superb surprises

This past summer, I spent two wonderful weeks directing a Calvin Seminars in Christian Scholarship seminar. We gathered 17 incredible writers from a variety of disciplines including publishing, academia, and the pastorate. Our seminar was titled "Writing as Christian Proclamation in Contemporary Contexts: The Truth's Superb Surprise." We spent our time together reading excellent books and discussing the Christian writing "scene," trying to figure out how to speak the big truths in rich, relevant ways.

The entire affair spoiled me as a teacher. When else in my teaching life will I show up with one or two little questions to launch the discussion, which will then take off and go on for three hours while I just relax and enjoy?? We reached some intriguing insights, I think, many of which are available in our daily summaries, posted here and here.

We came away from our time together having launched a little service project called "Write on the Money." This project has encountered some unexpected and humorous drama over the last two weeks. We are thinking perhaps the project should be called "Write on the Money We Thought We Had." The whole story is now emerging on our group blog.