Corinthian Matters

A Resource for the Study of the Corinthia, Greece

Category: Religion, 1 Corinthians

Holy Fools in Corinth

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Corinth always gets the spotlight this time of year in homilies and op-ed pieces about the significance of Christian Holy Week, especially that three-day period known as the “Triduum,” which begins on Maundy Thursday (celebrating Jesus’ last supper), proceeds to Good Friday (the crucifixion), and culminates in Easter Sunday (the resurrection).

Corinth is front and center in this annual cycle largely because of the disbelief and difficulties of the first Christ followers living in the city in the mid-first century, whom the apostle Paul took time to address in a fulsome letter now known as 1 Corinthians. In Chapter 1, Paul seeks to correct the perspective of some in his community who viewed power, status, wealth, and education as the most important values in shaping and structuring their relationships: Paul highlights, rather, how Christ’s death by crucifixion — the “foolishness” of the cross — turned the Roman world, in its orientation to power and dominance, upside down. In Chapter 11, the apostle deals with division and disorder in community meals by reminding them of Jesus’ words on the night of his betrayal: “the Lord Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, took bread….” And in the final chapter of 1 Corinthians, Paul addresses disbelief of some in the Corinthian community about the Resurrection of Christ.

The letter itself, then, frames the content celebrated in the Triduum, and Christians today hear plenty of reflections on the Corinthian situation between Maundy Thursday and Resurrection Sunday.

This year western and eastern churches celebrated holy week in quick succession, and western Easter coincided with April Fool’s Day for the first time in 70 years. Many of the Easter homilies and op-eds I read concerned the foolishness of the cross. Among the better ones I read:

Performing 1 Corinthians

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Creating-a-scene.jpgAmong the thousands of publications on St. Paul’s letters to the Christians in Corinth, Creating a Scene in Corinth: A Simulation (MennoMedia 2013) stands out for its unique approach to biblical study through simulation and performance. Written by Reta Finger and George McClain, the work invites its readers to experience 1 Corinthians by directly entering into conversation and even debate with the apostle and his conflicted Christian communities. Creating a Scene is designed to give students and small groups of 15-25 an immersive experience in studying Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. And while this is a work written for church groups, not academics, the authors have attempted to make accessible to their readers an extensive and complex scholarly literature related to Corinth, Pauline studies, and ancient religion.

Like A Week in the Life of Corinth (discussed last week), Creating a Scene is based on imaginative play around a series of characters—some historical, some fictive—such as the individuals known from the Pauline letters and local elite known from inscriptions (e.g., Babbius Italicus and Junia Theodora). But the main purpose of the work is less a primer for bible study than simulating the conflicts of 1 Corinthians through creative role playing. As the publisher page notes,

Creating a Scene imaginatively draws readers into Chloe’s house church, which has just received a letter from their church planter, the apostle Paul. Using group simulation, the book brings to life scholarly research on how the gospel penetrated the Roman Empire. As participants role-play early believers and debate with each other, they gain new insights and will never read 1 Corinthians the same way again.

First-century Corinthians were just as human as church people today. They did not consider Paul’s letters authoritative Scripture when he wrote them, so lively group discussion and debate are encouraged. This method of Bible study works for many levels, from youth groups to Sunday school classes, or in college and seminary courses.

While Creating a Scene frequently moves between simulation and character development, commentary, and voices from the authors themselves, the work consistently interweaves social and historical background content with role playing. One constantly feels while reading this that the community in Corinth had problems (and the leaders of the church just seem a lot less saintly than they do in A Week in the Life of Corinth). The first part of the work (pp. 11-94) includes an introduction to the idea of simulation as well as important matters for understanding Corinth, such as the conflicts in 1 Corinthians, the archaeology and history of the Roman city, the values of a Roman society in the first century, polytheism and religion, social status and inequality, among others. The second part (The Play Begins! Reenacting Chloe’s House Church, pp. 95-209) takes readers into the heart of the simulation, with each successive chapter working through the major points of commentary and conflict in the letter, as for example:

    • Hidden Persuasions in Paul’s Greeting—1 Corinthians 1:1-9
    • The Wisdom of the World versus the Wisdom of God—1 Corinthians 1:10-3:4
    • Field Hands and Master Builders: Images of Unity—1 Corinthians 3:5-4:21

Each of these chapters include background information, commentary, photographs and plans, rubric for simulation, and concluding sections inviting the four different groups—the factions of Christ, Apollos, Paul, and Peter—to respond to and apply what they have learned through reenactment (e.g., “What impact does this topic of resurrection have on you and your faction?…How does Paul’s view of bodily resurrection challenge common assumptions about the afterlife held among Christians today?”). The final chapter includes a simulation exercise for recreating a Corinthian agape meal including prayers, hymns, readings, dialogue, and even recipes! The two appendixes are devoted to additional reenactment (Corinthian elite gathered at the Isthmian games) and a leader’s guide.

Beyond the book, the publisher page makes available a number of extra digital resources including lengthy slide presentations about Corinth with plans and images, imaginary speeches from members in Chloe’s house church, supplemental material for character development, and recommendations for implementing the simulation in churches and seminary classes (based on Finger’s previous simulations carried out in her bible classes). Creating a Scene is intended for study by small groups in churches or introductory academic classes to 1 Corinthians (who can act their way through the book in 10-15 sessions), but it may be of interest  to  anyone interested in learning about the backgrounds of First Corinthians.

For full contents, see the table of contents at Amazon.

Additional reviews of Creating a Scene in Corinth are available here:

This is the eighth post in a series on resources for the study of ancient religion and Christianity in Corinth. Earlier posts include:

Imagining the Corinthians: A Week in the Life of Corinth

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In the late spring of 2012, there was a buzz in the biblioblog world about a new book by Ben Witherington III called A Week in the Life of Corinth (InterVarsity Press Academic), a fictional work about a character named Nicanor who converts to Christianity after meeting the apostle Paul. Seminarians, pastors, preachers, interested Christians, and not a few professors of New Testament blogged the book—so frequently that by August I had declared AWLC the hit Corinthian book of the summer. One may not find many academic reviews of this work in the principal New Testament journals, but AWLC has perhaps reached a broader audience than the typical academic monograph on Corinthian churches, or even the excellent commentaries on 1 and 2 Corinthians. Compare, for example, the dozens of book reviews (now 55 at Amazon alone) with whatever your favorite book on Corinth happens to be.

ACLC is accessible in its length (ca 150 pages), price ($14), and genre (historical fiction), and unique within a Corinthian context for adopting historical fiction for educational purposes. So the book description highlights fiction (an imaginary week) to highlight the work’s pedagogical ends:

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“Intrigue is in the air as Nicanor returns to Corinth and reports to his patron Erastos on recent business dealings in Rome. Nicanor, a former slave, is a man on the make. But surprises keep springing up in his path. A political rival of Erastos is laying a plot, and a new religion from the East keeps pressing in his life. Spend an imaginary week in Paul’sCorinth as the story of Nicanor winds through street and forum, marketplace and baths, taking us into shop, villa and apartment, where we meet friends new and old. From our observing a dinner in the temple of Aesclepius to Christian worship in the home of Erastos, Paul’s dealings with the Corinthians in his letters take focused relevance and social clarity. The result is an unforgettable introduction to life in a major center of the New Testament world. Throughout the text, helpful sidebars, maps and diagrams serve to further illuminate the sociocultural context of the early Christian world.”

And the publisher page makes clear that the scope of the book is intentionally educational:

  • Uses historical fiction to introduce the social and cultural world of Corinth
  • Includes close-up looks at important features of social and cultural life of Corinth
  • Gives a sense of what early Christian life and worship was like
  • Makes the social world of Paul’s Corinth come alive
  • Supplements or replaces customary textbooks on Paul’s social and cultural world
  • Written by an authority on Paul and the New Testament world

The purpose of the work, is, as many bloggers have pointed out, not gripping historical fiction, but, rather, whetting the appetite of someone setting out to study the New Testament letter of 1 Corinthians. It is a kind of primer to the study of the Corinthian correspondence. Some of the reviews on Amazon give a sense of the need that it meets:

“A winsome introduction to ancient Corinth”
“Why aren’t books like this more popular in Christian circles?”
“An Entertaining, Educational Resource on Corinth for All in the Church”
“A novella with great historical background.”
“Saint Paul up close”
“Wow, this book was really fun to read.”
“Corinth comes alive”

“Entertaining way to educate”

AWLC, then, is not written for Corinthian archaeologists, classicists, or bible scholars per se, who will find plenty of things to quibble about. It is, rather, written to encourage undergraduate students, new seminarians, and readers of the bible to think about Paul’s Corinth in context. With its numerous photograps of Greco-Roman contexts, including Corinth, and its sections devoted to taking “A Closer Look,” it acts as introduction.

AWLC4

Since the book is necessarily cursory in its discussions of background context, and controversial in its particular picture of Corinthian churches (the Corinthian assembly, which includes elites like Erastus, seem to me to be too saintly!), I would hope that the use of such work, whether in bible studies or seminary classes, would move quickly on to serious commentaries or some of the good scholarship on archaeology, texts, and ancient religion in Corinth such as Corinth in Context, Urban Religion in Roman Corinth, or Corinth in Contrast. 

The book is available in Google Books for preview.

This is the seventh post in a series on resources for the study of ancient religion and Christianity in Corinth. Earlier posts include:

 

Keeping the Feast: Metaphors of Sacrifice in 1 Corinthians (Patterson)

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This one seems appropriate for the eve of Passover and the Easter Triduum.

Patterson, Jane Lancaster. Keeping the Feast: Metaphors of Sacrifice in 1 Corinthians and Philippians. Early Christianity and Its Literature 16. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015.

As SBL describes the work in its October 7 newsletter, “Patterson uses cognitive metaphor theory to trace the apostle Paul’s use of metaphors from the Jewish sacrificial system in his moral counsels to the Philippians and the Corinthians. In these letters, Paul moves from the known (the practice of sacrifice) to the unknown (how to live in accord with the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ). Patterson illustrates that the significant sacrificial metaphors in 1 Corinthians and Philippians are not derived from Jewish sacrifices of atonement, but rather from the Passover and sacrifices of thanksgiving. Attention to these metaphors demonstrates that imagery drawn from these sacrifices shapes the overall moral counsel of the letters, reveals more varied and nuanced interpretations of sacrificial references in Paul’s letters, and sheds light on Paul’s continuity with Jewish cultic practice.”

Selective previews of the book are available here in Google Books.

 

Crowdsourcing Paul’s Letters to Corinth

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Last week I noted a few of the many new tools and online sites available for reading and interpreting Paul’s Corinthian correspondence. I was a little surprised to find so few digitally annotated commentaries on 1 and 2 Corinthians given the relative ease of coding a text through TEI markup language, the availability of online platforms that have simplified the process, and the currency of crowdsourcing in the digital humanities. One can find commentaries through subscriptions in biblegateway, of course, but there are now platforms available for producing collaborative crowdsourced commentaries.

Consider Genius, a site freely available for annotating musical lyrics. Their website claims to have made available annotations of literally millions of songs that include “all of Kanye and Kendrick, but also Hamlet, TV and movie scripts, Kurt Cobain’s suicide note, and even the Chipotle menu…”. The platform allows users to highlight difficult or obscure lyrics, annotate, comment, and add context and images to help individuals make sense of text. The site also provides a Genius Web Annotator which, through a Chrome extension, gives users the ability to mark up any internet page, make one’s own website annotatable, and easily share annotations with anyone. The website already has many Corinthian-related texts uploaded by their user community including Pausanias’ Book 2, Lord Byron’s “Siege of Corinth,” and chapters from modern scholarship such as Dale Martin’s The Corinthian Body.Genius

For one successful model in using Genius to mark up the Corinthian correspondence, check out Professor Laura Nasrallah‘s commentaries on the Pauline epistles and the Corinthian correspondence crowdsourced by Harvard University undergraduates. Nasrallah’s guide for students includes both practical suggestions such as formatting and multimedia, as well as contextual questions for students to consider as they annotate:

  • What is the significance of the historical context of the political power of the Roman Empire?
  • What is the significance of the socio-economic context of the first century CE?
  • What do the various arguments within the Pauline correspondence reveal about the debates in which the earliest Christians were engaged?
  • How does your experience help you to bring new interpretive contexts and to ask better questions?

CrowdsourcedCorinthiansNasrallah’s student commentaries build on earlier semesters with the result that students may interact with earlier classes. You can see the full list of Nasrallah’s annotated chapters and books here.

Crowdsourced platforms such as Genius have a wide range of potential uses that include but go well beyond academic contexts for reading Corinthian texts. Virtually any group or community could use such a platform for a collaborative study of 1 and 2 Corinthians. And it would be great to see someone put together a digital patristic commentary on these letters–an online version of Gerald Bray’s ancient Christian commentaries on 1-2 Corinthians. If you have worked to digitally annotate these letters, send me a link and I’ll add it a static webpage when I convert some of these posts into more static pages.

This is the sixth post in a series on resources for the study of ancient religion and Christianity in Corinth. Earlier posts include:

 

 

Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions

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This new Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions, edited by Eric Orlin and a team of collaborators, claims to be the “first comprehensive single-volume reference work offering authoritative coverage of ancient religions in the Mediterranean world.” As the publisher page describes it:
The volume’s scope extends from pre-historical antiquity in the third millennium B.C.E. through the rise of Islam in the seventh century C.E. An interdisciplinary approach draws out the common issues and elements between and among religious traditions in the Mediterranean basin. Key features of the volume include:
  • Detailed maps of the Mediterranean World, ancient Egypt, the Roman Empire, and the Hellenistic World
  • A comprehensive timeline of major events, innovations, and individuals, divided by region to provide both a diachronic and pan-Mediterranean, synchronic view
  • A broad geographical range including western Asia, northern Africa, and southern Europe

This encyclopedia will serve as a key point of reference for all students and scholars interested in ancient Mediterranean culture and society.

Orlin, Eric, ed. Routledge Encyclopedia of Ancient Mediterranean Religions. Routledge, 2015.
Not possible to outline an A-Z encyclopedia running over a thousand words, but the associated keywords suggest enough connections to Corinthiaka:
Abraham. Acolyte. Aeon. Aggadah. Apis. Assumption. Baptism. Byzantine Rite. Catharsis. Church of Rome. Codex Vaticanus. Constantinople. Cult Statue. Dead Sea scrolls. Demeter. Dionysius Exiguus. Eldad and Modad. Exorcism. Falcon. Fascinus. Flavia Domitilla. Glossolalia. Hagiography. Harpokrates. Healing Cults. Heaven. Heliopolis. Herodotus. Incubation. jackal, sacred. Jannes and Jambres. Jonah. Jude, Epistle of. Kerdir. Kirta Epic. Kronos. Lady Elat. Leviathan. Liturgy of John Chrysostom. Maccabees, First Book of. Magic bowls, Aramaic. Marduk. Midrash Rabbah. Monk. Nazirite. Netinim. Obadiah. Oracle. Pantheon. Peplos. polis religion. priestess. Ptolemaic kingdom. Renenutet. rites of passage. Sacrament. Samaritan Pentateuch. Saturnalia. Selkhet. Sinai, Mt. Sophokles. Taurobolium. Theodoric. Tobiad. Urartu. Vestal Virgins. Witchcraft. Yeshiva. Yohanan ben Zakkai. Zealots. Ziggurat.
Google Books has digitized and made available a significant chunk of the encyclopedia including the forward, which outlines the reason for the work and approach to subject (new theoretical currents, interdisciplinary approaches to religion, and the growing importance of material culture, among others). Digitized text also includes maps and numerous entries, which range from a hundred words to a page or more. A keyword search by the word “Corinth” turns up a couple of dozen hits from the currently digitized material.

Reading 1 and 2 Corinthians in the Digital Age

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A few years ago, a survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life found that Americans on average were broadly illiterate about the core beliefs, writings, and teachings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Only about half of Americans, for example, know the Koran is the sacred text of Islam, Martin Luther was somehow associated with the Protestant Reformation, or that the four gospels of the New Testament are Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (see the executive summary here). The findings echoed those of Stephen Prothero’s New York Times bestselling study, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know – And Doesn’t  (HarperCollins 2007), which documented the public’s general lack of knowledge about religions that many claim as near and dear to their hearts. Prothero argued that religious illiteracy was not simply an internal problem for particular religious groups and denominations but a fundamentally civic one that Americans need to remedy: presidents and politicians regularly invoke religious texts in civic discourse, after all, and knowledge of world religions would contribute to more informed foreign policy.

Whether or not you agree with Prothero, it is striking that the high rates of religious illiteracy — at least in respect to knowledge of the Hebrew and Christian bibles — can so easily coexist with the widespread availability and accessibility of ancient texts. Never before has it been easier to read, hear, and understand 1 and 2 Corinthians. Anyone with an internet connection has a thousand new digital resources at their fingertips. You can visit the Bible Gateway to read the Corinthian correspondence in dozens of languages (ancient and modern) and translations along with devotional readings and commentaries, or go to the Blue Letter Bible to find commentary, study tools, Greek text, images, sermons, music, and cross-references. Have a question about a certain part of 1 Corinthians? Ask it at biblical hermeneutics stack exchange, a crowdsourced resource designed for theologians, bible students, and anyone interested in exegetical analysis of texts. There are audio sermons galore freely available at sites such as SermonAudio and Preach It Teach It. And YouTube, of course, has a growing body of video sermons: a search on “Corinth” and “sermons” turns up nearly a thosand hits.  Then there are sermons, homilies, and studies that are constant on the internet.

I’m not sure if such resources contribute to any deep literacy about the Corinthian situation, or simply create a glut of information, but they have widely disseminated to an unprecedented extent the content and interpretations of Pauline literature and the Corinthian churches of Corinth. Over the next few weeks, I’ll continue to look at different ways that scholars are using both digital media and alternate forms of publication to explore the religious world of Corinth in the first century CE and educate a public that has the decreasing ability to read and study a long text.

This marks the fifth post in a Lenten series on resources for the study of religion and Christianity in Corinth. Earlier posts include

An Open Bibliography in Corinthian and New Testament Studies

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I’ve just surfaced from a week-long purgatorial session editing and indexing the proof text of The Isthmus of Corinth. It was awful–or maybe it was wonderful–but the manuscript is better for it. And now I now understand why authors sometimes cut corners and pay others to index their works.

I’m back on track this morning and eager to deliver my overdue Lenten Wednesday series on New Testament studies, this time on Thursday.

First a word on the Corinthian Studies library general. The most up to date bibliography for Corinthian Studies runs to 2,758 individual items and covers subjects from deep prehistory to the modern era. You can find other useful bibliographic lists of Corinthian Studies online, but you won’t find a more comprehensive and searchable open library than this one. You can access the bibliography in two ways:

  1. On the web at the Corinthian Studies Group Library hosted at Zotero.org. Simply search the library as a whole, or search the collections within the library by keyword. This only requires that you visit the Corinthian Studies group library and search or browse through the collections.
  2. As a downloadable RIS file, which can be imported into a bibliographic program such as Zotero, EndNote, or Reference Manager.

If you ask me, you should download and and install a reference managing program such as Zotero. Using software to mine the bibliography offers much more powerful and complex search capabilities than the web version. For an introduction to Zotero and further details about the Corinthian Studies bibliography, see this page. Zotero is free and easy to use. Try it.

PaulCorinthThe collected bibliography includes nearly a thosand entries related to ancient Christianity, Judaism, and New Testament Studies. As I noted a couple of years ago, there are plenty of select bibliographic lists floating about related to the Pauline mission, or the study of 1 and 2 Corinthians, but this collection has a number of key strengths that you will not find elsewhere. Some highlights for someone interested in understanding  scholarship on, say, some passage in 1 Corinthians (much of this applies to other subjects as well, of course):

  • Free. It is completely free and open to public use, not locked inside a pay-to-use database.
  • Comprehensive. The bibliography aims to be comprehensive. It includes articles and books from Urban Religion in Roman Corinth (2005), Corinth in Context (2010), and Corinth in Contrast (2013). It includes all relevant Corinthian studies material listed in the bibliography of Urban Religion in Roman Corinth, Corinth in Context, Corinth Volume XX, and Bridge of the Untiring Sea. And it includes works listed in a number of commentaries on 1 and 2 Corinthians, and relevant material from JSTOR and WorldCat searches (see this page for more information about coverage).
  • Current. The coverage from 2010-2016 is especially good, and thereby offers up-to-date views of what scholars are saying today about Corinth and the New Testament situation.
  • Open. Many of the entries include links to articles, books, and material that are partly or fully accessible online through journal websites, Google Books, Internet Archive, or Academia. Abstracts are included when available.
  • Browsable. The library is divided into three main collections (I. Archaeology and History, II. New Testament, Judaism, and Early Christianity, and III. Geology) and tagged accordingly (.ARCHAEOLOGY AND HISTORY or .CHRISTIANITY & JUDAISM or .GEOLOGY). These show up as the first three tags in the Tags area to the lower left of the Zotero Library (expand the tags if you don’t see them). An item may belong to multiple categories. You can also view the most recent material from 2015 by looking at the individual folders.
  • Searchable.  The collection is tagged with keywords such as “Roman,” “1 Corinthians”, and “2 Corinthians”. Much of the New Testament material is also tagged by chapter, e.g.,  “_1 Cor. 13”. This is especially useful f you are looking for some discussion of an enigmatic passage in 1 Corinthians of a recent discussion of the love chapter.
  • Variety.  The collection includes articles, books, PhD theses, and sermons

The bibliography is a work in progress. There are holes and inaccuracies and the entire collection needs better tagging. But it does provide a good place to start.

And it’s worth noting that the bibliography has been created largely through my own labor, and student help funded through work studies positions at Messiah College. If you’re interested in improving the quality of the collection, I’d be glad to have your help or support.

2015 Publications in Corinthian Studies: New Testament, Christianity, and Judaism

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This is the third in a series of five bibliographic reports related to Corinthian scholarship published or digitized in 2015. This post also marks the next installment in a Lenten series on resources for the study of Judaism, New Testament, and early Christianity in Corinth (see last week’s post on Corinthian-related blogs). Today’s report presents scholarship published or digitized in 2015 related in some way to the subjects of Christianity, Judaism, and the New Testament. This includes some scholarship on the Hellenistic and early Roman “backgrounds” of Christianity and Judaism but most of this material relates to New Testament studies.

Download the PDF by right clicking on this  link:

I generated these reports through Zotero tags and searches, and there are undoubtedly missing entries as well as false positives. Next week, I’ll put together a post about using the bibliographic database for the study of religion in Roman Corinth.

If you see references missing from the list, please send to corinthianmatters@gmail.com

Photo by David Pettegrew, June 6, 2014
Photo by David Pettegrew, June 6, 2014

 

The Long Lent

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The liturgical season of Lent begins today in the western Christian churches. If you don’t know what this is, Lent is a penitential season of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving that culminates in the celebration of Easter / Pascha. As far as liturgical seasons go, it’s a pretty old one that had emerged clearly by the council of Nicaea in AD 325, and perhaps earlier in some form. Today it is universally celebrated by different Christian denominations (even the anabaptist and brethren in Christ college where I teach usually serves up an Ash Wednesday service to students). Sometimes eastern and western calendars are closely aligned so that Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant Christians are celebrating the season (nearly) simultaneously. This year, these traditions have conspired against each other to produce about the greatest timespan possible between the celebration of western Easter (March 27) and Orthodox Pascha (May 1). This means that between eastern and western calendars, Christians will be in a lenten penitential season for nearly three months this year. And that’s a whole lot of Lent.

This liturgical season intersects in a number of ways with Corinthian studies.  The New Testament letters of 1 and WinterSkyCentralPA2 Corinthians, with all their discussion of repentance, salvation, the memorial of the last supper, and resurrection, among others, have made good material for for the lenten cycle of scripture readings (even this morning, at an Ash Wednesday mass, I heard 2 Corinthians 5.20-6.2). And the Corinthian saint Leonidas and his companions were martyred and are celebrated during Pascha/Easter (Sneak peak for next year: Orthodox, Catholics, and Protestants will be celebrating Easter / Pascha the same day and on April 16, the feast day of Leonidas and companions. I’m working now with some Latin students at Messiah to prepare a little translation of the relevant passages about those saints from the Acta Sanctorum)

So it only seems appropriate that I re-launch my weekly series on resources and books for reading and understanding 1 and 2 Corinthians, early Christian communities, and religion in Roman Corinth. Yes, I planned to do this two years ago but wasn’t on my game. In fact, I’m pretty bad at delivering any series consistently. But I have a little more time this semester, and will aim to deliver a Wednesday series.