The Peregrinating Parson

I am NOT responsible if you misread the title of this :) Queen Elizabeth II called 1992 an “Annus Horribilis”—a “horrible year”—because that was the year of so much turmoil in the Royal Family. I’ve seen many people call 2016 the same thing because of the US election results and because we lost so many influential people in so many fields of human endeavor (and there are still 4 days to go). In some ways, it would be easy for me to label 2016 a personal “Annus Horribilis”: my career took a somewhat expected turn several years sooner than anticipated which led to some serious financial fears until things settled down; my parents have both had significant health issues this year that remind me that they’re approaching 80 as fast as my brother and I are approaching 50; a bout with bronchitis early this year has left me more susceptible to respiratory allergic reactions than in the past; my knees remind me at least twice a week that I could have them replaced tomorrow (or on Monda

My friend and colleague Joel Hummel encouraged me to watch the movie Idiocracy during the 2012 Presidential primary season. I have never been so torn between laughing uproariously and crying bitterly in my entire life. Until now. The selection of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education in the next administration is an insult to every child and every public school teacher in America. Mrs. DeVos is an avowed Creationist. She supports the use of public (read: tax) money to pay for private education, including in religious schools, through the use of vouchers. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb to say that her religious belief probably trumps any support she should have for excellent science education, regardless of public or private school environment. The progress we have started to make in STEM/STEAM fields over the past few years with the introduction of high standards of achievement (Common Core, which though the name is reviled makes a lot of sense as a concept and

I have never been so relieved not to be preaching on a Sunday in my entire career. Maybe that will change by the end of the week and I'll be aching to proclaim some Good News into the world, in which case, my blog post might be a sermon (so fair warning). This is adapted from the Call to Worship I used for the contemplative service this morning at the Regional Theological Education Consortium of the United Church of Christ gathering in Oberlin, Ohio. We have been studying the texts for Epiphany season, which raise up the ideas of folly and wisdom. We aren't gifted with knowledge of the future; perhaps the voice of the people has actually spoken wisdom even though it sounds like folly to so many of us in this moment. If it is folly, we still have wise voices to call us to reflection and change in the years ahead. So here is my offering; feel free to use and adapt but please give credit as noted below. Peace. Grace. Hope. And most of all, Love. A Call to Worship for the Su

Don’t run away! I promise this won’t be deeply academic, it’s just that those are the word of the week for me and they happened to collide on my drive to Ohio Sunday afternoon. Epistemology is how we know what we know, or the system/method by which we discern what is true. If, for example, you only trust what you have personally experienced with your five senses, you fall into an epistemological system called “empiricism.” An epiphany is an insight that changes us (in small or large ways) that seems to come from within though often with a triggering experience that happens to us. Most of us would call these “AHA!” moments. I had two epiphanies on my drive, one precipitated by the other. The first is that I haven’t made headway on the conversion of my dissertation into a book yet because I didn’t have the first piece of the puzzle necessary for changing it into a general audience book. It turns out that I can do less rewriting and more revising if I add an entire new chapte

(Yes, I know I didn’t get an extra post up last week. In my defense, I worked 4 of my 7 jobs last week…and to my great surprise since I’d forgotten it’s salaried rather than contracted, got paid for a month’s work at another! Things are settling into place at long last.) Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church 499 years ago today (All Hallow’s Eve). I think that’s an important event to celebrate. Judging by the Facebook posts of colleagues and friends, however, many more churches focused on Stewardship yesterday than on Luther and all that his peers, his critics, and their collective descendants have brought to Christianity in the 21st century. Stewardship is incredibly important, but I wonder how many of us are still doing it in a way that Luther would find appalling: asking for money to the exclusion of all else. And in many cases, using guilt, either implicitly or explicitly, to pressure people into a pledge that may or may not be realisti

One of my favorite teachers, who taught history, once said that to earn a C in his class, you needed to be able tell him what happened. To earn a B, tell him how and what happened. To earn an A, he said, you needed to be able to tell him not just how and what but why things happened the way they did. In essence, to earn an A from him, you had to know enough background to be able to change history by changing one small detail 50 years before. Thus was born my love of alternate history and counterfactual thinking. Also, the beginning of a 9-grading period streak of A+ marks from him, a feat I understand had never happened before and did not happen again in his career, but in my defense, he said it couldn’t be done… I’ve been thinking a lot in the past week about what would change in the world if we could go back in time and change the philosophical basis of Christianity from its Greek roots to a root based more directly in African philosophical thinking. The major difference,

I subbed in a high school math classroom last week. The students were incredibly well-behaved and independent with their work, which meant that I didn’t need to hover over them to keep them working. Since I’m not one to pass up an opportunity to learn, I picked up a continuing education tome from the teacher’s desk and started to read. The book Mathematical Mindsets: Unleashing Students' Potential through Creative Math, Inspiring Messages and Innovative Teaching by Jo Boaler from Stanford University was the initial inspiration for this post, supplemented and enhanced a day later on October 7 by a segment in the August 26, 2016, episode of Science Friday that covered the same ideas, with an emphasis on the downstream implications of entire generations of students who have been blinded to the beauty of math by gatekeeping and poor pedagogy. Quick: What’s 18x5? How did you get the answer? Perhaps you simply “knew” the answer because somewhere along the line, you memoriz

This post was first inspired by a segment on a Science Friday podcast from August 16, 2016, which I heard on October 6 (the same episode partially inspired the next post, as well). And then, as God is wont to do on occasion, a completely different form of inspiration came from Rev. Vern Wright’s sermon on Matthew 22:34-46 , which he titled Open Hearts, Open Hands. Vern is the Pastor of Second Congregational Church United Church of Christ in Attleboro, Massachusetts. The One who wrote the laws from which the universe was born must occasionally sit back in wonder at all that has come from such simple equations as E=mc 2 (energy equals mass times the speed of light in a vacuum squared) and F=ma (force equals mass times acceleration). I think the One, God, wrote the laws out of love and curiosity: love for what could be and curiosity about what would be, in hopes that something would come about that would acknowledge the existence of the One and enter into relationship with God. We

One of my favorite podcasts is also a weekly TV show: StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson. Now that I have both the National Geographic Channel and a DVR, I can watch the show (hooray!), though I’ll keep listening to the podcasts because I’m reasonably sure that more of the main interviews is included there than on the TV show. Tyson’s guest this week was high-wire artist Philippe Petit, best known for his traverse of the space between the tops of the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1974. Their conversation included much talk of the physics of balance, especially concerning the 26-foot pole we all recognize as a tool of the trade. The pole serves as an extension of the artist’s arms, allowing him/her to recover from missteps and (in the case of heights and depths) wind gusts by counterbalancing the fall. These poles bend downward but do not go below the wire, which means that the center of gravity is still within the artist’s body; poles do not prevent fal