Entries in Life

While I've been waiting for a copy of Cox's book to read, Father Stephen has posted an excerpt from Richard Wurmbrand’s With God in Solitary Confinement.

Jesus Himself thought unsystematically on the cross. He began with forgiveness; He spoke of a paradise in which even a robber had a place; then he despaired that perhaps there might be no place in paradise even for Him, the Son of God. He felt Himself forsaken. His thirst was so unbearable that He asked for water. Then He surrendered His spirit into His Father’s hand. But there followed no serenity, only a loud cry. Thank you for what you have been trying to teach me. I have the impression that you were only repeating, without much conviction, what others have taught you.

In this, we hear the echo of that oft-repeated axiom from the fourth century Orthodox monastic Evagrius of Pontus: A theologian is one who prays, and one who prays is a theologian.

In the West, we tend to be systematic about things, studying them, taking them apart and seeing how they all fit back together. But this is not living the Way. The Way operates on us, in us. The Way changes us.

“Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Where is the systematic theology in that? What is being fixed?

If we spend our time praying intead of worrying about re-forming this or that area of the church, this or that system of theology, we'll end up living The Way instead of trying to figure out the right form.

But we need form. We need structure. We create structures to provide a framework for living. Take away the structure, take away the Tradition and we'll create new ones. Jaraslov Pelikan (a late convert to Orthodoxy) observed

Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living. Tradition lives in conversation with the past, while remembering where we are and when we are and that it is we who have to decide. Traditionalism supposes that nothing should ever be done for the first time, so all that is needed to solve any problem is to arrive at the supposedly unanimous testimony of this homogenized tradition.

At another time, he said “The only alternative to Tradition is bad tradition.”

And this is where we end up without creeds: with bad tradition. In fact, we end up re-formulating our thinking so much — re-creating our personal creed — that we don't have time to actually live it.

As Henry David Thoreau observed:

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

This is why we have Tradition. First, because if we didn't have it, we would end up creating it anyway and, second, because we want to create deep mental paths. Where systematic theology failed us, Tradition offers a way out.

When I wrote about possible apocalypses last month, I neglected the other extreme that we tend to go to. Just as many of us live preparing for a coming apocalypse, many think that we're on the cusp of a new utopia, a golden era.

Harvey Cox's “Future of Faith” could be seen as one example of this, just as Sam Harris' “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason“ could be seen as another. Both share a utopian view of the future: “One day, soon, we'll all live in peace!”

Today, a friend shared an article with me that manages to synthesize Cox's utopian view with that of Harris': “Stepping Up to the Age of Empathy; ‘Empathetic Civilization’: When Both Faith and Reason Fail”. I had just finished reading a review of “Kinds of Killing”, so it made an interesting juxtaposition.

Following is my response to my friend.

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When Jeremy Rifkin mentioned “embodied experience” the first thing that popped into my mind was existentialism. But then, also, the ancient (Hebrew) conception of belief: that it must be lived. At least in modern times it is common to claim to believe something, but live in ways that contradict that — often, it seems with little self-awareness.

But this bit I would take issue with:

For the former, especially the Abrahamic faiths, the body is fallen and a source of evil.

I'll agree that Augustinian Christians do see the body this way. Eastern Christianity (at least how I've experienced in, and in my reading of the Saints) sees the body as made “in the image of God”. The body is not the *source* of evil. In this way we echo the ancient Greeks who saw evil as the absence of good, rather than something of substance itself. The body isn't evil, but when we fail to do good, we “do” evil.

So, I'd say much of this is an straw man argument, or, at least, an argument against a distortion of Christianity. If we don't think the emotions and the body are not part of our baptism into Christ, then, sure, the argument makes some sense. But those of us who see the body and emotions as integral parts of the whole person would disagree. This may not be the common understanding of Christianity in much of the West, but it isn't a new take on Christianity that only just appeared during the “Age of Empathy”.

Which makes this a non-question:

If empathic consciousness flows from embodied experience and is a celebration of life—our own and that of other beings—how do we square it with faith and reason, which are disembodied ways of looking at reality and steeped in the fear of death?

I think it is telling that the Enlightenment took place in Western Europe, but there wasn't (at least as far as I know) a similar renaissance in the East. The Byzantine and then Russian Empires filled the power vacuum that the fall of the Roman Empire, along with its civilizing influence.

Which is not to say that the East is somehow purer, but that our understanding of history and philosophical development is very Euro-centric. The very notion of “Ages” seems, to me, to be part of our desire to compartmentalize. “That was then, this is now.” This is fed by our infatuation with ourselves: the idea that Humanity is advancing philosophically as well as technologically.

What period of time, wherever people had the resources to sit around and write articles like this, hasn't seen itself as entering some grand new “age”? I'm sure, for example, American slaves didn't see a new age coming, but their masters certainly did often enough.

None of this is to imply that we haven't seen a dramatic technological shift in the past 100 years. But our visions of the future are just that: dreams. Our dreams of utopia or apocalypse may change, but in the end, we'll probably end up somewhere in the middle.

Speaking of apocalypse, I just got done reading this book review.

I thought the first paragraph, which talks about how to prepare private citizens for war was good.

Then, this bit, farther down:

Mostly, though, soldiers complained of the miserable conditions of life that Russian villages offered them. “Partisan resistance prompted further reprisals, leading more to join the partisans, and so the escalating cycle of violence continued.” This inevitability, ironically, seems to have escaped the notice of present-day nations. What is the use of an upper hand if you can't spank someone with it?

Over the next couple of weeks, I plan on reading Harvey Cox's “Future of Faith.” Keep in mind I have to actually obtain a copy first: Hopefully through Inter-Library Loan or from a friend.

That said, I read (and responded to) John Goerzen's overview of the book, and I skimmed the book when I was at Barnes & Noble yesterday. (You can see much of the same material on Amazon's “Look Inside!” feature if you don't have a copy and don't want to trek to B&N for a look-see.)

After reading John's blog post, though, the first thing I did was read the Wikipedia entry on Harvey Cox. It was there that I learned Mr. Cox wrote “The Future of Faith” when he retired last year at the age of 80.

Now, I don't know about you, but I associate the hubris of predictions about the future of, well, almost anything, with the naivety of (relative) youth. Sam Harris wrote “The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason” (which seems to have inspired the title of Harvey Cox's book) in his late 30s. Predictions just don't work that well — we tend to overstate near-term changes (It's 2010, where's my hover car?) and under-state or misunderstand longer-term changes.

So, when the front flap of “The Future of Faith” claims that a trend Mr. Cox calls The Age of the Spirit began 50 years ago — within Mr. Cox's lifetime – I can't help but at least raise an eyebrow. Especially when he puts this change on par with what he calls the end of “The Age of Faith”: when Constantine legitimized Christianity in the fourth century. Oh, really? During that period, Christians went from being a severely persecuted minority (read up on how Constantine's predecessor, Diocletian, treated Christians) to being socially acceptable.

Today, Christianity is the world's largest religion. What change has happened in the past 50 years that is anything like the end of systematic persecution of Christians?

Obviously, Cox is talking about something other than the obvious. Let's go back to what the front flap of the book says.

The Age of the Spirit: a trend that began fifty years ago and is increasingly directing the church of tomorrow whereby Christians are ignoring dogma and breaking down barriers between different religions — spirituality is replacing formal religion.

Hmm… Still not buying it. Thomas Jefferson's Bible or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth is an edited copy of the Gospels that eliminates any indication of Christ's divinity to reveal “the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man.”

Or, look at the Unitarians who also focus on the “spiritual” teachings of Jesus (and others) while rejecting any ideas more orthodox Christianity has about his divinity.

To put it bluntly, what Cox is describing as the “Age of the Spirit” seems to be something that has been around much longer than 50 years. Within Christianity, the changes since the fourth century parallel the changes in our systems of government. As we rejected ideas like Divine right of kings and moved to more democratic systems of Government, people's lives in the church changed as they rejected the supreme spiritual authority of the Pope. Is it any coincidence that many of the Founding Fathers of the American system of government were not Christians?

After reading John Goerzen's post and looking over the table of contents of the book, I also get the impression that Cox, like many Protestants, has an interpretation of history that sees the Constantine's legitimization of Christianity as, somehow, harmful to the Christian ethic. That, in itself, isn't an unusual point of view. Even Christians contemporary to Constantine saw the “mainstreaming” of Christianity as harmful to the Christian ethic. As a result, many escaped into the desert and, as a result, birthed the monastic movement that continues today. The Anabaptist movement inherited this monastic zeal which (rightly) sees Christ's teachings as the focus of Christian life.

The Anabaptist movement, though, like many movements and reformations that ended up in that mish-mash we today call “Protestant Christianity” seems, to me, to have developed into a culture of Christianity that chooses protest as its point of identity rather than a focus on Christian life. And the protest is against anything that feels too “Catholic” or, in the case of Cox, too authoritarian.

I could go on here, but I really want to make sure I read the book before offering too many more of my own opinions. I imagine I'll have reactions along the way, and I'll post them here.

Finally, why am I interested in reading this book? Well, John seems to have liked it and I respect John. He's built one of the tools I use on a daily basis, OfflineIMAP. He's a thoughtful Christian and I'd like to be able to have a more informed conversation with him (and those like him) about why things like the Creed matter. To do that, I have to understand a little more where they're coming from instead of just dismissing what they say as hubristic ranting.

Working on free software projects isn't easy. Just because you're giving away your work for anyone to use doesn't mean that anyone is going to take it, no questions asked.

Take my MediaWiki work as an example. I am being paid for the work, but it is freely licensed and I'm learning about the standards of quality that the community has formed around the code.

Frankly, before becoming involved in such a serious PHP-based project, I didn't have a very high opinion of PHP. Even Rasmus (creator of PHP) doesn't seem to live in a pure php world and, as a result, thinks of systems where PHP is merely the web frontend instead of almost the entire system.

So working with others who have been neck-deep in PHP for years, building one of the top-10 sites on the net entirely in PHP, and gaining intimate familiarity with the quirks of PHP, has been a wonderful experience.

But MediaWiki isn't the only free software project I'm involved in. I also contribute to Emacs occasionally. (For those not so familar with Emacs vs Vi, let's just say this is like the social situation between Republicans and the Democrats or the Roman Catholics and Southern Baptists: You live next door to them, but you know they're going to hell.)

And it is my most recent commits to Emacs that have gained me noteriety. Yesterday, I was catching up on some blog reading (Planet Emacs, thankyouverymuch) and came across a nifty use of loccur.el. But it used defadvice instead of a hook (and hooks are better — no this is different than emacs vs vi, I swear).

I looked at the code and thought, “Hey, I can make a tiny little contribution to Emacs here!” So I made a couple of small changes.

Little did I know what a problem that was going to be.

Óscar Fuentes used my commit message as an example of how not to write a commit message. This was not the first time I've been so honored.

Three weeks ago, I made a mistake committing to the bzr repository for emacs and was again used as an example for the Emacs-devel community of how not to make a commit.

There are two reasons I'm such a stellar example for the other Emacs developers.

First, I've been using bzr for a couple of years while working on the iHRIS Suite. This experience (2 years more than most Emacs developers) naturally made me think I had things under control. So I didn't bother reading over Bzr for Emacs Devs.

Second, Emacs recently switched its source-control system (after much debate and some effort on speed the bzr side) from the ancient, worn, CVS to bzr. So people are still adapting their work flow. I just happened to make some commits that were particularly egregious and ended up being great examples of what people should avoid.

So, yes, Free Software is a great thing, but that doesn't mean the developers don't take it seriously. And being reprimanded in public isn't the most pleasent experience. But at least I can blog about it!

(This is copied from the first part of last week's weekly report. I've copied it here since more people may be interested in what it feels like to work in a highly visible open source project.)

I'm halfway through a 3 month contract (a relationship with the WikiMedia Foundation that I hope to continue) and it seems like a good place to write up some of my lessons learned.

Too many times I haven't spent enough time going over my code. Or, when I'm refactoring someone else's code, I don't look over it enough. Sometimes this is due to my own inexperience with the MW code base: If I had more experience, I would have a better idea from just looking at the code that dieUsage() was being used incorrectly.

Still, experience can be created, and when it is experience you lack, the effort to create experience must be made. This is where testing comes in. More than once while refactoring the UploadChunks api, Tim has just looked at the code and told me I wasn't testing it properly.

The same could be said for more trivial things like whitespace. Mixing whitespace commits with more substantive changes as well as just the way Emacs formats the code by default have irritated other developers. From this experience, I think I need to borrow an idea from Atul_Gawande's Checklist Manifesto and make — gasp — a checklist.

The checklist is the first step, but the second would be automating as much of the checklist as possible and creating a pre-commit hook that I could use to check my own code.

From my experience, here are some ideas for a checklist:

• Whitespace use.
  • Tabs, not spaces
  • avoiding spaces for indention and lining up code
  • spaces around parens
  • etc.
• Code correctness.
  • Ensure each exit point has a test. (Since I prefer to write unit tests for my code, noting a test for each exit point in a code comment would take care of this. An automated check would just verify that the exit point has a notation.)
  • Make sure no E_STRICT warnings are thrown during tests

Note that any automation here is going to fail to really enforce anything: it is impossible to verify code-correctness completely without actually running the code. Instead the idea is not to verify that the code is bug-free, but just to make sure that I've caught the things that more experienced MW developers aren't going to roll their eyes at.

That said, the number of developers actively working on MW code as well as the CodeReview extension on mediawiki.org make developing MW code an overwhelmingly positive experience. These things mean that — combined with the depth of PHP and MediaWiki knowledge and care that people take — problems see the light of day really quickly. When your code is likely to end up on one of the top-10 sites on the Internet, this amount of care is crucial.