So, I’m in Abilene for the Christianity and Literature Conference. There are four or so grad students from Baylor up here (three of us staying together), plus three or four faculty members giving presentations, so it’s been really great to be able to get to know some of them a bit better. We’ve been in conference sessions all day today, so our brains are starting to explode a little bit…we came back to the hotel right after the last plenary lecture (Baylor’s Dr. David Jeffrey, who did a magnificent talk on metanarrative, specifically the differences between the big archetypal Western narrative and the archetypical Eastern/Chinese narrative), skipping the post-conference jazz concert due to exhaustion. It’s been great…so many things to think about, both in terms of the papers I’ve heard and in terms of the whole conference experience. But I’m sort of glad tomorrow is just a half-day. Who knew that sitting around listening to people talk for twelve hours straight would be so tiring?

Dr. Jeffrey actually goes to Redeemer as well, but I hadn’t had a chance to meet him before. He’s teaching Literary Theory next semester, and I was already planning to take it (lots of good recommendations from other students), but now I’m totally psyched for it. I’m not huge on theory, but he’s so articulate and kind that I think it’ll be really good. Plus, there was a roundtable discussion today on postmodern theory that had me totally wired. I decided I like theory when other people who know about it are talking and I can just listen and absorb, I just dislike having to decipher it myself.