Leitourgeia kai Qurbana: Contra den Zeitgeist

I realize that there are a couple of brief items, probably most properly belonging to the category of chronos, that are buried in two blog posts that require a sense of kairos just to read them from start to finish. Thus, it seemed good to excerpt them here.

• As I’ve noted, I’m working on setting up an alumni network for Orthodox Christians who have attended Indiana University. This is for a number of reasons, not least (but not only) because we anticipate that such a network would have an interest in supporting potential building efforts in the near future. There’s a Facebook group, a domain name has been registered, and I’m slowly but surely compiling a mailing list. What I don’t have is a budget for any of this — the parties thus far whom I have informed of this work (who were the ones who thought this would be a good idea in the first place) have said only, “Sounds good, keep us posted”; they have, unfortunately, not been in a position to say, “Sounds good, let us know how we can help.” If I had, say, 20-30 interested parties willing to pool ~$1,000 in startup costs for charter membership benefits to be determined later, that would speed things along considerably. Alternately, if I had fifteen people willing to pool those costs and fifteen people willing to contribute some time, that would also be extraordinarily helpful.
• The chant workshop last weekend was a much bigger success than I could have dreamed, but because we weren’t charging admission, food and printing costs were quite a bit higher than what we had originally planned. As I said, we had a private donor at the outset, plus WEST’s support, and we’ve had some additional gifts that have been extremely helpful, but we had also hoped to end the weekend with some seed money for the next event, and we’re not there yet. To give people an idea, an upcoming one-day Gregorian chant workshop with Susan Hellauer of Anonymous 4 is charging $60 a head while advertising limited space. This was a weekend, and we neither charged nor turned anybody away. I am toying with the idea of setting up a booster organization specifically to support these kinds of things moving forward; Friends of Music at All Saints or some such. Again, if there are people interested in being a benefactor for charter membership benefits TBD, we can arrange something.

In any event, if either of these efforts (or both of them!) strike you as being the kind of thing you’d like to help support, please get in touch with me; I can be reached at rrbarret (AT) indiana.edu. Alternately, there’s always the PayPal button on the Tip Jar page, but there might be more efficient ways of doing things as well. Let’s talk.

Thanks!