… and I missed it. But you can catch up again by visiting Biblical Studies Carnival XXX on Tyler Williams’s Codex blog and Biblical Studies Carnival XXXI on James Getz’s Ketuvim blog.
I am so far behind on my “online life” that I barely know what month it is. I love my in-laws, but 28K dial-up (I kid you not) makes certain parts of my life very difficult.
This summer, one of my major projects is to enable a convergence of two of my geekdoms, role-playing games and biblical studies, merging them with my day job, teaching Old Testament courses to undergraduates.
For the past ten years, I’ve taught required Bible courses for first-year students at Pepperdine University and (before that) Milligan College—courses whose catalog descriptions billed them basically as Old Testament surveys. I’ve never been quite happy with the survey format, but I’ve taught the courses as such, not rocking the boat too much in terms of scope and sequence.
All that is about to change.
Back in the spring, I attended a conference of the Association of American Colleges and Universities in Boston. That meeting was mostly about assessment, and I dutifully attended the sessions and wrote little reports back to my colleagues who sit with me on an assessment committee. On the last day of the conference, however, I went to a session that was actually about teaching, and it knocked my socks off. Mark Carnes of Barnard College and some of his colleagues were there describing and demonstrating a history/humanities course used at Barnard and elsewhere. This course, called “Reacting to the Past,” involves students in complex live-action role-playing games to help them experience dramatic historical moments. Now, students don’t have to stat out characters or dress up (though I suppose they are allowed to dress up) or anything like that; basically, they spend a lot of time making speeches and politicking with each other. For example, one game casts students as Parisians during the French Revolution; another game I played in a conference at the University of Kansas cast us in the roles of Athenians debating democracy and other topics right around the time of Socrates’s trial and death.
I got so excited about this pedagogical method—which is not all fun and games, but requires a lot of reading and writing as well as public speaking from students—and resolved to employ it as a pilot project in my Religion 101 class this fall. The problem is that no Old Testament games currently exist using the Reacting method, so I’m currently grinding away at “alpha” versions of such. My goal is to have at least two scenarios ready to go by the beginning of the fall term—a very ambitious goal, but quite necessary if this is to work well.
Today I’m in the Samford University library working on the first of those scenarios, set in the days of Ezra and Nehemiah and focusing on issues of communal identity. Before anybody jumps on me, please know that I’m well aware of the potential pitfalls of using Ezra–Nehemiah (the books) for historical reconstruction. That’s part of the lesson the students will learn. But since the entire pedagogy is more or less based on students making persuasive speeches to one another, Ezra–Nehemiah is an excellent choice for this project. Davies—that is, Gordon F. Davies—explains why in the introduction to his Berit Olam commentary on Ezra–Nehemiah. Davies actually writes the following to support his use of rhetorical criticism as a primary interpretive strategy for these books, but his words apply equally well to my choice outlined above.
Rhetorical criticism is not the only approach for reading Ezra–Nehemiah. But the leaders bring the people around to their plans, and they do so without the violence of coercion or the grace of any theophany. Their strategies of argument to achieve their goals are a pass-key to the theological understructure of the book. To apply rhetorical criticism at its most straightforward we will concentrate on the public discourses and prayers. The very quantity of orations, letters, and prayers in Ezra–Nehemiah reflects its emphasis on the word. This approach to Ezra–Nehemiah fits it as a text of declamation more than action. (p. xiii)
From the “credit where credit is due” department: I stole the phrase “convergence of geekdoms” from a conversation with Joe Weaks.
6 comments Christopher Heard | Bible (specific texts), biblical interpretation (methods), teaching and learning
There are other Midrashim that are not to be taken literally, they have a secret meaning, an example being the Midrash to the effect that the Torah pre-dated the world by two thousand years. This Midrash is true only according to its secret meaning. However, many do not understand it so. Actually, it is impossible to take this Midrashic statement literally because a year is made up of a given number of days, and the measure of the minute and the day is contingent upon the motion of the sphere. Hence if there is no sphere there is no day, certainly not two days or a year or two thousand years.
—Abraham Ibn Ezra, in his commentary on Genesis
Quoted from the translation by H.N. Strickman and A.M. Silver
I try to avoid using Microsoft products unless I just have to. Today I just had to, in order to maintain cross-platform compatibility with some colleagues using PCs. When I launched Word, the Office Auto-Updater kicked in with a request to update my system. I clicked on “Update,” then everything else slowed to a crawl while the updater did its thing. A background update should be low priority on the CPU’s to-do list, but apparently M$ thinks their software should hijack the machine.
Oh, by the way, I’m in a library with high-speed internet access today, so I can blog my Microsoft complaints and read my e-mail and stuff like that. My in-laws’ home has only dialup, and wouldn’t you know it, my MacBook Pro doesn’t even have a modem jack! A while back, my in-laws had cable and cable internet … then they cancelled that and went back to free dial-up with Juno (!) and satellite. Yes, even though they live in an area where they get lousy satellite reception and frequent storms. DSL is not available in their exchange.
Yes, I still exist. Yes, I still plan on stimulating your thinking, entertaining you, or provking you with my blog entries. However, I’ve been on vacation with my family—still am, in fact. For some insight into my side vacation off of my family vacation, check out my last few posts on Icosahedrophilia.
Eric Cline has reported that the DigMegiddo blog is now live (as of about June 8). If you’re interested in ongoing archaeological digs, give it a look!
Okay, so I didn’t really cry. But I did laugh out loud and gape in wide-eyed wonder at some of what I saw in Prince Caspian. My 10-year-old son and I waited until May 31 to see the film, so that we could go with a large group from our church to see Prince Caspian at the marvelous El Capitan Theatre in Hollywood. This lovely old theatre dates back to 1926. The El Capitan shows only one film at a time, and the crew decks out the lovely single auditorium with all sorts of acoutrements related to the film. The theatre’s foyers, halls, and galleries were festooned with actual props from Prince Caspian, which was an extra treat.
To jump straight to the point, I really enjoyed this film, more than I expected to. In my opinion, Caspian holds its own in a field of rollicking-good-fun movies.
Since it has been so long since I actually read C. S. Lewis’s novel Prince Caspian, I could not cleary identify the film’s changes from the book. My son helped me out there, since he read Caspian earlier this year. To me, it doesn’t really matter. In fact, so far, I think I like the films better than the books (this is rare for me). I was aware of a few changes, like adding Susan to some of the battle scenes (Lewis was too genteel for that) and placing the story of Caspian’s escape up front in the actual narrative chronology, rather than treating it as a flashback story told by Trumpkin, as in the book. Probably the biggest change is the addition of the White Witch—which made me wonder whether they will try to work her into Voyage of the Dawn Treader somehow, or if they will identify the witch of The Silver Chair with Jadis. But enough about that.
Judged as a sequel to the Disney/Walden film The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I thought Prince Caspian was quite successful. Some reviewers have commented on Peter Pevensie’s snotty attitude; I agree that he was an arrogant little something-or-other through much of the film, but then, that was part of the plot. The theme of “we used to be adults” really did seem useful in the film, causing Peter (especially) to presume too much about his own knowledge and abilities. Edmund gained the most characterization, and it was good to see him “grow up” a little bit. I like that they added Susan to the battles, but if they wanted strong (i.e., violent) female role models, why not send along some of the female centaurs, satyrs, and dwarves into the battles as well?
In my opinion, Caspian himself, Miraz, Trumpkin, and Nikabrik were well-played by their respective actors, and Reepicheep was a hoot. I found the centaurs far too stiff for my tastes, as if Al Gore were playing all of them.
The CGI and special effects provided a visual feast, though there were spots in which I felt that the second movie’s effects didn’t quite measure up to the first. Some of the scenes involving centaurs just didn’t feel quite right. The griffons, on the other hand, were amazing.
One can’t really review Prince Caspian without talking about the battle scenes. I loved them. I don’t want to give too much away, but my favorite part of the battle at Aslan’s How came right at the beginning of the fight—the artificial sinkhole. I absolutely did not see that coming, and it struck me as very original. Some have characterized the trees’ and the river’s involvement in the climactic battle as “rip-offs” from Jackon’s Lord of the Rings movies, but the Awakened Trees and the river-god both played significant roles in the battle as Lewis narrated it in his novel (I did go back and look that up, and followed Lewis’s capitalizations, too).
I’m not big on “messages” in movies. I just sit back and enjoy the stories. Therefore, I have little to say about whether the movie is “Christian (enough)” or whatever. As a relatively light fantasy action-adventure story, Prince Caspian satisfies. My ten-year-old son loved it and I had a great time watching it. If you want a couple of hours of fantasy-adventure fun, you can do a lot worse than Prince Caspian (I think I hear a breeze from the east whispering through the Willow trees).
(Cross-posted on Icosahedrophilia.)
A truce between science and religion achieved by sealing the border would be a capitulation to compartmentalism that we should surely reject. How and Why are different questions, but the ways in which we answer them have to fit together and make mutual sense.
— John Polkinghorne, Traffic in Truth:
Exchanges between Science and Theology
(Fortress, 2002)
This from a man who knew something about his own limits.
Something over a decade ago, I conceived the idea of displacing Sig. Caruso as the world’s greatest lyric vocalist, and accordingly inflicted some weird and wondrous ululations upon a perfectly innocent Edison blank. My mother actually liked the results—mothers are not always unbiased critics—but I saw to it that an accident soon removed the incriminating evidence. Later I tried something less ambitious; a simple, touching, plaintive ballad sort of thing a la John McCormack. This was a better success, but reminded me so much of the wail of a dying fox-terrier that I very carelessly happened to drop it soon after it was made.
— H. P. Lovecraft
… to all of my fellow bloggers who have written about interesting things during May—interesting things with which I have entirely failed to interact. My summer course (Intermediate Hebrew I, weekdays 11:30–2:20) has dominated my life rather more than I expected at first.
The immediate future doesn’t look much brighter on the blogging front, as I will be leading a seminar for teachers next week, weekdays 8:00–1:00. This seminar brings together my colleagues who teach our “Faith and Reason” seminar for a week of preparation.
3 comments Christopher Heard | blogging, teaching and learning
