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Dawn Eden has continued her very thoughtful discussion of the debate about fencing communion. It has made me think about many things, especially about the Church, who we are and who I am in our midst. This isn't about her or about the conversation or about anyone else. This is about me, amigos.
I used to think that the church was something outside of me, an entity that I had to convince to let me stay around. I've been asked to shut up more than a few times, and have experienced being blown off in ways that would make my seventh graders blush. The church always seemed like a club that I didn't belong to, couldn't belong to. My story was that Jesus had invited me to the party, but the churchpeople wouldn't let me in. I stood outside, wailing, trying to get Jesus to come and see me, to see my plight and let me in, to side with me and not with my foes within. I wanted them punished. "Jesus is cool," we would say, "but his fiancée is a bitch."
I got an advert email about Pat Robertson's new book, The Ten Offenses. My first reaction to the subject line was, "I wonder which of his ten offenses they are going to talk about. I mean, he's offended in so many ways."
What was the editor thinking about when they titled that book? I can't imagine a conservative bookseller doing this intentionally. Or was it simply their Freudian slip showing?
Well, I thought it was funny...
Fearless Executive: Finding the Courage to Trust Your Talents and Be the Leader You Are Meant to Be by Alan Downs
Downs is a very successful executive coach who has worked the inside of a large corporation himself. He is even the author of an intriguing memoir of sorts about axing huge numbers of the employees for the corporation. His book rejets the very premise of the title: there are no fearless executives, only executives who face and work through their fears. Fear keeps us limited. By facing our fears about inclusion, the future, and ourselves, we can do more.
As a general coaching for individuals, Fearless Executive works. However, it avoids asking some of the tougher questions about how we structure ourselves in organizations and where our place might be. I found the book more of an encouragement to do what I wanted to do and to admit and face my fears about it. The fears he lists are basic fears, fears that psychologists have talked about at least since Tavistock. An interesting read, if nothing new.
Alan Farhi, an elder at Village Church in NYC, has commented on the closed communion question. He very succinctly describes his church's particular stance on this issue and raises some important issues. I want to include it here in a separate post because I believe that many of us, myself included, misunderstant his particular church's beliefs on communion. I am not posting this to say that he is speaking Gospel but simply to provide a clear view of what their position is.
It takes time to come to an understanding of a congregation's doctrine (the schema around which they build their faith), especially in our modern Western world with its very individualistic beliefs. Congregations cannot be determined by "brand" any more, as Russell Mann describes in a conversation about the church today. (He also calls Rick Warren "the Evangelical Pope" -- read it in context.) The PCA is a pretty doctrine-oriented denomination, although it gets expressed quite differently across congregations. So let's hear what Alan has to say.
In my last post, I responded to Dawn Eden's problems with Village Church's roping of the communion table. Her response to that post, along with some emails I received from various people, lead me to say some of these points here. Addendum: because I was probably wrong on some points!
A minister said that it is commonly called "fencing" and that fencing the table is common in almost all churches. If you say "You must be a Christian" or "You must be baptized", those are fences around your table. Membership is often used as a fence because it means that someone has made a credible confession of faith at some point. The problem is that this makes membership seem more important than faith -- as is pointed out in the comments to the previous post. A good point.
At my suggestion, Dawn Eden recently attended a Village Church, a Prebyterian (PCA) church in New York that friends had recommended highly to me for my now very infrequent visits to the Big East Coast City. She had a bad experience, a big part of which was their celebration of the eucharist or communion. She wrote:
The service's program listed the requirements for taking communion. They were the usual ones: Communicants had to be Christian. They could not carry resentment, an unforgiving spirit, or any other such feelings in their hearts. They must belong to a church that preaches the full gospel...
..................
He listed the requirements, all right, and he stressed church membership. He even added, "If you're not a member of a church, you really shouldn't take communion, because it wouldn't be good for you."
She was pretty ticked off for it meant that she wasn't welcome at the Lord's Table at this church, since she isn't a member of any particular congregation. She really wanted to partake ("The body and blood of Jesus Christ, taken by me in the spirit of faith alongside fellow faithful souls who belong to the worldwide body of believers, wouldn't be good for me?" she writes) but did not violate their request.
In an email to her, I suggested that the PCA may allow believers in Christ who have been Baptized to be allowed to take communion upon examination by the Session (the board of Elders, an ordained and taken-seriously role). She asked where the biblical justification for that examination was, since the ordination scriptures in Paul's letters say that each should examine himself before taking communion.
I want to open a dialogue on these issues, since they are important to many different types of Christian churches and because I feel a bit responsible for her attending Village and having all this come up. However, I am not a PCA elder nor am I a theologian or a scholar of first-century Christianity. These are points of discussion and I invite comments, whether here or via email.
I was reading this article by Brian McLaren, author of A New Kind of Christian, The Church on the Other Side and generally regarded as a guru of the post-modern church. [An aside: can there be such a thing as a post-modernism guru?] It was interesting that he compared the post-modern philosophies with the reformation movement (I don't think it holds up to scrutiny) but I found his omission of the global perspective disturbing. As we've seen in the Anglican schism that's happening, taking a national perspective on church issues can lead to serious repercussions for Christians elsewhere in the world.
When our friends stayed with us this summer, their teenagers got hold of my high school yearbooks, which I've had on my bookshelf for years now, down on the bottom with my oversize comics-related books. They pulled them down and found this painting, done by a senior girl my junior year. Her entry (not shown) took the entire other page of this opening, bleeding onto the bottom of this one.
"Man, manasclerk," they said, "these girls loved you!"
They were surprised because that's not how I have portrayed my high school experience. Which is weird. As is the fact that I really wasn't sure that she liked me, at least on a conscious level back then. They went through the rest of my junior and senior yearbooks -- poking fun at my various pictures, especially the incredibly moronic full-page where I have my hand on the globe, covering North America -- and kept on saying the same thing. "These girls loved you! What was wrong with you that you didn't notice?"
A lot, to be honest.
For one, I was a guy. We males aren't as quick as females, at least at that age. I have gotten more emotionally aware but back then I was pretty thick. At least that's something I have always said. But that's not really it.
When I heard that DC planned a new, book-length Sgt. Rock story, I felt a bit uneasy. The original Sgt Rock comics (originally titled Our Army At War) have a important part in my growing up. Through them I learned about loyalty, sacrifice, honor and doing right even when it cost you. I know that it sounds ridiculous but I probably am not overstating their affect on me. So I was more than a bit wary of any "updating" of Sgt Rock. Other efforts to do so have been miserable at best.
All the files have more or less been moved to Movable Type from Blogger. Comments, previously stored with BackBlog, have been lost. Please see the previous incarnation for any prior comments.
http://www.movabletype.org/
I'm moving to Movable Type for the blog. I'll make a smooth turnover but it will take a couple of weeks to shake out. I'm going to double entry until I get the templates right and the materials in.
MT wins for one reason: perl-based. Really. I'd have gone with Smarty if I could get PHP4 working on this host. Still trying, since Smarty gives me an open source (which I prefer) and a few additional elements on XML parsing that are interesting. Plus it is extensible.
Woo hoo.
Televangelism and American Culture: The Business of Popular Religion by Quentin Shultze
This book, originally published in 1991 and newly available in trade paperback, takes on the "televangelists" who still proliferate across the airwaves. Although written during the scandals of the 1980s, Televangelism still has much relevancy today.
Schultze, a professor of communication arts and sciences at Calvin College, admits to his bias in the openning pages: he is a practicing Christian (probably of the reformed type) who wants to write more than just a history of the televangelists. His effort is indeed far-reaching. His main premise is that televangelism is an outgrowth of the American success culture, and has permanently alterred the way that Americans worship in Christian churches, especially evangelical protestant ones. These churches have adopted the practice of the televangelists, including the entertainment and fund-raising focuses. Some of Schultze's ideas should be understood as a reasonable reaction by a fairly traditional (think a bit liturgical) Christian to the new changes. However, he makes a very well-written and reasoned argument, mostly by showing how clever and passionate these televised ministries are, how they are both cults of personality and more than that.
I read more than my share of materials on the New Religious Right during the 1980s. (My resulting paper, looking back on it now, would make a great Masters thesis and a good review of literature for a doctoral dissertation.) I have kept up with it from time to time, but mostly just let it go. I want to take this thread back up in my spare time and review my findings here.
http://smarty.php.net/
http://www.movabletype.org
I'm experimenting with the two systems, one based in perl and the other in PHP. Unfortunately, my host for this may not have PHP4 installed -- they take few risks. Movable Type is in perl, which is nice, but I have to confess that I'd prefer to use Plone. I talked about plone some time back. They built in on Zope and the CMF, a solid foundation. Zope.org folks liked it so much that the site now uses plone as its base; since it extends Zope and the CMF that makes sense.
Also, I want to stop using so much passive voice here. I hammer my writers when they write like this. I should not expect less of myself. Holding a degree in sociology gives no excuse.
This is what the pain is all about. L has lit some scented candle and has fallen asleep on the Chicago couch we bought in Naperville, with a book that is decidely not art historical. The white Christmas lights are still up over the mantle, making everything deliciously romantic. I'm listening to Dan Russell mangle a cover of one of Michael's favourite songwriters and typing on an old laptop that has seen better days. The weather outside, while not frightful, has begun to freeze all the melted snow into a fine sheen on the front steps but our house is cozy and warm, thanks to a new furnace that we had to buy during this latest unemployment. I don't have any work and none on the horizon but it's all good because I know where I'm going and I know who I love.
Life is sweet. The only way for this to get better is to have the kids we don't have asleep in the next room.
For you, maybe, this vision of happiness lacks some crucial element. Such as excitement or money. Or stability. For me, well, I'll tell you: I remember the nights alone, terrified to move because how much I wanted to slice open my forearms with my knifes, the lies told and retold, the hidden life and hidden self. I remember walking in a room afraid that someone would find out the secret: "he's not really human!"
You can take your CEO positions, your lives of ease and leisure. In my wildest dreams I never imagined that I would have this, that the Eternal Majestic Creator would give this to me. A woman I love passionately who loves me dearly. A home that friends come out from far away just so feel our comforting environment. Friends in every nook and cranny. The Holy Spirit of God here, for wherever two or more are gathered in Christ's name, there is He in their midst.
The real deal, my friends. The real deal.
-- manasclerk (atSign comcast net)
Recently, due to an inexplicable need to continue making my life miserable, I have returned to the chaos theory / complexity theory studies I for the most part gave up when I left college in 1990. Oh, the days of analogue computing and finding out that things were silly!
One of the things that has me wondering is the concept of emergence. There's something circular in the biological arguments. It's not that I have some big chip on my shoulder against evolutionary biology -- branches of it have explained some big mysteries fairly well, like why I still have an appendix even though it serves no purpose other than to kill me when it becomes infected -- or that I think that the idea of basic iterative fundamentals is somehow odd. Still, I have to admit being a bit skeptical.
I've just finished reading a piece by a guy named Clifton on Orthodox vs. Emerging Church and then ead Jamie's reply to his points on bechurch.net. One of the points that Clifton makes is that he is uncomfortable with the identifcation with "post-modern" as it seems to mean that the modern era is over. Jamie agrees, saying that he feels we are currently inside the transition between modern and post-modern.
It is an interesting idea.
One of the things that struck me about John Horgan's article in COMPUTER this month ("The End of Science Revisited") is how similar today's science seems to be to the science of the previous fin de siécle. People such as Horgan are claiming that science has gotten to a stopping point, a place where we cannot really know much more. The complexity of what we are studying will stymie us. In the late 1800s, pundits proclaimed the completion of knowledge in the reverse, that we knew how everything moved and soon it would all be down to measurement to predict all things. It didn't work out that way: what became known as quantum physics got in the way. And one of the bloodiest conflicts on record.
I can't get away from how little so many of us seem to experience the true Body of Christ. Laurie, in an response to one of Jamie's entry on Cell Groups And Community Development on his blog, bechurch.net, questions why we shouldn't just spend time in the communities we are already in, such as our work community, as opposed to this forced environment that is the church. She says that she spends most of her time within work, far exceeding that of church. It was awhile ago, but still sits with me.
NetObjects Fusion is still around. The original site-oriented website software with the easy interface is showing its age but still provides a good punch for those of us who need to design a site that can be easily shifted around with the bare minimum of programming. Sure, if I wanted to do anything fancy, I'd have to pull out the Macromedia Suite and probably run it all on my Macintosh. I have avoided upgrading to OS X since I don't want to upgrade any of my old Adobe applications -- why bother since I'm not a professional? -- so nothing new runs on my Mac equipment anyway. I never upgraded my laptop or desktop either, come to think of it. Maybe this is why Fusion is fine for me. My laptop is still the Dell Brick, an Inspiron 5000 with a 633 MHz chip in it. Ooooo. My dad picked up two boxes from work for US$35 a piece with 900 MHz chips because they were too old to use.
I have to redo the corporate website for the boss, so I'll let you know how this goes.
Dawn Eden has quoted me as saying this, which was really kind. I want to make clear that I'm pretty sure that I got this from Steve Brown, who is a friend-of-a-friend who teaches at Reformed Theological Seminary in Miami. Steve has a pretty interesting article about his run-in with doubt about preaching grace and not that grace must be accompanied with discipline. You can do a lot worse than listening to Steve talk. He has a radio show called "Key Life" that is as relevant and easy as the emerging church folks all want to be, but he doesn't make doctrine less than he believes.
"Of course it's cheap! If it cost anything, you couldn't afford it!" - from one of Steve's Thinkspots
"If you don't understand grace, you don't understand the New Testament."-- manasclerk (atSign comcast net)
Prof. Richard Wiseman has come up with why some people have good luck and some, um, don't. He actually created a way to discover which people are lucky and which aren't, and then tested them. He found that lucky people
He also discovered that people who were "lucky in love" (found good partners) were more able to discern, from looking at results of a questionaire, which potential partners were more psychologically similar to them. Although, from looking at his questionaire, I'd guess that some of this may be that positive people are positive in the same way. Kind of a spin on the old saw that happy families are happy in the same way, while unhappy families are unhappy in their own ways.
Of course, men should avoid beautiful women if they want to continue to have good fortunes. "If you want to be happy for the rest of your life / Never make a pretty woman your wife" . . . I didn't listen to this advice, so maybe I'm ruined for the rest of my life. I'll just have to avoid looking at L on days when I have to make big decisions.
On a similar note, the same publication quoted Michigan's Randolph Nesse as saying "Being male is now the single largest demographic factor for early death."
-- manasclerk (atSign comcast net)
Mark it down. Red letter day. manasclerk has nothing to say today. I'm meeting with Soren from INFOSEC for lunch and then running off to see the 'rents. And I'm about to destroy an entire family by making it impossible for them to continue unconsciously living in their lie.
Jamie over at bechurch has been raising some good points. I like his enthusiasm and the mistakes he makes are the ones of youth and love. Give a read and let him know what you think.
J finally started writing on his own site again. He calls it 100Degrees, which is either a reference to 100 Bullets or implying that he is running a slight fever, but one that is worse than Suzanne Vega's. Of course, I just like hearing about little Kevin because I can't believe that John's kid is so cute. . .
Dawn Eden has also had some really interesting things to say lately. She follows her heart so easily that you just know loads of folks berate her for being impulsive. It's a talent, not a fault. With my luck, you'll follow this link and she will be writing about soaking her socks.
It's been an odd week. Even the Bloated Goat of Despair has made an appearance. I beat the shit out of him and he's not made a comeback yet. My future's so bright, I gotta wear shades (oh, forgive me, Texas Music veterans!).
Tuesday, I met an old co-worker who is now the Chief Information Architect for a very large insurance company. We talked about what I'm looking for in my jobhunt. And talked. It went around in circles. I was talking about doing more consulting. I was talking about going corporate.
He finally in complete exasperation asked me what I actually wanted. And I dropped the pretense and told him.
Yep, good old manasclerk is going back to his Training and Public Speaking roots. Look for my radio show with my very conservative brother coming out of Texas in a year.
Kind of sad to follow my dreams rather than just settle on a nice, fat corporate job. After I left, I realized that he was going to offer me a position if I had really wanted one. He did tell me that he would be doing a fair amount of training for architects, and that he would try to use me.
I gotta keep food on the table somehow. I ended up using NetObjects Fusion 7.5 instead of Dreamweaver. I know, I know: Dreamweaver is a lot more powerful. But I am simply too old and too lazy to learn how to do all those neat things. I want my software to do it for me and Fusion does it easier than FrontPage does.
I'll admit to it: I'm old enough to have a vinyl, but not so old that my CD collection isn't bigger. Sure, vinyl sounds better and if I had $2Gs I'd get one of those analogue laser phonographs. Since I don't, and J took my turntable when I got married, I just don't get around to looking at it very often. In fact, my LPs have sat in a cardboard box, packed, for five years.
I took them out recently and realized that I have some really strange tastes. Or I just got lucky buying albums. I own copies of Bram Tchaikovsky's good albums; one from The Textones (Carla Olson's old band) that I always liked and now I hear that it was a cult fave; Lone Justice's debut, Maria McKee's old band; the demo tape from Sixpence None The Richer; and, of course, lots and lots and lots of absolute swill.
I mean, the first LP I ever bought was Todd Rundgren's Hermit At Mink Hollow. It's not even one of his halfway good albums. And I did buy a Tears For Fears LP, too.
Now, can anyone tell me why I have all these Styx and Boston albums? The T-Bone Burnett and Los Lobos EPs are understandable, sure; they're pretty good, especially And A Time To Dance, which got a grammy for historical recording (I think). But ELO? I'm positive that these are not my vinyl. And yet I've carried them around for ten years. . .
ADDENDUM: This still doesn't beat my high school pal, Danny, whose favourite recording artists were The Ramones and Hank Williams, Jr. Yes, that's the bad Hank Williams. If someone out there can put these together, please leave me a message.
-- manasclerk (manasclerk atSign comcast net)
(Yeah, I'm not a girl. And I don't have that much money.)
http://www.sharondurling.com/
Sharon is one of the most animated speakers I know. And I loved her book -- it was easy-to-understand without being dumbed down, a really fun read, too. An excerpt:
"Sale" does not mean "buy." You are no Pavlovian dog, so stop barking like one. Some of us instantly salivate upon seeing the word "sale." We fall victim to the retailers' elaborate and savvy marketing strategies: no wonder, because they've spent millions in research dollars just to get us in the store. Start at the other end. Begin at zero dollars and work up to what you believe to be the item's true value, not the discount from the arbitrarily assigned retail price.
For a variety of reasons, I've had to take a good look back recently. I'm not someone with a rosy childhood so I don't spend a lot of time in that room, now that I've sent the demons packing. I go in to clean and keep the windows locked -- and to make sure those bastards haven't returned -- but mostly I just keep the door shut. But today, this melting cold day, gray as gunmetal outside, I had to go in there and look around. Sometimes the most amazing things can be found amongst the shit I still haven't cleared out.
There among the ruins of failures that weren't mine, of original sin and the sins of my fathers visited down even to the third generation, amidst aborted efforts for something good, something new, something different; there, sparkling like diamonds in a shit pile: ministrations of God's grace through his holy church.
Back in the 1980s, when I was a very moody and irritating college freshman (first-year student?), a senior friend told me some great advice: "Most of the time, you just don't have to defend Jesus so much." This from a guy who had bunches of books on apologetics crammed next to his sociology books and I knew that he often had spoken up in class about what he thought were errors against the faith. He then told me a story to illustrate.
Earlier that year, he had taken an advanced course on the philosophy of Kierkegard. About midway through the semester, the professor said that the only way to truly understand Kierkegaard was to understand his version of Christianity. Without it, you will misinterpret the philosopher. My friend said that he started to go into his "defend God" preparations, but something inside said, Wait and listen. So he did, and decided to not argue this day.
Thanks to Dawn Eden for a great comment about this problem. It got me to post some thoughts before getting everything in order.
My answer is going to be much more humanistic. I apologize for the heartless way that this will sound. Instead of trying to soften it and thereby cause even more problems, I'll try to make it plain. I'm not going to shed light on the nature of God; I'm going to try to explain why these ruthless actions may have been taken, why it was reasonable for God to require this. This is an argument about politics not an apology for the God of Judah.
But I'd like to first point out something that we often don't recall in these discussions: God doesn't always do this. Jonah, my favourite prophet after Haggai, is sent to the worst, most ruthless city of the region: Nineveh. God is going to judge the city, but only after Jonah, his appointed messenger, delivers an ultimatum: repent or be destroyed. The city repents en masse and is spared. Jonah, very reasonably, is disgusted that God would let the most heinous war criminals of his day get by without destruction. God sees things in another way. God did not always tell the ancient Israelites to kill everyone.
[ Continue reading "Why God Had Israel and Judah Kill Every Man, Woman and Child" ]I found a cool position advertised on Monster this week: IT Process Consultant with a very small IT consulting firm. I decided that I needed to increase my chances, so I put together a print résumé and cover letter and went into the loop. I figured I would just drop by their offices ("I was just nowhere near your neighbourhood . . .") and maybe get a quick interview. Anyway, it would put my CV out of the instant-throw-away pile.
I found their offices before I headed to the Dearborn St Oyster Bar for lunch with a buddy of mine. The firm is on the southwest side of the loop, down from the Sears Tower but close to the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) and Stock Exchange buildings. After I lunch, I screwed up my courage and went up to their offices.
The door was locked.
J, in a recent comment to a previous entry, suggests that I take a look at an entry on Correction. Matthias, its author, writes about his response to conservative Christian Lee Strobel's book on apologetics (which means a reasoned defense or apology of the faith). Strobel apparently wrote approvingly about meeting a seminary professor who explains that the God of Israel was justified in killing every man, woman and child in these cities in the Jewish Bible (Christian's Old Testament) because they were evil. Matthias is enraged: this can't be true because of how horrible it is.
I'm impressed by how much Matthias interacts with the holy scriptures. Most of us read these passages and simply say "Uh-huh". Matthias takes exception for God's actions. That's pretty cool -- dangerous in many ways to do but just as dangerous not to.
I started crafting an exploration of this problem and realized after a couple thousand words that my argument was weak and ran in too many parallel paths to make sense. It's an interesting problem, one that probably comes up because of our safety and syncretistic culture. I think that the answer is one that we really won't want to hear, because it forces us to confront some even more basic problems about human existence and God's work in it. I'll post it when I'm done.
Worth a read, anyways.
I thought I'd let out a pic of where L and I stayed. This little swiss house is the "chalet" that we stayed in (think two-flat). It was not decorated that great, but it was clean and the kitchen was better than either apartment L and lived in during our sojourn abroad years ago.
One of the great things about waking up there -- besides that L slept next to me and I do so enjoy seeing her face in the morning -- was that the girls would stay asleep until roused, doing that half-sleep coma thing that teens do so well, and we could get coffee in peace, go into the living room and see this huge mountain out in the distance.
Niesen was described to me as "a giant pyramid of rock." From the pic you can see that it is true. It is a formidable giant. We watched clouds that rained on us dump big snow on its peak. Later it would stop a cloud so that it could dump a big snowfall on Spiez as we drove back to the EU.
For all the struggles and pain of seeing sin in my own life so vividly portrayed, the vacation did provide these amazing views. The Swiss Alps are just more spectacular than even the Rockies, perhaps because they are so much more settled and you can get to things easier. I like both areas but I'm still never going to downhill ski again.
Pic developed through Seattle FilmWorks.
There are mornings that I wake up and, for the life of me, I just don't believe in any of this. It doesn't a very long perusal of anything I've ever written on the Christian faith to see that I have a lot of problems with most of Christian doctrine and theology. Miracles, for whatever reason, don't bother me much: I don't have that hard a time believing that someone had oil coming out of a jar, that manna fell from heaven, that men with withered hands stretched them out. I'm not the usual skeptic. I don't go around harping on Jonah's stay in the whale or even problems of creationism. Maybe I just ignore a lot of the conflicts and inconsistencies I have in my thinking. Yet, I still wake up and think, "There's no way that God exists. We're alone down here, just meat and electricity, waiting to rot."
I have problems with believing in the basics: the existence of God, the Incarnation, the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. It all seems so totally unreasonable, so perfectly foolish. I mean, why would God be born as a man and then live such a bad life? He didn't even live inside a major metropolis. I know, I know, the Decapolis was right around there, but no one seems to be claiming that this Jew lived in one of them. Visited, maybe. Worked in, perhaps. But not made his abode. The whole idea is absolutely nuts.
I'm writing a new CV for a process engineering job. For kicks, I started searching for a company that I worked for a decade ago before I was married. (Okay, okay, J: so it was even more than a decade ago now. . .)
He's the older guy in the bottom pic. He's lost some weight, and a little grayer, but about the same, I'd say. The boy is a lot bigger, of course.
There's too many books I want to read that I'm not going to get to! There's a scad of books about teens (including that one about men being shafted, which has ramifications for them) that I'm just not going to get to read. And then there's the Death and Dying stuff (my university advisor's field), Calvin's Institutes, St Augustine, the rest of Dickens (oh the humanity!), Thucydides (or Kagan's rewrite), the rest of Goffman, basic research in organizational behaviour and dynamics, . . . the list goes on.
I need to settle down into some type of standard career instead of flitting around. I impressed our music professor guests this Sunday by talking about Lomax's recordings. I thought everyone knew about Lomax's incredible work recording The People's Music before the modern recording industry made everything boring.
Maybe if I stop working in computers, that will free up having to learn any more about IT Security and networking. Then I could spend more time on comics and comic strip history! I could finally learn french and dutch and start reading BD in the originals. Les Schtroumpfs / De Smurfen!
Anyway, I'm putting up some quick reviews what I'm reading so that I don't get lost and forget what I learned. Which would be pretty common. I hate not mastering what I read.
 | Someone in this old pic is manasclerk. Someone else is manasclerk's brother. And the pic is taken in a photobooth our other brother had set up at his wedding reception.
Boy, did we have big glasses back then. And we both should have shaved. |
Today's the day when western Christians have traditionally celebrated the arrival of the magi to the Christ. Astrology back then wasn't so much about predicting the future as it was about seeing what had happened. The stars did not control us; what happened on earth was reflected in the stars (loosely understood).
The academics of their day, the magi crossed and came to Herod the Great, asking about this new king. His scholars told him that the boy would be born in Bethlehem, a town name that was somewhat common in Israel at the time. The magi ran off without Herod and saw the young boy, bringing him rare gifts. Herod flew into a rage at the threat of someone born as the new king of the Jews and ordered all male children under the age of two to be slaughtered. God warns Joseph, Mary's husband, and they escape to Egypt where they live as refugees, returning only after hearing news of Herod's death.
It's a weird tale, made easy by two thousand years of telling it. The unnamed, unknown wise men become the popular Three Wise Men who bring a little baby some toys. Death and mayhem, wisdom and despair. God on the run from a crazed king. Who'd have thunk it?
-- manasclerk
My never-ending quest to reinvent my worklife continues today. I'm trying to drop in on a consulting firm in Chicago that is looking for an IT process consultant. Right now, I'm just looking for a job that I won't sabotage on a regular basis. I'd love to see what working at a requisite organization would be like, but they're pretty rare. I reckon that dropping by a small consulting firm is going to pay more dividends than just sending a resume. At least I'll stand out.
Small consulting firms are desperately looking for good people but don't know how to find them. They often end up hiring the wrong fit (think of me at INFOSEC). By courting them first, you can get in at a different level.
I can honestly say that I'm worn out from trying to work for myself. It's too draining for this extroverted reader to work mosly alone. Cold calling potential customers is just not doing it.
And it's snowing today, with lows going down to -15 C tonight. Windchills of -5 F by 5pm by the lake. Imagine what it will be like for me in a suit down by the Sears Tower, where no matter what direction you face, you're always walking into the wind. Brrr!!
I got a friendly suggestion that Steve may not own the copyrights to these recordings, which, I think, may be right. I've pulled the archive. I'm not sure that anyone really cares about these -- I can't imagine that Taylor's music will ever be reissued, except by some small press (think Daniel Amos's Alarma boxed set from a few years back; didn't know about? QED) -- but it's the principle of copyright that's important. Tonio K's unreleased effort Ole' is a good example of how weird copyright (recording right?) law is for recordings.
I didn't keep records of downloads, so I can't say that the files went very far, if anyone is wondering.