Posted 12/21/2002 10:03:07 PM
the way that the brain is wired is constantly changing in response to new realities. this is called plasticity. this capacity to invent/uninvent the circuitry of our existence is the basis for our shifting identity over time. the very process of change makes us who we are. just reading this has fired a tiny change in the connections that form you. plasticity is the you that others think of in reference to you. think of the old woman in the nursing home without the plasticity she once had. she is remembered in the vibrancy of her plasticity not in the catatonic moments of plasticity’s demise. though loved in these moments as the sacred remains of what once was this sad, quiet ending lived in memories as-if they were the present underscores the centrality of plasticity for identity. the slow downward spiral in plasticity is the slow creep toward nonexistence for any organism.

Posted 12/21/2002 09:40:27 PM
US blocks cheap drugs agreement...
special interest money trumps international consensus

here is one utopian idea: we pass some legislation that says that for every dollar in US taxpayer money spent on F-16's for Israel, spare parts for Turkey or stinger missiles for whatever breakout faction the CIA decides to support this week the US Government is required to spend $2 on cheap drug subsidies, de-mining and ecological renewal.

i know, i know, this is not even on the radar in our present political milieu.

the world system works these things out. the natural alternative to posturing ourselves with interdependence in global decision making and with benevolence amidst our wealth is for the world, out of the vacuum of our dereliction, to posture itself in what we call piracy and terror.

we bring it upon ourselves, friends. it is time for we the people to stop supporting a way of governance that privileges greed and death.

Posted 12/20/2002 09:32:40 PM

Spy1d had some near death experiences and the opportunity to practice his counter-terrorist driving this week.
it's all good until you die.

<dan wants to be cool too>
i was certified in counter-terrorist driving in '95. 
</dan is done being cool>

Posted 12/20/2002 08:24:46 PM

the runaway mystic shares a prayer in her "currently" file:
I once asked a Jesuit priest what was the best short prayer he knew.
He said, 'Fuck it,' as in, 'Fuck it; it's in God's hands.'
- Sir Anthony Hopkins

fuck it is the euro-american version of inshallah.

Posted 12/20/2002 01:06:01 PM

BBC NEWS | Mass arrests of Muslims in LA
when will the US authorities stop creating enemies of friends?

Posted 12/20/2002 12:21:25 AM

Cities Say No to Federal Snooping

Posted 12/19/2002 11:15:05 PM
current video:
alice.in.chains::i.stay.away
on an amazing DVD from an excellent band

Posted 12/19/2002 08:05:18 PM

it is fiscal 2003 for the USGovt and it is the first year in the last four that the US has not had a surplus. the Govt is spending far more than it is taxing us for.

what does this mean?? well, for starters it means that last month we the people spent $19.6 BILLION on interest payments. what i want to know is who gets this money and why the hell are we spending $20B a month on interest?

the biggest spending categories for November were:

• Social Security, $44 billion
  
• Medicare and Medicaid, $42.4 billion
  
• Military, $31.3 billion
  
• Interest on debt, $19.6 billion

Posted 12/19/2002 07:41:47 PM
current mp3:
boysetsfire::handful.of.redemption.[live]
(this album is so frickin' good)

Posted 12/19/2002 05:31:51 PM

Posted 12/19/2002 03:15:13 PM

AOL Patents IM
maybe the USoA should patent Freedom^TM and demand all nations who have their own Freedom^TM-like government pay royalties or get the shit kicked out of them. oh, that's right, we already do that. silly me.

Posted 12/19/2002 03:10:58 PM

Seeking Ways to Skip Sleep
this could be interesting at times, though profoundly overwhelming in large doses.

Posted 12/19/2002 01:44:52 PM
JOHO on metadata:

Metadata allows for imperfection.
Imperfection hastens time.
Haste leaves little time to erect defenses.
Therefore, metadata lets us be who we are.

Posted 12/19/2002 01:18:01 PM

New Premise in Science: Get the Word Out Quickly, Online

Posted 12/19/2002 11:22:39 AM

Brandywine Forum 2003 - Religious Freedom: The Missing Dimension of Security

Since the Enlightenment, the West has divided state from religion in the name of good governance. The result has been admirable, but the casualty has been holistic analysis. We have forgotten that much of the non-Western world, to a large extent, views religion and state together. This year's forum will explore the hypothesis that states that do not foster respect for religious freedom are vulnerable to a number of significant security threats... This forum seeks to develop a new security culture that promotes peaceable societies through the understanding that formerly "disparate" issues such as individual freedom of belief and international security are actually mutually dependent.

Posted 12/19/2002 10:39:40 AM

funny thing the word, lead.

a lead is a first among equals who shows the way,
a lead is a lode of gold ore in an old riverbed,
a lead is a channel of open water created by a break in a mass of ice,
a lead is a conductor electrically connecting one circuit to another...

lead is a malleable metallic element used in containers for corrosives, bullets, radiation shielding, paints...
atomic number 82
atomic weight 207.2
melting point 327.5°C
boiling point 1,744°C
specific gravity 11.35
valence 2, 4

Posted 12/19/2002 12:12:30 AM

Golublog writes on the genre of the blog entry in his post:
Blogs are Farmers on Diving Boards:

...blogs are about good writing...

the blog as genre is unique because of its size: longer than the utterance of a spoken conversation, definitely longer than the brief lines of IM, but also shorter than an article or chapter. Blogs are punchy. They're somewhat akin to very short conference papers: you have enough time to get in, make your point, and get out again - but not enough for much more than that. Blogs are all topic sentences and no supporting evidence, god bless 'em. This flare-up-and-fade-away aspect of them is what makes them so great and inspires such thought. This, in fact, is my answer to the question: How best to blog my academic career? The blog is a place to put all your unsubstantiated hunches, since it's too compact a format to allow for substantialization anyway. A blog is a place for thoughts that are one blog long.

Posted 12/18/2002 11:52:02 PM
i have not posted in a while. i have written some things, though not per my usual clip. life is wearier than usual. work is non-existent and i find myself a bit more critical than is my custom over the past collection of days. this reared its head a bit in some ranting i did below after reading a book that has been making the blog rounds of late. this ranting became a rather poorly constructed book review. it is harsh at points, but i am following my no-edit blog rule and putting it out. take it for what it is worth.

i am tired. i have been up for two days. it doesn't feel like Christmas around here this year. maybe it is the sunny and 70's forcast. maybe it is the not-so-subtle depression that rests as dew on the soul of the man who walks with lead feet as he flaps his arms in a vain attempt to fly.

You ever wonder when you gotta stop living up here, and start living down here?
-Rabbit

Posted 12/18/2002 04:00:02 AM

just in from the 12:01am showing of the Two Towers;
an exceptional cinematic story--though deviating from the book much more than the first. Al-haqq dressed up as Gandalf the Grey and wowed the audience by standing, arms raised, staff in hand to conjure the film we had been waiting three hours for. as fate would have it the projectionist inadvertantly played into this show of wizardry by rolling the film just seconds after Al-haqq's arms went up.

i look forward to the extended DVD version of this chapter in Tolkien's saga.

Posted 12/17/2002 03:03:43 PM

From McDonalds to The Last Supper

"In the U.S., it has just gotten to the point where they can't add any more stores because the (fast-food) market is so saturated. Now it's a matter of how they make the hurdle from saturation to cost controls."
-Morningstar analyst Carl Sibilski on McDonald's future

"In many areas of the U.S., it is has just gotten to the point where you can't add any more Churches because the market is so saturated. Now it's a matter of how they make the hurdle from saturation to service. The only innovation the Church has to offer is the naked prophet and his towel in a world of dirty feet."
-'Blinked ripping off Carl Sibilski

Posted 12/17/2002 02:58:29 PM

ABCNEWS.com : McDonald's Posts First Loss in 47 Years

i don't care what the professional pundits say: the economy is NOT on a rebound.

Posted 12/16/2002 07:44:03 PM

from a thread on the carriage blog.

Question:
what if we only had one of the gospels? How much different would our live be if only one account of the Jesus story survived?

example: If all we had was Mark, would we celebrate Christmas the way we do today?

- Summer

My response:
good thought, sum.

if mark were all we had there would be no virgin birth, no Word made Flesh, no "For God So Loved The World..," etc etc etc...

if this were the case, i think Xmas would be very different--if it were celebrated at all. it is very unlikely that the first Jamesian communities celebrated anything akin to Xmas. they had none of, what we term, the "canonical gospels." at best, they had gospels we no longer possess for reasons of historical accident, theological subjugation or simple non-transferal from oral to written form.

on this subject it is interesting to note that the Pauline churches, from the evidence we have, show no sign of having a virgin birth/advent tradition.

good question to ponder.

Posted 12/16/2002 07:27:16 PM

Daniel Miller's Integration.Research project has a new site and some excellent ideas.

Posted 12/16/2002 06:20:42 PM

ArabNews: US plans covert propaganda operations in friendly countries

this is absurd. why would the USG sponsor ill-contrived campaigns of political propaganda when there are opportunities to support legitimate, grass roots expressions of art, religion and political speech through the already organized and funded channels of USAID, the State Department's network of Cultural Attaches and American Centers and various UN and NGO organizations?

even floating this trial balloon speaks of the poorly conceived plans of a bureaucracy that quantifies solutions strictly in dollar amounts and presupposes cultural change comes about best by monitoring and coercion.

Posted 12/16/2002 10:28:25 AM

2600 NEWS:
Update On The Mike Maginnis Story

Posted 12/16/2002 09:18:34 AM
as satisfying as my one-sentence-and-three-fragment book review is in a hurried email it seems to lack the same panache when thrown out into the cold, harsh blogsphere. for a blog disseminated review to work i need more self-effacing clap-trap about this-or-that sandwiching a nicety-nice collection of sentences about how revolutionary the book's thoughts are. then i should drop a name or two and insert myself into some narrative that coolly shows my pivotal place amidst this crew of happy up-and-comers. after that i should put a link to Webber's book on Amazon with my little code in the URL so i can get my cut. then i should shoot Webber a belabored, nonchalant email mentioning how much i like his book and subtly insert a plug, in an, "oh, by the way," sort of way, for the ass-kissing review i've written in that smarmy "please say you like me, please, please, please" way that only a religious i-wanna-be-important subtext can muster.

naaaw. that has already been done. i'll stick to my stream of consciousness:

___________

The Younger Evangelicals

i really don't consider myself an evangelical. my background is too mongrel. i have seen too much. don't get me wrong: i like evangelicals, well, some of them. maybe. anyway, as i was saying... too mongrel, yes, far too much diversity in my memetic blood to be content noshing on rewarmed evangelical pabulum that is the sum and substance of the "Christian Culture" that the prayer-in-school ilk want to see America return to. boy, i am really going now. it's funny how creatively offensive one can become when discussing something that is close enough for one to potentially identify with, but so far afield in terms of what one wants to be identified with that one has to actively begin engaging in the precise art of broad brush ideological side-swiping. ok, enough mid-review self-talk.

yes indeed, the younger evangelicals are something to behold. at their best i find myself oddly attracted to them. they have hope and are less apathetic than many. those are good things. i applaud this. my main critiques of Webber's perspective (although he tries to communicate his perspective in the voice of others... ostensibly those virile younger evans) are some of the same challenges i have in embracing the Post-Liberal and Radical Orthodoxy streams of thinking that are hip in some circles: there is an odd tone of extractionary (cool word, eh?) cultural insulation and harmonizing classicist foundationalism.

Cultural Insulation

when counter culture is defined as setting up Christian versions of Disneyland, TNN, Harper-Collins and Island/Def Jam the irony of the situation elicits a vomit-like response in the younger evangelicals i know--should they care enough to stop laughing. it is out of this context of irony that many, perhaps the majority, of younger evans have grown. while still engaged in both Disneyland and her religious knock-offs these folks really want to be something else--and rightly so, i would say. but what exactly? the thoughtful younger evangelical tries their damnedest to live authentically, but when one's most authentic spiritual heritage is TBN, Willow Creek and Heritage USA what is a young evan to do?

Webber suggests that the younger evangelical in this situation has begun to rediscover beliefs and practices of "classical Christianity." bravo. well and good. yes-siree-bob. one question though, who determines what classical Christianity actually is? the inability to clarify this with precision has sent many of these younger evangelicals, and the startup churches that want to cater to them, into the a la carte spiritual boutique business. the ancient-spiritual-practice-of-the-week has become as trendy in some circles as the worship fads of the mega and wanna-be-mega churches of the younger evangelical's parents--although, perhaps, with less centralized production and marketing, though with no less of an emphasis on consumption and eventually discarding through disuse.

discarding as an outcome is the natural termination point for any practice that is not an authentically owned piece of a community's identity. the a la carte model is, by its very nature, postured with a propensity for a consumption/discarding lifecycle. i am all for the eclectic, but not the carnival eclecticism of domesticated ancient spiritual practice packaged for easy dissemination amidst a population averse to anything requiring more than a 15 minute commitment.

despite my disrespect for a shallow eclecticism that is more spiritual fashion than spiritual pilgrimage, i really like the historical focus that the younger evangelicals are supposedly pursuing. i think that the more we encounter the genealogy of the various trajectories of our spiritual traditions the more adequately equipped we are to walk with an ever increasing humility and love in the face of our own contingency. this is the thing though: in all of our ancient reflection and historical appropriation how do we move our experiences of these traditions, *that are not ours*, to a place of authentic lived-identity and not merely prescriptive or convenient cycles of consumption? how do our experiences of the historical other become transformatively integrated into our identities rather than making up some subset of an overall collection of disconnected experiences? if the ancient is to be honored the communities engaging the tradition must move their encounter with them beyond the fascination one has at the site of an odd dish at the all-you-can-eat buffet.

some approach this need for ancient authenticity by demanding the construction of a "Christian Culture" or, its less structuralist cousin, an entering into the world of "the" tradition as normative reality. when i read of thinkers advocating these positions i cringe. this seems to be what Webber thinks many of the younger evangelicals are pursuing--though my experience is otherwise. the challenge i find insurmountable when it comes to my reading of these advocates for "Christian Culture" is that when one presumes a discrete unit of culture labeled "Christian" one is inevitably sanctifying a particular interpretive appropriation, awash in the inescapable genealogically-gifted perspective of one's dwelling moment, of some specific past period's way. this project, so aptly identified in the ruminations of the Cambridge ilk that is Radical Orthodoxy, works to build an overarching Christian structure that one can then dwell within and, for some, then claim to have overcome nihilism and contingency.

this new-Augustinian constructivism is problematic only when one claims to have done something more than what has been accomplished. privileging a particular cultural construction is one thing. doing so and labeling it an encompassing "Christian Culture" is an altogether different thing. an effort to repress difference by claiming orthodox privilege and hiding the traces of diversity that whisper from the furthest reaches of the Jesus traditions is required when one is postured to christen a culture.

our communities can learn neato things by engaging the traditions of others. we should encourage this practice. more acutely, though, our communities have a dire need to simply live in faith, hope and love as the normal people that we are. the extraordinary is always seeded in the ordinary. the impossible germinates in the banality of the sacred mundane. the hard work of spiritual community is not walking a labyrinth, fasting from animal products for a month or confessing an ancient creed periodically. the actualization of community is in the boring, soiled exchange of large quantities of normal living. normal living is the laboratory of the spiritual.

all of that to say, yeah, cool, those with a fetish for ancient practices or those who enjoy A&E religion will fall in love with this new emphasis on the ancient. nonetheless, this posture of rediscovery and, to some degree, appropriation is not a silver bullet. this move to "Classical Christianity" is no less contrived than the traditional Christianity of our grandparents or the pragmatic Christianity of our parents. perhaps, oh please god, an authentic experience to some involved, but certainly no less contrived.

Classicist Foundationalism

my main critique of The Younger Evangelicals, as crassly communicated (but is this not all rather crass?) in my one-sentence-and-three-fragment book review, centered on the attempts by Webber, and some of his younger evans i guess, to overcome nihilism through a return to a self-justified classicism. i commend the general posture of this position as it is finding voice in various local ecclesiologies and ecumenisms, nevertheless, i personally have a real problem with the phrase "Classical Christianity" because of the presumption of an originary, theo-retical/logical unity in the tradition that the current incarnations of spiritual community around Jesus are simply the contemporary vessels of.

a classicist position is a foundationalist position. classicist foundationalism is a bulldozing force of homogenization that works from an historical and theological hermeneutic of harmony. the harmonizing of the various traditions of what has come to be called the Christian faith is not a new thing. we have been actively engaged in it since the days of the Diatessaron and before. what is insulting, beyond the obvious violence inherent in a sweeping metahermeneutic of harmony, is when its proponents, at times, begin their awkward little ideological ditties that pat their circle of ideologs on the back for overcoming nihilism with a new flavor of christian rationalism deemed the avenue for capturing the otherwise illusory True truth! yes, the standard (and valid in the extreme) interpretation-in-community mantra is thrown in there for good measure, but True truth is nonetheless presumed, claimed, packaged and sold.

there was no originary unity of the Christian experience save in love for the one God and love of one's neighbor. beyond this the Christian tradition--even before it was Christian--was inherently diverse. networks of spiritual relationships that embody this originary diversity is what i take to be the sum of the "reformation" that is taking place in our day. the propensity to entrench the way of the Kingdom in some particular community's/ies ancient Christian credulities in a vain effort to claim a theoretical meta-unity of the various churches historical and living. it is to posit a new foundationalism that rests on nothing more than a particular traditional trajectory (that is unabashedly an exclusively Latin-Hellenistic project) of evolved thought and practice whose primary historical privilege is that of having won (in every sense) the right to create and preserve the tradition.

this classicist foundationalism has simply idealized the orthodoxy and orthopraxy of some particular series of points in the ever unfolding genealogy of the Jesus traditions giving these points an air of the pristine that implies, and often states outright, a privileged connection to a more original knowledge and experience of the faith. i see this positioning, so happily forwarded by the various flavors of Christian restoration in our day, incapable of living up to anything approaching a claim at origin without a substantial encounter with the marginalized voices and communities that were subjugated politically, militarily, historically and theologically in the ascent of what we today call orthodox (small "o") Christianity.

those happy souls so excited to find our unity in the Celtic and the catholic, the orthodox and the apostolic need to begin to ask the more difficult questions that pop up when one does not stop the historical archeology of identity with Reformation Europe, Constantinian Rome or the Apostolic reconstruction after the Jerusalem community's cataclysmic demise. for example:

1. how does the gospel of the Kingdom of God relate to the various gospels and theological projects of non-semitic Christian thought (predominately post-destruction of the Temple/Jerusalem)?
   
2. how does seeing Paul as a minority voice among the Jesus communities whose very legitimacy was called into question by elements in the movements led by Peter, John, James and Jesus' other brothers in Jerusalem and throughout Eretz Israel effect our reading of Paul and James' letters and the Acts?
   
3. how can the tensions created by the internal diversity of the various cannonical writings we have help to foster a more open and humble view of gathering, believing and serving?
   
4. how does one account for the might-makes-right approach to the question of what should be deemed orthodox theology?
   
5. in what ways did the need to deal with the end of the Second Temple period play into the rise of new cultural pretexts, new gospel texts, and shifting structural and theological contexts out of which the Jesus story was framed in the ascendancy of post-135AD/CE Latin-Hellenistic Christianity? or slightly restated, how did the Temple and Jerusalem's demise impact the community identity, structure and message among those who sought after God in the way of Jesus?
   
6. in what way did the marginalization of all that was Jewish that followed the reframing of the faith in terms of Athens and Rome, the canonization actions and the creedal wars that took place over a 200+ year span directly go against the very cultural, religious, political and social identity of Yesh'uah?

the plague of classicist foundationalism in our day is fueled by the confluence of a "god-ordained continuity" view of history that says, in short, what wins is "god's will" and a functionally ahistorical approach to theology driven by a presuppositional commitment to the political/theological machinations of past church hierarchy in the minting of creeds that, in effect, would have marginalized the very Jesus they deified. this new-ancient foundationalism must not be the elixir that steals the defining imagination of our transitional period in church history.

i don't want to hear another thing about the need to return to a more adequately Apostolic, classical or Triune faith until some of these younger evangelicals, and the boomer-pragmatists who are making significant coin writing about them, begin a more engaging journey in the way of Jesus and those in the diverse communities who lived and died like him before the ascendancy of Christianity. why? because though i realize that for many the ancient in "ancient-future" is defined by the winners, for me, the ancient is the mass of illiterate peasants who held tightly to the thin hope of a Kingdom they could enact even in the midst of total political and religious domination. in large measure it was this viral kingdom of the powerless that was sacrificed for the violent kingdom of the empowered in the centuries following the execution of Yesh'uah and the historically unfolding definition of triumphant Christianity.

rediscover Jerusalem i say! and with her the altogether foreign (for us Hellenized orthodox types) experience of the various Yeshu'ah following, Kingdom living, Judahist communities that filled her ancient streets. the various flavors of Nicea that pass as a divided church today would have us not dip into the forgotten world of the pre-Christian Jesus community, but we must.

ok, i will stop now. in case some are wondering, i really am not a mean heretic with a chip on my shoulder. i'm nice enough—until you offend my silly little periphery dwelling theological sensibilities, at which point i tend to talk a bit too fast using words that are a bit too ponderous in a diatribe that is a bit too long. so there you have it. my three bits for the day. maybe i should just hide this little ditty away on my hard drive someplace. i'll think about it.

Closing Thoughts

spiritual community is a gift to others—most directly our planet and the human societies that inhabit it—which, in its loving, ugly, messy, beautiful, offensive, hopeful, awe-inspiring, disgusting way is about the embodiment of the divine: the work of reconciliation, agreement-forming, enemy-loving, beauty-creating, needy-providing, child-loving, community-engaging and self-sacrificing that is the very soul of our form of sentient life.

for all of those who have winced more than once in reading this: attaboy, you made it to the end. know that there is no intentional offense leveled at Webber in this, rather uncouth, stream of words that stay only slightly on topic. really, this is less a specific book review and more an opportunity for me to rant about some loosely related ideas that charge me up a little when i encounter them. i am happy Webber is writing. i think that his key audience is made up of my parents, grandparents and their friends and that is cool.

i wish i were still up in Chicago. i'd drop by Northern, kidnap Webber and take him over to a little place called Firkin that my compatriot, the illustrious executive-hacker, Sherpa introduced me to. we'd have a couple stout beers and debate just how important Nicene theology really is. until i can blog about that excellent exchange here is the promised link to Robert's book on Amazon. no, i don't get a cut.

peace.

Posted 12/16/2002 08:52:22 AM
so, everyone has been acting like this book is the shit. i like some of Webber's quotes. this is what lead to my reading his book last night. here is my one-sentence-and-three-fragment book review that i wrote in a stream of consciousness email to d.hopkins this morning:

overall the book has some charts that are interesting, but it is a modernist trying to say that he has overcome postmodernism by returning to a classicist position. ok. whatever. use your illusion.

Posted 12/16/2002 07:08:34 AM

Untitled Document
via evans