metapundit.net

Boxing and Me Part II

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:03:29 PST

(See the previous post if you haven't already.)

This isn't yet the answer to my question about boxing and violence. But I think it's probably worthwhile to start out with a sense of what training at an amateur boxing gym is like.

I was actually startled by the atmosphere the first few times I went to my boxing gym. In fact the first time I went in, I stood outside and took a couple of deep breaths before I sauntered in. I mean - come on - it's a boxing gym just north of the bad part of town (which is where I live), it has a grafitti-style sign painted on the wall - Bad to the Bonz - the gym name. It's between a body shop and a custom cycle shop with chromed bikes outside and a big rottweiler inside. I was prepared to be intimidated.

This wasn't just social profiling either. I've been in gyms all my life. I've never been a jock but I've always enjoyed a casual bit of weightlifting. A little excess of testosterone usually goes with the territory.

The atmosphere at this particular gym, however, is among the most friendly and open I've ever been around. Half the time there are little kids there, either training with a relative or just hanging while their parents train. And I haven't had a bad experience yet - there's no pressure to fight, nobody striking a pose, less "macho" by far than I would have expected.

And this extends to the fighters. When outsiders come to our gym to spar the sparring intensity level approaches a real match. Punches are thrown at full speed and people hurt when they take a punch. But I haven't yet seen any anger, haven't yet seen any bad sportsmanship. Even the TKO I saw ended shortly after with a fighter's embrace and mutual congratulation.

The reasons for this are eminently practical - boxing takes discipline and anger simply isn't helpful - at least in the context of sparring. The combatants enter the ring to learn something, to work on a particular skill and the pain they endure is simply the price that must be paid to learn.

I said I wasn't going to answer the question of nonviolence yet; I'm trying to keep these posts short. But my interests in nonviolence and boxing begin to merge at this point. How many self proclaimed pacifists do you know who could take a punch to the face and embrace their attacker? Me neither - yet boxers do it all the time. Could it be that pugilists have something to teach the peacemakers?

Confidence or Cowardice?

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 17:16:13 PST

Last night wasn't as bad as last year - but I continue to be a little confounded by my Church's annual business meeting.

There wasn't anything ground-shaking on the agenda but we did modify our constitution in a couple of spots. And we did this with absolutely no discussion. While the changes weren't substantial they are part of our (very brief) constitution and merited a little discussion. If no one else was - I at least was opposed to the changes and I was curious about the ramifications they might have in terms of our practice. It was pretty clear however that leadership wasn't particularly interested in discussing the changes so we took a vote without discussion and moved on.

It occurred to me that there are two possible reasons not to talk about changes to our constitution. One possible reason is confidence - if our constitution contained inaccurate information and obviously needed to be updated (say our address changed) than we might feel confident enough that the changes are self-evidently necessary and approve them without needing to talk about them at all. And after all our modifications passed by the necessary 2/3 majority - so perhaps it was a case of justified confidence.

But I think that it is cowardice that leads us to silence. Maybe instead of confidence it's a desire not to talk about the path we're on. Maybe nobody wants to talk about this stuff because everybody knows that we're divided and we'd rather not face that fact. It might just be a case of Ignore them and maybe they'll go away

I'm not a psychic, so I can't tell you what motive predominated. But neither explanation is particularly comforting to me. I've spent most of my life out of step with my wider social circle for various reasons (fellow geeks probably understand this without explanation) and I've got that familiar out-of-sync feeling. I'm not confident about our path (Well - I am in the "Stop! You're headed the the wrong way" sense). And I've never been able to understand what you gain by avoiding talking about something that's true and there none-the-less. Whatever the reasons for the way we do our business, it always leaves me unsettled.

Update: I've had a couple of people give me feedback (via comments and email). Thanks! I had one thought I expressed via email that I thought I should drop here as well:

I was thinking reading your note how much of the past we bring to the present. I completely agree (after the fact) that I should have talked about this beforehand, rather than waiting till after. Part of it all, however, is I grew up in a Church that strongly discouraged discussing council meeting business before the meeting (I think the idea was they didn't want to encourage factionalism) but also had a strong tradition of hashing things out in the meeting. We had four council meetings a year so if something needed talking out we could usually just postpone it three months and bring it up again.

I have to say I chafed a bit when I was young at the cultural pressure against talking before the meeting. Now that I've a little more experience, I have to say that the insistence on doing the business of the Church as the Church was well founded.

I guess I express two separate concerns each year after business meeting. One concern is the decisions we make, the other is how we make our decisions. It would go a long ways towards assuaging my second concern if we met more frequently and talked more openly. Maybe I should be talking about transparency and good governance! What we need is a Brethren Tea Party movement! Yeah, that's the ticket...

Migration followup

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:40:19 PST

Actually I've had a couple of hiccups in my previously datailed server migration. Well - check that - this my second server migration; don't ask about the first one!

Anyways, I need PIL and Pycrypto for my Django/Satchmo sites. Using easy_install to setup Pycrypto didn't work; the compilation bailed with the error message "ld: cannot find -lpython". I'm somewhat familiar with this problem - you get this when the linking portion of compilation can't find a needed .so library. Most linux systems maintain a system to configure search paths and build a cache of dynamically linkable libraries. The walkthrough I'd followed had me add a file with the path of the python 2.6 .so in /etc/ld.so.conf and rebuild the linker cache with ldconfig. I verified (ldconfig -p | grep python) that the linker cache was aware of libpython.2.6.so. I tried fiddling with some environmental variables that allegedly set the LD search path; but testing via "ld -lpython2.6" still produced the error message, while manually setting the LD path (ld -lpython2.6 -L /opt/python2.6/lib) worked. Yes I looked at the privileges on the .so file and containing directory without finding a problem. Eventually I copied the .so file to a known location with


cp /opt/python2.6/lib/libpython2.6.so /usr/lib

and was able to sucessfully build Pycrypto. The next piece I needed was the Python Imaging Library and it had seemed to easy_install without incident. When I started a Django site, however, it stopped running with a cryptic error message: "AccessInit: hash collision". Googling yielded nothing except the C source code for the PIL module. I have no idea what provoked the crash and running a couple of scripts I had that used PIL to resize images didn't generate the exit either. Downloading the latest version and running the setup.py file generated a working install...

There's a reason I'm not a sysadmin. Solving problems with code makes me happy - and hard problems just make me think harder. I want to understand the problem and come up with a good solution! Sysadmin problems (broken environments) just make me swear frenziedly and I don't care so much about the solution, I just want stuff to work so I can get on with my job. I wasted several hours between PIL and Pycrpto and I still don't know why ld couldn't find my libraries or even what the AccessInit error mesage from PIL meant (besides the fact that two different things hashed to the same value that apparently shouldn't). Hopefully posting my travails helps somebody else who bumps into the same problem...

Update: I should clarify one thing - I said above that "I wasted several hours between PIL and PyCrypto". I meant that merely as a description of the problems I was working on - both of those packages are solid pieces of code with a wide user base. Obviously the problems I'm encountering are because I'm building a non-standard environment. Anyways - I'm not capping on any particular piece of software here... Just complaining about my skills and inclinations that make sysadmin stuff possible for me but not particularly enjoyable.

Migrating from CentOS 4/cpanel to CentOS 5

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 00:03:36 PST

I recently completed a migration for a customer from a VPS with CentOS 4 and whm/cpanel to a new dedicated server with CentOS 5. The box had a variety of websites in PHP and Python/Django so I took the opportunity to switch from Apache proxied to Lighttpd for the Django sites to mod_wsgi. I can't guarantee that this is the best way to set things up - but it works for me.

Following are some of the steps necessary to complete the move:

First I compiled and installed a newer version of Python (CentOS 5 comes with Python 2.4) and compiled and installed mod_wsgi using this helpful guide - although I went for Python 2.6 and mod_wsgi 3.1. This also got MySQLdb and setuptools compiled and installed for my new python 2.6. No particular surprises here.

I'm reusing the Python environment customization I used on the last server - adding a simple sitecustomize.py file to the site-packages directory. See the site module docs for details. My sitecustomize.py:


import os, site
site.addsitedir(os.path.expanduser("~/.python"))

Next up is hooking my django site into mod_wsgi. Cpanel has a heavily customized Apache setup - you can't directly edit the httpd.conf nor does it simply include vhost.conf files - instead it has a baroque system of include files. I added include files that get added to the bottom of the vhost section as documented at the cpanel website. So for "domain.com" and user "test" I added a .conf file at /usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/std/2/test/domain.com/. My django.conf file looks like:


    WSGIDaemonProcess test user=test display-name=%
    WSGIProcessGroup test
    WSGIApplicationGroup %

If my site had an ssl cert CPanel had a separate VirtualHost section for port 443 so I needed an additional config file at /usr/local/apache/conf/userdata/ssl/2/test/domain.com/. I couldn't just duplicate the django.conf used for port 80 - this would try to create a duplicate wsgi process group and fail. Thanks to Graham Dumpleton's blog I realised I only need to duplicate the WSGIProcessGroup declaration to hook into the existing wsgi process group and have the same Django instance serve both virtualhost declarations. Unfortunately the cpanel command I was running to collect the include files (/scripts/ensure_vhost_includes --user=username as per Cpanel's documentation) now complained about duplicate declarations. Running /usr/local/cpanel/bin/build_apache_conf instead sucessfully rebuilt the httpd.conf file - I have no idea why. I really don't like the non-standard Apache config system...

Now I need to hook up my wsgi application. In my ~public_html directories I add a django.wsgi file that looks like this:


#!/usr/bin/python
import os, sys, site, pwd

user = pwd.getpwuid(os.getuid())[0]
sys.stdout = sys.stderr

site.addsitedir(os.path.expanduser("~%s/.python" % user))
os.environ['DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE'] = 'settings'

#def application(environ, start_response):
#    start_response('200 OK', [('content-type', 'text/plain')])
#    return (user,)

import django.core.handlers.wsgi
application = django.core.handlers.wsgi.WSGIHandler()

A few details about the code - I seemed to get hit by a bug (Apache? wsgi? python?) where python thought I was user nobody even though I have mod_wsgi configured to run each wsgi processgroup as the appropriate user. The os.getuid stuff is to sniff what my username actually is - os.path.expanduser("~") was yielding "/home/nobody" for whatever reason. I've also got sys.stdout set to stderr since for wsgi applications print to stdout causes an exception... And yeah - I've got a print statement or two buried in some code somewhere. I've also got a commented-out "world's simplest possible wsgi app" thanks to Eric Florenzano. Very useful for debugging (It's how I figured out the expanduser problem, for example). When I've got things figured out I comment it out and use the standard Django wsgi handler.

I then use mod_rewrite to hook up to my django.wsgi like so:


RewriteRule ^static/(.*)$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^admin_media/(.*)$ - [L]

RewriteCond % !-f
RewriteCond % !(django.wsgi)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /django.wsgi/$1 [QSA,PT,L]

And that's pretty much it...

Boxing and Me Part I

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 06:00:00 PST

So if you follow me on twitter or facebook you already know that I've been into boxing lately. For the last 4-5 months I've been going to a boxing gym in my neighborhood 2-3 times a week for a couple hours at a time. I wrap my hands, put on gloves and hit a heavy bag for a while, take part in group calisthenics, and do drills or exercises afterwards.

I started because I wanted to get into better shape - particularly aerobic shape. That's definitely happening. The first time I went I nearly passed out during the calisthenics (literally - I stood up turned pale, and had to bend over. Ice cold water on the neck brought me right round) and now I'm able to lead a class and talk while we do a few hundred jumps, a few hundred crunch variations and squats and pushups. I'm sticking with it for the exercise alone and I'm going to be in the best shape of my life by the time the year is out.

Strangely though, I'm also finding the actual boxing side of things... interesting. In fact one of my annual resolutions this year is to work my fitness and skill level up to be able to take part in full speed sparring. This despite, maybe because, I really don't like getting punched so far.

This is also despite the fact that I'm a pacifist. I don't actually like the term but that's what people would call the practical outcome of my beliefs - as a Christian I believe I am called to renounce violence. I reject violence personally as a way of accomplishing things and I cannot participate in the various forms of state violence - the military or law enforcement for example - that are widely seen as moral or ethical.

So what the heck am I doing in a boxing gym contemplating participation in a sport that is - let us not kid ourselves - basically organized violence? How can I justify punching and taking a punch as a regular activity and still say that I reject violence in any meaningful way?

Breaking with my tradition of writing single long posts I'd like to instead write several posts answering those questions. For a hint at some answers, however, you might read Chuck Klosterman's tribute to Norman Mailer.

...his central pugilistic theory, which originally ran in Esquire in October 1993: "[Boxing] arouses two of the deepest anxieties we contain. There is not only the fear of getting hurt, which is profound in more men than will admit to it, but there is the opposite panic, equally unadmitted, of hurting others." This was the inevitable thesis for all of the Hemingway-influenced boxing writers. What made the sport transcendent was its relationship with the base qualities of being alive. There is nothing contextual about hitting another man, and there is nothing metaphysical about getting punched in the face. For most of the twentieth century, people who wanted to write about primordial reality wrote about fighting. But not anymore. It seems we have finally reached the point where modern Americans have no relationship with primordial reality whatsoever.

The Next Bubble

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 23:55:33 PST

This is another of my hesitant recommendations - anyone hooked on Unqualified Reservations at my instigation knows what I'm talking about.

So - proceed with caution, minors without adult supervision are forbidden and management is not responsible for any sensations of discomfort you may experience - but the Misandry Bubble was a blast to read. Some people, you read and think, this might be right or wrong but it isn't on the same playing field as everyone else!

One graf among many that struck me as exactly right (emphasis mine):

Lastly, the religious 'social conservatives' who continue their empty sermonizing about the 'sanctity of marriage' while doing absolutely nothing about the divorce-incentivizing turn that the laws have taken, have been exposed for their pseudo-moral posturing and willful blindness. What they claim to be of utmost importance to them has been destroyed right under their noses, and they still are too dimwitted to comprehend why. No other interest group in America has been such a total failure at their own stated mission. To be duped into believing that a side-issue like 'gay marriage' is a mortal threat to traditional marriage, yet miss the legal changes that correlate to a rise in divorce rates (divorce being what destroys marriage, rather than a tiny number of gays), is about as egregious an oversight as an astronomer failing to be aware of the existence of the Moon.

Set aside some time and read the whole thing...

Readability

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 22:48:23 PST

Ok - this is a great little bookmarklet. Installing it allows you to reformat pages with lengthy articles into restful, uncluttered, spacious reading experience with a single click. It's earned a spot on my toolbar next to the Design bookmarklet I use all the time...

Released pydelatt

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 06:00:00 PST

Need to strip attachments from from maildir formatted mail files? Surprisingly there doesn't seem to be a convenient command-line tool to do just this... So I wrote pydelatt.

Bread in Five Minutes

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 11:19:27 PST

If you haven't been inspired by my previous post to give easy artisan bread a try go watch the video here - it really is that easy! I've already got several converts! Oh and a hat-tip to the meta-mom for the video!

That's a good question

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:32:32 PST

Recently a commenter on my David Wells and Ecclesiology post asked a great question. I haven't been much help so far and so I turn to you, the reader for help.

In one of your articles or blogs, you mentioned the 4 Spiritual Laws tract as reflecting the inadequate framing of the gospel message by evangelicals.

Recently, my wife and I have become involved in the "Kids Against Hunger" food relief campaign. The suggestion was made to include gospel tracts with the food portions. I was unhappy with the decision to go with "Chick" tracts.

I am contemplating creating a tract that presents the "Christus Victor" idea in a way that would be brief, clear, and universally relevant. Can you help by giving me your ideas of what the basic elements of such a tract should be? Any storyline ideas in which to embed this message? Thanks if you can.

It's a good question and my first response was that somebody with a developed visual sense and familiarity with Christus Victor theology should answer it. I referred bruce to Derek Flood over at sharktacos.com - he's got a great essay on Christus Victor that's been something I return to every so often...

I'm still looking for suggestions though - so I'd like to encourage you to leave your comments. What would a tract look like that communicated the Gospel in some more holistic form than the "If you died tonight, do you know where you would go" style approach?

My own two cents - the good news of the Gospel is not limited to eventual eternal salvation. The recognition that God looked on our condition and came to take part in it and so provide a way to enter into his life now is good news!

I think at all times in history it is possible to look at the world and recognize that it is wrong. Sin is not just personally transgressing God's will in failing to keep moral commands - it is the pervasive condition of life on this planet. Do you see injustice? Do you see war and death, starvation and oppression? And yes - even on a personal level - everyone who is honest recognizes the struggle against whatever moral creed, no matter how basic, that we espouse. We do what we do not want to do and can't see any way of escape! There ain't no rest for the wicked!

The gospel is that this reality is not all there is, that we are not condemned to be slaves to sin but God in Jesus Christ has set us free and is reconciling all things to himself. We can enter now into new life and new creation through the Grace of God, and Jesus is creating for himself a people who should embody that grace in their lives.

How can you tell all that simply and hopefully visually? Well - I'm not talented enough for simple or visual but let me suggest some themes. First clearly the New Testament narrative of Jesus needs to be central. Perhaps start with the hopelessness of life - is this all there is? Does it make sense? The reality of God as loving Father who sent his son to enter into the human condition. That Jesus faithfully followed God in all things in his life - being fully human and yet proclaiming victory over everything that is against us by forgiving sins, healing diseases, eating and drinking with us sinners and for all that he was executed.

I think it's appropriate to depict Satan as the oppressor, the villain of the piece. And from his perspective the cross is his moment of triumph when God in Jesus is beaten by the ultimate weapon of death. And yet because of his faithfulness Jesus' triumphs over death and is resurrected. Real victory is coming, in the meantime the people of God are called to live like Jesus through the Grace of God.

One movie that keeps popping up as I write this is the reality-behind-the-reality of the first Matrix movie - the feeling that this can't be all that there is.

Without the visual element (which I've been assuming - Chick tracts are basically comic books if you've never seen them) - I almost wonder about a tract that did nothing more than present Jesus. That he was God incarnate, lived a life of faithfulness that displayed the liberating power of God, died for us and invites us to follow him! No four step plan of salvation that necessarily is a distillation of theology but rather just the narrative. Here is the man whom I believe to be God - read the Gospels to find out more!

Well - my readers (both of them) doubtless have suggestions. What's the best tract you've seen? Or how would you convey the Gospel in two or three sentences?

Nobody votes on Oak Street

Thu, 27 Aug 2009 19:32:23 PST

I just had a couple knock on my door. They're with an independent group (I thought they said "CAL Votes") doing voter registration. I hastened to tell them my wife and I are both already registered voters but they already knew that. They had just noticed that their records indicated we were the only two on our block who had ever voted at our local precinct place. They just wanted to stop and thank us for voting! I said thank you and they moved on...

Dr. David Wells and Ecclesiology

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 17:07:43 PST

Our recent cross country road trip gave me the opportunity to listen to the radio a lot more than I typically would. One of the interesting things I heard was an interview with Dr. David Wells on the Lutheran oriented Issues, Etc radio show. I embedded the interview in a flash player above or visit www.issuesetc.org and download the mp3 for the session with Dr. Wells on May 27th 2009.

Dr. Wells recently wrote The Courage to be Protestant and the interview with him covered material from the book and was tellingly titled The Decline of American Evangelicalism. This is definitely not a case of agreeing with everything he said. He may be a little unfair to the emergents and (not being Lutheran) I'm not so sure that a re-emphasis of the historic creeds will restore depth and substance to the Church. It was amazing to hear someone from a substantially different perspective articulate the same indictment of the shallowness of American Evangelicalism.

I believe that the Gospel as typically presented by Evangelicalism does not adequately express the truth of the Bible. Coming from an Anabaptist perspective much of evangelical theology and typical evangelical language sounds... sounds not wrong, but lacking somehow. The whole story isn't there. And from an anabaptist perspective it doesn't take a Barna survey to be scandalized by the state of American Christendom.

As a Lutheran Dr. Wells has a different take both on the problems and potential solutions than I might. His analysis of what has happened - that Evangelicalism is defining itself out of existence is spot on. I appreciated the nod to history as well: what happens when the Church actively attempts to preach only the "core" of the Gospel, to present the "most important parts" of the Bible? Just call that core the "kerygma" instead of "the Gospel" and you give the game away - Liberal Protestantism in the west has already trod this path and lost Christianity altogether.

In my Church circles the discussion of the death of evangelicalism draws mostly puzzled looks. Evangelicalism is still the attractive and successful metropolis when compared to the Brethren ghetto of our past (in many people's minds). The emphases of Anabaptist and Brethren/Pietist thought and practice are exactly the remedies for much of what ails contemporary evangelicalism. And yet experience in Churches with a historical background in those streams seems to have inoculated modern day descendants against anabaptist ideas.

Why is no one interested in being Brethren for today? To reconsider what we know about the New Testament Church, to reflect on the successes and errors of our own history and other restorationists and to attempt to build new models today that embody for our time and place the Biblical picture of Community, Cross, and New Creation. I'm disheartened that the only alternatives appear to be a pursuit of contemporary models that lead to the death of New Testament Christianity or an adherance to denominational history and practice that is so scrupulous it manages to miss the heart of the tradition it espouses.

So I'm discouraged and looking for inspiration. Got any good ideas? Drop em in the comments below...

Whitney III

Sat, 25 Jul 2009 11:54:06 PST

Well - it's time for the annual Whitney update again.

Unlike last year we actually got to hike, and unlike two years ago I wasn't miserable the whole time.

Actually I had a pretty good time. Justin and I went with the same plan as last year: we drove up to Sonora Pass and hiked a little, had an excellent dinner of broiled steak, corn on the cob and garlic bread and kicked back listening to the Giants game on the radio (Jonathan Sanchez throwing a no-hitter, no less!). The sunset was beautiful but it got ridiculously windy and the night was less than restful than it might have been.

We rose early in the morning and took a pair of PCL hikers (John and Valerie from Austin Texas IIRC) down to Bridgeport with us - it was interesting hearing their stories and confirmed that I'm not cut out for a thousand mile hike...

After a stop to hike around Convict Lake we arrived at Whitney Portal and set up camp to relax for a few hours.

We hit the trailhead before midnight (after running a bear off who was nosing around our campsite) and headed up.

Night hiking by the light of our headlamps and the moon was definitely relaxing. We booked up to Outpost Camp in good time and made it all the way up to Trail Camp before I really started to feel fatigue. At Trail Camp we filtered some water and then huddled among the boulders out of the wind to try and rub some feeling back into our hands. I changed shirts - my jacket and shirt were soaked with sweat and severely chilling me in the mountain breezes.

We headed up the switchbacks and I braced myself - this is where I felt absolutely miserable the last time we summitted Whitney. The first thirty or so switchbacks went by without a break, however, and it wasn't really till I got to about switchback 80 that I started to feel bad. We still managed to keep up a decent pace but I was dizzy and increasingly sleepy - even when the sun rose on us I had the urge to walk with my eyes closed (not a safe proposition) and actually lay down on a rock and slept for five minutes once we reached the top of the switchbacks. The crest trail, as before, felt interminably long but I didn't really run out of gas till we hit the back of the peak itself. There was a lengthy traverse (a hundred yards at least) of a snow field to navigate and then the climb through the boulders up the backside of the mountain. I was "almost there" for about twenty minutes before I finally crested and could see the cabin at the top.

It took us about 8.5 hours from Whitney Portal Store to the top.

Coming down was about the same as last time - it was weird to see trail in daylight that I couldn't remember because we had ascended in the dark. It also felt incredibly long coming down - the hiking poles I brought along had already been worthwhile to help me find my footing in the dark and to traverse the frozen snow. They probably protected my body the most on the descent, however, cushioning some of the impact as we booked it down the trail and back down to civilization.

This was the last annual Whitney trip I think. It takes a lot of time due to the drive time and the need to acclimate before starting - it's a squeeze to fit it in three days - and the hike and view aren't intrinsically that rewarding.

Future hiking may be more in the familiar Sonoran Sierra's in places we can bring the family and enjoy a little more... If that was my last Whitney attempt I'm glad to have finished on an up note!

Disqus Integration

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:00:00 PST

After the recent reorganization I realised I had a little problem with my comments. Comments on this blog are provided by Disqus using their Javascript integration method. Disqus was a Y Combinator funded startup that uses Django to provide remote hosting for comments. They have an API to provide more advanced integration options and provide plugins and templates for specific enviroments like Wordpress and Blogger, but it's easy to just step through the "Generic Integration" option and paste a few Javascript snippets in your HTML. Voila - comment counts on links to specific posts and comments and a comment submission box at the bottom of each post.

Until I moved my urls around. I know, I know - cool urls shouldn't change! In my defense I'm using HTTP 301 redirects to catch the old urls and redirect to the new locations. At any rate Disqus uses the URL as the key to load a comment thread - so change the URL and you lose the attached comments.

This was no good - I didn't want to lose all 17 comments this blog has received - but I did want to take numeric PK's out of the url for blog posts and separate my tech blog from my personal/theology blog. A quick poke through the Javascript disqus provides showed how to keep comments working at their new locations.

The generic installation instructions has you add some javascript where you want the comments widget to appear:


<div id="disqus_thread"></div>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/metapundit/embed.js"></script>
<noscript><a href="http://metapundit.disqus.com/?url=ref">View the discussion thread.</a>
</noscript>
<a href="http://disqus.com" class="dsq-brlink">blog comments powered by 
<span class="logo-disqus">Disqus</span></a>

This code doesn't have any obvious dependencies on the current location (it's referenced in the embed.js file) so we can't fix our problem. Fortunately the team at Disqus anticipated our problem and provided a few variables to customise the Javascript embed (see the JSEmbed docs for details). Adding a quick line of javascript defining a variable to the template for individual blog posts allows me to refer back to the old PK-style urls:


<script type="text/javascript">
var disqus_url = "http://metapundit.net/sections/blog/242";
</script>

The other problem is getting the comment count to show up on links to individual blog posts. Disqus lets you display this data by adding an identifying anchor (#disqus_thread) to the links you want modified and than add some more javascript to your post list page:


<script type="text/javascript">
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
(function() {
		var links = document.getElementsByTagName('a');
		var query = '?';
		for(var i = 0; i < links.length; i++) {
			if(links[i].href.indexOf('#disqus_thread') >= 0) {
				query += 'url' + i + '=' + encodeURIComponent(links[i].href) + '&';
			}
		}
		document.write('<script charset="utf-8" type="text/javascript" src="http://disqus.com/forums/metapundit/get_num_replies.js' + query + '"></' + 'script>');
	})();
//]]>
</script>

This injects your comment count into the text of the link. Now that my links aren't pointing to the canonical location (as far as Disqus is concerned) I needed to modify the Javascript. Adding the old numeric key value to the id element of the links allowed me to make a minor modification:


if(links[i].href.indexOf('#disqus_thread') >= 0) {  
    query += 'url' + i + '=' + encodeURIComponent('http://metapundit.net/sections/blog/' + links[i].id.split("_")[1]) + '&';
}

and build the old url to send back to Disqus...

A Revelation in Bread

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 12:00:00 PST

I kid you not.

Right now I'm finishing up a glass of red wine and the last crumbs of a slice of bread slathered in hummus. The bread is from a good artisan-style loaf with a dense texture and a chewy crust. It holds together well enough to have made excellent slices of toast to contain a BLT. It looks a lot like the loaves I pay four dollars for at the farmers market or grocery. But I made it. And it only took about 10 minutes.

Well I feel like an informercial pitchman here, but I'm ridiculously enthusiastic about this bread. I'm a passable cook but I've never been a baker - in fact among my new year's resolution was to put in what I assumed would be the effort required to learn to make a decent french bread. Recently I stumbled over a pointer to an article at Mother Earth News entitled Five Minutes A Day for Fresh Baked Bread. The article explains a technique based on a book by Jeff Hertzberg and Zoe Francois which I intend to buy. Fortunately the article explains the technique - basically you mix an extremely wet dough, let it rise at room temperature and then refrigerate it. When you want to make a loaf you pinch off an appropriate amount, tuck it a little (no kneading) and let it rise, than bake at high temperature with a steam pan in the oven. It's easy, and it's good.

I have not yet tried the other recipes and I'm waiting to see how my stored dough matures - It's kept without an airtight cover and is supposed to take on wild yeast flavors and become more sour with age - up to two weeks. Even if it stays sweet, however, I'm personally delighted to have found a ridiculously easy way to make high quality artisan bread.

What a long strange trip it's been

Sat, 04 Jul 2009 22:37:06 PST

Well, I'm back. Okay - so you didn't actually notice that I've been gone but I spent the middle part of the past month driving to Indiana and back for my brother's wedding (my mom put up some pictures).

The wedding was fun. Jeshua is a musician (currently headed for his doctorate in choral conducting) so the music was fantastic and even the congregational singing was superb! The service as was really nice and it was a good time to reconnect with some of the family from the east as well. After the wedding we enjoyed a few days in Ohio visiting family and friends. Unfortunately our daughters got sick so the trip back home felt a lot longer than it actually was - and we're not quite back up to health yet. Ugh... One member of the family or another has been throwing up for most of the lat two weeks; I'm ready for all of us to be back to health.

In the meantime (as I can find time) I have an interesting radio show to comment on, a hike review (gearing up for Whitney again) and an absolute revelation in bread. Stay tuned...

Ubiquity and Jetpack

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:58:39 PST

Lately I've been getting enthused about a couple of Firefox plugins. They're both raw but I think they both point to the way forward for the programmable web.

Ubiquity is basically a command line for the web - a way to apply "verbs" to user input and web pages. Sample usage (and built in commands) include a "map" command to quickly build a googlemap and insert it into, say, the html in your webmail interface. What's cooler is that it provides infrastructure to quickly build additions to the browser that before would have to be packaged as bookmarklets or Firefox extensions. In the case of extensions it's frequently not worth the trouble and bookmarklets provide a lousy UI and development experience.

Ubiquity comes with a built in editor and commands can be tried out live in the editor or installed without any restarting required. To be honest the ease of writing commands made me think of emacs - executing code in the same tool you're writing it without any sort of compile->execute cycle. I even quickly whipped up an unwrap command when I was repetitively pasting sql statements from mysqlbinlog in a console to phpMyAdmin to restore some damaged data. Newlines inserted by the console were messing up the sql statements and visually scanning each statement was error prone. 30 seconds after thinking about it I had a two line Ubiquity command up in the editor that allows me to select some text in a textbox and unwrap it...

Along the same lines is the other Firefox extension Jetpack. This is even more alpha - but perhaps even cooler than Ubiquity. Similarly Jetpack comes with it's own editor that allows you to run code or install Jetpack features without a restart. While Ubiquity aims at interacting with webpages, Jetpack aims at interacting with the browser and exposes an API to let you play with notifications, the status bar, tabs and includes JQuery to easily slice and dice html and access web API's. Want to write an extension that shows your unread GMail message count in the status bar? The Jetpack tutorial does this in 45 lines of code and you can execute the code as part of the tutorial and immediately see the message count display. I can see Jetpack giving Firefox's conventional plugin infrastructure a serious challenge - I've already replaced one of my plugins with a few lines of javascript in Jetpack and I'll release it after I've added a couple of features.

Jetpack reminds me even more strongly of my Emacs environment. Emacs is famously "the programmable editor" and until you've taken advantage of that environment you don't know what an advantage that is. Firefox, with the new speed improvements to its Javascript engine, and new and easier methods of adding programmable functionality is becoming the programmable browser.

Atonement Theology

Mon, 25 May 2009 16:50:13 PST

I've been interested in the Atonement for a long time. Basic to Christian belief is the idea that because Christ died, my sins are forgiven and I am reconciled to God. How exactly this occurs is not spelled out - and the New Testament uses different metaphors to describe the work of atonement.

Most modern evangelical thought has tended to emphasis just one of these metaphors. For many evangelical Christians atonement = Penal Substitution. The famous Four Spiritual Laws tract explains that sin separates man from God and "... that God has bridged the gulf which separates us from Him by sending His Son, Jesus Christ, to die on the cross in our place to pay the penalty for our sins."

This is the Judicial metaphor and it is usually tightly connected to the concept of Justification: sin is transgression of God's moral law, God as Judge demands the penalty of death (Romans 6:23 the wages of sin is death) and Jesus offers his own death as satisfaction of the penalty guilty humanity owes. God as Judge than dismisses the charges against us since the penalty has been paid in full.

I didn't grow up opposed to the idea of Penal Substitution, it just always seemed ... insufficient. If Penal Substitution is the wholly sufficient explanation for our atonement and justification, what are we to do with Scriptures like

Hebrews 2:14-15
14Forasmuch then as the children are partakers of flesh and blood, he also himself likewise took part of the same; that through death he might destroy him that had the power of death, that is, the devil; 15And deliver them who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.

Colossians 2:13
And you, being dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He has made alive together with Him, having forgiven you all trespasses, 14 having wiped out the handwriting of requirements that was against us, which was contrary to us. And He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross. 15 Having disarmed principalities and powers, He made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them in it.

Clearly these passages are not using the sort of language that fits into a judicial model. But I didn't know exactly what to make of them until I bumped into the term Christus Victor. Thanks to an article by Derek Flood at sharktacos.com (very highly recommended) I began to have a vocabulary to identify the drama described in Scriptures where the Atonement is the victory of Jesus through his death and resurrection over the powers that oppress us and keep us separated from God. Christ the Victor!

The result for me of identifying the Christus Victor model in the New Testament hasn't been to challenge the Penal Substitution model as much as to emphasize the mystery at the heart of the atonement cannot be neatly packaged - the New Testament has a variety of models and metaphors to describe the atonement and each has it's contributions to make to our understanding and experience of the Christian life. I've several times done a "multiple metaphors of the atonement" style class or Biblestudy - looking at the Priestly/Sacrificicial, Financial/Ransom, Juridical/Justification, and Military/Victory metaphors for the atonement. But recent reading has left me wondering if perhaps the language we use to understand the atonement plays a decisive more role in determining our life in Christ.

I recently got around to reading Christus Victor - the 1931 work by Gustaf Aulen who coined the term. Christus Victor is basically a polemic survey of the various theological takes on the atonement with the assertion that the chief view of the atonement in the New Testament and Patristic writings has been lost since Anselm and Abelard and we've been left with the "objective" and "subjective" theories of atonement presented as the only choices. (briefly: "objective" atonement sees the passion as directed towards God; Penal Substitution or Satisfaction falls under this rubric. "Subjective" theories tend to see the atonement as aimed at humanity; the "Moral Influence" theory of atonement which sees Jesus sinless death as example of God's love to us. Presented with those two choices, of course, evangelicals rightly tend to gravitate towards the Objective theories. Aulen thinks this is a false choice and calls the narrative/dramatic account of victory over opposing powers to earn humanity's freedom from sin, death and hell the "Classic Theory" of atonement.)

I can't do justice to Aulen's arguments in this space (and really - if you're interested you should just go read the essay at sharktacos). Most interesting to me, however, were the observations that over and against Penal Substitution, Christus Victor takes into account the enemy (Satisfaction, for instance, needs no devil; God is sinned against, God demands Payment for sin), the incarnation and Jesus life of obedience, and the resurrection itself which is the capstone of Christ's Victory but seems somewhat inessential (besides being a note of Divine approval) in most atonement theology. It also suceeds in capturing the ambivalent nature of the operation of the Law in Scripture - blessed because it is true but ultimately against us and our opponent (among the powers defeated by Christ) because it cannot lead us into fellowship with God. Penal Substitution, despite being strongly associated with the reformation takes a legalistic view in which the Law's demands are immutable and cannot be broken - God will not forgive us without satisfying the demands of the Law. I have always wondered what the Penal Substitutionary model makes of Jesus' profligacy in forgiveness of sins. To the paralytic, the woman caught in adultery, the prostitute who washed Jesus feet with her tears, the thief on cross - Jesus extends forgiveness of sins without worrying about the demands of the Law.

Aulen also takes an interesting tour from the Patristic Fathers, through Medieval commentators and onto the Reformation, arguing most interestingly that Luther's atonement theory was mostly of the "Classic" type though largely misunderstood by his contemporaries and heirs. The historical treatment was mostly new to me (I haven't read much Anselm or Abelard. or Luther, for that matter) and a fairly convincing explanation of how penal substitution grew out of a medieval legal backdrop (concepts like penance and indulgences fit right into the western concept of justice).

Fresh on the heels of Christus Victor I got around to reading a gift from my sister-in-law: Joel B. Green and Mark Baker's Recovering the Scandal of the Cross (Joel is one of her Professors at Fuller). Recovering the Scandal... is a little less straightforward - in part it is also a critique of the dominant Penal Substitution model but it's purpose is not so much to replace it with another model as it is to emphasise the necessity and desirability of having multiple models for the atonement.

Green & Baker also provide a historical tour of atonement theology that covers some of the same ground. They review the language of the New Testament in regards to salvation and atonement and agree with Aulen that the Christus Victor best characterizes the Patristic writings (with a few variations). They also cover Anselm and Abelard and use Princeton Seminarian Charles Hodges as an expounder of Penal Substitution from the 20th century. Most interestingly, however, they move from a critique of existing models to relating several attempts at contextualizing the Good News of Christ's atoning work in models that communicate to a particular.

The Penal Substitution Model makes assumptions about the concepts of justice, punishment, guilt, and satisfaction that are only coherent within western cultural understandings. In Japan, for example, the judiciary operates under a shame/alienation framework that seems strange to western minds. Justice, in the west, is exemplified by the blind (and therefore impartial) goddess Justicia with scales and sword in either hand. Japanese culture as related by Norman Kraus, a missionary teaching theology in Japan in the early 80's, sees justice as the wise decision made by judges having taken into account the context and rendering the decision that will best preserve relationships in the community. Because shame, rather than guilt, is the primary cultural deterrent the ideas of forgiveness and propitiation as communicated by Penal Substitution do not resonate with Japanese culture.

Clearly Biblical truths should not be cast aside in order to conform to human culture. As Green & Baker point out, however, emphasizing the sense of sin as alienation from God and the atonement as Jesus entering into shame and dishonor in order to reconcile and restore us to God not only communicated meaningfully within Japanese contexts, it may also be closer to the scriptural depiction of the atonement as well! After all, the cultures in which the texts of the Old and New Testaments were written were also shame/honor cultures as well.

While I found the other attempts at contextualizing the meaning of the Atonement less successful, it was stimulating to think about how we can best communicate the mystery of the work of Christ in comprehensible ways. All metaphors break down at some point (if Christ effected a Ransom, to whom was the price paid? If it was Satisfaction of the Law's demands is God bound by the Law? Or did Jesus come to save us from God?) All we can do is resort to narrative and metaphor to explain the atonement. Not every metaphor is equally powerful or explicative but some do have the virtue of communicating in the "native language", so to speak, of a particular cultural group (I've been thinking, for instance, about Jesus as Trickster to communicate to the hacker/geek subculture I partially inhabit. The trickster (in the jungian archetype sense) is much revered in hacker culture (as embodied by words like "hack"). And Jesus' subversive relationship to the religious/political power structure of His day as well as the unexpected quality of His victory (achieved by submission to torture and death) and his upside-down Kingdom could communicate within this particular subculture in ways communication along the Penal Substitution lines cannot. In fact - following Gregory of Nyssa's imagery of Christ as a baited hook proffered to Evil, the Godhead concealed in humanity, Life swallowed by death which cannot contain it - the act of the Atonement might be classified as a clever hack. This will doubtless be seen as a sacrilegious characterization outside of hacker circles.

Besides being encouraged to think about how to think about the atonement Recovering the Scandal... also had the salutary effect of challenging my acceptance of the exclusive use of Penal Substitution language. About halfway through the book I became increasingly aware of my uncomfortableness with their polemic against Penal Substitution. For example:

Hodge's penal substitution model takes sin very seriously in that it presents sin as a huge barrier between God and humans. Yet it is a limited concept of sin that portrays it only in terms of moral failure or transgression of a law. Even within that concept of sin, however, the model does not intersect with the day-to-day reality of actual people. Describing the atonement as a legal transaction within the Godhead removes it from the historical world in which we live and leaves it unconnected to personal or social reconciliation. And in actuality it only addresses our reconciliation with God at an abstract level. That is to say, it is so objective, so outside of us (and in a sense outside of God) that what changes through the cross is a legal ruling. According to the logic of the model, an individual could be saved through penal substitution without experiencing a fundamental reorientation of his or her life.

Ethically this model has little to offer
p149

Should we be doing theology on this sort of ends-oriented basis? Surely as exegetes the question to grapple with is "what does the text communicate", not "how will this work out". And it is undeniable that the concept of Satisfaction is in the Bible and in places hints at a Penal understanding (Isaiah 53, for example). It wasn't until I had moved on to other reading that I realized I had the ends-analysis exactly backwards.

J. Denny Weaver, contributing to Anabaptist Currents analyzed the ways in which atonement theology contributes (or fails) to ecclesiology. One key statement stuck out to me:

The doctrine of substitutionary atonement allows the same kind of substitution to occur in the area of theology. Defining salvation in terms of escape from guilt and deserved penalty - a legal transaction with God - provides a theological way to talk about salvation apart from considerations of discipleship, nonresistance, and love of enemies. It thus enables and reinforces an understanding of salvation that is separate from ethics.
p35, The Church, Pietism and Nonresistance

Perhaps my question needs to be reversed. Is it possible that the Church in the West has selected Penal Substitution as the primary means of understanding the atonement precisely because it does lack an ethical dimension? Jesus came to preach the Kingdom of God the synoptic Gospels agree, and yet western Churches and western theology sees the Kingdom and discipleship as an optional add-on (at best) to the core message of Salvation (always understood in a juridical sense). Salvation as a legal transaction does allow us to do away with or render optional ecclesiology, discipleship, and ethics. But for the purposes of much of the Church this has been a feature, not a bug, which allows a Christianity neutered down to become a private transaction which need not affect the present.

Phrased like that it seems to me that a primary task of recovering the New Testament vision of the Christian life is to reject with prejudice exclusive claims for penal substitution and assert the diversity of Biblical language and atonement models (with all their implications for salvation).

Update: Fixed the spelling of Joel Green's name - thanks to nothing_to_say who may now deign to comment, if she's not to busy having coffee with Joel :)

Reorganization

Sat, 23 May 2009 09:24:08 PST

You may notice (if you're visiting the site) that things are moved about. New menu entries appear, old ones disappear - but fear not! All the great blog content you've come to expect from the virtual pen of the metapundit is still here - it's just been dusted off and moved around a bit.

As threatened a bit ago I've split my blog up into two separate streams: a Tech Only Blog and a personal blog. If you're visiting the old url or subscribed to the old RSS feeds than things will continue to just work, but if you'd rather not hear Baypiggies reports and rants about PHP you can now subscribe to the personal RSS feed and not get any of the tech stuff. And of course you can subscribe to the Tech-Only RSS feed if my theological ramblings are starting to annoy you...

Do poke around - I've put up an essays section to link to the longer writing I've done and I'll try to keep it updated as I write more. I've also got some UI changes in the works to make it easier to find related content...

Emacs and Django

Sun, 10 May 2009 00:55:39 PST

I added curiousprogrammer.wordpress.com to my emacs feed in bloglines after finding a cool tip that helps me out particularly with Django programming in Emacs.

One of the cool things about Emacs is that it's not just a text-editor, it's a whole ecosystem of code (or as the joke goes - a pretty cool operating system with a crappy built-in text editor). In exploring all the extensibility though - the built in major and minor modes, the many external modes available - it's easy to forget how much can be customised by setting a few variables.

I didn't even realise how much it was annoying me but the default way Emacs handles duplicate buffer names is kind of dumb. If you have multiple files with the same names the first buffer gets the filename and subsequent buffers get an index value. This isn't a problem in most editing tasks - you occasionally see a choice of switching between foo.py and foo.py<1> and have to remember which is which.

In most code editing I do I don't have many identically named files. Django, however, makes this a little more annoying - each django app I have open has it's own models.py, views.py and likely a urls.py file. When I'm working simultaneously in several apps at once it's confusing every time I go to switch buffers... Thanks to this post, however, I added the following lines to my .emacs:


(require 'uniquify)
(setq uniquify-buffer-name-style 'reverse)
(setq uniquify-separator "/")
(setq uniquify-after-kill-buffer-p t)
(setq uniquify-ignore-buffers-re "^\\*")

And now see a choice between views.py/app1, views.py/app2, and views.py/app3 when switching buffers. Uniquify is comes with Gnu Emacs so there's nothing you need to install to scratch this particular itch.

Update: thanks to commenter Van Gale Van Gale for the catch - I added the necessary require line above. I also should have noted that this is built in on my Emacs 23 packaged by Ubuntu 8.10 - YMMV.

Do not adjust your set...

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 00:27:34 PST

...regularly scheduled programming will resume shortly.

It's been a tough week around the meta-homestead. Between head gaskets and a popular case of the flu there hasn't been much of a chance to catch a breath, much less blog... Let's put it this way - I've had 1 hour of sleep in the last 40 hours, walked a couple miles back and forth taking my replacement vehicle to the shop to get smogged... I'm tired and it's still been the best and most productive day I've had in a week.

Ah well! That's life sometimes - and when I can catch a breath I'll get moving on my blog reorg and pump out the posts that are percolating right now...

Random Linkage

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 01:07:00 PST

One of the cool things about writing my blog has been discovering interesting people by looking at who's linked to me. Recently I got a couple hits from mennodiscuss.com - if you already know what that stands for you'll probably find it interesting. Name aside - it a forum site for discussion among Mennonites, Brethren, Quakers, ex-Hofers, Amish, and one Orthodox (just to list the affiliations I've seen). If you're interested in Anabaptist topics head on over...

The other link I've been meaning to post for some time - I had a conversation about homosexuality and the response of the Church with Jason and Isaac over at rustyparts.com (read 'em - they make me think) and while searching for an author they recommended I stumbled upon a completely unrelated essay about sexuality and Christianity. I can't adequately summarise the arguments in this philosophical essay - I can only say that All Sexed Up: Is There a Way Out of Chastity, Marriage, and the Christian Sex Cult? is a way better article than it's title might lead you to think! And I'll quote the recommendations at the end so you get some of the flavor (emphasis not in original):

As some possible ways out of the contemporary Christian sex cult, I propose a few very simple practices of freedom. First, form friendships in which you speak more about imitating Christ, wherein you discuss your vocation, feeding the hungry, caring for orphans, challenging each other toward economic simplicity, and your redemptive vision for the world than you do about the topic of sex.
By this I mean to say, trade in your accountability partner for a friend who will challenge you to imitate Christ in your life by the way you spend your money, the job that you take and the day to day interactions you have with others. Although sex will continue to factor into your discussions from time to time, refuse to make sexual confession the central reason for meeting together but more often concentrate each other on affirming the imitation of Christ. Engage in holistic forms of confession as well as affirmation that allow for failure and are not bound simply to a focus on chastity.
Second, refuse to be organized in the church along sexual lines by forming deep friendships outside of your sexual category. Singles should get to know married folk; women should befriend men; seniors should befriend youths; heterosexuals should get to know homosexuals.
Thirdly, speak more openly about marriage and refuse any formulation of chastity or virginity based upon marriage. Reject the attempt to make marriage the ideal for Christian living, and refuse to focus too much attention on the family. That is to say, do not allow your notions of virginity and chastity to be defined as preparation for marriage or as purified holding stations for an eventual spouse, for this is to disavow virginity and chastity from any intelligible Christian formulation.
One does not remain a virgin in Christianity in order to keep oneself pure for his or her eventual spouse, but virginity and chastity are always defined in Christianity as functions of integrity toward one�s goal of imitating Christ.
And finally, refuse to acknowledge liberation as a �coming out� because this implies that one�s essential sexual nature must be recognized. Liberty is always the freedom to love one�s neighbor, not to sleep with her or him as an expression of who one really is.
Both Paul and Christ refuse to acknowledge any essential nature, especially a sexual nature, other than the new human nature given in the resurrected Christ that gathers the community of his followers in friendship.
These practices, I believe, may begin to lead us out of the contemporary understanding of ourselves as essentially sexual beings. They may lead us in a new direction toward an evangelical asceticism that reclaims the imitation of Christ as a complete form of life. Each of these is only a beginning, but they are an important beginning for finding our way out of the worship of sex.

Baypiggies Talk on Pip, Virtualenv, Fabric

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 21:25:31 PST

I've been meaning to post this here - a week ago I was in charge of the monthly Baypiggies night in Mountain View. I'd suggested on the mailing list that we have a "Tools Night" and of course was "volunteered" to do a presentation and round up the other speakers. We had a great night (and a great post-meeting dinner at the Tied House) and I've put my slides up on my blog over at simeonfranklin.com. Check it out if you're interested in virtualenv (python development environments), pip (a new python installer which plays nicely with virtualenv and has some very nice features for developers), or fabric (the Pythonic remote deployment tool)...

Meta-Post

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 01:29:51 PST

If you're an rss-only reader you may not have noticed that metapundit.net has been sporting a comments section for some time now. Of course you might be pardoned for not seeing them even if you visit the site; the little "zero comments" links at the bottom of each article look lonely and insignificant and the eye just seems to skip over it.

Lately, however, there has been a little buzzing in the comments. I see a veritable discussion breaking out on some of my theological posts. And if you haven't yet contributed - here is your opportunity to voice your opinion about the future of metapundit.net.

I've been a very irregular blogger and I've been wondering about the causes (besides laziness) of my sporadic output. At least one issue for me is a problem with one of the fundamental rules of good writing. What did your 9th grade teacher tell you? Know your audience.

I have two distince voices and two distinct audiences. I regularly write technical posts about programming. I also sometimes write about theology and Christianity.

I always seem to worry that whatever I write is boring half my readers to tears. I haven't read many Geek-blogs with a side of theology; most tend to be mostly about technology with occasional theological posts (Gerv's Hacking for Christ is an excellent example of the genre).

I'm not inclined to cut back on my theological posting (in fact that's the area I'm most motivated in right now) nor am I likely to cut back on any tech ranting I may need to get out of my system. And I haven't figured out at all what to do on my professional site so I've barely blogged there at all.

So I'm thinking about splitting up my blog - having a tech blog and a separate theology blog both hosted at metapundit.net.

This is your opportunity to weigh in - always wished I'd have separate RSS feeds? Like the diversity of posts? Want to point out that nobody really does the "two blogs, one author, one domain" thing? (I already know that last one...) Or perhaps you have another suggestion entirely! Feel free to fire away.

A Provocation

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:17:16 PST

Ok - multiple choice quiz time: Who said the following:

Faith is God's work in us, that changes us and gives new birth from God. (John 1:13). It kills the Old Adam and makes us completely different people. It changes our hearts, our spirits, our thoughts and all our powers. It brings the Holy Spirit with it. Yes, it is a living, creative, active and powerful thing, this faith. Faith cannot help doing good works constantly. It doesn't stop to ask if good works ought to be done, but before anyone asks, it already has done them and continues to do them without ceasing. Anyone who does not do good works in this manner is an unbeliever. He stumbles around and looks for faith and good works, even though he does not know what faith or good works are. Yet he gossips and chatters about faith and good works with many words.

Faith is a living, bold trust in God's grace, so certain of God's favor that it would risk death a thousand times trusting in it. Such confidence and knowledge of God's grace makes you happy, joyful and bold in your relationship to God and all creatures. The Holy Spirit makes this happen through faith. Because of it, you freely, willingly and joyfully do good to everyone, serve everyone, suffer all kinds of things, love and praise the God who has shown you such grace. Thus, it is just as impossible to separate faith and works as it is to separate heat and light from fire!

Was it:
A) Martin Luther
B) John Wesley
C) Menno Simons

All right - what sort of works-righteousness legalist said all that stuff? He sure lacked the sophistication to separate justification and sanctification properly - as we know the one has nothing, nothing to do with the other!

Well that might be a bit too strong - but I have heard many times over the past few years that Justification (a Christian's positional salvation) is secure no matter what the state of their Sanctification (their personal salvation manifested in a changed life). Any weakening of this position tends to be seen as a move towards works-righteousness - the idea that we earn our salvation by our good works rather than accepting it as the free gift by grace through faith that it is.

It should cause one to pause, then, to realise that the works-righteousness preacher above is none other than the famous proponent of Grace alone through Faith alone - Martin Luther, writing in his preface to the Epistle to the Romans. It's hard to make the case that Luther was insufficiently radical in his understanding of grace and faith and it is basically Luther's understanding of Romans particularly that still shapes most of Evangelicalism's understandings of faith, grace, and salvation.

John Wesley's conversion came while listening to a reading of Luther's preface to Romans. Wesley is the great revivalist of Methodism - and for most people Lutheranism and Methodism would seem to occupy opposite poles in their understanding of salvation and good works. And yet I suspect that most would identify the quote with Wesley's (or worse! - the Anabaptist) side of the theological continuum.

And that is precisely my provocation. If you see Martin Luther's comments as betraying the Sola's of the reformation, as failing to understand the nature of salvation, where does that place you within historic Christian thought?

Internet Monk

Wed, 11 Mar 2009 23:16:39 PST

One of the my long-admired Christian bloggers (the Internet Monk) has hit the bigtime with an article in the Christian Science Monitor titled The Coming Evangelical Collapse. Since the article was published I've seen links on social networking sites like Digg and Reddit, he's been linked by religious/media bloggers (Get Religion, etc) and I think he's been linked by Drudge. I'm glad to see IMonk get some media attention and wish him well...

Part of the reason for all the hoopla is the release of the latest American Religious Identification Survey results which indicate declining religious affiliation pretty much across the Christian spectrum. Along with the discussion of the results (see this post for a good highlight of the results) the media is looking for analysis. Internet Monk is not a newcomer to the Evangelicaldom-is-dying bus and lists seven reasons for the decline in Evangelicalism in the Christian Science Monitor article. I don't agree with all of his predictions but observe many of the same reasons for decline that he points to. Wonder why I'm not wildly enthusiastic about attempts to re-pattern my Church on what was trendy 20 years ago in the Evangelical world? Because I'm not optimistic that the long term (or even short term) effects will be positive spiritually... Point number two resonates with me, but read the whole thing:

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. Ironically, the billions of dollars we've spent on youth ministers, Christian music, publishing, and media has produced a culture of young Christians who know next to nothing about their own faith except how they feel about it. Our young people have deep beliefs about the culture war, but do not know why they should obey scripture, the essentials of theology, or the experience of spiritual discipline and community. Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures.

A Modest Report

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 02:36:43 PST

Last night my Church voted to make the wearing of pants optional for membership and communion.

I have to confess I didn't see this coming. Wearing pants isn't really an issue near and dear to my heart - I wear them and see wearing pants as an issue the Bible speaks to under the general heading of modesty but I recognise that some Christians don't wear pants. Even in my congregation there has been some varied practice lately - but I assumed the Church as a whole was content to leave the constitution with the minimal requirement that people wear pants to weekly Church services and communion. Not so...

The meeting started off with some people expressing appreciation for the tradition our Church has of wearing pants. It was acknowledged that this makes us different from some - but that the difference was based in our desire to follow Jesus and should be embraced.

I spoke after a while - I wanted to challenge the congregation to wrestle with the issue of pants by turning to Scripture. I feel strongly that the inability of people on both sides of the issue to articulate their position about pants with regards to the Bible indicates our spiritual weakness as "Biblical Authority" becomes a principle we claim to subscribe to but don't actually practice. Being pro-tradition or anti-tradition isn't really the point.

I also shared that I knew when I became a member three years ago that the most important issue confronting our congregation was the issue of change and direction. What will we be like as a congregation in 5 years or 10 years? I knew when I joined that the congregation was moving in a particular direction - and as I've grown to know the people in the congregation better that impression has been confirmed. Everybody knows we're moving in a particular direction (some are happy about that and others less so!) but we don't talk in any sort of congregational fashion about this trend (and pants are only one small data point on the trendline).

Our congregation has already lost (for practical purposes) much of New Testament teaching about separation from the world, about the dangers involved in pursuing money, status, and things. We will lose (I predicted) particular teachings about nonresistance and marriage that are found in Scripture but not common among much of Christianity. We have an impoverished ecclesiology that no longer reflects the full message of the New Testament about the Church that has best been expressed in anabaptism and other "Believer's Church" traditions.

All those issues are more important to me than the relatively minor issue of whether we require communicants to wear pants. I see us as drifting away from Biblical authority, of losing many of the truths of the Bible as our minds are increasingly shaped by our culture and we coast on the cultural capital of previous teaching and instruction. My comments were echoed by a few, but most spoke in favor of the change.

Many shared their feelings of exclusion - that because they would not wear pants they are not allowed to take communion or that their spouse does not belong to the Church because of the issue of pants. How can we judge by looking at the outside when God sees the heart? How can we exclude simply based on an article of clothing?

Others felt that while it is true that the practice of the congregation regarding wearing pants has shifted, this shift represents maturity and growth. To focus more on Christ and less on externals is not drifting but maturing, and the relatively minor issue of whether to wear pants to communion is not something the Church should be mandating. Many expressed support for the principle behind wearing pants and even encouraged those who feel so lead to wear pants as much as they want.

One younger brother stood up to offer the view that he didn't understand the fuss over pants. His experience is that people are not put off by the requirement to put on a pair of pants to come to Church or take communion. That's not a huge requirement after all!

</satire>

I can't remember, now, all the comments that were made. I was saddened (though not suprised) to see us move in this direction. It seemed to me that my challenge to wrestle together on the basis of scripture was ignored - most of the comments could have applied just as well to the exclusionary effects of our beliefs about divorce and remarriage. They even sounded familiar to anyone who has followed the Prop 8/Gay Marriage debate here in California. While I appreciated the heart and concern of many who spoke out in favor of the change to our Church Constitution, I can't help feeling that the grounds of the debate, the appeals to tolerance and exclusion and judgement apart from the teachings of Scripture confirmed my concerns.

OK: just to reassure those who might not be in on the joke - the report above is satirical. My Church didn't really discuss pants and, just for the record, if you visit us PLEASE WEAR CLOTHES!

Ahem. The actual issue we discussed was different, but the arguments I reported are pretty much the same, and my own comments in particular are as accurate as memory allows. One thing I did say that I didn't include in the report was to commit to communicating more with my congregation and encouraging us to communicate more honestly as a body.

This blog needs to play a role in that process - so keep your eyes peeled for changes in this space. And if you're one of my tech readers (probably wondering what the heck I'm talking about) yeah - I've got something for you too...

Yes Exactly

Mon, 02 Mar 2009 01:55:05 PST

I can only echo the Internet Monk's comment on this excerpt: "Exactly."

No I take that back - I can say more. I enjoy the mocking of preaching based on relevance and fads. I especially enjoy the mocking of Christless preaching - I'm with IMonk that preaching that doesn't include Jesus is preaching in vain. I also think that the laugh line ("I have no problem with topical preaching, as long as it's done exegetically") should be taken seriously - topical preaching should be done with an emphasis on "What does scripture teach us about this?"

What I appreciate most however is the last few lines. Matt Chandler believes in preaching the Gospel to Christians - but the Gospel is not limited to "believe in Jesus and you won't go to hell when you die"!

By the cross of Christ socially I have been set free from the sin of arrogant hierarchy seeking and saved to humility and seeking the lower seat. That in Christ and His cross materially I have been set free from grasping and finding my identity in things and saved to using God's creation properly and giving away money and things to advance his Kingdom further.

Do you recognise that as the Gospel? This is the message of Jesus (who spent his 3 years of active ministry "proclaiming the Good News") and yet I daresay it has an exotic quality to the ears of many Christians.

Purismas Creek Redwoods Hiking

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:52:40 PST

I went hiking for the first time in the Purismas Creek Redwoods Open Space Preserve a couple of weekends ago.

My Whitney hiking buddy was in the mood to do some Coastal hiking and we had a great day together. Purismas Creek has lots of looping trails - we found one of the longer loops at 13.5 miles with a couple thousand vertical feet of climb and burned through it - at the trailhead before 8AM and sipping a pint at a microbrewery in Half Moon bay by 2:30PM.

This was a great hike if you just want a relaxing day of strolling through Redwood forests. Lots of moss, ferns, and everything started out dripping wet from the morning mist.

Occasionally the sun broke through the forest but until we made it to the "top" of Bald Knob we were mostly in the shade.

As we headed up the ridge however we got views of the surrounding hills and the ocean to the west.

Unlike Whitney, this isn't a trophy hike. Also unlike Whitney I had a great time enjoying the flora (and even a little fauna - we saw deer, quail, and of course banana slugs). With "hikes" ranging from 0.6 wheelchair accessible paved path to 15 miles through the loops, this seems like a great place to have a relaxing day hike.

And Now a Word from Our Sponsors

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 00:30:56 PST

Just kidding.

Actually I've been meaning to promote Big Wolfe Coffee on my blog for some time and haven't gotten around to it yet...

People who know me personally know that I take my coffee seriously. I've been hand roasting my own coffee since 2006 and typically fill up my thermos at the beginning of each morning with freshly roasted coffee made with my aeropress and hotpot (which allows me to control the time and temperature of brewing). I've been buying green coffee beans from Sweet Maria's in Oakland but have recently switched to buying from Big Wolfe Coffee.

Justin, the co-proprieter) is a friend of mine and fellow coffee fanatic. Some of the differences between Justin and I can be observed (as I have been fond of remarking lately) by noting that three years after I started I still roast coffee in a skillet in 6oz lots, judging degree of roast by smell and sight, and buy my coffee 10-20lbs at a time. Justin on the other hand has moved up to 120lb bags and I was recently privileged to witness his self-designed roaster in action that can easily handle 5 pound lots. Seriously, Justin and his dad may have built the most cost effective (quality/$) roaster in the world. And the coffee they turn out is pretty special - I got to cup some of the lots from they tested from wholesalers and it was all pretty good stuff; but the Sumatra they currently have on offer is exceptional. If you're interested in moving up to gourmet coffee (still at Starbucks prices) and live in the Modesto area you should check out their website and give them a call.

Update: Fixed the links. Stupid firefox plugin...