Mike English dot Net

The North American Orthodox-Catholic Theological Consultation met for its 77th session on October 22-24th. The meeting largely focused on forming a joint response to the 2007 “Ravenna Document” published by the JICTD. Both the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) and the Standing Conference of the Canonical Orthodox Bishops of the Americas (SCOBA) recently issued press releases (here and here), including the joint response.

The response repeatedly emphasizes that “[t]hroughout, the [Ravenna] document attempts to include the whole Church, not just the bishops within the exercise of conciliarity,” and prods that discussion of the “authority of the baptized to discuss the authority of bishops as exercised in councils” should not be passed over.

It is also critical of the Ravenna document’s failure to clarify “the ecclesiological status of regional expressions of primacy and synodality” as related by analogy to the “order (taxis) which exists among the three persons of the Holy Trinity.” The joint response goes on to note that the only footnote of the Ravenna document is incomplete and seems to portray the ecclesiological self-understandings of both Churches as more exclusivist than they are in actuality.

Overall, the response commends the JICTD’s continuing efforts and welcomes the publication of the Ravenna document despite the fact that “the text remains at the level of principle rather than practice.”

I am always delighted to discover intelligent and level-headed scholars publishing their thoughts online. The recent discovery of Peter Gilbert’s blog, De unione ecclesiarum is no exception.

Peter is a Greek Orthodox scholar working on a translation of some of the treatises of John Bekkos. (Bekkos was Patriarch of Constantinople during the Union of Lyons.)

An article by Peter Gilbert entitled “John Bekkos as a Reader of the Fathers” was recently published in Communio and is available for download  [PDF] on their website.

The article offers a sympathetic reading of Bekkos including criticism of some Photian assumptions regarding the Trinity as assertions not following directly from the Cappadocian Fathers.

Local legend, Chance Jones has a new album coming out this month on vinyl, CD, and as a digital download.  It’s worth your attention.

From Revue’s coverage:

Primrose is both “the most accessible and the weirdest album I’ve put out,” says Jeff Vandenberg, owner of Grand Rapids, Mich.-based Friction Records, which is releasing the album. “The recordings came out great and it reminds me of ‘60s and ‘70s rock, but in the best way. It’s got an old-school sound, but is still totally unique.”

If you love music, live in Grand Rapids, and you’ve never seen Chance Jones play, you really need to get out more.  Joshua Burge has tirelessly invested himself into rocker persona, Chance Jones, at every performance I’ve attended.  With “Chance’s” wildly theatrical mannerisms and  knack for melody, and the band’s tight backing, each show is thoroughly entertaining.  Why not come out to the album release at the Intersection on the 27th and see for yourself?

Still not convinced? Here’s a sample from the new album:

Chance Jones – Cute with a Knife

The Joint International Commission for the Theological Dialogue between the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church (what a mouthful!  ”JICTD” from now on) wrapped up its 11th plenary session in Cyprus last week.  On the agenda was a discussion of “The Role of the Bishop of Rome in the Communion of the Church in the First Millennium.”  Some Greek monastics, fearing that the meeting was an attempt to subjugate the Orthodox to the authority of Rome, organized protests and circulated misleading information about the nature of the event.

According to Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, the commission is making “Little steps forward in the right direction.”  The JICTD worked on a draft document that will be finalized at  the next session in Vienna, Sept. 20-27, 2010.

In the interim, I thought I might share some reflections on this, and other ecumenically-relevant topics from various sources.  Today, a selection from Olivier Clement’s You Are Peter:

A Creative Tension (Chapter 7)

From the fourth to the ninth centuries, pope and council never ceased to reinforce each other; like waves meeting and mingling, they clashed, yet, transcending the structures, they always ended by collaborating.  As Father Yves Congar points out in his introduction to Wilhelm de Vries’s book, Orient et Occident, the emperor had the authority to convoke a council.  He gave its decrees the force of law but, by and large, except in the period of iconoclasm, he did not claim to have the competence to determine doctrine, and the defeat of iconoclasm was the defeat of an attempt at caesaropapism.  The pope could hear an appeal, function as a court of annulment, but the canons protected the autonomy of local churches.  Councils, almost always with papal accord, clarified doctrine and established the foundations of Church discipline.  Nevertheless, as far as truth is concerned, it asserted itself of itself, transcending the contradictions of ecclesial procedures, imposing the confession of the apostolic faith, the faith of Peter.

Widening the focus, one could say that the Church had several aerials for receiving what the Spirit had to say to her:

– The Council as an expression of universal communion.

– The pope as being charged with care for this communion and watching over the petrine and pauline correctness of the faith.

– But also the utilitas of the people of God, its “sense of the Church,” which can express itself in times of major crisis through the witness, the martyrdom, of a lone prophet.  ”Anyone who is not with me is not with the truth,” exclaimed Maximus the Confessor when nearly everyone was content either to keep quiet or to compromise.  And Theodore the Studite, witness of orthodoxy during the second outbreak of iconoclasm and persecuted by the majority of bishops and the patriarch himself, affirmed most evangelically that “three believers who were united in the orthodox faith constitute the Church.”

The East did not experience primacy in the form that it was to take in the West after the Gregorian reform and the Council of Trent.  It refused it in anticipation.  But at the time of the ecumenical councils it acknowledged a true Roman primacy and the petrine charism which that presupposes.  And this was by no means a simple “primacy of honor,” a primus inter pares, in the purely honorific sense of these expressions.

What did it entail?  It is difficult to say exactly; any precise, juridical definition of the modern type seems out of keeping.  On either side theories were evolving which seemed in disaccord; in fact, ecclesial practice ended by transcending them.  The pope would write to the council with the intention of imposing an authoritative solution to some problem; his letter was received and listened to with the utmost respect, but freely and in the context of free reflection.  The faith of Peter, indeed, but could it be separated from the vicariate of Peter, if God wanted this latter and this charism that goes with it?  But did he want it?  The East, at the time of the ecumenical councils, said yes, but differently — differently, that is, from Catholic theologians who in modern times have hardened the texts of a Leo the Great, making them more authoritarian.  Certainly, that risk was there already; an evolution could be discerned.  Nevertheless Leo never ceased affirming that the purpose of Roman primacy was to serve ecclesial communion, fidelium universitas, itself founded upon the “unity of the catholic faith.”  Moreover, he says time and again that he cannot exercise his charism except in communion with his “brothers and co-bishops” whose rights he respects and safeguards.

It is, in the end, an admirable complementarity, a providential collaboration between popes and councils.  The councils only achieved their full ecumenicity through the fruitful contribution of the Roman tomes, however freely debated and amended, through which both the West and the petrine charism expressed themselves.  If the councils had not been complemented in this way, the rule of faith by which we live could not have been worked out.  Without the popes, more distanced from the political center of the empire and hence more independent (in which particular they joined hands with the monks), the ultimate transcendence of the Church could not have been preserved.

Each of the two structures, taken alone, can be seen to have failed.  Under Celestine the papacy vacillated, under Honorius and Vitalian it bent before the wind.  From the eighth century on, militarily abandoned by Byzantium, rescued from the Lombards by the Carolingians, it fell back on the West, hardening its pretensions to the point of creating another emperor.  In this, too, the tension inherent in the Byzantine “symphony” was replaced by logic of another kind: the absorption by the “spiritual” of the “temporal.”  Thus was the ground prepared for the schism between West and East.

For its part, the council could not prevent the tearing asunder of the Church in the ancient Christian lands of Egypt and Syria in the fifth and sixth centuries.  Clearly the dogma of Chalcedon was an immense accomplishment; even today it is pushing back the horizons of Christian thought.  But how can one forget all those bishops in the Middle East who claimed that the new definition ran counter to Tradition?  Philoxenus of Mabbug, for example, who was no heedless theologian of little consequence, disputed the claim that the council had been “received” by the entire Church, a reception which alone, for him, would have obliged acceptance of its decisions.  Who was right, one might naïvely ask?  Choices are often influenced by geographical, social, cultural, even ethnic factors, but at this time in the East choices were also made according to conscience, as they would be in the West at the time of the pre-Reformation and Reformation, as Maximus the Confessor had made his at the decisive moment.  Conscience protects and justifies itself first through polemic.  Burrowing deeper over time, it seeks communion, so that it is today that Chalcedon (and Ephesus) can be universally received; it is today, too, that ways can be found of bridging the schism between Orthodox East and Catholic and Protestant West: not through compromise, but through a clearer discovery in the Holy Spirit of the original core of the message.

These schisms aside, the true greatness of the period of the ecumenical councils is precisely that the power of decision reseted with no one: neither pope, nor council, nor emperor, nor public feeling.  All thought they had the final word, which meant that no one had it except, rightly, the Holy Spirit.

This greatness was more lived out than conceptualized.  Roman primacy defined itself in terms of a legalistic logic where tensions were crushed out of existence by a forcible slotting together of structures: the faithful were locked into the power of the episcopate and the latter into the plenitudo potestatis of the pope, the prophet was subordinated to the priest, Paul to Peter, perhaps even the Holy Spirit to Christ, as would be achieved in the mediaeval filioque quibbles.  In the East, the persistence and recurrence of schism was ensured on the one hand, from without, by force of historical circumstance, i.e., the dominance of Islam; on the other, from within, by the mental petrifaction imposed by closed systems, which confer on details a quasi-magical value.

It is our task today, going beyond the words — words which “stick out their tongues at each other,” as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry said in Citadelle — to reflect on the lived ecclesial experience of a period when, through compromise and miracles, tensions were resolved throughout the greater part of Christendom neither through forcible insertion, nor through violent schism, but after another fashion: and that was surely the free communion of personal consciences in the Holy Spirit.

[The English translation of this work, an Orthodox theologian's response to John Paul II's Ut Unum Sint, is published by New City Press.]

I’ve been playing with Google Wave for about a week now, but I still haven’t figured out what to do with it.  Yes, it has a lot of very cool features, but the as the combination is so unlike existing communication technology, it’s very difficult to know just how to use it.  I doesn’t help that at this point there is virtually no integration with existing communication channels (e-mail, IM, twitter) making it so that you have to be on Google Wave to know if anything is happening on Google Wave.  Most of the friends I’ve invited so far seem to have given up on trying to force this new technology into their lives.  There’s probably some wisdom in that, but I’d like to see this catch on because I do think it has a lot to offer.

Ann Michael has an post at The Scholarly Kitchen that outlines similar woes. From the post:

Google Wave is a cacophony of functionality that doesn’t even try to reveal its value or purpose to the user. You have to be determined to use Google Wave in order to make it work for you. Even then, since it’s a “preview,” the functions you try to use don’t always work. Being a new user you are left wondering if the function doesn’t work or if you’re just not doing it right.

My hope is that Google Wave will become much more useful and user-friendly as more extensions are developed and more invites filter out into the general public.  Once more people start to use it, it’s use(s) will become more defined.

That said, I have a couple invites left.  I’d like to trade them for something interesting (handmade crafts, mix tapes, etc.). Comment if you’re into that idea.

I am considering using this blog for topics other than technology – namely theology and music.

Should I create separate blogs? Separate categories?

I’d like to keep writing, but my interests are rather diverse.
Perhaps if I write consistently enough, a gestalt of the whole will emerge.

Watch this space…

News of Google’s plans for Chrome OS have started me thinking about computer hardware – trying to decide what my next upgrade will be. While I can’t afford anything new in the immediate future (I’m a poor college student), I’m beginning to grow anxious about my aging PowerBook’s health.

Besides my laptop’s impending and inevitable demise, my cell phone contract will be up soon, and I’m considering downgrading from my BlackBerry to a “dumb” phone when that happens. Rates for data are exorbitant when you consider the ubiquity of WiFi coverage these days.

More and more, I find myself wondering if I might be in the market for a netbook. I ridiculed a friend of mine for months after she bought a tiny MSI Wind, but now that I’ve seen how convenient it is, I really think it might be just what I need: a lightweight computer that I can type on and carry almost everywhere.

The thought of phasing out my laptop – my “real computer” – is frightening. However, I recall that I had similar fears about phasing out my desktop when that was my “real computer” and I bought this PowerBook to take to college. Netbooks are a whole different animal though, especially when you consider the growing demands of media.

I’ll cut to the chase. One possibility for the future of my digital life is this: a dumb phone with unlimited text messaging, a netbook of some kind, and a NAS/Media server. It’s the last piece of the puzzle that’s leaving me… well, puzzling.

I’d like to digitize my entire CD collection. I’d like to store the audio on a server in some lossless format (FLAC perhaps) to save having to re-digitize from the physical media in the future when I might want better quality files (than if I had stored them all as MP3s). I’d like to keep my movies on there too, and my photos, and backup all of my documents (including a small but growing reference library of articles and research papers for school). I’d like it to hook up easily to a television or stereo (read: surround sound + HDTV). Oh, and it’d be really nice if I could get at some of this stuff while I’m away from home too.

Humoring my imagination (and helping me wrap my head around the costs of this next generation of computing hardware), can anyone recommend a good NAS/media server (and/or netbook)?

Thanks!
I’ll be looking for myself too, and I’ll post what I find in the comments here.

Wanted:

A small web application that can help log plays for vinyl records to Last.fm and also report them to Twitter.

It would draw album data (including track length times and track numbering) from Discogs.com after the user identifies the correct album (or if they’re a member on the site, selects it from their collection.)

Then it would allow the user to “play” the album, one side at a time, using a timer to “scrobble” each track at the appropriate interval to Last.fm. It would offer the option to “tweet” the play of the album to Twitter with a link to its Discogs entry. It would pause at the end of each side and wait for the user to flip the record and press play before beginning to “scrobble” the tracks on the next side.

Accurate track duration data is essential to the proper functioning of this application.  If Discogs does not have the necessary data, it might be possible to retrieve it from the MusicBrainz database.

http://www.discogs.com/help/api

http://www.last.fm/api/submissions

http://apiwiki.twitter.com/

http://musicbrainz.org/doc/WebService

If anyone would be so kind as to help me out with this, it would be much appreciated.

Sorry, everyone. I had really hoped to keep this updated more often, but this semester has turned out to be a rather busy one. I’d like to write something about trust, privacy, and activity streams, but I just haven’t had time to read up on the latest developments. Would anyone care to explain foaf+ssl to me?

Also, when I have time I’m going to be changing some things with the blog to clean it up and make it run a little better. Consider this a heads-up that change is ahead.

I’ll leave you with a nod to Chris Saad’s post about Peered Data Portability.

I really like this graph:

In response to Michael Arrington’s post, The Meaning Of Friendship.

Bucketing and “fake following” are good enough for now.

Why?

Most of this social data will be public soon because managing changing relationship is a huge time-sink, and the benefits of carefully managed privacy just aren’t worth the efforts. I already have to think of it this way – as if all my social data were potentially public – just because I can’t mentally juggle which bits of my data I’m give to whom. (The users most affected by increasingly public social data are the popular users who receive a lot of attention. But they’re also in the best position to deal with potential problems because they can call on their ‘tribe’ to self-manage aberrant behavior.)

There are a number of problems with trying to manage relationships online as if they were analog equivalents to real life relationships. One problem has to do with two things, presence, and the persistence of data.

In real life, as Arrington points out,
“when you don’t want to be friends with someone, you just find ways not to spend time with them.”

This isn’t only true in a binary sense, but actually applies to how we manage all of our relationships. All relationships are constantly in a state of flux. You’re never just ‘friends’ or ‘not friends’ with anyone. The degree and nature of our relationships has a lot to do with how and when we spend time with people.

In the real world relationships are built up by when the two people spend quality time with each other and relationships can wane when people are apart. In the real world, these events are always symmetric. Online, this isn’t always the case.

Online, someone can read your profile data, or your blog, or your activity streams when you’re not there. Depending on what information you’re sharing, this could be like leaving a copy of your journal or diary at every single one of your friends houses.

Getting away from privacy paranoia, say we’ve already accepted that all of our social data may as well be public, one remaining problem is that this exchange is not equivalent to symmetric relationship building in the real world. It’s difficult to gauge online, without the subtleties of body language &c, the exact nature of our developing relationships. When the data exchange is inherently asymmetric, we may find a lot of people far more interested in us then we are in them. ( = problematic.)

In real life, for the most part, data about us is present when and where we are present. Outside of that it’s only present in our friends’ memories, and perhaps though gossip. Online, our social data is like everything else on the web, persistent. Every exchange is potentially immortalized in a log somewhere, and it’s quite acceptable to leave “wall posts” up forever. The social data is persistent, and this changes things.

Additionally, our relationships aren’t only determined by the amount of time we spend with other people, but how we spend it. Besides the quantitative aspect, there is a very important qualitative aspect to social interaction.

To put it in terms of data, we don’t exchange the same subset of our personal data with everyone. Every relationship is unique, because every person is unique and has slightly different interests. Within certain groups some general subset of data may be more relevant, but our relationship with one member of the group is still not identical with our relationship with every other member of the group; each relationship is unique, qualitatively and quantitatively. Even if the quantitative aspect is nearly identical (maybe you go bowling with the same group every Tuesday and you don’t see any of them outside of bowling,) still we couldn’t say that our relationship with every member of the group is identical. (You wouldn’t potentially ask Bob out on a date, but you might ask Mary out sometime.)

To mimic all of these nuances of relationships in both their quantitative and qualitative aspects would require extremely complex granular controls. It would be a huge time sink to manage manually, but I also wouldn’t begin to think I cold trust a computer to do it for me – at least any time soon.

Instead, I find it better to simply recognize that being “friended” on Facebook is not equivalent to being friends in real life. You can say that I’m “Facebook friends” with Robert Scoble, but that doesn’t tell you what our relationship is beyond the most basic level of trust. For example, I’d be out of place offering an intervention for his FriendFeed addiction – I don’t know him that well.

Merry Christmas, everyone!