(Ir)religiosity

Below is the manuscript — more or less, I tend to deviate quite a bit — of the sermon I will be preaching this morning, Transfiguration Sunday, at Quincy Community UMC.  It is based on the gospel text for this week (Luke 9:28-43).

In 1993, Greg Mortensen attempted to climb K2, the second highest mountain in the world.  For Greg, the way up was literally the way up the mountain, to the summit.  But Greg never made it to the top of K2.  There were problems with his crew and on the way back down the mountain Greg was separated from the rest of the group and wandered into a remote village in Pakistan called Korphe.  The people of the village cared for Greg and after spending time with them, Greg realized that the village had no school and no system of education for the children.  Once he returned to the States Greg decided to raise enough money to build a school for the children of Korphe.  This endeavor eventually grew into the Central Asia Institute, a non-profit organization which builds schools for remote villages in north-eastern Pakistan.  Greg recounts his journey in the best-selling book Three Cups of Tea which the Sunday School class has been reading over the past several months.  But these schools are only being built because Greg wasn’t able to reach the top of the mountain.  Three Cups of Tea was written because, in a sense, Greg failed.  Or did he succeed?  It seems that in the end Greg discovered that the way up, the real way up, was the way down — down into the village in Pakistan, down into a world were children had no access to education.  Down into the problems of the world where he could make a difference.

The way up is down.

We see a similar story in our text today.  In Luke’s gospel, Jesus takes three of his disciples — Peter, James, and John — to the top of a mountain to pray.  Now, I doubt that this mountain was as massive as K2 but it was high enough that Jesus felt he could be alone to pray.  This is something that Jesus does many times.  According to the Scriptures, Jesus would go alone, or sometimes with a few disciples, to a mountain or some other secluded place, to pray and mediate often.

But this time it was different, at least that is Luke’s version of the story.  According to Luke, while he is praying Jesus’ face begins to glow and his clothes begin to dazzle.  Then, suddenly, Moses and the prophet Elijah appear next to Jesus and Luke tells us that they begin to talk to Jesus about what he is to “accomplish in Jerusalem,” an obvious reference to Jesus’ passion and crucifixion.

Now, we have all been to the movies with all the new special effects, so let’s image what this scene might look like.  Jesus is on a mountain, his face and clothes are dazzling, and Moses and Elijah appear and start talking to him about his future trip to Jerusalem, the capital city.  Not exactly a calm, still event, right?  It seems to be pretty spectacular.  I mean, Steven Spielberg or Peter Jackson could probably do quite a bit with that on the big screen and I imagine it would be pretty true to the story, at least that seems to be Luke’s version of the story.  But where are the disciples during all this?  Luke tells us that they are so weighed down with sleep that they can barely stay awake!  Really?  Barely stay awake?  How could they miss this?  Moses, one the great heroes of their history who led their ancestors out of slavery in Egypt, has just appeared and Elijah, one of the great prophets is with him.  I mean, these are famous people that Peter, James, and John would have heard about growing up.  And to top it all off Jesus’ clothes are dazzling.  But yet the disciples can barely stay awake.  I mean, imagine it — what would it be like if Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy suddenly appeared right now, right here in this church?  And what if Pastor Susan’s clothes started dazzling?  I think most of us would be wide awake.  But Luke tells us the disciples can barely stay awake.  In fact, they don’t even say anything until it is time to go back down the mountain and then Peter says something like, “Oh, but this is such a great experience, let’s stay.  And we’ll build a church here, in fact, we’ll build three churches, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  It’s almost like Peter has woke up and realized what’s going on and he doesn’t want the experience to end.  We all know what that’s like don’t we?  Have you ever been part of an experience that you didn’t want to end?  Something that you wanted to prolong as long as you could?  Almost as soon as Peter says this a cloud appears and a voice says, “This is my Son, my Chosen, listen to him!”  And then, just as fast as they appeared, Moses and Elijah are gone and Jesus heads back down the mountain.

For Jesus, the way up is down. Read the rest of this entry »

Reading through Jean-François Lyotard‘s The Postmodern Condition yesterday I was immediately struck by this quote.

The relationship of the suppliers and users of knowledge to the knowledge they supply and use is now tending, and will increasingly tend, to assume the form already taken by the relationship of commodity producers and consumers to the commodities the produce and consume — that is, the form of value.  Knowledge is and will be produced in order to be sold, it is and will be consumed in order to be valorized in a new production:  in both cases, the goal is exchange.  Knowledge ceases to be an end in itself, it loses its “use-value.” (p. 4-5)

This is exactly the temptation of social media, I think.  If used with restraint and discretion social media outlets can be very useful tools to share knowledge and information.  But we must recognize the danger of changing the nature of knowledge by commodifying into something to be consumed rather than something to be internalized or reflected upon.  Then the act of consuming itself becomes the goal and not the use of knowledge or the information.

For example, I find myself following more people on Twitter or subscribing to more blogs not because I believe they are useful and enriching but because I need “more.”  The goal is not quality, but quantity.  More followers, more RSS feeds, more Facebook friends, etc.  I even catch myself doing it the bookstore, it’s not the book itself that I need or want but the act of buying and consuming more.  It is as if there is some sort of jouissance to be found in the act of consuming information and the abstraction of mere quantity.

So I think social media can be a useful and important tool in transmitting and sharing knowledge, but its potential won’t matter much if we allow the very nature of knowledge and information to be destroyed so we can consume more and actually “know” less.

Thoughts?

I’m going to take a bit of blogging and social media break.  For a few reasons.

First, I’ll be leaving early tomorrow morning for a canoeing/fishing trip at the Boundary Waters.  I’ll be gone for about a week.  No computer.  No cell phone.  No iPod.  No technology.  It will be refreshing.  And it couldn’t come at a better time.

Which leads me to a second reason.  I’ve become increasingly irritated and disappointed at the lack of substance and content in the “social media world” lately (blogging, twittering, etc.).  That is not to say that good, engaging and original content isn’t out there, it is.  But it’s getting drowned out by all the crap and the noise.  It makes me tried and cranky.  I’m sick of reading banal blog posts and my twitter feed being dominated by spymaster games or reports on someone’s workout routine.  For me, these are useful tools to share information and float new, creative thoughts or ideas.  But there seems to be a lot of rehashing going on and the endless noise both drowns out the things worth paying attention to and dilutes the larger conversation.

The lack of originality and the dominance of pure junk and noise has affected me and my creativity more than I realize.  A lot of what I blog about comes from inspiration from either what I’m reading offline or what I’m reading online.  Lately I just haven’t been inspired by the latter.  Again, that is not to say good stuff isn’t being written or shared.  It’s just being overshadowed and marginalized.

So I’m going to take a much needed break for a least a few weeks.  And when I get back and I may seriously cut back on my media intake by purging my feed reader and twitter.

Hey, I might even toss out thoughts and ideas the old-fashioned way and have some real conversations.  Imagine that.

I had an interesting discussion with some friends on Facebook the other day over this comic.  It’s a depiction of a quote from Neil Postman‘s important book Amusing Ourselves to Death. Here’s the full quote from the forward:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions”. In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Postman goes on to argue, very convincingly, that Huxley was indeed right and that our preoccupation with entertainment and excess of information has negated our ability to determine what is important, relevant, and true.  The book is a must read for anyone, especially people involved in social media.

The conversation I had revolved around the question of whether Postman was completely right.  In the book he argues that Huxley’s prophecy has come to pass (more or less) and Orwell’s has not.  I tend to think that there are elements of both in our culture and at our worst we oscillate between the two.  Which may turn out to be more dangerous than one or the other by itself.

Which do you believe is more present in our culture today? Or is it some mixture of both?

Evernote is hands down my favorite Mac application.  It creates space for all the things I find worth keeping on the web (unless it’s a full page, I use Delicious for that) or noting.  It is my all-purpose capturing tool.  And it does what it does very well.

Now things just got better.

Following David Wierzbicki’s lead I’ve decided to share one of my Evernote notebooks.  This one is my primary repository for good quotes, short thoughts, and other nuggets that don’t really warrant a Delicious save but I’d still like to keep archived for reference. Up until now I’ve only used it intermittently, but I hope to put it too good use now that I’ll be sharing.

So if you have an Evernote account you can link my web clippings notebook to your account, or, if you don’t use Evernote (I don’t know why you wouldn’t!) you can grab the RSS feed.

Also, if you are sharing with Evernote, let me know and I’ll add you.

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I wonder if someday I’ll have to explain to my children or grandchildren what a newspaper was.

(ht)

After two weeks of interweb percolation, Kevin Watson has posted the results of the UM Social Media experiment.

There were 759 views of the YouTube video promoting Reclaiming the Wesleyan Tradition: John Wesley’s Sermons for Today There were 44 hits to the video when I discovered it and posted it on the Methodist blogosphere. At the end of the first week there were 619 views. This means that the momentum slowed down significantly after the first week as there were 140 views in the second week. (On the other hand, that is still more than three times as many views as the video had in its first six months of existence.)

About a week ago I posted a comment on Kevin’s update of the traffic.  Maybe it’s because I had really low expectations going in, but I was surprised at the results.  I still am to some extent, especially with the increase of views in the first week.  A mere twenty-five blogs generated almost 600 unique hits.  I think that is pretty good.

Others have expressed some disappointment with the results.  That’s understandable.  The video itself  has been criticized; both the production and what it was plugging were lifted up as possible reasons behind why more persons didn’t participate and why the traffic dropped off after about a week.  The production/content problem looks to be true and the traffic issue may have more to do with the dynamics of viral marketing than anything else (though, this was not at all a true viral phenomenon) I think. A small number of initial participants necessarily limits the spread, especially after the initial peak in traffic.

Which lead me to my main disappointment of the whole thing.  Only 25 bloggers participated.  Just glancing over the MethoBlog I can see more than 25 links.  So why such a small number?  Is the actual number of active Methobloggers much lower than what has been compiled at the MethoBlog?  Or did most Methobloggers think the vido simply wasn’t good enough to be promoted on their blog? Or, are Methobloggers simply not effectively networked with one another?

I’m not sure.  Of all those questions, I think the third is really worth reflecting upon.  Especially since connectionalism one of our tradition’s most heralded hallmarks.  How does that translate into the online, social media-oriented world?  Are we really capitalizing on those resources?

What are you thoughts?  How can Methobloggers be more effectively connected and networked with one another?

Social media is changing things.  You could even say social media is changing everything and it would probably be true.  I’m about halfway through Tom Friedman’s book The World is Flat right now.  Though it was originally published only three years ago, it’s already becoming a little dated as far as the half-life of web 2.0 related things these days goes — which demonstrates perfectly exactly how things are changing.

Friedman’s overall thesis is that the world is becoming increasingly “flat” as we continue to explore what appears to be the endless limits of the information age.  Anyone who has access to a computer can search for and locate just about anything they want which undermines our traditional, hierarchical systems of transmitting information.  Things are becoming more and more open and less restricted.

I ran across this site yesterday (via Andrew Sullivan)  that illustrates this point perfectly.  It is basically a simple mash-up of Google Maps and the all the Prop 8 donors.  So you can actually see where in California, or the United States, individuals or groups that contributed to the pro-Prop 8 effort.  But that’s not all.  You can actually see their names and the exact amount they gave.

This presents all sorts of new possibilities (or problems depending on how you see it).  Now, to be fair, all this information can be accessed elsewhere and has been made public by the state of California; donors were presumably aware of this when then gave.  EightMaps simply makes it all more visual and accessible.

This is fascinating.  We normally think of “donating” to something as primarily a private action.  That isn’t really true, but that’s how we think about it.

This portrayal undermines that assumption.  It makes things very public.  I’m sure many people don’t like that.  But I don’t think it’s such a bad idea.

I wonder how, if at all,  our private actions might change if we assumed that everything was public. That’s not a false assumption by the way.  Our so-called private decision to “donate” to a certain cause may have very public consequences for someone else.

Just ask the gay population in California.

What would happen if we were actually walking advertisements for the causes/ballot measures/you-fill-in-the-blank that we fervently supported in private?

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Kevin Watson, who blogs at Deeply Committed, has started an experiment to see how much social capital Methobloggers have. This experiment was prompted by the feeling among some Methobloggers that United Methodism does not always do as good of a job as it could at getting the Wesleyan message out there, particularly online. So, Kevin wants to see how many views a YouTube video can get if Methobloggers work together to promote it. The experiment is to see how many hits the video will receive in two weeks.

If you want to participate you can: First, watch the video below. Second, copy and paste this entire post into a new post on your blog and post it. Third, remind people about this experiment in one week.

Based on the results of the experiment, Kevin will get in touch with the folks at Discipleship Resources and let them know the ways in which Methobloggers are often an underused resource.

I think this is an excellent idea.  And I’ll be interested to see what comes of it.  The sooner us Methodists improve our presence and ability to mobilize online the better.

You can find the other participants in this experiment here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here and here, and here. And here. Oh…and here.

Today, on Epiphany, a new social network, called Missional Tribe has been launched.  I’m pretty excited.  Here’s a short description of the network taken directly from the site.

The tribe …

… offers a collaborative space to connect people and generate an accepting, supportive community that intentionally seeks for diversity.

… fosters dialogue in a respectful environment and gathers grassroots stories for mutual encouragement, teaching, and support.

… focuses on serving practitioners through resources, ideas, and stories from the front lines of incarnational engagement and radical transformation.

… shares the nitty-gritty of living our faith and sharing our life in order to break anyone’s sense of isolation on this journey, especially when a virtual support network may be the only community currently available.

… creates an “evergreen” space to capture and continue the collective wisdom of those seeking to pursue Christlikeness, stewarding it in ways that will keep it accessible beyond the first generation of participants.

… encourages using the website as a social space for befriending people of similar (or opposite!) interests, as a discussion space for interactive learning, and as an archive space for links and materials that might otherwise be forgotten.

… engages in discussion of any topic about the missional journey, with a minimum of gate keeping and oversight to maintain it as a safe place for all so that nothing would be off limits except for bullying or belittling others.

… celebrates both individual and communal expressions of a missional paradigm, and constantly seeks to broaden its demographic reach because of its commitment to embrace and learn from the diversity in Christ’s Kingdom.

Although most descriptions of who and what the tribe is were stated in the positive, there is a place for stating some of what the tribe is not, or does not do.

In the tribe …

… it’s not about methods, but about our paradigm and lifestyle.

… it’s not about polishing theory or theology in attempts to get it perfect, but about our movement forward in our practice of a missional lifestyle.

… it’s not about control or ownership by the few, but about empowering each of us to participate responsibly.

… it’s not about celebrities, but about us as everyday disciples.

Well.  Now I’m even more excited.  This is exactly the sort of thing I’m into.  A decentralized, non-hierarchical, grassroots community of collaborators sharing thoughts and ideas.  This has really, really great potential.

You can read more about the Tribe and it’s inception at the site here.  Sonja Andrews, who blogs at Ravine of Light,  has written a great post about it as well.  You can read that here.

And — while you’re at it, go ahead and join the Tribe!  Seriously.  Go ahead.

Time to roll my sleeves up…