2008-07-13

John 3:17 or The Golden Middle Ground Between Grace and Sanctification?

There is a couple of things, which make for me sense together (and I am not sure, of course, whether they will make sense to you as well), and which I would like to record here.

“For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved.” (J. 3:17) In some aspects and for some people (like me) and in certain moments, this is even more important than the previous verse, and yet it is quite rarely mentioned in the Church. Maybe because it so clear, that nobody gets much fame to explain (and there is not much to explain here?). For all of us, who live with the idea of God-policeman, following our doings to punish severely any small misstep, this is the good news.

There is quite certainly something significantly wrong about preaching, that we always quote only John 3:16and we don’t continue one verse further. As if we are still more interested in what’s there in gospel for me, and we don’t understand, that we are not the central figures in whole Bible. Not that there wouldn’t be anything there for us, but … that’s another long discussion I would like to have with Dave.

2008-07-10T10:00:00

On the Catholic Charismatic Conference in Brno

Sitting on the coference and listening to P. Slavík about the Jesus and Samaritan woman ( John 4:1-26). First of course, about getting water out of the old cisterns just so that we don't have to go to the real source of the living water, which is Jesus Christ himself. That's kind of old news (although more practice in this arena is never enough). There is also an interesting arch from “You Jew …”, through “are you bigger than our father Jacob?” and “I see that you are a prophet.” to “… isn't he a Messiah?”.

What's more interseting. “Come, see a man, which told me all things that ever I did: is not this the Christ?” (J. 4:29) He came and told her all she ever did. Was he first? Didn't she hear many times from other people in the village what she did with her five husbands (or whatever they were to her, maybe even customers)? Didn't she hear it so many times that she was coming for water in the heat of high noon just to avoid community of other people? Yet, suddenly she was able to hear what she did. The point for me is that people are not afraid to hear what bad things they did in their life (or what bad they do just now). People long to hear it, when it is covered with love, when the point is to bring living water to a thirsty soul, not condemnation and self-justification to the speaker.

Another lecture of P. Tomáš Holub, the former army chaplain, on the defensive strategies we apply to avoid confession of our sins. Either we are rationalizing our sin (defensive strategies), or falling into depression and self-molestation to avoid confession of sins (traps) and to avoid the gift (sacrament) of confession.

There are not only defensive strategies to avoid confession of sins, but also traps which destroy us.

2008-01-19T23:59:52

Bug triaging and Ubuntu

Somehow bug triaging is now all the rage. Which is so cool!!! I first met some interesting sounds in the Fedoralang (of course). After writing in the November and December the internal policy for the Red Hat desktop team (there is a slightly lobotomized version available), which suddenly became interesting when bug triaging thread happened on fedora-advirosry-board (with subsequent related thread on closing old bugs, and prequel about closing old bugs). Then it went really wild in the long thread on fedora-devel (which unforunately got sunk into an idiotical discussion whether the bug should be called in its initial state UNCONFIRMED or NEW; oh well). It seems that my input (on the fedora-devel thread as well as in the subsequent discussion on #fedora-qaIRC channel) was taken kindly and so I was very glad that we have now something which looks like a draft of the Fedora bug triaging policy. Now we need just some more volunteer bug triagers! (but even them seem jumping out of the nowhere; cool!!!).

And now there is another fedora thread which is originally an reaction to the kind of hopeless rant about the depressing state of bug triaging in the Ubuntu land. I totally don't want to argue against Ubuntu, but I am still getting to the same question “Why?". While I was still using Debian (testing in that moment was etch, which is what I used) the Ubuntu came and everybody who wants to be hip was jumping to it. But even some people whom I respect jumped the fence and went Ubuntu from Debian (although I couldn't find any serious reason, than wish to install new distro in non-free time; and he doesn't seem to be that happy lately). I heard that the most important advantage of Ubuntu (or more relevant to me, Kubuntu) was that it was supposed to be easier to install – “Works out of the box”(TM). Well, my Debian was in that time working as well – I cannot say that it was working out of the box exactly as I would like it to work, but I have already went through all the configuration etc. and now it was working. Why should I switch to something which looked like a poor copy of Debian? I haven't felt like Debian/testing was that far from the bleeding edge, or at least that it was much less bleeding than I was afraid some upgrades to Ubuntu were (like beta versions of KOffice in that moment) too bleeding to my taste.

http://osnews.com/comments/19179 – considering the site quite reasonable, and pointing towards my thoughts.

Ubuntu – too small (comparing to Debian) without fanboys, too understaffed (comparing to Red Hat/SuSE), and without obvious raison d'etre (why not Debian/testing).

http://www.fabianrodriguez.com/blog/archives/2008/01/18/the-bug-reporting-culture-10-things-to-avoid-10-things-you-must-do/ – quite nice bug reporting HOWTO, but missing the point of the Ubuntu problems.

2007-12-20T05:47:43

But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves

While reading “Intercessory prayer” by Dutch Sheet I was greatly reminded how much I tend to be hearer of a word and not doer. Probably because of my dark past as a scholar-to-be, it seems to me much more natural to study things than actually do them. Which includes, of course, more studying about intercessory prayer than actually praying. So, I begun (at 4AM–why, oh why, all my revelations come in so crazy hours?) to pray.

And of course, this is also about blogging. How I was developing my own journaling system (based on Docbook; never finished) instead of actual journaling, although I know that it is pretty important for me. So, although I have my own feelings about Russian ownership of Livejournal (I know Tolkien was strongly against explaining The Lord of the Rings as an allegory of the current situation, but I always think about Russia when reading about the Land of Mordor–“There is an evil, which won't be killed forever, just suppressed for a while.”), I have decided that I will just sit down and write my current thoughts here, rather than waiting for something else to happen.

2007-12-30T14:52:23

Romans 6:11, Watchman Nee, new life, and sanctification

While reading Leanne Payne's “Restoring of Christians Soul” I found her complaining about oversimplified understanding of conversion. (Paraphrasing based on the Czech translation) “They jumped from the initial conversion straight to the matters of power.” And while reading that I think I saw a path towards the solution of my long-time problem with the interpretation of Romans 6:11 by Watchman Nee's “Normal Christian Life”. Not that he would be missing the point of sanctification, but that my understanding of him was oversimplified.

2007-04-23

Hurt nation

It is late in the night, I should really sleep, but I feel burdened by not writing these bunch of thoughts for all this time (more than a month?) that I am thinking about them. So, Lord, please, keep me focused, so that I can go to my bed soon.

I begun to think about this stuff couple of weeks (months?) ago, when I felt strongly agitated by the John's sermon where he labeled the Czech nation as nation under the curse of the spirit of humanism. I have no doubts that he is very sincere about this, but in that moment I felt like he was parroting thoughts preached to me many times by other Czech charismatic preachers (especially, Dan Drápal, of course), thoughts which I never understood and (therefore?) never liked. What does “humanism” mean in this context? Of course, I get textbook answer, that it is belief putting a human as a measure of all things, but what does it mean exactly? And especially, how is such humanism specific for understanding of the Czech nation? Is the Czech humanism somehow different from the humanism of other European nations? And how is such humanism specific from the point of view of any other atheism–after all, an atheist cannot use anything else than humans as goal and measure of his life?

Moreover, and it may totally be just a reflection of my own attitudes so no blaming of anybody, I always felt somehow distant attitude of these preachers towards “humanist them ” contrary to the righteous us . Somehow, like if all those preachers (and I am making an exception for John in this) were somehow able to jump out of being Czechs themselves.

Even worse, this idea of Czech humanism felt to me like being close to other “instant microwaveable” solutions. ^[1]Now, I am not saying that nothing which could be called with a lot of tendency for Hollywood-style names “territorial spirit” doesn’t exist, but dealing with it requires certainly much more than shallow label on the top of it, and one shouting of excorcism from the stage of some conference.

So, what I think about regional spirits in the area of the Czech republic? wounded hearts, lack of authority, fear of power, lost hope, hobbityism (don’t try anything bigger, keep it down, so no-one will notice you). And excorcism should consist mainly from long-term work on eliminating these traits from our behavior one bad habit at the time.

2007-04-15

Jane Eyre or Much more literature than I expected

I have just finished (at almost one o'clock in the morning) reading of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre and I was surprised by it. It was much more literature than I expected. I thought that it is somehow similar to Jane Austen's books–quite nice, but after all, stuff for romantic comedy with Hugh Grant as main star, nothing too serious. Of course, Jane Eyre is also a romantic love-story, even more so than Jane Austen's novels–after all it could be summoned in the popular sentence, “How poor orphan came to her Happiness through surprising marriage.” (considered to be an universal formula for women's novels of the early twentieth century in the Czechoslovakia). However, I believe there is more to that novel than just a romantic love-story (and no, I don’t care, that Jane become wealthy by the heritage of wealthy Deus ex machina).

First of all I was quite touched by the non-simplicity of some heroes of the story and Brontë's non-triviality in their design. Comparing to Mr. Collins, who is obviously just a tool to play his role and then be gone, there is much more complexity in both positive and negative persons in this novel. There is no mistake that St. John is a very real person, and although he is (rightfully) rejected by Jane as her husband, he is not scorned or made into pitiful funny bafoon of the Mr. Collins’s fate. He is truly a great man, who will do great things in his life (I am afraid more for the British Empire, than for Christ; no, that’s too harsh). And yes, of course, I was quite touched by him, because he in so many ways resembles my father (no, he is not so stone-like, and he has much appreciation for the life’s little pieces of joy). However, that’s true in the other directions as well–Brontë never misses to emphasize that Jane is not particulary pretty woman and Mr. Rochester is actually made into pretty ugly guy with rather harsh character, and after all, the happy-end of the novel includes the main lover being crippled and one-sighted (one eye just partially recovered, because even Brontë probably couldn’t get over the idea of the main lover being crippled and totally blind).

Of course, I appreciated as well, that Brontë is obviously quite religious lady and she has no condemnation for the faith and religion. And even though she clearly didn’t like Calvinism (in the fanatical side of St. John), her most purely positive hero of the book (Helen Burns) is clearly Presbyterian (or something close to it). Again, things are not so clearly delineated as expected.

Another thing which is different than I’ve expected (and probably that’s my lack of knowledge about the Victorian literature) is quite feministic (considering the book was first published in 1847) attitude towards male-female relations. By the all rules of the romantic lovel-story, Jane should just decide that “love justifies everything” and live happily everafter with Mr. Rochester in Marseille (his wife could conveniently die soon thereafter), but she really leaves him. She actually is wealthy lady, who could build her own house opposite to Mr. Rochester's one, etc.

This book really contains more than meets the eye.

2006-12-04

Thoughts in the night in Brno

The title is (as usual) totally meaningless, just that I am sitting in the hotel room in Brno, while being on the orientation training for Red Hat and I am thinking about what to write here.

Long time went away since I wrote the previous paragraph, but now its existence comes handy, so I will totally shamelessly misuse it for my purposes.

These are the thoughts which went to me when I was in Brno for my official interview with Red Hat and which then continued in the following weeks when I begun to work for them. Of course my expectations from Brno were largely influenced by the experience of my father’s ten years in Brno. However, after ten years spent in the Boston area (and a year in San Francisco, many years before that), outside of Prague, I could see that there is a lot of life even in the areas which are not that beautiful as Prague and even that there are more important things in life then living in the most beautiful city in the world (which among other cities certainly includes Prague, but I just couldn’t include Boston there). I found out that working the job I like, having friends, etc. is actually much more important than living in Prague. I know that for the most of you this conclusion seems to be pretty banal, but flip-side of living in Prague, is that one gets really hooked on its beauty and is not able to imagine life behind its borders. So I believe I was coming into Brno with at least slightly more open eyes than could be expected given my genealogy.

I was thinking then also about my accountability interviews with Chi-Ray Chien. One of the most important discoveries in my first years of the Living Waters was to really accept in the depths of my heart, that I am one of the 250,000 of students in the Boston area and not much more else. And that it is totally OK to be like that. That I don’t have to be (and I don’t have to pretend to be) the most exceptional of all scholars who were walking the face of the Earth. If I will be the best Matěj Cepl I manage to be and if I stay focused on this goal, then everything is all right.

After some thinking about what is interesting in Brno and what not, I saw very clearly that it is actually absolutely and totally the same as me with being just one of many many students in the Boston. If the citizens of Brno (and I think, it relates more to the affluent and influential members of the Brno community–who made my father crazy just when he hears the sound of the name of the city), so if the citizens of Brno humbly accept in their hearts the fact, that Brno is one of many (I don’t know, fifty?) half-million cities in the Europe and nothing more, than they could suddenly taste freedom in this attitude. And of course, it doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t use all their effort to be the best Brno they manage to be. It doesn’t mean that I would have anything against ``Husa na provázku'' or abundant supply of culture in Brno per se. Of course, the question arises who is paying for it and whether it is not paid from the state money which could be used better in something else than in paying oversupply of theaters, but that’s different question. When I am saying that they should accept the fact, that they are nothing more than one of many half-million cities in Europe, it means nothing about their effort to be the best half-million city in Europe (whatever it means).

And yet another thought came immediately after that. That we people of Prague are in the exactly same situation. Unless we accept the fact that we are one of many many million-plus cities in Europe, and nothing more, then we are same idiots we love to hate on people from Brno. Yeah, it happens, that it is probably one of the most beautiful cities architecturally in the world, but what does it mean for my life in Prague else then number of tourists who come here? Yes, I am living in the very center of Prague and working five minutes walk from home (so far, we will have to move soon), but what does it mean for things I found in Boston to be more important for life like my wife and children, my job, my culture, my church, my calling and ministry in life? Yes, I like it here (and there is nothing wrong with that), but necessary answer to the previous question is that nothing fundamental would change if I had all these things somewhere in the center of Africa.

2006-12-01

Stand in the breach

I wonder, whether Moses was not chosen just because he was willing to stand in the breach for his nation, for others.

Of course, the breach (Strong’s no. 06556 perets peh’-rets; dictionary shows how incredibly dynamic word it is–something about “breaking out”) is a great word for me (see Ez 22:30) and something which really makes me closer to what I feel to be my personal vocation. However, what is interesting on this verse is that Moses actually exemplifies what does it mean to stand in the breach. It is not about hopeless crying to the God–“Please, do not kill!”, but much more hopeful position, where we can trust in the God’s promises for the life of others or for our own life. And just for future reference–a list of all verses in the Bible with 06556: Genesis 38:29, Judges 21:15, II Samuel 5:20, 6:8, I Kings 11:27, I Chronicles 13:11, 14:11, Nehemiah 6:1, Job 16:14, 30:14, Psalms 106:23, 144:14, Isaiah 30:13, 58:12, Ezekiel 13:5, 22:30, Amos 4:3, 9:11.

The pope John Paul II. died today. What his dying shown for me again was a tremendous power of Strength in Weakness. His willingness to be powerless (while trying in vain to bless crowds with his “Urbi et orbi” blessing). And all the rest of his death and post-humous pompous celebrations were for me just sweet cherry on pie, but not the pie in itself.

2006-12-01

Dominus Jesus

When we were on the vacations of our church in Prague in the hotel owned by our denomination, one sister, who is a professor of medieval literature (and thus interested in M. John Hus & co.) mentioned in passing “that horrible letter Dominus Jesus”. I have heard about that letter before, but now my curiosity was ignited, so when we returned to Prague, I have found this declaration on the Vatican website and read it (or at least part IV., paragraphs 16 and 17, which I think constitute the most important part of the letter for me).

I have to admit that some parts of this reading caused the strongest attack on my hope of the Unity of the Church at all. All the time before, whenever I met a Roman-Catholic who undestood ecumenism solely as return of “separated brethern” to the arms of the Mother Roman-Catholic church, sole source of salvation (and I did couple of times), I believed that at least since the II. Vatican Council such belief is just a local closemindness and the official line of the Catholic church is much more open. I expected more of the ecumenism and longing for the unity of the Church, and I met many Catholics including some priests who supported such belief. First time in my life it occurred to me, that there is always the second possibility–that we were mistaken by our wishful thinking and that actually the Roman-Catholic church is still so stupidly closeminded as it was since at least XVI. century, that all the talks of the Council were just cosmetic changes of the finishing on the whole structure of the church, but that particularly in the area of relations with other Christian denominations not much has changed if anything at all.

2006-08-10

Depmod forever

Mental note to myself: whenever there are some problems with kernel modules, run depmod -afirst! Always!

2006-08-10

Stalled inovation

I am still thinking about scripts­how incredibly useful they are and how surprisingly little of them are in GUI-Linux world. Given the fact, that every Linux user (not talking about programmers) knows very well how scripting capabilities could be useful for everybody (not only for programmers), I would expect that every Linux application would be script-enabled sooner than application from any other environment. It is not so. From major applications, there is a long list of those which do not have scripting or the one they have is inferior. Even OpenOffice.org (which is probably the most advanced in this area) has scripts which are such mess, that even thousand-times cursed VBA is just a dream against it–talking to a scripting user about com.sun.star.style.CharacterProperties(and that is one of the shorter names) is just not good. And I am not even talking about most KDE applications (which I otherwise prefer)–they have either nothing or something terribly unusable (kate is going to get some reasonable scripting only in upcoming 3.5 version). And that’s even worse given the fact that underlying KDE technology has so excellent inter-application scripting technology.

Now, another sad story from the world of Linux. I was reading Tim Bray’s blog about expiration of his RDF challenge. I have tried to get bigger picture of what he is talking about, so I read also his introduction to RDF and I was struck as with a lighting–he is talking about my beloved pet, bibliography and sucking BibTeX! You see, I am becoming to be a social scientist and I used to be a lawyer. And in academic writing in both of these professions there is huge amount of references which needs to be quoted. So, for example my wife (who is a linguist–other heavily referencing area of science) switched immediately from Word after her first simple article written in LyX–convenience of having all bibliography material in one file is just so big, that the switch was just not question. So, it is obvious that having separate bibliography database and the referring document as such is The Right Thing™. However, then we get to the blue part of the story–almost only usable bibliography manager in the world of Linux (and in the Free software world itself) is [BibTeX].

http://hamish.blogs.com/mishmash/2004/01/bibliographic_r.html

2006-05-30

LyX, OpenOffice.org, structured authoring, and me

(This record is a slightly edited version of my message to lyx-users list. I would like to thank once more to the developers and all other participants on the list for their very civilized tone of the discussion.)

Sometimes around 1998+ I was working in law firm and was persuaded that Word is certainly not ideal, but probably the best what we can get and only occasionally I was dreaming about something better, which would be more helpful than just Word with its stupid styles (if you think, that Word style are best thing since sliced bread, or even better than that, then please define a style, which would have a first line intended except when it is a first paragraph after a heading style or list). Then I have learned more about HTML, structured authoring (separation of style from presentation etc.), XML, etc. and found out that (especially because I was moving out of legal field, so I did not need compatibility with the rest of the M$ world so much) what I really want is some tool which would enable me to focus on what I write and leave the presentation for sometimes later or to somebody else. After playing with some other stuff (namely lout and Amaya), I finally settled with LaTeX, mainly because of LyX (LyX supports partially Docbook/SGML, but many parts – including bibliography support – are missing), which allowed me to work on my stuff without being bothered about the underlying stuff and because truly good XML tools (Epic from ArborText) are terribly expensive and absolute overshoot for my needs (I do not want to maintain my thesis and personal letters in Oracle SQL database and paying $10k for that; thank you). Moreover, they usually do not run on Linux that well (or at all).

While working with LyX (currently I am working on my PhD thesis in sociology/criminology/law-and-society) I’ve got really addicted to BibTeX and nice support I get from LyX. Moreover, I love the simplicity of the environment. You know, writing scientific papers is actually all about sufficient number of characters put down on the paper – therefore, I am really not that interested in OLE, WordArt, included live spreadsheets, etc., but I need something where I could write a lot of text and my attention (not that strong in the first place) is not distracted by everything else (and the program is sufficiently fast in the first place). Moreover, it is possible to change a lot of the underlying programs to do more what could I do (so for example I am able to include export of Docbook/XML into LyX menus – actually it is just a small script which gets Docbook/SGML on input and then with sgml2xml utility creates Docbook/XML). Unfortunately, there is no way how to include support for some BibTeX-alike bibliographic system, so I am stuck.

While working with LyX I have unfortunately met some of its limitations and I am getting more and more frustrated, because I feel that there is actually so little what I really want (see below).

I have checked out what is actually available now in OOo and I was quite shocked, that the situation is actually much better than what I expected. Actually, I think, that in rudimentary (and not always useable) form most of the stuff I am interested is there. And what is more important, there is at least hope that most of my concerns will be addressed – either through huge crowd of programmers (I know that it is not ideal, but still there are more than six real programmers working on OOo, aren’t they?) or (and that is for me the value of my exercise with bibliography with Docbook) I can do actually a lot myself – either in StarBasic or with XSLT in export filters.

So what are my requirements?

Actually the last point illustrates some of my other frustration – it is painful to see how many projects from many different sides are for so long time really close my ideals and none of them really hits the bull’s eye. I am mostly working in sociology, so I really do not need that much advanced equations, complicated graphs, etc. and other complicated stuff which is usually associated with “document format for scholarly authoring” Probably the only four things I would need above HTML (which I consider to be minimal format for this purpose) is:

Some of these could be addressed with some simple namespaces over XHTML, but there is just no-one who would provide complete set of tools and GUI WYSIWYM environment for it. And it is frustrating to see how there are many programs which are darn close – Amaya is the most obvious example for many many years (ThotEditor seems to be failed attempt to do something similar for Docbook).

2006-05-26

Who am I?

OK, the perennial question of humanity – “Who am I?” was resolved. At least for me. According to The Simpsons Personality Test, I am Lisa. Yeah, she seemed to me kind of nice :-).

2006-05-09

Jesus is Magic

(I really don’t know anything about the movie, I just saw its poster in the window store and the title looks barely OK for what I want to write about.)

It is about magical thinking. One of the most interesting people I met in the last couple of months was Mario Bergner, episcopal priest whos ministry is in the inner healing. He had a talk to us about magical thinking and about persistence and staying in pain of unresolved suffering. He explained his thoughts on Romans 5:

The point of this is, how do we live with present suffering. And I am not talking about high-level stuff, like being in the concentration camp or things like that. No, he was talking about everyday suffering caused by unfulfilled desires and hopes–what is the God’s calling for my life, how to finish my PhD thesis, and so forth. We have two major bad ways how to deal with this issue. One is obvious and well known–just ignore or try to persuade the problem that it doesn’t exist. When it is possible, great! But most of the time, it is not possible. Or variant of the same, we can decide, that acutally we don’t care about the resolution of this problem that much–“whatever”. Unfortunately, the problem is real and so we cannot just avoid the resolution.

The other possible solution could be, what he calls “magical thinking”. The problem is very well known, but the pain of being in the unresolved situation is mitigated by the unfounded hope, that the solution will somehow “resolv itself”. A boy looking for accquintance with a girl, may just hope that somehow a girl will find him without any of his effort (and just to emphasize, I do not mean effort to find a girl by his own means; just an effort to live in the place, where God can bless him with her). Mario Bergner mentioned that he has a number of friends who are in their fourties coming through a mid-life crisis and dreaming about being a priests themselves. His answer is simple–“just go and apply for the study in seminary.” But that is for most people not enough. They want solution now and hopefully without any of their effort. So they don’t do anything and they get nothing.

However, this need to act on the basis of God’s calling for something, doesn’t mean legalism and dependency on our own effort. There is a third pitfall to avoid (mentioned by other of my pastor-friends). He called it “Christian unbelief in God”. The problem is that although most of the full and healthy solutions for these problems is in the God’s power only, and it cannot be replaced by our efforts, it looks plausible, that we could at least make our pain more bearable. Unfortuantely, it doesn’t work this way. Once we decide to resolve the pain and suffering on our own and “as if God was not alive”, we shut-down his ability to heal us. Moreover, practically, our own solution where we ourselves found today is absolutely from the situation we will find ourselves couple of months, or maybe a year or two. Therefore, the solutions we create today, may not be applicable or may be outright misleading us from the way the God has prepared for us in some time in the future.

You ask, my dear reader, why is this rant in the category research and not faith? I believe that this problem on the personal level can be very well transformed to the similar problem which plagues most of social sciences and political practice on the level of whole society. There is something in our environment, which is not what we like it to be–for example, people are killing each other and we want to persuade them not to do it. Or they have other people as slaves.

There are in my opinion many bad reactions to these realities. The most important problem with most of them is that we focus on this problem (I am now using thoughts of Dorothy Sayers in “ The Mind of the Maker”). And instead of really understanding of what’s going on we use any methods and tools to get rid of the presentation of the problem as fast and as easily as possible. And the problem is not presenting anymore in the appearance we defined as the problem, we claim that we have managed to resolve the underlying causes of the problem. So, when the fastest way how to eliminate slavery in the United States is to raise a very blood Civil War with subsequent long history of racial hatred and segregation, be it–Lincoln could claim that he had removed a problem of slavery (accepting for a sake of this example, that removal of slavery was among reasons for waging the war). And, to get finally to the topic of my research, when the murder rate of the Boston youth (or especially of the Boston youth) has decreased dramatically, everybody congratulated themselves how much they removed the problem of the crime wave.

My point is that all such “problems” are usually just very shallow presentation of the real problems in the structure of human society (or maybe they are not problems at all–if James Fox is right and crime rate in Boston could be largely predicted by the changes in demographic variables, then they are mostly natural events as hurricane waves; “hurricane prevention” anyone?). And if we wanted to help black Americans in slavery or another set of black Americans killing each other in our times, we need to get much deeper and develop much long-time oriented strategy and then persist to keep it running until real problems in the society are resolved, even when it could take fifty years of continuous effort (and spending of taxpayers money).

2006-05-09

Real self v. false self & symbolic interactionism

To know that all SI is just a game, because in reality we are not just who were made in the interactions. We don’t know any better how to describe our personality, but we know that there is something more. And we would love to know and we would love to see our own real image–which is God’s image.

2006-04-27

Technorati

Just that I would like to register this blog with Technorati and they want to see the link to my profile here.

And just for kicks–this is HTTP

2006-02-20

Danish “offensive” cartoons

I did not know what to think about the Danish cartoons much. First of all, when you look at them, it is really hard to be sure whether the author meant them to be offensive at all. Second, well of course, I am too much reader of The Voice of the Martyrs to take seriously Islamic complaints about how Christians are disrespectful to their faith. I really shouldn’t dig into the reports of VoM about situation of Christians (and especially new converts to Christianity) in Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, should I? However, nothing of that seemed interesting enough to be written down and I didn’t have a time and urge to research this thoroughly. Meanwhile, all what I wanted to say was written in much better way and with true understanding of what’s going on by HonestReporting.com. And, just one example– Tom Gross’ selection of Arab Cartoons.

However, I know that the reasons for many social actions do not lie in the rational causes, but in the symbolic struggle for status and support. So, it seems that Honest Reporting’s (which is really strange name) suggestion, that this case Islamic fundamentalist struggle to affirm their support lovely collaborated with their governments effort to find some other enemy than themselves. How lovely.

Thanks Mark for pointing me to the Honest Reporting site.

One off-topic comment. While looking at the Tom Gross’ website I found that it contains a lot of highly controversial and critical material. However, his articles on Roma sometimes get closer to the skin, than feels comfortable. I have never heard about Milena Hubschmannová, which is shame and I just like this picture.

I have decided to publish here the one picture–the most controversial one, not because I would like to offend muslims, but because I really believe that this picture is actually quite interesting and it can be interpreted in many other ways than just the one selected by protesting Moslems and almost all Western print.

2006-02-20

The Discovery of Discourse: The Heroic Struggle of the Boston Minorities to belong among “Us” and not “Them”

{abstract prepared for the Annual Meeting of the Law & Society Association}

The dramatic decrease in murder rate in the City of Boston in the late 1990s (so called “The Boston Miracle”) was explained by many researchers in many different ways and therefore seen as a result of many different actions of different actors. So, for example, Winship (2002) explained The Boston Miracle as result of the cooperation between The Ten Point Coalition (a coalition of local mostly Black churches) and the authorities of the City of Boston (esp. police, social and youth services), where Black ministers functioned as the mediating factor which provided an “umbrella of legitimacy” for BPD strategies, which could otherwise be understood as the use of excessive force against the minority community. At the same time the ministers provided valuable information for the police about the most troublemaking elements in the minority community. This story has now returned to the predominant position in the press and media, because of the 2004-05 rise of the murder rate again to the highest level in the ten years.

On the other hand, the project of police operation created by the team around the Harvard professors David Kennedy and Anthony Braga (Braga, Kennedy, 2001) was labelled by many others as the main cause of the successful crime prevention. And there are many other contenders (less influential and less visible ones) to claim the credit (for example, The Nation of Islam was credited by the local African-American community newspaper as the most influential factor in the decrease of crime). And of course, local politicians (whether African-American, Latino, or white) claimed their credit as well.

In view of the number and persuasiveness of different theories explaining The Boston Miracle, I do not want to add yet another all-explaining theory, because I think that the whole success of the Bostonian anti-crime policy of the late 1990s has multiple causes which mutually enforced each other and lead to the final success. On the other hand, I would like to suggest one more point of view on the whole history which could conveniently bind together many of these explanations. Symbolic interactionism (Blumer, 1969) explains the development of self-understanding as a by-product of the interaction between different actors and in the same moment predicts that the expected behavior can be linked to the actor’s self-perception generated in the past interactions (Mead, 1934).

The purpose of this research is to understand one particular aspect of this self-perception at the level of the community, and that is division into “Us” and “Them” between minority and majority actors. Analysis of the newspaper articles will be used to find out how much narrowing (or widening) of the gap between majority and the official establishment on the one side and minority communities on the other side made their mutual collaboration possible. Emphasis will be put on the relationship between long-term processes (as the redefinition of the community self is) and short-term consequences of changes during these processes.

2006-01-30

The community on the edge

There were again two shootings yesterday, one in Mattapan and other in Jamaica Plain. I was thinking about the TV news report about that and how does it shows the image of the community, and actually I found one thing interesting–the phrase “a community on the edge”. Somehow it again lead to the Dave’s “resist outrage” slogan. Of course, that it is terrible that somebody was killed, but what edge we are talking about–civil war, uprising, falling into anarchy? Probably, they meant the last one, but is it really so? Is really “the highest number of murders in ten years” (which is still somewhere around the Boston average of the long trend) reason for being on the edge?

And of course, that the point is not, what is the truth about the homicide rate, but how is it presented and what is the image of that homicide rate. What is probably the most interesting (but it may be again just the image) is that in this as in the December quater-murder people living around were claiming that this was previously rather quite neighborhood. Was it really (power of self-dellusion is enormous) and is it thus change in the focus of murders from the Blue Hill Avenue area? Or were they living in dellusion and whole Dorchester, Mattapan, Roxbury, Jamaica Plain is dangerous? Much more questions that answers. Oh well.

2006-01-05

Black Romeo

I was watching yesterday on WGBH on a documentary about black poor kids from London playing “Romeo and Juliet”. It was really deep experience for me. I was quite surprised by the fact that black kids (mostly guys, but of course Juliet and her friend were ladies) could play Shakespeare and that issues which are hard to understand for me, are very same (and much more understandable) for them. Suddenly I saw how much I am still in the grips of seeing folks from Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan as different from us normal people and how much I see them primarily as potential criminals.

It seems to me that actually this could be one of the most important issues of whole Boston Miracle–how “them, making trouble” became “us, needing help”. And then how all the petty issues of money etc. were just less important tools empowering a long-term process of this change, not direct tools to decrease crime.

And of course, I see no way how to prove this. On the other hand it shows how much more than just bloody news (literally, news about blood) I need stories describing normal life in the Black community of Boston. Which unfortunately makes my news articles reports totally unmanageable, because I would need much more than what I already have. :-(

2005-12-28

How does it work (preparing for appointment with Len)?

Len asked me to explain him how should all these theories I quote in my dissertation proposal work together and how I am not creating yet another Great Sociological Theory.

Of course, that this question hits on the most complicated part of the question. How does it all fits together? Am I not creating just another grand theory which has answer for everything but understands nothing? And if I want to get my theories out of data, and not to impose my theories on data, what should I do with the theories which already exist and which seem so close to what I see in my data? And isn’t whole that founding theories only on data more or less humbug, because there just are plenty of theories around and research cannot (and shouldn’t) just ignore them?

Somehow it resembles a denomination which is based “solely on the New Testament” and they “purged their teaching of all human inventions” (I have actually met a pastor who told me these two things about his denomination; needless to say, that I have run out of his church immediately :-) ) – these are usually the most dogmatic and legalistic church groups, whereas those Christians who just do not care that much about purity of their teaching tend to be quite often most relaxed, loving, and free. Isn’t best research also the one which is not that much concerned about purity of methodology? Of course, one shouldn’t go to the other extreme (in the Church context it would be liberalism), and to throw away all good rules, which generations of scientist found, as good preventive measures how not to fools themselves.

Back to the main question of how to deal with my different theories and my data. The basic idea I had was that there are many streams of thought which seems to lead to the similar conclusions, although sometimes the theories go from very different and strange angles. So for example, both Braithwaite (criminologist and founder of the theory of reintegrative shaming) and Charon (introduction to the symbolic interactionism) mention as an important factor how symbolic interactionist perspective does not include static concept of personality, which is a static result of our past experience (or it is inborn and thus even more static) determining our present action, but it accept that past experiences influence our present action through definition of self based on our reactions to the past experiences . When I read this for the first time, I was shocked. In that time I was just discovering (through a church-based program of inner healing) how much my understanding of myself very much determined (quite often not for good) my behavior, and how much I need to learn (and be told) who I am, so that I could see world differently and hopefully grasp more of the life. I didn’t expect much that I could find in (then still rather dry) sociology something corresponding to this very personal experience and new understanding, which seem to be too churchly and far from secular science. And yet, this was exactly what I read in this criminological textbook!

And when I was reading many newspaper articles about crime in Boston, I could see struggle of Black Bostonians to grasp self-image of “the ordinary citizen” and to persuade everybody that they are such. I could believe that actually Black pastors stepping into this self-image and BPD switching their approach of Roxbury & co. from “enemy battlefield” to “part of our city, where our fellow Bostonians need help” (my own terms, not quotations), that these steps could help to empower and mobilize Black communities of Boston to help eliminate crime in their midst. And this effort could clearly explain quite angry opposition of Rev. Rivers against Jessie Jackson’s trashing of Boston as racist–not only that Jessie offended his friend in the effort to improve position of Blacks in Boston (both Mayor Menino and BPD representatives), but he also directly attacked this new self-image of ordinary citizens and pushed them back to the image of poor underserved oppressed Blacks.

Unfortunately, the story continues, this business of changing self-image is very long-term process – actually this is just part of the process of overcoming Black slavery which (with interruptions) has been continuing for past hundred and fifty years and it is far from being finished. When the first effort made a huge difference, because improved cooperation between BPD and the Black community of Boston made a huge difference in the crime statistics, people in power of the City of Boston lost interest in supporting this process and it collapsed on insufficient funding (totally unsupported hearsay claims that the Boston Ten Point Coallition is broke and relations among participants of TPC are falling apart). Now, the only hope is that Mayor Menino & co. will get afraid again from the Black crime and will find some resources to support programs in Roxbury.

Moreover, not only that this example very well works in this psychotherapeutical-SI context of self-image, but it seems to be very nice example of how the theory of reciprocity describes that “[people] perceive that others are behaving cooperatively/shirking […] they cooperate/retaliate.”

All this is nice, but obviously this kind of anecdotical thinking is an exact example of all wishful thinking which would be rightfully trashed by Bernstein & co. And qualitative and interpretative research being what it is, I do not see any way how to make this into testable theory and how to eventually prove it.

2005-12-26

Concept of community?

First of all, this is what I’ve got from a member of my dissertation committee:

This is a lot. Basically, if I understand this correctly, he suggests to throw away most of what I have done so far and begin again. On the other hand, there is a part of me agreeing with him–it seems that there really may not be that much explicit about the image of the community. I would have to interpret even more from the given material–which could lead to pretty stupid conclusions (given my lack of local knowledge), or to something really interesting and new.

Which leads me again to the necessity of going through fundamental conceptual stuff and makes me less certain that I know what I am talking about. I mean, is it really possible to find out something that’s really going on out there, or do I just write again my superstitions into the previously created myth of “The Boston Miracle”? Should I just write how wonderful it is when people work together, talk about each other nicely, and kill each other less often? All that could be covered into nice “scientific” labels of “social capital”, “trust”, or “civic society”?

I am afraid, that after all scientific talking is said and done, it may come down to the question which story I am willing to take as a base of my own thinking. Unfortunately, there isn’t just one story to be told–the one about good pastors raising up the community and empowering themselves to fight crime. There is also much more sad story about the Ten-point Coallition which is (according to some spoken and unconfirmed information) more or less broke, about former co-workers (Rev. Hammond and Rev. Rivers) who were bashing each other in public (that was couple of years ago–what is the situation now?). The latter story may be really about the non-profit organization paid by the federal money which run out (was it because its own success and thus less need to prevent crime or because of the general economic downturn and need to save federal money or maybe even about the cutting down the federal budget?). The last possible story which comes to my mind is altogether nasty–about white voters supporting government’s support of the anti-crime prevention when fearing blacks to kill them (while killing each other), but hesitant to continue when the situation has turned better. The last two stories have in common that they understand TPC success as a seed of its own problems–maybe that is worthy to be investigated.

However, the last story, about fearful voters, can be at least to some degree verified, because at least some (indirect, self-censored, politically very correct, to be sure) footprints should be possible to find in newspapers, if there is at least some level of this discussion in the readers’ community (whatever such community means, yes).

2005-12-26

Two images and two hopes

This is probably the most obvious conclusion from reading of all the materials about the Boston Black community (shouldn’t I use term “neighborhood” as describing just geographical proximity of its members?), but in the spirit of Len’s theorem that all sociology is either common sense or non-sense, I should not forget to record it as well.

There seems to be two images, two lines of thought, and two hopes present in both primary and secondary literature on the Boston Black community. First there are those (let’s call them “liberals”, but it is not a good label, because it implies too much homogeneity in their thinking and too much about what they think) who think that the most important things in the Boston are causes –prejudice, racism, government neglect and many others. I do not know whether they have any hope at all, but if anything then they would like to install justice and apportion blame to all who caused the current situation. The other group of people is much less concerned about the causes of the current situation and much more about its possible solutions . I have two examples to show it. First is from the article “Putting our minds together for community–young leaders share their wisdom on prejudice, bad schools, lost opportunities” (Boston Globe, March 5, 2000, C3):

This sounds to me like a great example of speech by experienced community development professional and I would dare to say, politician. It doesn’t say much about specific proposed solutions, but it offers unification of all parties (“That is something that all of us here as panelists share, how we think about things.”) and then to all those such united parties his own solution is put into their mouth (“But the problem is, while there is an incredible resource structure in the city … it is inaccessible to people that live in the neighborhoods.”). All language is economical, promising, and very non-specific.

Contrast this with this quotation from the article (created in context of the Democratic Convention in Boston) “Jesse Jackson’s Dressing–Down of Boston on Race Draws Rebuttals” (Mens’ News Daily, August 1, 2004):

I abbreviated the article just to parts relevant to the discussed issue and I have removed all opinions of the author (which were rather conservative). However, I think that even this list of quotations makes a pretty good picture of the rift between two different pictures about the Black community problems (of course, I do not pretend that Jessie’s speech was just motivated by pure intellectual reasons, and I can easily accept that he was probably more trying to make points without any real concern and knowledge about the reality on the ground). If there was any Boston miracle, then it seems to me that one of the most important components of it was this ability to step over the past hurt and talk with people who were (and who still are) viewed as one’s enemies.

Which leads to more personal comment on whole issue. I have to repeat to myself, that if I want to make something sensible from my research then I have to use whole of my person in it and so it is no surprise that I will see in my research issues of forgivness and reconcilliation. Which also reminds me that I should study some history of White-Black relations in 1970s’ Boston.

{added later} Again, it is about hope. I remember talking with a pastor who claimed that the biggest issue of the young gang members which led them to gangs is lack of hope for their future. Unless you are a basketball wizard, super-super-smart, from rich family (at least so that they can afford college), or you go into army, there is no hope for you to get out of Roxbury and the only way which you were told by your parents (if there are any) and people around you is that the only hope is to sell drugs and make quick bucks.

2005-12-20

Don’t fall into “the ET trap”

There is a trap in thinking about the Boston miracle, and I think that so far (to the best of my knowledge) all researchers trying to understand what is (what was?) going on did fall in it. I would call it “the ET trap” (ET as “The Entertainment Tonight” one of the most stupid celebrity obsessed shows on the US TV) and it goes like this: “… there are some interesting people trying to do something interesting (or merely claiming to do something interesting) and here are the results–see the heroes who made the change!” Yes, I return still back to the question, how much actually mattered to the average kid on the street of Roxbury that Revs. Hammond, Rivers, and Brown had been talking with officials of the Boston Police Department? And I still cannot find an explanation, why it would matter that much, especially in the short-run.

But maybe there is a good very long-term process going on here of the redefinition of the identity, but that couldn’t make a change so prominent in so short time.

2005-12-07

Continuing story?

While reading an excellent introduction to SI “Symbolic Interactionism: An Introduction, An Interpretation, An Integration” by Joel Charon I was thinking about my research (of course) and about the current craze about rising murder rate in the City of Boston. Although I certainly do not want to diminish the real pain of murdered victims’ families, I just do not see anything so terrible around, which would deserve moral panic going around just now.

So, for example today’s “Here and now” was introduced by the headline declaring “Stop snitching” T-shirt as part of nation-wide conspiracy to frieghten witnesses to testify in gang-related court cases.

2005-12-06

Interview with Gary Edwards (ODF) and the madness of software patents

If there is one line which could make anybody clearly understand madness of the current U.S. practice of patenting everything, then it is this one from the interview with Gary Edwards(one of co-authors of Open Document Format):

When I was in the law school, our professors used examples of Thomas Alva Edison or Alexander Graham Bell (or their Czech equivalents) to explain why patents are useful for dissemination of groundbreaking inventions and stimulating development, but there is no way that Microsoft’s people would create 300 such groundbreaking inventions a day . And the only real software patent which IMHO would be worthy of patenting is in public domain. Well, somebody is great and somebody has to fake it via legal methods.

2005-12-05

Bitching about macros

After many years I got to work with M$ Office again and I got in contact with one of my old feelings about various Linux office suites (Openoffice.org may be slightly exception, but not that much)–none of them is suitable for high-level professional business work, because they all fail in providing functional user macros. I mean real macros for normal users who need to make their work goes faster by eliminating repetitive tasks. Take this one Excel macro as an example:

Sub CleanMissingJobCode() ' ' CleanMissingJobCode Macro ' Macro recorded 10/5/2005 by mcepl ' ' Keyboard Shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+X Application.ScreenUpdating = False Selection.Cut Selection.End(xlToRight).Select ActiveCell.Offset(0, 1).Select Selection.End(xlUp).Select ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Select ActiveSheet.Paste Selection.End(xlToLeft).Select Selection.End(xlDown).Select ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Select Selection.Delete Shift:=xlUp Selection.End(xlToRight).Select Range(Selection,Selection.End(xlDown)).Select Selection.ClearContents Range(Selection.Offset(-1, 0), _ Selection.Offset(0, 0)).Select Selection.FillDown ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Select ActiveCell.End(xlToLeft).Select Application.ScreenUpdating = True End Sub

I don’t show this macro here, because of its beauty, but on the contrary for its complete ugliness. The point is that although it is just result of macro recording and a little cleaning afterwards (Excel’s Macro Recorder put a lot of absolute references into the script) it just works(TM) . Whenever I looked at macro facilities (or rather their bare foundations) for Koffice, it seemed like a foundation for “real work”, i.e., programmer who would open his IDE, debbuger and other development tools, and begin to develop some custom application based on the office suite, using a lot of complicated DCOP calls etc. But I do not want to do anything significant with macros–just make my spreadsheet do some work for me!

2005-11-27

OpenOffice, regexps, and life

(from discussion on OpenOffice.org questions list):

Regexp is a fairly complex beast and probably quite unnatural unless you have some sort of programming training. In that sense it is questionable how useful regexps are in a generic word processor for the general public, but if you happen to have regexp experience by using tools like perl, awk, grep, lex and alike then you can express quite complex searches efficiently.

OK, first of all there is a famous cite of Jamie Zawinski: ‘(Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use regular expressions.” Now they have two problems.)’ There is something about that :-). Nevertheless, I use regexps quite often and when limited to useful level of complexity, they could be quite useful. But, it is difficult to use them and learning curve is quite steep. Perl (probably the best and fastest implementation of RE currently available) has four manpages for RE (perlrequick, perlretut, perlre, and perlreref).

Sideshow for serious geeks: first read this, its continuation, and conclusion. Explanation of this mystery is simple, but thought provoking– apparently Perl has support for REs so complex, that all other RE implementations break down on them, but this complexity has its cost in slightly lower speed. And BTW I do not use Perl if I don’t have to (much prefer Python, but apparently here Perl is better than anybody else).

Back to our main presentation tonight: there seems to be two ways how to deal with REs in OpenOffice.org (and elsewhere). Either you will ignore them, or you will bite the bullet and learn them. Actually, the first way is not so ridiculous as it seems to be. As it was repeated many times by vi-people (vi-family editors don’t have anything else than RE for searching): “plain string is valid RE and as such will be evaluated” (let’s ignore case sensitivity of REs for a moment); i.e., when you are searching for “moron”, you can just put “moron” into your RE field and everything will work as expected. Being in this position you are not worse off, then if there were no REs at all.

However, learning REs is not so difficult as it seems to be from looking at some really advanced examples (yeah, sure you want some examples; this RE in Python syntax r"(\d{3})\D*(\d{3})\D*(\d{4})\D*(\d*)$"parses US phone numbers and returns their parts in different fields; courtesy of Mark Pilgrim). You can begin for starters with just something so simple as “ colou?r” and even that will be incredibly helpful. Just throw “regular expression tutorial” into your friendly Google and you will find a lot of stuff which can help. You have to be aware only of couple of things–first of all, that there are at least two incompatible lines of REs living well “in wild” (for more info on that read aricle on Wikipedia). The best way how to deal with this is to learn just the type of RE used in the application you’re going to use (for OOo I just randomly stumbled upon some tutoliar on RE in OOo). BTW, you could just go to Help “List of Regular Expression”, but it is really just a reference material, which is not enough for somebody who doesn’t what’s going on.

The last thing–thank you, OOo developers, that you have included full-size REs into OOo and not something crippled like “wildcards” in M$ Word(which is just a small subset of REs packaged for non-geeks). This and other things (XSLT filters and scripting, albeit the latter is severly underdocumented) made OOo much more than just another free office suite-like (there are others), but serious platform for doing things in the proper geek-like way. Thanks!

2005-11-26

Consistency of user experience or Contra-zenclavier

(Answer to discussion caused by my message on gmane.comp.editors.vim.outliner about creating Kate syntax highlighting file for VimOutliner).

Probably it is just brain damage of mine caused by many years of using Windows, but somehow even after couple of years of using vim it still feels very strange and unfamiliar. However, discussion cannot be made around feelings, so here are some rational (or semi-rational) reasons, why I begun to think a lot about leaving vim.

I guess that you are a programmer (or some other CS-guy–why would you edit Common Lisp scripts?) and so the most of your time is spent editing plain text in a text editor. That is not my case, and I found myself to spend bigger and bigger proportion of time in some kind of KDE applications–KMail, KNode, LyX (OK, it is not KDE-based yet, but with similar user interface), Konqueror, which is probably the reason that even when I was editing plain text files (Python source code, R-scripts, different XML files) it felt better when I did it with kate (BTW, talking about XML files, kate’s XML plugin is probably the only comparable environment for editing XML files to Emacs’s PSGML I’ve met so far). It seems to me that more and more I work with KDE it is more and more difficult to achieve satori (I guess you have already read “Zenclavier: Extreme Keyboarding” by Tom Christiansen, it should be obligatory reading for any vi-geek) and contrary to the Tom’s article it was more and more simple to achieve it working with KDE programs. As if the most important condition of the satori is not the best design of the computer program (and there could be much said about clever design of vi–Tom has already wrote it), but uniformity of the user experience. It doesn’t mean, that there are many ways how to screw up design of a text editor (for example, no one explained me well, what are toolbars good for editing texts), but that the design is not everything. When you achieve relatively good design (and of course all main text editors for Linux and many other for Windows or Mac did it) then the familiarity can kick in and you can achieve oneness with your computer.

This leads to some rather strange conclusions. If the homogeneity of environment is the most important requirement, then the best Desktop environment is the one which provides the most homogenous user experience (which is IMHO one of the reasons why OS/2 failed and why Linux achieved competitivness with Windows for general public IMHO only in the last couple of years, although both desktop environments were much better in terms of their window managers, background philosophy etc. for many many years already). True, I have never tried GNOME hard enough in the last years to make any reasonable comparisons (so this should not be understood as a shot against GNOME in the KDE-GNOME holy war), but it seems to me that KDE is currently the best desktop environment on Linux (and not only on Linux???) in terms of its overall homogeneity. For each application which makes KDE you can probably find a comparable or better alternative (although sometimes you have to search really hard–for example, KMail and Konqueror are just bloody good programs in themselves), but each of these alternatives leads to the special world of their own not that much consistent with anybody else (I have to note though that I almost never use KOffice, which could change balance towards OpenOffice.org and GNOME for others). Mozilla programs are one world for itself, Emacs and GVim are kind of addictive drugs closing ones’ mind to anything else, and closeness is probably present pretty much in OpenOffice.org as well.

And then there are some just plain technical reasons why I am getting worried about any dependency on GVim–see for example this thread or the thread I have originated in comp.editors. No, and I don’t think that yzis is the answer.

2005-11-03

Three streams in the Christianity

Today Dave‘s sermon was mainly about the prophetic stream in the Christianity, but before that he was talking about three different streams of the ministry –I was quite pleasantly surprised that his three different streams of Christianity were apparently pretty similar to what I was thinking on the similar theme (although I had only two streams in my model).

The original idea comes from my reading of Floyd McClung’s “ Father Makes Us One”–he mentions that many clashes in churches is caused by two different streams in the church: on the one hand there are missionary groups trying to primarily reach to unsaved and then there is the body of local Church itself, which is mainly focused on development of current Christians and the body of Christ. I think that this is very right, but I tried to extend this theory from just practical advice on how to avoid conflicts in the Church to more general theory of many conflicts in the Church as whole. On the one side there are whom I would call “pastors”–people who are deeply interested in building Church (particularly specific local congregation), they care for current Christians, cry with them somewhere in the corner struggling with their personal issues, they study (often poor) popular books on psychology, they support diversity a enjoy spritiual (and psychological) depths (in their best members they could be great mystics). And there are “missionaries”–they running out to the world catching unbelievers and dragging them to Christ, they expect everybody to be pagan and object of their missionary activities (just kidding :-)), they are usually congregated in different para-denominational organizations, they are deeply involved in the sprititual warfare, while the pastors may have tendency to be sometimes too liberal (in the theological meaning of the world), the biggest temptation for them is legalism and superficiality (they have usually tendency to be more interested in the business management and marketing of missionary work then in the mysticism). Of course, that these are just a caricatures made into the extremes, but I think that they may well illustrate my point.

I thought that I could go even further and deeper (you can see, that I have a tendency to be more “pastor” :-)), and that this dichotomy could be paralleled in the dichotomy between masculinity and feminity (we all, both men and women, have both qualities and each of has some combinations of them). Whereas pastor tends to have more developed feminine qualitites (Church as relationships among people and with God), missionaries are more on the masculinity side (Church as an army and organization), and the parallel could go even further. I believe that both types of Christians are absolutely necessary for healthy life of the Church, but it is clear to me that their coexistence has to lead to conflicts, which have to be acknowledged and solved, so that these two types of Christians could live together (Biblical note: it seems to me that these two types of personal traits could not be combined without problems into one person–Jesus could be an exception from this rule–because even God did not create one universal human man-woman, but Adam and Eve). Which lead again to the better vision of the need for unity of Church, and to see how much it is a pitty, that Christians are talking so little with one another (and yes, the situation is slightly better in Czechia than here in the States–thanks to Communists for that). Even worse, not only that we do not talk with one another but we are pretty busy creating artificial barries make such communication even more complicated (see my inability to go to the Lord’s supper at the Catholic conferences).

OK, so this was my idea about the two types of Christians, which Dave made even more complicated. I do not want to give up on the wonderful parallels with masculinity/feminity, but it is true that without including the third type of Christianity and Christians it is hard to deal with (for example) the Black Church, with the Christian activism; the pastors I saw in Roxbury are hugely different from the evangelical crowd I know best, and this different part is certainly a lot about active participation in turning your own community around (be in your church or not).

Of course, much more important then this dry theoretical catalogization of Christians was Dave’s call to the ministry of justice and care for the poor. There is really no way how to get around the fact, that substantial part of the Bible (including famous Micheas 6:8) put care for the poor and disfavored among the most important parts of faith (much more important then more religious activities). “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” (James 1:26) Suddenly it seems to be more important then personal religiosity, prayers, sacraments, and many other things which are so important.

And yet, I do not know much how to begin this ministry. I know, I heard many times, that the Lord Jesus did not favor anybody, but does it mean, that I should give away all my money (or at least some money) to the random beggars I meet on the street? Probably not. Does it mean, that I should do something myself? Probably yes, but what? I am consoling myself, that we care for Andulka and participate in the Living Waters, but does it mean, that the poor care that much? I do not know. Should I rise my butt and go to help to some soap kitchen or something of that sort? I do not know. Probably, I will just keep this on a back burner (in the same way I deal with evangelization), and if I will meet an opportunity, then I will participate. However, what is the opportunity I am waiting for (“You will have always enough poor”)? I do not know.

2005-10-08

French class actions

USA Today reports about possible introduction of class action lawsuits in France. That’s really interesting, because I was studying a possibility of class-actions in the Czech law many years ago. The conclusion we’ve came to with Martin Mainser was that class action is not compatible with the legal regime in countries where every litigant has a right to control destiny of the litigation. I wonder what will French do with this problem–will they create some kind of mixed legal regime, or they will make class-actions somehow compatible with the European legal culture (I have no idea, how it could be done)? Interesting question.

2005-10-05

God’s subconscience

Just a really simple thought. Does God has a subconscience? Being omnipotent and omniscient, one would expect that not. But isn’t it just modernistic ideal of simple rational life? And if he doesn’t have one, how come that we as bearers of His image have one? Is it just limitation of creation (as apparently it was necessary to make man and woman as two separate individuals, although God himself apparently managed to comprise both full masculinity and feminity in himself–or is it part of the mystery of Trinity)? The reason why I am dealing with this rather esoteric question is that the last possibility would be that a subconscience is a product of The Fall and thus something which should be (at least gradually and maybe just partially) eliminated in our sanctification, i.e., is subconscience per se good or bad?

2005-10-05

Two Biblical notes (from VCFC sermons)

Deut. 5:9f–these are not about different generations, but God is offering to all of us both blessing and curse–blessing for thousand generations and yes, we should be aware of the possibility of a curse for four generations. This is probably more about being aware of possible consequences of our action (even for the following generations), however (so that we are not that much frightened) God immediately adds that his blessing is much more powerful than curses we bring on heads of us and four following generations.

Sirach 35:21-23–the prayer once prayed will not rest until it will do great things!

2005-09-23

So, what is the problem with The Ten Point Coallition?

Or actually is there any problem at all? Well, there seem to be problems–Rivers fights with Hammond (and vice versa?), there are no money for after-school activities, and it is not that important whether the number of murders actually increases, or whether it was just return to mean. Why is it so much dependent on the federal budget, cannot Menino let some money go into anti-crime prevention? Or is it? Actually, how much The City of Boston spends on this? I should get some kind of annual reports of TPC and Boston in this area.

Or is there an alternate version, that TPC served its purpose and now something else should be built up? How much can TPC serve as a provider of after-school care and high-risk prevention activities? Could and should they do what DYC is supposed to do (or is it)? Why should it be done by pastors and not by professionals?

Or is just a simple sad old story of people so celebrating their own success and trying to make themselves bigger by grandioze plans, that the original thing is kindly forgotten?

There are so many questions and not enough answers. Even worse, most of the questions are rather nasty and suspicious, and I have no idea how to keep myself in believing into innocence until proven guilty and yet to ask some hard questions those who are ‘suspects’ themselves.

2005-09-22

Finally, UTF-8 locale (and about Compose)

I have finally bitten the bullet and switched my locale to cs_CZ.UTF-8. When still writing this blog in gvim (the end of my relation with vim and here), I begun to write it in UTF-8 and it was such a relief. Suddenly, I didn‘t have to use ugly kludges like `` or –. Of course, the problem is that there are so many supplementary characters which could be suddenly used, that no keyboard layout is able to handle all of them (I think) and some other solution has to be found. Vim has digraphs which are really quite useful, but as everything else in vim, there is no connection to the outside world. Switch to Kate/KWrite was very pleasant issue, but obviously there are no digraphs native to them. My first reaction was to use HTML entities and translate them to the pure UTF-8 version with my special Python script. However, I felt very strongly that this is not the way.

I asked on cz.comp.linux about experience of people with inserting these non-keyboardish characters and the answer was “Use Compose key”. I begun to search on Google for the answer how to make it work and finally I found that actually the best source of information about the combinations of keys for Compose (aside from the article on Wikipedia) is directly in my computer. The only problem was that with ISO 8859-2 based locale only very small part of keys actually worked. This was the last straw which broke my back of resistance towards switching whole computer to UTF-8. The problem is (as always) Midnight Commander, which Debian version doesn’t work with UTF-8 at all (especially, panel frames are affected by this). So, again, Googling and Googling until I've found this thread on some discussion board, which contains a link to patched version of MC(requires also non-standard version of slang), which somehow works in my console. However, MC is not a critical for me anymore, now when Krusader is finally stable enough and featurefull enough to compete with MC.

One more problem–when I have switched to UTF-8 many filenames with accented characters were suddenly broken. I thought that Linux filesystems store all metada in UTF-8 already. Oh well, they probably don’t. So I had to run output of locatethrough cstocsand then to find out with diffwhat all has been changed.

Looking at all this issue with at least some distance, it seems to that actually Compose key combines best from all the options–it works as well as vim’s digraphs, but it is X11-wide, which is cool (and yes, of course, it is much better than M$-Windows’s Alt+<number>).

2005-08-28

Conflict in TPC and payment for the Miracle

Reading an article from the Boston Globe (2001-11-02) “Friction among clergy members seen in partnership” I begun to think again about some totally non-scientific comments. First of them is the Honza Horálek’s comment on difference between alliance and community–whereas in the world, people organize into alliances given their shared interest or goal, in the Church people should first organize into community and such community can then organize some action (and he has even fancy examples of this from the Book of Revelation; I guess from Rev. 13 about an alliance between a beast and dragon). And really, I can see on the Living Waters team in the church how much this principle is valid–unless we work through all our internal conflict and unless we pray for each other, we wouldn’t be able to work together well as a team towards participants of the program.

It seems to me that the strength of the Ten Point Coallition (yes, Coallition is probably closer to an alliance than to community) was sufficient to hold its leaders together only in economically good times when government supported all extra-curricular activities and such, but it looks like that when the waters begun to be rough (because of an economic crisis of early 2000s’) relationships and vision were not strong enough to keep TPC together. I would like to ask Rev. Hammond and Revers (if I will ever get hold of him), whether they invited each other for dinner to their home or something in this sense.

However, getting back to more sociological and “scientific” level, it could be really interesting to think how much is at least indirectly level of federal support to after-school programs responsible for the Boston Miracle.

2005-08-27

Thanks BBC!

Matt Kraai pointed out that some (and in future probably all) of symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven are available for limited time only online courtesy of BBC. Thanks a lot both to Matt and BBC.

2005-08-27

Bibliography, equations, structured authoring, and me

I wrote about my experience with LyX and the reasons why I am looking for an ideal solution to my authoring needs. One strange thing which surprises me for all that time (at least since 1998) is that there is still so little done in resolving my problems, because it seems to me that it should be an itch needed to be scratched by approximately the same number of people as users of LaTeX, so I was surprised why so few programmers seems to be interested in this (if I am not mistaken, really all exceptions from this rule I listed in the previous message on this).

Couple of days ago it came to me what’s going on–I am actually in between couple of communities with requirements slightly different from mine. I am not a typograph (even though I appreciate beautiful typography), so although I certainly appreciate beauty of typesetting provided by TeX it is not a crucial quality for me. I also appreciate its beautiful typsetting of formulas, but I really need to typeset only all three equations (and even these are really simple ones) from statistical models (as complicated as I am able to comprehend, which means they are quite simple :-)). Similarly, I miss what I see as the main target of DocBook. It is really created for computer related documents (and documentation) and it is not exactly the best DTD for my law & society dissertation. What I really need is powerful citations management, but it is done either in rather limited fashion (BibTeX, nevertheless it is still the best what is available), is in the alpha-stage and support for the actual authoring is missing (Docbook), or just a joke (OpenOffice.org).

Actually, what I would really like is some combination of Lyx(or Amaya) for simple structure-oriented authoring of slightly extended XHTML (with footnotes, generated references, table of contents, and bibliographical stuff) with powerful bibliographical management (here I am not sure whether there is any model which I could use –simplicity of Emacs BibTeX-mode but power of MODS). There is an interesting discussion of this problem available.

Oh well. It seems that I am here alone with these too simple requests.

2005-08-27

Mannheim’s Paradox

Reading Carey (1989), I met again the issue of the Mannheim’s Paradox (the author’s name), which is fancy name for finding that social scientists themselves are humans and thus subject of ideological pressure and laws of human behavior, which could influence how they perform as scientists. Or in other words, how scientists being humans and thus not fully rational cannot create purely rational theories and purely rational conclusions not influenced by their personal preferences and prejudices.

Carey suggests that there are currently two main streams of understanding of ideology–he calls them “causal” and “functional” explanations of ideology. The result of both theories is that seemingly irrational behavior is not considered to be what it really is. The first theory tends to explain ideological behavior in terms of social structure, power struggle, and class interests. The problem with these theories is that they are really hopeless in terms of quality of their predictions. People just do not follow their class interests enough to make these theories quite useful. The reaction to causal theories are functional theories, which try to explain ideology as an attempt to restore balance in the society which is perpetually malintegrated. Unfortunately these theories typically produce unbelievably complicated and obscure explanations omitting participants’ understanding. Carey citing Geertz (1973) summarizes this notion in this way:

The problem is obviously in the fact, that these theories implies elimination of anything which wouldn’t fit into the rational model of science, namely “the experience itself as some ordered system of meaningful symbols.” Of course, Carey sees as a solution following the tradition of symbolic interactionism and introduce study of symbols and their meaning. He also follows in this Blumer (1969) with the big stress on keeping research close to the data and omitting from data anything which is not convenient for the development of “scientific” theories.

Moreover, one thing which is common to all these theories is that they are really weak on explanation of the links between suggested explanations and observed action. E.g., what is the mechanism by which that wonderful solidarity is created in praying together?

2005-08-27

The Case for wonder

The three similar stimuli met me in the last days. First I have read in “Communication as Culture” (James W. Carey, 1989) that a good sociology is similar to an art in its orientation towards “making the phenomenon strange”, because

There is some beautiful naivety here at work – it is suddenly possible to take seriously the good old Aristoteles notion, that basis of all philosophy (i.e., all science, because it was contained in that time in philosophy) is curiosity and wonder. Moreover, for me personally it is calling back to the position where what really matters is something really personal and internal (after all, we are talking here about a qualitative research, not just data crunching).

And just immediately when I have begun to think about writing a blog record like this one, I opened again “More ready than you realize” (Brian McLaren, 2002) and found there this (p. 145):

And finally, when I was talking with a friend this afternoon, she told me about her feelings of people having too big expectations from her. After some further talking I suggested (because I begun to see the pattern) that actually the only way (aside from knowing that God knows as well and has neither too high expectations and in the same time he is not full of depression and self-hate as we are) how to defend herself against these feelings is to go deeper in knowledge of herself, and from that position to be able to stand up against any unreasonable (or misguided) expectations.

And of course, it is something which is of the utmost importance for me as well. What I am writing about images in newspapers, should be especially the most personal expression of myself – not stupid graphomaniac diatribes which does not interest anybody, but that the only measure of what I should write is what I honestly know about myself, not what anybody expects from me.

This was an interesting experience.

2005-08-27

genericwiki plugin maintained again

I have fixed genericwiki.py plugin for Pyblosxom, made it into the real entryparser, and made it to produce standard compliant HTML (block-level elements cannot be in <p> element). It is available on my website. I am not sure whether I will maintain it like forever, but so far I like it.

2005-08-27

Kant and Living Waters

While reading this morning next chapter of Carey (1989), I again hit some of my familiar spirits. I was thinking yesterday about the symbolic interactionism (the first chapter of Carey is actually a thorough explanation of the background of ideas feeding into the symbolic interactionism and similar constructivist sociological tradition), and it came to me that I should write into my dissertation proposal about the relation between the symbolic interactionism and the tradition of those who (following Kant, among others) considered “the real world” impossible (or hard) to understand directly. Actually, I am really not that interested in Kant’s philosophy itself (it is tempting to write “in itself” :-)) – I have never read any of his Critics– I use him more as a symbol of a whole line of thinking, which includes also Wittgenstein and the whole bunch of postmodern thinkers.

That is obviously just a small (and not that important) note, that could be added to the proposal in a minute. However, much more important is that I was actually thinking about this whole relation between “Kant” and the symbolic interactionism (and I was certainly not the first one, who thought about that – I wonder, what has been written on this theme in the “Handbook of Symbolic Interactionism” (2003)). I was actually saying to myself, that these things I found about SI remind me of discussions with my brother about Kant. And yet, I have not thought that I could actually use it for my dissertation, because what I really tried to do was to create a work which would resemble other scientific works I have read. However, the path to truly interesting stuff and to finding out something new goes exactly in the other direction – to use my own resources and thoughts as much as possible. The dissertation (especially with qualitative methods) should be as personal as possible – I don’t mean personal in terms of sharing my personal issues, but I have to go deeper in finding out what I actually think, what really matters to me, etc.

Actually, somewhere here may lie a root of my father’s dissatisfaction with sociology. Citing (again, there are more cites here than my own thoughts :-), oh well) my advisor Len Buckle, “real sociological truths are either common sense or nonsense”. Except that it sometimes requires a lot of uncommon thinking to discover common sense. And unless we go to the personal depths and appreciation of the artistic dimension of science, we don’t find anything that really matters.

Citing (indirectly) Markus Hoffmann, whenever we are insecure in our world, it is a reliable sign that we should go deeper in our healing. Whenever I feel bored and drained by the routine work, I should go deeper as well.

2005-08-27

Guiliani’s farewell address

While reading Guiliani’s farewell address I was quite surprised how much liberal it sounded–if I am not mistaken then the biggest achievement he saw in his work as a mayor of the New York City was that the situation of the poorest has visibly improved. I don’t know if this is genuine compassionat conservatism or he was just trying to apeace liberal New York public (after all New York is very blue state, isn’t it?).

Another thing is that his point of view on the Boston-NYC discussion about policing seems to be much less radical, then what I would expect from (mostly liberal and pro-Bostonian) articles I read so far. It sounds more like his wounded defense of a good work he did (and Compstat strategy) against the attack of liberal professors then anything else. Actually, when reading his address I thought that the difference between Boston community policing strategy and New York more policing strategy may be more political and virtual then real (after all, most supporters of the Boston miracle are liberals). Yes, Boston policing was probably more participatory then New York one, but it seems to me that the root of the idea (“Broken windows”) is present in both of them. In New York the broken windows are taken much more literally (petty crimes, disorder, etc.) and in Boston more abstractly (lonely kids, conflict resolution, having a bullet), but the idea that fight against huge crimes should begin with clearing out small issues is the same.

2005-08-27

Habent papam

Joseph Ratzinger was just elected as a pope Benedict XVI. I do not know much what to think about it. On the one hand he is actually not my pope (hence the title of this blog record), because I am not a Catholic, and if he wants to be the one then he must deserve it.

On the other hand, I hope that a German pope could understand more than a Pole that communication with non-Catholics is important and it cannot be one way street. On the third side, he is just not from Germany, he is from Bavaria.

Another interesting question is how will he relate to Jews. He will probably follow the policy of the late John Paul II. in being very open to them, but it will be interesting how as a German will he present the Catholic repentence for the anti-semitism.

We’ll see.

2005-08-27

Incompatibility between paradigms

Two things. First of all, while reading (and marking up) newspaper articles about The Ten Point Coalition, I have been again shocked how much people could misunderstood world of Rev. Hammond (and tend to agree with him on this point very much). Boston Globe from 2003-09-16 reported, that gay activists were very surprised by his negative stance on a gay marriage. I would brutally take this situation for my own purposes to say, that this is kind of illustration of incompatibility of the true conservatism with the democratic/republican dichotomy. Although, most of his actions look like quite liberal (socialist) ones, caring for poor, needy, disadvantaged, etc., he is not part of any crowd. God bless him!

2005-08-27

Intertwingling

Many Internet seers (e.g., Nancy McGough) prophesied that the future of messaging lies in intertwingling of all messaging platforms into one stream of messages transported by different means.

I have thought about cross-posting a message to two groups at Gmane.org and I had to think how is Followup-To:header translated into email lists. I have no idea–it is probably dropped without replacement. However, during that moment I could clearly see how newsgroups are actually very much different from email lists (where I spent most of my discussion so far). It seems to me that with good use of Followup-To: header and cross-posting the thread is actually much more independent from the newsgroup were it originated and being off-topic is much more rude than in email lists, where because of email’s inferior capabilities there is not much to do when the discussion genuinely shifts to the topic which is not related to the main topic of the list.

So when the intertwingling comes (and it is already coming) then only the lowest common denominator will remain and everybody will get poorer. Oh well.

2005-08-27

Update on comment about “jagged fonts” in Linux

I mentioned that I was using msttcorefonts. They are good, but Dejavu fonts are better. Highly recommended.

2005-08-27

Jagged fonts

Tim Bray blogged about his gripes with Mac OS X and then among the reasons why not to unswitch from Mac OS X he mentions “jaggedy spidery fonts" and “fast start". Did he every heard about FreeType or here? Since I have installed msttcorefonts on my Debian, I have never seen any jagged fonts at all. And with fontconfig and its support in KDE, I have never had problems with installing all beautiful fonts I can find (this is my favorite for writing).

Concerning the fast start. Suspend/resume is supported in 2.6.* Linux kernel and there is even more stable and robust kernel patch swsuspend2, which is not dependent on sometimes rather hairy ACPI support in Linux.

2005-08-27

Once more on jagged fonts in KDE

I have made Baghira working on my desktop (copying configuration from notebook–I have no idea, where I screwed up, but now it looks perfect) and as a celebration of my return to emulated Mac world, I have found a followup on the previous post about Linux fonts. There is very interesting comparison of Mac and KDE, with two very interesting screenshots: Mac screenshot and KDE screenshot. If I should choose, then I would stay with my KDE.

2005-08-27

Boston Miracle as a religious experience

It was very interesting comment by Amy Farell–the important part of the Boston Miracle is that it was described so much with the religious subtone. City deeply immersed in the desperation, sin, and murder is saved by the mission of pastors, who redeem poor black teenagers! It’s a miracle!!!

This comment reminded me also about my thoughts when reading Christopher Winship’s article. In the latter readings of this article I saw quite strongly lack of critical attitude towards the object of his writing, yes the article looks to me like a hagiography of saint-to-be Eugene Rivers, Ray Hammond and police officers who talked with them. I am not saying that they are not incredibly interesting people (and maybe even candidates for sainthood; I am not a Catholic, so I am not knowledgeable in that matter), but that scholarly article is supposed to go deeper in its understanding. No, that’s too much–Winship does offer a lot of analysis and it goes certainly further than just to the description of the story. However, only later I found that there are many other opinions on the whole preachers’ collaboration with police and city government–namely that African-American (and I use this term deliberately, instead of preferred “black”) politicians viewed whole partnership as something between collaboration with enemy and expression of the endless naivity (CommonWealth magazine, Fall 2003, p. 66). I would love to look in my research to both of this debate. Although, I have a tendency to believe volunteering minister more than unsuccesful politican, I do not want to write yet another chapter in Eugene Rivers hagiology.

2005-08-27

Power of praise

The point of this book (Merlin Carothers, “Power in Praise”) is not to be polyannish, but to praise God where we are , and not to praise him when (and if) we will be where we want to be .

I have always had a problem with this praising God for everything and in all situations by a “virtual Polyana” praising God for giving her crutches on Christmas. The problem I had with this was it looked so much like denial and against a personal vocation of truth and reality. However, the truth of this praising is actually all about seeing the reality of this actual God in this actual real life situation and conditioning our praise on satisfaction of our desires.

2005-08-27

Process

The issue of analyzing for process (Strauss, Corbin, chap. 11) brings another view on whole story of the Boston miracle. What kind of process are we actually observing? What is routine, what is a reaction to unexpected and what is emerging from the process?

How does the changing image (from scary & dangerous city to community & cooperation with satisfaction & glorification) influences the process?

One thing is obvious–when I have turned to newspapers and image analysis, I have also shifted from pure criminology towards something which has in itself a lot of political science. Are there any lessons about image-driven behavior already developed in the political science which can be brought to criminology and to the theory of reintegrative shaming & co.?

2005-08-27

Back to the purposefulness

There is this task in front of me and I have a limited time to fulfill it. The same framework for work I strived to find in the legal work, I should find in an academic one. And the root is the same – because I do not believe that I could give correct answer (whatever it means in given context), I try to find more and more evidence for what I say, so finally I say nothing. Lord, have mercy!

2005-08-27

My first political blog

Oh well, I tried to avoid falling into trap of commenting publicly all the stuff I have no clue about, but I cannot avoid thinking about politics, when I have finally found Richard Roth’s quotation on pain:

(I know it is second-hand quotation, but I haven’t found anything better, and this cite is repeated so many times over the web, that I assume it is reasonably correct).

I was listening to the Christopher and Dorothy’s sermon about raising children, where they quoted this claim by Rohr, and so I have finally searched for it on the Web. I found it quoted many times, but I have never found the original. However, I found one interesting article by Rohr about post-09/11 America.

When I was cooking a dinner I was thinking about it, and one thing which came to me very clear was thinking about Iraq and Afghanistan. How actually there is much about transmitting pain in invading Iraq and how little of true transformation happened in the United States after 09/11 (transformation meaning especially μετάνοια–changing the ways we think about the world). And in order that I would not be accussed of anti-Americanism, then I have to say that other thing which came to my mind in the same moment was doubts about the reasons why the Central European countries (“New Europe” of Mr. Rumsfeld) participated in the invasion to Iraq. It seems to me that there is something about cynical calculation of safe playing on the same side as the biggest guy on the playing field, maybe even subserviency to the stronger guy.

However, despite writing this I am not sure, that whole Iraq campaign is necessarily bad decision–besides getting rid of the Saddam Hussain, whole Middle East may be really shaken up to reform itself to more democracy and eliminate the Islam fundamentalism in the long run. Just that not all reasons for doing this were noble and pure. Who knows about the future?

2005-08-27

Why lua? or questions about yzis

(This article is a slightly edited version of my post to comp.editors newsgroup).

I just want to vent my frustration with state of vim on KDE. I hoped that in the Unix world we will get sooner or later even in GUI world to the situation equivalent to the one at console, where you have your $EDITOR set and everything just works (of course, I have it empty, so vim is what I get). However, as far as I can tell I have these options at the present (using KDE 3.3.2):

The most frustrating part of this situation is that there doesn’t seem to be any good solution coming, so point #3 sucks a lot. KVim is officially dead (although it sucked in many ways, it was by far the best solution to at least some of my problems and I was its somehow happy user, until it was eliminated from Debian) and there doesn’t seem to be any replacement coming.

Now, we are getting to yzis. Of course, that I know about that, but I am afraid it won’t be answer to my problems. I have tried to install M3++ (from the package 20050430-1) and I found it to be somehow nice but alpha quality. Nothing bad about that (I have a four month daughter, so I know that we were all young and we all did mess into diapers), but worse thing is that kyzis doesn’t seem to be much promising.

However, before saying anything else, let me note one more thing. This message is about personal gripes and I do not want to say that you should even react to them–I perfectly understand that you are volunteers doing what matters to you and you have no obligation towards me whatsoever. Let me just vent my frustration, please.

I wonder what reactions I will get on NG.

2005-07-07

The Story God is Inviting Us Into

Andrew began to talk about misconceptions that discourages us to join in God’s story:

The alternative Andrew has to these statements (and who of us did not find herself believing at least some of them?) is understanding Bible as a story, or as a report about part of the story God creates in the history (from the begining till today and still further until the end).

Beginning of the story is before the begining of Bible itself–God lives in perfect unity and harmony within itself (Trinity), but wants to extend this unity, love, and fellowship with other creatures. So he creates first angels and then humans. Unfortuantely, angels first misuse freedom he gave and under the leadership of Lucipher they make revolt against God so that Lucipher may take some of God’s glory. Then the Lucipher’s revolt is broken and he is rejected from the heaven to the earth. Why is then the world as it is and what should we do here–obviously we should fight and these little us can help the world to make at least small difference in the war (story of Abram).

Therefore, what was around the Garden of Eden? Huge wasteland [Ge 2.5] and the land under the rule of Satan (which is how it happened that a serpent was around the Garden of Eden). Adam and Eve were not sent to the Earth to be happy, enjoy each other, and name animals, but as a paratroopers to the area occupied by the enemy. (Which reminds me of John Wimber's comment on church: if the church is a ship, then it is not a cruise ship ready for departure to Carribean, but battleship leaving for war.)

Andrew’s conclusion: Rather than wanting a people who never make mistakes we learn that God is looking for weak, fallible people who are willing to take risks on God to provide for them exclusively. People experiencing God’s incredible goodness directly through their radical dependence on Him become unbelievably motivated (using all their resources) to bring as many others into this same place of radical dependence on God. Radical dependence leads to experiencing God’s radical goodness, which leads to involvment in God’s radical purposes.

2005-01-01

My first post

Pyblosxom somehow doesn’t like when there is no post in the top directory.

2005-09-01

Three Houses and Chelcicky

Charis Enns, quite interesting Canadian missionary in Tábor (which is an interesting combination in itself), wrote about her wacky dream to translate Petr Chelčický’s work(s) into English.

It is certainly a great idea and I would love to see her translations publised (it would be nice to put Chelčický on CCEL). However, I have slightly uneasy feelings towards the ectasy of some current Christian authors over his writings. Being a conscientious objector, I certainly accept value in his discovery of pacifism (as far as I know he was the founder of Christian pacifism), but even that is usually read through the eyes of Leo Tolstoy

The problem with Chelčický is that aside from this interesting notion (and being probably one of the first medieval anabaptists), there is not much which could be useful now. Critique of pope and a German emperor? Critique of society’s division into three classes (peasants, soliders, and churchmen)? Who cares? Moreover, concerning the Czech brethern, the problem is that (rightly or wrongly) brethern themselves later rejected most of his teachings except of the general environment of legalistic lay monasticism, which is IMHO not much useful today (comments of the Prodigal Kiwi notwithstanding).