Tag Archives: Librarian

Annual Friends of the Library Lecture

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Re-Designing the Bible for Reading, and How Kickstarter Made It Possible

– From the Friends of the Library Newsletter, Spring 2015

In mid-2014, book designer Adam Lewis Greene launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund his first independent book publishing endeavor, Bibliotheca. According to Adam,Bibliotheca aims to free biblical literature — a cornerstone of Western culture and storytelling — from the dense, encyclopedic typographic conventions to which it has been almost exclusively relegated for centuries, and to give it fresh expression as a multivolume set of elegant, traditionally designed books conducive to enjoyable reading. The fundraising goal was quickly surpassed 40 times over, totaling over $1.4 million and making Bibliotheca one of the top 50 Kickstarter campaigns to date out of over 197,000.

[vimeo 99418117 w=377 h=211]

Being more or less a student of the age-old disciplines of type design, typography, book design, book illustration, calligraphy, and print, Adam is fascinated with the dissemination of ideas via the book and the letter, as well as the history and future of writingand print. Confronted with an increasing tendency in design culture toward the superficial away from the substantive, he is interested in finding and creating artifacts that possess intrinsic beauty and goodness, and he thinks a well-made book is just about the best example of this. In this lecture — which is free and open to the public — Adam will talk about his vision for Bibliotheca and how he is implementing it. More information about the project is available from Bibliotheca.

Who: Adam Lewis Greene
What: “Re-Designing the Bible for Reading, and How Kickstarter Made It Possible”
When: Thursday, April 23, 7:30–9 p.m.
Where: Upper Gwinn Commons

Day of Common Learning 2014

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On Wednesday, October 22nd, SPU canceled all classes so faculty, staff, and students could attend Day of Common Learning, where talks and sessions were based on the theme of power. Below are the thoughts of some of our Library staff who attended lectures and taught sessions.

Keynote: The Good News About Power
Andy Crouch

Andy Crouch began his keynote address about power by addressing the problem that conversations about power are usually either cynical or naive, and asked the question of whether it was possible to have a talk that was both honest and hopeful. Crouch felt that was possible with some reframing of the grammar and definition of power. He then offered some descriptions of power, including Nietzsche’s concept that all people want to individually exert their power as widely as possible, forcing them into conflict with others who try and exert their own power. Crouch offered an alternative view of power from First Genesis, saying that our power comes from our ability as image bearers of Christ to make things that are “very good.” Crouch then offered several examples of this in physics, art, and music – showing how scientists and artists can use their ability to affect change to increase power for everyone. For example Henry Ossawa Tanner’s painting The Banjo Player – which took an instrument and music style that was being caricaturized and oppressed, and gave it a fuller expression in showing the importance of the banjo as part of African-American culture and community. Finally, he gave a two-by-two chart (for the business majors, he teased) showing a cross of authority – defined as the ability to affect change (authority), and vulnerability – to show the amount of risk one is exposed to. Crouch believes that low authority and high vulnerability results in poverty; low authority and low vulnerability is safety; high authority and low vulnerability is idolatry and injustice; and only with high authority and high vulnerability can we be image bearers.

– Carrie Fry

Session 1: Re-thinking Power and Powerlessness: Listening to Iraqi Voices in Blogs from Baghdad
Kimberly Segall

Dr. Segall’s talk yesterday focused on ways that the Western world tends looks at conflict in the Middle East. The ways in which our media tends to portray the Middle East as one homogenous region, whose religions and beliefs are all blurred into one. We talked about looking at the stories we hear from both sides of a conflict. For example, some of us may see the veil as forced upon women, as a sign of oppression. Dr. Segall pointed out that yes, there is oppression and power when forcing women to wear the veil, but there is also power when women make their own choice to wear it. She spoke about her own experiences of daily life from recently living in Iraq with her daughter. One of the main messages that I came out of this talk with was to remember to look to other sources of information for a clearer picture of the individuals living in conflict.

– Jo Krogh

Session 2: Technology and Power
Ryan Ingersoll, Michael Paulus, and David Wicks

David Wicks started the session sharing about the new Digital Education Leadership M.Ed. program. Wicks stressed the program’s intentional flexibility, as it is built around a unique sandboxed learning environment with team-taught courses, project-based learning, beta tests technology tools, and a preference towards using open access educational resources. Wicks touched on some of the important issues K-12 and higher education technologists, teachers, and students are navigating. Michael Paulus spoke next, reminding us of the long history of technology and invited us on journey to the past. Paulus shared about the different views of technology as liberator, oppressor, and instrument. To that end, Paulus introduced the need for attention and framed it by the Ten Commandments through the love of God and neighbor. Ryan Ingersoll closed the session with reflections about course topics on digital citizenship, mindfulness, multitasking, digital identity, and vocation. As a group we discussed Facebook’s mood manipulation project and reflected together on power and privacy dynamics. Ryan encouraged a need to focus on relationships in digital spaces by integrating love of God and neighbor, mindfulness, and a balanced approach to life based on the rhythm of Sabbath. Finally, he discussed how we should expand on Andy Crouch’s call towards being image bearers and implement that action of authority and vulnerability in digital spaces we inhabit.

– Ryan Ingersoll

Book Review: Traffic

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traffic

Recently, Travis Phelps of the Washington State Department of Transportation suggested that traffic would move more efficiently at merge points if people waited and merged late instead of lining up as soon as they saw the “merge ahead” signs.

I used to be resistant to the late merge, thinking like most critics that it is rude. However, after reading Tom Vanderbilt’s book, Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do and What it Says About Us when it came out in 2008, I made some observations and tried it myself. I was converted to late merging!

Also in Vanderbilt’s well-researched book, among many interesting driving facts, we learn about the traffic choreography that occurs during the Oscars and how we can improve our lives through better parking habits. One important conclusion the author draws is that we would all be better drivers if there was some way for us to receive regular praise on what we do well instead of only receiving negative feedback through road rage and traffic tickets.

– Liz Gruchala-Gilbert

Special Collections: Luther Bibles

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img_2023Special Collections Exhibit 2014:

Bibles and Bible commentary:

Endter Luther Bible no. 1 (Monroe)

SPU possess three of the Luther Bibles published by Wolfgang Endter and descendants between 1629 to 1788.  The Luther Bibles published by the Endter clan came in three basic forms:  the octavo-sized Saubert (from 1726 the Mörl) Bible (1629-1822), and the small and large folio-sized Weimar (1641-1768) and Dilherr (1656-1788) Bibles.  All three of the copies owned by SPU lack a firm date of publication, and the first two, an opening title page.  For this reason I refer to them by the donor-names Monroe, Marston, and Frost.  Monroe, the one featured here, is clearly the earliest.  Though it bears internal (and copperplate-based) title pages dated 1643 (not to mention a faint penciled inscription to that effect on a blank—and detached—opening page), this information may not be trustworthy, if only because all three of the copies owned by SPU may be Dilherr (1656-1788) rather than Weimar (1641-1768) Bibles.  They appear to be Dilherr Bibles because each meets the three Dilherr criteria specified by Oertel:

1) They are all folio-sized, and they all contain both 2) Johann Dilherr’s “Vorrede an den gottseligen Leser” (only partially still there in Monroe); and 3) Salomon Glassius’ notes (or Nutzen, embedded in the text in Monroe, but marginalized in Marston and Frost).  For these reasons (and because the first of the many editions of the Dilherr Bible appeared in 1656), I am inclined to wonder whether those three internal title pages (located at the onset of the Historical books, the New Testament, and the Epistles), though clearly authentic, would match the title page proper, did we have it.  (Indeed an excessively suspicious person might suspect that there are signs that the former may have been tipped in.  Yet it should also be noted that (and here I contradict myself), the second edition of the Weimar bore 1644 “auf dem gedruckten Haupttitel” (“on its printed main title [page]”), but 1643 “Auf dem in Kupfer gestochenen Titel” (“on the title [page] engraved on copper”) (Panzer, Geschichte (1778), 197).)  A further clue may be the fact that, except for the copperplate-based title pages, 4) Monroe is dominated (as an early Dilherr would be) by woodcuts.  (Were there two-column woodcuts in the early Weimar editions?)

But there are also reasons to think that, if a Dilherr, it may not post-date 1679:  the fact that, possessing only a Register of Sunday Gospel and Epistle readings, 5) it lacks the traditional four Registers transferred over from the Weimar Bible from 1720, the fact that 6) it sports no engraving of Luther and his family, and the fact that 7) it appears to lack a feature characteristic of Weimar Bibles and also many Dilherr Bibles from 1679, namely the copperplate engravings of the eleven Saxon Herzöge.

So though it is entirely possible that Monroe could date from 1643, or even be a second (i.e. 1644) edition of the Weimar rather than a Dilherr, I would place it for the time being tentatively somewhere between 1656 and 1674 (which is the date of the last Dilherr edition before the one dated 1679) inclusive.

Nonetheless, because a lot has been published on these Bibles, a great deal of additional progress could, given time, be made.  (So for my latest thoughts on this, see the exhibit notes themselves.)

This Endter Dilherr (?) Luther Bible was a gift of SPU Instructor of Nursing Heidi Monroe, who says that it would have come over from Germany with her paternal great grandfather Hermann Robert Baum, who was a druggist and the proprietor of the former Baum’s Pharmacy in San Francisco.

Possible fuller title:  [Biblia, das ist, die gantze heilige Schrifft dess alten und neuen Testaments.  Wie solche von Hernn Doctor Martin Luther Seel. im Jahr Christi 1522 in unsere Teutsche Mutter-Sprach zu übersetzen angefangen anno 1554 zu End gebracht. . . .]

– Steve Perisho

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2014 Friends of the Library Event: “The Archive of Seattle Pacific University: A Panel Exploring the Origins of SPU in Time and Place”

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FOL Archives PanelOn Tuesday, March 11, 2014, 7:30-9 p.m. in Upper Gwinn Commons a panel of historians and archivists will explore the origins of Seattle Pacific University through the history of Seattle, the Pacific Northwest, and educational institutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

When the school that became Seattle Pacific University, Seattle Seminary, was founded in 1891, Seattle had recently emerged as the largest city in the new state of Washington and there was broad interest in establishing schools to prepare for the region’s future.

Inspired by a passion for mission and place, the seminary’s founders proclaimed their belief in “teaching for the future” and their ambition to provide a place where students would acquire a thorough “education for character.” In 1930, the school’s leaders wrote that they had witnessed the transformation of both their “great city,” “from a village in a deep and lonely forest … to the great metropolis of the Pacific Northwest,” and their “small denominational Academy located on a barren hillside into a leading liberal arts College, on a beautiful tree-covered campus.”

Each panelist will focus on a different facet of the content and nature of the historical record that enables exploration of these transformations and better understanding of the SPU that exists today.

The event is free and open to the public.