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October 31, 2006
Most Reverend Web -2.0?
This coming Saturday, the Episcopal Church will invest Katherine Jefferts Schori as the Presiding Bishop, the U.S. primus inter pares (“first among equals”) bishop, and the Episcopal News Service will webcast the service. So far, so good.
The possibly web-retrograde element concerns the ENS’ request that interested parties pre-register for the webcast. The preregistration supposedly will not affect whether an individual can see the investiture; it’s just to help estimate how much bandwidth ENS will need.
That sounds plausible but it misses a whole array of points. First, it shifts the locus of uncertainty away from one part of the enterprise (“How much bandwidth will we need?”) to another (“How many people will want to watch the service without pre-registering?”) in a way that doesn’t diminish the cumulative uncertainty more than a hair or two — especially since the unknown number of spontaneous Saturday-morning viewers will be choosing from a variety of bandwidth options at unpredictably varying rates. And the concern that “[we] be good stewards” of bandwidth* suggests that the event coordinators have decided to spend sizeable sums on the countless different elements of the service (including a satellite uplink), but to shave costs on the webcast.
The reasoning sounds all inside-out to me; I’ll be curious to hear how the arrangements play out Saturday. Not so curious that I’m likely to pass up “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” to check the webcast, but curious nonetheless.
*This made me want to whip up a variety of bumper stickers and buttons with slogans such as “Save Endangered Bandwidth” or “Recycle Used Bandwidth.”
Posted by AKMA at 12:51 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 30, 2006
Dog-Eared Corner
I noted a heap of ideas for blogging yesterday on various scraps of paper — one in particular, for which my working title is “excremental semiotics,” will surely come to expression here sometime — but first I have to acknowledge the care with which Tom Matrullo read Faithful Interpretation. He gives the sort of kindly attentive and geenrous account of the book for which a writer (especially one whose efforts to think hard thoughts doesn’t always, as Frank points out, come to lucid expression) can only shout, “Hallelujah! Amen!” Not only does Tom make a marvelously helpful case for the book as a whole, but ha also gently offers to dry my socks by bringing my stocking feet closer to the fire of his critical interrogation. I promise to address your questions directly, Tom, but (for very much more than just a glowing review) I must above all else say, “Thank you, Tom, very very much.”
Posted by AKMA at 03:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 29, 2006
CSI Evanston
Pippa went to the church All Hallow’s Eve overnight lock-in dressed as a crime scene:
Posted by AKMA at 12:03 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 28, 2006
I Hate It When That Happens
Yesterday afternoon I went through some digital gymnastics to get my main computer back online. It turns out that the process of backing up and restoring my data with Carbon Copy Cloner somehow rendered my login account dysfunctional. I could log in to the cloned data on my external drive, but when the [same] data was transferred to my main computer, I couldn’t log in. I found a Unix hack for tricking the Mac into thinking I had never walked through the process that creates my login profile, so that it would make a new user profile for me — but the process hung in the middle, so that I suspect I had hosed the whole deal.
Wiped the hard drive, re-cloned the back-up, then this time tracked down my original install disk, found the clever option for changing a user’s password, changed my password to what I thought it already was, and hey, presto! Back in business.
Booted the newly-restored computer, and started up my Mail application, which I had carefully avoided using, because I wanted my mail to download to my main computer, not to download mail to my school-issued computer. I had been using the online Gmail interface for the week my main was under repair;it was clunky and slow, I fell behind in my communication because I dislike using the web interface, but I had finally gotten everything sorted out.
Then I noticed that I had mistakenly booted the backed-up version of my data, and after a week of painstaking reservation I had just downloaded all my mail to the wrong computer.
Posted by AKMA at 08:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 27, 2006
You Be The Judge
Margaret and I each had a dramatic and unexpected encounter yesterday; which was more extraordinary? You be the judge!
Margaret was sitting at the Mad Hatter, sipping her afternoon tea and studying for her comprehensive exams, when she started shooting me a series of questions. “Have you seen any pictures of Christian Laettner lately?”
“Does he have gorgeous locks?”
“He’s incredibly tall, right?”
“Would he be in Durham at a power brokers meeting?”
Yes, Margaret had a close encounter with the [apparently] devastatingly-handsome hero of the 1992 Duke-Kentucky game in the NCAA East Regionals. Apparently he and other principals in Blue Devil Ventures patronize the Mad Hatter frequently. So Margaret’s entry in this competition involves having a table adjacent to a former NBA, Olympic, and college basketball star, currently an entrepreneur/realestate developer with “gorgeous locks.”
Mine? Well, yesterday afternoon, shortly after I conversed with Margaret about her close encounter with greatness, I was sitting in the dining room when my attention was drawn to a fluttering sound above me. I looked up, expecting to see a bat — but instead, a sparrow was flying around our first-floor ceiling. It perched, first on our hutch, then the light fixture, then a window ledge, and so on around the first floor. Pippa and I ingeniously maneuvered the bird into the kitchen, then out the back boor, but until after it spent a few minutes roosting in the silverware basket — so we’re washing every blessed item from the basket. The bird got out, though, and that’s our exciting encounter from yesterday.
Christian Laettner, or indoor sparrow?
Pat says:
I vote for the sparrow--much more interesting and creative and a more significant encounter!
Love,
Pat : )
e says:
sparrow. after all, i know what a sparrow is. as for the other guy, even google has no images that aren't 15 years old when, apparently, he was 15 years old, so he doesn't do much for me, sorry/
--
e
Nate IM’ed me to say:
i must express my strong opinion that christian laettner, demi-god, a champion even among the blue devils, the only college student on the dream team of the 92 olympics, and idol of my youth, would beat out even an endangered sparrow
Si IM’ed his mother to say:
for what it's worth, mom... i vote for laettner over the sparrow. did a ruggedly good-looking sparrow ever win the ncaa tournament?
Bruce says:
I'll take the sparrow any day. That game still rankles my soul. I grew up a UK fan since the time a could hide a transistor radio under my covers and listen to the games on a school night. And I still bleed BLUE!
-Bruce Schmoetzer
Johanna says:
I'm not signed on to comment on your blog site, but I vote for sparrow and Bill
(mightily impressed!) votes for Christian Laettner. ‹g›
Johanna
Posted by AKMA at 12:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Restoration
The MacBook Pro is back from the repair depot in Texas; in order to remedy my Random Shutdown syndrome, they replaced fans on the right and left sides, and gave me a new battery. That makes sense — I hadn’t heard the fans kick in for weeks. They wiped the hard drive in the process, so I’m glad I had backed it up before I took it in. Right now I’m updating the system software (I had been up to 1.4.8 when I brought it in, but it came back back-graded to 1.4.6); once all my data has been restored, I’ll testify to the efficacy of the repairs.
Mark said:
In order to replace two fans they had to wipe the Hard Drive? Oy.
And I'd vote that you had the best encounter.
Posted by AKMA at 12:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 26, 2006
Gender Vexation
I’m thinking ahead to teaching my Beautiful Theology (online)/“Meaning and Ministry” (Seabury) course, considering what I’d like us to read. The reading list poses a problem because (a) I’m inclined to want to read too much, and (b) the keystone texts I want to read are all by White men. Now, if I cared to argue about this, I’d point out that there’s nothing quite like to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics or Edward Tufte’s Envisioning Information that I can assign to even things out.
Some of the essays in Questions of Evidence spotlight the relation of gender to communication, but none of the editors is a woman. My essays pertain, but alas! I’m not a woman either. Graham Hughes’s Liturgy as Meaning meant the world to me when I bumped into it, but whoops, he’s a man. I have’t read Sam Wells’s Improvisation: the Drama of Christian Ethics, but I have noticed that he’s notably male. René Magritte? Surrealist man. Steve Ross’ Marked and Fred Sanders’s theological comics exemplify some of what I want to say — whoops, they’re not women. Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home provides a brilliantly provocative text for our study, OK, there’s one (but not explicitly theological). I expect I’ll assign some essays by Henry Louis Gates, Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, Jane Tompkins — but since one of my students assiduously counts book spines and evaluates courses on this gross but revealing index of feminist-friendliness, I’d like to connect with at least one other book that’s officially, completely, by a card-carrying woman.
Maggi said:
Not sure if this would tie in with your course on meaning (not clear from your post what the thrust is) but Janet Martin Soskice? she is brilliant (she supervised my PhD) check out Can a feminist call god "father", Metaphor in religious language (her masterpiece) and various other essays on feminism/theology. She also co-edited a book with Diana Lipton, on Jewish and Christian feminist issues,
link to list of publications here
hope that helps! maggi
I read Soskice’s Metaphor and Religious Language in doctoral work at Duke, but I haven’t looked back since; I’ll track down my copy and check it out. Margaret also suggested some Sarah Coakley and Marianne Sawicki, but I’m not quite sure they connect squarely with what I’m aiming at. This is one of the difficulties that attends developing an idiosyncratic angle on a well-worn problem.
Posted by AKMA at 10:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Continuing Shutdown
Whatever the part is that’s on order at Apple’s repair depot, it hasn’t come in yet: seven days and counting. Whether my MacBook Pro had an exotic problem for which parts are not readily available, or a problem so common that they’ve run out of parts, I’m getting fidgety.
Posted by AKMA at 09:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 25, 2006
Substitute
I was going to leave a clever post about my conversation with David last Friday afternoon. It was going to explain why it’s not available yet (David’s computer exploded when I infused it with dangerously postmodern thoughts), and I was going to note some mistakes I made (I referred to “James Caputo,” but it’s “John Caputo” — I’ve gotten used to hearing people call him “Jack,” but in the flash between when I decided to mention him and when I actually articulated his name, I thought “I shouldn’t call him ‘Jack,’ I don’t know him at all, so I’ll use his formal name” and with “Jack” dominating my limited brainpower, I came out with “James”), and to re-emphasize my sense that meaning constitutes the potential difference that activates interaction and understanding in our network of relationships. I’m not sure I want to stick with that metaphor, but it just jumped out of my fingertips, so I’ll try it and see what happens.
If meaning characterizes our interactions and relations, if it’s not a quality that abides inside words and gestures, then our relationships with animals can reach the point of being “meaningful” even when those animals don’t share the full capacity consciously to propose, articulate, and infer meaning in grammatically-regulated words (or conventionally-regulated gestures). The creatures in our lives partake of meaning such that our own lives can’t adequately be described without including, incorporating, the animals we love.
So when Pascale, bereft of her beloved Ariel, anticipates resuming a fuller life with her friend, it sounds exactly right to me. The meaning of Pascale’s life has come to include a role for Ariel, and if one were arbitrarily to exclude cats (or other beloved creatures — for some of us, cats are the tough case) from heaven, one would rule out the fullness of Pascale, too. All that would have been fuller and more soundly reasoned, if I had had time to do a good job on these posts.
Oh, and while I’m (not) recapping my Friday afternoon conversation with David, I should note that just as I was pleased that he and Jamie Smith liked my book, so Frank Paynter seems not to have. That dissatisfaction doesn’t shock me. Frank and I have squalled over postmodern topics before, and if he didn’t agree with me before, these books weren’t calculated to win him over. So, consumer alert warning: If you think like Frank, you might want to take out my book from the local library rather than buying your own copy (let alone the gift copies you were about to buy for all your relatives). I’m still ahead, two critics to one, and I can live with that.
Frank said:
AKMA,
Just to be clear, the earlier book What is Postmodern Biblical Criticism? is easier going and may give me a foundation ...oops, are foundations good things? anyway, it is providing me the background to be able to read "Faithful Interpretation," my first copy of which is now in the Dubuque Friends Meeting library. When I'm ready I'll order up a second copy, read it and then put it in the Madison Meetinghouse library; but, probably not before I've jumped up and down about the travesty of postmodern criticism in general and the illness that has befallen us culturally because we have been influenced to hold no truths to be self evident and so forth.
Congratulations on the publication. I hope to use it to learn more about postmodern literary criticism, "the theory," to improve my own critical skills, and to practice disagreeing without being too disagreeable. Thank you for the link to my blog.
In peace and love,
Frank
David says,
AKMA,
Now the podcast is sitting in its pod, uncast, because I'm on deadline for copy editing my book. I should be able to provide the finishing touches in a few days. Sorry.
It could be, btw, that John/James/Jack Caputo was the external advisor on my doctoral dissertation. Was he at Villanova in the late 1970s?
David Weinberger
Yes, John Caputo had a very long tenure at Villanova before he moved to Syracuse a couple of years ago.
Posted by AKMA at 07:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 24, 2006
Update
I took my personal computer back to the Apple Store last week; it had developed a belated case of the Random Shutdown problem (the latest onset I’ve heard about, roughly five months after purchase). One reason I’ve been relatively quiet has involved the pokiness of my school-issued iBook compared to its zippy (but now dysfunctional) big brother.
My MBP has been in The Depot for a week; evidently the required part is “on order (20-Oct-2006).” I expect it’ll return strong and fresh sometime moderately soon, but for now, the iBook starts straining and sweating whenever I look at it.
The rest of my rationale for light blogging involves three stacks of papers that I managed to acquire simultaneously (with my usual uncanny knack for coincident due dates), a series of class-prep peaks, several administrative meetings, and so on. I’m hoping that the squeeze eases up tomorrow, and the MacBook Pro comes home before the weekend.
Posted by AKMA at 09:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 22, 2006
Esprit de la Cuisine
“Thanks for coooking dinner, Dad.”
“Not at all, sweetie, I love to make foods that delight and bring you joy.”
“And thanks for doing the dishes, Daddy.”
“Just part of the job description, honey.”
(pause)
“Well, you need a new resume.”
Posted by AKMA at 09:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 20, 2006
Whew!
I just finished a long audio conversation with David Weinberger about my recent book and some of the interpretive problems it brings to the foreground. David wanted to capture me in an interview that he could whip into shape and post as a podcast. Several days ago he tipped me off to some of the questions he might ask, so I spent a lot of the past forty-eight hours racking my brain for ways I could compress ideas that I articulated over hundreds of pages into a few minutes of conversation. Talking with David, especially with so intense a preparatory process, sets my brain a-whizzing, so now I’ll be wired for hours.
I’m not sure how well I did for him — David, ever the gracious interlocutor, assured me that it went fine — but the exercise of thinking it out gave me a great opportunity (or “necessity”) to distill my arguments into a few words. I’ll point to the podcast when David lets it loose.
As a side benefit of our talk, I now have a Skype account, and if you want to Skype me (that sounds a more hostile act than it should), just look for “akmadam.” I probably won’t leave Skype online all the time, though — you may need to call me to induce me to boot it up. I’m old-fashioned that way.
Posted by AKMA at 04:02 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Boxing Thoughts
Lawson Whitesides, a Seabury trustee and my former student in church history, is sitting beside me at the Board of Trustees meeting, and his Starbuckss take-out coffee cup bears a quotation from Dave Grusin: “In my career I’ve found that ‘thinking outside the box’ works better if I know what's ‘inside the box.’ In music (as in life) we need to understand our pertinent history...and moving on is so much easier once we know where we've been.” (I didn’t transcribe it myself, but found it on Sarah Friedlander’s blog —thanks, Sarah).
I note this because future-oriented church thinkers tend to be ready to dismiss the out-dated, antiquated thinking of those archaic servants of God who bequeathed to us the foolish ideas that have defined Christian theology over the millennia. “Christianity,”in Bishop Spong’s flatulently pompous prose, “must change or die” (as though Christianity has not always been changing, as though one could somehow prevent change in the church). If we care to change wisely, to respond soundly to changes in the world around us, I’m with Dave Grusin. In this, I sympathize with Katie Geneva Cannon, whom I once heard to explain that her theology graduate students complain about having to read so much of the writings of dead white guys; Katie Cannon answered something like, “If we want to do better than they, we have to understand the theology that got us here.” Dumping the past as a dead weight is the easy, quintessentially modern response to the past; a sounder, richer, more productive approach to our future would involve engaging our forebears, allowing them to teach us, and then endeavoring to figure out what will withstand the stresses of oncoming years, and what has lost its structural integrity. Let’s don’t repeat the harrowing mistake of bulldozing our heritage to slap together steel-and-glass monuments to an ephemeral aesthetic. We don’t need to; that hurts us more than it helps us; and if we put in the effort to think along with others (with whom we may not always agree), we prepare ourselves much better to offer our ideas, plans, and hopes to another generation (which may not, after all, agree with us).
Posted by AKMA at 09:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 19, 2006
Hi, Susie
I had a pleasant chat this morning with Seabury alumna Susie Shaefer, in the course of which I revisted her blog and noted the “How Many Of You Are There?” quiz. Curiosity got the better of me, and I learned that there seem to be 37 people named “Andrew Adam” in the U.S.A. It’s a good thing I have a distinctive nickname, although when I entered it, I got the unsettling news that “There are 0 people in the U.S. with the first name Akma.”
Susie pointed out that it isn’t really a “first” name, since it encompasses my first and last names by initial, to which I eagerly shot back, “It’s a mononym!” Susie and I were hoping that I had hit upon a hitherto undiscovered word, and Susie noted that it did not appear in either of the online dictioneries she consulted — but I quickly found it in the Dictionary of Difficult Words. While I would have enjoyed the glory of having invented the term, I am nonetheless pleased to be able to say of myself, “I’m mononymous.”
Posted by AKMA at 03:15 PM | Comments (0)
October 18, 2006
Bored-Again Christians
I attended an engaging lecture by Jason Byassee this morning. Jason — who works for the Century — was addressing the topic, “Why is Religious Journalism So Boring?”
He advanced a variety of reasons (including Peter Steinfels’s argument that there are only 6 “Religion Section” stories that get reprinted ad infinitum with names and specifics changed: “pastor has feet of clay,” and five more). I found most intriguing, though, his suggestion that religion (at least, Christianity) should be boring — that is, it ought to operate to change our frame of attention away from the misplaced desires for flash, for novelty, for instant relevance, and so on, toward a deeper, more prayer-like attention to the world we inhabit. He invoked, among others, Simone Weil and her “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies,”wherein she argues that the topics that interest us least, at which we have no particular flair, serve the great spiritual purpose of requiring us actually to attend to them.
I’m leaving out all the best parts, and over-simplifying what I do report, but I found it a delightful, heartening presentation. I hope he’ll publish it somewhere.
Susie wrote:
Is there any chance this lecture will be online, say, via whatever institution hosted the lecture? The part you posted really hit a nerve about something I think I might be trying to say in my sermon about James & John and wanting to be first. Probably if you knew an online link, it'd already be on your blog, but I thought I'd double-check.
See you next week at alumni days!
Blessings-
Susie
Posted by AKMA at 03:28 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 16, 2006
Bi-Monthly Trim
After
Posted by AKMA at 08:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 15, 2006
Awwww, Thanks
Vanity prompts me to note with appreciation that David has a generous review of Faithful Interpretation up at his site. Of course, I tend to think the best of any favorably-disposed reviewer, but I take particular satisfaction that David has such an encouraging response to my arguments: he’s a sophisticated reader of philosophy, one who subjects “postmodern” theory to critical scrutiny (our first exchange of links — the response he cites was emailed — involved his having criticized Foucault), without any predisposition to favor Christian theological claims. He’s a tough reader, and (though we’re friends) I trust him to be an honest reader, and impressing him delights me no end.
This makes the second positive response — Jamie Smith offered appreciative remarks on the book and on my work in general over at the church and postmodern culture site. As I appreciate David’s review from outside the official target audience, so I appreciate Jamie’s response from squarely within my expected readership — he describes my work just as I might hope a “church reader” would: “[AKMA] winsomely argues that ‘postmodern’ interpretation will be faithful, Catholic interpretation.” Jamie’s characterization of my proposal as “Catholic” sounds odd next to David’s suggestion that “you don't have to be Christian to appreciate the care with which AKMA approaches his topic,” but my hope was that by describing interpretation carefully and respectfully, I might arrive at an account that encompasses variety in interpretation while at the same time advancing criteria for assenting to (or dissenting from) particular proposals. To that extent, the distinct comments from Jamie and David suggest that I succeeded, at least in addressing them.
Thank you very much, David and James! When the negative reviews come, I will revisit your pages, often.
Posted by AKMA at 08:38 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 14, 2006
Baptism
I see in The Living Church that newly-consecrated Bishop Beisner said, “At this moment in our Church there are two seemingly contradictory principles. On the one hand we are seeking to strengthen the understanding of our baptismal covenant and on the other we want to practice open commensality. I don’t believe these two need to be in conflict.” I’m glad to see him put these pieces together; the apparent contradiction has been grating on my nerves as well.
I’d be interested in how the high doctrine of baptism explicit in contemporary “baptismal theology” can be reconciled with communion of the unbaptized. If “baptism” constitutes a defining sacrament of identity, is not eucharist appropriately understood only in relation to baptism? And if baptism “doesn’t matter” relative to the eucharist, what makes it matter so much in other spheres of church life?
“Open communion” looks to me like a weightier issue of theology and tradition than do the more visible controversies over sexuality, though it has drawn far less public attention. I admit to a certain ambivalence about the soundness of “open communion,” but until such time as I have seen arguments that treat patiently and respectfully the monumental warrants from Scripture, tradition, and reasoning through a consistent theological account of baptism, I can’t see a responsible basis for disregarding the canons on this one (especially when those who practice that disregard ever wish to enforce other canons on anybody else).
Posted by AKMA at 11:18 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 13, 2006
Hat Club For Priests
This morning, Seabury’s first-years reminded me that it’s customary that they wear cassocks to classes on the day after Matriculation. They all looked charming, and today was a good day for wearing an extra layer because the heat isn’t fully reliable yet. One among them impressed me by sporting a biretta, an ecclesiastical cap distinguished by its absolute lack of any conceivable practical basis. It’s an item I’ve been casting sidelong glances at whenever the liturgical haberdashers spread their wares at Seabury, but they run more than a hundred bucks a pop, and I wouldn’t have occasion to wear one nearly enough to make it worthwhile.
What burned my toast, though, was that the first-year in questions allowed that it wasn’t her own biretta, but belonged to a middler who is possibly the lowest of the low-churchmen presently studying at Seabury. The biretta was given him as a joke (!), and he had simply offered to share it with his friend.
So there we are —I, the arch-Anglo-Catholic, notorious hat-wearer, without a biretta — and he, the whale’s-belly-low-church seminarian, maybe puts on a baseball cap and probably wears it backwards, having a gift biretta. God hath indeed a rich sense of irony and poetic justice.
Pictures were taken of me wearing the doubly-borrowed biretta, and my esteeemed colleague Ellen Wondra wearing a Canterbury cap (Archbishop Laud example here), but they’re safe behind a password-protected barrier.
Posted by AKMA at 03:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 12, 2006
The War of the Lamb
A while back, someone used the “email a comment” function to ask me, “You write, ‘Our response to terrorist attacks should always be, “How can we conduct our collective affairs in such a way as to make terrorism pointless?” ’ I was wondering how you would answer that question, and what you consider to be the terrorist's point.” (I’m not posting it as a comment, since it wasn’t quite clear to me that the commenter intended the message that way.)
All along, my short answer has been something like, “Figure out what a war would cost in dollars and energy, and devote those resources to building up the economies and infrastructures of the nations where terrorist sympathies run highest. Don’t try to suppress violence and terror by answering it with terrifying violence; do good to those who hate you.” I do not claim that this would solve the problem of terrorism, but it would at least be an admirable course of action, and subsequent suffering and casualties would be inflicted in spite of the U.S.’s generous aid, not in response to the U.S.’s campaign of conquest and torture.
It doesn’t make a significant difference if the recently-published estimates of Iraqi death toll are off my 100%. The fact remains that the U.S. government chose to pursue a course of action that resulted in vastly more deaths than would have been the case if they had chosen differently. The fact that people are haggling over how many tens of thousands of Iraqis have died in a war that has not brought a higher degree of peace and security, that has evidently increased the amount of terrorist activity in Iraq, illustrates how the policymakers in the U.S. government have gone off their hinges. (Don’t let’s get started about their blaming the Clinton administration, during which there were no nuclear weapons in North Korea, for the recent nuclear tests there.)
Diana Butler Bass, a classmate of mine from olden times at Duke and a speaker coming to Seabury in a couple of weeks, said it vividly in a column at beliefnet. That’s what I meant; that’s what I hope that I would have done.
Posted by AKMA at 10:37 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 12
It’s snowing.
Posted by AKMA at 09:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 11, 2006
Security Update
The Homeland Security people haven’t made any headlines about this, so I’ll break the scoop myself: it turns out that the Transportation Security people have discovered evidence that the next strike against our nation’s infrastructure will involve turtleneck jerseys.
Margaret was absolutely sure she packed a turtleneck jersey when she flew north to spend a week with her daughter and husband. When she arrived here at home, however, the turtleneck was nowhere to be found in her luggage. Presumably, an alert defender of our nation’s airways spotted the turtleneck as a potential double-use object, and confiscated it to protect everyone from the dire consequences of allowing Margaret to wear a turtleneck. So beware, everyone — leave your turtlenecks at home, or empty them into the convenient “turtleneck collection bins” at security. Fly smart, fly safe!
(Either all that, or she forgot to pack it. We’ll find out soon, cause Margaret’s flying back to Durham tomorrow.)
Posted by AKMA at 08:46 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 10, 2006
Where Or How?
I’m preparing for tomorrow morning’s Gospel Mission class, and in our reading (chapter 4 of Darrell Guder’s Missional Church) I saw an interesting footnote (p. 94, n. 22). Guder observes that although the NRSV that he relies on uses “kingdom” to translate the Greek basileia, he uses “reign” “because it better captures. . . the dynamic meaning of basileia, which refers to the reigning itself and thus secondarily the realm incorporated under such reigning.”
I don’t have a beef with a permissive reading of that note — “sometimes ‘reign’ better captures the sense of basileia as an abstract noun for ‘kingship’ rather than a term for a geopolitical entity.” A less elastic reading of Guder’s note, though, suggests that basileia “really means” something dynamic and non-spatial, rather than something spatial and political.
I have several objections to that less elastic reading. First, I can cite a goodly number of cases in which basileia seems manifestly to refer to an earthly geopolitical regime, rather than to a disembodied activity of “reigning.” In many more cases, the sense could go either way. Since I attribute meaning more to usage than to etymology or association, I’m impressed with the likelihood that basileia — which could clearly be used to indicate a political unit — tends in colloquial writing to refer more to “where So-and-so is in charge” than to “So-and-so’s condition of majesty.” Neither is excluded, but I see many more uses for the former than the latter in the literary ambiance of the New Testament.
Guder himself devotes fair attention to the spatial aspect of the basileia, and discusses at length the relation of the two aspects of the term. Since he’s quoting texts that refer to the “kingdom,” I don’t quibble with his choice to use “reign” where he’s not quoting. Still, the better solution would identify cases in which basileia refers to a kingdom, and those in which basileia refers to “reign” or “kingship” or “majesty,” and translate each accordingly.
Posted by AKMA at 08:15 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 09, 2006
Ours Next?
Hey, Jeneane, feel like coming over for a visit?
Posted by AKMA at 08:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 08, 2006
Pushover
I often harrumph about not participating in the quiz-game-thingummybobs that propagate on the Web — you know, “Where was your first kiss?” “What’s your favorite Perry Como single?” and “If you could be a species of grapevine, which would you be?”
I nonetheless participate from time to time, either because it seems to involve actually important information (quizzes involving music, for instance) or because the fancy strikes me, or because a personal or political link to the person who tagged me outweighs my general antipathy to quizzes.
So when I noted that Beth had tagged me for a “Five Things Feminism Has Done For Me” quiz, I winced a little. There’s a worthwhile political impulse involved, and Beth’s a terrific student assistant, wonderful friend to Pippa and Si, and all-around commendable person, and it was her birthday Friday. Still, I might have resisted answering, since her post itself provided the escape clause “(who I don't expect will actually take it up, but whose response I'd love to hear).” But out of idle curiosity, I clicked around to see what her other correspondents said — and not one of them had taken up the challenge. “What Feminism Has Done For Me” seems worth at least one response, so I’ll take it up (and see if that motivates the other slackers to get going).
First, I’d say that feminism has played instrumental role in making the world a more humane place by bringing to explicit awareness the extent to which social systems tend to produce and exploit categories of less-privileged people who contribute much more labor, commitment, and vital energy than the society itself recognizes — so that more-privileged categories can enjoy the benefits of exploitation. The exploited need not be women (we could fill in the blank with “untouchables,” illegal immigrants, of course African Americans, or children). Still, since so many societies cast women into that category, and women constitute a part of every society, feminism calls to our attention to men’s exploitation of women as a paradigmatic case of this phenomenon.
Second, I’d cite the impetus that feminist scholars gave to the critical study of ways that language and social organization affect one another. In most cases, you can call me a traditionalist and I’ll be proud of the epithet, but I thank feminist social critics for teaching me to be more careful about how I use pronouns such as “he.”
Third, feminism has raised to prominence a bracing array of vigorous, challenging, sharp-witted and sharp-tongued and sharp-penned writers, speakers, personalities. Luce Irigaray (my favorite), Julia Kristeva, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, bell hooks, Judith Butler (despite her writing style), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Sarah Coakley, A.-J. Levine, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, and Mary Daly: I don’t by any means always agree with them, but their participation enriches our discourses immensely (and if our society were so organized as to stifle their participation, that silence itself would shout aloud a damning indictment).
Fourth, the prominence of such figures as I named above brings about great good for us all, by encouraging women to write out loud, by opening doors for further women to rush in through, by showing subsequent generations of women what it might look like for women to occupy a stage set by and for men, without accepting men’s terms for how and why they might be there. Because they’ve gone first, Pippa may have a surer sense of where she wants to go, and why, and how it may differ from the courses they took.
Fifth, feminist critics (along with critical scholars of race) stand to remind me (and most of us) how very eager we are to let ourselves off the hook for the persistence of sexism and racism. When I wrote about “White Guy Theology, the emphasis should have fallen as heavily on the “guy” part as on the “White” part — though if readers felt the impact of the latter more than the former, it may be a reminder of how urgently we need to keep listening to feminists.
I wince when people use the term “post-feminist”; even people who dissent from the arguments that characterize feminist criticism benefit from thoughtful engagement with feminism. Hard as I might try, I do not envision a day when any culture with which I’m acquainted will be able to dispense with its feminist challengers.
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October 05, 2006
Bag On!
In honor of Margaret’s impending return to the family home from her (congenial) exile in North Carolina, I’m pointing today to a favorite song of our family. The Abe Lincoln Story (watch out for annoying Flash pop-up), Silverlake’s premiere swing punk soul band, performs a song entitled “I Don’t Need a Bag,” protesting the hyperbolic overpackaging of America’s groceries. (I’m listed as its only fan on last.fm.)
It’s not only witty, but catchy and impressively-played as well; it reminds me of the early, jazzy phase of Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention (though with safe-for-work lyrics, in this case at least). The website suggests that they offer free downloads, but I don’t see any — just gird up your loins for some Flash, start the jukebox, and select “I Don’t Need a Bag (Live at KXLU).” And just you try not to think about it next time you go to the store.
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October 04, 2006
Parallel History
While I was at McCormick on Monday, Bob Cathey raised an interesting question related to Margaret’s conversation with me about Bultmann and Barth. “What if,” asked Bob, “the continental philosopher who had so pronounced an influence on New Testament studies had been Wittgenstein, rather than Heidegger?”
It’s an interesting speculative exercise, especially since it’s not outrageously unthinkable. Neither Heidegger nor Wittgenstein was an explicitly theological thinker (though each has found theologically-committed exponents). Both were recognized as extraordinarily important during their lifetimes. Wittgenstein’s position at Cambridge would certainly have situated him propitiously to affect the biblical faculties there (if they had been so inclined).
I’m not cut out for this sort of counterfactual supposition, but were providence to have preferred Wittgenstein to Heidegger as the 20th century’s philosopher-of-choice for biblical studies, the discipline would surely look very different now. (And I might be writing about ways that Heidegger’s philosophy could clarify problems bequeathed to us by Wittgensteinian theological epigones.)
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October 03, 2006
Bragging Right
Billy Bragg gets it right again, posting a video message to MTV that calls on them to amend their outlandish terms of service relative to the planned “MTV Flux” programming. Now, if only Billy provided permalinks to items on his front page.
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October 02, 2006
Top Of The World
ZOMG! My visit to McCormick this year went even better than the previous times! They put up with my customary monologizing; I began by showing them the slides from my SBL presentation of November 2003. They asked good questions, laughed heartily at my folly, and encouraged me to keep working on these ideas.
At the break, many of them actually bought my new book (not What Is Postmodern Biblical Criticism?, the book they’d been assigned for class) and asked me to sign both the new book and their copies of What Is Postmodern?. One woman showed me the copy of she’d obtained secondhand from Amazon: it bore the familiar signature of Stanley Hauerwas.
We decided that I not sign it on the same page that Stanley had hallowed with his mark, so I chose to sign it on the page toward the middle on which my signature already appears. Meanwhile, I enjoyed flipping through the pages, reading his marginalia, spotting his underlines.
BTW, a warmly positive notice of Faithful Interpretation from James K. A. Smith over at the church and postmodern culture website.Posted by AKMA at 08:21 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
October 01, 2006
Yes, Minister!
Frank is now a Minister of Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church. The service went fine; the offertory was a particularly exquisite rendition of Ralph Vaughn Williams’s setting of “The Call.” I saw a number of former students (both Seabury alums and Princetonians), and the sermon itself (below, in the extended section) was generously received. Now, off to a reception at Frank’s home, and tomorrow morning to a faculty meeting, then leaving early from there to McCormick for book-signing and a class, then back to Seabury for the week’s teaching, including a Seabury sermon on Friday.
Idle hands being the devil’s workshop, I’d say I’m on the fast track to sanctity. If only I didn’t have so very far to go. . . .
First Presbyterian Church of Wilmette
October 1, 2006
Ordination of Frank Yamada to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament
1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14; John 6:51-58
+
Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your
people, able to discern between good and evil.
In the name of God Almighty, the Holy Trinity on high — Amen.
I can understand why Frank might hear certain resonances, certain
distant echoes of his own situation, in this story of a humble,
youthful leader who begins the office to which he has been ordained by
praying for wisdom. I can understand why Frank might feel some
sympathy for a servant of God who, although he knows that God desires
to be worshipped in Jerusalem, finds himself offering sacrifices in
Gibeon. I am not so sure about why somebody who's joyously married,
with a marvelous family, might be compared to a man who chose to marry
a thousand wives – but every typology breaks down somewhere, and
besides, those verses aren't part of our lesson this afternoon.
Though Frank has not bisected any livestock in preparation for this
afternoon's service, our gathering here stands in syncopated
continuity with Solomon's sacrifice at the high place at Gibeon.
Indeed, in a tradition more, ahem, ritually expansive than your
austere Presbyterian home, an ordinand might make a vigil on the night
before being ordained. Kneeling in a dark chapel, silent but for the
sound of whispered prayers, you focus your attention on the
commitments you're about to make. You beseech the Lord for strength
and courage, for hope and patience; you examine your conscience for
those transgressions that stand to remind you of your weakness, and
ask that God give you the wisdom to lead from your strength, and to
protect the people from the effects of your foolishness. And in the
middle of this solemn contemplation — and here I speak from experience
— sometimes you succumb to drowsiness.
Such a drowsiness may have occasioned Solomon's dream, the dream in
which he asked of God nothing more than to serve well and wisely, and
if Frank asked nothing more than this of Solomon's God, we might
commend him for his humility (at the same time we'd be obliged to
point out that he's an outstanding scholar who has already in our very
midst demonstrated an understanding mind, able to discern between good
and evil). If Frank has already been richly endowed with
understanding, then, and if we grant that Frank has been called to a
vocation in which it would be too improbable to ask that he be
encouraged with great riches, and if we acknowledge that Frank is too
kindhearted and gentle to ask for the lives of his enemies, for what
might we ask God as we dream along with Frank?
Well, I think "bread" would make a good start.
In a dream-prayer for Frank, we might envision him offering bread to
hungry neighbors on the streets of his city. We might envision him
offering bread to students in earnest exploration of Holy Scripture.
We might envision him offering bread to faithful worshippers at the
Lord's table, proclaiming God's love and faithfulness in Word and
Sacrament. In all these our dreams, in all these our prayers, we hope
for nothing other than Frank's sharing with us the unique life-giving
bread sent to us in the person of Jesus Christ.
The bread with which Jesus feeds us, the bread that he calls his
Body, subsists through time and appears in manifold cultures always
only in as the embodiment of truth. Share this bread with us, Frank,
though it be hard, heart-breakingly hard to utter words of truth to a
world that applauds glib deceits. Share the bread of truth with an
academy that sometimes substitutes cleverness for sound judgment.
Share the bread of truth as you walk in the light Jesus shone on us,
and teach us how to walk in his way.
Share with us the bread of truth that shows us the difference between
well-intentioned pieties and the burning transformation wrought by
grace's power. When we falter, feed us with the bread of life that
encourages us; when we dissimulate, the us the bread from heaven that
humbles us; when we harden our hearts, feed us the sweet bread of
Christ's presence that raises us up to glimpse the new and unending
life in him. Share bread with us in every thought and testimony, in
every touch and expression, in abiding with Christ so as to make him
known among us.
"Abiding in Christ" enlists us in hard work (as you well know) —
though once you have taken up the office of a minister, God will find
fresh challenges to add to you. We have observed this happen before,
so we gather this afternoon to promise our solidarity with you in
ministry, a solidarity that binds all God's people into one body, for
all are one in Christ Jesus. We set at your disposal all the resources
of that solidarity, a treasure of things old and new, of precious
pearls and peculiar puzzles. Draw on them and teach us how truly to
pray and to dream. Interweave those gifts with your own wisdom and
erudition in matters biblical to help us understand how truth comes to
expression in Scripture, and how Scripture's truth comes to expression
in us. Take us higher, past shadows and mirages, bending our steps
toward the truth whose foretaste we recognize in the bread and wine
that we receive from God, that we receive at your hands.
The taste of truth reminds us of home, of our belonging to a kingdom
of righteousness and a King greater than Solomon in all his glory.
Truth's bread nourishes in us a longing for that kingdom, for that
city long-obscured from mortal sight, waiting for us at the end of the
world — and the living bread that came down from heaven will forgive
our sins, raise us from death, and turn our hearts always toward that
goal. You have prayed with us, you have dreamed with us, with us you
have sung "Gloria in te, Domine"; now feed us, in a way that gives us
breath, with a truth that ends all strife, toward a life that conquers
death, in the name of a heart that joys in love.
Amen
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