A Living Text

Writing in 1995, James Jordan said:

Now there is a last curious fact. The Book of Acts likewise ends with this same quotation from Isaiah (Acts 28:25-28). Paul applies it to the stubborn and unbelieving Jews, and now tells them he is going to go to those very heathen that Psalms 115 and 135 were written about in the first place, and they will listen. A full circle has been made. This is the third application of these original Psalms to Israel. It has passed through Isaiah, to Jesus, to Paul. In each instance, there are some who are saved and others who are further hardened. This is now a three-fold hardening that has come upon Israel, and God is done with Israel.

Where are we in this cycle? America is surely at least two-fold hardened, and perhaps we are moving toward the third. About this I do not know. But what is clear is that, more than ever, America is Self-Intoxicated, and it is harder than ever to get any hearing for the Gospel. Any man who attempts evangelism with an Arminian theology is bound to be deeply disillusioned in the contemporary world. For men to be saved it is increasingly clear that a purely supernatural miracle is required so that the blind can see, the deaf hear, and the dumb sing for joy. And, it is clear that we are in danger of losing our Gospel privileges. In many places in the third world, the Gospel is heard with great joy. Romans 11:7-8 is very liable to become our legacy:

What then? Israel failed to obtain what it sought. The elect obtained it, but the rest were hardened, as it is written, “God gave them a spirit of stupor, eyes that should not see and ears that should not hear, down to this very day.”

This article is chilling, not surprising, but chilling. This may be where we are headed. Having a President Obama won’t help. One excerpt:

What was Father de Valk’s alleged ‘hate act’?

Father defended the Church’s teaching on marriage during Canada’s same-sex ‘marriage’ debate, quoting extensively from the Bible, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and Pope John Paul II’s encyclicals. Each of these documents contains official Catholic teaching. And like millions of other people throughout the world and the ages - many of who are non-Catholics and non-Christians — Father believes that marriage is an exclusive union between a man and a woman.

The response from Mark van Dusen, a media consultant and spokesperson for CHRC, shocked me. I have interviewed van Dusen in the past and he has always struck me as an honest person willing to field tough questions on behalf of the commission. If he feels an accusation against the commission is hogwash, he states so plainly. If he feels the CHRC and its personnel are being unfairly tainted, he states so boldly.

Yet van Dusen did not dismiss the question out-of-hand as I thought he would. “We investigate complaints, Mr. Vere,” he said, “we don’t set public policy or moral standards. We investigate complaints based on the circumstances and the details outlined in the complaint. And …if…upon investigation, deem that there is sufficient evidence, then we may forward the complaint to the tribunal, but the hate is defined in the Human Rights Act under section 13-1.”

Well, the long-awaited release of the updated version of Buzzword is here! Buzzword is now integrated into what is called Acrobat.com, something that exits both online and as an app on your desktop - Mac or PC. Acrobat.com integrates with Share, for PDF and file sharing, Create PDF, which does what the name implies, Meet, which allows net meetings. It is now possible to upload and share files, have net meetings, and work in a sophisticated web processing environment - all for free.

I’m not sure about what all is new in Buzzword, but I do see that export to PDF is now enabled. I imported a Word document as an experiment, and it worked flawlessly. You can export to the formats shown below:

There are lots of things that we still need to see, for example:

Supporting the ODF format;

Supporting paragraph styles;

Supporting XML import-export;

Something like Lovely Charts for Acrobat.com;

Integrating Photoshop Express and other similar apps in the suite.

But I think we are headed towards seeing all of those things. And right now, this is an awesome set of apps that is free and beautiful. I would imagine that heads are turning in Redmond, and that they can see the end of their business model on the horizon. Granted, Office can do tons of things that Acrobat.com cannot do right now, but at the basic level of functionality that most people use word processors for, Buzzword is quickly ramping up to smash Word.

I’ve been thinking about my anscestors and my current reality. They came from Norway, Germany, Ireland and England. The most recent and dominant strains were Norwegian and German. My Grandmother spoke a good deal of Norwegian and preferred her Lutheran services in Norwegian. And yet this is completely lost to me. I don’t speak or read any Norwegian or German. I don’t read old Norse authors or study old Norse works. When we go to school, we study the Anglo-Saxon heritage, old English works, and the literature of England and nascent America.

This is right and how it should be. It is a good thing that Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin are not Norwegian enclaves that agitate for Norwegian on state forms and bi-lingual Norwegian education. Norwegians were absorbed into the Anglo mainstream. All of us descendants speak the language of Albion (England), we read Chaucer, Caedmon and Shakespeare. We have been assimilated, not into America, but into the Angloshpere. “Whites” who cast around for an identity forget that our past was as divided tribes, speaking German or French or Gaelic, not English. And yet we all are here, speaking English. And today, we see the same thing across the globe, in Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India, and North America - a sphere of nations that are formed by the English language, English norms and English history.

It is for this reason that I think English institutions ought to guide us, and we ought to seek out the English past as our own. Norway is lost to me, I will not use it’s history as a template for the United States. But England is the mother country of us all, for we speak her language. And this is just what will happen to the current wave of Hispanic immigrants. Over time they will lose any allegiance to Spain and it’s history (if any exists now), and by embracing English will need to learn Shakespeare and read about Queen Elizabeth just like the rest of us.

I further think that the existence of the Angloshpere with English as the mother tongue gives further impetus to the Anglican Church as the true home of English-speaking Protestants. The Lutheran tradition is a German, Norwegian and Swedish one. The Reformed churches remain Dutch in large measure. The Anglican Church is the logical choice for those of us who want to connect to the one catholic church, but are no longer German/Norse/Swedish in our speech and customs. It is a church for all of us who now speak English. It is an English institution that is inescapable in the history of our literature. Sometimes it is at the periphery, sometimes at the center, but there it is, a force that means something to all English-speakers, even if they know nothing about her. The English language and England are now the unifying forces in much of the world, because our language is the lingua franca of the world.

Well, OpenOffice has extensions for:

Latex

Google Docs

Unbeknownst to me, Microsoft also has a book search function, like Google’s Books that I have grown to love:

Live Search Books

You have probably already heard about Adobe’s free Photoshop roll-out last week. I see big things coming there. Integrating BuzzWord, Share, Photoshop and more could make for a really cool set of apps. I think we will see great things from BuzzWord this year, including a desktop version, easy export to PDF as text, and the beginnings of templates, styles, and PhotoShop integration.

These are scary times in the world of finance, and increasingly in our every day world too. The collapse of Bear Stearns shows the instability in the system. Housing prices have fallen, oil and gas are out of control and the dollar is weak. I am currently reading the Black Swan by Naseem Taleb (you should too) and his book seems incredibly relevant given the situation we are in.

Essentially he says the obvious: no one knows the future and the value of all predictions is next to meaningless. Statisticians and “experts” rule out massive outliers and thus their predictions are moot. They assume a nice, stable world where massive changes do not happen, when the reality of our time is that massive changes are more and more likely. No one predicted 9/11 of course, but it invalidated all financial models made up to the day before it. The current crisis in the financial sector is somewhat more predictable, but still, the collapse of Bear Stearns was not on the horizon. I read Tobias Levkovich weekly, and note that he assumes nice stable historical patterns, which mean that his predictions are as useless as mine. I am not doing justice to Taleb’s book or his ideas, but the main takeaway is that forecasting the future is almost utterly vain. What if the USA collapsed next month, or a new disease wiped out half the planet, or some other huge event? It would be unforeseen and disruptive. Also, in its wake we would see books and stories that tried to make sense of it in a narrative way, that would show us how we should have seen it coming and how it all made sense - but it wouldn’t.

So the financial situation can cause panic and fear. All I have to lean on are the word’s of the Messiah: “sufficient unto the day is the trouble thereof.”

From here:

“Much of what happens in history”, he notes, “comes from ‘Black Swan dynamics’, very large, sudden, and totally unpredictable ‘outliers’, while much of what we usually talk about is almost pure noise. Our track record in predicting those events is dismal; yet by some mechanism called the hindsight bias we think that we understand them. We have a bad habit of finding ‘laws’ in history (by fitting stories to events and detecting false patterns); we are drivers looking through the rear view mirror while convinced we are looking ahead.”

In Advent, we reflect on the first coming of Jesus and look forward to ‘the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead…’ It is worth reflecting on what God has told us about that day. First, Daniel says:

thrones were placed and the Ancient of days took his seat; his clothing was white as snow, and the hair of his head like pure wool; his throne was fiery flames; its wheels were burning fire. A stream of fire issued and came out from before him; a thousand thousands served him, and ten thousand times ten thousand stood before him; the court sat in judgment, and the books were opened.

Jesus said, ‘I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak, for by your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned.’

Paul said, ‘each of us will give an account of himself to God.’ He also said, ‘For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.”

John saw this future judgment and writes of it:

Then I saw a great white throne and him who was seated on it. From his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Then another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, according to what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead who were in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead who were in them, and they were judged, each one of them, according to what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. And if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.’

The Catholic Catechism says this, ‘In the presence of Christ, who is Truth itself, the truth of each man’s relationship with God will be laid bare. The Last Judgment will reveal even to its furthest consequences the good each person has done or failed to do during his earthly life.

The message of the Last Judgment calls men to conversion while God is still giving them “the acceptable time,…the day of salvation.” It inspires a holy fear of God…’

Anglican poet George Herbert wrote:

ALmighty Judge, how shall poore wretches brook
                                  Thy dreadfull look,
Able a heart of iron to appall,
                                  When thou shalt call
          For ev’ry mans peculiar book?
What others mean to do, I know not well,
                                  Yet I heare tell,
That some will turn thee to some leaves therein
                                  So void of sinne,
          That they in merit shall excell.
But I resolve, when thou shalt call for mine,
                                  That to decline,
And thrust a Testament into thy hand:
                                  Let that be scann’d.
          There thou shalt finde my faults are thine.

I’m wondering what the theological implications of water on planets other than the earth are? We are trying to find water on Europa, Mars and the Moon, and let’s just say it is there. Does it imply that water was splashing through space during the creation? That other planets once had water? Further, if there is microbial life or some other type of life in this water, what would that mean? Did God seed the universe with water for the future colonization of space by humanity? I’m interested in a theology of space exploration, and what water elsewhere means for us in the Church.

Green energy is something that I want to see as beneficial to the planet and a path to weaning ourselves off oil (and thereby imperial ambitions in the Middle East). By now I’m sure you are familiar with windmill power, solar power, and so forth, but now there is an idea so crazy that it just may work: sky wind power. The idea is to send a flying electric generator about 15,000 feet up into the jet stream, tethered to the ground and generating tremendous energy. The aircraft is pictured below:

the Sky WindPower website says:

An array of 600 Flying Electric Generators rated at 20MW each, a total of twelve thousand megawatts in capacity, operating over a ground space of a ten by twenty mile rectangle, would produce approximately three times as many megawatt hours per year as the 28,572,902 MWh produced by the Palos Verde Arizona nuclear facility in the year 2003, the most electricity produced by a single generating plant in the U.S. that year. While other power sources will, of course, always supply some power, 43 such FEG arrays, all operating at relatively remote sites with average capacity factors of 85%, but not located so far from metropolitan areas as to require very long transmission lines, could supply the same amount of electrical power as was produced in the United States in the year 2003, which was 3,883,185,000MWh.

To which I say, ‘cool’ and hope that it can work.