Y2KO to Y2OK

Summary

The other day, I found out the name for someone who does what I do. I'm a ‘forensic theologian’. Stephen Grey introduced the term in ‘Follow the Mullahs’, an article in the Atlantic Monthly for November 2004. It refers to someone who analyzes the religious content of intelligence data:

The analyst is engaged in a new and increasingly important aspect of the fight against terrorism—one that might be called forensic theology. Authenticating terrorist documents is just one of its uses. It can also help identify perpetrators, and targets for surveillance, sometimes far more effectively than conventional intelligence practices. Its greatest potential, however, may be strategic: with theologians at the center of the battle, forensic theology may help us pinpoint the groups that present the greatest threat.

I have been monitoring ‘open source intelligence’ for indicators of apocalyptic activity as an associate with the Center for Millennial Studies for a decade or so, and during the year 1999 rollover, I was Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the CMS, tracking both sacred and secular indicators with a special view to the potential social impact of the date change.

I am also the designer of a family of thinking tools known collectively as the HipBone Games. These games derive from my interest in the Glass Bead Game as described in Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel (1943), for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1946.