Watched the new Clint Eastwood flick "Gran Torino" last evening. Wonderful, powerful movie about life, death, rebirth, justice, courage, and grace. It will preach.

How can I be happy in today's economy?

Years ago Steve Martin, the comedian, did a short sketch on "How to make a million dollars and not pay taxes on it." It was a simple, two-step process: first, make a million dollars, and two, when the IRS comes to ask why you did not pay taxes on the million dollars just say, "I forgot." Scott Adams' cartoon character, Dogbert, sells admission to his seminar on "How to turn a $100 investment into a million dollars." After collecting an admission fee from all the members of the audience, he advises them to put $100 in a savings account at 5% interest and wait a thousand years. Seminar dismissed.

These recollections came to mind this morning as I was reflecting on the fact that I have not checked on the status of my various retirement savings accounts for nearly six months. While the markets and stock indexes have headed south, I have not bothered to check the daily net asset value of my IRA even once. This from a guy who used to monitor this kind of information on a daily basis and watch Jim Cramer's Mad Money show every evening. 

So, am I just being irresponsible? Is this a sign that I am in denial? Or is it an indication that my life journey has taken a new direction so that I no longer daydream about winning the lottery or hitting it big on the stock market so that I could quit an aggravating job? When people ask me how I am liking the new career I almost feel guilty talking about my good fortune of getting paid to do something that I love doing, something that inspires me, and something that, hopefully, makes a positive difference in the world. 

Joseph Campbell advised that the secret to life is to follow one's bliss. I used to think that required first figuring out what made you happy and then charting a course to get there as if it was a destination. Now I am realizing that to follow your bliss is a journey rather than a destination and that "your bliss" is not the same as "your desire." I think the Buddhists have it right with their teaching that desire is the root of all suffering. 

I went back to school in my mid-thirties thinking that if I got out of the ministry, I would be happy. That was my desire, to be happy. However, the coursework that I found most rewarding in my Master of Library Science program kept bringing me back to the ministry, i.e., applying information science theory to ministry practice. I ended up with a job that was challenging, the pay was decent, I got to travel, met a lot of good people, and got to work pretty independently, but it was not something that I could get passionate about.

I entered a PhD program thinking that I would move up in academic administration, make more money, and retire early enough to take my wife on a trip around the world and finish my bucket list. The goal was not happiness so much as a sense of accomplishment. However, I struggled and struggled to find a dissertation topic until I settled on the study of clergy in the sermon preparation task. Now I find myself helping to establish a Center for the Study of Information and Religion at Kent State University. Sixteen years ago I never would have dreamed of charting a course to arrive at where I am today. I got here by stepping through the doors that opened to me, taking a chance and then discovering that, yeah, this is really cool. This is bliss. 

I don't need to look to know the balance of the retirement funds are lower than they were a year ago, but then retirement is probably the last thing on my mind these days. If anything, I need to check to see how old I can be before Kent State makes me retire. I am just having too much fun.     

I am trying Ping.fm as a way to post one message to several networking sites at one time.

Faith, Knowledge, Doubt, and Depression

Well, November came and went without a blog post, but I am not going to apologize as I was enjoying most of November back in Kansas with my family. I am back in Kent briefly to wrap up the semester and then heading back to the Land of Oz. So this may be the only post for December as well. It has been snowing since about noon and I am getting ready to go out to attend the Kent Festival of Lights, which brings me to the topic of this post. 

One of the things I have really had to monitor during the past several months of living alone is depression. It has been a recurring problem over the years, but this experience has been a strong motivator to deal with it more thoroughly than usual. I know that my nervous system tolerates only a cup of coffee per day. Any more than that I can usually start to feel the anxiety and depression building up. Thank goodness for decaf. Daily exercise is also vital for keeping my depression in check and I am thankful for a daily schedule that makes it easy to fit in 30-40 minutes most every day. I know that this time of year when there is less daylight and the nights are colder gets me down, which brings me back to the Festival of Lights.

I know that this is more of a commercial/festive event than anything spiritual, but it reminds me of the ancient rituals of turning back the night and leads me to the topic I have been pondering for a couple of weeks: where faith begins and knowledge ends. Another value in this equation for me, however, is doubt. 

I grew up believing that faith was more important than knowledge. Knowledge was valuable of course, but it was more important to believe that the end was near, that Jesus was coming back at any time, and only those strong in their faith would be whisked away to heaven, while all those who valued knowledge more than faith would be left behind to suffer. There came a point in my life when I rejected all of that and took up the power of doubt to liberate myself from the fear of unreasonable faith. But for me the price of liberation, the cost of skepticism, is having to accept  uncertainty and the occasional bout with depression. 

I am experiencing a new appreciation for folks who are able to believe, who have faith, but not at the expense of knowledge. I am encountering people who, while seeming not to doubt their faith, are at least being conscientious in their effort and obligation to continually extend their knowledge of the world. This has helped me to realize my error in assuming that people of faith tend to draw a circle within which they stand with their faith and are content to never venture beyond the circle into the unknown. I have also become aware of my lapse in questioning my own lack of faith, my drawing a circle around my doubts and refusing to venture into the world of faith. 

Faith continues to be irrational for me, but not any less so than whatever motivated the many parents I saw this evening bringing their kids out in the cold and the snow so the children could stand in line to tell Santa what they want for Christmas. It was good to see the smiles, to watch snow angels being made, and to just witness and appreciate the innocent belief children that life is good. I was reminded that, as a child, there still was uncertainty, but there was also faith that the adults in my life were in control and that everything was going to be okay. 

Then, of course, there comes a time when we have to be the adults and we come to realize how very scary it is to be the one who is supposed to make sure everything is going to be okay. The inability to make everything okay for everyone in my life is another cause of depression, but is not near as easy to control as limiting coffee intake or taking time to exercise. 

Sense-Making and the luxury of a two-lane highway

I am back in Kent after 8 days on the road. I was in Columbus, Ohio, October 24-29 attending the annual meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. The first day was a workshop in Sense-Making Methodology led by Dr. Dervin and that set the tone for a worthwhile conference. I also took in a couple of NHL games, which was a first, and I was able to draw on the expertise of a couple of different hockey fans to help my Sense-Making approach to the situation. 

Following the conference I drove west to visit family in Indiana for a couple of days before heading home this morning. The drive from Columbus to New Castle, Indiana was on I-70 and just not a very enjoyable drive because of the heavy traffic, especially truck traffic. Yes, it is a more direct route and supposedly one makes better time driving on an interstate highway, but I find myself unable to enjoy the scenery and rather tense from the driving because of the constant diligence one must pay to all the vehicles sharing the same couple of lanes. 

So on the return trip I took the luxury of staying off the interstate, for the most part, and enjoying the much slower pace and less congested lanes of US highways 36, 127, 30 and Ohio route 47. I rationalized the longer travel time as necessary for exploring my new home state and an exercise in patience. Why did I need to be in a hurry to get back to Kent anyway? Sure, I had been living out of a suitcase for 8 days and I have several projects on the to do list, but there is always something on the to do list and what difference would a couple of extra hours make anyway? 

I passed through towns with names like Palestine, Versailles, and Wapakonata. Versailles is a beautiful, historical village with several interesting statues downtown. I have included a picture of just one of them. Wapakonata is home to the Neil Armstrong Air and Space Museum. It may be quite some time before I ever visit these communities again, but I have much context from which to work in my Sense-Making of this situation.

I saw corn pickers gathering the harvest, which brought back childhood memories taking me back to other times and places along my phenomenological horizon. The sky was blue, the leaves were beautiful, the lakes were shimmering, and life was good. I found myself thinking of William Least Heat Moon's book, Blue Highways. I also missed a couple of turns, had to backtrack, and stop and consult a map more than once, but it all helped me in the ongoing bridging the gap in this new situation in my life.  

Bridging the gap to a new home

I apologize for the long hiatus. On August 8 I moved 950 miles from Emporia, Kansas to Kent, Ohio on a quest to start a new career as a professor in Library and Information Science at Kent State University. I have lived in Kansas for the past 24 years and 35 of the past 38 so this is a big change, full of many new experiences intensified by the fact that I am here by myself. To say that it has been a learning experience is a big understatement.

There have been several gaps encountered along the way:

• The confusion of finding a place to live from a distance
• The angst of living alone for the first time ever in my life
• The confusion of a new geographical environment
• The riddles of a new occupation in a new working culture
• The muddles of being the new member of an established community

There have been episodes of high anxiety, second-guessing, and emotional unsettledness, but the good news is that a little over a week ago, while riding my bike home from work, it occurred to me that this is home. In the next few weeks I will report on the ways by which I arrived at this outcome in terms of Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology. 

Please stay tuned.  

No two people read the same book - Edmund Wilson

I just finished reading a fascinating story in today's edition of the London Times about a living library that speaks to the validity of Wilson's statement in the title of this posting. The guiding concept of a living library is that library patrons can "borrow" a person such as Gay Man, Immigrant, Ex-Gang Member, etc., for a 30-minute "read"/chat. Different people who fit a particular demographic volunteer to be a human book in order to facilitate communication and knowledge transfer with others.

The article reports on the experiences of David Baker and his first experience as the human book, Gay Man, and being "checked out" three times during the course of the day. Each patron wanted to tap his knowledge in a uniquely different way. An Eastern European woman shared with him how it upset her to see homosexuals kissing in public. An Anglican priest-in-training had a list of questions that seemed motivated by a desire to decide what his position should be on civil partnerships and whether gay couples should be allowed to adopt children. Two young black men asked Baker about the frequency of his experiences with homophobia in an effort to better understand why they often had strong negative feelings towards gay men.

This is fascinating on several levels, but especially for libraries in terms of facilitating communication between knowledge resource and knowledge seeker, the unique information needs of individuals, operating as a community center, and understanding that knowledge is not a static reality contained within a static entity such as a book or even a person. Different people approached the same "book" with different needs in terms of what they were looking for in order to make sense of a particular situation in their life. The way that each borrower used the "book" also caused a different effect on the book himself. Baker came to realize that he did not know much about Eastern Europeans, that he really did not have well developed positions on civil partnerships and adoption, and that his fear of young black men was just as detrimental yet curable as was their homophobia.

Evidently, the concept of a living library started in Scandinavia and is catching on in other parts of Europe. I hope to see announcements for Living Library day soon here in the States.

Going to Kent State University

Well, my big news is that I have accepted a faculty position as Assistant Professor at the School of Library and Information Science at Kent State University. This is a great opportunity and I am very excited with the many possibilities for research and collaboration with the faculty there and the professional library community in Ohio. I also look forward to networking with alumni from Emporia State University, School of Library and Information Management who are also living and working in Ohio.

It should also be a great place to continue my research of case studies of clergy members and the sermon preparation process. My goal is to do at least six case studies per year for the first three years. I also want to expand the scope of my case studies to include the congregation much more than was the case for my dissertation. I am thinking about studying congregations from the perspective of Wenger's Communities of Practice model. It seems to me that congregations fit the definition of a stable group that is formed through a social learning process of sharing a common interest over an extended period of time. I think there is a great deal to be learned here for the benefit of clergy members as they transition from one congregation to another.

Documents, Sermons, and the Paperless Society

Chapter 7 of The Social Life of Information by Brown and Duguid opens with a wonderful story by Duguid of an allergy inducing experience while working with an archive of dusty letters dating back about 250 years. One day he was joined by a fellow researcher who would open a letter, look at it briefly, hold the letter to his nose, take long, deep sniff, put the letter back in the envelope, make a note on his legal pad, open another letter and repeat the process. After observing this for several hours, Duguid finally asked about the olfactory fascination with each letter. Turns out the researcher was sniffing for traces of vinegar used to disinfect letters before they were mailed during outbreaks of cholera in order to prevent spreading the disease. Thus, he was mapping a chronological trail of cholera outbreaks in Europe.

Brown and Duguid relate the story to make the point that there is much more to a document than letters on a piece of paper. The chapter is a thought provoking essay on the dynamic tensions between the fixed and fluid, mutable and immutable, nature of documents. The printing press was hailed as a means to fix information content against the potential tampering inherent with hand-written copies of documents. At the same time, the printing press made the information fixed within a document fluid by allowing for quick and affordable copies for wider distribution. The technology of the telegraph, radio, television, and the web all pull society in the direction of fluid information, supposedly at the expense of printed documents such as books, newspapers, and office memos. Books, newspapers, and the use of office printers continue to thrive in the face of several decades worth of predictions of their demise as we supposedly evolve in a paperless society.

Brown and Duguid argue that fixed documents continue to exist because they create community by providing a common reference point for people by which they can read, refer to, and discuss. While documents as fixed products will continue to exist, the technology makes it increasing difficult to control ownership of fixed products and the economics are starting to focus on service and performance (fluid) rather than copyrighted product (fixed). Musicians are adopting economic models based on musical performance rather than musical product even if their recording companies are loath to do so.

The point of this long introduction is to argue that sermons have been in the middle of this fixed-fluid document dynamic for hundreds of years. The sermon as performance serves as a fluid expression and potential discussion starter focusing on a particular portion of fixed Scripture text. Scripture as a fixed document is an important resource of common experience for a vast number of communities. Yet the Scripture is also fluid and inconsistent. In one passage we are told it is acceptable to take an eye for an eye, in another passage we are told to turn the other cheek.

Scripture is read during a worship service so that everyone present is "on the same page" and the text is then interpreted in such a fluid way as to apply to the life and times of persons living many centuries removed from the time of the Scripture writer. The sermon is understood as a fluid, customized, message from God for a particular group of people at a particular place in a particular time. Yet for all this fluid leaning, Scripture is understood as the fixed authority on how one should live and what one should believe. Who knew such an ancient document was so current to the dynamic issues of modern life?

The Preacher Bot?

I have been reading The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid and had a few thoughts about the second chapter on Agents and Angels. The authors give an excellent analysis of the use of software bots that are increasingly influencing our lives as we spend more and more time online.

There are bots that track our online behavior and then customize search results according to various algorithms. The purpose of bots is 1. to help the user by quickly finding what it "thinks" the user really wants to find, and 2. to push products of certain customers who pay the bot owner for each customer who clicks through to their website. There are alert bots that we can program to continuously search the Internet for us to find news on particular people, companies, or phrases. There are shopbots that we can program to continuously search for a particular product that we want to purchase and it will find us the best price.

One of the oldest forms of bots are called "chatterbots" that act as conversational partners with a level of "awareness" so to seem truly human. The most famous chatterbot is Eliza, an online therapist chatterbot that has been around for more than 40 years as nothing more than computer code. These bots have long been predicted to develop into personalized assistants that will keep our calendars, handle our communications, wake us in the morning, and lull us to sleep in the evening with just the right music based on its "knowledge" of our personal preferences and practices.

Chatterbots have replaced customer service representatives as the first line of response when we call a business and get the automated answering system with the human sounding voice that gives us a list of options and directs us through several layers of problem solving before finally, hopefully, handing us off to a human. Some companies have gone even further by having chatterbots search a vast database of recorded incidents of customer problems and solutions while keeping you on the phone and then delivering the most logical answer according to the algorithm. It has also been suggested that reference librarians and any other number of information professionals might be replaced in the same way.

So what I am thinking is this. Given the vast number of sermons posted to the Internet by a wide variety of different preachers, why doesn't someone write a bot program that can draw from this online resource and create a customized sermon? I am thinking of a bot that operates from a web page where I can fill out a profile of my religious orientation - denominational affiliation, doctrinal leaning, etc., as well as information about how I am feeling or what I feel like I am needing on a particular day - I am feeling depressed, I am feeling fearful, I am full of joy, etc., and within moments the bot will deliver me a sermon, in stereo if I prefer, that I can listen to whenever and wherever. The bot might take into consideration the time of the year and customize the sermon for religious holidays or maybe it has been tracking my online history and decides that I need a sermon on the dangers of greed, lust, or idleness. I almost forgot the most important part! After delivering the sermon, the bot asks for an offering.

Let me know what you think.

Testimony, Clergy, and Justification

I am still processing the article by Robert Audi that I mentioned in the last post: "The place of testimony in the fabric of knowledge and justification." I have been thinking especially about the difference between my dissertation informant and myself in terms of justification and the contents of our sermons.

My informant is justified in his belief in the power of the Gospel to change lives based on his childhood experience within his nuclear family. In the course of my data collection, I failed to pursue more information about the nature of this experience, but I can conclude that we are not talking about a dramatic conversion experience by a particular member of the family. Rather, the implication is that once his family made a commitment to be involved in a church community on a regular basis, that a change for the better began to occur that may have been noticeable only from within the family itself. Whatever the nature of this change, it also influenced my informant's decision to follow a career path into the ministry.

While I noticed change in the lives of other people when I was growing up in the church, I never really experienced anything as close and personal as my informant did within his family. I went into the ministry following in the footsteps of my father, which is a completely different motivation than that of my informant. A clergy member's motivation for entering the ministry is an important context for my future research that was not addressed in the doctoral dissertation.

The contents of my sermons frequently spoke about my doubts more than my beliefs. Some people in the congregations I served found this to be refreshing and felt free to approach me with their own doubts. Other people found it bothersome that their minister was not a beacon of faith that they could look to in moments of darkness.

My informant can sincerely and credibly speak about the blessedness that comes from loving God with all one's heart, soul, mind, and strength and loving one's neighbor as one's self. It is a message that emanates from his life and which started from a particular change that he can remember and point to in the life of his family. Whatever the problem was that changed because of involvement with the church, it probably was a private matter that only the family knew about.

My childhood family experience revolved around being the oldest child in the minister's family, of living in a fishbowl, and having to keep up appearances for the congregation. Problems did not exist if they were not acknowledged nor discussed. The situation was only tolerable if one truly believed that ours was the model family. From my conversations with other children of minister's families, I know that I am not alone in this experience.

My belief in the model family, the model Christian college, the model denomination, the model faith, etc., came to be replaced with with an equally strong skepticism. Audi refers to the absence or lack of filtering beliefs as yielding credulity, but excessively rigorous filters yield skepticism. My information filters could be described with one of my favorite sayings, which comes Frederich Buechner - "Doubt is the ants in the pants of faith - It keeps it alive and moving."

I intend to design my future research taking into account whether or not the participant clergy members grew up in a clergy family and followed a parent's path into the ministry.

Sermons, Testimony, and Social Epistemology

Another way to look at my doctoral research and its links to the Library and Information Science field is from the perspective of social epistemology. Shera defined social epistemology as “the study of knowledge in society with a focus on the production, flow, integration, and consumption of all forms of communicated thought throughout the social fabric” (1970, p. 86).My research focuses on the Sunday sermon as a significant and prevalent means of communicating messages to a large percentage of the population on a weekly basis. I argue that the Sunday sermon is a major influence in the creation of social knowledge.

However, every Sunday sermon is a unique message created by a unique individual for a unique group of people at a unique point in time so that if it were possible to review every sermon delivered on any given Sunday, one would find an extremely wide range of messages. This diversity of messages certainly reduces the influence of the Sunday sermon on the general stock of social knowledge on a national scale, especially in specific matters. In a broader sense, though, the collective Sunday sermon serves to create the social knowledge that it is good to care about others, that honesty is to be valued, and that one should strive to be trustworthy in word and deed.

A particular facet of social epistemology that I am particularly intrigued with as it relates to my research is the concept of testimony. Robert Audi and his article “The place of testimony in the fabric of knowledge and justification” (American Philosophical Quarterly, Oct. 1997, p. 405) is very informative.

The concepts of testimony can be applied to sermons, lectures, campaign speeches, and any other kind of persuasive communication by which the listener has to decide whether or not to believe the testimony based on the credibility they give to the testifier. The listener has to justify their belief or skepticism based on their personal filters. The testifier, then, has to also communicate believability through sincerity, authority, competence, and so on.

The need to establish and maintain credibility is a major concern for clergy, professors, parents, teachers, coaches, business leaders, etc. This speaks to the findings of Dr. Don Wicks as a reason for why clergy operate from a closed information system at the intersection of the preaching role and theological world. For a clergy person to venture outside of their theological world means to take a risk of losing credibility with the congregation. The believability of testimony depends on the belief system of those hearing the testimony. The testimony has to make sense with the prior knowledge of the listener. So if the clergy person speaks on a topic that is outside the belief system of the congregation, it is likely that the testimony will be received skeptically and the clergy person may no longer be considered credible.

My dissertation informant considered the reaction of the congregation when preparing his sermons. His reaction to the leading of the Holy Spirit was often “Do I really want to go there?” His explanation at the time was that he is not a brash and bold preacher and I left it at that. For future research, I plan to be more attentive to opportunities in the interviews to explore the concept of credibility with my informants.

Credibility is established for the clergy person through the ritual of ordination by which the church declares that the individual clergy member hears and speaks the Word of God. The church expects the clergy member to testify to the message of the church in such a manner as to generate belief in the hearts and minds of church members.

By looking at the worship service from the perspective of the formal testimony concept allows one to see the sanctuary as a court room, the pulpit as a witness stand, and the liturgical garments as judges’ robes. All of these are powerful symbols designed to strengthen credibility, but which can also activate information filters that result in skepticism.

More to follow.

ALISE 2008

I attended the annual meeting of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) in Philadelphia the first week of January. Thankfully, the weather was unusually warm and pleasant.


I went a couple of days early in order to drive down to the eastern shore of Maryland to visit Rev. Eugene and Beverly Rasmussen. Professor Rasmussen was my faculty adviser years ago at Mid-America Nazarene College and started me on the path of sociology studies. It was great to catch up on old times and play a couple of games of Scrabble.



My primary purpose for attending ALISE was to compete in the doctoral student poster competition with 31 other LIS doc students from around North America. While I did not win an award, it was a great time meeting some other students and seeing the various research everyone is conducting. It was especially rewarding to meet T. Patrick Milas from Florida State University whose dissertation research is entitled: "The Role of Faith in Information Behavior: A Study of Theological Research." While his methodology is much more quantitative than mine, it appears that our area of interest is very similar and we are looking forward to opportunities for collaboration in the future. Stay tuned for more postings on the differences and similarities of our research on the clergy profession from the LIS perspective.

Philadelphia is not one of my favorite places to visit, but I did discover the Reading Terminal at 12th and Market and enjoyed browsing the various food stalls and vendors in this expansive indoor market. My colleague, Waseem Afzal, and I enjoyed some wonderful Indian food at Nandee's and I experienced some of the local brew, Yuengling's, at the indoor beer garden.

Paper submitted to the Midwest Sociological Society 2008 annual meeting

I spent my holiday break writing a critical self-evaluation of my dissertation research and I am entering it as a paper in the graduate student competition of the Midwest Sociological Society annual meeting this March in St. Louis. The paper is entitled The Challenges and Benefits of Insider Status: A Critique of a Single-Case Study of the Sense-Making Behavior of a Clergy Member and the Interpretation of Scripture. The article revisits the research methodology question about the proper role of the researcher: detached observer (outsider) or active participant (insider)?

I argue in the paper that something more than a simple either/or answer is required. I make the case that the clergy profession as a field of study is so complex that some degree of insider status, e.g., experience in the field, seminary education, etc., is necessary in order to properly study and accurately represent the participants. In the paper, I demonstrate that the attributes I had in common with my dissertation informant: gender, ethnicity, seminary education, ordination, clergy experience, conservative religious childhood, etc., was a benefit rather than a detriment to the research project. My insider status enabled me to pick up on certain things in the informant's sermons and interviews that likely would have been missed by a detached observer. But my questions regarding these different points did not lead to simple confirmation of my assumptions. Very often the informant's replies served to educate me from a perspective very different from my own and helped the research project to achieve a significant depth of exploration.

As a result of this self-evaluation, I am modifying my research methodology to intentionally include participants as co-researchers through the utilization of the Co-Operative Inquiry Method of Peter Reason. In the self-evaluation, I recognize situations of bias and over-rapport occurred in the dissertation research that fortunately did not undermine the integrity of the project, but is a cause of concern . By asking future participants in the research to review and critique the transcripts of interviews conducted with participants other than themselves, I am hoping that they will help catch me in situations of presumption, bias, over-rapport, and so on. The methodology will also empower participants to educate me on the subtle distinctions of theology and doctrine that may more accurately represent their unique situation and thereby help to clarify the complexity of the field of study.