sitting at Rita's desk

I'm sitting at Rita's desk today. For those of you not familiar with the ESR community, I've dressed up very professionally and am spending the day pretending to be a very competent and outgoing receptionist. It's fun for moonlighting, but I wouldn't want to do this every day. And no, I haven't really been asked to make coffee, although I've sure been drinking it.

There's not much to do- I cheerfully and graciously answer the phone when it rings, and then transfer the lucky callers to whomever might be able to actually help them. The unlucky ones get lost somewhere in the system, and I return to two important tasks:
a) looking competent
b) updating various things on the internet.

So, I've changed my Facebook status and updated my books, changed some Myspace stuff and left some comments, tinkered with my email, and now I've updated my Blogger list of books I want to read. It's in the top right hand corner, just in case you ever come into a large amount of money and want to spend some on me. I'm also updating my articles list, which I think I haven't touched since last semester. At some point, I will stop everything to search out more coffee, and perhaps redo my hopefully competent looking hair- if I've learned anything from working at the Roadhouse, or from preaching, it's that looking like you know what's going on is half the battle.

I read this today: The Peace Racket. "...we’re talking not about a bunch of naive Quakers but about a movement of savvy, ambitious professionals that is already comfortably ensconced at the United Nations, in the European Union, and in many nongovernmental organizations." Well, thank Heaven for that, at least.

And this: Enhancing Humanity "Of course, people are worried about more invasive innovations; in particular, the direct transformation of the human body. And this is where the gradualness of change is important, because as individuals we have a track record of coping with such changes without falling apart or losing our sense of self entirely. After all, we have all been engaged all our lives in creating a stable sense of our identity out of whatever is thrown at us." Narrative identity, etc. I've been reading a lot about that lately. Pieces of it will probably end up in my credo; my credo, in fact, is mostly pieces of things I've come across over the summer that I thought were interesting. It probably says more about my faith in its form than in its content.

And then this, from my hero Ben Witherington: Ignorance is Bliss? Biblical Illiteracy in the West. "Well of course part of the problem is the very nature of the modern and western church. It is all too often narcissistic and self-serving to the core. It spends the vast majority of its budget on itself-- its own buildings, its own clergy, its own self-help and nurture programs. The church has ceased almost altogether to be what it was at its inception-- an evangelistic movement, that also did some nurture and training of converts. Instead we are nurture institutions that might have a missions committee. Talk about placing the emphasis on the wrong syllable as the culture becomes increasing less Biblical. [...] What's wrong with needs based preaching? First of all in a culture immersed in constant advertisements and sales pitches, most people in the West have no idea what their real needs are. They can identify their wants, and they mistake them for actual needs." I just like Witherington, that's all. I love the fact that he has a blog, and that he uses bad grammar on it.

Ok, time to find more coffee.