Ross TenEyck's Journal

It's time to once again check in on those wacky Anglicans.

You may remember that recent events of note included the release of an updated draft of the proposed Anglican Covenant, and the disassembly of same by the Anglican Consultative Council. Another event which I failed to blog about was that the "Anglican Church in North America," or ACNA, met and formally adopted its constitution and canons a couple of weeks ago. ACNA is the breakaway church formed by disaffected Episcopalians, along with some of the older splinters like the Reformed Episcopal Church.

But right now, attention is on General Convention. The Episcopal Church of the United States is governed by a bicameral legislative body that meets once every three years, and this is it. The two houses are the House of Bishops, made up of (surprise!) bishops, and the House of Deputies, made up of lay people, priests, and deacons elected as delegates from each diocese. (If this structure sounds oddly familiar, it's because many of the people setting up the Episcopal Church governance were the same people who drafted the U.S. Constitution.)

General Convention is meeting in Anaheim from July 8th-17th this year, so things are currently in full swing. Hot topics include revisiting the quasi-moratorium we put on electing openly gay bishops in GC06, and whether or not to authorize official rites for blessing same-sex unions. Also, to a lesser extent, the fact that our budget is hurting just like everyone else's right now.

Back in this post, I discussed a popular political taxonomy for understanding the various Anglican factions. Using that terminology, the big difference between this General Convention and the previous one, three years ago, is that most of the "FedCons" have left -- they went into ACNA. This leaves us with only three of the four quadrants represented at this Convention -- the ComCons, and both flavors of the liberal side.

Pre-convention speculation was that this might play out in a couple of ways: either the liberals would unite and drive everything before them, or the ComLibs would find themselves in an uneasy alliance with the ComCons trying to keep the FedLibs from going too fast. Because, of course, we still have our relationship to the wider Anglican Communion to consider, and officially that relationship is predicated on our fairly tenuous compliance with something vaguely resembling what the Windsor Report asked for. If this GC rescinds B033 (the "please don't elect gay bishops" resolution from GC06) and/or authorizes rites for same-sex blessings, then even that tenuous compliance goes out the window.

What would happen then is an open question. On the international stage, the FedCons have not left the building. They do seem to be gradually adopting a stance of more or less ignoring the Instruments of the Communion -- the Ugandan Primate, for instance, simply didn't bother to show up to the most recent ACC meeting -- but if they saw the opportunity to argue that the Episcopal Church should be out and ACNA should be in, based on our flagrant non-Windsor-ish behavior, they might do that.

In the meantime, early reports suggest that there's some tension developing between the House of Deputies and the House of Bishops. The HOD seems to be dominated by FedLibs, who want to push boldly ahead with the liberal agenda. The HOB seems to be taking a more cautious, ComLib-like approach -- on the whole they do want to move ahead, but not so quickly and without openly discarding the Windsor moratoria.

In part this may be because the bishops were at Lambeth last summer and got to meet with other bishops from around the world and get a broader perspective. Whatever the reason, it looks all but guaranteed that B033 will be overturned by the House of Deputies; but whether the House of Bishops will concur is not yet clear.

Incidentally, this is something that causes confusion in many other parts of the Communion: they don't understand why our bishops can't simply issue decrees and expect everyone else to fall in line. Then we explain that the Episcopal Church, despite the name, is not structured that way, and then as often as not they come back and point that out as a flaw in our polity.

But be that as it may, the words are still flying thick and fast at General Convention, and I expect the drama to continue. When the Convention wraps up, I'll post a summary of what ended up happening.

In the meantime, here is Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams' meditation on what it means to be a church. The Archbishop is a guest at this Convention, and no doubt getting an earful from all sides.

...is a number I would like to bring up at this juncture.

If past experience is a guide, the artillery barrage will continue until sometime around three in the freakin' morning.

Why, yes, the fourth does bring out my inner curmudgeon; why do you ask?

Over on neko_san's journal, there's a meme with the rules:

Reply to this meme by yelling 'Words!' and I will give you five words that remind me of you. Then post them in your LJ and explain what they mean to you.

...only she doesn't want to have to think of five words that remind her of people, and I don't blame her one bit.

But, I thought, it could be amusing to see what people do with random words. So here's the mutated meme:

Reply to this meme by yelling "Words!" (Or, really, any way you like.) I'll give you five randomly-generated words, and you post them in your LJ and do whatever you feel like with them.

(For the record, I grabbed a copy of /usr/dict/words off a Unix box, and I'm using PowerShell to pick words randomly from it. Meme propagators may use whatever method of randomly generating words they feel like.)

To kick things off, here are my five random words:

melancholy
fudge
Valhalla
centric
granary

Melancholy is an oddly pretty word; to me, it always has the connotation, "I'm depressed, but in a sort of poetic way rather than seriously." It also reminds me of an anime series I watched just recently, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, which was pretty entertaining.

Fudge is yummy. There's a place on I-5 somewhere between LA and Sacramento that makes really good fudge. Or made; I have not, thank goodness, driven that road in years. I think it was called something about apricots. The place, not the fudge.

Valhalla, a.k.a. "heaven for jocks." Never sounded that appealing to me, plus I'm not particularly eager to die in battle.

Centric I rarely see as a standalone word (as opposed to a word component, e.g. concentric.) But my dictionary says it is one, with a number of specialized meanings, such as, "microbiology of radically symmetrical diatoms: describes diatoms which are radially symmetrical." So yeah.

Granary. It's probably the influence of too much Mythbusters, not to mention certain activities in college that shall remain discreetly undescribed, but honestly the first thing that comes to mind in relation to this word is "granary explosion." (Note to Homeland Security: Hi! Also: just kidding.) (Note to everyone else: ignore previous note.)

I liked this well enough. This is one of those movies that is pretty much exactly what the trailers say it is. For that matter, it's one of those sequels where they do the whole first movie over again, only bigger and louder. So if you liked the first one, or if the trailers left you thinking, "Hey, that could be fun," then you should see this. If not... then, well, not.

But I will say this: if you were a foolish or optimistic person, then you might imagine that a movie that is 90% robots would offer a somewhat reduced scope for jokes about flatulence, incontinence, and genitalia. If so, then you would be grossly underestimating the powers of Michael Bay.

Buffy meets what's-his-name, the sparkly git from Twilight.





The original is here in case the embedding doesn't work.

I realized that it's been a while since I posted about what's going on. So here are some things that have happened.

The quarter is over! I wrote my last paper and had my last class a week ago Monday. And now that I come to think of it, grades should be up now, so... <checks SU web site> yup, those are some grades, all right.

The internship is officially official! I turned in the paperwork and the person who has to approve it has done so. So that's all set and I'll begin at the cathedral in September. Although I'm thinking I should go there once or twice over the summer and sit in on the whole set of Sunday services, just to get a sense for what they're like.

My house is clean! Immediately upon school being done, I got to dive into a round of housecleaning that I've only been putting off for mumblemumble months. The reason I finally got off my duff to do it was that...

My sister and her family came to visit! That would be linda_marus, her husband John, and their four-year-old son Rick. They arrived Monday, stayed the night, and drove Oregon-wards on Tuesday. Rick was somewhat awed when I showed him some of my swords, but he was really, really into the toy lightsabers. So much so that he wanted to play lightsabers pretty much non-stop the entire time they were here, so that part kind of backfired on ol' Uncle Ross there. A good, albeit brief, visit.

The weekend is full of gaming! Saturday is our regular monthly game night; and Sunday some of us are going to play Arkham Horror. The fact that it will be the solstice is surely not ominous in any way.

All of which together means that my summer can now be said to have begun. At some point I should make a list of all the things I kept thinking throughout the year, "I can do that over the summer, when I have more time." Note that I say, "Make a list," rather than "Diligently accomplish all the things on the list." Sloth is one of the features of a good summer.

On which note... back to work!

I finished my last paper for this quarter today, so after tomorrow's class the school year will officially be put to bed. Finally, I will have free time to... frantically clean house for when my sister and her family come to visit.

Anyway, in the fall I'm taking a course called "Theology of Pastoral Leadership," which requires you to hook yourself up with an internship somewhere doing, well, pastoral leadership. Most of the people who are on ordination track use the field placement that most denominations require as their internship; but since I'm not on ordination track I have fairly free rein.

After talking to various people around the diocese, I will be interning at Saint Mark's Cathedral next year under the liturgist. Partly I'll be her assistant and gopher, but there's also some ongoing liturgical work being done with the cathedral services, and I'll be heavily involved with that.

I'm excited about this. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's right up my alley so it should be fun.

The only downside is that it will mean being away from St. Andrew's for most of six or seven months, since I will perforce be at the cathedral on Sundays. That also means I won't be able to teach Sunday School, which I really enjoy. But, it's only for a few months, then I'll be back; and in the meantime -- cool liturgy stuff.

I have to say that the recent Prius ads are kinda squicking me out. When the grass and trees were made of people, that was kind of clever; but for some reason when the water, clouds, and sun were also made of people that crossed a line.

At E3 Microsoft unveiled "Project Natal" (pronounced "nuh-TAL," because it sounds fancier that way) which is a way of making people look even sillier while playing games than they already do. It's a controller for the Xbox that's basically a camera; it watches the movements of your face and body and interprets them as controls. So clearly the biggest benefit of this will be the hilarity of watching people flail their arms and legs at their TVs, kind of like the Wii only more so.

But also at E3, Peter "Fable" Molyneux showed a video of something called "Milo" which if it were real and not smoke and mirrors would mean that we had real Turing-passing AI running on an Xbox. One might feel justified in raising a skeptical eyebrow at that, until one remembers that it's Peter Molyneux and therefore guaranteed to be smoke and mirrors.

But setting that aside, one aspect of the Milo demo was pointing out that it would interpret the player's facial expressions and respond appropriately to them. Now this is exactly the kind of thing that Microsoft Research loves to do, so I'm quite confident that there really is expression-recognizing software being developed and that in due time we'll see a variety of games and social-networking apps running on the Xbox that incorporate it.

Allow me to digress for a moment. Cast your mind back, far back into the mists of time, to the early 2000s. Remember how everyone had PDAs, and the typical way of entering data into the PDA was to scribble on it with a stylus? Remember Graffiti? All the PDAs had handwriting recognition software, and in fact it wasn't bad and got steadily better over time... but nevertheless it turned out to be a lot easier to train people to make their handwriting easier to recognize, rather than to get the software really good at figuring out normal handwriting. So the devices trained their users, via positive feedback (i.e., successfully entering data) to make their handwriting more stylized and more recognizable. And, at least if the people I know are any indication, many of them found Graffiti-style slipping into their regular handwriting.

Well, plus ça change and all that, and I think you see where I'm going with this. Software that recognizes and interprets facial expressions is inevitably going to train its users to make their expressions more recognizable, which will mean bigger, broader, and more stylized. We're going to raise a generation of people conditioned to be, when you get right down to it, mimes. And just as there are people who can't write anything without reflexively inserting emoticons after every phrase, expression-recognizing voice chat programs are going to produce people who will be compelled to punctuate every sentence with a grotesque facial distortion that's meant to be a smiley face.

What a brave new world it will be! I'm already limbering up my cane-shaking arm in readiness.

[Edited to fix egregious misspelling. Oops.]

"After you have crushed your enemies isn't it more of a scraping action than a driving action?"

From galbinus_caeli

So, Up.

It's currently polling at 98% at Rotten Tomatoes, so this is clearly not a bad movie. Personally I think I would rate it as fair-to-middling Pixar, which still makes it a pretty good flick by normal standards.

The movie does a lot of things really well, starting with the opening montage which I think may be the best part of the whole thing. The flying house scenes -- everyone has seen the trailers, right? -- are gorgeous, the story is a lot deeper than it looks at first glance (and it does some interesting things; keep on eye on when the house is liberating and when it's a burden) and the two main characters play off each other really well.

And yet... somehow it didn't quite click for me in that way that would push it from a good movie to a great one. The elements are all there, and they work, but the whole is just a hair off in a way I can't quite describe yet.

Ah, well; I quibble. Pixar has spoiled me. By any measure this is still a good movie, and you should see it.

So the other night Disney channel aired their 2008 straight-to-video CGI movie Tinkerbell.

Now, it is true that I watch a lot more kids' programming than a 40-year-old guy should probably be comfortable admitting, but what the heck, I enjoy it. Nevertheless Tinkerbell would not have been on my radar had not one of my friends, who has a daughter who is squarely in the Disney demographic, told me that she actually liked it. Her description intrigued me enough that I decided to see what it was about.

What it's really about is a new line of "Disney Fairies" marketing, but set that aside for the moment. Fairies, it seems, come in a variety of "talents" -- water talent, light talent, nature talent, etc., each with their own job to do. Tinkerbell is a "tinker talent" fairy; i.e., she builds things. But some of the other fairies make fun of her because she's "just" a tinker fairy, and so she decides that she's going to learn to do something else.

From that point on, the plot is subtle and filled with nuance by the numbers: Tinkerbell fails comically at all the other jobs, but then a crisis arises (the fairies might have to cancel Spring) and Tinkerbell has to save the day by using her tinker talents. Be true to yourself, yay.

But here's the point my friend likes, and about which after seeing the movie I agree with her: the message of the movie is that if you're a girl, and you would like to be an engineer, and other kids make fun of you for that, then #*&$ them; go ahead and be an engineer. Or, to paraphrase the movie more succinctly: girl geeks rule.

And I can approve of that.


Also, Loreena McKennitt is the narrator, Anjelica Huston is the voice of the fairy queen, and Máiréad Nesbitt played celtic violin on the soundtrack. So that's cool too.

As those of you who know me are aware, my attitude towards yard care can most favorably be described as "cheerful neglect," and less charitably as "whatever." I know there are people who genuinely enjoy getting out in their yard and weeding, pruning, cultivating, et cetera and so on; but I am not one of their number. I enjoy having a yard, but I do not care for doing work on it. In fact, I rather cordially detest yard work. Pretty much all I can roust myself to do is to mow the front yard every once in a while, and prune back those bushes that are most egregiously encroaching on space I need to walk on.

As it happens I actually prefer a fairly lush and overgrown look to my yard; which is fortunate for me, because it's what this Darwinian approach seems to produce.

( In fact, sometimes I think it doesn't look half-bad... )

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Remember the fallen.

Dollhouse has been renewed for a second season.

I thought that the last few episodes picked things up a bit, so I'm actually looking forward to seeing more.

And I will say that the Alan Tudyk thing genuinely caught me off guard. I was not expecting that.

The Anglican Consultative Council met in Jamaica last week, and among other things considered the most recent draft of the proposed Anglican Covenant.

The ACC is a body composed of bishops, priests, and lay members from the various provinces of the Anglican Communion, and is thus the only one of the four Instruments of Communion that has members who are not bishops. Its designated role is to "facilitate the co-operative work of the member churches of the Anglican Communion."

You may recall that this most recent draft, dubbed the Ridley Cambridge draft, is the product of the Covenant Design Group (CDG) and incorporates extensive feedback from the provinces and from last summer's Lambeth conference. The CDG suggested that the draft covenant be submitted to the ACC meeting for a straight up-or-down vote and submission to the provinces for them to sign on or not.

Expecting a group of Anglicans to give a straight up-or-down vote on any text was a vain hope, of course, and so when the ACC took up the matter of the covenant draft last Friday there were immediately resolutions for tinkering with it. What happened next is not entirely clear -- according to most of the observers, the meeting quickly descended into procedural confusion, with multiple resolutions being debated at the same time and some delegates not entirely sure what was being voted on at any given moment. When the dust settled, the meeting discovered that it had done the following:

• Thanked the CDG for their "faithfulness and responsiveness"


• Asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to "appoint a small working group to consider and consult with the Provinces on Section 4 and its possible revision" and report back to the next meeting of the Standing Committee, which will vote on the revision


• Asked the Secretary General, after this has been done, to "send the revised Ridley Cambridge Text, at that time, only to the member Churches of the Anglican Consultative Council for consideration and decision on acceptance or adoption by them"

Section 4 of the Ridley Cambridge draft is the disciplinary section, although the draft delicately does not refer to it that way (it calls it, "Our Covenanted Life Together"); but it's the one that talks about how provinces that tick off the rest of the Communion can be admonished.

Note that this section was sent for revision not to the CDG, but to some as-yet-unformed "small working group."

Another thing worth noting is that if and when a complete covenant text is approved by the Standing Committee, it will be sent "only to the member Churches of the Anglican Consultative Council" (emphasis added) for adoption. This is significant because the covenant draft text itself was deliberately vague on what kind of entity could sign on to it -- whether, for instance, an individual diocese could sign on if its parent province did not; or whether wanna-be Anglican entities like the splinter Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) could sign on. The ACC says: no. Only provinces may adopt the covenant, and only those provinces that are already official members of the Anglican Communion will be asked to do so. On the whole this is a blow to the conservatives, some of whom had visions of the Episcopal Church falling out of the communion (either by not signing the covenant in the first place, or by signing it and then being kicked out by the disciplinary process) whilst they, the conservatives, stayed in by virtue of having signed the covenant independently of the Episcopal Church.

But for the most part, the conservatives are reading this as the death of the covenant idea -- they have no confidence that anything resembling what they wanted will come out of this "small working group" and the Standing Committee. Opinion on whether this is a good thing is divided; some conservatives, the ones who never liked the covenant plan in the first place, are seeing this as good riddance to bad rubbish and hoping that groups like the Global South-led GAFCON will from now on just ignore the structures of the Anglican Communion, tainted as they are by heresy and liberalism. Others, the ones who saw the covenant as the sole hope of keeping the Anglican Communion together in anything like its current form, are naturally disappointed and a little bitter about it (see, for example, here.) Both groups are united in condemning the parliamentary chaos (some say deliberately manipulative obfuscation) under which these resolution were passed.

So whence now? The Archbishop of Canterbury is still committed to some kind of covenant, so it seems likely that there will indeed be a small working group and that it will report some kind of revision of section 4 to the Standing Committee, and that revised draft will indeed be sent around to the provinces. But it means more delay and more debate, and parts of the Communion -- for instance, the formerly-mentioned GAFCON -- are getting increasingly impatient with delay and debate. Many GAFCON bishops did not attend Lambeth out of principle; and the Primate of Uganda skipped the ACC meeting this time around because of a "schedule conflict" -- and I'm sure he was sincere, but it means that he considered a meeting of one of the Instruments of Unity of the Anglican Communion to be less important than the other things on his calendar.

I think this is likely to be the shape of the (as I see it, now-inevitable barring divine intervention) schism in the Anglican Communion -- no formal declaration of poxes on our houses, no official anathemas; just a large number (let's be honest: the majority of the members of the Communion) simply excusing themselves out of the Communion as it exists now.

During the Civil War, the Episcopal bishops of the southern states did not show up at General Convention. The convention simply noted them as absent, and after the war was over the southern bishops came back and that was that. (Well, there may have been pointed words in the hallways; but officially, at least, that was that.) In this case, though, I don't see the conservatives coming back to their empty seats any time soon.

Yeah, that was pretty good.

Another sermon; this one was given this last Tuesday at a Eucharist service at Seattle University. The text was the "Jesus is the good shepherd" passage from the Gospel of John.

I think it suffered a bit from me having papers due Monday and Tuesday. Which I knew when I volunteered to do the sermon, but I optimistically figured it wouldn't be a big deal. It did work out in the end, but I think this could have used about one more day to bake.

http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~teneyck/liturgy/shepherd.html

I saw two movies this week: Hannah Montana: The Movie and X-Men Origins: Wolverine. As far as I'm concerned, this makes me a well-rounded individual.

Both movies are pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. (I should note that some people consider linking to TV Tropes a hostile act. If you are one of them, you probably shouldn't have clicked on that link just there and wasted six hours.) Hannah Montana: The Movie is just like the TV show, only longer and with a bigger budget. X-Men Origins: Wolverine tells us the origin of Wolverine, and then dutifully puts all the pieces in the places where we know they have to be for the first three movies. Albeit not without some strain on the continuity, rather like the last twenty minutes of Revenge of the Sith.

Both movies (I'm determined to drag this parallel thing out as long as I can) do pretty well at the core thing their intended audience is going to the movie for. Miley Cyrus is cute and sings a lot of songs; Wolverine and various other mutants are bad-ass and perform visually spectacular feats.

Both movies are also pretty thin on anything else other than their core thing, though. It's perfectly possible to do a light-hearted coming-of-age-with-music-in or rock-'em-sock-'em superhero flick and also have some depth and substance to it, but these are not those movies. They are what the trailers say they are, and that's pretty much all that they are.

That being said, I enjoyed them both tolerably well.



Also, I'm officially starting the rumor now: Miley Cyrus as X-23. Eh? Eh? Remember, you heard it here first.