Ignatius of Loyola 16: Iñigo to Ignatius

Somewhere in the back of my mind I had always assumed that Iñigo was a form of Ignatius...like Peggy for Margaret or Sean for John. It's apparently not. Ignatius was baptized Iñigo, the Spanish form of Enecko, after an 11th century Basque saint.

Bordering on interrogation

One of my colleagues at the workshop noted that there are often many layers to a question. Why am I here? How did I get here? Do you start with the big bang, your grandparents, the bike you rode to work? We joke in my family that if you ask my brother Geek Guru what time it is, he'll tell you how the watch works. Part of figuring out the answer is figuring out where the questioner intends you start.

On my way back from Canada this morning I was briefly detained at the border so they could search my car. There was a piece of paper in the trunk that seemed to puzzle the agent at the crossing, I could see him pull it out and page through it, page through it again, go back inside and check something on the computer. Since I don't recall ever opening the trunk of my rental car, just tossing my bag into the capacious back seat, I have no idea what it was (and forgot to look when I got to the airport this morning!). [Memo to self, be sure to check the trunk of a rental car before you take it across a border - there could have been a body in there and would have had no clue.] I was directed to pull over, hand over my documents and wait inside while another agent searched the car.

A second border agent appears, bullet proof vest on, bristling with weaponry, brandishing an unwelcoming expression, "Is everything in the car yours?" I hesitated. Yes, to the best of my knowledge, but no way did I search the rental car as thoroughly as he was about to, and I had driven others around, so I really don't know what might be tucked under the seats, and was utterly clueless about what was in the trunk. I really didn't want to say an unequivocal "yes" but knew equivocating wasn't a good idea: "Yes."

"How did you get to Selkirk College?" "I took a plane from Philadelphia to Spokane, rented a car and drove up here," I responded. He looked at me like I was giving him attitude, sighed and said, "No, why did you come there from so far away?" Oh. I told him I knew a colleague there, another chemist, and that she had invited me. There were a few more questions about that, and he went out to search the car. They found nothing and returned all my documents and my vehicle and off I went.

The border agent and I are both nominally native speakers of the same language, and yet I did not understand his question, and so he did not understand my answer to be a serious one. How much more difficult would this be if we did not share a language? How quickly would he lose patience, and what would the consequences of that be?  Particularly interesting questions on a weekend where the assigned readings speak of responsibility to our neighbors.

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Photo is from Wikimedia.

Making virtual music

The Boy is one of these voices and one of these faces, though I've yet to catch sight of him.  It is a thing of beauty to watch and hear.  Almost six thousand singers (you can read all their names here) from all over the world, under the direction of Eric Whitacre.

Contemplating Science

I'm at Selkirk College in Castelgar, British Columbia this week, presenting at a conference on contemplative approaches to teaching. The twenty participants cover a broad swath of disciplines from nursing to social work to English to economics — to chemistry. Led by an anthropologist and a writer, we walked this morning to view the river, in full flood surging just below the Mir Center where we are meeting, and in a sun-warmed and still oxbow. It was an eminently practical and graced lead-in to a discussion on ways to help students pay attention to what they are seeing when they do field work (where that is construed very broadly). I did a short demonstration in the lab, looking at specimens of various sorts with the single instruction, spend 5 minutes writing down what you notice.

If you define contemplation as a long loving look at the real, it's hard not to see science as a contemplative endeavor, particularly this sort of data gathering. If you want to hear a bit more about how I see the connections between contemplation, Ignatian spirituality, and science you can listen to me be interviewed by John O'Keefe and Wendy Wright of Creighton University's Center for Catholic Thought on their Catholic Comments podcast here. (The Catholic Comments podcast has some terrific episodes, like this one on Thomas Aquinas in Context by Frederick Bauerschmidt or this one on Denise Levertov's poetry.)

Summer reading

I am a "summer reading list" rebel.  Back in the day, when summer reading lists came home I would sigh (whine?) loudly, tell my boys that they did not need to pick off the list and that I would write a note to their teachers saying that I had philosophical issues with such reading lists (and you can imagine their reactions to that).  I understand the upside to summer reading lists, to keep reading skills up over the summer, to give parents and students a sense of scope and appropriate reading level.

But I think there is a downside that goes unacknowledged.  There are things to be learned by picking out your own books that contribute to the development of life long readers.  Among them how to find books you might like, how to figure out what makes for a "good" book, besides the fact that your teacher thinks it's a good book.¹  

I'm lucky, my sons are voracious and happy readers, but I wonder if even less happy readers might benefit from a bit less structure in the summer reading.  (Though like most things, this, too, has a flip side.  Ask a son to stop reading and do a chore can elicit a sigh, and chiding "Most parents encourage their children to read."

Photo is my stack of entirely self-selected summer reading!

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1.  Case in point, last year, The Boy was assigned to read The Great Gatsby for English, and then to say why it was a classic piece of literature.  The catch?  He didn't think it rose to that level.  (He's not alone, we looked in the literature to find several English professors who had written scholarly articles agreeing with The Boy.)