Regards,

Phil Edwards

[Thank you, Phil. I added another comment in David’s thread, and am intrigued by your comments (Raymond Williams FTW!, as we say in gamer discourse).

I don’t stake out a claim on non-theological political activity — in the secular political domain, I can’t draw on my most important sources, nor advance the rationales that seem uniquely important. At the same time, it just looks like plain good behavior to me. ]

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April 25, 2007

Rowan Williams, David Weinberger, Joel Green, and Edward Tufte

No, this is not an arcane exercise in “which of these does not belong?” Earlier I projected that I’d write something up about Rowan Williams’s Larkin-Stuart lecture (endowed by St. Thomas parish and Trinity College) concerning the right interpretation of the Bible in the church. Earlier I indicated that I had some quibbles, that I hadn’t had a chance to read it carefully, but I’d come back later. I still haven’t had the opportunity to read it carefully, but this makes at least two careless skims, so that will have to do.

Quibble number one: Williams endorses Ricoeur’s heuristic device of talking about “the world in front of the text,” “the world of the text,” and “the world behind the text.” Okay, it’s a metaphor, and we all know roughly what it means: that as we read, we can pay attention particularly to the background of the text, that which makes the text possible, what it takes for granted, its historical infrastructure (“behind”); or we can attend to what the text’s apparently saying (“of”); or we can imagine how the text impinges on our own lives and our futures (“in front of”). But I’m persistently opposed to critical readers using that metaphor in their reasoning about interpretation, since it bootlegs in presuppositions about text and interpretation that influence the outcome of our deliberations. Texts don’t have fronts or behinds, though (in the sense the metaphor requires), and the background, the text “itself,” and the responses it subsequently evokes are all implicated in one another. It’s a quibble, but I’m sticking with it.

That being said, I appreciate Williams’s attention to Scripture under the rubric of “communicative act,” though you don’t need his stage-dressing of oral/aural contextualization in order to make that work. I affirm his suggestion that we “imagine that historically remote audience as not only continuous with us but in some sense one with us,” and his proposal that we ask “What does this text suggest or imply about the changes which reading it or hearing it might bring about?” Those seem like plausible, theologically sound hermeneutical gestures (though they’re already particular to the church, not disinterested principles of all interpretive activity).

The two examples that Williams chooses make sense to me. In both he selects texts that often serve as linch-pin proofs of particular positions, John 14:6’s apparent advocacy of the exclusivity of Jesus’ salvific agency (on one hand) and Romans 1’s assertion of the immorality of same-sex intimacy (on the other). Williams reads both passages carefully not just for the explicit points they make, but for their role in the broader rhetoric of the sources. He concludes in the first case that, in the context of John’s farewell discourses, Jesus appositely reminds/instructs the disciples that the path to his crucifixion is necessary, and that he is preparing a way that they in turn will have to go — not that Jesus is claiming a unversal, exclusive role in brokering God’s presence. In the second, he reads Paul as invoking the example of same-sex relations not for the purpose of reinforcing the Old Testament proscription of such activity, but specifically to indict those who find homosexuality a paradigm case of immoral conduct. I think he’s on plausible ground with both interpretations and with his interpretations of the interpretations: that in both cases the author presumably assents to the notion in question (Jesus only, and no gay sex), but that those notions aren’t the point. (He emphatically insists that he’s not deprecating these texts as evidence for theological claims against pluralism or blessing same-sex unions, but indicating that their usefulness as evidence is beside the point.)

So I also approve of his articulation, by way of Peter Ochs and Kevin Vanhoozer, of theological interpretation as a process of working out how we continue to live by the revelatory word that constituted us as a people, that instructs us on the shape and meaning of our lives.

David demurs from Williams’s lecture on the basis that “Although non-Jews often don’t give this full credence, Jews are a people. You are a Jew by birth, not by belief. (It’s more complex than that, but what isn’t?) Thus, the community isn’t created ‘out of nothing.’ ” (Is this a long way round saying that “existence precedes assents”?) I’m in no position to teach David why he should side with Williams, but I construe Williams as proposing that the people born into Judaic identity are so born by virtue of a calling and a covenant that precedes them, that made a “no people” into “God’s people.” By continuing the argument over Torah, interpreters born into that people-hood bear forward the identity of the collective. (Williams is also, of course, alluding to Christian theological investments in creatio ex nihilo as a doctrinal point — but I think his hermeneutics don’t depend on the allusion to a doctrine from which many prominent Jewish thinkers dissent.) But maybe I’ misreading you, David.

I don’t see Williams as evacuating people’s prior identity altogether as does *Christopher), or that “[Williams’s] ‘out of nothing’ in his reading of Scripture within the context of the Eucharist threatens to make of the community gathered in Eucharist itself a totalitarian hegemony or imperial enterprise by refusing to recognize the plurality of different subjects convoked by the Spirit for some sameness or nothingness too easily filled up and filled out by the scripts of those in authority or regaled with superiority who then determine the meaning of the Scriptures within the community.” Williams draws on 1 Peter 2:10 (where the author is apparently addressing Gentile readers, “Once you were no people, but now you are god’s people”) and invokes the two examples he chooses, I take it, to call into question two common interpretive moves that move directly against the kind of plurality that *Christopher commends. The essay in question does not, so far as I can read, include any assertion that “we’re all the same, ‘out of nothing’, meaning like me and interpretted by me” — but if we catch Williams making such a claim, I expect that I’ll gladly and vigorously join *Christopher in resisting it.

*Christopher’s concern resonated in my ears as I read Joel Green’s review of my book, a review written from a distinctly different ecclesial location from that which I inhabit. Joel very generously allows me my difference from him without making that an explicit point of contention — though I think that our difference also comes to expression relative to the queries he addresses to me. When Joel suggests that I ought to explain “how to adjudicate among not merely different but indeed competing and mutually exclusive interpretations,” I’m not sure that such “adjudicating” is the point. After all, as *Christopher points out, people tend to read the Bible as though it were about us, with our presuppositions intact and unquestionable, but calling their presuppositions and morals into question; on what basis could anyone promulgate the interpretive method that might satisfactorily adjudicate? Who would decide what would count as evidence? What disinterested party could function as a judge? (On these issues I continue to bear the impress of Jean-François Lyotard’s reflections on justice in The Différend and Just Gaming.)

And to draw the last of my title quaternity into the discussion, Edward Tufte proposes as a “grand truth about human behvior that, as Van Wyck Brooks said, “ It is a principle that shines impartially on the just and the unjust that once you have a point of view all history will back you up.” Other readers of his site contributed comparable observations: “ ‘What a man wishes, he will believe’ - Demosthenes” and Ben Franklin, “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable Creature, since it enables one to find or make a Reason for everything one has a mind to do.”

Quite so.

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April 23, 2007

Good News

Nothing puts the spring in an author’s step quite like a positive book review (well, an ample royalty check might, but since I’ve never gotten one of those, I’m just speculating). Today’s Review of Biblical Literature brought news that Joel Green of Asbury Theological Seminary reviewed Faithful Interpretation this week, and his review (PDF only, I’m sorry, I’ve talked to them about it to no avail) makes a very favorable case for the book.

I’m dreadfully vain, but I’m not vain enough to quote the passages that gratified me most. I will observe — I hope not defensively — that most of Joel’s challenges relate to the problem of interpretive difference, about which we evidently hold very disparate positions. Joel, charitably, identifies these as problems that I “[have] not satisfactorily addressed.” From the perspective I’ve drafted in these essays, that recognizes bounded diversity as both a datum and a positive good, there’s no pressing need to identify a method by which a community adjudicates conflicts over interpretation. Indeed, any such effort will arise from a particular interpretive location that other interpreters don’t share — so why would the dissidents abide by this hypothetical “rule for adjudication” in the first place?

But granted that Joel is examining a different part of the elephant from me, I greatly appreciate his thoughtful attention to the book. He does not, as others have done, accuse me of “hostility” to historical criticism, nor does he launch any cheap shots about postmodernism. His reservations involve real problems integral to the project itself. Although Joel had opportunity, possible theological motivation, and means to drop the hammer on my essays, he commends me and thinks along with me, and that’s about the most encouraging experience around.

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Book Alert

For a while I’ve been thinking about a monograph or lecture series on “subdominant christologies,” characterizations of Jesus that didn’t attain definitive prominence in the patristic period. Evidently Joseph Fitzmyer treats one of them, “the one who is to come,” as the touchstone for his most recent book. (I’ not tipping my hand on others I’m thinking of.) Fitzmyer is a scholar’s scholar, though his profound erudition sometimes seems to me to overshadow his judgment as a reader; I’ll be interested to see how his argument here develops.

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April 21, 2007

RetroStromateis

The week was jammed with events, meetings, services, ideas, and interesting links, such that it gets harder and harder to blog without taking a week off to work out each link and idea in detail. Instead, I’m going to post a few links with only cursory comments, and wait and see whether the things I have to say about Fun Home, Rowan Williams, this Thursday’s U2charist, the following links, or my daily life — if any of those come to semi-articulate expression. If so, I’ll blog them; if not, you can always ask me about them in some other context.

† John Lanchester writes about copyright

† The Bavarian State Library’s website with digital images of icunabula

† A cool interview with Bill Cavanaugh

† Fr. Thomas Weinandy OFM makes BoingBoing

† Another test suggests that listeners have a hard time distinguishing digitally-compressed audio from full CD quality

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April 18, 2007

Exhausted Words

Yesterday evening I preached at a funeral (on unexpectedly short notice, with imprecise information regarding the readings — I got lucky that nothing vital hinged on the substituted reading, but one of the readings I’d been told to expect was not what was read). It went all right, but preaching at a funeral is pretty stressful, especially when you have less time to work up the homily than usual, and then all the more so when you hear a different lesson from what you were expecting. Anyway, I’ll append it in the extended section.

I heard a rumor that David Weinberger read the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lecture and even had some comments on it; if he blogs it, I’ll delightedly link to him (and probably argue with him, since “AKMA and David arguing about hermeneutics” is like “David and AKMA breathing”).

Anyway, I’m drained from last night, and that’ before tonight’s service at St Luke’s celebrating our rector’s investiture. Tomorrow night Seabury’s celebrating a U2charist, plus we’re entertaining a candidate for our librarian’s position. I’m even more tired just thinking about it.

Someone, hire Gary!

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

If “in the eyes of the foolish our loved ones seem to have died,” why then this evening makes us all foolish. The tide of grief that rises high among those close to Anne touches all of our hearts, and we share in a sadness that disaster has stirred up, close to home and far beyond these walls. Grief casts a shadow whose disorienting chill throws us off balance, confuses us, wearies us, bewilders us into thinking of departure as loss, of absence as emptiness. Tonight we cannot deny death’s power. We are torn apart; we are frayed; tonight, if Scripture says so, we shiver at news of disaster, and if that makes us fools, then such we are.

Souls attuned to one another, lives interlocked with one another cannot simply brush off sorrow. We can hear that we shouldn’t be disheartened at their departure, that God holds their lives dear — but lives intertwined, loves shared will stagger and falter when stunned by loss. Faith doesn’t immunize us against sorrow. If we love with the wholeness to which God calls us, we have all the more at hazard in the lives of our family and our friends; and when they fall subject to affliction and death, we need not hesitate to weep without restraint. Jesus blesses those who mourn, not those who suppress their grief. Jesus commands us to gives ourselves fully to one another, not to protect our imperturbable autonomy. At Lazarus’ tomb, Jesus himself wept, and in his grief he shared our own shaken spirits.

Our sadness sets its roots in the precedent Jesus showed us, of utter faithfulness to one another; our sadness stems from rupture of memories from our on-going expectation of daily affection; our sadness blossoms in tears and sighs, in groans too deep for words by which the Holy Spirit adds divine support to our mortal mourning. In all this, though, our sorrow is shot through with the signs of a greatness that attends our grief and waits it out. For the sorrow that comes with a friend’s fidelity, with intimate memory, with affection, with wordless depths of devotion, bespeak death’s effect; but devotion, affection, memory, fidelity, all these good things outlast the power of death. Death cannot touch love, but love always endures and shines and wraps a warm blanket over our shoulders, sets a table for us in the presence of our enemies, offers us a heartening cup and welcomes us to a comfortable home.

These homely gestures of love undergird the solidarity that death shivers; but tomorrow we will open the doors again, we will welcome new strangers, we will share bread and wine. The steady rhythm of hospitality and prayer sustain our hope, express our hope, nourish our hope, and share our hope with everyone whose spirit has been stricken. Ours, too — for our readiness to share comfort opens us to sharing grief, and the deep, enduring ties of common life unite us in grief as much as in comfort. Together we comfort the mournful; together we mourn; together we receive comfort; together we offer comfort, and so, as the novelist says, so it goes.

Tonight makes fools of us all, but we are not entirely foolish; for we gather tonight not only to grieve, but also to share with one another the love and constancy God first shared with us, the self-giving love with which God brought us to life and raised us up, the love for which God made a dwelling-place among us and took on our death; and sharing our presence to one another tonight, sharing in God’s presence to us, we re-awaken in our hearts the slumbering assurance that the faithful live on in God’s hand, that they thrive free of the burdens and cares trouble our mortality. In this sacrament of trust in God, we understand the truth that grace and mercy are upon Anne and upon us all. Our eyes meet, and we glimpse, beyond the tears, the radiant promise of a new home where every tear is wiped away, every joy amplified, every life burnished and glorious with loveliness, every fool exalted to perfect communion with God. We mortals may be fools in our mortality, but in our imperishable hope and faith, we rise victorious over death, our hope crowned with immortality, our love perfected in grace, and finally, truly, eternally at peace. Tonight’s sorrow makes us fools; tonight’s communion makes us sharers with God in immortality; tomorrow’s light sets us free from every torment, free from mourning and crying and pain, free to rise reunited with Anne and with one another to sing love’s glory in harmony without end.

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April 17, 2007

Remembering Album Covers

Adrian Shaughnessy at Design Observer posts an essay on the art that accompanies our LPs, cassettes, and CDs. The essay and comments provoked me to think that these designs constituted an unusually affordable source of art; I doubt I’ll ever be able to afford a canvas by Mark Tansey, but I could obtain a gallery arresting 12 x 12 inch illustrations along with my favorite musical recordings. Somewhere there’s an opportunity for someone who figures out a way to broker the gap between unaffordable high art and strictly disposable media.

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Miter Tip

Archbishop Rowan Williams, target of a deluge of barbs over the past few years, has delivered a tremendous lecture on the theological interpretation of Scripture; While, of course, I’d want to argue some points, Williams (again) articulates his points with a rigor and theological depth that should shame most of his detractors.

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April 16, 2007

A Pause

I had a long day, I didn’t hear till the end of the day about the catastrophe in Blacksburg, where I know teachers and alums. It’s hard to say anything more.

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April 15, 2007

No Regrets Coyote

Last night, at about 4:30 AM (I don’t know what time that is UTC), Margaret and I woke up to a mysterious sound that called to mind an infant being dismembered. The uncanny cries showed no sign of phonetic articulation, so we were that hesitant to think it was a human voice — but if we were hearing a person in torment, perhaps their pain was so great that they no longer could form the cry “Help,” and even then, could we afford to take a chance?

Pippa staggered into our bedroom, and that settled things. All three of us made our way downstairs; I realized that the sweat pants that I’d grabbed on my way out of bed were in fact a sweatshirt, so I dashed back to grab something to cover my boxers. As Margaret and I cautiously approached Seabury’s West Garth, we spotted a coyote slinking across the street, headed north.

Margaret spent the next hour or so researching coyote sounds online, finding nothing that perfectly replicated the sound we had been hearing. Still, the evidence suggests that coyotes’ range of vocalization might include a sound that curdled our blood and lured us out to help a possible innocent sufferer. And we won’t be letting Beatrice out alone at night for a while.

AKMA, years ago my wife Carole & I were sleeping at a campground in our VW camper (that is a hint how many years ago!) in the mountains east of San Diego when we were both awakened by a sound similar to the one you describe. We knew we were safe locked in our steel box, but boy did that sound go to the gut. Here in northern NY, we've heard them in the distanced -- they're called coy dogs here -- but never close enough to give us that whole body shiver.

Joe

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April 13, 2007

Discussion Question

This morning, I woke up with a strong inclination to listen to Belle and Sebastian’s “She’s Losing It” — presumably in conjunction with my having begun to re-reread Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home for next week’s Beautiful Theology class. So out sets I, dog a-leash, and I appreciated the song in many different ways.

As I was listening, my iPod shifted to other selections from Tigermilk: “We Rule the School” and “The State I Am In,” before beatrice accomplished her mission and I returned home. Now, granted that I’m in a frame of mind to see beautiful-theology connections among all the different things I see and hear, I was surprised to hear the persistent subdominant theological themes in these songs that I had known mostly as interesting twee pop. So, for 25 points on the exam, what’s up with Belle and Sebastian and the gospel? And isn’t Tigermilk a lovely album?

I love Tigermilk, esp. "The State I Am In."

"So I gave myself to God
There was a pregnant pause before he said OK"

Love it.

Their latest album has a lot of theology on it too, doesn't it?

Going to Ekklesia Project this year?

michael iafrate

[I fully expect to. We’ll be in the midst of preparing to relocate to Princeton for the year, so Ekklesia should be a welcome distraction.]

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April 12, 2007

Yeah, Su-r-r-r-re

Does anyone expect us to believe that the White House coincidentally lost the email it sent from RNC addresses to circumvent accountability for its machinations? If I were a Democratic mover or shaker, I’d offer a significant bounty to anyone who could “help” the RNC recover those emails they so unfortunately “lost.”

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April 11, 2007

Report From The Side Project

I’m having a blast at Beautiful Theology, and in talking to my students about these topics in “Meaning & Ministry.” Just didn’t want anyone to think I was keeping it to myself.

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Visions

Pippa calls my attention to this informative poll from The Onion, which (as Josh Marshall points out) has its finger ahead of the pulse of the day’s news.

By the way, I’m very positively impressed with the way Josh has implemented video segments — there’s no reason someone couldn’t be doing comparable work in responsible theological, educational communication. Plenty of institutions already have more ample facilities than Josh’s; all it would take is the determination to do it.

I don't think the problem is equipment or other such resources, I think it is TIME. The time I spend blogging is NOT seen by my employer as work. Therefore I do not really have time to experiment with video blogging. Though I will be playing with audio now that Evoca has got me interested - see a forthcoming post on Sansblogue.

Tim

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April 10, 2007

Monday Indeed

Yesterday afternoon I drifted in to Seabury, knowing that I was scheduled to say the Easter Monday mass at 5:00. I stopped by the chapel on my way in the door just to make sure I wasn’t scheduled to preach — well, you can guess where this is going. I sat down and concentrated on working out an Easter Monday homily, and managed to put something together before a student dropped in and whiled away the rest of my afternoon.

This morning I realized that that was my last sermon at Seabury for more than a year. I’m not scheduled to preach any time in the remaining seven weeks of the academic year, and then I’ll be on leave till September 2008.

That feels odd; I certainly don’t need more to do, but preaching constitutes an integral part of my vocation, and Seabury is the primary locus for my exercising that vocation. I’ll try to concentrate on the “time off” angle, and not the “invisible man” angle.

Anyway, here’s my homily for Easter Monday. . . .

In the name of God Almighty, the Holy Trinity on high — Amen.

I have a quiz for you about the church’s observance of Easter, to see whether you’ve been paying attention. You may write a short answer in the margins of your ordo, or maybe even just raise your hand or speak out in chapel. The quiz question is: Have you noticed that the way we observe the feast of resurrection, of new life, of joy and hope and salvation. . . comes attended with monumental stresses on your time, your forethought, your energy, your skill, and your wisdom? Have you?

I raise the question to our explicit attention partly to signal that the faculty notices too. We’re not oblivious to the experience of planning and orchestrating services of intricate complexity and intense spiritual importance; we’ve been there ourselves, we remember, and we honor the effort you’ve put into the four-day Triduum we’ve just celebrated. Thank you.

There’s another aspect to my motivation, though. As we pull ourselves together after your heroic efforts on behalf of the community’s worship, as the physical and spiritual effects of this stressful weekend recede into nostalgic memories about “the way we always used to do it at Seabury,” St Peter stands up to stop us in our tracks and say: Easter is not an occasion for exhaustion. God does not initiate us by means of hazing rituals; such tactics belong to the world of the cynical spin doctors who sought out a more plausible, less disruptive explanation for the unconstrained power of God’s life. Don’t confuse the two, sisters and brothers! The elders and governors try to harry us with fretful cares, with approval offered and withheld, with slurs and allegations; they trap our attention in the tomb, with caviling harassment barricading us in precisely the place Jesus has left vacant.

If you’re anxiously looking over your shoulder lest someone whup you with a stinging lash or a discouraging word, you’re looking to some authority other than God. If they’re threatening you with death or one of its stand-ins — failure, rejection, condescension — they’re enshrouding you in the burial-clothes that could not close Jesus in mortality. The glory, the brilliance, the savory ecstasy of God’s presence draws us out of the tomb, always ahead, always onward, always out of cringing fear toward love: toward love not just as an abstract theological topic, dear ones, but toward embodied love (we believe in the resurrection of the body!), toward a most profound intimacy that binds us to God and to one another, toward purest self-giving service to our beloved neighbors.

Sure, that’s a tall order, it’s a calling that might exhaust us indeed if we tried to accomplish it on the basis of our own planning and striving. Our plans and efforts don’t raise Jesus from death; our stress levels and caffeinated all-nighters don’t bring us closer to the kingdom. By grace we have been saved, through faith; this is not our own doing, but a gift from God. By grace the tomb lies empty; by grace the stone has been rolled away, and we have been set free from their prison camp of anxious manipulation and forced choices. Jesus has shown you the path of life, and beckoned you to leave the tomb behind. The Lord is has gone before us to Galilee, beyond where we can get by our own strength, but we will not grow weary nor shall we fall — for together in his presence we taste the fullness of joy, and we share in pleasures for evermore.

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April 09, 2007

So Much To Learn

If I had time and resources, I would be devouring everything I could find about Wynkyn de Worde — with specific regard to his (illustrated, of course) editions of the Legenda Aurea and memento mori book, The Arte or Crafte to Live Well and to Dye Well. These works cry out for digitizing. . . .

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I Second The Notion

The Christian Century website reproduces an article by Nancy Ammerman from the current issue. Ammerman argues that the (uh-oh) “mainline churches” don’t devote enough energy to religious education, especially for older children and teenagers. That should probably be uncontroversial; I know of relatively few Christian education practitioners who would say, “Golly, we’ve got a thriving program that our congregation supports unstintingly, that actually teaches young people about the Bible and the faith.”

Ammerman recollects memorizing passages from the Bible as a positive, as “a formidable reservoir of memory to call on, with words and images that remain a powerful part of my psyche.” “[W]hen we commit something to memory, it sinks deep and often resurfaces in surprising ways to meet new situations.” These points strike the exact mark I aim at in my biblical theology course — a mash-up of Nancy Ammerman with Gary Klein, extruded into a practice of Christian halachah and haggadah, not in the tractionless idiom of “I like to imagine that” or “She must have thought,” but in rich, dense, durable continuity with the reasoning of generations of saints, preachers, activists, and sages.

Mainline churches have, I suspect, become so fearful of proof-texting, brain-washing, and imposing ideology that they, we, have defaulted on the opportunity to develop a profound theological infrastructure for whatever “more sophisticated” spiritual maturity we aspire to. But that’s just plain folly. First, the decision not to “impose” religious teaching conveys the clear message that religion is a consumer choice; unlike (for instance) traffic safety or, frequently, which political party to support. Learners recognize the unstated message that “we say this topic is important, but it’s not ‘important’ in the sense that we really insist you take it seriously.” Religion-as-choice makes doctrines and practices into the spiritual ornaments by which we always accessorize the really important parts of our lives.

Second, if churches want people to deal with Scripture and theology on a level more profound than just bandying catch-phrases, they/we need to move people through that phase, not just hope (wishfully) to leap-frog them over it. And there’s no time more suitable for learning to proof-text, so as later to grow beyond it, than childhood. That doesn’t require that we jettison the exquisite work done by the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd; it does require that we/they offer more than pizza, movies, earnest discussions of nascent sexuality, and encouragement to doubt everything. And for heaven’s sake, we should at least start with Catechesis (or something as good)! From the good start that Catechesis makes, we can then draw children with us deeper into the world of Scripture, the rationales of the faith’s teaching, the marvelous lives and testimonies of our forebears.

This being Easter week, I’ll forbear speculation about whether congregations (and leaders!) would support such a commitment, and why not. But by abstemiously refusing to teach our children, we escalate a spiral of ignorance that does nothing whatever to advance the faith we at least notionally pretend to uphold.

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April 08, 2007

Years

I think that 5:30 AM gets earlier every year. Having gotten out of bed in time for the Seabury vigil service this morning (no small feat, requiring some complicated cognitive labor relative to what that beeping sound might be and, having recognized it, figuring out why I set the alarm at so manifestly inappropriate an hour), I’m groggily staggering through the rest of what I hope id for you, and everyone, a joyous and blessed Easter Day.

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April 07, 2007

Nightmare League

I’m drafting my rotisserie-league baseball team today, after last year’s heartbreak. If I weren’t re-acquainting myself with the worthwhile players in the American League, I’d be explaining why I was thinking about rhetorical questions and burying your lede; but that will have to wait. Worst comes to worst, I kept Johan Santana and Travis Hafner from last year’s team, so my roster won’t be a total washout.

Hi Prof. Adam,

I’ve started a rotisserie team too – one of the Yahoo sports leagues. After four wonderful days where I was second in my league, now I’m seventh. Hope springs eternal, I suppose, but my pitchers better get their acts together! ‘Course, I wish it were an NL league, but Yahoo makes us include all of baseball. Yuch. The DL is evil.

Anyway, The Lord is Risen Indeed!

Best,

Bob S.

I was tempted to say something from the pulpit like 'And Jesus came out of His tomb, saw His shadow, and foretold of 6 more weeks of winter.'"

Didn't actually say it, but was tempted.

Shared said temptation with some friends in the congregation who said "Yeah, *we* would have laughed, but surely someone would have thought it was in poor taste."

And they probably would have been correct.

TjL

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April 06, 2007

The Answer To Your Search?

Judging by the referrer logs, a great many people have been combing the series of tubes for ideas for Good Friday sermons. I’m not sure what about my site attracts those readers, and it’s too late for most preachers (I hope), but here’s some ideas about what one might or might not say on Good Friday.

First, last, and every point in between, Christian preachers should preach on Good Friday as though they knew that the congregation were packed with our Jewish neighbors. Opprobrious observations about Judaism — and I’ve heard oceans of them, often as not from “liberal” preachers who wouldn’t dream of insulting the rabbi in the clergy group — not only insult people who had no role whatsoever in the events of Good Friday, not only reactivate the prejudices that engender Christian cruelty to Jews, not only [usually] originate in ignorance about Judaism and first-century cultural politics, but they also falsify the Gospel. The Gospel comes to the world proclaiming release from slavery, freedom to grow in holiness, and a grace that overcomes the innumerable obstacles that human sin persistently erects. There’s just no way that Judaism per se stands against any of this — which should come as no surprise, since the faith that Jesus proclaims depends on its Judaic roots. The church has been grafted in to Israel; it has no business derogating the roots and the trunk.

Second — go back and reread “First.” It’s that important. Romans held the power of crucifixion. If you cannot say anything on Good Friday without blaming someone, blame Romans. But better far not to point fingers on a day such as today; it’s a day to confess our complicity, not to scapegoat Others.

Third, the message of Good Friday involves the suffering and grief Jesus bore — but suffering and grief are not themselves the message. As Mel Gibson proved a few years back, the lurid appeal of grotesque misery offer a perverse attraction; yet if we preach so as to play on that perverse interest, we becloud the vital theological point that the depths of human cruelty to one another have been overridden in the name of kindness, forgiveness, patience, and reconciliation. If our preaching embeds the horror of Jesus’s suffering more vividly than it conveys the beauty of the Gospel, we amplify the effects of sin more than the opportunity to escape from it.

Fourth, to the extent that we do attend to the barbaric tortures to which Jesus was subjected at the behest of the imperial power of an occupying army (and its compliant quisling clients), we ought to look around for possible examples of such state-sponsored torture in the contemporary world, and resist it. That’s not the point of our preaching itself, but it should be an inescapable consequence of the Good Friday gospel; we can’t express the truth about grace if we soft-pedal depraved indifference to our neighbors.

Fifth, have you forgotten “First”?

Sixth, there’s a point at which Good Friday’s grim outworking of human opposition to grace — an opposition no less terrible, all the more terrible when cloaked in the well-intentioned motives of religious leaders — itself begins to reveal, in the unique identity and work of Jesus, the power of God. That point is “sublime” in the sense Lyotard deployed the term: it surpasses and overwhelms our capacity to give an account of it, to explain it [away]. We can turn away from it, or we can trivialize it, or we can refuse to acknowledge it, or any of a variety of other very plausible, sound responses. Or we can recognize in that sublime witness to God’s non-coercive, patient, generous, forgiving love for all people that we too have been invited into a loveliness we could never attain on our own, we could never even imagine on our own. In that loveliness we have to give up much that we would cling to (starting with our autonomy), but the beauty of holiness will catch us up and draw out from us those elements of our identities that edify, complement, intensify, elevate the truths that God draws out from everyone else who steps out onto this thin ice.

Thin ice, but it’s here that we’ve been called. We’ll hang on tight to one another. We will sing, we will pray, we will wipe away the tears in our loved ones’ eyes, we will remember and forgive, and come what may — we will turn our hearts ever toward God. Because we have beheld God come in flesh, full of grace and truth.

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April 05, 2007

You Would Think

If there’s a two-hundred fifty dollar 3D figure modelling program that makes photo-realistic human avatars, you might think there would be a fifty dollar figure modelling program that produces very basic cartoon-like shapes. (Poser Figure Artist is about $99, and specifically excludes cartoon figures).

Greetings,

Comments posted in your Random Thoughts landed in my gmail today, who would have thought? So whynot respond?

Regarding the below mentioning of Poser Figure Artist, so you know, Poser Figure Artist actually does let you save out human imagery in pastels, charcoal, pen and ink, as well as cartoon figures! Just in case that is what you're looking for.

Enjoy a great day!

Mark Leitch

[Yes, true, to some extent. My desideratum would be a simple application that offers the capacity to build and manipulate jointed skeletal 2D comics figures, with the capacity to add simple clothing. That’s not precisely what PFa does, if I understand correctly — but maybe I should download the demo and explore.]

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April 04, 2007

Let The Record Show

It’s been snowing today. Lightly, just isolated flakes, but snow.

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It's Official

In this morning’s mail, I received formal notification from the Episcopal Church’s Conant Fund that I had been granted the amount requisite to support my four hitherto un-funded months of leave time next spring. Woohoo!

AKMA, that is grand news, indeed. Congratulations, sir! Now you have all the time you need to respond to the call of ecumenical leadership mentioned in a previous post.

-Tripp

congratulations akma

Wonderful news to be fully funded for next year's plans!! We share in your joy.
Heaps of love,
Pat and Dick

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April 03, 2007

Links Stromateis

• When I agree with Stanley Fish, I do so with trepidation (as someone who thinks he knows which shell is holding the pea) — but I think Fish is quite right about “The Bible Without Religion.” “The truth claims of a religion — at least of religions like Christianity, Judaism and Islam — are not incidental to its identity; they are its identity.” I wish he hadn’t included that husk/kernel metaphor, much less ascribed it to non-specific “theologians”; I tend to see the whole husk/kernel discourse as a massive red herring (Ha! Triumphantly mixed metaphor!). But as to his insistence that you can’t disregard theology’s claim to truth without trivializing the whole exercise, I’on board. (Thanks for the link, Jennifer!)
• Via Aaron Swartz,who illustrates for us one possible result of giving an active and brilliant young mind enough money to enable him to devote time to what interests him, Tom Slee’s riposte to Chris “Long Tail” Anderson. I haven’t read either the much-ballyhooed Long Tail or No One Makes You Shop At Wal-Mart, but I estimate that I would — as usual — adopt a position that doesn’t align precisely with either.
• If Kathy Sierra is a cute little kitty, is Chris Locke a big teddy bear? People whose only notion of Chris involves his role in the recent ructions should take a refresher squint at his prescient “Common Knowledge or Superior Ignorance?” from way back in 1990. Locke 1990 was already saying some of what we ought to have learned last week, that also pertains to the current convulsion in favor of speech codes for bloggers: figuring out what things mean involves intricate judgments that gross instruments (such as computer-enabled “reading” or “codes of ethics for [all?] bloggers” don’t significantly advance. I have a post gestating about the “code of ethics” reflex, but it’s not ready yet.

Hmmm. . . I remember when a Furman buddy visited us at Duke and finagled a way into a Milton class Fish was teaching. Fish kept throwing out Scriptural allusions and the only one who picked up on them was my Baptist buddy. Much to the Dukies' chagrin, by the way. That kind of knowledge seemed pretty important to Fish about 20 years back, but consistency isn't all that important.

Fish has confused teaching religion — what I do at church — and teaching religious studies — what I do at William & Mary. Fish's approach explains why folks in universities cut religious studies departments off, or underfund them, or don't have them in the first place. It's all just Sunday School, so someone else should do it.

Don

[I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at, Don. I don’t think Fish is saying that instruction in Bible must inculcate the truth-claims of Judaism or Christianity; I take it that he’s arguing that instruction in Bible (or in theology-as-an-aspect-of-culture) oughtn’t minimize the truth-claims the Bible makes. The Bible isn’t just another story about the world; the whole idea of “just another story about the world” develops from Enlightened modernity, doesn’t it? Rather, the Bible tells the truth about the world, in a way that various sorts of Judaic and Christian traditions have recognized it. If students can’t recognize the BIble as a [per hypothesi] true story, they’re not reading the Bible in a way that will help them understand Milton (for instance).

Again, that doesn’t require religious-studies students to adopt biblical faith; it does require that they imagine a world in which they might do so. But that’s not fundamentally different from expecting English Lit students to imagine a world in which murdering your uncle to avenge your father’s murder makes any kind of sense. If we spend two or three hours saying, “That’s dumb; there’s no such thing as ghosts, and assassinating the king will only cause trouble unless you’ve got a posse of nobles and armies backing you up,” you’re wasting your time reading Hamlet.]

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Laying Down the Law

I was delighted to observe in James Darlack’s blog a transcription of some of the mandates inscribed in cuneiform tablets in the libraries of the Ancient Near East. You just have to sympathize with librarians who faced the problem of people spilling coffee on their clay tablets, though few of us would think to pray that “all [the deities] curse him with a curse which cannot be relieved, terrible and merciless, as long as he lives, may they let his name, his seed, be carried off from the land, may they put his flesh in a dog's mouth.” I am tempted, however, to design bookplates that say, “He who fears Anu and Antu will return [this book] to the owner's house the next day.”

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April 02, 2007

Thank Heaven For Mainstream Media

The diligent newshounds at CNN have rolled back the curtains of ignorance and misinformation in the Kathy Sierra death threat controversy. I found the link thanks to Dave, who points to Norm Jenson’s blog. Apart from the clip reporting mostly what everyone who read Kathy’s post already knew more than a week ago, it only got a few things wrong. For instance, sensible as Harvard would be to attract David Weinberger as a professor there, he’s a Fellow of the Berkman Center — but they didn’t make do to his words any of the terrible things he feared (I don’t think). And Chris Locke came of relatively benign, making a plausible point about the amount of human energy and cost that it would take to patrol an internet that was insulated from malignant sociopathy (I mean, we aren’t doing so very well in that department in the physical-space world). They didn’t mention Kathy and Chris’s joint statement (on which, good job, friends), but granted the volatility of the topic, CNN successfully avoided playing to hysteria.

On the other hand: I feel sorry for Kathy having been called a “cute kitty” on international news TV. Although she won’t get thousands of messages decrying this form of misogyny, the media digesters did not blaze any new bold paths in egalitarian journalism when they compared an endangered woman to a small, fuzzy, defenseless feline. No, it’s not as bad as a death threat — but if we’re going to open the topic of malignant effects on women, we should speak clearly and directly about androcentric condescension and “protection.”

It seems worth noting here that the “cute kitty” nickname for Kathy Sierra was first given her by fans in comments on her blog. Does this mean that Kathy Sierra is responsible for the ideological belittling of her — and by extension all women — that CNN perpetuated by equating her with a defenseless fluff ball? Or, is she not responsible for her comments? More to the point, if her commenters intended the “cute kitty” nickname affectionately, but the same words function quite differently in a national news story about perceptions of victimization (and reactions to such perceptions), might we have a lovely example of the multiplicity of meaning and the importance of context?

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April 01, 2007

Do You Have Any?

Chapel Hill, NC – Researchers at the Dean Smith Center for Interspecies Cooperation have released a report that should be required reading for every dog owner. Their preliminary findings suggest that the thin plastic bags that many owners use for cleaning up after their dogs transmit some of what they’re expected to contain.

“We ran a series of initial tests at the request of a public health department,” said Prof. Herb Eagle, “and observed right away that the two main bacterial contaminants — around the lab, we were joking around and called them ‘poop’ons — can’t pass through the plastic barrier. One kind, the white poopons, cause more of a smell than the black ones, but both black and white have a gross molecular structure that will stay inside all standard plastic containers.”

Prof. Eagle went on to say that one afternoon they noticed that bags that were supposed to be tied off and sealed were nonetheless emitting an unpleasant odor. Further analysis revealed that among the samples in the test, not only were there the expected black poopons and white poopons, but a third and rarer bacterium with some characteristics of each. This third sort of contaminant has a tighter structure that enables it to pass through the thinner plastic bags that some dog owners use — the bag that protects the Sunday New York Times, for instance, or fresh produce bags, especially the semi-porous green bags often used at up-market organic grocers.

“We called this third kind of contaminant the ‘grey poopons,’ ” explained Prof. Eagle.

Officials at the Smith Center expressed appreciation for the importance of the discovery and advised dog owners to stick with heavy-gauge plastic refuse-removal conveyances. They referred inquiries about the formal name of the newly-found hazard to Prof. Eagle, who admitted that “no one wants it named after them.” For the time being, it will presumably be identified with the research center that first isolated it.

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