Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Where Have I been? Where is Geoff going?

O' man. Where have I been? It has been over a month since I last posted. Where has the time gone. Easter pretty much took a bunch of my time, and then I was in Philly last week for the Emergent Theological Conversation with Caputo and Kearney (which was great!). I was also organizing the pre-conference readings for churchandpomo.org, which I think turned out pretty good. I posted on the conference here.

But where am I going?
1) Well here is the very exciting new. First off I was accepted to the Summer Seminary series on Liturgical Identities: Global, Nation, Ecclesial at Calvin College with Steven Long and Michael Budde.

2) But even more excitingly, I was accepted to the doctoral program in Theology at Marquette University in Milwaukee. This is huge blessing from God and opportunity for me. I have been in a process of discernment for a couple of years about whether or not I should pursue a Ph.d, and the doors always seemed ambiguously open and closed, not clearly shut or open. But then during Lent, appropriately, it really felt that the door was closing. Steve Long, who I really want to study with, took a job away from Garret (one of two schools I applied to), and then I got rejected from Garrett (ouch! I thought for sure I would get it). But then I got accepted to Marquette without funding (hello, who wants to pay $50,000 to go back to school). So that was like as bad as getting rejected too. But then, on Palm Sunday I got a call from the director of graduate studies telling me that some funding had become available. This guy then proceeded to offer me a full ride + TA (teaching assistant) living stipend. And on top of that, Steve Long took a job at Marquette and will most likely be my advisor.

So what does that means? Well I'm going to continue on pastoring at Life on the Vine, but I will be able to quite my part-time job at Starbucks. Hopefully my blogging won't suffer too much, but you all will probably get a bunch of my reading notes.

anyway, that's all for now.