May 9, 2006
Algorithms
The battle of Lent is well over, Jesus and his simple gospel have won it for us once again, and Easter is almost gone. Maybe now we can get back to the really complicated stuff like orthodoxy, people’s sex lives, and other fantasies.
I’ve heard that one way to move that sort of thing along is to get ourselves an algorithm. My handy Dictionary of Modern Thought says that an algorithm is a “procedure for performing a complicated operation by carrying out a precisely determined sequence of simpler ones.” I have, of course, not much of a notion what that’s all about and shall proceed now to prove it.
I do know that there’s a lot of plain old simple gospel stuff we have a way of making more and more complicated, but usually the hard way by beating people over the head with it. There must be somebodies out there who can “do” algorithms with one hand tied behind their back. I should hope that these are they whose ecclesiology could be trusted not to go berserk into some mediaevalist pontifical two-step of the kind that derails God’s penchant for doing new things. But that may be asking too much.
I was discussing this idea with Canon Quirk, and he said he thought an algorithm was the kind of tempo some presidential campaigns have taken.