Escuchando

So I'm in the earliest stages of brewing up two research projects in the area of listening. I'm describing them here in case former students of mine are interested, and especially in case you have insights or realizations to share.

Project #1

This one occurred to me in August, and I did a little scut work toward submitting to IRB, but I got sidetracked with this little thing called fall semester. This study would unfold in two parts.

First, I would create a survey that would ask participants to think about a very powerful, eloquent, persuasive speaker, and then think about a very sharp, incisive, powerful listener. Once they had the image of each clear in their minds, they would be asked which person would be better equipped to achieve each outcome from a list. The list would include things like win an election, graciously accept an award, give a best friend's toast at a wedding, form a close relationship, help someone overcome an emotional problem, etc. Scattered through the outcomes would be ones tied very precisely to persuasion and winning arguments. One item might well be, "Win an argument." Others might be things like "Change someone's mind on a politically controversial topic," or "Persuade a jury to find in favor of a client," or "Sell a used car." I would find a way to disseminate that survey to a large, very representative sample, with lots of demographics represented. My working hypothesis is that people from every background will disproportionately expect that the speaker is better equipped to persuade, and to win arguments, than the listener is.

Second, I would prepare a shorter survey for debate judges to complete immediately after a debate. It would have just four items: 

1. How close was the debate you just judged?

• Very close
• Somewhat close
• Not close

2. Was one or both of the winning debaters a more effective speaker than both of the losing debaters?

• Much more effective
• More effective
• Neutral
• Both winning debaters were less effective speakers
• Both winning debaters were much less effective speakers

3. Was one or both of the winning debaters a more effective listener than both of the losing debaters?

• Much more effective
• More effective
• Neutral
• Both winning debaters were less effective listeners
• Both winning debaters were much less effective listeners
• Don’t know.

4. Pick the most accurate statement from below:

• Effective listening had more to do with the outcome of this debate than effective speaking did.
• Effective speaking had more to do with the outcome of this debate than effective listening did.
• Effective listening and effective speaking had identical or very similar effects on the outcome of this debate.
• Don’t know.

And here are my hypotheses.

H1: After debates that a judge describes as close, the judge will more often describe the winning team as better listeners than as better speakers.
H2: After debates that a judge describes as close, the judge will report that listening skill had more to do with the outcome than speaking skill did.

If my hypotheses are supported, the study will establish that in practice, apparent listening skill makes more of a difference in persuasive and argumentative settings than speaking does. Now, some might object that I'm basing the conclusion on the judge's perception of each participant's listening skill, not anything measurable. But my answer would be that in a debate setting, the judge creates the winner by awarding the win, so if it's the judge's perception that listening made more of a difference, then that is a fact, because the judge's perceptions were the substance from which the win was constructed. I'd also argue that debate judges draw extensively from training and experience to make very detailed judgments of why each team either won or lost the debate, so I think this is actually one of the best in situ research designs for this question. A third shadow working hypothesis is that just about no judges will choose the "Don't know" options for the last two items, because I expect that when prompted, they'll actually have very strong opinions about both sides' listening effectiveness, but that might prove not to be the case.

On a logistical note, a common practice at college debate tournaments nowadays is for all the judge feedback to happen online, through a central web-based app. I have enough good friends left in the college debate world that I think I could get them to put a link to this survey right above where judges had to go to fill in their decision. And I'm thinking of rummaging around foundations that deal with civic engagement and seeing if I can't get a small grant for this. I'm a lot more likely to get lots of judges to take part if I can do a weekly drawing for a gift something-or-other to someplace. I'm also thinking of offering this to students in Listening Behavior as an honors contract: they can collaborate with me on the study, and if they make a sufficient contribution, I'll list them as co-authors when I submit it.

So, that's one project. Here's the other.

Project #2

Four or five years ago, I got an idea one morning while I was brushing my teeth, and a few months later I had a theory piece in International Journal of Listening about Performative Listening. In particular, I remember running the idea past Peter and Fromm on the way home from a tournament, and they gave me some helpful suggestions, which is why they're both listed in the acknowledgments. Now, I have another idea.

This morning, for no particular reason, it struck me that critical listening has a complement: persuasive speech. Comprehensive listening has a complement, too: a spoken lesson. Appreciative listening's complement is any sort of audible performance, empathetic listening is any sort of self-disclosure, and discriminative listening's complement is any sort of meaningful sound. In most of those cases, what I'm identifying is what would hit the bullseye as the paradigm case of speech suited to that listening function: people sometimes listen comprehensively to something that's only loosely a lesson, or they listen appreciatively to something not really designed to be aesthetically pleasing. But the exercise of thinking about their complement does pin down something about the listening functions, and something potentially very important.

The problem is, there are a lot more modes of speaking, or communicating audibly, that are not covered by the above list of communicative modes. Argument is not the same as persuasion, so what can we say about listening for argument? Corporate worship is not the same as performance, so what can we say about listening for worship or devotional activity? It's not critical, appreciative or comprehensive, precisely; it's participatory in a way the other listening functions don't quite capture.

My initial impression, which I'm not entirely confident is correct, is that it's a problem with breaking listening into discrete constructs. It feels to me as though there ought to be a spectrum. Crude instruction strategies in effective speaking very often turn back to the topos-based strategy in Aristotle's rhetoric: a list of kinds of things to say in specific circumstances. But that approach is shot through with serious limitations. Far better is an approach that treats the best speaking as that which is finely tuned to audience and circumstance. I think what I want to propose is that listening isn't divisible into discrete functions, but its purpose can be aligned along certain dimensions, and that listener and speaker experience the encounter differently, in effectiveness and satisfaction, based on the effectiveness of their tuning to one another. 

Now, naturally, people speak for more than one purpose at once, and listen under more than one function at once, and a speaker teaching a lesson might encounter a listener more prepared to be critical. But that could also be part of the theory: where the speaking and listening functions weren't tuned, then that would be a different type of communicative encounter with different outcomes.

Anyway, preliminary thoughts. Might wind up as another theory piece.

Cannonball

About two years ago, give or take a month, I left Fairfield Baptist Church. Today, I'm probably three or four visits away from re-joining it. I'm writing down what happened between then and now, so that any curious parties can read it here, and that way I don't have to tell it a bunch of times.

I moved here from Texas in 2007. Back in Texas, I was a member at Calvary Baptist Church of Nacogdoches. I helped out with the youth group, taught high school Sunday school, and headed up the AV workings for Sunday morning worship services. I spent a ton of time in church-related activities, and felt very rooted there. I knew what was happening, and they knew about twists and turns in my life.

When I moved here, I visited six Baptist churches, and out of those, I joined Fairfield. For a month or two, I taught first and second grade Sunday school. Then, I started teaching the college Sunday school class. I also pitched in with VBS, with Faith team, and with occasional events like the Fall festival and the block party. But somehow, it wasn't quite the same. I lived all the way on the other side of town, and it seemed as though quite often big things were happening at Fairfield that I never heard about. I never thought anyone was deliberately trying to exclude me, but I did feel badly out of the loop. Example: when Mick went home to be with the Lord, I didn't know about it until two weeks after the memorial service. I had this nagging feeling that somehow my roots hadn't taken. Once or twice, I set out to visit other churches, but never felt a peace about changing, so I put it on the back burner as a vague spot of discontent.

In the summer of 2013, I had a persistent ringing in my left ear. It turned out to be this. One of the symptoms of Ménière's Disease is sudden unexpected dizzy spells that can make it unsafe to drive. Since I'd been walking to and from work for six years, and since Enterprise Car Share had just come to town, I realized that the only reason I still needed my own automobile was to get to church. It occurred to me that if I joined a church in my own neighborhood, several things might change, all of them in a reasonably healthy direction:

• I might feel more rooted. My theory was that I would cross paths with people from my church family at the grocery store, at Alton Baker, etc., and have more of a sense of community.
• I could stop upkeep on a car I didn't use, including dropping car insurance. This seemed to me like wise stewardship.
• I could get out in front of the dizzy spells problem by giving up my car before I had to. Major life changes like that are never quite as traumatic when we choose them as when they're forced on us.
• I would also, to be honest, get a break from the jobs I was doing at Fairfield. I was terribly burned out on teaching Sunday school, and helping out with AV for the early hymn service was the biggest reason I couldn't give up my car, since I couldn't arrive early enough if I took the bus. The wise thing to do would've been just to speak up and ask for time off, but I didn't have that much wisdom handy.

So I started visiting Garden Way Church in October 2013, and I joined in January 2014.

I met some wonderful people at Garden Way, and I'm glad I had the experience. That said, it didn't take. The reasons it didn't doubtless have as much or more to do with my failings as with their traits, but it's now abundantly clear to me that it wasn't a good fit.

I don't regard it as a mistake, because I think I needed to learn a few things. The biggest among them is that I feel less rooted in my church because in Texas I had a job that wasn't very labor intensive, and here I work about a sixty to seventy hour week. Don't get me wrong; I love my job. But it does crowd out almost everything else in my life. When I went to Garden Way, I took the unrooted problem with me, and it didn't get appreciably better. The idea about a neighborhood church and a sense of community was just dead wrong.

And I also will say that whatever Garden Way's merits, and they are considerable, I've found Fairfield to be a church that's very warm, up front and basic. What first attracted me to Fairfield over the other churches I visited back in 2007 was that people weren't frantic to cover up imperfections. There was an honesty, and a wisdom about making fundamentals the main thing, that I didn't find in other churches. And I'm not saying it's absent from Garden Way, but I do think it's a particular strength, a particular provision from God to Fairfield.

So as of today I'm still visiting, and I plan to visit through September and keep praying about this. But it does increasingly feel as though I'm back where I belong, and that about October it'll be time to move my letter.

Gifts

I have a thing I do on Facebook every year, on my birthday, and this is why I do it. What I do is change the settings so people can't post to my wall, and then I put up a post that asks them to reply and share one memory of me. Doesn't have to be earth-shattering, funny, or a good story; it can be just a sentence long.

My reason for doing it has a lot to do with phatic messages. A phatic message is just a display of politeness; it doesn't convey, or request, any meaningful information. When you see someone you know and you say, "How're you doing?" and they say "Fine," you've exchanged phatics. If you ask "How're you doing?" and the person responds with details about different aspects of her life, then she commits a social mistake, because the proper response is "Fine." "Fine" is even the proper response if she's having a rotten day, because the question is simply a polite, empty ritual, meant to simulate interest and liking even when the asker doesn't really feel either one.

What I worry about is something I'll call "phatic creep," the slow desertification of language where empty politeness shoulders aside meaningful talk. One worrisome example of this is "I'm sorry for your loss." I'm not sure who coined it as the all-purpose condolence, but as you can see, it's enjoyed runaway growth over the past thirty-ish years. And the problem is, condolences shouldn't be empty. Sure, it's difficult and uncomfortable to think up something heartfelt to say to a person who's grieving, but some hard things need to be done well, with no shortcuts, and I count that near the top of the list.

I think this is a symptom of alienation and declining social capital. People who become unaccustomed to interacting in powerful and sincere ways with intimate friends tend to fall back into safe, scripted utterances. Bureaucrats use bureaucrat-ese with their clients, and too often, Christians lapse into church-safe language over taking the risk of speaking directly and dangerously to the situation in front of them. In a healthy culture, with more opportunities for direct interpersonal engagement, people would feel more confident talking through those sorts of issues, but that's not the culture we navigate today, sadly.

There is no steering wheel for culture; instead, there are little habits and little changes that can nudge in one direction or another. I see that birthday wishes on Facebook tend to be just the two words, and sometimes something as whittled down as HBD. Even when the wish has a little more elaboration to it, it's warm and thoughtful, but it doesn't really convey any content or foster real engagement. It's still phatic. So instead, I ask people to offer up a memory just so we both can have a moment of appreciating what we've done, and who we've been to one another. I try to make a point of responding to each reply, either with my reaction to the memory, or with a related memory. Sometimes it's a little extra effort to pull that out of the past, but it's worthwhile.

I started doing this about four years ago, and every year I've really enjoyed reading what people come up with. Some repeat the same stories from previous years, but they're fresh again and ready for retelling after that big a gap. And sometimes it makes for a pretty interesting relational Rorschach test; I think of the relationship we have in one way, but the top-level memory the friend comes up with shows me just how wrong I am. It's not always entirely comfortable, but it's a useful and welcome learning experience.

I'll add, I opted out of present-buying years ago. I decided that for small children, presents are about excitement and magic and a quick remission from discipline, but for adults, presents are about greed. I'm also very difficult to shop for, because I overthink just about every purchase half to death, and when I want something, I go right out and buy it for myself. This memory-sharing has turned out to be a lot more satisfying than possession-swapping. And there's a pretty solid research-based explanation for why that's the case.

I'm not against phatic communication; it certainly has its place and its important function. But phatic communication as a response to meaningful events like painful loss, or milestone events like birthdays, just seems like a squandered opportunity to enjoy and strengthen relationships. And those opportunities are finite, so it's important to make the most of them.

More fun

This is a sequel to this post. I've done a bunch more jumprope rhymes since then, so here they are:

Connie Wilmarth
Tried to kill Darth
Vader with her cotton twill scarf
Whistling Liszt
Torqued her wrist
Tragically, he died unkissed

‎Jedediah
Can supply a
Word about the one Messiah
Jesus' reign
He'll explain
If there's caffeine in his vein

Lanta Davis
Won't enslave us
Neither will she microwave us
Through her gracious
Perspicacious
Lessons, we'll wind up sagacious!

Peekaboo! It’s
Stacey Lewis
Unlike Mary, she’s no Jewess
Synagoguing
Nor out logging
Every day she’s here, Lew-dawging!

Samuel Robi-
son's not snobby
Meeting people is his hobby
Ball? He'll bounce it.
Race? He'll trounce it.
It's your birthday? He'll announce it.

Catherine Miller
Dance floor filler
Moved to Michael Jackson's Thriller
As she stepped
Jesus wept
Off His feet entirely swept

Aaron Dilla
Holy killa
In the field he's God's guerrilla
Bible blaster
Study faster
Cram it in, you budding pastor!

Britni Steiling
Schemes compiling
Like Paul said, she's reconciling
Homeless people
Once asleep'll
Find a welcome 'neath the steeple

Joseph Womack
Quite the throwback
Make us green like mountain snowpack
In a wink
Debt goes shrink
Beacons all are tickled pink

Peter Norland
Went to war. Gunned
Down at once, he left an orphaned
Bunny, Foo-foo
Crying "Yoo-hoo!
What's the ASL for 'boo hoo?'"

I also did one for Preston, but I'm afraid it's lost to history.
Edit, November 16, 2016: found it!

Preston Carmack
Superstar
Accelerates the van like Star Trek
Tallyho!
Make it so!
Warp nineteen to our next show!

Edit 2, November 21, 2016: just found another one I did for Dr. Steve Caloudas, who was briefly a psychology professor here a few years back.

Is he Judas
Or a Buddhist?
No! He's Doctor Steve Caloudas.
Like epoxy
His faith rocks! He
Lives that Eastern Orthodoxy.  

Testifying

Jenna paid me a visit yesterday. Jenna graduated in 2012, and is about to finish up at U of O law. When she was here, she was cheerful, hard working, and a joy to teach. She told me from the start that she wanted to go to law school, and I told her she should join the debate team, but she never did. Over the years she's told me that difficult tests and rigorous standards for writing assignments did a good deal to prepare her for law classes. And yes, yesterday she told me she should've tried debate. Jenna is well positioned to go out and make a very satisfying, meaningful life, and I'm proud of her. And I got to teach her.

I have a student in public speaking this term who is very different from his classmates in a number of ways. For one, he's a veteran. For another, he's unbelievably eloquent. His word choice is so unique and evocative and powerful, I've told him several times he reminds me of a slam poet. For a third, he has something going on that from time to time causes him to freeze, dead silent, in the middle of a speech; not just for five or ten seconds, but for two or three minutes. On some occasions it's meant he was unable to continue and had to sit down, while on others he's shaken it off and finished. There are five assigned speeches in my class, and on top of those we do a class exercise in impromptu speaking that supplies a little more practice. On his third assigned speech, he made it through for the first time ever without freezing, but he came in under the minimum time limit, and was quite vexed with himself. But then, this week, he gave the fourth assigned speech, which is the most difficult of all of them, and he nailed it: beautiful construction and language, no freezes, well within the time limit. The next day I got to my office and found a drawing had been slipped under the door. On the back, it said, "I knew I was an artist, but I didn't know until now that I was a poet." Yesterday, he stayed after class and said "Not bad for my fifth speech ever, eh?" I told him I was very, very proud of him.

Sierra is the backbone of the forensics team this year. She is talented, upright, industrious, and genuinely the sweetest and most loving person it's ever been my privilege to coach in speech and debate, which is not a community of people known for their sweetness and love. A few weeks ago, she asked me if I would write a recommendation letter for a scholarship she sought. I wrote the simple truth, expanding what I said in the second sentence of this paragraph into a full page letter. All of it was direct and honest, and none of it puffed up, exaggerated or misleading. Yesterday she emailed me that she got the scholarship. It reminded me of years and years ago when I performed Jordan and Tessa's wedding: I got to say "I now pronounce you husband and wife," and the world was different. Here, I got to describe what I saw, and then affix my title to the letter, and that helped move a foundation to give Sierra money that helped make school affordable.

When I arrived here in 2007, they told me that one goal was to prepare more NCC students to go on for graduate degrees. They also told me that historically, very few communication majors had done so. Since then, two of my advisees have done master's degrees in counseling (Krista and Britni), one in TESOL (Ambria), and Jenna did law school, but no one had ever pursued a graduate degree in communication, which left me just a tiny bit irrationally sad. But then, last week, I found out from Kelsay that she was going to be the first. Several months ago, she told me she had her eye on a master's program out in the midwest, and asked if I would write her a recommendation. Kelsay, like Jenna and Sierra, had been a career-lengthener and a burnout antidote, so of course I was willing. One fun twist to the task was that I knew a faculty member at the college who happened to be the associate director of the graduate program, so I decided to try to push all his buttons toward getting Kelsay a graduate assistantship. As with Sierra, I just told the simple truth about what I'd seen, but I chose the details that would make her a good candidate for scarce assistantship dollars. So when she stopped by with the good news last week, it included the wonderful detail that she was funded. She's going to teach public speaking, and every time I imagine her in a public speaking classroom, I get excited for the students who are going to learn from her. She'll be superb at it.

This year has been one of the most exciting in the past several years for newly declared communication majors. I won't name names and go into detail here, because I'd leave someone out and inflict hurt feelings, but I look over the list, and I can't contain my happy little office chair wiggle. (I do make sure my office door is closed, first.) I know there are  going to be days they drive me crazy, and I'll probably have to chew each one of them out once or twice, but it's an incredible, talented, joyful, lovable, wonderful group of people, and I have the privilege of a front row seat while they grow into themselves.

God is good.

Just what we need

This morning, an idea hit me for a new debate format. First I'll describe it, and then I'll work back through my thinking. It's probably not practical, but it is intriguing, and sometimes the early versions of ideas become the springboard for really good refinements.

Presidential Debating

• One person versus one person, like LD or IPDA.
• Topics are non-research driven; philosophical or fun, based on general knowledge, e.g. "Cats make better pets than dogs."
• The topic is announced, and there is sixty seconds of preparation time. 
• No outside research may be consulted after the topic is announced: no files, no electronic devices. The knowledge one carries in one's head, and that the judge recognizes as reliable, is the sole inventional resource.
• Speeches proceed as follows:
• First Affirmative: Two minutes
• Negative: Three minutes
• Second Affirmative: One minute
• After the debate, the judge has sixty seconds to rate each debater on a scale of one to ten for that debate, and to select a winner.
• There are seven debates in a round, and the debaters switch sides.
• The judge keeps a running tally of points through the first six debates. A tie in points at the end of debate six is forbidden, so the judge must ensure that one debater or the other has higher points. The debater with higher points gets to choose her or his side in debate seven.
• The round is decided by number of debates won.
• Tournaments are run single-elimination bracket only, with no prelim rounds.

Honestly, I got to thinking about this because of my odd relationship to sports. I find it entirely baffling that people get so worked up over football, baseball, or any other kind of athletic competition. The only sport I pay the slightest attention to is tennis, and even with tennis I can't bring myself to sit down and watch an entire match: I just read the results to see who won, by what margin, what the commentators said about the highlights, etc. I recognize references like "kick serve" or "inside out forehand," but I have no idea what such things actually look like.

Tennis interests me because a lot of the organization, and a good measure of the psychology, seem to parallel debate. Just like debate, tennis is either played one-on-one or two-on-two (although in debate the two-on-two formats tend to get more attention and emphasis, whereas the opposite is true for tennis). Just like debate, it's played in tournaments with a single elimination bracket. I've even found myself reading the draw for a tennis tournament and thinking So, if Isner beats Tomic in this round, then he debates Federer in the quarters before I corrected myself.

One element that's both similar and different is the correspondence between service games/receiving games and going affirmative/going negative. In debate, negatives have to take what affirmatives "serve up" and improvise on the spur of the moment. But the big difference there is that within a single tennis match, each player gets to switch between serving and receiving multiple times, which makes each match a legitimate test of each player's ability in both modes. That got me to thinking, What if there was a format of debate where your opponent stayed the same, but you got to switch between affirmative and negative multiple times?

They do something like that in the "debates" held during presidential campaigns: a question is posed to one candidate, who gives a short answer, and the opposing candidate gets to rebut the answer, and the first candidate gets a brief follow-up. So I thought, what if we set it up that way? Give the affirmative time to make one developed argument, or possibly two or three briefly described arguments, give the negative time to refute and time to make an argument for the other side, then give a follow-up. 

And in tennis, there are no "prelim rounds;" it's just single-elimination from round one to the final. But because players play so many games within each round, their survival in the tournament isn't based on the outcome of each particular game, so they can have one go badly but still mount a comeback. That has some appeal.

The academic in me chimed in and pointed out that the interval of public address is getting shorter and shorter: the speeches in the actual debates between Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln were as long as ninety minutes. In fact, this format matches the original LD setup pretty closely as far as speech order and ratio: they had a sixty minute 1A, a ninety minute N, and a thirty minute 2A, so take it down by 30:1 and you've got this format. 

But the point is that in 1858, audiences stayed tuned in to political speeches that went on for an hour and a half: it was a pre-media, pre-internet epoch of human history, and people's attention span for spoken messages was a lot longer. Today, sad though it might make me, people's attention spans are shorter, the utterance length is a lot shorter, and it's a very useful skill to be able to boil one's argument down to just a few powerful sentences.

Now, this format would put a lot of wear and tear on judges: a decision plus points every seven minutes for an hour, and only sixty seconds to make that decision and assign those points. But it might hold out the promise of tempering weird judge reasoning a bit; any one apparently inexplicable decision that the judge made would be only one out of seven, and the odds are that each side would be a little mystified at the outcome of at least one of the debates.

And because it fits into an hour block, it could run at the same time as an IE round, or it could be double-flighted and put into the block for a policy round. If there was space for four IE prelim rounds in a tournament schedule, then sixteen debaters could enter Presidential Debating; round one would be octofinals, two would be quarters, etc.

As for pairing: tennis pairs the first round of a tournament with a hybrid of power rankings and random draw: the top players are seeded, and are distributed among the quadrants of the bracket. Players below a cutoff point are paired by random draw. In Stoa, Speechranks point totals could be used to identify the top two or top four contestants, and distribute them across the bracket so they can't hit earlier than the finals or semis, and then other pairings could be random.

I'll go so far as to call it an interesting thought experiment. Generating enough topics, and enough of a diversity of topics, would be pretty labor-intensive. For a four round tournament, there would need to be twenty-eight good, debatable topics that didn't require research. But it would definitely be a change of pace, and would address some of the flaws of other formats, while rewarding spontaneity and brevity even more than debate already does.

Possible funky variations I'm already starting to think about:

• Re-seed after each round, using total wins and total points from all previous rounds.
• Give each debater a total of three minutes preparation time for the first six debates, and let them use as much or as little as they like in any of their affirmative debates.
• Allow the judge to stop the match as soon as one debater wins four debates, and use the balance of time for discussion and oral critique.
• For the final round of a tournament, do it like a tennis-style tiebreaker: first debater to win at least six debates, but by a margin of two, is the champion. The round continues until one debater pulls at least two debates out in front of her/his opponent. One problem: at some point, you run out of topics, unless you truly have the mother lode of topic lists prepared.

Oracularities

So in the early 1990s, I started participating in the Internet Oracle, all the way back when it was still called the Usenet Oracle. This morning, I got a sudden bug to post links to as many of my digested Oracularities as I can remember, before I completely forget which ones were mine. I'm sure this list is incomplete, but since the Oracularity folks themselves keep no records that I'm aware of, this reconstruction is the best I can do.

• My first digested Oracularity. It's not terribly funny, but it was the first one the priests accepted, so I was hugely excited. I bugged half a dozen friends to come look, and had to explain to each of them exactly what the Usenet Oracle was.
• I think this is the longest one I ever wrote. Bit wordy, and it wasn't entirely sporting to stretch the premise that far.
• After those first two, I had a long dry spell until this one was accepted. I was surprised at how high its score was. It's full of inside jokes, and might not make sense to someone new to the IO.
• Shortest one I ever wrote. I was proud of this one, because my favorites have always been the one-liners. I don't think it's that funny, but I did succeed in being concise.
• For some reason, writing for the IO put me in touch with my female side, so I had a pattern of writing Oracularities with Lisa premises.

After the above, I had only two more goals to work toward, and once I reached them, I didn't pay nearly as much attention to the IO. Those goals were ...

• More than one Oracularity in a single digest, which I accomplished with this one and this one.
• Getting an Oracularity into the Best Of, which I accomplished with this one, and then again with this one. My feminine side is on display again. Or maybe it's just all those years of teaching the gender unit in Interpersonal. 
• Oh, and I almost forgot this one, which happened between the two that made the Best Of. This one didn't score very well, but my interest in the Oracle was declining.

At any rate, there we have a little insight into my growth over the years as a writer, and especially an amateur humor writer.

Grace notes

From the mid to late nineteen nineties, I lived in Athens, Georgia while I worked on my doctorate at UGA. Two or three times a year I would drive from Georgia to Texas to see family. One night, just three hours into that drive, my eyes and my ears caught separate but perfectly matched beauty, and I've never forgotten it. I had "Rhapsody in Blue," the 1959 Leonard Bernstein recording, playing on the tape deck, and it had just reached this part when I looked up at the sky.

There was a solid ceiling of altostratus clouds, and several of the downtown Atlanta skyscrapers poked up into it. They were lit in different colors, and the colored light spread out into pools at the point of contact with the clouds. It was unbelievably beautiful. And it fit perfectly with the music. The color in the sky and the sweep of the music seemed as complementary, as compatible, as a key in its keyhole. 

And more than anything, I think I was struck by disbelief that they could be as completely unrelated as my reason told me they had to be. The clouds were a natural phenomenon. The music had been recorded forty years before, and composed another thirty before that. The buildings had been built and the lighting installed for purposes that had nothing to do with the nighttime viewing of highway drivers. None of the three could have been coordinated that perfectly by any human plan.

This morning, I had another one of those.

I was out for a run, listening to a very obscure piece of music that was just getting to the good part, and just as it began, just as I started to relax into it, I smelled honeysuckle. At that precise moment, I reached a honeysuckle patch that an apartment complex had grown on their outer fence, and it smelled wonderful. What's more, the length of the patch and the speed I was running worked together to make the scent last exactly as long as the good part of the music.

I don't believe in "proof" that God exists. Just in the last day or so I've gotten interested in the idea that demands for proof claims in any relationship are fundamentally misguided and destructive. But I do occasionally see moments that seem to reveal character, that seem to show kindness, delight in indulging a loved one. As proof, they're pitiful. As moments in a relationship, they're perfect.

Montmajour

So I have Ménière's disease.

The good news is that it's not fatal, and it does not involve pain. Discomfort, yes; pain, no. The bad news is that I may wind up deaf in both ears and completely disabled. I'm already partly deaf in my left ear, and have had three attacks of dizziness. Ménière's is progressive, and can take all the hearing in both ears, and can produce lengthy attacks of vertigo so severe that they're crippling. Milder cases can be, as some say, "a minor annoyance." But no one is sure what causes it, how to treat it, or even what measurable somatic state can confirm a diagnosis. I have it because I have the symptoms, and treating it will involve a lot of trial and error.

I first noticed ringing and pressure in my left ear in January. I tried to make an appointment with an ENT, but the one I saw four years ago had left town, and as a result all the remaining ENTs had waiting periods of several weeks for an appointment. I put the matter on the back burner until late summer, chiefly because I thought it was just impacted earwax, which I've had in the past and which is no big deal. But when my current ENT had a look, he said there was no impacted wax in my ear. He heard about my tinnitus, the feeling of fullness in the ear, the sound distortions that made music sound flat and people sound like androids, and he said "I think you have Minnear's disease, but don't look it up. An audiologist needs to test you, and if you know what it is, you'll start self-treating, and we might get a false negative." Very smart man, my ENT; knew exactly what I would do.

I held off until the audiologist tested me, and she confirmed that the bottom notes in my left ear are mostly gone, which is a Ménière's symptom. And yes, I've had dizziness attacks, although from what I can tell, they're pretty weak compared to how bad it can get. I haven't had any spinning at all; the world has just wobbled a little. It's been enough to make me nauseous, and make walking difficult, but I haven't thrown up or been unable to stand, so I'm thankful for that.

This week, the news is reporting the discovery of a previously unknown Van Gogh painting, "Sunset at Montmajour," which is pretty remarkable after all this time. I've read a few places that some folks speculate Van Gogh's reason for cutting off his ear may have been Ménière's disease; it's well documented from his journal and from his contemporaries that he suffered from dizziness, ringing in the ears and a sense of pressure, and if all of that built until he couldn't stand it anymore, and he took a knife to the offending ear, then possibly I have it in me to be a great painter. There's a problem with that reasoning, but I'm not going to examine it too closely.

Oh, and I get to donate my brain to Harvard! That's one of my favorite parts. Actually, they mostly want my inner ear, so they can study it to figure out the cause of Ménière's, or a diagnosis, or something about the condition. But they also ask for the brain so they can trace the path of the audial nerve and connect data on that, which means I get to donate my brain to Harvard. There's a certain coolness to that.

People are extending sympathy and offering support, and I appreciate that. So far, I haven't felt too downcast about it. I think it's probably some combination of the following:

• Right now, today, my case is very mild. The ringing in my ear isn't very loud, and the dizziness hasn't been terrible. I know it has the potential to get a lot worse without warning, but that hasn't yet sunk in. I suspect I'm still in denial about it.
• Not fatal and no pain is a lot to be thankful for. I've known folks with terminal illnesses, and I've known folks whose chronic illness caused non-stop pain. I have neither of those to face.
• I have clear, unmistakable evidence that God is sticking with me through this. It's a long story that I can lay out in a future post, but I made several changes in my life over the summer that prepared me for this. I cut out dietary triggers for the disease when I still didn't know I had it, and I scaled way back on my driving, and gave my car away, before I had any clue that my symptoms might force me to give up driving permanently.

So the world has changed a lot, and likely will continue to change, but I've actually been waiting for the shoe to drop and something major about my health to take a turn. I had a few hours of intense longing for my previous wholeness, but the sun came up the next morning and continues to come up, and as I take stock of the resources and options I have available, I'm very encouraged. Life goes on.

Fracture

Let's get the hard-to-believe part right out in the open: I'm a far-left academic who votes Green whenever possible, and today, what I want more than anything is for the Republican party to become more powerful and win lots of elections.

I'm a recent transplant to Oregon from Texas. That's my birthplace, and for almost a decade I lived in Nacogdoches, one of the more rural and conservative backwaters of the state. I was and am a Southern Baptist. What might make matters more clear is that my doctorate is in argumentation, and I've competed in and coached competitive debate for almost thirty years. I love a good argument. That helped during the east Texas years, because a liberal in Texas who can't take disagreement is a liberal with no friends.

Enough about me. What the Republican Party needs to do is re-purpose a Justin Timberlake lyric and bring smart back. Over the years, I have known conservative thinkers who could leave me speechless with the incisiveness of their insights and the overwhelming power of their reasoning. The problem is, for an entire generation they've been increasingly drowned out by Republican leadership who think the method for retaining power is fueling enmity and hatred. When you have to tell your followers not just "don't agree with my opponents," but "don't listen to my opponents at all," and worst of all, "don't trust my opponents, because they're out to harm you," then those brilliant conservative thinkers get pushed to the back of the pack.

There are reasoned, smart, streamlined, moderate arguments for privatization, for fiscal discipline, for welcoming faith into public spaces, for a host of other conservative projects. They can stand on their own merits. They don't have to languish behind verbal salvos aimed at a mythical liberal fifth column that's trying to destroy America. That's as silly as believing in monsters under the bed. Children who finally turn loose of those monsters learn to separate fantasy from reality in order to get a good night's sleep, and adults who are ready to turn loose of a faceless mob of liberals can turn the corner on separating fantasy from reality in order to turn in a good day's work solving problems.

I've strayed from my original challenge, so let me bring it back to center: please win in 2016. Please build a juggernaut of a campaign machine. Make it powerful, compelling, and most of allsustainable. Step one: admit that what you're doing right now is not sustainable, and it's turning the founding fathers' grand experiment in democracy into the world's most powerful dysfunctional family. We are, right now, resting inside a fracture in your narrative: you exerted all the purifying force you could on your candidates, and you didn't win. This is the perfect moment to forge a consensus behind a different approach, to call to those genius conservatives who've been wandering the back roads of the country, wondering when they'll have a place in the conversation again.

We're not your enemies; we're your siblings and your spouses. You need us as a corrective and a counterbalance, and we need you for the exact same reason. But we need you to do a good job of it. If you do, your reward will be power, and the satisfaction of seeing the nation prosper. You have a finite window of opportunity to repent, as the good Southern Baptist in me sees it, and leave behind the 2012 election's very bad strategy. You have the best chance I can foresee to topple talk show radio hosts, to discredit the angry wing of your party still trying to claw its way back into the driver's seat from the 1996 "revolution," and to become a trustworthy party of sober-minded adults. I have no control over any of the forces that might move you to do so; all I can do is point out the obvious. What you did this time did not work, and it's less likely to work in 2016. Resolve to do differently, and let's have a serious wrestling match of reasoning next time. If you accept that invite, it won't matter who wins or loses, because the entire nation will hit a jackpot that would put the Powerball to shame.

Location

Two, three weeks ago I went for coffee with a student and three of my colleagues. The student had some nagging questions, and the colleagues each approached those doubts with very coherent, erudite explanations and recommended readings. I was out of my depth, so I did a lot of nodding. But on the walk back, I made one contribution to the rap. Last week, the student mentioned in an email that what I said was helpful, so I decided to stick it here in case it helps anyone else. It's a good description, in just a handful of moves, of how I understand faith.

Do your parents love you? Have they included you, protected you, encouraged you, lavished affection on you, because they love you? If the answer isn't yes, then it's time for a nimble detour on this flow chart to address some serious, chronic trauma. But in most cases, the answer is yes.

At my most cynical, I could make the case that your parents had done all those things from purely selfish motives. They did them to fit in, to win acceptance from peers, to appear normal, to satisfy their own parents or spouse, and the list of plausible motives could stretch as long as necessary to make the point. Give me enough time to weave my argument and I could have you believing that they never loved you for one moment, from your birth to now.

Neither explanation would finally dismiss the other. I could raise a lot of doubt in your mind, but I couldn't construct a proof that necessarily excluded the possibility that your parents loved you. Similarly, every heartwarming story you could tell, all put together, could not stop me from my competing narrative that they behaved as they did to please themselves, to use you as a prop in their self-presentation.

You're left in a very Heisenbergian suspension. You either live in a world in which you have loving parents, or in a world in which your parents are cold, calculating, and very convincing liars. You have no real way of settling which world is real.

Pivotal question: in which of the worlds is your life better? Then live in that one. Live as though that's the correct explanation. If, in doing so, you find out that your life is, in fact, better, then you chose wisely. You might not know which explanation is really the correct one, but you were never offered the option of perfect, unquestionable certainty in the first place, so you lose nothing.

Transference of this analogy from your family to your faith is left as an exercise for the student.

Combustion

Elvis took amphetamines to fuel the runaway train of his life. Then, he'd take barbiturates to fall asleep, followed by amphetamines to burn out the barbiturates, followed by barbiturates to dampen the amphetamines. Lather, rinse, repeat. For a while, he was able to work that cycle and look good, but sooner or later the strain etched visible changes on him, and not for the better. And in the end, he died young and left an ugly corpse.

In Texas, business goes buzzing along, enjoying this huge infusion of wealth from the various petrochemical industries. Absurdly high gas prices mean eye-popping earnings, which then sweep through all the contiguous businesses like a flood finding its level in rivers, streams and creeks. And Texans congratulate themselves about how much better their choices have been than those of their compatriots, how recession-proof the state is. But my memory goes back to 1985, when an oil glut dropped gas prices to astonishing lows, and suddenly no enterprise in Texas, from the government on down, had the resources to accomplish anything. And it's perfectly plain that the future of energy in this state, nation, world, is not just more of the same. Very wealthy, well-connected people can put all their power behind calls for more domestic exploration and drilling, but there comes a point where the amphetamines no longer do their job, and my strong suspicion is that the day is closer than most Texans, and all Texan leaders, want to admit to themselves.

The state of Oregon sucked a fiscal teat longer than made any sense, and has been trying to work through withdrawal and come out clean. The progress is inching, and agonizing, but postponing it only would've made it more severe. Texas is riding a binge, and storing up a lot of pain for itself when everything topples.

Part of me thinks this is just a symptom, and the deeply rooted illness comes from a desperate craving for what's uncomplicated. If I were to try to distill Texan-ness down to one idea, that would be it. Some of the iceberg-tips that grow out of that nature are pretty appealing: a bracing assertiveness and a child-like faith. But it's also very Texan to play ostrich, to ignore bad news and hope it goes away, to shoot the messengers and double down on a dumb idea. People who know their Texas history should recognize those tendencies in a million and one turning points that have gone wrong.

I do have a love for the state where I was born, but it's an exasperated love, the love we give a backwards child who sets off one disaster after another, who marches proudly and stubbornly into an endless parade of preventable messes. It's a love almost untouched by admiration or emulation, a lot of combined smiles and eye rolls. And a lot of worrying, shrugging, and fatalism.

Continuity

The mistake we make again and again is declaring an end to history. We think, My entire life has built to this moment, to my current understanding, and there is no future. I will never again be surprised, pleasantly or not. I will never again learn.

One of my lazy pleasures is re-reading books I first tackled when I was a child. Naturally, I now catch things that I didn't notice, or wasn't ready to grasp, until now. But it's almost brain-wrenching to think that I might come back in my sixties or seventies and spot bits that whooshed right over my head back when I was a clueless forty-two year old. Nevertheless, I'm sure I will, and doubtless more so with the Bible than with any other book.

This spring, I've found myself in more discussions with people who think that our consensus, authorized, "safe" account of what the Bible teaches cannot, must not, will never change in the slightest, than I ever would've seen coming. In the course of those discussions I've pointed out that for centuries, both the curse of Ham, and Ezra's command that the Israelites divorce their foreign wives, were cited as proof that God had instituted white supremacy. That was taught in seminaries and preached from respectable pulpits by giants of the faith. Then, when the time came, when our slowly accumulating understanding of the world flowed into the proper shape, God moved, and a tipping point was reached. Today we understand that the Bible never taught white supremacy or nonwhite inferiority. Its text didn't change in the slightest, but our understanding of it improved.

Another example, and one I hadn't considered until I read about it earlier this week: for endless stretches of time, it was unquestioned truth inside Christian teaching that the Jews as a people were rejected by God because of their collective guilt from Christ's unjust execution. People clung to this teaching despite Christ's pretty unambiguous words on the subject, and some still do to this day. For the most part, though, we've understood our error and moved on from it.

This is on my mind today because two recent graduates, of whom I'm inordinately fond, have recently been struggling a lot with their faith. One is struggling publicly, and the other quite privately. What I want so desperately to convey to them is that history hasn't ended, learning hasn't run its course, and it's not time to close the book on their faith. The Church has had to return to an unchanged Book and accept that we had outgrown our flawed understandings, just as surely as I revisit books I loved in my childhood years and measure my own growth against ink on a page that was the same before, during and after my encounter with it. In my teens and twenties, I had a long fallow period when I never cracked my Bible, and had a lot of cynical things to say about its teachings and reliability. After that ran its course, and my understanding had germinated and gestated to the precise degree of readiness, it got its second wind, and doctrines I found naïve and childish reasserted themselves as powerful and moving truths. They hadn't changed, but I had continued to grow.

I'm fairly confident that these kinds of discoveries lie ahead for these students, so I'm not too worried, so long as they don't develop an ego-attachment to their incomplete understandings. I'm pretty sure they're inquisitive and curious enough that that's a small risk. It's something that figures prominently in my prayers.

Summertime

So back in summer of 2010, it was jump-rope rhymes. This morning, my philosophy professor colleague and former pastor was working on the eulogy for someone he barely knows, and it struck me funny that you could write quick little two-line, grossly inappropriate eulogies. Here are my first attempts, and you are invited to share your own in the comments:

Don't get too big a whiff
Your loved one's now a stiff!

Don't hope she sits up
Your loved one's gone tits-up.

Her to-do list? Time to chuck it;
She's hauled off and kicked the bucket!

The coroner's report confirms
Your family member's feeding worms.

Don't get tear-stains on your shirt
She won't notice through the dirt.

Want your dearest? Nope! Can't have her
How to put this? Look -- cadaver!

Don't protest my word belies her;
What's she care? She's fertilizer!

If you'll stop crying one smidge sooner, I'll
Speed things up and end this funeral.

Expectations

Two things I've heard people say they admire about politics are, to be blunt, idiotic. The first is direct language, and the second is ideological consistency.

Officeholders who want to make a positive, constructive difference are going to speak diplomatically. They have to thread the needle between too many different, opposing groups. Politician-speak is not incredibly pleasant, but neither is it avoidable. Someone who seeks office and promises to tell the simple, direct truth in all cases is like someone who promises to run a nursery in which there will never, ever be even the slightest odor of poop. The promise is, on a moment's reflection, dumb, and what they're promising to eliminate is a necessary and manageable part of the enterprise.

The second idiotic expectation is ideological consistency. Any office-seeker who promises to be a "consistent conservative voice," or a "consistent progressive voice," is like a mathematician who promises that the solution to every math problem will be an even number. Math solutions are sometimes odd numbers, sometimes irrational numbers, sometimes zero, and the proper next move for government sometimes appears progressive, conservative, libertarian, or any one of a dozen other political flavors.

There's a study waiting to happen about the turn against cognitive complexity in American political culture in 2012. Already I've seen reams of political commentary lamenting the persuasive force of the claim that refusing to compromise, or even listen, is somehow a form of strength. In fact, that's a glaring, crippling weakness, and even more tragic when it's self-inflicted. And the puzzle, for which we desperately need a solution, is why so many people embrace it; what particular fear or narrative or lingering trauma so twists their decisionmaking that they're receptive to it.

Silly Dream

So I dreamed that NCU actually did change its mascot, but not to the Cute Puppies. Instead, we became the NCU Wet Willies. The reasoning was that since it rains all the time in Eugene, we're soaking wet, and we're trying to do God's will, so we're the Wet Willies.

There was no suit with a big foam head. Instead, all the athletes in all the sports started giving Wet Willies: the cross country kids gave them to other runners, the basketball and soccer players to the other team, etc. Now that I'm awake, I'm not quite sure how that would work in volleyball, and in softball it would take split-second timing, but whatever. I'm also not quite sure why referees weren't calling fouls or tossing our players out, but give me a break: it was a dream.

So then, all the other teams started wearing earmuffs every time they played us, and as a result they couldn't hear one another or their coaches. Plus, for some reason I remember that the cross country runners got really sweaty ears, and that was bad for running. Anyway, all our teams won the NAIA championship in all their sports, and everybody was really excited.

And then I woke up, and instead of snowing, it was raining. Perfect.

Contrastive Apologetics

So last night I started reading The Crescent Through the Eyes of the Cross, by Nabeel Jabbour, and as of now I'm about halfway through it; that's how hard it is to put down. One thing he said wasn't new to me, but I'd never thought about it in this context, and another thing stopped me dead in my tracks for just a few minutes.

• I'm familiar with the fact that reasoning in syllogisms (B because A, C because B, D because C, so if you believe A, you must believe D) is a very western thinking pattern but not universal, so one common failing in our efforts to preach the gospel is that we package it in a way that doesn't make sense to hearers from other cultures. Far more effective throughout most of the Middle East is narrative reasoning that makes its point indirectly, but unmistakably. Strongest proof of the premise: Jesus didn't reason in syllogisms, but taught in parables. Paul, on the other hand, was all about the syllogism, but his education had a huge root in classical Greco-Roman thinking.
• The thing that hadn't occurred to me is a question Jabbour says many Muslims ask of Christians: "Why do the Christian nations favor Israel over the Muslim world when Islam is so much closer theologically to Christianity than Judaism? Jews deny that Jesus was the Messiah, and the Talmud even says Jesus is in Hell. Islam accepts that Issa was born of a virgin, did many miracles, and is in Heaven with Allah. Why can't Christians recognize their brothers?"

Put those two together, and here's my answer to both:

There was a family made up of father, mother, and several children, and the mother's father lived in their household. He had not aged gracefully, and was known for his sharp tongue. He denounced the father's work, the mother's decisions, and the children's lessons and games with loud, hurtful language. When guests came to visit, they marveled at the hostility the grandfather showed, and praised the family for taking care of him, even while he made his presence so very unpleasant.

One day, a visitor came from a neighboring town to complete a brief business errand. His parents had been childhood friends of the father and mother, but tragically, were no longer alive. Upon his arrival, everyone was struck by his resemblance to the children. He could easily have been mistaken for their brother! He spent the evening with them, telling stories and enjoying games, and everyone agreed that his nature fit with theirs perfectly. At the end of the evening, he said, "Why don't I simply become part of your family and live here? You can tell everyone that I'm another of your children that was away at school, but returned home to live in the house because of my great love for all of you?"

The mother smiled. "It is a blessing to us that you've visited, and we treasure your friendship, but we have no room here. Our family fills all the rooms in the house."

"But if you were to move your father out, I could take his room," the young man said. "He undercuts everything you do and say, while I am much closer to you in appearance, belief and attitude. I would fit here perfectly. Why not accept me in his place?"

Very, very gently, hoping not to hurt his feelings, the father replied, "Even if my father-in-law's words do not please us, my family would not exist without him. The relationship we have with him is genuine. It is living proof of our family's history. The relationship you propose is based on deceit. You are very near to us, but to tell the world we shared a blood tie would be a lie. We hope always to enjoy your friendship, but friendship with you is not a sufficient reason for us to deny what is."

It's a clumsy first attempt, but at least it doesn't fall into the error of framing the reasoning in a way that will only breed confusion, not understanding.

And that leads me to wonder whether anyone has paid serious attention to contrastive apologetics? Contrastive rhetoric is a fairly young field, having begun in the 1960s with the work of Robert Kaplan, and that makes me curious as to whether anyone has tackled the work of reframing reasoning that clarifies difficult questions in Christian thought in argument patterns that work in different cultures? That might be a research project for this summer.

Superiority

Walking is superior to bicycling.

• My feet will never go flat before, during or after my walk.
• Jesus never rode a bicycle on water.
• "There is nothing like walking to get the feel of a country. A fine landscape is like a piece of music; it must be taken at the right tempo. Even a bicycle goes too fast." -- Paul Scott Mowrer
• My feet don't need a lock, rack or cage, and Eugene is not the foot theft capital of the nation.
• There is no need for, and therefore no such thing as, a walking helmet.
  
• I only have to beware of distracted and/or psychotic drivers about 5% of the time, when I'm crossing a street. And even then I mostly have stoplights and crosswalks on my side.
  
• The LORD has not required of us that we do justice, love mercy, and go for a humble bike ride with Him.
• There are no catchy eighties songs with accompanying cheesy dances about biking like an Egyptian.
• I'm fine with walking a mile in someone else's shoes, but I'll pass on riding a mile in someone else's bike shorts.
• Falls being inevitable, would you rather skin your knee or rack yourself on a solid metal bar?
• Cool, thick, velvety green grass is meant to be felt between toes, not gouged out by tires.
• Biking across the stage for your diploma, or down the aisle to your groom, will get you talked about. Doubly so if you pop a wheelie.
• "Walking takes longer than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed." -- Edward Abbey
• Expensive bicycles are a status symbol, but a foot is a foot is a foot.
• God didn't pluck Enoch off his bicycle straight into Heaven.
• "There is this to be said for walking: it's the one mode of human locomotion by which a man proceeds on his own two feet, upright, erect, as a man should be, not squatting on his rear haunches like a frog." -- Edward Abbey
• If God had gone biking through Eden in the cool of the day, He would've roared up on Adam and Eve before they could hide in the trees, and pastors everywhere would be denied a prime sermon illustration.
• Making a bicycle consumes finite resources and energy, generates pollutants, and is repetitive drudgery; making feet is part of makin' babies, which is all-natural and fun.
• "Restore human legs as a means of travel. Pedestrians rely on food for fuel and need no special parking facilities." -- Lewis Mumford

Cinema

Just like last summer, I've spent the past three months checking a lot of movies out of the Eugene Public Library. Here, without further elaboration, is how much I enjoyed each movie I watched from start to finish between May 1 and today.

★★★★
None.

★★★☆
A History of violence
Eagle vs shark
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind
Fireproof
Happy feet
Little Miss Sunshine
Primer
The Pursuit of happiness
There will be blood
Waking life
World's greatest dad

★★☆☆
Amazing grace
Capote
Dark city
Something the Lord made
The Accused
The Chronicles of Narnia. Prince Caspian
The Cider House rules
The Curious case of Benjamin Button
The History boys
The Hours
The Ring
Patton
Walk the line

★☆☆☆
Bulworth
Chronicles of Narnia. The voyage of the Dawn Treader
Know1ng
Martian child

☆☆☆☆
None.

Parity

So this morning I heard, on NPR, a man from Tucson argue that it was a good idea to force college campuses to allow people to carry handguns. According to him, only law-abiding citizens obey the current rule against it, and he needs to pack his own protection against outlaws. He spoke approvingly of mutually assured destruction, saying it had done a fine job of keeping the world safe from nuclear annihilation for almost seventy years. And that got me to thinking, y'know what? We should also abolish traffic laws.

Seriously: we should paint over all the stripes, take down all the signs, eliminate all the speed limits, and, most of all, repeal the DUI laws. Because, y'know, only the law abiding respect them anyway. It's a war zone on them roads, what with drunk and crazy drivers thirsty for the blood of decent people. The only thing they understand is force! I should be free to run them off the road, knock them from their cars, run over them, reverse, run over them again, back and forth and back and forth until they're roadkill.

Now, I'm a little too tenderhearted for such work, so I might need a pint or two of courage, and that's where repealing the DUI laws comes in. If I'm just as much of a loose cannon behind the wheel, just as much of an unpredictable source of instant death as anybody else, then everybody will know to keep their distance from me, and I'm a lot more likely to get where I'm going without interference from other drivers. Oh, I suppose there's danger I might get in a one-car accident, but where's the fun in bothering to think about that when I'd rather get all worked up over the bogeymen of other cars, all driven by evildoers who have to be kept in check?

I mean, it's clearly my right to drive my car on sidewalks, through hospitals, up the escalator at the outlet mall, isn't it? The right to do anything you want in your car is part of what makes America great! Don't tell me anyone's un-American enough to think that there's a right way and a wrong way to drive a car. We don't cotton to that kind of traitor talk around here. Matter of fact, I think that's one of them Muslin Sorry laws, isn't it? Not here, thank you so much. We fought them over there to prevent them coming over here and actually stopping at all the stop signs just so they can slip in a quick prayer toward Mecca. Them big flowing robes just cover up the fact that they actually wear their seat belts. I'll tell you, Jesus would've weaved in out of traffic and run over kindergarteners in a crosswalk if He had sinners to smite and demons to cast out. Would've carried a handgun, too; Judas could kiss a barrel of cold hard steel for his trouble.

Bring 'em on!

Meatier-ology

Students who take more than one class from me get accustomed to hearing fresh riffs on a running analogy. Here, I'm going to set down the extended dance mix as a pre-writing exercise before I submit it to the National Communication Association convention in the GIFTS (Great Ideas For Teaching Speech) division.

Communication is like the weather.

• The weather is a complex system made up of a brain-mangling array of inputs, all mixed together in a system so complex and chaotic that we can't master it. Weather forecasting is not an exact science, and people are (for the most part) comfortable with that. But it's also not meaningless speculation, on a par with horoscopes: there are some observable signs that are powerful predictors of certain kinds of weather. Furthermore, weather follows cycles, with certain weather events being more likely at certain times of day or year. Communication is similarly impossible to map precisely, but is subject to forecasts of varying reliability, and those probable events also tend to wax and wane cyclically.
• If communication is like the weather, then culture is like the climate. The climate yields the raw materials for weather, along with a landscape that channels or obstructs the development of weather systems, but the weather also renews the climate: a wet climate will generate rainy weather, and the rainy weather re-moistens the wet climate. Furthermore, if I move a few feet in any direction, it's unlikely the climate will change much, but as I travel dozens, hundreds, thousands of miles, I'm likely to see large variations in climate. However, that curve isn't smooth: at particular spots far removed from my point of origin, I might find that original climate substantially reproduced. Similarly, culture supplies the raw materials and the parameters for communication, but communication renews or changes the culture. If I move a few feet, I'm not terribly likely to find that the culture has changed (although I might stumble into a different co-culture, much like stepping from sunlight into the shade), but a longer journey increases the likelihood I'll find cultural difference. Still, there are places very far apart that are pockets of substantially the same culture.
• Technologically mediated communication (the internet, cell phones) is air conditioning. We create a pocket of weather carved out from the surrounding weather for our comfort. Similarly, we use technologically mediated communication for very self-serving self-presentation, and to overcome physical barriers (distance, an expectation of non-contact) that would otherwise interfere with our communication choices.
• Verbal communication is air, and nonverbal communication is water. These are the newest riffs on this analogy -- in fact, I just thought them up this morning. Deprived of either one, we don't live long, but either can harm us if they're polluted. Air is influential (barometric pressure, wind), but water provides many of the most important clues about imminent events -- think clouds -- and is the easiest to feel and the only one that can be seen. Still, even water that can only be observed indirectly can impact comfort and structural integrity: humidity can make us sweat and can ruin documents and artifacts. Finally, water manifests in many distinct states: vapor, liquid, snow, ice, sleet, dew. Correspondingly, we can't be mentally healthy for long if deprived of communication, but toxic communication can injure us. A lot of us think of words as the substance of communication, but nonverbals provide many of the clues that predict the development and outcome of a communicative encounter. Nonverbals tend to engage more of the senses; only blind people ordinarily employ touch in reading, and it's not possible to smell or taste a word. Chronemic messages are only indirectly observable, but make a big difference in human comfort and relational stability. And, yes, nonverbals come in many forms, from voice qualities to touch to posture to the rest of a very long list.
  

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I've got about six weeks to get my submissions written for this year's National Communication Association convention. Two of my papers will be quick and dirty, but one is a sustained scholarly effort. What's below is my attempt to sketch what I think the final product will look like, to give myself some guidance. If you have a thought, do feel free to share it.

Premise number one: Christians exist for the purpose of drawing near to God. We can only do so, we can only bridge the alienation brought about by our sin, because Christ took the punishment and reconciled us to God. Once we accept this, we are in right relationship with God, God's children, and from there we walk daily with Him, growing nearer to Him as the Holy Spirit works to conform us to the image of His son.

The important bit: the Christian life is relational.

Premise number two: this relational essence makes it the higher priority than message content in things we say to, about, and in service of, God. Paul Watzlawick wrote in Pragmatics of Human Communication that every message has a content dimension and a relational dimension. If a wife asks her husband to lift something heavy for her, and he, watching TV, says "I'll come do it at the next commercial," he may think she's just made a simple request and he's agreed to do it within a reasonable time, which is what the content conveys, but she may fume that he treats her as less important than the television, which is a relational message. Transferring that concept to this discussion, much of what we do, including Bible study, including worship, including prayer, including fellowship, including serving people in need, involves producing and consuming utterances, each of which has a content and relational dimension, but if premise number one is correct, then the relational dimension is always dominant over the content dimension.

The important bit: what we say is never as important as the way our sayings position us relative to God.

Premise number three: our relationship with God is primarily instantiated in a single dialectical tension, not the several that turn up in relationships between humans. Leslie Baxter's work argues that people experience the desire to be together and apart, to be open with one another and maintain privacy, to work up a repertoire of traditions and be spontaneous, and that the life of a relationship is the endless collaborative balancing of those tensions. But all three are meaningless in the relationship between human and God: we're never apart from God, we have no privacy from Him, and we cannot surprise Him. Instead, I tentatively assert that our dialectical tension in relating to God is wisdom vs. innocence. God calls on us to trust Him with a childlike faith, but also allows us to argue with Him, even occasionally letting us win the argument.

The important bit: our relational positioning with God drives us to find the right mix of trust and critical acuity.

Premise number four: Christian argumentation has to date been dominated by an apologetic tilt, which has much in common with multi-vitamins. Taking One-A-Day® can be a good idea if someone's diet actually lacks an important nutrient, but anyone who eats a balanced diet doesn't need such supplements. It's been said that Americans, who lead all other nations in consumption of vitamin pills, simply have the world's most expensive urine. Worse, in some cases high doses of vitamins can be toxic. The fit of this analogy comes from the largely unacknowledged dangers of apologetic argumentation; where someone's faith is crumbling because they can't get over a reasoned objection to Christianity, then apologetic work is a vitamin, correcting a deficiency. But where people pursue such arguments for their own sake, they risk damaging their faith. C. S. Lewis, widely regarded as the contemporary champion of apologetics, repeatedly warned people not to attempt to build up their faith by winning debates, insisting that his own apologetic work had weakened his faith, and the only correction was to experience God's presence directly. Again, the relationship was far more important than the content.

The important bit: Trying to win arguments that prove God's existence or other Christian teachings can address specific obstacles to faith, but is equally likely to weaken it if deployed unnecessarily.

Premise number five: The proper role for Christian argumentation can be understood along the lines of work done by Doug Ehninger in the late nineteen sixties: argument as mutual correction, as a way of granting personhood to another, making oneself vulnerable to another and thereby building a bond. God shows us by joining in argument with us that He is not distant, detached, uninvolved, and as we argue with Him, we are forced to accept correction where we are wrong. Similarly, the arguments we have between ourselves should be opportunities to build fellowship, to grant one another the dignity of making our reasons explicit and being open to persuasion by the other, to surrendering our positions when they are successfully refuted. In all these instances, the relationship is far more important than the content. Rabbinic scholars fell into the trap of adding layer upon layer of content over the Torah, drowning it in commentary and judgments, at the price of a dynamic and engaged relationship with God and one another, and if we pull back from unnecessary apologetic argument and instead use argument as exploration of difference and a procedure for building trust, then we arrive at a more robust and sturdy bond.

The important bit: Argument as procedure has the potential to strengthen relationships, and the Christian life is relational in its essence. ■

I know I'm using argument in incommensurable ways, between us and God and between person and person, but that's one of the things I'll get sorted out. This is just a start, and I've got six weeks to develop it.