I began my doctorate at Cardiff University with the thought that Michel Foucault was still interesting to read after all these years. I had begun to purchase the lectures when they were translated into English in 2003 or so. They reminded me of the struggle to annunciate thoughts, the difficulty of saying something that changed the way people thought about the world, to say truth, even when it went against the norms of the day.

The latest of the lectures, released just last week, is The Government of the Self and Others from 1982-1983. I am reading the first lecture and receiving the words with a freshness that makes me write of Foucault as if he were still alive, teaching this just now, and I am saddened that he died.

The shame of losing him is another thing. The brisk and incisive scholarship of his mature work is often clouded in the minds of some people with a rejection of the man himself who struggled early in his life with being homosexual. Later he did not struggle, but defended the right of homosexual people to live and experience life without the censure and disapprobation of a conservative culture that had never and has not yet cleaned up its own propensity for violence. It is a shame that knowledge unearthed and constructed in this man cannot find the light of day because people are blocked by their own sense of moral propriety.

It is senseless to speculate what would have happened had he lived, what he would have said. But the records of his life are being unearthed again and again. I am doing this in my dissertation, hoping there is a place in the conservative culture I am embedded in for the exposure of his knowledge irrespective of the person who unearths it.

This is a fun thing, partially, telling conservatives that C.S. Lewis drank quite a bit, saying how great men don’t follow petty moral visions, that for all their authoritative ring, don’t even know what the Bible said, or if they know, have discounted it because it conflicts with their own personal convictions.

Not so Foucault. Never afraid of challenging his own or others notions, he nonetheless managed to work toward a challenging and holistic moral vision around the problems of self construction within the matrices of necessity surrounding all of us.

Thanks Michel. There’s plenty of work to be done. Time for my dissertation.

I am constantly bumping into references to science that force being scientific into the material/spiritual dualism I have begun to reject. But on that account, I really must define what it is that I think the real world is made up of. As I have said before elsewhere, John A. Wheeler’s quip that “it comes from bit” is an adequate description of what is real. The universe in all its diversity is neither material or spiritual, but rather, information. The experiences of the material world and non-material are all generated within the universe. Why is it that we need to attribute those effects to different kinds of stuff, as if wonder and concrete are opposing each other.

I clicked the link to my blog hoping to find something new there. I thought, dang it, this is not Twitter where something surprising may turn up. This is my blog. If something new is going to turn up it will have to be me that does it. I’m leaving now.

Sometimes I wonder if what I do at AGWM Communications is worth what they pay me for. We bought a new barebones computer to build for development here. When I had it all built and tested it, it wouldn’t come up. So after talking to Shuttle tech support, I bought another processor and memory, swapped the old ones out and tested again. Still, no joy. So, we ordered a new barebones and tested it. When it came in, I had another monitor I brought in for Tonny to build the touchscreen with, a nice, widescreen monitor. The new computer fired right up with the original memory and newer processor. Great! So then, the OS had not arrived by that time, so I emailed the seller. They had not shipped it, but did so pronto, and I got it on the cutoff day. I hooked up the new barebones after finishing the build, and hooked it up, started it. No joy. So I thought, maybe the monitor was screwed up, and used another one. Up it came and the build is proceeding properly.

OK, I thought, oh my gosh, all the trouble with the original barebones, and tech support, and finally RMA hash up, no box, etc. Money down the drain? I should have used another monitor in the first place, or at least suspected it. But I didn’t suspect the monitor because I have been using it for a few years on my Mac and it works fine. Something in the generic DVI driver in the Shuttle couldn’t hook up, and so I thought the computer was bad. Shame is washing over me in waves.

I know why AGWM Communications keeps me on the payroll. It is because in general, I keep everything else running, even ten-year-old equipment that in some other shops would have been recycled years ago. Thanks guys and gals for all the love.

Complete first draft of my dissertation by September 2010
Followed by Revisions taking you to spring 2011- submit April and then hopefully a viva within two months of submission

The screen I am looking at is fuzzy because I am looking through glasses that were too weak for me four years ago. I rubbed the best and longest lasting glasses on my shirt today and the connecter between the two lenses broke. Tape didn’t help. Where is Hermione when I need “occulous reparo.” It’s ten thirty in the evening Sunday. I just finished watching Stargate Universe. The writing is better later in this season. They’ve met aliens and landed on a planet that was created by aliens. Still a lot of personal drama, but the characters are getting more believable as the show goes along.

I spent some time reading “The Reason For God” by Timothy Keller this last week. I find myself agreeing with him in many ways. As it has become ordinary with every book I read now, there is always the inner critic forcing an evaluation on the material. Obviously Keller is not trying to comprehend all the end results of the arguments. He doesn’t cover everything, he doesn’t intend to do so. Still the book is really clear and easy to read. The arguments are easy to follow and the problems are ones we do face with some regularity.

I am thinking of the theology class in the fall I am teaching. It is the first seated class in a few years. I don’t want to waste this opportunity piling a truck load of crap on the students. What I really want is to provide for them a good reason for making the project of theology their own, for finding a way of integrating concepts of God into their ordinary life.

Is it possible to derive democracy from the Bible? If it is, then it should be easy enough to permit freedom in others that doesn’t impinge either on my freedom, or on the stability of society. If it isn’t possible, then why should Christians move toward its defense? Or, laterally, is every effort to “Christianize” government an attempt to move away from democracy?

I now have two great nephews on the east coast on my family’s side. On my wife’s side, I have a huge pile of great nephews and great nieces. But shortly I will upload a couple pics of Owen, the son of my nephew Chris and his wife Bronwyn, and Finley the son of my niece Allison and her husband Dan. Owen is one month younger than Finley.

I’m almost relaxing now. Last year in the beginning of January, I realized that my old web host, CIHost was suffering terminal invasion. My own website olena.com had been hacked and was spewing out spam, etc. OK. Stuff happens. So, tired of being in my own dedicated server, and tired of being the last to be updated, and then only if I begged and paid, I moved away from CIHost to JustHost on a shared server. After a year of minimally frustrating activity after the flurry of work from the move, I got tired of their fuzzy administration and screwy tech support and asked them to consolidate all my billing. One record, one administration. I had no idea what kind of a firestorm that would light. They consolidated all my billing alright by (without my permission) putting all my clients inside olena.com as addon domains, all the data which was in the http directory of my own domain.

Then, to add insult to injury, they couldn’t move the databases over without a lot of cajoling tech support and endless waiting on hold. What a mess! Then there were email problems and poorly behaving web sites, etc. It was grinding me to a pulp with worry for my customers even though olena.com seemed not to be suffering too much.

I examined new web hosts and moved my most irate and oldest customer over to Fat Cow. I don’t blame him for being irate. He is happy now. For the rest I finally settled on a cloud server farm called Media Temple. The dedicated servers are virtual. In other words, a number of dedicated virtual (dv) server clients are on the same hardware, but it is as if they are all on separate servers.

I am not one to leave things alone, and I hit the repair button in the virtual server control panel when I couldn’t get the backup utility to do what I wanted. All hell broke loose, or maybe just my stupidity broke loose of its usual moorings. The entire server became invisible from the net, email, web hosting, etc. It was completely off line while it repaired itself. It took an hour before I had the courage to hit the restart button, after I had called tech support and they told me “good luck, you’re on your own, here’s a file that might help.” The server came up happily and it was working 100%. I can hardly believe I dodged that bullet. I am sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop. But 24 hours later, as hard as it is to believe, I think things may be OK. I am not going to hit that repair button again, unless everything is completely broken. I hope I am not stupid enough to break it like that.

You may or may not be surprised to know that the insular character of modern conservative church life is one of the chief reasons people reject the gospel. If you are really interested in helping people find Christ you will expand your borders beyond the default comfort zone. As Isaiah said, “Woe to you who are at ease in Zion.” People need saving, and closing ourselves off from them and their ideas is a sure way to get them to ignore us.

We permit football (the modern equivalent of bloody gladiator sports) into our Christian homes, not only because it will get people saved if they realize some of the players are Christians, but because we like it. To shut off science because it somehow sullies our Christian thinking is a bit hypocritical. Some of you may also shun the sports arena. That’s fine. I admire your purity. But Jesus went where the people went. He didn’t sit in the Temple and wait for people to come to him.