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During my annual review with the Deans yesterday, I alluded to my frustration with the “real meaning” reflex. You know, when someone makes the claim to tell you what this or that really means. It functions as a an authority claim (or a discussion-ender): “What this Greek word really means is. . . .” or “You said X, but you really mean Y.”

Back in the 80’s “real meaning” struck Jeffrey Stout as a cardinal instance of a term that cries out for what Willard Quine called “explicating”: We fix on the particular functions of the unclear expression that make it worth troubling about, and then devise a substitute, clear and couched in terms to our liking, that fills those functions.” (Word and Object (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), pp. 258-59, quoted in Jeffrey Stout’s “What Is the Meaning of a Text?” NLH 14 (1982): 1-12 — unavailable on JSTOR). Since the rhetorical function of “really means” depends on the fact that the alleged “real meaning” is somehow in question — otherwise, why else would one say it? — we could probably advance an argument or two by eschewing a claim about “real meaning” and substituting a more precise characterization of our interest in pinning down meaning in the particular context in question.

I suspect that Fearsome Pirate and I advocate markedly different theologies, ecclesiologies, and liturgies, but his eight-step program for church growth makes sense to me. (No offense meant to people who actually like singing Earth and All Stars.)

Margaret and I celebrated our pseudo-pre-second-honeymoon (that is, “a week at home while Pippa is away at choir camp, before we celebrate our twenty-fifth anniversary next week, but not by any means a real vacation or second honeymoon”) by taking a day in downtown Chicago at the Art Institute and Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me. We had a glorious time, and I commend both activities enthusiastically, especially combined, with a simple dinner of omelette and salad at Maxim’s (where, despite the reviews, we were served a quite suitable dinner at a reasonable-for-downtown price by a friendly server).

The Art Institute — words do not suffice to sum up the banquet of treasures to be found there! Margaret and I wore ourselves out strolling from room to room, but we could hardly stop. I will say that, among all the stunning beauties we encountered, none struck me so forcibly as Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait; were I ever to live in a space with a masterpiece of art, this is a painting whose effect would take a very long time to become routine to me. I didn’t see any of the Matisses that I most love, and although I have long admired Monet, the paintings I saw here — marvelous and intensely lovely as they are — didn’t pierce my soul as did Van Gogh. Chagall’s White Crucifixion stood out in the same numinous way. Margaret cited some of the Picassos (the casual way in which oe can say, “some of the Picassos” about one’s local museum’s collection itself flummoxes me) as particularly compelling; she also loves Joan Miró’s The Policeman (larger, darker photo here), among other Miró favorites. She envisioned an exhibition that juxtaposed surrealist paintings from some of the images from the International Gothic and Renaissance styles.

Footweary and heavy-legged, we settled in at the Chase Auditorium and laughed uproariously at our favorite radio personalities. It’s well worth a visit, if you’re in Chicago; we didn’t even see our very favorite panelists, but Adam Felber, Roxanne Roberts, and Paul Provenza bantered at the highest pitch of wit. Peter Sagal and Carl Kasell presided with great good humor, and the live-in-auditorium version entertained with various slips, gaffes, and non-compliant ripostes that you won’t hear on air. (Email me if you want to know who won before the program airs.)

Now if only I hadn’t dropped my wallet while I was down there — but, thankfully, a security guard found it and it’s waiting for me at the Chase Tower. Looks like another trek to the big city.

What’s all this about people trying to banish intelligent design from our schools? Frankly, I think that we could all use a lot more intelligent design. For example:

Why do approaches to airports always offer you a choice between “arrivals” and “departures” (I know, I know, there’s a classic bit in Big Trouble about this) — why don’t the signs say “Pick Up” and “Drop Off”? The arrival and departure signs at Midway are way too small, and they’re positioned so that you have to play chicken with a concrete barrier as you peer forward and decide which sign applies to you, and aligns with which fork of the road. That’s certainly not intelligent design.

When did “reinventing” become not simply a possibly-good idea, but a social norm? I’m troubled by the currency that “reinventing oneself” has attained, with its concomitant resonance of repudiating history, continuity, responsibility (even “accountability,” however much that may irritate Dave).

I harbor no animus against trying anew, or changing direction, or amendment of life; the trope of “reinventing,” though, sounds ominous to me.
Continue reading “Reinventing”

Another thing I’ve said before: the survival mechanism for paying artists who participate in media subject to digital reproduction comes not through unsustainable, intrusive, obstructive digital-rights mechanisms, but through lowering the price of legitimate copies to the point that it’s more bother to obtain an illegitimate copy than to pay for a legit copy.

If any time I want to watch a high-quality digital version of an episode of The Office I can download it for a dollar, or fifty cents — so the cost of my archiving and saving (and storing and being able to find again) that episode is greater than the cost of my putting down another four bits — what would be the point of so-called piracy?

I’m sure I’ve talked about this before (yes, here at least), but as Seabury’s seniors graduate and as the Board of Trustees meets, and as I think over the content and methods of introducing students to the New Testament, I wonder again what graduate education in preparation for ministry should be like. Or — to put it differently — toward what are we preparing students?

In some fields, we expect practitioners to have mastered a field of vitally-important facts. I do not care how my civil engineer feels about cement, steel, and road surfaces; I care urgently that the overpass stays up while I drive over (or under) it. I don’t care how my doctor thinks about pneumonia, I want my doctor to treat my infection with an appropriate combination of medicines, pain relievers, and prescribed behavior. I want my engineer to know the properties of various materials. I want my doctor to know what’s likely to happen if I take these two prescriptions at the same time. These are, to a great extent, independent of the practitioner’s attitude, self-expression, will, preferences, or aspirations. Indeed, I positively don’t want a practitioner in this kind of field to permit her personality to color her relation to the “factual” aspects of her practice.

At an opposite extreme, some fields reward “creativity” and pure expression and personality. Some sorts of performance art (stand-up comedy, abstruse dance forms, monologists) can amount to the projection of attitude and self-expression on a large scale. Such modes depend hardly at all on knowing anything extrinsic, but almost entirely on the practitioner doing his thing.

For purposes of crude comparison, we can characterize the first as objective/cognitive practices, and the second as affective/intuitive practices. While of course the first are not purely objective, nor the second entirely devoid of cognitive underpinnings, I think they’re worth proposing as general points of orientation — if only for the purposes of showing the many shades of mediation that lie between them, and the ways that the ideal types themselves already inhabit one another (the value of bedside manner for a doctor, the knowledge of gestural semiotics and kinesiology for the dancer).

With this sort of schema, we can observe that the legal profession, for instance, calls on both sorts of excellence in varying degrees, in varying practices. Surely, lawyers should know the law and the precedents; but surely also they benefit from a creative sense of how law and precedents might relate to one another. And teams of lawyers (warning: I know nothing about legal practice) might benefit from drawing on some who stone cold know the case law, and others who have a strong imaginative grasp of what makes for a convincing innovation in legal argumentation.

What about church leaders?

My sense of the current status of theological education would suggest that we can cite a tremendous variety of perceptions of how church leaders ought to be prepared and to practice, and at the same time a high degree of unclarity about these. That doesn’t seem propitious to me. For my part, I take the consequences of “untrue” theological practice as much more grievous than of, let’s say, a very unpalatable, vacuous performance routine. I’d suppose that no matter how friendly, “effective,” or appealing a church leader might be, their practice involves serious dangers to their congregations and their neighbors if they do not know the gross anatomy and pharmacology of their role. The alternative — so far as I can see — involves suggesting that “it doesn’t matter,” and my reading of history, of theology, of Scripture, of the examples of the saints, and of a variety of other sources of evaluation suggests that the “doesn’t matter” position not only places real people’s real well-being at hazard, it cuts off the very limb from which it propounds its innovative, appealing, creative, provocative intervention.
Continue reading “What Is Theological Education Like?”

Last weekend, I received communion on consecutive days from newly-ordained former students of mine. That affected me deeply; these were folks who had spent years in my courses, whom I’d knocked myself out to invite into the practices of prayer and critical interpretation that equip a leader with deep, adaptive spiritual resources for recognizing and proclaiming the truth of the gospel. Now, they were feeding me with the bread of life.

That experience underlined the extent to which my work involves imposing on students: placing demands on their time and patience, their capacities for attention and understanding, their willingness to entertain — at least provisionally — perspectives on the New Testament, church history, and interpretive wisdom that may diverge from what they’ve hitherto thought. I cost them a lot, both financially and in less quantifiable resources. Their trust in me (those who tender it) beggars my imagination; I pray that I have responded to their willingness to rely on me with offerings fit for such lovely, ardent, earnest servants of God.

Sometimes people invoke “logic” and “reason” as though these were self-evident, natural categories that can determine human action. In response, Margaret and I cite the following evidently fictitious example of someone exercising sensible, logical reasoning (via Boing Boing).

As Margaret pointed out to me, the protagonist made a plausible, reasoned decision; it’s not that he was frivolous or reckless, he was just ignorant and dangerously wrong. But we’re never in a position to know when our ignorance puts us at risk; that, after all, is what “ignorance” means. When someone assures you that we know X or a rational actor would do Y, ask yourself whether there’s any possibility that the “we” in question or the “rational actor” in question might be about as logical, about as reasonable, as the narrator of today’s story.

What do I want in a course that introduces the New Testament?

I’ve been thinking about it as I look back on the year’s teaching, and after reading the article in Inside Higher Education about Robert Frank’s economics curriculum. Part of the problem involves the interplay of cognition and judgment. Entering students in Bible generally need to learn more about the Bible itself, and about the terms and frames in which biblical scholars write, but they also need to learn to think like biblical scholars — at least insofar as that enables the students to make useful sense of the vast quantities of scholarly writings.

The Franks article helpfully makes several points I want to bear in mind as I think about NT introduction. First: “The idea of taking a few core things, working on them until you get them, and then moving on and adding complexity only when the root stuff is firmly embedded, that just seemed like such an eye-opener to me.” There’s so much that NT scholarship has done, has gradually taken for granted as a minimal base for knowledge and reflection, that it’s hard for a teacher to see how vast a load of stuff we’re dumping on people.

Second, Frank’s project helps students develop a narrative intelligibility for the matters we study — rather like Stephen Neill’s book, revised by Tom Wright, The Interpretation of the New Testament, 1861-1986. I’m beginning to think that the best way to introduce students to the New Testament would involve helping them understand how we got to where we are, on several limited areas. A student who has come to understand the history of analyses of the Synoptic Problem will be better prepared to think about pseudonymity in the catholic epistles, even if we don’t spend a lot of time on II Peter.

You may remember that at last year’s choir banquet, Pippa walked away with two of the major awards (attendance and the Rector’s Award for exemplary ministry); I figured that she probably wouldn’t get any repeat awards, so she might manage without any this year.

Tonight was the choir banquet, preceded by the final choral Evensong of the year. During Evensong, Pippa sang an extraordinary improvised solo during the psalm; Margaret and I were very nervous going in, but Pippa rocked; everyone lauded her. Then at the awards banquet, she received not only the joke award for an “Exchange Student” (presaging her coming year in Princeton), but also the attendance award (again) and the Most Improved girl’s chorister. Then Jonathan gave her a special good-bye present from the choir, too.

She was characteristically reserved about all this — Jonathan remarked on it, joking that he knew she just loved the attention — but we were beaming with pride. She’s a treat, and it’s intensely encouraging when other people notice her.

The prospect of sabbatical leave provokes more lines of thinking and anticipating than I could realize in three or four years of time off teaching, but among the things I hope to do relatively soon is redesign this page.