Author: AKMA

I love it — I want the t-shirt even more than the bumper sticker!

Did I mention that I’m trying to work on my presentation for Wednesday? These are “Prospective Student Days” at Seabury, so I have a couple of meetings with applicants; I presided at mass today; I woke up at 5:00 to drive Margaret to the airport; we had a Technology Committee meeting this morning.

So the good part of all this is that I won a free iTune with my lunch bottle of Diet Pepsi, and when I entered the code I noticed that the confirmation screen suggests that I’ve been entered in an Apple-sponsored “sweekstakes.” Is that a real word? I see it in a couple of places online, but when I saw it on the Apple page I assumed it was just a typo. And why is this possessing my intellectual curiosity today, when I should be wrapping up my presentation for Wednesday’s colloquium?

You may have read the kinds of thing I typically say about digital distribution and copyright; may I simply point to a story in the New York Times (sorry, registration required) which reports a discussion between Lawrence Lessig and Jeff Tweedy on the topic. Several choice fair use morsels:

“[W]here the band’s previous album, Summerteeth, sold 20,000 in its first week according to SoundScan, Yankee [Hotel Foxtrot] sold 57,000 copies in its first week and went on to sell more than 500,000. Downloading, at least for Wilco, created rather than diminished the appetite for the corporeal version of the work.”

“Mr. Tweedy suggested that downloading was an act of rightful ‘civil disobedience.’ ”

As Meg observes (commenting on yet another Scalia inanity),

There are two things happening with online file sharing:

1. It’s the market’s way of saying not that it doesn’t see profit, per se, as legitimate but that the prices charged, for example, by BMG for Shakira’s CD don’t reflect its perceived value.

2. People are willing to pay when there’s a means available for them to do so that embraces what’s great about the digitization of media (easy access, portability, recommendations/sharing with friends and family, etc.).

I’m with Meg: “What about a bumper sticker that says, ‘Your failed business model is not my problem’?”

After Pippa crept behind me and roared an unearthly tiger-girl growl, thereby giving me a whole new population of white hairs, she said: “Well, it’s a good thing I wasn’t a real tiger, Dad; I’d have eaten you.”

True enough.

The X-rays of Krista’s ankle make me queasy every time I look.

With the expectation that no one really wants to hear these observations firmly in place, and with full respect to those spokespeople who defy the gross generalizations I make hereinafter, with great sympathy for those whose feelings are quick from long-term irritation at the hands of an unsympathetic church, I nonetheless make bold to poke the eyes of the Episcopalians with whom I agree and those with whom I disagree.

First, I’ll note that the ECUSA has tended to respond somewhat equivocally and defensively to the Windsor Report and the Primates’ Meeting. ECUSA (rightly, but awkwardly) points out that it observed correct process in reaching its recent decisions, but that’s not quite the point that concerns the Primates and our neighbors in the Communion. The leaders of ECUSA keep repeating formulaic assurances that “the Lord is making a new thing,” or that “the Spirit is leading us into new truths” — but not arguing the case for why people ought to share the discernment that these are newly-recognized truths or that the Lord is behind these new things.

And on another side, I see repeated assertions that the sexuality debate is not like all those other hitherto-unquestioned topics on which the church changed its mind markedly: not like barring Gentiles from fellowship, or usury, or slavery, or the Wife’s Sister’s Act, or (for some) the all-male priesthood. Now, without pre-judging the question of whether any or all of these constitute legitimate analogies to current deliberations about sexuality, it strikes me that the more pertinent question is how we would know whether these constitute legitimate analogies. After all, when these past controversies were troubling the church, the various parties to the debate invoked the imminent doom of the faith, the moral corruption of the people of God, and the stifling of the preaching of the true Gospel as the consequences of the impending change; were all those who cautioned against these changes quite deluded about their significance? If so, should we rule out their testimony about sexuality, too (since if they were wrong about the Wife’s Sister’s Act, we can’t be very sure that they may not be wrong about sexuality)? When we’re in the midst of a conflict, those with whom we disagree about heated issues tend always to look wronger and less intelligent than our heroes, and our arguments always tend to look natural, plain, and obvious. That we’re having an argument about the issue should itself provide a reason for thinking that “self-evidence” and “plainness” aren’t the most pertinent categories for resolving this mess; at least it would be if the Left were more actively involved in offering reasoned argument.

And to return to my criticism of the Left, the Right is onto something when it submits that ECUSA has been retreating from a willingness to stand for any particular thing. I hold no brief for coercion or oppression, and it should be obvious that I’m no darling of the American Anglican Council, the Institute for Religion and Democracy, or any of the various displacement groups — but over the past few decades, the Episcopal Church has in the aggregate drifted away from holding to a coherent theological identity, toward a notional inclusiveness that (sadly) evaporates when subjected to close examination.

And one more time, to fault the Right (actually, all concerned): doesn’t it seem odd that when one properly-constituted body of church leaders votes in a way we disapprove of, they’re heretical pretenders — and when a different body votes in a way we commend, they’re angels of sound judgment? (And vice versa, of course, for ECUSA — where General Convention stands in for the heroes, and the Primates Meeting for the villains.) How much does this reflect faith in the church’s discernment processes, and how much is it a reflection of parochial ardor for one’s own conclusions?

I should have figured this all out ages ago. In the meantime, mark me down with Gamaliel, give it some time, and give us enough time to look at these days with retrospect.

Almost three years ago (really? yes) Margaret was diagnosed with an acute case of Grave’s Disease. At the time, her endocrinologist said something to the effect that she’d only seen three living people with thyroid as active as Margaret’s, and it took some pretty brutal drug therapy to pound her thyroid into relative docility.

Then last December, she and her endocrinologist decided to nuke the thyroid, I spent a few nights on the day bed downstairs, and we hoped that her soon-to-be-ex-thyroid would wither away and leave her alone. Unfortunately, in a relatively unsurprising development, the radioactivity kicked her thyroid into even higher activity — she tripled the dosage of her thyroid suppression drugs after the iodine treatment. She kept going back for her monthly blood test, and the text kept indicating that her evil-genius thyroid gland was still determined to take over the world, beginning with Margaret.

Yesterday afternoon (on a weekend!), Margaret’s endocrinologist’s office called to say that her latest blood test showed her thyroid hormone levels plunging, and that she had to cut her meds way back — and when she comes back in a couple of weeks, she’ll be tested again to see whether she’s got any thyroid activity at all. It’s been a long, exhausting struggle for her, but it looks as though she may have defeated SuperThyroid.

In the aftermath of Pope John Paul II’s funeral, I wanted to leave two links: one to Cardinal Ratzinger’s sermon, which (I think) may play a role in my lectures of the next ten days — and the other to the moment early in John Paul II’s papal vocation that most vividly held my attention: Don Novello’s side-splitting sketch from the second season of Saturday Night Live, announcing the “Find the Popes in the Pizza” context. Me? My button says, “I read about the Pope on the Internet.”

As Dean reminded me in a whimsical email the other day, people pay ludicrously inflated prices for water.

Free downloading doesn’t spell the end of payment-for-creativity. It changes the marketplace — but observe that it’s the oligopolists who still make money from selling water.

There is and will continue to be a viable business in the packaging and distribution of movies, music, books, whatever. “Viable,” that is, for operators perceptive and nimble enough to negotiate the change in the ecology of commerce.

Albert Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus (whose German title, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, is much less dashing and merchandisable — older English edition available online here) includes the memorable line, “[H]ate as well as love can write a Life of Jesus, and the greatest of them are written with hate. . .” [my emphasis]. Why? Because

[i]t was not so much hate of the Person of Jesus as of the supernatural nimbus with which it was so easy to surround Him, and with which He had in fact been surrounded. They were eager to picture Him as truly and purely human, to strip from Him the robes of splendour with which He had been apparelled, and clothe Him once more with the coarse garments in which He had walked in Galilee.
And their hate sharpened their historical insight.

I remembered Schweitzer’s premise this morning when Micah pointed me to the op-ed in this morning’s New York Times by Thomas Cahill. I don’t know whether Cahill hates the late John Paul II, but his focused dissatisfaction certainly sheds a less flattering light on a figure regarding whom the opinion-makers have given a genial thumbs-up.

Cahill’s dyslogy over the sleeping Pope doesn’t only venture to strip away the flattering robes of splendor from a many-faceted theologian, activist, and politician; it also reveals one of the problems with Schweitzer’s axiom. Schweitzer notes that hatred of Jesus’ sanctity costs its sponsors their livelihood, their social standing, the satisfaction of seeing their work commended and advanced by sympathetic colleagues; Jesus research born of hatred was incorruptible, since it brought no rewards but only obloquy. Cahill’s denunciation, though, costs him little or nothing — and one may fairly wonder about the extent to which the holy martyrs of historical-Jesus research found their notoriety quite so odious as they enthusiastically advertised.

Yes, John Paul II showed a proclivity for promoting sympathizers; I don’t know enough to assess the extent to which he represents an extreme in this regard, but I’m confident that he didn’t promote only cardinals whom he could count as yes-men, and I guess that other popes may have tended to promote sympathizers as well (though they didn’t have as long a tenure with which to define the whole College of Cardinals). I doubt that the John Paul whom millions of people are flocking to venerate in death is ultimately responsible for the attendance levels in Roman Catholic parish churchs, and I see some congregations that appear to be flourishing. Perhaps distaste for one’s subject brings not only critical historical insight, but also a different, opposite sort of blindness. Cahill’s attempts to write historical work (I’m thinking of Desire of the Everlasting Hills, a shoddy work of wishful historical thinking, and of the romanticized picture of early church decision-making in the later paragraphs of his op-ed — notice Cahill’s unaccountable knowledge of St. Peter’s “frequent and humble confession that he was wrong”).

Maybe antipathy and sympathy emerge in almost everything that human creatures endeavor, and maybe we ought not be shocked, shocked, to learn that there is partisanship in papal appointments or historical retrospect.

Margaret arrives tomorrow for the weekend, huzzah!

This evening, after three and a half years of hard service, my TiBook encountered disaster: the bezel around the screen cracked through at the hinge. It’s sitting, open, on the dining room table. Who knows what’ll happen.

This year’s Biblical Theology class is using a blog for extramural discussion of our thematic sessions and case studies. I’ve included several Seabury alums in the discussion, and tonight post an entry about how Gilbert and Sullivan illuminate narrative theology.

But really, it’s rather late, I’m tired, and I must figure out the destiny of the trusty TiBook.

I experienced an epiphany this weekend, a bleated epiphany, and not the liturgical-kalendar type. I saw at a glance how the social discursive physics effects a Gresham’s Law of reasoned argument on controversial topics.

I had been wondering how prominence in media (and in arrant defiance of Jeneane’s strictures, I’ll say both MSM and Blogarian media) (by the way, our prayers and best wishes are with you and George and Jenna today, Jeneane) correlates to genuine agreement. That is, do people who associate with/apparently approve of/link to (with positive vote links) Extreme Representatives really hold to everything the spokesperson advocates?

Well, in short, no.

Let’s say we have two parties. I could call them “Cyan” and “Orange,” but readers would eventually make them out to be liberals and conservatives anyway, so I’ll just tag them Left and Right, and add that nothing I am about to say amounts to an unambiguous attribution of characteristics to anyone. I’m working something out, and just at the beginning.

Now, let’s say I belong (roughly) to the Left side of an argument, but that I see some of the wisdom behind a Right way of looking at the problem. The hard-core Lefties have an interest in masking my respectful dissent (it might lend aid and comfort, and it might erode the univocity of Left support), so while they may acknowledge my conclusions — “He’s one of us” — they have a definite reason to ignore my arguments. Likewise, the hard-core Right has reason to ignore my arguments, since if I can appreciate their premises and still arrive at Left conclusions, I might persuade some otherwise loyal Rightists to change their minds. The same applies, backwards, to the Rightists; both parties benefit from the appearance of unanimity, regardless of the realities behind the appearances.

Moreover, each partisan center benefits from eliding the differences among their opposite numbers, to the extent that the more monolithic the opponents seem, the more important unanimity and solidarity on “our” side of the problem become. Again, this helps account for the over-simplification of controversial discourse: the more vigilantly a partisan stays on message (“inclusiveness” or “no gay agenda” or whatever), the less the risk that any of the possible divisions, nuances, disagreements within the partisan bloc will distract ardent supporters.

So, for instance, if I were to lambaste the Left for a repetitive, shallow, anti-intellectual institutional practice that sacrifices depth of reasoning in order to maintain a comfortably superficial, appealing message of “inclusiveness,” — whereas all too often the Right actually mounts awkward things like arguments to ground their case — neither Left nor Right could afford to notice the critique.

(Now, it’s always quite likely that I’m just a clanging gong unworthy of attention; that’s not by any means ruled out. For the purposes of argument, though, I’m supposing that the criticism in question rests on some sound evidence.)

By the same token, if I were to call to attention some problems on the Right’s side, or propose ways forward that don’t play into the all-or-nothing will-to-power games of who wins and who loses, we should not expect Extreme Spokespeople to attend. They’re already affirmed by their own (carefully groomed) constituencies, and they’re awfully busy. Who has time to wrangle details when so much is at stake, and when the people with good sense have already endorsed the urgency of Our Side’s struggle?

So I no longer expect anyone to pay much attention when I point out the loose threads in various sides’ positions.