AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Political Perplexity

Without suggesting any particular enthusiasm for John Kerry, I’m at a loss to understand how this presidential election is even close. The Bush administration has taken on a calamitous and unnecessary war in a remote country (arguably two unnecessary wars — but I’ll opt not to contest Afghanistan, despite my conviction that even that invasion was misguided), has thrown the budget from great health to staggering deficits, has lied to the world and the U.S. people, and has responded to challenges by claiming a sort of sovereign immunity to criticism. And that’s just a sampling; his flip-flop-flip on whether we can win the war on terror bespeaks a pretty shabby platform from which to throw stones at Kerry. Why would anyone vote for more of this?

And for some [admittedly mild] bipartisan carping, why is it so hard to ascertain which state Granny D is campaigning to represent in the Senate? One might think that the New Hampshire-osity of her campaign came in as an afterthought to her progressive politics.

Moreover

Dorothea rightly notes, “Somebody out there is always worse at what you do than you are” — but she omits the vexing corollary, “and she or he probably gets stronger organizational support, better working conditions, and is paid more than you, too.”

Technology Inquiry

Back in ancient times, when I was in college (or, more precisely, when I was transcribing what Thomas of Aquino dictated to a mob of us novices), I resolved the book storage dilemma with what was at the time a hip, inexpensive, and semiotically-appropriate solution: boards and cinderblocks.

Since someone I love is presently facing the age-old book storage dilemma herself, I’m wondering if any of my generous and technologically up-to-the-moment readers knows of a book repository that's (a) cheap, (b) not cumbersome (it's a small apartment in which Margaret won’t be living too long, deo volente); and (c) somewhat more advanced than the ol’ bricks-and-boards. Anyone?

Two Heathers

Our nearest Heather is now a priest; I couldn’t wrench myself into yet another kink in the Adam Family Summer Tour to go, but Si held up the family colors. Lots of cheers and neighborly well-wishing to her, the new interim Episcopal chaplain at Northwestern.

Further away, Heather “Dooce” Armstrong has won our admiration and our hearts for her wit, her writing, and for her family life. One of the last things I read before the I closed my TiBook on the portico of the Atheneum Friday was her message that she was going to check into the psychiatric ward of a nearby hospital. We (and lots of other people) have been aching with her and praying for her, and this morning I caught an update that she passed on to Jon. Things are getting better, for which we offer up cheers and well-wishes to her too, and to Jon and Leta and Chuck.

We’re Ba-a-a-ack

We arrived in Evanston at about 7:00 CDT, after a jolly twelve-plus hours on the road (Pippa and I actually started Saturday morning at 7:30 Eastern, counting the packing and clean-up; Si spent roughly 24 hours on trains coming east to meet us, but his travel streak was interrupted by a delightful sojourn with a gifted artist and one of the leading undiscovered novelists writing in the English language.

The house is standing, and in no worse condition than when we left (apart from the baby chipmunk, and I’ll let Si blog about that); the car had not been pillaged during the fortnight we left it parked in Barnstable; moreover, the car started right up when I turned the key in the ignition. These may seem like no big deal to you, but my neuroses had a lot invested in some sort of catastrophe having struck in my absence. Now, they’re going to have to choose among the chipmunk, the hotel whereat we stayed last night, and a slightly slow-leak-prone back tire.

Worse things happen at sea. Take my word for it.

He Noticed

Jordon appositely asks, “Has anyone else ever noticed how all denominational websites are all the same and yet so many are frustrated with how little impact they are making and how so few people care about them?” (The rest of his observations merit your attention, too.) Well, yes — but the pertinent question (as Jordon himself observes) isn’t whether we have noticed, but whether they have noticed. I don’t see enough signs that they have, sadly.

Postcard To Everyone

Wrote productively.
Blogged controversially.
Visited Familial-ly.
Missed Margaret awfully.

If you’d been here, it would have been even greater — so long as you didn’t bring an SUV.

Grace and peace,
AKMA

Fast Two Weeks

The other day, I thought I heard Dr. Weinberger; must have been favorable acoustic conditions from the west. And it doesn’t take glasses to see Halley, even when she’s up on the Cape. (Hope he’s feeling better, Halley.)

I rather coarsely carped about Nantucket’s congestion on my first day here, and then there was the info-highwayman fiasco. I’ve hardly set foot outdoors all fortnight, although despite my best efforts I’m getting a splint-tan. I have no notion what to do about guest-y/host-y gifts. So at the end of the visit, I’m feeling a little like a horrible cranky old greybeard, for whom nothing’s good enough and who hasn’t a kind gesture for anyone, and I’m awfully sorry for that.

The island still is lovely, and my family has sheltered Pippa and Jennifer (and Bea) and me with overwhelming hospitality. Pippa’s Princeton friends have given vast amounts of visiting time, and through everyone else’s generosity I’ve drawn near the end of the rough draft of my exegetical labors.

So it behooves me to thank everyone involved, whole-heartedly, and to apologize if I’ve given offense, and if that chartreuse tea cozy with a tired joke about fishermen doesn’t go with the rest of the décor — well, at least I passed by the tie-dyed one.

Now, to connect with Josiah in Quincy and pull the marathon drive to Evanston. Back to work. . . .

Spooky

Maybe it’s the Philip Glass lover in me, but the rough composition by DJ Spooky over at Radio Babylon sounds terrific to me. Disclaimer: DJ Spooky went to Bowdoin, I know little else about him, but I was keeping my eyes open after an almost unctuous promotional article in the alumni magazine (“Hey, we’re an alumni magazine, but we know about hip-hop, remix culture too! Isn’t that groovy, like, man?”).

James 1:21 (actually, more about 3:15)

I will get back to the comments you’ve offered on previous James posts; my online time comes in intervals, but I’ll be back online freely next week. I appreciate the fact that people are bothering to read and think about these entries, and I’ll try to make it more of a dialogue as soon as I can.

So last time, I mentioned that I might take up the psuche/pneuma problem in Jacobean anthropology. It’s a problem not different in kind from the comparable problem in Pauline anthropology, and both are complicated by the ambiguity of contemporary English discourses of non-material anthropology.

Here’s a rough sketch of the problem. Our ancient forebears seem to have believed that human beings subsist not simply as material beings, but also with various degrees of other-than-flesh vitality and depth. In the New Testament, this plays out in a distinction between psuche and pneuma, both of which can be rendered in English as either “soul” and “spirit,” depending on the work they’re doing.

James and Paul, among others (and here I won’t go over the ancient background) discuss humanity as involving not simply (as colloquial anthropology generally assumes) one body plus one soul, but as a body plus a pneuma plus a psuche, a “spirit” and a “soul,” if we rely on conventional superficial translations.

The problem emerges when we try to communicate this in English. For instance, English-speakers generally hold the “soul” in high esteem; but in both James and Paul we find psuchikos used as an adjective for a certain not-so-great dimension of human existence. In 1 Corinthians 2:14, for the clearest possible example, Paul says that people who are psuchikos do not receive God’s gifts, because such gifts are properly discerned pneumatikos. In other words, psuchikos existence — which we might lazily translate as “soulful” — is only for people who are prepared to do without the gifts of God (reserved for pneumatikos, “spiritual” people). Likewise James, who in 3:15 categorizes “bitter envy and selfish ambition” as typifying “earthly, psuchikos, devilish” attitudes. While he doesn’t say much about pneuma (its absence leaves the body lifeless in 2:26, and in a difficult 4:5 a pneuma inhabits us), clearly the psuche comes out second best.

The NRSV translates psuchikos as “unspiritual,” to bring out this contrast. But that couches the term only in a negative context, where general usage shows psuchikos as “having to do with the ‘natural’ vital capacities,” “mental,” “animal,” all positive terms whose force is defined not as a negative contrast with “spiritual.” If one adopts one of these as the opposite number from pneumatikos, though, one risks understating the intended contrast between the lesser psuchikos and greater pneumatikos capacities.

How to render psuche and psuchikos, then, in English? (Here I show the influence of James, who shows a marked propensity for elliptical constructions.) In 1:21 and 5:20, it’s pretty easy to stick with “soul” or “life ” for psuche. At I don’t want to use “unspiritual,” for the adjectival form psuchikos at 3:15, as it ascribes no color to psuchikos save anti-pneumatism (as it were). “Animal” is interesting, as it provides a comprehensible contrast to “spiritual,” but I’m a little too sensitive to the Latin connection of “animal” to anima, which gets us back into the anthropological terminology carousel again. “Mental” or “vital” won’t sound “unspiritual” to readers, I don’t think. Maybe “ordinary”? I’m still pondering this.

End Of Story

So, I’ll look into talking with the library and Information Bureau folks about the Nantucket Wifi Fiasco. For now, though, it’s just another “this could happen to you” story.

Thanks for the advice and feedback. As a final sidenote, I war-walked to the Nantucket Bake Shop (contending against Downyflake for Best Native Doughnuts on Nantucket), and hit about twenty access points between the studio and the bake shop. All were closed, which sample begins to suggest that Nantucketers know how to close access points that they want to keep closed, and how to leave open access points that they want to share.

Late-breaking news: The Atheneum has just now posted a policy stating that the wifi connection is available only between a half-hour after they open to a half-hour before they close, on days that they’re open. The stated reasonn is “for better maintenance and operation.” Case closed.

Carryover

I dreamt that someone surreptitiously injected me with a deadly bioweapon as part of a terrorist plan — and when I woke up this morning, I felt reluctant to leave the studio lest I spread the infection.

James Pause

I ground out the last verses of James 4 this morning, but I’m going to skip a day posting some of my reflections on the epistle so that I can more rapidly get back from the Atheneum to the studio, to begin tackling chapter 5. Thanks for the feedback, more to come.

Congratulations, Jordon!

Jordon announced today that Resonate — a conversation about the Gospel and culture in a Canadian context — has gone live. It looks terrific; this certainly bears watching. It exemplifies the kind of use that churches should have been making of the web all along. Great idea, great realization, Jordon.

James More

I’ll keep this short today; yesterday I didn’t finish chapter 4 as I’d hoped to, so I really must finish it this morning.

In 1:12, James-Jacob invokes the subject of peirasmos generally translated as “temptation” in Christian writings. Jeffrey Gibson has persuaded me, though, that the habit of reading peirasmos as “temptation” should be reassessed, if not outright abandoned, in light of evidence he amassed to suggest that it never bears the hostile valence of “tempting” up to its usage in the New Testament, where it might well simply continue the more ancient sense of “testing.” James 1:13 (“No one who is being tested/tempted should say, ‘I’m being tested/tempted by God’ ”) provides a difficult test case for that hypothesis; if the peirasmos is neutral, then why not ascribe it to God? It makes more sense to refuse to ascribe peirasmos to God if that peirasmos is seen as intrinsically hostile. I have more decision-making to do about this; James 1 seems like a very tough challenge for taking peirasmos as “testing,” especially the end of v 13 where James says, “[God] tests/tempts no one,” when Scripture is explicit about God testing Abraham, the whole people of Israel, Hezekiah, and Job, whose example Jacob/James will cite in chapter 5 (although the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Old Testament, doesn’t use the word peirasmos or related terms). Moreover, God’s testing of people constitutes a major theme of wisdom literature — hmmm, maybe there’s an article in this, or maybe someone’s already written it up(I don’t have most of my reference books with me).

1:1X revisits the theme J/J opened in 1:5, wherein he characterizes God principally as the giver. J/J’s God “gives to all unstintingly,” and is the giver of “every good gift and perfect present,” just here in chapter 1. God’s identity as “giver” has been the subject of much discussion lately in light of analyses of “the gift” — don’t have time to open all that now, but James/Jacob provides a touchstone text in the New Testament for God and “the gift.”

Maybe next time I’ll take up the question of psyche and pneuma in Jacobean anthropology, but now I have a commentary to write. . . .

An Information Highwayman

Turn to Gary Turner for up-to-the-minute fair and balanced coverage of the Nantucket Wifi Bandit Scandal. . . . .

Ironies Never Cease

My mom gave me a copy of a local promotional magazine last night at dinner (with Holly, my sister, and Jennifer, who came over for a couple of days with Pip and me before her Ph.D. program begins — with Margaret’s Ph.D. studies at Duke, Jennifer’s at Union Seminary/NY, and Nate’s plans for advanced study in music, we’re a one-family faculty meeting, or unemployment line, depending on how dire the hiring situation is a few years from now).

Anyway, featured on the cover of N magazine (I can’t find reference to a web site for the print edition, though it gives a URI for its society pages — I don’t know any of the beautiful people I see there), nestled in with stories about why Bush should be re-elected to protect small businesses, on local painters, and on what Livingston Taylor is up to these days, is a story on — wardriving (without using that word). “Wi-fi Hotspots,” the cover announces, and the story narrates the author’s experience of wardriving the eastern end of the island and finding a hundred or so open APs, some of which he names.

The author — whom I will not name here, since he’s in grave danger of being identified not only as a felon himself, but as contributing to a crime wave of felonious Net surfing, observes,

In all, we discovered over 100 wireless access points. . . . We checked about half of them, and over 20 were open and accessible. I’ve included several secret hotspots in the sidebar. But not all of them. If I list all of my favorite wireless access points, the owners of those hotspots will get wise and shut them down. And then where will I be?

Well, maybe in federal prison, sir.

So, as I recapitulate the last two days’ events, I’ve been instructed by a uniformed police officer not to use my laptop at all within wireless range of the public library of which I am a card-holding member, at the same time an ultra-glossy tourist magazine promotes leeching the signals from private citizens and only mentions the library’s access point at the very bottom of the sidebar accompanying the article.

(I’ll leave out any questions about editors who let this writer get away with the sentence fragment in the middle of the paragraph, and the notion of printing the location of a “secret hotspot” in 18-point display type in a featured sidebar.)

At the same time, the article begins with a boldface caution: “Although some wi-fi networks are intended for public use, whether freely or with varying fees, unauthorized access to private networks [which is what the article to follow specifrically narrates] might be considered criminal theft akin to stealing signals from cable television connections [that comparison seems to be doing a lot of work in this discourse]. . . .”

So the magazine says, in effect, “Don’t do this — here’s how to do it, and where, and it’s fun and cool.” I feel like that turtle in the old cartoons, who stumbles into some mire of folly, and beseeches his magico-scientific wizard mentor to save him: “Help me, Prof. Lessig!”

For Clarity’s Sake

A) I’ve posted some images relative to my close encounter with a e-felony rap at flickr, of which I’ll link to a couple from here.

B) I’m in Nantucket, Massachusetts, not at my home in Illinois — and I don’t know whether Mass has different state law from Illinois (that’s one reason I asked). However you slice it, my police informant (so to speak) emphasized that this is a federal offense.

C) The library was closed at the time, or else I’d have gone ahead in to finish my surfing.

D) The signal was open. I did not use super-h4x0r powers to defeat any form of encryption, protection, or enclosure. If there’s a law against defeating security features, I would understand that. I might not support such a law, depending on how it was written; such a law sounds to me like ill-advised defensive anti-geek legislation, but I would absolutely understand the notion of a law saying that I ought not be permitted to circumvent the library’s security measures if they wanted to prevent me from using their wireless.

Might this be an obscure, malignant side effect of the DMCA’s anti-circumvention stipulations? Even though I wasn’t circumventing anything?

Three signals in my limited range (TiBooks have notoriously poor reception) has entirely open signals. One was the library’s. Moreover, the library staff evidently knew how to protect a signal, because they manage an encrypted, protected access point, too.

I didn’t hack. I opened my tiBook, and three happy lines appeared, Mail.app started checking my mail, and NetNewsWire posted my entries.

E) This is not a cause for which I’m ready to be a martyr. I’ve got one of those, but this isn’t it.

F) This is what bothers me the most, I think. The officer in question requested — with a grim law-enforcement professional’s demeanor — that I not use my laptop in the vicinity of the library, since that opened the possibility that I might be connecting surreptitiously.

So although it’s legal to use a wifi-capable computer within 100 feet of an 802.11b access point (further for an 802.11g AP), the police feel free to discourage using a computer lest it might pick up an illicit packet. If you’re going to take that approach to alw enforcement, though, wouldn’t it be fairer and friendlier to put up “No Laptop Zone” signs? There might be other open wireless signals around town; am I not allowed to operate my laptop in range of any of them? Isn’t this a rather overblown, silly way of effecting the stated goal of protecting access-point owners from unwelcome intrusion and unjust liability?

G) My mom (a local year-rounder) thinks this all may be because John Kerry visits the island (Not an anti-Kerry sentiment, just an observation of the way the Secret Service population fluctuates).

James 1:2ff

OK, so last time I got all the way through the first verse. As with writing a commentary, this could take a while.

Here are some follow-through questions. First, James (Jacob) uses the vocative adelphoi for his readers. Ordinarily, and perhaps especially for ecclesiastical reading, one would translate this as "brothers and sisters," since adelphoi conventionally serves as a general address to a group of assorted gender; yet at one point, James specifically refers to adelphos e adelphe ("a brother or sister," 2:15) — suggesting at least the possibility that his vocative adelphoi are addressed to a male-only (or male-normative) group, a possibility reinforced by his periodic use of the male-specific term aner to indicate "a person" (1:8, 12, 20, 23; 2:2; 3:2). None of these uses requires its referent actually to be male. To give you an idea of how odd that is, James uses "man" six times in five chapters, always to refer to a person without specific contextual markers for gender; Paul uses the word forty-three times in the seven undisputed letters (adding up to, let’s see, sixty-one chapters), a quick scan suggesting that he always uses aner in contexts where the gender of the person is in question (or in quotations; and we can quibble about 1 Cor 13:11, but even if I concede that verse, the general point stands). Especially since James/Jacob’s usage of aner is heavily front-loaded to the first chapter (creating a “primacy effect”), I’m inclined to suspect that James envisions his audience as being men.

If that’s so — and I’m still not quite confident that it is — it seems more fitting to render the Jacobean adelphoi as “brothers,” the more precisely to communicate my understanding of his message.

Second, in 1:4, we find the first of a construction that seems downright bizarre to English-speakers: a third-person imperative. Translators typically adopt the stilted usage, “Let him [do X, Y Z],” even though nobody actually speaks that way any more. More colloquial substitutes would be “she should. . .” or (as my student Monique Ellison suggested) “she better. . . ,” though I’m not sure what I’ll do with these third-person imperatives when I get to the translation part of the commentary (I’m doing the grammatical and textual analysis first, then going back and working out a translation. lest I have a bright idea over in chapter 1, but forget about it by the time I hit chapter 5).

Last (for today), James/Jacob presents us with an interesting problem in his use of the verb diakrinw (twice in the middle voice, in 1:6, once in a passive-voice form in 2:4). The general Jacobean problem to which this verb points is a departure from the ideal of living haplws, with a unity of personality that aims always at just behavior; in this context, meden diakrinomenos in 1:6 seems to suggest something like “without ambivalence.” Bible translators prefer to translate diakrinw-words as having to do with “doubting,” but the normal sense for diakrinw in the middle voice, though, is “to get [a dispute] settled” (s.v. diakrinw, LSJ) (that’s the Liddell/Scott/Jones lexicon, the standard lexicon for classical-Hellenistic Greek; I lean somewhat more heavily on non-“biblical” reference tools to avoid the theological axes that people grind, even inadvertently, in their linguistic research; why grind their axes, when I have my own hatchets that need sharpening?), hence, something like “arrive at a distinction among alternatives.” “Doubting” entails an attitude of (as it were) positive incredulity, where I don’t see that in the lexical domain of diakrinomai or even in NT usage.

Let’s look at what’s going on in the few diakrinomai passages of the NT. In Acts 10:20, Peter gets an emphatic command from the Holy Spirit, who urges him to get up and find three strangers whom the Spirit has sent; he is to go meden diakrinomenos, which the NRSV translates as “without hesitation,” good enough if one sees the hesitation as a matter of volition rather than time — but I’d say (again) “without ambivalence” may communicate that better. In Acts 11:2, circumcised colleagues diekrinonto Peter (for eating with Gentiles), which the NRSV renders “criticized.” That sounds fair for the context, though it seems a little odd for diakrinomai; it seems to be working in the sense of “observe a distinction,” with a negative valence in this situation. In Romans 14:23, Paul talks about people with dietary scruples; the NRSV identifies them as “those who have doubts,” but I think it much more to the point to say that they make distinctions among foods, some to be eaten, others to be avoided. Jude v 9 has Michael diakrinomenos with the Devil about the fate of Moses’ body; that looks like the classical “settling a dispute” to me. And in v 22, the letter adjures its reader to have mercy on the diakrinomenous, which the NRSV apositely renders “wavering.”

Now, in James 1:6, it looks a lot more like a case of “wavering” or being ambivalent than it looks like doubting, to me. And in 2:4, the passive form ou diekrithete en eautois seems to convey “aren't you being divided among youselves,” a sort of form of group ambivalence. But I’ve spent too much time on blogging already this morning, I’m arguing too loosely in a public forum, and PIppa is awake, Jennifer’s coming to visit, and I have to walk the dog. I will be sure to post this entry, though, from within the library precincts.

Next Step, Wiki

Mark Goodacre has a helpful entry on online glossaries of biblical-critical terms, in which he names several such sites and runs a quick check on them (he uses “the Synoptic Problem” as a reference test, I usually use “postmodern criticism” or some variant on that expression). Thanks, Mark, for collecting these and providing the links.

These are good, but it looks to me as though the natural next step is a glossary wiki. Imagine how much smoother and more helpful a glossary could be, if Mark had been able just to make the emendations he noted, instead of calling attention to them and waiting to see whether the site maintainers adopt the changes.

So Weirdly Wrong

A few minutes ago, a police officer passed the bench where I was sitting outside the [edit: Nantucket] Atheneum, enjoying the mild temperature and the wifi signal, and he said, “Sir, you can’t use the Internet outside the library.”

I said, “What?” (I’m pretty clever under pressure.)

The officer in question (whose conduct was entirely professional, firm, and calm behind those mirrored shades) solemnly assured me that in order to use the library’s open wireless signal, I had to be seated within the library. The officer then wandered on back to the nearby police station.

I dutifully, if reluctantly, turned off the power to my Airport card and, since I had only been on the bench a few minutes, began working — offline — on what turns out to be this post. I had noticed two other weak but open signals in the area, and I figured that I could post this perplexing moment via one of the other open signals, then scuttle back to the studio. As I was writing, the officer returned and — as the officer walked straight for me — I held up my TiBook, pointing to the zero lines in the Airport icon, and showed the officer that my card was off.

“Why don’t you just close that up, sir, or use your computer elsewhere?’

I closed the computer in order not to constitute a threat to established order, but engaged this peace officer in a discussion of the complexities of the topic. “I did notice several other open signals in the area — am I allowed to connect to them?”

“Maybe if you had permission it would be all right, but it’s a new law, sir; ‘theft of signal.’ It would be like if you stole someone’s cable TV connection.”

I responded, “But this is a radio signal thing — it’s not like a cable connection, it’s like someone has a porch light on and I’m sitting on the bench, reading a book by their light. I’m not stealing their light.”

“It’s a law, sir; if someone comes along and downloads child photography (that wasn’t the exact word the officer used) and it goes through their [sc., the access point owner’s] connection, that’s a violation and we’ve had cases of that. That’s a felony.”

(I skip the question of whether it’s less a problem if someone downloads such photos while sitting in the library. Since I’ve already been categorized, however politely, with felons, I thought discretion should prevail at this point.) “Is this a state law?” I asked.

“It’s a federal law, sir; a Secret Service agent came and explained it to us.”

“Look, I don’t want to give you a hard time, and I’m very thankful that you alerted me to this, and I’ve done what you asked, but I’d be very surprised if there turned out to be a federal law forbidding my using an open wireless signal in a public place.”

“Well, you can look it up, sir, and explain it to the chief. . . .”

At this point, it became clear that my uniformed interlocutor had to head in a different direction from me, so we shook hands and parted. And I walked back to the studio, dumbfounded that someone just rousted me for picking an open wireless signal in public — indeed (as it turns out) for using a laptop within a wireless signal’s range of the library. Weird.

posted from a secure hiding place near an open access point. . . .

[Rest of story: here, here, here, and if you haven’t seen Gary Turner’s coverage go here too.]

EFF, Ahoy!

Just in time for this year’s “Blog Like a Pirate Day,” I saw a t-shirt today in one of the stores dedicated exclusively to t-shirts and sweatshirts. It read, “Piracy: Just Like Hostile Takeovers, Without the Paperwork,” and features a skull and crossbones. Because I was in a Free Culture sort of mood, I was thinking about piracy and what it was “just like,” considering the ways that a Free Culture, Open Source kind of guy resembled a pirate, and the ways he might differ.

Then tonight, Pippa and I watched Jason and the Argonauts (it was a rainy night, and the Dreamland Theater was playing Open Water and the other downtown theater — I’ve forgotten its name, it used to be the Shaggy Dog, I think — was playing The Door in the Floor, and we didn’t care to see either of them). You may remember that the climactic scene in Jason involves a fight between three stupefied-looking Argonauts and seven animated skeletons; that jogged my mind back to the piracy and skull-and-crossbones theme.

I realized that a Creative Commons emblem couldn’t just be a skull and crossbones, since part of the point is that the culture for which we’re struggling isn’t properly someone else’s good that we want to steal, but rather is should be recognized as a common good, that we want to turn loose for the benefit of the culture in general. Instead of a skull, then — a light bulb (illuminating its surroundings, and itself an invention whose patent we would not want to have seen extended indefinitely). The crossed bones — a pen (obviously) and. . . a microphone?

We’ve already established that I’m not design wizard, but this is what I whipped up in Freehand. . . .

The Yankees, Disneyland, Etc.

I have a track record for misunderstanding Dave Winer, so I start out by saying that I may have missed a subtle nuance to what he said early this morning about the U.S. occupation of Najaf. He’s quite right that it must be a profound outrage to many Muslims — something more than “liberation” is at stake here, and I’m astounded at the present administration’s tone-deafness to the implications of its policies. So Dave’s quite on target that far.

I think the comparison of one of the holiest sites in the cosmos (to Muslim believers) to Yankee Stadium or Disneyland may understate the importance of Najaf. Important as the Yankees and Disneyland are to some (and I’m acquainted with both Yankees fans and Disney fans), there is a depth and extent and even duration of significance to the Imam Ali shrine that belies the comparison to the temporal citadels of the Bronx and
Anaheim.

I take his point, absolutely; but as Dave himself is wont to say, “It’s worse than that.” People of faith, any faith, should share the horror at what’s going on in Najaf: the violence, the desecration, the inhumanity, all of it. Baseball and theme parks aren’t playing in the same league.

Go, Creative Commons! But. . . .

Does it seem incongruous to anyone else that the tickets for the big benefit concert for the Creative Commons are being handled by Ticketmaster?

Well, Trying To Be

One Man’s Opinion: “Even if he is a Christian.”

(That was with a smiley, lest anyone think it offensive. By the way, yes, I am a priest, and thank you very much for your kind words!)

Prayers, Thanksgivings

After a long time away, Naomi has blessed her readers with a catena of knock-out entries about liturgy, prayer, language, and watermelon.Tolle, lege.

Appreciation for Antiquity

Lest anyone think that my postmodern technophilic interest in online publishing threatens the survival of the book, permit me simplly to observe how much I love my copy of Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon, with durable pages, and the marks of the type pressed visibly, palpably into the paper. I turn to it more than other references in my work on James, in part because I value reference sources that don’t already presuppose Christian theological language-use, but in part also because the sensuous experience of touching and smelling the pages, of observing the play of ink and subtle shadow (from the press’s imprint) delight me.

Then, I use fountain pens, too.

Wondering

Why doesn’t every newspaper in the country syndicate Spinsanity, and place its reports somewhere prominent (the front page wouldn’t be inappropriate, as far as I’m concerned)?

James Problems

Earlier I suggested that I might post some of the notable interpretive issues I’m working with in my James commentary. The first is more a complex of problems, having more to do with interpretive convention than with puzzling out the sense of the text.

A variety of cultural factors combine to produce a Christian document named “The Letter of James” where I see a profoundly Judaic document named “The Letter of Jacob.” The issue arises in the first verse, where one confronts not only the (alleged) author’s name,* but also the address “to the twelve tribes in the Diaspora.” First, the decision to render this author’s as “James” (Iakobos in Greek) obscures the vital connection between the name in question and the subsequent address: the biblical Jacob is the father of the twelve** tribes: “Now the sons of Jacob were twelve. The sons of Leah: Reuben (Jacob’s firstborn), Simeon, Levi, Judah, Issachar, and Zebulun. The sons of Rachel: Joseph and Benjamin. The sons of Bilhah, Rachel’s maid: Dan and Naphtali. The sons of Zilpah, Leah’s maid: Gad and Asher” (Gen 35:22-26). So it’s very hard to hear the resonances of Genesis, of the very identity of Israel, when we translate the author’s name as “James.”

Is it better to translate the Greek Diaspora to “Dispersion,” or to leave it in the now-familiar transliteration? Probably six of one, half-dozen of the other. Either way, though, the cumulative force of the first verse indicates in flashing neon letters that we’re talking about a Judaic context — which message is muted, if not quite extinguished, if we render Iakobos as “James.”

* I don’t have a big stake in whether the author of this letter was Jacob, Jesus’s brother, or some other Jacob, or someone pretending to be Jacob, or someone named Ermintrude whose name has been supplanted by the present ascription. Luke Johnson makes an intriguing case that the letter actually came from Jesus’s brother (in his recent Brother of Jesus, Friend of God); I’m more sympathetic with the implied early date of the letter than with the obligation to identify the author with that Jacob/James, for reasons such as those I described yesterday. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll operate here on the premise that the author is suitably identified as James (or Jacob).
** Okay, it gets complicated because he takes on Joseph’s sons, born in Egypt (Manasseh and Ephraim), in Gen 48:5, and “Joseph” turns out not to have a tribe of his own, and Levi remains a tribe but without territory.

Happy Ending

Thanks to the I Love Music site, I now know that the answer to this question is The Good Rats, “Tasty.”

Thank you very much!

Obscure Translation Question

In “The End of Peregrinus,” Lucian of Samosata narrates the career of a second-century mountebank who adopts a succession of religious postures to gain glory and honor. At one point, Peregrinus takes up Christianity, in order to be supported by the dupes who believe in Jesus and follow his way of mutual support.

(In what follows, I’m going to not-bother with Unicode or with rendering etas with a different character from epsilon — I’m on vacation, all right?

At one point, Lucian characterizes Christians thus: “they denied the Greek gods, and they worshipped that impaled sophisten” (presumably Jesus), where the translations with which I’m acquainted take sophisten as “Sophist.” Now, granted that Lucian has a jaundiced view of Christianity, and that he means no positive assessment of Jesus, isn’t there still reason to construe the Greek in the more general sense of “sage,” “philosopher”? Regarding sophistes as “Sophist” might please advocates of the cynic-Jesus hypothesis, but as a translator I tend to favor the rendering that leaves as little specificity as necessary, and as much leeway for ambiguity and allusion as possible. Lucian’s scorn emerges clearly enough — perhaps even more clearly — if one applies the honorable characterization to the “impaled” (not “crucified,” though we might not expect Lucian to bother about the distinction) leader of this sect, to whom Lucian earlier applies the honorable title of “law-giver” (nomothetes).

Just wondering, is all, when I ought rather to be working on James 4.

Dear John

“What,” you may ask, “about the earth-shaking, mind-bending, front-page story that finally somebody has discovered the cave of John the Baptist?”

Caveat: I have limited Net access (take that, Wired!), and haven’t done extensive follow-up work. This is just a first reaction to the sensational story.

I think that this sort of story is what helped turn me off archaeology; this, and the weeks of grimy labor sifting sand under the hot sun retrieving nothing but potsherds. (For my vast audience of archaeologists — I know you’re out there — I admire the determination that sustains you through work for which I just have no patience.)

This story reflects several problematic tendencies in the popular (biblical) archaeological market. We get their textual siblings over in literary historiography, so I’m not casting stones only at the other interpreters. But there have been heaps of hermits (I just spent way too much time trying to devise a collective noun for anchorites) in the Judean wilderness about whom we know absolutely nothing. We happen to know a little about one of them: John. So when an archaeologist finds a hermit’s cave that fits what we might expect John’s cave to have looked like, someone draws the inference that it actually was John’s cave.

The Bible narratives have a power over the imagination that tempts people to lead way beyond what the evidence offers. That’s a reason I assign Egeria’s Pilgrimage to my Early Church History class; fourth-century pilgrim Egeria keeps encountering the exact place where this or that biblical story took place, such that after a few stops on the pilgrimage even the most credulous student begins to wonder how on earth anyone knew that this is where Moses struck the rock, or where elijah heard the still small voice. In the literary study of the Bible, you can see readers trying to associate the Letter to the Hebrews (for instance) with people whose names we know from the New Testament, rather than allowing that one of countless unknown early Christian authors might have written it. Given “evidence” over here, and “possible answer” over there, people want badly to connect them and eliminate the uncertainty that dogs inconclusive data. Plus, more people will buy a book or watch a TV special is it says “Cave of John the Baptist” than if it says “Cave of Ascetic With Lustration Pools.”

But that’s a kind of argumentation that we would never accept in other spheres. It’s all circumstantial evidence, no positive evidence (as far as I’ve seen); and though we wouldn’t expect to see a stone at the entrance of the cave saying “937 Hermit Drive, Home of John the Baptist,” we have no particular reason to think that this was John’s own actual cave as opposed to the cave of some other hermit who might have looked like John, or a cave that some post-Johannine Baptists used for memorializing John. “Man with wild hair and carrying a staff”? Must be John the Baptist!

Of course, neither of those makes for attention-grabbing headlines: “Cave of Hermit Who Looked Like John the Baptist Found” (observe that this more accurate headline doesn’t exclude the possibility that it was John’s cave). Or, “Cave Shrine To John The Baptist Discovered.” They aren’t startling, because they’re probably truer.

Caveat redux: There’s probably some unreported, more-decisive evidence about this case, such that my specific jeremiad against premature closure in archaeological reasoning makes me look an arrant fool. If I’m wrong about this one, I’m demonstrably right about a stack of other examples that have a moment’s duration as Biblical Evidence, then fall into discredit.

Later: Mark Goodacre covers the news, with fuller examination of various reports and analyses. By the way, he is not the Mark who wrote Mark’s Gospel, nor John Mark who was supposed to have accompanied Paul.