Author: AKMA

Wedding in five hours.

Sermon done.

House-blessing service compiled and printed (just in case — it’s a long story).

The spambots have been busy, haven’t they?

Miss you. Back soon.

My Safari window is getting clogged up with pages I wanted to comment on and link to, but which I haven’t found time actually to write about. Some people solve this my putting d.elici.o.u.s links in a sidebar, but I haven’t girded my loins to figure that one out yet. I need to clear the decks, though, so let me point you to:

Adina Levin’s entry on friendship, conversation, communication, “social signals,” and online interaction — a very intriguing contribution to three or four discussions I benefit from.

Scott Matthews and Patrick Ross’s discussions toward a middle way in intellectual property publication, distribution, and remuneration. I’m resistant, not out of my determinedly piratical temperament, but from the sense that Scott’s proposal still owes more to perpetuating obsolescent economic customs than to maximizinng the efficiencies and possibilities of new technologies. But I haven’t taken time to think these over fully, so don8’t mind me.

Shelley’s fantastic overview and exploration of tags, tagging, memes, folksonomies, and how to exploit them. Speaking as someone whose name is already, in effect, a tag, I need to keep listening closely to her.

And in answer to her closing wish, she’s only one good tutorial away. . . .

If you’ve left a comment, or are looking for constant-updating excitement, or whatever, please be patient. I’m depending on the bandwidth of, well, not “strangers” but people whom I’ve only just met. It’s slow and sporadic here, so I won’t be as available as usual.

Well, it was a long twenty-four hours of travel, but we have arrived safely for Juliet’s wedding. On the plane flight out, however — and this slightly modifies the adverb “safely” — Margaret turned and asked me, “So, how’s the sermon?”

I had been so determinedly focused on grading the stack of papers on my desk before I took off that I had entirely forgotten that I should prepare a homily. So for the time being, I’m thinking evangelical nuptial thoughts, and reminding myself that it’s unkind to preach more than a couple of minutes at this sort of occasion.

Two years ago, I think, I posted a quotation from Henri de Lubac that Margaret sent me as a Valentine.

This year, she’s studying de Lubac in her doctoral program, and she regularly sends me clippings from her reading. This week, she excerpted some words from Catholicism, the 1950 translation of the French edition of 1947:

“Just to imitate primitive Christianity or the Middle Ages will not be enough. We can revive the Father’s all-embracing humanism and recover the spirit of their mystical exegesis only by an assimilation which is at the same time a transformation.
For although the Church rests on eternal foundations, it is in a continual state of rebuilding, and since the Fathers’ time it has undergone many changes in style; and without in any way considering ourselves better than our Fathers, what we in turn have to build for our own use must be built in our own style, that is, one that is adapted to our own needs and problems.”

De Lubac proposes two conditions on those who would take up, perpetuate, and renovate the Fathers’ teachings:

“We must recognize in the first place the great diversity of the theories which have been professed in the course of Christian history on those innumerable subjects where religious truth comes in contact with our human preoccupations. Secondly, we must realize to how great an extent these theories depend on social, intellectual or cultural conditions in a state of contstant development.”

“For although dogma is essentially unchanging, the work of the theologian is never ended.”

I really, really dislike the use of “reference” as a verb.

As I fight my way through a small stack of papers and fend off the daily barrage of small-but-urgent tasks, I’ll take a second to add yesterday’s homily to the “Extended” portion of this post. Everything went smoothly, I think, aided considerably by the fact that we used the same liturgical from all the way through the service (a rarity here). The sermon would benefit from some simplification toward the middle — I recognized, as I was preaching, that at least one clause had outgrown its surroundings and needed to be a sentence on its own. If I were preaching it again at another service, I’d have been busy editing and emending. . . .
Continue reading “Monday’s Homily”

No, it’s not a Rageboy post (I know, I know, I owe you a letter, Chris). I’m just looking for a good tutorial about implementing the Box Model Hack or one of its derivatives. The heat is on to make the Seabury site work for non-compliant browsers (Explorer), and I’d prefer to have as elementary a walk-through as possible. I understand what I’d be doing in principle, but I’d really like to have the templates work the first time through. Or second, maybe — but I don’t have the time to shoot for the seventh.

One hesitates to think what Michael Bérubé’s “Mr. Answer Man” would say if he were turned loose in the field of liturgical vestments.

Does anyone have any ideas for extracting pizza from the speaker of my iBook? Back at Blogwalk Chicago, I launched a slice of deep-dish pizza several inches from where I was carefully eating it away from my laptop, end-over-end, flop down on top of my formerly white iBook keyboard. . . and the left speaker.

Is there some way to clean out that space? It didn’t look as though there was an obvious way of gaining access to that when I removed the keyboard for a quick check. Margaret just gave me a stern look and said, “That will not continue” — so I have to find a way to fix it.

I’m up to preach tomorrow morning, though I’ve been hiding from that circumstance for the last few days. Providence has assigned me Amos 5:21-24 and Luke 4:14-21, texts that the lectionary uses to arm-twist me into preaching about “social justice.” I appreciate the good intentions; some preachers would never acknowledge the existence of poverty or social inequality if the lectionary didn’t oblige them to. Still, those of us who try to integrate the church’s social teaching into a seamless cloth of theological ethics, resist the days that take out a two-by-four to whup you upside the head till you agree to homilize about justice. “Justice” doesn’t stand on its own; it derives its hold on our hearts from its situation within a tightly-woven network of convictions and practices, and a leaden mandate to preach about justice feels like the liberal equivalent of a hair shirt.

So I’m working on a sermon to turn the force of the readings a little bit, to inflect the determined obligation to preach on justice toward a less stultifying, finger-wagging sense of justice, toward the liberating joy of the freedom to thrive among other free souls, to live in a world of mutual respect and cooperation. But if I write more, it’ll poach the prose I’m reserving for the sermon. I’ll post it tomorrow, God willing.