« July 2007 | Main | September 2007 »
August 31, 2007
How Did That Happen?
I seem to have changed some setting on my MacBook such that when I try to add anything to the Applications folder at the all-user level, I have to authenticate my account (even though the user account has admin privileges). This could have resulted from one of the system updates over the past few weeks, I’m not sure; does anyone else have an idea of what happened?
[Later: I had checked permissions on the Applications folder before, but I think I had checked only the Applications folder in my user directory, not the Applications folder at the system level. When I went back to check it, to avoid being made to feel stupid when someone suggested that, it was locked — so I unlocked it, which I think may solve the problem.]
[Even later: And the winner is — Kevin! He writes,
AKMA,I had this problem after the 10.4.10 update.
I fixed it by booting off the install DVD and running repair permissions on the boot volume.
-pkj
Will do, Kevin; thanks for the tip and especially for the etiology.
Posted by AKMA at 06:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 30, 2007
Not "Ago" If You Live There
It’s been two years since Shelley started tugging at our lapels, urging us to tune in to the fact that the storm headed for New Orleans was big, potentially catastrophic, and I worried and prayed about my former students in New Orleans and environs. At the time, it didn’t fully occur to me how close Long Beach was to New Orleans (sounds like it’s way off in Florida or California, right?).
Yesterday, it all hit David Knight, hard. He’s a tough guy — he had weathered a lot before he came to seminary, and heaven knows he’s been through a lot since — but Katrina didn’t stop affecting people when the eye of the hurricane broke up. It’s not “two years ago” if you’re still living in the middle of it.
Posted by AKMA at 06:54 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 29, 2007
Mmmm, Tasty!
Provoked by my recent acquisition of Magritte: The True Art of Painting, I wandered over to Firestone Library yesterday, picked up my library card, and walked out with two helpful volumes of Magritte-pertinent material, including a bound facsimile of the issue of La Révolution Surréaliste in which his essay “Les Mots et Les Images” appeared. On my way, I spotted a license plate that made me think of my hoopoe-loving friend, Richard Kieckhefer:
(The Latin name for the common hoopoe is Upupa epops.)
I scanned the illustration from “Mots et Images” and will be substituting them for the scans I had uploaded in the series of posts I wrote on the essay at Beautiful Theology.
The scans were much cleaner and clearer, and the sense of possibility — “You can do that, just walk in and learn!” — wonderfully encouraging.
Plus, Si arrived, I ran into Francis Watson (we’re having coffee this morning), Pippa made a spectacular Rice Noodles with Peanut Sauce for dinner, and we had a pleasant walk through town. Mmmmmmm.
Posted by AKMA at 08:12 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 28, 2007
Teased
After reading several columns worth of advice about making presentations (and recalling what I learned from Edward Tufte and Doc Searls), I spent a while yesterday afternoon pining for a reason to make one myself. I don’t think my editors will accept a slide presentation for a book review or a textbook chapter, though, so that will have to wait.
In ruminating about the topic, though, it occurred to me that for all the noisy denunciations of “lecturing” and the inefficiency of that pedagogical mode, my students seem to have learned a fair amount (more than I wish they had!) from television — another one-way, monological mode of communication. Are we studying the malign outcomes of “lecturing” in general, or about lecturing that doesn’t attain the level of effectiveness that characterizes My Little Pony or American Idol?
Posted by AKMA at 07:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Metaphor Man
How is AKMA like Brent Sienna? Well, apart from their both being Mac users, computer gamers, and caffeine addicts? (Oh, OK, throw in the “pretentious” from the PvP website.)
This morning’s answer is, “They both get caught up in inauspicious metaphors. . . .”
Posted by AKMA at 06:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 26, 2007
Taglog
Not the Pacific island language, but what’s happening to my browser and newsreader. For instance, I’ve had this link to a discussion about the future of textbooks in my reader, planning to enter the discussion. I don’t have anything particular to add to it, though; I think Stephen Downes is on the right track, and I’m increasingly skeptical about the pedagogical value of things that channel learning into orderly packages. I need to check out these two OS applications for encouraging and sharing development of learning resources.
When I finish the book review on which I’m working, I have to write a chapter about “technology and religion,” to which the WSJ’s article about the Second-Life [alleged] bigamist pertains. Likewise the more serious essay by Ray Tallis that argues in favor of understanding technology as part of a continuous process of altering our selves and our environments, with a long history (that has seen humanity modulate away from grim scarcity and brutal aggression) and a future that we should confront critically and temperately, but not fearfully and reactively.
In the church world, a letter from the Archbishop of Nigeria has been found to have been edited on the computer of one of his U.S. subordinates, with predictably shabby polemics to and fro about what that proves or doesn’t prove. Comparatively little of the rhetoric seems to focus on the actual text of the letter and the changes thereunto. I have in the past been impressed by the pitch of Archbishop Akinola’s oratory, and I don’t doubt his capacity to speak for himself; and I don’t think it’s entirely reasonable to suppose (absent evidence) that every change introduced into the communique under Bp. Minns’s must have come directly from Archbishop Akinola. That doesn’t mean conspiracy or racism or plagiarism or ventriloquism, nor would I rule out the possibility that Archbishop Akinola borrowed Bp. Minns’s laptop and edited the whole letter in solitude. The evidence supports the appearance that Bp. Minns was involved in the editing, is all. And so until someone advances evidence that one change or another, or none or all, come from some particular author/editor, I’d construe the specific changes as evidence of a shared outlook of the two clergy leaders, whom we’ve long had reason to perceive as like-minded colleagues. No shocker there, no conspiracy there, no speculative explanations about what must have happened or what it finally shows.
Thomas’s heart has been broken, from the shards and shreds of which he’s made a Broken Heart Manifesto, and invited others to join and comment.
I think there are other topics I meant to include, but if so, they’ve already slipped off the back of the shelf.
Posted by AKMA at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)
August 25, 2007
Hackers > Lock-ers
Cory Doctorow repeatedly asserts as a matter of fact that it’s easier to break digital control mechanisms than it is to devise them — so that the value of a company’s investment in researching and implementing a digital control regime falls to zero as soon as an inquisitive hacker (or community thereof) puts some brain-hours into cracking the controls. I don’t know enough about the topic to assert that he’s right, but I know enough (from a murky past in programming and a clearer present involvement in tech conversations) to say that the claim sounds valid to me.
Case in point: yesterday, two distinct groups announced that they’d cracked the iPhone’s lock-in to the AT&T cell network. OK, I’ll grant that Apple presumably gained a significant commercial advantage by being able to tell AT&T that the iPhones would run only on their network; still the amount of intellectual labor that went into first constructing, then cracking the lock seems lamentable.
Posted by AKMA at 08:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 24, 2007
Had To Happen
As we were packing up our belongings and stuffing them into the basement, we tried to make sure that everything was either on a shelf or resting on a plastic container. We had had floods before, and we didn’t want to lose all our packed goods in another. Toward the end, I got a little careless; after all, we hadn’t had any troubles for years, and the sump pump was working fine.
Pride goeth. . . .
Evidently, last night Evanston experienced a downpour that soaked the soil and knocked out the electricity. In other words, the sump pump is off and there’s (according to Si, our delegate on the scene) a couple of inches of water in the basement.
Oh, well. We’ll see what happens when the power comes back on. In the meantime, we’re mostly glad that we pulled the futon out of the basement before we left.
Posted by AKMA at 12:00 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 22, 2007
Generic Spam
I haven’t done much work with mailmerged documents recently, but I think I recall that back in olden times curly-brackets were used to indicate the variable that would be replaced with database information in the merged document. That’s the only sense I can make of this email message, anyway:
Hello,
I am sera muse am interested in renting your room, i am female 24 years old from united arab emirate dubai, i am coming to study my masters in { MainCampus in area university } So i need an apartment to stay so i will like you to tell me more about the room and you can try as much to send me the pictures of the room,i do not smoke,no pets and i am not dirty and friendly as well.Do get back to me with the price of the room per month and the term of lease,hope to read from you soon warmest regards
sera
Sera, if you really meant to send this to me, let me explain that Area University is a highly selective institution to which not every student is admitted — you’d better work on your punctuation skills before applying. And rents near Main Campus are pretty steep. That being said, we may have a room to rent you next year, if you really think you can walk to Main Campus of Area University from where we live.
(And now I’m thinking of a line of hoodies and t-shirts that say “Area University” in blocky letters, to go with the Onion’s line of Area Man merchandise.)
Posted by AKMA at 10:49 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 21, 2007
Brilliant Utility
The possible uses for PagePacker would keep me busy for ages. I’ve already set up a day-planner example (with larger type and lines, to accommodate my advanced age) and a booklet of prayers that I want to keep conveniently at hand. I can imagine using it for class hand-outs. And so on.
I wish I felt venturesome enough to try working directly from Multivalent with the directions that Mac OS X Hints gives, but PagePacker looks quite sufficient for me.
Posted by AKMA at 06:31 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Preacher Relocation Program
The Happy Tutor has mistakenly associated me with the Bush regime’s secret plan to suborn preachers. (Thank you for giving me a reason to use the verb “suborn” — I’m hoping to work in “traduce” later for a double play.) Fortunately for me, I escaped Evanston before the armed escort arrived to “protect” me on my way to the Clergy Response Team training session.
Instead, I’m undercover in Princeton, posing as a scholar. Believe me, the DHS would never think to associate preachers with scholars, so I feel pretty safe.
Posted by AKMA at 05:59 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 20, 2007
Birds of America
The Center affords (and see Jeff also, something was in the air last week) many glorious benefits to its members; after the obvious, I would number several subtler atmospheric advantages such as the Center’s practice of hanging numerous aquatints from Audubon’s Birds of America throughout the building. Between the stairway and my study hangs the Little Screech-Owl (a comforting sight for the member of a family for whom the owl is a totemic bird) and the Red Phalarope; these friendly neighbors attenuate the anxiety that might ensue from the image hanging in my study —the Passenger Pigeon.
Posted by AKMA at 09:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Superiority of Print Journalism
Really needs no further comment.
Posted by AKMA at 06:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 19, 2007
Debra Dean Murphy on Boring Liturgy
À propos for this morning — and I haven’t been to church yet, so I’m not pointing fingers — Debra Dean Murphy explains why liturgy should be boring.
Posted by AKMA at 08:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
LOST Race
Margaret has compelled me to catch up on The Office and LOST this summer (thanks to DVDs and iTunes), both of which I’ve enjoyed a great deal — but (semi-spoiler alert) I’m struck, and disappointed, by the mortality/disappearance rate of black characters in LOST. (We’re part-way into Season Three, so readers who know the series can judge to what we’re referring.) The first season gave writers a lot to work with, and a richly integrated cast; at this point, the color spectrum has shifted vigorously away from the darkest skin tones.
Which reminds me that someone suggested that my owning a television is like Les Carpenter owning a biretta — a waste of a glorious resource upon someone who doesn’t adequately appreciate it. And to make it worse, the Center’s townhouses come equipped with cable subscriptions. After the novelty of flicking through a hundred or so channels (it looked as though there were five or six “Christian” channels, to my surprise), we haven’t turned it back on.
Back to LOST for a second — I was intrigued to read Edward Cook’s entry about watching LOST with Hebrew subtitles; evidently the subtitling industry regards Hurley’s “Dude!” as equivalent to Hebrew ben-adam (literally “son of humanity,” “son of a human,” or traditionally “Son of Man”). The soteriological implications of a “Dude” theology, especially when we make the connection to The Dude of The Big Lebowsky (finally making sense of that bowling-with-angels sequence, and enhancing the Old-and-New Judaeo-Christian partnership of Walt and the Dude), set the imagination reeling.
Posted by AKMA at 08:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 17, 2007
Hobbyhorses Sighted In Public
Two prominent publications have just examined pet topics of mine in long, interesting articles. The New York Times Magazine actually covers a pair of my interests, typography and sign design. And the New Yorker offers a critical appreciation of Philip K. Dick. I was an admirer — with reservations — of PKD from the seventies, and at one point had collected most of his published books (something of an accomplishment in the pre-Amazon, pre-proliferation of PKD reprints era), but sold off the collection to Books Do Furnish A Room when we moved away from Durham.
Posted by AKMA at 09:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
CoverFlow Re-Envisioned
The Unoffical Apple Weblog proposes that Apple apply the CoverFlow approach to file organization from iTunes to iPhoto. Is’pose, maybe — but what about representing pools of data in ways even more intuitively familiar?
For instance, back when I looked among my record albums, they never danced and slid the way album covers do in CoverFlow; but I’d be excited to flip through an album selection the way I used to flip through the boxes of albums that lined my walls in college. The Leopard Desktop will feature “stacks,” which pretty accurately replicate the way I organize my desktop. But what about assigning files “spines,” which could be either auto-generated or user-edited, so that we could have bookshelf-like arrangement? A combination of visual (color) and verbal cues, together with persistent location, could make a very space-efficient file storage mechanism, with a model that anyone who’s ever used a bookshelf would recognize.
Let’s have a cup of coffee, Steve.
Posted by AKMA at 09:04 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 16, 2007
Mmmmmmm, Tasty
I’ve already procrastinated too much this week (I have lots of self-indulgence points stored up for when I wrap up this $%#$%$ lectionary series), but I hadn’t known about sIFR. You can imagine that a typography nut such as I will want to incorporate this development when he finally gets around to upgrading his Moveable Type installation and redesigning his blog.
Ever since David pointed to Cat and Girl, I’ve added that webcomic to my daily reading material (Doonesbury, Calvin reruns, PvP, and Dilbert — no more Boondocks, sadly). Today’s strip shows one good reason.
According to Geoff Pullum,
Producing language that other people will be able to understand involves not just having a picture in your mind of the scenario and designing a nice-looking (and policy-compliant) dialog box that you feel represents your view of it. You have to deploy a shared linguistic system, according to established rules, using lexemes of known meaning, to present that picture to others in a way that will work for them. You have to consider whether there are other ways of viewing the situation at hand. You have to examine the wording you have chosen to see if it has ambiguities or unclarities.
Amen.
Except that instead of calling it “the dance of the elephants,” Mark Liberman should have called this explanation of the on-the-ground reasoning in favor of Open Access publishing “the dance of the dodos.” The present model for academic publishing will be extinct in a relatively short while; the relevant question is not whether this will be so, but how closely the next generation resembles the present model. If publishers were to act rapidly, with foresight, they might be able to spin developments toward a simple evolutionary change; but if they insist that publishing dodos have an intrinsic right to their ecological niche regardless of the introduction of technological pigs and macaques to their ecosystem, then the pigs and macaques will prevail.
Posted by AKMA at 09:14 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 15, 2007
Facebook and Twitter
Isn’t there a way that the “updates” for Facebook and Twitter — which are usually essentially interchangeable — can read one another, so that you don’t have to edit each one if all you want to write is, “having granola for breakfast”?
Oops, I see that this is essentially what Dave is getting at, too. I didn’t look at his paper, honest; he’s on a whole different coast from me.
Posted by AKMA at 07:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 14, 2007
Arrival
The 25 boxes of clothing, art supplies, and books that Frank kindly shipped to us from Evanston have arrived. Unpacking will ensue.
Posted by AKMA at 12:09 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The Skeptical Chiast
The lectionary essays I'm working on involve texts that some scholars identify as chiasmic, composed in an “A - B - B - A” (those are letters, not “Abba”) pattern of inverted parallelism. I’m intrigued by these claims, some of which come from scholars I know well and greatly respect (“know well and greatly respect” forming a cheap illustration of the phenomenon: verb - adverb -adverb -verb) — but I’m very reluctant to accept the claims they make about chiasm in the New Testament.
Let me stipulate at the outset that I accept the premise that ancient rhetorical culture was more accustomed to recognizing such structural devices than are contemporary readers. We can assert with certainty that the ancients knew of chiasm, because they wrote about it in the rhetorical handbooks. We can find examples of chiasm in non-biblical ancient literature. To all of this, a firm “yes.”
On the other hand, the claims that contemporary scholars make about chiasm often conflict with one another, and despite widespread interest in the phenomenon, no interpretive proposal seems to have convinced a broad constituency of scholarly readers (even within the pool of chiasm-alert scholars). When you combine the uncertainty of the interpretive conclusions with the astonishing claims made on behalf of this device (it sometimes seems like the Philosophers’ Stone of biblical rhetoric, resolving all interpretive conundrums, clarifying textual enimas, whitening teeth and freshening breath), I respond with resolute caution.
So, first, let me suggest that the smaller the scale of the chiastic structure one proposes, the greater the likelihood that one has correctly identified deliberate chiasm. I’’m not suggesting that someone can’t, or oughtn’t, or wouldn’t, compose a large-scale chiasm (say, the Lukan travel narrative, perhaps) — just that the longer the composition, the more difficult it would be for ancients or moderns to sustain chiastic structure, and the less obvious such a structure would be to general audiences. Ancient readers would be better attuned, yes; but they would still be quicker to pick up a short chiasm — look at Isaiah 55:8-9 for an example, where the prophet contrasts human thoughts and ways with God’s ways and thoughts — than a very long chiasm. The probability of recognizing chiasm declines as the chiasm becomes more subtle. If an author smacks you over the head with inverted parallelism by shouting repeated keywords and by making a very pronounced contrast between the elements, we have a very clear example; but the more that the author relies on inference and allusion, the less reason we have to assert with certainty that we’re encountering deliberate authorial chiasm.
Second, I suspect that there was more of what we might infelicitously call “informal chiasm” than biblical scholarship can comfortably deal with. In a rhetorically-sophisticated culture, one wouldn’t need to set up flashing neon keywords to tip off careful readers, nor would one expect that absolutely everyone would recognize absolutely every chiasm. And an ancient storyteller might have in mind a very rough chiastic structure — “I’ll begin in Galilee, muck around a while in various intervening territories, have a central section in Jerusalem, then conclude the narrative in Galilee again” — of the sort that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of minute analytical overkill that funds arguments in biblical interpretation. Many proposed chiasms parse the text at such a level of detail that the nuances actually undermine the force of the argument by revealing just how the critic must strain to account for every conjunction, verb tense, and definite pronoun. That’s a besetting problem of the biblical guild, not an argument against the existence of examples of biblical chiasm; but when an interpreter complies with disciplinary expectations of comprehensive rigor (disproportionate with the likely rigor of the author’s compositional coompulsiveness), the whole endeavor goes off the rails.
So chalk me up as skeptical about proposed examples of large-scale biblical chiasm, until someone shows me an example for which there’s general approbation among critical readers, ideally including some of the ancients, and which displays its evidence with an appropriate tone of indeterminacy and humility. I’m sympathetic to the premise, and confident that there’s probably something there, just cautious about accepting grandiose claims on tenuous grounds.
On a peripheral point, does anyone know where to obtain reasonably-priced beer in Princeton? I made only one stop becase I was in a hurry, but it seemed the sort of place I’d ordinarily expect to find sensible prices. The six-packs I saw, however, were consistently priced a dollar or two more than comparable beers in Evanston. What am I missing?
Jonathan helpfully advised:
Dear Professor Adam,
Long time reader, first time commenter. I noticed on your blog that you were wondering about places to find cheap beer in the Princeton area. Frankly, I would avoid all liquor stores in Princeton Borough at all costs (e.g., Community Liquors, Princeton Liqours, etc.), since their prices are much too high. The one crucial liquor exception is the Princeton Corkscrew wine shop on Hulfish, which is superb. When buying bottled beer, instead I normally head to:
1) Joe Canal's on Route 1 South, in the Hooters, Shop-Rite, Men's Wearhouse shopping center. Their prices are not great, but certainly lower than in Princeton Borough, and their selection of foreign beers and decent domestic ones is ok.
2) Wegman's grocery store near Target on Route 1 South. Again, cheaper than Princeton but less selection than Joe Canal's for about the same price.
I hope this helps get you started.
Sincerely,
Jonathan Soyars
PS: I am a recent PTS MDiv grad and an incoming ThM student in New Testament, also at PTS. I look forward to seeing you around campus and town.
[Thanks a million, Jonathan. I gritted my teeth and bought over-priced beer again yesterday; it was the end of the day, and I wanted to get home promptly to feed the dog, so I stopped at a Borough venue. I picked a six-pack of Tsingtao, which for some reason was less expensive than Sam Adams — almost what one would have paid in Illinois. But I’ll go to Wegman’s soon, and will check out Joe Canal’s too.
And I look forward to meeting you — perhaps a cup of coffee at Mackay someday, or at a downtown establishment?]
I missed Don’s (other link here) comment earlier:
I think it was Danna Fewell who said that any biblical scholar worth her salt could fake a chiasm.
But who am I to complain too much -- I "found" a chiasm in Isa 25 and that gave me a structure for a whole chapter of the dissertation.
Glad you're settling in well in Princeton -- but I only know where to get good beer in Richmond.
Don
Posted by AKMA at 11:29 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 13, 2007
ADVENTURE In History
It’s long, sometimes repetitive, and utterly fascinating to someone (like me) who spent hours and hours playing ADVENTURE on campus terminals in the seventies. Dennis G. Jerz analyzes the legends, the effects, the actual physical location, and the source code of Willie Crowder’s and Don Woods’s invention of the genre of interactive fiction. I couldn’t stop reading it.
My favorite moment in the article comes on p. 172, when Jerz reveals that Don Woods contacted Willie Crowther “by sending an e-mail to ‘crowther’ at every domain name in existence at the time.” Yes, “at every domain name in existence.” Those were the days.
Posted by AKMA at 02:39 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Hysteria Alert!
I missed this when Undercover Black Man first posted it, but evidently the U.S. once suffered the predations of sporadic attacks from Giant Negroes. The New York Times tells me so. UBM followed up with a series of Giant Negro posts to furnish the dreams of hysterical white folks.
Posted by AKMA at 09:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 11, 2007
User-Motivated Learning = "Curiosity"
Jim McGee’s blog bears the epigraph, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity” (Dorothy Parker). Yesterday he connected the dots of marketing, blogging, and curiosity; today I’m connecting those dots to (home-school style) learning.
Margaret said:
Hold on! A word from Thomas seems necessary here (as always!): remember that curiosity can be a sin. Note the Summa II, II, 167. Curiosity for its own sake, knowledge for its own sake, or knowledge for our own creaturely sake--all these are highly problematic. Rather, seek the knowledge of truth, always keeping in mind that truth is of God and we can only access that knowledge of truth appropriate to creatures of God.
Of course, this gets us to that part of homeschooling that's generally hardest for us to talk about in the general public. Since a particular brand of Christian identity, worship, imagination, and pedagogy has so far received the greatest publicity, it's challenging to explain how our homeschooling is determined by our faith if we don't do it "that" way. And, since we spend most of our time in (and of) a social class that defines itself in part by its disdain of "that" sort of people, most folks assume that our approach to education must be safely knowledge-based, rather than faith-based. Bracketing for the moment the category of "Christian homeschooling," I would argue that most secular schooling dampens the curiosity of some and encourages curiosity for its own sake — and therefore hubris — in some others, rejecting in both cases human knowledge as a gift of God and as a means of (partial) participation in God. I like to think that in our efforts to homeschool, we have signified, formed, and witnessed with words and practice, so that all of our learning, all of our living, aims to be Soli Dei Gloria.
mba
Posted by AKMA at 06:44 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 10, 2007
For Glinda
In honor of Pippa’s recent triumphant appearance on the Theater Project stage, I point to Bibliodyssey’s Wizard of Oz first-edition illustrations page (via Boing Boing).
Posted by AKMA at 01:20 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
In On the Act
I’ve linked to Fred Clark’s scathing analysis of what he plausibly identifies as “The Worst Books Ever Written” before (digressive additional link (stop smirking, students of mine): Fred’s post yesterday on despair and suicide. I’d want to argue with him on several points, but only in the friendly, appreciative “Don’t you want to say. . .” way); now, it seems, Cross Currents editor Charles Henderson joins the chorus.
I wish I had room in my teaching schedule to lead a group through the Book of Revelation. As I read responses to Left Behind, I can’t help thinking that the most effective counterargument to LaHaye and Jenkins’ weirdly anti-literal interpretation would simply involve reading the texts carefully. As Fred’s most recent post shows in painful detail, there’s nothing “obvious” or “literal” about the prophetic fulfillments that LaHaye et al. purport to discover. But if you’ve been reading Revelation attentively all along, it’s hard to imagine that you find any of L&J’s snake oil convincing anyway.
Posted by AKMA at 07:17 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 09, 2007
Favorite Polemics
I’ve loved reading Terry Eagleton since I first encountered his book on Literary Theory; I don’t agree with him all the time, but he writes brilliantly, and even when I’m dissenting from his arguments I relish his prose.
So I wish I’d had a squint at his response to Richard Dawkins before I went on Open Source Radio to talk about Christopher Hitchens (and I wish I had a link to an Eagletonian response to Hitchens). Eagleton’s characterizations of Judaism show him to have blind spots almost as great as those he attributes to Dawkins, but in the cage match between the two, it looks to me as though Eagleton scores a solid take-down.
Debra noted:
Eugene McCarraher's piece on Hitchens in Commonweal is also worth a squint.
[Thanks, Debra; that was satisfying. But now I have a dilemma, because up to today I had never envisioned Debra among my readers; for some reason, I have the feeling that I ought to write more serious, profound things if she is going to take time to read my blog. Not that I don’t think that the readers of whom I’m already aware are serious and profound. Oh dear, it’s only getting worse.
I’ll stick with “Thanks for the link, Debra!”]
Posted by AKMA at 08:08 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
More Learning
A handful of provocations — Biella’s note about F/OSS projects as educational institutions, Scott McLemee’s column on the Open Library, continual reading at Stephen Downes’s place, and as something of a counterexample, IHE’s article about summer online courses at American University — amplify my confidence that competence-based evaluation in an open (non-“course”-based, non-credit-based) system best fits the circumstances of online learning (especially for institutions with straitened resources).
Posted by AKMA at 07:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 08, 2007
Lame Game v. AKMA
From CatandGirl:
Witness Protection Program Name = “Andrew Camera”
Punk Rock Name = “Andrew Lecturing” (?) (or “Intertwingling”?)
Prime Minister of India Name = “Andrew Gandhi” (Like Cat, I prefer the slant-rhyming “Nehru”)
Singer-Songwriter Name = “Mehershalalhashbaz Boston”
Science Fiction Name = “B. V. D. L. L. Bean”
Trust Fund Name = “Margaret Lloyd-Appleton” (sadly, no Roman numerals) (I wish Shirley Chisholm had been a senator, and Paul Wellstone would have been more gender-appropriate)
But everyone calls me “AKMA.” (But “Basil” would be my favorite seasoning, and would call to mind the hero of Fawlty Towers.)
Posted by AKMA at 08:09 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Eerie Pennsylvania
Boing Boing pointed to a NASA article about the coming lunar eclipse, which will transform the moon to a deep reddish color. I wonder whether there’s any way of checking to see whether there was such an eclipse thirty or so years back; I remember driving eastward along the Pennsylvania Turnpike one night, when I emerged from one of the famous Turnpike Tunnels (perhaps the Allegheny Mountain Tunnel?), and as the horizon opened before me I saw a deep red full moon. It spooked me; surely a blood red moon made an ominous harbinger for a long solo drive — but the drive was otherwise uneventful. Just unnerving.
Posted by AKMA at 07:22 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 07, 2007
New Beginning
Today I just puttered around my office-study, got my library cards at the seminary library and the public library, picked up a cheap printer, and bumped into four people I know from when we lived here before (and three other members of the Center). I spotted a few people I suspect I recall from the past, but of whom I’m not sure enough to have introduced myself.
Let me say this: I love Princeton. I walked across the seminary campus today for the first time since we left, and I was swept away by memories of those years. And I haven’t even stepped into Trinity Church.
I did some good work here; every footstep reminds me of that. I know the tiny township, and by some peculiar logic it fits me — the improbable outfit that’s snug in the right places, slack in the right places, in a color you’d ordinarily never wear, but it fits just right and you wear it anyway. This should be a wonderful year.
Carol wrote:
AKMA,
May your entire year be blessed with a generous measure of the joy, energy, confidence, and contentment of this moment.
Carol
Posted by AKMA at 06:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 06, 2007
Phase Six: Mission Accomplished
Bea and I are home, safe in Princeton.
Posted by AKMA at 04:44 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Phase Six
Express trip from Maine to Princeton with Beatrice. Looks like good weather, anyway.
Posted by AKMA at 06:21 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 05, 2007
Today and Tomorrow
Today, family day with Jeanne and Gail and Margaret’s mother and father, and we picked Pippa up; tomorrow, Pip and Margaret go to Nantucket to visit my mom, and Bea and I make our way back to Princeton, where I’ll finally put down some temporary roots.
Posted by AKMA at 07:27 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 04, 2007
Yes, Paul
As one who has just done significant decluttering, with more crying out on the horizon when we move back to Evanston, I hail Paul Graham’s essay on stuff.
Posted by AKMA at 12:49 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Phase Five, Part Two
Last night’s performance at the Teen Theater Camp of the Theater Project in Brunswick, Maine — properly entitled Oz: Revisiting the Wizard — went very smoothly, and Pippa shone in her various roles as the Good Witch of the North,
a
the Wizard’s Guard,
Glinda the Good Witch,
and Auntie Em.
This afternoon Pippa plays the ensemble roles; I probably won’t take many more pictures (at either of the two shows we’ll see today). She was terrific, and added a great deal of vigor, character, and audibility to the production.
Posted by AKMA at 09:33 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 03, 2007
Phase Five, Part One
Pretty easy drive to Maine. Tonight we’ll see Pippa appear in the The Wizard of Oz (she’l be in three presentations, of which we’ll see at least two).
Posted by AKMA at 03:14 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 02, 2007
Phase Four: Concluded
Arrived in Framingham. The backlog before the George Washington Bridge and the bridge itself were hellish, but the rest of the drive went fine. Tomorrow, in Maine!
Posted by AKMA at 04:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Phase Four: Incipit
Road to Framingham this morning. It’s hard to pull away just as we were getting familiar with the building and reacquainting ourselves with Princeton, but I’ll be back Monday.
Posted by AKMA at 06:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
August 01, 2007
We The People
I try to keep my mouth shut about the U.S. government, but every now and then something irks me to the point that I’m moved to comment. For instance:
White House spokesman Tony Fratto replied, “Every day this Congress gets a little more out of control. . . .”
It has been a long time since my elementary school civics classes (and even then I was a rabble-rousing lefty), but I think I remember Mrs. Jameson and Mr. Recht teaching me that the key difference between the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union lay in the fact that the Communist Party controlled the Soviet government, whereas in the U.S.A. the three branches of government function to limit one another’s powers. Congress being “out of control” is a good thing for U.S. democracy — I would have thought.
Posted by AKMA at 07:40 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Intermezzo In Princeton
Via Stephen Downes, I saw Wesley Fryer’s article on “natural learning,” the kind of learning we try to foster in our practice of homeschooling (and the kind I have in view when I pine for a way to homeschool seminarians). I don’t have much to add except that a large part of the deliberation and reflection that don’t go into my book project this year will go into seeking ways to promote natural, rather than merely “technical,” learning about the New Testament.
Posted by AKMA at 07:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack