I would have thought one of you might have managed to blog on the serendipity of the feast of Pentecost celebrating the divine energising of our Mother the Church, with Mother’s Day. (Of course, over here in the UK we keep Mothering Sunday as hallowed by Church tradition, not hallmarked by card companies, so I can’t write that kind of post.)
In a comment Stephen continues to make his point about post-modernism based on the ethics of torture. I haven’t got time right now to offer a major argument on the whole post-modern debate. But I do want to point up what I see as the problem with Stephen’s position as I understand it.
(Note: I am aware that there are some people who try to argue that water-boarding and the like are not torture. I think that’s rubbish – proving just how un-post-modern I am by such a blanket statement. As far as I can see, Stephen and I agree with the premise that the US Government is engaged in torture.)
I hope this isn’t a caricature, but it seems to me the argument goes a little like this:
I am baffled by this argument, since I can see several different options for stages 3 and 4 (combined), such as:
I can’t see how or why disagreement among those who call themselves Christian automatically leads to an acceptance of post-modernism.
I am surprised that Peter Kirk is impressed with this. It’s not just that I’m sceptical, I’m positively repelled. Being a fool for Christ is one thing, being a complete idiot is another. When I read stuff like this:
Many on the platform are ON THEIR BACKS ON THE FLOOR!!!
It appears that no one can take the mic.================================================
Todd starts having visions of healings happening right now
================================================We are in a GLOBAL atmosphere of CREATIVE MIRACLES…
TOUCH YOUR COMPUTER RIGHT NOW!!!
A man had donated a kidney to a friend… he has been asking God for a new kidney… when Todd called out a new kidney… he felt the power of God go through his body!!!
My first reaction is to wonder if it’s a spoof. My second is to think there’s more preying than praying going on. My third is to remember that people in Florida were too stupid to vote in 2000, so why should I be surprised.
Perhaps Jon Birch should have the last word.
At the end of my first week with the Mac, some comments are probably in order.
I’m still being driven mad by confusing the Command and Control keys in shortcut combinations. It’s not helped by continuing to use Windows.
I’ve by and large been impressed by running Windows in a VM (I’m using Fusion). This continues to be necessary for when I need the full power of Adobe Creative Suite, and also for using Bibleworks, and MS Publisher (an application I only use under sufferance!). If I had waited to be able to get all the software I needed when I bought the Mac, I’d still be waiting. WinXP actually runs faster in this virtual machine with a mere 512Mb RAM assigned than it did on my old hardware with 1Gb of RAM. Go figure! I have had problems with the printer driver. Printing from Windows disables the Mac driver and vice versa. I have a fairly kludgy workaround for that – printing everything in the VM to PDF and then dragging it over for a hard copy as needed.
I’ve set up the VM on another virtual desktop using Spaces. This is a great feature for running two OSs side by side and switching instantly between them with a keyboard shortcut: it’s almost instantaneous. Windows users who ned to go on using Windows have nothing to fear.
I’ve surprised myself by not yet buying MS Office 2008. I’m not yet sure what my word-processing solution will be. I have been taken aback by just how good Pages is: it is far more fully-featured than I expected, and is a real pleasure to use. I have played with Word 2008 in the Apple Store, and it is very good. Unfortunately it doesn’t have the same good language support as Office 2007 for Windows does. Pages seems to do enough for general work. I’m looking at download trials of Mellel and Nisus Writer Pro to see how they might pan out for me.
The fact that there is, in some ways, so little to say about the changeover says more about how much more alike the two OSs are than the “religious” wars of their fanboys might suggest. I am not having to change my ways of working that much. My use of dragging-and-dropping, always quite heavy, is increasing. I need to remember to use Spotlight, instead of drilling down through folders (as I would have to learn to use Search on Vista). I rather miss the Start button (a much better device than is credited: you could literally start doing anything by moving the mouse to the same place on your screen).
The Dock is better than the Windows Taskbar in many ways: being able to drag a file to an application without worrying whether it’s open or needs to open is a good move. You shouldn’t need to know: it’s your computer’s problem. The lack of feedback on things like which documents are open that the taskbar gave you is a bit of a minus.
Probably the thing that I notice most, and which I really like, is the almost instantaneous waking from Sleep, which means I can get going when I want, without wondering whether I’ve got time to switch the computer on to check for something before walking out of the door.
The first week: by and large, it’s been a good one.
Too much to read, to much to comment on. Here are a handful of posts that have caught my eye.
Let’s start off with a controversial one. I’d been wondering where Stephen (aka Q) had got to. Now he explains. (And it’s god to know he’s well if apparently disillusioned by the lack of agreement among Christians.) I have suggested to him (which suggestion he does not accept) that his explanation – an embrace of postmodernism – means his blog ought to be renamed “Diving headfirst into Babel”. I am not so ready to give up on the idea that some perspectives may be more true and more Christian than others. Stephen thinks postmodernism simply describes “what is”. I think that’s just his point of view; besides, postmodernism can’t actually talk about “what is”, only about “what is narrated in my tradition”.
There are, as Pentecost approaches, various posts about speaking in tongues and other gifts. (A special award for making me laugh to Chris Tilling.) It seems to me that evidence from other cultures and religions, to say the least, would point to a natural phenomenon of dissociative speech, that, like other natural phenomena, may be used to glorify God. It is the use of tongues, rather than the phenomenon, that can lead to it being regarded as a gift of the Spirit.
John Hobbins upsets Jim West when he calls St Paul a Zionist. Having described himself as a fundamentalist, Calvinistic, inerrantist in the past, describing St Paul as a Zionist is probably just John’s latest effort at a humpty-dumpty-ish recasting of Christian vocabulary. Terms mean what he says they mean. What might be more useful than anachronistic labelling would be to take into account is the way in which St Paul seems to replace the promise of the land with his vision of a heritage of new creation.
Finally, Loren Rosson (who rather suspiciously rates each Dr Who episode exactly in line with his predictions) has an intriguing post about whether the ark of the covenant inflicted the Philistines with impotence. Well, I suppose it’s in line with making Jacob limp.
NB This is not another post about charismatic experiences.
Several bloggers wish to draw attention to their a new adventure. I do, however, feel that the semantic resources of the English language have an undue burden placed upon them when the word “moderator” is applied to Nick (I’ll moderate your sorry arse) Norelli or Jim (You’re all totally depraved) West.
May I suggest we describe them more accurately as the forum “immoderators”?
A comment by Duane on another post, about pages left intentionally blank, makes me wonder if sometimes people forget the old jokes even when they are the best. So if this is new to you, note the index entry in Paul and Palestinian Judaism for “Truth, ultimate”. Look up the page numbers listed there, and you will see they are all blank.
One or two people have been blogging on which scholars have most influenced them. Nijay Gupta started it, Rick Brannan followed suit, and Nick Norelli (who never knowingly lets a bloggy bandwagon pass him by) joined in. I must confess to finding it extraordinarily difficult to do the same exercise. I think, however, that if I were to compose such a list, Tom Wright and Ed Sanders would be vying for top place for the role they’ve played in my own development (Sanders purely through his writing). Tom is oddly missing from Nijay’s list, yet was Dunn’s doctoral student at the time they were both discovering Sanders, and was a significant mentor to John Barclay. It is odd, therefore, to see him left out of the “Durham posse”. Also in my list would be Rowan Williams and Jürgen Moltmann. In terms of sheer ability to provoke different thinking about familiar texts, I would probably want to include Dale Martin.
The problem with this kind of list is that, for example, I couldn’t name a single Tom Wright book that would be among my top ten most influential books, despite listing him as one of the most influential scholars. Equally, I would have to list, as a matter of developmental fact, The First Urban Christians as one of my most influential books, even though Meeks wouldn’t appear in my top ten list of scholars. I’ll leave this is an askance comment on the listing game, rather than trying to actually produce my own lists.
I can’t specifically say when I first heard a reading from Eccelsiastes, but I do remember it sounding strikingly miserable for the Bible. I guess I might have been around nine or ten. I was not really aware of either the obsolescent meaning of vanity as emptiness, nor of the odd semitic construction of the superlative that passed into English via the KJV. What I do know is that I associated the phrase with Private Frazer from Dad’s Army. In my mind “Vanity of vanities: all is vanity!” segued effortlessly into “We’re all doomed, Captain Mainwaring, doomed I tell you.” Irrespective of the fine details of exegesis, that tone seems to match the rhetorical tradition of quoting Qoheleth, and shows how one’s own reading is a multi-layered and many-influenced thing. Some phrases just don’t seem the same in newer translations, and discovering the Bible’s very own miserable bugger made the wording all the more valued.
I was going to write a blog post today, but I realized I didn’t have anything to say.
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