Ahhhhh. I’ve treadmilled and showered and am feeling relaxed, sipping coffee. Listening to “Play this at my funeral” by “Hello Citizen” CD released yesterday. Click below on their logo to download their free MP3s yourself. I’m only minutes into the first cut, but like it fine so far.
I’m trying not to think too much about what looks like a sub-theme for next week: the theology of business.
Reading twitters is pretty fascinating. I tend to follow people in the music business. I prefer the people themselves but many of them have developed elaborate constructs that don’t even pretend to be people.
Like http://twitter.com/funmusicco which is actually an Australian music Teacher…. or http://twitter.com/ClassicalFocus whose url to their website seems broken.
Twitter seems to highlight the problems of self-promotion versus connecting and sharing stuff. It’s pretty easy to determine when a twitterer is basically only trying to sell you something.
But the other stabs at self-promotion can be sad to read. Only trying to point you to their web site without being clear what it is they are sharing. In fact they are probably not sharing but selling.
Which brings me back to my quandry of theology of business. This week, my church staff meets with a business consultant. I’m only glad that my boss didn’t hire a church consultant because my experience is that they are even worse than business consultants.
In my decades of church work I have watched how business metaphors have replaced community metaphors inherent in coherent human communities. What I mean by this high falutin’ language is that everyone assumes it’s our goal to raise money and numbers of people in the pew. When in fact, that’s not exactly the goal.
What is the goal? Well that’s where I usually try to get people to start. What goal are implicitly espousing? Is it the goal of the community? Is it the accurate goal? Ah well. Fuck the duck.
This brings me to another troubling email I read this morning. A parishioner has emailed me that my approach to the music program is all wrong (this is something I’m willing to admit for sure) and that with just an hour of my time she will help me with my leadership skills, something she does for a living.
I will meet with this person of course. But I can’t dampen my skeptism. She sounds very much like she’s selling me something before she understands my leadership goals and background.
Praise the lord and pass the stock options. Oh well. This balances off the morale boosting conversation I described in yesterday’s blog with the local violin teacher guy.
Finally I’m most of the way through Krugman’s article in yesterdays NYT Sunday mag: “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?” It’s a lay person guide to the theories behind some economic thinking of the last hundred years and of course how it has totally fucked everything up.
What struck me was the division of U.S. economists in Saltwater and Freshwater schools. This seems to economic talk. The Saltwater group are new-Keyesnians. I take this to mean that they are not totally free market believers which is the other group, the Freshwater school. The Freshwater school has dominated public policy for quite a while.
What struck me is Krugman underlying thesis that both of these schools are more related to each other than Keyes’ ideas. It hit me like the Democrats and Republicans. Both parties seem very similar to me and far from doing any coherent problem solving (pace Obama-ites). It’s seemed this way to me for quite a while. Since I realized Bill Clinton usurped the Republican agenda for Welfare Reform and continued the travesties around the world of U.S. military agression and intervention.
Anyway, I recommend Krugman’s article. I especially like his invocation of Dr. Pangloss from Voltaire’s Candide….. “We live in the best of all possible worlds.”
While I am very proud of Eileen’s recent accomplishments with her new loom, this picture Eileen took of me yesterday modeling her first finished product sums up my recent take on this.
fuck the duck