AKMA’s Random Thoughts

If you noticed my recent reticence online, I can explain that this year I’m having a particularly acute case of my annual tax-phobia-stress. Every year, I resolve to track down an accountant to do them for me; every year, I put it off till too late. I’m going public with this year’s panic so that there’s no chance that my irrational dread be a secret, and that anybody can ask me, “Have you gotten your accountant yet?”

I think I have all the information I need to get my taxes out this weekend without filing for an extension. I am really, really determined to not do this next year.

The Secretary of the Chicago Society for Biblical Research has been after me for a long time, to read a paper at one of the meetings we hold (meetings that I hardly ever have time to go to, so why I should be reading a paper at one escapes me). The papers I remember typically concern Chicago-school sorts of interpretive questions — detailed social and litarary analyses of texts, good stuff — so when he emailed me a few weeks ago, I said that there’s really nothing I’m working on now that would answer. “Well, what are you working on?”

At this point, most of my readers would have had the common sense to cough, or change the subject, or lose his email. I, however, am simple enough that I just told him what was on my present work agenda (kneading some of the ideas from my last year of lectures and papers into a preface for the Fortress Press book) — not at all the usual run of CSBR fare, more broadly hermeneutical. “We can take a hermeneutics paper,” he said. “Plus, it would be really rough; it’s work in progress,” I apologized. “We assume that all these papers are work in progress,” he assured me, and I had no polite way out.

So a week from Saturday, I’ll be presenting a paper on the legitimacy of academic biblical interpretation, a sort of mirror-image consideration of the questions concerning theological interpretation that I’ve been chewing on for the past year. Few in the audience will have heard my previous talks, so I can reuse some of that material, and I’ll bend it around to confront a different set of questions, but I still have to come up with a formal academic paper for the scholars of one of the world’s most theologically-sophisticated cities, in ten days.

More later. Rolls eyes, smacks forehead, again.

Prayers and heartfelt sympathy to Jeneane and Halley. We’re holding your hands, wiping your eyes. We love you and we’re with you. You too, Joey.

It’s seventy degrees outside — and the heat has finally come on in my office.

At the end of a busy day, I wish I had something short enough and weighty enough to blog. There are plenty of topics about which I have long pieces to write — but they come in second to doing taxes and writing the preface to one of the books coming out this year. I have been reflecting a lot about death this Lent, and I expect to write down some of the cosmically-inconsequential, but personally important, nexuses of what I’ve been trying to think out.

Margaret’s coming home Wednesday; they’re actually getting near the end of classes, and she’ll be home for some of the summer. That’something I haven’t even vaguely dreamed of: being together every day.

But now it’s time to go to sleep.

Show me someone who doesn’t care much about sump pumps, and I’ll show you someone whose basement never flooded, and who doesn’t have a hole in her or his basement floor isn’t filling up with ominously murky-looking water.

Our hard-working emergency maintenance guy put in a new sump pump for us yesterday, and let me tell you, I am intensely interested by sump pumps, and delighted that ours is working fine.

I’ve heard newscasters refer to the Italian premier as a “tycoon” or “media tycoon” so often that it usually just wafts by me — but this morning, I wondered how audiences would react if our news sources typically referred to the U.S. president as “oil tycoon George Bush” (or more precisely, “heir to oil wealth”). Maybe he doesn’t have enough money to qualify as a tycoon (how much?), or doesn’t have a sufficiently extensive array of holdings. What makes Berlusconi a “tycoon,” while Bush is simply an extraordinarily wealthy just-plain-American guy?

Several weeks ago, I chafed at some folks’ tendency to make an idol of “justice”; this morning, Margaret sent a quotation from officially-important theologian Johann Baptist Metz, who spoke about “emancipation” in similar terms: “

“There is a real danger of ideologizing. Hardly any other word seems so excessively used, so hyper-legitimate, and so emotionally charged in present discussions.”
Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology, Johann Baptist Metz (transl. David Smith) (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980).

That’s the kind of point I was trying to make.

I had been planning to do the family taxes tonight, when it came into focus that I’m preaching tomorrow morning — so I have a sermon to compose, along with a handout for tomorrow morning’s New Testament Intro class, a grocery trip. So if I seem busy, you’ll understand, I’m sure.

At the end of Greek reading group this week, Beth gave me an odd look and asked, “Did any of the prospective students [on whom Seabury spent three days making our best impression] seem at all confused about you?”

I hadn’t noticed anything, but the question was peculiar enough that I pressed Beth for some follow-up. This is what she told me:

“Your daughter was sitting with Lauren and me at the check-in table, and when prospective students signed in, we introduced ourselves. Pippa said that her father was the janitor, but he liked to pretend that he was the New Testament professor.”

She delivered this explanation with so solemn an expression, evidently, that Lauren was a little worried about what the prospective students would think, and some of the prospies asked Beth about it later.

Beth was a little uncertain about filling me in, but it was so spectacularly delicious a notion, and Pippa evidently spoke her lines so convincingly, that I could do nothing but roar with laughter and beam with pride. A father can impart only a few gifts to a child, and her capacity to deliver arrant absurdity with deadpan seriousness counts as a great inheritance from me (and my father and grandfather).

Doc helpfully nudged me to take a gander at his comments on morality in the Web 2.0 business environment, and I had a great time observing his thoughtful, critical readers work with his account of the various sorts of morality, and of their implications for business in the be-webbed ecology. I’m in an odd position with relation to Doc’s essay, since I have plenty to say — as usual, more than enough — but from a variety of positions and with different degrees of weightiness.

So, most important to me, I believe in the kind of interactions that Doc describes as a “morality of generosity,” to the extent that I’d want to call into question the propriety of calling the other approaches “morality” in the truest sense. As a theologian, I affirm the priority of grace (generosity, gratuity, giving) over other modes of interaction. “Balancing books,” an economy of interaction grounded in equal action (Doc’s “morality of accounting”) has going for it an intuitive sense of the fairness that matters deeply to U. S. ideological history — but it enmeshes us in an endless series of struggles over the nature of fairness, who gets to decide, and so on (struggles that constitute an economic drag as well as a practical impediment). “Self-interest” doesn’t even approximate a morality, as far as I’m concerned; even when “enlightened,” self-interest rarely approaches the degree of ethical grandeur of animal life. More often, it devolves into an appallingly degraded struggle of the rich and powerful to protect and extend their sphere of power at the cost of others’ livelihoods and lives.

So when Tim O’Reilly chides Doc for suggesting that Web 2.0 makes altruism central to business success (misreading Doc, as Doc points out), I have little worth saying. Sure, I root for companies to demonstrate the generosity that Doc commends, but I know less than zero about the balance sheets behind the people I know in The Industry. Maybe Tim’s right, such that altruism (which is not just the same as “grace”) bears no reliable connection to success in the Web 2.0 market. That’s not the point. Doc invokes the theology of grace to encourage business operators to show the same generosity that Flickr (a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo) does — but I invoke the theology of grace because it’s the right thing. Do it, eh?

After all, what does it profit someone to rake up a windfall on Web 2.0 and lose their soul?