Festival of Faith & Writing: Sat- kdc

Couldn't connect to the internet last night so couldn't upload my pix. Hopefully tonight.

Snippets from the last 2 days (& if there are typos, forgive my tired mind):

* Friday, Songwriter/author Michael Card ended his session on Christ & Creativity (perhaps based on his Scribbling in the Sand) w/a new song I can't get out of my head. It ended with "worship him with your wounds for he's wounded, too." Beautiful & haunting.

* Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz) is the great, hot speaker of this generation. He's quite funny & fresh, but seemed to repeat himself a fair amount between his 2 sessions (one dealing w/memoir & the other w/contemporary apologetics). I finally broke down & bought Jazz (I have this aversion to buying "hot" titles once I'm behind the curve on them. If I'm ahead of the curve, then, of course, I'll brag to everyone about how I just knew this book was special), so I'll compare from there.

* Got to go pull myself across campus to hear Walter Wagnerian close down the festival, but a couple of stats that I found interesting. The Salman Rushdie keynote was, by far, the largest attended, w/townsfolk showing up & stray students. They opened a new section of the bleachers & the back section was full as well. (More on the key note later.) Today's Marilynne Robinson was larger than the previous, but not larger than Rushdies.

HOWever, yesterday's hour-long interview w/Robinson was packed out. Today's interview w/Rushdie was not. I'm not sure what that means, but I found it intesting.

* The College cafeteria meal reminded me why I don't miss my old college days. (The box lunches have been delicious, though.)

* WORK THE SYSTEM: Rushdie said he would only sign one item per person. Not this time buddy! I lugged around 2 HC first edition The Satanic Verses + 2 speeches he'd had printed by Granta in 1990 all day & I would not be denied. So I had him sign one, then went to the back of the line, & had him sign the speeches (he seemed pleasantly surprised to see them, thank you very much), then talked a student to walk my last Satanic Verse through, since there was almost no line behind me.

* College Kids Today Aren't So Desperate, Mom & Dads! To expedite my Rushdie line-time, I tried to bribe the Calvin College "blueshirts" (their volunteers) into walking items in for me, but they refused. I got up to 75 cents and still they turned me down. Me in college? I would've caved at 50 cents easy! They're all spoiled rotten, I say!

* MORE RUSHDIE: One young coed drove 11 hours from Cincinnati to hear Rushdie speak and sign all 9ish of his books in her collection. She politely waited to be the final person in line, waving people in front of her.

* IS THIS INTERESTING TO YOU? I listened to thriller writer Ted Dekker discuss his intent (he thinks "Christian novel" is a misnomer that must be erased because "All truth is God's truth" & as long as he writes stories of good and evil, that truth is more important than if his books are overtly Christian or not. He said his first 6 or so were overtly Christian but the most recent 6 (or so) aren't & he has no intention of changing that.

Anyway, that's not what I find especially interesting. The lecture was in the Seminary Auditorium & as I exited I noticed a bulletin board w/pix & bios of 32 or so seminary students who'd been chosen for churches. One of the bio items was married status & spouse name. Of the 28 married seminarians, 2 women had taken their husband's last name, 2 seminarian couples (4 people) had merged/hyphenated their names, & of the other 22 (or so - I only counted once) all 22 female spouses had kept their maiden names. Don't know if this is typical of seminary/grad programs, but I still found the overwhelming landslide of wives declining their husband's name in matrimony interesting.

More tonight (assuming a connection).

Questions, comments, concerns? Please feel free to E-mail me!