Happy Diwali!

On Presidents and Beers

I choose not to comment on the whole kerfuffle over the arrest of Prof. Gates because I believe it to be quite silly and uselessly distracting to larger issues.

However...there is the issue of beer.

A few days ago President Obama offered to quell the situation by sitting down for a beer with Prof. Gates and the officer involved, Sgt. Crowley. My first reaction was one of approval; nothing better for an overblown conflict than a conversation over a tasty brew. But my approval turned to disappointment this afternoon when Press Secretary Gibbs said the following:

The President will drink Bud Light. As I understand it -- I have not heard this, I've read this, so I'll just repeat what I've read, that Professor Gates said he liked Red Stripe, and I believe Sergeant Crowley mentioned to the President that he liked Blue Moon. So we'll have the gamut covered tomorrow afternoon. I think we're still thinking, weather permitting, the picnic table out back.

Now, I have been a staunch supporter of the President through most everything. And though he has not been perfect (why does he insist on appeasing the GOP?) we should use our collective memories and the corresponding ability for inference and think about where we would be had we stayed on the same path. But that's not the point today.
Bud Light? Really? I mean, I guess nothing says America more than a mass produced piss water marketed for the alpha male that is actually owned by a foreign company. (As a side note, did you know that the largest truly American brewery is Sam Adams, and yet they only have 0.8% of the market? Think about that, Texas.)

But Bud Light? Mr. President, put down that beer. Gates has the hipster sense of humor to throw back a Red Stripe and Sgt. Crowley has the melons to drink a hefeweizen, at least have the respect to throw back a Boston Lager.

This country wasn't founded on bad beer and it certainly can't progress on it.
Just a thought.

-Eric

Narnia's Aslan, Earth's Darwin, and Heaven's God

The most common question I get after telling someone I am getting a PhD in Science and Religion is, what is that? Granted, it's a difficult question to answer from scratch and I have yet to come up with a concise version that is appealing to everyone.

And so, in the meantime, I will post this sermon given by one of the two heads of my program, the Rev. Dr. Wesley Wildman, at a recent service at the Marsh Chapel on the BU campus.

Dr. Wildman

It presents a thoughtful look at how the Christian community can approach the evolutionary theory of Darwin without losing its potency and message. Though brief and general, it gives an example of what kinds of ideas I'll be working with throughout the next five years, and throughout my career.

To read the sermon, click here.

To hear the sermon, click here.

-Eric

Clothes and books

Every trip to Florida seems like a whirlwind. The week has flown by and I'm just days away from packing up a rental truck and driving up the east coast to Boston. I'm very excited, though, for my fourth move across the country. It's becoming almost habit now to transition my life every couple years, but I am exceedingly happy that this one is more permanent than the last few. It will be so nice to live in the same city for longer than two years.

Transitioning is good for the Spartan personality. It gives you an opportunity to purge yourself of stuff, that dreaded villain of complacency and permanence. Perhaps it's the Buddhist within, but I have grown increasingly disconnected from material things...not as any sort of statement against society or personal history, but as an emphasis on the importance of being attached to ideas instead of things. I went through about 16 large boxes of my crap from the High School and Undergraduate years and wound up with only about four boxes worth of things to keep...almost entirely clothes and books.

It's not a new life, just a new chapter, a five-year chapter.

R.I.P. Dom DeLuise

Boston, etc.

I realize that I haven't posted anything of personal substance recently. I apologize for that. It's not for lack of anything interesting going on. By most accounts the last few weeks have been more eventful and exciting than the combination of the previous dozen or so. Allow me to catch up in brief...


As most of you know, I was accepted into Boston University's PhD program in Science, Philosophy and Religion, and thus the majority of my goings on the past few weeks have revolved around that tidbit of news.

My first goal was to establish shelter.

Thus I traveled to Boston last week and hit the ground running. After a red-eye from San Francisco to Boston, complete with a slightly stinky man falling asleep with his mouth open breathing on me for most of the flight, I managed to refuel with some coffee and viewed 9 apartments on the first day. And while I would have been quite content with a handful of them, something was missing...most likely certainty in Crystal's voice over my findings...and so I decided to give it another day and see one more apartment we both had starred on our lists.

Here is where the serendipity comes in.

I arrived in Coolidge Corner the next day a little early for my appointment with the leasing agent, so I decided to stop in to Panera and get some coffee...still not quite awake from my 40 hours of no-sleep from the day before. As I sat there, looking at the time and wondering what I would do for an hour until my meeting, I figured it couldn't hurt to call and see about coming in early. I called. She said yes. I walked the three doors down to the office.

As I was speaking with my agent, another agent came in the office with a young couple and they sat down to a table and began looking over some paperwork. Then, as we were walking out to the car, my agent told me that that couple had just looked at the same apartment and were probably leasing it, but that we could take a look anyway and get a general idea for what I was looking for. Le sigh...

We drove out to the apartment, I loved it. It was a perfect combination of price, location, space, and circumstances. However, as things tend to happen in the real world, I knew it was no longer available since that couple had clearly been sitting down to sign the lease. I told my agent I wanted it, half laughing, half pissed that I didn't meet with her yesterday due to my zombie state, and then added that if we could find something similar I'd take a look. We headed back to the office and as we got to the steps the couple was coming down, laughing and giddy...as if they had just leased a fantastic apartment. We went inside and my agent asked the other agent if she had sold the apartment to the couple.

Her response, "Well, they decided to go out for lunch and think about it first."

My response, "I'll take it."

And so, after some paperwork, some phone calls, and the ceremonial draining of my bank account, Crystal, her feline, and I have a beautiful apartment in Boston.


A day and a half in to my 6 day trip and I had already accomplished my goal...and so the rest was just for fun. Fun included spending quality time with old friends, meeting new ones, trying some new beers, playing some baseball and hurting my shoulder, touring the city of Boston, having some microbrews, taking a piss in a Harvard hall (there's something symbolic there, I think), having some great food, learning the transit system, avoiding Red Sox fans, and drinking free developmental beer at the Samuel Adams Brewery. (The astute among you will notice a motif.)


And after all that I managed to stop by BU and meet with the graduate administrator for my department and have lunch with one of my future professors - a theologin who is working on a grant-funded experiement to discover gravitational waves...God bless this school. I'm so very excited for this program and can't wait to get started. Nothing against the South Asian stuff I've been doing, but I just wasn't necessarily feeling getting more in-depth with it alone. I've always been more of an interdisciplinary kind of guy and now I won't have to parse my ideas to fit into a more rigid and focused field. I think I became fully optimistic about this program as I read down the list of readings for my comp exams and (after I picked my jaw up off the floor) felt excited about reading just about every single one of them.

That being said, now that I'm back in San Francisco, having tasted the future of my academic life...which has a slightly hoppy flavor...I am finding it very difficult to motivate myself to write final papers that are not directly relevant to my future focus. Yet I will persevere...I have no choice...my M.A. depends on it. And so I am 5 verses of Sanskrit and 30 pages of term papers away from adding some letters after my name and moving back to the east coast. The next 5 years are going to be absolutely crazy, and I'm pretty sure I'm going to love all of it.

Until then...

-Eric

I hear it's a Holy Weekend...

...so I thought that since I will forever have letters after my name associated with the study of religion, I should at least provide something to consider for this Christian holiday. Now, I do not have anything particularly relevant to Easter, but the words of Christ seem to be relevant whenever we have the opportunity to read them, don't you think?

I also realize that the Gospel of Thomas is not considered sacred by the vast majority of practicing Christians, but then again the four Gospels that are were rather arbitrarily chosen by a Roman emperor who was more interested in uniting a political state than promoting theological introspection some three centuries after the death of Jesus (or resurrection, since this is Easter), and so I choose not to place limits on the various accounts of the teachings of Christ.

From the Gospel of Thomas:

Jesus said, "If those who lead you say, 'See, the Kingdom is in the sky,' then the birds of the sky will precede you. If they say to you, 'It is in the sea,' then the fish will precede you. Rather, the Kingdom is inside of you, and it is outside of you. When you come to know yourselves, then you will become known, and you will realize that it is you who are the children of the living God. But if you will not know yourselves, you dwell in poverty and it is you who are that poverty."


I have my own interpretation of this verse, but I will save that for another day. For now, I merely wanted to provide a meditation and wish those of you who celebrate Easter a happy one.

-Eric