After mass, I went to lunch with the adult education coordinator of the parish (St. Elizabeth’s, Glencoe — which always makes me think of Scotland’s infamous massacre) that’s invited me out to talk about The DaVinci Code. She and I traded ideas about the panel discussion, which includes Prof. Barbara Newman of Northwestern University and Brian Hastings of Church of Our Savior, over an Indian buffet. She’s rather more sympathetic to Gnosticism than I am, but we held a lively and wide-ranging converstion. It sounds as though the church will be packed; she’s estimating three to four hundred people will attend, overflowing the sanctuary and spilling into an adjacent parish room. If you’re coming, come early, I guess.
When I got back to my office, the Dean rang me up; the Board of Trustees had voted to promote me to full Professor. It sounded as though he said “effective immediately,” but I got lost in a jumble of subsequent topics. To be on the safe side, you may kneel and call me “Full Professor Adam” when you address me.
Then, alas! I had to drop Margaret off on the train. Pip did her Halloween bit, Si is off at a (church) all-night lock-in, and I’m exhausted. I didn’t sleep well last night; tonight, I’m about to crumple altogether.
Today’s All Saints Day mass went well, I thought. The liturgy at Seabury is a bit odd, since we do something different almost every day, and there’s little chance to develop a rhythm of liturgical practice. On a day when we aim High (Church), the relative of habituation makes the whole exercise seem a great adventure. Still, we used up a good quantity of incense, we processed out to “I Sing a Song of the Saints of God,” and the liturgical team kept mostly in synch. I didn’t botch any of the chants, though when I’m intoning a long passage it can be hard to know whether I’m staying quite on pitch. Anyway, a wonderful mass, and prayers for Joey’s father and mine were wafted heavenward in billowing clouds of incense.
The sermon went well, although it was gauged for a slightly different congregation than actually showed up. I’d forgotten that today begins the two-week parish immersion part of the second-years’ “Plunge” course, so that a third of the seminary was away on location; and I had hoped that one or two more of the faculty would be there, but the Board of Trustees was meeting at the same time as mass. The first-years and some seniors were there, though, and I tried to modulate the tenor of the sermon better to fit the smaller, less-Seabury-ized congregation. It still could have benefited from a little more ripening and a finer connection to the congregation — but enough temporizing. This is what I preached:
Mass of All Saints
Charles Palmer Anderson Chapel of St. John the Evangelist
Seabury-Western Theological Seminary
October 31, 2003
In spite of all the learned have said
We hear the voices of the dead.
This is the beginning of a favorite poem of mine, John Hollander’s “The Widener Burying-Ground” (alluding to the name of the Harvard University library). The poem evokes a way of thinking about interpretation that disarms some of the imaginary barriers to rich, exhilarating interpretations of the texts our ancestors have left to us. We who preach are neither undertakers, who dress up still corpses as best we can, nor Frankenstinian scientists who shock a semblance of life into dead bodies. We who read poems and prophecies assimilate the words we read into our selves, and we renew their echo in a joyful, rich, responsible freedom to take up and resonate again.
Our marginalia all insist
– Beating the page as with a fist
Against a silent headstone – that
The dead whom we are shouting at,
Though silent to us now, have spoken
Through us, their stony silence broken
By our outcry (We are the dead
Resounding voices in our stead). . . .
Hollander captures the gravity of our place in the communion of saints. Our inheritance from the saints settles onto us as a constraint on our freedom. We are not free to scorn the saints, pleasant or prickly, great or small. We may not simply repudiate their wisdom. The saints have built up for us a place in the household of God, and we may not casually tear it down – even if we need to redecorate it once in a while. The saints, all the saints, testify that God’s plan is not all about us.
But with this unasked-for home the saints bless us more richly than we can imagine, entrusting us with their faith, to keep their hope alive and effective. We are the saints’ voices; we don’t invent, but we inherit the saints’ good news, which we proclaim anew in our own accents, our own dialects, from every tribe and language and people and nation. We are the saints’ bodies, bearing in our ?esh the marks of their suffering, renewing their ministry and testimony. We are the saints’ hearts, grieving and rejoicing and growing, ever growing in love for this fractured world and the lovely, stressed-out neighbors in whom we love God.
And here’s the pivotal point that this morning’s poem misses: As we indeed are the saints, as we bespeak their gospel and enact their faithful ministry and empower the church with their spirit, so the saints are not dead.
The saints are not dead, and we know that. We study at the side of African Augustine, learning how we can knit together diverse lives in a harmoniously-ordered City of God. We journey with Patrick and Francis Xavier to situations we can’t anticipate, learning to trust God’s care for us. We learn from Macrina the meaning of “resurrection,” from Sojourner Truth the meaning of endurance, from Thomas Aquinas the meaning of practically everything, if you know where to look in the Summa. And we learn not only from stained-glass saints, but from the Seabury saints who’ve warmed these pews before us, to whose inextinguishable lives we testify: Charles Harris and Jim Griffiss, alive! Lois Hart, Enmegabowh, Effie Alice Keith, Mary Gladkowski, alive! All saints, sisters and brothers, saints remembered and forgotten, saints present and absent, saints yet unborn whom we will someday parent and teach, all saints, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever!”
Amen.
It seems as though that Halloween picture I posted a year ago is getting a lot of traffic. It's pretty sweet; I just have to laugh every time I look at it and think about Nate and Si, and even their friends Brad and Cally.
Now that some of you have had a look at the flesh-and-blood Josiah, or even his most recent photographic manifestation, you may enjoy the past version all the more.
I’ have just left this as a comment at Joey’s place, but I seem to have screwed up my Reader account with Blogware, so I’ll write it here. Accordion Guy’s dad is in the hospital with an infection; but it’s not just an infection, it’s complicated by the fact that he’s a transplant recipient with a compromised immune system. We ask your prayers, wishes, hopes, candles, whatever for Joey’s dad — and for mine. My father’s wending his way through an epic array of sequential medical stunts: they want to take care of this, but they have to do that first, and there’s a risk if they don’t do the other thing. He’s negotiated the first round, but there’re a couple more ahead of him. Double up your spiritual energies, and let’s get these fathers through the obstacle course on a two-for-one.
I'm saying mass on Friday, so we’ll do a “special intentions” dedication for Accordion Guy’s dad and mine.
“I wanna say right now that this mass is goin’ out for a couple of special guys, the dad of a friend of mine and my dad, too — so Dad, so Mr. deVilla, if you’re out there, this prayer is for you. . . .”
I’m preaching Friday at the All Saints service here at Seabury. I have actually gotten pretty far along in preparation before I remembered that some people like to read about how I get from notion to sermon — so here’s where things stand.
I oinly found out which lessons we’ll be using yesterday, but since a service for All Saints will be heavily thematic anyway, I’d been mulling over how to address a Seabury congregation (which might even include a handful of trustees, who will however probably be kept too busy to worship) about one of the theological premises of All Saints: namely, that in all our servanthood and leadership, in our discipleship and spiritual growth, we are not alone, but we constitute integral elements of a greater whole that comprises all the saints, all the faithful of every generation. If I had more than five minutes, the designated maximum for sermons by people who aren’t the Dean, I’d probably throw in an excursus about Small Pieces, Loosely Joined, complete with sales pitch; but David will have to settle for a quick allusion this time.
Anyway, I looked around the chapel and made a connection with one of my favorite poems, “The Widener Burying-Ground” by John Hollander (sorry about the bleak page layout for the poem; there’s no excuse for treating a lovely poem so brutally). I’ll begin by quoting the opening couplet, and expound the burden of the remainder for a paragraph or so (this part’s giving me headaches just now, since the job of summarizing a poem falls so far short of just reading it — but I don’t think I have the luxury of assuming that the congregation would catch it well enough in a once-through oral presentation). I’ll then turn to the climax (“we are the dead / resounding voices in our stead,” in italics in Hollander’s original presentation).
At that point, I’ll wrest the stream of the homily toward the theological point that the voices we hear, the voices to which we in turn give new voice, are not dead, but alive. I’ll name some of the saints memorialized in the chapel, and make connections between their testimonies and our work as a seminary.
But I don’have a conclusion yet, and that’s the killer. I’ll have about a sermon-and-a-half’s worth of exposition, which I’ll have to trim back, and I’ll have to work with the material to see what coalesces for the wrap-up. I’ll report when anything comes clearer, but this is where things now stand.
Not only am I running late on my links to Britt, but I also neglected to point toward Richard Soderberg’s sensible advice for blog writing. Too many people want to pre-define what a blog can be, or how everyone has to write their blog; Richard just says, “This is what I learned.” What he learned sounds right to me.
Apart from the “long-winded essay” warning; those, after all, are my specialty.
In the whirl of activity that’s keeping me from losing vast amounts of ground to my mountain of obligations, I had let get away from me two points of interest regarding Britt Blaser. The first is that yesterday was his birthday, according to Doc, and I hope I look as good when I’m 61 as Britt does now. In fact, Britt probably constitutes an upgrade over how I look right now.
Second, a long time ago, Britt suggested that I check out The Right Christians. I needed a reminder because I hadn’t been back in too long. Allen Brill invited me around TRC when he first started it up; it looked cool, but a little sparse, and I have a hard enough time keeping up with my usual blogs that I didn’t come back very often, and eventually forgot to come back at all. Then Britt prodded me, and lo and behold, the site has gotten going. While the TRC team and I differ on a number of issues — on the whole, I get the sense that they’re classic theological liberals, and proud of it — it really is a remarkable site, strong and bold and firm liberal theologizing. Happy birthday to Britt, and cheers to Allen Brill and The Right Christians for keeping the torch aloft.
Look, I’m all about disagreement. I believe disagreement constitutes the most fundamental discursive element; “agreement” is at best transitory, more often illusory. So I’m not trying to force anyone’s conscience, anyone’s hand.
But let’s give the most charitable take on this story (that John Adams called to my attention). A history teacher/academic chaplain articulates one way of looking at a contemporary controversy — and for that, the administration fires him and drives him off the property.
I haven’t read the article; there are ill-considered, inflammatory ways of tackling our contemporary sexuality headaches, and the article may have been a fiery blast of liberal ignorance. More likely, from the tone of the report, the editorial just espoused a position unpopular with the school’s donors.
Either way, the administration’s hasty convulsions reflect the unproductive kind of panic reaction that so often substitutes for deliberation and reflective response (witness Gregg Easterbrook). The ways we might deal with unwelcome talk, disagreeable perspectives, or flat-out dumb mistakes, surpass what we imagine — but we typically jerk our knee and fire, blast, purge, shout down, stifle those whom we identify as transgressors. I’m willing to insist, though, that the vast preponderance of productive, healing, educational responses fall into the unhurried, imaginative category rather than the sudden, sweep-it-out-the-door-and-under-the-carpet category. I’ll apply that claim to international relations, to theological disputes, to child-rearing and spouse-coping, to domestic politics, to parish crises.
Practice thinking or saying:
“What if I’m wrong? What would I want to have done that would command respect in retrospect?”
“How can we work our way out of this mess?”
“Granted that this happened once: how can we pattern our lives to reduce the likelihood that it’ll happen again?”
“Did you say (or do) that because you’re an unreflective bigot, or because something distracted you so that your commitment to fairness and even-handedness slipped?”
“How can we make clear that we think you’re wrong, without muscling you into submission or flight?”
Maybe the school in this story does better for philanthropic gifts by its misanthropic policies — but I’d bet that they’d come out ahead in the long run if they demonstrated a principled, firm, policy of adhering to their institutional premises while permitting disagreement. Trying to suppress dissent has a nasty way of starting revolutions.
A lot of lovely people have said complimentary things about Josiah since they met him at BloggerCon (some who only heard others talk about their impressions of him), and this morning our friend Halley linked to his blog with kind words of praise. That inspired Frank to go over and check SiBlog out, and he seconded Halley’s affirmation; then that jogged his memory, and he posted pictures of Si and me back at BloggerCon. They’re fine photos (allowing, in my case, for conventional wisdom about silk purses and sow’s ears), and I’m especially pleased at the picture of Si looking over at the screen of my TiBook (taken the first day of the conference). Thanks, Frank, for the images and for your encouraging words about Josiah — and thanks likewise to all who have been praising him. He’s a great guy, and it makes me glow with parental pride to hera that others think so, too.
Frank Paynter pointed to this blogpost that I’d missed on Andrea’s ARJLog. The story ends with my allegedly saying, “It is improper squid etiquette to eat garlic with a fork.”
I read that to Margaret last night, and we relished the runaway absurdity of it all. Then last night, Margaret dreamt that we went to communion, where there was widespread murmuring about the communion bread, because it was supposed to have been marinated in cooked garlic, but it had been prepared with raw garlic instead. (She knew, because she went to investigate and took a bite out of one of the pieces of garlic, so she could tell from its consistency that it was raw. She sampled the garlic — but not with a fork, since she knew that just wasn’t done.)
Before today’s half-day ATR Board meeting, we celebrated a mass for theologians, especially remembering our late friend and colleague, the former editor of ATR, Jim Griffiss.
His former colleague, Bill Petersen, told the story of a time he and Jim were commiserating after an especailly vexing encounter with an exceptionally irritating neighbor. “Petersen,” quoth Jim, a pipe clenched firmly between his teeth, “you must remember that although all interesting people are difficult, not all difficult people are interesting.”
Perhaps there’s something in the air, or it’s the phase of the moon, but Bishop N. T. Wright isn’t the only one denouncing postmodern errors. (Honestly, I would feel a lot less like a postmodernist if I weren’t constantly running into shoddy denunciations of that way of thinking.) Bob Carlton points me to someone’s announcement that postmodernism is dead, that critical realism has finally done in the evil monster in the black turtleneck.
It strains my charity to take seriously a philosophical essay that includes the words, “Indeed, it is hard to give an overview of the major postmodernist tenets without seeming to fall into parody.” The author of such a claim manifestly hasn’t the slightest sympathy or respect for the ideas or thinkers he professes to represent; why should anyone expect the representations, under these circumstances, to amount to more than a parody (and a gross one at that)?
Critical realism has been around a long time; Bp. Wright actually makes it the premise of his historical work in The New Testament and the People of God , published in 1996, and biblical studies doesn’t come by its philosophical underpinnings hot off the presses. One can make a strong case for critical realism (it’s way better than uncritical realism), but I remain unconvinced that setting “realism” over against some supposed alternative — as though some of us might deliberately flout reality in our thinking — adequately deals with either the problems of our describing reality or the complex philosophical arguments that surround those problems.
And composing a jeering epitaph to one approach to these problems strikes me as a cavalier, perhaps nakedly rude rhetorical gesture. I don’t adhere to process thought, but I admire the depth of thoughtfulness that goes into it. I’m not a critical realist, but I can recognize its efforts to circumvent the weaknesses of simple realism. I would ask the same respect of those who promulgate opposing philosophical platforms, but then perhaps their response would simply be that I and the teachers whose arguments impress me are nothing but a bunch of dunderheads whose labors don’t deserve a serious, respectful rebuttal. More fool I.
I’ve spent the day so far (and will resume spending it in an hour) at meetings of the Board of the Anglican Theological Review (I’m sending you to these web pages, but they’re redesigning and moving to a new domain, and I fear that they’ll indiscriminately break links.) It’s been down-and-dirty thrill-packed Board of Directors action, with all the attendant soporific consequences — even as we get good, effective work done. In a break-out committee toward the end of the day, though, [name deleted by request], a colleague from [another educational institution whose name is withheld here by request], noted that she had agreed to write a double-digit number of book reviews on which she was long overdue.
“I only review out-of-print books,” she summarized.
Not quite in a category with International Talk Like a Pirate Day, today is Mole Day, a day dedicated to honoring the achievement of Amedeo Avogadro. All I remember from Chemistry class — apart from the surreal experience of taking the exam for the American Chemistry Society scholarships and actually doing well on it — are a few random names and notions, such as “acid-base titration” and “PV=NRT” and “Avogadro’s number.”
I have several numbers, not just one (a Social Security number, telephone numbers for home, work, fax, and cell). Still, if Avogadro had to have only one number, he chose a much bigger number than I’ll ever have: 6.02 times 10^23. That (to return to the subject of this post) is the number of molecules in a mole. A mole, if I remember correctly, is the quantity of a gas or compound or whatever equal to its molecular weight in grams. After copious research dedicated to bringing you a full explanation of this important day, I still can’t figure out quite why moles matter.
But then, chem majors need days like this to give them occasions for geeky fun, so (thinking especially of Betsy this morning) Happy Mole Day, and Avogadro bless us, everyone!
A couple of weeks ago, Trevor and I conducted our “Webbiness for Congregations” consultation as a continuing education event at Seabury. One of the features of our presentation is the “Let us cast obloquy on your parish website” portion. Among the participants who volunteered their parishes was the Rev. David Cobb, a priest whose congregation’s website wouldn’t load. We went ahead to another congregation and a wonderful time was had by all — but a couple of days later he sent me a note, observing that it was just possible that I was acquainted with his parish, Christ Church, New Haven.
Well, duh! It’s only the parish that was our home base while I was in seminary, where I served as an assistant during my second masters program, where I was ordained to the priesthood, where Si was baptized, where Margaret attended Bible study classes while very pregnant with Si (and after he was born, nursed him through Bible study). I returned his note gladly; I remembered Christ Church vividly, and sensually — Margaret and I both recall with strong affection the distinctive scent of Christ Church’s custom-blended incense. Well, yesterday, we received in the mail a lovely gift: a jar of Christ Church “Angelus” incense, which Margaret and Si and Pippa and I sat around, sniffing fondly. Si and Pip don’t even remember Christ Church, of course, but we all were enraptured by the deep message of reverent devotion that those grains of frankincense signified. “Walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave
himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.”
My respect for Tom Wright, even on topics about which we disagree, is profound; the church is better off with thoughtful bishops with whom people like me disagree than it would be with shallow head-nodding fellow-travellers.
So I’m all the more irritated when Tom ascribes his (correct) disagreement with Karen Armstrong to her proclivity to “ignore what the texts actually say and to attempt, in classic postmodern fashion, a synthesis of widely disparate traditions in support of that contemporary western phenomenon, ‘the religious quest’ ” (my emphasis). Wright’ positive case rings true to me: “resurrection” figures much more prominently in the pertinent texts than does the wan category of “life after death.” But his negative case effects just as grievous a misrepresentation as the one Armstrong foists on him.
Bishop Tom, if you’re so concerned with “what the texts actually say,” please cite for me one single scholar of postmodernity who invokes “a synthesis of widely disparate traditions in support of that contemporary western phenomenon, ‘the religious quest’.” I’ll even try not to quibble over who counts as a “scholar,” trusting that if you care enough to think about what you said, you will care enough not to scrounge up some shabby lackwit who justifies theoretical fustian by labelling it “postmodern.”
What makes this groundless casual accusation all the more bizarre is the way it misses the opportunity to score points against positions Karen Armstrong actually holds. Armstrong is no “postmodernist,” but a (very modern) comparative-religion writer. Instead of discrediting her assumptions and scholarship, Wright takes a random potshot at some uninvolved French guys smoking Gauloises in the next department over. If it’s worth starting a public argument — and in this case, I agree that Wright has a legitimate complaint — then it’s worth joining argument instead of attacking straw philosophies.
Micah and Laura both blog — I should’ve remembered them when I alluded to blogging partners. Sorry, youns!
And Micah pointed me to a great resource for ways to handle the preaching others’ sermons problem, which led me to another page on the same topic, both treating the practice sensibly, sympathetically, and very helpfully.
Wonderful, committed, I-sure-wish-I’d-had-her-when-I-was-in-second-grade (even though I had a wicked crush on Miss Fogg) second grade teacher Susan Hunberger has started a blog for her class. The coolness of this knocks my grade-school media experience sideways; yes, David Eddy and I did mimeograph a semi-underground school newspaper back in the sixties, but blogging in second grade would be a massive thrill. Especially when grown-ups from all over the world are leaving comments.
Which brings up a fascinating dimension of the matter: the varying ways that respondents address the second-grade authors. Some leave comments that look to me as though they’re taking part in a conversation with the second graders. That’s certainly what I was trying for — respectful attention to the authors and to other respondents, as though we were sitting around the family dinner table, batting ideas around. Other respondents, though, feel the need to tell the students what’s what. I’m sure Susan has the situation well in hand, but now I’m almost more interested in how Susan negotiates the varying voices that the blog students will be reading. (I have the feeling that this experience will play an important role in a presentation for a conference I’ll be addressing in the spring. I intend to challenge the conference-goers to begin to think of technology less as a pedagogical tool than as a pedagogical environment, though of course I’ll eschew spatial metaphors. I don’t treat gravity as a pedagogical tool; it’s just there, and I count on it to keep me vaguely tethered to the class I’m presumably teaching, but I don’t spend time thinking about gravity as a feature of my pedagogy. This connects with my presentation and Susan’s class inasmuch as the question of authority arises with particular force and complexity when one adds digital communication and technology to the pedagogical situation. Where some writers think the answer lies in filtering and editing web-based material, I will argue that the more immediate, appropriate response involves focusing the more vigilantly on students’ own capacity to ascertain the differences between “reliable” and “unreliable” information, an important human capacity that we ought to be doing better, always, regardless of whether we’re spotlighting technology in our pedagogy.)
Hey, yo! Evanston-area HTML-capable readers!
Seabury is looking for part-time (low-cost, naturally) help for website maintenance: updating links, adding copy, correcting typos, light-weight non-design tasks. If you need a few dollars for webby odd jobs, or if you know someone who might, please email me.
Euan was surprised (he actually used the word “scary”) when he noticed that an estimable theologian (and critic of sermons), to whom I am married, left a comment expressing strong dissent from what I had said about preachers who reuse others’ sermons without adequately acknowledging their source. What Euan doesn’t know is how mild her rebuke was, compared to what she can generate when really, really provoked.
That then led me to think of how few blogging relatives I know of. Jeneane and George at the head of the list, of course, and Elaine and B!x; Si and me (sometimes surprising people in Joi’s IRC channel); and in a different current of the blgostream, Teresa Nielsen Hayden and Patrick.
Do they always agree? Or are we supposed to keep our disagreements secret? (I’m not suggesting Euan spposed any of these things, just following what I take to be the vector of his thought.) Is Blogaria a “one-of-a-pair-of-spouses-only” club, such that the first partner to get a blog effectively edges out the other? I hope not; I hope that Margaret’s occasional dope-slap to me constitutes a step toward more partners feeling comfortable participating more generally in our Blogarian conversation. Unless I’m wrong about that, dear.
I’ve been having trouble leaving comments at enetation sites; sometimes they go through, but other times it seems as though Safari (my browsing weapon of choice) doesn’t agree with enetation. Or are their servers just erratic? Do other browsers miscarry sometimes?
Visitors to Digital Identity World may recall seeing the strained expression on my face as my trusty TiBook ran out of memory after a mere forty-five minutes or so of activity. I had ordered a new battery to be available Tuesday, before I left for Denver, but wouldn’t you know it — the battery delivery was late, and I had to fly away with only limited power.
I picked up the new battery yesterday, though, and I have to say that it feels intensely exhilarating to see the “time-remaining” estimate in the upper-right-hand corner hit three hours again, as in the olden days. Last year.
Let me stipulate at the outset that I may be one of the most cranky sermon-listeners in the known world. This is not a virtue: it’s fussiness and hyperbolic liturgical/theological intensity. OK?
That being conceded from the start, I have a couple of complaints. First, if you're going to ignore the Bible readings for the day, why not just save us the trouble of listening to them? Or ignore the ones that are mandated for the day, and read the lessons that you're actually going to preach from? It doesn’t advance the gospel to read three lessons (four, if you count the psalm), then preach from lessons that the congregation hasn’t just heard.
Second, sermons that feel obliged to pick up certified pop-culture themes (I heard a buncha sermons on The Lion King) frequently fall into any of several traps. Sometimes they over-summarize the plot, on behalf of the congregants who haven't seen the movie (or read the book or whatever), taking up sermon-time with superficial-overview narration; if the book or movie can't safely be assumed to have been seen by everyone listening, think twice about preaching on it. Second, it risks eclipsing the Bible readings: if what you really want to talk about is The Lion King or Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, why bother with the pretense that you’re preaching on the gospel? Again, save us the time of readings to which the sermon will not pertain. The strain that a preacher goes through to wring some connection to a Bible that’s diffidently silent on issues of leonine orphans or the sufficiency of elementary education doesn’t enhance any congregational sense of the relevance of Scripture, or the skill of the preacher.
Rant, rant, rant. Time for me to quiet down and go to bed.
Anyone out there know anything about Aberdeen, as a city or as an academic entity? Just asking.
While I was away, David “My memory is longer than yours” Weinberger pointed in a JOHO note to a long-ago post of mine. He’s worked up, as I was, about the RIAA’s assault on its customers, and my cold wrath has only intensified after having spent three days in close proximity to Cory Doctorow. Now, Micah Jackson (who has a history of involvement in both game design and law) has pointed me to Greg Costikyan’s recent recapitulation of the nonsense that Big Media has been generating over copyright problems. They’re even more ludicrously incoherent than Microsoft’s complaints about the iTunes Music Store (&ldqu;;Microsoft customers like choice” — I wish that one had come out while I was still within heckling distance of Peter Biddle). Cory, of course, linked to Greg’s rant, too.
Let’s keep things as simple as humanly possible.
My DigID World posts lack the hyperlinks that etiquette and webby-ness require. My project for tomorrow is to go back and add some links — didn’t mean to be rude, but was blogging as fast as I could.
While Doc and I were recapping DigID world, we sympathized about feeling, in Doc’s now-canonical metaphor, like farmers at a paving convention. I wondered what more we were doing there than hanging out with friends. I suppose that it may deflect Microsoft a few microdegrees further toward openness by mingling the Man Behind Palladium/NGSCB with Cory Doctorow (I’d say "more than a few" out of respect for Peter, but I don’t want to overestimate the extent to which the ocean liner’s course could be altered by an encounter with a couple of friendly marine mammals) , but perhaps there’s something else at work. Just unadulterated speculation, but maybe bringing grassroots advocates to DigID World extends the "real human being" pole of the DigID discourse further out, putting such admirable ventures as PingID and its related enterprises closer to what can be seen as the center.
Whatever. For no obvious reason, Eric and André and Phil made space at what was fundamentally an enterprise conference for outsiders to hold up mirrors, to tell the corporate behemoths (and would-be behemoths) what they look like from mere mortals. That’s a gesture of unusual hospitality, and I thank them very much.
I had a spectacular two-part afternoon today, after goodbye-ing everyone at DigID World. Chris Locke offered me a lift to the airport, by way of lunch and (of course) Starbucks. We talked about everything under the sun — life, love, DigID presentations, God, Feuerbach, Heinz Kohut, and Chris’s various gigs and book projects. We talked about the menu at the Original (TM) Pancake House, which promised "hand-crafted omelets" that might take as long as 30 minutes to prepare.
We talked about music and coffee and blogging. We talked about an idea for a keynote on teaching and technology that I’ll be giving in the spring. We talked about how to get to Denver International Airport. We were still talking to each other as I headed into the terminal and Chris pulled away.
And as soon as the Transport Security Authority decided that I wasn’t a threat to safe air travel, I headed to where Doc Searls had suggested that I meet him in Terminal B. We talked about organizing our digital photos, about conferences, about home-schooling, about people at the conference.
Next time somebody tells me that the Net makes people antisocial, I’ll be thinking about the precious gifts of friendship that I’d never have known apart from the Web. Thanks from the heart, guys.
Doc is offering the closing keynote again this year. He’s beginning with a Weinberger-instigated "Invasion of the Body-Snatchers" reference. He points out that Andre Durand’s notion of identity management puts the user at the center: "assumed identity" (me), "assigned identity" (relationships with others), and "abstract identity" (marketing aggregate blah blah blah). Tier 3 doesn't concern us as people, but as wallets. "Wallets are Tier 2 habitats" — aspects of our identity assigned by others. Mailboxes are Tier 3 habitats, the homes of junk mail and spam.
Doc and Andre ask, what happens when your own identity (Tier 1) gets equal power in Tier 2 relationships? Doc cites the Chris Locke line from Cluetrain, "Networked markets get smarter faster than most companies."
So, where are we now? The enterprise people are talking to each other. Theyre speaking in BuzzPhrases. But they're talking about "markets" in too many different ways, for big aggregates, "the Chinese market" or "the lipstick market," for sales, for lots of different things when markets are, places people meet for exchange and conversation. No one is in charge; the buyer and seller always negotiate. Hence, every transaction makes for a relationship. This translates Andre's three tiers to Doc's Mydentity (roots), Ourdentity (relationships), and Theirdentity (spam). To us grassroots types, this conference sounds a lot like a paving convention.
What do customers want? That's what companies should care about. Doc needed a cable for his TiBook; an interested seller could have sold him a cord, if they knew he needed one. Doc thinks that by shifting attention to the customer, we're dismantling the Matrix (which he construes as a metaphor for marketing).
Our morning discussion begins with Esther Dyson and Cory Doctorow taking the measure of RFID advocates Ken Traub and Someone Else. Cory is a media animal, with anecdotal fact bites at instant recall; he can call up a rebuttal example to just about any pro-DRM or pro-RFID booster point. Esther just poses calmly reasonable queries that oblige the RFID delegates to acknowledge some awkward dimensions to their technology. On the other hand, the RFID proponents staunchly defend the possible benefits of smart refrigerators that can tell us which food has spoiled, or smart medicine cabinets that warn us about dangerous drug interactions.
Cory: "Privacy never exists apart from power relationships. Privacy is all about power."
(Identity: I have to say that so this post turns up in the DigIDW aggregator.)
Last night we all attended the dinner that honored three DigID luminaries. I was at a table with Chris Locke, Marc Canter, Doc Searls, Elliot Noss (beside whom I sat at last year’s banquet, too), Simon Grice, Peter Biddle, and several of the guys behind the nTags most of us are lugging around. Peter won one of the DigID awards for Microsoft’s Palladium/NGSCB endeavor — an award that was not universally applauded. (Our table was adjacent to the table with Cory and the BBC delegates, a relative island of tepid enthusiasm.) (Peter, as you will see below, is a Good Sport about these matters; he conversed with some of us at length about how bad a PR year the Evil Empire West, as distinct from the George Steinbrenner’s Evil Empire East, has endured.)
After dinner, a crowd of us decamped to the hotel sports bar to watch with horror as the baseball season came to an end. Yes, Kassinda, the Yankees will play another four or five games, but there’s no reason to pay much attention anymore. During the agony, we struck up a series of shuffleboard games. At first, we guessed at the rules, and in a couple of imprecise non-games, Alice and Fiona and Nat and Cory and I skidded pucks around (I 0wnz0red — but these have to count as nothing more than a spring training version of the real games that ensued once we learned the rules).
When we got down to brass tacks, the team of Bryan and Fiona fell to Alice and Cory. Then representatives of God and Satan joined forces; Peter "DigID Ice Cube of Quality" Biddle and I teamed up to conquer the previous champions. Various subsequent games passed, including a Battle of the Sexes between Alice and Fiona and Cory and Peter, and the night wound down with Peter and me succumbing to Bryan and Simon in a winner-take-all death match. Well played, all, and took some of the edge off Pedro’s collapse.
Identity.
Cory Doctorow grills three participants — Denise Howell, Steve Potash (an eBook publisher), and Marco DeMello (of Miscrosoft). I’m not blogging it, because I’m both too interested and too distracted, but Cory is definitely exercising command of the podium; he regularly responds to panelists’ remarks by interjecting, "it should be noted that. . ." and adding a datum from his compendium of EFF knowledge. Steve acknowledged that eBooks have in the past exercised a hyperbolic control over the buyer’s uses of their purchases, and indicated his expectation that the market would even out the speed bumps and potholes. Marco defended Microsoft’s track record; it has made mistakes, but it’s really on the side of consumers. Denise represented her interest as an articulate advocate of fair use and sane DRM policies. Strong panel, fair and balanced.
Identity.
From lunch to now, I’ve been busy at various ends that didn’t appear on the published agenda. I had a long lunch listening to Elliot and Jamie, talking with Elliot about ways that Blogware might extend sideways to accommodate and encourage grassroots growth of DigID.
Then I spent a good long break outdoors (gasp!) talking with Chris Locke.
Then I had an exciting conversation with Simon Grice about Midentity. He was on The Best Panel last night, but admirably refrained from using the panel as a hustings for pitching his product. Instead, he grabbed my elbow as I sucked electrons out of a (rare) electrical outlet in the atrium while swilling Diet Coke and nibbling a peanut butter cookie the size of a small county.
Simon showed me the simple Midentity user interface, for which they’re building Windows and Java clients; it’s a fascinating vision! As he demonstrated the convenience of interoperating with email, phone, and text-messaging clients, I saw the tremendous possibilities for congregational online communities (and didn’t hesitate to bend poor Simon’s ear about those possibilities). What he showed me suggests that Midentity may be onto something, and I asked him to keep me up-to-date with development of the topic — something I hardly ever do.
Did I say Identity?
In a packed room, Dan Farber is moderating a panel on standards, whose participants include Peter Biddle Brian Arbogast from Microsoft, Simon Phipps from Sun, and Jamie Burton Lewis from the Burton Group. The weight of the discussion amounts to grilling Brian over whether WSI is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing). Brian’s making about the best case one could imagine for WSI, emphasizing MSFT’s aspiration to produce a real, open, usable standard. Still, the other panelists are evidently unsatisfied that it’s fair to think that Microsoft and IBM are plain dealers in this matter.
Simon is stressing the sleight-of-hand that accepts the normality of two huge vendors determining what a standard will be, and then ask a standards body to anoint it as the norm; he points out that the more ordinary course of events would involve a standards body asking an open commission to work up a neutral standard to which the heavyweight companies subsequently accede.
The remarkable Jamie Lewis takes the podium to discuss the relation of Web services and DigID. He suggests that this interaction involves two things: opening and protecting. This leads to two theses: Tightly coupled systems won’t scale; Web services framework, more loosely-coupled, will scale. Exclusionary security models don’t enable, but disable business; identity management needs inclusionary approaches. We’ve made progress, but hard problems persist.
Jamie defines DigID as a unique identifier, surrounded by credentials and profile information, and he just changed the slide so I don’t know the rest. (His presentation slides have too-small type, too, so that Squinty Man here can’t make out what the small print says, especially when the type is set on an arc. Oh-oh, here’s a huge chart with tons of small type.)
Much of the potential for the internet and for intranets lies unrealized because networks are inadequately integrated, and digID isn’t adequately managed. Integration poses the most pressing need; Web services, though overhyped, will do the job. The market will require it; loose integration will enable it; techincal and political progress will encourage it. Web services can mediate the tangle of incompatible proprietary standards to the net-connected applications.
He appositely notes that identity management suffers from a problem isomorphic to the incompatible proprietary document data management problem. Legislation and homogenization won’t work. Interoperability and common infrastructure will rely on protocols such as XML and SOAP to effect federation effectively, across the oard. Web services framework support will provide the tools that developers can use to make their work easier and more broadly useful.
Platform vendors are building Web services and digID management into their platforms; access management vendors are incorporating digID management; these will become core components for all vendors. When we get enough secure products, we’ll need fewer security products.
Fragmented identity infrastructure creates vulnerabilities and costs. Provisioning gets lots of attention, but what enterprise needs more is deprovisioning. (More small type.) Password management is a least common denominator, but it’s not an answer. All is changing, though, as federation coalesces. SAML leads the pack; it’ narrow, which is its strength and weakness. Liberty has begun to work. WS* federation shows a cartel (MSFT and IBM) in action; it integrates and produces real results, but its architecture derives from the interests of its two parents (over against Liberty).
Products and vendors that integrate and support interoperability and migration will prevail.
A pack of fascinating conversation partners went out to dinner last night, bringing me along as a sort of skinnier Friar Tuck for Cory’s Band of Merry Geeks. Cory organized the party, and Denise, Marc, Elliot, Nathan, Simon (Phipps), Alice, Fiona, and Imran (a former colleague/long-standing friend of Fiona’s whose name escaped when I first blogged this) and me rolled down to Morton’s Steak House, where one abstemious vegetarian observed remarkable feats of extravagant carnivory. Alice is working on getting the BBC’s Creative Archive out on the net; Simon and I talked about church life in the US and UK; Fiona and I talked, oddly enough, about grassroots DigID. A splendid time was had by all.
At lunch yesterday, Denise and Doc and I learned that Phil Becker’s house has an electric toilet. That thought brought two uncomfortable possibilities to mind: first, the combination of water and electricity in a peculiarly vulnerable context, and second, the complications of a power blackout. Phil assured us that he has back-up power. I'm still not convinced about the first problem.
I didn’t blog about the best panel at yesterday’s DigID, because I was busy moderating it. (Brava, Denise! She blogged her notes of this — as of everything else she observes. Her blog will be a valuable historic archive of life in the twenty-first century U.S.A.) The quality didn’t have anything to do with my moderating, though I’m glad to bask in the reflected splendor of the panelists — but Doc, Marc, Simon (Grice) and Simon (Phipps) shone, and we could productively have gone for several more hours. By "productively," I don’t mean "we would have enjoyed jawing at one another indefinitely"; I mean, "we and our audience were teaching and learning from one another."
Our message had a double direction: first, to entrprise marketeers, concering why they should care about growing identity from the grass roots; second, to one another, concerning how we seeds can contribute to growing a robust grassroots distributed-identity network.
Doc gets a keynote at the end to push back at the enterprise heavyweights, but this small session might have been as important, more important perhaps, than any other; enterprise digID managers and clients who ignore what Justin Taylor persistently called "carbon-based life forms" will face a much harder implementation path than those who encourage horizontal, relationship-based digID and learns from users rather than dictating to them.
Word got out fast that the cafe area of DigID had wifi coverage. I poked my head into the room, saw Doc and Simon Phipps, asked if the rumor was true, and Simon said, "There's enough signal in here to cook with!"
Unfortunately, there isn't electrical connectivity, so my dying battery forced me back into the on-and-off connectivity environment of the meeting room. . . .
Eric Norlin is moderating a panel on Trusted Computing with Peter Biddle, a representative from Microsoft’s Palladium group, and Steve Sprague from Wave Computing’s TCG group. The principal characteristic of this discussion — that involves as a definition of a “trusted device” — entails hardware identification of the "trusted" device.
After Microsoft and Wave describe their ventures, Eric generously invites one of my heroes Cory Doctorow to present the case for the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s recent white paper on trusted computing. Cory allows many of the benefits of some aspects of Palladium/Wave, but insists that users be allowed to refuse to allow a remote entity to introduce changes on their computers (he uses the example of Apple’s recent iTunes disabling venture).
The trusted computing advocates argue that [hardware] trusted computing actually allows stronger privacy than the user options that EFF advocates.
I was talking to my Early Church History class about the course wiki the other day, and Hope (one of the students) asked what “wiki” means. I repeated what I’d been told: that it was a Hawaiian word for “quick, easy.” At that point, Mitch (another student) asked what I had just said. I figured it was the manifestation of Student Partial Attention Syndrome, so I repeated what I just said. “Hunh!” he said, “ That’s just about right.” I begged his pardon; I knew perfectly well that that was what I had said. “No,” Mitch said, “I used to live in Hawaii, and that’s just about what ‘wiki’ means.” What makes this all the more piquant is that we have another Hawaiian student, who really lives/grew up there (Hi, Moki), and it never occurred to me to ask him.
As so often turns out to be the case, the wifi at the conference is spotty — due at least in part to unsuspecting users who run unwittingly ad hoc networks. Hoping for remediation soon. And I’m the only one in the room with Rendezvous, so I can’t even kibitz.
Mark Roberti from RFID Journal lauds the virtues and values of RFID tagging. If you know anything about RFID tags already, his pitch won’t tell you anything new. He actually says that RFID tags eliminate human error (why say “eliminate” when you can more truthfully and plausibly say “reduce”?). And the human error that persists through the data cycle will be less corrigible to the extent that managers tend to regard data derived from RFID tagging as less subject to error. I’m not opposed to RFID tags; I’m opposed to hype, and cautious about a data-generation tool that extends far beyond mere inventory control.
Mark points out that RFID tags provide a way to automate sorting, shipping, tracking, and billing in a way coherent with the XML-based protocols that Phil explained in the morning session. Again, though: "You have just taken all the human error out of the system." He’s mostly just citing inventory-control cases, though the particular benefit in each case differs. Non-standard uses: locating and tracking the medication of wounded soldiers in battle, and keeping track of the relative heat of tires (to prevent blowouts).
Ooops! Now that we’re coming to the end of the presentation, Mark acknowledges that RFID isn’t infallible after all; the actual operation of tags varies depending on their physical context (not surprisingly, metallic and aqueous environments deflect and absorb radio waves), and the speed at which a reader can pick up tags doesn’t always equal the speed at which an operator pushes a pallet past a reader, or the speed at which a manager needs a pallet to leave a building.
Mark is not worried about the privacy implications of RFID; he’s confident that business practices will protect individuals (banning an offending operator from using the Obect Naming Service that tracks RFID). Hey, no business would take a chance like that, would they?
Well, I'm sitting next to Doc, one row back of Denise, and that looks like the back of Esther Dyson's head in front of me. I saw Eric and Andre on the way in. I'm here, all right.
[Coffee Break]
After the break, I'm drifting down to Phil Windley’s DigID Primer. He's talking about certification (keys, scalability, and so on). He notes that some certificate providers will give you a certificate that reports just anything you tell them, which are thus not worth much; on the other hand, some require actual physical verification (and are thus more durable). One catch with certificates arises when certificates expire (annually?), which requires on-going attention in large enterprises. Another hitch involves revocability, which many enterprises don’t want to bother implementing (it’s trouble and cost that they figure they don’t really need to attend to).
Next, he’s turning to XML-based standards (good). First, XML Signature, XML Encryption, giving examples of these. SAML (Security Assertion Mark-up Language), explaining how it works. (I'll link to his paper when he gives the URL, but he's talking faster than I can type (and IM) ) — an XML way of exchanging requests and credentials. SPML (Security Provisioning Mark-up Language) — an XML way of allotting privileges from providers who don’t already have accounts for given identities (your online grocer arranging a new account at a particular florist, for instance). XACML (eXtensible Access Control Mark-up Language) — standards for storing, sharing, representing, and processing access control policies. As Phil says, SAML is about credentials, and XACML is about processing credentials; it's a rule-based language for managing identities and entitlements. It covers a huge variety of variables: personal, kinds of action, circumstances (time, place), authentication mechanism, protocols used, or connectors). You could write a policy in XACML to regulate access and actions for a whole server network. Jon Udell raises the question of the relation of SAML to XACML; Phil points out that there's some overlap, but that SAML is more container-based, XACML is rule-based and emphasizes intra-network implementation.
Now, he's modulating to federation, interoperating identity systems (single sign-on): Liberty Alliance, Microsoft Passport, SourceID, PingID, and so on. Liberty is trying to implement kinda open-ended participatory standards where a user can choose the provider. Alliance is an aspect of .NET, proprietary, and limited to Microsoft’s system. SourceID is an open-source implementation of Liberty specs. PingID functions as a broker for federated identity, in a way similar to the way that Visa and MasterCharge broker credit identity.
His analysis of the key steps for creating a DigID strategy would include adopting an enterprise architecture, an interoperability framework, an authentication and assertion policy consistent with your EA and IF, enterprise directory services and so on, and a privacy policy. Phil wants us to switch from a defensive posture to regarding DigID as an infrastructural enabler for process and growth.
I’m in Phil Becker’s opening keynote, and am trying to take notes efficiently (since my battery is tottering, my cord is dodgy, and I’m not sitting near an outlet). Some of Phil’s interesting points:
Now he’s espousing the definition of an identity: “The distinguishing character or personality of an entity,” and he’s proud of it because “entity” doesn’t limit ID to people. Again, this is the constricted perspective that will guarantee skepticism: “It’s not just about humans” (well, if you’re lumping people and cell phones into one larger category, a lot of people will object vigorously, whether the cell phone does or not). Identity Management then means “managing the relaiotnships among entities” (don’t you feel jolly being treated as an entity, like any other node on the network?). Justin keeps referring to people as "carbon-based life forms," a cute joke the first time but an eerie symptom when it becomes his habitual gesture for describing the relation between people who use computers and the computers themselves. He refers to "nasty privacy laws" that make business inefficient — stipulating that it’s a joke, but that’s a joke that someone attuned to carbon-based life forms would never make.
Ha! I remembered another topic I was going to write about: preaching recycled sermons.
Last year, around the time that a priest in Michigan got into trouble for preaching sermons he had downloaded from the net, I made my case (summary with links here) that preaching sermons that other people wrote was not only not-bad, it was a big step forward for many preachers. I made not only my own argument, but also invoked (with the help of kind readers, bless the Web) opinions from Ben Franklin, St. Augustine, and Joseph Addison.
Since last year, I have on more than one occasion been given grounds to believe that I was hearing a sermon that someone other than the preacher had written. That reminded me of another variable in the equation: some people just can’t read. I mean “read” not in the sense of puzzling out what words mean, but in the sense of being comfortable, thoughtful, careful, understanding readers. The preachers I heard were reading someone else’s sermon, but they weren’t reading it.
I hear this in my Bible classes, too; students often can’t read the Bible. You can well imagine that this complicates my job as a professor of the New Testament; how much does it matter it a student knows where Paul was when he wrote First Thessalonians, if the student can’t read 1 Thes as a comprehensible text?
Having diagnosed one dimension of a problem falls far short of solving it. If I were to concentrate my New Testament courses on remedial reading skills, some students might gain valuable practice at reading more richly, but there wouldn’t be time left to engage the sorts of critical interpretive questions that they pay me to teach — and the better readers in class would be left out, as they wouldn’t benefit as much from the change in tactic. In the end, I try to work with students on comprehension and oral interpretation in class, but I don't take it all the way.
So part of the preacher’s problem lay in his being a poor reader. Another problem lay in the tacit contract between a preacher and a congregation. Since the assumptions on both sides of the agreement remain unspoken, it’s hard to pin anyone down on what’s expected; this lay at the heart of the Michigan controversy, where it was argued that the priest’s transgression lay not in preaching sermons from the internet, but in reproducing passages from them as though he had himself written them.
Most congregations, though, expect that a sermon will have been composed by its preacher unless they’re told otherwise. A wooden acknowledgment goes a long way toward killing the homiletical moment: “I saw this sermon by the Rev. Jane Doe, so I’m going to preach it to you this morning.” A sophisticated preacher could probably indicate that the sermon had been written by another author in a less direct way: “It may be true, as Jane Doe suggests, that. . . ." (being sure to insert the Rev. Ms. Doe’s name at intervals). Instead, a preacher sometimes just drops the original author’s name into the sermon somewhere without differentiating the author from some other quoted theologian or anecdotalist (“anecdotitian”?), a move that the congregation will hardly ever recognize as proper attribution for borrowed prose.
I’m not utterly convinced that either of those is necessary as long as one doesn’t in any way make the positive suggestion that one has written the sermons in question. The human component of preaching is a performance art, and there’no need to interrupt the sermon to provide the metadata on authorship. But one ought absolutely to make it clear that the sermon wasn’t original in some extra-homiletical way. For instance, congregations that use a paper bulletin could include the author’ name therein: “This morning, the Rev. Ms. Doe will preach a sermon by John Smith”). If the parish usually prints copies of the week’s sermons to leave in a rack at the door, one might print the borrowed sermon out, with the author’ own name (perhaps saying, “preached on Oct. 12 by A K M Adam,” or whatever). Or if one wanted to finesse copyright restrictions (a pertinent problem if one is performing other authors’ material for pay) at the printing stage, one might write up a short summary, giving full credit to the original author. But preaching someone else’s sermon without making some explicit note of that fact seems to suggest that the sermon is original — and congregations typically respond badly to finding out that surprise. (As Paul notes in the comments below, some preachers feel obliged to resign; in the Michigan case, the priest was suspended for 90 days.)
Summary ending? I support absolutely the preacher’s prerogative to use another’s sermon, absolutely. And I don’t even feel as though the preacher has to make a prominent point of having borrowed the sermon, certainly not in the context of preaching itself. But a preacher who borrows without making that utterly explicit in some way (whether in the bulletin, the announcements after the service, or some other venue) is asking for trouble,, and I can offer only tepid support for unacknowledged (or “inadequately acknowledged”) borrowing.
One thing I would’ve blogged about last night if I had had the energy to remember it was that I leave tomorrow for Digital Identity World 2003 — not as much sheer fun as FooCamp or BloggerCon, but there’ll be fun and important work to be done.
My job is to sit up front and nod while Doc and Marc and Simon Grice (of etribes and Midentity) talk over the topic, “Grassroots Identity: Does It Have a Chance?” Doc is also giving a keynote; he’s thinking about this sort of approach. Marc points toward his views with his comments on a post from Kevin Werbach. And Simon will, I suppose, be explaining Midentity.
I didn’t blog today. I was worn out from yesterday’s sermon homiletical exhaustion. There was something I meant to blog out, but it never came out. Oh, well.
All right, I finished the sermon late-ish last night, and preached it this morning at 9 and at 11:15. The people at St. Luke’s were very positive about the sermon, which was heartening (if a little disconcerting — I was too self-conscious about it during the second service, and I dislike the feeling of self-consciousness when I’m preaching). As promised, I’ll post it here (in the extended-entry mode, in case someone wants to see how the serial turns out.
As to the experience of composing online, I must say it was peculiar. It takes more time, for one thing; one has not only to compose the sermon, but to compose little updates and summaries. That has benefits, too, as it keeps me thinking about the whole sermon as well as the point on which I’m working at the moment. Still, I expect it would be hard for me to work this way every time (except until I got used to it, after which I’d be reluctant to stop, creature of habit that I am).
Thanks for the interest and support that instigated my giving this a try, and encouraged me to keep at it when I felt stymied.
Proper 23, Year B — St. Luke's Evanston
Amos 5:6-7, 10-15/Heb 3:1-6/Mark 10:17-27 — October 12, 2003
We are [God’s] house if we hold firm the confidence and the pride
that belong to hope.
+ In the Name of the God Almighty, the eternal Blessed Trinity— Amen.
I do not just take it for granted that you made your way to church, to this particular church this morning. With dozens of other places to go, other places to be, each of you has offered to God and to our congregation the chance to share some time, to share a sense of the grace that attends and inhabits our gathering; each of you has lent us your presence, perhaps only for an hour or so but for a vital hour, and with you here this morning we are stronger and wiser and healthier and freer. Whether you're a vistor here, or a regular, we cherish your contribution to the energy we so desperately need for the work of healing and growing, of stretching our sympathies and bridling our partiality. With you, this morning, we see the sign of a hope that gives us confidence and pride. In you, we recognize our holy partners in a heavenly calling. Thanks to you, beckoning to us from ahead, we know that the wilderness has an end, that we are now coming home.
So we do give thanks for your coming out this morning, whatever brought you here. We're tickled pink, we're proud, if you came to us on the basis of the random choice of a random church; we’re not picky! We’re honored if you’ve come here before, and returned to give this tempestuous crowd another go-round. We don’t even mind if you dropped in to see whether things around here are as bad as the scuttlebutt circulating through the diocese would have it. These are not easy days at St. Luke’s, but no matter what anyone’s saying outside, in this home we welcome the sojourner. It’s not our house, to quibble and segregate, but it’s God’s house, and we come here, together, with worries and frustrations and distress, to testify that our love of God cannot be trumped by partisanship or power plays. And do you know what? As long as we hold onto that calling to praise and welcome, ain’t no conflict can break us, no schism can shake us, no change will deform us nor custom constrain us. We will give our praise, we will swing open the doors, and God’s glory will stream from every stone and portal no matter what.
Because people will talk, they will shake their heads with knowing smirks or they’ll frown with dire gloom, they will plot and consult and they will preach -- and yet we can come home to these halls, these walls, knowing that something greater than smirks and frowns has begun here. Years ago, a new life was born here. A congregation, a special congregation set down its roots and reached to the sky, and that congregation is older and stronger and wiser than any one of us here. Oh yes, our history is wracked with folly and even misconduct; what fools would we be to pretend otherwise? But visitors, but members, but generous-hearted guests, we are not determined by our past and we do not need to live out, over and over again, the grim convulsions that heredity would foist upon us.
We feel the spasms of our past, and we respond to the past, but the past is not our problem this morning. Troubles from the past can’t touch us without our own complicity. The new life that has grown from St. Luke’s beginnings includes more than just baneful habits that twist the spine of our common life, that halt and hinder us from the full freedom of discipleship. Those beginnings bequeath to us the strong muscles that we have long set at the disposal of weary refugees and hungry neighbors; our beginnings trained our voices to joyous song, our minds to ponder meaty sermons, our bodies to join with our souls in harmonious worship. Those beginnings taught us who we may be. We haven’t yet attained the fullness of the growth for which this congregation was planted; we’ve run into many obstacles, some that we even made for ourselves. But these walls, these pews, the aisles and offices, from our leaky roof to our flooded basement, throng with the living commitment of the saints who have built this church — not the bare wood and stone but the church itself, the Body of Christ here assembled. This Body has suffered much and will suffer more, but have no doubt, sisters and brothers: this Body will stand erect, and will rise and stand and sing more vibrantly than ever before, Alleluia, Alleluia, Alleluia!
How can that be? Why would anyone suppose that after scandal and outrage, frustration and disappointment, and now after years of protracted conflict, our bedraggled congregation isn't at long last ready give up the ghost and collapse? Only one reason.
You came here this morning. Without a compelling reason to come, and with plenty of strong reasons to sleep late, you came here this morning. That tells me that somewhere, deep in your soul, you already know the one reason.
We are praying, we are singing, we are swinging incense and heaven help us, we are preaching — somewhere, somebody will articulate the reason for us.
Because decisively, more than anything we do or think or say here this morning, it is God’s loving that binds this living church together. We who gather here this morning love the Body of Christ gathered at St. Luke’s with a love that nothing can crush, and the unconquerable love holding us here even in the extremity of improbable tension is none other than God’s own love. Somewhere, whether at the tip of our tongues or in some neglected recess of our forgetfulness, we know the reason and we come back here to give that reason a voice, to give it a body. In this gathering, among us just moments ago, we heard Jesus Christ give the reason in words of truth that will raise us up who have long been bowed down: “For mortals, it is not possible — but for God, all things are possible.”
All things are possible, not because we sit on passive posteriors and drum our fingers waiting for a fairy-tale ending to a film-noir nightmare; all things are possible because God’s power is already at work among us, in the determination of everybody, on every side, who’s involved in our parish life that we wrench ourselves free from our paralysis. God’s power brings us back week after week, and God’s power brings newcomers in the door. In fact, even though our controversies balk and baffle it, God’s power surges even through our mistaken judgments, for the love and determination and commitment that keep us struggling come from a power greater than we could ever thwart. And if we will persist in striving to enact in our flesh that power for peace and harmony, by setting aside the necessity of winning; if we persist in striving to enable in our lives that power for patience and forgiveness, by refusing to permit Enmity to make our sisters and brothers into our enemies; if we persist in striving to engage with all our integrity that power for hope, by living as the children of God and citizens of the heavenly city who we are — then indeed, all things are possible.
We have come here this morning in answer to an invitation, an invitation to build and strengthen, an invitation to heal and renew. This morning, the words, “For God, all things are possible,” mean that nothing can separate us from the calling to which we have been called, that in all things God’s love works for good, that a Spirit and a power and a truth greater than our willfulness has made a way out of our “no way,” for us to escape our turmoil and find ourselves at home, in a house whose architect and builder is God. And here we welcome you, God welcomes us all, to St.Luke’s, our home, which is none other than the House of Hope; and if we turn loose the hope that brings us here week by week, that builds us into the Body of Christ, if we permit the Spirit to shape and to guide our hope, then no mortal force can hold back the grace and power of God's ministry, yet to be revealed in the life of St. Luke’s Church.
Amen
I am no starry-eyed booster of Americanism; still, few experiments in civil organization have taken such bold and persistent steps toward respecting citizens as the raison d’être of the state, and I can’t help admiring the spirit that stirs advocates for civil liberty. That’s why I still care about stories like this one about Dan Hughes’s brother and his brother’s fiancée. These accounts peel back the veneer of patriotism from the red-white-and-blue-boys in Washington. Empty talk about protecting the U.S. from the Hydra of terrorism comes cheap, but the constitutional liberties for which Bush and his cronies presumably stand were bought dearly, imagined broadly and deeply, and are being squandered as sacrifices to the idol of Security.
No state founded upon ideals of liberty can ensure its security by compromising its ideals.
No policies aimed at protecting citizens’ security can attain that goal by imposing a politics of fear and suspicion.
Mssrs. Bush and Cheney, at long last sirs, have you no shame?
My post-surgical hair re-growth experience reminds me of the medieval penitential practice of wearing a hair shirt, only in my case it would be more like “hair briefs.” I would like to assure the world that I am adequately penitent, and am ready to move beyond this phase of recovery.
Going back to the beginning and following the sermon through to its end was the right move. There were some rough transitions that needed help (one or two remain in the final text for tonight), but the momentum helped me see that the paragraph I had set last really wanted to be the final paragraph — which meant that I’d been stuck because I was trying to write a paragraph beyond the fitting conclusion.
I took the paragraph-too-far, stuck it ’round front of the (now-) final paragraph, and fleshed it out. So far as I can tell in my sermon-benumbed state, it works all right. I’ll post it tomorrow.
Stuck, most of the way through. Will go back and see if I can’t follow the momentum of the sermon through to a conclusion.
I’m about halfway through, slightly more than half. I’ve gone from the beginning that I laid out earlier to an overview of the parish situation — not the surface stuff, with the firing of the rector and (we assume) the imminent firing of the choirmaster, but the texture of concern and controversy that have taken more than just a few years to attain this boiling point. In a mode influenced by the pattern of prophets’ oracles (and I say this not to suggest that I am comparably inspired, simply to indicate a rhetorical precedent for the structure of the sermon), I rehearse some of the afflictions and strengths of the congregation. And after I’ve tried to indicate some of the etiology of our present impasse, I invoke the words of promise from the gospel reading: “For God, all things are possible.”
Right now, I’m working on the amplification of that promise, so that isn’t just a baneful theological anodyne that conceals a fatal malady. The promise comes not in our sitting back and waiting but in our taking the energies presently set at odds with one another, and seeking the paths by which we may contribute to mutual strengthening.
I’m about a third of the way into the sermon, now, and I’ll be getting sketchier in my description of what’s going on. That’s partly because I don’t have time to reproduce every line and account for the decisions that led ot it, and partly because I want the sermon itself to have some freshness left tomorrow morning. Maybe I’m still stuck in old ways, and should learn to sit looser at this point, but this is still new to me.
So, I’ve modulated from an opening that acknowledges that everyone ho comes to church Sunday went to some bother to come here instead of any number of other attractive alternatives. I describe several motivations people might have had for coming to St. Luke’s: the random factor, force of habit, perhaps a certain morbid curiosity to find out whether things are as bad here as they’re made out.
Having allowed that we’re in a spot of turmoil, I suggest that the turbulence of parish life threatens to distract us from the reason for our being here in the first place: our calling to raise our hearts and hands and voices in praise of the God of grace, who invites members and visitors alike to share in an encompassing blessing that far exceeds our capacity to administer. While that blessing occupies the central place in our life, we can weather any storm; when we orient our corporate life toward that ideal more than toward any parish politics, we will come out of the wilderness to share together in a banquet of glory, together, at home.
Now I’m about to turn the direction of the sermon toward the texture of faith and life that makes steadfastness and hope more intelligible than control and interest — but first I really have to get some groceries in a trip to Osco with Pippa the Princess. Thanks for your patience.
Well, it’s a start: “I do not take it for granted that you made your way to church, to this particular church this morning.”
Now, that’s not an especially snazzy opening sentence by itself, but look at the directions it opens up. It addresses the out-of-the-blue visitor right away, and addresses them directly, respectfully. It acknowledges that some of the regulars will have felt ambivalent about putting their heads in the door. It prepares for a patient discussion of why the regulars might feel uneasy, without chasing the visitors away by waving our dirty laundry in front of them and scolding the congregation for their slovenliness (especially since the identity of the source of the dirty laundry is open to debate, at the very least — and that non-binariness will have to constitute part of the sermon body, too).
So, I’ll probably change my mind and start it a different way, but that’s how it stands for now.
I woke up this morning from a dream in which the rector of our former parish in New Jersey was interchangeable with Dave Winer. He (“they”?) drove a vintage sky-blue car from the sixties into a puddle, which was deeper than it had seemed. The car turned nose down and sank into the puddle; I woke up as I jumped into the puddle and tried to help him (“them”?) open the door.
By the way, Dave, I wasn’t invited to FooCamp either. Nor, evidently, was Liz. What could possibly explain this?
Okay, let’s say that I’m sticking with the constellation of texts that I proposed this afternoon. How do I begin the sermon?
The beginning is one of the vital parts. A sermon badly begun risks losing the charitable attention that one depends on in order to elicit sympathy for one’s efforts. If the first couple of sentences suggest, “Here comes a lame-o sermon; time for a nap,” a tremendous proportion of listeners will act on that suggestion. At the same time, The Bang-O Attention-Grabber opening sentence gets to be a shtick; I try not to seize attention at the outset so much as to entice it, to seduce it.
So, now I’m working on the beginning of the sermon. I will have read the sentence from Hebrews, I think, as the main text of the sermon. Everyone is quiet. And I’m working on what on earth I’d say to get the thing rolling.
Oh, and today will be a very important Sunday; there are a lot of hurt feelings around the congregation, and even more than any other Sunday, the sermon will need to articulate an intelligible way forward for people who might be on the verge of just plain giving up on the congregation. All that, without scaring away someone who happened to drop in out of the blue, and certainly without nagging or scolding. Hey, piece of cake.
Upon seeing my post from yesterday morning, Nate (Nate Paxton, not my son Nate) pointed me to something he had written a couple of days before. I was pleased to see it, and noted in response my genuine sympathy with his position (though without the same panentheist underpinnings).
One point in particular impressed me: Nate’s resistance — expressed in his willingness sometimes to blog his prayers — to the cultural tendency to enforce a strong separation between private and public manifestations of religion. That private-public abyss that’s been jammed into religious thought and behavior (partly to facilitate the American compromise relative to religion and state authority) effectively disables important dimensions of religious behavior, and tends perniciously to naturalize Christian observance and exoticize other religious expressions. Indeed, it tends to naturalize hegemonic Protestant Christian observances, so that less socially-prominent observances (praying the Rosary, for instance, or auricular confession, or pacifism, or dressing only in plain clothing) seems a peculiar transgression against cultural norms of religious behavior. (But why should it be less normal to pray the Rosary, for instance, than to worship in a white-paint-and-clear-glass colonial church? In Italy, I’d guess, the former would seem much more normal than the latter.) Making one’s prayers public defies convention Over Here, but it’s not that odd in a global context.
So praying in public may feel weird, and it’s certainly risky, but even for non-panentheist reasons, I sympathize with Nate: it's worth doing.
Margaret is studying her math.
She encounters the following problem: If ice cream comes in five different flavors — pistachio, mint, vanilla, chocolate, and coffee — and the ice cream is sold in packages of two flavors per pack, randomly assigned, what is the chance that any given two-pack you buy contains mint?
Margaret’s answer: “Zero chance. I wouldn’t buy any at all, because only an idiot would buy ice cream in randomly-assigned two-flavor packages.”
Okay, I now observe that one of the lines in the Gospel reading is, “For mortals it is impossible, but not for God; for God all things are possible.” That may work, for this Sunday, addressed to a congregation with plenty of reason to wonder and doubt. Throw in (from Hebrews) “we are [God’s] house if we hold firm the confidence and the pride that belong to hope,” and maybe a dash of &ldqu;; it may be that the LORD, the God of hosts, will be gracious to the remnant of Joseph,” and we could be cooking.
As a side note to Craig, who wondered why I’d be uneasy to preach on the (positive) comparison of Jesus to Moses, it’s not because I am ashamed of the gospel. It has more to do with the millennia of unbecoming (un-evangelical, I would dare say) preaching of Gentile Christian superiority to Judaism, beginning from when Paul had to scold the Romans not to boast over their sisters and brothers of Israel. Paul repeatedly emphasizes Israel’s precious identity, uniquely belvoed by God, never rejected, not forgotten, the covenant intact. Now, it’s possible to preach on Hebrews 3:1-6 while bearing that in mind, but it calls for caution and precision, and I wasn’t sure I was in a frame of mind that would measure up to the challenge this week.
More later.
No news. I’m not seeing anything yet. There’s an obvious track of going along with Amos and Mark and chastising people for their lack of commitment to social justice, but that doesn’t seem à propos in this congregation, specially not this week. Moreover, I hate doing the obvious.
I’m uneasy with the “Jesus was better than Moses” language from Hebrews, although there might be something to work with there. Now, though, I have some classes to teach and work to do.
The Chicago Trib (registration required, sorry) this morning ran a compilation of religious leaders’ answers to the question, “Is it OK to pray for the Cubs?” and our own local hero Trevor Bechtel was one of the luminaries they consulted. (Coincidentally, this was the general topic on which Griff, who went under the knife yesterday and for whom prayers are undeniably appropriate, and Si and I spent a long discussion at Logan Airport waiting for our plane to O’Hare.)
Most of these thinkers indicated greater or lesser degrees of scorn for so mundane a prayer. Trevor, on the other hand, said,
As Christians, we are taught to pray for everything, and that shouldn't ever be construed to exclude the Cubs. The Cubs, certainly in Chicago right now, are an important part of many people's lives. It seems kind of strange that we would leave that out of our prayer life.I think he’s right on the button. We learn to pray well by praying honestly, and Scripture repeatedly admonishes us to pray for whatever we desire — and although I agree with all the heavyweights that there are objects of prayer of more global importance, yet I wonder that theologians think it important for people to censor prayers (and that they know which prayers are justifiable or unjustifiable). “Better not to pray at all than to pray in a way I disdain”? I think not.
Pray for what your heart longs for, and keep learning how to desire most wisely, perhaps in the end learning not to “desire” at all (depending on how you’re deploying that verb). But don’t keep yourself from praying for that which you’ve longed since 1908 — or 1918.
At BloggerCon, several people urged me to blog out my sermon preparations more often. Part of me resists that; I like the idea that congregants are hearing a sermon for the first time (and I know some people from St. Luke’s stop by sometimes — and of course Margaret reads this blog vigilantly). I also don’t want to bore people (though I guess that the people in my session in Cambridge provide a sample of not-likely-to-be-bored readers). Partly, too, I simply have a long work habit of keeping sermon prep to myself.
But I’ll see how it goes this week. I’m preaching Sunday at St. Luke’s, where the congregation is struggling for a direction, and no one knows what new conflict lies around the corner. The lectionary readings include Amos 5:6-7, 10-15; Psalm 90 (though I can’t be sure we’ll use more than the verses 1-8 and 12); Hebrews 3:1-6; and Mark 10:17-31. I’ll let them roll around in my head overnight, and tomorrow we can see what has begun growing there.
Since somebody has been imputing disloyalty to me — not to name David’s name — I’ll hustle to congratulate Ben and Mena for their recent appearance on CNN. TypePad looks like a great package and a great deal, with different benefits from those that BlogWare will offer. But I’m sticking firmly to Movable Type, the content management system nonpareil, that powers all the Disseminary blogs.
This is Continuing Education Week at Seabury, “Bread for the Journey.” Today Trevor and I led a workshop called “Swimming With the Web,” in which we introduce some fairly elementary angles on thinking in webby ways, and then critique the church websites of any hapless victims who stray into our gravitational field. That part is loads of fun — but today the first section was a little disjointed; we had introduced some changes in our spiel, and we hadn’t attained a shared rhythm yet.
And my energy level drops off rapidly after a two-hour session (specially since I had a couple of advising appointments beforehand). I’m worn right out now; it doesn’t feel fair, even though it’s still moderately soon after my surgery.
Margaret was well past halfway through keeping her eye on me at BloggerCon when she realized that I had eaten lunch with and was sitting in the same audience as that Adam Curry.
She said, “Well, at least he was cute.” Yes, and I told him — and Margaret agreed — that he looked like he knew they were forcing him to talk arrant nonsense on MTV.
Dave Winer is rounding up various parties’ reflections on BloggerCon, and I had such a great time that I wanted to join the chorus of appreciation for the Berkman Center staff (especially the wonderful Wendy Koslow, and we-all-wish-we’d-had-a-chance-to-meet-and-thank John Palfrey) and Dave Winer for bringing us together. It was Dave’s weekend, and that lent the whole affair a strong sense of continuity. I had suspected (“feared”?) that a meeting on Spirituality at Bloggercon would draw the attention of neither church-y people (who might be expected to be worshipping at that hour) nor tech-oriented people (who would have had to choose Spiritulaity over such alternatives as “Weblogs in Presidential Politics,” led by Jeff Jarvis, Ed Cone, and Dan Gillmor (on one hand), and “Aggregators,” led by Jon Udell (on the other) ). Heavens, I probably wouldn’t have gone to hear myself! To my relieved surprise, not only was the session well-attended, but Dave himself spent a half hour with us, posing some deeply probing questions and putting me on the spot to think hard and responsibly. Although it doesn’t always feel good at the time, I have to remind myself that I owe it to the world to be able to give an account of the whys and wherefores of my reasoning.
I went to Ms. Suitt’s place for the first session Sunday morning, and she was entirely on. It’s a treat to watch her; she doesn’t necessarily know more than other people in the room, but when she’s working, she’s a seminar-surfer, letting the conversation move, turning it around, pulling something off the wall, bringing it back, and keeping the discussion alive at all costs.
Joi’s session exemplified just what he was talking about: community. His IRC channel was running behind him for much of the session, a channel where people make friends, banter, hang around, tease Joi, and feel at ease. He walked the crowd through his wiki (I think he might have lost some people there), and generally lived out ways that the community around him involves not only those in physical proximity to him, but also his neighborhood online.
Dave wrapped up Day Two with a discussion of the Con and what would be desirable if it were to come back next time. A number of people wished for separate tracks for geeks and straights, but I’m not so sure that would work; although no one got everything they wanted, the mingling among tech-oriented discourse and user-oriented discourse benefited everyone (if it could be pulled off again; I think part of the reason that came together depended on Dave’s unique persona and will). Dave called on me specifically a couple of times, catching me right off guard; why me, with so many notables and long-standing friends of his in the room? I tried to say something sensible, but at this point I don't even remember.
What more could be asked? Well, time. Of course, that's always in shortest supply, but mercy sakes, it rocketed past. Dave noticed it especially at lunchtime Sunday, but that may be because the Spirituality session ran over (I’m very sorry we didn’t get to you, Elaine, and thanks so much from both Si and me for your kind observations). But I missed Elizabeth Spiers’s voice. And it was great to meet Oliver Willis — we were at the same lunch table Saturday — though I’m not jumping aboard the “we need more dystopianism” train; the Web enthusiasts I saw around Cambridge this past weekend were mostly quite feet-on-the-ground people who can parse the similarities and differences between the dot-tulip bubble and blogomania. Excitement about what weblogs can do doesn’t equal blind mania (and I think he’s on that point, too). And we need both to extend Web access and to keep extending the boundaries of what we can do with the Web.
This was one subject we didn’t address in Saturday’s “Weblogs in Education” session at BloggerCon. Of course, my seminarians are heavier than I could lift. . . .
Halley points out that she and her warbler belong to species in which males and females don’t look the same. No argument here.
All the same, I had one of those “separated at birth?” moments Sunday morning, while watching Halley work the room at her BloggerCon panel: Halley Suitt and Mick Jagger. Not just her visage, but her way of operating. Halley Suitt, the [dimorphically reflected] Mick Jagger of blogging.
Si and I had a great, great time in the Greater Boston Area this weekend, none of it in Boston. Not that we gave Boston much of a chance — we just rode through on the T. But we had a blast in Cambridge and Quincy.
I enjoyed having the excuse to introduce Si to the mountains of wonderful folks who were there — and I’m not going to try to list ’em all again, I’ve been linking all weekend, except I know I’ve left out Ryan and Boris and Roland and Betsy (more names as I see people I left out, and eventually blogroll changes, though I’m lazy about that). He loves Doc and David and Chris and Halley as much as I do, and had a wonderful time hanging out late Saturday night with Joi and Kevin and others. If I may speak parentally, it was just the kind of night-out-with-cool-people-whom-I-trust that I would wish for a kid.
What really capped it off, though, was Steve Himmer’s generosity with his time and hospitality; he didn’t even have time to come on BloggerCon’s free day, but he took time to show Si around Emerson College, bring him back to the hotel and sit around talking for a while, and then with Sage to pick us up at the Quincy Adams T stop, bring us home to Checkers, fix us a delectable homemade vegetarian dinner, commiserate about grading papers, and swap good stories with us till we couldn’t keep our eyelids open any longer.
And listen — you know how well Steve writes, but few of you have any idea what an accomplished artist Sage is. Between the two of them, the intensity of remarkableness takes my breath away. Everyday conversation ascribes excellence in writing or photography or graphic arts to “talent” or “gifts,” but the work that it takes to transform gifts and talent into art receives far too little attention.
Margaret wonders, “If you Stealth Disco someone and nobody videorecords it, does anything happen?”
That means I got back safely, had a great time, am dealing with events that took place in my absence, and will blog later.
Halley successfully Stealth Disco'ed Joi Ito at BloggerCon — and, brazen woman that she is, continued discoing after he noticed. . . .
Si and I had a terrific dinner with Joey “This Old Blog” deVilla, Andrew Grumet, Lisa Williams, and Aaron Schutzengel. I returned to base station while Si lingered with his newfound homies, enjoying late-night stealth disco and the end of the Sox game with other BloggerCons.
We’re packing up to check out and get to the Berkman Center in time for my “Spirituality” Day Two talk. It’s free, bostonians, so celebrate the Sox’s victory by going to the early service at church and coming round to the Berkman Center.
Spiritual Exercises for Bloggers: I can get behind that, Lisa.
I’m falling down on the note-taking job. People have said many terrific, fascinating things — but I’m paying attention to what they say, not typing notes. Plus, Halley’s been using my TiBook to check her email, and I’m chatting with Margaret back home. Looks like I’m not live-blogging this one, but the folks to whom linked below would be doing a better job, anyway.
Look, I’m a happy and loyal Movable Type user — but Ross “the Boss” Rader just passed along to me a Blogware t-shirt, so I will certainly let everyone know that Tucows has just opened the curtains on their entry in the weblog software derby. Thanks, Elliot!
Jeneane testifies to one of the problems in contemporary education. Blogs won’t solve it, but here’s hoping that her having blogged it will at least help her remember that she has allies backing her up.
The education panel made some important points; it was a great opportunity to get acquainted with Lance, Pat, Brian, Kaye, and Jenny. I wish the forum itself had made it more possible for Jenny (for instance) to describe her priorities and perspectives (glad she blogged them). Each of us had strong interests that merit a more thorough airing than could necessarily emerge in the Q-and-A format (Pat and I, perhaps Kaye as well, muscled our interests into air time, but it would have been great to hear more from Jenny and Brian). I don’t see blogged notes on the panel (no, Betsy posted some notes, thanks! Heath Row, whom I don’t know to speak to but whom I’d like to meet, posted something like a transcript of the first ten minutes or so, for heaven’s sake. That’s amazing. And now I found Tim Jarrett’s notes, too. And here’s Roland’s notes, that look like the most complete); it would have been helpful to see what came across to a blogger.
A couple of things didn’t get foreground attention this morning. One involves the access problem. People expressed righteous frustration over the distribution of online access, about the demographics of the weblog user community; another topic of interest involved the flexibility of electronic publishing (there’s no great imperative to constrain publications by length, for instance, in the way that print media require attention to the physical and commercial ramifications of a publication’s length.
We’re tackling elements of both these at the Disseminary. On one hand, we’re trying to generate educationally valuable material that can be freely shared, regardless of a user’s or an institution’s capacity to pay. That’s not the same as, maybe not as important as, the matter of gaining access to the Web; but it’s a part that’s within my capacity to effect a change. And having Web access in general is worth a lot less if there isn’t good stuff to do there.
Likewise, Disseminary publications aren’t constrained by the publishing parameters that keep some work out of print media, or remove it from print media after long, or make available in print but at so high a cost that very few people can have access to it. We’ll publish any worthy monograph of any length (from pamphlet/article to full-scale book) and distribute it to anyone in the world who’s interested, and will print copies through our print-on-demand publisher.
Gary’s having trouble with his toaster, and we’re having trouble with connectivity here at BloggerCon. Is there a connection?
We’re not supposed to mention that the network connections are dodgy, so I won’t utter a word about that.
Charlie Nesson introduces Dave Winer with a comparison to Socrates; Dave takes the floor to introduce the whole conference. He reminds us about the rules he’s established for the conference (on the record, no arguing over whether blogs are journalism, users’ conference), and talks about the schedule.
The Politics panel is up first; Ed Cone is moderating, Glenn Reynolds and Scott Rosenberg and Josh Marshall are talking over it. Ed is intensely clever — he refers to Glenn Reynolds as &ldqu;;the Dirk Diggler of hit counts” and observes that Instapundit gets &ldqu;;more hits than Adam Curry at an Amsterdam coffeehouse” — and he’s talking with Josh and Scott about what goes into the decisions about what they blog and what they publish in print (and when), and to Glenn about what it means that he doesn’t have a regular print outlet. Ed notes that one can no longer close off meetings (or cities or other venues) from journalists; now, anyone might be a publisher, via weblogs.
Josh has a nice point: how does he discern when to publish something that reflects the consensus of DC journalists, but which doesn’t rise to the level of reportable &ldqu;;fact.”
One of the themes of this discussion — that the public’s once-upon-a-time assumption that if something appears in print, that it must be true — has fallen by the wayside. Some questioners point to the perceived necessity that writers own up to their biases (Lance observes that that’s a U.S. perception, that outside the U.S. everyone knows that media sources are biased one may or another). Other questioners ask about the propensity of readers (one educator mentioned high-school students) simply to believe what they read online.
My response, not in the forum (which is highly congested with pertinent participation from smart people) but here, is that online credibility will develop as an emergent epiphenomenon online, just as the sense that most people trust the N Y Times more than, say, the Weekly World News developed as an epiphenomenon of the print media themselves. Talking to one another about “what can we do about unreliable blogging?” won’t do it, any more than Fox News is fair and balanced just because they say they are.
I think I’m supposed to be up soon, and I won’t live-blog the education panel. But I did want to add that Wendy says that Si is an exceptionally well-mannered youth.
There was a frustrating glitch at the beginning of Phase Two of this weekend’s expedition: the restaurant at which the BloggerCon kickoff party was held has a bar, into which underage patrons (such as Josiah) are permitted. Si handled this with a certain rumpled grace; he went to the comedy club upstairs from the party room and had a moo shu dinner while I was hanging out with the party mob. At a moderately early hour, we left the crowd and connected up with Joi at a nearby hotel, where conversation was more audible, more open to youthful participants, and more focused on folks I’d been hoping to converse with in person. Staying up too late for my time zone and physical condition, I needed to flee before the evening conversation with Joi, Chris, Roland, Dan, Doc, Scott, Britt, et al. (links to come)
We’ve settled in and accomplished the first portions of our mission in Cambridge. Si toured Emerson College with patient, indulgent, insider expert Steve Himmer, and evidently formed a highly positive opinion of the place. Meanwhile, I answered Halley’s summons to join her for lunch to catch up with Chris (“Margaret’s Hero”) Locke and Doc, and to meet Ed and Adam. Terrific lunch, which Ed and Adam document, and now, after a leisurely bath and long nap, Si and I are off Phase Two, to the Wiener Room, and from there to the opening night party. Will report when we return.
DRMA: "Camel Walk" by Southern Culture On The Skids; "I'll Come Running" by Brian Eno (Chris and I were just talking about this at lunch!); "The Big Three Killed My Baby" by White Stripes; "Three Sisters" by the Jim Carroll Band; "Brass In Pocket" by the Pretenders; "I Wish it Would Rain" by the Temptations.
If you read this, I will have gotten off to O’Hare with Josiah, planning to arrive at Logan at 10:15 United Airlines Time.
(Lapse of several hours)
And arrived!
Eric Norlin’s claiming our attention with a fiery post over at Digital ID World. I’m in too big a hurry to make grand claims about the proportion of light and heat, but I detect some overblown characterizations of those from whom Eric dissents, but some genuine glimmers of light in his unwavering advocacy of some form of presupposed DigID (and the fact that I’ve been spamblasted today does probably affect my perspective on this to some extent). It’s just that I’m more with Doc: I want the identity that operates on the net to function in a way no one party — especially especially especially no corporate party — can control.
My fingerprints aren’t copyrighted to Microsoft; my iris patterns aren’t Time-Warner’s intellectual property; the friends and acquaintances who will vouch for me (assume, for a second that there are some) don’t belong to Oracle or Apple. Corporate entities may call my identity’s bluff, as it were, but they don’t hold my cards and they don’t keep my chips while I’m at the table. As the song says, “I like it like that” (it comes from the pre-hip-hop era, Eric; you may not recognize it).
Margaret just came home and wrested me bodily from the keyboard, at which I was about to start paying bills, and commanded me to pack my clothes for Cambridge. Tomorrow morning Si and I leave at five o’clock. . . . See some of you there, and I’ll blog to the rest of from there. . . .
Well, I’d had some light brushes with spam commenters before, easily cleaned up with deletion or excision. But the last two days, my spam-comments went through the roof, and I’ve commissioned the Disseminary’s trusty technical services librarian (I’m hoping that’s a welcome job description; if I’ve missed the mark, Dorothea, please just let me know) to install Jay Allen’s anti-comment-spam prescription in our MT set-up (which I learned about from Liz). That said, I spent a lot of time searching out and deleting unwelcome spam today, time that might have been reduced if Movable Type had a more powerful comment-editing option.
In a moment of vanity, I vaunted myself on having gotten an average of two comments for ever post at this site; deleting the spam has reduced that average considerably, which simply reinforces the old adage of pride going before a fall.
And that was time I could’ve used for other purposes. I took part in a Disputatio in Early Church History this afternoon; Trevor argued the case that in the year 150 CE, Christianity was appropriately viewed as an entity distinct from the Judaism within which it developed; I argued that even as late as 150, Christianity should be understood as one of a variety of Judaic sects. (I cleaned his clock, but that’s probably just because he felt sorry for me.)
I could’ve used that time for paying bills, a necessity catalyzed by (a) my impending departure for Cambridge, a neurosis I evidently share with Frank, and (b) the arrival of the first post-operative medical bill (they don’t waste a second, do they?). Luckily, I may be able to impress someone at BloggerCon with Josiah’s usefulness as a gofer, and lease him out to raise funds.
I could’ve used that time for responding to some of the sharp insights going down over at the Disseminary “Ethics of Interpreting the Bible” blog, and to David Weinberger’s kind appreciation of my “Seeing Hermeneutics” posts.
Instead, I was weeding spam (now, that’s an ugly picture!).
DRMA: "Edison Museum" by They Might Be Giants; "Where The Hell Is Bill?" by Camper Van Beethoven; "Down Along the Cove" by Bob Dylan; "Postcard" by the Who; "Picasso's Last Words" by Paul McCartney; "I'm A Little Dinosaur" by Jonathan Richman; "Ladybird" by XTC; "I Am a Lonesome Hobo" by Bob Dylan (big night for John Wesley Harding on iTunes); "Sing Oh Barren One" by Sweet Honey In The Rock; .
I just received a flood of email messages that seem to have been backed up for several days. If I neglected to answer your email, please excuse me; I don’t have any idea why that happened.
That bugs the dickens out of me; it's hard enough to keep up with email, without having a sneaky dumpster-full jumping out at me all at once, already overdue for my attention.
Having seen several of Blogaria’s leading lights dismissed by their short-sighted employers (Kevin, Jeneane), I’d have thought that Michael’s former employers wouldn’t make the same mistake. It’s time for BlogTank to kick into gear and set these brilliant friends’ gifts to work on behalf of clueful companies. . . .