AKMA’s Random Thoughts

I’m fiddling around with tomorrow’s sermon. I have a heap of points that I want to make, but “points” are cheap; anyone can meander around and hit a few points, valid points, if you allow enough time.

A standout sermon will pick up some of the same “points” that a more casual sermon touches on, and will order them in a way that strengthens the convincing power of each, and integrates them into a vision of the whole gospel. Here’s a significant weakness of much “justice” homiletics; many preachers walk through a relatively predictable series of points about inclusion, equality, poverty, and liberation, without structuring the sermon so that these carry more weight than “a bunch of things that Christians think are good [or ‘bad,’ depending].” Theologians didn’t simply discover justice and liberation in the 1960’s, and the theological significance of these themes ramifies through more stories than only the Exodus, the Syro-Phoenician woman, the anonymous woman who anointed Jesus, and so on. “Justice” absolutely constitutes a cardinal theological theme — but we only enfeeble our preaching when we don’t make strong connections with the whole of the gospel. (And it’s not only “justice” preaching — one could say the same thing about “the tradition” or any of countless other homiletical themes).

We preachers often care so much about our points that we neglect the vital importance of integrating them in a coherent, intelligible, convincing structure. That’s a more complex task, and we don’t always do it well even when we try. But (as my students will acknowledge), the gospel is more complicated than just the points, and we best serve the whole gospel when we attend not only to its fruits, but to its roots as well.

I’m preaching Sunday, working on the texts, looking for the hook. The readings are Joshua 24:1-2a,14-25 (“Choose ye this day whom you will serve”); Psalm 16; Ephesians 5:21-33 (the dreaded “Wives, be subject to your husbands”); and John 6:60-69, the end of the Bread of Life discourse.

Right now, I suspect I’ll want to pick up and interrogate the question of “choosing” — but since I don’t have a hook, it’s hard to tell what’ll become the most important element in the whole.

This fall, for the last time, I’ll teach my Early Church History course. (Next year we switch to semesters, and this course will be wrapped into a one-semester über-survey of church histry; I may occasionally teach topics in early history, but will no longer have this intro course).

For the occasion, I’m fine-tuning the Theology Cards game. I never erally liked the designation for people who died a natural death, so I’ll go fix that on all the cards.

I’m also going to look into make a set of Chronology cards. Pippa has developed in interest in Chronology in the past year or so, and we play by a simple set of rules (simpler than the rules given with the game): each player turns over a card and has to guess/say where that card fits among the cards in the other player’s tableau. For instance, my first card may be “Abraham Lincoln assassinated,” and Si’s is “The Battle of Hastings.” I draw “The beginning of the Tang Dynasty,” and have to determine whether that was before or after Lincoln’s death in 1865 (it was, founded in the early seventh century). Si draws “U.S. Bicentennial Celebration” and has to guess whether that came before or after 1066. Then I draw “Morocco conquers the Songhai Empire,” and I have to decide whether that took place before the beginning of the Tang Dynasty, or between that date and Lincoln’s assassination, or after Lincoln’s death. (It was 1581, so between the two otehr dates.) And so on.

I’ll make up a series of cards for the church history class, so that they can play this homegrown version of Chronology to learn the basic sequence of events in church history, and I’ll post it on the Disseminary site when it’s ready. And once I wangle the upgrade to our MT install, I’ll begin working on the Beautiful Theology reading group, I promise.

Weekend before last, giddy with thinking, I stopped in at Comix Revolution (looking for Scott McCloud’s forthcoming book) and wandered home with Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Steve Ross’s Marked. I was at one point thinking about writing on both of them in one entry, but I fear that would take up too much room, and would short-change each, so instead I’ll accord each one a separate entry. (I’m impressed that Alison B. keeps her website with blog software — cheers to her for that very insightful, practical decision!)

Fun Home rehearses Bechdel’s growing-up and coming-out, with particular reference to her father, and to their relationship. The story is grim — her childhood was not cheery, and her father dies while she’s in college — but Bechdel will not permit the story to descend into [self-]pity or facile denunciation of her father’s remoteness. When the story’s tensions and tragedy lurch toward despair, she foregrounds moments of relief, of delight. She studies her family’s fissures with the candor of detachment and the intimacy of involvement, and invites her readers to see past the deceptions on which her family’s identities were grounded. But she goes further, to teach her reader to reckon with the possibility that every conclusion is premature, that neither she nor we can escape building identities from fictive elements that we may at any moment betray, that may at any moment betray us.

Bechdel’s insight and patience mark the book as an impressive memoir; even more remarkable, though, are her gift for communicating the memoir in comic panels that constitute a complex mosaic of motifs, echoes, recapitulations, and cadences. She reproduces pages from her childhood diaries, from the books that illuminate her father’s life, from postcards and letters — her depictions representing both the original source and the extent to which she has appropriated the material for her story’s purpose. She illustrates several scenes multiple times, using different emphases as she urges her readers to see the scene differently, this time. She bares to her readers a soul clothed in dire beauty.

I would not recommend this book to everyone; it is too harrowing for many, and may stir painful memories to the surface for some. The sexual dimensions of her narrative will offend some with their explicitness, some with their affirmative homosexuality. Many, many readers, though will find here a remembrance that touches their memories and imagination with images, insights, and rhythms from a hauntingly subtle narrative artist.

Some poisons just never get purged from the system; the word “recrudescence” was made for this, with the accent on “crude.” People who want to make claims about “honor” and “nobility” and “heritage” owe the rest of us an explanation of the way that noble, honorable tradition has never separated itself from loathsome racism.

If United Airlines stopped junk-mailing every member of our family “Limited Time Offers” for Mileage Plus credit cards two or three times a week, they could lower fares on all their flights. If fares were lower, we might fly more often.

I’m just saying. . . .

A belated Happy Birthday to Librivox! Listen to their anniversary special here.

NPR interviews Edward Tufte (yes, I’m still thinking through a Beautiful Theology online discussion group) — Weekend Edition Sunday offers audion and video here.

“Wally Wood’s 22 Panels That Never Fail,” courtesy of Joel Johnson (link from Boing Boing). There’s a connection there to Beautiful Theology, but we’ll have to wait for the discussion to figure out what it is. Does anyone know what “Ben” stands for in these frames?

Tim made me go look at a clip from the Colbert Report. I’ll bet Tony Campolo could’ve named the Ten Commandments, unlike pro-Commandment crusader Lynn Westmoreland.

Micah wanted me to check out this and this. They’re both from Canadian sources, which makes me wonder whether I’m living on the correct side of the border. No, I don’t really wonder.

Multiplexities.

The other day I felt a rush of retrospective excitement as I read through David’s post on “why anonymity should be the default” on the internet, and then clicked over to Eric’s response. We’ve been having arguments like this for years, but it’s been a long time since it has come to the future (its reappearance is probably related to the near proximity of the next Digital Identity World Conference. Send my regards — the day when philosophical-theological participant observers fit into the schedule are over). Their insightful, well-informed, respectful disagreement rewards reading and reflection.

Since “several years” is a long time even apart from the internet, and even longer online, I’ll take the risk of repeating a response that I’ve been making to their positions since we first broached this topic. Although on the whole, I take David’s part in this specific disagreement, both Eric and David (and Doc, to drag another old DIDW friend) complicate matters by taking the metaphorical sense in which we can fittingly characterize the internet in spatial terms, and inappropriately argue conclusions about the Net that disregard the pivotal differences between the (non-spatial) internet and (spatial) physical interaction. To aggravate my current Wittgensteinian theme, a spatial picture about the internet holds their discourse captive, when the problem that David and Eric are hashing out arises in great part because of the ways that the Net differs from physical space.

I’d like to mash up their conversation with Nick Yee’s piece on “The Prison of Embodiment” at Terra Nova. Here’s the point: how do we deal with questions of disembodied identity? Most of our familiar devices for identification depend on physical characteristics (our physiognomy, external paraphernalia such as cards or papers, physical location) — but the online aspect of our lives dissolves those physical-spatial devices. If we reason about digital identity with devices or metaphors that perpetuate the legacy of spatiality, we occlude some of the decisive characteristics of the technological transition in which we participate.

Of course, the church has been trying to think through the importance of non-spatial identities for centuries, which helps explain my confidence that a theologian’s perspective can contribute to the discussion. All along, people’s identities have been constituted by the memories, links, knowledge, and patterns that they share (or not) with the rest of the world; in our digital environment, those aspects of identity come to the fore. Let’s not shackle them to simulated spatiality, but instead let’s seek out a way to work with identity in ways indigenous to a non-spatial identity ecology.

The New York Times article on the Dead Sea community takes the predictable “newsy” angle by playing up doubts about whether the Dead Sea site should be associated with Essenes; its closing line, “Despite the rising tide of revisionist thinking, other scholars of the Dead Sea scrolls continue to defend the Essene hypothesis, though with some modifications and diminishing conviction,” understates the predominance of the Essene hypothesis and overstates (as far as I can tell) the interest in alternative theories. On the whole, the vast preponderance of the Qumran scholars whom I know hold to one version or another of the Essene hypothesis, and since I’m not by any means a Qumran scholar, I regard that predominance as significant evidence.

At the same time: I hold to several minority positions in my own field of expertise, so I don’t dismiss those who question the Essene hypothesis. There have not been any links between Qumran and the Essene movement that approach “conclusive” evidence for their association. Even if there were stronger evidence for the Qumranites being Essenes, we should attend carefully to divergent positions — they keep us honest by focusing attention on the inevitable weak spots in our speculations, and they often enough do turn out to become the next generation’s scholarly consensus. And as I’ve said before, just because an “expert” said something, whether it affirms or challenges received opinion, doesn’t make it so.

At this point in the Qumran story, though, the Esssene hypothesis has persuaded the most knowledgeable scholars that it best accounts for the evidence we have and involves the fewest weaknesses, leaps, idiosyncratic interpretations, and obtrusive ideological imperatives. Yes, the argument could be a lot stronger; no, it’s not anywhere near an established fact; but no, the revisionists haven’t yet turned the tide of informed judgment, as best I can tell (and Jim Davila evidently would back me up on this).

The Episcopal Church — the US branch office of the Anglican Communion (for the time being) — stands at an increasingly awkward point, as the cartoon figure with one foot on either side of a widening chasm. Many will point out that its actually rests on just one foot, and the Episcopal Church is managing to brush the dust of the far side with its other toe, claiming that it’s straddling the gap, but at least for formal reasons, its center of gravity remains finally to be determined. In matters that involve God and the action of the Holy Spirit, we should exercise all our restraint to avoid foreclosing what may be possible.

I’ve observed here before that something desperately important about the Episcopal Church’s “Anglicanism” is in jeopardy, perhaps quite lost by most people who have a dog in the particular fights that have catalyzed this decomposition. In the established Church of England, the Church had to operate on the premise that citizens and Anglicans constitute (generally) overlapping sets; although the culture knew of Jews, Catholics, Dissenters, Muslims, and Freethinkers, the extent to which church and state were integrated entailed a complicated tension of expansiveness in self-definition. If you factor out the obligation to make room for all but the most determined non-Anglicans, you collapse one element that sustains the definition of “Anglican” or “Episcopalian”; while the church could always (and did always) develop deliberate claims about doctrine and practice, those claims had to be applied in a way that recognized the citizen-congregant status of almost all English/Welsh/Scots-Episcopal/Northern-Irish adults. (Establishment brings with it a variety of pernicious effects, absolutely; here I’m citing one background effect of establishment that I appreciate, without arguing that the legal ground for that effect should be preserved.)

Another bulwark against convulsive exclusion in Anglican identity was the Book of Common Prayer. Its careful compromises between the firm Calvinism of many Anglicans and the Catholic resistance to Reformed theology (a legacy of Henry’s theology, the determined position of some theologians, and a strong substrate in much popular theological sentiment) in a single point of theological reference obliged all Anglicans to frame their positions with regard to a particular regimen of affirmations and claims. That the BCP served admirably in that regard for so long provides preliminary evidence that something like “the historic Book of Common Prayer,” a generally harmonious series of BCPs from 1662 onward (and it would be easy to overamplify the differences among the editions before 1662) articulated a flexible but durable reference point for theological orientation.

Fast forward to 2006 in the United States, where the Episcopal Church stands under no extrinsic obligation to comprehend a maximal constituency of people-who-might-be-called-Anglicans, and where the 1979 Book of Common Prayer departs from its predecessors by incorporating a wide variety of liturgical forms (leave aside, for a moment, its deliberate changes in theological perspective) — and at the moment, many congregations treat subsequent liturgical texts as functionally equivalent to the BCP, meaning that any of nine (I think) eucharistic prayers may count as the legitimate sacramental expression of the church’s faith, depending on where one worships. Absent two powerful checks on capricious theologizing, the whole matter of “Anglican-ness” has drifted toward a Humpty-Dumptyian ideological stipulation, rather than a bounded compehensiveness. That is, when one must accept, in general, the Anglicanicity of most everyone who wants to be called an Anglican, and while “wanting to be called ‘Anglican’ ” involves at least general affirmation of the authority of the Prayerbook (with a single authorized form for the Daily Office and the Eucharist), then one can afford to be patient with dotty vicars and controversy-mongering bishops; one has an identity imprecisely-bounded, but a bounded identity nonetheless.

Without the tension between needing to take a generalist view of the church’s identity (on one hand) and acknowledging the formulations of a canonical compromise among divergent visions of ecclesiastical identity (on the other), things fall apart. Particularly when we treat the Prayerbook simply as a sourcebook and inspiration for “the kind of prayers we like, here,” and when our partisan (in a non-pejorative sense, if that’s possible) alternative definitions of “Anglican” vie for the power to enforce their theology over against opposing views, something fragile stands in peril — if indeed it has not already been lost. That loss would injure all concerned, whatever their theological stripe, however confident they may be that theirs is the divinely-justified, legitimately correct response to God’s call.

OK, I got a cable to connect my Motorola V[erizon]265, and it makes an effective USB connection from my cell phone — but as far as I can tell, one of the corporate links in this chain has set up the phone so that the photo images on the phone are encrypted and inaccessible apart from the proprietary software that Verizon sells. And the proprietary software is, so far as I can tell, Windows-only.

I had another question, but it slipped my mind.

[Later:] OK, I remembered. I’m getting sick and tired of deleting comment spam, so I’m thinking about replacing the built-in comment function (that I moderate anyway, by hand, relatively laboriously) with a link that sets up an email to me, with a subject line that included a keyword such as “feedback” (for filtering purposes) and the title of the post, and then invites you to send me an email with your comments. I can filter them at this end, add them by hand to the original post, and make sure formatting works out. I won’t take significantly longer than the overburdened “accept” button of my Moveable Type installation, and I wouldn’t have to spend valuable time every day deleting comments (and it would significantly diminish the burden on the ISP’s s server). So, first of all, does this make sense in general? And second of all, does someone with the chops to do it right know in a flash how to code that, or shall I exercise my overaged script kid capacities to try it myself?

That was it.