Like and Love, Ramblings of a Theologian in Progress

The United States and the United Kingdom are not the same place. Over the past 19 months, the differences have become apparent in some hilarious ways. For example, football means something dramatically different in Aberdeen than in Houston (and I use dramatically because both sports incite equal amounts of drama). I am fortunate in that I share a graduate student office with non-Americans. My department is overwhelmingly American and at times it can feel as though we aren't living in a foreign country, and to a larger extent a foreign culture. The realization of how vast these differences are appeared in an unusual manner this afternoon- the rights of postgraduate students to take personal time, or annual leave as its known here. The discussion emerged in response to a lovely blog by a postgraduate student elsewhere in the United Kingdom. At her university, the school requires their students to take annual leave, up to six weeks a year in that case. It seems that she isn'...

This morning began in the way most of my mornings begin. A quick breakfast and out the door to the office- where I safely confine myself to a desk and read and write. This morning had two deviations. The first was an innocuous chat with my friend Amy. We are hosting a Seder dinner on Thursday for Maundy Thursday and needed to run logistics. As conversations are inclined to do, we found ourselves also chatting about The Passion (the Mel Gibson movie) and how unsettling it is. Then I returned to my office and read about the attacks on Brussels. And while that bombing is tragic and unsettling because it shakes our Western sensibilities, I've found much more coverage on it than on either the bombings in Ankara or Istanbul that happened in the last week. Or for that matter one of the continued bombings occurring in many other places in the world that, to be blunt- aren't former imperial powers (which is a nice way of saying WASP-y). And I can't help but see the connectio...

I am an introvert. While I'm not surprised by it, I've only recently been able to find the value in it. Thankfully, academia is a collection of introverts. My colleague and friend, Joy Allen, who is a rare extrovert in our department, once remarked that the extroverts needed to plan the excruciating periods of networking at conferences to balance out the nominal amounts of social time they would get normally. You would imagine then, that postgraduate work would be windfall.  Postgraduate work is inherently lonely. The premise that you, alone, are adding a unique contribution to research often means that you are alone. It's the combination of long hours in your own head, driven by your own sense of urgency and pressure to add a small, and often rather insignificant, 100k works to the collective knowledge of the world.  It can be hell, and I'm never surprised at the number of studies published about the correlation between postgraduate work and mental illne...