Desktop users aren’t going to see a difference, but if you’re one of those oddballs who visits sites individually (as opposed to using an RSS aggregator of some sort) on a mobile phone, you’ll notice a very nice, sleek, and user-friendly interface. No zooming required to read! The theme will work well with iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre and BlackBerry Storm mobile devices, they say. Others will be hit or miss, I suppose. It looks very nice on my iPhone.

WPtouch is the free plugin version. I may actually go ahead and buy the fully-featured WPtouch Pro version from the authors, Brave New Code. It looks pretty spiffy.

If you’re using a mobile browser other than the iPhone, iPod touch, Android, Opera Mini, Palm Pre or BlackBerry Storm, please take a look and let me know how it looks. I’m curious as to how it might not work on other mobile readers than those mentioned by the authors as being compatible.

UPDATE 8:20 PM:
Nick Norelli asked for some screenshots of what this looks like on my iPhone (which is a very good idea I should have thought of, so thank you Nick!). Here they are!

First, here is an image of the home page of biblicalia with the new mobile theme on my iPhone:

Next is an image of the menu that appears when you click the down arrow to the right of the biblicalia blog title:

Here is an image of how the Categories look, which is the option next to the menu that you see when you click the down arrow:

Now back to the menu. Here’s what the Archives look like:

And here’s what the Links page looks like:

And last but not least here’s what Nick’s comment below looks like:

I may be making some cosmetic changes here and there, but I like the overall look already.

Oh, one more. This is an example of the default settings. Here’s what Esteban’s blog’s home looks like:

Before anything else, sit yourself down and think about how you want your stuff sorted. You’ll need to be clear on how you want things sorted not just generally, but specifically. That is, there may be some exceptions to your general sorting rules. This whole process is, after all, about making the order in which these items are displayed most useful to you. You can apply the information below to achieve your own goals.

We begin with the beginning: the data. Your media files are likely, like mine, from different sources: some purchased, some downloaded free from the internets, and some loaded from CD. In most cases, track information is automatically located (which never ceases to amaze me) and to all your media files. But it’s necessary to say that this information is basic, and is occasionally even incorrect. In every sense, it is invariably incomplete for the sorting scheme I will describe below. Thus your generic sort based on the incomplete and/or incorrect information attached to your files is going to be somewhat unpredictably accurate, which is frustrating. You’ll want to make sure the information in your files (dates, song names, etc) is all correct anyway at some point, so you might as well do it (if you haven’t already) before you fix your sorting. Those are all accessible in iTunes through, on a Mac, ctrl-click (or like me, lower-left-corner-touchpad-click) or on Windows right-click an album in iTunes, and pick Get Info. The easiest and quickest way to do this for an album is by ctrl/right-clicking on an album in Grid View, picking Get Info, and going from there as described below.

The Sorting options are your friend. In Get Info on iTunes in Windows, Sorting is a tab; on a Mac, it’s one of the option buttons. Whichever, click it. You’ll see these listed:
Sort Artist
Sort Album Artist
Sort Album
Sort Composer
Sort Show
These are where you’ll set your sorting up. These fields are where you can specify for iTunes (and the iPod) how you want your media to sort, overriding the defaults extrapolated from the information of the individual files. “Sort Album Artist” and “Sort Album” are the important fields here. “Sort Artist” actually is the Artist field for all the songs on the album, so you need to be careful with that. You could wipe out and screw up some compilations (more on which below) if you’re not careful with that field. But for an album by a single artist, “Sort Artist” and “Sort Album Artist” will very often both be the same. “Sort Composer” is important for those who want to sort that way, and “Sort Show” is used for multiple episodes of video media, and not applicable here.

So, the trick to setting up sorting is simple: it’s alphabetic. In “Sort Album Artist” you will put the artist’s name in the way in which you want it to sort within your collection. For instance, you would put “Beatles” rather than “The Beatles” because you don’t want all your stuff to show up alphabetized by “The…” but rather back in the Bs, according to “Beatles.” So, also “Gabriel Peter” instead of “Peter Gabriel” and “Keyrouz Marie” instead of “Marie Keyrouz” or “Soeur Marie Keyrouz”. All that is up to you, but keep it in mind that the “Sort Album Artist” is purely alphabetical.

After you have established your “Sort Album Artist” names, to put things in an order determined by you, simply use the same name exactly that you put in “Sort Album Artist” followed by a two-digit number: “Sylvian 01″, “Sylvian 02″, “Sylvian 03″ and so on. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. If you put the actual album names in that “Sort Album” spot, all it will do is sort them alphabetically by name. Note that in putting these things in the various Sort entries, these don’t at all effect the display of the Artist or Album names in any of the displays. They’re solely for sorting. And solely by patiently tinkering can you fine-tune the sorting to make the display of your media perfect for you. Hopefully the above hints will help in some little way toward that.

In Cover Flow in iTunes, ctrl-click/right-click in the Cover Flow display itself and pick “Change Sort” and then “Album by Artist”. In Grid View, select the View menu, then Sort Albums, and select: “By Artist” and “Ascending” and “By Title”. Then all your media will sort in the order you just set up. Sync up your iPod and check the results there in the Cover Flow and Album list. Fix any oddities. “Rinse and repeat” as they used to say.

It must be noted that there is a difference in the way that iTunes and the iPod sort compilations. Compilations are albums that include songs which are from more than one artist. In the iPod Cover Flow, all compilations appear at the very end, but in the Album list they appear in their alphabetical position. In iTunes, in both Cover Flow and in Grid view by Album, they appear alphabetically. So, the oddball here is Cover Flow on the iPod. That’s something to keep in mind.

I should say that the above instructions are accurate as of this date, for iPod 2.0.1 and iTunes 9.2. Who knows what an upgrade might bring?

I hope all have enjoyed this short interlude of geekoutishness. We now return to our regularly scheduled programming….

It’s unfortunate that this thing is necessary, but it really works well. Berkeley is known for being horrible at allowing the installation of cell towers and antennas (there are some few on various buildings, mostly downtown and on campus). The Berkeley people involved are probably the same ones going on and on with conspiracy theories about contrails and whatnot, so that’s not surprising. I am a well-practiced eye-roller. Anyhow, even the UC Berkeley campus isn’t sufficiently saturated. At my work, far uphill from downtown and the campus, reception is terrible, but it’s terrible for everyone. There’s talk of some antennas or repeaters being installed for us, and throughout campus, but it’s so far just talk.

AT&T also unfortunately gets a bad reputation for the state of the network, which I’m sure is only about to get worse, judging from all the people buying new iPhones. They really are great tools, and I’m very happy with mine. And it’d be nice if AT&T could somehow jump ahead of the demand and have some super-network in place that’d work everywhere that I went. And then we can ride to work in chariots of gold pulled by unicorns! People go on about how Verizon is much better in our area, and it certainly is, but I don’t see that lasting at all if they also started carrying the iPhone. It’s immense popularity will be the bane of whatever network carries it. That’s simply the nature of the situation. I read somewhere that they’re expecting the year’s sales of iPhones to be around 40 million units. Nuts! It would certainly be wiser to spread the support over several networks. We’ll see what happens.

Anyhow, I’ve got a great connection at home now. No garbled voices, no dropped calls, and five bars throughout the house. I actually spent a long time talking to a friend on the phone and found it a pleasant thing! I used to hate talking on the phone, because the signal was always so bad and I just couldn’t hear what was being said well enough (yes, that bad!) that I thought I was missing half of what was being said. So this will be a definite improvement in the Ministry of Communications at Palazzo Biblicalia!

The latest example is the Burton-Christie book The Word in the Desert which I mentioned in my previous post, which is a book about the Apophthegmata Patrum, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. None of what Burton-Christie writes about the Sayings of the Desert Fathers is revolutionary or innovative. It’s simply stuff that’s there in the text and available to the sympathetic and attentive reader. In this sense it reminds me of Derwas Chitty’s masterpiece (much more impressive for the amount of work it evidences, which I don’t think Burton-Christie would quibble with at all) The Desert a City. But, again, these are good books, even excellent books about great books, books and writings which stand in a completely different category.

So why am I not more often reading the great books?

I see that one reason is that I don’t want to take such a book as the Philokalia into my local pub and perhaps spill something on it. And although I’ve always found the noise of a café or pub to be conducive to reading (those are what I habitually did my studying in, in university), I just don’t feel right bringing the Evergetinos or the sermons of St Gregory Palamas into a bar, to be blunt. (And I used to, and my friends found it interesting, but I seldom would get reading done, anyway.) So, don’t go to the bar, right? Read at home, right? Where I’ve got all this other stuff I should be doing, too (three books in preparation, three handritten pages of a To Do list for the summer, and a laundry pile larger than I am), right? Okay, so out on the street corner under the streetlamp reading? (Another favorite spot!) Some of these books are heavy. My hands can’t hold them up for too long before wearing out. Also, I don’t want to get any of these books, some quite expensive, dirty by spilling coffee/beer on them, or dropping them, or possibly having them swiped from my table (it’s happened), or dropped and banged up by my clutzy tired hands (that’s happened too).

But these practical matters are, I think, just excuses I’m making to avoid diving in and paying attention, getting to work, knuckling down spiritually, you might say. Is that so surprising? Don’t we tend to avoid what’s best for us sometimes just when we need it? There’s that at root, partly.

This is especially the case with the Bible. I don’t know how many books I’ve read about the Bible, using up time that would have been much, much (millions of times!) better spent in simply reading the Bible itself. Not only do we have a cacophonous pandemonium (let the reader understand!) in the commentaries and journals and just about anything Bible-related, so little of it even remotely edifying or even interesting, we have very little incentive to weed through it all. The ideal of scholarship is to be widely read and to be able to discuss all aspects of an issue from an informed perspective. That sounds noble and correct. Only the Bible is not an academic treatise, a product of Reason. It is the work of the Prophets, a product of Faith. And regarding the books under consideration, this is the dichotomy: the “good books about” are products of reason, whereas the “great books” are products of Faith. These latter, to the discerning, truly belong in a different category. This is not only because they hold a “classic” status in a religious community and are therefore honored by proxy. It is because they are ontologically different. Their words work differently than those same words work when used by others. The reasons are: Inspiration and Revelation. Is it no wonder that those who are best qualified to write about such things typically ending up simply contributing to the body of them rather than the commentary on them? Only the inspired succeed, but then as they are inspired and their own words are a sort of revelation, their works become honored as more than just “a good book about a great book” and become “a great book” on their own. In any case, to subject a work of one realm to the ministrations of the other realm always ends badly. The realms are entirely separate. The Spiritual is not accessible to the Rational, contra Scholasticism and all its legitimate and illegitimate children. The Rational is thoroughly accessible to the Spiritual, yet it is irrelevant to the Spiritual, which is a much more interesting dynamic. The quixotic (or psychotic) thing is that the Rational thrills to examining the results of the Spiritual, all the while denying the validity and authenticity of the latter. I don’t see how anyone is supposed to take that kind of behavior seriously. In any other such pairing, such as Oceanographers and French Literature, that’d be considered irrational behavior, or at the very least extremely rude. But, that’s the world we live in.

And where was I going with this? Ah, yes! I have some assigned reading that I need to get to: three small books written by the Abbot George of the Monastery of St Gregorios on Mount Athos. I am going to finish The Word in the Desert tonight (an excellent “book about”), and then start on Abbot George’s little books tomorrow. So there we go!

Love was at the heart of the desert fathers’ world. Whatever diverse motives may have first drawn them to the desert, whatever particular struggles occupied them during their sojourn there, the end of all their longings was ultimately expressed as love. The language, the attitudes, and the actions of the desert fathers were filled with this longing, with the desire to be touched and transformed by love. Nearly every significant act in the Sayings either moved toward or grew out of the commandment of love. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the biblical commandment to love, more than any other, defined and gave shape to the world in which the desert fathers lived. The memories of that world, preserved by later generations of monks, suggest that love was seen as the hallmark of early monastic life. A brother once asked an old man why in these [latter] days the monastic life did not bear the kind of fruit it had born in earlier days. The elder answered him simply and directly: “In those days there was charity.” The desire to remember the days when life in the desert was characterized by love accounts for the many stories preserved in the Sayings which portray the desert fathers’ struggle to love.

Douglas Burton-Christie, The Word in the Desert (Oxford, 1993)

The Sayings referred to in the remarkable excerpt above are, of course, the Sayings of the Desert Fathers (the alphabetical collection), often referred to by their traditional Latin title, Apophthegmata Patrum. [There is a widely available English translation by Sr Benedicta Ward, The Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection (Cistercian Press, 1984); I began a translation here, as well, which I will recommence soon.] Burton-Christie provides a thorough introduction to the Sayings through a very sympathetic reading. I’d recommend it for anyone wanting a quick overview of the intructional ethics of the desert fathers. This introduction in the end is larger than the work itself, which is not too surprising, though it has only barely skimmed the depth of the riches of the Sayings. Can you tell I’m impressed? My only quibble is with the subtitle “Scripture and the Quest for Holiness in Early Christian Monasticism”. It smacks of an editorial hand, for one thing. For another, Scripture does not play so primary a role in Burton-Christie’s book on the Sayings. What he does show is how well-internalized Scripture was amongst the desert fathers, to the degree that their lives and instruction were permeated by not only Scriptural phrases and imagery, but by what we might recognize as the underlying ethic of much of Scripture as understood in the first centuries of the Church. The majority of the book therefore focuses on the phenomenon of the “word” given by a desert father in response to a request for such. To anyone who has read the Sayings attentively, none of Burton-Christie’s book will be new. But such a person will (like myself) recognize the value of his book as a sympathetic introduction to the Sayings for a thoughtful and well-read reader who is interested in the Sayings but uninformed concerning the expression of monasticism in Egypt of that day. This will be an excellent introduction in that sense.

He describes their origins in a post titled The Headers of Twenty Ten.

He has quite a good eye!

Incidentally, that photo that I’ve had there for a while now is of the approach to Blarney Castle, County Cork, Ireland.