Month: August 2005

I slept poorly, waking from a nightmare early in the morning (it involved a massacre, an image presumably evoked by Br. Roger’s murder). I’ve had a heap of financial details to square away.

Edward Tufte publicizes Charles Joseph Minard’s graph of Napoleon’s 1812 campaign in Russia as “the best statistical graphic ever drawn”; it displays the size of Napoleon’s army, the army’s location in Europe, the passage of time, and the temperature, all in a single extremely lucid presentation. That chart reminds me of our family finances — as the family disperses to various locations, supply lines get drawn thinner, and winter is coming on. We’re not in bad shape, but it’s all so darn complicated.

So in order to distract myself from visions of the Berezina River, I took the “Which Harry Potter character are you? Myers-Briggs quiz ” as much to see whether a short online quiz would return the same result that the longer, more elaborate version typically gives for me. Sure enough, it did: INFP, in this case supposedly Remus Lupin (the werewolf-Defense Against the Dark Arts professor of Prisoner of Azkaban, with whom I actually felt a strong pang of sympathy throughout).

Someday, I’ll have to take the Which Blogging Archetype Are You? quiz again, to find out if I’ve become myself after an interval of being David Weinberger.

Oh, and although we ran into a bit of a snag relative to Volume Three (Christ Church sent volume three of the full ten-volume Dogmatics, rather than volume three of the shorter Theological Outlines), I posted Chapter Eighteen (“The Properties of Christ”) of Theological Outlines. (No, he doesn’t always get Boardwalk and Park Place.) Anyone with a line on Volume Three, second edition, of the Theological Outlines, please let me know; otherwise, we’ll have to use the first edition, which Hall revised substantially for the second edition (unless the copyright holders of the third edition want to permit us to post that version).

Brother Roger, founder of the ecumenical Taizé Community, has been murdered.

“You wept at the grave of Lazarus, your friend; comfort us in our sorrow.”

Few details are available, but this sounds just horrible; pray for his assailant, for the horrified witnesses, and for the community, as everyone who’s acquainted with Taizé and their work wonders how such a thing could happen. (Via Jordon)

In the alternate reality where George Soros calls me up and funds the Disseminary with enough support actually to do all the great things we could do with the opportunity, we would be all over DTV. This is a giant step toward the right idea about digital video transmission, and I’m tickled pink that the Participatory Culture collective would launch this terrific app.

On the reality-based side, we have an arrangement for professional voice artists to record texts from early church history, which won’t amount exactly to podcasts — though we could always set up something like that, hmmm — and we published Chapter Seventeen (“The Person of Christ”) of Theological Outlines. If you’ve been up late worrying about the hypostatic union, this is a hot chapter for you. No, the Hypostatic Union did not just split off from the AFL-CIO.

As Jeneane’s recent experience shows, the hotel industry — it would be an overstatement to call it the hospitality industry, although some hotels can show hospitality (Margaret and I had a good time at the Metropolitan Hotel in our June trip to Toronto) — needs a thorough shaking. I’m still annoyed about our recent trip to South Bend, where a check-in clerk assigned us a room that the desk knew not to have working cold water in the shower. (I’m surprised to see that I didn’t blog about it; I think I must have wanted to wait till I could do so without losing my temper.)

The problem seems to lie with managers and executives who think of their hotels as pay toilets — they know you need to use it, and they reckon that they can extort payment from you because you’re in a hurry, or don’t see any alternative. Changing hotels causes more bother than putting up with inconvenience or overcharging. Somehow, though, I’d rather stay at an inn that thinks of itself in terms more commodious than “pay toilet with lumpy bed.”

When I temperately pointed out to the management of the venue at which we stayed that the clerk indicated that they checked me into a room in which they knew I wouldn’t be able to take a shower Saturday morning, I was accorded a twenty-dollar credit for the night’s lodging — a better deal than Jeneane’s been offered, but still way more than I’d have been willing to pay if someone had said, “We’ll give you this room without a shower for $50,” and more, I think, than I should be expected to pay for a nasty surprise. And Holiday Inns should positively hire Jeneane to work on their customer relations.

She’d set ’em straight about how to handle their internet connectivity, too, so Doc won’t be all over their sorry cases.

I’m having a slow Monday, not intensely productive. On the plus side, I broke the back of my fall syllabus, learned a little bit about imposition and PDFs, and published Chapter Sixteen (“The Incarnation”) of Theological Outlines (admit it, you were looking forward to that one; I like the section entitled “The Convenience of the Incarnation”).

On the minus side, I didn’t accomplish much else. Yet. Maybe after I go buy groceries, I’ll feel more motivated.

Josiah made his farewell to the Evanston stage, and to the Thin Ice theater group, in a compelling performance as Tom in The Glass Menagerie Friday and Saturday nights. All four actors did a very impressive job; Thin Ice actors have consistently shown admirable insight into roles and situation more “adult” than one would have expected for a group of high schoolers, much to the credit of Eileen Rosenthal and Paula Sjogerman, their directors.

I don’t have time for an expansive review, nor the impartiality for a reliable one, but I was proud and impressed by the production. I had a conversation with a more sophisticated blogger before I went, in which I had to confess that I just don’t know the Tennessee Williams oeuvre that well. This production introduced me to the style and themes I expected from Williams, but with a fine hand for the humanity of the characters involved. Cheers all around, and anyone who lives in convenient distance of Marlboro College dramatic productions, keep an eye out for Si.

I’d say “He’s a keeper,” but this is the time for us to let him go — with love and pride and our warmest blessings.

OK, today I’ve already published Chapter Fifteen (“The Fall of Man”) of Theological Outlines; that’s no big accomplishment, since it’s been sitting there in draft mode for weeks). Next, I have some academic study/writing to do, email to catch up on, and tonight I go to see Si in The Glass Menagerie. Last night’s notices were wildly enthusiastic, so I’m looking forward to his triumphant farewell to the Evanston stage.

If I need a break, I may make up a theology card or shoot a scene from the life of Ignatius — but the weather is cloudy today, and I rely on the sun for illumination for the photos.

On the way home from the Tufte presentation that I blogged about yesterday, Trevor and I stopped off at a Catholic bookstore so I could pick up some holy cards. Me, I think the lamination is tacky, and I prefer the ones with nineteenth-century illustrations to this batch’s Hallmark-y airbushed effects, but it’s delightful to have a handful of holy cards that aren’t just printed images from online sources. I suppose the lamination renders them more durably eligible for blessing with Holy Water.

We’ve been churning out chapters of Theological Outlines. Here are Chapter Ten (“The Trinity”), Chapter Eleven (“The Divine Economies”), Chapter Twelve (“Creation”), Chapter Thirteen (“Angelology”), and Chapter Fourteen (“Man” — hey, it’s from the nineteenth century). The wonderful folks at Christ Church, New Haven have lent us their copy of Volume Three, so that should be arriving in the mail soon. We’ll start posting the chapters from Volume Three as soon as we can.

Si is leaving for college in about ten days. Between Laura and Marlboro, his consciousness has already, to a great extent, left. He’s a fantastic guy, and I’ll miss him a lot, but it’ll be something of a relief when his brain and his body are more nearly in the same place.

Jane, this was a picture I didn’t need to see — esepcially with the annotation that you “didn’t hit much.” On the other hand, I’m glad to be on your good side.

Speaking of Edward Tufte and his antipathy to PowerPoint, here’s today’s Foxtrot comic.

Trevor and I spent the day at an Edward Tufte seminar course, which was worth it even if only for the books and the fanboy factor. He’s a great hero of mine; he’s influenced my thinking about semiotics, information, communication, and probably several other topics.

The course attracted about four hundred or five hundred people in a basement ballroom in a downtown hotel, two huge projection screens, an excellent voice projection system, and Tufte’s very big personality. He had started before the designated opening time, and he rocked through the morning session at high intensity; I learned a lot just from observing him (the actual points he was making constituted a side benefit). Quite simply, Tufte is a genius of the design and presentation of information. He’s developed a patter that distills his work in the four books (The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations and Beautiful Evidence (not yet in print) ) in a captivating six-hour monologue (“Questions only during office hours!”). He’s amazing.

At the first break, I presented a book for autographing, and — thinking of a twist on my prized Lawrence Lessig digital autograph — asked for his audio autograph, which I recorded on my digital voice recorder. Unfortunately, it picked up tons of handling noise (that WS-200S is terrific, but it must be quite still to record cleanly). The clattery version of Tufte’s audio autograph is here, but don’t download it unless you really want to.

When I replayed the first try and observed that it had not produced a good example, I ventured to Prof. Tufte again and asked his indulgence for another go. That one produced the following audio autograph: long version, short version.

After lunch, Trevor and I were psyched for Prof. Tufte to apply the knockout blow, but it seemed to us both that he was not as lively, not as powerful in the second half. I suggested to Trevor that in the morning, Tufte was blowing us away with his genius, whereas in the second half he was being a genius, and that was something of a letdown. Trevor thought that maybe he needed a nap (this was the second of two consecutive all-day gigs in Chicago). I noted, too, that a large part of the afternoon session revolves around his commentary on the Columbia space shuttle disaster, and that topic does not lend itself well to his barbed irony. He could project somber determination that this not happen again, or fiery outrage that bureaucracy triumphed over the lives of valiant explorers — but dry wit concerning the pointless (if perhaps inevitable) deaths of the Columbia astronauts doesn’t, to my estimate, do justice to their memory or to Tufte’s own insight into how poor information design obstructed the engineers’ assessment of the damage the falling foam caused to the shuttle wing. Since Tufte’s indictment of PowerPoint appears in his presentation as the coup de grâce, the macabre feeling of learning about presentation software over the graves of the astronauts brought the course to an uneasy ending.

We venture to criticize the presentation because it was so intensely impressive (especially, I think, for one who has not already quaffed so deeply at the tap of Tufte’s wisdom). He is a grandmaster of presentation, and on the El on the ride home, our minds were buzzing with ideas from sitting in with the hundreds of other learners today. Trevor said that if he were running any for-profit entity, any business involving presentations, that everyone from the company would take this course. I just wish I could assign it to my students. He’s amazing (Tufte, not Trevor. I mean, Trevor’s amazing, too, but not in the same way as E.T.).

I usually write here about how great the web is, and why I’m positively-disposed toward the Web for pastoral, theological, social, and academic reasons. Today I’ll show that I’m not entirely sanguine about online communication.

I have posted a couple of wedding sermons here, sermons that went over pretty well — and I’m very sure that no one who attended either wedding will be at Joey and Wendy’s wedding in September. But now that I’ve posted these two exemplars, I have to come up with something fresh for Joey and Wendy. (I actually prefer to preach fresh sermons under most circumstances; my belly-aching here is merely for effect.)

I suppose that I wouldn’t be able to recycle a past favorite anyway. The interfaith, interethnic ceremony has already been carefully planned, and there won’t be a reading from the Bible during the service proper, so I just wrote to offer them their choice of any Bible passage whatsoever. I don’t assume they’ll choose one of the readings on which I already have a sermon in the files.

They could play it conventional and choose a passage about love and marriage, or they call my bluff and choose one of the passages about sex and body parts, or chopping people into bits, or seas of fire and horses like scorpions. My hunch is that they’ll go for a safer selection, if only to prevent my taking longer than the allotted time for my exposition. “You may wonder why we just heard a lengthy reading about the dimensions and decoration of the Tabernacle. . . .” Or “Joey did not have to present Wendy’s parents with a hundred foreskins, but. . . .”

While I was travelling, I overheard a media report that dermatologists suggest that every American have a yearly dermatological exam to catch skin cancer in its earliest stages.

Meanwhile, over at Ignosi et Quasi Occulti, Kevin considers the likelihood of getting a yearly exam for his general health, and it just doesn’t add up. We’ve heard comparable stories from Jeneane and Chris and probably other people, too. If Kevin can’t afford a basic health care check-up, what does the recommendation of yearly dermatological check-ups imply? When will the sleeping giant of the U.S. health-care mess wake up?

Two Three only-slightly-related points, one a question and one an answer and one a link.

Q: Seabury’s stalwart Director of Communications would like a gentle, clear, informative tutor to help walk her through the process of learning how to make the most of Seabury’s MT installation, CSS, and so on. We can’t pay exorbitant consulting fees, but someone who’s casting about to make ends meet, or on parental leave, or retired with megabucks at the height of the dot-com boom and feels charitable, would be a great helper as we try to enhance our use of the web. Is this you?

A (specific to Mac OS X users): I use GraphicConverter for most light image-file management purposes, but I usually switch to Photoshop for more interesting, heavy-duty file effects. People with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) who rely on GRaphic Converter or iPhoto may want to take a serious look at BeLight’s freeware Image Tricks app, which uses the Core Image capacities built-in to Tiger in order to produce slick, simple Gaussian blurs, unsharp masks, and various color-balancing, image-manipulating goodies. They say it integrates with iPhoto; I’m not much of an iPhoto user, so I wouldn’t know. It’s very handy, and quite free, though — which I applaud and call to your attention.

L: I’m usually resistant to check-it-out links in my comments, but Hugh won me over with his LibriVox project — a more-experienced, better-organized, longer-view version of the Lessig read-a-thon barn-raising. I’d jump right in to read a chapter myself, but we’re working on audio files for Disseminary use, and I have one or two other overdue obligations. But here’s a link to you, Hugh, with best wishes for the project. Go help him out!

I recorded the talk I gave at the CBA meeting on my snazzy Olympus WS-200S digital voice recorder, which I got for the Disseminary on the strength of recommendations from a column at O’Reilly and from Lorna “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” White. I’ve trimmed off David Penchansky’s laudatory opening and the closing q-and-a session; I may re-edit the file subsequently (break it down into smaller chunks, whatever), but for now I’m just posting the unpolished audio below.

The talk draws heavily on the version I presented earlier this year at Seabury, though I had a little more time for this one; I omitted a part at the beginning, thanking everyone for everything, and added a section at the end, giving reasons for adopting the terminology of “signifying practices.”

“Do This”: Translating, Re-Presenting, and Signifying New Testament Theology (23.7 meg — watch out)

Stephen Downes comments on Bob Reynolds’s response to Jimbo Wales’s call for a free curriculum (about which I blogged last week). I’m reacting not to Reynolds, but to Downes’s comments; I’m halfway from Collegeville to Minneapolis (here’s a question: is it still called “carsickness” if you’re on a bus?) on my way to the airport, and for some reason I can’t pick up a wireless signal (or find an electrical outlet! Imagine!).

Wales’s call, Reynolds’s response, and Downes’s comments all bear on the problem of how (and whether) to connect scholars and experts with the free-distribution model of online education. What they (and so far, everyone else) overlook is the extent to which the very mechanisms (I’m thinking of the French word “dispositifs”) of public education by experts are already at work — only they’re being operated and constrained by previous-generation models of mass communication. I’m referring to the advertising campaigns and PR deartments of major professional and public-interest groups such as the AMA, the ABA, AARP, ACLU, and so on. These organzations spend boatloads of money eliciting expertise from (presumably) reliable experts — then transmuting it into expensive 30-second TV spots, or three-panel folded panphlets that a pharmacist stuffs into your bag and you throw right away.

If a professional association really wants its members to gain mindshare, to raise the level of public discourse over the topics it addresses, that organization ought to commission educational materials from its leading exponents and distribute them online — for a tiny proportion of what mainstream-media campaigns cost.

Yes, that won’t reach every audience segment, and perhaps it won’t reach certain audiences at all (though I’m inclined to suspect that a vigorous online sphere of attention would at least stand to generate side-channel interest and awareness). Some professional association ought to give it a try, someday. (I would single out the Society of Biblical Literature and Catholic Biblical Association, but these have no PR budget at all, to the best of my knowledge. Still wouldn’t cost them much to do a world of good.)

(Later: Rob Reynolds responds to Stephen Downes here)

At the risk of commending another Dead White French [Postmodern] guy, the Hermeneutics Task Force of the Catholic Biblical Association has been holding a very provocative series of discussions of the work of Michel de Certeau (specifically, this year, essays from Hetereologies and The Practice of Everyday Life) (I know, it’s twenty or thirty years late; remember, though, that this is biblical scholarship, so by our local time, we’re right on schedule). Note to Margaret: evidently Certeau started out as a protégé of Henri de Lubac. We’re only getting a little way into each essay — “Walking in the City,” “History: Science and Fiction,” and “Reading as Poaching” — provoke us to talk about the relation of textuality to the real, the role of power and authority in interpretive discourses, the social, ethical, institutional, and epistemological status of the interpreter. Cool stuff.

Paper went well. Details at eleven, unless I fall directly asleep.

[Later: Dropping off briefcase at dorm room. Say, I have to lecture to Catholics more often — they really liked my essay.]

Greetings from Lake Wobegon Collegeville!

The Catholic Biblical Association meeting is going well; I’m catching up with friends, learning a thing or two, haven’t bought any books, and working with and avoiding editors. This morning at eleven I’ll give a presentation that’s genetically related to — but not identical to — my Winslow Lecture. I’ll make a recording of it and post it here when I get a chance.

St. John’s Abbey and University are lovely in unpredictable ways; the combination of the modern concrete bell tower, church, and library with the perpendicular brick quad and other buildings risks looking shoddy, but in fact I think the campus holds together beautifully. And the land is wonderful; you can see why people vacation in Minnesota’s lake country. The brothers of the Benedictine Abbey are welcoming us amply, and the entire experience has been enchanting. (Apart from the “sleep-in-a-dorm-=room” side; the room itself is very comfortable, but the pillow is thinner than a White House apology.)

Yes, I’m up early again, this time to catch a flight to Minneapolis. I don’t know what connectivity will be like at the Minneapolis airport and at St. John’s (we traditionally have problems getting access, even wired access, at CBA meetings). Anticipate light blogging, and we’ll see what happens.

When I said below that I’m not an oracle, what I meant was: I sure wish I’d been the one to connect these dots. “What happens when you combine the notion of the state-of-the-art cell phone (with picture-taking capability standard fare these days) with QuickTime and its H.264 compression, which Apple touts as being great for mobile phones? A video (ipod) phone, with audio/video recording, not just playback. (And perhaps more far-fetched, transmission — now we’re talking beyond Dick Tracy).”

Makes sense to me, much more so than the spasmodic will-they-release-it-or-not anticlimaxes over the alleged Apple-Motorola iPod phone (how many people will buy a device that renders redundant one or two expensive gadgets they already own?) or a plain old video-playing iPod (so I can see Lord of the Rings on a 3 × 5 screen?). It’s exactly the kind of thing Steve Jobs would love to spring on the world, and would certainly help sustain Apple’s energy coming away from the iPod wave.

I’m at home finishing off some assignments (a revision of my Windsor Lecture material for presentation at this weekend’s Catholic Biblical Association meeting, an introduction to the book in which the four Windsor lectures will be published), but so that readers do not feel neglected, I’ll point to a Theology Card:

#47, Council of Nicaea: Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

and two snazzy maps that Ryan discovered in my copy of Walker’s History of the Christian Church. Eventually we’ll move jpegs of the Theology Cards over to the Disseminary flickr site and serve image files from there, but for now I’ll keep uploading everything to the main site.

And Debra is wrapping up the first volume of Theological Outlines; Chapter Eight and Chapter Nine are set, and she’ll probably wrap up Ten and Eleven before I get back from Minnesota (at which point we can start publishing the chapters of Volume Two, which are already scanned and set to go). Anyone with a copy of the second edition of Volume Three who’d be willing to share, please let us know!