AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Polycarp at the Oscars

I’ve been putting way too much time into the Polycarp Project, especially given my limited talents, but it’s a fabulous way to spend time that you really ought to be devoting to more responsible things.

I like Annie Lennox as much as the next filmgoer (and I can’t put into words how highly I think of Elvis Costello, next to whom I once stood at the Virgin Superstore on Boylston St.), but “Kiss At The End Of The Rainbow” succeeded both as a great movie song and as great parody — and it’s rare enough to succeed at one or the other.

Nate hopes the Bill Murray gets another chance.

Since I occasionally humiliate my offspring by posting their baby pictures here, I’ll subject myself to the same treatment here. My cousin Adele just sent this out last week:

And you thought they didn’t even make color film back then!

Not Gone, Distracted

But back soon, with selections that may include pictures of the children from five years ago, alternate titles for “The Passion of the Christ,” a description of the ludicrous scene at dinnertime Thursday, the age of my coffee cup, the beginnings of my own response to The Passion of the Christ, general observations about life under this roof, and Oscar predictions (but I probably won’t get around to posting those till Monday).

Oh, and go back to look at “Cockaigne 1993-2003” again.

On Heterotopias

Back in October, I promised Chris Locke I would point him to this short essay by Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces.” It originally appeared in English in diacritics 16 (Spring 1986), 22-27; Foucault had been tussling with the topic since the time of The Order of Things, where he introduces the utopia-heterotopia distinction. Good thinky thoughts, and now I finally fulfilled my promise.

Next Presentation

This afternoon I felt the inspiration to begin working on my next presentation, the one coming up at the Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace Conference in April. (My inspiration was somewhat instigated by impatient emails I’d been receiving, but since the emails hadn’t worked yet by themselves, I trust that some extra agency fueled my ruminations this afternoon.) I want to connect old-school library research functions to the ways that students (and we) think about online research.

In order to make a point about old-school research, I wanted to talk about the cards that used to inhabit library books. If you're over, oh, 18? you’ll know what I mean; you young folks, however, will just have to believe me when I say that libraries used to track their collection by vast arrays of cards that indicated who had withdrawn a book, and when it was due back. But what were those cards called? They aren’t “library cards”; those are your personal license to use the library. What were those sign-’em-out thingies called?

My guess was “circulation cards,” but Liz Lawley advised me (from Japan) that they were properly known as “book cards.” So that settles that question.

Then I chatted with Kevin Marks about a cool Technorati feature request: what if you could run a conventional web search, but that the results were weighted by comparison to a particular site’s links (or a collective of sites’). That is, what if I wanted a dishwasher like David Weinberger’s? I could call David and ask his brand, but some of us aren’t bold enough to call him cold. Why can’t I search for the term “dishwasher” with the results prioritized by how strong their links are to David’s pages? Thus, if you looked for “philosophy” as it’s inflected by David’s links, you’d turn up a lot of Heidegger, but (I estimate) not so much Bergson. There’s probably a Bergson booster out there somewhere, though, whose site would generate a very different list of “philosophy” sites. If you used my site as a seed for this sort of search for “biblical interpretation,”, you’d come up with few inerrantist pages and more liberal and postmodern pages; if you searched with the seed site of Pat Robertson, though, the results would be reversed.

Kevin reminded me that links don’t tell the whole story; his Vote Links would enable me to differentiate an enthusiastic link about a good book from a link to Amazon that points toward a particular weak novel without much plot that alleges esoteric secrets behind that well-known secret-keeping institution, the Church (by which is meant the Roman Catholic Church, as though Orthodox and Protestants didn’t even exist, which is handy for the plotless book because if there had been disaffected secret-keeping clergy around the time of the Reformation, we might have actually encountered evidence for the preposterous premises the book puts forward). I could Vote Link “-” for The Galileo Code, and Vote Link “+” for one of Rowan Williams’ books, adding tremendously useful metadata to the bare link. All great stuff, and it stands to be very helpful for my presentation.

Yale Bad News

Trevor just pointed me to this story about sexual harassment at Yale. It’s horrifying — whether every allegation is true or not, there’s no excuse for the way that Yale responds when someone confronts it with such charges.

People who know me well know that I’m deeply loyal to Yale (for historic, familial reasons as well as fond personal experience) — but even more than I am loyal to Yale, I’m repulsed by people (especially people in my vocational areas of ordained ministry and teaching) taking advantage of their position to intimidate and exploit those whom they should be serving. Nothing could warrant the Yale administration’s opaque and evasive defense against the consequences of their inaction.

Code Name

Micah and I have been working on a Disseminary enterprise, about which we're very excited. Our code name for it is “Six Degrees of Polycarp.” . . .

By the way, I’m just as thrilled as can be to find that Paul Halsall, Internet digitizer extraordinaire, has lodged The Golden Legend in his online Medieval SourceBook. His many, many sites incorporate so very much rich material for historical study that it’s a wonder one man has seen them all — much less assembled them all.

I O U

I’ve been meaning to blog a couple of recent gifts from Heath Row, really I have, but breath has been hard to catch here. They’re coming.

What She Said

In yesterday’s New York Times, Laura Miller laid out The da Vinci Code for the fraud it is. I’m going to save the whole article, but among other pertinent observations, she said, “''The Da Vinci Code'' is one long chase scene in which the main characters flee a sinister Parisian policeman and an albino monk assassin, but its rudimentary suspense alone couldn't have made it a hit” (my emphasis) and “ The only thing more powerful than a worldwide conspiracy, it seems, is our desire to believe in one.” I only wish they’d allotted her more space, or perhaps printed Margaret Mitchell’s comments alongside and that they’d elicited from Harvard a firm repudiation of the nonsensical, pedagogically-tonedeaf sorts of pseudo-scholarship that the main character represents (with the tacit imprimatur of that storied institution).

I have one or two da Vinci Code gigs coming up, and have turned down others — so I have to admit that Dan Brown is putting some money in my pockets. But liberty in the extremism of [intellectual] vice is no defense; Brown profits from the confusion he engenders between hoax and history, between bogus “symbology” and critical history-of-religions research, but (for all the pious rhetoric of “encouraging free inquiry”) he short-circuits the quest for truth by capitalizing on his readers’ credulity.

Perhaps what hurts most is that even after some serious, thoughtful people read the uncontroversial explanations of why the book’s theories don’t even ascend to the status of crockery, those readers still want to think there’s something to it.

Can’t Stay Away

OK, so there’s a certain allure to spending the weekend at a suburban inn, cutting loose with an academic presentation and then coasting through the weekend, sleeping when you like and watching Office Space (for the first time) just ’cos it’s on TV. But who can stay away from a daughter who spends Sunday diligently cleaning out the kitchen?

Notice the sign above the counter: now, that’ll keep us from messing things up again.

Then again, this is from the same wonderful daughter who painted for herself this sign:

I have a photo of a bag of leftovers from our Mexican restaurant; I’d post it, but the contrast is too low. Pippa wrote on the bag, “This means you! If you eat my food, I have to deal with you - Pippa.”

No one ate her food, I assure you.

Recommending Rhetoric

Was it over the top when I put into the letter I wrote on your behalf, “disarms tactical nuclear devices in his spare time”?

From Behind the Firewall

Greetings from Olivet Nazarene University, where the network (wired and wireless) is so tightly buttoned-down that the open kiosks in the students cetner won’t let you online unless you know the local secret handshake. By inadvertent social engineering — I didn’t mean to manipulate anyone, honest — I’ve found my way online, so I’ll blog out the exciting events from yesterday as they developed subsequent to my awaking from my waffle dream.

Yesterday morning began with getting Margaret off to the airport for her trip to Major University; she got going on time, looking so sharp, and in due course arrived safely. She’s having an exhausting time, but is learning more about the program she’s visiting.

Next, a number of us went to donate blood, which (as you may recall) is a big deal for a chicken such as I. All went well, however, and I returned home somewhat depleted. I then dashed off an on-deadline letter of recommendation, ran to pick up Pippa, hastened back to the house, and threw some clothes in a case, hopping in the car at a little after two o’clock to make the two-hour dash down to Bourbonnais to finish up my paper, print it in time to give a copy to my respondent (this is a University campus, right, so public printers should be all over the place?), and give my keynote address.

After about twenty minutes, I was lodged in bumper-to-bumper traffic. I remained locked into traffic for about two hours, which got me only to the southern parts of the Chicagoland mmetropolis. I had another hour of driving ahead of me; I was tired and irritated, I was running low on gas and food — so I stopped for a late lunch at a Subway, or (to be more precise) a sandwich shop to which Subway transfers employees too slow and too sullen to make it in the high-pressure Subway location in, possibly, Two Silos, Iowa. After negotiating with the reluctant servers to extract my veggie sub from their preparatory clutches, I drove the remaining forty-five minutes to Bourbonnais, drawing nigh unto my destination near five o’clock. I stopped by a video rental place to pinpoint my destination, and pulled up to the registration desk shortly after five. I got to my room at the Olivet Alumni Inn, showered rapidly and changed into my conference suit, put my final editing touches on my address, and whirled by to the conference center, only to discover an aggresively PC-only network, that the only printer around had only a serial port — no USB.

At this point, I gave up my illusion of control over my circumstances, handed a rough draft of the talk to my respondent (with due apologies), and settled in.

The address went very well; the attendees had lots of probing questions and positive feedback for me. It was encouraging to observe that people seem more ready to respond affirmatively to the kind of argument that I’ve been amking for a long time. Maybe the ideas have been around long enough to seem less startling, more comfortable; maybe the social validation makes a difference, so that ideas that sound ludicrouus when an assistant professor makes them in the obscure meeting-room where a Semiotics group holds its sessions, sound more convincing when a full professor makes them in a keynote address. Whatever the cause, it’s a treat and a relief that the conversation was active, pointed, and encouraging.

Mmmmm. . . . Good Waffles!

Last night, I dreamt that Euan Semple lived in our neighborhood, and that a number of us (Gary included — he moved to Evanston too, evidently) were going over to his place, because he was cooking waffles for us. Gary ate prodigiously, asserting that “last year he ate so many of Euan’s waffles that he didn’t have room for any more, until today.”

Then I woke up and resumed working on my presentation for tonight. Actually, I’m working on version two; the first one is all right, but it ought to be better organized. I’ve already been out to give blood this morning, I’m making some headway on presentation v. 2, and now I have to get my mind off those waffles.

You’re Smart Enough to Get to Florida

Michael O’Connor Clarke — unplugged, but not inattentive — calls our attention to this exciting quiz. Golly, a Florida vacation! Sign me up, especially since Michael has done the legwork of providing all the correct answers.

An Idea Whose Time Has Come

Since Gonzo Marketing was eclipsed by post-9/11 spasms of grief and insecurity, relatively few of the mainstream pundits who’re trying to suss out the Dean Qijote* phenomenon have read Chris Locke’s brilliant, profane, analysis of why things happen the way they do online.

Wouldn’t this be a great moment for an insightful publisher to put on a marketing push for a new edition, maybe with an introduction by Joe Trippi?

* Clarification: by associating the Vermont Governor with a literary character whom I deeply admire, I do not in the least mean to trivialize what the Howard Dean candidacy has meant; indeed, I wish the grandeur of the allusion to convey some of my respect for Dean and those who shared the excitement of his hope.

Excuses

If sometime in the next forty-eight hours it seems as though I’m not paying enough attention to you, I beg your pardon. I’m giving a talk at a conference Friday, and they’ve gussied it up by calling it a “keynote,” which is often enough just a polite way of saying “not everyone will have gotten here yet, but we had to schedule something,” but just in case people actually do show up and expect more than hand shadows (or faster horses), I should spend some time ebtween now and Friday pulling together the notes I’ve left on my desk, at my seat in the chapel, on my Handspring, and in various files here on my laptop, so that I can make a coherent presentation Friday at 7.

Music Appreciation

I do get some use out of that young fella around the house. Hes not absolutely always at rehearsals of his band (working name: Colonel Panic). Of an evening, he and I will wash the dishes after dinner (as long-term blog readers/voyeurs remember).

As we blithely scrub, rinse, and dry, we listen to — and especially sing along with — favorite albums (while Margaret and Pippa withdraw, in terror, to the safety of their bedrooms). The other day it was Elvis Costello’s King of America; before that, London Calling.

Today we sang along to the Housemartins’ London 0, Hull 4 — what a great album! Especially if you’re singing along, in close harmony, “And I know what you think/What you think about me/Thoughts like that strike home/To you we’re not deep. . . .” That’s the stuff of which ludicrously embarrassing memories are made.

Early Returns

I’ve only been using Libra for a day, but it seems to accomplish what I had long wished for — comfortable switching among iTunes libraries. I could never get the hang of the AppleSCript solution that I paid $10 for, but Libra does the trick beautifully. So far. And it’s free (as in beer).

Going Around

Pippa’s not the only one who’s been on the receiving end of a poetic muse; Susan’s students at Room 209 have been posting their poetry. This one touched us especially powerfully.

Let Me Count The Ways

Have I mentioned how much I hate grading?

Part of it derives from my own issues, I’m sure. But another part involves the extent to which I devote vast stores of energy to building up goodwill between teacher and students, to constructing an ephemeral community of shared interest and inquiry — which seems to require a kind of attention almost exactly opposite to that required for a standard academic exercise. One reason I hate grading is that although some people write sterling papers that unquestionably enthusiastic applause, others hand in hasty schlock that they ought clearly to recognize as a transparently offhand, pro forma gesture (But do they? Will I break the spell if I say, “This is terrible, it insults our friendship for you to hand this to me?”).

I suspect that the right answer to this sort of frustration would entail an alternative to customary assignments and grading (and thank heavens, Seabury courses are mostly pass-fail). But I still believe in the assignments I’ve constructed —it’s the grading that kills me. I’d rather just help students with assignments. Maybe next term I’ll rig something that works along those lines. Maybe I won’t assign several classes’ worth of papers to come in all at once. Maybe the weather will be nicer, and I won’t have so many other things to do. And an angel will tap my stack of papers with a glowing pen, and they’ll all be graded, perfectly, in an instant.

In the meantime, I hate marking papers.

This Too Will Pass

Someone — I’m not naming names here — is going through a phase:

I feel, I feel, like a lightbulb, out. . . of power!

I feel lonely, lonely, lonely!
I don't understand my fate!!
Just as a pair of suspenders yearning to be washed, I need the truth!
Give me the truth young soldier, Give me it now!

I yearn to go to the dry cleaners, the dry cleaners. . .

That was “Ode to a Closet” by O D D 1, the worst selling author in the history of history. Thank you, thank you.

Some days we wonder what “empty nest” syndrome would feel like, and others we can imagine it only too vividly.

Checkers Speaks

I just had the oddest experience.

Here I sat, grading papers like my life depended on it (“as my life depended on it,” I would write, but that exemplifies the sort of situation in which correct grammar sounds outrageously stilted, such that only Oscar Wilde or Steve Himmer could pull it off, and since Oscar is an ex-author and Steve’s far too busy to trouble himself with trivia, the idiom must remain in its solecistic vernacular), when I heard the voice as of a faraway dog (in this case, you may note, “as” works) bidding me, “Take, and write.”

No, it’s ”Take, and read,” I corrected the dog, “Tolle, lege”; I do, after all, teach Augustine in my Early Church History Class. “Take, and write, stupid,” the ethereal canine voice returned. “Who’s got the lines in this auditory hallucination, anyway?”

The dog’s voice — oddly familiar to me, as though once I had heard it before, perhaps even shared a roof with the dog, perhaps even broken bread that the dog would gladly have taken from my hand at the table had I not been warned not to let him eat any of it — the dog’s voice, as I say, bore a note of absolute authority, the sort of tone that obliges squirrels to stop dead in their tracks for a fateful millisecond before they scamper to safety up a tree — not that the dog couldn’t have caught them, of course, but that this dog, a verray parfit and gentil knight of a dog, would not so inconvenience them as to take their lives — a note, that is, that brooked no digression or parenthesis. “I have a very important message for you, about the saga of Andrew Huff and the Pool of Lost Souls.”

“Tsssssss! Do I have to find another password for Alex? Or is he reminding me to write that letter for him? Doesn’t he know. . . ?”

“Rrroooowwff!” the voice barked, decisively. “That authorial digression is Steve’s trick. You just shut up and write what I tell you.”

The voice paused as I obediently sat at attention. “Good boy, AKMA. Have a brown-sugar cinnamon Pop-Tart. Now, write: ‘In the days of the Emperor George, in the city of Daley, when Kerry was campaigning in Wisconsin and the Deaniacs still held out hope of a mind-boggling upset, a word came to a young Jedi scribe named Alex. . . .’ ” The voice ebbed away, and I saw myself as in a familiar room (see it worked this time, too! Oooh — sorry, Checkers), Steve Himmer’s dining room where I had sat at his table and surfed on his wireless connection, and at the table sat a good-lookin’ exquisitely literate man typing intently on his six-month-old iBook. These are the words he typed: “Deep in the tangled nest of flashing lights and blink-blinking things and chirping chirpers and other mysterious noisemakers and diodes and displays and, for some reason, a doorless microwave circa 1973, which is to say pre-safety concerns, that hurled harmless in small doses but deadly over time (the time, say, it takes to cook a years-long constant stream of bags of popcorn. . . .”

Franciscans Sue Starbucks

ROME (CNS) In an unexpected move, today the Franciscan Order filed suit against the Starbucks chain of coffee houses, enjoining them to refrain from using the name “cappucino” to identify their cream-topped espresso product.

Friar Roberto Pascattio, spokesman for the Order, explained that the Franciscans like a good cup of espresso as much as the next person.

“But ‘cappucino’ is a description based on a brand that the Franciscans have been cultivating for centuries.” Cappucino is so named after its resemblance to the cowled, brown-robed monks of the Capuchin Friars, a branch of the Franciscan Order. The name of the coffee drink derives either from the brown color of the monks’ robes, or the pointed crown of steamed milk that resembles the Capuchin hood. “After we’ve spent centuries building up the name recognition of our spiritual movement for simpler living, these people pirate our name and our trademark pointed hood and the goodwill associated with them, just to identify an over-priced cup of coffee.”

The Capuchins are a branch of the Franciscan Order. They were founded in the early sixteenth century as a reform movement among the Franciscans, dedicated to returning to strict observance of St. Francis’s ideals. They adopted a long, pointed hood in contrast to the close, rounded hood that more relaxed Franciscans wore. The people among whom the reformers worked nicknamed them for their hoods — “Scappuccini” — and that nickname became part of their official designation as a religious order, the Order of Friars Minor, Capuchin.

Prominent Capuchins in history include St.. Bernard of Corleone, and Padre Pio, who was recently canonized by Pope John Paul II.

In Seattle, Starbucks lawyer Thomas Billingsgate soft-pedalled the suit. “Starbucks has a latte good will toward these spiritual seekers, but everyone knows you can’t make intellectual property claims on varieties of coffee, apart from Frappucino®, Caffè Verona®, and other proprietary formulations.”

Br. Roberto indicated that Starbucks was only the first in a series of possible copyright enforcement targets for the Order. “Next, we’re looking into negotiations with those monkeys.”

Marks Of A Principal

I’m on the Education mailing list from Small Dog Electronics, which includes both sale prices and miscellaneous advice that their Marketing Director. This week, the newsletter included Eight Characteristics of a Good Principal:

A good principal:
1. Recognizes teaching and learning as the main business of a school
2. Communicates the school's mission clearly and consistently to staff members, parents, and students
3. Fosters standards for teaching and learning that are high and attainable
4. Provides clear goals and monitors the progress of students toward meeting them
5. Spends time in classrooms and listening to teachers
6. Promotes an atmosphere of trust and sharing
7. Builds a good staff and makes professional development a top concern
8. Does not tolerate bad teachers

Another Thursday

This term, Thursday is my Friday, if you see what I mean. I don’t have any classes scheduled for Friday, and my intense prepare-teach-and-read-papers week (with meetings and appointments wrapped around and infiltrated between) eases off a dite, until Monday begins it all again.

So I came home from school this afternoon after my two-hour Greek tutorial and evening mass, and after dinner with my academic hotshot spouse, I settled down and watched our Netflix rental DVD of Bowling for Columbine, which Margaret and I found nettlesome and powerful, both.

I’ll crash soon, then tackle the Board of Trustees meeting tomorrow, I have a couple of letters of recommendation to write, a letter to compose for some bishops, a keynote address to write for next weekend, two stacks of papers to mark, I need a haircut, and I owe the Disseminary some attention. After I get all that squared away, it’s back to work.

I wish I’d been able to go to eTech; sounds like it was quite the get-together. But when one puts inventive and passionate people into small quarters for concentrated time, exciting things can happen. I’m glad so many sharp minds had the chance to strike sparks from one another.

(I would mention that linklobber Bob Carlton put me onto Flikr, just when the befriending process was settling down on Orkut, but I don’t have time. Exactly what I needed — another social software network. But this one looks interesting: it’s by Ludicorp, the Game Neverending people. Hmmmm. . . .)

It Had To Be You

This morning, my distant early warning system (the estimable Eric Norlin, whose address I have to remember to change in my blogroll) alerted us all to Verisign’s recent strategy of giving away digital ID certificates to online teenagers. Eric correctly associates this gesture wtih his touchstone case study in building marketshare, the credit card giveaway of 1958.

I expect Eric’s right — if this isn’t the impetus that gets the DigID wheel rolling, then whatever does give DigID the momentum it needs will look a lot like this. By targeting teenagers, Verisign (hissss) outflanks the adult’s expectation of privacy rights and demonstrable advantages. The teenage user can just scoop up his or her dig-signature, use it however he or she wants, and generate just the kind of market and audience that the enterprise DigID deployers have been waiting for. I just wish that some other vendor had twigged to this tactic first. . . .

Links

I want to quit-and-restart my browser (it’s getting congested, so I’m going to by-title link to three posts I read yesterday that I would use Kevin’s “link +” tag to indicate my positive interest in. First, What David Weinberger Would Have Said at E-Tech, if he hadn’t yielded his slot to make time for Joe Trippi to answer some questions. For a long time, I’ve seen one of the great benefits of online interactivity as our capacity to complicate the aggregate-thinking that rules broadcast media; it’s not that the same rules don’t apply, or that everything has changed, so much as that several significant elements have changed, such that “sameness” has changed (if I may venture that cryptic formulation, for which I already imagine a vigorous objection from at least one reader). And Mike Sanders’ comment about the magic number 150 points toward this; online interactions admit of such a variety of degrees of commitment and participation that maybe 150 isn’t the mystic threshold any more.

I also wanted to point to Frank’s post about the disintegration of Constitutional freedoms in Iowa. I’m darkly pessimistic about human government in general, so it’s hard to surprise me; still, the notion that such gestures come from a political party that likes to trumpet its patriotism, its adherence to the Constitution, its inheritance from the Founding Fathers — that just beggars my imagination.

There was a third link, but my browser hung up before I could retrieve it. I’ll try to dredge it up later.

Afterword

I was unduly dismissive of Bishop Robinson yesterday morning; from everything I hear about him, he is (and will be) a marvelous bishop to all who can receive his ministry. Moreover, he’s a spectacular bishop to a number of Episcopalians, who have longed for a presence such as his. I have heard only positive things about his pastoral sensibilities and his work with the church in New Hampshire.

I was thinking about other things, and perhaps trying to justify (to myself) my not trekking down to St. Edmunds; I usually don’t hop around Chicago to meet every bishop who comes to town (I often enough miss opportunities to see long-time friends who pass through Chicago, it being a big city and all). Doing so in a public way, though, may have communicated the impression that I lack respect for Bishop Robinson. That’s not the case at all, and I give thanks for his ministry. I hear he preached an excellent sermon, and I know his visit meant a lot to many colleagues and friends.

Two Bishops

Today, the Right Reverend Gene Robinson visited St. Edmund’s, Chicago, and many of my friends and colleagues will have gone down to see him. Margaret and I gave it a miss; without intending any disrespect, he’s a bishop; maybe a famous/notorious bishop, and of course he’s a gay bishop, but just a bishop nonetheless, and I already know a lot of bishops. God bless him, and the crowds who will have headed to St. Edmund’s, but I’ll wait till the brouhaha settles down some.

I’m thinking more about another bishop, Peter Lee of Virginia, who’s taking a lot of flak for voting in favor of Gene Robinson’s consecration. Bishop Lee appeared in a cover story in the New York Times Magazine at the beginning of January, when I was in New Haven. At the time, meant to note the story online, but it slipped my mind. Now the Times has relegated it to their paid archive, but one can find more or less of the article at various sites (viz..) with judicious Googling.

A number of people have commented to me about the portrait of Bishop Lee as complex person, whose willingness to go out on a limb lags behind his sense of what might be right, who stepped out at General Convention to do what he thought was the right thing; others have commented on the portrait of Martyn Minns, his opposite number, rector of Truro Episcopal Church (home parish of Oliver North, Clarence Thomas, Diane Knippers of the Institute for Religion and Democracy and — I think — John Poindexter). Evidently Minns’ friends hold a more favorable view of him than they think the Times conveyed. (I’ve met Bp. Lee a couple of times, and he made a positive impression on me, not least because he addressed Pippa with respect and genuine attention at the General Convention in 1997, though I’ve heard less favorable assessments of him also. I haven’t met the Rev. Mr. Minns.)

The paragraph that caught my attention came toward the end of the article. Bishop Lee observed that he still can’t bring himself to ordain somebody he knows to be gay: “noting that a half-dozen or so clergy members — some of whom he had ordained — had already come out to him privately. The bishop remains opposed to ordaining noncelibate gays, because of both his own personal resistance and that of his diocese. He's only willing to go so far.”

If I read that correctly, Bishop Lee is saying, in effect, that he won’t ordain an honest gay or lesbian person; but if someone deceives him, then he’ll ordain them and not inhibit the exercise of their ministry. Does that sound odd to anyone else? I’m not so concerned with ordinands who feel obliged to keep closeted in order to follow their call to ministry; it hurts me very much, but I can see why they would feel constrained so to do. But Bishop Lee admitting that he institutionalized deception in the ordination process. . . . That can’t be healthy for anybody involved, and I’d have hoped that Bishop Lee would acknowledge some discomfort with that situation.

NPWA — NAWP

Billy Bragg put a song entitled “NPWA” on his last album: No Power Without Accountability. As I inhabit two spheres where “power” is a very tricky word (I’m thinking of the church and the academy), signaling a dangerous resource that no one can afford to seem to want but that very many people want anyway, I greatly appreciated that lyric.

I’ve encountered some frustrations in both settings. Frequently, people will deny that they want to control a project, but will emphasize the importance of input or consensus as a way to assure that their priorities affect the outcome. Or they’ll assign responsibility for a project, but will not relinquish any of the resources that make effective work possible.

So in the spirit of Billy Bragg, but run back-to-front, I have a new institutional byword: “No Accountability Without Power.” I just won’t accept responsibility for making your great idea work unless you let me have the resources that would make that possible; and I won’t assign someone a project unless they have specified what they need, and I’m confident that they may have their necessities. Any other arrangement, you can include me out.

Thank you.

Who’s That Guy?

I was browsing idly around Dogpile yesterday when I encountered a link that led to this Russian page (the URI includes the word “trash,” so I intuit that the page may not be there forever). Look closely at the top two product pictures, evidently the front and back of some frozen snack-food package. I can’t read Russian (maybe my father-in-law will read the copy to me), so I profess total ignorance about the comestibles involved.

I want to make two observations, though. (1) I did not license the valuable “AKMA” brand to any Russian food manufacturers, so if you’ve been buying these. . . whatever on the premise that I endorse them, by all means disabuse yourself of that illusion. The Disseminary’s crack team of IP lawyers are drafting a cease-and-desist order right away.

(2) I am not the guy in that ludicrous get-up.

Feast of St. Brigid

Well, at least Duke won. I didn’t get much work done on the sermon last night, though. And this morning’s preparations were somewhat rushed by the fact that I remembered — in the shower, at 8:40 — that I was supposed to sit in on our 9:00 team-taught class on mission, culture, and gospel. Whoops!

What I cobbled together before mass this morning follows in the “extended” portion below. More important, however, my own wonderful bride returns tomorrow morning from her triumphant conference tour to Birmingham. I’m awfully proud of her, but I missed her, too. It’ll be good to be back together.

Now, on to the sermon:

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

1 Corinthians 1:26-31/Matthew 6:25-33
February 5, 2004

I’m thinking about writing a bestselling novel; I can call it The Kildare Code, referring to the lost book of Gospels produced in the scriptorium over which Brigid ruled as abbess. The plot could involve the shocking, shocking revelation that Brigid the Irish saint, the Mary of the Gaels, shows remarkable resemblances to Brigid the Irish goddess of fire and fertility and poetry. The Church has been covering up, for all these years, the secret truth that Irish Christians venerate a Druidic deity; maybe we can throw in a subplot where Sinn Fein and the Ulster Union are racing to reclaim the relics of the saint, which were scattered at the Reformation.
Was there even a real Brigid of Kildare? Maybe some manipulative early Christians made up a non-existent heroine who just happened to have the same name as the goddess. Maybe they transferred to the fictive saint the attributes of the Celtic goddess, in order to win over the indigenous devotees of the Celtic Old Order. Maybe St. Brigid never existed.
And St. Paul reminds us this morning, that’s just the kind of thing God would do. Where the wisdom of this world teaches in the words of Shakespeare’s King Lear, that “nothing will come of nothing,” or in the words of Ray Charles that “them that’s got are them that get,” God’s calling takes up and transforms a world that extends from the least and lowest to the greatest and most mighty – and as Paul points out, God’s calling extends even to the things that are not. Moreover, God calls the least, the nothings, exactly to knock the stuffing out of the leaders. These nothings have nothing to lose, nothing to worry about, free as birds and beautiful as lilies, while we high-ranking Christians stumble along in the chains of pension funds, car payments, vestments, etiquette. God called nonexistent things – and then by grace, pulls us big deals along in the backwash.
Of course, that won’t work for the novel. The novel has to involve success, exotic secrecy, and ideally millions of dollars in royalty payments, not to mention a movie deal in which, I think, Nicholas Cage plays the role of the church historian who discovers the big conspiracy, escapes near-fatal traps, and ends up with the beautiful, slightly dim-witted, but resourceful Irish woman reporter. The novel is all about greatness, power, acquisition, and esoteric knowledge while Paul’s Gospel is all about serving, weakness, giving, and the plain candid gospel that God loves us, God embraces us with a grace that we can’t comprehend or control, God calls us into a ministry of and among nothings. That’s nothing: nothing but fire, nothing but fertility, nothing but poetry.
No glamor to that, but I can live without the glamor. I don’t fit that way of life anyway, I guess. I’ll have to settle for the God who is the source of my life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption. I mean, God’s gift was good enough for Brigid – if she really existed.

Stumped

I had been aware at the threshold of consciousness that I’m preaching tomorrow at the mass for St. Brigid; tonight I realized that I had made no progress whatever on the sermon for tomorrow. Plus, the Duke-vs.-Carolina game is on tonight. Plus, did I mention that I’m stuck?

The readings are 1 Corinthians 1:26-31 and Matthew 6:25-33. I’m inclined, at this points, to preach on verse 28f: “God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” I’m intrigued by that notion of God choosing “the things that are not,” especially in the context of Brigid (the saint who seems to have displaced a Celtic goddess of the same name, leading to questions about whether she really existed, and if so which of the legends about her rest on historically reliable traditions).

Carolina just tied the game. And I still don’t have a sermon.

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While the Bush Imperium claims to have been goaded into the Conquest of Iraq by faulty intelligence reports, and David Kay lies that everyone was sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the intelligence arm of Sojourners magazine was pointing out to anyone who bothered to read it that the probability of finding WMDs was somewhat less than 100%.

Weak Site, Interesting Occasion

If you’re interested in preaching, it looks as though the Festival of Homiletics (sort of a fancy-dress preaching slam) could be intriguing. Overlook the lamentable site design, and skim the list of speakers. It’s hard not to think that this would be a great chance to soak up some wisdom on preaching; some awfully gifted preachers will be present.

It’s clearly not oriented toward the most obvious manifestations of emergent-church thinking, but I often wish that more attention be paid to ways that emergent spirituality and leadership may inhabit the forms of church life inherited from Christianity Classic. “Emergence” and tradition are not, after all, antithetical; emergent vitality can catalyze a congregation whatever its theological style, so long as it’s actively expressing the truth that brings the congregation together, that the congregation has gathered to remember, to celebrate, to receive and to share. Perhaps one way of sizing this up would posit that “traditional” manifestations of church life [probably more readily] risk ossification and routinization in familiar ways whereas nontraditional ways of church life [can] fall into ruts that are harder to recognize until in retrospect.

Thus “traditional” congregations will always have a lot to teach, and “nontraditional” congregations will always have a lot to teach. And being “traditional” doesn’t mean that all the answers to your life derive from things that have already been settled in centuries past, and being “nontraditional” doesn’t mean that the wisdom of the saints has no bearing on what happens from here on forward.

But the site for the Festival of Homiletics could use a through consultation from Dean Peters, couldn’t it? (Ha! I got his name right this time!)