Category: Uncategorized

The lions of first-generation continental postmodern thought are disappearing; Jean Baudrillard, most recently.

I don’t have the time or the heart carefully to write out what I think about/with Baudrillard, but there’s a worthwhile, timely conversation over at Church and Postmodern Culture.

I find myself in the very odd position of writing and talking about seminary education under Web 3.0 conditions, and receiving appreciative feedback for it, with no immediate prospect of participating in a project that realizes the characteristics I describe. I suppose the “appreciative attention” beats “gales of derisive laughter,” though.

Recent posts about rivals to Second Life tend to confirm my sense that the future holds a successor to the kind of context that Second Life has pioneered — but that successor isn’t on the immediate horizon. (That’s trivial, right? No one thinks that SL will be eternal. But I mean that if someone wants to modulate into a Web 3.0 environment, they should probably move into SL cautiously, not vesting all their resources in SL-specific features. Build out into SL, but build out as a staging area, not as though it will be the long-term platform for your online education venture. SL may have the winning recipe to be its own successor, and that revised iteration may preserve your SL assets — but there’s no need to gamble.)

On the other hand, institutions that shy away from persistent-media online venues will be less well prepared for the transition when it comes. Now is an entirely appropriate time to begin exploring avatar-oriented education; after all, Socrates did all right just wandering around the Agora with his students.

I took the MSNBC/Newsweek fifteen-question quiz on my “good basic knowledge of world religions” (not a precise description of the quiz, but I went ahead and took it anyway). When I got the first answer right, it told me that I had attained a score of 200% — pretty good, eh, considering I had only just started? Then I got the second answer right, and it said my score had dropped to 150%. Now, apart from the mathematical absurdity of my having a score over 100% after only two questions — and I agree that that’s a big “apart from” — my score actually declined when I got a second answer right.

For the rest of the quiz, my reported score again varied in ways that don’t correspond to a percentage-of-fifteen. So I think this whole set-up is an elaborate scam, designed to trap readers into boasting about hyperbolic scores that reveal that they don’t know anything about math. Either that or the quiz programmer. . . no, it must be a trap.

My students know me to oppose the use of the verb “like,” on the grounds that it typically signals a student’s unwillingness to participate in critical evaluation of their claims. “Like” doesn’t entail accountability for discernment. I like vanilla ice cream more than I like chocolate, and there’s an end on’t.

You can quickly see why the “like” reflex corrodes academic discourse; if different arguments and truth-claims matter only as a matter of a reader’s preference, then consistency, rigor, precision, all go out the window. The problem intensifies in the field of theological study, where cultural predisposition already consigns our topic to the realm of private disposition. Why shouldn’t Henrietta say she likes to think of Jesus as just a really swell teacher, or Mercutio say he likes Tom Wright more than Dom Crossan? Well, to start with, Crossan and Wright and the conciliar fathers all advanced arguments for their positions; if their influence depends solely on their winsomeness, as distinct from the convincing arguments they advanced, their intellectual efforts were squandered. Moreover, in the regime of “Like”-ness there’s no rationale for a student to learn more; anyone can like this or that without apprehending the nuances, the contexts, the consequences of their subject.

“Liking” and “commending” or “affirming” entail different complexes of claims. I may like a scholar whose theories I wouldn’t endorse; I may dislike a scholar who has devised a compelling argument. Indeed, I may like or dislike arguments themselves, without regard to whether they convince me. “Liking,” in these circumstances, suggests an unwillingness to relinquish the habits that arise from ignorance. If we aren’t willing to resist “like” theology, we might as well not bother with theological education; if we sense some value to theological education, we need to support it by rooting out “like”-ness.
 

When did it become a mandatory cliche that every significant change be called a “sea change”?

I relish the sense of mysterious transformation to which Shakespeare applied the expression “sea-change” in The Tempest; when writers imprecisely apply it to simpler differences, I second Paul Brians’s advice: “Avoid the phrase; otherwise you will irritate those who know it and puzzle those who do not.”

Last night, Pippa and Margaret and I went out to dinner to celebrate their recent accomplishments, and in the course of ingesting my grilled vegetable sandwich, I bit my tongue, hard. Really hard. Today I find that so long as I only talk a very short while, everything works okay. If I talk for a long-ish while, though — say, reciting a psalm or leading a class discussion — my tongue starts swelling and I have a very hard time pronouncing things.

OK, since I’m complaining about one thing, I’ll mention another and get it out of my system: the winter has lasted long enough that my skin has dried out to the point of near-flammability.

Sorry for the kvetching. I’ll get back to other topics.

A few weeks ago I posted a link to a “worst rhymes in pop music”, a topic that rewards — albeit poorly — the copious attention it inevitably attracts once you start thinking about it. In subsequent days, radio stations have driven home to me another “worst” category worthy off note: “worst syntax.” Some rhymes, after all, are themselves perfectly kosher, but their authors arrive at them by way of gruesome constructions or incoherent expressions (not “obscurely evocative,” but “outright insultingly stupid”).

The paradigm case, or course, is America’s “Horse With No Name,” which attains immortality in so many categories of badness that it’s not quite fair to include it with the rest of the popular song oeuvre.

In the desert, you can’t remember your name
Cause there ain’t no one for to give you no fame

Note that “name”/“fame” is a righteous rhyme, all right — and let’s bypass the issue of whether living in the desert induces onomamnesia — but that last line defies any English-speaker to utter it with a straight face. “There ain’t no one” — well, we’ll cut these young men some slack thus far — “for to” — oh dear, they lapse into a construction that might work in a folk song, a genuine folk song or an earnest imitation, but sounds painfully artificial in pop — “to give you no fame” — start with the triple negative “Ain’t. . . no. . . no. . . ,” then raise it by the power of the nonexistent expression “to give fame.” It’s a masterpiece of lyrical bad-osity.

But again, “Horse With No Name” attains sui generis badness status. If we look for a sublunary rival, what about Rod Stewart’s couplet from “Maggie May”:

I laughed at all of your jokes
My love you didn’t need to coax

Again, “jokes”/“coax” works; in fact, it’s a delightfully unpredictable pair that someone such as Cole Porter could have forged into a classic. But this pair’s second line transgresses every convention of English-language expression. The rest of the song has its plusses and minuses; Margaret doesn’t like it, but the band projects a strong, loose, semi-ragged conviviality that I admire. But that couplet comes around, and I have to wince.

Continue reading “More Bad”

It was only well into the first act that I realized I was watching a show that instilled in these young people the premise that drunkenness, thievery, kidnapping, licentiousness, and lying were amiable pastimes for friendly characters in a musical comedy. Still, the redoubtable Thin Ice Theater Company launched into Oliver! with gusto and verve. Pippa starred appeared as “Orphan” and, in an uncredited cameo, as “Night Watchman” (never has “Murder! Murder!” been shouted with such poignant urgency, such a tender compassion for the fallen streetwalker, such ironic metacommentary on the plot’s disquieting abjection of women).

She was terrific, of course, and her choir experience contributed greatly to a production in which melody, pitch, and English accents conspired to stymie many of the young performers.

And to top it all off, Nate won a prize today for Best Student Presentation at the annual music theory association meeting. And did I mention that Margaret passed the oral exam for her doctoral program, and is visiting home for the weekend? Are they marvelous, or what?

Mild-mannered clergyman and academic brushes up against notoriety again! My encounter with the Nantucket police department has gotten renewed attention in light of a recent Alaskan incident; that one earned me the “Infohighwayman” sobriquet. Now, it turns out, I’m a “culprit”; because I turn out to have written the first retrospective blog entry about Joey and Wendy’s wedding, which they asked that people not live-blog. Jennifer Saranow of the Wall Street Journal, who was unfailingly diligent, polite, inquisitive, and pleasant in our numerous conversations, construed my post that way, anyway. Apart from the somewhat incongruous characterization of my compliance as culprit-hood, it’s an innocuous enough account, and it’s fun to be relinked to Rachel and Ethan and Joey and Wendy.

Dave didn’t like it* — “it’s such a non-story” — and David resists the association of live-blogging with narcissism with the wise observation that “Live blogging is inexplicable enough that it seems likely to be an indicator of a more important fault line in how we’re constructing public and private spaces,” to which I lend heartfelt affirmation.

* Yesterday Dave took up the problem of disappearing blog archives I raised a few years ago, that Joi and David made fun of, that ultimately got me interviewed by France 2. So our paths cross and link twice in two days.

I just got off the phone with Margaret, who reports that her committee sustained her doctoral exams. She’s done with course work, done with being-a-student!

Eventually, she’ll submit a proposal for her dissertation and write it, but that’s a fundamentally different exercise. It’s a big job that not everyone can pull off, but it’s the sort that she’s actually better-prepared for than she was for the peculiar task of taking exams. Plus, after she’s done TA-ing this semester, she doesn’t need to live on campus!
Continue reading “Done!“

Tomorrow morning at 10 Eastern, 9 Central, Margaret begins the oral defense of her doctoral exams. Any candle-lighting, prayer-offering, incense-burning, or whatever that you’ve been doing for her reaches its urgent peak for the hour or two after that.

Only very foolish people figure they can outthink a faculty committee, so I don’t pretend to know what will happen — but the written versions of her exams, and the prep she’s been doing between the written exams and tomorrow morning, make me confident that there should be no problem for her. Compared to exams I’ve observed from the sidelines and participated in (as student and as grad faculty at PTS), she’s in the secure zone.

On the other hand, there are the matters of sleeping tonight, keeping food down, and so on.

Stay tuned. I’ll post here when I get done with my first reactions to her phone call.

I’ve been approaching the New Testament II class this winter somewhat differently from past years; whereas before, I divided the survey between gospels (first term) and epistles (second term), this time around I tried to do the cognitive work of the survey of the whole NT in the first term, and have been trying to get at questions of discerning stronger and weaker interpretations in this second term.

Certain aspects of the class have affirmed that decision. It looks clearer and clearer to me that it’s right to segregate the modes of thinking; it’s too much to introduce the conventions of NT scholarship at the same time I’m asking students to identify which are the strongest and best interpretations, and which are dodgier.

On the other hand, I haven’t quite successfully helped the NT II students arrive at a critical apparatus for recognizing stronger or weaker. That has a lot to do with the way the discipline has constituted itself; I’d argue that New Testament studies, biblical studies, has tended to induct new practitioners based on their intuitive apprehension of practices and rules that remain unstated, or are stated in ways unhelpful to a beginning outsider. I’d love to have the time to do some work on ways that biblical scholars actually frame their arguments — not the tacit arguments and warrants that we’re socialized to recognize and interpolate into the explicit rhetoric, but the ways we actually frame our cases (so that I could then work with students toward identifying which of these a particular article was advancing, and also could try to supply what our elliptical reasoning omits. That pertains directly to the project I was pitching to Rodney Clapp last fall, introducing students to biblical scholarship with very short manuals on “what makes this kind of argument convincing”; unfortunately, it would require a set-aside block of time to go through a repertoire of articles, highlight the argumentative skeletons of the pieces, and foreground the warrants, make explicit the presuppositions that stand to persuade the careful reader. Maybe after the next book. . . .