Category: Uncategorized

I know they don’t rely on analogies in the new SAT, so maybe there’ something retro about my wondering, but — is David to Israel as Arthur to Britain?

Yesterday I blogged out a week’s worth of notions, which is sort of a shame, since today classes resumed at Seabury. I’m both weary and dazed, which is hardly justifiable since I didn’t have any classes today. But Margaret left yesterday, and Duke won, and I could prolong my sense of denial that classes would ever meet again.

When Margaret is home, I eat more and exercise less, with predictable consequences.

In the immediate future, I’ll start the Biblical Theology class tomorrow and the Gospels survey on Wednesday morning. I’m saying Mass on Wednesday, and preaching on Good Friday (my present starting-point involves the last words from the cross according to John, “It is finished” — but who knows whether that starting-point will stick). The week after, I’m headed to Washington to tell David Isenberg and other Freedom to Connect participants why theologians [should] think that the Net should be a World of Ends, not a confederation of fiefdoms in the middle.

But now, I’m mostly weary and worn. Did I mention that Margaret went back to Durham? I miss her.

Church should be the place we learn how to change.

Not, “avoid change” — that’s a futile striving for a timelessness that characterizes only God. Neither, therefore, does it mean “we need to learn the capacity to change,” since we’re always already changing anyway.

Not, “celebrate change” — that’s pointless. The canard about “change” manifesting life ignores the fact that we don’t stop changing when we die. “Changing” doesn’t prove anything about how lively or moribund we are, about how imaginative or how faithful we are.

Church should be the place we learn how to change, for we don’t simply know the ways we need to change on our own. Our life shared with God and the saints should shape our wisdom to recognize appropriate and inappropriate change. Life in church should help us let go of mere nostalgia, and should protect us from novelty-mongering. Church should help us understand that what we like isn’t the measure of all things, nor is passive subjection to strictly extrinsic autocracy. If we live the gospel, then the gospel will always be characterized by change (at the same time that it remains recognizably the same gospel, not “another gospel”). In order to avoid our running aimlessly or beating the air, and to avoid our disguising our stubbornness as piety, church should be a place where we learn how to change. And how to disagree about how we should change.

I was going to let the boy tell you himself, but since he’s humbly kept quiet about his news, I’ll boast on his behalf: the one institution of higher education that has admitted him so far (none have rejected him) just offered Si a merit scholarship based on his prospects as a leader in academic and community life — so we’ll almost certainly be able to send him away to college next year, even if none of the other schools to which he applied sees fit to invite him.

And hey, you others: you’ll have to increase your offers, now.

Reminiscence has been the coin of the realm around the neighborhood lately. People have remembered UBlog fondly (I’d still like to consolidate all that with a dedicated web page, downloadable diploma, and so on); people have recalled the old conversations we used to have, batting ideas around like party balloons; people have reminded everyone how silly and how profound we could be, back then. “Those who didn’t blog during the years before the revolution, don’t know the pleasure of blogging” (thank you so much, Jonathon).

This morning, Margaret and I were talking (in the immediate, occupy-the-same-geographic-space sense of the word, which I must say will never be replaced by digitally-mediated interaction) about getting paid for blogging. We look around and see Chris writing as Highbeam’s Chief Blogging Officer; Jeneane’s hot new firm, the Content Factor, has a blog for which she writes, and Mitch just started a web-services company; Halley and David blog for Worthwhile; several boatloads of bloggers have written for Corante, another assortment received subsidies from Marc – qui (Liz worked with both of them). How would you separate Joi, Joey, Elliott and Ross as “bloggers” from their business interests (and who would want to)? And about three years ago, Ben and Mena actually visited Seabury as a couple of code-writers with a cool blogging program — rather than as multinational blogopreneurs.

(I don’t make a red cent from blogging, and although I always check with my tech-business friends, it doesn’t seem likely that anyone’s hiring a digital theologian.) (But if you change your mind, you know where to find me.)

And things have changed — no question about that. I miss a lot of what we used to do. I miss some of the conversations that used to flow wild and free. I miss the days when I just didn’t know so many people whose blogs I can’t possibly keep up with any more. It’s all changed, and I miss it.

But y’all didn’t start blogging just for my entertainment. If blogging is putting bread on a few tables, buying toys for a few kids, putting together the down payment for a newlywed’s house, then I’m the last one in line to bemoan times past. It’s all changed, but do you know what? It was going to change anyway. It was going to change anyway, and while it’s changing, there are no people I would rather have those changes benefit than the wonderful friends I met back when none of us was making a cent off blogging.

This afternoon, first thing after I turned my attention from the Duke game, I read that Yahoo! has bought Flickr. Two reactions battled to win my disposition: first, that the community-building, image-sharing fountain of wit and snappiness would surely be transformed into another pop-up-spewing, LOL!!ing wading pool of used band-aids and adolescents chicken-fighting; and second, Caterina and Stewart and Eric and the whole Ludicorp team made a decision informed by the same sensibilities that I so admire in their construction of Flickr (and especially GNE — remember GNE?) in the first place. And if Yahoo offered to buy out the Disseminary, I’d be all over it.

Congratulations, everyone who’s made another dime from blogging. Bless you, everyone who’s in it for love of words and images and links. And peace be with us all.

My Chicago and Albuquerque brackets are a total mess (in part because I was relying on Wake Forest — ahem, Ryan — and Georgia Tech to hold up the ACC’s pride). I can’t blame anyone else for my Chicago bracket; I picked BC to go all the way to the finals.

But in the single most important aspect of the NCAA Championships, Duke made the round of 16 with two lackluster wins, and there’s a decent chance that if they can sneak past Michigan State and Kentucky, they’ll have the opportunity to face off against an ACC rival in the Final Four. That would be a great, great game.

A number of times, when I’ve been asked to talk about tradition and change in the church, I have adverted to the status of usury — the lending of money at interest. I was delighted, then, to see the Slacktivist take up the topic in three powerful entries in the context of his energetic interrogation of the particular forms that “conservative Christianity,” “evangelicalism,” and “traditionalism” take at the moment.

The people of Israel set distinct limits to the scope of interest (including the jubilee year, a sort of pre-market-economy form of bankruptcy protection), and Jesus explicitly repudiated the practice of lending at interest. The church institutionalized laws against lending at interest, and only relatively recently has the topic dropped away from the church’s social agenda. Fred surveys the history of usury, then turns his attention to the exploitation of greed bill bankruptcy bill weapon of mass expropriation of wealth that the Republican Congress and the Bush administration have deployed.

Fred’s nauseated by the spectacle of lawmakers who proclaim their allegiance to “family values” and “biblical morality” rolling over to strip away the small borrower’s protection. Me too — but I’m simultaneously intrigued by the ways that some forms of “tradition” become old-fashioned and mutable, whereas others reflect timeless morality and must be upheld at all costs. The phenomenon gets even more intriguing when — as so often happens — someone takes the pains to explain what I obviously haven’t yet understood: that there’s a perfectly transparent premise in the light of which these differences are revealed to be natural and necessary. Oh, right!

Si’s drama troupe will enact The Odd Couple this evening, for their closing engagement of the winter stage season.

Actors were ready, production impressive, and they’re performing again tonight at 7, at the Edge of the Woods. Go, take your family, and buy a cookie or two. Just watch out for flying pickles. . . .

Margaret saw this on Boing Boing, so she entered my name in it.

I don’t know where that “Golf” book came from, though.

I thought I’d mentioned it before, but searching doesn’t turn anything up. Back at BloggerCon I (“when dinosaurs walked the earth,” as my sarcastic sons used to say) Dan Bricklin and I talked about seminarian bloggers; his eyes lit up as e described how wonderful it would be for a congregation (synagogue, parish, whatever) to be able to read a seminarian’s blog, to get a sense of the kind of person they were thinking about hiring. Of course, your blog would displease some people — but would you want to be working for them in the first place? Wouldn’t you accept that happily, as a correlative of the possibility that a congregation could look you up and say, “That’s just the kind of person we want around here!”

Well, Tim Bray has responded to the inextinguishable “You Blog? You’re Fired!” topic from the dominant media by writing ten reasons blogging is good for your career. (I especially endorse reason number 4: “No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.”) Yes, the tech industries differ from ordained ministry (at least, they were different when I was working in computer graphics lo! these decades ago), and yes, there are complications attendant to the benefits. But Tim and Dan have this much right: If it’s easy to find out that you’re congenial and interesting, then you’re more likely to be hired by people who want congenial, interesting employees — or to be called by congregations who want congenial, interesting clergy leadership.

The ordination process in the Episcopal Church tends to promote fear and defensiveness (not in every case, but in many), and the intense partisanship of the moment amplifies those anxieties. It’s hard to expect seminarians to see anything but danger. Danger is not, however, the end of the story, and I’m convinced that a position is more likely to work out better for congregation and clergy leader if they know as much as possible about one another. Why stake as much as relocation and full-time employment on the impression made in a relatively brief interview (conducted, often, by people who aren’t skilled interviewers)?

(At the intersection of church and tech industry, linked by Jim McGee: “Don’t Rock the Boat.” Congregational development students: identify the mission strategy implicit in this ethos. . . .)

Technotag: pippa

The planning for the Winslow Lectures has pinned down the sequence for the series, and invitations are in the mail. On Wednesday, April 20, at 7:45 my dear friend Steve Fowl will give the first lecture on the topic, “The Importance of a Multi-Voiced Literal Sense: The Example of Aquinas.” Then on Thursday morning at 11:00, Francis Watson from the University of Aberdeen will speak on “Inspiration, Word, and Text.” That afternoon at 3:00, I’ll give my talk on “Poaching on Zion: Biblical Theology as Signifying Practice,” after which Seabury will hold a gala wing-ding to install our new Dean and President (one job, two titles); the service will start at 5:00, at Northwestern’s Alice Millar Chapel. Friday morning, Kevin Vanhoozer will ask the hermeneutical question, “Imprisoned or Free? Text, Status, and Theological Interpretation in the Master/Slave Discourse of Philemon,” which will be followed by a short panel discussion.

Stephen’s lecture and mine will be held at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary chapel (second floor of the main building), whereas Francis’s and Kevin’s will be held at the Northwestern University Sheil Center. (There’s an ironic temper at work in arrangements that have Steve and me speaking in a decidedly Protestant ambiance, and Francis and Kevin in a markedly Roman Catholic setting.)

There’s still time to make your travel arrangements! Don’t miss this once-in-a-month opportunity! We have a PDF of the schedule available here, and I posted a JPEG to flickr.