As a result of peer pressure from all of the cool kids, I signed up for a twitter account. I have no idea if/how much I’ll use it/be able to use it—but we’ll see…
I’m suddenly reminded of Prov 29:11: “A fool uttereth all his mind: but a wise [man] keepeth it in till afterwards.” How easy it is for Web 2.0 to help us prove Scripture right!
The Elizaphanian has a post up collecting his theological responses to the environmental issue of peak oil. (h/t Dean Knisely)
Too, one of his recent posts deals with switching away from Windows.
This is pretty high on my list. My Linux machine is down at the moment but its a result of age finally catching up with it. The hardware was at least ten years old—if not older. Nevertheless, it ran Xubuntu just fine with no serious time lags. So (here’s the Earth Day tie-in—tenuous though it be…) I could get away with using hardware from the previous century without having to constantly junk and consume to keep up with ever-voracious demands from the Windows OS.
No, Xubuntu/Ubuntu, OpenOffice, Firefox, Eclipse are my new core suite. Since I do corporate computing I can’t entirely wash my hands of Windows and Office, but I can at home.
As much as I hope Open Source will catch on, however, I fear it will continue to find a home in a niche population than the true mainstream. M, for instance, will still retain a Windows machine. She’s not a computer person and hates when I tinker with things or when everything doesn’t work just as it ought. Many of the Open stuff still isn’t terribly user friendly—and some of it deliberately so, I think… Until that changes she’ll probably stick with Windows.
…for the weird phenomenon where you copy and paste a bit of code from one part of your pragram to another and it works fine in the first place but gives you errors in the second…
Since I’m supposed to keep my foot elevated and not drive, I didn’t make it to church yesterday. M was going to take both girls to church with her (which I really hate to make her do—as she’s suggested , perhaps I should try taking them into the office with me one of these days…) but since Lil’ H has pink eye she stayed home with Daddy. The, M went out with a best friend from middle shool who dropped into town for such much needed r&r. Once I put the girls down I had some spare time on my hands.
In between the other stuff, I wrapped up a little project: it’s a web page (currently only locally hosted) that uses PHP and a SQLite database to calculate the temporal cycle’s liturgical date in both a long and a short form (i.e., L4Mon/Monday after the Fourth Sunday in Lent), gives both Proper numbers and Sundays after Trinity for the post-Pentecost period, assigns a relative rank for both the morning and the evening, and determines the daily office lectionary year for every day for the next ten years…
Next up: cross-referencing it with the sanctoral cycle and weighing temporal vs. sanctoral ranks to determine sanctoral celebrations/commemorations/etc.
Once it’s working properly, it’s just a matter of switching between database tables to move between assessing modern and early medieval kalendars.
Hope y’all had a good Christmas as the season draws to a close. I’m back but not really “back”. Things are extremely busy and I won’t be online much. (Except to be loading freakin’ Oracle tables row by row through a PHP portal since my SQL*Loader is messed up…)
Speaking of how hacked off I am at Oracle, I’m thinking that SQLite really should be the hot new thing. And yes, I realize that sentence made no sense to anyone other than computer geeks but there’s a practical(?) payoff—I think SQLite (a small-profile database system) will give me functionality to program a method of calculating liturgical dates that can easily be switched back and forth between different sanctoral/temporal cycles. So moving between calculating a date in the modern revised common lectionary and a 10th century Benedictine kalendar would be fast and simple—and just a click away for a web visitor…
I think my feed reader said I had some 500 items to catch up on and I’ve seen some interesting email to which I’ll respond when able and yes, I’m gonna do our buddy Ælfric Bata for the history meme that Jonathan and Michelle both tagged me for.
Ack… More later.
AKMA is quite right as usual: technology is proceeding apace–we need to be informed about the change and be intentional about discovering both its promises and perils.
An example of how we can use these technologies is this site on liturgy and liturgical spirituality with a monastic bent from New Zealand. The Rev. Bosco Peters has put together a strong site with a growing number of resources. This is the kind of site that I think is at the forefront of what is emerging and is representative of what some have called “blog-level ecumenism”; looking it over I wasn’t immediately clear whether it was Anglican or Catholic or liturgical protestant—and that’s not a bad thing. In touch with the Tradition, liturgical, spiritual with a monastic grounding, yet engaged with contemporary realities for the sake of proclaiming the Gospel with power and integrity in our local times and places.
I’d include Full Homely Divinity in the same category…
Dr. Nokes points us to a great example of what scholars can be up to and how a blog can be pertinent for the dissemination of academic data. There are a spate of Beowulf films in various stages of production including a major studio effort coming out soon. As a result, people are asking Anglo-Saxonists about Beowulf and are searching the internet for more about it. Dr. Michael Drout does a great service to the general public by giving some helpful information to those wondering about Beowulf.
As Dr. Nokes has noted before, one of the factors that goes into how Google indexes hits is based on the number of links that a page has to it. The more links to it, the higher it goes. This is why he exhorts his readers to link to it; it’s a public service. The more links that lead to good data, the more that good data will be read…
Scholar-type people and academics often frustrate me. There’s a picture I love that hangs in the law library where I used to work; I’d push book trucks by it most everyday. In the picture a wizened old African-American man is outfitted in well-used work gear and he’s got his hand out offering something to the viewer: a small white pillar shaped object. The caption is “Ivory Tower.” The way that I interpret the watercolor is that those who “make it” into academia never get there on their own. Yes, it takes tremendous sacrifice from family (that’s a whole series of posts by itself…) but there are hundreds of thousands of others who make it possible as well from the great philanthropists down to the share-croppers.
As a result, we have an obligation. We’re not sitting around thinking great thoughts for our own sake even though that’s how so many of us seem to act. We study and think in order to advance human understanding in all realms for and on behalf of all. Even if our work is arcane and abstract, I have a conviction that we have to share what of it we can for wider consumption, for the benefit of those who have enabled us to do what we do.
Many of us don’t take this seriously. Furthermore, many of us can barely string together a sentence about our work coherent to those outside of our discipline—and that’s just wrong… As I see it, that’s one of the reasons why academics should be blogging. People like Mark Goodacre and Richard Nokes (among others) have the right idea; blog about academic topics and subjects in ways that are accessible and meaningful to the rest of life on the planet that doesn’t care—or perhaps doesn’t know why they should care—about the minutia of our fields.
Here’s another thing scholars should be doing: Wikipedia edits. What sparked this post was the discovery of a well-done entry on Latin Psalters. As more and more people start relying on things like Wikipedia for information, scholars of various fields need to step up and make sure that the data is right. (And yes, you can debate about whether people should rely on these sources of information but that debate is secondary to the fact that they do.)
Of course, now that I’ve said all of this, I realize that I have my own civic duty to do… The page currently states that Jerome’s Roman Psalter was used in “Britain ” until the Conquest. While it is true that editions of the Roman Psalter were in use and were copied until the Conquest, the majority of Anglo-Saxon era psalters were Gallican…
The superlative New Testament Gateway blog points us to a great new site that represents the future of academic tools in the humanities. It’s The University of Birmingham’s Vetus Latina Iohannes Electronic Edition. A word of explanation on what the Old Latin is and why it’s important and why this project matters…
As you may recall, back in the patristic period there was general griping about the crappy state of the translations of the New Testament into Latin from the original Koine Greek. A classic example comes from Augustine’s On Christian Doctrine II.11.16:
The great remedy for ignorance of proper signs is knowledge of languages. And men who speak the Latin tongue, of whom are those I have undertaken to instruct, need two other languages for the knowledge of Scripture, Hebrew and Greek, that they may have recourse to the original texts if the endless diversity of the Latin translators throw them into doubt. . . .But the knowledge of these languages is necessary, not for the sake of a few words like these which it is very easy to mark and to ask about, but, as has been said, on account of the diversities among translators. For the translations of the Scriptures from Hebrew into Greek can be counted, but the Latin translators are out of all number. For in the early days of the faith every man who happened to get his hands upon a Greek manuscript, and who thought he had any knowledge, were it ever so little, of the two languages, ventured upon the work of translation.
Later in Book II he recommends one version in particular, the Italian (Itala) (CD II.15.22) though—to the dismay of biblical scholars since then—fails to give any identifying features of this particular translation…
In any case, this was the condition that led Jerome to undertake his work of translating, editing, and updating that resulted in the Vulgate as he describes here in his prefatory letter to Pope Damasus:
You urge me to revise the old Latin version, and, as it were, to sit in judgment on the copies of the Scriptures which are now scattered throughout the whole world; and, inasmuch as they differ from one another, you would have me decide which of them agree with the Greek original. The labour is one of love, but at the same time both perilous and presumptuous; for in judging others I must be content to be judged by all; and how can I dare to change the language of the world in its hoary old age, and carry it back to the early days of its infancy? Is there a man, learned or unlearned, who will not, when he takes the volume into his hands, and perceives that what he reads does not suit his settled tastes, break out immediately into violent language, and call me a forger and a profane person for having the audacity to add anything to the ancient books, or to make any changes or corrections therein? Now there are two consoling reflections which enable me to bear the odium—in the first place, the command is given by you who are the supreme bishop; and secondly, even on the showing of those who revile us, readings at variance with the early copies cannot be right. For if we are to pin our faith to the Latin texts, it is for our opponents to tell us which; for there are almost as many forms of texts as there are copies. If, on the other hand, we are to glean the truth from a comparison of many, why not go back to the original Greek and correct the mistakes introduced by inaccurate translators, and the blundering alterations of confident but ignorant critics, and, further, all that has been inserted or changed by copyists more asleep than awake? I am not discussing the Old Testament, which was turned into Greek by the Seventy elders, and has reached us by a descent of three steps. I do not ask what Aquila and Symmachus think, or why Theodotion takes a middle course between the ancients and the moderns. I am willing to let that be the true translation which had apostolic approval. I am now speaking of the New Testament. This was undoubtedly composed in Greek, with the exception of the work of Matthew the Apostle, who was the first to commit to writing the Gospel of Christ, and who published his work in Judæa in Hebrew characters. We must confess that as we have it in our language it is marked by discrepancies, and now that the stream is distributed into different channels we must go back to the fountainhead. I pass over those manuscripts which are associated with the names of Lucian and Hesychius, and the authority of which is perversely maintained by a handful of disputatious persons. It is obvious that these writers could not amend anything in the Old Testament after the labours of the Seventy; and it was useless to correct the New, for versions of Scripture which already exist in the languages of many nations show that their additions are false. I therefore promise in this short Preface the four Gospels only, which are to be taken in the following order, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, as they have been revised by a comparison of the Greek manuscripts. Only early ones have been used. But to avoid any great divergences from the Latin which we are accustomed to read, I have used my pen with some restraint, and while I have corrected only such passages as seemed to convey a different meaning, I have allowed the rest to remain as they are.
So–the Vulgate became the standard Latin translation of the Western Church…eventually. In the Early Medieval period, though, both the Vulgate and “those others” still circulated. Modern scholars dub “those others” the Old Latin text (or OL) to distinguish them from the Vulgate (Vg). For people who do stuff with Early Medieval England knowing the specific textual variants between the Vg and the OL can be quite helpful because by and large the Irish retained the OL while the Rome-based mission to the Anglo-Saxons brought the Vg. As a result, Irish influence on a particular writing or manuscript can be determined by identifying OL features of Scriptural citations. So, what this electronic edition does is to present all of the major witnesses of the Old Latin so that those who do that kind of thing can sift through the various layers of evidence.
(Another reason why the OL is important is because it is through the OL tradition that some of the differences between the Hebrew text of the Old Testament and the Septuagint appear in the writings of the Scholastics. I remember once being amazed that Thomas Aquinas referred to a Septuagint text not found in the Hebraica Veritas and wondered how he got his hands on it. Later, I discovered that the OL was one of the major ways that these differences were passed through to the High Medieval period.)
While this sounds rather boring to virtually all sentient life on the planet, there are a few of us who get quite excited about it…
One of the reasons I’m lifting it up is because it represents the way that academic tools need to be going in the next few decades. Knowledge is power–but it must be organized for that power to be harnessed. We need a lot more initiatives like this that maximize the power of relational database and the information-sharing capabilities of the internet.
The Rubric Policeman who lives within me and who I normally suppress is busting forth this morning…
I ran through MP online this morning. When I can do this, I normally open up both MissionStClare and the C of E’s 1662 MP and use the 1662 ordo with the readings and collects from MissionStClare. Thus, I’m in line with the lectionary and weekly collects so when M and I pray EP together I don’t get liturgical whiplash. (MSC doesn’t maintain a consistent Rite I—hence the English book…)
Neither of these sources had the Collect for the Feast of the Holy Cross. MissionStClare didn’t have the readings for it either. What’s up with that?! I’ll note that Josh’s Daily Office site had both the readings and the collects… (I would have used the Festal Canticles but again—that’s just me.)
I know that to 99.9% of Christians this kind of detail focus comes across merely as nit-picking and a show of liturgical arrogance and that’s really not my point—and why I try to keep my inner rubric cop on a short leash. (I’m trying to repent of years of liturgical arrogance… ;-)) Rather, the point is about formative patterns. What is the rota that we adopt or have adopted by which we will form ourselves? Liturgical formation is a process that happens over a period of years if not decades. And I’ll freely admit, these things jump out at me because I struggle with them—I’m always tempted to toss my current plan out the window in favor of the next great breviary.
The real issue and explanation in terms of the online offices, of course, is that these aren’t really liturgy issues or rubrics issues—as I see them, they’re database issues. That is, the best way to set these things up is not to put them in place manually, rather it’s to program your pie (kalendrical calculations) to seamlessly plop in all the right pieces at all the right times. In fact, as I see it, missals and breviaries are materials that exist only imperfectly in manuscripts or books. These things have pleaded and cried out for integration with relational databases for centuries and our computer technology has finally caught up to our liturgical vision.
What I’d love to see is a Daily Office site where you could select from a range—what version you wanted to use, which lectionary, which kalendar, with Office Hymns and antiphons or without, with each possible Office either readable on screen or printable as a PDF. The technology’s in place—it’s just a matter of the time…
The big liturgical news of the day, though, isn’t about the Office… Rather, M has been invited at the last minute to celebrate mass at our alma mater’s contemplative Eucharist today so I’ll be spending my lunch hour with her there—hopefully in the service if Lil’ H will permit…
 | John-Julian, OJN on Ain’t It Odd…… |
 | Richard Scott Nokes on Ain’t It Odd…… |
 | Anastasia on Ain’t It Odd…… |
| Anastasia on Discipleship at the Cafe |
 | bls on Discipleship at the Cafe |
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