Month: January 2010

For those of you who are interested in knowing a bit more about what I spend my time doing, you can find the website for the course I will be teaching this semester here. It’s a course in the philosophy of religion in which I and my students will discuss arguments for and against the existence of God, questions about whether religious beliefs require evidence, and some general issues regarding religion in the public realm. If you are interested in reading some of the things my students will be reading, send me an email via the address in the Contact Information page on the site and I will make it available to you.

I had a memorable movie experience over the weekend. Though I watched the movie together with Pam, I don’t know if the movie was as memorable for her as it was for me. It was a foreign language film and I could understand the language better than she could. What language was it in? Low German, of course! The movie was Stellet Licht (Silent Light in English). It is set in a community of Mexican Mennonites and is about a man who has an affair and then must deal with the effects the affair on his relationships with his wife and children. Because the Low German dialect was a little different than the one I grew up around, I wasn’t able to catch all of the dialogue. However, I didn’t have to rely on the subtitles completely and I was even able to pick out some places where the subtitles slightly misrepresented what was actually said. The pace of the movie was a bit on the slow side, but it managed to hold my attention. It provided a fascinating view of life in a Mexican Mennonite community.

One of the most memorable scenes in the movie occurs after one of the main characters dies. While some family members prepare the body for final viewing and burial, others, all dressed in black, sit in a large circle around the perimeter of an adjacent room. Most of the time is spent in silence, but sometimes they sing. After the body has been prepared, people are permitted to go and say their last goodbyes. Although I’ve never been part of such a funeral event, I’m sure the scene would be a familiar one to my grandparents.

There were other memorable scenes in the movie, though they weren’t memorable for the same reasons. One, in particular, involved the main character and the woman with which he was having an affair. (Only readers who are familiar with conservative Mennonites will know why this scene was so memorable.) Imagine a woman in a floral-print dress and black kerchief and a man in jeans and sweat-matted hair standing in the middle of a field of long grass. Now imagine them in a passionate kiss that seems to go on for hours.

Although we were eventually sleeping in our own beds Monday night, getting there was a bit of an ordeal. We knew that there were going to be several hurdles during our trip back: our connection in the Twin Cities was going to be a tight one; we were going to have to do some paperwork at US Customs–Pam isn’t going back to work immediately, so we had to put her back on my visa as a dependent–and we were going to have to deal with heightened security measures–since the attempted bombing over Christmas, there have been additional restrictions on what passengers on flights into the US originating in Canada have been able to carry on to the airplane with them. We did our homework beforehand. We went to various websites to see what the new policies were. We even called Delta Airlines to make sure that we packed appropriately. Then we made sure to give ourselves plenty of time at the airport.

The stop over at US Customs went smoothly. Then we pushed our luggage over to the security checkpoint and discovered that the person we spoke to on the phone at Delta wasn’t on the same wavelength as the security personnel at the airport. After patting all of us down–even L had to “spread em”–they gave us grief about each of the bags we wanted to take on the plane with us. First, they took issue with the backpack in which L’s toys and books for the plane ride and K’s diapers and such were in. Then they took issue with our camera bag. Finally, they took issue with the bag I use to carry around my laptop, work documents, and reading material. We eventually talked them into letting us take the diaper bag with the toys and books and the camera bag with the portable DVD player, but they wouldn’t let me take the bag I use to carry around my laptop. They said it wasn’t a “laptop bag”, which, according to them, was a bag that only contained a laptop. Delta’s website said that I could take a “briefcase” and the person I spoke to said that each passenger with a seat could take a “personal item”. The security personnel obviously hadn’t received the same instructions. Eventually, I took the laptop, wallet, keys, and cellphone out of my bag and let them check it. I thought to myself, “If they let us take the other two bags if I check my laptop bag/briefcase, then I’ll let it go.” I was still steaming when we went to the flight deck and I discovered that many of the other passengers sitting around were holding bags that looked remarkably similar to the one I had just been compelled to check. Not only were the security people not on the same page as Delta’s, they didn’t seem to be consistent in executing their own policies.

When we got to the flight deck, we realized that our flight was going to be about three quarters of an hour late. Originally, we were going to have about an hour and fifteen minutes to make our connection in the Twin Cities. The person behind the desk assured us that we wouldn’t have any trouble making the connection. She turned out to be correct, but she failed to mention that it wasn’t going to be as easy for our luggage to make the short connection. Only one of our five checked items made it to Hartford with us. One of the missing item’s was L’s car seat. The claims person gave us a carseat and we were finally able to get in the car and drive home to bed.

The luggage came the next day. One of our suitcases, however, arrived covered in shrink-wrap. The suitcase had been opened by security. I guess the containers of Lego and the other Christmas gifts inside looked suspicious on the scanner monitor. I had spent about an hour packing the bag carefully so that we could get as much into it as possible. The security person obviously didn’t have as much time to repack the suitcase after inspecting it and had just used shrink-wrap to close it up again.

Anyway, the holidays are over and we’re safely back in Massachusetts.