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From the Onion AV Club section:

I go to a kind of Anglo-Catholic church now that I’ve been going to for the last three years, but I haven’t really been raised that way. I’m definitely entrenched in the tradition now. I kind of admire it for being so traditional and sort of unchanging and unwavering in a lot of its doctrine, but also very sort of open and broad in its understanding of human nature. I like that it’s kind of open to the discussion about the tensions between those two things.

I’m tickled, so I won’t kvetch about the part where he says, “Maybe [my faith] really shouldn’t be a part of public discussion, because, you know, it really is about personal relationships.”

Margaret and Pippa have gone for an overnight with friends.

Si is off to Justin’s wedding. I am alone in the house (well, Bea is here, but she doesn’t count.) It feels so unnervingly quiet!

I shook together the bits of what I expect to say Tuesday at the Ekklesia Project Gathering, and this is what came out.

The title of the talk will be, “ ‘The Strong Right Arm That Holds For Peace’: Godliness as an Alternative to Empire.”

I’ll begin by walking through the first three commandments (working from Ex 20:2-7). I’ll read through and paraphrase them, with observations on the Hebrew and Greek, but I won’t emphasize the technical aspects — just give a sense of the diction and expression.

Then I’ll expound these words as an expression of God’s identity, from which we derive our way of life. We acknowledge God alone as the determinative premise/context for orienting our lives; we repudiate any mediatory representation of or alternative to God; we can not invoke God as leverage toward proximate ends. In other words, God is unique, aniconic, and inutile.

I’ll then sketch the ways that U.S. culture effects a displacement of the unique, aniconic, inutile God by intervening as complementary unique savior — but one that you can see, that does stuff for you. I’ll differentiate this from “idolatry” in the way that preachers conventionally characterize our captivity to capital, to entertainment, to achievement. The sacralized American way of life has displaced God, not presented itself as an alternative — but the God who addresses us as our unique, aniconic, inutile source of identity cannot be displaced without denying that God.

In case this all sounds too dramatic and too abstract, I’ll introduce a case study that shows one way in which Imperial America supplants God.

I’ll argue that the church does not fittingly testify to the God of the Decalogue (and resists the imperial American supplanter) by arguing over just what constitutes idolatry, or whether this or that constitutes an appropriate policy direction for the U.S. government. Partly, that’s because the very terms of the engagement distance us from our immediate allegiance to our God; and partly because our strongest arguments for the God of the Decalogue, against the sacred America, come when our identities bespeak as distinctly and unambiguously as possible, an embodied exposition of God’s identity.

We profess an alternative to Empire’s claim on our lives when we live in a way that our interlocutors cannot make sense of, apart from acknowledging that which sacral America cannot abide: we owe our allegiance only to God. While divinized America can couch its prerogatives in terms of justice, of freedom, it cannot make explicit claim to godliness as a civil virtue. The practice of godliness, of making manifest a persistent allegiance to the unique, aniconic, inutile God of the Decalogue, constitutes the church as an anti-Empire.

Well, it’ll all take a lot of fine-tuning — and it’s not an argument congenial to my many liberal-democratic friends, to the extent that (as much as I admire their steadfast commitment to representative democracy) I remain unable to vest my hopes in the the political process.

I’ll see whether I can record the talk when I give it, and I’ll post both the recording and a rough transcript.

The Disseminary is uploading the classic out-of-copyright Anglo-Catholic theology textbook Theological Outlines by Francis J. Hall. My student colleagues Debra Bullock and Ryan Whitley have already made great progress (Ryan’s name doesn’t appear yet, partly because he’s working on the second volume, and partly because he’s logged in from my own office computer). The entries are not quite in order; I’ll try to keep the hyperlinks rightly arranged as the articles come available. Eventually, we’ll try to whip up a marked-up XML version and a nicely-formatted PDF, but for now we’re concentrating on entering the data in the first place.

I don’t assent to everything Hall writes, but the presentation is straightforward and orderly, and there’s space for discussion in the comments. In many ways, it’s a proof-of-concept endeavor.

One reason I’m pointing to this now, while we’re still in-process, is that we have access to the second editions of volumes one and two, but only the first edition of volume three — and the second edition introduces some significant alterations. If someone has a second-edition third volume available that my assistants can use — and that involves a lot of scanning, so it risks the binding — please let us know. We’ll acknowledge your generous sharing on the site.

As an inveterate ogler of holy cards, I was cruising the eBay Holy Card pages today when I spotted this bit of evidence in the James/Jacob dilemma of several weeks ago. Since the picture itself will disappear once the eBay auction is over, I’ll stipulate that the card in question depicts “Sint Jacobus de Mindere” — St. James the Less. Unfortunately, there was no accompanying card for Jacob the Patriarch.

I was listening to Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Pippa’s covering all the Harry Potter books in the run-up to Saturday’s book release) when I smiled to hear McGonagall’s remark, “If it were not for the fact that I never speak ill of my colleagues. . . .” I can imagine that if I were a colleague of Trelawney’s, I too might be hard-pressed not to breach the collegiality about which I care deeply.

Michael Bérubé is planning to devote a series of blogposts to explaining why intellectually-active people ought to be acquainted with what’s gone on in “theory” over the past few decades, and if the whole series lives up to the clarity of his first entry, this’ll be a memorable contribution. I wish I had had the leeway to write as conversationally as he does when I put together my book on postmodern thought, but the editors very stiffly removed almost everything that resembled informal diction. Only by my utter intransigence did the book retain the traces of relaxed exposition that it does.

(I wrote this before Michael stopped by to correct my confusion about his current base of academic operations; annoyingly, I had noticed my mistake when I went to his site to read this very post, but then I forgot to correct myself.)

David’s recent blogging about zoological taxonomies reminded me of a favorite book of mine, now beautifully reproduced online — the Aberdeen Bestiary.

Where else can you find the valuable knowledge that “when [the beaver] knows that a hunter is pursuing it, it bites off its testicles and throws them in the hunter’s face and, taking flight, escapes. But if, once again, another hunter is in pursuit, the beaver rears up and displays its sexual organs. When the hunter sees that it lacks testicles, he leaves it alone.”? Or that the deadly basilisk (Harry Potter to the contrary notwithstanding) measures only 6 inches long, with white stripes? (Not my favorite illustrations of hoopoes, though.)

Dr. Weinberger, I hope you address the relation of this taxonomic (indeed, “folksonomic”) masterpiece to the internet, along with your reflections on its more famous heirs.

I stopped writing last night at about 12:15, came back and went to sleep. I woke up this morning, had a half-cup of coffee, and set to rewriting the ending. I wrapped up the rewrite in the sacristy at about 9:45, and the service started up at 10:00, right on time. I think the sermon went all right. I’ll tuck it into the extended section, and when St. Luke’s posts the MP3, I’ll link to it here.

The version I post here will differ in some details from the PDF that I’m sending off to St. Luke’s office, and will differ from the MP3 version, too. Is there a text in this sermon?
Continue reading “Sermon Report”

Now, both Micah and David have pointed to a relatively foolish article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the point of which is that academic job-seekers shouldn’t blog. Why? Well, if a search committee sees your blog and doesn’t like what they see, they might not hire you. They will fear that you’d tell a reading public about what their institution is really like. They prefer to hire someone about whom they know less, on the assumption that the bits they don’t know about will all be agreeable and impressive.

The fatuities and fallacies therein defy enumeration. To take it from the top, the article assumes that a job-seeker should want a job so desperately that she or he would want to be hired by a department that wouldn’t choose her or him if they knew the truth. It assumes that if they don’t know you’re a blogger when they hire you, you won’t embarrass them at any point in the future (and that if you’ve blogged soundly and discreetly for years, you’re more apt to spill tawdry details than someone who hasn’t established a track record for public discretion). It assumes that blogs constitute a unique mode of public communication — so that a disgruntled blogger poses more of a decorum risk than would a disgruntled academic novelist.

The article puts the search committee in a bad light, since it demonstrates that they made unsatisfactory choices for finalists. The problems among these candidates weren’t the blogs per se, but with character flaws that came into focus through the blog (or, in one case, apart from the blog — though the columnist seems to count the blog against that candidate anyway!). Does the pseudonymous columnist think that Duke wouldn’t have hired Mark Goodacre if they’d known? that George Mason wouldn’t have hired Dorothea if they’d known? Maybe Penn [State] can find a way to dump Michael Bérubé; what an embarrassment he must be!

The article says a very great deal more about the competence and insight of the author and the search committee than it says about blogging.

The other day I was pestering Stewart about when Flickr would incorporate e-postcard capability; I imagined a “Send as Postcard” button right there beside the “Blog This” button. Stewart suggesteed that they’d been holding off on this function so as not to overburden their servers, but that it might come soon.

What I didn’t anticipate was that somebody else would use the Flickr API to send Creative Commons-licensed photos as postcards — but that’s just what Delivr has done (link via Tom Coates). Ultra-cool! I’ve already sent a Pippa-postcard. . . .

Until the day that nobody ever reads another Left Behind novel (except, perhaps, as an exercise in historico-literary curiosity), one cannot link often enough to Fred “Slacktivist” Clark’s painstaking dissection of exactly what makes these The Worst Books Ever Written.

Right now, if you Google “left behind,” Slacktivist comes in behind a number of the LaHaye/Jenkins franchise moneymakers and the federal government’s underfunded education initiative. If we all link to his Left Behind category archive, maybe we can push him to an above-the-fold PageRank, so that searchers can see the antidote on the same screen as the theological, literary poison.