Author: AKMA

This morning’s Inside Higher Education includes a breathless column by two professors of entrepreneurship about the relevance of computer games to education. I link to it partly because it’s further evidence of what some of us have been arguing for a long time – that if you want people to learn voluntarily and enthusiastically, it’s a good idea to observe and benefit from the patterns of eager learning they already demonstrate. But more, the giddy rhetoric reminds me of Victorian travel prose: “You’ll never guess — they wear t-shirts from previous conventions!”
 
I’ll try to decide whether I’m more satisfied that some faculty have begun to open their minds in this direction, or more frustrated that so vast a proportion of profs decline even to consider these ideas.

Videorecording lectures is like filming a stage play (or a concert). An excellent performance can cross the media difference, but the odds are stacked against it. In order to make the recording snap, one needs to render the performance on the medium’s own terms. Compare a static camera recording a rock concert with Jonathan Demme’s Stop Making Sense, for instance.
 
(I know I’m not the first to say this — just marking it down here since it crossed my mind again this morning, and by writing it out I may prepare my thoughts to move on to the next topic.)

I heard about the deaths of Mark Fidrych and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick on the same day. The world is poorer without them both, but there’s something subtly winsome about the coincidence.

Brother Matt O’Riley made a mountain of beaded decorative eggs to give out at Easter; we received ours several days ago (and waited till closer to today to open it), and they’re marvelous! I think I spotted our Elvis Costello egg, our “shell” eggs, and our Mary egg in the movie he and his friend made of the project — the earring egg I missed. Maybe I’ll have to watch again.

Pippa, Margaret and I hit all the Triduum services at Holy Family to bring our very peculiar, somewhat stressful Lent to a joyous end. As John the Elder says, “what we will be has not yet been revealed” — but we’re hoping that Eastertide brings some relief and pleasant surprises in that regard.

I listen to NPR a lot, and this morning I was struck by the extent to which they devote air time to people who expatiate on theological topics, but without the benefit of rich literacy in theological deliberation.
 
Lest I be misunderstood — and people frequently react sharply on this topic, so I’ll probably be misunderstood anyway — I’m not saying that poets, politicians, opera singers, ballplayers, legal commentators, dog catchers, and diplomats should be prevented from commenting on “what I believe” or that their views should be explicitly deprecated. Imagine, though, a culture in which NPR spent a lot of air time describing home remedies for various ailments, offered by people with no particular claim to medical authority, and hardly ever mentioned the fact that a number of researchers and practitioners have actually attained articulate and closely-reasoned insights into health care. Interested as I am in home remedies, I also want to know what medical researchers say about health and wellness.
 
Surely a great part of NPR’s reticence, and that basis of their choice of the populist path, involves the headaches that would ensue from reporting some angles on theologico-spiritual topics and not others. The Reformed theologians might be up in arms if a story included Catholic/Orthodox scholars, but not Presbyterians; a story that quoted a conservative Southern Baptist scholar would irritate the liberal Congregationalists, and so on ad infinitum. But NPR is already doing this by reporting only anodyne demotic spirituality; they’re simply evading the issue by selecting interviewees who don’t wear an explicit denominational tag.
 
This is not a moment when NPR will probably consider hiring a richly-informed, sympathetic, even-handed reporter of theological and varied-faith issues (a sort of audio-journalist version of Martin Marty); still, if they understand their mission to include educating the public about various angles on complex topics, this would be an area where their present coverage falls radically short.

Jennifer alerts me that Trinity Church Wall Street will be offering online Station of the Cross and a Twittered Passion Play. I haven’t found the online Stations on their site, but if you copy-and-paste their script into a page you own, evidently the online stations will appear on your page. I’m somewhat baffled by the mechanics of that, and I’m not sure I want to see a passion play mixing in with the rest of my Twitter feed, but I s’pose they get points for using digital media.
 
Today’s Cat and Girl follows up Wednesday’s comic about words and meaning.
 
The Duke colleague for whom I’m substituting, Richard Hays, sent me a link to an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education by Tod Linafelt, who was a recent graduate from Eckerd College when I went to teach there and who holds an appointment at Loyola College, where Margaret is teaching this year. Tod questions James Wood’s assessment of biblical narrative as devoid of complex characterization.

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?