the waiting game

Well, once again I'm sitting by the phone, waiting on my DS or future senior minister or Jesus Christ to call and let me know where we'll be moving in June. I realize I'm toward the bottom of the line as far as importance within the system, so I'm not expecting a call from the Bishop on the way out of the cabinet meeting or anything. But it's still kind of nervewracking, just sitting around and waiting for something to happen. As Amanda just said, "now you know what a teenage girl feels like."

So now that we've developed that I feel like a teenage girl, today's news was that I had a presentation on Gary Gunderson's Deeply Woven Roots in Mission and Western Culture. It was pretty entertaining, since the entire course talks about intersections between modern culture and the church, so we're allowed to make some bizarre connections. For instance, my presentation was done jointly with Lonnie Pittman, a Florida fan from Pensacola. So, naturally, I began the presentation with a discussion of the role of Alabama football as religious community. My discussion was based on an article written by David Chidester about "the church of baseball," but basically it took the four major functions of religious community (timelessness, continuity, community, sacred space) and applied each of these to Alabama football (the rituals of holding up four fingers and our crimson jerseys, our tradition of winning, the connection between likeminded fans, and bryant-denny stadium). Lonnie retorted with a slide about Florida winning the basketball championship, so I fought back with a picture of the scoreboard from the 2005 UA-UF game. After that, we talked about the news about the American Bible Society refusing to print bibles with the phrase "Jesus loves Porn Stars" on the cover. Pretty interesting stuff.