Author: AKMA

(No, not really, Cameron.)

The other night, I had a dream about Pippa’s art. When my recollection of the dream comes into focus, I had gone to a gallery where a prestigious juried exhibition was about to open. I brought one of Pippa’s works — in the dream it was a shallow cabinet that she had painted and decorated — to show it to the various volunteers, ushers, and other interested parties standing around before the opening. All were enthusiastically impressed, and one of the young, black-clad art-student types urged me to get her involved with some outstanding art instruction program, “because it’s already happening right there” (pointing at the painted cabinet). Eventually, I headed for the door so as not to intrude on the formal opening festivities, but as I was leaving, one of the curators touched my arm and told me, “If you can leave that with us, we will find a place for it in the exhibition.”

That’s when I woke up. Pippa, when later informed of this auspicious dream, grimaced and rolled her eyes.

Someone wrote a script to search Flickr for the most recent photos posted that correspond to his most-recently-played audio tracks — with results that look like this. Someday features like this will be almost standard on blog-like pages; it calls to mind Marc Canter’s digital lifestyle aggregator in action.

I’ve suggested a number of times that I’m not a liberal; I’m uncomfortable with the ways bedfellows get parceled out by the superficial horse-race-consciousness of theological partisanship (“And it’s Gay Bishop by a nose!”). A while back, I offered to spell out why I don’t fit with the faction to which I’m usually assigned; “I’m not a liberal, because. . .”

In what follows, I’ll be using the term “liberal” in a conversational way, not as a technical term in political theory, or U.S. electoral politics, or even in technical theology. Many people would be inclined to call me a liberal because I believe that the Church’s wisest way forward includes admitting lesbian and gay people to sanctified intimate relationships, and to the highest roles of church leadership; it’s that sense of the word “liberal” that does not fit.

• First, I don’t construe faith or theology as a discourse supplementary to the real, genuine, scientific accounts of truth. After science, philosophy, history, sociology, and psychology have sated themselves at the table of knowledge — theology does not come in late to gnaw on the problems that other discourses either can’t or don’t care to resolve.
  I’m not against scientific inquiry — I just confess the faith that the saints know something about the world that one doesn’t learn apart from life in the church. The gospel is not dispensable in deliberation about truth. When somebody begins talking about “what we all know now” (based on X or Y non-theological master discourse), I realize that they are talking about a “we” that operates with presuppositions I just don’t share.
• Second, I do not accept the premise that change and novelty are good in and of themselves. The church is a body that includes generations past as well as its present participants — and it must bear in mind its responsibility to generations yet unborn. Those of us active in the church this year constitute a relatively insignificant proportion of the church’s life, and it behooves us to show respect for the saints who have bequeathed this endeavor to us by not casually shucking off the life and teachings they have died to uphold, and by not impetuously imposing our will as a norm for future saints. We frame decisions in ways that show the maximal respect for all our forebears and all our children. Though the church can err, that’s not the same thing as the “liberal” notion that “up till this moment everything was a barbaric kludge, and now we’ve finally understood things right.” I affirm the need always to be ready to reassess the church’s teaching (especially on matters about which the church has never before undertaken comprehensive deliberation); I deny that the church needs to play the modern game of continual (illusory) self-reinvention.
• Third, my humanism is always conditioned by my theocentricity. Human beings are pretty cool, and our capacities extend beyond anyone’s imagination — but Protagoras to the contrary notwithstanding, we are not the measure of all things.
• So, fourth, God is not there to make us feel better or to affirm us as we are. We confess that we will be transformed in ways we neither control nor anticipate in advance. That implies that our selves bear witness to God’s truth not by the extent to which a hypothetical account of God assures us satisfactorily of our own goodness; rather, we bear witness to God’s truth by allowing that we will be changed apart from our desires (our desires themselves will be changed). If we can stipulate in advance what God must be willing to do, how God must relate to us in order to win our approval, we are no longer talking about God or faith as I understand them.
• Fifth: doubt, idiosyncracy, questioning, and freedom of choice all come after confession of faith and affirmation of trust in the wisdom of the saints. All too often, people treat doubt, skepticism, and questioning as though they were intrinsically virtuous; the romantic appeal of the fearless doubter will sell a lot of books, win a lot of votes, rack up big points in the people-pleasing business. I am not an Aufklärer, an Enlightenment thinker; I am a priest and theologian, a servant of a truth that did not originate with me. Yes, emphatically, I can and must question the church when I think it in error; but if my inclination to consider the church in error becomes a full-time occupation, I am probably worshipping a very different deity, one who looks an awfully lot like. . . me.
• Sixth, catholicity (the shared character of theological conviction) and unity matter more than individuality and unique authenticity. Yes, we’re all different (“I’m not”) — but our difference always contributes to a greater whole. An individuality that impairs our capacity to share, to sustain a lived connection with our neighbors, diminishes our humanity; those who celebrate their individuality by reveling in alienation misconstrue the meaning of being human. Yes, large numbers can exercise tyrannical short-sightedness and bigotry. Yes, the church shows some of that behavior. Bigotry constitutes a problem, though, not because all differences are beautiful, but because bigotry elevates locally-preferred grounds for association and connection to unduly general authority.

So, am I a liberal? If so, the term shows so much elasticity as to lack useful meaning except as a term of opprobrium. I may be wrong, I may be deluded, I may be many things — but I don’t understand how I can plausibly be labeled a liberal.

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.

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.

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.

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. . . .

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.

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”?

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.

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.”