In our day, we are unable to envisage comfort except as part of the technical order of things. Comfort for us means bathrooms, easy chairs, foam-rubber mattresses, air conditioning, washing  ma­ chines, and so forth. The chief concern is to avoid effort and pro­ mote rest and physical euphoria. For us, comfort is closely asso­ciated with the material life; it manifests itself in the perfection of personal goods and machines. According to Giedion, the men of the Middle Ages also were concerned with comfort, but for them comfort had an entirely different form and content. It represented a feeling of moral and aesthetic order. Space was the primary ele­ment in comfort. Man sought open spaces, large rooms, the possi­bility of moving about, of seeing beyond his nose, of not con­stantly colliding with other people. These preoccupations are alto­gether foreign to us.

Moreover, comfort consisted of a certain arrangement of space. In the Middle Ages, a room could be completely “finished,” even though it might contain no furniture. Everything depended on pro­ portions, material, form. The goal was not convenience, but rather a certain atmosphere. Comfort was the mark of the man’s personal­ity on the place where he lived. This, at least in part, explains the extreme diversity of architectural interiors in the houses of the period. Nor was this the result of mere whim; it represented an adaptation to character; and when it had been realized, the man of the Middle Ages did not care if his rooms were not well heated or his chairs hard.

From Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, p. 67-68.

The items in a code stand to the moral law as bricks to a building. Wisdom must involve some comprehension of how the bricks are meant to be put together.

This has an immediate bearing on how we read the Bible. Not only is it insufficient to quote and requote the great commands of the Decalogue and the Sermon on the Mount. We will read the Bible seriously only when we use it to guide our thought towards a comprehensive moral viewpoint, and not merely to articulate disconnected moral claims. We must look within it not only for moral bricks, but for indications of order in which the bricks belong together. There may be some resistance to this, not only from those who suspect that it may lead to evasions of the ‘plain’ sense of the Bible’s teaching, but from those who have forebodings of a totalitarian construction which will legislate over questions where it would be better to respect the Bible’s silence. But in truth there is no alternative policy if we intend that our moral thinking should be shaped in any significant way by the Scriptures.

Oliver O’Donovan, Resurrection and Moral Order, p. 200.

Cross-posted on Wondering Fair

These days, we often fail to appreciate lyrics. A catchy tune may follow us around, but who remembers the words? Or worse yet – we memorize traditional songs but fail to make a grasp at their deeper meaning. Given that last Friday is the Feast of the Epiphany, I thought I’d celebrate the revelation of the magi by dwelling on some lyrics that may be quite familiar to our Christmases, but carry some remarkable suggestions and offer potent reminders of the meaning of Christmas.

In the early years of the 1700s, English hymn-writer Isaac Watts wrote “Joy to the World” a reflection on the 98th Psalm. It begins like this:

Joy to the world! the Lord is come;
Let earth receive her King;
Let every heart prepare him room,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven and nature sing,
And heaven, and heaven, and nature sing.

The placement of this song in many Christmas services (which celebrate the nativity of Jesus, or his first coming) may obscure Watts’ original intention to proclaim the second coming of Christ, as Psalm 98 more overtly suggests. Verse 4 provides the obvious basis for our “joyful noise”: “Make a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth; break forth into joyous song and sing praises!” The next verse of our carol affirms the resounding noise that shall be heard in this corporate celebration:

Joy to the world! the Saviour reigns;
Let men their songs employ;
While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat the sounding joy,
Repeat, repeat the sounding joy.

The final verse reaffirms what has already been noted in each verse before – this is a return to ‘rule the world’ and this rulership conforms to the pattern already set by Christ’s humble birth. On epiphany we celebrate the majestic implications of God coming to dwell among us – that dysfunctional rulers will be put under new management:

He rules the world with truth and grace,
And makes the nations prove
The glories of His righteousness,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders of His love,
And wonders, wonders, of His love.

Christmas is a celebration of the strangely humble beginnings that God-among-us chose to begin with, but Epiphany  is a day to note the implications of God’s intimate presence among God’s creation: the return which is promised is not one from a distance, but back into an order of human life which is intimately known by the saviour who returns. Joy to the world indeed!

In my early days as an aspiring theologian, fresh out of undergraduate studies, I was keenly interested in the idea of social justice. It is hard to deny that we are by nature designed for community, and thus inextricably interconnected. In the light of this reality, the biblical call to do justly cannot be observed passively, i.e. not harming others, but must be seen as an active call. Each act we make (or moment of inaction) and each decision we make has consequences for others and we bear some measure of responsibility for these consequences, even if they are unintended or undesired. I don’t mean to commend a lifestyle of constant hand-wringing or agonising over each act we undertake, as this can lead to a sort of paralysis or worse still apathy. Rather, I believe we are called to pursue a life of communally guided formation and submission which can lead us into increasingly positive choices. Along these lines, the key concern is not: how can I avoid oppressing a textile worker on a distant continent by shopping at the GAP; but rather how can I further the thriving of my neighbour by supporting their work. This sort of thinking does lend itself to localism, as the consequences of our actions are far more transparently evident when dealing more directly with out neighbours, but this is not exclusively the case.

Lately though, under the influence of the “Edinburgh-school” Christian ethicists, Michael Northcott and Oliver O’Donovan I’ve been drawn to a model of justice which is not only practice-oriented, but also one which is sensitive to the span of generations. You can read previous posts I’ve offered along these lines, when I suggested that political conservatives would do well to be attentive to the act of actually conserving something; in a series I did summarising and interacting with Oliver O’Donovan’s common objects of love; and in my reflections on Edmund Burke’s political philosophy. After several years of reflection on ecological ethics from the perspective of Christian theology, I’m convinced that any model for justice that is focused purely on one moment, or even one generation, is fatally flawed. Now that biblical scholars have laid to rest some of the more unhelpful eschatologies of the 20th century, it is time to turn our moral reflection to the future generations that God’s will continue to sustain on this earth either with our help or–with what seems to be our present preoccupation–our hindrance.

It is certainly the case that preparing for the future requires a different sort of moral reflection than our acting in the present moment, but there are plenty of resources there to aid us. This generation’s obsession with engineering-oriented science makes concepts such as the precautionary principle seem inaccessible. In spite of this though, we must begin to open our minds to the possibility that the slowing of technological achievement and economic growth in the present may be what is morally necessary to promote the flourishing of future generations.

This is, as Oliver O’Donovan observes in Common Objects of Love, the meaning of the fifth commandment:

The paradigm command of tradition is, ‘Honor your father and your mother, that your days may be long in the land which hte Lord your God gives you.’  It appears to our eyes to be concerned with the duties of children, but this is a mistake.  The duties of children are purely responsive to the duty of parents to be to their children what their parents were to them.  This is a command addressed to adults, whose existence in the world is not self-posited but the fruit of an act of cultural transmission, which they have a duty to sustain.  The act of transmission puts us all in the place of receiver and communicator at once.  The household is envisaged as the primary unit of cultural transmission, the ‘father and the mother’ as representing every existing social practice which it is important to carry on.  Only so can community sustain itself within its environment, ‘the land which the Lord your God gives you.’  No social survival in any land can be imagined without a stable cultural environment across generations.  By tradition society identifies itself from one historical moment to the next, and so continues to act as itself.

H/t: Brad Littlejohn for typing the quote out.

“How”, said I, “is such a conversion possible, that there should be a sudden and rapid divestment of all which, either innate in us has hardened in the corruption of our material nature, or acquired by us has become inveterate by long accustomed use? These things have become deeply and rad-ically engrained within us. When does he learn thrift who has been used to liberal banquets and sumptuous feasts? And he who has been glittering in gold and purple, and has been celebrated for his costly attire, when does he reduce himself to ordinary and simple clothing? One who has felt the charm of the fasces and of civic honours shrinks from becoming a mere private and inglorious citizen. The man who is attended by crowds of clients, and dignified by the numerous association of an officious train, regards it as a punishment when he is alone”

(Cyprian of Carthage, Ad Donat. 3. Cited in: Christopher M. Hays, “Resumptions of Radicalism. Christian Wealth Ethics in the Second and Third Centuries.” Zeitschrift fur die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und Kunde der Alteren Kirche 102, no. 2 (2011).

I’ve just run across a particularly pithy summary of the classic critique of monetized economies in favour of a labour-oriented approach to economics:

One particularly prominent strand in Western discourse, which goes back to Aristotle, is the general condemnation of money and trade in the light of an ideal of household self-sufficiency and production for use. The argument goes something like this. Like other animals, man is naturally self-sufficient and his wants are finite. Trade can only be natural in so far as it is oriented towards the restoration of such self-sufficiency. Just as in nature there may be too much here and not enough there, so it is with households which will then be forced to exchange on the basis of mutual need. ‘Interchange of this kind is not contrary to nature and is not a form of money-making; it keeps to its original purpose – to re-establish nature’s own equilibrium of self-sufficiency’ (Aristotle 1962: 42). Profit-oriented exchange is, however, unnatural; and is destructive of the bonds between households. Prices should therefore be fixed, and goods and services remunerated in accordance with the status of those who pro-vided them. Money as a tool intended only to facilitate exchange is naturally barren, and, of all the ways of getting wealth, lending at interest – where money is made to yield a ‘crop’ or litter’ – is ‘the most contrary to nature’ (Aristotle 1962: 46).

“Introduction: Money and the morality of exchange” from Jonathan Parry And Maurice Bloch eds., Money and the morality of exchange (1989: CUP), p. 2.

I should also mention for those of you who won’t go on to read the whole book that this is not the author’s position, merely a very helpful summary of one in a spectrum of many options.

Wendell Berry opens his latest collection of essays, “Imagination in Place” with the following:

By an interworking of chance and choice, I have happened to live nearly all my life in a place I don’t remember not knowing. Most of my forebears for the last two hundred years could have said the same thing. I was born to people who knew this place intimately, and I grew up knowing it intimately.

Berry goes on to suggest that this geographic rooting in a particular plot of land has guided his writing and reflection; by being anchored he has avoided a certain amount of unhealthy creative ‘drift’ and by being well-planted on his farm in Kentucky he grown to love not just for the generic ‘environment’ but a particular place guided by intimate knowledge of its geography.

I’m very convinced by the trajectory of Berry’s suggestions. This notion of what the monks once called ‘stability’: purposefully anchoring yourself to a place, could go a long way towards dissolving the anomie that so much of our generation suffers from as we come and go from nondescript places where we work and live. Berry and others suggest also that by unrooting ourselves from a particular place it has become far easier to despoil God’s creation and again, I think there is something to this suggestion.

My own life and experience is a nearly perfect inversion of Berry’s tale. The demands of a graduate education have led my wife and I to relocate numerous times, from the Puget Sound region to upstate New York, to British Columbia in Canada, and most recently to Scotland. Digging back into previous generations, I’ve spent some time reconstructing our own family history from old census records in hopes that might find a stable family farm hidden somewhere in my past waiting to be reclaimed. But my family also is an inversion of this tale of being rooted in place. For the past four or five generations, almost every branch of my family has moved away from their place of birth to a different state – in most cases a completely different geography. For me, there is no family farm. For that matter, my family has invested itself so lightly in place that there is no family legacy lingering in any of those places they formerly occupied.

So with regards to being rooted in a place, I cannot escape the post-modern ‘blessing’ of self-construction. I suspect that I’m not alone in this predicament, both in desiring a place to call my own which I can commit our family to inter-generationally and in lacking an obvious option. What’s more, former generations have re-engineered the American labour market to support transience. Many employers are now trans-national and they often expect a person to pick up and move at some point over the course of their career. The notion of local business has nearly disappeared into unplaced options such as Wall-Mart, Whole Foods, Starbucks, and McDonalds. These workplaces may offer excellent compensation and benefits, and even invest in local community projects, but they remain decidedly un-parochial – and at best impostors. Local musicians, artists, writers, and local government struggle to capture the attention of the occupants of towns and cities. In the midst of these realities, to choose one’s “place” rather than inheriting it seems to represent a peculiar challenge, if not a fantasy.

While this essay might come across as a lament, I don’t mean for my tone to convey despair. It’s all well and good for Wendell Berry to enjoy his farm, but I’m in a different situation faced by a task that is perhaps more prefatory. I must first work to create the circumstances in which parochial life is again possible for my children and grandchildren. To this end, I have begun to search for ways to re-commit myself to those old parochial patterns. Here are a few that I’ve settled on thus far: finding culture generated by local people; ignoring presidential political theater until I’m confident that I understand and can participate in my local government and the issues it faces; spending my money at businesses which are not only staffed by local people, but which are owned and supplied by local people who choose to invest their wealth in their neighbourhoods. Finally, I’ve also begun to consider what features of their former homes led my family to leave their communities behind so that inasmuch as I can influence the shape of my future community it doesn’t suffer from these patterns.

If we are to address the ecological crisis that threatens the future of our children, we must commit to making decisions which are not just superficially ‘green’ but also pursue patterns of life which produce healthy locally invested communities.

Some Further Reading…

  • Berry, Wendell. Imagination in Place. Counterpoint Press, 2010.
  • Northcott, Michael. A Moral Climate: The Ethics of Global Warming.
  • Gorringe, Timothy. A Theology of the Built Environment : Justice, Empowerment, Redemption. Cambridge, U.K. ; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  • Bouma-Prediger, Steven, and Brian J Walsh. Beyond Homelessness : Christian Faith in a Culture of Displacement. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Pub, 2008.
  • Wilson-Hartgrove, Jonathan. The Wisdom of Stability : Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture. Brewster, Mass.: Paraclete Press, 2010.
  • Inge, John. A Christian Theology of Place. Aldershot, Hampshire, England ; Burlington, VT, USA: Ashgate, 2003.
  • Alasdair MacIntyre, ‘Politics, Philosophy and the Common Good’, in Kelvin Knight (ed.),  The MacIntyre Reader, Notre Dame, Indiana, University of Notre Dame Press, 1998, 235 – 252.

Cross-Posted on Wondering Fair

“I don’t know how it is, my brothers and sisters, but the spirit of the person who actually hands something to a poor man experiences a kind of sympathy with common humanity and infirmity, when the hand of the one who has it actually placed in the hand of the one who is in need. Although the one is giving, the other receiving, the one being attended to and the one attending are being joined in a real relationship.” (from Augustine of Hippo, Sermon 259.5)

The word charity has accumulated connotations over years past such that today doubts swirl around its use: Can we really give to another selflessly? Is charity really just a superficial way to ease my conscience and in the end enable someone else’s self-destructive habits? Given some of these doubts I’ve heard it said many times that we must accept that humans are driven towards self-maintenance and shape our good intentions around this reality.

Like many discussions in modern moral philosophy, this one ends up being circular. As long as you start with the conviction that we are creatures primarily driven by survival instincts, then it is reasonable to conclude that we must organise our societies and communities around the protection of mutual self-interest. As Augustine suggests in the quote I’ve opened with, however, we need not begin with this conviction. This is precisely the legacy of the long history of Christian moral philosophy, which is driven by another starting conviction – that we are made to give and receive love. It is no accident that the Latin word for “love,”  “caritas”… is the same root that gave us “charity”.

We cannot rehabilitate this way of talking about how people might live together while relying on a soporific version of love, however. What is required here is something more robust, a sort of loving that, as Augustine points out is inherently reciprocal and self-involving. Giving in love requires that we enter into another person’s experience in empathy. If we do not allow ourselves the chance to feel the suffering (and joy!) of our neighbour, then we may not actually be experiencing “true love.” The long-term consequence of this love is a mutual relationship.

For Augustine and other Christians reflecting in this tradition, it must be noted, this way of approaching our conduct did not apply exclusively to one’s personal life. This same sort of mutually involving Love could be expected to drive the interaction between societies as well. As we have seen over past decades, efficient calculations of mutual self-interest do not necessarily lead to more healthy societies or offer us the tools to truly confront the defining moral issues of our time – including the environmental crisis in which we now find ourselves. An ethic of love provides us a starting point which pursues not mere survival but a principle of self-giving which can seek to help across borders and across generations. This is surely a complicated matter, but it is nonetheless crucial to affirm a starting point by which we can expect to reliably guide our interactions, and the Christian tradition offers us exactly that.

Jeremy Kidwell

Online digital media, especially software designed specifically for pedagogical use, presents comparable obstacles in terms of connecting to that which is outside their purview. Educational platforms like Blackboard[1] and Finalsite[2] are inward-looking systems that have a conventional relationship to content and whose interaction design tends to encourage navigators to remain within the confines of the system, directing their attention back to its many nodes, pages, plug-ins and modules. Although internally consistent and relatively comprehensive in its features, these systems tend to feel closed off. Ask anyone who uses Blackboard to describe it, and the words “sterile,” “clunky,” and “institutional” are invariably invoked. What is underlying these sentiments is the frustration that these interfaces do not participate in society, but form an enclosure from which to observe its workings from afar. (from “Crowdmapping the Classroom with Ushahidi” by Kenneth Rogers in Learning Through Digital Media Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy Edited by R. Trebor Scholz)

Based on this observation, which I consider fundamentally right, Rogers offers “ten guidelines I always try to follow to effectively select and critically employ digital tools in the classroom.” Here they are:

  • Do not use digital tools gratuitously or teach them as if learning the tool is an end in itself.
  • The selection of a digital tool should always be determined from an immediate social issue or local problem that is the larger concern of the class and for which the tool might have some relevant impact. Repeatedly ask the question, is this tool relevant to address the issue or problem posed to the class?
  • Select digital tools that are being used by social groups other than a classroom. Always demonstrate the connections of the digital tool to spaces/environments outside of the classroom. Who uses it? What immediate social purpose does it serve?
  • Illustrate the direct cultural, social, political, historical and economic context out of which a given digital tool arose. This must be understood as part of its functionality.
  • Avoid digital tools that replicate classroom space; seek tools that reconfigure it.
  • Dispense with the laboratory method of teaching digital tools that privileges the tool’s problem-solving capacity over and above the problem to which it is applied. Let the tool itself be reshaped by the problem.
  • Wherever possible and appropriate, encourage the creative repurposing of a digital tool against its original intent.
  • De-emphasize digital tools that are overly oriented around an individualized “user.”
  • Emphasize digital tools that have collaborative capacity and that produce cultural situations that facilitate collective engagement.
  • Identify digital tools that can help sustain participation in a project long after the class is over.

There are a number of tech-savvy academics reflecting from the cutting edge of technology and teaching. Among these is the ProfHacker blog, the Institute for the Future of the Book and (the more web elusive) “Digital Humanities” which each represent a community of creative faculty in higher education with an interest in the thoughtful and thorough use of new technology in their teaching. Faculty use twitter, blogging, and other internet applications in the classroom, with a critical eye to whether this technology augments or impacts their teaching. There isn’t nearly the same energy invested in digital theology, ethics, or biblical studies, but I’m hoping to be a part of changing that! This is my first, in what I hope to be many posts casting a critical, but interested gaze on the thoughtful use of technology in theological pedagogy and a proper Christian contribution to the digital public space.

One of the reasons I like the Digital Humanities is because of their emphasis on “Open Access.” I’m convinced that I participate in the scholarly life standing on the shoulders of many benevolent people. This includes many people that I’ll likely never meet, including the Scottish taxpayers who have been incredibly generous in funding my PhD. With that in mind, I am keen to make sure that my output as a scholar is freely available when possible and appropriate.* But it’s not enough to just put stuff up online where it will never see the light of day, so my interest is to find the best possible way in which to contribute to existing online collaborative research and learning.

Since I’ve just been working on this over the past couple weeks, I thought a good place to start would be with a quick look at the best way to share bibliographies (i.e. a list of books and articles on a particular subject) with others, and how to weave these into existing public conversations. I maintain two fairly substantial bibliographies related to my research on this blog, and because the hunting down of resources can take so much time, I’ve been working on getting them online. My hope is that this can save others some time and that this will enable them to pick up the subject more quickly and accomplish more in their research. Right now these bibliographies are just plain text pages hosted in this blog, but for this post, I surveyed several alternative services to see if there is a web-related technology that might offer a better way to post a bibliography online.

Mendely

Meant to be an open source replacement for bibliographic software like EndNote, Mendeley also adds in a healthy dose of social networking. You can synchronize your entries on CiteULike and your zotero database (see more below), and they have a web importer that you can use to import links while you’re surfing when you come across an interesting book or article. Mendeley has an open API, which means that anyone can create software interfaces for the databases you create. I initially tested Mendeley over a year ago, and their Desktop application was pretty feature-bare and buggy. Now they’re nearly at a full 1.0 release and have an iOS app for your iPod as well. Mendeley has recently moved towards a moderate-fee system to generate revenue for this non-profit project. You get allocated a certain amount of online storage space where you references and attachments are stored, and then you have to pay for additional space. I’ve got no problems with this model, as it allows moderate users to go free, and encourages heavier users to support the system they’re using.

For my purposes here, Mendeley doesn’t really have an online bibliography feature, but you can create research interest Groups, which others can join, and you can group references in folders which you can then share with others. On the plus side, it is possible to add any reference, books, journals, etc. Also, you can add tags to items, which, when viewed online by other Mendeley members who have joined your group, can be sorted on the fly by tags.

On the negative side, you have to be creative in adding summaries and comments to the papers, as all the data remains within your reference data. Further, only Mendeley members can access the bibliography and group once its is created. Also, because you’re not working with plain text, it is hard to identify relations between references, which in the case of John Zizioulas is quite significant has his works have been translated multiple times.

Zotero

Zotero started as a plugin for the popular firefox web browser. The idea was to create a quick and easy way of grabbing academic content while surfing online and then storing it in a lightweight database for the purpose of citation in academic writing. I was admittedly skeptical of zotero when it was first released a few years ago, but since then it has developed into a really mature project. They are close to a release of a stand-alone version of the software so you’re not restricted to your web browser. Further, they store the reference data in a standard sqlite database, which you can deposit wherever you like on your computer. This is open-source software being developed collaboratively by anyone who wants to contribute, and so their import engine is probably one of the best available. You can quickly grab an article and download its content from all sorts of major websites including google scholar, the New York Times, and so forth. Zotero has also recently adopted the same online storage model as Mendeley, for those who are interested in synchronising all your references across multiple computers.

For the purpose of this review, I found that Zotero has much the same solution for sharing references. You can create a research group, and associate references with them. This options follows roughly the same cues as Mendeley while offering slightly less, so unless you’re invested in Zotero for a particular reason I’d look elsewhere, while checking back in to see how this develops in the future.

CiteULike

Moving beyond the previous two options, which are anchored in a software program, CiteULike is purely web based, offering a user-generated catalogue of academic research, with a healthy dash of social networking. It is important to note at the outset that CiteULike is a free service, run by a for-profit venture, and supported by what are somewhat visually-intrusive google ads. You can link to friends who are also on CiteULike and stay on top of articles they add and recommend. Like most of the other services that are heavily web-connected, CiteULike is primarily used by researchers in the sciences (including economists and other business-school types), so the social features are less than impressive for someone doing work primarily in the humanities.

Connotea

Connotea exists in the same genre as CiteULike, while offering a much cleaner interface. One gets the impression, however, that they have a smaller user base and if you’re a scientist, this might mean that less of the articles you’re looking to add aren’t already there. Similarly, this meant that it could only import 11 of my references.
WorldCat
Still in the web-based, but in an entirely different genre, WorldCat is a service that aims to integrate public and university library catalogues. Along with this, if you become a registered user, you can add “book lists” which are bibliographies which link to books that are catalogued in worldcat, along with brief notes for each work you’ve chosen and global tags for the list itself.

I should also add a quick plug for the amateur librarian out there. Many of these public library catalogues rely on volunteers to keep their catalogues organized. I’m often submitting requests to the folks at worldcat.org to combine books and correct (the admittedly rare) data errors. I’ve also got a librarian account at LibraryThing which is a service similar to worldcat, though which promotes more along the lines of user based book reviews. You’ll find a similar, though less academic service with GoodReads.

Sente, Papers, EndNote, Bookends, etc.

The last category, not to be forgotten, are those software based applications you can use to organize bibliographies, but which lack a web-based component. I use Sente myself. But none of these applications offer any sort of web-based bibliographies. At best you can organize and format references in a software program, and then augment the references as plain text. This is what I’ve done for the blog, and a process I’m hoping to transcend…

My conclusion?

I like the smooth interface of Mendeley, which has something on Zotero, I think. But both present a very limited range of options for annotating your bibliography. I should note that many faculty now encourage their students to learn Zotero and provide bibliographies for their courses for the ease of student use. CiteULike offers a thicker set of options and a more sophisticated set of social tools, but their ads are intrusive, and their features are still limited. I love the degree to which WorldCat it plugged into public library catalogues, but their interface is quite limited and it’s hopelessly tedious to add references which are not books (i.e. journal articles, etc.).

This leads me to still prefer a blog post in which I can narrate my choices more fully, and add hyperlinks as appropriate. What I’ve decided, I think, it to stick with what I’m using currently on my two bibliographies hosted here (and the more to follow) and to augment them. What I’ve concluded here is that a software solution, at least what is currently on offer, cannot replace the basic art of writing. Along these lines, I’m encouraged by the work by the folks at the “Institute for the Future of the Book” to bring digital publishing back closer to the hand-written page by enabling marginal notes and comments on digital pages. The blog includes a comments space, and I hope to add the possibility of marginal notation soon as well. I’m looking to get some more independent web server space and port this blog to Joomla. Once I’m there, I can use the J!Research plugin. Or, I may stick with wordpress and use the CommentPress plugin (see the great in-depth article here and see a sample on display here). In the meantime, I’d be curious to hear from others who are either hoping to write, or looking to read bibliographies to hear what your experience with the services I’ve reviewed here has been. Have I missed anything? Are there features you’d like to see in public communication of research like this?

Notes:

* I’m actually fairly reluctant about the idea of self-publishing, not because I want to profit off books (ask most theologians and they’ll tell you that book sales hardly augment their salaries) but rather because I think that it is especially important for theologians to have their work scrutinised careful by editorial staffs that are cultivated by publishing houses. If anything, we would benefit from less and not more theological writing.