I am at the library. It is 4 in the afternoon and I am going home to eat and read some more. John and David Totten and Meg Martin are currently en route to our apartment from Missoula Mt. It'll be fun to see them.
So far, the quarter is going pretty well. I'm still getting the hang of teaching, and I'm trying to figure out exactly what I'm doing here. That is a strange paradox; on the one hand, I absolutely love being in graduate school, while on the other, it often drives me crazy. If I wanted to be more analytical, I could tell you exactly what does each of these things, but I don't feel like doing that right now.
It's still pretty lonely here for both of us. That's partly my fault; I'm so busy most of the time that I can't really put a lot of time into meeting people. There are a number of people that some of you told us about that we haven't called yet. I have a group of people I know in the program, but there is a big difference between colleagues and friends. I'm sure I drive a lot of my friends crazy with my philosophical/literary ravings; so you would think I would be happy as a swine in excrement being around other raving lunatics like myself. I'll admit, its fun, but not everything. It goes to show we are far more complicated than we think ourselves to be.
And then the election. What a bloody mess. I don't even want to talk about it.
Tomorrow night Capria and I are going to a Halloween party held by a fellow English grad student. We're supposed to dress up as something literary. I'm never good at coming up with costume ideas. I see Halloween as yet another one of those regularly scheduled opportunities for indulging in liquid adult-candy, which I do. Anyway, I think we are going to go as postmodern punk-rock versions of Oedipus and Jocasta. Kinky, I know, but it was the best I could do on a limited budget.
This post is really funny. Have a good weekend, everyone. Read poetry.
Well, here is the exciting news. Capria got a job. And it's a nice job. A well-paying job. A job 5 blocks from our house. That is a definite blessing.
She's working at a large, locally owned VW dealership, in the service department. It seems to be a nice blend of office skills (which she wanted to develop) and customer interaction. So we are very excited.
And, as always, I have to theorize it somehow. Actually, I found this book synopsis in Sunday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, before I knew Capria had a job. But I thought an increase in our collective capital might be a good lead-in to talk about the market in general. It seems that Jeremy Rifkin has a more leftist perspective, but the idea behind the book is one that I've thought about for a long time. I think there is an American assumption that capitalism is an all-or-nothing system, and I think this attitude has hurt us in the long run. Anyway, I'd like to read the book and I'd like to hear what other people think.
I've got other stuff to do, so I'm going to leave it at that. But consider this to be an introduction to a longer piece on capitalism that I have percolating in my head.
On Saturday, I left a substantial comment in a substantial conversation on John Totten's blog. As I was writing this comment, certain things were clicking for me in my thinking. For this reason, (and because I am lazy), I offer a revised edition of that comment for your perusal.
I believe that there is a tension inherent in fallen human existence. Namely, this: I don't think that we can have complete, total, absolute knowledge on anything. If you sit down and think about it, this is a valid statement (although it will raise certain hackles).
A common response to this statement is something along the lines of "Baloney. I can know that I am sitting on this chair." OK, perhaps you can. But is that knowledge complete, total, and absolute? Do you know, for instance, what the chair is made of? If it is wooden, what kind of wood? If oak, what type of oak? If white oak, what is its grain pattern? What caused that pattern? What is its cellular makeup? What is the location of its subatomic particles at this very moment? (They will be somewhere else as soon as you say it.) What is the nature of those particles? And that's just talking about the chair.
Here's my point. Every truth claim that we make is the product of belief and doubt -- we offer statements because we believe a certain explanation and doubt another. Obviously, by this definition I am not talking about blind belief; we have experience, memory, and that nebulous yet very real faculty, rational thought to inform our beliefs and doubts. Consequently, we can have severly compelling reasons to make certain truth claims, extremely sophisticated beliefs, but we cannot move very far past that.
So, have I just cleared the way for relativism (such a naughty word)? Not at all. Because there is an object outside of the believing subject (this is one of the sophisticated beliefs that I and many others hold tenaciously). Consequently, I am not saying that complete, total, and absolute knowledge is impossible. That knowledge simply requires a different kind of Knower, namely, God.
We receive the benefit of having communication with that Knower (by using the capital "K," I am not refering to some sort of Berklianism, in case anyone wonders), both in the form of a written text and through the Holy Spirit. And that gives us a way to negotiate our existence in the world, in relationship with each other, and in relationship with God.
But that negotiation is not complete, total. Because we are still stuck with the problem of having incomplete, limited, not entirely coherent knowledge -- and this includes knowledge of the Knower and his message to us. We still have to struggle to come up with an understanding of the message that comes from God. We still have to deal with belief and doubt. I'm not saying the Gospel is unclear, or that we need theologians and philologists to understand it. But I am saying that theologian and middle-school student alike; all face the struggle of knowledge, the fight for existence, ethics, metaphysics that we cannot completely win but we also cannot abandon.
I believe (!) that formal logic and systematic theologies are often useful ways to assist us in that struggle. But they are not complete, they are not infallible, and they are not absolute. The Law of Non-contradiction is not inherent in the universe nor is it spelled out in the Bible as such. By taking it too far in our hermeneutic, we may be forcing, for instance, something that really is paradoxical in human terms into a human non-paradoxical mold, and thus fashioning the Bible after our image.
This is the place of come to in all of this. I think about it WAY too much, but I also can't help thinking about it. And I know there's someone out there who wants to challenge me on this. I'd sincerely enjoy it.
This is a shout out to Jonathan Huffine for letting me know that Watchman Alexander has made his (I can only assume glorious) entrance onto the scene. I know this is probably old news to most of you reading this, but it's new to me and so I salute young Watchman and his parents. I am really, ridiculously excited.
I have to go now.
I walk to school early every morning. It's a great time of day; the air is cool and the people are sparse. As I approached a busy intersection right on the edge of campus, I noticed a late middle-aged man dressed like a 50s CIA agent, just standing on the corner. One sees a lot of strange and wonderful things in this city. As I got closer, I noticed a stack of tiny, green leather-bound books under his arm.
"Free New Testament?" he asked as I passed.
I politely turned him down. The woman next to me took one, though. I noticed that he had 3 other agents with him, each on a different corner, each standing very early in the morning to hand out free Bibles.
I found this tremendously exciting. Causes are a dime a dozen in Seattle, particularly in the U-District. Throw a stone and you will likely hit some activist trying to get you to sign something for whatever reason. This bothers some people, but I like it. I think it's a sign of civic and individual health when volunteers will take time for something they believe in.
But these guys were the best yet. If most activists act like rally speakers, these Gideons were more like drug pushers. "Hey, kid, wanna hear about Jesus?" No glitz, no glam, and not a reference to abortion, gay marriage, or terrorism in sight. These guys were cool, but not "Cool"; late-middle aged white guys, unless their name ends in Ph.D., don't have a ton of cred on this campus, which is a shame. But these guys didn't care, they were out their anyway. And I loved it.
I'll be the first to admit that I struggle at times with the doctrine of Scripture. Sometimes it's hard for me to believe such amazing things about a book penned by human beings to human beings. But, at the end of the day, I believe that it is a message from God that changes peoples' lives. And so do those old white guys out on the street corner. And that doesn't require a loudspeaker or free frisbees or a political stump.
Jacques Derrida, the writer of deconstruction, died last night. I did not know that he suffered from pancreatic cancer. He was 74 years old.
How does one speak of Derrida? For to place him in a privileged position would be to do him a disservice. His writing and speaking (and his writing of speaking) was preoccupied with the positions of privilege. Consequently, I don't think that he would want to be remembered as an authority.
Of course, as logocentric readers and people, we couldn't help but privilege him. He was a French philosopher, after all. Toward the end of his life, he was probably over published; when you are recognized as a powerful and significant intellectual force, you can get paid for saying almost anything. Nevertheless, he never stopped thinking and writing, and I respect him for that. And some very interesting texts emerged from his later writing. Derrida was fascinated with religion and his own relationship with his Jewish heritage, and he recently published a collection of essays on faith as a place of beginnings, an epistemological movement that cannot be fully contained by epistemology.
I regret that I was never able to meet Derrida. (Even now, I am privileging him!) But perhaps I am not privileging him as much as I think. For when I think of Derrida, I don't think of an powerful philosopher. Instead, I think of a man who wrestled his entire life with what it means to be human, which is to say, what does it mean to be an inheritor of language and culture and memory? Is this meaning ever completely settled, fixed, total, beyond question and discourse? Does it mean to be human, or is being human what causes us to mean? He was not a privileged person; he was simply a person.
And, in one very real way, perhaps that is all we can say about any of us.
. . . but still able to catch Thomas Friedman today at nytimes.com. I recommend you do as well. I really like Friedman, at least what I have read. Although I don't agree with him on everything, I consider him to be an intelligent moderate voice in an often rabid (read: insane) dualisticUSA.
Off to class, more later.