Ecuador’s Salesians promote free software

Michel Brauwens translates Marco Fioretti’s experience of the Salesian Polytechnic Uninersity’s Congress on Free Software. Arguing that free software is not just a technological ideal, it is a social ideal that necessarily has theological implications:

The third day’s conference was from Fr Julian Fox: Rights and equity in the democratic building of knowledge“. While criticizing some positions and attitudes of both the FSF and OSI, Fr Julian explained why it’s important for Salesians, and Catholics in general, to finally develop a t[h]eology of technology in the path laid by the Church’s social doctrine, in order to make of technology a real enabler of common good.

Link.

Anglican Diocese of Sydney ditching Microsoft

ZDNet Australia reports the Anglican Diocese of Sydney will purge its Microsoft products over the next three years. Tectonic carries a brief of the article.

The diocesan CIO George Lymbers had this to say:

Some people say, well you only need Windows. Wait a second: you need Office, you need Windows, you need this, you need that. Before you know it you have 10 to 12 licences on one PC covered across thousands of installations. The cost of that is just spectacular.

They are electing to go with IBM Lotus Symphony to replace Microsoft Office. Symphony is free to download but IBM is paid for support. It runs on Windows and the free Linux operating system, which can help ease the transition to totally free software.

The Sydney diocese will save about $150,000 annually by making the switch. Presumably, the savings will benefit the “schools, youth groups and aged care villages” whose computers will be switched.

I typically hold mixed feelings about the Sydney diocese, but this move is very much to their credit!

Christians crazy-go-nuts with Wordle

Wordle is an application to create tag clouds. The clouds show, proportional to size, the frequency of words in a text. It’s not a bad way to get the gist of what a text is all about. Commonly used on blogs to get the sense of what the whole blog is about, Wordle is getting used with arbitrary texts and, especially, Christian texts.

The ESV Bible blog has wordled the ESV Bible. (Both New Testament and complete Bible texts.)

Another blog carried wordles of individual books of the Bible.

On Wordle is Luther’s 95 Theses.

On Wordle is Jonathan Edwards’s Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.

On Wordle is also John Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.

Someone has also done a lovely wordle of the Psalms in Hebrew. (See above.)

By the by, the largest words in Hebrew above are “LORD,” “God,” “eternal,” “my soul,” “all,” and “not.”

Ministry and Math: Making it add up

This post at the Ship of Fools site has my attention. The original poster is studying for ordination. Before heading to seminary, she needs to complete her bachelor’s degree and she is struggling with the required algebra courses. She asks to the Ship a new form of Tertullian’s old question, “What has Alexandria (i.e., Euclid) to do with Jerusalem (i.e., Jesus)?”

To summarize the conversation, most replies state that math is unimportant for the clergy and should be done away with. Others state that math is of minor importance, only to serve the practical duties of parish accounting and bookkeeping. (Some posts are of the “grin and bear it” variety, suggesting tutors and guidebooks to help her way through.)

Being a clergyperson with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics, I have to disagree with this assessment of clerical training. It’s too long for a post at the Ship, but this is still just a sketch of a few ideas. Generally, however, the overall point is that education is always more than job training.

So, here are just a few thoughts on the place of math in clerical training:

1. Mathematics is always a part of liberal education. Building on classical foundations, medieval Christians developed the university system. University education in the liberal (not manual) arts was broken into two segments: the trivium and quadrivium. The upper portion, the quadrivium, included arithmetic and geometry as core components of an educated Christian’s competency. Having mastered these arts, a student is prepared for education in philosophy and theology.

2. Mathematical competency is needed for basic conversation with the sciences. Few people would argue that Christianity is guilty of too much conversation with science. Poor popular understanding of astronomy, evolution and statistics have been at the root of clashes with science for a long time. As a result, many in scientific and engineering professions want nothing to do with the Church (“What has Jerusalem to do with Alexandria?”) and the Church has generally returned hostile feelings. Mathematical literacy opens up this conversation. Being able to speak and listen with integrity are the seeds of evangelism.

3. Good math makes for good theology. Even at the secondary-school level, algebra and geometry impress students with methods of proofs, rules for argumentation and clear-headed rigor. Each of these skills is intrinsic to math and serves theologians well. There’s no sense in proving that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line; every ass knows the quickest way to the barn. However, being able to demonstrate truths from basic principles keeps our theology, our preaching and our practice well-trained, open-minded and clear-headed.

4. Mathematics includes the movement from abstract concepts to practical application. Moving from the abstract to the concrete is necessity in mathematics. Having techniques for solving differential equations later helps you design and build air conditioners. Similarly, going from principles to actions is the basic act of preaching and pastoral care. It’s no coincidence that one preaching method closely mirrors Laplace transform solutions for differential equations. Without training in moving from the abstract and ineffable to something practical and useful, what good is a preacher on Trinity Sunday?

Again, these are just a few thoughts that bubbled up over the weekend after reading the linked post above. Hopefully more will come up later.

Religious hacking: Christians on atheists

(Read more on this topic at Notes from Off-Center. Thanks Drew!)

Iain Thompson of vnunet.com writes on an unusual Myspace defacing in his article, “Christian Hackers Attack Myspace: What wouldn’t Jesus do?” Counter to the recent press on the Anonymous hacking group attacking Scientology sites, this time it appears that “radical Christian hackers” are behind this attack.

(Apparently, this story is now dated but it’s just making the rounds to Christdot. See the Athiest and Agnostic Group article on Wikipedia.)

I’m far from defending the action. It’s a childish and immature act of vandalism. However, it isn’t much more than that. This is a defaced Myspace group and not burning heretics. Hardly the worst form of religious discrimination. At the same time, it fails standards of Christian charity and anyone’s standards of decency.

Thinking of intolerance, has anyone looked at the Atheists & Agnostics group page? Especially the pictures page? At the time of writing, there are 43 pictures there. About a quarter of them are explicitly bashing Christians: Adam and Eve, Mother Angelica, an image of the Virgin Mary in toast, an Israelite throwing stones, a Baptist Church sign, DaVinci’s Last Supper are all parodied. The rest are self-promotional bits and fan photos.

What other religions are parodied? None. Only a few make generic reference to God or Faith. No one here wants to attack Allah, the Dalai Lama or the goddess Durga. Just a chance to take a cheap punch at Christians with a less than clever graphic of an Icthys fish eaten by a Darwin fish. This behavior is typical of many atheists, from the prominent folks like Dawkins or Hitchens down to one of the ordinary 35,000 members of this Myspace group, they are less interested in declaiming faith as giving kidney punches to Christians.

To me, the story here is that an Atheist group took many cheap shots at Christians. In return, a Christian group is returning cheap shots. About as exciting as man-bites-dog: a usual story but with some reversal.

I will not condone this act of vandalism. Some of my sympathy goes out to the Atheist and Agnostic Group, but only so far as the response to immaturity has been immaturity.

Here’s the report from the group leader’s Myspace page:

Update: 1/30/08, 10:00 p.m. EST.

Thanks sincerely to all who sent emails or forwarded the press release (real big thanks to the Secular Student Alliance and the Humanist Chaplain from Harvard). Myspace hasn’t yet responded, and our group is still deleted.

Short FAQ based on some of the emails I got:

Q1) How do you know the group was deleted for religious reasons?

A1)I have no smoking gun. I cannot produce any internal Myspace memo saying “crush the heathens”.

However, I assert that our group’s history up to its recent deletion (1/1/8) establishes a prima facie case that we were deleted for religious reasons:

Note first that I ran the group for almost 3 years, and was very careful to not violate any TOS.

We were deleted two years ago due to complaints from a group called the “Christian Crusaders.” They would search Myspace for profiles they found offensive, and then mass complain to customer service.

Their strategy was to send so many emails to customer service that someone, somewhere at Myspace would delete the profile or group.

It worked. They were able to get us deleted for a few weeks til myspace restored us (pre-news corp; Tom Anderson, himself posted to our group offering to protect us). The “Christian Crusaders” also got many other groups and profiles deleted, including a large pro choice group.

Three months ago, my account was hacked. The hacker took control of the group and renamed it “Jesus is love”.

It took almost a month of constant emailing to Myspace just to get them to restore the group. I lost my profile (3000 friends; dozens of blogs), and the hacker banned many regular users.

Banning on a Myspace group is oddly permanent / can’t be undone. So, I sent more requests asking Myspace to un-ban my regulars.

I got an email back– finally; after about 3 weeks of requests for help– saying “thank you for the information. We have scheduled the group for deletion.”

Literally 5 minutes later, the group was deleted. I think it’s ironic that Myspace’s response to my persistent and sincere request for help was to delete the group!

I hope that puts our deletion in context. Add to that, the biggest xtian group here was deleted not too long ago (post news corp) and Myspace Tom personally restored it.

Do I think Myspace is an evil atheist hating conspiracy– no. Do I think an agent of Myspace deleted my group because it was an atheist group. Yes.

I realize this is circumstantial evidence; but I think the case outlined above is strong enough to warrant my conclusion, and I am waiting to see if Myspace replies.

Q2) You realize that Myspace is privately owned; you have no right to free speech there; they can delete content at will?

A2) I do; but I think Myspace deleting atheist groups is equivalent to a restaurant refusing to serve minorities. Myspace provides a free service, yet it benefits tremendously ($$$) only because users provide content. As a for-profit, I suspect Myspace has some duty of equal protection to all members of protected classes. If Myspace deleted the largest African American group here, no one would tolerate that. Why should we tolerate it for any minority group?

I’m not trying to be dramatic. My experience is nothing like the typical civil rights violation, but I believe it is nonetheless a violation. I’m not sure where the line is drawn between trivial violations and ones-worth-fighting for. I personally think this one’s worth fighting for.

I feel our group had value; we helped give a misunderstood (and often despised) minority a sense of community. The fact that 35,000 people took the proactive step of joining the group (even if most never posted) suggests that it had value. The emails I got today from regulars and strangers suggests that it had value.

Personally, the three years I invested in maintaining the group (and the blogs on my deleted profile) had value to me. So, I think trying to get the group back is a rational investment of my time.

Further, I’m not asking for a march on the capital. I just want our group back.

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.

VeggieTales creator on Christian fantasy and culture

Via Think Christian, this interview with Phil Vischer, the creator of VeggieTales, fits right in with my previous post on Christians following general culture.

Perhaps his best moment was in this analysis of the difference between successful Christian stories (Narnia, Lord of the Rings, Passion) and unsuccessful ones (Evan Almighty, Nativity Story):

Vischer: Some Christian films have failed flat-out because their plot was their message when it should’ve been a subtext or a comment that a side character makes in passing. However, if your main character turns to the camera and delivers the truth of Jesus, you’ve probably lost nine-tenths of your audience in five words. It’s hard to accept that when you are a filmmaker who has decided God wants you to use filmmaking to share the gospel.

The Passion was such an anomaly, you really can’t use it to learn much of anything about the nature of film. You had the most popular film actor in the world making a deeply personal work of art about a religious story. What are the odds of that happening again?

The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings are also tough test cases. How many Narnias are there? How easy is it to come up with another Lord of the Rings? It’s not. There’s Tolkien and Lewis and then everybody else. Besides, you couldn’t write Narnia today and have it accepted by the evangelical world because [of the magic] and because in its metaphor, it effectively has a non-Christian worldview.

Now, if we go to another fantasy world, we need to find Jesus there—literally. That is why the Harry Potter books are viewed to be straight from the pit. Even if Rowling says she’s enjoying Christian themes, forget it. How do you write a Christian fantasy today? I have no idea. I don’t know that you can. I think we’ve killed it. I think we are so concerned with how oppressed our worldview is and so defensive that we’ve painted ourselves into a corner. And thus, we can’t tell the kind of stories that Lewis or Chesterton would have told to share the gospel. It’s kind of depressing, frankly.

Emphasis is mine. Part of the problem is in trying to make the Christ overly explicit, which results in, say, a “Christian Harry Potter,” “Christian Linux,” or “Christian Green Day.” Take the cultural X and make it the “Christian X.”

Early on, Vischer went straight to this tendency, with X = Disney, but seems to have reconsidered:

Vischer: Well, I was hoping Jonah would save my company and keep me on a path to build the Christian Disney. That’s a pretty high expectation to put on one story. This film, honestly, I just hope people will be engaged by the story and get a glimmer of the Christian life because it’s in there if you look for it. That’s it.

For more, read this interview with Vischer: What Makes a Movie “Christian?”

Christians following culture

What is it about the way Christians follow culture these days? The past year has brought us the popularity of GodTube: Christian Web site similar to YouTube and Facebook is growing fast.

Other reports (1, 2) from December that News Corp. has acquired Beliefnet. They also own HarperCollins and, by extension, Zondervan, so please know where the profits go when you purchase a Bible from these publishers.

H. Richard Niebuhr’s Christ and Culture described several ways that the Church has related to broader culture. Oftentimes the relationship is of “Christ against culture” and “Christ within culture.” The first describes the Christian religion as revolutionary and countercultural (e.g. the German Confessing Church). The second is complicit in the culture and cannot resist it (e.g. the Protestant Reich Church).

I don’t think that Niebuhr quite expected the present American situation. Perhaps to be termed “Christ after culture,” we have a situation where the secular culture leads and Christian culture shoddily rebrands about 24 months later. Thus, the cultural phenomenon of YouTube gets a quick label change to become GodTube.

Unlike times past, Christians are not the cultural leaders. The original music, original literature and original art is not explicitly Christian, until (typically conservative) publishing groups duplicate and rebrand, regularly adding no value at all.

Here’s a few other examples of “the Christian X,” for various values of X:

1. GodTube, the Christian YouTube
2. Super 3-D Noah’s Ark, the Christian Wolfenstein 3-D
3. Christdot, the Christian Slashdot
4. A Christian pop music conversion chart (though it disclaims this)
5. Shadowmancer, the Christian Harry Potter
6. Ubuntu Christian Edition, the Christian GNU/Linux

The Trinity and multithreaded processes

The Gospel reading given for the First Sunday of Advent (RCL, Year A) was Matthew 24:36-44. Jesus gives apocalyptic teaching regarding the last day, the Day of the Lord. He opens with the statement, “But concerning that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only.” Similar sentiment is given in Acts 1:6 among other places.

This verse can give the confusion that Jesus is not God. The argument usually goes that

1. If Jesus is God, then he is all-knowing.
2. Jesus admits he does not know “that day and hour.”

and, therefore, Jesus cannot be God.

The perspective of multithreaded processing can be a useful model for the Trinity. For a multithreaded process, several threads acts together within a process. The threads share state information and other resources while also having their own local data. Each thread has its own identity and integrity while at the same time being bound up into a single process.

Considering the Trinity, we might liken the God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit as threads. Classically, they are called persons, but understanding them as threads preserves the notion that they have identity and integrity apart from each other.

Simply affirming their independence isn’t enough (it’s tritheism). Classically understood the Trinity is three persons with one substance or being. Holding that the three threads are bound together in one process helps fill out the analogy. One process, three threads. No thread can stand alone without the perichoretic process.

So, Jesus, as God the Son, is kept as of the same being/process with God the Father. They share state, resource, and other context. However, being distinct persons/threads, God the Father can have information that God the Son does not. In this case, “that day and hour” is data local to one thread, hidden from another.

Perhaps the incarnation could be likened to a kernel thread entering userspace? Can this analogy address the filioque question? That’s for future posts.

The classic Christian metaphor

A friend of mine who is the pastor for Grace Anglican Church in Dothan, Alabama describes that congregation like this:

As Anglican followers of Jesus, we are “classic Christians.” You’ve seen classic cars, heard classic rock, and probably drink classic Coke. These are solid, time-tested, older than yesterday’s fad. They are proven items. We are classic Christians whose worship style, Creeds, and method of reading God’s Word in worship weekly reaches back for centuries.

Similarly, the Prayer Book Society uses the word “classic” to describe the species of Anglicanism that they represent. It’s a peculiar use of the word, hearkening to studies of “the Classics,” or “the Greats” of ancient Western civilization.
The whole concept enshrines a particular period, philosophy or way of life as golden. A classic ’57 Chevy and a classic Coke somehow evoke a power that my Honda Accord and a diet Mountain Dew fail to do.
This use of “classic” is familiar to lots of hackers. The famed Jargon File describes Classic-C like this:

Classic C: /klas�ik C/, n.

[a play on ‘Coke Classic’] The C programming language as defined in the first edition of K&R, with some small additions. It is also known as ‘K&R C’. The name came into use while C was being standardized by the ANSI X3J11 committee. Also ‘C Classic’.

An analogous construction is sometimes applied elsewhere: thus, ‘X Classic’, where X = Star Trek (referring to the original TV series) or X = PC (referring to IBM’s ISA-bus machines as opposed to the PS/2 series). This construction is especially used of product series in which the newer versions are considered serious losers relative to the older ones.

The division of classic and post-classic falls into the hands of the ANSI committee. Before that, and it was two guys, K&R, hacking on their projects at Bell Labs. Nothing but the innocent act of creativity. What could be more pure? What could be more great?

Its fall was the committee. To the Jargon File, the ANSI committee made a “serious loser” of C. Classic Coke was great until the focus groups came. Only a marketing committee would come up with the PS/2. After Gene Roddenberry, Star Trek fell apart at the hands of a committee of writers.

The classic form usually looks to a single inspired person or a small pairing (Roddenberry, K&R, Jobs and Wozniak). Almost out of a necessary narrative, committees and marketing groups come in later to ruin it all, leaving little but hackish nostalgia.

Classic Anglicans, by extension, try to hang their hat on Thomas Cranmer and the Book of Common Prayer. A nearly single-handed creation that was, like Algol-60, “a great improvement on many of its successors.” As soon as liturgy committees enter the picture, the attitude changes.

Certainly these behaviors are not unique to hackers and Christians. Classic Coke and classic cars also exemplify the same. Always looking back, we hope for the unexamined innocence of a golden past.

Theology is founded on the great genius and singlehanded work of Jesus Christ, a unique person if there ever was one. Unfortunately, the committee he entrusted his work to (Judas the Betrayer, Peter the Denier, Thomas the Doubter, etc) managed to muck it up from the year 34 onward. However, hoping for a future cast in the image of an innocent past finds canonical recognition in the New Testament with Jesus Christ as a second Adam, ready to create a new heaven and a new earth after the vision of ancient paradise, the Garden of Eden.

(Perhaps this can be expanded on in terms of the second-system effect.)