The Lists #14 by Scott Hoffman

Top 10 Things Not to Say to  Your Theology School Comps Board

10. What’s it to ya?!

9. Reading list? What reading list?

8. Did you all find the envelopes I slipped under your doors?

7. And now a reading from the Book of Mormon.

6. Hey, did you hear the one about the monk, the nun, the Lutheran minister and the theology professor?

5. You call THAT a question? Geez! How’d they make YOU a professor?

4. I don’t know—I, I didn’t write this….

3. The responsorial psalm can be found on page…

2. I refuse to answer on the grounds that it might incriminate me.

1. Anybody else as drunk as I am?

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Scott Hoffman (Episode 66, essay) is an independent scholar and native Austinite living and working in his hometown. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies from Purdue University in 2005 and is currently revising his manuscript Haloed by the Nation: Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America. In 2008, he was nominated for a Lone Star Emmy for researching and writing The World, the War and Texas, a public television documentary about Texans during the Second World War. His publications include “How Do You Solve a Problem like Maria? St. Maria Goretti in the Post-Counter-Cultural World” in The CRITIC and “Holy Martin: The Overlooked Canonization of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” and “‘Last Night I Prayed to Matthew:’ Matthew Shepard, Homosexuality and Popular Martyrdom in Contemporary America,” both in Religion and American Culture. This year he completed compiling an LBGT Resource Guide for the Austin History Center. In his spare time Scott likes to sing like nobody’s listenin’ and dance like nobody’s watchin’, which means he tends to wail and flail his arms a lot…