Akma

Great news about a great blogger and a thoughtful church guy: Jordon Cooper is now VP of Community Development at Stewart Property Holdings, continuing his long work against homelessness in cooperation with local social justice agencies.

Jordon, Wendy, Mark, and Oliver are long-distance heroes of mine. It was great to get together with Jordon back in the early days of Blogaria, and I’ve been reading his blog through thick and thin since then. Maybe Mark will want to come to Oxford….

This evening, while conducting important research, I learned something that startled me.

I should explain that I’m a lifelong Baltimore Orioles fan, starting from when my dad took me to a Meet the Players event at Southtown Plaza in Rochester NY, and I was greeted by Red Wings players and coaches (including Luke Easter (coach), and possibly Freddie Valentine and maybe Mark Belanger?). My all-time hero was Brooks Robinson.

(I know I used to have this baseball card)

Recently I had been hearing talk from the sabermetric community about Brooks — boosting the status of other third basemen, knocking my hero. And I have to admit that his batting skills (wOBA .322) were not to be compared with Schmidt or a handful of others. I thought I had heard that his fielding was over-rated as well — I didn’t look any of this up, because it would be too depressing to see the latest mathematical analysis disclosing that my hero, the great Brooks Robinson, was acclaimed only on the basis of hype, grit, and the other ingredients that the anti-Beane traditionalists held dear.

So when I was, ahem, researching this evening, I was knocked out to discover that Fangraphs lists Brooks as the player who made the single greatest career contribution to his team’s defence — if I read the charts correctly, that’s a calculation of how many runs the balls that he successfully fielded (theoretically) saved his team. His Fld column — based, it must be said, on much less complete statistics as modern fielding measurements, which are themselves not yet a satisfactory measure of a player’s defensive ability — saved the Orioles almost 300 runs. Only four other players saved as many as 200. Four of the top ten are heroes of mine (Robinson, Mark Belanger, Roberto Clemente, and Cal Ripken), and three were Orioles. (My dad’s hero Carl Yasztremski is up there, too, and including Paul Blair four of the top twelve were Orioles.)

Again, there are reservations and cavils to be made. I’m not making the claim that Brooks Robinson was in every respect the greatest defensive player of all time, nor even the greatest defensive third baseman of all time (though the statistics make that an arguable case). It is heartening to see, though, that they don’t smash the reputation of my childhood hero. Well done, Brooks.

It’s hard to adjust to the prospect of leaving Glasgow behind, when it has been such a welcoming home to us,

 

even though it means we’re going to Oxford, where we’re already being welcomed, and I’m bring put to satisfying work.

 

Apparently there are many university murders in both locations. We promise to be on the lookout for crazed professional rivals, nefarious gangsters, psychopathic stalkers, religious fanatics, and general malefactors.

If you had been waiting impatiently for a fresh analysis of the syntax of the Epistle of James, you can satisfy your hunger now with my long-gestating contribution to the Baylor “Handbooks to the Greek Text” series.

 

is now shipping. Everyone who doubted that I actually was writing a book about James (seriously, when I started, James was still a recent addition to the New Testament canon) can prove to themselves that it”s real by ordering a copy or two. It makes great beach reading (if you have some Greek and are curious about how the bits of James go together). It doesn’t cover as much as does Dale Allison’s 800-page alternative, recently released in the ICC series, but it’s a lot less expensive.

Margaret and I were ambling into the office this morning, talking about her book Our Only Hope: More Than We Can Ask or Imagine (forthcoming from Pickwick Press, autumn 2013), when one of us casually referred to ‘books in print.’ Since we both have worked in bookstores and libraries at times, we shared a particular memory that will seem peculiar to young folks these days.

To wit: Once upon a time, kiddies, there was a book published every year whose title was Books In Print (it still is printed, evidently, though I can hardly imagine who would buy it now). It included what it said on the cover — the publication information for every book in the USA whose publisher had print copies available. If you wanted to track down a book for library use, or to order a copy of your own, you would go to Books In Print, find it by title or author, write down the publication information, and convey that data to a librarian or bookseller.

It was, as you may imagine, an unwieldy fat volume, with supplements published at regular intervals, but before digital databases and the Internet and Amazon, this was how we located copies of the books we wanted to read and buy. Nowadays the prospect of a print book which lists every book available defies imagination. Practically everything is in print one way or another; how would one encompass all the books from all the publishing entities in one book? The idea of having to go someplace and look something up in Books In Print (regular people didn’t ordinarily own copies, in my experience) rather than just looking at Amazon or WorldCat seems bizarre. And writing down publication data and carrying it, or mailing it, to the person from whom you wanted a copy….

Yet this was how your parents or grandparents used to deal with book acquisitions in the pre-Net world. Sometimes I’m amazed that we read as much as we did — but then, we weren’t distracted by Facebook.

This hasn’t been much of a year for blogging for me — mostly just sermons and apologies for not blogging more. This is due partly to persistent problems with the backend software and perhaps my server company, but mostly to my falling out of the habit of blogging. Work was beastly this past year (not my lovely, brilliant, delightful students, nor my diligent, cooperative, supportive colleagues, but the workload and the alignment of omens about the future), I had hard writing to do just for work and administrative purposes, and I don’t like moaning about my working conditions. So if I got to the end of a day tired of extracting words from my brain, and frustrated by developments at work, I wasn’t inclined to write anything particular in a blog.

 

A while back, though, Stephanie Booth — one of the longtime regulars in Joi Ito’s IRC channel — challenged a number of us old-timers to renew our participation in blogging. She proposed a “Back To Blogging” movement, and in light of the increasing Matrix-isation of Facebook and Google users, her call to arms stuck in my imagination. I missed the ten days she specified. Whoops. But I Christopher Roussel have has ironed out a couple of wrinkles in my WordPress installation, and everything seems to be working today, so maybe I’ll give this “blogging” phenomenon another go. After more than eleven years (for me), maybe it’ll really catch on.

I’m always a bit slow on the uptake, and especially as Margaret and I have been particularly distracted during the past ten days or so; though I saw my friends and students and all posting comments about their sermons for Trinity Sunday, I didn’t connect the dots that the “26 May” on the rota that said I was on duty to preach also meant that I too would be expected to have something to say about that holy mystery.

I had preached recently — a couple of weeks ago, at St Aidan’s (which reminds me I should get that sermon online too), so my homiletical habits weren’t too rusty. And although I have a lot of other things on my mind, this sermon seemed to come together pretty smoothly. As often, I needed to let the sermon settle and my imagination detach from it a bit before I could gather it into a conclusion, but that too came out all right when I needed it. (The sermon bit is below, in the ‘Continue reading’ link.)

Our home-front unsettledness continues for another few days. After that, I’m counting on being able to let out some very deep sighs and begin relaxing.

 

Continue reading →

(I knew I kept this thing alive for a reason!)

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.’

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* If you don’t know Kevin, he’s a legal studies professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, the impresario behind Supernova, the author of For the Win (not the Cory Doctorow novel by the same name), and a wildly popular and successful online teacher). That is: probably understands a thing or two about what he says.

The end of teaching for the year is coming up on us, so my working days will be less oriented toward ‘what hitherto-unprepared lectures do I have to give this week?’ and more toward ‘what backlogged obligation can I clear away?’ This will make a considerable difference for the better, I promise.

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.

 

Continue reading →