Teaching, a few books, and “Lies”

Today I finally started the online TESOL course which I’d been thinking about for a while. Shortly after I graduated from high school I applied to a similar program at a local university but was rejected. I guess this is my second shot about 12 years later.

A few months after I got back I taught World Religions and Philosophy at a small local college here, and since the educational style was based on the American system I enjoyed it very much. I only lasted one semester, though: they weren’t offering enough courses to keep me there full-time so they gave me a part-time offer and I told them I’d rather not. Part-time doesn’t quite pay the bills around here, you know. That was almost four months ago.

As much as I enjoyed teaching religion and philosophy last semester and Scripture while I lived in the United States, I’ve become more and more uncomfortable with handling these things in a classroom. More and more I feel that I know about less and less, and becoming Orthodox certainly didn’t help since I’ve been thrown into a religious vertigo of sorts. For now, and perhaps for some time after this, I’d rather not be teaching “deep things”. English seems pretty harmless by comparison, doesn’t it? For one, you can’t play spiritual guru when teaching English, at least not without trying very, very hard.

From the brief stint at the local college last semester I acquired a few books for class preparation which I think might interest some of you:

• The Meaning of the Holy Qur’an by Abdullah Yusuf Ali (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia: Islamic Book Trust, 2007). This is of course a classic translation—or rather, “interpretation”, as the Muslims would prefer to call it. Mine is a handy pocket-sized edition.
• The Bhagavad-Gita: Krishna’s Counsel in Time of War, translated by Barbara Stoler Miller (New York: Bantam, 2004). I chose this translation because it was the least technical of the ones I found and also because it simply keeps the word “Krishna” when the original text actually refers to him by his various lordly titles.
• Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, translation with introductions and notes by Alastair Hannay (London: Penguin, 1996). I’m going to read this as soon as I finish with the collection of the letters of Flannery O’Connor (which might take a while more since it’s a sizeable book).
• Sheng Yen, Attaining the Way: A Guide to the Practice of Chan Buddhism (Boston: Shambala, 2006). Both my curiosity about and respect for the Mahayana School of Buddhism were stirred as I learned more about it. You see, what little training I had, I had as a Theravadin, which is hardly the way to learn about their “opponents”, so to speak.
• Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). This hardly needs introduction. His narrative of the Enlightenment project for ethics is quite captivating, I think.

Unfortunately, starting a TESOL course—and hopefully finding a job later—won’t leave me with more time to read, but I hope to get to these eventually.

Since it’s Friday, I’ll leave with something I’ve been thinking about—my favorite song from one of my favorite movies, Once. I think it speaks to the effect of lies on our relationships—you know, the ones we tell God, others and ourselves. Repentance, it seems to me, has something to do with acknowledging them and leaving them behind in order to begin again. Give it a listen and let me know if you think it’s as Lenten as I think it is. Here is Glen Hansard’s “Lies”:

Liturgy and TV

In his commentary on the Book of Numbers, Gordon Wenham suggests that the modern reality that most closely approximates the life-shaping power of the liturgy in Ancient Israel is the television. When I first read this some years ago, I found his analogy striking because it gave me a vivid impression of how much the liturgy must have permeated life in Ancient Israel.

As the years have gone by, though, what Wenham probably intended as a passing comment has come back to haunt me more and more. I feel as though I’m gradually waking up to something I’d rather not think about—the fact that TV, like the liturgy, offers us a hermeneutic for reality, a common system of symbols and, if I may say so, a rhythm for daily life itself.

We know about—or least we think we do—the dangerous lives of Alaskan fishermen who face the Bering Sea or the political forces at play in the Middle East. We know the songs, the jingles, the Jeopardy time-keeping tune. We know what time the news comes on and the day and time on which the season finale of our favorite show will air. Can we say the same about the dangerous lives of revolutionaries in first-century Palestine, the psalms, or the feasts instituted by God in Leviticus 23?

Is the television really an alternative liturgy?

“Boredom is the kingdom of the Devil”

“The curse of labor.” But many people, if not the majority, are wallowing in furious activity because they are afraid of remaining face-to-face with life, with themselves, with death. They are bored, and boredom is the kingdom of the Devil. Bored and afraid, they deafen themselves with action, with ideas and ideologies. The key to our culture is an optimistic activity with traces of fear and boredom. Without God, all is possible, but this “all” is endlessly frightening and boring. It seems to me that the first duty of the Church is to refuse any part in the logic and the keys of this world. One cannot enlighten the world without first wholly rejecting it. What is needed in contemporary Christianity is courage and spiritual freedom….

The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983, Entry for October 19, 1973.

2008

In no particular order, the top 10 things I learned/realized/was told in 2008:

1. The other Dan Craig is a brilliant a musician/songwriter from Colorado and has an album called Skin Grows Thin that just came out this year. I listened to it every day while driving to work last semester.

2. If you jump on the Facebook bandwagon everybody will find you—everybody from high school classmates to students to people you’ve only met once. All 242 (and counting) of them. And you’ll even do a little friend-scouting and stalking of your own.

3. Fr. John Behr is one kick-ass historian and theologian.

4. Pablo’s on 6th on the southwest corner of 6th and Washington in Denver makes the best Americano in Colorado and the world. Believe me: I’ve moved halfway across the world and it’s TRUE.

5. The more honest you are with yourself and others, the more you can love and let yourself be loved.

6. God isn’t fooled by the masks we put on even though we ourselves are.

7. Behind the wheel, most Malaysians are functionally Darwinian. Also, they don’t believe in concepts such as “lane” and “letting other people in”. Blinker? What blinker?

8. If you tell non-Christians you’re a Christian, they’ll expect Christian behavior from you.

9. These words which a wise friend wrote me after my mom died:

Each mother, like each human being, is unique, and one’s relationship with one’s mother is necessarily unique; but I think it is true to say that the loss of one’s mother is something none of us ever really gets over, even if we were to live for 200 years. For most of us, losing one’s mother changes the way we look at life and death; it is the door through which mortality really sinks in to us for the first time. The person through whom we were brought into life succumbs to death; one’s tie to the world of the living becomes strangely ambiguous, because so great a part of oneself is no longer there. At the same time, the confrontation with the reality of death is, I suspect, part of God’s will for each one of us. The medicine is very bitter, but it is given to us out of love, in God’s will to lead us out of what we are and into what he would have us be. It is part of the painful process by which we are made fit to enter into his kingdom, a communion with him in which all that we ever lost is found again.

10. Prostrating in prayer can change the way you look at God, yourself, the world. Seriously.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

I think the Internet’s been giving me the stoopids lately, and I’m not alone.

I can’t read War and Peace anymore.  I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.

Bruce Friedman, Professor, University of  Michigan Medical School

Prove the guy who wrote this wrong by reading the whole article.

Hat Tip: Malaysian blogger Marina Mahathir