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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...