Summer, Unofficial Day 6

Driving today along Wisconsin Highway 64.

A great way to start the summer

With the visit of family. This is mom, daughter and uncle.

But it's too bright to read at the beach

I remember summers past according to the books read during those salubrious months of repose. Roger Angell's The Summer Game was the year before sixth grade. Stephen King's On Writing was three decades later, the New York summer. The Grapes of Wrath filled one afternoon and the next morning in the June of '87. Victor Hugo's Les Miserables consumed parts of a couple of summers, during neither of which did I come close to finishing the 1,463-page Signet Classic paperpack edition. Not counting 1,000 Places to See Before You Die, which I just picked up at a Goodwill for $3, here are some others I've cracked open or will soon.

Going global

A grad-school semester ends quietly, audible only in a collective exhale of relief. When the high school year ends, it does so with the clamor of a giant street party. For Jackson, sophomore year ended literally in jazz and celebration. Pictured here, he and the NRHS jazz ensemble closed out the year with an appearance at the state contest and the annual spring concert. Then it was off to Knoxville, Tenn., where the school's Destination Imagination® team competed for the second consecutive year at the Global Finals. The results are in: NRHS took 16th. That topped last year's placing of 21st (tied with Corpus Christi, Texas, and Victoria Junior College of Singapore). This morning they piled back into a borrowed RV for the return trip to Wisconsin.

2008 Destination Imagination® Global Finals
Hit or Myth, Secondary Level
Top 25 (total of 52 schools competing)
1, Conroe (Texas) Academy of Science. 2, Miamisburg (Ohio) HS. 3, Oxford Hills (Maine) Comprehensive HS. 4, Plano (Texas) ISD. 5, St. Francis (Minn.) HS. 6t, Clarence School (N.Y.); Brimfield (Mass.) Monson HS. 7, Lynnfield (Mass.) HS. 8, Fairfield (Iowa) Maharishi School Gold. 9, Cordova (Tenn.) Hutchison School. 10, Concord (N.H.) HS. 11, Ravenna (Mich.) HS. 12, Ferndale (Mich.) Southfield Christian. 13, Central at Raymond (Neb.) 14, Bourbon (Ind.) Triton HS. 15, Humboldt (Tenn.) Milan HS. 16, New Richmond (Wis.) HS. 17, Woodridge (Ill.) Willowbrook. 18t, Yorktown Heights (N.Y.) HS; Penrose (Colo.) Florence HS. 19, Rockville (Md.) Richard Montgomery. 20t, Alliance (Ohio) Marlington Schools; Middleton (Wis.) HS. 21t, Carl Junction (Mo.) HS; Norco (Calif.) HS. 22, Auburn (N.H.) Pinkerton Academy. 23, Germantown (Wis.) HS. 24, Norton Shore (Mich.) Mona Shores School. 25, Vashon (Wash.) Annie Wright School.

A preaching party

Naomi Tutu (photo by steve 22 may 08)

We spent the past week with 2,100 preachers attending the Festival of Homiletics in Minneapolis. Don't you wish you were there?

There was inspiration in abundance. Some of it came from the country's best preachers, who lectured and preached for five days. But some came from "normal" people. Normal people such as Naomi Tutu. She told a few tales on her famous father, the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

When Naomi and her siblings were young, they would begin murmuring "Amen" when they believed it was time for dad to wrap up his sermon, a cue he came to rely upon. Years later, he was asked to preach in an African-American church in the southern U.S. No sooner had Tutu begun speaking than the congregation began shouting "Amen." (In clergy circles, that's a funny story.)

In her own right, Naomi Tutu is an expert on race, justice and reconciliation. Another real treat was Beth Nielsen Chapman. On her latest CD, Prism, she sings in nine languages. She is melodic, spiritual and real. Another highlight was Prudence Johnson, especially when she sang an old Greg Brown tune. (See, preachers can have fun.)

See related post on the Festival of Homiletics.

Staying in Jesusville for $12 a night

I've been in school so long I can't bear to imagine how many miles I've put on my car commuting to and from class. I'm often asked why seminaries don't offer correspondence courses. Some do. But the two I've attended don't for the most part. Despite the dents in my debit card from all those fill-ups at $3.73 a gallon, I believe that's a good thing.

Education doesn't take place in a vacuum. There's a good deal to be learned by class discussion. Hearing something in person deepens what you absorb in reading. And because Christianity is relational, learning in a classroom environment requires you to grapple with your own thoughts in light of how other people are experiencing and interpreting the material. (Not surprisingly, often quite differently than you are!)

Still, much of my education has been as a commuter student (except for some wonderful extended stays in Evanston). Now, as a UTS student in the Twin Cities, I motor in for class and then return to my abode. Said abode, however, is unavailable for these last two weeks of the semester, so I'm staying overnight in an on-campus commuter apartment. As one fellow squatter said last week, "welcome to Jesusville." And it costs only $12 a night.

I doubt I can live in our own home for $12 a night. Beyond the benefits of frugality, however, living where you learn gives you an entirely new perspective. It wrests you out of the fragmentation of "this is school, this is work, this is home, etc." It makes you feel like a participant in the whole learning thing, not just an observer or a note-taker.

I think that's why it's so important that churches need to create a space beyond a one-hour worship service for the give-and-take, the learning, the grappling, the questioning, the meal-sharing, etc. Without entering into that space, we can never really integrate what we learn with how we live.

I'm too old to go back to dorm life. But I'm heading back to Jesusville for a couple more nights as the semester ends this week. It's a good model for living with one another: be a good roomate, pick up after yourself, and bring your own linens.

Do you know the way to Santa Fe?

We went car shopping today. Well, not really shopping, because buying a car when only one of you is working and the other is in grad school isn't exactly tops on a financial planner's to-do list. But with the cost of gas outpacing the cost of tuition, it's pretty compelling to look for new wheels. Besides which, our two cars are a combined 15 years old with a cumulative 341,000 miles. That's 13 1/2 times around the Earth. These were the two test drives we're still talking about. Guess which one is whose favorite?

Above left: The 2008 Hyundai Santa Fe. Above right: The 2004 MINI Cooper (in British Racing Green).

Is the Bible an excuse to hate?

We watched the film For the Bible Tells Me So in our pastoral care class today. It is certain to provoke a response if you watch it.

The trailer is available here.

There used to be a ballpark

This is the 95th season of baseball at Clark and Addison streets on Chicago's north side. Off-the-field talk centers on the pending sale of the Cubs and Wrigley Field, and a proposal to sell naming rights to the park. That's ludicrous: no one will ever call it anything but Wrigley, no matter how much a company pays to call it otherwise.

The larger issue is the ballpark's future. I never thought I'd come to this, but I'm now accepting Wrigley is in its twilight years. Modern baseball economics would require too many changes to keep the park viable (more signage, corporate sponsorships, restructured seating), plus millions of $$$ in maintenance and repairs necessitated by its age.

Let the park age gracefully, rather than giving it so much cosmetic surgery that it obliterates the pristine qualities we loved about Wrigley in the first place. Plan now to build a new park (not a Wrigley clone), using all the design acumen that has made the rest of Chicago an architectural treasure. Allow six years for site procurement, design and construction. Open the new park in April 2014.

Meantime, enjoy Wrigley Field for its final seasons. Let's not be all maudlin about it. Just play baseball there, as it was meant to be. It its final season, its 100th, in 2013, don't sell season tickets. Instead, make single-game tickets available for every home game, and distribute them to schools, boys and girls clubs, church groups, families, and the legions of Cubs fans who haven't been able to get into the sold-out park for years because of the obscene prices and the overrun of ticket demand in this second-smallest park in the major leagues.

No one would miss Wrigley Field and grieve its passing more than I. I've attended more than 100 games there in 35 years, despite never living closer than a six-hour drive. I've saved every ticket stub, and most every scorecard. The memories are priceless. But I'd rather see Wrigley reach 100-years-old intact rather than watching it mutate into something unrecognizable for years to come. That would be far sadder.

Once the new park is open, allow Wrigley to remain the landmark it already is. Allow special games to be played there. Turn its concourses into a museum. It has every bit the charm of Cooperstown, and just as much history.