Laodicea (Spewville)

Colossae

Heirapolis

Turkey, So Far

I arrived in Istanbul yeseterday and crossed the river as the late afternoon sun cast shadows on the spires. We'll return later in the week to see the city. But this morning we had a 3 AM wake-up call and caught an early flight to the interior.

First we went to the tell at Colossae. It amazes me that no one has yet excavated that ancient city. But it's in a gorgeous, fertile valley with vineyards and the sound of a stream running behind us. The mountains towered in the background, and I had a new appreciation for the apostle Paul's description in Colossians 1 of Jesus Christ as the Creator of all. The Colossians were surrounded by breathtaking creation.

Then we moved on to Laodicea. It is the only city mentioned in Revelation 2-3 to which Christ had nothing positive to say. Everywhere in the ruins we saw the remains of structures related to water. Roman baths. Aquaducts. A huge fountain with statues.

Hot water came to Laodicea from nearby springs. Cold water came from different springs. But by the time both got to the city, the water was lukewarm and brackish. Jesus told the Christians in Laodicea that He wished they were either hot or cold, but because they were lukewarm, He would spew them out of His mouth. When I got back to the bus after walking in the heat, I took a big swig of water from my bottle and guess what--it was lukewarm and I wanted to spew it! Cold water refreshes. Hot water--love it every morning for my coffee. But lukewarm water, the tepid stuff, makes me want to hurl. God too, apparently.

The city was quite rich in its day. It suffered two major earthquakes in the first century, and when Rome offered to send in government help, they refused. Didn't need it. They could handle it on their own. Jesus tells these people through John's revelation that, though they are rich, they are really poor.

I was amazed at how extensive the excavation was in Laodicea. The past ten years have seen incredible strides in what's been uncovered, and the city left us with dropped jaws.

The best of all, though, was ancient Hierapolis. Huge calcium deposits make it like the Cliffs of Dover in the middle of the valley. Picture Mammoth Hot Springs (near Yellowstone) without the sulphur smell and multiply it several times over in terms of scale, and you get the picture.

The city also had a temple to Apollo, is where Philip was reportedly martyred, and has the best-preserved theater I have ever seen. You can see it behind us in the shot above.

More when I have e-access again.

Sitting in Frankfurt

I've spent the last ten hours sleeping at a 45-degree angle, watching He's Not That Into You and Slumdog Millionaire, and reading a few essays on aesthetics of the novel. Now I'm sitting in the Frankfurt airport awaiting my flight to Istanbul. Walking through the terminal, I've seen only one short newsclip and a single headline relating to Michael Jackson. Everything else focuses on Iran, the European Union, sporting events (swimming especially), the worldwide economic meltdown ...

I'm headed to Turkey and the Aegean for two weeks of research. My next Coffee Cup study is tentatively titled Sumatra with the Seven Churches. For the first week I'm in Turkey visiting the location of six of the seven churches from Revelation 2-3. Also on the agenda is Philippi, where the biblical Book of Philippians was sent. I have two new studies releasing July 27, and one is on Philippians. So hopefully we can shoot some photos and upload them to my web site.

The seventh and final rev-church site is Ephesus. That happens the second week, during which I'm set to sail from Istanbul and end up in Athens with Ephesus, Patmos, and a number of Aegean sites between. I hope to set my dissertation project in Ephesus, and this visit should give me a close-up look that will hopefully also give me some clearer direction. The trip happened through amazing provision from the Lord, and I'm still pinching myself.

I have about 3 more hours of sitting around plus three hours or so of flight time before meeting up with my hubby, who's joining me in Istanbul from Nairobi for the Turkey part.

He was in Kenya with a small team from East-West purchasing and delivering home-building supplies to destitute families displaced in last year's civil war. The team has experienced good weather (better than Dallas's 104 degrees!), smooth purchase and delivery of supplies, and obtained video footage of recipients expressing gratitude that they will now have homes. More about that in the days ahead.

Meanwhile, stay tuned here for photos and thoughts as I embark on what promises to be an unforgettable adventure.

In the News

Today's New York Times book review included mention of a book, The Whole Five Feet, by Christopher R. Beha, who set out to read all 51 volumes of the Harvard Classics (known as the five-foot shelf) in one year. I could totally relate.

But I was struck by the fact that today's book review included nothing about the King of Pop or one of Charlie's Angels. I was an Michael Jackson fan, though less so after he started grabbing his crotch. But what a dancer!

And my freshman year I tried to cut my bangs ("wings") like Farrah's in the girl's bathroom, a fact I had forgotten until my best friend from junior high reminded me on Facebook today.

Anyway, my point being that I liked these people. Still.

When I turned on cable news last night looking for news out of Iran and could not find anything even on the bottom-of-the-screen scrolling from any of the three main news-providers, I felt like I had subscribed to Cable People Network and Fox Entertainment. Gimme a break. We have North Korea turning nukes at Hawaii, Ahmadi-nutjob (as one of my students calls him) in Iran squelching free speech, and a host of economic crises across the world. C'mon people! At least the NY Times demonstrated a little perspective here. But what does it say about our culture that they're going bankrupt?

Writers Who Endure

I've been taking part in an online discussion on writing with originality and authenticity, and I think part of learning to write with one's own authentic voice comes in part, ironically, from reading enduring (classic) works of writers who have found their own authentic voices. And many of these authors whose works have endured have written essays full of good thinking about how and why they write as they do. Here's a quick sampling of good essays by writers who endure:

**Flannery O'Connor's "The Element of Surprise in 'A Good Man is Hard to Find'" from the book On Her Own Work (excellent explanation of why she uses violence to explore grace)

T. S. Eliot's essays in Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, especially "Tradition and the Individual Talent" and "Religion and Literature"
I have a link only to the first of these two: http://www.bartleby.com/200/sw4.html

Nathaniel Hawthorne's preface to The House of Seven Gables
http://ibiblio.org/eldritch/nh/sgpf.html

(And the Cliff's Notes commentary on that preface:)
http://www.cliffsnotes.com/WileyCDA/LitNote/The-House-of-Seven-Gables-Critical-Essays-Hawthorne-s-Preface.id-18,pageNum-35.html

D. H. Lawrence's essay on "Why the Novel Matters"
http://individual.utoronto.ca/amlit/why_the_novel_matters.htm

Emerson's two-part Eulogy of Thoreau, which appeared in Atlantic Monthly, 1862
http://www.rwe.org/pages/eulogy_of_thoreau.htm

Wordless Wednesday

A Day in Uncle Tom's Cabin

I didn't plan to include with this post the photo of Harriet Beecher Stowe that you see here. I intended instead to use a shot of the cover of her book, Uncle Tom's Cabin. Yet when I did a "Google images" search to find a shot of her book cover, I could not find one that included her name. Okay, I did find one, but it included the names of illustrator and annotator in such imposing print that their names crowded out hers, which appeared in about 7 point type.

It seemed unfitting that the brilliant, witty, insightful mind behind this work of lit should lose out on one shred of the credit rightfully due her.

As with Dracula, I feel as if I'm reading a book right off the CBA list. (CBA used to mean Christian Book Sellers Association, but then CBA stores added t-shirts and DVDs and such, so CBA now just means C-B-A.)

At any rate, both Uncle Tom's Cabin and The Grapes of Wrath beautifully flesh out biblical teaching on social justice. In reading UTC I have laughed out loud and cried and shaken my head and shuddered and then laughed again. Somewhere I once read that the strongest argument comes with a one-two punch, the second blow being humor. Harriet Beecher Stowe surely knew this.

Both books seem incredibly timely. As if written in our time.

UTC contains much wisdom, revealing insight into how the powerful twist scripture to their own ends. Beecher-Stowe shows how a simple, humble, uneducated soul can have more spiritual insight than all the wise and powerful of this world simply by asking "would I want someone to do this 'unto me'"?

Dracula Surprise

When I was in sixth grade, I invited my neighbor Sara to spend the night. We set up our slumber arrangements on the hide-a-bed in the basement, the only room in the house with a TV. And Sara announced that Psycho was on that night.

Uh-oh.

I hated horror movies. They scared the snot out of me. But I was too cool in the sixth grade to tell someone who regularly watched Dark Shadows and loved Barnabus Collins's character that I was too chicken to watch Psycho. So we watched it. Afterward Sara fell right to sleep. I, on the other hand, sat up in that hide-a-bed until 4 AM, constantly looking around the room to verify that I was safe. Making matters worse was the fact that our basement was only 3/4 below ground level, and up near the ceiling was a long horizontal window. That little ground-level window creeped me out even more. That was the scariest night of my life, and for the next thirty years (no hyperbole here), whenever I took a shower, I would glance outside the curtain to make sure no knife-wielding psycho was poised to get me.

Yes, I hate being terrified. So when I started reading Dracula, a requirement in my PhD aesthetics-of-the-novel reading, I expected to loathe the thing. I certainly did not expect to be edified! But it turns out Bram Stoker was a genius...the different points of view he chose for telling the story, the varying voices of his characters--some of whom were quite lovable, the brilliant way he handled chronology. Not to mention the gripping suspense. All of it--great. And the grandest surprise he delivered was that the novel's overall point of view falls in line with a Christian worldview. Crucifixes have power over evil as does the Host. The Father of all is the laughter-giver. Selfishness is more limiting than others-focused living. Evil is bad; good is worth dying for. Christ is the giver of eternal life. If I didn't know better, I would have thought I was reading the latest CBA release.

I've been told that Christian Horror is a newly emerging genre. But after reading Dracula, all I can say is that it may be emerging, but it certainly isn't new.

Happy Father's Day!

Today I'm grateful for a dad who raised me to camp, sang me to sleep, and never hesitated to get his arm dirty in a clam hole. And I'm grateful for a husband who believed in me before I believed in myself and does the same with our daughter.

Dracula!

I finished Main Street. It moved pretty slowly for the first 3/4 of the book, but the end engaged me. Still, The Grapes of Wrath proved a difficult act to follow.

I've now moved on to Dracula. I started reading it last night while I was home alone for a while, and it was dark outside, and the house creaked (it turned out to be the cat in the rocking chair). I think I'll limit myself to reading this one only during daylight hours!

Wordless Wednesday

FYI

Follow this link to my Tapestry Blog posting about using positive adoption language.

Thirty years ago I married my husband. I would do it all over again in a heartbeat!

Find Me on Facebook

You can find me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/sglahn.

Monterrey

For family and friends wanting to follow the adventures of Mark and Erin, my bro-in-law and niece, along with the Watermark team in Monterrey this week, here's a link to Mark's blog.

Next on the List

Having finished The Grapes of Wrath, I'm now diving into Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (later made into the movie, "I Married a Doctor," that is sadly still unavailable for home viewing). Anybody out there ever read it? Liked it? Your thoughts?

Cowtown

If all goes as planned, our family will be apart a lot in the next two months with camp and business trips and such. So we decided to take today and have an outing together in Cowtown--Fort Worth.

We started with a tour of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where the government prints money. When I was a teen living outside of Washington, D.C., my two favorite attractions were Monticello and the money factory. Looking down through a glass window at the millions and millions of dollars stacked up--wow! The Fort Worth facility is relatively new and quite beautiful. We began with a twenty-minute film about the money-making process, and then we got a guided tour through the plant.

We then high-tailed it over to the OMNI theater to catch an IMAX showing of "Night at the Museum II." We didn't tell our girl ahead of time that we were going. In fact on the way to Cowtown she mentioned again how much she wanted to see it. So it was fun to surprise her. Gary and I decided the screen was too big for our maximum enjoyment, but our girl thought it rocked the world. So, score!

From there we headed to The Stockyards. We wandered through shops, grabbed a milkshake, and watched the cattle drive (which happens daily at 11:30 and 4). The temperature reached 94 today, and we inched pretty close to "misery" at that point, so we headed back to the air-conditioned car (which averaged 44.6 mpg today).

Our next destination was Central Market. My hubby had never been. (He's the grocery shopper in the family.) We nibbled our way through Friday night samples that included buffalo meat. And frankly, he was unimpressed because of the high prices. Until he saw the pastry section, until he sampled that chocolate. Oh my. Just about the time we were ready to cave and buy a whole cake that would send him into the migraine inferno, our friends Octavio and Angelica texted us to say they had a table reserved for us on the patio. Rescued!

Octavio was one of my writing students seven or eight years ago, and now he's a professor who does stuff like teach a summer session at Oxford and spend fall and spring teaching in Fort Worth. He and Angelica introduced us to "Nacho Libre" and "A Day Without a Mexican." That should put things into perspective. Anyway, they've also gone with us to Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and translated for us at a pastors conference.

Tonight we met their 18-month-old and sat out sipping on lemonade and trying to talk above the band, which was quite good, while the aroma of burgers and lemon-chicken crackling on the grill swirled around us. We munched on chips and hot sauce until our orders were ready, and then we dug in. A few hours later, we went back to their place for a bit before heading home...

...where I finished reading The Grapes of Wrath. I wanted to analyze Steinbeck's writing as I went, but I kept forgetting I was reading. Instead, I lost myself in the joy of reading a great story. If you want something of a modern-day context for the events in the Book of Ruth, this one's your pick. Maybe the best treatise on community I've ever read.

Punishment and Wrath

This morning I finished reading Crime and Punishment. Next on the list: The Grapes of Wrath. The books appear in no particular order other than that I decided to read first the copies I already own. I plan to read the stuff sitting on my shelves before I head for the library and the half-price book store.

If I had done one thing differently I would have kept a list of characters for Crime and Punishment. Dostoevski's characters have three names, and sometimes the author refers to them by the last name, sometimes the first, and sometimes the first and middle. Very easy to lose track of who's who! Still, what a story!

My Ignorance is Showing

So I'm 150 pages into Crime and Punishment, and I land on the word "dormouse." I always thought it was "door mouse," though whose door I thought the rodent lived in or under, I'm not sure.

So I look up the word. And I learn that the little creature is thought to be dormant in winter, entering a semi-hibernation, so it probably got its one-word name from people hearing "dormant mouse" and thinking it to be a species of mouse rather than a modifier + "mouse."

Dormouse. One word. Not to be confused with the two-word church mouse--as in "poor as a."

Small Town City

Tonight our friends the Mathewses invited us to join them for Music in the Park. That's where the Mesquite Symphonic Band--comprised of folks from high-school age through retirees--perform outside, and we hear music ranging from the National Anthem to The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, Your Cheatin' Heart, and a medley from South Pacific.

You borrow your neighbor's bug spray. And you stretch out your blankets and lawn chairs. The lady next to you says she's been coming to these for 17 years. And they have drawings for prizes like a sandwich from Shorty's BBQ in nearby Sunnyvale (that's what my hubby won). The music sounds good, though the conductor admits at one point that he has muffed up, so the band has to start again. A little girl holds out her dress with her fingers (pinkies out) so she can dance her heart out. And you forget you're 30 minutes from the heart of the 9th largest city in America.

As we're sitting there just one week shy of our 30-year anniversary, my husband says he used to go to band camp (he played sax) every summer in August, and it was the highlight of the band year. He talks about how the members all loved staying in the huge mansion/hotel and sitting in the shade all day playing music. I had no idea.

Just another day in paradise.

Artsy Weekend

Friday night our family went with my sis's family to celebrate the end of school by seeing the 3-D version of "Up." If you go, take Kleenex. Loved it.

My daughter and I heard Tchaichovski and saw Joyce Yang, Van Cliburn silver medalist, playing Rachmaninoff at the Dallas Symphony last night. Amazing performance. I got free tickets thanks to an incentive the DSO was doing to get folks on their mailing list.

Did I mention that the Tchaichovski performance was of favorite selections from Swan Lake? The concert notes said when Tchaichovski originally composed Swan Lake, an average choreographer left dancers concluding the music was "undanceable." Only when a great choreographer came along and saw the brilliance in the composition did the work become the classic it is. Sort of a variation on the old saying: The play was brilliant, the audience a failure.

I also finished reading The Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald was a genius in his use of time and flashback. The "rules for writers" say to avoid jumping all over the place in terms of chronology because it totally confuses the reader. Yet F. Scott pulled it off.

On to Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment...

(For those just joining us, I'm gearing up for examinations in my PhD program, and I have to read a ton of lit, so some of of my readers asked me to chronicle that process.)

The Future of Christian Mag Publishing

Newsweek ran a really good article yesterday on the trends and future of Christian magazine publishing. What I read encouraged me, though many magazines are folding. I'm curious to know others' thoughts about it. Here's the link.

The Reading List

I finally finished Middlemarch, one of the many books on my long reading list. At about 950 pages, I think I started with the hard stuff. I certainly hope so.

Then yesterday I had to stop plodding through the PhD reading list to take a day to read The Blue Parakeet, a popular-market non-fiction book that explores how we read the Bible. The syllabus for the class I teach in the fall is due today, and I was thinking of changing out an academic book on hermeneutics for this more-accessible one. Which I ended up choosing to do. Syllabus done, now back to reading (after I hit the gym).

Next on the list: The Great Gatsby. It's looking like a breeze at less than 300 pages!

Sacred Sexuality Conference

This October Dallas Seminary's Center for Christian Leadership is offering a one-day conference that will challenge leaders to create a church culture where sexualty is theologically grounded, embraced, and discussed as God designed it to be.
Who should attend: Church staff members, parents, lay leaders.
Keynote speakers: Dr. Gary Barnes and Dr. Doug Rosenau
Workshops: include prevention and healing of marital affairs; infertility in the Christian community (I'm teaching that one); God's heart for singles; walking with the wounded; beyond the birds and the bees; and holy eroticism--marital intimacy
The date: Monday, October 9, 2009
The time: 9 AM - 3 PM.
The cost: $85
For more information, go here.

Wordless Wednesday

Artemis, Part II

Today I posted on the Tapestry blog the second part of my conclusions relating to Artemis study conducted all last semester at UTD. You can read my entry here.

India Meets Heartland

For all you fans of Dr. Reg Grant, head of DTS's media arts program, here's a link to a movie trailer for the film he's shooting in India right now.