Month: September 2008

Good stuff (writing a paper on this now and thought I’d share):

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on…”

Gotta love a topic that encompasses Dylan, Genesis, Jewish-Christian relations and modern day politics (but doesn’t every topic include Dylan these days?).

Thanks, Jon!

This has to do with that.

Todd Crawford and I recorded our first (in a series) of weekly podcasts focused on all things geeky (gadgets, web2.0, new sites, etc).

The show runs about an hour and I thought it was one of he best podcasts I’ve done in a while.

http://www.hipcast.com/playweb?audioid=P3b69097de17a55471ec5e2b493ca1b5ebF98QFREYmN2&buffer=5&shape=6&fc=FFFFFF&pc=CCFF33&kc=FFCC33&bc=FFFFFF&brand=1&player=ap27
MP3 File

Here are the topics:

– New iPods (and 2.1 software)
– iPhone apps
– DropBox
– Yammer
– BearHug Camp
– chi.mp
– Netbooks and the culture of streaming
– Macbook Batteries
– Two Fingers

Give it a listen and let us know what you think. Shows will be published every Friday and run about an hour in length.

Columbia Physics Prof and science celeb Brian Greene wrote a great op-ed for the NY Times today about the Large Hadron Collider and its impact on science and society. It’s definitely recommended reading.

Greene is most famous for his books such as The Elegant Universe
and The Fabric of the Cosmos
(recommended readings):

Op-Ed Contributor – The Origins of the Universe – A Crash Course – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com: “The collider’s workings are straightforward: at full power, trillions of protons will be injected into the otherwise empty track and set racing in opposite directions at speeds exceeding 99.999999 percent of the speed of light — fast enough so that every second the protons will cycle the entire track more than 11,000 times and engage in more than half a billion head-on collisions.

The raison d’être for creating this microscopic maelstrom derives from Einstein’s famous formula, E = mc2, which declares that much like euros and dollars, energy (‘E’) and matter or mass (‘m’) are convertible currencies (with ‘c’ — the speed of light — specifying the fixed conversion rate). By accelerating the protons to fantastically high speeds, their collisions provide a momentary reservoir of tremendous energy, which can then quickly convert to a broad spectrum of other particles. “

If you’re interested in the LHC, this is a great read.

One of my favorite “web2.0” startups in a long while has opened to the public…

Dropbox launches to the public! : The Dropbox Blog: “We’re excited to announce, after what’s been a long wait for many of the folks on our beta list, and a great launch at the TechCrunch50 conference in San Francisco, that Dropbox is finally publicly available for everyone to try. (Go get it!)”

Whether you are a techie early adopter like me or someone who likes to wait for things to shake out, I think you’ll like DropBox.

Basically, you install a little program on your Windows, Mac or Linux (how awesome!) machine and you can drag/drop files into it that are automagically (and quickly) synced up and accessible from anywhere or any machine via the web interface. There’s also an awesome iPhone custom site that works for the BlackBerry.

Initially, you get 2 gigs free, but there will be options for 50 gigs for $9.99 a month, which sounds great.

I keep waiting for Google to release the GDrive so that I can work across my Mac, Ubuntu and Asus eee boxes, but DropBox has quickly solved the problem.

In other words, go give it a spin.

People have been asking me what BlackBerry theme I use on my 8830 Curve since I posted my “Living in the Cloud” videos last week.

Here you go…

This really is a great theme and I love using it compared to some of the other BlackBerry themes I’ve tried in the past. Mainly because the front screen puts the essential info you need (messages, calendar appointments and call log) right up front. Everything else is accessible in an “Apple-ish” pop up bar on the bottom.

It costs $4.99 but I love it and highly recommend considering the joy and pleasure it will give you at that price.

While the awesome Tor.com scifi book site was being refurbished, Tor was giving away top quality eBooks (and wallpapers based on new scifi art) to subscribers over the summer. Every Friday, I opened my inbox with glee to see what the new offering would be.

So, I’m glad to see the fine folks at Tor bringing it back:

More details next week–but yes, we plan to resume giving away selected e-books on Tor.com, at least one title per month. To download them you’ll need to not just visit Tor.com but register as a user; the downloads won’t be accessible until you do. Registering on the site takes maybe thirty seconds if you type particularly slowly…so Act Now, Act Without Thinking, get over to Tor.com and create yourself a user account today.

If you’re a scifi fan, head over to Tor.com and register… not just for the free eBooks, but for all the other great content and community they have going on there.

9/11/08: Review of Neil Stephenson's Anathem and Randomness (about 8 mins/8 mb's)

http://www.hipcast.com/playweb?audioid=Pec87776571ce70921bf89f5f91aa6c6fbF98QFREYmN3&buffer=5&shape=6&fc=FFFFFF&pc=CCFF33&kc=FFCC33&bc=FFFFFF&brand=1&player=ap27
MP3 File

I know I talk too much about Anathem
, but it really is an amazing book so far. Definitely go check it out if you’re so inclined after listening to my thoughts.

Is immediacy good for us?

About 8 mins…

http://www.hipcast.com/playweb?audioid=Pb629c9034e12b84b33e8468dda49f2f0bF98QFREYmN0&buffer=5&shape=6&fc=FFFFFF&pc=CCFF33&kc=FFCC33&bc=FFFFFF&brand=1&player=ap27
MP3 File

Here’s a link to Neil Stephenson’s Anathem

Here is a short piece I wrote in response to Philip Cunningham and Jan Katzew’s essay “Do Christians and Jews Worship the Same God?” which can be found in the collection Irreconcilable Differences?
:

The two different emphases of God’s character(s) as presented by Jews and Christians are complimentary in their natures. Rather than being either contradictory or contrasting, Christianity and Judaism (in generic terms) each provides understandings of God that augment each other.

Rather than understanding the complimentary natures of both Judaism and Christianity within the confines of either a) history or b) theology, a much more beneficial understanding of God arises when these two competing religious teleologies are reconciled. The term competing is used in this context because, traditionally, Christian theology has been the underpinning of understanding the “Judeo-Christian” tradition from the modernist Christian perspective seeking to understand the value of Judaism to contemporary Christianity. The evolving understanding of humanity, Christ, God and the creedal statements, which have come to define Christianity proper but do not have an analogue in the Jewish faith, heavily influences this theology. Rather than having a concrete theological conception or even need of theology to reflect upon the Scriptures, Jews come to know and experience God as an active participant in history. This historical understanding places a great deal of emphasis on the individual, since like God, each person must willingly choose to act to participate and fulfill the parameters of the covenantal relationship.

Although Jews emphasize the holiness, uniqueness and transcendence of God and Christians tend to emphasize the nearness of God and the ability of humans to have relationships with God
(in accordance with God’s transcendence), the historical ethical impetus of Judaism and the prominence that Christians place on a theological understanding of God each provide complimentary means to better understanding God. It is in the dynamic relationship that exists between the historical and the theological that God may be experienced on a relational and individual level. While access to understanding God can be found within the Jewish and Christian faiths respectively, there is a great deal of fertile and rich space for a human to experience God in this interplay between theology and history.

In their essay “Do Christians and Jews Worship the Same God?” Philip Cunningham and Jan Katzew approach this topic from their respective points of views as a practicing Catholic and a practicing Jew . At the outset of their essay, Cunningham and Katzew somewhat heavy handily misrepresent their final task by framing their goal as “theological harmony, not homogenization.” It is not the anti-homogenization point that is disjointed (rather, it is very valid), but the insistence on theological harmony when their actual accomplished goal by the end of their essay is to tie the experiential and historical nature of Judaism with the theologically biased worldview of Christianity. This is no small feat. Rather, as they state in numerous places, God is known to us and best experienced by us when these two seemingly irreconcilable differences are bridged with a coherent understanding of the relationship of history and theology:

God is known to us through historical experience, and as a result of that experience Jews are called to accept that God as the one and only, the foundation for ethical monotheism…Our belief in God’s existence is not the consequence of philosophical argument but of historical experience.

The ancestors worshipped the same deity, but their relationships were private, personal, and unique. So it is with each one of us. Christians agree with the Jewish experience that God is met in history and that such meetings generate relationship.

The relational aspect is the glue that sticks the theological with the historical in this architecture. Whereas Chistianity proper and Judiasm proper have general understandings of the nature of God, those conditional statements or understandings of history do not limit God and the individual. The subjective nature thus enables the wiggle room needed to experience God both theologically and historically through the mutual benefit of Christianity and Judaism.

Therefore, it is possible for Jews and Christians to worship together, pray together, study Scripture together and minister in the community together because of their mutual worship and allegiance to the same God.

Since I’m no longer on GeekCast or RedHatBlueHat, I need a place to do my podcast thing.

So, here is the place for my new podcasts:http://show.samharrelson.com. I’ll be covering topics I’m interested in (which is a pretty wide ranging field) as well as interviews with people I think are interesting and want to have conversations with on certain timely or untimely subjects. There will be some “latest news” type stuff thrown in as well.

There’s a feed you can subscribe to if you just want to get the podcasts (same feed as the AffiliateFortuneCookies show if you were subscribed there) and could care less about the stuff I write here (although I’m sure there will be some overlap in content and topics).

I’m lumping some video in there as well, but most of the content will be audio in the old AffiliateFortuneCookies format I used to do.

Stay tuned (or subscribed, I guess)!

MH loves the yard fruit.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

MH loves the yard fruit.

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted by email from sam harrelson (posterous)

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted by email from sam harrelson (posterous)

MH aggregates my Google hat…

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

MH aggregates my Google hat…

Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry

Posted by email from sam harrelson (posterous)

The times, they are a changed:

Gullible.info: “Five in six Americans under the age of 18 has never touched a postage stamp.”

I get lots of questions from people about which web applications I use and why I’ve replaced most (all?) of my desktop applications with stuff from the web. So, here’s how I get things done using web apps and my BlackBerry…

Part 1 (web apps and screencast):

And part 2 about BlackBerry and mobile stuff:

This is more of a pointer post that I’ll be sending people to when they email or ask me how I use GMail or Evernote as part of my work or study flow instead of relying on Outlook, Word, etc.

Feel free to leave your thoughts and suggestions in the comments, though…

Here’s a short thought piece I did in response to W. Ward Gasque’s piece, “The Challenge to Faith” in Tim Dowley’s work, The History of Christianity
.

Basically, this section covers both the internal and external challenges that faced early Christianity such as persecutions, infighting over doctrinal matters and eventually the canonization/orthodox theological movement. Gasque is covering a great deal of time and space in 12 pages, so most of my points below can be seen as extensions of the issues raised about persecutions in the first and early second centuries but not elaborated on…

Enjoy!

W. Ward Gasque spends a brief amount of time (pages 82-85) giving a surface presentation of the persecutions that early members of the Christian movement faced in the first and second centuries before tackling the more documented persecutions in the third century before Constantine ties the Empire to Christianity forever in the compilation The History of Christianity (edited by Tim Dowley). While Dowley spends just a couple of pages on the persecutions under Nero, Domitian and Trajan, I would argue that these events had formative effects on the Jesus movement in this very crucial time of its development into what would become formal and orthodox Christianity by the Nicea.

The context of persecution in the first and early second centuries gives us a suitable lens to examine three interesting facets of the early Christian experience:

1. What do the empire sanctioned persecutions say about Jewish-Christian relations in the formative years of Christianity?
2. What do the persecutions say about the members themselves of the Jesus movement in the first and second centuries?
3. And what are the effects of the persecutions on the development of what would become canonical texts and orthodox theology within the Christian movement?

First, it is beneficial to consider what these various empire sanctioned persecutions tell us about the relationship of Jews and members of the Jesus movement (I hesitate to use the term Christian given that the movement is still in its infancy and the term Christian denotes more of a full-fledged religion and orthodox system of thought rather than what is reflected in the historical record) in the first and early second centuries. What Gasque and others seem to gloss over is the reality that it was still difficult to tell the difference between Jews and the members of the Jesus movement in this time frame. Within the New Testament itself, we are constantly reminded of the conflicts that occurred in the first century between Jews, Judaizers and gentiles in reference to the formation of local communities of faith in Jesus. The writings of Paul (Galatians particularly) as well as Acts and eventually Matthew and John allude to strained relations between Jesus’ followers and Jews as well as Jewish Christians intent on keeping kosher and Torah. Even by the late second century, writers such as the medical doctor and philosopher Galen was lumping the two groups together from his perspective in Rome by referring to “the followers of Moses and Christ (de Puls. Diff. 33).” In other words, defining Christians as a complete and separate group apart from the Jewish faith, even into the earliest parts of the second century, does injustice to the historical, textual and archaeological records that indicate the “parting of the ways1” was not so clean cut and quick in nature. What the persecutions in Rome and the urban centers of Asia Minor (and possibly in Palestine) do tell us is that instead of viewing the entire Jewish and Christian movements as monolithic institutions by the end of the first century, it would be better to look at local circumstances and how Jewish and Christian groups interacted and were seen as different or similar depending on time and place. The events of 66-70 with the Jewish War as well as the Bar Kochba Revolt of 132-135 (and perhaps the anecdotal Council of Jamnia, though I suspect its importance has been over emphasized) helped to lead to the eventual split between Jews and Christians, but this was by no means an empire wide and systematic occurance as attested to by the New Testament, the Patristics and archaeology.

Second, we must consider what the persecutions under Nero, Domitian and Trajan tell us about the persons belonging to the Jesus movement. Clearly, they were a suspect group (in Rome at least) by the 60’s and stood out enough in that community to be recognized as separate scape goats for the fire that destroyed a large piece of Rome. However, with the letters of Pliny to Trajan, we do see that Christians, even under persecution, were otherwise seen as “normal” citizens. In effect, what seemed to make these early Christians stand out was being discovered or confessing to their faith rather than it being outwardly visible that they were followers of Jesus. Coupled with such late first century / early second century works as Revelation and the Gospel of John, the picture of Christians is once again muddied and difficult to portray unless we take into account specific places and times rather than some over-arching definition of what it meant to be a Christian in 100 CE.

Lastly, the empire sanctioned persecutions of Christians during the first and early second century must have had a profound effect on both the faith of the followers as well as the developing ideas of canonical books to be held as scripture and the evolution of orthodoxy that was occurring at this time. The earliest writings of the New Testament, the letters of Paul, reflect a Jesus movement that is wrought with infighting as to Christologies and relationships to Jews and Jewish-Christians. This carries over to the synoptic Gospels and by the time of the Johannine works, a rather high Christology affirming Jesus’ place as God incarnate has been developed and communicated. While Revelation is normally considered the book most associated with Roman persecution, there are still traces of community issues beyond Christology in both the Gospels and the Epistles. Because of the charges levied upon Christians such as being cannibals and atheists (charges which were not made against the Jews who were exempt from Roman cultic observance due to the high regard the Romans placed on the antiquity of the Jewish / Israelite faith), the ideas of the personhood of Christ and the resulting need to eventually decide on a set canon of writings for all of Christendom (even though this was done for three centuries before that decision was made) were starting to be formalized in response to such experiences as persecutions.

While Gasque covers the bases in setting up the importance of the persecutions on the eventual orthodox Christian faith, there are definite points where more refelection and analysis is needed in order to gain an accurate understanding of the historical, sociological and even theological variables influencing the developing early church during this period. Some of the points I’ve made here will be jumping off points that I will continue to explore in the future.

Notes:

1 J.D.G. Dunn, The Partings of the Ways (London: SCM Press: Philadelphia; Trinity, 1991); idem (ed.), Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways AD 70 to 135 (WUNT, 66; Tubingen: Mohr, 1992).