Miscellaneous updates and an AKMA reference

I haven't blogged for some time, partly due to a lurking illness which hasn't yet been bold enough to assert itself fully. Low grade sickness saps your energy, but not enough to wipe you out, In this way, it is rather like an inch or two of snow: not enough to cause life to grind to a blessed halt so you can rest and recuperate, just enough to add misery to exhaustion.

Also, I've been busy, not least with looking at several General Ordination Exams. I will be helping the Board of Examining Chaplains to assess them next week at an Episcopal camp outside of Houston. I've done this for three years now and while it is an awful lot of work, I think the GOEs are important and I am glad to be able to serve the church in this way. In a certain slightly perverse way it is even fun. But it also means I won't be able to blog next week.

All grad school applications are now in, but I won't hear about them until probably March or so. Shpilkis in the meantime. I don't like not knowing where we will be living several months from now.

AKMA has contributed an interesting post on the subject of Christian marriages, with all of his usual eloquence and charity. (This was the third in a series for him. Here's the first, and here's the second.) Along the way he expands his discussion, summarizing and clarifying what I have written elsewhere about contested questions. (I don't mean that he actually looked at what I said and summarized or clarified, this isn't a statement of literary dependence -- it is more likely, if anything, that I have unwittingly imported ideas he set out on his own. But it seems at least that our minds are travelling in similar circles.)

His entire post is very much worth a read, but I thought the following sentence particularly worth marking:

Facile binaries between “us” and “them” serve the political purpose of drumming up the fevers of the
partisans (especially when we pathologize or anathematize those with whom we disagree), but they rarely
clarify the best grounds for advocating one or another theological position, and almost never give somebody a good reason for changing her or his mind.

I originally wrote "...the following sentences worth marking:" but when I returned to the original post, I realized that I wanted to quote the whole darn thing: it's gold. So go and read it. Now. That's okay, I'll be waiting here when you're done....

Other miscellaneous tidbit to include here include a couple of note about upcoming blog stuff:

1) I owe Peter (and others, no doubt) a definition of "church marketing", which is forthcoming.

2) Rhett has asked me to discuss premillenial dispensationalism and what I find problematic with it, particularly its eschatology, and this might be more interesting in a post than in an e-mail. (Tell me if I'm wrong, Rhett.)

3) I need to provide some more evidence and argumentation about church marketing generally, in support of my earlier post.

4) I am planning to start a series of entries which introduce modern theologians to readers, with links to online resources. Regular readers will be not at all surprised to find that my list of theologians leans towards Anglicans, the Radical Orthodox, and postliberals. Rowan Williams, David F. Ford, John Milbank, and Stanley Hauerwas will be among the first.

5) Some more ruminations about the Christian faith and its relation to the "public sphere" (and why the "public sphere" is such a dubious and dangerous idea).

6) I also owe Howlin' Hobbit something on the relationship between doctrine and life/ethics/behavior/something like that. I have been wanting to blog on this for a while, anyway.

7) More book reviews.

So, watch this space! But not next week, I'll be gone.