So far my blogging has been rather bleak. To balance that, here are two (completely unrelated) good things that I have encountered in the last 24 hours:
1) Today is Daffodil Day, so there are bright yellow clumps of daffodils (and daffodil-related paraphernalia) being sold all over the place. As I walked in the university gates this morning, there was a girl in front of me carrying a bunch of daffodils. She was being followed, at about head height, by an absolutely enormous bumble bee! It was just buzzing along cheerfully, presumably following the scent (sight? what kind of senses do bees have?) of the daffodils. Wonderful!
2) I have been reading Walter Brueggemann on the Psalms, in preparation for talks that I am giving in Brisbane next weekend. He has very good things to say. Here's one of them:
'I think that serious religious use of the lament psalms has been minimal because we have believed that faith does not mean to acknowledge and embrace negativity. We have thought that acknowledgement of negativity was somehow an act of unfaith, as though the very speech about it conceded too much about God's 'loss of control'.'
(Brueggemann, The Message of the Psalms (Augsburg: Minneapolis, 1984), 52)
Which is also wonderful, and leads me to sneak in a third good thing - yesterday I got the program for the conference I am presenting at in the States in November (the American Academy of Religion Annual Meeting, www.aarweb.org ). Walter Brueggemann (and Mark Noll, Miroslav Volf and Stanley Hauerwas) will also be speaking! I'm feeling much more enthusiastic about the conference as a result.
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