Bibliography, version 0.1

15 January 2010 at 1:59 pm (Software)

Hey there dear readers!

As some of you know, I’ve been hammering away in my spare time at a piece of Mac software called Bibliography.  It’s a citation-generation and -management application, kind of like a really streamlined version of Endnote.  I’ve finally gotten the beast into something like a workable beta version, and would be interested if any of y’all would like to do me the huge favor of testing it out for me.

Alas, it only works on OS X Snow Leopard (v.10.6), the latest version of the operating system, so if you’re interested, but aren’t running Snow Leopard, perhaps this is some good incentive to upgrade! (haha…).  Here are some features of the app:

  • Looks and works basically like Apple’s Mail application, or iTunes.
  • Creates citations out of thin air via drag-and-drop.  Just drag a book’s title from the library to your word processor and poof! your footnote appears.
  • Drag a whole folder to drop out a whole paper’s worth of endnotes.
  • Smart folders that let you gather together books based on a number of criteria like title, author, notes, or tags.
  • Speaking of tags, Tags! You can label a work with any number of descriptive tags to create as complex a system of organization as you like.
  • Add citations to a work.  Like notecards, you can take notes on a specific work, adding searchable tags to keep all of your brilliant observations in order
  • Create templates to make the creation of new documents easy.
  • And maybe even others that I don’t even know are features.

Click for a bigger version

Of course bearing in mind that it’s in a rough draft phase, I absolutely welcome critique, bug reports, suggestions for features, and gushing praise.  If any of these things sound like fun (I  mean, who doesn’t love giving criticism?), let me know and I’ll send a beta copy your way. That said, there are a couple of caveats:

  • Right now it only produces citations in Chicago/Turabian style.  This is what I use at the GTU, but I’m planning on adding other formats in the fullness of time.  Let me know what you’d like to see!
  • Author names have to be entered in this format: Last, First.  If you don’t do this, the citations won’t form properly, and children weep.

I’m hoping at some point to make this into a salable piece of software, so when the time comes, and I’m funding my church off of Microsoft-like profit streams, you can look on and say, “I helped make that happen!”

I would love your help, and with luck you’ll get a handy piece of software out of it, too!

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OWLs for Priests: The General Ordination Exams

8 January 2010 at 5:48 pm (Church)

Hi friends.  So, at the end of our time at seminary, before the whole ordination party begins, we get to take a set of tests called the General Ordination Exams.  For you Harry Potter fans out there, these are just like the OWLs or NEWTs, and for the rest of you, they’re like comps in any other more normal graduate program.

We take them over four days, with two questions per day, and three and a half hours per question.  They cover the seven areas in which the Church’s canons require us to be proficient: Holy Scripture, Contemporary Society, Christian Theology & Missiology, Liturgy & Church Music, Christian Ethics & Moral Theology, the Theory & Practice of Ministry, and Church History, Including the Ecumenical Movement.

I have just finished these tests.  Below, I’ve posted the questions, and once my head has stopped spinning, I’ll post my responses to them, if people would like to read them.  All-in-all, it was kind of fun.  It was a great chance to bring together all the stuff I’ve learned in seminary and try to make some kind of coherent statement about the faith.  And so, without further ado: the questions:

Set 1: Holy Scripture

LIMITED RESOURCES: A non-annotated, non-electronic, one volume Bible (N.B. the Oxford Annotated Bible and the HarperCollins Study Bible are not acceptable), and the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

In the face of the tragedy and seeming randomness found in disease, people have often turned to the Bible to find a reason for their misfortune. In a three-page essay, explain your own exegetically informed understanding of the interrelationship of sin, disease, and healing in at least the following biblical passages:

  • Deuteronomy 28:1-8, 15-29
  • John 9:1-33

You may use passages in addition to the two above if you wish to do so.

Set 2: Contemporary Society

LIMITED RESOURCES: A one-volume non-electronic annotated Bible and the 1979 Book of Common Prayer

One of the most daunting issues in contemporary society is the unprecedented complexity of global economic forces, with the potential for crisis in an interdependent world. The Episcopal Church should be able to speak credibly about the systemic and societal dimensions of such a crisis, in addition to addressing the pastoral concerns it might raise for individuals.

Understanding that there are no simple solutions to the problems that such complexity raises, respond in a three-page essay to the following question:

What can the Christian tradition usefully bring to the public discussion of an economic crisis that economists, politicians and business leaders, as such, might not bring in dealing with the underlying economic issues facing contemporary society?

Set 3: Christian Theology and Missiology

LIMITED RESOURCES: A one-volume non-electronic annotated Bible and the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

In the Book of Common Prayer the Exsultet states that “earth and heaven are joined and man is reconciled to God” (287). Atonement accomplishes this reconciliation. There are different theologies of atonement. For example, in the BCP:

  1. The Examination of a person about to be ordained as a bishop states that the bishop’s joy will be to serve him “who came, not to be served, but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (517).
  2. Eucharistic Prayer I, Rite I, affirms that Jesus Christ offered “a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world” (334).
  3. The Collect for Palm Sunday states that God sent “Our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility” (272).

In an essay of three pages:

  1. Describe the theology of atonement represented by each numbered quotation above and distinguish one from another.
  2. How does this variety of theologies reflect the Anglican theological tradition? In what ways is this dimension of our tradition important and useful today?

Set 4: Liturgy and Church Music

LIMITED RESOURCES: The 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

You are vicar of a small congregation. On one of the designated baptismal Sundays your parish will celebrate Holy Baptism. The church building includes a stationary altar at the front and a stationary font on the central axis inside the main door at the opposite end of the space. The seating consists of movable chairs.

In a three-page essay:

  1. Articulate the baptismal theology and ecclesiology of the Book of Common Prayer as revealed in the Baptismal Covenant and the Blessing of the Water, and
  2. Describe how you would design the enactment of the baptismal service so that this baptismal theology and ecclesiology are expressed
    1. by the movement of the participants within the space, especially between the font and the altar, and
    2. by the arrangement of the people within the space during key moments.

Set 5: Christian Ethics and Moral Theology

LIMITED RESOURCES: A one-volume non-electronic annotated Bible, and the 1979 Book of Common Prayer.

The education committee of the parish where you are rector has asked you to give an adult forum presentation on the ethical practice of medicine in the context of Christian moral theology.

Taking as a given the presumption that moral principles derived from scripture and theology should inform all areas of human activity, in a three-page essay:

  • identify and describe at least three moral principles from the Christian tradition that you will use in your presentation, and
  • show how they can be applied to the practice of medicine.
N.B. No detailed knowledge of medicine is required for your presentation.

Set 6: Theory and Practice of Ministry

NO EXTERNAL RESOURCES

You are rector of a parish that houses on site a popular, low-cost, non-profit, accredited preschool each day of the week. You serve on the board of this affiliated program. It is, in effect, subsidized by the parish, through its daily use of parish facilities (heat, space, etc.), without charge and with no acknowledgment in the parish budget. As the school has grown in success and popularity, its free use of church facilities has become a contentious issue between the leadership of the school and some members of the congregation.

Sunday School teachers increasingly complain about the preschool equipment and materials that are not stowed away, leaving a chaotic environment on Sundays. Moreover, parents; and teachers’ cars fill the church parking area during the week, leaving no room for the needs of those attending church meetings or programs held on weekdays. You also hear claims that although many new families are moving into the area and signing their children up for the preschool, they are not interested in joining the congregation. The vestry’s hope in originally supporting the school was that it would help spur growth in the parish; that has not occurred.

Some members of the vestry now want to charge fair market rent to the preschool or even to eliminate the program. Other vestry members want to continue to support the preschool as the parish’s ministry to families who pay the below-cost rate for the program, citing the importance of preschool programs for all children.

In a three-page essay, describe your leadership in this difficult though not uncommon parish situation, identifying at least three challenges for ministry, and explaining how you would respond to each of them.

Set 7: Church History

LIMITED RESOURCES: A one-volume non-electronic annotated Bible and The Hymnal 1982

The following hymns appear in the The Hymnal 1982:

  • “A mighty fortress is our God” (687, 688)
  • “The spacious firmament on high” (409)
  • “God of grace and God of glory” (594, 595)

In an integrated three-page essay, relate each of these hymns to the development of Protestant Christianity by:

  • Elucidating the major themes of each hymn, giving careful attention to its language and content; and
  • Setting each hymn text briefly in its historical context, showing how each expresses religious themes distinctive to its era.

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Advent 4C — The Visitation & The Magnificat

21 December 2009 at 10:28 am (Sermons, Theology)

• Luke 1:39-55 •

In our Good Friday service here at St Gregory’s, we read a section from TS Eliot’s poem “East Coker” that says, “Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love, For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith — But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”

This is our season of waiting.  The coming Jesus is so close.  He is so close that he is, as the Apostle Paul says, in our hearts and on our lips.

God is just dying to be born, ready, full of promise.

•

We are now at the end of Advent.  We have been waiting, and we have been hearing about God’s promises, and we have been hoping that What Mary said is true: that God is faithful and mindful of her love.

Mary’s song that we just heard is a lot to hear.  It’s a lot to believe.  God has promised to fill up the hungry, but people still need to be fed.  God has promised to bring the princes down, but they are still sitting.

And yet we hope.  We hope because hope is like love: You can’t prove it, there’s no way of controlling it.  We just have to trust that it’s true.

Advent is the time of year that we remember what it looks like when God says “I have a desire for you, a love, a dream.

•

Some have said that the whole of Jesus life, death, and resurrection is what it looks like for God to love the world.  If that is so, then what we heard today is the beginning of the love story.

Mary had just gotten the news that she has been asked to be the mother of the messiah, th

e great savior that she and her people had been waiting for, through occupation and exile, all these many generations.  The Angel Gabriel who came to he

r told her everything she might be expected to hear about the savior: he will take up the throne of the great King David.  He will reign forever and never be overthrown.  This is what messiahs are for.

Mary agrees, and when she does, it is as if at the moment she does so, everything changes.  Suddenly what she has signed up for is something completely different than she had expected.

Suddenly, this fourteen-year old peasant girl, who, it should be mentioned, lives in the middle of nowhere, in a town nobody has heard of, has fallen in love with God.

•

Sometimes we like to talk about the books that Mary would have known as the Bible as though they’re full of nothing but doom and gloom, punishment, judgement, and fire.  But if you had asked Mary, she would have told you one thing about what the Scriptures contained: God’s loving-kindness for God’s people.

And now, suddenly, to begin the God’s work in the world, Mary is given a glimpse of what that loving-kindness looks like, and she just has to tell somebody.  She’s filled up with it, and it comes spilling out: a picture of what it looks like for God to be out of her mind in love with the Creation.

•

I can’t help but think that there must have been times for Mary and her people to believe in that love.  When the Roman soldiers were setting up camp in their towns.  When the tax collectors were taking so much that there wasn’t enough to buy food to eat.  When teenage girls without husbands got pregnant, and then had to hide out for fear of getting stoned to death by the authorities.  It would be hard to see just exactly how it is that God’s love is working here.

What the Magnificat, Mary’s Song of the Love of God tells us is exactly what God always does and we always forget: God is always doing things that we couldn’t expect.  God’s love is always pointing further than we can see.

I have a feeling that when the Angel Gabriel came to Mary and told her all about the savior to come, she was expecting the dashing military type who would clean out the Romans and set things right, like they used to be.  That’s certainly the picture that Gabriel paints for her.  But as soon as she’s agreed, she knows better than what she’s just heard: Mary’s Song is about God doing everything backwards, everything upside-down, all of our millions of ways of making each other less human thrown out, nailed up, and let go.  There will be no military conquest, there will be no throne of David.  There will only be mercy.  Mary’s song is about what all love is about: Mary’s song is about dying and being given life, and about being truly human.

•

The scandalous thing about the Christian message is that we claim to have experienced God as having become a human being.  Not a superman, or an angel, but a real man born from a real woman, with blood and tears and laughter.  A real human being, standing on the ground.

As Paul said a couple of weeks ago, if there’s one thing we know from the Bible about who God is beside the fact that God’s all crazy in love with us, it’s that God’s desire shapes our reality.  The things that God wants for the world are being worked out right now.  And more than anything else, what God wants for people is that they should be people.  Not pretend-people, or empowered-people, or humble-people, but people: real, true, fleshly human beings.

•

And so, Mary’s Song is about God’s love; it’s about God working in history to love people to life, to make them back into people.  We go to great lengths to turn each other and ourselves into something other than human.  But the whole point of Mary’s Song is that these things really, really don’t matter to God.

You are not the pile of money that you’ve stacked up around yourself, it says.  You’re a person.

You’re not the pit that you’ve been thrown in by a system that has forgotten you.  You’re actually a real human being.

You are not the student loan debt that you’re afraid you’ll never repay, and you’re not the house that you just had to sell.  You’re not the ex-boyfriend that you’re still missing, and you’re not the college that you didn’t get into.

You are not problem to be solved, you’re a person.  You are not illegal, you’re beloved.  You are not a failure, you’re about to be resurrected.

God’s love is the kind of love that changes everything.  It even changes death into life.

•

There is an old medieval folktale that tells that, when Gabriel came to visit Mary to invite her to join in God’s story of the Incarnation and the saving of the world, she was there weaving weaving Jesus’ burial shroud.  She already knew what was to come, and she was getting ready.

This is not the image that we ordinarily have of Mary at Christmastime.  This is not the Mary sitting peacefully by the manger, or looking pretty for the painter when hearing the news that soon she’s going to be in a family way.

This is not the way that we ordinarily think about Christmas, about the Incarnation, about the love of God.  God does not will death, and yet the medievals were not just morbidly fascinated by death.  They were surrounded by it.  I would imagine that death was much less interesting to your average Christian in the middle ages than it is for us, still sad, still tragic, but not at all unfamiliar.

And so, it’s just a folktale, but it points to something very important that is easy to miss at this time of year, when we think the focus is supposed to be on joy: that Christmas points to Good Friday.  Sometimes people here at St Gregory’s say that there are only two season in the liturgy: East and Easter is coming.  What we forget when we say that, though, is that Easter never comes before Good Friday: the resurrection never comes before the crucifixion.  You have to die before you can be resurrected.  Like all love, the Love of God that we celebrate at Christmastime, goes through suffering into life.  And, Christmas is about the beginnings of love.

You are suffering now, says God, and I am with you.  You are dying now, and I am waiting to breathe you back to life.  You have died, and now you are alive.

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