Medieval Multitasking

Further evidence that sometimes we give new technology too much credit for producing new varieties of the human condition?

"there were a lot of “distractions” built into a medieval book. Indeed, these were often the main fare for the “reader” of a book. “Anyone can take delight in turning the pages of a Book of Hours, for example,” says Christopher de Hamel, “even without reading the text.” ... medieval books were very often not the single-author volumes familiar to us today. A binding might include a bit of Chaucer—something from the life of St. Bridget, perhaps—and part of an almanac, or a treatise on herbal remedies. They were mash-ups, that is. Or, to borrow terminology from George P. Landow, they were “dispersed texts,” unburdened by the modern fiction of sequential ordering of thought as “natural” or unitary authorship as normative that contributed to Enlightenment understandings of the “focused” mind of the individual thinker."

Puts me in mind of the enjoyment I sometimes derive from reading a text book from a library. Some people forget themselves and leave their annotations and marginalia. But that is sometimes a real help: it can point up where and what the big or contentious issues are and sometimes offer a help to find cross references ...
Medieval Multitasking: Did We Ever Focus? | Culture | Religion Dispatches

 

Organic vs mechanical metaphors

A couple of days ago, reading an Adult Education conference report, I discovered that there had been a question about a part of it entitled 'tools for education'. The challenge was whether we could find a more organic metaphor than the mechanical one employed there. I take it that the point is that 'tools' implicitly frame learners as machines and educators as mechanics. Or at least the classroom as a machine. There is an implication that the right application of tools and techniques will produce 'learning'. Of course it is more complex than that, and that is just the point. The kind of things that are complex are often organic. The point is that there isn't a simple input-output thing going on, rather several inputs running through a dynamical and interactive system producing a series of outputs which have statistical correlations but not inevitable ones.

Anyway, what organic metaphor could do the duty for what 'tools' attempts to capture and does so in a way that meaningfully captures something about the complex dynamical nature of the exercise of teaching and learning.

The only thing that I've managed to come up with is 'genes'; they are a simple finite set of things which combine to produce things of great complexity. However, they are not the only factor: we now know that they are affected in their expression by things like hormones and even other environmental factors. So while genes have a determinative role, they are not all that is at work.

Of course the difficulty may be that the metaphor is not immediately clear. 'Genes for education' doesn't sound like it's a metaphor yet. It tends to sound like it may be a literal statement about our genetic dispositions to learn.

So, back to the drawing board. Or do you think it could work? Or is there a better metaphor lurking out there?

Organic Organizational Design: "From our industrial age roots, organizations were thought to have clear boundaries and assumed an authoritarian, hierarchical pyramid like organizational structure. Our organizations reflected a mechanistic model. This was effective for the time since the need for responding to change was not as immediate. Access to information was not easy nor was the workforce as educated. Access to information and decision making was concentrated at the top. This authoritarian hierarchical model provided clarity, consistency, and control."

Toad of Toad Hall meets the speed camera

You remember: Toad loved to speed and it caught up with him. This is an interesting article in terms of bringing some useful stats to bear on a debate that suffers from a lot of ignorant prognostications (exposed in the article). For evidence of the real war involving motorists, look in the mortuary | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian The thing I'd wonder about is Monbiot's insistence that the decision to take down speed cameras is about toffs getting caught or not. I actually think it's a cheap bit of attempting populism which may backfire when figures such as this are put into reverse in towns and villages up and down the country: "19% fewer people were killed or seriously injured at accident black spots after speed cameras were introduced, above and beyond the general decline in accidents on the roads." In fact the figures could be even more stark: "A study conducted by the Wiltshire and Swindon Safety Camera Partnership, across the whole county over three years, found that after speed cameras were installed there was a reduction at those sites in deaths and serious injuries of 69%."
Just imagine if you are living near to a speed camera on an accident blackspot and you have children, and you see that statistic ...

Abolish Control Orders

Check it out and give your rating ... Abolish Control Orders — HMG - Your Freedom Why be concerned? Because: "The legal procedures by which control orders can be challenged are gravely unfair. The court will consider secret evidence which is not disclosed to the person concerned or their lawyer of choice, preventing them from effectively challenging the allegations against them.
In effect, the control order regime bypasses the ordinary criminal justice system by severely restricting the rights of people suspected of involvement in terrorism-related activity, including those who have never been charged with any terrorism-related offence and those who have been acquitted at trial."

my other blog says ...

As I wrote this post on my 'work' blog The Alban Institute – 2010-06-28 Why Blog? | 4orty2wo I realised that the topic might interest some of you who pop along to this one. Here's why I thought that: "I’ve found some corporate entities like small colleges and charities doing this. I’m not yet sure I’ve seen a church blog set up this way (but if you know of one, let us have a link in the comments). And, alerting us to the misuse of blogs as mere official announcement media, we are reminded usefully that “Blogs have a distinctive voice: conversational, personal, and informal. “. I say ‘misuse’ in the previous sentence not because it is an absolute rule but simply because the coriolis force of usage and expectation with regard to blogs has meant that this is what people tend to expect: a blog that is mere announcement without the personal opinion and reflection will tend not to attract revisits. That’s not to say that some announcements aren’t in order, but they should contain a personal take.
So, not just: “There’s a coffee and study morning on Friday at 10 in the narthex” but rather something like; “I’m gutted not to be going to this week’s coffee and study event. I love the way that the narthex has been kitted out to engender a really lovely atmosphere. And for the last 2 months when I’ve gone along to it, it has helped me to … This week they’re looking at … go along yourself and see if I’m not right!”"

My question is: do you think I'm about right? Also is anyone aware of collaborative church blogs?

Roman Catholic women priests

Those of us who are Anglican in England may be wondering about women and Bishops. Spare a thought for RC women who are sensing a vocation to ordination. Particularly as the Vatican has just issued a document which seems to associate ordaining women with things like paedophilia:

"“Sexual abuse and pornography are more grave dealings, they are an egregious violation of moral law,” he said. “Attempted ordination of women is grave, but on another level; it is a wound that is an attempt against the Catholic faith on the sacramental orders...”"

So, it is understandable that some people have found this gravely offensive. The Vatican are saying that it was just a document covering a, clarifying and tidying up number of things and so it is happenstance that the two issues are in the same document. Fair enough; though it is hard to believe that their PR people ddn't realise that dealing with paedophiliac offenses in a document with other issues would be a difficulty in the making.

A RC acquaintance of mine once said that he though that ordaining women (specifically nuns) would be more likely than ordaining married men. He may be right in arguing that the paying men to support families would be a deal breaker; RC priests are not paid a huge amount; certainly not enough to raise a family on; and (given Vatican teaching on birth control) it would be a huge risk not to have priests with large families -if they only have one or two kids the suspicion would be that they are not themselves adhering to the party line. So ordaining nuns would seem to be a less complicated matter. But then look at what is being said about the matter of ordaining women.

The other side of the matter is to recall that for RCs, the matter of clerical celibacy is not really doctrinal. It is custom codified by canon law. There are churches in communion with Rome, mostly in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean area, which were formerly Orthodox (mostly called Uniate Churches) and who continue to ordain married men; they have carried over their Orthodox practice. So there can be no doctrinal objection to married male priests. So from that perspective it may be that married priests would be the more likely: they already have them, it is simply a 'tactical' matter.

What do you think?
And, if Rome changed its mind about women's ordination: where would that leave the debate for some Anglicans?

Bridget Mary's Blog:

Some helpful articles on religion online

It's worth checking this out. I'm hoping that more scholarly articles might be deposited over time. The aim of the compilers is to find freely available scholarly articles on a variety of religious topics. I can't speak for all of them but there were some useful ones to do with liturgy and worship some of which I've added to a reading list for next year. Check out your interest and let me know what you think ...
religion online: "More than 6,000 articles and chapters. Topics include Old and New Testament, Theology, Ethics, History and Sociology of Religion, Communication and Cultural Studies, Pastoral Care, Counseling, Homiletics, Worship, Missions and Religious Education."

Conversion and its Discontents

One of the difficulties of living human life and spirituality is how the corporate/institutional interacts and takes on a life of its own which may pull across or against the values or objectives we most wish to espouse. In Christian terms this shows itself most flagrantly in the awareness that people may be attracted to Jesus but find the Church a huge stumbling block. As churches become social, political and cultural actors and artefacts, they gain identities in those terms which may or may not speak well of Christ.
This quote from India puts it well:
"'Conversion, instead of being a vertical movement toward God, a genuine renewal of life, has become a horizontal movement of groups of people from one community to another, very often backed by economic affluence, organizational strength and technological power. It also seriously disrupts the political life of the country by influencing the voting patterns of people. Why then should Christians be surprised when the very words mission and conversion provoke so much anxiety, suspicion, and fear?'"
The issue can be looked at from the other side too. The social, cultural, economic and political dimensions of another religious identity can make it hard for someone to really engage with Christ and then to consider changing a whole cultural (even civilisational) identity. To what extent do we think it right or desirable to allow Christ to become so identified with provisional human structures or to be identified against certain provisional human structures. This is an issue that touches on the Powers. Hopefully I'll be able to develop that thought more fully at another point ...
We're probably all aware to some degree how our desire for peace or justice is made turbulent by the cross-currents of being citizens of a particular nation and wanting to preserve the goods of democracy, welfare and liberty
Conversion and its Discontents:

Dealing with diverging views

This caught my attention because it is about pluralism vs exclusivism. However, the way of handling the differences is one that bears emulation.

"Whenever I see smart people take opposite sides of an issue ... I tend to do four things.
First, I look for truth on both sides. Each side sees something worth seeing...
Second, when questions create polarized camps with wise and good people on both sides, I tend to look for limitations or flaws in the way the question is framed. ...
Third, when I come across questions that divide good people from each other, I often look for the rhetorical purposes of the question and its possible answers: what good do they intend to accomplish - beyond the intermediate goal of engendering agreement or disagreement? ...
Finally, in situations like these, I try to hold the good things that each side values, and encourage each side to do the same. ..."

Christians inherit a tradition which calls peacemakers blessed. We will more likely be called blessed when we approach issues of disagreement in the spirit that Brian McLaren outlines here.
On Faith Panelists Blog: Let there be peace in our individual identities - Brian D. McLaren:

The Outquisition

I've found myself mulling this over since I read it. It's a bit 'community development' meets environmental crisis, trying to avoid Mad Max! Here's the main scenario that's been bugging me:

"Even if we do a pretty decent job of hugging the curve, and bright green innovation brings prosperity and security to a lot of people in many regions, some others will still suffer from ecological shifts, political abandonment, economic collapse or some combination of all three. Unless things change dramatically, we have not seen our last Dust Bowl, our last New Orleans, our last Detroit. What do the people who are left trapped in degrading places, who don't get the green collar jobs, do?"

To me this chimes with a concern I've had for a few years now, playing away at the back of my mind. The apocalyptic version of which is a new Dark Ages caused by environmental unsustainability becoming catastrophic probably via peak oil's economic effects and the rising tide of global warming. The latter will probably require resettlement of large numbers of people or their re-tooling for new conditions ...

... abandoned people and places are sometimes the ones who most need radical innovation; that, these days, new tools and models are practically scattered all over the ground, just waiting for people to pick them up; but that those who most need them are those who least know how to find them.

In the Dark Ages, arguably, it was the monasteries that kept learning alive and which often enabled development. I wonder whether part of the Church's mission should be conceived of in these terms:

What would it be like, we wondered, if folks who knew tools and innovation left the comfy bright green cities and traveled to the dead mall suburban slums, rustbelt browntowns and climate-smacked farm communities and started helping the locals get the tools they needed. We imagined that it would need an almost missionary fervor, something like the Inquisition (which largely destroyed knowledge) in reverse, a crusade of open sharing, or as Cory promptly dubbed it, the Outquisition

And if I'm right about that (and check out the five marks of mission for a plausibility check: it hits at least 3 of the 5) ... how do we begin to build the capacity of national and local church institutions to do that?
Worldchanging: Bright Green: The Outquisition:
Ecology, food & civilisation

Many English speakers cannot understand basic grammar

Now this really is a big deal for educationalist, linguists and people concerned with communication in various ways (public health, for example). The article is here: Many English speakers cannot understand basic grammar

Now the background to help you clue into why it's a big deal:

"...for decades the theoretical and educational consensus has been solid. Regardless of educational attainment or dialect we are all supposed to be equally good at grammar, in the sense of being able to use grammatical cues to understand the meaning of sentences."

So what has happened to that? Well, they tested people to discover what they thought was the meaning carried by various syntactic constructions.

participants were asked to identify the meaning of a number of simple active and passive sentences, as well as sentences which contained the universal qualifier "every."
As the test progressed, the two groups performed very differently. A high proportion of those who had left school at 16 began to make mistakes. Some speakers were not able to perform any better than chance, scoring no better than if they had been guessing.

One of the interesting results when they were trying to eliminate various other factors:

Participants with low levels of educational attainment were given instruction following the tests, and they were able to learn the constructions very quickly. She speculates that this could be because their attention was not drawn to sentence construction by parents or teachers when they were children.

So it may be that much of this really is down to exposure to certain 'registers' of language. In some ways this is not new: it may be demonstrating that we tend to learn the grammar we are exposed to and have opportunity to practice. In that sense grammar is the same as vocabulary: we don't know the whole potential repertoire, but we can always learn more if we have sufficient motivation and opportunity to practice. And that is important: our ability to learn new linguistic tricks still seems pretty remarkable ...

So the real story here is probably that linguistic diversity within a language is more than we may have realised and may affect syntax more fully than many have given credit for. That said, we should remember some dialectology basics, such as that a dialect is a form of a language with grammatical differences to another (ctr 'accent' which merely differs according to pronunciation). So we are probably dealing with differences which are on a dialectological scale. And, just as pronunciation differences are a statistical continuum along a scale, it may be that the use certain syntax is similarly something that varies along a social scale (whether that scale be determined along social, regional, educational or some other lines).

So it would still be true that this has implications for public notices etc; but we probably should frame it as a dialectological matter (standard English and regional variants, probably). My worry is that some may pick this up as a kind of linguistic disability thing and that probably isn't the real story. Clearly there is a range of ability with language use, but that isn't really the issue here.

Why you are ordained ...

I came across this (htt Richard Sudworth) and offer it to all those I know who are ordained, particularly those newly ordained. The words are actually by Ray Gaston:

'We are not ordaining you to ministry; that happened at your baptism. We are not ordaining you to serve the Church in committees, activities, organisation; that is already implied in your membership. We are not ordaining you to become involved in social issues, in ecology, race, politics, and the search for justice and peace; for that is laid on every Christian.

We are ordaining you to something smaller and less spectacular; to read and interpret those sacred stories of our community, so that they speak a word to people today; to remember and practice those rituals of meaning that address people at the level where change takes place; to foster in community, through word and sacrament, that encounter with truth which will set people free to minister as the Body of Christ.

God grant you grace not to betray but uphold it, not to deny but to affirm it, through Jesus Christ our Lord."

Distinctly Welcoming: Pioneer Ordination: more tea, vicar?