Jumping to conclusions in John

Since I’m teaching the Gospel of John this fall, I’m trying to make my way through it in Greek. I just finished chapter one this morning, and it included a passage that I have always found strange. I don’t think it’s a translation issue at all, but I’ll include the Greek just because it’s cool to be able to have Greek in the post:

Active and passive nihilism

In the United States, the political options represented by the major parties are either active nihilism and passive nihilism, and the current crisis is pushing them both to more extreme versions of their respective options.

Pedagogy that “lives in the cloud”

When I first got my Shimer College e-mail account, I was pleased to see that it is hosted in Gmail — and apparently this summer they introduced a shift making Google Docs and other services available as well. At K College, I already received the majority of classwork electronically, and I specified to the students that they would get comments and grades in the same format (i.e., either paper or electronic) in which they submitted their work. If they submitted electronically, I would leave changes and comments on the file using Word’s “track changes” feature and e-mail it back to them. I found that I was able to leave much more detailed and helpful comments in that format, and students were able to read them much more easily. Some students still opted for the paper method, but I don’t recall any complaints from students about the electronic method.

Now that I have an “official” college-wide Google Docs setup, I’m thinking of using it for all written work — after all, I know for a fact that all students will have an account, so there would be no concerns about the hassle of getting everyone set up to work with it. It would also provide an automatic backup of their work if they composed it in Google Docs itself, and they could obviously upload files created elsewhere if desired.

Does this plan sound plausible to you, dear readers? Are there potential drawbacks I’m not seeing? Should I still allow for the paper option?

Atonement and supercessionism

In all our recent discussions of supercessionism in connection with Carter’s book, a thought occurred to me: in none of the “classical” theories of the atonement (i.e., on the nature and meaning of Christ’s saving work) does it actually matter that he’s Jewish. In Irenaeus, Gregory of Nyssa, Anselm, and Abelard alike, everything would’ve gone fine if he’d belonged to any nation or none. The Christ-event is not connected to the covenant with Israel, but skips straight back to the “universal” problem of Adam’s sin or bondage.

When You’re Not Reverend MBA

I’ve been invited to speak next weekend at a big church growth conference, which is the Center for Progressive Renewal’s New Church Leadership Institute-East (NCLI).  There are two NCLI conferences every year, one on the east coast, and another on the west coast; this year’s east coast offering is being held at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania.  Lancaster Theological Seminary is offering a graduate credit opportunity in conjunction with the conference.  (The other NCLI is being offered in Pasadena, CA, in November.)

I’m going to be offering a workshop titled “When You’re Not Reverend MBA,” on financial growth in small churches.  My congregation, Zion “Goshert’s” UCC, in Lebanon, PA, was recently featured in the UCC Calendar of Prayer for the congregation’s growth.  In 2010, we experienced a 4% increase in church membership, 8% increase in Sunday worship attendance, and a 17% increase in plate giving.  As of the last figures I have available, in 2011 so far we have a slight increase in membership, but we’ve counting another 9% increase in Sunday attendance and another 14% increase in plate giving.  So, a little to my surprise, I suppose I’m in a position to talk about how this has happened.

The debt ceiling and the paradoxes of hope

One of the worst things about this ongoing debt ceiling clusterfuck is that it is making me hope for things I would otherwise oppose. First, it’s making me hope that Congress really is completely owned by big finance, which would never want to let a U.S. default occur. Second, it’s making me hope that if Congress fails to act, the president will declare a “state of exception” in order to ignore a law passed by Congress. In fact, a recent New York Times op-ed argues that the president should ignore the debt ceiling, not “based on some obscure provision of the 14th amendment, but on the necessities of state, and on the president’s role as the ultimate guardian of the constitutional order, charged with taking care that the laws be faithfully executed.” As they explain:

When Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War, he said that it was necessary to violate one law, lest all the laws but one fall into ruin. So too here: the president may need to violate the debt ceiling to prevent a catastrophe — whether a default on the debt or an enormous reduction in federal spending, which would throw the country back into recession.

A deadlocked Congress has become incapable of acting consistently; it commits to entitlements it will not reduce, appropriates funds it does not have, borrows money it cannot repay and then imposes a debt ceiling it will not raise. One of those things must give; in reality, that means that the conflicting laws will have to be reconciled by the only actor who combines the power to act with a willingness to shoulder responsibility — the president.

A further expansion of the imperial presidency in domestic policy is probably not something any of us would support in principle — yet in this case, it seems like our last hope.

Why feminism is still important: Take it from a man!

Yesterday I had a discussion with some women in which I was defending feminism from them. This has happened to me many times, particularly since I taught a feminist theology course twice over the past couple years. My conversation partners in this case seemed to share all the relevant feminist convictions — reproductive rights, non-discrimination, etc., etc. — and so the only thing apparently keeping them from being feminists was the name itself.

Of Niches & Audiences: Come for the Gifts, Stay for the Offering

It doesn’t take a genius to see that something is afoot in the world of publishing. Between the shuttering of Borders this week to the E-book reader wars, there is an interesting Wild West feel to the current terrain. Some folks, like Borders, have a lot to lose, and may well lose everything. And then there are others, like John Locke, who will somehow strike gold.

For new writers, there doesn’t appear to be a formula for survival or success right now. The traditional route of securing an agent and plodding through the system is tried & true, and I’m not one to think to its final days are wholly upon us, but it certainly seems to me that the editorial gatekeepers are letting through fewer and fewer. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you have confidence in the gatekeepers. I do not.

I’m drawn to the various alternative publishing models that’ve been cropping up in recent months. Kindle Singles; direct e-publishing to the IPad; and, most recently, the crowd-surfing patronage scheme, Unbound. I see some pretty significant shortcomings to all these, and I don’t want to sell my friends in independent print publishing short, but I think there is immeasurable value in creative people thinking creatively about what to do with the stuff they create. If there is a potential value to be had from the upheaval in publishing these days, it is this.

What I like especially about independent presses like Melville House or Publishing Genius, direct publishing outlets, and patronage schemes is that they all are, I hope, waking many an author from the illusory pipe of “Mass appeal.” As I’ve been repeating throughout various social networking forums, this has always been the case: mass appeal has always been more a motivating tool than an actual marketing reality. One writes for more than oneself and one’s friends, yes; but, at the end of the day, only a very few, for reasons often quite foreign to quality, is it ever realized in terms of the sales. For everybody else, the vast majority of people who publish anything at all, the one-trick ponies & the professionals nearly out to pasture, the trick has always been identifying a niche & turning it into an audience.  The result, beyond the reality that most books published do not pay the rent, let alone the utilities, is decidedly less sexy than London Review of Books write-ups, Pulitzer Prize parties & and NYC dinner clubs with Joan Didion you get to knowingly poo poo while “humblebragging” about them in the cab or the loo, but for that perhaps also less venereal.

To that end, I’m very pleased with the more or less healthy, complex niche–the ecosystem (of) niche, to bastardize Anthony–we’ve somehow identified here at AUFS, and remain hopeful that it will continue to evolve as a pool from which we might harness our audiences. Books are on the horizon, academic & not-so-academic, traditionally & non-traditionally distributed. Your attention to each is appreciated; your patronage even more.

Invitation to Open Thread Discussion: What are your experiences with self-publication, direct e-publication, independent/open presses? Any strong opinions for or against them? Can you conceive of a way (or whether at all) a site like AUFS might harness a patron system not unlike that of Unbound?

Like the “seed” of a mustard “tree”: a question

While rehearsing my sermon early Sunday morning–titled “Five Cent Coupon,” on Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52–I started to go back to the scripture and re-think some of my research on the subject of the parable of the mustard seed.  The NRSV translation of the key part of the lection is this:

He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”

I really struggled with writing the sermon this week, perhaps because last week’s sermon (“You Put Your Weeds In There”) was on the parable of the seeds and weeds, where the weeds are burned.  But this week is a celebration of the weed, specifically the mustard weed.

A key issue here is that mustard doesn’t grow into grow into trees, it’s a weed.  So in this parabolic fantasy realm, what does it mean beyond its obvious statement about proliferation?

Carter Book Event: Historicizing Race: Albert J. Raboteau, Religious History, and the Ambiguities of Blackness (Chapter 3)

—Xavier Pickett is the Founder and President of Reformed Blacks of America, a Philadelphia based think tank, and a Ph.D. candidate in Religion & Society at Princeton Theological Seminary.

In Chapter 3, I take Carter to be unmasking the implicit theological claims of Albert Raboteau’s magisterial work, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South and unraveling their full import for thinking about subjectivity, historiography and religion.