Rest

Ray Charles died today.

While other performers got snazzier nicknames and more acclaim, I think I’d just as soon listen to the Ray Charles catalogue as that of any of his R&B;/soul colleagues. Maybe today God’s asking, “That second part of ‘What’d I Say,’ with the Heunnhs and the squeaks and moans, where did that come from? And beginning the song with the solos?”

Vintage Photos

Well, “vintage 2003,” that is. I decided to try out Blogware’s photo gallery utility, and it worked very well. The photos could use some manipulation, but the gallery works fine.

A New Footnote

I’ll have to take account of this article (found via Boing Boing) in the article I’m working on, but first I hope that my posse will bat it around a little. For instance, David, what do you think of the argument?

Bugs Redux

My Breedster bug seems to have recovered from its two incurable infections. I don’t know what that means, but it makes me a little more hopeful about my thumb. I mean, if a computer simulation of an anthropo-arthropod can recuperate from simultaneous digital diseases, maybe this flesh-and-bones homo sapiens can battle back against thumb deformity. . . .

Anyway, I have an egg again. Go figure.

Churches, Identities, Learning, and the Virtual

A few weeks ago, I succumbed to importunity from friends, and agreed to write an article on short deadline. This I should have known not to do; all I can say in my defense is that I held out for a long time, and was won over finally by charm of my editor, Joel Weiss, and by the list of other contributors.

The volume compiles a variety of essays relative to the ways that computers mediate our participation in “learning environments,” “sometimes supplanting them and transforming them, and often causing us to see our world from new and diverse perspectives.” In the collection, my contribution should “take up such issues as the cultivation of identity, the perceived dangers, by some, of digital interactivity taking over role of substantial reality, and what is community; to summarize some of the discourse that you're familiar with regarding these issues, and to feel free to express your own interpretations of these concepts related to religion and spirituality, including online examples and ideas on fantasy and literature. What I see emerging in your contribution is a distillation of so many of the issues that others are taking up, but in your case, in the context of a field that traditionally has discussed concepts of soul, out of body experiences, and the like” (in this summary, I’m part quoting and part-paraphrasing a general description that Joel Weiss sent via email; to the extent that this summary is infelicitous or misleading, the responsibility is entirely my own, of course).

Joel was responding to the notes for my presentation to last year’s Digital Genres conference (ah, those were the days!). At the conference I proposed (here I’m working from David Weinberger’s summary) that “we can learn from millennia of thought about what constitutes identity. He asks: What does a digital blessing stick to? What is the who of the Web? And how does that affect the proposal for digital identities, e.g., Passport, Liberty Alliance,...

Biometric makers push the idea that physical characteristics mark you as a particular human. But that doesn't account for pod people. Blessings adhere not to the physical marks but to ‘something more’ that AKMA’s tradition calls ‘soul.’

Now AKMA brings it back to the digital world. Our digital identity is created by our digits — our fingers typing digits. (He later connects ‘fictive identities’ with the Latin root for fiction: fingere. Cool.) Our fingers enact identity through the words we type. Our acts further substantiates our digital identity. Someone whose physicality is limited may find his/her online identity to be more real. We make ourselves online. But what are the characteristics and limitations of our online identities?

The key point: Our identities are already constituted nonsubstantially. Our online identies don't represent a new space and type of identity but is instead a recognition and embracing of what has always been at the heart of identity. It thrusts role-playing and authorial voice to the fore in the question of ‘true’ identity.

So, ‘perhaps blessings stick precisely to our identity as we play them, blog them, confect them, mold, share and make these fictive selves physically and online...’ ”

(I’m quoting from David’s notes here as an even less “final” version of what I actually said, than my own notes would be. At this stage, the whole essay for Joel remains deeply undetermined.)

So, looking back to what I said, some of which interested Joel, and looking forward to what Joel would like the essay for his volume to address, what shall I say?

First, I suppose that I’ll stipulate a resistance to the idea of distinguishing virtual learning environments from “real world” environments. I can’t develop that resistance in this essay, since I expect others will take up that dissent and I’m not claiming to have invented it. Having noted my doubts about stronger than rough-and-ready distinctions between “real” and “virtual,” I’ll note that my doubts concern not only the external mediated environment (mediated whether physically or non-substantially), but also the personal environment we call our “identity.” We have (theologically speaking) always already been non-substantial — and to that extent digital — so that reflections on “the church as VLE” begin not with “can you take communion online?” but with “What’s the point of ‘church’ anyway?” I’ll check-in at Ship of Fools’ e-parish, “Church of Fools.”

From a discussion of Church of Fools, I’d modulate to the conjunction of my earlier point about what the church is good for, to a point about the extent to which various church-y things flourish or atrophy in predominantly digitally-mediated interactions. That entails addressing the vivid fear that many people feel about whether “the virtual” will replace “the real.” This is where I can discuss “replacement panic,” and my sense that the impulse to panic obscures the much finer-grained changes that will eventually (have already) overtake(n) us.

That’what I expect to write — but since working out ideas in public always helps me refine what I think, the essay will probably work better if you prod me about various aspects of my argument.

Posts I Intend To Write

(1) About Lectionaries (for Tom)

(2) About talking to dead writers (regarding Steve)

(3) It’s not just a tool — it is indeed personal (about the headaches of deciding on a weblog platform)

(4) About the article I’m supposedly writing regarding churches and/as “virtual learning environments”

Thumb Revelation

Would it catch your attention if your occupational therapist (I said occupational therapist, not physical therapist, in case my occupational therapist reads this, so she’ll know I learned that she’s not a physical therapist) suggested that if you follow your present trajectory, your thumb might well end up looking like this?

She sure got my attention. I’m working on those thumb exercises like crazy, now, not hyperextending my thumb, and begging my occupational therapist for more that I could do to fend off the Boutonniere thumb pattern she envisioned. Meanwhile, I’ve become acutely aware of (a) how weak the second tendon in my thumb is (not the one down at the end that hyperextends, but the one that draws the thumb away from the palm); (b) how generally I had been relying on a hyperextended thumb for everything from washing dishes to mouse-padding to turning keys; (c) how swollen the base of my thumb is. My occupational therapist was very nettled that my muscles are still inflamed, after four or five weeks of treatment.

Friday Summary

Everyone who should have graduated from Seabury today, did so.

Pip and Si recommend the new Harry Potter film (actually, Pippa did the Dance of Excitement as a sign of her approval).

I have a bunch of notions I need to blog out in response to various neighbors in Blogaria, but for now I note with interest and sympathy David Weinberger’s comments about the ways that he’s shifted the topics of his weblog recently. I know that I’ve spent less time actively conversing with my friends (which I regret); I’m hoping that release from classes will jar loose some of the blogs I’ve been planning relative to Tom and Steve and others. Tonight, though, I have to go to sleep at a timely hour, since I’m driving Josiah to his SAT IIs (what we used to call “Achievement Tests” back in olden times, when you filled out the answers with a chisel) tomorrow morning.

Incredible — Perhaps Not True

Somebody tell me that the Patent office hasn’t actually granted Microsoft’s application for a patent on double-clicking.

Gender Politics

On Morning Edition, Nina Totenberg reported about recent developments in the White House/Plame scandal; evidently the President now has hired outside counsel. When the anchor (who would have been Bob Edwards, if he hadn’t been forced out earlier in the year) asked Totenberg whether Vice President Cheney also had hired a lawyer, she replied, “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

Margaret says, “So, Bush is the goose, and Cheney is the gander?”

(I was mostly just surprised to hear Totenberg say “what’s good for the goose” rather than “what’s sauce for the goose” — but maybe I mis-heard her.)

Definite Diagnosis

I was at a dessert reception tonight for the Board of Trustees, and conversation around the coffee table turned to my be-splinted thumb. Sharon Lemler (spouse of the present, soon-to-be-ex Dean, took a quick look at me as I described the symptoms and said, “Aha! Blogger’s Blight!”

Which described precisely what’s wrong with my thumb, and I rushed home to register this characterization online, so Sharon gets appropriate credit when the New England Journal of Medicine adopts this diagnostic terminology.

Proof Positive

The essay on “integral and differential hermeneutics” is headed for the presses, but I have a few days left to send in corrections. If you’d like to download the PDF of the file, by all means help yourself — and if you see anything that needs correction, feel free to let me know (I’ve caught a number, but fresh eyes would surely catch more).

Decanal Visit

Seabury’s surprise visitor turns out (as Reverend Ref observes in my comments) to be the Rev. Dr. Howard R. Anderson. He seems to have made a favorable impression on everyone with whom I’ve talked, although a number of conversation partners wondered about the way in which he was suddenly, secretively presented to us.

He read my blog before he came here, which suggests (a) a heightened degree of technological awareness, (b) foresight, and (c) the possibility that he may read these very words — so I won’t just gush unguardedly. He struck me as much more promising than I’d have expected under the circumstances, as quite possibly an excellent candidate for the job. I think I’d always be more comfortable with a vocational academic than with someone who’s more of a ecclesiastical insider, and some of his statements reported in the press strike me as injudicious, but if the trustees call him as our new Dean, I wouldn’t begin his administration expecting the worst.

I’d guess the odds incline markedly in his favor, and I’m very willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Executive Summary

Maybe this is what I was trying to say Sunday: in the Episcopal Church, we had a long, lamentable tradition of clericalism, whereby people were expected to kowtow to clergy regardless of the ordained person’s capacities, simply because he [then] was ordained. We have worked hard to overcome that tendency — a very good thing. One consequence of our anti-clericalism, however, has been an inclination to obscure the authority of a clergy leader whose understanding and abilities warrant acknowledging her leadership.

The idea isn’t “clericalism” or “lay leadership,” but “leadership by people who know what they’re doing.”

That’s a start, anyway.

Handicapping the Race

The campus is a-buzz as we puzzle over a mysterious memo from the Board Chair. Evidently, the Executive Committee has a candidate for the soon-to-be-vacant Deanship, whom we get to meet tomorrow. Said candidate seems, from the letter, not to fit into the anticipated one-year interim box; where earlier we had been promised a “person of stature” (raising immediate queries about tall Episcopalians), now we seem to be headed toward a Dean whom the Trustees and their advisors think an outstanding candidate for whom they’d be inclined to change the rules.

No names here in the blog, but Margaret and I had a comprehensive discussion of possible deans, and the IM wires have been humming as concerned community members speculate.