Month: September 2007

I no longer teach Early Church History, so I don’t have students to guide toward Fred Sanders‘ series of posts on the ecumenical councils’ Christology (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7) — but if I did, I would.

A correspondent just sent me a meditation which began from with a quotation from John of Fame, a Benedictine hermit, which I must share here:

Study then, mortal, to know Christ: to learn your Saviour. His body hanging on the cross, is a book, opened before your eyes. The words of this book are Christ’s actions. as well as his suffering and passion, for everything that he did serves for our instruction. His wounds are the letters or characters, the firve chief wounds being the five vowels and the others the consonants of your book. . . .
So eat this book which in your mouth and understanding shall be sweet, but which will make your belly bitter, that is to say your memory, because he that increases knowledge increases sorrow too.

I’ll be quoting this in some article or presentation, I’m sure.

Yesterday morning Margaret and I talked over the New York Times Book Review retrospective on Allan Bloom’s dyspeptic screed in defense of Western Civilization, The Closing of the American Mind. As an advocate for classical learning, I take offense at Bloom’s scattershot demagoguery; while something has indeed been lost in an economy of knowledge wherein (according to the article) more than half of U.S. undergrads major in business, health, education, or computer science, Bloom casts blame on every figure and cause he dislikes, without making the discriminations that justify pretensions to intellectual high ground.

Margaret and I winced at the comparable figures for English and history majors: 1.6 percent and 1.3 percent, respectively. And experience suggests that even the one percent who devote the major part of their undergraduate studies to these topics have not necessarily drunk deep at the Pierian spring. “There’s a reason,” I always exhorted my undergraduate students back when I was teaching college, “that the job fair posters always say “All majors welcome.’ That means, “We’re not looking only for business majors.’ It means your future employers would rather hear you sound sharp, excited, and well-informed about a subject in which you excelled because you cared about it, than to hear you sound formulaic and predictable on the basis of business courses which you took out of a sense that you had to get a salable degree.” So far as I know, my exhortations made no difference (to students who were otherwise inclined toward a business degree; I do know that some of my students from those days took other exhortations and encouragements to heart).

Tonic for an abraded soul, then, to read the dialogue of Tom Matrullo and Phil Cubeta, two admirable souls and (I am honored to say) of my dearest online friends. The American Mind is not closing — but the particular doors and windows by which some inhabitants have gotten used to admitting fresh air may have been painted shut. Would that one of Phil’s philathropists recognized the value proposition of supporting liberal education, with an eye to such benefits as their colloquy exemplifies!

   Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord;
   Yes, says the Spirit, so that they may rest from their labors.

Prayers and blessings for Lula, for George, for Jeneane and Jenna, for all in Lula’s family and her friends.

If the discovery several weeks ago of the vast spiderweb in Texas had not already suggested to you that we are living in the end-times, consider that entomologists now think that twelve different families of spiders — “families” in the taxonomic sense, not the “household” sense — cooperated to construct the giant web. Bill Poser at Language Log compared this to a cooperative effort among humans and eleven other primate species, such as Lar Gibbons

But it gets even spookier than that, since in a follow-up post he notes that the spiders’ arthropod species are a great deal more diverse than are mammalian species — so a fairer metaphor might enlist humans cooperating with marsupials. So now, imagine a complex engineering endeavor in which humans, gibbons, chimpanzees, gorillas, lemurs, baboons, kangaroos, wombats, opossums, Tasmanian devils, bandicoots, and koalas participate together (too bad, for this exercise alone the Thylacosmilus became extinct!).

That funny taste at the back of your throat may be adrenaline.

We’re keeping our eyes on the theological job market as Margaret moves along toward her own job search. It’s not a great year for entry-level openings in theology; almost all of them stipulate additional specialties or focused work (“Catholic systematic theology” or “systematic theology — must sign our Statement of Faith” or “systematic theology with an emphasis on Native American heritage”).

On the other hand, if you’re an Islamist, you’re in a seller’s market (as it were), as was the case last year.

Some colleges and universities have noticed that Web 2.0 affects them. Hunh — who anticipated that?

I’m trying to get started on the actual composition of the technology and religion article, which estimable goal has been obstructed not only by the usual blank-page syndrome, but also by two particular problems specific to this task.

On one hand, I want to treat the questions in terms concrete enough to keep most readers engaged. I’m writing not only for those first-year college students whom I can count on staying with a highly-abstract meditation on technology, but also for less patient readers. Still, the concrete examples of technology about which I write today may strike readers two years hence (when the published book actually “drops”) as lame, if not utterly outmoded. Academic treatments of digitally-mediated interaction frequently emphasize MUDs — as though Usenet, email, instant messaging, online RPGs, and so on (I’m being fair, and not expecting academicians to have anticipated the expansion of MMRPGs or online environments such as Second Life) — whereas very few of my students, even the older ones, have the slightest experience with good ol’ MUDs. So impediment Number One involves attaining an effective degree and quality of particular examples.

Impediment Number Two involves the opening, which (as my Writing Group colleagues will affirm) triggers such strong expectations from a reader that a good first paragraph or two can determine how carefully and sympathetically the audience considers the rest of the essay. I expect to use some narrative examples in the body of the chapter, but I’m leery of opening with an anecdote (especially an anecdote with a startling twist! at the end). So I’m fretting about how to sucker a wide range of college-level readers to pay attention to some challenging provocation in the pages that follow. Plus, of course, I must without question use my opening paragraph or two to prepare the audience for the direction and conclusion that the chapter will take.

Now, back to actually trying to do it, rather than simply blogging about it.

Before I get so accustomed to Princeton that I lose the sense of unfamiliarity that accommodates close attention:

• Evanston seems to have more Hummers and Escalades; Princeton, more Jaguars and Lamborghinis.
• Evanston drivers make more U-turns; Princeton drivers make more dangerous swerves and lane changes.
• The obvious: Evanston = flat with a rectilinear street grid; Princeton = hilly with streets that curve every which way.
• Evanston houses generally look much more interesting; Princeton houses include a surprising number of architecturally vapid cookie-cutter MacMansionettes.

Evanston has a big edge in bookstores, for the time being; Micawber’s couldn’t stay open. There’s a Barnes & Noble at a Route One shopping center and a small used book store in Princeton, but for the time being downtown book browsers have to content themselves with the U-Store. And so far we haven’t found a restaurant that suits us as well as Cozy Noodle, or Chipotle, or Blind Faith.

The backlog of linkable tabs in my browser and newsreader (I’ve converted to Vienna, which works very nicely, thank you very much, and is free-as-in-beer) obliges me to point of several of these by title.

First, we’re enjoying a Get Smart retrospective around Templeton Palace, and I noticed a few days ago that the Chief and Max outdo the Bush regime by invoking a magenta alert. Since the present Executive Branch seems committed to repeating history as farce, we ought probably all to acquaint ourselves with the significance of a Magenta Alert, and other sooper-hi-security designations.

Second, Jeff Sandquist narrated a way to synchronize your Twitter and Facebook status messages. I don’t know if this still works, but I’m about to try it.

Third, Fred Sanders points to the connection of Homer’s orality (or not) to bluegrass music.

Fourth, Judith pointed me to a one-page survey of semiotics.

Fifth, Jay Rosen summarizes Charlie Savage’s reporting on the expansion of executive power under the Bush regime.

Sixth, Boing Boing points to a display of postcards from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France illustrating in 1910 what the artist thought the year 2000 would be like.

And this actually is important — Bob Carlton urges everyone to make a real contribution toward bringing slavery to an end.

This year’s Type Director’s Club prize-winning faces have been announced. I admire them all as artistic achievements, but none captivates me. My favorites here include Darden’s Corundum and his Untitled face. Carl Crossgrove’s Beorcana impresses me, too. I’d be more delighted at seeing Greek glyphs in the winning typeface Arno if I actually liked the letters (the debacle with the typeface for UBS4 — I’m not acquainted with anyone who likes the type in UBS4 as much as in previous or alternate Greek Testaments; one Amazon reviewer describes it as “a repellently ugly font that has not much resemblance to any font with which a quality edition of a Greek text has ever been published before”) heightened my sensitivity to unsatisfactory Greek type). Palatino Sans works well as sibling to its serif antecedent.

But how long before Peanut follows Papyrus down the precipitous road to overuse and abuse?

My Bluetooth cordless mouse has started hyperactively sending a double-click signal to my MacBook Pro whenever I single-click with the left button. Does this sound familiar/intelligible to anyone? I tried adjusting the sensitivity of the control panel, but that didn’t help. . . .

If only in our dreams.

The Not Safe For Delicate Viewers story that follows is not for everyone — in fact, if you aren’t positively motivated to click there right away when I describe the story, you should probably avoid it — but the saga of Jason Mewes getting clean from addictions to heroin, oxycontin, alcohol, cocaine, and practically any other substance you can imagine occupies the following nine links (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9). We can’t say, “finally getting clean”; he hasn’t lived that long yet. But at least it seems as though he’s not addicted right now, and that’s a big deal. If it doesn’t sound as though he’s attained the moral stature of a saint, at least he looks pretty good.

It’s repulsive and repetitive: that’s a large part of the point of telling about addiction.

I woke up this morning, stretched, twisted my arms around a wee bit, checked to make sure that everything was pretty much in working order. (It seems so to be.) I don’t take that for granted; whereas for a long time, I treated my body rather the way I treat cars (fill it with fuel when it needs it, take it in for repairs when it doesn’t want to go, figure that as long as it’s rolling forward it’s in fine condition), I’ve grown more acutely aware of the value of preventative maintenance. Not, however, without some rips and tears and creaks and sparks. But that’s to be expected: today I’m fifty years old.

That’s more than a great many people are afforded, even in the medically-advanced cultures of Europe and North America. Each day is a gift, but every morning that gift becomes a more rare and precious — and weighty — responsibility. Over the decades I’ve gotten some things right, many things wrong, and fallen far short of what a more disciplined, focused person might have done with my resources. Alas, the insight of fifty years can’t ensure that I’ll bear down harder and focus more intently with the days still afforded me.

So when a flock of generous and dear friends, most of whom have never shared physical proximity to me, wish me a happy birthday and say kind things about me, I shuffle my digital feet and gaze off into space, I blink my eyes a bit and squeeze them closed; I give thanks for all the good news they’ve shared with me, and I ache for the hard times they’ve trusted me to go through beside them, and I hope and pray for better days all around. Though much of what I’ve been mulling over with regard to digital technology and religion has struck a cautious note, I most nonetheless recognize that these friendships have begun and grown and borne significant fruit in the digital medium (with apologies to Doc, who (I think) disapproves of using “medium” to characterize digital communication technologies). My mom and dad, my sister and Margaret’s family and Si and some of my oldest, closest friends all emailed birthday greetings. I’ve met Frank and Jeneane and Gary and Joey and David in physical space (not yet Tom or Mike or Euan), but who we are together derives much more from the colorful page designs and compelling, or casual, or comical, or cutting, or comforting, or critical, or sometimes even contemptuous words by means of which we communicate.

Their affection and generosity demonstrate so much of what’s exquisite about this risky business of reaching out into the digitally-potentiated dimension of our lives: sometimes we touch.

I can’t really believe that anyone who’s acquainted with Lord of the Rings, and has role-played a fantasy adventure — as, for example, Dungeons and Dragons — hasn’t already seen “The DM of the Rings,” a comic made from stills of the LoTR movie series, with dialogue based on the conceit that these are players in an RPG. In case I’m wrong, though, I invite you to look it over; it certainly brings back memories of my days playing, and DM-ing, fantasy RPG campaigns.

Yesterday I broke the news to Margaret that Madeleine L’Engle had died. We had read many of her novels (Margaret more than I), and we had been part of her receiving an honorary degree from Berkeley Divinity School at Yale, where Margaret was working as the Dean’s secretary (back in the days that was called “secretary” and not one of the precisely descriptive titles now in use) (or perhaps, “secretary” accurately described that work once upon a time, before that title evolved to connote “stenographer” or “attractive living ornament for executive’s antechamber”).

When Ms. L’Engle came to Berkeley to receive the degree, she generously autographed Margaret’s worn copy of A Wrinkle In Time, inscribing it to Margaret and “to the one within,” indicating Nate (the unlinkable) who at that time was making his presence in utero increasingly obvious. Nate has returned the favor by reading L’Engle’s books repeatedly, most recently this past summer.

We give thanks for this extraordinarily alert and articulate story-teller, for her love and faith, for her wit and grace, and we pray for her and for her family. Ora pro nobis, Sancta Magdalena.

First, Pippa rediscovered the William Steig book C D B at the library yesterday.

And I discovered (through Typophile.com) this Italian cartoon, apparently from 1958, in which the animated speaker’s mouth forms the letters of the word he is speaking.

I’m turning now to writing a chapter for a college-level introductory textbook on religion. My chapter raises issues pertaining to “Technology and Religion.” I’m working with a swarm of ideas; I raise the topic here since readers of this blog include some who know more than I about both topics and many who know more than I about one or the other — I’m very interested in feedback.

I plan to point out that the present pace of technological innovation heightens our awareness of technology’s role in life — hence all the more acutely, its role in religious life, which genreally tends toward the traditional or the timeless — cultures have been dealing with technological change all along. Religions have been evaluating technologies for their spiritual implications for ages, and have simultaneously been devising specifically religious technologies. (Two cases in point: question of musical instruments in Christian worship, and role of prayer wheels in Tibetan Buddhism. More examples would vastly enrich the chapter, which will otherwise follow my idiosyncratic tendency to drift toward abstraction and theory.)

Other points I’ll try to work in:

• With specific reference to digital technology, if “code is law” (Lessig, citing William Mitchell), what account does one offer of spiritual “freedom”? (Does that make hackers into digital apostles?)
• Might technology reflect a sort of practical theology of mechanical culture?
• To the extent that technology entails a reallocation of power, to what extent is that reallocation consensual and benign, to what extent is it coercive and destructive?
• How do intuitions about the nature of the the self/soul intersect with technological prostheses? When I drive, I sense the car to be a semi-sensate extension of my being; many of us refer to our computers as “outboard brains,” and the feeling of devastating loss when a hard drive fails or a computer is stolen bespeak a more powerful connection than solely that to lost property.
• Many religious questions involve divergent assessments of material and non-material realities (along with divergent means of distinguishing them, etc.). Can we draw any conclusions relative to religious expressions that affirm the goodness of material creation and their assessments of technology, or religious expressions that deny the goodness of material creation and their assessments of technology?
• To the extent that technology involves amplifying convenience or comfort (hence removes its users from the labors attendant upon obtaining, producing, maintaining objects of our attention), does technology then constitute an interruption of our relation to our environment (and is that a bad thing)?
• What is the relation of religious expressions mediated by digital technology — say, in a “virtual” environemnt — to religious expressions in a physical environment, and on what basis does one make that evaluation?

I’m sure there’s more that ’s not occurring to me at the moment, and I don’t know how the chapter will flow, but these are the points that press on my authorial awareness this morning.

(Yes, I’ll make some bibliographic suggestions, including Heidegger’s “Question Concerning Technology,” Ray Kurzweil’s Age of Spiritual Machines, Albert Borgmann’s Power Failure. . . . Others?)
Continue reading “Questions Concerning Technology (And Religion)”

There are important topics rumbling around Blogaria — nuclear missile surprises, terrorist arrests, Tim Burke’s post “Angry at Academe” (with The Little Professor’s codicil about “Immobility”) — but let’s descend to the muck of consumer indulgence: what about the new iPods?

By and large, Apple seems to be developing the product lines in telligible ways. I don’t recoil in horror at the wide-body Nanos, since they come with video capability. $200 for 8GB and the capacity to watch The Office (oops, no NBC series) LOST on a two-inch screen seems fair, though a mild bump in storage would have been nice. The storage/screen combination for the iPod Classic sound plausible. The lure of a portable 160 GB, or even an 80GB hard drive that plays tunes and video will be hard for some folks to resist. Lower-priced iPhones make sense to me, and should accelerate the market for that device. Heck, I’m doing the math on our Princeton landline and wondering whether we might not be better off in the long run if we got an iPhone and a pay-as-you-go option from the traitor-to-civil-rights AT&T. At the end of a year with a landline we’re out $300 plus miscellaneous per-call charges, with nothing else to show for it; after a year with an iPhone, we’d be out $400 plus miscellaneous per-call charges, but we’d have a portable wifi-enabled phone/camera/video/audio player.

The spotlight gadget yesterday, though, was the iPod Touch, the iPhone without phone that we had been wondering about since the iPhone was introduced. Only it’s not exactly iPhone sans-a-phone; it’s iPhone sans phone, camera, Bluetooth, and various other bells and whistles (which only add $100, plus activation and call charges, to the “iPod Touch” price). It’s clearly the hottest item in the line, but it’s harder for me to get excited about it without either the non-phone extras or more storage (either would have amped up the value proposition for this device).

They’re all impressive gadgets for entertainment, and my 2G iPod is beginning to show signs of age, so I’m keeping a close eye on them. But no single contender separated itself from the pack this time.