A World Passing Away

One of my early memories is wandering around the Haverford Township Library. In those dark, dusty stacks, I found and read a biographies of Thomas Jefferson and Sun Yat-Sen, and Ed Jablonski's then recent history of the B-17. My grandfather Swartz had a bookshelf behind his easy chair, where I found and read Herman Wouk's "The Caine Mutiny." I can remember it as if it were yesterday, but it's been a half-century.

And it's not as if there weren't books at my parent's house, there were plenty. Part of their allowance to me was a book a month. By the time I was 10, I had a complete set of the Hardy Boys, and had moved on to natural histories. They were great, but not enough. I read.

And then, as I oriented myself in life, there were and are the great stacks of Wells, Altgeld, Eckhart, Regenstein, and Crerar, and their seldom visited archives, in which I found the copies of Mathematische Annalen that contained Richard von Mises's original, flawed definition of randomness.

But life doesn't end at thirty. My wife and I recently downsized, moving from the five bedroom house in which we raised our kids to the two bedroom condo we hope to spend the next twenty years or so. I've had to cut down to 75 linear feet of shelf space, about 60% of what we had in the old house, not counting the boxes in the basement that date from my undergraduate years. It's been a hard cull, and it's not entirely done. Almost all of the paperbacks are gone, along with most of the cookbooks. Goodbye, Bernard Cornwell; goodbye, W.E.B. Griffin; goodbye, Frugal Gourmet. I knew you well. Thank you.

Harder culls lie are ahead.

In my office at work, I have about 100 linear feet of shelf space, and these aren't trade books. They're Elsevier, North Holland, Springer-Verlag, including many hard cover mathematical texts set by hand in the era before Donald Knuth and computerized typesetting. Fifty dollars an inch, conservatively valued. It sounds crazy, but a couple hundred dollars a month over the course of more than thirty years of faculty life adds up. I set no records. There is not so much sticker shock as resignation. I expect to retire in a decade, give or take, and that 175 total linear feet will have to culled down to the 75 feet I have here. The rest will be divided into two parts, the marketable to be sold at O'Gara and Wilson Booksellers in the traditional UC faculty capitulation, the rest to be simply given away, stacked if need be on the radiators of Ryerson Hall for those who will have them.

But what of the next decade? Even if my acquisitions have slowed down from six inches a month to three, that's another three feet a year, another thirty feet over that last working decade. Or is it?

I think it is not. I love paper books. I love their heft, their feel. But I've been slowly moving from preferring digital editions only if they're cheap, to preferring digital editions. Old eyes prefer larger type, and old shoulders prefer a lighter backpack. And digital books don't face that hard, hard cull, which grows closer with each passing day.

I don't think that books are passing away, but I do think that paper books are passing away. Today's libraries are morgues, and today's librarians know it. They're preparing for a very different world. And with great reluctance, so I am. The world of bound, physical books is passing away. Look at it, love it, and ultimately, remember it, for our successors will not. Their world is still being borne.

Peace

A Lutheran's Prayer on the Election of a Pope

Dear Lord, For your servant Francis, That through the continued development of the values by which he has ordered his life, He might become a symbol of the unity of your church, and not of its divisions. Amen

Robert Bakker on Science and Religion

Noted in passing: Slashdot: Dr. Robert Bakker Answers Your Questions About Science and Religion.

To Whom Do We Pray?

I'm co-leading an adult group through “Unbinding Your Heart,” a book/process that focusses on evangelism and prayer. This morning, I encountered an arresting line in the book, “What's at the heart of life with God? A powerful relationship between each one of us and the Trinity.” The heart of our life with God is our relationship with an abstract theological construct? That's not the way people work. It struck me as an awkward, peculiarly mainline Protestant way of talking. And then, perhaps exceeding the author's attempt at elegant variation, a fruitful one.

To whom do we pray? Evangelicals pray directly to Jesus, who is to them the person of God. Catholics (at least, according my Lutheran catechetical instruction) pray to a favorite saint, as an intercessor between them and an God. Jews and Muslims pray directly to the one God, who Christians equate to the Father/Creator person of the Trinity. But for mainline Protestants, it's not so clear that there's such a consensus. My intuition is that they're lead in prayer to Jesus when they're very young, but that they don't often build a sense of a personal relationship. As they enter the teen years, when relationships with authority figures of all sorts are often strained, and reinforced by catechetical experiences that tend to be academic and theological, they drift into addressing such prayers as they offer to a de-personalized God, which mostly equates to the Father. Then, in late middle age, as what their life will be becomes more and more a function of the choices they've made than the choices they'll make, they rediscover Jesus in prayer.

Contemporary mainline Protestants often struggle with prayer. We sometimes seem to face a chasm between the prayer life we know, which may be infrequent and unsatisfying, and the vibrant life of prayer that we feel we should have, and which we sometimes witness (with both discomfort and envy) in our evangelical friends. How can we get from here to there? If we try to jump the chasm, will we fail the trial of faith?

One strategy is to enter into prayer through a conscious discipline. Pray a Psalm. Structure prayers as if they were Psalms, following a formula such as “adoration, supplication, thanksgiving, intercession, confession.” I think that this a productive strategy, and I'd like to build upon it by suggesting a supplementary discipline, inspired by that awkward notion of our relationship with the Trinity as the heart of our life with God. Let me suggest praying in turn to each of the persons of the Trinity. I think if we took this seriously, these prayers would be different. Our prayers to the Father might emphasize adoration, supplication, and thanksgiving. Our prayers to Jesus might emphasize confession and intercession. And our prayers to the Spirit? They would emphasize our desire to follow God's will, and for us and others to be inspired in love to do the work he's set out for us.

The advantage of being smaller in scope is that this kind of prayer would encourage us to go deeper. The advantage of rotation is that it gives our entire prayer life (if not each prayer individually) the breadth of the formulas. And it makes the point, the heart of our life with God isn't our relationship with the Trinity as an abstract theological construct, it is our relationship with the persons of the Trinity: with the Father, with the Son, and with the Holy Spirit. Now and forever, Amen.

Peace