Surviving Hard-Drive Meltdown …
It finally happened ... last weekend, I was typing away on my MacBook and it froze. My hard-drive had melted down. I took it to the local Apple Store, and within 24 hours they had installed a new (slightly larger) hard-drive. Unfortunately, they couldn't recover the data. Fortunately, I had backed everything up a few weeks ago, and I use gmail so all my email stuff is saved externally. I only lost about 50 pages of recent work. It could have been a lot worse.
Can I be one of those nagging people who reminds you that you could be next, so please back up your stuff!
I leave tomorrow morning early for a few days in the mountains, fly fishing with some good friends who are theologians and love fly fishing, hence the name of the group - "Ich-theology" [insert groan here]. If the scheduling function on my blog works, there should be a few posts coming up even while I'm away.
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creative communication
Blaine Hogan passed on this report - with good photographs - about some creative communication in the Seattle area, courtesy of the good people at Mars Hill Graduate School.
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objectivity, transparency, and reliability
There's a connection, I think, between the furor over Sotomayor's wise-Latina speech and the controversy over Dr. Gates' arrest. Both controversies relate to the confidence shared by many (especially white folks, and especially white males) that laws and institutions are objective - meaning that it's "just the facts, Ma'am," and that personal biases, experiences, and perspectives can be bracketed and rendered insignificant in the face of pure reason or something of that sort. This blog (thanks again, Bob C) reflects "the epochal shift" that is underway (part, I imagine, of the postmodern/postcolonial transition) in our global culture ... so that transparency (being open about your experiences, biases, perspectives, even limitations) earns more credibility than claims of objectivity (as if you had no vantage point at all ... ).
Quotable quote:
Outside of the realm of science, objectivity is discredited these days as anything but an aspiration, and even that aspiration is looking pretty sketchy. The problem with objectivity is that it tries to show what the world looks like from no particular point of view, which is like wondering what something looks like in the dark. Nevertheless, objectivity — even as an unattainable goal — served an important role in how we came to trust information, and in the economics of newspapers in the modern age.
You can see this in newspapers’ early push-back against blogging. We were told that bloggers have agendas, whereas journalists give us objective information. Of course, if you don’t think objectivity is possible, then you think that the claim of objectivity is actually hiding the biases that inevitably are there. That’s what I meant when, during a bloggers press conference at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, I asked Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Walter Mears whom he was supporting for president. He replied (paraphrasing!), “If I tell you, how can you trust what I write?,” to which I replied that if he doesn’t tell us, how can we trust what he blogs?
So, that’s one sense in which transparency is the new objectivity. What we used to believe because we thought the author was objective we now believe because we can see through the author’s writings to the sources and values that brought her to that position. Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases. Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.
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Thinking about a DMin?
I recently learned that my friend Jason Clark will be leading a new cohort with George Fox Evangelical Seminary's new Doctor of Minstry program in Global Missional Leadership:
http://www.georgefox.edu/seminary/dmin/gml/index.html. The cohort will launch in January 2010 in Nairobi, Kenya. George Fox already has an amazing faculty - including Len Sweet and other great folks - and now having Jason on board makes a good thing even better. Worth checking out.
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Sunday meditation … a beautiful movement
My friend Bill Duncan was the first person to recommend Paul Hawken's book Blessed Unrest to me some time ago. Then many people recommended his amazing commencement address. A few days ago my friend Graeme Codrington recommended this short video featuring Hawken (about 6 min):
Destructive, dehumanizing ideologies - whether they be racism, nationalism, communism, capitalism, socialism, industrialism, secularism, reductionism, chauvinism, religious supremacy/exclusivism - have driven our world to this precipice of stress, breakdown and suicidal behavior. But thanks be to God, there is a healing movement afoot, an uprising of blessed unrest that I believe reflects the moving of the Spirit of God.
As in Jesus' day, this movement is full of ironies: people who think themselves first and foremost are often found sitting on the sidelines criticizing it, or so engrossed in arguments about other things that they're missing it entirely. Meanwhile, people who consider themselves disqualified outsiders find themselves right in the thick of it, participating as unwitting agents of God's saving love.
I stumbled more deeply into all this as I researched and wrote SMJ and EMC ... and I've become convinced that the new kind of Christianity that is emerging around the world has a key role to play in this beautiful thing that God is doing at this critical moment.
Today I'm imagining a sunny day in Galilee when a crowd of over 5000 gathered to hear Jesus teach about a new movement he called the Kingdom of God. It was a movement of reconciliation, not revenge ... healing, not abuse ... liberation, not oppression ... stewardship, not exploitation ... celebration, not fear. This beautiful day came in the aftermath of the latest horrible atrocity committed by the emperor's local puppet ruler (Herod's murder of John the Baptizer). In contrast to Herod's violence and corruption, this day with Jesus was filled with peace, hope, and mutual service .
At the end of the day, Jesus led the crowd in a kind of divine guerrilla theater, as the people demonstrated an alternative faith-based local economy of abundance, giving, and sharing, exposing the imperial economy's greed, hoarding, and fear. May that beautiful movement continue and spread in and among us all today. For where evil and ugliness abound, God's grace and beauty abound all the more.
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