AKMA’s Random Thoughts

( 1:12 PM )   I’ve spent most of the morning setting up and stage-dressing a shared blog for some friends to talk about theological topics at the Theoblogy Seminar (dead link, alas). Steve Webb is outta control, racking up the postings at the moment, but I’m hoping other folks will join in.   Dave…

( 12:52 AM ) Dave Rogers at Connect & Empower says (in a response to a blog from David Weinberger, who has since responded to David Rogers, but I’m a slow reader), “The secret, the magical art is to find and know one’s soul and to speak and write from that wellspring. That holds true…

( 8:20 PM )   David Weinberger thinks he’s winning the contest of “incipient assholism”–don’t tell him (it’ll break his heart), but I’m just letting him win to make him feel better.   As for whether it would be appropriate for us to call one another friends, I’m a little surprised that yesterday he cited…

( 1:09 PM )   Okay, so part of the blog phenomenon involves locating oneself in a network of co-conspirators — not necessarily likeminded, but interesting conversation partners, and then linking to their blogs and further articulating the web. So far, so good.   Since I’m just a nouveau blogger, however, I have relatively few…

Kierkegaard: “If I want to keep myself in faith,” Climacus writes in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, “I must continually see to it that I hold fast the objective uncertainty.”   Right.   Now, the author of the article cited above, Erin Leib, continues, “In building faith out of doubt, Kierkegaard made the absence of God look…

George Bush heard my rant from the other day and hammered home my point with this speech.   “Not only will our country be better, but we will show the world that values — universal values — must be respected and must be adhered to” — or else, presumably, we’ll bomb the dickens out of…

David Weinberger gets what jillions of folks can’t see: that it’s only to be expected that religious disagreements may go all the way to the roots, even when the disagreement seems to involve really nice and friendly people. I suspect the Dalai Lama is a snazzy guy, probably beats the dickens out of many of…

   ( 3:27 PM ) It’s interesting to observe the tides with which particular artists wax and wane in popularity in the cyberworld of the Gnutella, Napster, and Hotline networks.   I happen to be very enthusiastic about the Pyschedelic Furs. I am both a fan and an advocate; I relish the listening/croaking-along experience, and I…

I get weary of well-intentioned Christians using their air time to run down the church.   Yes, by all means, Christians have done and continue to do dopey, destructive things, too often in the name of their faith. That’s a true, significant problem, and no one better try to sweep it under the rug. Clear?…

So the Pippa is over at my office this afternoon, drawing pictures of palm trees and cocoanuts and waves and seagulls (because I only had brown and green and blue markers available) and a bathing suit and towel and washer and dryer (to remind me to do laundry before her swimming lesson tomorrow). She’s here…

Derrida eulogizing Pierre Bourdieu here in Le Monde; Jennifer had just given me The Work of Mourning for my last birthday. What a peculiar role for Derrida, chronicling the passing of the monumental generation of philosophico-cultural types among whom he has stood! And yet (complaints from the peanut gallery notwithstanding) he’s one of the contemporary…

Yet another public figure has had his reputation tarnished by plagiarism. The president of Hamilton College (Clinton, NY) has confessed that when greeting the incoming freshmen class, he used words first uttered by someone else. In this case, it was some phrases in a review of the book “Overnight Float.” The president apologized abjectly and…