Oscar

Here's remembering my great uncle Oscar Scudder (my Grandfather Herbert's brother), who was killed on this date 94 years ago on the western front in the waning days of World War I.  Thanks to my cousin Patrick Myers for sending it along.

Oscar Scudder

Quiet Prayer

Here's a nice shot from inside the Suleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul.  It is a very beautiful mosque, which dates back to the reign of Suleyman the Magnificent (so it is not nearly as old as the Hagia Sophia).  What I like about it is the shot of the one peson who came in to pray in the middle of the day.  We tend to think of mosques as very busy places with hundreds if not thousands of worshippers praying at once in a very ritualized fashion, but here's the other side of the story. 

While I really should not have snapped his picture, I wanted to capture a bit of the serenity of the moment and share it with an audience which all too often has a very different view of Islam.

Fujairah

Since I made it back to Burlington everything has been a blur, which has been fantastic, but it also means that I am way behind on my blogging.  I can't remember the last time I only posted once in a month, and we're getting awfully close to the end of this month so I need to get busy.  So, let me just quickly post a few quick thoughts, and maybe that will inspire me to write more over the weekend (and maybe I will find my missing camera so that I can download my pictures from the UK).  Here is one of my favorite pictures from the year, from one of my favorite days.  Laura, who is a very experienced scuba diver with over a hundred dives (but no shark sightings, oddly), took it upon herself to introduce me to the sport on a trip to Fujairah on the east coast of the Emirates.  I'll have a lot more to say about it later, including some pictures which somehow survived the loss of yet another camera.  You can tell what a good time I had - and I think she is just relieved that I actually survived.

She did discover something even scarier than sharks.

If Anyone Asks, I'm Lutheran

Well, I am actually almost Lutheran, sort of.  Growing up out in the Hoosier hinterlands of southern Indiana the closest church was St. John's Lutheran Church.  Pastor Jackson was a really great guy and smiled obligingly when we played endless baseball games behind the church, and didn't even get mad when we used a lawn mower to carve out three golf holes on church property while he was on vacation.  On the first hole you teed off under the willow tree and played parallel to the road; on the second hold you hit over the graveyard; and the third hole was a real short par three with a precipitous drop-off after the green into a cow pasture.  To make up for my sins I actually attended Bible study for a while as preparation for being baptized, but I was reading a couple Erich von Daniken books at the time and spent the whole time "analyzing" text for proof of aliens so the decision was made that maybe I wasn't quite ready for conversion.  However, we parted on the best of terms.

So what does this relate to today?  My excellent friend Andy, who works in the library here at Champlain, and his even more excellent girlfriend Heidi, who works in the library at Norwich University, are getting married this summer and asked me to precide over the ceremony.  Yes, I don't believe it either, but it makes me so incredibly proud and happy.  I love them both and I was just happy being invited to the ceremony to share the day with them, let alone anything else.  Of course, there is the small problem of the fact that I need to get ordained.  However, our excellent friends Kerry and Steve were both ordained online and have married several of their friends, so we'll sort this out somehow.  And bringing it all back around - I asked Heidi if there was some particular online church where I should go for ordination.  Her response, "It doesn't matter to me, but if my grandma asks you're Lutheran."  Doubtless there, will be much more on this adventure in the coming months.

Me: "Heidi, how in the hell did you let Andy talk you into this?"  Heidi: "It was my idea."  Me: [too choked up to respond]

Culture Wars

First off, let me apologize for the girly picture.  Bear with me, there is a point to this (beyond my own infamously prurient nature, of course).  This is a picture of an ad featured in a magazine I found while killing time at a Mugg & Bean coffeeshop in the Mushrif Mall in Abu Dhabi.  Granted, it is amusing/offensive on several levels, not the least of which is the always successful appeal to male fears of waning virility.  However, what I find most interesting are the black lines which attempt, clumsily, to cover up the more "offensive" parts of the woman.  As you might guess, those are lines from a black marker which some Emirati official used in an ineffectual attempt at censorship.  My grandfather Herbert, the Hoosier philosopher, to allay my fears, would tell me that when I saw a snake I should remember that the snake is actually far more afraid of me than I am of it.  The same can also be said for our relationship with the Islamic world.  Despite our well-documented fear of this part of the world, mainly whipped up by the increasingly hysterical right wing, the truth is that Muslims are far more afraid of the U.S., and not because of our military might.  Rather, they are afraid, rightly so, of the cultural might of America and the concomitant worldview.  The point is not whether or not that worldview is better or worse than the prevailing worldview (as with most things it is a little bit of both), but that it inspires some very tangible fear, which might manifest itself as anti-U.S. riots in the street or something as seemingly harmless as black marks in magazines.  The reality is that very few Americans actually have any contact, even tangentially, with any aspect of the Islamic world, whereas America touches the lives of every Muslim.

If you are reduced to using a black marker to color out the naughty bits of women in magazines you are taking a serious pounding in the culture wars.

Exorcising Demons

I am back safe and sound in Vermont after my year in the UAE - and a glorious five day visit to the UK (more on that later).  In addition to buying a car and organizing an apartment and getting caught up on a year of mail, I'm also preparing for classes to start next week.  For the first time in fifteen years I will not be serving as an administrator, and will be returning full-time to the classroom.  Teaching is my first love and being able to devote all of my attention to my students without balancing the endless demands of running an international program (as much as I believe in the Global Modules vision and am proud of what we accomplished) just feels like a gift.  I'll also be devoting serious time to some long-delayed writing projects, including the epics book which was supposed to be the topic of my sabbatical before the unexpected Zayed offer.  So, I'm excited to launch this chapter of my life, even though I can also see it lasting only a year. I'm at the point in my life when what matters most to me is being happy and contented, and I can easily see how the pursuit of that quest could lead me pretty far afield.  Yes, Dorothy, there may be no place like home, but who can say where home is?

Here I am on the famous/infamous Exorcist stairs in Washinton, DC, as part of last year's Trip of Excellence.  What better place to exorcise personal and professional demons?

Doors of Sana'a

Guess I've been thinking a lot about Yemen, and also about closing old doors and opening new ones.