You know your 6 year old is ahead of reading level for his age when he picks up your @Natures_Voice field guide to British birds and rattles off a half-dozen pages. #ecotheologianproblems
Author Archives: Jeremy
Wrote my first proper #python script yesterday. I think this might be goodbye, R.
New Website
I’ve put together a new website. For anyone who has been following my presence on the internet, this change shouldn’t come as a big surprise as I’ve periodically migrated my web presence from a static html site (1994) to movable type (2002) to wordpress (2004) to joomla (for about 15 minutes), to drupal (2010) and then back to wordpress again. What is perhaps a bit different this time is that this migration marks something of a homecoming as I’ve officially abandoned the Content Management System where I’ve been dwelling digitally for a little over a decade. When things first got started with Movable Type and WordPress, the idea of a CMS was convenient and quaint. People still used america online and geocities for hosting, so layout and design weren’t really a concern. Databases were pretty basic in their deployment, and hacking was still a pastime of hobbyists and not yet salaried professionals. Things have changed, in some cases for the better – with new emphases on making the web accessible for persons with different abilities, aesthetics through user experience design, and the frameworks and database architectures available for client and server side web development have simply exploded. There is a great deal of good here.
However, it would be an understatement to say that digital media and capitalism have not developed a stable or equal relationship. The uptake of the web by corporations and venture-capital funded startups have created an astonishing level of new technologies, energy and noise. We now have digital-born media and marketing firms that are capitalised at sums nearing trillions of USD. Apple is currently hovering over $700billion. Google is at $655bn. Facebook, $430bn. I could go on – but you get the point. These are sums that exceed the GDP of many nations, and so the stakes here and the amount of power that can be mobilised is nearly unfathomable. And these firms have developed an uneasy relationship with the common good, representing themselves as contributing philanthropists and humanitarians, but conducting their business in ways that subvert the very intentions that were embedded in the design and architectures of the internet. Google’s pervasive footprint offers a wide suite of so-called “free” services which provide the backbone for their bread and butter business as a marketing firm. Their mobilisation of user activity and identity as a product has paved the way for an array of truly sinister subversions of local and national politics. Facebook too has proven very bad at balancing their desire to develop a product with the need for user protection, privacy, and protection of the common good. But even more than these problems of privacy and exploitation, I fear the hegemony that these firms have begun to covet and protect. Stacy Mitchell covers the [strange disappearance of the word “Monopoly”](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2017/06/word-monopoly-antitrust/530169/) in political discourse in recent decades in her article in the Atlantic earlier this month.
There is much more to be covered here which I’ll explore in future blog posts, but what I want to underline is that my own transition to blogging in markdown and producing a static website is underpinned by a desire to return to the original (and what I take to be) philosophically astute aims of the internet. There are several promising conversations starting up around different corners of the internet that take things back in this direction. My own web host [Reclaim Hosting](http://reclaimhosting.com) is part of the own your own domain movement pioneered in universities. Until big providers are willing to provide an honest accounting of their products, and even offer paid services which don’t track and sell their users data. So, for example, I don’t run google analytics, but use a self-hosted instance of [Piwik](http://piwik.org) to keep track of what people enjoy reading here. I boycott Facebook unless I have to access content there that is inaccessible. For more ideas about how to divest from centralised services, check out the github repository on the [alternative-internet](https://github.com/redecentralize/alternative-internet). There are very exciting developments in federated technologies – that is services which can be distributed transparently across multiple providers, so [Mastadon](https://mastodon.social/about) (now more than 1m users) offers an alternative to Twitter and [Matrix/Riot](https://matrix.org) an alternative to Slack. In both cases, these services produce the same features as the centralised commercial service but anyone can add a server of their own which can interconnect with the existing mesh of services. This turn towards federated services has been given new energy by the success of blockchain services and bitcoin currencies (or clones) which depend on similar kinds of federated technologies. So much of the basic fabric of the internet works in this way and these massive service providers are essentially free-riders attempting to remanufacture infrastructure towards centralisation and technological walled gardens for profit. And I’m not alone in feeling this way – at the [Decentralised Web Summit](https://www.decentralizedweb.net) (written up in [Wired magazine here](https://www.wired.com/2016/06/inventors-internet-trying-build-truly-permanent-web/)) a year ago in San Francisco a raft of industry leaders met to discuss how architecture, protocols, and implementations can better serve a distributed and more robust internet. And as the (surprisingly banal) [Amazon S3 outage](https://www.wired.com/2017/02/happens-one-site-hosts-entire-internet/) earlier this year indicated, diversity and distribution is increasingly important to the success of the internet.
I feel strongly about these things because they map onto political realities and in an age when our domestic politics are suffering such atrophy we need to re-politicise our daily lives to involve cooperative problem solving and a robust (if pluralistic) conception of the commons. I’ll look forward to chatting more about all this in due course.
Peer review and reddit?
There’s a terrific interview this week on the Inquiring Minds podcast with Nate Allen, one of the lead moderators for the r/Science subreddit. Colleagues will be especially interested in their discussion of the r/Science AMA (“Ask Me Anything”) events they run which host sciences who have recently published results for an interactive, carefully moderated and pretty high-level conversation with the 15 million + users on that forum. Check it out here: https://art19.com/shows/inquiring-minds/episodes/3992f5e7-b17a-4319-b5c7-979719ed4572
Voting and Civic Participation, a response to Wayne Grudem
Note: Crossposted from Mere Orthodoxy and In All Things
This has been a strange and bewildering year for American politics, and for certain segments of the American church. Some commenters have felt confident to call the church’s reaction to the general election a “schism” in the religious right—quite strong language. The candidacy of Donald Trump has been inordinately mystifying for many of us, Christians included, but “schism” is far too vague a diagnosis in attempting to capture the state of this discourse, just as “religious right” is a rather unimpressive sociological descriptor. We would like to suggest that this and a great many other takes on “evangelical politics,” reflects a troubling confusion about the nature of Christian political citizenship that has finally been drawn from the background into the foreground of political discourse. This confusion is on clear display in Wayne Grudem’s 19 Oct piece “If You Don’t Like Either Candidate, Then Vote for Trump’s Policies.”
In Grudem’s narration, the situation is one in which voters must make a decision between two unsavory options. He doesn’t especially like either candidate, but nevertheless recommends that Christians consider voting for Trump’s policy proposals, though he at the same time admits that he doesn’t agree with Trump “on everything.” He then highlights Trump’s proposal to “immediately deport all undocumented immigrants” as one example of disagreement. In many ways, the narrative of Grudem’s argument is matched by Justin DePlato in his iAt post, “Voting for Donald Trump”
This disagreement comes with a proviso, though; Grudem stipulates that we can look away in this instance because “[Trump] could never get it [his deportation proposal] through Congress, and he has backed away from that and now only talks about deporting those convicted of crimes and those who have overstayed their visas.” If we judge the cogency of a Trump policy by its overall probably of passing through congress, then there isn’t going to be much left of the Trump platform. This is, after all, the candidate who rose to prominence by promising to build a wall and have another sovereign nation pay for it. But an idiosyncratic argument is only one issue among a wider array of problems with Grudem’s proposal.
On a more fundamental level, at the heart of this vote-for-the-policy-but-not-for-the-man approach lies a highly reduced account of Christian political participation to *voting*, a related reduction of theological judgment to utilitarian tactics, and an untenable bifurcation between a candidate and his policies.
Let us begin with the matter of voting. It is important to note at the outset that voting is a crucial and important part of democracy. We celebrate the many crucial advances that have been won against injustice around voter equality and note the many ways in which this fight is still ongoing. However, in Grudem’s presentation, the Christian citizen’s electoral duty is imprecisely portrayed and over-prescribed. In this view, the candidate we choose will be radically determinative on issues of concern. But politics can be a much wider domain and we would like to point towards an alternate theological account of civic participation, particularly in its electoral expression, which adheres more closely to the traditional logic of Christian discipleship.
When we vote we are casting a ballot in favor of the candidate whom we believe will do the best job of governing. The restrictive character of voting itself disallows voting in protest or opposition. To undertake this particular activity—voting—the Christian must be convinced that the ballot is cast as *an obedient response to the command of God in discipleship*. The Christian seeks to discern the word God has for them and to act upon it faithfully. One participates willingly in democratic elections *as a disciple* or not at all. This might mean that the Christian abstains from voting or votes for an alternate candidate who they believe (again, in good conscience) will best carry out the office. Yes, God works through material affairs themselves to inform the Christian of whom a candidate is and what is at stake in voting for them, but God’s revelatory providence is by no means restricted to the empirical and obvious.
Politics is about far more than electing a president. It is also, one may hope, a rich tapestry of interwoven institutions, traditions, processes, representatives, jurisdictions, and practices. But it is precisely the complexity of politics—and the Church’s place within it—that undermines the whole of Grudem’s argument. For, if we acknowledge that politics is about more than just a presidential election, we must appreciate how our involvement in politics—our political citizenship—is about so much more than a single vote.
It is also about our votes for other offices, like judges, city councilors, school board reps, sheriffs, and state legislators. It is about matters that may not even involve voting at all, like our willingness to pray, to notice and stand up for the vulnerable (as Jesus put so powerfully in his parable of the good samaritan), it is about our commitment to a range of social structures including churches and schools. It is about our individual vocations. To cast the current election as if it is only about this single vote, which has produced such troubling theatre, is a deception in which we prefer not to participate. This view also, ironically, contradicts the vision of Jeremiah 29 which is a message given to a nation in exile. Verse 7 is preceded by examples of what seeking the good of the city looks like – these are long-term tasks which do not reduce well to a four year election cycle: conducting work, building houses, committing to reside in a place and raise families there.
Turning to the matter of political judgment, we are also deeply troubled by Grudem’s (and indeed DePlato’s) suggestion that Christians take a consequentialist approach to voting. He feels it would be un-evangelical of him to vote for Secretary Clinton because of her “ultraliberal” policies. On the face of things, Grudem’s presentation indicates a sort of culture-wars ideology which reflexively divides the world into binaries: Republican / Democrat; liberal / conservative; etc. But this kind of view simply does not reflect the kind of careful reflection that we should be able to expect from someone who puts themselves forward as a public Christian intellectual. From this ideologically determined space, Grudem goes on to parse out his consequentialist logic: given his identification of Clinton as “enemy” he can only vote either for Trump or for a third-party candidate, and tactical speculation leads Grudem to conclude that his voting options are really only two: Vote Trump or help Clinton get elected.
Nevermind that there are policy proposals by Clinton which could be easily identified as “Christian,” or even politically conservative, Grudem’s conclusion here does not follow. Even if one were to approach voting in the calculated way Grudem prefers, his individual vote does not have the causal efficacy that he thinks it does. Grudem’s concluding question makes it particularly clear that he is commending a utilitarian approach. He asks, “which vote is likely to bring about the best results for our nation?” Of course, Christian moral reasoning is deliberative and anticipatory. It is imperative that we have the moral imagination to contemplate potential futures we may or may not act within.
Grudem’s question, however, functions as a guiding *moral rule*. The Christian’s vote should be world-improving. Ironically, Grudem appeals to Jeremiah 29:7, to “seek the good of the city,” as grounds for his claim. Only it is not at all clear to us why Grudem thinks that Trump represents such an overt good. To what noble attribute or comprehensive policy statement can one point to support the suggestion that Trump will “for the most part govern in the way he promises to do, bringing good to the nation in many areas?” Since the vamping up of the election primaries early last year Trump has added a fresh entry each week to the catalogue of incendiary, vindictive, and even wicked remarks. We doubt very seriously that Trump is capable of articulating what governing for the good of the city would even look like.
Following on from this concern is our final point relating to the matter of relating person and policy. Grudem argues that one can vote for policies without necessarily voting for the person who advocates them. This distinction between the person and policies resembles the untidy but expedient distinction Luther wished to draw between person and office. One may be forced to do violence as *Prince* without thereby implicating himself personally. The claim has its charms, but as many within the Christian tradition have pointed out, it is theologically mistaken. A ruler’s discipleship is not temporarily suspended simply because the social order they’re required to govern is discomfiting with the Word of God. Likewise, neither can a distinction be drawn consistently between Trump and his policies, since policies do not arise ex nihilo, but are in this case propounded and advocated by Trump himself. When you enter the ballot box next month it is not his policies that you will find listed beside other party candidates, but his name. And, again, underlining this tendency towards idiosyncrasy, by his article’s end Grudem has in different places stated that its Trump he’s voting for, not just his policies.
In the end, Grudem has a misshapen conception of conscience. His response to the first type of objection he typically receives when trying to argue this case with well-meaning Christians is illustrative. Many tell Grudem that their “conscience won’t allow a vote for Trump.” He’ll hear nothing of it. How could a Christian’s conscience allow them to help Clinton get elected, since withholding a vote increases her chances? Shouldn’t one’s conscience be troubled by the inevitable harms she’ll bring to our nation, he asks? Grudem’s breathless dismissal of sincere appeals to individual conscience is perplexing and in the end he simply does not offer an alternative. Conscience is surgically removed from political judgment to allow for a more forensically pure utilitarian calculus. Apparently the only way to vote in good conscience is to share the same level of disapprobation toward Clinton as Grudem.
We wish here to affirm those Christians who, like us, cannot comprehend either themselves or a fellow believer casting a vote for Donald Trump. There are ample Christian reasons not only for withholding your vote from him, but even for actively opposing his candidacy. Perhaps you also question the evangelical heritage sometimes evoked by certain apologists for Trump. Is it possible, we ask, to live and announce the good news in Jesus Christ and at the same time publicize one’s support for a candidate who openly and brashly advocates viewpoints in direct contradiction to the gospel and who boasts of exploiting others for fame, pleasure or financial gain? Can someone, out of intense anxiety (whether justified or not) about what a Clinton presidency might bring, justify acting to help appoint a man whose campaign is a great public purveyor of insidious vitriol?
Such questions press into deeper theological concerns, and reflection upon these concerns may be of help to the Church during this time of travail and questioning. As one political theologian recently suggested, “When believers find themselves confronted with an order that, implicitly or explicitly, offers itself as the sufficient and necessary condition of human welfare, they will recognize the Beast” (*Desire of the Nations*, 272). And we’d like to suggest the “order” O’Donovan mentions can also be a person, who claims alone to possess the unique power of making a nation “great” again. For this reason and those above, we reject both Donald Trump and any argument that somehow a Christian responsibility is to vote for him this November. We invite Grudem and others who are persuaded by his argument to consider a wider view of Christian civic participation that is not reduced to vesting unwarranted hope in the promises of a charlatan to do in the future what his own character in the present seems to wholly contravene.
How should we respond to ecological crisis?
Cross-posted on Wondering Fair
Among the numerous critics of human industry in recent years, one held a particularly noteworthy place in the headlines: the Unabomber. In part of his manifesto attempting to justify his acts of violence, the man who sent bombs by mail over a period of 20 years suggests: “The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race.” Kirkpatrick Sale, a Neo-Luddite critical of modern technology, was quoted as saying that the Unabomber represents “a rational man and his principal beliefs are, if hardly mainstream, entirely reasonable.”
In a photo released by Korean Federation for Environmental Movement, a bird covered in fuel oil from the spill sits on the beach near Mallipo, South Korea.
Dubious personalities and actions notwithstanding, critics of industrialism often point a finger at Christian theology as a major culprit for the failures of modern society to anticipate and address issues such as pollution, natural resource exploitation, consumerism, and waste. The idea was perhaps most famously put in a 1967 article by the historian of technology Lynn White Jr., titled “The historical roots of our ecologic crisis.” While White offers a complicated historical argument, it tends to get replicated in a simpler form today, i.e. the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament) offers a mandate for humanity to subdue the earth and dominate its creatures, and this is a key inspiration for the undiscerning modern love for industry.
Indeed, some Neo-Luddites suggest even that we need to abandon our technological society (and in some cases, our religious faith) in order to recapture a sort of pre-modern harmony. Yet, as a quick trip to a natural history museum will reveal, from the earliest record, humans have been making and improving tools. As I suspect many folks sense on an intuitive level, too extreme a version of this anti-technological vision really asks us to stop being human at a basic level.
But we’re not off the hook, as the recent gulf oil disaster reminds us. Yet in contrast to the idea that Christianity is the source of the problems of industrialism, and counter to the suggestion that a secular answer is the best solution, I’d like to briefly suggest that Christian faith actually offers some of the best resources in navigating our way out of the troubles that society finds itself in. Perhaps there is some truth in what Sale suggests, in that the Unabomber’s criticism and violence are rational actions for a world which consistently denies its creator and consequently denies its own created-ness. But what if we began not with the concern for self-preservation, which seems a common mantra for so much of both radical and conservative movements today, but rather by a another starting point: “the earth is the LORD’S and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it…” (Psalms 24:1 NRSV). This seems to call for a radically different economy. One which, begins by affirming that we have a good creator, and then proceeds to affirm that love should determine our response to industry and its consequences. We are left with recourse not to violence or inaction, but rather to the peculiar way of Christ. This calls instead for repentance and willingness to sacrifice when we learn that we are implicated in issues of injustice and an economy which treats the creation as if it were a commodity to be used and not the creation of God.
As we watch the news and are reminded of the many ills and obsessions of modern society, maybe it is worth considering how the affirmation and worship of a creator – indeed one who receives and absorbs our violence – might shape a different, redemptive response.
The Interwebs
Usually we tend to think of the WWW as a tool for research, and I’ll dive into some of the ways that I make use of specific tools to search and mine the web for resources into a later post, but today I wanted to share a bit about how the web can serve as a subject for research. Web social science is the next big thing, with regular sessions now appearing at many major academic society conferences. 
If you want to get the big overview, I’d recommend you start with Robert Ackland’s recent book, Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (University users can click here to read the book online via the University of Edinburgh library). Ackland’s book is a terrific resource, covering both qualitative and quantitative modes of research and he covers a large range of tools from online surveys and focus groups, web content gathering and analysis, social media network analysis (which I’ll discuss in a future post), and online experimentation. For an author who is quite technical the book covers a very helpful range of ethical considerations, surveys a range of contemporary methodological literature, and he presents the domain of research involved in each of these which would be accessible to a readership that hasn’t done this kind of work before. A few years ago when I began doing web social science and social network analysis, I found Acklands book to be a terrific catalyst into the wider field of web studies. Continue reading
Beauty and Truth?
Cross-posted on Wondering Fair
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” wrote John Keats in 1819. This celebrated line, still admired as poetry, rings somewhat untrue today. In an age when beauty is often achieved by untruth – Photoshop editing, misleading camera angles, 
manipulated statistics – and when truth is often not beautiful – the world’s hunger, meaningless tragedies – the connection Keats noticed between truth and beauty seems today tenuous at best.
Still, our idea of beauty carries a direct relationship to our ethics. Contemporary eco-philosophers have noticed, for example, that though a person may appreciate the beauty of a mountain range, or of an endangered tiger, this appreciation of beauty does not necessarily lead to a desire for conservation of one’s idea of beauty. If we think of beauty only in terms of our own subjective experience, and not in terms of beauty being embedded in something outside ourselves (i.e. the animal, or flower, or mountain range), the act of preserving beauty turns in on itself. Beauty becomes only subjective. Our primary concern is to sustain our experience of the sublime, not to promote life outside of us.
A different perspective arises when we appreciate beauty as something given to us, not arising from inside ourselves. It generates a consideration of beauty which does not get lost in its own subjective sphere, but which also propels us outward, to active engagement in the world. In a dense but interesting comment on a passage by theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, David Moss observes,
Where we can no longer read the language of beauty so, for Balthasar, the witness of creation as created becomes untrustworthy and open to abuse… In short, those transitory experiences of the truth, goodness and beauty of the cosmos are intelligible only by way of reference to a transcendent order of Being that is absolutely true, good and beautiful.[i]
In other words, only when we recognize objective beauty, truth and goodness in the world, beyond our own subjective experience of it, can we really be moved to preserve it and to admire the work of their creator.
Among the wide variety of theories of beauty competing for our attention (and operating underneath many contemporary cinematic plotlines), one can make a good case for the “wheels coming off” when social understandings of beauty ceased being based on knowledge of a creator God. The celebration of beauty which remains possible within a nihilistic understanding of the world is deeply problematic, and as Moss suggests, open to abuse and even untrustworthy. To affirm God’s act of creation of the world, with all its beauty and ugliness, provides a stability for beauty that allows us to appreciate it in the context of love and relate beauty to truth.
Jeremy Kidwell
[i] David Moss, “Hans Urs Von Balthasar: Beginning with Beauty”, in David Horrell et all., Ecological Hermeneutics (London: T & T Clark, 2010), 202. In case you’re curious, here’s the passage by Hans Urs von Balthasar (a contemporary Swiss theologian) that inspired Moss: “the world, formerly penetrated by God’s light, now becomes but an appearance and a dream – the Romantic vision – and soon thereafter nothing but music. But where the cloud disperses, naked matter remains as an indigestible symbol of fear and anguish. Since nothing else remains, and yet something must be embraced, twentieth-century man is urged to enter this impossible marriage with matter, a union which finally spoils all man’s taste for love. But man cannot bear to live with the object of his impotence, that which remains permanently unmastered. He must either deny or conceal it in the silence of death.” (Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Volume I, (1982) 18-19)
What use is GIS for the humanities and social sciences?
As I’ve mentioned in a previous post about my favourite GIS tool QGIS, geospatial software tends to be used in a rather narrow subset of academic research, i.e. mostly environmental scientists and geologists. The reasons for interest there are somewhat obvious, I think, but this is not as much the case for the humanities and social sciences. I was recently having a conversation with a colleague who asked me why maps might be part of my research toolkit and this got me to thinking. There are some good reasons for researchers to be suspicious of cartography – particularly inasmuch as the “gaze” from above can tend to lend a sense of “mastery” and unwarranted epistemological confidence. James C. Scott conveys this powerfully in his book Seeing Like a State.
However, with a bit of humility in hand, geospatial data can be a terrific tool for learning and teaching. Continue reading
Teaching with Blogs
Between 2010-2012 I worked with two other colleagues in Divinity to integrate student writing with blogs into one of our courses. We were able to devote some focussed attention to the relative merits and demerits of using blogs in teaching thanks to some funding from the Principal’s Teaching Award Scheme here at the University of Edinburgh (I’d encourage colleagues to apply as it’s a great way to secure resources to explore tech in pedagogical context and PTAS is great about providing avenues for dissemination). If you’d to read a bit more about it, we’ve written up some of our results which were published in 2012 which you can read here. Looking back on the experience of working with this technology in a teaching context over three successive teaching years I have to say that the use of blogging by students is not automatically successful, nor does it necessarily improve the learning experience. An instructor has to be careful about integrating the technology into a learning context which suits its contours as a form of media and a process of content generation. Continue reading