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January 31, 2005
I Heart Tags
After Dave Winer cited my Friday post about tagging, I’ve been remonstrating with myself for saying only part of what I wanted to say. Yes, there’s a problem with the present state of tags (and the fact that Roland and Dan chimed in tends to reassure me that I wasn’t just being cranky). Yes, the overhead of effort presently imposes a high tariff on early adopters (Dan appositely cites the contrasting example of entering music information in an online database). Still, as I said before, I love the idea of tags, and I see plenty of reason to care about them.
Here’s a Shirky-an reason for my remaining hopeful about tags. In my biblical-interpretive line of work, and especially given my idiosyncratic interests, I spend a lot of time wrestling with the ways that the Library of Congress classification system parcels out the books I care about. Since I specialize in theological hermeneutics, I have to look for books (all intimately connected with one another in my imagination) shelved under specific New Testament books or authors, particular theological themes, philosophical hermeneutics, and comparative literature (to take only four disparate examples). These books reside in different parts of at least three different libraries at Northwestern. Top-down classification systems impede my work, and tend to reinforce a view of knowledge current at the moment the system was devised; if the organic semantic Web were a few degrees easier, more rewarding, to implement, with the prospect of durable return-on-time-invested, I’d be all over it.
And for ad hoc purposes, tags already have shown their usefulness. A week ago Saturday, I wrote on a chalkboard at Seabury, “flickr tag blogwalkchicago.” within minutes, flickr and Technorati showed a satisfying array of posts and photos. It also points to a weakness in the concept: if you look simply for “blogwalk,” you’ll find a fuller array of references, many of which don’t show up on the more specific search even though the more specific search term applies equally to them (and I’m not sure I tagged everything I posted with the simpler “blogwalk”).
So yes, if (as Dan points out) the rewards were not so thin relative to the effort, if (as Roland points out) software support more frictionlessly relieved tagging of its nuisance factor, if (as Shelley points out) we didn’t confront a multidimensional spam/bother/imprecision/then (as David points out) a ground-up, user-oriented tagsonomy would rock. Something like that still seems like the likeliest alternative to an metascheme for organizing all online knowledge (in which this blog would be destined to be relegated to the BS section, as are my books (BS 476.A32, BS 476 .H24, BS 2397 .A32, to pick three). But we haven’t turned up the device that’ll kick that engine into gear, not yet.
Posted by AKMA at 03:55 PM | Comments (0)
AKMA Fit the Battle of the Atheneum. . . .
Jane Ellen sent me this cartoon, wondering if it explains why the constabulary gave me a hard time when I was using a laptop outside the Nantucket Atheneum this past summer. . . .
Posted by AKMA at 10:39 AM | Comments (0)
January 30, 2005
If It Came In A Bottle
Last week, Micah pointed me to the cover story in The Prospect, which I (in turn) called to the attention of my Writing Workshop students. At one point the author, Richard Jenkyns, quotes the canonical essay on bad English, George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” with devastating force:
Orwell found certain faults common to all of these passages - ugliness, staleness of imagery and lack of precision: “The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.”
As I reflected on this point — so vividly (or, more to the point, so dully) reflected in daily discourse — I remembered the wounded disclaimers I’ve so often encountered from people who wrote or said clumsy things. Somewhere, somehow, many people have gotten the idea that it should be easy to communicate exactly what they want to communicate. That belief has attained the status of an axiom for these writers, so that the repeated evidence that communicating accurately is not that easy tends not to disconfirm the axiom, but rather to demonstrate that everyone else bears the fault.
So I must reckon not primarily with the problem of teaching such writers as these to communicate well, but more fundamentally with the challenge of persuading them that communicating precisely may require more effort than they want to think. If you express yourself so vaguely that I can only guess at what you mean; or if you express yourself so tediously that it’s hard to pay attention; or if you give me no clues from which to infer the point of your discourse; or if you say something foolish, or wrong, or self-contradictory, or injurious, it’s not your reader’s problem — but yours. And it’s up to you to do something about it.
Posted by AKMA at 11:20 PM | Comments (5)
January 28, 2005
Poll Tags
When I read about Technorati tags, I was excited. In fact, I knew to be excited about it because Kevin messaged me, and first thing I read about them online was David Weinberger’s encomium, and when Kevin and David are excited about something, I know enough to realize that it’s good. And when it involves searching (Kevin’s area) and epistemological taxonomy (David’s area of concentration), somebody who respects those guys as much as I do simply must get excited. So I did.
But I should pause to say that I’m not a natural for “tags.” I’ve hardly ever used deli.cio.us tags. I didn’t begin tagging my pictures for flickr for ages; even now I’m liable to tag pretty cursorily (no, I don’t mean “with a computer pointing device”). I don’t use categories in my own Moveable Type posts, although the Seabury site that used to be (and may someday live again) integrated categories into its architectural rationale. And once I started thinking about tags, I felt chagrined; the folksonomized Web that David envisioned, that Kevin and Stewart and all had begun to implement, presents such a tremendous opportunity — but here I was, too lazy to tag. I had worked on my to care about valid mark-up, and I emphasized this aspect of the Seabury site. But I just wasn’t sure I had the determination to add Technorati tags to my posts. You’re too polite to complain, but I get long-winded — how would I tag my monologues without repeating most of the words? I was going to be a stick between the spokes of the organic semantic Web, when my friends were building and turning the wheels.
So I didn’t blog about tags at all. I thought they were a great idea, but I didn’t have the energy to implement them here, and I didn’t want to be a party pooper. Who knows? Maybe if the haphazard-HTML writer I once was can become a CSS ascetic, even lazy AKMA could become a tags-onomist.
But now Shelley has spoken up and even illustrated her wise words, and I think I have to agree with her (I didn’t implement “nofollow” either, so she’s my official Webby Oracle this week). It’s not so much the vulnerability to spam; it’s not so much the imprecision; it’s not so much the bother tagging; but the cumulative effect of a number of “it’s-not-the”s tarnishes the luster of this really great idea.
Brilliance still peeks out from beneath the tarnish. The idea excited me at first, and it still does in a murky way. I expect that the fantastic organic semantic webbiness of the idea will come to expression in more spam-resistant, more precise, less cumbersome ways, and I expect that I’ll get on board in a while (no doubt before it’s really easy and an obvious thing to do); that far, I share David’s ultimate confidence in a grassroots taxonomic web. For now, though, I remain unconvinced about this step toward the Web of tags.
Posted by AKMA at 08:55 PM | Comments (6)
It’s A Gift
Don’t let me near your database — okay?
Last fall, the database on the Disseminary site fell to bits when I tried to upgrade the Moveable Type installation without hand-holding; yesterday, the other MySQL database with which I’m closely associated (Seabury’s MT installation, which hosts my New Testament Resources pages and for which Micah and I just did the redesign I’ve been blathering about) opted to rearrange its bits and bytes during a system upgrade.
I thought for a while about switching to BlogSpot or some other remote hosted service, but then I realized that was selfish; just think of the havoc I’d cause when their database melted down, stranding thousands of innocent users . . . .
Posted by AKMA at 09:19 AM | Comments (0)
January 27, 2005
Apart From That
I appreciate Amy Welborn’s writing, I s’pose, and the Velveteen Rabbi is a colleague-in-ritual for me, but it strikes me as odd — and not, I hope, only from a self-interested point of view — that only Welborn and Evangelical Outpost are selected to represent Christian blogs in the interesting Deep Blogs “Spiritual Blogs” category. Selecting Welborn’s articulate Catholicism and an explicitly “evangelical” oage neglects a pretty broad and significant Christian readership (though it replicates the big-media tendency to recognize Chrtistians only when they’re Roman Catholic or evangelical). Chacun à son goût, of course, and Deep Blogs may simply be uninterested in a technological theologian’s random thoughts; but I could nominate others who would complement the selection at Deep Blogs (I would say they would “flesh out” the list, but I’m in the middle of lecturing through St. Paul this term).
Posted by AKMA at 07:17 AM | Comments (0)
January 26, 2005
Almost Done
I spent much of today combing through Seabury’s website, trying to make loose ends meet, to replicate arcane (sometimes bizarre) layout, to palliate outdated information and links. When I finally got the new version ready, and ran into vexing permissions problems.
So I can’t say that the new Seabury site is live, now. But it’s lying on the lab table, electrodes attached to its temples, with the Van de Graff generators* and Jacob’s-Ladders making dramatic sparks in the background. If Bruce can sort out the permissions tomorrow, it’ll be the cue for the townspeople to grab their torches because — it’s alive!
* Hat tip to Jane for reminding me what those doohickeys are called. . . . .
Posted by AKMA at 11:09 PM | Comments (1)
January 25, 2005
Pretty, Pretty
Last trip to the library to pick up books to feed Pippa’s literary voracity, I bumped into Matisse : From Color to Architecture, a compendious documentation of Matisee’s work before and during the design and construction of the Dominican chapel at Vence. As an ally of the Dominicans, an enthusiast for Matisse, and (as I just mentioned) a Francophile, I had to take the book out. It looks fascinating — though it triggers my caution that I’m reading out of my field, and I oughtn’t simply accept claims and analyses because they’re printed in an elegant book. . . .
Posted by AKMA at 11:07 AM | Comments (2)
Moi? Pourquoi?
It seems as though France 2 is planning a story on “the global blogging phenomenon,” and I’m on their list of people who might be worth interviewing. They’re particularly interested in my reflections on bloggers’ electronic afterlife, especially the Cyber Crypt that Joi and David foisted on me, and that Jeneane wondered about before me. Between worrying about whether the interview will be in French (“Bien sûr? Pourquoi pas?”) and trying to remember what we were talking about a year and a half ago, I wonder whether this is a tremendous honor for a Francophile such as I, or simply the decline of Western civilization.
And it looks as though I may be going to Freedom-to-Connect, too. That’s got to be the limit; no way can I squeeze in more gigs this spring. Don’t even think of it. Just say “No.”
Posted by AKMA at 10:57 AM | Comments (1)
January 24, 2005
Bad For The Ears
The group at Boing Boing is right: the sound of the Tasmanian Devil tops my list of “sounds I never want to hear a creature make.”
Posted by AKMA at 11:15 PM | Comments (1)
Sic Transit Filius Mea
Just Saturday, I referred Josiah to Paul Graham’s terrific hypothetical speech to a real high-school class. We shared our amazed delight at Graham’s perspective; I particularly relished his account of secondary education:
When I discovered that one of our teachers was herself using Cliff's Notes, it seemed par for the course. Surely it meant nothing to get a good grade in such a class.In retrospect this was stupid. It was like someone getting fouled in a soccer game and saying, hey, you fouled me, that's against the rules, and walking off the field in indignation. Fouls happen. The thing to do when you get fouled is not to lose your cool. Just keep playing.
By putting you in this situation, society has fouled you. Yes, as you suspect, a lot of the stuff you learn in your classes is crap. And yes, as you suspect, the college admissions process is largely a charade. But like many fouls, this one was unintentional. . . .
Why does society foul you? Indifference, mainly. There are simply no outside forces pushing high school to be good. The air traffic control system works because planes would crash otherwise. Businesses have to deliver because otherwise competitors would take their customers. But no planes crash if your school sucks, and it has no competitors. High school isn't evil; it's random; but random is pretty bad.
Ouch! Graham inspires me both to speak out in defense of teachers, who work conscientiously to attain goals that their culture and their institutions function to sabotage, and to agree that he pretty much captured my own experience of high school. Mine drifted a little toward the evil — having been beaten and hospitalized sours my nostalgic retrospect — but on the whole, “random” characterizes my experience fairly.
So Si and I were tut-tutting about Graham’s essay, when what do you know, this afternoon he got the fat envelope from one of the colleges to which he applied. Still four to go, still his first choice to go, but for the moment we can rest easy that next year, as long as I can get a good price for my extra kidney, he will move away from home.
That means, by the way, that next year Pippa and Bea and I will be on our own. I sense a situation comedy in the making.
Posted by AKMA at 11:12 PM | Comments (1)
January 23, 2005
Far Worse Than Here
As you may recall, my Mom lives on Nantucket. I’m looking forward to hearing that she’s OK.
[Update: Margaret got through to my mother this morning; she’d been evacuated to the high school, where she spent a sleepless night sitting in the cafeteria (the cots were unusable). She’s okay, but it’s good for her to be back in her own bed.]
Posted by AKMA at 11:23 PM | Comments (1)
The Mist of Trust
I recall today that few struggles challenge one at a deeper level than the problem of figuring out how far to trust somebody. I have known more than one person who treated me wonderfully, but who treated others very inconsiderately. I did not find out until later that my experience was atypical; how then are we to distinguish coercive social engineering from genuine kindness and integrity?
“He was always a perfect gentleman to me and my family, so he must have done the same to you. Since he was always reliable to me, you must be the liar.”
(Reminds me of the Jim Cunningham character in Donnie Darko, which I finally watched last night, clearing two-thirds of the Netflixjam.)
Posted by AKMA at 11:08 PM | Comments (1)
What I Was Getting To
Way back when I posted twice about marriage, I was preparing a general case about the texture of Christian marriage as a particular sacramental institution. I proposed a variety of ways of thinking about Christian marriage, noting that a strictly biblical version of Christian marriage (hence, a version defined by marriage as the New Testament represents it) begins with indissolubility, exclusive duality, constitutive gender complementarity, and the subordination of women to men.* Add to that the long-standing tradition that sexual expression in marriage serves solely procreative ends, and you can get a plausible picture of “traditional Christian marriage.”
Being a vexatiously picky hermeneutical philosopher, I’d be prepared to argue that one can’t simply pick that characterization (or any) up, carve it in stone, and identify it as a changeless divine model for marriage. Let’s ignore my fussiness, though — some with whom I’d be arguing will dismiss my objections out of hand, so we’ll save trouble by affirming what I would myself dispute: that this traditional biblical Christian marriage constitutes a timeless pattern by which [some] Christian marriages orient themselves to God’s will.
Having granted that possibility to those who want to claim it, what are we to say of those who enter into Christian marriage, but who understand that vocation to involve some departure from the “traditional” model I describe above? Perhaps these couples decline to enforce male supremacy in the relationship, or they permit sexual expression apart from procreative intent. Certainly that makes a noteworthy difference from the traditional model — at least, from the most traditional perspective it does. Does a very-conservative marriage that allows both spouses equal authority within the marriage deviate from the “traditional” norm so far that the traditionalist can no longer recognize it as a legitimate marriage? that their reluctance to accord him final authority counts as a sin?
In other words: if you dig in your heels and draw a line in the sand (deliberately, delightedly mixed metaphor) against Change, you can make a pretty resilient case that God permits your kind of marriage, but not others (not the kinds with authority-sharing, remarriage after divorce, recreational marital sex, or more controversially, “open” relationships or same-sex couples). That case is not, I’d insist, airtight — but it’s admirably simple and well-attested.
Once you openly admit some mode of change in your model, though, you enter a different zone of reasoning. Once you adopt (let’s say) shared-authority in marriage as an alternative to traditional biblical Christian marriage, you have opted to permit certain changes and resist others. Then you need to make as strong a case as possible for the particular change that you advocate, and make clear the extent to which the change remains in continuity with the tradition, and you need to differentiate your proposal from “anything goes.”
I see convincing cases to be made for some such changes, and very plausible cases for others. I don’t see how one can inveigh against the possibility (for instance) of same-sex marriages when one allows remarriage after divorce. I don’t see why biblical mandates for gender complementarity can have eternal authority, but biblical mandates for male-dominance (or traditional mandates that sex be oriented solely toward procreation) no longer bind the consciences of Christian spouses.
Let’s step back for a second from an exclusive concentration on marriage. Over the past hundred-fifty years or so, certain portions of the church have adopted particular changes in their doctrine and discipline. Vatican I promulgated the Pope’s explicit claim to ex cathedra infallibility; churches have begun to recognize the marriages of people who have previously been divorced; Roman Catholics have recently accorded dogmatic authority relative to certain claims about the Virgin Mary; many churches now ordain women; some churches recognize same-sex relationships; some churches reject Constantinian baptism (by this rejection, I mean positively the expectation that baptism involve catechesis and a demonstrable commitment to Christian life); and an increasing number of congregations share the sacramental elements with non-baptized congregants. These are all changes from what has long been taught, whether as a making-binding of a traditional point, or the repristination of a quiescent practice, or the reformation of a practice which the church had allegedly misappropriated. These changes look obvious, natural, quite harmonious with the tradition — to their proponents. To their opponents, they endanger the very integrity of the Body of Christ.
Every thoughtful Christian can articulate reasons why these changes shouldn’t simply be equated with one another. “Change” is not automatically good; resistance to change, likewise. Some changes make sharp turns away from the Church’s received wisdom, where others simply make the gospel’s teaching effective in hitherto neglected ways. Of these changes, I’m intrigued to notice that none entails rejecting the conciliar doctrines; one can [not to say that all do] ardently uphold Nicene trinitarian theology, Chalcedonian christology, and countless other marks of orthodoxy, while at the same time adopting and resisting particular points from the list above.
Recently I’ve noticed that some re-asserting voices have begun demurring at the assumption that all “conservative” or all “catholic” observers hold to the same sample of positive and negative changes in the church. I’ve also seen conservative objections to both “open communion” and “open baptism,” which in my own reflections portend a much weightier problem for the church’s relation to its tradition than does the question of who’s in what kind of ecclesiastically-approved marriage-like relationship (I’m not trying to convince others of this, at the moment, just adding my tuppence). This seems good to me — not because I want to fracture the opposition in order to trample them as my side** rolls to victory, but because all of us owe one another a careful account for our theological consciences. Facile binaries between “us” and “them” serve the political purpose of drumming up the fevers of the partisans (especially when we pathologize or anathematize those with whom we disagree), but they rarely clarify the best grounds for advocating one or another theological position, and almost never give somebody a good reason for changing her or his mind.
In the extremely complicated context I’ve stirred up, I can make a case that committed, lifelong, exclusive relationships between people of the same sex makes less of a problem for the church than remarriage, or (to shift out of the sexuality debate) “open communion.” Other people can make strong arguments against those propositions. As I said earlier, I’m prepared to hunker down with hypomonê, respecting those wise souls who disagree with me, not using muscle to settle spiritual dissent.
In the meantime, let’s encourage everyone, on every side, to read and listen more widely, for the more we learn about our teaching and traditions, the more clearly we’ll be able to frame our claims about the truth, and the more we’ll share a repertoire of common premises by which to develop wiser, more edifying disagreements.
Let’s look for profound theologians (regardless of their “side”) who deal with the complexities of these conflicts, which so grieve the people of God — rather than assailing the follies of our least-apt interlocutors.
Let’s work out which claims best bespeak the gospel of holiness and grace. Let’s learn who among us can patiently endure waiting for the Spirit to sort out our confusions, and who knows already what the rest of us ought to recognize if not for our ignorance and willfulness.
And by all means, let’s pray that the truth so win the hearts of us all, that we can lay down insult and accusation in favor of praise and thanksgiving, upholding one another in the vows we have made to God in the church, and showing to all onlookers the kind of shared life that bespeaks the beauty of holiness, the variegated solidarity, and the admirable clarity that point to the One God of heaven and earth.
* The household code in Ephesians stipulates that husbands love their wives, as Christ loved the church; that can be read so as to ground a marital ethic of mutual submission. The prevalent instances of “traditional Christian marriage,” however, have in effect if not also in theory located decisive authority with the husband, the “head” of the wife as Christ is of the church.
** I don’t even want an “opposition” or a “side” — here I’m couching my renunciation in terms that one might anticipate from conventional popular polemics.
DRMA: I Don't Remember by Peter Gabriel; Thow That Men Do Call It Dotage by Henry VIII/St. George's Canzona; Pink Turns To Blue by Hüsker Dü; Landslide by Shannon Campbell; Revival by the Allman Brothers Band; Thank You by Led Zeppelin; She Belongs To Me by Bob Dylan; One Beat by Sleater-Kinney; Jammin’ by Bob Marley and the Wailers; Do I? by Decibully; He Brought Us by Delois Barrett Campbell and the Barrett Sisters; (I'm Not Your) Stepping Stone by the Sex Pistols; Something So Right by Annie Lennox; Akimbo by Ani DiFranco; Hard To Explain by Strokes; Rain by the Blake Babies; Cool Dry Place by the Traveling Wilburys; Hypnotized by Fleetwood Mac; If God Will Send His Angels by U2.
Posted by AKMA at 03:57 PM | Comments (14)
January 22, 2005
BlogWalk After Lunch
After lunch at BlogWalk Chicago, we’ve broken into more small groups. Ours is examining/envisioning the way one might construct the pitch to get an enterprise involved in social software (selling blogging to an organization). Lilia suggests finding out where in the work flow, blogging might help. Maybe R&D research logbooks; maybe shift reports; sales territory reports — replace paper with software. Jim suggests another angle: a workgroup that’s open to trying, to support whatever their work processes are. Then you coach them and also see how blogs help in unanticipated ways. The latter phases of the discussion depart in divergent ways from the initiating topic.
Whoops! Now we’re getting to a favorite topic of mine: ways of coping with resistance to the change that online communication provokes. Shannon thinks it’s a matter of writing style; Lilia points out that some of her colleagues will not read her blog no matter what, even when it would benefit their participation in her work flow. Shannon likes threaded bulletin-board discussions; they make my flesh crawl.
Here are the overviews of group discussions: The first group talked about blogs as money-making entities. The current way that blogs are structured makes monetizing very hard, as compared to movies (in theaters, on cable/ on broadcast TV, on DVD/video, then free on airplanes). It serves mostly as a calling card, by definition an area where money is not being made. Is reasoning about “blogging” itself reasonable?
Three phases of individual blog: 1 ranting-raving, 2 affecting real life (information collection/mentoring), 3 transforming your life (blog as business). Payback from blog is not material capital but social capital. Blogging is s lightweight form of consulting.
Cluetrain side of it: to pitch to a CEO, say that blogging will result in better conversations.
Second group focused on the pilot-project blog. Skipping the “why” question, went directly to the what would it look like? (Phil posted a lot of this to the wiki). The overt purpose is for the pilot to produce the intellectual results that would justify the manager giving the go-ahead. The covert purpose would involve getting people on board emotionally. So the group worked on ways that one might make those responses more likely. We deemed it important to choose participants carefully, whether to stack the deck or to find people for whom blogging would serve an immediately useful purpose. We talked over how long it takes to make a case on behalf of blogging: a day? a week? one shift?
The third group considered the changing state of technology and the work environment that children will be modulating into — an environment wildly different from that for which schools are presently structured. The group discussed learning-how-to-learn, pathfinding without already knowing what the path is. Students need to learn how to develop social networks. The critical piece used to be finding resources; now it’s finding people who’ve already done that research. The conclusions one draws may still be individual, but they need to learn how to conduct shared research. School assignments are artificial; now students can actually write their own textbook. The process itself is as useful as the end product. Skype enables language students to talk with native speakers.
(For the record: the snow outside verges on whiteout conditions. All the snow we haven’t gotten this winter is falling on BlogWalk Chicago.)
When would you (as a manager) fire a blogger?
Now we’re wrapping up. What are the most important things learned today — and what follow-up should we cover? The piloting discussion provided a helpful framework relative to planning a similar enterprise. We made human connections, and we participated in imagining the ways that this technological transformation may affect us. This is a center of what’s happening, but instead we should understand that we’re already changing business-as-usual. Why aren’t we 0wnz0ring the world? Blogs aren’t necessarily appropriate, though, for all corporate purposes. We had a great conversational in-person blog right here today. Stuart is making a strong case for Skype — I may have to give that a try. People express a lot of appreciation for the catalytic effect of blogging and meeting people; everyone in the room is an enthusiastic blogger, but many here say that acquaintance with online personae amplifies their interest in hearing people’s voices, seeing their faces.
Pictures available at flickr.
Posted by AKMA at 03:01 PM | Comments (0)
Tomorrow I’ll Be Three
In our BlogWalk small-group discussion, we’re talking about the duration of time necessary to make a case for blogging in an organization, which reminded me of the age of this humble site. Three years ago tomorrow, I made my first post (now edited to accommodate an esoteric joke).
At the time, I wrote, “A weblog of my own! Now I can be just like David Weinberger, only more theologically nuanced and less funny. In other words, more boring and offering less reason to read it.” After three years, the flow of tedium continues unabated. . . .
Posted by AKMA at 02:54 PM | Comments (5)
Quick Note
After some frustrating misadventures involving system software upgrades, I resuscitated my iBook and installed iWork. I can’t give a rich explanation for this, but my first reaction is that Pages presents a truly seductive interface; I want to write in this environment. I can’t imagine why this is so, but some editors and I sure hope that feeling lasts, and works.
Posted by AKMA at 10:39 AM | Comments (3)
BlogWalk Blogging
This would be about the coolest thing since our technology lecture series — a conference-cum-get-together, BlogWalk Chicago, about social software at Seabury — if we hadn’t gotten a foot of snow overnight, with another half foot coming down as I type. Various people have had to cancel including (to my disappointment) Krista and Mr. Boyfriend, but Phil Wolff has spontaneously flown in; I hope he can get from the Hilton to Seabury based on my directions.
We’re going around the room, introducing ourselves (in a good ice-breaking fashion). I already know Jack Vinson and Jim McGee, and I ’ve met Mark and (I think) Denham before (Golly, I feel like I’ve met Denham, but it seems not). Jim McGee observes that until very recently, “more information” tended to correlate to “better decisions”; now, we’re drowning in information. We need not more information, but better discernment of what information helps, and how it helps.
We’ll move into an Open Space phase till lunchtime, based on what Lilia calls a window-wiki, a window with Post-It notes stuck all over it. We’re figuring out how our Open Space groups will divide up.
Right now, we have two main discussions. One started from questions about the definition of “social software” and why it’s a problem, and what kind of problem it is. The other concerns the roles of social software in organizations.
Ooop, that first group just modulated to “why do you blog?” One of the shared topics involves monetizing social software, or — to be more precise — monetizing the benefits of social software. Phil Wolff just referred to the practice of forced blogging simply to satisfy an imposed expectation as “blognosing.”
OK, Lilia is leading us through summarizing. Jim describes a converssation about the changing nature of work, the changing nature of organizations, and where to take those changes. That’s a fair degree of important work in organizations that’s different from the industrial well-defined work taht still dominates thinking. A lot of work tends to be more fluid, more driven by collaboration, even if the tools don’t support that. People are making do, without clear models.
The nature of that change: A conflict in organizations between successes that are emergent, and the impulse to impose that as a top-down phenomenon. How do you bring about emergence, without imposing it? There’s at least an interesting question of whether emergent behavior is antithetical to control-and-predict management. Are there places these tools are inappropriate?
A side conversation involved how [we] monetize expertise in this new world.
There could be value integrating these tools with current processes; some imposed structure, some highlight examples would accelerate the change. These changes take sustained energy being pumped into an organization to reach a change in the organizational ethos. There aren’t a lot of good models. The group debated “good” and “bad” blogging — are there such things, and how would you tell? There’s an economic issue relative to the proportion of a blogger’s company time devoted to contributing to social software. Social software can add tremendous value to an organization in the context of a help center, for example.
Editing and summarizing may catalyze the value of organizational software. Lilia sees a lot of divergence in the discussion — individuals pushing their particular points, with relatively little mutual-contribution interaction. It’s talking like blogging: each of us saying his piece (Lilia’s the only woman here, regrettably— Krista and Judith had to cancel/decline), not changing one another’s minds necessarily. But are blogs really a vehicle for harmonious mind-changing? Just how open are they? In organizations there are real, tangible rewards for making useful contributions; in Blogaria, the rewards are vague and intangible.
In the other group, people disagreed about the very definition of social software. The money-blog relationship came up there, too; bloggers undervalue their writing because they love doing it (they’re starving artists). Blogs deliver tremendous value to their readers (look, measure the amount of time spent reading blogs).
How do you know who’s the expert, and who’s the village idiot? If you read their weblog for a while, you learn about them. And the village idiot about sales may be the expert about baseball, and vice versa.
Now, we’re having a lunch break, during which I flipped a slice of deep-dish pizza over onto my (formerly white) keyboard. The “walk” part of BlogWalk is a snowball fight out in the parking lot.
Pictures available at flickr.
Posted by AKMA at 09:59 AM | Comments (0)
January 21, 2005
Lust Affirmed
Oh, baby! Turns out that my geeky desire will be fulfilled when the iWorks package arrives today: according to MacInTouch, Pages saves files in an XML-=compliant format. W00t!
That outburst reminds me of a tired joke I heard at last summer’s Lilly educational technology conference, to which I thought of an alternate answer, viz.:
Q: What’s the difference between God and a technologist?
A: God doesn’t think he’s [sic] a technologist.
I realized, “And God sometimes answers prayers. . . .”
Posted by AKMA at 10:15 AM | Comments (0)
No There There
Here’s another time I think Dave Winer got it just right: “[T]here is no ‘the’ blogging community. So many people think they grok the wholeness of it, but are only looking at a small part.” We see this in big-media representations of blogging (over-simplified to “cats and politics” or “teenagers and dweebs”), but also in the recurrent effort to define blogging; most characterizations and definitions end up excluding [atypical, hence especially interesting] examples in order to establish an authorized, conventional set of data.
I would probably say that “the blogging community” exists, but is so thin an entity that once you nget past “sometime in the past year I’ve posted an entry in a weblog” there isn’t much “common” held by the community. It’s like “the community of English-speakers” — vast, and utterly diverse.
Generalizations about Blogaria fall into the same trap that besets moaning about A-lists and power laws. Sure — columnists and pundits can gaze bemusedly at the head and tail of the curve, at Glenn Reynolds and Josh Marshall, at “My Three Kitties” and “What I Had For Breakfast.” Yes, the closer one is to the “power” of the power law, the more you resemble the big media, the more familiar the star trip, the less interactivity possible. But Blogaria has a longer, thicker, more varied and intellectually richer tail than print and broadcast publishing. The elbow of the power law provides the sweet spot for online communication, and bloggers hit that elbow in so many different ways that they wind up defeating the noblest and best efforts to define, to characterize “the blogging community.”
(By the way, in this weird world I almost didn’t post this, in order to avoid the possible conclusion that I’m currying favor with Dave Winer by concurring with him twice in recent memory. After deliberating for a few seconds about how absurd the situation is, I went ahead because I thought the point was worth making. Often enough when I disagree with Dave (and that’s often enough, by all means), I doubt that there’s much to be gained by calling attention to the fact — and I can rest assured that plenty of other people have already ignited their flame-throwers. So, Dave, if the fact that I’m agreeing with you again inclines you to think more favorably about me, be sure to remember a topic on which we’ve argued, and factor that in.)
Posted by AKMA at 09:56 AM | Comments (3)
January 20, 2005
Don’t Blog Like My. . . .
Lately my days have filled up with obligations and infinitesimal gaps between them, so that there’s little productive to do in the cracks. I find myself getting to bed, weary and conscious that I’ll have to get up early next morning, and blogging has fallen off my radar altogether. I feel like Tom and Ray Magliozzi saying, “You’ve wasted another perfectly good hour listening to Car Talk. . . .”
I should acknowledge right away that some of the errands and obligations are my own doing, so I can’t moan at the world. Tonight, for instance, I voluntarily watched Road to Perdition. The family was suffering from Netflix Constipation: you know, the time when you have all three movies out, and you really want to see them, but just now you’d like something else, but you can’t get something else from Netflix till you return one of the three, which you can’t, because now isn’t the moment to watch those three movies, and so on. I had sent for three relatively somber movies, because (at the time) Margaret was away and Pippa had just been on a comedy spree; I felt I was clear to watch a couple serious flicks without upsetting anyone. But (as John Belushi used to say) “No - o - o - o - o - o. . . .” I got sidetracked for a couple of days, and Margaret came home, and she usually doesn’t like heavy movies as much as she likes light movies, and that goes double when her endocrine system is playing malignant games with her mood. So Road to Perdition, Gangs of New York, and Donnie Darko sat on the dining room table, waiting for someone to have mercy, watch them and send them back to their DVD homes. Pippa sat at the dining room table, thinking that those DVDs could be Austin Powers or Batman, if only Dad would send them back to Netflix so her choices could come. And of course, any day I could simply have mailed them back, and put them back into the queue for a later date — but that would be giving up.
Anyway, my notions about marriage have to wait another day.
Posted by AKMA at 11:57 PM | Comments (2)
Idea Shelf
This morning, I realized one aspect of Jürgen Habermas’s philosophy of communicative action that really bothers me. Habermas suggests that the tacit “intent to communicate” that every communicative action implies, obliges us to interpret those communications in concord with the latent intent. As I was doing my sit-ups this morning (sit-ups coming back easier than stationary-biking, my mind was clearer), I tried to connect Habermas to the general points I’ve tried to make about signifying practices in general; Habermasian arguments tend to play well among biblical scholars, so I’d do well to have a riposte in view.
What dawned on me is that Habermas tends to define signifying in terms of speaking/writing — to define all signifying in terms of verbal communication. Now, he doesn’t exclude non-verbal communication, but the thrust of his argument treats non-verbal communication as though it were a less-precise version of verbal communication, or a failed (or flawed) attempt at verbal communication. This tendency has bothered me from the time that I began to observe ways that ASL required that I think about hermeneutics in very different ways; this morning, it occurred to me that when a Habermasian approach treats the case of verbal communication as normative, it bootlegs in a variety of suppositions about interpretation that don’t necessarily apply to non-verbal communication. If I’m right in supposing that all we do signifies, and that we can’t control signification, then one can’t simply hold up verbal communication as paradigmatic. . . .too sleepy to finish. . . .
Posted by AKMA at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)
January 19, 2005
What Might Have Been
I fully intended to wrap up my musings about Christian marriage this evening, and to talk more about identity and ceremony — but Joi phoned me up to siphon me into his podcast on Self-Esteem.
I am, of course, sympathetic to Chris Locke’s bombastic denunciations of self-esteem as a cultural idol — though Joi wanted to explore the specific effects of a subject’s sense of his or her possibilities. What I know about this topic ran out after about forty-five seconds of conversation, but instead of hanging up on Joi, I grasped desperately for vaguely sensible angles on the topic. I don’t have the heart to listen tonight.
With BlogWalk Chicago coming up this weekend, and David Isenberg’s intriguing-looking Freedom To Connect get-together beckoning to me from the end of March, we may be in for even more hectic days than I anticipated.
Posted by AKMA at 10:53 PM | Comments (2)
January 18, 2005
Rapidly
My day’s crowded, so I’ll settle for quick links to (a) Helenann Hartley’s blog, where she reports that her examiners have recommended that she be awarded the Ph.D. (or “D.Phil., as they call it at Oxford) from Oxford (or “Oxon.”, as they call it when they give you a “D.Phil.”).
Congratulations, Helenann! W00t!
And (b) I’m fascinated by the suggestion being bruited about that DigID involve something called “Ceremonies” — Eric called my attention to it (showing that he teaches me not only about more than just hip-hop — but hey, dude, I’m not as “ancient” as all that), Kim “Laws of Digital Identity” Cameron invokes it, and Carl Ellison devised it in consultation with Jesse Walker (mp3 of Kim interviewing Carl here).
I’m fascinated, but the interview and blogposts give only a vague sketch of what a “ceremony” might mean in this context. It sounds promising — but I await further details before adding a vote-yes or vote-no tag to my links.
Posted by AKMA at 01:09 PM | Comments (0)
January 17, 2005
Acontextual Recommendation
Mac OS X users: I love Camera Helper, the one-trick memory-card downloader from Script Software. Since I prefer not to use iPhoto (its incomprehensible mandatory file storage system puts me off — I don’t dislike the interface or tools), Camera Helper saves me the multi-step work of detecting, downloading, and deleting image files from my camera. It doesn’t do anything else, but it’s handy to let Camera Helper do these errands.
Posted by AKMA at 02:51 PM | Comments (5)
Self Portrait
Pippa gave me this self-portrait yesterday evening, executed to correspond to one that Nate made long ago. Nate’s portrait included a frame with plastic toys glued on around the image; Pippa noticed the other day that they made a vaguely facial pattern themselves, picking up and reinforcing the depiction of Nate’s face. Evidently the idea of “eyes” on the frame stuck with her, as this features googly-eyes all around the frame, and Pippa’s eyes are likewise googly.
Posted by AKMA at 02:43 PM | Comments (2)
January 16, 2005
Field Trip
This afternoon, Philippa and I rolled down to the Field Museum to take in the Jacqueline Kennedy exhibit. Pippa is an avid student of biographies, and earlier she devoted particular attention to First Ladies. You may remember her Jackie Kennedy balloon at right (included a matching Jack on the reverse of the balloon). When she took out the library books on Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the librarian asked her whether she was going to the exhibit at the Field Museum. We hadn’t been aware that there would be such a thing, so the question became a provocation for this afternoon’s Field trip (so to speak).
We made it to the Field just in time for our 1:30 ticket pick-up (note of advice: Buy tickets in advance online. We coasted past a line that would have lasted a half-hour or so of standing in a winding queue near the chilly vestibule), though the signage for parking at the Field leaves a tremendous amount to be desired. We thus took a scenic tour of the promontory on which the museum, aquarium, and planetarium are situated, only eventually finding our way to the parking garage. Tickets for special exhibits such as this are exorbitant, though if you make it a doubleheader (“Jackie Kennedy and Machu Picchu! Such a deal!”) you save a lot over the cost of separate visits. We didn’t have the time and energy for that, so we contented ourselves with offering our organ donations to get into just the Jackie Kennedy exhibit, then wandering around the rest of the museum as Pippa’s spirit moved her.
The Kennedy exhibit touched me more than I anticipated. I have almost no interest in fashion history, so the array of hats and dresses blurred before my eyes. The letters, films, and memos, however, bespoke a personage of remarkable brilliance of a sort that has to a great extent faded from public awareness, to our impoverishment. Be it granted that the exhibit set out to cast Ms. Kennedy [Onassis] (and Jack) in the best possible light — the discourse of Presidency that the Kennedys enacted diverges sharply from recent presidencies, even though particular policy mistakes may fairly be compared back and forth. The overwhelming impression from the artifacts assembled here pointed toward a literacy and depth I have missed for decades.
In this context, Jacqueline’s cultural alertness, multi-lingual fluency, remarkable taste (not only in clothing, but the arts in general) evoked in me a pang of unexpected nostalgia, but even more profound admiration of this extraordinarily articulate, elegant, accomplished woman.
Her life of privilege certainly made possible opportunities and achievements to which she’d never have access had she been born with similar gifts in rural Appalachia. At the same time, the braying golden asses to whom the Tutor so relentlessly directs our attention represent only one of the fruits of aristocracy; and given the benefits of privilege, Jacqueline Kennedy seems not only not to have wasted them, but rather to have extended herself to make her advantages into benefits for everyone, the true noblesse exemplified by the philanthropists who hang around at GiftHub).
All that being said, boy! there were a lotta dresses. Pippa examined them carefully, read the descriptions (with designer, occasions on which JBK wore the dress, critical analysis of the design), attended to the film clips, soaked up the whole display. When we got home and she told Margaret what we’d seen, she freely supplied details and recounted anecdotes as though she’d been there.
Afterward, we strolled at length through the natural history displays (she gleefully spotted a family of moose, whom she associated with Margaret’s father, and of geese, which she claimed as her own totemic creatures). She surveyed the owls that her great-grandfather loved to etch, and studied the informational panels dedicated to Sue, the Field’s unique Tyrannosaurus Rex, with all the intensity that I used to indulge at the Peabody Museum.
Posted by AKMA at 10:50 PM | Comments (0)
January 15, 2005
Hidden Wisdom
After Jim McGee said such a kind thing about my Law of [Non-]Simplification, I have to spread around some of my new organizational-theory whuffie, pointing it at Merlin Mann. You may think Mann has all the whuffie anyone could need, with countless tech hipsters eating out of his folders, but as I was drowning myself in an RSS subscription backlog, I spotted a gem of a comment from him.
In response to a story about Apple picking up the tab for a reservation he and some friends made, Merlin notes that “Things like this make me feel they’ve got elves all over making smart micro-decisions. . . .” That’s it — “smart microdecisions”; that expresses in two words what I have always aimed at in administrative functioning. When you make smart microdecisions as an administrator, experience suggests to me that other people start making smart microdecisions, too. The administrative ecosystem begins to work in your favor, good sense starts showing up at the roots, and the tree flourishes. Now I have a phrase for it — thanks, Merlin.
Posted by AKMA at 10:17 PM | Comments (0)
Back To
I haven’t complained about my exercise regimen lately — for a subtly important reason. While Margaret was home in December, I fell out of the habit of exercising. Unfortunately, the internal somatic good-will built up by my commitment to health, vigor, and ascetical self-discipline did not carry me over through the holidays, so I lost much of the ground I had gained by the fall’s grueling exertions. Beginning today, I hope that I will resume regular enough exercise that I may end up complaining about it online again.
In the meantime, often as I have disagreed with Dave“Formerly Time’s Shadow, Now Groundhog Day” Rogers in the past, he makes some very strong points in response to David Weinberger on the world-liness of the web. (Speaking of Dave’s blog’s name, Pippa doesn’t remember having seen Groundhog Day, which means that in the near future we have the prospect of a delightful movie-watching evening.)
[Later:] And Jeff Ward, too.
Posted by AKMA at 12:43 PM | Comments (0)
January 13, 2005
Things to Figure Out
Relative to the Seabury site redesign, I just visited two of our site authors who use PCs, and discovered (to my dismay) that Explorer doesn’t like our two-column layout or the character entity (⊕) that I used as a dingbat . I now have to figure out what went wrong with the dimensions of the columns such that the left hand column gets pushed to the bottom, and I have to replace the character entities with some other thingy (I s’pose either a GIF or a plus sign).
I also want to be able to share with them the joys of newsreaders and blog entry clients, but I don’t know the best (and the free) PC applications in those categories. It looks as though Jeneane is having a good time with Qumana — I’ll investigate that for starters. It was very cool to be able to show them that Feedster already knew about Seabury’s RSS feed.
But first I have to fix the columns, sigh.
Posted by AKMA at 12:23 PM | Comments (3)
Bad Combination
Short on sleep, headache, and — writing workshop. I hope I behave myself adequately.
Posted by AKMA at 09:26 AM | Comments (0)
That’s Just Weird
I’ll bet you’ve never attended a Canadian dissertation defense at which dooce was chair of the committee and Keanu Reeves served as a special guest outside examiner! Well, in a dream from which I just woke up, I did — so there!
I got to the defense a little early. It was held at Heather’s house, and she was showing me around. The house was set on pronounced hill, so it had a view of the neighborhood, which was flooded at the time (surprisingly so; Heather hadn’t noticed how the water level had risen in the recent rains, but two-story houses at the base of the hill were under water). Heather, of course, praise Jon’s judgment for selecting so marvelous a house.
The defense started, and it was actually more like a critics’ get-together. The dissertator had evidently prepared an art project as her thesis, and everyone (a very well-attended defense, perhaps because of the guest star, but I saw some of my former colleagues from the biblical faculty of Princeton Seminary there, too) was milling around, waiting for someone to speak first.
At first, people asked some tentative questions, but Keanu was evidently worked up about something, and I nudged him to speak his piece. He asked the dissertator, with a tone of desperation, “Did you really mean just to say, ‘A - O; A - O; A, A, A, A, O, O, O, O’? Wasn’t there something more you could have done?” That caused a flurry of tut-tutting and disavowal of any involvement with the project. As people embarrassedly drifted out, Reeves went on to praise the dissertator’s earlier work — there was a painting that I had myself seen, a sort of Andy Warhol paint-over-photo with some crayon outlining, that everyone had thought sensational. Reeves was beseeching her to say why she had gone from a marvelous, subtle painting (you’ll have to take my word on that) to a videotape of two people saying “A - A - A” and “O - O - O.”
When the hors d’oeuvres ran out, I headed back to my office, a rather more spacious habitation than my present phone booth, and was settling down to ignore some work when a clump of attendees, knocked at my door. I invited them in, and a stream of black-turtlenecked hip critics flowed in, occupying every available seat and a bunk above a file cabinet (that is a very cool idea, by the way, and I may look into having a bunk bed over my files cabinets if I move — I could use a place to nap). I didn’t know all these people very well, so there were lengthy futile introductions, and just as we were getting around to discussing the dissertation defense we’d just seen, along with a project for indexing the works of Bob Newhart, somebody began deliberately scooping out the grounds from my coffee maker and spilling them on the floor. It turns out that this guest (who was the one lying on my bunk) was not one of the dissertation critics, but was just a wanderer who had stumbled in, drunk. I dragged him off the bunk, so that he landed in the midst of the grounds.
At that, I woke up, and felt the imperative urgency to record the weirdest dream I’ve had in ages.
Posted by AKMA at 04:46 AM | Comments (3)
January 12, 2005
Oh, And. . . .
In the next few days, the new Seabury web page will go live. It’s not finished — Connie and Micah and I want to fiddle with it in various ways — but within a day or so, it’ll be close enough, and the lovely thing about designing with CSS is that we can do the fiddling in situ.
The home page is dead; vive l’acceuil!
Posted by AKMA at 06:58 PM | Comments (0)
NT Resource Page
At the end of each term, or each Adult Ed gig, the odds favor the likelihood of somebody coming up to me and asking, “Can you recommend any commentaries on that?” Add that to the number of times I try to whip up a starting bibliography on a given text for my New Testament classes, and you get a relatively strong case for my building up a repository of my recommendations relative to secondary literature on the New Testament.
So this morning I started a blog whose entries will all be topics in the field of New Testament studies, the contents of which will be bibliographic suggestions along with casual evaluations of the works in question. This way, I’ll be able to leave it open for comments (so that visitors can make helpful suggestions) and hyperlink to online resources. This overlaps, to some extent, with Mark’s wonderful work on the NT Gateway — though with a bloggy difference, since over the long run my pages aim not for comprehensiveness, but for partiality. The NT Resources page will run under Moveable Type, but I won’t be treating it as a daily-update site. I’ll flesh out and edit entries as I see fit, and probably won’t multiply entries once I cover the canonical books and some pretty obvious thematic headings.
I’m starting with the Epistles, as I’m teaching through them this term. I’ll put up a page for each unit as I encounter them, but I won’t have the time to put together a rich overview of the literature right away. The advantage of using a CMS for this work, though, is that I’ll be able to return to each topic as I have time, or as I run into a work that particularly impresses me.
In this way, I’m putting my time and energy where my mouth and pen are. If (as I submitted) the future lies with seeded-search rather than a filtered-links/gateway approach to online research, then it behooves me to post my biblical scholarship links; indeed, if I get up the energy (in other words, when I have something more important to do, for which this provides a congenial distraction), I may even code in vote links.
There’s definitely a way in which one could read this gesture as my bowing to the value of the gateway; if it were important for me to differentiate these pages from (say) Mark’s, I suppose that I’d say that mine aims less toward comprehensiveness, more toward critical evaluation. Of course, if one stops browsing at my page and treats it as a last word on biblical scholarship, then mine would certainly constitute a throttle to knowledge; I prefer to think of it as Google- (or Technorati-)fodder. . . .
Posted by AKMA at 06:49 PM | Comments (0)
New Law
When trying to simplify a complex [bureaucratic] system, any change that does not result in an obvious quantum of simplification amounts to further complication — or, more concisely, “any attempted simplification short of a quantum change is always a complication.”
Posted by AKMA at 03:11 PM | Comments (2)
Software Lust Update
I’m happy enough with the spreadsheet functions in AppleWorks as it stands, but it’ll be hard to resist buying iWorks, just for the Pages function (I’m a sucker for word processors; what can I say?).
Still, it would be a vast improvement if Pages could read and write an XML-based format, especially Office Document format.
Posted by AKMA at 03:08 PM | Comments (0)
January 11, 2005
All I Want For MacWorld
For the record, the various devices that the rumor sites identify sound terrific and all, but the one MacRumor of consequence to my life would involve a resuscitated AppleWorks. That antique program is hardly useable these days; a snappy new version, Cocoa-fied, would be good news indeed.
On the other hand, if Tom is on the right track about the headless media center, a new version of AppleWorks might look pretty pallid in no time flat. Apple should hire Tom straightaway — but then, they shouldn’t have fired Kevin, so obviously I’m on a very different wavelength from their employment priorities.
Posted by AKMA at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)
Cool and, Potentially, Cooler
I’m a late adopter when it comes to last.fm — due mainly to problems working out what my password was (does the last.fm play appropriately with Safari? Might that be the problem?), but I finally got the password straightened out, and the possibilities of that project look terrific. I’m always to eager to learn about new artists whose work I’ll like, but I’m slow to try out music. The “profile” radio function should be exceptionally helpful in that regard.
Here, though, I see the usefulness of something I’ve never used much for my own iTunes purposes. The “profile” sorting would be more powerful, wouldn’t it, if it could read my ratings of the selections I play? I mean, I play plenty of tunes that aren’t my very favorite (and I don’t bother marking them as such, since I know which ones I like and don’t) — but the profile engine might benefit from knowing that I play Flaming Lips because I think they’re great, but I play Wu-Tang Clan because I’m trying to refine my hip-hop sensibilities, and am not perfectly ready to make a commitment to identifying them with my profile. I could tag “Suddenly Everything Has Changed” with five stars, “7th Chamber” as two (or no tag at all), and my profile would more accurately reflect my taste (until I realize that Eric is right, and mark Wu-Tang with five stars, too).
Posted by AKMA at 09:39 AM | Comments (1)
January 10, 2005
Comings and Goings
Most importantly (to me, he said selfishly), Margaret returned to Durham this morning. She has an exhilarating array of courses for her second semester, but it’ll take some concentration for me to focus on her accomplishments and intellectual opportunities, and to bracket my missing her. I’ll see her again in February — time to begin counting down the days again.
Posted by AKMA at 09:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More About Marriage
Here’s some more throat-clearing about marriage, before I get to the more difficult task of saying something useful about this controverted topic.
The discourses of marriage, it occurs to me, have clouded the topic by latching onto the notion of “marriage” as “the zone of licit sexual activity.” I’m trying to figure out what it would look like to think about marriage apart from sex. I’m trying this not because I don’t think sex is important — I do, emphatically, think it signifies with near-unique importance — but just that importance engenders an interference pattern when it’s brought into close proximity to the importance of understanding what’s what about marriage. I may be better able to figure out what I think, and why, if I attain some clarity by deliberating about them each in relative isolation.
So, for instance, I’m not sure how one could possibly object to two people devoting themselves to shared lives, mutual care, lifelong exclusive spiritual intimacy, whatever the sexes of the couple so united in loving harmony. Fred and Wilhelm (or Frieda and Violet) feel a homo-erotic attraction, that might complicate their ascetical harmonious partnership, but it’s nonetheless admirable, isn’t it?
Now, I may be deliberating incorrectly about marriage, but I thought that all the non-sexual stuff was pretty important (at least, I hope it is, since I can’t imagine that it’s any buff, agile, dextrous, sizzling manliness of my own that sustains my marriage). [I’m not excluding sexual expression as an important component of marriage, and I understand about the possibly-definitive question of procreation — but a relatively broad proportion of thoughtful Christians doesn’t construe procreation as a sine qua non of true marriage, and I don’t want to exclude their hesitancy from the discussion without pausing to consider what intimacy looks like without sex, and what we have to say as moral theologians about such intimacy.] Put it crudely: a sexual relationship without kindness, fidelity, unique intimacy, and mutuality doesn’t constitute much of a basis for marriage, so far as I can tell; and all of those things without sex sounds a lot more like Christian marriage (no jokes, here, please).
Now, should the church (understood in a more “reasserting” sense) discourage people from forming particular intimate homoerotic relationships even when those relationships don’t involve sexual expression? On what basis — that it would be a dangerous kind of friendship? Would that presuppose that people couldn’t possibly live in ascetical celibacy nurtured in a shared life? Are the people Paul criticizes in Romans 1 culpable not only if they actually “committed shameless acts with men,” but if they might be tempted to commit those acts?
One can short-circuit a ton of moral-theology problems by stipulating that procreation constitutes a normative condition for legitimate marriage — but I doubt that everyone involved in the present discussion would be willing to resolve the conundrum by appeal to this simple premise. The difficulty begins, though, when one relaxes that norm even slightly. Just which relationships might be permitted to count as marriages even when they do not have procreation as their telos? On what basis?
I’m aware that there’s a substantial literature of analytic and pastoral casuistry on this topic; my interest is not to short-circuit it, but respectfully to situate it and to examine its rationale. Here, though, we reach a point where a “conservative” perspective has rather less traction than would be desirable; once one begins making allowances, one has a harder time barring the door to the allowances one doesn’t accept.
End of tonight’s throat-clearing. Again, I’m not [consciously] trying to stack the deck one way or another; I’m staking out the terrain on which I can make sense of the disagreements we’re having, and whether there’s any prospect of those disagreements attaining some livable resolution.
* Scholars debate the sense of “burn” here, whether it serves metaphorically to describe lust, or eschatologically to designate punishment. I’m inclined toward the latter, but whichever sense one adopts, celibacy remains the state that Paul commends, marriage the state that he grudgingly permits as preferable to flames.
Posted by AKMA at 09:39 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
Ooooh, Teacher
Today David Weinberger blogs about the Web as a medium (which makes sense to me) and about the Web as a world. We’ve talked about this kind of topic before, so I’m nostalgically excited; maybe we’ll get into a jolly online donnybrook about it with acerbic interjections from other quarters.
The difficulty with that prospect lies in the fact that I agree with him, that it does make sense to talk about the Web as world — though as he and I both know, I maintain firmly that it’s a non-spatial world, hence unlike anything we humans have explored before. In that sense, it’s not a “world,” because spatiality constitutes an essential characteristic of every other world we’ve encountered. The hyperlinked “world” of the Web is thus radically different as well as also “world”-like; the Web may thereby teach us more about what inhabiting a world means, in ways that we hadn’t hitherto imagined.
That’s what excites me most of all: we don’t already know what we’re doing, we don’t already know how our adventures online will turn out. That’s a setting in which we can do some serious learning!
Posted by AKMA at 08:00 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 09, 2005
Let Me Not Admit Impediments
I was thinking this morning during the sermon (nothing against our rector’s sermon — she’s batting 1.000 in the Sundays I’ve attended), thinking about marriage. Marriage was on my mind partly because I’ve been working with Juliet about the blessing of her marriage, and partly because I was remembering a discussion with Micah about the sacramental character of marriage. The thoughts I rehearsed fall short, I’m sure, of originality, but I haven’t heard them recently in the din about who might be allowed to marry whom, so I thought I’d write them down here instead of catching up on my email as I really ought.
So first, I recalled that in church we call this sacramental rite “Christian Marriage” — a recognition that marriage exists in a variety of modes, of which Christian marriage is only one. That’s a no-brainer, in a certain sense; Christians didn’t invent marriage, nor did the Christian kind of marriage instantly displace every other basis for marriage once it was introduced. (Indeed, one could well argue that there’s no one thing rightly identified “Christian marriage,” in the empirical sense that Christian groups define that state differently — but that would be a distraction, especially since I’m about to make a point relative to the divine institution of the rite.)
Quick, now: I’m not arguing that marriage is whatever you make it.
Instead, I want to point out that the church’s definition of marriage can differ from the state’s definition. That’s a very good thing; all sorts of mischief might result if we were bound to the state’s definition. We shouldn’t want to be stuck with the state’s definition of marriage, and (by the same token) we shouldn’t want to compel the state’s definition of marriage to match the church’s (at least, if we work toward that goal, we should do so on secular grounds). People advance many bogus arguments relative to “separation of church and state,” but I hope that most people can agree that the state shouldn’t be endorsing one particular theological definition of marriage to the detriment of the practice of other religious definitions. That’s one reason we had a revolution over here.
Within the church’s ambit, Christian marriage (as a sacramental rite) constitutes a practice that bears a resemblance to other institutions of marriage, but which derives its appropriate expression not from particular state or cultural versions of marriage, but from God’s will for humanity. Moreover, we have to construe that will as revealed particularly in the New Testament. as distinct (for example) from the concubinage, polygamy, and levirate marriage practiced without divine disapprobation in the Old Testament.
A distinctly Christian version of marriage can appeal, then to the New Testament (especially where it bespeaks a harmonious affirmation of the Old Testament). The most obvious characteristics of marriage in the New Testament, as best I recall, involve its indissolubility, its exclusive duality, its constitutive gender complementarity, and the subordination of women to men in marriage. Christian marriage begins (at least “begins”) with those characteristics. The New Testament does not anywhere give a definition of marriage — it does clearly point out certain characteristics of marriages among Christians.
Now, many bodies of Christians endeavor to work from this starting-point to a mode of marriage that brings God’s will for people living together in marriage into focus in a way that corresponds to other theological premises (perhaps for some, “holiness,” for others “inclusivity”). Many Christian groups allow that the trajectory toward indissoluble marriage can run by way of failed attempts at that goal. Others take the gospel’s call for mutuality and the rejection of social differentiation as ground for construing marital subordination more symmetrically than unilaterally. My point in this paragraph is not to suggest that no one actually lives out a strictly New-Testament-ly version of marriage; I’m willing to allow that some people don’t understand themselves to be practicing any form of adaptation, fine-tuning, harmonizing, or anything other than reproducing literally in their lives the form of married life prescribed in Scripture.* All of these entail using human faculties of judgment and reason to connect a concept of “marriage” that isn’t, can’t be derived exclusively from Scripture, to a practice of distinctively Christian marriage that draws on and perpetuates that vision of God’s marital will that the authoritative teaching of the church has helped articulate.
My interest in laying all of this out derives from (a) wanting to distinguish arguments about the nature of marriage-in-general from arguments about the Christian shape of marriage; (b) wanting to suggest that people who care about the destiny of Christian marriage take the time to differentiate their arguments about how Christians should order their marital relations from arguments about how a given state should order its institution of marriage; (c) wanting to open the topic of the locally-adapted character of Christian marriage, always pointed toward a divine archetype whose appearance is sketched in Scripture, and fleshed out by the saints; (d) wanting to begin a process of moving from the NT characterization of marriage to subsequent, various, different instantiations of marriage — instantiations whose soundness and validity we must assay. Does my position here predetermine the outcome of such deliberations? I hope not; I imagine that someone with whom I disagree vehemently could mount a case for her or his divergent understanding of marriage while observing these points (and one can always argue that I’ve erred in these prolegomena).
It will help me say anything further on this subject, though, to have first narrowed what I think about to the field of Christian marriage, grounded in a specific construal of the New Testament characterization of marriage, as the tradition has interacted with rival non-Christian characterizations of marriage. I will know better what counts as a relevant consideration, and what amounts to a distraction.
But tonight, I have to help Si and Margaret finish Si’s second round of college applications. And I still have a mountain of email to answer.
* I reserve the perhaps-trivial hesitation that, in a world no longer determined by Hellenistic law and cultural norms, one will necessarily be involved in some kind of recapture of a now-inaccessible ancient mode of marriage. That doesn’t prove anything one way or another, and it won’t impress someone who thinks that their affirmation of the definition of marriage they derive from the teachings they accept, from their reading of a preferred English translation of the Bible, and from their lived sense of continuity with “how it has always been done.” It’s important to me, though, since I would argue that at all stages of a tradition, those who want to submit to the tradition take on an on-going self-critical process of approximation.
Posted by AKMA at 05:34 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
Favorable Types
Someone has collected links to 300 downloadable TrueType fonts* that the site-owner describes as essential. I wouldn’t go that far, and I have qualms about the inclusion of some Bitstream fonts (identifiable by the “BT” marker at the end of the font name), but I thought some readers would like a pointer to the site anyway.
The 300 includes a number of Nick Curtis’s designs (Mac users note that despite the restrictive warning, PC TrueType fonts should work under OS X); I’d just as soon go collect his all at once. Typefaces from the Apostrophic Type Lab appear here. I download most of Manfred Klein’s typefaces on his Sunday site updates — though by now he’s produced so many fonts that I can’t imagine being able to browse among them to choose one to use. Dieter Steffmann no longer makes fonts, but he has left a sumptuous treasure of type for other users. Paul Lloyd has resumed type design, and he’s contributing to the Blackletter collection and the Piratical collection. Harold Lohner offers some of his monthly updates for free download, too.
Not every one of these fonts attains the very highest standards (especially for kerning), but if one’s concern is for free typefaces, these are my favorite sources.
*I’m giving up the struggle to use words strictly by reserving “typeface” for the design of a particular character set and “font” for a complete set of a given size of a typeface. That just seems irrelevant at this point — so “font” and “typeface” have become functionally synonymous.
Posted by AKMA at 02:16 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 08, 2005
Congratulations, And, Well, We’ll See
Micah scolded me for not blogging about SixApart’s purchase of LiveJournal: “I shouldn’t have to hear stuff like this on the street.” I have to admit that I saw so many different people commenting on the takeover, and with such intriguing visions of the possible benefits and pitfalls of the move, that I didn’t reckon I had anything to add — but now I know Micah was counting on me for news, and the whole topic reminds me that Moveable Type has been very, very good to us (the company has been extraordinarily good to us, the software generally good) and minimal courtesy obliges me to send my congratulations.
So, Ben and Mena, three cheers on this development, and kudos for your status as “People of the Year” (to think I knew them way back when). Bravo Joi and Anil and Loïc and Jay and, ummm, anyone else whom I know who works at SixApart (it seems as though they’re gradually adding everyone I know — if you see rumors from Om Malik about SixApart showing an interest in theological blogging, I may be packing my bags for San Francisco). It’ll be exciting to see what happens with both MT and LiveJournal — mazel tov!
Posted by AKMA at 09:08 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Further Miscellaneous Linkage
I’ve had a couple of items rattling around my newsreader for a while, so instead of waiting till I have a short essay to write about them, I’ll drop them off here. For instance, I enjoyed reading Malcolm Gladwell’s article on personality testing (though he left out the online personality quizzes that identify you as a breakfast cereal, a character from Gone With the Wind, a wavelength from the spectrum of light not visible to the naked eye, or a species of cat indigenous to Oceania and Australia).
Martin Ryder offers an helpful guide to different approaches to instructional design, and what to make of them. I get edgy when people present me with the One True Way to teach; I’m unmethodical enough that I tend to resist any claim that a single particular set of pedagogical premises and tactics will make me the best teacher I can be, wax my floors, and give my breath that minty, fresh aroma. That’s partly because it always hurts to become self-conscious and self-critical about one’s praxis (especially when one is slightly vain about that practice, as so many teachers tend to be, myself emphatically included), but also partly because I have seen too many circumstances in which the One True Pedagogy fails a student or two (or three or four), or where a middlin’ teacher adopts the One True Pedagogy in a mediocre way, or where teachers who’ve attained moderate comfort and competency and comfort teaching one way feel obliged to start over and work through years of discomfort and impaired competence in order to fulfill someone else’s sense of How Teaching Must Be Done. Add to that Seabury’s mixed environment of adult learners and young learners, of academically-ambitious and academically-modest, of graduates from classic liberal-arts programs and of community colleges, and the whole matter of pedagogy becomes (my students join in the chorus) more complicated than that. Working from Ryder’s page, one can see a tremendous variety of schools of pedagogy, their arguments against other such schools, and the contexts within which they make the most sense. I won’t be done reading this one for ages, if ever. In connection to this, George Siemens proposes the pedagogy beyond Constructivism, which he calls “connectivism,” so if you want to push avant the avant garde in the theological education, this may be the path. (I must have gotten both of those from Stephen Downes’s blog, but I don’t remember when.)
Most important — and I say this with some discomfort — I met Evelyn Rodriguez at Digital ID World (I had thought we met at BloggerCon I, on the evening that I introduced Wendy to Joey); we had a short conversation about my vocation and hers. She was vacationing in Thailand two weeks ago, where she was caught up in the tsunami. As subsequent posts reveal, she’s doing all right. I’ve kept quiet about the cataclysm; I doubt that I can add anything to what wiser people have said, and I know that enough people have said foolish things. But it has felt odd, all along, trying to figure out what not-saying meant, as I knew somebody who was so directly affected, and that my thoughts about a disaster focused so narrowly on one person.
Posted by AKMA at 04:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 07, 2005
De Rigeur Mortis
Frank suggested to this morning’s Gospel Mission class that I was a Big-Time Blogger (don’t disabuse anyone of this illusion, you who know better) — so I probably ought to write something today. Ordinarily that’s no trick; you know that I can get up a good head of steam talking about almost anything. Still, today I feel less garrulous than usual. I’m a little short on sleep, it’s been a stressful week or so, and I haven’t been as productive as (for example) Liz.
Yesterday Nate and Jennifer left for the east coast. Tonight Juliet arrives for a couple of days. Monday Margaret leaves for Durham. Today weighed on me a little.
Add to that a spasm of nostalgia from reading Jeneane’s reminiscence about the good ol’ days in Blogaria, when we played idea football (world football, not U.S. football) and everybody scored, and my fingers felt heavy, my heart weary, and my mind dull.
So instead of waxing philosophical, I’ll throw out some links:
- Dan Gillmor’s new blog, this time naming Bill Gates’s recent spate of lying for what it is
- Jeff Ward is as smart as can be — he makes me edgy about presuming to talk about representation in public
- David Weinberger and Shelley point to the LID distributed digital identity system, which sounds promising, but which lies far beyond my capacity to implement it
- I’ve been meaning to write about blogrolls and bookmarks, but I seem never to get around to it
Maybe I’ll get a good night of rest and say something worth noticing tomorrow.
[Everyone arrived at her and his destinations safely. Juliet’s here, and we’re catching up on the years that we haven’t seen her.]
DRMA: I Found Love by Lone Justice; Shelter by Lone Justice; After The Flood by Lone Justice; Don't Toss Us Away by Lone Justice
Posted by AKMA at 08:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 05, 2005
Potpourri and Popery
Last night, as I prepared some official Angelus incense from Christ Church New Haven, Laura asked about the theological status of incense, of how and when it is blessed, and so on. I noted the times in the service at which incense is blessed, and the various prayers appropriate to those occasions (I was taught to bless the incense before the procession with the prayer, “Be thou blessed by Him in whose honor thou art to be burned,” and at the offertory, when the gifts and people are censed, with the prayer, “By the intercession of blessed Michael the Archangel, who stands at the right hand of the altar of incense, together with all the saints, may the Lord bless this incense and accept it as a sweet smelling aroma; through Christ Our Lord” — but I always forget the latter when I’m not standing in front of a loaded thurible).
She pressed me for details about the sacramental status of incense prepared for the liturgy, but not blessed. It turns out that she had in mind somebody in particular who (evidently) has a stash of liturgical incense stashed in his bureau drawer. Laura was probing the difference to which I allude in the title, using her words, between potpourri and popery.
Posted by AKMA at 10:55 PM | Comments (10) | TrackBack
January 04, 2005
Call Mel Gibson
Micah and Laura came over tonight for chili and a big round of Bible Pictionary — Nate, Pippa, Margaret and Micah against Laura, Jennifer, Si, and me. Dinner was great, and we had a vigorous round of Pictionary, in which Pippa particularly distinguished herself as a gifted Pictionathlete. During one spell, she ran off a series of convincing drawings culminating in a hasty depiction of the Last Supper (this is the version Micah recognized promptly). The topic stuck in her imagination, though, and after we had shared some Christmas-Epiphany cake (which Pip had decorated with swash lettering that read, “Mr. 2000” in honor of Jesus), Pippa returned to the easel to draw a more complete representation of the shared meal in the Upper Room. That’s Judas on the left, of course, thinking about going to McDonald’s instead of partaking of the bread and wine at Jesus’ table.
Posted by AKMA at 11:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
What He Said
In connection with the thread developing from yesterday’s observations on doctrine and emergence, I wanted to add Augustine’s observation from On Genesis (li. 8. de Genes. ad liter. cap. 5.):
Melius est dubitare de occultis quam litigare de incertis.It is better to make doubt of those things which are secret, than to strive about those things that are uncertain.
(From the English supplied by the translators of the Authorized Version of the Bible)
Posted by AKMA at 02:55 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
January 03, 2005
Finally
You should, of course, never trust a preacher who says, “Finally. . . ,” especially when he’s talking about a subject on which he has no standing from which to claim authority. So, from here on, you’re on your own.
But I really did mean “finally.” When I wrote to Kyle at the end of his course, I adduced four characteristics that look like pertinent signs of “emergence” from this limestone-tower perspective: breadth/depth of participation, decentralization of power, worship that the congregation embraces and understands, and a commitment to a vision of truth that respects both the vitality of staking something on one’s truth-claims with the humility of observing how frequently our most cherished theological forebears have disagreed with one another, or over- or understated the importance of one premise or another. I frequently cite with relief the Church of England’s nineteenth Article of Religion: “As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch, have erred, so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in their living and manner of Ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.” The Church errs, and when it finds itself in error needs to reassess its ways, repent of errors, and reform its living and manner of Ceremonies, and also its matters of Faith. The modern church came increasingly to identify right doctrine as a basis for exclusion of err-ers, on the premise that a decreasing number of disciples of Jesus actually understood rightly what the Church should be about; an emergent church should, I think, be more ready to endure uncertainty within the church about which controverted topics needed to be determined right here, right now, and the newly-established Bad Guys expelled (or otherwise punished).
The “emerging” spirit about which I’m talking will find a home where people care enough about theological truth to sustain disagreements about it within the community. That doesn’t make truth “up for grabs” or irrelevant (despite what a common knee-jerk response wants to make it). It means that truth comes clear over time, and that however confident we are that our position bears the impress of God’s very own truth, we have not finished learning. Our certain knowledge of the truth about God stands in the shadow of our sister’s equally certain knowledge, and until some extrinsic criterion resolves the disagreement for us, no one of us can afford to stop our ears at what our ardent sibling in Christ would urge us to consider. That attitude may be more “propositional” than “grammatical”; it’s not Lindbeckian-ness that makes “emergent,” but understanding that truth itself has an emergent dimension that can’t be pinned down and put away.
I’ve started calling this a hypomonic relation to truth, alluding to the high value that the New Testament authors put on the virtue of hypomonê, “endurance,” “long-suffering.” Such an outlook trusts that where brothers and sisters disagree, and their faith on matters other than the disputed topic harmonizes with the faith received from the saints, God will in the long run make resolve conflicts that seem in the short run to be intractable. No one gives up their strong truth-claims; they do, however, decline to use truth as a lever for excluding those with whom one disagrees.
That requires me to make explicit my assumption that ont every congregation should be “emergent” (as I sketch emergence here). If your faith is such that your conscience requires you to banish those who permit women to teach in the church, for instance, by all means go ahead — but such a firm conscience will leave little room for the unexpected, and (to belabor a point) “unexpectedness” constitutes one of the touchstone features by which we recognize emergent phenomena.
Posted by AKMA at 11:28 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack
January 02, 2005
And Another Thing
In reflecting on “emerging-church” matters, I’ve earlier suggested that emergence (in church life) should involve breadth and depth (I should perhaps have added “length and height”) of people’s involvement in a shared life, and involves a kind of leadership more than a particular form of leadership.
The third point by which I’d expect to identify emergence in church life involves worship — but I suspect that the specific characteristics of worship matter less than does the extent to which they’re internalized and integrated to the coherent life of the congregation. Thus, a congregation committed to very catholic worship, for whom the rhythms and choreography of catholic worship make sense, and enliven their sense of who they are and how they serve God, may be more “emergent” than a gathering of twenty-somethings in a coffee shop who are there for reasons they don’t quite understand, doing cool stuff with candles and labyrinths. The latter will be “emergent-church” in a social-category sense — but “emergence” (in the sense I think most helpfully relevant) involves a community’s constituting a whole greater than the sum of its parts, and it would be easy enough to find a rave congregation that amounts to a good deal less than its sum. Worship that lends symbolic expression to the inchoate beliefs and the explicit teachings of the congregation matters more than whether PowerPoint or praise bands are involved.
It should go without saying that I’m not knocking coffee shops or PowerPoint (I like coffee shops, and when I want to knock PowerPoint I’ll go for the throat). Congregations in coffee shops can worship in ways that conduce to emergence; indeed, such congregations have the emergent-advantage that the force of routinization doesn’t weigh down their praise with the kind of habituation that issues in heedlessness. So I’m not arguing against coffee-shop congregations, or trying to propose that all Anglo-Catholics are automatically “emergent” (believe me, we’re not, no question).
But as with leadership, so with worship: it’s not the formal characteristics that brand it as “emergent,” but the spirit. If there’s one thing that falsifies claims about emergence, it would be the claim that these preliminaries predictably bring about that result. Whatever else that is, that’s not emergence; “emergence” involves a subsequent complexity that one couldn’t predict on the basis of its constituent parts (whether those ingredients include incense, labyrinths, PowerPoint, or fancy vestments).
Posted by AKMA at 06:04 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 01, 2005
Record-Breaker
I gather that today was the all-time heaviest load on flickr (which makes sense, once you think of it). I had set our Jennifer up with an account, and she was having a hard time completing uploads; evidently there’s a good reason. This is a picture she took of our local fashion model; she says she’s uploading a picture of me singing into a Dishmatique, but so far that hasn’t appeared in her photostream. The picture of Si and Laura is cute, though.
Congratulations, Stewart, Caterina, Eric, and all.
Posted by AKMA at 10:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
As I Was Saying
I think I left off here:
[Again, entirely unauthorized pontificating follows. And I’s sure that Soularize is wonderful, I was just grabbing the name, Jordon, since I knew it was a big get-together.]
For the second, I would put little emphasis on the formal status of leadership and more on how leadership is carried. To indulge in a pop-cultural figure, I wouldn’t in the least mind having Aragorn as my king — much less, indeed, than I mind having Bush as my duly-elected President. By the same token, I would pay less attention to whether a pastor be ordained, or elected, or dragged off the street on Saturday evening, than on whether such a leader exercises her or his authority so as to shore up his/her own standing, or (alternatively) to cultivate the maximum strength and leadership among other participants in community life. You can do that as an appointed rector, or as an elected elder. You can grasp for power in indirect ways in an “emergent” setting, and you can disperse power in an apparently hierarchical setting.
So the formal structure of a congregation — whether it be constituted as a top-down magisterium or a bottom-up populist forum — can imply a certain distribution of power, but the formal structure can also mask the way power operates. “Emergence,” as I understand it, has less to do with the way corporate legislation gets passed than with the ways that a community would arrive at a sense of what might be possible, plausible, the right thing to do — before any formal decision gets made. (As my colleague John Dreibelbis often says, “If you have to appeal to the canons, you’re already in trouble.”)
Posted by AKMA at 08:01 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
What They Don’t Get
Is my money, evidently. Yesterday I felt the whimsical impulse to listen to the Boomtown Rats’s track “Me and Howard Hughes,” from the Tonic for The Troops album. I looked in the iTunes Music Store — no luck there, just greatest-hits compilations from the Rats. Rhapsody and emusic seemed unwilling even to let me know whether they had what I wanted unless I registered; sorry, I’m not going there. Allofmp3.com and Napster? Only greatest hits (but at least they let me search before I register). Insound would sell me the whole CD for $23.
The punch line is that in the halcyon days of Napster Classic, one can be sure that somebody would have had “Me and Howard Hughes” available for sharing. It’s exactly the kind of selection that online distribution works best for: a relatively obscure track by a marginally popular artist, not worth keeping in stock in a store, not worth manufacturing onto CDs with jewel cases and printed covers, but simple to make available online, for aficionados to buy — unless, of course, no one bothers to make it available commercially.
And I’m still looking for the track of Tom Robinson playing “1967 (Seems So Long Ago)” from the first Secret Policemen’s Ball album. . . .
(wood s lot reminds me that Ani DiFranco seems to get it, which makes me glad I bought her last album the minute it showed up online.)
Posted by AKMA at 12:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
We Interrupt This Program
Just want to cast a trackback vote in favor of Jon’s advocacy of rolling category-variable templates into the core functionality of Moveable Type. Part of my plan for the Seabury redesign involved setting up different templates for each of the categories. I can probably use the Salo Maneuver from the Disseminary design (I have to re-implement that in the aftermath of the MT reinstall), or Stepan’s Per-Category Templates plug-in at nonplus.
But ingenious as Dorothea’s workaround is, I’d rather just be able to call on a different template for each category. Please, SixApart.
Posted by AKMA at 11:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Where I Left Off
So, if the term “emergent” applies to churches in a non-Pickwickian sense, what might that term indicate?
[Warning: I bear no certification to talk about “emergent church” matters. I’m a certifiable theologian with interests in technology and church life — but I’m not the kind of guy who gives influential presentations at Soularize or writes popular essays at TheOoze. Consult official spokespeople for official insight.]
I wrote to Kyle about four possible manifestations of a spirit of “emergence” in an end-of-term email. I suggested to him that the emergent spirit shows itself in breadth and depth of congregational involvement in activities that observers might identify with the church; in lack-of-investment in leadership as power, and strong investment in leadership as voluntary commitment to heightened service and accountability; in worship that in which the congregation senses itself intelligibly involved (not the object of an indifferent display, but participants who understand and relish their roles — whatever those roles may be); and commitment to an understanding of theological truth that attends less vigorously to borders than to satisfactory ways of articulating the truth.
For starters.
Thus, for the first (“breadth and depth”), I’d argue that “participation” is a wan characterization for distinctive features of emergence in congregations . One can “participate” in pro forma ways that have no real relation to the mode of ecclesial vitality that’s worth bothering to identify as emergent. At any given Episcopal parish, plenty of people participate — but that doesn’t make St. Alphonso’s an emergent Episcopal parish. Congregations marked by a spirit of emergence would have a higher general degree of engagement in various community activities, and more diverse activities associated with congregational life (the poetry readings and gallery activities we hear about, along with more conventional outreach ministries). There might be less (internal) sense of particular behavior as a “church” activity, since it arises readily from the convergent interests and shared commitments of congregants; that would, of course, communicate powerfully the congregation’s sense of who it is and what it stands for, such that interested people might notice and join in.
In other words, I guess that an “emergent” congregation would be recognizable precisely to the extent that its common life doesn’t entail saying “Jesus” all the time — not because Jesus is unimportant to them, but because the congregation’s love for Jesus doesn’t come out explicitly at the bowling alley, or the informal [un]employment counseling get-together, or the bicycling group. That’s not a missed opportunity for evangelism; it’s exactly the kind of deep commitment that will speak for itself, over the long run, if people will stop chattering about Jesus long enough to allow space for a quieter voice.
Posted by AKMA at 07:56 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack