AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Margaret had her second preliminary exam this morning. It was hard, involved some unexpected topics, but she’s halfway done. Go, Margaret!

Nothing like two weeks of sub-zero temperature to make 29° F feel like a heat wave. I walked the dog in the morning snow, thinking, “I don’t need this parka. . . .”

Saturday night, as I was drifting to sleep, the thought crossed my mind that my laudatory address for Robert Brawley might be the next morning, not next week as I had thought. I drifted off to sleep, and when I woke up I was very sure that the address was next week.

Later in the day I was checking iCal to see whether I had a faculty meeting Monday morning, and my date for February 11 said, “SBL meeting/Brawley tribute.” As in, “AKMA, you just skipped the tribute and banquet in honor of your friend. People were standing around saying, ‘He said he’d be here; I wonder where he is.’ Instead of paying tribute to your admirable friend, you blew him off. You louse.”

So I drafted a letter that aimed for maximal explicit penitence without crossing the line into unbecoming groveling. I noted all the ironies and faults of skipping out on my commitment to deliver a paper called “Friends and Others, in Tribute to Robert Brawley.” I was fine-tuning my meek conclusion, when I decided to Google to pin down the timing of my blunder, and Google indicated that the meeting was in fact scheduled for next Sunday. So my question is, after having gone through all the agony of having actually missed the date, am I more relieved not to have missed it, or disappointed that the adrenalin surge and attendant rhetorical exercise in self-abnegation was for naught?

• Yesterday Pippa and I ran some errands in downtown Evanston, including a stop at Bookman’s Alley; I wanted to pick up an Edward Gorey book for her, and while I was browsing for it I saw a compendium of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comics. This afternoon, after Pippa made a delicious dinner for me, she asked, “Would you mind if I borrowed the Krazy Kat book?” (Yet another win for the “they’ll find it” approach to learning.)

• I enjoyed mp3 blogs for a while, but the more popular blogs started changing their URIs, many new blogs opened up, and a few closed down, and the whole scene convulsed for a few months as the great big world discovered them. Last week, I found the Peel mp3 player/downloader application for the Mac OS X; it’s a very clean, smooth, convenient interface; I’ll be finding out a lot more about a lot more, different music thanks to this. Well done! (I expect there’s an equivalent for PC users, but my brain can’t handle all that I’d wish to know on the Mac side — sorry I can’t point to the PC alternative.)

• Week after week, I’m thunderstruck by how extraordinarily lovely are the people with whom it’s my privilege to share in worship and sacraments. Sometimes it’s all I can do to keep from weeping.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve had communication with two sources who are taking my Disseminary ideas to heart. It’s not clear just what’s going to happen in either case; experience teaches me that people rarely get the idea at all, and among those who get the idea, none have been willing to take it up and put some energy and resources behind it yet.

Still, hearing (out of the blue) from interested correspondents at a southern theological school, and (even more surprisingly) hearing that Seabury might be interested in orienting itself more comprehensively toward online education, comes as an affirmation for ideas that I had almost given up on seeing in play. In conversations at the trustees meeting yesterday, people were expressing fiery enthusiasm for the possibilities of letting go of impedimenta from conventional physical-space pedagogy, and letting Seabury learn how to grow into digitally-indigenous education.

I’m not holding my breath. But I’m curious to see what happens next.

Right about now, Margaret begins writing the first of her preliminary exams (what Duke calls “comprehensive exams”), which mark her transition from doctoral course work to writing a dissertation. Think kind thoughts, pray, light a candle, spin a prayer wheel, but please keep her in mind.

And today Seabury’s Board of Trustees meets to make some intensely important decisions relative to the future of the seminary. I’m required to attend this (after my morning class), though I do not anticipate that my input will affect the process in any particular way.

So that’s why I probably won’t be visible online today.

[Update: First exam (of four) complete. No casualties.]

When I first saw pointers to Michael Wesch’s “Web 2.0. . . The Machine Is Us/ing Us” video, I put off looking at it. The “Web 2.0” tag deterred me, and its trendy allure provoked my “I don’t need to see that” reflex. I was very wrong.

The video is terrific, suggestive (not in that way!), and it strikes me as very sound. I was especially impressed by the concluding section:

We’ll need to rethink a few things.
We’ll need to rethink copyright
We’ll need to rethink authorship
We’ll need to rethink identity
We’ll need to rethink ethics
We’ll need to rethink aesthetics
We’ll need to rethink rhetorics
We’ll need to rethink governance
We’ll need to rethink privacy
We’ll need to rethink commerce
We’ll need to rethink love
We’ll need to rethink family
We’ll need to rethink ourselves

Well, that bit about family and love aren’t necessarily of the same order as the others, but the far-reaching changes in other fields will inevitably impinge on family and love, so I acknowledge even those two.

That video arrives at the same time Steve Jobs says DRM should go by the boards. Micah asked me what I think about that, and I respond that Jobs is manifestly disingenuous and self-serving on a number of levels (to start with, the iTunes Music Store still imposes DRM on music selections whose performers ask that they be sold without such restrictions)— but that nonetheless, he’s right. Others (who don’t have executive authority over the biggest legit distribution system for downloading music online) have said as much before, but it does make a difference when Jobs says it. If you drop the DRM and price appropriately, volume will more than make up for what you lose on file-sharing. Way more. Way, way more.
Continue reading “In Which The Trend-Resister Is Shown Up”

Behind the facade of composure this week, I’ve been seething with annoyance and frustration over a series of irritations. I know that one should never ascribe to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence, but sometimes one confronts a situation in which one’s respect for others obliges one to ponder which is more charitable: to think someone else foolish, or to think them malign? And since I think that artificial forced choices signal a perniciously constrained imagination, what besides malice or incompetence might explain startlingly misguided behavior?

In such circumstances, this morning’s epistle lesson included 2 Timothy 2:23-25, “Have nothing to do with stupid and senseless controversies; you know that they breed quarrels. And the Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness.” Oooops.

Since aging rockers have made so prominent a transition to musical theater recently — Elton John working on a couple of musicals, Pete Townshend, you could even include the Andrew Lloyd Webber who started, after all, with Jesus Christ Superstar — it’s about time for someone to take up Ray Davies’s oeuvre. He’s always been oriented toward the musical/revue/“rock opera” genre; over the years, he’s constructed more-or-less fully realized versions of Preservation, Soap Opera, and Schoolboys In Disgrace, but I suspect that Arthur (or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire), or Village Green Preservation Society, or Muswell Hillbillies would provide promising material for that transition.

Better yet: Sleepwalker or Misfits, perhaps forged into one. Let’s do lunch; my people will talk to your people.

Last week I chatted a bit with Daniel Terdiman about the new edition of World of Warcraft, and in the article he submitted to C|Net, he not only got my name correct (not at all something I rely on) but represented very fairly what I said to him. There’s more I would like to say, of course, but that’s almost always true.

(Terdiman’s using Blogspot as an online resume makes tons of sense. If I had more than a few seconds, I might whip up such a device. Flexible, updateable, and Google-friendly!)

It really is that cold. Colder, maybe.

I realize that it’s colder some places, colder longer some places. But this is plenty cold for us. And the Bears lost.

OK, it’s been a while since I’ve heard a sermon — not quite forty-eight hours — so I can write something about preaching that doesn’t apply to any particular recent homily.

Last time, I said, “Don’t write checks you can’t cash.” This morning’s admonition is less metaphorical: Don’t assert when you can evoke.

Often, unnervingly often, preachers will pull the sermon to a dead stop and tell the congregation that what they just said was noteworthy, startling, moving, or whatever. “His love is amazing.” “Stop and think about that.” Sometimes they tell the congregation how they ought to feel.

I vigorously support affective preaching, no question. The sermon should affect the congregation not by naming a feeling then stating that the congregation should feel it — that’s no more pertinent than when you might tell the person on whom you have a crush that they should love you, too. Ummm, if it ain’t already happening, then telling people to feel it won’t help.

The sort of preaching that seeps into people’s hearts, that changes the way they look at the world, involves bringing to the fore and articulating feelings that your listeners might not have understood in the way you’re suggesting. It involves showing them familiar sights with highlighting, with coloration, with particular sorts of reinforcement and emphasis, so that they make unfamiliar associations (associations that stick, intensified by the feelings that the service and the sermon evoke and heighten). Sermons that affect people in the soundest, truest ways bring truth (the deep truth, the truth that necessarily involves non-demonstrable, deeper-than-words truth that emerges from between, around the things you say explicitly) not by stating propositions and cajoling a congregation into assenting to them, but by providing the conditions that draw forth assent, even more than assent, affirmation or conviction.

Is that manipulative? Yes, in way. There’s no way on earth to stand up in front of a crowd and talk to them that doesn’t involve some sort of manipulation. Preachers imperil their congregations and themselves weekly; again, all the more reason to do this carefully, deliberately, and to do it toward the end of a considered (and intersubjective) truth. The rhetorical tradition through the ages recognizes the power of discourse, and the ethical problems that preaching, writing, oratory involve. We do not evade those problems by speaking off the cuff, saying just what occurs to us, submitting “just my perspective” on matters of transcendent importance. And it’s part of the reason I understand pacificism, non-coercion, to constitute a cardinal mark of the Christian tradition: our only claim to integrity rests in a transparent, free, visible connection to the truth. Otherwise, it’s all just more marketing hype. Evangelism as Super Bowl advertising.

If you want people to share a feeling of awe, or shame, or joy, or gratitude, you don’t just tell them to feel it — you construct the sermon so as to evoke that feeling. Careful composition puts more responsibility on the preacher, requires deliberation, entails a kind of attention to what you say and how it works. Most preachers shun that sort of craftsmanship (someone please come up with a duly gender-inclusive word for “craftsman”); it’s just plain hard. But if you won’t put in the effort to draw feelings out from the congregation, don’t bother just saying “Feel this.” You might as well start a career in stand-up comedy and tell your audience, “This is funny: laugh at it. C’mon, laugh!”
Continue reading “Preaching: Don’t Assert, Evoke”

Few people can escape a degree of nostalgic amplification of how much their present conditions differ from their pasts. Sometimes they frame narratives of redemption — “I was a depraved sinner, but now I’m clean,” or “The oppressors had their boot on our necks, but we finally threw off the chains of our servitude” — and sometimes they’re myths of a Golden Age from which we’ve fallen (on one hand, the ideal American Family Home of Eisenhower’s fifties, or the social activism of the sixties and early seventies). Granted that there’s a decent chance that things are getting better or worse (though we shouldn’t minimize the likelihood that life continues at a pretty steady state of trading off improvements and decline), experience teaches us that people show a strong tendency to exaggerate the scale of the alleged change over time.

That being said: in the past weeks, we’ve seen the ludicrous antics of Boston politicians accusing ingenious PR flacks of inciting terror (when the “terror” had more to do with the law enforcement officials’ ignorance than any danger associated with the LED advertisements) and the disingenuousness of the Bush regime’s effort to escalate their war against Iraq, to Joe Biden’s stunning unselfconscious racism. The institutionalization of fear and folly seems increasingly entrenched, increasingly stifling.

All the more poignant, then, was my flash of recognition yesterday when the Gospel Mission class screened a television documentary that reminded me how wrong Joe Biden was: Barack Obama (whatever his gifts and charms) was not “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and. . . nice-looking” to run for President.

Shirley Chisholm was. (Lest anyone sniff that Biden said a “mainstream” candidate, they should recall that Chisholm won 152 delegates under conditions inimical to outsider candidates.)

As I look back on my formative years, I think that if anything ever impressed me with the majesty, the brilliance, the truth of what the United States might stand for, it was the presence of Shirley Chisholm on the political scene. If anything might enkindle my hope for this nation, it would require a stature, an integrity that tapped the deep reservoirs of trusting admiration Shirley Chisholm inspired in me. But I’m not holding my breath.
Continue reading “Nostalgia or Truth?”