Retired Pastor Ruminates: August 2009

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Chef Hats off to Julie and Julia!

If you haven’t seen the film Julie and Julia yet you must. By now you probably know that it is based on two books, My Life in France (which I have read) by Julia Child and her nephew, and Julie/Julia (which I have not), by Julie Powell that grew out of a blog by Powell in 2002, in which she attempted to cook every recipe in Child’s iconic Mastering the Art of French Cooking in a year. Both books are getting a bump from the movie and are on the NYTimes best seller list.

The film interweaves the two stories, and although some critics have a point that the Childs' sections overshadow the Powell sections, the result is engaging and lots of fun. The incomparable Meryll Streep once again demonstrates her powers as a conjurer by becoming Julia Child, the lilting voice, the stoop of a too-tall woman, the goofy charm, it’s all there and it is something to behold. Stanley Tucci is wonderful as her husband Paul, and the chemistry between these two is terrific to watch. Would that any of us could have that much fun together.

Of course, the real star of this movie is the food, as you see Julia and Paul eat their way through France, and Julie (played capably by charming Amy Adams), cooking her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking in her upstairs apartment over a pizza parlor. The movie gets a little overly mystical for my tastes about Julie's imagined bond with Julia, but after a year of cooking her recipes Julie is entitled to be a little off balanced.

So this one goes on my list of other favorite foodie movies with Eat, Drink, Man, Woman; Like Water for Chocolate; Babette’s Feast; and Tampopo. Foodie friends tell me I must see Big Night and it’s on my list.

Yesterday I pulled my copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking off the cookbook bookcase and noticed it is a first edition. It was given to me by my late Aunt Tia (Grace Louise Forster, aka Brownie Boghosian). It is a Book Club edition, so I am pretty sure she got it from The Book of the Month Club. I have both volumes with their dust jackets and they are in pretty good shape, since Tia didn’t cook very much and was pretty neat when she did (like my mom she was a librarian.) I, on the other hand, who also take good care of my books but give cookbooks a big exemption, have left pinot noir stains on both the Boeuf Bourguignon and the Coq au Vin (photo below) pages.

In addition to these two provincial classics, I have made Julia’s Cassoulet, and all three of these dishes are delicious, labor intensive, time consuming, and laden with butter. The Cassoulet takes several days to digest,

Julia’s later book, The Way to Cook, has simplified recipes, but loses some of the joi de vivre (along with the butter) of the original. I have made her “Zinfandel of Beef,” an updated and simplified Boeuf Bourguignon, and it is delicious, but not nearly as sumptious as the original, in which you braise onions and mushrooms separately and add them to the final dish at the end.

In today’s NYTimes Book Review Mastering the Art of French Cooking is now number one on the Hardcover Advice and How-To List, which means it will be taking up space on many a kitchen bookshelf for years to come. For those who actually open it and try to cook from it be warned. It is a great cookbook and deserves its reputation, but Julia was not fooling around.

The movie makes Julie’s attempt to cook all the recipes seem pretty grueling, but I suspect the reality was even more daunting. These recipes take time, thought, care, attention, good ingredients and love. There are no shortcuts. They yield wonderful results.

And in many ways Mastering is an artifact from another age. It is not only French cooking made accessible for Americans, it is French cooking from 1960. A lot has changed since then, and even the French don’t cook this way much anymore.

But it is still wonderful, so hats off to Julia for being Julia, and also to Julie for sparking a new interest for another generation in this great cuisine and the oversized personality that brought it to America.

(all photos: R.L. Floyd)

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Where I Ruminate on My Experience of the British National Health Service

One of the many inflammatory charges that frequently gets tossed into the current health care reform conversation is how bad nationalized health care systems are.

I have recently read an interview with David Sedaris (very funny, of course) about having kidney stone attacks in New York and Paris and comparing the two experiences (and costs.) And author Sara Paretsky, creator of fictional detective V.I. Warshawski, had a piece in the New York Times Magazine about taking her husband to the emergency room in France with chest pains. Both Sedaris and Paretsky agree that the French hospital experience is bureaucratic, but also effective, and above all, cheap.

I can’t speak to the subject, since I have always been healthy when in France (I suspect it’s all the wine and cheese), but I have been ill while in Britain, and have first-hand (although somewhat dated) experience with the British National Health Service.

My family and I have lived in Britain for extended periods of time on three occasions during sabbaticals. My first one was in Oxford, and my children were almost 5 and almost 7 when we got there. Our doctor was Dr. Shakespeare (I’m not making this up) in Summertown, and he ran a clean efficient surgery that adequately took care of our medical needs for the months we were there. Medications, such as antibiotics for a child’s earache, came from the neighborhood chemist. Both the visit and the prescriptions were free, thanks to the NHS. We were resident aliens, but we received care with no questions asked. Sometimes we had to wait, a situation not unknown in America.

On one of the children’s mid-term holidays, we left Oxford and traveled, along with Martha’s sister Andrea, to the Cornwall coast. We stayed in the charming fishing village of Mousehole (pronounced Mowz-uhl) at a guesthouse called The Lobster Pot.

I awoke one morning with a sore throat and a slight temperature. We were slated to go down the coast to see St. Michaels Mount, a part-time island with a picturesque priory on it that sits just off the coast in the English Channel. I decide to tough it out, but inquired from our host where I might get medical care if I needed it. She told me that there was a medical group in the village of Marazion, on the mainland, just across from the island.

By the time we got to Marazion I was feeling pretty feverish, so I had Martha drop me off at the medical group while the rest of the party went to see the island. I waited for about a half hour for my turn to go to the window. The friendly receptionist asked me my address, and I explained that I lived in Oxford, but was on holiday in Cornwall. “Where are you staying?” she inquired. I told her I was at The Lobster Pot in Mousehole, and she said, “Then you must go to Penzance for care, you are not in our district.” I don’t know if it was the fever or the reference to Penzance, but the conversation did seem to have a Gilbert and Sullivan feel about it.

So, having been denied, I left and walked across the causeway to the Island (you can only do this at low tide) found my family, and spent several hours huddled on a stone bench in a shady spot burning with fever.

In due time we found the doctor’s office in Penzance, waited a reasonable amount of time, and I saw the doctor, who, now that I think about, it looked a lot like Hugh Laurie, the British actor who plays Dr. House, in the TV show House. He asked me where I was from, and I told him Oxford. “Ah,” he said, “the city of dreaming spires.” He looked in my ears and throat, listened to my chest, took my temperature and sent me to the chemist next door to get some antibiotics, which did the trick in a day or two. All at no cost.

So I draw no big conclusions from my tale except to say I always felt welcome as a visitor in Britain, and it always felt like the right thing to do to provide health care for everybody. I’ll let the experts work out the details, but I am really hoping we can do that here.

Tuesday, August 25, 2009

Eugene Peterson on Spirituality

I always gain some insight when I read Eugene Peterson, the pastor scholar who created The Message, a fresh contemporary paraphrase of the Bible. Peterson's own immersion in the Biblical texts makes him refreshingly immune to the seductions of the culture, and I find him telling hard and graceful truths that both evangelicals and mainliners seldom hear because of their mutual commitment to the fratricidal Christian culture wars. Peterson is not ashamed to call himself an evangelical, yet he served as pastor to a mainline Presbyterian Church for many years. In a 2005 interview with Mark Galli for Christianity Today (“Spirituality for all the Wrong Reasons”), Peterson challenges the American tendency to see spirituality chiefly in terms of personal growth and relational intimacy.

Galli queried him on this: “Yet evangelicals rightly tell people they can have a ‘personal relationship with God.’ That suggests a certain type of spiritual intimacy.”

Peterson responded: “All these words get so screwed up in our society. If intimacy means being open and honest and authentic, so I don't have veils, or I don't have to be defensive or in denial of who I am, that's wonderful. But in our culture, intimacy usually has sexual connotations, with some kind of completion. So I want intimacy because I want more out of life. Very seldom does it have the sense of sacrifice or giving or being vulnerable. Those are two different ways of being intimate. And in our American vocabulary intimacy usually has to do with getting something from the other. That just screws the whole thing up. It's very dangerous to use the language of the culture to interpret the gospel. Our vocabulary has to be chastened and tested by revelation, by the Scriptures. We've got a pretty good vocabulary and syntax, and we'd better start paying attention to it because the way we grab words here and there to appeal to unbelievers is not very good.”

I've been watching Mad Men, a TV show about Madison Avenue advertising men in 1960. It is a very cynical show, but captures some of the manufactured quality of American culture, which relies on superficial images to sell products. Part of the climate for this to be effective is what might be called historical amnesia for what has come before. It is always change that is sold (even, perhaps especially, in politics). As Peterson wisely points out, the church has “a pretty good vocabulary and syntax” rooted in Scripture and long generations of rich tradition. Sadly, we in the church too often jettison this grammar for the grammar of the culture, which is typically ephemeral.

I think that one of the reasons Martin Luther King was so compelling was the way he employed the sacred vocabulary during the civil rights movement to speak to a great public moral issue. Folks in the black churches in America were acquainted with this vocabulary, because it had been preserved in their churches. But suddenly it spoke to us all with great power.

We have rich traditions of spirituality in the church, but we tend to ignore them and look elsewhere for wisdom about it, often to a faux Eastern spirituality made for America. What Peterson articulates so well is that when spirituality becomes unmoored from the grammar of faith it becomes vacuous, just another consumer product sold to us to enhance our quality of life. As he puts it: “It's very dangerous to use the language of the culture to interpret the gospel.”

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Where I Ruminate on the Joy of a Good Witty Quote

I am a collector of witty and pithy quotes, epigrams, aphorisms, and one-liners. This hobby is an occupational hazard for a preacher, but I took to it long before I ever went to seminary. Being theologically educated gave me a huge stock of quotes from sacred Scripture, only to discover, as my Dad once said about Shakespeare’s plays, “It’s just a bunch of well-known sayings strung together.”

For fun I sometimes browse through one of my several editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

One of my early influences may have been Yankee catcher Yogi Berra, whose penchant for unintended (or is it?) paradox makes him a master of this genre. Some of my favorite Yogisms: “If you come to a fork in the road, take it,” “You can observe a lot by watching, ” and “Nobody goes there anymore; it’s too crowded.” Of course, like Samuel Johnson, Mark Twain, and the prolific Anonymous, Yogi may be credited with things he actually never said. Or as he, himself, once admitted, “I didn’t really say everything I said.”

Yogi learned from Casey Stengel, the long-time manager of the Yankees, who had some pretty quotable lines himself, such as “Don’t cut my throat, I may want to do that later myself,” and the immortal, “Being with a woman all night never hurt no professional baseball player. It’s staying up all night looking for a woman that does him in.”

Sometimes a phrase captures the humor or irony in a situation better than a full-blown description. When I started my first ministry in a city after being a country parson, I had several seasons of being taken advantage of by various professional indigents before I learned how to screen them properly. If one of them caught me in a generous mood, I could count on seeing three of his colleagues the next day with equally pressing needs. I came home one night, and my wife inquired about my day and my ministry, and I said, in frustration, “No good deed goes unpunished.” I just Googled that to find that it is attributed to Clare Booth Luce, but like many of these, it was floating around in the ether.

Here are some other favorites of mine:

Oscar Wilde, “I can resist anything but temptation,” and “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.”

Dorothy Parker: “If you want to know what God thinks about money, just look at the people he gave it to,” and “Brevity is the soul of lingerie.”

Mark Twain, “A banker is a fellow who lends you his umbrella when the sun is shining, but wants it back when it begins to rain,” and “Wagner’s music is better than it sounds.”

James Thurber, “Why do you have to be a nonconformist like everybody else,” and “He knows all about art, but he doesn’t know what he likes.”

Woody Allen: “Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends,” and “I was thrown out of college for cheating on my metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”

Groucho Marx, “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read,” and “I don’t want to belong to a club that will accept me as a member.”

Steven Wright: “You can’t have everything. Besides, where would you put it?” and “Everywhere is within walking distance if you have the time.”

Well, I could, and usually do, go on, but I’ll end with one from the ever-quotable Dr. Samuel Johnson, who once wrote, “Every quotation contributes something to the stability or enlargement of the language.”

Saturday, August 15, 2009

On Hearing John Updike's “Voice” for the First Time

I get my copy of the New Yorker magazine second-hand from a friend, so I receive a pile of them at a time, and work my way through them. This means there is sometimes a lag of a month or more between when they come out and when I get them, and some of the matters being explored therein have lost their sheen. I actually like this since it provides a filter for the ephemeral, and reminds me how much of what passes for information is really just entertainment.

So it was that I came to read a review of a book about writer John Cheever, one of my favorites, by John Updike, another of my favorites.

The review was published on March 9, but Updike had died on January 27, and it occurred to me that this might be the last time I would hear Updike’s voice from the pages of the New Yorker, where a good many, perhaps most, of his short stories were first published.

Updike’s voice and I go way back. There are writers who seem to have always been part of one’s life, but I can pinpoint exactly when I read my first Updike.

It was the summer of 1966, just about this time of year in the dog days of August. “The Summer of Love” was still a year away, but it was my summer of love, in that I was seventeen-years old and had my first real girlfriend. It was an exhilarating as well as a painfully troubled time in my life, for in addition to all the usual struggles of adolescence my mother was dying of cancer, which provided the emotional backdrop for this heady summer.

My girlfriend’s family was moving to California in September, and they were slated to go on a two-week vacation in August on their boat, which was a 42-foot Hatteras power yacht. Believing (mistakenly, it turned out) that she couldn’t live without me for two weeks she persuaded her parents to invite me to join the family on their vacation, and I persuaded my parents to let me go. I think they thought it might be a break from the emotional heavy-lifting going on at home.

So I got to go on this amazing trip. We launched from the boat's dock on the Hudson, and went into the East River by the Spuyten Duyvil, and eventually into Long Island Sound toward New England. We docked the first night in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, later to Watch Hill, Rhode Island, and eventually we made our way to the island of Nantucket, my first time in Massachusetts, where I have lived for the better part of my life (mostly at the other end, in the Berkshires). I daily saw beautiful sights on land and sea.

My parents were culturally rich, but financially, not so much. My mother was a school librarian, and my father was trying to keep his small business from failing. This meant that the family had a somewhat tenuous finger-hold on the middle class, and vacations on a yacht didn’t feature in the family profile.

This, then, was quite an opportunity for me, but the high life became short-lived when a confusing combination of youthful indiscretion and parental misunderstanding led to the decision that I was to be sent home.

So I found myself on the dock of the White Elephant Yacht Club in Nantucket on the phone to home. My parents were not at home, but my younger brother Bill, then twelve, was, and I delivered him the message that I was flying in from Nantucket to La Guardia Airport and needed to be picked up. I told him the flight number and my time of arrival, said my goodbyes to the stormy vacationers, and left by cab for the Nantucket Airport. From there I experienced my first airplane flight, a rather bumpy short ride in a prop plane.

I arrived in New York, and waited in the terminal to be picked-up. It takes over an hour from where we lived in Bergen County, New Jersey, to get to La Guardia, so I was prepared to wait for awhile.

So there I was, a seventeen year-old kid from the suburbs, sitting in a busy New York airport, full of turbulent thoughts and emotions. I had just been on this dream vacation, and it was suddenly over. I had been voted off the boat, and now would have to explain that to my parents, who had enough to worry about without worrying about me. My girlfriend was moving away, and I would probably never see her again. My mother was sick and dying. I was starting my senior year and had no idea what I wanted to do, or where or whether I wanted to go to college. And it was beginning to seem like I had been in the airport a really long time. I tried calling home again, but this time there was no answer, so I figured maybe they were on their way (can you remember before cell phones?).

I left my reverie, found a bathroom, and noticed a store in the terminal. This was in the days before elaborate airport bookstores, but along with the candy and magazines was a circular wire rack display of paperback trade books. I perused the possible selections, and decided on two. One was a selection of short crime fiction by Eric Ambler, the name of which I have forgotten long ago, and the other was The Same Door by John Updike, the first collection of his short stories.

I don’t know why I chose Updike. I’m guessing I sized it up as serious, and God knows I wanted some of that in my life right then. I think I started with an Ambler story. Then I moved on to the Updike, and heard that voice for the first time.

How would I describe that voice? There was a fluency in his words that immediately brought you into a world so richly described that you could inhabit it for a time. His people weren’t heroic or engaged in grand escapades, but like me, were worried and sad and preoccupied with the scuffles of life, with sex and death and religion and all the other challenges of living.

I think I read them all. In any case I called home again and this time got through to discover that my brother’s message that I was coming home had been lacking in specificity, and so I waited another hour, maybe five or six in all, until my Dad came and got me. He didn’t seem particularly upset or even that interested in my story, which was a relief.

The summer ended, my life moved on, my girlfriend moved away, I went off to college, and my mother died. A decade later I was a pastor in rural Maine, and a friend (a different one) started bringing me his castaway New Yorkers. I have been regularly hearing that Updike voice all these years, through the novels and reviews, the poetry and the stories, above all, the stories. It became for me the voice of a particularly intelligent and insightful friend. I am going to miss it.

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Rick's Gooey Inauthentic Chicken Enchiladas Recipe

These are a family favorite, but they have no claim to any regional authenticity. For one thing, I use flour rather than corn tortillas, and for another I load them with sauce, and to add further insult, they are also much bigger than usual since I use burrito-size tortillas.

For shortcuts you can use leftover chicken (or turkey) or buy a rotisserie chicken and chop it up. For the salsa you could use good jarred salsa. I use 2-cup packages of Mexican-blend grated cheese, but you can grate Cheddar (not sharp) or Monterey Jack. Be alerted that you will need a really big baking pan to get these big boys all in. I use my roasting pan. You could do it in two pans if you need to. Feeds eight normal people (or four Floyds)

Ingredients

For the filling:

8 Burrito-size flour tortillas

2 cups chopped cooked chicken

1 large chopped white onion

12 oz homemade or jarred salsa

1 cup of grated cheese (Mexican blend, cheddar, or Monterey jack)

Salt and pepper to taste

For the sauce:

4 Tbsp vegetable oil

4 cups chicken broth

3 Tbsp chili powder

1 Tbsp ground cumin (cominos)

1Tbsp chopped canned chipotle peppers in adobo (optional, makes it pretty hot)

1 14.5 oz can diced tomatoes with their juice

2 garlic gloves chopped

2 tsp dried oregano

1 cup grated cheese

chopped fresh cilantro for garnish

chopped Romaine or Iceberg lettuce

To make the sauce: Make the sauce first, because it needs to cook down a bit. In a two-quart heavy-bottomed saucepan, heat the oil over medium heat and stir in the garlic and oregano for a few seconds being careful not to burn it. Add the chili powder and cumin and stir constantly for about a minute until you get a thick paste. Then slowly drizzle in the stock while stirring. You want to incorporate the other-ingredients into the stock. Stir in the tomatoes and the chipotles and bring the pot to a boil, then turn your heat down to get a good simmer. Let the sauce simmer and cook down while you assemble the enchiladas. It will not thicken too much, but don’t worry since it will spend another half hour in the oven.

To assemble the enchiladas: In a large mixing bowl mix chicken, onion, salsa, and 1 cup cheese. Salt and pepper to taste. Pour 1 cup of the sauce into the bottom of a large baking pan. Put a tortilla on a plate and fill with one-eighth of the filling, rolling each of them one at a time, and placing each of them into the baking pan with the seam side down to hold them together.

To cook. Pre-heat the oven to 350 degrees. Pour the remaining sauce on top of the enchiladas so that it moistens the tops of all the tortillas. Sprinkle 1 cup grated cheese over the top of the enchiladas, and put the pan uncovered into the oven for 30 minutes. Remove the enchiladas from the oven and let them sit for 5 minutes. With a spatula put an enchilada on each plate, put chopped lettuce on either side of it, and sprinkle with fresh chopped cilantro.

(Photos: R.L. Floyd)

Monday, August 10, 2009

Where I Ruminate on My Long Love Affair with Food

I love food. I love to cook it, and I love to eat it, especially my own.

Mom and Dad both cooked. It wasn’t haut cuisine, but it was pretty healthy and had variety. I was born in 1949 so my earliest days in memory are in the fifties, not a heyday for American cookery. We had our share of frozen potpies and TV dinners and Mrs. Paul’s fish-sticks, but more often it was a home-cooked meal. My mother was a Midwesterner, so it was pretty simple with not a lot of seasoning. But she did have a well-worn copy of M.F.K. Fisher’s “How to Cook a Wolf” on her shelf, which was pretty avant-garde in those days. Fisher, Elizabeth David, and, of course, the incomparable Julia Child, were bringing back dispatches from the front about such exotica as olive oil and fresh garlic.

My favorite food was my mother’s friend chicken, which was a company dish. I remember fat pork roasts you couldn’t buy today for love nor money, with an inch of fat on the outside, and cooked ‘til it was gray for fear of trichinosis. The Sunday roast appeared mysteriously throughout the week in various guises and disguises. My Mom’s pork roast would supply the main ingredient for my Dad’s Pork Chop Suey or Chow Mein. That was exotica in the days before Szechuan and Hunan restaurants, when all American Chinese food was faux Cantonese. We had mac and cheese and ham steaks and haddock (frozen) that Mom would roll in corn meal and fry.

We seldom went out because it was expensive. When we did it was for pizza at an Italian bar called the Antlers (this was North Jersey) or to Westwood to the Cantonese place, where my Dad would always silently issue a “winner take all” challenge to the poor waiter with the water pitcher. Or for a real treat we might get the clam strip roll at Howard Johnson.

In those days, at least in my house, there was no extra virgin (or any) olive oil, no kosher salt, no pepper mill (that came ground from Durkees), no fresh garlic, no cilantro, no jalapeno peppers, no garam masala, or Hungarian

paprika. Cheese was typically Longhorn cheddar. Steak was chuck and cooked gray. Pasta was spaghetti with red sauce from a jar, with some browned ground beef in it.

My parents didn’t drink when we were growing up, so the first wine I recall having was the sweet Portugese rose, Mateus, that was the rage when I was in college.

I started cooking when I was a young adult in the years before I married. It started with a simple spaghetti sauce or chili con carne. I added a spinach loaf that was mainly frozen spinach and crumbled Saltines.

When Martha and I were married our friends the Handspicker’s gave us a copy of Fannie Farmer’s Cook Book as a wedding present. That was my first cookbook, and I made my way through it and added more dishes to my repertoire: sauerbraten, shish kabob, and variety of soups, chowders, and stews. Martha gave me Joy of Cooking in our early days and I added still more. We moved to Bangor in 1979 and they didn’t have a decent Chinese rerstaurant, so I went to the Bangor Public Library and found Joyce Chen’s Cookbook and taught myself rudimentary Chinese cooking. There was a little Vietnamese place with a small market, and I found tree ears and tiger lily blossoms to make hot and sour soup.

I discovered other cookbook authors: Julia Child, James Beard, Craig Claiborne, Madhar Jaffrey, and Marion Cunningham. I made tandoori chicken and turkey enchiladas, paella and ratatouille. I discovered wine can be tasty. I still remember Arthur and Anne Perkins coming to dinner and bringing a bottle of Cabernet from Rutherford, and it was

a revelation. In 1980 Martha and I went to Sonoma County to visit my college friend John Kwitkor, who worked for winemaker David Stare at Dry Creek Vineyards. John took us up and down the county, tasting and eating and having a ball.

When our children arrived on the scene a few years later they landed in a culinary household far different from the one I grew up in. They ate tofu with scallions in oyster sauce regularly, and curries with raita, which Rebecca called “cucumber white.” When they were four and six we dragged them off to Oxford, England, for a term, and they ate pakoras and samosas, Scotch eggs and Cornish pasties, scones with jam and cucumber sandwiches with no crusts.

On a plane ride back in the days of airline food the flight attendant asked the woman next to my son Andrew, then about age five, which entrée she would like, one of the choices being coq au vin. “What is that?” she asked. “It’s chicken, Mam,” my little guy answered. When my daughter returned from Oxford she started in kindergarten again here in the states, and early in the year the children were all asked to name their favorite food. There was lots of pizza, pasta, and hamburgers represented, but the teacher got a big charge out of Rebecca’s choice: tandoori chicken.

This little culinary autobiography was prompted by Michael Pollan’s piece in the New York Times Magazine last week about food, where he writes about how we are becoming spectators of food rather than makers of it.

I still make food. Every day. I don’t do it to be virtuous, but because I enjoy it. I enjoy making it for others and sharing it with them. As a pastor for thirty years I know the joy of celebrating the sacraments with a community. There is a near-sacramental quality about a meal well-prepared and presented and enjoyed with family and friends. I often take pictures of the foods I make for a “cookbook” that maybe someday will be Christmas presents for my family (the pictures in this blog are all of things I have made).

My parents didn’t make fancy food, but they made good food, and from them I learned the joy of the table, about taking your time, and enjoying your food and the company and the conversation. We all know we need food to live, but I believe we also have a deep hunger for this larger communal experience of which food is just one part, albeit an important one. To me food takes time, thought, and creativity so it becomes something to celebrate and not just to eat.

(Photos from top: Grilled shrimp with uncooked basil tomato sauced pasta; Littleneck clams with black bean sauce; Portuguese Cataplana; Korean BBQ'd Flanken Beef Short Ribs. Photos by R.L. Floyd)

Monday, August 3, 2009

Bridging Two Worlds: the Church and the Academy

As I have written before, my favorite theology blog is Jason Goroncy's Per Crucem ad Lucem. On his blog today, On the relation between the pulpit and the academy, he has a terrific quote from Charles Partee:

‘[I]f God speaks, and if God speaks in the church, then on some subjects sermons are not popularized products of more basic scholarly reflection. Rather scholarly reflection is an academized product of the more basic proclamation of the gospel … Thus, for the Christian community, sermons are a first-order, not a second-order, activity … As worship is more fundamental in the church than theology, so kerygmatic proclamation is more basic and often more pertinent than scholarly reflection’. – Charles Partee, The Theology of John Calvin (Louisville/London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008), 46.

I couldn't agree with this more. I have always had one foot in the local church and one foot in the academy. I served two congregations adjacent to seminaries, and we always had a number of faculty members in the pews. In my church in Bangor I was also the chaplain and sat with the faculty.

I did three term-long research fellowships during sabbaticals at Oxford, Cambridge and St Andrews Universities. I tried to stay current with the leading theology and biblical journals and wrote articles and reviews for several of them. I participated in the Pastor-Theologian Program at the Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton.

I am comfortable in both worlds, at a lecture hall at Christ Church College, Oxford or at a planning meeting for Vacation Bible School. But my comfort is more that I am, by analogy, bilingual than that they speak the same language. They don't.

The Partee quote gets at one of the problems that plagues theological education. Once upon a time, seminarians were trained by ministers who were also scholars, but had spent some time serving congregations. Their commitment was to the church and its ministries and they believed in a learned ministry as the means. They were bilingual in being able to speak both church and academic.

There are still wonderful teachers who share these commitments, but sadly, the secular academy is now the model that must be considered, with its emphasis on tenure and publishing. And, at least in America, members of the Academy who represent the theological disciplines are often viewed as quant relics of a bygone day. They don't get big research grants like their more robust colleagues in the sciences.

This inferiority complex makes them strive harder to be like the cool kids, and the art of theology is then betrayed by a series of niche disciplines dominated by identity politics and other “happy little hyphens” to use Karl Barth's term of derision.

What is worse is that there seeps into theological education the conceit that what happens in the academy is more important that what happens in the church, and students then become ministers who are ashamed of what should be their life's joyful vocation.

I can tell you from experience there is a lot of apologizing going on in our pulpits. Instead of hearing the bracing Good News about Jesus Christ and his holy love one often gets an attack on the tradition or an exhortation to do and be better. Sin and death are not the enemy, Christianity itself is, at least the kind practiced by our benighted forbearers who didn't get straightened out by three years at a divinity school.

And if a commitment to a learned ministry went along with this critical posture there might be something to be said for it. But often, it is the worst of both worlds, a distain for the local church and a laxity about keeping up with the genuine insights of the academy. So no wonder the laity often think of the academy as obscurantist, while at the same time the academy views the faithful as naive. The result is many a pastor who feels, not at home in two worlds, but like a stranger and exile in both.

I have suggested in the past that theological education be removed from the secular academy, but there are drawbacks to this, and it just isn't going to happen. And there would be much lost if students were deprived of having interlocutors from other disciplines.

I wish I knew how to bridge the gap. I have known many great teachers who did it, such a Gabriel Fackre, Gerald Cragg, Colin Gunton, Alan P.F. Sell, N.T. Wright, George Hunsinger, and Brown Barr, to name but a few.

My New Testament Professor, Krister Stendahl, at Harvard, was a first-rate scholar and a Lutheran bishop. There is a story told about him in one of his preaching classes. One of his students climbed into the pulpit, and before delivering her sermon said, “The text for today comes from the Deutero-Pauline corpus.” Stendahl looked over the top of his glasses, as he was wont to do, and gently said, “The people have come to be fed. Do not give them the recipe!”

He knew that preaching was a first-order activity!