Easily type diacritics in Windows

One frustration with switching to Scrivener has been that I lost Word’s simple key-combinations for typing diacritical marks. That led me to declare that my next computer would be a Mac simply because they have system-wide support for typing special characters easily. Whatever may turn out to be the case on my computer purchasing choices, I have learned from the intrepid @benladen that you can easily set up Windows to have a similar capability — just set your keyboard to “U.S.-International” and the key-combinations are actually even easier than in Word for typical special characters. More details are available here.

AUFS Constitutional Convention

One of the results of the wide-ranging dialogue on women’s experiences in the theological academy last week was a growing realization that our comment policy was producing results opposite of what we intended. Where we had set up the policy to shut down “entitled white dude” behavior, we did not do so in a way that emboldened and empowered non-”entitled white dudes” to participate. We had long known of this disconnect, but Brandy and others’ posts in recent days were a wake-up call — change was long overdue.

Accordingly, an ad hoc committee (me, Anthony, Beatrice, Brad, Brandy, and Dan) wrote up a new policy. We hope that this policy reflects all that we’ve learned and can serve as a new social contract to help make AUFS an even more diverse and robust intellectual community.

A note

I speak only for myself here, but I don’t consider this blog to be my primary academic work. By volume, it doubtless exceeds my published work, but my blogging serves my published work both in terms of providing a forum for me to test out ideas and in terms of increasing my public profile so that my published work can reach a broader audience.

Nothing I write here should be considered my final position. If I don’t seem to substantiate a position in the context of the blog, you should first look to my relevant published writings before drawing any conclusions about the depth of my engagement with the topic.

To take a random example: one could conclude from the blog that I hardly have anything to say about Larry David. Even a thorough search would only reveal a handful of references, and those would be relatively superficial. Yet fully a fourth of my book Awkwardness is dedicated to Larry David and the entire project is inspired by his work on Curb Your Enthusiasm. Anyone who was gossiping about how I fail to really engage with Larry David would, therefore, be intellectually irresponsible. One could presumably extend this principle by analogy to other relevant figures and movements we discuss on this blog.

All of my books are in print and readily available on Amazon or from academic libraries. All but a couple of my articles are readily available for your perusal on my CV page (some must be omitted for copyright reasons but can be found through library databases; you can also e-mail me for a copy). In short: if you want to know what I think about something, you don’t need to rely on your vague impression from my blog posts.

Calendrical Questions

My method for keeping track of appointments is appallingly primitive — I have a desk calendar in my office at home, and I just write everything on that. In terms of getting all the appropriate information onto the calendar, this actually works better than one would think, given that most appointments are made via e-mail. (In the last resort, I’ll e-mail myself to remind me to write down said appointment when I get home.) Yet the system has one glaring hole: I can only refer to it when I’m at home. It also seems likely that I’m only going to get more busy over time, and so it makes sense to form new habits now when things are relatively calm.

How do you, my readers, keep track of such things? I’ve considered using Google Calendar, which would be convenient given that Shimer uses Google for their e-mail, etc. I’m also due for a phone upgrade this summer, at which point I could get an Android phone so that it would all integrate, preferably without seams. (I’ve also hypothesized that I could put my files in which I take notes on students on Google Docs and have instant access to that, because I’ve noticed that I have a hard time remembering paper topics, etc., to write down once I get back to my office.)

Thoughts on future book events

I think our book event over Carter’s Race has gone well. There were lulls in the conversation, but overall it broke with our past pattern where discussion basically collapsed at the end of the book event. Pacing does not seem to have much to do with it — we’ve had fast and slow book events in the past, and the result is the same in that regard. I think the key difference this time was not only Jay’s own contribution, but the presence of a couple of his students (Brandy and Tim McGee) who consistently kept things going.

Looking back over past book events, I’ve been trying to come up with a new approach that will still give us the kind of thoroughness that have characterized our book events while still making the best use of our contributors’ time. In specific, I would like to move away from the chapter-by-chapter summaries and propose a format more like a conference session.

A reminder

Next week I’ll be kicking off our book event on J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account with a post over the prologue and prelude. The following week, Brandy Daniels will be posting over chapters 1 and 2. I thought I’d give a heads-up, because the more people who are keeping up with the reading as we go, the better the discussions will be.

It’s longer than any book we’ve done before, so we’ll be experimenting with the pacing as we go, but I’d expect that we’ll most likely cover at least one chapter per week. We’ve also recruited a couple new writers who should help spice things up. Truly, this will be the theology blogging event of the summer!

A preview of coming attractions

We have two further book events planned for this summer. The first, which will likely begin toward the end of June or beginning of July, will be over J. Kameron Carter’s Race: A Theological Account. We have been talking about the possibility of doing Jay’s book for at least a year and several readers have expressed a strong interest, so hopefully it’ll be a good discussion.

The second, which will likely be in August, will be over Ted Jennings’ Plato or Paul?: The Origins of Western Christian Homophobia. I was very involved with the production of this book — the seminar on which it was based was one of my first seminary courses and I also served as a research assistant, copy-editor, and indexer — and the thesis Jennings advances here has completely and irrevocably changed my view of the relationship between homosexuality and Christianity. However, since the book wasn’t available before recently, I probably always sounded like a crazy person, so it’s nice to be able to discuss it finally.

As preparation for the Jennings event, we will also be having two guest bloggers in late July reviewing his books on homoeroticism in Scripture, The Man Jesus Loved: Homoerotic Narratives in the New Testament and Jacob’s Wound: Homoerotic Narrative in the Literature of Ancient Israel.

I strongly encourage anyone interested in participating in comments to track down copies and try to read ahead of time — the more people we have involved in comments who have actually read the book, the more the discussion will benefit us all. (This is of course not to say that those who haven’t read should refrain from asking questions, etc.)

Adam Kotsko e-mail: akotsko (at) gmail (dot) com

I apologize for using the blog for this, but I have been regularly receiving e-mails out of the blue at my K College address, presumably because that’s the one that comes up in search engines. That e-mail will soon be expiring. If you wish to contact me, use the following: akotsko (at) gmail (dot) com.

Book event?

Dearest colleagues, it has been a while since we did a book event. Is now or soon a propitious time? Does anyone have any suggestions for an appropriate book to center our interpretive and evaluative efforts on? We tend to focus on contemporary works that deserve greater attention, but some have previously suggested that discussing a “classic” work might be a good route as well. Personally, I am totally open at this point.

AUFS’s failure of branding

In the comments to Mikhail’s send-up of SpecReal/OOP/OOO, I came across this very compelling post by Kvond that characterizes SpecReal/OOP/OOO as a kind of philosophical “speculative bubble.” Not being very conversant with Graham Harman’s work or the details of Levi Bryant’s “onticology,” I can’t vouch for the accuracy of Kvond’s analysis — but it does seem like his description of “philosophy as Ponzi scheme” is something that could actually happen:

These packaging movements [of OOO] meet squarely it seems with Harman’s own Great Idea concept of philosophical significance, the thinking that all the Great Philosophers were really exaggerators that some how fooled the public long enough to get their ideas off the ground. Once enough people “buy into” the intial debt of explanation it is passed off onto the whole group, the bad mortgage is cut into tiny Madoff pieces and distributed everywhere. Philosophy as Ponzi scheme.

This brings me to the point of this post: how can AUFS brand itself so as to reap the benefits of such dynamics? So far, we don’t have the workings of a coherent brand: we’re ecologically-minded quasi-internal critics of the Christian tradition who also read novels? Half the time we don’t even approve of our own ideas, much less advocate others join in the fun!

Obviously we need to streamline here, so what’s our Big Idea? (And no, “being rude to commenters” isn’t enough.) We can collaborate on the explanation later — right now, we just need something that can really reach out to MA students and the underemployed, because they’re at the forefront of blogging. Then we can work on how we divide out the labor of “declaiming from on high” and “responding to everyone who writes about [insert brand] ideas in 1000-plus-word blog posts.” I’d like to think I would get the former job, but my relatively hyper-active blogging would likely saddle me with the latter — Brad would probably thrive best in the declaiming department. Seriously, though, we can hash that out later. We just need a Big Idea, fast.