Impressions, proceeding backwards

I'm going home for the weekend, so thought I should give some idea what I've been doing:

Tonight I went to grad hall at Christ's. It was great to catch up with Johnny and Ian and to be enraptured by mathematical notation and medieval bestiaries. The food was well done too, with beef steak just the right consistency, succulence without sogginess. Earlier today I was reading subversive pamphlets from the 1590s (relating to the Marprelate controversy - people bashing bishops and bishops bashing them back).

On Sunday, we had Dr William D. Taylor, executive director of the Missions Commission of the World Evangelical Alliance, preaching at church. Bill Taylor is a Texan who spent 17 years in Guatemala doing missionary work with his wife. He has a very particular style of preaching, laid-back and forceful at the same time, combining a southern drawl with a sharp mind, biblical thought categories with contemporary application and broad cultural analysis with a valuing of particular stories. Whilst his morning sermon was more 'theological' and his evening sermon more 'anecdotal' in style, the message was consistent, being the need to connect our particular stories with God's big story and mission being our participation in God's story through inviting others to join in that story.

((Feel free to skip this paragraph if you want.) There seem to be very similar themes emerging in much current missiological thinking in the evangelical church (missiology = study of Christian mission) - Chris Wright, N.T. (Tom) Wright, Samuel Escobar and plenty more I haven't looked at closely, are singing off much the same hymn sheet. Themes include Christ as the model of missionary endeavour, the embodiment of the gospel in the church as the community of God, the relevance of Abraham and the nation of Israel as bearers of the story of God, and the Trinitarian and participatory nature of mission. What's interesting is that many of these 'new' emphases, while thoroughly biblical, represent shifts from (though not complete disavowal of) dominant evangelical approaches of the past. The diversity in theological background and cultural context of these thinkers suggests to me that the emergence of these ways of thinking is not just a trendy bandwagon but a work of the Spirit in renewing the theology of the global church to serve the mission we are called to accomplish. Samuel Escobar's A Time for Mission (IVP, 2003) (US title The New Global Mission) gives an excellent and fairly accessible intro to some of this, and his bibliography gives suggestions for further reading.)

On Saturday, I went along to the fireworks on Midsummer Common. Once a year pretty much the whole of Cambridge, town and gown, converges on Midsummer Common to watch things go bang and make pretty patterns in the sky. All pretty spectacular (note three senses of the word "pretty"), though I spent most of the time trying to find the group I was meant to go with. Afterwards I met up with Simon and Lucy. Lucy, with whom I went to Norway in the summer, was visiting from London, and seemed very smiley.

Before the fireworks, I attended the baptism of a Chinese friend. Baptisms are always wonderful, but it was particularly moving to hear her speak about how Jesus completed and cleaned her heart.
"We were therefore buried with him [Christ] through baptism into death in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too may live a new life." (Romans 6:4)

The ducks in Emmanuel College evidently have a higher status in the college than the students, since the ducks are permitted to walk on the grass, which is forbidden to the students but not the fellows. The other Sunday the ducks advanced towards us in a triangular military formation, evidently seeking food. Alas, we were not able to provide them with the sustenance they desired (though I am informed that some of them pretend to be ill from time to time in order to win sympathy and more food). Later, however, I observed that the ducks had formed themselves into circles, a shape which looks much more domestic and restful.

One Wednesday we had a paper-folding session for our textual studies class in order to replicate 16th/17th century printing practices. We had to fold up large sheets to form folio, quarto and octavo bindings with the pages in the right order. Nataly was sadly ill, but I thought that she shouldn't be allowed to miss out on the fun, so I delivered the sheets to her to fold and aid her recovery.

We also discovered from one of the paleography transcriptions we had to do, that Fulke Greville, an Elizabethan aristocrat who wrote some stuff (ODNB entry for subscribers and people on Cambridge network, Wikipedia for anyone else), left some money to endow a library at Cambridge as an answer to the Bodleian. Like many of Greville's schemes, this one didn't come to anything. If he had, the UL might look a bit different.

That's all for now, folks.