"Your Great"

Tonight (Wednesday), I attended a University of Memphis NIT basketball game. The previous Saturday, we played Louisville for our Conference Tournament championship and an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. Our year, until the Conference tournament, had been inconsistent at best, but we managed, quite unexpectedly, to reach the finals and played a terrific game against Louisville. The last play of the game actually took place at the free throw line when our freshman point guard, Darrius Washington, had a chance to win the game with three free throws or force overtime by making two. He made the first, but painfully (for him more than anyone else) missed the last two. We lost the game and, in due course, received an NIT bid rather than going to the NCAA "dance." Hence our game tonight, which we won by 35 points. Darrius Washington played very well, receiving a standing ovation from the hometown crowd before the game started.
Sometime during the game, the on-court cameras panned the crowd, looking as usual for signs or pretty faces to put on the Jumbo-Tron scoreboard. Part of the modern reality of attending a game: nothing problematic with it as far as I am concerned. There remain, however, some realities that bother me quite a bit.
As the second half progressed, one camera came across a hand-held sign that said "D. Washington--Your Great." Our young point guard has already established himself as a very good player with the potential to be one of our school's historically best players. That's not the problem nor is it my issue. Upon reading that sign, I did roll my eyes with frustration and wanted to say "what else is new?" The word "your," as used on the sign, is a possessive pronoun, employed in cases such as "your book," "your car," and "your basketball." In other words, the person holding the sign (and its maker) used a pronoun in place of the verb "You are," here contracted to "You're great." The older I get, the more unwilling I am to allow misuses of words or to endure horribly incorrect grammar. Children, of course, are an exception, but if we as Americans really believe in education, it seems fair to ask that if their parents or guardians are not willing to instill reasonably decent English (I always get confused about the uses of "to lie" and "to lay," so I by no means claim perfection) in their children, then the schools must do so. Unfortunately, in seemingly far too many places, paid school teachers and their administrators mangle subjects and verbs, confuse the nominative and objective cases ("between you and I" among other such jewels) and would think nothing of "Your great," even if they recognized its incorrect useage.
I speak of one town where I served pastorally in particular. To provide truth in packaging, my anitpathy toward these people extends far beyond the manner in which many of them butcher our God-given language. The misuse and wholesale destruction of basic grammar, however, on the part of school teachers and principals provides a picture of the overall problem as I see it. If children hear verbal pronunciations such as "He already done it," or "They is running late" from those who receive salaries from state tax money to teach them, something remains dreadfully wrong. The end result becomes a university whose students don't know the difference between a contracted verb and a pronoun. I react, but despair about what to do. My students in Carbondale, however, know that I will correct them if I recognize improper grammar. At least in part, I get paid to do so.

Library Thoughts Southern Illinois University

Wednesday afternoon, I attended a meeting that concerned recently raised issues about the discarding of books at Morris Library, the main campus facility for SIU. Some English department faculty, other graduate students and myself met within the context of SIUC's stated "goal" of becoming one of the "top 75 Public Research Institutions in the United States by the year 2019," when we will celebrate our 150th year as a school. It seems logical, given our "goal" that the university would spend whatever resources are necessary to UPGRADE library facilities and its holdings such as books and print journals.
Unfortunately, however, for some (seemingly undetermined) time the library has been discarding books with very little attention paid to a given book's value for the same scholars whose research will help to make SIUC one of the "top 75 Public Research Institutions in the United States by the year 2019." By almost miraculous good luck, at least 20 volumes that would otherwise have been, in the not-quite-euphemism used by the Dean of Libraries, "recycled" have been recovered and the process of discarding has (so we were told) been discontinued for the time being. One of the recovered volumes is, seemingly, one of only two paper (non-copied or computer regenerated I think) copies that remain in the entire WORLD. The Dean of Liberal Arts (God bless her) mentioned that several scholars from other universities have e-mailed her expressing concern over the discarding policies and procedures of our library.
The meeting itself lasted almost two hours, the first quarter of which was spent in listening to the Dean of Libraries discuss the progress of our years in planning, 42 (or so) million dollar renovation project currently underway. We the listeners were given detailed diagrams with multi-colored sections that designated the layout of the new facility, scheduled to be completed sometime in 2008. Part of our millions are to be spent for the installation of a Starbucks within the Library itself, presumably for the purpose of making our primary research facility more "student friendly," perhaps neglecting to remember that those of us seeking advanced degrees are students as well as teaching assistants. At the same time, however, the Dean made it clear that the newly renovated library would not have additional space for books or (presumably) print journals. His attitude in answering that question, made by one of my fellow graduate students, almost brought her to tears. In a word, he literally laughed in her face. What evidently the Library Dean means by ageeing with our university "goal" of being one of the "top 75 Public Research Institutions in the United States by the year 2019" is to spend 42 million dollars on a coffee shop, one of which we already have in the Student Center. Presumably, having two Starbucks in our university will make it easier for the attainment of our "goal" in being one of the "top 75 Public Research Institutions in the United States by the year 2019" more than the maintenance of rare volumes or the purchase of new ones.
The remainder of the meeting managed to remain a civil affair with the Dean promising that a new "policy" will soon be formulated that will clarify the existing "procedures" about book discards and "recycling." He rejected any sort of physical shelf on the first floor where faculty or students could, as a last measure, check which volumes are to be discarded as "unworkable." The Dean wants to rely upon the Area Liaisons to inform the faculty member of books or other materials that are scheduled for "recycling," asking for their input one way or another. Evidently, one person in the Library for the (in my case) entire College of Liberal Arts is somehow to remain responsible for keeping tabs on scholarship within each of its respective departments, each specialty and interest of faculty members and each area of study for even greater numbers of Masters and doctoral students. I leave it to practioners of basic logic to discern whether or not the Dean's approach of "policies, procedures and liasions," upon which he insisted, as being more "workable" than a physical space on the first floor (of a seven story building) for books to be placed before they become, seemingly, Rare Editions of toilet paper. Maybe our university's "goal" will be achieved. Maybe those who evaluate research institutions will be impressed by the taste of coffee in the Library Starbucks; they certainly will not have many books to examine.

fundamentalism

I grew up Southern Baptist, being baptized by immersion at age 9, some 32 years ago this month. My maternal grandfather served Southern Baptist congregations with honor in Georgia and Mississippi from the teens until his death in 1946. In part becuase of his legacy, but more due to my persistently unanswered questions about Christian faith and God's basic nature, I attended Vanderbilt Divinity School (graduating there in 1988) and eventually served congregations in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) between 1993 and the spring of 2004. I discovered that the fundamentalism of my boyhood was not simply cofined to rightwing interpretations of Scripture. Fundamentalism, in a word, is an attitude that asserts its right to dominance by any means necessary. Since leaving seminary (which intellectually I found stimulating in very important ways), I have spent a good deal of these almost 17 years trying to formulate a working faith in the context of Protestantism. I continue to discover, however, that being one among very few voices in a wilderness of Christians who only want their Pastors and Church executives to "tell me what I want to hear" leads to a dynamic of, as William Faulkner described Flem Snopes, "having eyes like stagnant water." In other words, fundamentalism in any form destroys the life it claims to protect. God does not create and redeem us, I believe, to live the "morality" as arbitrarily designed by someone else. God invites us to live with all the abundance that he (or she) provides.
While I am not dedicating my "blog" solely to a fight against fundamentalism, I do hope that most of our conversations can focus upon different ways to understand faith or even a lack of faith. God is beyond our comprehension: that's my basic premise, which I believe to reflect my Judeo-Christian heritage and the Biblical witness. That being so, let's explore God's nature together in a spirit of acceptance and openness. Such openess is the best way to resist fundamentalism as theology and, more importantly, as Form.