Author: AKMA

Last week, three wise bloggers posted entries about the future of ebooks. I’ve been keeping them in my RSS feed for days, waiting to put them together into a post of my own — so here they are.
 
First, Steve Himmer quoting Matt Cohen on publishing as choral activity.
 
Then Seth Godin on ‘what talent wants’.
 
Then Suw Charman Anderson (herself the author of the marvellous, inventive Argleton) on what an author needs.
 
So far as I can tell, they’re all right. And while I’m talking about ebooks, I would be remiss to neglect Halley Suitt Tucker’s new BookBox blog.
 

A couple of days ago, Kelvin posted the video of my sermon from Sunday at the cathedral website. It will nat have vaulted me into the Times or a top fifty list, but several people mentioned yesterday that they had been talking and thinking about it, which is about as much as I could possibly ask.
 

 
A number of people have disagreed with me on this, and I do take that very seriously — but I’m inclined to stick with what I take to be a position solidly grounded in catholic and biblical warrants. That doesn’t mean I scorn the alternatives that my interlocutors present, but that (granted that there may be more than just one plausible construction to put on theological interpretation) I’m not persuaded that the alternatives hang together as well in a theology I can live with. But that’s for talking out — at any rate, I appreciate the amount of energy people have put into thinking the topic over. That’s all to the good.
 

A long time ago, in radically different institutional and editorial circumstances, I wrote a Greek textbook called A Grammar for New Testament Greek. I didn’t set out to write a Greek textbook, but thought it was worth someone producing a somewhat updated version of an earlier volume. The first time through, I made modest editorial corrections to the preceding volume, out of respect for the earlier author. Then I was instructed that the author wanted nothing to do with the revised edition at all, and that I should go through and make sure that none of the earlier author’s words were perpetuated in what now had to be a textbook of my own. You have probably never tried to do something like that — especially in the discourse of language instruction, where there are (after all) only so many ways to describe the formation of the aorist middle participle — but it’s painfully complicated. The awkward textual maneuvering left footprints all over the manuscript, which had been edited in one of the most awkward possible sets of circumstances, and when the book was finally printed (without the agreed-upon third-party reader’s corrections), it was rendered less useable by the numerous typos and convolutions that it had grown through in its editing process.
 
At first I begged the publishers for a corrected edition continually; then I begged annually, when I saw them at professional meetings; after ten years or so, I figured they would just let it wither away and die a quiet death, and I didn’t have the persistence to argue for a revised edition, especially since several newer textbooks had come out with some of the features that had been distinctive benefits of my venture.
 
Fast forward another few years: Seabury-Western, at which I maintained an errata/corrigenda web page, along with chapter-by-chapter commentary and answers to exercises, has self-immolated and arisen from its ashes (in a very different form), like a phoenix whose ashes yield a blue jay; Seabury’s web ar hive has been nuked; I’ve moved on to Glasgow; and this morning I received an email from Duane Watson, as estimable scholar with impeccable (if somewhat odd) taste in textbooks. Duane asks what ever happened to those correction/answer pages that used to be on Seabury’s site?
 
In case anybody else is searching for them, they no longer exist as such, and although I ought to comb through them and substitute Unicode for all the defunct type-kludges that we used back in the early days of the Net, for the time being all I’m going to do is link to the relevant pages via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The institutional-reward system over here sniffs at at pedagogical writing, and corrections on a long-ago textbook would be regarded even less favourably (alas).
 
The mention of that book brings bittersweet memories. It was very good and forward-looking in some ways (verbal aspect, treating the middle voice as its own phenomenon and not as a sort adjunct to the passive, directing students to the New Testament text and lexicons as soon as possible), but the pain and humiliation from the typos, and my publisher’s unwillingness to produce a corrected edition, rankle. It’s (very!) gratifying that Prof. Watson is using the book, but it would be even greater if I’d been able to make it better from the start. And now I have another task to put on my to-do list — update the pages and port them over to a stable web location.
 

(— by which I refer not to Rosh Hashanah, which will be coming up in ten days or so, but to the new academic year.)
 
The new-look Level One course met this morning, and the lecture room was full to overflowing; we actually had to disperse people who were signing up for the class at the end, because the next course needed the room. That was pleasing and fun, and then I began my stint as Church History lecturer for our Level Two course (Early Church History in two weeks, whee!), and that was fun as well — I got to see some familiar faces there. Now, I’m about to meet David Jasper’s Honours course in Bible, Literature, and Culture (he’s away in China); and tomorrow I’ll have the Bible course, the Church History course, and (I think) the Level One Worship and Liturgy course (also covering for David).
 
There’s a mild chill in the air, leaves are turning, my voice is holding up despite all the talking and some night-time throat irritation. Happy new year, everyone!
 

From this report on the interview between Frank Skinner and the Archbishop of Canterbury: ‘Skinner described himself as “a tough crowd” when listening to a sermon, and said that priests don’t try hard enough to make an impact when preaching’.
 
I say the same all the time, including occasions during both clergy conferences I addressed last week. Preachers have no clear feedback mechanism for learning when they preach well, or poorly; and they exercise a vocation that tends to be protective of one another (at least, face to face). I know of plenty of self-protective devices clergy use to explain the appearance of congregational dissatisfaction with their preaching: ‘I’m a propehtic preacher, so it’s natural that people will be uncomfortable’, or ‘They’re comparing me to their beloved former pastor’, or ‘It’s unreasonable to expect a great sermon every week’. (And it should be said that many congregations demand so much time from clergy that they have no basis for complaining if the preacher is ill-prepared.)
 
Still, one wonders what would happen if sermons were regularly reviewed by a good critic (or by an itinerant representative of the diocese/synod/whatever), or if it were permissible to take preaching as a strong ingredient in such gross indicators as rise or fall in attendance. What if the church were obliged to be honest about the plain fact that some preachers are not as good at their craft as are others? And what if the church recognised that some of the most prominent characteristics in selecting for ordained ministry, and then also for determining appointments, are not co-implicated with preaching skills? What if, to be blunt, ‘preaching well’ is not the norm, but a noteworthy exception?
 

Ha! Everyone (who cared) was betting that I wouldn’t possibly blog three days in a row — but they were wrong!
 
It wouldn’t count if I left matters at that, so I’ll note that I’m working on the plan for my presentations to the diocesan clergy conferences next week (three days for stipendiary clergy, two for non-stipendiary). It’s an interesting remit; the broad category given was to note the changes in NEw Testament interpretation that may have taken root since people trained for ministry. Now, that’s tricky all by itself, since some people will have come directly from University or the non-degree training programme in the Scottish Episcopal Church, that is the Theological Institute of the Scottish Episcopal Church. Some others will have trained longer ago (I was chagrined to realise that I started by training at Yale Div nearly thirty years ago) (not quite thirty, detail-oriented correctors). But over all, I’m comfortable talking about changes in NT scholarship over the past few decades, and even people who graduated with first-class honours just a year or so ago, if we have any, could likely use a refresher.
 
I have four main topics in view: the changing status of “history” and “objectivity” in interpretation, the changing understanding of Judaism, the recognition of the role that imperial conditions played in first-century lives, and the importance of having a joined-up understanding of how matters affect one another.
 
The presentations will overlap and infuse one another, which is good because it will help me illustrate my fourth point, one that isn’t often made explicit in academic biblical studies. On the other hand, having a well-informed, synthetic view of how the various elements we’re considering affect one another constitues a key ingredient in propounding a persuasive, compelling vision of NT interpretation. It’s one of the reasons Rudolf Bultmann’s influence lasted so long; it makes Tom Wright’s theological take on the Bible stronger; and you, too, will better understand and teach and preach and minister from the New Testament if you have a sense of how things hang together, rather than a database of Curious Facts About the Bible. Plus, your teeth will be cleaner and your carpets will sparkle.
 
I’ll work in my Pauline theology lecture as a case in point, since that frequently goes down well. I’ll draw out some of the differences between and implications of what I’ve called “esoteric{ and “exoteric” imperatives in interpretation; and I’ll make a case that my sort approach to hermeneutics offers the soundest, most carefully-reasoned and theoretically-grounded vision of how one’s theology, biblical interpretation, worship, and daily ministry can indeed be joined-up.
 
Now, however, it]s down to exactly which bits go where, and what I want to do for handouts, and how to convey all this without sounding only like a wheezy old lecturer. We’ll see.
 
Hey, good Doctor Who episode tonight, wasn’t it?
 

I can’t wait to see Alasdair Gray’s mural installed in our (common) local subway station, where I’ll surely take lots of photos of his depictions of our neighbourhood. Likewise, I love how he laughs at himself, and his comments on writing:
 
“Can writing be taught?”
“Of course it is! I couldn’t write before I was taught. That’s why they give it to you in primary schools. No, writing and speaking are all things that have to be learned first. The difference is that some people at certain stage think that they don’t have to learn any more. If you’re very interested in words, then you’d try to keep on learning more. The best way, of course, is by reading other writers — good ones, but even bad ones are better than none to begin with.”
 

 

I don’t blog as much as I used to, partly because the community of readers/writers has largely shifted over to Facebook and Twitter (we’ll stipulate some wailing and gnashing of teeth about what’s wrong with that picture), but partly because I’ve used up a lot of the passion that used to go into my posts about what’s wrong with copyright, how higher education should re-situate itself relative to digital media, ways of thinking through hermeneutical issues, the future of the Anglican communion, and so on — and I have no particular taste for repeating myself ad infinitum. That distaste is compounded when it seems as though I was right when I first wrote about a topic, that my premise has gradually become common knowledge apart from me, and that what’s left for me to write about is mostly unbecoming “I told you so, why don’t you give me credit” laments. (I’m reading some material just now that represents arguments that I made twenty years ago, now as someone else’s innovative discovery, so I’m feeling more than ordinarily cranky. No, I will not name names.)

So, all that being said, here are some more links that point to things wrong with copyright and media in the current environment — Inside Higher Education on classrooms and copyright, George Monbiot on the academic publishing industry extortion racket, the Guardian on the relative health of the book-publishing industry (hat tip to Suw “Argleton” Charman — no, really, download it, buy a copy any way you can), and Mark Kermode on the film industry and why it’s not in danger as long as it can make bountiful profits on utterly mediocre films.

In a faraway country, some surreptitious malefactor strikes terror into the simulated dairy world: “[A] 115-pound black and white fibreglass cow, owned by Lock City Dairies, was taken from Walmart.”
 
Meanwhile, closer to home, two more fibreglass prop cows have ben stolen from a location setting for the Brad Pitt vehicle World War Z: “The cheeky thieves carried off the life-size mementoes, despite the film company employing a security guard to prevent such thefts.” Now, apart from obvious questions such as “How does a specially-hired security guard miss the theft of two large fibreglass cow models?” it seems to me that the pressing problem involves the likelihood of an international conspiracy of fibreglass cattle rustlers (or “reivers”, if they’re based over here)!