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It’s been a very long time since I preached. This week’s sermon has been resisting extraction from my imagination. In fact, it’s been resisting conception.

I’m proud that Bowdoin College, Margaret’s and my alma mater, was planning to offer free wireless to the town of Brunswick, Maine — but disappointed that the misguided Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act prevents their offering this service.

I’ll be preaching this coming Sunday at St. Barnabas, Glen Ellyn, and as I sit in the seminars at CBA I am mulling over the readings for that service. The Old Testament lesson will be Deuteronomy 8:1-20, Moses reminding Israel that they must not depart from obedience to the God who gives life; Ephesians 4:25 – 5:2, adjuring the community to lives of harmonious self-giving that bespeak their allegiance to God; and John 6:35-51, the culmination of the Bread of Life discourse. So far, I don’t have a hook — but I’ll blog about it as soon as I do.

Fleshing out one-verse characters — how does Gina do it? Social sciences, resisting the narrator (picking up clues that the narrator doesn’t want us to notice), literary-critical cues (Claudia notes that here, she isn’t resisting). If anything, it manifests a resistance to conventional readings, but doing so in the name of sound insights.

David notes that the minor character whom Gina picked is a very rich one. The servant of Naaman “brought him to the prophet” — in many respects not a minor character at all. What if she chose a really minor character? Sandra points out that anonymity plays a large role in Gina’s definition, but John’s Gospel uses anonymity deliberately to highlight people.

David P. proposes that biblical interpretations should meet the criterion of justice. Can “concern for justice” be a corrupting influence? Classical theologians would affirm the priority of “love,” which then necessarily motivates unwavering commitment to justice, but more recent generations might argue that “love” has been sentimentalized, privatized, rendered abstract, so that “love” can no longer provide a criterion of truthful interpretation. Might “justice” some day lose its critical edge? How would we know? Wouldn’t that time come when our invocations of “justice” no longer engaged us in action-for-justice (and who determines what is just?), but simply serve as wallpaper that authenticates our credentials as the right kind of people (people who value “justice,” as though people who don’t invoke “justice” with great regularity instead necessarily favor injustice)? I don’t so much disagree with David’s proposal as I take great interest in the cultural signification of David’s alteration of the criterion Augustine advances.

Mary Margaret said, “It’s in our genes as Dominicans” — which delights me since the last mens by which Dominican identity can be transmitted is genetic. . . .

From Anarchism and Christianity yesterday to the Catholic Biblical Association today. If I have a signal, I may blog from there.

The talk with the anarchists went well this afternoon. I got to Champaign about when I expected — a little later due to a late start and traffic outside Chicago — but had a hard time finding the venue of the conferenec. I telephone the organizer to apologize, and when I was through leaving a message on her cell phone, I turned the car around in a parking from which was clearly visible a banner that read, “Welcome to the Fourth Annual Anarchism & Christianity Conference.” Oh.

The anarchists indulged my pitiably compromised position as a tenured full professor, and attentively listened to me give a talk based generally on the notes I posted yesterday. At the end, they had some terrific, hard questions for me. I did the best I could at answering them, but some just leave me flummoxed. For instance, even at a conference specifically designed for anarchists, some attendees have so committed themselves to state-run public education that they gave me a hard time for suggesting anything else, or for not giving more concrete suggestions about how Christian radicals could help out the work of state-run public educational institutions.

They gave me a very enthusiastic welcome, though, and thanked me generously; and I asked their prayers, and yours, for all of us who presume to teach, and all of us who commit ourselves not to stop learning.

The blurb for my talk tomorrow runs this way:

Education: An Anarchist Approach
Cultural assumptions try to enforce understandings about education relative to age segregation, instruction vs inquiry, grading, the learning environment, seasonal attendance and separation of religion from the rest of the learning process. Radical allegiance to Jesus’ way obliges us to reckon with a richer, more complicated and demanding perspective on education than simple alternatives of “public or private.” A.K.M. Adam (AKMA) will discuss the education system from the perspective of his work in both church and seminary institutions, and as a home-schooling parent. He looks forward to a lively discussion on ways anarchic Christians might envision and practice education in a setting where participants can learn from one another.

What I actually plan to say involves connections among several of my familiar themes and some observations I don’t repeat quite as frequently. I’ll be wobbling between first-person singular and plural throughout, since Margaret and I share ideas and practices relative to formal and informal education (not that she’d agree with everything I say, but that the things I say aren’t neatly extricable from our collaborative teaching).

Who we are: My (our) approach to teaching derives from a wide variety of experiences, our own and our families’. My grandfather taught at a prep school and a college; my father, private school and college; my father-in-law has taught high school, and is always in demand for teaching adult learners about his areas of interest; I’ve taught in a private elementary school, college, and graduate programs. Margaret and I are public school grads, with heaps of years of study in college and graduates programs. We’ve TA’ed for others, and I’ve supervised TAs. We have pursued topics in which we were interested on our own, without institutional guidance. And we home-schooled our three children, each in a different way.

So we bring a lot of experience to the topic, but relatively little expertise (in the sense of “things we learned about teaching from academic experts”). That engenders blind spots in our approaches, but it permits some strengths as well; we try to pay respectful attention to what we can learn from the experts, while we also grant considerable authority to our first-hand observations as learners and teachers.

My own reasoning about education is powerfully colored by the situations and experiences from which I’ve learned the most. I learned a lot about comedy, for instance, from watching movies with my father and talking through the details of what makes them funny (or not), and from reading about W. C. Fields. I learned a lot about probability theory because I was intrigued by baseball statistics and, in an era that did not yet know the term “sabermetrics” I spent hours calculating, theorizing, comparing, in order to ascertain more precisely what constituted sound strategy, at the same time that I teetered on the verge of failing high-school math courses. (That familiarity with probability theory has influenced practically everything I’ve thought since those days lying behind the sofa with Earnshaw Cook’s Percentage Baseball. I’ve learned from famous and relatively-little-known professors in lectures, and I’ve had the privilege of sitting in seminars with several of the outstanding theologians of the 20th century, arguing with them as though we were equals.

Autodidact, Pupil, and Learner: Ways of learning differ in their qualities and effects, and differ in how different people take to them. An autodidact — as I was, when it comes to baseball statistics — has the freedom to follow leads and construct arguments that haven’t been pre-digested by the institutional parents who instruct us what follows from what, what counts and what’s just ridiculous. On the other hand, the autodidact risks falling prey to misapprehensions that no teacher has had the opportunity to explain and correct. The pupil — the docile consumer of an instructor’s structured knowledge — can often progress further in settings that rely on institutional knowledge, but they relatively easily succumb to the temptation to regard their institutional experience as an absolute horizon of fact and wisdom. Much as I learned about probability theory on my own, or about the Old Testament from Brevard Childs, I think I have learned best from intense deliberative argument with my friends; the communal setting, with the mutual obligations of respect and politeness but also of demanding the best of one’s colleagues, nurtures thinking (not “free” thinking exactly, but not thinking under the manipulative control of a Teacher) and seeks the greatest strengths and most dangerous weaknesses of ideas. That atmosphere provides a nearly ideal setting for learning, so far as I can tell.

Learning Ecology: We take cues from our environments about how we should respond to others; the setting of education can support or militate against rich learning. Sometimes we couch this in terms of “expectations”; we hear that students of whom teachers ask much often demonstrate more impressive achievements than those whom their teachers assume not to be capable of outstanding work (witness a score of movies from Stand and Deliver and Dead Poets’ Society back to To Sir, With Love and numerous others). At the same time, some contextual signals can frustrate teaching and learning, while others facilitate teaching and learning. The obvious class-based differences in test performance (and the idea of “test performance” itself) provide one example; at a more subtle level, though, the effects of gender on students’ work in science and engineering studies illustrates a far-reaching phenomenon of which particular, more local instances can affect learning even more strongly (and less subject to amelioration, since they don’t lend themselves to Major Grants). Where is the classroom located, and what does it suggest about how the school, the teacher, and the wider culture regard the value of what gets done there?

Signifying Practices: My concern about learning ecology impels me to press the question of “What do we want to say with the ways we teach?” When we assign our children to institutional structures that divide them into manageable divisions of age and, sometimes, alleged “ability,” of differentiated fields of knowledge, and then tell them that nine months of this experience are compulsory, but that three months constitute a libeation from learning — what are we teaching them? When we determine in advance that every normal eleven-year-old will attain proficiency in these areas in this sequence taught according to that curriculum, what effects can we reasonably anticipate? When we constitute for our children a primary social group of other children mostly their own age, what behavior and inclinations can we suppose that they will reflect? And what do all of these characterizations suggest that the culture we inhabit thinks about education?

I’ll follow up all that with some discussion of how we ended up home-schooling Nate, Si, and Pippa. We didn’t so much intend to be home-schooling pioneers in our communities as we fell into it. Each child responded (responds) to our efforts in a particular way, and we try to respond to each. At the same time, not every parent will take up home schooling, and not every teacher has the opportunity to teach just three students (or the obligation to take responsibility for their learning in so vast a range of fields). What, then, shall we do?

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That’s pretty much the skeleton of what I expect to say. It’s none of it original; I’m a dreadful magpie of other people’s ideas, which I then assimilate and reconfigure to suit my own reflective purposes. But it’s how I anticipate beginning my conversation with anarchist Christians tomorrow, anyway.

One of my good friends in online gaming plays a character whose headgear generates luminous streaks that extend upward from the back of his skull. “It’s my brains leaking out,” he says. That’s the way I feel as I turn the last corner of summer into the stretch before school starts, and I’m vexed at myself for not having been more productive.

Yesterday I devoted a lot of time to an email message. I’m known for agonizing over the words I choose and the syntax I adopt in emails and memos; yesterday was just another example. The pains I took over casual correspondence in the morning, though, drained me of energy on into the afternoon, and soon I noticed that it was time to get ready to go to the memorial service for my friend Richard Kieckhefer’s father.

Meanwhile, as I was at church and Si was away visiting Laura, Beatrice got into Si’s backpack, extracting and eating two packages of McDonald’s animal-cracker style cookies and — unbeknownst to me — a chunk of Mexican chocolate (the kind for drinking).

The chocolate part wasn’t obvious because she didn’t start upchucking until late in the evening. Once it became clear that she had in fact gotten into some chocolate, but had thrown up twice, Josiah and I figured that she had cleared her system and went off to bed. At about three in the morning, though, young Si awoke to the sounds of a very agitated dog. He went downstairs, walked her around the yard to comfort her, but nothing seemed to settle her down. He then looked online for symptoms of chocolate poisoning, and when he read about the relative proportions of chocolate and dog-weight, he called Animal 911 and, in short order, we were rolling down to Skokie to have the vets handle the rest of Bea’s night.

Bedraggled and concerned, we were instructed to pick her up at 8:00 to receive further instructions (since the overnight clinic closes during the day). When we returned, they indicated that Bea was doing better after treatment with Valium and activated charcoal, and they instrucgted us to take her to her regular vets at Bramer Animal Hospital for observation for the rest of the day. She seemed closer to normal when we picked her up at the overnight clinic — that is, apart from wooziness from the Valium, and messiness from throwing up charcoal slurry on my feet and the vet’s floor — but after I spent most of the day restlessly waiting for the phone to ring, at the end of the day she’s mostly all right. She’s home to sleep here, and we’ll take her in for continued observation tomorrow, but the vets don’t seem apprehensive about her recovery. And with some sleep and the re-centering that my conferences this weekend will entail, I expect I’ll be all right too.

In my on-going (some might uncharitably say “obsessive”) concern to articulate the ways that faith and culture, reflective theology and daily life interact, I’m working out some premises of which I’ll try to persuade my students this fall. This morning’s premise concerns the relation of the self to culture, and how that affects the ways we prepare for and exercise our ministries.

Premise: We do not have “selves” in a way we can analyze apart from our involvement in particular cultural (social, relational) circumstances. Such selves presumably exist with God — but we do not have access to them, except by way of the culturally-inflected understandings with which we recognize, puzzle out, assent to, strive to correct, and confess our faith. “Inflected,” not “determined”; that is, all our understandings partake of cultural infusion, though we trust that they also partake of a truth that subsists distinct from mortal cultures.

Several points seem to follow from this. First, we mustn’t think of ourselves in the [modern] sense of individual selves; that necessarily involves a distorting isolation from the lives and settings with which our own lives are intertwined. (One of the many problems that afflicts our recent convulsions about holiness in intimate relationships derives from our willful occlusion of the extent to which two people’s intimacy and commitment affect the world around them, as should be obvious to anyone who has spent time around two infatuated high-schoolers or has lived through the dissolution of the marriage of two beloved friends.) The “selves” that we know always involve other people’s selves, and environmental dimensions, always in ways that elude our apprehension. No one is an island, and so on; it tolls for thee.

Second, if the selves we know and the selves with whom we interact as disciples and as ministers of the gospel always intertwine with others’, then we need always to attend to communicative, interactive aspects of our claims and behavior (or, I suppose, just say “too bad for you-all” and write off everyone else). With regard to my special area of concern, we (my students and I) simply must learn to act and speak with care for what we express. I can imagine no excuse we could plausibly offer God for choosing carelessness.

Third, if we don’t have access to some insulated, pristine “self”or “truth” (and I know I haven’t been arguing about “truth” heretofore, I don’t have time to double back and fix it up, but I suspect that the same points hold), we stand under a greater obligation to understand that which share with others whose solidarity we claim to share. That is, if I say that you and I have something in common (“Christian faith”or “Anglican identity,”for instance), only an boor would presume that she or he already knows what that common inheritance entails without attending to her or his partner’s sense of the shared inheritance. Under present circumstances, this point cuts two ways. It absolutely requires “conservatives” to offer honest, open attention to different senses of “what is shared.” If the Anglican tradition affirms that churches can err on matters of faith (and Anglican traditionalists should be comfortable with this premise), we can never foreclose the possibility that the churches have in fact erred.*

It also absolutely requires that “liberals” offer honest, open attention to what millions of [non-liberal] sisters and brothers hold and teach and live by, and have done so for centuries. There’s a whole lot more “objectivity” in the overwhelming consensus of practically everyone who has accepted the new life offered in baptism than there is in “what my friends and I are sure must be true.” People always tend to believe what they want to; when people want to believe something that contravenes long-affirmed premises, they have to be honest about the extent to which they’re proposing a novelty, about how thin the basis for that novelty is, and about how precarious a position that proposed innovation puts them, us all (since we are not islands), in.

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* One of the awkward torsions that contemporary stress imposes on admirable, pious people is the simultaneous claim that Anglican identity involves adherence to claims that Anglicans have “always” held, and that this settles one or another important issue — when the very identity of Anglican Christians rests on the corrigibility of matters of dogma and discipline. That does not mean that anything goes, but it does mean that we can’t rule out a prior any possible claim, much as we might like to, and as improbable as that claim may look at the outset. At the same time, the more far-reaching the claim that the church has erred, the stronger the argument needs to be, and it’s difficult to overstate modern people’s overconfident, condescending, dismissive, feeble arguments when they suppose that a past dogma or practice has become old-fashioned.

A very happy birthday to Doc, a sweet guy as well as being one of the most insightful denizens of the internet.

Beauty, truth, excellence are hard; they cut through encrusted bullshit. And if you open your heart to beauty, truth, and excellence, they will not let you off the hook. They will haunt, afflict, beset you.

One of the pernicious dimensions of the da Vinci Code phenomenon derives from the extent to which both its conspiratorial advocates and its horrified detractors occlude the truth in the interest of upholding something they want to be true; the element of wish-fulfillment prevails over critical questions relative to the narrative’s beauty (despite the frequent concessions that “it’s a good thriller,” I found the book tediously flat and predictable), its truth (despite the proud assertion on the front page, there is hardly a shred of truth to it), and its excellence.

They like it, or they can’t stand it, but questions of truth get derailed by the strength of people’s desire to believe one thing or another.

“Liking” is easy, though, and “opinion” is cheap; anyone can like something, everybody’s got an opinion. Though one would like to like what is beautiful, and to hold true opinion, one’s preferences and opinions don’t depend on truth or beauty.

“Liking” doesn’t exclude loving, knowing, appreciating — but if one always only likes, one forgoes the opportunity to gaze into the truth, to work into love.

If I understand theology correctly, we have the opportunity to endeavor one of the hardest things people can venture, to witness the beauty of the gospel, to share the truth of the gospel, to participate in the excellence of the gospel — but these require something more than liking Christian faith.