Author: AKMA

I’ve just finished the family taxes (Nate comes next, hang on, fella), and a spate of forms that I fill out annually when Seabury sees what kind of medical insurance it can afford, and I’m working on financial aid applications. Permit me to say, relative to all these, that I have yet to encounter a form that doesn’t invoke my deepest anxieties about making a mistake, misunderstanding or forgetting something, and having my house surrounded by flare-orange-suited agents from a federal agency, armed with automatic weapons. I’m not math-phobic; I appreciate some sorts of legal puzzling; but this particular high-stakes game gives me a terrible allergic reaction, and the ways that tax software (no doubt itself constrained by dread legal forces) and insurance companies elicit information from me aggravate every confusion and fear my unconscious mind could rev up.

Again, next year I hope I can send our taxes to a professional. This year I needed to do them in a hurry so that I can submit financial aid information (late) to go with Si’s college applications (Happy Birthday, 18-year-old son!). There’s a lot of good work to be one simplifying and clarifying information-gathering for these agencies.

At the other end of the spectrum, Burning Monkey Mahjong 2005 has just been released, and this ludic user interface has me very positively impressed. If only I had more opportunity to play this, and less obligation to fill out the former.

Pippa does not read my blog, so far as I know (this would be a good time to tip me off if you are reading, Pip!), so I’ll crow about Margaret’s and my subtle method for inducing our children to read books that we know they’ll be interested by.

We hit them over the head with it.

No, no quite that obvious, but still — the time-honored method in our family entails leaving the “interesting” book in some incredibly obvious place (Margaret used the middle of the floor for a while), until the target child can no longer ignore it. This doesn’t always work, but it’s more consistently successful, and a lot less costly, than nagging.

On today’s library trip, I spotted a book on drawing comics that I knew would interest Pippa, if only I could induce her to look into it. As Pippa hit the comics section upstairs and the children’s section downstairs, I settled into the adult recent acquisitions section with a book by Paul Ricoeur that I’ll ignore until it’s due, Neil Gaiman’s Marvel 1602 (which I enjoyed immensely, though wityh a slight let-down at the end), and the how-to-draw-comics book on the library table in front of me. When Pippa finished her browsing, she came to get me. I continued reading 1602 until I reached the end of a chapter. She glanced at the cover of Ricoeur, looked at her own stack of books — then picked up the comics book. When I decided it was time to go, she had been reading intently for a good ten minutes. I took that book out along with the two that interested me, and it’s sitting prominently on the dining room table. . . .

Somewhere I thought I had learned that the obsolete word “eke” was used to fit into metrical lines that needed an extra syllable — hence the expression “to eke out” meant “to draw to necessary length by adding the syllable ‘eke.’ ” I thought I had learned this, but I can’t find support for that usage anywhere online. So, to everyone to whom I’ve asserted this to be the case, I issue a blanket reservation: maybe so, maybe not.

Certainly the use of “eke” tends to fit that characterization, even when editions of Chaucer gloss “eke” as “also.” The value of this syllable frequently entails only its contribution to the scansion; only rarely does an affirmation “additionally” flavor eke’s semantic role in a line. Still, absent an authoritative permission to continue my previous line of thinking, I’ll retract and wait further instruction.

A subhead in the Baltimore Sun suggests verblessly that “Gonzalez latest to refute steroid claims of Canseco.”

May we agree that Gonzalez “contradicted” or “disputed” or even “gainsaid,” Canseco’s allegations, but unless Gonzalez presented ironclad evidence, he cannot yet be said to have refuted Canseco? For now, it’s one outfielder’s word against another.

David Isenberg reminds me that “there’s one week left to register [for the Freedom to Connect conference] at the Early Bird price of $250. The higher price, effective 12:01 AM on March 1, will be $350.” Don’t say I didn’t warn you!

There’ll be a tremendous line-up of ’net policy thinkers, with a passel of other geeks and wonks in attendance. I missed the WTF!?! — A Gathering of SMART People conference last year; I’m tickled to be going to F2C this year (this year, David lowered the standard from “smart” to “available,” in the theologians category, anyway). Disclaimer: I’m giving a keynote at F2C, so take that in consideration when I say it’ll be a conference full of chewy, nutritious net-policy goodness, apart from one keynote’s worth of theological reflection on freedom and connectivity. I still think the other speakers will be good, the company will be heady, the conference productive, and the Early Bird Special a better deal than last-minute registration.

Something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: collect a bulletin from a garden-variety congregation and go over somme elementary steps by which one could make the bulletin a more effective device for communicating with its users — sort of a makeover program for church bulletins, such as Mean Dean provides for websites at Heal Your Church. “Teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteous bulletin design. . . .”

I’m not sure how I got to this article [also described here; sorry for the busted link, Mitch and Joe!], but it’s double-edged message delights and daunts me.

The first cut, of course, enables me to chortle that other people show so little awareness of their folly. Not only are they foolish, but their limitations prevent them from recognizing the full extent of their occlusion! Lord, what fools these mortals be!

The second cut so neatly severs my vanity from me that one might easily miss the line of the cut. If semi-competent people can’t see their own limitations, then my own confidence that I’m not one of them. . . may be misplaced.

Luckily, I am protected from error because I so regularly encounter people who know so much that they couldn’t possibly be wrong.

Once upon a time, I was a church-management know-nothing. I deliberately avoided any of the tawdry books about increasing attendance, about church marketing, about management and leadership with a thin theological icing. I knew I was spiritually superior to people who relied on such works, and I didn’t bother to learn anything about the claims I rejected.

That was a long time ago. I’m still cautious, skeptical, about the relation of “management” to the life of that peculiar institution, the church, but I’m more guardedly skeptical, and I hope I’m humbler. For instance, although I agree with some of the points Jay Bauman makes in an article for TheOoze, I would want to couch his criticisms differently, and to register an appreciation for management/leadership theory. Yes, you heard me right.

I’ve learned enough from my neighbors online — some of whom include those grievous sinners, the marketers — and from experience in churches and academic institutions, and from my retired colleague John Dreibelbis, that I see ways I’ve benefited from business theory. I’d steer away from thinking of that as “management” (for reasons I’ll stipulate in a minute) and “marketing,” but I participate more productively in various contexts through a refined understanding of organizations, communication, and desire. I expect that a large part of Bauman’s work as an Executive Pastor draws heavily on responses and insights informed by his business experience.

At the same time, Bauman’s arguments rightly point toward subtler versions of his critique. No one has laid this out with more clarity and theological nuance than my friend Phil Kenneson in Selling Out the Church. Alasdair MacIntyre tackles the ideology of management in After Virtue and Against the Self-Images of the Age. Even Chris Locke has gone on record (in last night’s Chief Blogging Officer report, if not earlier) as an anti-marketer. I’m not going to rehearse here the points they all make at much greater length, with admirable subtlety, but will simply assent that a great proportion of what gets passed toward churches as management theory or appropriate marketing ought to be passed even further — to the dumpster.

That last increment, though? The what’s-left-over after we throw out the dross? I hope that my colleagues don’t fall for the same spiritual pomposity to which I fell victim. We can’t afford to decide in advance that we have nothing more to learn, in any area. Sometimes, though, we learn most when we’re learning something a little different from what the teacher thinks we should be learning. I’m still cautious and skeptical.

(a) I hope that enough people support Jason Kottke that he can make it as a full-time blogger. I threw my change in the guitar case.

(b) Speaking of supporting people, Blogarians band together today to call attention to the situation of the Iranian bloggers Mojtaba and Arash.

(b) If a place like Seabury wanted to start with its MT-based web page and commission someone to redesign it using CSS and templates — something like a page from the CSS Zen Garden — roughly what ought they expect to pay? The question will probably turn out to be purely hypothetical, but the answer should be worth learning.

That was odd. For the past two days, posting has been closed down here due to “Got an error: Bad ObjectDriver config: Connection error: Too many connections.” I don’t know what that means, but it kept me from posting yesterday.

I realized recently that if I don’t start reading again, I may lose the will even to try.

It’s hard to clear my mind enough to read a serious printed work, and the tenor of Seabury life militates against thinking of reading as something more than a self-indulgence. That’s a fatal attitude, though, and I simply have to read a number of works to prepare for my inaugural lecture in the spring. Today Yesterday I indulged myself with a dip into the essays of David Jones, an English artist-writer who had a special interest in meaning, the topic of my lecture.

Reading Jones has helped me see the discipline of biblical hermeneutics as having hobbled itself by taking the special case of “translation” as the fundamental model for the much broader phenomenon of signification and interpretation. The notion of textual univocity loses its sense of coherence if the text in question is, for instance, an image (what’s the single correct meaning of the “Mona Lisa” in a non-da Vinci Code universe?). Meaning doesn’t cooperate with human (academic) efforts to constrain it to equivalences. (One idea I had for the lecture was to present my talk with a soundtrack; a strictly textual version would thereby signify very differently, in a way that most observers would acknowledge.)

Jones makes the point that sacraments (in a lower-case sense) surround us, and we participate in them daily, as our actions bespeak a meaning greater than their explicit, objective definition. Tonight Laura reminded me of an example from her caring for her grandmother, who died Sunday night. If a sacrament is “the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace,” then much more sacramental activity is going on all the time than only the church’s seven sacraments (that’s right, Protestant readers, I said “seven”). But when we locate the matter of signification in the domain of sacramentality, we situate our participation in the economy of singification (and in the ecology of signification) in a context that far surpasses our capacity to pin down or to limit to the narrow model of formulating ideal textual equivalences (What’s the meaning of anointing Grandmother’s feet with lotion? Don’t equivocate, now!). Moreover, a sacramental context appropriately invokes the liturgical, doxological dimensions of our acts of interpretation (biblical and otherwise). When we venture into the realm of signification, we can’t invoke any consoling regulative principles to protect ourselves from criticism, to ensure that we did the unassailably right thing; signification doesn’t work that way.

In case anyone in the Evanston area cares, I’ve reached the end of my patience with the drywall that’s occupying one corner of our basement. We have about eight sheets resting on sawhorses, and if anybody wants ’em you may have them. But first come, first served, and if I don’t hear about them in the next few days, I’ll just dump them.

I’m reclaiming that space for some bookshelves. The kids and I will conquer the basement!