spinning wheels in academia

I'm in the middle of a lecture in my digital libraries class right now. It's actually not as boring (today) as my in-class-blogging might suggest. We're learning about digitizing, archiving, and making accessible AV files. The example the prof is using is of EVIA, an IU-based archive project wherein sociologists, ethno-musicologists, and the like record video and audio of indigenous and/or otherwise unique cultures. Each hour of video gets at least eight hours of processing... from compressing it into digital formats to scholarly annotaton of the entire thing, moment by moment. As cultures are assimilated, this project captures slices of the heritage of peoples, and will preserve it for future generations.

It's actually kind of cool.

(One interesting thing about the project is that some of it can't be made publicly available because some of the sacred things recorded cannot be seen/heard by, say, women, according to the cultural standards. I think it's cool that the scholars respect that, even if it's passe in our culture.)

Anyway, my thoughts today are more in the direction of stewardship. People are spending hundreds of thousands of hours, and hundreds of thousands of dollars, on this kind of academic research and archiving. It's fascinating and potentially useful for academics and interested members of the public, but is it a good use of resources? I realize that it's grant-funded, etc, so if the money wasn't used on this it would be used on some other significant academic project... But I was just thinking... Really? Is this worth it?


The QOTD from my google homepage is from Ellen Goodman:

"Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work and driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for - in order to get to the job you need to pay for the clothes and the car, and the house you leave vacant all day so you can afford to live in it."

Are we just spinning our wheels? Personally? Are we living in light of the purpose to which we have been called? Are we even aware of what that purpose is? I think most of my friends would say yes, they know their purpose, and are at least trying to live in light of it. But it's good to check in about it.

But is there an extent to which we are just spinning our wheels here in academia? Literary scholars find new ways to pick over the same old works, ad infinitum. Historians search again and again to extract new meaning from history, or to figure out what "really" happened. Physical scientists really do make strides into understanding more of the world, but conflicting studies in significant areas confuse the very assertion of observable truth. Social science even more so. Perhaps I feel it more in this arcane world of librarianship, where we fill the shelves and screens with information that will almost certainly never make a significant impact for long-term good on people's lives.

If we're going to work...if we're going to engage in academia...shouldn't we have just as much purpose in that as in the rest of our lives? And if, from the Christian perspective, we define our purpose based on the gospel, how can we orient our academic life to reflect that centrality? Is it just a frame of mind, doing it for God? Or is it more than that--choosing work that will impact the world for Him, or celebrate Him?

Lots to think about.

amazing grace

You may have read this before. But read it again. It's from Yancey's What's So Amazing About Grace?

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A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. "I hate you!" she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.

She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid detail the gangs, the drugs, and the violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is probably the last place her parents will look for hr. California, maybe, or FLorida, but not Detroit.

Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she's ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she's ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: her parents were keeping her from all the fun.

The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car--she calls him "Boss"--teaches her a few things that men like. Since she's underage, men pay a premium for her. She lives in a penthouse, and orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring and provincial that she can hardly believe she grew up there.

She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the side of a milk carton with the headline "Have you seen this child?" But by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewelry she wears, nobody would mistake her for a child. Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit.

After a year the first sallow signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. "These days, we can't mess around," he growls, and before she knows it she's out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don't pay much, and all the money goes to support her habit. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. "Sleeping" is the wrong word--a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. her cough worsens.

One night as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she's hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she's piled atop her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.

God, why did I leave, she says to herself, and pain stabs her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She's sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.

Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, "Dad, Mom, it's me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I'm catching a bus up your way, and it'll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you're not there, well, I guess I'll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada."

It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them? And even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.

Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she is preparing for her father. ‘Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. It’s not your fault; it’s all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?’ She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as rehearses them she hasn’t apologized to anyone in years.

The bus has been driving with the lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit the pavement rubbed worn by thousands of tires, and the asphalt steams. She’s forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. Oh God.

When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air breaks hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, ‘Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.’ Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smoothes her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wonders if her parents will notice. If they’re there.

She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepares her for what she sees. There in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They’re all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads "Welcome home!"

Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her Dad. She stares out through the tears quivering from her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, "Dad, I’m sorry, I know…"

He interrupts her. "Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies. You’ll be late for the party. A banquet’s waiting for you at home."

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James 1:26 says "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress...

I used to be an orphan. I remember it vividly, and it was awful. The hurt is everywhere. . . certainly among those who haven't yet turned to Christ, but also among us, the family, the chosen and beloved. Either way, the call is clear. The command is clear. And the love, the grace? Limitless. And amazing.