Contraria Sunt Complementa

First Sermon on Evangelism

2012-01-24T07:37:00.004-06:00

This is the first evangelism sermon I've ever preached. I'm grateful to David Gortner here at VTS and to so many of my classmates for their help shaping my heart for this ministry.

PDF | Audio | Text:

Our hearts have to go out to Jonah. He’s a tough prophet to admire, but an easy one to love. Who in the Bible can we better relate to than someone one who, a couple chapters earlier, receives “the word of the LORD” …and promptly runs away.¹ You may remember that he hops on a boat headed for Tarshish, which means he’s fleeing west when God had sent him east.² I can think of a few times I’ve tried a similar move. Here too is a prophet who knows what it’s like to have a bad day. Shortly after boarding that westbound ship, he gets thrown from it by a cowardly but discerning crew who want nothing to do with someone trying to flee from the presence of God Almighty. And as you know, that’s where the story truly takes a turn for the bizarre: Jonah is swallowed by a giant fish. But he doesn’t rail against God or pout about this most recent indignity. No, instead, he undergoes what has to be the most distinctive conversion story in the entire Bible: he sings a psalm of thanksgiving “from the belly of the fish,”³ praising God’s name for delivering him from the depths of the sea. And after the fish vomits him out on dry land, the story picks up as we heard it a few moments ago: “The word of the LORD came to Jonah a second time, saying, ‘Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.’’’⁴

What he finds at his destination is “an exceedingly large city, a three days’ walk across,”⁵ and we are told he walks a whole days’ worth into it. Keep in mind that he spent his whole trip preaching—not in quiet confines like these but out in the streets. As he walks, he cries out “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown! Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown! ”⁶ And then the most remarkable thing of all happens, remarkable at least if we consider the success rate of the biblical prophets. Unlike with so many of his colleagues the people actually listen to Jonah! The citizens of Nineveh declare a fast, put on the garments of mourning, “turn from their evil ways,” and are delivered as God decides not to bring disaster upon them.⁷

Three chapters, three nights in a fish, and a city three days’ walk across is saved from destruction. I wondered this week about how Jonah could have strength for his assigned task because now we are called to go about ours. The gospel lesson we heard calls it leaving our nets.⁸ Indeed, as we prayed in this morning’s collect, this week’s readings are about “answer[ing] readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim[ing] to all people the good news of his salvation.”⁹ Because the Greek for good news is euaggelion (yu-an-ge’-le-on), we call this proclamation, in English, evangelism.

Now, Jonah wasn’t proclaiming the euaggelion of Jesus Christ; he wasn’t an evangelist as we use that word. But as I said at the start, he is a highly relateable prophet, at least for me, and our work as evangelists shares much in common with his prophetic office and his example of service to God.

For starters, the story of Jonah reminds us that we do not need to be perfect to speak the word that God has put in our hearts. Like me, and perhaps like some of you some of the time, Jonah is whiney, self-satisfied, inconsistent, overly dramatic, and seldom sufficiently grateful for what he has been given. Yes, he bravely and tirelessly preaches repentance to a vast and ultimately responsive metropolis. But then he resents their good fortune at being spared and tells God, a few verses after our passage, it would be “better for me to die than to live.”¹⁰ So too, then, should we be comfortable being imperfect bearers of the good news. We don’t need to be super-Christians to be good evangelists. Jonah manages to do his God-given work despite a host of flaws and frailties. Talking about our faith, giving an account of our hope in Christ—this task is about honestly naming what we think God is doing in our lives, not about convincing others that we have everything figured out.

If anything, it’s the telling of our faith story that helps us figure things out. I believe this is part of what Episcopal evangelism expert David Gortner is getting at in his book Transforming Evangelism. Early on, he writes,

Evangelism is a spiritual practice: active—and receptive. Just as in prayer, study, and acts of compassion, in evangelism you experience a sense of your movement not being entirely your own. Receptive to the Holy Spirit’s activity within you—and trusting that the Spirit is active in others all around you—you move into action as the Spirit’s partner.¹¹

So just like in prayer, study, or service, in witnessing to Jesus Christ we are gradually transformed by our consistent practice. We become better evangelists each time we seize an opportunity to say, “Hey, that reminds me of something I realized when talking to my spiritual director,” or “Actually, I’m here serving at the shelter because I believe we meet Christ when we serve people in need.” There are any number of ways we show others, and remind ourselves, about the meaning God gives to our lives, about how the Spirit has been moving. So we don’t need to be “advanced in the faith,” to be evangelists. On the contrary, evangelism is one of the practices that helps our faith to grow.

I think there’s a second lesson we should take from the story of Jonah. I believe this short book tells us something really vital about where all our best service to God will come from. Recall that Jonah is most obedient and effective in that moment following his unlikely psalm of thanksgiving. When he accepts the work God has put before him, his decision comes from a place of joy and gratitude. Of course, we will sometimes treat prayer, or study, or evangelism like a duty or divine command—and we will sometimes run away from that command. But these practices are transformed when we find ways to delight in them. Dr. Gortner continues,

Energized by your active and practiced gratitude for all that you have received as gift from God, you enter your public life daily with a readiness to share your gratitude and wonder with others—and to hear their own experiences of God’s abundant goodness. This kind of evangelism, the giving of your delight, returns to you abundantly as you are nurtured and strengthened by listening for and sharing good news.¹²

I don’t know about you, but I first heard these words as a breath of fresh air: Evangelism can be “the giving of [our] delight.” When we view it in this way, the word evangelism loses all the connotations that many in our tradition tend to recoil against. In this light, heavy-handed attempts to scare or coerce others into Christ seem not so much misguided as sad. What a missed opportunity to celebrate the good news, to grow in one’s faith by daily giving away the love that is “drained in making [others] full” and “bound in setting others free.”¹³

Now, this has all been a little abstract. What does it look like to, as Gortner writes, “enter [our] public life daily with a readiness to share [our] gratitude and wonder”? If you’re looking to hear some ideas, I suggest you talk to parishioners involved in some of the more formal evangelism efforts at St. Paul’s. They’ve had some practice. Better yet, seek out a chance to hear people who live with great need talk about what God is doing in their lives.

As for my own practice of evangelism, joy and thanksgiving well up most strongly in me when I hear God’s call for compassion and promise of steadfast love. I hear it most clearly in these words by Anglican thinker F. D. Maurice:

The acknowledgment of a God who beareth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things,—who has been long suffering with all His creatures and long-suffering with us,—[that acknowledgment] will make us tremble to deal harshly with the struggles and doubts [and especially] convictions …of our fellow human-beings.¹⁴

We should “tremble” to “deal harshly” with others’ doubts and convictions? That sounds like good news to me. So my witness to our compassionate and long-suffering God often comes in the form of a call to civility or the defense of another’s convictions. When opponents in a conflict are demonizing each other, I try to speak up and say that the Christian faith has taught me that no one is beyond the pale and that we are all called to respect the dignity of every human being. In our polarized society, there are a lot of opportunities to share this part of my gospel hope with the people I meet. That’s a lot of opportunities for evangelism, especially during election season, when it’s so easy for us to hold other people’s convictions in contempt.

So what about you? What aspect of the gospel lights a fire in you? How has the Word of God come to you and made your life richer and more joyous? How has the good news of salvation in Christ set you free from the guilt of imperfection and sent you out to share what’s in your broken but healing heart? The more we ask and answer these questions, the easier it will be for us to witness to the grace of God wherever we are—at home, at work or school, at a political debate, in the city of Nineveh, or in the belly of a providential fish sent to deposit us wherever God is calling us to minister.

Give us grace, O Lord, to answer readily the call of our Savior Jesus Christ and proclaim to all people the Good News of his salvation. Amen.

1Jonah 1:1–3.

2See note at 1:3. Mary Joan Winn Leith, “Jonah” in The New Oxford Annotated Bible, ed. Michael D. Coogan (New York: Oxford, 2007): HB 1322

32:1.

43:1–2.

53:3.

6See 3:4.

73:10.

8Mark 1:18.

9BCP, 163 (The Collect of the Day).

104:3.

11David Gortner, Transforming Evangelism (New York: Church Publishing, 2008): 2.

12Gortner, 2.

13W. H. Vanstone, “Morning glory, starlit sky” in The Hymnal 1982 (New York: Church Publishing, 1985): Hymn 525.

14F. D. Maurice, Reconstructing Christian Ethics: Selected Writings, ed. Ellen K. Wondra (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998), 210â“211, emphasis added.

A marathon, not a sprint: General Ordination Exams

2012-01-02T09:54:00.005-06:00

Tomorrow through Saturday I will be taking General Ordination Exams administered by examining chaplains appointed by the Episcopal Church. My buddy Mike wrote a nice summary last year, comparing the test to OWLs. The comparison that springs to mind for me, though, was the Ph.D. qualifying exams I took in my first year of grad school. The scope is similarly comprehensive, though the stakes are not as high. In this case, failure in a subject area generally means a meeting with a local examining chaplain and maybe a supplementary paper. Not, you know, getting one more chance to pass it or being asked to leave with a master's degree.

In any event, I swore after that exam (for which I studied full-time for two months and managed to squeeze by on the first go, thank God) that I would never again get that worked up about a test. Some nerves that set in yesterday notwithstanding, I've managed to stick by that pledge. The only systematic review I've done is re-reading three quarters' worth of church history lectures--more than 400 pages in all. It was a bigger project than I'd first thought but also fun and probably worth it. Today I've set up my examination files and will do some light review of my notes. And then I will watch the Rose Bowl (go Badgers!).

I appreciate your prayers and good wishes for me and my classmates during what I expect will be a long, but perhaps also kinda fun, week. Catch you on the flip side.

Support me, O Lord, in my examinations; and, that I may make the most of the knowledge I possess, grant me confidence, steadiness, honesty, and a quiet mind. Amen.

(Prayer courtesy of fellow test-taker Jo Belser.)

Sermon on Waiting, Proper 28

2011-11-13T18:14:00.004-06:00

Here's today's sermon in PDF form (inspired by my recently encounter with some old Hacker Within pals, I'm back to using LaTeX for sermons--Milad Fatenejad's "radhydro" package, no less), in audio form, and pasted below (via latex2rtf).

****************

Waiting is a perilous business. Perhaps you don’t need to be convinced of this. Perhaps you can remember, or indeed are in the midst of, just such a time of waiting—for a new job, for the healing of a loved one, for the guidance of the Holy Spirit, for the strength to forgive. And as you are no doubt aware, times of waiting are ripe for many of the most painful experiences we humans must endure, including anxiety, self-doubt, and even paranoia and despair. My own reflections on waiting have been shaped by meeting regularly with incarcerated men at the Alexandria City Jail. I remember one who spoke candidly about how the dread of waiting to be caught by the authorities was as difficult as waiting to be released by them. Another gentleman spoke about the strange interior world he entered during months of twenty-two-hour-per-day solitary confinement.

Waiting is a perilous business. If you still don’t believe me, just ask the least “talented” slave in today’s parable from the Gospel According to Matthew. “Afraid”¹ of a master who reaps where he does not sow and gathers where he does not scatter seed,² the slave buries the money he’s been “entrusted” with³ and waits out the “long time” it takes for his master to return to “settle accounts.”⁴ Imagine what it would be like for him, watching his colleagues go about their bold business maneuvers and wondering if his choice to play it safe would prove to be wisdom or folly. We can’t help but feel for the guy, especially when we learn that his one measly talent actually amounts to many years’ worth of wages for a day laborer.⁵ That’s some kind of pressure, and it’s this kind of high stakes that bring out the worst in so many of us waiting to see how things will turn out.

We realize the stakes are high indeed when we recognize the purpose to which Matthew puts this parable.⁶ It’s not hard to see if we look at where he places the story. Matthew 24 and 25 are an extended reflection on “The Coming Judgment,”⁷ which culminates, immediately after our parable, in the separation of the sheep from the goats, of those who cared for people in need from those who ignored them.⁸ And so Matthew uses this parable to comment on the nature of the Christian life: waiting⁹—waiting for the coming of Christ, waiting for the full realization of his kingdom, and waiting for the perfect justice that his kingdom will establish.

So what do today’s readings have to teach us about the nature of our Christian waiting? What lessons might we sit with as we pass the time before our final deliverance unto and into Christ or while we wait for relief from our own personal crises and unfulfilled longings?

The most obvious lesson, I think, is to cast off fear! The one-talent slave is quite self-aware that it was fear that stifled his creativity and stayed his hand. It paralyzed him, and it led him to misjudge his master’s wishes. It can do the same to us, if we let it. However natural and tempting it may be to act out of fear while we wait, we can hardly expect our best efforts to come from such a place of anxiety. And, on the contrary, when we learn to hold our fears in their proper perspective and ultimately give them up to God, remarkable things can happen.

Think about the demographic of middle-class, American young adults who are coming to be known as the “Boomerang Generation.” They’re so named because the challenges of a stagnant job market are forcing them to move back in to their childhood homes after college or unsuccessful employment. At first, the prospect of moving home seems the ultimate humiliation and defeat, and many would sooner suffer malnutrition or rack up debilitating credit card debt in an attempt to avoid it. The experience of fear in the midst of disappointing fortunes can be very strong, and anxious questions begin to set in: “Was all that studying even worth it? ” “Will I ever be able to support a family? ” and, maybe most importantly, “Will I be stuck in my parents’ basement for the rest of my life? ” But many who conquer their fears and make the move home discover something they didn’t expect. The momentary respite from endless worry about cover letters and grocery bills, and the chance to be re-immersed in unconditional love, creates a space for them to think creatively and optimistically for the first time in months or even years. They get back in touch with the hope that will motivate them to re-launch their journey and the personal strengths that will help bring those hopes to fruition. Waiting is a perilous business, but it’s harder than it needs to be when we face it from alone in the solitary confinement of our own anxious minds.

It’s better to become, as Paul says to us today, “children of light”¹⁰ and to remember that our Savior and our loved ones are our greatest weapons against the fear of waiting for whatever end. He writes, “For God has destined us not for wrath but for obtaining salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ …Therefore encourage one another and build up each other, as indeed you are doing.”¹¹ That’s good advice from an apostle who we sometimes forget was a spiritual master.

OK, so we need to cast off fear: easier said than done, but manageable with God’s help. Another way these passages might speak to our reflections can be summarized in three words. Those three words comprise instructions that I would probably need to hear from my own parents in the days following a boomerang journey home: “Kyle,” they’d say, “Do something useful.” This advice echoes the words of the master in the parable, who says, “You could have at least invested the money with the bankers! All you did was bury it and then twiddle your thumbs! ”¹² However excruciating our times of waiting can seem, they are still limited, and this prods us on to action. So Christian waiting is about using the talents we’ve been given in the time we’ve been given. The inclusion of Psalm 90 in our service today is a reminder that that time is short. How can we afford to wait idly when we will soon return “back to the dust,”¹³ when we will “fade away suddenly like the grass” that withers,¹⁴ when God will “sweep us away like a dream”? Listen to that last one again: “You sweep us away like a dream.” What a lovely and terrifying expression. After hearing that, I think we’re quite right to pray with the psalmist that God might “teach us to number our days * that we may apply our hearts to wisdom”¹⁵—and indeed to other tasks as well.

Here, too, there are lessons from the Boomerang Generation and from many others suffering from joblessness. I’ve been humbled and inspired by many unemployed friends, both of my age and much older, who have combated the boredom and hopelessness of their waiting by staying active, especially by stepping up their charitable volunteer work. In this way, they witness to the fact that our part in God’s mission in the world is not just to put food on our own plates or even just our families’ but those of every man, woman, and child on God’s green Earth. So however we read today’s texts on waiting, we should remember that they are not just therapeutic but also missional. They offer us comfort and advice but also demand from us the response of action. Waiting is a perilous business, especially if we think that waiting is the only task put before us.

But even action is not the most important aspect of our waiting. No, our highest calling is to wait expectantly and open-endedly, two things that are sometimes hard to do at the same time. Here the lectionary does us a great disservice in omitting the final two verses of today’s psalm, which speak to this very point. The psalmist writes, “Show your servants your works * and your splendor to their children. / May the graciousness of the LORD our God be upon us; * prosper the work of our hands; prosper our handiwork.”¹⁶ So first we recognize God’s works, and then the “work of our [own] hands” can be blessed. First we take account of the promises of God and the hope we have in Christ Jesus. Only then should we survey the landscape before us, because only then can we see it with the eyes we need.¹⁷

In other words, part of why waiting is so hard is that we get too rigid an idea of what we are waiting for. Our gazes are so fixed on a certain picture of how things should turn out that we miss the way unfolding before us if it doesn’t conform to our parameters. This is certainly true in our own personal circumstances. But I believe it is also true for groups of people who wait, like cultures waiting for boom times to return. It’s perhaps especially true for the Church’s collective waiting for the full fruition of God’s kingdom on Earth. God stubbornly refuses to give us what we expect. Stubbornly, and mercifully. Because I would guess that most of us can point to that time in our lives where things turned out better than we could have hoped precisely because they turned out differently from what we knew to expect. I know what that moment was for me, but no example I can give you will have the power of your own memory of God’s surprisingly generous and creative shaping of your life. I invite you this week to identify and reflect on such a memory and to hold it gently as an almost sacramental token of God’s faithfulness. You’ll need it the next time the waiting gets tough, as it surely will. Waiting is a perilous business, but it’s the business we’re in.

References

Keck, L. E. (Ed.) (1995, June). The New Interpreter’s Bible: Matthew - Mark. Abingdon Press.

Keck, L. E. (Ed.) (1996, January). The New Interpreter’s Bible: Luke - John. Abingdon Press.

Moltmann, J. (2010, May). Theology of Hope. SCM Press.

1Matthew 25:25

225:24

325:14

425:19

5Keck (1995), 451

6Luke’s telling of this parable, which portrays the master in an even harsher light, makes our sympathy for the slave explicit; his version includes bystanders who shout “Sir, he already has ten! ” when the master gives away the fearful slave’s dutifully protected sum in Luke 19:25 (NIV). But Luke is using this parable to contrast the free and easy ways of a rich and unjust ruler with the constricting plight of the poor and needy. Keck (1996), 334-335

7Keck (1995), 438

8Matthew 25:40, 45

9Keck (1995), 453

101 Thessalonians 5:5

111 Thessalonians 5:1–11

12It might also remind us of the warning we heard from Zephaniah about the dangers of “rest[ing] complacently on [our] dregs” (Zephaniah 1:12).

13Psalm 90:3

1490:5–6

1590:12

16Psalm 90:16-17

17See also Juergen Moltmann’s opening meditation in Theology of Hope: Moltmann (2010).

Presentation: “Faith Seeking Understanding”

2011-11-09T09:51:00.000-06:00

[Cross-posted at Into All The WWWorld]

An invitation to those in the Washington DC area: Kyle will be giving a short presentation on faith and reason at St. Mary's Court on 24th St. NW tomorrow (Thursday, Nov. 10) at 7 p.m. Please contact him if you are interested in attending. See below for more information!

Faith Seeking Understanding: Three Christian thinkers reconcile reason and religion

Much has been made in recent years about the so-called conflict between science and religion. But the issues involved in this conversation are neither new nor hopeless, and countless religious thinkers throughout the centuries have held a lively faith engaged with the best in contemporary knowledge and scholarship. Find out about three of them in this presentation with discussion.

Kyle Matthew Oliver is a senior at Virginia Theological Seminary and holds a B.S. and an M.S. from the department of engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is currently writing on providence and science in thesis work with VTS's dean, the Very Rev. Ian Markham, and he is the creator of Into A Wider World, a free online course introducing the science-and-religion conversation.

Motorz Skills

2011-10-06T09:22:00.002-05:00

The line in my bio about doing some freelance writing and editing "when circumstances allow" is not completely outdated. I wrote, during some time off in August, this article about Chris Duke and his Motorz.TV operation, and it's in the print version of EventDV going out to subscribers now. I had a blast working on this story. Duke is a fascinating and really talented guy. I could generally care less about cars, but even I like his show.

Last week's sermon

2011-10-02T18:47:00.005-05:00

I keep forgetting to post last week's sermon. The main text is Ezekiel 18. You can also listen to the audio here. All in all, the experience of preaching for the first time at St. Paul's, K Street, was a good one.

Like so many readings from scripture, our lesson from the Book of Ezekiel this morning can be summed up like this: the people are grumbling, and God has had just about enough of it. Now, to be fair, Ezekiel's contemporaries did have plenty to complain about. They lived in a time of “never-ending crisis,”^¹ resulting in year after year of “generalized anxiety”^² about the events taking place in the world around them and about what this news meant for their personal and national security. Perhaps this is a familiar feeling to us as we struggle to make sense of an increasingly volatile world. In any event, the people's exhausted complaint, as described by Ezekiel and also his fellow prophet Jeremiah (13:29), was that their ancestors had gotten them into this mess. “The parents have eaten sour grapes,” went the proverb, “and the children's teeth are set on edge” (2). “It's not fair that we've been taken into exile in Babylon,” they seem to say. “And it's unconscionable that God would abandon the temple city of Jerusalem. This can't be because of something we did. We must be getting stuck with someone else's punishment.”

And so the the word of the LORD that comes to Ezekiel contains a series of responses to the people's pessimism, responses that have some bearing, I think, on our own occasional feelings of self-righteous despair during trying times. What we first hear from Ezekiel is a reality check about the relationship between God's power and divine justice: “Know that all lives are mine,” says the LORD. “The life of the parent as well as the life of the child is mine: it is only the person who sins that shall die” (4). In other words, we hear God say through Ezekiel, “Let's be perfectly clear. I am Lord and Sovereign over all creation and each generation of my children. If my beef was only with your parents, or only with one particular person or group, then I'd have taken it up only with them. Don't be so quick to assume that you yourselves are without blemish.”^³

But notice that, in this particular discourse, the prophet leaves aside the question of how exactly the people's current problems are a part of God's judgment. In the verses that the lectionary omits from this reading, Ezekiel speaks in only general terms about righteous living and personal responsibility. He says that a person who is “righteous and does what is lawful and right … shall surely live” (5, 9) and that an unrighteous person “shall not” (13). He gives some examples of righteous and unrighteous behavior, but he doesn't directly connect them here to what the people of Israel have done. For Ezekiel, all the people need to do going forward is take note of God's ways. The rest is fruitless speculation and fingerpointing. “Don't dwell on how we came to be in this situation,” he says. “Rather, turn from your ways in the present and live.” It's not the last time he will say it.

In the next part of this prophetic discourse, God makes a second point through Ezekiel. “[Y]ou say, 'The way of the Lord is unfair.' Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair?” In this second section, it's as if God is saying, “But as long as you brought up the subject of fairness and justice, let me say that you have fallen terribly short, O my people.”

As I said, Ezekiel does not get specific in this passage about how Israel has failed, though we can of course piece together the story based on his principles of justice and the transgressions he names in other chapters. But one of Ezekiel's general admonitions seems particularly poignant in our situation today. In verses 12 and 16, he recites that God's people are not to “oppress[] the poor and needy” but instead are to “give[] [their] food to the hungry and provide[] clothing for the naked” (12, 16 [NIV]). Over the past several months, we've watched with a sense of déjà vu the horrifying consequences of drought and famine in Somalia and throughout the Horn of Africa. On the ground in Somalia, unchallenged militants are engaged in just the kind of oppression Ezekiel names, blocking desperately needed aid from international agencies within the territory they control. Domestic medical officials say the lack of assistance has made things worse than in 1992, when 240,000 people died, with another 110,000 saved by the American-led intervention.^⁴ Meanwhile, on the ground in America today, a weary and cash-strapped nation is reluctant to intervene again. After almost ten years of war, it's not hard to understand why. But this time the death toll could be even worse, the UN warns perhaps as many as 750,000 Somalis. “Hear now, O house of Israel: Is my way unfair? Is it not your ways that are unfair?” How can the global community live into and up to the commandments Ezekiel confronts us with, not just the imperative to feed the hungry but all the demands of God justice? How can we face such immense problems? Such intractable problems. Such heartbreaking problems. God only knows.

Actually, I think “God only knows” is precisely the mantra we might take away from Ezekiel's advice for living a resurrection life. Let's review: Ezekiel first assured the people of God's sovereignty and justice. He then called them out on the basis of their own individual unrighteousness. Finally, in today's last verses, he extends to them God's word of hope: “Cast away from you all the transgressions that you have committed against me, and get yourselves a new heart and a new spirit! Why will you die, O house of Israel? For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord GOD. Turn, then, and live” (31-32). The hopelessness that set in for the Israelites in captivity in Babylon and that threatens each one of us in difficult times, this hopelessness ought to be a sign for us. Sometimes God's commandments are too difficult, and the world's problems so painful that we change the channel whenever they are talked about—if they are talked about at all. It is in those moments that we most need the word that Ezekiel uses 53 times in 48 chapters: (in Hebrew) שׁוּב, turn. From the depths of despair comes a voice that calls us to turn ourselves in the direction of God. To align our wills to the Lord's own. To wade deep in the waters of God's justice and get caught up in the current. To “look not to [our] own interests, but to the interests of others” (Philippians 2:4).

Now, it has been widely observed throughout the course of Christian history that turning is no simple thing to do. Sometimes it seems impossible, this taking on of God's will and mission as our own, this getting ourselves “a new heart and a new spirit.” Yet I think if it's true what God says elsewhere, that this life is “not too hard for [us], nor is it too far away” (Deuteronomy 30:11), then it must be that this ability comes to us as St. Paul described in today's Epistle: “work out your own salvation with fear and trembling,” he says. “[F]or it is God who is at work in you, enabling you both to will and to work for his good pleasure” (Philippians 2:12b-13). I believe Anglican mystic Evelyn Underhill summarized this idea more succinctly still in a line puzzlingly inserted into one of her journals. It's a line that carries with it the benefit of two thousand years of Christian argument over exactly what Paul meant, and it never ceases to help me when some ancient or modern-day prophet is calling me to something I feel powerless to undertake. Here's the expression: “Not grace alone, nor us alone, but [God's] grace in us.”

We encounter despair in this life when there seems to be no good options available to us, when we seem, like the exiles in Babylon, to have “nowhere to turn to.” But Ezekiel reminds us today that little if any good comes from desperate searches for how we got ourselves into a particular mess or especially how our ways can get us out of it. More importantly, he reminds us, as St. Paul does, that we always have someone to turn to, someone who is already mysteriously at work inside us and will lead us where we could never have imagined, someone whose ways are not our ways. Thanks be to God.

1Von Rad, Gerhard, The Message of the Prophets (San Francisco: Harper, 1968): 229.

2The Rev. Dr. Roger Ferlo used this term to describe our post-September 11 world in a sermon at Virginia Theological Seminary on Holy Cross Day, 2011 (Sept. 14).

3To be fair, Ezekiel's view here makes him a somewhat unusual biblical prophet, especially when compared with earlier prophets. See Von Rad, 229-232.

4See “Somalis Waste Away as Insurgents Block Escape From Famine,” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/02/world/africa/02somalia.html

An "experiment on ourselves": The German energy picture

2011-08-30T09:06:00.006-05:00

So Germany has decided to make permanent its decision, post-Fukushima, to shut down its eight oldest nuclear reactors. Today's New York Times has a story analyzing Germany's energy situation, and the sense one comes away with is partially captured by a quotation from Jürgen Grossmann, who runs the utility that owns two of the deactivated plants: "Germany, in a very rash decision, decided to experiment on ourselves,” he said. “The politics are overruling the technical arguments.”

Actually, I think that's a bit overstated, which is no surprise given the weight of the decision on Grossmann's company. Certainly, the decision seems to have something of an emotional ring to it. But I think it's tough to argue anything other than that the Fukushima accident merely accelerated (albeit for partly non-technical reasons) the timeline of a project Germany had already more-or-less decided to pursue. My guess is that this "experiment" was going to happen either way.

What is that experiment? In short, it's to set aside nuclear energy and continue aggressive expansion in renewables to make up most of the difference. (But do note that the energy gap they're creating is dynamic and requires diversified assets to fill it: "To be prudent, the plan calls for the creation of 23 gigawatts of gas- and coal-powered plants by 2020. Why? Because renewable plants don’t produce nearly to capacity if the air is calm or the sky is cloudy, and there is currently limited capacity to store or transport electricity, energy experts say.")

Now I'm obviously partisan about whether eliminating nuclear is a necessary or even advisable part of plans to make our energy use and production more environmentally responsible. I (still) happen to think that, by and large, we're going to need more nuclear plants, not fewer, if we're going to keep this planet habitable and continue to improve our ability to feed, clothe, and shelter a growing population. The trick, it seems to me, will be keeping affluent people content enough with their shrinking (but still ample) lot that they won't react by simply blocking efforts at reform. That tenuous situation is part of why I believe in nuclear power: it's cheap (like gas and especially coal), but it still allows us to actually deal with the waste stream rather than pumping it into the atmosphere (unlike with gas and coal). The cheapness keeps us energy-addicted types plugged in, while our secure possession of the waste prevents carbon emissions and gives the planet (and the people living in the most vulnerable places) a fighting chance in the globally warmed years to come.

So what caught my eye in this article is Germany's willingness to go "all in" on what is, by almost all accounts, a technically ambitious plan, in order to bring desired change about. It's a plan that is rife with uncertainty. There seems in Germany then a mandate for making a certain amount of sacrifice, or at least potentially doing so, in order to make ends meet while using (even) cleaner energy. I very much doubt there will be any tenable long-term solutions that don't require still more significant sacrifice (or what will at least feel like sacrifice for a while).

Thus, whatever I think of this plan as an erstwhile systems analyst and as a nuclear power proponent, I'm encouraged as a wannabe Christian ethicist by another super-rich country's willingness to take on a little collective uncertainty for the sake of bringing about a desired change. I think much of our fate as a planet will ride on the willingness of the first to be last (Matthew 20:16) in just this way. I hope my own country will find ways of taking analogous moral leadership in the face of the crisis ahead.

Publication in The Living Church

2011-08-23T13:07:00.003-05:00

I recently won second place in a student essay contest sponsored by The Living Church. I've heard from some friends who get the print mag that it is now available, so I feel comfortable posting the excerpt from the digital copy I got from the publisher. The essay is called "The Wisdom of (Small) Groups: OT Visions for Decentralized Life and Ministry," and I originally wrote it for Dick Busch's VTS course on small group ministry. Many thanks in particular to Dr. Cook for pointing me in some useful directions.

Click here to read. Enjoy!

2011-08-23T12:52:00.002-05:00

[Cross-posted at IntoAllTheWWWorld.org]

As I mentioned briefly when I live blogged the Francis Collins presentation at the Christian Scholars Conference, some evangelicals do not accept the scientific conclusion that the human race descended from a pool of not less than about 10,000 distance ancestors rather than from one historical couple, Adam and Eve. NPR religion reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty reports that this scientific and theological argument has come to a head in some evangelical circles. Hagerty writes,

But now some conservative scholars are saying publicly that they can no longer believe the Genesis account. Asked how likely it is that we all descended from Adam and Eve, Dennis Venema, a biologist at Trinity Western University, replies: “That would be against all the genomic evidence that we’ve assembled over the last 20 years, so not likely at all.”

It’s distressing to me that Hagerty would use the phrase “no longer believe the Genesis account” without further qualifier. I believe the Genesis account, I just don’t think it literally describes our genealogy. But, as is clear from the remainder of the article, such are the (I believe, sad) terms of this debate.

In any event, it’s a good article, and an important one. Perhaps most intriguing is the section exploring whether or not this is “a Galileo moment” for Evangelical Protestantism.

Hat tip to The Lead at Episcopal Cafe for bringing this article to our attention.

Percy Paper and Slides for Christian Scholars' Conference Presentation

2011-06-17T21:05:00.004-05:00

For the benefit of people in the audience and for simple access for anyone else who's interested, I'm posting my paper and slides for tomorrow's talk. I hope you find these helpful and/or interesting.

"No end to the mystery": Scientist-as-prince, scientist-as-scientist, and what one has to do with the other in Lost in the Cosmos

Paper (PDF)
Slides (PDF, PPT)

Live Blogging Ted Peters Address at Christian Scholars’ Conference

2011-06-17T19:19:00.001-05:00

[Cross-posted at Into All The WWWorld]

The final plenary session speaker at the Christian Scholars’ Conference is Ted Peters. Peters is a systematic theology professor at Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary, member of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s task force on genetics, and author of Sacred Cells?: Why Christians Should Support Stem Cell Research.

20.13

Francis Collins is asking a question: In vitro fertilization is OK by more traditions, and we’ve got lots of in vitro embryos sitting around. What do you think about us using them, even if you’re a staunch embryo protection person but want to use the embryos we already have, since they’re already been created? For that matter, and on the other hand, how are embryo protection people being consistent when they say in vitro fertilization is OK?

Peters: Some Catholics do in fact say we should oppose use of in vitro embryos because, in so doing, you participate in the original sin (of creating the embyos artificially?). “I want to say ‘Get a life!’” (?!) He then went on to say that, yes, Francis, that’s a great idea, potentially very ethically helpful, and I think that’s what’s already happening in some places.

20.00

Takeaways from Peters:

Respect competing commitments as conscientious (this is a critique of the Vatican calling stem cell researchers “baby killers”)
Understand with empathy the coherent logic of each framework.
Be guided by “faith active in love.” (Gal 5:6)
Take a stand with courage, but without malice toward opponents.

19.58

Singapore has a helpful policy: only use young embryos (<14 days), use surplus embryos when possible, or get special permission on a case by case basis. Apparently no one has gone for the last option. He’s making the point that the religious discussion has affected the secular policy.

19.56

He’s giving the theological foundations of this framework of beneficence by talking about eschatology and Jesus as healer. Quick survey of stem cell research beliefs in other traditions (he’s flying now–apparently he’s almost out of time): Jews and Muslims are for stem cell research, by and large. How about Christians? He’s going really fast, and his slides only give the groups not their positions. RCs against, Orthodox against, Anglicans and Episcopalians generally for (“to the extent that I can get them [to give me a position]“), … OK, I give up, he’s just going too fast. Presumably he’s written this down somewhere.

19.52

A third framework (I’m not sure I’m exactly tracking with his outline): nonmaleficence and beneficence. He’s explaining these with respect to the Good Samaritan. The priest and the Levite did no harm (nonmaleficence), but the Samaritan did good (beneficence).

19.50

I’m continuing to be unimpressed with Peters’ explanations of stem cell science. I’m not following his discussion of chimeras. He gave an example about DNA testing from sperm samples. Totally didn’t follow.

19.47

Peters’ point: this anti-Brave New World argument looks like the Vatican argument, but it’s not, it’s a secular philosophical argument.

19.47

Leon Kass from U. of Chicago (“That means you know he’s smart”) says we’ve got a slippery slope here, from “Yuck!” to “Oh?” to “Gee Whiz” to “Why not?” This is the anti-playing-God framework, but it came not out of a Christian context but, I guess, a sort of pagan context (appeals to Prometheus, etc.). Brave New World dehumanizes us, Kass says. “What does human mean for Kass? What it really means is family life. Families should have mommies and daddies and children … [and] death is a part of life.”

19.44

Those scientists are causing us to “fall into sin,” according to a Der Spiegel article after Dolly. Note the theological language in a secular context.

19.42

OK, back to Dr. Polkinghorne’s heart attack: “Suppose we take on of his skin cells … and activate that … and produce a stem cell line with his genome.” Can we do DNA nuclear reprogramming? Scientific researchers generally appreciate the possibility (they find it “appealing”) of making stem cells without destroying an embryo. Apparently it turns out you could form a baby from these cells, which Peters hopes the Vatican doesn’t realize and reverse their position that adult stem cell research is morally permissible.

19.39

Another thought is the 14-day position: When you get to the adherence of the uterine wall, that’s when for the first time you’ve got individuation. This happens at roughly 14 days in. This looks like a good candidate for a moral threshold if you’re willing to take your clues from nature. Conservative Catholics who oppose abortion but support stem cell research hold this view.

19.37

He’s now taking a shot at John Breck, an Orthodox theologian who makes a claim that the Orthodox Church has “always taught that human life begins at conception.”

19.36

The Vatican has done the most thorough job of thinking through the issues of embryo protection, he says. He’s going to walk us through JP2 and Benedict’s thinking: Egg from mother gets penetrated by father’s sperm, creating a unique genome not shared with anyone else. God then imparts a brand-new soul to this fertilized egg, they say. The genome is “crying out for the addition of a spiritual soul”–this was JP2′s theological anthropology. The soul is what gives us dignity, the imago dei, etc. And you cannot violate the dignity of this ensouled person. But notice that this theology was formulated before the abortion controversy, with nothing to do stem cell research. It was applied to the stem cell controversy, but note the differences, including that we’re not talking about a mother’s body in stem cells.

19.32

Peters thinks non-compatible shots were being shot across the related parties at each other. He’s giving three bioethical frameworks produced by the ethics board:

Embryo protection
Nature protection
Medical benefits
Professional standards

19.31

Peters wants us to pause and ask if Newsweek got the issue right: stem cells research vs. (pro-life people?–he switched the slide).

19.30

The ethics committee at Geron had been in place two years before human embryonic stem cells were isolated. Peters was on it. “You may not like what we do, but you can’t deny that we were there.”

19.29

He’s showing a Michael West slide now explaining why West is interested in human cloning: “From deep within my soul, I erupted in an explosion of anger; ‘This won’t happen!’ I shouted out loud at the thought of death. This was the most profound experience of my life. I realized it was simply not in my nature to accept death or be defeated by it.”

“Most scientists don’t talk that way,” Peters notes. But he’s “part of mix” when it comes to stem cell cloning.

19.26

Scientifically, he’s pointing out, the Dolly controversy was misunderstood. Willmot (sp?) didn’t want to create duplicate animals. Seriously, he’s going really fast, I think not taking the time to explain the science as carefully as the other speakers have (though maybe I’m just experiencing it this way because this is the area I know the least about).

19.23

Oh dear: Peters is proposing a thought experiment where Professor Polkinghorne has a heart attack. Could he be treated by foreign stem cells? Of course not.

19.22

Scientific preliminaries: We get human embryonic stem cells from a fertilized egg in a petri dish providing totipotent cells with a full complement of the genome. You could make a baby or any kind of tissue out of these cells. Days later we have the blastocyst surrounding … he’s going too fast: here’s a similar diagram from Wikimedia Commons.

19.19

These science are promising, he notes, the possibility of a new picture of human well-being and flourishing.

19.19

Peters points out that the goal of stem cell research is regenerative medicine, which will apply to a long list of problems plaguing the human body (spinal cord injury, MS, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc.).

19.18

He’s now showing cartoons showing two disparate viewpoints: one with science running off with the ethicists following from far behind, and the other espousing the opposite view (scientist: “I’m having a hard time getting any work done with all these ethicists hanging around”).

19.17

Peters is summarizing Knud Løgstrup and Emmanuel Levinas, both students of Heidegger. I’m getting started slow, so I missed his exact point, but he wants us to keep in mind the difficulty in supposing that science can be an interpretation-less enterprise. I’ll try to keep up better as we go along.

19.15

Peters is giving a history of the founding of UC-Berkeley, which was apparently originally named (the town named for the school that would be founded there?) for Bishop Berkeley (another Anglican) who said that science and religion would be harmonious in this great new land (ouch, not yet, huh?).

Live Blogging Simran Sethi Address at Christian Scholars’ Conference

2011-06-17T15:56:00.002-05:00

[Cross-posted at Into All The WWWorld]

This morning’s plenary speaker at the Christian Scholars Conference is Simran Sethi, a prominent environmental journalist who got her start at MTV News. I know much less about Sethi than the other speakers here, practically nothing in fact. But she’s got an impressive CV and should be an engaging speaker. The topic of her presentation is “Our Daily Bread: Food, Faith, and Conservation.”

15.15

We’re now discussing taking up a collection for the people of Joplin, especially students and faculty at Ozark Christian College.

15.13

She’s giving the genuinely touching personal wrap-up now, admitting that this has been a challenging presentation for her. She’s quoting biblical sources and yesterday’s “Augustine” quote from Collins about unity, charity, etc. (someone told me yesterday that it can’t be traced to Augustine). The plea is for us to look at the issues of climate change and creation care, to think critically about our food system, and to ask ourselves if this is the best answer. Cool McKibben quote to the effect of “There is no silver bullet, only silver buck shot.” When I was getting a “precautionary principle” link, I missed a cool thing about Kant and examining the intentions of Monsanto, etc., which was I think the boldest part of the presentation.

15.08

“Hungry people in the developing nations have no right to choose,” is our logic, she’s pointing out. They should, I’m extrapolating here, be desperate enough to eat whatever we have to offer, even if it’s dangerous. And it is, very likely: she’s now citing a first-of-kind study about “[m]aternal and fetal exposure to pesticides associated to genetically modified foods” in Quebec. These toxins are in the animals, in the meat, and int he blood of humans, including “humans who aren’t even here yet.” So back to the precautionary principle (this is a technical term you may not be aware of if you haven’t followed the technology, science, and policy wars, see here).

15.03

Grant says solution to hunger problems are to double or triple yields. Pollan asks “yields of what?” Sethi thinks the best way to tackle these problems is to let farmers save their seeds. (I missed connection between these two ideas, sorry.)

15.01

What’s are the implications of GMOs and “terminator seeds” (GURTs) which don’t reproduce (Farmers will have to buy them every year)? Monsanto is talking up the ownership themes, which Sethi finds theologically problematic. Huh, the environmental discourse around this is known as “seed sovereignty.” Love it. Also, Monsanto’s CEO’s name is Hugh Grant.

14.59

The point of contact between man and nature is spiritual. She’s riffing on Matthew 31-33 metaphors. “Christ doesn’t say ‘the kingdom of heaven is like a chariot race’ … The kingdom of heaven is like a grape vine.” Food patents work directly against this spirit.

14.57

Public policy should follow the precautionary principle, she and other advocates maintain. But this hasn’t gone well. Monsanto has grown in proportion to GMO adoption. They control the seeds. It’s not germane to her argument that Monsanto created Agent Orange, she notes. She doesn’t want to give the impression that multi-national corporations are bad. That’s why she has a grad degree in business. She would want to celebrate Monsanto if they were doing good things, because “Man, they’re big. When they do something, the world changes.” But that’s not the case. They present themselves as feeding the world, but most of the crops they create are commodity crops generating bioplastics and biofuels. But “whoever controls the seed controls the food system.”

14.54

Up to 70% of packaged goods in the U.S. contain GMOs, mostly in corn and soy, which are a huge part of our diet, Pollan points out. Hehe, the only person in the room who raised his hand when she asked if this was surprising “is also wearing a DNA tie.”

14.52

GMed cotton sounded like it would be a good idea, since 25% of insecticides were being used on cotton. But, constant exposure to the toxin in this cotton has created an evolutionary pressure for insects to adapt resistance. “The engineered crop is no longer resistant to the pest it was designed to kill.”

14.50

GMOs and non-GMOs can cross-pollinate (“that’s what nature does; it tries to be fruitful”). But this drift (out-crossing) actually turns out to be detrimental. This doesn’t just contaminate local organic farms. It has also led to Monsanto, et al., to sue small farmers whose crops have been so contaminated. There’s a patenting of life forms going on.

14.48

She’s talking about Pluots, plumb-apricots that she would call “part of God’s plan” that any horticulturalist could do. Using recombinant DNA technology is of a different quality, and this couldn’t happen naturally. She describes this strategy of “man’s plan.”

14.47

“To understand the world as God’s creation is to understand … our accountability to God as tenants.” We can’t destroy what has been so richly provided to us. Our works should be “in harmony with the laws that produced them.”

14.46

She’s now moving onto GMOs (genetically modified organisms). She’s prefacing it with an admission that she longs for a silver bullet even though there isn’t one. But she’s saying that GMOs are, at the very least, not that silver bullet. Investors and many others have come to that conclusion, but she humbly disagrees, citing (in part) conflict of interest among the big seed makers. Do these practices honor life and stewardship, she asks? Simple asnwer: these GMOs feed people. But her point is that it’s not that simple.

14.44

The highest rates of obesity correlate quite compellingly with the highest rates of food insecurity. Telling a compelling story about the urban food desert in Sugar Hill, Harlem.

14.42

Insecticide endosulfan is a chemical cousin of DDT and was only recently banned. It’s an endocrine disruptor with risk of accumulation. 1.4 million pounds were used in the U.S. EPA is missing the point in saying small amounts are OK: what about the people handling it? What about people drinking nearby water? Why all the fuss, including the push to exempt Global South farmers who couldn’t afford substitutes? It was a multi-million-dollar industry, of course (I missed the exact number).

14.39

Agricultural chemicals can cross the placental barrier, studies say, so farm workers and city dwellers alike are doing great harm to, at the very least, their children.

14.38

“Monocultures deplete the soil of important nutrients: diversity creates harmony.” She’s very theological/philosophical, notice. Lovely speech and lovely visuals. Just as we could tell yesterday that Collins is a scientist (and now bureaucrat), we can definitely tell Sethi is a journalist.

14.36

Hehe, quoting “Good Crop, Bad Crop.” Its analysis of Green Revolution: farms had to adapt to seed variety rather than the other way around.

14.35

“Our food is oily,” both in terms of food shipping and petro-chemicals, as she noted before. Plus we’re “growing” plastics and fuel (ethanol, etc.). Many farmers feel like they can’t afford to grown anything but corn. Price volatility makes us incredibly vulnerable (and more so people who depend on us) with our one-crop economy. Historical and contemporary parallels: Irish potato famine, “rice crisis” in Southeast Asia. We’re pushing out crops that came about by “the methods of diversity” for a “one-size fits all” solution controlled by seed companies, etc., who want to maximize yield, not nutritional value (for the most part).

14.32

Food inflation hurts the least among us, she’s noting “the worst form of taxation on the poorest of the poor” (she’s quoting someone).

14.30

Food First Institute realized years ago that world farmers were producing four pounds of food per person per day. The fact that we won’t have enough of it is a much more recent occurrence. She’s noting that her home country of India has great poverty along with the most Forbes-list billionaires of any country in the world (think I have that right).

14.28

It’s going to be a luxury to have food at all “and as people of any faith … we should find this unacceptable.” Anglican Bishop Jeff Davies argues that overpopulation and overconsumption are our two greatest sources of environmental harm. [Lots of Anglicans are popping up at this conference, this one is happy to note.]

14.26

Talking about European e coli. Pointing out the petro-chemical inputs and transportation costs of our food practices and whether our answers about the global food market are misleading and detrimental. Food prices could double in next ten years, analysts say.

14.25

She just read a lovely excerpt from David Mas Masumoto about peaches and the coming of summer. Modern farming puts us out of touch with this spirit, and it’s causing us to be filled with a spiritual longing.

14.22

Sethi has an M.B.A but nevertheless has strong critiques for Big Agribusiness. Farm subsidies mostly help diversify these large corporations.

14.20

“How many of you come from agricultural states?” We have a luxury in that we can know a bit more about where our food comes from. Although we’ve lost 300,000 small farms in this country (?!).

14.19

“Eating is an agricultural act,” says Wendell Berry. “I just started growing my own food this year,” and it’s a humbling experience.

14.17

“Everyday meals carry with them sacramental power.” We know that food is a part of spirituality, a reflection of “what we hold sacred.” “We know that God dwells in the host, but can we bring [Christ] into the Big Mac?”

14.16

Need a food ethic that believes that the earth itself is sacred (“or very good”).

14.15

She’s having trouble with the slides “I’m ‘Girls Gone Wild’ with the clicker here.” [Laughs.]

14.15

She’s not a Christian but a believer (Hindu): “The food and the eater of the food are both forms of divinity.” Talking about Prince Siddhartha’s food experiences and discovery of the middle path between self-mortification and (missed the other exact term).

14.12

“We all eat,” she says. And “our food system is in great disrepair.” And–this is intriguing–she thinks faith-based efforts will be what helps bring about a solution to the food system problem.

14.11

Sethi says she’s a “an unlikely fit,” neither Christian nor scholar, used to seeing a lot more hippies in the audience.

14.10

The Provost of ACU (I think) is giving the introduction: Sethi is a “Top Ten Eco-Hero of the Planet” according to The Independent. She blogs on environmental matters, including on her efforts to “green her own home.” Sethi is “impatient” in her advocacy, saying we need to get way past new light bulbs and reusable bags.

Live Blogging Francis Collins Address at Christian Scholars' Conference

2011-06-16T19:46:00.003-05:00

[Cross-posted at Into All The WWWorld]

I really dug the live blogging thing this morning and am going to keep it going for this afternoon’s Francis Collins address. You probably know that Francis Collins was the director of the Human Genome Project and is now the director of NIH. He is also an Evangelical Christian and the founder of the BioLogos Foundation, about which there have been several sessions today here at the Christian Scholars Conference. Same two notes as with the Polkinhorne lecture: (1) Read from the bottom, obviously. (2) Forgive my EDT time stamp; the talk began at 4 p.m. PDT.

20.25

Just got a much more interesting question about continuing human evolution, and whether we should be a part of it. He gave a cool answer about recent human mutations (why pre-historical white people didn’t get rickets). As for whether we should be a part of it (genetic engineering), he had both scientific (what if we screw up the germ line?) and theological (playing God, etc.) answers.

20.21

Wow, someone just got up and asked a really hostile question about macro-evolution. Collins is giving a kind, careful answer about why we ought to expect the gaps in the fossil record. Now he’s moving on to the point about the genomics evidence, which the questioner obviously either doesn’t get or is choosing to ignore. This is a very classy answer, classier than my characterization of the questioner (who also said that lead would be gold but for “one electron”–a comment that evoked a meaningful look from a molecular biologist I met earlier today).

20.18

Final slide was Augustine: “In essentials, unity; in non-essentials, liberty; in all things, charity.” A nice note to end on given how this topic is usually treated.

20.17

Another interesting question: Even if you accept Nowak’s evolutionary altruism, “the fullest and noblest expression of altruism are a scandal to evolution.” Even if we can explain truly radical altruism in evolutionary terms, this won’t bother Collins, who thinks it’s conceivable that God brought it about via evolution like everything else. A final point: if the Moral Law is purely a consequence of purely blind evolution, then there is no absolute God and evil (this is the “Can we be good without God?” question).

20.12

He’s talking now about Adam and Eve with respect to Denis Alexander’s book Creation or Evolution: Do We Have To Choose?

Options

A literal Adam and Eve as sole founders of the race
An historical couple of Neolithic farmers chosen by God
An historical event where God intervened and created the species Homo divinus from Homo sapiens (suddenly? gradually?)
Everyman [which Collins is not at all comfortable with because it's hard to square with the rest of Scripture. This is the second time today (both of them Collins talks) where I've been made very aware that, as a mainliner rather than an evangelical, I'm in many ways an outsider at this conference.]

20.06

OK, now he’s back to fast-and-loose apologetics, dismissing giant arguments with single PowerPoint bullets. “Isn’t evolution a purely random process? Doesn’t that take God out of it?” is a considered objection that oughtn’t be dealt with in ~10 seconds. A careful reading of what Dawkins is rightly saying requires this, in my opinion.

20.04

He’s telling the story of founding BioLogos (bios = life, Logos = Word = Jesus), a foundation that creates a meeting place of people interested in these questions. In my opinion, his proposal that BioLogos replace “theistic evolution” is flawed. He explains why he did it (to appeal to evangelicals who don’t like the “theism” playing second fiddle to “evolution”), but I think it’s an inappropriate term because it’s replacing theistic evolution, not Christic evolution. We’re excluding the other theistic religions in our choice of a term that need not exclude them.

19.59

He’s doing a cosmic history now. First, God was an awesome mathematician, fine-tuning the universe to give rise to complexity. Here’s the crux of his argument: “After God’s plan for evolution, in the fullness of time, had prepared a … [sufficiently large brain]” [he changed the slide] we were endowed with rationality (created in God’s image) and eventually fell…

19.57

[Sorry, just lost my connection for a few minutes.] Now he’s doing the Adam and Eve question. We’re from a pool of about 10,000 ancestors (definitely not just one or two), and we definitely have a common ancestor with Neanderthal (then a bottleneck of one or two would be very strange).

19.49

He’s showing the computer-generated, genomics-based “tree of life” that coheres so well with Darwin’s own drawing (one of the neatest parts of his book), though he admits this won’t meet the creationist “special creation” argument.

19.48

[After the clip:] “If you think that was rehearsed, you’re wrong. All he said was, ‘You’re Collins? I’m gonna get you.’”

19.46

Collins is doing great, way funnier than most Colbert guests. Just the right level of pushing back and playing along.

19.43

“Evolution is your friend,” he said to Colbert. “Evolution is God’s plan for giving upgrades.” Opposable thumb? Upgrade! Bigger brain? Upgrade! Love it.

19.42

He’s showing a hilarious Bizarro cartoon about Goldfish Crackers. Another good laugh from the audience. Now we’re seeing “one of the scariest moments of his life”: when he was on The Colbert Report: “Sorry, God doesn’t speak DNA, he speaks English.” This clip is pretty funny.

Collins: How do you think we got the ability to do science?
Colbert: Uh, because we misused God’s gifts?

19.38

NIH is “Steward of Medical and Behavioral Research for the Nation,” according to slide. He’s talking with some laughs about a Sam Harris editorial that opposed his appointment: “Must we really entrust the future of biomedical research in the United States to a man who sincerely believes that a scientific understanding of human nature is impossible?” He took this as an opportunity to point out the differences between science and scientism. He’s noting that this has not generally been his experience in this position. He says he’s treated very well by scientists, though some think he has a “weird streak.”

19.35

Talking about “The Cancer Genome Atlas,” looking at genomic changes in major types of cancers. Definitely feeling like I’m at a scientific conference. He’s got lots of touching anecdotes about individuals he’s worked with. New targeted gene therapies are “not carpet bombing but smart bombing.” “Beverly’s doing great,” though not everyone does (their genetic misspellings are different).

19.33

Interestingly, the cost of sequencing base pairs followed Moore’s Law for quite a while but is now getting cheaper faster. Within three years, it’s going to cost about ,000 to sequence an individual’s entire genome. “Not a bad cost curve” from 0 million (I think he said). While I’ve written this, he’s been talking about therapies for rare diseases with genetic risk factors. His job is to push such insights into “new diagnostics and new therapeutics as fast as we can.”

19.29

Talking about all the different genome projects that they did after the human. Showed a great picture of the Nature cover with the dog genome article. It’s a picture of dogs looking up at the famous picture of Crick and Watson pointing at their double helix model.

19.27

The big question, he says: “Isn’t evolution incompatible with faith?” He never had the knee-jerk Christian response to the world evolution because of not being brought up in a conservative Christian household.

19.25

Slide describing what he missed when he was “falling in love with second-order differential equations”:

Nature provides some interesting pointers to God

There is something instead of nothing
“The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics” [that's Wigner]
The Big Bang [need an Augustinian creator "outside of time," notice]
The precise tuning of physical constants in the universe
The Moral Law [he always capitalizes it]

He just said Dawkins admits that “that fine-tuning thing” is the argument from believers that bothers him the most (though “none of them bothers him very much”).

[By the way, this presentation is basically a chapter-by-chapter summary of Collins's book.]

19.19

Just got a chuckle that his anthology of writings on faith and belief covers writers “from Plato to Polkinghorne.” Giving his testimony: Jesus is the bridge to a God who is “good and holy” though he, Collins, was not. Another common Collins theme: “book of nature” to complement the book of faith.

19.16

As in his book, Collins is giving a very narrative presentation, talking about his move from atheism to Christian faith via his experiences in medical school. He was impressed by the power of the “psychological crutch” belief seemed to be for his calm, but very sick, patients.

19.13

He just gave an explanation of why the “all your mind” thing creeped into Matthew 22:36-37 when compared to Deuteronomy. I think he’s wrong. It’s not for emphasis, it’s because in Hebrew you think with your heart.

19.11

“Adam and Eve with no clothes on is a lot better than DNA,” he says, commenting on a Time Magazine cover. Anyway, “For me, this [genome science + religion] is a coherent whole,” he says.

19.10

Topic: “Reflections on the Current Tensions between Science and Faith.” Collins is very tall. One of Collins’ themes both earlier today and now is the worshipful nature of science as practiced by Christians. Apparently as a presidential appointee, Collins was very difficult to get here. They’re apparently not allowed to do all sorts of public speaking that may appear to be representing the government.

19.08

NIH budget is billion. I’m actually surprised it’s not larger. Introducer is now telling a personal story about Collins’s “bedside manner” when getting badgered by eager (and disturbed) students after a lecture Collins gave at the C.S. Lewis Society (Foundation?). “Dr. Collins is a consummate bridge-builder, healer and friend.” [Applause.]

19.06

Hehe, Collins at Yale (?) was “relentless gene hunter.” Stirring reminder that the genome is 3 billion letters long. Talking about Collins’s careful consideration of ethical and legal issues around genetics. Hehe, I believe he just said within like two sentences that Language of God was published in 1910 and was on bestseller list for 20 years.

19.03

Introducer is talking about the Human Genome Project, his coming to love molecular biology, and then his decision to go to medical school.

Live Blogging John Polkinhorne Address at Christian Scholars' Conference

2011-06-16T14:18:00.004-05:00

[Cross-posted at Into All The WWWorld]

I’m going to live blog the John Polkinghorne address at the Christian Scholars Conference. Two notes: (1) Read from the bottom, obviously. (2) Forgive my EDT time stamp; the talk began at 11 a.m. PDT.

15.15

Now an organizer is reminding me that I won’t be able to go to Polkinghorne’s second Saturday session because it overlaps with mine. Grrr…

15.14

Question: You gave an argument for the resurrection of Jesus Christ at a lecture you gave at a public university. I said to the atheist who organized your talk “That’s the first time I’ve heard the gospel preached in this place.” So I have a testimony, not a question.

Answer: Well thank you. It’s been great fun being here.

15.13

Question: My wife is a biologist, and one of her favorite quotes is attributed to ? (I have heard this quote recently): “I’m afraid that when we ascend to the top of the mountain, we’ll find the theologians already there.” Do you think spending lives denying the importance of theology is part of what’s going on in their meanness toward it?

Answer: No, not really (essentially). The quote is silly because scientists ask scientific questions and theologians ask theological questions. We work in complementary ways.

15.10

There’s another reason: biologists see a much more ambiguous picture of the world. Biologists see wonderful fruitfulness, but they also see the wastefulness and blind eyes and ragged edges of the evolutionary process. “We as believers have to take that absolutely seriously.”

15.09

He’s making an interesting point here about how the biologists are going through right now what physicists have already gone through, this idea of a mechanistic universe. Physicists have emerged on the other side of that process, and he thinks that will happen to biologists as well.

15.08

Question: Why is it that so few scientists are believers given all the discoveries about our surprising and open universe?

Answer: I don’t think there’s a general answer to that. “Physics looks at a world that is full of wonderful order.” There’s a “cosmic religiosity to be found among physicists,” even if they’re not traditionally faithful. Einstein felt like a “child in the presence of the elders,” and so on. But he said he saw he saw no evidence for the personal God of theism. “Of course, that’s not surprising, because he wasn’t looking in the right place.”

There’s far less openness to religious belief among biologists. One of the reasons is this terrible bickering over evolution. (He said some fairly unkind thing about supposed servants of the God of truth here, which I quite catch, unfortunately.)

15.05

Question: Do you think philosophy of science is a good resource for those of us working on science and theology?

Answer: Yes, there’s a certain cousinly relationship between all these disciplines. “I think philosophy is a wonderful handmaid. Like all scientists, I’m a bit wary of philosophy. They so often come up to us and say, ‘I’ll tell you what you’re really doing.’”

15.04

A note to Americans: British academics prefer to be called “Professor So-and-so” rather than “Dr. So-and-so.” Don’t I have that right?

15.03

There’s no universal epistemology either. The appropriate question about a proposition isn’t “isn’t it reasonable?” (quantum physics wasn’t) but “what makes you think that might be the case?” Theology also needs to take this outlook. Need to be willing to be bottom-up thinkers, beginning with our experience. The problem with the top-down approach is that clear and certain ideas so often turn out to be “neither clear nor certain.” Dual nature of Christ is, of course, a more perplexing claim than the dual nature of light. But the continuing worshiping experience of the church continues to offer answers to the question “what makes you think that might be the case?” And so, for this and other reasons, we still need theology in the modern university. Full stop. (I’ve missed a few things in here, of course.)

14.58

Realism commends itself because of the “stubborn recalcitrance” of nature. It just does not want to conform to our evolving understandings of it. There’s no universal rationality.

14.56

As in physics, successful theories in metaphysics also needs to offer us a certain explanatory power. “Atheists are by no means stupid, and many are genuine truth seekers.” But, in P.’s view, the theistic view is more properly explanatory.

14.55

Two metaphysical traditions from the West: (1) naturalism — takes existence of nature as their basis, and (2) theism — takes existence of a divine creator as basis. Nature seems to point beyond itself. Wonder is a pointer toward that second view, P. says. These are not knock-down arguments, he notes.

14.52

“Intuitive powers of perception” made Einstein’s discoveries possible. Desirable metaphysical properties motivated him, notice.

14.50

“Exercise of judgment” is too important to science to overlook. “We know more than we can tell,” Polanyi says. There’s a sense in which science is an art.

14.49

I don’t know MacIntosh, but what P.’s saying about him sounds a lot like Thomas Kuhn to me.

14.48

“Natural history ends and science begins precisely when we interrogate the world from a particular point of view.” Our theoretical science has to be open to correction. The process is a subtle mechanism, subtler than Popper would have us believe (P. sides with MacIntosh’s idea of a research program).

14.45

Both religion and science, Polkinghorne says, are shooting for “reliable insight” not “indubitable proof.” The term “proof” is used way too often. Even in mathematics, Goedel showed, we can’t expect systems to internally derive themselves (I’m not getting that phrasing quite right). So even mathematicians have to take a certain leap of faith.

14.43

[Lost track of how we got here...] Whitehead’s “fellow-sufferer” observation meets the problem of suffering head on, though of course it doesn’t solve it.

14.43

Notice: Theorizing in theology is bound to be less successful than theorizing in science, because of the nature of what we’re talking about. And so we see Chalcedon, etc., merely draw off some boundaries about what we can say and what we can’t say and still be working within the same theory-space (my term).

14.41

Now let’s use Christology as an example of the pursuit of truth in the religious realm. The “phenomenology of early Christian belief” has to be assessed with appropriate scrupulosity (he does this in Faith of a Physicist). But after we do that, we can observe that what’s going on in that phenomenology is the construction of models. These monotheistic Jews played with models for what would describe their experience of Jesus.

14.38

So we’ve got two models: Bohr and Bohm. Polkinghorne says the choice between them has to be made for metaphysical reasons, since they’re empirically identical. While constrained by physics, the question between determinacy and indeterminacy is a metaphysical question.

14.36

Quantum physics has a probabilistic character, of course. We don’t know when a nucleus will decay. There are two possibilities: (1) there are all kinds of factors we can’t understand that are contributing to the time of decay, and (2) actual ontological indeterminacy. The early quantum physicists followed Bohr in adopting the latter. But Bohm in the ’50s made a more deterministic move that nevertheless makes the same predictions as the Bohr model.

14.34

Key point: It took a long time to get some theoretical machinery in place. His process is (1) phenomenology, (2) theory, (3) models. (I think I got these right.) Now to the point about realism: We’ve got to be quite convinced of the reality of these theories when, say, Dirac combines quantum mechanics and relativity and then makes “unforced” predictions about the physical world that turn out to be true.

14.31

He’s talking about the history of theorizing about the quantum lines of hydrogen, etc. I’m trying to take pictures.

14.27

Let’s return to the theme of “motivated beliefs.” “Indispensable role of theoretical interpretation” can’t look purely Baconian. “Truly insightful understanding is a much more complex activity, and exercise in creative imagination to see truly illuminating underlying patterns.” Einstein: physical meaning (?) has to be created. Einstein was pointing to the need for open, intuitive insight in describing reality. He didn’t brood on the failure of Michaelson Moorely (sp?), he thought about what it would be like to ride on a wave of light.

14.25

This project will leave us with a wide circle, and universities should embrace “this whole spectrum.” Universities are “loose affiliations” of researchers on narrow bands of this spectrum. Universities without theology departments are missing out on this perspective on truth-seeking.

14.23

Both are engaged by the great human quest for truth “attained through motivated belief.” (Helpful phrase, no?) “So theological questions receive theological answers given for theological reasons.” We can separate these as “how?” and “why?” questions. But their answers “must be consistent with each other.”

14.22

“Science has achieved its great success by the modesty of its ambition.” It concentrates on process not on value and purpose. But we know these latter things are “both meaningful and necessary.” Scientist: “the kettle is boiling.” A different kind of answer: “The kettle is boiling because I’m making tea. Would you like some?”

14.21

Encounter with “sacred reality” is what is meant by revelation. “Bible is not divinely dictated textbook set forth in propositional terms.” Bible is “more like a laboratory notebook in which are recorded” spiritual experiences.

14.19

Theology is concerned with “interpersonal encounter” and “transpersonal encounter with the sacred reality of God.” Here “testing” has to yield to “trusting.”

14.18

We meet reality at different levels with different kinds of experience in both science and religion. We reach “high degree of intersubjective agreement” in science because the way we approach the world is based in experiments.

14.17

Hehe, “My [scientist] friends do not want to commit intellectual suicide. Of course, neither do I.”

14.17

“Enormous explanatory success of science” says that the interpretive circle involved in science is virtuous rather than vicious. Scientists who reflect on their methodology generally say that their perspective is that of “critical realism.” Einstein feared that the Uncertainty Principle created a bit of a monster of the world. He made the mistake, Polkinhorne says, of confusing reality with our experience of it [I think this is his gist. I'm still getting the hang of the live blogging workflow...].

14.13

test

14.00

Conference organizer is giving an overview of the conference, it’s theme (“The Path of Discovery: Science, Theology, and the Academy”), and its special guests.

Provost of Pepperdine University is now welcoming us as well. He’s quoting a Wesley hymn about the pairing of knowledge and “vital piety.”

Learning from third introducer that Polkinghorne studied under Dirac. It’s also apparently inappropriate to call him “Sir John Polkinghorne” because he’s also ordained.

Polkinghorne: People say science is about facts and religion about opinions. The latter is about personal preference, they say. There are two bad mistakes in this judgment, he says. The first is a mistaken idea about scientific discovery. No interesting facts are not already interpreted.

Fun with Wikipedia Networks

2011-05-25T09:30:00.003-05:00

So the mouse-over text of today's xkcd ("Wikipedia trivia: if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at 'Philosophy.'") has inspired a little playful procrastination. I'd love to put together one of those fun xkcd-style info graphics (the ones with results of interesting little Internet experiments, e.g. "Numbers," "Regrets," "Dangers," etc.) with the results of some collective poking around. Data so far (from myself, Katy "Southside" Huff, Matt Waldron, and Eric "Wolfman" Howell):

"xkcd": 19 clicks
"Kadevu": 21 clicks
"Walker Percy": 27 clicks
"Kevin Bacon": 13 clicks
"Wisconsin Badgers": 27 clicks

Also, can someone who knows more about graph theory than I do give us some vocabulary to flesh out the kinds of data we can gather (or wish we could gather)? For instance, Matt Waldron asks via Twitter "I wonder what the longest non-loop answer is (i.e. was the furthest 'point' from Philosophy)?" His point about loops (graph theory: "cycles") is an interesting one. Has anyone found a cycle yet? I thought I had one in the Percy chain, but it turns out there are separate articles for "Meaning (philosophy of language)" and "Meaning (linguistic)." (This is one of those moments where I wish I were a better programmer and could just start writing code to explore all these questions. I'd also need to not be on the clock with someone else's money, which may actually be all that is stopping me.)

Anyway, if you're looking for a few minutes off from whatever you doing (I myself am determined to finish my Walker Percy paper for the upcoming Christian Scholars Conference), please consider checking out a few articles' paths to "Philosophy" and report back!

New, Temporary Haven

2011-05-22T15:29:00.008-05:00

I've not made it a secret that I don't much like Northern Virginia. Mostly because one almost has to drive to get anywhere, and the traffic is as bad as any place I've traveled stateside except maybe Chicago. So it feels very good to be in new, albeit temporary, environs after my second year of seminary at VTS.

Granted, I haven't scored quite as awesome a set of gigs and digs as last summer. But I am excited, for my first stop, to be back in a college town for a while. I'm currently living in New Haven, CT, a couple of blocks from Christ Church, where Kristin is an intern with St. Hilda's House.

New Haven, I am learning with good help, is an admittedly troubling place. It goes well beyond a mere case in point of Town and Gown Syndrome to a level of wealth disparity that is truly heartbreaking. I've been lucky to spend some time this past year at the bright spot that is St. Martin de Porres Academy (Kristin's intern site) and to hear about several others from her colleagues. But there's a lot of darkness too. Indeed, the most common sign I see even here in the comparatively serene Chapel West Special Services District is a warning about constant video monitoring.

With that important preamble, though, I will say that it has thus far been close to heavenly for this very lucky wannabe academic to get to work here. With support from the Evangelical Education Society of the Episcopal Church, I've got a nice sublet (see below), decent Yale Library privileges, and five weeks to dedicate to developing an online curriculum module for a course on the conversation between science and theology (you can follow my progress at intoalltheWWWorld.org, the site I'm starting to host the course materials--and I hope others in the future).

It's about three blocks to morning prayer and another three to my adopted office, so I count myself extremely blessed and will plan to leave my car put as much as possible. I will, however, be taking to the skies in a couple of weeks, to give a paper on Walker Percy at Pepperdine's Christian Scholars Conference and hopefully make some contacts with potential reviewers for my course.

More to come on these later opportunities, but the next legs of my summer will take me to Camp Webb (most of July), Camp Oliver (living at home for the first two weeks of August that will feature a diocesan internship of some kind and my parents' joint 60th birthday party!), and Camp Campbell (catching some baseball in KC with the Turner House crew).

Sublet photos (living room, kitchenette, bedroom, hallways with icon/"mendicant" summer mascot):

"The resurrection of the body..."

2011-05-02T17:26:00.006-05:00

My systematic theology professor recently made a comment about the preaching Christians hear this time of year, to the effect that it was a kind of a shame that few Easter sermons share the power and specificity of your average Good Friday sermon. She continued, that, rather, "Easter needs to be this great truth, and the death is the narrow gate by which we enter into this great hope. So we should reflect on this treatise [Gregory of Nyssa's On the Soul and Resurrection] in order to read someone seized by that conviction and to become seized by it ourselves."

This sermon, which I preached yesterday at St. John's, was basically my attempt to take her, and Nyssa, seriously. It was a bit of a departure for me (very little humor, lots of difficult imagery), but I got the impression that it hit home for a lot of people. "Good sermon--but heavy" was a representative comment. There's kind of a glaring transitional error in one of the footnotes (where some of the stuff I had to cut for time and cohesion ended up), which error I hope you'll indulge because I don't feel like regenerating the PDF.

-------------------------

Second Sunday in Easter:

Acts 2:14a, 22-32; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

Take a minute, if you will, to be aware of your body. Closing your eyes might help. Notice how you're sitting. Feel the way your legs are crossed, or not. Take a deep breath and imagine your rib cage expanding as you do so. Keep your eyes closed and think of a time when you were glad to have a body, to be a body: Imagine lying in the sun or floating in the ocean or being tickled by a parent or hugged by a friend. It's OK to think about such things in church. Now think of a time when you felt estranged from your body, when it stopped working properly or caused you great pain or somehow just didn't feel right. Perhaps you're feeling this way today. Perhaps you've felt this way for a long time. [Pause.] OK, open your eyes as you feel so moved.

This little reflection is an Easter reminder to us all that our bodies are real, and they matter in this life and the next. They are an integral, not an extraneous, part of who we are. I am not, to use one writer's expression, simply “a ghost in a machine.”^ⁱ Indeed, one thing our Christian tradition is clear about is that our bodies are part of what it means to be human.

And so I take as my text this morning John 20:25: “So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’”

The apostle Thomas—let's just call him Thomas, rather than “Doubting Thomas,” that unfair nickname we give him when we read this story each year —Thomas seems to understand all this body stuff profoundly. “If Jesus is really risen,” Thomas says, “he has a body, a distinctive body, a body I will recognize by its wounds and a body I want to see and touch for myself.” If anything, we sophisticated modern types are the ones who should consider adopting the apostle's moniker. It's Doubting Kyle who so often ducks out of commenting on the apparent impossibilities of the bodily resurrection. “Show me the marks,” the apostle Thomas says faithfully. “Please don't even mention the marks,” comes my tepid modern reply.

But I think the real reason we're afraid to talk about the physical reality of the resurrection has to do with our bodies, not Jesus' body; with our marks, not his. After all, our profession of the resurrection is nothing more or less than the claim that the God who fashions us can re-fashion us and that in the case of Jesus of Nazareth this refashioning has already occurred. That's no small article of faith, I grant you, but it's roughly on par not only with the Doctrine of Creation but with plenty of other things we Christians more readily believe. For instance, we don't do nearly as much hand-wringing about the Incarnation, the idea that God became vulnerable by being born into the world God created: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord.”^ⁱⁱ Now there's a passage we can get behind.

No, I think we'd all be keener on the resurrection if we made ourselves a little more available to the realities of bodily human suffering, to the ways we need resurrection. It's not easy, but I think we owe it to ourselves and to our brothers and sisters to take account of the breadth and depth of our need to be healed, refashioned, perfected, resurrected. If we can't acknowledge the pain and woundedness in the world and in our very bodies, then of course the Easter message of hope will fall flat in the face of our apparent reality. If we try to pretend we don't carry this pain, then it's hard for us to imagine being set free from it. And so I ask us this morning, what and where are the wounds that mark these bodies [gesture] that God promises to raise?

Well, war inflicts such marks with cruel regularity. I watched this week an ABC News clip about the “Wounds of War” in Libya.”^ⁱⁱⁱ It was heartbreaking footage from early in the Civil War, taken aboard the first ship carrying wounded rebels to Turkey for treatment. Broken arms and legs were common, and the reporter spoke briefly with an amputee in tears and a wounded and bereaved mother for whom even tears seem finally to have failed. For each of those injured bodies sailing from North Africa, probably hundreds more now lie wounded, or dead, on battlefields and in the streets. And it is the very hopelessness of those persons—of many of the living and of all of the dead—that speaks to the power, the audacity, of our Easter proclamation. We claim that God can in some way, we know not how, make things right in the fulness of time—“bind[ing] up the broken-hearted”^{^iv} in this life and raising up the broken-bodied “at the last trumpet.”^{^v} It's almost too foolish to believe. Yet many who have born such marks for themselves do believe it, and some carry this hope precisely because they have born the marks as well.

Other human indignities lead to marks that differ greatly from a bullet wound or amputation. Those who have seen, in person or in images, the distended stomachs of the chronicly malnourished are no more likely to forget the sight for the lack of blood or bandage. And those who have lost their hair during chemotherapy are no less marked by their illness than if the tumors themselves were actually visible. Of course, we could go on bearing witness to these marks, as many in this world and some in this room do each day because they have no other choice. The point is, we are not ourselves so far away from the powers of death and darkness that Jesus descended into to vanquish.

Let me now ask your forgiveness for raising this dread imagery on a Sunday where I, at least, am accustomed to having a light-hearted laugh at Thomas' expense before going on to revel in the joy of a disciple reunited with his resurrected Lord and God. As I said, I think Thomas is on to something in his insistence that we must behold the wounds before we rejoice in their being overcome. But the good news we acclaim in the Easter season, the very best news our faith has to offer, is that the final word will be that rejoicing. And so we look to the stories—in scripture, and in our lives—of what that hope looks like. These stories can be touchstones for us. They are markers that point to Easter joy when all other hope has drained away.

One such story—no more than a moment really—took place for me earlier this year in the library at Virginia Seminary. I was doing some reading from a book the Episcopal Church publishes for use in ministry with those who are sick or dying. Having lost one grandparent to Parkinson's Disease with dementia and another to Alzheimer's, I was drawn to a prayer called “In Loss of Memory.” As many of you know, the marks of dementia are a terror to behold, so bad at times that it seems like the person we know is already gone, changed into someone we scarcely recognize. Working with dementia patients during my summer hospital chaplaincy had recently forced me to confront the memory of these wounds my grandparents carried in their last years. And so I think God had specially prepared me to hear to resurrection hope in the following prayer: “Holy God, you have known me from my mother's womb, and have been with me throughout my life. Protect me and keep me safe through all the changes that may come. Since I am sealed as Christ's own, help me to trust that who I am will never be lost to you.”^{^vi} I read that prayer, and I just started to cry. The promise that God held in care and would restore these people I love—that the mutations in their brains were, in resurrection hope, temporary conditions—this came as a balm for my wounds as well. Hope for the hopeless—that is the power of the gospel for all of us.

Of course, none of us knows exactly what the resurrection will be like.^{^vii} Unlike Thomas, we can only guess, because, unlike Thomas, we don't get to witness it on this side of our own resurrection. We can't yet see for ourselves the kind of change that God wrought in Jesus and will bring about in those Libyan amputees, in the victims of the tornadoes down south, in my grandparents, and in each one of us. We can't yet witness the reforming of our very bodies and the transformation of the marks of our suffering. But we can bear witness to those marks—and to our Easter hope about their fate. In the meantime, “Blessed are [we] who have not seen and yet have come to believe.”^{^viii}

iWalker Percy, “The Delta Factor” in The Message in the Bottle: How Queer Man Is, How Queer Language Is, And What One Has to Do with the Other (New York: Picador, 2000): 9.

iiLuke 2:11.

iiiDavid Muir, “Wounds of War Bring Libya Together” on World News with Diane Sawyer (New York: ABC News, 2011): http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/video/wounds-war-libya-rebels-flee-president-obama-gadhafi-us-13288087 (accessed April 27, 2011).

ivIsaiah 61:1.

v1 Corinthians 15:52.

vi“In Loss of Memory” in Ministry with the Sick or Dying, Burial of a Child (New York: Church Publishing, 2000): 77.

vii Will our wounds, too, be changed but not erased, becoming “mark[s] of honor” as St. Augustine speculated? To be fair, he was talking about the bodies of the martyrs, so I'm being a little presumptuous here. I also like St. Gregory of Nyssa's image of the “draw[ing] together” of the parts of our former bodies so that “the rope of our body will be braided [together] by the soul,” which evokes in me the further image of the re-coiling and repairing of mutated DNA. I myself like the idea that a resurrection body that still bears marks is no less “imperishable, undefiled, and unfading,” to borrow those words we heard in 1 Peter. St. Augustine, The City of God: Volume 2, Marcus Dods, ed. (London: T&T Clark, 1871): 514; St. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Soul and the Resurrection, trans. Catharine P. Roth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary, 1993): 68.

viiiJohn 20:29b.

VTS Forum Event Next Week

2011-03-28T19:12:00.010-05:00

I don't write much here about my job as coordinator of the VTS Forum Hour, but we've got a big event next week that I'm trying to promote as widely as possible. Plus I'm genuinely excited and wanted to share the news! Tell your friends!

Special Guest Next Week

Next week, 4/4-4/6, the Rev. Stephanie Spellers will visit VTS to meet students and be part of several special events. Many of you know of Rev. Steph and her work. She serves as priest and lead organizer for The Crossing community, a fresh expression of church within the life of St. Paul's Cathedral in Boston, and as the Consulting Editor for Emergent Resources for Church Publishing in New York. She is co-chair of the Standing Commission on Mission and Evangelism and travels the country consulting and supporting Episcopal congregations as we embrace the challenges and opportunities of life in 21st-century America.

Rev. Steph's visit is an opportunity for VTS to get another take on the world of emergence Christianity and some of the ways it expresses itself in an Anglican context. In particular, let me draw your attention to the Tuesday night conversation. We have scheduled this event at 5 p.m. in the Welcome Center to accommodate as many students as possible, knowing that some will have to leave for classes and other commitments. Please come for as much of this evening as you can. If you plan to be around for dinner at 6:15, a dinner that will be worth your while, RSVP to this email and let me know that you're coming.

Please join me in welcoming Rev. Steph when you see her here on campus next week, and do join us for these events with her as you are able.

Many thanks to the following students who have helped plan these events: Mike Angell, Tim Baer, Kirsten Baer, David Erickson, Bert Hall, Gregg Morris, Audrey O'Brien, and Brenda Sol.

In Christ,
Kyle

Summary of Events

Tuesday at 1: Anglicanism Remixed -- Embracing Our Traditions and The Other

How do we balance a commitment to transformation and radical welcome with love for Anglican traditions? Can you keep the baby but refresh the bathwater? Rev. Stephanie Spellers leads this interactive forum exploring multicultural, emergent visions of Anglicanism.

Date: Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Time: 1-1:50 p.m.
Location: Gibbs Room
Contact: Kyle Oliver, koliver@vts.edu

Tuesday at 5: Dreaming with Both Feet on the Ground

A session for students considering ministry as innovators, church planters, and church redevelopers (or anyone who wants to introduce radical welcome and fresh expressions in a conventional congregation). Please join us for an introductory session at 5 p.m. and/or an informal, no-cost dinner around 6:15. Please RSVP for dinner to koliver@vts.edu.

Date: Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Time: 5-7:30 p.m.
Location: Welcome Center
Contact: Kyle Oliver, koliver@vts.edu

Wednesday at 12: Seminary Eucharist

Rev. Steph will preside as we use the Eucharistic liturgy from Evangelical Lutheran Worship, the ELCA worship book. Bishop Richard Graham, bishop of the Metropolitan Washington DC Synod ELCA, will be our Lutheran preacher for this service in observance of our Lutheran-Episcopal full communion agreement.

Date: Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Time: 12-1 p.m.
Location: Prayer Hall
Contact: Mitzi Budde, mjbudde@vts.edu

Last Sermon for a While

2011-03-27T21:26:00.002-05:00

I've preached three of the last four Sundays, so I'm looking forward to a bit of a homiletical hiatus. Still, it's been a rewarding month for this preacher-in-training. Here's what I had to say today on John 4:5-42:

Throughout the centuries, readers of today's story from John's gospel have encountered the passage, taken in its many details, marveled at what one expert called this “first full example of [John's] dramatic ability,”¹ and emerged from their careful study with one lingering and important question: “Why does it have to be so long?” Of course I kid, but the designers of our lectionary are not ignorant of our attention spans or of the necessary vocal endurance it will take for deacons throughout the church to belt out this hefty portion of the good news today. So let's let the question stand. Couldn't we do justice to the story while shaving off a few verses? Couldn't we, for instance, have heard only the first half? When this passage came up in the church's daily lectionary a week ago, that's exactly how we got it: the encounter with the woman one day, the follow-up with the disciples the next day.

I think if we look closely at what actually happens in this story, the logic of sticking to our full dose will become clear. So, if you can, think back to the beginning. Jesus is fatigued and thirsty after a morning's travel. He asks for a drink of water from a woman he encounters near a well and, after the initial exchange says, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water” (10). The woman replies, “Sir, you have no bucket, and the well is deep. Where do you get that living water?” (11). Jesus tells her that she's misunderstood him: “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life” (13-14). In other words, the woman has underestimated Jesus's person and promise. The living, flowing water is not a physical gift that relieves us of the need for our daily H₂0; it sounds more like a spiritual gift, like his teaching and his sharing of the Spirit.² Of course, he and the woman say lots of other things, but let's leave it at this for our gloss of Scene One: the woman and the water.

In the second half of the story, we see Jesus turn his attention to the disciples. As is often the case, they start off scandalized by the company he's chosen to keep, but then they move on to more immediate midday concerns: “Rabbi, eat something,” they say, and he replies, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” Like the woman, they initially miss the point: “Surely no one has brought him something to eat?” they say. And as with the woman, Jesus chooses to enlighten them about their misunderstanding: “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to complete his work.” So the disciples underestimate him as well. He is sustained not by material food, he says, but by his mission.³ So that's Scene Two: the disciples and the food.

The importance of these parallels, I believe, is that each scene contains a challenge, and these challenges are related. In Scene Two, the challenge is pretty direct and obvious: it's to make Jesus's mission our mission. He says, “I tell you, look around you, and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting” (35). Now, as then, the time is ripe for us to go out and reap what God and other servants have sewn. The time is ripe because the need is great, and without even knowing it we reap God's harvest as we speak a word of hope to a neighbor or engage in an act of solidarity with a stranger.

Scene One, I think, contains a similar challenge, not about mission this time but about devotion. To say it briefly, we have to choose to drink the water, a choice that will affect us every day of our lives. Like staying hydrated on a hot summer day, “being watered” by our Lord takes discipline; it's not a lot of work, but we have to remember to do it. Drinking the water is about letting the risen Christ into our lives or—better yet—about taking time to realize that he is already there inside us. There are lots of ways to do this, of course: perhaps prayer, bible study, or just quiet time with God. That a little effort each day can make a lifetime of difference in our relationship with God is surely a sign that the Spirit is active in our lives and working within us to transform our hearts.

So, I said that the challenges Jesus has in store for us in this passage are related, and this is the point I want to really want to make clear. The way they're related makes a difference, because this is probably the point in the sermon where we all start to feel a little weary. It sounds, I'll admit, suspiciously like I'm trying to add to our to-do lists, maybe not just for Lent but for the rest of our lives. Perhaps, as it does to me, the very prospect exhausts you.

Well, let's take a tip from Bishop Sutton for a moment. I loved the point he made toward the end of his sermon when he was with us back in February. He asked us to notice that Jesus didn't say, “You are the pepper of the earth.” It strikes me that we'll get a better handle on this morning's gospel passage if we think about what else Jesus didn't say. He didn't say, for instance, “I came that you might have another to-do list, and feel guiltier about it.” He didn't say, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will add to them.” No, what he said was that he has innumerable good gifts to offer us: life abundant, rest for the weary, and, today, food and water for our journey, what John Calvin called “the secret energy by which [God] restores life in us.”⁴ The way our two challenges this morning are related is that Jesus claims they will sustain us.

So maybe the real challenge is simply to hear that good news—“I have food to eat that you do not know about”; “The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life”—to hear that good news and believe it. Believe that Jesus's food, which is to do God's will, really can nourish our lives. Believe that Jesus's living water really can quench our spiritual thirst if we but stop and drink. Believe that God alone can sustain us.

This is where I think we can help each other out. Have you ever heard someone talk about a change in their life and seen the incontrovertible signs that this change is bearing fruit for them? Perhaps they light up at the mention of a new outreach project they've been participating in, chronicling it for you not because they want to boast, but because all the joyful details just kind of bubble up. Or perhaps they get very quiet and shy as they admit during a small-group conversation that they've had a profound experience of God, one they think might stick with them for years to come. They can't really make sense of it rationally, but neither can they dismiss it and go on as if nothing had ever happened. Does hearing about those experiences ever stir something in you? Does it start to make Jesus's promises today sound a little less far-fetched?

Let me risk a personal example. I have this inkling that the practice of keeping a journal might be a good idea for me. This is not something I want to do. It sounds exhausting. Seminarians write a lot, much of it under duress, and the thought of adding even just a couple more paragraphs each day was enough to invoke in me something approaching despair. But I had a conversation recently with a friend who has been diligently journaling for years. And when I hear her talk about all that she's learned about herself in those pages, and how much this record of her struggles and her triumphs has meant to her as the years have passed, I start to believe that keeping a journal could be a source of life for me too, a way of deepening my awareness of how God is working within me. I'm starting to believe, and so far I haven't been disappointed. It may not stick, of course, but for now it does feel like the kind of blessing Jesus promises us today.

So how about you? How do you need to be sustained by deepening your life of mission and devotion? How have you been sustained by these things in the past? My prayer for us today is that we ask ourselves these questions—and especially that we ask each other. That Christ can sustain us in this way with his food and his living water is such good news that it can be almost impossible for us to believe. In this third week of Lent, let's try to help each other's unbelief.

1 Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Doubleday, 1997): 342.

2 See Raymond E. Brown, The Anchor Bible: The Gospel According to John (i–xii) (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966): 178-180.

3 Anchor, 181.

4 John Calvin, Commentary on the Gospel According to John, trans. William Pringle (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005): 149.

Little Rock...Rocks

2011-03-15T20:32:00.002-05:00

So, I was in Little Rock this past weekend preaching at St. Mark's Episcopal Church. What a thoroughly lovely parish and a fun experience. If you ever get to Little Rock, definitely check out Whole Hog; it had been far too long since I had real barbecue. Anyway, here's the sermon I preached on Romans 5:12-19.

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Good morning, my name is Kyle Oliver, and I bring you greetings from Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, where I'm a second-year divinity student. I'm here thanks to the kind generosity of this parish and especially of Mary and Dean Kumpuris, who sponsor a scholarship for seminarians in memory of their daughter Anne. I am very grateful to be here, and I'm grateful to be your guest preacher this morning, even if it is the First Sunday of Lent.

I've gotta tell you, though, that's the last thing I thought I'd be saying when I first starting preparing this sermon. You see, my mind kept leaping back to an Ash Wednesday sermon I heard several years ago. It was given by a priest who may very well be the sweetest, gentlest man that I know. But you wouldn't have guessed it sitting in the pews that day. He very starkly laid out the situation for us, starting with words like “We are all here guilty of the sin of idolatry!” And it turned out that he was just getting warmed up. It was a shocking experience, and it has stayed with me as a real landmark sermon for the beginning of Lent. “Uh oh,” I said, “I don't think a sermon like that would be an advisable way to begin a relationship with people who had just given me money for school.”

Imagine my relief, then, when I got a look at our passage from the fifth chapter of Paul's Letter to the Romans. It speaks quite well to our Lenten situation, and it views the problem of our sinfulness in proper proportion. The message here is profoundly upbeat, very much in the spirit of our psalm's opening line: “Happy are they whose transgressions are forgiven * and whose sin is put away” (Psalm 32:1). Of course, that joy comes after several stages of reflection, examination, and confession. The first step is acknowledging that we are among this potentially happy lot. Paul makes no bones about this first point: “death spread to all because all have sinned” (Romans 5:12). And so we are right to face the reality our sins, our weakness, and even our wickedness. Good Protestants that we are, we ground this reflection in scripture. On Ash Wednesday, we take a deep breath and march through a very difficult liturgy, listening as the readings and prayers form for us a list of our transgressions against God's holy law. We need this list of the charges, because, as Paul writes next, “sin is not reckoned when there is no law” (13). So in the season of Lent, we are first called to wake up to the reality of our situation. We take note of the full extent of the law and our failure to keep it, and this renewed awareness “reckons” to us—points out to us in no uncertain terms—our enslavement to sin in all its weight and inevitability. So that's step one on our penitential journey: taking stock of our sinful situation.

Now it's in the next step—perhaps even more so than in all the sinning we've been up to previously—that we can go seriously astray. In this next step, we decide, usually without even realizing it, that we're going to make it all up to God. We're going to change our ways, put things right, take responsibility for our actions, pull ourselves up by our bootstraps in splendidly self-sufficient fashion. We're good Americans, after all, and we believe in accountability. And so all our well-meaning Lenten disciplines take on a note not just of penance, a means of saying we're sorry, but of punishment, a means of suffering for and therefore, we hope, atoning for our wrongdoing.

This, Paul says, is precisely the wrong response to our predicament. Death is indeed “exercis[ing] dominion” over us (14), but we cannot flea to freedom through our own efforts. And this is where we get to the good news, which is plentiful. First and foremost, it is the news that we do not need to earn our freedom. It has been earned for us, and it is—Paul says no less than five times in this passage—a free gift. As in really and truly free. No shipping and handling. No mandatory mail-in rebate. Our redemption is a free gift that we need not and indeed cannot earn or pay for.

What's more, Paul says, the power of this gift is like no other force in the universe. Listen again to what he writes next: “But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man's trespass [that would be Adam], much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many. And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification” (15-16). In other words, the effects of sin spread like a cancer. Adam and Eve eat the apple and—boom—we're off and running, multiplying transgression upon transgression. But on the other hand, the free gift of God's grace can and does wipe clean the face of the earth and usher in an era of abundant health and wholeness, of true and abiding rightness with God in Christ. As a very literal translation would render what comes next, “where sin abounded, grace overabounded” (17).

I implied earlier, I hope somewhat provocatively, that this whole “free gift” gospel that Paul preaches in all its power does not sit very well with our American sensibilities. We want so desperately to earn what we have. We want, like Mrs. DuBose in To Kill A Mockingbird, to live in and then depart this world “beholden to no one.” It's encoded in our national ethos that there is something lazy or shameful about asking for help, about even needing help. By confronting us with our own sinfulness and mortality, Lent seeks to relieve us of this toxic but pernicious thought. This is the second stage of our Lenten reflection, and it will take many of us an awful lot of Lents to get the message—myself, I fear, quite definitely included.

I heard an interview recently with Eugene Peterson, author of the popular paraphrase of the Bible known as The Message. It sounds like Peterson can relate to our plight. When the interviewer asked him if his faith had ever been tested, he talked about a particular time in his life: “Yeah, those early years that I call the Badlands, when my competitive instincts weren't working anymore. There were six years when nothing seemed to be working.” The interviewer asked, “How did you get over it? Did it just pass, or did you have to really work at it?” Peterson answered, “Well, you see that was the problem. I was used to working at things, and now working at things didn't make any difference. So I found some people to talk to. I started running … so that became a way of being competitive without being competitive … We started keeping Sabbaths, my wife and I … We just kind of lived into that Sabbath world of rest … So there were a number of things like that. It wasn't a program. It goes each step an arrival; each thing we did led to something else. After six years, I can't tell you what happened, but here I was, I was whole. All that stuff had gotten integrated into something which was more like a joyful, obedient life rather than a striving, mastering life.” Listen to that. “Working at it” was part of the problem, he says. Learning to receive was part of the solution. And in the end, he “cant' really tell [us] what happened … [he] was [just] whole.”

I think we would do well to treat our Lenten journeys, and especially our Lenten disciplines, with the same soft hands Peterson used to receive the wholeness God had in store for him. During this season, and throughout our lives, we can and should say that we're sorry. We can and should renew our commitment to doing the best we can, and expect that God's gift of grace in our lives will gradually raise that bar higher and higher. But if our Lenten discipline becomes another venue for trying to earn a free gift that has already been bestowed, then heaven make us free of it. Not to be overdramatic, but such practices are not just pointless, but dangerous. In the words of spiritual writer Martin Smith, if we can't learn in Lent to accept our creatureliness and imperfection, then we will become a “menace” and not a “grace” to the people we encounter, and to ourselves. It will turn us into self-hating perfectionists and turn our life of faith into a piety contest. And a piety contest, it was recently pointed out to me, is no more likely than a pie-eating contest to win us the peace of God that we seek. Lent, I believe, seeks to teach us to receive that peace as pure gift, not earned by our merits but freely given through the merits of our Savior Jesus Christ.

Another Take on "The Real Problem" in Anglicanism Today

2011-03-04T08:54:00.005-06:00

I recently read with some exhaustion a Living Church account (though not this one) of the Mere Anglicanism conference held in Charleston, SC, back in January. The theme of the conference was "Biblical Anglicanism for a Global Future: Recovering the Power of the Word of God." I have to say, especially in the added light of following this week's hubbub around Rob Bell's new book, I'm getting awfully tired of having my faith be portrayed as "unbiblical" by people who, in good faith, read the bible differently from how I read it (which manner is, I believe, also in good faith).

One particular case in point is the following comment about the Rev. Charles Raven's session "The Wages of Synthesis or Lasting Treasure? Recovering the Power of the Word of Truth." (In fairness to Raven, let me preface all this by acknowledging that I'm relying on Daniel Muth's account of his position, so I'm happy to stand corrected if I'm misrepresenting him.)

Raven described Archbishop Rowan Williams as a brilliant committed Christian beset with an ultimately unworkable combination of hermeneutical pessimism (Scripture is unclear) and ecclesiastical optimism (if we talk long enough we will find common ground). Despite the archbishop's best efforts, treating Christian orthodoxy as process rather than proposition does not keep all parties at the table, Raven said.

It seems to me that the accusation of "hermeneutical pessimism" gets to the very heart of what is tearing us all apart right now. I believe Williams is a hermeneutical realist; he acknowledges that faithful people encounter the biblical text and reach different conclusions about what it means. You can call that an attack on "the Power of the Word of Truth" if you like, but . . . well again, we ultimately arrive at me saying something like "but we're going to have to agree to disagree on that point." I believe we are called to a more hopeful and realistic doctrine of the Truth of Scripture, one that is neither relativistic nor threatened by the existence of a diversity of interpretation. We don't have to be soft on truth to be firmly convinced that no party sees it in its entirety but, rather, "in a mirror, dimly" (1 Corinthians 13:12).

And so it goes. The demand that orthodoxy be purely about proposition is common enough, but the history of Christianity shows--in my reading of it, though some of my classmates understandably disagree--that we've never gotten very far at living out our catholicity when we demand of all our fellow communicants rigid adherence to a universally agreed upon dogmatic program. Indeed, you could do a lot worse than to interpret the term "Mere Anglicanism" in exactly that spirit: our tradition chose to acknowledge the difficulty of demanding uniformity of doctrine, so we dedicated ourselves to sharing common worship. (Then again, I got into one of the two shouting matches I've been in during seminary defending that position.)

What seems especially unfair about Raven's claim (or, again, Muth's gloss of it) is the language about keeping "all parties at the table." It sounds like we can agree, at least provisionally, that doing so is an admirable goal. But why is it intractable under the Williams formula (hermeneutical pessimism + ecclesiastical optimism)? Because the hermeneutical optimists want us pessimists to either (1) see the light and change our tune, (2) leave the table because of our dogmatic unworthiness, or (3) allow them to take the table with them somewhere else. Keep in mind that subscribers to the Williams formula are not--by and large, though we have some things to repent of, I believe--asking anyone to leave the table. What is communion, our position leads us to ask, but continuing to sit at the table and talk about the things we disagree about? So take note: in this program, no one's being forced out (this is absolutely essential to the integrity and cost of the position, and I think my "side" has blown it in a couple of instances), though some do choose to leave.

On the other hand, what of the converse position? What would happen if the dominant formula were hermeneutical optimism (Scripture is clear) and ecclesiastical pessimism (no amount of talking will lead us to identify common ground)? That table seems to have people leaving in droves: First, most of us hermeneutical pessimists will be forced to leave for our unwillingness to sign on the dotted line (except for those few whose individual interpretations happen to fall in line and who are willing to push away from the table their brothers and sisters for whom that is not the case). Second (and of course this one is subject to my biases as a hermeneutical pessimist), there will be the inevitable trickling out of those hermeneutical optimists who find, not that their optimism was misplaced (Scripture is clear!), but that their fellow optimists just happen (out of ignorance? unfaithfulness? outright rebellion against God?) to be wrong about some point or the other. In this alternative, even if "the Power of the [unambiguous] Word of Truth" heads off the secondary trickle that has never heretofore been headed off, an awful lot of people get forced out.

So we have two alternatives, both resulting in the original table seating many fewer guests. How do we choose among them? Well, hermeneutical pessimist that I am, I return to 1 Corinthians 13:12 and then keep on reading:

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.

Final reflections:

(1) I'm sorry about all the polemical Us vs. Them here, I really am. This article has just been eating away at me all week, and I needed to get my objections out there in the open. Obviously, the terms Raven/Muth set out here are fundamentally inadequate to capturing the complexities of the situation. But there's a kernel of truth here that teaches us quite a bit about what all the fuss is about.

(2) Obviously, the combination of hermeneutical optimism AND ecclesiastical optimism is an attractive third option and may best account for why the Anglican Communion has made it this far with its current level of intactness. And I certainly want us to go forward with an approach that is deeply grounded in faithfulness to scripture and that trusts in the Spirit's power to guide the Church into all truth. But aren't we asking too much of the Bible if we expect it to somehow be the unambiguous arbiter of all our doctrinal disagreements? And isn't that what Raven, in comparing hermeneutical optimism favorably to Williams' ecclesiastical approach, ultimately does?

I don't think you have to be a radical historical-critical biblical skeptic to believe the Bible contains some pretty significant ambiguities on issues that matter to our modern life together. This is why I prefer the term "hermeneutical realist" and why I believe that love--God's love for us, our love for God, our love for each other, and Christ's longing for us all to be one--is the only force strong enough to keep us all at the table.

(3) Incidentally, does anyone know why these Living Church issues keep ending up in the VTS mailboxes? Did the seminary score, like, a complimentary subscription for all its students? What about at the other seminaries? I'm not speaking ill of my hometown's ecclesiastical periodical (indeed, I'm grateful, even on a day where I've frittered away my entire afternoon on a blog post about a single paragraph on page 26 of the February issue), but it's slightly creepy to be getting a magazine without knowing why.

Some Roman Reflections

2011-02-26T10:58:00.006-06:00

The following is going to go up on the VTS Anglican Commentary at some point, but I owe you all some kind of comment on my Rome trip, so you get a sneak peak. Sorry for my absence here lately! It's been an exciting but extremely busy semester so far. More info...sometime. Enjoy!

The first of our two weeks in Rome was spent studying the history and architecture of the early churches there. One of my more fascinating experiences that week was my visit to the Basilica dei Santi Cosma e Damiano, the first site of Christian worship in what had been the center of pagan Rome. The church was converted to that purpose from its former identity as part of the Temple of Peace by Pope Felix in the late 520s. Felix added a beautiful Hellenistic mosaic of Christ at the parousia and an accompanying inscription describing how “THE TEMPLE BEFORE NAMED AS SACRED HAS INCREASED IN HONOR.” The church's nearest neighbor is the circular Temple of Jupiter Stator (Jupiter the Stayer), a beautifully preserved structure that at one time served the basilica as a narthex.

What's going on at Santi Cosma e Damiano, as far as I can tell, is a coming together of two somewhat troubling aspects of the way the Greco-Roman milieu influenced early Christianity. On the one hand, we see in Felix's triumphant inscription the victorious spirit of Christianity's great coming-out party. I suppose this party was fed not just by the memory of persecutions and marginalization but by the way Constantine and his successors sought to use the church as a force to unite the empire. On the other hand, we sense in the Hellenistic mosaic itself and in the church's one-time narthex something of the Ancient Roman civic spirit, the spirit of aloof detachment.

We encountered the vestiges of that spirit in many of the churches we visited. It was like seeing represented artistically and architecturally what Bishop Tom Breidenthal describes theologically and ethically when he recounts St. Augustine's struggle to decide how other people ought to enter in to our lives of faith (Breidenthal led our second week's reflections on the ethics of power and the church's vocation of service to and solidarity with the poor). Augustine in the end decided that we are to enjoy each other in God and be pushed by God into relationship with one another rather than being pulled out of such messy entanglements. But many of our experiences in Rome, including our church visits, reminded me how easy it is for us to lose track of this hard-won Augustinian insight. I pray that our church buildings and our congregations will be places where we are sent out for the messy work of relationship and service to the stranger.

Buona sera da Roma

2011-01-10T10:35:00.001-06:00

Well, I've been traveling for about a week and have seen a lot of Italy that I didn't catch on my previous trip. My classmate and I stayed near Sorrento and saw some of the sights in Naples (yuck), Pompei (extensive and relatively pristine), Capri (touristy but stunning), the Amalfi Coast (a tough drive and a site to see!), Paestum (2500-year-old temples that are apparently in better shape than many of their contemporaries in Greece), and quiet Piano d'Sorrento (home). A happy (for us) plumbing problem at the Porto Salvo guest house got us an upgrade to the really charming Secret Garden Relais (same owner). It's not just a clever name--it took us an hour and a half to find it. It's in an orange grove. Behind a wall. Down a pedestrian-only street (which is saying something in Italy).

Pictures soon and news from the start of our interdisciplinary course on history, architecture, theology, ecumenism, and the ethics of power here in the Eternal City. Ciao!

(Additional) Good News of Great joy

2010-12-29T10:45:00.004-06:00

For those of you who haven't heard through other channels (or haven't heard the story), I'm writing to let you know that I am now engaged! Kristin and I decided sometime in November that we were ready to take the plunge, and we ordered a ring at Savitt Jewelers in New Haven when I was there for Thanksgiving.

The plan was for me to propose sometime over our Christmas visits home. Now, Kristin is from Whitefish Bay, and my parents now live in Waukesha. This, combined with the constraint of not involving her parents in the planning (so as not to spoil the surprise), had me feeling particularly anxious. Have you heard people talk about both successful and (especially) unsuccessful proposal scenarios?! We're looking at a lot of pressure here. How do you make it a surprise? How do you make it memorable? Wisconsin, much as we both love it and miss it, seemed fraught with peril.

In case you don't know, my lovely fiancée loves New York, and especially loves the West Village's Church of St. Luke in the Fields. So it was only natural that she plan to be in the city for her birthday on December 18 and for church the following morning. With final exams upon me during that weekend but only one major test to take (and an online one at that), I saw my opportunity for a genuine surprise proposal. I planned to moan and groan about marathon study sessions for a liturgics class that I'd legitimately neglected ("It's only a lot of reading if you do it," is a sad VTS mantra but also sometimes an important survival strategy), while in reality making my way to the big proposal in the Big Apple.

My best friend, Carl, suggested a subway proposal (did I mention she also loves the subway), and our mutual friend and my co-conspirator, Julia, helped me refine the plan--Q train proposal to take advantage of the outdoor East River crossing, rendezvous point at James in Brooklyn if we failed to make the connection.

Of course, the only thing that could possibly go wrong did: as the week before the big day progressed, Kristin got so sick that it became increasingly clear she would not be going to New York for her birthday. With my tail between my legs, I got on the Megabus on Saturday morning planning to hop the Metro North to New Haven for a subdued and less-life-changing birthday visit. I almost left the ring in Virginia to avoid the temptation to propose in a decidedly sub-ideal city and circumstance.

But just before we went into the Lincoln Tunnel, I got a text to the effect of "Antibiotics doing their job! Feeling much better today and might be able to at least make it church tomorrow, yay!" I got off the bus, called Julia, and proceeded to plot a new plan. Julia called Kristin to confirm her improved state of health and insist that they meet at St. Luke's early and grab a quick belated birthday breakfast before the service. I scouted out the beautiful St. Luke's garden (though less beautiful in winter, of course) for a spot where she'd not see me immediately upon entering. And then I had to figure out a place to spend the night, since I'd planned on sleeping on the floor next to whatever friend's couch she'd booked for herself that night. Thankfully, my summer roommates were around and had a couch with my name on it.

The morning arrived, as did the soon-to-be-fiancée, and everything worked out better than I could have hoped. She was indeed surprised, and we had a wonderful morning of sharing our good news with our St. Luke's friends at coffee hour before and after the main liturgy. After that and a quick lunch with friends, I was off to Virginia on the 3 p.m. Bolt Bus. An exhausting weekend, but a wonderful one. To top it off, I was greeted by my classmates back at VTS by a surprise gathering and champaign toast.

It has been lovely being together in Wisconsin for more than a couple of hours, and it has been lovely sharing the news with family and friends. Thank you so much for all your warm wishes and prayers! We'll let you know when we have a date, but our lives are full of uncertainty right now, and it's liable to be a long engagement!

Sermon Catch-Up

2010-12-29T10:29:00.003-06:00

It's been a busy couple of weeks (see forthcoming post), so I'm just now getting around to posting my sermons from the second and third weeks of Advent. They were each shortened a bit on the cutting-room floor, but this ought to give you the gist. Indeed, the Advent 2 sermon was given from the aisle with no notes (a new experience for me, and a surprisingly positive one), so the manuscript is really just what I handed in in homiletics class and was the starting point for my oral prep.

Advent 2
Advent 3

A Tale of Botched Science Reporting -and/or- A Plea to Headline Writers

2010-12-02T17:05:00.006-06:00

If I'm understanding it correctly, then I'm massively disappointed with how someone (Gizmodo? headline writers?) is shaping reports of NASA's new findings on Gammaproteobacteria GFAJ-1. The first release I read, by Gizmodo at Wired Science via an excerpt on Episcopal Café (I love my church), made it sound like a life form had been discovered in Mono Lake whose biochemical makeup included arsenic in the places we expect phosphorus to be.

Not so, explains a second post on Wired Science by Rachel Ehrenberg of Science News. Researchers believe they have coaxed the bacteria to replace phosphorus with arsenic. The actual situation is still pretty mind-blowing but much more modest than we'd been originally led to believe (apparently Tom Faber commenting on Episcopal Café's Facebbok page has since also caught the error). Here's the NYT's take:

The bacterium, scraped from the bottom of Mono Lake in California and grown for months in a lab mixture containing arsenic, gradually swapped out atoms of phosphorus in its little body for atoms of arsenic.

I'm usually not concerned with "Who's to blame?!" in these situations, but I just spent ten minutes thinking the universe was vastly different from what we thought it was. And now I find out that, well, some people working in a lab think that maybe it might be that way and have compiled some evidence based on a clever experiment. Again, this is still a mind-blowing piece of science news, but the ball has definitely been dropped, journalistically.

So who is to blame? Well, it may be that Gizmodo just didn't write a very good article. But if you go over to the NASA press release, I think you may find that the culprit could be who the culprit almost always is in these situations: the damn headline writer. Sure, the release itself starts with the outsized claim, "NASA-funded astrobiology research has changed the fundamental knowledge about what comprises all known life on Earth." But then it immediately makes clear that the new life form is "able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic." That, in my opinion, is a far cry from the reality touted in the headline: "NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical." At the very least, it should be "NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Capable of Rebuilding Itself With Toxic Chemical."

To go back to Gizmodo: Yes, "This changes everything." But not quite so massively as it would have if they actually "discovered" (instead of, more accurately, "built") "a completely new life form" that, when the experiment started, was a completely ordinary life form with an intriguing habitat and a possibly novel biochemical ability.

My guess is that it started with the misleading NASA headline. How many times do we have to make that mistake? Editors: please, please, please, let your writers suggest the headline. Doing otherwise is just asking to embarrass yourself...and to dash the hopes of excited science geeks.

Update (In Words and Pictures)

2010-11-28T20:54:00.008-06:00

A lot has happened in the past few weeks. Here are the ultra-highlights:

(1) I became a godfather. The new Christian in question is Josiah William Paul Kradel, son of my dear friends Adam Kradel and Melissa Wilcox. The baptism took place at Adam's parish, Christ Church in Media, PA. It was a special day. I was struck in particular by the very real connection I felt not just with little Josiah but also with my fellow godparents. That's us, with Adam (collar) and Melissa (right of Josiah).

(2) I ran the Marine Corps Marathon. This was also a really great experience. I will be eternally grateful to my friend and training partner Josiah Rengers (lots of Josiahs in my life), who kept me motivated and talked me through the hamstring cramps that set in as we hit the Pentagon parking lot. Strangest part: the eerie isolation of mile 20, above the Potomac on the 14th Street Bridge. I think there may be more of these in my future. That's us with fellow runners Katie and Lara in our VTS Fighting Friars shirts.

(3) [Not a highlight in the positive sense:] The VTS chapel was destroyed by fire. Many of my colleagues have written movingly about what the chapel meant to us. What I eventually settled on is this: The thing I appreciated most about our little mismatched chapel is that it accepted you where you were. I find the austere Georgian/Colonial style so prevalent around here to be really alienating; it's as if at any second Jonathon Edwards might just ascend the pulpit and preach damnation at me. I much prefer the stone and Gothic Revival more typical of an Anglo-Catholic parish, but for me the space can be almost too transcendent. If I've got an off-hours need for a prayer chapel, a parish whose Sunday worship is like being in heaven throughout the service is probably gonna be overkill. But VTS's Immanuel Chapel did not put on any airs. It was a great place to pray late at night, and it was the perfect place to worship after my grandmother died last year, when all I wanted to do was sit in the back of the balcony and silently lean on my classmates and teachers doing the work of the liturgy for me. I will miss worshiping in a place that was so honest about its own imperfections. And I will miss the Miriam Window.

(4) I wrote some music. Well, I harmonized some music. I'm currently taking Advanced Musicianship at VTS, and it has been a great way to reconnect with my long-dormant jazz training. My final project was to reharmonize a hymn, so I took a few liberties with the Advent plainsong chant Conditor alme siderum ("Creator of the Stars of Night"). My favorite reaction came from my friend Carl: "That's a lot of half-step motion. I think you would've gotten burned at the stake for that."

We're entering finals mode around here, so it may be more radio silence from me for a few weeks, aside from posting the sermons I'll preach at St. John's on 2 and 3 Advent. Exciting upcoming travel includes Milwaukee for Christmas and Rome for January term. Stay tuned!

Sermon: "How do we solve the sandwich?"

2010-10-18T15:13:00.004-05:00

I preached my five-minute sermon on Mark 5:21-43 today in homiletics class. I share it below in case (like at least one person I know) you enjoy reading sermons online at every possible moment. Note that it was written for and preached solely to an academic audience; I understand that the very premise of "solving the sandwich" wouldn't fly in a congregation ("who cares!"), at least not without a lot more legwork.

My one other word of introduction is that I think I belong (at least for the time being) to the school of homiletical thought that says a sermon should be inductive, allowing the hearer to "problem solve" along with you and arrive at his or her own conclusions as you go. This is apparently the position associated with Fred Craddock and excerpted nicely here in Tom Long's The Witness of Preaching:

Taken as a whole, then, the sermon form proposed by Craddock is an attempt to organize the flow of the sermon so that it "corresponds to the way people ordinarily experience reality and to the way life's problem-solving activity goes on naturally and casually." (125)*

* In this light, I couldn't help but think about my attraction to exegesis and preaching as looking a lot like my attraction to science and engineering. See Thomas Kuhn's "Normal Science as Puzzle Solving" in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

My way of thinking about this issue is that every sermon is a "teaching sermon" in that every sermon (okay, maybe most sermons) ought to be modeling how we as Christians (indeed, as particular kinds of critically thinking Christians) engage the Biblical text.

So, without further ado...

--------------------------------------------------------------

“How do we solve the sandwich?” This is the question I always find myself asking in Mark. He includes these “intercalations,” where one story is inserted into another, no less than nine times. In a gospel with so much forward momentum, why all this interruption and doubling back? What do we make of this surely intentional storyteller's device? Let's search for some clues about the theological importance of this particular Markan sandwich.

We could start by examining the two main characters, who are a study in contrast. Jairus is named and well-known, male, a religious and community leader (5:22), a person empowered to action. The bleeding woman is anonymous, female, a patient and a victim, almost certainly shunned by the likes of Jairus for her uncleanness (25) and probably taken advantage of by doctors legitimate and otherwise (26). They couldn't be more different, these two, and yet notice where they end up: in turn, meek and mighty each fall at the feet of Jesus (22, 33). Perhaps the sandwich, then, serves to remind us that “God shows no partiality” (Romans 2:11). Both are worthy of Jesus's mercy.

Another approach might be to look carefully at the role of faith in each story. Despite his relative social empowerment, Jairus is the picture of passivity in the faith department. Before we know it, he's just part of the crowd, along for the ride as the throng “presses in on” on the healer headed for his home (24). In contrast to the woman, who reaches out to Jesus on her own initiative and receives his healing power as a result of her faith in action (34), Jairus requires a little encouragement: “Do not fear,” Jesus tells him, “only believe” (36). Perhaps the sandwich encourages us to aim for the faith of the woman at its center, but reassures us that, in the end, grace abounds, and those of us with a more marginal faith will nevertheless receive the saving help we need.

Let me propose a third option. Suppose that, at least stylistically, there is no sandwich. What if Mark is constantly interrupting the narrative because that's just the way things tended to go when Jesus was out among the people? What if the way these two stories comment on one another is to emphasize that Jesus, unlike the disciples, never suffers from tunnel vision? What would that mean for our lives of discipleship?

Well for starters, and this is the hard part, I think it suggests a motto for our lives as ministers. It's a motto you'll recognize if you join us for the fourth installment of our Harry Potter marathon on Saturday night. It's the motto of Alastor “Mad-Eye” Moody, a hot-shot hunter of evil wizards. The motto is this: “CONSTANT VIGILANCE.” The symbol of his vigilance is his magical left eye, which can rotate a full 360-degrees and see through both walls and the back of his own head. Now, I believe Jesus's instant awareness “that power had gone forth from him” (30) is suggestive of his own constant vigilance: a caring attention to the needs of those around him. As ministers, our own attempts at a Christ-like constancy should always be open to finding the needs of the world in places we wouldn't expect and at times that may not be convenient us. A magical eye sure would help.

Now, this sounds like exhausting news at best, and an unachievable standard to live up to. But suppose again that there really is no sandwich, that Mark's meandering storytelling is simply indicative of God's alertness and persistence and compassionate concern for the needs of all God's children. Then the good news for us and for the those we minister to is that the love of Christ cannot be contained. It is effusive, a cup overflowing, a story that cannot help but meander, an all-seeing eye that longingly but tirelessly seeks us out. And though there will be days when our finite attention narrows or our tired eyes droop closed, we can rest assured in the knowledge that God's never will.

Post-Columbus-Day Prayer

2010-10-12T08:14:00.005-05:00

One of my colleagues from the VTS Native American Heritage Month committee distributed this prayer this morning. It was published by the Native American Ministries Office of the Episcopal Church. I thought it did a fairly nice job of addressing what is problematic about Columbus Day in a positive and understated manner:

CREATOR, we give you thanks for all you are and all you bring to us for our visit within your creation.

In Jesus, you place the Gospel in the Center of this Sacred Circle through which all of creation is related. You show us the way to live a generous and compassionate life,

Give us your strength to live together with respect and commitment as we grow in your spirit, for you are God, now and forever. AMEN.

I'm Not A Marathoner...

2010-10-02T09:05:00.003-05:00

...but I'm getting close. Yesterday my training partner (the unflappable Josiah Rengers) and I hit the pavement at 5:15 a.m. and did our longest training run to date. We're about a month out from the Marine Corps Marathon and, after a shorter long run next weekend, will start to taper in earnest. It's been an almost uniformly positive experience.

What I was reminded of yesterday was how significant the mental challenge of these long runs can be. Before our last one, which was about eighteen miles, I didn't know what there was to be afraid of. Most of my long runs has gone really well, so I approached this one very upbeat. It didn't turn out so hot (stomach problems, caloric problems), and so yesterday I was kind of a wreck early on. It definitely helped to be with someone who's been through all this several times before.

As much as I love the solitude of running, I'd have to say my biggest piece of training advice is to find a training partner you like spending time with. Preferably one who's already an accomplished runner and with the pastoral skills of a soon-to-be priest. Perhaps that leaves a small pool of candidates. I guess I'll just count my blessings, and the last month's worth of miles.

I'm Not A Poet...

2010-10-02T08:56:00.003-05:00

...but I play one in homiletics class. Here's my poetic/midrashic take on Mark 5. Was this poem largely an excuse to write something in iambic pentameter? Yes. But I do really wonder about what it must have felt like for the disciples to be constantly thinking narrow-mindedly only to be rebuked (in words or, as in this case, silently) by a Lord who is always several steps ahead of them. Maybe I wonder about it because it's such a familiar feeling.

A knot between my shoulder blades had inched
Its way from left to right from dawn 'til noon.
And I, for one, the last to disembark,
Had suspected we'd depart again so soon.

It seemed to be our master's way to wear
Our welcome thin with just a single cure.
At least this time he'd cast away a legion
'Ere we casted off again for the western shore.

But still, that afternoon of inching back
Did little to improve my state of mind.
Had I known The Way included so much rowing,
I'd suspect I'd not have left my nets behind.

So shoulder strain and pent up irritation
Came with me as I joined the evening's throng
And jostled just behind the troubled Jairus,
Whose synagogue, en mass, followed along.

En route there was an incident of sorts.
(In hindsight, though, it wasn't incidental.)
What's kept that run-in fresh for me years later
Is that I could be so cold, and him, so gentle.

At first he asked the crowd which one had touched him—
I asked him how and why he hoped to know—
And then, in fear and trembling, came a woman
Who for twelve years spent and suffered, with naught to show.

“It's not good for you to be here,” I'd have shouted,
Since the rules were clear despite her desperate cries.
But before I spoke I glanced in his direction
And glimpsed the sea of mercy in his eyes.

What I've Been Up To Instead Of Unpacking

2010-09-12T21:21:00.002-05:00

One of my new leadership positions at VTS is forum coordinator. Part of this job involves inviting famous people (most of whom will turn us down, but a few of whom won't) to come to campus for cheap and give talks during the lunch hour. Part of this job involves recruiting VTS students, faculty, and staff to do the same thing for free. The rest of this job is logistics.

Now, I like logistics. It's (They're?) kinda what I studied in grad school. But this job is taking over my life. I'm cautiously optimistic that my early time investment in a new system will pay off as the year creeps on (thanks, Paul). Let's hope so. Otherwise all I'll have to show for it is this lousy Web site.

Tired grumbling aside, I do think that www.vtsforums.org is gonna make my job a lot easier, and it was actually quite a bit of fun to do. It had been over a year since I'd played around with Google Apps (see the suspiciously similar www.stfrancisuw.org, www.diomil.org, and www.stjameswb.org, as well as previous posts), and I discovered several nifty new features. I still think this tool is one of the best things going for Web sites that are functional, free, and maintainable by non-experts. In particular, I highly recommend it to churches on a budget.

CSC Ethos Scores Scholarship

2010-09-12T21:07:00.005-05:00

I recently got some glad tidings about a scholarship I applied for back in the spring. The award is given in memory of Anne McNair Kumpuris, and in their note her parents told me they thought their deighter "would have appreciated [my] view on life." It's a view that's been largely teased out on this blog, so it seemed appropriate to post the principal essay here. Enjoy:

One important ah-ha moment that came in a very different setting from where I am today but continues to shape my life occurred during my junior year of college. As part of a history of science class, I was reading about Danish physicist Niels Bohr. Bohr was influential in developing what came to be known as quantum mechanics, a subject I studied in some depth as an undergrad and then graduate student in engineering physics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But the moment itself came as I worked through a piece on Bohr's philosophy. What I already knew about Bohr was that he'd changed physics through one simple but daring mental leap. Scientists were currently arguing about the nature of light, whether it was a wave or a particle. For decades, they'd been successfully studying it under the assumption that it was a wave. The wave hypothesis had great explanatory power, and there was no real doubt that it was true. However, a series of key experiments then came along and seemed just as unambiguously to show that light is, in fact, a particle. Bohr was the one who forced us to get our heads around the fact that it is both; light behaves as a particle or as a wave depending on the way you observe it, the way your experiment aims to study it. Previously, it hadn't occurred to anyone that this was even an option. The idea is part of what came to be known as the “Copenhagen Interpretation” of quantum mechanics, and Bohr abstracted it into the slogan that would eventually end up on his Coat of Arms: contraria sunt complementa (“opposites are complementary”).

As I read this article on how Bohr applied “a general lesson to be drawn from quantum mechanics” to other fields of study, I noticed a vague but palpable sense of excitement building up inside me. Sitting on a beat-up blue couch in a crummy college apartment, I began reinterpreting whole swathes of my life and studies. I had ideas for research papers, a new understanding of my church and it's dual Catholic-Protestant identity, and some much-needed affirmation that my trying to keep up with honors humanities coursework during engineering school could be fruitful and worthwhile. There were many new facts before me, but the resounding force was more like an emotional understanding: the fact that reality is inherently multifaceted felt right to me, like few things in my life had ever felt. It's an idea that I've in some sense staked my life to, and it's one of the forces that brought my spiritual life into balance with my intellectual life and eventually gave me the courage to leave my Ph.D. program in engineering and head to seminary.

I've learned a few things about the Bohrs of the theological world since coming to Virginia. I've seen contraria sunt complementa at work in the early church rejecting the Diatessaron (the gospel harmony that eliminated the distinct, multifaceted witness of four separate gospels), the Council of Nicea affirming the dual nature of Christ as both fully human and fully divine, and Thomas Aquinas's ingenious philosophical method of engaging the tension between two apparently contradictory truths. Time after time, God prods us into acknowledging that this world we live in is stubbornly resistant to oversimplified or monolithic thinking. It's there in the doctrine of the Trinity and in our Anglican via media and in the sub-microscopic phenomena that I think a little bit less about these days than that morning four years ago. As I reflect on that strange day in my life, I realize the Holy Spirit must really have been with me if today I can sit at my desk at Virginia Theological Seminary and write that—at least in some sense—everything I learned in seminary I learned first from Niels Bohr.

Back on the Hill

2010-09-01T10:23:00.002-05:00

The good news about this year's dorm room: more living space. The bad news: less closet space. It's going to be a long day or two. But not just yet. I've got a Web project to finish that I hope to be able to announce soon!

King Jed

2010-08-31T09:55:00.004-05:00

I'm in Media, PA, visiting my friends Adam Kradel (Rector of Christ Church, Media) and Melissa Wilcox (former chaplain at St. Francis House). And this is their youngest son, Josiah. I just had to share.

In case you're keeping score at home: After meeting the vestry of my new field ed parish outside of Baltimore (St. John's, Ellicott City), I will finally be arriving back in Alexandria late tonight. Looking forward to no longer living out of a suitcase. At least until Friday, when I leave for New Haven for the holiday.

Preacher Man, Part 2

2010-08-29T19:14:00.003-05:00

Madison was, as always, a delight. (The Twitter feed is probably a good summary of my weekend there, in case you're interested.) I still remember visiting Madison during my senior year of high school and saying to my girlfriend, "Man, I can't believe we're going to get to live here for four years." It turned out to be seven in my case, and I still can't believe it. In particular, Madison is an amazing city to run in, and I got my money's worth on Friday. I also got to catch part of a former colleague's Ph.D. defense and another's oral examination practice; turns out I've forgotten a lot of nuclear engineering material already. Other than that, Wisconsin micro-brews were consumed, stories were told, and good times were had.

Also, this sermon was preached. Thanks for having me, St. Andrew's!

Preacher Man (Two-Week Stint)

2010-08-23T09:12:00.004-05:00

Yesterday I preached at Trinity Church, my home parish of many years. It was a really positive experience: a warm welcome from familiar faces, good feedback from parishioners and clergy, and a wonderful liturgy besides. The highlight of the morning was definitely the vestry member "faith story of the week," which had us all in tears at the late service.

Interestingly, it turns out that half the retired Protestant clergy in Wauwatosa (Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians) attend Trinity, which made for some interesting conversations in the "receiving line," or whatever we call it. On the whole, though, the lay feedback was much more specific and useful than that from all these retired pastors. The moral of the story: Trinity is a healthy, thriving, and appealing place to be right now. I'm so glad.

If you're interested in having a look, here's a link to the PDF. Bill says the audio will also make it here at some point.

Next week: St. Andrew's in Madison. The service times are 8 and 9:30. The texts?: "a sort of a progressive Miss Manners." Should be interesting.

Home Again, Home Again

2010-08-16T09:26:00.004-05:00

Well, the summer of CPE is behind me, and I'm back in Wisconsin for a couple of weeks off. I'm sure I'll have some more summative thoughts on New York, the hospital, and the summer in general, but for now I've got sermons to write and a school year to plan for (and geeky, biblical procrastination endeavors [think open-source BibleWorks] to engage in). I'm preaching at Trinity Episcopal Church in Wauwatosa on 8/22 and St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Madison on 8/29. Feel free to come check it out if you're interested in what this life I'm signing up for is (partly) about!

In the meantime, it's good to be home. I've picked a good temporary office, no?

My On-Call Week Reflection Paper

2010-07-18T17:17:00.002-05:00

What have I learned and seen during my week of being in the hospital for seven days in a row?

I've learned you don’t have to be a cantor to leaf through a hymnal and sing to a woman who’s used music to keep her going through twenty-some years of cancer treatment. I've learned you don’t have to be a fiery prayer giver to mean a lot to an elderly Baptist woman (a psalter and, more importantly, a warm hand will do). I've learned you don’t have to be a Rabbi (or even Jewish) to feel inescapably moved to sing the Shema to a scared and dying man alone in a too-quiet ICU room.

I’ve seen patients, families, and caregivers disagree vehemently about end-of-life care, sometimes selfishly and sometimes -lessly. I’ve seen paranoid and uncooperative patients who want to triangulate the hell out of you still needing and able to accept (in their own way) the care you offer. I’ve seen communities of faith and communities of a city block be the kind of lifeline that St. Paul and the Deuteronomist dreamed they could be. I’ve seen a patient who hadn’t spoken for a week (and who I assumed would never speak again) tell me how he likes to look out his window at the river. I’ve seen what a gift high-strength pain relievers are for people who live their lives in constant, excruciating pain.

A lot of these things I’d learned and seen before. Some I hope I’ll never encounter again. But I think the value of experiencing it all in so short a time was to see the enormity of what even a very inexperienced chaplain can do to help in just one week, albeit an unusually long one. For me, the great paradox of this job is that we can do so little and yet we accomplish so much. It seems algebraicly impossible. It’s the kind of heavenly math that—despite all the psychologizing and pastoral toolkits and mnemonic devices and hospital procedures and scholarly articles—reminds you that the Holy Spirit is very much at work here, somewhere.

I Write (/Think) Like...

2010-07-17T09:45:00.004-05:00

I recently plugged a couple graphs of my review of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (excluding quotations, of course) into the Web site I Write Like. The humorous and perhaps unsurprising result was that I apparently write like David Foster Wallace: http://iwl.me/s/d7939cdb

Granted, I've always written in a childishly DFW-esque way; that's part of why an old writing teacher of mine recommended him to me. But I also find that an author's style will sorta bleed over into my own style--and, more disturbingly, into my internal monologue--when I finish reading a book.

Is this a common experience? I'm wondering if this shows up in book reviews often. The only time I've noticed it, actually, is in other reviews of books by David Foster Wallace. I also wonder what will happen when I finish my current book, Barbara Kingsolver's Poisonwood Bible, which changes point of view (and therefore voice) every chapter. I'm preparing for a narratively schizophrenic couple of days in my head.

Thanks, Matt, for passing this tool along!

Hundred-Word Highlights

2010-07-09T17:20:00.005-05:00

Our official mid-unit evaluation day at CPE took place on Tuesday, which means my time in New York is more than halfway done. One of my late-emerging CPE learning goals is to be more concise when speaking and writing, so let me offer a few hundred-or-so-word highlights of my time here. Here's some of why I love CPE and New York in general.

The Radios

I do not lead with this item lightly. My off-hours life in the Upper West Side and West Harlem is blessed by the presence of countless people engaged in one of the few cheap recreational activities New York offers: sitting outside listening to boomboxes. Maybe I just miss my parents' backyard, where this activity comprises a fair chunk of my family's time together. Or maybe there's no better soundtrack to summer than Michael and Marvin (in Harlem) and endless salsa (on Columbus south of Morningside). Plus—in a New York moment I can't believe I've now experienced—one night I heard someone very appropriately rocking LL Cool J about a block from my house. I don't think I could live without it either, LL.

The Markets

Not that I missed grocery shopping all that much, but among my pining for Madison apartment life during a year in a suburban dorm room was the occasional desire to be back at Regent Market Co-op, picking up groceries on the walk home from St. Andrew's. Well let me tell you, RMC (unsurprisingly) can't hold a candle to the likes of New York markets like Fairway (“Like No Other Market,” indeed almost otherworldly) and the more modest Westside Market (still frickin' beautiful). New York markets have so much delicious food crammed into so little square-footage that I'm surprised none have collapsed into some sort of gastronomic black hole.

The Multi-faith Chaplaincy

My short list of complaints with Virginia Theological Seminary includes what one of my classmates calls “the orthodoxy wars.” Think of it as an omnipresent, just-below-the-surface tension that descends on practically any conversation of theological import. This is in many ways a good thing. It's the result of bringing together opinionated and highly intelligent Episcopalians and other Anglicans from across the theological and political spectra to teach and learn at a deliberately centrist institution. It can be fun and a tremendous learning experience. But it's also exhausting. I'm so grateful for this summer in the hospital, for the opportunity to recharge my spiritual batteries via an experience founded on the goodwill that results from people of different faiths coming together to do work that is, let's be honest, far more important than systematic theology.

The LGBT Pride

Check out Kristin's post and pictures for much better coverage. I would add that it was incredibly moving to hear the passion in the various parade-side emcees' voices as they gratefully announced the approach of the Diocese of New York's marchers (and float!). It's quite something to walk through the Village in the Pride parade and be thanked for being part of a church that (at least in some places) was welcoming LGBT folks back when practically no churches were. I also picked up a little New York gem: People say “Happy Pride” the same way they would greet each other on holidays (as in—to choose a not-at-all random example—“Happy Thanksgiving”). The whole thing was a tremendous experience that I felt really privileged to be a part of (including, unexpectedly, as a substitute acolyte at the St. Luke's Festive Choral Evensong that night).

The Prominent Judaism

As I've alluded to previously, only a couple of books have changed my life of faith more profoundly than Harvey Cox's Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey Through the Jewish Year. Well, I've now shared a fair bit of common prayer with both the many Jewish patients I serve in the hospital and with my fellow CPE chaplain interns, three of the four of whom are Jewish. In fact, at 8:11 this evening, Kristin and I will help light Shabbat candles with the latter up near Jewish Theological Seminary. I can't overstate what a joy it has been to be a part of so many lunches of comparative-theological exploration, so much shared ministry (a touchy word in this context, but my colleagues have encouraged me to go with it), and so much mutual affection. (I'm also totally excited to live and work within the truly massive Manhattan Eruv. I can't really explain my strange fascination with this theologically rich enclosure.)

The Soccer

My past three weekends have revolved around multiple viewings of a sport I spent a lot of my life hating, and I couldn't be happier. Yes, perhaps the greatest highlight of all has been watching soccer in a wide assortment of Manhattan drinking establishments with a rabid Germany fan I happen to be quite fond of. While die Mannschaft can sadly do no better than third place and the Americans squandered a golden opportunity in a lopsided bracket, I'll count this year's Cup as a success because I'm now hooked on an exciting, beautiful, even sexy sport I've spent too long ignoring.

Soccer in the Hospital

2010-06-24T21:02:00.002-05:00

Kristin has a new post up about soccer in the port. The soccer-aiding-chaplaincy factor is definitely present in the hospital as well. I met one cancer patient yesterday who is almost always asleep when I swing by. They were saving her a seat for the U.S.-Algeria match, though. She told me she's more of a tennis fan (speaking of which, holy smokes) but that she'd really gotten into the World Cup. Nice to be able to high-five a serious leukemia patient, even if it is over a last-second goal rather than a more important piece of good news.

Come to think of it, the World Cup was probably on in 85-90% of the patient rooms I was in today during match hours. I guess there's not much else of value on TV during the day, but still...I think Kristin's right about the U.S. continuing to catch soccer fever.

Newbie Soccer Thoughts

2010-06-13T17:14:00.005-05:00

I am a systems person; I enjoy watching new systems in action and trying to figure out what makes them tick. I'm also, as one of my CPE supervisors pointed out to me this week, an associative person; I like making connections between seemingly disparate things (both a blessing and a curse in the CPE context, let me tell you).

As such, I've had a field day--or would it be a pitch day?--watching World Cup games this weekend with my my über-enthusiastic, half-German girlfriend. I've been dipping my toes into soccer's waters off and on since the last Cup, but it's starting to get a bit more serious. Among the questions I've been pondering are the following: why don't more Americans like soccer, and am I allowed to support* Germany in the plausible event that Germany and the U.S. meet in the Round of 16 (apparently it would happen if Germany wins its group and the U.S. takes second in its, or vice versa)?

Regarding the former, my working hypothesis is built on the lens of looking at the two most dominant presences on the American sports landscape: football** (it dominates our current sports culture; we can't get enough of it) and baseball (it dominated our past sports culture; we're slowly abandoning it). I'm coming to the conclusion that soccer is more like baseball than football. It's subtler. It requires the fan to have a greater appreciation of small details and a more patient orientation toward brief, intense action rather than the throb of regular scoring. And, just like in the game where the best players only succeed about a third of the time, soccer doesn't always reward brute effort. Kristin caught this telling gem in the Times this morning: "It was a characteristic American effort, full of resolve[***] instead of beauty."

This comment actually sort of leads me to my second question. Many people rightly sing the praises of international soccer's coolest attribute: that the teams' styles often mirror their national personalities. And a major reason I want to support Germany in this tournament is that they play, well, like Germans: organized, patient, attentive to detail. Somewhere around the tenth minute today, I said, "They look like they're spending more of their energy thinking than playing." Like a Bo Ryan basketball team, they're patient, plotting, and sometimes plodding. They're like my parent's Volkswagon Cabrio, which was a humorous and kinda futile attempt at a midlife-crisis car. They're not a sexy pick. They're a sensible one. Sounds like my kinda team.

My problem is this: I'm not so sure we get to pick our loyalties. I grew up a Pirates fan because I lived in the town in Florida where they Spring Trained (this was before the Marlins). And then, when I moved to Milwaukee, I became a Brewers fan. "Root, root, root for the home team" is not easily dismissed in my sports worldview. I think Americans who have spent substantial time in countries that actually care about soccer are well within their rights to transfer their allegiances abroad. But that's not me. Am I stuck with Team USA until they're out?

What do you think about sports allegiances? Do we get to be primarily aligned with the team that makes us say, "I like they way they play"? Or is there something bigger at stake?

* Pitch instead of field and support instead of root for are among the charming vocabulary upgrades you get when you watch soccer (others: match instead of the more pedestrian game and side instead of team, which is fun even though the connotations are troubling). But see below for a major vocabulary pet peeve.

** If you are an American living in America and have not spent significant time in a foreign country (that's context information your hearers usually have), please don't call soccer football. Don't get me wrong, I think it's kind of obnoxious and typically American that we call our much more provincial game by the same name that everybody else (more accurately) uses for the world's most popular sport. But you only confuse things when, as an American having a conversation in America, you use the non-American convention. Not only is it confusing, it's kinda obnoxious. It's like insisting on calling the theater the theatre, spelling gray with an e, or putting periods and commas outside of quotation marks: nice idea, classier perhaps, but you're in the wrong country. I want to be British too--that doesn't give me license to punctuate or spell as if I were.

*** Even I can see that this is why an America-Germany matchup will just be a train wreck. The Americans will be stubbornly flying all over the pitch wearing themselves out while the Germans very patiently pass the hell out of the ball and dissect their opponents' feeble defense (especially if Howard is out).

Brief Review of Brief Interviews

2010-05-30T15:11:00.005-05:00

I've written a fair bit on this blog about one of my top two or three favorite authors, David Foster Wallace. I'm hoping to use this summer's respite from required reading to finally finish slogging through his rather daunting catalogue. Of the three books that remained for me, I decided to start with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I think the requisite "acclaim for" pages in the softcover version nail it pretty well, especially the blurb from Time's R. Z. Sheppard:

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men is meant to interrogate the reader, to elicit fresh responses to horrors that have lost their edge in the age of information overload . . . It displays a range of intellect and talent that is unseemly for any one writer to have, let alone show off.

My only quibble with Sheppard's assessment is his implication that Wallace is showing off. I mean, maybe. But I think the truth is probably more innocent and more tragic. I think he's simply trying as hard as his prodigious talents will allow him. I think more than just about anywhere else in the Wallace canon (at least the 85% or so that I've encountered), Brief Interviews is where Wallace fesses up to what seems to account for some or perhaps most of why he writes. Things come to a head in Pop Quiz 9 of "Octet," which begins, "You* are, unfortunately, a fiction writer" (145).

Ironically, there's no fiction to be found in PQ9, because it's where Wallace lays out, in agonizingly self-conscious detail, what he's up in "Octet" and--as Sheppard points out--in pretty much the entire book. The piece isn't working as he intended, he comes out and tells us, and so urgent is his desire to quote-unquote bare his soul** regarding the apparently undefinable thematic backbone of the Pop Quizzes that he decides to "address the reader directly and ask her straight out whether she's feeling anything like what you feel" (154).

I frequently get the impression that Wallace haters think all his formal acrobatics are just some tiring attempt to be cute. I think they couldn't be more wrong. As I said, I think he's concentrating really, really hard. And, to borrow from Dave Marsh's characterization of Aretha Franklin in "Respect": "[Wallace] when [he's] concentrating is as good as it gets" (Heart of Rock and Soul, 10). Here's his description of his own desperation in resorting to this fourth-wall-breaking ploy, "which in the late 1990s, when even Wes Craven is cashing in on metafictional self-reference, might come off lame and tired and facile, and also runs the risk of compromising the queer urgency about whatever it is you feel you want the pieces to interrogate in whoever's reading them" (146, emphasis his):

The trick to this solution is that you'd have to be 100% honest. Meaning not just sincere but almost naked. Worse than naked -- more like unarmed. Defenseless. 'This thing I feel, I can't name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?' -- this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it's perilously close to 'Do you like me? Please like me,' which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene. In fact one of the very last few interpersonal taboos we have is this kind of obscenely naked direct interrogation of somebody else [Ten years later we have an abbreviation for the self-revelation that rhetorically must accompany such prying: TMI. ~KMO]. It looks pathetic and desperate. That's how it'll look to the reader. And it will have to. There's no way around it. If you step out and ask her what and whether she's feeling, there can't be anything coy or performative or sham-honest-so-she'll-like-you about it. That'd kill it outright. Do you see? Anything less than completely naked helpless pathetic sincerity and you're right back in the pernicious conundrum. You'll have to come to her 100% hat in hand. (154)

This is the sentiment at the heart of all the material I've found most compelling and heartbreaking--but also the most deeply reassuring--about Wallace's work. For more of what I mean, see the painfully self-conscious Dean or President or Provost or whoever in Infinite Jest (my copy is currently missing or I'd name him for you). Or see that scene in IJ where he's talking about all the things you learn in AA or the halfway house and there's like four or five pages of semicoloned subclauses that just make me want to weep because they so thoroughly finger the jagged grain of each of our darkest secrets and most relentless insecurities. Or see, for the closest thing to PQ9's direct and explicit desperation, the "intertextual quotation[s]" that contain "the really urgent stuff" as part of the "multivalent defamiliarization-flourish or some such shit" in "Joseph Frank's Dostoevsky" (Consider the Lobster, 271).

The reason Sheppard's show off misses the mark is that Wallace's decision is ultimately a move of deep humility:

[I]t's not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe the literary artist who wrote what they're reading is when they sit down to try to escape the insoluble flux of themselves and enter a world of prearranged meaning. Rather it's going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you do . . . more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine to be clean and dry and radiant of command presence and unwavering conviction as he coordinates the whole campaign from ack at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ.*** (159-160)

In the end, Wallace knows all he can do is ask us to think about it: "So decide" he concludes (160). I will be forever puzzled by the people who decide he's simply putting up a front.

------------------------

* In all of these pop quizzes, we're asked to make an ethical judgement or some other decision about one or more of the characters or situations in a short sketch. The sketch of PQ9 is of a writer writing an octet of quizzes (this "Octet" of quizzes, as it were), and so the implicit quiz question is something like "What would you do in my situation?" Thus, it's important to be clear about the pronoun antecedents in these quotations: "you"--the reader of the Pop Quiz--are Wallace himself.

** See B.I. #20 and much of PQ9 on how we all get reduced to such banalities when we really drill down deep into the big-insights-into-the-human-condition layers of personal experience and attempted expression.

*** I wonder if being a good priest/pastor/preacher is perhaps analogous to learning--to use Wallace's terms as he's developed them here--when to be a reader and when to be a Writer, or more appropriately just a writer. I think the great emphasis on cultivating self-knowledge as part of priestly formation is so we can learn to see and get some kind of handle on which of these two impulses is most strongly informing whatever bit of priestly advice bubbles up for us in a particular situation. I.e., "In recommending X, am I actually just responding to the way this situation pokes at my own insecurities, or do I have the kind of critical distance that surely almost all of us need in order to be truly open to the guidance of the Holy Spirit?" Of course, theologically and rhetorically, the ability and desire to relate to fellow human beings as Wallace's reader rather than his Writer is also really important. Most of us know a seemingly 100% Writer-priest or -pastor, and there's a good chance he or she is not very effective.

Kyle's Blogging Tips (80% of which are too specific to be useful)

2010-05-28T11:37:00.007-05:00

I am probably the worst kind of blogger (OK, maybe not the worst kind: see Exhibits A, B, and C). I know a lot about blogs (I used to evaluate them for Newstex) and about blogging best practices (having edited many words on the subject), but I don't put that knowledge to very good use. For better and worse, I primarily write posts that explore rather vague and abstract notions of complementarity and wholeness, because these are ideas that seem central to my life/work/ministry/interests (it's hard to resist the forward slash when your life/work/ministry/interests have something vaguely and abstractly to do with complementarity and wholeness).

Thus, CSC has a theme but no focused topic, except maybe the worst topic any writer can have: him- or herself (e.g., the experiment with video blogging to keep in touch during my first year of seminary, regarding which experiment: thanks for all the good feedback this year, friends). Prompted by a couple of recent incidents (a retweet by David Meerman Scott of my post about BEA and then a very minor burst of secondary exposure on Twitter because David also mentioned in another tweet that I was the one who filmed this video), I took a look at the CSC stats today to try to glean what (silly) tips I might have for bloggers (silly because, for the reasons outlined above [and more], this blog is no example to follow). Here goes:

Name your blog after a snobby Latin expression. Almost all of my traffic from Google comes from people searching for the phrase "Contraria Sunt Complementa," presumably trying to figure out what it means. Sorry, y'all, I'm afraid you'll find only very opaque, inductive help here (I guess with the exception of my first post, which actually does do a decent definitional job and is--probably not coincidentally--my most popular post).
Know some important bloggers. I know two, sorta: David Meerman Scott--whom I rather shamelessly mention here from time to time and who as I said has been very kind with comments, retweets, etc.--and Freakonomics co-author Steven J. Dubner. OK, I don't actually know Steven J. Dubner, but I know (and currently live with) his pirate-obsessed research assistant, Ryan Hagen. And Ryan once saw my post about the Wikipedia article for "real life," which in turn prompted a post about what fantasy is for. The h/t traffic from that post has made freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com my fourth-largest all-time referrer, although I now believe that stat to be skewed because of a rather hideous record-keeping blunder on my part (see No. 4 below).
Have lots of time off and/or periods of isolation and a desperate need for concrete goals during same. As the last two weeks have reminded me, I am--like Sports Night's Dana Whitaker--terrible at having "unstructured time on my hands." Blogging has typical been for me a great way to manufacture some structure. I first got into blogging during a summer when I lived with my aunt and uncle in Cold Spring, NY, worked a pretty mindless job as a totally unqualified assistant to a medical equipment company field engineer, and had pretty much no friends and nothing to do. I started this blog during a Christmas break from grad school, by which time most of the high school friends I still kept in touch with had stopped coming home for more than a couple of days at the holidays, and anyway my parents now live pretty far from "home," or at least where home used to be. Point being: I do my most productive blogging during long school breaks. I recommend getting some of those.
Keep your counter's URL information up to date. This one is only silly because it's sad, though it's also only a problem if you care about your visit stats. When I bought my own domain name about a year and a half ago, I went ahead and moved http://contrariasuntcomplementa.blogspot.com over to http://blog.kyleoliver.net. However, I failed to enter this piece of information into my profile over at Blog Counter. Thus, I have like sixteen months' worth of statistics wherein the only recorded visits are via an outdated URL. I only discovered this blunder when I checked to see how many people had visited the site after David's recent retweet of my post, only to discover that only one person had. David currently has 40,558 followers on Twitter, so that number seemed pretty unlikely. (If only tinyurl.com, which I use for all my tweeted links, offered statistics the way tiny.cc does. Perhaps I should switch my allegiance.)
Write about your adventures wrangling household bats. What can I say? My most popular post not about physics (or about BookExpo America, but see Nos. 2 and 4 above) is about my adventures trying to usher bats out of St. Francis House while working as the House Fellow there. I guess it was funny.

So there you have it, my probably-not-at-all-helpful blogging tips. By the way, in other news of blog traffic suddenly and rapidly expanded, the secret is now out (thanks to the enthusiastic and tech-savvy clergy and parishioners of New York's St. Luke in the Fields [the former parish of my favorite VTS professor, incidentally]) that my smart, observant, and unusual-adventure-having girlfriend, Kristin Saylor, blogs about life as a port chaplain, St. Luke's parishioner, Wisconsin transplant, and amateur urban anthropologist at Wisconsin meets NYC. Since the cat's out of the bag, I can now offer a whole-hearted recommendation. It's a highly entertaining read, and she's got lots of interesting insight on the challenges of port ministry.

(P.S.: Apologies to any cat bloggers, cat lovers, or cat blog lovers reading this. You all can and should continue to blog or read about whatever you want.)

A Lesson and Some Highlights from BookExpo America

2010-05-26T16:10:00.008-05:00

My friend David Meerman Scott was at the Wiley booth today at BookExpo America, signing copies of his new book, Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now. Since I now live in New York but haven't started working yet, I was able to attend. (David scored me a free pass. I was a John Wiley & Sons "Exhibitor Author," which made for a couple of initially awkward clarifications at other publishers' booths, since no conversation began without a subtle name-tag check.)

One thing I learned today: You really can come to know somebody pretty well without ever meeting him or her. I've been doing early-manuscript editorial work for David since the first edition ("1E," if I'm successfully extrapolating from an abbreviation I heard thrown around today to describe later editions) of his popular but "underrated" The New Rules of Marketing & PR. That's four years of reading "every word of every book that [he's] written for Wiley," he noted today. But because we got introduced via email by a mutual colleague (EContent's Michelle Manafy, who I've also worked for but never met), and because until now I've never lived in a city that's especially well trafficked by business speaker-authors, we've never had the chance to meet. And yet, after reading and deeply engaging with so much of his prose, it really did feel like I already knew him. I was highly encouraged by this realization, since I don't expect the trend of increasing numbers of "e-colleagues" to ever reverse itself.

Anyway, David, if you're reading this (and if you doubt that he is, I can only assume you've never read any of his books), thanks for getting me in to a really fun event. It was great to finally meet you.

What kind of loot did I come away with? Well, the highlight might be an autographed copy of Leo Tolstoy and Ben H. Winters's Android Karenina, from the publisher who brought us Pride and Prejudice and Zombies as well as Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. I confess that I've heard about but never (yet!) read one of these remixes, but I was pumped nevertheless. I also procured a signed copy of Colette Brooks's Lost in Wonder: Imagining Science and Other Mysteries, the 2010 Frommer's guide for D.C., an unsigned copy of Richard Miller's Fighting Words: Persuasive Strategies for War and Politics, a half-dozen less promising titles (some signed, some not), and--of course--a galley of David's new book.

All in all, not a bad way to spend an afternoon! That's it for now. Stay tuned for thoughts on why I love Minneapolis-St. Paul, even though the Brewers always more-or-less collapse when I go there.

My Favorite Preacher Unexpectedly Reminds Me Why I Miss Him

2010-05-20T13:50:00.005-05:00

[First, a guarantee: I will post something about my life and not about church very soon. Probably when I get back from the Brewers-Twins series this weekend!]

I remember reading at the beginning of the school year some article in which the author claimed, "Good preaching changes lives." I know that statement is true when it comes to my life, and no one has changed it in that way more than Alan Jones, whom I'm profoundly lucky to have been introduced to during my discernment year.

I listened in Central Park today to an old sermon of his, one I'd never heard before. The text, I presume, is from Jeremiah 18 (the potter's house), but from the sound of his voice you've got to assume he was riled up enough about some personal or news-reported incident that it wouldn't have really mattered what the text was. His subject is authority, in particular the challenge of interpreting scripture and the peril of bringing it to bear on our lives without proper care, perspective, and--most of all--humility.

The sermon got me thinking back to one of the last late-night patio theology sessions that I was a part of before I headed north (yes, this is what seminarians do in their free time, which I'd despair of if I didn't have a record of how I spent my free time as an engineer). I said a lot that night about why I think the Anglican ethos gives us answers to how to be a functioning church without resorting to sola scriptura disengagement from the world's present realities or to a reliance on theological witch hunts to defend orthodoxy. Unsurprisingly, Jones sums up what I was trying to get at rather gracefully:

We are not without resources. We're not floundering around. We look to the cross; we share in this Eucharist; and surely we see a trajectory in scripture and history, the trajectory of inclusion and justice. That's our pilgrimage together.

Anyway, I highly recommend this gem from the "master of the serpentine sermon" (thanks, Gary). It has greatly lifted this exhausted liberal-centrist seminarian's spirits. I can't find a direct link anymore, but you want the 9/10/07 sermon that seems to be available here.

In other news, I watched the VTS commencement ceremony today. Brian McLaren, who I've never read but had assumed I would dislike, gave a great address (full disclosure, though: I missed the last few minutes to take a phone call and haven't had a chance to catch up yet). You can check it out here.

Spring Update

2010-05-18T14:11:00.003-05:00

Well, that's a wrap for the first year of seminary. Man, did it go fast. If you want the short version, it was a challenging but formative and faith-deepening experience. On the whole, very positive, very blessed. Click below for some more details and information about my new gig in New York for the summer.

250 Words About My Favorite Bible Verse

2010-04-01T14:47:00.004-05:00

When the LORD restored the fortunate of Zion *
then were we like those who dream.
(Psalm 126:1, BCP Psalter)

Our hope as Christians is for restoration with God, our neighbors, and ourselves, through Christ. I can think of no better way to describe the joy of that restoration than to note that, when we experience it, we are "as dreamers." As a trained and duly pragmatic engineer, I need this verse's insistence that we should not be content with a small-potatoes promise; God's abundance extends beyond all that our most wild and reckless dreams can come up with. At the same time, I find it possible to trust this verse so deeply because of what we learn from it in the wider context of the psalm. We live and minister in a kingdom that is already here and has not yet fully arrived, and so it should resonant deeply when the psalmist goes on to call for God's re-restoration of Zion. When the verb tense changes in verse 5 (thank you, Dr. Ferlo), reminding us that our earthly fortunes will always be like the rhythmic waxing and waning of “the watercourses of the Negev,” the imagery from verse 1 makes even more sense. The LORD is also with us in our deprivation, and in those decidedly darker dreams it produces. For me, the sustaining witness of this verse is that in most moments of our lives, all our joy and thanksgiving (“O LORD, we are restored!”) intermingles with all our hope and even regret (“O LORD, restore us!”), and God declares the whole lot good.

Ice-chaton 2010

2010-02-08T08:33:00.003-06:00

Yes, my friends, it's true. I have seen, in the past couple of days, more snow fall at one time here, south of the Mason-Dixon Line, in balmy Alexandria, VA, than I did in 17 years in Wisconsin. 28.8" in about 31 hours. Pretty impressive. Here are some pictures.

Album link

On the Marq, Finally

2010-02-03T08:08:00.005-06:00

A while back, I lamented all the difficulties involved in establishing a paperless seminary workflow. Lots of people chime in, but in the end we didn't locate an ideal way to do the main task: mark up PDFs (with highlighting, marginalia, etc.). During that process (though not on the comments--perhaps via Twitter?), someone told me about Marqed.com, and online service that provides tools for doing most of the things we had discussed. To my great frustration, however, it was really buggy (perhaps just on my system--Firefox 3.0.17 on Ubuntu 9.04).

However, highlighting at least seems finally to be working well enough to make this a legit go-to tool for now. You get ten PDF uploads per month with the free version, or you can upgrade to unlimited. (The paid account allows you to upload MS Office documents as well, though don't ask me why you'd want to involve a Web tool to edit a document that can already be marked up natively. Maybe for read-only files?) Of course, I'm not wild about being dependent an Internet connection in order to view my files, but all our classrooms here at VTS have Wi-Fi, so I guess I can deal with this for now. Anyway, I feel like I can finally recommend it. Check it out at www.marqed.com.

In other news, we got some beautiful snow last night here in Northern Virginia. I posted a few quick pictures to Facebook here.

Football Photos, Thomist Thoughts

2009-11-14T21:56:00.004-06:00

You could probably do worse for an update on what I've been doing at seminary the last couple weeks than to check out two digital snapshots.

The first is actually a collection of snapshots. The VTS Fighting Friars went 1-2 at the Luther Bowl in Gettysburg a few weeks back, ending our season 2-2. But we went 2-0 "in conference," after adding a win against our fellow Anglicans at Trinity School for Ministry (aka the Pittsburg Kneelers), who were by far the best sporstmen (and sportswomen) and the cleanest team we played on a day of startlingly hard hits for a flag football tournament. Anyway, you can check out the pictures here, including this highly embarrassing one of me running with the ball after our goal-line zone won us an interception:

The other tidbit is a response to one of the several comments I got on my Twitter post about enjoying Thomas Aquinas. A friend wanted to know what I'd liked about him, and this is what I wrote:

I guess what I appreciated about the excerpt of Aquinas that we read was the motivation and methodology. I like this notion of saying, in effect:

"There's some unity to this huge mass of literature the Christian tradition has accumulated. Of course, there is some genuine disagreement, but more often than not the much of the conflict either evaporates completely or at least diminishes if you look at it closely. If we borrow a little Aristotle and go through the careful (if at times a bit tedious) exercise of very clearly defining and categorizing this vast repository of theology, we realize that the story is a lot more harmonious than we might have guessed."

I just really admire the care and precision that goes into the whole thing. Plus, the implicit and rather bold claim that logic and analysis can be deployed meaningfully to help us navigate among this collection of hundreds of isolated claims, plucked (almost at random, it sometimes seems) out of the Scriptures and patristic literature, is just endlessly fascinating when you watch it being deployed. The effort feels very rigorous and worthwhile even if the underlying epistemology seems a little naive by modern standards. [Response from my church history professor to my follow-up question about this final issue: "It's what scholastics do."]

Hope you're all having a lovely weekend and that the weather wherever you are is better than on this dreary day in Northern Virginia.

Travel Day: Harlem to VTS, Via Media

2009-11-02T00:13:00.004-06:00

Navigate past vesting choir members to leave apartment at St. Mary's, Harlem, (126th between Amsterdam and Broadway) at 10 a.m. Take southbound C train to 34th. Walk to Madison Square Garden to get in line for Megabus. [Romantic interlude.] Take Megabus to 30th Street Station, Philadelphia. Take R3 SEPTA train to Media, PA. Walk to Christ Church to attend installation of Adam Kradel as new rector. Change out of suit at Christ Church rectory and walk back to Media station. Take R3 back to 30th Street Station. Take Amtrack 165 Regional to Union Station, Washington, D.C. Trains are shutting down for the night, so take final Red Line train from Union Station to Metro Center, transfer to the Orange Line and ride to Roslyn, then transfer to Blue Line and ride to King Street. Take taxi from King Street Station to VTS and arrive at 12:45 a.m.

Fall Break Update

2009-10-27T16:15:00.010-05:00

Sorry for my month-long absence; it's been a wild month or so here at VTS. I hope to make up for it by putting off my final Hebrew studying to tell you a bit about first quarter and share a few photos. Enjoy!

The weather was a lot like it was at Crazylegs 2009 in Madison.

Lined up for a blitz, I think. See the rest of the really excellent pictures (by my friend Cayce Ramey) here.

Second-quarter books! (With Kermit, for scale. Special thanks to Trinity Church for helping me pay for them!)

There are some beautiful fall colors just out the back door of Price Hall (yes, this Price, who apparently wrote one of my favorite prayers in the '79 BCP).

Kristie and me by the WWII memorial on a beautiful afternoon over Columbus Day weekend.

The Ongoing Pursuit of a Paperless Seminary Reading Workflow

2009-09-29T07:53:00.006-05:00

In seminary, we read a lot. Like, probably more than we do anything else--including playing intramural sports (a surprising but deeply rewarding time sink), praying (though we've received tremendous support in this respect), sleeping (at least it feels that way), and complaining (a necessary thing sometimes, let me tell you).

And--as any humanities major knows but us engineering students are always too busy with problem sets to notice--retaining even a small fraction of that reading is a matter of no small challenge or importance. The old middle school "reading notes" model is an almost laughable prospect due to the shear number of pages we're talking about here. The highlighter, I've been told, is my friend. I have come to agree whole-heartedly.

However, because this school thankfully realizes that part of being good stewards of God's creation is to learn to use less paper (and because--let's be honest--who reads paper copies of anything these days, except maybe for actual books?), I find myself with a quandry: how do you highlight PDFs?

You may know that this is a maddeningly difficult question to answer. Trying to do so may be the one thing I'm spending more time on than the actual reading. The problem, as I see it, is that it's impossible to justify spending the money on programs like Adobe Acrobat or Foxit Editor when all you want to do is highlight some text in any damn document you please. I'm not an expert in digital copyright or fair use, but I really don't think this is too much to ask.

In a move we're apparently supposed to interpret as magnanimous, Adobe now allows Reader users (people like me who aren't willing to pay for Acrobat) to do some basic markup on files with "document rights...enabled." The problem--and surely the people at Adobe know this--is that I have never, ever, been given a PDF course reading with document rights enabled. Again, some of this may be a matter of legitimate intellectual property concern. But if these files are being used for educational use (and clearly that's why my professors are allowed to distribute them as PDFs via course management software in the first place), it seems like merely applying a "highlight filter" to a local copy of the document ought to be fair game. Am I off base here?

Anyway, enough complaining...let me tell you what I've converged to and then put out a plea for anyone who finds this post and has a better solution to please help me out. After playing quite a bit with PDFedit and finding it summarily difficult to use (or maybe the Ubuntu distribution is just buggy?), I've settled on the more user friendly but still unsatistfactory flpsed. Basically, this program lets you do text annotation. As you can see in the screenshot below, the text manages to remain persistent even if you view the re-converted PDF in a program like Evince, which is handy. But this workflow still requires a lot of typing, when all I really want to be able to do is highlight. I'm encouraged by early experiments with Scribus, but I'm still fighting the learning curve.

Am I overlooking a simpler free (or cheap) solution? It wouldn't be the first time. If so, please enlighten me. Is anyone else as perplexed as I am about this stunning lack of obviously useful functionality?

DC Must-Sees?

2009-09-03T18:06:00.002-05:00

Hey everybody, this instalment of the video blog includes a request for tourist destinations for me to take the folks this weekend. Please chime in in the comments if you have favorite places. Thanks!

Traveling, Traveling

2009-08-29T09:10:00.005-05:00

Two interesting travel stories (of a sort) caught my eye in this morning's NYT. The first was one of those periodic road trip accounts that you see now and then and that tend to be pretty entertaining. I love the minivan angle--timely and practical, I thought. Made the notion of the cross-country road trip seem more manageable.

(Speaking of minivans, a brief moment of venting here: A month or so before I moved to Alexandria, I was in a car accident--my fault--and had to have the front passenger door replaced. They put in a refurbished door...and now it won't unlock! I have to climb in the through the back or passenger side doors. And I can't take it back to where I had the work done, because I had the work done 850 miles away. Grrr...)

The second was one I hadn't heard about here but apparently has gotten a lot of attention in Europe. A thirteen-year-old Dutch girl wants to sail around the world by herself. Her parents gave her permission, but the state has intervened to tell her she can't go--at least for now, while they evaluate her fitness for the trip. Fascinating stuff:

She said on a Dutch children’s show this month that she had been sailing solo since age 6 and planning her global voyage for three years.

“I asked my parents if I could — please — start now,” she said, The Associated Press reported.

“In the beginning, they asked if I was sure I really wanted to do it,” she said. “They have sailed around the world, so they know what could happen and that it’s not always fun, but I realize that, too. But I really wanted to do it, so my parents said, ‘Good, we’ll help you.’ ”

She has been practicing her solo skills. Earlier this year, she was picked up in Britain after she was discovered sailing alone to the port of Lowestoft, on the east coast of England. The British authorities ordered her father, Dick Dekker, to go get her. He went, but Laura ended up sailing home alone, according to news reports.

Caroline Vink, a social worker at the Netherlands Youth Institute in Utrecht, a research organization that advises the government on youth policy, said Laura’s case was not clear-cut because she was obviously a talented and passionate sailor capable of great things. But she stressed that, ultimately, “the state and society had a moral obligation to intervene when the safety of a child was at risk.”

The ruling came from a district court in Utrecht, which said she could continue living with her father during the assessment of the trip’s risk. Laura was not in the courtroom, The A.P. reported. She was out sailing.

Critic Signing Off

2009-08-27T12:13:00.002-05:00

Final columns by long-time writers are a fascinating genre all their own. I like the way NYT restaurant critic Frank Bruni handled it yesterday: by collecting a list of "questions that [he] was often asked or that [he] wished [he]’d been asked, along with responses." Here's my favorite:

IS THERE ANY BEST, SAFEST WAY TO NAVIGATE A MENU?

Scratch off the appetizers and entrees that are most like dishes you’ve seen in many other restaurants, because they represent this one at its most dutiful, conservative and profit-minded. The chef’s heart isn’t in them.

Scratch off the dishes that look the most aggressively fanciful. The chef’s vanity — possibly too much of it — spawned these.

Then scratch off anything that mentions truffle oil.

Choose among the remaining dishes.

Advice

2009-08-23T16:36:00.005-05:00

In this week's video post: brats and beer, baseball, and biblical languages. Two of the three required an umbrella.

Glad Someone Else Mentioned This

2009-08-23T13:02:00.009-05:00

Earlier today, Anglican Centrist asked a question that I've been wondering about myself and will paraphrase here: where's the media tumult over the recent decision by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Churchwide Assembly "to open the ministry of the church to gay and lesbian pastors and other professional workers living in committed relationships"?

Don't get me wrong. I'm from the heart of Lutheran country and have a great love and respect for the ELCA; I'm happy that so far they at least seem to have been partly spared the kind of oversimplified, conflict-emphasizing mass media attention the Episcopal Church was subject to last month. Of course, that doesn't mean things are going to be any easier within their Church, so I hope you'll join me in keeping the ELCA (and the Episcopal Church) in your thoughts and/or prayers during what's sure to be a difficult time for both.

Getting back to the question, though, here's my thinking:

(1) I get the impression this decision has a smaller international impact than ours does. I'm not a demographer of religion, but I believe the Anglican Communion is larger and (perhaps more relevantly) more culturally heterogeneous than the Lutheran World Federation. There may be ecclesial reasons as well. Am I on the right track, anyone who actually knows something about this? I'm woefully ignorant of global Lutheranism.

(2) I wonder if perhaps since the Episcopal coverage hits so much closer to home for me, I'm only perceiving the Lutheran coverage to be more muted. Note that, like me, Anglican Centrist seems to have started out this general line of thinking when noticing the lack of coverage in the New York Times (I don't read the print version but do get a daily headlines email from which this story has been persistently absent). But The Times may not be a very good proxy given the Episcopal Church's ties to New York. Do any trained media-types have suggestions for a more systematic comparison? I'm guessing it would be necessary to give it some time; of course there's currently more coverage out there of something that happened in mid-July than of something that happened Friday.

What am I leaving out? This is obviously a complex and difficult question to answer well.

(Video) Greetings from Alexandria

2009-08-15T19:35:00.007-05:00

Well, I've emerged from the minor ordeal that was finishing up a master's thesis (an interesting process that probably deserves further reflection at another time), recovering from same, and moving across the country. So I wanted to start checking in (hopefully regularly) about my somewhat different new digs and educational context. Most of you know, I think, that I've started studies at Virginia Theological Seminary with the eventual hope of becoming an Episcopal priest. I've had a week or so to get settled here, and it's definitely starting to feel enough like home to overcome the effects of the waning post-move adrenaline.

I'm sure I'll have plenty of thoughts to share about this place, but for now let it suffice to say that a big part of why I was so excited about coming here is that the school seemed genuinely committed to the importance of formation in community and to fostering an atmosphere conducive to that work. I'm thankful that so far it has not disappointed.

Anyway, I was saying to a friend of mine before I left that I somehow felt like video blogging might be an especially good way to communicate some of my experience down here. I haven't totally figured out why I think that or whether I'm right, but see below for a minor dipping-in-of-toes to that ocean. Let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like to know about my life or studies down here. I'd love to try to stay connected in as authentic a way as possible--even if I do look and feel a little silly.

More Funny Found Science

2009-05-06T10:19:00.003-05:00

Man, colloquia abstracts are a seemingly endless source of buried jokes. Check out the grad student dig in the following summary of a talk on using machine learning to study human and animal learning:

Machine learning studies the principles governing all learning systems. Human beings and animals are learning systems too, and can be explored using the same mathematical tools. This approach has been fruitful in the last few decades with standard tools such as reinforcement learning, artificial neural networks, and non-parametric Bayesian statistics. We bring the approach one step further with some latest tools in machine learning, and uncover new quantitative findings. In this talk, I will present three examples: (1) Human semi-supervised learning. Consider a child learning animal names. Dad occasionally points to an animal and says "Dog!" (labeled data). But mostly the child observes the world by herself without explicit feedback (unlabeled data). We show that humans learn from both labeled and unlabeled data, and that a simple Gaussian Mixture Model trained using the EM algorithm provides a nice fit to human behaviors. (2) Human active learning. The child may ask "What's that?", i.e. actively selecting items to query the target labels. We show that humans are able to perform good active learning, achieving fast exponential error convergence as predicted by machine learning theory. In contrast, when passively given i.i.d. training data humans learn much slower (polynomial convergence), also predicted by learning theory. (3) Monkey online learning. Rhesus monkeys can learn a "target concept", in the form of a certain shape or color. What if the target concept keeps changing? Adversarial online learning model provides a polynomial mistake bound. Although monkeys perform worse than theory, anecdotal evidence suggests that they follow the concepts better than some graduate students. Finally, I will speculate on a few lessons learned in order to create better machine learning algorithms. (Source, but ultimately via Eric Howell on the Hacker Within mailing list.)

No exactly stand-up material, but I love that the guy was playful enough to put it in the abstract. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, though, given what I found on this project's spring 2009 schedule page. We actually had that same xkcd hanging in our office for a while.

THW on the Radio

2009-05-05T10:55:00.005-05:00

A couple weeks back, The Hacker Within's fearless leader Milad Fatenejad and I did an interview with Matthew McCormick of Hacker Public Radio. I got notification today that it recently went live. Aside from having to suppress the occasional wince at my usual longwindedness, I had fun re-listening and think it turned out pretty well. If you're interested in programming/computing or would just like to hear about what we're up to and why, you can check out the interview here (I had to download it). Thanks very much to Matt for his help as we continue to try to get the word out about the organization and its work.

Some atoms? Some CHEMICALS?

2009-04-30T12:42:00.003-05:00

I was looking up some citation information on a text I use a lot but don't have on me today when I stumbled across this wonderfully bizarre customer review on Amazon. Those of you familiar with Benedict and Pigford's Nuclear Chemical Engineering may find this especially funny, but I thought the prose was amusing enough that I had to share.

I'm always supportive of huzzah, but--as is so often the case--the bewilderment sets in when you try to parse the all-caps text. Also, I wonder if we might adopt prehaps as a new nuclear safety term for the means by which we prevent mishaps.

Enjoy:

But seriously folks, this is the MOTHER of nuclear chemical engineering novelas! If you plan on reading this book be prepared to BUCKLE UP because you're going for a RIDE. A ride to Nuclear Chemical Engineering LAND! Huzzah! What have we here? Some atoms? Some CHEMICALS? Prehaps this CHEMICAL SOUP ISN'T SO BAD AFTER ALL! BOKKO!

Here's the link.

Another Sweet Google Tool

2009-04-11T14:54:00.004-05:00

Three events recently converged to respark my interest in a little mini-project I tried to do some time ago:

(1) At yesterday's Python subgroup meeting of The Hacker Within, our resident Pythonista got me all excited about developing easy web applications in that language. I write a lot of Python for pre- and post-processing of nuclear fuel cycle systems data, but I've never done any web-related Python work except for fixing a bug or two in some Trac instances. Nico got me pumped about the prospect.

(2) I started helping the Diocese of Milwaukee with their new Website, for which we're using Google Sites in an attempt to improve the ease of collaboration and maintenance. I think Google Sites is pretty terrific, but it does have some limitations, and I'm interested in identifying some Google-compatible solutions. The Python-based Google App Engine seems like a promising direction.

(3) My friend Ryan re-activated pangramaday, which I've mentioned here before and is now available via Twitter (@pangramaday).

As it did during my short-lived interest in learning to develop Java Applets, the pangramist's quandary motivated a little mini-project a few steps more complex than Hello, World! and perfect for learning a new set of interfaces. And this time I can actually publish the result (such as it is), because the Google App Engine framework is just so frickin' easy to use.

So if for pangram-, crossword- or Wheel-of-Fortune-related purposes you ever need a list of words that all contain some given collection of letters, look no further than pangramhelper. It's currently both ugly and slow, but if my interest in learning these APIs doesn't wane too much, that may change.

It's actually kind of fun to enter random (or not so random--can you tell I'm getting ready for the Easter Vigil?) letters and see what you get:

You wrote:

Christos anesti

We found:

anchorites
characterizations
chlorinates
cinematographers
interscholastic
orchestrating
orchestration
orchestrations
overenthusiastic
rhetoricians
stenographic
theoreticians
thermodynamics

It only took a few hours and about a hundred lines of Python (and most of those are just longhand HTML inside of function calls). Seriously, check out the App Engine.

Cross-posting: St. Francis Forum

2009-03-16T09:27:00.002-05:00

I put an item up at St. Francis Forum that I figured I should post here as well:

I had the opportunity (at Bishop Miller's suggestion) to preach at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in addition to St. Francis House a couple Sundays back. I wanted to post the sermon because I know that some folks who wanted to come couldn't make it and because I was getting lots of questions about the Harvey Cox book I mentioned (it's called Common Prayers: Faith, Family, and a Christian's Journey Through the Jewish Year).

Anyway, if you're interested, you can find the sermon here.

Doctorow Did It!

2009-02-27T08:55:00.004-06:00

As I was catching up on my usual Web comics this morning (which were really on fire this week--see links in sidebar at right), I was especially amused by a thought that occurred to me when reading Wednesday's xkcd. If you've seen Cory Doctorow's excellent essay "Wikipedia: A Genuine H2G2—Minus the Editors" in the mostly disappointing The Anthology at the End of the Universe, you realize this comic's basically already been written. Have you seen that "Simpsons did it" episode of South Park? I couldn't help wondering if Randall Monroe has similar visions of Doctorow always one step ahead of him. Then again, in the case of those two, the idea-borrowing goes both ways.

Anyway, great comic anyway, as usual. Image courtesy xkcd.com and used by permission:

P.S.: I hate to badmouth anything DNA-related, but, seriously, The Anthology at the End of the Universe pretty much sucks. The notable exceptions are the Doctorow piece and the brilliant and hilarious "The Secret Symbiosis: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Its Impact on Real Computer Science" by Bruce Bethke. I work with these people--it's all true.

P.P.S.: I'm sure other people have pointed this out on the xkcd forums, but in my opinion the scraped away Kindle logo should have yielded "Don't Panic." It's an inside joke anyway--why not get it right?

Rave Within A Rave

2009-02-23T10:17:00.005-06:00

My colleague David Meerman Scott just posted one of the coolest projects I think he's done: a video in which he hopes to demonstrate the power of and principles for creating what he calls a World Wide Rave by starting one around his new book of same name. I do editorial work for David and was involved in both the book (available from Wiley on March 3) and the new e-book (in which he explains how he put the video together), and I highly recommend that anyone interested in raising the online profile of his or her organization have a look at what he's put together. Watch carefully during the first few seconds!

Another Bootcamp

2009-02-18T09:28:00.004-06:00

For those interested in computing, The Hacker Within will be doing our second bootcamp of the semester in a few weeks. See below for details (flyer by Katy Huff, our talented Director of Creative Affairs):

New Insights Posted

2009-02-14T22:00:00.003-06:00

I mentioned in the last post that I'm taking over as the editor of the Engineering Learning Center's Teaching and Learning Insights newsletter for the semester. Just thought I'd mention that the February issue (which I did the markup and some light editing for) is posted at insights.engr.wisc.edu. I wrote an article for TLI last year and am looking forward to getting started on some articles for the March issue soon.

The Difference Is Maintainability

2009-02-09T00:34:00.008-06:00

So I write a lot of Python, and one of the claims promoters of the language usually make is that it helps you write more maintainable code. I think they're right in that claim, and I think they're right to stress the centrality of the issue.

We've discovered over the years at St. Francis House (and in my research group, for that matter, and at Wisconsin Engineer, if I remember correctly) that maintainability is also essential--and difficult--on the Web (of course, this is really just another kind of source-code-maintenance problem). In a high turnover organization, it's especially hard to cultivate a continuous Web presence.

Say what you will about the low-powered solution offered by Google Sites, I think they're on to something, and I'm super-excited that we've ported the St. Francis House website over to this system. Sure, I wish it were a little more flexible and powerful. But I think you'll agree that it lets you construct reasonably attractive and well organized sites (nearby St. Andrew's uses the system as well), and I can attest to the relative ease of use over other options (and I like screwing around with webpages and have learned a lot about XHTML/CSS in preparation for taking over for the semester as editor of this site about engineering education). Most importantly, no FTP or SCP is required (we computer geeks take these tools for granted, but I think they can be just as much a barrier as HTML).

I think Google's got another winner here, at least for a presumably significant market niche (groups who want a good site but can't afford to pay professionals, especially for maintenance and updating). I'll keep you posted as to whether the feature-set improves in the coming months.

Holmes Slice

2009-02-02T09:10:00.002-06:00

Just had to pass along a quick Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. snippet that was the "Thought for Today" in Wordsmith.org's A.Word.A.Day email:

Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the same machinery of sensibility; one is wind-power, and the other water-power.

This is the same Holmes (father of the Supreme Court Justice) who brought us the wonderful "Wonderful One-Hoss-Shay" which Henry Petroski writes so thoughtfully about in To Engineer Is Human. Sounds like an interesting fellow.

TV Plea

2009-01-03T11:17:00.007-06:00

These days I watch virtually no television other than sports. There's nothing virtuous about this; I live three flights of stairs away from the set at our house, I'm busy most evenings and don't honestly have much chance, and--most importantly--I'm seldom able to find shows that I actually like.

Especially not on broadcast television, which is a shame. There's a great scene in Studio 60 where the eponymous show-within-a-show's network president is trying to woo a young writer who's created a drama about the United Nations and wants to take it to HBO. Knowing he once wrote an off-broadway play about Pericles, she appeals to Pericles's quote that "All things good should flow into the boulevard," the point being that she thought the show was too good to be tucked away on cable. I've always found that scene, and Sorkin's "glass tubes" ode to Filo Farnsworth in Sports Night, to be surprisingly moving. I can't remember what TV was like before cable, but I imagine it must have felt much more like a common experience than it does now.

Anyway, over the past two days I finally caught up with discerning TV watchers everywhere and caught Freaks and Geeks on DVD. It was, as a friend of mine once said of his not having read Infinite Jest, a point of growing professional embarassment. In my case, the profession isn't English literature--it's bitching about good TV shows always getting canceled. I have no legitimate claim to this profession (again, I am at best a failure and at worst a poser as a TV snob), but when your favorite TV shows are Sports Night, Studio 60, Arrested Development, Firefly, etc., it's hard not to take some kind of vocational interest in this high calling.

Aside from Studio 60, I didn't watch any of those shows while they were still on the air. And it seems to me that part of the fun of watching TV is blocking off a chunk of your week to get a little excited and to watch the new episode with friends. That's how I felt about Studio 60. It's how my dormmates and I felt as we treked to our buddy's house to watch Smallville each week during my freshman year. I can even remember my parents and I feeling that way about Star Trek: The Next Generation when I was a little kid in Florida. I think it's part of what's worthwhile about watching TV in the first place, and it prevents falling into the profoundly 2000s-era mailaise you get from falling in love with and then immediately having to say goodbye to a great cancelled-early show as you watch its entirety on DVD in grotesque marathon style (my eyes still hurt from last night's final Freaks and Geeks binge).

Here's my plea to the genuine TV snobs (or merely the very fortunate) among you on this Saturday morning: can someone please tell me which shows are that good right now? I don't have "Rock & Roll Lifestyle"-type aspirations of hearing of them first or anything. I just want to get to experience them the way TV was meant to be watched rather than in gloomy DVD postmortem. I don't read the Onion AV Club much much anymore (out of desperation to get some work done); please help me compensate and to have a genuinely positive TV watching experience, before it's too late. In the meantime, I guess I'll be tracking down the Undeclared DVDs.

Give Us Some (Ecumenical) Music

2008-12-23T12:03:00.004-06:00

If you're looking for a Christmas music special to watch tomorrow night, let me recommend "Voices of Christmas" on CBS at 10:30 Central. It was produced by the National Council of Churches and hosted by Michael Kinnamon, who I met a couple of months ago and who's a brilliant, caring teacher and theologian (I'm standing next to him in this picture in the back row at right).

In fine NCC fashion, the special presents music from a number of member communions, which I think will be a nice change of pace from more monolithic specials from a single tradition. I've been a little down on the church these past weeks (and it always gets worse when I get home and start getting sucked into watching cable televangelists--just change the channel, Kyle), so Kinnamon's closing remarks in the preview below were like a breath of fresh air. Also, I was pleasantly surprised to see my friend Cassandra pop up in the interviews. Nicely done, Cassandra!

Two Beer-Related Recommendations

2008-12-20T17:13:00.004-06:00

I met one of the hosts of WSUM's Beer Talk Today last night at a friend's housewarming party. Really interesting guy with fascinating insight into the local beer and food scene. Anyway, I checked out today's Year In Review episode and really enjoyed it. Consider it recommended; I've added a link to their blog at right, and you can also subscribe to the podcast on iTunes. FYI, their timeslot is apparently moving to Tuesdays at 9 p.m. when they return after the holiday break.

Speaking of recommendations, the beer that got us talking last night was New Glarus Brewing Company's new "Alt," a German altbier. A friend of mine happened to mention it to me a few days back, and the convenience store I stopped at on my way to the party happened to have it. Everybody at the party who had some raved about it, and I defnitely suggest that you add it to your holiday to-drink list. It's apparently not expected to last through December, so make haste.

Another Ad: Be Like This Guy!

2008-12-19T16:06:00.006-06:00

I was reading an article on yellowcake today in an old issue of the Journal of the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society, and I just had to pass on this hilarious advertisement for becoming a professional engineer (PE). Granted it's ten years old and directed at folks who already have engineering training, but I couldn't help but think it's small wonder that we're having a hard time getting people interested in being PEs if ads like this are thought to be a legit recruitment tool.

By the way, Samuel Florman writes about the issue of PE licensing and much more in a fascinating book called The Introspective Engineer that everyone with even a passing interest in the field should definitely consider reading. I found it helpful to have a historical perspective on why engineering school is as unpleasant as it is (speaking of poor recruitment strategies...).

Florman's also a PE, albeit a (slightly) cooler-looking one. What he really looks like, though, is Ed McMahon.

Florman:

McMahon:

Another Hacker Within Ad

2008-12-18T07:05:00.003-06:00

I know this doesn't make for a very exciting post number 100 here at CSC, but please help spread the word about this software carpentry training we're doing the week before UW-Madison classes start. Join us if you can!

Hacker Within Meeting Friday

2008-12-09T11:12:00.007-06:00

I doubt I have too many UW-Madison computer geek readers who don't already know about this (if indeed I have any at all, which is also doubtful given my dire posting record of late), but on Friday at 2:15 in 414 Engineering Research Building, the Hacker Within computational science interest group that a few of us started this summer is going to be hearing from Tim Tautges:

Component interfaces or APIs should a) have the right level of abstraction, so they can handle new kinds of data without needing to be modified, and b) should be callable from multiple languages, and c) should not get in the way of good performance. I'll describe the ITAPS mesh interface, which has been designed to meet these constraints.

Sound cool? More importantly, does this look cool?:

If so, you should come by. What better way to celebrate the end of the semester? ;)

Worlds colliding

2008-11-19T10:13:00.009-06:00

So, my friend and colleague David Meerman Scott has a new book coming out. As you can see, he's collecting pictures of the promotional poster hanging in people's offices, etc. I sent him my contributions today and just had so share, such was the glory of the juxtaposition. The first is boring old me sitting in my boring old office, computer screens ablaze (surprisingly enough, it looks like I'm actually getting some work done). The second one is me in the lab that a bunch of my classmates work in. That's the Inertial Electrostatic Confinement experiment behind me, a project of our department's Fusion Technology Institute. The IEC group does not endorse the content of World Wide Rave; they were, however, nice enough to let me get a shot with their gear. Anyway, I can't wait to see what David's got up his sleeve. Should be exciting.

Office photo

Lab photo

If you're surprised to see me in decent clothes, you're not alone. The reason is that I had to give a talk earlier in the day to some visitors from the University of Tokyo. I haven't talked much about my research here lately, so I posted the slides, IYI. Please note that although they should stand alone (legitimate thanks, Michael Alley and Co.), these slides do look a little mangled depending on what you're viewing them with (sarcastic thanks, PowerPoint 2007). Rest assured that I'm not a total moron when it comes to font choice.

As a general PowerPoint PSA, I suggest you also check out Tufte's rant about it--mostly because it's hilarious.

Update: Here's the photo on David's WWR page.

It's hip to be genuinely square

2008-11-04T09:55:00.004-06:00

Just in case the blogosphere fails to produce any non-election-related material today (an absurd notion, of course, but do me a favor and grant the damn premise), I wanted to pass along an article my friend Erica posted recently: "Hipster: The Dead End of Western Civilization."

Don't get me wrong, I hate the "oh, kids these days" mentality. I hate it in the middle third of Alan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, I hate it when it rears its head periodically in the composition literature (every ten years or so, if I remember a couple of writing center scholars' talks correctly), and I hate it because I hate being referred to as a kid.

So apologies in advance for sending along what is essentially a "kids these days"-style rant. That said, it strikes me as pretty much the most wickedly fun rant I've read since Jon Pareles declared Coldplay "the most insufferable band of the decade." It also strikes me as true, but I would appreciate some insight from anyone who understands the situation better and can deliver me from what I suspect is an oversimplified view. Genuineness and originality are out there somewhere, right? Hipsters, help an engineer out.

Miscellaneous Updates

2008-10-19T13:04:00.005-05:00

Let me surface from my digital dormancy (which one of these days I'll get around to writing a post to explain) for a couple of quick updates.

First, I went with some other UW-Madison folks to UW-Platteville Friday for a conference of the North Midwest region of the American Society for Engineering Education. We didn't stay for the evening banquet and keynote (nor obviously for the second day of the conference), but a lot of what we saw was interesting and encouraging. I was especially intrigued by Haiyan Zhang's paper "A Model-Based Multidisciplinary Correspondent Methodology for Design-by-Analogy" and frankly touched by the important work reported in Dale Buechler's fascinating "An Electrical Engineering Program for Place-Bound Students: The First Two Years." If you're interested in our paper, which was about ASEE student sections, you can read it here.

Second, you may notice that the above URL points to a non-UW-Madison domain. I'm trying to get untied from doing all my hosting on UW computers, and as a consequence you can now find this blog at blog.kyleoliver.net. I gotta admit, it's going to take a little getting used to being a domain owner. One early bummer: Blue Host servers don't have svn installed. Still, I'm excited to have a reasonably sustainable option for implementing that Holy Grail of personal file organization: putting your entire electronic life under version control (which, as my friend Matt points out, gives you superpowers).