theo|digital

I realized last Thursday afternoon right as I was about to being my second class of the morning (“Church and Sacrament”) that I feel Done.

Done with seminary classroom learning.  Ready to move to the next thing.

By done I don’t mean “want to quit” or “frustrated” or “need to escape” or “overwhelmed.”  I mean more “done” in the sense we feel after a robust meal–the main dish still sitting as an invitation in the middle of the table, but receiving less attention than the conversation and brandy and smiles slowing the evening.  Satiated.  Done.

It’s hard to believe I’ve almost completed two full years of classes.  And they’ve tasted good.  Old and New Testaments, Church History, Christianity and culture.  Despite reading widely in Christian worlds before arriving, this experience calibrated me for the academic landscape of the history of Christian thought.  Gave me challenges and new ideas, but mostly taught me better how to teach myself.

This is important, because the one thing you find out fast is how much you don’t know, and how much you probably won’t get to.  Not even in the next twenty years.  It’s this feeling of swimming in the ocean of knowledge. I know it because I sense it every time I see a new pile of free books discarded by a professor in the basement of the seminary—available for the taking.  I’m too eager… reading titles, setting aside my stack… wondering how it’s possible I don’t even know how to *classify* some of them.  And eventually, if I’m not careful, my intellectual curiosity drowns me into irrelevance.

So I need to start moving away from the seminary book table in Life, and head back outside.  A few things stirred this in me in the last weeks.  Seeing pictures of my home church serving the underprivileged in Memphis.  Visiting a city home group that sat and discussed how to follow Jesus.  A long conversation with a friend that orbited the gospel as the only real answer to love and purpose.  This is remembering how powerful being a “minister of the gospel” really is.  How much I have loved this and want to continue.

I don’t regret this decision to take a step back and study.  I was so excited!  I know many of my classmates arrived somewhat “Done” in the first month (a side effect, sadly, of a system that requires an identical “professional” degree for those that seek pastoral leadership, regardless of their diverse gifting).  But I wasn’t.  This is one of the ways he’s made me—this crazy mental curiousity.  I’ve lasted almost a year and a half.  Sure there have been a couple classes that were partial duds.  And plenty of times where I’ve been exhausted from the work and needed rest.  But in general, my intrinsic motivation remained very strong.

But now I think I’m Done.

I’ll make it through these last requirements.  I still have several:  complete this term.  Then finish a thesis and six additional hours in the Fall.  But I’ll find myself looking toward the future.  Toward turning my gifts toward buiding the kingdom again, back on the front line.  Not in the basement.

Today, Obama held a townhall meeting in Strasbourg, France. He doing his first European tour after attending the G-20 summit in London. I notice that some of this remarks sound like somebody has been paying attention to communication and culture theory:

…
You’ve served as a center of industry and commerce, a seat of government and education, where Goethe studied and Pasteur taught, and Gutenberg imagined his printing press.

So it’s fitting, because we find ourselves at a crossroads as well, all of us, for we’ve arrived at a moment where each nation and every citizen must choose at last how we respond to a world that has grown smaller and more connected than at any time in its existence.

You know, we’ve known — we’ve known for a long time that the revolutions in communications and technology that took place in the 20th century would help hold out enormous promise for the 21st century, the promise of broader prosperity and mobility, of new breakthroughs and discoveries that could help us lead richer and fuller lives. But the same forces that have brought us closer together have also given rise to new dangers that threaten to tear our world apart, dangers that cannot be contained by the nearest border or the furthest ocean.

Full transcript here.

A Google research team made a startling announcement late last night.

But close though we may have come to a theory of the brain, the body – computer hardware – wasn’t capable of handling the extraordinary processing demands that any reasonably “intelligent” brain would place on its circuitry until Moore’s Law really kicked in a few years back and the modern ultra-dense machinery of atomic scale-sized gates and their light-based interconnections finally reached the scale of brain neurons – and then surpassed it, when, in early 2007, a tight-knit, vaguely feared quantum computing group here at Google extended computers with quantum bits of Einstein-Bose condensate, polynomially speeding up our machines’ data-processing ability.

Now we were finally ready to begin the painstaking work of building the first evolving intelligent system. We based our work on three core principles. First we designed the entity (as we decided to refer to our Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity early on) as a collection of interconnected evolving agents. Second – and this really cost us an arm and leg in hardware and core time – we let the system build its own heuristics, deploy them as agents and evolve them by running a set of evolutionary cascades within probabilistic Bayesian domains. Go read…

“At the end of his Gospel, John describes how Peter looks at the beloved disciple and seeks from Jesus some promise or prediction of what the future may hold. Jesus’s answer is brusque. “What is that to you? Follow me!” (John 21.22). So begins the journey of Christian ethics. Jesus’s statement recognized that there are mysteries, wonders, problems, and troubles that the disciples—even Peter—will not be able to resolve,at least not with a simple, verbal explanation. The statement asserts that there is, nonetheless, a valid way forward, despite the lack of a comprehensive solution.”

I’m reading The Blackwell Companion to Christian Ethics edited by Stanley Hauerwas and Samuel Wells.

This rings true not only theologically, but experientially. A valid way forward without knowing which way that is…