Month: February 2012

Jeph Jacques — a terrific comics writer/artist, one-man band, and thoughtful person — has once again run into the uncanny valley of unintended consequences, where what you write (draw, sing, sculpt, design, whatever) engenders responses wildly different from what you expected. Actually, to be more precise, this time he has caught himself at the edge of that valley and changed direction. This time, a space station’s AI system harassed one of the staff (bear with us on this, it’s coherent with the rest of the comic; here’s the original offense) and offered her roughly $5 million as restitution.

But the more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I got with that idea. Station’s offer of the shares was made entirely with good intentions on his part, but Potter accepting them might send the wrong message. That you can simply buy your way out of trouble if you’ve got the means, or that money is an acceptable substitute for contrition.

His change of direction may have been prompted, to some extent, by his experience on which I commented two years ago, when a polyamorous character expressed a moment of wistfulness about the [then] stable relationship between two other characters. Then, Jeph’s polyamorous readers lit into him for implying that polyamory wasn’t an ultimately fulfilling way of life, which — as Jeph notes — he had neither intended nor even said. (By the way, I’m once again not tackling the moral-theological problems here, just the hermeneutics of expression and intention.)

 
So this time, Jeph stopped before he wrote himself into the situation of appearing to support the notion that a sumptuous payoff was adequate recompense for harassment. And in his Tumblr blog, he wrote

You as an author have control over the intent of your work, but you do not have control over how other people will interpret it. And if someone’s interpretation of your work differs from your intent, while you can defend your intent, it does not necessarily render their interpretation invalid.

Jeph’s so on target here that I want to applaud him digitally (isn’t all applause ‘digital’, in the sense that you do it with your fingers?) — he doesn’t shift blame onto his readers, and he offers only qualified self-justification. And yet, there’s still something missing. The notion of control obtrudes awkwardly here at both ends of the communicative interaction. I’m not convinced that writers (artists, et al., or even anyone at all) actually do have control over their intentions; isn’t that part of what psychology and related sciences remind us? We do stuff; we intend stuff; but only relatively rarely do we formulate a coherent intention and deliberately, critically implement it in a careful way. Jeph’s actions relative to this strip are the exception, rather than the rule. By the same token, it’s more than a little odd to think that someone might control someone else’s interpretation. When has this ever happened?
 
We’ve developed and propagated a way of thinking about interpretation that fosters the illusory notion that ‘control’ is even a relevant consideration. Rather than beginning with our observable, universal, demonstrable lack of control as a datum, hermeneutics has begun by taking the instances of satisfactory communication and supposed that they constitute a norm that provides a warrant, an intrinsic ethical criterion, by which to evaluate interpretations. And since we can’t control our intentions in the first place, and since a hermeneutics of success ignores the significance of countervailing evidence, the discourse of hermeneutics continues to generate anomalies and puzzles about ‘misinterpretation’ and ‘validity’ (‘it does not necessarily render their interpretation invalid’). No: start with lack of control and unsatisfactory communication, account for them, and then work toward how we manage so often to get communication more or less right.
 
Jeph is a terrific comics artist (‘comicist’?) and a mensch; he’s thoughtful, alert, and willing to face criticism, and he’s way more on top of this pivotal hermeneutical issue than the vast preponderance of we biblical scholars are.
 

The news that broke a few days ago that now science reveals that wealthy and powerful people are more likely to lie, steal, cheat, and generally disregard the norms that apply to mere humans seems to have surprised some readers. They evidently have forgotten The Philadelphia Story, one of the sources of formation for our household. (We endeavoured to counteract the message that paternal adultery improper flirtation was justified because of the faults of mother and elder daughter.)
 
Evidently people haven’t been paying attention to the daily news, to the Con-Dem coalition’s agenda, to the protests about the results of the 2008 ‘World Throws Boatloads Of Money At Losing Gamblers’ crisis, the congressional follies and the Republican primaries… the list could go on indefinitely. So to underscore the message, Scotland Yard loaned a retired police horse to underprivileged Rebekah Brooks, perhaps so that she could unwind between sessions of her trial for phone hacking.
 
I think people are too quick to pick on the felonious, unscrupulous, mendacious, cruel-hearted members of the upper class. They have feelings, too. Just don’t expect those feelings to extend to pretty much anyone but themselves.
 
(Can you tell I’ve been writing a commentary on the Epistle of James?)
 

I’ve been playing with Pinwheel this week, and it promises to be very interesting. The premise is that users leave digital notes relative to locations through a web interface (for now; mobile options are in the works) — then other users, in turn, can find these notes and benefit from their colleagues’ wisdom, or nostalgia, or photographic capabilities, or knowledge of history, or poetry, or whatever else. I’ve been concentrating on leaving notes in Glasgow’s West End, but I’ve dropped some in places I’ve lived before.
 
I invited a few people who have so far left (count ’em) zero notes among them, no doubt for good and important reasons. If I get more invites, I’ll pass them along to interested friends, but please do actually use the service if you enlist.
 

Dear Lazy Web,
 
On the train yesterday, reading The Multiplayer Classroom, I was thinking about pedagogical problems, problems that could be resolved using lower-tech solutions than arming a classroom full of students with individual clickers. I know I’d really like a way to leverage students’ laptops (many fewer in UK classrooms than in US classrooms, I notice) or smartphones to make possible a sort of University Quiz team question-answering exercise.
 
So this is my Lazyweb request: a web page to which a set number of entrants could log in, which would register the order in which those entrants clicked in response to a question. That is, at the beginning of class, three (or seven) team captains (or individual quiz players) would log in to aforesaid page. The page would display the names of each entrant, provide a button for them to click, and would have a ‘clear’ button for the referee to restart the question process. At the beginning of a question round, the referee would read* a question, and the page would note which team/entrant clicked their button first (and, ideally, which second, third, and so on — but the key would be registering the first).
 
One could envision lots of bells and whistles†, but at its heart, this would provide an indisputable arbiter of who clicked first, and that’s what I’m looking for. Lazyweb, are you listening?
 

---

 
* Clearly it would be possible, in a more advanced version (see below) to do the whole thing online, with the referee typing the question gradually into a chat box, or the interface revealing the question gradually — but those are the ornate icing on the very basic cake I’m wishing for.
 
† As above, a completely online interface would be one bell or whistle; point totals would be another, sound effects to go with the first-click, the imagination devises multitudes of desiderata. But first things first: lock-in for first click. That is all.
 

This will get long, so I’ll put most of the matter below the fold. The story is that the Doctrine Committee of the Scottish Episcopal Church keeps its members from idleness by assigning them the annual task of producing a small tract called The Grosvenor Essay on a particular topic. A year ago, it was ‘Incarnation’; the one in preparation concerns ‘Marriage’ (we’ve had some quibbles about the title, whether it concludes ‘and Human Relationships’ or ‘and Same-Sex Relationships’ or ‘and Human Intimacy’ or, in a left-field suggestion, “and Salacious Photos of George Newlands’). The one on which we’re working right now concerns the spiritual preparation for death — the Ars Moriendi. This is, as I’ve said to many, many classrooms and naves full of people, a very good thing, and I’m happy to be participating.
 
Among my other various obligations, including clearing up tax returns, finishing the notorious James commentary, and watching back episodes of the Spooks BBC series with Margaret, the lot fell on me to prepare the biblical material on death and preparation for death. For today’s meeting, I managed to cobble together a synthesised summary of the Old Testament’s handling of the topic of death; I’ll have to revisit the various suicides in the OT, since part of our work will involve addressing the Scottish Parliament’s consideration of a bill permitting assisted suicide/assisted dying, and I need both to report on the New Testament and offer an overview of the whole Bible on ars moriendi. Since what I write will be mashed up and woven into the community property of the Grosvenor Essay, I figured I would post today’s draft here, where it can attract the corrections and suggestions of careful readers, and where I won’t lose it on my hard drive.
 
Continue reading “On Death, Part 1”

I’m copy-and-pasting the posts from 2002 and 2003 into my WordPress database, as I think I’ve said before. It’s interesting to observe what blogging was like back then, how long some of us have been talking toeach other (and observing when someone new enters the conversation), noting that Josiah blogged from Sri Lanka when he went there (wish I could recover those posts, but the earliest I can bring back are from the time he returned to the States), and generally getting a fresh view of things we said yesterday.
 
If you’re curious, you can follow the links from down at the bottom of the archive list, as they grow longer; or if you subscribe to the RSS feed, those posts will probably just pop up as they’re entered. Those were the days….
 

Yesterday I crossed paths with Radio Mick Danger, a site that streams spoken-word material — mostly old radio programs, especially crime drama, but also some classic radio comedy from Burns & Allen and readings of C.S. Lewis’s theological writings. Share and enjoy!
 

As I was walking to the Doctrine Committee meeting in Edinburgh this morning, I was startled to see this:
 

 
It is not, as it seemed to me to be, a person pushing her head through a window. As it turns out, she was simply leaning over to speak into her phone, and the curve of her shoulders matched the cracks in the window. I hesitated to take the photo for a moment, but the Weegee in me couldn’t resist.
 

Among the heaps of roses and chocolates, the fizz and finery, Tim O’Reilly’s Tools of Change conference yesterday brought to the world’s attention two very intriguing ventures in e-publishing applications. The first is Inkling, specifically oriented toward constructing iPad textbooks. It looks powerful, fascinating, shiny, and very strongly oriented toward non-verbal instruction — indeed, their publicity suggests that iBooks Author is a good thing, a great app, but not sufficiently oriented toward the ‘born digital’ approach to textbook construction that Inkling aims at. They have an impressive partner — O’Reilly Media — and if the project looks good to Tim O’Reilly, only a very unwise person would bet against it. I signed up for a look at the beta, but they’re screening beta-testers with a view to selecting people who will actually be producing their kind of textbook, so I don’t count on seeing Inkling at work until it’s open for all.
 
[Side note: Among the patrons who might back the kind of disruptive innovation that I yearn for in academic theological publishing, wouldn’t Tim O’Reilly be a natural? When I gave my pitch for this at Ars Electronica 2008 I addressed my plea to (the absent) George Soros, Pierre Omidyar, and Bill Gates, but Tim O’Reilly would be perfect.]
 
The other app unveiled yesterday was Booktype, a comprehensive OS package for authoring, collaborating, editing, and publishing ebooks to a variety of platforms. It’s free, it looks very useable, it handles a number of the vital aspects of a project like the F/OS/OT/NT/T, its OS ethos complements that of the textbook project. Booktype seems to be structurally open for multimedia elements, but it’s much more directly focused on verbal media. Suw has looked it over, and she thinks it’s promising. I’m actually eager to set up an installation and kick its tyres.
 
I hope both Inkling and Booktype flourish — that would betoken a strong environment for digital publishing across the board. Since Booktype is available now, and is open source, and is oriented toward distributed collaborative projects, I’d favour it for the FOSOTNTT — pending, of course, consensus from colleagues.
 

The interwebs were a-buzzing last week when the viral dream team of cats, parasites, and mind control converged in The Atlantic’s story about Czech biologist Jaroslav Flegr and his research into toxoplasmosis. Margaret and I read the column, were duly appreciative, and noted that we weren’t cat people ourselves (my family, while I was growing up, had one cat, Tina Mina, for a few years) so the odds of our having toxo were somewhat diminished.
 
This morning, Stuart David’s song ‘The Spider Man’ came up on my iTunes random shuffle; he used to play bass for Belle and Sebastian, and has for a while been recording under the band name Looper. ‘The Spider Man’ was on Looper’s first EP (which you can now download for free!); it caught my attention because the song begins by narrating the singer’s walk home

Straight up University Avenue, then right on Byres Road.
And at the top I turn onto Observatory, then down the lane and home.
I don’t even think about it anymore,
I just start walking and twenty minutes later I’ll find myself there.

which closely parallels our own walk back to our flat at the end of the day (David presumably envisions the subject of the song as either a student or staff member at the University of Glasgow). So that delighted me; if I knew what David looked like, I might give him a ‘Heya’ when our paths cross. (We may have another indirect connection, since I’m busily vying for the title of Mayor of Dowanhill Park with Gavin Dunbar, the bass player of Camera Obscura, one of my favourite Scottish bands — but I don’t know if the two West End bass players are acquainted.)
 
‘The Spider Man’ then goes on to note that ‘A few nights ago I went into Barrets [a Byres Road stationers, where Margaret and I also shop] to buy the newspaper I always buy’, but he discovers that instead he has bought a science magazine that includes a feature about Polysphincta gutfreundi, the wasp whose larvae inhabit and ‘possess’ the orb spiders in which they gestate — the same wasp-and-spider to which The Atlantic compares T. gondii.
 
I’m not sure that all means anything particular, but the earworm in my brain instructed me to post about it.
 

What do people mean by ‘faith’? The question came home to me over the past few days, overhearing (‘over-reading’?) conversations online, reading the Bible, thinking about church life and what we do about it. I thought of some rough, schematic answers; they betray my intellectual ancestry, since they correspond closely to what George Lindbeck wrote about in The Nature of Doctrine. That doesn’t make me feel bad, since I don’t imagine myself to be as great a theologian as Lindbeck (who lived just a few houses down from my grandmother — and across from Aunt Isabel — on Autumn St).
 
Allowing lots and lots of room for enhancement (and again, figuratively footnoting Lindbeck) — I jotted down in my notebook three complexions of faith. The first identifies faith with certainty about a set of assertions about the nature of things, the existence and character of God, the role of Jesus Christ, and our relation to all of the above. This way of thinking about faith brings the advantage of clarity and force, though it brings also the uncomfortable drawback that almost anything a Christian can think of to affirm about God is non-demonstrable at best and outright outlandishly unlikely most of the time. (By ‘unlikely’, I simply mean that if these assertions were made about any other being, or any other state of affairs, most of us would probably say ‘You’ve gotta be kidding!’) This interpretation of faith (related to Lindbeck’s description of ‘doctrine’ as propositional) puts people in the position of determining that they know things to be true on the basis of equivocal evidence, evidence that doesn’t convince a very great proportion of those who consider it. It clearly connects firmly with common-sense understandings of ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’, although it seems somewhat oddly disconsonant with New Testament characterisations of faith as counter-intuitive. Does one’s faith assert the requisite stuff about God because one has sufficient appropriate epistemological warrants? If so, why don’t more people (even more Christians) do the same? The more special one makes knowledge of Christian truth to distinguish Christian faith from faith in mathematical equations or scientific explanations, the less it holds up in company with its more robust would-be companions. Eventually, one is no longer talking about ‘knowing’ or ‘truth’ in their ordinary senses at all; but the common-sensical affirmations of theological truth constitute one of knowledge-faith’s great discursive strengths.
 
Second, people use ‘faith’ in the sense of an arational visceral certainty of something: a feeling of certain confidence that something is true, without regard to the plausibility of the truth-claim at all (Lindbeck labels the comparable doctrinal position as ‘experiential-expressive’). ‘I know in my heart’, one might say, or one might claim an uninterrogated special mystical knowledge. Faith, in this sense, is certainty in the face of facts and logic. This feeling is requisite for salvation, and if one feels something other (something less) than warm-hearted loving elation about God, Jesus, and various doctrinal points, one’s faith is imperilled. This way of thinking about faith rightly declines to categorise ‘faith’ as congruent with other sorts of knowledge — ‘things that cannot be otherwise’ — but locates [the feeling of] faith problematically as independent of and superior to any sort of deliberative or factual knowledge. And if one encounters challenges to the outlook that this brand of faith promotes, or if one experiences depression, has “faith” itself been impaired, or lost?
 
When I consider ‘faith’ as part of my ministries of teaching and priesthood, and as part of my daily life, I mean something rather different (and I’m not quite sure that Lindbeck’s ‘cultural-linguistic’ category works well here). ‘Faith’, so far as I can see, entails a lived pattern of testimony in word and deed, an orientation, that points toward a telos which renders this way intelligible. It’s a virtue (in the theological sense), a habituated disposition. Faith involves knowledge inasmuch as it is not just any way; it points not toward the latest fad in ‘what the church must be right at this minute to fill it with lots of people whose identities are bound up in just-this-minute behaviour’ nor toward the most recent issue of Nature, nor toward the Guardian nor the Daily Mail (nor the New York Times nor Fox News). The telos of this way can’t be defined by a homogenised “religion’ of all bien-pensant people, but entails a recognisable relation to a particular discourse, a particular practice. This approach involves feelings and intuitions, but they’re checked by traditions, decrees, the logics of doctrinal thinking and convincing rhetoric. They’re tested by the witness of millennia of fellow-travellers, some of whom have shown themselves to be expert navigators of this terrain.
 
While I have no hesitation in relying on the trustworthiness of typical Christian doctrinal and creedal claims, I don’t think it right to stipulate that they must be affirmed in the same way that I affirm that a body near the earth’s surface falling in a vacuum accelerates at 9.8 meters per second per second, or that I went to church this morning, or that I am a fountain pen appreciator. As I said above, most of the teachings to which the Church calls attention are pretty improbable; if I had to compare Galileo’s cosmology or Newton’s mechanics to the Virgin Birth on the terms of ‘how credible these claims are’, I’d put my money on Galileo and Newton every time. That is, after all, at least a part of the point of the Virgin Birth narrative: the church doesn’t bother affirming highly probable things about Jesus, because so few people would bother to doubt them in the first place. But the notion of forcing people to demonstrate their ‘faith’ by pretending that improbabilities don’t exist, or that un-predetermined deliberation partakes of opposition to the truth, seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with loving and serving God, and a great deal to do with organising and imposing human power over others.
 
And I don’t by any means discount feelings as an element of the picture; on the whole, theological affect means a lot to me. I count ‘beauty’ as one of the notes of theological wisdom, and beauty has profound non-cognitive effects on us. Wesley was not wrong to pick up the clue phone at Aldersgate, but he would have been misguided to make his cardiac temperature the sole determinant of theological affirmation (which he didn’t). We can be moved and wrong-headed at the same time, just as we can be certain and wrong at the same time.
 
So when church people start derogating theological teaching, as though all anyone really needs to know about the church and its outworkings was a pocketful of aphorisms about welcoming strangers, being generally nice to others, how woeful sinners are, what the precise words are the utterance of which will launch one from the pit to the pearly gates, or (maybe worst of all) it doesn’t really matter what you believe — when people start suggesting that anyone with no particular understanding of the church’s history, its roots in Scripture, or the complex interlocking balance of theological affirmations, inferences, consequences, and renunciations, should be entrusted with leadership, that’s a bad sign to me. When someone suggests that the church leave off its teaching ministry, that’s a bad sign to me. When someone suggests that the church obscure its particularity in the name of being able to assimilate people who might object to being part of — you know — a Christian body, that’s a bad sign.
 
Let the churches teach, gently but honestly, thoroughly and humbly. Let the churches acknowledge that although some are well-suited to exercise leadership regardless of their theological attainments, it would be unwise to suppose that the general condition of church leadership could be separated from understanding of the subtle, intricate historic way of life that millions have discovered, learned, deepened, refined, and passed along. Let the churches always remember that abstract knowledge about details must be tested against the living activity of the whole Body. Let the (modern) churches restrain the self-despite that tempts them to renounce their own heritage, the wisdom of their forebears. Let us all learn from one another, mull over what is good, and exercise patience and humility in our claims. In faith, for faith.
 

Ages ago, Brooke and Tim and I batted around the idea of a Free (as in beer) Open Source Old Testament/New Testament Textbook, and it strikes me — as iBooks Author and Kickstarter and perhaps the new tool from Sourcefabric (any inside details for us, Suw?) — make the whole project more readily plausible, that it might be time to revisit the notion.
 
When I thought of a revival blog-post, I suspected that I might have not sketched out all details two years ago, but as I reread the post, it looks to me as though it’s all there.

• Agreed terminology/glossary
• Organised by chapter, with minimal dependence on specific sequence
• Commissions for individual chapters to make the v. 1.0 textbook (how much would you reckon would motivate scholarly participants?)
• Open to (non-commissioned) substitute chapters from whomever
• Serious grant/Kickstarter funding for editor to clean up format, mark-up, copyedit, and so on
• Output as PDF, ePub, mobi, HTML, ibooks, maybe other formats
• Free to download, pay for printed copies (and pay for any ibooks version, of course; maybe we can add animations to justify putting it into the Apple iBookstore)
• CC licensed, Attribution/Non-Commercial
• Kickstarter/grant rewards including acknowledgement panel identifying the generous support of donor — ‘The Song of Songs, brought to you by Robert Nesbitt’
• Extensible to include related textbooks — interpretive methods, church history, theology, and so on. At a certain point, the enterprise would roll over to encompass academic publishing in general

Since 2010, Kickstarter has demonstrated its efficacy as a locus for crowdsourcing funding, the tools for ePub authoring are improving, ebooks are more visible as a viable means of publishing, there’s more pressure upon students’ finances, and no one else has done it yet.
 
My top recommendation would be for an interested theological-education foundation (say, Pew or FTE or the Barclay Trust or some other such entity) to support and organise such a thing. In many foundations’ budgets, even a generously-funded project would be a drop in the budgetary bucket. Or we could whip together an editorial team and a budget, and throw it onto Kickstarter. However you slice it, though, the signs of the time are only more auspicious for the FOSOTNTT vision.
 
[Later: I should add that, as I just looked back at my email inbox I realised that what probably triggered this notion was a message from Micah calling my attention to Unglue.it, a different but related sort of endeavour. It looks good within its designated scope (producing CC-licensed digital editions of previously published works), alleviating the problems of curation/selection and of rewarding rights-holders, but I’m intent on a project along the lines I sketch above. Thanks for the pointer, though, Micah!]

I’ve thought about posting a ‘Top X songs/albums of 2011’ entry, but it’s still too soon for me to have perspective on which musical endeavours will continue to impress me, and which will pass away like the flower of the field. Luckily for me, and for us all, the collaborators at Typographico had no such compunctions about identifying favourite new typefaces of 2011, so they compiled a list of ‘Our Favorite Typefaces of 2011’, a feast for the eyes and for the typographic imagination.
 
There are none I dislike (marking a change from years past when one or another edgy, or trendy, or idiosyncratic typeface grated on my sensibilities. I’ve a soft spot for Venetians, so I [particularly like Cala, and grotesks, so I like Supria Sans. The list encompasses numerous ingenious, subtle, versatile, forceful designs, though — OK, I’ll shout-out to Simonson’s Bookmania, too; Simonson is terrific — that the list as a whole shows the wonders that continue to blossom in the fields of typography, sturdy perennials, and I look forward to putting one or two of these into use some fine day.
 

Some video clips delight you, then fade away from popular attention. This morning, Margaret and I were moved to raucous laughter by footage of Japanese officials making sure that their zoo would be safe in case a rogue paper-mâché rhino escaped from its cage:
 

 
(Sorry, I don’t see a way to embed the video).
 
That, in turn, reminded me of the all-time classic fake-animal-news video from a couple of years ago, in which a Cleveland news station demonstrated what it would look like if a black bear meandered the suburbs of their fair city:
 

 
Nothing like getting your day off to a jocular start….
 

I’m giving my lecture on Fun Home again this year, only it’s two lectures this year because my one-lecture stint last year seemed overly compressed. (I know, I’m on study leave, but this is actually sheer pleasure on my part, and it’s stimulating for my imagination of projects that lie ahead.) I went over my Keynote presentation this morning, and it’s pretty good; I think I can reorder it a wee bit, add some parts here and there, and go forward without constructing two whole new lectures. If I can, I’d like to post the lectures here — we’ll see whether this would be too time-consuming, but it’ll be on my mind. At worst, I can plan to post the lecture pair after I finish with James.
 
In the course of taking a quick look at the interwebs for updates on the world of Fun Home, I noticed that Alison Bechdel will publish a book about her mother in May. I almost wish I didn’t know Are You My Mother? was forthcoming; I’ll be awfully impatient, the stakes will be high (can she recapture the density and intensity of Fun Home? Will she amaze her readers with something as different from Fun Home as Fun Home was from whatever we anticipated?). But wait impatiently I will, and maybe next year I’ll have a very different lecture to give!
 

Evidently Apple took my our advice, and rejiggered their EULA to make it clearer: they claim copyright and exclusive sales prerogatives to the iBooks version of your work, not to the writing, photos, or whatever. Nor do they make any claim on your work presented in a format other than the special iBooks format.
 
It’s not as much of a loaf as I’d have liked, but it’s better than it had been in the original state.