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.
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.
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.
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. . . .
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.
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.
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.And from Pope Paul VI, Dignitatis Humanæ:
An abstract attachment to non-violence is therefore not enough — we need to practice this as a skill, and to learn its idiom.
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.
Nonviolence is not only an ethic about power but also an epistemology about how to let the truth speak for itself.
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!
Go to Steven Frank’s blog to read the lyrics of bloggers’ anthem, “Ben and Mena,” as you listen to the MP3.
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=. . . .
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”]
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:Ęcircumcised 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?
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.
“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”
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.
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.
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).