Everything is changing. We are living through a period of unparalleled technological and cultural transformation. A large percentage of this seismic change comes from making the transition into worldwide electronic interconnection. It seems increasingly right to see the era through which we are now passing as the end of the Gutenberg age and the beginning of the digital age. More and more, we conduct business, get information, look up answers to puzzling questions, and even find intimate partners through electronic means.
I heard several people say in online chatter before a meeting that the autumn of 2020 was the most beautiful that they had ever remembered. Several people commented about the colors of the leaves, the extended warm weather, and the beauty of the October light. I could hardly disagree with them; I did wonder, though, if it had, in fact, been an extraordinarily dazzling fall or whether they had just taken time to notice it due to the constraining circumstances of semi-lockdown during the pandemic. I suspect that it was the latter. Though most of us experienced many kinds of loss and grief during the long ordeal, it also had the odd effect of helping us to slow down and pay attention to small and ordinary beauty all around. Almost like van Gogh's paintings of grass, undergrowth, or a vaseful of flowers, the ordeal through which the world has passed since early 2020 provided occasion to look, listen, and reflect on small, ordinary things. Despite all the losses and the waiting, I now have an appreciation for foxes, foliage, and all manner of flittering things in my neighborhood. I suspect that many around the globe have had a similar awakening to small beauties that in "normal" times would have been ignored or passed by on the way to something deemed to be much more important. As Alexandra Horowitz writes in her fascinating book about learning to attend to the complexity and beauty of her neighborhood in New York City, On Looking: A Walker's Guide to the Art of Observation, "Sometimes we see least the things we see most." 1 Somehow, noticing small, beautiful things afforded moments of respite and poignancy for millions of us in recent months. These moments of attending to taken-for-granted realities did not solve our problems or obliterate our suffering, but they did make such hardships more bearable.
This paper elucidates the connections in Gregory of Nyssa's thought between the rite of baptism, the doctrine of God as Trinity, and practices of ecclesial pedagogy. These components formed a dynamic and differentiated whole for Gregory. To consider one element in isolation from the others runs the risk of interpretive distortion of Gregory's work. This means that the current tendency to harvest Gregory's trinitarian ideas abstracted or disembodied from the rite of baptism and practices of ecclesial pedagogy perpetuates the false notion that the doctrine of the Trinity can be adequately treated apart from liturgical and pedagogical concerns.
Princeton Theological Seminary has an ambiguous legacy around issues of slavery and race. From its founding in 1812 through at least the period of Reconstruction, the seminary's faculty espoused African colonization as the only viable response to the problems caused by slavery in the United States. In their enthusiastic support for the colonization effort, the seminary's faculty manifested a profound failure of theological imagination in that their efforts along these lines were premised upon an inability to conceive of a society in which Black and White could live together as equals before God. This article signals the beginning of an effort by current faculty to research the history of the seminary's ambiguous legacy around matters or slavery and race with an eye toward developing a constructive way forward in the present and for the future.A few years ago, Rick Osmer and I wrote a book on the history of practical theology at Princeton Seminary, published in 2011 as With Piety and Learning:
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