Category: Uncategorized

From the treeware media, three columns called to my attention. First, Kevin called my attention to a column in the Telegraph, one that might have been titled “No Theology Please, We’re Anglicans.” Even though I’m a vocational theologian who winces at the author’s suggestion that he daydreams past “the concern for Jesus, for the Church’s mission, the affirmation of doctrine,“ and that he likes his religion privatized, I think the columnist hits something just right. A large part of church-going, of caring about the church, lies in this: people are drawn to the church’s inchoate expression of something shared, something deep and true, something so powerfully right that it need not bluster and threaten to make its point. That truth comes explicit in the language of familiar hymns and traditional liturgy — such that well-intentioned efforts to spruce up those timeworn formulas risk losing exactly that which attracts many people to church in the first place. That’s not simply hidebound narrow-minded conservatism; rather, it’s a genuine affirmation of a faith less ephemeral, less topical, less contemporaneous than the liturgical or musical catch of the day. Yes, absolutely, I advocate liturgical change (there’s no need, really, since liturgical change will happen whether anyone likes the idea or not); but yes, absolutely, it’s a much more delicate operation than most sponsors of liturgical change admit — in part, I suspect, because there are more people who want to write new liturgies (in their own words!) than there are people with the gifts to revise respectfully, elegantly, and inconspicuously.

Anyway, if church leaders were to begin by appreciating and encouraging people’s inclination to come to church out of loyalty and happy habit, and work from there to help them see the deeper dimensions of their words and actions, I would expect a stronger practice of evangelism. Indeed, this points, I suspect, to the tragic flaw of the strong “traditionalist” current in Anglicanism. Whereas their great strength lies in exactly their concern to preserve the precious liturgical and theological endangered species of church life, they endeavor so to do with a forcefulness that’s out-of-keeping with the spiritual calm that the tradition’s liturgies bespeak (whereas the church modernizers affect the tradition’s serenity even if they’re promulgating prosaic, didactic petitions to a Liberal Democrat of a deity).

Speaking of Democrats, Bob Wyatt asks what I think of an op-ed in the Sun-Times that points out how unlikely it is for Democrats to prosper in the rhetorical economy that rewards Karl “Frog March?” Rove for ascribing manifestly false motives to Sen. Durbin and his comrades, whereas Sen. Durbin speculated (manifestly soundly) that most of his listeners would not readily believe that U.S. interrogators were capable of the inhumanity exemplified in Guantanamo. What do I think? I think that the present partisan environment pits the fearful (led by the duplicitous) against the cautious (led by the compromised). For the time being, I anticipate only the rival demagogueries of toadies and equivocators, a disheartening spectacle all around. (I should say that the interview with Sen. Hagel in today’s NYT Magazine, registration required, sorry, suggested a bracing alternative on the Republican side of this set-to.)

Finally, I appreciated a motif latent in Judith Maltby’s column in the Guardian. Maltby laments the Church of England’s unwillingness to call women to the episcopacy; she asks, “Can anyone reasonably believe that if the selection of bishops was based purely on ability, we would, at present, have an all-male college of bishops, or that only men would sit as spiritual peers in the House of Lords?” Now, the traditional argument includes a premise that Maltby conceals, namely that the “ability” in question constitutively includes gender as a qualification — so indeed (the argument runs), the present bishops possess an ability that able ordained women lack. I don’t assent to that premise, of course, but it’s an element of the case.

But the point that especially caught my eye was Maltby’s next paragraph: “the Christian must always be ill at ease with arguments based on ‘merit’ in this way. At the end of the day, ordained ministry is not about how qualified or able a person is, though that is no excuse for slipshod practices in the professional work of the clergy.” Though this is not the main point of her column, she strikes a glancing blow at the neuralgic funnybone of the church’s predicament. In the name of inclusiveness and grace, the church has developed a lingering indifference to excellence. Until the church learns how to encourage excellence without reinforcing elitism, we can look forward mostly to a painfully protracted series of task forces, committee meetings, partisan salvos, huffy defensivenesses, and overall tawdry decline. One doubts that this is a mark of the indwelling Spirit.

Joey can add this frame from Calvin and Hobbes, July 3 1994, to his collection of prescient comics that deploy the word “blog” before the advent of weblogging. . . .

Doc’s pages in memorial to Susan Camusi offer a compelling witness to why we might wish we had known Susan and how we would miss her; to the Web’s capacities for memoriousness (I keep telling churches that they need to pick up this particular clue phone); and to Doc’s gentle, affectionate heart. Doc illustrates what it might have meant to have a friend such as Susan, and that in turn shows us what a blessing it would be to have such a friend as he.

Mommie

Originally uploaded by AKMA.

I encourage everyone to rush and download ArtRage, the free natural-media paint program from Ambient Design. One never knows how long a generous company will prolong its generosity, and ArtRage offers a variety of top-notch tools for the unbeatable price of naught. (I was hoping Pippa would like it as much as it turns out that she does!)

My only desideratum would be a slight tweak of the trace tool (which Pippa used in painting this portrait of my beloved). In its present iteration, the trace tool reproduces across its whole width and stroke the color it finds at its starting point. It would be truly niftily handy if one could use the paint tools to apply stroke and paper texture, but have the color change with the color of the underlying photo (I believe Painter does this, or used to). But zowie, this is a very slick tool.

I was intrigued by Joi’s pointer toward Dan Gillmor’s “Honor Tags”; this looked like a step toward a bottom-up, interconnected reputation system. I’ll watch it with interest, but right now it seems narrow; what tag would apply to Shelley? to me?

It took a while, and then I forgot to look online, but if you click here, you will see the Christian Century’s version of my post on whether clergy should wear distinctive clothes. Of course, this is just a convenience for you, since most of you deluged your local bookseller for copies of the print edition.

It’s no secret that I’m very enthusiastic about Pippa’s painting. As much as she has impressed me in the past, though, she continues to surprise me in various ways.

A while back, Pippa worked on a very large canvas that Margaret and I picked up on sale; that canvas and the tempera paints we bought for her really sparked her current productivity. She would spend hours down in the basement, listening to NPR and toiling at a three-by-four foot canvas of a pond in the woods. After weeks of work, though, Pippa lost interest in that piece (page, work, substance, text, material, post, truc) and moved on to smaller canvases, and to oil paint. She disliked the way that tempera cracked when dry, and she felt frustrated at the way the composition worked (or didn’t).

So a few days ago, I asked if I should wash the tempera off the big canvas so that she could have at it again, for a different composition, with different paints. She thought about it for a while, considered the costs and benefits, and agreed that it made sense. Today I hauled the monster out into the back yard with the hose, and started spraying. Should be easy, right? Tempera, washes right off?

First, I was astounded at what the washing-off process revealed. Layer after layer of underpainting: the near-solid green background of the forest trees yielded to a marvelous patchwork of leaves of distinct hues; the large rock in the foreground showed alternating layers of black, white, and gray; the lily pads disintegrated from solid green pads to blossoming lilies, to white-struck-with-black, back to green; the black water of the pond revealed a sky blue patch. And — being Pippa — she had painted the edges of the canvas as well, not simply in continuity with the first layer of color, but layer after layer, treating the edges as integral aspects of the whole.

After forty minutes of scouring spray, I still face a canvas with a green upper half, a gray lower half, and a vast patch of white paint in the foreground. I’ve only been able to get three or four layers of paint off. Maybe later in the afternoon I’ll have at it again, to scrub away the inadvertent Rothko into a more nearly blank field for Pippa’s next venture.

I avoid many of the pass-along-quiz memes, partly because they can sometimes probe to the point of inappropriate self-disclosure for a priest/professor. (You don’t want to know, and even if you did, I shouldn’t tell you some of those answers.) But since Danya noticed that I hadn’t played in this one, and tagged me for the “books” meme — and since few things are more appropriate than my disclosing my reading habits, I’ll take her up on it.

Number of books I own: You’ve got to be kidding. I’d guess several thousand; five? ten? Jane and Beth have first-hand experience with the office collection, but there are eight or nine bookshelves at home over and above the books at the workplace.

Last book I read: The last book I finished was Lemony Snicket: The Unauthorized Autobiography (I read through all the “Unfortunate Events” books in a fit of catching-up-with-Pippa before the new Harry Potter).

Last purchased: The Reformation: A History, by Diarmaid MacCullough; The Westminster Handbook of Patristic Theology, edited by John Anthony McGuckin; The Westminster Handbook to Origen, edited by John Anthony McGuckin. All three look terrific; I’m impressed with MacCullough’s ability to keep the countless elements of political, theological, cultural, geographic, even medical history in play while keeping the exposition readable, critical, and convincing. I’ll be recommending McGuckin for my Early Church History class next fall.

Books that mean a lot to me: As others have done, so I exclude sacred texts (stretching that to include the Book of Common Prayer).

The Complete Pelican Shakespeare I used to memorize passages from Shakespeare on my way to and from high school, a mile-and-a-half walk or so, learning about meter, diction, English history, love, death, honor, and truth.

Ulysses, by James Joyce. “Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead. . . .” Joyce breathed new life into the love of words I assimilated in my youth.

The Pleasures of Philosophy, by Will Durant. I doubt I would assent to most of what Durant advocates, but when I picked this up in a used-book store, I had little notion of how a world might make sense, or how philosophy could be beautiful.

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne. So rich and lovely , it makes me cry.

Nigger, by Dick Gregory. Two generations now know of Dick Gregory — if they know him at all — as a vaguely comic health huckster. This book broke my nose, it changed the way I look, the way I move in the world. I have not by any means gotten where I need to be; but almost forty years ago, I picked it up because I guessed I ought to, and Dick Gregory knocked a little truth into me.

Discipline and Punish, by Michel Foucault; The Postmodern Condition, by Jean-François Lyotard; Writing and Difference, by Jacques Derrida. I had not a clue, not the faintest notion, that the uncanny cosmos I always suspected of subsisting behind the façade of predictable, conventional everyday life could find words and point toward what may be thought where words fail you.

The Chosen, by Chaim Potok. I read a mountain of modern Jewish literature in the early seventies; this had the lovely effect of training me to recognize and cherish the possibility that people might care so much about God as to allow it to alter their behavior, without triggering the sense that I might be one of those people. (After all, I knew I wasn’t Jewish.) This illustrates God’s irrepressible sense of irony and loving mirth at the follies of human life.

Crossing to Safety, by Wallace Stegner. My life is in this novel, somewhere; I hope it’s in the parts that move my admiration, and I fear it’s in the parts that touch my pity.

It would be best for me to cite a book by a woman (I certainly love Austen, I admire Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but these didn’t mark me as forcefully as the others). It would be best for me to cite a book from somewhere outside the West (I learned a grat deal from Nurbaksh’s In the Tavern of Ruin, from the Tao te-Ching, from Shusako Endo’s Silence; but I wouldn’t be telling the truth about myself if I claimed that these influenced me, shaped me to the same extent as the preceding works).

Probably others too, that I’ll add here or in the comments.

Since I’m late to this party, I won’t pick anyone in particular to come next — but if no one has asked you yet, and you’re feeling a little piqued, consider this an invitation to take up the meme.

I started playing with My Web 2.0 beta the other day, pretty soon after Caterina announced it on the Flickr blog.

It made a weak first impression on me, because — can you imagine! — someone else already had the nickname “AKMA.” That kinda dampens my whole interest in the thing. But I went along (I’m “rev_akma” there), searched a little, then saw something shiny, and wandered off to pursue it.

Today I went back to flesh out “my community,” but it turns out to be a cumbersome process, largely dependent on contacts from Yahoo Messenger, Yahoo Address Book, and Microsoft Outlook, none of which I use. Extra bother to generate yet another social network? Not yet worth the bother, and surely don’t want to spam my friends.

The magic of the Flickrfolk is strong, so I’m sure that something groovy is happening there. It’s just not yet happening in a way that leaps up and grabs me by the throat, like the neatness of the Game Neverending and Flickr.

I was writing about a website earlier today, and needed to use a word that indicated the individual chunks of textual goodness thereon. I wasn’t talking about whole pages — more about the stuff on the pages. I wasn’t talking only about words, either; you know I’m very concerned about the role of images in communication, too. The obvious word for the stuff about which I’m talking, in the business context, would be “content,” but Doc has scolded us often enough about using the word “content,” and even if I were inclined to defy Doc, “content” refers more to the aggregate of a bunch of the subjects about which I’m thinking.

Are they “works”? Sounds grandiose. Are they “pages”? That’s close, but not it exactly; it’s not the page-i-ness I’m trying to convey. If they were all one genre, I could say “short stories” or “villanelles” or “mash-ups.” But I’m trying to point to miscellaneous compositions, expressions, in diverse media, each hosted at a page address but not really identical to the page itself.

You know, a. . . . [fill in the blank].

Trust Doc Searls to know more than most of the rest of us will ever dream that there is to know about FM radio. In a long, intricate explanation of FM signal strength, Doc unveils the clue to getting those low-power FM transmitters-for-your-portable-music device to work: “Make the antenna longer by adding a headphone extention cord: female at one end and male at the other. Put it between your audio player (iPod, Archos or whatever) and your transmitter. Stretch it out. The signal increase is remarkable.” Dave Winer attests, “It works.” Si has one of those gadgets; we’ll test it and see, but this sounds intensely helpful.