Lest Blood Be Shed

Classes start for McCormick next week and I don't have one book that I need. Not that I even know what books I do need. Despite that, I'm really excited about this up coming semester. I know it's going to be hard but I'm sure I'll pull through. I'm taking History Survey II, Introduction to Theology, and Paul and the Politics of Difference. Once I finish with these courses I will be finished with all of my 9 bible courses and 3 history courses that are required for my M.Div.

I've also been playing around with publishing my iCal calendars. I found this pretty cool php ics calendar display program (though they don't have a website anymore) and have published my calendars here.

As I look back at what I've taken already, it just shocks me at how far along I am.

These are the classes I've taken up at McCormick:
I 301 - Pilgrimage in Faithfulness (PIF)
MED 313 - Introduction to Christian Education
E 300 - Introduction to Contemporary Christian Ethics
B 300 - Introduction to Biblical Studies
B 321 - Hebrew Exegesis I
B 322 - Hebrew Exegesis II
B 324 - Greek Exegesis I
B 325 - Greek Exegesis II
B 433 - Genesis
B 400 - The Foundations of Jewish and Christian Difference
B 407 - The Gospels
H 300 - History Survey I
H 430 - Daughters of Ethiopia: African & African American Women in Conversation
M/E 405 - Families in Theological, Pastoral & Ethical Perspective
M/E 417 - Power & Abuse
MWP 314 - Introduction to Christian Worship

That's a lot of writing. Each one of those classes was on average more than 20 pages of writing.

The college I work for has found itself in a bit of a controversy. Currently the handbook has gender issues (sexual orientation) relegated to every part of the handbook (anti-harasment, etc.) except the anti-discrimination policy. That's right, if one works for Saint Joseph's College, the administration can at any time fire that person because of his/her sexual orientation. Another part of the discrimination at SJC is that any student-run group at SJC that deals with gender issues will be denied funding. That isn't the real controversy! Many in the faculty and among the students see the Neanderthal like policy for what it is and have started the process of changing the policy. The policy change was brought up in the Student-Life committee and voted to proceed. After the vote, the non-tenured faculty who brought up the issue were called into an administrator's office and told it would be better if they withdrew their suggestion and keep quiet about such issues lest they be fired. These faculty members brought the suggestion of the administration to the committee and declared in the minutes the egregious back-room dealings of the administration. The administration has essentially called for a silencing of ideas amongst the faculty. Fortunately, the faculty is in an uproar and the administration is claiming they are only doing what they have been told to do by the Bishop of the Lafayette Diocese, Bishop Higi, and the CPPS Provincial Director for the Cincinnati Province (which includes SJC), Fr. Angelo Anthony. This Wednesday the faculty had planned a meeting to discuss how an Academic Catholic institution is really a diverse place of discourse and learning. Many faculty who were slated to speak at the event have changed their position on the acceptance of the Roman-Catholic church to embrace diversity in an academic setting. There will be a board meeting this weekend too. Which, of course, Bishop Higi and Fr. Angelo are members. I wonder if anyone will be fired on the faculty and truly wonder what would happen if anyone found out that one of the top administrators at SJC is gay (don't ask me who. I won't say.)?

Silence will never let people hear the Holy Spirit working in communities nor will "firing" people. The Roman-Catholic church should have learned that from Martin Luther

As part of the requirements for being a inquirer with the PC(USA), I went to a two day psychological evaluation. The two days involved testing, some one on one counseling, testing, lunch, testing and did I mention testing? I took a revised version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (138 questions), the MMPI-2 (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory) (538 t/f questions), sentence completion, career preference, career evaluation, and an enneagram test. They started me off with the MMPI-2 test (maybe to wear me out!) and there were some pretty crazy questions on the test. For example, more than once the test asked if I would do better in life if people were not out to get me/kill me. Another one was; "have you ever lied? T/F" The results of that test showed that I didn't try and cheat the test (either positively or negatively) and that I fall well within the statistical average for sane people on every point of the test. The test is ancient though (I think it was developed in 1948 and revised in 1986). It's so old the test still checks for the "psychological disease of homosexuality" which, as the psychologist explained to me as we were going through each section being evaluated, is know to show a false positive if the individual is highly educated. So, you are either queer or have been exposed to ideas...or maybe all gays are super intelligent and are the next evolutionary step... or maybe not The second test they gave me was the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. I was on the borderline (and crossing the boundaries for every other subgroup) INTJ/INFJ. The sub-evaluation said I was an "Experiential INFJ" or an " Empathizing Caring INTJ." The counselor and I figured that my "default" mode was the INTJ and I had learned to be an INFJ for close personal situations (say like in a church community or a close friendship). The Enneagram personality test showed I was a 9 or "A Peaceful Person" which basically means I'm the archetypal (or stereotypical) priest type (peaceful, easy-going, bridge-builder, ecumenical, laissez-faire). The counselor and I also thought I was a 5 or "A Wise Person" which would be someone who is "wise, observant, a thinker, curious, synthesizing." Which makes sense because of my borderline INFJ/INTJ.

All in all the two days were kind of boring but very informative. And it's nice to know I'm Mary Poppins, "Practically Perfect in Every Way!"

I get an email every day that contains daily lectionary readings and I have stopped really reading the email because of all the other clutter I get in my Inbox. I needed a way to make these reading more accessible to me and from anyplace on the Internet (not just from my inbox). I use the "Live Bookmarks" feature of firefox quite a bit now and thought... "why can't I do that for my lectionary email?" Well, after a day of coding I have finished the feed. I wrote a perl script to parse the email when it comes into my Inbox and write out a static xml+rss2.0 file. The script seems to be working pretty well and so I offer it to anyone who would like to use the feed.

http://lestblood.imagodirt.net/lectionary/lectionary.xml

The lectionary readings are from the PC (USA) and so they are not exactly the same as some other church's lectionary readings. Though, on Sunday there are two sets of readings... the standard lectionary readings and the church year lectionary readings (which do correspond to other church lectionaries).

Finally a Mac I can give my parents that will not cost me an arm and a leg! There is no excuse, now that Apple has released the Mac Mini everyone needs to move away from the evil-proprietary, virus and spyware ridden regime that is Microsoft. Pactice safe computing and help the World be a better place... Switch from Windows to something better!

I've recently been asked to preach outside of my own church! For two Sundays! I guess word gets around about really good (or really cheap) preacher types. I just received the bulletins for the Fowler Presbyterian church and it seems they are a very small community. I love it! I'm going to be in conversation with the temporary pastor to see what type of church it is and what type their particular commmunity's "vocabulary" is.

In other Jesus news, I just finished a book talking about queer theology which speaks greatly about our baptismal identities being our sole identity and all other things that society constructs our identity are non-essential. These non-essential marks of societal identity include such pillars of society as gender, class, sexuality, nationality, political affiliation, etc. What makes this "Jesus news" worthy is that today the RSS feed from BibleGateway.com had the following as the "scripture of the day."

Galatians 3:26-28

²⁶You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus, ²⁷for all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. ²⁸There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

I have been using for my long-distance at home a VoIP connection provided by Vonage. The school had been paying for the service which gave me free long-distance. Fortunately the school finally wised up and cancelled their Vonage service (vonage is a horrible horrible VoIP company) but this left me with no long-distance (other than my .10 a min lan long-distance). The school (Brian Capouch) has been big in the VoIP scene and had switched to a company called NuFone. This company works great with the Asterisk open source PBX software and so I decided to setup my own PBX in my house! Asterisk requires a linux machine to work which since I didn't want to have a full machine up and running 24hrs a day just for a few phone calls, OpenWRT+Asterisk seemed like the best solution. OpenWRT is a linux distro that runs on the Linksys WRT-G/GS wireless G routers. These OpenWRT routers are fully functional linux installs without all the hassle or electrical cost of a full machine running.

I've since setup some pretty cool things with more on the way with Asterisk. I can now call (using a sip phone on campus) x7106 and it will ring my house internet. I can also call (from the house) any long-distance number and have it use the SJC NuFone account to place the call.

Here is how (how-to) I got it to work