So, before I say anything else, I want to wish a very, very happy (USA) Mother’s Day to my mom Nancy, and to Margaret’s mom Pat, to my grandmothers Isabelle, Lois, and Del, and to Margaret’s grandmothers Ruth and Dorothy. And to Margaret — hi, honey! And without prejudice also to anyone for whom Mother’s Day entails painful recollections, awareness, prospects, and also to mothers-to-be. Seriously, my best wishes and thanks and sympathies to you all.
 
This morning I preached the sermon I was struggling with yesterday, and it went well, I think. I’ll post it below in the “More” link. If you’re a critical preacher (by which I mean, you think back over the mechanics of what seems to have worked, what not, how and why things worked or didn’t, how it could have been better, and so on) Sunday afternoon can be an intriguing time. I’m utterly exhausted, as are most clergy I know. At the same time, I can’t resist tinkering with the sermon, especially as I copy-and-paste it into my blog.
 
The Scottish elections resulted in a landslide for the Scottish National Party, an interesting group that is explicitly pro-independence for Scotland (but which may, behind the scenes, be hoping not to have to cope with the economic ramifications of — you know — actually separating from England). They had one part of the right spiel for higher ed in Scotland: no fees for home students (we’ll surely impose fees for students from the rest of the UK, otherwise sticker-shocked English students would flee for the border by the thousands. The £9000s, to be precise). The SNP would have done better to promise us also fully to fund university education in Scotland, perhaps with provisos about the integrity of programmes so that they don’t end up underwriting “degrees” that amount mostly to money grabs by unscrupulous profiteers. Still, it’s hard times around, and I don’t begrudge other parts of the social and cultural fabric the support they need. Go, NHS!
 
Our friend Madhavi got a post-doc last week, that commences in January, after she finishes her contract with Glasgow. It’s great that she got a job, thus avoiding penury and deportation, but it’s sad that she won’t be part of our immediate close-knit group of local friends.
 
Twitter and Facebook are strangling the intertwingled web by cold-shouldering RSS. Say, remember when people had a lot invested in RSS, its precise versions, its alternative Atom, and who invented what? Now Facebook and Twitter are trying to make sure that you access their data only in the form they control. Someday, I fear, we will look back on the Aughties and see with regret the way that an open web and an open social-media infrastructure flourished before interested capital stifled them.
 
Margaret and I leave tomorrow — she to the States, for graduation and Pippa-pick-up duty, and for visits to the mothers we are greeting and saluting today (Hi, moms!); I, to Wales, where I will represent the Scottish Episcopal Church in the Four Nations (England, Ireland, Wales, and Scotland) Faith and Order meetings. If you were thinking of committing heresy, don’t try it for the next three days — I’ll be on your case in a flash and will solve it in an hour, just like the crime dramas that Margaret watches.
 
I found a very nice bargain fountain pen on eBay this week, and it arrived yesterday. It’s a rather dated shade of green (olive-avocado-ish) but the Triumph conical nib is sweet and it’s a Touchdown filler, one of my favourite kinds. That made a nice treat.
 
Too much blether. I’ll paste the sermon below, and will try to spread out my blogging more evenly hereafter.
 
Continue Reading »

AKMA :: May.08.2011 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

(You will not be surprised to note that I am simultaneously working on tomorrow’s sermon and listening to my iTunes DJ playlist.)
 
People frequently comment on the physicality of my sermons, the extent to which I preach with my full body. That comes in great part from having been taught to preach by the congregation I served in Florida, at St James’ Church, Tampa (before it merged with House of Prayer). A good part of it, though, comes also from my fondness for r & b and rock’n’roll music. While I’m devising a sermon, I typically have an implicit soundtrack — sometimes just one song, sometimes two or more — playing in my imagination.
 
This morning, the playlist brought up the Dream Academy’s “Life In A Northern Town”, which illustrates and intensifies my practice. As I was listening along, I awaited (and mimed, I confess) the signature double-drumbeat that comes at the beginning of the “Ah hey a ma ma ma” refrain, and noticed that as tremendously powerful as that drum figure is, the arrangement reserves it only for the beginning of the refrain. One could throw it in at several positions, but it arrives just once at each iteration of the “Ah hey” in the first refrain. After the first verse, the refrain is sung only once; in subsequent verses, the refrain is sung twice through (each time with the double-drumbeat on the first two “hey”s). As the song develops, the drummer (Ben Hoffnung) leads into the drumbeat with fills that heighten the anticipated duh-dum.
 
OK — that might satisfy one the “Great Moments’ posts I’ve written before, but the point this morning is that the drum track defines an acoustic and affective space for the song. And our sermons are not categorically distinct from this sort of musical composition. The double-beat in “Life In A Northern Town” contributes a point of orientation to the song; it signifies by accenting the chanted refrain and by contrasting with the relatively quiet arrangement of the rest of the song.
 
When putting together a sermon, we may well ask ourselves “What’s going on in the drum track?” or “How are we heightening the crescendo to which this repeated motif is leading?” For many sermons, the answer is all too easy: there’s no drum track, there’s no crescendo, there’s only a relatively monotonous meander. There are no ornaments, no hooks, only time passing slowly. Preacher: if your sermon were a song, would you willingly listen to it more than once? Would you even listen to it all the way to the end?
 
Churches often devote vast amounts of individual and institutional energy, money, and time to figuring out why people don’t come to church. Here’s a very quick, but demanding, tip: if the worship and the sermon don’t affect congregants and visitors, then the clever poster campaign, the cool-ly ironic name of the congregation, the bare feet or the coffeeshop ambiance or the incense or the elaborate planning will probably not enliven, perhaps not even sustain, the congregation.
 

(This is not to say that every sermon should be bombastic: no, no, no. “Life in a Northern Town” is actually a relatively subdued number, and one can imagine meditative sermons that work in the ways a minimalist composition does. But if you haven’t even thought through the ways that the sermon involves a great deal more than the cognitive work of “thinking something up and saying it”, or “looking up a cute, or touching, or striking, story to illustrate [what you take to be] the point of the Bible reading”, I’ll lay heavy odds that the sermon is missing a great deal that could strengthen, deepen, and extend the impression that the sermon leaves. Or doesn’t.)
 

AKMA :: May.07.2011 :: Music :: No Comments »

I’m not surprised to hear about a study at the University of Washington that gives the Kindle (the large-size DX model) middling marks as an educational tool. We have a smaller Kindle and like it a lot for casual reading. The screen is extremely readable, the battery lasts for ages without recharging, and as long as you don’t need to hop back and forth in the text (for instance, to look at footnotes) and the text is formatted correctly, it’s a joy to work with. We who have just made a transcontinental move and given away about two-thirds of our (heavy) books appreciate the lightness and convenience of Kindle; it’ll never replace books, and there are still books we want to own as physical entities, but for many purposes the Kindle makes more sense than buying another pound of bound paper.
 
That seems to correspond roughly to the students’ response at Washington. For immersive reading, the Kindle comes out fine. For any form of multimodal reading — note-taking, reference-checking, research-seeking — it can be a pain to annotate or highlight text. I fully expect that the next few years will bring rapid improvements on that front, but for the time being I recommend the Kindle for fiction only, and probably not for what we might call “reference fiction” (which one might want to read with some to-ing and fro-ing).
 

AKMA :: May.03.2011 :: Uncategorized :: 7 Comments »

Other people will have said more than enough about the US’s execution of Osama bin Laden. Amid all the exultation and deprecation, there are a number of points we ought to bear in mind.
 
First, bin Laden’s attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have successfully pushed once-open Western democracies into a state of security panic. The aftermath of the horrible devastation in Manhattan endures with every body scan, CCTV surveillance camera, unauthorised interception of telephonic or digital communication, and every political intervention aimed at heightening public anxiety for partisan advantage. “Be very afraid, so vote for the toughest-talking rich (mostly), white (mostly) (that’s “white, mostly” not “mostly white”), male (mostly) candidate”. Bin Laden’s terrorist attacks inaugurated a chain of events that has led to the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives — Iraqi, Afghan, American, British, and dozens from other nations. The thousands murdered at the World Trade Center, the hundreds murdered in the Madrid train bombings, the dozens murdered on 7/7 in London, and the incalculable casualties of the subsequent wars. Terrorists did not force Western governments to retaliate with military force, but tough-guy posturing perpetuated and amplified the after-effects of the criminal terrorist acts. The scale of bin Laden’s enduring effects will be impossible soundly to estimate for decades.
 
Second, however brutally cold-blooded bin Laden’s tactics were, the principle of due process has been integral to Western claims to political integrity for more than two hundred years. Summary execution of an accused — even a publicly-acknowledged — criminal does nothing to support the claims that liberal democracy offers a fundamentally different, fundamentally superior way of national government. Jubilant mobs and jingoistic chants don’t burnish the public stature of any nations, either.
 
Third, there have always been terrorists and criminals; bin Laden and al-Qaeda are not sui generis phenomena, but examples of a recurrent response to particular sorts of economic and political conditions. Assassinating bin Laden doesn’t change those conditions; it attacks the symptoms, not the sickness.
 
Fourth, even the most firmly convinced just-war Christian has no business expressing anything other than penitent relief at this turn of events. The litany of biblical texts and theological principles that speak against revenge, warfare, and unilateralism should not need repeating, but the atmosphere of exceptionalism and self-justification that suffuses the aftermath of the NYC terror attacks probably requires that belligerent avengers revisit some pertinent texts.
 
“You have heard that it was said, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth’. But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also… I say to you, love your enemies” — Matthew 5:38-39, 44
 
“Do not rejoice when your enemies fall, and do not let your heart be glad when they stumble” — Proverbs 24:17
 
“As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from their ways and live” — Ezekiel 33:11
 
“For if you forgive others their trespasses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you; but if you do not forgive others, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses” — Matthew 6:14-15
 
“Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord’.” — Romans 12:19, alluding to Deuteronomy 32:35, 41 — “Vengeance is mine, and recompense, for the time when their foot shall slip”, “I will take vengeance on my adversaries, and will repay those who hate me.”
 
I have no sympathy for terrorists and mass murderers. But their horrible crimes do not override obligations to observe international law, and still less do they release Christians from their commitments to follow in a way of patience, forgiveness, peaceableness, and non-violence — on 9/11, 7/7, or today.
 

AKMA :: May.02.2011 :: Uncategorized :: 5 Comments »

I missed it when Roland Boers made the announcement, but he has taken Bible and Critical Theory (on whose editorial board my estimable colleagues Ward Blanton and Yvonne Sherwood serve) to an Open Access distribution model.
 
That’s great news on a number of fronts. Of course, it makes B&CT easier to read and cite (and with biblical studies at Glasgow a very active centre of critical theory, our students have a new avenue for their research). It bumps the number of OA academic journals up by one, and it increases the pressure toward an online digital basis for publication. Well done, Roland!
 

AKMA :: May.02.2011 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Joi Ito — one of my old-time Web pals — has been named Executive Director of the MIT Media Lab. Here’s his own blog about it, here’s the NY Times story, and here’s MIT’s press release.
 
It’s always exciting when the Good Guys win one, and Joi is a Good Guy par excellence. Moreover, since Good Guys often get chewed up and spat out by positions in academic administration, he’s both savvy and well-connected, uniquely able to build the sorts of alliance that will benefit the Media Lab in the long and short runs. And Joi has demonstrated the capacity to recognise opportunities and risks better than most people.
 
I’m thrilled as can be that Joi will be occupying this nexus of innovation, exchange, intellectual effervescence, and social transformation. Ding!
 

AKMA :: Apr.26.2011 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

It’s “They Might Be Giants Appreciation Day” — if you’re not inclined to buy their new album, appreciate one of their earlier releases.
 

AKMA :: Apr.26.2011 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

“This profane man hates Holy Scripture so much that he claims much in it is not written correctly!” (Bracciolini, Opera 1:199, cited in Henning Graf Reventlow, History of BIblical Interpretation Volume 3, p. 16)
 
Valla responds, “What, then, is… Holy Scripture. Is not everything an interpretation of the Old and New Testaments? It is even multifaceted and diverse and highly contradictory one to another.” (Antidotum, no further source, cited in Reventlow, p. 16)
 

AKMA :: Apr.23.2011 :: Commonplaces :: No Comments »

Someone asked me today whether I’m that fellow who blogs, and I admitted that I am. But that means I have to blog now and then, so here’s me blogging. It’s not much, but it’s the thought that counts.
 
I heard some very exciting news yesterday, which news (embargoed, don’t bother asking) dovetails with my increasingly urgent interest in seeking a mega-grant to back a disruptive-digital-publishing venture (along lines complementary to Wharton Digital Publishing or various of the great Hugh McGuire’s ideas). If you’re a mega-philanthropist who’s interested in helping spark the kickover of the digital publishing revolution, please let me know! Especially with mega-aid, I could put together an all-star team of kindred minds, whose vision and energy — duly supported — would predictably make a signifcant dent in the world of publishing.
 

AKMA :: Apr.21.2011 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »

Our son Nate — who first appeared in these digital pages as he prepared to begin his undergraduate studies at Eastman School of Music — will this afternoon defend his doctoral dissertation (US)/thesis (UK) at the University of Michigan. The work in question bears the title “Open Coding OK Computer: Categorization and Characterization of Disruptive Harmonic and Rhythmic Events in Rock Music”, and it concerns the composition of Radiohead’s musical oeuvre. He defends at 12:30 EDT/5:30 BST, and although we’re unwaveringly confident of him, we reserve the right to be a little heart-in-throat-y about the outcome (if only because we’re so proud of him and can’t stand the idea that anyone on his committee might give him a hard time). If you’re in the Ann Arbor area and feel like dropping in, the defense will be held in the West Conference Room, Rackham School of Graduate Studies.
 
But honestly, it should be a doddle. What a year!
 

AKMA :: Apr.19.2011 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

I just finished a long response to colleagues on a subcommittee of a task force of a working group of a project of a Cabinet, which in the normal course of events would go unseen except by a dozen other people. Rather than consign the response to oblivion, I thought I’d drop it here (edited in places, to make it more general); I’ll put the bulk of the letter in a “Continue Reading” link, leaving just the first paragraph above the figurative fold.
 

In response to the materials you sent: I note particular emphasis on two points: One, the perception that we can arrive at definitive interpretations of the Bible, such that we have them sorted; and two, the perception that a hermeneutical gap separates the academy and the pew.

 
Continue Reading »

AKMA :: Apr.09.2011 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Back a long time ago, when the Web was a much smaller place, I had the opportunity to ask Stewart Butterfield (one of the founders of Flickr) whether my photos would be safe with Flickr in the aftermath of the Yahoo takeover. He assured me that as long as he had anything to say about it, Flickr would put its users first and would (for instance) keep linked-to photos visible even if, for instance, the account owner died, or left Flickr.
 
That was, of course, a long time ago, before Stewart left Yahoo/Flickr. And businesses change direction; they can’t be trammelled by previous executives’ pledges. At the same time, as Mike Arrington notes, Flickr’s current policy of closing access to the accounts of former paying customers is not just a matter of Yahoo’s balance sheet. The perception that Flickr was a web-friendly service underlies a large part of its standing as a good neighbour on the Web. By withholding photos from the Web, Flickr injures both the Web of which it’s supposed to be a pillar and its own reputation.
 
And the warning that it’s time to make sure that you have back-up copies of everything you’ve ever uploaded to Flickr may be increasingly urgent.
 

AKMA :: Apr.08.2011 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »