Month: March 2012

So, this morning Margaret and I were enjoying our Saturday treat breakfast at Avenue G (baked egg and cheese for her, a scone for me), and I suddenly remembered that I’d had a dream last night about meeting John Darnielle.
 
I told Margaret about it: John was sitting on a highway embankment practising some new material. The embankment was cobblestone, inclining down to a parking lot; I spotted him from the road across the street from the parking lot, and drifted over closer to greet him. He was wearing a jacket with patches of paper affixed to it, with lyrics written on them for songs he was working on (this struck me as impractical — he couldn’t very well read them looking down at them — and not especially snappy-looking, but hey, it’s not as though I’m a fashion hero). After a short while he paused, and I introduced myself: ‘Hi, I’m AKMA, that guy who wrote an article about you, just wanted to thank you for all the great music’, but I sensed that I was beginning to ramble and fawn. I wanted just to shut up, was trying to wind down my monologue, and John evinced a strained patience as two members of his band (no one I recognised, not Peter Hughes nor Yuval Semo nor Jon Wurster) stood and waited. I made a closing joke about not introducing my eighteen-year-old daughter to Wurster, but it wasn’t funny and I was feeling increasingly desperate and stupid. So I woke up.
 
I explained to Margaret that I woke up feeling intensely relieved. I had escaped from the mortifying situation, and it had only been a dream! She laughed and noted that if it had been her dream, she’d have been overshadowed all day by the memory of such intense awkwardness. This difference comes as no surprise to us, nor to any who know us well….
 

Looking back, I fear that I’ve encountered too many church people who are resistant to investing energy in theological education when they’re satisfied with the status quo (when, in other words, most members go along with what the leaders really want them to be doing) — but who develop a greater interest in education when people need to be taught to think what their leaders want them to. Even then, ‘education’ involves mostly just ‘taught what we want them to think’ more than ‘grounded in the historic, doctrinal, Scriptural, enacted life of the church so as to be able to make well-founded discernments on their own’.
 

I’ve been out of Warcraft pretty much since I moved to Scotland; my guild tends to be operate on US-centric time zones (understandably, since that’s where most of the guild lives), and I was less and less captivated by the world of the game. It was getting more like a second job than a continuing adventure, so when my life changed intercontinentally, I just drifted into retirement.
 
A great deal of what frustrated me over the years I was active involved the game designers’ response to keeping the game fresh. The folks at Blizzard introduced new zones (great!) and instances (very great!), and new character classes (meh) and races (meh), and added new levels of achievement (tut tut) and new gear (tut tut). The new classes and races don’t bother me that much, though I’m sure they took mind-boggling numbers of work-hours to develop and balance, work-hours that I’d rather had been spent on world-building and lore. But the really irksome aspect of the ex-pacced (‘expansion pack-ed’) game was the devs’ decision to raise the ceiling on levels, and to accord these new levels greater powers on a scale comparable to the increases at preceding levels.
 
What that meant in practical terms was that good, ordinary players on the terms of the older game could become demigods (on the older game’s terms) just by being good, ordinary players on the ex-pac’s terms. Instead of diminishing the increments of improvement as players ascended the levels — so that there was always an incentive to advance, but a longer, slower curve with smaller incremental improvements — they opted to keep hopping skills and talents up, which made the regions in which players begin and learn their fundamentals an uncanny zone in which the bosses who once had been the biggest, meanest monsters imaginable were easily defeated by small groups of hyper-advanced players (and the new, tougher bosses in the successive ex-pacs were so intensely powerful that they could have wiped out the entire world of the original game).
 
OK, so Blizzard chose another route, they’re introducing Pandarians in the next ex-pac, and maybe it’s great and maybe it isn’t — but I have an idea for an alternative revenue stream for Blizzard.
 
Since they already have invested in and built out a world that has to be playable for beginning characters, why not put up a couple of servers on which the monster/opponent structure is recalibrated to older standards, but with diminishing incremental advances for player levels and equipment? Why not, in other words, rely for allegiance to the game on the game itself, on challenging monsters, new terrains, groups and raids at a consistent level across all zones, and where bosses get more challenging by making them more intelligent rather than more powerful, less predictable rather than more intricately choreographed (and predictable)? I’d think they could make money at it, and at the same time learn about game behaviour and mechanics under this different reward system, and about building more intelligent bosses. That’s my idea for the day; theology will wait for tomorrow.
 

As you may have heard, the Anglican Covenant is, if not technically sunk, at least sliding inexorably below the waterline. If the Church of England will not even enlist for this Covenant, it’s hard to imagine it as an effectual affirmation joining disparate provinces in harmonious communion.
 
I have mixed feelings about this development. Many of my friends count themselves staunch defenders of the covenant, and many as implacable foes. Both assessments offer intelligible reasons for their conclusions. Sentiment doth not cut any ice on this important theological topic, and even if it did, it cuts both ways.
 
Part of my disappointment about the Covenant’s foundering derives from the sense that we all are better servants of the Gospel to the extent that we’re more closely joined with one another. We learn from one another less readily at great distance, and especially when great distances are amplified by hostility. We less fully communicate our vision of a variegated Body of Christ joining different peoples in a faithful, joyous, willing unity if we’re busily suspecting, rejecting, and vilifying one another. We make ourselves less available to the Spirit’s prompting, the more determined we are to prevail over those others.
 
Yet at the same time, the Covenant as it came into being was surely oriented toward being used juridically to separate some from others. If such separation be on the horizon — and in all likelihood it is — let it be straightforward, direct, and explicit, rather than be staged by a process of triangulation that separates us by way of some new-forged fulcrum for levering-out the wrong sorts of people. The Covenant at its best stated what should not (to my mind) be controversially questionable about Anglican identity; but my mind isn’t the issue. The mind of the whole communion, the minds of the distinct provinces that make it up, and ultimately the mind of Christ stand to resolve these stresses, and what seems obvious and unquestionable to me may seem dubious and obscure to an Anglican in New Zealand (or for that matter, to another Scottish Episcopalian). As I’ve said before, if it’s universal, you don’t need to regulate it; if you need to regulate it, it obviously isn’t universal.
 
And I wonder how the Covenant would have looked to various constituencies if the presenting stressor were different — if, say, the Lambeth Conference were trying to define gender equality as intrinsic to Anglican identity (obviously that would be a non-starter, since England isn’t precisely on board there). A juridical unity can be a fine thing when it’s serving ends of which one approves, even as it serves as a bully’s bludgeon when applied against the conscientious determination one’s own favoured position.
 
A great many people have invested a great many days and months on drawing up the Covenant, and many more months and days in defending or opposing it. I pray that in days and months to come, the will of the Anglican Communion to knit more closely together (forestalling future crises such as this, and God willing, making eventual healing more nearly possible) not waver; that the Communion redouble its commitment to mutuality and bearing one another’s burdens; that the Communion structure such ruptures as become inevitable so that we may most easily be restored to unity; and that we free ourselves from shackles of mistrust to love our sisters and brothers, and above all our enemies, in the way that keeps eristic demons at bay, that invites communion of hearts and spirits as well as sacramental communion, and that opens all of our eyes to what we did not soon enough see clearly on our way to the awkward ending of a well-intentioned endeavour to help articulate the tremendous gift of the episcopal tradition.
 

The past week didn’t seethe with provocative, scintillating ideas; nothing cried out at me ‘You’ve got to blog that’ (apart from my sharing a high school alma mater with Wiz Khalifa) (and, PIppa advises me, Mac Miller, who named a recent album after the park just a couple of blocks from Allderdice).
 
I’ve been working on whipping ‘The Strong Right Arm That Holds For Peace’, the talk I gave at the Ekklesia Project Gathering a few years ago (a/k/a ‘the Sapolio talk’, a/k/a ‘the Sacramerica talk’) into a publishable form. It’s an awkward transition, since the original version really was oriented strongly toward that particular audience, and rewriting it for publication involves imagining a different readership — which step is made more complicated because I don’t yet know to which publication I might submit it. But I still like the piece, and it deserves a bit of renovation and publication.
 
I’m eager, though, to get on with my work on ‘codes’, hermeneutics, and Relevance Theory. I have much to read on relevance — made more difficult because I keep forgetting/neglecting to put my reading glasses on, and it’s extremely hard for me to read for steady intervals with my varifocal glasses. And of course, it’s hard to interact with people, computers, and so on with my reading glasses. These are minor distractions, though, and maybe by writing them out here I’ll remind myself to switch glasses more frequently.
 
Meanwhile, Margaret’s getting ready to give her paper at the Society for the Study of Theology meeting in York next week. I’ll be on my own for four days; luckily, I believe that I haven’t lost the resourcefulness built up over the years we spent living apart.
 

I know I haven’t checked in often this week — what can I say? I didn’t have any particular announcements — and this isn’t a deep philosophical musing. But my fellow alumnus of Taylor Allderdice High School Wiz Khalifa, has just released a mixtape named after our alma mater (Official motto: ‘Do Something • Know Something • Be Something’; unfficial motto: ‘Nobody Shakes the Dice’).
 
On that list of noteworthy alumni at the bottom of the Wikipedia page, Evan Wolfson was a friend during high school (he was a year ahead of me; his senior year, he was Secretary-General of Western Pennsylvania Student U.N. while I served as vice-chair of the General Assembly). What Wikipedia doesn’t say is that Evan (along with a number of the rest of us: Betsy Kulamer, Rob Croop, Dave Barbrow, Nina Amenta, Becky Goldburg, David Kalla) was a demon at Password and Diplomacy.
 
Anyway, here’s a shout-out to Wiz Khalifa and to TAHS, to Evan, to Student U.N., and to our alumni friends and colleagues. Allderdice had its rough side (I was hospitalised when an unknown assailant whupped on my face with a tree limb after bowling league one day), but I fell in with a good crowd. If I think back on things in just the right way, the positive side of those years can pretty much block out the (garden-variety) teen high school miseries.
 

OK, Margaret and I listened to this week’s harrowing episode of This American Life, and listened while Mike Daisey doubled down on his lies and misrepresentations. It was a painful experience. But when Ira Glass emphasises that TaL expects journalistic honesty of all its features, we asked one another — does that apply to (for instance) David Sedaris’s stories about his family, too? Or Sarah Vowell’s?
 
It’s not that I suspect that they lie to us — it’s that I don’t care, and I don’t think Ira Glass should care either. Daisey made a miserable mistake in judgment that he was presenting more of a Sedaris/Vowel kind of story, when Glass was warning him that TaL expected him to be presenting a ‘The Giant Pool of Money‘ kind of story.
 
If Ira Glass subjects the amusing-family-narrative stories to scrutiny as close as those reporting on financial misdoings, then I’m intensely impressed. But I don’t think he should bother, and I think we should clarify that we don’t expect him to. When someone (such as Daisey) purports to be reporting, he should be held accountable for that — but we listen to TaL for other kinds of story, too, and that’s OK with me. Mike Daisey was still lying to us, and that’s very, very wrong. But Sarah Vowell can lie to me about being a goth any time.
 

It’s a grey, drizzly day here in Glasgow; we’ve had disappointing news at the University (a treasured colleague will be leaving); we’ve been handling several intercontinental complications with Big Scary Institutions; Margaret’s marking essays; and I’m supposed to be coming up with a sermon for Sunday. Right now, it looks like interpretive dance of the Bronze Serpent. I don’t even feel guilty about not making progress on the sermon, that’s how worn down I feel.
 
On a different topic, does anyone remember the talk I gave years ago for the Ekklesia Project, the talk that involved the first three (of the Ten) Commandments, and Sapolio? In the rush to get articles into print for the Research Excellence Framework, a colleague suggested that I could polish up that piece and publish it. Anyone with a good idea about where it would fit well is encouraged to let me know. If you’re an editor and want it, we can absolutely make a deal.
 

Pippa presented a ‘prototype’ of the work for her senior thesis at Interlochen yesterday. We’ve seen bits and pieces of it before; she was crocheting doilies all summer (the work currently totals 291 doilies), we’ve seen the ‘tree’ on which she’s sitting, and so on. But put all together, it makes a really stunning impression —
 

(Photo credit: Pippa’s friend Christine)

 
(Granted that I do not accord ‘the author’ the defining voice in interpretation, I’m interested to learn what a creator supposes she is doing, so:) She observes that the tree on which the central figure sits is her locus amoenus, which she has ruined, through nostalgia and jealousy, so that it’s preserved, enclosed in a snow-globe, as a frozen memory. She sent along some photos of details of the piece as well (below the fold).
 
Continue reading “‘Elegy for our Locus Amoenus’”

The BBC has moved (and is continuing to move) many of its operations to newly-developed facilities in Salford, outside Manchester. Part of the point seems to involve an effort to devolve the media facilities away from London, so that a more northern perspective may inflect coverage. And, of course, no place is as expensive as London, and the BBC Television facilities in White City may no longer suffice for purpose.
 
Still, I’m going to miss Sian Williams, who will be leaving the BBC Breakfast show, as she declines to uproot her family to move north with the show. She’ll continue on BBC radio, but that’s not the same; watching her roll her eyes at Bill Turnbull, joke with Charlie Stayt, and generally bring grace, maturity, beauty, and wisdom to the broadcast has been one of my satisfactions since I landed here and switched on the telly to find out if anything had happened overnight. I’ll miss her.
 

Suw Charman-Anderson is a champion in every sense of the word — a champion of women’s participation in technology (and founder of Ada Lovelace Day), a champion fictive-geography novella-writer, and just a champion as a human being. She’s Kickstarting the production of her next novella, Queen of the May (‘Every year, faeries steal a human woman to be their Queen. This year, they pick the wrong one’ — I want to do the voiceover for the film adaptation!), and she needs everyone’s support. You too can be a champion: pledge to support her Queen of the May, and help Suw out! (Pro Tip: Suw’s been bookbinding like a madwoman, so if you venture up to the ‘Colombier’ level, you’ll be receiving not just an engaging storybook, but a hand-bound work of art.)
 

 
Go, Suw!
 

It says a lot, I guess, that I’ve been going to the office daily, grinding out pages for a commentary or writing a book review or catching up on sundry other things. Today I’m at what I hope will turn out to be the peak of the cold I caught from the most wonderful woman in the world, and it only just occurred to me that it’s OK to take a sick day when you’re on study leave. Go figure.
 
Anyway, that’s what I’m doing today: concentrating on allowing my body to beat the cold, and not going in to work.
 

I’ve just finished a review of Lee Sheldon’s The Multiplayer Classroom for Teaching Theology & Religion, the journal of theologico-religious-studies pedagogy. The review only allows 500 words, which I stretch a bit, and it’s formally constrained — so I’ll expatiate a little here, in the manner of a pub conversation about the book. I know that Liz (not here, Liz?)is using this book enthusiastically at RIT, and there’s an online community of academic gamifiers at Gaming the Classroom and likewise a Facebook page for the book and its users.
 
First of all, I’m dead certain that gamification has significant benefits for theological education if approached and deployed sensitively. The key insight — that people from all walks of life, with varying capacities, willingly (nay, eagerly) learn a great amount in a relatively short while if they actually want to learn — poses a serious challenge to all who teach. If students select your course, but do not show themselves willing to learn, what is going wrong? Surely it isn’t all ‘the teacher’s fault’, but we may too rapidly point to extrinsic obstacles to learning. The widespread tendency to scapegoat teachers doesn’t imply that the opposite tendency (to set teachers above criticism) should prevail. Teaching involves a variety of obligations, but if we decline to frame our instruction in winsome ways, we’ve chosen a way that will predictably deter some students.
 
To return to Sheldon’s book, much as I’m a proponent of learning from games as an enhancement to our pedagogical repertoires, I don’t find Sheldon’s book as helpful as I wished I would — and I especially doubt that many teachers in TRS will find it helpful. For instance, the preponderance of the book treats topics in academic areas (science, technology, engineering) that don’t transfer very obviously to T/RS. An imaginative teacher will be able to negotiate the distances and differences, but that requires an increment of determination that some teachers — many, I suspect — won’t sense the urgency of mustering. Sheldon lauds his supportive administrators, and bless them, and bless him. Practitioners whose admins look with suspicion on innovation, or who eagerly pounce on possible ‘failures’ to hang on the neck of adventuresome teachers, or who load up teachers with such daily work that they labour and are heavy laden, will understandably hesitate before they apply suggestions that risk disapprobation from higher-ups.
 
Likewise, Sheldon puts much emphasis on the appurtenances of gaming in the courses he designs. That makes perfect sense when one is teaching game design — but that’s pretty different from teaching the history of Buddhism (‘Our sangha is called the Hillhead Bowling Club!’), or Political Theology. Yes, certainly, one can work out congruences and translations, but the book displays mostly STE (not ‘M’) and especially game-design applications.
 
A more helpful book — for teachers in Theology and Religious Studies — might have started from the premise that students often find it difficult to master the welter of different terms, rhetorical moves, discursive rules, textures of what counts as ‘evidence’ and who counts as an ‘authority’. By framing a skill-acquisition context in which to develop the background competencies (the way that grinding particular sorts of mobs prepares gamers to face more intricate, more powerful boss encounters), a TRS teacher might distinguish the capacities and background knowledge vital for excelling in TRS (much of which is usefully transferable from course to course) from mastery of the course subject itself. One can certainly imagine a student as a beginning ‘player-character’ without the possible institutional risks of naming your biblical-studies students ‘Hebrews’, ‘Hellenists’, ‘Herodians’, and ‘Hasmoneans’* and assigning them to level up their avatars (from the classes of ‘scribe’, ‘prophet’, ‘sage’, ‘lawgiver’, ‘bandit’, and so on) through quests in first-century Galilee and Judea
 
Another drawback to Sheldon’s book is his relative inexperience as an institutional academic (he’s been teaching gamers for years, of course), which colours some of his presentations. Other relatively new-minted teachers may read and nod in sympathy, but older geezers may turn up their noses at Sheldon’s rookie mistakes, or his tone of having discovered truths that teachers have been practising in one way or another for years. Again, this isn’t an intrinsic problem with Sheldon’s pedagogy or even the book — it does, however, run the risk of attenuating his uptake, especially among teachers sensitive about their status (and a very great proportion of teachers is either deeply anxious or lying).
 
And I should acknowledge what some readers will hasten to remind me if I don’t state — that there remain pivotal questions about motivation (intrinsic versus extrinsic rewards) and trivialisation (possibly engendering among students the sense that critical questions about interreligious understanding can reasonably regarded as a game in which the object is to attain Enlightenment by circumambulating the library stacks a hundred times). Those topics are worth working through with practitioners and theorists, absolutely; they don’t occupy centre stage in Sheldon‘s book, though).
 
So I remain unwaveringly confident about the importance of applied gaming for theological teaching — but I’m not sure Sheldon’s book will win over my colleagues. Maybe someone else will take up the challenge, or maybe TRS pedagogy will so maintain its cloistered seriousness that it forgoes the insight into skill-acquisition and captivating, immersive learning and sticky knowledge that game designers must incorporate into their structures for learning. If what we do is more important than building online games (as many of my colleagues will insist), ought we not know at least as much about how to cultivate willing learners as game designers know?
 

* I know that proposing two groups, one Herodian and another Hasmonean, is redundant, but I liked the alliteration. Call the last one ‘Hessenes’ if you want.
 

Yesterday, I was surprised and delighted to see David Weinberger’s blog pop up in my RSS feed with a post about something I had written — it felt like Olden Days! Better still, I agreed with practically everything he said, which always reassures me, since David is a remarkably smart guy. It’s always fun to talk with David, and he has very often triggered some of the insights that I’ve wanted to stay with and explore further (we were conversing before our talks at a conference a few years ago when he mentioned Claude Shannon’s essay on information, and I realised that part of my project entailed problematising the nature of ‘information’ — but I digress).
 
David contrasts the particular (retrospective, somewhat individualised) way I framed up my ‘On Death (Part 1)’ essay about the understanding of death in the Old Testament/Tanakh with the ways that the Judaic tradition keeps the text as an on-going element in the interpretive conversation. If I’m reading David aright, he proposes that the rabbinic tradition constitutes a case in point of what I’ve elsewhere called ‘differential hermeneutics’: ‘The Jewish understanding of its eternal text is the continuing contentious discussion.’ If that’s a sound interpretation of David’s contribution, and of rabbinic textuality, I couldn’t be much happier, because it would be fair to argue that my energies have all along been directed toward persuading Christians to read more the way rabbis do.
 
I wouldn’t identify the ‘continuing contentious discussion’ with ‘the text’, or maybe not with ‘the text’, since I see some value to preserving the possibility that there’s a point of reference that isn’t simply dissolved into the discussion. Or maybe not ‘point’ of reference, since I don’t think a ‘text’ (which can also be an image, a flavour, a gesture, a sound, a scent, and so on) has an autonomous self-identical existence apart from our engagement with it, such that that autonomous existence can serve as a beacon toward which interpretive discussion can, or should, tend — maybe a zone of reference, or a nexus of reference (to attenuate the possible spatial implications of ‘point’ or ‘zone’). To that extent, I don’t share David’s suggestion that his community of readers shares ‘an unchanging text. We’ve been given an original text that stays literally the same; its letters are copied from one text to another with error-checking procedures that keep the sequences of letters quite reliable.’ (My explanation of why I doubt this constitutes part of my ‘Sensing Hermeneutics’ presentation/argument, which I may try to whip into publishable shape someday.) But both the ‘meaning’ of a text, and the constitution of what we count as the text, are thoroughly bound up with the ‘contentious discussion’ David describes.
 
Now, a careless reader might move from this to suppose that David or I posits that Christians wrongly ascribe essential self-identity to texts and pursue their interpretations in strictly individualistic terms. My first reaction would be to underscore that Christians who seem so to be doing are themselves caught up in a ‘continuing contentious discussion’ of what texts mean every bit as much as the Jews whom David describes — but whereas the shared venture of interpretation is an explicit part of the Judaic interpretation in David’s essay, the post-Reformation Christian/secular interpretive practice tends to suppress the role of community, difference, polyvalence, and non-finality in favour of the ideal of a single, univocal, universal, (aspiring-to-) final meaning. As I overstated a couple of days ago, ‘Everyone wants to be right, and most people want to have a theoretical apparatus that justifies coercion directed against those who aren’t right.’ Christians’ cultural dominance has contributed to a sometimes-unstated imperative to make social power correspond to a correct interpretation of Jesus, the New Testament, and orthodox ‘faith’. To the extent that Jewish communities have been excluded from social dominance (and here I’m not forgetting that power struggles continue even when they aren’t extruded into state/civic policy), the issue of controlling other people’s interpretations has taken less prominence than in more dominant cultural groups — notably, among Christians.
 
David’s ‘tradition of revered sages’ corresponds to some extent to the Christian ‘communion of saints’; renewed attention to the ways that Scripture has been interpreted among previous generations provides perspective (so that readers don’t suppose that ‘this is what all right-thinking people have always thought’); it provides a reservoir of imagination for various ways one might take a text seriously; it provides a sense of elastic, but not non-existent, discursive boundaries; and it offers us guidance toward growing into the sorts of interpreters we want to be. In that context, the quotation from Levinas that Jacob Meskin provided to David seems very right: ‘ the multiplicity of irreducible people is necessary to the dimensions of meaning; the multiple meanings are multiple people.’ (This also sounds quite Pauline to me, but then, he was very Jewish himself.)
 
So without romanticising Judaism or deprecating Christianity, David rightly upholds the Judaic traditions of reading, interpreting, appropriating, embodying, and protracting the understanding of texts. These are reminders that others, especially Christians, do well to remember, to rediscover within their own tradition, and to bear forward in conversation and (especially) in controversy. And they exemplify the sort of reason I so appreciate having David as a reader and friend.
 

Someow I posted yesterday’s blog entries as WordPress pages rather than as posts, screwing up a variety of aspects of the blog. Error corrected, back on track, more or less.