Otter's Rock

Okay, you all know about Project Gutenberg, right?  Project Gutenberg works to get books and magazines that are out of copyright online for free in text form.  They've got almost 30,000 books available, with more being added every month, and there are a lot of sites that take books Gutenberg has put up and offer them on their own site.  It's awesome.  And the process of getting books ready is pretty cool, too.  Distributed Proofreaders is a system whereby texts are scanned, OCRed, proofread multiple times, formatted, and made ready for posting.  The whole system is designed so that people who want to volunteer their time can do as much or as little as they want, and still contribute.  Have twenty minutes to spare?  Log on, find a book that interests you, and proofread a single page.  Have more time?  Do more pages.  Alas, there are some steps that simply can't be broken down like that, and content providing--i.e. finding books, scanning, and OCRing them--is one.  (Well.  A lot of the time, you can use Google Books or The Internet Achive or various university libraries to 'harvest' page scans from, and that speeds things up considerably.)

Well.  To make a long story short, I have just finished scanning a book.  It is now ready to be handed off to someone else to OCR.  The book is True Christianity, by Johann Arndt, which was one of the major Lutheran devotional works of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and was the first spark in what became the Pietism movement within Lutheranism.  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, if a Lutheran household was going to have only two books, chances were one of them was the Bible and the other was True Christianity.  Which makes True Christianity a major work, and one that should be easily available, for scholarly research if no other reason.  And while part of the book is on Google Books, it is nowhere complete, and the Google Books version isn't that readable, as is so often the case.  So I checked an 1863 copy out of the seminary library, borrowed a scanner from a friend, and have spent the last month scanning pages while doing my homework.  And it is now finished!  Yay!  All 542 pages!

I've been recommended for Endorsement! That means that I can continue my seminary education and go on Internship next year in preparation for becoming a rostered minister in the ELCA. There wasn't much doubt that I would be recommended for Endorsement (if my candidacy committee or my professors or my CPE supervisor thought there were problems or room for doubt, they would have told me so that I could do something about it). It is still a great relief to get through it. The process is this: your academic advisor and two people from your synod's Candidacy Committee go over your transcripts, your ten-page Endorsement Essay, and your CPE final evaluation. They talk about them for about ten minutes without you, then bring you in and ask you about them and anything else they have questions about. The question-and-answer portion lasts about 45 minutes, and can include anything they think is relevant to being a pastor and/or anything that gets brought up. Then they send you out and discuss things, before bringing you back in and letting you know what they're recommending. Then they give their report to your committee as a whole, and the committee votes on it (the vote is basically a rubber stamp; I've never heard of anybody getting recommended for Endorsement who doesn't actually end up getting Endorsed). It's pretty important; without being Endorsed, basically, you can't progress any farther towards ministry.

( This semester as a whole )

I preached last Sunday the 21st; here's my sermon.
( Sermon for Sunday, October 21, 2007 )

Anyone interested in how censorship works on the internet needs to go read this post. Right now. Particularly if you're active in fandom. It talks about some frightening things happening in today's society as regards free speech and the way it works online, and the witch hunt being led by a lot of legislators, law enforcement, and citizen's groups against child pornography.

(I think going after child pornography and predators who target children is an excellent idea. I think doing McCarthyist-style witch hunts is a very bad idea, because in the hysteria a lot of people who are completely innocent get persecuted, and many times that number have their legitimate rights and freedoms curtailed through fear. And I think that, unfortunately, it looks like we're heading into a McCarthyist-style era, here.)

One of my classes is Early Church and its Creeds; we spent most of the semester focusing on the first 300-400 years of Christian history and the writings of the great early theologians. Now we're going at speed through the Dark Ages in the west (i.e. the time between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the beginning of the Middle Ages), because, let's face it, it was the Dark Ages. Nothing much was happening, theologically. As for the 'practical' history, aside from the reign of Charlemagne it was pretty much one d@*^ thing after another.

Anyway, one of the main figures of the end of the Dark Ages was Bernard of Clairvaux, and we have a short section on him in the reading for tomorrow. In it is a quote he said about Mary and Martha. (For those of you who don't know the story, Mary and Martha were the sisters of Lazarus. At one point when Jesus was visiting them, Martha was doing the housework while Mary was listening to Jesus, and Martha asked Jesus to make her sister help. Instead, Jesus rebuked Martha, saying that Mary had chosen the "good part." Bernard said that "Martha's part, if that is our lot, must be borne with patience." Luke 10:38-42)

It reminded me of a poem by Rudyard Kipling, one of my favorite poets. It's a great poem, about the people who get their hands dirty.

( The Sons of Martha )

Okay, 99.9% of the people who read this aren't going to get it, but I've been trying to remember this limerick for a couple days and I finally did and I'm really glad so I'm going to post it here. I got it from Dr. Marvin Slind, a history professor at Luther, in a class called Rome: Republic and Empire. We were studying the latter days of the Empire, and since the Christian Church was one of the major players at the time, we ended up discussing a lot of early church history as well. Facts you need to know to understand this limerick: one of the early councils codifying Christian doctrine took place at Nicaea, and one of the doctrines they decided was heresy was called "aryan" because it had been thought up by a guy named Arius, iirc. It had to do with the nature of God, and after three years I don't remember all the details. The opposing view, that the Nicene Council approved, was trinitarianism, that God is one God made up of three distinct beings: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Anyway, for some reason a lot of barbarian tribes who converted to Christianity as the Roman Empire was crumbling preferred arianism to trinitarianism.

The heretical creed of the Arians
Appealed to many barbarians
They liked the idea
Condemned at Nicaea;
Not many became trinitarians

(Thanks, Dr. Slind!)