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March 31, 2005

F2F Blast From the Past

Last night before dinner, another conference participant thanked me for a link I had made to her blog way back in olden times (when we blogged with quill pens). I didn’t remember the link at the time — it was two and a half years ago — but lo and behold, here it is (Hi, Sara)! It’s great to meet and converse with people with whom you have online history.

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Someone Else’s Dream

As I was hunter-gathering at the continental breakfast bar this morning, one of the other participants here came up to say she had had a dream about me last night. (I took heart that she said “dream,” rather than “nightmare,” but I was still cautious as she began to tell me what she dreamt).

As it turns out, she dreamt that somebody came up to her, pointed to me and said, “That guy isn’t really a priest. He’s too cool to be a priest!” Now, for clarity’s sake I should emphasize that this doesn’t count as a conscious asseveration of my coolness (she’s obviously the sort of highly-intelligent tech observer who would never make such a mistake if she were fully responsible for her assessment of me) — but given the sorts of things that might ensue when somebody looks up and says “I had a dream about you last night,” this counts as one of the very most positive.

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Posted by AKMA at 08:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Technorati Tags, Update

Observant readers may notice that I haven’t kept up very well at tagging. I just realized a way to use MarsEdit, my present favorite blogging client (no disrespect to ecto, which I’ll happily try out some time, adriaan, but MarsEdit originally came bundled with NetNewsWire) to do better hereafter, using the “custom tags” feature, so I’ll try to reform my wayward habits.

But here’s a problem with tags: you can’t simply copy-and-paste them, the way you can with links. Copying and pasting links is very simple process; unless I’m missing something, creating a Technorati tag requires a separate step and a degree of deliberation about “how to tag.” The incorporation of categories as tags is a nice step toward this, but most category-users deploy categories that would be too broad to make good tags, and many people don’t use categories at all. At the moment, after the blush of excitement about the tag-powered, folksonomical Web has faded, that looks like an unacceptable brake on this new step. Brent, Adriaan, Firefoxians, SixApart, tool developers: please help us out on this, or tip us off that the overhead isn’t worth it.

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March 30, 2005

Post Mortem

Just before the Four Freedoms session, Jerry Michalski found me and pointed out that he had read the previous blog entry, and he had some good news: I wasn’t going to be expected to talk for twenty minutes. We weren’t going to occupy twenty-minute blocks of time at all, but would have about five minutes, followed by an open Q-and-A from the floor.

That clearly solved my awkward-duration problem, but left me a bit at sea concerning what I would say in my five minutes. I shaped my note cards for the twenty-minute slot, so I tried to summarize and skim. It seemed to go all right; no one hissed, or threw overripe fruit. Afterward, I had a couple of very provocative conversations; that’s all you can ask, I guess.

Heath “the miraculous Transcriptionist” Row seems to have blogged the session almost verbatim — bless you, Heath! And if you were listening, here or in the webcast, many thanks for your patient attention.

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Freedom to Digress

[I wrote this last night — now I’m here, in Silver Spring, and we’ll find out just how wrong a twenty-minute slot can be.]

I have about twenty minutes, according to the Freedom to Connect conference schedule, which is precisely the wrong amount of time. In about five minutes, I can make a crystalline, sharp-edged case for something; in an hour or so, I can develop a careful, thorough analysis and argument. Twenty minutes is too long for scintillating, but too short for pains-taking. At least, that’s the way it feels tonight.

Luckily for me, I’ve heard David Weinberger at a number of conferences, and if I start feeling the audience slip away I’ll talk about shopping for a washing machine, or the Dewey Decimal System. That will not only occupy my fleeting minutes, but will offer me the satisfaction of watching David’s face as he realizes I’m using up some of his prime material, since he doesn’t speak at F2C until after I’ve gone! Hoohah!

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March 29, 2005

Amending

I usually stay a long way away from the bloggers-vs.-journalists streetfight, but this morning Margaret pointed me to Jack Shafer’s column in Slate, where he excoriates LA Times critic David Shaw’s screed on the topic. I’m paying slightly more attention this morning, since tomorrow I head out for the Freedom to Connect conference, where I’ll spend a couple of days hanging around with bloggers and journalists (among other people).

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Connection? Dis-?

As a long-time Talking Heads fan, I was pleased to see in Boing Boing that David Byrne isn’t worried about people downloading his recordings without paying: “I don't see much money from record sales anway, so I don't really care how people are getting it.” Later, he acknowledges that he himself P2Ps for music (“ I’ve also — I guess you could say — illegally downloaded some songs”).

So far, so good. He’s making me feel better, after I was disillusioned by his public enthusiasm for PowerPoint.

But in the same interview, he observes that he’s starting his own online radio station, since he wants to build an audience for music that lies outside the ambit of hits and favorites. He observes that back when one bought an album, one got both the music one anticipated and sought, and also other selections that one might not have chosen; Radio David Byrne will try to enrich its audience's listening habits with both popular and more obscure selections. That’s good, too.

But does anyone else note the disconnection between the two sets of observations? If people weren’t obliged to pay for online recordings, wouldn’t they listen much more adventurously? I think we can prove this case, friends; certainly Alan Wexelblat over at Copyfight is on top of the reality-based analysis of downloading and sales (thatnks for that link, too, Boing Boing). On a purely anecdotal level, I hardly ever haunt the P2P filesharing world any more, but just informal filesharing with friends and mp3 blogs called to my attention my favorite recent recordings — and pretty much all the music I’ve bought in the past few months has come to my attention through some form of filesharing. I don’t buy music unheard any more.

So David, by all means run an internet radio station, but go further to connect the dots. If you want to build audience for unexpected music, distribute it for free, online, with a http://creativecommons.org/audio/ and see what happens to sales.

Posted by AKMA at 09:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 28, 2005

Pippa’s Buddy — And Joey’s

When Margaret called my attention to Accordion Guy’s Easter Day blog entry, I realized that I had to post the sketch Pippa drew for me the other day. Compare the two side by side; look carefully at the photo of the figurine; then ask yourself, “Does that Buddy really look so friendly after all, or isn’t there something a little ominous about the winking eye, the protruding cheekbones, the pointing finger?”

Technotag: pippa

Posted by AKMA at 12:48 PM | Comments (0)

Department of the Inexplicable

Chris evidently has too much time on his hands, as he’s been Googlefighting again. He emailed me to point out this startling development.

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March 27, 2005

Risen Indeed!

After a short night (I got to sleep at about 11:30 after the Vigil service at St. Luke’s), it’s time for me to wake up for the Easter Vigil here at Seabury — after which I’ll stagger back to St. Luke’s for the regular Easter Day mass. Then I’ll come home and collapse in a heap, thankful that a body isn’t asked to take part in more than three three-hour services in an eighteen-hour period.

To all my guests here: the very best of all possible wishes, to you and to all whom you love. Bless you!

And — redundantly — to my Christian sisters and brothers: Alleluia! Christ is risen!

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March 26, 2005

Recommendation and Puzzle

When Simon recommends something, I follow up on it — so I downloaded Freemind promptly after he mentioned it, especially sicne I figured it would be helpful for the series of presentations I’ll be giving in the next three weeks. But it’s woefully underdocumented, I think, and I’m having a hard time figuring out how to benefit from it.

I’m making a pile of 4 x 6 notecards instead, for now.

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March 25, 2005

Done

The Good Friday service has come and gone, and I’ll post the sermon — as usual — in the extended section below. It was a privilege to serve at this occasion with Carolyn Keck and especially with Tony Lewis, with whom I share a certain vocational ancestry as we both studied at Yale (he in the doctoral program, I in the Masters), and served on the staff of Christ Church. It would have been a great treat to have overlapped with him in those days, but I came along after he had moved on.

Good Friday doesn’t want a proper liturgy; Good Friday needs nothing more than plain truth.

Which is one way of saying, Good Friday wants more of us than we can stand. Year by year, we show an enduring proclivity to devise distractions from the truth. The classic diversion, of course, involves blaming the Jews, but ingenious, pious disciples have wrought more subtle diversions than crude theological bigotry to evade the harsh gospel of Good Friday. We blame our political or theological adversaries for their ignorance, their hard-heartedness, their folly and depravity. We can magnify our own sin beyond what anyone could plausibly take seriously. We can craft painstakingly-detailed worship designed to evoke just the right degree of penitence and solemnity, or adhere precisely to the divinely-ordained formula for the correct Good Friday service. Whatever we do, however we observe the agonizing grace of the cross, we hold onto the capacity to turn the occasion away from the cross, and toward our piety, creativity, profundity, toward our humility. We can make Good Friday over, to be about us, instead of the truth.

Good Friday doesn’t want for a liturgy; we supply an ample Good Friday liturgy with disingenuous litanies of self-justification, with partisan anathemas and behind-the-hand ridicule, building community on the brittle foundation of spite directed at those others. Good Friday doesn’t need a special liturgy, because Christians enact Good Friday every day. Then, once a year, we make a show of humility and dare to venerate the cross, which is so very much more tolerable than facing the plain truth that the church’s daily life consistently belies our confessions, belies our promises, belies our good intentions.

Good Friday reminds us – if we will permit it – that our creativity, our piety, profundity, our very best intentions and most generous gifts often become the most intractable obstacles to our conversion. Our sense that we can do better, we can get it right, we can do it, fix it, offers the distracting possibility that Good Friday is about us, and even our own sins offer a more comforting topic than – the plain truth.

Awkwardly, frustratingly, we can’t do anything about the truth, can’t control the truth, can’t make the truth turn out the way we really know is best for all concerned. The truth, like God’s love, doesn’t consult us first, doesn’t heed us when we offer our sincere wisdom. The truth and the love and the way and the life and the Spirit aren’t all about us; they blow where they will, and we don’t know where they come from or where they’re going. And based on what we learn from past experience, if we were allowed a measure of control over the truth. . . we would control it to death on the cross. Behold your Truth!

Good Friday doesn’t want a proper liturgy; whatever we do this afternoon will not be enough, will not make anything right. Maybe all we can do is come to the truth and here let go of any close-clinging need to justify our worship, our lives, ourselves. We can draw near with confidence to the truth we crucify, and let the uncrucifiable truth set us free.

Amen

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Consuming - Musing

This is the kind of question people love to debate, so let me tap the collective strong opinions of the web. If — and I emphasize the word “if,” because tax refunds and financial aid decisions and medical bills and so on will make a big difference — if I were to look into buying a camera so that I could hand down to Pippa the camera I’ve been using for two or three years, now, what recommendations would my visitors make?

Myself, I don’t make vast enlargements, so I don’t need to impress anyone with the size of my megapixels; on the other hand, there’s no point to skimping, either, so I’d guess that 4 megapixels would be a fair compromise. I don’t typically take the pictures that require extreme wide-angle capacity, but I do like being able to zoom tighter on a composition (though I don’t envision needing the extreme high end of a zoom range; back in my 35mm days, when I was continually proving that great equipment can be used to produce mediocre photographs, I relied on a 135mm lens, mostly, occasionally reaching for a 200mm lens, which I loved but didn’t use that much).

I’m a wobbly sort of person, so the camera itself should produce images as sharp as possible. I end up taking a fair proportion of photos in low-ish light, so flash and image-stabilization require consideration — but I really hate most built-in flash units (it’s the one most irksome feature of the Nikon 2200 that I now use); it would be spectacular if a digital unit permitted some sort of bouncing. I like using the rechargeable Li-ion battery in my present camera more than the multiple-rechargeable NiMH AA-battery option in its predecessor, but I’m open to persuasion. I have an irrational attachment to Compact Flash memory cards, because those are what I’ve used all along, and I like being able to use the cards that worked in the camera I used years ago (even if it would only hold four images from a new multi-megapixel camera). OK, I’d have to let go of that, but I needed to confess my groundless predilection. And while I’m admitting to irrationality, I have to admit that I have been a long-term Nikon loyalist, so if my advisors strongly suggest a different manufacturer, they’ll have to soothe me with sweet blandishments.

And then there’s price.

The A K M Adam, tailor-made ideal camera would thus be something like a 4 megapixel camera with a zoom roughly equivalent to 35-200mm, possibly with stabilization (though at 200mm, would it be necessary?), a humane flash (not placed too close to the lens, bounceable?), very sharp lens to make up for my instability, Li Ion rechargeable battery, Compact Flash memory. . . and a firm recommendation from my friends about reliability and quality, for between $200 and $300. I know I’ll need to compromise on some of that — what compromise would you recommend?

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March 24, 2005

Well Begun

This morning as I was bicycling along the three-mile stretch of imagined highway that constitutes my morning exercycle routine, I realized that the “it is finished” sermon I was trying to force out for tomorrow wasn’t going to fly, but I had what I hope turns out to be a better idea. It involves the extent to which our formalizing Good Friday enmeshes us in an antinomy of penitence, to which grace is the only answer.

We’ll see how it turns out, but I desperately want to avoid both tedious, disingenuous self-flagellation and minatory scolding, the kind of “ you bettermake yourselves appropriately miserable ’cos this is Good Friday” shtick that gets so tiresome and amounts to liturgical-emotional blackmail. Having said that, I’m sure to stumble into both pitfalls.

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March 23, 2005

Bless Me, Author

Let me be first in Blogaria to congratulate Steve Himmer for a successful defense of his thesis!

We’re all looking forward to reading it in hardback. . . .

I wish I could offer him a wonderful story for this occasion, but prayers and prompt congratulations will have to do for now. Cheers to Steve and Sage and especially to the brains behind the operation: Checkers.

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Under My Cassock

Micah sent me to the site for this t-shirt yesterday, which reminded me of this t-shirt that I wish I’d have thought up (and its related blog), and digging around for the link to Micah’s link brought me to this one.

Meanwhile, as I say Mass this morning, I’ll be holding Steve in prayer, and underneath my alb and chasuble I’ll be wearing. . . no, but that would be telling.

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March 22, 2005

Wait, Wait

If there ever was a story destined to ornament the weekend NPR news quiz, this must be it. Margaret has been sending me snippets (“ ‘Our insides were just bubbling,’ said Darlene Turner”) and updates all morning. She wonders, does Accordion Guy have a line on this one?

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Plagues, Houses

I’m getting mightily sick of both the intolerance of ambiguity and the celebration of ambiguity. Ambiguity pertains to our human condition. Repudiate it, and it will show you a presumptuous braggart; revel in it, and it will demonstrate your fatuousness.

Our job is to discern how to make affirmations in a world of ambiguity, how to deal with uncertainty in an uncertain world. That involves reliance on God, not because God resolves our ambiguities into clear-cut iron-clad certainties that circumvent our travails, but because in turning to God we enter a Way that promises forgiveness for the missteps we make in earnestly endeavoring to draw nearer to God. We follow in that Way, — we don’t determine it ourselves. We offer forgiveness as a condition of our presuming to ask forgiveness. We commit ourselves to pursuing a truth we don’t control, a truth that may lead us to conclusions we don’t like, may oblige us to change our minds. We enter a network of communion with one another, with ourselves, with our forebears and children, and above all with God, in which winning falls out of the vocabulary of our relationships. If anyone “wins” we all lose. God handles the “winning” department; if we share in it at all, we share in it by participating in a humble, partial way in the utter loss on Good Friday, by being baptized into the death of Christ, and it comes not to those who are right, or to those who are the most loving, but to those who receive it as a gift.

Among the simplest, least ambiguous things Jesus said was, “if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.” I don’t read the part where he says, “Except if they really provoke you,” or “except if they’re too conservative (or ‘liberal’).” If we made some headway on that one, maybe we’d be in a position to advance our understanding of more complicated issues.

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Analogy

I know they don’t rely on analogies in the new SAT, so maybe there’ something retro about my wondering, but — is David to Israel as Arthur to Britain?

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March 21, 2005

Term Time

Yesterday I blogged out a week’s worth of notions, which is sort of a shame, since today classes resumed at Seabury. I’m both weary and dazed, which is hardly justifiable since I didn’t have any classes today. But Margaret left yesterday, and Duke won, and I could prolong my sense of denial that classes would ever meet again.

When Margaret is home, I eat more and exercise less, with predictable consequences.

In the immediate future, I’ll start the Biblical Theology class tomorrow and the Gospels survey on Wednesday morning. I’m saying Mass on Wednesday, and preaching on Good Friday (my present starting-point involves the last words from the cross according to John, “It is finished” — but who knows whether that starting-point will stick). The week after, I’m headed to Washington to tell David Isenberg and other Freedom to Connect participants why theologians [should] think that the Net should be a World of Ends, not a confederation of fiefdoms in the middle.

But now, I’m mostly weary and worn. Did I mention that Margaret went back to Durham? I miss her.

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March 20, 2005

Speaking of Change

Church should be the place we learn how to change.

Not, “avoid change” — that’s a futile striving for a timelessness that characterizes only God. Neither, therefore, does it mean “we need to learn the capacity to change,” since we’re always already changing anyway.

Not, “celebrate change” — that’s pointless. The canard about “change” manifesting life ignores the fact that we don’t stop changing when we die. “Changing” doesn’t prove anything about how lively or moribund we are, about how imaginative or how faithful we are.

Church should be the place we learn how to change, for we don’t simply know the ways we need to change on our own. Our life shared with God and the saints should shape our wisdom to recognize appropriate and inappropriate change. Life in church should help us let go of mere nostalgia, and should protect us from novelty-mongering. Church should help us understand that what we like isn’t the measure of all things, nor is passive subjection to strictly extrinsic autocracy. If we live the gospel, then the gospel will always be characterized by change (at the same time that it remains recognizably the same gospel, not “another gospel”). In order to avoid our running aimlessly or beating the air, and to avoid our disguising our stubbornness as piety, church should be a place where we learn how to change. And how to disagree about how we should change.

Posted by AKMA at 08:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

A Toast

I was going to let the boy tell you himself, but since he’s humbly kept quiet about his news, I’ll boast on his behalf: the one institution of higher education that has admitted him so far (none have rejected him) just offered Si a merit scholarship based on his prospects as a leader in academic and community life — so we’ll almost certainly be able to send him away to college next year, even if none of the other schools to which he applied sees fit to invite him.

And hey, you others: you’ll have to increase your offers, now.

Posted by AKMA at 08:19 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Growing Up

Reminiscence has been the coin of the realm around the neighborhood lately. People have remembered UBlog fondly (I’d still like to consolidate all that with a dedicated web page, downloadable diploma, and so on); people have recalled the old conversations we used to have, batting ideas around like party balloons; people have reminded everyone how silly and how profound we could be, back then. “Those who didn’t blog during the years before the revolution, don’t know the pleasure of blogging” (thank you so much, Jonathon).

This morning, Margaret and I were talking (in the immediate, occupy-the-same-geographic-space sense of the word, which I must say will never be replaced by digitally-mediated interaction) about getting paid for blogging. We look around and see Chris writing as Highbeam’s Chief Blogging Officer; Jeneane’s hot new firm, the Content Factor, has a blog for which she writes, and Mitch just started a web-services company; Halley and David blog for Worthwhile; several boatloads of bloggers have written for Corante, another assortment received subsidies from Marc - qui (Liz worked with both of them). How would you separate Joi, Joey, Elliott and Ross as “bloggers” from their business interests (and who would want to)? And about three years ago, Ben and Mena actually visited Seabury as a couple of code-writers with a cool blogging program — rather than as multinational blogopreneurs.

(I don’t make a red cent from blogging, and although I always check with my tech-business friends, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone’s hiring a digital theologian.) (But if you change your mind, you know where to find me.)

And things have changed — no question about that. I miss a lot of what we used to do. I miss some of the conversations that used to flow wild and free. I miss the days when I just didn’t know so many people whose blogs I can’t possibly keep up with any more. It’s all changed, and I miss it.

But y’all didn’t start blogging just for my entertainment. If blogging is putting bread on a few tables, buying toys for a few kids, putting together the down payment for a newlywed’s house, then I’m the last one in line to bemoan times past. It’s all changed, but do you know what? It was going to change anyway. It was going to change anyway, and while it’s changing, there are no people I would rather have those changes benefit than the wonderful friends I met back when none of us was making a cent off blogging.

This afternoon, first thing after I turned my attention from the Duke game, I read that Yahoo! has bought Flickr. Two reactions battled to win my disposition: first, that the community-building, image-sharing fountain of wit and snappiness would surely be transformed into another pop-up-spewing, LOL!!ing wading pool of used band-aids and adolescents chicken-fighting; and second, Caterina and Stewart and Eric and the whole Ludicorp team made a decision informed by the same sensibilities that I so admire in their construction of Flickr (and especially GNE — remember GNE?) in the first place. And if Yahoo offered to buy out the Disseminary, I’d be all over it.

Congratulations, everyone who’s made another dime from blogging. Bless you, everyone who’s in it for love of words and images and links. And peace be with us all.

Posted by AKMA at 08:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Basketball Report

My Chicago and Albuquerque brackets are a total mess (in part because I was relying on Wake Forest — ahem, Ryan — and Georgia Tech to hold up the ACC’s pride). I can’t blame anyone else for my Chicago bracket; I picked BC to go all the way to the finals.

But in the single most important aspect of the NCAA Championships, Duke made the round of 16 with two lackluster wins, and there’s a decent chance that if they can sneak past Michigan State and Kentucky, they’ll have the opportunity to face off against an ACC rival in the Final Four. That would be a great, great game.

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March 19, 2005

What He Said

A number of times, when I’ve been asked to talk about tradition and change in the church, I have adverted to the status of usury — the lending of money at interest. I was delighted, then, to see the Slacktivist take up the topic in three powerful entries in the context of his energetic interrogation of the particular forms that “conservative Christianity,” “evangelicalism,” and “traditionalism” take at the moment.

The people of Israel set distinct limits to the scope of interest (including the jubilee year, a sort of pre-market-economy form of bankruptcy protection), and Jesus explicitly repudiated the practice of lending at interest. The church institutionalized laws against lending at interest, and only relatively recently has the topic dropped away from the church’s social agenda. Fred surveys the history of usury, then turns his attention to the exploitation of greed bill bankruptcy bill weapon of mass expropriation of wealth that the Republican Congress and the Bush administration have deployed.

Fred’s nauseated by the spectacle of lawmakers who proclaim their allegiance to “family values” and “biblical morality” rolling over to strip away the small borrower’s protection. Me too — but I’m simultaneously intrigued by the ways that some forms of “tradition” become old-fashioned and mutable, whereas others reflect timeless morality and must be upheld at all costs. The phenomenon gets even more intriguing when — as so often happens — someone takes the pains to explain what I obviously haven’t yet understood: that there’s a perfectly transparent premise in the light of which these differences are revealed to be natural and necessary. Oh, right!

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March 18, 2005

Odd Couple at Edge of the Woods

Si’s drama troupe will enact The Odd Couple this evening, for their closing engagement of the winter stage season.

Actors were ready, production impressive, and they’re performing again tonight at 7, at the Edge of the Woods. Go, take your family, and buy a cookie or two. Just watch out for flying pickles. . . .

Posted by AKMA at 11:50 PM | Comments (0)

March 17, 2005

Cool Vanity Gadget

Margaret saw this on Boing Boing, so she entered my name in it.

I don’t know where that “Golf” book came from, though.

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Blogging, Interviews, Prospects

I thought I’d mentioned it before, but searching doesn’t turn anything up. Back at BloggerCon I (“when dinosaurs walked the earth,” as my sarcastic sons used to say) Dan Bricklin and I talked about seminarian bloggers; his eyes lit up as e described how wonderful it would be for a congregation (synagogue, parish, whatever) to be able to read a seminarian’s blog, to get a sense of the kind of person they were thinking about hiring. Of course, your blog would displease some people — but would you want to be working for them in the first place? Wouldn’t you accept that happily, as a correlative of the possibility that a congregation could look you up and say, “That’s just the kind of person we want around here!”

Well, Tim Bray has responded to the inextinguishable “You Blog? You’re Fired!” topic from the dominant media by writing ten reasons blogging is good for your career. (I especially endorse reason number 4: “No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.”) Yes, the tech industries differ from ordained ministry (at least, they were different when I was working in computer graphics lo! these decades ago), and yes, there are complications attendant to the benefits. But Tim and Dan have this much right: If it’s easy to find out that you’re congenial and interesting, then you’re more likely to be hired by people who want congenial, interesting employees — or to be called by congregations who want congenial, interesting clergy leadership.

The ordination process in the Episcopal Church tends to promote fear and defensiveness (not in every case, but in many), and the intense partisanship of the moment amplifies those anxieties. It’s hard to expect seminarians to see anything but danger. Danger is not, however, the end of the story, and I’m convinced that a position is more likely to work out better for congregation and clergy leader if they know as much as possible about one another. Why stake as much as relocation and full-time employment on the impression made in a relatively brief interview (conducted, often, by people who aren’t skilled interviewers)?

(At the intersection of church and tech industry, linked by Jim McGee: “Don’t Rock the Boat.” Congregational development students: identify the mission strategy implicit in this ethos. . . .)

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Swallow Before You Read

Technotag: pippa

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Times and Dates

The planning for the Winslow Lectures has pinned down the sequence for the series, and invitations are in the mail. On Wednesday, April 20, at 7:45 my dear friend Steve Fowl will give the first lecture on the topic, “The Importance of a Multi-Voiced Literal Sense: The Example of Aquinas.” Then on Thursday morning at 11:00, Francis Watson from the University of Aberdeen will speak on “Inspiration, Word, and Text.” That afternoon at 3:00, I’ll give my talk on “Poaching on Zion: Biblical Theology as Signifying Practice,” after which Seabury will hold a gala wing-ding to install our new Dean and President (one job, two titles); the service will start at 5:00, at Northwestern’s Alice Millar Chapel. Friday morning, Kevin Vanhoozer will ask the hermeneutical question, “Imprisoned or Free? Text, Status, and Theological Interpretation in the Master/Slave Discourse of Philemon,” which will be followed by a short panel discussion.

Stephen’s lecture and mine will be held at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary chapel (second floor of the main building), whereas Francis’s and Kevin’s will be held at the Northwestern University Sheil Center. (There’s an ironic temper at work in arrangements that have Steve and me speaking in a decidedly Protestant ambiance, and Francis and Kevin in a markedly Roman Catholic setting.)

There’s still time to make your travel arrangements! Don’t miss this once-in-a-month opportunity! We have a PDF of the schedule available here, and I posted a JPEG to flickr.

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March 16, 2005

Change Is As Good

I did take a picture of my new office yesterday, but neglected to post it here. This photo no longer represents the appearance of the office — Brian offered me another unclaimed bookshelf, so I moved the bookshelf on which the camera is resting to the right of my desk, and put the new shelf where the camera is sitting in this picture. I’m ahead by five shelves, in other words.

The other institutional news is that I’ve had unwelcome news on the sabbatical front. I’m eligible for one term’s leave (out of three) next year. I’d been hoping to push that back till the year after, and combine it with a grant to cover a whole year’s worth of writing. I’ve been told, however, that I will not be permitted a full year’s leave year after next, and will have to wait to see whether I’d be allowed to take a sabbatical-plus-leave in 2007-08.

Since I’m juggling a mountain of writing and lecturing obligations, that’s very disappointing news. It’ll be a significant challenge to uphold my various commitments without burning out.

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March 15, 2005

Blind Justice

Anyone care to compare the convictions and consequences meted out to Martha Stewart and Bernard Ebbers?

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Some Of You Want This

Anyone with an ear for underproduced (in the radiantly positive sense) roots gospel music should click over to the Tofu Hut, where John posted a series of mp3 files of the Gospel Harmonettes of Demopolis, Alabama — terrific, captivating recordings that provoke you to wonder about the value of preserving a recorded-music industry that makes some performers fabulously wealthy while it relegates others to the cut-out bins and collectors’ shops.

John puts us in touch with marvelous voices that most readers would never have heard, and I’d gladly buy a CD from the Demopolis Harmonettes if they had a distributor. I’d chip in to encourage them to regroup and record more!

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Lesson in Stature

Judging from my students’ papers, one of the most prominent journals in the field of biblical studies would be Bibliotheca Sacra, a publication of Dallas Theological Seminary — a source whose theology almost all of Seabury’s students would reject out of hand.

Why do they turn so frequently to BibSac for exegetical guidance, when they dissent so firmly from the authors’ presuppositions? Because BibSac got to the digital party early. The Journal of Biblical Literature, Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Journal for the Study of the New Testament, New Testament Studies, Novum Testamentum — the journals that Seabury students ought more consistently consult for interpretations more in keeping with their general theological outlook — all keep very low online profiles (most appear online only on a subscription/fee-per-view basis, and though our library carries subscriptions to them, students avoid the complications of searching from campus computers). Moreover, these more academically-prominent journals don’t show up in affordable packaged digital libraries, as BibSac does.

As a result, students who have no sympathy for the doctrine of biblical inerrancy opt to cite a journal written from the perspective of inerrantists, because it’s convenient. There’s a lesson in that — and it isn’t “forbid students to use a journal that espouses a different theological perspective from yours.”

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March 14, 2005

Backstory In Motion

Today the students who were relocating my colleague’s office evacuated her more rapidly than we all anticipated, so they promptly turned their attention to me. (Photos tomorrow.) This came at an awkward moment since I had spent the morning not commenting-out papers, as I ought to have, but responding to Jay Rosen’s response to Kenneth Minogue’s commentary, “Journalism: Power Without Responsibility.” I wrote more than was fair to send Jay, and I may post some of that material tomorrow.

Then my estimable colleagues swept me up in the exciting turbulence of relocation, from which I extracted myself just in time to take my sweetheart out for a dinner date. Now we’re settling down with an Albert Campion DVD, and if I can stay awake till the end of the mystery, I will stop trying so to do shortly thereafter.

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March 13, 2005

You Want This

If you’re a student serious about the academic side of your work, or a reader serious about keeping abreast of academic discourse, or just somebody who’s interested in cool ideas taking shape, you will want to register and play with CiteULike. (If I didn’t have to thank David for too many things already, I’d still be indebted to him for this one — thank you thank you thank you, and you too, Lisa, for telling him.)

If you register at the site, you can set up an account that associates your username with academic articles, books, theses, whatever, with bibliographic information and your notes on the work. It’s like an online, offboard version of a bibliographic program, free, and it evidently plays nicely with EndNotes. If the journal you rely on publishes its table of contents online, you can subscribe to tables-of-contents through watchlists or RSS, and you can establish a watchlist or RSS feed for any tags you imagine (so that if you have a watchlist for “hermeneutics” (as you should) and I tag an article “hermeneutics,” it comes to your RSS feed.). You can join a group for sharing reference material (Bibliobloggers, I’ve already staked out “NT-Interpretation,” and once that gets approved I’ll open one on the theological interpretation of Scripture. This may finally get me into the frame of mind that encourages tagging.

I can think of several students who should have established accounts before they reached the end of this post. If you think I might mean you, I probably do.

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March 12, 2005

Moving Day

I had falling culpably behind in posting Pippa’s works to flickr, so this afternoon I uploaded several sketches and more polished pieces. I mentioned to Pippa that some of her sketches look as good as commercial comics, and she said, “Yes, but the trick is drawing the same character again.” We’ll have to pick one of her works to enter in the Seabury Spring Art Show — but which one?

Instead of selecting one of the images I just uploaded, though, I chose this picture of my office in its present condition. On Tuesday, supposedly, I’ll begin moving into the next office over. I’ve been reminded that many people manage their vocational lives just fine without offices at all, so it ill behooves me to complain about the scale of my quarters; still, having a distinctly larger space to work in will help me somewhat, at least, in some of the roles that Seabury expects of me. I’ll show you the new look when I move in.

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Coincidence? I Don’t Think So

Thursday evening, when I returned from my Adult Ed gig with Margaret and Pippa, we went through an hour or so of thinking that I’d lost my wallet. As it turned out, Margaret did a third check in the car and found my wallet between the front seats — but for a while, we were girding ourselves to cancel all our credit cards, re-apply for my driver’s license, get a new library card, and manage without all the fortune-cookie slips that I’d been saving.

This morning, we were rousted from bed by a phone call at 8:30 (didn’t someone tell them it’s Saturday, the first day after term?) from MasterCard security, checking to see if we really had charged our dinner at a Mexican restaurant last night. Now, a couple of things: First, we hardly ever charge anything less expensive than four burritos; why did that attract MasterCard’s attention instead of, say, the loads of books we order from Amazon, or the birthday presents Margaret bought this week? They’re protecting us from the massive problem of burrito-based identity theft?

Second, how did they know that I had lost my wallet?

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March 11, 2005

End of Term

Today was the last day of Epiphany Term here at Seabury. No classes next week, as I finish commenting on papers, grade final exams, move offices, prepare for Easter Term classes, work on upcoming presentations, and enjoy my copious free time with my favorite theology grad student in the whole cosmos.

Now, if N.C. State can hold on to beat Wake, and if (ideally) Duke can win the ACC Tournament, my weekend will have been perfect.

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Snow Can’t Stop Her

Though Margaret’s flight was considerably delayed — throwing our exquisitely-timed plans off — she arrived safely. I had an Adult Ed gig in Park Ridge, so Pippa and I hopped into the car, drove out to O’Hare to pick Margaret up, and went from there to St. Mary’s.

Margaret and Pip waited in the rector’s office while I sketch the relation of the Nicene Creed to the Bible, and after the presentation we rolled home, delighted to be together again.

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March 10, 2005

Dumb Snow

Evanston’s getting a spring snowfall this afternoon, a last-gasp-of-winter snowfall that serves mostly to try to cover up the lovely weather we had over the weekend, warm and sunny weather that betokens the inevitable return of spring. This snow doesn’t even look like regular winter snow — it recognizes its belated role, forestalling the rightful advance of the seasons just out of spite and cold-heartedness.

Plus — and this doesn’t affect my outlook on the weather at all — it’s delaying the flight that will bring my sweetheart back home to her family. The snow will be gone in hours, days at most; why must it indulge the puerile temptation to prolong my separation from Margaret?

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March 09, 2005

Wednesday, Four Lent

After fretting, editing, rejecting, fasle-starting, staying up too late and getting up too grudgingly, I put together a few minutes’ worth of homily for this morning’s service. I’ll tuck it below the fold, as it were, in the extended portion of the entry.

Now, I have to mark out a heap of papers (I’ve already marked them, but I need to explain what my cryptic annotations mean, and what grade the paper amounts to), catch up on emails on which I’m culpably behind, catch up on certain other correspondence on which I’m criminally behind, and whip up a final exam for the New Testament class — at which point I’ll be pretty much done for the term, apart from grading the exams, determining final grades, and everything else. . . .

In times of stress – and I dare say some of us have felt a heightened degree of stress over the last ten days or so – in times of stress, clergy sometimes feel appropriately hesitant to say anything cheery. We’ve learned to listen, we’ve learned not to apply smiley-face Band-Aids on deep spiritual wounds, we’ve learned to respect the truth that evil tells us about our limitations, about our mortality. We’ve know better than to offer celestial pie to terrestrial starvation. We train ourselves to sit patiently with suffering, and in these stressful times we gain the benefit that if we never make any promises, we will never be caught short-changing anyone.

We hesitate for appropriate reasons, because we can’t deliver on promises that things will be all right; we can’t explain how this contributes to a best of all possible worlds. We endeavor so diligently to steer clear of false hope, cheap illusions, that sometimes – perhaps especially in stressful times – our caution mutes the melody of truth. Our honest humility itself fixes our attention on what we can’t accomplish, and distracts us from the fact, the fact, the reality that all the embarrassing miracles, the outlandish promises, the extravagant expectations we’re avoiding depend not on us but on the power of God.

As they say in the comic pages: “Oops!”

Listen, I know how frightening those promises sound. I’ve winced when preachers scolded congregations for not trusting God to provide miracles. The arrogance we’ve seen in some super-apostles turns us off, and it obscures the gospel, and we will have no part of it. We’ve looked into the eyes of suffering and we will not trivialize grief and affliction with happy talk and exhortations to “Just cheer up.” I’ve looked into your eyes, and have shuddered at the wear and tear that flicker in your spirit, that fray the seamless love that holds us in communion. You share, and I share, in a desolation made visible in the eyes of our sisters and brothers, and that very sharing, that solidarity, prevents our dispensing facile assurances of impossible happy endings.

For that reason, for precisely and explicitly that reason, for that unendurably grave reason, we may not stop at the boundary markers of frustration, of grief, of pain. The very same solidarity that obliges us to stand up for the truth that suffering speaks, obliges us also to bear witness to the promises that suffering does not speak the last word. Our solidarity with our wounded sisters, our sharing with brothers at St Leonard’s House, our communion in your own baffled pain: they open the way that leads beyond exhaustion to a grace promised us not by virtue of our holiness or our understanding of psychology or our medical expertise or even our theological, Scriptural precision, but because we have united our lives with the life of the Son. We have heard his word, and we believe the One who sent him. We have been astonished by the gift that humbles our determined efforts to make things better, and when the Word of promise speaks, we step out of the way so that the prisoners can hear God say, “Come out,” and those in gloomy obscurity can hear God say, “Step into the light”; we hasten to pass along the food and drink that God graciously provides for every living creature. The hour is coming and now is here, when in our solidarity, in our communion, we share in the miraculous restoration, the impossible healing, the extravagant fulfillment of the promises that our frailty cannot impede, that God’s grace will not withhold.

Amen

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March 08, 2005

Speaking of Improbability

I was given to understand that the odds of winning a free iTune were one in three, and the odds of winning a free bottle of soda were one in six — but I’ve gotten something like six consecutive “free soda” caps, and only a couple of free tunes since the promotion began.

I don’t want your soda, I want the [more probable] music!

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Teaching Moment Dream

I woke up this morning in the midst of a dream that involved an end-of-year conversation with my first-year students (not this year’s students — they were the anonymous extras provided from Central Casting of the dreamworld). They were adopting a favorite moment from their Early Church History class as the theme for next year’s orientation. It seems that I’d been talking about the controversial ministry of some leader — Gregory of Nazianzus during his Constantinopolitan tenure, perhaps, or John Chrysostom. I described the impact of his ministry on civic life, using a sequence of four vivid nouns: “Riot! Rebellion! Something! Devastation!” [I don’t remember what the third element in the series was, just that there had to be four.] I then noted for the class, “You can expect that sort of response if you dare to work for truth and excellence in the church.”

Evidently the students in the dream had loved the idea of causing trouble by working for truth, so (to my surprise) they had made that their organizing motif. Wish I could remember that third noun — but apart from that it was a pretty gratifying dream.

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Got There Second

Pippa and Si have inaugurated a marathon listening session for the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by way of preparation for the upcoming Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, and it occurred to me that the Guide makes a plausible analogue to the Wikipedia (if you cut Douglas Adams a little slack for not getting absolutely every detail right). I figured I’d Google the combination, and the first few pages of results suggested (improbably) that I might be the first person to blog that comparison.

Plunging further into the results, though, I discovered that not only had the comparison occurred to somebody else who wrote it up online, but that my forerunner had gone one better by making the connection between the Hitchhiker’s Guide and the Encyclopedia Galactica (on one hand) and the Wikipedia and the print encyclopedias. Well done!

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March 07, 2005

Fair Warning

I’ll be preaching Wednesday, assuming I don’t wig out from paper-marking and administrative responsibilities. The readings will be Isaiah 49:8-15, Psalm 145:8-19, and John’s Gospel 5:19-29. At this point I haven’t the foggiest notion what I’ll say, but if something occurs to me, you’ll find out almost as soon as I do.

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Church Thoughts

This morning, I felt a moment of frustration about the attacks some observers launch against the “emergent” church when emergent congregations pick and choose liturgical elements to lend an air of mystery, or to allude to a tradition of worship that congregants self-consciously repudiate, or just because they like this or that.

I’m pretty pronouncedly Anglo-Catholic about the kinds of liturgical expression I’ll support. I’m from the stream of worship-tradition that falls to the left of the upper-case-“O” Orthodox and the ultramontane Roman Catholics, and to the right of most Roman Catholic congregations I’ve visited, and virtually all Protestant congregations. That’s not a claim about quality or authenticity or divine favor — it’s a rough assessment on a spectrum between two poles. It places me in the zone where “being able to make a clear claim about the coherence and continuity-with-tradition” carries immense weight.

But friends — the very liturgical sensibilities that formed me to think the ways I do derive from a retrospective repristination of selected liturgical practices in Victorian England. Likewise the “liturgical movement” of the mid-twentieth century sent liturgical scholars scouring ancient texts to scoop out some prayer or practice that centuries had concealed with dust, polishing them up, and plopping them into contemporary liturgies.

“Continuity” is always a fictive thing — not fictitious, but fictive, something made. When it suits us, a detail from the Gelasian Rite fits right in to our worship. If (on the other hand) a particular detail irritates us, it constitutes a grave departure from the coherence of the tradition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We aren’t just making it up; the way we customarily think about things like liturgy guides us to regard some changes as natural and harmonious, and others as pernicious. Without having an outlook at the start, we couldn’t make judgments at all about “what is coherent” and “what isn’t.”

So, however grouchy I feel when a start-up congregation skims my missal for congenial words and gestures, the Apostle reminds me (charitably, I hope) that “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”

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March 06, 2005

Another Sighting

Face of Jesus Seen on Crucifix!

The Rev. Mosely Baskerwithe summoned reporters, photographers, best-selling novelists, and some parishioners to annouce that, in his words, “I suddenly noticed that one of the statues in St. Euphrasia’s Church bore a miraculous resemblance to Jesus — or at least, to Jim Cazeviel. . . .”

He noted that since this astonishing event, he’s observed that many of the windows, sculptural ornaments, and paintings in the church bear an uncanny resemblance to Jesus, too.

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What Were the Odds?

Within the space of a week, I posted this page from the Bowdoin Orient (the oldest continuously-published college weekly in the US), that cites the scintillating political-debate skills of Margaret Bamforth [Adam] marshalled in support of Barry Commoner for President in 1980 — and Michael Bérubé posted a photo of himself kneeling at a sidewalk star dedicated to Barry Commoner, noting that he cast his first presidential vote for Commoner in ’80.

How many people even remember that “the Citizens Party” existed? Margaret and I put a ton of energy into the Steering Committee for the Citizens Party in the great state of Maine that year. Bérubé has changed course back to voting for the more tolerable of two unsatisfactory options; Margaret and I refuse to lend our support to candidates we don’t believe in. But twenty-four years ago, all three of us hoped that we could break this logjam. . . .

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March 05, 2005

Aftermath

More people turned out for today’s service than could fit into St. Luke’s (I’m slightly beyond the top of the frame in the second image of this sequence); the wardens were obliged, reluctantly, to turn what looked to me like a hundred or so people away. I waited outside the doors until partway into the service, when space was found to squeeze in a last handful of us. I second the headline writer: we will remember Michael with Joan, as “everything we want people to be.”

The service was tremendous: musically exquisite, liturgically profound, jammed with parishioners and former parishioners, side-by-side with friends of the Lefkows from all over. Jackie Schmitt preached a compelling sermon. We sang “Oh God, Our Help In Ages Past,” “Eternal Father, Strong to Save,” “Come Down, O Love Divine,” “The King of Love My Shepherd Is,” and “For All the Saints.” We greeted one another. We wept.

After sharing Communion, we prayed, “All of us go down to the dust; yet even at the grave, we make our song: Alleluia, alleluia, alleluia.”

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One Suggestion

As the spouse of a first-year [graduate] student at Duke, I have a suggestion of what they can do with all those leftover iPods: “Six months after the Duke University iPod First-Year Experience began, a stack of unopened iPods line Lynne O'Brien's office. ” . . .

(Found via Stephen Downes).

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March 04, 2005

Props For Our Man

It’s a treat to see e-learning pundit Stephen Downes commend our hero Chris Locke’s recent column on serendipity and research at his Chief Blogging Officer gig. “Someone who finally understands search” — indeed!

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Do You Think?

I suggested something along these lines of this article from the South Carolina State in response to some questions from Jordon Cooper a while back: it turns out that churches (laggards at recognizing the benefits of the Net in general and weblogs in particular) have recognized the benefits of podcasting, and now constitute a large and growing segment of the podcasting spectrum (I found the link via largehearted boy).

Congratulations to congregations that have seen this opportunity to use what they do best to their advantage; I’m delighted that St. Luke’s makes our sermons available as mp3s, along with some of the choral music (don’t miss the Biebl “Ave Maria”), and it wouldn’t take much to rig them up as podcasts.

The startling discovery that provides the take-away line for this article, however, must be repeated here: “Religious podcasters said they like the medium because it's an inexpensive way to reach the masses.” Really?

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March 03, 2005

Biting Back at Reality

Pippa and I went to the library tonight, and I took out a couple of books. Now, this seems (on the face of it) a plausible enough gesture, until you recall that the last time I went to the library I took out Ricoeur’s Memory, History, Forgetting, — a 600-page tome that I haven’t even begun reading. I thought of a couple more books I ought to be reading to prepare for my spring series of talks, and today I received twenty-odd papers to mark, with a set of final exams coming in next week.

As I wandered haplessly toward the library check-out desk, I realized that this constituted a pathetic charade: since I no longer have time to read, I go through the motions by taking books out, and then returning them a week or so later, as though I’d read them. Not only is that embarrassingly irrational behavior, it deprives other Evanstonians of the use of good books while I sit beside the stack of books on my desk, wishing they would read themselves to me while I struggle with my round of tasks.

This will not do — no longer.

I’m about to head upstairs, where I will read a chapter or two of Worship as Meaning before I go to sleep, no matter what.
I will learn to read again; I will not give in to attention entropy.

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March 02, 2005

Cheerier Note

Margaret’s iBook died last week, midweek, and I conducted some long-distance pastoral care-cum-tech support. We talked through the problem and got her to Duke’s computing center, all good (apart from having to go without her computer for a week in the middle of the term). She’s been managing all right, apart from withdrawal symptoms, checking her email via webmail interface at open lab computers.

This morning she was checking her email and realized that lost among the messages from Josiah, weather updates, and helpful anatomical, relationship, pharmaceutical, real estate, and inheritance advice, was a note from the Computer Center saying that her iBook was ready. Although they had her phone number, they emailed her to say she could come pick up her computer.

And yesterday I had to open some files from my long-ago WordPerfect phase (Chris emailed me for the report on iWork, which is pretty good, so far — not perfect). I used nothing but WordPerfect for about a year and a half, and since there’s no native WordPerfect solution on OS X, I’ve been grouchily booting into Classic every time I needed something from those years. Yesterday I recalled, however, that the latest version of AbiWord is supposed to open WordPerfect filers, so I tried it and — yessirree Bob, it opens them beautifully. One more onerous use for Classic eliminated!

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March 01, 2005

Another Memo

Reminder to self and readers: It’s pivotally important that we reflect on and work out our theologies concerning death — but the time to do that is when things are going well, when the road’s pretty smooth. A time for grieving brings with it other tasks.

The medievals were not simply gloomy, morbid weirdos; the skull on a medieval desk reminds us of our mortality, and of our need to come to terms with mortality, at a time when grace offers us some measure of respite for reflection and prayer.

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