Dressing for Pastoral Success at the Festival of Homiletics

A few days ago one of my favorite bloggers, PeaceBang, wrote a short note about someone she had seen at the Festival of Homiletics in Nashville last week:

[I just want to ] send a short note to the young male clergydude who was wearing a tie-dye teeshirt in the most garish shades of orange and blue, shorts and bright orange Crocs:
Sweetheart, Jesus wants you for a sunbeam, not an acid trip.

This brings me to a recent book by Russell Smith, Men’s Style: The Thinking Man’s Guide to Dress (Thomas Dunne, 2007). It's not the usual candidate for a mention among the top fifty theology reference books of the year. But the clergy person does have to dress, and ought to think hard about clothes and their appropriateness for the situation. This is about "contextualization," folks. Whether you like it or not, what you wear, when you wear it, and how you wear it communicates something. In January of 2005 when VP Dick Cheney wore a fur-hooded parka, snow boots, and a wool toque to the somber ceremony commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, he communicated something. All the European dignitaries present wore formal, dark woolen overcoats and clothing more fitting for the occasion. For clergy, if you're Roman Catholic or Orthodox, many of those decisions are already prescribed for you. But we Protestant clergy have choices to make. Smith is a little too formal for my own taste, but his book is well-informed, witty, entertaining and very readable. While it's not directed to clergy, you can do some of your own travelling here. In some situations, in some congregations, it might be perfectly appropriate to conduct a winter graveside service in brightly colored Gore-Tex. But you might at least read Smith to know your alternatives. What does it mean when the invitation says "Black Tie" or "Black Tie Optional"? What options do you have for shirts, suits, shoes and facial hair? What sort of connotations does a bow-tie have? There are other books out there about dress, but if your public library has Smith, check it out.

I know -- what about female clergy? Back to PeaceBang's blog -- Beauty Tips for Ministers , subtitled: "Because you're in the public eye, and God knows you've got to look good." PeaceBang (pseudonym for a young female Unitarian/Universalist minister) shares her observations about clothing trends and grooming for female and male clergy. See a recent article about her in Calvin Seminary's student publication, Kerux. Her observations on the recent Festival of Homiletics in Nashville, for example, cover matters of great weight, facial hair, men's hair styles, women's footwear, and dirty knapsacks.

I'm a librarian, so I can't help but give a few historical resources about clergy clothing:

• Graeme Murdock, "Dressed to Repress?: Protestant Clerical Dress and the Regulation of Morality in Early Modern Europe," Fashion Theory 4, no. 2 (2000):179-200. Get this through the database Wilson Select Plus (through Hekman Library; search for it by typing in 3 or 4 keywords from the title). This article considers how Reformed and Protestant Churches across Europe dealt with issues of appropriate dress for clergy (and clergy families).
  



• Reimar Zeller, Prediger des Evangeliums: Erben der Reformation im Spiegel der Kunst (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 1998) HL N8180 .Z45 1998
  (I know it's German, but you're looking at the illustrations.) A collection of portrayals of Protestant preachers in art up to the mid-20th century.
  



• Dress: Sources for Clerical Costume -- Lambeth Palace Library's guide to sources for the costume of both pre-Reformation English clergy and post-Reformation Anglican clergy.

And finally, to put this all in perspective, a good word from John Chrysostom (not a bad dresser himself) from his sermon Judge not, that you be not judged

". . .such rich attire is like a pile of withering hay. Beautiful garments are good for worms and moths. When they set upon such a man, they will strip him bare . . . But he who is clothed in virtue cannot be harmed by worms nor even by death itself."

Faith and Wartime Letters

This weekend I read Andrew Carroll's Grace Under Fire: Letters of Faith in Times of War (New York: Doubleday, 2007). Over the past nine years Carroll has assembled an archive of letters (or e-mails) written by U.S. soldiers involved in any combat operation from the American Revolution to the present day. The letters in the present collection were selected because they deal with issues of spirituality, religion, and theodicy. There are two letters written by brothers fighting on opposing sides of the Civil War, letters by chaplains, letters that attest to strengthened faith and letters that address the question of God's presence or absence in the face of the unspeakable suffering of wartime. I give it a high recommendation, especially as food for thought as we think about the disastrous tragedy of this present war in Iraq. These letters help us get inside the lives and thoughts of some of the participants in war. Several of the letters in this book are available online through Random House.

Carroll heads up the Legacy Project, which collects and preserves wartime letters. While there is no complete online digitization project for the archive, there are a number of web sites which exhibit letters from the project:

In partnership with the Gilder Lehrman Insitute of American History, the Legacy Project is exhibiting letters and audio recordings of the correspondences .

PBS produced a critically-acclaimed documentary titled "War Letters," based on Andrew Carroll's national bestseller of the same name, and letters featured in that program can be seen by clicking the link that says "Featured Letters." PBS also provides a brief bibliography related to wartime letters.

History Channel also produced a documentary, "Dear Home," based on World War II letters in the Legacy Project's collection, and has made some of these letters available.

Carroll has edited several previous collections of letters in book format, among them are:

War Letters: Extraordinary Correspondence from American Wars (New York: Scribner, repr. 2002)

Behind the Lines: Powerful and Revealing American and Foreign War Letters -- and One Man's Search to Find Them (New York: Scribner, 2005)

Mary Douglas, 1921-2007

Mary Tew Douglas, an anthropologist with wide-ranging interests, died on 16 May 2007. (See the obituary in the London Times.) Her book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (1966) [HL GN494 .D6] was a cross-cultural study of cleanliness, pollution and taboo and their roles in ritual systems. She argued that rather than being primarily about hygiene, these systems served to provide order to a perceived chaotic world. She applied this to the dietary codes of Leviticus and Deuteronomy, and has greatly influenced subsequent interpretation of these books.

In her later years she turned to biblical interpretation with

• In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers (JSOT, 1993; repr. Oxford, 2001)[HL BS1265.2 .D68 1993]
• Leviticus as Literature (Oxford, 1999) [HL BS1255.2 .D68 1999]
  
• Jacob's Tears: The Priestly Work of Reconciliation (Oxford, 2004) [HL BS1171.3 .D68 2004

Her latest book, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition (Yale, 2007) [HL PN212 .D68 2007], is a revision of her Terry Lectures at Yale in 2003. She used the term "ring compositions" to refer to chiastic (also called "pediment") literary structures which occur in more lengthy literary compositions, such as the Iliad, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, the book of Numbers, and certain Zoroastrian hymns.

ARTstor

Hekman Library is pleased to announce that we've purchased online access to ARTstor, a magnificent database containing over 500,000 images covering art, architecture, and archaeology. ARTstor includes software tools that support a wide range of teaching and research uses, including viewing and analyzing images through zooming and panning features, saving groups of images online, and annotating images. ARTstor has great potential as a resource for faculty and student presentations, research papers, and web pages. Each image comes with a detailed description that allows for effective searching.

In the area of religion and theology, ARTstor users can easily find images related to the study of worship, iconography, liturgical arts, church architecture, church history, and other areas. See the handout ARTstor Resources in Religious Studies and also those for Classical Studies and History.

For more information, access ARTstor to find a wide variety of tutorials and explanatory materials. From off-campus, be sure to access the database through the library website rather than directly On a more technical note, you will have to disable your popup blockers to use ARTstor. Click on Using ARTstor to see how to do this.

From Scroll to Codex: A Big Shift in Information Technology

One of the major technological shifts that took place in early Christianity was the transition from the book as scroll (a long roll of paper or parchment) to the book as codex (folded sheets of paper stitched together into bundles protected by a wrapper of thicker material). In Christianity and the Transformation of the Boook: Origen, Eusebius, and the Library of Caesarea (Belknap Press, 2006) [HL BR67.2 .G73 2006] Anthony Grafton and Megan Williams sketch out how this revolutionary change in the technology of the book took place in the book production of Origen and Eusebius of Caesarea in the third and fourth centuries. The codex afforded significant advantages over the scroll for the study and comparison of rival versions of Scripture (e.g., Origen's Hexapla, a 6-column parallel version of Scripture) and the study and writing of history (e.g., Eusebius' historical work and chronologies). See the review by Eamon Duffy, "Early Christian Impresarios," New York Review of Books 54:5 (29 March 2007).

From scroll to codex didn't happen without stress. This video from Norwegian television gives us a possible scenario from a medieval IT Help Desk (though user frustration was probably focused in the early Christian era rather than the late medieval setting portrayed in the video):

Wicca

The NY Times has an article this morning (16 May 2007) about Wiccans: "Wiccans Keep the Faith with a Religion Under Wraps", the gist of the article being that Americans are becoming more and more tolerant of this rapidly growing religious movement. I've had little direct contact with Wiccans. I recall a local Wiccan priestess in Chicago who offered to bless my vegetable garden in the parsonage yard several years ago (I thanked her as graciously as possible, but declined). But I have been asked about Wicca by students doing research for papers. The last one informed me that our library had nothing about Wicca or witchcraft, and she was going to have to head back for Ann Arbor where, she told me, "people know more about these things."

It seems that Wicca originated in the first half of the twentieth century as an attempt to recreate what was believed to be an ancient indigenous European religious tradition. If you're looking for an account of all this, there's the Wikipedia entry, readily available, and fairly informative. The best current, brief, dependable overview (with bibliography) of Wicca I've found is Joanne Pearson's article "Wicca" (pp.9728-9732). in the new Encyclopedia of Religion, 2d ed., ed. Lindsay Jones (Thomson-Gale, 2005) [Hekman Library ThRef BL31 .E46 2005] (This may be available to you online, if your library has the electronic version.) See also Joanne Pearson's essay,"'Witchcraft will not soon Vanish from this Earth': Wicca in the 21st Century," in Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular and Alternative Futures, ed. Grace Davie et al., 170-182 (Ashgate, 2003).

For a scholar-participant's account of Wicca, take a look at Nikki Bado-Fralick's Coming to the Edge of the Circle: A Wiccan Initiation Ritual, American Academy of Religion(Oxford, 2005) [HL BL615 .B33 2005]. Here's a table of contents. The Amazon site allows you to view pages of the book, and if you do it right, you can read fairly large sections. See especially pages 32-42 (under the heading "Mapping an Ever-Changing Landscape") for Bado-Fralick's take on the "landscape" of Wicca, including its relationship to witchcraft, contemporary paganism, Wicca and the "old religion," and the role of texts in Wicca.

Another fascinating perspective on Wicca is Kathryn Rountree, "The New Witch of the West: Feminists Reclaim the Crone," Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 4 (1997): 211–229. (Available, again, if you have online access to this journal).

Children at the Lord's Table

The Spring 2007 issue of the Calvin Theological Seminary Forum has four fine articles on an issue that will be addressed by the Christian Reformed Church denomination at its annual synod this June: the place of children at the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

• "Children at the Lord's Supper and Reformed Theology," by Lyle D. Bierma
  

• "United, Separated, Re-United: The Story of Baptism and the Lord's Supper," by David Rylaarsdam
  


• "Children at the Lord's Supper and the Key Text of 1 Corinthians 11:17-34," by Jeffrey A. D. Weima
  


• "Children at the Table: Some Provisional Answers to the Practical Questions," by John D. Witvliet

(For background to this, see the report of a task force of the CRC Synod which addresses this issue in the CRC's 2007 Agenda for Synod.)

The above-mentioned article by David Rylaarsdam, in two succinct pages, tells the story of the shift from the intimate connection of the sacraments of baptism and communion in the early church, through their separation in the Middle Ages and Reformation period, and the present desire of some Protestant denominations to re-unite them. Since this history is not only fascinating, but also unfamiliar to many, I've added a bibliography below to supplement the article:

• Fisher, John Douglas Close. Christian Initiation: Baptism in the Medieval West: A Study in the Disintegration of the Primitive Rite of Initiation. London: S.P.C.K., 1965.
  Hekman Lib BX5141.A1 A6 NO. 47

• Fisher, John Douglas Close. Christian Initiation: Confirmation Then and Now. Chicago: Hillenbrand, 2005 (Reprint of SPCK edition, 1978).
  Hekman Lib BV815 .F5 2005
  

• Gallant, Tim. Feed My Lambs: Why the Lord's Table Should Be Restored to Covenant Children. Grande Prairie, AB: Pactum Reformanda Pub., c2002.
  Hekman Lib BX9423.C5 G35 2002


• Hinant, John T. Children at the Lord's Table. Indianapolis, IN: Three Fountains Publishing, c2005.
  Hekman Lib BX7325.5 .L67 H56 2005 MRC-Circ


• Holeton, David. Infant Communion--Then and Now. Bramcote, Nottingham: Grove Books, 1981.
  Hekman Lib BV825.58 .H62 1981


• Jewett, Paul King. Infant Baptism and the Covenant of Grace: an appraisal of the argument that as infants were once circumcised, so they should now be baptized. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, c1978.
  Hekman Lib BV813.2 .J44


• Johnson, Maxwell E. The Rites of Christian Initiation :Their Evolution and Interpretation. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, c1999.
  Hekman Lib BV873.I54 J64 1999


• Mitchell, Nathan. “Dissolution of the Rite of Christian Initiation.” In Made, Not Born: New Perspectives on Christian Initiation and the Catechumenate, from the Murphy Center for Liturgical Research, 50-82. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976.
  Hekman Lib BV812 .M27

Congratulations to the Meeter Center for Calvin Studies

The H. Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies, located in Hekman Library, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The center began with a collection of important books and a bibliography by Calvin College professor Dr. H. Henry Meeter during his tenure of teaching in the Bible (now Religion) Department from 1927 to 1957. At the initiative of DR. Meeter, Calvin College and Calvin Theological Seminary established the Committee for Scholarly Research and Development of Basic Historic Calvinism in 1961. This committee was the genesis of the H. Henry Meeter Center and its governing board.

Today the Meeter Center with its rare items, books, articles, literature, and bibliographies is acclaimed worldwide as one of the most extensive and user-friendly of all Calvin and Calvinism collections.

The center recently purchased a copy Calvin's "Congrégation sur l’élection éternelle de Dieu."

The book was printed in Geneva in 1562 by Vincent Bres and only five libraries in Europe are known to own it and none in the United States.

It measures just three inches by 4¾ inches in size, slightly bigger than a deck of cards, but what is contained in its 118 pages presents Calvin’s teaching on election, particularly the issue of universal salvation against particular election (Calvin came down on the side of particular election).

A local television station recently featured this acquisition. Here's a link to their video feature.

Checking Out the Mormons

Helen Whitney's film, The Mormons , a coproduction with the American Experience Frontline series, aired over PBS on April 30 and May 1. The film explores the history and current realities of the Mormon religion. It's possible to watch the entire 240 minute documentary online. PBS has a well-constructed website with good information about the history and various topics of Mormon culture. The Readings and Links page provides further information about Mormon history and religion, politics, Mormon dissent, and genealogy.

This is all useful and illuminating, but what if you're doing serious academic research about Mormon history and culture?

You might begin by reading a recent bibliographic essay on the state of Mormon studies. Here are a few possibilities (links to journal articles will work on Calvin's campus, but are not available to the general public unless you can proxy in through a library site):

"Jan Shipps and the Mainstreaming of Mormon Studies," by Philip Barlow. Church History 73:2 (June 2004): 412-426.

Shipps has been described as "the Jane Goodall of Mormon studies." In this review essay of her book Sojourner in the Promised Land: Forty Years among the Mormons (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2000) [HL BX8611 .S493 2000], Barlow describes how Shipps, a Mormon outsider, helped "shape, shepherd, and broker the field of Mormon studies." In addition to reviewing Shipps' book, Barlow's essay is a good summary of current issues in Mormon studies, with bibliographic pointers to good current scholarship.

Excavating Mormon Pasts: The New Historiography of the Last Half Century, ed. Newell G. Bringhurst and Lavina Fielding Anderson (Salt Lake City: Kofford Books, 2004) [Hekman Library BX8611 .E93 2004].

This book contains 16 bibliographic essays covering different periods of Mormon history and topics of interest, including Mormon women's history, polygamy, and the internationalization of Mormonism. See a review of this book in Church History 75:1 Mar 2006):216-219.

For a well-written popular and fairly rigorously researched book, take a look at Mormon America: The Power and the Promise, by Richard N. Ostling and Joan K. Ostling (Harper, 1999) [HL BX8635.2 .O88 1999]. Harper plans to issue a new edition of this book in October.

The standard bibliography of Mormon history is an exhaustive (and exhausting) compilation of more than 16,000 items: Studies in Mormon History, 1830-1997: An Indexed Bibliography, ed. James B. Allen, Ronald W. Walker, and David J. Whittaker (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2000) [HL TheoRef Z7845 .M8 A44 2000]. There's also an online update for post-1997 bibliography.

For popular culture fans, take a look at the Wikipedia article "Portrayals of Mormons in the Popular Media," a survey ranging from Arthur Conan Doyle's novels to the TV program "Big Love" and the notorious Episode 712 of South Park, "All About the Mormons?" (recently removed from YouTube by Viacom).