Radical on the Bookshelf--My Piece in Geez Magazine

The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!

Not really, but I am in print!

I may have mentioned that I was putting together a bibliography of sorts for Geez Magazine's "Worship and Anarchy" issue. My piece isn't available online, so I'll post it here. But if you want a hard copy--and you really should, it's a great issue!--you can order one HERE.

These are books I'd recommend if you are interested in learning more about Christian anarchism. Any of them would be a great starting place if you're just looking into it, or a place to dig a bit deeper.

Let me know what you think. Have you read these? What would you add to the list?

The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894) by Leo Tolstoy	This classic has influenced anarchists and nonviolent resisters from Ammon Hennacy to Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr., and is an enduring cornerstone of the anarchist canon. *Available for free online – Google Books, Kindle
Anarchy and Christianity (1988) by Jacques Ellul	A short, accessible argument for Christian anarchism, directed at both anarchist and Christian skeptics. Ellul challenges the involvement of the church in the politics of the nation-state and encourages the reader to imagine a more Christ-like alternative. Also recommended: Violence and The Subversion of Christianity
Anarchism and Other Essays (1910) by Emma Goldman	Reading Goldman, a committed atheist who sometimes supported violence, is important for giving shape to an anarchistic worldview. Plus, she’s a formidable early anarcha-feminist you want to know about. *Available for free online – Google Books, Kindle
The Long Loneliness (1952) by Dorothy Day	This autobiography gives us a glimpse into what a life shaped by Christian anarchism looks like. Day, who created the Catholic Worker anarchist newspaper and founded Hospitality Houses that fed and clothed the poor, had a passion for “making the world a place where people can be better human beings.”
The Politics of Jesus (1972) by John Howard Yoder	Yoder, an anabaptist theologian who has been influential for Christian anarchists, takes Jesus as a “model of radical political action.” He shows how the Jesus of Christendom hardly resembles the Jesus of the gospels. Truly following Jesus should change our social ethic to the countercultural ethic of the Beatitudes and Jubilee.
Living on Hope While Living in Babylon (2009) by Tripp York	In York’s analysis, the Christian anarchist politic is apocalyptic rather than apolitical. He shows how it has been lived out by well-known anarchists like Dorothy Day and Clarence Jordan. The tone is hopeful: York presents a Christian anarchist way of life as not only viable but even fruitful.
The Myth of a Christian Nation (2007) by Gregory Boyd	Boyd tackles the creeping problem of Christian patriotism in the United States and challenges believers to rethink the way they engage in politics instead of buying into the evangelical myth of the religious right.
Resident Aliens (1989)  by Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon	This book isn’t explicitly anarchist, but it challenges Christians to think critically about our cultural contexts and how to live as a colony of believers – in the world and yet not of the world.
Waging Nonviolent Struggle (2005)  by Gene Sharp	Sharp is neither overtly anarchist nor Christian, but he offers a “social view of power” – that power comes from the people and is dependent on their cooperation. He advocates for nonviolence as an effective means for oppressed people to create change and lists 198 different methods of nonviolent action.
That Holy Anarchist (2012) Mark Van Steenwyk	A quick read that covers the basics of Christian anarchism as well as its most common challenges. Van Steenwyk provides a very accessible and informative primer on the anarchistic leanings of Jesus.
Jesus For President (2008) Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw	Designed in full colour with a DIY aesthetic, this book uses the stories of ancient Israel and the early church to frame the way Christians may think about government and rulers today.
Oppression and Liberty (1955) by Simone Weil	Simone Weil was an anarchist-turned-Catholic mystic. A well-educated early-twentieth-century woman, she offers a unique, thorough and philosophical perspective on power and politics, and a particularly apt criticism of Marx.
Christian Anarchy (1987) by Vernard Eller	In a scholarly yet informal style, Eller provides many “whys” of Christian anarchy, explaining how kingdom of God “arky” is so different from wordly “arkys” and therefore how Christians should think and live differently. *Available for free online HERE

Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel (2010) byAlexandre Christoyannopoulos

With accessible academic style, Christoyannopoulos presents an extensively researched and thorough study of Christian anarchism that includes its origins and history, prominent leaders and influencers, and biblical and theological supporting theories.

Theology I'm reading this Thursday but not sharing with you...

Welp, today has gotten away from me, and I'm knee-deep in about ten different books working on a project (will share later) and just didn't get around to Theologian Thursday today.

So sorry!

But you know, I went 8 weeks in a row without skipping, so I feel like that's pretty good.

Now I have to start over. Like a factory worker keeping track of the time since the last accident.

It's been ZERO weeks since I skipped Theologian Thursday. :(

If you're interested in what I'm reading this week, here's the stack of books sitting on my desk currently.

Top to bottom:

In Good Company // Hauerwas

Living on Hope While Living in Babylon // York

Ambassadors of Reconciliation (vol. 1 & 2) // Enns & Myers

The Politics of Nonviolent Action vol. 1 // Sharp

The Politics of Jesus // Yoder

The Subversion of Christianity // Ellul

A Faith Not Worth Fighting For // York

Anarchy and Christianity // Ellul

What are you reading this week?

Mutuality as Miscellaneous: Feminist Theology-Library Science Crossover!

Since it's finally summer, and coursework for the year is over, I'm getting to some "fun" reading... which turns out to still be related to my Organization of Information and Resources class (so much so that I think it should have been required reading).

The book is called Everything is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger, and I'm only halfway through, but I highly recommend it--and not just to librarian-types. It's definitely everyone-accessible.

But the interesting thing is not the book itself.

What's interesting is that I'm reading it through the context of feminism and all the feminist theology I've been reading lately (including Rachel Held Evans's "Week of Mutuality" #mutuality2012).

Weinberger explains that there are three types of order:

1. The order of physical things themselves--where things go, like books on shelves.
2. The order of information about the things of the first order--a directory of where things go, like a catalog.
3. The order of digital "things" which take up no space--the removal of the first and second orders' limitations

Weinberger talks about how, historically, people have been bound to ideas of "natural order" or "heavenly order" that, when analyzed critically, turn out to still be established rather arbitrarily. For example, planets are real things that exist in nature, but to classify an entity as a planet, it has to meet certain criteria, and this criteria is just a definition established by astronomers, and the astronomers don't even agree on the definition. Further, some think that the whole concept of a class of "planets" is totally cultural to begin with, and doesn't even translate globally. Weinberger says that "Maintaining a category of planets says less about the nature of our universe than about our need to imagine walking on speres other than our own blue one" (39).

He goes on to show how Aristotelian categorization has prevailed as the organizational structure of choice for millennia, with its hierarchical trees and nesting of smaller categories into larger.

Truly, the Aristotelian system is useful in many ways (if only because its engrained in our collective psyche). But with the rise of the digital age and postmodernity, its cracks are beginning to leak.

I see that this is also true in the patriarchal hierarchy of the church.

Weinberger says that "Classification is a power struggle--it is political--because the first two orders of order require that there be a winner. The third order takes the territory subjugated by classification and liberates it. Instead of forcing it into categories, it tags it" (91-92).

I refuse to believe that this is not as relevant to me as a woman in the church as it is to me as a librarian in a digital context.

There no longer has to be a winner. Men and women (and everyone in between) can live and serve and minister as miscellaneous persons, "tagging" themselves as they are called and doing what they are meant to do.

The first two orders are no longer sufficient for organizing information or society. We are in a new time--historically and in light of the incarnation and resurrection--and we should be liberated by the ability to be miscellaneous, be what we are, without trying to force our new wine into old wineskins. This new wine will burst the old wineskins. Let's allow it to spill out.

On Really Old Journal Articles

Today I read an article written by Melvil Dewey for the very first issue of Library Journal back in 1877.

 I'm researching the purpose and value of library cooperatives and consortia for a project regarding the SkyRiver v. OCLC lawsuit, and this Dewey article came up, and I figured that if one of the revered Fathers of the Library wrote something about this, I'd better read it. It ended up being quite an ordeal to even find the thing, which led me to the following resolutions:

1. If something is in the public domain, it (as in, the actual document) should come up in a Google search. I mean really. I was absolutely shocked that no library Dewey nerd has compiled the works of Dewey into an easily navigable website. I know you're out there, Dewey nerd, and just know--I'm very disappointed in you.
2. If you are going to cite/reference an article, you should have actually looked at the thing. I found no less than four articles that either cited or referenced a certain 1886 Dewey article (many in curiously similar syntax), and yet said article is nowhere to be found. I'm disappointed in all you lazy, cheating scholars too! I know you didn't read it! You're all just semi-paraphrasing each other without citations because none of you could find the article either!

Seriously, though, if anyone wants to use their searching skillz to find me Melvil Dewey's "Library Co-operation" from volume 11 (issues 5 and 6) of the 1886 Library Journal (pages 106-107)... Let me know.

Besides those two grievances, it was pretty interesting to see that even way back in the nineteenth century, librarians were still dealing with similar issues--ones the solutions to which we are now seeing come to fruition (i.e. WorldCat). Plus, I just love some good nostalgic solidarity.

The Hunger Games, or: My First eBook

This is a post about me succumbing to peer pressure in two ways at once.

For all my love of digital media--getting used to online-only course material, loving open-access journals, PDF articles, and all that--I had never read an ebook until this weekend. I'm not one of those staunch devotees of hardcopy print, though I do like the feel of actual books, the ability to scribble in the margins, and, yes, the smell. I just never got around to it. But with all the hype surrounding the Hunger Games movie coming out, and the fact that my mother has loved the books for years, and my student employees and friends were all raving about them, I figured I'd better have a read. At the very least because I fear irrelevance. I knew there'd be no way of checking out a copy from a library anywhere (San Diego County has over 300 in circulation, and surely they have holds lined up until the next Quarter Quell...harhar what I did there), so I decided I might as well venture into the world of ebooks and see how I like it.

Even though I know Amazon is supposed to be the bane of every library and librarian's existence, I knew I cold easily download the Kindle app for my iPad and be reading in five minutes. So that's what I did. Sure, sure, I could have done a bit more research, but I'm a slave to Zipf's Law.

Later, my boyfriend showed me this sweet deal where you can get all three books for about $3, so I downloaded Kobo (which is pretty much just as good as Kindle... maybe more "social") and got my read on.

I started Hunger Games on Thursday night and finished on Saturday night. I started Catching Fire on Sunday morning and finished on Sunday night. Woe is me, spring quarter starts today, so who knows when I'll finish Mockingjay. Hopefully sometime this week.

But you guys. I'm obsessed. It definitely lives up to the hype. Though I'm hesitant to see the movie, since, as everyone knows, the book is always better than the movie. I'll probably see it anyway. And reading an ebook wasn't so bad after all. I did end up tethered to the wall during my Sunday read-athon, but it was OK. I could even highight. I'm not about to abandon all print, but I'm far less skeptical now. This is the future, you know.

I also want to write a bit more about the book, and all the interesting themes going on there, but it will have to wait, since this post is already too long and I have yet to even look at my new course websites for the new quarter. Blerg.

Marcia J. Bates and the Google Bookcase

In this week's reading we have an article written by Marcia J. Bates in 1989, in which she talks about better ways to facilitate online browsing--making it more like real-life browsing, or what people are familiar with.

One thing she says is, “If the interface can produce a picture on the screen that looks like the books on a shelf, the searcher can transfer a familiar experience to the automated system. If then, a mouse or similar device makes it possible to, in effect, move among the books, a familiar physical experience is reproduced and the searcher can take advantage of well-developed browsing skills.”

So. Have you SEEN the video for the Google Chrome Bookcase?



We live in the future!

Technology amazes me.

Friday To-Do List Report

It's the end of my first real week of class, and I'm feeling really good!

Figuring out a method of organization was a big goal in the last week, and I think I've settled on weekly to-do lists, created in Evernote. Putting together, all in one place, the lectures I have to watch and articles I have to read has been really helpful in making sure I get it all done. And I think in the following weeks I'll be adding discussion board posts I have to make and group-work-related things I have to do. (Speaking of group work, that's another post--it's good news!)

So here's my To Do List report for the week.

500

Lectures

√ Nature of Info Bearing Objects

√ Acts of Publication & Distribution

√ Notions of Aggregating, Collecting & Collections

Readings

√ Brown, John Seely and Paul Duguid. 2000. The Social Life of Information. Chapter 7: Reading the Background.

√ Benkler, Yochai. 2006. Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. Chapter 3: Peer production and sharing. Yale University Press.

Waltham, Mary. 2003. Challenges to the role of publishers. Learned Publishing 2003 (16), 7-14.

√ Lee, Hur-Li. 2000. What is a collection? Journal of the American Society for Information Science 51 (12).

510

Lectures

√ Welcome & Intro

√ General Expectations & Midterm

√ Social IB & Reflection Papers

√ Course Overview: What is IB

√ Overview & Quantitative Methods

√ Qualitative Methods

Readings

Case, Chs. 1-2; Chs. 8-9

√ Julien, H. and Michels, D. (2003). Intra-individual information behaviour in daily life. Information Processing and Management, 40:3, 547-562

√ Fisher, K. E., & Naumer, C. M. (2006). Information grounds: Theoretical basis and empirical findings on information flow in social settings. In A. Spink & C. Cole (Eds.), New directions in human information behavior (pp. 93-111). Amsterdam: Kluwer.

√ Dill, E., & Janke, K. L. (in press). "New shit has come to light": Information seeking behavior in The Big Lebowski. Journal of Popular Culture.

I'm almost done with the reading from Case for 510 (just one chapter left) and should be done by the end of the day. Didn't finish last night because I was too obsessed with THIS LIST of 136 creepy Wikipedia articles. Crazy, interesting stuff!