The Filter

We live in a time of exponentially rising information.

Whether that information is useful or mere noise getting in the way depends on the filter of one's mind.

In this context, the value of higher education is not primarily in the delivery of information, but in the development of the character, capacity, and capability of the filter.

The information is everywhere but without the filter you still won't find it.

Talk of God Talk of Science / #tog2013

Day 1

Jennifer Wiseman

I deeply appreciated Jennifer Wiseman's reminder of our context as practitioners of faith within a cosmos we now know to be many orders of magnitude more vast than humanity had ever imagined prior to this century.

Particularly poignant was her highlighting of the tough question of what we are to do with the the age of the universe as a people whose tradition is only concerned with the smallest sliver of the last few thousand years. Further, what meaning do we make out of the profoundly slow process of many generations or cycles of star birth and death that are required to forge the heavier elements that form solid planets and make up all life on earth?

By situating the problem of evil, both disasters and people being wicked to other people and other creatures, within that narrow band of the last few millennia of creaturely existence, and by emphasizing the goodness of creation prior to that,  she radically recontextualizes the problem of evil within a vast and ancient created cosmos that is in her words "good in its totality."  This is not an perspective I've encountered before in the age old wrestling match between thinking, suffering humans and our concept of an omnipotent God and it is one that, I think, is only possible by the dramatic expansion of our ability to imagine and understand the cosmos that comes from the fruits of science in the past century.

All the more fitting that her talk happened within sight of the Mount Wilson observatory where Edwin Hubble first made the observations that established that the universe's expansion was accelerating.

Warren Brown

Dr. Brown's talk on embodied cognition and the role mirror our mirror neurons play is always fascinating, but all the more in the context of Christian formation.

I'm a little leery of his quick jump from the notion of mobile phone as off-loaded cognitive work into the environment to the notion of Christian community as off-loaded cognitive / belief / formation work since the one is reliant on artifacts, designs and systems and the other is reliant on humans in relationship.

Further, since my work with read-together.com and with Fuller's endeavors into formation through programs primarily delivered online, I've been working on the question of how formative interactions mediated through the web can be.  I'm no techno-determinist but if you accept Brown's thesis that most meaning, language, learning and formation happens through the means of the body "enmeshed in recurrent situational feedback" and "rooted in sensory motor experiences" the relatively dis-embodied modes of most online interaction become problematic. Stripped of both communal context for language, and of all sensory motor cues he suggests are used in everything from making sense of language to building empathy, it's little wonder so few people understand one another or interact charitably online.

My team and I are working on decreasing the context-stripping tendencies of the web by structuring the scaffolding around interactions to build both context for the individuals and shared contexts, experiences and interactions on which to build better discourse.  Online contexts can perhaps themselves be venues for recurrent situation feedback and charitable, Christ-patterned online interactions can themselves become something to be learned by observation and mirroring.But if the cognitive roots of empathy and the ability to be formed by mirroring others we observe are rooted exclusively in bodily experience, and the cognitive work of running non-enacted simulations of the other's mind, how far can we expect to get in being formed and transformed by those whose bodies we can't see, hear or mirror?

I attempted to get at this question and was thankful for Mark Labberton's observation that my question was an expression of concern for the implications of embodied cognition in a world that is increasingly communicating in disembodied ways (note the way we the room groaned at the mention of the endless sea of email).  Brown concluded his response by recognizing this as something on which more work needs to be done.

This is precisely where I am focusing my work.

The centrality of these challenges for the Christian Church and really all human communities who strive to stay whole and make sense of themselves given the disembodying tendencies of technologically mediated interaction are what motivate that work.

Extremophiles

"An extremophile is an organism that can survive in climates that are hostile, [where] it was previously believed that no life could exist. It's an apt metaphor for the independent artist in 2013." -Sole

http://www.spin.com/articles/sole-gold-panda-extremophile-video-no-wising-up-no-settling-down/

When is Matt Going to Use His Seminary Degree?

 Seminary

I moved to California in 2007 to attend Fuller Theological Seminary.  I had spent the seven years prior trying on different ways of being a minister, searching for one that didn't feel like a sentence to a slow death.

During and after my BA in Biblical Studies and Philosophy, I had been a youth minister, a missionary and a hospital chaplain.  I was ready to bring my questions to a community known for new models, new ideas and new ways forward between the rock of the Christian tradition and the hard place of human culture and experience.  I was ready to explore the length and breadth of what it could mean to be faithful to a call to ministry because none of the ways I had tried had fully fit.

I went with the blessing and support of my family, my grandmother and the Church that ordained me to the gospel ministry.  I went with the expectations of dozens of teachers, ministers, colleagues and friends who saw in me potential, gifts and ability as a minister in the ways that they understood that role. I expected to hold my nose and tolerate Southern California. I never expected it to feel like coming home.

I finished my MDiv in 2011, exactly four years after I moved to California. It's now 2013 and I'm still here.  People are beginning to wonder why.  They are too polite to ask me, so my wife has to try to answer for me when they say "So... When is Matt going to USE his seminary degree?"

During my MDiv I studied with teachers and students from Lebanon, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Malaysia, Philadelphia, PA and Little Rock, AR.  I came to deeper, more satisfying ways of understanding how culture, religion, scripture and the human mind interact. I came to see how God plays, composes and breathes among them all.

A Call From a Broken Community

For the first time since adolescence, I let myself look unshrinkingly at how broken the community that shaped my faith and my call to ministry had been. I began the painful process of questioning my own call and identity as a minister.  With help from dear friends, my pastors and my wife I emerged on the other side with a new confidence in my identity as one loved and called by God to faithfulness. But I came to realize that I had understood that call in far too narrow a way.  No matter what ministry I did, no matter how innovative or demanding, I heard in my mind a voice condemning me for running away from my “call” to be a pastor of the sort I had known at the small country church where I had grown up.  It was a searing, freeing sort of pain to realize that this wasn't the voice of God but of my old pastor, living on in a mental chorus of condemnation that I was conducting. Because that little church had been the context where I had become aware of God's call, I had mistakenly taken it as the boundary of that call.

Never Just one Thing

A wise teacher of mine once told me, “God doesn't call us to do one thing.  God calls us to faithfulness.” Those words have sustained me through many different things I have done and continue to do in my life of service to God.

Perhaps the most powerful lesson of my MDiv was that faithfulness involves taking seriously the particular gifts, skills and opportunities God has given me.  Repeatedly in scripture, God calls particular people with particular histories and personalities and then makes use of them in ways that emphasize their particularity.

All my life I had imagined that one day I would have to cut off all the strands of myself that didn't fit within that narrow band of what ministry might look like, but I couldn't bear the thought of it so I leapt from one model of ministry to another, looking for a way to be both faithful and whole.

But what if God knew who he was calling? What if faithfulness didn't mean cutting off or stifling my love for science, technology, music, art, poetry and philosophy, but instead embracing them and the opportunities and joy they bring to me and others?  Suddenly a new way of being faithful to God AND to myself began to crack open.  At first I could only see a blurry image of what that kind of life might look like but it has grown clearer and clearer since.

A Gutenberg Moment

During my time at Fuller I developed my skills with the web which had begun when I was a chaplain.  Before long I was being paid by Fuller to work on web projects.  I moved through projects and positions until the last one was paying our rent and allowing my family to stay in Pasadena where we have a healthy church we love and a school where my oldest daughter is thriving.

Also toward the end of my degree I began thinking about ways I could share the transformative experience of studying scripture with people with very different experiences and history from one another. I started working on an experiment in social reading called read-together.com in 2012.  Around this same time, Fuller began focusing its energy on expanding our online course offerings and new models of education and course delivery.  It became clear that my work on read-together.com and the goals of the school were beginning to overlap.  Last June I accepted a new position as Online User Experience Strategist focusing on building the online structures to facilitate formative encounter between students, faculty and the entire seminary community.

Forty years after the invention of the Gutenberg press, the reformation happened along with the complete social and political upheaval of Europe.  We are twenty years into the Internet and I don't believe we fully understand the extent to which this will change us.  The church survived and thrived in that era because individuals and communities were exploring how this new information technology could be used well and in ways faithful to the Christian tradition.  I see my work today very much along the same lines.

Read-together.com is on the verge of private beta launch (you can sign up now to keep up with the latest).  I'm working on a project for Fuller that is a pioneering new effort in connecting students with the life of the seminary online.  What we are learning has implications beyond the simple survival of theological Higher Education.  We are experimenting with the new tools the Church and the rest of humanity will use to encounter, hear and hopefully be changed by one another. We are helping shape the future of human discourse and cultural exchange.

This is not the kind of life I could have imagined as faithful to a call before my degree at Fuller.  My MDiv expanded the horizons of the possible so that I could see this work for the service to the church and humanity that it is.  My education enables me to think critically, anthropologicaly and theologically about the rapid transformations our species and the church are undergoing.

The Answer

I teach an adult bible study class every week at my church, Altadena Baptist.  I preach, teach and speak whenever I can both there and other places.  I welcome other artists, musicians and creatives who are struggling between the same rock and hard place of identity that I passed through.  I play music with worship bands, release albums of experimental electronic music online and occasionally perform it or lend it to filmmakers to tell stories with.  I paint and draw in church as a part of worship or on my own as therapy and catharsis. And I eat lunch almost every day with my wife and youngest daughter in the warm California sun and the cool breeze.

I have found a place of faithfulness where every part of me is vibrant and alive, humming with the creative energy of the God who created the universe and the unquenchable life of the Son who came to embrace it through death into resurrection.

But when you decide to go off the existing paths in a new direction, you have to expect that people will ask where you are headed and that you will have to offer some word of explanation if they are going to understand, let alone follow you.  

Still, the misunderstanding of those who ask the question stings the wounds I carry and rouses the chorus of voices for whom my faithfulness will never be enough --that is until it conforms to familiar patterns.

But I do have an answer:  My degree created a context for a new vision of where the church and the world's need and my gifts, personality and opportunities intersect. My degree got me where I am and I'm finding new ways it informs my work every day.  

I hope you will join me in my gratitude to God who revels in fresh possibilities and loves to set them free and see them thrive.

From: How to Find Fulfilling Work on Brainpickings.org

"The lack of any clear positive relationship between rising income and rising happiness has become one of the most powerful findings in the modern social sciences. Once our income reaches an amount that covers our basic needs, further increases add little, if anything, to our levels of life satisfaction." Roman Kznaric

Krznaric quotes the French writer François-René de Chateaubriand, who wrote over a century ago:

A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.

How to Find Fulfilling Work
http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/04/23/how-to-find-fulfilling-work-roman-krznaric/

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