Author: AKMA

Tonight, Pippa and I dropped Margaret off at the train station for her trip to Rochester to visit Nate, before she returns to Durham. In case anyone out there is wondering whether, after twenty-three years of marriage (twenty-seven years together), people can still get sentimental about reunion and parting, the answer is “yes.”

On the same trip, we looped down to Midway to pick up Josiah, home for a long weekend from his first year in college. He’s having a great time — one might even think he had a flair for life in an academic community. By the sheerest coincidence, this weekend Laura will be home from her college, too.

Finally — and this is not related — if what I hear is correct, this is the golden year for job applicants in Islamic studies. I suspect that if you’ve seen Lawrence of Arabia more than once, you may be able to squeak into a tenure-track appointment; there can’t be that many Islamists looking for work, but it sounds as though half the Religion Departments (and some History and Area Studies Departments) in the U.S. are searching in that area. A hat tip to the jobseekers for whom this is a favorable development. Academic hiring is such a wildly capricious domain, it’s great that someone can catch a favorable market.

• As I was leaving my office to run an errand, I spotted a name tag on my shelf. It reminded me that nine years ago today Margaret, Pippa and I were in Washington D.C. serving as volunteers at the last display of the full AIDS Quilt. While we were there we saw newly-placed panels for my late colleague, David Weadon and for our friend from Florida, Gary Seife.

  Disasters didn’t start in Louisiana this September, and they didn’t stop in Pakistan, where a Himalayan winter is coming up on people without homes. AIDS combined with poverty is still killing millions — even if they’re further from our home.

• The news that BlackBoard and WebCT are merging doesn’t surprise me in the least. (Stephen Downes has some PR clips here). A commenter at Inside Higher Ed suggests that this makes them the Microsoft of online learning; I’m just glad that Seabury got out of their grasp a few years ago.
• Ron Jeffries picks up the dangerous rhetoric in the Bush administration’s increasingly frantic efforts to get Harriet Miers onto the Supreme Court. He cites the threat to a Jeffersonian separation of church and state that results when a President cites a candidate’s faith as the basis for knowing she’d make a good Supreme Court Justice. I8’m more offended by the overt doubletalk: “You should support her, cause she’s a conservative evangelical Christian, but her faith won’t make a difference in how she rules as a judge.” This kid of talk reveals Bush’s deep disdain for the intelligence of the public.
• Yesterday afternoon, I checked in to see what the big fuss had been about at Apple: so, a new iMac model, new version of iTunes, videos and TV shows available from the iTunes music store, and video-capabilities for the iPod. The iMac seems like a good plan — Pippa immediately wondered how much it would cost and how wide the screen is, envisioning its use as a TV-substitute right away. The video iPod looks to me like more valuable for its reinforcing Apple’s momentum than actually for changing the consumer environment (the Nano is a more interesting design change, and watching short intervals of video on a tiny screen has limited appeal for most users, I think). It still looks to me like a gesture to sustain interest and buzz while (a) they develop a credible library of short-form video to watch, for which TV is exactly the right source (that part’s brilliant) and (b) they iron out the kinks on a video cell phone.

  Wouldn’t it be great if the Apple dominance of DRM’ed audio and video provided the impetus that the entertainment industries need to loosen their fixation on restrictions? After all, in a year or so, the studios and record companies could have established a very big installed base of files that depend on using Apple software. In the long run, non-proprietary formats serve the interests of both provider and server; proprietary formats serve only the owner of the format, as both providers and users have to abide by the format-owner’s dictates.

• Larry Lessig was great on Marketplace tonight.

I’ve been gestating, for a long time, a thorough, seething rant about the effects of cultural romanticism on Christian faith. I don’t have time to vent it all this evening — it involves the premise that faith and worship should make you feel good, the notion that everyone’s ideas about religion are equally sound, the arationality of religion, the premise that anything rebellious or heterodox is likely to be truer than anything settled or orthodox, to name but a few of these canards (the creed of the cult of the prophet St. Dan Brown) — but that jeremiad was on my mind as I prepared today’s sermon for the Feast of St Teresa of Avila (which I’ll post in the “extended” section).

I’ll rest with the note that romantic religion makes teaching practically impossible; romantically-conditioned audiences already know everything they need to, they are predisposed not simply to question but to disbelieve authority, and they may expect that anything that doesn’t warm their hearts doesn’t matter. Romanticist theological thought represents the triumph of self-justifying ignorance over diligence, reflection, and discernment.

(Good thing I’m not cutting loose with the real rant.)
Continue reading “Gefühls For Christ”

My referrers logs include the usual searches for “random thoughts,” “plural of impetus,” new contenders “wedding sermon” and “wedding blessing” (neither is in the top ten results, so some folks are searching pretty diligently), old favorite “forgiveness,” now “iPod Nano protective cover,” and — “Frank Paynter smoking” (no kidding). Frank, you should know someone’s checking up on you.

A relentless string of natural disasters is assailing humanity, of which the Katrina-Rita combination turns out to be the least catastrophic. Hurricane Stan in Mexico and Guatemala, the earthquake in Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan, oblige our sympathies, our help, every bit as much as when disaster strikes closer to home. I would be heartbroken if it turned out that we who called for aid from all around the world — and who accepted aid from regions now stricken with even greater miseries — were too preoccupied with local problems to hear the cries of our sisters and brothers who need us more desperately than ever.

It’s easy to make a contribution to Episcopal Relief and Development.

On a different topic — my Tutor’s link to me reminds me that I’ve been meaning to consult him about the promotional campaign for Forth & Towne a new Gap-owned chain of women’s clothing stores (remember when you went to the Gap to buy blue jeans, and pretty much only blue jeans?).

You won’t see this on the website (right now), but they mailed to prospective customers in Chicagoland a pink-and-grey PR brochure that includes the following frightening blandishments:

“It’s not just about the clothes. It’s about being inspired. It’s about being indulgent.”

“Develop a fetish for leisure time. . . .” “Show up with an entourage. . . .” “Commit random acts of indulgence. . . . It’s about treating yourself to an experience in shopping where you are the center of attention. Isn’t it about time?”

I have a hard time keeping track of the staff at Wealth Bondage (though if I recall correctly, Captain Blowtorch is always keeping track of me), but this operation would seem to pertain to several of the castmembers of that World. The unabashed stench of sweet self-obsession cries out for the kind of counteragent only the Tutor’s bitter medicine can deploy.

The Toronto Star (registration required, sorry) covers the triumphant wedding (two weeks ago) of Torontonian ex-bachelor Joey deVilla and new Canadian Wendy “The Redhead” Koslow. Mazel tov!

Every now and then, someone floats the notion that Western Christianity might better serve God and humanity by declaring a “free play” moment, where ecclesial boundaries were suspended and the contents of extant denominations were shaken up and reshuffled — such that the “liberal” and “conservative” poles of contemporary churches could regroup together into internally-coherent theological bodies. That notion, of course, fails to reckon with the complexities of terms such as “liberal” and “conservative,” nor with the particularities that constitute churches as distinct from one another; the fantasy of spontaneous realignment might resolve certain kinds of conflict, but it would result in new sets of unstable conflicts, so no one would be much better off (we just be at each other over different topics — refreshing in the short term, but not particularly edifying in the long term).

I mention this because one conclusion I draw from the likely futility of the realignment dream reminds me that whatever definitions and distinctions we invoke to identify our church as church (as something different from a synagogue or a mosque, a benevolent society or club), we probably have to factor in a certain proportion of people with whom we disagree. The difficult part about dealing with tensions about and within the church comes from dealing with the difference between “disagreements we absolutely can’t live with” and “disagreements we have to put up with, like it or not.” When sometimes we imagine a church without the neuralgic discords that give us such headaches (and that attenuate the vigor of our mission), do we successfully manage to imagine that purified church including some of the disciples who represent annoyingly different ways of living out the Gospel? For myself — and I admit to having a very limited imagination — the only way I can do it is by thinking of particular people with whom I actually disagree, who (as it turns out) are the kinds of people who might be excluded from and “purified” congregation I might dream of. Which is essentially the church as I now inhabit it, which is one reason I would hate to see that church fracture and splinter into temporarily-homogeneous ideological adversaries.

To be fair, I acknowledge that that other Calvin got some things right:

“Calvin’s preaching represented an intensive examination of the detail’s of God’s Word that few other expositors would equal, sucking the last drops of meaning from every last syllable and turn of phrase. . . . This could be liberating to an audience precisely because it was so demanding: Calvin and the preachers who followed him asked a lot of their audience and were thus taking them seriously, as adults in the faith. Reformed congregations were expected to absorb and understand complex and abstract material and therefore were encouraged to see the value of education.”
— Diarmaid MacCullough, The Reformation: A History, p. 247.

I mean you no disrespect, but my wife is in town for a few days — blogging takes a back seat to refreshing our acquaintance with one another.

Happy birthday, wood s lot!

My well-deserved reputation as a handyman puts me in a league with the very most hapless schlemiels who have ever picked up a hand tool (the Geneva Convention prohibits allowing me near power tools ever since my woodshop teacher Mr. Proviano contacted Interpol way back in the sixties). Sometimes, though, a project presents itself that’s so very easy that even I can handle it.

The other day I was cleaning out a desk drawer in my office — itself an odd enough occurrence — when I happened on one of those cheap plastic cases that frequently gets thrown in with an order of business cards.

Having been keeping myn ears open relative to the brouhaha over how easily iPod Nanos (“Nanoes”?) get scratched up, I instantly considered the possibility that I held in my hand the easy solution to that problem. Sure enough,

it looks like it would work. I worked the Nano into the case and eyeballed the location of the output port, so I could cut as small a hole as necessary (and I tried to keep my cut smooth, so that there wouldn’t be any corners susceptible to tearing). I had to add a little width to my first cut, but the second cut aligned nicely with the headphone port, and the extra width allowed room for the casing for the headphone connector).

It works like a charm, the headphone plug fits perfectly, and the plastic is thin enough that you can operate the controls through it (though it somewhat attenuates the hypersensitivity of the control wheel, so you can handle the Nano with the volume jumping).

And here’s the end with the headphone port — plenty of room.

For my next project, I’m thinking of making a snowflake from folded paper, or preparing a peanut butter sandwich.