New liturgy blog organized by Liturgical Press

I thought it best to announce here my presence on a brand-new liturgy blog, Pray Tell. The blog is cosponsored by St John's School of Theology • Seminary and Liturgical Press.

The blog is intended to be a moderate blog on the liturgy whose contributors are well-informed of liturgical history, theory, and practice. It is inspired by the liturgical movement and by St John's place in that movement. I do not know what it will eventually become, but I invite you to come share in its becoming and find out.

A thought on copyright protection

You all know I'm interested in copyright and its limitations.

Every semester I end up asking students if I can use their papers, essays, or assignments as an example for my future classes. Almost every time, they agree wholeheartedly but choose to be anonymous.

I think it's interesting that they are more interested in contributing to the common good (and in the affirmation of their work that it entails) than they are in getting credit for it. This also means that no one has to feel singled out or embarrassed. Ideally, at least.

The primary motivation for creative work is to find readers for that creative work.

Gee, thanks

Matt and I got a retirement account balance today.

"Expect to be working a long time," he says.

"I'm an academic. I'll never retire!" I respond. "We don't really retire, we just become emeritus."

"Yeah, that's true. You just stop teaching -- or stop teaching well."

"Hey!"

"Just telling you my experience."

Note to hiring committees...

..."we do whatever the law requires" is not a selling point.

Due to a shocking combination of grace, coincidence, the good word of my mentors, and hard work (always the most shocking component), I ended the job search season with two offers. I was surprised and (very) pleased and was able to take a job I'm extremely enthusiastic about.

There was one part of the job search process that amused, annoyed, and, eventually, infuriated me, however. That was exploring the maternity, family, and emergency leave policies where I interviewed. This was interesting to me for a lot of reasons. A couple of my friends have done research on family-friendly institutional policies and their effect on women's academic careers. I went to both my on-campus interviews visibly and unmistakeably pregnant, and I was upfront with everyone about having a 2 year old. Most importantly, however, I'm a parent of a kid with a potentially serious chronic health condition, who was hospitalized and endangered as an infant. I know exactly how much a family medical emergency can impede academic work -- I estimate I was set back at least 9 months by mine.

At the first place I interviewed, I explained this experience and asked about their family leave policies. The chair responded, "We do everything the law requires." His tone implied that this was something to be proud of and that I should be fully reassured by his response. Not terribly impressed, I asked about tenure freezes. "That's covered under the law." No, it's not, I said. "Oh, it definitely is." Eventually I was told that the university was "very family-friendly" and then breezily assured, "Anyway, you don't seem like the type that would need to take time off for maternity leave!"

With the implication being, I suppose, that if I did seem like that type they wouldn't be interested? In the context of my having explained taking time off to care for my sick newborn, this hit me with frustration and unease. To make matters worse, the assistant provost didn't know any more than the chair about the university's policies. No one seems to care.

The next institution was very different. One of the people on the hiring committee met me at the airport and visibly noticed my condition. I volunteered my due date, etc. and she cheerfully told me a lot about their policies in the car on the way to the university. The provost and one of the other women in the department repeated and elaborated the next day. There was no feeling of stigma -- in fact their paid leave for maternity is exactly equivalent to the partial research grant they offer periodically, which makes it seem more sanctioned. The policies were adequate (not European but much better than most American jobs), but the sensation was much better.

This didn't make the decision for me -- far from it -- but I have to say, "we fulfill the law" isn't much of a selling point.

Serendipity

The universe is conspiring... in my favor?

With all the attention I've been getting recently about my work at Mar Thoma, I was starting to worry that my dissertation would never really get out of that big black cover at ND -- although I know I should just be worried about getting it into that cover at this point. But in any case I was concerned that the interest I was getting was for the project, not my work, and that I'd never get my other projects off the ground.

Now I have two initial interviews, at my top two school picks. This week I've heard about two conferences and a collaborative volume that are soliciting proposals on concepts that are central to my dissertation work.

Both the conferences are within 15 miles of my apartment. So even though they're both in the spring, and I have big and unalterable plans for the spring, I might be able to go.

And finally, I should be submitting revisions this week.

I sure hope the universe only has this one shoe.

Yes I did

Chapter 3 did in fact go to my advisor, along with (somewhat outdated) revised versions of chapters 1 and 2. Fixing that broken chapter (and its counterparts in chapter 2) has taken me almost a year.

I love fieldwork

Yesterday I was at Mar Thoma as usual, but I was giving out questionnaires on Qurbana experience to the youth. I got 62 surveys back and did one interview of a young CCD teacher who got so emotional talking about the East Syrian rite that she started trembling and forgot about the meeting she was supposed to go to.

A girl in my friend's 9th grade class diffidently asked me for my autograph after she had filled out the questionnaire. Bemused, I ended up writing in the front of her CCD notebook thanking her for her help with my research and invoking God's blessings on her. Her answers to the questionnaire were really wise and beautiful.

A young man who just got back from five years in India started teaching me Malayalam. (I had to work hard to make him believe I actually planned to learn it, first.) Nandi!

Today I'm tabulating the results and looking for correlations between the young people's birth place, command of Malayalam, and preferred mass and their way of speaking about the experience of worshiping in the Syro-Malabar rite. I'm having a blast.

I actually think that the reason I'm enjoying this so much is very similar to the reason that Michelle likes washing mugs: each questionnaire, with its handwriting, its unique phrasing, its biographical information, and its futile attempt to constrain the spiritual life to a few brief lines, gives me some insight into the complexity of the wonderful people I've met at Mar Thoma and their relationship to their unique and beautiful liturgical tradition.

Structured procrastination

I was remarking today on how many important professional things I've gotten done in the past couple of months since I stopped working on my dissertation. I've taught my first class (a whole world of impossible demands in itself), updated my CV, applied for a grant, submitted important proposals, begun working on a totally new article for possible publication, and sent a bunch of emails to strangers about important matters that I would normally agonize over for months (in this case, I instead only agonized over them for weeks).

This is not because I've suddenly become a productive person. It's because I'm letting my dissertation atrophy, and I have to do something useful to keep myself from overflowing with panic about it. I found a highly entertaining article about this phenomenon:

The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.

Maybe this is why they make me write a dissertation, so I'll get all these other things done. Maybe it's all a ruse, and in the end I won't have to finish it?

Please?

Teaching glee

I was pleased with my students' performance on my first-ever midterm exam, but grading the essays has been tedious, a tedium that occasionally falls into frustration at hitherto-unsuspected misunderstandings of key material.

The high points, though, are astonishingly high. After grading a few in a row of "good essay, but it could be better" (I mentally categorize before I think about point values), I hit an essay where every line was clearly revealing the student's excellent understanding of the topic and its connection to the course. I found myself muttering, "Yes, yes... YES!" and I wanted to send a personal email thanking the student for studying so hard. (Of course I won't.)

I can't decide if this is teaching or if I'm nuts.

One year old games

I've decided that one-year-olds are cute. At least when they're Thomas.

He's gotten "mamamamama" down. He says it and then he waves at me and grins. Except sometimes he gets it "amma" instead. I'm ok with that -- that's what Indian babies call their moms, I've heard.

His second word was "out." Pronounced "owwwwww... teh." So Matt tells me. He and Thomas were in the back bedroom and Thomas closed the door too hard so he couldn't get it open again (he likes to open and close the doors). Matt says he looked at him very seriously and said "owwwww... teh." So Matt said, "You want to go out?" and Thomas said again, "owwwwww... teh." What a fun "first" word.

Yesterday he invented a new game. I have a pair of drawstring jeans. I hold the string out and wiggle it, saying, "Fishing for baaabies! I'm fishing for baaaabies!" He grabs it between his teeth and I say, "Oooh! I caught one!" He laughs like crazy, letting go, and I say, "Oops, it got away. Fishing for babies!" He liked this so much I had to tuck the strings in eventually to get him to stop grabbing at my legs.

On the other side of my life, I got a proposal accepted for a conference in Germany. Heidelberg, here I come! This is my first accepted proposal.