525,600 meetings
12/2/2005
Bless me bloggees for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last blog and that one came after a four week gap. Along the way I've been in 525,600 meetings but I can confidently say: We're OK! So light your candle, watch for an Angel and find your own version of a restaurant in Santa Fe. Christmas bells are ringing, somewhere else—and here.
OK, so maybe you didn't see the Broadway show but perhaps you'll catch the movie. I love Rent and would say so even if it wasn't also my daughter's favorite.
I should tell you I should tell you… so much happening here.
Last week we spent half a day with Martin Sanchez, the Counsel General of Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and screened an extremely vivid, provocative documentary about the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela.
Yesterday we spent the afternoon and evening with Patrick McWilliams, who wrote and performed a one-person play on the trial of Socrates. It was a fascinating and entertaining piece, based largely on Plato's Apology, and in which Socrates' famous challenge, that "the unexamined life is not worth living," was brought into sharp relief and applied to contemporary events.
Later in the evening, McWilliams performed a dramatic, and deeply inspirational reading of the entire Gospel of Mark. There's something wonderful about hearing that entire text, in the beauty of the King James version, all the way through with its incredible power and dynamism—the consistent failure to understand by Jesus' disciples, along with the abiding offer of God's forgiveness and the surprising and at times even shocking eruptions of God's grace, manifested through people, like women and children, where the prevailing religious and social norms least expected it. What were they closed to seeing? What are we?
I also had a wonderful visit before Thanksgiving from a student who graduated from Dominican last May and is now in a master's program elsewhere. She'd emailed me earlier in the semester, and said this: "My solid liberal arts education is really helping out here a lot. It seems that many of the students who went to [her current grad school] undergrad don't have a solid background in the humanities. They seem really focused on one specific, technical area—aka journalism. So while that's great for reporting and editing, it's not too helpful in discussing and analyzing contemporary issues. I really appreciate all those seminars and philosophy classes. It's too bad I didn't take more at Dom."
When we talked it was so clear that she got it—not the vague and unspecific "anything could be IT" we see on the television commercial for eBay, but the very specific love of learning and thinking along with the critical tools to do so—and that "IT" is at the heart of a Dominican education.
That's it for now. I'll write more—another day.
Bless me bloggees for I have sinned. It has been two weeks since my last blog and that one came after a four week gap. Along the way I've been in 525,600 meetings but I can confidently say: We're OK! So light your candle, watch for an Angel and find your own version of a restaurant in Santa Fe. Christmas bells are ringing, somewhere else—and here.
OK, so maybe you didn't see the Broadway show but perhaps you'll catch the movie. I love Rent and would say so even if it wasn't also my daughter's favorite.
I should tell you I should tell you… so much happening here.
Last week we spent half a day with Martin Sanchez, the Counsel General of Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, and screened an extremely vivid, provocative documentary about the 2002 coup attempt in Venezuela.
Yesterday we spent the afternoon and evening with Patrick McWilliams, who wrote and performed a one-person play on the trial of Socrates. It was a fascinating and entertaining piece, based largely on Plato's Apology, and in which Socrates' famous challenge, that "the unexamined life is not worth living," was brought into sharp relief and applied to contemporary events.
Later in the evening, McWilliams performed a dramatic, and deeply inspirational reading of the entire Gospel of Mark. There's something wonderful about hearing that entire text, in the beauty of the King James version, all the way through with its incredible power and dynamism—the consistent failure to understand by Jesus' disciples, along with the abiding offer of God's forgiveness and the surprising and at times even shocking eruptions of God's grace, manifested through people, like women and children, where the prevailing religious and social norms least expected it. What were they closed to seeing? What are we?
I also had a wonderful visit before Thanksgiving from a student who graduated from Dominican last May and is now in a master's program elsewhere. She'd emailed me earlier in the semester, and said this: "My solid liberal arts education is really helping out here a lot. It seems that many of the students who went to [her current grad school] undergrad don't have a solid background in the humanities. They seem really focused on one specific, technical area—aka journalism. So while that's great for reporting and editing, it's not too helpful in discussing and analyzing contemporary issues. I really appreciate all those seminars and philosophy classes. It's too bad I didn't take more at Dom."
When we talked it was so clear that she got it—not the vague and unspecific "anything could be IT" we see on the television commercial for eBay, but the very specific love of learning and thinking along with the critical tools to do so—and that "IT" is at the heart of a Dominican education.
That's it for now. I'll write more—another day.
