Dan Ariely (of Predictably Irrational, inter alia) gives an assessment of his involvement with online education via MOOCs, from a PBS NewsHour segment. His experience tends to confirm my perspective about the role and future of MOOCs, so I was chuffed to hear from his quarter. Something he didn’t mention — that I brought up in a conversation with Kevin Werbach*? the other day — is that the very idea of a ‘course’ (defined in the terms necessitated by quantised, bureaucratic models) is itself alien to the online learning environment, which is more conducive to learner-led, associative, indefinite-duration endeavours.

I’ll bet that Ariely’s course is great, just as I would bet that Kevin’s online course is great. The cost of mounting such a course (especially one well-enough executed to compare with these) is, of course, non-trivial, and there are arguments and experiments to be made about the relative worth of a pound spent on a MOOC and a pound spent on making the most of an in-person educational venture — but online education isn’t going to vanish even if it’s prohibitively costly for many providers, so it may as well be done brilliantly by outstanding practitioners with deep-pocket support.

Last night, though, Tripp tagged me to comment on a HuffPo post by a former student of mine, Wayne Meisel. In response, I noted that Wayne has some good points, and some fairly serious mistakes.

I agree with Wayne that an intentional-community model makes a lot of sense for most seminaries; I used to suggest at Seabury that we should re-imagine the plant on a monastic model, with some residential brethren and some who come for formation, and whom we send out into the world. (I proposed renting a storefront in a particular neighbourhood which would serve as a satellite/lab for learning and serving in the hood.

I think Wayne is dead wrong about a topic on which I’ve been insisting all along: that seminaries should teach something other than theology (and its allied disciplines). I’ll begin listening to that one when someone suggests that a med school teach theology, or that a law school teach pharmacology. The implicit assumption is that theological understanding doesn’t matter that much, or that it comes automatically. “Their courses left something to be desired in terms of leadership training and skill development”? I don’t remember any courses at PTS that advertised themselves as leadership training. PTS is a theological seminary, one of the best in the world at teaching students deeply to understand the Bible and the theological tradition and the best practices in their ministerial vocation. ‘Leadership training’ is not irrelevant to that, but it’s no more central than it is in very many other fields, and is surely less important that, hmmmm, knowing what you’re doing as a Christian minister.

And by the way — where do we see the vast benefits of leadership training courses on Wall Street and in US government? It appears that the US has a shortage of leadership from pillar to post; it’s not really fair to assail seminaries for the problem (and simply identifying one’s favourite leadership guru doesn’t solve anything; Peter Drucker can only teach in one place at a time).

Luther Seminary didn’t falter because it should have been teaching leadership training; it faltered because it overspent on buildings and managed money based on the expectation that a boom would continue (as has been the case with other financially-troubled seminaries). But Wayne doesn’t say, ‘Avoid imprudent expenditures,’ which would seem to me a much more apposite lesson.

Joint programmes make a lot of sense; a different model for formation and community life gets at a genuine problem; but the heart of the problem that no one talks about is committing to excellence in theological education. Anything else simply papers over a more significant problem: ‘We have these jazzy community houses and leadership training, but if you go to our theological seminary you won’t actually learn much about Jesus and God and worship’.

MOOCs do terrific work of a particular kind; conventional university instruction does terrific work of a particular kind; seminaries can do terrific work of a particular kind (especially if they remember to concentrate on their historic strengths). Foundation executives can do good work of a particular kind, too. I endorse The strengths or failures of specific cases in one or the other don’t imply that others should be more like X or less like Y — if you want to suss out the future of online education, of seminaries, of universities, or whatever, it’s utterly vital that you pay attention to strengths and weaknesses, of capacities and purposes, and work from there. Even my preferred suggestion of an excellence-focused, monastic-model theological seminary has very significant limitations on the scope of its applicability.

‘One size’, as the Waitresses reminded us in the theme to Square Pegs, ‘does not fit all.’

I preached again this Sunday, this time at St Aidan’s in Clarkston, and I utterly omitted mention of it being Mothering Sunday (and almost avoided mention of Refreshment Sunday). This is not out of defiant despite of mothers, or my mother, or Margaret, or anything; I just followed the logic of the sermon as I was writing it out, and ‘mothers’ really didn’t enter the flow of the thing. No worries, though — we had plenty of matricentrism in the liturgy.

The text of the sermon below, and then I’m off to cobble together the slides for tomorrow’s lecture on theological interpretation.

+ In Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

   We have known one another, you and I, for a surprisingly long time. That is to say, three years isn’t a long time by itself, nor is it a particularly surprising interval — but I’m surprised, and you also may be surprised, that this nomadic academic clergyman who first hopped onto the East Kilbride train to help out Fr Nicholas back in the spring of 2010 has now lived in Scotland for nigh onto four years, and is eagerly awaiting permission from the Home Office to attain the status of having ‘Permanent Leave to Assist at St Aidan’s’.

   My itinerant life illustrates the folly of thinking that one has put down permanent roots and made a home in this world. Few people are more inclined to staying put than I, much to Margaret’s frustration! Yet here I am, four years in Scotland after one year in North Carolina, one in Princeton, eight in Chicago, five in Princeton, four in St Petersburg, three in North Carolina, four in New Haven, four in Pittsburgh, five in Maine… the itinerary begins to sound like the wanderings of the wilderness generation, who spent years in Ezion-geber, then on to Kadesh-Barnea, to Mount Hor, to Zalmonah, to Punon, to Oboth, to Iye-abarim, to Dibon-gad, to Almon-diblathaim, to the mountains of Abarim, the plains of Moab….

   Several weeks ago our Old Testament lesson read from Deuteronomy, ‘A wandering Aramean was my father’; this morning’s lesson speaks of an end to this wandering. Israel spent years and years as slaves in Egypt, and then forty more years wandering in the wilderness of Sinai — ‘with no fixed abode’, as the police reports say — and in this morning’s reading, their wandering days are over. Joshua leads them across the Jordan in the way that Moses led them across the Red Sea, and when at length they camp in the milk-and-honey land on Canaan’s side, they observe the Passover. ‘On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.’

   Those verses strike me as bittersweet. Be it granted that Israel had spent a long time wandering; be it granted that they did not always appreciate having the same miraculous food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day; be it granted that they had been promised a land in which they could settle and flourish; granted all these things, still those years in the wilderness were spent under the guidance of God, fed by God. This morning, Israel celebrates its arrival in the land, and the manna ceases. God will never desert his beloved Israel, but now that they eat the crops grown in Canaan, they no longer depend directly on God for their daily nourishment. They’re on their own now.

   And to mark their graduation, their passage, Israel takes boulders from the Jordan and rolls them up to form a circle of standing stones, not altogether unlike the stone circles we see around Scotland (though apparently Israel more practically chose rollable stones rather than the angular stones we see in typical Scottish archaeological sites). The name ‘Gilgal’ comes either, as we heard this morning, from God saying ‘I have rolled away, gallothi, from you the disgrace of Egypt’, or from the circle, the word gilgal itself, of stones that the people made.

   Gilgal, the circle of stones where God rolled away the disgrace of the slavery in Egypt, emblematised their realisation that they had at last, at long last, arrived. But that made for a problem as well; for Israel, as for us, the time when we think we’ve finally reached our goal only begins a new range of struggles. Years of wandering hadn’t ended Israel’s trials — after settling into the land, they would face invasions, civil war, exiles, and the persistent temptations of wealth, power, and privilege. Eventually Gilgal became a sign of apostasy: ‘Every evil of theirs began at Gilgal; there I came to hate them.’

   Gilgal was the end of Israel’s wanderings in the wilderness, but the beginning of Israel’s struggles against the problems of life as a settled people. We may tire of a journey, day after wearisome day, and we may long for the promise of a land flowing with milk and honey; but we pass through by way of Gilgal, and that stone circle reminds us that others have been here before us, that they too have longed for a respite from toilsome wandering, and that once they settle down, once we settle down, we learn that settled life doesn’t mean no problems, it doesn’t even mean easy problems. It means different problems.

   When Israel moved ahead into Canaan, they exchanged their footsore restless striding ever onward, and the vulnerability of life without protective city walls, for confinement by the walls they built, and for the fetters of being possessed by your possessions. And at the end of the day, the thick city walls did not protect them; the possessions for which they fought were lost, burnt, pillaged. No longer led on their way by the God who was their pillar of cloud by day and their pillar of fire by night, they got lost.

   The longing for relief, for settling, for the modern consolation of closure lie before us in Lent. ‘How long till Easter?’ we may ask, or ‘I want to say Alleluia again!’ But forty days is not so long to spend on this road, and once we enter Eastertide and the season after Pentecost, we won’t have escaped any of the problems that irritate us during Lent. Every day is Lent. Every day is Easter. We observe the different seasons to remind ourselves that both sorts of living are possible — to guard ourselves against casually assuming that we know well enough what self-denial is like, we don’t really have to do it, or against refusing ever to celebrate the promise that God’s power for perfect joy can make itself felt even in hard, lonely, heart-breaking times. We separate Lent and Easter for the practice of showing ourselves deprivation and feasting, but sadness and travail accompany us into Easter — and undefeatable life, glorious, beautiful truth persists in our presence even at the heart of Lent.

   The stone-rolling, rolling stone life of wayfarers suits some, and fatigues others, just as we know that some people — I, for instance — crave the comforts of a settled home. If it be determined that Glasgow is Gilgal, that Scotland will be the land flowing with… well, with rain if not with milk and honey, if Scotland be the promised home where I will finish my work, then I will make my way to some circle of stones and affirm again my praise of the God who has brought me so very far. But I don’t suppose that whether I’m a prodigal child in a faraway country or a hard-working obedient child in the bosom of my motherland, that in either condition my troubles will be lifted from my shoulders just by virtue of having gotten somewhere, or having done just what my Father tells me. Rest, and homecoming, in the end aren’t something we deserve, but something we receive as a pure gift (just as the wayward son in this morning’s parable didn’t deserve the fancy clothes and the feast) — and in receiving these gifts we discover that they were always at hand, every step of the way. Glasgow is Gilgal, and Clarkston is Gilgal, and Sheffield and Swansea and Boston are Gilgal. We’re coming home, we are home, and we’re heading out again, all at once, until time shall be no more.

   Gilgal may be a going-forth as much as it’s a coming-home, but going-forth isn’t all it is. In the week, there is a Sabbath; in the decades, there is a Jubilee; in Lent, there is Refreshment Sunday; in the whole cyclical year, there is Easter; and in this church, this plain, beloved, sometimes leaky church, there is manna. There is water from the stone. There will be the bread of heaven, and the cup of salvation, such that mortals shall eat the bread of angels; and God will provide for us food enough. Even before we can return and fall to our knees, saying ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your child’, God will reach out to us and say, ‘Tomorrow you will eat the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain. But now, you’ve come a long way, you’re hungry. Today, one more time — manna.’

   My name confuses some people. Not over here, I should say — no one in Scotland has ever expressed perplexity over Andrew Keith Malcolm Adam, a proud Scottish name, handed down from ancestors who go back to Lochwinnoch hundreds of years ago — but over in the States, a great many people had trouble remembering whether to address me as ‘Andrew’ or ‘Adam’, or whether my family name was ‘Adam’, ‘Adams’, or ‘Andrews’, or some other variation on that theme. So if you’ve wondered why my nickname AKMA sticks so firmly to me, part of the explanation is that my American acquaintances find it easier to cope with an unusual appellation than to remember which name is which, and whether it has an ‘s’ or not.
 
   But the puzzlement that my name elicits is as nothing compared to the bafflement evoked by the Name of God; and my name confuses people accidentally — whereas it seems as though the Divine Name is chosen deliberately to puzzle people. Just in the verses from this morning’s lesson, God provides three somewhat different versions of the Name: first ‘I Am Who I Am’ (or, as scholars have been pointing out for a long time, probably ‘I Will Be Who I Will Be’); then just ‘I AM’; then at last God gives the Divine Name itself, as the tradition has come to know it — the Name too holy to be pronounced, which our English translations used to render as ‘Jehovah’, and now is usually printed as ‘the LORD’ with upper-case letters.
 
   This revelation makes one of the breakthrough moments of the Bible — although God has been interacting with humanity all along, only at this moment does God confide in Moses the Name. In one of my favourite interpretive traditions, it is said that for a breathless moment all of creation stilled: when God uttered the Divine Name ‘no bird twittered, no fowl flew, no ox lowed, none of the Ophanim (the wheels of the divine chariot seen by Ezekiel) stirred a wing, the Seraphim did not say “Holy, Holy”, the sea did not roar, the creatures spoke not, the whole world was hushed into breathless silence and the voice went forth: I am the LORD thy God.’
 
   This is the turning point; this, the transformation; this, the big cinematic reveal, the first kiss of the beloved, the ‘Be it unto me according to thy word’. And for millennia, nobody has been precisely sure what that Name means.
 
   The sages who translated Exodus into Greek rendered God‘s Name as ‘the One Who Is’, or ‘the Being One’. The story-tellers expanded the scene, so that God answers Moses, ‘You want to know My Name? My Name is according to My acts. When I judge My creatures, I am called Elohim; when I rise up to do battle against the sinners, I am Lord Sabaoth, “the Lord of hosts”; when I wait with long-suffering patience for the improvement of the sinner, My name is El Shaddai ; when I have mercy upon the world, I am Adonai. But to the children of Israel you shall say that I am He that was, that is, and that ever will be, and I am He that is with them in their bondage now, and He that shall be with them in the bondage of the time to come.’
 
   The God who (as we say in the Creed) has spoken through the prophets, has opened to us the secret of God’s own identity — and it turns out that God’s identity is as almost mysterious as our ignorance of God had been. If — as Cedric reminded us last Sunday — God is emphatically not a beardy old white man (and for some reason I myself tend to suppose that beards partake of the divine more than does Cedric!), neither is God any other recognisable persona. ‘I will be who I will be’, says God — ‘not who you want me to be, nor what you’re ready to think that I am, nor what it makes you feel better to imagine me as.’ Our desire, our will, our need does not bind God; our mind does not capture God. Even when God addresses humanity directly, with the ultimate secret, we perceive only a faint trace of what God reveals.
 
   None of this should come as a surprise to us. If we have learned anything over years of retrospect, we ought to have learned that we humans show a persistent tendency to affirm a certainty that at last, we’ve figured everything out — only to be proved wrong very shortly thereafter. Our bold self-assertion points to proud accomplishments and staggering insights, but we still do not feed the hungry or melt the cannons. The leaps of progress from Glasgow’s own James Watt and William Hunter to modern industry and medicine have, sadly, been accompanied by tyranny and slaughter on a harrowing scale, made possible by our technological advances. We think we are standing, and forget to anticipate the possibility that we might fall. Even as history repeats to us the lesson of the human tendency to see ourselves as the exceptions, the enlightened ones, we balk at confessing our limitations. ‘About this, God, we must finally be right!’
 
   In response, God speaks again the Divine Name — and stops our mouths from boasting, for a moment at least.
 
   We do know God — and when we most truly know God, we know even more vividly how staggeringly limited is our understanding, how provincial our horizons, how narrow the range of possibilities that we can contemplate. At every turn we confess our narrow ethical horizons and blinkered moral imagination not because we feel miserable all the time, but because we acknowledge that in the flesh, in the mind, in the spirit, our desires and our determination gang aft agley and leave us nought but pain. We confess because the God whom we know, we know in love, not in meters and axioms and standard deviations and syllogisms. Love bids us take the wellies off our feet before we enter the presence of radiant majesty, and love embraces us, puzzled and partial, as bearers of a Divine secret.
 
   God entrusts us with the Divine Name, and instructs us not to invoke it in vain — we may not claim that God supports our side in conflict, that God approves us and rejects them, that God certifies that what we say is true. Knowing the Divine Name gives us no advantages, provides no leverage, discloses no hidden superpowers. God’s Name is no use to us whatsoever.
 
   But using the power of names ought not be what we’re about anyway. Indeed, if the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, is at all similar to what the prophets have been telling us all along, the Divine Name should be mysterious. All we can do is turn our hearts toward the Name, and trust its Bearer. All we can do, all that Ken and Anne and Andrew and Sue and Cedric and Adanna and Lisa can do is say, ‘Yup, that’s you, LORD: full of mystery and beauty and surprises and even some unwelcome stuff that we can’t cope with. You will be who you will be, and although we have no control over you, or even ourselves — we love you and we trust you. We’re with you in this mad, unpredictable mystery. Hallowed be your Name.’
 
   And when we hallow the Name — when we renounce the illusion that we can boss God around, tell God how to do the job of creating and sustaining the cosmos better than God’s been doing it apart from our guidance, when we opt out of claiming to know more than any humans can know, to judge what humans can’t have any perspective on; when we embrace the God who will be with us in our bondage, and trust God without presuming to control — God addresses us by our own true names, Kelvin and Greta and Udoka and Bruce and Muriel then all of a moment the trains stop, silent; the football terraces cease their chants; the traffic on the Great Western Road pulls over in wonder, the BBC’s microphones go mute; even the falling rain stops in midair and for just a moment, before the saints and angels and all the company of heaven, the sublime harmony of pure silence utters aloud the answer to Moses’s question.
 
   What shall we say to the world? Who sent us? The Name sent us, the unsearchable, impractical, illimitable Name above all Names. And at the silent sound of the Name, Moses’s face glows with the radiance of recognition. Sin and death shudder, grace and mercy flare, and in that briefest of instants water turns to wine, wine becomes blood, bread becomes life-giving flesh, and a variegated throng from an urban cathedral is transformed from glory to glory, a sign of sunlight in a dreich season, a sign of trust in a cynical world, a sign of Easter in the midst of Lent, a mystery that will be who it will be, our best reason and our only explanation, world without end —
 
   

First, They Might Be Giants’s ‘The Mesopotamians’ (for Madhavi) —

Margaret and I often begin our mornings singing “Sargon, Hammurabi, Ashurbanipal, and Gilgamesh” to one another.
Then I stumbled on Louie’s hip-hop anthem to the city we love here. The title itself probably tells you all you need to know in order to decide whether you want to watch and listen to‘(Glasgow) I F**kin’ Love You Mate’:

I posted them to my FB feed when they crossed my path, but now the links are here on my blog, where they belong. This helps set things in order.

Sorry, I meant to say ‘the wonderful Border Agency, our favourite government agency in the whole world’.

But we have friends who applied for their residency seven months ago and who haven’t heard; after his having been here as a regular worker for years, his job has come to its end, and he’s looking for a position, but is being turned away because (after all) he can’t prove that he’ll be granted leave to remain when the results come back from the Border Agency. And who would want to hire somebody, only to find out six weeks later that they’ll be deported? But in a grim catch-22, people who are here on a visa don’t have the right to unemployment benefits, so because he’s still waiting for visa approval he both (a) can’t get a job, and (b) can’t get benefits. Margaret and I aren’t in that position, but we can certainly sympathise.

The pitch of the piece veers imperfectly from technological audiences to theological audiences (the core audience that’s literate in both spheres being uncomfortably small). As such, I alternate oversimplifications and under-explanations from side to side — if I were going on Newsnight or The Colbert Show to expound this topic, I’d try to even it out and do a better job clarifying the various dimensions of it. Feel free to correct me in comments, if you want.

But in response to popular one request, I’m posting the PDFs of my speaking text and the presentation slides below the fold. I haven’t compared my text to Bloch’s God’s Plagiarist to make absolutely certain I cited every case in which I relied on his specific wording — so you should know that most of what I know about Migne I learned from Bloch, and his is the True Source on all that section, no pretence of personal originality there. And some copyrighted images may have fallen into the slide show, though I tried to stick with Wikimedia or obvious fair use of other sources. So, disclaimers having been made, you can find the PDFs of my slides and talk below.

Austria:CLTA Talk Transcript

Eight-meg image-laden presentation slides (sorry)

In honour of that span, and because I noticed the other day that something was missing from the Web, I have reconstructed the original web version of the talk I gave at the Theology and Pedagogy in Cyberspace conference in 2001. Teaching Theology and Religion (on whose editorial board I now sit — hey, where’s the cushion?) subsequently published a longer, dressier version of the presentation as an academic article, but it loses some of the vigour of the as-presented talk. Mine was one of the later papers, if not quite the last, and I got impatient with the ways my fellow presenters were imagining the internet and the Web, so I was editing the talk and even some of the graphics as I was waiting my turn. Considering the talk was given in 2001 — I wasn’t even blogging yet! — I’m quite proud of it. I stand by the general premise, if not all the specifics. And I wish that someplace would put some institutional weight behind actually, whole-heartedly embracing the vision I set out there. (The ideas were, at that point, already two years old; I made essentially the same pitch to the dean and the president at Princeton Seminary while I was working there, and then again to the dean of Seabury as soon as I moved there.)

You can see institutions implementing some of the aspects of a Disseminary-like vision, but I’m not aware that anyplace has fully, deliberately gotten aboard the cluetrain. I regret that — there are twelve, fourteen years of innovation and impact that we could have been making — but the opportunity hasn’t closed.

I just noticed this since Kelvin Facebook-linked to a post in which Gillan Scott offhandedly observes, ‘As those on both sides fight over the exegesis and hermeneutics (i.e. the correct interpretation) of the Biblical texts…’.

As long as biblical studies and hermeneutics are haunted by the longing for an illusory ‘correct interpretation’, we won’t get anywhere; the stakes are too high for combatants who can’t risk loosing their death-grip on their professedly correct interpretations. So part of the reason my work draws less uptake than do those essays and books that promise to guide readers to the proper 13 steps to arriving at the correct interpretation lies in my stubborn unwillingness to play that game. Of course one can always identify particular interpretations as correct relative to certain bounded criteria and premises — but people really want not just to be right relative to people-like-them, but specifically to be able to use their ‘rightness’ to bludgeon others into acquiescence. It won’t work; it has a long, demonstrable history of not working; but since participants in this fantasy gladiatorial sport can’t consider the possibility that their energies amount to nothing more than a charade. Big rewards fall to those who play the charade exceptionally convincingly — but the case for a different approach to hermeneutics gets no traction in a world where most participants mostly want to shore up their preconceptions.

(If you read my blog, and yet haven’t been following the temblor of grief and shock and anger following Aaron Swartz’s prosecution and death, David’s links will start you. If you’re inclined to take the criminal charges against him quite seriously and wonder why such a fuss about an alleged serial felon whom the Secret Service, and the FBI, and the US Attorney’s offices were all investigating, shore up your initial dubiety by reading Orin Kerr’s guarded affirmation of the charges (1, 2) and then read what Larry Lessig (1, 2) and especially Jamie Boyle had to say.)

In the aftermath of Aaron’s funeral and two memorial services, and in conversation with Jay and Will and Rachel, I wonder why I haven’t heard any theological, ecclesiastical, synagogal leaders speaking about Aaron’s struggle against injustice, and the overwhelming stress that seems to have eclipsed his determination. (Hereafter I’ll speak only as a Christian theologian with a technological turn of mind — if my query touches other traditions, that’s incidental to my main interest.)

At a time when there’s a virtual arms race of church leaders trying to redefine their theology and ecclesiology better to fit a series of demographic shifts and cultural transformations, why have I not heard any of the soi-disant pioneers call attention to the tremendous loss to the internet’s future, to the beneficiaries of digital innovation, to the ‘public’ of the public domain? Why have they not soberly and humbly taken up the question of where the churches stand relative to the enclosure of common goods by indefinitely-extended copyright periods? Why have they not, at the very least, reminded their blogging, Facebooking, tweeting, tumbling, pinboarding, SMSing, iPod-listening audience that Aaron was agitating on behalf of the very digital affordances that have made their movements possible?

There was a big Emergent Christianity conference the weekend Aaron died; did any of the speakers mention him (please tell me ‘yes’). There’s been one Sunday already, and today will be another, in which sermons will be preached around a world increasingly closely woven together through protocols and technologies to which Aaron contributed, on which he worked, for which he stood up; has anyone even heard a prayer of intercession on Aaron’s behalf?

The theological ramifications of technology are only just beginning to receive searching theological attention. My colleagues Jana Bennett and Brian Brock have written books about it, Alan Jacobs has been at it for a long time, and I pitched in my essay; but when a force of digital nature (as it were) falls silent, stills, stops, one might anticipate at least a murmur of theological deliberation about what’s at stake, how we cane to this pass, how churches might take a deep breath and rethink their relation to copyright and the commons, to digital technology and the increasing centralisation of digital power (exemplified by the intensification of government authority to examine, collect, and redeploy all manner of digital data from emails to browser histories, without a warrant). Without for a moment minimising other concerns about other dimensions of human well-being — does not this concern touch the lives of far more people than are even inchoately aware of it, who are at risk of being made an example by a zealous investigator or a self-righteous media corporation?

Some of these have been themes of mine for a long time; Jamie Boyle and I met when he introduced a talk I gave five years ago, arguing that the churches should be at the forefront of challenging copyright extension and embracing (free) digital publishing and distribution; Larry Lessig and I met through my initiative to crowd-source an audio version of his book Free Culture nine years ago.. So, sorry if what I say is repetitious and predictable.

But the churches have an intrinsic interest in communication, free communication, profligate communication. That interest is not simply limited to ‘evangelism’, since our faith that all knowledge of the truth is theologically important warrants an unwavering, unflinching commitment to encourage practices of critical deliberation and exploratory reasoning (even when that exploration leads where we would not ourselves go). Few thigns could be more important to the churches than full capacity to communicate online. Heck, denominations and religious cranks used to (and still do) buy and build and maintain television broadcast networks and radio networks, and print publication plants. How can we not be deeply invested in the well-being, the sturdiness of a communication medium ideally suited to the purposes of a non-profit educational communication endeavour such as ours?

And the churches have an essential theological commitment to justice, justice not just for the privileged stockholders and financiers but for the people whose only access to the prerogatives of wealth comes through generosity, sharing, and openness — libraries, clinics, parks, public (and, once upon a time ‘church’) schooling, shelters, soup kitchens, and so on. The churches’ stand on digital freedom owes a preferential option to those with least resources and least access. The enclosure of vast amounts of human knowledge and imagination in dusty reserves, guarded so as to protect that last trickle of royalties to bloated corporations contravenes the ethics of the Torah and the prophets, the teaching of Jesus and Paul.

And the churches have a fundamental commitment to humanness, to compassion. The churches, above all communities, should care when human souls are threatened, overshadowed, brought to the breaking point of desperation — especially when those who threaten, overshadow, and break such souls do so behind the façade of justice. If we continue to serve Jesus’ promise of the fulness of life, or life abundant, of a grace that sustains and nurtures the greatness of human capacities, then the churches have an obligation to stand up and call to account any force that crushes what is most extraordinary, most promising, most ardent in striving for mutual well-being. The premise that runs through the Scriptures proclaimed in synagogue and church day after day holds that God shows no impartiality, and that God in particular does not take the side of wealth, power, impersonal government processes, no matter how pious their professed intention.

If you can read this, and if you have the very least awareness of what Aaron was up to, I hope that you too are wondering why the churches are silent. I hope that perhaps this was just a respectful interval of restraint, allowing a beautiful life of integrity and brilliance and sorrow to hold centre stage for a while — and that soon we hear the churches speaking out thunderously on behalf of the commons, of justice, of human well-being rather than corporate profits. I hope the churches remember Aaron as someone who taught, in so many ways, the kind of example that the churches should be supporting and living up to.

In this city with its glorious heritage of art and design, it’s positively mortifying to have to look at a poster with such execrable kerning. The kerning isn’t even remotely adequate; the word looks as though it were the phrase ‘Hogm A Nay’ (which could plausibly look legit to a visitor with no knowledge of Gaelic). Come now, Council, between these posters and the architectural designs for George Square — click through and support the grassy restoration — this has been a weak winter for a beautiful city.