Archive - Feb 2015
February 14th
Keeping the Saint in St. Valentine’s Day
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 02/14/2015 - 18:21This morning on Facebook, I posted,
Happy Saint Valentine's Day everyone!
(Let's keep the Saint in Saint Valentine's Day!)
Several people liked the post, but one asked,
Why? I'm fine with thinking it was invented by Hallmark.
A friend of a friend on Facebook posted,
Who was St. Valentine? I believe he was beheaded for secretly marrying couples during a time when marriage was banned so that men would be more likely to go to war! St Valentine was therefore canonized by the Catholic Church. Am I right?
Another posted
St Valentine was a pimp... but then again we celebrate slave owners and criminals as well.
So, let’s look at some of what is currently said about St. Valentine online.
Wikipedia lists several stories about St. Valentine, noting that
All that is reliably known of the saint commemorated on February 14 is his name and that he was martyred and buried at a cemetery on the Via Flaminia close to the Milvian bridge to the north of Rome on that day
History.com provides this story:
Under the rule of Claudius the Cruel, Rome was involved in many unpopular and bloody campaigns. The emperor had to maintain a strong army, but was having a difficult time getting soldiers to join his military leagues. Claudius believed that Roman men were unwilling to join the army because of their strong attachment to their wives and families.
To get rid of the problem, Claudius banned all marriages and engagements in Rome. Valentine, realizing the injustice of the decree, defied Claudius and continued to perform marriages for young lovers in secret.
When Valentine's actions were discovered, Claudius ordered that he be put to death. Valentine was arrested and dragged before the Prefect of Rome, who condemned him to be beaten to death with clubs and to have his head cut off. The sentence was carried out on February 14, on or about the year 270.Wikipedia also mentions this story as one of many about St. Valentine.
While we may never know the true story, there is a timeless truth people performing marriages against orders, to avoid military service, or to promote some greater good.
Marriage was a way to get avoid being drafted during the Vietnam War. Friar Lawrence married Romeo and Juliet in hopes of bringing to warring families together.
Even this past week, we have seen the Alabama Chief Justice order probate judges not to issues marriage licenses to same sex couples after a Federal Judge found the state’s same-sex marriage ban unconstitutional. Some probate judges refused to follow the Chief Justice’s order and a subsequent ruling was expanded the number of probate judges issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples.
So, while, my post was meant as a play on, let’s keep the Christ in Christmas, and the many other lines that inspired, such as let’s keep Thor in Thursday, there is something to celebrate in priests and judges that seek to bring people together against the will of those who would wage war or try to keep people apart.
Happy Saint Valentine’s Day.
February 13th
Day In Day Out
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 02/13/2015 - 21:06The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day in day out" really means.
My wife and I both had long days today, not doing anything especially noteworthy, just doing a lot of those “day in day out” tasks that make up a large part of adult life. So, I picked, up a grinder on the way home. In the car, I listened to All Things Considered and Marketplace on public radio. Day in and day out, they produce those shows. One segment talked about a photographer for Saturday Night Live, a show produced weekly for forty years.
One of my tasks for the day was going over the interview questions for an upcoming guest on Conversations on Health Care with the producer, I have a sense at what it takes to produce a show, week after week, and am awed by people who can produce a daily show.
These are shows that inform and entertain. This year, I’ve gotten back into the swing of writing in my blog daily, day in day out. There are times that it is a struggle. I sometimes think it would be better to skip a day here and there rather than put up a blog post that really isn’t all that interesting, posts that perhaps neither inform nor entertain.
Yet my daily online performance is just part of many daily performances. My performance at work and at home. The performances of those making the grinder I brought home. Hopefully, it makes me a better writer. Hopefully, it is putting together a collection of ideas, perhaps like Deleuze’s plateaus or Wittengenstein’s Zettel, but that is a different idea to explore.
So, day fades into night. I write my blog post, do a little research online and head off to bed.
February 12th
Further Exploration into the Network of Ideas
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Thu, 02/12/2015 - 22:24This morning, I had a long interesting discussion with my eldest daughter about where some of her studies and some of my recent thinking have been overlapping. We talked a little bit about the work of Judith Butler, and Mairead sent me the link to the Wikipedia article about Butler. We talked about Foucault and Deleuza and who influenced whom.
I was interested to see that Wikipedia has a section listing influences. So, I started mapping out a little bit who influenced whom. Using GraphViz, I even created a quick and simple graph illustrating some of the links.
I wander off on different thoughts about Hegel, Marx, Freud, Proust, Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze and Butler, but I am tired and my wandering thoughts aren’t leading anywhere constructive right now, so I’ll pause and see where they might lead me another day.
February 11th
Unknowing
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 02/11/2015 - 20:56Yesterday, I was exploring Deleuze and Guattari again, trying to figure out how their thoughts, their words, fit with my own thinking. I’m not sure I made much progress. I won’t pretend to understand what they are saying. Yet the underlying thought I was coming away with was to challenge orthodox thought and see where the challenges take you.
Yet my religious beliefs are fairly orthodox. How do I put the two of these together?
Romans 12:2 says, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.” Does reading Deleuze and Guattari contribute to renewing my mind? Is not conforming to the patterns of this world related to challenging orthodox thought?
This morning, I read about the shooting in Chapel Hill. Some people have been trying to shift the narrative around terrorism from “radical Islam” to “extremism”. Others has pushed back against this. I can hear the words of Barry Goldwater, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”.
What is ‘extremism’? What is ‘Islam’? I suspect that many people have many different definitions. Sometimes, it seems, these definitions end up being used to justify violence or terrorism.
As I thought about it, it seems like the real dangers are not ‘radical Islam’ or ‘extremism’. I’m probably extreme in some of my own ways. Perhaps a more significant root of terrorism is ‘certainty’. When you are certain that your way is right and everyone else’s ways are wrong, it becomes easier to lapse into not honoring people with other views, or, even worse, to committing violence against people with different views.
It leads me to a quote from Anne Lamott, “The opposite of faith is not doubt, it’s certainty.” My thoughts head back to a paper I read years ago, Our Best Work Happens When We Don’t Know What We’re Doing
The article challenges the dominant assumption that the key to working effectively as academics, organizational researchers, consultants, managers or teachers is to know what we are doing. Instead, it proposes that learning comes from working at the edge between knowing and not-knowing.
How do we work, or better yet, how do we live, at the edge of between knowing and not-knowing? How do we embrace uncertainty? How do we renew our minds, perhaps including challenging social constructs, so as not to be conformed to the patterns of this world?
This leads me to The Cloud of Unknowing.
February 10th
Connecting Random Thoughts
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 02/10/2015 - 23:17As I look upon layer on layer of snow, I long to run my hands through the warm spring dirt, pulling out weeds and nurturing the plants I want to flourish. One weed I’ve fought with during much of my grown life has been bittersweet. The long woody orange roots seem to go on and on, branching here and there, and if you don’t get all of it, it comes back with a vengeance.
It has been a long day, and again, my time to write is limited. So, I’m writing about some other roots, roots of thoughts. The MOOCs I was participating in have ended, and I’m looking for some new MOOCs to participate in. In the MOOCs about teaching with Moodle, I started exploring Connectivism. So, I thought it would be interesting to see if there are any MOOCs about Connectivism. Instead, I found an article on Connectivist MOOCs
This lead me to Rhizomatic Learning – A Big Forking Course, and I had an interesting connection. I don’t remember how I first stumbled upon Dave Cornier and his work on Rhizomatic Learning, but it has been a topic I’ve been meaning to explore. It looks like all of this may come together in a MOOC towards the end of the month.
Related links are a section in Open Education. Section 5.4 is about Connectivism and Section 5.5 is about Rhizomatic Learning. Circling back, I visit Rhizomatic Learning – Why we teach?.
Rhizomatic learning is a way of thinking about learning based on ideas described by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in a thousand plateaus.
The connection becomes more complicated. Guattari was an analysand of Lacan. I’ve long been interested in Lacan and from that Deleuze and Guattari. Now, to tie it all together into where groups, education, psychology and a whole bunch of other stuff meet.
