Must a senior pastor have a penis?

At the church I used to attend, the pastor insisted that you have one in order to serve as an elder. At present, the leaders of my denomination appear to think you need one to be a senior pastor. The Roman Catholic church has inisted that priests have one.

Perhaps I lack imagination, but I can't figure out why that body part is so essential to particular kinds of ministry.

Below, N.T. Wright explains far better than I ever could why I have long thought (as you can tell by the sardonic title of this post) such a position is nonsense and cannot be supported from scripture.

http://www.cbeinternational.org/new/pdf_files/wright_biblical_basis.pdf

trivial fact about me

I wear a plastic guard on my teeth ($400 something at your local dentist if you can imagine that) when I sleep because my dentist thinks I clench my teeth, cracking them. This little device, he says, is a "deprogrammer." Jeanie has always made fun of me for sleeping with my mouth open. I'm content to live with these contradictory truths.

I'm reminded of cartoon figures who clench their teeth so fiercely in rage that they shatter in a heep on the ground.

Cryptic opening remarks from tomorrow's world lit class

Hell is the place where you get what you want only and always. Only and always getting what you want is not freedom but slavery. We can be a slave to self and remain a slave (to sin, to our own impulses), or choose to become a slave to God and be set free. There is no third option. In Romans 6 Paul puts it very clearly—we have a choice between slaveries. The first option is death that results in nothing but Death. The other is a death that leads to Life.

notice...

Almost everything here can be found somewhere else.

Except for this.

What you write when you can’t think of anything to write…

My brother is a prolific blogger. His blog is the Don Quixote or the War and Peace, if you will, of the blog world. It’s like he’s got diarrhea of the keyboard. I don’t know how he does it; I can’t keep up. It took me 13 minutes just to write these five sentences.

It took me four years to write my stupid dissertation.

So if you ever come here and you don’t find anything new worth reading, chances are my younger and more famous youth pastor brother has probably written something worth your musing. Occasionally he even mentions me. Check him out.

http://www.derryprenkert.blogspot.com/

Speaking of my dissertation, I’m pretty sure, if you were to bother reading it, it would be the most unconventional dissertation you’ll ever read. There are several reasons for that, not the least of which is that most people don’t read that many dissertations, and if you read mine it just might turn out to be the ONLY dissertation you ever read. In the spirit of shameless self-promotion-which is what blogging is all about (isn’t it?)-allow me to entice you with my dissertation’s abstract.

I’m tempted here to copy and paste an example of the typical dissertation abstract. But let’s just say of dissertation abstracts, exciting reading they are not.

Not that mine will be either. It’s just different. And sometimes, I still can’t believe I got away with it.

ABSTRACT
On the Wonder of Mentors Never Met:
A Memoir of a Reading Life:
Part One

D.Litt. Dissertation by
Robby Christopher Prenkert

The Caspersen School of Graduate Studies
Drew University May 2008

This dissertation-a “memoir”-is about R, a man who loves books. The narrative’s central layer explores the ways some of these beloved books have shaped his character, formed his faith, and impacted his life. A further layer of the work is a meta-narrative deconstructing the challenging process of writing a doctoral dissertation about “book mentors,” which eventually makes a case for the value of the subjective in scholarly writing. It is at once a memoir with multiple voices; an involuted, post-modernist “novel”; an elegy on grief and loss; a spiritual and intellectual autobiography; a tribute to mentors and friends, and to books as mentors and friends; and a meditatioin on the effects of writing about all of this.

Acknowledging, questioning, and ultimately affirming the potent influence of his evangelical heritage and Christian faith upon his life, R borrows the vocabulary of that tradition and attempts to find connections between his progress as a reader and his faith journey. He narrates his conversion, baptism, and “second conversion”-which in the Wesleyan tradition is frequently called the “filling of the Holy Spirit”-and tells the story of the important real-life persons who helped to mentor him in the Christian faith. Interwoven with this is the main narrative of the work: the story of the books that mentored him and influenced his growth as a reader and lover of literature. This “reading life” is marked and shaped by its own “conversion,” “baptism,” and “second conversion,” suggesting that this reading journey is mysteriously but inseparably connected to his faith journey.

These books, which include Frank Laubach’s journals on the mystical prayer life, the novels of Vladimir Nabokov, Shusaku Endo’s Silence, and C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces, become his friends, his conversation partners, his mentors in the art of empathy. They teach him about loss, life, and love. In the end, his contribution to their conversation, the book he has written as an expression of gratitude to his mentors, becomes his most significant “book mentor” of all.

Did you catch all that? Layers. Multiple narrative voices. Post-modern self-reflexivity. Deconstructive gamesmanship. Grief. And it goes on and on for like 300 pages. I bet you can’t wait to buy a copy at the local bookstore.

Oh ya. You can’t. At least not until hundreds and thousands of you send letters to all your big publishing company friends saying, “You’ve got to publish this book now! I’m a reader, I’d buy it.”

Meanwhile, back to reality.

I’m not very good at this blogging business, but I’m going to try in the days ahead to give you my very (did I say very) subjective perspective on life here at Bethel College. Where I sit at present writing these words is where I sat for hours upon hours writing the 80,420 words that make up my dissertation.

Let’s just say I have a love/hate relationship with this little corner office, and this little keyboard, and this little chair I nearly wore out my rear-end on while writing that stupid thing.
But I’m glad I did it. It was hard. But I really like hard things. Like working like mad for four years as an undergraduate to try and win a national basketball championship. I don’t miss the glory of the championship. I miss the hard journey getting there.

I don’t miss the glory (I’m still waiting for the glory) of finishing the dissertation. I miss the hard work of writing it.

Maybe that’s why my brother writes so much on his blog day after day. He likes the hard work of filling the blank screen with something like coherent and often amusing thoughts. I admire him for that.

Anyhow, what you have just read is the sort of rambling mess I end up writing when I can’t think of anything to write. One thing I end up writing when I can’t think of anything to write. A blog. Another thing I end up writing when I can’t think of anything to write. A dissertation.

http://www.bethelcollege.edu/blogs/?p=1300

Happy (belated) birthday, Cervantes

Yesterday (29 September) was Miguel de Cervantes’s birthday. I’m sure you’re still recovering from the huge party you held celebrating the life of the author of what many people have called the “greatest novel ever written.” The rest of you are wondering, so who is Cervantes?

Incidentally, I can be a little sarcastic from time to time. I’m allowed. I’m an English professor.

Cervantes wrote a book you probably have heard about but have never read cover to cover. The reason you probably never read it cover to cover is because its 940 pages long (at least the best translation by Edith Grossman is), and your high school English teacher knew that if she assigned it you wouldn’t get anything else done that semester. Don Quixote is a really long book. But you should read it cover to cover anyhow. Not because it’s good for us to read great literature or because educated people have read the great books or because it would be something to brag about on a college entrance essay, but because it’s a really entertaining story. And funny. Even sad.

Incidentally, I like to use sentence fragments. I’m allowed. I’m an English professor.

I’m also allowed to recommend good books, and in fact, I’m probably expected to. So I’m recommending Don Quixote today, the day after we celebrate Cervantes’s 461st birthday. Because it’s entertaining, funny, and even sad.

Let me know what you think of it.

http://www.bethelcollege.edu/blogs/?p=1202