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March 31, 2006

For the Record

I think this is the first time that I’ve used the American Airlines terminal at O’Hare, and my first impression is that it beats United (our family’s usual airline). Now, I got a little lucky — I’m sitting near a floor electrical outlet, but I didn’t see many of them available — and my flight is delayed, so I splurged on wifi. But given the gamut of airport terminals, American has done well with this one.

My beloved Margaret says the hotel has wireless, so I’ll check in tonight after the first session with the Human Rights Campaign.

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March 30, 2006

Horton As Moral Formation

Margaret and I have often exchanged poignant observations about the assumptions on parenting that inform Dr. Suess’s classic Horton Hatches the Egg.

On the other hand, I realized again this morning how powerfully the book’s moral catch-phrase had affected me over the years from when I used to read Horton frequently.

I meant what I said and I said what I meant
An elephant’s word is one-hundred percent

The web instructs me that there’s a citation problem here; the “elephant’s word” version of the saying is the one that sticks in my head, but that’s from Horton Hears a Who, which was not a central text in my growing-up library. Hatches seems to conclude the couplet, “An elephant’s faithful, one hundred percent” (which also suits me, though it’s not the phrase that resonates as vividly in my conscience and my hermeneutics).

Posted by AKMA at 02:30 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Warcraft as Learning Environment

John Seely Brown brings a technologist’s eye to what World of Warcraft and its online siblings portend. There’s a lot that a brief article in Wired can’t take account of (for instance, just for starters, “why not learn to improvise from materials at hand in a physical environment, like camping or hiking?”), but I agree that Brown is onto something. His article and Don’s that I cited yesterday both point to a dimension of MMORPG (“massively multi-player online role-playing games”) participation that frequently eludes detractors: that these games can cultivate a sense of cooperation and mutual respect among very diverse participants. I stress the word “can,” because that cooperative respect isn’t automatic; it may indeed be rare, as a sizable proportion of participants monomaniacally pursue selfish wealth and advancement.

Still, there can be much more going on than meets the casual eye. I maintain strong reservations about the game, but (for now) an even stronger interest in just what’s developing as increasing numbers of bright, inventive, cordial people encounter one another online. (Witness the scintillating thinking that shimmers around the Terranova community, for just one example.)

So participating in MMORPGs does not magically inculcate leadership, cooperation, and adaptive effectiveness, nor do MMORPGs present the only sphere within which to learn such capacities — contra one possible reading of Brown’s piece. But attentive observers have shown increasing interest in possible positive dimensions of MMORPGs, and I reckon that we’ll see increasing appreciation for them as the idea becomes less alien.

I still have to write the (a) review and (b) ethical reflection on Warcraft — I think about them a lot — but Don Park and John Seely Brown signal that something’s happening here.

Disclosure Statement: I’m a Guild Administrator in Joi Ito’s “We Know” guild on Eitrigg, one of the Warcraft realms; that gives me a particular investment in foregrounding positive social dimensions of the guild and the environment.

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March 29, 2006

Gazes Wearily Over Stack of Papers

So, it’s thesis season for one of our degree programs, and I’m reading and commenting on theses for several; I assigned weekly short papers for one of my classes this term (why did I not remember that that meant I would have to read weekly papers, too); I redesigned my courses this term, so I don’t have course materials in a file somewhere for either one of them; I have an essay on my desk to referee for an editorial board; and today, the manuscript of the book that’ll include last year’s Winslow Lectures arrived for copy-editing. At the same time, the production editor of the other book coming out this year emailed me to say that they were sending the manuscript out for typesetting, and I should expect to see it soon for copy-editing, and I should be ready to prepare a bibliography and indexes of authors and biblical passages.

I’ll tackle what I can tomorrow, then (after class Friday morning) head out for the headquarters of the Human Rights Campaign, where I’ll give them my perspective on their impending series of preaching helps. I’m not sure I’m exactly the right guy for that assignment, but we’ll try it on and see.

Meanwhile, David has been keynoting and blogging wonderfully at the Information Architecture Conference , Jeneane is getting boggled by Blogger, Dave noticed something helpful that Don wrote about Warcraft a couple of months ago. And Margaret and I will meet Pascale for dinner on Saturday night, making the in-person connection to complement our online friendship.

Apart from that, not much is going on here.

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March 27, 2006

Pre-Movie da Vinci Fix

In a gesture toward perpetuating my wearisome fixation with the pernicious anti-intellectual Ponzi fiction, The daVinci Code, I offer a pointer to Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me’s podcast of its “Not My Job” segment (streaming audio available here, but I couldn’t get it to work — if they’re going to make an mp3 version available anyway through their podcast, why do they have to link to cumbersome RealAudio files from their site?).

All of this is relevant because this week’s quiz involved questions about author-or-plagiarist Dan Brown. I won’t spoil the fun by divulging any of the correct answers, but they touch on his past as a failed singer-songwriter, his other literary accomplishments, and his inside tips for improving your writing skills. Fran Leibowitz, the guest expert, could have been funnier, but the insight into Dan Brown is more than worth the download.

Posted by AKMA at 10:28 AM | Comments (0)

March 26, 2006

Not Prepared

Today the Fantasy Baseball League in which I participate — which is about ten years old — holds our annual player auction. I have paid absolutely no attention to baseball this winter, so I’m going to play it safe and stick with proven greats. I’ll pay top dollar for Cal Ripken and Jim Palmer, and fill out the roster with whomever I can.

Posted by AKMA at 08:16 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 25, 2006

Intolerable

Margaret called my attention to a story that should curdle the blood of everyone — but especially anyone with affection or respect for Duke University.

First, I acknowledge the principle of innocence till proof of guilt; nothing has been proved at this point.

Second, the allegations compiled in this story demand public, vigorous, unwavering enforcement directed not only against convicted offenders, but also against any circumstances that conduce to encourage students to imagine actions even remotely comparable to the most innocent account of what could have happened. Rape, kidnapping, and strangulation are not simply out-of-bounds; they bespeak an utterly disordered sense of what counts as possible human behavior. At this point, Duke’s officials have a human obligation to step up and stamp out any sense that anything even vaguely like this event is tolerable.

The many dimensions of vicious brutality that converge here are neither coincidental nor arbitrary. These men are alleged to have used life-threatening physical violence to effect sexual violence against a woman of color (at whom they allegedly addressed bigoted rhetorical violence). No element of the situation permits hesitation, ambiguity, or the risk of lingering infection.

This sort of crime is intolerable, and Duke needs to send the loud, clear, convincing message to that effect. Immediately. Effectively.

Posted by AKMA at 09:46 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 23, 2006

Follow-Up And Next Random Thought

Jill and Esther cover a fantastic re-employment of Warcraft, and articulate some of the noteworthy problems relative to using the Warcraft infrastructure for such outlandish merriment.

And cheers to Jennifer’s classmate Isaac Everett for his participation in the Game-Mosh winning entry. Maybe Micah and Isaac and I should form a weird society for game-design/theological reflection. Seminarians don’t have to enter ordained church leadership — that’s a good thing — and maybe by devoting some deliberate theological energy to game-design problems, we could both enliven theological discussion and add a further critical dimension to the design of games.

Posted by AKMA at 08:27 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

March 21, 2006

About Those Links

Here’s what I was going to say about the first of those links from Saturday:

By the way, lest I forget, the Episcopal Church has asked that we Blogarian Episcopalians link to their survey on “online evangelism” through their website. If you feel like giving the Episcopal Church a piece of your mind (relative to their use of the web), this is your opportunity.

So, first of all, headphonaught picked up Joi’s post on leadership in World of Warcraft, and applies some of Joi’s conclusions to church life. Since Joi prodded me into playing Warcraft, I’ve been fascinated by many aspects of it (I actually will write up a review someday). Most prominently, though, I have relished the community life of Joi’s guild. Warcraft illustrates a premise that I’ve held for a long time now: online applications thrive by providing the opportunity for social interaction while doing something else. Flickr, the old Flickr, illustrates the point; ostensibly an image-sharing application, it gave people a social space for annotating and commenting, not just looking at pictures. In a similar way, Warcraft — by enlisting players in shared adventures — makes conversation and cooperation possible not by creating an Orkut-like space where social interaction constitutes the end of the site, but by drawing people into activities in which social interaction emerges as an attractive byproduct.

What does this have to do with church? Headphonaught identifies two lessons. First, he notes Joi’s enthusiasm for camaraderie in Warcraft, which he (plausibly) associates with “fellowship” in church. In light of my comments above, I’d just add that the durable, productive sort of fellowship emerges when shared activities evoke harmonious interaction — much more so than from settings in which an organizer sets up an event and expects people to fellowship. Churches offer a skillion opportunities for that kind of cooperative activity: the liturgy itself, of course, and the countless support activities. The church should probably recognize those activities not solely as productive endeavors toward the goal of [whatever], but as opportunities for people to intertwine their lives (and we should handle matters of setting, comfort, and so on, with a view toward encouraging the sort of ambiance that enriches the side-conversations that ensue when a bunch of people is making sandwiches or cleaning fixtures).

Second, Headphonaught notes the importance of mood, and suggests that “[t]he role of any leader in church should be ‘mitigate’/ facilitate and act as Custodian to the group rather than a formal leader.” Certainly churches have tended toward authoritarian leadership, in ways that belie their mission and limit participation to only those who don’t mind the power structure. At the same time, I’m very cautious about the dogma of egalitarianism. The “We Know” guild in Warcraft has very real power structures, and is not casual about applying them (even though Joi himself does not usually drop the hammer on people).

Church life presents a dangerous temptation to “let the Spirit guide (so long as it happens my way).” I’m much more comfortable with honest authority structures, so long as they’re occupied by people who don’t particularly want the power. By the same token, one can’t eliminate manipulation and power games by eradicating the explicit lines of authority.

Yes, by all means, church leaders shouldn’t boss people around, shouldn’t play neighborhood tyrant. That has more to do, though, with guiding the right people to leadership roles than with defining the role of “facilitator.” A good leader will facilitate, but calling someone a “facilitator” doesn’t mean they won’t live out their power trips (all the more destructively if they can plausibly disclaim any “authority”).

That’s not precisely what Headphonaught is talking about, I think, but it touches on a frequent current in discussions of ecclesiology and emergence — and I needed to get it off my chest.

What else about church and Warcraft? Well, I see a couple of things worth remarking. One, people want to believe in magic. Not only do they enjoy the exercise of magical faculties in the game, but the meta-play (in chats and during intervals of relative inaction) suggest strongly that participants relish an outlook that takes explicit account of extraordinary capacities. Obviously, one part of that is plain old-fashioned wish-fulfillment — but I think I detect something else also, a sense that they feel a deep affinity for this “virtual” world in which people can change into animals, disappear, levitate (but not “fly,” interestingly), zap evil-doers and (especially) never die. If we bracket the interminable discussion about “magic” vs. “miracle,” we can acknowledge that a sizable number of people are ready to deal with claims about worlds in which more is going on than meets the strictly scientific eye.

Second, I observe that the game (as other team sports) evokes extremely strong feelings of solidarity, accomplishment, frustration, disaffection, and persistence. The possibility that these are intensified by the manifest extent to which “doing well” in the game world involves making optimal use of complementary, different gifts suggests that the church may want to learn from Warcraft about team-building and orchestration — which brings us back to leadership (as “leaders” in the game can’t afford to ignore effectual differences among players to satisfy sentimental inclinations, whereas the church very often subordinates competence in favor of sentiment).

And more — but I should leave that till the essays I expect to write by way of a general game review, and my musings about the ethics of playing Warcraft.

Posted by AKMA at 04:11 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 19, 2006

What do elves, Tom Coates,

What do elves, Tom Coates, a mallet quest, dwarves, St. Paul, and ninjas have in common?

They all have parts in today’s sermon (posted below in the “extended” section). Tom brought the typology of dwarves/elves and pirates/ninjas to my attention; St.Paul wrote the epistle on which my sermon concentrated (with constant attention to the Torah, from which the Old Testament reading today was the Ten Commandments); and an interlocutor online suggested that I incorporate the phrase “mallet quest” into my sermon. It did not make it per se, but the words “mallet” and “quest” appear in relatively close proximity to one another.

You may question the spiritual wisdom of my accepting a challenge such as this, and I see some warrant in that question — yet if we take preaching seriously as an exercise in sacred rhetoric (and few people take it more seriously than do I), the aspect of rhetorical artifice always constitutes both a dynamo of spiritual semiosis and the glittering lure of worldly showiness. I frequently resort to rhetorical gimmicks to dislodge conceptual logjams when I’m working on a sermon: making acrostics of the initial letters of the sentences in a paragraph, omitting or including certain letters (in an Oulipian mode), embroidering the words of particular songs or poems into sermons.

There are some rough, forced transitions, and some points I’d wish for more time in which to expatiate — but part of the point of my attending to rhetorical ornamentation is to distract me from my temptation to deliver academic lectures on my pet theological themes. At least to that extent, I think the device worked out all right for today’s sermon.

+

In the name of Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit — Amen.

A couple of years ago, somebody introduced me to a biaxial typology of human character types, a technology-age alternative to familiar personality inventories such as the ubiquitous Meyers-Briggs typology. Instead of dividing people into introverts and extroverts, into “perceiving” or “judging” types, this typology identifies people along one axis as pirates or ninjas, and on another as dwarves or elves. The first axis distributes people according to their sense of piratical chaos or ninja orderliness, their exuberant ardor or their unobtrusive precision; the second axis distributes people according to their preference for the dwarf’s diligent hard toil over against the elf’s timeless rumination. [Improvise, vamp to allow time for people to figure out for themselves where they and their friends fall on this typology.]

Now, one can see in an instant that there’s no social scientific basis to this at all — it’s strictly folk knowledge (and I suspect it’s especially useful as such), and it doesn’t necessarily rest on historically sound descriptions of buccaneers, assassins, short people, or Orlando Bloom. But this typology does usefully testify to particular ways of thinking about how people do and should shape their lives, and these ways of thinking even at such improbable times as, for instance, when we’re trying to muddle our ways out of theological problems. Piratical Christians may suppose that none of our abstract thinking does anyone the slightest bit of good; they may claim that God wants us mostly just to live whole-heartedly, robustly, going for the gusto and relying on God to forgive our miscues and extravagances in the name of abundant life. Contrariwise, the theological ninja insists that God has made absolutely clear a code of explicit eternal laws to govern our behavior. On the second axis, the dwarven disciples might commit themselves to earnest effort to accomplish demonstrable good in their lives, to taking direct action in the world, building the Kingdom of God on earth, whereas the Christian elves might sponsor contemplative withdrawal from the hurly-burly of mundane life, in favor of cultivating the beauty of holiness in undistracted lives. We could substitute James of Jerusalem for the ninjas, and Paul’s uninhibited congregation in Corinth for the pirates, and Mary and Martha of Bethany for the elves and the dwarves.

So the Psalmist may have been a ninja, in this sense, when he said that “the Law of the Lord is perfect, and revives the soul” — and the pirates, in turn, can rush in to point to the example of Jesus’ wild disruption of Temple worship, chasing people around with a whip while they’re trying to fill out their pledge envelopes. But the typology also points to a more profound, more subtle theological point: the temptation to cast our deepest problems in terms that resolve easily into “us” and “them,” to our credit and their disadvantage. It doesn’t take an advanced degree in theology to recognize pernicious oversimplification when you see it — the church embraces both Mary and Martha, we need activists who love God recklessly as well as careful scholars of doctrine. But when the church considers questions of power and policy, we frequently fall back on facile dichotomies that congratulate people like us and castigate people like them.

At such times, we may want to open our ears to St. Paul, that always-unfashionable theologian who devoted his ministry to serving as Christ’s ambassador between “us” and “them,” between Greeks and Judeans, between the Law-observant established congregations based in Jerusalem and the innovative, emergent congregations in Antioch and the Gentile world. Paul could have insisted, ninja-like, on everybody adhering to the Torah, perpetuating unchanged the commandments by which God promised life to the people of Israel. Paul could have rebelled against the Torah, insisting that God had done something so new and so spiritually provocative that all that old stuff had to go by the boards. “Arrrrrr, Mateys, let us sin the morrrre, that grrrrace may abound!” Paul could have simplified his life and ministry by playing to the partisan audiences, and bequeathed to us a plainer, less complicated gospel.

Instead, Paul grapples with the Law in this morning’s lesson, but not because he couldn’t live up to its expectations. St Paul shows no hesitation about assuring us that he advanced in Judaism far beyond the rest of his contemporaries, because he was more zealous for the traditions of his ancestors. If anyone had reason to be confident in the flesh Paul figured he had more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews, as to the righteousness under the Law, Paul claimed to be blameless. Yet the Law, which this morning’s reading identified as “spiritual” and “good,” could not bring about the grace that sets people free; it could point to the difference between sin and goodness, but just as it calls our attention to possible sins, the Law inevitably tangles us up the more in fretting about what we may or may not do. Sin, working through our mortality, takes advantage of the Law to bind our imaginations all the more intractably to the question of just how much naughtiness we can get away with. So Paul bemoans the complications of the truth: The Law is good, but it does not release our imaginations from their captivity to sin and death. We rise from death to new life with Jesus, the faithful and righteous incarnation of the truth, who does not reject the Law but enlivens us, enlightens us by showing what joyous discipleship looks like, how it gives, with whom it shares.

So Paul tried to help us understand that God’s wisdom encompasses a more extensive, a more intensive vision of community than any flat, sloganeering, partisan program could sustain. The Law alone could not be exhaust God’s policy for human life, or Jesus’ death and resurrection would be pointless. At the same time, Jesus’ life and ministry derive their meaning from his unambiguous loyalty to the Law and to God’s promises. Likewise Paul saw, and Paul taught, that we have only begun to receive God’s grace if we receive it in harmony with the patterns of life that Israel teaches us, as they have been amplified, extended, intensified, by the faithful example of Jesus. In rising with Christ, as the Spirit transforms us by the renewing of our minds, we take part in the new creation that catches up both Gentile and Jew, and elf and dwarf, pirate and ninja in a spiritual ecology of unstinting mutual respect, so that the Law does not mark our division from one another, but it traces the interweaving and mutual enrichment of Moses’ commandments and the Spirit’s instruction, for which we all give thanks and praise.

Our own efforts to engineer a common life that suits us persistently fall prey to the limitations of our field of vision; when we claim to abandon the Law in favor of the Spirit, very often we institute a new, covert sort of Law in place of the older, explicit, God-given Law we displaced. We become fundamentalists of canons and power even as we claim to be set free by the Spirit, or we acclaim our open inclusiveness at the same time that we comfortably repel the wrong sorts of people from God’s holy sanctuaries.

To all our over-simplifying, however well-intentioned it may be, Paul thunders, “By no means!” When his congregations inferred that the Torah bore no relevance to the kind of lifestyle they learned from Paul, he reminded them that the Law is holy, good and just. True, the Law does not bind Gentile disciples of Jesus in the same way that it binds the children of Israel, because Jesus has called us Gentiles into communion with God specifically apart from the Law; but neither does the Law misrepresent God’s portrayal of a faithful, peaceable, holy way of life. In our belief and in our behavior, all of us have been baptized into a truth we did not dream up, an ethics we did not pick and choose, a community we did not select, a harmony of which we remain only one part.
We do not choose the Law, but we receive it as a gift from God. Such a gift we cannot reject, we cannot despise, without turning our rejecting the Christ who lived by the Law, to the Law and the Prophets bear witness. To the extent that we share the faith of Jesus, we are beholden to the Law as our guardian and instructor — and to the extent that we give praise to the Spirit who sets us free, we demonstrate that freedom by flourishing in a liberty that has no need of the Law because it nothing desires that the Law would forbid.

We can live that way. We can move past desire and contentiousness, beyond the desperate grasping for power that drives institutions and governments to defy the Law in the name of an illusory security. We can let go ancient mistrust and hatred, we can trust the stranger and bless those who persecute us. Indeed, we certainly will know that blessing one day! Yet these blessings will come to us only when we yield the willful determination to produce salvation on our terms, when we relax our death-grip on coercion’s mallet, when we cease our restless questing for our true selves and let grace blossom where God has planted it.

God has scattered the seeds of grace so far afield that they reach from the depths of hard-hammered Moria to the shimmering beauty of Lothlorien, from
the tall-masted decks of the Barbary Coast to the ninjutsu of Tokugawa Japan. Our imaginations stammer and fail before the comprehension of a holiness, a righteousness, whose gifts encompass so vast a range of constituents. If we had to depend on ourselves to accomplish salvation, to build a truly inclusive church, to ascertain the Way by which we arrive at the fullness of life, we would be wretched captives indeed. But thanks be to God, who knows us with unflinching truthfulness, who loves us with unwavering generosity, who imagines us as possible bearers of a glorious light in a radiant world — thanks be to God who has given us the Law that revives our soul, the peace that passes human understanding, the grace by which receive God’s gifts; who has given us the victory over sin and the grave, through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Posted by AKMA at 01:45 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 18, 2006

It's All Happening at Seminary

For the time being, I’m working on tomorrow’s sermon. I can’t keep the links to all these posts sitting in my browser. Eventually there’ll be a real post here, commenting on them, but for now I’ll just put the links up.

From Joi: Church Leadership and World of Warcraft

From Jennifer: Union Seminary Student Wins Twenty-Four Hour Game Design Mosh

From Micah: Students Flock to Seminaries, Not to Pulpits (NYTimes, registration required)

From the Archer: Superheroes and their Faiths

Posted by AKMA at 05:59 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Uh-huh

Margaret got the following phishing letter yesterday, from which I copy and paste directly:

Dear CitiBank Member,

We are looking forward to your assistance and understanding and inform you about new CitiBusiness® department system updrade performed by security management team in order to protect our clients from increased online fraud activity, unauthorized account access, illegal funds withdrawal and also to simplify some processes.

The new updated technologies guaranty convenience and safety of CitiBusiness® account usage. New services for your account will be effective immediately after an account confirmation process by a special system activation application.

To take an advantages of current updrade you should login your account by using CitiBusiness® Online application. For the purpose please follow the reference:

Please note that changes in security system will be effective immediately after relogin.

Current message is created by our automatic dispatch system and could not be replyed. For the purpose of assistance, please use the "User Guide" reference of an original CitiBusiness® website.

I don’t know, maybe Citibank attracts billions of dollars of savings and investments by economizing in the copy-editing department. Maybe the writers at Citibank don’t know the subtle difference between “guaranty” and “guarantee” (though one might think such ignorance runs the risk of legal complications), and maybe their IT department really does install updrades.

Maybe. But somehow, I don’t think so.

Posted by AKMA at 03:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 16, 2006

That Time of Year

I should have called my basketball-predicting season complete when I correctly forecast the winner of Tueday’s play-in game for the NCAA championship tournament. I easily picked Monmouth over Hampton — on the basis that two of Nate’s godparents went to Monmouth forty years ago.

In the first three of today’s basketball games, however, I have spotted no winners among the first three games. I picked Seton Hall as an upset victor, because they used to be coached by Duke grad Tommy Amaker (and are now coached by Louis Orr), and I picked BC and Oklahoma because I didn’t think they could be upset.

[News flash: BC has rallied to save my bracket — though I started this post when BC seemed destined to fall to Pacific. By the way, my condolences to Wake Forest, which lost its first-round game in the NIT tournament.]

Still, our family will spend a great deal of time for the next few weeks scrutinizing updates from the tournament sites. . . .

Posted by AKMA at 02:25 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

March 15, 2006

R-e-l-i-e-f

Alsoft Disk Warrior seems to have saved the day again; really, I can’t imagine a Mac-based household without a copy. I rebuilt my directory, did some uninstalling and reinstalling, and everything seems to be working.

That’s especially good since I’m preaching this week at St. Luke’s. The readings include the Ten Commandments (the Exodus version), Psalm 19:7-14 (“The Law of the Lord is perfect and revives the soul”), Romans 7:13-25 (Paul’s vexations relative to explaining the Law’s role in human life and sin), and John 2:13-25 (John’s version of the cleansing of the Temple — a real outlier among these). I suppose I’ll preach about the Law; I’ll try not to repeat the same old things I usually say about the Law, but it’s hard not to. Christian congregations have been so thoroughly conditioned to approach the Torah on one of several oversimplified models (none of them particularly respectful to Judaism) that it’s hard to escape a sense of obligation to make audible, make visible a different way of thinking through these theological problems). We’ll see. I haven’t even checked to see whether there’s a sermon in my files that I might refurbish for Sunday’s use.

Posted by AKMA at 06:04 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Technological Headaches

Something mysterious and non-good is happening to my iBook. Am trying to figure out what.

Posted by AKMA at 11:48 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

March 14, 2006

Dee-fense, Dee-fense

A few Mondays ago, I caused a minor convulsion in the Force by serenading the Seabury faculty meeting with the Pittsburgh Steelers fight song (which was steeped into my consciousness in my adolescence living with a father who was a lifelong Steelers fan); the students representatives to the meeting then demanded a reprise in my New Testament II class, where I also could display the Steelers championship t-shirt that my dad had overnighted to me.

Because I am just that kind of guy, I have tracked down an online version of the original performance.

It comes with a slide show of the current Steelers (of whom I know nothing; I kept peering intently at the slides, asking “Where’s L.C. Greenwood? Where’s John Stallworth?” And what’s with the new numbers? Why aren’t they real football-uniform numbers?), but the sound track reproduces the first, unsurpassed version of the Steelers Polka.

Deee-fense, deee-fense
Make them scramble, intercept the ball!
Deee-fense, deee-fense
Blitz them, drive them up against the wall
Franco, Franco
Look at that, we have a running game!

Good things soon come to those who sit and wait. Hey!

The existence of this clip by itself justifies the existence of YouTube; thanks for hosting this gem.

Posted by AKMA at 08:53 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

March 13, 2006

Raptor Attention

The other morning, I was walking Beatrice (who has become a presidential candidate in some of Pippa’s latest doodles) north along Orrington Avenue when I saw a bird about the size of a pigeon flying toward me at about shoulder height. As it flashed past me, I realized that it was not only not a pigeon, but was in fact a hawk of some sort — given the nesting pattern at Evanston Public Library, my first inference would be that it was a peregrine.

That reminded me of last weekend in Vermont: as we were driving toward Marlboro, Margaret and I saw a bird plummet dramatically to the ground. Our first thought was that someone had shot it, but as we processed what we had seen and as we recollected that the bird had seemed to be standing up after it reached the ground, we realized that we had probably seen a hawk dive and strike.

I’ve always felt a sympathetic affinity to hawks (I wanted to say “accipiters,” but that subgroup of hawks includes only a few of the birds in question); seeing them as part of my daily life elates me.

Posted by AKMA at 06:45 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 12, 2006

Wireless Neologism

Margaret — inspired by her experience at a local cafe that offers free, but unreliable, 802.11 wireless access — suggested that we refer to the connectivity at such venues as “wiffy.”

Posted by AKMA at 08:30 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

March 11, 2006

Nostalgia, Politics, Witness

Since I recently denounced nostalgic liberalism, I should confess my own moment of that sentiment from the past week: our Gospel Mission class was discussing the 1960s, and in that context Prof. Wondra and I shared a sense of loss that forty years ago, there was something we could accurately call a “peace movement.”

It may be too much to imagine that, in the present political climate of national pathology triggered by strangers and danger, the witness of Christian Peacemaker Tom Fox might quicken the consciences of political incumbents, or inspire resistance to fear-mongering and scapegoating among the world populace in general.

Something, sometime, will make clear just how grim, how cynical, how exploitative and degraded the U.S. government’s policies have become. Evidently tens of thousands of Iraqi civilan deaths haven’t done it. Thousands of U.S. military deaths haven’t done it. I doubt that Tom Fox’s faithful witness will get enough media play to provide the occasion for repentance (maybe if he had been a young, attractive woman from an upper-middle class family); but he has contributed his life to catalyzing that recognition. The sooner, the better. Ora pro nobis, Tom — while we search our hearts for the courage and determination to look at brutality, call it by name, and refuse to comply with its advocates.

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March 09, 2006

Anglican Calvinists Can Relax

I graded and handed back the “Bible content” final exam for my New Testament II class — based on the Presbyterian Bible Content exam — and the good news is, all my students could become Presbyterian ministers (at least, as far as their knowledge of the NT epistles is concerned).

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She’s Home

My terrific daughter arrived home last night from her sojourn in Maine; she had a spectacular time with her aunts, and now I’m delighted that she’s back to help me with the groceries, the dog, the recycling, and all the other complications that I’m liable to lose track of without her.

Jeanne posted a great cast photo from the end of the Angels performance, too:

That’s Si, as Louis, at the extreme left, next to his roommate Simon (who played Joe). I’ll add some pictures of my own later. . . .

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March 08, 2006

Once Bytten

I’ve wondered idly, for a while, whether the correct locution for those snatches of aural information was “sound bites” (which I’d always thought it to be) or “sound bytes” (which I’ve seen increasingly frequently). At first, I was sure it must be “bites,” but I realized that my confidence rested solely on that being to form I’d been approving for years — self-justifying prejudice. “Sound byte,” on the other hand, modified “sound” with a definable quantity of information, and an appropriately small one at that, so I reckoned that I ought to let go my predisposition and actually learn something about the subject.

I first checked the Wikipedia which, though fallible, offers a helpful starting point for online inquiry; it favored “soundbite” (one word), without even mentioning “byte” as a possible error. Then I ran into the eggcorn database which takes up exactly my question, and comes down in favor of “bite” over against Lou Marinoff’s sniffed dismissal, “ ‘sound-bite’ is nonsense.” The scale of evidence tips decisively when a commenter notes that the OED cites a public example from 1980 — well before the digital storage of audio information would have made “sound byte” a coherent term.

Parenthetically, the whole phenomenon of “eggcorns” opens a new horizon of linguistic fascination for me....

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March 07, 2006

Learning and Decoding

I’ve known Carl Conrad a long time online, and I sense that he may have said something like this before — but the remarks that jps reports put the finger exactly at a dangerous soft spot of theological education. The vast preponderance of seminarians and divinity students learn Greek in order to decode the hidden message concealed in those ominously different-looking letters (be they Hebrew or Greek), not to learn how to read well the texts written in those languages. Indeed, that sensibility of decoding a cryptogram often carries over into further dimensions of the interpretive task, so that students (and some teachers) suppose that there’s a single hidden “correct answer” to each of our interpretive problems.

It ain’t so, it can’t be so, and in order to recuperate from the delusional hope/need that reading work this way, we have to learn first of all to read rather than to decode. It ought not be too hard; we read most of the texts we encounter and interpret. Unfortunately, years of decoding-thinking (structured into the ways biblical languages are taught and into the ways Scripture is deployed in theological argument) have saturated the imaginations of at least a generation’s prominent theological spokespeople, and any recognition that reading well entails more than decoding risks being shouted down as “relativism” or “postmodernism” (in the derogatory sense).

Deep Weeds has it right: “The basic goal — improved reading aloud — seems to be coming along. More and more, I think I will begin next year’s class with at least 6 hours of mimicry, memorization, and simple commands, before getting into the written language at all.” (I think Randall Buth teaches Greek this way at the Biblical Language Center in Jerusalem, and I expect that Baruch will teach future Greek classes on that basis.) I know that the “decoding” approach to learning Greek has hampered my appreciation of that language over the years, and I wish I hadn’t written my Greek textbook before I came to the full conviction of how pernicious the conventional way of teaching and learning Greek could be. (By the way, read and appreciate Baruch’s acrostic, too.)

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March 06, 2006

Zzzzzzzzzzzz

Flight from Hartford to Chicago scheduled to board: 6:00 PM EST

Flight from Hartford sto Chicago scheduled to depart: 6:25 PM EST

Flight from Hartford sto Chicago scheduled to arrive: 8:00 PM CST

Actual boarding time: 9:30 PM EST

Actual departure time: 10:20 PM EST

Landed in Chicago: 11:46 PM CST

Arrived at gate: 12:05 CST

Phoned taxi companies to obtain ride: 12:21, 12:34, 12:38, 12:43, 12:53, 12:54 CST

Taxi arrived at O’Hare: 1:15 CST

Arrived at home: 1:39 CST

Messaged Margaret, settled dog down, snacked to calm my stomach, fell into bed: 2:15 CST

Morning Prayer: 8:30 CST

Faculty Meeting 9:00 CST

And so on.

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March 05, 2006

Extraordinary

I’m not talking about the Duke game — grrrr — but about the Marlboro College performance of Angels in America. The cast and crew, drawn from a very small college population (Marlboro has around 350 students total), outdid themselves last night — an overpowering performance, of which everyone involved should be very proud.

I had not seen the play before; when it came out, we didn't have practical access to any performances, and by the time it hit video or DVD I didn’t feel like stirring up the memories of those days (on the rare occasion when the family was willing to watch a Serious Movie); watching this performance really did bring back a suppressed tub of queasy, ominous, tragic feelings. I had the recurrent sense that I knew those guys, and seeing Si as one of them — he played Louis, a particularly troubling character — amplified the sense that these lives were part of my life.

All the actors were great. In contexts that might tend to invite overplaying (undergrad theatre, small campus, hyperdramatic scenario involving sometimes-histrionic characters), every player rang true. The student who played Si’s lover carried the role exceptionally well, and student who played Harper Pitt just amazed me with the subtly of her reading. Si’s roommate Simon played Joe Pitt utterly convincingly, suggesting his pain and ambivalence with nuanced departures from a baseline of stolid impassiveness.

It was hard to see Si play the part of yet another tormented unsympathetic character; someday I’d like to see him in a positive, blithe, heroic role. Knowing him as we do, when we see him portray someone high-strung, and embittered, it’s harder not to see his performance as acting. That being said, at the key moments of the play, I winced at his betrayal of love and integrity. He was great in an unrewarding role, with a terrific cast around him, and the whole night was utterly captivating.

Now, we have to clean up, pack, check out, have brunch with Si, Laura, Jeanne, and Pippa, and then travel back to our respective destinations. And Duke better win the ACC Tournament — I’m just saying.

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March 04, 2006

Quickly —

Travel worked fine yesterday, the ’net finally came live at our hotel, we like Jennifer’s boyfriend (they drove up from NYC to see last night’s performance, which was evidently excellent). Margaret and I love New England; the topography, ecology, demographics, cultural practices, all make sense to us as indigenous, as culturally given. Jeanne and Pippa have driven in from Maine, and we’ll meet them on campus for the play. I’ve taken some pictures already, will take more tonight, and some at tomorrow morning’s group brunch (didn’t think to take any while we were with Jennifer).

Show is tonight at 7:30, opposite the basketball game on whose outcome the struggle of good against evil depends — Si couldn’t persuade Marlboro to reschedule the performance till after Duke had put Carolina away (I hate writing that kind of thing, because it just invites providence to contradict what I’ve written — but this is just the way it has to be, I guess). I’ll boast write about both the play and the game when I find out how they end.

[Later: I shoulda known better; well done, Carolina.]

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March 03, 2006

Convergence

From all over the country — or at least, “from Maine, North Carolina, Illinois, and Minnesota,” which is pretty good coverage — people are converging on Marlboro, Vermont, to see Josiah Adam in tomorrow night’s performance of Angels in America.

Margaret has shrewdly plotted our trravel paths through Bradley Airport and a hotel in Brattleboro, both of which offer free wifi. Still, the odds suggest a diminished online presence over the weekend. Eventaully, there’ll be pictures and stories.

[Later: Arrived safely, if ravenously. It seems as though Bradley is trying single-handedly to punish United for its recent brush with bankruptcy, but with the diligence of the truly hard-core, I found an open wireless signal.]

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March 01, 2006

Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is not usually a festival of mirth and hilarity, but our service today was a little more solemn even than the usual, as we prayed for Dr. de Villa. Our guest preacher, Fr. Douglas Brown of the Order of the Holy Cross, gave a sermon that fit both the day and our additional observance. We remembered, reflected, prayed, and committed ourselves to a holy Lent.

For myself, the convergence of these circumstances suggested that I make my Lenten discipline a determination to spend time every day in an earnest memento mori; I suspect that some of the burdens I work with would benefit from my sizing them up in perspective to my own mortality: the things that I ought to make sure to have done, and the things no one will mind if I leave behind, obligations to my family and friends, and indifferent matters that no one cares about that much. We’ll see how that works out.

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