarted by my introduction to, and subsequent immersion in, Netflix and the instant gratification of Netflix's streaming movies (curse you, Peter!). It started innocently enough with wanting to watch again the James Bond film License to Kill , an underrated film featuring the very underrated Timothy Dalton. Then I was introduced to the BBC's modern interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, called simply, Sherlock . Then there was the 9-part documentary World War II in Color from the History Channel. Of course, having been a long-time fan of Michael Palin's travel documentaries, I had to see Michael Palin's New Europe (good), Sahara (very good), and Himalayas (great). Then ther...

I'm not sure whether I "hear the hidden rhythms of everyday life," but I often find myself keeping the beat to any number of ambient sounds, from the seat belt alarm in my car (which rings exactly 50 times) to the second hand of a wall clock: The Brain of a Drummer . Even now, while proofreading this entry, I found myself tapping my finger against my thumb to an inaudible rhythm in my brain.

People sometimes ask me what music I'm listening to these days. My music funds are somewhat more--restricted--than they were when I had a full-time job. I don't remember the last time I bought a CD or even made a purchase from iTunes. Yet occasionally an album does force its way into my awareness, and often it is through that cheapskate's guide to music known as YouTube. I recently came across PJ Harvey's latest record, Let England Shake , which was released in February. Anyone much younger or much older than I probably has no idea who PJ Harvey is. She was the iconoclastic banshee of 90s Alternative rock--a sexually charged, guitar-playing front woman for her eponymous blues band. The PJ Harvey of Let England Shake bears little resemblance to that woman. Let England Shake is a concept album about World War I as experienced by the English--not exactly the subject matter of a platinum seller. But while Harvey's lyrics refer to a particular time and place (e.g., t...

I took this photo while on my most recent morning run: There's also a "James Street" about a mile from where this photo was taken.

Since I'm on break and the weather has warmed up, I've been out running the streets of Englewood and Tenafly again. Both towns are home to some beautiful old Victorian homes, which remind me of the haunted houses I enjoyed reading about--and wouldn't have minded living in--when I was a kid. My favorite house in the area is the one below, which I believe is serving as an annex for a synagogue. It reminds me an awful lot of this house. If it looks familiar to you, then you probably remember the TV show The Munsters from the mid 1960s.

"riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs." Thus begins James Joyce's virtually impenetrable masterwork Finnegans Wake . For reasons of which I'm not really aware, I've been taken by a desire to revisit FW for the first time since I was an undergrad. That class was actually one of my favorites--Yeats and Joyce it was called. We read a full anthology of Yeats, as well as Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , Ulysses , and portions of FW . Maybe I just need to read something that is not explicitly theological over the summer before the seminary reading onslaught begins anew in the fall. Two students from my Barth class plan on reading six pages a day of the 10,000-page Church Dogmatics until they finish it...four and a half years from now. Although Joyce wrote FW in his own secret language, I think I prefer its 600 pages, however much I enjoyed B...

The most interesting person I've met on campus thus far is an older ThM student from Korea named Sung. Well, his Korean name is Sung. His English name is a bit more colorful...Rainbow. I've yet to hear anyone call him Rainbow, but that's how it's listed in the directory. I first met him in my class over the winter short term. He and I were in the same group for a group presentation in Christianity's Cultured Critics. My group was like the UN. We had two Koreans, one Indian, one Nepalese, and two Americans. Although English was not his first language, Sung had an economy of expression, a way of maximizing the meaning of each word he uttered. Our project involved presenting and critiquing the work of John Dominic Crossan. At one of our preparatory meetings, Sung was saying how he understood that the disciples would want to lay low after the crucifixion (before being emboldened by the resurrection) because "they were cowards...like me." That "like me...

Those were the words on a t-shirt my oldest brother wore the day he turned 30. I still have the shirt, and in fact wore it on my own thirtieth birthday 10 years ago. If I were to wear it again, I suppose I would need to update it. I would be lying if I said that I didn't at all ponder the ramifications of turning 40. I don't mean the physical things, which thus far have been mostly inconsequential. Yes, the ratio of gray to brown hair increases by the day. And, yes, my knees rebel if I try to run two days in a row. What I mean is more of an intellectual awareness that time is fleeting. Such an awareness is not new to me because even as a child I had it. I can remember getting up out of bed one night around age 5 and crying at the top of the stairs, having somehow come to the awareness that everyone in my family would one day die. It's like the Flaming Lips song, Do You Realize?. "Do you realize / that everyone you know some day will die?" (If only I had reached ...

To paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of this blog's demise have been greatly exaggerated. I haven't posted for a long time, and that's for several reasons. In no particular order: 1. School. I finished midterms last week and recently completed two papers. 2. Not feeling I had anything particularly interesting to write. 3. Japan. I felt that anything I wrote would be trivial next to the devastation wrought upon that country. I managed to run outside this morning for the first time since December, which enabled me to clarify my thoughts on some issues that I will share shortly.

It's been quiet around here because I've been under the weather--and under my blanket--for the better part of the past 10 days. I feel about 90% today. Note to self: get the flu shot next year.

Soon there won't be any need for human contact at all. From the New York Times : A new application being sold on iTunes, “Confession: a Roman Catholic App,” cannot be used as a substitute for confession with a priest, the Vatican said Wednesday. The application was developed by American entrepreneurs with the help of two priests and the blessing of a bishop. It features a questionnaire of sins, and is promoted as a tool both to revive interest in confession and to help Catholics prepare for the sacrament. But some media reports cast the app as a “virtual priest” for Catholics who do not have time for church, prompting the Rev. Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, to respond, “One cannot speak in any way of 'confession by iPhone.'” All I can say is, where was this app when I was younger and dreaded the semiannual hangman's walk to the confessional?

On Tuesdays I have no classes (as opposed to no class), so I took the opportunity to go to the dentist for the first time since I've been at Princeton. The dentist's office was located in a strip mall about 4 miles from campus, next to the usual martial arts school and Chinese restaurant. I was the only patient, which was mildly disconcerting, but it was 3:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday. While lying in the examination chair waiting for the dentist to appear, I made small talk with the dental assistant who was from Bulgaria and has only been in the States for 10 months. I told her that I recently came to seminary after several years' copywriting. It turns out that she has a friend who left Wall Street to become a--she struggled for the word--monk. Seeing as how everything in the office--from the computers, to the paint job (typical dentist's green), to the chair I was lying in--looked brand new, I asked her how long the office had been there. Six months, apparently....

I really needed this week off. I purposely did not bring any books from my upcoming spring classes, although I was sorely tempted to do so. I spent much of the week watching Sandy watch Korean TV,  hanging out with the dogs, and practicing my Korean with KoreanClass101.com--a pretty neat site. (Alright, I did a little bit of reading for the spring via e-reserve, but it was assigned--I didn't take the initiative.) I've gotten used to it on the weekends, but since I was home all week I was reminded that we've rented out three rooms in our house. All the rooms are rented to Korean men, two of whom are about 50 while the other is 24. The 24-year-old lives on the first floor and is rarely seen or heard. The two ahjushi (older men, for all you Cauc-asians) live on the third floor with us (each has his own room). I'm most aware that we're living with strangers whenever I open the refrigerator. The ahjushi both have Costco memberships and shop as though they're buying...

This is a draft of an article I wrote for the church newsletter. I thought I'd post here as well. I can still remember the discipline I received from my father for marking up the kitchen cabinets with a full palette of magic markers when I was four years old. This is one of those incidents that lives on in family lore even though it happened more than 35 years ago. I don’t know what was going through my four-year-old brain—maybe I couldn’t reach any drawing paper—but I decided that it would be a good idea to treat the kitchen cabinets as my artist’s canvas. When my siblings retell the story, they always cite how the incriminating squeak of the magic markers on the cabinets was audible above the TV playing in the living room. That was the sound that drew my father’s attention. He stormed into the kitchen, only to stop in his tracks as he took in the full scope of my destruction. The spanking I received has largely faded from memory, but the red-faced wailing that followed is still ...

Today was the last day of class for the 3-week short term fall semester, which followed the 12-week long term. In 3 weeks of Christianity's Cultured Critics, which was actually shortened to 12 and a half days because of the MLK holiday, one snow-day cancellation, and another half day due to snow, we covered 10 critics. Blessedly, there were no exams or long-form papers. Rather, we kept a critical log of our response to each critic (recommended 250 words, maximum 500) and participated in a group presentation for the last two days of class. My group presented John Dominic Crossan and the Jesus Seminar. More on this class to follow in a separate post. Thirteen credits down, 65 to go [sigh].

What a presumptuous question! But this is a blog, after all, and presumably someone is reading it--that's what the blog's statistics indicate, anyway. I haven't posted at all since Christmas because during my two weeks "off" for Christmas break I: prepared the children's Christmas sermon with my pastoral partner, Dan Yang; wrote the senior high curriculum for the winter youth group retreat; and prepared a seminar for the retreat on the Old Testament. All that took place the first week. The second week was spent at the retreat, from which I got back just in time for the New Year's service. So going back to school on January 3 was actually a welcome break from my break. Since I've been back on campus I've been immersed in my readings for Christianity's Cultured Critics, my course for the fall short term. The readings are not light (Hume, Kant, Schleiermacher, etc.), and I have to keep a daily critical log and prepare a group project for the l...