For those of you familiar with the Institute of Sacred Music program at Yale Divinity School, this is a flash mob done right. Love the kettle drums above the ticket windows. And the kid singing off a score on his iPhone…
Gosh this brings back so many memories. I suppose when I was there we might have attempted a Gilbert and Sullivan flash mob too.
(Actually I guess we did at that… We used to stage surprise concerts at Yale Station to publicize when one of our shows was about to open.)
UPDATED BELOW:
Those of you who read the Lead or Daily Episcopalian on the Episcopal Café site have probably noticed that we haven’t updated the site since Saturday evening. It’s a server error. The Café was migrated to another server at the site where we get our donated space. But something seems to have gone wrong in the latter stages of the migration and the editors are not able to access the back-end of the website at the moment.
We’ve put in a plea for help. Hopefully we’ll be back up and running in short order.
In the meantime, members of the Lead’s newsteam are posting notes and articles (that would normally be posted to the Lead) over on our Facebook page. (http://www.facebook.com/TheEpiscopalCafe)
Sorry for the disruption. But I suppose it’s inevitable. The Café has little or no budget, and we rely on donated server space to keep the place running. I’ll post news here as soon as we’re back online.
UPDATE:
Okay, after an engineer went and kicked the server, looks like we’re all able to access the administrative pages again. Let the news flow!
Lucas Mix, a friend of mine here in Arizona and so brilliant he makes my head hurt (heh) has taken up a lenten discipline of daily blogging. (Lucas btw is one of the people who finally convinced me that I might actually be accepted a member of the SOSc.) He’s been writing for the past week on the ways we can think about concepts in a scientific worldview and about how we can think through the same things in a theological view. Today’s post on “time” goes a step beyond that. And discusses vampire curses at the end…
Picking up his argument in midstream (heh) where he is introducing the idea of a river (with its current) as a tool for thinking about the relationship between time that is everlasting and time that is eternal. (Newton btw uses the same sort of metaphor, as does Gregory of Nazianzus.)
“The current does not transcend the river, so we can think of it as everlasting, but not eternal. A dam crosses the river and exists beyond it, but only at one point. We can think of it as eternal, but not everlasting. The air above (and interacting with) the river throughout its course can be thought of as both eternal and everlasting, while a solitary stone stuck to the bed might be neither.
Similarly, we can speak of temporal things. Those are objects within the time-stream. Everything about the current is temporal, but only the wet parts of the dam are. Only the dissolved oxygen from the air counts as temporal. So eternal things may or may not have temporal elements.
I think science can only talk reliably about temporal things. Science depends upon empirical data, information received through our physical senses. Science, then, inherently relies on the physical and sequential events reported by our temporal bodies. Nor, do I think, it should speculate on things outside the river, as we lack an objective reference frame. How can we say the river curves, when we cannot see objects on the bank to compare it to? How can we say the current speeds up or slows down if we cannot compare the flow rate to some clock unaffected by the current? I’m not saying we could never ask these questions scientifically, but I do think to do so begs the question – what is science? It would require philosophical assumptions we’re not prepared to accept at the moment. So for now, science only does temporal things.
Christian theology, on the other hand, speaks of eternal things. I don’t know that I can analytically prove the existence of things eternal. The existence of a river strongly suggests to me the existence of a bed. (See my post on “The Unmoved Mover.”) The persistence of entropy, which is currently our best understanding of what drives the current, also seems evocative of something transcendent. Nonetheless, belief in eternity usually comes from transcendent experience rather than discussion. I can show you eternity, but I have difficulty telling you about it.”
More here.
Follow the link to read the connections between this idea, the meaning behind the eternal soul and the everlasting life of a vampire.
Lucas’ argument here is deeply grounded in traditional Christian theology (particularly that of the Patristic era). If you read the writings of any of the Oxonian Inklings you’ll here strong echoes. And J.K. Rowling makes a similar point in her description of Harry’s experience at King’s Cross Station in her last book of the Harry Potter series.
This Lent I’m leading a book study of Scot McKnight’s latest work “The King Jesus Gospel: The Original Good News Revisited”. We’ve only had one meeting so far (I was on retreat this week) but the conversation in that meeting was fantastic and people committed themselves to reading on in the book in preparation for our next gathering.
McKnight’s point in the book is that ever since the rise of the Englightenment groups of Christians have tended to equate the Gospel with saving people. You’ve probably heard the script. The claim is that the Gospel is about personal salvation and it’s deeply connected to Paul’s writing in some of his letters (not all). McKnight even points out there are serious people asking whether or not Jesus actually knew what the Gospel was during the time of his incarnation… or did that not become revealed until Paul’s writing? (Shudder)
When people who want to base the Gospel on the 4 spiritual laws and little else are asked why there are four Gospels in the New Testament that simply don’t explicitly make this point, they have no answer. Much less can they explain the inclusion of the Hebrew Scriptures. I suppose that’s why, if you listen to Soterians (McKnight’s word for people who focus on personal salvation as the Gospel) preach you note that they tend to focus almost exclusively on St. Paul.
McKnight spends a number of pages developing his point, but the simple version is this; Jesus, the Messiah has come, and all that God has been promising to us has been (or has begun to be) fulfilled. McKnight uses early Christian writers, the early liturgies of the Church and the Creeds to bolster his argument.
Turns out that the early Reformers wouldn’t have had much to argue with. Look at this quote from Luther:
“The gospel is a story about Christ, God’s and David’s Son, who died and was raised and is established as Lord. This is the gospel in a nutshell.
(Martin Luther, “A brief instruction on what to look for and expect in the Gospels,” in Luther’s Works[ed. E. Theodore Bachmann; 55 vols.; Fortress: Philadelphia, 1960] 35.118.)“
From here.
Of course Luther got his start in ministry as an Old Testament professor, so it’s no big surprise to read these words.
Earlier this week I spent a couple of days reading diagnostic exams for a group of young seminarians. (I serve as a member of our diocesan Board of Examining Chaplains and on our Commission on Ministry among other diocesan roles.) We had asked a question of the students that was something to the effect of “Can you give us a two sentence summary of the Gospel?”
Most of the answers tended to focus on the role of Jesus as exemplar of what Humanity is capable of achieving. None of the answers were of the form that McKnight would describe as “soterian”. But none of the answers talked about Jesus as Messiah either.
So here’s a question for you to ponder, especially if you’re part of our Cathedral’s reading group; How would you tell someone the Gospel in two sentences?
I posed a question like this before. I’m trying to decide if I’d have the same answer today.
It’s a worthy thing to ponder for Lent.
Quantum Entanglement should be an incredibly useful tool for communications. Though it won’t ever become an ansible, or even the basis for subspace radio, the ability to communicate through entangled pairs of quantum particles would, in theory, create a situation where no third party could intercept the message. Which means that we’d finally have unbreakable secure communications. In theory at least. There are a number of practical problems.
One of the problems is that it’s very difficult to extend entanglement to a useful range. Generally anything over a meter is pretty much impossible and typical length scales are a million times shorter than that. But there’s some hope that the range can be extended much much further by using a series of “repeaters”, not unlike the way telecommunications or ethernet systems manage to extend their range to world spanning distances.
From Ars Technica:
“Researchers in Geneva, Switzerland have now built a possible model for a quantum repeater, using entangled photons to excite rare-earth atoms embedded in two crystals. The atoms themselves have correlated quantum states, and when they emit new photons, those are also entangled, guaranteeing that the original “message” is passed along. Devices built along these lines could act as solid-state nodes within quantum networks, allowing for larger quantum computing systems.
As with many other successful entanglement experiments, the core of the Swiss apparatus is a type of crystal that absorbs one photon and then emits two that have opposite polarization states. The specific state of each of these photons is undetermined until measured. But because they are entangled—correlated—measuring the polarization of one photon instantly reveals the state of the second, no matter how far they are separated in space.
(No information can be transmitted this way since the people on either end would need to discuss how the measurement should be taken, and that discussion takes place at light-speed.)
[…]The absorption-remission process and a photon passing through without interaction both may trigger a detector, but the wrong photon means the message isn’t actually received. To ensure that only the right photons are counted in the repeater, Imam Usmani and colleagues prepared the initial signal so that each “proper” photon is partnered with a second photon of a different wavelength known as a herald. ”
More here.
Neat idea. There are any number of simple useful applications for such a tool. Credit card and financial transactions lead the list and are probably what are going to bring the big money to solving this problem.
Plus you gotta love any headline that lets you glom together the idea of photon heralds with quantum entanglement. Grin.
(Remember that none of this sort of behavior is allowed in a deterministic system. There’s no right and wrong answer in the way that a reductionist world view would allow here. And that’s useful to keep in mind when one is doing theology, especially if one has been reading a great deal of scholastic theology.)
Well, this is interesting… Just when cosmologists were starting to arrive at a consensus about the reality of Dark Matter and a sense of how it drives cosmic evolution, observations of Abell 520 completely contradict what people expect. The Dark Matter seems to be having no gravitation effect on galactic trajectories at all.
“”We were not expecting this,” the study team’s senior theorist, Arif Babul of the University of Victoria, said in a news release. “According to our current theory, galaxies and dark matter are expected to stay together, even through a collision. But that’s not what’s happening in Abell 520. Here, the dark matter appears to have pooled to form the dark core, but most of the associated galaxies seem to have moved on.”
[…]The results contradict what scientists thought they knew about dark matter. In a previous study of the Bullet Cluster, 3 billion light-years from Earth, astronomers found that concentrations of dark matter blasted through the scene of a collision, with their associated galaxies tagging along. Meanwhile, waves of hot, X-ray-emitting gas clumped up in the middle.
In the case of Abell 520, the situation is completely different: The galaxies sailed through the collision, but the dark matter piled up in the middle, along with the hot gas.
Researchers were hoping that Hubble would resolve the mystery first posed by the detection of the dark core in 2007. No such luck.”
More here.
Just another reminder that theologians need to be a little cautious before embracing a working hypothesis and turning it into a mechanism for doctrine. Heh. (And here I was starting to speculate on Dark Matter as the unseen heavenly reality that permeates all of the Cosmos.)
So, this is a rather boring bit of news about the announcement earlier this year regarding observations of neutrinos that seemed to be going faster than the speed of light:
“According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos’ flight and an electronic card in a computer. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis.”
More here.
Assuming this is the reason for the results, and it does seem likely, because it’s a lot easier to believe a bad wire than all of Relativity needing to be overthrown; we can chalk this up to science. Cause this is how science works… An odd result is announced, studied and then explained.
I wonder if there’s a similar analog to this sort of process in Theology. I suppose it would be declaring a certain view to be a “dead-end” – what is technically termed “heresy”. But that process hardly goes as quickly as this scientific process has. And the consensus will probably never be as broad in theology as it tends to be in science either.
So, it was a loose wire in the end after all.
