Mein Kampf

Perhaps it is in bad taste to label a post with the infamous title of Hitler's manifesto. However, I find that the title aptly catches the nature of my month of June. The phrase means, simply, "My Struggle." My struggle for the month of June is the German language itself. That's right - it is not enough that we need to know Greek, Latin and French, but now they thrust upon me this most difficult of languages, a language that requires a gutteral spit every third word, a language that sounds best when spoken while pounding a table with a fist. There is nothing mystical about the language, as there was for me with Greek. There is nothing divine or classical about the language, as there was for me with Latin (or what I now refer to as our Lord's language). There is not even anything elegant or beautiful about the language, as there was for me with French. Its just a confusing, angry language where the verbs are, for some unknown reason, split up and most of them come at the end of the sentence! My apologies to German speakers. Ich bin traurig.

To top it all off, we are given only a month to learn enough to pass an efficiency exam. That means an hour and a half of class a day, four days a week, followed by a good five or six hours more of study a night. And even then one feels continuously behind. Mein Gott! Deutsch ist nicht gut! The situation is what my cousin Mark Farrell calls "the firehose experience." In other words, open your mouth wide because the water is coming at you full blast!

Some while back, a famous American writer catalogued his struggles with this peculiar language. Anyone who has tried to learn this language will be able to relate. The following is a great quote from "The Awful German Language" by Mark Twain:

"Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand. Such has been, and continues to be, my experience. Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me."

Of course, he wrote the thing in German.

On Romance Languages and the Romantic Idiot

Today I experienced my first official "moment of crisis" in the PhD program. Don't get me wrong, I've had plenty of moments filled with self doubt and self loathing, not to mention a number of cold sweats - not to be confused with cold sweets, which for my money does not get any better than Hostess - but today is the first time I experienced, as it were, the teeth of the PhD program, what I'm up against, the proverbial wall. Check that, I realized today I might not know enough to even hit the wall. I'm somewhere outside the city with a piecer car, the wrong map, and a broken compass. Or if you like sports metaphors: I'm in the Hell Bunker at St. Andrew's and all I have is a putter. Or entertainment: I got nothing.

In my Eastern Fathers class, I was assigned to introduce and lead discussion on the figure Jacob of Serug. This assignment involves providing a lengthy abstract of the figure's biography, theology, other works, and recent scholarship concerning him. I actually had a choice between he and two other figures and I picked the former simply because he had an English sounding name (as opposed to Severus and Philoxenus). Oh the bitter irony for as I began my research, I quickly realized that there was nothing English about Jacob of Serug or the scholarship surrounding him.

The first book I located was written in some sort of obscure Syriac. I believe it was a work by Jacob himself, but truth be told I didn't know enough to tell. The footnotes appeared to be french, but I am basing that feeble assumption on what I thought looked like a "we." The second book I located looked a little more familiar. At least, with all the hichs and sclichts, I was able to identify it as German, not that that did much for me. I did manage to find an English book, but of course it is checked out until December. Because apparently Jacob of Serug is slotted for Oprah's bookclub later this month. (Word on the street, however, is that he fabricated parts of his memoir. He didn't really fall off that camel.)

So unless there is a book on Jacob written in Iowan via Kentuckian via Wisconsian English or Koine Greek on the level of 1 John or Latin in the present tense only (minus the genetive case), I'm pretty much sunk. I did, however, manage to find quite a bit of helpful material on both Severus and Philoxenus.

That Oprah sure knows how to pick um . . .

The Church's Way of Speaking

I was walking through a book store this afternoon, one of my favorite activities (to my wife's chagrin), when I noticed the book The Best American Spiritual Writing 2006. (This is part of a series of The Best American . . . which includes other collections of short stories, essays, mystery writing, etc.) I picked it up fully expecting to be hit by a number of essays regarding new age topics and "Oprah Winfreyesk" spirituality. To my surprise and delight, my eyes lit upon an essay entitled "The Church's Way of Speaking" by Robert Louis Wilken. It was published in the August-September issue of First Things.

First Things is an ecumenical publication that features articles relating to thinking "Christianly" about current events. I have been an avid reader of First Things for a year and a half now and am constantly impressed by the quality of writing that is produced. It regularly challenges my faith and how that faith gets applied to everyday living. I recommend the publication to anyone.

In my year and a half of reading, the article that clearly stands out in my mind is the article by Wilken that made its way into the Best Spiritual Writing collection. It addresses the distinctiveness of the Christian community and the importance of knowing and living that distinctiveness in the world. All you "Hauerwasians" would love it. Here is the link:
www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft0508/articles/wilken.html

Let me know what you think . . .