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September 30, 2006
Down To The Wire
Since my lead in the fantasy baseball league has dwindled to a half-point, and two or three of my star players have succumbed to injuries, I’d like the electronic record to show that with two days left in the season, my team was in first place. If the apparently inevitable happens, well, I was hanging on by my fingernails to the end.
Posted by AKMA at 12:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 29, 2006
Errors
This fall, I was planning to hand out to my students in Early Church History photocopies of pages from some tawdry billion-selling hack novel, for them to compare with their readings in textbooks and primary sources. I have to put that off for the moment, but eventually I’ll be adding below here a series of page numbers and short quoted claims that a student in an int4ro class in church history could easily recognize for her- or himself as false or misleading.
Later:
From Margaret Mitchell’s response among other sources,
p. 231 — Jesus "inspired millions to better lives" [sc., while he was alive?]
p. 231 — "more than eighty gospels" "the Bible, as we know it today, was collected by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great"
p. 232 — "Rome's official religion was sun worship"
p. 232 — Constantine invented the divinity of Jesus and excluded all gospels but the four canonical ones; Constantine made Christianity "the official religion" of the Roman Empire
p. 233 — "Until that moment in history, Jesus was viewed by His followers as a mortal prophet"
p. 234 — Constantine coined the term "heretic"
p. 234, 245 — "the earliest Christian records" were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls (including gospels) and Nag Hammadi texts
p. 234 — the Nag Hammadi texts "speak of Christ's ministry in very human terms"
p. 234 — "Constantine commissioned and financed a new Bible, which omitted those gospels that spoke of Christ’s human traits and embellished those gospels that made Him godlike"
p. 244 — the marriage of Mary Magdalene and Jesus is "a matter of historical record"
p. 245 — the Nag Hammadi texts represent “the earliest Christian records”
p. 245 — "Jesus was a Jew, and the social decorum during that time virtually forbid a Jewish man to be unmarried."
p. 248 — Apocryphal texts were “unaltered gospels”
Posted by AKMA at 01:17 PM | Comments (0)
September 28, 2006
Darn You, Doc!
This is just what I love about my friends online, and just what drives me crazy. At the threshold of a weekend of manic activity, Doc responds to my vote of confidence with an elegant clarification that provokes me to push back a little. As a wise man once proposed, “It’s more complicated than it appears.”
My demurrer involves the second part of Doc’s formulation: “Gestures are expressions of intent.” I’d like to factor the word “intent” out, for a variety of reasons. At first, I thought that “intent” might be implicit in “expression”from the start, but then I recognized that we could speak intelligibly of unconscious expressions; when my eyes widen in surprise, I express my startled response without intending it, and we could multiply examples indefinitely. My [initially] preferred alternative “Gestures are deliberate expressions,” which I hoped would capture the element of intent without using an overloaded word, seems to leave out some phenomena. But the possibility of unintentional expression, and of significant gestures that aren’t deliberate, leads me to wonder whether some gestures might be unintentional?
I see a possible usefulness in talking about “intent” in the marketing context: we want to offer advertisers something to work with, and if (on Doc’s account, still haven’t gotten to Steve’s) we can get advertisers thinking about their interlocutors as maybe “intending to buy something,” they’ll be more likely to pay attention. Of course, Doc can just stipulate that when he says “gesture,” this is what he means. But what about this: what if we opted for “Gestures are expressions of interest,” or “are interested expressions” (using “interest” in the sense of “interested parties,” “people whose interests are affected by X”)? Does that advance the cause of precision in our use of this term? (I have no particular interest in making it more salable to marketers, though if the discussion helps Doc gain traction for his arguments, then so much the better.)
Posted by AKMA at 10:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Getting Out
This just in: copy of Fortress Press book discovered in Minnesota!
Thomas (this is his copy, spotted in the Luther Seminary bookstore) wonders if there’ll be an opportunity for online interaction about the book. I’m hoping so; Geoff was talking to me this summer about possibly discussing it (and the Baker book, not out yet) in conjunction with the Church and Postmodern Culture blog.
I’m still itching to start a discussion on Beautiful Theology, too, so if the Church and Postmodern gig doesn't pan out, we can kick the ideas around at a place I’ll build. But this Internet thrives on discussion, and I’m looking forward to taking part in that.
Posted by AKMA at 07:24 AM | Comments (0)
September 27, 2006
Doc's Gestures
I don’t know precisely what Doc means when he talks about gestures (or Steve, when he does), and they talk about “gestures” in the context of marketing and economics (rather than the Queen of Sciences, Theology) — but in my wrestling with hermeneutics over the past few years, I’ve found the problem of communicative gestures to constitute one decisive fulcrum for my reasoning.
Posted by AKMA at 08:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 26, 2006
Sermon and Events On The Horizon
I’ll be preaching at Frank’s ordination on Sunday — we’ reading 1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14 and John 6:51-58. It’s pretty clear — at least in prospect — that I’ll preach about Solomon’s prayer for wisdom, but I’m not sure exactly where I’ll go with it (and administrative obligations and course preps and social network turbulence are beclouding my perception on this).
But I received a surprise tonight when I opened an email from my hosts at McCormick Theological Seminary, where I’ll be making a guest appearance in a class they teach: They’d like to set up a book-signing reception for me. I don’t know if it’ll work out, but the fact that they’d think of that out of a clear blue sky means a ton to me.
Tripp said: I will see you there...
-Tripp
[Tripp recently posted a nice piece on how his mandolin lessons force him to un-learn some deeply-ingrained habits, and whether that might correlate to any comparable experience in learning theology.]
Carol writes:
A book signing! How cool! I was happily surprised to find my copy of "Faithful Interpretation" waiting for me when I returned home from a weekend out-of-town on Monday. The introduction distracted me from my misery for a while yesterday afternoon in bed with a cold. I found it very instructive in providing some intellectual underpinning for my unexamined assumptions. How did I miss the widespread insistence that there is only one correct interpretation of any Biblical text? (I've certainly encountered my share of folks who were sure they knew the single true meaning of the text in question, but they always denied they were interpreting at all.) Was it it my training at Andover Newton where William Bradford's "God has more truth and light to break forth from his Holy Word" was repeated more often than any creed? Is it the influence of Baptist freedom? Certainly there would be no point in asserting the right and responsibility of every believer to interpret scripture (in community, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit) if one wasn't assuming a benefit to many perspectives, and the possibility of more than one outcome. Thanks for the helpful insights. I look forward to the rest of the essays.
Carol
Posted by AKMA at 09:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 25, 2006
Linguae Francae, Dialects, Pidgins, and Gibberish
I frequently hear Anglicans apologize for their liturgical language and customs (even on the minimal end of the scale). They have accepted the premise that “a language understanded of the people” (Article XXIV of the Articles of Religion) should be interpreted as something like “in colloquial use.” Since few of those who walk past my perch at the coffee-shop window use formal diction, much less poetic diction, the church ought not speak formally in worship.
You may be able to guess how this sets my teeth on edge. I fully accept the principle involved; a congregation ought to be conversant with the claims and invocations made on their behalf in the liturgy. Still, Article XXIV legislates against using Latin in liturgy, and we ought to be able to agree that the difference between reading ecclesiastical Latin and formal English is a lot greater than that between reading formal English and colloquial English.
We shouldn't turn this into a William Bennett castor-oil defense of good ol’ fashion liturgical language. If someone doesn’t catch the reasons for precise verbal formulations in worship, that doesn’t make them base, or dumb, or inferior, or any other opprobrious term. Neither does it set the baseline for theological communication at the threshold of the least acute apprehension in the congregation.
The church struggled, and struggles, to articulate its claims to transcendent truth in terms that command assent as widely as possible, as precisely as possible. That enmeshes us in efforts toward attaining a kind of theological-liturgical lingua franca. When I wrote sadly about the Episcopal Church promoting an array of nine or so authorized eucharistic prayers, my concern pivoted at this point — I’m not [solely] a nostalgic old grouse, but am concerned that we’re modulating from being a loosely-joined communion with a liturgical lingua franca to being an umbrella group for allied enclaves that all speak idiosyncratic versions of a pidgin derived from the Prayerbook tradition, mingled with the vogue terminology of the moment.
That worries me for a variety of reasons. If there’s no clear theologico-liturgical grammar against which we can assess our provisional formulations, we approach a condition of mutual unintelligibility and doctrinal indifference. If every enclave frames its liturgy according to dictates indigenous to that community, wherein lies the catholicity of our communion? And if there are, in fact, some theological sticking points on which these enclaves all must agree, what are they, and (more important, in a certain way) how would we know?
It’s vitally important that the church speak in a comprehensible language, but part of its job involves teaching people that language. We don’t need to stick with an amber-encased archaic language, but neither need we dis-integrate our liturgical expressions to a point where an observer might wonder whether any distinct premises ground all of the assortment, or where a casual observer might easily conclude that any sentiment, any expression acceptably characterizes God, so long as it’s authentic. The more we proliferate “authorized” expressions of the church’s faith, the more carefully we need to coordinate them toward the sound communication of the gospel with which we’ve been entrusted.
Reader Bob writes: AKMA, I didn’t quite get what you’re actually proposing. Do you want to eliminate or reduce the number of authorized Eucharistic Prayers? I would simply point to the Roman Sacramentary, which essentially has dozens of Eucharistic Prayers, with lots of cool variations even in the theoretically standard Roman Canon. One may debate the catholicity of the Roman Catholic Church, I suppose, but I think the mere proliferation of Eucharistic prayers is not necessarily indicative of non-catholicity. It seems to me the liturgical Ordo is the true mark of catholicity, a la “Rite III” on page 400. All of our full-text prayers follow the Ordo, even II-C. I think that the different emphasis each has is what lends applicability, and interest, and reflects the diversity of thought that we celebrate within our catholicity. I would not like to go back to a single prayer. Inevitably, the emphasis of any single prayer leaves out other important emphases, (Rite I-A tends far too much toward the breast-beating for a rite that celebrates our salvation, for my taste), and seasonal or theological variation is fine. What’s wrong with a little Gallicanism, anyway? Cheers, Bob
AKMA answers:
My quick response would point to the difference between a magisterial Roman Catholicism and the more conciliar-consultative Anglican Communion. A rite is by definition sound, if it’s been vetted and promulgated by the Vatican — but we have no such decisive authority structure. Indeed, the Book of Common prayer itself seems to bear some of that authority as it functions in the ordination rite. So variety in liturgical expression operates differently in a magisterial context than in a context where the liturgical texts themselves constitute a criterion of theological soundness.
I've heard some conservative voices espouse a sort of hostile-takeover theory of liturgical revision in the Episcopal Church, where the Prayerbook was changed in ways that laid the groundwork for subsequent changes in the historic theological emphases of the Episcopal Church. I tend to doubt conspiracy theories, but I do think the liturgical authorities have tended to set the Episcopal Church on a risky course by modulating us from the Book of Common Prayer to an anthology of various sources for liturgical prayer; I value having a clear sense of what the church stands for (and what I dissent from!) more than having a compendious miasma of theological slurry, to the whole of which few people could avow allegiance, and to the congenial bits and pieces of which anyone could.
Posted by AKMA at 06:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 24, 2006
Bultmann and Barth
Margaret had never read much of Rudolf Bultmann’s work before this year of her doctoral program, so she messaged me to ask some questions. We were intrigued to chat about some of the patterns of similarity and difference between Bultmann and Karl Barth, and what Margaret might make of Bultmann for her own work.
One of the peculiarities of our discussion was our very firm demurrer from Bultmann’s own Heideggerian theology — but our common resistance wasn’t based on the (frequent) argument that Bultmann “imports alien concerns into the text,” or that his existential interpretation was anachronistic, or that “demythologizing” misses the point of the writings he claimed to be interpreting. On our hermeneutical perspective, there’s no “importing” or “exporting” in interpretation, so we can’t indict him on the first charge. We all contextualize what we read in terms that aren’t already implied by the text before us, so Bultmann’s not formally different from any other reader on that score. We rejoice in anachronism, so long as it’s practiced with due caution; Bultmann was more reckless than we’d approve, but we’d have to acquit on the charge of anachronism too, on the basis of selective enforcement if no other. And complaints about “demythologizing” beg the question by presupposing that some other context is intrinsically more fitting for reading Paul and John than is Heideggerian existentialism — and we don’t buy that, either.
Our objections to Bultmann fall into two main categories. First, he seems at various pivotal points not to be offering a convincing account of the text he’s ostensibly interpreting, but rather is explaining what would have to be true in order for his interpretation to be correct. But since we don’t already buy his interpretation, the gesture heightens our sense of critical sleight-of-hand. We can see Bultmann deal from the bottom of the deck, and though he shows us a handsome poker hand, we still question the fairness of his dealing. Second, and more interesting to us, is the point that although we don’t dispute his critical prerogative to interpret the New Testament in terms of a particular strain of twentieth-century German existential thought, we can’t understand how one warrants that as a work of Christian theology. Isn’t it more like the current vogue of dressing Paul up in a black turtleneck and saying that he’s the progenitor of a postmodern ethics of difference? (I’m looking at you, Badiou and Zizek, among others.)
But if you’re going to take up the vocation of being a Christian theological interpreter of the New Testament, why not lend a little more attention to the deep, subtle interpretive tradition that provides for your guidance such brilliant readers as Origen, the Cappadocians, Augustine, Thomas, and all that bunch? Of course, part of the answer is that he’s a Protestant, and part of the answer that he’s a modern Christian who can’t submit his intellectual liberty to the judgments of the ancients — but as a result of his inability to give a rich account of the church’s theological deliberations over the centuries, his theology suffers from a foreshortened perspective on the truth-claims he makes. While he may produce an exquisitely wrought theological text in the end, it holds little interest whatsoever to Christians who regard the New Testament as more canonically pertinent than, for instance, Being and Time. That’s a good book, and Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament is an excellent, fine, careful exercise in interpretation; but as Christian theology, it leaves nigh onto twenty centuries out of the picture. Anachronism we can live with, and contextualization we can live with, and “eisegesis” we can live with, but we can’t say much on behalf of a theological proposal that ignores the creeds and the great articulators of theological soundness.
Derek says:
I am intrigued by your post, particularly as I spent the summer reading Zizek (and others), and have just finished Badiou's Saint Paul - The Foundation of Universalism. With that said, here are my thoughts and questions.
You said by way of comment on Bultmann, "Isn’t it more like the current vogue of dressing Paul up in a black turtleneck and saying that he’s the progenitor of a postmodern ethics of difference? (I’m looking at you, Badiou and Zizek, among others.)" I certainly recognize this is an apt description of the moves B&Z are making, I am not as sure that they are doing so under the guise of Christian theological readings. Butlmann claims his existential reading is Christian theology. Badiou explicitly disawows this. Zizek I think is unclear; sometimes he seems more like Badiou, and others more like Bultmann. Is there more to this that I am missing?
In my estimation, their readings are not helpful because they are theological per se, but because they generate challenges for reading the text in relation to late modern global consumer capitalism. I am particularly moved by some of their Leninist-Lacanian articulations about the law and its suspension. Here, I find Agamben's Romans commentary of use as well. Much like Jeff Stout, I view them as sympathetic provocateurs or provocative sympathizers.
These are just some first thoughts. I haven't even beta tested them with my wife or colleagues. I'd like to hear/read more about your readings of these and others.
Yours,
DWL
Well said, Derek. You observe, I am not as sure that they are doing so under the guise of Christian theological readings.
No, absolutely not. Both they and Bultmann "know" what's really right about Paul (or whomever), and it has no durable relation to the Christian theological tradition. The point is that the move whereby one decides at the outset that that some third point of reference is what Scripture is "really" all about (whether it be Heideggerian existentialism or the poltiics of universality and Otherness or Javanese astrology), one has separated oneself from that point on from the Christian theological tradition.
So Bultmann’s claim to stand within that tradition strikes a false note; his gesture is more like Badiou’s than like, for instance, Barth’s.
Butlmann claims his existential reading is Christian theology. Badiou explicitly disawows this. Zizek I think is unclear; sometimes he seems more like Badiou, and others more like Bultmann.No, my acquaintance with these thinkers tends to follow yours (though I take Zizek's flirtations as more a matter of display than of substantial commitment).
In my estimation, their readings are not helpful because they are theological per se, but because they generate challenges for reading the text in relation to late modern global consumer capitalism. I am particularly moved by some of their Leninist-Lacanian articulations about the law and its suspension. Here, I find Agamben's Romans commentary of use as well. Much like Jeff Stout, I view them as sympathetic provocateurs or provocative sympathizers.Indeed — and again, the point is that Bultmann would not self-represent as a sympathetic outsider, but as a vigorous defender of the gospel -- which gesture I find unconvincing.
Posted by AKMA at 11:50 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 22, 2006
Happy OneWebDay!
I doubt anyone can approximate the wonders that the marvelous series of tubes we call the Internet and its subset the Web have brought us. On One Web Day, we can sit back for a moment and think about the amazing changes the Web has wrought in our conventional communication (remember when you had to telephone somebody, or write them a postal message, if you wanted to communicate with them? Today we can use instant messages, email, VOIP, audio and video conferencing. Remember needing an item that your local retailer didn’t stock, and not having the appropriate mail order catalogue on hand? Remember when “columnists” were only those writers whom the local newspaper had favored with a few inches a week, and when news was meted out solely by the bureaus at a few media centers?
It’s all changing — not by any means in unqualifiedly idyllic ways, not everywhere at once, not all in cheery, comfortable ways; but it’s changing willy-nilly. And the idyllic, good, cheery, comforting bits, where we find them? They’re really terrific. And the problems? We’re still working on them — together, I hope.
Posted by AKMA at 11:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 21, 2006
New Glasses
Pippa had been waiting patiently for a chance to consult an optometrist; this morning she got her snappy new pair of glasses. All the way home, she was reading far-away signs, rejoicing at the vivid acuity of the world, and suggesting that I had been “hogging all the vision.”
Mom says:
Love the glasses, need the smile! xox, Mom
Posted by AKMA at 02:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 20, 2006
In Time For October Birthdays
Much to my surprise, yesterday brought a package from Fortress Press containing my author’s copies of Faithful Interpretation, the collection of essays from my first published work through a paper I gave just last winter, sort of a follow-up to the Winslow Lecture. I wasn’t expecting the book till October, so this was a marvelous bolt from the blue.
As I say, it’s a collection of essays from spanning an eighteen-year interval, so it’s not as tightly-integrated as I might like it to be. Still, there’s a thematic consistency to the whole, and the miscellaneity serves to show that the fundamental insights I’m articulating have more than just narrow implications. I have a job ahead writing up a careful treatise spelling it all out, but that lies a few books ahead of now. For the time being, this and the forthcoming Baker book do a great job of sketching out my arguments about hermeneutics. I’m delighted it’s, out there, very thankful to Neil Elliott for soliciting the manuscript for Fortress and then overseeing the production process, and to all my friends —online, offline, students, colleagues — for prodding me into refining the rough intuitions that I’m hammering into shape here.
Reader Margaret Adam asks,
Where is the part in your blog posting that says: ONLY 13.60 FROM AMAZON! ORDER NOW WHILE STILL AVAILABLE!! DO YOUR HOLIDAY SHOPPING NOW!!
Posted by AKMA at 06:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 19, 2006
Pirates Don't Phone
Durn! Between long-range planning, midday mass, running home to check on Pippa, and new student advising, I missed out on PhoneCon. Sounds like fun, Jeneane; wish I could’ve been there.
Posted by AKMA at 02:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Arrrrr!
Mark says:
That doth look as though it would indeed rot one's teeth away. On that I am in agreement with the young pirate!
Posted by AKMA at 01:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 18, 2006
Not Her Cereal
Yesterday I had to run to the grocery store to pick out some food for an overtired, underfed chorister. Among the foods we had run out of was Crispix, the rice and corn chex-like cereal, of which she occasionally has a bowl before bedtime.
The cereal aisle was every bit as visually noisy as it was designed to be, and since Sunday afternoon is a prime time for grocery shopping in Evanston, people had been picking up and putting down boxes in a variety of places. I spotted the mammoth boxes of Crispix, but decided to compare the price of the smaller box, and (as is often the case) the smaller box was actually less expensive per ounce, so I grabbed a box and brought it home.
Well, not exactly. It turns out that someone had replaced the most accessible box in the smaller-Crispix place with a box of “Kellogg’s Pirates of the Caribbean” cereal, chocolate blobs interspersed with marshmallows shaped in piratical motifs. (I link to the Google image search page because the available online images come from Kellogg’s, which forces a pop-up Flash window; a salacious Hollywood gossip site; and eBay, where the images will soon have disappeared.) When Pippa reached for the cereal last evening, not only would she not touch the stuff, but she conducted a lengthy review of all the ways I should have been able to tell that this wasn’t just a promotional; box for good ol’ Crispix, and an analysis of exactly how bad for you the candy cereal must be.
Solution: I’ll bring it to compus tomorrow for “International Talk Like a Pirate Day” and leave it in the refectory.
Posted by AKMA at 09:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Marked!
No, not about the graphic interpretation of the gospel.
Boingboing, geek icon and ditigalibertarian (-libertine?) bastion, summarizes the recently-released This Film Is Not Yet Rated in a recent endorsement. That summary includes the following paragraph:
The movie revolves around the mystery of the MPAA's ratings process. Kirby Dick hires a likable middle-aged lesbian private eye who stakes out the MPAA's LA headquarters, writing down license plate numbers and war-dialing the MPAA voicemail system until she gets the names and addresses of all the "parents" on the ratings committee, some of whom are childless, or with grown children.Do you see what I see? The private eye’s sexuality gets mentioned in the piece, but the director’s doesn’t; even in a vigorously pro-gay venue such as Boingboing, lesbian identity is marked, and heterosexuality unmarked.
Is the private eye’s sexuality pertinent to the documentary’s plot? Maybe — but if hers is, I’d be interested to know why Kirby Dick’s is not (indeed, he’s named in the article, without indication of sexuality; she’s anonymous, identified only by occupation, temperament, and sexual behavior).
My point is not to scold Cory Doctorow or to dictate anyone how they ought to communicate. I want to bring to awareness the ways that our expressions effect messages that go beyond what “we wanted to say.” I know that Cory doesn’t think that lesbians are an aberration from a “normal” heterosexuality, but it’s worth extra trouble deliberately to compose prose that aligns with one’s considered philosophy.
Cory checked in with me this morning, and our conversation obliges me to clarify that I didn’t mean to suggest that Kirby Dick is gay (I don’t know one way or the other), just that Cory leaves Dick’s sexuality unmarked, where the private eye’s is marked. I'm referring to the socio-grammatical concept of “marked” and “unmarked” categories — you know, “the assailant was an African-American male, 5 feet tall” versus “the assailant was male, 5 feet tall [= white],” or “female comedian Brenda Bobbysox” versus “comedian Alan Athleticsox [= male].” The “different” category is marked; the “normal” category is unmarked.
As it turns out, Cory assures me that the investigator’s sexuality does engage the movie’s narrative arc, so that his specifying her identity as a lesbian was not out-of-a-clear-blue-sky.Posted by AKMA at 07:51 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 17, 2006
Not Forgotten
I don’t think I ever met lilo offline, but I know that we participated in spirited discussions on #joiito, and I know that the freenode IRC net that he oversaw made, and continues to make, a great contribution to online communications.
Sometimes people say that connections made online are less real than offline interactions. I dare say that they are flat-out wrong. In time, perhaps pretty soon, we’ll have adjusted to the online dimension of human interaction, and the replacement panic reaction “that’s not a real friendship” or “you mean, he’s an online friend” will seem peculiar. That’ll be a day Rob helped prepare us for.
Posted by AKMA at 02:53 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Chasing David
It’s a good thing that I don’t always write about online matters, and good also that David Weinberger and I have long-standing philosophical disagreements about hermeneutics and digital metaphysics. Otherwise, one my be inclined to construe this as nothing more than a Weinberger applause blog.
But David hits the point squarely with his post about “free peanuts,” the not-strictly-free enticements with which purveyors entice customers to spend [more] money. Shared music and video files — usually highly compressed, of less quality than the full originals — should constitute the peanuts that distributers write off as indirect advertising, as one by-product of the general popularity of their merchandise.
I don’t like the sound of “freechasing,” David’s neologism for this phenomenon, but this was exactly the argument I made this week to a publisher who called me up for some feedback about an online publishing project. Save money that you might spend on access restrictions, give away as much as you possibly can, and make money on your popularity, reputation, and added-value features.
And I prefer free popcorn to free peanuts.
Posted by AKMA at 02:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Me Neither
Catching up unsystematically on posts I’d missed, I came to Les Orchard’s pre 9/11 post, “I refuse to be afraid.” He and Bruce Schneier (whom his post cites) have it exactly right — you can’t beat terrorism by brute force. Our response to terrorist attacks should always be, “How can we conduct our collective affairs in such a way as to make terrorism pointless?” Saber-rattling coercive politics positively invites persistent attacks; it challenges terrorists to beat us at the game of destruction. In such a game, the terrorists always hold the advantage of surprise; it’s a lot easier to outmaneuver a monolith than for the monolith to devise preventive measures against any possible mode of attack (as our belated, retrospective gestures demonstrate).
At this point, the number of deaths after the terrorist attacks outnumbers the deaths on that date by a factor of, what? 10? The U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq have not disabled Al-Qaeda; neither Afghanistan nor Iraq has a peaceful, benign, democratically-elected government; the U.S. population does not live in a higher degree of peace and security than it did on September 10, 2001. Thousands of military families, and tens of thousands of Iraqi families, bear the long-term costs of a misbegotten and failed policy.
I’m not afraid of Al-Qaeda; I am afraid that U.S. efforts to dominate the world are inadvertently advancing the cause of fear and terror, and are corroding the political ecology in which the ideals for which the Constitution and Bill of Rights represent an admirable, hopeful, vision.
[Edited to read “admirable, hopeful, vision” rather that “admirable, hopeful, ideal,” which was repetitive and imprecise.]
Posted by AKMA at 09:24 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 16, 2006
On Not Banging My Head Against The Wall
It’s been more than two days since I cleared a bit of comment spam. This is so intensely satisfying that I can seriously begin thinking about starting a “Beautiful Theology” blog at the Disseminary site; I’m working on cleaning up the other constituent databases, and then upgrade the MT engine, then “Beautiful Theology” here I come.
Speaking of which, Temple of the Seven Golden Camels blogs about drawing and design, emphasizing design for animation or comics; it includes a scan of the widely-circulated Comic Strip Artists’ Kit.
Posted by AKMA at 09:32 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 15, 2006
Chronology Cards
I settled on six pages of eight cards each (Avery 5390 template), with most of the same material as in my previous post. I fixed some dates, changed the specific reference to Septimius Severus to a commemoration of Perpetua and Felicitas, added Athanasius’ Festal Letter, omitted Apollinaris (not because he was unimportant, but because I didn't have a handy single date for him), added Theodosius’s establishment of Christianity as state religion, added Pelagius, added the Council of Toledo and its Filioque, and added Dionysius Exiguus.
I’ll print out a set to use for class, will upload jpeg pages to the Disseminary Flickr site, upload corrected jpegs and pdfs for the Theology Cards game, and begin thinking about re-formatting the Theology Card Game to fit the Avery template (for ease of printing and separating). Now, beating on the syllabus, working in the emphasis on composition, checking dates, and reading the books I’m supposed to review (and writing the reviews for them). Plus, Pippa’s Latin tutorial at 3 PM.
Posted by AKMA at 09:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
A Different Theological Divergence
The Bishop of the Diocese of Southwest Florida (where I used to serve) has urged his diocese, “I would encourage you to join me in a 40-day fast from reading the web blogs. ” To be fair, Bp. Lipscomb has in mind the topical, controversy-mongering blogs that derive a sort of vampiric appeal from exacerbating the disagreements that beset the Episcopal Church these days. When he refers to “the blogs” (without specific antecedent in the letter), he pretty surely refers to just a few.
At the same time, the letter bespeaks some sad misunderstandings about Blogaria, and about media in general, that risk casting Bp. Lipscomb as the House of Bishops’ Ted Stevens. I have no way to know whether anyone has answered his appeal, but I haven’t detected any less blogging, nor have any of the church-in-crisis blogs reported a fall-off in readership. Indeed, Kendall Harmon’s (not itself a flame-brandishing blog, though some arsonists frequent it) reports all-time high readership.
As Micah asked me, “Would Bp. Lipscomb ask that his diocese not read any books for forty days?” Would he say, “I encourage you to undertake a 40-day fast from newspapers?” Or “neighborhood hang-outs?” “telephone calls?” If he asked people to avoid a particular subset of blogs, or to eschew all media of a particular tenor (“ecclesiastical tabloids,” let us call them), that would be one thing; but alas, Lipscomb’s gesture toward cultivating a more irenic atmosphere seems likely only to provide fodder for. . . the blogs.
Trevor says:
isn't it weird that this call went out over the internet?
t
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September 14, 2006
September Stromateis
• Via Liz Lawley (who was mentioned by name and quoted in the Newsweek article), Presentation Zen endorses Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. I read Making Comics a few days ago, and enjoyed it — but it’s still not a patch on Understanding.
• Via Accordion Guy, Pajiba’s “The Best Movies You’ve Never Seen,” the kind of column that I read and note, which I draw on in video stores to amaze my family with masterpieces that they’ve never heard of. We have in fact already seen Shallow Grave, though not the rest.
• Via Language Log, Wayne Leman’s Better Bibles Blog shows that God approves of the use of “they” as a singular pronoun.
• I missed it, but didymustk has started seminary at Luther. Say hey to my faculty friends there (which is about a third of the teachers). . . .
• One of these days, I’ll turn off comments for a little while, to facilitate upgrading Moveable Type. It’s hard to imagine anyone getting upset about that, but if you were tempted to see it as a sign of some sort, please bear this in mind. [Later: I went ahead and did that, for the time being. When I get the spam backlog under control, I’ll backup, upgrade, and then we’ll see what happens. For the time being, the boldface link below will use your email client to send a comment to my email address, which has the advantage that it saves a copy in your “sent” folder and my inbox. Then I’ll go in and edit the entry itself to incorporate your comments.]
• I think Si is taking a class on Python. I don’t know for sure, because when things are going well with him, I don’t hear much — but I’m pleased that he’s at least considering learning a scripting language.
• Pippa and I went to get some frames for the paintings and pastels that she’s been making. I take delight in the art itself, but even more so when the framers express surprise and admiration for her work.
• I can’t tell you what a relief it is to look at the “comments” section of my MT interface and not see full pages of spam. I know, this is only a makeshift interim solution, but it’s exciting.
From didymustk:
*cough* wordpress *cough*
God's peace,
tk
##[dydimustk.com ]########
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September 13, 2006
The Water's Fine
As so many other Apple customers, I whooshed through the tubes of the internet to check out the new downloadable movies feature of the iTunes Music Store. The terms-of-use remain opprobriously restrictive for a resolute open-access advocate such as I — you can't archive your movie on a DVD, evidently, only watch it on your computer and iPod — but the assortment of movies is pretty good, for starters. I expect that as Disney and Miramax begin making money on downloaded movies, the other studios will succumb to Steve Jobs’ blandishments and drink the Kool-Aid. As I was browsing, I wandered over to the music videos section and found that they still have almost none of the videos in which I’d be most interested (OK, “the only videos in which I’d be at all interestes”), that is, the videos from the early phase of the genre, the first few years of MTV. U2’s “Gloria” video? Not there. Talking Heads? Nope. Springsteen, “Rosalita”? Elvis Costello? Buggles? Flash and the Pan? Peter Gabriel?
The silly thing is that rights-owners spent considerable money producing these videos, and now most of them are gathering dust, perhaps deteriorating or getting lost, where they could be making back some of the investment from people of a generation that appreciated them, with disposable income to devote to preserving the relics of their memories.
Good thing the people at the Participatory Culture Foundation have brought Democracy Player (formerly just DTV) to such a fine condition. An open-access culture will be good for artist-creators, if only we can get there. . . .
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September 12, 2006
National Media Weekend
Over the weekend, I found out that I’d made appearances in two national magazines. In one, I was identified by name: the Anglican Digest apparently cited my blog post from September 20, 2004. My first reaction was concern — with all the ill-considered things I write at this site, what my TAD have selected to call the church’s attention to my cantankerous folly? When I learned that it was the preparatory reflection towards a St. Michael’s Day sermon, I was greatly relieved! My second thought was, “How odd that Kendall chose to use the preparatory reflections rather than the sermon itself, which (after all) appears online just a few days later — but as I look them both over, I think I may prefer the reflections to the sermon.
Then also, I found out that the Newsweek article about World of Warcraft mentions me, though not by name. On page 49 (page 2 of the onlline version), Steven Levy mentions that among the members of Joi Ito’s guild, “There is a priest whose character is ... a priest.” That’s me.
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September 10, 2006
Turning A Corner
This being a square birthday,* the last I’ll have before I have to worry about who will need me, who will feed me, I’ll take advantage of the occasion to write something solemn and portentous.
The years have steadily amplified my appreciation of, and amazement at, the intricacy and fragility of the world. Even in very modest circumstances, we’re surrounded by devices of staggering complexity; even with minimal social engagement, we’re immersed in lives whose cumulative joys and stresses extend far beyond our capacity to imagine. And I live in neither very modest circumstances nor minimal social engagement — I’m swamped in complexities and intensities.
Our capacity to start with [natural] complexities and amplify them hyperbolically charms me. In the face of our mortality, of our relative insignificance, of our childlike overconfidence in our capacity to make a difference, our determination to take ourselves seriously wins my heart. When Nietzsche compares humanity to a mayfly (at the beginning of my beloved “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-moral Sense”), he calls our attention to “how wretched, how shadowy and flighty, how aimless and arbitrary, the human intellect appears in nature.” The comparison has just the opposite impact on me: no matter how heavily the forces of circumstance weigh against our sense of our dignity, we remain convinced — by the testimony of our actions, our daily lives — that somehow all this stuff matters greatly.
I take that confidence as a theological clue to both our harmful obliviousness to how small and limited we really are and to how nonetheless we are beloved, we are given meaning. That gift of meaning attains its fullness as our lives cooperate in enhancing the beautiful, frail, evanescent intricacies of life, so that others may share in apprehending them. They are, and remain, always a gift. It’s easy to damage, destroy, mangle such gifts — but when we take the harder way of letting the gift teach us how to receive it, and then cooperating with the gift toward engendering more beauty, more grace, we testify to a grandeur extends beyond our grasp.
Among those gifts in my life, I number my remarkably spectacular family; my patient, devoted friends; my students and colleagues over a long-ish teaching ministry; congregations that have made homes for me in their midst; and the extended network of people who have drawn what I write here into their lives, who have reciprocally made me a welcome part of theirs. Thank you for this, and all the many gifts you’ve given me.
* I thought “square birthday” was a term I’d heard from someone else, a birthday that’s an integer squared, and it made sense to me and so I started writing this entry on the assumption that the term was publicly intelligible. A quick search, however, turned up no obvious links that used the term as I do here, so in case my [false] memory is an inspiration just masquerading as a memory, I’ll stake a claim for it here.
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September 09, 2006
This Is Not What They Mean By "Convergence"
So, by apparent coincidence, Chris sent me an email the other day calling my attention to “Armor of God Pajamas,” just a couple of days after Mother Jeanette DeFriest preached about those very pjs at St. Luke’ on Sunday. That reminded me that someone had asked that I put up a pointer to the recording of my sermon from the week before, so here that is. That, in turn, reminded me that my voice also recently appeared online in a very different setting. That, in a turn that brings us almost full circle, reminds me that while Nick Janus and I were conversing about life, the universe, and everything this afternoon in Azeroth, we fell into a discussion of Mother DeFriest, and what kind of character she might play if she took an interest in Warcraft.
Web 2.0?
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September 08, 2006
There and Back Again
When I met Jill O’Neill yesterday, her first question was, “How is the dog?” I ought therefore to assure readers that Beatrice came through her toxic dose of chocolate as sweet and dumb as ever.
All the travel yesterday went as well as could be asked, if it be granted that it involved waking up at 3:45 in the morning. No traffic, no cancellations, no delays, and no one even squeezing into the seat next to me on either flight (though on the return flight I was seated behind a knee-masher; he reclined till the crossbar of the tray table crushed my patella, then — as I tried to maintain some degree of leg space — bounced his seat back to make sure that he gained every millimeter of reclining space possible, which was important because he was in the exit row seat without a seat in front of him). I got home early, to Pippa’s surprise. She had a great time with Beth, and came home cheery and agreeable.
What I said at the SSP-TMR turned out to depart more or less significantly from what I expected. Jill had been in touch with me several times, which was very helpful, but arriving on the scene and sizing up the people there, and hearing the kinds of thing they came to Philadelphia to talk about, I realized that I had not arrived at as focused a sense of the occasion as would be most productive. I scribbled through the morning session, excused myself early from lunch, and came up with a different set of points.
What I wanted to propose — whether it came through or not, I suspect I could have made my points more clearly — was the relatively bleak situation for discovery tools in the humanities, compared to the snazzy, elegant tools in the scientific, technical, medical sector. Once I caught on to the difference, it made sense; STM searching involves data sets that lend themselves to orderly definitions and manipulation, and there’s a lot more commercial-industrial value in the databases in STM fields. So as I say, it makes sense that discovery tools have a big head start on tools in the humanities. At the same time, “scholarly publishing” does indeed include the humanities, and there’s a sense in which the digital transition in the humanities poses a more pointed challenge to the inherited models and assumptions about scholarly publishing. With that in view, I described a series of desiderata. For the vast audience of non-expert users, search tools need to be much more intuitive and effective; the user community with which I’m most familiar engages two discovery methods, a bibliographic interface that baffles even committed researchers (I won’t name proprietary names), and Google. Each of these, for different reasons, returns less-than-satisfactory results. The humanities in general, and the theological academy in particular, stand very far behind STM sector for the useability of discovery tools.
(It occurs to me that another piece of this puzzle may involve the various levels of users, and their capacity to interact productively with databases. Even a lower-level inquirer into STM research quite probably brings more rich acquaintance with structured inquiry than many advanced scholars in the humanities. This may engender a cycle of success-and-improvement that leaves humanities search lagging.)
So, useability constitutes a goal for non-expert users, but for more adept users “useability” (in a different sense) would be great, too — but the advanced useability, involving full, standards-compliant mark-up, rich metadata, and so on.
On behalf of all humanities users, though, I urged the SSP to look forward to a digital-media future, rather than backward, toward a book-and-card-catalog past. Open access (made possible via online distribution, made practicable by the capacity for unlimited exact copies), non-verbal media (increasing amounts of scholarly communications will involve audio files and images, not solely alphanumeric information), and developing business models that support these endeavors with a basis that doesn’t rely on restriction and control (the ol’ copyright model).
I’ll try to add more reflections on the earlier sessions, but I have an all-day faculty meeting today. . . .
Posted by AKMA at 11:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
September 07, 2006
Rock Around the Clock?
It may be my advanced age, but if the clock struck four and the band slowed down, I would no longer yell for more — I’d just call it a night.
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September 06, 2006
What I'll Say
I’m working on what I expect to say tomorrow at the Society for Scholarly Publishing’s conference. I had a short conversation with the panel convener, and she had some fairly specific angles in mind for me to cover. I likewise had a chance to benefit fro Dorothea’s expertise — if I don’t look like a rube when another panelist refers to “gold” or “green” solutions, it’ll be because Dorothea tipped me off.
The moderator would like me to speak about my role “in the creation, dissemination and use of content,” and “the scope of the content with which I work (discipline(s), content formats (datasets, images, manuscripts, books, journals, etc.).” Answers to those two questions themselves could fill much of the fifteen minutes I’ve been allotted. I write books, articles, sermons,