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michaelgratliff's posterous

Not Just 12, and not THE 12, But 12 Books all the Same

            At first glance, identifying 12 books that changed the world seems a daunting task. However, it is the place that one's mind goes with this challenge that is daunting, and it is the same place that Bragg almost goes with his 12 Books that Changed the World. Then, he finds a more comfortable resting place from which to launch his British challenge to the reading public. Clearly in his introduction, Bragg states "these are not the 12 books." (2) They are only his version of 12 books, and 12 books from his British Isles. So, what did he choose?
Magna Carta (1215)
On the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1789) — William Wilberforce in Parliament, immediately printed in several versions
Experimental Researches in Electricity (three volumes, 1839, 1844, 1855) by Michael Faraday

            Not all are actually books. The Magna Carta is the oldest with the newest Bragg included being Married Love in 1918. It seems that the criteria must have been something like "these books need to be symbolic or instrumental in identifying a shift in the culture of their time. Newton has influenced our framing of reality in every faucet based on his theoretical understandings of the universe. Only recently have quantum and chaos theories begun to give us peeks into a future beyond Newton. The King James Bible did, for several centuries represent the "real" Word of God. I once heard a woman on a religious call-in radio program question why anyone would ever read a different version because we all know that the KJV is the authentic Word of God -even more interesting given the fact that William Tyndale's Bible lives on as "the body of the King James Version."(272)
            There are several entries to stir things up including Darwin's Origin of Species. I must admit I've never read it - just read about it. Bragg has changed my mind with one quote from the end of Darwin's work: 'There is a grandeur in this view of life,' he writes, 'with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the  Creator into a few forms or into one, that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been and are being evolved.' (149) The inclusion of Shakespeare seems formulaic and yet the reasoning is fascinating. "He had a vocabulary of at least 21,000 different words...possibly 30,000!" According to Bragg, most of us mutter around with about 2000 words. (335) There's something else I need to read directly!
            So, though Bragg's list is not definitive, it is indicative of possible direction. It creates a basis for choosing. Of course, the question for you and I has to be: "What are our defining books, or what books so define the world we live in today that they are fundamental for a foundational understanding of humankind and the existence we inhabit? I'm taking notes! #dminlgp

He's Got the Whold World in His Hands

In the book Global Warming, A Very Short Introduction, Mark Maslin does an amazing job of identifying a vast array of influences, facts, and attitudes that are a part of the current conversation on the topic. I discovered in my class that edition of the book I read, circa 2004, is not the latest. While I wonder what I missed in the later edition, I want to spend this post looking at a portion that was evidently left out of those later editions, but seems useful in examining how one would look at the current conversation.

Maslin begins the chapter (3) with this question: "Considering all the scientific evidence collected to support the global warming hypothesis, why is there still a huge range of opinions on what the future holds for us?" (p. 36) He then proceeds to support the question based on Prof. John Adams 'four myths of nature' and 'four myths of human nature.' These myths are outlined below:

Nature
1. Nature benign. Nature, according to this myth, is predictable, bountiful, robust, stable, and forgiving of any insults that humankind might inflict upon.
2. Nature ephemeral. Nature is fragile, precarious, and unforgiving. It is in danger of catastrophic collapse thanks to human interference.
3. Nature perverse/tolerant. This is a combination of the first to myths. Within limits nature can be relied upon to behave predictably.
4. Nature capricious. Nature is unpredictable, the appropriate management style is laissez-faire, as there is no point management.

Human Nature
1. Individualists are enterprising self-made people relatively free from control by others, they strive to exert control over their environment and the people in it.
2. Hierarchists, who inhabit the world with strong group boundaries and binding prescriptions. Social relationships in this world are hierarchical and everyone knows his or her place.
3. Egalitarians have strong group loyalties but little respect for externally imposed rules, other than those imposed by nature.
4. Fatalist have minimal control over their own lives. They belong to no groups responsible for decisions that will rule their lives. (Maslin, 36-43)

Maslin then uses a series of illustrations to demonstrate how combinations of these two sets of myths could be charted, identifying how the interaction of particular individuals might view the issue of global warming. If I am a fatalist who sees the nature as robust, I would imagine that nothing has to be done, and anything I tried to do would not matter anyway. Therefore, I could continue to drive my SUV and dump my waste on the earth with little effect or concern. However, if I am an individualist who believes that nature is ephemeral, I will probably be out in front of the charge to save the world through activism and strength of personal influence.

The use of these myths may not be pivotal in moving the world to a better interpretation of the possible scenarios of climate change Maslin outlines in his book, but they can certainly afford a way of understanding reactions to the data as it is presented and people's reactions to that data. The number of factors now considered as elements of climate models and their relationship to the single-faceted study of atmospheric change in the 1970's is mind-boggling. (p. 69) The possible variations based on cyclic warming and cooling of our planet adds to the  complexity of the ability for scientists to reflect what is and what might happen. God's ways are much greater than ours, and the finite nature of our knowledge certainly limits our understanding. What would seem reasonable and faithful is to do all we can to care for God's gift of creation with faith that the future is in God's hands. #dminlgp

Have Thine Own Way...

Shelley Trebesch's book Isolation: A Place of Transformation in the Life of a Leader is a treatise to the need for and process of isolation in the life and development of ministry leaders. She suggests that 95% of ministry leaders experience isolation at some time in their ministry. (p. 56) Her Biblical examples place isolation in the forefront of spiritual leadership development. (pp. 13-27) There is a need for self-examination and openness to God that she suggests can only be experienced through isolation.

Isolation isn't only being set aside from your ministry setting, but can also happen within the context of that ministry. What Trebesch defines as "quasi-isolation" can happen within the regular work-life of a ministry leader who is experiencing a paradigm shift within that ministry setting. (p.10)
I find this very helpful, as I do Trebesch's description of the stages of isolation: 1) The stripping a leader to the core of who they are; 2) A time of wrestling with God in what some call the "dark night of the soul"; 3)The arrival at a new place if intimacy with God; 4) And finally, a release of the ministry leader into God's future for them as a transformed leader. (p.35-43)

It is beyond this point where I struggle with the book. There are lists and charts and steps that analyze, describe, and guide the process. In my experiences of isolation, a number of these have happened, but it would be later that I was able to identify them. Perhaps the usefulness here is not to see the significant "guidance" as a proscribed way to "do" isolation as much as signpost along the way to understand the experience better. If a person were  designing an intentional time away from ministry - which seems to be Trebesch's experience - a process orientation would be helpful. Someone who needs to let go of how they have been defined by themselves or others could become so consumed by doing isolation right that they miss the opportunity it brings to allow God to have God's way with us. Thoughts? #dminlgp

Follow the Elite #dminlgp

In his book To Change the World: the Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World, James Davidson Hunter says "the work of world-making and world-changing are, by and large the work of the elites: gatekeepers who provide creative direction and management within spheres of social life. He says that "even where the impetus for change draws from popular agitation, it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites." (p.53) This quote came back to me as I was reading New Media, 1740-1915, a series of essays edited by Lisa Gitelman and Geoffrey B. Pingree.

Their book is filled with amazing facts about different forms of media and their introduction into society.  The authors describe their endeavor this way: "this collection of essays challenges the notion that to study "new media" is to study today's new media. All media were once "new media," and our purpose in these essays is to consider such emergent media within their historical contexts - to seek out the past on it's own passed terms." (p.xi)

What was interesting to me is that Hunter's statement seems to be as true for the adoption of new forms of media as for any other cultural change. The examples of the zograscope, physiognotrace, optical telegraph, telegraph, stereoscope, telephone, phonograph, scrapbooking, and cinema were shaped in ways and spaces that the elite defined. In the first essay on the zograscope, Erin Blake describes how this new way of seeing "did not provide a new dominant model of seeing; it provided a different way for a limited group of people, the men and women who considered themselves members of polite society, to visualize public space." (p.5) The physiognotrace was "free to all who paid an [museum] entrance fee of twenty-five cents..." in addition, they were charged a penny for supplies. In that time-frame, this would have continued to reserve the experience of a flat profile for those with means. The telegraph, was an elite form of communication for the first thirty years of its life  and only translated into popular culture by those operators who were essentially instruments of the elite in using the technology. (pp 92-93). If you wanted more than a tin strip souvenir  of the phonograph or to have a telephone for your own use, you had to be a member of the elite class of those times. The translation of these media into the cultural milieu where each  was introduced was dependent upon the ability of elite support for the discovery, elite adoption of the form of media, and elite distribution to a broader public.

In the United States, this use of the term elite makes us uncomfortable. We are a nation who believes that there is an equality that transcends social class and financial strata. However, it is the early adoption of new technologies which lead the masses to adopt. For example:

"Celebrities have been early adopters of the Toyota Prius, as the car gives them the ability to both "care" about the environment while allowing them to set an example for the little people. Of course, any "caring" they're doing is offset the moment they hop in their private jets, but they'll do their best to convince you otherwise through rhetoric. It's what they do." (http://www.seattleweekly.com/slideshow/trading-their-porsche-for-a-prius-cele...

What does this mean in relation to faith? Do we need celebrity football players or superstar preachers to draw people  to the faith? Is cutting edge technology a substitute for this because it is cheaper and easier to come by? Are we selling out the content of faith to be a celebrity church based on our style of worship or ministry? Has the Christian church become an elite church or a church for the elite?

Davidson suggests that "the cultural economy of contemporary Christianity has strongest, in the main, where cultural leverage is weakest - on the social periphery rather than the cultural center and in tastes that run to the lower-middle and middle brow rather than high brow." (p. 285) Maybe we Christians have missed the point  when we seek to be, in some way, the elite. Paul's words might be instructive "But God chose what the world considers foolish to shame the wise. God chose what the world considers weak to shame the strong." (1 Cor. 1:27). #dminlgp

Distraction Reaction #dminlgp

I get bored easily. Give me ten things to work on, and I spend my day going from one to the other...or sometimes I work on three of them at the same time. When the term "multi-tasking" arrived on the scene, I celebrated the fact that someone finally recognized my propensity for accomplishing a multitude of tasks at the same time! It was gratifying to finally be recognized for what I knew I could do.

Over the past week, my doctoral cohort has been reading Consider, Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking in Your Organization by Daniel Forrester.  It's predicated on the postulate that  American business has a "bias towards action."  Forrester suggests that in this bias, "...we gain speed, immediate connection, and reactions while giving up richer contexts that emerge only when we take time to think" (p.7) Then Forrester moves into the arena of multitasking.  He states that "multitasking between two technology-driven tasks is nearly impossible." (p.14) and goes on to quote from a Stanford research project that determined through the use of MRIs that "our mind functions best when pursuing only a single task. .. when we try to do two technology-facilitated tasks at once, neither is done as well as if we had only one task." (p.15) So does that email popping up in the corner of my screen while I'm writing a report invite me to a deeper level of thinking or distraction? According to another study Forrester quotes it could be the former if I'm in the 2.5% of the population who are termed as "supertaskers." Unfortunately, I'm probably in the nearly 97% of the population who are multitasking posers (my term). (p.15)

If this is true - and I'm not yet convinced - then that email popping up in the corner or that Facebook message I'm responding to while listening to the speaker in the front of the room are just distractions. Of course, Forrester has something to say about that as well. He suggests that  a small one minute distraction causes me 10 minutes of "recovery time" to be back completely present in the task at hand. (p.13) If this is true, and I have two 5 minute interruptions from staff members stopping by my office to ask a question, answer a phone call (2 minutes), and check my email at least once every 15 minutes (2 minutes each time), I have had 90 minutes of interruptions and recovery time in that hour! What that really means is that I have not been able to think deeply about any task I have been working on during that time, and obviously my work quality will suffer. The description above is not an exaggeration, it may actually be best-case. What is a body to do? Forrester highlights several ways to create think time. He highlights Lincoln's cottage near Soldier's Home where he escaped to have concentrated thinking time and how he used the travel time to the White House as more thinking time. (pp. 34-35) He describes Obama's strategy of "reflective dialogue" as a way to create an atmosphere to generate new thinking.(pp.58-59) He discusses Google's concept of 20% time which allows employees to spend up to 20% of their work time in any way they want. (p.79) He describes how Petraus and Mattis take time "off the battlefield" to rethink and recast their strategy for the war in Iraq. (p.146) Forrester also suggests the concept of sabbatical with an example from the McDonalds corporation which benefits the individual, the company, and increases their social capitol. (pp.168-9)

I see Forrester painting a mosaic of possibility for avenues of reflective thought. I hear possibilities for injecting deeper thinking into my own situation. I feel hope for a more intentional use of my gifts because I am more deliberate in the way I exercise my God-given ability to think.

I definitely need to - consider.  #dminlgp

IS THE WESTERN CHURCH FRENCH OR ENGLISH?

Whereas the children of the French Enlightenment tended to see society and it's institutions as machines, to be taken apart and reengineered, children of the British Enlightenment tended to see them as organisms, infinitely complex networks of living relationships. In their view, it's often a mistake to dissect a problem into discrete parts because the truth is found in the nature of the conections between the things you are studying. Context is crucial. (Brooks)

TICK TOCK GOES THE CLOCK

We live in a "clock" kind of world. We like the explainable. We search for what makes things tick. We like deconstruction - if we can just break things down to their elemental parts, surely we'll be able to 1) understand them, and 2) reassemble them to make them better than new. Of course, sometimes it's better to just learn from the deconstruction of the old clock and create a new one that keeps better time, that takes advantage of better technology, and that will serve us into the future. While we may not have a good sense of what will happen in the future, we certainly feel more comfortable if we understand the process that is taking us there.

In his book The Social Animal, David Brooks tells us about Karl Popper's distinctions between clocks and clouds. "Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be defined and evaluated using reductive methodologies. You can take apart a clock, measure the pieces, and see how they fit together. Clouds are irregular, dynamic, and idiosyncratic. It's hard to study a cloud because they change from second to second. They can best be describes through narrative, not numbers...one of the great temptations of modern research is that it tries to pretend that every phenomenon is a clock, which can be evaluated using mechanical tools and regular techniques." (pp.166-167)

Brooks discusses Level 1 cognition - "which is cloudlike, nonlinear, hard to see, and impossible to formalize" in contrast, he describes Level 2 cognition which values the conscious - what "it can see, quantify, formalize, and understand." (p.226) This understanding of the two different levels of cognition permeates Brook's work in The Social Animal. In some ways, Level 1 cognition harkens to Taylor's (A Secular Age) understanding of enchantment, excepting that enchantment isn't seen as a period in time, but an ongoing phenomenon undergirding our every action and interaction. And Weber's "disenchantment" relates well to Level 2 cognition. This concept also lends balance to Nolls dichotomy of anti-intellectualism/intellectualism as it relates to the fear of evangelicals of losing  the affective by exploring that which is knowable in an intellectual way.

The challenge facing the church, and perhaps our current western social structures and institutions, is this balance. Is the church more like a clock or a cloud? Can we analyze it according to modern (often corporate) criteria, reduce it to fundamental elements, and rebuild it as an improved, more functional self? Can we alternately just let it be, allow it to float to wherever it gathers itself and call it good?

Rational, analytical, modern, enlightened humankind seemed programmed to favor the clock. After all, we can measure our effectiveness, right? How many members? How many attend worship? How much money? We see this beyond the church as well. Measures of success and fame individually and corporately are reflected most often in numbers - how much money a parson makes, how large a city is, the stock prices for a corporation, the numerical reach of a non-profit. Accountability is calculated and worth is quantified in spreadsheets and graphs.

How do we get our head around the cloudlike nature of our existence - and God's church? Where does Level 1 cognition enter the realm of accountability? This is a different picture from scripture; "...by loving the LORD your God and by serving him with all your heart and all your being, 14 then he will provide rain for your land at the right time—early rain and late rain—so you can stock up your grain, wine, and oil. 15 He will also make your fields lush for your livestock, and you will eat and be satisfied." (Deut. 11:13 CEB) A different picture.

Balancing the two levels, allowing the "clock" to provide a framework for loving God and serving God, can we be accountable? Is accountability the equivalent of an increase in numbers every week, month, year, or is there another way to affirm our response to God that provides an accurate understanding of what we are doing as faithful followers? Can narrative ever equal numbers as a reflective practice in the church and our social realms?

Clocks and clouds... #dminlgp  

The Enchanted Forest

Beauty and the Beast, Hansel and Gretel, Snow White,  Rumpelstiltskin - the list of fairy tales taking place in enchanted forests goes on and on. Some of the magic that took place in these fanciful places was wonderful and wondrous, and some was fearful and frightening.  None-the-less, it was a time that transcended the world of rational thought...it allowed the mind and spirit to surpass the factual world and the drudgery of the times.

 Charles Taylor, in his extensive tome exploring humankind's journey to a world he defines as secular humanist, identifies a shift from a world of enchantment to disenchantment. This shift is acknowledged in his world as being elemental in leading to the current state of humanistic secularism. A Secular Age identifies three traits of the world of 500 years ago that allowed people to intuit God as a part of everything; 1)"The natural world they lived in, which had its place in the cosmos they imagined, testified to divine purpose and action...2) God was also implicated in the very existence of society...One could not but encounter God everywhere... 3) People lived in an enchanted world...The enchanted world in this sense (the opposite of Weber's expression of 'disenchantment') is the world of spirits, demons, and moral forces..." (p.28)

 Taylor describes people of this enchanted time as being porous. "By definition for the porous self, the source of its most powerful and important emotions are outside of the 'mind'; or better put, the very notion that there is a clear boundary, allowing us to define an inner base area, grounded in which we can disengage from the rest, has no sense." (p.38)  There was not a sense of us versus Spirit, but a sense that there was no us without that which was beyond us. This logic was not limited to a sense of God, but also of all forces of the cosmos. His contention is that we have shifted to a time where our self have becomes "buffered." "This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things for it."(p.38)

 Time-shift to today. If you are a thinking person, you have boundaries. You have decided what you will let in to your world and what you will keep out. Your buffered self allows you to walk/drive past people on the street asking for money or holding up a sign that says "Will work for food." You have decided that you will not get caught up in religious fanaticism, so instead you seek out a theologically sound framework that gives you the opportunity of talking about the faith without ever participating. This, I think, describes the world of secular humanism Taylor seeks to define. God is one among many ways to express our individualism, and probably not the one that entices us to experience ecstasy, or in Taylor's terms - enchantment. We have no need. We actually might find the practice of a more charismatic faith completely out of the bounds of acceptability. We might label it as Taylor has - "folk ritual," controlling and manipulative. (p.438)

 How then do we experience wonder? How do we discover the multi-layered  dimensions of own existence? How do we move beyond the disenchantment of Weber, and once more find the enchanted forest waiting for us with great gifts of spirituality beyond the realm of sensibility? #dminlgp

The B.I.B.L.E. #dminlgp

"A question facing each new generation of theologians is: 'How do we read the Bible?'" (p. 215, Raeper)

This quote comes from the book A Brief Guide to Ideas by William Raeper and Linda Evans. It is an amazing book that strives to identify significant thinkers and streams of thought from across history - Western history - and succinctly categorize them so that the reader has the opportunity to gather a broad swath of philosophical theory without getting much depth on any one in particular.
Intriguing to me was a section on Biblical interpretation and a new - for me - way of understanding  interpretive motifs long associated with lack of willingness to seriously explore scripture. This began to surface for me in reading from Mark Noll, intensified with the current book (A Brief Guide to Ideas) and was illustrated by an interchange in my doctoral cohort session this week. In his Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind, Noll continues the discussion began in his earlier book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind related to creation, evolution, and interpretation of scripture. He identifies literalism as an ongoing mode of interpretation but continues to explore other ways of understanding scripture in relation to his chosen focus stating "...Christian believers of all sorts can only applaud the devotion to Scripture that has been so prominent in conservative history, but many believers today - including a growing number of evangelicals - question some of the assumptions about how best to interpret Scripture that evangelicals sometimes treat as interchangeable with trust in Scripture itself." (p.109, Jesus Christ and the Life of the Mind). In explaining the concursus approach of B.B. Warfield as it related to Biblical inerrancy and evolutionary creation,  it is obvious that a literal interpretation of scripture is not necessary for an understanding of Biblical inerrancy.

This quote from Tom Wright on this in his book, Simply Christian was shared with me during my class session this week:

Though I am not unhappy with that people are trying to affirm when they use words like "infallible" (the idea that the Bible won't deceive us) and "inerrant" (the stronger idea, that the Bible can't get things wrong), I normally resist using those words myself. Ironically, in my experience, debates about words like these have often led people away from the Bible itself into all kinds of theories which do no justice to scripture as a whole...Instead, the insistence on an "infallible" or "inerrant" Bible has been seen as the bastion of orthodoxy against Roman Catholicism on the one hand and liberal modernism on the other. Unfortunately, the assumptions of both those worlds have conditioned the debate. It is no accident that this Protestant insistence on biblical infallibility arose at the same time that Rome was insisting on papal infallibility, or that the rationalism of the Enlightenment infected even those who were battling against it. (183)

Raeper and Evans suggests two ways of viewing the Bible as God's revelation: The first being that "The Bible is a divine record of religious truths" (216), that the Bible is the "verbally inspired" word of God - God's words written down by humans. The second is that "the Bible is a record of human faith in God."(216) In this view, the Bible is a human document written to describe the relationship between  humans and God.

What does inerrant mean to you? Can God's word be without error and still contain two versions of the creation story? Is this just a difference of interpretation, or an error on the part of the interpreter?

Does inerrant mean that I can take the approach inferred by the German "Geschichte" and look beyond the literal words on the page to the meaning of what happened? Or would "Heilsheschishte," the understanding of "Salvation-history" allow me to understand God acting in human history without becoming tangled in an objective historic justification of scripture? (218, Raeper)

Throughout Christian history, the church has used and abused scripture - that continues today. The way we understand the Truth of God's written Word varies even as does our definition of descriptors like infallible, inerrant, literal, historical, analogical. What I've been reminded of over the past several weeks is the importance of understanding those definitions, both to enrich my ability to consider scripture from a difference point of view and more, to embrace those who cojourn with me in the desire to know and be known. #dminlgp
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