Peculiar Bug

My iPod is getting a little old (in digital terms — if it were a hammer, it would still be in its early years of usefulness), and the battery has lost a lot of its capacity, but I didn’t expect this:

Every now and then, the “shuffle” function will forget that it’s supposed to be shuffling by song, and will continue playing a particular performer’s songs until it runs out. You can fast-forward it through the supposedly-shuffled playlist, but if it falls into this while playing songs by a favorite performer, or an especially prolific act (such as the Magnetic Fields), it can take a great many button-pushes to get the shuffle function out of its rut.

Yes, I have checked, and the “shuffle” function is checked for “by song,” not by artist or album. Moreover, it doesn’t always get tracked for an artist even when I have multiple selections by that artist.

Worse things happen at sea, of course, but it’s an odd little nuisance of a bug.
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Kiss Me Quick

The anniversary of Kirsty MacColl’s sad death comes round in a couple of weeks; yesterday, walking down to Pippa’s Latin lesson, her prescient “Soho Square” came on my iPod.

One day you’ll be waiting there, no empty bench in Soho Square
And we’ll dance around like we don’t care
And I’ll be much too old to cry
And you’ll kiss me quick in case I die before my birthday

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Very Good and Write

And our bounden duty.

A couple of months ago, Micah emailed me the link to this page, which I promptly forgot about until a recent spasm of emailbox-cleaning. From my exalted position as Writing Director at Seabury (“no benefits, just more responsibilities”), I have several reactions to the article and its attendant comments. First, I approve — generally — of the list of desiderata for students assignments. I don’t want to think of them as “rights”; that terminology engenders too much murky thinking. They do, however, comprise a very good list of desirable features for writing assignments, and I try to observe many of them.

The comments note that teachers vary in the ways they apply their standards; one awkward element in the frustrating knot involves teachers who lack all but the basic (and in some cases, “even the basic”) skills for assessing written expression. I’ve encountered their writing in my role as editor; I can’t begin to imagine how these impaired writers evaluate students’ papers. When a student encounters varying evaluations from teachers with varying capacities, what sense can the student make of the divergent sets of comments? Why should the student not trust the more favorable, more charitable grades and comments?

And while I’m at it: Stephen Downes linked to a post on Creating Passionate Users, which argues that more sources should use more graphics to communicate more effectively. Amen, and Amen. But as with ill-composed writing, so with ill-composed graphical communication: just putting something out there doesn’t imply that it will contribute to getting a message across. Too often, people feel obligated to throw kitchen-sink graphic communication into presentations with no regard whatever to whether the images contribute to clear communication of particular ideas. Imagine if one did that with words! (Sadly, too many of us need not “imagine” such a circumstance, since we’ve seen and heard arguments that seem to have been composed with random words thrown in for seasoning.)

If what you write, or if the images you use for graphical communication, do not contribute to expressing clearly and precisely the message you’re hoping to convey — then don’t confuse and distract your readers with pointless, vague, superfluities.* Communicating is a difficult enough task without further complicating it with noise.

* I don’t mean you should never allow your reader to relax a bit, or never digress, or never entertain. We should, however, assess such indulgences with a pretty rigorous criterion of whether they contribute to communicating the greater message. (I’m looking at you, preachers who include irrelevant shaggy dog stories in your sermons.) Sometimes readers benefit from a light distraction, an opportunity to relax their concentrated attention. More often, distractions attenuate the focus of one’s rhetoric and diminish the effectiveness of the entire presentation — especially when the presenter hasn’t maintained a taut focus to begin with.
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Thanksgiving

Over the weekend I confirmed to relevant authorities that I plan to accept the offer of membership at the Center of Theological Inquiry for the 2007-08 academic year. The financing remains to be worked out, but Margaret, Pippa, Bea and I will spend next year based in Princeton.

Over and above the honor of being chosen for this opportunity, we give thanks for being given another year to live and work in Princeton. Our five years there were exceptionally important to us; Pippa’s best friend still lives there, and we know and admire the choir director at Trinity Church — it’ll be a great choir for her. Margaret and I will be able to study at the Princeton Seminary Libraries, and at Firestone. Amazing.
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Filling In The Blanks

I’m ba-a-a-a-ack.

What do theologians do when they go away to an academic conference?

What Do Theologians Do?

The answer presumably involves someone in conference planning who doesn’t keep alert to online jargon (definitions two and three).

My response to Dale Martin’s Sex and the Single Savior follows in the extended link at the bottom of this post. The session was delightful; it began with Daniel Boyarin looking up and down the dais at Amy Hollywood, Stephen Moore, Dale Martin, Serene Jones, Jon Berquist, and me — and saying, “I love being on a panels like this. It’s like Cheers.” He also got off the zinger of the evening when Serene suggested that Dale wrote with a disingenuous irony comparable to that of the Bush regime: “The only difference between George W. Bush and Dale Martin is that Dale is actually from Texas.” Dale shocked a number of audience members (and some panelists) by asserting his unwavering commitment to doctrinal orthodoxy.

Yesterday was devoted mostly to mop-up shopping (I bought my copy of Robert Jewett’s monumental Romans commentary, to packing and to travel, though I ran into B.J. and Rodney at the departure gate at National Airport and pitched to them an idea for a book series. On the book production front, both Faithful Interpretation and Reading Scripture With the Church sold out at their respective display booths, and Faithful Interpretation received a favorable short notice in the Christian Century.
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All But The Shopping

The annual meeting is pretty much complete, except for the Tuesday-morning “it’s on sale, it’s such a bargain, I really ought to read it” impulse purchases at the book display. My response to Dale’s paper went well, but it’s on my computer, not Margaret’s (which I’m using to compose this, since our hotel makes you pay for wireless per CPU); I’ll blog it as soon as I can get a signal.

Margaret’s response yesterday went very well (the scholar who invited her was delighted), and we’ve been to numerous wonderful parties. Sadly, my metabolism is not what it once was (I almost titled this post, “Too old to SBL, to young to die”) — my feet are swollen and weary, my digestive system rebelled against me this afternoon, and staying awake at parties gets harder every year. Still, the joy of seeing Margaret incresingly at home in her own professional milieu at the meeting strengthened my weak hands and made firm ny feeble knees.

Somewhere Else

Greetings from the heterotopia. Last night I greeted Adam and Sarah in the hotel; I saw Chris Spinks and Tyler WIlliams; the session I chaired this morning on Walter Moberly’s book Prophecy and Discernment went well, and Jason showed up for it; Margaret and I had a pleasant visit toward midday, where we ran into Derek and his wife; this afternoon I was among the author-guests who skulked around the Baker-Brazos book display to promote their fall line to biblical-theological fashions (“Now, coming down the ramp, is AKMA, showing a spin on the Birmingham School’s analysis of signifying practices — trendy and oh-so-comfortable on the Day of Judgment. Next, see. . . .”). Tonight, dinner with alums of the Wabash Center Greek Teachers colloquium, then the receptions for Princeton Seminary and for Duke.

Feet sore, legs weary, thumb sensitive — but a good conference, no matter what.

Hooks

Very little time today, as I have to finish up my SBL response to Dale Martin’s new book Sex and the Single Savior; it’s a collection of essays, hence a shade miscellaneous, making it hard to compose a through-coherent response. I think I’ve found an approach that sets me up to say most of what I want to say. My biggest challenge right now involves choosing between two titles for my response: “This Sex Which Is Not Single” or “I Did Not Have Sex With That Man”?

Because I’m squeezing too many activities into today — packing, haircut, drafting response, teaching, time with Pippa before the weekend, looking into sources for grant support for my zingy research gig — I shan’t blog much more, though I’ll try to paste in my response if I finalize it tonight.

Two Good

I spent this afternoon with Juliet Dodds’s doctoral seminar on hermeneutics at Garrett, across the vast expanse of Sheridan Road. They had read two of my recent essays on hermeneutics (“Poaching on Zion” and &#8220:This Is Not a Bible”) along with essays by a couple of less-distinguished French guys you never heard of. I showed them the presentation on Visual Hermeneutics, since it had gone over so well at McCormick earlier this fall, and then we launched into a vigorous discussion of meaning, textuality, communication, the Bible, history, and other topics. It was a blast — they were good readers of the essays, not uncritical but neither were they simply gainsaying (or affirming) my arguments. They were the sort of readers who convey to you that they paid attention and have worked with your premises carefully enough to advance the discussion (which is most of what I really want from writing anyway). The thought that a generation of students at McCormick and Garrett — and maybe other places as well! — may regard my essays as a constituent element in their hermeneutical outlook excites me no end.

As I was walking home from Garrett, I opened a letter that I knew to contain a polite rejection notice from a research institute to which I’d applied for my next year’s sabbatical residency. As a rejection letter, it was pretty confusing; it discusses the physical facilities at the research center, among other things. It took me some puzzling and staring to figure out that the reason it was so confusing was that it wasn’t a rejection letter at all, but an acceptance — so if I find funding, I can look forward to spending next year in a very propitious, rather prestigious theological study center!
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The Office

I know many people who are worried that Rowan WIlliams has gone off his theological chump. Since he had written firmly and eloquently on behalf of the full participation of gay and lesbian persons in the leadership of the Body of Christ before his elevation to the archepiscopate of Canterbury, but now advances a different perspective on licit and illicit relationships, some of my friends take him as a callow vacillator who abandoned principle in order to advance to the most prestigious job in Anglican Christianity (short of being by God’s grace Monarch of England). I’m reluctant to think him so base a careerist; contrariwise, I have several times wondered whether he might not construe his new role much as did Thomas a Becket — as an office to which, by accepting, he agrees to subordinate his own interests and convictions. (“Oh God, I hope not!” sighed one interlocutor.)

I wish the Most Reverend Dr. Williams, with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, were deploying his considerable theological wisdom and rhetorical skills to direct the Anglican Communion in a direction different from its present course. But if he’s getting up morning by morning to ask himself how the Archbishop of Canterbury must rightly serve God and the Anglican Communion — rather than what he, Rowan Williams, could do to effect ends that he knew were right — I think I’m pretty sympathetic with him. I believe in “the office” as an expression of vocation distinct from the full expression of personal convictions. “The office” exemplifies a social identity in which we participate, the exercise of which we affect (obviously), but which we do not possess, to manipulate as an instrument for our purposes.

(Parenthetically, I don’t suppose that everyone who disagrees with me or Rowan Williams therefore must think of offices solely as nexuses of power that avail to satisfy self-interested policy goals. There’s shades of difference, by all means.)

Now, as a follow-up reflections: I doubt that demystifying and disenchanting “the office” effect the same gesture. On my hunch, “the office” provides something of a bulwark against the bare-knuckled brawl of power and will; it can surely be used in manipulative ways, but that’s the gesture of someone who already disbelieves in the distinct responsibilities of “the office.” And I wonder whether, if we leave behind an ideology of office, we don’t swing the door open to the puerile sorts of egalitarianism (because each of us presumably has some positive qualities, because we stand equal before the throne of God, therefore everyone’s opinion and standing should be treated equally in all circumstances”). But maybe this just catches me on a grouchy day.
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