Nottingham

I’ve been asked what I think about the Anglican Consultative Council’s decision to suspend the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada until the next Lambeth Meeting (gathering of bishops) in 2008. There’s not much for me to say, because things played out pretty much as I’d have anticipated. I was surprised, in fact, that the vote to suspend was as close as it turned out to be.

The Episcopal Church compiled a respectable case for its having reflected long and diligently about topics pertaining to sexuality. I’d have wished it a little more thorough, with some different points of emphasis, but my colleagues did a strong job of making a case for the Episcopal Church’s stand. At the same time, a large part of that good case involved demonstrating that the Episcopal Church has been arguing (internally) about sexuality for forty years, while the consistent point of the Windsor Report and the Primates (and now the ACC) has been that the Episcopal Church has made decisions that affect other provinces without the consultation and shared deliberation that might render such decisions intelligible to those others. Sure, we’ve been talking to ourselves for forty years, but we haven’t been taking sufficient part in inter-provincial theological reasoning. Our strong report doesn’t really affect that claim, and indeed the more forceful a case we make that we’ve really worked on this a long time and resolved many of the glitches, the less excusable our relative reticence in global discussion.

Did we try? I don’t know — but as we constantly ask other provinces to listen to us, to the voices of the lesbian and gay sisters and brothers whose lives and ministries we uphold, we owe it to all concerned also to listen to our unconvinced sisters and brothers around the world who firmly maintain that we haven’t listened well enough to them.

It looks to me as though the Consultative Council reluctantly made a decision that the Episcopal Church can’t get along by being brash or headstrong — even if it may be right. I do not estimate that Lambeth 2008 will be markedly more favorably disposed toward tolerating the North American churches’ decisions regarding sexuality. We have three years to find out, however, and to figure out what it’ll mean if the Lambeth bishops finalize what the Windsor Report, the Primates, and the Consultative Council have begun.

History, Cartoons, and Legos

I’ve been working on the historical narrative, layout, navigation, and framing for the whole project; I set up a Flickr account to house Disseminary-related images (distinct from my personal account, which makes sense, really). from now on, I’ll upload Disseminary pictures to the specific Flickr site.

So, at this point I have both images and narration for the first few frames of the history, the portion on first-century Judaism. I lack a bridging frame that illustrates the ambiguity and fluidity of “Christian”-“Judaic” identity in the first- and second-century. From that, I’ll modulate to the story of Ignatius. I need a couple of doctrinal pictures (which I probably won’t make headway on this weekend, with god-daughters visiting and a general backlog of work to be done), then the execution scene. Margaret and I went to the movies yesterday, and when shopping for snacks we came across a Pez Lion that’ll join the wooden Noah’s-Ark lion for the martyrdom of Ignatius. From Ignatius, then, I’ll modulate to Polycarp, and from Polycarp to Justin Martyr (for whom I’m envisioning some good learning-from-philosophers scenes). Then Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria and Origen, Tertullian, Perpetua and Felicitas. . . .

But the point is that I have an intro-entry page, now, with continuous links through first-century Judaism, and a path forward into the early Christian figures I’ve been working on. Not yet what Amy asked for, but it’s on its way.

Music and Money

At a certain point, it only bores and annoys people if you repeat the same things over and over (unless you’re a “pundit,” in which case people eagerly expect you to repeat yourself ad infinitum) — so I’ve resisted the temptation to hammer away at the recording-packaging-and-distribution industry’s ludicrously wrong-headed approach to the digital music transition.

This morning, though, I stumbled over to the P2Pnet blog’s application of economic analysis to the digital distribution of music files. Essentially, the author argues that an honor-system of payments would probably generate ample remuneration to encourage artists and recording. I’m not entirely convinced, but in a comment, the redoubtable Julian Bond suggests what seems to me the overwhelmingly superior suggestion: “Adopt the AllofMp3 model, pack it with every audio track ever recorded and then sell the tracks at the equivalent of 10c each for 192K VBR. In other words, get rid of the bits that annoy about iTMS et al (DRM, limited catalogue, low quality) and then see what price the market will bear and how much price elasticity there is.”

Case in point: the other day, Nate asked me about Ben Harper. I commended his work highly, and wanted to point out a couple of particular tracks. Now, because of DRM nuisances and high cost, I’m not about to download those tracks from iTunes Music Store — but if I could just pull them down from a legit online source for about a quarter per track, I would without a moment’s hesitation just buy the tracks for him and send them along. I wouldn’t be tempted to send him tracks that I’ve already bought. The “right thing” of buying each file is so easy, at that price point, that the benefit of clean files, full metadata, legitimate file ownership, etc., make buying a preferable alternative to unauthorized downloading.

I’m just saying. And I’m still trying to turn up copies of Tom Robinson’s “1967,” and of Jools Holland and the Millionaires’ first album, from whatever source.

No Snowman Just Falcons

For the second year, a family of peregrine falcons has nested at the top of one of the brick columns of the Evanston Public Library. The library staff has set up a FalconCam that uploads a picture of the nest every two minutes during daylight library hours. We’ve become falcon junkies; Margaret and I trade messages several times a day, noting exciting developments, checking for the adult birds’ presence, observing the personalities of the fledglings. . . .

A Bit of Toronto

My sweetheart gave me a Father’s Day gift of the Toronto Subway typeface that we had admired so much, and I — in delighted gratitude, and as a reminder of the glorious time we had in Accordion City, the home of the Flackster PR excellence — redesigned my banner.

I had meant to complete my “why I am not a liberal (theologian)” entry and perhaps even comment on the goings-on in Nottingham (ably cartooned by Dave Walker), but life intervened.

“Desecration” Again

Today, the House passed the following proposed amendment to the Constitution: “The Congress shall have power to prohibit the physical desecration of the flag of the United States.” Now, the word “desecration” has no force unless something is “sacred” beforehand, and since so many elected officials make public protestations of their ardent Christian faith, we can safely assume that they led the resistance to defining any symbol of national identity as “sacred” — can’t we?

I may be extra sensitive about the issue, since I’m going to give a presentation on the first three commandments in a few weeks — but if those commandments mean anything, don’t they absolutely and unequivocally forbid their adherents from elevating anything or anyone other than God to the status of “sacred”?

James and Jacob

Old co-conspirator Dwight Peterson pursued the “James”/“Jacob” question more diligently than I, with some intriguing results. First, the translation “James” seems to have prevailed from the time of Tyndale and Wycliffe. Second, even the languages that don’t supply a starkly different form for the New Testament author tend to differentiate the Old Testament patriarch in some way: German “Jakob” OT, “Jakobus” NT; the Vulgate, “Iacob” OT, “Iacobus” NT. Likewise, he notes that the French Bible Jerusalem in his collection identifies the OT figure as “Jacob,” while the NT figure is “Jacques.” And of course, the New Testament and the Septuagint apply the name Ιακωβ (undeclined) to the patriarch (and to Jesus’ grandfather), but Ιακωβος (the declinable form) to all the companions of Jesus who go by this name.

Quite intriguing. It clearly makes no vast difference in most ways — an apostle by any other name would remain in the New Testament canon, even if the letter may be pseudepigraphical — but it suggests a lot about the role that presuppositions play in biblical interpretation. Even scholars who wear their non-theological identity proudly collaborate with the linguistic proclivity to mark a sharp rupture between the “Christian” James and the “Jewish” Jacob.

Today’s Episode

Feeling The Effects

Last night, Pippa shifted into concentrated-idea mode, and presented Margaret and me with the cartoon above. She wanted us to guess the caption; I don’t recall whether Margaret had a guess, but mine was way off the mark. In case your eyesight is as frail as mine, the correct caption is “I see the gas prices have affected you, too.”

Back to James

I have two — well, make that four or five — big assignments looming, one of which returns me to the Epistle of James to spruce up and flesh out the commentary on which I’ve been working. Last summer, I mentioned the oddity that English translations render the putative author’s name “James” rather than the more apposite “Jacob”; Now that I’m at home with my commentaries, I observe that few scholars do more than note that “James” stands in for the Greek form (actually, one of two attested Greek forms) — much less reflect on the appropriateness of rendering that name as “James.” The problem wouldn’t arise, of course, in a German context where both the apostle and the patriarch are identified as “Jakobus.” Is the solution to the mystery as simple as the power of custom (in English) reinforced by conformity to German-language standards?

Words’ Roots

Tom is right — the Etymonline site provides a fantastic resource. I especially appreciate the caveat on the main page: “Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.” For some reason, theological (and perhaps especially homiletical) discourses show a lamentable proclivity toward the etymological fallacy. . . .

Where’s Tom?

Once upon a time, when our family lived in New Haven (and listened regularly to the radio news on WCBS), my two-year-old son Nate, infant Si, and beloved spouse Margaret collaborated to obtain a Father’s Day cake for me. Not just any cake, mind you, but an official Tom Carvel ice cream cake, of the sort that Carvel sold as “a whale of a cake — for a whale of a Dad.” (The Carvel’s site reveals that this design bears the name, “Fudgie the Whale.” Whatever.)

This afternoon, Pippa proudly brought up from the basement a cake she had frosted for me, to bring back fond memories of that long, long-ago Father’s Day before she was even a glimmer in anyone’s eye:

Whale of a Cake

Thanks Pippa, Si,and Nate, and thanks to Margaret, who (as the greatest Mom ever) always shows me how to be a better Dad. . . .

Later: One of the benefits of the Net comes when helpful readers join in to correct mistaken claims. For instance, no sooner had Margaret read this post than she assured me that I was off by a year, that the cake in question had been given me when Nate was 1, and we were preparing to move from our home in the basement of the Berkeley Center at Yale Divinity School to our housing in downtown New Haven. She messaged me, “You had just finished your M.Div., after a very difficult semester in which you had had mono. Then, at the end of the semester, in the post-school let-down period, in addition to recovering from mono, you developed terrific back problems. You were stuck on the bed, where I set Nate with you, briefly, to go out and purchase a cake. I was in a state! Getting out of the parking lot of the Carvel store with the cake, I backed up into somebody’s new truck. I made no mark on the truck, but the guy was massively upset and angry, since it was brand new.”

Ancient Whale

Pippa, however, recalled the photos of the event and (though she was not even there! and notice what a great job she did in reproducing the original cake!) showed that Nate himself was only a few months old on the Father’s Day in question — thus, my first as a father. So the cake in question was not a Fudgie, and was given when Nate wasn’t even one year old. It was still a whale of a cake, from Carvel Ice Cream, and I’m still thankful that Margaret went to such lengths to obtain it for me.