I got up to the kitchen around 7pm tonight and noticed right away the smell of fish cut straight through the muggy atmosphere. I had about five liters of white wine in two sacks and sat it on the counter where Marcus had been laboring for hours over the vongole. David and Serena were at the sink pulling the clams out and separating the shells. Maurizio had bought eight kilos of those little suckers. I threw the wine in the freezer to get it real cold in time for dinner and took a cold bottle out of the fridge, opened it, and started serving it up. I made a workstation at one of the plastic tables and got the other large pot ready to separate. David, Kyle, Barbara, and Maurizio gathered around, rolled up our sleeves, and we all got our hands into the piping hot sandy water, combing our fingers through the shells making a loud clack, and started plucking. I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing, nor how to cook these things. I just followed what everyone else was doing.

Conversation and laughter sprung up as one of us would accidently throw one of the shells into the pot of clams. Serena kept slaving away in the kitchen with Marcus preparing the onions, garlic, oil, and parsely. It was magic in the making. The actual meal wasn’t served up until after 9:30pm.

This pasta dish requires a whole day and a lot of hands to help it come off without being completely overwhelming. In the end, there were about ten of us at the table. We ate a ton, drank most all of the wine, and even made room for coffee and desert. Several times during the eating, we would break out in applause and cheer for the chef, Serena. It was that good!

April started cleaning up the dishes and Maurizio would run in from the other room reporting the soccer score. What, on the surface, seemed like a fun evening together between friends is really church happening. If you knew the stories of those hands that contributed to making the meal, and if you knew how much they’ve grown, if you knew their desires, hurts, and hopes, then I think you’d see church happening. It’s probably not the kind of church you grew up with, but its the kind of church, that in its happening, opens up and embraces God’s grace in our midst. It’s one of those meals that you get the feeling that you are being oriented towards a promised future which roots us all the more firmly in life of the risen Jesus and opens us up to the love of God in the here and now (cf. Kerr, 154).

Does all that happen during a meal, you ask?

When he was at table with them, he took the bread and blessed and broke it and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened, and they recognized him (Luke 24).

Maybe so?

A review of Scot McKnight’s latest book on Fasting

A good overview of a book called UnChristian

Ben Myers on 10 virtues for theology students and on the theology of novelist John Updike

Peter Admirand at the Irish School of Ecumenics On Forgiving the Unforgivable?

Here’s some things that you should know about or read about….

Miroslav Volf’s book review of Wolterstorff’s latest book

If you’re in the Indianapolis area on March 13-14, 2009, I’d HIGHLY recommend going to the conference on John Howard Yoder and the Stone Campbell Churches.

I’ve been listening to some very good N.T. Wright lectures recently from a conference that the Centre for Catholic Studies put on in Durham last month.

Here’s an article worth pondering on Valentine’s day: “Love: the last god standing?“

“Finally, Playboy is back in Italy!” was plastered at
the top of a large provocative advertisement leaned up against a trash can next
to the newsstand near my apartment. It caught my attention. In the ad, there
were two men, one young and one older, dangling the latest issue of Playboy
by the centerfold cleverly covering up their faces. The slogan at the bottom of
the ad reads, “Talks about everything. Speaks to everyone.” As I walked away
from the newsstand, I wondered to myself two things: 1) Playboy is back?!
I never knew it was gone;  and 2) Why
does a romantic place like Italy need to advertise for Playboy?

As I walked down the cobbled street, I began to think, “What
message is being sent here, and why?” After living here for a few years, and
getting to know Italians as people, I’ve begun to see the cracks in the
mythical nature of the romantic in their country. The romantic is always
fleeting and never sustainable. In Italy, you only think about getting married
only after you have a solid job (which you won’t get while you’re living
with your parents until you’re 40), been (or lived) with someone for roughly 10
years (ironically, this does not presume that you’ve moved out from under your
parents roof). In the meantime, if you find a fling, go for it. Who knows, it
could be what your life has been missing.

I’ve also been reading a great book recently by David Matzko
McCarthy called Sex and Love in the Home: A Theology of the Household
which got me thinking about how our culture embeds and expresses messages
through things like images and implied narratives.  McCarthy says that, “the sexual landscape of
contemporary culture is a market, for entertainment and consumption, pleasure
and play. Although popular culture is just a market and not necessarily
true to what people do or believe about sex, the market is shaped by a public
grammar of sexual desire that taps basic modern truths: sex is exciting, good,
fun, healthy, ephemeral, and elusive. Sex dies in the routines of home” (40).

So it’s no wonder, that in a (sexually?) frustrated culture,
people have to be sold into what their lives have been missing. This is the
whole point of ads (like the one I came across today) which “evoke a code of
desire where feelings of longing and impulses of unfulfilled desire are transferable
… [and] the ads create a sense that we are missing something we could have”
(33). In this case, the point of the ad is not, “Buy the mag, bag the girl” but
instead, “You lack the mag and you lack the girl.” Most of the advertising
world profits off of manufacturing an unfulfilled desire.

My point here in mentioning all of this, is not to conjure
up the Church to shut down these newsstands. But instead, I ask myself, what kinds
of households exist in this city that offers a contrasting story of desire? The
story of marriage tends to be balked at for being impractical and only for the
brave or the stupid. The story of abstinence makes us cringe as we see elderly
nuns or priests walking down the street. On the surface, it would appear that
the story of indulgence (not the kind that the Church used to sell back in the medieval
times) is held out to the city as the only viable story to live by. My worry is
that the city has bought into the wrong story. The crazy thing is that the
Church inhabits the city and tells a story as well.  But my question is, has the Church bought into
the same manufactured story of unfulfilled desire? What has the Church done (or not done) in promoting and perpetuating this bankrupt story of manufactured desire? Has the Church been reading Playboy?
Maybe just for the articles…

Symposium on Christian Origins (1-3 April, 2009)

The Institute for the Study of Christian Origins will co-host a Symposium at the University of Tübingen, 1-3 April, 2009. The topic is: “The Septuagint and Christian Origins.”

The co-sponsor will be the Institut für antikes Judentum und hellenistische Religionsgeschichte, Prof. Dr. Hermann Lichtenberger, director. The program will feature four key-note speakers: Emanuel Tov, Jerusalem; Loren Stuckenbruck, Durham, UK; Carl Holladay, Atlanta; and Martin Hengel, Tübingen. In addition, fifteen scholars from North American and Europe have been invited.

A volume of conference papers will be published by Mohr/Siebeck (Tübingen).

Download Symposium Program

If you have any questions (or donations!) feel free to contact

Dr. Scott Caulley

scott.caulley[at]oe.uni-tuebingen[dot]de

Would you normally put “Church of Christ” and “cutting edge” in the same phrase?