Ruminations about hermeneutics, theology, theory, politics, ecclesiastical life… and exercise.
Over at Typophile, the current “Type Battle” involves combining a randomly-chosen band name, a randomly-selected sequence of words as a title, and a random image as an album cover. The results are impressive; if you’re releasing an album sometime, you might consider recruiting a designer from the Typophile community.
Why is it so hard to get to the “friend requests” list on Facebook? The only direct way I know of to check on whether I have any requests pending involves going back to an email notification and clicking in from there.
I’m not sure how to count this, but although I sat down to further my standing in the International Biblical Studies Writing Month project, I ended up producing negative results. Shortly after I opened the file I was working on, I got an email message from Chuck Campbell about the lectionary essays I submitted last fall; they needed a final going-over, and would I please trim them by several words each? Since I ordinarily write in a very compact style (the outcome of a writing process that constantly poses the question, “What work is this phrase doing for you?”), there’s rarely any fluff that would make an obvious candidate for omission. Taking out twenty words here, forty words there, fifty words in another essay, requires some reweaving of the fabric of the piece.
So I spent my day raveling and reweaving, raveling and reweaving, and ended up a hundred words in the hole. Now, I also put about two hundred words into the sermon file I was working on, but I had written those on scrap paper over the weekend (along with my thank-you notes, which are in the mail now) (the thank-yous aren’t on scrap paper, they’re o nicely printed cards featuring a tinted woodcut of Matthew the Evangelist; making the cards was part of the delay). So I don’t think the sermon-words count for yesterday’s accomplishment total.
Today I have to pick up Margaret at the Philadelphia airport after her triumphant appearance at the Society of Christian Ethics meeting and her visit chez Sessum, drop off some clothes to be dry cleaned, push laundry through the washing/drying process, and write and read some (I’ve realized that part of my writing block comes from not reading enough). If I don’t hit max wordcount today, I hope I can at least hit min word-reading.
(Judy is having trouble leaving comments; I don’t quite know what’s up with that, as Derek seems to have been able to comment successfully. I’m getting the same security message as Judy this morning. I hope this condition doesn’t persist, since I adopted WordPress largely for the commenting feature. If you have a comment to make, persevere!)
Alert! Cool Googlosity Feature! On a hunch, I just typed the carrier name and number of Margaret’s plane flight into the Google search box, and Google correctly parsed that data and offered as the first search result a link to the actual status page for that flight — but on the search results page, it also listed the flight’s origin, destination, scheduled departure and arrival times, and its present status — right there atop Google results page one, no messing with airlines’ arcane “enter this data into that box and click the following agreements, and by the way what’s your credit card number, your flight club number, and an email address at which we can harass you for the rest of the internet’s lifetime.”
Anyone who has gotten a paper back from me with the annotation “asserted, not argued” should recognize Patrick’s entry concerning Prof. Marianne Meye Thompson’s expectations of her students. You may not like it, but I’m not the only one who expects students to write thoughtfully and argue a case.
I got to Patrick’s page from Judy’s Research Blog, which was discussing Tim’s link to Mark’s comments about preaching. Since, in a moment of insanity, I have acceded to a contract for a book about preaching, I’m heavily invested in this topic —but this morning I’ll merely note that the vast preponderance of preaching that I’ve heard functions at the level of “it could be worse” or “mildly enjoyable.” If preachers depended on the quality of their exposition and presentation for their bread, a great many would be in different lines of work. One result is that preachers and churches have a notion of “evangelism” or “mission” that involves “inducing people to do things that they know aren’t so pleasant, but really are in their best interests, and not as bad as they might be” rather than “You really have to hear this!” or “Come on and do this with me, it’ll be a blast.” It’s castor-oil evangelism, and it’s utterly self-defeating; it guarantees a lukewarm result. It institutionalizes a sense of our mediocrity, but with the weird rationalization that we ought not do better (it might be “inauthentic” or “a performance”). After all, priesthood of all believers, let the greatest among you be a servant, blah blah blah — ignoring the “varieties of gifts” and “different parts of the body with different functions” passages that pertain more cogently.
I’ll name this elephant: “Incompetent Self-Justifying Vanity.” “Incompetent,” because so few preachers show the capacity to read and interpret Scripture sensitively, responsibly, carefully, and express themselves clearly and effectively; “Self-Justifying,” because so many fall back on pallid pseudo-theological rationales for this state of affairs; “Vanity,” because so few willingly to face the implications of their relative mediocrity.
I’d write it off as my just having a headache this morning, but Tim’s and Mark’s and Judy’s comments embolden me. Honest, if you expect people to take the gospel seriously, would it be so unthinkable to suggest understanding it well and communicating it effectively?
The household is back down to three now, but not the usual three; I dropped Margaret off at the airport this morning as she makes her way south to the Society of Christian Ethics meeting, then lingers for a few ays with Jeneane, George, and Jenna. On the rush-hour drive into Philadelphia, we listened to the Irish NewsTalk radio program for which I was interviewed last fall (download it here, if you want).
The producers handled the odd situation of the show pretty well — that is, because some wire got crossed in Ireland, I couldn’t actually participate in the discussion with the other speakers, so they interviewed me later and dubbed in my parts. If I’d actually been on the line when some of my interlocutors said what they did, I would have needed to respond directly to their remarks (especially the casually condescending characterizations of Judaism, or the supposition that postmodernism entails disregard for truth). But I didn’t say anything that struck Margaret or me this morning as arrantly foolish, and although I spoke at about half the words-per-minute rate of the other participants, I managed to generate vaguely sensible responses to the interviewer’s questions. I’m still awestruck, though, at the speed with which other participants poured forth verbiage; not all of it bore on the point that was nominally in view, but it just kept coming! I get worked up and talk faster sometimes than I did on the tape, but I doubt I ever reach their pitch of prolixity.
Now, as a half-hearted participant in International Biblical Writing Month, I will own up to having three lectionary mini-essays to tackle right away, a sermon for the feast day of Hilary of Poitiers, and (of course) this book about Matthew’s Gospel that constitutes the rationale for my sabbatical leave. At least I have a framing idea for my Holy Week sermons at Christ Church, and can begin putting some time into those. Will update on progress as it comes.
One of my Christmas gifts this year was a new hard drive — and I’ve spent much of the past few days backing up, reorganizing, archiving, weeding, and so on. In the course of giving up and loading all my photos into iPhoto, I observed that iPhoto’s “gargantuan library bulge” problem hadn’t been resolved since I last tried it as an archiving tool.
On a whim, I thought I might upload my photos to Flickr, mark them as private, and see how close I came to my monthly upload limit. Only then did I notice that Flickr had removed all bandwidth limits for Pro accounts; I can upload everything, archive it there, mark it “private,” and only flip selected photos to “public.” I’m a shade uneasy about relying on a service whose terms are subject to non-negotiated changes, but it does solve a swarm of storage problems.
Anyway, if you see some old photos cascading through my Flickr feed, that’s why.
This morning we took Jeanne and Gail (and Laura and Nate and Si) to Princeton’s University Chapel for Trinity Church’s Christmas Lessons and Carols (we had Advent Lessons and Carols a few weeks ago). I was assigned seat-saving duty, so I arrived two hours early and stretched my personal effects out over seven seats. Then I wandered around the chapel taking pictures for my collection of illustrations of biblical/church-historical figures.
The University Chapel has an impressive collection of stained-glass images, from Pythagoras to Jonathan Edwards. If only I could get a better line of sight on them, with a steadier camera!
Of course, Pippa sang with the choir, dressed in her new black dress from Christmas time. She was not only lovely, but melodious, attentive, and harmonious too.
OK, I think my understanding of what’s going on with my runaway osascript process has focused to a leading candidate: namely, a malformed or bugged cron job. Today’s question is, “Where do I look for the system crontab and for any user crontab that some application or installation might have constructed?”
We drove up to Greenwich this afternoon to visit my sister Holly and James, and my father and Susan. We took a complicated route over to Route 1, then from the GW Bridge to Greenwich, but it all worked out, both ways. We had a great time — Nate’s Laura learned a lot about my family history — even we picked up some new angles — we had a wonderful lunch, and trundled back home.
Tomorrow, Jeanne and Gail roll down from Maine, and we all head over to the Sully-Rohrer household for dinner.
We had a visit with the Winter-Thurman family for which we cleaned up and made brunch, then some of us trekked into Princeton to resolve the Case of the Elusive Rutabaga (resolved), then back for dinner, and by this time in the evening we’re pretty exhausted.
Regarding rutabagas: It turns out that the hot gift item this fall was the USB turntable — a fact that I did not suitably appreciate, especially when I saw stacks of boxes of them in en electronics store a week or so before Christmas. Since we weren’t going to celebrate till the 26th, I figured I could pick up a turntable for Si on the morning of the 26th, at post-Christmas sale prices, and not have the box lying around the house for a week. Wrong! When I went through town yesterday morning, Pippa and I stopped in five electronics stores, none of which had any USB turntables left in stock. I finally tracked down a USB rutabaga this afternoon, and Si is happily listening to records on it. I, in turn, am awash with nostalgic reveries about the extent to which LPs and turntables defined a phase of my life. Now I wish I had stored those mountains of vinyl somewhere, instead of selling off Si’s birthright for a mess of pottage.
PIppa and I will soon leave to pick up Nate and Laura in Philadelphia, stopping en route to buy a rutabaga. After the travelers catch their breath, we’ll open the gifts that we ignored yesterday, and have our choir director over for dinner.
Briefly noted, then:
¶ A while ago, in the sad aftermath of Anita’s and Marc’s deaths, Dave Winer noted that bloggers risk disappearing from the Web once they’re no longer around to pay their hosting bills. Subsequently Tim Bray has weighed in with his very cogent thoughts on the topic. For the record, and since Dave is very exercised about keeping track of the historical record with regard to “firsts,” I blogged about this problem way back in 2003 — as Joi and David noted at the time. It even turned out to be the hook for my TV interview on France 2. So although I didn’t invent the Internet or blogging, my concern about archive death predates Dave’s.
¶ I don’t remember the chain of links that led to it, but yesterday I discovered The Head Lemur’s “new Greek” page of meaningless boilerplate prose to fill up a given text frame. He’s the guy behind pixelview.
¶ I frequently look for song lyrics online, a practice beset by dire danger of running into pop-up, pop-down, pop-behind, polypop, spam-infested traps. The safest site (I think) that I’ve run into is Song Meanings, which adds the debatable value of site members appending their interpretations to lyrics.
¶ Thanks to the remarkable Stephen Downes, I’ve been impressed by links to an open-source flight simulator, a concise demystification of how people learn online, and Stephen’s own thorough account of how creators benefit from freely-distributed work.
¶ I haven’t figured out how best to use it yet, but the Vatican’s Bibliaclerus site looks promising.
¶ I haven’t been really knocked out by the music releases of 2007; I’ll post a longer entry about the year in music eventually, but as I accumulate more and more digital recordings, I spend less and less time to listening to brand-new releases. For a similar reason, I hardly ever listen to “albums.” Off the top of my head (where hair used to grow), though, I can affirm my positive response to Springsteen’s Magic and to Lyle Lovett’s It’s Not Big It’s Large.