AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Two Three only-slightly-related points, one a question and one an answer and one a link.

Q: Seabury’s stalwart Director of Communications would like a gentle, clear, informative tutor to help walk her through the process of learning how to make the most of Seabury’s MT installation, CSS, and so on. We can’t pay exorbitant consulting fees, but someone who’s casting about to make ends meet, or on parental leave, or retired with megabucks at the height of the dot-com boom and feels charitable, would be a great helper as we try to enhance our use of the web. Is this you?

A (specific to Mac OS X users): I use GraphicConverter for most light image-file management purposes, but I usually switch to Photoshop for more interesting, heavy-duty file effects. People with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) who rely on GRaphic Converter or iPhoto may want to take a serious look at BeLight’s freeware Image Tricks app, which uses the Core Image capacities built-in to Tiger in order to produce slick, simple Gaussian blurs, unsharp masks, and various color-balancing, image-manipulating goodies. They say it integrates with iPhoto; I’m not much of an iPhoto user, so I wouldn’t know. It’s very handy, and quite free, though — which I applaud and call to your attention.

L: I’m usually resistant to check-it-out links in my comments, but Hugh won me over with his LibriVox project — a more-experienced, better-organized, longer-view version of the Lessig read-a-thon barn-raising. I’d jump right in to read a chapter myself, but we’re working on audio files for Disseminary use, and I have one or two other overdue obligations. But here’s a link to you, Hugh, with best wishes for the project. Go help him out!

I recorded the talk I gave at the CBA meeting on my snazzy Olympus WS-200S digital voice recorder, which I got for the Disseminary on the strength of recommendations from a column at O’Reilly and from Lorna “Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me” White. I’ve trimmed off David Penchansky’s laudatory opening and the closing q-and-a session; I may re-edit the file subsequently (break it down into smaller chunks, whatever), but for now I’m just posting the unpolished audio below.

The talk draws heavily on the version I presented earlier this year at Seabury, though I had a little more time for this one; I omitted a part at the beginning, thanking everyone for everything, and added a section at the end, giving reasons for adopting the terminology of “signifying practices.”

“Do This”: Translating, Re-Presenting, and Signifying New Testament Theology (23.7 meg — watch out)

Stephen Downes comments on Bob Reynolds’s response to Jimbo Wales’s call for a free curriculum (about which I blogged last week). I’m reacting not to Reynolds, but to Downes’s comments; I’m halfway from Collegeville to Minneapolis (here’s a question: is it still called “carsickness” if you’re on a bus?) on my way to the airport, and for some reason I can’t pick up a wireless signal (or find an electrical outlet! Imagine!).

Wales’s call, Reynolds’s response, and Downes’s comments all bear on the problem of how (and whether) to connect scholars and experts with the free-distribution model of online education. What they (and so far, everyone else) overlook is the extent to which the very mechanisms (I’m thinking of the French word “dispositifs”) of public education by experts are already at work — only they’re being operated and constrained by previous-generation models of mass communication. I’m referring to the advertising campaigns and PR deartments of major professional and public-interest groups such as the AMA, the ABA, AARP, ACLU, and so on. These organzations spend boatloads of money eliciting expertise from (presumably) reliable experts — then transmuting it into expensive 30-second TV spots, or three-panel folded panphlets that a pharmacist stuffs into your bag and you throw right away.

If a professional association really wants its members to gain mindshare, to raise the level of public discourse over the topics it addresses, that organization ought to commission educational materials from its leading exponents and distribute them online — for a tiny proportion of what mainstream-media campaigns cost.

Yes, that won’t reach every audience segment, and perhaps it won’t reach certain audiences at all (though I’m inclined to suspect that a vigorous online sphere of attention would at least stand to generate side-channel interest and awareness). Some professional association ought to give it a try, someday. (I would single out the Society of Biblical Literature and Catholic Biblical Association, but these have no PR budget at all, to the best of my knowledge. Still wouldn’t cost them much to do a world of good.)

(Later: Rob Reynolds responds to Stephen Downes here)

At the risk of commending another Dead White French [Postmodern] guy, the Hermeneutics Task Force of the Catholic Biblical Association has been holding a very provocative series of discussions of the work of Michel de Certeau (specifically, this year, essays from Hetereologies and The Practice of Everyday Life) (I know, it’s twenty or thirty years late; remember, though, that this is biblical scholarship, so by our local time, we’re right on schedule). Note to Margaret: evidently Certeau started out as a protégé of Henri de Lubac. We’re only getting a little way into each essay — “Walking in the City,” “History: Science and Fiction,” and “Reading as Poaching” — provoke us to talk about the relation of textuality to the real, the role of power and authority in interpretive discourses, the social, ethical, institutional, and epistemological status of the interpreter. Cool stuff.

Paper went well. Details at eleven, unless I fall directly asleep.

[Later: Dropping off briefcase at dorm room. Say, I have to lecture to Catholics more often — they really liked my essay.]

Greetings from Lake Wobegon Collegeville!

The Catholic Biblical Association meeting is going well; I’m catching up with friends, learning a thing or two, haven’t bought any books, and working with and avoiding editors. This morning at eleven I’ll give a presentation that’s genetically related to — but not identical to — my Winslow Lecture. I’ll make a recording of it and post it here when I get a chance.

St. John’s Abbey and University are lovely in unpredictable ways; the combination of the modern concrete bell tower, church, and library with the perpendicular brick quad and other buildings risks looking shoddy, but in fact I think the campus holds together beautifully. And the land is wonderful; you can see why people vacation in Minnesota’s lake country. The brothers of the Benedictine Abbey are welcoming us amply, and the entire experience has been enchanting. (Apart from the “sleep-in-a-dorm-=room” side; the room itself is very comfortable, but the pillow is thinner than a White House apology.)

Yes, I’m up early again, this time to catch a flight to Minneapolis. I don’t know what connectivity will be like at the Minneapolis airport and at St. John’s (we traditionally have problems getting access, even wired access, at CBA meetings). Anticipate light blogging, and we’ll see what happens.

When I said below that I’m not an oracle, what I meant was: I sure wish I’d been the one to connect these dots. “What happens when you combine the notion of the state-of-the-art cell phone (with picture-taking capability standard fare these days) with QuickTime and its H.264 compression, which Apple touts as being great for mobile phones? A video (ipod) phone, with audio/video recording, not just playback. (And perhaps more far-fetched, transmission — now we’re talking beyond Dick Tracy).”

Makes sense to me, much more so than the spasmodic will-they-release-it-or-not anticlimaxes over the alleged Apple-Motorola iPod phone (how many people will buy a device that renders redundant one or two expensive gadgets they already own?) or a plain old video-playing iPod (so I can see Lord of the Rings on a 3 × 5 screen?). It’s exactly the kind of thing Steve Jobs would love to spring on the world, and would certainly help sustain Apple’s energy coming away from the iPod wave.

I’m at home finishing off some assignments (a revision of my Windsor Lecture material for presentation at this weekend’s Catholic Biblical Association meeting, an introduction to the book in which the four Windsor lectures will be published), but so that readers do not feel neglected, I’ll point to a Theology Card:

#47, Council of Nicaea: Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG

and two snazzy maps that Ryan discovered in my copy of Walker’s History of the Christian Church. Eventually we’ll move jpegs of the Theology Cards over to the Disseminary flickr site and serve image files from there, but for now I’ll keep uploading everything to the main site.

And Debra is wrapping up the first volume of Theological Outlines; Chapter Eight and Chapter Nine are set, and she’ll probably wrap up Ten and Eleven before I get back from Minnesota (at which point we can start publishing the chapters of Volume Two, which are already scanned and set to go). Anyone with a copy of the second edition of Volume Three who’d be willing to share, please let us know!

Yes, “Passion dollars” — those are the terms in which Sony is thinking of its movie production of The da Vinci Code, according to an article in the NY Times (thanks for the tip, Dave Hedges). The ariticle will disappear behind the pay-archive wall soon, but the gist of it involves Sony’s tortuous efforts to cash in on a religiously-themed premise without offending Christians by suggesting that the whole faith is a bad idea forced upon a coerced world by murderous zealots.

Unfortunately, that’s pretty much the plot of the book.

So the movie execs now sought cooperation from media Christians (they didn’t call me, though) to bowdlerize the anti-Catholic, anti-Christian, anti-historical-truth elements of the book into a vaguer, friendlier movie that will draw the same (largely pro-Christian, often ardently Catholic) audiences that went to see The Passion of the Christ: synecdochically, “Passion dollars.” Why not just call them “Passion pieces of silver”? They could probably get thirty or so.

I am often wrong, and about lots of things. I am not an oracle.

For that very reason, I feel all the more investment in the things I get right. About seven years ago, I made the first proposal for what we now call the Disseminary to one possible source of funding. I’ve pitched it to other possible sources of support since then; most of the specifics are identical to what the site now says, based on the proposal for which the Wabash Center granted start-up funding two years ago (Thank you, Lucinda and Paul and Tom!).

Among the things toward which that original proposal pointed were podcasting (not under that name, obviously, but it included downloadable audio files, so I’m claiming a hit) and open-access textbooks. Yesterday, Jimbo “Wikipedia” Wales posted the following over at Lawrence Lessig’s blog: “An open project with dozens of professors adapting and refining a textbook on a particular subject will be a very difficult thing for a proprietary publisher to compete with. The point is: there are a huge number of people who are qualified to write these books, and the tools are being created to leave them to do that.” Again, seven years ago I wrote essentially the same thing.

OK, hold down the applause, that’s not the point. The point is that, with the backing of a serious foundation (or private funder), we could get this kind of thing done in the area of theology, an area that’s particularly fitting for educational philanthropy. What we need is the time to devote to open-source scholarly productivity (yesterday I diverted hours from my workflow to track down copyright-safe images for Theology Cards) and the financial support that will motivate scholars to offer their research and written instruction outside the current print-publishing-prestige-profit complex. It can be done in our disciplines, it will be done in some areas of education. Instead of lagging woefully behind the culture, religious educators could vault ahead of other areas of educational culture (with a little redirection of funding that’ll be expended anyway). Trinity Institute, Episcopal Church Foundation, Lilly, Pew, put some oomph behind online theology and it’ll take off. I said so seven years ago, and I still say so. It would be exhilarating if, seven years from now, we could look back and not see just another missed opportunity.

Margaret and Pippa dropped off. Caffeine coursing through my veins. Groggy.

#37 The Venerable Bede: Single PDF — Six-Up PDF — JPEG.

And the Theological Outlines project is coming along rapidly, too; Chapter Seven is done, and we’re working on Chapter Eight in Volume 1, and Volume 2 is all squared away (though not yet online). Ryan’s keeping busily scanning in pages from an early edition of Williston Walker’s History of the Christian Church.