7/28/2004 09:22:00 AM

Well, friends, it seems this little stream-of-consciousness post caused some discussion. There are scores of posts and comments out there, and I am unable to reply to each specifically (I have children to make waffles for), but hope that my bit of clarification that is to follow is a positive entry into the wider conversation. I also hope that many of you disagree with me. That has been the only reason any of this was interesting in the first place.

To begin, we should perhaps clear the air of, what I take to be, misreadings of my post. I did not say that the act of blogging made one a theologian. Maggie Dawn ("Does blogging make you a theologian?") simply misreads my statement in this regard.

"the next generation of theologians will start as bloggers. ...."

This statement is read the way I would most like to be read when its analog is something akin to: "The next generation of policeman will have talked on the telephone" or "The next generation of scientists will have utilized ARPANET." My statement was not an overstated apologetic for blogging so much as it was a pedestrian prognostication about the milieu from which future theologians will come forth and the generalized social practice and apparatus that will be a presumed part of their existence and therefore carried into their work without direct intention.

If I had the sentence to write again I would perhaps make a more gallant effort at precision; penning something like, “The next generation of theologians will carry with them something of the blogging techne and ethos” or "The next generation of theologians will have interacted with people and information in a significantly different manner than those who carried the tradition before them." That this could be said of many generations, at least to my mind, does not dull the point.

Techne, in Heidegger’s usage, following the Greeks from the pre-Socratics on, is a way of knowing. It is closely connected with episteme--how one knows what one knows.

Both words are names for knowing in the widest sense. They mean to be entirely at home in something, to understand and be expert in it. Such knowing provides an opening up. As an opening up it is a revealing.

-Martin Heidegger,
The Question Concerning Technology, 13

I take this, in reference to our present topic, for the opening cleared by being entirely at home in the accelerated global diversity that is enabled by the pathways and practices that are coming to be the normal fare for more and more of us on planet Earth. It is this space of truth’s revealing; this shifting space called into being through the utilization of particular technikon according to certain techne that is the point of saying, "the next generation of Theologians will start as bloggers"—and not only start as, more precisely, will know through, presume, and be totally at home within the capabilities and constellations, within the very horizons cast out by that which is the memetic bricolage that is the space of dwelling in these moments yet to come.

There is still a profound sense in which we do not appreciate the importance of McLuhan in our speaking about Theology. The oft quipped seldom contemplated maxim, "The medium is the message" is disregarded to our peril. Christianity, and the work of Christian Theology, work themselves out along the archival pathways of medium and there is no aspect of their various kerygmata that are not impacted by this (more on this, if I remember, in reference to spatial and temporal communication before I wrap this up).

There was much, at least what I took to be, knee-jerk commenting about bloggers and blogging that came out after this silly little post of mine. It all seemed rather odd to me. I did not say anything about this generation of bloggers (and by implication, says Jonny, me). In most of the comments that people have posted to various blogs the content seems oddly fixated on the present despite my post having nothing to say about the present. I found Jason Clark’s comment about blogging somehow becoming Theology as a parallel to the "suggestion that blogging is church" particularly odd. My comment was decidedly future-oriented; speaking of a time that we would not fully recognize should we ever have opportunity to time-travel in search of data to substantiate my silly anecdotal projection.

There were many other potential minor misreadings, but I am already growing tired of this sprawling reply that will be little read anyway (Why are we blogging about blogging? Why don’t the more substantial posts start firefights?) so I will mention only one more.

Keith Seabourn is concerned that my trite bit of futurist rhetoric is overstating the case for blogging--which I have already disclaimed above, but I would also like to point out that I wrote another little quip soon after the original post under review that begins, everything is overstated that was composed (if such a word can be used with reference to my from-the-seat-of-my-pants blogging habit) with specific reference to this post.

Honestly, I don't really like the word, "blog." I used it in the post we are discussing because, as with most of my posts, I did not edit the piece or take more time than it physically took for fingers to touch keys in considering its idiom, tenor or cadence. I have other work, my specializations following Maggie’s line of well formed thought, that do cause my online yabbering to be of little more scholastic quality than quips to friends at the pub.

Keith's real beef, at least it seems to me, is that I am not clearly upholding the distinction between content and form; substance and surface: our real conflict is that between his religious essentialism and my theological pragmatism (or whatever other language one could use in naming an anti-essentialist stance in a manner that is not negatively defined).

Now, before I end, I should address a few concerns that were not, from my perspective, poor readings. Steve Taylor, posits an interesting question when he asks what blogging might mean for "professional theology." This interests me because the same question is being asked of journalism at the moment and will likely be asked of many professions and disciplines in the coming years. Maggie, in her response to Steve, seems rather concerned to protect the academic pursuit of professional theology. I would likely be more inclined in this regard if I were to be offered tenure or I was a recently minted PhD starting a church. Since neither of these is the case in my life I have little vested in the current systems and I tend to see their flaws and lunacy as precarious counter-weights to their contribution to humanity: but that is another discussion.

Maggie specifically states that, because she is a specialist, she goes into the tradition and mines it so as to bring its ore back from the nether regions of the dark depths of Truth for everyone else to benefit from. How very nice. While that is well and good (seriously, I am quite happy that we have people who think full time about theories of the Mayan world wars and the impact of Strange Quark Matter; my beef is not with specialization), so what? Any of us can now choose to do this.

In the past an office, a discipline kept knowledge producers and knowledge consumers in check. There was a clear demarcation between the two—a demarcation that, ironically (in this conversation), marginalized women, the poor, the foreign, et al. Today anyone who meets a limited number of technology prerequisites can both consume and produce content in any area of specialization, and, while this may strike fear in the well-ordered world of the disciplinary partisan, this ecosystem of the known is self-stratifying along the distributed, peer-reviewed course that the Internet imposes on any who would contribute.

Lowering the bar on information production and consumption is one of the legacies of the Internet. People can now produce as well as consume theology. Deal with it. The specialist fear of non-specialist theology is akin to the Catholic organizational fear of the Reformation phenomenon or the denominational fear of the independent churches. It is also not unlike, from a different specialization, the Cathedral builders’ fear of the Bazaar. I hear many of the same things bandied about by pro-Cathedral software organizations in reference to their Bazaar-driven peers. Who gives a flying fuck? All systems have their benefits and challenges. We exist within them for our own reasons (most of us reading this having chosen our constituency—another massive paradigm shift in how humans interact with information and identity that has only become a widespread phenomenon in the relatively recent past) and have hand in contributing to the legacy that they will form for the coming generations. These systems of communication that we inhabit are vehicles that we have created and this need not be forgotten.

It is easier than ever for the uninitiated to read and practice their way into a discipline. It is not simply the democratization of knowledge that is enabled by these systems of communication we inhabit it is the democratization of specialization. We are currently amidst the least friction across the largest swath of humanity that we have yet known in the recorded history of our species with regard to specialization. This is a direct effect of our liberal political, economic and communication infrastructures. While there are still vocational hurdles for contribution to a specialization there are fewer and fewer functional hurdles. One does not need to travel to a particular institution to be credentialed by a particular authority to be sanctioned to carry out the work of an ever increasing number of pursuits that were, until the advent of our travel and communication networks, locked away for the chosen few.

There is no right way. There are agreements that are useful. We all make them. They always change. So it is with Theology. So it is with every discipline. Educational expectations change. Job descriptions change. What “the literature” is said in reference to changes. What the shape of scholarship looks like changes. Our institutional (the church at large as multi-generational media), convivial (the local church as embodied memory) and tangible archives (the inscriptions, the pictograms, the codices, the parchments, the fragments created, burned, recreated, collected, published and interpreted) help to (in)form our ecosystems of belief.

These systems are enabled by these contributing forms of spatial and temporal communication in their institutional, convivial and artifactual forms. These mediums, these archives are the memetic systems inscribed in and by the genetic systems that hold them. Because these archives shift and are held to be meaningful touchstones to narrative worlds we together enable within our shifting, living moments it is impossible to declare anything as definitively proper in how one goes about the gestation, rumination and publication of Theology. We are left to agree and not and that is enough.

This is where blogging comes in. This is where all of those pesky perspectives become useful. We are accustomed to monopoly and pedigree. That may be well and good when the rate of change is measured in generations, but it is less so in an economy of exchange that is moving at a less moribund pace. An increased rate of change is the functional end of monopoly and pedigree as they are enfolded into the shifting waves of argumentation and community enabled by our global channels of interconnection. This functional end is the reconfiguration of monopoly and pedigree in more fragile terms. Not that these have not always been fragile. It is simply the rate of change that accelerates the lifecycle of any one configuration that has made them appear more so in our moment, and it is in their fragility that we find our excuses for the othering that accompanies monopoly and pedigree (and their many cousins: anthropocentrism, xenophobia, provincialism, et al) melt away in the flame of our common lot.

It is the cross-disciplinary/ethnic/cultural synergy and the outside appropriation, extension and critique of our actions and ideas by those who both do and do not share our proclivities and specializations that makes the open multipoint sharing and argumentation a breakthrough benefit derived from our technology-enhanced interconnectivity and a new ground reality from which the scholarship of the future will act.

That was my point.

The pasts we inherit and create for those to come are intractable sieves through which our worlds are variously configured and reconfigured within the situated spaces opened by our know-how. It is this inheritance, or rather, it is the value we invest in this inheritance that is the impetus for our ferocity in speaking of such things as this. It is this inheritance that both inhabits the contingency that is the forgotten past enabling who we are and is effaced by the who-we-are that carries it on.

In most of the reaction, honestly, there seemed to be more hand ringing than alternatives presented. If after reading this post you believe that blogging (as a catch all word for the peer-to-peer and peer-to-world interaction that the Internet is enabling—pick your own word, I don’t particularly care) does not, will not, impact the theology of the impending future please suggest why in a manner that is compelling.

cheers.