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July 31, 2007
Phase Three: Complete
We rolled into Princeton this afternoon, and have been semi-unpacking and unwinding and getting ready for a lovely evening with friends. All is well.
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Rice Univ. Press Has A Clue
They’re shifting to a peer-reviewed, online publishing, print-on-demand model. It can be done; it will be done.
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Phase Three: Unexpected
We had not assumed that Harrisburg would be a site of excitement and intrigue, but we were partly wrong. It turns out that three or four young women who behave as though they’re rehearsing for a future appearance on “Girls Gone Wild” occupied the room next to ours last night, making it clear that such old-fashioned concepts as “quiet” and “sleep” no longer apply in the thrilling epoch of twenty-first century Harrisburg. At least, at the Red Roof.
Thanks to these vivacious culture mavens, Margaret and I have plumbed the banal shallows of the Nickelback oeuvre, since the girls phoned one of their mothers, shouting instructions to Google the lyrics of a song they were referring to as “Pants Around Your Feet.” This was made more complicated by (a) the girls’ inebriation, (b) the mom’s apparent incapacity to spell “Google,” (c) the fact that the title of the song in question is “Figured You Out,” and (d) the girls’ proclivity for drowning one another out. Several gentle cues went unheeded, but sometime after midnight these ladies could no longer remain conscious. Margaret and I have been resisting the temptation to incite Beatrice into a yipping fit outside their door this morning, though I can think of no more perfect complement to a hangover.
We have a relatively short drive into Princeton this morning, but we may be changing our plans to stay over with friends tonight; we may need to get into the townhouse early, or to find some other place to lodge. Ah, the sweet mysteries of unexpected developments!
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July 30, 2007
Phase Two: Complete
Safely ensconced in Harrisburg. Only drawback (consistent with experience in Ann Arbor) involves the complications of having a dog with us — we can’t just leave her at the motel lest she whine and fuss, but we can’t take her in to restaurants either. Apart from that, travel has been fine. Margaret and I talked over course syllabi she might put together, episodes of “Lost,” and sundry other topics.
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Phase Two: Incipit
Beatrice woke us up early. The coffee machine is out of order. We’re leaving for Harrisburg, assuming the car still works.
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July 29, 2007
Happy Birthday, Doc!
The other day I suggested that Homeland Security might better be administered by people who actually know what they’re doing; today, celebrating Doc Searls’s birthday, I suggest we might prosper if someone who knows what he’s doing, someone with a level head and a charitable heart even when people are giving him a hard time, someone who has forgotten more about radio than most anyone at the FCC has ever learned, someone who has an articulate and well-reasoned approach to the relation of media to public service — if someone, in short, like Doc Searls was in charge at the FCC.
I wouldn’t wish to stick him with that responsibility — but then, being Doc, he might just take it up anyway out of his love for the media, his respect for people’s imaginative uses of public spectrum, and his pride in a country that has should have the wisdom to trust its citizens to exercise their ingenuity on behalf of the general welfare.
Happy Brithday, Doc. Thanks for the gifts you’ve given your friends.
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Phase One Point Five
We’re taking a restful Sunday, visiting with Nate and exploring Ann Arbor. We had a late breakfast at the Cloverleaf Restaurant, then wandered around the University of Michigan campus. We watched the re-re-edited Return of the Jedi, complaining about all the revisionist changes George Lucas made — culminating in the soundtrack change at the end (A very young Pippa used to delight us by singing along, “Halle-lu-ke-lah! Boop-boop!”) and the substitution of Hayden Christenson for David Prowse in the Jedi Ghost Alumni Association sequence.
Tonight we bid Nate goodbye, and tomorrow morning we roll out for Harrisburg. All is well.
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July 28, 2007
Phase One: Mission Accomplished
Arrived in Ann Arbor safely and more-or-less comfortably; amazingly so, considering how much we’ve crammed into the car. Dinner with Nate, watching a little TV, and then early to bed.
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No BBC 4 Me
The BBC has stuck with its weirdly wrong-headed decision to take the media projects that the UK’s public has paid for, and lock them behind Microsoft’s Wall of Inaccessibility (in patent defiance of the BBC’s own mission). One could devise so very many ways to offer the citizens of the UK free use of their audio and video archives, and even some ways to access to people who seem to be in the correct territory — but ceding control to Microsoft has to be the least defensible. At least Euan and Tom don’t have to take the heat for this disaster, which will cost Britain money, productivity, and the joy (and prestige) that open access would have afforded millions.
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Zero!
We have more closing-out to do this morning than I had hoped, but today’s the day we head out to Ann Arbor. Heaven consenting, I’ll check in from our motel later in the day.
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July 27, 2007
One!
Today we’ll tackle my office, extracting books that I’ll need and clearing a space for my successor Raj to occupy. We’ll make sure everything fits into the car, get some rest, square away our directions from Nate, have a festive good-bye dinner with Si and Laura, and get a good night's sleep.
At least, that was our plan before Mr Josiah’s persistent cold took a turn for the bronchial worse. Now we’ll try to shoehorn our packing-like activity into the first part of the day, take Si to the physician in the early afternoon, and think through some contingency plans in case we’d be ill-advised (no pun intended) to leave him behind in precarious health.
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Say Amen Someone!
Jordon pointed his shiny new WordPress blog to Dan Wetzel’s column at Yahoo Sports, where he asks the vital question, “There's no excuse for dog fighting, but why doesn't everyone get even remotely as outraged about all the pro athletes who simply beat on women? That's practically an every week crime.”
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Random Footnote
A few years ago — well, to be candid, many years ago — Phil gave me a copy of David Antin’s book tuning as a summer reading present. I don’t remember what weird circumstances directed his attention to it, but I’ve loved tuning from first reading (which was delayed for a while because I was put off by Antin’s ad hoc punctuation and typography). I’ve pushed it on friends, and assigned it to a PhD seminar on hermeneutics.
I glimpsed my copy of tuning the other day as we were packing up, and it reminded me of how richly provocative I found Antin’s work. So I dug up some links, made an entry, and blogged him.
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July 26, 2007
Self-Sustaining and Good For the Public
I hear the expectation that not-for-profit endeavors have some prospect for sustaining their existence (if not exactly a “business plan,” at least a responsible budgetary path), and I understand that especially when we hear of mismanaged charities and institutions we heighten our sense that generous donations not underwrite high livers and wastrels.
At the same time: I remain aggrieved that this rhetoric rules out from the start projects for which there is an explicable absence of market support, which nonetheless stand to benefit a wide public. The report on “University Publishing in a Digital Age” (via Inside Higher Education) provides a case in point; there’s a strong case, I would argue, that disseminating scholarly discourse can’t be a break-even proposition any more than (for instance) the public library system can support itself.
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Two
Yesterday I finished the lectionary columns and solicited some reader comments; today I’ll make some edits and send them off. We finished the upstairs bedrooms — the ones we’re vacating — though we need to pack up the clothes in suitcases and get them out of the way, so that the cleaners can come in at midday and dust, polish, vacuum all the surfaces that we can make available to them.
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Deaccessioning
Because of our family’s circumstances this week, I’ve been thinking a lot about my ownership of so many books. I’d be very happy, I thought, to share my books with my circle of friends, many of whom now have duplicates of books that I own, and who’d be inclined to be interested in most of the books I have that they don’t (and vice versa). Sadly, we mostly live in widely-distributed locales, and none of us can afford to buy a building to house a collection any place. (My fantasy of being endowed with an informal compound with tons of dry shelf space and dorms and sheds for guests to sleep and write in seems further from realization than ever.)
These thoughts were flitting about my mind when I read Scott McLemee’s column about culling book collections in this week’s Inside Higher Education. I don’t buy nearly as many books as I used to, and the trend is downward, but we still have an enormous theological (and philosophy/literary theory) library. I wish there were a way of maintaining ready access to books that I’ve paid for, while relocating them to another site, one where others could benefit from the library as well.
Matthew said:
A random comment from a random reader and random St. Luke's member...
"I wish there were a way of maintaining ready access to books that I’ve paid for, while relocating them to another site, one where others could benefit from the library as well."
Be careful what you wish for. My grandfather felt the same way, and found a site that would take them (it may have helped that most of the ordained staff were former students and advisees of his...)
http://www.philadelphiacathedral.org/content/blogcategory/107/98/
In 1996, I helped move the first load of books up three flights of stairs. After they were all in the library, it took about a year to get them in order and on the shelves. Then everyone realized the space wasn't large enough, so all the books went back into boxes, down three flights of stairs, and into another building. Ten years latter, they've finally finished adding LoC numbers to the book spines, putting them in order on the shelves, and entering them into a computer database. While I'm sure he didn't think it would be a small project, I'm also pretty sure he didn't think it would take more than a decade to get the library running.
[Dude, if I were confident I’d be located in Philadelphia near the cathedral, I’d be all over that — and it looks like there are lacunae in biblical studies. . . .]
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July 25, 2007
Verbal Tics
Not “ticks,” as I saw in another online source this morning (later: either Josh Marshall corrected this, or perhaps I misread it the first time through), though verbal ticks would be annoying too – perhaps burrowing under your cognitive skin and sucking out your creativity, infecting you with chronic cliché syndrome?
As I pound out my last Evanstonian paragraphs of the summer, I catch myself repeatedly resorting to formulaic constructions that vex me much (friends who’ve worked with me in the Writing Group will recognize these old nemeses coming back to besiege me): First, the “One of the. . . is. . .” construction, a prevalent but weak way of characterizing a specific item or quality from a range of other possibilities (“One of my most common tics is the ‘one of. . . is’ tic”); second, the negation-affirmation tic (“It is not X but Y,” boy does that one possess my writerly soul); and third, the paired-term tic (“fiercely and persistently,” “oppression and steadfastness,” blah blah blah). I will probably leave many of them in, from lack of time to edit them all out – but how annoying to observe myself yield to their power over me!
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Three
We hope to close out the bedroom today; we have at least one trip to the Salvation Army planned, and some other errand-type things. Cleaners come in tomorrow.
[Later: Ha! Finished drafting Set One of lectionary helps!]
Bruce Schneier points to an article on airline security by David Mackett, the president of the Airline Pilots Security Alliance. Why are our security czars an array of duplicitous cronies, and not competent, qualified experts? Are we safer with Michael “I think with my intestines” Chertoff and Heckuva Job Brownie than we would be with Schneier and Mackett?
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July 24, 2007
Four
We made some headway on the bedroom yesterday, but we need to push hard today as well. Bea gets a trip to the vet and a haircut today. I should try to grind out the last of my lectionary helps for assignment #1 (I have two more sets of lectionary helps to produce in the next few weeks).
Yesterday Si and I were talking about the article in the NY Times Magazine (registration required) Prince’s clueful approach to making a living in the digital media environment. Si kept focusing on Prince’s megamillions; I certainly respect his (Prince’s, not Si’s) capacity to generate massive revenues, but since arguments about digital handcuffs on music recordings typically try to represent themselves as a favor for the smaller-scale artist, I promoted the cause of Michelle Shocked (warning: involuntary music track for site, sorry), who has been making her way as a recording and performing musician in the digital environment, without a record label owning her, for a number of years. Like Prince, she rebelled against a restrictive contract; like Prince, she protested that she was in effect a slave (she sued Mercury Records under California statutes against involuntary servitude, and entitled her 1996 album with Fiachna O’Braonain “Artists Make Lousy Slaves”); like Prince, she won her free agency; but unlike Prince, she’s not a purple-obsessed multimillionaire. She’s making modest records and terrific concert appearances, selling music online (albeit with fierce, sharing-hostile monitory notes), and doing okay for herself. Her new album comes out in September, and I’m sure to buy a download.
The industrial mediators of music distribution have enthralled the populace with their glamourous promise of wealth and notoriety, but that lottery-hit windfall comes only to a tiny proportion of the musicians from whose energies and creativity the industry profits. If we’re looking for proof that musicians can manage just fine in the digital environment, let‘s look not only at Prince, but at Michelle Shocked, too.
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July 23, 2007
Western Civilization
Fascinating notes from Earthgoat relative to the cultural differences between the Netherlands and the U.S. (thanks for the pointer, Dave!).
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Five To Go
We’ve got five days left here. Margaret has finished, pretty much, with Pippa’s room and the guest room; we mostly just need to pack up our bedroom and the bits of my office that I’ll be leaving for my sub. I’m making some progress on the lectionary articles I owe (resisting any temptation for cutesy topical allusions to Harry Potter). Bea has vet and grooming appointments. We have cleaners coming in on Thursday. Saturday we set out to connect with Nate in Ann Arbor, and a whole huge year-long adventure begins.
I’m not quite as queasy-stressed-out as I was last week; Margaret has shouldered a massive accomplishment in packing/storing to get us to this point. And Saturday is in sight.
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July 22, 2007
Accio, Deathly Hallows!
I’ve taken my turn for reading the Deathly Hallows, and I suspect I enjoyed it every bit as much as Si did. Rowling included some vexatious bits of teenage contention again, but she didn’t allow that to dominate the story (and in its own way, it advanced the plot somewhat). We’re criticizing Harry Potter in the midst of its cultural currency — always a dangerous gesture, as a retrospective glance at media “of the Year” awards will reveal — but I anticipate that Harry will stand up as a durable contribution to its literary neighbors.
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July 21, 2007
Information Ecologies: Yes, I Hope
Brent Graber directs my attention to Information Ecologies (excerpted at First Monday). When I have time, I want to look it over; it sounds very promising.
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Misgeography
Jeneane really feels like packing up someone else’s stuff (and selling some on eBay).
Margaret and I feel nauseous about packing and decluttering our stuff before we go to Princeton.
Why does she live there when we live here?
[Speaking of Jeneane, last night Margaret and I had a difficult time sleeping because Beatrice kept whining and yipping in response to a mysterious thumping sound we heard in the night. Jeneane theorizes that it was the hamster-essence of Marshmallow, making its way to Hamster Heaven, intimidating our seven-year-old Bichon Frisé puppy.]
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Zizek Krispies, Too
Language Log revives a “Breakfast Theory,” a wonderful cartoon from the eighties (remember them) by Jeff Reid, that Steve Lawler sent me when it was first published.
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Acid Test
Si read all night, only just emerged from his room to get up and eat, and he beams with approval about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I’m next in line to touch the numinous book.
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July 20, 2007
Makes Sense to Me
Five.sentenc.es, explained by Mike Davidson.
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Miscellaneous Is Terrific
I started reading David Weinberger’s Everything Is Miscellaneous late, partly because it took me a while to get around to obtaining a copy (Margaret bought one in North Carolina before me) and partly because it’s taking me some time to get the knack of “reading books” again after the school year. I had read the early reviews, both the enthusiastic and the critical, and I wanted to respect the critical reviews even as I also wanted to admire the work of someone I regard as a very dear friend (DISCLAIMER: To my grateful astonishment, I discovered that David refers to me as his friend on page 211 of Everything. Margaret said, “You didn’t look for yourself in the index? You always do that!” which is embarassingly true, but since I didn’t expect to appear in this book, I had not peeked.)
David’s argument will be familiar to anyone who reads his blog regularly. On his account, the transition to a world in which we store information digitally rather than physically effects a “third order of information.” He says, “In the first order of order, we organize things themselves” (17-18). We order our environment by locating objects in predictable, meaningful places. The second order of order creates further objects that refer to first-order objects: we call many of these things “catalogues,” even though a library’s card catalog differs from the innumerable catalogs of merchandise that arrive in my mail every day. They do not physically set the objects to which they refer in order; they constitute an order of representation, which points to the physical objects. Weinberger’s pivotal point here involves the fact that these representations themselves remain physical entities, limited by the necessity of locating these representations in space. One could, solely in theory, generate a catalogue in which every item was connected by a catalog entry to every possible association by which one might want to look it up — but even proposing such a thing provokes the realization that the scope of such a project would be impossibly vast. The second order to which David adverts remains constrained by its physical limitations.
The book goes on to celebrate what David calls the third order of order, the digital environment in which catalogs can function apart from the limitations of spatial organization. The all-encompassing catalog for Lands End merchandise would be infinitely thick (though the postal service would still offer an absurdly low mailing rate to subsidize mail-order companies) because Jeneane and I think differently about clothing, luggage, linen, shoes, and so on (DISCLAIMER: I don’t actually know if Jeneane buys anything from Lands End, or if we think differently about their merchandise, but it’s a likely guess that we do). But in David’s third order, Lands End doesn’t need to produce a single ultimate catalog to accommodate Jeneane and me; instead, they could produce a digital catalogue that presents Jeneane and me with different representations of their merchandise that fit our respective different interests. Freed from the constraints of physicality, “order” can remain miscellaneous at the back-end as software presents us with infinite different personalized “orders” when Jeneane and I consult it.
That’s the heart of David’s argument, if I understand it correctly; most of the book illustrates this principle, amplifies its ramifications, and endorses its implied metaphysics, and I agree with David ninety-five percent or so. I’ve put a lot of energy into pushing the theological and pedagogical angles of this point, that the non-spatial character of digital interaction changes the environment in ways that most authority figures in those fields haven’t begun to deal with (but also, to be fair, in ways that the self-promoting hucksters of change mostly misrepresent). David does a beautiful job of highlighting the difference of digital information with vivid, convincing, provocative examples. Everything Is Miscellaneous should help undermine the pompous ukases of the media authorities who run around like the character in the Homecoming Parade sequence at the end of Animal House who shouts, “Remain calm! All is well!” (take, for instance, David’s recent point-counterpoint appearances with Andrew Keen).
David embellishes his argument with a terrific hip-pocket history of ideas about taxonomy. He explains the metaphysical backstories that inform claims about the “natural” way of parcelling out information, and disarms them with insight, wit, and actual counterexamples. This element of the book delighted me, but I expect that some readers will resist the possibility that the joints at which we endeavor to carve our world are as miscellaneous as David shows them to be. Tom takes this up and launches it into the orbital shell of brilliance by comparing David’s thoughts in this chapter with Benjamin’s observations on tradition and the collector.
I’m not sure about the other 5%, though. As others have pointed out before me, digital data is still spatial in several senses (otherwise I’d be able to carry around infinite data on my laptop computer), and that does make a difference in the scaling of data. It’s a difference that’s insignificant relative to card catalogs or retail merchandise displays, certainly, but we shouldn’t overlook the real spatiality of data in our excitement about the difference digital storage makes. I’m not convinced, either, that this is a different “order of order”; I’m inclined to think that the order of order is the same — that is, it’s still “a representation of information about objects,” just as a card in a library catalog, or an entry in a Lands End circular — but it’s a different dimension of that order, or a different regime of that order. Maybe that’s hair-splitting, but I have a hunch that it’s related to the “spatiality” reservation, and to protests that David isn’t really describing anything very new. More metadata, even a lot more metadata, is still metadata.
[As a side issue, in connection with reading David’s book, I’ve been messing around with the Wikipedia lately, and it’s heightening my mixed feelings about that source. In my own area of specialized knowledge, the Wikipedia is heavily shaped by partisanship, and it’s hard to see how it will move away from its current condition toward the ideal of a neutral point of view. At least, I don’t have the energy — nor do I presume to volunteer others to supply the energy — to push back against ardent partisans. In relatively uncontroversial areas, or areas where I know the background terrain pretty well, I will continue to use the Wikipedia as a first source for general information, but I’ve become somewhat disillusioned about Wikipedia’s prospects overall.]
In short, Everything Is Miscellaneous fittingly heralds a dramatic change in the ways David‘s readers now encounter information, and even more so in the ways that they will shortly encounter it. For those who want to understand that transition better, and those who want the help of a lucid, engaging, convincing expositor, Everything Is Miscellaneous provides a unique touchstone. Once we grant a couple of David’s premises, we can get into further arguments about his conclusions — but that signals what an extremely valuable waypoint David has published.
David responded:
Thank you, Akma, for the thoughtful review, and especially for the way you honor difference. As always.
The division into three orders is, of course, merely a convenience for thought. So, there's a strong sense in which an argument about exactly where to draw the line (if there is a line to draw) could become a self-referential self-parody. Nevertheless, I do want to maintain that the moving of info into the connected digital world is not merely more of the old, or even more of the old faster. It's a truly significant change. And you've anticipated what I'm about to say. It does have to do with the spatiality of data.
First to acknowledge the limit you point out: Yes, we are not in the limitless world of connection yet. And yet...we are rapidly putting our info devices online, which means they have (slow or fast, easy or hard) access to the wide world of the Net. We're connecting it all up. But put that aside for the moment.
The difference between what we have had and what we are giving ourselves erases the formal boundary between data and metadata. We certainly will continue to attach metadata to data, and as far as that goes, yes, we'll be attaching more than we could when we had to fit it on a label or a card, and that's not all that different. But there are real differences. I'd point to two:
First, in the connected world, even the new labels and cards are linked into the big mess we call the Web. So, the metadata for the online book (let's say) may give the pub date, but because it's on the Web, you can find a whole bunch of other stuff via that date. All of that other stuff -- i.e., the Web -- now can serve as metadata for the online book. The explicit metadata leads to data that can act as metadata (let us find and understand the original book) even though it wasn't intended to and may never have heard of the book.
Second, in the new world, objects themselves are metadata, if we use them that way. The book is online, not just its metadata (well, some books are online, and I assume that will be the norm within just a few handfuls of years...I hope). The content is metadata. The content of the book the original book points to in a footnote is metadata. The ability to link, traverse, find, navigate, relate, coordinate, contextualize and get distracted is something new enough to be worth calling new. IMO.
In closing, you'd better agree with me or you're not my friend any more. That's how it works, right?
Love and peace,
David W.
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Ekklesia Roundup
Charlie Pardue has begun posting downloadable audio of the Ekklesia Project Gathering sessions, beginning with the day that Margaret and I led worship (Sharon Huey preached a terrific sermon, which the audio appropriately foregrounds). Phil Kenneson’s description of the Project should be a priority-one download for anyone interested in this group. If you know my laugh, you’ll probably hear me in the background.
[Later: It occurs to me to note that my friends who know of my allergy to “praise music” will be struck by the incongruity of my participation in the services at Ekklesia. In order to preserve my grumpy reputation, I’ll simply re-emphasize that excellence makes a difference, and David Butzu has an excellent sense for liturgy and music. I’m not about to change my listening patterns, or alter the repertoire on which I’d voluntarily draw for services I plan, but I admire David and his liturgical-musical leadership. So there.]
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July 19, 2007
By Title
Sloodle (via Stephen Downes) and the Open Library (via David) look fantastic.
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Regrouping
The aftermath of Ekklesia leaves us physically and spiritually exhausted; though we need to lean into the project of moving to Princeton, today Margaret and I will be concentrating on several errands and restoring our vigor for relocating in fewer than two weeks’ time.
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July 18, 2007
Imaginary Philippians
Mark Lau Branson led a very helpful workshop on the role of narrative in shaping congregational identity. I was pleased and encouraged that he set appreciative inquiry at the foreground of his presentation; he pointed out that churches’ strategic planning frequently reifies and institutionalizes exactly the problems that they set out to solve. Mark drew on Paul’s thanksgiving sections as a case in point of starting congregational change. Some of you can imagine my surprised delight when he espoused the vital importance of enriching the gospel imaginary in the local congregation. He refers to this aspect of congregational life as “Interpretive Leadership” which
creates an environment and provides resources for a community of interpreters who converse about God, texts, context, and congregation. The fruit of interpretive leadership is in the truthfulness, adequacy and ownership of meanings. Often most available in narratives and metaphors, interpretive resources lead to discernment and imagination.
Mark exhorted us to observe the social imaginaries on which our communities draw, and to draw our congregations into an understanding of ways that the Gospel offers a different vision of what might be possible.
Before and after Mark’s session, we heard Steve Fowl expound the Letter to the Philippians in ways that connect very vividly with the lectures I give in New Testament class, and that resonate with some of my arguments about the imitatio ethic. Steve gave a tremendous, convincing account of what Paul was up to in that letter, to unanimous enthusiasm.
The Ekklesia Project annually refreshes my affection for the church; the admirable people who navigate from intentional communities, from ordinary churches, from faculty offices, from independent churches, to this family reunion charm and awe me every year.
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July 17, 2007
From the 19th Century
A hat tip (with gratitude for the generous compliment) to Jason for the link to Andy, and to return their favor a reminder from Newman:
It is in point to notice also the structure and style of Scripture, a structure so unsystematic and various, and a style so figurative and indirect, that no one would presume at first sight to say what is in it and what is not. It cannot, as it were, be mapped, or its contents catalogued; but after all our diligence, to the end of our lives and to the end of the Church, it must be an unexplored and unsubdued land, with heights and valleys, forests and streams, on the right and left of our path and close about us, full of concealed wonders and choice treasures.
John Henry Cardinal Newman, in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, chapter 2, §1.14 (page 71 of the Longmans, Green edition of 1909).
Now, appreciative as I am of Andy’s passion and Jason’s approval, I would propose that studying the Bible constitutes one of the very healthy ways of learning how better to inhabit it. To hark back to my comparison to the practice of medicine, I would not want a doctor who knew only the correct conclusions and treatments about which she had read in books, especially when those books are gestures in the literature of controversy; “why I’m right and she’s wrong” doesn’t bring out the best, most responsible thought from any of us. But a humbled Bible study — aware that (as Andy says) the point of the Bible is not to enable us to defeat our doctrinal adversaries, but to build up faith — stands richly to strengthen devotion and discipleship.
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July 16, 2007
Another Year
For the next few days, we'll be at the Ekklesia Project Gathering; I'll try to take notes, though I'm terrible at that.
Pippa is off with her aunts, at a theater camp during the day, tending chickens in her off hours.
Si is working and spending free hours with Laura.
We’ll be in touch.
This year, in one of my New Testament lectures I referred to having learned “The Happy Wanderer” in elementary school — an experience that certain students of my generation seconded — and when I sang it for the class, our younger colleagues were dumbstruck that anyone ever thought it was a plausible idea to make that song part of a curriculum.
Evidently JP and I have something in common.
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Faceoff
Lately Dave, David, Doc, and Maggi (and I’m sure, many others) have all lamented some of the oddities of Facebook (and danah has posted a trenchant class-structure analysis). In the age of folksonomies, why can't Facebook offer a starting set of obvious relationships, and allow users to create their own tags for others? I'm still stumped that I can’t have "married" be my relationship with Margaret, and my students and I have to go through contortions to indicate that I was their seminary teacher; if you turned the power of tagging loose on Facebook relationships, you could clean this up in a flash.
Nate showed me how to be married to Margaret in Facebook — not in the “how do you know her” dialogue, but in the “married” status entry. But since Margaret didn’t have a Facebook entry when I made my page, that wasn’t in any way obvious; once she made a page, I added her as a “friend” (I hope I’m not overstating things in that regard), but I couldn’t identify her as my spouse in that process.
Posted by AKMA at 08:39 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 15, 2007
More What If. . . ?
I realize there’s a spirit of non-competitiveness afoot in the churches, and I understand the commendable side to that — but what if we took knowing something about our faith seriously enough to conduct something such as Quiz Bowls on topics of pertinence to theological education?
What if theological institutions felt at least a superficial obligation to demonstrate their capacity to stir up theological literacy adequate for participating in such an endeavor? But I suppose the answer is that the present climate of non-compeitition has fostered a nigh-ideal state in which all share equally in the spiritual gift of understanding.
Dylan rebutted:
There's a spirit of non-competitiveness afoot in the churches? You've got to be kidding. Haven't you heard priests at diocesan conventions comparing ASA figures? And I'm sure you've noticed all the complaints about how seminary education doesn't prepare priests "for the real world," and the move to add requirements in fields such as "leadership training" to the canons.
There is indeed a notion floating about that because understanding biblical texts is important and different people have different kinds of levels of training and different kinds and degrees of intellectual capacity and interest, therefore understanding biblical texts does not really require training or intellectual enterprise. However, I suspect a dynamic more active in the lack of emphasis we see on hard work and training in scriptural interpretation is not so much the product of an idea that spiritual gifts are distributed to all equally as it is of the quintessentially American idea that success is both equivalent to profitability and the ultimate measure of God's blessing. A pastor who can "grow the congregation" numerically and financially or at least do better than her or his peers' congregations in those two measures clearly knows everything s/he needs to know, or that is desirable for a pastor to know.
Blessings,
Dylan
[Well, I’ve certainly encountered a lot of non-competitiveness in certain regards. Clergy don’t usually talk to me about congregation size, but they do talk about the relative lackof necessity that they or seminarians attain more than just rudimentary theological. historical, or scriptural knowledge. Much more important, they assert, are small office management and leadership and accounting.
I firmly acknowledge that these represent valuable capacities, and would be happy for all our clergy to develop expertise at them. I don’t see these as taking precedence over knowing what they’re doing and saying theologically, any more than it’s acceptable for a physician to substitute office management skills for anatomy, or to cultivate a thriving practice by applying maleficent but popular treatments.
I don’t think we disagree, and I concede that I may hear more about “not competing,” and observe less competitive number-touting, in my seminary environment than I might if I were based primarily in a parish.]
Posted by AKMA at 07:34 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 14, 2007
Empirical Test
Stephen Downes asks the right question: Would Canadians swap their health-care system for ours? No. And I’ll tell you what — that’s not because single-payer advocates are pouring millions of dollars into pressure advertising.
Jenny was blogging the 2007 Games, Society, and Learning Conference (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8). I envy her and everyone else who has a rationale for being there; that’s an area into which I’d love to extend my involvement. These papers look terrific —the ones I agree with, I’d want to follow up on, and the ones I disagree with, I’d want to learn from the speaker about the grounds for disagreement.
Raph Levien has reached a stable point in the development of Museum, the Bruce Rogers typeface Centaur, and has released it under the SIL Open Font license, for which many users will thank him. In a more nearly perfect world, the faces would have complete alphabets.
Posted by AKMA at 10:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 13, 2007
Sesame Fright
I don’t recall any of our kids being frightened by Sesame Street, but Nate was absolutely petrified by Reader Rabbit.
Posted by AKMA at 05:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Ten Thumbs Up
The five of us (Margaret, Pippa, Si, Laura and I) went to see Harry Potter on opening night (not at 12:01 “opening morning” — we can’t stay awake that late). We had heard the polarized reviews that described Order of the Phoenix as the best of the series, or as a sign of the series’ exhaustion. I was uneasy; the book had struck me as largely stage-setting for the big climax in Half-Blood Prince and Deadly Hallows; the plot hadn’t left much of an impression on me when I read it. That suggested that the movie might be flat, since several of the directors have relied on a break-neck rush from one event to another to their dramatic conclusions; without a propulsive plot, though, we might encounter characters who stand around being puzzled or over-emoting (I’m looking at you, Ron). Add the fact that Margaret hadn’t read the book, and so couldn’t count on background knowledge to fill in the gaps left by the transition from mammoth book to two-hour movie, and the possible booby-traps gave cause to take the nay-sayers seriously.
On the contrary — all five of us were delighted with this entry. The director steers away from the somewhat murky plot, emphasizing instead the character development and thematic points. The adolescents spend very little time pouting and fuming (thank you, thank you, please remember how much this strengthened the movie when you direct the next one!). Harry and Hermione have grown into exceptionally good-looking young actors, and Phoenix gives them room to work. Even Harry’s sense of isolation — which in some of the movies would have occasioned frequent tantrums — is here subordinated to the struggle between Voldemort and Harry, between suspicious self-centered isolation and trusting, loving mutuality. Dumblebore’s decisions show frustrating lack of insight into Harry’s needs as a teenager (especially as an extraordinary teen), and educational policies of the Ministry of Magic (under both Dumbledore and Umbridge; you can’t dump the blame on her) seem bizarrely dangerous. Still, those perplexities don’t overshadow the satisfaction of seeing the films hero-children emerge as effectual agents with initiative. And the paring-away of Quidditch, Hogsmeade, and so on all served the laudable purpose of keeping attention on the protagonists’ progress toward maturity and reliance on one another.
Margaret thought the battle sequence at the end was too confusing and cluttered. I suppose so, though it caught me up into an uncertainty that intensified the excitement of the special effects.
I give Order of the Phoenix high marks. It’s not Citizen Kane, but it ranks with Prisoner of Azkaban as my favorites in the series so far. Not surprisingly, my main suggestion would be— more Lupin! I hope Rowling draws on his character more generously for the final volume, especially as Sirius Black and Dumbledore are now offstage.
We’re arranging to buy Deathly Hallows from a local bookseller, without the loss-leader discounting that the megachains will offer. I’ll have to wait my turn to read it, but I’ll be exceptionally eager to see what Rowling has up her sleeve. Well done, all around!
Johanna said:
I totally agree! I saw the movie yesterday and loved it for the very reasons you state so well!
Johanna
Posted by AKMA at 12:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
July 12, 2007
Unwarranted Pride
I had nothing to do with it, so there’s no basis for me to bask in their glory, but I nonetheless take pride in my alma mater Bowdoin College’s triumph in the international 4-legged soccer tournament Robocup. (Back when I went to Bowdoin, I hacked the campus mainframe version of STRTRK, first to replace the various galactic locations in the array with place names from campus, then to eliminate the annoying flaw in the game architecture that squandered energy by firing phasers at Klingons that were hiding behind planets. In those days, hacking was made simpler by the fact that security consisted to a large extent to “no one knows how to do that,” “nobody would try that,” or “no one knows where we put it.”)
Posted by AKMA at 10:43 AM | Comments (0)
Best Typefaces of 2006
The online type-design community that gathers around Typophile and Typographi.ca just announced their favorite fonts of last year (yes, it’s July, there were technical complications). Of the faces they cite, my favorite has to be Fabiol; I’m a sucker for Venetian Renaissance type. (Plus, anything from the Font Bureau. I want the job of composing their type specimen copy.)
One might think that after five hundred years of typography and more than a decade of the democratization of digital typeface design, that relatively little room remains for creativity in legibly, gracefully representing the Latin alphabet. These designers demonstrate how false that inference would be.
Chris said:
I wanted to comment on your most recent fonts post that while many of the fonts are very nice, many of them are also deficient in their range of diacritical marks. Some of them would make beautiful, quasi-distinctive body text for my syllabi or Keynote presentations or handouts, but they don't support a wide enough range of diacriticals for me to accurately transliterate Hebrew or other Semitic languages. :-(
Chris
Posted by AKMA at 09:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Star Star
I can’t wait to hear what Bruce Schneier has to say about the FBI’s new “system to assess risk.” (A German report here, which quotes Schneier as saying something like, “These programs are based on the dangerous myth that terrorists fit a particular profile, and we c