Interpreting the numbers

Via A Conservative Blog for Peace, TitusOneNine has posted a link to a spreadsheet of 2006 statistics on the Episcopal Church. There’s a great deal of hype (or, as the Young Fogey might put it, “common knowledge”) about how church statistics get interpreted.

I commented on the Young Fogey’s blog and wanted to flesh out a “hype-free” method for looking at church statistics. Being hype-free is the equivalent of being as exciting as bran flakes, but I feel that it brings much-needed focus to the art of statistical interpretation.

1. Pay attention to population density.

After the 2004 presidential election, Ann Coulter made a remark about “seeing a lot of red” on the US map, even though the popular vote was very close (50%/48%). Looking at the map, though, she’s right. There’s huge swaths of red in Wyoming, Montanta and the Dakotas. Blue-voting states seem miniscule by comparison.

Of course, Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas are have some of the lowest population densities in the US. Added together, their population is less than the city of Boston alone.

The same goes for church statistics. Comparing the dioceses of Dallas and Nevada has an unfair whiff to it when you consider the respective populations. Comparing, say, the diocese of Dallas and Massachusetts shows a greater parity. Better yet would be a per capita normalization to take away bias. Even better yet would be not to do this at all.

2. Beware double standards.

What I said on the Young Fogey’s blog: “The double standard usually goes: when the numbers are in my favor, it’s because we are right and they are wrong. God blesses the right with good numbers and curses the wrong with decline. When the numbers are not in my favor, the story is Athanasius contra mundum. The righteous few are the remnant bearing witness to a lost nation.

Christians of all kinds, liberal and conservative, are guilty of this kind of thinking. (I’m not innocent of it.)

Either way, the numbers always support the position of the speaker. It’s great for finger-pointing and self-righteousness.”

Numbers don’t make right. Or wrong.

3. Beware post hoc, ergo propter hoc. Also, correlation does not imply causation.

Interpreters of church statistics love this fallacy. We take one statistic only. One downturn, one uptick–it doesn’t matter. Then we take one cause celebre and say that this one issue caused the statistically-measured shift.

Church decline is due to the ordination of women. People are coming back to church for the Latin Mass. When you add contemporary worship music, members are alienated and leave.  When you add contemporary worship music, churches grow by doing away with those stuffy hymns.

It’s weak logic and bad statistics all around. There are many reasons for church decline or church growth and the issues are systematic and complex. Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone is a good introduction to these cultural and systemic changes.

4. Beware schadenfreude.

“In all things, charity.” By combining the three above, the path to self-righteousness is easily found. It’s easy to point fingers at the areas losing church membership, blame them for their too liberal/conservative theology, and take joy and thank God that “I am not like other men.” Jesus was pointed about this type of behavior.

Any church, any diocese, any denomination losing members ought never be a source of joy. As interrelated members of the Body of Christ, the injury that happens to one member ought be felt by all.

Two-track copyright policy

Yesterday, the Guardian ran Cory Doctorow’s article, “Copyright law should distinguish between commercial and cultural uses.” He distinguishes between business-copyright and folk-copyright. The former is what happens when, for example, a record label negotiates the rights to a song for a particular TV advertisement. One lawyer calls another, writes a contract, money changes hands and the song “Baba O’Reilly” can get used to sell me auto insurance or something.

The idea of folk-copyright pertains to cultural use. The sort of pedestrian usage of a babysitter bringing DVDs to keep her charge occupied, making mix tapes, covering songs in a garage or a bar, or photocopying a comic strip for your cubicle wall.

Nobody calls the lawyers at United Feature Syndicate to ask if they can duplicate yesterday’s Dilbert for hanging the office fridge. What Doctorow advocates is a more descriptive rather than prescriptive copyright law. To describe the situation: on a folk/person-to-person scale, people are sharing copyright material freely. This use is often a cultural exchange (e.g. teenagers learning guitar by playing copyrighted riffs). Cultural exchange simply isn’t going to stop.

Also coming in yesterday is William Patry’s blog post on copyrighted jokes. It’s a thought-provoking angle on Doctorow’s article. It’s one thing to personally compile David Letterman’s Top Ten Lists and publish, distribute and sell them, making oneself a tidy profit. It seems to be another thing to imitate Robin Williams’s jokes on stage. And it’s a third thing to quote Family Guy to my girlfriend.

Among preachers, the practice of a folk-copyright (“cultural exchange”) is routine. In such an oral medium, I do not find offense at someone using an analogy that they lifted out of my preaching. Once a story, an illustration, a sermon is out into the oral sphere, it is free for the taking. Attribution is only a courtesy. This type of folk-copyright has been known in Christian preaching for centuries and serves as a helpful guide for contemporary policy.

More on Pope Benedict XVI and Sapienza Univesity

This post follows up on the previous “Pope Benedict XVI postpones speech at Sapienza University.”

Reuters carries a story on Pope Benedict the XVI’s remarks on the “seductive” power of science. The news agency spins the story as the Pope”reviving the science-versus-religion debate” and certainly not as continuing the science-and-religion-together inquiry. The Pope supports a wholistic view of the inter-relatedness not only of the sciences but also of theological inquiry. From the article:

Scientific investigation should be accompanied by “research into anthropology, philosophy and theology” to give insight into “man’s own mystery, because no science can say who man is, where he comes from or where he is going”, the Pope said.

This editoral blogger at the Guardian paid attention to an overlooked fact of the Galileo affair. An all-too-human Galileo unfairly satirized the Pope’s beliefs in the words of Simplicius. An all-too-human Pope unfairly got over-offended and responded in kind:

In fact one of [Galileo's] closest allies was a pope – Urban VIII – who supported the publication of his classic work Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. It was only when the scientist – renowned for his acerbic style – put the Pope’s thoughts into the mouth of a character called Simplicius that the offended pope withdrew his support and turned Galileo over to the inquisition.

Largely unreported the astronomical observatory moving out of Castel Gandolfo this month (Independent, Register, Times). Happily Catholic News Service reports that they are moving on to more up-to-date facilities in a renovated convent at the papal gardens.

(Via TitusOneNine.)

McLuhan on the comeback

Bob Rodgers recently wrote “In the Garden with the Guru” for the Literary Review of Canada. It’s a short essay (maybe 5 pages) on not just McLuhan’s work but also on McLuhan the man and his family. The essay relates how his conversion to Catholicism impacted his career and makes a positive assessment of his role today.

From the essay:

Like all original thinkers from Blake to Einstein, McLuhan was much misunderstood. He never promoted TV over books as popular accounts gave out. He never expressed a preference for tribal culture over individualism. He never said the patterns of perception imposed by the ear are superior to those of the eye. One small aphorism sticks with me: “When the globe becomes a single electronic web with all its languages and culture recorded on a single tribal drum, the fixed point of view of print culture becomes irrelevant, however precious.” However precious! Those are the operative words, about as far as McLuhan went in taking sides. But they also bring his innermost sympathies to the fore.

This quote is Rodgers’s interesting take on the slave trade, deduced from McLuhan’s principles. It’s important that the realm of ideas, individuals and Spirit (“life force”) are not to be denied. McLuhan’s (and thus Rodgers’s) assertion is that new technologies must be taken into account as forces in history.

One spark, often overlooked, but crucial, I found buried in The Gutenburg Galaxy, a book often passed over by those who prefer his later, more popular works. Philosophers have always asked what drives history. Is it revolutionary ideas, manifest destiny, great individuals, something called “the life force”? McLuhan denied none of these causes but, following one of his most influential mentors at U of T, Harold Innis, he asked: “How about tools?” We may think the end of the slave trade on the Atlantic was powered by humanitarians and abolitionists in England and America, and McLuhan would not disagree. But the main impetus, he would say, was the steam engine, a tool that reduced the need for muscle. This example is not one I have taken from McLuhan’s writings. As far as I know I arrived at it all by myself. But I would never have thought of it if I had not read McLuhan. That’s how his probes work.

(Via A Conservative Blog for Peace. Thanks!)

Elegant Bible art: relationship networks in the Scriptures

Following up on Google Earth-style views of Biblical scenes, Chris Harrison has mashed up art and the Scriptures.

(making the rounds: Boing Boing and Think Christian)

Again, the comments on various blogs are divergent but enlightening. I particularly enjoyed this comment on Boing Boing:

i like that way that, if i knew nothing about the bible other than what i could work out from these charts, i’d assume jesus was a minor character in it. notable, but still minor.also, it kind of recasts the bible for me as being less about interesting and unusual people like jesus and moses and more about geography.

this one too:

The cast of players in the Bible makes the list of characters in even the thickest and most convoluted Victorian novel look as short as a list of W’s bestest friends. It’s cool to have a chart that ties them all together.

(Tangent update: while you’re at it, check out these pictures of computer center cabling.  It gets my art-appreciating sense tingling as well as my OCD neatnik sense tingling.)

Bible geek goodness: NatGeo and BibleTech

National Geographic has scanned Codex Tchacos and put the images online! Codex Tchacos is the Coptic manuscript that contains, among other things, the Gospel of Judas. I’ve already snarfed the images and have them on my desktop. Not knowing any Coptic, it’s of limited use to me. Check out the FTP site linked above and see them for yourself!

Also, this weekend is BibleTech 2008! BibleTech is a conference for Bible study and technology. So, folks like Sean Boison of Blogos and Rico will be there with papers and presentations. This conference seems much like Def Con for textual criticism geeks. That said, I’m insanly upset that I’ve never heard of this before and I’m looking for ways to get to BibleTech 2009!

Preaching and the Laplace Transform

When studying preaching, we learned about some of the general formulas that sermons follow. The classic three-point sermon, the church equivalent of an eighth-grade five-paragraph essay, is easily recognized. Eugene Lowry treated the narrative sermon, building up to a single climax that the preacher resolves, in The Homiletical Plot. There are just about as many forms of sermons as there are integers.

One method that grabbed my attention was Paul Scott Wilson’s method, The Four Pages of the Sermon. His method depends on two particular assertions. First, that the world of the Scriptures is intimately connected to the world we inhabit today. Secondly, that the Scriptural story presents problems and their resolution.

So, the “four pages” of his sermons would flow like this, with an example:

1. Identify a problem in the Scriptures (1 Cor. 1:10-17–the Christian Church faces division)
2. Identify a problem in our world (Too many to number–factions and discrimination plague us today)
3. Present God’s solution in the Scriptures (1 Cor. 1:18-25–Christ’s strength and wisdom makes all people one)
4. Present God’s solution in our world (Question our own wisdom; find prayerful unity)

After adding some material to introduce and conclude the sermon, you have about five pages that should last a respectable 10-12 minutes.

Keeping one eye on our problems, we find an analogous problem in the Scriptures. Seeing a solution on the pages of Scripture, we track our eye back to a Godly solution for our problem.

The Laplace transform is a species of the same genus. Given an certain type ordinary differential equation, solving it directly is very difficult. So, you take the hard problem (f(t)) you have. Using the Laplace transform, you turn it into a polynomial that’s easy to solve (F(s)). With the solution to the easy problem, you do another Laplace transform and turn that into the solution to the hard problem.

Like the four pages of a sermon, it looks like this:

1. Identify the hard problem: ordinary differential equation f(t)
2. Transform the hard problem into an easy problem: polynomial F(s)
3. Solve the easy problem
4. Turn the solution of the easy problem into a solution to the hard problem

It’s not a direct analogy, but it’s the same technique. To paraphrase the mathematical proverb, “A trivial problem is one that has already been solved.” Finding problems and solutions in the narrative of Scripture gives way to solutions to problems in our lives. The connection of the Scripture stories to our life stories could be called by a number of names: incarnation, inspiration or mediation. Whichever term we go with, moving between this earthly realm and the heavenly realm is for the Christian as trivial as a Laplace transform for the mathematician.

Into Egypt: my lenten blog

I’ve just begun a second blog, Into Egypt. I’m not sure how many others have or will write blogs for Lent, but looking around, there seems to be a few. This blog intends to follow the assigned Bible passages from the Book of Common Prayer, which begin with Joseph going into Egypt and follows through Exodus to the story of Passover, which coincides with Easter.

I have no illusion that my meditations will be so spiritually insightful that the world will soak them up. More than anything, it’s a hope for spiritual discipline, one of the classic focuses of Lent. For me, there’s something about writing blogs that keeps me going more than writing in a pen-and-paper journal. So go ahead, check it out. Then go do something important.

The changing face of Anglicanism

This weekend the Episcopal Cafe brought attention to Theo Hobson’s Guardian article in which he asks, “Is liberal Anglicanism finished?” I found the article confusing, as many did, but some clarity can be found in limiting his meaning of Anglicanism to the Church of England only and not to the broader Communion.

More than anything, it’s interesting to consider this article with ex-Episcopal-bishop Clarence Pope’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church last year. Coverage of the event in The Living Church cited him as saying, “The Catholic movement in The Episcopal Church has degenerated from a theological imperative into haberdashery.” In other words, conservative Catholicism in Anglicanism is also at an end.

Oddly, it would seem that liberal Anglicanism and conservative Anglo-Catholicism are both dying (as is BSD Unix). Anglicanism certainly is not well-understood along the axes of liberal-conservative and catholic-evangelical and it is not usefully broken down into hierarchies of churchmanship. The landscape is significantly more complex and broad, especially when the emerging movements or Diana Butler Bass’s astute assessments are considered.

My own contention is this: that Anglicanism, along with ecumenical Christianity, is changing in ways that betray old conceptions of theological parties. This change, whatever it may be, will be about as radical as the changes of 1054 or 1517. That is, the way we once understood the church is no longer beneficial and the way that we will look back on the church of this era may well be romanticized (e.g., Victorian neo-gothic aspirations to the high middle ages and long-gazing looks at a fictional “undivided church.”).

More on online discipleship

This post follows up on an earlier post, The Myth of Online Discipleship.

The blog Lessons from Babel posted a summary today of one conversation about Internet ministries. The conversation broke down the ministries into three types:

1. Evangelism: Use the online medium to invite new members into face-to-face ministries, usually targeted toward specific groups.
2. Augmentation: Use the online medium to facilitate a face-to-face ministry.
3. Replacement: Use the online medium for a ministry that has no face-to-face equivalent and, indeed, will never have one.

Also from the article:

The class agreed that the first two categories were definitely useful, but that the third category was problematic. In fact, as the discussion turned from “what is Internet ministry?” to “what is effective Internet ministry?”, the class agreed that effective Internet ministry should always encourage face-to-face fellowship and should never replace the physical gathering.

Personally, I’m glad to hear that they agree with me that the face-to-face fellowship ought never be replaced.  Seemingly absent from the conversation was the place of worship and the sacraments. Discussions of Internet ministries focus, as these do, on small group discussions, sharing prayer concerns, Bible studies and targeted evangelism. It’s not a bad start, but it leaves out a lot from the whole picture of ministry.

There’s a great deal that the Internet cannot provide and chief among these is the sacraments. Without a physical, face-to-face gathering, there is no Eucharist and no Baptism. I’d be interested to see how people think it is possible to have the following via Internet:

• Children’s Sunday School: Not to take too many cues from Cliff Stoll’s High Tech Heretic, but many of his concerns about education as the formation of character cross over from the public school into the Sunday school.
• Coffee hour or church suppers: only deceptively social affairs, but often occasions for bringing something to the pastor when the parishioner otherwise wouldn’t call or write an email.
• Shawl-knitting ministries: Laser-printer instructions and prayers with a mailing address for your shawl contribution can’t compare to knitting together and then taking the shawl to a beloved person in a hospital bed. The same goes for most outreach ministries: food pantries, clothes closets, and soup kitchens are only the beginning.

Perhaps one can run a good Bible study roundtable online, but there’s more to ministry than just

Read the article here.