AKMA’s Random Thoughts

A Clarification

On Gerry Gleason’s non-blog (“When is a blog not a blog?”), he observes of me that “ [h]e. . . laments that much of what they have learned instead is more from popular culture than rather than significant knowledge.” Gerry has reason to read what I said as he does, but in the paragraph to which I think he alludes, I deliberately said of my students, “they know more about a whole spectrum of topics than their predecessors, and that’s just fine.”

My lament concerns the extent to which learning that might in the past (for a varying proportion of seminarians, not all) have taken place before seminary, and also learning that would typically have taken place after seminary (the nuts-and-bolts of leadership and administration) now have been squeezed into the three years of seminary education. That leaves me as a teacher of Scripture and Church History less time and less institutional authority to cultivate with students a rich sense of the import of the topics I address. I don’t think that’s the same as what Gerry imputes to me. I view with vivid interest the peculiar and mutable definitions that mark off “high” and “low” culture; I know a lot more about the history of baseball in the twentieth century than of the church in the seventh to nineteenth centuries, and I know way more about rock and roll than about church music (and am candidly happy that way). How many people do you know who can rattle off the starting infield for the 1944 St. Louis Browns?

On God(s)

It’s difficult to talk about various ways of faith without the risk of offending someone. And it’s probably not worth bothering to say the calculatedly inoffensive remarks that would be left over after you filter out all the possibly offensive ones. Is it more important to make quite sure not to offend anyone (I know I haven’t attained that anyway), or to add a different perspective when an important, possibly offense-giving, topic is being bandied about? I’ll take the risk.

In the past few days, Joi and Jonathon and Shelley have expounded their views on religions in general, more than once with remarks specifically directed toward Christians; add in the active comments threads on these entries, and you’ll see a roiling welter of discussion about what religions are, and should be, and what’s wrong with them. Christian faith comes off rather badly in these conversations, compared to more civilized religions, or to non-religion, or to ad hoc spirituality. Observers have some good reasons to knock Christian faith, and some less coherent or creditable reasons, and some arguments seem to rest on misguided claims grounded in ignorance.

First, let me note that I am who you’re talking about. I may not agree with everyone to whom you’re referring — surely, surely, surely not with Roy Moore — but I want to make the discussion personal, so that people don’t feel as though they’re deriding an abstract, absent buffoonish blob. In that blob, you’ll find me, doing what I can, standing up as best I can for that which is true.

Among the things I stand for is the premise that the God about whom Scripture and the saints have taught me is God, not in a perspectival or contingent way, but in a thorough, undeniable, absolute way. Not “among other gods,” though I see the interest and functionality of a polytheistic world. I just don’t inhabit a world like that, and it would be false politeness for me to pretend otherwise. That doesn’t mean I want to stamp out other people’s ways of believing, or legislate against them, or get into condescending arguments with them; it just means that so far as it’s given me to know things, I know the God of Abraham to be God in a unique way. This may mean I’m just plain wrong, a possibility that I do grapple with more or less constantly. Or perhaps (as on some of the accounts I’ve seen) it makes me insecure, or a fundamentalist, or some other opprobrious characterization — or an exception, an intriguing oddity among otherwise-misguided Christian believers.

The prevalent attitude — that one’s relation to God, or gods, or the stars, or self-help books, is a matter of personal choice — entails a tacit claim to be able to assess and judge religious traditions, determining what’s really good about this or that way. That’s a claim I try not to make. I’m not a Christian because I’ve understood all there is to know about other ways, and have weighed and balanced their strengths and weaknesses, and gave Christianity the Good Spirituality Seal of Approval (“brightens teeth, cleans floors, edifies children and opposes nastiness”). I exemplify more the way that St. Perpetua seems to have had in mind, when her father visted her in her prison:

“Father,” said I, “Do you see this vessel lying, a pitcher or whatsoever it may be?” And he said, “I see it.” And I said to him, “Can it be called by any other name than that which it is?” And he answered, “No.” “So can I call myself nought other than that which I am, a Christian.”

Christianity may not be the best pragmatic option in the world; I regret disappointing anyone who deems my faith to fail to meet the requisite criteria. But it’s what I am.

I confess the truth as the Truth has unfolded itself to me, and I hope that my cultural, philosophical, social, sexual, racial, and national ideologies haven’t eclipsed too much of what I ought to have learned. But there’s no coherent way, so far as I can tell, to experience and live out stuff one doesn’t actually believe; one’s ways of acting and speaking and pondering and responding can’t help constituting a compendium of one’s understanding of what is true — and mine is not a Hindu, or Sikh, or Sufi life. It’s a Christian life, for better or worse.

I respect, admire, and learn from much that some non-Christian traditions manifest and teach. I have no interest in making other people accede to my faith if they don’t acknowledge its truth. That’d amount to more of the haranguing, bullying, arm-twisting, behavior of which the world has seen more than enough. Nor do I write this in order to extract apologies from people who may think they’ve offended me (anyone who’d care enough to worry is someone I already like enough to expect they meant no offense, so there’s no need, honest). I write this because sometimes it seems as though anyone who holds a position such as mine can safely be dismissed as an arrogant, intolerant imperialist; and I hoped to make sure that someone who wanted to hold to that assessment knew to include me therein.

If you’re reluctant to describe me that way, we may just have the grounds for an interesting conversation.

[Moments later: Kurt does a lovely job of pointing to the difficult, complex relation of “organized religion” to the ideological Individual; much of what he says here can probably be replayed, in a different key, harmoniously to what I’m trying to get at.]

Finest News Source, Most Annoying Navigation

I’m not clicking on links to the Onion any more. In fact, I’m not even linking to the Onion. Much as I love their fair and balanced news analysis, their man-on-the-street queries, the headlines, photos, stories, everything about the publication — as long as they deploy obnoxious navigational interruptions “predirecting” to advertisements, and redirect deep links and even searches from their own search page to the current issue, it’s just not worth the bother. De-link the Onion, and maybe they’ll get the message.

[Later: David Weinberger advises me that he had no trouble while using a pop-up blocker. I have Safari, my main browser, set to block pop-ups, but The Onion still interposes an unwelcome Monty Python ad between me and the main site. I’m experimenting with other browsers to see where the problem lies (Mozilla not-Firebird dodges the pre-direct, but still redirects archive searches to the main page. Internet Explorer receives a pop-up window, since MS doesn’t want to permit its users to avoid pop-ups. OK — now I’m finding that searches that point to older articles work fine in all my browsers (my problem seems to be that the California Recall picture, for which I’d been searching, redirects to the current front page for reasons I don’ quite fathom).

Lest I be thought to have been making this all up, Margaret points out to me that a CNN story involves the observation “During the dotcom boom, ads flowed into the Onion without much coaxing from sales reps. But the flow had stopped, so Mills sent reps out to build relationships with ad agencies. That change and a new willingness to accept rich-media ads have helped the Onion replace fallen dotcom advertisers with such blue chips as DreamWorks, HBO, Nike, and Volkswagen.” My emphasis on the phrase “rich-media ads.”]

On Good Bishops

The process by which Anglicans determine who will be a bishop varies from region to region. English bishops are still, appointed by the Crown, acting on the basis of consultation among church and political leaders on the Crown Appointments Commission. U. S. bishops are elected by the clergy and lay delegates to a diocesan convention. The former method leaves open a door to cronyism and deck-stacking, but also permits the appointment of bishops on the basis of wisdom and integrity; the latter method fends off the insularity of a system of appointments, but too frequently results in ecclesiastical demagoguery and mediocracy. Don Juel and I used to commiserate about the degrading lengths to which some candidates for bishop would descend in order to win votes. (The relation of popular election to a calling to episcopal orders remains obscure to me — though I would be remiss not to note that many would be surprised at the extent to which the church’s business has been conducted on the basis of nominally representative democracy).

I raise this point because the recent death of Bishop John Burgess of Massachusetts illustrates the point that my jaundiced view of electoral politics in the church fails to give due credit to the instances in which a majority vote selects a principled, competent, intelligent, resolute, compassionate, and just soul to serve as bishop.

Margaret’s family had a long-standing relationship to Bishop Burgess, who was diocesan bishop of Massachusetts during one part of Margaret’ father’s tenure as rector in that diocese. He confirmed Margaret, who says “I can still feel his hands on my head,” and she remembers him sharing dinner with her family. He was a great man, and a great example of how the church can get things right.

I remain dubious about election as a way of getting things done (I favor casting lots), but respectfully dubious — because I’ve seen that even fractious, froward political assemblies can reach profoundly wise decisions. I give thanks for the decision of the electors in Massachusetts forty-one years ago (and then again eight years later), but above all I give thanks for the ministry of Bishop Burgess, and his example of what a bishop can be.

Million-year-old Carbon

I finished watching the director’s cut version of Woodstock today, and it struck me powerfully in a variety of ways.

(1) People really made it happen, despite all the impediments. It was no idyll, and the incipient OSHA inspector in me kept having seizures as I saw scene after scene of risky infrastructure. (rain + electricity + gusting winds + towers of scaffolding = ??) Still, the will to make those three days come off prevailed.

(2) The time and the documentary were even more male-centered than I remembered. The movie very obviously emphasizes women’s nudity; though some men appear naked, a leering camera persistently lingers on women bathing or sunning or dancing. Great index moment: the announcement from the stage to the effect that “there’s a guy here whose old lady just gave birth. Let’s hear it for this guy. . . and his old lady!” Oh, yeah, a woman might in some way have been involved in this guy’s big moment. This is a world in which women were still sexual ancillaries of dominant males, and the documentary underlines that.

(3) Some of the acts just were not at their best. Granted that the material circumstances weren’t exactly favorable, at least they could hardly have asked for a more sympathetic audience.

(4) Where was Johnny Winter? I didn’t see him in the movie, but he’s in the credits.

(5) The design of the director’s-cut DVD box is lame.

(6) The director devotes a lot of the camera time to idiosyncratic angles, blank shots, “trippy”effects, that don’t enhance my viewing time at all.

(7) It’s fun to see how young so many of the musicians I remember looked back then. You’re tempted to pat them on the head and walk them to the school bus stop. Well, I am, anyway.

(8) It’s easy for me to see how the recent debacle-reenactment couldn’t recapitulate the [best moments of] the first Woodstock. It’s hard for me to see how anyone thought it could, especially if they had watched this recently. Woodstock 1 had a lot of positive contextual support going for it, a reservoir of unmatchable goodwill.

(9) Mud. So very much mud. Muddy, muddy, mud. Everywhere.

Aqui?

Do you miss Tom Matrullo? I do.

More Information Transgressors

Try to figure out how to contact Harvard Divinity School about offering a presentation on theology, education, web technology, and congregations. After spending a half hour to narrow down the possibilities to the office of the Associate Dean of in the Office of Academic Affairs, you click on his link, but it turns out that his term as Associate Academic Dean expired in June, and he’s on leave this year. Click on the link to his Administrative Coordinator, and you get 404’ed. (OK, that’s supposed to be a mailto link; but you catch the point. I’ve repeated the experience, with similar results, at several other Boston-area institutions. A directory is not so very hard to write up, and need not be highly ornate; why make it difficult for a visitor to get at useful information on your institutional web site?)

Photo Albums

Margaret points out that the Choir Tour photo albums may have been pushed so far down the page by my tedious long-windedness that no one will ever find them again — so look here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here for photos from St. Luke’s Choir Tour, 2003.

As a side note, someone at Apple ought to make it possible to add photos to an album page once the page has already been started. For instance, if I wanted to add a picture of Mr. Fennig or Mr. Taipala (who eluded my camera in the individual photo sessions), I’d have top go through all sorts of baroque rigamarole to include them on the portraits page. That ought to be easy-peasy, as they say.

Together Again

This morning, I woke up bright and early — unaccountably early, since Amtrak was involved — to pick up Margaret and Pippa, who were returning from New Jersey. Margaret had picked up Pip from the family of Pippa’s Very Best Friend from Princeton days, who took care of her while Margaret, Si, and I were gallivanting among the cathedrals of the capitals of Europe.

Anyway, the early wake-up and residual jet-lag combined with other circumstances to slow me down today, and just now it’s all I can do to keep my eyes open. But as I drift to sleep, it’ll be in a household with all four of the remaining nuclear family members, plus the witless dog Bea (entirely recovered from her mysterious pre-trip digestive ailment), under a single roof for the first time in a month or so. That feels good. Mmmmrgphsfvsvzzzzzzzzzz.

Not Yet

I’d been thinking about writing some posts on “hope,” but General Convention-related topics seem to be crowding that topic out. Don’t give up on it, though.

Who Knows What?

In the wake of yesterday’s fulminations about the Episcopal Church’s General Convention, and more specifically about seminary education, Jonathon Delacour wonders (and David Weinberger echoes the question), “If, as I am sure is true, your beginning students know less about ‘Scripture, church history, and theology/ethics than ever before’, what do they know more about?”

The pitfalls in answering this question are so numerous as to tempt me simply to ignore it. Lacking the good sense that God gave a squirrel, though, I’ll give it a try, if only to amuse the masses who witness my discomfiture when offended colleagues, students, bishops, Baptists, and squirrels lambaste me for my ill-informed temerity.

One thing they know more about is “everything.” I say this not to be a wiseacre, but to observe that the field of things that “everybody knows” used to include much about the Bible, about the saints and heroes of the various theological traditions, about what we believe and they don’t, and so on. In a way similar to the way my students know about actors’ filmographies, or athletes’ statistics, or superheroes’ comic-book numbers, past generations might have known about the generations from Adam to Noah, or about the seven corporal works of mercy, or the content of the Westminster Confession. In this sense, they know more about a whole spectrum of topics than their predecessors, and that’s just fine. On the other hand, now my classes have to make up for what’s lost from a cultural “common knowledge,” and that places an increasing burden on my limited teaching time.

As Tripp indicates in a comment on David’s blog, people know a lot about the jobs and specializations they’ve developed in the course of earning their livings. They probably know more about academic disciplines that blossomed into full academic departments over the past half-century (psychology, sociology, business, and so on). They know more about video games and television programs.

Many people come to faith after many years of from church, and they don’t have whatever benefit of learning might have accrued during years of Sunday School, youth group, Bible study, or Sunday Forums. Now, one might think that a cause for remedial study, but some of these new arrivals have duly-attested calls to church leadership, for which additional study would only interpose delays (and delays for a cause whose value is not transparently obvious to many church leaders). I don’t know what’s filled those years of non-involvement, but it probably wasn’t Church History and Dogmatic Theology.

Another possibility is that the culturally prominent understanding of religious faith has modulated from thinking of theology a science that issues in true (or false) propositions about God to a thinking of theology as a way of talking about a sentiment, that issues in unverifiable claims about one’s orientation to God. So long as theology was thought to involve propositional truth, it would have been important to get the theological answers right; if most influential voices regard theological claims as expressions of exclusively private, personal piety, one has much less stake in whether those claims cohere with the broader theological tradition. Indeed, some teachers and students can take an “expressivist” outlook as a warrant for disregarding the [irrelevant] feelings of dead theologians. One knows one’s own relation to God better than does anyone else, and Augustine knows nothing whatever about my piety — so why bother reading what he said?

There’s a possibility, though, that there are some ways in which some students just plain don’t know as much as an entering seminarian might have been assumed to know fifty years ago. For instance, it once was customary that academically-ambitious high school students study at least Greek or Latin, if not both. Such a student might then continue reading Greek through college (by which time he would have attained sufficient reading fluency to be quite comfortable with the New Testament in Greek); if he went on for advanced study, he’d begin with early Christian theological texts and other related literature. That kind of fluency in ancient Greek would once have been a norm among Ph.D.s in Bible; now it’s a noteworthy exception.

Many high schools and colleges feel increasing pressure to give students higher grades for less distinguished work. I’ve taught at one; I was told by a former colleague that, years after I’d left my first teaching position, people were still saying, “AKMA would have given that paper a D” (a flattering, if unrealistic, perspective on my capacity to resist social pressure to lower my standards). But I have been confronted by students who waved a paper in my face and said, “I got A’s all through high school; how can you give me a B for this?” when the paper in question was plainly unexceptional. Even if all my present students have emerged unaffected by a cultural trend for inflating evaluations, the institution of education has acclimated itself to expecting less of students.

At the convergence of these social forces I encounter students who have not wrought their own erudition or ignorance of the broad outlines of Christian teachings. Seabury students are required to take two (survey) courses on the New Testament, and some students take another course if it fits in (many indicate on their graduation exit interviews that they wish for more instruction in Bible, but my point isn’t to boost Scripture’s status in the curriculum); I have to squeeze as much teaching energy into those two quarters as possible. That’s a challenging assignment, and I’m not in the least bit surprised if our controversies seem to some observers to bear little serious relation to the fullness of biblical or theological understanding.

Regarding Church Web Sites

I’m writing some follow-up notes to the places we visited on our tour, so (of course) I’m curious to know what the postal mail addresses are for these locations.

Here are the sites for the various cathedrals we visited:

Rochester Cathedral
Christ Church Cathedral
St. Paul's Cathedral
The American Cathedral in Paris

If you have a spare hour or so, see if you can find the mailing addresses for the Cathedral Chapter (or other central location) of each institution on its site. The American Cathedral gets bonus points for having the address on its main page, though that’s hidden behind a useless decorative introductory screen. Christ Church was next easiest, as its address is prominently displayed on the main page for Christ Church College. Rochester Cathedral is a non-starter, and St. Paul’s simply doesn’t seem to want to divulge where one can contact the chapter — especially frustrating on as large and elaborate a site as theirs, where so many pages might possibly list a mailing address.

I know there are other ways of getting that information; I’ve worked some of them out. My point is that it’s quite bizarre that so important and so small a bit of information is so difficult (in some cases, impossible) to find on the web sites of such prominent cultural institutions.

Burns My Toast

A number of people have asked what I think about the recent General Convention of the Episcopal Church. They’re most concerned about the Convention’s assent to consecrating Gene Robinson as Bishop of New Hampshire. This does not bother me a whole lot, partly because (a) I support the ordination of gay and lesbian Christians, as well as supporting the church’s recognition of and blessing on their relationships, and (b) if I’m wrong about that, it will not be the first time I or the church have been wrong about something, and I trust that the Spirit will make that clear sooner or later. That puts me in a minority, so far as I can tell; most of the people I encounter already know that they’re right, and have no patience for waiting around for the wrong people to be expelled from the church. So far as I can tell, this is a disagreement that will take a long time to settle, and I hope that those who oppose ordination and blessing will stick around so that we can attain a shared perspective on the outcome. Then again, there are still monophysite churches 1500 years after the dominant streams of Christianity concluded that this was theologically erroneous, so I am not expecting any sudden resolutions to this problem.

What does have me worked up is the Convention’s perspective on the role of seminaries. As part of Convention’s deliberation on helping the Episcopal Church grow, legislators had the helpful ideas that seminarians should (a) have to take courses in a second modern language, and to attain “cultural competence” in a second culture, and (b) to inculcate a cornucopia of leadership skills for intercultural ministries. Now, I hasten to add that I’m positively fervent about people learning other languages, am firmly positive about cultural awareness and competence, and agree that clergy need organizational skills in order effectively to fulfill their ministries. I agree with that, and I’m pleased that Seabury’s curriculum places a very high priority on breaking down provinciality, and in raising up organizational skills (the church’s principal practitioner in this area, John Dreibelbis, is a valued colleague here). And the Convention did note the increasing problem of student debt, though I wasn’t knocked out by any commitments to fund seminaries more adequately.

At the same time, I wonder where these new expectations will fit into the seminary curriculum.

We have three years of courses to work with. Students already arrive with less rich acquaintance with Scripture, church history, and theology/ethics than ever before; if one assumes even an elementary familiarity with any of these topics, one risks losing a significant proportion of the class right from the outset. In order to attain a working minimum understanding of the faith that clergy are presumably promulgating, they need as much of the three years of study as can possibly be allotted — but less and less course-time addresses understanding the faith, and more and more involves administering it. If few students now study either of the languages in which the Bible is written, how many will take that venture up once they’re required to learn Spanish or Chinese? If few students now attain a thorough understanding of how the church has arrived at the theological principles by which it strives to live, how many more will take on the effort once their curriculum fills up with courses on accounting and change management (can change be managed?)?

We run the very real risk of raising to church leadership a generation of students who know a great deal about small groups, organizational culture, and leadership skills, but have only a superficial familiarity with Christian faith. Moreover, by institutionalizing this imbalance in seminary curricula, we explicitly communicate the church’s sense that it’s organizational expertise that’s really important, and that the gospel and its implications are something people already know enough about anyway.

This comes around back to the kerfuffle about the soon-to-be Bishop of New Hampshire, as most of the arguments on this topic have evinced only a trivial engagement with theological reasoning. As one (Baptist) grad-school friend of mine observed in an email,

Here in the local Episcopal community the split is between those who privilege the Enlightenment over Scripture (they see the issue solely as a matter of “rights” and imagine themselves to be sitting at the Greensboro lunch counter — . . . white liberal guilt at its best) and those who privilege the Scripture over the Enlightenment (they see themselves as God's last bastion of resistance against barbarism — garden variety conservativism).

On the whole, I have seen more thoughtful and wise theological arguments on the part of conservative opponents of Robinson’s ordination, perhaps because they sense the necessity of pulling out all the stops, and perhaps because conservative leaders at least care that they present some plausible theological case. On the other hand, the conservative case tends to suffer from the limitation that it uncharitably assumes its own self-evidence, and fails to take seriously any dissent.

At least part of the doctrinal poverty of the Robinson debate, I am convinced, lies in the priorities the Episcopal Church evinces for its clergy: not thorough engagement with Scripture or the church’s malleable identity through history or the ways the church has struggled to attain clarity with intensely complicated issues before, but how to avoid triangulation and how best to organize a capital campaign. Again, family systems theory is illuminating, and churches need new roofs — but at a time when every other sentence includes the word “schism,” I persist in suspecting that the people of God need a little more.

As David Weinberger reminded me yesterday, the truth lies in complexity, and I am no doubt accountable for having oversimplified several dimensions of the Convention’s deliberations. If we all had more time to work on these questions together, perhaps some flase simplicity would give way to rich appreciation for the patterns of our agreements and disagreements. For what it’s worth, I haven’t heard any complaints about the way the General Convention was organized and administered.

For You, Joey

I forgot to mention that while Margaret and I were navigating the Metro earlier this week — sniffle — we encountered an accordion busker in our subway car. I thought of a number of things: (1) Can I designate a contribution for the Repair Fund, so that future listeners have a better chance of the accordion functioning better? (2) At times such as this, I do somewhat miss an American sense that mass transit is for getting from one place to another, not for fund-raising. (3) Don’t be such a stick-in-the-mud; the guy’s laboring hard to make a few Euros. (4) He ought to work a little harder before he takes his axe out in public. (5) There’s probably an international brotherhood of accordion players, and even if this guy’s performance reminds me to make a contribution to People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, I ought to give him some change in honor of Joey deVilla. (6) Joey might be insulted, if he knew how this guy was playing. (7) Just give him the money, you old skinflint.

I dropped some Euros into his cup, but he didn’t stop playing or get any better.

Now that France has gone to Euros, does that mean no one any longer says he or she doesn’t give a sou? I never encountered a sou, as far as I know (I was strictly a New Francs and centimes man), but the expression always appealed to me.)

What Happened On What Wasn’t Exactly A Summer Vacation, Final Part

I know that some of you who read this blog can’t quite imagine spending three weeks cooped up in a bus coach with a male choir of forty ranging in age from ten to about sixty (that’s a guess). I myself would have had a hard time imagining what it would be like, and some of what boggles my imagination won’t be published here for all the world to read — but it was interesting in the fullest sense of the word.

So, I left off a week ago. (Is that really possible? Only a week ago I was in London, getting ready to meet Gary and Fiona and Cameron? Wow!) We were supposed to meet up with Gary at 12:30 in the Crypt of St. Paul’s (a cheery place, with lots of memorials I was too scrupulously conscientious to photograph, including Sir Arthur Sullivan, Florence Nightingale, Henry Moore, and of course Christopher Wren, along with Lord Nelson, the Duke of Wellington, and so many other military heroes that one of our friends referred to it as “St. Paul’s Cathedral and Armed Services Memorial” — if you click on the “About St. Paul’s” menu, you can see a layout of the Crypt that will show relevant memorials, and if you click on “cathedral floor” you can see QuickTimeVR panoramas of the cathedral, including the Quire, where the choir sang, and the centre of the cathedral, through which our procession entered the Quire). But traffic was bad, and the Turners were running late; we knew, because Gary kept calling to update us on where they were (“It’s ten after twelve, and we’ll be a little late”; “We’re about ten minutes away”; (ten minutes later) “We’re about five minutes away”), and finally we agreed to meet out in front of St. Paul’s. We didn’t care — we had to see Cameron, and if that meant waiting around for Gary and Fiona, well, that’s just the cost of the excitement.

So we ended up playing a game of “Where’s Gary?”

Were they Gary and Fiona?

What about them?

They might be Gary and Fiona.

Or the occupants of this snazzy car?

I don’t think they’re the Turners.

Here they are!

We wandered up and down Ludgate Hill looking for just the right place to eat lunch, and talking about Cameron (other topics emerged, but none so important). We knew Gary would be a delight, and we estimated that Fiona would be as congenial as she is beautiful (she turned out to be more so), but we longed to get to know Cameron better, and we must report that she was both lovely and fascinating. She evinced a strong interest in digital ID, for instance.

That’s Margaret’s ID, with Cameron’s digits.

The time passed all too quickly. Gary was as funny and clever as you’d expect (and you have high expectations, I know); I like his use of “organic” as the characterization of what others sometimes refer to as “meatspace” or “real life” (although it does work as well for saying things like, “QuickTime VR is cool, but you have to see St. Paul’s organically”). Fiona was just spectacularly sweet and bright and breathtakingly lovely; Cameron had the exemplary good taste to bond quickly with Margaret, who has a very soft spot for infants. It was all we could do to resist the temptation to hop into the car with them as they pulled away from their parking space in Smithfield Market.

Gary’s picture is better, I think (would you send me a full-size version, please, Gary?), but this was the photo of ours that I liked most.

Organic interaction enriches tremendously the pleasure of knowing people online, but it’s not fundamentally different. I miss Gary, but not as much as I miss Fiona and Cameron ’cos I can read Gary’s blog. ’Twould be great if we were closer neighbors, though, and not only because we might get to babysit sometimes. . . .

Now, back to choir events. The Saturday Evensong went exceptionally well; it would have been exciting to sing the Sunday mass, that wasn’t on our agenda. By the way, leading worship always evokes an indescribable awe, but doing so in the ancient, historic cathedrals of Rochester, Oxford, and especially St. Paul’s raises that feeling to an entirely different order. I will not soon forget the experience of hearing the choir’s harmonies reverberate for eight or nine seconds (down from the canonical eleven seconds because of the shroud of scaffolding surrounding parts of the nave), or of reading the lessons from in front of the high altar. Entirely humbling and amazing.

Sunday morning we got up early and boarded the coach in time to get to the Sunday mass at Canterbury Cathedral (our fourth cathedral in two weeks). I had an entirely incorrect notion of what it would look like; it was manifestly ancient and lovely, but it simply wasn’t the cathedral I had imagined. During the service, some seminarians studying in Canterbury for the summer stood up to sing, and to our surprise, one of the group was Seabury’s own Gwynne Wright. We visited the shrine of Thomas à Becket — simple and, again, overwhelming — then set out for Dover, where we embarked for the ferry ride across the Channel to France. (By the way, I want to put in a plug here for the intensely entertaining journal of Mike and Tex’s winter trip to Paris from 2000. It’s not strictly relevant to our tour, but it’s funny and reflects many experiences that St. Luke’s choir members may also have encountered. The martyrs in his pictures from the Louvre, of whose identity Mike wasn’t sure, are the same Peter Martyr whose image graces the Jerusalem chamber at St. Luke’s.)

John the Coach Driver made good time getting us to Saint-Denis, but unfortunately wasn’t clear on where in Saint-Denis our hotel could be found, so we spent a good while reconnoitering this suburb of Paris before we made our way to our lodgings. The hotel was right around the corner from the basilica, but our schedule wouldn’t allow for us to explore the lovely church until late afternoon, Tuesday. We were on a narrow street winding through the apartment complexes that housed many commuters; the bus coach could fit through the streets, but it was another of John’s impressive feats of driverosity that he got us where we needed to go without knocking over any signs, bollards, trees, or pedestrians.

Sometime during our stay in Oxford, where the staff at Lady Margaret Hall kindly provided us with cute little miniature toiletries kits, someone (whose name might sound like “Budzynski”) started a fad of seeking out shower caps and wearing them on the coach, identifying them by their French designation “bonnets de douche.” At varying points, tour participants adopted hair nets, rain bonnets, and several varieties of the genuine bonnet de douche. At the end of Monday’s travels, John gave Mr. Budzynski the ultimate refinement — the beret de douche — in a touching ceremony recorded on my photos page.

Monday went well; John gave us a ground tour of Paris (carefully avoiding making any commentary on what we saw, lest he transgress the law forbidding non-French guides using onboard intercoms for guided tours of the city), then we splintered into smaller touring groups to explore on our own. Margaret and I covered the exterior of the Louvre (we decided that rather than short-change that museum and miss everything else about Paris, we wouldn’t look in), thence to Notre Dame. After we explored Notre Dame, we stopped for lunch at a cafe on the Boulevard St. Germain which, as we discovered with some vexation, offered free wifi (“Bandwidth, bandwidth everywhere/and not a laptop to connect with”). Vegetarianism not being a prevalent way of life in France, so far as we can tell, Margaret and I had omelettes for lunch, then set out to see the Pantheon and make our way back to then Eiffel Tower, near where we’d meet the rest of the tour again to take a ride on one of the bateaux-mouches that ply the Seine.

Just after we docked, we rushed to the American Cathedral in Paris for rehearsal and Evensong. Margaret and I visited with our friend & Seabury alumna Sharon Gracen about her work as Canon Pastor at the cathedral, then slipped into the cathedral for the service. The choir was a little worn out by this time in the tour, but Evensong ended the worship schedule of the tour triumphantly. We returned to the hotel for dinner and collapsed into bed.

Tuesday — just five days ago as I write — we clambered aboard the coach to drive past Versailles (“don’t look too closely, we only have five minutes!”) on our way to Chartres, where we explored the amazing cathedral, had lunch, and played by the riverside (successfully losing one of the tour frisbees in the Eure), and returned to Saint-Denis, where we had the chance to look in at the basilica (unfortunately, the necropolis had closed by the time we got there). This was in many ways my favorite of the French churches we visited; it was airier than either Notre Dame de Paris or Chartres, and the necropolis — what we could see of it — was staggering (more than seventy-one French monarchs have been interred at Saint-Denis!).

We concluded the tour with a sumptuous dinner, a farewell ceremony, and on Wednesday flew back. No teenagers were lost, left behind on purpose, locked in the baggage portion of the coach, nor were any of the adults. Margaret’s already working on next year’s tour with the girl’ choir and Schola.

Photos of the last few days’ events here, and a collection of photos-of-participants here.

Things I Owe

I’ll try to catch up today by blogging the last few days of the choir tour and posting photos. I’ll acknowledge David Weinberger’s welcome-back greeting (oops! just did that) and join in his temporary-bachelor status (pizza for dinner tonight, no cigars). I’ll catch up on bills and mail the post cards that I didn’t mail from France ’cause I didn’t have a convenient interval to get to a tabac to buy stamps. I’ll work on my fall term course online resources. I’ll procrastinate and have to do some of this tomorrow, or next week. I’ll think a lot about Margaret (who’s on her way to pick Pippa up in New Jersey) and Pippa (whom I haven’t seen for a month). I’ll link to Jordon Cooper, who’s way on board with congregations and online interaction, and is writing about it on his blog. And speaking of Exemplary Technotheologians, Bob Carlton is getting ready to start seminary, brave soul, and he asks for our prayers.

[Later: Since I’ having a Weinberger link-a-thon, I’ll note in response to David’s remarks about music-file-sharing, that what I usually say is, “It’s more complicated than that.” Doc Searls promulgated Searls’ Corollary, “It’s more complicated than it appears,” and everyone, Casey Stengel possibly excepted, seems at one point or another to have said either “The devil is in the details” or “God is in the details.” But being quoted is heady enough that I’m not about to quibble; that’s exactly what I said on an occasion that I don’t remember as well as David does.]

Plan for Opening

Trevor and I put our heads together yesterday — okay, he put his head in proximity to my befogged, addled European-time semi-consciousness — and we worked out a plan for opening the Disseminary soon. We wanted to have one of our seminars ready-to-go at the outset, but both Wes Avram and Tania Oldenhage wished to have al,ittle more time before they offered their seminars. Not wishing to rush anyone, Trevor and I figured we could co-chair a seminar ourselves, thus availing ourselves of the opportunity to be first in line to observe any glitches in the system we envisioned, and to show by example how such a seminar might work out. So in a very short while, when we swing open the figurative doors of the Disseminary, we’ll invite applications for a seminar on the Ethics of Biblical Interpretation, s topic on which both Trevor and I have done work, and which usually elicits general interest.

Wes will offer his seminar on Spirituality and Technology, and Tania her seminar on Parables, after they’ve had chances to see a seminar in action, and they will have had time to work out the details of their plans for the seminars. This’ll give us something to offer right away, while keeping two very-valued participants on the Disseminary [clue]train. We also have recruited four authors for our Study Guides (Stephen Lahey on allegorical interpretation, Wendy Love Anderson on mysticism, J. P. Kang on Old Testament Prophets, and another as-yet-to-be-identified participant), and we’re still waiting to hear back from the scholars whom we contacted for essays (John Mbiti has been positive, but we haven’t yet pinned down what might work out for him).

Rest

I’m sorry that news of Doc’s mother’s death comes at a time when I have so very little to offer by way of wisdom and consolation. I hope that Doc can know us to be with him in his grief, and available to him if he needs us. He’s given his readers and friends tremendous gifts over the years, and there’s no reason for us not to go out of our way to make these times better for him if we can in any way.

God bless, Doc, and we’ll keep Eleanor in our prayers.

No News

I thought I’d spend today writing out more stories of the tour, and responses to stuff that’s been going on while I was circulating elsewhere — but I was wrong. Too much grogginess, a movie and a grocery trip pretty much killed my day. Oh, but Trevor and I did have a productive talk about the Disseminary roll-out, which should be coming along soon.

Wow!

Hey, I found a very cool place in Evanston with a wireless connection, a comfortable bed, laundry machines, and everything. Home.

I have a mountain of stuff to talk about, and a mountain of email to respond to, and a mountain of bounced emails that spoofed my address (thank you, virus writer), and a mountain of physical mail to respond to, including some bills to pay. All of which I will tackle tomorrow, after we get a bite to eat, and curl up in jet-lagged, fetal comas.

There’s no place like home.

Too Much

What’s been happening here in London? (I mean, apart from events of global significance and all that other stuff.) I think that the last time I wrote, we had just enjoyed dinner at a curry restaurant (now immortalized in tour lore as “Currymania”). The next day, we had our usual ecclesiastical schedule (rehearsal in the morning, rehearsal in the afternoon, Evensong at 5 in the evening), with a trip to the Tower Bridge at midday, and fish and chips for dinner. Thursday, our midday activity was a cruise on the Thames, which we topped off by a visit to the terrible 3D movie playing at the Imax on the South Bank, but then a delightful and exuberant pizza banquet. Yesterday, we had a romp in Hyde Park for midday, then were invited to the a reception at the home of the Succentor at St. Paul’s. Dinner and evening involved dinner in small groups, which Margaret and I spent with the rest of the tour staff (Nurse Naida, Choirmaster Mr. Webster, and Organist Mr. Budzynski).

This morning, Margaret and I will try to contain our excitement as we wait to meet up with Gary Turner. Chukka Bar Reloaded? Probably not with Cameron along, but we’ll see. All I know is, I’m keeping my eyes open for any blue Volvos. (Links absent since I’m composing offline so as to save pounds, sorry.)

Photos here, though.

Just a Flash

Haven’t found a free alternative near our hotel or St. Paul’s, but I haven’t given up yet. The in-room high-speed access, which I’m using now, is exorbitant, so I’m determined to find a plausible alternative.

In the meantime, the choir is singing beautifully at St. Paul’s, the break-in at Lady Margaret Hall is only a distant memory, the schedule is just packed (we spent today rehearsing, going to Buckingham Palace to see the backs of the heads of people who were watching the changing of the guard, then for some reason to Westminster Cathedral — not the Abbey, the Cathedral, then back to St. Paul’s for another rehearsal, then Evensong, and then dinner at a lovely Indian restaurant near our hotel). The boys are exhausted, the adults are exhausted, and the staff is. . . exhausted. I haven’t been taking as many pictures, because there’s absolutely no photography in St. Paul’s.

And although I haven’t said anything, Great Britain is suffering along with the rest of Europe from typical Chicago summer weather. Unfortunately for Europe (and the rest of us), Europe is not as prepared for typical Chicago summer weather as Chicago is. As a result, it’ been brutally hot everywhere we’ve gone, and there’ve been no air-conditioned oases to soothe weary travelers. For the first couple of days, Britons were telling us we were complainers, but since this was officially declared the hottest weather in recorded British weather history, it seems socially acceptable even for Britons to admit that it8’s too &^#$@% hot!

Photos tomorrow, I hope. [Later: Photos here.]

Radio Silence

The last few days have been hectic and active, and I may not have wireless access in London once we get there, so steady yourself with a cup of tea and prepare for light blogging and photo-transmitting.

Yesterday we spent the whole day away from our digs at Lady Margaret Hall, singing Mattins, the Eucharist, and Evensong. The services went very, very well. Congregants kept seeking me out and praising me, as though I had anything whatever to do with the choir’s accomplishmenmts (I just pass the praise along to Mr. Webster). We had an entertaining open-top bus tour of Oxford that reiterated much of what we already had heard, but it all looked more interesting from twenty feet up.

When we got back after Evensong, we discovered that a series of rooms had been broken into. The circumstances are very, very odd; some relatively valuable items were overlooked, and the only thing that seems to have been taken is the laundry fund amounting to about twenty or twenty-five pounds, from a drawer in Margaret’s room. Doors were forced open in what must have been an extremely noisy operation; my TiBook was saved by an especially hardy lock and doorjamb. The deadbolt on Margaret’s lock was forced clean out of its socket.

No boys’ possessions were taken, no one was injured. The porters at LMH are thunderstruck; “nothing like this could possibly happen here.” The Thames Valley Police had not followed up the porters’ call for investigative help as of this morning, although we gather that weekend nights keep the constabulary busy.

It’s been a captivating week in Oxford. If any reader knows of a vocational opportunity here, please don’t hesitate to tell me! We leave for London in a half-hour or so. I’ll try to post some final Oxford pictures, and we’ll come-what-may in London.

[Later:] Change of plan. I didn’t take that many post-worthy pictures yesterday, so I’ll punt till I see what’s up in London. I’m sure I’ll be able to work something out. If anyone wants to suggest an open wifi node in the Barbican/St. Paul’s area, just let me know.

A Full and Hot Day

Pray for me. Before I get a chance to blog again, the choirboys have roped me into playing football — that’s “soccer,” to you Yanks — and calamitous injury may ensue.

[Later] Well, I survived, and didn’t embarrass myself. I posted the new photo page.

Collapsed in a heap, past my bedtime.

Blogs That Pass in the Night

Jonathon’s back, but I’m away. . . .

Friday in Oxford

Morning: After breakfast, I tried to get my network connection percolating. No luck; I suspected that someone at Lady Margaret Hall had taken exception to my freeloading on the wireless network and had banned me. So I read an annoying book I’m supposed to review, and waited till the end of the choir’s rehearsal to take Si and Adrian (another choir member) down to do some errands in town. We bought Si a new nosepiece for his glasses, bought another packet of laundry detergent, took out some money from the cashpoint at the bank, tried (and failed) to induce a teller to give me change with which to do still more loads of laundry, tried and succeeded at a different bank, walked back just barely in time for lunch.

Afternoon: cleaned up and headed downtown to tour Magdalen College and then Christ Church, then to rehearse at Christ Church for Evensong, then the nightly double-time stroll back to LMH, where we dined in relative solitude as so many of the young people were being taken out for dinner by tour parents.

Evening: After dinner, Margaret started the next (we hope it’ the final) round of laundry here, I juggled photos (not ready to post any just yet), and we shared a few glasses with some of the other adults in the entourage. Margaret is enjoying a leisurely bath; I’m dashing a few words into a blog. We’re both quite weary — but tomorrow is another day.

Long Day, No Few Words

We rod