When Shakespeare lamented the “bare ruined choirs” of the destroyed monasteries in sonnet 73 he was not necessarily signalling his opposition to Henry VIII’s brutal reforms or secretly recording his sympathy for the Catholic underground. Rather, he was expressing his dismay at the fracturing of late-medieval Christendom, a traumatic division that horrified Catholics and Protestants alike.
My point is just this: how hard it is even for people who are warning against reading too much into Shakespeare not to read too much into Shakespeare.
[gallery] Centre for Material Texts: “At the centre of the exhibition were two truly extraordinary stitched texts … by a woman called Lorina Bulwer, who was an inmate in the ‘lunatic wing’ of the Great Yarmouth workhouse for several years at the beginning of the twentieth century. During her time there, Bulwer covered each of these three-metre lengths with densely embroidered text in which she expressed feelings of anger and frustration. Both pieces are made up of brightly coloured cotton fabrics stitched together, with a wadded lining and a backing fabric, like a quilt. Each individual letter is stitched through all of these layers. Writing in the first person, Bulwer offers a torturous working-out of her own identity. She is obsessed by names and places, frequently referring to herself by name, as well as other people, including her own relations, members of the Royal family (she claims to be ‘Princess Victoria’s daughter’), and various towns and places in the East of England.”
Streamlining
For the last few months I’ve been experimenting with various blog and blog-like options for online writing and linking. None of them are perfect, which I suppose won’t be news to anyone.
For a while I thought I needed to post to my own site, on the “own your turf” principle. So I started transitioning away from this tumblelog and towards that space. But posting to a WordPress site, especially if you’re posting anything other than text, is far clunkier than posting to a tumblelog; and since I am not hosting the site on my own server, I’m still dependent on other people to keep my blog up and my data safe. Also, while I don’t have many readers here at More than 95 Theses, there are people who’ve been following me here for quite some time and have told me that they miss my posts when I go quiet here.
So I’m just going to perform regular downloads of my Tumblr data — using SiteSucker, a fine app — and do my posting here.
As you can see by looking at the sidebar, I have other online projects as well — the Gospel of the Trees site and the Book of Common Prayer tumblelog — and those will remain available, though I don’t expect to add any more to them. That is, I’m going to treat them as substantially complete projects. If I ever happen to update them, I’ll announce new posts on Twitter.
I will continue to post to Text Patterns when I have something substantive to say on the topics that blog considers. Everything else will be posted here.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Mi9RHv1SS4?feature=oembed&enablejsapi=1&origin=http://safe.txmblr.com&wmode=opaque&w=250&h=187]
Archguitarists Peter Blanchette and Elliot Gibbons performing J.S. Bach’s Prelude 15, from the 2nd book of the Well-Tempered Clavier. Northampton Center for the Arts, March, 2013
That fleeting bestseller designation is one that the pastors have embraced and trumpeted. Until last week, Mark Driscoll promoted himself as a #1 bestselling author. Perry Noble’s Facebook profile says only two things: He’s a pastor and a New York Times bestselling author. While the bestseller designation has its own value in increasing future book sales and inflating speaking fees, its special value is in the appearance of non-church wealth it creates for these pastor-authors.The truth, however, is that much of their spendable wealth is generated by laundered tithe money, so the royalties and speaking fees comprise a second, hidden church salary. By using tithed money and their own pulpits to drive book sales and even buy the books outright, celebrity pastors have turned their non-profits into personal profit centers.
The problem isn’t only an ethical one. Tax-exempt organizations are prohibited from contriving special financial gains for their leaders, a violation called inurement that the IRS can punish by revoking the organization’s tax-exempt status. That seems a risk that these pastors are either unaware of or comfortable with, because their churches’ budgets, branding, and messaging are routinely used to sell as many books as possible to make the preachers even wealthier.
Ed Stetzer: What are the greatest differences that can emerge between older and newer churches?Philip Jenkins: There’s one word that I would come up with again and again – healing. If you want to understand the success of Christianity in the past hundred years around the world, it is in the concept of healing. Not, of course, in the sense of healing physical injuries, but a holistic a healing of the body, the mind, the soul, the spirit, and society is central to church growth around the world.
These kind of mission churches are providing a way for healing a great division in Western Christianity, where they always find this distinction between liberation theology, which aims to cure the material ills of society, and deliverance, which aims to cure the ills of the soul. What the newer churches have realized is that those two words are the same word. Any kind of mission that does not cure both is offering a flawed, partial, and inadequate message.
In late 2008 I put myself through a crash course in the works of Willmoore Kendall, the “wild Yale don,” as Dwight Macdonald called him, who had been one of the founding senior editors of National Review. This was research for an essay that would appear in The Dilemmas of American Conservatism. I’d read some Kendall before—a desultory stroll through The Conservative Affirmation in America, at least—and hadn’t profited much from the experience. But the second, more attentive perusal was different. Kendall himself had told of how R.G. Collingwood had taught him at Cambridge to read a book by asking what question the author was trying to answer. I didn’t find that approach too insightful, but I picked up something else from Kendall’s own methods—the habit of asking “What conditions would have to be true in order for this author’s arguments to make sense?”That’s a more productive thing to ask of a serious work than simply, “Do this author’s arguments make sense?” The latter invites the reader to supply a misleading context: the author’s arguments may not match up with reality, but they must match up at least with his own view of reality, and that’s something worth figuring out and contrasting against whatever the reader thinks he already knows.
Technology comforts, surrounds, and confounds us. When we argue about MOOCs, hydraulic fracturing, NSA surveillance, or drone warfare, we’re arguing about technology. Unfortunately, the conversation is impoverished by the absence of a robust cadre of scholars who can engage with and critique the role of technology in society. Instead, we have the glib boosterism of tech intellectuals like the former Wired editor Chris Anderson, the media gadfly (and CUNY journalism professor) Jeff Jarvis, the British writer Andrew Keen, and the Google executive Eric Schmidt. A fairly homogenous group of white men with elite degrees inclined to champion innovation, disruption, and the free market, these tech intellectuals have usurped the role of explaining technology to policy makers, investors, and the public. Their arguments and advocacy are too often a tepid substitute for robust analysis and honest critique.
Montfort’s involuted, single-line programs give BASIC something of the tang of the Old English of Beowulf—sharp and shorn, barbed and battered by the harsh economies of its habitat. Perl, by contrast, might be the programmer’s version of Occitan, the language (a cousin to latter-day Catalan) of the medieval troubadors, whose poems chimed with the decadent elaborations that flavored courtly life in medieval southern Europe—a fanciful dichotomy, which manages to caricature both the software and the vernaculars in question. Programmers of philological bent will find the comparison to Occitan especially laughable, given Perl’s cobbled-together nature and its reputation for clunkiness; a better example might be the macaronic jargon of the later middle ages, of which Pig Latin is an impoverished descendant.
[gallery] Any comment would be superfluous. Via Sonny Bunch on Twitter.
