Teoma No Google-Killer

On the basis of the results, I can confidently state that Teoma is a long, long way from equalling Google. On Google, the results for "AKMA" begin with this very blog page, and there’s a second-choice page from this site for those with more expansive interests.

On Teoma, however, my blog page doesn’t appear within the top 90 results for "AKMA." In fact, when you search for "AKMA" on Teoma, wood s lot appears at number 30, St. Luke’s Church at number 34, Jonathon Delacour at numbers 35 and 40 (and what a come-down it must be for the high-flying blogger, after “vaulting to the top of blogging’s A-list within a few months of starting his blog. . . [such] that his site now dominates Daypop, Blogdex, and the Weblogs.com Top 100,” to come in behind a lightly-linked parish church), DownWrite appears at 36 (and seems no longer even to be mentioning me), and the good Doc Searls is numbers 55 and 56. But no mention of my page at all—at least not within the page range that my self-esteem could stand visiting.

As far as I’m concerned, Google is here to stay.

Although Akoestische Materialen, Rie Muñoz, the Alaska Manufacturers’ Association, and the Albrecht Kemper Museum of Art may think differently.
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      ( 10:04 PM )  

New Bestseller-to-Be

To Attend or Attend Not

First, we should observe that I have an immediate vocational stake in the question: not only am I a priest myself, but I teach clergy and aspiring clergy, so there’s one sense in which I’m obligated to go to church more than anyone, and another in which I have a vested interest in inducing others to go to church.

That being said, I would hope my friends and correspondents not think that I’m only in it for the money, or to dupe others into falling for a load of malarkey in which I’ve found myself inextricably entangled. Likewise, I have no desire (despite my Dominican alliances) to play Torquemada and extract grudging professions of feigned faith from uncertain consciences.

Dave observes—and I won’t argue the correctness of his claim—that

I currently see little similarity between American churches and what I read in the Gospels and New Testament. I don’t see anything there about institutions and bureaucracies and jargon that is out of touch with the culture outside the doors. I don’t see any counsel about taking on multimillion dollar loans to build edifices that are used but once a week and that leave a burden of debt that effectively limits service to needy people. I barely see anything there about a distinction between clergy and laity. And I certainly don’t see an emphasis on “feel-good” spirituality that denies that we all suffer pain, brokenness, neediness and difficulties.

Well, yes it can be pretty badly off. The churches do give Dave reason to charge that they’re over-institutionalized. Office buildings and meetings and committees and task forces and who-knows-what-all-else frequently clog the arteries of the Body of Christ. I have no taste for bureaucracy, and sympathize with Dave in his antipathy to leaden organizational thinking. On the other hand, although I have several brilliant ideas about how better to order church life, I have to concede that were any of my scintillating plans to be implemented, lots of serious, devout, dedicated, active disciples of Jesus would be really ticked off at me and the church. Our present ecclesiastical org charts, cluttered though they be, reflect actual people’s actual practice of coordinated and vigorous service—however misguided Dave and I might think it.

I’m fiercely resistant to the church falling out of touch with the culture—though we should admit that sometimes when other people deploy that claim, different people use that claim in different directions, so various Christians might honestly and thoughtfully parse the question of “how to be in touch” differently.

“Edifices” are a problem. They’re costly and underutilized, as Dave points out. They anchor the churches to specific places and ways that bog down the gospel in many ways. For some reason, though, Christians of virtually every sort have kept building them. This could be a residual aspect of our cultural conditioning (remembering that when King David wanted to build a temple, he got a direct and pointed rejection from the Deity he thought to honor); we get hung up about places and walls and roofs and that sort of thing. Some of those buildings have amounted to exquisite expressions of human praise and adoration, though; while we can’t quantify the positive contribution of a beautiful synagogue or church relative to the good things one might have wrought with the same sum of money, we ought at least to acknowledge that the money that builds the church doesn’t go for nought, and that some congregations actually make ingenious daily use of their buildings. While we get disproportionately hung up about buildings for worship, I’d think it odd that they should repel someone from gathering with other Christians (and if the building is the problem, I’d suppose there may be congregations with humble structures, or some that even worship outdoors, especially in southern California).

I feel acutely Dave’s suggestion that churches make too much of the distinction between clergy and laypeople. I’ve wrestled with the challenge that this claim poses against my sense of who I am and what I do. I can’t rebut the charge, but I wonder if the problem involves the bare existence of ordained leadership for the people of God, or if congregations might properly ordain leaders to ministries that involved less monarchy and more servanthood. Jesus taught his disciples to form congregations in which no one might exercise domination (Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza refers to this as “kyriarchy,” from the Greek for “rule by a Master”; I wish she’d taken the Latin route, because “dominocracy” sounds more ominous and autocratic to me), where no one should be called “Father.” If ordained leadership cannot work to Heaven’s glory when church leaders govern as monarchs, might it still be appropriate if leaders were to minister as servants?

Finally, Dave laments that the New Testament conjures up fewer images of cozy spiritual jollity, and more of a challenging regimen of costly discipleship. Yet again, I endorse his critique. The North American church has indeed gotten very comfy in the world, and tends to take its material abundance and its political protection for granted; both conditions would likely change markedly were the churches to pursue more radical paths of countercultural fidelity to ways of righteousness and peace.

So I agree with Dave on much of what he protests— but I still go to church, and I wish he felt that he could. Discipleship is a craft we learn from one another, from the sharing and mutual accountability that we cultivate most fully in collective activity. When we all help build the identities of one another, church serves the positive purpose of helping stack the decks of our identities with others who share our way of believing.

Moreover, churches benefit from the participation of people who recognize the disequilibrium that Dave diagnoses. Dave might help a congregation admit its complicity in exploitive political and economic systems more clearly, or recognize the dangers of putting new-building programs at the heart of ministry. And if protest and reform don’t feel right, another congregation may embody a higher commitment to laudable theological ideals.

But perhaps the biggest reason I have to go to church every Sunday (and go several times a day on weekdays, too, when school’s in session) is that my judgments about the church need to be leavened with the wisdom of other folks besides me—and if I absent myself from church, then I’m also stepping out of the arena in which my wiser sisters and brothers have the most traction in calling me to account. I can’t do for myself what church does for me; and my sisters and brothers can’t do for themselves what I (along with other folk) can do for them. So if we muddle along, too propertied, too commercial, too out of touch, and too stratified, however badly we mangle the job of being disciples, we are at least trying to work things out together, to learn from one another, and to bring each other along as best we can.

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      ( 10:58 AM )  

Arrr, Matey!

Well, Since You Asked

Spaces, Places, and Lives

In past blogposts, I’ve resisted the metaphor of our hyperlinked network as a space, or even (in David Weinberger’s more nuanced presentation, as a place. I want also to resist a related metaphor that I’ve encountered in Lawrence Lessig’s excellent Code. Lessig devotes extensive energy to the ramifications of our “living” in cyberspace, but he doesn’t open the question of whether we ought to rely on these conventional metaphors for our online activities. But that won’t stop me from pressing that button!

If we begin by characterizing our engagement with links and pages as spatial, then we do indeed have ample basis for saying (as Lessig often does) that we “live” in a different “space” online. It’s probably too late to stop that train from leaving the station, but I see manifold problems that the spatial metaphor engenders. Yes, we can aptly describe our online activities as “going places,” as “visiting people,” as “exploring.” But those subsequent-metaphors derive their coherence from having first accepted the spatial metaphor. I’ll hobby-horse-ride for a minute or two: a few months ago, I proposed the metaphor of the web as a vast, shared imagination. Okay, we can stipulate that this comparison doesn’t work across the board, but the point is that if a different metaphor (such as “web as imagination”) had caught on before “web-as-space,” we wouldn’t have the same conceptual problems that the space metaphor generates. We would surely have different problems, yes—but then we need to ask, “Are we better served by simply accepting (if there’s even an option any longer) the ‘space’ metaphor or by working toward a mtaphor whose problems can more readily be dealt with?”

Let’s get down to specifics: Lessig’s examination of multiple sovereignties in Chapter Fourteen keeps going back to the premise that online, we “live in a different place” at the same time that we’re living in a (familiar) place in the physical world. If we accept that premise, we’re challenged by a dizzying array of legal and ethical problems, and Lessig diligently sorts them out and proposes insightful solutions. But must we assent to that premise in the first place? I don’t think so. I don’t think our ethical/legal reasoning requires it; I don’t think our conventional adoption of the “space” metaphor warrants it; and I think we stand to benefit greatly if we cast about for an alternative model for reasoning about online activity.

We just don’t live online, and we don’t inhabit space online. And constructing laws and conventions based on those metaphorical premises seems premature.

It Is, It Is a Glorious Thing

The spokesbots repeat the accusation—which I haven’t yet seen justified—that anyone who downloads music must be a pirate, heartlessly dedicated to depriving hard-working musicians of their meager sustenance. Doing so, they elide a variety of issues, many of which other folks have explored elsewhere (most notably and most recently Michael Fraase in Arts and Farces). I’ll suggest a dimension of the affair that I haven’t seen discussed before.

Ought we not consider the distinction between recordings and packaging? This came to mind yesterday morning before church, when I was exchanging emails with the estimable Tom Matrullo. We chatted not about Luke’s use of the aorist participle, our usual topic for intellectual stimulation, but about the Fugs. More precisely, I emailed my amazement that the very morning after the first time in many, many years that I’d played “Ramses II is Dead, My Love,” he blogged an interview with Ed Sanders in which the Fug commented on that song. Using words I will not quote here, I opined that this surpassed all estimates of plausible coincidence (all in just three words).

Tom, in response to my telegraphic explostulation, noted that the Fugs were readily available on Napster, and I affirmed that just yesterday (“yesterday” when I wrote, “Saturday evening” to be unambiguous) I had downloaded a copy of “Ramses II” to replace the LP that is probably moldering in a forgotten, flood-damaged moving storage box (because we have no functional turntable). And that kindled the thought, “I’ve already paid Ed Sanders, Tuli Kupferberg, Ken Weaver and all their tenth-of-a-cent for playing ‘Ramses II’; they didn’t play it any more often, or anew, or better or worse when I stopped listening to vinyl and started listening to CDs.” If I’d bought the CD, though, I would have gotten a lot of new packaging.

I’ve paid for the privilege of listening to vinyl recordings of bazillions of songs I don’t own on CD, and moany of these songs I haven’t been able to scrounge online. I don’t want new packaging. I want to listen to songs for which I’ve paid a licensing fee (as it were), whether I still have a functional turntable or not. (Strictly speaking, I could borrow David Cunningham’s turntable, dig out my old LPs, see whether they’re still functional, rip them to MP3s, and settle this once and for all; but remember, I have already paid for the music—it’s just the packaging that’s in question. Why should I have to bother going to all that trouble?)

If Elvis Costello, Billy Bragg, Joan Armatrading, the Clash, Bob Dylan, David Byrne, Patsy Cline, and all the others had sold me little music licenses, I’d be all set, they’d have made more money, and I’d have bought much more music (since I have in the end re-bought numerous albums, some three times over)—spreading the benefit of my music-buying dollar more broadly. But then, no A&R men or ClearChannel executives would have made a cut.

Don’t worry, though, guys. The next time I want some slick packaging, I’ll know who to ask.
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      ( 9:59 PM )  

Merely Academic Affairs

I shall have to take matters in hand, then, and [unless there be an overwhelming non placet from the U Blog community] prepare a room for a Section 508 Professor of Web Accessibility and Usability at U Blog and a Professor of Melanesian Hermeneutics. With apologies, and a gesture that David Weinberger just taught us all.

Responsa to David and Tom

My first impulse is to say, “Aw, shucks, guys,” because they say such nice things—but that would short-change their acute responses.

David catches the specifically Christian determination of my essay, and indeed I ignore Judaic interpretive practices for a number of reasons. One is the obvious: I am a Christian, and the essay was written (mostly) for other Christians. Another is less obvious, but also powerfully influential; that is, these particular cultural processes (the ones that constructed “biblical interpretation” as the kind of discipline against which I’m arguing) developed principally among Christians. I want to avoid some of the saccharine romanticization of Judaism that some literary critics sponsored a while back, wherein the whole way of life amounted to a ludic exploration of polyvalence. At the same time, David rightly points out that “words” function differently in Judaism from in Christianity. It would be presumptuous for me to guess why Judaism cultivated a word-mysticism rather than a word-mystification, but even a cursory acquaintance with the contours of these two ways will reveal far-reaching divergences in their practices of interpretation. I constantly struggle to persuade seminarians that they ought to learn to read Scripture more as the rabbis, when cultural prejudice and Christian bigotry have inculcated the very opposite lesson.

Serious as law, playful as fantasy, interpreting at the intersection of life and death, before the Creator of words and time and space—that’s a tall order, but Judaism has generally sustained a wiser, more balanced way of interpretation than has Western Christianity. (Since sweeping generalizations come cheap, here’s another: Orthodox Christians typically are taught to read the Bible much more imaginatively than Western Christians).

So yes, David, Judaism stands much more culturally-prepared for hypermedia than does Christianity. Had I been writing for a more general audience, I’d have mentioned Kaballah and gematria and the typographic/cheirographic conventions of the production of the Talmud, all these testify to a kind of hypermedia-consciousness. Christians did okay for a while; figurative interpretation, the glosses, annotated and illustrated Bibles, these all exemplify a particular version of Christian hypermedia. If I had an Amazon gift list, it would begin with Thomas Aquinas’s Catena Aurea (part of which is available online here) or the domesticated version edited by M. F. Toal under the title Sunday Sermons of the Fathers. On the whole, though, modernity, along with the conflicts that the Reformation engendered, have not been kind to Christian biblical interpretation, whose practitioners have bought the cultural acceptance that comes with pretensions to scientific inquiry, but at the cost of the fullness of human understanding and interpretation.

Tom joins in here, appraising the prospect of a broader practice of biblical interpretation and wondering, if the lion of imagination and the lamb of restraint lie down together, how well the lamb will sleep. The question carries particular weight since the lamb has been so fiercely restraining the lion for much of the last century. I can’t predict what’ll happen, but I suspect this much: the transition from a tightly-controlled practice of interpretation to a richer, fuller, sounder practice will encounter resistance from a vast populace who have become accustomed to the notion that interpretive legitimacy depends on control and exclusion, and the cultural forces on the side of hypermedia will generate interpretive responses all the more extreme and outlandish for the establishment’s resistance. In the end, though, if Tom is right that the lion stands for imagination and the lamb for control, I’d bet heavily on the lion.

Later: David Weinberger says, “Did you try pushing the ‘safe mode’ button above the Blogger window where you see your posts?” Well, no, David—it seemed so unsafe. But that’s what solved the problem. Did you ever thought you’d see the day of David Weinberger urging AKMA to take the risk of pushing the “safe” button?
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