One of those poker situations

So, you have a king-ten suited and someone raises you all-in with Ace Ace King on the board. You fold, right? Well, this is what happens:



I'm the chicken on the bottom.

Heretics, part 2: The heretical continuum

I wanted to make sure everyone saw Vince's comment:

I am certain that the Baptist tradition would not raise sprinkling-baptism to the level of heresy. It would be a disagreement of biblical interpretation, but the baptists would not anathematize the infant baptizer!

Heresies are extreme 'wrong-thinking' positions that would put one outside the limited doctrines of orthodox Christianity. There are not many 'right-thinking' requirements for most Christian denominations. The Nicene Creed probably covers the doctrines. Thus, the Mormon doctrine of three separate gods of in Godhead could reasonably be put in the category of heresy. Orthodox Christianity is Monotheistic with a trinitarian footnote.

There are a lot of little things Christians could disagree upon and still be within the 'one catholic (universal), apostolic church' and not be called a heretic. Mode of baptism is probably one of those non-heretical differences. There were both modes in Catholic history. I don't think any of the creeds (until you get to Baptists) included a mode of baptism. But since nearly all Baptists consider baptism a symbolic act, they would not insist that God only accept immersion-baptized people.

I think that most denominations and most Christians have very few things that are heresies.

Having said all that ... I keep running into too many Christians in conservative evangelical circles that have a very well-defined concept of what right-thinking Christianity is. This is certainly what Dan it talking about. Many of my thoughts on the age of the earth, on God's grace towards non-Christians, Bible understanding ... etc etc etc, would bring anathemas from some. So it goes.

Vince is right to point out that heresy suggests a very specific meaning in the context of Christian orthodoxy: doctrine that is so far out of the norm that it must be officially rejected by the gathered church. In the historical sense, there are sharply defined boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy. Either you're orthodox or you're not, just like Vince said. There is basically a list of beliefs that are out-of-bounds enough that they don't deserve the label of Christianity, and there is a list of beliefs that constitute orthodox Christian belief.

These concepts are problematic because of what they don't say about the rest of Christian belief. There is a wide gulf between historical orthodoxy and historical heresy, but any issue that is even slightly more squishy meets silence. You might say, following Paul, that we should "Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters" (Romans 14:1 ff.).

All well and good, but meanwhile, for instance, the issue of gay priesthood is tearing the Anglican church apart (the latest). The crux of the issue is whether or not a particular point of doctrine counts enough to pass judgment on, whether or not it is a disputable matter that gays should be candidates to be priests. Is this issue important enough to cause a schism in the church to preserve the belief? Does the centrality of this belief rise to the same level as the historical orthodoxies?

Suppose, as Vince basically says, orthodoxy is about basic, weighty issues of the nature of God, Jesus, and salvation, and its contents can be confined to the creeds. Or, suppose as the letter to the Hebrews, Chapter 6, put it, that orthodoxy involves the elementary beliefs of "repentance from acts that lead to death, and of faith in God, instruction about baptisms, the laying on of hands, the resurrection of the dead, and eternal judgment." Where does that leave issues like gay marriage, the gay priesthood, or the other "minor heresy" issues that were not covered in councils hundreds of years ago? Where I think it leaves them is somewhere between the center and the periphery of belief. Our friend Sarah mentioned that her husband had to do a homework at school where he placed a long list of beliefs on this continuum, stretching from "timeless, central" to "temporal, peripheral".

In the context of heresies, thus, all heresies are equal, but some are more equal than others.

Another aphorism is also coming to mind: "One person's heresy is another person's orthodoxy". I suppose over the course of this little series, I will be trying to ask whether we can get any deeper definitions of orthodoxy than "what the orthodox people say". I bring this up because the belief that is orthodox in the end did not necessarily outnumber the belief that was orthodox in the beginning. Is the Kierkegaardian knight of faith, denying the community standard in favor of the will of God, a heretic? Ponder Martin Luther. It may be helpful to remember that I am thinking about this. It also occurs to me that there may be better words for what I am trying to talk about than "orthodoxy" and "heresy". If you know them, please suggest them.

The other reason I tried to talk about my dunking baptism in the context of heresy is because of a commentary on Dante's Inferno: The Figure of Beatrice, by Charles Williams. Williams writes:

[By heresy Dante] meant an obduracy of the mind; a spiritual state which defied, consciously, a power 'to which trust and obedience are due'; an intellectual obstinacy. A heretic, strictly, was a man who knew what he was doing; he accepted the Church, but at the same time he preferred his own judgment to that of the Church.

From the day I read this passage, I've thought of heresy in the context of disobedience to the will of the church. I felt it was important enough to become a member of Maranatha to accept a belief I thought was wrong (or, at best, only weakly justifiable). The heretics are willing to insist, against the will of the church where they are a member, on their own ideas and the actions springing from those ideas. In a sense, they love their idea of the church more than they love the real church; their problem is a lack of humility. We often think of heresy as incorrect belief; I think another aspect of heresy is that it is a belief held against the community.

The gray area of orthodoxy only gives rise to more questions. For instance, where Vince says, "Heresies are extreme 'wrong-thinking' positions that would put one outside the limited doctrines of orthodox Christianity", the hidden assumption is about where those limits are. Are they only the conclusions of A, B, and C ancient councils? And if so, by what authority do they draw their conclusions? If you say on the authority of the Bible, how must you read the Bible? By what authority do you choose the right way to read the Bible? (The Catholics have interesting answers to these questions; friend of the Lewis family Mark Shea wrote an illuminating book on those answers, By What Authority?)

Again, what makes an orthodox belief orthodox? And we might add, what makes an orthodox belief central rather than peripheral?

I also skimmed lightly over a subject that really requires more attention, which is how we should treat the heretics, both in the historical sense and in the more squishy sense of people who hold beliefs we find offensive to our personal definition of orthodoxy. So, we have plenty to talk about.

On a personal note, we had to take our friend Sarah (originally from England, but our friend for many years from her time at USU, now taking up some missionary work overseas with her husband) to Denver International tonight. It was a bit of a strange parting, as we are dear friends, but we are unlikely to see each other for five years, and that at a minimum. When we got to ticketing, we were surprised to find Ina Williams and Kathy Eccles from Logan wearing enormous backpacks, waiting for a ride to begin a hiking trip. Our paths overlapped for about ten minutes, but it was great to see some more friends out here.

Heretics, part 1

Bored holes through our tongues
So sing a song about it
Held our breath for too long
Till we're half sick about it
Tell us what we did wrong
And you can blame us for it
Turn the clamp on our thumbs
We're so whipped out about it

Heretics -- Andrew Bird
video

Some of my friends already know the story of my second baptism. Or rather, my second water baptism. (There is stuff in the Bible about a believer's second baptism; after water, then the Holy Spirit. I guess this story is about my third baptism.) My parents did not baptize my brother, my sisters, and I when we were infants. Instead, we were supposed to make our own choice when we grew up. I held out the longest, I think; anyway, it was a long time, and I was baptized at age 20 in the Presbyterian church in Seattle I grew up going to (at 8th Ave S and S 200 St, across the street from where Mt. Rainier is right now; they moved it into Olympic Elementary, where I went to the first grade). There are pictures floating around of the whole thing, of Pastor Ben Lindstrom blessing me and marking the sign of the cross on my forehead. It was as good as I could imagine; I still look back on that event with a sense that it was very good indeed.

After I got to Utah, married Sarah, and settled in, Sarah and I decided that we wanted to declare our membership in Maranatha Baptist Church after some years of going there. This meant to us that we were affirming our relationships with the people there, kind of like saying that we were part of a family now.

There was just a little catch. One of the Baptist distinctives is full-immersion water baptism. What that means is that the ceremony that marked a passage into spiritual adulthood, that publicly stated my faith and commitment as a Christian, that symbolized my death and rebirth into a new life, just as Christ died and lived again, not to mention the spiritual ramifications... that wussy sprinkling of water on top of my head just wasn't making it for the Baptists. My membership of Maranatha would be inaugurated in a white robe, holding my nose, in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, underwater.

Or not.

Pastor Emerson came to our apartment to talk membership over with Sarah and I. I brought up the fact that I had already been baptized, so this wouldn't, couldn't mean exactly the same thing to me, and he seemed to accept that. He also wanted me to know that nevertheless, this was the Baptist way, their interpretation of the relevant Biblical sources, so it was not optional. The question then was whether or not I would accept that.

Welcome to the world of heresy and orthodoxy. Heresy means the wrong way; orthodoxy means the right way that heresy is wrong about. Sometimes, claims that violate some discipline's received wisdom are called heretical, but you will most often hear about heresy in the context of religious doctrine, where heresy means wrong belief.

Heresies, like Patripassianism and Arianism and Pelagianism and Manichaeism, are named after people, not ideas, and if you know what these people were thinking or disagreeing with in the context of their times, you are a historian. In fact, some of the theological issues involved are so abstruse that from a distance, if you don't know your history, you might not remember which idea is orthodox and which is the heretic. If I say homoiousios, for example, and say that it's a word used to say that Jesus was like God the Father, it sounds pretty innocuous. Until I tell you, you may not recognize it as one of the distinctives of a heresy that nearly split the Christian church down the middle in the 4th century.

Who orthodoxes the orthodox? How can we tell the orthodox from the heretical?

Good news

A conversation with our visiting friend Sarah (lately of Birmingham, England, and Logan, UT, and destined for parts beyond) clarified some of my thoughts on heresy. This is providing fresh material. I am beginning to be surprised by how much of my religious experience is related to questions of orthodoxy and heresy...

I think I just have to start writing and split it up as much as I can. With that, history of the heresy part 1.

One thought per post?

I thought once that if I put one thought per post, I'd get a lot more posts out here. But I don't know if I can adjust to that lifestyle. One of my friends once said I had long thoughts, like paragraphs.

I noticed today that my family is on Facebook even if I am not (or only nominally). Maybe I'm too old to see the point, your powers grow weak old man. One of the strange connections was seeing people I thought of as kids at Southminster all grown up and doing their thing. Other than Steven Martel, I really hadn't noticed.

I was going through my papers again (for more information, see With the benefit of hindsight). One that really stuck out to me was dated September 16-17, 1995. It is just a slice of life, where lots of little things happened all at once. That weekend, I went to see "Oklahoma!" a couple of times at the Highline Performing Arts Center. A lot of my friends were in it, or around it. Ian and Paul went with me to see them. I really wanted to remember, I was seized to write, thank goodness. When I annotated it last night, I said, "Some days are perfect, that's all."

That date is significant because it means I wrote this thing basically the day or two before the 19th, when Chris Tyni killed himself. You couldn't draw it up better in a Stephen King book: all is calm, all is bright, and then all is dark. It is like a time capsule, not only for the twelve years intervening, but also for my innocent childhood. It wasn't the beginning of my adulthood by any stretch, but the end of my childhood... yes. When I tell myself the stories of my life, that day sticks out in many of them.

The other interesting thing I found was a record of a dream I've never forgotten. It actually makes a lot of sense, for a dream:

I go into a large elevator and ride it to the top floor of a building, where there's a museum. After the doors open and lights come on, I must be distracted because the lights go out and I have a feeling of being too late, or waiting too long as the doors close and the elevator continues up. I'm crushed and I can't see anything, but I feel things breaking until finally my head goes too. Everything is silent. I hear a sigh, and I don't know if it's mine. Then I wait for the next thing. Then I wake up.

The most likely date on the dream is 1997. I was not a Christian then. It brings together two great fears: my ongoing fear of being killed by the automatic operations of senseless, ignorant machines (along with fear of my teeth falling out, it is the only thing I have remotely resembling a phobia), and my fear that somehow life has already passed me by, that the great decisions and moments occurred when I was too young to understand what to do with them, and that the life I have lived must be resigned to, must be borne and not enjoyed, that the story of my life is a story of failure.

I was paging through the moments of my life, which, thank God, I have saved in boxes because my head is too small for them, and thinking about my past a little bit. I saw names who should still be friends, words that should have been held and remembered for all this time. Instead, the story chops off insensibly, out of apathy, or a falling-out, or my ignorance or my ill behavior, or just the vagaries of chance. I thought about these things and I felt like a discontinuous person, a person lacking structural, spiritual integrity. It's not that I've forgotten, it's that little parts of my life that should be there are blacked out: I remember nothing of the life I should be having with these people down to today.

I don't just think about forgiveness, however relevant it is in several of my discontinuities. I do want to be forgiven for what I did, or failed to do, with these people. But even more, I want not the closure of forgiveness, but the aperture of connection, of renewed friendship. That other universe, that life where we are whole people, together again, we should be living there today.



[You can read some great stories about this, like The Girl I Left Behind and Deep River by Shusaku Endo.]

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So what with one thing and another we've been pretty busy. So here is a capsule of the last two weeks:

Cujo sucks.

Ocean's Twelve isn't nearly as bad (so far) as I had previously been led to believe. I'm finishing it tonight.

Gaudy Night and Strong Poison do not, thanks Anon for encouraging me to pick them up again.

Charmed Life is going well.

The Painted Veil, the movie version of the book by W. Somerset Maugham with Ed Norton and Naomi Watts, was really pretty good. For some reason these "British people in the uncouth wilderness of the foreign devil" stories have very similar feels to me. But it was also a well-done story of alienation, love, and forgiveness, a Graham Greene kind of thing.

A Hard Day's Night (original, that is not American) has about 7 good songs on it. No surprise, they're almost all the ones that made the actual movie, except for "Any Time At All", which I think should have been an A side, and the execrable "I'm Happy Just To Dance with You", which is the most phoned-in Beatles song I have ever heard. It's an F side.

In the where have you been all my life department, Radiohead's masterpiece OK Computer. The album is 10 years old now, and people have been telling me for ages that I would love these guys. Ummm, instead of telling me, you could have perhaps strapped me to a chair and slapped on some headphones. That would have spared me a lot of regrets right now. I've been listening to this thing for a week straight, about 3 hours a day. Maybe you remember the first week you heard this album. I had heard tracks from it, of course, without knowing the whole story: "Lucky", "Exit Music (For a Film)", "Karma Police"... I had even played "Karma Police" on the bass once for a party (without getting the key change on the bridge quite right, in hindsight). If you haven't heard it at least once, and you can stand modern/indie rock in the slightest, you owe it to yourself to try it at least once.

Oh, and I finished a project at work and I've been staying too late this week. And Sarah's Uncle Tim stopped by our house on a cross-country drive. And I'm going to be in Seattle for a week in October (13-21), prior to my sister Kefi's wedding. Congratulations, Kefi! And if anyone is around, we'll make time to see you.

Be well; the magnum opus on heresy is still being written.

What I did this weekend

Ok, ok, so there's not a brand new opus on hermeneutics, heresy, and orthodoxy occupying this space. Let me explain why.

I have a 9-80 schedule, so every other Friday is free. This weekend was an off Friday, so Sarah and I decided to go get the dining set we've been dreaming of. To do this, we drove out to a warehouse east of I-25, about half an hour away. We found a great oval table, counter height, with white and blue tile for $100. It had a little crack in one tile and a new base, but hardly anything to worry about. Certainly worth a $150 discount. We got bar stools that swiveled to go with it, rented a truck to drop it all off at our house, then drove home, ready to enjoy the rest of the day and the weekend together.

Or so we thought.

It turned out, when we sat at this so-called counter-height table, that it was just a few inches short of standard. Unfortunately, those were the few inches between the bottom of the table and the tops of my legs. We hadn't found this out before, because we bought the chairs from the showroom area and the table from the clearance area. We have since resolved to measure all our furniture to avoid these kinds of problems.

We agonized over what to do, and eventually we decided that the best course of action was to return this furniture, then spend more for an uncracked version of the table at normal height. So we had to rent another truck, this time from the local Home Depot, to take back the old furniture and to bring home the new furniture. Finally, when I got back, we had no trouble returning the furniture, but every one of our alternate tables was out of stock, even though it was on the floor. It took a few phone calls to get to the table we agreed on. Finally, I got everything back to the Home Depot, crammed it into my car, covered the open trunk with a comforter and wrapped the whole thing up in a shiny pink rope, and drove home.

That was Saturday. I've now driven enough Ford trucks to know that I would prefer not to own one. My stepfather-in-law's Honda Ridgeline totally blew away the F-250 and F-350. Strangely, the F-250 was worse than the F-350. As far as I can tell, it had no shock absorbers at all. In both trucks, I noticed that I had very poor instincts for my speed on the road. I was constantly looking down at the speedometer and going about 15 mph faster than I thought. I think it has something to do with being so much higher off the ground than in my Corolla, learned parallax or something. I didn't hit anyone, only got lost once, and only ran a toll booth once (I paid later).

Today I got us lost on the way back from a park and my whole family trudged along a busy street. Sarah asked me if I was lost. In response, I kept repeating the cross streets where I had parked the car, even though for most of our walk, said streets were not visible. Also, I clogged the garbage disposal with potato skins and had to take apart the tubes under the sink to get it out, soaking the kitchen in the process.

Plus, the last two days included the Colorado Scottish Festival and a Rockies game, neither of which I got to go to.

Waaah.

On the plus side, the potato dish was pretty good. It was Italian potato pie, which basically means baking mashed potatoes for half an hour in the oven. There were a lot of leftovers.

In other news, we started Diana Wynne Jones' Chrestomanci books, with Charmed Life. The front of the paperback says, "If you're mad about Harry, try Diana." There are a lot of echoes of the beginning of Harry Potter in these books: the protagonists lose their parents, one seems to be extra-talented at magic, the other has no talent, both receive portentous fortunes, they ride a train to a castle where an extremely powerful wizard has adopted them... Sarah said to me, this sounds a lot like Harry Potter. And I said, "That's funny. Of course, this was written in 1977."

We also listened to a few of Neil Gaiman's children's stories: "The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish", "The Wolves in the Walls", "Cinnamon", and "Crazy Hair". He's one of my favorite authors, so I was glad to finally get around to these.

Back to religion, here's an interesting thought experiment that bounced around in my head the last few years of living in Utah, related to the topic I am mulling over. It requires a little background information.

The Mormons have a highly-organized church structure. One of the things they believe is special about their Christian revelation is the organization of the church, which is, if memory serves, laid out by Jesus himself in the progress of the narrative of the Book of Mormon. At the top of the pyramid is the church President, currently Gordon B. Hinckley. There have been several church Presidents; Joseph Smith was the first one. Next to the President are two close advisers; these three are collectively known as the First Presidency. Next down are the council of apostles, twelve in number. Down the chain it goes, with numbers and roles. I think next are the Seventies, but we're beyond my expertise.

Belonging to a church that contains God's representative on earth in the President, Mormons expect the continuing, progressive revelation of God from the President. This was a practice begun in earnest by Joseph Smith, who received at least dozens (hundreds, maybe) of personal revelations from God. These revelations, and subsequent additions by other church Presidents, are collected in another book in the Mormon scripture, the Doctrine and Covenants. I don't know if the D&C contains anything else.

The process of revelation continues to this day. In 1978, there was a big deal because a new revelation came out declaring blacks eligible for the priesthood, which is basically like church membership in Protestant circles; being barred from the priesthood was basically second-class worshiper status. To find out more about this, Google . For another interesting case study in revelation, learn more about the Mormon stances on polygamy.

To an outsider like myself, this whole thing feels like 1984, and the entrance to Mos Eisley. We have always been at war with Eastasia, polygamy is wrong, blacks aren't the cursed descendants of Cain, these aren't the droids you're looking for. And so on. But it raises interesting questions about the boundaries of heresy and orthodoxy in the Mormon religion. On the one hand, there is established doctrine that can be used as a standard to excommunicate non-conforming members. On the other hand, that doctrine is subject to sudden, violent change.

So, here is that thought experiment, perhaps most relevant to those who have been living in Utah. Is there any revelation that the Mormon President cannot make? Can he (and they are are all old white men) reveal that there are no more revelations from God? Can he reveal that the Book of Mormon is not true or that Joseph Smith was a liar? Can he tell the church that they are all Catholics now? In the balance, which will win: the received doctrine, or the progressive revelation? Could the Mormon President ever be a heretic?

You're really not going to believe this

Okay, if you read that last post, you might be thinking as follows: Suppose, Dan, that I go along with your crazy ideas about not reading too much into the text of the Bible, and I decide not to play cryptic crossword with parallel passages, or impart too much knowingly significant double entendre to the ones that just happen to support my worldview. Tell me, Dan, is anything left of the Bible at all? Is Christian faith possible? I'm glad you asked. Without having the time to go into it tonight, let me just say a quick yes and definitely to that. There are views of inspiration, of the spiritual intervention of God in shaping the Bible, that do not require us to construct Bible codes to divine God's intent (such as we can).

I also had an interesting talk with Sarah about whether or not it is right to take these positions on marriage and the Bible when so many other people disagree with you. Are you crazy? I think she felt better to get that out there, not in so many words. I guess this is a question that can challenge any Christian thinking. Is it important to be right, in the doctrinal sense? Does right in the doctrinal sense mean right with God? And if not, what good is it? As a related issue, how can we tell Christian orthodoxy from Christian heresy? Are you a heretic? And if so, what should you do about it?

I hope to get to these questions this week, so berate me if I am being slow.

But now for something completely different. Long-time readers of this blog will have heard ad nauseam about Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its related spinoff show Angel. It took Sarah and I most of a year to watch them all. Once, under the weather, we did 8 episodes in a day. Well, a few days ago, having no Harry Potter to read and no obvious substitutes (yet; we are taking a trip to the library soon) without much discussion, Sarah and I decided to start watching them again. 3 episodes down, 251 to go.

Again.

WHY WHY WHY DAN WHY? NOOOOO....

Well, I'm reminded of Dorothy L Sayers on Dante's Divine Comedy. She said, more or less, "Once I cracked the book, all my prejudices were dispelled. I read it as fast as I could. When I came up for air, I looked around and saw nothing better to read out there. So, I started it again as breathlessly as the first time."

Except for The Simpsons, which pile on to the DVR about three times a day (and some of the newer episodes are getting pretty good again), there's nothing better to watch this summer than Buffy and Angel. Period. Ok, ok, so Season 1 is pretty hokey-fenokee and everybody looks so young. But it's the best.

Love and marriage

When I hear those words, I immediately think of two things. The first is Frank Sinatra singing the theme song to Married with Children. I've actually been to that fountain in Chicago, incidentally. It was a math trip. The other one is a Woody Allen movie called "Love and Death", which is a parody of Scandinavian existentialist films.

Jen asked me to expand upon my funny reaction to the lines "Head of household" and "Spouse" in the nursery check-in form at the megachurch I attended two Sundays ago:

What feelings did that line ignite in you and why? Let's hear the heated theological debate.

Ok, you asked for it.

As a recap, those lines were for the names of the parents of the child. There was an unspoken premise, obvious to me, that under "head of household", one was supposed to write the father's name, and that left the mother for "spouse". Leaving aside all the alternative family arrangements this ignores (grandparents, nannies, unmarried couples, divorcees all come to mind), I didn't want to just leave that values system sitting there. Plus, I was irked at having to give my information for a one-time visit, like I said. I put myself as spouse, and Sarah as head of household.

So here we go. I've thought about this a lot, in the context of living in Utah, in the context of having evangelical friends, in the context of my own marriage and how I want to spend the next fifty years. I thought about it before I got married, and now that I'm married, I spend less time thinking about it and more time trying to live it.

Caveat lector; this is one of those religious things that divides people along lines of opinion. You can see a civil example here.

As I said once on Vince's blog, I think that one mode of reading the Bible, as a philosophical premise source-book, in order to learn what to believe, is like building elaborate sand castles. The architecture of these belief systems may be thrilling to behold, even beautiful, but they tend not to survive their tidal contacts with the ocean of life.

I say it that way because it happened to me in college. When I became a Christian, it was first as a sort of theologist, and life started washing that away almost immediately. I had a gay roommate in the spring of 1999, and my other roommate decided to become a Christian in the vein of Marcus Borg and the Jesus Seminar (bugaboos of a liberal stripe, to fundamentalists such as myself; I still don't like them and the mockery they made of criticism, but that's another digression). I was having trouble deciding how to live, struggling with how to talk to and deal with my roommate. I started from the position that I didn't agree with what he was doing, how he was living (it turned out I was actually saying, who he was), but I could live with him anyway. I told him words to that effect, and it got really chilly. My liberal roommate threatened to move out, I think, and then I took some long walks around campus trying to figure out if I should just move out. I figured out that I was the third wheel. I read my little green-plastic-covered Gideon bible as I walked, but not the verses on homosexuality... I think it was the book of John.

I went back to the dorm, and somewhere in there, my gay roommate had left me a poem he had written about being gay, about being rejected by his parents, but learning to find himself beautiful anyway. As someone who writes things that rhyme, I just couldn't ignore this. He got through to me. I think I understood what was so wrong with the way I had been acting. I pasted words on top of that man I didn't know, then got all righteous about my own labels. So I tried to explain. I said I loved him, and I meant it, and I apologized, I think, and gave him a hug. Looking back, I don't know whether he understood too, or just thought I was weird. But I might be misremembering; we might have cried and had a moment. My liberal roommate later said that I really came through there; he might have said it was strengthening his faith. We were all good for the rest of the semester. The next year, the gay guy moved to a house and my other roommate moved in with his best friend.

Appendix, none of this is in my diary and the UW deleted most of my email (although I may have saved some of it in an archive I recently recovered), but I'm pretty sure I still have the poem in my things. It's been a long-term project of mine to go through my papers, so I may find it sooner or later.

I tell this story because I am aware that the New Testament says things that turn into admonitions and strictures against homosexuality when read by the American evangelical subculture. The fact that they're almost all don't-do-it commandments suggests a certain attitude toward homosexuals as well: a spirit of righteousness and judgment. Thus, the fire-and-brimstone signage, the counter-parades, the angry Christians on your TV set, the obsession with dog-whistle political issues instead of the war in Iraq. This is playing word games with the Bible. (Another short take on this, a couple years old.)

I forget where I read that Christians misidentify the Bible with the Word (probably because the Bible has so many words in it). I think Karl Barth said something to that effect. I don't think it makes me un-Christian to agree, or to point out in addition that we are not supposed to follow what the Bible says. The Bible does not have a little tag on it with the words "DRINK ME". Instead it tells the story of a man; he is the one who says "Drink me."

This is a lot of preamble for a pretty short thesis: I consider the argument "'Wives, submit to your husbands; husbands, love your wives' is a prescription for stratified gender roles in Christian marriages" to be based on word games with the Bible. One reads the Adam and Eve story in Genesis, and so much is implied. One reads the passage in Ephesians that the husband is head of the wife, and so much is implied. And so on. And faced with all this circumstantial evidence, the combined weight of implications, how could one not be persuaded to the roles worldview? Well, something fishy is going on here. It is not hard to find differing views on this evidence; see Vince in that discussion I linked to earlier, or the first Google hit for "husband is the head of the wife": The Husband is Head of the Wife?, which is one more fascinating take on the subject by a Greek Orthodox guy. It's hard to call fascinating ideas a dime a dozen, so let's just say it doesn't stop there.

If one reads the life of the Word, one sees a different portrait emerging. This is my take, Christians can be free to disagree. As the Greek Orthodox guy says, Jesus did not come to us in order to fall into stereotypes or prescribe them for other people. He blew them apart every chance he got. The Samaritan, the centurion, the woman with a bleeding problem, the children, the sinners, the poor, the sick, the prostitutes. He told a tax collector to come and he told farmers to stay behind. What he did come to do was not to be served, but to serve, and to offer himself. There is nothing male or female about that; that is for everyone who would follow him. Remember who will be greatest in heaven; is that person a boy or a girl?

One thought I have as I reread Ephesians 5 is that in the middle of Paul talking about how the husband is like the head and the wife is like the body, he quotes Genesis:

In this same way, husbands ought to love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself. After all, no one ever hated his own body, but he feeds and cares for it, just as Christ does the church--for we are members of his body. "For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh."

Before Descartes laid his thumb on the globe and spun, we believed, among other things, in a unity of mind and body. Christians say now that we are body, mind, and spirit, or some equivalent; I just read a passage in John Michael Talbot's book that this idea is pervasive throughout all of Christianity, and in the Eastern religions he is interested in as well. Why does Paul bring up this idea in the middle of talking about the head and body? Maybe it's to point out that in marriage, man and woman are to be growing so close to each other that you cannot tell where one ends and the other one begins. Or, to put it another way, the goal of marriage is to end gender roles, not preserve them.

I don't think this is a terribly convincing argument. It's another word game about what may or may not be implied by the chance inclusion of a quotation in a letter whose main subject is obviously other things, hatched by my view of the context, which may disagree with yours. But my point is not to argue, really; I merely think that it's plausible to read these passages this way. Also, my conclusion may not be as complex as the gender-roles word game, but it uses the same hermeneutical approach with opposite results. This does not say much about who is right, but it does say something about the shortcomings of this manner of reading.

You might say Joseph Smith and the Mormons took this kind of reading to the logical extreme when they read the stories of the patriarchs taking multiple wives, and resurrected polygamy. The fact that they oops, got it wrong (they would say, followed the inscrutable, changing will of God), is one of those chapters in Mormon history that has to be read to be believed. To this day, Mormons believe that there will be polygamy in heaven, as men progress to become Father Gods and their wives progress to becoming Mother Gods, eternally giving birth, populating new worlds with their spirit children. Now those are some gender roles in marriage! In fact, there was some to-do when some feminist Mormons sought to formally worship the Mother God who had birthed them onto Earth with the approval of the LDS church... this did not go over well, to say the least.

So, if you don't have roles in marriage, what do you have? If there's one thing I've learned in my Christian journey, it's that there are things you believe because they sound correct to you, and there are things you believe because you lived them yourself. (Aside: watch the show Thirty Days.) When I had a gay roommate, there was a war in me between these two kinds of beliefs. I went through a similar struggle before I married Sarah. We talked about this stuff, and I read books about it, both sides; eventually, I decided that given two plausible ways to go on this roles stuff, to head for equality within marriage, almost on instinct. Later, I wondered if I'd really gotten it right, but I have never regretted that decision. I decided if I ever did have to explain it, I would say that you might be able to win an argument that gender roles in marriage are Christian and important, but that wouldn't be the same thing as me being ready to live that belief anyway. I have been a person willing to change who I am for what I am convinced is right, but convincing is a matter of conviction, not just A implies B, QED.

Equality in marriage is simple to me; it means knowing who we are as people, and treating each other like the gifts from God we know each other to be. Someone is good at math (me), someone is good at finances (her), someone is going to work (me), someone is raising our son (her), someone is addicted to video games (me), someone loves to take pictures and blog into the wee hours (her). What equality in marriage means to me is that it could easily have been the other way around. I don't get the final say in decisions, we just have to agree, or compromise. She is not the nurturer, I am not the leader; each of us acts in those capacities at different times. At least, we're supposed to. I see my failures in marriage not as a consequence of my failure to conform to a role, but as personal failures.

Past my bedtime.

Churcharama, and digressions

Sarah and I have been attending metro Denver churches, hoping to find a new home where we can meet other young parents and grow up for a while. We've been sort of careful about it. We've used a list from Denver Theological Seminary, checked out churches online, tried to check for small groups and family ministries like women's studies and Mothers of Preschoolers. We are trying to avoid churches that are loosey goosey on the Bible, but also trying to avoid extra-denominational places, along with fire and brimstone kinds of places. It's time to grow. Two, three hundred people in the Sunday service seems about right.

Two weeks ago we screwed the whole thing up.

We drove the back way to Cherry Hills Community Church. We took a road called Wildcat Reserve Parkway. I believe it does actually pass by a wildcat reserve, but we haven't explored all the parks (of which there are many) in the area. I knew the way, because the day before we had gone swimming at one of the Highlands Ranch Rec Centers. These are free to residents of Highlands Ranch, and we had heard that this one had an indoor pool for kids. The pool was very cool, with all kinds of fountains and slides, wading, a spa, and one wavy loop with a slow current that tugs you around. The loop was also the only place I came close to putting Alex underwater. I was holding him up, as was his flotation vest, in the little river. Going around a curve, the undertow pulled my feet off the bottom and I got dunked. As I fell, I pushed Alex's butt up with my hand, trying to keep him up for Sarah, who was behind us. I lost him for a second, got my balance and spun around to look. Sarah had him ok. She told me that when I pushed him up and let go, he looked surprised, but he started kicking and kept himself afloat for a second. To me, this bodes well for his future, both in the water and in overall survival. Anyhow, this pool was a little way down the right hand of an intersection on Wildcat Reserve, and this church was a little way down the left.

We turned onto Fairview and saw traffic cones taking out a lane, and a cop parked in the middle of the road. We wondered what was going on until we got to the cop, who... waved us in to the church parking lot. Oh. We got a sinking feeling. They have to control the traffic for the Sunday service? And there they were, hundreds of cars driving around. I can't say they were driving around a church building. Instead, they were crossing over into the embassy of what was, and still remains, a foreign country to me.

The complex, campus, whatever term you prefer, sprawled out on a hillside. At first, we didn't know which door to enter because crowds were going towards a few different entrances. We lucked out and found a sort of atrium that the church used as a greeting area. To the left was a concierge with information. To the right was the child check-in area.

We went to get Alex signed up for the nursery. As a first-time child, we had to give up some personal information to get registered. It didn't help that the man attending us said, we'll get him right in the database, so he'll be good to go next week. I have been a little more wary of this lately. I mean, the weekend before I started work I went to our local haircut place to get spruced up for my first day. They asked for my name, then they asked me for my phone number. For some reason, this brought me up short. I had never been to a barber shop that needed my phone number. My name, yes, my money, yes, my repeat customer punch-card, sure. But my phone number? So I said, "I would prefer not to." This completely flustered the receptionist. She literally did not know what to do next. She had to ask one of the stylists, who said, use the phone number for the house. Even so, the stylist had to come over and help the receptionist click through her menus. Finally, I was all set, and the receptionist told me the wait would be fifteen minutes. Just enough time to get groceries, I thought, so I told her I'd be right back.

Half an hour later or so, I walked back in, ready for my haircut, and sat down. The receptionist chose that moment to vacuum up nothing from the floor right in front me. Then the stylist, busy with another customer, said, you were already on the list, right? I said, that's right, ready to wait. When it was my turn for a haircut, the stylist asked me what I wanted. I said that I just wanted it nice for my new job, and I hadn't been in a while, so I'd like it shorter. For the rest of the haircut, the stylist didn't say one word. She sprayed my hair with the water bottle for so long that my head was freezing, then she cut my hair practically without using her comb. I didn't figure it out till later, but she left a wing on one of my sideburns, and barely touched the sides, which have since begun to poof out. Needless to say, they've lost my business, but the more interesting point is that they were willing act affronted and mess with me because I wouldn't give them my personal information. There is such a thing as privacy, and you've got to start somewhere.

So I was really stuck, checking Alex into the nursery. I already knew, without even seeing the service or the nursery or much but the parking lot that we would never be back, yet I had to give out my information again. This was a situation that called for a little protest, but what? On the form I found it, two lines not marked "Parent A" and "Parent B", but instead, "Head of household" and "Spouse". For me, that little line created all kinds of feelings, basically a heated theological debate, which I proceeded to win with permanent ink: I marked Sarah as head of household, and myself as spouse. Alex was tagged with a serial number and the last four digits of our phone number were marked on his tag. During the service, the man said, if we were needed in the nursery our digits would be flashed under the screens. Screens? but we had no time to think about it then. We took Alex off to the nurseries.

The nurseries were divided by age, as in all the churches we've visited. Here the difference was that there were maybe eight, maybe a dozen nurseries, divided up by age groups of two or three months each. That is, Alex was placed in a nursery for children born in September and October 2004 only. Think a little about how many staff and children this implies (a hundred kids? more? under three or four), and you'll get an idea of the scale of the thing. I glanced out the sliding door of the nursery as we handed Alex off to the nice young man, who was explaining about the emergency paging system again. There was a Big Toy, a little playground out back of this (and presumably, every) nursery. We dropped him off and headed for the service itself.

We got lost on the way to the service and had to consult a map. Again, the traffic was no help because people were going about equally both up and down the hall. Finally, we arrived in the worship center, which again was enormous. It reminded me of a theater. It had a balcony, of course. Greeters were stationed across the expanse as you walked in, impossible to avoid. Ushers at the door handed out full-color brochures. Later, they would guide people into open seats. Sarah and I sat on the end of the next-to-last row, in the middle, by the door.

The theater atmosphere continued inside. The band was already singing as we found our seats. Where to start? The room is perhaps best thought of as a quarter of pie, with the stage at the point. We were seated at the bottom edge of the crust, near the tin... The stage was enormous, like the stage on Austin City Limits, or any other theater you care to imagine. There were two enormous big screens to either side of the stage, and five slightly smaller big screens arrayed around at balcony height. These screens displayed various members of the band as they sang and played, panning, fading, and zooming in a manner reminiscent, for me, of PBS concerts. The lyrics to the songs we sang (all of them Christian praise choruses that we all knew quite well) were displayed, not on an overhead, but as subtitles placed gracefully on the screens without obscuring the musicians.

There were thirteen people in the band: five singers, a pianist on a grand, a drummer, a bassist, a lead guitarist on a flying V, a saxophonist, a guy on acoustic, a guy on a synthesizer, and a guy on the violin. They sang with palpable emotion. On the stage itself were two columns, where the lights and shadows of concert lighting played, and a gigantic screen in the center, behind it all, made screen-saverish patterns like the ones that play behind the singers on American Idol. And I started thinking the word "staged", a word which still captures almost everything I took away from the production. A few other things stood out to me about the music. The guy on lead guitar had these amazing solos, which were technically breathtaking, but not, perhaps, setting the mood. On the song "You're All I Want", the lead singer started singing the lines of the verses before us, while we sang the regular tune behind her. The effect was not unlike the echoes of a gospel chorus, which again was technically cool, but it occurred to me later that we the church, like the other four singers on stage, had metamorphosed into her backups. Of course, no matter what the song, the band was turned up so high that it was not possible to hear yourself or the congregation singing. And perhaps most important, everyone clapped after every song, and it felt like a rock show.

The sermon was not much better. For some reason, there was a rug onstage for the pastor to pace on as he delivered his talk. It was about the apostle Paul seizing his moment. I was hoping for great things, I guess, as this was the most Christian part of the show, but here, as exemplar, was the takeaway point, in gigantic words on the big screens: "Jesus calls us from something, for something." This, I thought to myself, was the problem with preaching to such a wide audience: the lowest common denominator. And after the sermon, the people all clapped. And at the end of the service, it was the biggest ovation of all.

Sarah told everyone afterwards what I said to her as we hurried past the luxury cars to our little Corolla and got out of there: "I don't know about you, but we're not going back." We talked about it for most of the rest of the day, but we already agreed about that.

We've had better luck our other weeks, with two fine churches in Bethany Evangelical Free Church, and Valley View Christian Church. We are hoping that we have many to choose from; time will tell.

In other news, I've also started work in what is basically a locked-down facility. I've been enjoying work, but there are aspects of it that are a little surreal. And I almost forgot, but Sarah and I finished the Harry Potter saga. Without spoilers, let me just say that JK Rowling deserves your money and your eyeballs glued to her pages, and I'll leave it at that. Buy them, read them, give them out. We now need something new to read together, so feel free to suggest something.

I miss you, friends, and I hope you're having a happy, fulfilling time wherever you are.

First week

Hi everyone. As you may know, I've been almost completely off the map. It was my first week of work. I thought it was fun, but exhausting. I am happy to be working a 9-80, which means I get every other Friday off. Getting up at 6:00 to make it has not been easy, but I've rolled with it.

Sarah and I visited a nice evangelical free church two Sundays ago, and our visit to a megachurch yesterday was a real doozy, basically a first for both of us. I eventually just started taking notes, because the whole experience was just too much. I'll fill you in as I get time. Sarah and I went to Sam's Club on Saturday morning, and bought Harry Potter VII for half price off a pallet stacked with them. We went to the Tattered Cover first, but they weren't discounting the fastest-selling book ever (or if they were, we didn't see the sign), which was the kiss of death.

I finished What's So Amazing About Grace? again. It's a book about the Christian distinctive that means something: real unconditional love towards the unlovable. That is one definition of grace; another might be "treating people better than fairness and justice demand", or "do better to others than you would ever expect them to do to you", or "the stairway off the karmic wheel of reward and retribution", or "living beyond inertia", or "making the first move". It's a good book and it always makes me think. Spurred by Vince, I visited the USU philosophy blog, so I was thinking about ethics as I read this book. Grace is meant to be beyond ethics, I think. Ethics is about the right thing, and the fair things, and values of obligations and weighing the matter, and determining consequences. Grace is not beyond good and evil, but it lies past them; the Boy Scout's good deed for the day is what ethics means to me. Boy Scouts finish, they arrive, check it off their lists. Grace never arrives. On the bright side, grace never ends.

I got my library card, so I'm in the middle of Firestarter (Stephen King), Don't Know Much About History (a primer for those with an American History hole in their education, which somehow I got), and Come To The Quiet: Principles of Christian Meditation by John Michael Talbot. I am reading that last slowly and carefully. Talbot (a famous singer-songwriter in Catholic and, broadly, Christian circles) has written a very deep book here about quiet time with God, trying to draw out the meaning of meditation in Christianity and also meaningful parallels within other world religions. I've also got a John Scalzi space war novel, an Alice Miller book, and Einstein's biography to get to.

Stay sane, and I'll try to be back soon.

Colorado

Hi people. The Lewis family has successfully arrived in Highlands Ranch, just south of Denver. Our house is quite nice. I even mowed the lawn for the first time in about ten years yesterday. We have approximately one extra bedroom and one extra living room. If you have any suggestions about what to do about this, let me know.

Also, if you're from Colorado and know some things we should do on my last week of vacation for a while, let me know.

The weather is very nice and so is the library and everything else. We'll have pictures sooner or later at Sarah's blog, lewislife.typepad.com. Thursday our home internet gets hooked up, so transmission will be spotty until then.

Independence Day

Tomorrow, I'll be homeless for the last time in a while. Sarah and I are packing up and moving to Highlands Ranch, CO (think the last homely suburb in southern Denver). Maybe we'll see fireworks in Denver, I don't know. Sarah's mom and stepfather are also coming, and maybe her brother.

I finished The Once and Future King. I thought it was very episodic and disjointed. Like Vince told me, the first part was definitely the best.

I also picked up and read The Stand for the first time. It's Stephen King's classic, apocalyptic tale of the near-destruction of the human race by a military super-virus. This is a novel par excellence, with many stories that intertwine and reinforce each other, with some unforgettable imagery, and a backbone of dangerous Christianity, in the sense of "Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things". It's graphic and horrific in spots. It would be an easy R, shades of NC-17 if it were a movie. Sex, swearing, drugs, violence, Satan, and rock and roll. I can't do it justice, but I'm definitely reading it again sooner or later.

I guess I'll be going even darker now than lately. I don't know when we'll hook up the Internet. My love to you all, as appropriate.

Oh, our new address. Email me if you want our Colorado address. We'll be changing the phone soon too.

Strange few weeks

Hi everyone. It's been a strange few weeks, with a trip to Denver for house hunting, security clearance procedures, and I still haven't finished The Once and Future King. This book is breaking all my records for slowness in reading. I can't remember the last time I took 3 weeks to read a novel.

Sarah and I are anxious for our new situation. We found a nice house to rent, close to work, groceries, parks, and schools. The movers are packing our things a week from yesterday and hauling them off a week from tomorrow. We've decided to drive to Denver in one fabulous day, by way of Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Sarah and I liked the area a lot on our trip. I diaried the first 3 days, so maybe I can tell a few stories about it later. Our friend Karen even got to show us around downtown Denver. It's a cool city. I will be back for the US Mint and the art museums for sure, and for the baseball game.

I've been worrying that the time is making me dopey. I haven't been this long without my PC ever, and my programming skills are, no doubt, slipping. I've been reading Effective C++ to try to keep a hand in.

It looks like our Las Vegas trip is going to fall through. Basically, it is happening because we lent a massive corporation our money to search for a house, and they are reimbursing us too late for me to go; also, the movers are coming during the trip. I am disappointed, but there's nothing else we could do.

I've also felt at loose ends because of our homelessness. Our relatives have been really great about the whole thing, but I have settled into an uncreative routine. I don't feel like myself. I'm just doing lots of crosswords and logic problems and watching Mythbusters all day, with an occasional walk around Brigham City. I feel like I'm just surviving. Thank goodness this is all ending soon.

Interesting news

Viva Las Vegas! Sarah, Alex, and I are heading to the City of Sin for my first professional conference, Worldcomp '07. A short version of my thesis was accepted as a conference paper, so I am going to present it at one of the couple dozen simultaneous conferences, CVIP '07 (which stands for computer vision and image processing). I'm also on a mission to see other interesting papers and tutorials, and to network. Unfortunately, we won't be there in time for John Holland's keynote the first morning, unless they schedule me for Monday and we have to change our plans. I'm interested in some of the other conferences too. There is one dedicated to AI, another one for machine learning, another one for data mining... parallel processing, software engineering, knowledge engineering, semantic web... it's all there.

We will have 3 luxurious nights to live it up. If I have my druthers, the poker room at the Rio and the World Series of Poker bracelet events will be on the itinerary. We're staying at the Tropicana, so if you aren't doing anything June 25-28 and would love to vacation (hotels.com + southwest.com) among the pimps, high rollers, snakes, and sleaze of it all, come on down.

I got sucked into The Once and Future King, which is, so far, a funny sort of book, so I am reading it back and forth with Sons and Lovers, a tragic sort of book. I feel like Homer in the one where he's a truck driver and he takes big handfuls of uppers and downers in combination so he can drive across the country without sleeping.

Heroes Season 1 is over

I'm going to call it PG-13 for those who care. Mature themes, violence including murder, sometimes disturbing images. And then there's all the good stuff. About fate, destiny, heroism, racism, identity, it is the most perfect 10 on network TV right now (I haven't seen Lost or spent the time on 24, but whatever). Heroes. You can watch every episode online (interlaced with commercials). Or you can wait for the DVDs. I've said it before, but run, don't walk. Make haste to see them.

In other awesome TV show news, I picked up my first issue of Buffy Season 8 (The Comic Book), and it was totally rad.

Furthermore, I saw two good episodes of The Simpsons on Sunday. It's hard to believe they've still got it.

Also, two good episodes of Futurama, which I sadly neglected while it was on air. The one with a universe in a box was hilarious. I howled with laughter.

Sarah and I saw Shrek 3 last night. It's hard to believe any movie ending in a 3 can be good, but they did it well, if a bit predictably. It had its moments. Also, a nice date, which Sarah and I haven't had for a while.

Why am I talking about nothing but TV? It's because I'm on vacation. While I wait on the intentions of Lockheed Martin (really, it's simple: tell me how to get to Colorado and start to work), I've been TVing it up and reading it up.

I recently finished Graham Greene's ultra-personal autobiography, A Sort of Life. Some of the reviewers called it, basically, bloodless. I didn't find it ironic, exactly. Obviously Greene was not able to write as if he had not lived for six decades, and be the awkward teenager he was, but he did try to get at the kinds of things that he had felt and struggled through. In a way, I felt like he was almost writing in what's called the objective voice, or the camera view. In that voice, you don't judge, you don't feel your material... you look, and pass, look and pass. The mask of neutrality said volumes to me, and I found many threads common to my own life. Perhaps you wouldn't find similar points of contact.

Up next, a book that has been sitting on my shelf for several years: Sons and Lovers, by DH Lawrence. It's a weird reason to read a book, but I heard about a friend doing a paper on it once. I tried to get into it a while back, so I hope that my recent jaunt through the British consciousness has prepared me mentally.

I recently received a graduation book, the daunting biography Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson. I am fascinated by genius scientists and their biographies, like Tesla and Feynman, so I am looking forward to this one.

Also in the backpack, The Once and Future King, which another friend of mine was reading in college, and which I picked up at the USU book sale for $.50, The Name of the Rose, another incredible USU book sale find (in hardback), The Stand, a fantasy by Guy Gavriel Kay, and, as filler, the complete Sherlock Holmes.

My summer reading list is filling up, but if you have a good one for me to read, let me know.

We miss you friends in Logan already...

The best defense

is the soul of wit. It turns out my thesis defense today went a wee bit long. I presumed on my committee's indulgence. But it doesn't matter, because I passed. Our long educational nightmare is over.

Our long national nightmare continues apace... if you didn't catch a story about the Iraqi parliament,

Supporters of anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr said Thursday that they'd gathered enough support in Iraq's parliament to pass a bill requiring a timetable for U.S. forces to pull out.

The legal or practical implications of an Iraqi law that would attempt to require a timetable for U.S. troops to leave the country were unclear. Even those circulating the legislation said they expected to sort out particulars in parliamentary debate.

But the announcement, on the anniversary of the parliament's swearing-in last year, underscores the difficulty of the American position in Iraq.

...

Word of the Iraqi pullout legislation came amid growing signs of dissatisfaction in parliament over the inability of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's government and U.S. officials to curb violence in neighboring Diyala province. Sunni insurgents tied to the group al-Qaida in Iraq have undertaken a campaign there against Shiite residents.

A parliamentary committee reported Thursday that 11,200 people have been killed in Diyala since 2004. Its report says 9,500 families have been displaced, 8,250 women have been widowed, 16,500 children orphaned and 66 mosques or shrines destroyed in the same period.

When some lawmakers appeared preoccupied as the report on Diyala was being read, a member of the United Iraqi Alliance, which represents the parliament's narrow Shiite majority, chastised them.

"You received the report as if it's about the sewage flowing," Shatha al-Mosawi said. "We heard about kids who are given to their families fried after being kidnapped."

And it's got a great clincher:

In a meeting with Maliki on Wednesday, Cheney repeated U.S. officials' warnings that the Iraqi parliament should cancel its two-month summer break to deal with the country's political issues.

I told my dad when he visited last week that I am not optimistic about the situation in Iraq because I see the pogrom has already begun.

For more on these issues and daily translation and interpretation of news from Iraq (I find it hard to read most days), visit Juan Cole. He's sometimes polemical (I ignore those), but mostly the news just forms his argument for him.

And like this insubstantial pageant faded

Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Somebody gave me a job today, quite officially. So it's on to the next dream.

I'll be working in defense for Lockheed Martin, in the Littleton, CO area. Graduate school has been good to me, and I'm essentially starting up a level on the career ladder because of it. Down the road, the door is open to a PhD because of my thesis, which I'm defending next Friday. And best of all, it taught me a lot about computers and about science.

It will be nice to get off the school and work grind, and just learn and grow in my profession. It will be nice to pay off some school loans, live in a house. It will be nice to be out on our new grand adventure.

I'll write some contact information here in due course. The Internet, insubstantial as it is, can keep us all on one stage, and that's how it should be.

More reviews

While I try to take violence to the next level, a few good books and movies.

I recently finished EM Forster's classic lecture series Aspects of the Novel. While the first sections on plot and character are quite interesting, apart from the references to books solidly in the British tradition that I haven't read, like Tom Jones and Portrait of a Lady, the later sections suffer from some concerns peculiar to his era. The section on fantasy, in particular, was written to explain to people that they could suspend their disbelief and let fantastic things become a part of their stories. Our hindsight, with the benefit of Tolkien and all his progeny, need not be told. The comparison of (I think it was George Eliot) with Dostoyevsky was instructive, though. Both depict scenes of conversion, but Eliot goes with a voice of preaching, while Dostoyevsky takes the strange, sacred voice of the prophet (in a scene from The Brothers Karamazov). What he was trying to get at was that Dostoyevsky was writing deeper than Eliot.

I've come across the same theme in a great book by the lady who wrote A Wrinkle in Time. It's called Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art by Madeleine L'Engle. I would buy this book. It is a third, say, a reflection on art, a third theological, and a third devotional. I could read books like this all day and all night. In some ways it reminds me of The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy L. Sayers, but it's more personal and magical. I haven't finished it yet.

I also finished a great memoir. I don't read too many of these, but a friend recommended it way back when. It's called Girl Meets God: On the Path to a Spiritual Life, by Lauren Winner. It's the odd but true story of a girl born to interfaith parents, who first decided to become an Orthodox Jew, then slowly came around to Christianity. She never writes exactly why she became a Christian; there is no conversion moment. Instead, there is a loving description of both her Judaism and her Christianity, of life lived through those prisms and what faith does in an ordinary life.

I saw the new James Bond movie the other day. It was action violence as you might expect, but it had heart and character too. It was a very interesting, throwback James Bond, in the Sean Connery mold, certainly better than the Pierce Brosnan fare we've had to swallow for the past few years, but nothing so spectacular as I had been led to believe. Solid, meaty, but not world-beating.

If I object to anything, it's the depiction of poker. Yes, big pots are won and lost by a great hand losing to a phenomenal hand, but it's more often like two pair losing to three of a kind, or just maybe a full house losing to a higher full house. But even more often, tournaments end with the escalation of the blinds, as more and more players are forced to protect their stacks by moving all-in with subpar hands.

For that reason, I found the scene where a four-of-a-kind loses to the straight flush to be a pretty hack move. I just read a great Aristotle line about the audience in Walking on Water (paraphrase): People will believe the probable impossible more than the possible improbable. In other words, presentation is everything; dragons can be more convincing than this kind of poker hand. Truth may be stranger than fiction; there is a story in The Biggest Game in Town where Johnny Moss recounts a hand where he won a boatload of money. His opponent turned over the 6 of spades with the 7 through 10 on the board for the straight flush, but Johnny had the jack of spades, the higher straight flush. The fact that it really happens is no excuse for putting it into a story, though.

I also saw The Prestige the other day. It's one of the best movies I've seen in the past year, perfect at what it does. It's the story of a sometimes nasty rivalry between two magicians at the turn of the century. Magician A is suave, debonair, with a flair for the dramatic. Magician B is more rough and homely, but he does a fantastic trick that Magician A can't match. Magician A becomes obsessed with beating Magician A, learning his secret, and topping his trick. The characters are pretty cruel to one another. When they get violent, it's realistic and raw. The cruelty is probably worse than the violence itself. But the plot is so good, and every note is so right, it's yet another strong recommendation for an adult-content, violent movie.

Happy birthday!

My lovely wife Sarah is 26 today! You could stroll over to her blog and send her a birthday wish...



I love you, sweetheart!

Would the whole world pass him by?

Read this article. Watch the videos. It's awesome.

Christos anesti!

And now for something completely different

I'm writing a post about violence in movies and literature in response to some of Vince's comments, but this popped through my reader and I just can't resist. From Terry Jones, of Monty Python fame, comes this editorial on the mistreatment of British prisoners in Iran. Here's the first paragraph:

I share the outrage expressed in the British press over the treatment of our naval personnel accused by Iran of illegally entering their waters. It is a disgrace. We would never dream of treating captives like this - allowing them to smoke cigarettes, for example, even though it has been proven that smoking kills. And as for compelling poor servicewoman Faye Turney to wear a black headscarf, and then allowing the picture to be posted around the world - have the Iranians no concept of civilised behaviour? For God's sake, what's wrong with putting a bag over her head? That's what we do with the Muslims we capture: we put bags over their heads, so it's hard to breathe. Then it's perfectly acceptable to take photographs of them and circulate them to the press because the captives can't be recognised and humiliated in the way these unfortunate British service people are.

Violence

After my last post, I got a comment from Vince, a friend from church, who writes, among other things,

A couple of very mature Christians that I respect were discussing and laughing about "Kill Bill". With some trepidation I decided to see what they were raving about. I was appalled and never got beyond the kitchen scene. The beauty of humans should remain so.

Certainly there is a place for graphic violence, but only in the despising of graphic violence ... "Schindler's List" for instance.

Just a bit of elderly exhortation.

Your character and kindness seem to bear the violence well, but only in spite of these gruesome selections.

Where to start? Maybe with kung fu movies. As long-time observers of my life will know, I have been a Jackie Chan fan since I first saw Rumble in the Bronx at Mike Tosch's house way back when. I find the cartoony violence of Who Am I? and Drunken Master II (in the US, dubbed and retitled Legend of Drunken Master) delightful, more people dancing and pretending to hit each other than actually violent. (Chan's taken a real downturn of late in the very soggy Around the World in Eighty Days and The Tuxedo, but I'm sure he'll be on top again any month now.)

Some of his grittier outings like Police Story appeal to me less, and I prefer to go without the gory stuff you could see in a lot of Jet Li's wire-fu and gangster movies. And then there is the really beautiful stuff in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Hero. We could go on, but I think these three broad categories of kung-fu violence are a good place to start: cartoony up to delightful, realistic up to gory, and fantastic up to beautiful.

The first and third cases are not exactly graphic. Maybe they desensitize people to violence in the long run, slowly wearing down one's defenses, like gateway drugs. Start with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or GI Joe, or The Lone Ranger?), end with Kill Bill. I won't focus on this slippery slope. Some people really do stop at social drinking and other people stop at Jackie Chan. I'll also include Buffy and Angel somewhere on the slippery slope, because violence is certainly a theme, but it's just not that realistic. Or, you might say, the violence is less realistic than the characters and their stories and relationships.

I am more inclined to think of realistic, gory violence like one might see in a horror film, an action movie, a crime drama, a war movie, a historical or similar depictions as the broad class of graphic violence that Vince is advising against. So let's try to make a case against gratuitous graphic violence. One film that pops to mind is Bad Taste, a zombie movie featuring a dude with his braincase falling open, said brains being munched on by scavenger birds and zombies, ripping apart said zombies with a chainsaw. Ad nauseam. (Incidentally, the director/actor of this movie is Peter Jackson, the same guy who made that Lord of the Rings trilogy and got that Oscar sweep. True story.) And the argument would go, whatever redeeming content this movie has, the violence is essentially at right angles to it, and overwhelms, say, the story, script, direction, cinematography, costuming, and such.

By changing the example movie and exchanging the word "sex" for "violence", we will essentially arrive at the Supreme Court's argument about distinguishing obscenity from art, or more specifically, pornography from erotica. And the infamous line from that argument is "I'll know it when I see it", which is really no argument at all. The reason they had to say that was the definition of obscenity that they used: "prurient, patently offensive expression, lacking serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value." The Supreme Court couldn't define most of those words, so they had to substitute human instincts, or community standards, or an appeal to obviousness to make these judgments. If our goal were to judge violence in movies by this legal standard, we would have similar problems.

Here's that list of genres again: horror, action, crime, war, historical/realistic. Here is an example each from these genres, so you know what I'm thinking of as I write: Nightmare on Elm Street, True Lies, Law and Order (a TV show, not a movie), Saving Private Ryan, Black Robe. Looking at it again, I suppose this is a rough order of how high the bar should be to consider violence as having serious artistic or literary value. The case is hardest to make for horror, with its splatter and torment of innocents, playing the notes of fear and disgust in relentless, dissonant jangles. Action movies at least excuse their killings by portraying the victims as evil and concentrating on killing as heroics. Which of these two last is more pernicious is an exercise for the viewer. Crime dramas, though, have the potential to tell us about human psychology and engage our minds in a mystery. Depending on how dark the psychology, we may encounter more graphic violence. In war movies, violence is still more germane to the action. Historical or realistic portrayals of human behavior, and the capacity of humans to do violence to one another, are extremely important too, even as Vince mentioned.

But if that's so, where do you draw the line on violence? Can extremely graphic violence be excused by extremely artistic content? Or by extremely probing, meaningful human stories? Or by meditating on violence? Vince says no to the first. However amazing Kill Bill is as film-making art (I haven't seen it), that doesn't excuse the wanton, graphic violence, which Tarentino could have omitted, if he wanted to, just by making a different sort of movie. When violence is entwined inextricably with the story, though, or when violence is the story, what then?

For instance, was the violence in The Passion of the Christ gratuitous? I read some reviews saying it was overdone. I could see that. I cringed as I watched it, I felt numbed by it all. I found myself translating Latin numbers as the soldiers counted out the strokes of Jesus' flogging. (As an aside, I also do prime factorizations of the timestamp on the DVD player when I find myself looking away from a movie.)

On the other hand, although some of the incidents in the movie came from extra-biblical sources (such as the face of the Messiah on St. Veronica's handkerchief, or the sopping up of the blood by Mary and the other women), most if not all of the violence is right out of the Gospel narratives, and it's probably never been as completely depicted on film as it was there. Was there value in seeing that, value that I couldn't have gained by just watching the Jesus film (mostly Luke's gospel; this is the one that has been translated into almost a thousand languages) and letting my imagination do the work?

Just before Vince wrote, by chance, I saw another movie that put these issues in perspective for me. When I told Sarah about it, I said, "Well, it was really violent, but..." It's called Children of Men, and it just came out on DVD. It's the year 2027, and women mysteriously ceased to have children eighteen years previously, and the youngest people are now 18. So long without a cure for infertility, without children, and the world has descended into madness, despair, loss. It is a harsh, violent world. England is cracking down on illegal immigrants, sending them to camps. Revolutionaries rebel against the totalitarian government by blowing things up. A man makes his way through this world and kills when he thinks he must. The violence is very realistic, although it's more realistic as in war than as in gruesome gory details.

The movie is amazing. I can't help but highly recommend it. It's deep, it's poignant, it made me cry huge sobs near the end. It has a lot to say about children, and violence, and hope, and it's very well made. Of course, if you are deeply offended by realistic violent content, you'll have to steer clear. And that's the crux of the thing right there: how much violence are you willing to watch in the pursuit of these human moments, or otherwise redeeming content?

When I talked about obscenity, I mentioned that we'd run into major quandaries trying to judge the artistic value of movies to the precision of a legal standard. In America, we tend to rate more heavily against sexual content than violent content, or at least the ratings board of the Motion Picture Association of America does for us, but this is all very ad hoc and informal.

Suppose we want a higher standard than just legalities and broad cultural opinions. How does being a Christian play into these issues of adult content? I am no expert, so what follows is all me. The verse that comes to mind is Paul's "whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable--if anything is excellent or praiseworthy--think about such things." There's an obvious interpretation of this verse (no doubt similar verses could be discovered) that suggest that Christians are to confine themselves to milquetoast art. All I can say about that particular interpretation is that I've tested it with my own life and found it wanting.

Vince's comment hints at the idea that there is such great non-violent art out there that I could spend a lifetime on the excellent and praiseworthy, without getting around to the violent and disgusting. And the work he points to, while excellent, is not just naive about human behavior. Silence, one of my favorite books, depicts the torture and martyrdom of Christians in feudal Japan, and tells the story of a priest's loss of faith and renunciation of Christ. The first time I read this book, it was like a bombshell going off in my newly-minted fundamentalism. I was drawn afterward, like the author, Shusaku Endo, to the worrisome cases, to depictions of sinners more than saints. Lurking underneath this is probably a connection to my relative tolerance of violence and inhumanity in literature and on the screen.

I find that it's hard to compromise on excellence in art, to censor that great emotional connection I make as a reader and viewer with the artist who created the work. Sometimes they will show me, horrified, things I might prefer not to see, but things they think are important for me to see. Shusaku Endo certainly goes that route in one of my other favorites, Scandal, probably the most affecting portrayal of evil I have ever read. I would certainly call it excellent and praiseworthy, but co-mingled with the story's beauty is a very real heart of darkness. Did God want me to go there? I say yes.

None of that is to say that I'm ignoring Vince's lists of great works (on the books, I actually have a generous head start). I want to see great stuff that's not also rated R. And I do avoid gratuitous violence on principle, as an offense to human dignity. But there's a big grey area in between that I haven't sussed out yet.

I guess I'll mention, last, that I too am a non-violent sort of person and I haven't had any need to create graphic violence in my little world. I imagine myself as a conscientious objector and hope I'd be brave enough to say no in the event that someone asked me to pick up a gun for my country, or design a better nuclear bomb.

Busy busy

Hi everyone. In the last couple of weeks, I've been to Silicon Valley and Austin. Now I'm off to Denver on Friday. Get your all-expenses-paid recruiting trips in while you can, space is limited. They all seem like great offers.

I read a cute little book called Understanding Comics, by Scott McCloud. It's a deceptively simple book that's a comic about comics; their semantics, their special idioms, their potential, their uniqueness. I loved every minute of it, and even though I can't draw worth beans, it inspired me to put pencil to paper and do a couple of strips. I am certainly fascinated by comics, as my reading list shows, if not enough to become a starving comics artist.

I read a graphic novel (emphasis on graphic) called From Hell on the plane, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. It's a sprawling black and white about the Jack the Ripper murders, poverty, violence, freemasonry, Victorian England. It's one of the best and one of the most disturbing things I've ever seen and read. Rated a very strong R, if not worse. I don't see how they could make it a movie. Whether it's true or not, who could say.

I also finally finished a book I've been chewing on for months: Database in Depth, by CJ Date. It's a look at the relational model that underlies (or, rather, should underly) virtually all modern databases, and has for decades. My particular background with logic made some of the material more obvious to me. I am in a peculiar position, because I probably have more experience with relational theory than I do with actual database products like Postgres or MySQL, which basically turns the usual order of education inside out and backwards. If you're a computer science dude or a programmer and you've never thought much about data management or relations, I highly recommend it. It is concise, readable, occasionally crotchety and opinionated, and highly illuminating. I was surprised at how interested I became in the topic as time went on.

Yet another couple of plane books. I read Freakonomics, a bestseller about microeconomics with interesting applications, by Stephen Levitt and Stephen Dubner. It showcases datasets that are more interesting than the run-of-the-mill demand curves, and draws out some classic results from economics, with somewhat bizarre human results. For instance, sumo wrestlers have, at times, strong incentives to take a dive on the last match of a tournament, and drug-dealing operations have an org chart not unlike your neighborhood McDonald's.

I also read a cool book on the origins, motivations, and contents of the Microsoft puzzle interview. It's called How Would You Move Mount Fuji?: Microsoft's Cult of the Puzzle -- How the World's Smartest Companies Select the Most Creative Thinkers by William Poundstone. Don't let the title scare you. It's a mind-bending trip through the history of IQ, the trouble with one-hour interviews, and Microsoft, along with answers to some of the worst puzzles. Entertaining even if you are not interested in interviewing at Microsoft. And then there's me, who will interview with just about anyone these days. Mom recommended this one to me. Thanks Mom.

I totally forgot, but I still have Cujo and The Stand to read, so maybe I'll take those on the plane. I also picked up Thomas Pynchon's V on a whim, and Lauren Winner's memoir Girl Meets God. And as for the computer textbooks I've been reviewing with for my interviews... well, the less you know about those the better. If I actually finish one, which is a distinct possibility, I'll let you know.

By the way, have you been watching this US attorney thing blow open? My feed reader is overflowing from all the travel, to the point where I'm thinking about renting a laptop at the hotel just to read for a few hours. People deserve to go to jail for that one. Letting smart, competent attorneys go because they're investigating your corrupt buddies is out of the frying pan, into the firing. I'd be more indignant about it, but I guess the Bush people have managed to saturate my scandal circuits. I mean, screwing with corruption investigations is one thing, but then lying to Congress about it? And they still don't have their stories straight weeks later? If the medium is the message, the history of this administration will be written in feces.

It's a long way to the top

if you want to get a job.

I'm flying out to Mecca... uh, that is, the Silicon Valley, for the first time today. The company is good. Other interviews and fly-outs are pending.

Sarah is disappointed because it doesn't look like she'll get to fly out with me to Austin in a couple of weeks.

I am still hoping for something in Seattle, and so are my parents, and some of my friends are hoping I can find something here in Utah, but time's a-wasting.

Happy 10th

Buffy the Vampire Slayer first aired ten years ago today. Sarah and I bought seasons 2 and 3 of Angel (the interleaved spin-off) and we've been chain-smoking them for the past few weeks. These are what great television can be: deep, witty, exciting, moving, and character arcs fifty episodes long.

I read the V for Vendetta comics in one sitting yesterday. Excellent. They were different from the movie in some ways, of course, but I think Alan Moore's beef with the remake was really overblown. A lot of the movie was word for word, shot for panel. If anything, some of the cruft was edited out for the movie, like the computer and the LSD trip. The strongest part of the comic, about the twin, entwined nature of democracy and destruction, came through very strongly in the movie too. I was also surprised to find that all of the great stuff with Stephen Fry was only hinted at in the comics, but it was fleshed out really well in the movie.

Inspired by my encounter with Positively Fifth Street, I finished the original great poker memoir, The Biggest Game in Town, by A. Alvarez, a writer for the New Yorker. He wrote this in 1982, chronicling Stu Ungar's second straight win of the World Series of Poker main event.

Like Positively Fifth Street, it went beyond poker into accounts of Las Vegas and the gambling life, and it managed to capture something that I think went missing from the later book. To be a gambler, you have to stop caring about being broke. Being broke happens. You have to risk it all and lose it all to win it all. This means the gambler requires a remarkable resiliency and freedom to fail, and it's one of the many reasons I can't do this for a living. On the other hand, though, David Sklansky, game theorist and gambler extraordinaire, has never been broke...

Set forward your clocks.

Craziest week in a long time

Last Friday, my friends' baby Olivia died. She had congenital heart defects and it finally got to the point where she couldn't recover from either her defects or the operations to fix them. She was four and a half months old. Sarah and I visited her a few weeks ago when she had come home (still on oxygen) and Sarah took some lovely pictures of her.

On Monday, we went to the private viewing for Olivia in a mortuary in Ogden. We saw some friends, which is a strange thing about funerals. For Sarah's father's parents' funerals, there was an air of happiness and togetherness that would have been altogether out of place at Olivia's. I talked to Aaron, her father, and he was taking it about as well as anyone could.

On Tuesday, we went to the funeral and saw more friends. The coffin was tiny and white, with fake handles. The pallbearers wheeled it on a little cart like you might use for an overhead projector. Aaron gave a very moving tribute to her life.

At times like these, I think you wonder, "Where is God?" The platitudes that we share at funerals are unconvincing. It reminds me of The Brothers Karamazov, where Ivan says, suppose we could build heaven on earth, and all we required was the unredeemed suffering of an innocent child. We were with the family at the gravesite too.

On Wednesday, there was a career fair. I dropped off about 15 resumes. The employers seemed impressed with my record. On Thursday I had an interview for a tax software place and on Friday I had an interview with National Instruments. They both seemed like good companies. On Thursday, the HR lady said they'd probably be flying me to Denver for a last interview.

On Friday they said less, but it was still interesting. I did some Electrical Engineering 101 in a question on hardware. What devices would be necessary to measure the temperature of a room? I said you could train a camera on a mercury thermometer, then use image processing techniques to find out where the break is between the mercury and the empty glass. My interviewer said later that no one had ever done it that way before. That's because it would be stupid, he didn't say. But I learned a little bit about how an electrical engineer would think through the problem, measuring voltage and converting the analog signal to digital. It all felt very familiar, object-oriented design like data flow diagrams in UML, just with physical devices I hadn't used before. Even though I sucked at it for my first time, it was actually kind of fun. They also gave me a copy of their flagship software, LabView, and that was fun to mess around with too.

I have a lot of job stuff to do, but mostly I am just tired, tired, tired.