Monthly Archives: November 2007

AAR/SBL News

The conference went very well. M and I did most of the things we wanted to: did some exploring of the city (and found this free gallery that has some nice icons and Old Master paintings), enjoyed the whirlpool, had some nice meals without children (though we missed them terribly), and met up with a bunch of folks–like Christopher, Mother Laura, and Anastasia. We took in some sessions as well (including Mother Laura’s paper on Perpetua and Felicity).

And we hit the book room. Restraining ourselves, we left as empty-handed as we came—but the book room was still a joy to behold…

Meet-up Location

If anyone on site is checking in reagard to this… We’ll be meeting at a table in the Cafe which is in the back portion of the Book Room. Bring food; M and I have discovered a good cheap option in the grocery store up two blocks or so on First.

 I’ll have a little sign… :-)

Deo Gratias

TeDeum

M was just offered a part-time job at a local parish entirely out of the blue!!

There shall be much rejoicing at our household tonight including the intoning of a solemn Te Deum of Thanksgiving…

Jesus on Marriage

In light of the earlier discussion on Christian chastity, I was struck by Sunday’s reading and noticed something in it I’d never seen before. Here it is with emphasis:

Luke 20:27-38 27Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him 28and asked him a question, “Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. 29Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; 30then the second 31and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. 32Finally the woman also died. 33In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.” 34Jesus said to them, “Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; 35but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. 36Indeed they cannot die anymore, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. 37And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. 38Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.”

From Oremus.org’s NRSV.

Luke has Jesus making a contrast between two ages. These ages are not temporal, rather, they are paradigms of existence. He opposes “this age” (i.e., the present age, the status quo) with “that age” (i.e., those worthy of and who will participate in the resurrection; read with Christian eyes=us).

The explicit message of Jesus on marriage, then, is that children of the resurrection don’t do it…

AAR/SBL Meet-up

M and I are looking forward to San Diego very much. It’ll be the first trip without kids since we’ve had kids… It’s a wonderful destination by all accounts and our hotel sounds great! We’re imagine some nice meals without children, sleeping without said children or cat waking us up or hogging the bed (that’d be the cat…), and generally spending some quality time together amidst going to the book room, sessions, receptions, the book room, and such. And did I mention the book room? (In previous years this is normally where we’ve run into AKMA…)

In view of the fact that this is a place to meet people, network, etc., M has graciously relinquished Sunday lunch from just being “us” time and we’ll do a meet-up for those interested.

I’ve never done one of these events before let alone “hosted” one so I’m not entirely sure of the protocol. In terms of both convenience and budget, I’m thinking that if there is a foot court/feeding area in the main hotel that should be our venue. I’ll say 12 arbitrarily as I don’t have a schedule in front of me to know if that’s a logical time or not. Please leave logistical suggestions in the comments if you know of a good way to arrange all of this. In any case, if you’re interested and available, shoot me an email at the address listed on the side-bar so I have an idea of how many we’re looking at.

Musing on Sacraments and Saints

Here’s a thought I’ve been rolling around a bit recently: The higher your sacramental theology, the more necessary it becomes that you have a robust theology of the saints.

That is, if we understand Baptism as a true joining of the self into the reality of God through Jesus, then we must (or perhaps “should”?) take more seriously our mystical connection with our fellow baptized. If we understand Eucharist as the share of the one bread that joins us in the one Body (as 1 Cor speaks about it) then—again—our relation to the “communion of the Saints” is that much more important. In essence, we must posit a stronger eschatological bond between the members of the Body.

But, a thoughtful evangelical student pushed me on this when I mentioned it in a class discussion of the saints: does this mean that a sacramentally higher church has a “better” understanding of Christian community than a sacramentally lower church? Furthermore, does it necessarily have a better embodiment of Christian community?

My answer was that it is not necessarily better—it is just different. I think it can be said that a higher sacramental theology requires a less individualistic understanding of spirituality and salvation—but does it play out this way in reality? And in how we embody our theologies communally?

Martinmas

Once again Martinmas has rolled around. It means that a new year is waiting in the wings, ready to get underway. As the signal-day for the old six-week version of Advent, we’re reminded to locate our Year 2 Office materials and to find some decent selections for our Advent hymnody. Yes, some suggestions may even be forth-coming in the next few days as I start casting about myself…

St. Martin is one of the great heroes of Gallican monasticism so this is a good time to recall some of the other monuments from that source and to point you to the famous Life of Martin: these can be conveniently found together in this volume (which happens to be one of my favorites in the whole set…). In addition to the importance of Gallican monasticism, the Life of Martin became a template of sorts that, in conjunction with Athanasius’s Life of Antony, set a pattern for Western hagiography that blossomed in the centuries that followed.

I said a while ago that I would take a break from documenting our ongoing inter-Anglican feud until today. The time off has been good for me. While I may comment on such matters, I don’t see them occupying a whole lot of space here—I’d rather use it for something edifying instead…

Great Find by bls

…well, ok, great if you’re an Anglo-Saxon liturgy geek… (so maybe “invaluable” is a little extreme, but since I don’t have consistent access to Milfull you have no idea how helpful this is to my dissertation.)

bls directs us to the Anglo-Saxon Hymnarium produced by the Surtees Society under the editorship of the Rev. J. Stephenson reprinted as the volume for 1851. (Here’s the alphabetical index if you want to check for any particular hymns. [Important note: this text contains only the Latin and the Old English gloss. It does not contain modern English translations/paraphrases/equivalents.])

What this means is that yes, it contains a transcription of the Durham Hymnal; no, it does not necessarily follow current editorial standards–caveat lector! So, for basic information this is a great reference to have sitting on your hard-drive; for academic citation, go look it up in Milfull first.

This is also helpful and fascinating for those with an interest in the history of the Ritualist/Anglo-Catholic movements. In terms of “what did they know and when did they know it”, this date establishes the available presence of a classical Anglo-Saxon hymn cycle before the first publication of Hymns Ancient and Modern (TOC here) which first appeared in 1861 (in planning since 1858) and which included some Anglo-Saxon options in the Sarum Office Hymn list of 1904.

For the Aelfric folk in the crowd, there are some interesting connections between the Durham Hymnal and Aelfric. For instance, I believe that the Hymnal was bound with an edition of Aelfric’s Grammar—which may make the glossing that much more interesting since his grammar included a glossary (a list of Latin words and their Old English equivalents). When the two texts were bound together I cannot answer and should look up… Furthermore, the order of hymns in this hymnal can be compared with the list that Aelfric gives in the Letter to the Monks at Eynsham the temporal cycle of which I mostly reproduced here. IIRC, they are similar but by no means identical (reminding us once again of the inevitable variation in medieval liturgy).