Climate Change

You may find this article from NewScientist interesting:

Climate change: A guide for the perplexed

A great bible class idea

Well, Richard Beck is laying out some principles for the class he is teaching at church, so this seems like a good time to share my latest Bible class idea. I guess you could use it for a sermon, too, but you should probably send the kids out of the auditorium/sanctuary first.

The idea revolves around a trend in recent horror films ... Hostel, Saw, Saw II, Saw III, and so forth. I haven't seen any of these films myself, but people who have seen them tell me that they represent a move from "horror film" to "torture film". In the past, it might have been difficult to get ahold of graphic depictions of torture, but I'm thinking that these videos should be pretty easy to find. (Though I guess if you're not up for the horror films, you could just make do with the fingernail-ripping scene from Syriana.)

So you get together some of the most gruesome scenes in this video, and you splice them together, back to back. When your class arrives, you sit them all down in front of a TV, turn down the lights, and play your video.

Be sure to set it to loop. Over and over and over.

When people start leaving, mock them. Tell them that it's embarrassing that they can't endure an hour of watching suffering and torture, when God intends to watch people to suffer in hell for eternity.

If anyone is still hanging around, read them the parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16.

For the one or two people who haven't left because you cleverly tied them to their chairs while the lights were off, read them the parable of the lost sheep in Luke 15. Be sure they know it's in Luke 15, which comes right before Luke 16.

Then go find a new church. Hopefully, these people won't need you to help them work out a new doctrine of hell.

Why we shouldn't talk about crucifixion with children

The pair of images is from a series of monsters drawn by children and continued by artists. h/t colby.

I have an idea

People seem to react poorly when I call God "she", so I've been trying to think up something a little less jarring.

If I can't call God "she", and it doesn't make much sense to call Jesus "she", maybe I can call the holy spirit "she" and not get kicked out of church.

Who's with me?

I hate April

April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

- from T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land

Identity is messy

Just jokin' about the post I promised you. I'm going to post this one first, because I like it, and because it's marginally related.

What follows is a musing by my Victorian* friend Sara Martinez.

In case you weren't aware, "musing" is a literary genre, named by Sara, which often involves thoughts written on napkins, trees, walls and random Web sites. This musing was first published on the wildly illustrated wall of an art studio on the ACU campus. Imagine it's written in blue marker.

I am myself, a single, whole entity, having only one physical manifestation and occupying only a set length of time, having only one soul, whose destiny is unique. Yet I am myself a plurality, made of various, uncertainly connected, discrete parts.

For I am made of emotions that bow to various masters, of thoughts born from various progenitors, of opinions that have grown from, are growing from, or have yet to grow from seeds sown by various cultivators.

My heart cannot be said to be one to give to one, for it is free for the tearing to many, who may hate me, who may love me, who may never have even imagined my existence.

I am not of a uniform, singular, or unique spirit, being prone to mercurial changes in tone of mind and direction of purpose.

Bearing all this in mind, then, though I am but one person, in what way, exactly, am I an individual?

* "Victorian" as in "from Victoria", with no connotations of prudishness or steampunk.

Thinking Blogger Awards

I've been tagged with the "thinking blogger" award-slash-meme by Paul and Richard. (Richard thinks it started here.) I am supposed to respond by naming five bloggers who make me think. I'll go ahead and start with ... Paul and Richard:

1. Original Faith is Paul Martin's blog. Paul knows about interesting things like belief, psychology, and being really ill. Also, He's a bit of a poet. I like that about him.

2. Experimental Theology is Richard Beck's blog. Richard is a philosophy professor at my alma mater, Abilene Christian University, and shares my peculiar religious tradition. He knows about interesting things like genes, psychology, and speakeasies in New Orleans. He plugged me as "one of the few people I know who might be more heretical than I am". I like that about him.

Here are six other bloggers who make me think. I need to do extra because I don't want a real "blogroll" on my sidebar, and I feel bad about it sometimes. This is my way of expurgating that guilt. I'm glad you can all help me out.

3. Douglas Muder is a Unitarian Universalist, who once upon a time gently thumped me down because I said he had written a book he hadn't written. He's not a frequent poster, but he occasionally drops some good stuff at Free and Responsible Search.

4. Jack Whelan and Crystal are both Catholic, so I'm cheating and squeezing them into one slot. Jack's blog, After the Future, is primarily political, with a little touch of Catholic theology thrown in occasionally to spice things up. Crystal's blog, Perspective, is probably the most personal blog that I read, and has lots of Catholic theology with the occasional sci-fi movie review thrown in to spice things up.

5. Scoots is a Ph.D. student at Boston College, which happens to be in Boston. Scoots is a contrarian in a sea of liberals, just like I'm a contrarian in a sea of conservatives, so his posts tend to be a little conservative. His almost-eponymous blog tends to talk about things like the Bible and songs by Rich Mullins. But it's pretty good anyway.

6. Joel Spolsky, at Joel on Software, writes mostly about software development, but a lot of his insights apply to entrepreneurship in general. He used to work for Microsoft, started his own software company and wrote a couple of books, and has since ascended to the status of demigod in the programming community. I think this might have something to do with the fact that he says things like, "programmers should not be farmed in cubicles, but should have their own private offices with doors." I could be way off base, though.

7. Pastor Katherine preaches at South Bay Christian Church of Redondo Beach, which should make you deeply jealous. Her Sermon Blog is here, and she mostly keeps it updated. On a fairly regular basis, Pastor K's sermons manage to be triumphant without being cotton-candy. That's pretty sweet.

So there you have it, my set of "thinking blogger" awards. Hugs and kisses to all the winners.

Next up: the promised post about God and information theory.

Panentheism and Theodicy: Creator's guilt

I strongly suspect that the panentheistic approach isn't a silver bullet for theodicy problems, but it does have some interesting implications. For example, Scoots asked...

Would we understand a panentheistic God as having created the cosmos, i.e., with some form of intention? Because if we don't, then we still need some explanation for why there's a universe, and if we do then that god would still bear culpability for making a world where horrors would take place.

I think a panentheist could go either way on this one, depending on how he understands the relationship between God and the universe. An epiphenominal panentheist* who says that the mind of God arises from out of the universe, would probably say that God did not create the universe, but instead the universe created God. Regarding the origin of the universe ... who knows? I guess he could ascribe to some scientific theory about the of the universe, or he could dip into some narrative that attempts to explain existence, or he could simply argue that the question of "why" doesn't make any sense with regard to brute existence.

A pattern panentheist* might argue that God is not personal, and is therefore both unable to willfully "create" and, by similar reasoning, exempt from guilt altogether.

But a Platonic panentheist* might say that God is personal and did in fact create the universe. Then, like Scoots says, he would need to justify God's decision to create. If God created the universe, and could have foreseen the horrors that would come to pass, then God should be held responsible for those horrors. I expect a Platonic panentheist would use one of the many arguments that traditional theists have already made attempting to extricate God from creator's guilt. Maybe he would take a line from Romans 9 and say that it's OK for God to create things with the intent of destroying them. I don't like that approach very much. Maybe he would argue this is this is indeed the best possible world, and that the goods of existence outweigh the horrors that seem to remove any possibility of meaning from that existence. I don't like that approach either.

But here's a possibility: what if the idea of "creator's guilt" makes sense when discussing, say, the atomic bomb, but is inherently contradictory when discussing the creation of worlds. Here's what I mean:

Suppose that God is puttering around in God's kitchen, making Mrs. God an egg sandwich and trying to decide whether or not to create a universe. And to simplify things, let's further suppose that God wants to create a deterministic universe, where all events in time can be known based on the universe's starting configuration.

Also, God is making the egg sandwich using eggs from free-range, grain-fed chickens, so there's no guilt to deal with there.

To decide whether a universe is worth creating, God can simply follow the implications of the universe's configuration, thinking it through, so to speak, and decide whether the horrors in this potential universe are justifiable. If they're not justifiable, God will refrain from creating the universe. If they are justifiable, then God can go right ahead and do whatever God wants.

So, settling down in an easy chair, God begins thinking through our universe. God begins with the big bang, or whatever came before that, and proceeds to the formation of earth, and the animal ferocity of life as it evolved. God's mind simulates the universe perfectly, so God knows your person in its entirety. God knows what Abraham will think about Isaac, and what Pharaoh will do about the Israelites, and what you will think about these words you are reading right now. God considers, in every detail, the suffering of starving children, the grief of mothers, lovers, friends, every single detail up to the point that God decides should be the end of the universe.

But wait.

In thinking so exactly about the world, and its people, and their thoughts and feelings, God has essentially created that world.

In information systems terms, the hardware of the universe is the mind of God. The program of the universe is composed of its its initial configuration and physical laws. And because, in our panentheistic model, the mind of God is the only reality we have to work with, the only way to know the outcome the universe is to run the program. Once the program has been run, the horrors have already occurred. God simply can't think through a potential universe without making it an actual universe.

And if that's not curious enough: what if this is the simulation? What if, right now, God is simultaneously considering all possible universes, and the salvation of the universe involves God's ultimately selecting the best possible universe, or - even better - merging all the possible universes into the Best Possible Universe?

Hunh. Things keep getting curiouser and curiouser.


* I just kind of made up the terms "epiphenominal panentheist", "pattern panentheist" and "Platonic panentheist", so you might not want to use them in essays or on dates or anywhere important.

Panentheism and Theodicy: Why worship?

Next, Connor and Jennifer hand us this question regarding the God described in the previous posts.

What about him is compelling, or inspires you to worship or follow him?

I think I'm going to have to begin by unpacking some of this panentheism stuff. Briefly, panentheism is the belief that God both transcends and is radically present within the universe. It is distinct from pantheism, which teaches that God and the universe are identical. So in terms of set theory, pantheism teaches that Universe = God, while panentheism teaches that Universe ⊂ God.

Paul's speech to the Areopagus begins to move in this direction:

"The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. 'For in him we live and move and have our being.' As some of your own poets have said, 'We are his offspring.'

There are lots of metaphorical approaches to this idea, each with slightly different implications. You might take the Platonic route and think of God as the Divine Nature or Form of Divinity, and all the things in the universe as being instances that reflect this form to a greater or lesser degree. Or you might think of God as the Divine Pattern, with all things in the universe exhibiting this pattern to a greater or lesser degree. Or you might think of God as the Divine Mind, a consciousness arising from the interactions of the physical universe in the same way that a creature's mind arises from the physical interactions in its brain.

Each of these metaphors provides a different way of describing God's relationship with the world, and each has slightly different implications for God's relationship to the good. If God is most accurately described as a Form that exists separately from the world, but is instantiated within the world, then good becomes the degree to which an instance reflects the divine form.

If God is most accurately described as a pattern that is replicated on small and grand scales throughout the universe (think fractals), then good becomes a part of this pattern, or perhaps is identical with the pattern itself.

If God is the mind that arises from the interactions of the universe, then the good is likely an idea that has some independence from God, but the mind of God would always affirm the good, and insofar as the mind of God could interact with other minds, the mind of God would always promote the good.

I think that these metaphors present sufficient reason for feeling worshipful awe and affection toward God: First, because God is immense, subsuming the universe we know and probably all the universes that we don't know; second, because God is present, immanent, intimately involved in every moment, suffering as we suffer, and rejoicing as we rejoice; third, because we can identify God with all the good we experience, either because God is the source of that goodness, or evident within that goodness, or personally affirming that goodness.

Panentheism and Theodicy: What do we do with the Bible?

In comments on my original theodicy post, Jennifer made several comments like this:

You could reject special providence, but I find it hard to reject the special providence if you're going to hold that the Scriptures contain anything that resembles truth regarding the nature of God

Sure enough, it is a royal mess. You have God dropping pillars of smoke and fire, smiting people hither, rescuing people thither, impregnating a virgin, sending angels here, sending angels there. You have Jesus walking on water, miraculously healing people, miraculously feeding people, and rising from the dead. You have tongues of fire, apostles freed by strategic earthquakes, casting out evil spirits, and raising the dead.

And then you have me sitting here, saying that this sort of behavior poses a logical dilemma that can best be resolved by saying that, in fact, God didn't do those things.

Now it's easy to see how I could maintain this belief and reject the validity of the Bible. And it's easy to see how I could abandon this belief and accept the validity of the Bible. The odd thing is that I'm saying that the Bible is valuable, but that God didn't do all these things that the Bible says God did. If the Bible contains all this misinformation about God, how can it be valuable?

I'm going to begin my answer by making an assertion about the Bible: The Bible was not written by God.

For some people, this statement will be terribly obvious, and for others it will be terribly offensive. For those who find it offensive, I'll just mention the internal contradictions in the text (variations in the number of Solomon's stalls and horses in 1 Kings 4 and 2 Chronicles 9; insects with four feet in Leviticus 11, how long Jesus spent in the tomb, yada yada). But if none of that makes *any* impression on you, please consider the following biblical story from Numbers 31:

"Have you allowed all the women to live?" he asked them. "They were the ones who followed Balaam's advice and were the means of turning the Israelites away from the LORD in what happened at Peor, so that a plague struck the LORD's people. Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man, but save for yourselves every girl who has never slept with a man."

And the LORD was displeased with Moses for his lecherous and genocidal counsel, and struck him dead on the spot.

Oh, wait, that's not how it ends, is it? It ends like this...

The LORD said to Moses, "You and Eleazar the priest and the family heads of the community are to count all the people and animals that were captured. Divide the spoils between the soldiers who took part in the battle and the rest of the community."
...
The plunder remaining from the spoils that the soldiers took was 675,000 sheep, 72,000 cattle, 61,000 donkeys and 32,000 women who had never slept with a man.

I find that offensive. So now we can all be offended.

Really, though, my point is that it's difficult to read the Bible as a Perfect Book provided by a Perfect God. Either God's severely messed up, or the book is, and (based on the theological axioms I mentioned earlier) I have to prefer the latter.

Now if you're still with me, let's go on to another assertion: The Bible is, first and foremost, a collection of stories. It is not a divine rulebook. It is a story about how people - mostly, Israelite people - have experienced God in some unusual circumstances. Like all stories, it was written by a person (actually, many people) with differing goals, values, biases, priorities, perspectives and ethical blind spots. Like all stories, it was written for a particular audience, within a particular society at a particular point in history. This doesn't mean that other people can't read the story and learn things from it, but it does mean that there's probably a disconnect between what the text meant to its intended audience and what it should mean to us.

These two assertions encourage us to approach the text very cautiously and interpret it with an eye to the likely biases of the writers. When a writer says, "God said this," we should read that not as a divine claim that "God said this," but, "I think God said this," a statement that could be true even if God didn't really say such a thing.

This is the generous approach, by the way. The cynical approach would assume that the writer was intentionally putting words in God's mouth to get the God Trump for manipulating people.

So there's one way in which the Bible could be considered true: it's true insofar as when people say, "I heard God say this," we can assert that those people are telling the truth, although it's possible that they could have been mistaken about what God actually said.

But I don't think this goes far enough. The Bible has been revered for thousands of years by millions of people, and seems to capture some deep truths about the human experience of God.

I think this is the sense in which we should understand the Bible to be true. Somehow, it distills many human experiences of God into a single compilation. And so rather than trying to figure out whether we have to be baptized to be saved, or whether God created the world in 7 days, we should be looking for broad themes that are woven throughout the Bible. It's here that we can expect to see God's inspiration, threading hints about Divinity through its disparate stories, occasionally surprising us, continually nudging us toward goodness and love.

God Exists, God is Good, God is Love

Connor asked:

Could you say a little more about dropping special providence, but sticking with God is good. It seems to me that most people, at least at the gut level, claim God to be good because of special providence, i.e. Jesus (as God) dies for my sins so I'm saved, yanks me out of Egypt, whatever.

That is a bit of a conundrum, isn't it? The Israelites say, "we know God is good because God brought us up out of Egypt". But I'm saying, "if God brought you up out of Egypt, God is not good."

Let me cheat a little and rephrase Connor's question as, "If there is no special providence, how do you prove God is good?"

The short answer is, I can't.

My theology begins with a pair of unprovable statements: "God exists" and "God is good". My theological goal is not to prove these statements. If anything, my goal is to disprove them. I want to see if there is a way to understand the world given that these two axioms are true. While I can and can present arguments for each of them, and can relate my own experiences that reinforce these beliefs, and can relate the experiences of other people that have been elevated to the status of Church Tradition, I'm not really concerned with proving them true. These are things that I simply believe, in the same way I believe that the sky is blue. You could argue the heck out of the proposition "the sky is green", and I could try my hardest to believe it is green, but in the end I simply would be unable to affirm, from the depths of my being, that the sky is green.

Once upon a time, my theology probably operated under the influence of a third axiom, "God regularly intervenes in the world", but I've since decided that this one simply won't jive with the first two axioms and my experience of the world. However, this panentheism project is an attempt to see if it's possible to soften that axiom somewhat so that it still captures an important part of the Christian witness; in particular, I'm seeing what might happen if I changed "God regularly intervenes in the world" to, "God is intimately involved with the world," or "God loves people," or something like that.

So really, these three axioms underpin my assumption that theology is something worth doing. If God does not exist, theology is silly. If God is not good, theology is dark and futile. If God does not care about the world, then why care about God?

But if these three axioms are true, and can be brought into harmony with my experience of the world, then theology may actually be a worthy endeavor.

My theology is not for people who have happy, rosy relationships with God, and who believe things like "God made the world in 7 days" or "God got me a parking space." My theology is for people who are suffering, or who see the enormity of the suffering in the world and are - rightfully - furious with God. If I can present a theology that provides a way to understand God as good and loving within a world full of horrors, then I think I will have done something helpful.

Theodicy

Theodicy (thE-'ä-d&-sE): A vindication of God's goodness and justice in the face of the existence of evil.

For those of you who haven't encountered theodicy before: it's generally depressing. In fact, it could be magnificently depressing. So if you haven't already been wondering about God, and evil, and all that, you may want to go read something more pleasant. Like cute overload or something.

Still with me? Great.

Let's start this mess with a few observations about how Christians answer Big Philosophical Questions.

1. When answering the question, "What is God like?", Christians generally make several claims about the attributes of God, among them that God is all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good. The Bible seems to support these claims.

2. When answering the question, "How does God interact with the creation?", Christians generally endorse an idea of a God who is intimately involved with the creation, particularly with human beings. Christians also usually endorse special providence, wherein God occasionally interrupts the natural order to do something helpful for people. The Bible seems to support these claims.

3. When answering the question, "Is there evil?", Christians generally say, "yes." Sometimes people say that evil is illusory, or that evil is merely an absence of good, or that all evil is constructive and eventually has positive results, but sane people generally acknowledge that the world is full of evil - sometimes perpetrated by people (murder, rape, genocide), and sometimes perpetrated at random by nature (disease, earthquake, tsunami). Most sane people also acknowledge that often, this evil is so egregious that it destroys people, and it seems patently ridiculous to insist that these sorts of evil (called "Horrors", in a recent related discussion) could ever be constructive.

From the perspective of Western philosophers, this slice of worldview is fraught with peril. More specifically, it is internally contradictory. The answers to the questions can't all be right ... one or more of them must be wrong. This is where theodicy starts to show up. People - both Christians and non-Christians - notice what appear to be contradictions in the standard Christian story about the world, and so someone has to resolve the contradictions.

In general, there seem to be three ways that people go about doing this.

1. People deny the question has any validity, whether because it is immoral to question God in this way, or because God's ways are mysterious and incomprehensible, or what have you. Really, no discussion can be had after this point.

2. People try to define terms in such a way to dissolve the contradiction. So, for example, someone might claim that all-good does not mean that God ought to rescue children trapped under the rubble of a building collapsed by an earthquake. Or they might claim that all-powerful does not mean that God can do things that are inherently contradictory, and then show that intervening on behalf of abused children would raise an inherent contradiction.

3. People try to find a leg of the argument that they can let go. So, for example, process theologians might claim that God does not really fit the traditional descriptions: that God's moral character is developing just like a person's does, so the claim that God is all-good is simply inaccurate. People who are unwilling to deviate from the traditional description of God might try to give up a different leg, perhaps claiming that evil does not really exist, or if it does, God is not responsible for creating it or intervening to fix it.

Now, a few final observations:

First, the "problem of evil", as it has often been called, raises for atheists no analogous "problem of good". The problem of evil arises specifically because theists claim that a certain kind of God exists, and that this God has a certain kind of relationship with the world, which seems incompatible with the existence of evil. On the other hand, people who claim that there is no God need not explain why God allows evil, and they also need not explain why, if God does not exist, there is good. The painfully simple atheistic answer to that question is that good is not contingent on a God.

Second, in my estimation, the problem of evil is the strongest single argument against worshiping God. If God does not exist at all, it's ridiculous to worship. If God does not provide for followers, why worship? If God is not good, why worship? In fact, if God is not good, we may have a moral obligation *not* to worship. To make matters worse, this is a visceral argument. People can brush off a claim like "the ontological argument for the existence of God is invalid", but it's harder, rhetorically, to brush off the suffering of millions of people over millions of years.

Some people manage to do it, but it's harder.

As a result, it is absolutely necessary that Christians do good theodicy, theodicy that not only can be accepted by those in the Christian community, but those outside as well. And as others have said before, people outside the community can't take you seriously if your answers won't stand up to Auschwitz.

I've recently decided that, for me, the moral contradictions in the problem of evil trump all the other problems. I absolutely accept the claim that special providence is incompatible with perfect divine goodness: A god who delivers money to American churches but fails to rescue children from Indonesian tsunamis cannot be a good god.

But I also am incapable of dropping the claim that God is all-good. I am simply incapable of releasing that belief. So I have to drop something else ... and to me, the thing that seems most droppable is the doctrine of special providence. So I have to claim that when money arrives in the mail, or when I get a good parking place, or when a friend's cancer disappears, God hasn't intervened or done anything out of the ordinary.

Obviously, this move puts a new burden on me, first to explain how I can understand the Bible to be true in light of this doctrine, and second to explain some other way that God might relate to the world. And it also doesn't solve the problem of how God could be morally justified in having created a world that allows for so much horror. I'll talk about those things in a later post.

I swear

I'm going to get around to posting a real post. Regardless of the hot water leak in the slab of my house, I really am going to have some free time this week.

But this is just too rich.

Question #6: Regarding Walter Reed Medical Center

Which would you rather give for your country, your legs or your life?

Question #5: Punctuation

Continuing our series of odd questions ... quick, is the following sentence correctly punctuated?

Come in and enjoy a home-style dinner with all the fixin's!

Definitive Answer from Casey:
"Though it looks wonky somehow, I think it is. "Home-style" is not in the dictionary, so it's hard to say if it should be a hyphenate, and though "fixin's" looking like an improperly placed possessive, it seems like a proper conjunction."

Equality Ride 2007

Looks like the Equality Riders won't be coming back to ACU this year. But they will be at Baylor...

Question #4: Zephyrs

Anyone remember the name of that church song with the line about the "gentle zephyrs"?

Definitive Answer: As expected, my mom and dad figured it out.

The song is Beulah Land. Interestingly enough, in our old songbook the first line was changed to "I've reached the land of love divine".


Beulah Land by Edgar P. Stites

I’ve reached the land of corn and wine,
And all its riches freely mine;
Here shines undimmed one blissful day,
For all my night has passed away.

    * Refrain:
    O Beulah Land, sweet Beulah Land,
    As on thy highest mount I stand,
    I look away across the sea,
    Where mansions are prepared for me,
    And view the shining glory shore,
    My heav’n, my home forevermore!

My Savior comes and walks with me,
And sweet communion here have we;
He gently leads me by His hand,
For this is Heaven’s borderland.

A sweet perfume upon the breeze,
Is borne from ever vernal trees,
And flow’rs that never fading grow
Where streams of life forever flow.

The zephyrs seem to float to me,
Sweet sounds of Heaven’s melody,
As angels with the white-robed throng
Join in the sweet redemption song.

My Son My Executioner

Last night, I had the privilege of attending a reading by the U.S. Poet Laureate, Donald Hall.

The Poet Laureate is almost 80, and doesn't move too quickly. He sat behind a long, narrow table covered with a white tablecloth, and occasionally, when he got involved in a poem, his foot would poke, poke, poke at it.

I enjoyed his poetry. Listening to a thoughtful, eloquent lector made me feel like I was participating in something important and mysterious, and when he finished, I felt like I'd been to church. As far as feelings go, I haven't been to church in quite a while.

Here's one of his early poems, written about his first child.

My Son My Executioner

My son, my executioner,
  I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir
  And whom my body warms.

Sweet death, small son, our instrument
  Of immortality
Your cries and hungers document
  Our bodily decay.

We twenty-five and twenty-two,
  Who seemed to live forever,
Observe enduring life in you
  And start to die together.

*piff*

Woah.

I think a fuse in my brain just blew. And nobody else is likely to understand why. But here's my attempt at an explanation.

Jack Whelan just said this:

The encounter with the Christ is an experience of insemination in the Matthew 13 sense (parable of sower, mustard seed, etc.). This seed has a subversive effect within the soul life of those who are inseminated, and they find that if they nurture its germination in the right way, a new regime grows within.

This was a marginal point within his post about postmodern Catholicism.

Now briefly: The idea of "seed" is an ancient idea, an archetype that goes way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way back. It may be so old that it's actually genetic rather than just memetic. It's all tied up with life and death, with dying to live again, with harvest gods, with Jesus, with sex. And, as hinted at in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, the idea of seed is all tied up with modern things, too, particularly potentially world-changing technologies such as genetics and nanotech.

Another primary theme in The Diamond Age is subversiveness ... the idea that things change for the better primarily because of tiny changes that happen out of public view, and perhaps in opposition to public norms.

Those two ideas rattle around in my head fairly often. I know they're really important ideas, but I'm not sure why. So anything that talks about "seed" or "subversion" will light up my pattern-matcher.

Particularly things that also talk about "Matthew", and my lucky number, "13".

Hrm.

Question #3: Regarding Social Norms

Say you, personally, wanted to change a social norm. In light of the last 100 years of American history, what method would you use to make that change?