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It seems like Internet Explorer crashes at least twice a day. And I'm not really putting this computer through its paces or anything. Is it Vista? Is it IE? Who knows?
So I've made the switch to Firefox. It's a little bit slower than IE, and it took this below average techie some time to figure out how to install the right version of Flash Player, but I do appreciate the fact that it doesn't up and shut down on me.
In full effect! Here, here and here.
What's Godwin's Law? Wikipedia knows all.
People are leaving comments, but the comment widget on the sidebar isn't updating. I don't know why. But don't be deterred. Comment away!
My colleague, friend, and fellow Israel pilgrim Bill Hoyle has emailed me not once, not twice, but three times today about my opinion about the Blackberry device. He's desperate for me to post a blog about this, and solicit feedback from my legions of sycophantic readers about the little hand-held gizmo.
See, Bill's... well... he's old, you see; therefore he (erroneously) assumes that since I'm a blogger I must be a tech guru. I don't know the first thing about Blackberries, but he insisted I poll my readers. He also doesn't realize that only about three people read this blog on a regular basis. But hey, Bill's a Carolina fan, so he's still a little punch drunk from Saturday night. Give him a break.
So, what do you think about Blackberries for ministers? A waste of time? A Godsend? Something else? My own hunch is that their usefulness depends entirely upon how wired your congregation is, and how often you're away from your desktop. But what do you think?
Gary Gygax, the creator of Dungeons and Dragons, died last week. But his world lives on, and I'm not just talking about Ciniath, my fourth level barbarian who wields a triple damage war ax. You're living in his world. Wired's Adam Rogers:
The most popular books on earth are fantasy novels about wizards and magic swords. The most popular movies are about characters from superhero comic books. The most popular TV shows look like elaborate role-playing games: intricate, hidden-clue-laden science fiction stories connected to impossibly mathematical games that live both online and in the real world. And you, the viewer, can play only if you’ve sufficiently mastered your home-entertainment command center so that it can download a snippet of audio to your iPhone, process it backward with beluga whale harmonic sequences and then podcast the results to the members of your Yahoo group.
[snip]
Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.
Which means that the joke's actually on the jock Alltel guy:
Don't believe me? Check this out:
Sorry, but that's all I got. I've been waiting for Elliot to blog something more profound, but to my surprise he hasn't said anything yet about Gygax's passing.
I took our oldest for his biennial check up at the cardiologist. He's had two open heart surgeries in his first decade of life. An every-other-year appointment is good news. "See you next year," is bad news. Fortunately we won't have to go back until he's twelve.
And, we can drive three blocks instead of an hour to Charlotte! The pediatric cardiologist now comes to Salisbury twice a month, and when the new wing at our pediatrician's office is built, they'll be here once a week.
They can do this because now they have laptop cardiac ultrasounds. Today the gear comes to you. And I thought that Windows Vista was fancy shmancy!
I have certain Luddite tendencies. I don't own an answering machine. I compost. I've read Wendell Berry! They're exacerbated this time of year. All the oohing and ahhing over the new gadgets you'll want to see under your Christmas tree. It's easy for me to put on a frowny face at the gadgetry, and pontificate (on a blog, no less!) about the crass materialism.
But some of the gadgets, and the super smart people who wield them, are the reasons my son is alive. And while our hunter gatherer or even Puritan ancestors might blush at our wealth, and marvel at our stupidity with regards to all things in the woods, I think they'd gladly trade with us for the antibiotics, the pain relievers, and the miracle of cracking open an eight-month old baby's sternum so that he can live.
After the doctor's appointment, we ate lunch at home. We said the usual prayer. "Be present at our table, Lord. Bless this food to our use, and us to Thy service. And make us ever mindful of the needs of others. Amen."
We opened our eyes, stopped holding hands, and our son piped up. "There's something else I'm really thankful for," he said. "What's that?" I asked. "That my heart is healthy." So we invited him to lead us in a second prayer of gratitude for a good doctor's appointment. And he did.
When you're a parent, sometimes you're so anxious about your child that you forget that your child has anxieties of his own. And when you're a jaded, materialistic adult, you so easily take for granted the good things. Wasn't it just three years ago that we were sweating it out in the cardiac waiting room at Carolinas Medical Center? How could I have taken today's good report in stride? Not even bother to be thankful for it? My son didn't take it for granted. Thank goodness.
They say that losing feels worse than winning feels good. And deprivation is worse than abundance is good. We become so jaded about our blessings, and sadly, some of us find only one escape, even more jadedness about the excess of blessings.
Of course materialism is a problem. Of course it's troubling that a lot of our abundance has been bought with polluting oil and the blood, sweat and tears of far off, greatly suffering people. But I wonder if simple gratitude for all our blessings isn't the better way than ironic commentary or self-righteous fulminations. As Deuteronomy 8 shows us, remembering the hard times in the present abundance leads to gratitude. And gratitude leads to obedience. And obedience, of course, is all about giving God and neighbor, especially the long suffering neighbor, his or her due.
Isn't that the better way?
No stock sermons condemning the crass commercialism of Christmas this year. I have nothing new to say on that account. And the congregation's heard it all anyway. Gratitude, gratitude, gratitude.
I discovered that I can still moderate comments without requiring commenters to create a Typekey account. So I hope that making this little change will make commenting here easier while still enabling me to screen out spam and ad hominen attacks.
Hugo Schwyzer is now on Facebook because all the cool blogs and candidates are. He got out of MySpace before I even got in because he didn't want to know everything about his youth group that his youth group seemed to want the world to know about themselves.
Like Hugo, I created a MySpace page to communicate with my youth group, but to be honest, their MySpace pages aren't much more revealing than they are in person. Not that they're discreet on MySpace. It's their complete lack of discretion in person. Which is why I, unlike Hugo, never entertained notions of cleaning up a little corner of MySpace by befriending my youth group.
I do wonder if they're trying to shock me, or if they simply lack boundaries. And I wonder if this exhibitionism is typical of the age group, of this age group, or is confined to these people?
Perhaps this generation has radically different understandings of privacy than their elders. One wonders what will happen to the precedents in Griswold vs. Connecticut and Roe vs. Wade when the MySpace generation sits on the Supreme Court.
In my continuing search for a Reformed worship aesthetic that's in critical conversation with our image-saturated world, I stumbled across this passage from Marva Dawn's Reaching Out without Dumbing Down in praise of the organ (please, bear with me):
(Martin) Marty suggests that one of the gifts of organ music is that we cannot be in control (which I take to mean that the organ ushers us into the presence of God and an awareness of various divine attributes by means of its diverse sounds--majestic, mysterious, massive, ethereal, thundering, pastoral, trumpeting, meditative, plaintive, jubilant). The Church's organ repertoire can convey all sorts of aspects of God--the horror of the Passion, the glory of the Resurrection, the nothingness of suffering, the exhilaration of Joy. Certainly there is no single way to be in the range of awe, but, as Marty stresses, there'd better be awe.
Oddly enough, this tribute to the awe-full, awe-inspiring potential of the organ called to mind a very different description of worship from the introduction to Baker and Gay's Alternative Worship:
Alt worship has also been shaped by broader currents of post-modern living. The practice of sampling feeds into the post-modern emphasis on continuous and shifting processes of construing meanings. "Texts," whether they are written, visual, or aural, are wide open to interpretation, with interpreters unmasked as those who make meanings rather than merely uncovering or discovering them. This process of interpretation can be violent, suspicious, playful, and subversive--one text can be read through another unlike text. Post-modern theories of interpretation offer one way to describe what is happening when an alt worship service explores a theme simultaneously through the use of computer graphics and photographs of medieval religious paintings; through dance music with sampled quotes and fragments of the 1662 Anglican Communion Service; through continuous loops of silent TV ads backgrounding the gospel reading from a modern inclusive language Bible, with another slide showing a page of the King James text for the same passage. Instead of full frontal pulpit/altar dominance, large screens construct a space within a space, a worship space with false walls and hidden depths; temporary icons are flashed up while the real monumental stained-glass sits obscurely in darkness 20 feet behind. The organist is a DJ. The vicar has been deconstructed. There is no front--people worshiping in the round--and the space is visually overdetermined (you cannot look at or take in everything at once), so you have to make your own meanings--even which direction you face in is a decision about making meanings.
This sounds rather disorienting to me, but not dissimilar to the disorientation one can experience in the midst of an outstanding piece of organ music. Both passages call to mind Jacob's oddly fearful and reassuring encounter with the Lord at Bethel, a dreamlike experience endlessly open to interpretation--by Jacob himself, by Jesus much later on, and by today's reader.
So I'm led to wonder if Debra Dean Murphy's caustic critique of PowerPoint in worship says less the inherent dangers of screens and tubes in worship and more about her personal experiences of multimedia technology. For instance, if all I knew about the organ was the standard funeral medley of How Great Thou Art, When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder, In the Garden and The Old, Rugged Cross that one hears on cheap, electronic instruments in mortuaries throughout the land, I'd be dubious of the organ's ability to facilitate an encounter with the Holy God. But I've heard it played well, and I know that Marty's description of the organ's potential to generate awe is spot on.
My experience of multimedia technology in worship is far more limited--projecting words on screens, slide shows, and the like. This I do find distracting, aggravating, or worst of all--entertaining, and as Postman and Dawn show us, entertainment is not capable of bearing the weight of religious agony and ecstasy. But what I read about Emergent Worship suggests that something different is going on there, despite, and even because of their use of visual technology.
Dawn's book tries to do two things at once: 1. Argue that seeker-sensitive worship is disastrous because it makes something other than God the subject and object of worship, and 2. Argue that traditional instruments and hymnody lend themselves to keeping God at the center of worship better than guitars and praise choruses. Awesome God, it turns out, makes for less than awesome worship.
I'd like to affirm her first point, but as for the second... well, it's just a less important point to debate. Sure, no tool or technology is neutral, but...
Rather than writing off a technology, an instrument, or a genre of music, we ought to ask, what technologies and instruments are at our disposal, and how can we use them to glorify God? If there's no one in the congregation who plays the guitar, it's not necessary to run out and hire a praise team just to "appeal to the unchurched market in our community." Nor do ministers need to stop reading theology and start reading PDA owner's manuals, as George Barna recommends. On the other hand, if you do have a web designer or graphic artist in your congregation, why not ask that person to serve on the worship committee and think with you about bringing his/her gifts to bear on the upcoming lectionary text or liturgical season?
Some discussion of worship elements is important. We aren't free to substitute beer and pretzels for wine and bread. But the broader question, Who and what is worship for? is the essential one. And if you answer that question properly, you may yet find room for a drum set or a screen in your service. Not for the purposes of relevance or entertainment, but for glorifying God.
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