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Dan Joslyn-Siemiatkoski

Put Out Into the Deep Water

In chapel recently, I had the opportunity to preach on Luke 5:1-11. This is the story of Jesus commanding Peter to let down his nets after a fruitless night of fishing on the Sea of Gennesaret. After hauling in a miraculous catch of fish, Peter recognizes who Jesus truly is and leaves his boat […]

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Going Where Jesus Has Gone

In the accounts of the Resurrection, I have always resonated with these words from the angel at the empty tomb in the Gospel of Matthew: “He is gone ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him” (Matt. 28:7). These words arrest me because of the sense that Jesus is always going ahead, drawing us forward to the next part of God’s will for us.

Along the road to GalileeI have travelled the road from Jerusalem to Galilee. It is not an easy journey. You travel down from Jerusalem to the edge of the Dead Sea. Then you turn and travel along the Jordan River. It is a dry place, arid and dusty. The Jordan is not broad and deep.  It is narrow and muddy.  Surely there are good places to stop and rest, but to move from Jerusalem to Galilee takes a certain resolve.

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Telling Stories

During the first week of January, I participated in the annual Interfaith Seminary Retreat sponsored by the Multicultural Alliance of Texas. This event brings together students from Christian seminaries in Texas with Jewish and Muslim seminarians from Los Angeles and Baltimore for the purpose of deeper learning and awareness of one another’s traditions. The focus of this retreat was the role of story telling. Stories were used not just to explain the various traditions represented but as a way of engaging one another in small groups and individually. The act of telling stories is a powerful way of humanizing those who might seem different from us. It allows us both to see what is distinctive about each of our journeys but also what are the commonalities that bind us together.

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Things You Think While Traversing Austin On Foot

It has been a pleasure to read all the various blog posts welcoming me to Southwest and offering advice on how to deal with the summer heat. As a former doctoral student noted, it really is a very warm and hospitable welcome that I think speaks well of Southwest’s core values.

Given that at the moment we are currently a one-car family, I have been taking the bus to work from where we live in Brentwood. No matter which route I take, I generally have to walk just under a mile either on the way to the school or back home. This has given me a lot of time to walk in the Texas heat. And as it happens when one walks, the mind tends to wander. Here I offer a Top Ten list of random thoughts about transitioning from cool, foggy summers of Berkeley to the blast furnace that is Austin.

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Beating the Heat while staying Immobile (Jesus Prayer Optional)

Our Dean has said: “The Jesus Prayer may be said while immobile.”

Anyone who has studied the Prayer Book knows the difference between a permissive rubric and a strict rubric. The Jesus Prayer may – or may not – be said while immobile. The important thing in the summer in Austin is to remain immobile some of the time. The Jesus Prayer is optional. Other things you could do while immobile: someone could bring you a Shiner in a CamelBak, so you could suck your favorite cold beverage through a straw, without moving. Icees work, too. Just lie there and let someone bring it to you. Mmmmm.

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Going Underground to Beat the Heat

Luckily for everyone, the prone position has fallen out of fashion in liturgical observance save for a few rare moments on Good Friday. Whew! But I think perhaps “reading the epistles in a prone position” is the Dean’s way of recommending an afternoon siesta. The siesta is a fantastic way to avoid the sweltering heat of the afternoon – unless you have a three hour post-lunch elective. Then it is sweet torture to fight against the drooping eyelids as you daydream about that quiet and cool basement corner of Booher library.

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How to Stay Cool in Austin? Surprising Findings in Latest Research

The world’s top scientists maintain that 89% of the human body is composed of water.1   What comprises the remaining 11%? While academics in the rest of the world still heatedly debate the answer, researchers at one of Texas’ top universities have irrefutably concluded that, for the subspecies of Texans known as “Austinites,” the primary ingredient in that elusive 11% is simple: it’s Shiner beer.

Sven von Ulrichson, a lead researcher in anthro-alchemical science here in Texas, writes in a recently published paper on the topic, “In my home country of Sweden, people have adapted culturally to deal with the cold. But in Austin, it appears that people have adapted biologically. It is not that Austinites are immune to heat, or that they sweat more efficiently than other Texans. Rather, the high frequency of Shiner beer occurrence allows Austinites not to care about the heat as much.”

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Repurposing Parked Cars in Summer to Stay Cool

In a concerted effort to prepare our new Church History professor for the rigors of summer in Austin our esteemed leader Dean and President Kittredge inaugurated this effort by providing a list of suggestions to keep cool in the summer. As our new professor moves from the moderate climes of the San Francisco Bay area and into the rattlesnake, cactus infested environs of Austin where air conditioning is a basic human right, we thought we would all pitch in with advice that helps us get through the heat of summer (May to October).

In particular, Dr. Kittredge offered this advice about cars: Never leave anything in your parked car: sunglasses, laptops, cell phones, boxes of chocolate, pets. Between May and October, no sleeping in your car.

This is all true. A metal box does not protect you from the heat, regardless of its color. However, what she failed to mention are the benefits of your outdoor oven, or as you may call it, your car.

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Keeping It Cool with Alternatives

I once heard a former dean of this Seminary describe Austin’s local catchphrase “Keep Austin Weird” as “America’s Least Necessary Municipal Slogan.” The truth is Austin is the kind of place that prides itself on its local color and local culture. It’s easy to find, but also easy to forget in all the hustle and bustle of modern life.

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Relearning the Art of Noth-ing

As I remember it, when I was growing up in Buffalo NY every summer had at least a few days when the temperature soared to the high 80s or more, a real heat wave, the dog days of summer. In those pre-Cambrian days when no one, at least not in my neighborhood, had air conditioning and life ground to a halt, motherly urges to go outside and play fell on highly resistant ears, or we went, slowly, with the journey halted on the front porch where we sat and watched the world go by.

Living next to a city park meant plenty of pick-up baseball games, and games of tag or "Mother May I" or walks to the nearby swimming pool, but we would have none of that, let alone pull out the roller skates. Even jacks seemed too demanding.

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Staying Cool in Austin: Advice for a New Professor

I love the quote, misattributed to Mark Twain, that “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” My husband, Frank, and I often say that when we grow so tired of each other that we risk running out of topics of conversation, we will always have two: the weather and real estate. The five months of Austin’s relentless heat provides a perennial subject for discussion between us. So I was delighted to be invited to offer advice to our new professor of Church History about how to stay cool in Austin. [Real estate will have to wait for another blog post.]

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