THOUGHTS ON THE INTERNET, SMALL BUSINESS SATURDAY, AND MY NEW FRIEND, THE DUCK...

Although the date of this post, “Small Business Saturday,” is mostly coincidental, I hope there is a certain appropriateness and coherence to this report on some changes I’ve undertaken lately in the tech-consumer-social-media elements of my life.

You might wonder, “Who cares?” and why I’m bothering to tell you about these things, dear reader. To me, this blog is a conversation as well as my “journal;” I’d be very interested to hear how you are navigating these various channels that are carrying us into and through the Brave New World that is still very new to all of us.

Here are some recent resolutions, changes, epiphanies, experiments having to do with my interaction with the internet and its wider context, with observations on why any of this might be important:

1. I now use Amazon.com only as a last resort. Two strands have led me to this resolution: One is the issue of Amazon’s treatment of employees. (One aspect of this is the basis of a case before the Supreme Court right now.) This op-ed piece by Paul Krugman is a good overview of the role Amazon plays in the economy.

The other strand is the common-sense realization that the presence of a local bookstore and other retailers enhances the quality of my community and my life, and I need to support them to keep them around. There are, alas, no longer any bookstores in Faribault (they departed while I was clicking away on Amazon), but nearby Northfield has a wonderful new bookstore, “Content,” as well as The St. Olaf and Carleton College bookstores. These are now my "first resort," followed by Barnes & Noble (both brick-and-mortar and online versions) and other online booksellers.

My resolution, “…only as a last resort,” may sound wishy-washy, but for me to say “I will never use Amazon again” is almost as unrealistic as it would be to say, “I will never use the power company….” For many years I have been (at least) a weekly Amazon shopper, and the one-click option became like the chicken-pecking-the-button-for-feed attraction at the carnival. At this writing, I have not ordered from Amazon for about two months. Surprisingly ( to myself), I haven’t missed it. I hope they’ve noticed.

2. For the same reasons of enlightened self-interest (I want these shops to stay around), I will “Shop Small and Shop Local” as much as possible. I recently had a problem with my iPhone. I was able to contact a real human being at the online Verizon site, and she was friendly and patient with me, but in the end wasn’t able to help me. I took the phone to our local Verizon store, and the cheerful, no-nonsense woman behind the counter solved my problem in about three minutes. She also corrected my mistaken notion that coming to the store or visiting the web site amounted to the same thing. “We’re actually in competition with each other,” she said. Brick-and-mortar Verizon is now my go-to site for most cell-related items and issues.

3. I have gone back to paper-and-ink as my primary medium for book-reading. I have nothing against e-books (except for that Amazon thing), and I read them quite enjoyably on my iPhone Kindle app, especially in a doctor’s waiting room, etc.

Books.

But I recently had two thoughts that led me to this change: 1). When our grandkids see me reading a book, I’d rather have them witness me reading a book and not staring into a screen. 2.) I like books. I like having them around.

4. I will happily pay a reasonable price for on-line content that is important to me. (Newspapers, music, etc). At the genesis of the internet age, most publishers and musicians were ensnared by the “I ain’t payin’ for nuttin’” attitude which was the ethos of those early days—and still hangs on. But of course It doesn’t make any sense. In the news business alone—to name one example—we’ve all paid the price for this stinginess by the cutting back of news coverage in general, foreign correspondents in particular, and the substitution of 140-character tweets for in-depth articles. (Again, nothing against Twitter—in it’s proper perspective. Here’s one of my recent tweets: “After hundreds of pre-school readings: I prefer early Berenstain Bears—when Poppa is a hapless doofus—to the later preachy-teachy tales.” Deep.)

5. I am taking the following initiatives against online data-mining and privacy invasion. (In the ever-changing internet environment, who knows if these changes are worthwhile or futile.)

• I have changed my primary email from google.com to outlook.com. Outlook claims that they do not read e-mail content for the purpose of ad placement (as gmail does). Outlook is a Microsoft product, so it’s hardly a feel-good mom-and-pop replacement, but they are up front about stating that they target ads only according to zip code. I’ll take that trade-off. I am a Mac user, but I like the Outlook interface, and the easily-ignored ads are part of a clean-looking page. (And I can get an ad-free Outlook for $20 a year.)

• I have switched my search engine from Google to Duck Duck Go, an extension of my Safari browser. The Duck does not track web searches. It is serving me well.

• “Ello” is a new social media site that is ad-free and does not follow or track users. I am joining it as a kind of experiment—it will only be as good as the number of friends that I can convince to interact with me on the site.  Like many of you, I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook. It is useful, but I mainly don’t trust it. It is clear that, as has been often pointed out, we users are the Facebook product, to be sold to advertisers. Like many of my generation, I stay with it for grand-kid photos (and, okay, I use it to lob the occasional bon mot), but I can’t wait to get off it. A researcher in a recent Atlantic Magazine article, "The Fall of Facebook," reports, “In three years of research and talking to hundreds of people and everyday users, I  don’t think I heard anyone say once, ‘I love Facebook…’”

• Just yesterday I discovered and installed “AdBlock,” another extension of my Safari browser. My Facebook ads are gone. My tastefully placed outlook.com ads are gone. Data-miners are no-doubt still mining, but I don’t see the ads!

POSTSCRIPT:

I continue to be mystified at how easily we have acquiesced in surrendering our privacy (I’ve certainly played my part in this). Germany in particular and Europe in general are taking a harder stand against the likes of Google and privacy infringement. As a result of a recent trial settlement, the court assigned a social media privacy expert to be a part of Google’s “team." In an interview on NPR, he said, “If I

walked into the neighborhood right now and went door-to-door asking, ‘Could I have photographs of all your children?’ I would either be arrested or physically driven from the house. And yet this is very close to what most of us are voluntarily doing online every day.”

TWENTY HOURS A WEEK?

A friend in another part of the country recently told me that he and his wife had been unexpectedly pleased by their pastor’s Christmas sermon. It was unexpected because they had been concerned of late that his preaching was consistently a mixture of thin soup and “avuncular rambles.” They found themselves pleased, that is, even though they were pretty sure the sermon had been downloaded from the internet. “But he delivered it well.”

My friends’ consideration as to whether they should go and talk to the pastor about the issue of his preaching is, perhaps, food for another blog post. For my purposes, their report brings to mind a growing, uneasy intuition I have that more and more sermons are being downloaded by more and more preachers.

This is discouraging and disturbing at many levels. The first, of course, is dishonesty. Unless the preacher is informing his listeners of the source of his sermon (yes, some may be), he is not only plagiarizing, but erecting a kind of wall of deception between himself and those with whom he has an ongoing pastoral relationship. The deception goes beyond the legalities of plagiarism; a sermon, unlike a speech or lecture, is a unique concoction of the word spoken into and out of the context of the community that is the church. The lives and experiences of parishioners and the community (including the wider community of the world)* is every bit as much a part of the process that results in a sermon as is whatever goes on in the preacher’s study. The downloaded sermon renders this inter-relationship irrelevant.

A few years ago I discovered a collection of sermons by the great twentieth century Scottish preacher, James S. Stewart. I was so charged up by reading these sermons that I decided to deliver one or two of them to my congregation (with full disclosure). In my opinion, the endeavor fell flat. Stewart did not write these sermons for these people or for this time. They had some inspirational appeal, but they didn’t work as sermons preached by this preacher. (This also raises the obvious question of delivery: Should a preacher simply be “reading” a sermon to his congregation?)**

Another possible deception practiced by the internet sermon downloader is the theft of time. Now, I’ll be the first to acknowledge that there’s plenty to do in parish ministry, and time not spent reading, studying, writing, and preparing for a sermon can readily be sopped up by other areas of ministry. (Perhaps the preacher is spending all that time, like Doonesbury’s Rev. Scot Sloan, as “the fighting young priest who can talk to the youth.”) But even if a pastor was spending 60 hours a week in youth ministry, hospital visitation, committee work, administration, education, and counseling, that would only beg the question: “What about preaching?” and how is the preacher’s time being used if not in study and sermon-writing?

While some of my colleagues may disagree with me, I confess that I give “preaching” top priority in any list of ministerial duties, for the reason that it is at the center of most preachers’ “letter of call” (job description), and because the weekly worship is the only time in the life of the parish when the whole congregation is (at least potentially) gathered together.

Preaching calls for time and care. My homiletics professors urged twenty hours a week in sermon preparation. Rather than dismissing that as “impossible,” I rather see it as a goal and experience a sense of frustration when I realize how often I fall short (precisely because of the other things on the list) of that reasonable standard. Sermon preparation in the life of a parish pastor is exhibit A in support of the maxim: “That which is urgent but not important crowds out that which is important but not urgent.”

In my first parish, I once strolled past the open-door office of my senior colleague, Charlie Mays (of blessed memory). Charlie – recognized widely throughout the church as a great preacher – was sitting at his desk hunched over a book. I walked past a few hours later, and he was in almost the exact same position – still reading. It struck me as a revelation: “He’s not afraid to let people see him wasting time reading a book!” It’s one of the many ways Charlie served as a model for me.

I’ve written elsewhere about how the freedom of the study granted by the Anglican system of “the living” or the “freehold” has given the world the great poetry of the Revs. John Donne and R.S. Thomas. (Or perhaps I should say that their congregations have given these gifts to the world by granting their preachers the time.) But as Bill Bryson, in his new book, At Home, and Jane Austen remind us, this Anglican system has historically also been rife with preachers reading out sermons from published collections while spending their time at the garden party up at the manor. How they would have loved the internet!

If you have any involvement with the church, dear reader, how much time, really, do you expect your pastor to spend in sermon preparation?

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*I agree with theologian Karl Barth, who said, “The preacher should prepare the sermon with the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other.”

**A true story: A committee of the congregation approached their bishop with concern about their pastor’s preaching. “I think he’s just reading them to us, out of books, and he doesn’t even read that well,” said the committee chair. The bishop agreed to check it out. One Sunday morning he slipped unnoticed into a back pew. As the sermon progressed, he recognized it as one of his own – it had been published in a collection. At the conclusion of the service, the committee chair approached the bishop. “Do you see what we mean, Bishop? And this one was really bad!”

A TEA PARTY AT JESUS' PRESS CONFERENCE?

They asked Jesus, "Teacher, ...is it lawful for us to pay taxes to the emperor, or not?" But he perceived their craftiness and said to them, "Show me a denarius. Whose head and whose title does it bear?" They said, "The emperor’s." He said to them, "Then give to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s." ~Luke 20

I have a confession to make: I am the cause of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s recent bankruptcy. When I found out I could get the entire contents on line, I cancelled my subscription to the paper version, and it all went downhill for them from there. (Yes, I miss the tactility and scanning of the paper, but that’s another blog for another time.) I was simply acting as a member of a universal digital-age movement: Since the very dawn of the internet, newspapers and all sorts of other providers have made their wares available for free – some as a deliberate business plan, others because they became victims of a kind of “hell, no, I’m not paying for anything on the internet” populism. Of which I was a part. Until recently. I have come around to the view that if I want some of this to remain available to me, I’m going to have to pay for it – and I’m willing to do so.

As I was completing my taxes recently, the thought came to me that this kind of anti-payment populism may also be driving a lot (certainly not all) of the no-taxes movement. They just don’t want to pay for anything. The conservative commentator George Will makes this observation: “The government we have did not come about overnight, or by accident, or by conspiracy. Middle-class Americans who are the articulate complainers about it are the principle benefiters from it. They have no intention of dismantling it, so they had better pipe down and pay up.”

One of the most cryptic mysteries in the scriptures is the question of what, exactly, Jesus meant by his answer to the tax question (see above). It is certainly open to a variety of interpretations, but I am persuaded by this one: “Jesus flips the coin back into the crowd, shrugs, and says, ‘If you use Caesar’s roads, then pay Caesar’s taxes.’” Whether he meant that to be politically provocative, cynical, or sincere is another question, but this interpretation seems to follow logically from his observation about whose face is on the coin. (And when you consider that Jesus called a hated tax collector to be one of his disciples -- no wonder they strung him up!)

In a representative democracy, taxes, for a Christian citizen, are tied to the idea of stewardship: an elective way of contributing to the poor-box at the back of the church. And if we worship at the altar of Adam Smith (the “father of capitalism”), we are reminded (by Smith) that “it is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.” None of this (Christian stewardship or Adam Smith), makes any sense if the driving principle is simply selfishness. Both a capitalist economy and a representative government – whether you call it a democracy or a republic – will decay at the roots with the drought of selfishness.

Let me give the last word to former South Carolina senator Ernest Hollings:

A veteran returning from Korea went to college on the GI Bill; bought his house with an FHA loan; saw his kids born in a VA hospital; started a business with an SBA loan; got electricity from the TVA and, later, water from an EPA project. His parents retired to a farm on Social Security, got electricity from the REA and soil testing from USDA. When the father became ill, the family was saved from financial ruin by Medicare, and his father’s life was saved with a drug developed through the NIH. His kids participated in the school lunch program, learned physics from teachers trained in an NSF program, and went through college with guaranteed student loans. He drove to work on the Interstate and moored his boat in a channel dredged by the Army Corps of Engineers. When the floods hit, he took Amtrak to Washington, D.C., to apply for disaster relief, and, while there, spent some time visiting the Smithsonian museums.

Caesar's highway. Been on it lately?

Then one day, he wrote his congressman an angry letter asking the government to get off his back and complaining about paying taxes for all those programs created for ungrateful people.