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July 31, 2005

Facelift

Trevor’s working on a way of refactoring the appearance of the Disseminary — partly ’cause it’s been long enough, partly because we cam up with the old appearance right at the start, and have learned enough to be ready to make some changes, partly because the Moveable Type database that powered the old design melted down last winter and we never rebuilt it.

Trevor sensibly thinks that we ought to solicit feedback for the new design before we implement anything — so, how does it look to you?

Posted by AKMA at 01:31 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Clockwork

Today’s shipment of cards:

39 Polycarp, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

40 Montanus, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

41 Gnosticism, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

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July 30, 2005

Ideas and Time

I appreciate the positive feedback about the Theology Cards; we have another dozen or so in the works, which will dribble out over the next week, I expect. If you have a request, leave a comment — I can’t make any promises, but if a subject would interest you, then it might well be useful and interesting to my class, or to other non-curricular explorers. I will concenttate my efforts on the years from 100 to 600 (roughly, though I’ll stretch the interval to include some early of the missionary saints of the British Isles); though there be worthy subjects for cards outside that window, I just don’t have the time right now to think about a series of “Continental Reformers” or “Caroline Divines.”

In response to Being Shielded’s request for “an idea flow chart,” I like the idea a lot and will try to work such things up for some major theological concepts. Unfortunately, I got a different really great idea while I was mulling that over, a real Tufte-an idea that I’ve spent hours working on already today.

It goes this way: Part of the job of our introductory course in Early Church History involves helping students develop an awareness of the shape of major theologians’ lives, the connections among them, the chronology and the geography of their careers. It occurred to me to follow a character’s life with a line that changes color as the character ages. So a character’s life-line starts out yellow, modulates to red at 25, to purple at 50, to blue at 75, and to green should he or she live to 100. With that visual device, one can both illustrate a character’s life and travels (“Aha! He’s in Gaul at 25, but he returns to Alexandria in his forties”) and point to synchronisms (“So she was in her fifties during the Council of Chalcedon”).

The catch is that my Photoshop/Illustrator chops aren’t immediately up to the task, so I’m going deeper in the applications at the same time I’m working on illustrating (for instance) Athanasius’s exiles. I hope I can produce a nice, clean one in time to take it to the Tufte seminar that Trevor and I will go to in August.

So, life-lines now; idea flow-charts, next. And, if I can get a handle on the stressors that have interrupted my sleep and productivity, I can wrap up my work on the Winslow Lectures publication project, put together the elements for my semi-plenary at the Catholic Biblical Association meeting next weekend, and help Margaret and Pip get ready for their August trip to the east coast. And resume the Lego Church History illustrations. And finish up my syllabus in time to share it with my Church History colleagues. And rework my study guide for the course. And write the books I’m supposed to have written this summer. Etc.

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Card Posts

Latest update on the Theology Cards front (Theological Outlines buffs will have to wait — but aren’t five-plus chapters enough for starters?):

23 Evagrius of Pontus, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

34 Eusebius of Caesarea, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

38 Clement of Rome, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

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July 29, 2005

My Kind of Argument

Phil Windley (Ha! no one thought I even remembered Phil — hi, Phil!) points to a useful argument from Timothy Grayson on the subject of digital identity. It’s the sort of argument I love — he calls attention to the extent to which our frustrations and conflicts over “digital identity” and “privacy” involve conceptual confusions left over from the conditions that prevailed before the advent of digital interaction. The technical problems are aggravated by linguistic confusion.

Three cheers for that good catch! The difficulty arises when you try to attend not only to the changing conditions that require us to redefine our expectations (that’s a tough enough job by itself), but also to the moral intuitions, the social forces that inculcate our sense of identity, and the negotiations by which we mediate these non-personal factors. You can’t just “cahnge the language,” nor should we simply turn the language over to people who assure us they know what they’re doing, even if they’re good guys like Kim Cameron and Dick Hardt and Eric Norlin (well, OK, Eric has that sinister NSA side to him, but you get my point). Our language needs to change and will change, but the right answers for DigID will take when the affordances that the technology offers align with expectations that non-geek citizens are willing to bend in order to enjoy the benefits of comfortable, secure, trustworthy online interactions.

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Like Clockwork

Another series of Theology Cards, another couple of chapters of Hall’s Theological Outlines.

Among the cards, we’ve added

20 John Cassian, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

30 Modalism, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

36 Pachomius, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

Meanwhile, we have Chapter Four (Theism) and Chapter Five (Anti-Theistic Theories) finished, and Chapter Six (Revelation) is under way.

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July 28, 2005

They’re Multiplying

Bwa-ha-ha! More questionae going up in Chapter Four of the Theological Outlines, and four more Theology Cards:

25 Jerome, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

27 John Chrysostom, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

28 Mary of Egypt, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

29 Ignatius of Antioch, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

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July 27, 2005

You and Big Broadband and Me

Yesterday David (evidently on vacation, but blogging up a storm) called attention to what calls itself a Big Broadband Bill of Rights. He urged us to sign on, and I went over to check it out.

I’m a determined user of broadband, so the issue concerns me actively — and I support the premise that the U.S. has adopted (or, more precisely, “allowed to tumble into a mixed-up array”) misguided regulations relative to the distribution of broadband services. If I am correctly informed, other nations offer faster, more readily available broadband at lower prices; that should certainly sound like a desirable circumstances to decision-makers over here, too.

I didn’t sign the manifesto, though, for a couple of reasons. First, I balk at furthering the notion that access to broadband constitutes a “right” (even in a metaphorical sense). Enumerated rights ought to stay few and general, and the more we talk about a right to this and a right to that, the more vulnerable all of these rights become to the argument that “when your rights conflict with mine, something has to give, isn’t that a shame,” etc., blah blah blah — an argument that serves too easily to undermine what ought to be deep, durable, exceptionless civil rights (as near to “exceptionless” as mortal social arrangements can make). In other words, I’d be more sympathetic to seeing this as a sub-instance of “free press” than as a sui generis matter right-to-boradband.

Second, the manifesto’s Article 2, section 3 reads, “2.3 You have the right to trust that others will respect your copyright ownership. In turn, you shall respect the copyright protections afforded to us and compensate copyright owners per their request” — and, given the present complexion of copyright law in the U.S., I can’t endorse that. I don’t have anything against a modest regimen more in line with historic copyright protection, but I just don’t assent to the present megacorp-feeding-frenzy of copyright restriction. To repeat: a sensible business model will benefit artists and those who mediate and distribute their work to customers. That’s no0t just what my observations affirm; that’s what the data suggests, too.

The same applies to Big Broadband. Legislators and business leaders should see the long-term economic benefits to making absolutely sure that the U.S. supports the fastest, least costly, most reliable broadband network in the world. THat’s the basis on which they should be supporting Firstmile.us and Big Broadband — not on the basis of a putative right to online access. Great principle, great vision, great models, misplaced argument.

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Hard at Work

Crossing from repetitive to downright tedious, we’ve got even more of the Theological Outlines online: we have Chapter One (The Science of Theology), Chapter Two (The Dogmatic office of the Church), Chapter Three (Holy Scripture), and about half of Chapter Four (Theism). And we’ve added four Theology Cards:

14 Leo the Great, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

16 Egeria, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

18 Benedict, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

22 Cyprian, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

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July 26, 2005

Offspring of Even Still More Cards

More questions from Theological Outlines blog. More cards. More to come. (Yes, more Lego Church History too, but not this instant.)

15 Constantine, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

17 Augustine, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

19 Ambrose, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

24 Hippolytus, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

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July 25, 2005

More Cards

The work on teaching resources continues behind the scenes at the Disseminary. We’ve uploaded several more questionae to the Theological Outlines blog, and we’ve uploaded three more Theology Cards, available from here:

9 Macrina, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

12 Origen, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

13 Justin Martyr, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

Posted by AKMA at 04:28 PM | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Another Example

The St. Luke’s volunteers came by today to pick up a bed for the Yancuba family, and as I was cleaning out the space where the bed used to be, I found a parish bulletin (location and date withheld) where I had noted that the preacher started by observing, “Today is Father’s Day. Many Christians will celebrate today as the Feast of Corpus Christi. . . .”

That’s the kind of thing that makes me feel feisty and un-American, when a preacher announces that it is Father’s Day but observing Corpus Christi is an optional, “Christian” thing to do.

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July 24, 2005

My Cards

In one of the Ekklesia Project conversations, and again this afternoon, I alluded to the Theologian Cards for my Early Church History class. I checked, and only Anthony, Perpetua, Irenaeus, Athanasius, and Tertullian were available online. So I just uploaded another batch, and will work through the rest of them in my copious free time. And yes, I’ll get back to work on the Lego Church History series.

6 Basil the Great of Caesarea, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

7 Arius, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

8 Clement of Alexandria, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

10 Gregory of Nyssa, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

11 Gregory of Nazianzus, Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

It’s not too hard to format and upload these, mostly just a matter of making the PDFs and JPEG from the main InDesign file, so I should be able to get a few more up here soon. (Though I put “My Cards” in the title bar, anyone interested should know that the drawings were executed by extremely gifted artist-philosopher Steve Lahey.)

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Lovely, Lovely

It was a treat to visit the garden home of Scandal of Particularity (after having met her at the Ekklesia Project on Monday), where with her husband she generously hosted Camassia, the AngloBaptist, Liz (who — so far as I know — doesn’t have a website, the horror!), and me for a civilized afternoon conversation about liturgy, theology, sexuality, blogging software, other Blogarians, and the Tour de France — among many other things.

The next time someone tells you that online activity cuts into physical-world interaction, sock ’em in the nose you may correct them based on the empirical data of my experience.

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Ugly, Ugly

I have a hard time even believing that is a dog. Ugly, undoubtedly — but to count as “the ugliest dog,” shouldn’t the connection to dog-dom be a little more obvious?

Either way, Sam will probably be the ugliest dog on Google and Technorati soon — dog tag or no tag.

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July 22, 2005

Next Installment

To relieve the theological humdrum, I’ll call attention to another couple of paintings from Pippa that I uploaded to Flickr.

We made a trip to the art supplies store yesterday, and she’s begun work on the huge canvas — a seaside landscape based on a photo she herself took.

Posted by AKMA at 10:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Correction

David Weinberger is too classy to pout online — or maybe he hasn’t noticed yet — but it must be annoying when The Paper Of Record ascribes a diluted version of his witticism about the Web to one “Scott Williams” (link via Dave Winer).

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July 21, 2005

Dubious

I’ve only just recently found out that anybody cares what I think about the recent sad news from Connecticut. If you don’t care to register with the New York Times, the short answer is that the diocesan bishop inhibited a priest (“suspended” him), took possession of the parish’s buildings and records, changed the locks, and installed an interim rector. It is hard to think that it’s coincidental that the priest in question was one of six clergy who actively resist the consecration of Gene Robinson to the episcopacy (among other vexatious actions taken by the Episcopal Church over the past few years).

Since it’s a matter whose resolution depends greatly on details of the transactions between bishop and priest, I have kept my own counsel — I reasoned that it could hardly help clarify a complicated situation if large numbers of people who don’t know the details take uninformed positions. I’ve been in situations where the presenting issue could not be discussed publicly, which circumstance contributed to an appearance of extreme unfairness on the part of the authority involved; since then, I’ve tried to be especially cautious regarding such situations.

Because this has become a touchstone for determining even-handedness in ecclesiastical commentary, however, and because there’s been plenty of time to make as clear as possible a case for what looks on the face of things like a clumsy power grab, I can without hesitation say that if Bishop Smith has a good reason for the way he handled this situation, he has so far withheld it. The highly-charged atmosphere ought to incline someone who holds power to exercise that power as little and as gently and unexceptionably as possible, with as much explanation as possible. Unless Bishop Smith is in the agonizing position of knowing something very terrible and confidential about the conduct of the Rev. Mr. Hansen’s ministry — something of which no hint of a clue has even been rumored, so one has to consider that option off-the-table — Bishop Smith must be deemed to have mishandled a delicate situation.

In a couple of conversations at the Ekklesia Project, I observed that I increasingly find the pivotal text in Pauline ethics to be 1 Cor 6:7: “In fact, to have lawsuits at all with one another is already a defeat for you. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be defrauded? ” We demonstrate sinfully constricted imaginations when we concentrate our efforts on prevailing over our sisters and brothers, arm-twisting or out-maneuvering in order to win, to justify oneself.

I can imagine some circumstances that might motivate Bishop Smith to take the actions he did, and I can imagine some circumstances that might motivate Fr. Hansen to have taken the actions that seem to have precipitated the diocese’s foreclosure — but the information circulating in public so far casts the diocese’s side in a pretty grim light. When I wrote “if our charity were not already exhausted,” this dysangelical mess was the sort of sorry outcome I feared.

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July 20, 2005

Closing EP Post

The Ekklesia Project always excites and refreshes me, so it’s not just because I gave a presentation there this year that I have to say what a wonderful gathering they put together for us.

That being said, I was delighted that so many people gave very kind positive feedback on my talk, and that so many people seemed to get the idea of the Disseminary (which Phil mentioned when he introduced me). It’s gratifying, but frustrating, that their feedback suggests that Trevor and I have the right idea — while we’re still having trouble harvesting enough useful material to make the site go.

Thanks, though, to readers from EP who meander over here; it was great to hear from you in person, and I hope you feel welcome to come back electronically fromm time to time.

Posted by AKMA at 02:43 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 19, 2005

The Strong Right Arm

This morning we all woke up way too early, and Margaret and Pip and I trundled down to DePaul so that we’d be sure to arrive in time for me to give my plenary at the Ekklesia Project Gathering. We were pretty sleepy till partway through breakfast, but by my third cup of coffee I figured I’d be able to keep my eyes open through the whole presentation.

I’ll add the transcript of the whole presentation in the (More) area; PDF available here, and an mp3 from ChuckP3 here. For casual readers and RSS, though, the short answer is that it seems to have gone well. We had some active conversation afterward, and I could spend the rest of the day relaxing and jawing with friends rather than kicking myself.

“Relaxing,” that is, until 7:15, when the presenters and I were called to the front for a panel discussion of our papers, led by Barry Harvey. Barry asked us hard questions, which struck me as decidedly unfair, given how little sleep I’d had. When the EP crowd got tired of hearing us panelists talk, Margaret and Pippa and I hastened back north to Evanston.

Within an hour, I’ll be fast asleep.

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.
You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name.

(Exodus 20:2-7, NRSV)

Thank you, Brent and Rodney, for the invitation to talk with the Ekklesia Project this year. Every year’s Gathering encourages and refreshes me in vital ways, and I hope that by talking through some of the ground that mediates Bill Cavanaugh’s talk about theological dimensions of our imperial situation, from last night and Sylvia’s more comprehensive account of a biblical perspective on Empire, I can clear some ground where we can meet and work out concrete ways of living as godly people as a practice of resistance to an imperial context.

So, to begin a reflection on the how the Decalogue – and specifically, the first three commandments of the Decalogue – might shape us for godliness in resistance to the power of Empire, let’s re-read together the passage that Rodney assigned to me.

First, these commandments are addressed not to a nation-state, but to a bunch of people wandering around in the wilderness. The relevance of the Commandments doesn’t depend on an established civil government enacting these principles into public policy, nor on each individual adopting them as a personal code. The Commandments are addressed to a people, a particular community. And this people hold together as a people in relation to the words we’re reading.

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” God begins by announcing the Divine Name; where our careful translations say “the Lord,” the Hebrew specifies God’s own name – at which, according to the tradition1, all the world stands still, all sound is hushed, the praise of God in heaven and the mysterious wheels of the chariot cease spinning, as God pronounces the unspeakable Name. God announces the Name, and explains that God’s identity is made known in saving this people from slavery – in the words of Psalm 77, “with a strong arm God redeemed the children of Jacob and Joseph” (Ps 77:16). That point bears on a later part of my argument, but for now bear in mind that the Name itself is understood as a command in the Judaic tradition2; the bare fact of knowing God activates an ethical obligation whose details emerge in the subsequent verses.

The Lord emphasizes that this is not a random encounter between nomadic herders and a post-Chaldaic deity. As it turns out, the God who teaches Israel how to live in the Decalogue is the same God who delivered them from slavery in Egypt; God has already extended divine mercy to Israel as a basis for Israel trusting in God. “Deliverance” now constitutes a further revelation of God’s identity, so that everything else we will learn about God should cohere with the this demonstration of freedom.

“You shall have no other gods before me.” The prepositional phrase “before me” could be clearer; it could mean a variety of things, from “over against me” to “in preference to me,” but whatever the precise nuance of “before me,” the across-the-board sense is that any other allegiance must be set aside in favor of our allegiance to the Lord. Here God is not arguing that other deities don’t exist – the next commandment goes on to allow that they’re real in some sense, since God commands that we not bow down to them or worship them.3 Our allegiance to this God takes precedence over any other possible priority; any other god, any other possible rival for our commitment, must give way to the Lord God who brings us out of slavery.
The next commandment, then, goes on explicitly to require not only that the people of God commit themselves completely to the Lord, but that we follow through on that promise of loyalty. God’s unwillingness to allow anyone or anything to come intervene between God and humanity comes to expression in the commandment, “You shall not make for yourself an idol”; we may not participate in any of the plausible, popular, culturally-acceptable practices that infringe on our unique commitment to God. That rules out the obvious – making and adorning statues that depict other deities (golden calves, for instance). It further rules out such representations of the Lord God as might confuse us into worshipping the created instead of the creator, or such as satiates our imaginations with definitive details on topics where God has not seen fit to supply knowledge. Our God specifically does not want us to think that God looks like a white guy; Moses is the only person in Scripture who gets a direct glimpse of God, and even then he only sees God’s hinder parts. (Not that God’s hinder parts wouldn’t look divine.)

In a theme that resounds through all of Scripture, God consistently condemns any human endeavor that encroaches on God’s unique self-representation. The Golden Calf episode stands out as an example, not only because it displays the chosen people indulging in a festival of idolatry while Moses is on the mountain, receiving the Torah, but especially because Aaron assures the people, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt” – to which God responds, “No way, Moshe.” however much the God’s people demand God on their terms, we may not arrogate to ourselves the prerogative to characterize God as suits us; we may not devise domesticated deiti-ettes to solace our longing to lay hold of holiness for our own ends with emblems of the Lord.

Sometimes the basis for our exclusive commitment to God is read as “jealousy,” as though God were a suspicious, envious figure, hiring sleazy detectives to catch us in a motel with strange gods. The jealous zeal of which Exodus speaks here is not expression of a lack – as though God were the Ricky Ricardo, calling, “Israel, you got some ’splaining to do” – but this zeal identifies God as “utterly ardent, uncompromising,” as unwilling for anything or anyone to come between God and the people God loves.4

Finally, the third commandment forbids us to invoke God for ungodly purposes. The commandment may be directed specifically against lying in general, or for swearing by God’s name in a false cause. The sense of this commandment, though, permits a broader interpretation – and its proximity to the commandment against bearing false witness in 20:16 suggests that this verse concerns something different, something more pertinent to the preceding verses. In context, that difference seems to entail claiming God’s authority for purposes that are not God’s. We are not free to profane God’s name by ascribing to God’s will, God’s wisdom, that which we intend for our own aims. Just as God won’t allow us to revere the Golden Calf or to honor it as our deliverer, so God rejects false prophets who claim “Thus says the Lord” when they themselves have devised the prophecies. Indeed, the church has appropriately discerned a further sense to this commandment in forbidding any magical use of God’s Name – whereas in many systems, possession of a god’s or a spirit’s name gives one power over that subject, the God of the Decalogue cannot be compelled by such devices.5

To summarize, then, the first three commandments articulate a theology by which we align ourselves with a God who claims priority over all other interests or motivations, whom we may not draw down from heaven in the tangible, visible form, nor may we substitute for this invisible God a more congenially accessible champion. We may not dress up our intents and purposes by wrapping them in God’s radiance. The God of the Decalogue is uniquely authoritative, cannot be fashioned after our own image (pace Feuerbach), and cannot be controlled: God is absolute, aniconic, and useless.6 God does not exist for our use. We cannot honor this God by soft-pedalling God’s uncompromising will, or by painting God in our image, or by bossing other people around in the name of God. We honor the God who brought us out of slavery into freedom by the practice of godliness, of standing firm for God.
As you may have ascertained from this description, the characteristics of the Decalogue’s God comport poorly with priorities of an empire. Whether or not, one construe the present U.S. regime as an imperial pretender, recent events point to ways in which a nation formed with a powerful ideology of the state can modulate from general respect for civil authorities to veneration of numinous national entities in a mode that challenges these commandments. The transition from dutiful respect to misplaced reverence is facilitated by a several factors. In part, people understandably long for a more available God, a God whom one can rally to urgent causes. In part, such a transition serves the interests of the state. Some part of the transition serves other interests. However one distributes the causes, they combine to engender an atmosphere in which the state draws to itself allegiance, iconic sanctity, and effectuality that properly pertain only to the Lord.

I’ll concentrate on the U.S. in the following examples. That’s not because I think the U.S. is unique, or that this is the worst offender; it’s because I’m better acquainted with public discourse in the U.S., and the illustrations are so poignant.

So let your memories drift back to 2002, when a panel from the 9th Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in the case of Newdow vs. the U.S. Congress. The 9th Circuit determined that state-sponsored recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools violated the establishment clause; it’s impossible, they reasoned, to identify the U.S. as a nation “under God” without promoting a religious agenda. Politicians of almost every stripe rushed to demonstrate their pious patriotism by insisting that professing loyalty to “one nation, under God” need not conflict with the Constitution’s insistence against any “law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Positions ranged from the embarrassing de minimis claim that such a short phrase couldn’t do any ideological harm – it didn’t mean much of anything (which provokes the question, “Why then include it?”) – to overwhelming votes in the House and Senate to the effect that the words “under God” ought to be retained in the Pledge, anyway.

My theological complaint doesn’t rest on any of those grounds (though I’ll admit to being grieved that anyone would argue that public affirmation of a transcendent God doesn’t mean enough to give offense to an atheist). Rather, I want to call attention to the oddity that so many Jews and Christians were advocating a pledge of allegiance to a national flag. The U.S. flag stands in a direct line of descent from the insignias, emblems, and standards by which nations invoked totemic deities in battle, so that two millennia ago, faithful believers were willing to lay down their lives rather than venerate, or even tolerate, these representations of rival gods. Tertullian rejected the regimental standards as “rivals of Christ”7; and when a Roman procurator brought flags that honored Caesar into the city of Jerusalem – not into the Temple, mind you, but just in the city limits – a crowd of Judeans staged a five-day demonstration to have the standards removed; and when that procurator threatened to execute them, they volunteered to be killed, rather than permit these idolatrous emblems to remain within the city of Jerusalem.8

Now, we concede without hesitation that the policies of the Roman Empire entailed a pervasive paganism inimical to Judaism and Christianity. Nonetheless, Pontius Pilate was not asking the Jerusalemites to pledge allegiance to the standards; yet the people resisted the very existence of the iconic representation of imperial power within the holy city. In the twenty-first century, on the other hand, a unanimous vote of the U.S. Senate affirmed the premise that U.S. Christians ought to pledge their allegiance to the flag, and to the republic for which it stands.

Several weeks ago, as though our legislators were afraid that I wouldn’t have sufficient material for this talk, the House of Representatives passed a proposed amendment to the Constitution that reads, “The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.” I want to call your attention to the one word “desecration,” for that word distinguishes the amendment from merely debatable prohibitions of unwelcome political expression. This amendment, however, presupposes that the flag of the United States is in some sense sacred; and that claim of sanctity stands diametrically opposed to the teaching of the Decalogue, as the citizens of Jerusalem knew, as Christian conscripts into the Roman army knew.

It will be said that the flag’s sanctity is figurative: “Of course no one regards the flag as the symbol of a transcendent divine national entity, and the flag doesn’t signify the genius of the President or the totemic protector of an army division.” But a figure of speech is never simply a figure, never just a metaphor. As it turns out, the vehemence with which politicians leapt to defend the state’s interest in inculcating obedient allegiance to the flag, and to define the flag as a sacred object that one might be punished for treating impiously, bespeaks a more than merely metaphorical sensitivity at this point. One need not alter the Constitution to justify a metaphor.

As the priorities of civil powers have permeated U.S. Christianity, it becomes harder and harder to make a theological case against the imperial ethos. The church feels a powerful temptation to accommodate, indeed in some quarters even embrace, the image of the United States as an visible, effective anointed agent for realizing divine purposes. In the name of realism, in the name of deference to honoring those who bear the effects of war (effects that our everyday language reveals that we regard as a sacrifice9), strident voices demand that Christians profess their loyalty to a national ensign, and observe the festivals that the government establishes as though they were feasts of holy martyrs. The combined interests and sensitivities – often innocent, often commendable – of state power, of patriotic citizens, of injured families, and of corporate advantage converge in an ambiance I will call Sacramerica.10 In Sacramerica, the national pride of the United States blossoms into a displaced messianic hope that subordinates the God of the Decalogue to the sentimental consolations and pragmatic policy interests of a vast congregation of baseball fans, apple-pie eaters, and fireworks admirers.

Lest you think that my rhetoric has carried me too far, and lest the tone of this presentation grow too grim, I’d like to call your attention to a handout from a century ago. This handout richly rewards our critical attention, and vividly illustrates my claim that Sacramerica constitutes a spiritual alternative to the God of the Decalogue.

This illustration comes from an advertising campaign originated by Artemis Ward, one of the pioneers of the modern advertising industry. Ward made Sapolio a brand name second only to Ford in popular recognition and cultural currency11 by publicity stunts, jingles, mass-transit placards, and full-page advertisements in literary magazines. One such advertisement found its way into Margaret’s and my private collection several years ago.

How does this advertisement serve my point? Let me count the ways. Being a biblical student, I’ll start by commenting on the words. First, then, “the strong right arm that holds for peace” in this poster belongs not to the God of peace who redeemed the children of Jacob and Joseph, but to Lady Liberty. The ad seems to identify the inhabitants of the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico at the turn of the twentieth century as “dark,” “dirty,” and “uncivilized” relative to the United States; Sapolio and the U.S.A., it suggests, will take care of that with their cleansing, civilizing imperial mission. The copy warns us that “imitations disappoint,” or as Moses might have said, “Thou shalt have no soap before me.”

The iconography of the advertisement speaks even more emphatically of Sacramerican displacement of God. Here Lady Liberty, carrying a sword, draped in a flag, enlightens the world with her bar of soap. The world as Sapolio imagines it constitutes only the U.S. and three of its colonies – Mexico (which is almost the same area as Cuba) vanishes into the ocean, and Canada doesn’t exist (not to mention Europe, Asia, or Central and South America). This American idol portrays the self-image of the U.S. projected to a heavenly scale; this is the god that Feuerbach and Durkheim warned you about. Lady Liberty wears a Phrygian cap, the vestigial signifier of the Mithraic mysteries. Any other features of the advertisement strike you?

If anyone thinks that the religious infrastructure of this ad is simply incidental, they may want to consider such other Sapolio advertisements as that placed in the Century magazine of 1904 which links Sapolio with the “very peculiar, very strict” 6,000-year-old ceremonial law of the Hebrew race. Thus it declares Sapolio “kosher” – in English and in Hebrew characters.12

It’s a measure of how thoroughly Sacramerica is ascendant in our culture that an advertisement that represents a superhuman figure that bestows light and health to a chosen people while attired in the garb of a participant in a mystery cult doesn’t strike us as odd. The point isn’t that anyone would explicitly endorse a claim that the personified ablutionary regime of U.S. commercial imperialism should be worshipped as God. The point is that an advertiser could confidently invoke an image that comprehensively displaces the God of the Decalogue, without fear that U.S. Christians would take offense, without expecting that displacement to hurt his sales.13 In an atmosphere like this, how can one proclaim the Decalogue so as to bring into focus the antithesis of Sacramerica with God’s unique, aniconic, useless identity?

Whatever else we do – and this project certainly brings together intensely creative, ingenious cultural activists – we need to take seriously the extent to which Sacramerica names not just a set of pernicious assumptions about the U.S.’s role as liberator, law-giver, and commercial agent to the world. More than that, Sacramerica names a signifying practice, a repertoire of premises and especially actions that express, affirm, reinforce, and disseminate particular sorts of meaning. To the extent that our lives do not differ perceptibly from the lives of convinced advocates of U.S. exceptionalism, the rest of the world will justifiably number us among those advocates.

What do I mean when I use the term “signifying practice”? I’m drawing that term from the disciplines of semiotics and cultural criticism, where it points to ways that people express important claims about themselves and the world not only by talking or writing, but by the ways they behave, by the ways they interact with others. It’s what we called “living signs” in our worship yesterday afternoon. Cultures, subcultures, dominant and resistant groups articulate their identities in the ways that people dress, the ways that people address one another, the type of cars they drive or their decision to ride a bicycle or take the El. We can take the example of religious vocations as a highly-visible signifying practice, wherein every article of clothing, every meal, every prayer, every gesture combine to express a particular kind of life given over to the praise and service of God. More often, though, we participate in signification less self-consciously, more by elective affiliation, with much less formal expectations and obligations; in so doing, we float along with the significations made available by mass culture and socially-dominant institutions.

Thus, when I say that we should recognize Sacramerica as a “signifying practice,” I mean that it amounts to more than a set of explicit verbal claims about the U.S. and its manifest destiny. As a signifying practice, it entails a certain confluence of patriotism, political theory, messianic hope, personal and corporate interest, and historic loyalties that go beyond arguable claims that this nation should exercise its wealth and military power in this or that way; it includes the axiom that one must vote, that liberal democracy constitutes a political order unexceptionably superior to other alternatives, that the way to resolve all conflicts is to hold a vote of some sort, hence that being right in the world should be correlative to winning, and since winning depends on out-numbering the wrong people (as Bill pointed out yesterday, the God of the Bible seems almost always to favor the smaller number), we get a persistent fascination with the number of members in churches, the number of votes for or against the denominational legislation Lillian mentioned in her sermon yesterday, and so on.

In this sense, then, I suggest that we need to take Sacramerica seriously as a cultural system. People really commit themselves to live (and die!) for the American Way. We don’t undermine that whole system of assumptions and the practices that express and reinforce Sacramerican beliefs simply by talking. To return to the Decalogue, it’s all very well for those of us who preach to devise fine sermons about national idolatry, on corporate idolatry, and on our sinful proclivity to suppose that we can sanctify our mortal purposes by invoking God’s Name over them often enough. But leaders who put their trust in the size of their armies, who believe they will be delivered by their great strength, don’t think of themselves as worshippers of Mars; they aren’t likely to acknowledge that they’ve put their faith in a god of war. And besides, when one of the most popular shows on television is candidly named “American Idol,” who’s going to balk at a little idolatry in a good cause?14 (When Margaret and I were at a conference last summer, we saw a cosmetics poster urging shoppers to “Be Your Own Idol.” It’s hard to think that’s promising sign.)

In order resist the signifying system of Sacramerica, I propose that we need to begin the work, the practice, of imagining our discipleship as an antithetical signifying practice, a practice of living in a way that throws Sacramerica off-step, out of balance.15 Now we could undertake a practice of resisting the dominant culture in the name of a new, better dominant culture – but that’s a trap. That invites us to construct Sacrekklesia or Sacramergent in the place of Sacramerica. Instead, I want to suggest a placeholder for signifying practices in resistance, and that placeholder rubric is “godliness.” I suggest that we aim at godliness (partly, of course, in response to Sapolio’s offer of cleanliness, but also) partly because this catches some of the pivotal importance of God’s identity as it’s revealed in the Decalogue; we ought to live in ways that bespeak the uniquely authoritative, aniconic, useless God of whom the commandments teach. Moreover, “godliness” gives us a target that’s harder for Sacramerica to explain away. If we target “justice” or “freedom” or “openness” as the characteristics of our people, the dominant culture can comfortably ignore us; they know all about justice and freedom and openness, and our protests that “that’s not what we mean by justice” or “that’s not true freedom” will fall on deaf ears. But godliness names a characteristic that the nation-state cannot as readily simulate and co-opt; we have a few more seconds of a fighting chance to define our own terms.

The number of possible syncopations we could throw at the imperial ethos of the commercial U.S. mission obviously exceeds my capacity to catalogue this morning, and (less obviously) exceeds my imagination. Moreover, if I were to propose one or two practices, probably practices at which I have some experience, I might make myself out an exemplary resister – but in the interest of binding this theoretical account to more concrete realizations of it, I’ll venture that risk here.

How might we activate a signifying practice of godliness? I’ll throw out a few suggestions, not expecting that my suggestions carry any authority just ’cos I’m standing up front of the gathering, but hoping that you’ll call up better, more winsome ideas. So here are some ways we might enact our signifying practice of Decalogical discipleship:

+ Not voting. Suggest not voting to a Sacramerican, and watch the explosions.

+ Home schooling, only not because you’re worried about evolution

+ Holy dying, to learn how gracefully let go of that gift in hand that we will eventually have to exchange for an inconceivably greater gift

+ Sell your cars. All of them.

+ Eat intentionally – vegan, vegetarian, eating only local produce perhaps

+ Other ideas that you all will suggest in the conversation time16

Life under Empire gets disorienting and disheartening. The Decalogue helps remind us why, because in the light to the Decalogue we see more clearly the differences between God and idols, between the empty Shrine and the empty tomb. If we keep covenant with the God of the Decalogue by shaping our lives to testify to the God of the Decalogue in contrast to Sacramerica or any other rival deity, we will have done what God requires of us – and we can gather, an imperfect but faithful body, to pray together the words of Thomas Cranmer: Lord, have mercy upon us, and incline our hearts to keep this law.

+++++++++++++
I’ll add notes later; tomorrow, maybe.

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Ekklesia Talking

I’m mostly set to go for this morning’s talk, although I’m not quite sure I’m awake yet (if I fall asleep in another session, please excuse me). I will post a full version (with notes!) as soon after the presentation as I can get back online.

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July 18, 2005

Canavaugh’s Empire

Bill Cavanaugh begins a talk about theology and empire by citing Michael Novak’s observation that democratic capitalism has constructed for religion an empty shrine — not out of hostility, he says, but of reverence. The difficulty is that the empty shrine ends up excluding the God of the Decalogue, and that the emptiness and openness that lie at the heart of empire lend themselves to expansionism and imperialism.

In the U.S. liberalism has been wed with corporate and state imperialism.

The reluctant empire: in order for the U.S. to have an empire, it must constantly deny that it has one. Since the democratic ethos that the U.S. sponsors lies at odds with the actual practice of dominating the world with military and economic power, we need to demur from the appearance that we might be willing actually to exercise that power.
And our modesty and reluctance confirm our worthiness to exercise dominant power.

The policy of pursuing “openness” serves the exploitative ends of developed capitalism: the U.S. needs “open” foreign markets for the export of our surplus; and now, we need cheap industrial goods bought on loans from foreign banks.

The openness of our system, the emptiness of the shrine ensure freedom and happiness for everyone: we’re the “universal nation.” American values are a sort of universal solvent for the flow of freedom and wealth — if we force others to accept our way. Because we are the truly universal nation, we’re unlike any other — the same rules don’t apply to us. In the emptiness of the shrine, the absence of an absolute end, the American way of life itself becomes the absolute end of the system.

American idealism and American selfishness both derive from the idea of limitlesss expansion. Bill combines Voltaire’s “I may not agree with what you say, but will defend to the death your right to say it” with the cinematic George Patton’s “Nobody ever won a war by dying for his country; you win a war by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.”

At the very moment when peace was supposed to arrive, as liberal democracy and free-market capitalism triumphed over communism, our very “openness” turns out to put us at ever-greater risk. National defense is supplanted by national security.

So, empire is understood as an attempt to see and act as God sees and acts, without limits; it stands at the point of universality, overcoming all particularities. The national God of the U.S. replaces

Exodus 19:5-6 — God instructs Israel that God encompasses all the earth, but makes a covenant with a particular people. The particularity of Israel won’t be effaced, because God has made a covenant with this people. The problem with transferring this covenantal relation from ancient Israel to the modern U.S. is (among other things) that the correct complement of Israel is not the U.S.A., but the church.

Exodus 20:2-6 — If the empty shrine has been filled with a national God, then we’re obviously breaking the first commandment. But “openness” doesn’t make a functional candidate for “idolatry.” But the invisibility of the national god shields it from critique. The empty shrine becomes the new Holy of Holies.

Exodus 20:13 — The state determines for itself whom it may kill — you can profess faith in any god you want, so long as you’re willing to kill for the American way of life. You may not kill, because life and death belong to God.

++++++++++++

Those were my notes. I may have gotten some things wrong, because Bill was talking faster than I can type — so if anything’s amiss, blame my stenographic skills, not Cavanaugh’s thinking.

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EP Today

I’ll spend most of the day at the first day of the Ekklesia Project Gathering — will blog some notes, at the end of the day if not sooner. Phil Kenneson tells me that all the presentations will be digitally recorded and posted online; that’s great to hear, because the other speakers (I’m thinking of William Cavanaugh and Sylvia Keesmaat, right off the top of my head) should be terrific.

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July 17, 2005

Potter Query

Has anyone noticed an oddity on page 485 of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince? Pippa observes that on that page, Prof. Slughorn tells Harry that he “had a house elf taste every bottle after what happened to your poor friend Rupert,” after an incident in which Harry’s friend Ron (played in the movies by actor Rupert Grint) was nearly poisoned. . . .

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Pointer Institute

Jordon is beset with pain, but not so limited that he can’t turn up tons of instructive links. Forty Things That Only Happen In Movies will satisfy readers such as I who are unwilling to suspend their disbelief (Pippa’s refrain: “Daddy, it’s a movie!”). SF writer C. J. Cherryh offers helpful tips for writers (directed mostly to writers of fiction, but helpful also for attentive expository writers). My students have heard the first two from me countless times. That reminded me of the Poynter Institute’s 50 Tools for Writers, by Roy Peter Clark — whose first tools likewise resonate with my counsel.

Wednesday’s healing mass at St. Luke’s was offered with special intentions for Jordon and for my dear sister-in-law. Take care, and get better and better, y’all.

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Shapely Discourse

David gracefully acknowledges that he didn’t think up the term “Public Relationships” himself (he cites EdelmanPR) — but did he devise the more delightful, “adding ‘hips’ to ‘public relations’ ”?

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July 16, 2005

Design Frustration

I’m working on the the final draft of my Ekklesia Project presentation, which I had been composing in typeface that Trevor and I had bought for the Disseminary, Scala by FontFont. It’s a handsome typeface, sturdy at small sizes, distinctive without being idiosyncratic. I have only one complaint: the foundry produces the various members of the family as entirely distinct typefaces, so that one can’t invoke the italic style simply by a keyboard command, or from the style menu of the application. It’s a small nuisance, but a real nuisance, and will be an even bigger nuisance if I were to decide to set the presentation in some other typeface.

Why does a leading type foundry deliberately distribute its products in a less-usable format?

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July 15, 2005

I Liked Sufjan Stevens Before I Knew

From the Onion AV Club section:

I go to a kind of Anglo-Catholic church now that I've been going to for the last three years, but I haven't really been raised that way. I'm definitely entrenched in the tradition now. I kind of admire it for being so traditional and sort of unchanging and unwavering in a lot of its doctrine, but also very sort of open and broad in its understanding of human nature. I like that it's kind of open to the discussion about the tensions between those two things.

I’m tickled, so I won’t kvetch about the part where he says, “Maybe [my faith] really shouldn't be a part of public discussion, because, you know, it really is about personal relationships.”

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Uncanny Sensation

Margaret and Pippa have gone for an overnight with friends.

Si is off to Justin’s wedding. I am alone in the house (well, Bea is here, but she doesn’t count.) It feels so unnervingly quiet!

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July 14, 2005

Roughly What I’ll Say

I shook together the bits of what I expect to say Tuesday at the Ekklesia Project Gathering, and this is what came out.

The title of the talk will be, “ ‘The Strong Right Arm That Holds For Peace’: Godliness as an Alternative to Empire.”

I’ll begin by walking through the first three commandments (working from Ex 20:2-7). I’ll read through and paraphrase them, with observations on the Hebrew and Greek, but I won’t emphasize the technical aspects — just give a sense of the diction and expression.

Then I’ll expound these words as an expression of God’s identity, from which we derive our way of life. We acknowledge God alone as the determinative premise/context for orienting our lives; we repudiate any mediatory representation of or alternative to God; we can not invoke God as leverage toward proximate ends. In other words, God is unique, aniconic, and inutile.

I’ll then sketch the ways that U.S. culture effects a displacement of the unique, aniconic, inutile God by intervening as complementary unique savior — but one that you can see, that does stuff for you. I’ll differentiate this from “idolatry” in the way that preachers conventionally characterize our captivity to capital, to entertainment, to achievement. The sacralized American way of life has displaced God, not presented itself as an alternative — but the God who addresses us as our unique, aniconic, inutile source of identity cannot be displaced without denying that God.

In case this all sounds too dramatic and too abstract, I’ll introduce a case study that shows one way in which Imperial America supplants God.

I’ll argue that the church does not fittingly testify to the God of the Decalogue (and resists the imperial American supplanter) by arguing over just what constitutes idolatry, or whether this or that constitutes an appropriate policy direction for the U.S. government. Partly, that’s because the very terms of the engagement distance us from our immediate allegiance to our God; and partly because our strongest arguments for the God of the Decalogue, against the sacred America, come when our identities bespeak as distinctly and unambiguously as possible, an embodied exposition of God’s identity.

We profess an alternative to Empire’s claim on our lives when we live in a way that our interlocutors cannot make sense of, apart from acknowledging that which sacral America cannot abide: we owe our allegiance only to God. While divinized America can couch its prerogatives in terms of justice, of freedom, it cannot make explicit claim to godliness as a civil virtue. The practice of godliness, of making manifest a persistent allegiance to the unique, aniconic, inutile God of the Decalogue, constitutes the church as an anti-Empire.

Well, it’ll all take a lot of fine-tuning — and it’s not an argument congenial to my many liberal-democratic friends, to the extent that (as much as I admire their steadfast commitment to representative democracy) I remain unable to vest my hopes in the the political process.

I’ll see whether I can record the talk when I give it, and I’ll post both the recording and a rough transcript.

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July 13, 2005

Dogmatic Prospects

The Disseminary is uploading the classic out-of-copyright Anglo-Catholic theology textbook Theological Outlines by Francis J. Hall. My student colleagues Debra Bullock and Ryan Whitley have already made great progress (Ryan’s name doesn’t appear yet, partly because he’s working on the second volume, and partly because he’s logged in from my own office computer). The entries are not quite in order; I’ll try to keep the hyperlinks rightly arranged as the articles come available. Eventually, we’ll try to whip up a marked-up XML version and a nicely-formatted PDF, but for now we’re concentrating on entering the data in the first place.

I don’t assent to everything Hall writes, but the presentation is straightforward and orderly, and there’s space for discussion in the comments. In many ways, it’s a proof-of-concept endeavor.

One reason I’m pointing to this now, while we’re still in-process, is that we have access to the second editions of volumes one and two, but only the first edition of volume three — and the second edition introduces some significant alterations. If someone has a second-edition third volume available that my assistants can use — and that involves a lot of scanning, so it risks the binding — please let us know. We’ll acknowledge your generous sharing on the site.

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July 12, 2005

Linguistic Evidence on eBay

As an inveterate ogler of holy cards, I was cruising the eBay Holy Card pages today when I spotted this bit of evidence in the James/Jacob dilemma of several weeks ago. Since the picture itself will disappear once the eBay auction is over, I’ll stipulate that the card in question depicts “Sint Jacobus de Mindere” — St. James the Less. Unfortunately, there was no accompanying card for Jacob the Patriarch.

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Collegial Scruples

I was listening to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Pippa’s covering all the Harry Potter books in the run-up to Saturday’s book release) when I smiled to hear McGonagall’s remark, “If it were not for the fact that I never speak ill of my colleagues. . . .” I can imagine that if I were a colleague of Trelawney’s, I too might be hard-pressed not to breach the collegiality about which I care deeply.

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What I Said (Or Would Have)

Michael Bérubé is planning to devote a series of blogposts to explaining why intellectually-active people ought to be acquainted with what’s gone on in “theory” over the past few decades, and if the whole series lives up to the clarity of his first entry, this’ll be a memorable contribution. I wish I had had the leeway to write as conversationally as he does when I put together my book on postmodern thought, but the editors very stiffly removed almost everything that resembled informal diction. Only by my utter intransigence did the book retain the traces of relaxed exposition that it does.

(I wrote this before Michael stopped by to correct my confusion about his current base of academic operations; annoyingly, I had noticed my mistake when I went to his site to read this very post, but then I forgot to correct myself.)

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July 11, 2005

Before Linnaeus and Buffon

David’s recent blogging about zoological taxonomies reminded me of a favorite book of mine, now beautifully reproduced online — the Aberdeen Bestiary.

Where else can you find the valuable knowledge that “when [the beaver] knows that a hunter is pursuing it, it bites off its testicles and throws them in the hunter's face and, taking flight, escapes. But if, once again, another hunter is in pursuit, the beaver rears up and displays its sexual organs. When the hunter sees that it lacks testicles, he leaves it alone.”? Or that the deadly basilisk (Harry Potter to the contrary notwithstanding) measures only 6 inches long, with white stripes? (Not my favorite illustrations of hoopoes, though.)

Dr. Weinberger, I hope you address the relation of this taxonomic (indeed, “folksonomic”) masterpiece to the internet, along with your reflections on its more famous heirs.

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July 10, 2005

Sermon Report

I stopped writing last night at about 12:15, came back and went to sleep. I woke up this morning, had a half-cup of coffee, and set to rewriting the ending. I wrapped up the rewrite in the sacristy at about 9:45, and the service started up at 10:00, right on time. I think the sermon went all right. I’ll tuck it into the extended section, and when St. Luke’s posts the MP3, I’ll link to it here.

The version I post here will differ in some details from the PDF that I’m sending off to St. Luke’s office, and will differ from the MP3 version, too. Is there a text in this sermon?

I beg your pardon – and I mean this in the very most flattering of ways – but as we file in past our new gardening initiative here at St. Luke’s, and in the immediate afterglow of this morning’s gospel lesson, this congregation has begun to look more than just a little bit seedy. In fact, if we may invoke other biblical passages as well – the ones where Jesus and St. Paul remind us unless a grain falls into the earth and dies, it bears no fruit – that we could say that around St. Luke’s this morning, we look not only seedy but also grainy. Now, it’s summertime, we’re all allowed a little leeway in our appearance, and heaven knows that we’ve been through a lot together — so there’s no penalty for seedy, grainy discipleship around here. Indeed, in our seediness, in our graininess lies a saving hope, a hope that even tiny, casual, summertime mustard-seed faith may turn out to amount to more than it appears.

More indeed, as we listen to this morning’s lessons, where our seedy identity takes on the dramatic features of a high-budget Hollywood action movie. As we’re scattered along the road, we encounter voracious evil birds that swoop down to snatch us from the sheltering embrace of the earth. We encounter deceptively promising shallow earth, giving us refuge at first, but ultimately unable to protect us from the scorching heat. We encounter dangerous plants that try to choke us as we’re growing toward God. It’s life and death in that garden, friends, and if we could assign Mr. Scarozza and the choirs to supply us with an ominous soundtrack, we could perceive that this innocuous, homey parable puts up a charming agricultural façade that conceals a horrifying movie-trailer full of threats and dangers.

A lot of people want only that pretty façade of that parable; many people hope that if they only think cheery thoughts about sweet songbirds and blue skies and green lawns, then nothing bad can happen. Somewhere along the line, somebody encouraged the enchanting premise that every seed will find a cozy furrow, ample refreshing rain, fertile earth, with no predatory crows nor opportunistic weeds. Someone figured out that the illusion of a blue-sky, green-grass, white-clapboard paradise wins more votes, sells more cars, scores higher Nielsen ratings. The commercial illusion of a perfect field grows more prominent, more dominant, than the uncomfortable awareness that none of us lives in such a place. You all know better; some of us sitting right here have crossed minefields and mountains, we have eluded gunfire and mobs, to come to this haven, this altar of peace – and all os us will return from this altar to homes whose tranquility may anytime give way to unforeseeable tragedy. We read about danger in the news from Baghdad, and we hear about danger from our friends in London. Yea, we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, and neither perfect pastel daydreams nor guns and armor will protect us.

And so we stand up in the perilous garden we now inhabit, and we turn to the gospel, and we incline our ears to hear from Jesus a parable that helps us make sense of the chaotic wildness around us; we listen, so that we may live. When Jesus gives us the cue to enter the parable ourselves, we come in as the various combinations of seed and soil, combinations that partake both of circumstances that we don’t control, and of our response to those circumstances. The first scattering of seed fell on soil that certainly didn’t try to be trodden down to a hardened path, and the birds don’t come to punish seeds for sinned against God – but when the Word is scattered among us, we can try to receive and shelter and embody the Word in our lives. The thorns don’t choke the young grain to teach it a theological lesson, and the soil can’t eject the roots of unwelcome weeds – but we can acknowledge the perils of growing in the thorny soil of prosperity and comfort. We can try to protect the fast-growing shoots of faith, so that the sun not strike them by day, nor any scorching heat. We can listen for the Word, listen and understand, and use all our living energies to show the depth and the strength and the power of the gospel. We can let go of futile striving in this disorderly field, where the good wheat grows up right alongside useless tares. The bad things that happen to good people show us creation groaning in travail, awaiting a harmony that comes not from us, from our frail determination to make things right, but from harmony itself, from the source and definition of all that is right. And we stand up out here in the fields, and we hear a promise that whatever befall one or two of us, the birds and thorns and drought can’t stop us all.

And we stand up in pews that have witnessed sad, frustrating, divisive meetings; we stand among kneelers that have supported the prayers of this faction and that one without discrimination. We stand in the aisle that has borne the mortal bodies of our sisters and brothers, our children and parents, from this patch of unkempt garden to pastures of grace and boundless peace, and we affirm the promise that we will be united with our loved ones when God reveals a heavenly feast where everyone who thirsts, everyone who hungers, may come, buy, and eat priceless wine and milk – wine and milk that God has provided at a cost we could never reckon.

And we stand in the ashes left by towering skyscrapers and a crowded rail stations and Underground trains, and we raise a psalm of grief and pain that gives voice to God’s own Spirit bearing witness with our spirit. And in our divine threnody, we commit ourselves all the more to resist the grim power of hatred and retaliation. The grain triumphs not by trying to transmute itself into stinging nettles, nor by summoning weevils to consume the tares, but by growing, by flourishing, by bringing to harvest all the nutritious, life-giving fruit it can bear. And though our numbers be diminished by predatory violence or by brutal greed, we will rise with a power for health and salvation that no enemy, no force of nature, no weakness or frailty can suppress.

Anyone can tear down, anyone can fall. Falling is what happens when we determine to do things on our own terms, by our own power, apart from God’s grace. Anyone can slash, trivialize, trample and destroy; that’s a work of the flesh, an achievement anyone with a brick or a boot or a bomb can share. This week, this morning, we sing that we’re done with falling.

We will rise, because no chains of slavery, no burden of terror can weight us down to death. No violence can reduce us to victims. We have walked and stumbled through fields of grief, and having shared with Christ in his suffering, we will rise to share with him in his glory.

We will rise, because we have heard God’s promise of rain and snow to refresh and strengthen us – because we know that God’s word does not go forth in vain, but will accomplish what God purposes, and will prosper God’s handiwork. We will rise, because we are debtors not to the flesh, to live and die as mere skin and bones, but we owe our vitality to the spirit, by which we turn to the source of our being. We will rise, because as long as there’s dirt and sun and water, “rising” is what we seeds do.

We will rise, because something has been implanted in us that does not stop at death. In fact, we perceive that in Jesus Christ – the word implanted in us – our rising has already begun. Filaments of faith now bind us to his rising, draw us onward, and pull us out of muddy mortality. Our roots are set for rising; our stalks shoot upward, strain skyward; and stretching to our utmost capacities, we offer all that we can give, to God and to the wheat-fields that root and feed us. This morning, our songs gather up our yearning now for an exaltation that we receive in prospect, in promise, in solidarity with seedy saints over centuries. We rise, this morning and every morning, not by cinematic special effects, but by irrepressible grace, bearing the spiritual fruit of harmony and peace, whereby we reveal the true imperishable life of us seedy children of God.

Posted by AKMA at 06:55 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Call It “Pseudonymous Bosh”

Now, both Micah and David have pointed to a relatively foolish article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the point of which is that academic job-seekers shouldn’t blog. Why? Well, if a search committee sees your blog and doesn’t like what they see, they might not hire you. They will fear that you’d tell a reading public about what their institution is really like. They prefer to hire someone about whom they know less, on the assumption that the bits they don’t know about will all be agreeable and impressive.

The fatuities and fallacies therein defy enumeration. To take it from the top, the article assumes that a job-seeker should want a job so desperately that she or he would want to be hired by a department that wouldn’t choose her or him if they knew the truth. It assumes that if they don’t know you’re a blogger when they hire you, you won’t embarrass them at any point in the future (and that if you’ve blogged soundly and discreetly for years, you’re more apt to spill tawdry details than someone who hasn’t established a track record for public discretion). It assumes that blogs constitute a unique mode of public communication — so that a disgruntled blogger poses more of a decorum risk than would a disgruntled academic novelist.

The article puts the search committee in a bad light, since it demonstrates that they made unsatisfactory choices for finalists. The problems among these candidates weren’t the blogs per se, but with character flaws that came into focus through the blog (or, in one case, apart from the blog — though the columnist seems to count the blog against that candidate anyway!). Does the pseudonymous columnist think that Duke wouldn’t have hired Mark Goodacre if they’d known? that George Mason wouldn’t have hired Dorothea if they’d known? Maybe Penn [State] can find a way to dump Michael Bérubé; what an embarrassment he must be!

The article says a very great deal more about the competence and insight of the author and the search committee than it says about blogging.

Posted by AKMA at 05:00 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

This Rocks Mightily

The other day I was pestering Stewart about when Flickr would incorporate e-postcard capability; I imagined a “Send as Postcard” button right there beside the “Blog This” button. Stewart suggesteed that they’d been holding off on this function so as not to overburden their servers, but that it might come soon.

What I didn’t anticipate was that somebody else would use the Flickr API to send Creative Commons-licensed photos as postcards — but that’s just what Delivr has done (link via Tom Coates). Ultra-cool! I’ve already sent a Pippa-postcard. . . .

Posted by AKMA at 01:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Millionairian Dispensationalists

Until the day that nobody ever reads another Left Behind novel (except, perhaps, as an exercise in historico-literary curiosity), one cannot link often enough to Fred “Slacktivist” Clark’s painstaking dissection of exactly what makes these The Worst Books Ever Written.

Right now, if you Google “left behind,” Slacktivist comes in behind a number of the LaHaye/Jenkins franchise moneymakers and the federal government’s underfunded education initiative. If we all link to his Left Behind category archive, maybe we can push him to an above-the-fold PageRank, so that searchers can see the antidote on the same screen as the theological, literary poison.

Posted by AKMA at 08:25 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 09, 2005

Checking In

Having a hard time with the sermon. That is all.

[Later: One of the side benefits of being stuck for a sermon has entailed a rush of good ideas for my Ekklesia Project talk. The sermon, however, is still resisting. I’m considering the possibilities of homiletical Pictionary for tomorrow morning. . . .]

Posted by AKMA at 01:57 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 08, 2005

Intriguing Argument

Margaret and I enjoyed meeting Philip Blond a few years back at the annual theologians’ meeting — but we hadn’t heard or seen much from him since. I was interested to see that he and a friend of his have a column up in the International Herald Tribune on “how the West gets religion wrong.” I’d wish for more precision, less punch, at a few points — but it’s worth reading and considering, anyway.

Posted by AKMA at 04:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Bless the Web

Last week, I received emails out of the blue from a high school friend (with whom I don’t think I’d communicated since we left for our colleges) and a former student. (Hi, Rob! Hi, Vito!) Now I’m trying to track down a couple of former students, whose wedding sermon had mysteriously vanished from my digital archives. This afternoon, as I was straightening up the study for a visit from Nate, I found the missing wedding sermon, and want to pass it along to my friends. I’ll post it here in the extended portion of the post, sans names, while I try to pull together the shards of a sermon for St. Luke’s this Sunday.

Now Micah’s just checking in as he and Laura make their way languorously to California.

So this Web thing — it’s really great for sociality. I worry that people who don’t get thoroughly involved with the Web will become isolated, cut off from the people around them.

+ In the Name of God Almighty, the Blessed Trinity on high – Amen.

You are not far from the kingdom of God, Betty and Joe. In about fifteen minutes – or perhaps twenty or twenty-five, depending on how long the preacher talks – you’ll take on one of the most uncanny commitments a human can make. You have already pledged before the all-witnessing God that from now on your lives will intertwine so intimately and completely that the church understands you to be one shared life; in a moment we will solemnize and bless that promise, and you will put yourselves in a way that will lead you ever closer to understanding how close you have come to the kingdom of God – and some days, how far away you remain.

You’re getting closer to God’s way, because God did not create us for solitude. “Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil,” and “if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone?” Now, rewards are good, and warmth is good; yet it isn’t reward or warmth in itself that brings us nearer God’s walk. The way of life that Jesus commends to us derives its strength and hope, its vitality and freedom from the sinews of trusting hope that hold us together, spouses together, family together, friends together, drawinng us ever closer to the perfect love and trust that we find in the presence of God.

That love that trust are not automatic; we know that. Unimaginable contingencies lie ahead of us. Ours is not a marriage of fuzzy pink pillows and cloying verse. It’s a marriage sealed with tears of wound and regret, with the sweat of late stifling nights and struggling through misunderstanding and adversity, with blood shed in calamity, perhaps in childbirth. Yours will be a rare love if it does not bring with it irritation and disappointment as well as ecstasy and joy. The joy arrives when you discover that we can sustain one another through such unwelcome possibilities without giving up; the ecstasy comes from finding ourselves that much closer to God’s way, to God’s walk.

Love does fluctuate, but love does not yield; life fluctuates around love. Though chance can touch and wound us, chance cannot touch love. By magic, or by the Force, or by God’s Holy Spirit, the power of love is real; it happens.

This marriage, of which we all are part, to which we all have committed ourselves, will sometimes suffer damage from life’s contingencies. Chance will strike you unawares, and we’ll need to work together for the sake of your shared, united life. We can support you through weaving your lives into one holy robe, and it’s magic, and it’s fearful and dangerous, and it is as great a blessing as any soul can receive.

Joe, Betty, you both love faith, the giddying certainty that there will always remain a truth that we can’t parse, on which we must nevertheless rely. Tonight, enter a covenant that teaches souls some of what it means to walk with a God whom we know by faith. Give to one another that trust from which you will dare to live as bodies and souls set free to love the world richly, deeply, truly. Love one another, for the God of heaven and earth calls for our love to each other and to all our neighbors. And when, in just a few more minutes, I invite you to make holy vows to one another, answer wisely – for you are indeed not far from the kingdom of God.

Amen

Posted by AKMA at 02:32 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Just Asking

Does anyone in the U.S.A. need another tote bag?

I think we could solve a great many problems by the creative re-purposing of the cornucopia of tote bags that we’ve received at various conferences over the years since the conference tote bag has become a de rigeur tschochke. Maybe the irrepressible imagination of Gary Turner can devise appealing uses for these otherwise redundant vessels. (Yes, we can start by taking them shopping with us, and not using so many hydrocarbons and paper products — but I’m thinking even beyond that important possibility.)

Posted by AKMA at 11:05 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 07, 2005

Belated Greetings

I tend not to pay much attention to my blogroll; I use my bookmarks more for navigation, and my newsreader for a sense of what’s going on at the moment. So the blogroll falls dusty, while I merrily navigate by other means to sites I enjoy.

But then I need to play catch-up, and with the recent arrival of Raisin and Laurel, I needed to add Debra and the Archer along with our newer neighbors to my blogroll to keep up with Seaburian bloggers (I think I’ve got ’em all, now, don’t I?). Welcome to Blogaria, and I hope you find it as refreshing and encouraging a community as I have.

[Later: Whoops! I had a lingering feeling that I had left out whose blog had been an immediate provocation to update. Sorry, Brooke — Seabury alum, former student, current colleague!]

[A few minutes later: Gentle Jane reminded me that I had also left off Mark and Todd, among my own academic progeny, and Emily, who graduated a year or two before I arrived at Seabury. This sort of embarrassing development illustrates my utter detachment from my blogroll, since I knew well enough where to find them.]

Posted by AKMA at 10:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Heads Bowed

I’m human enough to give heartfelt thanks that none of the Londoners I know was harmed by this morning’s terror bombings. For those who will endure long years suffering the effects of those attacks — whether in their flesh, in their spirit, or in the heartsickness of an absent love — we’ll keep you in our hearts and prayers.

When tumult forces itself upon us, the church bears a special responsibility to respond out of its compassion and patience, out of the knowledge of a depth that comes to expression not in threadbare imprecations, but in gentleness and constancy. Our worship and our proclamation enact a hope that outshines any gloom that grim spite stirs up, and that hope is the church’s distinct gift to share with a world that stakes its future only on fluctuating configurations of temporal power, that sacrifices the lives of God’s children on the altar of domination. Grace and peace be with every reader who comes here, and may grace and peace prevail in our reactions to every death-dealing fury that assails us.

Posted by AKMA at 10:17 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Got Off Light

Doc points to a story about a man in my former home base, St. Petersburg, Florida, who seems to have been arrested for using an open wifi signal. Sounds as though police have stepped up their enforcement since my experience on Nantucket last summer.

Posted by AKMA at 07:22 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

July 06, 2005

1980 In Music

I have for a long time wanted to do some work on retrospective review of popular culture — the sorts of work that usually receive immediate reviews in the popular press, receive annual awards (or don’t), and then give way to the next, latest release. How often do entertainment-industry flacks anoint someone as the next Bob Dylan, or assert the monumental importance of this or that movie, when a few years afterward those overinflated award-winning works of genius crowd cut-out bins and used-video sale shelves?

I’m starting with 1980 because it’s twenty-five years ago, a very good round number, and because I was still listening to enough music that my opinions warrant more than derisive attention. We can branch out from there to other years, and to movies (of which I watch relatively few). I’ll base many music observations on my iTunes database, which is subject to misleading labels and outright errors — but gives me a starting point, anyway. (More dangerously, for my reputation, I’ll overlook some albums that I own but haven’t ripped yet, especially risky since those will be the more-often-played CDs by more prominent artists.) Then I’ll sum up by proposing awards that seem fitting to me, in quantities and categories that suit my whimsy.

In 1980, the Grammys lauded the Doobie Brothers (“What a Fool Believes”) and Billy Joel for (Phil “Wanted” Ramone-produced) 52nd Street. Ricki Lee Jones was their Best New Artist. Muddy Waters got an award for Muddy Mississsippi Waters Live, and Irakere got a Grammy for their eponymous album. Donna Summer won Best Female Rock Performance for “Hot Stuff”; Bob Dylan, Male, for “Gotta Serve Somebody”; the Eagles, Group, for “Heartache Tonight”; and Paul McCartney and Wings, Instrumental, for “Rockestra Theme” (I appreciate fundraisers as much as many people, but you’ve got to be kidding). The R&B selections: Dionne Warwick for “Déjà vu”; Michael Jackson for “Don't Stop ’til You Get Enough”; Earth, Wind & Fire for “After the Love Has Gone”; and Earth, Wind & Fire for “Boogie Wonderland.”

Jazz: Oscar Peterson for Jousts; Chick Corea & Gary Burton for Duet; Duke Ellington for Duke Ellington at Fargo, 1940 Live; Weather Report for 8:30; and Ella Fitzgerald for Fine and Mellow.

(Grammy reports courtesy of the Wikipedia.)

Ummm, yes; something was happening, but they didn’t know what it was, did they?

1980 was a monster year for music in my iTunes collection: I’ll just throw out the following terrific albums for starters: Elvis Costello, Get Happy!!; David Bowie’s Scary Monsters; the Pretenders’ first album; Peter Gabriel’s third solo album named Peter Gabriel; X, Los Angeles; Dire Straits, Making Movies; Dead Kennedys, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables; Jim Carroll Band, Catholic Boy; Bruce Springsteen, The River; XTC, Black Sea; Roxy Music, Flesh + Blood. Friends, that’s a very good year.

On the R&B front, Prince’s Dirty Mind album was released, and Kurtis Blow released “The Breaks.”

I see a handful of “not quite” albums. The Beat’s I Just Can’t Stop It (ooh, now that I take a closer look, that album leaps in my estimation); the B-52’s, Wild Planet; the Specials, More Specials (though their reappropriation of “Maggie’s Farm” came out that year, I think, winning them bonus points for taste and political pertinence); Squeeze, Argybargy. Blondie’s Autoamerican catches them way past their best work, and Devo’s Freedom of Choice likewise seems a sign of falling-off (sad that “Whip It!” captured the public imagination rather than the title cut — can someone re-release or remix that in honor of the present condition of U.S. politics?). The Stones’ Emotional Rescue is just sad.

OK, here are some AKMA awards for the year 1980, subject to correction and amplification when others point out stuff I missed:

1980’s Album Lingering in My Consciousness: Making Movies.

Unfairly Overshadowed Album: (Well, “unfairly overshadowed movie,” with album in tow) Rockers, the amiable reggae potpourri film that will never emerge from the shadow of The Harder They Come.

Great Covers: “Soul Kitchen,” by X; “Stop Your Sobbing,” the Pretenders (I love her a capella intro); “Eight Miles High,” Roxy Music.

Too Late Reintroduction: Professor Longhair got some posthumous press for Crawfish Fiesta, from listeners who should have been paying attention all along. The Muddy Waters album was pretty good, too; I guess the Grammys can’t get everything wrong (though if I were a folk artist, I might be grouchy about the blues taking this award, though if I were a blues artist, I’d respond that at least “folk” had a category of its own. OK, enough bickering).

Best Single: Not the Romantics’ insidiously catchy “What I Like About You,” nor “ ‘Antmusic!’ ” by Adam and the Ants, the prescient “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles, but the especially deserving “That’s Entertainment” from the Jam’s Sound Affects.

Best Debut: The Pretenders.

Best Album: Top to bottom, I suppose I have to go for The River.

That’s how I see it, anyway; but I’m probably forgetting something, 1980 being so long ago and all.

Posted by AKMA at 02:17 PM | Comments (11)

July 05, 2005

F.Y.I.

Have you ever seen someone fill in the periods for the abbreviation “RSS”? I hadn’t wither, until I saw this article from the New York Times (registration required). The main emphasis falls on the protocol’s possibilities for advertising, so we may overlook the author’s silence on the contribution of various developers to the history of RSS (actually, that silence is what caught Margaret’s attention, and she pointed me to the article) — they do, however, weigh in in favor of Dave Winer, that RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” (rather than “Rich Site Summary”). Money quotation: “We need to preserve all of the things that are good about R.S.S. feeds right now and also introduce the opportunity for publishers to monetize those feeds,” according to Google’s Shuman Ghosemajumder.

I’m no fan of monetizing anything, though I’m more sympathetic than Wonderchicken to the idea of scrounging bloggers picking up some paper and iron for blogs they’d be writing anyway. But the corporate sound of the whole article reminded me of the ways that our conversation has changed since I first learned what I’d been missing online. And it would be willfully foolish of me to suppose, under the circumstances, that money hasn8’t changed anything.

Posted by AKMA at 07:52 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Another Skill to Cultivate

I have to develop my capacity to photograph art, I guess; my casual pictures of Pippa’s canvases falls radically short of the power of the images themselves. The photographs miss the texture and richness of the oils; I think Pip likes oil paint in part because she can mix colors without entirely blending them — an effect it’s hard to capture with just an offhand photo. Lighting and color balance affect the presentation, too.

Once I almost had a job doing art photography as a work-study position in college. It seemed so direly tedious, though: line up the page on the stand, check the lighting, snap the shutter, again, again, again. No composition; no decisive moment. Now I look back on that relatively automated set-up and grumble that I have a hard time reproducing the correct circumstances time after time.

Anyway, two more Pippa canvases today, with several watercolors to come soon (I can scan those — oh, joy!).

Posted by AKMA at 07:30 PM | Comments (0)

July 04, 2005

Again, DRM

Umair scores a bunch of direct hits in this argument that proponents of DRM are dealing with the digital transition all wrong, basing his claims on the economic effects of DRM imposition.

One more time, with feeling: whatever turns out to be the appropriate way to distribute revenues in the world of digital media, that new model will work based on the characteristics of digital media, not by forcing digital media to emulate characteristics of physical-media distribution.

Posted by AKMA at 04:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Work In Progress

I might be working on Sunday’s sermon, for which I do have the germ of an idea — but instead, I’m sketching the preface to the published version of the Winslow lectures and ruminating about my presentation to the Ekklesia Project in a couple of weeks.

Relative to the latter, I find myself (that’s for Debra and the Seabury writing group) musing about the ideological implications of the first three commandments. For those who don’t have them memorized, those go roughly as follows:

I am the Lord your God who brought you out of bondage.
You shall have no other gods but me.

You shall not make for yourself any idol.

You shall not invoke with malice the Name of the Lord your God. (BCP)

or

I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.

You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, punishing children for the iniquity of parents, to the third and the fourth generation of those who reject me, but showing steadfast love to the thousandth generation of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the LORD your God, for the LORD will not acquit anyone who misuses his name. (NRSV Ex 20:2-7; cf. also Dt 5:6-11)

I’m working on the notion that the first commandment asserts God’s unique priority over all other considerations; in the context of a resurgent sense of Empire, that unique priority refuses all compromise with any nation’s claims to historic, or economic, or theological privilege. (I’m intrigued that at this point, God does not claim unique existence — “As for all the gods of the nations, they are but idols” (BCP, Ps 96:5); rather, the First Commandment simply insists that all other rivals be subordinated to God’s authority.) The Second Commandment then insists on God’s aniconicity, the extent to which God’s people must not affix their allegiance to any specific (tangible, visible) representation of God. That which is sacred can’t be figured in a way that captures the divine nature (so that our representations themselves can never be objects of worship). And the Third Commandment warns that we may not use God; whereas one might plausibly reason that knowledge of the Divine Name gave us a kind of leverage, a power-with God if not a power-over God, the commandment stipulates that we invoke God at our own peril. Even God’s name, the uniquely fitting alphabetic/phonetic representation of God, comes to us not as a tool to be used, but only as a means of recognizing that greater truth, greater promise, by which we order our sublunary efforts to orient ourselves toward the sole source and end of all that is, and of all that should be.

For about forty minutes. That’s what I’m thinking right now.

Posted by AKMA at 12:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Navigational Tip

This story about a “mysterious plume of water vapor” warns “ships should avoid the area.”

I hope Chris is on top of this — taken with the first sign of the apocalypse, it may portend the kinds of paranormal events that only a prophet such as he can duly diagnose.

Posted by AKMA at 10:07 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

July 03, 2005

Curious Consumer

I’m thinking about portable digital audio recording. Not the “sneak-it-into-a-Stones-concert kind,” nor the voice-memo kind, but the kind suitable for recording a lecture, or an interview, or a chapter of a Creative-Commons-licensed book. I would have thought that such devices were relatively inexpensive and common, but my cursory overview of the market suggests an abysmal gap between utterly casual memo machines (I can’t see one of them without thinking of Michael Keaton in Night Shift) and semi-pro music-recording devices.

The most appealing in-between choice would be a MiniDisc recorder, but it looks as though Sony has made it so difficult to transfer data back and forth that it’s not worth the expense of the MiniDisc technology. Am I missing something here?

Posted by AKMA at 10:38 PM | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Welcome, Baby Delaina and Mother Susie

Congratulations to Anna and Clifton Healy on the birth of their new daughter Delaina (on the anniversary of Anna’s late brother Delane’s birth). Three cheers to Delaina, Anna, and Clifton — and a special extra cheer for big sister Sofie.

Congratulations also to dear friend Susie, on her ordination to the priesthood. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it, but I hear you were surrounded by friends and supporters. Prayers for you and your ministry, and for your clergy spouse Luke!

Posted by AKMA at 07:17 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Three Named Sources

From the treeware media, three columns called to my attention. First, Kevin called my attention to a column in the Telegraph, one that might have been titled “No Theology Please, We’re Anglicans.” Even though I’m a vocational theologian who winces at the author’s suggestion that he daydreams past “the concern for Jesus, for the Church's mission, the affirmation of doctrine,“ and that he likes his religion privatized, I think the columnist hits something just right. A large part of church-going, of caring about the church, lies in this: people are drawn to the church’s inchoate expression of something shared, something deep and true, something so powerfully right that it need not bluster and threaten to make its point. That truth comes explicit in the language of familiar hymns and traditional liturgy — such that well-intentioned efforts to spruce up those timeworn formulas risk losing exactly that which attracts many people to church in the first place. That’s not simply hidebound narrow-minded conservatism; rather, it’s a genuine affirmation of a faith less ephemeral, less topical, less contemporaneous than the liturgical or musical catch of the day. Yes, absolutely, I advocate liturgical change (there’s no need, really, since liturgical change will happen whether anyone likes the idea or not); but yes, absolutely, it’s a much more delicate operation than most sponsors of liturgical change admit — in part, I suspect, because there are more people who want to write new liturgies (in their own words!) than there are people with the gifts to revise respectfully, elegantly, and inconspicuously.

Anyway, if church leaders were to begin by appreciating and encouraging people’s inclination to come to church out of loyalty and happy habit, and work from there to help them see the deeper dimensions of their words and actions, I would expect a stronger practice of evangelism. Indeed, this points, I suspect, to the tragic flaw of the strong “traditionalist” current in Anglicanism. Whereas their great strength lies in exactly their concern to preserve the precious liturgical and theological endangered species of church life, they endeavor so to do with a forcefulness that’s out-of-keeping with the spiritual calm that the tradition’s liturgies bespeak (whereas the church modernizers affect the tradition’s serenity even if they’re promulgating prosaic, didactic petitions to a Liberal Democrat of a deity).

Speaking of Democrats, Bob Wyatt asks what I think of an op-ed in the Sun-Times that points out how unlikely it is for Democrats to prosper in the rhetorical economy that rewards Karl “Frog March?” Rove for ascribing manifestly false motives to Sen. Durbin and his comrades, whereas Sen. Durbin speculated (manifestly soundly) that most of his listeners would not readily believe that U.S. interrogators were capable of the inhumanity exemplified in Guantanamo. What do I think? I think that the present partisan environment pits the fearful (led by the duplicitous) against the cautious (led by the compromised). For the time being, I anticipate only the rival demagogueries of toadies and equivocators, a disheartening spectacle all around. (I should say that the interview with Sen. Hagel in today’s NYT Magazine, registration required, sorry, suggested a bracing alternative on the Republican side of this set-to.)

Finally, I appreciated a motif latent in Judith Maltby’s column in the Guardian. Maltby laments the Church of England’s unwillingness to call women to the episcopacy; she asks, “Can anyone reasonably believe that if the selection of bishops was based purely on ability, we would, at present, have an all-male college of bishops, or that only men would sit as spiritual peers in the House of Lords?” Now, the traditional argument includes a premise that Maltby conceals, namely that the “ability” in question constitutively includes gender as a qualification — so indeed (the argument runs), the present bishops possess an ability that able ordained women lack. I don’t assent to that premise, of course, but it’s an element of the case.

But the point that especially caught my eye was Maltby’s next paragraph: “the Christian must always be ill at ease with arguments based on ‘merit’ in this way. At the end of the day, ordained ministry is not about how qualified or able a person is, though that is no excuse for slipshod practices in the professional work of the clergy.” Though this is not the main point of her column, she strikes a glancing blow at the neuralgic funnybone of the church’s predicament. In the name of inclusiveness and grace, the church has developed a lingering indifference to excellence. Until the church learns how to encourage excellence without reinforcing elitism, we can look forward mostly to a painfully protracted series of task forces, committee meetings, partisan salvos, huffy defensivenesses, and overall tawdry decline. One doubts that this is a mark of the indwelling Spirit.

Posted by AKMA at 04:40 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

More Recent, But Still Pre-Dave, Pre-Jorn, Pre-PeterMe

Joey can add this frame from Calvin and Hobbes, July 3 1994, to his collection of prescient comics that deploy the word “blog” before the advent of weblogging. . . .

Posted by AKMA at 12:03 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 02, 2005

Memento

Doc’s pages in memorial to Susan Camusi offer a compelling witness to why we might wish we had known Susan and how we would miss her; to the Web’s capacities for memoriousness (I keep telling churches that they need to pick up this particular clue phone); and to Doc’s gentle, affectionate heart. Doc illustrates what it might have meant to have a friend such as Susan, and that in turn shows us what a blessing it would be to have such a friend as he.

Posted by AKMA at 03:11 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Recommendation

I encourage everyone to rush and download ArtRage, the free natural-media paint program from Ambient Design. One never knows how long a generous company will prolong its generosity, and ArtRage offers a variety of top-notch tools for the unbeatable price of naught. (I was hoping Pippa would like it as much as it turns out that she does!)

My only desideratum would be a slight tweak of the trace tool (which Pippa used in painting this portrait of my beloved). In its present iteration, the trace tool reproduces across its whole width and stroke the color it finds at its starting point. It would be truly niftily handy if one could use the paint tools to apply stroke and paper texture, but have the color change with the color of the underlying photo (I believe Painter does this, or used to). But zowie, this is a very slick tool.

Posted by AKMA at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)

Grassroots Identity

I was intrigued by Joi’s pointer toward Dan Gillmor’s “Honor Tags”; this looked like a step toward a bottom-up, interconnected reputation system. I’ll watch it with interest, but right now it seems narrow; what tag would apply to Shelley? to me?

Posted by AKMA at 08:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 01, 2005

Aha!

It took a while, and then I forgot to look online, but if you click here, you will see the Christian Century’s version of my post on whether clergy should wear distinctive clothes. Of course, this is just a convenience for you, since most of you deluged your local bookseller for copies of the print edition.

Posted by AKMA at 09:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Behind the Scenes in the Artist’s Studio

It’s no secret that I’m very enthusiastic about Pippa’s painting. As much as she has impressed me in the past, though, she continues to surprise me in various ways.

A while back, Pippa worked on a very large canvas that Margaret and I picked up on sale; that canvas and the tempera paints we bought for her really sparked her current productivity. She would spend hours dow in the basement, listening to NPR and toiling at a three-by-four foot canvas of a pond in the woods. After weeks of work, though, Pippa lost interest in that piece (page, work, substance, text, material, post, truc) and moved on to smaller canvases, and to oil paint. She disliked the way that tempera cracked when dry, and she felt frustrated at the way the composition worked (or didn’t).

So a few days ago, I asked if I should wash the tempera off the big canvas so that she could have at it again, for a different composition, with different paints. She thought about it for a while, considered the costs and benefits, and agreed that it made sense. Today I hauled the monster out into the back yard with the hose, and started spraying. Should be easy, right? Tempera, washes right off?

First, I was astounded at what the washing-off process revealed. Layer after layer of underpainting: the near-solid green background of the forest trees yielded to a marvelous patchwork of leaves of distinct hues; the large rock in the foreground showed alternating layers of black, white, and gray; the lily pads disintegrated from solid green pads to blossoming lilies, to white-struck-with-black, back to green; the black water of the pond revealed a sky blue patch. And — being Pippa — she had painted the edges of the canvas as well, not simply in continuity with the first layer of color, but layer after layer, treating the edges as integral aspects of the whole.

After forty minutes of scouring spray, I still face a canvas with a green upper half, a gray lower half, and a vast patch of white paint in the foreground. I’ve only been able to get three or four layers of paint off. Maybe later in the afternoon I’ll have at it again, to scrub away the inadvertent Rothko into a more nearly blank field for Pippa’s next venture.

Posted by AKMA at 12:23 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack