My mom is making me go through the boxes of stuff in our basement – books, notes, paper trails from my years of schooling and other activities. I thought a lot about how much fun I had at various times of my life, how much I’ve learned since then, typical sentimental stuff. I also thought about how things serve as tactile reminders of what we were. For me, it is mostly paper. But I imagine for others it’s more object-based.
It turns out I was funny and awkward before, kind of like I am now, only in a younger sort of way. It’s fun to see my writing develop through my education. When I was a kid I started novels in notebooks. I have several of them stowed in the basement for me to read later. None were finished. This is an artifact of my nerdy adolescence. Is it any surprise that this same person is now a compulsive blogger and graduate student, with delusions of poetry fame?
It was also interesting to think about how much technology has changed recently. I have so many things archived on floppy disc and photographic paper. And even more just printed on paper, written by hand. What will my children have to store in my basement? A few cds or a memory key with some photos and school work (complete with powerpoint)? What does it mean that our history is becoming less and less tactile? It’s not that big of a deal for my hypothetical biographers; so what if we lose all record of what happened to me in the year 2005? But on a larger scale, I wonder if it will matter to all of us. What kind of archives will future historians use to figure out how our lives were. Blogs? Email archives? Online photo albums? Will the abundance of public information about the everyday make it impossible to conclude what is banal and what is of note? Perhaps this is the responsibility of the academy – to sift through the present and find themes and events that will be important to the future. Like me, paging through my high school journals and placing them carefully in the “keep” box, and putting my biology notes lovingly in the garbage bag. I’ll leave it to my biographers to cull through the reams I left and find a few key quotes to include in their book. Or more likely to an older, less sentimental me.
Saturday, December 31, 2005
Sunday, December 25, 2005
And Dwelt Among Us
I was sitting at Centrepointe today during the sermon and listening and thinking about distance and presence. I thought about these people sitting around me who I hadn’t seen in five months, and how at home and welcome I felt anyway. I thought about all the people I had reunited with already since coming home, and about being with my family, and how no number of emails or IM conversations is quite the same as being physically with people.
Derrida talks about how language is built on absence – you write something down, and send it away or leave it and then somebody else gets it and reads it and you’re not there and they weren’t there when you wrote it and it may or may not mean the same thing to the reader as it does to writer. Language in itself creates space between people – we must assume an imaginary presence in order to function at all. But this assumed presence that’s really absence means that everything is built on this shifty ground of absence.
And in this world of absence, of distance, of loneliness, the Word becomes Flesh. God becomes one of us – God With Us. God stops being absent – God becomes so intimately, humanely present that he is born – he grows inside a woman and then arrives in a cave in Bethlehem with a man and a woman and blood and flesh and dirt. He became a person who can touch and hug and bleed and die. This is imminence, this is presence, this is Christ.
Merry Christmas.
Derrida talks about how language is built on absence – you write something down, and send it away or leave it and then somebody else gets it and reads it and you’re not there and they weren’t there when you wrote it and it may or may not mean the same thing to the reader as it does to writer. Language in itself creates space between people – we must assume an imaginary presence in order to function at all. But this assumed presence that’s really absence means that everything is built on this shifty ground of absence.
And in this world of absence, of distance, of loneliness, the Word becomes Flesh. God becomes one of us – God With Us. God stops being absent – God becomes so intimately, humanely present that he is born – he grows inside a woman and then arrives in a cave in Bethlehem with a man and a woman and blood and flesh and dirt. He became a person who can touch and hug and bleed and die. This is imminence, this is presence, this is Christ.
Merry Christmas.
Tuesday, December 20, 2005
On DA Carson on Emergent Church
Matt directed me to this DA Carson article, which is one of the best summary/critiques of the Emergent Church conversation/movement/whatever that I have encountered. Carson summarizes some of the main books and thinkers in the movement and the general gestalt of the whole thing.
One of his best thoughts, I think, is when he points out that most of this is a clear reaction against “seeker sensitive” and “megachurch” models of Christianity. Much of the literature (although certainly not all of it) tends to ignore the more traditional churches that aren’t doing some of the things they are reacting against. He points this out particularly with Dan Kimball, when he says “some of his suggestions—such as insistence that sermons should be theocentric and not anthropocentric, that they should not insult the intelligence of the hearers, that instruction in the Word should go on throughout the week and not be confined to public services on Sunday, and what we should aim for in kingdom living, one could easily find in Reformed exhortations.” Indeed.
I also think Carson’s suggestion for a closer examination of the assumptions about postmodern culture that underlie the emergent movement is right on. A rigorous look at what, who and which ideas we mean when we say “postmodern” is important. Some thinkers, most notably Grenz and some others involved in Radical Orthodoxy are doing good work in this area, the trouble is much of this is too complex or esoteric for the laity. But, as Carson says, “the difficulty of the task… cannot exempt us from making an attempt.” I hope to continue in this vein here and elsewhere.
Carson’s most important concern is this: “Is there at least some danger that what is being advocated is not so much a new kind of Christian in a new Emergent Church, but a church that is so submerging itself in the culture that it risks hopeless compromise?” And I imagine some might suggest that most of modern Protestantism is equally submerged in the culture of Western Philosophy – based in Plato and Descartes. The Platonic tradition, I would argue, is not inherently holier than the Sophistic one. The truth often lies between two extremes, and swinging too far toward relativism is also a concern. But I wonder if we need the sophistic pole, particularly in the present culture, where the Christianity that gets the most press is dogmatically Cartesian.
I think Carson’s concerns are important, and I think he would agree with me that these are warnings for an imperfect vision, in hopes that we get closer to the truth.
One of his best thoughts, I think, is when he points out that most of this is a clear reaction against “seeker sensitive” and “megachurch” models of Christianity. Much of the literature (although certainly not all of it) tends to ignore the more traditional churches that aren’t doing some of the things they are reacting against. He points this out particularly with Dan Kimball, when he says “some of his suggestions—such as insistence that sermons should be theocentric and not anthropocentric, that they should not insult the intelligence of the hearers, that instruction in the Word should go on throughout the week and not be confined to public services on Sunday, and what we should aim for in kingdom living, one could easily find in Reformed exhortations.” Indeed.
I also think Carson’s suggestion for a closer examination of the assumptions about postmodern culture that underlie the emergent movement is right on. A rigorous look at what, who and which ideas we mean when we say “postmodern” is important. Some thinkers, most notably Grenz and some others involved in Radical Orthodoxy are doing good work in this area, the trouble is much of this is too complex or esoteric for the laity. But, as Carson says, “the difficulty of the task… cannot exempt us from making an attempt.” I hope to continue in this vein here and elsewhere.
Carson’s most important concern is this: “Is there at least some danger that what is being advocated is not so much a new kind of Christian in a new Emergent Church, but a church that is so submerging itself in the culture that it risks hopeless compromise?” And I imagine some might suggest that most of modern Protestantism is equally submerged in the culture of Western Philosophy – based in Plato and Descartes. The Platonic tradition, I would argue, is not inherently holier than the Sophistic one. The truth often lies between two extremes, and swinging too far toward relativism is also a concern. But I wonder if we need the sophistic pole, particularly in the present culture, where the Christianity that gets the most press is dogmatically Cartesian.
I think Carson’s concerns are important, and I think he would agree with me that these are warnings for an imperfect vision, in hopes that we get closer to the truth.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
places
Becky’s recent post (and our related conversations about going home and growing up and how much we’ve learned and changed over the semester) reminded me of a poem I had been working on. And since ideas bouncing around between blogs and through comments is one of my favorite things about weblogging, I thought I’d post it here. See also my July post anticipating some of these thoughts too. Critiques, comments, or further discussion invited:
I have become intertwined with this place
It is almost as if the pavement
presses back against my foot
in a more friendly way, now
that we know each other.
As if the swing of my hips
has learned to match the
quirks of this sidewalk.
I wonder if my last place will
still recognize me when I return.
If the rhythms of its staircases
will re-enter my legs,
if the gentle curves of its streets
still fit the steps my car and I
dance together, hands, feet,
wheels in sync.
I wonder if it will fold me back
Like a missing page or lost coin.
Or if it will pull away,
Curious of this familiar new
friend-stranger.
Our reunion simultaneously
awkward and expected,
like an adolescence.
I have become intertwined with this place
It is almost as if the pavement
presses back against my foot
in a more friendly way, now
that we know each other.
As if the swing of my hips
has learned to match the
quirks of this sidewalk.
I wonder if my last place will
still recognize me when I return.
If the rhythms of its staircases
will re-enter my legs,
if the gentle curves of its streets
still fit the steps my car and I
dance together, hands, feet,
wheels in sync.
I wonder if it will fold me back
Like a missing page or lost coin.
Or if it will pull away,
Curious of this familiar new
friend-stranger.
Our reunion simultaneously
awkward and expected,
like an adolescence.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Derrida on Jesus as Deconstruction
I just discovered a passage of a conversation with Jacques Derrida from 2001 which was recently published, and it both helps me a lot with my current project and points out that Derrida himself (among others) may be a step ahead of me. Derrida, here, seems to affirm an open theist view and also points out the paradox and deconstruction inherent in Biblical Text and the person of Christ.
“We usually identify God with the almighty, that is, with absolute power. I’m trying now in seminars and in texts, by following a political thread, to deconstruct, so to speak, the onto-theological heritage of the political concept of sovereignty, without abandoning the unconditionality of gifts, of hospitality, and so on. That means that some unconditionality might be associated, not with power, but with weakness, with powerlessness. Now some would say this is still Christian. There is in Jesus Christ some weakness, some vulnerability, some powerlessness, but there you see that the powerlessness, of course, is also a sign of the almighty.” (from a Roundtable Discussion with Derrida in Augustine and Postmodernism 2005. page 41)
Perhaps Derrida doesn’t undermine biblical hermeneutics as much as I thought. Perhaps he actually illuminates it.
“We usually identify God with the almighty, that is, with absolute power. I’m trying now in seminars and in texts, by following a political thread, to deconstruct, so to speak, the onto-theological heritage of the political concept of sovereignty, without abandoning the unconditionality of gifts, of hospitality, and so on. That means that some unconditionality might be associated, not with power, but with weakness, with powerlessness. Now some would say this is still Christian. There is in Jesus Christ some weakness, some vulnerability, some powerlessness, but there you see that the powerlessness, of course, is also a sign of the almighty.” (from a Roundtable Discussion with Derrida in Augustine and Postmodernism 2005. page 41)
Perhaps Derrida doesn’t undermine biblical hermeneutics as much as I thought. Perhaps he actually illuminates it.
Tuesday, November 22, 2005
blogs and academics
I was directed to this slate article by blogora.
The article talks about how young professors who blog might be hurt inn their tenure hopes because the academic establishment looks down on blogging as an activity for faculty. This makes me a little distressed about my own future as a grad student and faculty member. However, I am fully aware that my blog is subject to google searches of my name and invite that audience, at least for now. Perhaps when I’m on the job market I will find it wise to post a little less frequently and not be very subversive.
For now, though, I see blogging as a responsibility for my academic life, rather than a detractor from it. First, I’m interested in studying the ways communication changes because of technology and I think participant observation is a good way to find out things. Second, I think academics spend way too much time talking amongst themselves and the important ideas and discussions never get to real people or practitioners of the very things they are studying, and I think that’s a shame. Blogging is one way of giving the benefits of one’s education to a more general audience. And the discussion sometimes directly benefits my work. Some of the conversation in the previous post about Derrida and the Bible is going to help me in my paper project about Derrida and Christianity. And it got me really excited to learn more so I can post again and contribute more.
Also, I imagine the terrain on this issue will shift a fair amount in the next 5 years, as technology changes the way we deal with technology and the way we use it. It will be interesting to see long-term the way technology impacts academia (as well as everything else).
The article talks about how young professors who blog might be hurt inn their tenure hopes because the academic establishment looks down on blogging as an activity for faculty. This makes me a little distressed about my own future as a grad student and faculty member. However, I am fully aware that my blog is subject to google searches of my name and invite that audience, at least for now. Perhaps when I’m on the job market I will find it wise to post a little less frequently and not be very subversive.
For now, though, I see blogging as a responsibility for my academic life, rather than a detractor from it. First, I’m interested in studying the ways communication changes because of technology and I think participant observation is a good way to find out things. Second, I think academics spend way too much time talking amongst themselves and the important ideas and discussions never get to real people or practitioners of the very things they are studying, and I think that’s a shame. Blogging is one way of giving the benefits of one’s education to a more general audience. And the discussion sometimes directly benefits my work. Some of the conversation in the previous post about Derrida and the Bible is going to help me in my paper project about Derrida and Christianity. And it got me really excited to learn more so I can post again and contribute more.
Also, I imagine the terrain on this issue will shift a fair amount in the next 5 years, as technology changes the way we deal with technology and the way we use it. It will be interesting to see long-term the way technology impacts academia (as well as everything else).
Sunday, November 13, 2005
Derrida and Biblical Hermeneutics
I’ve been reading Derrida for my Rhet Theory class, and working on a potential paper about Christian engagement with Derrida. (disclaimer: I plan to read a lot more and I might later find out that the stuff I’m saying here is obvious and/or wrong. Hopefully I’ll think of more interesting things soon.) The idea I have been trying to understand today is différance. As far as I can tell, it is about the distance between the author, the text, and the reader. The lacuna of absence, the semantic slippage that necessarily occurs in any use of language because of inherent ambiguity. According to Derrida this leads to openness of meaning and possibility. Possibility for new understandings, including new understandings of old texts, as well as possibilities of misunderstandings – we cannot assume that what we express will deliver the same thought or feeling to our hearers or readers, but this gives way to a fecundity of language as well as an imprecision.
This same idea of ambiguity and necessary distance between author, text and audience is problematic for fundamentalist biblical hermeneutics – it means that language (including (especially?) Biblical text) necessarily means different things to different people at different times. It means that perhaps the bumper sticker “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” does not really settle it at all. Because how do we know that what God meant is what God said and that we understand it the same way? Is there even a correct way to understand it?
Does Derrida free Christians to interact with Biblical text in new and different ways because of the possibility built into language? or does it only mean we are doomed to misinterpretation until the New Earth? I prefer to think about it in terms of the former, although there is a sense of the latter as well (especially when I hear some pretty crazy stuff). I know plenty of Christians who avoid the question altogether and that is why they are so scared of postmodernism – it undermines their very epistemology. Perhaps this is how “postmodern” became a dirty word in the church until recently (thanks to the likes of Grenz, McLaren, etc). It all certainly raises new questions: if we are following a text that is necessarily ambiguous, how, then, do we choose to read it? Why would God choose to use a language that is so slippery to tell us things in the first place? Perhaps God, with Derrida, revels in the diversity, the possibility, the différance the text allows…
This same idea of ambiguity and necessary distance between author, text and audience is problematic for fundamentalist biblical hermeneutics – it means that language (including (especially?) Biblical text) necessarily means different things to different people at different times. It means that perhaps the bumper sticker “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” does not really settle it at all. Because how do we know that what God meant is what God said and that we understand it the same way? Is there even a correct way to understand it?
Does Derrida free Christians to interact with Biblical text in new and different ways because of the possibility built into language? or does it only mean we are doomed to misinterpretation until the New Earth? I prefer to think about it in terms of the former, although there is a sense of the latter as well (especially when I hear some pretty crazy stuff). I know plenty of Christians who avoid the question altogether and that is why they are so scared of postmodernism – it undermines their very epistemology. Perhaps this is how “postmodern” became a dirty word in the church until recently (thanks to the likes of Grenz, McLaren, etc). It all certainly raises new questions: if we are following a text that is necessarily ambiguous, how, then, do we choose to read it? Why would God choose to use a language that is so slippery to tell us things in the first place? Perhaps God, with Derrida, revels in the diversity, the possibility, the différance the text allows…
Wednesday, November 09, 2005
Lexical Curiosity: Platonic
I’ve had a troubling question floating in the back of my mind for several days now: why do we use the same word to mean having to do with the ideas of Plato as we do to mean a friendship with no romantic or sensual intentions? What does a Platonic friendship have to do with Platonic dialogues?
Well, I got frustrated and looked it up in the OED, an excellent resource for these sorts of etymological dilemmas. And I found the answer. Evidently, the term “platonic love” has been in use for centuries, and it was originally meant “to denote the kind of interest in young men with which Socrates was credited: cf. the last few pages of Plato's Symposium.”
So there you have it. The idea of platonic friendship, evidently, comes from Plato. Well, I’m sure people had them before Plato. But that’s why we call it what we do. I feel better already, knowing I won’t be arguing for a more aristotelian friendship with some of my friends and acquaintances.
Well, I got frustrated and looked it up in the OED, an excellent resource for these sorts of etymological dilemmas. And I found the answer. Evidently, the term “platonic love” has been in use for centuries, and it was originally meant “to denote the kind of interest in young men with which Socrates was credited: cf. the last few pages of Plato's Symposium.”
So there you have it. The idea of platonic friendship, evidently, comes from Plato. Well, I’m sure people had them before Plato. But that’s why we call it what we do. I feel better already, knowing I won’t be arguing for a more aristotelian friendship with some of my friends and acquaintances.
Friday, November 04, 2005
blogs in the news
A recent survey (covered in a number of news sources, see USA Today version here) makes the ground-breaking observation that teenagers use blogs not as a public forum so much as a social tool. This comes as no surprise to me, as I began blogging in this manner a number of years ago. Such is the advantage of being my age I suppose. I know about teen life because it wasn’t so long ago I was one (if a nerdy and not particularly popular one). If only I knew this kind of material was noteworthy. I really need to start publishing this stuff someplace other than my blog with it’s ~15 faithful readers, because it seems that the news thinks these observations are interesting.
I think what is most interesting about this new information, though, is the ubiquity of teen blogs. When I started keeping a xanga about 4 years ago there were only a few people I knew who kept blogs. I thought it was a little bit nerdy and kept it low-key (although I will admit that, like most writers, I have delusions of grandeur and huge audiences from time to time). Having an online presence was unusual and probably geeky at the time. Now, college freshman are weird who DON’T have online identities in xanga or facebook or myspace or something. Online society is an integral part of young society, and this has changed in a matter of only a few years.
This presents a problem for new media scholarship (which I have been considering): how do you make any meaningful generalizations that will not be obsolete by the time they go through a review process and arrive in published form? I think there are things that remain the same, but the internet changes at such a quick pace, it seems there are always new examples and new challenges to any theory of online communication.
I think what is most interesting about this new information, though, is the ubiquity of teen blogs. When I started keeping a xanga about 4 years ago there were only a few people I knew who kept blogs. I thought it was a little bit nerdy and kept it low-key (although I will admit that, like most writers, I have delusions of grandeur and huge audiences from time to time). Having an online presence was unusual and probably geeky at the time. Now, college freshman are weird who DON’T have online identities in xanga or facebook or myspace or something. Online society is an integral part of young society, and this has changed in a matter of only a few years.
This presents a problem for new media scholarship (which I have been considering): how do you make any meaningful generalizations that will not be obsolete by the time they go through a review process and arrive in published form? I think there are things that remain the same, but the internet changes at such a quick pace, it seems there are always new examples and new challenges to any theory of online communication.
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Thoughts for Reformation Day
On October 31, 488 years ago, Martin Luther nailed 95 theses to the church door in Wittenberg Germany. Little did he know, I imagine, the cultural craziness that was about to ensue, or the tradition of church schisms that would continue for the next 500 years plus (to be perfectly fair, the east-west schism had happened hundreds of years before that anyway, so somebody else really started it).
We mention the Protestant Reformation a lot in my Rhetorical Theory class, and it seems that the reformation has something to do with the history of ideas. It was clearly grounded in what was going on culturally at the time – the Guttenburg press enabled the reformation as well as the development of democratic ideas. Luther’s idea of the Priesthood of All Beleivers either led to or was influenced by the individualistic turn in thought at that time. My colleagues in the Rhetoric of Science tell me that Dr Lessl believes the Protestant reformation led to the development of Science. I had no idea before recently how interrelated all these events are.
So what has the reformation given us, and what has it left us with? It lead to some necessary changes within the Catholic church in Europe, and undermined the hegemony of church officials, which was being abused plenty. It began a tradition of criticizing the church and, unintentionally, of division within the church. I think the criticism is a proud tradition – we need sincere voices of dissent. I wonder if the constant division, sectarianism, dogmatism and defensiveness is a necessary side effect of an atmosphere that allows for dissent. I’m sure Luther would be appalled at the sorts of Protestant-Catholic fighting that has been going on since the Reformation, the entirely un-christian tribalism that even leads to war and terrorism in extreme cases. Must Reform lead to fighting? How do we change a bad system while acting in love? Can we be both prophets for change and voices of unity?
We mention the Protestant Reformation a lot in my Rhetorical Theory class, and it seems that the reformation has something to do with the history of ideas. It was clearly grounded in what was going on culturally at the time – the Guttenburg press enabled the reformation as well as the development of democratic ideas. Luther’s idea of the Priesthood of All Beleivers either led to or was influenced by the individualistic turn in thought at that time. My colleagues in the Rhetoric of Science tell me that Dr Lessl believes the Protestant reformation led to the development of Science. I had no idea before recently how interrelated all these events are.
So what has the reformation given us, and what has it left us with? It lead to some necessary changes within the Catholic church in Europe, and undermined the hegemony of church officials, which was being abused plenty. It began a tradition of criticizing the church and, unintentionally, of division within the church. I think the criticism is a proud tradition – we need sincere voices of dissent. I wonder if the constant division, sectarianism, dogmatism and defensiveness is a necessary side effect of an atmosphere that allows for dissent. I’m sure Luther would be appalled at the sorts of Protestant-Catholic fighting that has been going on since the Reformation, the entirely un-christian tribalism that even leads to war and terrorism in extreme cases. Must Reform lead to fighting? How do we change a bad system while acting in love? Can we be both prophets for change and voices of unity?
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