Author: Jana

  • Bible Study

    As part of John’s Mind on Fire book group, I’m posting a brief summary/reaction to the Introduction of Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus

    First of all, this Intro is a journey narrative so I feel particularly drawn to it. Ehrman recalls his changing faith in Christianity—from an apathetic Episcopal (his natal faith) to an evangelical Christian during his teen years. As his desire for a greater understanding of the New Testament brought him to Moody Bible College and later to Princeton Theological Seminary, he was plagued with the same, seemingly unanswerable, question:

    “How does it help us to say that the Bible is inerrant the word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God correctly inspired, but only the words copied by scribes—sometimes correctly but sometimes incorrectly?”(7).

    His answer to this question is hinted at in the Intro, as we know that Ehrman no longer believes in the Bible as an infallible book, rather he believes that it is a human book, written to meet specific human needs. Thus, _Misquoting Jesus_ is his attempt to explain for a lay audience “how scribes were changing scripture and about how we can recognize where they did so.” That all sounds very interesting. But what I’m looking forward to is the answer(s) to why the scribes changed the Bible. In my mind, that is the more compelling question and I’m curious to see how Ehrman will tackle it.

  • Feed Me!

    Okay, for those of you who just can’t get enough of the conversations going on at pilgrimgirl (and you know who you are), I’ve added a comment feed to the sidebar on my blog.

    If you want to add my comment feed to your GoogleReader (or other reading service), you can subscribe with this URL.

    Hat tip to John-with-an-h for his help in setting this up :)

  • birds of a feather

    Today we attended a luncheon and prayer service at a local mosque. A lovely experience–learning about the faith and practice of our Muslim friends. Bonny wrote a lovely summary of her impressions. I found the most provocative part of the visit was joining the women in midday prayer. We covered our heads with scarves, knelt on the lushly carpeted floor, and observed. The women’s space was far off to the side from the main mosque room. The men’s room was richly adorned with curtains, symbols, and the like. The women’s room was completely plain except for a small cupboard with some well-worn books stacked in haphazard piles and a small stash of folded white polyester headcoverings for women who’d forgotten theirs. From where we sat and stood, we couldn’t even see the speaker who voiced the prayers.

    On the drive home from the mosque we encountered this cloud up ahead:

    Then, as we got closer we saw this:

    And then this:

    And this older gent shaking whole bags of crumbs out of crumpled bags in his grocery cart. It was obvious that these birds knew this man–their numbers were far too large for this to be a chance meeting.

    We circled around the block to watch this spectacle until it was over. He balled up the empty bags and headed down the street alone.

    And John and I resolved that when we are old, we will feed the birds.

  • pardon my construction…

    So the dust is settling ’round the frame of the new & improved pilgrimgirl blog. I’m most thrilled about the categories that I’ve set up in the sidebar. But now I’ve got to sort through hundreds of old posts and categorize them. That’s going to take awhile. Whew.

  • like a fire is burning

    The Spirit of God like a fire is burning!
    The latter-day glory begins to come forth;
    The visions and blessings of old are returning,
    And angels are coming to visit the earth.

    At my first Quaker Meeting, I felt a bit awkward, as I feel with anything new. John had explained a bit about Quaker silent worship to me. Just sit and meditate. Every once in awhile someone will feel prompted to speak. Like in Testimony Meeting. I wasn’t quite prepared for the simplicity of the room where we would sit and worship. Like a Relief Society room with no flowered curtains, no pulpit or table, no pictures on the walls. Just chairs in a circle in a large plain room, about half of them occupied with a wide variety of people. Many were older, almost all wore pants, nearly everyone wore sandals on their feet (certainly a far cry from the fanciness of my Orange County ward).

    As I seated myself and settled into silence, I tried to quiet my mind and think godly thoughts. As I did so, with insistence the temple ceremony came to mind. I found myself walking through each step of the washing and anointing. I smiled as I imagined my self looking into the eyes of the temple workers who were administering the ordinances. I moved on through the endowment and soon found myself seated in the celestial room. Warmth and light filled my chest as I reflected on the many hours that I’d spent praying and basking in the Spirit within that special space.

    When I was endowed, about a month before my marriage, I was wholeheartedly enthusiastic about the temple. John and I attended at least half a dozen times before our actual marriage ceremony. Then we arranged to stay in a temple apartment for the last part of our honeymoon–so we could go through several sessions per day. Then, throughout that first year of our marriage we attended nearly every week. We would arise at 4:30 each Saturday morning so we could make the 40 mile drive to LA without traffic and we could watch the sunrise from a sealing room in the temple, and we could share a cup of custard and a slice of blueberry pie for breakfast after a session or two.

    So why was I reliving all of this in my mind at the Quaker Meeting? I didn’t know at the time and I learned not to fight it. Nearly every time I attended silent worship, I had the same experience. I came to expect it, even though my attendance was spotty, the temple experience was predictable. And like the warm-fuzzy feelings that I’d had in the temple, I would leave Meeting with a giddiness, an ebullience that rather frightened me. I mean, I liked the feelings, but I was scared to question too deeply why it felt so good. I also kept myself rather aloof from the Quaker community. I was friendly with the Quakers that I met, but I was not at all interested in investing in a new faith community. I was too absorbed with grappling with Mormonism and navigating my marriage (by this time, John had been an atheist for many years, and I had long given up hope of changing his mind about spiritual matters).

    I now believe I understand why the temple figured so importantly in my early silent worship. Up to that point in my life, if I sought direct communion with God, I sought him in the temple (or before I was endowed, I would spend time meditating in the garden just outside the temple). Even on a subconscious level I needed the temple ritual (even virtually) to bring me close to the divine.

    Now I can slip much more easily into prayer as I sit in worship with Friends. On occasion I still return to the temple in my mind, but that is becoming more rare. Recently I read these words from George Fox (the founder of The Society of Friends) about the temple:

    The Lord showed me, so that I did see clearly, that he did not dwell in these temples which men had commanded and set up, but in people’s hearts . . . his people were his temple, and he dwelt in them.

    [Note: the second picture above is a sneaky photo that John took during our Quaker Meeting]

  • feminism 101

    So I’m taking a Women’s Studies class this quarter, which I really need. For too long I’ve been skirting around the edge of Feminist Theory, without ever diving in.

    So today I read my first article, “Toward a Woman-Centered University,” by Adrienne Rich in 1973. I’ll share a few portions of the article that resonated with me, though I wish I could share all as I find it highly relevant to my daily life as a mother-academic. This article builds on Virginia Woolf’s notion of “A Room of Her Own” and “Three Guineas” to propose a model for a woman-friendly college. I would add that the changes that Rich proposes would be more human-friendly and parent-friendly (not just for women, IMO).

    It is difficult to imagine, unless one has lived it, the personal division, endless improvising, and creative and intellectual holding back that for most women accompany the attempt to combine the emotional and physical demands of parenthood and the challenges of work.

    As I write this I am sitting in the midst of laundry that needs folding, dishes that need washing, and 2 kids who are working on a rock-polishing project. While I love my life and I am thrilled by the creative tensions that occur in the process of ‘improvising’ my life, it is so not easy and sometimes I wonder if I am wasting my academic pursuits because I can’t devote full-time attention to them.

    Later in her article she quotes Susan Sontag (another favorite author of mine):
    The first responsibility of a ‘liberated’ woman is to lead the fullest, freest, and most imaginative life she can. The second responsibility is her solidarity with other women. She may live and work and make love with men. But she has no right to represent her situation as simpler, or less suspect, or less full of compromises than it really is. Her good relations with men must not be bought at the price of betraying her sisters.

    Wow, there is a lot of meat in the quotation. I love the challenge that Sontag proposes–of living life as fully and imaginatively as possible. Yes, I have taken up that gauntlet. I’m not sure, though, that I have been completely honest about the challenges and compromises that I face in my academic path. Perhaps this is because I don’t discuss my academic path much at all on my blog? Perhaps it is just too raw? Perhaps my experience doesn’t involve such grand compromises because earlier women have paved the path for me to follow? I’ll continue to ruminate on these questions as I approach my later readings.

  • speaking of prayer…


    This week at the class formerly-known-as-Institute, I led a discussion about prayer and fasting. I gained much insight from my class members and I felt spiritually fed in the process. My Friend John-with-an-h attended the class and has written about about his experiences here and here. Another attendee, JourneyGal, shared her thoughts about the class here.

    I’ve also addressed prayer in my ExBlog post this week, which some of you might enjoy.

  • because this is beautiful…

  • On the intellectual stimulation of children

    When GameBoy was born, I was just finishing up my bachelor’s degree. It was a hard schedule–trying to study in the very little bit of free time that I had as a I cared for my young son. On top of that, I was sleep deprived. One day I was stretched out reading a novel for my English class on the bed with GB napping at my side. Within a few moments I feel asleep, too. When I awoke, I discovered that he had devoured the corner the corner of my book and had eaten half of the first two pages, too. My book was a gummy mess. At the time I thought it was pretty funny (though I did worry about the healthiness of wood pulp in his diet) and after that incident I was more careful from then on to keep my books out of his way. Now, whenever I run across Pamela I get a thrill of remembering that crazy-busy and joyful time in my life.

    So an acquaintance was asking me about my kids, wondering if they ever complained about having been raised in the collegiate environment rather than a traditional middle-class lifestyle. I explained to her that GameBoy has been attending classes with me since he was in utero, as has CatGirl. They know no other way of life, though I think they have moments of imagining the way that “the Jones’” live. I have occasionally queried my kids about this. Would they rather live in a stand-alone house and have a Mom who wasn’t perpetually preoccupied with classes, research, and teaching? They say no, that they love our lifestyle. While I appreciate their affirmation, I do wonder how, later in life, they will react to their unique upbringing. Will they rebel by rejecting academic pursuits? Will they feel that they lost out on some essential childhood experience? Will they feel that they were too quickly thrust into the adult world of intellectuality?

    It seems that everyone grows up with some sort of regret about their childhood. For example, have you ever heard anyone say that their formative years were just perfect? I suspect that we are all a bit envious of others’ experiences and we wonder if the grass wasn’t just a bit greener in someone else’s backyard. But, for now, as I see the amazing humans that my kids are becoming, I think I’ve done okay by them. They continue to digest the written word with ease (though through their brains rather than through their intestines nowadays), they have a passion for learning and a genuine curiosity about the world. They are gentle, kind, and nurturing. They have compassion for the needs of others. They share love and resources unselfishly. They can both be a bit shy, but they are rarely intimidated by adults; engaging deep conversations with people more than five times their age. It seems to me that my kids are empirical evidence that a lifestyle like ours “works,” and is laudable.

  • revoked

    For those who want a laugh, check out this snarky post about John getting his “Guy Card” revoked.

  • make me smile


    –burning GameBoy’s old homework in a firepit (photo above). And the sparks, as they blew around the beach in the dark, they looked like stars
    –first day or Winter quarter classes for me. Printed syllabi. The promise of fresh new start.
    –Giving lots of stuff away on freecycle over the weekend. The lightness of it.
    —garden catalogs.
    –sitting in bed with John last night. Making up silly acronyms. Giggling myself to sleep
    —this photo, because I know what it is.
    –getting a UPS package from electronics company this afternoon What? Isn’t Xmas over with? Then opening it up and finding a cordless phone as a gift from an acquaintance. (Note: those of you who know me well know that I am not a phone person. In fact, I probably only use the landline phone once or twice per week). Our current phones are laughable anyways–under our bed in case of emergency: an old princess-style model cobbled together from random phone parts and has no ringer. And in the LR: an ancient cordless phone w/a weakening battery and a connected answering machine–given to us by friends who moved to Japan two years ago. So I’ve just figured I would get a new phone someday via freecycle so I’ve never bothered to replace either of them. But now, a brand-spanking new cordless phone. That’s a first in our household.
    :)

  • because they smell that way?


    incense
    Originally uploaded by pilgrimgirl.

    So John and I have had this box of incense for years. We used some of it in our Buddhist-style butsudan altar. And of late we’ve found a new use for the incense.

    Given that there are four people who share this house and just one bathroom (sans window or any good ventilation), well sometimes things get a little, shall we say, odorous in that small space (especially when we have a weekend like this past one where one of us who shall not be named was suffering from what my Dad used to call “the holly-grobbles”)

    Okay. So burning incense in the bathroom is one fine way of removing stink. Did you know this? I learned it while I was traveling in China and the very finest restrooms had incense for masking the stench…

    So the tagline on this box of incense cracks me up every time I read it: “The Frangrance of Our Ancestors” . Does this mean the way they smelled way back when they were alive? Or they way they are smelling now (blech) all a-moldery in the ground? Or, given that this is Japanese incense and most people are cremated there, do their remains smell like sandalwood incense? Inquiring minds want to know…