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To AKMA's Seabury-Western Home Page Email me at Seabury AUTHENTICITY PREMISES Voice, Authenticity, Style, Politics Faculty and Administration of the University of Blogaria  Prof. of Hyperlinked Humanities, Primus Inter Pares David Weinberger Provost and Vice Chancellor of Imaginary Affairs Frank Paynter Wealth Bondage Registrar Halley Suitt Dean of Memetic Engineering and Reader of Thoughts Kevin Marks Research Professor of Markup Cryptology Phil Ringnalda Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon Foundation Professor of Early Japanese Literature Jonathan Delacour Abraham J. Simpson Chair of Desultory Conjecture Steve Himmer Clued Professor of Micro-journalism and Women's Studies Jeneane Sessum Prof. of Digital Psychometry Eric Norlin Christopher Locke Prof. of Comparative Kim Novak Ray Davis Ho Chi Minh Chair in Vietnamese Studies & American Poetry Joseph Duemer Section 508 Prof. of Web Accesibility and Useability Mark Pilgrim Professor of Haemophagy and Laputan Linguistics Naomi Chana Harley Davidson Saddle of Comparative Literature Tom Matrullo Prof. of Melanesian Hermeneutics Alex Golub Prof. of Linguistics Dorothea Salo Zimmerman Professor of Music and Poetics Mike Golby Senior Lecturer in Tlonian Area Studies and Chaplain A. K. M. Adam Szarkowski Chair of Photography Jeff Ward Prof. of Analytic Philosophy and Korean Area Studies Stavros Alfred E. Newman Foundation Chair in International Blogging Relations Shelley Powers Prof. of Gluation and Scissorology Mark Woods Professor of Folklore & Mythology Renee Perlmutter Crone-in-Residence, Purveyor of Eclectic Mysticism�??�?� and Professor of Rhetorical Ritual Elaine de Kalilily Prof. of Fractured Philosophy Tom Shugart Director of Music, Blogaria School of Divinity Tripp Hudgins House Band Shannon Campbell Audio-Visual Guy Josiah Adam Campus Cat Dizzy, at Allan Moult's place DAILY BLOGS The Usual Posse Doc Searls Dave Rogers Victor Echo Zulu Gary Turner Textism Jordon Cooper Elke (Sisco) Zimmermann sacra doctrina Mike Sanders ZINES The Ekklesia Project Fellowship 
Member of the JOHO Curling Team  
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Saturday, March 30, 2002 ( 6:18 PM ) Sermon refluxI should have noted that Friday morning David Weinberger directed my attention (while he was in Florida? what a guy) to this editorial in USAToday. . . . Permalink -Main Page-( 3:06 PM ) Paradise in our timeDoc Searls's anti-CARP postings put me onto Radio Paradise a while ago, after I had tried unsatisfactorily to tune in a couple of Web-streaming stations a while ago. Paradise reminds me of the radion stations of my formative years, when I found out that the broadcast choices were not limited to WAMO (the soul station, that none of my friends listened to so I learned that I wasn't supposed to, though I secretly listened to it for a long time after, even after the presence of the Osmonds on a soul station's top 40 disenchanted me), or WIXZ (straight top 40) or KDKA (utterly mainstream adult AM, but with Pirates games cast by Bob Prince and Nelly King)--which meant WDVE Pittsburgh and WBLM Lewiston-Auburn (Maine, though by the late seventies the FM moment was already slipping away).All of which is to say that I've had more fun listening to Radio Paradise than I have any radio station in twenty-five years, and I don't want to see the CARP gobble them up. Let it rock. Oh, and I forgot--the one drawback to Radio Paradise is its playlist function, which (under the guise of providing helpful information) tantalizes me with the news of the cuts I just missed. Permalink -Main Page- ( 9:33 AM ) Versions of JudasWhat became of Judas? St. Matthew suggests that he hung himself, unable to live with the consequences of his informing on Jesus--though Matthew also emphasizes that God will forgive anything short of a crime against the Holy Spirit, specifically including speaking a word against Jesus; God offers abundant forgiveness to anyone who repents (and Judas' regret certainly bespeaks a degree of penitence), so Matthean theology suggests that Judas might die forgiven. St. Luke, in the Acts of the Apostles, does not ascribe penitence to Judas, and does not narrate his death by hanging, but says that he stumbled and his internal organs exploded (a favorite mode of death for Luke). Theological pioneers Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice ascribe Judas' actions to a misplaced activism. Nils Runeberg developed three successive theories about Judas: first, that he was a necessary tool in the divine plan of salvation, for which he ought not be vilified; second, that he was an ardent follower of Jesus' teaching of renunciation, so much that he felt obliged to renounce even his loyalty to Jesus; third, that Judas, by bringing about the salvation Jesus promised was himself the least of all, the slave of all, hence the one anointed by God.These representations of Judas lack one thing: an account of Judas' persistent voice in culture. Judas (as Runeberg acutely demonstrated) knew best of all what Jesus taught; if Peter was the rock on whom Jesus established his congregation, Judas was the restless discontent into whom Jesus instilled his subversive spirit of inquiring and teaching. One legend has it that Judas did not in fact die, but moved from place to place, raising unwelcome questions, scribbling pseudonymous tracts against hypocrisy, against greed, against exploitation. This version of Judas traces the imperishable irritant from an ancient feud with Seneca (Judas argued that though the Apocolocyntosis appropriately filleted Claudius, it amounted in the end to nothing but a crass ploy to curry favor with Nero), to companionship with the exiled and embittered Spinoza, to a minor cure under the supervision of his patron Dean Swift, down to this very day when, his identity concealed by obscurity and odium, by the flaming brand, by the consuming blowtorch, he happily teaches his love of truth from behind the veil of opportunism and compromise. Take and read these things in memory of him, and be thankful. Permalink -Main Page- Friday, March 29, 2002 ( 10:17 PM ) Ideas Don't DieAt least, not so long as someone doesn't ignore them. Like Daniela (warning: not a permalink), for instance, who warms my heart by characterizing my pig-headed resistance to spatial metaphors for the Web as "admirable." I like her point already. I can't comment on her interpretation of Heidegger--not in front of David--but by and large I sympathize with her take on the Web, metaphors, and intelligence discussion.One reason I wanted to stick with "imagination" as the reference-point for my suggestion lay in the dodginess of the Web. I'm not sure the availability of the kind of outré websites that David Weinberger refers to in Small Pieces (see, David, I really did read it--it's just hard to write a thoughtful review in Holy Week) would make me more intelligent, but I'm confident that they might make me more imaginative. The Web amplifies the range of possible notions we might have, but doesn't necessarily affect our capacity to make sense of them, to assess their value, to make a coherent case for why one should think one thing rather than another (and I take these, without argument for the nonce, as markers of intelligence). Speaking of the Web and metaphors, I have to join the groundswell of dissenters to David's claim that the Web is not a medium (here, restated with amplifications here). Or, more to the point, I think I see where he's coming from, and I like it, but the "is it or is it not a medium" discussion moves at an angle oblique to what I appreciate in David's position. I gather from him that the Web, unlike television, film, radio, print, or fingerpaint, isn't a matter of messages imprinted in and transmitted via a distinct channel (broadcast waves for TV and radio, film for movies, paper and ink for print, and so on). Something different is happening here (it should be observed that if we police our terminology and say "internet" instead of "Web," a differentiation that David productively avoids, we might be closer to isolating a medium distinct from the Web's messages). But then David goes back to that spatial metaphor, and I'm at odds with him again. I'll work this out tomorrow morning. (Post facto note: I didn't.) Permalink -Main Page- ( 8:13 AM ) Maybe after Holy WeekI've been visiting and reading at Caveat Lector for a week or ten days. Dorothea Salo works on eBook specifications, and as I'm extremely worked up about the future of publishing and copyright issues, I've been hoping to learn from her blog (and I have learned a certain amount, but I don't know enough about XML to make sense of a lot of what she writes). Today she notes Michael Fraase's popular "When Elephants Dance," and affirms her unease with the present copyright miasma. Three cheers! As a critical network of creative-and-technical talents shapes up, the whole megacorporate rearguard action may simply become irrelevant. In the meantime, Mary Wehmeier writes an open letter to the sponsor of the latest legislative nonsense, and Doc Searl (no one entry, but it's a constant theme these days) and David Weinberger (most recently here) and Dave Rogers keep the kettle boiling. Tom Matrullo too, though he's away camping just now. Permalink -Main Page- Thursday, March 28, 2002 ( 8:12 AM ) Maundy Thursday MidwestAs Halley reads her part in Massachusetts, I'll be preaching here in Evanston. It was a tough sermon prep. I have mountains of things to do, and feel too distracted from my family, and nothing was working; I didn't have a hook. Since I've been inveighing so ardently for preachers to feel utterly free to borrow, I looked around for used sermons that I could recycle. Augustine had a very nice riff on footwashing, drawing together the scene at the beginning of John 13 with Song of Songs 5:2(!). I wanted that to work, very much, but just couldn't swing it. Then I looked at John Chrysostom, looked through George Herbert's poems, still to no avail. Finally I remembered Jean Anouilh's excursus on the nature of tragedy from his Antigone; it begins:The spring is wound up tight. It will uncoil itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. The least little turn of the wrist will do the job...That would work, but I had to wrest the emphasis from tragedy and its inevitability to the promise of grace that distinguishes the scene in the upper room from the scene in the court of Thebes. The Maundy Thursday service was scheduled to start at 6:30; actually, at 5:30, with a dramatic reading at a community dinner. At 5:15, the Anouilh quotation started working for me. 5:45, I printed. 6:30 the procession started. News FlashAs the family dashes around in a dozen different directions, to jobs, to choir, to classes, to church, it's tough enough to keep an eye on family, and prayer, much less on blogs--of which I've seen some interesting ones recently. But at a moment when no two of us were in the same place (I was at the office, Margaret was home studying, Pippa was at art class, Si was hanging out with Tim, and Nate was working at The Art Store), a letter arrived from Boston Conservatory saying that Nate was admitted for the fall. After we, and one should understand that to mean "Margaret--oh, and AKMA helped a little," home-schooled the guy for all these years, getting admitted to college is the sign we needed to affirm that we did an okay job. Whew!Last night was differentLast night, at the loving invitation of Julie and Beth, and Micah and Kaethe, we reclined at table and remembered the bitterness of slavery. We grieved for all the victims of every plague, and celebrated the promise of freedom. We remembered resistance in the Warsaw ghetto, and we gave thanks for lives joined together by the Eternal. We prayed for peace, sought (and found) what was hidden, we taught and learned and shared a feast (vegetarian and gluten-free--except for the matzoh--through Beth's and Julie's painstaking culinary ingenuity). At the end of our meal, we prayed, "Next year in Jerusalem," and Julie said, "United." United, all at peace, all together--may we live to share that feast. Thank you, Beth, and thank you Julie; thanks to David and Wendy, who have invited us to this table before. Peace.Permalink -Main Page- Wednesday, March 27, 2002 ( 8:23 AM ) PhooeyI didn't mean to not blog yesterday--I just couldn't induce Blogger to behave when I finally had the time to sit down and write. There goes my consecutive-days-blogged streak; Cal Ripken can rest easy. Permalink -Main Page-Monday, March 25, 2002 ( 10:54 PM ) Another take on postmodern theologyIf anyone was interested by the spasm of theoblogging between RageBoy and me, they might check on Joel Garver's notes from a lecture that Merold Westphal gave at LaSalle. Westphal's a very sharp theologian (hey. he's been president of the Hegel Society of America and the Soren Kierkegaard Society--that makes my head spin), and makes a noteworthy case for a particular way of construing the relation of postmodern theory to theological thinking, an account closer to the branch of the river where I live than to Mark C. Taylor's part of the delta. Permalink -Main Page-( 10:30 PM ) Better decideI turn my back for a day, and we're picking up teams of good guys and bad guys. I don't want to play.(a) I'm a pacifist; I'm against anyone using violence for coercion, ever. If someone wants to appeal to me to make the case that violence, though not ultimately justifiable, was less grievous a wrong than inaction, they'd have to make the a pretty extensive case--not the "he hit me first (or worse)" that typically passes as a rationale for so-called just wars in contemporary media reasoning. I wouldn't commend the violence, but at least I could know we were talking about the same bad news. (b) When peoples take fatal action against one another--whether they be gangs, nations, a nation against an ill-defined terrorist entity, a band of desperate oppressed resistors taking up the recourse of desperation--we need to try to understand what's going on. There's no superabundance of understanding floating around the world, and I'm perplexed by the notion that trying to understand people, even people whose actions are morally repugnant, makes those of us who seek understanding into terrorists' allies. (c) One of the sayings for which my students know me is, "It's more complicated than that." Binary decisions and forced choices artificially reduce the complexity we encounter in the world; rather than recognizing suffering among all parties to a grievance and observing that no one seems to have behaved irreproachably, a forced choice obliges us to determine that one side is Good and another Bad, thus occluding the extent to which the Good have transgressed (those transgressions become "justifiable") and the Bad have plausible complaints (the complaints are invalidated by their Bad behavior). I need not be talking about international policy here; I encounter it all the time in parish and academic life. The world I live in isn't that simple, and most particularly when someone is rationalizing coercive violence, they need to offer the very richest possible account of why their violence differs in kind from someone else's coercive violence. If we reduce conflicts to teams of white hats versus teams of black hats, we undermine the likelihood that anyone is exercising nuanced moral judgment--and if we advocate taking violent action without nuanced moral judgment about it, well, we're in an awful pickle. I decline to play for a side. If someone wants to tell me that I'm officially on the "other" side, that's their trip. It's happened before. I have no sympathy for terrorist acts. I'm rooting for anyone who works toward peace. I want to understand people who threaten me. Maybe that makes me Bad--but it's a Badness I have to live with, for the alternatives look plainly to be worse. Oh, and I still like Tom Robinson--but even a catchy song from someone with whose politics I typically sympathize can't make me choose between cluster bombs and hijackings; or between government-ordered military violence and suicide bombers; or between land mines and biological weapons. That's no choice. Permalink -Main Page- Sunday, March 24, 2002 ( 9:54 PM ) Who put these fingerprints?David W and I had some email correspondence today, in the course of which I proposed some of the following. I told him I'd blog these, so don't feel as though you're listening in--besides, I edited out all the incriminating parts.Our discussion about metaphors for the Web (key links now are here with further links backward and here) might better focus not on "space" or "mind," but exactly and precisely on the hyperlinks themselves. Pages may be spatio-place-ial, and the Whole Enchilada might be like a vast shared imagination (a constructed version of what Jung thought that we inherited unbidden?), but what makes the thing cool--as David often reminds us--is the links ("It's the links, stupid"). Links take us from bits of knowledge, which anyone can have or look up, to associations, which under physical-world conditions are principally (and in some cases constitutively) private, but which on the Web are shared. So any number of us can note the same news feed or idea, but each of us is liable to hyperlink it differently, and in those differences lie all sorts of exciting new associations for each of us. It's that transition, the opening up of what Laurence Sterne called "the strange combination of ideas" (I only remember that because I wrote a paper on "the sagacious Locke" and Sterne in college) (that's John Locke, not Chris Locke) into a shared associative space, that so provokes my imagination (and attracts me to David W's advocacy of the Web). But that's a feature of the Web that spatial or place-ial metaphors background (when we're talking about space/place, we're talking about stasis, whereas when we talk about links we're talking about transit. David suggested a connection with Heidegger's language of ek-stasis, going beyond oneself. That's cooler than what I was thinking: simply that the motion, the transitive quality that links sites together, might be the clue to what's been pestering me. Does this begin to make some sense, both of the shared interest in the topic we bloggers have in metablogging, and of why I might have been so reluctant about (static) spatial/placial metaphors? Permalink -Main Page- All times are local. Local times may vary. Minutes do not expire. A. K. M. Adam That which we have not yet bothered to imagine is not therefore impossible. |
He seems like a nice guy. Has he written any books? Would he come speak to us?
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