September 2008 archives
Archive
September 28, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Emergent Christianity
The main subject of tomorrow’s first lecture on the New Testament is going to be the question of how the model of culture as the interplay of dominant, residual, and emergent forms can help us to understand the relationship between the New Testament and the Old, particularly the way in which the New appropriates, reconstructs, [...]Archive
September 28, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Shea Goodbye
So today was the final game at Shea Stadium as it turned out. In the end, it came down to the inability of the Mets’ bullpen to do its job, as all of us who have been following the team’s fortunes since the All-Star break. Perhaps we should have seen it coming when Billy Wagner, [...]Archive
September 27, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Tie Goes to Obama
Last night I watched the first debate between Barack Obama and John McCain downstairs in our residence hall’s commons. We had a group of about forty Faculty Fellows, RAs, and first-years from our building and others. The students were largely pro-Obama it seemed to me: they laughed at McCain’s fumbling of names and groaned when [...]Archive
September 27, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
The Athletic Sublime
Here’s a modern definition of the sublime: watching a star athlete come through in the clutch and raise the level of his or her game beyond expectations. Michael Phelps at the Olympics this summer was an example of the athletic sublime, particularly when he won the 100 meter butterfly at the final touch by .01 [...]Archive
September 26, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Musical Moment
Well, it happened: one of the moments to which I always look forward whenever I’m teaching a lecture course. It’s been my practice for quite a while now to play songs before and after each of my lectures that are somehow related to the day’s major ideas. Sometimes the lyrics are important, but sometimes it’s [...]Archive
September 25, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
Suspend the Pennant Race!
Apparently, I’m not the only one who thinks that you can use baseball to talk about politics. Check out the post entitled “Manuel: Mets ‘suspending’ pennant race” on slacktivist. Thanks to Bryan Waterman for bringing it to my attention!Archive
September 23, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
The J & P Mash-up
I spent a lot of time during Monday’s ConWest lecture talking about the “Documentary Hypothesis” formulated by the nineteenth-century German philologist Julius Wellhausen that suggests that the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible) are not, as tradition held, authored by Moses as the result of divine revelation, but rather a compilation of [...]Archive
September 22, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
High Anxiety (II)
The Mets’ bullpen blew another one this afternoon, this time against the Braves in Atlanta. Leading 4-2 going into the bottom of the seventh, the bullpen gave up one run in that frame, and four more in the next. Carlos Delgado hit a two-run homer in the top of the ninth to make the final [...]Archive
September 17, 2008 by Cyrus Patell
