Welp, since Google Plus is now dead, and my blog used it for commenting, I can no longer moderate old comments — including removing some spam. So I was reluctantly forced to switch to regular Google-based commenting, which nuked all old comments. My apologies, but…well.
On the upside, at least with this new commenting system, I can moderate more effectively than before. Comments are always welcome, but no spam, no personal promotion, and please keep it respectful and polite.
The following completes my series on Anglican history. Part I can be found here, and Part II can be found here. The text of this was originally posted on Quora in answer to a question there.
As I alluded to in Part II of this series, the common misconception is that Henry VIII “founded” Anglicanism (or at least the Church of England). That is actually completely false. The true founder — if we discount St. Augustine of Canterbury founding the English Church in 597 — was not Henry, but his daughter, Elizabeth. This is something of a pet peeve of mine…
Elizabeth I was formally the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, technically the first to hold that title. (Her father, Henry VIII, and her brother, Edward VI, had been Supreme Head, but many loyal English Catholics were offended by it and Elizabeth changed the title to appease them.) All British monarchs ever since Elizabeth have held that title.
The pet peeve is that it is commonly (and wrongly) said that Henry VIII “founded” the Church of England. He did not. The existing English Church simply cut ties to Rome. These ties were restored by Mary I, and again cut under Elizabeth.
It is also commonly (and wrongly) assumed that Henry dramatically reformed the Church of England, and that he left a lasting mark on it. Actually, Henry stoutly resisted any attempts at reforms, and feuded with Luther and the Reformers on the Continent. Priests were still required to be celibate, the Mass was still usually in Latin (though an English Bible was published), belief in transubstantiation was required by law (see Six Articles), prayers for the dead were still said. And anyway what little he did change was restored by Mary. (She was unable to reverse the Dissolution of the Monasteries for political reasons, but otherwise wiped out the few small changes Henry did allow.)
The Church of England — and with it the Anglican Communion as a whole — was reformed not by Henry, but by Elizabeth. The hallmarks of Anglicanism are not to be found in Henry’s church, but in Elizabeth’s, and broadly speaking, the essentials of the Elizabethan Settlement are still what makes Anglicanism unique in uniting Catholicism and Protestantism in a single body.
So if anyone could be said to have founded Anglicanism (besides Jesus Christ and St. Augustine of Canterbury), it would be Elizabeth — not Henry VIII. Her vision of a single church uniting all Christians regardless of denomination is what makes Anglicanism what it is today.
Hence I would argue that the only real service Henry VIII did for Anglicanism is fathering Elizabeth. She is the true central figure in Anglican history, and really should get a lot more credit for it.
The following was posted on Quora as a response to the question, “In the Bible it states, "thou shalt not lie with mankind, as with womankind, it is an abomination", Lev 18:22. Can someone be gay and be a genuine Christian, that is, accepting the Bible as the word of God, or that it contains the word of God, and doing ones best to follow it?”
The thing about such Biblical literalism — aside from the fact that this passage may well not say anything like the English translation you quote, as Lana Fisher correctly points out — is that you have to first understand what the Bible is and how it came to be. That in turn greatly affects how it should be interpreted.
The first question is, did the Bible create the Church of God, or was it the other way around? Did someone sit down and write it, and then we Christians all agreed to follow it as written? Or was it more like the Church already existed and then decided which existing writings were canon?
Any cursory reading of Church history shows that it was plainly the latter. The Bible did not fall from the sky fully formed, but took centuries to find its present form (and even now Christians can’t fully agree on which books belong to it, like the Biblical apocrypha). The various books that make up the Bible — along with many others, like the Gnostic texts — were floating around with varying degrees of acceptance by the early Christian congregations, but no “Bible” existed yet. Various lists circulated in those days containing books considered canon; they generally lined up, but there were sometimes significant differences.
Then the Church got together in a general council and decided on what books should be compiled into the Bible. Not only that, but they picked up on the already existing practice in Judaism (which evolved into modern rabbinical Judaism) of following an established tradition of how to interpret that canon — that is, the interpretations of learned experts approved by the Church took on a kind of canonicity of their own. Joe Shmoe can interpret the Bible any way he likes, but in the eyes of the Church, only that established tradition matters and Joe Shmoe has no authority to claim the Bible says this or that.
Thus the Church began that tradition with what we now call the Church Fathers, learned men (and they were generally men, or at least few writings from the period from women survive) who began to interpret the Bible based on that earlier Jewish tradition. And here is where it gets really interesting for this question.
The Church Fathers generally rejected a strict literalist interpretation of the Bible. Let that sink in a minute and read this quote by Origen of Alexandria, one of those Church Fathers (emphasis mine):
15. But as if, in all the instances of this covering (i.e., of this history), the logical connection and order of the law had been preserved, we would not certainly believe, when thus possessing the meaning of Scripture in a continuous series, that anything else was contained in it save what was indicated on the surface; so for that reason divine wisdom took care that certain stumbling-blocks, or interruptions, to the historical meaning should take place, by the introduction into the midst (of the narrative) of certain impossibilities and incongruities; that in this way the very interruption of the narrative might, as by the interposition of a bolt, present an obstacle to the reader, whereby he might refuse to acknowledge the way which conducts to the ordinary meaning; and being thus excluded and debarred from it, we might be recalled to the beginning of another way, in order that, by entering upon a narrow path, and passing to a loftier and more sublime road, he might lay open the immense breadth of divine wisdom. This, however, must not be unnoted by us, that as the chief object of the Holy Spirit* is to preserve the coherence of the spiritual meaning, either in those things which ought to be done or which have been already performed, if He anywhere finds that those events which, according to the history, took place, can be adapted to a spiritual meaning, He composed a texture of both kinds in one style of narration, always concealing the hidden meaning more deeply; but where the historical narrative could not be made appropriate to the spiritual coherence of the occurrences, He inserted sometimes certain things which either did not take place or could not take place; sometimes also what might happen, but what did not: and He does this at one time in a few words, which, taken in their “bodily” meaning, seem incapable of containing truth, and at another by the insertion of many. And this we find frequently to be the case in the legislative portions, where there are many things manifestly useful among the “bodily” precepts, but a very great number also in which no principle of utility is at all discernible, and sometimes even things which are judged to be impossibilities. Now all this, as we have remarked, was done by the Holy Spirit in order that, seeing those events which lie on the surface can be neither true nor useful, we may be led to the investigation of that truth which is more deeply concealed, and to the ascertaining of a meaning worthy of God in those Scriptures which we believe to be inspired by Him.(Origen of Alexandria, De Principiis IV.15, 3rd century AD — Source: ANF04. Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second)
* — What is meant here is that the Holy Spirit speaks to us through the Church as well as through our individual consciences.
To summarize Origen, we need guidance and understanding in interpreting Scripture, because sometimes the Bible was meant literally, sometimes it wasn’t. Clearly Jesus was being quite literal when He said to love our neighbors and to love God, but the Earth was plainly not created in six calendar days and the Flood didn’t really destroy the whole world. What matters is the spiritual truth contained in the narratives.
He also wrote, with another Church Father, Gregory of Nazianus, supporting him:
For who that has understanding will suppose that the first, and second, and third day, and the evening and the morning, existed without a sun, and moon, and stars? And that the first day was, as it were, also without a sky? And who is so foolish as to suppose that God, after the manner of a husbandman, planted a paradise in Eden, towards the east, and placed in it a tree of life, visible and palpable, so that one tasting of the fruit by the bodily teeth obtained life? And again, that one was a partaker of good and evil by masticating what was taken from the tree? And if God is said to walk in the paradise in the evening, and Adam to hide himself under a tree, I do not suppose that anyone doubts that these things figuratively indicate certain mysteries, the history having taken place in appearance, and not literally.(Origen of Alexandria, De Principiis IV.16, 3rd century AD — Source: ANF04. Fathers of the Third Century: Tertullian, Part Fourth; Minucius Felix; Commodian; Origen, Parts First and Second)
St. Augustine wrote similar things roundly criticizing a literal interpretation.
So…how do we decide? We refer back to earlier precedents in the writings of the Church Fathers, while also allowing for a range of opinion to exist. Only where the Church has definitively spoken in a general council is there any one possible interpretation binding on all Christians. The Church decides, not individuals, and only when it is in consensus. As Vincent of Lérins said in his famous rule of catholicity — i.e. that which is established canon and binding — id teneamus, quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est; hoc est etenim vere proprieque catholicum:
[6.] Moreover, in the Catholic Church itself, all possible care must be taken, that we hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all. For that is truly and in the strictest sense “Catholic,” which, as the name itself and the reason of the thing declare, comprehends all universally.St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory, 434 AD (Source: NPNF-211. Sulpitius Severus, Vincent of Lerins, John Cassian)
Dogma — in other words, something Christians must believe because the Church has decided so — is therefore only that which the Church has proclaimed in general council.
Which brings us to this question of homosexuality in particular. Has there ever been a general council that has defined this text to say what you think it says? Is homosexuality a sin or abomination? Of the seven ecumenical councils (i.e. those recognised by the Orthodox, Roman Catholics, Old Catholics, and in theory Anglicans), none say anything about homosexuality. Nothing. De nada. There were regional councils that did condemn “sodomy” at various times, though what they meant by that term changed over time, so we can’t even be sure that they meant homosexuality per se (e.g. a loving long-term relationship, as opposed to just having extramarital sex with people of the same gender or pederasty or beastiality or any of the many other things the term was applied to). But there has never been a definitive dogmatic statement from the whole Church — a statement establishing that this has been believed “everywhere, always, by all” — declaring that homosexuality as we understand it today is in fact a sin and that this passage means what you say it might mean. In fact there is some evidence that same-sex relationships in some forms may have been tolerated, even celebrated (see Adelphopoiesis), particularly in eastern Europe. At times the Roman Catholic Church has actually worked to decriminalize homosexual relations between consenting adults, like by supporting the Wolfenden Report in the UK in the 1960s or the National Federation of Priests' Councils in the USA noting their opposition to “all civil laws which make consensual homosexual acts between adults a crime”. Thus any claim to homosexuality being dogmatically defined as sin fails St. Vincent’s simple test — and thus a range of opinions is perfectly OK.
To answer your question based on the above: Yes, it is entirely possible to be gay and be a faithful Christian, unequivocally. I certainly hope many more do so, and am glad to personally know a great number of gay Christians (both clergy and laypeople) who enrich our church’s life. As for the great pain that many Christians have caused gays by claiming otherwise, I am deeply sorry and hope that their wounds will heal, whatever path they take.
I'm a longtime and diehard fan of the Washington Redskins, with many fond memories of the likes of Theismann, Riggins, Monk, Carter, Green and many other stars of the 1980s and 1990s. I also happen to think the controversy over the name, which some claim is racist, is overblown and misplaced, and distinctly remember being very annoyed when my beloved Redskins played in Minnesota in the 1980s (first play of the game: 68-yard TD pass from Theismann to Monk…I think I was the only person in the stands cheering) and saw a handful of protestors demanding the name be changed.
Having said that…I'm also a creative guy dontchaknow, and as such I had an idea. Just suppose the name had to be changed for some reason (like the NFL caves to pressure, something hardly unimaginable). What would an alternative be that would be palatable to someone like me?
So…I hereby propose the alternative "Washington Redbloods". The name would have many advantages: One, the classic script "R" logo used on ballcaps starting with Joe Gibbs could be maintained. Two, the old Lombardi-era "R" helmet (sometimes used in throwback uniforms) could be revived as a possible replacement for the Redskin head logo. (Yes, I would still keep the feathers as a reminder of the Redskins team's pride and tradition. The colors could however be reversed so that the helmet is red as now, not yellow.) Three, it would maintain the warrior fighting spirit of the Redskins name. Four, the "Hail to the Redskins" song could be kept, with just one syllable changed. Five, the warrior imagery from other throwback elements — the Sonny Jurgensen-era spear helmet, for example — would still make sense with the new name. And of course red would remain the dominant color.
So…while I'm still in favor of keeping the name as it is, I could certainly live with "Redbloods" as an alternative if the NFL does indeed cave in…which something tells me it will eventually.
Recently I had to plan and lead an English Morning Prayer service for a friend who got married Saturday. He wanted a quiet, meditative service, which is right up my alley, because that's how I like them anyway. (I like to go to the Benedictine monastery in my neighborhood for just that reason.) So it had lots of psalmody in plainchant - what most would refer to as "Gregorian" - which had the added benefit of me being able to lead everyone in singing easily and not having to rehearse hymns, since we would have no organist. That said, given that most attending wouldn't know hymns anyway, not being churchgoers, psalmody is quick to grasp and learn. Even so I was sure they'd want to hear at least one hymn, and it would have to be one they would readily know and that I could lead singing. So as a send-off, the closing hymn was "Morning has broken".
Thing is, I don't much like hearing it anymore, having heard it a few times too many, but I couldn't think of anything else. So out of frustration, I came up with my own version, to wit:
My wind has broken
Raised my leg highly
Foul stench has spoken
Face is a smiley
Smell of beans flowin',
Onions and broccoli,
Intestines twisting,
sing out all day.
Presumably from the filming of the original "Planet of the Apes", but priceless nonetheless.
As you no doubt have heard by now, the B-16 Bomber is heading to the hangar, which naturally opens the question of who will succeed him. I wish to throw my mitre into the ring, even though I don't actually have a mitre, or even a clerical collar, for that matter. No worries, Pope John XIX was in fact also a layman at the time of his election to the Papacy, and happens to share my name, so I take that as a good omen. So I'd be Pope John XXIV, give or take a few antipopes.
Vote me for Pope! The one in Rome, not one of those other ones. I promise incense in every thurible and baptism for all!
My girlfriend says I'm such a smart creative guy, why can't I choose the right lottery numbers? So I choose ½, π, √-1, 911, e, and Planck's constant. I plan to sue the lottery authority for discrimination against non-whole numbers not between 0 and 50, too. Numerist bastards.
After a long hiatus, the reason for which is explained in the sermon below, I've written my first sermon in well over two years. Hope you gain something from it.
Isaiah 43:1-7, Psalm 29, Acts 8:14-17, Luke 3:15-17, 21-22
Today we’re celebrating the Baptism of Jesus, part of the Christmas season leading up to Candlemas on Feb. 2nd. The events described in the Gospel today have an obvious personal reminder for me.
Back in 2010, here in this church something extraordinary happened right over there behind you – I had the great honor and pleasure of sponsoring Jon for his baptism. It was a moving and powerful experience, and I was deeply honored to be a part of it, welcoming Jon into the Church. I’m very glad and proud to see how he’s become such a pillar in our parish in the time since then.
In the process of that Easter Vigil 2010, not only was he baptized, but also in a sense this church we’re standing in now was itself baptized. It was the first service we celebrated in this church that we are truly blessed to have, the first baptism to be held in it, and the waters in the baptismal pool were in turn used to renew our own baptismal vows and to hallow the church long before it was formally consecrated by our bishop almost 18 months later.
It was also, however, in a way the beginning of the end for me, though of course I had no idea about it at the time. As you may remember, Jon was not the only person who was baptized that night. The other person, Michelle, and I developed a powerful attraction to each other, and my horrible guilt over what I felt was the final straw that led directly to the breakdown of my marriage. My life of apparent normality and seeming stability came crashing to an end not long after, seemingly without warning. My marriage fell apart, my family torn to pieces, and my own personal unhappiness, which until then had largely been hidden from the rest of the parish and the outside world for literally years, exploded into view for all to see. It was without a doubt the worst time of my life, and I’m still sorting through the emotional debris left over.
For a time I seriously considered leaving the parish and never coming back. But I didn’t want to abandon the place where I had invested so much of myself. So to try and reboot, to get out of the spotlight and let things calm down, I withdrew from my parish duties while still attending services. Those duties included doing something I really enjoyed, which was writing sermons for the English services. This is the first time I’ve preached since then, and I have to say, I feel very strange doing it precisely because of all those events that began around the time of that Easter Vigil. When writing this, I often wondered if I even belong up here.
So do I have any business talking to you about right and wrong, about moral issues? My moral example is damaged goods. Without putting too fine a point on it, I’m an adulterer, a sinner. I caused immense pain to my wife and kids and disappointed and shocked a lot of people. To top it off, Michelle and I later broke up, compounding the pain and uproar. I’ve had a hard enough time asking the forgiveness of the Church, but the hardest part of all has been to forgive myself. So I hardly feel like I should be up here now. And I also can’t help but wonder what would be going through the minds of my ex-wife or ex-girlfriend or my friends if they were here listening now, let alone what God thinks about all of it.
But maybe today’s Gospel has a ray of hope for me. In the Gospel, Jesus, the one human being without sin, the one person who ever lived who didn’t need baptism in any sense, that Jesus goes to John the Baptist and asks him for baptism. In the parallel reading in the Gospel of Matthew, John exclaims to Jesus that Jesus should be baptizing him, not the other way around.
Maybe it’s because of the name, but I can easily place myself in John’s shoes right now. I’m supposed to stand here and act all holy and wise and pretend I can teach you something in a sermon, when I feel like I’m the one who needs teaching and guidance most. To carry the metaphor further: The Church, like the local parish, is referred to as the Body of Christ, and at the Eucharist, we often say we receive the Sacrament so that we “may become what we have received, the Body of Christ”. In effect I’m John the Baptist standing here in front of Christ’s body – that would be you – and wondering what the Body of Christ wants with someone like me, because I certainly don’t feel worthy to do much of anything church-related. Like John, I’m here exclaiming, “who, me?!”
I have a wonderful book I love to read to the kids at bedtime, called Mungo and the Picture-Book Pirates. It’s about a little kid named Mungo who loves having a pirate story read to him multiple times every night. But the hero of the book, dashing Captain Horatio Fleet, gets tired of having to go through the motions of being the hero so many times in one evening. As he is leaving the book to go on a holiday, he tells Mungo that maybe Mungo should just go do it himself if he likes the book so much. Mungo exclaims, “Me?! I can’t do anything!” but is left with little choice but to save his favorite book from the evil pirates. So he jumps into the book and becomes the hero himself.
After much buckling of swashes, Mungo does indeed save the day from the dastardly pirates, and Captain Fleet returns from his holiday to give Mungo a medal.
There is a parallel here. It’s not a perfect one, but it will do. Mungo is like John the Baptist – or me – and the hero, Jesus, or Captain Fleet, wants us to not just like him and admire him, but to follow in his footsteps, to save the day like he would. That’s what we’re here for in the Church. If we sit back and say, “I can’t do it” or “I’m not worthy” and let our guilt destroy us, then the paradox is that we only hurt ourselves while not solving anything or doing anybody any good. We have to forgive ourselves before seeking forgiveness from others, and we can do that by accepting God’s grace and peace within us. We can’t wish others peace and spread peace until we make peace inside and with ourselves and with God. God is there to help us by sending out His Holy Spirit, but that Spirit can’t do anything to guide us if we’re so bound up with our own problems that we fail to notice the dove coming down and filling us with grace. It’s a free gift, the gift of salvation, there for the taking if we just stop navel-gazing and beating up on ourselves.
Even the unworthiest person, the gravest sinner, can accept God’s grace and turn things for the better, doing God’s work. So I ask – beg – God and His Church to forgive me, but I especially ask God to help me forgive myself – and then I will have His grace within me, which I need to buckle swashes and swing to the rescue in His name.
So what I can give you, even as unworthy as I am, is this: I ask you to forgive yourselves in the same way, and to forgive one another, so that we, like Mungo, can all set sail into the setting sun and see the waters off the coast of tomorrow – for as Jesus promised on the Cross as He died for our sins, tomorrow we sinners shall be with Him in Paradise. Amen.
By the power invested in me by myself, I hereby claim the whole of the land known as Israel/Palestine, and order the current inhabitants to leave the country. I'm deporting them all to Newark, New Jersey.
There, I just solved the whole Middle Eastern crisis at a stroke of my brain.
You better watch out,
you better not cry,
you better not pout,
I'm tellin' you why,
Santa Claus is coming to town.
He's makin' his list,
checkin' it twice,
gonna find out who's naughty and nice,
Santa Claus is coming to town.
He knows when you've been sleeping,
he knows when you're awake,
he knows when you've been bad or good,
so be good for goodness' sake!
Oh, you better watch out,
you better not cry,
you better not pout,
I'm tellin' you why,
Santa Claus is coming to town!
In other words, Santa is a Stasi agent vigilantly observing all children through his network of spies ("parents"). He does, after all, wear red. Commie bastard.
From today's noonday prayer at my friendly neighborhood monastery. Seems especially fitting for me…
As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God,
for the living God.
When shall I come and behold
the face of God?
My tears have been my food
day and night,
while people say to me continually,
‘Where is your God?’
These things I remember,
as I pour out my soul:
how I went with the throng,
and led them in procession to the house of God,
with glad shouts and songs of thanksgiving,
a multitude keeping festival.
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God.
My soul is cast down within me;
therefore I remember you
from the land of Jordan and of Hermon,
from Mount Mizar.
Deep calls to deep
at the thunder of your cataracts;
all your waves and your billows
have gone over me.
By day the Lord commands his steadfast love,
and at night his song is with me,
a prayer to the God of my life.
I say to God, my rock,
‘Why have you forgotten me?
Why must I walk about mournfully
because the enemy oppresses me?’
As with a deadly wound in my body,
my adversaries taunt me,
while they say to me continually,
‘Where is your God?’
Why are you cast down, O my soul,
and why are you disquieted within me?
Hope in God; for I shall again praise him,
my help and my God.
Why do I call it the Hitchhiker's Psalm? Because it's number 42.
Yesterday, I was with the kids at the German Technology Museum in Berlin-Kreuzberg. On the whole, the exhibitions were well made, but I was irked at the strangely Germanophile emphasis of the things on display.
There were many examples of teutocentric stuff:
Yet the museum is mostly bilingual and had lots of international visitors, and had an extensive display about the Berlin Airlift, emphasizing the positive role Americans played. Indeed the museum is topped by a "raisin bomber", one of the aircraft used by the US military to fly goods into West Berlin during the Soviet blockade and still fondly remembered here.
I'm used to American museums being very America-centric, but to have a German museum behave that way – where Germans in my experience are usually much more circumspect about being nationalist and are more prickly about not focusing too much on one country – is a little jarring.
One personal note was that the lobby has a Cessna plane hanging there. I immediately guessed that it was a very certain plane, and was right – the very plane that Mathias Rust flew and landed in Moscow in 1987, embarrassing the Soviet military. I remember it well, because at the time I had to write an essay in high school about what I would do with a million dollars. I found the topic dull beyond belief and didn't take it too seriously. Whereas the other kids wrote things like they'd buy an awesome car or donate it to the poor or whatever, I said I'd buy 100,000 pairs of Levi's at bulk discount and hire Rust to fly them into the USSR for sale at a huge markup, then use the proceeds to buy more Levi's and sell them in the USSR, and so on until I had gained economic control over the Soviet Union and would bring it to its knees. Then I'd seize control of the Soviet Union and use nuclear blackmail to take over the world. (I got an A. And probably ended up on some FBI watch list.)
On the whole I'd highly recommend the museum, in spite of its flawed emphasis on German achievements to the expense of other, historically more important figures. Kudos for the interactivity of the exhibits, but a big minus for historical context and scope.
To be sung to the tune of "Planet of Women", with apologies to ZZ Top:
Out in our front yard, there was a large old shed that we used to store our bikes. The shed was pretty ramshackle, obviously cobbled together from bits and pieces sometime just after the war. But it did its job.
The odd thing about it is how it smelled inside. Not an unpleasant smell at all, but strangely it smelled just like my grandmother's garage when I was small. I've only ever smelled that smell in one other place, in my uncle's garage. He took over my grandmother's house when she died, and then took the stuff with him when he and my aunt built their new house, so whatever it is that causes that smell, it's now in his garage. Either way, for that reason I was oddly fond of the old shed, just because of the smell.
Well, sad to say, but the owners of the condos in my building decided to tear it down for a new bike shelter, and it's gone, being replaced by what looks like an el cheapo generic…thing. The odd thing is that the inconvenience of not being able to put the bikes away, along with the noise and chaos outside, doesn't bother me, but the loss of that smell does.
Starting tomorrow, I'll be attending the German Old Catholic 2012 synod in Mainz as a delegate. I'll also be posting via Blogger and Twitter on my own account in English and German. Follow @jlgrantham for my updates and personal views in English, and follow @altkatholisch for the official tweets in German that I'm posting together with other delegates. You can also follow the hash tag #aksynode2012 to get the full hashtag channel for the synod, or use the official Twitterwall at alt-katholisch.de.
The Old Catholic magazine Christen heute has an overview of the issues and resolutions to be discussed at the synod in German here. Some of the highlights: A resolution to change the name "Old Catholic" to "Christ Catholic" (like the Swiss Old Catholics always have been called); dropping the requirement for vicars to reside in the vicarages provided for them by the parish; revoking the electoral reform from the last synod that tried to make absentee balloting easier for diaspora parishes – but may have made things for worse for all the others; and some 53 other resolutions, some of which should prove to be quite controversial. All that and the election of the new diocesan standing committee, plus much praying, preaching, and postulating, some of which will even be in church.
For what it's worth, this is my fourth Old Catholic synod as a delegate, so I guess I'm going to end up chairing the Ways and Means Committee, if we had one, which we don't. (Sorry, American political joke there. Nevermind me.)
The synod runs from Thursday afternoon to Sunday midday – stay tuned here and on the links above for news and views from the synod from your friendly neighborhood armchair theologian and blowhard.
You know the Rush song "Red Barchetta"? Of course you do. And if you don't, I hereby proclaim you to be a philistine and order you to buy "Moving Pictures", the greatest album of like forever, and burn several Lady Gaga CDs as an offering to Geddy Lee. By that I mean really burn with lighter fluid, not burn them onto a physical CD. Then again Lady Gaga probably never sells CDs anymore anyway, just MP3s, so, er, burn your hard drive containing the Lady Gaga MP3s. And if you just buy an MP3 of "Red Barchetta" and not the whole album, I will personally hunt you down and...well, do something you really really wouldn't like but for which you couldn't press charges. But I digress.
The song is a kind of sci-fi geek's ballad, telling the story of a guy in some unspecified future where cars are banned who visits his uncle to race an (illegal) red barchetta (that being a type of Italian sports car for those not aware). He is soon hunted down by the cops for doing so. I always knew it was based on a sci-fi story, but could never remember which one, then stumbled across a site which has the linked story at the end of this post.
The reason I link it: OK, it says it takes place in 1982 – which is about as (sadly) hilarious as "Blade Runner" with its flying cars and deep-space colonies taking place in 2019 – but the story is otherwise eerily prescient, especially considering it was written in 1973. I quote:
The valley roads were no longer used very much: the small farms were all owned by doctors and the roads were somewhat narrow for the MSVs (Modern Safety Vehicles). (Note: Or, as we say today, SUVs.)
The safety crusade had been well done at first. The few harebrained schemes were quickly ruled out and a sense of rationality developed. But in the late Seventies (Note: or maybe late Nineties...), with no major wars, cancer cured and social welfare straightened out, the politicians needed a new cause and once again they turned toward the automobile. The regulations concerning safety became tougher. Cars became larger, heavier, less efficient. They consumed gasoline so voraciously that the United States had had to become a major ally with the Arabian countries. The new cars were hard to stop or maneuver quickly, but they would save your life (usually) in a 50-mph crash.
[...U]nforeseen complications had arisen. People became accustomed to cars which went undamaged in 10-mph collisions. [...] But the damages and injuries actually decreased, so the government was happy, the insurance industry was happy and most of the car owners were happy. Most of the car owners – the owners of the non-MSV cars – were kept busy dodging the less careful MSV drivers, and the result of this mismatch left very few of the older cars in existence. If they weren't crushed between two 6000-pound sleds on the highway they were quietly priced into the junkyard by the insurance peddlers...
That, my friends, is downright spooky, especially for 1973 in the midst of the OPEC oil shocks and the Cold War – allies of the Arab nations in exchange for oil? Naw, it'll never happen. And trade MSV for SUV and whaddya got? Ford Exhibitions driven by soccer moms with iPhones plastered to their ears, driving 'till they tip over then blaming Firestone, ¡olé!
You can read the (fairly short) story, A Nice Morning Drive by Richard S. Foster (along with the story of how Rush was inspired by it to write "Red Barchetta") at the Rush fan resource site 2112.net. And tell them I sent you.
My uncle has a country place / that no one knows about / He says it used to be a farm / Before the Motor Law...
I programmed my first website way back in 1995 or so. (Somewhere I even still have a copy. No, I won't show it. Must save myself the embarrassment. ;)) Since then, the Web has grown immensely, and the technology has changed dramatically as well – the way we use HTML today has little in common with the methods used back in 1995. Cascading style sheets, or CSS, were not even on the radar screen, and separating design from content was laughably impossible: the design and content were so intricately and hopelessly mixed up together that any changes had to be done on each page, and the content couldn't be easily reused anywhere else. Maintaining a site of more than a few dozen pages quickly turned into a major headache, because it generally involved editing pages by hand or using roll-your-own template systems of limited use and often requiring substantial computing power (by the standards of the day).
I'm not going to make any predictions – as Yogi Berra said, never make predictions, especially about the future. But I can see some trends that I find very exciting, both as a designer and as a programmer (which I tend to be in roughly equal parts).
First and foremost, it is increasingly the case that Web pages can be (and increasingly are) designed with the same level of precision and consistency you would expect from a DTP program like InDesign. That might not sound all that amazing to someone not familiar with the underlying technology, but believe me, this is huge. It used to be that any sort of layout had to be cumbersomely chopped up into manageable bits and then painstakingly put back together again using HTML code elements that were never intended to be used that way. The result was one big messy kludge that somehow worked, and often didn't work the way the designer wanted.
Typographical control was almost nil – you were stuck with whatever fonts the user happened to have, but worse, the way CSS was interpreted and displayed by the various browsers was often wildly different. This meant spending a lot of time testing on all the various browsers and being forced into a sort of lowest common denominator, limited by whatever the crappiest browser on the market was capable of doing, while also having to use non-standard tricks and kludges just to get it to work. Even the most trivial of layouts often involved ridiculous amounts of effort to achieve, frustrating designers and clients alike.
Today, though, the current browsers are all more or less standards compliant, for the first time in like ever, though this was promised back in the mid-90s when Microsoft was still worried about Netscape, only to ignore the issue once Netscape was suitably crushed. With true standards emerging, this means web designers can spend lots more time concentrating on creative design and less worrying about whether this or that design idea is even possible, or would take too much time to implement, or be forced into that lowest common denominator because so many users still use Internet Exploder 6 or Lotus Notes.
On top of all the possibilities in layout, with HTML5 and CSS3, combined with some useful tools like WebINK, Cufón, FontSquirrel, jQuery and others, there is far more freedom in using elements like fonts – there are dozens, if not hundreds, of free web fonts available (such as Google’s excellent collection), and it is also readily possible to use existing fonts as Web fonts, provided of course you've got the right license or at least figure out a way of protecting the font from being downloaded.
Because of the way CSS supports print-oriented units like inches, centimeters, and points, it is at quite possible to readily design "normal" page layouts using HTML and CSS for printing on any current platform. That would have been unthinkable as recently as five years ago. The reason this matters is because until now, if designers or clients wanted to present content to users and ensure the complete and total consistency in the way the content is displayed, there were only proprietary options available – namely PDF and Flash. And to use PDF or Flash content, the user had to have the right additional software, which on more obscure platforms may not even exist or only in a very patchy way (like PDF was for ages on Linux) and more often than not just increased the instability of the whole thing.
Now, though, it is increasingly becoming possible to present such content with nothing more than a simple browser – no more being tied to one company's software ecosystem, be it Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, or anyone else.
Long ago on Slashdot in the late 1990s, one of the more notorious trolls, called Meept, gloriously said he would like to take all the many divided factions of Linux and combine them into one big divided faction. Replace "Linux" with "web development", and he was oddly prescient. Yes, the platforms are still fragmented and divided, and there is still bickering amongst Mozilla, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and your Aunt Reba (who really should get around to fixing those bugs I sent to her). But now we web designers are no longer forced to effectively build multiple versions of websites in the name of consistent presentation, speeding up development times and unleashing a lot of creative potential – while also increasing the overall pool of design talent working in that one big divided web development faction.
Where it gets interesting is where this will start to encroach on PDF and with it InDesign. Given the cross-platform possibilities, it will start to make more and more sense to use HTML and CSS as the platform of choice for presenting designed content, rather than additionally creating PDFs and DOCs and whatever else comes to mind. While InDesign will be with us for some time yet – just as Dreamweaver continues to be in use today, in spite of it really being totally unnecessary. (OK, so I'm a hand-coding fascist. BBEdit is good enough for me, should be good enough for anyone. *grin*) But by wiping out being dependent on one software provider, more and more potential will be unleashed, and change in both the Web and common printing will continue to accelerate.
Where will be be in 2013? I dunno, maybe we'll be looking back on the world's destruction thanks to those pesky Mayans and their calendar, but it will certainly be the beginning of Armageddon for proprietary platforms for print and the Web. Flash is on its way out (helped by iPhone and iPad), PDF's end is readily imaginable, and looking a bit further, even operating systems could be opened up by this. What's more, it is becoming ever easier for the non-technical to create stunning products without gobs of obscure knowledge, and with online collaboration ever easier, the possibilities for a creative explosion look ever greater.
I could now lean forward, peer out of my good eye, stroke my long white beard and wave my walking stick at all the young whippersnapper web designers who never had to work in such unspeakable conditions like we old-timers, but in fact it's truly exciting to see where we are now in such a short span of time. This is a Gutenberg moment we're experiencing, where media are becoming radically personalized and democratized in ways unimaginable as recently as the 1980s.
Die, PDF. Die, InDesign. So that more wonderful things may be born...
