Having slept and showered and sorted the five days’ email into stacks labelled “spam,” “trash,” “answer immediately,” “ignore for now,” and “ignore for a long time till you can just trash them,” I now proceed to offer my overview of the SBL meeting from which I just returned.
Margaret and I traveled on Friday, flying out of O’Hare uneventfully and arriving comfortably in Toronto’s Pearson International Airport. After a we satisfied the relevant security personnel that we were neither terrorists nor smugglers, we connected with our dear friends Phil Kenneson and Steve Fowl, and all caught a taxi to our hotels. We regrouped for dinner with some other friends, most of whom were Duke grad students around the same time I was (which, if it were French wine, would be an increasingly valuable vintage), and wandered thence to the Ekklesia Project reception. We lingered there with the great EP folks till the staff closed us out of the reception room, and wandered back to our proper hotel.
Two digressions: first, Toronto’s convention area is honeycombed by a network of underground passages from block to block, designed to permit pedestrians to get around without unnecessary interactions with traffic or weather. These are no unadorned steam tunnels, but instead form a veritable underground mall with boutiques, food courts, and dentists and opticians. The system permits conference-goers to get from hotel to hotel to conference center without wearing heavy coats, but by the same token they channel unprotected pedestrians to only those locations that lie along the walkways (and conceal what looked, when I ventured into the outside world, like a significant problem with homelessness). I do wish I had a good picture of that illustration of the Michelin man in a diaphanous skirt, though.
Digression Two: The Royal York fairly radiates traditional elegance. It doesn ont, however, radiate “connectivity.” I had assumed too much when I left for the conference, and had not (I don’t know how this happened) loaded AOL into my applications folder. Wouldn’t a major business destination have in-room ethernet? No, it wouldn’t. So there I was, without AOL for dial-up connectivity or ethernet for broadband. I discovered Monday morning that they have a wireless area in the lobby for Those Who Know, probably their Presidential Club members, but I had neither the time nor the membership to work my way onto the network. Friends who had registered at other hotels smirked at me through the weekend as they had lovely broadband access, while I sweated through five days’ withdrawal from on-line-ity.
Saturday morning I had a committee meeting, then attended the session at which John Milbank represented the interests of Radical Orthodoxy to a panel of Mennonites who, in their turn, represented the Radical Reformation. Milbank, in vigorous form, argued that the Mennonites ought to seek a more epsicopal (I’m assuming he meant small-e “episcopal,” not “more like the Episcopal Church”) structure, and that pacifism (a fundmental element of Mennonite identity) was misguided and unrealistic.
You may imagine that this met with some resistance, though most of the response was patient and respectful; Gerald Schlabach took a couple of potshots at Milbank, one more pointed and justified than another. John had some ingenious, profound points to make, but he grossly underestimated (as he has in the past, and as he may well into the future) the sophistication of the peace churches’ commitment to pacifism. One ought not simply blow off anabaptists as though they were nothing but bourgeois North American liberals who feel real bad about something as tacky as war; the lived testimony of the peace churches demonstrates an ingenuity of nonviolent resistance that resounds from historic changes in the peoples and cultures with which they’ve interacted. And if, as John seems to suspect, the truly profound, dedicated pacifists have engendered a sort of “pacifist chic” (and if there is such a thing, I haven’t seen it, but then I might be the sort of low-depth intellectual hanger-on that John has in mind), one might well ask whether the cause of testifying to a deep Original Peace that passes human understanding is furthered better by dismissive scorn at pacifism, or by drawing as close as possible to the real thing (even if that doesn’t culminate in the total lived commitment that the peace churches themselves aspire to, and often attain).
(Sorry—that last sentence was pretty barbaric, eh?)
I’ll continue the Annual Meeting update in a series above. . . .
Posted by AKMA at November 28, 2002 12:26 PM | TrackBackBarbaric? Not at all... but then, that's only my point of view. Welcome back you low-depth intellectual hanger-on, I'm glad to see you made it [it was quite an operation] and that the pharmaceuticals have a decent half life. Give it a week or two and you should be back to normal. Alternatively, just cut the dose to half and rock on :).
Posted by: Mike Golby at November 28, 2002 02:41 PMBeing able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.
Posted by: Owen at January 13, 2004 08:57 AMThis variable is then used in various lines of code, holding values given it by variable assignments along the way. In the course of its life, a variable can hold any number of variables and be used in any number of different ways. This flexibility is built on the precept we just learned: a variable is really just a block of bits, and those bits can hold whatever data the program needs to remember. They can hold enough data to remember an integer from as low as -2,147,483,647 up to 2,147,483,647 (one less than plus or minus 2^31). They can remember one character of writing. They can keep a decimal number with a huge amount of precision and a giant range. They can hold a time accurate to the second in a range of centuries. A few bits is not to be scoffed at.
Posted by: Newton at January 13, 2004 08:57 AMTo address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Posted by: Wombell at January 13, 2004 08:58 AM