Entangled States

Third game this week

Behind home dugout today. Was behind visitors last Monday and then home plate on Wednesday.

Already down three runs in the bottom of the first. Gonna be hard to sweep this series.

David Ord: Becoming Real with Each Other

A friend of mine (actually my book editor) picked up on an off-hand illustration that I used in a sermon recently about why Christian marriage is a life-long affair and fleshed out the reasoning that undergirds my thinking.

He writes, in part:

"When we become serious about someone and in due course enter into a committed relationship, we are still hiding a large part of ourselves. We are hiding because we can’t believe some parts of us are lovable. We even try to hide these parts from ourselves much of the time.

But as time goes by, if our authenticity is allowed to grow and we show more and more of who we are to the other person, we find that this person has always known we are the very person we think we have been hiding—and they have loved us as this person we have been trying to hide.

It’s now that we can finally relax into loving ourselves.

Commitment isn’t about two people propping each other up, covering for each other, pretending together that their flaws and weaknesses don’t exist. It’s not about keeping masks in place. It’s about becoming increasingly authentic, and thereby learning to accept all the parts of ourselves into ourselves and at last own who we truly are."

Read the full article here.

David has a lot of interesting things up there. He's even gotten me to finally read "The Little Prince". Enjoy.

Photos of our Cathedral by Eric Brimhall

Eric posted some of these shots online earlier today. I'd not seen them before. He's done a great job of giving folks a sense of what the main worship space feels like at the Cathedral. See the photos here. Note that this set does not have pictures of the new pulpit that was just installed. We'll have to get them added soon hopefully.

2008 Advent Calendar

The Episcopal Diocese of Washington is continuing their Advent tradition and has a 2008 version of their online calendar.

From the website:

"Featuring daily meditations from Episcopal Café, videotaped interviews with the young people of the Bokamoso Youth Program in Winterveldt, South Africa, and opportunities to support Bokamoso and the Diocese of Washington's other ministries in Southern Africa. A new window will be available each day during the month of December. "

The calendar goes "live" on Dec 1, but in the meantime there are videos to watch and links to follow.

Bookmark the calendar here.

Maybe you can set up an Advent homepage through Christmas?

Thanksgiving Day Rainbow

Yay for Jawbones

My good friend Jan Nunley, one of the finest religious journalists I've ever known, has set up new digs for herself over at Jawbones.

Not sure what she's going to do with the site since it's just getting started:

"...oh my goodness yes. See, I've got Google Reader set up to capture feeds from most of the blogs over there on the left side of your screen (if yours isn't there yet, it's probably because you haven't posted this morning and I haven't added you yet, so calm down) and a lot of others in various areas of interest to me. The needle on the chatter meter is pegged, and that's without you Left Coasters having had a decent cup of java yet."

Read the full post here.

But it looks like she's going to continue the sort of meta-commentary on reporting that she was doing initially at Episcope before she stopped being the one posting there.

If that's true, then this is definitely a blog you're going to want to keep an eye on. Jan knows journalism and will point out good reporting and bad as it happens.

Nice to have her voice in the mix again.

I'm still here...

It’s been pretty quiet on this blog. I apologize for that. I’m still here and still trying to find some time to write.

I suppose it’s good news that I haven’t found time to say anything. We’ve been so busy at the Cathedral this fall with a large increase in new members (especially in our spanish-language congregation) that we’re all scrambling to keep a lid on all the pots that are wonderfully boiling over. Between that and getting ready for diocesan convention, there’s not been a whole lot of time to do much thinking, and even less writing.

And besides all that, I’m probably doing the same thing a whole bunch of you are doing; watching the stock market meltdown and worrying about what the coming year is going to bring for those of us in the non-profit world.

And now we are one!

Jim Naughton, the editor in chief of Episcopal Café posted this on the "Lead" blog this morning:

"We are celebrating our first anniversary today. We actually began operations in this incarnation on April 19, but we’ve decided that today is easier to remember, and probably represented the first day we had most of the bugs worked out and were getting a relatively clean read on our Web statistics.

We’d like to thank all of our visitors, especially those who make us a part of their daily routine. You make doing this work seem worthwhile.

[...]In our first year, we received about 1.36 million visits and 3.36 million page views. Our biggest sensation was an essay on a Japanese tourist begin kicked off a train for taking pictures, which drew nearly 60,000 visitors to the site in November—not quite double the 30,000 visitors (and 125,000 visits) per month we’ve been averaging since then. More people visit The Lead, our news blog, than any of our other offerings, but all of the blogs receive an average of at least 250 visits per day.

While people visit to keep up with the Anglican controversies and news of the Episcopal Church (and to read rip-snorting essays like this address by Marilyn McCord Adams to the Chicago Consultation), we’ve also had some off-beat hits like this April Fool's piece on the Episcopal Church being named the official denomination of Major League Baseball and Carol Barnwell’s interview with one of the students portrayed in Denzel Washington’s recent movie The Great Debaters."

Read the of his post here.

If you'd like to give some money to support some rennovations we'd like to do to the site (to make it more user friendly) Jim has posted a link over there that you can use to do that.

Fixin' me software

Hi all.

Today’s my day off. I’m sitting here at the house doing my chores (laundry, gardening, cleaning) and I remembered that I’ve been having problems with one of the programs (MacJournal) that I prefer to use for writing longish posts and essays for this here.

I’ve had it for so long, and mucked about with it’s internals that it’s managed to get itself completely confused about how to communicate as a client with the Typepad server.

So today I just went plowing through the various journals, archiving the ones that were no longer active and fixing the ones that I was regularly updating. If all the maintenance bears fruit, then this should appear with proper categories, and the formatting intact.

If not, then apparently I’ve got to dig a little deeper into the internals.

Update after posting...

Yay. Looks like I was able to fix the issue. (For those who care, it appears that MacJournal stores the server information in each journal that’s configured to post to the web. I had to nuke journals one at a time until I found the ones that were problematic. The problem was more on my end than that of the software author (Dan Schimpf). I’ve been running every beta he’s ever posted - and somewhere along the line something broke in my installation. But it seems to be working now.

The Mosher Pit » "Tag"

One of my online friends wrote this yesterday:

"The funny thing about being tagged in a “what are you reading” meme (as I was by Jamie Notter) is that I do much of my reading through audiobooks, so the book I’m currently reading doesn’t have a page number, although I could dig up the physical copy of the book if I looked around enough, that’s not true of most audiobooks I “read.” See, I have a long commute, and what makes it bearable is Fairfax County library’s extensive collection of CD audiobooks. Granted, I am an NPR fangirl (we’ve dug up the evidence from the 2004 archives and will migrate it here soon), but I love being read to."

Read the rest here.

And then Helen tagged me, and a few other people to list what we're reading.

You can see the blogs I'm reading over on the right-hand column.(And if I could figure out how to link it, I would...)

At the moment on my bedside table is a copy of "Barth for Armchair Theologians".

On my Kindle right now I'm reading:

• "World Without End" by Ken Follet
  
• "Aegypt" by John Crowley
  
• "Copernicus' Secret: How the Scientific Revolution Began" by Jack Repcheck
  
• "Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America" by Steven Waldman
  
• "The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism" by Timothy Keller
  
• "The Other Boleyn Girl" by Philippa Gregory

Sounds much more impressive than it is. But I'm hoping to have the pile of them done by the end of May so that I can start piling up some summer reading.

Me and my clever mouth...

Heh. A few months ago, after the announcement of what looked to be a large quantity of hydrocarbons were detected on the one of the moons of Saturn, I blogged about it by reporting that "A Massive" new reserve of oil has been discovered. Clever me huh?

Over the last two days, something like a third of my hits have come from people following links from Google Searches for "Oil reserve discoveries". Silly Google.

(Another third of my hits have come from my linking to a YouTube video of a ballet performed by Chinese Acrobats. No idea how that became so popular... but it's seems to have gotten onto someone's email listserv because a big chunk of the links are coming in from web email pages.)

Like I said. Heh.

Writer's Block

I've been struggling with finding a desire to write just about anything since the beginning of this past fall. I think I know the reason - which has to do with some family issues - and rather than rage against the void, I decided I'd be better served by just going along with the blockage. Luckily it seems to have mostly effected my online essay output, not my sermon output. (Though truth be told, my parish newsletter pieces have been pretty thin gruel of late.)

The good news is that I'm starting to feel the ideas bubbling up again. I've got a couple (maybe three!) ideas for Daily Episcopalian columns, I'm not dreading Fridays right now (the day I'm normally responsible for the news at the Lead), and I'm finding myself being drawn back to the basic questions of faith and reason that got me started blogging in the first place.

So it's all good.

I guess it's true what they say; when you find your self in a "dark" place, the only way to get out of it is to keep on walking. Eventually you'll start to climb again.

So keep an eye out here. Summer's coming, and I hear the clergy cavalry bugle signaling reinforcements are on their way to the Cathedral. I'm thinking I've got some time to do some of the writing that I'm starting to get excited about doing.

Anglicans Online, "A little help please?"

Anglicans Online, the site that began the process which created the constellation of Anglican websites is looking for some help.

From their front page:

"For the first time in 11 years, we're taking the cry of the Bereans as our own: Come over and help us! We could use some assistance. We welcome people who might like to be a part of this venerable website, one of the oldest on the web and perhaps the best known in the Anglican Communion.

This page will give you a bit of an idea of what it means to be a part of the Anglicans Online staff. We trust that will be helpful and not intimidating. Have a look — and see if you see yourself there. (Or here.)

For the entire 11 years of our time with AO, there's never been a paid advert anywhere on this site. We are a part of no official organization in the Anglican Communion. We don't apply for grants or gifts from Anglican bodies. (Instead, we adopt the quirky technique of having irregular and infrequent appeals for donations from our readers.) We offer Anglicans Online as our weekly labour of heart, soul, and mind, for the good of our beloved if somewhat broken Anglican Communion. We have no plans to do otherwise. We'd simply like a few other good souls to labour on with us."

Read the rest here.

Maybe you've been looking for a way to get involved?

Back to the past...

I've gotten bored with the "red" design. It was just too blah. So I've gone "back" to a design that's based on one I used a for a while (and really liked.)

The masthead picture (btw) is from a margin illustration in one of the Gospels in the Book of Kells.

I've finally gotten around to updating the "blog roll" on the left too. I think I've listed everyone that I make a habit of checking daily.

Flying Spaghetti Monster Prank

This is an April Fools day joke worthy of the students at MIT:

"Members of the Crossville, TN Chapter of The Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster have installed a giant Flying Spaghetti Monster statue outside The Cumberland County Courthouse in Crossville, Tennessee."

Read the fool story here.

Amazing pas de deux

As someone who used to dance (modern, not ballet) trust me when I tell you, this is one of the most extraordinary demonstrations of athleticism that I've ever seen...

And the frogs are pretty cool too.

Thanks to Craig+ for the pointer.

New Scientist on online Flames

New Scientist has an article today that discusses why it is that people present themselves so differently online than they do in person:

"Social psychologists have known for decades that, if we reduce our sense of our own identity – a process called deindividuation – we are less likely to stick to social norms. For example, in the 1960s Leon Mann studied a nasty phenomenon called 'suicide baiting' – when someone threatening to jump from a high building is encouraged to do so by bystanders. Mann found that people were more likely to do this if they were part of a large crowd, if the jumper was above the 7th floor, and if it was dark. These are all factors that allowed the observers to lose their own individuality.

Social psychologist Nicholas Epley argues that much the same thing happens with online communication such as email. Psychologically, we are 'distant' from the person we're talking to and less focused on our own identity. As a result we're more prone to aggressive behaviour, he says."

Interesting bit of information - that piece about deindividuation. I was one of the folks at Episcopal Cafe that insisted on making folks using their real names to leave comments on the site. My gut told me that doing so would raise the ratio of signal to noise. That's been the case by the way. I'm one of the moderators on the blog and I get to read all the potential comments submitted. The ones that have a fake name are substantially different than the ones with a real name attached.

Now I know why.

Read the rest here.

A new author! Welcome Deacon Bill

Some of you know that I spent a chunk of last month traveling around the state of Arizona meeting with other Episcopal clergy and talking about the work of writing for blogs. As a result of that series our bishop is now blogging and about 7 or so other clergy have blogs in the works. (That’s in addition to the 6 of us (lay and clergy) who were already blogging.)

One of our deacons was very interested in participating but wasn’t too keen about trying to learn the mechanics of actually creating a site, registering a domain, finding a host, etc. He is by training an epidemiologist and was interested in writing about the intersection of his scientific work and his ministry as a deacon. I saw an opening and went for it. Deacon Bill will be joining me on this blog as one of the authors. This is particularly exciting because I know just about nothing useful in the biological sciences. Having a “for real” biologist/epidemiologist working with me fills a gaping whole in the sorts of material I could post.

I asked Bill if he’d be willing to introduce himself, and he dug this bio up:

William(Bill) Martin was ordained as a deacon along with his wife, Nadine, in October, 2006. He retired from the Centers for Disease Control(CDC) and Prevention on December 31, 1998 and became a member of GSP in mid-2002.

Bill received his doctorate from the University of Utah in 1965 in medical microbiology and immunology. His professional career spans both academic medicine as well as public health and epidemiology. He held tenured positions at both UCLA School of Medicine and Tufts University School of Medicine in their Departments of Pathology, Medicine, and Microbiology and Immunology. In 1993, Bill took a position with the CDC in Atlanta where he was named Director of their Scientific Resources Program in the National Center for Infectious Diseases. This was Bill's second tour of duty at the CDC. He was employed there in 1965 as a research scientist in the Enteric Bacteriology Unit. It was in this position that he traveled a lot to the Third World countries and saw how these people "lived". He never forgot those experiences which are the prime reasons he is in his current ministries of helping the less fortunate persons whether they are the homeless or the immigrants trying to enter this country.

Back to my roots

Sorry for the lack of updates these past weeks. I’ve been swimming as fast as I can just to try to keep up with what’s really important - being a priest who serves a congregation. At the moment I’m the only full-time priest at the Cathedral, and as we’re growing, trying to ramp up our regular activities, and manage staff changes, it means that I’m running out of time to post.

But I’ve been thinking about the direction that I’d like to this blog over the next couple of years. When I started this blog, it was originally a website that I used to talk with my students at Lehigh about matters of faith and religion - something they were asking about in class but which I thought would be better handled outside. When General Convention in 2003 came around and I attended as a deputy, moving the webpage to blogger made it easier for me to write up what was happening at Convention each day and have it shared among the people of the diocese that elected me and the parish I was serving. Having gained a bit of notice for having done so, I kept at it. When I traveled to Swaziland the next year, this blog served as a travelogue of my trip and was an easy way for folks from the parish to travel with me.

But as we approached General Convention in 2006 I started using the blog to post information about the events in Columbus. 2006 was different than 2003 in that a number of people started using blogs to write up their experiences at Convention and share them with others. Following Convention an even larger number of people started going online and doing the same thing - and began a very intense conversation about what the Conventions in 2003 and 2006 meant to the Episcopal Church and to the Anglican Communion. It was during that time that I started trying to think through what it meant to be a moderate within the Episcopal Church.

But things in the blogsphere have changed in the last year. Last spring saw the beginning of Episcopal Cafe, a team blog that Jim Naughton, I and others had been dreaming up for some time. It’s built up quite a readership in the 6 months or so since it went “live”. On a good day I might get 500 readers here. Episcopal Cafe can see upwards of 100,000. As one of the regular contributors and part of the news-team, much of what I would have once posted here is instead going to the Cafe. Which is a good thing because its being seen by many more people. And a few months ago I was invited by some friends to be part of Covenant Communion. That site is still figuring out how it wants to work and what sort of voice it will share, its given me a place to engage with other moderate and some conservative voices on what it does mean to be moderate/centrist within the Episcopal Church.

So with two major areas moved offsite, what’s left?

I think I’d like to return to my original thoughts here - how science and theology interact with each other. I’m particularly interested in how good science can inform good theology. I’m also interested in the more practical matters of the ethical challenges that decisions made from a scientific viewpoint have for the people effected by them. (Global warming being a chief example.) I’ve also met a number of other scientists out here in Arizona with theological training who are asking if they might collaborate with me on this work. And having seen how well team-blogging works on two other sites, I’m grateful to accept their help and add their voices to the articles here. Look for some new authors over the next couple of months.

So the upshot is this: I’m going to focus more on Science vs Theology here - and start posting my thoughts about the Great Anglican Upheaval over on the Cafe and the Communion sites. We’ll see if I can stick to that, but at least for now it’s the plan. Grin. I will keep posting sermons here and other bits of writing that don’t fit in the other places. I’ll try to steal some time over the next week or so to reorganize the link list on the right and might reorganize the tags as well.

Arizona Bishop is a blogger

I've been going around the Diocese of Arizona this month giving a series of talks titled Online Evangelism: "Bloggin' for Jesus"

It's been great to see the clergy here in the diocese get excited about finding creative ways to connect directly with people seeking to learn more about Christianity and about the Episcopal Church.

I'm particularly excited to link to our bishop's first blog post at his new blog:

"This is my first experience in the world of blogging. The Dean of our Cathedral, the Vy Rev. Nick Kniseley has given the clergy of the diocese some lessons in 'Blogging for Jesus.' I hope to use this as a tool for reaching those in this Diocese and beyond."