AKMA’s Random Thoughts

My baby daughter, our youngest child by far — is babysitting tonight. I feel old.

Of the various theorists of hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur always frustrated me most. I would assent to roughly four-fifths of a point he makes, and then the remaining fifth would seem entirely off the mark. And in such frustrating prose! Give me a bracing, dense passage of Derrida any day, rather than the deadpan exposition of Ricoeur.

Yet I doubt that anyone has done more productive work, across the whole span of hermeneutical thought, in the twentieth century. Ricoeur affected everything; if you disagree with him, you still interact with him (whereas ideology fences off, say, Derrida from his dissenters). His reflections on time, identity, narrative, parables, interpretation, culture, all make a difference to participants in the discussion across the board. Dissent need not mean disrespect; all grace and peace be with Paul Ricoeur, now and forever.

In the tumult surrounding Pope John Paul II’s death, the vaunted self-promotional network of web insiders failed miserably. If it were half the megaphone it’s supposed to be, everyone would have heard ad nauseam about the April 11 issue of Newsweek, which I picked up not as a JPII collectible (despite his beatific visage on the cover), but because it includes a section on “who’s prospering on the web these days,” and I’m acquainted with some of those named.

So here’s to Stewart and Caterina, to Joi, to Mena and Ben (why is “Ben and Mena” the canonical order?) — whom Newsweek deems “leaders of the pack” of “hi-tech’s new day.” That kind of acclaim can be embarrassing, and I’m intrigued that I couldn’t find a trace of anyone trumpeting the feature online (this, even before “Newsweek” became the journalistic scapegrace of the moment). And now there will perhaps be an easier-to-Google reference to this article. . . .

For some reason, people keep dreaming about me. Krista, Steve, a co-conferee at Freedom to Connect. . . .

The family trundled down to the local moving picture show this afternoon, after a curriculum committee meeting, to watch The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I enjoyed it greatly — it’s light without being lite, and my main complaint was that I would gladly have stayed for a double feature with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which I hope is coming soon.

That’s partly because our house is a serious branch office of the Zooey Deschanel fan club, ever since Big Trouble. Margaret was delighted to see her as Trillian, and I second the motion.

The new plot elements worked moderately well; they skewed a little heavily toward Hollywood for my taste, but Douglas Adams skewed toward Hollywood still remains delightful and ingenious. They handled Zaphod’s extra body parts very well; the Vogons were appropriately repulsive; I love Bill Nighy as Slartibartfast, even though I wish he’d paced the name-revelation dialogue a little differently. Mos Def and Martin Freeman did very well, and I toast Sam Rockwell for moving from Guy Fleegman in Galaxy Quest to President of the Universe here.

Adams’s anti-religious tic, though, just gets wearisome for some of us against whom his barbs are directed. Perhaps I’m too touchy, perhaps I should find my life as risible as he would have, but I see in these scenes less of Adams’s outlandish wit and more predictable japery.

So, is Restaurant in production yet?

If churches sense the importance of preparing high-quality managers for their organizational life, should they start Six Stigma programs? Any volunteers to take that on?

No, I’m not talking about the suppression of the Bush war memo from July 2002. I’m talking about the reason that a movie almost everyone agrees to be a disappointing special-effects reel with leaden dialogue, improbable plotting, and formulaic directing will nonetheless make zillions of dollars in gate receipts.

It occurred to me as Margaret was compiling another catena of continuity problems, contradictions, and confusions, that the reason the movies will do well has much to do with George Lucas’s capacity to propose a compelling ideology much more than a believable cosmos or a well-engineered motion-picture franchise. I’ve read several times that Lucas actually believes in the myth he’s telling, and that assent provides the only reason I can possibly acknowledge for being able to bear looking at the most recent three movies. For a true believer, there are good reasons that Darth Vader doesn’t recognize C3PO and R2-D2 when he sees them in The Empire Strikes Back; there are good reasons that the apparently “liberated” proletariat must be kept under constant heavily-armed surveillance; there are good reasons that “full employment” includes large numbers of long-term unemployed workers, or that the public rationale for a massively destructive war keeps changing.

If you buy the ideology, the contradictions dwindle to irrelevance, and the glories of the cause you espouse far outweigh the incoherences your cause engenders. Star Wars doesn’t need to make sense, because Luke Skywalker’s triumphant torpedo shot justifies it.

(Might this also apply to church politics?)

I’ve fallen behind my posting Pippa art; she’s been drawing cartoons such as this one, but also has begun experimenting with oils and mixed media. I’ll have more to post in a few days, as she gives me permission.

She has a canvas up in the Seabury community exhibition, and will be showing a ceramic piece in the Evanston Young Artists exhibition, in the home-schooled students’ area — but now she’s busy watching Attack of the Clones (she thinks that the closing wedding scene should have had me edited in as the officiant at the marriage of Anakin and Padme, though she points out that “Dad would forbid it” [the wedding]).

It will take a long time for Margaret to forgive Micah for instroducing our family to “Pants Wars,” the foolish game of substituting the word “pants” for some other word in the dialogue of the Star Wars movies. It gets pretty stupid, pretty rapidly.

I located this site with examples, to call to Pippa’s attention; she responded by scouting out this site. I don’t understand using “pants” as a verb — maybe I missed that page of the lexicon.)

Beginning a couple of decades ago or so, a particular group of theologians bestirred themselves to recognize that an arid concentration on propositions and abstractions did much less to enhance our understanding of God than it desiccated people’s interest in the whole topic. They pressed the case for “narrative theology,” which takes manifold forms depending on whose understanding of “narrative” and “theology” we’re adopting — but which typically focuses on the extent to which our knowledge of God involves extension in time, in a way that narrative captures more adequately than propositions.

Around the same time, politicians showed increasing awareness that a well-publicized anecdote (however embellished and fictionalized) sways the polls more than a carefully-reasoned policy document. Legislative hearings and executive speeches piled up one heart-wrenching anecdote after another in support of initiatives that would have been much less popular had they been debated as matters of statistics, rights, and responsibilities.

Comparable patterns of debate have emerged in the Anglican Communion’s contortions over sexuality and its appropriate expression. The parties involved have done a certain amount of theological reasoning, and have buttressed their arguments by copious examples of how harshly their adversaries have treated kind, pious disciples, or of how wonderfully the church flourishes when their way prevails, or of their sides’ martyrs, orr the other side’s tyrants.

The Windsor Report took sides on this issue: it specifically indicated dissatisfaction with the paucity of theological reasoning that the Episcopal Church’s leadership had advanced in support of the changes in church life that it proposes. Not everyone agrees that the Episcopal leadership lacks theological backing, but it’s obvious that they haven’t satisfied the Communion outside North America. I haven’t seen the Episcopal Church’s spokespeople redoubling their efforts to address this explicit perceived lack, but the stories keep coming.

Everyone will continue to say a lot about most aspects of this situation, but I want to make a single point at this juncture: “Narrative theology” is not the same thing as “telling affecting stories.” The narrative dimension of theological truth may involve many different things, but it still involves questions of truth that engage more than simply the heart-rending experiences of the aggrieved. Whatever we say about theological truth, we need to connect those claims with the truth that the church has received over the centuries, with Scripture, in a way that constitutes a satisfactorily reasonable argument. Windsor says ECUSA has not done that. Telling more stories not only will not answer Windsor’s point, but will convey disrespect for the very specific point that the Report makes.

Since the Number of the Beast is obviously important, and since we now have a degree of uncertainty about whether that number is 666 or 616, what shall we do?

We could just split the difference: The Number of the Beast is 641. Of course, we don’t have any text that says it’s 641, so we’d be likely to be wrong either way. But whichever number turned out to be right, we’d be equally wrong.

Or we could note the margin of error in our Bibles. If we opt for 666, we could note “(with a 7.5% margin of error)”; if 616, “an 8.1% margin.”

At least, as David reckons, the forces of evil may have been diminished by fifty.

Before I followed Maggi’s link to Rachelle’s blog, I’d have thought that I was opposed to over-structuring theological education — but some of Rachelle’s commentors leave me in the dust.

Margaret and I have home-schooled the three kids we raised, partly on the basis of our commitment to their very distinct patterns of learning and interest, partly out of frustrating experiences in our own educational history, and partly from the conviction that they would learn well on their own terms, at their own time, what they really wanted to learn (and wouldn’t learn well what we tried to induce them to learn on our terms, at a time we chose). Our experience as learners, and our experience as home-school parents (“un-school” parents, to be more exact), places me squarely on the un-structured side of the discussion with Maggi and Rachelle and others. I wish there were some way I could choose to home-school the seminarians at Seabury.

If one were not going to junk the whole notion of “classes” and “degrees” (and I’m not unsympathetic with the temptation to dispence with them), I’d probably suggest that each area of the curriculum, or each professor, schedule one series of lectures to introduce the areas for which she or he is responsible. After that, students would have the responsibility of pursuing such independent studies and organizing such seminars in consultation with the relevant faculty as would prepare the students for their various ministries.

Seabury’s reviewing and revising its curriculum in conjunction with our upcoming shift to semesters; I’ll be pushing gently for as few requirements as possible, and as many electives as possible. Maybe one way to administer such a program, given Seabury’s student population and the size of the faculty, would be to allot each full-time faculty member one required course, two elective courses, and one advanced seminar each year. That would entail radically re-envisioning some areas of the curriculum (that operate with a fairly rigid sequence of required courses), but a more open curriculum would facilitate our cooperation with other seminaries (students often transfer into Seabury with credits that don’t match our curriculum at all), would benefit students by treating them as real adult learners, and would offer faculty the opportunity to teach students who’ve chosen to learn in a given area.

In most respects, I’m with Doc on education: The more formalized the process, the less education is happening, and the more we’re selling short our birthright of curiosity and ingenuity in order to cash in the mess of pottage of quantifiable outcomes. (Sorry for the brutally mixed metaphor.)