Blue Cord

Most of my books are still in transit from Lithuania, so I am hard pressed for scholarship right now. Fortunately, I had ordered two books by Mary Douglas, which were waiting for me when I returned to the US. As you can see from the sidebar, I am currently reading In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers. It has a blurb by Tyler Williams on the back cover, so I knew it would be good.

Douglas, an anthropologist, approaches the text through sociological models. I am not far enough into her work to comment on how it applies to Numbers, but I did want to discuss one of the models that she is proposing.

Douglas talks about religious groups (both those as small as congregations and those as large as nations) and places them on a graph with two axes. One axis represents how structured a given group is, while the other represents how concerned they are with group boundaries. This gives four quadrants:

• Hierarchical groups are well structured and very concerned with the boundaries of the group.
• Enclaves are egalitarian with little leadership, but are still very concerned with boundaries.
• Individualists groups are egalitarian and have open boundaries.
• Insolates, the least common type, have a hierarchical structure but little concerns for boundaries.

One of the characteristics of the enclave is that it has a hard time maintaining cohesion. Due to a lack of central leadership (because it is anathema to an egalitarian system), there is no ability to discipline. Enclaves depend on a sense of ‘rightness’ to keep the group together, i.e., the idea that the enclave has the correct theology is what keeps people on the inside. One of the problems, however, is that differences in theology tend to lead to to fragmentation of the group, since each side is convinced that they have the correct theology.

I think her scheme can be applied to modern Christianity as well. Evangelicals certainly qualify as an enclave group, while mainstream Protestants are probably individualists. Roman Catholics are hierarchical, while different Episcopal groups span the gap between hierarchical and individualists, although certain groups within the Episcopal church qualify as enclave groups. I think this is one of the things that is causing problems within the Episcopal church right now.

Douglas seems to be setting a situation where she can present the book of Numbers as having been edited by a hierarchical group in the midst of an enclave community. It will be interesting to see how she proceeds. Her model seems to be a helpful one, especially since it avoids the tendency to places groups on a two dimensional spectrum. This should lead to a more nuanced reading of Numbers.

Although I mentioned in a blog last week that we had made it back to America, the only problem I mentioned was that we were delayed overnight in Washington, DC, and our luggage arrived late. I didn’t mention all of the other problems we had with our travel. I won’t bore you with them here, but suffice it to say I won’t be flying United Airlines again. One part I thought I would mention is the fact that I was sick on Thursday and Friday. I had gastrointestinal problems upon which I shall not elaborate. I was down for the count for two whole days.

Today I heard on the radio that over 100 people had gotten sick at the Dulles Hilton this week. The cause was the norovirus, which is commonly known as the cruise ship illness because of recent outbreaks on cruise ship. In case you haven’t made the connection yet, the Dulles Hilton is where we stayed when we missed our connection in Washington, DC. So, I have now officially had the cruise ship virus, even though I have never been on a cruise ship.

In case you are interested, you can read about the outbreak at the Dulles Hilton in the Washington Post.

And by the way, United Airlines did not pay for our hotel, even though it was their fault we missed the connection. I have spent so much time on hold while calling United Airlines that I now get physically ill when I hear Rapsody in Blue.

For those of you interested in the history of religion, here is a graphical representation of the spread of religion through the centuries. It only focuses on the five “world religions.” One minor problem is that it shows Judaism disappearing after the Exile, even though there were very vital Jewish communities in Babylon from that time forward. It also does not show Judaism in Europe throughout history.

I was going over my Google Analytics today to get a snapshot of information that would help me tweak a couple of things on my blog. The following bits of data struck me as interesting and/or peculiar in some fashion, so I thought I would share them for grins and giggles. I started using Google Analytics in mid-September, so this represents a little over 3.5 months of tracking.

Once again, here is my favorite method of presenting data: the unordered list.

• New vs. returning visitors to my blog is split about 50% / 50%.
• 57% of readers use Internet Explorer to view my blog. The second place browser is Firefox at 35%. Apparently I am not a big hit among the Linux crowd, as only one person running Konquerer has ever visited my blog. Yes, I know you can run other browsers on Linux, but Linux visitors accounted for only 0.5% of my traffic.
• One person visited my blog using Internet Explorer 4.01. I have to assume this was running on a Pentium II machine with a top speed of 96 MHz. The Smithsonian just called sir. If you could bring that machine by, they would love to put it on display in the American History Museum. Make sure you bring the green screen monitor. Seriously, though, if you are out there, let me know who you are. There has to be some story behind that.
• About 10% of viewers use 800×600 resolution, which is high enough for me to continue to offer a fixed width site that will fit on a screen that size. The rest of my visitors have higher resolutions.
• 2% view my site in only 8-bit color. I can’t make my computer go that low, so I have no idea the view they are getting.

By far my favorite stat is the one that tracks how people get to my blog. Where were they before they came here? That gives me a pretty good idea how they found me. Not surprisingly, the largest group are those who receive my blog via RSS. This group accounts for 29.19% of my readers. What is surprising, however, is that the second largest percentage of viewers (28.82%) comes from Biblische Ausbildung. In other words, if I hadn’t encouraged Steve Cook to start blogging, my readership would be much smaller. He sends me more readers than Google search! Where do I send the check, Steve?

Google Analytics also revealed a few lesser trends among my readers:

• Most of the women who read my blog are named Suzanna.
• My readers’ top three favorite colors are blue (23%), green (19%), and puce (11%).
• The male readers would pick Mary Ann over Ginger by a margin of 5 to 3.
• The majority of them think black and white photography is pretentious.
• My readers prefer Krispy Kreme donuts (56%) to Dunkin’ Donuts (22%). One guy at Taylor University picked some place called Tim Hortons.
• Only 3% of my readers can throw a curve ball. An additional 5% know how to throw one but have never been able to get the ball to break properly.
• If they were stranded on a deserted island and could only take one blog with them, the majority of my readers would opt for a boat instead.

OK. I will be the first to admit that I have done some pretty ridiculous things as a fan of various TV shows, movies, books, etc. When I like something, I have a tendency to go overboard. Most of them involve Star Trek, but not all. Here is but a small sampling:

• I was the director of the Klingon Bible Translation Project. (Yes, I speak Klingon.)
• I have, in fact, gone to Star Trek conventions in a full uniform.
• I put a Klingon battle cruiser on my wedding registry.
• I once watched every single James Bond movie in a two week period.
• I am currently documenting pop culture references in the sitcom NewsRadio. Yes, I know it has been off the air for eight years.
• I collect Doonesbury books.

Nothing I have ever done, however, could compare to what a guy and a couple of his friends did over Christmas break. The modeled the entire Battle of Helms Deep from The Lord of the Rings trilogy in candy and icing. Pictures of the model, which measures 7′x3′x2′, can be seen at his blog, Miss(ed) Manners. They used over 500 Gummy Bears as orcs and Uruk-Hai. The Elves, Dwarves and Men were represented by sour patch kids. My personal favorite is the Tootsie Roll Pop catapults, although using Smarties as stonework in the walls was visionary.

This thing puts every fan activity I have ever done to shame, with the possible exception of the time I build a full size working model of the starship Enterprise (”No bloody A, B, C, or D”) out of pipe cleaners. Yet not even this candy representation of the Battle of Helms Deep is as impressive as the Abston Church of Christ, which is made completely of LEGO building blocks.

I’m feeling inspired. Maybe at lunch today I will build a model of the Devil’s Tower out of my mashed potatoes.

By the way, as an interesting tie-in between two of my obsessions passions, I discovered in a web search last night that Stephen Root, the actor that played Jimmy James on NewsRadio, also played a Klingon on the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode ‘Unification’.