The Peregrinating Parson

(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