The Ascension is a soft-spoken Catholic feast about dwelling in a prolonged and reoccurring Advent. More and more, I feel like all feasts eventually collapse on each other, but today the feast of the Ascension feels unique because of its peculiar absence, its anti-climatic and even surprising exit. Birth, Death, and Resurrection is much more straightforward. It covers all the bases and leaves no loose ends. But there's more? Yes, yes, there is. Salvation history is an … [Read more...]
Franciscan Theatrics: Papa Francisco’s Gangsta Ways
March 23, 2013 By 16 Comments
"Show, don't tell." This could be the Franciscan evangelical motto. The Franciscan tradition is rooted in story, stories of Father Francis doing crazy, wild, and beautiful things. St. Francis was, in many respects, a fool. He saw things in the most literal, direct ways. A childlike artist. Finger painting. When called to rebuild Christ's Church, Francis began with his hands. Only later did he realize that the work was not a brick and mortar affair. This is the man who placed a manger under … [Read more...]
Space, and not being smart in an e-mail.
January 29, 2013 By 17 Comments
Sorry, readers. The end of the month is usually the time when I'm trying to meet all the end of the month deadlines that I should've started to work on a month or more ago. I'm swamped. In the meantime, here's an e-mail I just sent to my Foundations of Educational Thought class. You might find it interesting. Some context: I often assign an infamous first paper where students must describe the word 'word' in one page. The better way to put the prompt is like this. Describe the following … [Read more...]
A Tale of Three Cubicles (full length)
January 20, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Part One I was first assigned to the beam-cutting station, but I asked to be reassigned. I wanted to weld. It seemed honorable and I wanted to be somebody. But I guess no ones asks to be a welder once they get to the cutting stations. I was given the materials: gloves, sleeves, apron, mask. I needed boots. No tennis shoes. I don't recall the details or the exact time, but I passed an initial inspection of some kind. I was first assigned to be a go-fer, which sucked. I took naps and wasted a … [Read more...]
A Tale of Three Cubicles, Epilogue
January 20, 2013 By 3 Comments
Part I Part II Part III I was destined for the collar. Everyone seemed to see that, and believe it, too. Fr. O'Malley, the priest who converted my father and baptized me, would take me out for a steak dinner sometimes. He'd always say, "When you're a priest, you can eat steak everyday." That stuck. I love to eat. I felt obligated to say that I wanted to be a priest when I grew up. Not sure why, but I knew there was no firefighting in my future. I was a devout and precise altar server … [Read more...]
A Tale of Three Cubicles, Part III
January 13, 2013 By 1 Comment
Part I Part II The opening details are mostly unimportant. The hiring process was convoluted and indirect. I quit my job at Target to work closer to where we lived, working on an IT project for Medtronic Corporation, as a consultant for another middle-man corporation. I had to get hired by both of them. Still an hourly employee, but making ten dollars more per hour. My official title, which I only learned after a week or two on the job, was something along the lines of a "coordinator." Most … [Read more...]
A Tale of Three Cubicles, Part II
January 10, 2013 By Leave a Comment
Part I. Bilingual Benefits Representative. That seemed pretty good. What was it? Target Corporation, corporate headquarters. Sounded important enough. Fourteen dollars an hour, plus ten percent off at Target stores and lots of perks to rent limousines and go watch WMBA games. (I did both.) I was teaching Spanish. 26k a year before deductions. With my commute and everything else I was beginning to feel like Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych: underpaid and under-appreciated. Unlike Ilych, I actually was … [Read more...]
A Tale of Three Cubicles, Part I
January 5, 2013 By 7 Comments
I was first assigned to the beam-cutting station, but I asked to be reassigned. I wanted to weld. It seemed honorable and I wanted to be somebody. But I guess no ones asks to be a welder once they get to the cutting stations. I was given the materials: gloves, sleeves, apron, mask. I needed boots. No tennis shoes. I don't recall the details or the exact time, but I passed an initial inspection of some kind. I was first assigned to be a go-fer, which sucked. I took naps and wasted a lot of time. … [Read more...]
New Year’s Eve
January 4, 2013 By 1 Comment
I spent New Year's Eve with a buddy from college. We weren't super close while enrolled, but we knew each other. He was a little older and I had a bad reputation. We somehow ended up in the Twin Cities afterwards and became good friends. I sang and played at his wedding, we recorded music together and played terrible golf at a nine-hole course. He's a genius or something --- understands how things work and can replicate that sense of things in craftwork, computation, and the fine arts. He … [Read more...]
Education, The Craft of Desire
December 31, 2012 By 4 Comments
There is a universal and inextricable relationship between desire and belief. This relationship contains and reveals the natural, religious, and erotic order of things. It is no surprise, then, that New Atheists are today's fiercest defenders of religious belief in their evangelical zeal, straw-man debates, and group therapy sessions. Echo chambers. No, I'm not going to spell this out to the predictably irritable vigilantes out there. I simply want to point out two well-known facts … [Read more...]
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