AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Kendall Harmon cites a paper by Aidan Nichols at Anglican-Use.org. It’s a forty-page PDF entitled “A Personal View of Anglican Uniatism,” and it’s well worth general attention. Nichols is a thoughtful and articulate Roman Catholic critic of Anglicanism, so he’s Roman-er than I’d be — but it’s a pragmatic, subtle piece on what the future might look like for Anglican-Use Roman Catholics.

My Ken Paul Beard/Creative Communists t-shirt arrived yesterday, and I wore it today. Margaret observed that it typified my t-shirt repertoire, since almost no one would understand it.

(I think she’s a little too harsh on my t-shirts; I do wear my Apple Store t-shirts occasionally, and my Duke basketball t-shirts are pretty intelligible. My ŒùŒôŒöŒó t-shirt, however, stumps some people, as does my ŒºŒøŒ?ŒøŒ? Œ±Œ?Œ±ŒªœÖŒµ Œ±œÖœÑŒøŒ? shirt. And my SPU shirts. The “Uncle Sam [Seabury]” and Enmegabowh t-shirts are self-explanatory around campus. So I’m only partly unintelligible.)

I asked Si to take my picture, and it became clear that Pippa wanted to share the spotlight — entirely plausibly, especially since her t-shirt today bore a parallel theme.

A couple of readers prodded me to comment on the thrilling — ahem — revelation that the notorious “number of the beast” in Revelation 13:18 might actually not be 666 (thus putting a crimp in the Omen movie franchise), but 616. This makes the news because a few years ago, one of Oxford’s Oxyrhynchus Papyri turned up with the number 616, and it’s taken a long time for this bit of text-critical esoterica to catch the attention of mainstream media (go figure!) — which seem to have noticed only when MTV figured out that this news had implications for heavy metal bands.

The textual variant here isn’t news; we already knew that Codex Ephraemi Rescriptus (codex “C”) reads “616,” and Irenaeus shows knowledge of that variation in Against Heresies (Stephen Carlson cites the passage here). If you own a critical edition of the Greek New Testament, you should find a mark in the apparatus that cites this variant. Indeed, this particular papyrus was published in 1999. The fragment in question merits attention because it makes the earliest direct attestation for this variant; the Oxyrhynchus people seem to be dating P.Oxy. LXVI 4499 as later third/early fourth century. That’s after Irenaeus, who died around 202, but well before fifth-century Ephraemi.

It’s hard to displace the fairly strong evidence for 666, but this bit of papyrus strengthens the case that St. John may have ascribed the number 616 to the beast — whatever that number turns out to mean.

Margaret won’t let go of an intriguing topic. She notes that Media Matters has taken up the question of Abu Faraj al-Libbi’s grade inflation; CNN has finally noticed that it’s a problem; and the Christian Science Monitor acknowledges the confusion. Atrios put it best, though: “ Apparently, he just said he was ‘Third in Command’ to impress the ladies. . . .”

Sorry for the delay — it’s been an intense week.

What I was thinking about the Baptist excommunication controversy was this: Public debates about religious groups frequently ignore the most decisive features of such communities, and frequently assess them as though they were voluntary associations of any familiar civic kind. Hence, some portion (not all) of the brouhaha about the unfortunate congregation in North Carolina teems with the outrage we would appropriately feel if some ostensibly apolitical entity had purged its ranks of Jews. [I should add: “And of course, no one has attempted the genocidal exttermination of Democrats.”]

But that superficial outrage is surely groundless; if voting for John Kerry is incompatible with the discipline of a given congregation, that congregation must be free to say so. The pastor did not, after all, clap Kerry voters into leg irons or confiscate their property — he said they could not be part of that congregation. Since the Democratic platform included some claims (about abortion, sexuality, and so on) that a Christian group can intelligibly deem incompatible with the faith, I’d say that — at first blush — the pastor was on firmer ground than his critics. Churches don’t owe Caesar neutrality at the cost of muting the Gospel.

Ah, but things are more complicated than that. After all, there’s established case law to the effect that if a tax-exempt religious group uses its place in the community to effect particular electoral results, they lose their tax-exempt standing. Now, I don’t suppose that’s the worst thing that can happen to a church (not really up there with “take up your cross and follow me”), but it’s a nuisance and puts a crimp in the budget. (If they’re going to play Caesar’s political game, they must pay Caesar’s tax.) If East Waynesborough Baptist Church figured that the gospel was at stake, why I’d positively commend them for forgoing their tax advantage in order to remain true to the church’s moral teaching.

On the third hand, though, there’s an ironic catch. If I recall correctly from the Baptist students who have labored so hard to teach me the truth about church polity and the state, one of the founding principles of the baptist movement involved the believer’s freedom on conscience (vividly expressed in Thomas Helwys’s A Short Declaration of the Mystery of Iniquity (8-meg downloadable PDF of scanned pages here; why hasn’t anyone transcribed and marked it up in HTML?). Having experienced the tyranny of imposed profession of belief, the baptist movement stood squarely for the uncoerced freedom of the individual conscience. To the extent that the pastor in question intended to sway his flock toward unanimous support of George W. Bush, he came awfully close to aligning himself with the early persecutors of baptists, over against the earliest baptists themselves.

All that being said, the pastor in question seems to have handled the situation badly; his most eloquent defenders offer a much more precisely-framed theological case than he seems to have done, and his assailants justly call him to task for expressing so unalloyed a partisan sentiment. The controversy illustrates yet again that church leaders need the skill of careful and measured communication more perhaps than any other — and they run into all kinds of trouble when they say important things in careless ways.

I have a second consecutive all-day faculty meeting, so I won’t be free to blog right away, but in response to Tripp and some email correspondents, I’ll think of something to say about the Baptist brouhaha, later in the day. . . .

[Later: I meant to say, “tomorrow, after I get through the faculty meeting and work out tomorrow morning’s sermon.”]

While I’ve been concentrating on other obligations, various ructions have caught fire concerning links and ranking. I haven’t wrestled with this topic before, but sooner or later I may as well step in it.

So, relative to blogrolls, I’ve got one, and I’ll keep it — not out of any militancy or point-making, but because Margaret uses it to navigate to recently-updated blogs from people she knows. I hardly ever look at it at all, so I’m very slow to make changes to it (I usually change it only when Margaret has reminded me that someone’s address has changed, or that there’s someone whose blog she wants to keep up with). I go to other blogs mostly from my bookmarks.

I see interesting arguments for and against having blogrolls, but none seems more immediate than the pragmatic criterion. There’s something blank about a blogroll link (as opposed to a topical, direct link). To draw on my favorite overburdened terminology, a blogroll link signifies a lot less; a link that persists on every page, regardless of context, and that points to an index paged rather than a particular post, lacks the rich texture of a topical link. Add the occasional social pressure for reciprocity, add the awareness that search bots index and rank links, and you can see reasonable grounds for opting out of the whole blogroll matter. As I say, I wouldn’t miss mine if it were gone; when blogrolling.com goes down for a while (and my bogroll blogroll vanishes), I don’t even notice.

On the other hand, blogrolls do serve some useful purposes. Mine provides Margaret with information about which of her favorite sites has been updated recently. They might direct first-time visitors to other sites they haven’t seen yet (the most frequent defense of blogrolls). In that the blogroll typically combines more-familiar, more-prominent names with less-familiar, less-well-known names, blogrolls can serve a leveling function; through my blogroll, only one degree separates Dave Winer from Reverend Ref — the keynoter, bon vivant, and inventor of blogging from a parish priest in rural Montana. Few if any other sites mediate that connection.

Moreover, a blogroll attests to a set of affiliations — the convergence of particular circles of acquaintance. (Research project: find a threshold of common links that productively marks out “communities of online discourse,” particularly tightly-joined small pieces whose link patterns suggests a neighborhood hangout where denizens share conversation, interests, and demonstrated commitment to mutual attention.) Those links don’t reflect such patterns infallibily, but as a rough guide, they’re a lot better than a wet finger in the wind. When we attest to such social loyalties, we re-bind our attention to one another, and that’s not an empty gesture. (It may be a nearly empty gesture, it’s a highly ambiguous gesture, but it’s not entirely empty.) If I were to advance a reason other than Margaret’s convenience for me to keep a blogroll, it would be the community-signaling aspect of a blogroll (which I exemplify only very imperfectly).

Now, once you have an advanced network of links, you won’t be able to stop people from compiling and analyzing the patterns; no way. That information is too richly interesting, too easily available, for motivated geeks to ignore. One of the most obvious interesting things to do with that data would be ranking blogs by a nuanced algorithm for authority; hence, we see bloggers fretting about their Technorati authority or their Google PageRank. We can opt out of contributing to that system by banishing blogrolls (or, I suppose, ultimately by not linking to other bloggers), but there’s no escape from being linked-to short of trying to keep all bots at bay.

So I don’t so much see any of the AOTechnorati100 or PageRank, best-of lists, annual awards, whatever, as a problem for Blogaria as I see them as a predictable concomitant of measurably-linked human interactions. They bother me precisely to the extent that I pay attention to all the politicking, begging, exulting and weeping — that is, “not much.” It’s pretty much the same with these barometric representations of popularity as with pay-for-blogging: some folks won’t be changed by the recognition, some will, some are only in it to gratify their narcissism, and some stand for a popularity-neutral policy of saying what they want to. If we take away commercial (or attention-economic) motivators, a certain constituency of bloggers would find some other way to clutch the spotlight. Even ranking engines, though, serve the useful function of signaling that someone else’s blog interests a lot of other people, whether I’ve heard of it or not.

I don’t blame anyone for resisting the star-maker machinery behind the popular blog. I don’t feel guilt-stricken about keeping a blogroll. I’m not wounded that I’ll never win an award or make the Top XXX list. If by a weird quirk of voting or categorization (“New category: Best Theological/Technological Blog by an Episcopal Priest Named ‘AKMA’ ”), I did win something, I might well be tickled. I’m very impressed at how rigorously my neighbors are thinking through the complexities of these phenomena, but I don’t have enough time, energy, or indignation to lend to a movement for or against.

(Oh, and I don’t have any non-obvious nominees for Dave’s list. Does the world need my testimony to affirm that the names you already know are famous, got there first, wrote the software, and supply the capital? I know, respect, and like the bearers of the names of those who show up in everyone else’s ballots — but so do many other people, and my word can’t possibly matter much in ascertaining who should be recognized.)

It seems as though flickr’s been down all day, but no-one’s said anything about it on the flickr blog. . . .

[Later: It’s 9:53, and flickr’s back!]

Sermon coming up next Wednesday — the readings will be Acts 20:28-38 and John 17:11b-19. For now, I don’t have the vaguest idea what I’ll say, but I’ve opened a file within which to include my half-baked notions.

I’m a Firefox advocate, no question — but my browser regularly hangs with a even few tabs open. I suspect a glitch with Java or pop-ups or something, but so far I’m just force-quitting and restarting it.

The Times says that Abu Faraj al-Libbi is not such a high-ranking Dread Terrorist after all, but U. S. news sources haven’t affirmed or repudiated (or, so far as I’ve yet been able to determine, even picked up) the story. What’s with this?

Toronto: This afternoon, it was announced that an anonymous donor has established the Cluetrain Foundation to provide opportunities for reflection, research, analysis, writing, podcasting, travel, teaching, and productive goofing-off. The first recipient of a Cluetrain Grant is Michael O’Connor Clarke, better known in some quarters as “Ruari’s dad” (no disrespect to Charlie and Lily, and of course not to Leona).

Future grants may include research grants into eugenics and marketing, swinoculture and hamster husbandry, journalism and Joyce, photography and open-source blogging software, satire and philanthropy, librarianship and RPG, talking bears and lobsters, rhetoric and intellectual property and visual communication, and perhaps even technology and theological hermeneutics (among others).

In the meantime, the Foundation will gladly put inquirers into contact with grant-holder[s], particularly if said inquirer has an attractive job offer. Or would like to donate to the Worthy Blogger Support Fund of the Cluetrain Foundation.