After a LONG pause from Blogging...

I'm back! No excuses, really, but I have been busy in PhD land and then found a new distractor to waste time on the inevitable MySpace. Yikes!

Anyways, hi out there. If anyone still checks this page, that is!

To give you a sampling of the fun I have in the PhD program, check out the email my friend Kara, a first-year PhD student in New Testament, sent me.

"O Holy Night ... I love that Christmas carol. But the other night I was listening to it and realized it was SUCH an enlightenment carol. It's such a product of its time in all the good and bad ways!

The first verse represents the German idealistic tendency in theology, where Jesus' message could be reduced to an eternal truth (typically it boiled down to the "Brotherhood of humanity and the eternal worth of the soul"), rather than having the weight of social/historical particularity. Knowing this ... listen to selected words to O Holy Night:

"O Holy Night, the stars are brightly shining.
It is the night of our dear Savior's birth.
Long lay the world in sin and error pining.
'Til he appeared and the soul felt its worth."
...

"Chains shall he break for the slave is our brother.
And in his name all oppression shall cease."

WELL: I still love the song, although I hate that train in biblical interpretation (where you strip off the "myth" to get to the ideal) ... but I mean, you can't hate a song that includes an anti-slavery verse! I just think it's so interesting the theological suppositions imbedded in these songs we sing without thinking about it. :) Maybe you've all already thought of this."

Why no, Kara, somehow this hadn't crossed my mind, but now that you point it out, I , like, totally see what you are saying. It is like, totally, reminiscent of Adolf von Harnack... (Said in valley girl voice for full effect). Kara thinks I'm mocking her, but really I'm just embracing the brilliant nerdiness in her that I see in me...Or is it the brilliant nerdiness in me that I see in her???

Missed me, didn't ya? ;=)