Pointer Institute

Jordon is beset with pain, but not so limited that he can’t turn up tons of instructive links. Forty Things That Only Happen In Movies will satisfy readers such as I who are unwilling to suspend their disbelief (Pippa’s refrain: “Daddy, it’s a movie!”). SF writer C. J. Cherryh offers helpful tips for writers (directed mostly to writers of fiction, but helpful also for attentive expository writers). My students have heard the first two from me countless times. That reminded me of the Poynter Institute’s 50 Tools for Writers, by Roy Peter Clark — whose first tools likewise resonate with my counsel.

Wednesday’s healing mass at St. Luke’s was offered with special intentions for Jordon and for my dear sister-in-law. Take care, and get better and better, y’all.

Design Frustration

I’m working on the the final draft of my Ekklesia Project presentation, which I had been composing in typeface that Trevor and I had bought for the Disseminary, Scala by FontFont. It’s a handsome typeface, sturdy at small sizes, distinctive without being idiosyncratic. I have only one complaint: the foundry produces the various members of the family as entirely distinct typefaces, so that one can’t invoke the italic style simply by a keyboard command, or from the style menu of the application. It’s a small nuisance, but a real nuisance, and will be an even bigger nuisance if I were to decide to set the presentation in some other typeface.

Why does a leading type foundry deliberately distribute its products in a less-usable format?

I Liked Sufjan Stevens Before I Knew

From the Onion AV Club section:

I go to a kind of Anglo-Catholic church now that I’ve been going to for the last three years, but I haven’t really been raised that way. I’m definitely entrenched in the tradition now. I kind of admire it for being so traditional and sort of unchanging and unwavering in a lot of its doctrine, but also very sort of open and broad in its understanding of human nature. I like that it’s kind of open to the discussion about the tensions between those two things.

I’m tickled, so I won’t kvetch about the part where he says, “Maybe [my faith] really shouldn’t be a part of public discussion, because, you know, it really is about personal relationships.”

Uncanny Sensation

Margaret and Pippa have gone for an overnight with friends.

Si is off to Justin’s wedding. I am alone in the house (well, Bea is here, but she doesn’t count.) It feels so unnervingly quiet!

Roughly What I’ll Say

I shook together the bits of what I expect to say Tuesday at the Ekklesia Project Gathering, and this is what came out.

The title of the talk will be, “ ‘The Strong Right Arm That Holds For Peace’: Godliness as an Alternative to Empire.”

I’ll begin by walking through the first three commandments (working from Ex 20:2-7). I’ll read through and paraphrase them, with observations on the Hebrew and Greek, but I won’t emphasize the technical aspects — just give a sense of the diction and expression.

Then I’ll expound these words as an expression of God’s identity, from which we derive our way of life. We acknowledge God alone as the determinative premise/context for orienting our lives; we repudiate any mediatory representation of or alternative to God; we can not invoke God as leverage toward proximate ends. In other words, God is unique, aniconic, and inutile.

I’ll then sketch the ways that U.S. culture effects a displacement of the unique, aniconic, inutile God by intervening as complementary unique savior — but one that you can see, that does stuff for you. I’ll differentiate this from “idolatry” in the way that preachers conventionally characterize our captivity to capital, to entertainment, to achievement. The sacralized American way of life has displaced God, not presented itself as an alternative — but the God who addresses us as our unique, aniconic, inutile source of identity cannot be displaced without denying that God.

In case this all sounds too dramatic and too abstract, I’ll introduce a case study that shows one way in which Imperial America supplants God.

I’ll argue that the church does not fittingly testify to the God of the Decalogue (and resists the imperial American supplanter) by arguing over just what constitutes idolatry, or whether this or that constitutes an appropriate policy direction for the U.S. government. Partly, that’s because the very terms of the engagement distance us from our immediate allegiance to our God; and partly because our strongest arguments for the God of the Decalogue, against the sacred America, come when our identities bespeak as distinctly and unambiguously as possible, an embodied exposition of God’s identity.

We profess an alternative to Empire’s claim on our lives when we live in a way that our interlocutors cannot make sense of, apart from acknowledging that which sacral America cannot abide: we owe our allegiance only to God. While divinized America can couch its prerogatives in terms of justice, of freedom, it cannot make explicit claim to godliness as a civil virtue. The practice of godliness, of making manifest a persistent allegiance to the unique, aniconic, inutile God of the Decalogue, constitutes the church as an anti-Empire.

Well, it’ll all take a lot of fine-tuning — and it’s not an argument congenial to my many liberal-democratic friends, to the extent that (as much as I admire their steadfast commitment to representative democracy) I remain unable to vest my hopes in the the political process.

I’ll see whether I can record the talk when I give it, and I’ll post both the recording and a rough transcript.

Dogmatic Prospects

The Disseminary is uploading the classic out-of-copyright Anglo-Catholic theology textbook Theological Outlines by Francis J. Hall. My student colleagues Debra Bullock and Ryan Whitley have already made great progress (Ryan’s name doesn’t appear yet, partly because he’s working on the second volume, and partly because he’s logged in from my own office computer). The entries are not quite in order; I’ll try to keep the hyperlinks rightly arranged as the articles come available. Eventually, we’ll try to whip up a marked-up XML version and a nicely-formatted PDF, but for now we’re concentrating on entering the data in the first place.

I don’t assent to everything Hall writes, but the presentation is straightforward and orderly, and there’s space for discussion in the comments. In many ways, it’s a proof-of-concept endeavor.

One reason I’m pointing to this now, while we’re still in-process, is that we have access to the second editions of volumes one and two, but only the first edition of volume three — and the second edition introduces some significant alterations. If someone has a second-edition third volume available that my assistants can use — and that involves a lot of scanning, so it risks the binding — please let us know. We’ll acknowledge your generous sharing on the site.

What I Said (Or Would Have)

Michael Bérubé is planning to devote a series of blogposts to explaining why intellectually-active people ought to be acquainted with what’s gone on in “theory” over the past few decades, and if the whole series lives up to the clarity of his first entry, this’ll be a memorable contribution. I wish I had had the leeway to write as conversationally as he does when I put together my book on postmodern thought, but the editors very stiffly removed almost everything that resembled informal diction. Only by my utter intransigence did the book retain the traces of relaxed exposition that it does.

(I wrote this before Michael stopped by to correct my confusion about his current base of academic operations; annoyingly, I had noticed my mistake when I went to his site to read this very post, but then I forgot to correct myself.)

Before Linnaeus and Buffon

David’s recent blogging about zoological taxonomies reminded me of a favorite book of mine, now beautifully reproduced online — the Aberdeen Bestiary.

Where else can you find the valuable knowledge that “when [the beaver] knows that a hunter is pursuing it, it bites off its testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes. But if, once again, another hunter is in pursuit, the beaver rears up and displays its sexual organs. When the hunter sees that it lacks testicles, he leaves it alone.”? Or that the deadly basilisk (Harry Potter to the contrary notwithstanding) measures only 6 inches long, with white stripes? (Not my favorite illustrations of hoopoes, though.)

Dr. Weinberger, I hope you address the relation of this taxonomic (indeed, “folksonomic”) masterpiece to the internet, along with your reflections on its more famous heirs.

Sermon Report

I stopped writing last night at about 12:15, came back and went to sleep. I woke up this morning, had a half-cup of coffee, and set to rewriting the ending. I wrapped up the rewrite in the sacristy at about 9:45, and the service started up at 10:00, right on time. I think the sermon went all right. I’ll tuck it into the extended section, and when St. Luke’s posts the MP3, I’ll link to it here.

The version I post here will differ in some details from the PDF that I’m sending off to St. Luke’s office, and will differ from the MP3 version, too. Is there a text in this sermon?
Continue reading “Sermon Report”