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This morning’s presentation in honor of Robert Brawley went well, I think; it was a shame that more people couldn’t have made it out to Bourbonnais, but the speakers made clear our admiration for Robert and his work. My observations on postmodernism as the context for Robert’s scholarship were well received, and the audience even found a musing a line that I hadn’t intended to elicit mirth (I’ll have to think about that).

And the night before, Pippa went to the Mardi Gras party at St. Luke’s (held on a Saturday, but nonetheless not called “Samedi Gras”):

I was not so well-dressed at my occasion; I should’ve checked with Pippa to see what she thought of The Postmodern Condition relative to Text to Text Pours Forth Speech.

Earlier I suggested a selection of posts that pertain to the difference it would make for an institution of theological higher education to emigrate to digitally-indigenous teaching. Today’s blog from David Weinberger relative to his consulting visit to NPR (summarized by Jeff Jarvis, to whom I haven’t had a good excuse for linking in a long time, Hi Jeff!) raises, in a different venue, an array of topics that could provoke an established institution to rethink its mission in more digitally-coherent ways.

Writing. Errands. Exultant that Margaret had a satisfying effort on her exam yesterday.

A certain member of the household — who shall go unnamed, except in the program of Oliver!, in which she’s playing the role of the Night Watchman and singing in the chorus — suggests that she found a source for me to get new vestments at a bargain price:

“The model even looks like you, Dad!”

This morning is Margaret’s third preliminary exam, the one on comparative literature and critical theory (she’s concentrating on nihilism). This is the last of the closed-room exams; after this one, she has a two-day take-home exam on her dissertation topic.

Send a few supportive thoughts her way, give her spirit a boost as she churns through this phase of the academic gauntlet. She’s coming around the bend, into the home stretch, and we’re cheering her on. Come on, sweetheart!

[After the exam: First reports are positive. Now, for the two-day take-home exam on her special area of concentration!]

Pippa’s starring in the chorus of the local homeschool production of Oliver!. OK, she’s in the chorus. But a couple of weeks ago, she was awarded the vital role of the Night Watchman.

On that account she gets a line. It goes: “Murder! Murder!”

I, being a diligent homeschool parent, have been working with her on her line. I cue her: “How’s your part going? Think you have a handle on your part?” I try to help her get into her character. “What do you think the Night Watchman’s motivations are? What’s his backstory? How old is he? Does he even have a name?”

For some reason, Pippa seems unimpressed by these considerations.

Tripp was querying me about history, historicism, texts, and ancient credulity. He called my attention to Paul Cantor’s article at the Claremont Review of Books — an article I found very impressive, though I applied the brakes at the sentence, “Historicists always stress the integrity of a culture and treat it as a seamless whole, set apart from the rest of the world,” a sentence that casts the rest of the argument in doubt. The point is not an oversimplified generalization about what historicists always do, but the rare and extraordinary circumstances in which cultural production demonstrably attains a currency and affective power across the boundaries of cultural difference. Let’s not a write a check we can’t cash by saying that this or that work attains universality; we don’t need to. And sometimes historicists overestimate cultural seamlessness, but more often they attend to the complexities of how cultures determine meaning, and how meaning resounds beyond the cultural limits we might anticipate. (Speaking as a biblical theologian and a defender of a traditionalist-classicist approach to liturgy, I’m vigorously in favor both of attending to ancient texts both in their antiquity and of allowing that they may harbor dimensions that bespeak an unanticipated contemporaneity.)

This came up partly in response to Tripp’s having heard from someone about how foolishly credulous people were in the ancient world — so I pointed him to Lucian’s “On Sacrifices” and Plutarch’s (warning! subsequent link leads to a PDF) “De Superstitione.” And of course, to illustrate the foolish credulity of twenty-first century people, there’s always Fox News.

This afternoon, my colleague John and I talked with the Dean about what it would mean for Seabury to become indigenous to the Net. We went over a variety of points — Seabury teaching the church; Seabury changing from a static, bounded community to transient, open community; Seabury changing from curriculum-and-units-driven learning toward something more like home schooling; and Seabury changing from degree recognition based on a credit count to recognition based on performance evaluation (my summaries, not John’s more elegant formulations). As we left, I urged the Dean to spend more time with the Net, to explore what’s going on there.

Among the points of reference that came up in our conversation, or that pertain to the kinds of topic we introduced:

• The presentation version of my “What Theological Educators Need to Learn From Napster,” a refined version of which was later published in Teaching Theology and Religion.

• The presentation video clip for Charlie and Rebecca Nesson’s Harvard Law course “CyberOne: Law in the Court of Public Opinion”

• Michael Wesch’s “Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us”

• The Cluetrain Manifesto (and with tip of my snow hood to David Weinberger, “Introducing The Book”)

Just for starters. Throw in “Blogumentary,” spend some time playing with Flickr, play Second Life for a while. I wish I could refer him to the Game Neverending, but alas, it has gone the way of all bits. (This is my house from GNE. . . .)

[Added later: Lawrence Lessig’s “Five-Point Proposal” for safeguarding the Internet, and his “Open Spectrum” presentation. He clearly stands out as a brilliant interpreter of law, but we shouldn’t let that distract us from his brilliance as a communicator of ideas.)

(Also later: Darn! I’d intended to point to the Democracy Player open source video device. Imagine a Seabury DTV channel — wouldn’t that transform our public identity (and with it, our own practice as teachers and learners) just by itself?!)

Margaret had her second preliminary exam this morning. It was hard, involved some unexpected topics, but she’s halfway done. Go, Margaret!

Nothing like two weeks of sub-zero temperature to make 29° F feel like a heat wave. I walked the dog in the morning snow, thinking, “I don’t need this parka. . . .”

Saturday night, as I was drifting to sleep, the thought crossed my mind that my laudatory address for Robert Brawley might be the next morning, not next week as I had thought. I drifted off to sleep, and when I woke up I was very sure that the address was next week.

Later in the day I was checking iCal to see whether I had a faculty meeting Monday morning, and my date for February 11 said, “SBL meeting/Brawley tribute.” As in, “AKMA, you just skipped the tribute and banquet in honor of your friend. People were standing around saying, ‘He said he’d be here; I wonder where he is.’ Instead of paying tribute to your admirable friend, you blew him off. You louse.”

So I drafted a letter that aimed for maximal explicit penitence without crossing the line into unbecoming groveling. I noted all the ironies and faults of skipping out on my commitment to deliver a paper called “Friends and Others, in Tribute to Robert Brawley.” I was fine-tuning my meek conclusion, when I decided to Google to pin down the timing of my blunder, and Google indicated that the meeting was in fact scheduled for next Sunday. So my question is, after having gone through all the agony of having actually missed the date, am I more relieved not to have missed it, or disappointed that the adrenalin surge and attendant rhetorical exercise in self-abnegation was for naught?

• Yesterday Pippa and I ran some errands in downtown Evanston, including a stop at Bookman’s Alley; I wanted to pick up an Edward Gorey book for her, and while I was browsing for it I saw a compendium of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comics. This afternoon, after Pippa made a delicious dinner for me, she asked, “Would you mind if I borrowed the Krazy Kat book?” (Yet another win for the “they’ll find it” approach to learning.)

• I enjoyed mp3 blogs for a while, but the more popular blogs started changing their URIs, many new blogs opened up, and a few closed down, and the whole scene convulsed for a few months as the great big world discovered them. Last week, I found the Peel mp3 player/downloader application for the Mac OS X; it’s a very clean, smooth, convenient interface; I’ll be finding out a lot more about a lot more, different music thanks to this. Well done! (I expect there’s an equivalent for PC users, but my brain can’t handle all that I’d wish to know on the Mac side — sorry I can’t point to the PC alternative.)

• Week after week, I’m thunderstruck by how extraordinarily lovely are the people with whom it’s my privilege to share in worship and sacraments. Sometimes it’s all I can do to keep from weeping.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve had communication with two sources who are taking my Disseminary ideas to heart. It’s not clear just what’s going to happen in either case; experience teaches me that people rarely get the idea at all, and among those who get the idea, none have been willing to take it up and put some energy and resources behind it yet.

Still, hearing (out of the blue) from interested correspondents at a southern theological school, and (even more surprisingly) hearing that Seabury might be interested in orienting itself more comprehensively toward online education, comes as an affirmation for ideas that I had almost given up on seeing in play. In conversations at the trustees meeting yesterday, people were expressing fiery enthusiasm for the possibilities of letting go of impedimenta from conventional physical-space pedagogy, and letting Seabury learn how to grow into digitally-indigenous education.

I’m not holding my breath. But I’m curious to see what happens next.