Over Easter weekend, I went home along with my wife and baby to visit my parents (separately — they're divorced). The big event was that my mother was joining the Catholic church and would be officially received into full communion during the Easter vigil on Saturday night. This took place in a big, loud, very multicultural church service in an urban parish just inside the D.C. beltway. My brother and I both attended. The night before that, my father (who is Jewish) held an informal Passover seder (i.e., ceremonial meal) for the family, which meant a total of eight people: my father himself, my stepmother and her son, my brother and sister-in-law, who brought a little dog, and then me, my wife, and Zeke. Zeke, who is fourteen and a half months old, was asleep and didn't participate. What I decided to do, as a project, was to write up the experiences of this weekend in a way that takes Orsi's work into account. His book has had a tremendous influence on my thinking, I have to say. The draft of this project is excerpted below, or it can be seen by following this link. At the time of posting this, it consists of just some very rough notes, but I wanted to get something down before I started forgetting everything.
Technical note: if you are curious, this little window into a draft-in-progress was created using an online word processor called Writely, which can do almost anything that you probably do regularly in MS Word but does it all online, so you can work on your writing anywhere that you have a web connection.
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