AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Sermon Prospect

I know I’m in good shape for the sermon, ’cause last night at Halley’s house party for Howard Dean I asked Halley — or Betsy, it was hard to tell who was using Halley nick at the time — to ask the candidate for some homiletical advice.

Betsy — or so she called herself — answered, and I quote (as best I can), “emphasize moral leadership.”

Now, as it turns out, I hadn’t been planning so to do. I put together the reater part of the sermon today, fleshing out the elements I had composed specifically for this weekend with some pieces from the 2 Christmas sermon from last year about which I’d already blogged (I don’t think that anyone who was in Evanston last year will be in New Haven this year, except Margaret and me). Tomorrow, I work through the whole thing, move bits around, smooth out the seams, and try it out on Margaret (something I don’t ordinarily do, but it seems imperative for this case).

I experienced a wave of panic this afternoon as I realized that I didn’t know where the e-ticket plane reservation was, and it wasn’t helped by the recollection that Margaret might have made the reservation on her computer, which has had its hard drive replaced between the reservation and now. But the macho husband who backed up Margaret’s drive before repairs had replaced the mail file when the computer came back, and eventually I found the message she forwarded to me with the reservations in it in my own archives, so everything’s cool.

For the Historical Record

I can’t figure out how to navigate Steve Himmer’s beautiful new page design for OnePotMeal, but I fear that this important advice from Steve will get lost without a visible permalink (I found it on yesterday’s post, but it’s marked “In Passing” and doesn’t appear on the daily post’s individual page):

Serious novelists know that it’s essential to look at a chapter in every available font and format before making any revisions to it, and certainly before writing a new one.

Breadless Sandwich

The sermon is going well, in a sense; I have much to say, a clear sense of how I hope to develop the body of the sermon. The difficulty lies in beginning and ending the thing; so far, no beginning has impressed itself on me, and (as I’ve said before) that’s really quite an essential element in my preaching (especially on a special occasion; the congregation will no doubt indulge me for a sentence or two, but that makes me all the more determined to meet them with a strong starting premise). I know, I could just go ahead and start writing out the middle of the sermon before the beginning — but for some reason, I’m balking at that very sensible step.

The material with which I’m working revolves around the phrase I mentioned earlier, in conjunction with the allusions to God’s glory in the psalm (“For the LORD God is both sun and shield;/he will give grace and glory”) and the epistle (“to the praise of his glorious grace,” “the Father of glory,” “the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints”), mashed up with a couple of other Pauline passages (perhaps particularly 2 Corinthians 3:18, “And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another”) — all wound around the gospel passage’s evocation of a crew of Gentiles trying to make their way to the incarnation of the God of Israel, not just approving and stating solidarity, but embarking on an arduous journey, offering precious gifts, and humbly acknowledging the belatedness of their affiliation to God.

All that’ll cook, once I get the beginning right.

Done, and Done

This afternoon, Margaret finished her grad school applications (in essence — there’s a tiny mop-up to be done, but she sent the packages and the ransom checks, so she’s through with the hard part). Much rejoicing and relief! We were amused that a couple of institutions asked for Margaret’s “electronic signature,” by which they meant “type your name here.” — an ultra-sophisticated digital identity authentication system, eh? Eric Norlin, do we have some potential clients for you!

Now, all we have to do is wait to hear back, and figure out what we’ll do if the best match involves a location further away than Hyde Park. In the meantime, though, if you have clout with the theology admissions committees at any of Margaret’s programs, now is the time to mention what a great catch she’d be.

Sermon Progress

At our last service at St. Luke’s for the time being, I jotted down a phrase for my sermon Sunday. Since we’ll be celebrating the sesquicentennial anniversary with readings for the Second Sunday of Christmas (including the Epiphany gospel), I inclined toward picking up the “Gentiles following a star” motif with our participation in the divine light. In a moment, I scribbled down the phrase, “reflecting the radiance of a star that leads on beyond us.” I don’t know that that will make it into the final version of the sermon, but it’s a start. Add in some of the elements of a sermon that I preached on 2 Easter here in Evanston last year, and I’ve got some good material toward the sermon for Christ Church.

I’m working on my article on postmodern biblical interpretation, too, but that’s coming more slowly even though it has to be longer and is due sooner.

Prosperity and Lack

Kevin “Top-Ten Blogspot Blogger” Marks, who keeps me alerted to developments involving my taste in British musicians of a certain generation, yesterday pointed me to a pleasant sketch of Jools Holland’s career and current activities. I’m glad he (Jools) is doing so well; I still wish for MP3's of his early solo work, though.

I’m Just Noticing

In the Sunday Styles section of today’s New York Times, Margaret noticed the announcement that this year’s 68th Debutante Cotillion in Manhattan had included the first African-American debutante in its history, Ms. Lauren Ashley Grayson. (This story seems to appear in the only column from the Sunday styles section that’s not online.) Your print edition should have a photo in section 9, page 5.

One could take this unheralded development in a number of ways; putting the best possible light on all of them, I suppose we should congratulate the Debutante Cotillion for noticing that not all the upper-class families in Manhattan are white.

A Week Hence

Not tomorrow, but the Sunday after, I’ll preach at Christ Church, New Haven. I already feel slightly anxious since (a) I have an article due to be written between now and then, (b) I served Christ Church as the Utility Infielder Priest about fifteen years ago and some people may remember me from then, (c) that particular Sunday begins Christ Church’s year of Sesquicentennial celebrations.

The readings offer many fitting points of departure: Jeremiah 31:7-14, Psalm 84, Ephesians 1:3-6 and 15-19a, and Matthew 2:1-12. With such an embarrassment of riches, I’ll surely squander several hours just fishing for a particular text to adopt as the reference point for the whole sermon.

At Enoch’s instigation, I try to blog my sermon ideas as I prepare for sermons; if that doesn’t begin to amount to doubling the time I spend on the sermon, I’ll keep blog readers in touch with my deliberations. That’s more than I can promise relative to the article (on postmodernism and biblical interpretation, of course — a topic about which I’ve written enough now that I’ve passed the point at which my exposition came fluently, and now am in a freshly aridified desolation of finding something to say that I haven’t already written elsewhere (I have a horror of repeating myself).

My Lurid Past

Mark D (in yesterday’s comments) and Micah (in chat) expressed surprise that I ever designed a typeface. Strange, improbable perhaps, but true.

I first worked on type in 1980, when I was working at a computer-graphics start-up in Pittsburgh; that’s where I first heard words like “kerning” and “anti-aliasing.” One of my jobs involved editing the bitmapped type that our software used. I still have nightmares about Cheltenham Bold 24, adding a row of pixels to a curve, taking the pixels out, adding pixels, deleting pixels (without a mouse, naturally, but with a flaky bit-tablet that had to be degaussed every couple of hours). Frustrating as the tools were, I fell in love with type there.

When I retreated from business and took up academic life, our first computer was a Kaypro II with daisy-wheel printer; I promptly bought another daisy-wheel with a more attractive typeface than the one that came with the printer. When I discovered type-editing tools on our Mac (our second computer, a Mac Plus), I began editing bitmaps again — first for Greek character sets, then for more satisfactory display typefaces.

In those days, before actual editors wanted me to write for publication, I put off chores, grading papers, committee work, whatever else I had to do, by designing typefaces. Some of my stuff still lingers in the less selective typeface libraries online. My payment yesterday was for Sinaiticus, a face designed to approximate the Greek uncial letters characteristic of the earliest majuscule manuscripts of the New Testament. I also produced a very crude rendition of Gill Sans, from a period (now unthinkable) when Gill Sans didn’ come licensed with every major software package. Probably the most remunerative typeface I built was more precisely a collection of sorts, a series of crosses and other theological symbols, Little Gidding (since re-worked, though not re-released, to include some glyphs specifically useful for planning worship — newly titled Liturgical Gidding).

I’m not even a good amateur type designer, though when I’m in a whimsical mood I play with others’ designs to add ligatures or other useful alternate glyphs to typefaces that lack characters I need. It’s fun, but I don’t have the hand with beziers that digital design requires. Nor, for that matter, do I have any real type design tools; whereas PC users have (or used to have) at least one highly functional freeware type design application, Mac uses have always had to rely on commercial wares. Fontographer hasn’t been updated in years, doesn’t run under OS X, and still costs more than I could possibly afford — even if I had time to use it. So for the time being, I’ve given up type design. I have way too much to do, to indulge that particular distraction.

It was fun, though. . . .

DRMA: "Dreamer" by Supertramp; "Let Down" by Radiohead; "Reno Dakota" by the Magnetic Fields; "The Beauty Of The Rain" by Dar Williams; "I'm a Soldier in the Army of the Lord" by Lyle Lovett; "Another First Kiss" by They Might Be Giants; "Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin; "Doesn't Make It Alright" by the Specials; "32 Flavors" by Ani Difranco.

Well, I’ll Be!

I received a shareware payment in the mail today for a typeface I designed, oh, about twelve years ago. The internet: where the past sends you small checks at mysterious intervals.

Nothing So Strange

I have a hard time getting around to all the websites I enjoy, admire, or appreciate. It had been a while, for instance, since I had dropped by Aaron’s page; he doesn’t update that often, so I don’t visit that often. I do keep him in my aggregator of choice, NetNewsWire, so when he updated yesterday I was interested to read about a project he commended to our attention: the film Nothing So Strange, about which I’d heard nothing before.

OK, the project grabs my attention by depicting the assassination of Bill Gates in December, 1999.

More than that, though, the producer (a blogger!) released digital versions of the film online in two versions, a smaller (shorter download, less expensive) and a larger (longer download, more expensive) digital version, covered by Creative Commons license declared the footage itself Open Source (encouraging anyone else to remix their footage!), and available via BitPass (best known as a micropayments broker — at 3 and 5 dollars, this is more of a macropayment, but the principle is the same).

So: fact/fiction/narrative/visual hermeneutics problems, independent production, aware of the possibilities of online distribution, Creative Commons/Open Source principles, micropayments: what’s not to fascinate?

The producers might easily have elicited all my political sympathies while still making a superficial, amateurish, disappointing movie — but Nothing So Strange succeeds across the board. The digital version I bought (the larger version) had some digital artifacts or pixellation problems with rapid action onscreen, but that’s the closest I come to a complaint about the whole endeavor (well, that and I don’t like Lydian Roman, the typeface they use for the whole production). The filmmakers produced a tightly-plotted “documentary” with recognizable, multi-dimensional characters; they achieved a convincing imitation of journalistic style; and both the filmed narrative and the gesture of producing such a film raise terrific questions about truth-telling and representation.

The filmmakers earn our support just by attempting such a project. Their accomplishment practically demands attention from people who like movies, who think about online media, who wonder about truth and narrative, who believe in micropayments, who advocate fundamental changes in the ways creators interact with their audiences, who question archaic copyright restrictions. Thank you, Aaron, for noticing and flagging this; Bravo, Nothing So Strange! Buy it, watch it, remix it!

Happy Christmas

Tonight, dream of peace. Remember your dream. Live it — for your sake, for the sakes of all the people whom you love, all whom you encounter day by day, even for the sake of people whom you think don’t deserve it. Peace isn’t about deserts, it’s about grace, and the only way we can participate in a grace that amounts to more than “my side wins, neener neener” comes when we allow grace to define us. Receive grace; share grace.

That’s my Christmas wish for you.

Panic and Help

Well I blogged about “replacement panic” at just the same time Halley wrote up a wonderful related post over at misbehaving.net. Time to join the conversation over there, I suppose. In answer to Dave (I’m not sure whether it was Dave ”C & E,” “I used to be a blogger” Rogers, or Dave “Times Shadow” Rogers, who has hung up his blog-pen for now) Rogers: by “tenor” of our interactions, I mean the felt character of those interactions, the texture of them. By the possessive pronoun “our,” I meant “we, the people who talk about things like online interactions, their perils and benefits” (thanks for calling me on that!). The universe of interactions my “all” encompassed included at least “all the interactions among us, and probably all our other interactions as well.” The “shift”to which I advert involves an alteration in interactions that accompanies the addition of a quality of relatedness (the online aspect) that is always in play, whether actively or not. It’s already affecting our interactions, and will continue to affect them to an increasing extent, whether obviously or subtly. Same shift, but with different textures of apparent-ness, and probably with changing characteristics (then in what sense is it “the same”? Good question. It’s “the same” insofar as it was precipitated by the amplification of the extent to which we interact digitally, I think). Yes indeed, I would always expect people to have mixed degrees of exhilaration and apprehension about modulating into a more-comprehensively digital mode of interaction. Whew!

And Dorothea, I’m no one to comment on Martin Buber either.

And Peter, you’e quite right — and children today (in my experience) do tend to know less about calculating, most people telephone more often than visit (except at my office), watch TV more than read or play outside. None of these activities has ceased, though; we’ve adjusted to a different balance, and part of that adjustment may involve resistance to the change (our family doesn’t watch TV, for instance, and reads more, although the younger generation isn’t much on calculating). That’s why I use both words in “replacement panic”: “eplacement,“ because of the misplaced fear that physical interaction will disappear, and “panic” because it involves a loss of the historical perspective you so helpfully provide.

With regard to my cry for help, I haven’t followed up the second round of J.P. and Wes’s advice, since Margaret’s iBook came back yesterday. I do want to get that Lombard wireless-ed, though, since (a) I bought the card, and (b) it would be a lot more useful if it were functional as a wireless outpost than it is as a decorative motif sitting on the cassette player.

O, Canada!?

Jordon Cooper calls our attention to the follies of humor-impaired, tone-deaf to the melodies of civil liberties, cowardly leadership of Canada’s Liberal Party — a partial disincentive for those of us whose internal compass points northward when we read the headlines from Washington D.C.

O, Washington

Let’s just note for the record that although we have a security spectrum that ranges from blue through green, yellow, orange, to red, the Department of Homeland Security has actually used only yellow and orange through the twenty-one months since the Bush administration implemented the system. Moreover, although the security wonks evidently have reason to suspect that al-Qaeda operatives may be planning once to use airplanes to attack targets in urban and rural locations (Margaret and I imagined the “attack a tiny, unguarded site to terrorize the whole nation” plan ages ago), Tom Ridge urges travelers not to change their holiday plans (except, presumably, to allow for longer lines at airports).

Question: What is the actual function of raising the Terror Threat Alert color under these circumstances, with these instructions to the public?

I resist cynicism, but the whole deal smells to me a great deal as though the Terror Threat Alert serves mostly to cover the posteriors of administrators in case a terrorist succeeds. That’s why the Alert color can’t go below yellow, and is unlikely to go above orange: letting the color slip below yellow constitutes too great a risk if a terrorist were to pull off an attack; letting the color rise above orange risks raising expectations that the administration disclose or foil an actual plot.

In the meantime, the U.S. government’s foreign policies have done nothing to quell terrorist activity, but have aggravated the grievances that embolden sane men and women to take suicidally extreme actions. How many billions have been spent, how many lives lost, in responding to an initial act of violence by raising the stakes of violence? Had those resources been devoted to the well-being of the world’s needy and disease-haunted billions, it would be a great deal harder to conjure a picture of the U.S. as a greedy, murderous international predator. That wouldn’t eliminate the threat of terrorism — nothing will, including a color-coded security system — but it would diminish the evidence in favor of terrorists’ hostile portrayals of the U.S. Instead, the Halliburton administration has in almost every way possible fulfilled the grimmest allegations made by desperate adversaries, waging two wars whose civilian casualties far outnumber deaths caused by terrorists, botching the conclusions of both wars (letting Osama escape in Afghanistan, and grossly miscalculating the way the Iraq conquest would play out), lying to the U.S. public about the basis for one of these wars, and directing the spoils of war to highly-connected corporate interests.

But at least we have color codes.

Another Cry for Help

I’m trying to fix up Margaret with my old Lombard while her iBook rests in Apple’s recovery room. It works OK so long as it’s plugged in — dead battery, sigh — but I can’t get it online with the Lucent WaveLan Silver card I have. I tried the AirPort software that comes with System 9 (which the Lombard is still using); I’ve tried IOXperts’ 802.11b driver, which recognizes the base station but won't connect through the base station to the internet. I’ve sent them a note asking for help, but would also welcome geeky feedback from anyone else who has a guess at what might be going on.

Replacement Panic

I’ve run into replacement panic on a couple of occasions recently, and since I have grading to finish, a major article and a major sermon to prepare in the next two weeks, I figured I’d open up a major blog topic.

“Replacement panic” is the expression I started using back at the Digital Genres conference that Alex Golub arranged (by the way, Alex, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette thinks that PNG is a near-perfect place for a vacation). I use “replacement panic” to refer to the fear — frequently a spontaneous reaction to positive assessments of online technology — that digital media will supplant physical interactions.

I should agree at the outset that replacement panic doesn’t arise out of nowhere. some of the techno-romantics have heralded the advent of a dsay when our memories will be downloadable to hard drives, our thoughts presumably assisted by sophisticated applications, our sensations provided by elaborate simulation algorithms. David Weinberger has made a small campaign against such illusions, but they nonetheless play loud in mass media and (hence) the popular imagination.

At the same time, physical interaction won’t just go away. The people I know who seem to spend the most time online (starting with Josiah, but think of David Weinberger, Meg Hourihan, Doc, Chris Pirillo, Denise Howell) also spend lots of time in physical interaction with people. If anything, the way that online interaction permits a vehicle for modulated, careful interaction permits increased sociality for introverted people who might otherwise not venture out at all.

Before we succumb to replacement panic, we ought to look closely at the characteristics of our physical interactions, and how they’ve changed over time. Would we suggest that the class-determined interactions of Upstairs, Downstairs-era Britain, the physical-world interactions of slave-owners and their chattel, were fully authentic, present, relationships? Of course not; but one problem with replacement panic lies in its appeal to an unarticulated, illusory ideal speech situation in which everyone is present, everyone is candid, everyone is unclothed with mediating signifiers or modifiers that might distort speech. That speech situation has never existed, can never exist, and rests on pernicious assumptions about truth and the authenticity of communication. Nonetheless, the sponsors of replacement panic argue as though we all know of a situation for communication that’s uncontaminated by mediations (such as digital media), social determination (nobody say “power laws”), or class-, race-, or gender-based privilege. We don’t know of any such place — but if we did, my guess is that it would look a lot like the internet.

The point of online interaction is not that it will replace physical interaction, but that the tenor of all our interactions will shift, has already shifted, and that unnerves some people as it exhilarates others. We’re all dealing with the change, though, in our physical presence as in our online [self]-representations, and neither online interaction nor physical interaction will go away.

Hello, Necessity?

Margaret says, “They ought to invent a way of doing the [New York Times Magazine Sunday] crossword puzzle while under the blankets. That would be a big life improvement.”

Home Again

Safely, again. We drove from Pittsburgh to Columbus, where we picked up our eldest child (back from Rochester for Christmas vacation), then rolled north enjoying three-part conversational harmony (with Nate’s choice of music) all the way to Chicago. He’s great, and we’re very proud of him.

My dad got up early to see us off. We had some coffee and orange juice, toast and eggs; he gave me some sage advice about starting a stretching regimen to improve my muscle tone; we took some pictures and hugged him and Susan goodbye. I hope he gets some rest between now and Wednesday, when my sister Holly arrives. Urge him as we might to take it easy, he was determined to spend a fair amount of time with us, and I’m sure it must be exhausting. Heavens, I was tired, and I hadn’t just had an abdominal aortic aneurysm (or three) repaired. We’ll keep Don and Susan in our prayers, and we thank you-all (I should say “youns,” since they’re in Pittsburgh) for your concern.

He’s Getting Better

We spent the day with Dad (mostly); he walked downstairs on his own power three times, and ate a hearty dinner with us. We exchanged presents, talked a lot, and gave him a little space. The interval that he set aside for his nap coincided perfectly with Duke’s rout of Texas, which was an added treat for me (I haven’t seena Duke game in couple of years). He’s over-exerting, but on the whole he seems to be pretty hardy.

Rites of Transition

Congratulations today to Nathan Weinberger, to takes on the yoke of the Torah; to Heather, who was ordained to the diaconate on Thursday; to Mark, Fran, Lisa, Carolyn, George, Kara — anyone else? I don’t remember — who are being ordained to the priesthood today.

Long Day to Pittsburgh

We drove through two or three snowstorms, picked up some Chinese food in Squirrel Hill, and stopped by my Dad’s house. He’s looking very well — I wouldn’t have guessed anyone would look that good a week after major surgery.

Now Margaret and I have returned downtown to the Hilton, which has free wireless in the room, which I hope balances out the nuisance of a decrepit parking garage a block away. I’ve never been up in the Hilton before; I have vivid memories of looking up at the Hilton from Point State Park, from civil rights and peace rallies, from concerts in the park, fireworks displays, and so on. Now I’m on the twenty-first floor looking down at the Point, in a New-York-size hotel room. With Margaret, of course.

And Another Thing

While I was basking in sunny Pasadena, Mark called this development to my attention. . . .

Two Points

Point One: A former student of mine, David Reed, now studying for his doctorate in Toronto, emailed me the following story: “Yesterday I went to order one of your books from Amazon.com.  I believe it was Making Sense of New Testament Theology.  As you probably know, Amazon tells you other books people have purchased along with the book you are about to buy.  Did you know that one of the books most often associated with your Making Sense of New Testament Theology is Rick Warren's Purpose Driven Life? ”

Now, it is indeed hard for me to account for that confluence of interests, but I say, “If they’re buying my book, then there must be something to that Rick Warren guy.” But I add the link to this site (hat tip to Jordon Cooper).

Point Two: Trevor said I had to blog this picture, so I will.

Home

Safely. I’ll write tomorrow.

On My Way Home

All finished up today, and packing, and trying to decide what reading (and grading) material should accompany me homeward in my carry-on, and what should be checked. This has led me several times to imagine the consequences of a catastrophic plane crash involving a professor who’s carrying final exams: does everyone pass? Are there students somewhere offering ambivalent prayers about my safety?

My dad is in a regular hospital room. It’s not clear whether he’ll be home by the time we visit next weekend, but my sister says his voice is getting stronger (I’ll call him in a little while). Margaret’s iBook is still hosed; time for me to come home and find out whether my techno-macho enables me to retrieve her personal files from the hard drive before we send it off for a new motherboard.

Life goes on.

Long Day

The longest part of the day came for the two on-camera hours. Having lived through the two-hour taping, I admit only a faint interest in seeing the twenty-minute edited product; any important words I might have said stand little chance of correlating with the production crew’s sense of what they want to display to viewers. This, of course, is the way of the media world; I knew that going in. I participated without a vivid expectation that the producers would ultimately sustain the focus of a message that diverges from the messages they quite reasonably anticipated. And one-fifth of a twenty-minute panel doesn’t constitute much time to get across a nuanced version of an unfamiliar possible way to think about the Bible.

I should emphasize that the production crew has been tremendously cordial, friendly, attentive, accommodating. It almost makes one believe that they really think you are what they call you: “talent.” I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with them, every minute, from Sonya who applied my make-up (“so you’ll look more Californian, not so pale”) to Sean and Austin and Tom and Susan and Elaine and Rosa Lee and of course Jonathan. They’re terrific, and bless them for the effort they’re putting into this project.

It would be a lovely surprise if I sound, on the video tape, like the kind of theologian I try to make myself when somebody else isn’t producing me; and creation is full of surprises. If, however, I sound like someone else — someone more predictable, with an off-the-shelf story of how we might interpret the Bible, I sensed it coming, I cooperated (knowing full well that these circumstances wouldn’t bend to accommodate the terms of my preference for self-presentation).

Three New Cards

I added three Early Church History Cards this morning: Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Athanasius.

Three Pancakes, Two Eggs, and One Terrific Conversation

As I was sleeping late in my idiosyncratic way (turn on a news station, NPR or CNN, and drift in and out of sleep as droning voices waft over and around you), the phone rang and Michael, suggested that we have breakfast together. I had talked with him last night on Joi Ito’s IRC channel, and thought we probably wouldn’t have a chance to connect — but Michael picked me up and we had a long, rambling breakfast conversation at IHOP.

He, working at Disney, and I, working for the church, had a lot to exchange about tradition, continuity, and change. I’ll be thinking along with him, enriched and provoked by his ideas, for a long time — and we demonstrated yet again that online acquaintance and friendship are no less “real” than their physical-world counterparts.

Hooray for Hollywood

Or Pasadena, at least.

My plane travel went very well, Chicago to Denver, Denver to Burbank, connections on time and no lost bags. A friendly volunteer picked me up at the airport and whisked me to the hotel right away, with instructions to change and walk around the corner to the church right away for my taped interview.

Being an obedient soul, I followed instructions and showed up at the church after only the briefest delay to check in, wash up, and change out of travel clothes — then I waited for two hours for my interview. As a side benefit, though, I had two hours to get acquainted with some of the people working on the video project, and to eat the snack mix and drink Coke. When the interview room was finally ready for me, they ushered me in and asked me to sit there for a while as a stand-in for myself, while they moved around the decor to fit my interview. This involved changing the drape behind me (“I know we wanted it to look ‘Charlie Rose,’ but that’s just too dark.” “What about purple?” “Let’s just use the wood panelling behind him. . . .” and so on, indefinitely), the lighting (several times), the furnishings on the table that would be visible behind me (candles, cross, stoles, chalice and paten vested, chalice and paten side by side, chalice alone, (“It looks too lonely”), chalice and paten side by side again, only with a purificator draped over the chalice), the lighting again now that we knew what would be on the table behind me, and the position of the interviewer.

We did finally get to the interview part. During one of the delays, I asked the interviewer if she knew what she would be asking me, and she showed me her list of questions. I was glad to have asked, since they were’t questions I’d have done well at answering without some advance time for thinking (“What affect has being a Christian had on your life?” “What does it feel like when you celebrate the Eucharist?” “What would you say to people who might be Episcopalians out of habit, but who really don’t know why they come to church?”). Then — in an inspired moment of double-quality foresight — I asked what length answer she wanted, whether a story, a reflection, a ramble. . . and she said, “Thirty seconds. Maybe a minute.” This saved us a lot of frustration, as I was preparing my customary long wind-up for all the questions.

We talked through the interview, and although I disobeyed her expllicit instruction not to move (if you’ve seen me preach or teach, you can imagine how likely “not moving”was), everyone said it was fantastic, it was perfect, it was great, a perfect start for the taping. That would have made me feel better if I hadn’t heard that The Hulk was fantastic, great, perfect, before it was released. I think it was Hollywood-ese for “If we’re lucky, we can use a few seconds of it.”

Then we went to the rehearsal room to go over the spontaneous, lively, after-dinner discussion we’re supposed to simulate tomorrow at about 1:00. The production staff sat around us, stage-whispering helpful advice, and at one point even holding up a cue card for me. Our discussion group involves some pretty pronounced differences over theory-of-interpretation issues, and I’m not allowed to get all down-and-dirty Derridean on anyone because that might scare people away from the church (even more than seeing me in an outreach video would in the first place). We’ll see how gracefully I negotiate the complications of the discussion tomorrow.

Now, I’ll just collapse in the fluffy bed and watch mindless television. I woke up at 5:00 AM Central, it’s now 7:30 Pacific, and I’ve been going-going-going all day. It’s definitely time for me to collapse in a heap.

Oh, and Margaret’s iBook died (so that David Weinberger could leave a comment suggesting that she get a nice reliable Dell). Or, to be more precise (as Billy Crystal wouild say), it’s mostly dead. Si miracled it into yielding a few essential files, so Margaret’s intellectual history and grad-school application process aren’t totally nuked, but she’s feeling edgy about letting her computer go before her applications are finished.

No news about Dad today, so we figure he’ doing well, and church did not get any worse. Now, I really am stopping.

Haunted

In my travels today, I have so far seen two three copies of The da Vinci Code — and I certainly wasn’t looking out for it. I have the grim feeling that I may rack up an depressingly high total before I get back to Evanston.

Before I Fly

Late word from Pittsburgh is that my Dad is out of ICU/Recovery, in a regular ICU room. He’s doing well — off breathing tube — but still on a feeding tube, and still with an epidural. He’ll be getting home about the time we roll in to visit next weekend. Everyone else seems to be bearing up fine, too.

Take care, and I’ll try to look in from Pasadena.

Hi, Neighbor!

I stopped in at the Blogging Ecosystem a few minutes ago, to discover that I’ve attained the status of a “Marauding Marsupial” — an altogether rapid evolution from my long-term residency as something more on the order of a paramecium or hydra. this lends credence either to punctuated equilibrium, or to divine intervention, and I won’t lobby for which of the two.

But the point of mentioning all this is that this, the number 612 weblog (our motto: “We tried harder for a while, but nobody noticed, so we’re just slacking off like everyone else south of Instapundit, Josh Marshall, boing boing, and Volokh”), landed right next door to number 611, Jeneane Sessum. So I’m thinking maybe we should form a partnership, buy out 610 and 613, put up a nice garden, a hedge (I’m a sucker for juniper), and start a hangout for like-minded bloggers. What do you say?

Nicene Creed Request

A former student of mine (Hi, Tim!), now a pastor (in Florida, Tim?), sent me an email message this afternoon asking if I had access to the ttext of the Nicene Creed in Greek. Well, duh! Of course I did; but it was in one of the proprietary typeface layouts that were foisted on us in the pre-Unicode era. So — having nothing to do other than grade exams, evaluate papers, pack for California, attend to my family, and eat dinner politely — I went through and re-entered the text as Unicode. Use at your own peril; I haven’t had enough time to give it a good proofreading.

I used Gentium, a Unicode typeface developed by Victor Gaultney (I could have sworn I had a Greek student named “Victor Gaultney,” too, but if so it evidently wasn’t this Victor) of the Summer Institute of Linguistics; I think many modern default browser typefaces recognize Unicode these days, but go get Gentium (roman and italic) anyway. It’s free and it’s handsome. I’ll paste in the Creed below.

??? ??? ?? ?????? ?? ?????, ?? ??????, ?? ????????,
?? ?? ??? ?????? ?????????????
?? ??? ????? ??? ??? ????????????????? ??? ??????????????,
?? ??????? ??? ??? ????????.
??? ????, ?????, ????????? ??? ??????????? ?????????.
??????? ?? ???????? ??? ?????? ????????.
???????? ????????? ??????, ??? ???? ??? ????????? ??????.

[Later] Well, that’s a sad failure. Here’s an RTF file, with the Unicode version of the text. It comes up nicely in Safari — I don’t know about other browsers.

Remote Intelligence

I’ll be operating out of downtown Pasadena for the next three days, and my advance scout indicates that there’s no broadband at the hotel, nor (apparently) at All Saints church where they’ll be shooting the video. Question: Is there a good [free] internet café within a short walk of the hotel and church? Also, the production company that’ll be shooting the video decided not to cover my dinner costs, so I’ll be looking for really cheap vegetarian food (or fasting in the evenings). Any Pasadenian suggestions?

Last Day of Term Sermon

I had planned to finish up the sermon this morning, looking forward to a relatively wide span of time between my first cup of coffee (time before coffee is not calculated as “awake”) and morning mass. True, I had a conference call scheduled for mid-morning, but it was a committee meeting that’s always pretty perfunctory. No problem.

No problem, except that this morning’s call was not perfunctory, that some misguided people actually thought that the purpose of the meeting was to deliberate (can you imagine?), and I watched with something like panic as the minutes ticked down to 11:00. I tried writing a couple of sentences while I said inarticulate “Uh-huh”s into the phone, but that was useless. The call finally ended at about five of eleven, with me needing a closing paragraph. I ran a little late (I was supposed to be in the sacristy at eleven, mass starting at quarter after), made it on time, and preached the sermon, pretty much as follows.

It’s a Seabury sermon, so I’m supposed to stay within five minutesw (and I’m a slow speaker); if I’d had more time I would have tried to develop the concomitant point that God’s love does not abandon discernment or truth even as it embraces instantiations of the truth that look unlikely, even impossible, to us. Before a God who is both Love and Truth, we must continue to seek the Truth and commend it to our companions — but in our reverence for the God for whom “mercy triumphs over judgment,” we should practice always a patience and humility grounded not in “niceness” or “reticence about the truth,” but in honest caution about venturing to speak words bigger than we are.

Anderson Chapel of St. John the Divine, Seabury-Western Theological Seminary

Isaiah 48:17-19/Ps 1/Matthew 11:16-19 December 12, 2003

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Four days ago, I stood at the front of the refectory and reminded my colleagues in Early Church History class that Benedict of Nursia regarded the ulti