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October 31, 2005

Blog Globe

Today’s mail brought me a DVD of the June 23 telecast of Envoyé Spécial, the French TV program that devoted a half hour to covering the emergence of blogs as a social phenomenon. The producers sent me a copy because the segment concludes with a brief series of shots of St. Luke’s church and me, talking about blogs and particularly about my casual suggestion that someone look into archiving the sites and posts of deceased bloggers — what Joi and David called “AKMA’s Cyber Crypt.” In other words, I provide the mild comic relief after others demonstrate the salacious, political, and journalistic aspects of blogging (as one viewer commented, “perfect for making the blogosphere look ridiculous”).

I suppose I’d have liked the French viewing public to hear about some of my, um, deeper ideas about theology, technology, postmodernism, or biblical hermeneutics — but it’s not surprising that only the goofy idea got edited into the final cut. I’ll remember that the photography around St. Luke’s was lovely, and seeing the segment reminded me of what a good time I had talking with the crew.

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FWIW

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October 30, 2005

To Do, Really, Must

Sermon for tomorrow, sermon for Thursday’s conference, overdue paper for SBL conference.

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Imposing Task

I have a request of the LazyWeb, or the Expert-Readers Web, or something. It involves Macs, pages, PDF, and printing.

The problem is this: I produce a lot of documents for students. Custom and the material circumstances of production typically require that I print them on 8.5 × 11 paper, with roughly a 1-inch margin all ’round.

That’s not the most suitable format for reading or printing, though — otherwise, our bookshelves would be crammed with folio and quarto-sized volumes, instead of the much more common duodecimo size. No big problem; almost all word processors (and all page-layout programs, of course) permit me to write two columns on a landscape-oriented page, making a presentation functionally equivalent to a duodecimo page layout. (I’m waiting impatiently for Mellel to introduce columns — the major impediment to my making my annual word-processor application switch, in this case returning to Mellel from a year using Pages).

But: I’m not aware of a way conveniently to paginate such a volume by column (that is, “by simulated page”).

I’ve tried making the normative page size a half-sheet of , then printing the resulting page two-up, but the combinations of Mac OS X and my printers and PDF add a margin around the whole page, thus doubling the margin and reducing the area available for body copy. I’ve tried imposition programs (Cheap Impostor), and none of them seems to facilitate printing two-up pages side by side. Someone would be doing me, and the Web, a big favor if they could explain an effective way to produce pages with two columns (= side-by-side pages), numbered consecutively (= by page number, if I were photocopying from a bound work), without an excessive margin around the whole.

FYI: I have Pages, Mellel, Word, Appleworks, InDesign, RagTime — and probably other word processing and page layout software.

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Stolen Piffle

Over and above the Guardian’s ill-advisedly denominating Leigh and Baignent “historians” (they’re historians in the same sense in which Lyndon Larouche is a politician), I’m intrigued and appalled at the news that the authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail are suing Dan “All Facts!” Brown for stealing their ideas for his jigga-zillion-selling The da Vinci Code.

Last I checked, you couldn’t copyright “ideas,” least of all if they’re factually true. Moreover, the Brown book has revived interest in a theory that had fallen into well-deserved obscurity; if anything, Brown has helped their sales. I can only imagine that this is a publicity maneuver, the ludicrousness of which is beside the point.

But if the case signifies that HB,HG really is a work of fiction, then I suppose they could sue Brown, perhaps effectively (though their having represented it as history at the outset would hamper their case).

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October 29, 2005

Sweets For Her Majesty

Our household had a family tradition that I would make pancakes for brunch every Saturday. I started when Margaret and I were first married, and I distinctly remember making her tiny little pancakes for Nate, when he was still in utero (she is now off pancakes of the conventional kind) since we’ve learned that she has celiac disease and can’t digest gluten). When the boys were little, I used to astound them by producing pancakes with their initials on them. Once, Nate was in a mood and demanded the Lord’s Prayer on his pancake (I got about as far as “who art in heaven,” if I recall).

As the boys grew up and moved away, as Pippa’s wake-up time and appetite departed from regular interest in mid-morning pancakes, we fell away from the habit. I will confess that I felt a pang of regret that my paternal trademark had become redundant, but I suppose that sort of thing happens as humans get older.

This morning, Pippa stumbled downstairs and asked, “Do you think we have the ingredients for pancakes?” (What she doesn’t know is that I would have walked to D & D Finer Foods barefoot to obtain any missing ingredient if it would make it possible for me to flip pancakes for her.) We did, and I did; the decades of experience had not deserted me, as the resulting flapjacks were golden brown and delicious. Since occasionally people express surprise at the way I prepare my pancake batter, I thought I’d provide the recipe:

Dad’s Copyright-Free Pancake Recipe

First, decide how many people you plan to stuff. For two people, you ought to be able to satisfy them at the “N = 1” level; from there, you make sure you have ingredients according to the following formula: N cups of milk, N * 1.5 eggs (round up), and N cups of flour.

Mix the eggs into the milk (we use soy milk or rice milk, in order to maintain our New England hippy cred), and beat the bejeebers out of them.

Gradually add the flour to the egg-and-milk mixture.

Sprinkle some Baking Powder in the batter. I always use Clabber Girl Baking Powder, because I get a charge out of saying “Clabber Girl” with a weak Irish lilt to my voice. Sometimes I do it two or three times, which may have something to do with my family’s loss of interest in pancakes. “Some” means “enough that when you mix it in, the batter bubbles gently.”

Add a shake or two of salt. If N > 2, add three or four shakes.

Pour a splash of oil (we prefer organic canola oil) into the batter. Size of splash should be proportional, of course, to N.

Finally — and this is a vital ingredient — pour some of the maple syrup (that’s real maple syrup, ain’t no “corn syrup-with-caramel-coloring-and-artificial-flavor pseudo-maple syrup”) into the batter. Just a dite.

Heat a griddle over a medium stove. Pour six- or seven-inch disks of batter; brown on Side One until they turn easily. Serve with butter and maple syrup since, as everyone knows, pancakes are merely syrup delivery vehicles anyway.

Consume with gusto.

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October 28, 2005

Should I Mention This?

I will, because it will please Jane, anyway.

Someone over at Kendall Harmon’s blog pointed to a site that makes available the Bible Content exams that the Presbyterian Church administers as part of Ords (their answer to General Ordination Exams).

I won’t ask that anyone report a score — but it will reward seminarians (and clergy, and interested churchpeople, and cultural literacy types who don’t believe anything particular about Israel or Jesus) to give the test a few tries.

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Check It Out

I’ve ranted here, repeatedly, about the potential value of “seeded search” — weighting a web search by the proximity of search results to a stipulated set of reference sites. If I search for links related to digital identity, for instance, I might want to seed the search by ordering the results relative to their proximity to Eric Norlin, Dick Hardt, and Phil Windley.

So I built a search window that seeds the results with a handful of the soundest biblical-studies research sites. Presumably this will highlight sites to which my reference sites link, and leave behind the sites that they likewise ignore. Let’s see how it works:

(I won’t know how this is going till after I post it, so if I have anything else to say, it’ll appear in the comments. Thanks for the tip, Chris and Jeneane!)

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October 27, 2005

Full Day

No comment.

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October 26, 2005

Out Of A Hundred

This list of 100 Best Toys comes from the U.K., so I’m not surprised that I don’t recognize all of them. I was surprised by the low ratings they gave to some great toys, and the high ratings given to some shoddy ones, and outright stunned that Lego bricks (c) don’t make the list at all. The real fun comes from the authors’ descriptions of the toys and games.

Tonka trucks have to come in higher than 69 (behind “Stretch Armstrong” at 58? Get serious). It turns out that Parker Brothers marketed “Clue” in the U.K. as “Cluedo” (#37) (why?), in which game Mr. Green turns out to have been a vicar, Rev. Green. As for Strawberry Shortcake (# 75) and My Little Pony (#13) (no Care Bears at all), well, I’m with Pippa.

The essential point, though, is: what about the Mattel Thingmaker, that multi-vector health and safety hazard that I (and many other children, I’m sure, he said hopefully) spent hours and hours experimenting with? I don’t remember any single toy from my childhood that possessed my attention span more than baking those plastics in the dangerously hot oven, inhaling fumes that probably account for my acute short-term memory loss, and burning myself on the element. Those were the days! Creepy Crawlers, Fright Factory, Fun Flowers — oh, mercy.

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Thumb Wear

For some reason, it seems as though more people have been asking me about my thumb over the past couple of months than were asking me for the year and a half before that. As a result, people shake hands with me and then pull back apologetically, and I have a lot of conversations such as this:

“No, I don’t have carpal tunnel syndrome. My thumb is hypermobile in the carpal-metacarpal joint; as I understand it, the joint seems not to hold together well, so the bones shift around in ways that rub generate extra stress and wear. I have early indications of osteoarthritis in that joint, and if I don’t wear my splint the arthritis will probably get worse quicker. It usually doesn’t hurt much, if at all (though sometimes the joint catches and gives me a nasty pain) — it’s worst when I stress the joint by squeezing (as a key) and rotating (as a key) (or as scrubbing dishes, not that it gets me out of doing dishes, alas).”

I bought an off-the-shelf splint the other day, my first that wasn’t specially set for me by the occupational therapist I saw. It’s not ideal; I may want to go back to the OT and get another custom splint. For the time being, though, it helps immobilize the carpal-metacarpal joint, which is what protects the joint, and it doesn’t look too grimly dramatic. And if you read the blog, now you don’t need to ask me about my thumb.

(As soon as I saved this, someone came over to ask, “Do you have carpal tunnel?”)

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October 25, 2005

Stories Of My Life

I don’t read the Chronicle of Higher Education that much, but I miss it even less. Inside Higher Education has been advancing by leaps and jumps since they started this online rival to the Chronicle. Just this week, IHE featured an article on the perils of built-in digital restrictions that sounds an even more ominous note as BlackBoard controls all the major proprietary e-learning applications; ran Alex Golub’s scintillating essay on professors as personal trainers (my advocacy of Dr. Golub’s work has nothing to do with the presence of a clergyman/professor in some of Golub’s now-inaccessible works of fanfic — didn’t anyone archive “My Weekend With Leuschke”? Later: the author function himself directs my attention to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6); and a report on James Hilton’s recent address to the annual Educause meeting.

Alex’s essay pushes back against the so-called commodification of education, but also against educational discourses that get so student-centered that the main goal of education becomes helping students feel “empowered,” whether they have learned enough that they ought to be empowered or not. Teachers, like personal trainers, need your trust and your willingness actually to put some effort into the endeavor if you want actually to learn something. We who teach need to remember that we can’t simply requisition that trust and that interest level.

Hilton’s essay sounds like a post facto vindication of the kinds of arguments I started making a while ago, in my presentation at the first Garrett Conference on Teaching, Technology, and Cyberspace (earlier, if you count unanswered memos to administrators). More power to him!

---

It wasn’t in Inside Higher Ed, but Ron Jeffries pointed to this post contra “postmodernism” by a Yale philosopher, which in turn spawned a Metafilter thread.

And Chris pointed me to a collection of “religious web templates,” which provoke me to observe that if online evangelism hinges on these, we may not have advanced the cause so very much.

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October 24, 2005

God Blog Conference

Last week, Mark Goodacre’s blog and a letter from Michael Pusateri called my attention to the God Blog Con recently held in Pasadena. I had been vaguely aware that it would be happening, and I checked on the coverage when these worthies prodded me. It’s interesting, looking on from outside, to see what seems to have happened, and how people reacted.

Most of the participants were unfamiliar to me, so I’d have had a lot of meeting and getting-acquainted to do from the start. On the other hand, the topics of many sessions seemed dated to me, or to reflect a different segment of blogging (and theological) culture from that within which I feel most at home. I like conferences, so I’m sure I’d have had a good time, but there’s lots more to be said, more to explore, and further to explore, than the schedule page suggests that this year’s conference said and explored.

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October 23, 2005

Relicuriosity

My delightful Early Church History class evinced some curiosity the other day about martyrs and relics. In the course of trying to address their interest, I mentioned that in the Catholic tradition, it’s customary to require a primary relic (usually an actual recognizable portion of a saint’s body) for the installation of an altar, and that St. Luke’s had an assortment of relics.

Well, of course, right away they wanted to know what the relics were. I remembered that the high altar enclosed a primary relic of St. Elizabeth Seton (at least, according to parish lore); I knew we had more relics, though, so I asked John Lukens, on whom I rely for all wisdom about our parish. John pointed me to a sealed statement from the Bishop James Montgomery (ninth Episcopal bishop of Chicago), stating that our St. Luke’s altar contained a primary relic of St. Domity, a primary relic of St. Louinian, a primary relic of St. Joachim, and tertiary relics of Sts. Benedict and Teresa.

Now, I would not be inclined to doubt the sealed affirmation of a bishop, but this placard entails several problems. First, I can find no record of the existence of a “St. Domity” or a “St. Louinian,” so the matter of their primary relics seems. . . cloudy. St. Joachim is familiar as the father of the Virgin Mary; that would attenuate the likelihood of a relic of his making its way to Evanston, except perhaps that the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1911 notes that the supposed tomb of Joachim and Anna was discovered in 1889. Perhaps that rediscovery made available relics that had long rested in obscurity.

The tertiary relics — items that had touched a saint or a saint’s relic, as distinct from secondary relics hallowed by close association with a saint — pose no great problem; I reckon that it’s pretty simple to come by tertiary relics even of Benedict and Teresa. I’ll have a lingering fascination, however, with the question of who on earth Sts. Domity and Louinian might have been. (For the time being, I’m imagining pious dowagers in the congregation whom Bp. Montgomery decided were saintly enough for commemoration here.)

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October 22, 2005

Ordination Day

I saved up a couple of ecclesiastical topics to flesh out my post relative to today’s sermon, but the headline story is that Jane has been well and truly ordained. She is a priest, and many of us have vivid, joyous memories of a wonderful service.

We pulled into St. Paul Church a few minutes late; our car had followed all the directions pretty much exactly, but with one small catch: we turned off onto Calumet Road from I-90, not from I-94/80, so the “about one mile” till the left turn Jane instructed us to make turns out to be more like four or five miles. We, meanwhile, rolled to and fro on Calumet until we discovered a street with the name Jane had given us — except that there was a median strip between us and the turn she instructed us to make.

At this point, we stopped and assigned Reverend Ref the task of asking for directions: “Hi, I’m from Montana. . . .” Once we cleared up our confusion, we got to the church with no problem. The rehearsal went fine; the sermon (complete sermon below) was received with kind warmth; the music (although not as exclusively stodgy as I prefer) was admirably uptempo, and the musicians played with lovely sensitivity to how they might swing the meter subtly to keep the music rocking; in short, the service touched and delighted me and (I believe) a very sizable crowd as well.

One reception, one house party, one smooth drive, and one leisurely leftover dinner later, I’m parked at my desk for the evening. Here I see a link to which Jordon called my attention, featuring a choir’s sung protest against their pastor’s despotic rule, and another link to which Margaret pointed me, which engages both my technological interest and my fondness for the varieties of iconography: the tapestries of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels (be sure to follow the links to the north and south tapestries). Margaret saw a lecture in which the artist, John Nava, explained his technique and projected examples of the tapestries. Nava depicted the saints in the tapestries not as stylized or idealized human figures, but as actual humans, standing against a background that he photographed and digitally remixed from actual stone walls in Jerusalem. He then sent digital pattern-files to weavers in Belgium to execute the designs (the iomages on which were pre-distressed to suggest the appearance of aging frescoes).

The technique strikes me as a smashing success, though I wonder about what’s implied by the decision to use digital manipulation to create precisely-woven tapestries that simulate decaying frescoes. Some of the costuming ideas seem odd to me, too (the bishops wear contemporary episcopal regalia, regardless of when they lived). But on the whole, I appreciate the execution, I wish I’d been there for the lecture, and I would enjoy arguing out the ideas with the artist. Well done!

Kyle, C.J., I invite you to imagine your mom wearing a loose robe and a burnoose (it’s not much of a stretch, considering what she’s wearing right now) in the camp of the Israelites. This picture fascinates me for a variety of reasons. One, I can’t help wondering whether the Israelites would have made it out of the wilderness in somewhat fewer than forty years with leadership from a strong-willed woman (albeit with a few speeding tickets from Moabite Mounties). Two – and this is my technological side coming out – I wonder about the asymmetrical broadband that connected Israel to God (because it seems as though God heard everything from Israel’s side instantly, but it took Moses forty days to download ten commandments and a few chapters of Exodus). Three, I doubt that any Israelite children would ever have missed the school bus. These are ways that the Jane we know and love would remain pretty much the same no matter what she was dressed in, no matter what century or landscape you painted her into.

Now, though, I invited you to imagine Jane in the scene with Moses and Joshua and the tent of meeting because something dramatic is about to happen; like the seventy elders, and like Eldad and Medad, she is about encounter the Holy Spirit, and the Spirit will take the Jane whom we know, whom we can imagine cussing out a Philistine or explaining to a Levite how best to forge the precious metals for the tabernacle, and will change her in a tremendous, important way. This morning we take from you the Jane who’s become so familiar over all these years, and we return to you a mom who will be – in elusive, wondrous, glorious ways – different.

Now, though, we should turn our attention from Jane and observe what’s happening with Moses next door. Over at the tent of meeting, Moses has called together seventy elders, seventy old men, to help him bear the burden of serving the people. And as he calls these men together, as he invokes God’s name and commissions them to serve, the Holy Spirit stirs among them, and the seventy chosen elders began to prophesy: to prophesy, to bespeak the gift of God’s presence and wisdom. Those whom God calls, God fills with the Spirit, and the presence of the Spirit makes a difference – it shows.

It shows, though, not just among the old guys standing around the tent of meeting. God tells Moses to pick seventy, and Moses does; God promises to fill the seventy with the Spirit, and God does; but the Spirit will not be confined to the decisions that the leaders make standing around the tent of meeting. Moses hasn’t chosen the wrong seventy, and God doesn’t have anything against the rest of the congregation, but sometimes the Spirit brings gifts above and beyond what’s been promised. So even though Eldad and Medad – the Dad Brothers – were not among the ones that the Commission on Ministry sent to Moses, the Holy Spirit fell on them, also, and the next thing you know, they’re prophesying too. And when Joshua, bless his soul, wants Moses to shut them down, Moses says, “Would that all the Lord’s people prophesied, and the Spirit rest on all of them!”

Eldad and Medad might not have gone through the canonical ordination process, but Moses understood that when God’s duly appointed leaders see the Spirit unambiguously at work outside of normal channels, our job is not to quench the Spirit, but to join our blessing to God’s blessing and to give thanks that God pours out the gifts of leadership so extravagantly. God frequently chooses leaders that God’s people might not have expected. Paul himself gives us a window into that pattern operating in his own life, when he tells the Galatians about his calling:

When God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I went away at once into Arabia, and afterwards I returned to Damascus.
Then after three years I did go up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and stayed with him fifteen days; but I did not see any other apostle except James the Lord’s brother. Then I went into the regions of Syria and Cilicia, and I was still unknown by sight to the churches of Judea that are in Christ; they only heard it said, “The one who formerly was persecuting us is now proclaiming the faith he once tried to destroy.”

Imagine trying to get that “not from mere mortals, I didn’t consult anyone” attitude through a Commission on Ministry! But for Eldad and Medad, for Paul, wherever the Spirit makes a difference, where the Spirit overflows to strengthen the church and enrich our ministry, there we affirm the Spirit’s sovereign freedom to blow where it will, whence and whither we know not, but we give thanks and follow as best we can; and as the churches of Judea welcomed the news of Paul’s conversion, we glorify God for such unexpected blessings.

The Spirit makes a difference. As Moses points out, it’s not just everyone in the camp who prophesies; this Israelites aren’t all prophets, such that anybody can stand up and claim to speak for God. The Spirit differentiates among us, suiting us to particular roles according to our particular capacities, and it’s no more appropriate to suggest that a third member of the Dad family – maybe his name was BoDad – should just have up and started prophesying than it would have been appropriate for Joshua to stifle the Dads who actually had the Spirit. The point of ordination is not that anyone’s superiority has earned them a position of control and authority, but that God’s understanding of us, of our depths and our superficialities, finds matches between what we can offer and what will strengthen the church, and through the Spirit strengthens and amplifies the graces by which we can best serve. Moses, and Paul, and Jesus all testify in today’s lessons to the mystery that God takes our ordinary everydayness and transforms it by the Holy Spirit. Eldad and Medad burst out in prophecy; the persecutor builds up the church; a boatload of fishermen turn the world upside down with their preaching; the engineer proclaims a shining promise of hope through tears, the metallurgist transformed into a meta-liturgist.

The Spirit makes a difference – and that difference can’t help transforming what it touches. The Spirit takes the Dads, and makes them prophets; today, Kyle, Carolyn, the Spirit takes your mom, and makes her a priest. The Spirit takes up all the faith, all the wisdom, all the love we know so well in Jane, and turns up the volume, and adds subtle touches we can’t predict. From today on, she stands among us not simply as Jane Ellen Schmoetzer, our beloved sister in Christ, but as someone whom God and the church have set apart to serve as Jesus’ minister among us in ways distinctive to her. In the sacrament of Holy Order, God and church and unsuspecting volunteer come together; the clues by which we’ve recognized Christ at work in Jane, God affirms as a gift, and the Spirit fills with the promise of God’s power, anointing her with the authority and the grace to preach, to declare God’s forgiveness, to pronounce God’s blessing, to preside at this altar where the Spirit makes a difference between common bread and wine, and the Body and Blood of Christ.

In the difference of the Spirit, Jane, I invite you to look squarely into the all the complications and challenges that this change will bring; for only by acknowledging the complications can you preach with integrity the simple good news that God has come to us, called us, taught us to live holy lives of love as he loved us, and by yielding his life for us, has brought us unconquerable life. From the depths of the difference that the Spirit has wrought in you, proclaim Christ Jesus, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that you may present everyone mature in Christ. With the power of the difference of the Spirit, share in Paul’s toil and struggle with all the energy that Christ powerfully inspires within you.

Because, Jane, greatly as we love and respect you for all that you’ve shown us, all that you’ve done among us – in just a few minutes we will set that fondness aside and ask you to step out of the fishing boat, to get off your donkey, get in the line of fire as the Holy Spirit flashes among the seventy elders, the seventy presbyters, and we will ask you without sentimentality or indifference to subject yourself to transformation. Because I have been granted the privilege to work and study and pray, yes, and weep and laugh with you, I venture to say I know that you will answer without sentimentality, and certainly without indifference.

And Edward, Bishop in the church of God, will lay apostolic hands on you;

And your brothers and sisters in holy orders will unite their ministries with yours;

And we will sing “Come, Holy Spirit”;

And the Holy Spirit will come, will rest on you and dwell in you, will abide with you and make you different.

And though your new ministry sometimes leads you by ways to sorrow or frustration, yet I charge you to bear in your heart the radiant gladness that sings the Spirit’s joyous presence. Share the ecstasy that overflowed onto Eldad and Medad. Proclaim among us, with heartening word and encouraging example, that best, truest news in all creation: that the Lord is good; his mercy is everlasting; and his faithfulness endures from age to age.

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October 21, 2005

Light, Tunnel, Sermon

I’ve survived the fall meeting of Seabury’s trustees without embarrassing myself by falling asleep at a key moment, and I’ve even sent out my notes on the meeting to my colleagues (thereby fending off my proclivity to fall down on that particular job). I think I have a workable angle on the sermon for tomorrow morning (don’t worry, Jane, it’s a long night). And as I write out the fillips and flourishes (and, to be honest, some of the supporting body copy), iTunes delights me by playing side-by-side Marvin Gaye’s “Mercy Mercy Me,” and Robert Bradley’s “Once Upon a Time,” in which he sings

Once upon a time, when I was in high school
I was in love with you, lady and you treated me so cool.
I was drivin’ a Chevy ’72 had 4 on the floor, girl,
one hundred 20 it would do

I remember Marvin Gaye, singin’,
Let’s Get It On...

And the sermon is coming together; I may even get a decent night’s sleep.

DRMA: Almost Cut My Hair by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Once Upon a Time by Robert Bradley’s Blackwater Surprise; Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) by Marvin Gaye; ; Kiss Me Like You Mean It by the Magnetic Fields; ; Softly and Tenderly by Willie Nelson; ; Where Does The Time Go by Innocence Mission; Up The Wolves by Mountain Goats; Tonk by Duke Ellington; Hammering In My Head by Garbage.

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October 20, 2005

Tally Another Day

Submitted manuscript, morning-long trustees meeting, afternoon class, advisee appointments and business letters, worked on the sermon, fixed dinner, back to sermon, various family (and canine) responsibilities.

One of the business items I completed today involves the contract for the Winslow Lecture book, which will be credited as four authors -- so all four of us have to initial every page of four copies of our contracts, and mail the contracts around to one another, before they make their way back to the publisher. That’s a lot of initialing.

I don’t meant to slight people who live in the Yucatan, but would be all right with me if this hurricane season expired without renewing Tom’s acquaintance with FEMA (you too, e).

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October 19, 2005

How I Do It

Every now and then, someone observes the list of my responsibilities to Seabury, to St. Luke's, to my family, and to a variety of editors, and they ask how I manage to blog every day, too. The short answer is, sometimes I just can’t. (More later, if I can.)

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October 17, 2005

No Batter!

My daughter is in the back yard playing whiffleball with her nine-pound Bichon Frisé Bea — and she’s heckling her own dog.

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October 16, 2005

The Cat In The Bag Whoops!

Joi and I were chatting this evening about iPod Nanos (“Nanoi”? “Nanim”?), delighting the capacities of this small machine, and gnashing our teeth at the ways that Digital Restriction Management (David Berlind is getting credit for that term lately, but I thought I remembered Doc using it years ago) monkey-wrenches the revolutionary effects that’ll overtake the recording industry eventually, like it or not.

(To illustrate my point: what other industry devotes so significant a proportion of its business energies to preventing you from maximizing your use of the product? Does your bed restrict how long you can sleep on it, or with whom? Does your lawn mower work only on your property? What if you had to pay twice as much for a home appliances that only worked up to your property line, and shut down as soon as they contacted the border of your property? You’d better not move; you’d better have a very clear idea of where your property line begins, and not use your tools too close to that line, just to be sure. And remember, you’re paying extra for the technology that makes these hypothetical tools less useful.)

We were imagining the world I wrote about last month, in which Nani are just a little less expensive. You buy one for your sweetie, and load it up with music — do you really re-purchase every selection all over again, to fill up a 2-gig (you cheapie) iPod, or do you just download songs from your CD and mp3 collections? You have a friend whose musical taste you want to improve — you buy him an iPod and. . . what? $500 worth of bluegrass music he may not like? You know a DJ, an archival-music whiz, or just somebody with whiz-bang taste in music; what makes more sense than that they fill your iPod with files they have right on hand? And I’d bet that the situation only gets hairier, faster, as TV-on-iPod becomes more generally available.

I’m not at all against musicians and filmmakers earning a living — I’m against their intermediaries demanding that technological innovation accommodate carved-in-stone business practices, rather than requiring business practices to accommodate innovation. “Your failed business model is not my problem.” (And now that I notice that Meg has given up the subway-tile design for her blog, I may try my hand at it; I always loved that design.)

I can’t imagine that as iPods grow more affordable, more common, and more capacious, that the music-buying public will remain docile about intrusive restrictions on the simple act of copying a file. There’s tons of profit to be made in other areas, friends, with an extra-big helping for those who get there first.

[Later: By the way, I wanted to tip my hat to Joi for a post earlier in the week, where made a specific point of acknowledging that “[he] knew nothing about Eastern Europe,” then went on to show that he took that as an occasion to start learning. With that one post, Joi provides a powerful illustration of Margaret’s and my convictions about how and when people learn. On the other hand, it looks as though he’s spending most of the time he should be working on his thesis playing “World of Warcraft.” . . .]

Posted by AKMA at 10:48 PM | Comments (5)

Checking In On Church Sites

Over the weekend, a couple of correspondents pointed me to church-oriented sites. Congregational and Diocesan Development Issues uses a Blogger interface to outline the author’s perspective on Congregational Development. I give high marks for recognizing the value of a blog for web communications; next, the writer needs to let go of the board-room PowerPoint prose style and actually communicate. There’s no better model in Blogaria than PR blogger extraordinaire Jeneane Sessum, whose professional work you can see over at the Content Factor — but notice that the heavyweight names who get invited to address snazzy-sounding conferences with influential presentations don’t write this kind of ponderous jargon on their websites. I wouldn’t be surprised if church clients prefer their consultants to sound like this — disappointed, but not surprised — but this blog sounds like a pitch, not a conversation. (I haven’t read the blog itself closely; I can’t assess the soundness of the cong-dev proposals here, but then it’s not up to me to fight through the marketing-speak.) Oh, and the blog should get a more digestible name, and it wouldn’t hurt for you pay the modicum it would cost to get a domain name and hosting.

Over at Subversive Influence, Brother Maynard gives a useful counterexample of web-based communication. He’s linking to others, and quoting from them. He’s writing in a dialect of English that non-marketers can easily apprehend. Even though his post is quite as long as the posts at Cong and Dio Dev Issues, it’s infinitely more readable. If I wanted advice about sizing up a congregation, I’d turn to Brother Maynard in a heartbeat, but I’d procrastinate a long time (something at which I’m an expert) before I got around to contacting Congregational and Diocesan Development Issues.

Now, the point of Brother Maynard’s post (which I actually read, because it’s clear enough to read) involves a comparison between “The Purpose Driven Life” and Windows. (Why would anyone compare something about which they feel unambiguously positive to Windows? Rick warren has to know that there’s a significant constituency of people who mistrust Microsoft and dislike Windows; even if they’re entirely wrong-headed, does he think he’s gaining rhetorical yardage by comparing his version of the gospel to their least favorite operating system, an OS that they perceive as letting them down,, that they resent for having been forced onto their machines, that they imagine as an impediment to productivity and happiness? It doesn’t matter whether such people grossly undervalue the crystalline perfection that is Windows — just by making the comparison, Warren has stepped on their tows and insulted their mother. No matter how oversensitive their toes or degraded their parents, you don’t win people over that way.

I admit that I’m grouchily unsympathetic to the whole Purpose-Driven Remedy For What Ails You megaplex of books, products, seminars, and coming soon to a desperate impoverished nation far away from the USA, but I’d be much more apt to listen patiently if Rick Warren didn’t take the bold first step of unembarrassedly declaring himself to be out of touch with my interests and perspectives. I have a long way to go toward Getting Things Done, but I’m radically more receptive when exponents of effectiveness show that they have a clue.

Posted by AKMA at 10:19 PM | Comments (1)

October 15, 2005

There Goes My Evening

I had never seen this before — surprising, given my well-documented interest in highway signs. The selections are limited (it would be great to have the option of adding those helpful Canadian information symbols), but it successfully distracted me for a long haul tonight.

Posted by AKMA at 08:39 PM | Comments (1)

October 14, 2005

Change

Tonight, Pippa and I dropped Margaret off at the train station for her trip to Rochester to visit Nate, before she returns to Durham. In case anyone out there is wondering whether, after twenty-three years of marriage (twenty-seven years together), people can still get sentimental about reunion and parting, the answer is “yes.”

On the same trip, we looped down to Midway to pick up Josiah, home for a long weekend from his first year in college. He’s having a great time — one might even think he had a flair for life in an academic community. By the sheerest coincidence, this weekend Laura will be home from her college, too.

Finally — and this is not related — if what I hear is correct, this is the golden year for job applicants in Islamic studies. I suspect that if you’ve seen Lawrence of Arabia more than once, you may be able to squeak into a tenure-track appointment; there can’t be that many Islamists looking for work, but it sounds as though half the Religion Departments (and some History and Area Studies Departments) in the U.S. are searching in that area. A hat tip to the jobseekers for whom this is a favorable development. Academic hiring is such a wildly capricious domain, it’s great that someone can catch a favorable market.

Posted by AKMA at 10:24 PM | Comments (1)

October 13, 2005

More Stromateis

• As I was leaving my office to run an errand, I spotted a name tag on my shelf. It reminded me that nine years ago today Margaret, Pippa and I were in Washington D.C. serving as volunteers at the last display of the full AIDS Quilt. While we were there we saw newly-placed panels for my late colleague, David Weadon and for our friend from Florida, Gary Seife.

  Disasters didn’t start in Louisiana this September, and they didn’t stop in Pakistan, where a Himalayan winter is coming up on people without homes. AIDS combined with poverty is still killing millions — even if they’re further from our home.



• The news that BlackBoard and WebCT are merging doesn’t surprise me in the least. (Stephen Downes has some PR clips here). A commenter at Inside Higher Ed suggests that this makes them the Microsoft of online learning; I’m just glad that Seabury got out of their grasp a few years ago.


• Ron Jeffries picks up the dangerous rhetoric in the Bush administration’s increasingly frantic efforts to get Harriet Miers onto the Supreme Court. He cites the threat to a Jeffersonian separation of church and state that results when a President cites a candidate’s faith as the basis for knowing she’d make a good Supreme Court Justice. I8’m more offended by the overt doubletalk: “You should support her, cause she's a conservative evangelical Christian, but her faith won’t make a difference in how she rules as a judge.” This kid of talk reveals Bush’s deep disdain for the intelligence of the public.


• Yesterday afternoon, I checked in to see what the big fuss had been about at Apple: so, a new iMac model, new version of iTunes, videos and TV shows available from the iTunes music store, and video-capabilities for the iPod. The iMac seems like a good plan — Pippa immediately wondered how much it would cost and how wide the screen is, envisioning its use as a TV-substitute right away. The video iPod looks to me like more valuable for its reinforcing Apple’s momentum than actually for changing the consumer environment (the Nano is a more interesting design change, and watching short intervals of video on a tiny screen has limited appeal for most users, I think). It still looks to me like a gesture to sustain interest and buzz while (a) they develop a credible library of short-form video to watch, for which TV is exactly the right source (that part’s brilliant) and (b) they iron out the kinks on a video cell phone.

  Wouldn’t it be great if the Apple dominance of DRM’ed audio and video provided the impetus that the entertainment industries need to loosen their fixation on restrictions? After all, in a year or so, the studios and record companies could have established a very big installed base of files that depend on using Apple software. In the long run, non-proprietary formats serve the interests of both provider and server; proprietary formats serve only the owner of the format, as both providers and users have to abide by the format-owner’s dictates.



• Larry Lessig was great on Marketplace tonight.

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October 12, 2005

Gefühls For Christ

I’ve been gestating, for a long time, a thorough, seething rant about the effects of cultural romanticism on Christian faith. I don’t have time to vent it all this evening — it involves the premise that faith and worship should make you feel good, the notion that everyone’s ideas about religion are equally sound, the arationality of religion, the premise that anything rebellious or heterodox is likely to be truer than anything settled or orthodox, to name but a few of these canards (the creed of the cult of the prophet St. Dan Brown) — but that jeremiad was on my mind as I prepared today’s sermon for the Feast of St Teresa of Avila (which I’ll post in the “extended” section).

I’ll rest with the note that romantic religion makes teaching practically impossible; romantically-conditioned audiences already know everything they need to, they are predisposed not simply to question but to disbelieve authority, and they may expect that anything that doesn’t warm their hearts doesn’t matter. Romanticist theological thought represents the triumph of self-justifying ignorance over diligence, reflection, and discernment.

(Good thing I’m not cutting loose with the real rant.)

Long minutes, long hours, lonely and frustrating days – days of prayer. Prayer can be a hard job, which explains some part of why it’s often difficult to persuade people to give it a try, and why even here, the chapel is not entirely full day by day. Prayer costs us the illusion that we can do it all, and that the universe rotates around us. Prayer draws us away from tackling the world on the terms we set, and draws us toward a willingness to meet God on God’s terms. Prayer demands that we offer all, but prayer promises us nothing. That, my friends, is a sucker’s bet, and it’s hard to invite people you care about to be fleeced – all the more difficult if perhaps, maybe, sometimes you aren’t absolutely convinced that this prayer business makes any difference your own self.

As if that weren’t enough, somebody has cooked up the notion that even after the first fruits blossom, prayer ought to be easy: a sweet, comforting, restorative balm for our troubled souls. While I can’t rule out the chance that prayer operates that way for some favored souls, what I’ve heard about prayer runs almost entirely the opposite direction. Somewhere, the green lawns of suburbia surround cozy homes with happily active, prosperous nuclear families, where hurricanes never blow, where earthquakes never shake, where the maid never misses a day and the meaning of debt is unknown. Somewhere prayer always comes easily, and always delights; somewhere, but probably not Pakistan or Guatemala, New Orleans, and definitely not Ávila.

We can’t make prayer easier by some clever technique, as though it were all in the wrist action, or as though it just depended on knowing the right words. Difficulty lies at the heart of prayer, as the whole creation moans and stammers along with us as we labor to focus our attention on God to open our wills to God’s direction. Tedium and vexation accompany us as we wait with impatience to make a way out of our homelessness in a hobbling, heartless world into a shelter prepared for us from the foundation of the earth.

Hard circumstances make hard prayer, and when those hard praying times come your way, remember that you are not alone. When your soul is full of heaviness, when your arid prayer bores and frustrates you, bear in mind that others have found themselves in that desert before you. At those times, you know I will be praying with you, this chapel will be praying with you; Santa Teresa y todos los santos will be praying with you. The whole creation will strain and groan along with your heart. The Spirit itself will intercede with sighs too deep for words – and with the work that you devote to prayer, the Spirit will work along to draw us more faithfully together, to shape our hearts to welcome the truth, to kindle in us the light by which our praying eyes recognize, in the communion of our faithful friends and reconciled enemies, in constant prayer, in labor that takes delight in serving and sharing, the patient, sweet, brilliant glory of God.

Posted by AKMA at 07:38 PM | Comments (12) | TrackBack

October 11, 2005

Log Picking

My referrers logs include the usual searches for “random thoughts,” “plural of impetus,” new contenders “wedding sermon” and “wedding blessing” (neither is in the top ten results, so some folks are searching pretty diligently), old favorite “forgiveness,” now “iPod Nano protective cover,” and — “Frank Paynter smoking” (no kidding). Frank, you should know someone’s checking up on you.

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October 10, 2005

Quality of Mercy

A relentless string of natural disasters is assailing humanity, of which the Katrina-Rita combination turns out to be the least catastrophic. Hurricane Stan in Mexico and Guatemala, the earthquake in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, oblige our sympathies, our help, every bit as much as when disaster strikes closer to home. I would be heartbroken if it turned out that we who called for aid from all around the world — and who accepted aid from regions now stricken with even greater miseries — were too preoccupied with local problems to hear the cries of our sisters and brothers who need us more desperately than ever.

It’s easy to make a contribution to Episcopal Relief and Development.

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Back At You, Tutor

On a different topic — my Tutor’s link to me reminds me that I’ve been meaning to consult him about the promotional campaign for Forth & Towne a new Gap-owned chain of women’s clothing stores (remember when you went to the Gap to buy blue jeans, and pretty much only blue jeans?).

You won’t see this on the website (right now), but they mailed to prospective customers in Chicagoland a pink-and-grey PR brochure that includes the following frightening blandishments:

“It’s not just about the clothes. It’s about being inspired. It’s about being indulgent.”

“Develop a fetish for leisure time. . . .” “Show up with an entourage. . . .” “Commit random acts of indulgence. . . . It’s about treating yourself to an experience in shopping where you are the center of attention. Isn’t it about time?”

I have a hard time keeping track of the staff at Wealth Bondage (though if I recall correctly, Captain Blowtorch is always keeping track of me), but this operation would seem to pertain to several of the castmembers of that World. The unabashed stench of sweet self-obsession cries out for the kind of counteragent only the Tutor’s bitter medicine can deploy.

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October 09, 2005

In the “Entertainment” Section?

The Toronto Star (registration required, sorry) covers the triumphant wedding (two weeks ago) of Torontonian ex-bachelor Joey deVilla and new Canadian Wendy “The Redhead” Koslow. Mazel tov!

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Costs of Disambiguating

Every now and then, someone floats the notion that Western Christianity might better serve God and humanity by declaring a “free play” moment, where ecclesial boundaries were suspended and the contents of extant denominations were shaken up and reshuffled — such that the “liberal” and “conservative” poles of contemporary churches could regroup together into internally-coherent theological bodies. That notion, of course, fails to reckon with the complexities of terms such as “liberal” and “conservative,” nor with the particularities that constitute churches as distinct from one another; the fantasy of spontaneous realignment might resolve certain kinds of conflict, but it would result in new sets of unstable conflicts, so no one would be much better off (we just be at each other over different topics — refreshing in the short term, but not particularly edifying in the long term).

I mention this because one conclusion I draw from the likely futility of the realignment dream reminds me that whatever definitions and distinctions we invoke to identify our church as church (as something different from a synagogue or a mosque, a benevolent society or club), we probably have to factor in a certain proportion of people with whom we disagree. The difficult part about dealing with tensions about and within the church comes from dealing with the difference between “disagreements we absolutely can’t live with” and “disagreements we have to put up with, like it or not.” When sometimes we imagine a church without the neuralgic discords that give us such headaches (and that attenuate the vigor of our mission), do we successfully manage to imagine that purified church including some of the disciples who represent annoyingly different ways of living out the Gospel? For myself — and I admit to having a very limited imagination — the only way I can do it is by thinking of particular people with whom I actually disagree, who (as it turns out) are the kinds of people who might be excluded from and “purified” congregation I might dream of. Which is essentially the church as I now inhabit it, which is one reason I would hate to see that church fracture and splinter into temporarily-homogeneous ideological adversaries.

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October 08, 2005

Worth Noting

To be fair, I acknowledge that that other Calvin got some things right:

“Calvin’s preaching represented an intensive examination of the detail’s of God’s Word that few other expositors would equal, sucking the last drops of meaning from every last syllable and turn of phrase. . . . This could be liberating to an audience precisely because it was so demanding: Calvin and the preachers who followed him asked a lot of their audience and were thus taking them seriously, as adults in the faith. Reformed congregations were expected to absorb and understand complex and abstract material and therefore were encouraged to see the value of education.”
— Diarmaid MacCullough, The Reformation: A History, p. 247.

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October 07, 2005

Politely

I mean you no disrespect, but my wife is in town for a few days — blogging takes a back seat to refreshing our acquaintance with one another.

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October 06, 2005

Essential

Happy birthday, wood s lot!

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Home Improvements

My well-deserved reputation as a handyman puts me in a league with the very most hapless schlemiels who have ever picked up a hand tool (the Geneva Convention prohibits allowing me near power tools ever since my woodshop teacher Mr. Proviano contacted Interpol way back in the sixties). Sometimes, though, a project presents itself that’s so very easy that even I can handle it.

The other day I was cleaning out a desk drawer in my office — itself an odd enough occurrence — when I happened on one of those cheap plastic cases that frequently gets thrown in with an order of business cards.

Having been keeping myn ears open relative to the brouhaha over how easily iPod Nanos (“Nanoes”?) get scratched up, I instantly considered the possibility that I held in my hand the easy solution to that problem. Sure enough,

it looks like it would work. I worked the Nano into the case and eyeballed the location of the output port, so I could cut as small a hole as necessary (and I tried to keep my cut smooth, so that there wouldn’t be any corners susceptible to tearing). I had to add a little width to my first cut, but the second cut aligned nicely with the headphone port, and the extra width allowed room for the casing for the headphone connector).

It works like a charm, the headphone plug fits perfectly, and the plastic is thin enough that you can operate the controls through it (though it somewhat attenuates the hypersensitivity of the control wheel, so you can handle the Nano with the volume jumping).

And here’s the end with the headphone port — plenty of room.

For my next project, I’m thinking of making a snowflake from folded paper, or preparing a peanut butter sandwich.

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October 05, 2005

Speaking of Pandemics

Margaret “Hot Zone” Adam called my attention to this story from CNN about reasearchers who try to learn about the present impending bird flu pandemic by re-engineering the flu strain that killed millions in 1918, and asked, “Do you think the novel has a movie contract yet?”

With a headline such as “Researchers reconstruct 1918 virus” or a photo caption such as “Workers take a blood sample from a chicken at an Indonesian farm where 156 chickens died” — that alone is a movie-worth of plot premise. Margaret wonders whether it’s hard to find actor-chickens, but I suggested that Jeanne and Gail could supply the cast.

Pippa, then, would get to portray the little girl who becomes a tragic first victim — who has a chicken as a pet (she loves her aunts’ chickens)!

I feel sad just thinking about it; at least, I will till the first royalty check from Hollywood rolls in. Spielberg, you know where to find us.

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Don’t Panic

In honor of Margaret and Chris (on whom I rely for advance warning of any conceivable catastrophe), I’m pointing to Rebecca Blood’s Flu Pandmeic Awareness Week post and an article in Foreign Affairs on “Preparing For the Next Pandemic” (via Frank and Liz).

Reading them makes my throat feel scratchy. Maybe it’s not my bad back — maybe those are muscle aches. And my head. . . .

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October 04, 2005

Still Here

No, I haven’t vanished into the ether; I’ve just been alternating between trying hard to work productively (not that successfully) and trying to rest up so that I could work more productively. My back is flaring up, too.

On the good news front, Rosh Hashanah has come; l’shanah tovah, may you all be inscribed for a good year. My beloved Margaret passed her grad-school German exam mit Fliegenfarben, and my Early Church History class has responded well to their readings. Pip is doing well with Hope and Beth, and Katie has been doing marvelous work whipping our house into shape. Now, I just have to step up and match all this good work with some effective labor of my own.

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October 02, 2005

To Do, As of Today

Finish preface for Winslow Lectures book, keep up with my class in Early Church History, write out my presentation for the SBL meeting (“ ’He Set Himself in the Order of Signs’: Exegesis Signifying Theology”), keep up with the Introduction to the Bible class I’m leading at St Luke’s, prepare for the Sunday Lectionary Introduction I’ll be leading in a couple of weeks, work out two book reviews, referee an essay, and prepare the sermon for Jane’s ordination. Oh, and pay bills and send in a bunch of miscellaneous forms. Highest priority: being present to and responsible for Pippa. Next highest: the preface, followed closely by the SBL paper and the refereeing. I have a few bloggable ideas, but they fall by the wayside for now.

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Calvinism

I’m more impressed with one Calvin than with his antecedent.

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October 01, 2005

Weekend

After spending the morning in the ATR board meeting, and then feeding Pippa and trundling her downtown to get her hair cut, then back homeward to get to Game Day with Heather, I tried to get some work done this afternoon — to no avail. I think I’ll just go to bed early tonight and try for tomorrow.

Of course, we have church tomorrow morning and an ordination tomorrow evening, but if I rest well there may be a chunk of afternoon time to work in.

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