Fast-forward

After a hellish ordeal of a finals week at my beloved Divinity School, I suddenly find myself bored on vacation. So what better time than to try to reboot my moribund blog that nobody will ever read, unless somebody is looking for something stupid I said someday. Obviously, a lot has changed in the world since my last post, a snide comment about a tasteless joke on the part of our soon-to-be-ex-President, now the lamest duck who ever quacked. Something about the state of discourse as the campaigns proceeded made me not feel like contributing much to the digital landfill. Kos and Yglessias and even Andrew Sullivan were doing just fine without my two cents, which would have been redundant anyway, though my facebook status frequently shared whatever oneliners I came up with. But we won! We also have a semi-firm date for withdrawl from Iraq that even Bush endorses, we've had signals from Russia that they will be giving us more headaches in the future, and we are in the Worst Financial Crisis Since the Great Depression. And yet, pretty much everybody has been pleased with Obama's preparations to take office, and though I had a few worries about his economic agenda during the election, I think I join the vast, vast majority of Americans in saying I'm very glad he won. I've heard a lot of people say that only an idiot would want to be President now, which may be true. But I've also heard it said that this is the worst time in the nation's history to assume the office, which is patently false. If I had to suddenly change bodies and time periods with any President on his first day, I'd take Obama's first day on the job over Lincoln's or FDR's. And they are widely considered two of our best ever. So I remain relatively optimistic about our country's political future.

The thing that actually concerns me most at the moment is Russia. Obama is inheriting a plan from Bush to build missile defense facilities in Poland and the Czech Republic, to which Russia is opposed, and it threatens to put missiles in Kalinengrad and point them at European cities if we go through with it. Obama's going to be in a bad position because this is probably a bad idea anyway, but he can't just back down without looking weak to both the American cable news audience and, perhaps more importantly, the Russians. So I expect him to push for some sort of compromise that nobody will think is a good idea, but what else is he supposed to do? It looks like Bush is bowing out fairly gracefully, but he's poisoned this particular well whether he meant to or not.

In personal news, I've gone from being a "freelance theologian" (read: unemployed slacker) to a bona fide Ph.D. student. All my classes focused on 19th and early 20th century Germany last quarter. It was good to finally delve into some figures I've always meant to read but never had, including the likes of Kant and Barth, and I think I even wrote a pretty good paper on Schleiermacher that I plan to keep working on, and maybe present at a conference or something. But aside from being the initial preparation for one of my doctoral exams, this quarter confirmed for me that my interests are mainly patristic and medieval Greek and Latin, and modern English, French, and Spanish, NOT 19th century German. Next quarter will be entirely patristic though, so I'm looking forward to that. Happy Advent then, and more updates as things occur to me.