Del Martin, 87, died Wednesday. She and her partner of 55 years, Phyllis Lyon, were the first couple to be legally married in California this year. In 1955 she and Lyon were among the founders of The Daughers of Bilitis, a pioneering lesbian-rights organization.
I’ve made an attempt to learn about gay and lesbian history, and about the amazing men and women who made the world a better place to live. I’m not a brave person, and certainly wouldn’t have been in 1955, so thanks Del Martin.
In honor of PL’s first week of law school.
In Georgia…
It is illegal to use profanity in front of a dead body which lies in a funeral home or in a coroners office.
No one may carry an ice cream cone in their back pocket if it is Sunday.
All sex toys are banned.
All citizens must own a rake. (Acworth)
It is against the law to tie a giraffe to a telephone pole or street lamp. (Atlanta)
One man may not be on another man’s back. (Atlanta)
One may not place a dead bird on a neighbor’s lawn. (Conyers)
Chicken must be eaten with the hands. (Gainesville)
Though it is illegal to spit from a car or bus, citizens may spit from a truck.(Marietta)
O’Malley will not be getting a Kook Dogz ice treat maker. First, I hate when words are intentionally spelled wrong, and they have a double dose here. Second, I have this great thing in my house known as a freezer with automatic ice maker. It magically dispenses freshly made ice cubes just for my dog–he gets very excited by this. Third, if you pour water and anything else into a big container and put it in the freezer, it will freeze, and make a Kool Dogz treat and save you $24.99.
PL and I like to think we aren’t overly tempted by marketing when choosing the things we buy. But, when PL went grocery shopping on Monday, she found that the cat food we normally buy was located next to a package that was the same brand, same price, same size, but with a free gift….
Our cat is now the proud owner of an officially licensed Fancy Feast ash tray…er, food bowl.
On the way to a meeting on Friday I drove past this sign in the Decatur/Avondale Estates area. It does seem that “All You Neat” is supposted to be “All You Can Eat”, but missing a few letters.
The rest of it though…thin crab legs gay!
We’re now officially halfway into our first month on our new budget, so I though I would check on our spending and see how we’re doing.
Good News:
1. Our health insurance now covers a doctor they previously didn’t, saving $95 each visit, adding up to hundreds and hundreds of dollars in savings a year. Now if they’ll just freakin’ pay more at the dentist.
2. Even though we set our grocery budget for about $100 less each month than we were spending, we still have about half of that budget left for the month and have been eating healthy foods that taste great. We are planning a Costco visit tomorrow, so we end up spending more, but then won’t buy detergent or anything for a long long time.
3. PL got called into work to help out at the last minute on Monday, and will be picking up several extra unexpected days worth of income over the next week or so before school starts. (The downside is less than an hour of reasonably awake time together on 4 out of the 7 days this week since she’s leaving for work when I get home, and I’m sleepy and ready for bed when she gets home.)
4. With one week left before orientation, all of PL’s student loans got sorted out, including the extra bit to help us eat and not get foreclosed upon for the next three years. She also got a pretty nice scholarship, which helps me to not have a stroke when I realize that just one semester of tuition plus everything else at that school costs more than I make in a year.
Bad News:
1. Eating out is our budgeting Achilles heel. We had a couple of unplanned eating out adventures because of an evening meeting and some social obligations, plus some times when we just wanted to eat out but didn’t really need to. We set a really low eating out budget ($50) for the month, and are already at $88, but still less than the over $100-200 we were spending.
2. It’s hot in our house. All the time. And we still paid $133 to Georgia Power.
3. Living on a budget sucks. But zero credit card debt is more fun than the new Amy Ray cd I suppose.
I found some old pictures this week, and among them was this beauty.
When PL and I lived in a tiny tiny apartment near Washington, DC, this was our fabulous bathroom. Our neighbor downstairs had a pink version, and I suspect in other parts of the building there might have been mustard and cocoa colored ones, and perhaps even a chartreuse one. The fact that it was in such good condition considering it dated back to when things were made this color is a testament to the building’s owner and his overall decency.
When I mention we had a blue bathroom in our old apartment, I suspect that people don’t quite grasp the fact that EVERYTHING was blue. I was always glad that we didn’t end up with the pink one, but the gay man downstairs said the pink was “jazzy.”
That was our first apartment together, and despite it being unbearably cold in the winter, miserably hot in the summer, a whopping 665 square feet, and next door to a house that hosted Panamanian pentecostal church in it’s basement late at night, I cried when we moved out.
I remember when I first started learning about theology and the Bible, I mean really learning stuff about it, not doing touchy feely Jesus loves me stuff, I got really mad at all the ministers I knew because I realized they knew this stuff, but just chose not to ever bother trying to teach it in church. I suspect that’s partly what drove me to seminary in the first place. I think you can tell people the truth about our faith history, show that it was messy, that we made it up as we went along, and people will still find it valuable and still find truth in it.
This is something I wrote way back in my intro to the New Testament class, but that professor, who I respect more than almost any other scholar, said that people in church could read this paper, as is, and benefit from it. And no, she didn’t write that on everybody’s paper. In this relatively short paper, I bet there are quite a few shocking, but simple things, that too many people in church never heard or realized—that the gospel writers never knew Jesus, that the gospels tell different stories about Jesus (and not just the little things–like the birth and death parts), and that the gospel writers cut and pasted their writings from common sources and each other.
The Living Voice of Inspiration and Authority in the Synoptic Gospels
In reading the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, it becomes apparent that these three Gospels often tell similar stories, yet sometimes use different wording, tell them in a different order, or even omit certain details and whole stories. Contrary to Raymond E. Brown’s statement that “most readers of the New Testament find the issue complex, irrelevant to their interests and boring,” attempting to understand the similarities and differences between Matthew, Mark, and Luke is actually quite relevant to the reader’s faith because the issue is part of a larger question of biblical authority and inspiration (Brown 111). The question at hand, then, is how do we know that the Gospels offer a message that is faithful to Jesus? For some readers, Scripture as a whole is viewed as the inerrant Word of God, so any discrepancies (dare I say errors?) such as those that can be found in the Gospels really need no explanation since that is the way God intended the Bible to be. Ignoring this group of readers, the answer to the question of faithfulness to the message of Jesus is addressed to readers who seek to have faith informed by scholarship, not in spite of it, and yearn to see the Gospels as a living Word of God, finding the Word of God to be a viva vox (“living voice”) experienced through time (Gnuse 2259).
The four canonical Gospels–Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John–account for elements in the life and ministry of Jesus, primarily through the use of narratives and parables. These four Gospels were probably written in the period of 65-100 C.E., with Mark considered the earliest and John the latest (Brown 109). Understanding that the attributed authors were not actually eyewitnesses to the ministry of Jesus is important to understanding the nature of the differences between the Gospels. It is very difficult to explain why separate eyewitnesses would tell accounts that sometimes were similar, sometimes exact, and sometimes completely divergent, including occasional anachronistic elements, and restructuring verbal identity in a way that even changes the actors in the story. Within the four canonical Gospels, Matthew, Mark, and Luke are called the Synoptic Gospels, because they can be viewed side by side, that is, “syn-optically” (Brown 111). Of the material that makes up the Gospel of Mark, 80% appears in Matthew and 65% can be found in Luke (Brown 111). Scholars refer to the content present in all three Synoptic Gospels as the Triple Tradition. There is also material found in both Matthew and Luke that is absent from Mark, and this is known as the Double Tradition. In instances when Matthew diverges from the text of Mark, Luke fails to do so, and when Luke diverges from Mark, Matthew does not. There is also some material present in the Synoptic Gospels that is found in Luke alone, and likewise some that is unique to Matthew.
In finding an adequate explanation for the origin of these nuances of the text, that is, in solving what can be called the Synoptic Problem, the most commonly accepted solution is called either the “two document hypothesis” or the “four source hypothesis.” The wording, phrasing, and order are often so similar between the Synoptic Gospels that a common written tradition, rather than an oral tradition, seems likely. This solution posits Mark as the earliest of the Synoptic Gospels (a Marcan priority), and says that the writers or redactors of Matthew and Luke had access to Mark in document form and used portions of it to craft their Gospels. The four source hypothesis also posits a second documentary source, called Q, representing Quelle (“source” in German), that they used independently of one another. The Q source, while remaining hypothetical since it is not actually known to exist, has been reconstructed from the material found in Luke and Matthew to be 220-235 verses in length and is thought to consist primarily of Jesus’ teachings (Brown 117). The other two sources (not necessarily documents in this case) that play a role in this hypothesis are known as M and L, are different elements that Matthew and Luke, respectively, drew upon when creating their text.
This solution to the Synoptic Problem does not explain everything in the Synoptic Gospels, nor is it accepted with universal consensus notably because of the divergences that Matthew and Luke make from Mark independently from each other. Other theories suggesting, for example, a Matthean priority (such as the Greisbach Hypothesis), may solve some problems, but also raise the question of the accounting for the Double Tradition and would need to explain why Mark chooses to leave out so many things found in Matthew that Luke does include. Despite not being a perfect solution to the Synoptic Problem, the four source hypothesis does succeed in answering more questions than it creates in the attempt to trace how Matthew and Luke came to agree so often in both wording and order with Mark (the Triple Tradition), while also answering how the Double Tradition diverges from Mark.
While the hypothesis uniting a Marcan priority, the existence of Q, and the suggestion of separate Lucan and Matthean material has been useful for explaining the origin of the observed Synoptic Problem, it does little to resolve for the reader the primary question about what such a difference actually means for interpreting scripture, understanding Biblical authority, and thinking about the Bible as the Word of God. The reason that such a technical answer to the apparent Synoptic Problem does not seem adequate for many is because “this is a theological issue, and so a theological answer is appropriate” (Brown 110). For many people of faith, the Bible is treated with a sense of authority, and a belief, however general or specific it may be, in divine inspiration of the creation of the text as the Word of God. The idea of inspiration and authority are often linked together in a fashion that would suggest that the Scripture is somehow less authoritative as it becomes more human. The problem a reader may find in encountering the Synoptic Gospels, and the discovery of the process of editing and adapting sources, then, is that of a tension between treating the Bible as either a divine or a human document-and then believing that if it is human it has no authority and is no longer the Word of God.
If a difference in the way that the Gospel of Matthew tells a parable versus the way Luke tells is, for example, is viewed as an the work of a human redactor, it is liable to have errors, and thus not be infallible. Perhaps when Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source for their text they “felt that the Sprit of God was still on the move, so that they could change Mark’s words in ways that were still applicable to their contexts and people” (Blount 60). The challenge in creating a viable theological solution to the Synoptic Problem is to show that the discrepancy is not always an error, but perhaps an intentional act of redaction that conveys a specific message to the audience that would be less clear if the story was told in any other way. The authority of the Bible does not necessarily have to rest on its inerrancy or on “its being a seamless document with a homogeneous or monolithic meaning” (Trible 2253). Authority can instead arise from the way in which a writer or redactor becomes a theologian and speaks of their experience in a community of faith to others in a way that is both coherent and meaningful. The reformer John Calvin treated this issue in a similar manner and suggests that Biblical authority does “not lie in words themselves but in the activity of the Holy Spirit at work both in the Scriptures and in believers” (Trible 2248).
The focus on conferring Biblical authority through the inspiration of scripture is really that of an incarnate Word, a living Word, that does not just rest with whatever author or redactor first wrote the words. In focusing on an inerrant word, a word that is located in a book, as the basis for Scriptural authority, inspiration is lost, and the text dies. Words contained in books, even if they are read aloud, are always read–never spoken. A perspective on Biblical authority that sees the words as anything other than evolving and alive “does a disservice to the power of the living Word to confront, challenge, and liberate us in the places where God’s Holy Spirit of Christ meets us today” (Blount 67). The Word of God thus becomes not an infallible Word, and perhaps not even what some would call a Living Word, but is for the readers a Living Voice that was written with the author’s best human attempt to look toward the divine and shape the story of Jesus into a message that would speak to the readers of that time and continues to speak to us today as we experience it.
Works Cited
Blount, Brian K. “The Last Word on Biblical Authority.” In Walter Brueggemann, William C. Placher, and Brian K. Blount. Struggling With Scripture. Lousiville, Kentucky: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002.
Brown, Raymond E. An Introduction to the New Testament. New York: Doubleday, 1997.
Gnuse, Robert. “Inspiration of Scripture.” In Walter J. Harrelson, Ed. The New Interpreters Study Bible. Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2003.
Trible, Pyllis. “Authority of the Bible.” In Walter J. Harrelson, Ed. The New Interpreters Study Bible. Nashville, Tennessee: Abingdon Press, 2003.
At work, I occasionally read websites and blogs focused on productivity and work management. It’s totally not slacking off and not the least bit ironic to be reading a blog about productivity when you are supposed to be working. I generally don’t buy into that whole “success in business” genre though and find it all pretty worthless and it also makes me glad I don’t work in a corporate environment.
This attitude dates back to a memory of my dad being forced to buy and read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and attend a management seminar on it back in the 90s. If you know my dad, or even if you know me, you know how well this went over and how useful he found the whole exercise.
I did learn something a while back though that has really helped me keep up with my many tasks–a To Do List is different from a Project List. Maybe other people realize this already, but thinking about this and putting it to use has really helped me manage my to do lists for work and home whether they are in my head or on paper.
I have big projects that I work on most of the year, so if my To Do list says “Festival” I find that totally overwhelming and rather than getting work done, I get panicked that there’s too much to do and wake up really early in the mornings thinking about it. Instead, the Festival is actually a project and not a single task, and is broken up into many different tasks for my To Do list that happen over many months such as 1) send in rental application 2) review draft from graphic designer.
The same is true at home. Writing “clean the house” or “do yard work” on a To Do list (I don’t usually write tons of home stuff down on paper, but thinking in those terms is the same thing really) isn’t too helpful because those are projects and not tasks, and there’s always something to clean in the house. Housework, yardwork, home maintenance, and shopping are all never ending projects, for better or worse. Being able to think of them as different smaller tasks helps you to prioritize and get more done. Instead of writing “clean house” and “do yardwork” and expecting to successfully mop the floor, vacuum massive amounts of dog hair off the couch, clean the toilets, do laundry, weed the flower bed, clean the gutters, and cut the grass all in a single Saturday, a home To Do list works better if it has actual tasks on it that can be done one at a time. All of those things have to get done, but if they are many small tasks and not a giant project, they can be broken up, accomplished every day or every other day in just a few minutes, and that makes it much more manageable.
There’s a chance that we can leverage some resources at work in the coming months to get some extra help in the Development side of things at the office. I’ve never been in the corporate world, luckily, but in the non-profit world, resources are scarce and there’s too much work to go around.
I’ve been the only full-time person we have doing Development since my position (and I) started almost 2 years ago. I’m managed by a 30-hr week consultant that deals with the higher-up agency management issues but is spending more and more time on other projects. We have more work that we can ever finish though as we grow and want to increase the quality of our publications and write more grants and build more programs. We’re slowly adding to what we call our empire (somehow we don’t find the empire metaphor offensive in our multi-cultural office full of people who escaped brutal regimes and civil wars, don’t ask me why), and have a new Americorps VISTA person with us, and another Americorps position that was already around move into our empire from another section of the office management.
We’re not sure yet what kind of staff changes might happen over the next year or so, but we had an interesting meeting today to talk about some options. First, I created a list of all the different projects I do to see what kinds of things it makes sense to segment off to other positions and also to see what kinds of things I would choose to spend more time on if given the chance. I jokingly made it clear that I was here first and get to pick what I want to do, but that’s pretty much what will happen. It was pretty enlightening to see how my current project list as it now stands could keep 2 full time and 1 part time person occupied.
So, the 3 schizophrenic parts to my job break up into being:
1) special events and donor relations
2) database admin and management for the donor and client databases
3) grant writing and communications
If given the choice, I want to do number 3, because I can spend a whole day messing with writing a grant or newsletter and not realize it. I’m learning to build more and more complex programs, and set up structures to manage their outcomes and evaluate them. Over time, I think I could see myself advancing further up this ladder than the others based on my skills. I would be perfectly happy to never do number 1 again, even though I’m really good at it and might have trouble trusting the details of pulling off our events with anyone else. I’m a geek so number 2 is fine, but it gets boring quickly. Having been the only person doing what I do at the office, and having been the one who figured out the how to’s of it all, I know that the jobs are all closely linked and each need to get done right for the whole ship to keep floating, or at least to not sink too quickly.
We don’t do it often enough, but I think today’s meeting was a good chance to step back from the busyness of our usual days and reflect on the work we’re doing, my personal career development and interests, and agency strategic planning. Taking the time to do this made me feel a little better about feeling like I’m drowing in work most of the time, and it’s nice to know that the “management” doesn’t think I’m slacking off when projects take longer than expected.
