A Postmodern Orthodoxy

Well, we’re into the second half of the baseball season, now, and from the perspective of most of the folks in my immediate family, we’re still having a pretty good baseball summer around here. At least, it’s a good baseball summer in the sense that the teams that we like still seem to be doing okay; not in the sense that any of us have made it to many games. The Detroit Tigers are still in first, although after watching them play, it’s not entirely clear how that’s happened. They’ve got to get their offense together before anyone considers them to be a pretty good ball club, really. Over in the senior circuit, the Giants – my dad’s team – were second in their division up until just a few days ago. Although I don’t think anyone expects that they’ll be able to catch the Dodgers, they’ve got a pretty good shot at winning the wild card. We’ll see.

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My job – which has had me working on the road quite a bit lately – has me in Sacramento for the end of this week and the beginning of next week. Rather than have my employer buy two round-trip plane tickets so I could be home for the weekend, I volunteered to stay out here in the greater Sacramento area.

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One of the fairly new developments with which the last few generations of humans have had to contend is being part of a society in which there is more information than any one person can reasonably be expected to absorb. If you think about it – in terms of human history – this is actually a fairly recent development. If you lived in the year 1700, for example, you could conceivably read everything that had ever been published on a topic like, for example, chemistry, before you tried to embark on a career as a chemist. That doesn’t work anymore: if a student of chemistry tried to read everything that has been published on chemistry, there’s no way to finish reading everything in just a single lifetime. In addition, it’s a pretty safe bet that in chemistry (in addition to a host of other subjects), new material is being published at a fast enough rate that even if you set out to read all the material that was published after the date that you started reading, not only will you not be able to keep up, but you’ll get farther and farther behind.

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Those of you that know me are probably aware that I play mandolin in Slipjig, a local Celtic band. On a fairly regular basis, we do various shows in the local area – like local bands anywhere, we play at various pubs and coffee shops, with the occasional wedding reception or party thrown in for variety and for the sake of getting another gig. Like most local bands, I’m sure, some of the stuff we play is a lot of fun, certain other events are not.

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We now take a break from our regularly scheduled theological and political ramblings to ramble about national parks for awhile, and the experiences that I seem to have while meandering around them.

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