Back from a great conference in Kentucky, the Society of Vineyard Scholars. It was the culmination of a marathon of work, so I have not been able to blog much at all. Later today I will negotiate a new teaching contract, so things are not settling down for me either. We tend to take off on the weekends in the Summer which is great, but I usually try to disconnect from my work and blogging. I’m sure I’ll be back at this a bit more intently in the fall.

Caleb Maskell speaking at SVS

I will be posting my paper from the conference for your reading pleasure. It went over really well. My big challenge is that I am still neck deep in lecture preparation for next semester at Saint Paul and taking on new courses will only make that worse. Plus I’m doing a lot of reading to write a chapter for a book project I am part of, trying to squeeze in an hour or so of reading here and there. I have most of it on my kindle so I am dragging that around quite a bit these days. And finally I’m setting up a closed forum for Vineyard pastors wanting to talk about pastoral realities of inclusion, inter-religious work, ecumenism, and more. This is to support a network of people tired of debating whether or not we should be doing these things and sharing real experiences, good and bad, with just doing them. I think this will be helpful and I’ll let you know how the project progresses.

I also have a few home projects I’d like to talk about here. Cladding my basement stairs with maple, raising a set of stairs at the cottage, and finally finishing the until I built into my front entrance. At this rate the cottage will get done first – I need to source some metal post caps yet, but it is a quick job and good for a weekend up there. Plus my brother is coming up and I think we could do this together.

The image is from the opening panel on the intersection of Christianity and Culture. It was really quite good. SVS is my favourite academic conference.