Gail and I did not take any exotic trips this year, so I did not have a whole lot of pictures to put on a website.  Instead here are some traditional season’s greetings.  And for the first time in many, many years, you will receive them on time.

One of the year’s highlights was sitting in on Christina’s dissertation defense at Duke.  Her chair said it was one of the most original theses ever to come out of the music department.  The title was “Intertextuality and Gender Ideology in Alban Berg’s Modernist Aesthetic,” which was in most part a philosophical analysis of musical meaning.  She is now applying for ten tenure track positions at UCLA, Utah State, Emory, Lawrence U., U. of Rochester, Yale, and some others that I’ve forgotten.

My book on Gandhi The Virtue of Non-Violence: from Gautama to Gandhi is coming out on Dec. 18.  The pre-publication reviews are the best I’ve ever had. You can read them and view the book cover at users.moscow.com/ngier/ home/vnv.htm.  (Note: there is no www in this address.) For some reason SUNY Press decided not to print a paperback edition, and at $40 they have split the difference between a $20 paperback and a $60 hardback.  If you are interested, I can get you a copy for $24 with my author’s discount.

Gail has not had a good start to her retirement, and that is why we have not ventured too far from home.  She had a partial knee replacement in May at the U. of Washington and we stayed in Seattle for a month so that she could do physical therapy and be close to her surgeon.  Not wanting to be left out of the action, I had two hernias repaired, but I was walking two miles within two days after this minor surgery.

While Gail was recovering I moved out of my university office, moving most of my library into the department library, some of it into storage at 509 Taylor, and the best books came home to Gail’s.  (That took about two months!) I rented out my house on Taylor to my temporary replacement, a very sharp fellow from Indiana U. whose wife also has an MA in philosophy.  It feels good to have some good folks in the old family home.  My permanent replacement will be in environmental philosophy, and none of us are sure if my three semester sequence in Asian philosophy will survive.

In August we had a great trip to the Oregon Coast with Gail’s mom.  We rented beach trikes at Cannon Beach and all three of us were soon zipping down the beach.  It was Gail’s first real exercise in over a year and 88 year-old Viola tied with an English woman for oldest person to ride a beach trike at Cannon Beach.

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my retirement so far and my daily agenda is very full.  I’m starting the research on my next book “The Origins of Religious Violence,” focusing right now on Sri Lanka and Mughal India.  So far it looks as if colonial influences were the principal causes for the rise of Buddhist and Hindu fundamentalism.  This will be a long process, and I’m enjoying the 2-3 hours each morning that I spend reading this fascinating material with Gail’s home-made latte in hand.

I thought I would be withdrawing from campus politics, but the new liberal arts dean fired a promising young ceramics professor, and we have managed to organize much of the faculty against the dean and the provost who keeps backing him up. Sadly, we may not be able to save the fellow’s job, but we may be able to shame the dean into resigning.

I also can’t keep away from our own local fundamentalists.  Our top Unitarian minister Forrest Church debated a local Calvinist, and even though the Trinity was not the topic, the Calvinist still hit Church over the head with it.  If you are interested, I have a long reply to this guy at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/trinity.htm.  The same group also, incredibly enough, has reinterpreted the Civil War as a theological war and one has come out in support of slavery.  You can find my response at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/slavery.htm.  Never a dull moment in our little town! 

Check out my other writings at www.class.uidaho.edu/ngier/

We will be spending Christmas at home in Moscow with Gail's mother, her son-in-law and his two lovely nieces.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New Year,

Nick Gier