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.