Harvard vs. Yale

While grading papers this weekend, I caught my mind wandering to summer promises of some very fine literature review with peers. For those of you in Brad Harper's Angelology/Pneumatology class, I apologize if comments on your recent book review is laced with verbage about "evolutionary truces" or "identity, otherness, and reconciliation."

This morning I read an e-mail from my brother who currently resides in Tokyo, Ohio. The ever-teasing heckler, Ben told me that I should have applied to attend Yale, where he received his Master's in Architecture and Design. Today, his jest caused me to mosey over to the Yale Divinity School website to browse the faculty. The only member known to me is Miroslav Volf, whose book Exclusion and Embrace is one of the two on the docket for literary digestion (I will be embracing A. Steward and M. Irvine in the process, and excluding everyone else who wants to read this with us. Perhaps we will feel convicted by the end?). However, a full perusal of Yale's faculty made me again question my decision of graduate schooling. I also received an automated e-mail updating me on NYU Steinhardt's name change to "Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development." I confess that it is easy for me to dismiss an education that I know to be of high quality and thoroughly personal for one that attracts the "big hitters." Perhaps for now I will need to settle for allowing these "big hitters" to continue influencing my thought by way of print rather than a classroom setting.

The other summer review will be a slight repeat for me: The Evolving Self by Robert Kegan. I read excerpts in class last year (and didn't understand much if it at the time), but now I will be re-undertaking this beast of a book with M. Block. I've already wandered in a little ways and have enjoyed absorbing Kegan's rich model that was lost on me just a year ago. I keep telling myself that perhaps I will be able to mosey into one of Kegan's classrooms at Harvard next year. He does not teach at the Divinity school (where I can take classes through the BTI), but watching Good Will Hunting makes me longingly presume that Harvard's campus is terribly accessible. I'll just need to work out a bunch, drink and cuss more, and pick up the Boston accent. Either way, I am primed for engaging some very rich theology and some thick and meaty psychology. It will be neat (and vital to my learning process) to document the many overlaps these works will have.

By the by, thank you to all who participated in the viewing of P.T. Anderson's Magnolia with us the other night. For a brilliant and theologically-revealing critique of the movie, go here (but only if you've already seen it).