Following Christ 2008, Day 1

As of this post, we're just about at the twelve hour mark since the Following Christ 2008 conference started-- technically this is still the "Day Ahead" part, though, since the official plenary sessions don't start until Sunday evening. Be that as it may, it's still been a long day for all involved, particularly those who had to get up way too early to get on the road. My own transportation method of choice was Greyhound (way cheaper than gas, let alone parking fees, and just as fast as driving), which pulled into the downtown Chicago station at around 9:30. Initially, I'd planned for about a mile walk between the station and the hotel, but apparently calculated from the wrong spot. So, the walk stretched to two miles, in the suddenly warmish and rather muggy weather. Wearing my winter coat onto the bus thus proved a mistake, as I had to clean up and change clothes before I even thought about any large-scale socialization. Fortunately, that's been the only logistical hiccup so far: the hotel supplied the two full-size beds I'd requested, plus the roll-away bed, so all three of us in the room have plenty of space. To my knowledge, they're still upstairs (on the 25th floor-- my ears pop every time I ride the elevator up or down) snoozing, but I wasn't nearly tired enough to sleep when they were. Thus, this post, tapped out in the still-noisy hotel lobby, the only place in the building with free wireless.

For the Day-Ahead event, I chose the Emerging Scholars Network meeting, as there wasn't anything more overtly nerdy available. Keeping with the conference theme of "human flourishing," the theme of our meetings and various mini-seminars is "Flourishing in the Academy," as most of the participants and leaders are either in or en route to tenure-track academic positions. Today's buzzword was "calling" (one wonders if Falco's vocation was a Vienna Calling), so the panelists mainly addressed questions of definition, practice, and potential obstacles to calling. As this is a fairly popular discussion topic among Grad IV types, some of the basic concepts were already familiar, but overall I think the speakers struck a good balance of simple and complex material. Unfortunately all my notes are upstairs at the moment so an extended account/critique will have to wait, but suffice it to say that there was considerable methodological and theological diversity among the speakers so far. That happens, I suppose, when you put a Catholic mystic (or wannabe mystic, I suppose, given that we're no longer in the medieval period) and a staunch Evangelical Protestant in the same room, let alone on the same panel. However, given that Intervarsity is a parachurch organization and thus rather tautologically tolerant of differences which would make other groups' collective blood curl, this is not terribly unusual. My own taste is definitely for the more intellectual (or failing that, at least exegetical) presentations rather than their rambling Charismatic counterparts, but I got at least something out of all the talks.

The yawns are finally starting to hit my brain, so I'll save further comment for later posts. Let me close, however, is a quote I found particularly interesting, and one I'll probably inflict on my students next quarter as an introduction to the study of Christianity and American literature. It's from Jurgen Habermas, an atheist German philosopher who nonetheless sided with the Roman Catholic Church when the Pope protested the systematic exclusion of Christianity from the then-pending European Union constitution:

Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Christianity]. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. Everything else is postmodern chatter.

Perhaps I'll be really mean and make my students analyze that quote for their diagnostic essay. Bwahaha.