Updates

My installation of Leopard seems stable at this point, and I’m missing only a few passwords and registrations, so far as I can tell. (Whoops! I forgot to add an email account for disseminary.org; oh well. . . .)
 
I’ve had a lot of helpful feedback on the phone topic. Shelley emailed me, then posted, some extensive directions on playing hardball with mobile phone companies. Trevor and Kevin have offered disused Verizon-credentialed phones, while Bruce sent me to an online phone store, and Tom suggested picking up a substitute Verizon-OK model at a Big Box retailer. I’ll probably take up one of these suggestions, but I’m more irked than ever that I can’t just select a server and a phone manufacturer based on the quality and price of their services — rather than participating in a bizarre, anti-competitive hazing ritual to get phone service.

Asking Around

Margaret sent me to the Verizon store yesterday because the microphone on my cell phone no longer works. I didn’t come away with an audible sell, because the very patient Verizon franchisee explained that I wasn’t eligible for a new phone till April 8 — at which time I could receive a “free” phone if I re-upped for another two-year contract. I could, of course, buy a new phone at retail price, which would run about $150. “OK,” I asked, “without disrespect to your helpful service, what if I wanted to switch carriers?” Well, if I switched before August 8, I’d owe Verizon $175.
 
Now, I’m sure there’s someone out there savvier than I about the ways of the telco oligopolies. What would you suggest that I do? You can either leave a comment, or email me, or you can text me at my cell p[hone number.

One Of Those Other Days

I had been delaying the upgrade to the latest Mac OS, and — it turns out — for good reason. This was the most painful OS upgrade I can remember. Luckily, I had cloned my main drive before I started the operation. Unluckily, the cosmic forces of contingency hammered the interactions of my drive, the installation DVD, and the back-up drive, such that I ended up installing the OS about three times (I lost track after a while). Once it was all installed, the system wouldn’t boot; evidently, it needed its PRAM cleared. Then the usually-silky-smooth Migration Assistant pooped out partway into the transfer of files from my back-up to my main drive. I’ve been doing the rest by hand.
 
On the other hand, tomorrow probably won’t be worse than today.

Lambeth and Waiting

Rowan WIlliams has taken incessant hectoring for his approach to the current miseries of the Anglican Communion. Yesterday morning, I understood one reason I’d been sticking up for him through the storm of dissatisfaction.
 
Internal conflicts in church take shape in a context that is lost once the antagonistic parties formalize their exclusive distinction from one another. That is, once a church divides over the question of whether congregants are permitted to sing in harmony or only in unison, the two parties define themselves as “harmonic Anglicans” or “unison Anglicans” in a way that neither party was predefined before the schism. Once that “not-them” definition enters the self-consciousness of everyone concerned, it can be exceptionally difficult — impossible, as far as flesh permits — to bring together the groups who once separated, even if they no longer sense the urgency of arguing over congregational music. It will turn out that Harmonic Anglicans decide to tithe their gross income, and Unison Anglicans will make a voluntary pledge based on tax-adjusted income. Unison Anglicans will decide to ordain adolescents, but Harmonic Anglicans will reserve ordination to adults.
 
Especially when participants in the conflict believe that the well-being and integrity of common life depends on their interpretation of the gospel prevailing over their neighbor’s, they need to preserve as long as possible the conditions that conduce to sustaining that common life — even if that entails impatience and dissatisfaction — last we burden our heirs with the task of rejoining an even more intractably divided [ex-]communion. So far as I can tell, Williams is not rushing deliberations toward a “decisive” outcome, not because he’s wishy-washy or lacks principle, but because he cares with all his heart for the possibility of unity, and that possibility would suffer devastating harm by any formal schism.
 
Oh, and the Archbishop didn’t suggest that the UK inevitably adopt sharia law, as a careful, patient reading of his remarks should make clear.

One Of Those Days

In a good way, I mean.
 
I had to take Blue Bumpy back to the garage for some more LaRue Lovin’ (the cooling system had developed an airlock that was overheating the engine, non-heating the cab, and forcing radiator fluid out of the pressure valve), and I discovered that sitting in the garage waiting room, sipping burned coffee and reading, listening to my iPod, that I was overflowing with ideas. I could hardly write fast enough to note down angles that I want to incorporate in the sermon series, in the first chapter of the Matthew book, in articles and talks. I’ll try to develop some here, but my highest priority is whipping them into shape for the particular writing assignments I have this season.
 
But doesn’t that feel great, with ideas sizzling through your mind like lightning, connections between intuitions and evidence coalescing, explanations leading to inferences that lead to new insights. I almost hope the car needs more work in the near future — but you can’t recapture those intervals simply by recreating the circumstances, as any number of novels and films have tried to teach us.

Lent

An unusually early Lent and Easter, during which time I have four Holy Week sermons to prepare (about 2000 words each), one article (2600 words), and a paper for discussion here at the Center. Add in a few other preoccupations, and please understand if I’m paying only partial attention to Blogaria.

Drawing Interpretive Conclusions

Two links:
 
First, a connection at Boing Boing pointed to Clarence Larkin’s marvelous (if theologically debatable) charts illustrating the principles of dispensationalist biblical interpretation. I’m wondering whether it might not make a good assignment or exam question to ask students to explain problematic aspects of these charts, or to design alternatives.
 
Second, Bibliodyssey pointed to blockbook illustrations of the Book of Revelation. This, too, would make a useful assignment; compare the illustrations with what you read in Revelation, and come to class prepared to discuss the congruence (or the discontinuity) of the illustrations with what your text suggests.
 
(Cross-posted at Beautiful Theology)

More Precisely

I’ve heard this report a number of times, each account prominently using the term “accidentally” to describe the U.S. armed forces’ killing of nine Afghani civilians. Would it not be more precise to say that the military mistakenly killed the civilians? It’s hard for me to see how dropping a bomb on some buildings and killing the wrong people counts as an “accident.” The military deliberately bombed the buildings; it wasn’t, so far as I can tell, a matter of a clumsy pilot hitting the “bomb” button instead of the “left turn signal” button.

Doing It In Public

I read Jeffrey Di Leo’s article on “Public Intellectuals” over at Inside Higher Education, and — although I disagree with him vigorously at a number of points — I was interested enough to read to the end of a lengthy argument. I think Di Leo’s train takes a very wrong track in the last section on “corporate intellectuals,” but much of the preceding analysis strikes a chord.
 
Rather than bemoaning the bad times for “public intellectuals” or cheerleading the advent of (shudder) “corporate intellectuals,” I’d suggest studying the hard times on which subtlety has fallen. Subtelty and its companions nuance and distinction pay great long-term benefits, though it’s not always clear at a given moment where the benefits will lie. They are non-partisan in the best sense: they speak for the truth, which is almost always more complicated than facile sloganeers make it out. They defer to no celebrity, no power, no hipness.
 
I don’t know enough about accounting practices or stock-picking or other high-financial enterprises, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that over the past decades, the laws concerning corporate value and the culture’s continuing hysterical fear of death (and concomitant desperate sucking for the utmost temporal profit every minute) have eroded the sense that it’s in anyone’s interest to build toward long-term value. On the corporate side, that leads to transactions-for-transactions’ sake, Enron, tulip crazes, and so on; on the cultural side, that encourages partisanship of various sorts, the efficient superficiality that keeps one maximally free to adopt whatever new trend arises, echo chambers, and so on.
 
I have the strong feeling that I’ve just driven firmly through the barricade that might prevent me from speaking beyond my ken, so I’ll leave it at that. Corporate intellectual? No, thank you.

Not Top Ten List

Margaret noted to me yesterday morning that the organ prelude was “Consolation in D Flat,” which (she observed) didn’t sound like a propitious key for consolation. I, in turn, pointed out to her that the composer was evidently the obscure taxonomist “Franz List,” so we shouldn’t have expected too much.