I am not having the greatest night. I meant to post, but I've been having computer problems for the past week, so I can't get on the internet. My display is being jerky too. Jeff, I want you here to tell me what's going on so I can stop worrying. Instead of posting, I spent the night backing up my files to our travel drive, and freaking out about my honors project, since I made the mistake of projecting into the future and trying to guess how long it's going to take and how much work I'm going to get done by the end of the summer and the answer is not much, even though I'm giving so much time to this. And so I'm frustrated and tired and irritated with everything. I think I'm just going to go to bed.
Barge,
S.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
I really never meant to work myself to death...
Okay, I thought about it, and even though it's long, I thought it would be a good idea to post my project proposal for my honors project up here. I'm probably going to be talking about it or at least referencing it lots this summer, since it's already consuming boatloads of my time, and you should be able to have at least some idea of what I'm doing if I plan to talk about it that much. Skimming is encouraged, it did take up three pages in MS word. I didn't post the five page bibliography, because that's just scary. Anyway, I hope this is somewhat interesting, and of course, if not you always have the option of averting your eyes. And stay tuned, I've got a couple of actual posts brewing in my head, I just haven't really had time to commit them to paper yet.
Shannon Callan
Honors Project Proposal
Advisor: Dr. Linda Mills Woolsey
Readers: Dr. Terence Paige, Dr. Marcus Dean, Prof. Lori Huth
"Word in Flesh: A Contextualization of Christ’s Parables for 21st Century Minds"
Perhaps one of the greatest questions facing the church in the West today is the question of relevancy. It often seems that there is a growing gap between the understandings, language and concepts that are common in churches and among Christians and the understandings of those concepts among the common person on the street. Also adding to the problem of this chasm is the growing biblical illiteracy of the average American or European today; many cannot even answer the most fundamental questions about the content or meaning of the Bible. This is an especially pressing crisis in the area of evangelism: if ordinary people cannot understand the words or concepts Christians use to communicate the gospel, how can we tell them the good news about Christ? One possible answer to this problem is the teaching form of the parable. It is well attested, especially in postmodern scholarship, that story-telling is a very effective way of teaching and communicating. But if those very parables that Christ used to show a picture of the Kingdom of God are in that same confusing language and drawing on those same concepts, how can they be of any more assistance? I believe that what is needed is, in a sense, a “translation” of these parables. In my project, my goal will be to decipher biblical parables into parables that contemporary, unchurched people can relate to and understand, yet are still faithful to the original intent as communicated in the biblical text.
I will attempt to do this with four parables from the gospels by putting them through a three stage process. This process will be interdisciplinary, drawing not only from the field of literature, but also from biblical and cultural study. In the first stage, I will use biblical and hermenutical tools to do exegesis on each of the passages to find out as clearly as possible what they meant in their original first century context. I will first do some introductory reading on the biblical parable form and Jesus’ use of it as well as some general reading on paradigms for parable scholarship. I will be looking in depth at each of the selected texts (listed in the outline) and also looking into the cultural background of the concepts that are alluded to which Jesus’ first listeners would have been intimately familiar with. With the information that I uncover, I will be writing a “mini-exegesis” paper for each of the parables of 5 double-spaced pages each.
In the next stage I will be looking at interpretation of the parables from the standpoint of liberation theology in a Latin American context. This will aid the final product in giving me a fresh perspective on the parables by stepping out of the traditional ways of interpretation and seeing how one culture has made these parables meaningful in their context. I will first be doing some introductory research to the process of contextualization of biblical and theological concepts and then doing some introductory reading to gain a better understanding of liberation theology and its growth in Latin America. I will then look specifically at Latin American liberation readings of the parables to gain greater understanding of their unique interpretive paradigm. The final product of this phase will be a research paper about 10 double-spaced pages in length.
The final phase of this project will be my creative response to my research in the form of fictional retellings of the four parables I have researched, set in the 21st century and using language and concepts that will be as familiar to my readers as the concepts that Jesus used would have been to his. This is where the “translation” work of my project will be done as I seek to find concepts in modern understanding that are comparable to the ones that Christ used. For this portion I will first do preliminary reading of other literary precedents in this kind of interaction with the biblical texts and then write drafts and revise to form final copies of my own parables.
Shannon Callan
Honors Project Proposal
Advisor: Dr. Linda Mills Woolsey
Readers: Dr. Terence Paige, Dr. Marcus Dean, Prof. Lori Huth
"Word in Flesh: A Contextualization of Christ’s Parables for 21st Century Minds"
Perhaps one of the greatest questions facing the church in the West today is the question of relevancy. It often seems that there is a growing gap between the understandings, language and concepts that are common in churches and among Christians and the understandings of those concepts among the common person on the street. Also adding to the problem of this chasm is the growing biblical illiteracy of the average American or European today; many cannot even answer the most fundamental questions about the content or meaning of the Bible. This is an especially pressing crisis in the area of evangelism: if ordinary people cannot understand the words or concepts Christians use to communicate the gospel, how can we tell them the good news about Christ? One possible answer to this problem is the teaching form of the parable. It is well attested, especially in postmodern scholarship, that story-telling is a very effective way of teaching and communicating. But if those very parables that Christ used to show a picture of the Kingdom of God are in that same confusing language and drawing on those same concepts, how can they be of any more assistance? I believe that what is needed is, in a sense, a “translation” of these parables. In my project, my goal will be to decipher biblical parables into parables that contemporary, unchurched people can relate to and understand, yet are still faithful to the original intent as communicated in the biblical text.
I will attempt to do this with four parables from the gospels by putting them through a three stage process. This process will be interdisciplinary, drawing not only from the field of literature, but also from biblical and cultural study. In the first stage, I will use biblical and hermenutical tools to do exegesis on each of the passages to find out as clearly as possible what they meant in their original first century context. I will first do some introductory reading on the biblical parable form and Jesus’ use of it as well as some general reading on paradigms for parable scholarship. I will be looking in depth at each of the selected texts (listed in the outline) and also looking into the cultural background of the concepts that are alluded to which Jesus’ first listeners would have been intimately familiar with. With the information that I uncover, I will be writing a “mini-exegesis” paper for each of the parables of 5 double-spaced pages each.
In the next stage I will be looking at interpretation of the parables from the standpoint of liberation theology in a Latin American context. This will aid the final product in giving me a fresh perspective on the parables by stepping out of the traditional ways of interpretation and seeing how one culture has made these parables meaningful in their context. I will first be doing some introductory research to the process of contextualization of biblical and theological concepts and then doing some introductory reading to gain a better understanding of liberation theology and its growth in Latin America. I will then look specifically at Latin American liberation readings of the parables to gain greater understanding of their unique interpretive paradigm. The final product of this phase will be a research paper about 10 double-spaced pages in length.
The final phase of this project will be my creative response to my research in the form of fictional retellings of the four parables I have researched, set in the 21st century and using language and concepts that will be as familiar to my readers as the concepts that Jesus used would have been to his. This is where the “translation” work of my project will be done as I seek to find concepts in modern understanding that are comparable to the ones that Christ used. For this portion I will first do preliminary reading of other literary precedents in this kind of interaction with the biblical texts and then write drafts and revise to form final copies of my own parables.
Friday, June 23, 2006
Puffy Pink Clouds of Insulation
It's kind of been funny to have my sister away at camp. Everybody keeps asking me what I did all week, as if I would have accomplished some great important deeds in her absence. Alas, I don't really think that was the case. I watched Casanova with my mom on Sunday, went for lots of walks, cooked nice dinners for us (Baked Chicken and Cheese Enchiladas and Reuben sandwhiches) made iced tea, went to the library a lot, cleaned the whole house, went to Bible study on Wednesday, got most of the clutter in my room back under control and spent lots of time researching for my fantastic honors project. I've been researching like a fiend, or as much like a fiend as I can research, since most of the books I need I have to order through Interlibrary loan and so they won't be coming for about another week, and I'm really afraid they're all going to come at the same time, and then I'll have to read 10 books in 14 days and I think by the time they finally get in it will be almost time for us to leave on our vacation. I'm biting my nails a bit over this one. But that's about all the excitement that's been happening this week.
I feel a great deal of pressure to make a very good blog right now, since I just e-mailed a bunch of people about its existence and so they might be visiting. Company prose, boys and girls, we might have unexpected guests. Anyway, one of the things that happened this week is that we had to clean out our spare room, my mother's former office and my current office, since I'm a very important person with an important project now and my room has no desk and my mother always works at her own office downtown. But there was a former adventure before I made it home with this spare room, involving the washing machine in the room next door, which my sister tried to operate while the hose was disconnected, and it ended up spraying water all over the floor. The water then leaked into the closet of the spare room and caused a most fragant layer of mold to grow on the carpet. So my mom dragged everything out of the closet so we could cut out the old, moldy carpet.
But that's not even the adventure. My mom wanted to get a scrap piece of carpet for the newly denuded floor from our attic, so I pulled down the ceiling hole and up we went. The carpet was tucked away in a space that was off the beaten attic track, in order to get there you had to cross a narrow board that had been placed over a trecherous land mine of puffy pink insulation that concealed the fact that there was nothing beneath you except the brittle drywall of the ceiling. Well, it was across this narrow walk that my mom had committed herself to sojourn. However, there was the additional fact that part of my sister's old bed, the really heavy row of drawers had recently been moved up to that out of the way space. Since it was too long to fit neatly, it hung out and squarely covered the end of that narrow board.
First step, my mom inched her way out onto that flimsy board and reached over this huge, spongy silver pipe kind of thing to push the drawers off to the left. Now they sat only about halfway on the board and teetered precariously as if they wished to tumble off. My mom had to inch over to the right to avoid the drawers and began to teeter herself, so near the edge of the board. I watched in breathless suspense, helpless to give any aid and wondering which catastrophe would strike first, the drawers tumbling off and falling through the ceiling to land in the laundry room, or my mother tumbling off to fall through the ceiling and land in the garage. When the tension was almost too much to bear, I suddenly heard a crack from the board. I shut my eyes and let out a little shriek, expecting the worst. But the board held, my mom snatched the scrap of carpet, and hurried back, balancing half on the battered board and half on one of the wooden ceiling timbers, inches from death. But back she came, and all was well in the land, another near death experience averted, and the people rejoiced: "Huzzah!" You'll all be thrilled to hear, I am sure, that the new carpet was laid, all the crap was moved back into the closet, and now my office all but sparkles in the newness of cleanliness.
All right, phew, this is why I don't post all that often, b/c they always end up being so long! Later, peeps, I'm going swimming!
S.
I feel a great deal of pressure to make a very good blog right now, since I just e-mailed a bunch of people about its existence and so they might be visiting. Company prose, boys and girls, we might have unexpected guests. Anyway, one of the things that happened this week is that we had to clean out our spare room, my mother's former office and my current office, since I'm a very important person with an important project now and my room has no desk and my mother always works at her own office downtown. But there was a former adventure before I made it home with this spare room, involving the washing machine in the room next door, which my sister tried to operate while the hose was disconnected, and it ended up spraying water all over the floor. The water then leaked into the closet of the spare room and caused a most fragant layer of mold to grow on the carpet. So my mom dragged everything out of the closet so we could cut out the old, moldy carpet.
But that's not even the adventure. My mom wanted to get a scrap piece of carpet for the newly denuded floor from our attic, so I pulled down the ceiling hole and up we went. The carpet was tucked away in a space that was off the beaten attic track, in order to get there you had to cross a narrow board that had been placed over a trecherous land mine of puffy pink insulation that concealed the fact that there was nothing beneath you except the brittle drywall of the ceiling. Well, it was across this narrow walk that my mom had committed herself to sojourn. However, there was the additional fact that part of my sister's old bed, the really heavy row of drawers had recently been moved up to that out of the way space. Since it was too long to fit neatly, it hung out and squarely covered the end of that narrow board.
First step, my mom inched her way out onto that flimsy board and reached over this huge, spongy silver pipe kind of thing to push the drawers off to the left. Now they sat only about halfway on the board and teetered precariously as if they wished to tumble off. My mom had to inch over to the right to avoid the drawers and began to teeter herself, so near the edge of the board. I watched in breathless suspense, helpless to give any aid and wondering which catastrophe would strike first, the drawers tumbling off and falling through the ceiling to land in the laundry room, or my mother tumbling off to fall through the ceiling and land in the garage. When the tension was almost too much to bear, I suddenly heard a crack from the board. I shut my eyes and let out a little shriek, expecting the worst. But the board held, my mom snatched the scrap of carpet, and hurried back, balancing half on the battered board and half on one of the wooden ceiling timbers, inches from death. But back she came, and all was well in the land, another near death experience averted, and the people rejoiced: "Huzzah!" You'll all be thrilled to hear, I am sure, that the new carpet was laid, all the crap was moved back into the closet, and now my office all but sparkles in the newness of cleanliness.
All right, phew, this is why I don't post all that often, b/c they always end up being so long! Later, peeps, I'm going swimming!
S.
Tuesday, June 20, 2006
"Unless you are a protestant, cause protestants can't vote..."
Okay everybody, it's time to vote:
(the quote is from www.makingfiends.com)
Should Shannon join up with Facebook (another internet service on which she can waste time and yet somehow also neglect) or no?
Also, if you have awesome pictures of me, send them to me b/c I am already looking for my senior picture...
That is all.
(the quote is from www.makingfiends.com)
Should Shannon join up with Facebook (another internet service on which she can waste time and yet somehow also neglect) or no?
Also, if you have awesome pictures of me, send them to me b/c I am already looking for my senior picture...
That is all.
Kids, Ants and Rain
So, last week was the great Art Reach of famousness, from which I should regale you with many heart-warming and harrowing stories. Well, I will perhaps not regale you with many stories, so if I only tell you a few, I shall make sure that they shall be high quality. I think, perhaps, the most interesting day was actually the very last, for which we rearranged the schedule so that the kiddos could get some rehersal in for their show. First we congregated them in the gym, which was no mean feat in itself b/c there were over 200 kids in total at our camp. Then we herded them in groups out to the stage, which was outside. First, as we were settling the drama kids in their places in the grass in front of the stage, a few of the kids in the back row lept up yelling. Quick-response investigation revealed that those particular children had been seated in a very large nest of fire ants. Fire ants, for those of you who are not privileged enough to be Texas residents, are biting bugs who's stings hurt about 5 times as sharply, and 5 times as long as mosquito bites. So these kids were not very happy, and neither were the guides who were working crowd control trying to keep the other very curious tykes away who's first impulse in responding to the screams was to run over and get bitten themselves. So, a large area of grass was taped off and order was restored, although a number of kids seated near the taped off area looked very concerned about their tender tushes.
So we finally got all of the kids out and seated and more or less quiet, and were just beginning to run them through the walking around that they would have to do, when the first drops started falling. Perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that the weather for this particular day had not been at all promising, dark and gray and very windy. So the first drops began to fall and as they came more and more quickly, the kids were getting more and more restless. The youth pastor tried to reassure everyone, "Don't worry kids, it's just a sprinkle," and on we went. But then the rain reached some kind of unspoken critical mass and the drops started falling heavily and, as if on cue, all 200+ kids started screaming. The grown-ups all threw up their hands and laughing and the rain fell down on us all quite steadily. We started moving the kids back in trying to keep some semblance of order, and wouldn't you know it, right as we did that, the rain slowed and stopped.
Now, for a couple of cute kid moments: we were working on these crazy wire sculptures, which were easily the most difficult art projects of the week, and not terribly successful. Basically all the kids, K-5th grade were give a couple of feet of wire, and were told to bend it into some kind of skeleton for a summer symbol that they would then cover with yarn. Well, these kids got so frustrated with this project...a couple of quotes overheard: One girl working on her project said lamentably, "This is not turning out the way I expected it to." Another boy, when asked by a guide what he was making replied dazedly, "I have no idea."
I don't want it to sound like the week was negative, that's not true at all. It was a wonderful week, pouring into the lives of these dear little ones. It was an entirely gorgeous show, the props were beautiful, you could actually hear the children singing their cute little songs and the set was fantastic, their were swiveling panels along the back w/ seasonal icons that switched over for the final number into a kind of pastiche of the different descriptors of God. It is a beautiful thing to see children worshipping God, even in their lack of understanding and naiveté. And they are lovely people, for the most part, tho some of them can really give you a run for your money. I also got to put together a kind of free form poem out of the adjectives and phrases about different seasons that the children wrote up on our "Wonder Wall" (which, by the way, got the song stuck in my head all week). I would post the poem, but I think that the only existing copy is floating somewhere in Calvary Community church.
So that's the Art Reach scoop, sports fans. Hope you got enough FYI, because that's all I'm writing for tonight. Have copious peace in your souls, and eat more fish. I know I do.
Peace, love and crabs,
S.
So we finally got all of the kids out and seated and more or less quiet, and were just beginning to run them through the walking around that they would have to do, when the first drops started falling. Perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that the weather for this particular day had not been at all promising, dark and gray and very windy. So the first drops began to fall and as they came more and more quickly, the kids were getting more and more restless. The youth pastor tried to reassure everyone, "Don't worry kids, it's just a sprinkle," and on we went. But then the rain reached some kind of unspoken critical mass and the drops started falling heavily and, as if on cue, all 200+ kids started screaming. The grown-ups all threw up their hands and laughing and the rain fell down on us all quite steadily. We started moving the kids back in trying to keep some semblance of order, and wouldn't you know it, right as we did that, the rain slowed and stopped.
Now, for a couple of cute kid moments: we were working on these crazy wire sculptures, which were easily the most difficult art projects of the week, and not terribly successful. Basically all the kids, K-5th grade were give a couple of feet of wire, and were told to bend it into some kind of skeleton for a summer symbol that they would then cover with yarn. Well, these kids got so frustrated with this project...a couple of quotes overheard: One girl working on her project said lamentably, "This is not turning out the way I expected it to." Another boy, when asked by a guide what he was making replied dazedly, "I have no idea."
I don't want it to sound like the week was negative, that's not true at all. It was a wonderful week, pouring into the lives of these dear little ones. It was an entirely gorgeous show, the props were beautiful, you could actually hear the children singing their cute little songs and the set was fantastic, their were swiveling panels along the back w/ seasonal icons that switched over for the final number into a kind of pastiche of the different descriptors of God. It is a beautiful thing to see children worshipping God, even in their lack of understanding and naiveté. And they are lovely people, for the most part, tho some of them can really give you a run for your money. I also got to put together a kind of free form poem out of the adjectives and phrases about different seasons that the children wrote up on our "Wonder Wall" (which, by the way, got the song stuck in my head all week). I would post the poem, but I think that the only existing copy is floating somewhere in Calvary Community church.
So that's the Art Reach scoop, sports fans. Hope you got enough FYI, because that's all I'm writing for tonight. Have copious peace in your souls, and eat more fish. I know I do.
Peace, love and crabs,
S.
Friday, June 16, 2006
Greetings, citizens
I have just come to a screeching halt from a week of headaches, running, boundless enthusiasm, sticky hands, baby wipes covered in paint, loud kids, discipline and rule-enforcing, and art, art, art. That's right, friends, Art Reach is officially over. It has been a great week, but it is hard to feel enthusiastic when I am this tired and my feet are this sore. So, stories later. I just wanted to say that I miss you all a great deal, and I am sorry that I have not been e-mailing or calling, but life has basically been on hold for the entire week and now I am behind on everything. But life will resume on...Monday. I think. There is so much that I have wanted to do and I have not been able to get to much of anything, since I've only been here for two weeks, one of them entirely consumed with our VBS. Lord help me, I feel like this summer is already passing me by. Ugh, I don't want to think about anything right now. I just wanted to say I am not dead, I have not forgotten you, you will, I hope, hear from me soon.
Adios, mis aguacates,
S.
Adios, mis aguacates,
S.
Monday, June 12, 2006
Again!
Look! Look at me, y'all, I'm posting. I just posted yesterday and I'm posting again today! I'm the awesome. So, today was the first day of Art Reach, which was pretty cool. I had a fun time working with all the little kids, both the small ones and the youth sized ones (it's pretty funny b/c sometimes I can't tell which is which). I was helping out in the art room today, which was unbelievably hectic. We were trying to get the kids to do prints made out of foam. They would carve an image into the foam and we would roll paint onto it. The idea was that the places that they carved should have stayed white, but the foam was so thin that the paint got everywhere and most of the prints were just blobs of color. Some of the kids apparently got upset about this lack of success, but in my room I think there was too much chaos for the kids to really internalize what was going on enough to react. And when I say chaos I mean 30 small children, paint and sharp sticks kind of chaos. It was wild, but I really don't mind that kind of madness, I can usually keep my head pretty well even when a lot of different things are happening at once. We had props workshop in the afternoon with a lot of highly technical Crayola marker field and had a great time regaling some kids with the wisdom that I've gained in my 56 years of life, much of it lived before the invention of telephones. Really guys, there was so much crazy noise and motion and thinking ahead and thinking on your feet and I was busy constantly, but it was great and vibrant and I loved hanging out with the kids and teasing them and playing duck-duck goose and enjoying hearing about their schools and lives. They are very funny and...bold. They don't seem to be afraid of anything. I have lots of theories about kids (as I'm sure Heather will tell you, she's a guide this week, so she's hearing a lot of them) but one of the things that I don't understand is why we make these blunt categorical distinctions between children and adults. Adults are not the only ones with thoughts or the only ones with knowledge to impart. I swear I learn as much, and with such freshness, from hanging out with kids as I do when I'm at school, it's just a different kind of learning and a different kind of knowledge. I have much more that I could say about the things that I have been thinking about children and adults, and will probably come up with even more in my current practicum, but for now it's getting late and I have to get up rather early tomorrow to continue spreading joy and goodness throughout the earth. Btw, I had a call from the library, and I hope and pray that it is about my wallet. Please God, let them have found it...
Goodnight all,
S.
Goodnight all,
S.
Sunday, June 11, 2006
Happy Birthday Blog!
So...welcome back Kotter? I think, my goodly friends, that I would like to resolve to post more often, I would like to resolve to start posting on a daily basis, at least for the remainder of the summer. I will not, however, go crazy with things that I cannot actually commit to. I have been surprised thus far by how busy the summer has been, in spite of not having a job and not having a true and for real internship. I have spent a lot of time at church getting ready for our special VBS which is happening starting tomorrow and going until next Friday. It's kind of different because we have a big production that all the kids spend the week working on in different workshops like acting and art and music and then it all comes together in this big show. It's pretty fun. I will be working with the art/props group and just generally helping. We'll have lots of little kids to hang out with, as well as being able to continue making friends in the youth group, since they're basically running the whole bible school. In other news, I can't find my wallet, which has been a total bummer for me. So, if any of you have seen it, I'd appreciate a locator. I don't like this post, I'm really not feeling it tonight. Tomorrow, tomorrow I'll be witty and brilliant. Postpone the magic for another night. I'd just like to include a shout out to Thryn, the only person who consistently posts comments. And Eddius, I think you're the reason my wallet's gone. Guilt upon your head!
~S.
~S.
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