August 28, 2006
Back
First day of school today. My third year teaching at Bluffton. I now share seniority in my department with only one other person. Seniority is an interesting thing as the oldest person in our department will finish his graduate work last, and the newest member of the department finished his Ph.D. first.
Threw my back out this morning reaching for a towel. First time anything like this has happened to me. I'm in unbelievable pain.
Off to teach.
Posted by Trevor at 01:37 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
August 02, 2005
Touch
"Touch .... communicates in a way that exceeds or transcends reduction to verbalization. Touch, then, never occurs uninterpreted (and therefore unmediated by language), but it escapes total translation into words. Right when words fail, touch becomes a major expression of extreme feelings ranging from aggression to intimacy.
- Paula Cooey
The act of touching another, in which what is touched is sensed only as itself touching, establishes a circuit of exchanges in which two become one flesh and each becomes part of the other. Because this reaches into dimensions of our being that only an occasional poet or singers have been able to articulate, we should not think of this exchange as a form of communication so much as a form of communion..
- Donn Welton
The last light of day crept away like a drunkard after gin
A hint of chanted prayer now whispers from the fresh night wind
To this shattered heart and soul held together by habit and skin
And this half-gnawed bone of apprehension
Buried in my brain
As I don't feel your touch, again.
- Bruce Cockburn
Posted by Trevor at 08:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
June 10, 2005
Against Research
I want a new word for what I do because I'm not at all convinced that I do research. My work is more or less wholly about the consumption of media-92% of it in book form-and the reguritation of new orderings of that media. Theologians don't, as a rule, conduct surveys, dissect corpses, collide atoms, or blow things up. My hunch is that we started calling what we did research because to fit into the idea of the scientific university. I'm not admitting that what I do is less valuable than people who conduct surveys, dissect corpses, collide atoms, or blow things up; it's not. I'm not admitting that what I do belongs in the university any less than people who conduct surveys, dissect corpses, collide atoms, or blow things up. I belong in the university; anyone who has endured my standard comeback to the intended slight, "oh you study theology, the queen of the sciences" ... "well yes thank-you it's so rare to hear anyone outside my discipline acknowledge that these days", knows I believe this. But I don't do research. I read and watch and think. I hug people sometimes. I talk alot. I want a word for this.
Posted by Trevor at 11:37 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack