Spring New (Emergent) Moon
Since listening to the TED talk I posted below, I’ve been trying to decide what my home is. Certainly writing is a contender. Two or three times a day I sit down the computer and pound out a post for this website. I’ve written novels and short stories over the last twenty years plus all those sermons over the last forty. When I need to clarify fuzzy thinking, I head to the keyboard, trusting the One Who Types as less addled than the One Who Only Thinks.
The other contender is scholarship. I’m hesitant about this one, since it seems the realm of the academic and I left the academy long ago. Still, I translate Latin, take the MOOC courses and follow up, stay in touch with the literature in several fields: hermeneutics, biblical scholarship, ecologial thought, climate change, certain sub-disciplines of philosophy like aesthetics, pragmatism and metaphysics, neuro-science and classical literature. And, perhaps more telling, I approach life with the mind of a scholar, critical and analytic, wanting to be confident of my data, my sources, always pushing toward synergy, toward new ways of thinking.
These are not, of course, exclusive. The writing requires research and research requires writing. Perhaps my home is the liminal zone between writing and scholarship.
