(Ir)religiosity

I am taking a free, no-credit reading French course this semester.  The primary text is Karl Sandburg’s French for Reading.  Languages are not my strong suit, so I am hoping to obtain some French texts to begin working through on my own.  I am wondering if anyone might have some suggestions.  Obviously I am not looking for the complexity and difficulty of, say, Derrida (though I hope to get there at some point!).  Something relatively easy and straightforward would be best.  It would be even better if it were related to theological, biblical, or philosophical studies, but I doubt that those areas will be best to start with.

Thoughts?

You may or may not be aware that my site was down most of the day yesterday.  Steve Knight first gave me the heads up and I made some quick changes on the way out the door to the grocery store that I thought would solve the problem.  And they did — temporarily.

When I got home all I got was the white screen of death.  No pages.  No posts.  No Wordpress dashboard.  Nothing.  So I did what I usually do.  I started stripping things away.  Themes, plugins, etc.  That didn’t work either.  I did some Googling around.  Some people had the same problem and were able to fix it pretty easily by tweaking some memory limits.  That didn’t work.  I tweeted about it and go some good suggestions (thanks Gideon) and some not so good.  None of them really worked.

I wiped Wordpress off my server I don’t know how many times and uploaded fresh installs.  Nothing.  I started to panic.  And for most of the night (and some of this morning) I thought I might lose all my posts and comments.

It turns out my sql database was somehow corrupted.  So corrupted that I couldn’t use my main backup and had to export and import reach table manually.  I’m still not done.  A lot of meta-data still needs to be dealt with and I know that some links are dead.

But the good news is I didn’t lose anything.  If you stopped by here yesterday and got nothing but a white screen I apologize.  Hopefully over the next few days I can get thinks back up to normal.

So much for starting off the week with a Moltmann post.  Those will come soon.  I promise.

Below is a map of our Boundary Waters trip. I’ve never really messed with Google’s custom maps so it’s the best I could do in a short amount of time. Anyway, the first blue place-marker was our entry and exit point. The red line represents the entry and exit routes and the second blue marker is the campsite. We made the entry trip in about 3-4 hours. It probably would’ve been a little quicker but we had to wait on some other campers at a few of the portage points. The exit trip was much quicker, we made it in about 2 hours or so.

We spent most the week fishing around the campsite, off some of islands (the smaller ones don’t show up on Google maps) and in a few of the coves. Fishing was pretty slow as the weather beforehand threw off the normal cycle. The weather while we were there was very nice, a few showers in the evenings but nice. We did catch some though (mostly Pike, Walleye, and a few Smallmouth Bass) and ate fresh fish almost every evening.

The green line on the maps represent a trip a few of us took one day in about 4-5 hours. We went up through some of the other lakes and looped back around to our campsite via a marshy stream. It was a nice little day trip and the scenery was absolutely breathtaking.
View Boundary Waters Trip in a larger map

It was a great trip and my time away from technology was wonderful. It helped put things in perspective. As I mentioned before I’m going to be cutting down on my media intake and plan to reorganize things this week. More on that to come.

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.

Today I’m on my way to Oklahoma City to attend Oklahoma Annual Conference and to (hopefully) be certified as a candidate for ordained ministry in the UMC.

Along with some others, I plan to tweet from AC and, if I feel inspired, to blog a bit.  Not sure if that will happen or not.  I’ll be pretty busy with meetings, catching up with some old friends, and leading worship at my former church on Wednesday night.

So, follow me on Twitter!  And if you’re up for it, follow the #okumc hash tag to keep up with all the goings on at Oklahoma Annual Conference.  If you’re not Methodist or just don’t care I apologize in advance for all the spam tweets you will be receiving this week.

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I opened my Facebook this morning to find this:

It is conceited I know.  But it’s not every day one of your intellectual hero/ines is perusing your reading list.  So I’ll indulge myself.

But seriously, his latest post on the nature of belief is well worth your read.  It is interesting to observe how quickly a conversation, especially a theological conversation, concerning belief and the nature of one’s beliefs capitulates to what one can know with certainty — beyond the shadow of a doubt as it were — and the empirical factoids that one can observe in an ‘objective’ manner about the world.  Belief is hopelessly reduced only to what one can sensibly see rather than pointing toward the incoming of a reality that, in Peter’s words, “does not yet exist,” the incoming of something wholly beyond mere fact, something wholly beyond epistemological certainty, and something wholly Other that inaugurates the very real possibility of the im/possible.

Peter draws particular attention to the absurdity of our relegating to the realm of absurdity any belief that might appear to be counter-factual.  It is an important observation and one I hope we do not ignore.

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my writings page.  Mainly because I haven’t really written anything worthwhile or anything I thought someone would find interesting (not that I ever did anyway).  I put up two new files.  A short paper on Augustine and Postmodernism and a review of Brian McLaren’s A Generous Orthodoxy.  Check ‘em out…if you’re into that.

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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Inspired by some others, I decieded to revamp my “About” page last night.  It was pretty generic and didn’t really give much insight into my rationale for blogging (partly, because I’m still figuring that out.)  And that got me to thinking about the direction and purpose of this blog.

When I started this thing a year and a half ago it was just an experiment, an outlet for my thoughts, and a repository for, well…whatever.  It will still function in that manner.  I enjoy my work and I enjoy seminary, but I have to have some sort of creative outlet.

So my blog will continue to be that outlet, but hopefully it will be a bit more focused.  Check out the about page to see what I’m talking about and let me know what you think (the comment for pages are closed so you can comment here).

We’ll see how this works out.  See if I can do the whole “focused” thing. (Says to self, “I think I can. I think I can. I think I can.”)

I mean…I like ketchup and fries, but that just sounds gross.