Last week, Randy Cohen, “The Ethicist” at the New York Times, asked that very question:
Etiquette holds that religion, especially another person’s religion, should be treated with deference or, better still, silence by nonbelievers. Hence the familiar dinner-party injunction: don’t discuss religion or politics. Even at a table full of co-religionists, feelings can run high, and there is a reluctance to combine digestion with discord (particularly where knives are nearby). To the observant, a nonbeliever’s comments on church doctrine can feel less like a discussion of theology than a personal attack.
Yet despite the risk of provoking the ire of believers, we should discuss the actions of religious institutions as we would those of all others—courteously and vigorously. This is a mark of respect, an indication that we take such ideas seriously. To slip on the kid gloves is condescending, akin to the way you would treat children or the frail or cats.
If only Cohen would follow his own advice. Instead of discussing the actions of religious institutions “courteously and vigorously” and taking “such ideas seriously,” however, Cohen suggests something altogether discourteous and unserious: that the Vatican’s recent decision to grant Anglicans a personal ordinariate within the Catholic Church was tantamount to “bigotry.” Later, Cohen complains that more news sources did not “castigate the Vatican’s invitation to misogyny and homophobia.”
But does childishly and dismissively admonishing the Vatican for its supposed appeal to misogynic and homophobic Anglicans really amount to “talking about religion”? I can’t see how it does. I’m supportive of much of what Cohen has to say here. The media do shy away from stories on religion for fear of appearing ignorant. And our society would benefit from more vigorous and substantive discussion of the religious tenets and traditions on which this country was founded.
But it seems to me that instead of wanting to “talk about religion”—instead of investigating and writing about the historical and theological causes and implications of the latest religious headline—what Cohen really wants is the freedom to unfairly and reflexively beat religious institutions he doesn’t agree with or doesn’t understand with the stick closest at hand.
So, yes, let’s talk about religion. But let’s do it in a way that is reflective and thoughtful and doesn’t simply repeat hackneyed and unhelpful stereotypes.
Tom Bethel has been riding an anti-relativity-theory hobby horse for years. He has recently published an article questioning the theory of relativity in the American Spectator. I have never met Mr. Bethel. I am sure he is a fine fellow; but he should stick to subjects he knows something about. Bethel apparently learned what he knows about physics (obviously very little) from a now-deceased friend of his named Petr Beckmann. Bethel tells us that Beckmann was an engineer. I have enormous respect for engineers—as engineers. But knowledge of engineering in itself no more qualifies a person to talk about fundamental physics than does knowing about baseball or butterfly collecting.
To a non-scientist, maybe there is not much difference between electrical engineering and fundamental physics—they both deal with equations and with electromagnetic phenomena, after all. But that is like saying that because a civil engineer who designs bridges is dealing with gravitational forces and doing calculations involving them he is therefore also competent to discuss the ins and outs of Einstein’s theory of gravity.
Bethel refers to a $2,000 prize that awaits anyone who can disprove a certain one of Beckmann’s crackpot ideas about relativity theory. I will offer a prize of my own. I will pay Tom Bethel $2,000 out of my own pocket if he takes the following courses at a first rate research university and passes them with a grade of A- or better: Classical Electrodynamics I and II (at the level of either Griffith’s book or Jackson’s book), General Relativity, and any course that covers the Dirac equation and relativistic field theory. If he succeeds in doing that, he will at least know what he is talking about when it comes to relativity. Why is it that so many people think they can talk intelligently about extremely technical subjects without knowing anything about them?
The British biologist J. S. B. Haldane used to say that if biology had taught him anything about the nature of the Creator, it was that he had “an inordinate fondness for beetles.” If we can learn a similar lesson from astronomy it might be that God has has an inordinate fondness for the color beige.
The picture below is the average color of the universe.
More precisely, if the entire sky were smeared out, what color would the final mix be? This whimsical question came up when trying to determine what stars are commonplace in nearby galaxies. The answer, depicted above, is a conditionally perceived shade of beige. To determine this, astronomers computationally averaged the light emitted by one of the largest sample of galaxies yet analyzed: the 200,000 galaxies of the 2dF survey. The resulting cosmic spectrum has some emission in all parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, but a single perceived composite color. This color has become much less blue over the past 10 billion years, indicating that redder stars are becoming more prevalent.
God love beetles, beige, and me, this I know for—if scientists and childhood nursery hymns are too be believed—biology, astronomy, and the Bible tells me so.
“Every anti-choice group in the country is pulling out all the stops to derail health care reform,” Planned Parenthood announced this week. “For example, right now, Catholics are being asked to contact their legislators, telling them to alter current health care legislation to include anti-choice amendments. The Catholic bishops have inserted letters into church bulletins, and asked priests to include their call to action in their sermons—and even in their prayers—during Sunday services.”
Planned Parenthood is not exactly wrong. Thomas Peters, for example, reported last week on the bishops’ conference request that all bishops publish an insert in every parish bulletin on healthcare reform—an insert that informs Catholics: “the U.S. bishops’ conference has concluded that all committee-approved bills are seriously deficient on the issues of abortion and conscience.”
Even more on point, look at Bishop James Conley’s op-ed this morning about the reforms on which the House is being urged to vote this weekend.
Planned Parenthood added to its announcement this line: “Groups that want to defeat health care reform, led by anti-choice extremists who are desperate to use legislation to block women’s access to care, have been lobbying Congress for months. And the worst part is that lawmakers are listening.”
It would be great if it were true—wonderful if Planned Parenthood’s worries were justified—but I’m doubtful right now. The democrats in Congress are under enormous pressure from their leadership to hold the party line.
Okay, so I’m willing to listen and think about it, when the CEO of Barclays, John Varley, gets up at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in London and says “Is Christianity and fair reward compatible? Yes.”
I’m even willing to listen and think about it when Lord Griffiths, of Goldman Sachs, stands up in St. Paul’s Cathedral to insist that “we have to tolerate the inequality as a way to achieving greater prosperity and opportunity for all.” The preferential option for the poor may well be best achieved by increasing universal prosperity.
But Griffiths is just not going to get much traction for the idea when he uses this phrasing: “The injunction of Jesus to love others as ourselves is an endorsement of self-interest.”
Descendre dans la rue et tirer au hasard dans la foule—a beautiful language, French is, though the line, from Jean-Paul Sartre, means “going down to the street and shooting at random in the crowd.”
It’s from Sartre’s short story, “Erostratus,” titled after Herostratus, the man who in 356 B.C., burned down the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, so that his name would be immortal. In response, the Ephesians passed a law banning any mention of the arsonist, in the hope that he’d be forgotten and not spawn any imitators. They didn’t succeed; you can find his name if you look in any standard ancient history. Friedrich Nietzsche uses him as an iconic figure in Human, All Too Human. And Sartre modernizes him in the form of a weak and resentful man—an office worker named Paul Hilbert—who imagines becoming important by murder.
In a blog posting this morning, Victor Davis Hanson points out the extent to which the media accounts of the shootings at Ft. Hood have already turned therapeutic, far more in fear of stoking anti-Muslim feeling than in being accurate.
I haven’t seen enough of the coverage to know if he’s right. But the title of his post, “When Anger Goes Cosmic,” reminded me of Sartre’s story—and of the psychological truth that Sartre seems to have missed: The resentful, it turns out, do not imagine their resentments entirely as assertions of individuality against a dehumanizing world. The individuality of resentful anger, it turns out, is like a free radical in chemistry, looking for something upon which to latch.
The modern Herostratus, thinking of descendre dans la rue et tirer au hasard dans la foule, finds a rationalization of his fury in something like the system of fervid imaginings by radical Islamists. And the resentment feeds the system, and the system feeds the resentment, and then the murders come. We want it to be just the resentment of the lone madman, or just the madness of the paranoid system of thought, but it’s both: a perfect cycle of mutual confirmation.
During times of tragedy, it is often easier to talk about praying than to take time out to pray. But I hope that all of us truly will take the time to pray for those involved in the recent massacre at Fort Hood.
We should pray for the dead, pray for the wounded, pray for the victim’s families . . . and pray for Nidal Malik Hasan.
Although he swore an oath to protect his homeland against all enemies—foreign and domestic—Hasan became a traitor to his country and a murderous enemy to his fellow soldiers. His actions make him an enemy of the state and an enemy of his fellow citizens. He is our enemy now. As such the duty of those who call ourselves Christian is crystal clear: We must love and pray for Hasan.
As Christ’s commanded, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.” We can be angry, we can grieve, and we can expect Hasan to pay for his crimes. But we must also love and pray for him, remembering that we were once enemies of a God who, though angered and grieved, paid for our crimes with the blood of his only begotten Son.
The president of Notre Dame, Fr. Jenkins, is receiving an award tonight here in New York—from the American Irish Historical Society dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria.
The society’s reasons for honoring him include things of which the Irish and Catholic—and honor-worthiness—character is not all that apparent. “Father Jenkins has appointed five new deans during his tenure as president,” for instance.
Still, there is this: “Father Jenkins repeatedly has vowed to maintain Notre Dame’s identity as a Catholic university, perhaps most notably at the 2009 commencement ceremony when, in the face of criticism of his invitation to President Barack Obama to receive an honorary degree, he said: ‘Tapping the full potential of human reason to seek God and serve humanity is a central mission of the Catholic Church. The natural place for the Church to pursue this mission is at a Catholic university.’”
In Great Britain, the Committee of Advertising Practice and the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice have embarked on a 12-week consultation to determine whether abortion facilities should be allowed to advertise on television. The consultation is an attempt to respond to the British government’s resolution to combat rising teenage pregnancy, and the committees are considering approval of both pro-choice and pro-life ads. If approved, only the pro-life clinics will be required to spell out their convictions, as well as the possible medical complications of delaying one’s decision to abort; abortion facilities will not have to address the possible complications that attend aborting a child.
Thirteen years ago, while serving as a Marine Corps recruiter in Washington State, I learned a startling secret about the future of our national defense: the younger generations are completely unqualified for military service. Almost three-quarters of America’s youth were too dumb, too sickly, too overweight, too drugged out, or too criminal corrupt to serve in the military (the other twenty-five percent were just too apathetic).
In a study being released Thursday in Washington, Education Secretary Arne Duncan and a group of retired military officers led by former Army Gen. Wesley Clark will sound the alarm bells and call young Americans’ relative lack of overall fitness for military duty a national security threat. The group, Mission: Readiness, will release a report that draws on Pentagon data showing that 75 percent of the nation’s 17- to 24-year-olds are ineligible for service for a variety of reasons.
Put another way, only 4.7 million of the 31.2 million 17- to 24-year-olds in a 2007 survey are eligible to enlist, according to a periodic survey commissioned by the Pentagon. This group includes those who have scored in the top four categories on the Armed Forces Qualification Test, or AQFT; eligible college graduates; and qualified college students.
According to the Pentagon, the ineligible population breaks down this way:
•Medical/physical problems, 35 percent.
•Illegal drug use, 18 percent.
•Mental Category V (the lowest 10 percent of the population), 9 percent.
•Too many dependents under age 18, 6 percent.
•Criminal record, 5 percent.
Amazingly enough, the military is still able to meet—and exceed—recruiting goals. If current trends continue, though, we’ll have a critical shortage of military personnel within another decade.
When I open up my web browser on my computer each day, I always go first to a news site—just to see if anything is on fire, so to speak. For a couple years now, that site has been CNN.com, not because I thought the people there had particularly good news sense, but just because the print stories were all laid out in well-sorted order, easy to look through.
The redesign of the CNN site has promoted all kinds of videos and junk features over that news, I can’t find the headlines I want to glance through any more. So I need a new site. What do readers here use for their news? if you’re going to visit only one general news site a day, which is it?
That, according to the Crimson, in response to the arrest of a young man who graduated from Harvard’s law school last spring—Brian Schroeder, who has been accused of setting fire to the New York City chapel that houses the remains of unidentified victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Eliot Spitzer, former Governor and Attorney General of New York, will deliver a public lecture as part of the 2009/10 Labs Lectures on the Question of Institutional Corruption.
Thursday, November 12 at 4:30pm
Emerson Hall, Room 105
25 Quincy Street, Cambridge
This is a ticketed event.
Yep, Mr. Spitzer looks like the guy to answer Chief Riches’ question about what they teach at Harvard.
Earlier this week, Fr. Gerald E. Murray wrote, “We remember those whom God placed into our lives here below for a time and who are united with us still, even after they have left our sight. This fact, taught to us by our faith, compels us to act. We pray, and we rejoice at the goodness of God—he who allows us to help those we love who are beyond our earthly vision yet still are seen by God.”
Sometimes, though, the help comes to us from those who have already crossed over into the Land of the Living. Consider the case of Elena Desserich.
Just before her sixth birthday, Elena was diagnosed with brain cancer and given 135 days to live. She lived 255 days, passing away in 2007. After her death, Elena’s parents, Brooke and Keith, found hundreds of notes from Elena hidden around the house:
There were so many of them, in so many places, that it became clear Elena wasn’t inspired by whimsy, but had set out with a clear purpose. “It wasn’t just a random collection of notes. She was actually hiding these notes for us,” her father said.
“It was her way of letting us know that everything would be OK,” added Brooke. “You hope that it never ends.”
[. . .]
The Desseriches have not counted the notes, but said they fill three containers. Finding them, said Brooke, “felt like a little hug from her, like she was telling us that she was looking over us even though she wasn’t with us.”
The parents still don’t know if Elena knew she was dying. They never talked of death while she was still with them.
[. . .]
The Desseriches have not counted the notes, but said they fill three containers. Finding them, said Brooke, “felt like a little hug from her, like she was telling us that she was looking over us even though she wasn’t with us.”
Stylistic clarity and uncluttered simplicity are the qualities of Robinson’s work that puts her in the tradition of American literary Calvinism. As Wood says, “There is a familiar American simplicity . . . which is Puritan and colloquial in its origin,” found in “the Puritan sermon, in Jonathan Edwards, in Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, in Mark Twain, in Willa Cather, in Hemingway.” And Robinson. Wood quotes a line from Robinson’s Pulizer Prize novel Gilead: Literary Calvinism possesses “a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to the essentials.”
One of my favorite bloggers—Justin Taylor—has an excerpt from a book by one of my favorite Catholic philosophers—Peter Kreeft—on one of my favorite thinkers—Blaise Pascal.
In his Pensees, Pascal wrote, “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.”
We ought to have much more time, more leisure, than our ancestors did, because technology, which is the most obvious and radical difference between their lives and ours, is essentially a series of time-saving devices.
In ancient societies, if you were rich you had slaves to do the menial work so that you could be freed to enjoy your leisure time. Life was like a vacation for the rich because the poor slaves were their machines. . . .
[But] now that everyone has slave-substitutes (machines), why doesn’t everyone enjoy the leisurely, vacationy lifestyle of the ancient rich? Why have we killed time instead of saving it? . . .
We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.
So we run around like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us, like a dark and empty room without distractions where we would be forced to confront ourselves. . . .
If you are typically modern, your life is like a mansion with a terrifying hole right in the middle of the living-room floor. So you paper over the hole with a very busy wallpaper pattern to distract yourself. You find a rhinoceros in the middle of your house. The rhinoceros is wretchedness and death. How in the world can you hide a rhinoceros? Easy: cover it with a million mice. Multiple diversions. (From: Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensees, pp. 167-187.)
Claude Lévi-Strauss has died, at the age of 100. He was, in his way, a great mind, if somewhat typical of his era—a fact made manifest by the typical response to his death, which expresses not so much surprise that he has died as surprise that he was still alive, to have died.
Without getting into the specifics of structuralism and anti-structuralism, we still have to say that such books as The Savage Mind, The Raw and the Cooked,” and The Origin of Table Manners were compellingly interesting.
And yet . . . and yet, who killed cultural anthropology? There was a moment, of which Lévi-Strauss marks the peak, when it looked as though cultural anthropology were destined to be the premier field for understanding human beings: combining, somehow, philosophical insight, poetic analogy, and scientific method. Gone, all gone. Who now reads this stuff? Who now believes it?
There’s probably a history to be written about how postmodernism came out of anthropology, and then reached back to destroy anthropology, but I suppose Lévi-Strauss’ death is not the occasion for it.
As someone who has never understood the appeal of Bob Dylan (I don’t get it at all), I naturally loved Andrew Ferguson’s long, brutal, and funny takedown of the crooner (croaker?) in The Weekly Standard:
Deep thinking reviewers from Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone began toying with what has since become famous, to me at least, as the Dylan roots theory. It has proved remarkably durable and elastic. Whenever Dylan did something artistically egregious, in poor taste, inept, schlocky, or otherwise incompatible with his reputation for genius, the reviewers would explain that he was a kind of musicologist, plumbing the roots of Americana, absorbing within himself the variegated traditions of our native music and transmuting them into art uniquely his own. Hence “All the Tired Horses.” Stupid? The work of a tapped-out songwriter who doesn’t know when to quit? Think again. Dylan was simply wandering in realms of the spirit the rest of us hadn’t yet reached. As his audience has been saying ever since, he’s always one step ahead of his audience. The fact of his genius became unfalsifiable. Nothing he did could contradict it.
So Dylan turned and hit ‘em again. He became a born-again Christian. He performed in Kabuki make-up. He performed drunk. He wore funny hats. He veered from headbanger rock to Opryland cheese. He made boring, pretentious movies about himself. He played with the Grateful Dead. Nothing seemed to work; his admirers just dug in deeper, gaining confidence as their ranks grew even to include England’s poet laureate. At last, in what for any other performer would have been a self-administered death blow, he adopted the stage style he’s famous for today: the adenoidal voice mumbling unintelligible lyrics, the chain-saw arrangements mangling the most beloved Dylan standard till the body can’t be identified. He tours continuously, doing this night after night.
A Dylan concert is unlike any other event in the history of American show business. It is notable most for the uneasy sense among the audience that no one has the slightest idea what song they’re listening to. To an outsider, it looks like a cruel hoax, an inside joke that the joker alone is in on. Yet I’ve seen fans weep in gratitude as he garbles his most famous lines. The ovations are deafening. Forget Baby Huey: Dylan fans are the battered wives of the music industry
Be sure to read the rest, especially the last two spot-on paragraphs.
A Saudi court has ruled in favor of the public display of a crucifix, despite a Kingdom-wide ban on Christian symbols. The only proviso is that a beheaded human body has to be attached to it:
RIYADH (Reuters) – A Saudi court of cassation upheld a ruling to behead and crucify a 22-year-old man convicted of raping five children and leaving one of them to die in the desert, newspapers reported on Tuesday.
The convict was arrested earlier this year after a seven-year old boy helped police in their investigation. The child left in the desert after the rape was three years old, Okaz newspaper said.
International rights groups have accused the kingdom, the birthplace of Islam, of applying draconian justice, beheading murderers, rapists and drug traffickers in public. So far this year about 40 people have been executed in Saudi Arabia.
In Saudi Arabia, crucifixion means tying the body of the convict to wooden beams to be displayed to the public after beheading.
For almost a decade the “emergent” movement has been a peculiar subculture on the borders of evangelical Christianity. Members of the movement—or “conversation” as they prefer to call it—tend to be known more for their cultural choices (Likes: tattoos, cussing, Sufjan Stevens, Obama; Dislikes: orthodoxy, megachurches, CCM, certainty, their evangelical parents) than for their theology.
Now it appears Judaism is getting its over version of the emergents:
When Moses came down from Mount Sinai about 3,300 years ago, he couldn’t have seen these Jews coming.
A blogger writes about how one of Judaism’s holiest days ended, for her, in a strip club, while elsewhere a guy strolls into a tattoo parlor requesting a Star of David. Two women exchange wedding vows in a Jewish ceremony, and hipsters toss back bottles of HE’BREW, The Chosen Beer. A full-time software developer prepares to lead a group in Jewish prayer, as a PhD candidate in Jewish thought pens a letter criticizing Israel’s policies.
Meet the “New Jews,” as some call them: pockets of post-baby boomers — or more accurately Generation X and Millennial (Gen Y) Jews — who are making one of the world’s oldest known monotheistic faiths and its culture work for them and others in a time when, more than ever, affiliation is a choice.
“I could wake up tomorrow and say, ‘I don’t want to be Jewish.’ There would be no social, political or economic consequences,” said Shawn Landres, the 37-year-old co-founder of Jumpstart, a Los Angeles-area organization that pushes forward out-of-the-box ideas in the Jewish world. “It’s true for the first time in thousands of years that we can build the identities we want.”
Many of those at the forefront of innovative Jewish construction are rabbis, religious educators, people who know their stuff. But they’re not interested in foisting labels on people — like the denominational terms Reform, Conservative or Orthodox — nor do they want to perpetuate the pressures that come with fitting into religious, political and social molds.
Having just received my own review copy of A New Literary History of America from Harvard University Press, I was intrigued to read Mark Bauerlein and Priscilla Ward’s email exchange on the book over at The Chronicle of Higher Education. Unsurprisingly, the book does not just focus on literature, but also on history, politics, popular culture and art in a series of discrete position papers arranged chronologically. No metanarrative here—except one, of course: what Bauerlein calls “a drama of multiculturalist emergence.”
Indeed, what struck me most in reading the exchange and in flipping through the book was that this is not a new literary history at all. It is simply a reification (to borrow that popular Marxist term) of what has long been assumed about the nature of history in general and American literary history in particular in the humanities. That Ward often encourages Bauerlein to write his own literary history on the figures and topics that have long been excluded while still claiming that the Harvard history is new and fresh is more than a little ironic.
Read the whole exchange here, in which in addition to his intelligence, Professor Bauerlein should be commended for his generous civility.
In the Lord of the Rings films, British actor Ian McKellen played Gandalf, a wizard who helps protect Middle-earth from the forces of evil. But in real he plays a censor, protecting hotel guests from the nefarious collaboration of Moses and the Gideons:
Details: Is it true that when you stay at hotels you tear out the Bible page that condemns homosexuality?
Ian McKellen: I do, absolutely. I’m not proudly defacing the book, but it’s a choice between removing that page and throwing away the whole Bible. And I’m not really the first: I got delivered a package of 40 of those pages—Leviticus 18:22—that had been torn out by a married couple I know. They put them on a bit of string so that I could hang it up in the bathroom.
Details: So did you?
Ian McKellen: It is in the bathroom, yes, but it’s too much of a curiosity to actually put to use.
