Jeffrey Miller

Lifetime Apple user Domenico Bettinelli writes on the subject of Steve Jobs’ death.

I’m not going to write a hagiography of Jobs here or canonize him. I’m sure he was flawed and had his failings. But you can’t deny that he’s changed the world as we know it. In the past 30 years, he has completely changed four major industries: computers, telephones, music, and animated movies. And his influence has extended deeply into dozens of others.

While much has been written on the subject of his passing and the effect he had I want to add a Catholic take. The Catholic blogosphere has done fairly well with the pro-life aspect being that Steve Jobs was adopted. Umberto Eco had the famous essay “Mac is Catholic, DOS is Protestant” which I will expand upon. Eco also saw Windows more like “an Anglican-style schism.”

For the majority of my life the world of Apple was not one I paid any attention to much cared about. If anything I was a common Apple-bigot full of inaccurate opinions about Apple computers. I was also an early adopter of MP3s and the first players that came out and went through various makes and models. In addition I started listening to podcast early on and getting those podcasts on my mp3 player was a daily chore. It took some overcoming of bias to take a serious look at the iPod and so in 2005 I bough my first Apple product. Two years later I bought my first Mac.

Now as someone who makes a living writing Windows based software this was a bit like heresy to me. But there were serious reasons I moved into the Apple ecosphere other than just “new and shiny!”.

By all accounts Steve Jobs seems to have been not only a perfectionist, but a visionary in the area of design. In the past these qualities did not always mesh well with what was the state-of-the-art in hardware at the time. Many companies talk about user experience, but Steve Jobs really did seem to see that as an overriding focus.

So what are the Catholic aspects I see? It is Apple’s design philosophy that really drew me in. For one they talk about the philosophy of UI design and create specific guidelines such as the “Human Interface Guidelines.” There is a canonical aspect to how software designers and programmers are to write user interfaces. So often I find that when it comes to form and function one side of the equation is more represented than the other. For the human person aesthetics are not something that is just to be an afterthought. We have lost so much beauty for example when we design churches more like auditoriums than places of worship. The considerations seem to be more to the physical than with having beauty help your spirit rise up in worship. When it comes to hardware and software this is also quite evident. Sure a skin or a gloss might be added to something at the end of production, but it is something grafted on and not a coherent whole of form and function. There is something almost Gnostic about so much design. In Gnosticism the body is evil and the spirit is good and in design Gnosticism the material aspects are all that really matters.

What I discovered with Apple products and the Apple software development community is that they have a very Catholic both/and as a philosophy. Form and function both drive the end product. The attention to detail in their products is at a level I had never seen before. Sure they might constantly tempt us with the latest model, but there is no planned obsolescence built into their products. I never kept a computer longer than the Mac I am typing this on. Yet it still looks as aesthetically pleasing as the day I bought it and has not experienced any of the problems I have had before involving parts going bad or pieces of the case coming off. Apple’s attention to detail is what drove them to add a speaker to the iPod just so you could hear an audio click with you pressed on the classic iPod’s click wheel.

This type of attention to detail is also found on the software side where again how the user interacts with the program is given great importance. As a long-time geek I worked with hundreds of programs with confusing and/or ugly interfaces. Sure the underlying program might have done it’s job quite well, but again as human persons we should expect more than just function as in an atheistic materialist way. Though things have improved in the Windows world as the importance of design has become more prevalent and tools like WPF and Silverlight helping to focus on that.

Apples products are certainly a team effort, but it is quite evident that Steve Jobs set the bar when it came to sweating the details so we don’t have to. His leadership brought a company that was on the verge of bankruptcy to a world leader in consumer electronics it is today. It takes more than leadership to bring this about, it took having a vision and a philosophy and imparting it as a part of the DNA of the company. As Catholics there is much we can learn from this. Are attitudes should always take in account the whole of the human person. Each individual is the intended target of the Gospel and when the world of Catholic art and literature is substandard it is no surprise that so are the results.

There is much talk about how the Catholic faith “baptized” various things and brought them into use within the faith. Apple did not create the first personal computer, mp3 player, GUI, tablet, or phone – yet they took each to a new level. Again as Catholic we need to do the same with all the tools at hand looking for opportunities to spread the Gospel with the highest levels of professionalism.

Link: Good article on Steve Jobs at the National Catholic Register

A novel approach by Associated Press reporter Tom Breen.

My father is a journalist, though, and it was his influence that steered me toward news. After college, I was working at the Daily Hampshire Gazette in Northampton, Mass., at the time the most recent sex abuse scandals began to break in Boston. Partly because I had some Catholic bric-a-brac on my desk, my editor assumed I actually knew something about the church, and so I was assigned to cover a few local stories related to the scandal.

I quickly realized that I didn’t know anything about Catholicism, and so to avoid embarrassing myself and the paper I resolved to learn what I could. In addition to reading everything I could get my hands on, I started pitching stories on religious topics that had nothing to do with the abuse scandal, hoping to bring myself up to speed.

I call this a novel approach considering how bad much of religion coverage is which is full of ignorance and axes to grind. The full story is well worth reading as found at GetReligion.

Tom Breen reminds of a former AP reporter Matt Baglio whose coverage of exorcism led him tow write the book The Rite which later resulted in the movie of the same name. He truly worked to cover the story with an investigative eye and ended up writing a informative and theologically concise book.

Okay, maybe it is British humor. Really though the use of a Dalek to promote women Bishops in the Anglican Church? Instead of “Exterminate” they have “Con-se-crate.” Though maybe a Dalek is appropriate. It is easy to imagine the raspy electronic voice of the Dalek as to how these women talk. The Daleks had every emotion removed except hate and the tone of the Women’s ordination movement reminds me of this.

Though I don’t know what they are worried about. The Anglican Church always caves and unlike the Catholic Church it really is only a matter of time since the governing General Synod has already decided this was to be allowed. I guess their chant is “We want women bishops now and not just in the next year.”

Via Father Z

The president of the Southern Baptist Convention, the second-largest church in America, announced today that come next year, they might not be the Southern Baptist Convention anymore.

President Bryant Wright said the “Southern” part of their name might need to go since it implies a regional focus, and he’s launched a task force to consider new options for the 166-year-old body, Baptist News reported.

Their findings will be shared with SBC leaders in February, and any change would have to be approved by delegates at its annual meetings.

Across the Baptist blogosphere, Southern Baptists seem to be thinking that Wright may be right, supporting his claim that without the regional modifier, Southern Baptists may have further reach across the continent.

Interesting, but it does seem to me that outside of the Catholic Church all forms of Christianity are geographical in nature.

For example the Protestant fathers all created competing forms of Christianity and adherence pretty much formed regionally or in areas where their regions projected spheres of influence. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldrych Zwingli, King Henry VIII all established churches which largely became national churches. After the Protestant revolt you did not see countries with roughly equal amounts of Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, Anglicans, etc; you see pretty much geographical dominance. Colonization plays a role in projecting regional Christianity, but eventually as is always the case with Protestantism geographical fracture occurs. For example no one would compare Anglicanism as practiced in England with Anglicanism as practiced in Africa. For now African Anglicanism is more like historic Anglicanism in belief. Really geographical fracture becomes so extreme that the local non-denominational denominations are tied to neighborhoods and not regions.

This is also certainly so in the Orthodox Churches in that they are pretty much tied to national versions of Orthodoxy and their spread to other countries is pretty much confounded to expatriates. Being that the Orthodox have valid Holy Orders and have retained the sacraments their geographic fracturing is largely kept in check as compared to Protestant churches.

The latter half of the first century use of the word Catholic to describe a particular and universal Church is an escape from being tied to the geographical. This is one of the reasons I dislike and don’t use the term “Roman Catholic” a term which rose from Anglican quarters. Being a Catholic of the Roman or Latin Rite is more accurate terminology and I dislike prefixes that would limit the word Catholic. Besides in the 1300s we didn’t suddenly become “Avignon Catholics.” Certainly there is much to appreciate in the historic association of the Catholic Church and the city of Rome. The reality though is that the Catholic Church is the Church established by Christ and geography does not limit its universality.

That is part of the beauty of the Catholic Church is that we can be a universal Church and at the same time have some geographical and cultural distinctions. These distinctions mainly occur with the different rites where you have different emphasis on theology and liturgical expression. These distinctions don’t resolve into totally different theology as we find in the myriad Protestant churches.

Though to be more accurate there is geographical fracturing that does occur within the members of the Church. These fractures occur whenever there is departure from the Magisterium of the Church. The Dutch Bishops and their infamous Dutch Catechism did not bring about a more universal church, but regional dissent from the Church. In the United States the heresy of Americanism was and is a departure from the universality of the Church. The Church is universal because the truth she teaches is universal and the Church’s teaching authority maintains that universality. That authority from Christ and protected from the gates of hell will keep the Church universal despite the ebb and flow of the adherence of her members. Dissent from that authority results in individualism and geographical fracturing.

Getting back to the renaming of the Southern Baptist Convention they will have a difficult time coming up with a name devoid of both geographical associations and having a form of Baptist specificity. Maybe they can do what Prince did and change their name to a symbol. The ecclesial community formerly known as the Souther Baptist Convention. Joking aside I really should be joining Jesus in his high priestly prayer to the Father.

“I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe in me through their word, that they may all be one; even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. they may be one even as we are one, I in them and thou in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that thou hast sent me and hast loved them even as thou hast loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom thou hast given me, may be with me where I am, to behold my glory which thou hast given me in thy love for me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, the world has not known thee, but I have known thee; and these know that thou hast sent me. I made known to them thy name, and I will make it known, that the love with which thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them.” John 17:20-26