Nate Knows Nada

Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times asked, at the end of the last
Democratic debate on Sunday, “Really quick.  Is God on our side?”

(You can find more facts and opinions here.)

Beyond the idiocy of such a question, it belies a fundamental
misunderstanding by may of the Northeastern liberal elite (of whom I’m
probably a member, on some level) about religion.  The better
question that Bumiller (and her lack-of-religious-understanding bedmate
George W. Bush) might ask: “Are we on God’s side?”

And there’s no easy answer, or even any answer to that question.

Here’s my gripe.  I have contacted every person at Harvard’s
Berkman Center to get some help with the following problem, including
Dave Winer, since he’s the guiding light.  I’ve contacted the blog
support group, the webmaster, the webmaster’s alternate contact, and
I’ve done the whole Manila users’ group over at Userland’s
website.  I have asked for help in every possible forum, and I
have received little assistance.

What chaps my hide the most is that the problem (as I point out) seems
to be with the Harvard weblogs servers, but no one at Harvard will
respond to tell me how I can engineer a fix of my own, whether they are
working on it, or any status whatsoever.

I’m not averse to doing my own coding and all that, but I’ve got no
idea where even to start, especially since it seems like a localized
problem.

If some of the Harvard weblog people weren’t so busy leading a
“revolution” (against what?  with what results?  It’s a good
question that remains largely unanswered), and they might actually do
some server maintenance.  I’m annoyed because I’ve been asking for almost two weeks now!

What’s even funnier about all of this is that it’s an open-source
software project that has the rendering bug.  Knowing a bit about
the ideological predilections over there (I read their blogs, so I
think I’m safe in making this supposition), I’m surprised that they
have allowed a rendering bug to affect only open source software packages!  Commercial packages from MS and Netscape work just fine.

But I want to support the open source movement as much as possible, so I’m trying to move away from those packages.

So, if anyone has any suggestions for how to get someone’s attention
here or how to fix the problem I have (you can read its full
description below), please tell me.
———————-
Hey
all,

I do much
of my work in the latest generation Mozilla browsers (Firefox and Mozilla
1.6), but I can’t work on my blog in them, as my theme seems to
incorrectly render the site in these two browsers. I’m using the
Moveable
Manila Modern theme. In
this
picture you can see what it does. More than just being an annoyance,
the browser won’t provide full lists of news items or photos, puts some
text entry boxes in the wrong places, and just acts annoying.

I can
provide some more examples of stuff that doesn’t work correctly:

• News
  Item creation, where the text entry field overlaps the sidebar
• Turning off WYSIWYG editing does
  this. 
  Which doesn’t really solve the problem.  The news panel render
  better, but the text entry boxes are still misplaced, i.e., when I click
  on a text entry box, such as for the subject or url to assign to an
  entry, the cursor does not end up in the box, but several lines above,
  blinking in the black background area (so I can’t see what I am
  entering).  The green arrow points out highlighted text that should
  be in the “title” box.

I
should make it clear that in that first picture linked above, there’s a
huge gap between the main news text and the sidebar, where in IE, NS, and
older versions of Mozilla (1.3 and below) the main column and the sidebar
column are flush with one another.

Of course,
the other common Harvard blog themes do not seem to have this problem in
the later Mozilla browsers. Just as a check, the MMM theme that’s at
http://theme43.weblogger.com/ works fine in Mozilla, but the theme as installed at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/movableManilaModernTheme/ has the same problem as I am encountering in my blog.

Any ideas on how to fix this?

Thanks for any help others might have.

So I went to see the Gibson version of the Passion narrative the other day.

For a good review of all the artistic issues, take a look at this
article in the New Republic.  I’m not gonna recapsulate
all of that.

For me, I can’t say I really believed it.  I was never able to
suspend disbelief and get lost in this.  It just seemed like a set
of scenes with lots of gruesome pain as their motif.

I mean this on a very basic level.  The movie was a cartoon: all
that blood and violence and savagery and for what?  It wasn’t
particularly believable.  It looked and impressed at about the
same level as a Schwarzenegger or, well, Gibson action flick. 
There’s no sense of empathy there.  Christ suffers, and I can’t
understand why I was supposed to care.  We never really got to
know him (I guess it’s assumed we were supposed to before we walked
in), and we just see Him suffer a lot.  It’s gory, but to what
effect?  In the end, I think, my reaction has come to be something
close to “Who cares?”

I mentioned to my monk friend that I felt more about the Passion of
Christ when we recite or chant the narratives in church on Palm Sunday
and Good Friday then I did in this film.  I care then.

It may be that, as an American, I am inured to violence on such a level
that this had no effect on me.  What it seemed like was just the
next step in the envelope pushing that we get used to in the
movies.  Special effects, violence, sex, all that stuff gets made
more and more fantastic, more and more graphic, more and more “real”,
but in the process of so doing, it becomes surreal and unreal. 
This film did not seem much more than the progression of that
trend.  I didn’t understand, feel, or relate better to Christ’s
suffering and death by seeing the film, and I guess I don’t understant
why some people do, unless they have so little imagination and feeling
of their own that they need a movie to do it for them.  

I don’t know what it is that the movie is supposed to show me. 
That Christ suffered for my sins?  Yeah, I already knew that. That
crucifixion was really bad?  Yeah, i already knew that too. 
That this is a true account of Christ’s death?  Well,
hardly.  It’s certainly not “literal,” like he maintains, as it
contains the “visions” of an 18th century German nun and all sorts of
extra-biblical material.  That Christ was a human sacrifice for
sin?  That’s a theological position, a theory of atonement that I
find less persuasive than a more incarnational one.  And the movie
doesn’t make anything beyond gallons of blood very clear (no pun
intended).

Besides that, the acting was flat, and the only thing that Gibson seems
to have to say about the life and death of Christ was that there was a
death and, boy, was it horrible.  He seems to be so “literalist”
in his interpretation (a point about which many have argued over the
last week, so I’m not going to plunge into that discussion right now)
that he’s made a hollow life of Christ.  It’s like he doesn’t know
the person he calls his Savior.

Gibson, in focusing so hard on Christ’s human suffering, failed to give Him any humanity.

…to all the new people from Anglicans Online who linked in today.

For everyone else, I saw The Movie, and I’ll probably write about it
tonight, although there’s not tons I think I can say that hasn’t been
said already.