Harvest Time in the Academy

It’s that time of the year again for students and professors: Crunch Time, Year End, the last, sheer drop of the scholastic roller coaster.

Professors are trying desperately to cram in all the material we are supposed to “cover” and haven’t yet because we enjoy our digressions too much. (Sorry about that, students. You’ve been a wonderful audience.)

Students, meanwhile, face term papers, final exams, thesis deadlines, and other forms of Doom.

Remember how we start a school year as students? Everybody excited about new courses, unread books and undiscovered ideas, foreign territories or tongues to explore? Remember how we wanted to get so many good things accomplished? Remember all those good reasons we signed up for education in the first place?

Obama’s Gaffe–and Mine–and Yours…

It may not be obvious at first glance, but President Barack Obama is a lot like me. We both used to live in Hyde Park and  attend the University of Chicago. We both are married to beautiful and capable wives. And we both have said something we shouldn’t have in public.

The joke Mr. Obama made on the Tonight Show has received a lot of press — more attention than was given to what was an even more revealing remark about American bank executives. (You can read about these gaffes and a whole lot of others by other presidents and by other administration figures here.)

My own gaffes, on the contrary, receive no press at all — thank God! But as I made one or two more last week in some speeches I was giving, I reflected afterward on just what the heck happened. Why did I make that offensive joke? Why did I use that incendiary word?

Fair Payment for Speakers

What does your church pay for visiting preachers or camp speakers or conference leaders? What does your organization pay for theological or ecclesiastical consultants?

A lot of speakers feel insulted by those who invite them, while hosts are sometimes nonplussed by speakers asking for fees well above what they had budgeted.

To help with these vexing matters, I’ve written a guide that I previously published in a national magazine (ChristianWeek) and later as a post on this blog. To make the post easier to find for speakers who would like me to do some of their talking for them on this tricky subject (!) and for hosts who are wondering how to budget properly, I’ve now put it in the PAGES section to the top right of this blog’s main page.

Let’s treat each other right–that’s the true “bottom line.”

Registration Open Now for Summer School Course on Filmmaking

Here’s a reminder of the course I’ll be co-teaching this summer at Regent’s pretty fabulous Summer School.

Remember, Regent’s summer school is not what you might think it is. It is not “remedial” for those who failed the regular courses (!), nor is it generally the grind associated with many summer schools. (I’ve taught a few of those courses, too, but not at Regent!)

Instead, Regent’s very popular summer school (which runs in two sections: spring and summer, from May to August) is more like “summer camp for grown-ups” and is comprised mainly of one- and two-week courses for just two or three hours a day. Those who sign up for credit have 45 days to go home, do the reading and assignments, and then mail it all in. Those who audit pay less (!) and don’t do the homework at all!

In between the courses there are noonhour concerts, evening public lectures, salmon barbecues on Vancouver beaches, architectual tours, and more. Bring the family and spend your vacation blessing mind, body, and spirit. Check it out here.

Now, this blog entry is about the course I’m going to be doing with my friend Ralph Winter. It’s just one week, so we will have to cover a lot of ground in a short time, but I think it’ll be a blast. It’s simply called “The Ethics of Filmmaking” and it will cover how money, sex, power, and ideology affect commercial filmmaking, with particular reference to Hollywood but to other other film centres (such as Vancouver itself) and, indeed, to other media as well.

Simple Is Good; Oversimple Is Bad

I happen to chair the committee that coordinates the major lectureship at Regent College, the Laing Lectures. Roger Laing, our patron, is a very smart businessman with theological degrees who reads more theology than most pastors or professors and wants Christians to enjoy thinking as much as he does.

This lectureship has brought some extraordinarily thoughtful people to campus: Neil Postman, Charles Taylor, Margaret Visser, Peter Berger, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Miroslav Volf, and Walter Brueggemann, to date.

Recently someone suggested we bring Malcolm Gladwell to campus, author of bestsellers such as The Tipping Point and Blink. I read both of those books and found them mildly entertaining but almost entirely insubstantial: cotton candy for the mind. I take notes assiduously on books I read and I frankly found almost nothing noteworthy in either of them. They seemed either to take a while to state the obvious or to raise contentious possibilities without cogent argument. A British journal has decided to go after Gladwell and has done so pretty seriously here and here. They seem right to me in their criticism and I can’t imagine us bringing him to campus–not that we could afford him, even nowadays, given how popular he is.

It reminds me of the dictum ascribed to Einstein: “Simplify as far as possible, but no farther.” One of the key intellectual disciplines to learn is when you just can’t make it any plainer or simpler without misleading yourself or your audience. Sometimes you really do have to say five things, not one thing, and use four paragraphs or even four chapters instead of twelve words.