This and That

Book Title: With some help from historian Brian M. Ingrassia (Brian and his wife live two doors down from us), I've come up with the following proposed title for my book manuscript: Making Disciples in the Chickasaw Nation: One Woman's Spiritual Odyssey in Indian Territory and Early Oklahoma. What do you think?

Sleep! The research keeps accumulating. It all says the same thing. If you want to function well, you need to get plenty of sleep. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal ("How Your Brain Recovers From Sleep Deprivation," by Aylin Woodward), when you sleep, your body conducts what might be described as housekeeping for your brain. Useless cells get taken out and, in general, the brain gets a cleaning of sorts. When you don't sleep well, the next day your body is doing some of that housekeeping work. But that means it can't do its ordinary, "awake" sort of work. It's like trying to do math problems while vacuuming. These two sorts of tasks don't go together. (If you can do math problems while vacuuming, just shut up). During the day after little to no sleep, your body and brain actually sort of shut down in order for the cleaning process to take place. It's like you came to work one morning, but the overnight cleaning crew never showed up the night before. This is why sleep deprived people often have car wrecks. The driver wasn't necessarily being negligent. It's as if the driver was temporarily asleep! So, pay attention to what's now called "sleep hygiene." Your brain, your body, and everybody else will thank you. 

Memories of Connecticut: I first arrived in Wallingford, Connecticut, in August 1993. As the new preacher for the Ward Street Church of Christ there, I was coming from a world where one's opinions about Rubel Shelley and what was known as "the new hermeneutic" would quickly peg you as being one sort of preacher or the other. I did not mention or talk about any of those things. I just wanted to help the congregation to have a positive view of Christian life. Above all, I wanted them to love and admire Jesus more and more. My first series of Sunday-morning sermons was about Him. The titles were basic: "Jesus: A Friend of Sinners" and "Jesus: Our Great High Priest." Stuff like that. After a few weeks, it dawned on me that what were "big issues" among Churches of Christ in the Mid-South were no issues at all in Connecticut. In fact, the members of the congregation didn't even know about those things. And I wasn't about to tell them! Finally, here was a church where pursuing the goals of pleasing God, becoming more like Christ, studying the Bible for all it's worth, etc., was the entire point. That's what people wanted, and that's what they were doing. The only thing I had to do was to teach them and provide the best example I could. For several years prior to the demise of my first marriage, it was glorious stuff, a golden age in my life.

Dr. Fulkerson: When I was a student at Freed-Hardeman College in Henderson, Tennessee (1984-86), one of the star professors there was Dr. Raymond Gerald Fulkerson (1941-2019). On campus, at a time when relatively-few faculty members at F-HC held a terminal degree, he was "Dr. Fulkerson." He taught courses in Communication. As I remember, he was chair of the Communication Department at F-HC. In my first semester there, I took the basic Speech Communication class, with Fulkerson as the instructor. It was obvious to me that this man "knew his stuff.." Although I was majoring in Bible, I thought he would be a good person to study with because, after all, my future would have a lot to do with communicating. In my senior year, I took what was a capstone course for all students majoring in Communication. I believe the course title was "Survey of Rhetorical Theory." That class was quite a challenge, and Demosthenes became something of a hero to me. I decided to take yet another class with Fulkerson, one titled "World Public Address." It wasn't required for Communication majors. So there were relatively few students in that class. I believe that just a few years later the title was changed to "Great Speeches," or something very close to that. Anyway, although I did not know him well, Fulkerson made a real impression on me. One thing I walked away with was the idea that speeches and sermons always have a "rhetorical situation," the context of the place and moment. Consider, for example, that Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous "I Have a Dream" speech was delivered before a huge gathering in the nation's capital during the March on Washington for civil rights. As a preacher, the idea made me wonder: What is the rhetorical situation in a church on an ordinary Sunday?

The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism

Mark R. Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. xiii, 404.

Mark Stoll, Associate Professor of History and Director of Environmental Studies at Texas Tech University, begins this wide-ranging study with an important historical footnote: in 1967 Lynn White Jr. published an essay in Science magazine "claiming that Christianity had caused the environmental crisis," a notion that lingers "in the back of a lot of people's minds when they think about religion and the environment" (1).

Stoll noticed, however, that many figures in the history of American environmentalism grew up in either Congregational or Presbyterian churches, both types "in the Calvinist tradition" (2). What was the connection? Starting with questions like that, the author has written a book that "overlays American environmental history on American religious history" (6). Stoll further describes his work and identifies his thesis as follows:

Inherit the Holy Mountain uses religion as a wholly new tool for dissecting American environmental history. Historians have invoked a long list of factors to explain the motivations behind conservation and environmentalism: nationalism; monumentalism; Transcendentalism; democratic ideals; growing appreciation for wilderness; nostalgia for the disappearing frontier; alarm at disappearing game; antimodernism; fear of urban pollution, corruption, disorder, immigrants, and class conflict; automobiles and leisure time; and masculine ideals of conquest and domination. All of these factors, and more, played their roles. Yet as this book shows, a religious perspective gives the history and development of environmentalism a trajectory, unity, and power. Rather unexpectedly, even to the author, religion turns out to provide extraordinary insights into environmental movement's past--and future (9).

So what exactly are those "extraordinary insights"? For one, Stoll shows how Calvinist thought served as the foundation of American environmentalism, "from its moralism to its suspicion of humans in the landscape to its urgent evangelism" (53). All of these had everything to do with the Puritan vision established in books like John Milton's classic, Paradise Lost. Thus, when Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalists recommended spending time alone in the woods or some other natural surrounding, they weren't suggesting something new. They were repeating "long-standing Calvinist advice" (41).

Stoll describes the theological ethic of stewardship, accountability to God for all things. This was an old, patristic theme, but one that Calvinists, especially Puritans, revived and emphasized. A Puritan buzzword was improvement. Along this line, one should conserve soil and improve land. A good steward is the farmer who uses the best, most productive techniques, and who also ensures that the land will be productive in years to come. It was actually Huguenots, French Calvinists, who "wrote the pioneering works of modern agriculture" (72).

Moreover, in the same way that American environmentalism was not fathered by Emerson, nor was it born on the Atlantic coast somewhere near Boston and Harvard College. Rather, it was fathered by Calvinist thinkers, and was born along the Connecticut River Valley, near places like Northampton, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut. The movement's alma mater was Yale College in New Haven, Connecticut, home to Yale Forestry School, the nation's first such postgraduate program (91).

The movement influenced not only schools, but art as well. Born to Congregationalists, famed landscape artists Thomas Cole and his protege Frederic Edwin Church inspired "the nation's leading advocates and creators of parks, forest conservation, and agricultural improvement." Indeed, with only one exception,

every one of them either like Church grew up in New England Congregationalism or was no more than one generation away. The American conservation and environmental movements were born in the elegant steepled churches rising above the greens of Connecticut Valley towns (78).

During the years that surrounded the dawn of the twentieth-century, American Presbyterians, similar to those earlier Congregationalists, built on the Reformed tradition which represented "a virtual training ground for environmental activism" (140). But whereas New England Congregationalists of the nineteenth century focused on the stewardship of the individual over his farm, "Presbyterians . . . called the nation to moral account."

Indeed, the Progressive Era belonged to Presbyterians. "Between 1885 and 1921," Stoll writes, "Presbyterians held the White House for nearly 28 out of 36 years, over three-quarters of the time" (150-51). From the 1880s through the 1940s, Presbyterians headed up the Department of Interior almost the entire time. Their leaders included, among others, John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, and U.S. Presidents Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson. This was the heyday of American conservation. As Stoll notes, however, Presbyterianism in the U.S. has since become liberal and ecumenical, not so confident in its righteousness, less preachy.

Stoll explains that since then environmentalism has not gone away, but has fractured into a number of unorganized impulses and movements. Even to this day, environmentally-minded people are often lapsed, "spiritual but not religious," Presbyterians of some sort. "For three decades after World War II theirs were the most prominent and effective voices for environmental causes" (174). These folks represent a sort of "second wave" of Presbyterian interest in "a proper moral relationship of humans to the natural environment" (175). They include such names as Alice Hamilton, Rachel Carson, Jane Jacobs, and Annie Dillard (193). From Muir to Carson, they exhibit a great capacity for identifying and railing against evil. Yet, unlike the Puritans, they were not so good at holding up a unifying vision for how to order a society.

What has happened more recently? Stoll answers that during the last few decades an "outsider" environmentalist mode replaced the old "insider" conservation ethic. Given that change, it should come as no surprise that Henry David Thoreau's reputation rose spectacularly. During the countercultural 1960s and 1970s Thoreau "was canonized as the greatest saint in the environmentalist pantheon" (215).

Beginning around that time, some African Americans, particularly Baptists, along with Jews, Catholics, Methodists, and Episcopalians, have become involved in environmental issues. But the environmentalism they promote tends to be more about social justice, rather than about "nature, wildlife, and resources" (234). Stoll points out, for example, that unlike the old Congregationalists, contemporary Baptists tend to be much more individualistic than communal. Consequently, environmentalists who grew up Baptist, like the recent presidential candidate Al Gore, tend to preach sermons to individuals rather than to the government about what it should be doing.

Environmentalism stemming from the black church has typically been a fight against "environmental racism" (238-39). On the Roman Catholic front, in the wake of Vatican II, it appears that of all the issues Catholics disagree about (abortion, women in the church, clerical celibacy, etc.), the one thing they agree on is "the centrality of the moral principle of social justice" (243). Indeed, as Protestant environmentalists have faded even more, "Catholics along with Anglicans have fairly taken over the enterprise of environmental writing that is explicitly religious, as opposed to vaguely spiritual" (249). Jewish environmentalism tends to relate to the faith's emphasis on community, and involves human beings as part of the subject. Jewish theology associated with justice and righteousness "implies social goals and duties" (258).

The up-to-date report? "If it is not dead yet, environmentalism is certainly weak, divided, and wandering in the wilderness" (275).

In sum, Stoll makes a solid case that, in fact, religion had everything to do with the rise of American environmentalism, and that a person's formative religious outlook brings with it a controlling theology and view of the world, facets that always make a difference in the way a person thinks about nature. Our environmental crises would not improve with the disappearance of religion, but they might improve with a religious tradition that could effect systemic change for the better.

"Holy Whine" at Pulpit Rock: Connecticut Connections to the Bible-Belt South

Born in Boston in 1706, Shubal Stearns lies buried more than 600 miles to the south and west, in the little town of Staley, North Carolina. Between those two places--at Tolland, Connecticut--Stearns underwent a spiritual transformation. The changes he embraced in Tolland led him to lay part of the foundation of a well-known feature of our modern American religious landscape: the Bible-Belt South.

The Stearns family moved from Boston to Tolland in 1715, when Shubal was still just a boy. An active member of the Congregational church, in 1727 he married a local girl, Sarah Johnson. Years later, his life forever changed with the coming of what we now call the First Great Awakening.

By the 1730s, Puritan churches seemed stale and formalistic. Preachers of the Great Awakening challenged the status quo with emotional sermons that called hearers to a vibrant, all-consuming faith. Stearns heard the most famous evangelist of them all, George Whitefield, when he preached in Connecticut in 1745. Immediately, Stearns identified himself as a New Light, someone who welcomed the message of the revivalists. Even more, he sided with the Separates, radical New Lights who felt they could no longer be members of their spiritually cold and lifeless congregations.

With no church facilities, Separates had to decide where they would gather for worship. In Tolland, they met in the Stearns home on Charter Road. Stearns himself served as minister of the congregation, which grew through the years. But in 1751, the group divided. Some, like Stearns and his family, embraced the Baptist teaching that church membership is only for those who have experienced believers' baptism, adult immersion upon a profession of Christian faith. Soon after he was immersed, Stearns organized a "Separate Baptist" church in Tolland.


Charter Road in Tolland, Connecticut

Weather permitting, people would sometimes gather at Pulpit Rock in Tolland, where they listened to the evangelist preach. Stearns was small in stature. But when preaching, what he lacked in height he more than made up for with over-sized gestures, a piercing gaze, unrestrained emotion, and a sing-song delivery some called "the holy whine." Many listeners who at first didn't care for his style eventually warmed up to his obvious sincerity and devotion.

Three years after his conversion to the Baptist persuasion, Stearns concluded that he should take his message to the colonies that lay south and west of Connecticut. This was part of a historic trend. As scholar Christine Heyrman explains, "evangelical revivals in the northern colonies . . . inspired some converts to become missionaries to the American South." Stearns's brother-in-law, Daniel Marshall of Windsor, was also a Separate Baptist preacher. In 1754, the two men moved their families to Cacapon, Virginia, near present-day Winchester.

After working for months with only moderate response, they received word that people living in the Piedmont section of North Carolina would ride long distances just to hear a sermon. So it was that in late 1755, a company of fifteen people, mostly Stearns and Marshall and their families, migrated to Sandy Creek in what is now Randolph County, North Carolina, where they immediately began a church.

Pulpit Rock in Tolland, Connecticut, one-time gathering place for Separates.
Shubal Stearns sometimes preached here.

With Sandy Creek as his home base, Stearns traveled through parts of North Carolina and Virginia preaching sermons, training evangelists, and planting Separate Baptist congregations. By the time Stearns died in 1771, there were 42 Separate Baptist congregations served by 125 ministers in North Carolina and Virginia. In effect, the migration of the Stearns and Marshall families transplanted the First Great Awakening from New England, and specifically central Connecticut, to the southern back country.

According to the late Sydney Ahlstrom, a Harvard professor and the unofficial dean of American religious historians, those few Separate Baptists who came from central Connecticut were critical to "Baptist expansion throughout the South and the Old Southwest." That's no small difference considering that the dozens of Baptist groups in America today constitute the nation's largest Protestant family.

If I get to another post about this topic, I'll want to say a bit more about the connections between Separate Baptists in the South, like Shubal Stearns and Daniel Marshall, and the American Restoration Movement, associated with names like Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell.

Some Sources

Ahlstrom, Sydney E. A Religious History of the American People. 2nd ed. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. See Chapter 20, "Evangelical Expansion in the South," especially pp. 317-24.

Bowden, Henry Warner. Dictionary of American Religious Biography. 2nd ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993. A brief entry on Shubal Stearns appears on p. 514.

Fischer, David Hackett. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. For cultural background to Stearns's "holy whine," see the discussion of "Massachusetts Speech Ways: Yankee Twang and Norfolk Whine," pp. 57-62. See also Fischer's reference to old British folkways according to which, at least in England's North Midlands, people sometimes assembled "in the open at a standing-stone," p. 446.

Garrett, Paul E. Where Saints Have Trod in the Expansion: Volume One. Barberton, OH: Garrett Publishing, 2009. See especially pp. 21-23.

Heyrman, Christine Leigh. Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. See esp. pp. 10-11.

Hughes, Arthur H. and Morse S. Allen. Connecticut Place Names. Hartford: Connecticut Historical Society, 1976. This unique, outstanding resource does not include a listing for a Pulpit Rock in Tolland. Yet, it does list Pulpit Rocks in other towns, indicating that some of them were gathering places for religious activities.

Humphrey, Carol Sue. "Stearns, Shubal." In American National Biography, edited by John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, 20:597-98. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.

Taylor, C. E. "Elder Shubal Stearns." North Carolina Baptist Historical Papers 2 (1897): 99-105.

Waldo, Loren P. The Early History of Tolland. An Address Delivered before the Tolland County Historical Society, at Tolland, Conn., on the 22nd day of August an 27th day of September, 1861. Hartford: Case, Lockwood & Company, 1861.

A Note of Thanks

Historians publish their writings under their names. But as we see in the "Acknowledgements" sections of their books, they never carry out nor complete the work all by themselves. Far from it. When it comes to communicating history, we should not imagine that the job gets done by Lone Rangers. Instead, we should recognize that collaborative networks of people make it happen. Thank you to George Caruthers for taking me to Tolland, and also to Carl Sallstrom who listened to my story about Pulpit Rock and who eventually located it. Today, the land on which Pulpit Rock stands is owned by Lloyd Bahler and family. Lloyd was nice enough, on the spur of the moment, to show the three of us around the Bahler family property. Thank you!

Graduation at the University of Connecticut

We decided to take some pics outside Chloe's apartment.

Chloe and Abigail

Just outside Gampel Pavillion

Congratulations and best wishes to the University of Connecticut Class of 2011!

Sunday Soccer

Here and there, I've posted a few photos of my soccer daughter, Abigail. She's still playing and had a game this morning in Rocky Hill. However, things are a little different these days: she's a teenager now and does not want her dad taking pictures of her. And since this Papa isn't quite ready to join the paparazzi, well, I didn't get the greatest photos. Here's the best I could do.

Last minute instructions from her coach before getting on the field.

That's her in the center of the photo. Rocky Hill didn't beat Berlin this time around. But they gave it a good try. 2-1 was the final score.

See Abigail Ski!

So Ab and I went to Ski Sundown today. It was her first time to go skiing. After her lessons, I took her up to the top of the mountain. She skied down like a champ. Watch out, Lindsey Vonn!

We had to take a break every once in a while. . . .

Like a Giant among Dwarfs: Robert Sandeman

On April 17, 1771, Ezra Stiles, then pastor of the Second Congregational Church of Newport, Rhode Island, wrote in his diary about something he had recently seen in the newspapers:

that lately died at Danbury in Connecticutt [sic] Mr Robert Sandeman Founder of the Sect of Sandemanians. He came from Scotland into New Engld Autumn 1764. then about aet. 47. as he then told me.

Stiles (portrait below) would go on to serve as President of Yale College from 1778 until his death in 1795. An influential church leader during his day, he met Sandeman when the Scotsman first arrived in America, landing at Boston in 1764. Even before that time, Stiles and several of his fellow Congregationalist pastors had taken a wary interest in Sandeman and the independent Christian group of which he was the leading light.

It's hardly a stretch to say that Stiles, like many other great men, was interested in just about everything. The same was true of his friend Benjamin Franklin. But not everything captured Stiles' attention as did the life and times and demise of Sandeman. From the diary entry for August 5, 1772:

In the Boston print [i.e., newspaper] of 3d Inst. it is said.

"A Monument has been cut in this Town by Mr. Henry Christian Geyer, Stone cutter at the South End, to be sent to Connecticutt: it is executed on the composit Order with twisted Pillars, and the other proper Ornaments, having a Cherub's Head on Wings, and the following Label from his Mouth Rev. xiv 6, 7. --On the Tomb-stone is this Inscription.

Here lies

Until the Resurrection

The Body of

ROBERT SANDEMAN

A Native of Perth, North Britain,
who in the face of continual Opposition
From all Sorts of Men
Long and boldly contended
For the ancient Faith:
That the bare work of JESUS CHRIST,
without a Deed, or Thought, on the part of Man,
Is sufficient to present
The chief of Sinners
Spotless before God:
To declare this blessed Truth

As testified in the holy Scriptures

He left his Country--he left his Friends,

And after much patient Suffering

Finished his Labors

At DANBURY

2d April 1771,

aged 53 years.

Deigned Christ come so nigh to us

As not to count it shame

To call us Brethren--shall we blush

At aught that bears his Name.

Nay let us boast in his Reproach

And glory in his Cross,

When he appears, one smile from him

Shall far o'erpay our Loss."

The April 3, 1826 issue of The Christian Baptist includes an exchange between a semi-anonymous writer and the editor, Alexander Campbell. The initial letter, says Campbell, was written by one of the most worthy bishops in Virginia; whose standing in the learned world obtained for him the honorary degree of D. D. and whose piety and intelligence refused the title as a badge of popery. That, along with the signature R. B. S., leads to the conclusion that the letter's author was none other than Robert B. Semple, a great leader among the Baptists in Virginia at the time.

In his letter, Semple offers a number of compliments to Campbell as a preacher and writer. He also lists a few thoughtful and well-worded criticisms. Campbell then responds to Semple's letter. Among the points that Campbell takes up is the assertion that he is basically a Haldanian or Sandemanian, i.e. that he is a follower of the brothers Robert and James Haldane; or yet another church reformer from Scotland, Robert Sandeman. In his reply, Campbell acknowledges that he has learned from an array of writers, including the likes of the Haldanes and Sandeman, Luther and Calvin and Wesley. But, he adds, I do not believe that any one of them had clear and consistent views of the Christian religion as a whole.

Then, Campbell says more about Sandeman. He explains that many years before he had taken up a special project. He explored the question of rational versus experiential conversion: When a person initially comes to Christ, which is prior, the mind or the heart? Campbell admits that at the beginning of his studies, he was prejudiced against Robert Sandeman, the champion of rational religion. Instead, he had favored James Hervey, whose popular book Dialogues between Theron and Aspasio breathes the warm spirit of the revivalism of his day. Campbell mentions that, with the Bible nearby, he studied many authors, including Hervey, Marshall, Bellamy, Glass, and Cudworth. But as he went along, he discovered Sandeman to be like a giant among dwarfs . . . like Sampson with the gates and posts of Gaza on his shoulders (228).

So who was Robert Sandeman? And why did he so impress the likes of Stiles and Campbell? More to come in future posts.

Back in CT

Abigail was one of the readers during "Children's Sunday" this week at the Rocky Hill Congregational Church. She did a great job.


Benjamin was one of the seniors recognized that morning.

On Monday, Chloe and I had lunch at Bangkok Gardens in New Haven. Aubrey and Ben don't like exotic Asian food (!), and went for pizza slices instead.

Later that afternoon, I took Ben to see the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. It houses, among other things, Yale's copy of the Gutenburg Bible, printed in 1455. The book in the background isn't a reflection. It's the other of the two volumes.

A Trip to Pepe's Pizzeria

It was such a great night. For supper, Chloe, Benjamin, and I went to the center of the pizza universe, Frank Pepe's on Wooster Street in New Haven, CT.

As you can see, by the time I was able to take a photo the two of them had already gotten started.

After we finished off this pie, we went next door to Libby's for some of the best gelato ever. The perfect finish.

The Abigator and I at the Cheesecake Factory

This is the chocolate mousse cheesecake that we ordered at the Cheesecake Factory in West Hartford Center yesterday. Guess who got the first bite?

Let it be known that Abigail doesn't like this photo of herself. But it was the only one I had of her eating our dessert.

The Bellizzis in Connecticut

It's been so good getting to spend time with my kids this weekend. We took this photo just after church this morning.

Rebecca Signs to Play for Ohio Valley University

As of last night, I'm back in Connecticut; spending Spring Break with my kids up here. It's so good to be with them, and so nice for us to enjoy the hospitality of Michele's parents. Photos to follow, but so far it's been cool and rainy up here. Colder tomorrow, says the forecast. Yuck.

Anyway, last Tuesday my step-daughter, Rebecca Richardson, signed a letter of intent at her school, Randall High in Amarillo. She's going to attend Ohio Valley University and play soccer for them starting in the fall. I'm betting she'll be a great addition to their team. Michele, Aubrey, and I got to be there for her signing. Congratulations, Rebecca! We're proud of you!

Beach Boy Week

I'm thinking about my parents this morning. It's their 54th wedding anniversary. What a record of faithfulness through joy and tears, good times and bad. I'm very proud of and thankful for them.
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Nine of our crew splashed around in the Long Island Sound yesterday. Hammonasset Beach in Madison, Connecticut is nice this time of year. I'm glad I live in the day of waterproof spf 30!
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Oh, and the night before? Michele and I got to go cruising in a friend's '61 Vette convertible. A 283 with dual 4-barrels and a 4-speed. Drivin' round, top down. Photos and a Beach Boys song to follow. The friend was driving his other car: a '59 Vette convertible that's even faster. I think he's enjoying his "retirement."

Go to Yale for Free

I'm back in New England for the time being. Woke up to rain, which is precisely what these Connecticut Yankees didn't want. This July has been their wettest one on record (not counting the year they had a hurricane). Today's showers will likely push the total for the month to over 9 inches. We're hoping for sunshine this afternoon.

Anyway, sometime back Yale University began its open courses program. What's that? The homepage says, Open Yale Courses provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the internet. The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

So far, I've watched several of the segments from "Introduction to the Old Testament/Hebrew Bible" and "Introduction to Psychology."

As you'd expect, the lectures are very good to excellent. The one complaint I have is that only one camera is used, and it stays on the instructor. So when watching the videos, you can't always see the visuals (slides or chalkboard) used in the classroom. But that's a minor thing.

I've mentioned this program once before. But just recently they added several more courses and basically doubled the number. So if you didn't see something that interested you the first time, you might check it out again. Here's the Yale Open Courses homepage.

New Testament in New England

I'm excited about this summer. In early June, I'll make another one of my trips to Connecticut.

My employers provide me a week's worth of professional development. So next month, on a Monday through Friday, I'll be taking a course at Yale Divinity School. This year, it's "Romans" with Harold Attridge, a first-rate New Testament scholar and the Dean of YDS. Should be good.

Then, that weekend, I'll get to take Ben back to Kent, Connecticut, for this year's Northeastern States Men's Retreat. If you guys have the opportunity to make this one, it's well worth it.

Spring Break in New England

Yeah, I know. My title sounds like a collaboration between Barry Manilow and the Beach Boys. Anyway, the title for my life on Thursday was "Amarillo to Hartford on Southwest: One Man, Three Planes, Four Flights, 2100 Miles." And here I am back in Connecticut.

Friday was such a great time with my children. Chloe's on Spring Break from UConn this week. So I picked her up that morning (yes, she was devastated about the previous night's basketball game). We went down to New Haven for lunch at Claire's Corner Copia, hanging out in bookstores, etc. Chloe wound up buying a new pair of shoes. She really liked them and besides, "They were originally $100!" (Sigh. Cha-ching).

I, on the other hand, wound up buying two new books: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages. (Yeah, that's where I got the phrase above). The book is Ammon Shea's story about reading all twenty volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary in one year. That's the equivalent of about one novel's worth of reading every day, for a year, through the world's greatest, most-technical English dictionary. He has a chapter for each letter of the alphabet, talking about some of his favorite words. For someone who sits around reading dictionaries (he's been doing it since age ten), Shea is one entertaining writer.

I also got Michael Coogan's volume on the Old Testament in Oxford's "Very Short Introduction" Series. So far, I've found this series to be a bit of a failure, mainly because the authors have a hard time hitting a balance between "informed, solid coverage" and "very short." It's the nature of the beast as far as I'm concerned. We'll see how Coogan does with the Old Testament.

Later in the day, we picked up Benjamin and Abigail. The four of us got to spend some time just hanging out together. Then it was looking around in the Barnes & Noble, followed by dinner at the Cheesecake Factory in West Hartford.

More about books: On the plane rides up here, I read most of Jon Meacham's book American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of Nation. I suspect every religious professional in the U.S. should read this book--at least the first 80 pages or so--especially if one doesn't know much about the history of the First Amendment. Meacham's book goes a long way in proving that the framers of the Constitution were neither Tom-Paine type anti-religionists nor conservative Protestants bent on making the United States a Christian nation. The book is well-written and full of tasty quotes from people like Jefferson, Adams, and Madison.
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So I'm done with the Rice Haggard series from a couple weeks back. But that experience made me realize that there are several topics I'd like to do a series of posts on. Here are a few that are running around in my head:

As Good As It Gets: The Message of Ecclesiastes

Our Turn to Preach: Structures and Message in Matthew

The Basics of Buddhism

Chapters in a Life of Paul

So, You Want to Learn Hebrew

Church Elders and Their Children
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I'm sitting here writing this post at Michele's parents' place, my Connecticut home. I've said it before, but they're such fine people, such great hosts. I'm thankful for them and for this place.

And now, we're off to Abigail's soccer game for this afternoon.

Back Again, Leaving Soon, Psalms, Ecclesiastes

Last weekend's visit to Lubbock turned out even better than I expected it would.

For one thing, Kevin Schaffer wound up traveling with me and Ken Danley. Kevin, a former member of Acappella, is the worship minister at the Central Church of Christ. We'd met once or twice before. But the car ride to Lubbock and back gave us the chance to get to know each other better.

Over the weekend I got to talk with, learn from, and worship with the following people: Terry and Charlotte Smith, Jeff Walling, Randy Harris, Mike Cope (who, if you hadn't heard, announced a transition this week), Scot McKnight, Greg Taylor, Brandon Scott Thomas, Randy Gill, Larry Mudd, and Tod Vogt. Rich stuff.

Spring Break is next week for us. I plan to get an early start, flying out to Connecticut later this week to spend some time with my kids.

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This month, I'll finish out a Sunday-morning class on the Psalms that I've been teaching at Central.

Next month I'll be teaching a four-week, Wednesday-night series on Ecclesiastes at the Colonies Church of Christ here in Amarillo. I'm so looking forward to doing that class. For one thing, I'll have the chance to get better acquainted with the people at that congregation. And, this will also force me to go ahead and finish out some material on Ecclesiastes that I've been trying to put together for a long time now.

As a lot of people have discovered, Ecclesiastes is one of the more-interesting books of the Bible. To their credit, the people who put the Scriptures together decided not to squelch this dissenting opinion.

Getting ready to teach Ecclesiastes, I've thought about working through one of the newer commentaries. I've read the great, older works of Robert Gordis and Graham Ogden.

What newer books (or classics) would you recommend?

Two Weekends in New England

My week and a day in Connecticut went by so fast.

Yesterday was my twelve-hour travel day back to Amarillo. That's not the funnest experience (and, yes, funnest is a word), but it was sweet to see Michele when I got off that last plane.

Quick question: Does Chicago's Midway Airport just have short runways, or what? Landing there always feels like we're coming down on an aircraft carrier.

Anyway, here are just a few of the highlights from my trip, in random order and varying levels of importance:

1. As things turned out, I didn't take the course on "Judaism in the Time of Jesus." Sorry, nothing to report about that. However, if you go to the link for that course, you'll see another link that will take you to the syllabus, which is worth a look for those interested.

I hadn't realized until Monday morning that "Judaism . . ." was being offered as an afternoon class. I would have loved that one. But what I really needed was a morning class. I finally wound up going to a great alternative for me, a class called Reel Presence: Explorations in Liturgy and Film, taught by Dr. Teresa Berger.

Wow, what an interesting teacher. She's a German, Roman Catholic scholar, with two earned doctorates, who specializes in liturgical (worship) studies. As you might have guessed, everyone else in the class came from either Catholic or mainline Protestant backgrounds (Lutheran, Episcopalian, etc.). That's something I can count on at the Divinity School: always meeting up with people who come from places that are quite different from the places I know. That can be an education all by itself.

So, as it turned out, the movie buff in me got to learn a little more about reflecting theologically on the films we tend to watch as mere entertainment. Maybe I'll talk about that sometime. By the way, although most of what we actually watched in class were movie clips, one film we watched all the way through is called Whale Rider. Anyone else seen it? That could be a provocative one for churches, to say the least.

2. While in Connecticut, my kids and I got to visit some of our favorite places to eat, including this gourmet vegetarian place in downtown New Haven called Claire's Corner Copia. We followed that up with ice cream dessert at Ashley's. Woobie Doobie.

3. Over the weekend, Friday and Saturday, my boy and I got to attend the Northeastern States Men's Retreat, held annually at the Kent School up in the northwestern corner of Connecticut.

This year's speaker was J. J. Turner, a long-time leader among Churches of Christ and, yes, John Alan's dad. J. J. spoke about "activating Acts in the 21st century." In addition to presenting so many great reminders, he put his quick sense of humor to good use. It was good for me to hear those lessons, to sing with 250 other Christian men, to introduce my son to that experience, to see again so many church leaders from the Northeast.

Oh, and speaking of bloggers, late Saturday morning, as I worked my way through most of the items at the Kent Public Library book sale, I just happened to meet The Blog Prophet himself, Brian Nicklaus. Very cool.

4. Finally, last Sunday I had the exquisite pleasure of baptizing my son, Benjamin, into Christ. This was something he'd had on his mind for a long time, something we had talked about and prayed about and planned. How sweet. Photos to follow (when I can figure out how to copy them).

Back in Connecticut

It's late Sunday night, the end of an unusual weekend. Saturday was one of those all-day travel days. From Amarillo to Dallas to Little Rock to Chicago to Hartford. Four flights, two plane changes, twelve hours, and I was back in Connecticut.

This morning, I drove from South Windsor to Rocky Hill, where I picked up Chloe and Benjamin, my two older children. The three of us attended worship at the Ward Street Church of Christ in Wallingford. It was the first time we'd been back in a year or more. It was good to be with the people who were there this morning.

Anytime I step inside that white, picture-postcard church built by German Lutherans nearly a century ago, I open up the book that is my life and turn to one of its most significant chapters, a time in my life with some of the highest highs and all of the lowest lows.

The selfish side of me always wants to be welcomed back to that place as though I were some kind of Christian hero. Good things happened at Ward Street during the more than ten years I preached there. We grew by more than 50 percent, revived Vacation Bible School, ordained elders and deacons for the first time in the church's history, purchased a tract of land on which to build new facilities, had a fairly-successful capital fund-raising campaign. The list goes on.

There's only one problem. Those aren't the only reasons I'm remembered there. You see, Ward Street was the scene of my horrifically-bad divorce. It's the place where, for all of my preaching and teaching about faith, hope, and love, my life and my marriage became a source of doubt, hopelessness, and anger. I was officially divorced on the day after September 11, 2001. (That was one ugly week). Along with the house where I used to live, the Ward Street Church represents my personal ground zero. So visiting there always evokes so much inside of me. I'm not always prepared to handle it well.

After driving around a little, we had lunch in Wallingford and then went to pick up my youngest, Abigail. Then, the four of us came to South Windsor. I'm staying here because of the hospitality of Michele's parents, George and Elaine Caruthers. They're some of the finest people God has anywhere. What a pleasure to be their guest. I drive their car, and my kids and I come and go as we please. It was beautiful this afternoon and we spent a little time just hanging out on their back deck, which is where George took the picture above.

Tomorrow, I'll get up early (for me) and make my way down to New Haven for the first day of class. The course on "Foremothers in Faith" was canceled due, I think, to low enrollment. So I've switched over to what was my first pick, "Judaism in the Time of Jesus." I think it will be a good class. What I'm really looking forward to, though, is spending the afternoons and evenings with my kids, once we all get out of school.

Another one from last week's Vacation Bible School