o1mnikent

Why We Read
Despite the proliferation of book groups and literary blogs, reading is ultimately a private act. Why people read what they read is a great unknown and personal thing.

The Dance of Evolution, or How Art Got Its Start
Art gives us pleasure, and activities that feel good tend to be those that evolution deems too important to leave to chance. The artistic impulse is a human birthright, a trait so ancient, universal and persistent that it is almost surely innate. (ht: Arts & Letters Daily)

TV + Self-Help + Marketing = Bestseller
Prayer of Jabez , Purpose Driven Life, Your Best Life Now: Today’s spiritually oriented self-help literature is rooted in the American religious tradition that emphasizes individual search and introspection.

Vanslaughter
In the 1970s, the van was a temple of middle-class hedonism, trimmed with fur, chrome, simulated walnut, and the classiest knitted textile known to man, crushed velour. Alas, much has changed.

Death of Socrates (chapter one)
We cannot predict the day or the hour when we will die. Socrates, by contrast, died in complete control, and his death fitted perfectly with his life. If Socrates had been crucified, then the whole later history of western philosophy and religion might have looked very different.

The Philosophy of Wine-Tasting
Is not taste merely subjective? If the “merely” is to mean that there is no fact of the matter as to what makes one wine better or worse than another, that a wine is only as good as it tastes to the subject currently quaffing it, then questions of criticism appear largely idle.

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The editors of the New York Times book review have posted their picks for the ten best books of 2007, which got me thinking about the books I’ve read this past year. Here are my top ten, in the order I read them:

Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s Eye View of the World

Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter

Kenneth Bailey, Poet and Peasant and Through Peasant Eyes: A Literary-Cultural Approach to the Parables in Luke

Miroslav Volf, Exclusion and Embrace: A Theological Exploration of Identity, Otherness, and Reconciliation

Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Leo Tolstoy, Master and Man

Excerpted from a letter in this week’s Lynden Tribune:

“My property taxes almost doubled because the County Assessor’s staff have bought into the pro-casino propaganda. My real estate value has dropped 30 percent or more. If you get lucky and find someone to buy your house, it will be almost impossible for them to get financing. The night sky is lit up by lights and sky beams. There is a constant stream of traffic on the road. And, yet to come, drunk drivers.”

It seems that the writer of this letter hasn’t, you know, played the odds very well. Why are poker tournaments and lotteries considered gambling, but investing in real estate or the stock market is not?* Why do churches in Lynden selectively pray against grambling but not against the woeful decisions made by sub-prime lenders (or the lendees sitting in the pews)? It’s easy to bring anti-casino tirades to church, but we ought to be more concerned about the things that we’re too ashamed to pray about, since gambling addiction, I suspect, is less of a problem in our churches than bad credit and the cultural assumptions that justify our spending habits. It is reprehensible that a community as affluent as ours opposes gambling on the grounds that it encourages greed among the most impoverished. Gambling is certainly not the most pressing moral problem for church-goers in our community.

I suspect that we’re upset at the casino not for its gambling, but because we have become aware that gambling amounts to little more than a redistribution of wealth and power to a minority group on the fringe of our city whom many of us have arbitrarily deemed less-than-deserving of either.

*This sentence was quoted.  Can’t remember the source.

Taking Marriage Private
Not until the 16th century did European states begin to require that marriages be performed under legal auspices.  Today, however, possession of a marriage license tells us little about people’s interpersonal responsibilities.

Flying Spaghetti Monster Inspires Wonky Religious Debate
Pastafarianism is as serious as the religious-studies wonks are taking it.

America’s Hotel Industry
Americans invented the grand hotel. They also launched the standardised one.  America’s hotels unwittingly shaped its history.

Can Biology Do Better Than Faith?
Religions continue both to render their special services and to exact their heavy costs. E.O. Wilson asks, Can scientific humanism do as well or better, at a lower cost? (ht: Arts & Letters Daily)

Big Art Museums
Professional baseball and football did not become wildly popular because big stadiums are inherently compelling, but because people learned to love the games as children when they played and watched them on lowly sandlots.  The art world should take note.

Bean and Gone
It is said that around the seventh century, somewhere near the Red Sea a herd of goats ate the magenta berries of a local shrub and began to act strangely.  The goats, and the humans who observed them, would never be the same.

Lost in Translation: Versions of the Fall
Because the rhythms and rhymes of Heidegger and Derrida can sound like secular renditions of the Christian story, we can be lulled into thinking that Continental philosophy has “got religion” and now bolsters our Christian claims about the human condition.

Taking Science on Faith
Can the mighty edifice of physical order we perceive in the world about us ultimately be rooted in reasonless absurdity? If so, then nature is a fiendishly clever bit of trickery: meaninglessness and absurdity somehow masquerading as ingenious order and rationality.

Are the Family Cliche’s True?
The difficult middle child, the spoilt only child, the wayward baby — convincing birth order cliches.  But try to predict the birth order without first being told, and few people would get it right. (ht: Arts & Letters Daily)

The Opposite of Thanksgiving
Thanksgiving in the 17th century: At its center was not an extravagant meal, but a long fast. And its chief concern was not bounty but redemption.  But the belief in repentance – and its power to improve the American experiment – has retreated.

Remedial Cooking
To acheive the fabled charm of a Thanksgiving dinner – more than the turkey – you have to be a confident, if not experienced, cook.  But something is lost when we solicit advice from the Food Network and substitute internet printouts of Emeril’s pumpkin creme brulee for handwritten index cards.

The War on Thanksgiving
Holidays have turned into a tug of war between cold, hard history and comforting popular folklore, between fact and faith. Shouldn’t our holidays be able to accommodate both?

Postings will resume next Monday.  In the meantime, this is worth reading:

“We Gather Together”: Consumption Rituals for Thanksgiving Day [pdf]
So certain is material plenty for most Americans that Thanksgiving has lost its meaning as a harvest celebration and instead functions as a ritual of consumption. 

The Glorious Toothpick
The humble mass-produced toothpick is a paradigm for American manufacturing: inspiration, invention, marketing, trade, success, and failure.

Resistance Is Surrender
One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible, says Slavoj Zizek, leaving the traditional Left to look for a third way.

Say You Love Santa: Pop Culture’s War on the Secularists
Rick Warren versus Rick Dawkins: Pop atheism’s T-shirts aren’t as visually appealing and their rock bands aren’t spreading a 110-decibel message of rational humanism. It’s time to evolve past the Darwin Fish and fill up nonbelievers’ stockings with atheist junk that’s as gloriously profane as the junk blessed by Jesus.

Overheard at a local casino:

“The community will see what good neighbors this casino and this tribe intend to be.”

Overheard at a local church:

“We are going to stand in the way. We will not make the Northwood Casino feel welcome in the community.”

The Native Americans attempt hospitality in the name of business and gambling; the rest of us act like jerks in the name of God. I’m not sure which is worse.

Dollars to Doughnuts
If smoking causes secondhand damage, then it is a public health concern. If overeating brings only private costs, it is not.  Is obesity really a public health crisis, or is it merely a widespread private health affliction?

Knowing Right and Wrong: Is Morality a Natural Phenomenon?
The wrongness of boiling babies differs from the wrongness of dropped rocks not conforming to the law of gravity.  Of course it’s wrong to boil babies, but it’s hard to say why.

Sequins and Scandals
The evaluation of a performance that has any sort of aesthetic component, as figure skating programs do, is to a certain extent subjective, and this leaves room for personal bias to both influence the evaluation of individual performances and to be very difficult to detect.