Stages of a Project

In one of the Bibles I use, there's a note attached to the first page of Mark's gospel. Most of my books I have notes, sticky arrows and marginal jottings in them. It's rare for me not to refer to sources of ideas, but in this case, there's nothing to indicate where I got the contents of the note. That's annoying. I don't remember why or when I wrote it: it could have been anytime in the last ten years. Even so, while I can't cite the source of the material, it's worth repeating here. I've been thinking about it for the last two days as I read Mark and started to make notes for our session on Thursday night.

Most projects go through six stages:
1. Enthusiasm
2. Disillusionment
3. Panic
4. Search for the guilty
5. Punishment of the innocent
6. Praise and reward for the non-participants

In what ways does Jesus' project follow these stages?


--Ann

This powerful statement by Peter Rollins about belief and doubt, "I have met the stranger, and he is me," echoes the gospel reading from last Sunday--the story of Thomas.



The text of Peter's blog is available here.

Parker Palmer posted this on his Facebook page today. It's not summer yet, but Mary Oliver's question is for all seasons.

Reading the Gospels as Literature--Introduction

The first session of the "Reading the Gospels as Literature" program was this evening from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m.

A copy of the course outline is available here.

A copy of my lecture notes is also available. 

Resurrecting the Blog

In this first week of Easter, I think it's time to resurrect this blog and put it to better use than in the past.

And so, I'll begin with brief blurbs about the Reading the Gospels as Literature program that begins this evening. I'll upload outlines and notes for each week as we go along.

Notes and notices for other events can appear here, too. If you have anything that you'd like to include, please contact me.

Final Fixes

The last few tweaks and adjustments have been made, including recovering lost images and fixing a couple of broken links.

Next on my list of things to do is to amass the early documents into a reference library for anyone who is interested in reviewing some of the stages of our history.

Updates and fixes

I discovered that Blogger had re-assigned the file names of some of the image files, here, and so I have replaced them. This page should load correctly now. However, there are still a couple of little images on the previous page that I haven't re-loaded, but I will take care of them in the next day or two.

The URL for the 2009 Annual Report wasn't working with some browsers. I've repaired that, too.

I've also added a link to our current liturgy in the Worship section on the "Where and When" page.

If any of these are not working for you, or if there are things that need to be changed, please let me know.