Article from September Anglican

Here is the article I wrote the the issue of the Anglican that was just published (September 2010):



It's a short reflection of my thoughts post-Canterbury.

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Patrick O'Brian at Sea...

A friend of mine sent me a link to an article a sailor wrote about his experience having Patrick O'Brian on his large sailing yacht for several days of voyaging in the Mediterranean. Apparently O'Brian's practical knowledge of sailing lags significantly behind his historical knowledge of sailing!

Underway to Menorca beneath a sunny sky with a twenty knot following wind, the sailing was marvelous and O'Brian was delighted. I introduced him to the helm, but he seemed to have no feeling for the wind and the course, and frequently I had to intervene to prevent a full standing gybe. I began to suspect that his autobiographical references to his months at sea as a youth were fanciful. He had no idea of the limitations of even a big yacht like Andromeda in terms of the handling and actual distance we could cover in a day. However, he and Mary adapted quickly to the yacht with no trace of seasickness. (source)

O'Brian worked on his novel The Yellow Admiral while aboard, as well...

Every afternoon between two and five, Patrick retired to my on-board office to work on his novel The Yellow Admiral, then in progress. He borrowed the yacht's charts of France, particularly the area around Brest, to incorporate detail of the blockade of Brest which is featured in that book. Very much to Mary's surprise he showed me each day's progress. She said that he had never shared his work with anyone before completion. Later, Patrick sent me the original manuscript for this volume which I still keep aboard and which I treasure.(source)

Kind of a neat story that gives you a sense of what O'Brian was like. The fact that this persona was an invention of the author (real name, Patrick Russ), adds another layer of meaning to the whole "Patrick O'Brian" phenomenon.

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The Mission-Shaped Muffin Pan

My latest column in The Anglican newspaper is out....



There is one typo. Where it reads "St. Luke's" I meant "St. Paul's."

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Rhetoric...

One of the finest features of a Hampden-Sydney education is the "Rhetoric Requirement." Many Colleges and Universities require students to take composition courses, but rarely do they come anywhere near HSC's rigorous standard. Stanley Fish's latest blog article in the New York Times--What Should Colleges Teach?--gives a sense of state of things elsewhere. Several years ago Fish was disturbed to learn that most of the "composition" courses being taught by graduate students at his University actually taught very little about the craft of writing. The common pattern was for students to discuss something (like an essay, TV show, or controversial topic) and then write about it, however there was little or no instruction in basic grammar or the art of argument.

As I learned more about the world of composition studies I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research. Now I have received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable... (source)

At Hampden-Syndney, on the other hand, everyone must prove proficiency in Rhetoric in order to graduate, irregardless of Major. "Proficiency" had two parts: passing a test of pure grammar knowledge and then passing a creative-writing essay test. In other words, you had to be able to prove that you know the rules of grammar and then creatively apply those rules in a cohesive essay. Neither of these tests are easy, the majority of students fail the first (Freshman-year) attempt. Luckily we all have four years to learn and try again. Students that struggle get extra help.

The result is that all Hampden-Sydney graduates (even those majoring in "hard" sciences) have excellent writing skills. At the very least they know what a comma splice looks like! This sensibility seems to pervade the academic culture across disciplines at Hampden-Syndney: you were expected to write well (and correctly) in all your course work.

When I was a Teaching Assistant at Yale for an undergraduate course I was shocked at how poor writing is tolerated. All kinds of mistakes would be passed back to the students without a jot of red ink. I made it a point of principle to take to time to at least note the mistakes. How else will they learn? Many of my colleagues at the graduate level discovered they had a lot to learn about how to write, as well.

So Stanley Fish's argument that basic composition courses should focus on basic composition rings true to my experience. I am thankful that my Liberal Arts education put so much emphasis on something as foundational as writing!

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the "blog" of "unncessary" quotation marks

Meg directs my attention to the "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. Here's one church related "gem":



There are other amusing examples, like this one:



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June Column for the Anglican

Here's my June Column for the Anglican. I went for humour, obviously. Apologies to Zen Flesh, Zen Bones and the Desert Fathers, of whom this is a parody...



Actually, I could come up with these quippy little stories all day. So perhaps next year I'll do another column along a similar vein!

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May's Anglican Column

Here is my column from the May edition of The Anglican:

I wrote this while on retreat at Holy Cross. Obviously that comes across!

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April Column for the Anglican

Here's this month's column I wrote for the Anglican...



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Article in the Daily Episcopalian

The Daily Episcopalian, one of the blogs on the Episcopal Café website, is running an article I wrote. Regular readers will remember our roof disaster on Christmas Eve here at the church. It was a big deal to be asked to write for this blog--they get about 4,000 visits (12,000 page views) per day! This personal blog gets only a fraction of that--so I feel pretty honoured.

Once upon a time my grade school teachers didn't think I would amount to much when it came to writing. My mother was even accused once of not reading enough to me as a kid! Her counter-claim to their criticism was that they weren't sufficiently challenging me. I think history has proven her right--all three of her kids do a substantial amount of writing in their careers. One of my sisters was a senior magazine editor until she recently decided to go back to school for another degree. My other sister is the Director of Communications for a major American non-profit. Odd how we all ended up doing stuff that involves words!

Anyway, I'm really enjoying having the chance to write for the Episcopal Café and for The Anglican. It's a very different set of muscles than sermon writing.

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Plagerism and Self-Persuasion

Remember that guy Neale Donald Walsch that wrote the "Conversations with God" series? He is being accused of plagiarism for using a well-known anecdote from another popular spiritual writer, Candy Chand (Chicken Soup for the Christian Family Soul). He was writing a Christmas essay for Beliefnet and told a heart warming story about a Christmas pageant he says he saw. Oops. Turns out the story he claimed happened to him was written 10 years ago by Chand and has made the rounds on the web ever since and appeared in the Chicken Soup series as well as elsewhere. It's even officially copyrighted.

Now, Walsch says he convinced himself that this happened to him 20 years ago and that it was an honest mistake. But that fails to explain why his version of the story matches Chand's almost verbatim. He offered this explanation:

All I can say now — because I am truly mystified and taken aback by this — is that someone must have sent it to me over the Internet ten years or so ago,” Mr. Walsch wrote. “Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of ‘stories to tell that have a message I want to share.’ I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized ... and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience. (source)

Chand doesn't bite: "Quite frankly, I’m not buying it," she told the Times. It's not the first time people have tried to claim the story as their own, but it the first time a professional writer has done it. "As a professional writer, when someone appears to plagiarize, they damage the industry, they damage other writers’ credibility and they hurt the reader because they never know what to believe anymore."

Quite right. But the best line was her zinger that ended the NYTimes article about the situation: "Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not lie, and thou shalt not covet another author’s property." Lol.

But I think the real question is whether it is possible to absorb a story and make it your own in this way. Answer: "of course it is." In the television version of This American Life, there is a true story of a husband and wife where the husband has convinced himself of something that actually happened to his wife, not him. (Episode 11: "Every Marriage is a Courtroom"). I think it's perhaps quite common for people to appropriate anecdotes in this way. Of course, it's impossible to notice oneself.

So understand Chand's anger as well as how Walsch could have persuaded himself in this way. Now, are some people more prone this kind of self-suggestibility than others?

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January Column for The Anglican

The January edition of The Anglican came out this week. I was particularly pleased with how my column came out this time. SMM folks may remember the anecdote I use from a sermon I gave on Christmas Eve 2006. I remember that John Ralston Saul complimented me on that sermon--and he did not give such compliments lightly!

Anyway, here is the article. My writing is improving with practice--and blogging helps. I think the addition of the illustration was nice, too.


Although I didn't get a by-line, I also wrote the first draft of what became the article on the bottom left of page 12 ("Ghanian bishop seeks support"). I thought it was important that the bishop should get a press release into the Anglican.

Now I have to write another Column due today--but I have the idea-germ in my head so that will be fine. Where I start to get freaked out is when I have no idea what I'm going to write about!

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Grammar and Customer Service

Stanley Fish, something of a celebrity in Academia, has an amusing blog in the NY Times this week complaining about customer service at AT&T. Apparently, informing the operator that that her that her scripted opening line "With whom am I speaking with?" was grammatically incorrect caused her torment him mercilessly and send him through the phone system on a wild goose chase. The best part is that AT&T later had no record of his call!

Apparently he hit a nerve, because within a few hours of posting the blog entry he had 465 comments and the NY Times capped them at that! I'll be curious to hear if the company replies. I checked the press release section of the corporate site and found nothing. Even better, I tried to find an e-mail address to write to and didn't have luck that way, either.

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Toronto Star Op Ed

Okay, okay, without further ado--

Enough with the Santa-bashing

There is still something simple and joyful about a holiday in which we give each other presents
The Rev. W. Tay Moss

Here is how Santa Claus was crucified.

A story began circulating in the 1990s that a Japanese department store chain attempted to lure shoppers to adopt Christmas with a comically wrong poster: They crucified Santa.

There he was, the jolly red-suited man, dying on a cross. The mistake was understandable, but also probably apocryphal. No one has ever proved that this actually happened in Japan.

It did, however, happen in the United States. A Washington state man, Art Conrad, crucified a life-sized Santa Claus mannequin in his front yard in 2007 to protest the commercialization of Christmas.

CTV News reported him saying, "Santa has been perverted from who he started out to be. Now he's the person being used by corporations to get us to buy more stuff."

He's right. The 4th-century St. Nicholas of Myra – remembered for saving three sisters from a life of slavery or prostitution by giving them money for dowries – bears little resemblance to the iconic shopping-mall Santa with his squirm-inducing lap.

Considering that the average American owes nearly $9,000 in credit-card debt, there is good reason to organize a mob south of the 49th parallel.

This is the new wave of anti-Santa, let's-save-Christmas sentiment. Forget the stuff about how Christmas lost Christ – the new front in the war on St. Nick is about overconsumption fed by credit-card debt.

No one captures the spirit of this new anti-corporation mood better than Rev. Billy of The Church of Stop Shopping. Rev. Billy (a persona created by actor and performance artist Billy Talen) has been on a crusade against the likes of Wal-Mart, Disney and Starbucks. He wants to put the "odd" back in God.

With his Elvis-like hair, white suits and televangelist voice, he has tried to exorcise the demons of greed from cash registers at Starbucks (which got him arrested) and staged other protests designed to prevent the "Shopocalypse." It's the best sort of spoof, as funny as it is relevant.

There are many reasons why Canadians might have qualms about Santa, too. Perhaps his little North Pole kingdom violates Canadian Arctic sovereignty?

And has anyone checked whether his elfin toy sweatshops violate Labour Canada policies? And what's up with the naughty-and-nice list?

Yet the most compelling argument against Christmas in Canada is simply this: Can we claim that this essentially Christian holiday (even its most tamed, Santa-ized version) is relevant to non-Christians?

Consider that Statistics Canada reports that most of the population growth in Canada is due to immigration – a record-setting 89,100 in the third quarter of this year alone. Most of these newcomers (83.9 per cent in 2006) were from non-European countries.

Even putting questions of immigration aside, it's clear that Canada is rapidly becoming less and less Christian.

StatsCan reports that the number of Canadians who identify as being Christian has steadily declined over the years, from 82.8 per cent in 1991 to 76.6 per cent in 2001.

Meanwhile, the number of Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus and Sikhs have all either doubled in number or come close.

Given the increasingly multicultural, secular character of Canadian society, what does Christmas have to offer? My answer is that Santa represents the best spirit of generosity and pure fun the Great White North can muster.

For all the justified hand-wringing about consumerism or Canada becoming a post-Christian nation, there is still something simple and joyful about a holiday in which we give each other presents. It's winter; it's cold and snowy. What else is there to do except show our love with a little generosity?

For Christians, this is a small imitation of the grand goodness of a loving God that gave us the gift of himself in Jesus.

We celebrate because God did a very good thing for us, but that doesn't mean that we have exclusive rights to a season of joy and giving.

So, let's share Santa with the malls and the corporations and everyone else who wants to celebrate generosity and joy, because at the end of the day, it's really all about the love.

The Rev. W. Tay Moss is the incumbent minister at The Church of the Messiah at Avenue Rd. and Dupont. (source)

Incidentally for all the professional editors in my family--the title and the subtitle as well as the paragraph divisions were all paper's choices. My original title was "The Accidental Crucifixion of Santa Clause or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Yuletide"--but I suppose that was too long for them. I understand!

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More Writing

I'm very excited to say that I've been invited to write an op-ed piece for the Toronto Star Newspaper. The article will appear in the Christmas Eve edition. This is a huge deal and an enormous honor. Consider that this is the most read newspaper in the entire country, with a circulation of about 500,000 in the Greater Toronto area alone. It's by far the largest audience I've ever had for a sermon or article. Huge. Simply huge.

But the article itself will be fairly small: 600 words. So not much chance for a meandering treatise! So far they've asked me to write about why Christmas should matter to Jews, Muslims, etc.

So I'm elated, naturally. But now I have to come up with a really compelling thing to write about! But, hey, if I don't have something to say about Christmas than perhaps I'm in the wrong gig!

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Writing

Recall last week when I had all those writing projects to do? Most of those are now done, but I still have three remaing: a blog piece for Episcopal Cafe, a column for the February Anglican, and the Christmas Pageant. The Pageant is actually the easiest of those, since we are simplifying the parts that don't involve rapping and dancing to make room for those that do!

I've also been asked about another article that would potentially appear in an even larger venue. Big, big deal if it happens, and I'm deeply honored that they are considering me. Apparently I'm getting a reputation as a writer on matters of faith!

So now I have come up with new ideas on what to write about. Interestingly, I had a real downpour of ideas when I was walking to St. Paul's Bloor Street last week. I had to stop on the street to write them down lest I forgot. I was thinking about St. Andrew's Day and an amazing sermon given by Mark Frank in 1672. In it he used the image of St. Andrew leaving his nets when called by Christ:

And alas! what have we, the best, the richest of us, as highly as we think of ourselves and ours, more than Saint Andrew and his brother: a few broken nets? What are our honours but old nets to catch the breath of the world, where the oldest is the best, and where that which has most knots, most alliances and genealogies, is the most honourable? What are all our ways and devices of thriving but so many several nets to catch a little yellow sand and mud? And if you will have it in somewhat a finer phrase, [what are they but] a few silver scaled fishes, in which yet (God knows!) there are so many knots and difficulties, so many rents and holes for the fish to slip out of, that we may justly say they are but broken nets, and old ones too, the best of them, that will scarce hold a pull, all our new projects being but old ones new rubbed over, and no new thing under the sun. Our very life, lastly: what is is it but a few rotten threads knit together into veins and sinews? (source)

This notion of casting off "networks" of connection and entanglement is strikingly modern in sentiment. But I guess there really is no "new thing under the sun." So from this I thought of this phrase to work into one of the articles I'm writing: "Somewhere between the fierce urgency of the holy and ascetic now and the Parish Strategic Plan with its Tactical Appendix is the tippy centre of our fishing boat." I'm thinking, of course, of the paradox between Christ's call to abandoning our nets and yet also to build the Kingdom. It's a struggle I think many church leaders feel: the tug between getting necessary things done and yet cultivating the kind of detachment that seems part of Jesus' teaching. Simply going to the extreme one way or other won't do--but how to stand in the tippy centre with something like grace and joy?

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November Anglican Column

Here is the column I wrote for November's Anglican. Many thanks, again, to Stewart for asking me to write it. I find writing a very rewarding part of my ministry (hence this blog)!



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Anglican Article Published

That article I wrote for the Anglican just got published:

I got a full color page, at that! I'm very pleased with the results. Many thanks to the Editor (you know who you are!) Life is good.

I learned so much in Turkey that I could have easily written an article twice as long. In the end I simply didn't have the space to talk much about the non-Anglican Christians in Istanbul and some of the neat things they are up to. Just as well, as I was a bit nervous about saying too much about these communities that try to stay under the radar. The Anglicans (as well as a few other groups) have a more "official" status that affords some protection.

Anyway, I'm very pleased about this. Funny how my two sisters and myself all have been writers to one degree or another. And at one time my mother was told by one of my teachers, patronizingly, that she should read to me more!

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Art from Articles

I had trouble getting to sleep last night. It was a little warm in our bedroom, I suppose. But since the weather is only going to get cooler from now on it doesn't make much sense to try to put the A/C in. Interestingly, our new bedroom is much "warmer" feeling than the old one: probably because of the wall-to-wall carpet and the smaller size.

I finished that article for the Anglican. They are going to pay me this time, which is extra cool and definitely may motivate me to do another. I'm saving up to buy a piece of art for the new house. I have my eye on a gorgeous long Japanese Zen Bodhidharma scroll. I really like these type of scroll paintings. Here's a very nice version of the Heart Sutra:

And there are lots of beautiful landscapes and still-lifes, too. So that's something to look forward to.

The Mural is finished! Yipee! Now we just have to plan for the official unveiling.

The sound system at the church broke last Sunday. Luckily I believe I can get it repaired tomorrow. What it is it with church sound systems? So rarely are they done well. This one is in terrible shape and I'm surprised it lasted this long!

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Betsy's Blog

Betsy started a blog to write about our travels and adventures this summer. You can find it here. Here's an article that I particularly liked.

Small Cat Safari
With dozens of years in the industry, Queen’s Elms Residence is able to combine our expertise with your dreams to create a perfect safari. We listen to your needs and desires and are especially equipped to eliminate any unwanted rodents such as mice.

Spend the day rambling through the bush and across the grassy planes. You may wish to be escorted by trackers and a guide who will give you insight into their fascinating culture and way of life. These uniformed workers who appear at various stations around the Elms Residence are unable to answer any questions about life either within or beyond the limits of Elms, yet they are retained for the unique insight into the life patterns of the small cats breed in their nature reserve. Their dedication alone preserves the high concentration of tabbies, medium, and short haired cats.

Your best opportunities to see cats within this preserve are in the vicinity of trash bins, on windowsills, and behind the shrubberies. (source)

She has a bunch of pictures of the cats that hang around the university residences to accompany the article. Apparently she is enjoying herself!

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The Anglican Article

The article I wrote for the Diocesan Newspaper (The Anglican) about the conference I attended in San Francisco just got published. Here's a readable JPG.

The PDF of the whole newspaper can be found here. I was very pleased that they asked me to write this piece. Ultimately, I decided only a very personal and anecdotal style would do the experience justice--so I'm pleased with how it turned out.

The picture doesn't really match the story, though. I could have given them something from the actual conference--but they never asked! Next time I'll send along some photos with the article. Luckily, they had some pictures from Palm Sunday to use.

Perhaps they will ask me to write about my experience meeting the Anglican Community in Istanbul this summer? I'm certain to have some good pictures and stories from that experience!

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