Search Results for: authenticity

I was pushing the sash of the window back up yesterday, and the windowshade fell down squarely on the bridge of my nose. I now have an angry red bruise on my nose, and it hurts. I’m just saying.

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Now, to the point. This week has drawn together a variety of my interests. I’ll be talking to our Gospel Mission class tomorrow morning about Krazy Kat, I think — we need to talk about culture, purity, contamination, and authenticity, and George Herriman may provide an entree to my efforts to queer the concepts of purity and authenticity.

I was talking to Josiah about the topic last night over dinner, and he pointed me to Scott Kurtz’s recent plea to Bill Amend (“rhymes with ‘Raymond,’ ” Pippa sternly admonished us several times). I reciprocated by pointing him to the speech by Bill Watterson to which Kurtz alludes at the beginning of his post. (And as I type, the Bonzo Dog Doodah Band is playing “Mickey’ Son and Daughter” in the background — it’s that kind of day).

Meanwhile, the most recent issue of the Society of Biblical Literature’s imaginatively-named Forum (to which there’s evidently no distinctive entry-page or archive, alas) features two short essays on the Bible and comics. Greg Garrett writes about allusions to biblical myths in superhero comics, and G. Andrew Tooze cites instances in which a Bible appears in superhero comics. I’m delighted that they’re bringing these topics to scholarly attention, although both tend strongly toward the “Look! There it is!” genre. Of course, there’s a ton more to be said about this general phenomenon; we could start by discussing comics other than superheroes (both articles not only omit mention of other sorts of comics, but treat the superhero subgenre as though it were a privileged representative of the medium — a highly problematic gesture not only for what it neglects, but also for its tendency to play to dismissive observers’inclination to write off comics as a playground for adolescent power fantasies). We should likewise go beyond exercises in Bible-spotting toward a more adventurous analysis of what’s going on when [superhero] comics show us a Bible, or invoke a biblical trope.

All of this is progress, though. People are beginning to think provocative things in public, even in the field of biblical scholarship. Guild disciplinarian Ignatzes may lob bricks at us, but krazy interpreters have begun to claim some off-center discursive terrain from which to renew interpretations with strange fire.

I’ve been wrestling with an Epiphany sermon for the latter part of the week, with a book review in the interstices, and of course classes started at Seabury. I’ll post the sermon in the extended area after I preach it at St Luke’s (already gave it a test drive at Seabury, and it’ll benefit from some burnishing).

That reminds me, the mp3 of the Advent sermon from St. Luke’s is online here, now.

A couple of days ago, Frank sent a pointed open memo to the administrators of the Women’s Media Center. He observed that “ the only place for news on women, links to women columnists, bloggers, media organizations and more” (according to their self-description) was overlooking some of our long-standing neighbors. Frank nominated the best–known, longest-standing friends of ours already, and some obvious omissions among those whom I don’t know so well. They might also think of adding the RevGalBlogPals blog, and Dorothea, Krista, Pascale, Liz, and Naomi (when she has time to blog).

Tripp tagged me for one of those survey thingies in which I resist participating, so I’ll give a cursory answer:

Appetizer: Have you ever seen a ghost or an angel?

I don’t know, but I would expect so.

Soup: What is your favorite board game?

Hmmm. My family had a Shakespeare game I used to play solo a lot, but for social play I suppose Monopoly prevails. Someday I may play Diplomacy again. . . .

Salad: What was the last movie you saw that made you cry?

I don’t remember, but it’s sure to be recent. I’m an old push-over for weeping at movies. Oddly, I didn’t cry at King Kong.

Main Course: What would you do if you had 3 months off from your job?

Work on the books I need to be writing.

Dessert: What kind of shoes are you wearing today?

Black church shoes.

There’s something else I’m thinking about, but I don’t remember what it was. Oh, wait, now I remember: Micah pointed me to Jeff’s observations on the new TV series, Daniel, and to Sherry Turkle’s observations on “authenticity.”

Oh, here’s the sermon:
Continue reading “Friday Stromateis”

I was talking about authenticity* with a friend after church last week, and she advanced the premise that careful, deliberate writing showed a writer’s minimal courtesy to her or his reader. Since I have a reputation to uphold, I suggested that it’s more complicated than that — but I sympathized with her concern that too few writers attend to readers’ uptake.

This shows up in student papers when writers back up their claims with an aggregation of assertions, rather than a productively structured argument. I understand why the distinction might not appear obvious; relatively little public debate observes the difference between assertion and argument (indeed, a great deal of political discourse seems to rest not simply on naked assertion, but on bellicose assertions without even a tenuous basis in common knowledge). Discursive conflict gravitates quickly and fatally to “she said, he said” or “well, that’s my perspective, you have yours,” without acknowledging the possibility that he and she, you and I might have a way of reaching for conclusions to which we both can assent.

Deliberative argument doesn’t guarantee that possibility, nor does it provide some ideal, neutral path toward truth. Still, it’s different from mere assertion — and if we fail to respect that difference, we’re poorer both in intellectual responsibility and in the wiser, more generously consensual relationships that the practice of argument can foster.

To oversimplify: If you want to elicit agreement with your thesis, you should not simply assert claims you suppose to be true (perhaps even self-evidently so), but present your reader with reasons to think that your claims are true, and that they add up to the thesis you propose. Some of your reasons may indeed strike some of your readers as self-evident, but if everything you think were equally self-evident to your reader, you wouldn’t need to persuade her of anything. If your reader disagrees with you about something, we have grounds for suspecting that she doubts a reason that you regard as sound, or that she doesn’t follow a chain of implications that you take as granted. Further, the more a writer takes for granted, the more likely he has overlooked (or deliberately elided) a fallacious inference in his own reasoning. The more carefully you write out your argument, the better you protect yourself from your own fallibility.

I worked through this with a student once, who experienced this as the revelation of a great secret. Once my student caught the idea that one could distinguish “assertion” from “argument” and that one could actually craft a paper toward the goal of persuading a reader to accept a thesis for explicit, sound reasons, my student couldn’t believe that the world had withheld this knowledge thus far. Why hadn’t anyone explained this to her? How could any grown-up get along without this knowledge?

Most people don’t find the distinction as surprising as that. Still, few cultivate the countercultural practice of differentiating assertion from argument. Preserving that distinction won’t resolve all the world’s problems — but it might make a useful step toward ameliorating a few, here and there. And it certainly wouldn’t hurt.

I’ve suggested a number of times that I’m not a liberal; I’m uncomfortable with the ways bedfellows get parceled out by the superficial horse-race-consciousness of theological partisanship (“And it’s Gay Bishop by a nose!”). A while back, I offered to spell out why I don’t fit with the faction to which I’m usually assigned; “I’m not a liberal, because. . .”

In what follows, I’ll be using the term “liberal” in a conversational way, not as a technical term in political theory, or U.S. electoral politics, or even in technical theology. Many people would be inclined to call me a liberal because I believe that the Church’s wisest way forward includes admitting lesbian and gay people to sanctified intimate relationships, and to the highest roles of church leadership; it’s that sense of the word “liberal” that does not fit.

• First, I don’t construe faith or theology as a discourse supplementary to the real, genuine, scientific accounts of truth. After science, philosophy, history, sociology, and psychology have sated themselves at the table of knowledge — theology does not come in late to gnaw on the problems that other discourses either can’t or don’t care to resolve.
  I’m not against scientific inquiry — I just confess the faith that the saints know something about the world that one doesn’t learn apart from life in the church. The gospel is not dispensable in deliberation about truth. When somebody begins talking about “what we all know now” (based on X or Y non-theological master discourse), I realize that they are talking about a “we” that operates with presuppositions I just don’t share.
• Second, I do not accept the premise that change and novelty are good in and of themselves. The church is a body that includes generations past as well as its present participants — and it must bear in mind its responsibility to generations yet unborn. Those of us active in the church this year constitute a relatively insignificant proportion of the church’s life, and it behooves us to show respect for the saints who have bequeathed this endeavor to us by not casually shucking off the life and teachings they have died to uphold, and by not impetuously imposing our will as a norm for future saints. We frame decisions in ways that show the maximal respect for all our forebears and all our children. Though the church can err, that’s not the same thing as the “liberal” notion that “up till this moment everything was a barbaric kludge, and now we’ve finally understood things right.” I affirm the need always to be ready to reassess the church’s teaching (especially on matters about which the church has never before undertaken comprehensive deliberation); I deny that the church needs to play the modern game of continual (illusory) self-reinvention.
• Third, my humanism is always conditioned by my theocentricity. Human beings are pretty cool, and our capacities extend beyond anyone’s imagination — but Protagoras to the contrary notwithstanding, we are not the measure of all things.
• So, fourth, God is not there to make us feel better or to affirm us as we are. We confess that we will be transformed in ways we neither control nor anticipate in advance. That implies that our selves bear witness to God’s truth not by the extent to which a hypothetical account of God assures us satisfactorily of our own goodness; rather, we bear witness to God’s truth by allowing that we will be changed apart from our desires (our desires themselves will be changed). If we can stipulate in advance what God must be willing to do, how God must relate to us in order to win our approval, we are no longer talking about God or faith as I understand them.
• Fifth: doubt, idiosyncracy, questioning, and freedom of choice all come after confession of faith and affirmation of trust in the wisdom of the saints. All too often, people treat doubt, skepticism, and questioning as though they were intrinsically virtuous; the romantic appeal of the fearless doubter will sell a lot of books, win a lot of votes, rack up big points in the people-pleasing business. I am not an Aufklärer, an Enlightenment thinker; I am a priest and theologian, a servant of a truth that did not originate with me. Yes, emphatically, I can and must question the church when I think it in error; but if my inclination to consider the church in error becomes a full-time occupation, I am probably worshipping a very different deity, one who looks an awfully lot like. . . me.
• Sixth, catholicity (the shared character of theological conviction) and unity matter more than individuality and unique authenticity. Yes, we’re all different (“I’m not”) — but our difference always contributes to a greater whole. An individuality that impairs our capacity to share, to sustain a lived connection with our neighbors, diminishes our humanity; those who celebrate their individuality by reveling in alienation misconstrue the meaning of being human. Yes, large numbers can exercise tyrannical short-sightedness and bigotry. Yes, the church shows some of that behavior. Bigotry constitutes a problem, though, not because all differences are beautiful, but because bigotry elevates locally-preferred grounds for association and connection to unduly general authority.

So, am I a liberal? If so, the term shows so much elasticity as to lack useful meaning except as a term of opprobrium. I may be wrong, I may be deluded, I may be many things — but I don’t understand how I can plausibly be labeled a liberal.

Is it even possible to err, theologically? How would we know?

I see two prominent ways of addressing the possibility of theological error. The first depends on the premise that theological truth doesn’t involve any particular realities apart from our selves. If one speaks one’s heart, sincerely and authentically, one speaks the truth. On this account, the dangerous sort of theological error entails making claims on a basis other than one’s own personal understanding of the world; by the same token, any claim made authentically, from one’s heart, can’t be challenged. One can’t be right or wrong about God — one can only be inauthentic. Our intuitions and feelings provide the criteria for theological truth, and they can’t bind the consciences of anyone else.
Continue reading “Truth, Error, and Varieties of Dissent”

This morning, I felt a moment of frustration about the attacks some observers launch against the “emergent” church when emergent congregations pick and choose liturgical elements to lend an air of mystery, or to allude to a tradition of worship that congregants self-consciously repudiate, or just because they like this or that.

I’m pretty pronouncedly Anglo-Catholic about the kinds of liturgical expression I’ll support. I’m from the stream of worship-tradition that falls to the left of the upper-case-“O” Orthodox and the ultramontane Roman Catholics, and to the right of most Roman Catholic congregations I’ve visited, and virtually all Protestant congregations. That’s not a claim about quality or authenticity or divine favor — it’s a rough assessment on a spectrum between two poles. It places me in the zone where “being able to make a clear claim about the coherence and continuity-with-tradition” carries immense weight.

But friends — the very liturgical sensibilities that formed me to think the ways I do derive from a retrospective repristination of selected liturgical practices in Victorian England. Likewise the “liturgical movement” of the mid-twentieth century sent liturgical scholars scouring ancient texts to scoop out some prayer or practice that centuries had concealed with dust, polishing them up, and plopping them into contemporary liturgies.

“Continuity” is always a fictive thing — not fictitious, but fictive, something made. When it suits us, a detail from the Gelasian Rite fits right in to our worship. If (on the other hand) a particular detail irritates us, it constitutes a grave departure from the coherence of the tradition, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We aren’t just making it up; the way we customarily think about things like liturgy guides us to regard some changes as natural and harmonious, and others as pernicious. Without having an outlook at the start, we couldn’t make judgments at all about “what is coherent” and “what isn’t.”

So, however grouchy I feel when a start-up congregation skims my missal for congenial words and gestures, the Apostle reminds me (charitably, I hope) that “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.”

I owe Frank an answer to the question, “Why do I blog?”

That’s complicated, but the best answer would be that I started blogging as a lark, out of a clear blue sky. I continued blogging because I fell into such lovely conversations with friends such as David, Halley, Tom, Shelley, Chris, Jeneane, Doc, Steve, Gary (and, of course, Frank) among others. Those conversations have died down in some ways — we don’t run into multi-day, multi-blog hash-it-outs as much as we did a couple of years ago — but these friends are still around and blogging strong.

I keep blogging because it’s become part of what I do: part of how I learn, part of how I write, part of how I teach, part of how I think, part of how I keep up with technology.

Oh, and I owe both Joi and Frank observations on current creationist controversies. That’s tricky, because I enjoy watching disputes between evolutionists and creationists as an ongoing drama in intellectual history. I won’t simply align myself with either party; that would take much of the fun out of watching. I remain especially intrigued by the problems evolution hasn’t solved, I am unconvinced by the ways that some “evolutionary” discourses overplay the strength of their theory and data, and I hesitate to endorse whole-heartedly the “evolution” ideological complex that has borne along some awfully unsavory fellow-travelers. At the same time, most of “creation science” is flat-out not science, the arguments in behalf of “intelligent design” (ingenious circumventions of previous fallacies though they be) miss vital points on their own, and the underlying premise — that the Bible must provide a kind of oracular anticipation of scientific knowledge — strikes me as a monumental category mistake. So I’m no creationist, so sirree, but I’m not a card-carrying “shocked, shocked!” evolutionist. (We used to get into stressful situations when other home-schooling families assumed that we held our kids out of school to avoid the “E”-word.) I relish the puzzles and complexities more than either of the proposed answers.

And I owe my Early Church History class a final exam. No, I won’t forget.

I owe David notice for his terrific response to Dinesh D’Souza on authenticity.

I owe the Tutor a similar notice for his observations on family values and the state of the culture.

All that doesn’t begin to catch me up on obligations — but it helps correct the perilous spiral of behindness I had slipped into.

I’ve run into replacement panic on a couple of occasions recently, and since I have grading to finish, a major article and a major sermon to prepare in the next two weeks, I figured I’d open up a major blog topic.

“Replacement panic” is the expression I started using back at the Digital Genres conference that Alex Golub arranged (by the way, Alex, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette thinks that PNG is a near-perfect place for a vacation). I use “replacement panic” to refer to the fear — frequently a spontaneous reaction to positive assessments of online technology — that digital media will supplant physical interactions.

I should agree at the outset that replacement panic doesn’t arise out of nowhere. Some of the techno-romantics have heralded the advent of a day when our memories will be downloadable to hard drives, our thoughts presumably assisted by sophisticated applications, our sensations provided by elaborate simulation algorithms. David Weinberger has made a small campaign against such illusions, but they nonetheless play loud in mass media and (hence) the popular imagination.

At the same time, physical interaction won’t just go away. The people I know who seem to spend the most time online (starting with Josiah, but think of David Weinberger, Meg Hourihan, Doc, Chris Pirillo, Denise Howell) also spend lots of time in physical interaction with people. If anything, the way that online interaction permits a vehicle for modulated, careful interaction permits increased sociality for introverted people who might otherwise not venture out at all.

Before we succumb to replacement panic, we ought to look closely at the characteristics of our physical interactions, and how they’ve changed over time. Would we suggest that the class-determined interactions of Upstairs, Downstairs-era Britain, the physical-world interactions of slave-owners and their chattel, were fully authentic, present, relationships? Of course not; but one problem with replacement panic lies in its appeal to an unarticulated, illusory ideal speech situation in which everyone is present, everyone is candid, everyone is unclothed with mediating signifiers or modifiers that might distort speech. That speech situation has never existed, can never exist, and rests on pernicious assumptions about truth and the authenticity of communication. Nonetheless, the sponsors of replacement panic argue as though we all know of a situation for communication that’s uncontaminated by mediations (such as digital media), social determination (nobody say “power laws”), or class-, race-, or gender-based privilege. We don’t know of any such place — but if we did, my guess is that it would look a lot like the internet.

The point of online interaction is not that it will replace physical interaction, but that the tenor of all our interactions will shift, has already shifted, and that unnerves some people as it exhilarates others. We’re all dealing with the change, though, in our physical presence as in our online [self]-representations, and neither online interaction nor physical interaction will go away.

Biella is talking to us about IRC. (Her paper is online here, but she says she’ll take it down as soon as the conference is over). She’s drawing cultural criticism — specifically Paul Gilroy’s critical depiction of Black/Caribbean culture — into the study of social interactions on IRC channels.

She’s arguing against the premise that “authenticity” constitutes an essential components of community. She also argues against the homogenization of online interaction; if we invoke “technology” as a blanket characterization of what’s going on, we miss the diversity of online interactions and communities.

IRC and Caribbean street talk “are public spaces in which clever word play, performance, and stream of consciousness conversation predominate.” Whereas the Caribbean Diaspora derives from a distinct geographic and cultural dislocation, IRC brings together persons whose physical locations remain dispersed. The forms of speech in both communities converge — but the dramatic divergence of cultural circumstances of Caribbean diaspora identity (on one hand) and hacker channels remains vitally important.

Now Anne Galloway will tell us about “What Is the Augmented City?”: ubiquitous/pervasive computing. Amplified reality assembles, layers, virtual spaces onto physical spaces.

Anne proposes that “We have never been modern” (following Latour). Four facets of ontology: the real, the possible, the ideal, and the actual. The virtual is the ideally real; the abstract is the possibly ideal; the concrete is the actually real; and the probable is actual possibility.

The virtual is a real idealization, as a dream, a memory (as past-ness). The concrete is the present, the taken-for-granted event, the now. The abstract doesn’t exist in se. The probable exists (to the extent that it does) in the future.

Molly Wright Steenson picks up by talking through “imaginary architecture.” Bruno Taut, expressionist architect, wrote in November 1919, “There is almost nothing to build, and if we can really build somewhere, we do it to live. Or maybe you’re lucky enough to be carrying out a good contract? I’m finding the practice to be cloying, and in principle, you all seem to be feeling the same way. Honestly: it is completely good that today nothing’s being ‘built.’ Things can thus mature, we can collect our strength, and when it begins again, then we’ll know our goals and be strong enough to protect our residents from dangerous adhesion or degeneracy. Let us consciously be imaginary architects.” So doing, he founded “the Crystal Chain.” Molly submits that this makes as timely a claim now as it did then. As she narrates the history of the Crystal Chain correspondence, she notes her disappointment that so little design thought today is utopian: “If you silence the discourse of vision too early, you cut it off and get nothing.” “The Web grows community without even trying.” (Trevor leans over and points out that the Disseminary is utopian information architecture.”)

Not fade away

Heartfelt thanks to wood s lot for bringing us a daily serving of mind food. I was especially nourished by the Manuel DeLanda and the Olympic beer riot essays–but you bring us more good thinking than I can begin to digest.

( 10:11 AM )
Reading and Faith

On Saturday, David Weinberger asked two shabbos-themed questions: “Where can we read what you think about the possibility of reading the Bible without a faithful commitment (of some sort), i.e., the Bible as literature? Can it be done?”

Well, I suppose “here” is the only answer to the first question, although the topic already figures obliquely in most of what I write. I say “obliquely” because biblical scholars have fought such fierce battles over the legitimacy of interpretations grounded in (secular) historical reasoning that one can hardly take up the subject directly without seeming to advocate an already-established party line. The problems that arise from simply accepting these given pictures of interpretation-from-faith and interpretation-from-secularity provoke much of my absorption in postmodern theory. If you read my various essays as attempts to dismantle the siegeworks that separate “secular” from “theological” interpretations, with each side boosting its own legitimate practices and assailing the other’s biased or corrupted practices, you will get a rough picture of how I’d answer the question.

But David followed up with the second query, so I’ll try to give a brief account of an explicit answer here.

Unhelpful response: Sure; people do it all the time, from casual skimming by disengaged browsers to exquisitely nuanced close readings. To take one example, Robert Alter (though firmly Judaic) offers literary interpretations of the Bible that one need not share his faith in order to appreciate. And as I suggested Saturday, the whole academic discipline of “biblical studies” operates on the principle that anyone who’s read enough, thought enough, and paid close enough attention to the text and its historical context ought to be able to participate in the discussion of the Bible. The Journal of Biblical Literature and Novum Testamentum are not addressed to believers, but to interested scholars.

I suspect, though, that that doesn’t get to the dimension of the question that motivated David to ask. David’s question echoes a theme sounded very forcefully by critics like Matthew Arnold (who argued that we ought to read the Bible as we would any other book) and C. S. Lewis (who argued that one can’t really read the Bible as any other book, that a reader’s denial of the Bible’s foregrounded tenets amounts to a resistance to the book itself) and Erich Auerbach (who in celebrated chapters of his book Mimesis suggested that the biblical narratives distinguish themselves from other contemporary literature in the very texture of their literary composition. (Dave Rogers, the “Connect & Empower” Dave Rogers, suggests as good reads the anthology Incarnation edited by Alfred Corn, and Larry Woiwode’s interpretation of the Book of Acts [out of print]; I add, for symmetry’s sake, the book Congregation edited by David Rosenberg [also out of print], which was the Old-Testament precedent that sired Incarnation as its New-Testament offspring.) Can one, as it were, really read the Bible apart from some sort of “faithful commitment”? I mean, really read it?

That question I dare not answer. It presumes that I could somehow escape my own experiences (which embrace both apart-from-faith and faith-full readings) to evaluate the authenticity (!) of another soul’s reading of the Bible. At the same time, I will say that there’s something about the interplay of living faith with attentive reading that fecundates provocative, stimulating interpretations. These are possible apart from faith, and heaven knows that faith in itself doesn’t engender interesting biblical interpretation, but when a deep reverence combines with literacy and sensitivity, then something special, something different and precious is liable to happen.

Can one read the Bible apart from a faithful commitment? Yes, indeed.

Does being a committed Jew, or Christian, or something-else make one ipso facto a better, more reliable, privileged reader? No, not a bit.

May someone who deeply loves the material and subject of the Bible read the Bible with a sympathy and sensitivity that someone less committed might not be able to muster? That seems plausible to me.

Does that mean everyone has to listen to what I say? I hope that no one is so foolish as to think so.

Unceasing wonders

While I’ve been trying to keep the theological content of this blog a seasoning—rather than a main course—a number of correspondents have acknowledged my voice among you all exactly as a theological presence. Your gift of patient attention and appreciation touches and, in a way, surprises me. I’m listening, and I’ll try to honor the complexity of speaking to your hearts from my own, with all our differences and shared interests. Thank you and, if I may say so, God bless you.

Calling

RageBoy, not one to permit a bluff lightly, has put his postmodern theological cards on the table and even challenged me to show what I’m holding.

I had been playing these close to the chest because (a) experience teaches that very few people in the world actually want to talk about theology and (b) those who do often want to explain how they figured out what life, the universe, and everything were all about and (c) they’re usually painfully shallow and (d) when they’re not shallow I’m embarrassed that I figured they would be and (e) it’s a topic about which I get even more excited than I do about things like voice, authenticity, community, and so on — and you’ve seen what disastrous consequences come from my getting excited about those topics.

But having been dared to reveal what I wear under my cassock, I will acknowledge that I’ve read some (not all) Mark C. Taylor (and what many readers won’t know is that there are more “Mark Taylor”s in the theological world than you can shake a blackboard pointer at: Mark C. Taylor, Mark Lloyd Taylor, and my former colleague Mark Lewis Taylor, to start with). Though the umbrella labelled “postmodern theology” probably looks pretty small when you’re not underneath it, for those whom it covers the umbrella provides more than enough space for some pretty significant divergences.

For instance, Mark Taylor (the “C.” one) talks about theology and a/theology, but most of his time he plays in the sandbox identified within the discipline as “religious studies.” “Religious studies” tends to treat “religion” as a general category (Christianity, Buddhism, cargo cults, Islam, fundamentalism as a cross-religious category, things like that). Religious Studies gives people a place to study and talk about religion and theological topics without the potentially awkward obligation to believe anything in particular. Within this group, Taylor is a brilliant and subtle scholar — but this is not the sandbox I play in, nor do I particularly care to work with the religious-studies ideology on its own terms. That’s okay; they do their thing, and I do mine.

One of the other possible sandboxes is (and here I continue oversimplifying to an extreme) the “theology” sandbox, within which one plays when one says “I’m a Christian (or, less often but quite interestingly, “a Jew,” “a Muslim,” “a Buddhist”) and here’s how I puzzle out all the confusing and complicated stuff that my tradition and I claim to be true.” This is probably the sandbox within which I’m most comfortable, but for odd reasons it’s not my home.

Another sandbox is the “biblical studies” sandbox, which is where my training and job description locate me. “Biblical studies” differs from “theology” inasmuch as “biblical studies” (which I will not abbreviate to initials, for obvious reasons) is another sandbox where one may play without owning up to believing any one thing rather than another. Many people, I dare say most people, who play in biblical studies are adherents of a variety of Christianity or Judaism; but non-adherents are welcome to the discussion, and that’s part of the self-definition of the sandbox.

I eschew the temptation to talk about the peculiarities of these divisions, or the strengths or weaknesses of particular versions of the sandboxes.

What matters relative to Rageboy’s instigation to talk this talk is that I entered the “postmodern” discourses by way of biblical interpretation, in deed by way of literary interpretation. I was flummoxed by how staggeringly boring most books about the Bible were, and I sought an understanding of interpretation that might help me both figure out why biblical interpreters wrote boring books and articles, and avoid tedium myself. The explanations that clarified matters for me came from courses I took on literary theory and postmodernism.

Derrida, Foucault, and Lyotard, Fish and Rorty, and eventually people like de Certeau and Irigaray put ideas into my head that interbred and mutated (with the maieutic intervention of beloved friends), and brought me to the theological position from which I teach and preach today. That position is probably closest to the kinds of writings associated Radical Orthodoxy, a sort of politically progressive, theologically traditional, philosophically postmodern guacamole: spicy, tasty, rich, and great with tortilla chips. I got acquainted with John Milbank in grad school, where some of us sat around reading the early drafts that became Theology and Social Theory. Neighbors of mine have written Divine Economy, These Three Are One, Torture and Eucharist, Engaging Scripture, and Beyond Sectarianism.

My own works have dealt mostly with the ways that biblical interpretation as a collective enterprise has assimilated assumptions from modern culture, treating those assumptions as necessary axioms of rational interpretive practice. That got me onto a number of lists as a spokesperson on postmodern biblical interpretation, so I write a lot of definitions and overviews. If I could build my own sandbox, it would lie at an intersection of theology and biblical interpretation and postmodern theory. (Anyone who wants to buy my stuff can reach it from here.)

Thanks for asking.

Proof of Objectivity

Make that, “Thanks for asking, RageBoy, you pustulent excrescence on the stinking corpse of cultural literacy.”

From There to Here

After all this time, to believe in Jesus….
( 9:49 AM )

Oh, for heaven’s sake

Bad enough to indulge in cutesy-wootsy circumlocution (which I was about to delete this morning, having had an acute attack of good taste)–but then David Weinberger has to notice and, worse still, blog it.

One of the useful functions of writing in public lies in its propensity to increase one’s humility.

Speaking of DW, if John Dvorak has to ascribe Cluetrainista-style writing to drug use, what would he think of the JOHOblog segment on the recent music award ceremonies? My hunch is that he would not identify it as an outpouring of the Spirit of prophecy: “In those days, your old men will see visions, and your young men will speak in anagrams….”

Jargonman, to the rescue!

Dave, an “ideologeme” is “a fundamental element of a complex ideology”; so one might say that some of the ideologemes of specifically modern culture are the axioms that newer is better, that “expertise” is more important than judgment, that objectivity is more important than engagement, and so on. So the ideologeme that “you shouldn’t prefer to hang around with people you like” (which I am not ascribing to our insightful email interlocutor Cinnamon) might constitute an element of a sort of kinky populist ideology that tries to eliminate conflict and discomfort by suppressing difference. (Or it might just be an obviously true statement about the world that an ideologically-blinkered elitist just doesn’t get.)

Actually, this gets back to the parrhesia, blogthread from a few weeks ago and the Web-personae blogthread as well. Let’s recognize in the radically anarchic domain of Hyperlinxia a situation where folks can speak as they want and then live with the consequences, without trying to police the conversations bloggers fall into.

The Return of Authenticity

You thought the blogthread was dead, but when you went to the basement alone and opened that cobwebby closet door — egad! it lives!

Friday, the Rev. Lane Hensley (a Seabury alumnus who survived at least one class with me) leaned over to me at chapel and whispered, “I’ve been reading your blog, and I can explain what people mean by ‘authenticity.’ ” Lane points out that people typically apply “authentic” to a particular experience to indicate its visceral impact, its vividness; subsequently they use the term to mean, “something that revives memories of what that prior experience was like,” even though the context of the experience, perhaps even the character of the experience itself, is quite different.

I’m not quite convinced by this, but it catalyzed a different explanation in my speculative imagination. Perhaps the problem derives from an ellipsis, by which people mean to say something like “her voice is authentically human” or “his website reflects his authentic personality” — then gradually the specific referent of “authenticity” drops out and leaves only “authentic” behind.

I’d probably have forgotten to blog Lane and just left the topic behind, but Tom Shugart poked the blogthread’s carcase and it twitched convulsively. (Yes, Tom, we do need a new word.) I like Tom’s treatment of self in its temporal extension; that’s something the rest of us hadn’t brought out well enough. The suggestion that the “true self, in my view, is created as a conscious act of existential will,” sounds a lot less convincing. My true self includes a mountain of stuff that I didn’t choose, and some of what I did choose (much of it in the 70s — say no more) I would like to think doesn’t express the truest dimensions of my self. Not to say that I repudiate those choices, but to say that the truth about myself emerges from the complex interplay of conscious will and unconscious impulse and unchosen circumstance, all of them. Tom’s version begins to sound a little Promethean, a little Ayn-Rand-ish, a little of the dangerous part of Heideggerian (what Adorno scathed him for in The Jargon of Authenticity). Some of what is truest about us is more or less bred in the bone, and some of who we are depends on the material conditions under which we live. However much we may wish that we were altogether our own creation, a big, powerful, inexorable world of contingencies exerts its claims on us every time.

One thing that makes the Web so interesting is the extent to which the hyperlinked world operates with different environmental conditions than the material world. It’s as though gravity no longer held us to the earth, and we could fly from place to place without benefit of United Airlines, we could change our appearance at will, we could appear and disappear on a whim (or ISP failure). When the conditions that make “authenticity” possible themselves change, then everything else changes willy-nilly, authenticity included (if one must say “authenticity”).

Si’s Birthday

Son Josiah turned 15 today, but by the time we had breathing space to notice it his day was over. Since he’s precisely 12 hours opposite us in Sri Lanka, his version of his birthday arrived yesterday at noon (midnight Sri Lanka); the overlap of his day with ours expired at noon today. And we were busy all morning, and he’s in the mountains reminiscing about indoor plumbing–about any kind of plumbing–and avoiding elephants. Happy birthday, Si! UPDATE: an hour or so after I typed those words, Si made it to a hotel in Anuradhapura and arranged 90 seconds of telephone time to assure us that he was having a great time.

Duke 97, St. John’s 55

Glad Doc got to see a good one.