Raiders of the Lost Ark

No, not that ark. The other one. Noah's. Apparently a group of Turkish and Chinese Christians claims to have found it.

See this article for more details.

I'm intrigued by this. Not because I think it might actually be Noah's ark (I suppose it's not impossible, but I'll need some convincing), but because of the sheer number of times Noah's ark has supposedly been found. It's rather like all those Crusaders who returned to Europe with various relics - bones of saints, and the like. I mean, if all the supposed pieces of the True Cross that were brought back from the Crusades were put together, you'd probably have enough wood for Jesus' cross, the crosses of the bandits crucified with him, and a couple of spares. Sometimes it seems that we modern Christians, who so often revile our Medieval brethren for their backwardness, are not so far removed from them as we might like to believe.

On Productivity

So, I'm really making a liar out of myself by even writing this right now, because I really should be attacking the mountain of reading I've got to do this week (my workload this semester is pretty much all reading; only a couple papers to write, and a little Greek translation, but mostly reading). But I've spent yesterday and this morning getting about half sick, so reading about ancient Babylon, Egypt, and the Hittites isn't really grabbing my attention today, and this has been knocking around in my head for a couple days, so I'll write for a bit, then get back to reading, I guess.

This is the third year of my Ph.D. program and I am taking right now, God willing, the last three courses I will ever be required to take. Ever. I know, right? It's crazy. Now, there's still miles to go before I sleep - exams, dissertation, defense, and so on, all of which I expect to take two more years, but still, it's pretty awesome. But I digress. Anyway, the first two years of my Ph.D. work were a real struggle, both in terms of self-confidence (in a there's-no-way-I'm-actually-smart-enough-to-be-doing-this sort of way), and in terms of actually doing the work. Jenny works full-time (more than full-time, really), which left the primary care of our son (and now our foster daughter) to me. So for the first two years of my Ph.D. work, I was both a full-time student and a stay-at-home-dad. This meant taking G* to a sitter while I was in class, and working around his sleep schedule when I was at home. I worked all through naptime, and for several hours after bedtime. This, as you might imagine, became wearing. It got a little better when he started half-day preschool last year. This year, though, things got much more complicated when we were given a newborn foster daughter. Suddenly (literally, in the span of about four hours) we went from having one child to having two.

I realized very quickly that this wouldn't work: I couldn't manage being the stay-at-home-dad to two kids and being a full-time student. I was, in fact, at the point of starting the necessary proceedings to take a year off from school, when we hit upon the notion of putting G in school all day and M in care for the day. This allows me to effectively treat my schoolwork as a a 9-5 job (usually more like 9-3 or 9-4, depending on circumstances), with the result that I am much more productive, and much happier with the situation overall. I even have my evenings and weekends relatively free - meaning I don't usually have to bring work home, and can spend my evenings doing other things. This usually means cooking and keeping the house in general running order, but it also means that I have some time for more entertaining activities that usually had to just go on hiatus during the semester - video games, reading fiction, and so on.

To be honest, I'm not really sure what the point of all this is, except to say that an academic career is best treated like an actual career (i.e., a job), at least at the level where I currently am. Trying too hard to juggle what amounts to two full-time - and more than full-time - jobs (stay-at-home-parenting** and Ph.D. work, in my case) ultimately doesn't work well. So my advice: if you're a Ph.D. student (or thinking about becoming one), try to get yourself into a situation where you can focus on school with the attention it deserves: namely, as though it were an actual paying job, because it's at least that much work. Also, if you're the friend or loved one of a full-time student, don't hate. We work our butts off. The fact that we're still "in school" and may not earn any actual income for what we do doesn't change that - and can even make it more frustrating.

*Being as this blog (and my Twitter feed) are completely open to the whole wide internet, I refer to my kids by their initial, rather than their actual names. It may seem silly and paranoid, but I'm okay with that. So if you see G and M, that means my son and foster daughter, respectively. (Also, it saves me a few characters when I talk about them on Twitter.)

**Most people have probably heard me say this before, but it bears repeating. I've never been one to disrespect the stay-at-home parent. I remember all too well what royal pains in the butt my brother and I could be at times to take the all-too-common attitude that it amounts to just sitting around the house doing nothing all day. But after a couple of years of doing it myself, somebody who tried to tell me "I wish I could just stay home all day and do nothing," would probably not be able to finish the sentence until after they'd spit out a couple of teeth.

Comments

I had to add word verification to comments. Because apparently spammers are too stupid to realize that month-old posts on a blog read by about ten people are not a good place to try and drum up buyers for their snake oil. (Have I mentioned I hate spammers? 'Cause I do. Mostly because I find their sales pitches insulting.) So anyway, no big deal, so long as you're a human and not a spam-bot. You'll just have to do the word verification thing before you can comment. That is, before you comment on the posts that I rarely make. Anyway, that's all for now. Have a lovely evening.

On Blogging

I was looking through some old posts on my old Xanga blog the other day, and I was struck by how much of my previous habit of blogging has been replaced by Twitter/Facebook updates. I was also reminded, though, that I quite like blogging, and really feel I should do it more often. So that's what I'm going to try to do. I've got the seeds for several posts bouncing around in my head, on a wide variety of topics, ranging from academic/theological stuff to a review of the shiny new Nook e-reader I got for Christmas (because my wife rocks).

So anyway, I guess this is the occasionally obligatory "I don't post very much but I'm going to try and start posting more often" post. Of course, my final semester of coursework starts next week, so how much time I'll actually have for blogging is anybody's guess. But I'm going to try.

Quote of the Day

"A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature, and yet he who first founded the state was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when perfected, is the best of animals but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all."

-Aristotle, Politics Book I

This jumped out at me when I read it this morning because it fits nicely into my views of human nature and my cynicism toward politics and politicians, which stems from my views of human nature, and which I was thinking about earlier this morning.

From the Mouths of Children

Sometimes explaining theology to a child yields interesting results.
For example while we were on the way home this evening, my three-year-
old asked "Where's God." Which led me to... Wait. Before I start, let
me preface this by saying that he is obsessed lately with racing. We
are always racing everywhere: to the car, to his room at bedtime, and
so on. So anyway, I tried to explain to him that God is everywhere all
at once. Ultimately, this led to the fact that God was in the truck
with us, and at home with Mommy. He said: "Is God already at home?" I
said yes, and he said "He beat us! God was racing!"

I don't know if the whole idea of God being everywhere all at once
sunk in (you never know: he may repeat it all back to me in a week, or
he may forget it all). I can say with some confidence, though, that he
did not understand why I was laughing so hard.

Quote of the Day

From Ken Schenk's Quadrilateral Thoughts blog:

"We have to accept the fact that the original context of the Bible was sexist in its orientation. We can't be as Christians in our context, not and be faithful to the core message of Christ. But when we are studying the original meaning of the Bible, we simply have to deal with the fact that we are reading male-oriented texts, as all the texts of the day were. This is one area, interestingly, where Western society as a whole--even the fallen world at large--has thankfully moved closer to the kingdom than the New Testament itself, since its books were truth incarnated within the thought patterns of its day.

God took where they were, met them there, and pointed them in the direction of the kingdom. Pity those like the Grudems and Pipers of the evangelical world who mistake the wineskins for the wine. "

Probably one of the lessons about Biblical interpretation that I most value from my education thus far is this idea of trajectories in Scripture. That is, the idea that when set within the cultural context from which it came, the Bible can set us on the path toward certain theological conclusions that are not explicitly stated in the text itself. It's an idea that was well understood (and then taken much too far) by the pre-Reformation church, but which certain forms of modern Protestantism have largely lost. This sort of reasoning gave us, among many other things, the doctrine of the Trinity: though no such doctrine is ever specifically articulated in the New Testament, there are many passages that point in that direction and, when followed to their logical conclusion, result in the Trinity. The abolitionist movement of the 18th and 19th centuries is another example: it's not often remembered nowadays that the abolitionists' position rested largely on their conviction that slavery was fundamentally counter to the message of Christ. Though the New Testament never explicitly says "slavery is evil," it points strongly in that direction - especially in places like Galatians 3:28 and Paul's letter to Philemon. If in Christ "there is neither slave nor free," and a Christian master is urged to receive back his runaway Christian slave as "no longer a slave, but more than a slave, a beloved brother." It's only a short hop from there to the conclusion that slavery is inherently anti-Christian.

Some of these ideas, however, meet with resistance. Indeed, from would-be debunkers of Christianity, many of them do: it is makes their argument easier. If they can argue that the Bible promotes slavery and the oppression of women and that the Trinity (especially the divinity of Jesus) is a later Christian invention (*cough* The DaVinci Code *cough*), then it's easier to argue that Bible is irrelevant.

There is also controversy over some of these issues within the church, particularly the issue of the roles of women. That is what Dr. Schenck is discussing: there are many (myself among them) who see in the New Testament a trajectory leading toward the equality of men and women within the leadership structures of the church (and the marriage). Others, like John Piper and Wayne Grudem, disagree, and argue that gender-based hierarchy remains in force in the church.

I do have to disagree with Dr. Schenck on one point, though: I think the ESV, though overall an excellent translation, does suffer as a result of the politics of its origin. It's translation of certain passages most favored by egalitarians is plainly constructed so as to minimize the impact of such passages for egalitarian arguments. An example being Romans 16:7, the ESV's translation of which is deeply problematic, and is designed to undercut a specific egalitarian argument (namely, that a woman in the New Testament-era church bore the title "apostle").

Ultimately, though, I think Schenck is right. The Bible does put us on a particular path on this issue, and I expect that ultimately, this view will win the day, and in a century or so will be largely taken for granted among Christians, in much the same way that the abolitionist arguments of our predecessors have done.

(Which is not, of course, to say that there is no racial prejudice within the church, certainly there is. But there's also nobody arguing for the re-institution of slavery, either.)