Author: AKMA

I just uploaded a new set of scans of Pippa’s latest work — two oil paintings, a tempera painting, and a mixed-media Mother’s Day card. These include a couple of our favorites, though such judgments stand only for the short time until she composes another canvas.

Why — when health-care costs so burden small and large businesses — is not all the force of corporate lobbying power of every industry marshaled to enact a national health care plan? Wouldn’t GM be better off without having to negotiate health plans? IBM? And certainly the small businesses that the U. S. President always claims to support would benefit tremendously — as would almost everyone.

Well, except the insurance and medical industries, of course.

Just this afternoon, I received from Seabury’s Director of Communications a series of photos she took during my Winslow Lecture last month. The photos are terrific; since I’m not very good-looking to start with (I have, as Halley might say, let myself go over the years, except to the extent that the phrase implies that I had anyplace to go from), it’s not often that pictures please me. I’m an especially bad subject when I’m painfully aware that someone’s taking my picture. But since I had other things on my mind while Connie was taking these pictures, I’m very much at ease, and I think it shows. Thanks very much Connie, and a toast to the other lecturers, who made the series such a success.

Now, if they send their manuscripts to me soon, we can get this puppy off to our editor. . . .

This morning’s Dilbert comic (it’s archived here, but there’s a dreadful wait-spam commercial before you get to the comic — so beware) and yesterday’s post from Accordion Guy make a strong combination. Knowledge workers of the world, unite!

Jeanne and Gail’s dog Kindred died this morning, at an undetermined — but quite advanced — age. Kindred was a precious friend, a trusted member of the family, whose body could not sustain her any longer.

Our sympathies go out to our sisters in Maine. When Pearl’s afflictions overbore her strength, nine years ago now, our hearts broke; Margaret especially missed the puppy she’d chosen fourteen years earlier, and had raised into a wonderful friend to our college and seminary communities. I didn’t know Kindred very well, but I know Jeanne and Gail, and I know their love for Kindred, and I didn’t want her life and death to pass by unmarked.

Is it even possible to err, theologically? How would we know?

I see two prominent ways of addressing the possibility of theological error. The first depends on the premise that theological truth doesn’t involve any particular realities apart from our selves. If one speaks one’s heart, sincerely and authentically, one speaks the truth. On this account, the dangerous sort of theological error entails making claims on a basis other than one’s own personal understanding of the world; by the same token, any claim made authentically, from one’s heart, can’t be challenged. One can’t be right or wrong about God — one can only be inauthentic. Our intuitions and feelings provide the criteria for theological truth, and they can’t bind the consciences of anyone else.
Continue reading “Truth, Error, and Varieties of Dissent”

My baby daughter, our youngest child by far — is babysitting tonight. I feel old.

Of the various theorists of hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur always frustrated me most. I would assent to roughly four-fifths of a point he makes, and then the remaining fifth would seem entirely off the mark. And in such frustrating prose! Give me a bracing, dense passage of Derrida any day, rather than the deadpan exposition of Ricoeur.

Yet I doubt that anyone has done more productive work, across the whole span of hermeneutical thought, in the twentieth century. Ricoeur affected everything; if you disagree with him, you still interact with him (whereas ideology fences off, say, Derrida from his dissenters). His reflections on time, identity, narrative, parables, interpretation, culture, all make a difference to participants in the discussion across the board. Dissent need not mean disrespect; all grace and peace be with Paul Ricoeur, now and forever.

In the tumult surrounding Pope John Paul II’s death, the vaunted self-promotional network of web insiders failed miserably. If it were half the megaphone it’s supposed to be, everyone would have heard ad nauseam about the April 11 issue of Newsweek, which I picked up not as a JPII collectible (despite his beatific visage on the cover), but because it includes a section on “who’s prospering on the web these days,” and I’m acquainted with some of those named.

So here’s to Stewart and Caterina, to Joi, to Mena and Ben (why is “Ben and Mena” the canonical order?) — whom Newsweek deems “leaders of the pack” of “hi-tech’s new day.” That kind of acclaim can be embarrassing, and I’m intrigued that I couldn’t find a trace of anyone trumpeting the feature online (this, even before “Newsweek” became the journalistic scapegrace of the moment). And now there will perhaps be an easier-to-Google reference to this article. . . .

For some reason, people keep dreaming about me. Krista, Steve, a co-conferee at Freedom to Connect. . . .

The family trundled down to the local moving picture show this afternoon, after a curriculum committee meeting, to watch The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I enjoyed it greatly — it’s light without being lite, and my main complaint was that I would gladly have stayed for a double feature with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which I hope is coming soon.

That’s partly because our house is a serious branch office of the Zooey Deschanel fan club, ever since Big Trouble. Margaret was delighted to see her as Trillian, and I second the motion.

The new plot elements worked moderately well; they skewed a little heavily toward Hollywood for my taste, but Douglas Adams skewed toward Hollywood still remains delightful and ingenious. They handled Zaphod’s extra body parts very well; the Vogons were appropriately repulsive; I love Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast, even though I wish he’d paced the name-revelation dialogue a little differently. Mos Def and Martin Freeman did very well, and I toast Sam Rockwell for moving from Guy Fleegman in Galaxy Quest to President of the Universe here.

Adams’s anti-religious tic, though, just gets wearisome for some of us against whom his barbs are directed. Perhaps I’m too touchy, perhaps I should find my life as risible as he would have, but I see in these scenes less of Adams’s outlandish wit and more predictable japery.

So, is Restaurant in production yet?

If churches sense the importance of preparing high-quality managers for their organizational life, should they start Six Stigma programs? Any volunteers to take that on?