Positive Outcomes of Vanity

I’ve been checking over at the Christian Century website more regularly these days, as they asked me for a column responding to the recent meeting of Primates and the Communiqué that the meeting promulgated. Those visits stem partly from vanity, but also partly from a degree of worry about how the column will be received (on which more later).

Because I was paying attention, though, I caught two columns that impressed me very favorably. James Alison’s piece on drowning in theology aptly communicates the joy of coming to understand what you thought you already knew — and that understanding disclosing vast frontiers of yet-undiscovered brilliance and depth and wisdom.

Over on the Century’s blog, Lillian Daniel meditates about why pastors write badly (focusing her attention on the newsletter). She proposes a very charitable analysis, suggesting on one hand that we “pour our creativity into that weekly sermon, and sometimes at the end of all that, the well has run dry.” She does not suggest, as she might, that a sizable proportion of the pastors about whom she’s thinking just don’t understand writing (or any form of communication) that well, and that those who might have obliged them to write better either never really tried, or gave up in baffled desperation. Whatever the factors, she gently urges that church leaders remember how great a proportion of their work involves writing, how high the stakes are.

Fear Factor

I’ve recently heard an unfortunate number of people explain conflicts in which they’re involved by ascribing “fear” to the people with whom they disagree. That’s so very problematic. . . .

I don’t doubt that people rationalize public positions that they arrive at by way of private, perhaps unconscious fear. I take that as a given.

Nonetheless, that principle applies across the board; it can’t be reduced to “People like me are rational, people like them are fearful.” That’s why it’s a toxic tactic in public argument. It either trades on the presumed immunity of Side A to fear (“I’m a bold exponent of the truth! You, on the other hand, are an intellectual coward”), or undermines everyone’s arguments (“Golly, one of us might be afraid and justifying our strident polemic out of a kind of insecurity and projection”). Accusations of fearfulness amount to a more sophisticated, condescending version of name-calling, but (as with accusations that “you’re being defensive”) they perniciously privilege the accuser and diminish the accused, just on the basis of the accusation. If we hope for productive engagement with one another, we can’t afford to impute “fear” to our partners.

There are, of course, better and worse reasons for suspecting other people of fearful discourse. Still, once you enter public controversy, the accusation that your adversary is “afraid” no longer functions as a diagnosis for peculiar argumentation, but as a disrespectful derogation of your interlocutor. Those who brandish that accusation forfeit their claim that others interact respectfully with them.

Seminary 3.0

I find myself in the very odd position of writing and talking about seminary education under Web 3.0 conditions, and receiving appreciative feedback for it, with no immediate prospect of participating in a project that realizes the characteristics I describe. I suppose the “appreciative attention” beats “gales of derisive laughter,” though.

Recent posts about rivals to Second Life tend to confirm my sense that the future holds a successor to the kind of context that Second Life has pioneered — but that successor isn’t on the immediate horizon. (That’s trivial, right? No one thinks that SL will be eternal. But I mean that if someone wants to modulate into a Web 3.0 environment, they should probably move into SL cautiously, not vesting all their resources in SL-specific features. Build out into SL, but build out as a staging area, not as though it will be the long-term platform for your online education venture. SL may have the winning recipe to be its own successor, and that revised iteration may preserve your SL assets — but there’s no need to gamble.)

On the other hand, institutions that shy away from persistent-media online venues will be less well prepared for the transition when it comes. Now is an entirely appropriate time to begin exploring avatar-oriented education; after all, Socrates did all right just wandering around the Agora with his students.

Got Math?

I took the MSNBC/Newsweek fifteen-question quiz on my “good basic knowledge of world religions” (not a precise description of the quiz, but I went ahead and took it anyway). When I got the first answer right, it told me that I had attained a score of 200% — pretty good, eh, considering I had only just started? Then I got the second answer right, and it said my score had dropped to 150%. Now, apart from the mathematical absurdity of my having a score over 100% after only two questions — and I agree that that’s a big “apart from” — my score actually declined when I got a second answer right.

For the rest of the quiz, my reported score again varied in ways that don’t correspond to a percentage-of-fifteen. So I think this whole set-up is an elaborate scam, designed to trap readers into boasting about hyperbolic scores that reveal that they don’t know anything about math. Either that or the quiz programmer. . . no, it must be a trap.

Escape From The Land of “Like”-ness

My students know me to oppose the use of the verb “like,” on the grounds that it typically signals a student’s unwillingness to participate in critical evaluation of their claims. “Like” doesn’t entail accountability for discernment. I like vanilla ice cream more than I like chocolate, and there’s an end on’t.

You can quickly see why the “like” reflex corrodes academic discourse; if different arguments and truth-claims matter only as a matter of a reader’s preference, then consistency, rigor, precision, all go out the window. The problem intensifies in the field of theological study, where cultural predisposition already consigns our topic to the realm of private disposition. Why shouldn’t Henrietta say she likes to think of Jesus as just a really swell teacher, or Mercutio say he likes Tom Wright more than Dom Crossan? Well, to start with, Crossan and Wright and the conciliar fathers all advanced arguments for their positions; if their influence depends solely on their winsomeness, as distinct from the convincing arguments they advanced, their intellectual efforts were squandered. Moreover, in the regime of “Like”-ness there’s no rationale for a student to learn more; anyone can like this or that without apprehending the nuances, the contexts, the consequences of their subject.

“Liking” and “commending” or “affirming” entail different complexes of claims. I may like a scholar whose theories I wouldn’t endorse; I may dislike a scholar who has devised a compelling argument. Indeed, I may like or dislike arguments themselves, without regard to whether they convince me. “Liking,” in these circumstances, suggests an unwillingness to relinquish the habits that arise from ignorance. If we aren’t willing to resist “like” theology, we might as well not bother with theological education; if we sense some value to theological education, we need to support it by rooting out “like”-ness.
 

Every Change A Sea

When did it become a mandatory cliche that every significant change be called a “sea change”?

I relish the sense of mysterious transformation to which Shakespeare applied the expression “sea-change” in The Tempest; when writers imprecisely apply it to simpler differences, I second Paul Brians’s advice: “Avoid the phrase; otherwise you will irritate those who know it and puzzle those who do not.”

Mmph Gmph Mmmmb Mmmph

Last night, Pippa and Margaret and I went out to dinner to celebrate their recent accomplishments, and in the course of ingesting my grilled vegetable sandwich, I bit my tongue, hard. Really hard. Today I find that so long as I only talk a very short while, everything works okay. If I talk for a long-ish while, though — say, reciting a psalm or leading a class discussion — my tongue starts swelling and I have a very hard time pronouncing things.

OK, since I’m complaining about one thing, I’ll mention another and get it out of my system: the winter has lasted long enough that my skin has dried out to the point of near-flammability.

Sorry for the kvetching. I’ll get back to other topics.

More Bad

A few weeks ago I posted a link to a “worst rhymes in pop music”, a topic that rewards — albeit poorly — the copious attention it inevitably attracts once you start thinking about it. In subsequent days, radio stations have driven home to me another “worst” category worthy off note: “worst syntax.” Some rhymes, after all, are themselves perfectly kosher, but their authors arrive at them by way of gruesome constructions or incoherent expressions (not “obscurely evocative,” but “outright insultingly stupid”).

The paradigm case, or course, is America’s “Horse With No Name,” which attains immortality in so many categories of badness that it’s not quite fair to include it with the rest of the popular song oeuvre.

In the desert, you can’t remember your name
Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no fame

Note that “name”/“fame” is a righteous rhyme, all right — and let’s bypass the issue of whether living in the desert induces onomamnesia — but that last line defies any English-speaker to utter it with a straight face. “There ain’t no one” — well, we’ll cut these young men some slack thus far — “for to” — oh dear, they lapse into a construction that might work in a folk song, a genuine folk song or an earnest imitation, but sounds painfully artificial in pop — “to give you no fame” — start with the triple negative “Ain’t. . . no. . . no. . . ,” then raise it by the power of the nonexistent expression “to give fame.” It’s a masterpiece of lyrical bad-osity.

But again, “Horse With No Name” attains sui generis badness status. If we look for a sublunary rival, what about Rod Stewart’s couplet from “Maggie May”:

I laughed at all of your jokes
My love you didn’t need to coax

Again, “jokes”/“coax” works; in fact, it’s a delightfully unpredictable pair that someone such as Cole Porter could have forged into a classic. But this pair’s second line transgresses every convention of English-language expression. The rest of the song has its plusses and minuses; Margaret doesn’t like it, but the band projects a strong, loose, semi-ragged conviviality that I admire. But that couplet comes around, and I have to wince.

Continue reading “More Bad”

More Excitement

It was only well into the first act that I realized I was watching a show that instilled in these young people the premise that drunkenness, thievery, kidnapping, licentiousness, and lying were amiable pastimes for friendly characters in a musical comedy. Still, the redoubtable Thin Ice Theater Company launched into Oliver! with gusto and verve. Pippa starred appeared as “Orphan” and, in an uncredited cameo, as “Night Watchman” (never has “Murder! Murder!” been shouted with such poignant urgency, such a tender compassion for the fallen streetwalker, such ironic metacommentary on the plot’s disquieting abjection of women).

Card-Playing Urchin

She was terrific, of course, and her choir experience contributed greatly to a production in which melody, pitch, and English accents conspired to stymie many of the young performers.

Downcast Street Child

And to top it all off, Nate won a prize today for Best Student Presentation at the annual music theory association meeting. And did I mention that Margaret passed the oral exam for her doctoral program, and is visiting home for the weekend? Are they marvelous, or what?

Infohighwayman or Culprit?

Mild-mannered clergyman and academic brushes up against notoriety again! My encounter with the Nantucket police department has gotten renewed attention in light of a recent Alaskan incident; that one earned me the “Infohighwayman” sobriquet. Now, it turns out, I’m a “culprit”; because I turn out to have written the first retrospective blog entry about Joey and Wendy’s wedding, which they asked that people not live-blog. Jennifer Saranow of the Wall Street Journal, who was unfailingly diligent, polite, inquisitive, and pleasant in our numerous conversations, construed my post that way, anyway. Apart from the somewhat incongruous characterization of my compliance as culprit-hood, it’s an innocuous enough account, and it’s fun to be relinked to Rachel and Ethan and Joey and Wendy.

Dave didn’t like it* — “it’s such a non-story” — and David resists the association of live-blogging with narcissism with the wise observation that “Live blogging is inexplicable enough that it seems likely to be an indicator of a more important fault line in how we’re constructing public and private spaces,” to which I lend heartfelt affirmation.

* Yesterday Dave took up the problem of disappearing blog archives I raised a few years ago, that Joi and David made fun of, that ultimately got me interviewed by France 2. So our paths cross and link twice in two days.

Done!

I just got off the phone with Margaret, who reports that her committee sustained her doctoral exams. She’s done with course work, done with being-a-student!

Eventually, she’ll submit a proposal for her dissertation and write it, but that’s a fundamentally different exercise. It’s a big job that not everyone can pull off, but it’s the sort that she’s actually better-prepared for than she was for the peculiar task of taking exams. Plus, after she’s done TA-ing this semester, she doesn’t need to live on campus!
Continue readingDone!