Visual sermons

I'm thinking about adapting some of my talks to a visual medium, like powerpoint, for storing afterwards.

Currently, I post the texts of my sermons on a blog, mainly as an archive for my own benefit, although there has (believe it or not) been occasion for someone to request a copy of a sermon they heard. In that case, it's helpful to have a searchable archive that I can't lose in a computer crash. From the perspective of someone encountering one of those sermons/homilies outside the context of its delivery, however, the written version is not primary - it's way, way secondary. 

A sermon is written to be spoken and heard, not read.

You've got to be able to hear the inflections in the speaker's voice, wait during the pauses to wonder what will follow and try to imagine ahead, otherwise, how can you be surprised when what's said is different than you predicted, or how can you feel affirmed if it's the same?

You can create tension and anticipation and suprise in a written text intended for reading, but the techniques are different. 

Writing techniques, when translated to speech, sound 'bookish' and stiff. Similarly, words intended for speech, when written down, can look simplistic and like there is a lot missing, so a text-based format is not the best medium, in my opinion.

A visual medium like powerpoint, which allows for words to appear and disappear, seems like it might somewhat re-create this aspect of the timing of the words. It also allows for focus on single ideas at a time and then come to some new understanding of them in the way the following ideas are linked to the previous ones. 

A sermon, written to be delivered, is put together with a clear structure, strong imagery, and repetition of key ideas and phrases to allow people to hold the words and ideas in their minds, because they can't read what you're saying to remind themselves of something they missed or forgot. They have to hold onto it only by hearing. 

This is very different than a text written to be read. Texts written for reading can make use of complex grammar, long sentences, subtle imagery and unclear structures, because the reader can read back and forth within the text, go back and re-read something from the beginning when it has been enlightened by a later comment. They can go back and reread something they forgot or didn't pay attention to the first time, which becomes important later. 

I think a sermon is more like an event than a text, and there are different ways of hearing it. Each person in a single congregation does, in fact, hear the same sermon differently, so it shares some similarities in this respect with the idea of "adversarial readings" of texts.

From these thoughts, it seems to me that a visual medium like powerpoint, which can visually indicate emphasis through color and other means and which can present material sequentially in small chunks, especially when combined with timings and images, may "translate" an oral sermon into a visual text more accurately or effectively.

This summer, when I have some more time, I'm going to try adapting my Good Friday meditations to this format and see how it does. They are short texts which very intentionally make use of visual elements and timing.

I'd like to teach the world to sing...

Material on the diaconate should definitely include resources on how to chant the Exsultet, the ancient hymn announcing the resurrection of Christ, traditionally sung by the deacon at the beginning of the Great Vigil of Easter on Saturday evening.

The service begins in darkness, lighting a new fire. The Paschal candle, representing Christ, is lit from the new flame, symbolizing resurrection. The deacon then leads the procession into the church, stopping three times and singing "The light of Christ," to which the people respond, "Thanks be to God." Once inside the church, the deacon puts the Paschal candle in its stand as the people light candles from it, and then the deacon begins the Exsultet.

The Episcopal version of the Exsultet in the Book of Common Prayer is a bit different than the the Roman Catholic version in English. Both are beautiful. One primary difference regards theological views about whether or not it was necessary for Adam to have sinned in order for humanity to eventually be redeemed.

Here is a video from Easter 2009 at an Episcopal Church:

and at a Roman Catholic college:

In many churches, the tradition of celebrating on the evening of Holy Saturday has gone away, but that's too bad, because it's a very beautiful service, and it has such a rich tradition going back to the earliest Christian communities.
Not every deacon or deacon-in-training will want to chant the hymn (it's pretty long), so there is an option just to say it, but IMHO, if it's at all possible (and this will mean doing a lot of preparation), chanting it adds a great deal, and Easter is the highest holy day of the Christian calendar, so why not pull out all the stops?

If you want to try it, here are a few things to decide:

• Will you read or chant?
• Do you want to memorize it or use a book?

Other considerations and tips:

• A good resource for learning to chant is probably the organist/choirmaster at your church or someone who has musical training, particularly in voice. Alternatively, talk to folks in school or university music programs. If your church has a choir that sings plainsong, you may be able to practice some with the choir to strengthen your voice and learn the techniques of chanting, because it is different from other styles of singing.
• If you are comfortable doing so, it is great to memorize the chant, so that you will not have to be finding your place in a long piece of text in the dark. Also, it's nice to be able to see the people to whom you are making this great announcement. However, it is also wise to perhaps have a prompter behind or near you, or a notecard with the beginnings of key phrases, in case you need a line.
• If you will be using a book, make sure you have sufficient light at the place where you will be standing (the church will be dark) and remember to place the book there ahead of time, because coming into the church, you will be carrying the candle.

Anglican Cathedral in Second Life

I heard a while back, before I knew what it was, that there is an Anglican cathedral in Second Life. So, after it was brought up in class, I went there to see about it.

They hold services and classes and programs, which is fascinating. They have a priest, and serving the church in Second Life is part of his Real Life job, which is also interesting.

The services are participatory events, as you can see here:

I’ve been thinking more on the idea of a cathedral as a space to preserve memory, especially in the obvious things like stained glass, tapestries, icons and statuary, which tell stories. I would like to see if a virtual cathedral space, as in Second Life, could be combined with the idea of a website. 

My uncle worked on creating virtual museum tours as part of his dissertation, and he helped students at native American schools assemble websites documenting temporary museum exhibits, creating permanent records of those events. The students would take 360 degree photographs in the middle of each room of the museum and stitch them together on the computer so that a person could virtually "look around" in the exhibit. Close-up photographs of individual displays, combined with text researched and written by the students provided more in depth information that a viewer could access by clicking on links from the 360-degree view.

I wonder if, for example, the National Cathedral could be reconstructed as a virtual space, and the information regarding its traditions embedded within that space in a way that a visitor to the site could walk around inside and look at things and learn about them. I think it would be great if visitors could also interact with cathedral staff and volunteer docents.

The national church has been redesigning its website, and I wonder if that might be a new thing that could happen in site design somewhere down the road - they could become not only layered but three dimensional. 

From the Second Life cathedral, it looks like some of these ideas are already being realized – at least the virtual and social aspects though I don’t think the memory idea is incorporated. I would like to explore the idea more and talk to these folks some about it.

Cathedrals as VR worlds and mnemonic devices

In Leah Marcus' article in Chapter 2 of the Renaissance Computer, she discussed memory and the idea of finding ways to extend the memory. She briefly made mention of 'memory icons,' which sounded to me like a term, and I was not familiar with it, so I went on Google to see what I could find. 

One connection that came up was with the construction and embellishment of Gothic cathedrals, which, according to at least one guy, are themselves enormous memory devices.

The idea behind memory icons is that you first "build" a virtual space in your mind - the more complicated and detailed, the better. You should have a clear idea of what it looks like, its dimensions, and where its various buildings are in relation to each other. The idea is that you could 'walk around' in it in your mind. 

It has been speculated, for example, that the Plan of St. Gall, drawn up in the 800s AD was not necessarily intended to be built but as an idealized layout to serve as an aid to meditation. The monks could walk through the grounds virtually and meditate on various things that its layout represented symbolically and possibly on the significance of icons that they had placed around the grounds. It sounds like a medieval version of a virtual world or MOO - or maybe also a MUD, because if all the members of this community used the plan as a meditation tool, they could theoretically collaborate on its construction or talk about virtually shared experiences in that space.

But back to memory icons - once you 'build' your space, then, you start to put things in it: objects, people, critters of various kinds. They should be striking in some way, so that they arrest your attention. Then, once you have this space built and populated with stuff, you can "store" things in it by making associations with the things you want to remember and something inside the space. Mentally, you go to a certain place in your virtual memory and put the thing you want to remember inside or behind or under one of the critters or things you have sitting around in there.

Anyway, if a cathedral - even just the plan of one that was never built, could serve as a huge mnemonic device to preserve spatially and visually, through association and symbols, the history of its community, what if VR worlds could be intentionally constructed as a teaching tool or memory device for telling important aspects of our culture and history?

I just think it's interesting, especially the possibilities of gaming as an educational tool, in the medieval tradition. 

In a lot of ways, there really is nothing new.

Articulating hypermedia theory

For my final project, I'm working with another deacon in my diocese to create some web-based materials on the diaconate, which is exciting. It's great to feel that the work I'm doing on this is not just hypothetical but can actually be used now.

In collaborating with someone outside this class to produce a web-based project, however, I've had to do some explaining about what the point would be of turning a print text into a web-text. The reading we've been doing on media theory has been useful in trying to explain and justify the idea.

It's interesting this time to be working collaboratively, adapting someone else's content rather than my own. When I worked on the text-webtext project, it was all my material, so I made my editing and organizational choices without any discussion or need to explain or justify my choices while doing it.

Now, I am taking someone else's work and talking about changing and adapting it to a web environment, and the author has some questions about it. I can understand. It's got to feel a little precarious handing over your work to someone and not knowing exactly how they may change it or why. 

He's been asking me what the point of changing it will be - what will be added by converting his text and power point slides to a web text. He wanted to know also how emphasis will be given to different parts of the content, because, as its creator, he knows what he stresses when teaching it and would like to ensure that the same things are stressed in whatever way that happens in the web format.

It was a good question. In a straight print text, things are sometimes emphasized by italicizing them, but it's not good to overdo this, because it can get annoying after a while.

In brochures or newsletters or newspapers, you have the added flexibilities of changing the color, size and shading of the words and using word art and images. You can also organize information visually using a variety of elements. 

Powerpoint allows these capabilities to a slightly more limited degree, because the size of the writing space is limited to one slide at a time. Powerpoint allows, however, for sound and motion, which changes the palette again.

Because of it's one-screen-at-a-time limitation of the slide space and the capabilities of adding sound, motion, and videos as well as text, color and images, powerpoint moves text closer a web format. Some of the choices made to adapt a print text to a slide show will transfer easily to a web format, though the web format will be layered more than linear.

An Idea that Worked

Last night, I taught a class with a philosophical view of a theological topic. 

I was trying to explain how a word can convey some aspects of reality, but not very fully. A picture is a little more complete in conveying the reality that the word represents (as Bolter has been describing also). The thing itself is the most real, but it is not always available or accessible depending on the form/limitation of the receiver.

Anyway, I found a successful way to explain it. One of the class members recently had a grandson. So I wrote the baby's name on the board. The baby's name represents him - and it's true that that is who he is. Then, I asked the man to show us a picture, which he had on his iPhone. 

If he said, "This is my grandson," what he says is not untrue. Nobody would look at him weird and say, 'No it's not; it's a phone!" But in some sense, what he says is not totally accurate, either. If he were to bring his grandson to the class, we would all have a much more complete understanding of the reality of who the baby is. But he didn't have the baby with him, so the picture was as good as we could get under the circumstances.

So, the picture and the written name are predicated on the actual baby and represent the baby in some sense accurately, but the baby himself is the most real. However, the picture and the name are more accessible.

Signs, symbols and Plato vs. Aristotle on primary knowledge

Here are some further reflecting on the connections between signs, images, words, language and meaning:

There is nothing inherently more true about an alphabetic text compared to a picture-based text; in some ways the pictures are more 'immediate' because they are less abstracted. If I know nothing at all about iconography or religious symbology, I can still "read" a little bit from mosaics, stained glass or painted icons - from pretty much any geographic area or time period.

A mosaic tile from a baptistry in North Africa from the 300s AD, for example, uses the same symbology as a stained glass window or altar hanging in a 21st century church in Texas (if has these kinds of "decorations.")

I was amazed, walking through a museum in Tunisia, to look up on the wall and, among artifacts from more than a millennium before, see images I clearly recognized as part of my own story now. The oral - or even the written - language of people in Carthage at that time would not be intelligible to me at all, probably. But these images were immediately recognizable; I could read most of them pretty well. There were some symbols I didn't recognize, but most were familiar.

In teaching English to speakers of other languages, I rely heavily on pictures, especially with beginners. Images are more immediate, more universal in that way. Images connect to our sense perception rather than our reason, primarily.

Plato and Aristotle had different views of how we acquire knowledge, or what kind of knowledge is more real, more essential or more true. Platonists generally seem to consider the mind as primary, not the senses. The essential forms of things (which can only be apprehended by reason/contemplation) are more "real" than individual instances of them. Aristotelians, on the other hand, didn't see a need to posit 'forms' which no one could actually see or touch; actual things themselves, then, were more primary. 

Platonists (and Western civilization has been more Platonic than Aristotelian since the Enlightenment - that's my theory anyway) focus on knowing things by thinking and abstract reasoning, and words are very good for that, so books have been a big deal.

And, for the same reason, the Protestant Reformation put a big focus on scripture (The WORD) rather than on sacrament (visible expressions of invisible grace, a.k.a. 'transparent signs' - in other words, sensory things like water, bread, wine, oil, icons)

Aristotelians, placing more weight with experience, consider knowledge gained through sense perception to be more primary - so books are not as good for that. Images, sounds, smells, tastes and touch are required for this kind of knowledge. I think this is why folks in the Middle Ages were so keen on categorizing things and sub-categorizing them, and also why they were into illuminating their manuscripts with so much color - and using incense and polyphonic singing and icons and forms of prayer that involved tangibility: prayer beads, walking a labyrinth, going on pilgrimage, etc.

In my opinion, we're swinging back toward a more Aristotelian view, and this is expressed in many aspects of our culture, including the interest expressed in the Internet of compiling all kinds of knowledge and classifying and connecting it and making it all accessible.