Month: April 2009

The wind bore whispers of a job possibility yesterday. It’s only a faint possibility, but that’s still a lot more possible than the “nothing doing” situation I was facing before. I’ve sent in a c.v., and I’m waiting out the rest.
 
Friend and former colleague Brian Blount came to Duke today, to give the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture. It was great to see him, he gave me an old-fashioned shout-out at the beginning of the lecture (we may all be thankful that he didn’t describe the occasion when, after his having given a glittering, animation-laden PowerPoint lecture, I followed him by noting that without any digital technology, all I could do to enhance my lecture was to dance, which I did for twenty seconds or so to general mirth). Quite apart from his acknowledging my presence, the lecture was terrific.
 
The weather turned cold, which intensifies my conviction that getting healthy by exercising more is a gravely problematic idea. The only thing that would persuade me to keep exercising daily is my awareness that I’ll have to do it sometime anyway, and waiting any longer will only make it harder.
 
Oh, and the Orioles are in first place!

Kate writes out [now taken down — see here] her discomfort with the increasing frequency with which Christians set up and proceed to “enact” seders. I’m with her on this (with certain reservations), though with different emphases and concerns; Christians just setting up and observing a seder feels every bit as creepy to me as would any non-Christians saying the words and performing the actions of the Eucharist — it’s a mode of ritual tourism, and if someone asks me about it, I firmly discourage them.
 
Answer number one: I except from my disapprobation the many people I know for whom Judaism constitutes a defining element in their identity, even though they now adhere to faith in Jesus. None of these is a Messianic Jew in the sense of “I converted and my Jewish friends and relations should, too”; all of the folks I have in mind approached Jesus in a way similar to the first generation of Jewish Christians, recognizing in Jesus an articulation of what they cherish about their heritage and identity as Jews (pardon me for speaking for y’all in theological ventriloquism; I’m going by what I’ve heard and observed, and first-person testimony would be more to the point, but this is my blog, so I’m doing my best). I do know people who have emphatically converted from Judaism to Christianity; they are not, as best I know, inclined to perpetuate their observance of Passover. Anyway, though, I’m not troubled by people observing a seder as one of several expressions of a living Judaic identity within Christian faith. I respectfully acknowledge my Jewish friends’ prerogative to declare that these are not truly Jews, that they have separated themselves from their heritage, but that’s not a call for me to make. From where I sit, this looks legit; your mileage will in all likelihood vary.
 
Second, I don’t meet many Christians who imitate a seder in order to experience what Jesus did. In fact, I don’t remember ever having been told that that was someone’s motivation. Overwhelmingly more often, I have been confronted with people who could not imagine why they might not do such a thing. They adhere to a deracinated spirituality that regards anything that a “religious” person does as fair game for appropriation, since every path leads to the same goal, all are equally valid, blah blah blah. I don’t know what to say about this except that I can’t offer a charitable account of how such a direly wrong-headed trivialization has attained so predominant a cultural ascendancy. Rather than blame-shift to other folks, I’ll simply say that such an attitude within the Episcopal Church bespeaks the erosion of our ministries of education and deliberation. If there are profound, theologically-rich explanations of why seders should be OK for Gentile Christians, they have not been called to my attention.
 
Third, I do see a value for Christians to learn more about Judaism from Jews (from sympathetic Gentiles where that’s needed, as some White folks teach African-American history and criticism). I whole-heartedly affirm their participation in seders on that basis, as invited guests of Jewish hosts. I’ll also reserve a space for deliberate simulation for strictly educational purposes, more comparable to stage performance or informal walk-through; these could be badly done, of course, but I think they fall under a different category.
 
Fourth, whenever Christians participate in such an observance, they should undertake concomitant soul-searching about the power dynamics and cultural politics to which Kate so forcefully points. Christian theological bigotry has built a system within which Judaism persistently figures as an exotically misguided Other, even when Christian-dominated cultures offer (sometimes “liberal-like-us,” sometimes “traditional-like-Others-should-be”) “good Jews” a share of approbation. The U.S. has elected an African-American president, and increasingly relegates racist talk to the deprecated outworlds of uncivilized discourse — but anti-Judaic prejudice persists and runs deep (always complicated by political considerations involving the state of Israel, a state whose existence was catalyzed by Western willingness to allow anti-Judaism to run rampant — so Christians can’t glibly slough off their complicity even in policies they may deplore).

I took some time this afternoon to photograph and post on the Fountain Pen Network another assortment of pens for sale, and one has already sold. If there were a decent profit in all this, I might make my living next year as an itinerant pen refurbisher and salesman.

Lectures on YouTube and iTunes are like stageplays on film. Teachers who approach online education solely, even primarily, on models provided by the classroom of the degree-granting institution do not understand the medium, and the energy they divert from a more fitting apprehension of the medium ill serves both their students and their colleagues.

Playing History: I don’t see the games I’m looking for [yet], but I’m very glad to see historical simulation games making their presence known online.
 
Online education — on the right track, absolutely. I’m putting Alex Reid on my list of “people it would be cool to be on a faculty with.”
 
Ivan Illich, The Church, Change and Development: free e-book. Alas, it’s a compilation of scanned pages, but it’s free. When I get that munificent “Show us your big vision in practice” grant, I’ll see about typeset pages for work such as this.
 
“Reading Marx’s Capital” with David Harvey — online video. Timely, eh?

It’s been a year (plus two days, I was stalling) since my dad died. It has been a hard year, in various ways; although some of that hardness started before Dad died, the hour that we spent together in a hospital room in Pittsburgh marks a focal point for the early stages of hard. It’s not yet clear when we’ll reach the landmark for the later stages. Dad’s instructing me in literature, in comedy, in the baneful manifestations of racial injustice, and in steadfastness all form a subtext to what I recognized and what I wrote a few days ago.
 
Part of what was great about F2C this year was nobody dying; truly, one element of my participation involved wanting to sit through the whole thing without calamity touching my family — not rational, but a healing step anyway. Now, we just have to keeping pressing on till we pass from under the clouds of our several other challenges.

As I dauntlessly press my case for a different way to think about interpretation (“different,” that is, from what prevails in the theological academy, though also different from prevailing culture) I keep running into examples of my problem outside the sphere in which I primarily work. The umbrella characterization of my argument can be oversimplified as, “People mistakenly construe the trope of ‘interpretation as deciphering’ as a definition of interpretation; hence, they import aspects of “deciphering” into interpretation in ways that don’t impede ordinary casual conversation, but that generate significant problems when they’re inflated into ‘given,’ ‘natural’ elements of communication.” This morning on the shuttle bus, I connected this reflex with the mantis, the Delphic prophet(ess) whose obscure utterances required the hermeneutic intervention of the priests. In the economy of mantic communication, everything has a “real meaning” that differs from its apparent meaning; and knowledge of real meanings belongs to an assortment of anointed interpretive guilds, from biblical scholars to psychoanalysts (I was listening to a lecture on Freud at the time) to conspiracy theorists to illuminated New Age cognoscenti, ad infinitum.
 
So “mantic economy” works for the ideology I resist. For the alternative — that there are no “real” meanings in the mantic sense, but only more or less satisfactory ways of integrating utterances (and other, non-deliberate phenomena) with the vast array of contexts we bring to our own efforts to make sense of life — this alternative doesn’t bring to mind a snappy alternative to “mantic.” So I’m casting about for a label, one that doesn’t immediately imply self-congratulation or grandiosity.

News organizations rarely cover the theological conferences I attend, and even my tech conferences usually get only a passing glance from the media (We Magazine excepted).But for good reason, some media outlets have paid attention to the Freedom To Connect conference this year.
 

 
This was a good, different year for F2C. The conference was more confident; the change in political administrations, the provision for support for broadband connectivity in the stimulus package, and success stories in Lafayette, Louisiana and in Glasgow, Kentucky all buoyed the spirits of the conference’s advocates for extending high-speed access to the internet. A greater proportion of attendees wore suits, and the proportion wearing geek couture was lower — too bad, in many ways, but a sign of a kind of progress. The conference connectivity was superb, powered by a new fiber optic connection at the venue. The John Jorgenson Quintet impressed everyone with brilliant gypsy jazz. The conference went marvelously. Years from now, I may be telling the holographic projections of my great-grandchildren that I was there.
 

 
Among all the exciting opportunities, swinging chords, and hot debates over fiber vs. wireless and public vs. private financing models, cane New York Times columnist and high-profile author Thomas Friedman. Friedman addressed the conference with what seemed to be a talking-points version of his latest book; he sometimes lapsed into talking down to one of the most technically- and scientifically-savvy audiences around (presumably, at points when his book simplifies concepts for easier reading). Much as I sympathize with Friedman’s urgent warning that catastrophic climate change will not wait around for us humans, I was unimpressed with his address more generally. And he lost significant marks when conference organizer relayed to Friedman a challenge from the projection screen’s chat channel, and Friedman first indicated his intent to not answer, then suggested that his questioner “be fruitful and multiply” (but not in those words, as Woody Allen said) .
 

 
That didn’t set well with the audience, and much back-and-forth has ensued. Should a prominent figure such as Friedman have been challenged at all? Should he be excused his profanity? Should the audience just chill out?
 

 
Dan Gillmor, who’ll be visiting Duke soon, speaks about the event from a long career in journalism. His conclusion sounds wise to me: “Saying ‘F*** y**’ didn’t make him more authoritative. It diminished him.”