Dang, I always get myself into these things. I took the bait and upgraded my server. What it means is that I am having to learn all over again how to behave in the newish control panel. I am still at Media Temple and so the transition is not so rough. They have a terrific knowledge base that gets me through the pinches, but since the host works so well, and I have had to do next to no maintenance this year, I have forgotten most of what I know.

S’OK. I expect to be up to speed soon, and working all this out. It is close to 2 AM yet, I am happy that I got this blog to work. Great!

I am saving a bit of money though, and even though it’s a hassle upgrading, I have learned in the last 1o years as a hosting provider, that if you don’t upgrade, pretty soon your websites get left in no man’s land, the empty basement, with no maintenance, and the hackers eagerly hacking into seemingly forgotten sites.

That happened to me once at CIHost.com. I discovered to my dismay that my site had become a spam outlet, and the index page a popup generator. I lost control and got shut down. You never expect that, but it happens. CIHost is now forwarded to another provider. They lost control also and died.

OK, so I’m happy about upgrading, except all the work involved.

I grew up in a house where respect for science was common currency, not unlike many houses in the United States. My mother, before marrying my father, was a research chemist. Both my parents took it as gospel that science and reason give us useful access to the world and its wonders. I grew up believing the earth was ancient and the universe even older. As readers of National Geographic, we all followed the exploits of the Leakey family as they fleshed out a plausible narrative of ancient paleontology. Louis Leakey was both a follower of Darwin and a devout Christian, not an unusual combination in the circles my parents traveled in.

When I became a believer in the early 1970s I began a long and sometimes tortuous relationship with the evangelical church. I had no problem with Jesus, but some of his followers weren’t so happy with me. God, however, saved me in many ways by the blood of Christ and fellowship of the saints. I needed the church and devoted my life to serving God.
My evangelical adoption came with many things as a package deal. Short hair (no big deal, I was in the Air Force anyway,) a literal interpretation of the Bible, and a deep devotion to God. I’m sure you can guess where we are going with this. I adopted with my new family a literal interpretation of the Bible, itself a very modern method, and struggled to reinterpret the world in those terms. I have to say that in my euphoria of early salvation, I glossed over the troubling consequences of literal interpretation and because of my grateful reaction to God I rebuilt my world with a young earth view.

None of my education at Valley Forge Christian College prepared me to face the consequences of such a naïve view of the scripture, though I was learning that not all scripture could be read literally. I did adopt an old earth view during that time, seeing that it was one reasonably supported view in Christianity. The curious thing was that I defended it with a strange logic of scripture. God perceived that a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day. So, if time was relative to God, then I also would count the six days of creation to be relative. This realization did nothing to dissuade me from literalism, if I could import a reasonable argument to defend what, on the surface, appeared to be true, that the earth looked like it was very old.

I discovered later that the young earth creationists, many of them my brothers and sisters in Christ, also believed that the earth appeared to be very old. What seemed strange to me was that they spent most of their time proposing arguments more gimmicky than mine to prove that the earth was actually very young. I rebuffed their nuances when I realized that they were not as interested in doing science as they were in discrediting it. I started to see those people as one would see a dull witted uncle who still argues that the New Deal of Roosevelt’s era was a bad idea. You still invite him to Thanksgiving dinner but hope nobody brings up politics. My problem is that I like to get him going and ride the excitement, even though sometimes it turns sour. I don’t think he gets it.

When I was doing my doctoral studies at Temple University, I became interested in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. I discovered that within these disciplines, a critique of science was emerging that at once acknowledged the middle state of our knowledge and the embeddedness of the scientific enterprise within human limitations. Science, on this view, could not declare its findings with certainty, even though it had mastered technologies of many kinds. I found comfort in the realization that unlike the young earth creationists, the scientists, with many exceptions, were able to critique their own work. That seemed to be a much more honest way of engaging the world, and I adopted that ethos wholeheartedly. I hadn’t abandoned Christ, but believed that he would prefer this sort of humility against the principled dishonesty of the young earth creationists. I call it principled, because it resides within a tradition of biblical interpretation that had for a large part been a profitable means of exploring scriptural truth. I call it dishonest because its participants were not interested in the truth of the world any longer, but building a rational citadel against infidels. Their method had become naïve propositional logic and not faith in God.

In order to enter the kingdom of God one must become like a little child. Between the scientists and the young earth creationists, the scientists were more like little children being guided by wonder, beauty, and curiosity. I am not suggesting that scientists are blameless and more holy than the young earth creationists, but rather that they model an ethos that leads to the kingdom of God. They are also continuing to obey the command of God to subdue the earth.

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.