The other nice thing about Easter is that it lets one again appreciate the things renounced during Lent -- in my case, Civ III! So, yes, Easter Monday (a holiday if you werk at a semetary!) allowed me a day of 11 hours of being Japan, pounding the Zulu off my island, and then frantically trying to develop sefaring to find the other 13 civilizations still out there on the Huge Map.

Easter Tuesday, being only a holiday when it falls between Easter Monday (a real, obscure holiday) and the start of a missions conference to which most of the students, lots of the staff, and almost all the faculty will be going, as well as yours truly and lovely bride, kata private persons, not staff, or even student, strange as that is to me still, Easter Tuesday was new tires for the car, ftp-ing a file for piscis, making bbq chicken pizza (+garlic slices!!), just a little more Civ, and the realization of why I renounced it in the first place: it eats my time like a shark. So after pizza, I caught all up w/ Iraqkrieg news, griped at the Beeb for not having better coverage of the voting issues in Nigeria, and called it a day by making tea and picking up piscis from teh werk.

So, "missions conference." Yes, all about being, sending, supporting Christian missionaries. If the entire concept is inherently offensive to you, and you can't be bothered to remedy your ignorance about the concept in the least, now is the time to stop reading while I comment on it from my last experience at this conference in 1997.

Where was I? Oh yes, missionaries. Among a host of things the 19th Century is going to get damned for, are the patterns of only-marginally-Christian proclamation that formed the modern missionary movement. The tying of the "three Cs" (Christianity, Civilisation, and Commerce, listed in increasing order of importance to the British Empire) is the epitome of the phenomemon. Of course, to not venture for fear of failure is damnable itself.

NW (the conf.) is 4 days of Episcopalian (and misc. Anglican) conventionery on how to do missions well, with God's help. It will cover everything from the mundane aspects of parish comittee formation and the basics of "culture shock" to spiritual realities unseen beneath the struggles for hearts and minds in cities and rural places. There'll be both the wacky charismatics, floaty about, speaking of angels, warbling in voice and hands, breathy about practically everything; there'll be, this year, a rather larger contingent from the high-churchers' seminary, which should produce mighty hilarity in their shellshocked expressions (for those blessed with somewhat higher levels of cynicism).

By and large, NW is going to be a few days' of HOWTO: how to convince your parish there's an outside world which might also want and need to hear the best news ever, how to stir people to useful and sustainable activity, how to support missions and missionaries, how to send them in the first place, how to get into doing missions yourself, how to proclaim Christ and not Americanism (or home-culture-ism, for $VARHOME)...

Why? Well, NW is always held in Easter I, liturgically speaking. When Paul went to Greece, we was referred to as a preacher of "foreign divinities" because the preached Christos kai Anastasis. God has broken down the dividing walls among us, making us one, and in Christ is reconciling the world to himself by the Cross for our sins, and the Resurrection for our redemption. Knowing is half the battle....