Dr. Strauss's guidelines for good work

1. Work for the love of it.
2. Work within a trustworthy story.
3. Work with friends.
4. Work true to who you are.
5. Tikkun olam.
6. Cultivate wonder.
7. Answer the call.
8. Acquire expertise.
9. Testify.
10. Say thank you.

It's Splits

The man with one of the least enviable jobs in the world made what must have been the hardest decision of his life. The right Reverand Rowan Wiliams the Archbishop of Canterbury is proposing to split the Anglican Communion. This means that the ECUSA will no longer be a full communicant and will have a status similar to the methodist church in England. Why is this issue- one so seemingly peripheral to the gospel-the one noone can take? And not core issues such as nonviolence, simplicity, and the resurection? How many overweight, warmongering, or heretical bishops are there? And yet it's homosexuality that causes the split.

Mckibben on Berry/Abbey

My first real introduction to the modern environmental movement came through reading Outside magazine. It didn't take too long to realize the eminent figures in Outsides account of caring for the Earth: David Brower, Gerry Lopez, Yvon Chounaird, and the great "Cactus Ed" Abbey.

Abbey is known as the greatest defender of the American west he combined a keen observers eye, with writing skill, a penchant for shock value, and a curmudgeonly individualism. In many ways he was the Hunter S. Thompson of the environmental movement. In the same career he penned one of the most moving tributes to a place I've ever read "Desert Solitaire" and a book that is probably best described as eco-warrior pulp fiction "The Monkey Wrench Gang". In a few short months I read "Desert Solitaire", "The Monkey Wrench Gang", "Hayduke Lives!" and (my favorite) "Fire on the Mountain". Abbey is the patron saint of green peace, a womanizer, a trouble maker, and one of the greatest American nature writers of all time.

My two other favorite nature writers are Bill Mckibben and Wendel Berry. Mckibben is young (aged somewhere between me and my parents), writes for the New Yorker, and drives a hybrid. Berry is an anachronism, an old fashioned man of letters who gave up a successful academic career to return home to rural Kentucky to farm the same soil as his parents and his parents-parents. Obviously these three writers are very different but with the similar agenda. They all think that in today's life the halting of destructive human living is of tantamount importance. Mckibben I read in high school but my college learning is all about Berry. His pastoral writing captivate me, his emphasis that choosing to live our lives in a certain way ( a faithful, careful, hopeful, simple way,) as the most important thing we can do "a man with a garden does more for the earth than the entire environmental movement" provides one or two of the shaky underpinnings of my even more shaky worldview.

It is obvious that Abbey and Berry seem to be at loggerheads (I'll let Mckibben tsort it out)

"One, "Cactus Ed," was wildly and rudely funny, irresponsibly in marriage, likely to be drunk in the evening or at least to imply that he had bee. The other is very nearly solemn in his writing, valuing fidelity above all else. One seemed most alive in motion(his essay on the joy of abusing rental cars is a masterpiece); the other draws his strength from what he calls "sticking." It seemed at first to me as if a reader had to choose one vision or the other. But both appealed enormously to me, and as I got to know both men, they were deeply appealing, too. As it turned out, in fact, they were great fans of each other, attempting one the backs of various books to pin each other with the title of our finest national essayist".

So whose right? the ultimate individualist or the ultimate family man? I say Berry.

Again Mckibben "they each held part of the puzzle: the iconoclastic, individualistic, rebellious defense of the wild as necessary for our sanity; the communalistic, enduring defense of the pastoral as necessary for our culture"

That is Mckibben's word here is Berry's last word on Abbey. A poem read at his funeral

I pass a cairn of stone
Two arm-lengths long and wide
Piled on the steep hillside
By plowmen years ago.
Now oaks and hickories grow
Where the steel coulter passed.
The Sabbath of the trees
Returns and stands and is.

And i'll let Cactus Ed have the last word on life (I first saw this when I was sixteen or seventeen and still find myself returning to it)

One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.

"Blink" and Work

I finally got around to reading Malcolm Gladwel's "Blink". I absolutely loved it. The book is about the subconscious and how the human mind functions to draw complex conclusions from very small amounts of data. This process usually happens quickly, in the blink of an eye, and most of us are not conscious this process. In fact we usually do better with quick reactions to minimal data rather than long processes of deduction.

What most interested me about the subconscious is the way we can consciously condition it. For example Gladwel discussed Harvard's famous test dealing with association between races and positive and negative characteristics. The test studies response time in assigning these attributes and does so on a miniscule level. A breakthrough came when a grad student, who had been taking the test every day with similar results, all of sudden had a more positive association with blacks, remember the test measures miniscule differences, why the change? Because the day before he had watched the Olympics! Since then studies have shown that our subconscious is rather easily conditioned.

One of my principal interest in the subconscious is in how its conditioning is attached to expertise in work. Gladwel cites one example of what I'll call "vocational conditioning" succeeding, the identity of an artistic forgery and one example of it failing, the Amadou Diallo shooting. The question I'm now asking myself is what sort of subtle practices are apart of my current work that will only come to me after years of faithful practice? I ask you the same question.

Summer Reading List

The summer solstice is fast approaching and that means it is high time to craft one of the critical documents of my liturgical year-the summer reading list.

Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point
Wendell Berry: A Place on Earth
Citizenship Papers
The Way of Ignorance
Umberto Eco: A History of beauty
Garrison Keiller: Lake Wobegon Days
Thomas Cahill: How the Irish Saved Civilization
Ched Meyers: Who Will Roll Away the Stone?
Annie Dillard: The Writing Life
Leslie Newbiggen: The Gospel in a Pluralist Society
Jean Vanier: Becoming Human
Wallace Stegner: The Spectator Bird
Dallas Willard: The Divine Conspiracy
Michel Foucault: Madness and Civilization

This is a list based upon me returning to the reading form of years past and making up for a slow year. And leaving plenty of time for Senators games:

the ties that bind

some people you love because you were born into it and you woldn't have it any other way.
some people you love because they need it and you have it to give.
some people you love because you have to, Jesus offers no leeway
some people you love because at the end of two hard years they are the ones who got you through it, they are the ones that make the beer taste that much better and the night that much more comfortable.
And love is the tie that binds

sidebar

I've finally started to learn how to do things with my sidebar. The first of my tasks is to create links to blogs I check regularly. If you feel that you have ben slighted some way i.e. if Byron thinks he's more of a celebrity please tell me and I can change things. But, that' s pointeless example because Byron knows that being lis ted under "the membership" is a sign of love whereas being a "celebrity" simply denotes a distant respect for and an interest in the authors ideas.

"would you consider yourself a pragmatist or an aesthete?"
this question was directed to me at work. at the time I could come up with nothing better than mumbling something about finding the healthy middle ground. So, here's an attempt at a more nuanced response to that question.

Let the practical things of our lives be beautiful. Not, that the responsible practical thing isn't beautiful in itself. But, let us lose a artificial distinction. We should reject any practicality that ignores the basic human need for beauty in our daily lives. And we should reject an aesthetic that does not understand beauty as in some way constituted by the practical resources and human needs involved in the production and transmission of the art.