We're on an Information Superhighway to No-where

All the same, I'm stuck pondering the topic. Each of these insightful ruminators (I didn't say "ruminants") points out ways that "space" serves us well as a metaphor for the Web--but each assures us that the Web is very different from space as we know it. Fair enough--"difference" is what makes a metaphor different from a simple statement of identity. But let's take up Tom Matrullo's hint that music might provide a powerful alternative to "space" as a guiding metaphor for our Web exploration. Or further down in his blog, prosody itself, with caesuras, ictuses--perhaps spondees and anapests. (I mostly just wanted to say "spondee" online; I've always loved spondaic meter, because it's so hard to keep up for more than a few words).

The impetus for my question, the one I want to stick with, derives from my caution that all the ways in which "space" suits our exploration of the Web--and I don't dispute that fitness--may insulate us from the weirdness of the (non-)spatial or even placial features of the Web. The weird part is the Web I want to explore, and I don't want to have trouble recognizing it because I'm wearing "space"-colored glasses.

But I'm probably wrong. Tom's not, though. Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 4:30 PM )  

Famous?

Hang it Up

He Could Write a Book

More Than One Answer

AKMA: I don't by any means expect everyone to believe what I believe. Mercy, I am alert enough to have learned that relatively few people believe what I do. I listen with respect to what people say about what they believe as long as they give an account of it that testifies to someone extending her- or himself to his/her fullest capacities to understand what they're up to. Longer, really, 'cause I don't want to make a grievous error in presumption. Of course, that's the secret to, what?, eighty percent of ministry: knowing how to sit patiently and recognize when someone really does want you to say something, and when they don't.

Halley: Sitting patiently and waiting and listening is the only posture worthy of adopting.

My rather eccentric uncle used to start every conversation with "Have you taken Jesus as your personal savior?" in a casual "How about them Yankees?" tone. It was off-putting for many, as you can imagine. It was much too "born again" for most of my straight-laced Presbyterian family. He lived in the Lower East Side of NYC, much to my family's chagrin and embarrassment and started a church himself and helped many people.

I wonder if "organized religion" is just too formal for people these days and they must go for God in oblique ways.

AKMA: The tag "organized religion" irks me a little. How much in our lives, really now, do we want to be disorganized? Rapid transit? Medical care? College basketball (go, Duke!)? If the argument is that churches are too organized, I wonder which churches we're talking about; I don't know any (and the best-organized churches I know are often the strongest arguments in behalf of "organized religion"). Perhaps we should say "bureaucratized religion"--I could get on board with that, I guess, though I think that the Vatican, for all its faults, has more going for it than its detractors commonly allow. The problem tends to be bureaucratization + patriarchy (as your pastor's prof at Harvard Divinity School, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, would affirm).

Halley : I only meant what people call 'organized religions' like Catholicism, Protestanism, Judaism, churches/temples with big buildings and worship times and all. I wasn't saying anything about whether they were organized or not.

{Other stuff}

AKMA: When people with a little power, with oblique power, like their power and want to use it, they almost inevitably fall into malign relations with those among whom they have been vested with authority. It's not the authority per se (that happens willy-nilly in all spheres of life, as we can illustrate abundantly in our own blogcircles), but the determination to use it. Kinda Lord-of-the-Rings-y, but nonetheless true, I think.

Halley: The most frightening part of knowing God is learning about power and powerlessness.

AKMA: Oooh! You can say that again. There's a malignant romanticization of "powerlessness" that's cruelly complicit with evil, and a petulant romanticization of opposition to power that's tediously self-congratulatory. I give thanks that I was led to study the theoreticians I did, to help me toward a more nuanced treatment of power that helps me accept with awe and caution what's given me, and to beware the impulse to lay claim to more.

Halley: I like to read people like Deepak Chopra and Shakti Gawain, as they express notions about the soul, about the material world, the experience of reality that lets me think more broadly. Perhaps they are saying the same things that good old time Christianity addresses, but like fast food, they make it more accessible in some way.

AKMA: Deepak Chopra and Shakti Gawain make my flesh creep, but not because of my starchy orthodoxy (I do love starched clothes , though; one of my students assured me it's a gay thing, which only complicates my already-knotty identity). It's because I don't hear in their voices the notes of wisdom by which I recognize the truth. I don't hear it in the way that I hear it when the Berrigans, or (usually) the Dalai Lama, or Meister Eckhart, or the Sutras, or Sufi teaching traditions bespeak the truth. I'll withhold unfavorable characterizations of Chopra and Gawain, but simply suggest that you think about the music you hear closest to your heart's beat, and then of the music that apparently addresses similar topics, but in a less satisfactory, more commercially successful mode.

The problem for me isn't whether people carry a nihil obstat and imprimatur from the Orthodoxy office--it's whether in their divergence from what I understand to be true, I recognize in them an awareness of the ways to truth as I know those ways (or whether they prompt me to reassess the ways I had been relying on). Lots of non-orthodox (non-Christian, non-religious, anti-religious) sages teach me much.

Halley: Really, one could ask why is your religion more legitimate than someone else's? If they get sustenance from it, learn moral practices, gain the ability to choose compassion over hatred by practicing their "religion", what's the difference? Are you a religious snob? Is it just about a fancy building and silver chalices?

AKMA: Well, I do love church architecture and I'm very high-church myself, so you may be able to get an indictment on those charges.

"Why is your religion more legitimate than someone else's? "--there's the hard question. Religious faith, after all, isn't demonstrable in the same ways that gravity or thermodynamics are demonstrable. Wise, erudite spokespeople for divergent faiths reach opposite conclusions, and untutored devotion has much to teach the most sophisticated divines. All true.

At the same time, that doesn't warrant saying that everything's as good as everything else. To return to the music metaphor, one can't prove that Elvis Costello is better than N Sync--but I know he is.

There are complex nets of premises, consequences, and connections among them to which we need to pay painstaking attention if we want to lay claim to authority in these non-metric fields of knowledge....
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      ( 9:04 AM )  

Where in the Hell's That At?

I'm still lobbying for a change in our repertoire of metaphors--the radical changes in our ways of thinking and relating to one another won't come to light as quickly if we persist in trying to define and identify them with conceptual nets whose roots lie in limited-availability, spatial media. "Bloggers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your outworn metaphors!" Permalink -Main Page-
      ( 8:28 AM )  

Close Down Those Corporate Jam Factories

No Particular Place to Go

I'd been tempted to reject the notion altogether before I read what David has to say about the Web's "persistence." He points out that our experience of the Web's "persistence," its durable continuity, grounds our perception of the Web as a place--in contrast to such modes of interaction as telephony and ham radio (and he might have added in light of Friday's talk, instant messaging). That's a good point, and I hadn't been thinking in those terms. Still, wonder if our sense of the hyperlinked aspect of the Web (DW's point #3) doesn't far outweigh our sense of the Web as an enduring spatial domain. "Space" typically entails "extension" for everyday life; space has dimensions of height, breadth, depth, all of which are absent (or extremely different) with relation to the Web. Our first round of metaphors helped us grasp the notions of linked compositions (hence, a "Web" or a "superhighway"), but the very metaphors that communicate "linking" also imply distance. In physical reality, we need links to connect two remote locations; in the Web, though, our pages are not so much physically far from one another; for all we know, the pages we read and write are being served from the caches of a single server.

I'm not about to supply a newly-minted, copyrighted Superior Metaphor. None has come to mind. But one of my concerns as we modulate into the new regime of hyperlinked presence involves the ways our leftover metaphors constrain our behavior under different conditions. Davids' talk seems to draw on an etymology of "Utopia" as eu-topia, from a Greek compound that would mean "good place" (DW fretted with the possible/impossible extent of "perfection" in the "new" and "fresh" Web), but one might also derive "utopia" from ou-topia, "no place," and that line of thinking appeals more to me. How might we imagine the Web if we tried to conceive it nonspatially?

But If You Study the Heuristics and Logistics of the Mystics. . . .

First, Elaine Pagels is an outstanding scholar. I agree with her about some things and disagree with her about others, but my pique was directed at Alex Burns,not at her. Second, the responses that Mark obligingly cites from First Things are only somewhat more likely to yield illuminating assessments of Pagels than is disinformation. First Things leans heavily toward a particular (generally conservative) version of Catholic teaching, such that it would be surprising to find a positive review of Pagels's book there. At least First Things knows something about theology and church history, and they enlisted as a reviewer Jeffrey Burton Russell, a scholar of stature roughly comparable to Pagels. (Some would disagree about that; the point, however, isn't their precise equality, but the fact that both are widely-known, widely-respected scholars.) Third, and this is the point I wanted to make, Burns fallaciously ascribes to Pagels authority as a spiritual teacher, whereas her studies, credentials, and writings justify her authority as a historian. Historians can be spiritually enlightened, and people with a rep for spirituality can be frauds--but Burns treats her acknowledged brilliance in one field as the basis for a very different sort of authority.
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