But the topic I wanted to discuss was The Roots, of whose act we caught a few minutes. I had listened to Game Theory when Nate urged me to check it out, and I noted it as a noteworthy example of strong hiphop. But mercy sakes, last night they rocked, hard and tight. They played “Don’t Feel Right” and another song I didn’t recognize, and in between an amazing cover of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War.” I’m revisiting Game Theory now, but if someone knows of cuts where their capacity to display the terrific ensemble playing and hard rocking they showed live, I’d be all over it.

[Later: Last night, Jackson Browne opened his mini-set by playing “World In Motion” (brave man, to cover Pops Staples!) — and today, Pops’s original version showed up in my shuffled playlist of roughly 13,000 songs for the first time in months. I’m just saying. . . .

Still later: And the joke’s on me, because it’s Pops Staples who covered Jackson Browne’s original!]

Blammo! The same again — massive slowdowns across the board while Adium and the Keychain work out their interaction. Oddly, they don’t overload the processor; the system load drops to almost nothing while Adium negotiates its access to the Keychain, but all processes go at a snail’s pace. Once Adium gets happy, everything returns to normal. But this is much too big an annoyance to put up with more than once in a great while, and if I didn’t have a bunch of friends using incompatible messaging protocols, I’d just go back to iChat.

Anyway, I wanted to linkcheck Scott McLemee’s review (which points to the New York Magazine review) of Pierre Bayard’s How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. The reviews and the book itself sound partly right, partly elliptically determined by an unspeakable aversion to saying directly what they’re trying to get at.

And this morning’s Dilbert cartoon captures the thought that more than once has flashed through my mind when I heard someone enthuse about “innovation.”

If you go to their site to try your own blog out and then paste in their medallion, you may want to edit the HTML they supply to omit the link that seems to point to an online loan shark.

The gospels don’t seem to associate Jesus’ birth with any distinct holy day (the dating of Christmas near Hannukah is later). Are there additional data that might harmonize other moments in the messianic plot line with holy days from Scripture?

Simon answers the question relative to a newspaper’s journalistic mission (the topic about which he and the interviewer were talking).

You see these sort of 'we gotcha' stories, bite sized morsels of outrage, half-assed scandals. No one is tackling big problems. That kind of ambition is gone. When I went into journalism school, which is over 20 years ago now, high end journalism seemed like it was growing by leaps and bounds in its ability to assess the most delicate and ornate contradictions in society. . . .
What happened to the people who are supposed to be sounding the alarm? While the unions die, while the jobs disappear, while the political infrastructure dispatches one reformer after another, while the police department and the school system and every other agency create systems to deny the obvious – that they’re not doing their jobs anymore – while all this is happening, what was the external monitor doing and paying attention to?

It’s good to see Simon calling attention to the corrosive effects of profitable cultural mediocrity; now I’ll spend a few minutes thinking over how this plays out in church and academy. [Link from the estimable Doc Searls.]

I’m piqued to note this today, because my credential badge for the annual SBL meeting arrived the other day, and it read “Andrew Adam.” Now, when I filled in the forms for registration, I typed "A. K. M. Adam,” and when the forms reviewed all the data in order to confirm it, the forms all showed “A. K. M. Adam.” The confirmation email said my badge information would read “A. K. M. Adam.” (I’d upload a screenshot of it, if anyone cared.) This is important because every book I’ve written, every article I’ve written, every book review I’ve published, my whole professional life has borne the label “A. K. M. Adam.” There are few enough people who read and note my stuff, that when one of them meets me, I want them to know I’m that guy.

Nothing against the name “Andrew” —I like it very much. It doesn’t, however, communicate that “the bearer of this nametag is the person whose books you may have read, who’s appearing in several conference sessions, whom you know to work at Seabury-Western.” And with due respect to Dorothea (and “due” = “a whole lot”), I don’t want disciplines, journals, conferences, or registration bots to start unilaterally altering my self-presentation — whether contracting “Ermintrude Regisphilbin Wattbottom” to “E. R.,” or assigning me an unrequested “Andrew.” Initials: maybe, maybe not; consistency and consideration, absolutely.

10 years ago, I was teaching here at Princeton Theological Seminary. Back then, my hair was much monger — well down my back, in a pony tail — but really, that’s about it. Margaret hadn’t begun her graduate studies; Nate, Si and Pip were all still at home; Jennifer and Juliet were probably both living with us (Jennifer’s coming to visit later this week); I was looking for a job, since my position at Princeton was non-tenurable. We loved Princeton back then, the town and the seminary students and my colleagues.

20 years ago, I was making the transition from my masters studies at Yale Divinity to my doctoral work at Duke. We had to leave Margartet’s beloved dog Pearl behind us (no dogs allowed in the only apartment we could track down); Nate was two, and Si was not yet a year old. I had served as day school chaplain at St. Thomas’s Day School (preaching every morning to a group that includes junior kindergardeners through sixth grade and their teachers puts a lot of mileage on, fast) and as Assisting Priest at Christ Church, New Haven; at Duke, I helped Earl Brill with the campus ministry, but mostly concentrated on my studies (I had a three-year grant, and needed to be employed full-time when it expired, so feed the family).

30 years ago, I was a college junior at Bowdoin. Now there are some stories to tell about my junior year! For the purposes of summary and discretion, let us simply indicate that I had experienced some heartbreak, some other sorts of stressful turbulence, I had started carrying around a coffee cup with me everywhere and filling it when empty, and — this will surprise you — more or less stopped eating and sleeping. I realized that I needed to cut out the caffeine, and after a couple of weeks could resume a more healthy regimen. I also had the disturbing realization, through a medical ethics class, that although I could win an argument on either side of a contested point, I didn’t really have any coherent principles to shape my sense of which position was right.

The next year, I met Margaret.

OK, enough of that. After WS graduated from Eckerd and I went to teach at Princeton Theological Seminary, she was called to ministry in the Presbyterian Church, so she came to study again where I was teaching. Now that I’m back in Princeton for sabbatical, and she’s on vacation from her congregation, we met up at the sand pit in Marquand Park.

Although I enjoyed the chance to catch up, to talk through the various transitions and turbulences and lessons and delights in our lives, the very best part of the visit was the chance to meet Will. He truly is, as they say, all that.

Thanks so much for stopping by, WS, and for introducing me to Will. Thanks for long-lasting friendship and a loveliness in life that you’ve given now to Will, that you’ve shared with a blessed congregation, and that touches your many, many friends.