AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Blogroll Excuse

If you were on my blogroll and I haven’t got you there yet on this new page design, please be patient. I’m working out the kinks of using blogrolling.com, and trying to figure out an effective way to differentiate the various sites I visit regularly. Feel free to remind me, but please don’t feel hurt.

Say, what do real Web-users rely on for analyzing their referrer logs? I’ve been using sitemeter’s free service, which is fine as far as it goes, but since we have a real domain now and a real log resident thereon, I expect there’s some application that’ll help us see what’s happening, who’s visiting, and other stuff we can use to impress granting agencies with.

And by the way: the University of Blogaria will remain on the Seabury server, where (once we get the Disseminary squared away) I’ll begin to develop that august institution’s Web presence.

The Die is Cast

We flipped the switch this morning, and now our new location should be propagating through the aether, eventually to direct packets to this our new home. It’s exciting, as transitions usually are, and it has been and will continue to be a lot of work — but especially as this betokens the beginning of the Disseminary presence, it’ll be worth every bit of the effort.

Moving In

I’m really almost set to go cut my moorings to the Seabury server, I’m glad to welcome anyone who has come to poke around, set us straight about our page and site design decisions, and alert us to potential sites of embarrassment before our Grand Opening. I’ll being blogging more often here than I will there, so if you can be patient for two days or so, I'll change over the DNS and you’ll be good as gold.

Media Revolution, Next Phase

With Shannon Campbell giving away heaps of tremendous MP3s of her songs, and Protest Records giving away some of the politically-charged recordings that can’t get airplay on monopoly radio, not to mention Steven’s inspired Ben
& Mena song, it’s time for another step in the dis-integration of the music industry. I propose an alternative album cover art collective. (Has someone already done this? I'm not trying to claim priority here.) Like Blogstickers, only for CD covers.

Now it’s possible for us to burn back-up copies of our legally-obtained MP3s, but all too often we simply write the name of the CD with a marker directly on the disk. If we get ambitious, we print a cover that’s mostly just a list of the cuts. But just as there are gifted musicians out there for whom the music industry doesn’t have room, and gifted writers for whom the print world doesn’t have room (too many to count around here, but Jeneane to start with), there are surely designers around who could make covers available for CDs that don’t exist as official releases.

Hypothetically, someone would start a gallery of covers: thumbnails, with full size images and information on the music and performers in a separate window. One could do this for a collection (say) of Shannon’s songs, or for an assortment of available music.

For that matter, one could make alternative covers for commercially-released CDs. Some have covers so unutterably lame that anything would be an improvement. And a sharp enough designer might attract the kind of attention that gets them a job. . . .

MT Working, Mostly

Michal gave me the cue I needed to get MT working at the Disseminary site, bringing us one step closer to being able to start up the engine and kick the project into gear. You won’t be able to tell from the way the site looks right now — and I have to figure out how to export the MT entries from this address and import them at the Disseminary. I’m itching to go live, but we’re not quite there.

Aural Knowledge

Margaret and I were talking yesterday, as we drove to the Department of Motor Vehicles Office that turned out to be closed to honor State Rutabaga Day, about the metaphor of sounding “like a scratched record” (Margaret reminds me that the metaphor runs, “like a broken record, not a “scratched record”). There’s nothing else that exhibits the same behavior as a scratched record; a scratched or dirty DVD just freezes and staggers, at least in our DVD player. A scratchy CD won’t play, or stutters or hops around. But nothing else repeats the way a scratched record does. Generations to come won’t have an experiential basis for understanding that metaphor (as they may never have heard a phone ring, as opposed to buzzing or chirping or playing the first eight bars from “Oops I Did It Again”).

What brought this to mind was listening to “Eclipse,” the last cut on Dark Side of the Moon (Euan’s listening to it, too). On the copy we heard most often in college — John Markert’s copy — there was a scratch right at the climactic closing bars of the song:

All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
and everything under the su-
<scratch!> under the su-
<scratch!> under the su-
<scratch!> under the su-

and so on.

That reminded us that we knew of one other canonical record to which we listened regularly, that had a similar scratch at the end. We were sure it was by the Who, but we couldn’t remember just which song. Today, in the middle of a conversation about something else altogether, I interrupted Margaret to sing,

When I walked in through the door
Thought it was me I was looking for
She was the first song I ever sang
But it stopped as soon as it bega-
<scratch!>bega-
<scratch!>bega-

(That record belonged to John, too.)

And our children will never have that experience, although they’ll probably get sick of hearing us reminisce about it.

Anyone notice that I blog more now that I’m using NetNewsWire?

DRMA: "Pure And Easy" by Pete Townshend; "Oh Happy Day" by the Edwin Hawkins Singers; "Walk on By" by the Stranglers (oh, that’s so good!); "Dixie Chicken" by Little Feat; "God Moving Over the Face of the Waters" by Moby.

Peace and Truth

From John Milbank’s Theology and Social Theory, page 398:

If, indeed, there are no objective standards of truth and goodness, as nihilism claims, then every act of persuasion is in fact an at of violence. Yet, on the other hand, Christianity does not claim that the Good and the True are self-evident to objective reason, or dialectical argument. On the contrary, it from the first took the side of rhetoric against philosophy and contended that the Good and the True are those things of which we ‘have a persuasion’, pistis, or ‘faith’. We need the stories of Jesus for salvation, rather than just a speculative notion of the good, because only the attraction exercised by a particular set of words and images causes us to acknowledge the good and to have an idea of the ultimate telos. Testimony is here offered to the Good, in a witnessing that also participates in it. This commitment to a rhetorical, and not dialectical path to the Good opens out the following implication: only persuasion of the truth can be non-violent, but truth is only available through persuasion. Therefore truth, and non-violence, have to be recognized simultaneously in that by which we are persuaded. Without attachment to a particular persuasion — which we can never prove to be either true, or non-violent — we would have no real means to discriminate peace and truth from their opposites.
   An abstract attachment to non-violence is therefore not enough — we need to practice this as a skill, and to learn its idiom.

And from Pope Paul VI, Dignitatis Humanæ:

Truth cannot impose itself except by virtue of its own truth, as it makes its entrance into the mind at once quietly and with power.

And from John Howard Yoder, The Wisdom of the Cross, page 28, note 9:

Nonviolence is not only an ethic about power but also an epistemology about how to let the truth speak for itself.

Wee-Hah!

Tripp will no doubt blog this also, but I’m a-getting there first. Today the United Library of Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary and Seabury-Western had its periodic book sale, and some of us went to town. (Don’t tell Jane.) I spent $52 for two boxes and two bags of really great books. All right, for a few really great books, and a bunch of plausible candidates. I found the two volumes of Charles’s Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, a number of commentaries, books about Matthew for the book I’m having trouble writing (maybe I should go see Adaptation again), about eight Greek New Testaments, some Modern and Everyman’s Library editions of favorite books, and sundry biblical and theological works. They’re charging a scant $1 for hardcovers, 50¢ for paperbacks, and the price goes down over the next few days. It’s an addiction, I know — but sweet. Hey, Trevor went, too!

Number One With a Bullet

Go to Steven Frank’s blog to read the lyrics of bloggers’ anthem, “Ben and Mena,” as you listen to the MP3.

We’re On Our Way

Phase One-and-a-Half of the Great Disseminary migration has begun and, mostly, concluded satisfactorily. With much hand-holding from Dorothea and Michal, I got Moveable Type installed. I did, however, screw up a number of things along the way, so it’ll take a little more hand-holding, along with perhaps some anesthesia and furniture repair, actually to get Moveable Type working.

It’s one step closer to Trevor’s and my plan for world domination <evil chuckle=. . . .

For Disseminary Justification

Bob Carlton reminds me to some statistics I’ve seen floating around the Web from time to time. I don’t have the references for these, so I’m not going to rely on them, but I’ll put them here in case I ever want to come back to them (possibly to bolster a case for the Disseminary).

⊕ 28 million Americans have used the Internet to get religious and spiritual information and connect with others on their faith journeys.

⊕ 25% of Internet users have gotten religious or spiritual information online at one point or another. This is an increase from survey findings in late 2000, which showed that 21% of Internet users - or between 19 million and 20 million people - had gone online to get religious or spiritual material.

⊕ More than 3 million people a day get religious or spiritual material, up from 2 million that was reported last year.

⊕ George Barna Research notes, "By the end of the decade, 50 million Americans will seek to have their spiritual experience solely through the Internet, rather than at a church; and upwards of 100 million Americans will rely upon the Internet to deliver some aspects of their religious experience.

⊕ The Vatican notes that the Internet, "offers people direct and immediate access to important religious and spiritual resources-great libraries and museums and places of worship, the teaching documents of the Magisterium, the writings of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church and the religious wisdom of the ages. (II. 5)"

The first claim seems fair enough, especially if we make me reserve my cavils about the category of “spiritual information” until later. The second shouldn’t surprise anyone; presumably the original 21% still counted, and in the interval between the first and second surveys, 4% of internet users who hadn’t sought out ”religious or spiritual material” had done so. The third claim seems high, given the numbers reported above; presumably a lot of users get “spiritual material” every day, and others never do.

As to George Barna: the claim seems so ill-formed as to make it unlikely that it comes directly from the Barna group. I have big complaints about Barna, but he surely ought to sense that the idea of “hav[ing] their spiritual experience solely through the internet” raises all sorts of what-does-that-mean flags. What may pass as spiritual experience in my life has not always involved church; sometimes general solitude, sometimes contact with my dearest friends, sometimes with the majesty of creation — but even as pro-Web as I am, I don’t have a vague idea what it would mean to have a spiritual experience online, nor am I sure about “deliver[ing] some aspects of their religious experience” online.

But all of these are liable to impress granting agencies, so I should track them down and figure out a way to cast them in prose that doesn’t make me flinch.

Viral

When I re-jigger my blogroll — which I actually will, someday, soon — I’ll have a section called “Blogeny” for kids-o’bloggers, now including not only Si-man but also Jane’s daughter CJ and Chris’s daughter Selene.

[Kevin reminds me that I left out Andrew Marks — corrected!]

Have you noticed that I’m having a blast using NetNewsWire?

DRMA: "Porcelain" by Moby; "Flight 19" by Phil Manzanera and 801.

Woot!

I’m entering this from NetNewsWire, not simply a terrific RSS aggregator, but now also a very slick and handy blog editor. It took me a while to figure out how to make it work, but now I’m cooking with gas. (I keep forgetting to allow NNW to enter tags for me — but once I get used to using that capacity, I’ll be intensely spoiled.) My interest in figuring out the blog-editing capacities of NNW revived at Mena and Ben Trott’s visit to Seabury, which also began the groundswell of demand for a fuller, more basic introduction to TrackBack. A couple of days ago, they posted a beginner’s guide to TrackBack, an extremely helpful guide to implementing the protocol whose usefulness is only beginning to become clear.

My TrackBack hang-up isn’t covered in the beginners’ guide, however. I turned TrackBack on, but for some reason I’m not clever enough to figure out, MT doesn’t build TrackBack pages for me, so you’ll click in vain on my TrackBack links. 404 City, Baby, as Dick Vitale might say. I dont necessarily wwant to fix this; I think I’d rather have Trackbacks mixed in with comments in the way that Adam Kalsey’s SimpleComments plug-in permits. Maybe I’ll get around to this when Trevor and I move our blogs from Seabury’s server to our new home. Soon.

DRMA: "Steal Away" by Paul Robeson; "Black Crow" by Joni Mitchell; "Crazy Love" by Van Morrison; "Anchorage" by Michelle Shocked; "Cheepnis" by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention.

Human All Too Human

I ran across photographer Daniel Pepper’s column explaining why he regrets having gone to Iraq to serve as a “human shield.” (Actually, the headline — possibly not his responsibility — reads, “I was a naive fool to be a human shield for Saddam.”) I appreciate Pepper’s ambivalence about the exercise; the situation involves brutal complications, and ambivalence seems an appropriate response.

More than his ambivalence, though, I appreciated the conversion he experienced, from a somewhat starry-eyed romance of sacrifice and Iraqi antio-war unanimity to a more nuanced recognition that some Iraqis welcome the war and that the Hussein regime tries to manipulate the volunteers for their advantage. Thank heaven that there’s one fewer observer supposing that either the pro-war or anti-war position involves nothing more than unquestionably just international politics (on one hand) or putting flowers in rifle barrels (on another). Oversimplifying the situation doesn’t help anyone understand what’s up, and it seems as though Pepper has experienced a radical enrichment of his perspective.

At the same time, readers ought not suppose that every volunteer enters Iraq with as quaint a naïveté as did Daniel Pepper. The daughter of my old grad-school comrade Jonathan Wilson today arrived in Iraq with her new husband (well, they’ve been married for a few months, but that’s still new) not as “human shields” but as participants in a Christian Peacemaker Team. Leah and Jonathan (her husband, not [yet] my friend) explicitly note that they expect to be manipulated or even killed by an Iraqi government that may do anything to serve its propagandistic purposes. They aren’t going with daisies braided in their hair; they’re going to make visible, palpable, the possibility of confronting evil without violence. They’re going to live out their communion with Iraqi civilians (and from what I gather, many Iraqi soldiers) who want nothing to do with guns, bombs, propaganda, Saddam, or Bush. They’re going so that fewer people will feel free to shrug off civilian casualties as inevitable collateral damage from munitions delivery systems. Leah and Jonathan will surely learn more about the situation in Iraq from the time they spend in Baghdad, but their commitment to peacemaking and communion has little to do with Pepper’s disabused humanitarianism.

I’l be praying for them, for all whose lives are touched by the war, civilians, soldiers, politicians; for peace; and for an deep understanding that grows where patience and nonviolence help make room for us to listen and learn.

Hi, Bob

I’ve been tardy in acknowledging a lovely gift from Bob Carlton, a blog reader, church leader (and possible seminarian), and entrepreneur in technological and educational products. If I were to say that Bob sent a compilation CD of songs that he chose for Lenten listening, someone might think he violated copyright law; but no one could complain if I say that emailed me with a list of songs that seemed especially fitting for the season. Some I knew — who, with my taste, would not have heard Bruce Springsteen’s “Into the Fire”? — and some I recognized as I listened to them (The Blind Boys, Ben Harper, Bonnie Raitt, Johnny Cash, Rufus Wainwright). And David Sedaris’s report from Paris on learning French as a second language at Eastertime. But other songs were very new to me, and the compilation works beautifully together.

As I listened and thought about Bob, I thought about some of his earlier work in educational technology. Bob was involved with a couple of my least favorite programs (WebCT and the accursed BlackBoard) and was working the money-making side of the street. That’s OK with me; I’m not against folks earning a living. My argument with MegaCorp educational enterprises rests on the premise that they’re rushing to make the money that they can by providing “solutions” that prematurely constrict the commerical imagination relative to educational technology.

That’s not a fatal problem, of course; so long as tech/ed people like Liz, Alex, Anne, Sebastien Paquet, Sebatian Fielder, Jim McGee and countless others (and teachers like Trevor and me who have glimmers of intuition about possible aternatives), innovation will break through. If a company really got the cluetrainical gonzo marketing point, though, they’d see that perpetuating familiar models of “courseware” and even of commodified education offers only a short-term answer. They’d recognize that the digital transition will soon transform familiar products and practises, and would be funding experiments like Liz and Alex’s and the Disseminary. With a relatively low investment in experiments by educators who aren’t themselves R & D employees of the company, an alert entrepreneurial ed-tech company could observe what works and what doesn’t could indeed advance the rate of the transition and begin (ahead of competitors) to figure out how to make money under the transformed conditions.

Again, I’m not knocking Bob, who has generously offered his epxerience and insight to Trevor and me as we stagger along in our grandiose pedagogical experiment. thinking about his carreer, though, I wished that one of his former employers or clients were offering material support for the ventures that so excite me (and stand to benefit them, if they could see it).

[Postscript: After I finished typing, Bob sent a message reminding me that “on Monday, 24 March 1980, the Archbishop of San Salvador, Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdamez, was celebrating mass in the Chapel of the Hospital de la Divina Providencia when he was killed by a professional assassin. . . .” One of the many websites that report on Romero’s life reports that he said, “Peace is not the product of terror or fear. Peace is not the silence of cemeteries. Peace is not the silent result of violent repression. Peace is the generous, tranquil contribution of all to the good of all. Peace is dynamism. Peace is generosity. It is right and it is duty.”]

Cancel My Reservation at the Academy Awards

It was a busy day. The honorable, reputable part of the day involved going to early mass at St. Luke’s, then sprinting downtown (in the car) (not sprinting in the car, but driving fast) (no faster than other traffic on Lake Shore Drive, in fact less fast, but not lolly-gagging either) to St. Chrysostom’s to lead the adult education hour talk about St. Paul. Good sign: I found a parking place on the street, which is nearly impossible in St. Chrysostom’s neighborhood. I think that all those cars in parking spaces never move at all, but simply occupy the spaces that intruders might use to infiltrate the neighborhood.

This week was “Paul the Pharisee,” in which I coached the group on just how deeply Jewish Paul was (and remained even after he stopped persecuting and began working for the followers of Jesus). And even people who acknowledge that Jesus was Jewish have a hard time remembering just how Jewish Paul was; they can read passages such as “I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means!” (Romans 11:1) and “What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! . . . [T]he law is holy, and the commandment is holy and just and good” (Romans 7:7, 12) and “If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:Ýcircumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless,” and still imagine that Paul was crushed by his incapacity to fulfill the odious, burdensome Torah, so that he turned to the gospel of grace that put no particular demands on its adherents. Sigh. So I walked the St. Chrysostom’s adult class through Paul’s solemn insistence that God has not revoked the covenant, had not reneged on the promises to Israel, and that Paul retained the sense that being a Gentile was not the ideal state (he evidently said to Peter, “We ourselves are Jews by birth and not Gentile sinners. . . .”).

A good hard-working hour, and then I came back north to pick up Margaret and Pippa after the nine-o’clock service at St. Luke’s. We had our lunch, and then Si and I wandered over to Frank’s office where we pursued the less distinguished part of the day: the conference call with Oklahoma and Maine that convoked the annual Balking Heads Fantasy Baseball League auction. I came away from that draft with a moderately good team, although I spent too much money too early. I have a marked propensity to get annoyed when players are selling for less than they should, so I then bid for them and get stuck with bargain players who don’t fit into my team (and who use up salary money that I had planned to spend on others). But a good time was had by all, even if Alan does win the league again.

When I got home at about six, I checked my email and noticed that Alex had sent me a note directing my attention to BoingBoing, where Cory Doctorow had pointed to an exchange of messages between Stewart Butterfield (lead developer of the Game Neverending) and me, concerning the role of religions in the forthcoming, super-duper version of the game. Who needs Oscars when you can get BoingBoinged?

Day in a Nutshell

Finished a review on time.
Went grocery shopping.
Helped straighten up before dinner.
Jacob and Angela came over.
Duke won!
Prepared for adult class about St. Paul tomorrow morning.

More Newspeak

“Shock and awe” instead of “bombing the living (?!) daylights out of people”

“Coalition of the Willing” instead of “hypothetical list of nations whom the Bush administration has bribed or coerced to allow their names to be added to a secret list of supposed supporters”

“Target Opportunity” instead of “chance to kill Saddam Hussein himself, or at least his chief lieutenants”

Last Words

Dave asks me to have the last word, and I will do as he asks.

He says I misunderstood him; having read his long response, I can see some points at which he’s right. Dave suggests that I did this deliberately.

He accuses me of being passive-aggressive; I don’t know how to refute this charge. Passive-aggressive behavior infuriates me, and the only way I know to resist it is to speak openly, to say what I mean. There’s no defense against a charge of passive-aggressiveness, just as there’s no defense against the charge of defensiveness; if one tries to rebut the charge, the accuser can always shake his head knowingly, since he is sure you don’t really mean it. So if Dave knows me to be acting in a passive-aggressive way, there’s nothing I can do about it.

Perhaps the central issue for Dave involves whether soldiers acting under orders, in fulfilling their oath to serve, are in any way morally accountable to non-combatants. I stand by my three points. First, everyone is accountable for her or his actions, and any claim of moral immunity gives me sorrow because I don’t understand how a fully human life (of the sort that Dave enjoys reading about in the Greek philosophers whom we both appreciate) can flourish apart from that accountability. (Passive-aggressive behavior characteristically aims at achieving particular goals in ways that escape accountability.) If I understand him correctly, Dave wants to preserve for soldiers the prerogative to isolate their military actions from moral evaluation; such an insulation seems, as far as I can tell, inimical to the fully human, examined life. I repeat that I’m not pointing fingers or accusing anyone in particular, but Dave has already discounted that as more of my passive-aggressive rhetoric.

Second, I respect Dave, or at least I’ve been trying. I’ve been reading his blog for a long time, and have been trying to avoid tangling with him over these matters. I see that I misunderstood some of what he said; for instance, when he said that I wasn’t “fit” to judge soldiers, he meant that I wasn’t qualified to judge them (I’m not God), a point that I’ve always affirmed, explicitly, repeatedly, in this interchange. Reading Dave’s blog has been a pleasure and has taught me.

Third, I don’t see anything in this disagreement that maps to a distinction between my being a lofty academic and Dave’s being a lowly engineer. I haven’t been bombing Dave with footnotes or alluding to more correct interpretations of Greek words. Indeed, the passive-aggressive behavior of which Dave charges me would be unnecessary if I were using the social/educational advantage he imputes to me.

Again, this is a conflict that I think that neither Dave nor I needs. It’s pretty clear by now, I hope, how we disagree, and on what. I encourage Dave to respond again, if he wants, but please don’t ask me to have yet another last word; I’ll only repeat positions that by now are not only irritating, but tediously familiar. I apologize to Dave for any offense I’ve given him that derives from my shortcomings and lack of moral wisdom; let’s leave it at that.

Ward on Sado-Masochism

Margaret and Pippa I spent the afternoon at Northwestern University, where Graham Ward was appearing to talk through the relation of Christian theology to cultural sado-masochism (I kept wishing the Tutor had been there). Ward teaches theology and a heap of other culture-theory topics at the University of Manchester; he’s one of the key figures of the Radical Orthodoxy movement in contemporary theology, very smart, impeccable postmodern credentials, quite committed to the church, and an eloquent speaker. We had a chance to converse over lunch (along with Trevor, who’s picking up Susan at the airport tonight -- hi, Susan!), where with Regina Schwartz, Richard Kieckhefer, and several grad students, we talked about Derrida, the Iraq war, the nature of democracy, theology, and the Disseminary. Graham picked right up on our premises for the Disseminary, and asked what he could do for us — a query he may live to regret. But this is yet another step closer to getting the Disseminary off the ground.

He'd be great for the Big Fantasy, but I have a hunch he’ll have a major university post in the US soon.

Sleepless Prayers

I was having trouble sleeping last night, and so put my restlessness to the work of prayer: for the suffering of noncombatants, beset by terror on every side; for soldiers, killing and be killed, injuring and being injured in the name of causes greater than personal interest; and for their commanders, who make the decisions that will almost certainly result in thousands of deaths.

Honor, Obligation, and Grief

Dave “Time’s Shadow” Rogers has scolded me on a number of counts, among which are my fundamental misunderstanding of a soldier’s commitment, my shirking my responsiblity to support the army regardless of the circumstances, of speaking glibly about community, of letting down soldiers, and of covertly passing judgment on them. Jonathon has now seconded Dave, and I suppose I should respond — although any rejoinder I make already stands under Dave’s characterization of me as “unfit” to speak to this subject.

I don’t want to be in a shouting match with Dave or Jonathon. I don’t feel as though I have to convince them that I’m right and they’re wrong; if each of us respectfully speaks his piece (not only in words but in deeds) and we finally disagree, we don’t have to fight to the rhetorical death. I don’t feel morally superior to Dave and Jonathon. I respect them. They have strong and articulate consciences, and that’s pivotally important. They have one way of looking at this invasion; I adhere to a different way of thinking about violence, conflict, duty, and honor.

If I understand Dave correctly, he argues that I am morally bound to support the soldiers invading Iraq, because “one has to keep faith with those who have sworn an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, to bear true faith and allegiance to the same, against all enemies foreign and domestic, and to obey the lawful orders of the officers appointed over them.” I must support without questioning the work of those soldiers because “because we placed them in those circumstances, through our own inaction and indifference.” (“We” placed them there, although a couple of sentences later Dave points out that the “we” is illusory, that one speaker’s “we” can’t bind the “you” whom the speaker addresses.)

I haven’t said more about Dave’s imputations and his ethical reasoning because I don’t know how. How does a soldier’s voluntary oath to defend the Constitution bind me to hold my tongue? How did I let the soldier down by inaction and indifference? What does Dave think I should have done? On what basis does Dave reserve for himself the prerogative to call me unfit, while insisting that I keep silent on matters concerning the soul, concerning wrong and right, life and death?

Speaking out — preaching — is part of my job description. I have taken an oath, too — an oath to stand for the truth, to speak up for life and peace rather than coercion and bloodshed, to talk candidly about what’s right or wrong as I have been given to understand them by the saints of the tradition that commissions me. In talking through the problems relative to the moral justification for this war and the burdens that soldiers bear, I’ve been fulfilling my oath. Who decides that the soldier’s oath prevails over my oath, and who appointed that person my judge?

While in fulfilling that oath, I’ve explicitly prescinded from using language of judgment. I have not at any point suggested that I knew Dave or any soldier to stand morally condemned — for which Dave criticizes me, on the basis that he suspects that my sorrow disguises a covert judgment. Since anything I say can thus be accounted a concealed judgment, I’ll hold my tongue — honoring Dave’s stature and wisdom and experience and military oath.

The Big Fantasy

The title of this entry doesn’t refer to an antiseptic war, or a world consensus in favor of invasion and overthrow. It refers to the unlimited-budget version of the Disseminary project (on whose website I’ve been working this evening, to spruce up the stylesheet and incorporate changes that y’all have been kind enough to offer). An associate at our granting agency, the Wabash Center, asked what we’d do if we received a really whopping grant from (for instance) a large pharmaceuticals firm with robust profits from antidepressant sales, or the foundation associated with a journalism magnate, or even the foundation for what to do with the pocket change from the cracks in Bill Gates’s sofa. This is our answer so far, but since this is a fantasy we can always amplify it in some way without breaking our budget — so feel free to prompt us to go further, or to clarify what we’re up to and why.

Our long description of the Big Fantasy appears on the Disseminary website, but I’ll post it here also, in the “extended entry” space of this blog. Please remember that the time isn’t ripe yet for a link-a-thon PR push for the project. I’ll shamelessly ask you for links when we finally throw open the doors. For now, though, the Big Fantasy goes like this:

Since we first found receptive ears for our Disseminary project, we’ve had various tiers of aspiration for the project. Tier One, “The Little Dream,” was realized in last year’s Teaching and Technology Conference at the Wabash Center, to be renewed September 2003. Tier Two is the Disseminary — you can see the prospects and results of this all around the site.

Tier Three is “The Big Dream,” and this would entail offering an open-enrollment conference for seminaries, religious studies departments, and theological other educators. The premise of The Big Dream would be to round up travellers for the technological clue train, to bring educators who don’t have the time to explore new aspects of technology into contact with some practitioners who live at the frontier of innovation in digital media.

Tier Four is “The Big Fantasy,” the dream-come-true funding opportunity for a visionary philanthropist. The Big Fantasy would be a theo-technology center for the practice and enrichment of the use of technology in teaching religious studies and theology.

The Center
The ideal Disseminary Center (or “The Wozniak [or whoever] Center for Technology and Theology”) comprises office and presentation space, and ideally housing for resident and visiting faculty. The Center should be in an area with at least one teaching institution with a theological library, with convenient air and auto (and rail?) access. One alternative would be floors in an office building, as a studio or loft space; that would probably entail limiting the amount of faculty living space. Another alternative would be a building or complex of buildings, but that would tend to exclude metropolitan areas. A rehabbed warehouse would be great; so would a complex of buildings in a campus setting.
The importance of offering living space involves both visiting and residential faculty. One of the cardinal characteristics of the work cycle of a research and teaching center is fluidity — but if faculty must dwell miles away from the Center, the effects of working odd hours on their family and social lives would begin to erode the flexibility of the Center (“flexibility” being especially important for a technologically-oriented research and teaching facility).
Were the timing (and realities!) different, it would have been a spectacular opportunity to work out an arrangement with Union Seminary in New York City. Office space and housing may be at a premium in Durham, as they surely are in New Haven (though YDS has unused bulding space), Cambridge, DC/Northern Virginia, Atlanta, the Bay area, and Los Angeles. Rochester might make a powerful combination of possible facilities, cost, and cultural setting.

Residential faculty
The ideal Center will have a core residential faculty of from two to four theologians and one technologist. These would provide the continuity, the human repository of experience, discernment, and transmission for the Center?s functions, ensuring that the Center (part of whose work it would be to not know exactly what it’s doing) would not be assembling every year, every semester, as a team of possibly-mismatched or oddly-matched blind dates, but would form a smoothly-cooperating core to buffer differences among visiting faculty and facilitate (and pass along the benefits of) effective research when visiting faculty pursue divergent research agendas, or encounter discordant personalities.
The residential faculty would draw from distinct theological domains, to the extent possible, although they would need to work comfortably with one another. They would, in other words, share a sense of mission relative to engaging the intersection of emergent technologies with the study and practice of religious traditions, while engaging that mission from various disciplines in their studies.
The residential technologist would concentrate on overseeing the Center’s relationship with technologies it has already adopted, and also keeping an eye on the technological horizon for further possibilities. Her job would not involve introductory hand-holding, for the most part (that would more cost-effectively fall to work-study students), but would probably involve mediating the Center’s experimentation with and adoption of new technologies. This would be a great job for a classic geek, provided that he understood the cooperative dimension of the position (and did not exploit it as a venue for self-interested gadget-chasing).

Staff
The Center would need staffing including a Director (which position might fall to one of the residential faculty), office manager, and a variety of assistants (some of whom might be drawn from local seminaries, colleges, and universities). The staff would hold the leadership in bringing order to the research plans of residential and visiting faculty, their schedules, travel plans, the presentations and teaching work of the Center’s site, budget, supplies, and so on. The staff are the sensible people who sustain the diesseitigkeit of the Center’s visionary work. While the faculty’ feet may not always stay on the ground, the staff keep the faculty’s ankles within reach.

Visiting Faculty
The Center would invite a cadre of visiting faculty for each semester or for one-year terms, providing a locus for research and development. This opportunity would benefit faculty, whose ordinary work schedule permits no opportunity for such development and would disseminate the understanding of technological possibilities for faculty to take back with them to their various home institutions. One would not want to great a disparity between the number of visiting faculty and the residential faculty, lest the two bodies develop distinct, disintegrated senses of their identity and work. With a residential faculty of four, the Center might effectively house a visiting faculty of seven or eight, but a ratio closer to one-to-one would be more desirable.

Ad Hoc Faculty/Staff
The Center might decide to take on specific projects of limited duration, for which faculty and staff would be recruited. These faculty and staff would remain with the Center not on a term-by-term basis nor on long-term contracts, but as their specific project8’s need dictates. The Center might, for instance, commission several teachers and programmers to develop a walk-through animation of particular religious sites or events: the Temple in Jerusalem, a hajj to the Kaaba, a visit to the Temple of the Tooth, a circumambulation of the monumental stupa at Borobudur, a Capacocha sacrifice.

The Center?s Mission
The Center would take on the mission of conducting fundamental experimentation and exploration of the relation of technology to teaching in the area of religious studies and theology.
One element of this mission involves end-less fiddling with technology to see what happens. The faculty would be expected to work at a level of technological sophistication that would permit them to converse with technologists, but without necessarily sustaining programming or soldering skills. They would be, in the words of one IT department, “expert users.” In order to sustain and cultivate their expertise, the Center would expect them to devote some of their time simply to playing with technology.
Another element to this mission involves teaching. Since the Center exists to serve the end of enhancing teaching through technology, its faculty should be dedicated teachers. The Center should offer classes, presentations, lectures, and other educational activities on a regular basis, affording its faculty the occasion to demonstrate and sustain their teaching abilities. The Center may, on occasion, assign faculty to the work of institutional classroom instruction (making the proximity of an educational institution all the more desirable) — though it is not by any means assumed that this constitutes the norm for education, especially for technologically-mediated and -enhanced education.
Another element of the Center’s mission involves demonstrating the possibilities for technologically-enhanced education. In certain respects, this would follow the Disseminary agenda; in other respects, it would involve workshops with visiting faculty and others (whose home institutions might pay for the opportunity for them to come learn what’s going on at the Center).
Another element involves the faculty’s own ongoing research (not necessarily “technological” research). Faculty would be expected to maintain their participation in the scholarly discourses of their fields, and the Center would respect the need for time dedicated to research and writing in these fields.
Yet another element of the Center’s mission could include consulting to educational institutions with regard to institutional deployment of technological resources. The Center could offer disinterested consulting grounded in its own experience and experimentation. Such consulting conducted by salaried members of the Center team could raise funds for the Center.

Facilities
The Center’s facilities would of necessity be shaped by its technological focus. Residential faculty would work with CPUs replaced on a regular cycle; visiting faculty would be encouraged to bring up-to-date equipment from their home institutions. The budget for hardware acquisition would be higher than might be the case were the Center not committed to an exploratory mission; the Center should be in a position to showcase best practices in technology acquisition and deployment.

Prospects
Well, none in particular at this point — but contact one of the Disseminary directors, if you know someone who might be interested in funding such a center.

Prayers

Prayers tonight for those who, through no will of their own, suffer injury, the loss of loved ones or family goods;

for those who take up arms and risk death to fulfill their obligations, and for those whom they kill;

for those who take counsel that bring about the deaths of hundreds, perhaps of thousands of people;

for all whose lives will be affected by the grim days ahead.

Music Alert Annex

In today’s episode of good friend Euan’s The Obvious, he admits to the constant cruel teasing to which he subjects me about my taste in music, now made obvious to him via iChatStatus. Oh, it’s all fun and games, so long as we can fleer at the vicar for listening to Joy Division! One might almost think that he turned me on to iChatStatus solely for the twisted delight this japery would bring him. That, and it’s a really cool application, especially when combined with Clutter.

The catch is, I’m not in the least embarrassed by my musical taste, from Frank Zappa to Adam Ant (allowing for a very few exceptions — but no one caught me listening to Gimme Dat Ding by the Pipkins, I think). That’s why I used to add the Dave (C&E) Rogers Music Alert to my blogs (and still would, except I usually am not listening to music when I blog nowadays, for a variety of reasons). (Trevor, that iPod thing would change this circumstance.) So much as it may amuse Euan to think of me, vested in alb and amice, incense wafting up from the thurible, poring over my Greek New Testament and typing on my TiBook as I listen to Sleater-Kinney intermingled with Sister Winona Carr (I love “Life is a Ball Game”), this is the me that I’m content to be quite public. I don’t have the subtlety or energy to cope with facades — and besides, this music is so wonderful!

I do wrestle with the theological significance of liking music that vigorously repudiates the tenets of my faith, and (often even more painfully) romanticizes and perpetuates an ideology of women-as-consumable-plaything. I don’t have answers, and I’ not willing to shrug off the ethical problem by claiming, “I know — it’s only rock’n’roll/But I like it.” I will sing along heartily, but I won’t excuse myself by suggesting that the lyrics don’t make a difference. They do, and I’d be a better person if I could articulate the relation between my edifying aspirations and my (ahem) sometimes questionable taste.

At the same time, that’s the truth about me, for better or worse, and anyone who wants to know to what I’ listening can look at their AIM client and see. And as soon as I get back into the blogging-to-music groove, the DRMA will return.

What They Said

When Ben and Mena came to Seabury, they blew our minds by demoing a heap of things you can do with TrackBack that are so cool I can’t even describe them. I was slackjawed, and not in good note-taking form. But just as is the case with Doc and David, we couldn’t make head or tail of how to make it work for our sites.

At the time, I asked Ben and Mena please to look into posting what David calls “TrackBack for Dummies” (indeed, most of MT’s documentation could benefit from a little dummie-fication). They agreed that a more basic introduction would strengthen the site. It would help users who are already interested in Moveable Type become more effective users, and increase their satisfaction with what’s already a fantastic application. Which is usually good for business.

Malignant Rhetorical Virus

I’m seething with irritation that the vast preponderance of the journalists I’ve heard and read recently — journalists, the people who have been vaunting their professionalism relative to mere bloggers — have simply adopted the Bush administration’s sterile locution “regime change” for the coerced overthrow of a foreign government. Saddam Hussein is a bloody, foul tyrant, and Iraq would have to be better off without him. There’s nothing, so far as I know, to be said on his behalf.

But although it’s in the Bush administration’s interest to make the invasion and occupation of a hostile nation sound like the turning of seasons (you know, “weather changes,” “times change,” “fashions change,” “regimes change”), I would have hoped that journalists wouldn’t act as surrogate propagandists for the Bush regime.

Since Hussein is almost as bad as Bush makes him out (Bush still imputes to him an al-Qaeda connection, which still doesn’t work), honestly call it an invasion and overthrow; Hussein’s villainy would presumably outweigh the negative connotations of those terms. I expect Newspeak from office-holders, but I am still eager to trust reporters to tell us their best effort at the truth, not the spinning dialect of Babel from the towers of the high and mighty in Washington.

Working

Been putting together bits and pieces of the Disseminary site. This is a little like inviting passers-by into the shop before the decorators are through with the renovation — indeed, before the architects are quite sure of the design. But this way, if those of you who know more than I and Trevor do about design spot any foolish transgressions, you may protect us from a grave mistake.

Don’t bookmark these pages; they’ll have more economical URLs once we get the domain squared away. But feel free to look around, get oriented, and in a week or two we hope to stage a grand opening (complete with your offering yourself a glass of your favorite festive beverage at your convenience).

Endorsement

Earlier this year, I plugged PlayAlong, an iTunes companion application that shows the album cover art for the song playing on your computer. Since then, I flirted with Clutter and The Sofa Project, but Sofa required organizing your MP3 library the way that Apple and Sofa thought was best (thank you very much, I’ll stick with my own disorganized heaps) and downloading album art onto it. That was a shame, because Sofa also incorporated a control panel for iTunes into its interface, which enabled me to hide the iTunes app and still control it conveniently. The “reorganize your music lbrary” stipulation was a deal-breaker for me, though.

I tried Clutter, but nothing worked. I couldn’t induce it to fetch the album cover art, and when I pasted it in manually, the app forgot the image as soon as the song ended. I was utterly at a loss to explain why its developers would release so lame an implementation of their idea, so I sent them a gentle note asking why it totally didn’t work. And they didn’t answer, so I forgot about it and went back to PlayAlong (and squinted at the tiny little image of the cover art, which was still better than nothing).

Yesterday, though, I received an answer from Sprote Rsrch. They were as mystified as I was about why Clutter hadn’t worked for me, and asked for some specifics. So I dourly fired up Clutter, and right away the album cover appeared in the display window. There had been nothing whatever wrong with Clutter from the beginning — as I’d have found out if I had tried the application again. My mistake. Moreover, Sprote has upgraded Clutter to incorporate fast-forward, back, and pause buttons on the display window. The picture is bigger than PlayAlong’s and there’s a doo-hickey alongside the cover image to view other cover designs. It’s neat-o cool-o, and I hereby change my allegiance from PlayAlong to Clutter. “Try it, you’ll like it,” as the guy in the Alka-Seltzer ad used to say.

One of Those Things

Did you know (well, no you didn’t, because I didn’t write it yet) that Margaret and I couldn’t find a patron saint for the heartsick? Google availed us not. We didn’t want a patron of lovers or heart patients or The Sacred Heart or anything — we were looking around to find the patron of people who’ve been jilted, or are just pining over an unattainable beloved.

Not Just Me

At tonight’s peace vigil (I almost wrote “peace blog,” which reveals the extent to which this endeavor has invaded my consciousness), Pippa and I had scarcely arrived before a news photographer started snapping pictures of us. More to the point, the photographer started taking pictures of Pippa, with her dad in the background. This I understand; in fact, if I’d been the photographer, I would have tried to compose me out of the shot.

Anyway, he didn’t ask Pippa for her analysis of what was wrong with the threat of war, nor did he stick around for her only-somewhat-muted improvisational repertoire on the themes of “No War,” “Don’t Bomb Iraq,” and “Peace.” (Not quite the heavenly harmonies Mary heard, but encouraging nonetheless.) Those would have given a more rounded sense of with whom he was dealing; but as it was, I noted that his immediate attention to Pippa tended tacitly to confirm that our daughter is exceptionally beautiful.

Witness

Rachel Corrie was run over by an Israeli Defense Forces bulldozer.

Some will describe her as misguided, as foolish, as a teenager without an adequate sense of self-preservation. Some will accuse her of aggravating tensions in Gaza, of further complicating the already convoluted politics of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. These all may be true; I don’t know enough to say (though that won’t stop the pundits).

She was unarmed. Her actions suggest that she cared enough for people treating one another respectfully and humanely that she risked, then gave her life as a sign of how desperate the situation in Gaza has become.

Retrospect

There were several things I wanted to blog yesterday, when my blogging time evaporated in the mist of a bright idea and a (forlorn) attempt at clarification. One was how excited and honored Seabury has been by the visits of Jordon Cooper and Ben and Mena Trott. Jordon gave a compelling picture of how digital communications can build closeness and communication in congregational life, and more Seabury students and faculty turned out for his presentation; Ben and Mena stimulated the Seabury contingent with a more technical afternoon workshop that had the whole gang reaching for the red pill. Their evening presentation drew fewer Seaburians (end-of-term crush, plus conflicts with other evening obligations) but reached dozens of Chicago-area Blogarians, and made manifest to Seabury the scale of the phenomena with which we’re dabbling.

If this catches on at Seabury as some of us hope, we’ll be working at a whole different kind of seminary, a whole different kind of academy than any with which I’m acquainted (note the specific disclaimer on the scope of my knowledge). It’s cool. Three cheers for Jordon, Ben, and Mena — and boy, are we looking forward to the visits from Jim McGee (April 10) and David Weinberger (May 15).

Another leftover was my relief at having reached my term of leave, on which I’m supposed to work on my book about Matthew’s Gospel. If I mention Matthew a lot over the next few weeks, please indulge me.

Finally, I just noticed that my very-wonderful colleague at Luther Seminary in Minnesota, Mary Hess, has finally begun Tensegrities, the blog she’s been threatening to start for months. Cheers, Mary, and welcome to Blogaria!

Honor and Judgment

Dave “Time’s Shadow” Rogers looks ahead to soldiers and their risks and challenges, in the context of which meditations he cites a blog I wrote and observes

AKMA fundamentally misunderstands the leap of faith the soldier makes, and this misunderstanding leads him to "honor" some and "grieve" others. It is a judgment he is not fit to render.

I’d like a number of things: to have the opportunity to talk over what’s at stake and how each of us live that out, the fuller theological and ethical context in which I take part in civil life, and many other things. Were I to try that here, I would probably only sound defensive — so permit me just to say that yes, I am unfit to judge soldiers, and I specifically do not presume to judge them (or others, Dave included). I am obliged to size up the world and make my way in it as best I can — we all are — and that involves discerning honorable and unfortunate Ways in life. I haven’t yet seen the honorable aspects of claiming immunity from moral accountability; but I try always to await further instruction and clarification, to change my mind when people show me where I err.

World Without Ends

How could I have missed it?

First, Halley’s penetrating blog this morning reminded me of one of the eye-opening dimensions of online community. I’d been blogging only a matter of single-digit weeks when Halley and I ended up corresponding, and only very shortly after that her dad’s health began failing precipitously. Halley’s friends, in the flesh and in digital spirit, were with her through that awful time, with her as her father made his wobbly steps in growing toward death.

That got me thinking about the way her dad came to see himself as a creature of community, of the children and relatives and friends who emptied his bedpan, who stuck with him even when he could no longer bid cash for their attention. Was Halley’s dad an “individual” in the sense that some of our conversation partners admire? No, that can’t be it. But he certainly wasn’t living in community in any rich sense, either.

That, in turn, provoked me to recognize that the whole individual/community discussion fails, to the extent that it adheres to these binary alternatives (or even, as I will propose, a spectrum between the two poles). Non-binary! Wasn’t I listening to my own rhetoric? Trevor stands now as a metonym for community in this discussion, but Trevor embodies none of the dangers that have been identified by people speaking out for individuality. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find someone who looks more like an individual around here. Something else is going on, something not reducible to Individual vs. Community (though these are manifestly very important dimensions of the discussion).

Other qualities cross the I vs. C axis, deepening the relations and attributes that complicate the discussion (Seabury students are not surprised, at this point, to hear me insisting on the complications). For instance, Halley’s father made me wonder whether a willingness to trust and be trusted might not be a dimension of the discussion that hasn’t yet come to light, but which inflects one’s standing as an individual and as a member of communities. No doubt you all can identify other dimensions of being a person that don’t reduce to I vs. C, but which intersect, bend, warp, twist that axis and along with all the other characteristics, in deeply complex and particular ways.

Which brought me around to Trevor’s World of Posses (Dave disapproves (in the comments) of the term “posse,” which came to Trevor by way of my casual appropriation of it; maybe we could say, “crews” or “teams” or some other term Dave prefers): Trevor observes that the World of Ends consists not in independent individuals who are the stopping-point of action and discourse, but to pools of shared interests, to groups of sympathetic friends, to communities where one member’s grief and fear and loss are shared and addressed by the whole network of participants.

Doc, David, it’s not a World of Ends, it’s a World without Ends, all the more so on the Web, where we’re so persistently joined with one another.

Trott Report

Ben and Mena Trott are here, visiting Seabury as part of our technology lecture series. They gave a spectacular workshop talk this afternoon for a gathering of students, stimulating their imaginations about the potential of personal publishing beyond anything they’d dreamed before.

They joined Trevor and Margaret (and Pippa) and me for dinner at Cozy Noodle, and now are beginning their evening presentation at Seabury. Three Seabury students are surrounded by a sea of Chicago-area bloggers who came out to show their appreciation for Ben and Mena.

I’m live-blogging from the back of the room.

They’re beginning with a quick overview of Movable Type’s new version, and pointing us to sites that use MT without it necessarily being obvious that MT is behind the scenes. First, the Urban School of San Francisco; they use MT not so much as a blog, but uses MT for content management by calling on categories. The Urban School uses the standard MT calendar to power an event calendar (!), filtered by type of event.

Second, they point us to the 826 Valencia, a writing center and pirate store in San Francisco. 826 Valencia actually gets their students writing; they sent a student to NYU, I believe, who continues to blog on the site (demonstrating to current students that there can be a benefit to the work of learning writing skills).

Third, they point to a site that aggregates TrackBack feeds from a number of disparate individual blogs, AustinBloggers. This site collects TrackBack pings from separate individuals’ blogs, and compiles them into the Austin Bloggers page (they do mention Topic Exchange, Liz). Ben and Mena suggest that Seabury could use this schema to compile entries from individual blogs, into a shared meta-blog (as it were). They mocked-up a Seabury version of one of these, based on Trevor’s ethics class blog.

Now they’re discussing helper applications, such as NetNewsWire Pro and Kung-Log (on OS X), or w.bloggar or NewsGator (on Windows). It’s hard to overstate their enthusiasm for NetNewsWire and Kung-Log. . . .

Now they’re talking about the upcoming release of Moveable Type Pro. Among the upcoming features are a photo album tool, differentiation of editors from authors, custom entry fields, registration for Comments and Posting, and hierarchized categories.

Questions? A Chicago blogger asked whether there were any alternatives to the word “blog”? Ben and Mena don’t like the word, but they don’t see an effective alternative. Better support for Windows installations? Ben says “some.” One user had a firewall problem. Will the moblog feature be available on future releases? Mena notes that some features are very hard to implement at each specific server location. They’ve had blog-by-email ready for ten months, but the haven’t released it because it requires too much customization.

Alex asks about the effect of weblogging software on social groups who meet face-to-face regularly. Mena notes first of all the the Chicago Bloggers are out in force tonight — weblogs brought a couple dozen people to Seabury tonight who would never have been here otherwise, who knew one another in the face-to-face world. Blogging in academic settings brings together self-expression by writing with interpersonal interaction. Ben mentions the different perspectives one gains from reading various accounts of, for instance, a conference. Mena notes that when Ben blogs during their vacations, she reads his blog to find out what he really thinks.

I missed some questions about marketing, hype, blogs, Raging Cow, and the future. I was busy putting the brownies and molasses cookies out.

I’ll ask Liz’s question (from the comments): “Can you convince Ben & Mena to create "Movable Course" software? :-) Or to let us turn it into that?” Ben says it’s an interesting direction, and allows that they will in fact be looking at other applications for their software. They had built an education portal at their previous workplace. They know there’s a big market; maybe, but Mena doesn’t think it’s in the immediate future.

Will Moveable Type Pro eclipse any free versions, or will there be a free version alongside MT Pro? Mena says that they will always keep a free version along with the Pro version, but will also allow the incentive of a more powerful version for those who are willing to contribute. They note that they’ve done very well from donations, that their donors have been very generous.

What are their favorite blogs? Boing Boing — they don’t specify any others. Have they met them all? They’ve met the authors of about half of their favorite blogs. Most of the bloggers they read go to tech conferences, where they meet.

What’s the timing on their release cycles? Mena’s telling funny stories about the release of the first version.

Later. . . . Well, I lost the note-tracking trail there, and after a few minutes I got up to make an official end to the presentation portion of the festivities. That didn’t bring the evening itself to an end, though. The Chicago Bloggers assembled for a team picture (bigger and better at me3dia.com) with Ben and Mena (Mena: “So, we’re big in Tokyo and Chicago”);

Cinnamon had made a lovely hand-sewn handbag for Mena; Alex announced the Digital Genres Conference (Sidebar comment by Alex: “Being an anonymous blogger is like being a serial killer; you really want people to know”); the audience consumed home-baked brownies and molasses cookies from Margaret; and the CBs decamped with Ben and Mena for a local pub. I stayed, stacked chairs, and tried to calculate whether I really am old enough to be their father. A splendid evening!

Whoosh!

Leave it to Trevor to take up the World of Ends, the community and academy discussions (no, I’m not going to link to them all; Trevor does a good enough job), and spin them all into conversation with Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, all without adequate sleep. (PS, Trevor — differentiate your visited-link color from the background better.)

Reasons to Be Cheerful

⊕ If you had told me, “Someone from college days will email you today, AKMA,” it would have been a very long while before I guessed it would be Melinda Aumaitre. But it was good to hear from her — greetings, Melinda!

⊕ Trevor designed a hoopy vastly superior header for the Disseminary pages. The site’s not really live yet, just twitching, but it will be moderately soon. For the morbidly curious, and not for locking into links, our work area on CornerHost is here.

⊕ I’ll put up some signage relative to the Mena and Ben presentation tomorrow evening. That’ll take some of the mystery out of the experience, but will make finding Seabury Lounge — complete with rafters, Dave — that much easier. I’m getting rumblings that suggest that everyone from Tim Berners-Lee to People magazine will be there; it seems to be quite the social event of the North Side tech season. I just hope that Seabury is well represented among the attendees.

Arrival of the Jedi

Alex spent the day out here, looking over our antiquated server (“feeding the gerbil,”someone said), sizing up the problems we already have, the problems we might develop, and the problems we can fend off moderately easily for the time being.

I didn’t see his light saber, but he really did see Yoko Ono when he was in New York.

Another Chris

Not to be confused with Chris Locke — not by a long chalk — Chris Tessone of Polyglut has started Seminary Forum, an online forum for people preparing for seminary, or for any graduate program in theology or philosophy. It’s a great idea, and it looks as though it’ll be a useful place for a crowd of people in similar boats to learn about channels and reefs. Chris was talking to me about hosting it at the Disseminary, but we’ve been tackling other matters first, and he didn’t want to wait us out (wisely).

I’ve wanted for a long time to cultivate something like an online grapevine for academics in theology and religious studies (who’s retiring? which department is going up in flames? who got fired for basketball recruiting violations? that kind of exciting thing); Chris has the better idea of spreading around the information for people who haven’t already stuck their toe in the water.

To Clarify

I’m not dissolving the University of Blogaria — I couldn’t if I wanted to, right? since it isn’t mine (I almost said, “The University of Blogaria isn’t a thing,” but some on the faculty would have thrown erasers at me) — I’ll just put it on a different page. With a page of its own, it can grow some historic documents (I believe it was founded in 395 BCE, wasn’t it, by some renegade students of Socrates?), scenic pictures of the (poison-) ivied campus, and the downloadable PDF “Your Name Here” diplomas I’ve been imagining for a long time.

It’s just outgrown my blog. So Gary, we’ll pull out a chair with a whoopee cushion for you, and George will get his Musick chair, and No, it’s not all Dorothea’s doing, I had expressed the intention in an email before it even came up in communication with Dorothea. Plus, when I get it moved over, we can work on some important features such as the satellite campus that Tripp is working on, and the [web-safe] school colors that Alex and Heather and Jane and Todd and I talked about over lunch. It’ not over; it’s over there.

Grand

It’s good to see Chris blogging away again (a sizeable blog entry every time I check back, lately) especially since I know he’s using a snappy new Powerbook.

More Further Information About the Trott Visit

Mike wanted to know more about the Trotts’ visit to Seabury this coming Thursday. Glad to provide all the information you could desire.

Seabury sits adjacent to Sheridan Road in Evanston, in the Northwestern University campus area (I believe we have a very long-term lease from the University). The number is 2122 Sheridan, but that won’t help you much, because I don’t think it’s posted anywhere. We’re on west side the block between Haven St. and Garrett St., neither of which has a stop light, and we’re opposite Garrett Evangelical Theological Seminary. There are lights at the intersection of Noyes Street and Sheridan to the north of us (I think the light is at Noyes) and at Foster Street and Sheridan to the south. We are, to belabor the obivous , beween them.

Once you find Seabury, you’ll want to park (unless you took the El and got off at the Noyes Street station, which is a jolly good idea). No real tips on finding a parking space, but there’s a chance that evening will diminish the crunch at Seabury enough to open up a space or two in the Seabury lot. Come into the Seabury lot from Garrett.

Once you’ve arrived at the Seabury building, you’ll be faced with some choices about where in the building to look for Mena and Ben. Since there are various entrances to Seabury, it’s hard to anticipate just how to swing this, so I’ll make two suggestions. (1) Ask somebody. They’re friendly seminarians, practicing to be priests most of ’em, but they won’t Bible-bash you. Not unless they read this blog and, out of a wry sense of humor, go out looking for stray campus guests to evangelize. (2) Get to the second floor somehow. Follow somebody else around. Most of the space on the second floor will be pretty empty and inactive; if you drift a bit, you should soon come to a big empty room with a high ceiling. That’s the Seabury Lounge, where the presentation will be. Guests are most welcome — indeed, the more the merrier. I want people hanging from the rafters, standing up in front of our portrait of Enmegabowh (first Native Aermican priest in the Episcopal Church). Pack ’em in!

Blog That Thought

I keep having ideas about things I want to mention here, and I’ll say to myself “Remember to blog that.” Pfaugh! I might as well say, “Obliterate that very notion from your memory, ’cause it ain’t coming back in your lifetime.” I really meant to blog about. . . Well, about. . . .

Here’s something: I received a couple of emails today that prompted me to make a decision I’d been weighing for days. I’m going to take the UBlog dimension of my blogroll down, and relocate it to a separate page. Then, I’ll just have a nice, simple blogroll, maybe powered by blogrolling.com, and it won’t take up two lines for every name, and I won’t have to explain it all the time. Plus, in the aftermath of the notorious “academic” dust-up, it seems an impaired metaphor for the collegium of friends it encompasses.

So I’ll do that, as soon as I get around to it.

Oh, and Chris Locke is back in form and blogging up a storm. At leastfor the last four dsays he has been.

And Alex is coming to look over the Seabury server tomorrow, to get acquainted with the hamster that runs in the wheel to operate the server, and to find out where we keep the sugar to mix in the hamster’s water.

Now I have to turn to a very odd task, to offer advice on modelling fictive religions for a game setting. Odd, but probably loads of fun to think about. Speaking of which, the GameNeverending is having a spasmodic reactivation today. Imagine the oddity of seeing an entire fictive world annihilated while people around the world held vigils and parties — and then it’ reconstituted for a few hours. Very weird experience.

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For Digital Identity World 2003, October 15-17 in Denver. And more urgently, the Digital Genres Conference coming up in Chicago, May 30-31. . . .

Some Good Things

◊ The preacher at church today did not try to come up with an original sermon, but read portions from two sermons by the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, our new Archbishop of Canterbury. That was very good. Margaret and I filled out the parish survey concerning what we wanted the new rector to be like. ALthough the survey omitted many of the points that seem most salient to us, we were good Doo-Bees and filled them in from beginning to end.

◊ Pippa seems to have entered a new phase of her musical repertoire. In the bath tonight she was belting out (for Pippa, “belting out” and “singing” are virtually synonymous) Edwin Starr’s “War.” Then she ventured onto the Temptations’ “Same Old Song,” and modulated to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” This phase is a blast, especially with Pip channeling Ethel Merman as she goes.

◊ The Tutor and Trevor have been saying kind things about me behind my back, and I’m deeply moved.

◊ The World of Ends has been riding high on the charts for the last few days. Just when I think that I see a pattern to acceptance/resistance, someone comes along who messes up my neat little categories (for instance, Shelley and Liz, oops! and Stavros). That’s good for my temptation to reach conclusions too quickly, and good as a reminder that communities are very far from being homogeneous cesspools of back-scratching, log-rolling yea-sayers. Of course, I’m still not certain what’s to not like about the World of Ends, but another good thing is that remaining in community affords me the opportunity to learn from Shelley and Liz why I oughtn’t to be as impressed as I am by this concise characterization of some threatened aspects of the non-space we share.

◊ I haven’t been relaying free typeface news recently, but there haven’t been that many useful releases. Nate Piekos at Blambot released an intriguing styllized uncial he calls Ale and Wenches, but Manfred’s recent releases have been mostly more experimental (his half-glyph series) or more idiosyncratic than I can use. Today, though, he released Tradition Sans Extra Light, with the special intention of being used for the obituaries of those who will be killed when the US government unleashes war on Iraq. Harold Lohner released two special faces, Level and Peace. And Diane DiPiazza released a flock of new designs: Feelin’Groovy (I just miss the point of these typefaces with embedded extras, old fogey that I am), script face Sunday San Francisco, Socks, BoyToy, and a heavy script typeface, Sweet Potato.

◊ The New York Times Book Review (free registration required) echoed my assessment of Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom this morning — although I’d like to think I didn’t adopt the note of near-condescension concerning Cory as blogger, nor make Antrim’s fairly flat comparison of Doctorow’s Bitchun Society with Bay Area cultures in the dot-com boom. It’s good to read a review in the NYTBR and think, “I did a better job.” (PS, Cory, if you read this: it’s in stock at Comix Revolution in Evanston, where I bought my rare unsigned copy.)

Who Would Name a Drink After This?

I promised Kevin (in the course of a conversation about his church’s website) that I’d link to his Raging Cow anti-Blog, but in the press of circumstances during the past few days, I lost track of that plan. Now, however tardily, I’m making good on the promise and adding a twist peculiar to my line of work.

Every year, I require my students to read The Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, a document of the early third century that regales its audience with a detailed account of the thoughts, words, and actions of a young Carthaginian noblewoman and her slave in the days leading up to their martyrdom in the arena. The remarkable account — much of it ostensibly composed by Perpetua herself — explains how each of the Christian prisoners was put to death.

At the beginning of the spectacle therefore [Saturninus] with Revocatus first had ado with a leopard and was afterwards torn by a bear on a raised bridge. Now Saturus detested nothing more than a bear, but was confident already he should die by one bite of a leopard. Therefore when he was being given to a boar, the gladiator instead who had bound him to the boar was torn asunder by the same beast and died after the days of the games; nor was Saturus more than dragged. Moreover when he had been tied on the bridge to be assaulted by a bear, the bear would not come forth from his den. So Saturus was called back unharmed a second time. But for the women [Perpetua and Felicitas] the devil had made ready a most savage cow, prepared for this purpose against all custom; for even in this beast he would mock their sex.

So if I understand the present marketing effort correctly, Dr. Pepper is trying to sell a beverage named after feral creature, an “unpredictable and mischievous” ungulate such as martyred the brave and faithful Christian noblewoman, Perpetua. Call me oversensitive, but that seems like a counterintuitive marketing gesture. For now, mark me down as a sympathizer to the Raging Cow Boycott movement, even if Tim Ireland seems theologically tone-deaf. (But Tim is right — Tony Blair should have an email address.)

David and Doc

Well, I can link to the World of Ends as well as anyone else. I suspect that the critics who complain about the essay’s simplification of complex problems have sound reason, and I resist oversimplification as much as anyone I know (more than anyone else I know, I suppose). But simplification has its purposes, and in the “My eyes glaze over” world of technology and engineering, simplification has tremendous value. Politicians need simplification, especially from people who understand the Web as Doc and David do, because they’re getting massive oversimplification from industries who feel threatened by the End-to-End net that David and Doc describe. And granted all the people who are going to remain fixated on oversimplifications, I’d rather they were sticking with these simplifications than any others.

Indeed, in important ways, the World of Ends simplifications represent the truth about the Web more clearly and soundly than any other simplifications I’ve heard. And where there are quibbles and cavils to be registered about various points (Exactly how stupid should the net be? Could David and Doc come up with a more effective trope than “adding value decreases value?” — that one seems to have triggered a lot of bile), I remain persuaded that Doc and David point us in the right direction for exploring the problems we’ll encounter.

Maybe we have heard Doc and David (and the SATN team and others) say this before, but tons of other people haven’t. Maybe there’s a strand of idealism there (available to be bashed as “hippy-dippy” by heavyweight philosophers such as John Dvorak), but candidly, I don’t want the important understandings of the Web to be defined without a heavy dose of idealism, and I don’t want policy-makers to be thinking that a smart net of some kind is gonna be the really cool version of the net, because they’ll just screw it up. Sear onto their consciousnesses that a stupid net is more valuable than a smart net, and then let them concede some degree of non-stupidity as an exception — if it’s necessary. I still don’ think it is. So far as I’ve encountered and observed the Web, there’s no ten-point summary that comes nearly so close to capturing the pivotal points as does the World of Ends.

We all (Margaret, Si, Pippa, Trevor, and me) went out to dinner tonight to celebrate the close of an exasperating day, and on the drive home we got to discussing the essay; I indicated my satisfaction by observing that “there’s a divinity that shapes our Ends, rough-hew them how we will.” But Trevor capped me; when I noted an allusion to Kant’s “Kingdom of Ends,” which Pippa heard as an allusion to a book she read recently, and its “Kingdom of Ents”! To which Trevor immediately responded, “That makes no sense to me, but then again, you are small. . . .”

On a more personal interest note, if (as David and Doc argue) each “end” is immediately contiguous to each other “end,” then I’m going to be all the more tenacious in resisting spatial metaphors. I encounter space every day, and that ain’t it.

By the Way

Trevor said some stuff about the community/individual topos that I should think about and interact with. He’s on a path that looks right to me.

And also by the way, this would be a great time for us to switch over to meaningful permalink addresses rather than Moveable Type numerical permalinks.

Home Sweet Host

Well, Trevor and I have a new home picked out, thanks to Mark Pilgrim’s casual recommendation of CornerHost. I was talking to Burningbird for a while about a big ol’ communal server (all kinds of Blogarians hanging out in the wings and annexes — just my kind of hioppy dream), but that seemed impractiable in the short run.

What this means is that we now need the gentle, hand-holding, unreasonably generous help of our various Blogarian sages who can advise us on the steps to take relative to moving our pages and our domain over to CornerHost.

Our pages currently reside on Seabury’s server, in several different places. DomainDirect (thanks, Elliot, with more formal thanks to come once we get the Disseminary page working correctly in its new home) presently forwards inquiries for www.disseminary.org to the relevant Seabury directories. We will eventually switch that to a name server. Once we get the files in place, Michal of CornerHost has offered to set up subdomains for Trevor and me -- but we can’t put those in place till we have everything set at CornerHost. And then we'll need redirects to get people from Seabury to CornerHost.

So, when anyone feels like giving us some words-of-one-syllable, step by step, ultra-simple advice on how to make the transition, we’ll welcome that advice. Whee!

Matrullo on Community Consciousness

Tom Matrullo (better known, in his turn, as Sawyer’s father) does his usual fine job of turning the crystal to see refractions and reflections and radiance that some of us — well, me — hadn’t got to yet.

Jeff had said his part so clearly, I had little to say beyond, “Amen!” But Tom reminds me that my earlier interventions oblige me to submit my tuppence to the discussion, and out of respect for him, I will do so (whether they turn out to be legal tender remains to be seen).

Without actually knowing anything about the topic, I would reckon that communities generally don’t articulate their self-knowledge to the same extent as a single consciousness. I doubt that communities attain the degree of unanimity that a single consciousness (even a modern or postmodern fragmented consciousness) reaches, and that shared sense of identity, purpose, ideology enables the depth and focus that characterize an individual’s rigorous critical capacity. But then, bbut then, individuals don’t come by their critical perspective ex nihilo; critical capacity frequently derives from other commonly-held premises brought to bear in uncommon ways. Critical perspective isn’t so much a cognitive random-mutation as a cognitive version or torsion or fold.

So in response to Tom’s question, “to what extent are groups that purport to speak of truth, and believe in reforming the individual, open in turn to the unsettling deformations of reform and reconfiguration?” I would say, Communities can’t help being open to unsettling deformations. It’s just that the deformations aren’t the same deformations as may be taking place in other groups at other times, and may not be the same deformations that other groups sure wish would envelope their neighbors. Contemporary conservative evangelicalism is profoundly different from conservative evangelicalism of the 1950’s or even ’60’s. US Catholicism is already deeply different from Catholicism in the rest of the world (ditto Anglicanism, and so far as I can tell Western Buddhism is a very different creature from Eastern Buddhisms, which themselves diverge on regional and cultural bases). The groups in question are always changing and always resisting, and are always self-critical — though often not about the topics we wish they’d be.

Academia included.

Speaking of which, this is all I plan to say:

• I work in academia, now. I’m very good at my job.


• My dad worked in academia most of his life. He was a tremendous teacher, beloved by students, effective at engaging them in the classes he led.


• Academia treated my dad pretty brutally. That’s what I entered this line of work expecting.


• I’ve had ups and downs in academic life, but I’ve outflanked some downs, and made the most of some ups.


• I’ve seen, close up, some very bad academic situations, and I’ve tried to do my best to make them come out humanely for all concerned. In those situations, everyone involved was sure he or she was right and the other person was villainous.


• Before I went back to school, I worked full-time in computer graphics. I think I’m employable, though the business world isn’t getting any gold stars for its open employment practices these days. I could go into parish ministry, but I don’t think that’s what I’m best at. Either way, I’d probably be better paid than I am at Seabury.


• When I had a business job, I saw people undercutting one another, brutally firing or side-tracking one another, clawing for acclamation, being petty and manipulative and hostile and mean. Oh, and cordial, friendly, supportive, and encouraging. (Except in sales.)


• A theory of academia that identifies its manifold flaws and destructive aspects will have also to take account of me and Liz and Trevor and Naomi and Jeff and our posse. We’re not ignorant of academic vices, but I’d be offended if someone said we were intrinsically compromised (without naming the specifics that would give us grounds to rebut them).
• I’m not going to apologize for my job. I do it well, better (I dare say) than most of the people who might be hired to fill my position. I’m busily at work on a project specifically designed to short-circuit a number of academic obstacles to learning. I am an academic. If you have problems with me, let’s talk. If not, I’m done with the topic.

O’Connor Clarke on CAPPS II

Michael, perhaps better known as “Ruairi’s Dad,” points to the utterly outrageous Bush administration plan to categorize air travellers based on the extent of a threat they supposedly pose to safe air travel.

This is so stunningly gruesome an assault on everything that vaguely resembles an open society that I will be awfully tempted to volunteer for a high security threat label. If we all volunteer for a high threat label, they’ll have to come up with an expanded “high security seating zone.” Maybe eventually the high security seating would comprise enough of the plane that there just wouldn’t be a point to the plan. Plus, I’m not sure how the color they assign me would go with my ensemble; better to determine in advance what color it’ll be, so I can plan ahead.

Morford on Positive Resistance

Earl asked me to comment on Mark Morford’s comments from a few days ago in the SF Gate.

Sigh.

The short answer, which will turn out not be be short because I hardly ever say anything short, is that I’m broadly sympathetic to his call to good-vibes arms. Broadly sympathetic — not entirely sympathetic. On one hand, as Jesus said, “Whoever isn’t against us is for us.” Sound Christian theology is all for good feelings, for joy and freedom and love and swell stuff like that. On the other hand, Morford takes some gratuitous swipes at Christians (in contrast to “New-age babble about love and peace and godless pagan prayer, organic foods and sustainable trees and chakras, divinity and luscious goddesses and soul paths and upping your personal vibration”), and the contrast hints at a pretty un-nuanced view of both (negative) Christianity and the (positive) good stuff that Morford endorses. Does someone with a public voice have the nerve and the intelligence to say, “Let’s marshal the joyous impetuses in all our peace-loving neighbors — Jewish, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, neo-pagan, whatever, drawing on whatever grounds that faith offers — and refuse to comply with the oppressive fear and suspicion that strengthen the militaristic gun-waving that obscures our paths forward to hope and grace”? Why does a spokesperson for open-mindedness need to kick me in the shin as he promotes peace and harmony?

That’s probably about what Earl expected — if so, I’m content to oblige.

Movable Developers

Paul and Alex wanted to know more details about Mena and Ben Trott’s talk at Seabury on Thursday, the 13th. We’ve invited them up to the campus for an afternoon get-together with Seabury tech types, then there’ll be a public lecture at 7:30 in the evening (it’ll be in the Seabury Lounge — but then, if you know where the Seabury Lounge is, you would also probably know that that’s the only place we could consider holding their lecture). The title of their presentation is “Building Websites and Community with Movable Type”; it will probably run toward the basic for heavy-duty webslingers like Paul and Alex, but how often does one get the chance to see Ben and Mena in action?

And if plenty of people from the community show up, Seabury may notice and start thinking that this stuff makes a difference. . . .

Geezer Report

I miss telegrams.

Now, some of you youngsters won’t remember telegrams, but there were few feelings in the modern (that is, “ancient”) world that equalled getting a telegram. Everything about it was special. It arrived by messenger; that guy in uniform was coming to the door and delivering the messaage just for you. It was specially constructed: little cut-out words pasted (or, later, printed, I guess) onto the telegram blank. The diction of telegrams was distinctive, since you paid by the word and didn’t have simple access to punctuation marks. “Arrived Venice STOP Streets flooded STOP Please advise” (I’ve been searching for a collection of quotations from famous telegrams, and can’t find one. Here’s an opportunity for one of you obsessive types who hasn’t yet fixed on her or his particular obsession.)

Evidently you can still send telegrams, though the effect has attenuated somewhat. Maybe I will look into this — but in the meantime, I suspect (especially in the aftermath of Mark Pilgrim’s slick refrigerator-magnet hack) that there must be a moderately simple way of generating images of pasted-up telegrams online. . . .

Uhhhh. . . Home At Last

Margaret and I staggered home at about one o’clock this afternoon, making our travel time come to about twelve hours of delays on top of twenty-four hours of scheduled travel.

We are, as you might guess, a wee bit weary. Maybe two wee bits. Maybe more.

Will catch up soon.

We Were There

With Liz and Gerald, at Java’s Saturday night. And we can prove it, kinda.

Urgh. . . .

Last night at 5:45, Margaret and I boarded the El train to take to the suburban rail Metra train, which we took to Chicago’s Union Station, where we were scheduled to catch the 7:45 Lake Shore Express to Rochester, where we anticipated meeting Liz Lawley for a cup of coffee, then spending the weekend with Nate. “Careful,” we warned Liz, “Amtrak has been known to arrive as many as four hours late, and then we’d have to connect directly with Nate.”

That’ll teach us to underestimate Amtrak. We were roughly three hours late when we boarded the train, and we quickly fell another hour behind schedule just trying to get out of the Chicago city limits. Then a drunken and unruly passenger had to be arrested and removed outside Toledo (at one point there were five police cars and an ambulance outside our car), and that evidently required questioning the rail staff at some length. So we were six hours behind schedule just after entering Ohio.

As I type, we are six and a half hours late, and we haven’t reached Rochester yet (it’s 2:20 Saturday afternoon). We’ slowing down in the middle of some snowy fields, presumably to prevent us from spending too much time this weekend in the company of our college son.

I truly believe in a national rail system, subsidized by the federal government, as an attractive, affordable alternative to fuel-intensive modes of travel such as cars and planes. It’s a shame we have Amtrak instead.

On the positive side, the seats and furnishings, which have been grotesquely uncomfortable for the past 14 hours, are in very nice condition. If my back and butt and head and eyes didn’t ache, I’d be very impressed with the decor.

And thanks to Amtrak, I did have time to watch A.I. and rough out a poster to announce Ben & Mena Trott’s visit to the Seabury campus to promote weblogging, content management, and (of course) Movable Type.