Life is, at the moment, kicking us around a bit–especially M. So if y’all could spare some prayers I’d appreciate it. And if you know her IRL, an email/phone-call/get-together would be greatly appreciated…
Category Archives: Random
Note on African statement
No, this isn’t what you think it is.
Rather, I’m drawing attention to the statement from the Anglican Peace and Justice Network.
Note these lines from the recent ACNS email about the communique:
A primary recommendation noted “our firm conviction that the Anglican Communion increase its presence in the regions and countries in conflict, and to be in solidarity with the affected local Anglican provinces and jurisdictions.
“This “increased solidarity” is especially needed, the communiqué says, with the Anglican provinces in the Great Lakes region of eastern Africa.The Great Lakes region includes countries surrounding Lake Kivu, Lake Tanganyika, and Lake Victoria. Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda have a combined population of 107 million people.
The whole Friedman-style flat earth thing is our reality; it has an enormous effect on our worldwide communions—Anglican and otherwise. What I keep discovering, though, is that I am constantly tripping over my massive ignorance about what has and is going on in other parts of the world.
Case in point—the reference in the above statement to the African Great Lakes region. How many of us know where that is? How many of us know what has happened there over the last few decades? While most of know know about the Rwandan Genocide, how many of us know anything about the Second Congo War, aka the Great War of Africa?
One of the pieces that bothers me here is that this war officially ended in 2003. I was a functioning literate adult the whole time it was going on but had no sense that it was happening.
What Scholars Should Do
Scholar-type people and academics often frustrate me. There’s a picture I love that hangs in the law library where I used to work; I’d push book trucks by it most everyday. In the picture a wizened old African-American man is outfitted in well-used work gear and he’s got his hand out offering something to the viewer: a small white pillar shaped object. The caption is “Ivory Tower.” The way that I interpret the watercolor is that those who “make it” into academia never get there on their own. Yes, it takes tremendous sacrifice from family (that’s a whole series of posts by itself…) but there are hundreds of thousands of others who make it possible as well from the great philanthropists down to the share-croppers.
As a result, we have an obligation. We’re not sitting around thinking great thoughts for our own sake even though that’s how so many of us seem to act. We study and think in order to advance human understanding in all realms for and on behalf of all. Even if our work is arcane and abstract, I have a conviction that we have to share what of it we can for wider consumption, for the benefit of those who have enabled us to do what we do.
Many of us don’t take this seriously. Furthermore, many of us can barely string together a sentence about our work coherent to those outside of our discipline—and that’s just wrong… As I see it, that’s one of the reasons why academics should be blogging. People like Mark Goodacre and Richard Nokes (among others) have the right idea; blog about academic topics and subjects in ways that are accessible and meaningful to the rest of life on the planet that doesn’t care—or perhaps doesn’t know why they should care—about the minutia of our fields.
Here’s another thing scholars should be doing: Wikipedia edits. What sparked this post was the discovery of a well-done entry on Latin Psalters. As more and more people start relying on things like Wikipedia for information, scholars of various fields need to step up and make sure that the data is right. (And yes, you can debate about whether people should rely on these sources of information but that debate is secondary to the fact that they do.)
Of course, now that I’ve said all of this, I realize that I have my own civic duty to do… The page currently states that Jerome’s Roman Psalter was used in “Britain ” until the Conquest. While it is true that editions of the Roman Psalter were in use and were copied until the Conquest, the majority of Anglo-Saxon era psalters were Gallican…
Random Items
Extreme busyness continues–I need to catch up on emails but haven’t had a chance…
- Don’t miss Heavenfield’s introduction to St. Adomnan. I do wonder a little how far I’d want to push the lawyer thing. What would seal the case for me (so to speak…) would be a clear presentation of how the three books of the Life of Columba fit into the categories of stasis theory—the “official” lawyerly way of arguing according to period texts like Cicero, the ps-Ciceronean Rhetorica ad Herennium, and Quintillian.
- LP’s got a new call! I’m happy for him—and worried at the same time. This will be a huge challenge both professionally and in juggling a growing family. Many prayers for Mrs. LP too!
- Continued prayers are requested for M’s job search, of course…
- bls has an article on a renewed push on Confession.
- NLM has some links that clarify the place of music in the Extraordinary Form of the Mass that are helpful for both students of the liturgy and current practicing church musicians.
- Great question from bls on Why Saturdays on the Ember Days. Wednesdays and Fridays were traditional fast days for Christians going back to the Didache. So why Saturdays? Good question… My most recent thought on the matter is that I read an expectation in the fifth through eighth centuries that Western Christians would be at mass on those days. My logic is based on what we see in the lectionaries—proper Gospels are ideally provided for Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays. I say “ideally” because the manuscript evidence is mixed. Sometimes all three ferial days are provided, sometimes only the Wednesdays and Fridays. For instance here’s a page where the Fifth Sunday after Epiphany has a reading for Sunday (EBD V), Wednesday (FR IIII), Friday (FR V), and Saturday (FR VI) But the following two weeks only have readings for Wednesday and Friday. Very fascinating is this page from the same lectionary for the time after Pentecost where there are blank spaces for the ferial Gospels under the appointed Gospels for the Sunday. The scribe knows that these readings *ought* to be there—but he seems not to have the readings… There was a major push to fill all of this in that only hits English lectionaries in the tenth century or later (Lenker’s Type 3 alt.). I’m not sure what happens to these ferial readings after this point…
Notes
- Today’s the first of the Fall Ember Days. More on this later.
- It’s also the feast of Theodore of Tarsus, Archbishop of Canterbury
- Yesterday was the Day of Decadent Dessert. As some of you know, cooking ranks high among our hobbies in the haligweorc household; M is, among other things, an incredible baker. Yesterday I got to taste the fruits of her latest brownie recipe that she had located somewhere. It was nothing short of amazing. I didn’t know something without hydrogenated vegetable oil and high fructose corn syrup could taste that good. Then, she made one of her famous apple pies. You couldn’t have asked for a better crust. She insists that the filling recipe needs to be tweaked a bit to get the spice mixture right, and I’ve heroically offered my services in testing just as many pies as she wants to make…
- Fr. Marshall Scott has a great piece on blogs and blog commenting at the Cafe today.
- Holy crap–what happened to my blogroll!? I know I had more people than that on it. I hope this is just a temporary WordPress glitch… [it seems to have been]
- Lutheran Chik reminds us that today is, in fact, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. [Lil’ G will be thrilled. She’s already informed me that I will be a pirate for Halloween…]
Ghostwriters for Bishops
The only part of the whole ghostwriting-for-bishops thing that I can’t understand is—out of all the bishops in the Anglican Communion, why haven’t any contacted me to help them? I’m available too! I’ve even got some lovely boilerplate about reviving the Offices, Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, and a liberal and gracious implementation of 2000’s Resolution B-042 that I could drop into any minor communiques that need a little more spice… ;-)
Anniversary
Yesterday was our 8th anniversary. I’m generally not known for being a romantic. Not necessarily because I’m *not* romantic but because I don’t normally plan ahead and set up things that are going to be romantic… I actually did ok yesterday, though, even with the constraints of two kids and a quite limited budget.
I woke M with breakfast in bed which was crepes simply dressed with lemon and sugar (n.b.: I found myself wishing I’d made lemon-sugar—I’ll have to try that next time.). On my return home from work, I brought an inexpensive but good bottle of wine and a bag with spinach dip and gnocchis from our favorite upscale Italian place (one order of the gnocchis feeds both of us with left-overs to spare…). I had set up a screened-in pavilion on our notoriously mosquito-infested deck and festooned it with little white Christmas lights. M fed the girls a quick supper and we put them to bed shortly thereafter, then we enjoyed our dinner in the pavilion, under the lights, accompanied by Glenn Miller’s greatest hits (snuck into M’s iPod when she wasn’t looking). After a leisurely dinner, we pushed the table out of the way for some dancing before we retired.
All in all, a wonderful evening with a wonderful wife.
Tech Is Here To Stay: Learn To Deal With It…
There is a post at one of the great academic web projects, the New Testament Gateway Blog, on the WikiScanner. Dr. Mark Goodacre, now at Duke, has been thinking for a bit about the future and direction of his own project which has grown into an incredible endeavor. Several things here are of interest to me:
- The world is in the midst of perhaps one of the first truly global paradigm shifts with the rise of the Internet. It involves data, who can access it and how it is communicated. We’re all still trying to figure out what it means but one thing is clear: it’s not going to go away. Particularly in this context–students will be relying much more on the Internet.
- As far as tenure goes, one of the fundamental metrics is books and articles published. If we take the first point seriously, then university-type folks need to have more serious conversations about how research and topic databases like data portals, wikis, etc. should be added into the tenure discussion to promote the creation and proliferation of reliable, verifiable data.
- Broadening the scope a bit: congregants and congregations and those seeking knowledge about both will be—no, are—relying more on the Internet as well. What are we religious-types doing about this?
- And is the answer to this question (either in the academic or the religious realms) rooted in organization-wide top-down directives or more of an individual and small-group collective nature? It seems to me it’s the second—but that produces the inevitable problem of content control; how do you distinguish the trustworthy from the flawed and fallacious?
- Because of the kind of material out there and its means of production, one way to move the conversation forward is the growth of “certification groups” who would certify the content of a site according to their standards. Both the blessing and curse of this kind of approach is that the group would essentially have no direct power over the content and the value of the certification would be only as good as the public trust held by the certifying group.
There’s more to think and say about this—but I lack the time and brain-cycles to do it justice at the moment…
Brief Note
I’ve not been around much and will continue not to be.
But… I just had to point to this article that AKMA has brought to our attention on “Adventure: Search for the Colossal Cave.” Those who recognize the name will need no reminding; for those who don’t, an introduction really won’t suffice–because one can never capture what it all means to those of us who played it back then.
The article is fascinating, but doesn’t answer a question that I’ve wondered about for quite a while. At what point in the game’s history did the den of the software wizard disappear? I have vivid memories of the room littered with Dr. Pepper cans sporting a pin-up of a nude Cray-1 supercomputer that somehow was missing from later versions I’ve played… Anybody know?
Few Thoughts and a Recommendation
I’m quite busy and haven’t been around much lately. I’ll continue not to be online much but I am pleased to see that some good conversations have been going on without me here and elsewhere. As for current goings on, I think the Postulant speaks for me too and I have nothing more to add on that score…
What I will say is this: if you have a chance, go see No Reservations! I don’t normally plug movies because I don’t normally get to go and see them, but M and I got out last weekend and we both liked this one. It’s a good date movie (i.e., no explosions) but is about food and New York (we lived right by the school!). Even though it’s a romance it has a sense of realism about it as well and isn’t as overtly immoral as many of the things Hollywood tries to pass off in the “romance” department… In any case, see it if you haven’t.