AKMA’s Random Thoughts

End of the Day

I said it over at Invisible Adjunct’s and I’l say it again here: with all due respect to Steve and IA, both of whom I esteem highly, I don’t see the problem with “star” scholars getting paid high salaries. I’ve been around the academy long enough that I can offer empirical data to suggest that this isn’t a self-interested argument; I’m not going to make more than scale for my position. But if one of my brilliant colleagues — think, perhaps, of Naomi, who could within a few years be weighing competing offers from various reputable institutions — represents such a presence on campus that several universities want to bid for her affiliation, I decline to fuss about it.

That’s a different position, by the way, from saying, “I don’t have a problem with intellectual frauds getting paid more than they’re worth.” That does indeed bother me, but I’m just not as clever at recognizing intellectual fraud as some people. I’m so shallow that I learn a good deal from many among the most notorious bamboozlers, and if I’m put out at the salaries given any “stars,” I’m probably more piqued at Named-Chair facile debunkers who appeal to anti-intellectual ressentiment instead of joining argument and respectfully exploring unfamiliar ideas. But that probably just demonstrates my own deplorable credulity; I was dropped on my head at an early age, and now I mindlessly repeat anything that’s told me by someone with a French accent.

Yes, absolutely, adjuncts are underpaid, and yes, absolutely, too many institutions rely far too heavily on adjunct, thus undermining the very profession they depend on. As far as institutions expand their reliance on exploitation as a way of sustaining their academic programs, so far they degrade the integrity of those programs.

On the other hand, I rejoice that someone, somewhere, thinks that intellectual brilliance is worth paying for. I’d rather live in a world where too few professors are paid generously than one in which none at all are. That doesn’t prevent me from resisting adjunctification; it’s precisely in the name of people being able to earn a culturally-coherent salary that I acknowledge without carping the perks that go with fancy academic appointments. They still make less than a mediocre infielder who can barely hit a curve ball, and I respect the most prominent academic scholars no less than I respect the 25th guy on a major league roster.

DigID Reality Check

Courtesy of honorary postmodernist Phil Windley, a link to an interview with bioinformatics researcher James Wayman.

The key moment for observers such as I comes when the interviewer asks Wayman how she could tell whether he really was James Wayman, and Wayman answers, “Right now, your best information that I am who I say I am is what I know.” It’s exactly that diffused notion of identity that comes closest to getting at who we really are — but it’s going to be devilishly difficult to devise an algorithm for checking who I am by asking where I used to sit in my family living room (behind the couch by the radiator or at the end of the other couch, with my files of baseball statistics), or who I hung out with in high school (mostly Nina Amenta, Rob Croop, Becky Goldburg, David Barbrow, Linda Austern, and David Kalla), or what make my first 10-speed bicycle was (Bottecchia, but I didn’t advise them to adopt the annoying Flash intro screen) —matters which (up to now) were not available on any particular database, but which identify me as positively (and more truly) than my whorls. I am that guy who rebuilt his bicycle part by part, who polished his adolescent wit by bantering with geeky comrades, who taught himself probability theory at roughly the same time he was barely passing Algebra II; I don’t know if I could say the same about the patterns on my irises or fingertips.

Apple Store

Many people seem to be coming by here looking for my Apple Store comments, which are just down a little ways on Friday’s entry. Since this has become a minor attraction, I’ll re-emphasize how deeply, intensely snazzy the iSight is; the experience is almost exactly like what sci-fi movies have been showing us for decades. I just had an AV chat with Pascale Soleil (in which she could hear my voice, but her DV camera kept flaking out on voice or video or both); during the interval when we both could talk, and I could see her frown or laugh or reach around the back of my head (as it seemed) to turn the camera on and off, I caught a glimpse of what's so captivating about this technology. And Pascale and I have only just met, as it were; ’twould be even more thrilling if I could iChat with Margaret during her travels, for instance.

So I’m wondering how to rationalize adding another gadget to my desktop.

The rest of the store is mostly like other Apple Stores, but bigger. We may buy Margaret a sleeve for her iBook, and it’s great to know that there’s a place downtown that’s more or less guaranteed to have standard Apple stuff in stock (much more convenient than the store out west in Schaumburg, and with wider selection than Nabih’s here in Evanston). The staff were convivial and hyperactive, the equipment was first-rate, and the store itself is handsome. (One of the employees suggested that the transparent staircase itself was worth the wait. Call me jaded, but it didn’t particularly move me.) Four blocks from an El stop; stuffed with Mac-centric goodies; near the Cathedral of St. James (so I can combine ecclesiastical with electronic errands); all in all, highly favorable marks.

On Faculties

With a growing community of dissent over at Invisible Adjunct’s column, with an increasingly sympathetic correspondence with Dean Kriss, and with some turbulence on the academic home front, it’s probably time that I stake out some of my own thinking about the academic vocation, about graduate study, about tenure, and about specifically Christian academic work (as that’s one of the bases of Dean Kriss’s critique of tenure).

As far as “academic life” in general, I’m willing to grant that the privilege of enjoying one’s daily work might, just might, warrant accepting less-than-ideal circumstances for undertaking that work. That slender possibility narrows considerably, however, when one reflects on the likelihood that any particular academic job will actually offer the features of “academic life” that attract many of us in the first place: the atmosphere, the opportunity, and indeed the responsibility to read broadly, deliberate deeply, and to engage students and colleagues in a searching consideration of the subtleties that reward our patient attention to history, literature, human social interactions, philosophy, art, and, of course, theology. Once one adds in administrative responsibilities, the impedimenta of classroom instruction (constructing and evaluating assignments, record-keeping, class management), the ways that our personal responsibility to students occupies time, extra teaching to balance out the generally low pay for educators, and the thousand natural shocks that academic life is heir to, the time remaining for the life of the mind dwindles dramatically. Most of those who point to the benefits of academic life aren’t themselves enjoying the full experience.

Academics are almost universally overworked, underpaid, condescended to, offered fustian flattery in the place of velvet respect, and flat-out ignored by a culture that depends on their work for sustaining the wisdom, balance, perspective, and critical insight that build and enrich our shared culture.

Now, while it’s true that graduate programs often admit more students than can realistically expect to attain tenured academic positions, please let’s take a step back and assess what to make of that fact. After all, some people really do pursue academic studies for the sake of the knowledge and discussion itself, and they can end up in non-teaching academic jobs, or in related-but-not-academic positions (perhaps in publishing, with foundations or other NFP organizations). That doesn’ mean, “Hey, disappointed grad student — just buck up and take a job at a benevolent NGO” (as though it were that easy anyway); it does mean that we can’t look on advanced studies simply as a conduit toward tenured faculty positions, a conduit that’ faulty if it doesn’t convey one hundred per-cent of its graduates to those positions. Yes, most grad students want faculty jobs, and yes, most advisors think only in those terms, but we simply can’t take some step as drastic as [hypothetically] limiting grad-school admissions to balance out retirements. If someone wants to get a theology degree, then go be a screenwriter, that should be an open possibility.

But there’s the rub — for if we admit people without regard to the likelihood of their obtaining a tenured position (after all, they might be florists at heart), we comply with the circumstances that have constructed the gruesome labor scene that presently prevails in academia. If we treat graduate school strictly as a pre-faculty training process, we turn away bright, interested students who don’t particularly want to deal with academia’s frustrations.

It’s worse than that, though, because there’s no way reliably to tell which entering students will be the ones who will, at the end of their programs, be most employable, and which will be bright, insightful, and not at all faculty material. The difference between an application from a college senior and the embodied learning and pedagogical outlook of an ABD or a new Ph.D. plays a tremendous part in the tangle of finding places for scholars and would-be scholars to work. No one can make that determination from a masters-degree admissions folder, so the notion of restricting admissions in order to head off an oversupply of PhD’s just won’t fly.There need to be more masters students admitted to programs than there will be tenured positions at the end of those programs because not everyone admitted should be a professor. So although a top-flight program could afford to make the pledge that I proposed, to carry a graduate until he or she got a steady gig, that would only clarify which institutions were willing to put their money where their mouths are — it wouldn’t be possible for less prestigious institutions to make that commitment, and they’d still be producing more graduates than could attain tenured positions.

I don’t think tenure is the problem, though it plays a role in the dreadful situation we now have. To put it another way, if tenure suddenly disappeared, I expect most faculty would work hard to re-establish it, for the same sorts of good reason that engendered the practice of granting tenure in the first place.

Not to let academia off the hook, but I see the outstanding culprit as a culture that can find no use for extremely capable, insightful, academically-sophisticated workers. It speaks volumes about the way of life in the U.S., and about our long-term economic future, that Ph.D. holders with strong academic careers would not be a massively attractive pool of job candidates. Of course, if the culture showed more interest in scholarship and learning, there would also be more jobs available in academia.

Are academics at fault? Not for being too egg-headed, no matter what populist appeals to common sense and plain language cry out. Some jargoneers are frauds, and some plain-spoken observers speak plainly because they can’understand complicated ideas. Some jargoneers are trying arduously to extend language to express insights that don’ already fit squarely into conventional patterns of expression, and some plain speakers have a gift for communicating disorienting insights in deceptively lucid prose.

More culpable, I reckon, are those teachers who sustain the romantic possibility that everyone could be an academic star. Teachers ought to be more honest about the prospects of getting the academic jobs that most PhD students will hunger for, both at the college applying-for-masters level, through the progress toward a masters degree, and especially as students draw closer to the sacrifices that a doctoral program requires. Sentimental urges to boost students’ self-esteem, to boost the teacher’s self-esteem by giving birth to intellectual progeny, to conceal the relative weakness of one’ home institution by pretending that it can justifiably send off a high proportion of its students for doctoral study, all these buy some comfort at the expense of the students themselves. It’ hard to tell students, especially friendly, ambitious students, that they’e looking for self-esteem in all the wrong places, but someone has to do it.

Tenure? It’ certainly a problem, and less of a problem (in some ways) than I’d reflexively have assumed, but I still mistrust administrators’ sense of what’s best for an institution, and what they owe to faculty who have worked hard to support that institution. Perhaps this is just a classic instance of labor versus management, but I still sense a peculiar vulnerability of teachers, which vulnerability tenure exists to counteract.

The bigger villain, oddly enough, is the nature of the academy as an institution — such that one must own buildings, a vast library, and a broad array of infrastructural devices in order to count as offering “education,” whereas a conspiracy of bright allies could probably cobble together an earth-shaking faculty of academic outcasts and margin-dwellers if only they could just set up shop and teach people.

Should an ostensibly Christian institution offer tenure to its employees? Dean Kriss suggests that there is a principled reason for eschewing tenure, in that it presupposes a degree of mutual mistrust that’s antithetical to shared discipleship. I suppose that’s true, and I just admitted that I don’ trust administrators (as a category — I know one or two whom I trust — one, anyway — most days). How would one begin to cultivate the trust that Dean Kriss stipulates as requisite for institutional discipleship? I think that putting faculty at constant risk of being fired would not encourage the sort of atmosphere for which my estimable correspondent hopes (as do I!). Especially in an situation where any of several issues might constitute a vocational third rail, teachers without tenure would not be free to promote the fullness of intellectual engagement with sensitive issues, but would be obliged either to parrot the administration’s party line or risk unemployment.

What would it take, to make possible a seminary without tenure? I could imagine a seminary in which the faculty was relatively free to govern itself, such that a dean (if there be one) would emerge as an effective leader from within the faculty (this is beginning to sound like the Gospel of Matthew’s ideal of community life); the trustees would serve not so much to manage as to protect the institution’s well-being; the seminary’s mission explicitly named its accountability to high standards of mutual obligation; and the remuneration and benefits were such that it drew faculty who were making a reasoned judgment of risk, so as to avoid simply taking advantage of the surplus of nominally-qualified jobseekers. For such an institution, though, I would not by any means ask the faculty to make the first move.

To sum up these miscellaneous ruminations, I resist blaming academia for not dealing effectively with its cultural degradation. Yes, the academic world certainly ought to do better, must do better by its prospective participants — but the battered spouse of commercial culture isn’t to blame for the embarrassing bruises and black eyes it endures, and is not even fully guilty when it unthinkingly passes on abusive assumptions to the next generation of academics. A bigger cultural change, with more expansive ideals, will have to come before academics have access to the resources that would make possible a truly humane academy.

Does This Bus Stop at Rome?

Evidently Google knows something I don’t. Using Aaron’s AdSense tester, I found out that Google would paste advertisements oriented strongly toward Roman Catholics, enticing clickers to educational institutions (for obvious reasons) and to religious orders.

For the record, that’s Anglo-Catholic, and Margaret would have a conniption fit if she thought I was anywhere near Rome. She gets stern when I so much as joke about it.

Now, of course, having been explicit about this association, Google will think me all the more appropriate a site for their Rome-oriented theological ads. I went ahead and mentioned these topics ’cause I don’t mind that much, but I avoid several topics that show up frequently in my referrer logs (involving a well-known spokesman for generalized mythological spirituality and his unfavorable outlook toward Judaism, and the New Yorker author who made a fuss about him) since I don’t particularly care to emphasize that single post). I got some unusual search-engine attention when I quoted a line from the B-52’s “Rock Lobster”

Good night, and have a pleasant tomorrow. . . .

Recuperation

Deliberately lazy day, regrouping and clearing my head from the whirlwind of the preaching class. I didn’t try to fend off the backlog of mail or links, but I didn’t let it get any worse. Watched Goldfinger (Pippa and Margaret love James Bond movies) and read most of Beyond Belief by Elaine Pagels, which I’ll be reviewing for the Trenton Times. I’ll ask my editor if I may reprint the review on the Disseminary “reviews” page.

Tomorrow I have to get back to work, but it felt good to give myself a day without obligations.

iTunes Report

A few weeks ago, I centralized all my MP3s on my external hard drive. It seemed the only plausible way of dealing with file management and my iPod. The process lasted several days, but I finally got ’most everything categorized, sorted, and deposited on my external.

Now, however, whenever I start iTunes, the application assumes that it has ready access to my main library — and when I’m not at my external drive, iTunes figures all those files are lost somewhere. The next time I connect to my hard drive, iTunes doesn’ seem to see the files it had thought “lost” earlier.

So now, I’m just dealing with the annoying library system and waiting for Apple to iron out their implementation of iTunes’ file organizing capacities. But when the day comes that one can easily just choose which library one wants to work from (without the annoying assumption that a particular ur-library will always be accessible), I’ll be an enthusiastic early adopter.

At Last!

Made it! I survived class today, after which Frank dropped me at the Apple Store, where I would meet Si for the grand opening. I walked to the door, followed the line to the corner of Huron and Michigan, turned east and walked the whole block to St. Clair. I turned south on St. Clair, again following the line, and beginning to wonder whether Si had gotten there at all, when a woman somewhat older than I called out, “Dad!”

As I gazed at her in bewilderment, she pointed to her feet, where Josiah sat eating the sub he had bought for dinner.

By 6:00, the time the store was scheduled to open, the line stretched all the way around the block and lapped over the whole length of the Huron St. side of the block. We spotted Aaron Swartz while we were standing in line, and Si introduced himself later on. Eventually we made our way in, look around, tried in vain to win an iSight (I was very, very impressed at the image quality they generated, much better than any other webcam I’ve seen), and picked up our free T-shirts. (Pictures at my dot-Mac address.)

I was going to come home, eat popcorn, watch a movie, post my pictures, and drift to sleep — but I didn’t really have time to watch the movie, and though I could have eaten popcorn while I typed and image-edited, I hastened through the process so that I could sleep all the sooner.

Last Day of School

After more contact hours than in an ordinary class’s semester, today will bring to a close the preaching seminar on which I’ve been working. It’s a good bunch of preachers, and we’ve had some exciting discussions, but I will deeply relish the opportunity to sleep late tomorrow morning. Oooooh, yeah.

When I’m done with teaching and Si’s fulfilled his many social obligations, we’ll meet on Michigan Avenue for the opening of the new Apple Store (I’d link to Si, but he’s packing and moving to a new location). We had been talking about going to a Cubs game, but we reasoned that the Cubs play 81 home games a year, but the Apple Store Grand Opening comes only once. Plus, OK Go (a band that Si likes, whom assures me, earnestly, has improved since I saw them) will be playing, and they’re giving away 1000 T-shirts and 20 iSights. I’ll be the one staggering around with bags, duffel bags, under my eyes and a good-looking teenage man-boy steering me.

Realizing the Obvious

I was wondering why I felt so exhausted at the end of my ten-hour teaching shifts; after all, teaching isn’t so physically demanding an occupation. I was wondering, until I ate lunch today. I went down to the cafeteria late, and rather than break into a table with an ongoing conversation, I sat down by myself.

It was only as I was giving thanks for a few minutes of solitude that I caught on that I was an introvert living by a schedule that only an extrovert could have devised. Whereas on an ordinary day, a couple of classes (totaling three or four hours) or masses (another three or four) knock me flat, I’ve spent the last four days socializing non-stop from 7:15 to 6:30.

Now I don’t feel puzzled — I feel dumb that it took me so long to figure it out. At least I get out a little early this afternoon. I can go home, hide, and take a nap.

Another Quotation

“Die Sprache verkleidet den Gedanken.”
Language disguises thought.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-philosophicus 4.002

Trevor (of ) thinks this goes well with

“Voice is truth’s body.

Maybe.” David Weinberger
(Not: “maybe David Weinberger” but: “Maybe.” David Weinberger)

I don’t know about pairing the two, but I like verkleidet, “disguises,” for language’s relation to thought. . . .

You Know

. . . . I’m busy when I squeeze in time to blog twice in a day, and they’re both about spam instead of the Holy Spirit or DigID® or responses to any of the friendly, insightful visitors who ask questions about what I write, to help set me straighter. Frank thinks we get out of school early tomorrow, so I may catch up a little; and Si won’t be home at dinnertime, so I can put together a very casual meal — but even then, I’m behind on reading (and listening to) assignments from my class.

No Thanks

“Sherbert Floy” offers me the opportunity to “get a degree in any experienced field.” It turns out that “It is a well known fact that people who posses [sic] a degree are looked upon as the elite. If you have a degree, you are almost assured to gain leverage in the work place. There's no testing required.”

No, thank you very much; I don’t work for the Department of Homeland Security.

Strange Spam

Did the rest of my Blogarian sisters and brothers receive the same emailed opportunity I did this morning? A representative from a website for the Carthusian Order called my attention to his site (I usually don’t link to spam, but I’m a sucker for religious orders).

Some questions: first, how did they choose my name? These can’t be the same people who worry about my anatomical dimensions, my pharmaceutical needs, my relationships with depraved college women, or any of the other causes that try to make an unsanitary landfill out of my inbox every day. I’m a fellow-traveller of the Dominican Order, but with no special attraction to the Carthusians. How did they choose me for their mailing list?

Second, the spam itself is written in good clear English, but the site is in French — so they’re targeting a bilingual (or even multilingual, since the site points to Italian and German links) audience. Again, that’s not your average spam list.

They must have harvested my email from the Catholic BIblical Association list. I’d ask about it at the annual meeting, but I can’t go this year. . . .

Strange Homework

One of the assignments I frequently require for Scripture classes involves reading aloud ___________ (fill in the name of a text here) on an audiotape or, now, an MP3-format file.

This accomplishes loads of positive things, on which I won’t discourse for the moment, but checking this homework becomes complicated. I can’t listen all the way through an indefinite number of multi-hour audio tapes or files, so I end up skipping around a lot, just randomly dropping in to see how my student did when s/he got to Matthew 13, or Galatians 3, or whatever.

So tonight I’m sitting groggily in bed, with my portable tape player, listen to snippets of Matthew’s Gospel read in various different voices. It’s a pretty peculiar experience. Luckily, they’re all good readers so far.

She’s Almost All Right

Leslie Harpold: “Possible Scenarios for Heaven”

I hate to split hairs, but wouldn’t it be more heavenly if the scenario weren’t “You are always a size six,” but “No one cares what size you are,” perhaps adding “and everything fits and is comfortable?”

Beat

I’m utterly exhausted, and this was only a one-afternoon shift. I can’t believe that they expect us to teach tomorrow, 8:30 to 11:30, and 1:30 to 5. I’ll spontaneously combust.

Preaching Teaching

Between community worship and the beginning of today’s class, I found an empty ethernet port and plugged in. The seminary sent instructions to summer faculty saying where we could find phone outlets into which we might plug our modems, but didn’t mention a thing about the campus network. Don’t even think about wireless.

This’ll be an odd experience; we have four days of all-day classes (beginning this afternoon, ending Friday midday), so that by the time I get a sense for what-all is going on, the course will be over. Let us hope that the group can come together quickly, so we can get as far and as deep as possible in the short span of time allotted to us.

Resume and Information Design

I’ve had some kind offers of help, and I’ve done a fair amount of looking around, and I haven’t yet seen evidence that the conventional resume has been tackled to a significant extent as a problem in information design. Even brilliant designers of snappy websites get all conventional when it comes to presenting their credentials.

Now as I said before, part of this has to do with the audience: many resume-readers want to see a good old-fashioned presentation of experience, credentials, goals, and so on. But I observe so many kinks in the conventional resume as a solution to a problem in information design that I remain convinced that there must be some better way to represent oneself to potential employers.

Either it has been solved, and kept secret — or it’s awaiting a new solution.

For Arete

Travailler, c'est entreprendre de penser autre chose que ce qu'on pensait avant.

To work is to undertake to think something different from what one thought before.

Michel Foucault; epigraph to Une histoire de la vérité, Paris: Syros, 1985.

Cheers, Arete!

Preaching and the Spirit IV

Why don’t I just come out and try to convert the lost sheep of the École Normale Supérieure? Do I really mean it about conservative worship (I can’t find anything I even said about conservative worship, but I’ll try to answer the question anyway)? Can one bespeak the Truth without so intending? I don’ have as much time as I’d like, and I’m a very slow thinker and typer, so this’ll be sketchy. I’ll mix in some other stuff I’m thinking about preaching, as I get ready for tomorrow’s (gasp!) class.

Why not “convert the postmoderns”, Tutor? Because converting people isn’t my job. That’s just not theologically sound; conversion is the Spirit at work. My job, and maybe all the work of preaching, maybe even all the work of discipleship, means trying to cooperate with the Spirit — as it were, to make the Spirit’s job easier. To soften people up for the Spirit. To find the open passing lane so the Spirit can sneak in for a lay-up. To do all I can to defuse people’s objections to what I profess, and to exemplify someone whose life permits both a steadfast commitment to the Truth and a functional brain, hearty laughter, and broad sympathies. I don’t do Edwards well (at least, not the apocalyptic Edwards; I have some attraction to the deliberative Edwards). If I were to try to preach “Sinners in the Hands,” I’d sound like somebody imitating a hellfire-and-brimstone preacher, probably not a convincing imitation at that. If on the other hand I be permitted persistently to make my own patient case for the joyous, life-giving Way of the gospel, and for the anesthetic (or worse) alternatives to that gift of freedom and peace, I may better prepare someone to hear the Spirit speak of the deep things of God, teaching us in wordless depths. If someone whose sympathies stop at a postmodern creed doesn’t hear Truth when I preach in the idiom within which I work most truly to my capacities and fluencies, then invoking the furnaces of Gehenna won’t change their hearts either. I’ getting the sense that I know someone who may be called to be the theological bad cop to my good cop.

Conservative worship? I’m not sure what that means, but I should admit that I’m a firm adherent to the Anglo-Catholic tradition of worship — not because I think that it is or should be the only way anyone ever praises God in worship, but because I find in some representatives of that tradition a practice of transgressive beauty that I haven't met as reliably elsewhere. Some Anglo-Catholics are prissy control monarchs; who needs that? But I was taught my most precious lessons in catholic worship at an inner-city Hispanic/Caribbean-American congregation in Tampa. Do I thereby anathematize ways that other people worship? By no means (as the Apostle saith)! Any way of daring to draw near God in ways we devise entails a risk (which is one reason many congregations avoid the issue by not even trying to draw near God) — but the number of ways in which God takes delight in our praise can’t be numbered. (I just don’t understand many of them.)

What then (speaking of variety) about an atheist communicating the Truth unawares, perhaps despite herself? It seems plausible to me; I certainly don’t exclude that possibility. But at the same time, I’m obligated to take seriously an atheist’s rejection of the Truth that I profess — otherwise I’m just flat-out not listening. I used to have a French teacher (an Algerian Jew; maybe she grew up with Derrida?) who insisted that there are no atheists: “Non, M. Adam; everrhy man has hees God, whethair he knows eet orrrh not!” Well, in a certain sense, I guess; but I sure wouldn’t want to try to tell Jean-Paul Sartre or Jesse Ventura that really, they did believe in God. Do I hear notes of the Truth in Sartre? Yes, though they be heavily muffled (sorry, not in Ventura, but then I haven’t read much Ventura). I’m utterly convinced that the Spirit can make the Truth heard in unexpected ways — is that what you’re asking, Danya?

The “deliberate” part of the narrower definition, about which Danya may be concerned, should apply only, I suppose, to those of us who might aspire to speaking with the Spirit’s support; but your challenge brings to view so many problems with that stipulation that I may have to withdraw that part of the definition. I’m guarding against the presumption that some preachers bring to their task, where they reckon that simply by wearing outlandish garb and standing up in the congregation, they must be in the Spirit, so anything they utter is good. There’ a more precise way of getting at that, though.

Well, phooey, it’ getting late, I must sleep well tonight since I have a long teaching shift tomorrow, and I haven’t been able to get back to the topic. Permit me to close this phase of the discussion by observing that gut-wrenching experience has convinced me that the Holy Spirit has a different theology of preaching from a lot of preachers, who evidently think that if they trust in the Spirit and talk for a long enough interval, something edifying will have been said.

Excursus: Danya and I have already opened the topic of preaching from a manuscript vs. preaching without a predefined text — in deference to her and to the other forty-three (or however many) good extemporaneous preachers in the world, I insist that I’m not declaring that everyone should preach from a manuscript. No, no, no! It’s just that people who don’t preach well extemporaneously, which is “many who try,” should work from a manuscript, which at least gives you a basis from which to amend your folly. Of course, if the preachers in question were conscientious enough to examine their sermon manuscripts to see where they could be improved, they probably wouldn’t be preaching badly, extemporaneously, in the first place. But Danya and the other good extemporaneous preachers, God bless ’em, and stick with what you do best.

Now I’ll wrap up before I go off on a long tangent and lose all sleep tonight. . . .

DRMA: Radio Paradise (I’m away from any CDs or my external hard drive/MP3 trove); then "Making Contact" by Bruce Cockburn; "Absolutely Fabulous" by the Pet Shop Boys; "Andrew Duffy’s Jig" by Jonatha Brooke and the Story; "Lounge Act" by Nirvana.

Michel, Meet Phil

I had a great conversation with Phil Windley at DIDW last October, which included his touchstone observation that the state has an intense interest in the question of identity: “we have an entire branch of government that is devoted to establishing links between identity and a physical body: the courts.  Trials are largely about proving that a particular physical body has a particular identity.” I like him a lot and read his blog regularly — but I never thought I would encounter him discoursing on “self-fashioning” and “technologies of the self.” Maybe next year we can have a good ol’ round table on différance, justice, and undecideability.

And although Clay Shirky has resisted having a blog in favor of publishing a monthly column, his participation in the Corante Many-to-Many collaborative blog (with friend Liz and Ross Mayfield, Sébastien Paquet & Jessica Hammer) ends up with him blogging as much as many people do on their personal pages — which is a good thing.

Preaching and the Spirit III

What difference does all that rigamarole I’ve been propounding make?

In answer to Naomi’s question — I haven’t forgotten it — I’d say, I’m not in a position to assert whether preaching (narrowly defined) is an exclusively Christian phenomenon. I can well imagine a symmetrical convergence of circumstances in non-Christian congregations in which different people might identify someone/something like the Holy Spirit at work, but it’s not my office to try to adjudicate the Spirit’s activity in those cases. As a Christian, I can only affirm the activity of the Spirit (provisionally) where I encounter the fruits of the Spirit; that may not involve an explicit proclamation of the gospel, but (again, in the full faith of my Christian self) I would say that in those circumstances, the Spirit must be at the work of the gospel in obscure ways.

In other words, I’m unwilling to say that people are “preaching the gospel whether they know it or not,” in a sort of Christian-imperialistic, Rahnerian “anonymous Christians” kind of way (Karl Rahner, extremely important, subtle, dense, twentieth-century Jesuit theologian). If people want to live by and to propound something other than what I can recognize as the gospel, why, it’s not my business to force anything down anyone’s throat. And here my understanding of the Spirit enters in: it’s by preaching in the narrow sense (which still may be non-verbal, a matter of how one lives, what one loves, one’s way in the world) that one articulates and commends the faith that’s more than only one’s personal outlook on things, but may touch on, resonate with, a multi-subjectivity so profound as to presume the designation of the Truth. Where we open ourselves to the truth that is greater than we, and permit that truth to operate in and through us, I trust that the Holy Spirit conveys the truth, protects us (to some extent) from the scarifying effects of that truth (thanks for the tip, Bob Carlton), supports us in that truth, and amplifies that truth in us and in our expressions of it.

Problem: lots of nice, well-intentioned, politically-correct, Christians don’t want to get anywhere near that truth. In (officially-designated, broader-sense) preachers, this often issues in sermons that catalog a long list of things you don’t really have to believe in, or cloying anecdotes, or assurances that Jesus was a Swell Guy who would have voted Democratic Just Like You (Republican Christians have different ways of insulating themselves from the truth by imagining a Jesus Just Like You who urged people to work for what they earn, to pick themselves up by their bootstraps, to blow the smithereens out of dictators who might have weapons of mass destruction or maybe not but surely are brutal, and control lots of oil). Truth — being more complicated than that — imposes a greater burden of responsibility for one’s thinking and talking and living. Truth raises the stakes, and very many people would prefer to stick to penny-ante living, where our dumb ideas and deceptions and careless talk and our self-interested actions don’t make a difference.

They do make a difference, though, whether we say so in the name of “mindfulness” or “authenticity” or “tzedekah” or even, perhaps, “endeavoring to walk in a narrow way that leads to salvation.”

I’ll stop there for today, leaving in suspension questions like “What does that have to do with preaching?” and “Is that really postmodern?” or “What about grace?” or dozens of others. Much to do today — but I’ll come back to this one, promise.

DRMA: "Ain't Misbehaving" by Leon Redbone; "Ain't Hurting Nobody" by John Prine; "Keep on Trucking" by Hot Tuna; "Law and Order" by Phil Manzanera; "You Turn Me On (I’m a Radio" by Joni Mitchell; "Brian Wilson" by Barenaked Ladies; "White Punks on Dope" by the Tubes; "After the Gold Rush" by Neil Young; "Night and Day" by Django Reinhardt; "Thunder Crack," by Bruce Springsteen; "Coolsville," by Rickie Lee Jones; "Temptation," by New Order.

Intensely Amusing

[take the test] - [by krystaljungle.com]

Interruption

If Trevor and I were to install wiki software on the Disseminary site, what would the multitudes of experts out there recommend? Are any (a) relatively inexpensive and (b) amenable to at least minimal design enhancement?

Preaching and the Spirit II

I left off yesterday observing the broadly-defined preaching need not be problematic. We’re constantly trying to engender goodwill for premises and causes that we support, and that’s certainly fine.

We’re also tangled up in what we might call commercial preaching, or “marketing,” wherein we try to gin up support for a premise or cause not because we’re already committed to it, but because its proponents pay us so to do. Likewise, some of our energies intersect with the practice of bolstering support for participants or causes in political campaigns. We might observe that this differs from all the other sorts of preaching I’m talking about by noting that the motivation for this preaching discourse depends not on the inclination to promulgate or further our own ideas, but from the motivation to do well at persuading (regardless of the cause). I’m not going to get into a discussion of whether that’s problematic — hey, although I’d never have foreseen it, I now have to say that some of my best friends are marketers — but I think it’s plainly different, and certainly some people will challenge the integrity of anyone who make their capacity for persuasion available for pay. That’s one of the things that got the Sophists in trouble.

So I’ll take stock, for a second, before I take Josiah for his check-up, and then return and set about staking out the narrower version of preaching.

We can speak intelligibly about preaching in a broad, loose context that includes most forms of public persuasion. This includes (in one area) people who address religious congregations about spiritual topics, and (in another) people curry favor with mass-media interests by trying to hobble the productivity of the internet. This constitutes a big, loose category that I distinguish here mostly from “acting” (where the social contract of acting involves a consensual recognition that the persuasion involved is short-term and fictive), “coercion,” and “nattering” (in which one ascribes no real weight to one’s words).

Now, on to the narrower definition. In this narrower sense (which I’m resisting calling “real preaching”), preaching involves a particular kind of proclamation, exhortation, encouragement, invitation. The particularity resides in this preaching’s deliberate self-location within discourses that invoke the premises, the authorization, and the judgment of the God made known to Abraham (here I’ making room for the possibility, but not the flat claim, that Jews, Christians, and Muslims worship the same God; it’s obvious, in some respects, and not so obvious in others).

In other words, someone in funny clothing who stands up in front of a congregation but specifically disclaims being accountable to God for what s/he says, or someone who makes no claim to be preaching, or who dissents from the premises that the congregation upholds, such a person can justifiably be excluded from the narrower sense of preaching. I’m setting up my point this way because often enough, a “guest preacher” really doesn’t intend to be preaching-in-the-narrower-sense, and shouldn’t be held accountable as though that were the intent. On the other hand, one might well preach to a gathering of observers who don’t assent to the preacher’s faith; that pretty much has to be possible. But such preaching then draws on the premises, authorization, and accountability that the community ascribes to the preacher.

Having woven my intricate and abstract set of rationalizations and distinctions, I’ll say that preaching in this narrow sense involves some necessary connection to the Holy Spirit, as Christians ordinarily regard preaching and the Spirit. In other words, I’m not saying every such sermon gets the full Holy-Ghost spiritual dosage, or that a rabbi or imam necessarily operates on that basis (what do I know about that?). At the same time, I would think it odd to suppose that a (Christian) theology of preaching acknowledged the preacher’s disciplined adherence to the community’s faith, the preacher’s vocation to speak, and the preacher’s willingness to stand under judgment for the words of the sermon — but then suggested that the Spirit might not have anything to do with the preaching. Without intending to limit the Spirit (per impossibile), if you can’t reckon on the Spirit’s activity under those circumstances, I wonder whether one can say much about the Spirit at all.

What-all difference do I think this makes? I’ll try to spell out some of that tomorrow. Tonight I want to read a little and go to sleep.

Preaching and the Spirit

I’ll try to make this interesting even for good, empirical, disbelievers — but I can’t promise to be successful, so they may want to skip this one.

A long time ago, Naomi asked whether “preaching [were] an exclusively Christian activity, and does it necessarily imply ‘the gospel’?” In response, I’d make a distinction between a narrower sense of preaching, and a broader sense. (The broader sense involves what ought to be interesting to readers-in-general; the narrower sense involves premises that stand to enrich thoughtful engagement with theologically-interested conversation partners, whether dissenters or adherents, but not dismissers.)

In the broader sense, preaching has nothing whatever to do with the Spirit, and anyone can (and does) do it. “Public speaking,” “rhetoric,” “ethics,” “politics” all might fit under a broad definition of preaching (politics and ethics as lived advocacy of particular ways of life). If what we’re talking about is “making a case, even a very thin case, for a trusting, thinking, feeling, acting, in particular ways,” then preaching embraces everything from marketing pitches to campaign speeches to talk-show tomfoolery (and also intense, deep, articulation of philosophical and theological claims).

Now, so defined, preaching seems uninterestingly broad — but I want to hold up this almost trivial version as a foil for the alternative I propose because (a) it’s much more prominent in the culture, (b) much of what represents itself as theological-philosophical preaching amounts only to pitching-ideas or free-associating about one’s feelings, (c) the thin version still involves some important dimensions of what remains pertinent in the deeper version, and (d) I haven’t thought of (d) yet, but I’m holding space for an edited version here.

(C) first. At the broad level, all of what we do to affect others’ behavior partakes of preaching, and that affects both the narrower and broader definitions, partly because it provides an angle of view that conflates the two in unproductive ways (“Sermons — they’re just marketing for churches!” or “The church can teach Madison Avenue about marketing; it’s been doing it for two thousand years”) (speaking of whic, whatever happened to “Madison Avenue”? I mean, as a metonym for advertising/marketing?), and partly because the unproductive comparisons interweave with some true and relevant congruences.

(B) second. A lot of the time, preachers are just talking; something informed by the Spirit may happen when they talk, but if I have to believe that everyone who stands up in front of a congregation is therefore preaching in the Spirit, well, that’s a version of the Spirit that would tempt me to get very skeptical, very suddenly. (I have the feeling that a theologian will bust my chops about that, but I’ll venture it for the time being.)

(A) last (I’ll squeeze in a (d), if I come up with one, above). When there’s so darn much public persuasion going on, when in certain respects spin-doctoring, advertising, marketing, hyping, and soft- and hard-selling have become ubiquitous (“Welcome to TutorWorld!”), it’s important to acknowledge that ubiquity before trying to isolate anything possibly different about the narrower sense of preaching. As the discursive space within which narrowly-defined-preaching operates has been claimed and in many cases usurped by advertising/spin control, the very possibility of narrowly-defined-preaching seems to dwindle.

Now, the broader version of preaching doesn’t need to be pernicious; raising children, for instance, involves lots of suasion that’s not necessarily determined by spiritual interests. Inculcating the importance of “Don’t cross against the light” doesn’t depend on faith.

[I’m going to call it a night and get back to this tomorrow. I dropped off the ladyfolk at the train station, am tired and will probably just watch a movie and go to bed. But I will return to this topic.]

Let’s Get This Straight

So, those who remember the Bush Administration as asserting that Iraq had to be conquered in order to fend off the imminent use of weapons of mass destruction have now become “revisionist historians” if they wonder where those weapons might be? Exactly who is rewriting history here? Were the news reporters rewriting history even as they transcribed speeches? If so, why did it take so long for the Bush Court to correct these distortions? They might have said in February, “No, no, this whole WMD thing isn’t the issue at all. . . .”

I have a fantasy that one day Bush and his flacks will stand before the press, and the very words they try to speak will resign and tell what it’s really like to be so abused. . . .

Redemption and Release

I do want to write down some thoughts about preaching in the next day or so, partly in response to Naomi’s intriguing query, partly so that I’ve articulated and catalogued some of my thoughts in preparation for next week’s classes. Just now, though, I’m spiritually becalmed, having spent the morning at the bedside of a colleague in a Skokie hospice. Jeff’s vigil is over, now, as our friend died peacefully, escorted by prayers from everyone here at Seabury and from very many others in the Episcopal Church.

A Midsummer Nightmare

Tom imagines a third option in parsing politics, but it’s a vision so fine and rich that a keen-minded producer should instantly commission him to write it into a screenplay. “Bottoms in reverse, they conceal asses ears under human masks” — who’s the filmmaker witty enough to equal the screenplay that Tom would write?