Today I received my first set of tattoos.1 It took me many years to come up with something that I felt was meaningful enough to make a permanent part of my external appearance. Ultimately, I was able to develop a short poem in Koine Greek that hit the mark for me. What follows is a sort of theological meditation on the text and the meaning of these tattoos. The text in Greek:2 ...
In recent months, “race relations” has been in the news a lot here in America due to “racially-motivated violence”. We’ve seen videos of innocent black citizens gunned down by the police that is supposed to protect them. We’ve seen a community devastated by a terrorist attack that can only be described as pure, premeditated evil. We’ve seen numerous examples of peaceful protests turning ugly, with attendees being beaten, mocked, and abused by government representatives. As these events unfolded, I have for the most part been a spectator. What else could I be? To be sure, I’ve retweeted the requisite amount of condemnation, and penned my own 140-character expressions of grief, but this is a mere echo of a thought, too frail to stand even in aggregate against a tidal wave of injustice. And so for the most part I have remained silent, trying simply to fathom the extent of the twistedness we find ourselves in, and failing, or being distracted, even in that small effort. ...
In the year and four months since I last bothered to post anything here, a lot has happened. Chief among these events was my proposing to and actually marrying my now-wife, Jessica! I also began a graduate program in linguistics at Oxford, and am in the second year of that program, finding great enjoyment in it as well as in exploring Oxford with Jessica. The hectic pace of life in the last year and a half did not keep me from having ponderings worth blogging about, but it did keep me from actually blogging about them. Also, I noticed that the ability to post snappy one-liners as Facebook status updates, or to share a link with only a brief description, tended to siphon away any drive to construct actual extended discussions here (a phenomenon which I’m sure is quite widespread). ...