SchneiderWeb

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...