Category: Uncategorized

The diligent newshounds at CNN have rolled back the curtains of ignorance and misinformation in the Kathy Sierra death threat controversy. I found the link thanks to Dave, who points to Norm Jenson’s blog. Apart from the clip reporting mostly what everyone who read Kathy’s post already knew more than a week ago, it only got a few things wrong. For instance, sensible as Harvard would be to attract David Weinberger as a professor there, he’s a Fellow of the Berkman Center — but they didn’t make do to his words any of the terrible things he feared (I don’t think). And Chris Locke came of relatively benign, making a plausible point about the amount of human energy and cost that it would take to patrol an internet that was insulated from malignant sociopathy (I mean, we aren’t doing so very well in that department in the physical-space world). They didn’t mention Kathy and Chris’s joint statement (on which, good job, friends), but granted the volatility of the topic, CNN successfully avoided playing to hysteria.

On the other hand: I feel sorry for Kathy having been called a “cute kitty” on international news TV. Although she won’t get thousands of messages decrying this form of misogyny, the media digesters did not blaze any new bold paths in egalitarian journalism when they compared an endangered woman to a small, fuzzy, defenseless feline. No, it’s not as bad as a death threat — but if we’re going to open the topic of malignant effects on women, we should speak clearly and directly about androcentric condescension and “protection.”
Continue reading “Thank Heaven For Mainstream Media”

Chapel Hill, NC – Researchers at the Dean Smith Center for Interspecies Cooperation have released a report that should be required reading for every dog owner. Their preliminary findings suggest that the thin plastic bags that many owners use for cleaning up after their dogs transmit some of what they’re expected to contain.

“We ran a series of initial tests at the request of a public health department,” said Prof. Herb Eagle, “and observed right away that the two main bacterial contaminants — around the lab, we were joking around and called them ‘poop’ons — can’t pass through the plastic barrier. One kind, the white poopons, cause more of a smell than the black ones, but both black and white have a gross molecular structure that will stay inside all standard plastic containers.”

Prof. Eagle went on to say that one afternoon they noticed that bags that were supposed to be tied off and sealed were nonetheless emitting an unpleasant odor. Further analysis revealed that among the samples in the test, not only were there the expected black poopons and white poopons, but a third and rarer bacterium with some characteristics of each. This third sort of contaminant has a tighter structure that enables it to pass through the thinner plastic bags that some dog owners use — the bag that protects the Sunday New York Times, for instance, or fresh produce bags, especially the semi-porous green bags often used at up-market organic grocers.

“We called this third kind of contaminant the ‘grey poopons,’ ” explained Prof. Eagle.

Officials at the Smith Center expressed appreciation for the importance of the discovery and advised dog owners to stick with heavy-gauge plastic refuse-removal conveyances. They referred inquiries about the formal name of the newly-found hazard to Prof. Eagle, who admitted that “no one wants it named after them.” For the time being, it will presumably be identified with the research center that first isolated it.

Phds.org’s rating system for doctoral programs isn’t quite the Philosophical Gourmet, but it’s more information than potential applicant might have had before. If soeone were to bootstrap a Theological Gourmet, though, I’d be behind it all the way.

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Heather pointed to this essay which touches on “deafness as culture” issues that pertain to both Beautiful Theology and Seabury’s Gospel Mission course.

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As so very often, Dorothea has a keen eye and clear talk about gender politics. This exemplifies what the leadership tries energetically to do in the We Know guild, in Warcraft. Many people, including some officers, resist Dorothea’s approach; as she says, the playing field tilts strongly toward discourse that treats women as the objects of particular, sexual, [I’m scrabbling for a word here, “diminutory” — small-making — not quite the same as “derogatory”] rhetoric. A number of us intervene in guild chat regularly to quash anti-gay and misogynistic talk, but the effect tends more to be “keeping the problem from overflowing,” not yet to the point of “engendering a healthy communicative ecology.” And that’s not just “a healthy communicative ecology for women and lesbigay guildies” — it’s unhealthy for straight men to operate in a discursive world that derogates everyone else. Thank you, Dorothea.

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Tax Day. Will I be able to complete our taxes in one convulsive day of computer activity?

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Mark Goodacre (whose work on Q scholarship I hyped in New Testament Intro last week) speaks up on behalf of Wikipedia in his blog today; I think he’s quite right. Wikipedia isn’t perfect; nothing is; it’s useful; my bigger problem with students, research, and the Net involves students who won’t look at any sources that aren’t online (looking around in a library is too inconvenient).

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Federal and NC taxes complete and filed for AKMA and Margaret; Illinois taxes must be mailed in, but they’re complete also.

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Josiah’s taxes completed and filed.

In an online interaction today, somebody thanked me for picking up a cue she offered; I had responded to her straight line with exactly the [witty, clever] a propos punch line she had hoped for.

That brought to my consciousness that over the years, I had imbibed the idea that passing up a straight line was about as deplorable a gaffe as one could imagine. The social act of extending a straight line to someone involves offering them the opportunity to deliver the funny part of repartee, without any obvious credit going to the straight man. We do it, though, for the love of a punch line, for the satisfaction of comedy well crafted, of participating in funnier conversation than would be possible if each of us were out only for his or her own glory. It’s a funny kind of solidarity, but I cherish it.

A number of people offered appreciative notice of my observations on the death threats against Kathy Sierra, what they were and weren’t; that’s a relief, since I have no interest in blaming victims, and the whole dreadful situation has made most of the people it has touched into victims of one sort or another (and I don’t want to get into establishing a scale of suffering, either; the fallout affected different people to different degrees in different ways, and few of us, if any, know enough about more than one or two of the people involved to say anything responsible about who suffered more than whom).

Among people who noticed what I wrote, some have scolded me for not issuing a public denunciation of — well, different people want me to denounce different specifics, or generalities, but some folks wanted me on the record against X, Y, or Z.

That irks me for a variety of reasons. First, I am not sure how someone could read what I wrote without recognizing that I explicitly, firmly, denounced death threats, ominous sexual aggression against women, and I directed pretty stern words calling into question the actions (direct and indirect) of some of my friends. Second, it presumes that whatever I have to say relative to my friends and their actions has to be said for the entire cosmos to read — and that contradicts both my sense of pastoral ministry and my common sense of what friendship means.

To give you an idea of how clearly the pertinent people understand my perspective on things like “outrageous” japery, I not only wasn’t invited to participate in the sites in question, I didn’t even know they existed till well after they were established and I happened to follow some links.

Third, and this gets back to a point I made back in the earlier post, some of the criticism implies a much fuller knowledge of “what actually happened” and “what AKMA’s involved in” than I see any warrant for. It’s OK if people don’t trust me not to snicker behind my hand; it would disappoint me, but presumably I haven’t earned their trust, and whimpering won’t enhance my standing with such a person. That’s different, though, from saying that “AKMA should do this thing I stipulate about that.” Feel free to criticize me (for reasons you enumerate), but please don’t tell me what I have to do. It’s at least possible you don’t know everything about what I’m up to, or why.

I venture the next point hesitantly, because I don’t want to take anything away from the points Dave Winer gets right in supporting people with whom he has long-standing feuds. But in his posting today, Dave said, “I’ve asked other people who do, like David Weinberger and AKMA how they can support that — I asked when I was a target of their attacks. All I got was silence.” I need to note, perhaps defensively, that in my case that’s flat out untrue. Dave asked me, at BloggerCon I, how I could remain friends with people who attack other friends of mine. Now Dave may not have been satisfied with what I said, but we conducted the conversation in front of a roomful of people, including Dan Bricklin, David Weinberger, Ross Rader, Joey DeVilla, Boris (don’t remember Boris’s last name), I think Halley (I’m not invited to see her blog any more, but I assume it’s still there) Suitt was there for that session, Enoch Choi, a bunch of other people who might have been there but my memory may be blurring them with others (I’ll happily add or subtract names as others correct me), and the prodigious Heath Row who transcribed it (Thank you, David, for saving the link for me). And besides, what person who knows me can imagine that when someone asks me a complicated question, I’d be silent?

So, on friendship: I construe friendship as involving me in other people’s lives on terms that neither of us gets to determine on our own. Friendship involves yielding some degree of one’s self-determination, in the name of participating in a shared life that exceeds the sum of its individual parts. Sometimes friendships lessen us, sometimes friendships ennoble us; often they alternate between those; sometimes we’re graced with friendships that overwhelmingly bless us with stronger, lovelier, more generous relationships. When my friendships involve me in conflicts among different friends, friends who fall out with one another, I try to deal with those conflicts on the basis of what has been strong and true in each of the divergent relationships; I refuse to be jobbed into picking one side over against another. As a result, some interlocutors have grounds to regard me as morally compromised, and to make such accusations public. I don’t like that, it’s not what I work toward in friendship, but it’s out of my control. I don’t get to determine what others will do any more than they get to determine what I’ll do. But it’s not my way to write people off, nor to require them to engage the world on my terms, nor to stifle my understanding of what’s good, and admirable, and morally binding, just to please my friends. If they don’t like who I am and what I stand for, then they probably don’t want to be friends of mine. And if they can take having a friend with my characteristics, OK.

(By the way — I don’t by any means always live up to the identity I sketch above, but it’s the point of reference toward which I’m aiming.)

The other day after work, I ran to Jewel to pick up some supplies, and one of the grocery-cart guys hailed me, “Hello, Rabbi!” (He was probably misled by my black wool hat.) This was a new one for me, and we were passing each other so we didn’t really have time for a discussion of the differences between a Hasid and an Anglo-Catholic. I said, “Hi, thanks!” If I’ve given offense by not disclaiming strongly enough, I herewith apologize.

Last year, Sarah’s mom reported to me that Sarah had asked her, “Is Father Adam Amish?” since, after all, she usually sees me dressed in black and white.

So I guess I’m a one-man interfaith, ecumenical movement — and the joke’s on me, because I’m one of the least likely theologians for that identity.
Continue reading “A Different Honor”

What with classes and papers and painstaking endeavors to say something true in the fog of rhetorical war, I had a difficult time squeezing out a sermon for today’s service. Though I am ordinarily quite susceptible to distraction, the past couple of days rendered me entirely distracted – especially because I felt as though the homily involved my saying some relatively Big Important things about myself and my faith, which I would rather. . . hey, look at today’s Dilbert!

I noticed after I sat down that the sermon placed “me” at its epicenter rather more firmly than I approve. On the whole, “my stuff” shouldn’t be the subject of a sermon, since a sermon should point to Scripture, not to the preacher. I’ve stuck with some qualifying expressions, though, because I think that in this case, I wouldn’t have been able to talk about “people’s faith” in the abstract; the rhetoric works, or doesn’t, to the extent that it invokes a concrete person with actual concerns and commitments. While I may well be self-deceived at this point, it seemed (intuitively, in prospect; deliberately, in retrospect) that the sermon required a specific subject, and that I couldn’t project it onto anybody else.

So, apart from some critical reflection on first person homilizing, and a relative lack of time to get well enough acquainted with the words I’d chosen that I could handle pacing and emphasis as well as I’d have wished, it went OK.
Continue reading “Midday Homily”

Pippa returned to her pastels over the weekend, and she offered me the self-portrait that resulted:

I’m glad I waited a while to post about Kathy Sierra’s unfortunate situation; a vast sea of people expressed their solidarity with Kathy, Shelley sized up the situation with the wisdom and perspective that typify her, and Frank, Jeneane, and Chris have responded, and Allan seems to have closed up shop. The mysterious “Joe” has left comments here and there. I had glanced at the two sites in question, what, about a week ago, saw nothing interesting and several things that irked me, and moved on. I didn’t notice any death threats, or any close approximations thereof, but I wasn’t looking for them.

To begin with the obvious, no one should have to cope with death threats , whether private ones in anonymous emails (about the height of creepiness) or public — and, granted the popular culture’s predilection for highlighting (and selling) the exhilarating voyeurism of women-in-jeopardy, I see ample reason for people to exercise special care to steer clear of sending messages that intensify any woman’s already-heightened sense of being the object of someone’s pathology. It’s wrong, and it’s dumb. It’s not near the fine line between stupid and clever. It crossed that line, stomped on it, scuffed it out, and kept going (and not in the “clever” direction).

After one establishes that nobody ought to threaten people’s lives, a premise I whole-heartedly endorse, people seem to have run in a great many other directions with this incident. Some commenters have interposed themselves among Kathy’s very many admirers to say, in essence, “If you don’t like it, don’t go on the internet.” I suppose that might work for some people — “If you don’t want us to brutalize you, don’t come to our neighborhood, or if you come, make sure you’ve got us out-gunned” — but it falls considerably short of the kind of ideal community life, short even of “minimally functional community life” in my book. Kathy shouldn’t have to choose between writing a blog with death threats and vanishing from Blogaria.

Some of Kathy’s defenders seemed a little hysterical, though. A great many people asserted their certainty that they knew what kind of person would participate in the MeanKids and BobsYerUncle sites, and why. That sort of presumption pushes my buttons, and not simply because I know the people Kathy named in connection with her death threats; I persistently push my students to articulate “How would you know that? What evidence do you have for that claims?” because I observe so many people taking precipitous action on the basis of conclusions to which they’ve jumped far in advance of any evidence. I see it in students’ and scholars’ biblical interpretation, where readers just know what must have happened; I see it in church conflict, where people just know what others really mean, and why they profess the claims they do; I see it in politics, where prominent figures commit vast resources and numerous human lives to projects on the basis of unsubstantiated intuitions. What I don’t see is any sign that this presumed knowledge makes the world a better place.

So in response to very real pathological threats (explicit in the emails), Kathy sensibly explained in a very public way (a) why she wasn’t going to Etech and (b) whom she held responsible. I take it that this is one of the positive uses of the Net: to make a visible, public record of the situation, so that any possible assailant would know that Kathy and Bert, law enforcement authorities, and pretty much the whole Net-reading world, knew about what was going on. Lots of light on the obscure goings-on.

That transition from anonymous threats in email to calling-out specific people (who — so far as I know — have no direct connection with the murderous threat) changes the picture. Granted, without question, that Kathy shouldn’t have to put up with death threats, I’m uneasy about her targeting others for whom there isn’t a demonstrable connection to the specific death threats. There’s a difference between tasteless, hurtful tripe (on one hand) and credible death threats (on the other); although the two may be congruent, I need to know more about the connection before I assent to connecting these particular dots.

In this way, anonymity cuts more directions than one: It enables a mysterious assailant to terrify Kathy, but it also provides the grounds for Kathy suggesting that Frank, Chris, Jeneane, and Allan are complicit with a would-be murderer. That’s a pretty serious allegation; she has interpellated them as co-conspirators. That wouldn’t fit with what I otherwise know of them, but more important, I don’t see evidence for that charge. Again, crudity that’s congruent with death threats may be worth condemning, but it’s not the same as participating in those threats. And since very few people on the Net are as anonymous as they think they are, we can expect that there is light to be shed on precisely who was threatening Kathy.

Compare [reports about] the sites in question with other websites, those that cultivate calumnious derogation of political figures, or that use tropes of sexual violence to the purpose of satire. I can propose distinctions that would categorize some as vile and dangerous, others as puerile and hurtful, others as scathing but just; so can you, and our assessments are virtually guaranteed to differ. In such perilous circumstances, distinctions and the reasoning that grounds them make all the difference in the world. Accusations that efface distinctions spread the damage around, but they don’t remedy anything, and often enough they take a bad scene and make it a lot worse.

All these dimensions show, yet again, that whatever else is true, there’s no magic barrier that separates the Net from Real Life. Whether in flesh or in pixels, we’re continuously taking part in a venture with the highest stakes, in a medium with an exceptionally long memory and no guarantees of anonymity. What we do, we do in public even if we hold a domino in front of our features — the slandering, threatening, stalking, bullying and other gestures we make online had better be gestures whose consequences we stand by.

First, Margaret pointed me to these photos of a recently-discovered owl species (“Strange Owl” — I love it! Xenoglaux, literally “strange owl” in Greek); with our public affinity for matters glauxological, and my family’s history of involvement with owls, I couldn’t omit mention of it here.

Second, I’m preaching Wednesday at Seabury’s chapel service; the texts are Daniel 3:14-28 (omitting 21-23), Canticle 13 from the BCP, and John 8:31-42. I belabor the topic of John and Judaism enough outside of chapel that I think I’ll concentrate my attention on John 8:32 (“You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free”), but I’m not sure yet.

Pippa decided that this morning, we would take advantage of the fine weather and bicycle to church. Yesterday she pumped up the tires and made sure we had enough locks and helmets; this morning, we rolled down to St. Luke’s in the early morning fog, in time for her to rehearse with the choir and for me to sip coffee and read, and to discover how many joints and muscles were not accustomed to the posture and exercise of biking.

Then, after church, the weather was significantly clearer, which made the ambient temperature a great deal warmer.

Si’s bicycle had a flat tire, we discovered early on, so he drove; I asked him to take my blazer and briefcase for the ride back home. I’ll get fitter every week, but this could be a lo-o-o-o-ong summer.

I think it’s a major flaw in the system, that you can’t enjoy the benefits of fresh-brewed coffee while you’re still lying snug, warm, and cozy in bed.
Continue reading “Just Saying”