1. Learn Coptic
I, along with a mix of graduate students, professors, and one undergraduate student are learning/teaching ourselves Coptic this summer. We are using Thomas Lambdin’s Introduction to Sahidic Coptic as well as Bentley Layton’s Coptic in 20 Lessons. Also, we will be taking a bit of an inductive approach as we read through the Gospel of Thomas in Coptic. I am very excited to finally be learning Coptic, as it opens up a whole new world of ancient texts.

2. Write a book review
I am reviewing Emmanuel Tukasi’s Determinism and Petitionary Prayer in John and the Dead Sea Scrolls: An Ideological Reading of John and the Rule of the Community (1QS) for the journal Dead Sea Discoveries.

3. Improve my classical Greek
I will be reading book 6 of Josephus’ Jewish War with a few students and Dr. Levenson to brush up on my classical Greek and prepare myself for reading Xenophon’s Cyropaedia in the Fall.

4. Prepare NT Lectures
I will be teaching an Introduction to the New Testament Course in the fall, so I will spend time this summer preparing lectures, presentations, assignments, and handouts. I am particularly excited about teaching NT, though I suspect my students will be a bit less enthusiastic about the course.

5. Learn French 
Part of my program’s requirements (along with many other religion departments) require doctoral students to show competency in German and French (aside from the numerous ancient languages). I already have competency in German, so I will spend this summer and fall learning French to then take the university reading competency exam in December.

Aside from these plans, Trinity and I have a few trips to NC planned and I hope to get back on the bike a lot this summer (that is, after my broken ankle heals).

It is, to put matters bluntly, poor method to compare and contrast a richly nuanced and historically complex understanding of Pauline christology with a conglomerate of ‘mystery texts’ treated as if they were historically and ideologically simple and interchangeable; to treat the former as development and the latter as frozen. As long as we identify recognizable humanity with historical consciousness and openness to change with critical thought – as we do – the usual treatment o the religions of Late Antiquity, as well as the bulk of the other mythic traditions of humankind, is inhumane.

In other words, we can not, in our quest to be scholars and not mere “cheerleaders,” as Bruce Lincoln would say, we must make sure that we are doing our sources justice. If we start out to compare “Christianity” with other religions, for example, in an attempt to show how “Christianity” is “unique,” then our end necessitates that our means will be unjust to that which is not “Christianity” and even to that which we label as “Christianity,” because we are, at best subconsciously, projecting our own normative view of “Christianity” onto the vast landscape of Christianities and declaring as “essential” or “true” Christianity, that which happens to be the form of “Christianity” that we happen to subscribe to today in light of our historical, social, economic, and political circumstances.

Americans, especially American politicians, have goten quite comfortable that America is the “greatest country on earth.” In short, many believe in “American Exceptionalism,” the idea that America is qualitatively different from every other country on earth; i.e. there is something in the “essence” of America that makes it better than every other country.

At the risk of With almost certainty that I will be labeled “unAmerican” or as someone who “hates America,” I have to say that I fundamentally disagree with this sentiment. This disagreement lays on numerous foundations, chief of which is the fact that America claims the moral high ground in almost every situation, yet cannot seem to adhere to those same moral codes itself.

Civil Disobedience
During the Arab Spring earlier this year, cable news outlets gave 24 hour coverage of the events in Egypt and Libya (though not as much in Tunisia) and yet when our own citizens engage in civil disobedience, we largely turn a blind eye. Don’t know what I’m talking about? It’s called Occupy Wall Street, a movement calling on people to peacefully protest the greed that runs rampant on Wall St. and the financial collapse of 2008 that was largely caused by practices of those on Wall St. Sounds like a fine, democratic right that they should have, even if you disagree with their message. Yet, some of these protestors have been the victims of alleged police brutality, a theme which dominate media coverage of the events in Tahrir Square, but which is getting minimal coverage when it happens to our own citizens. See this video where protestors, who have been corralled and penned against a building by a mesh barrier, are pepper sprayed by an NYPD officer (caution contains explicit language. Note one officer saying of the other office, “I can’t believe he just F***in’ maced her):

Read Jeanne Mansfield’s, the videographer here, piece, Why I Was Maced at the Wall Street Protest.

To give you an idea of the attitude of some of the NYPD, NYC Deputy Commissioner Paul J. Browne had this to say about the protestors:

Protestors who engage in civil disobedience can expect to be arrested. Those who resist arrest can expect some measure of force will be used.

I understand that if someone breaks the law, they can be arrested and that force can be expected if they resist, but is this the legacy of civil disobedience we have inherited? Further, from the videos I’ve seen and the reports I’ve heard I haven’t seen large scale law breaking, though NY has gotten creative, using a 150 year old law banning masks to arrest some of the protestors.

Torture
Next, let’s talk about the Geneva Conventions, those pesky pieces of paper that “establish the standards of international law for the humanitarian treatment for the victims of war.” America expects other countries to fight according to these standards, but doesn’t think it has to itself, specifically when it comes to torture. Dick Cheney, former Vice President, has consistently upheld the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” what everyone else in the world calls torture, such as waterboarding. He did this while he vice president and even in his most recent book, In My Time, yet the Geneva Conventions expressly forbid the use of any form of torture.

No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted or exposed to unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind.

American Exceptionalism, though, means that we don’t define things like torture the same way for us as we do for other countries, specifically our enemies.

These are only two examples of hypocrisy I see in our country; there are plenty more. But, does all of this mean I hate America? Absolutely not. I love this country, but I love other countries as well. I think there are great people in America and I think there are great people all over the world. Is America exceptional? Of course, in many ways, but there are other countries that exceed us in many areas too. We now only rank “average” in education:

The three-yearly OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) report, which compares the knowledge and skills of 15-year-olds in 70 countries around the world, ranked the United States 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science and a below-average 25th for mathematics.

Other countries have more affordable health care, more equal civil liberties, and we now have 46.2 million people living in poverty in this country, the highest number on record.

We are great, but the greatest? I don’t think so.

//Rant. End.

The question arose earlier in the week during a class I TA for of why ancient men would not have showcased themselves with larger genitalia (the specific instance was when looking at casts of body parts taken to the temple of Ascelpius, the god of healing).

Statue of Asclepius

I knew I had read something along the way about how being well-endowed was actually a negative trait in ancient Greece. I tracked down the passage in Aristophanes’ Clouds:

This is the right way for you, my lad, and if you do what I say
you’ll be eternally blessed
with a strapping body, a gleaming complexion,
huge shoulders, a tiny little tongue,
big buttocks, and a small cock.
Should you choose to follow the fashion currently
in vogue amongst the young men of this city,
then it’ll be pasty skin, round shoulders,
concave chest, an enormous tongue,
no arse, a great hunk of meat, and a very long . . . turn of phrase!

Not much has changed since the ideal Greek body, but some aspects have. I won’t get into the theories as to why this was preferred of Greek men, but most of you can probably guess.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written.
[...]
Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high space, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tiptoe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

Go read a book and read it well.

From “Song of Myself”:

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand
. . . . nor look through the eyes of the dead . . . .
nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either,
nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.

Here by myself away from the clank of the world,

Tallying and talk’d to here by tongues aromatic,

No longer abash’d, (for in this secluded spot I can respond as I would not dare elsewhere,)

Strong upon me the life that does not exhibit itself, yet contains all the rest,

These words come from the same man who said,

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,

Was Uncle Walt truly able to celebrate himself and sing himself if he required a secluded spot to respond as he would not dare elsewhere? What will it take for us to get to a place where we need not be in a secluded spot to be “no longer abash’d”?

"Our diversity enhances us"

Let us never lose sight of this truth.

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

Is this world that Lennon imagined still even possible to hope for? Can you even imagine a word void of greed, need, and hurt? I like to think that I can imagine it. I hope for that kind of world. I don’t just hope passively, though. I also work to bring that world about.

Great is language . . . . it is the mightiest of the sciences,

It is the fulness and color and form and diversity of the

earth . . . . and of men and women . . . . and of all

qualities and processes;

It is greater than wealth . . . . it is greater than buildings

or ships or religions or paintings or music.

Walt Whitman, from his 1855 version of what later becomes known as “Great Are the Myths”