The blog

The blog—informal opinions and chat about the parish

Tuesday, September 6, 2016

Slogging through HTML

I have just spent nearly two hours working on the church website, trying to bring the code up to the current standards. Aside from the hacking (which was real), a big problem was that I had used methods that were about five years old for doing such things as inserting photos. And everything has changed. Not in very obvious ways either.

In the middle of all this, I posted a Facebook comment (somewhat grumpy) that I agreed with Harry Potter's Dolores Umbridge, who said that "change for the sake of change must be discouraged." As is usual with quotes from memory, I got that one wrong. What she actually said was "Progress for the sake of progress must be discouraged." Quite a difference! And Umbridge was mangling a more reasonable version of the old proverb: "Change for change's sake does not always result in progress."

We in the Episcopal Church often get accused of "going with the flow." Female clergy, a gay bishop, and now we are on record supporting transgender rights. Do we do this because we use The New Yorker magazine as our moral compass?

Actually no, and it takes a LOT to change our official stance on anything. The process is similar to amending the US Constitution, and for similar reasons. Big-time proposals have to go through committees, be voted on in major legislative bodies, then down to the parishes, and on and on. We do this so we are not tempted to jump on every bandwagon that comes down the street.

Then there is the "three-legged stool," our nickname for the three sources of authority in our church: Scripture, tradition, and reason. (In practice, that's a misleading metaphor: We should talk about the old-fashioned stool at a lunch counter. Scripture is the shiny pole embedded in the floor, while reason and tradition are like the footrest you use to keep from falling off the thing.)

In practice, Episcopal theology has a baked-in stability. I just wish HTML programming language did the same.

No comments: