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In the blog write up on Andrew Jones's "thoughtful and reflective review of the recent MR issue on the Emergent Church movement" which appeared recently over at TallSkinnyKiwi, Shane Rosenthal of Modern Reformation links to my site to a post on how "Emergents and Modern Reformeds Should Get Together".
Of course, TallSkinnyKiwi will always be "the other famous UK Christian named Andrew Jones".
I wonder if this makes me Reformed Blogger of that day? I'm going to be throwing a celebration all weekend. Maybe even a barbeque over here in the North End.
Of course, the got the name wrong. Officially, it's manasclerk's The Power Struggle, but beggars can't be choosers and all.
A friend wrote in about "Dawn Eden Begins Catholic Journey", where I wrote about Dawn Eden's recent post about taking the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults. I had refered to her earlier position on fencing the communion table (she was against it) in light of joining a denomination that rigorously fences it.
He pointed out that Eden probably was under the mistaken belief that all Protestants share the Annabaptist belief (if I've got that antecedent write) that the elements of the Eucharist are mere symbols. Catholics, of course, belief in the transubstantiation of the elements, that they become the very physical body and blood of Jesus Christ. The Roman Church would have to fence the table; others would only be being rude.
Wow. I mean, wow! Oh, wow!
I just made it through episode 14. Trey is going to flip.
It's the best anime series that I've seen thus far. I'm not a traditional fan of anime so perhaps this explains why I am like this and so many anime fans do not. But the design work! I'm even enjoying the storytelling. And the design! Glorious!
Range Murato, the series designer (but not director), says that they designed even the spoons and saucers so that the world would be immersive. (Emersive?) Fabulous job.
Unbelievable. Restores my hope in Japanese pop culture after Pink Lady.
Also up, Zipang, the What If? story of a Japanese JMSDF Aegis cruiser finding itself back in time at the battle of Midway. Looks very interesting. It's in Japanese but someone made a subtitle track for it. Thank you, friend!
Special thanks to Vanship Soaring fansite!
I'm sitting here with an original iMac keyboard on my lap, writing this on a Blueberry because, to complete my personal journey away from IT work, my desktop has taken a drive. Apparently the hard disk (and or controller) has failed. I would have converted it to NTFS... Well, what can you do? It's the old 40GB drive that's been in there since time immemorial, or at least since I bought the Dell box in 2000 or so. Not bad I suppose. I've recently put it through it's paces. Or it got a nasty destructive trojan that ripped a piece of it out.
Unfortunately, I don't have anything that operates on NTFS drives. Linux tools are pretty sparse on NTFS for a vareity of reasons. I suppose that what I'll do is try converting the NTFS drive to FAT32 through System Commander 7, which is still on the drive somewhere. (I'm booting through GRUB right now.) From there, maybe I can run one of my Norton tools from a few years ago on it. They'll handle NTFS but only the earlier NT version. Did you know that there are three NTFS formats? Tricky, isn't it? NT reads only the bottom one. 2K can read v1 and v2. XP can read v2 and v3. So nothing reads all three, I think.
I intended to leave IT anyway because I suck at it. This is just driving the move earlier. Like the Dell Brick's dive into the mat earlier this month.
Ah, these were two great contenders. I really appreciated their ability to continue to function in the face of terrible problems and abuse. Hail the dead! Not victorious, really, considering what's been happening.
David Wayne, over at JollyBlogger, has posted some interesting thoughts by someone else on the Harry Potter books. Wayne admits that he hasn't read the books and is unlikely to. The conversation got me thinking about conservative Christians' reactions to the series.
When the issue first heated up, some folks at my PCA church asked me what I thought of the book, I suppose because I was a professional writer at the time and had been a middle school youth worker. I didn't see the big deal. The first was a fun kids book, a kind of kitchen-sink approach to storytelling that kids seem to like. It wasn't a great book, but then again neither were the Narnia books that these folks loved so much. Or Tolkien's works (they're terrible novels). But like them fun nonetheless, and a roaring good read for a kid. Certainly better than most of the wretched cardboard imitations of stories that some of these parents had been foisting on their kids as "wholesome reading". By golly, there's no greater sin for a storyteller than boring your audience. If those kids don't want to stay up all night and finish the book, then for goodness' sake dan't put my name on the cover. My brother, after giving me The Lord of the Rings set for 5th grade Christmas, proceeded to borrow the first and proceed to read through them all in about a week. I think he slept 2 hours in a 72 hour period during it. He just couldn't put the books down. Now that's storytelling!
When I was still working in and out of London, I even bought a copy of the second book in all its UK glory for M, L's best friend and an ex-pro. The UK versions are a bit nastier in tone, I think because the British don't require as much political correctness in their children's lit as the Americans do. They also have all of the UK slang and terminology. It makes for a better read. Better story, too, in my opinion. Something more captivating about the tales in their unexpurgated forms.
I saw that Dawn Eden has recently begun the journey of Catholicism and will be taking the Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults. I note it because it is interesting in light of an earlier conversation that she and I had after I sent her over to a church in Greenwich Village. They fenced the communion table, saying that you should be a member of a confessing church (or something like that) and be able to take communion in your home church to take it there. She took offense, and I tried to explain why anyone would ever fence a communion table and even continued the discussion about communion and setting standards for communicants later. Even the ELCA church we sojourned at fences the communion table (you have to be a Baptized Christian able to take communion in your home church), so I never thought much about it.
The Roman Catholics, of course, do a pretty good job of fencing the communion table. So her choice is a smile in light of the prior discussion.
I wonder how the blogging community will take it?
Marcy recently posted a comment where she talked about the problems of making music for a living:
Me too; I'm a musician. So many folks do music "on the side," so they don't need to charge much. And anyone can make their own music. So it's hard to justify choosing not to have "a job" and trying to make money by doing music. Especially when I rarely go out to other musicians' concerts or buy CDs.
Of course, this is quite true. And a mistaken belief on the part of the amateurs she competes with.
I've been in the sun all morning, something deadly to Night Boy, and then in the basement the rest of the day. Church outside sounds great, but somehow we always do it on a very humid day when the outside temperature goes towards body temperature. Accuweather "RealFeel" temperature was supposed to be about 102F. That's pretty hot, I'd reckon.
After much maurauding, I finally got things settled down by grabbing Core 4 from a mirror site. Man, but I do love these DVD ISOs.The throughput is just so much greater than even on a fast CDR. I'm still trying to get everything to settle down: the upgrade from Core 3 took out my Turtle Beach Santa Cruz sound card. Turtle Beach isn't interested in writing a driver for the thing and their windows one is proprietary all over the place. So it goes. Maybe I'll put that old Sound Blaster Live! card back in.
The Dell Brick (my old Inspiron 5000) has been decommissioned after it's complete hardware failure. Not worth repairing at this point: it would have set me back almost as much as a new Acer lightweight (which is less than US$1400 over here now). I took out the LCD screen and examined it. For whatever reason I've never taken apart a notebook. It's an interesting piece of engineering. I upgrade the RAM to a half gif about three years ago, and that added with the fast 60GB drive (first gen) I put in at the same time caused some serious overheating problems, which I have written about more than I should. The Brick almost comopletely burned off the Windows 2000 sticker on the bottom of it; you know, the one with your serial number. The video out failure, which followed the LCD screen breaking by about a month, meant that nothing would boot. I think I finally bent up a connector on the IO.
Fedora seems stable enough. I decided to skip Debian and Suse, returning to my old pal, a bad RedHat. Back in the day, I had an DEC Alpha workstation that I was trying to get RH 5 on. By the time I figured out that I would have to write my own X drivers for my non-standard video card, and completely failred at rewiring the non-standard PS2 mouse connectors, RH had come out with 6 which oddly enough installed better. I had to compile everything myself, of course, because who used RedHat on an Alpha? Okay, the guys who created the CGI for Titantic, but who else? Yes, yes, the guys who created that amazing beowulf cluster at the University of Illinois. But who else? And why would I have tried it?
So the Dell Desktop has assumed primacy down here in the Basement of Dank and Stale Diet Dr. Pepper (apologies to the folks of Computer Shopper). I had already begun the process of upgrading its Windows 98 to Win2k, a nonintuitive process that I am just now completing. I think that the Quicktime installation has killed my Musicmatch, but that's going to not be continued by Yahoo!, who would prefer that I sign up for their music service. I would, but my non-standard MP3 player, the RCA Lyra harddisk thingy, also went down for the count. A power problem that I could probably fix if I could get the darned screws off.
It is a lot faster with NTFS and Win2k. I even get a major boost in Video performance. Maybe that's just a driver issue but I don't think so. I'm betting that I had too many things loading for poor Win98 to handle, and Win2k handles memory allocation and garbage collection better. So I'm told.
I've even begun to use the old iMac again. I've got a good load: Illustrator, Office, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash... but I'm running OS9. Yes, I'm a luddite. It's slow, old and in the way, but it's portable enough that I can haul it places when I need to. I have to go to Toronto for a conference, so maybe I'll haul it with me. Officially, I am to write for them, which is why I get the discount I do. We're trading services, as it were. I'm currently writing up a brief case study on their most successful implementation. I'll get to write up the book articles, along with the people involved, so look forward to several articles in the academic business press by manasclerk later.
I must be really tired because I'm not even rambling. Too much sun.
From Edward L. Deci, Why We Do What We Do:
When it comes to issues of motivation, people always seem to want techniques for motivating or managing themselves.... The truth is that there are no techniques that will motivate people or make them autonomous. Motivation must come from within, not from techniques. It comes from their deciding they are ready to take responsibility for managing themselves.
When people are really ready to change for their own personal reasons, and wehn they are willing to face and cope with the myriad feelings — anxiety, inadequacy, rage, terror, or loneliness — that underlie their maladaptive behaviors, then they will have the motivation for change. Once that has happened, various techniques may be useful for them, but without a true resolve, without reasons for change that are personally important, techniques will not help. Whey people put stock in techniques as something that will change them, they are expressing an external locus of causality rather than an internal one; they are holding the misguided belief that being controlled rather than autonomous is the means for bringing about meaningful, personal change.
A deep personal desire to change must come first....
...............................................
...[People with an internal motivation to change] can pick their own technique, if they want to use one at all. But if they are not really ready to change, there is no sense bothering with a technique for it is bound to fail. [pp. 194-195]
Until you want to change, you aren't going to. We can force you to change, but it won't stick.
There is a way around this: destroy the self. Military boot camp does this, as does cult brainwashing weekends. Or many other religious deprivation events. Destroy the self and create the one that serves your purposes. Get them young enough and it works.
The other way is through the Conversion Experience. These are limited to religious people; atheitsts have had as many conversion experiences as have the religious folk. They tend to be very similar, including the bright light or figure in white. And the "converted" really do experience a great change, going from lackluster communist to tireless communist hero, willing to face any danger or deprivation for the movement. (I use the communist example because the one that always gets written up is of a German communist journalist from the 1930s.) This is why "converts" are so bloody irritating: their entire self is the movement. But you can't force the conversion experience. You can get people into a place where it can happen, but you can't force it to occur.
Otherwise, you're stuck with trying encouraging people's autonomy, to let them make up their own minds. "Come if you want to" rather than "Come because you must".
Nothing but bad news.
This weekend, the Brick (Dell Inspiron 5000) finally gave up the ghost, after five years of hard service. Nice job. It's been hauled across cities in Europe several times, not always in the friendliest way; yeah, it's done more than it's fair share. But it turned over and left this world at an inopportune time. I had been finally upgrading the desktop (a PIII 800) to Win2K — I used to be up to date back when I cared about such things. So everything was broken all at once. I'm still trying to recover my software and my data from the 2.5 in. hard drive. What an experience.
And the kids this weekend got out of hand during youth group, something I have only let happen once before. I'm surprised that I don't have parents calling me. Great thing about having working class kids: the parents give you more rope at times. But it was another disappointment.
Yet, let's put this into perspective: we were talking with our friends, the H-es, on Sunday. Their the parents of C., the smartest nine-year old that I've ever known and a personal friend, too. Apparently Mrs H has been having one hell of a headache. For the last five days. She was out shopping and got hit by total weakness. Imagine what you felt like when you ran your hardest heat; now imagine that coming on suddenly. L and I were there and we prayed for her. She had an appointment for Monday.
She went in for an MRI today. It was immediately sent to Mayo for further evaluation. If the news is good, she has MS. If the news is bad, she has a brain aneurism and if she survives until the operation, will have brain surgery. For a variety of reasons, the kids are likely to think they caused it.
We're not a church of nice people. We're a church of desperate people, desperate Christians reaching out for a grace that we only have believe in. Most of us are severely underemployed, some due to bad decisions and some to illnesses, including mental ones. Exactly the people who get hit with these types of events.
Mrs H fits our mold. She grew up in a rough life; her mother did time, and I think is still in prison. A life of trouble that hounds her at times. She's pretty private about it. Maybe we seem to be more perfect than her instead of the bunch of fuckups that we are. I'm as guilty as the rest, for all my talk of honesty.
I know this sounds weird, but the Emergent Christian movement folks and the Modern Reformation (neo-Reformed?) should get together. Their about as close as one can get in this world of religion without actually agreeing, and thereby having unreconcilable differences.
I came to this while thinking about the recent dialog between the Emergent Andrew Jones (TallSkinnyKiwi) and neo-Reformed Dr. Michael Horton of Modern Reformation. Give a read if you haven't seen it because it illustrates something fascinating:
The Emergents and the Neo-Reformeds are complaining about the same problems in the western evangelical church. They are basically the same: just different emphases and weaknesses.