Archive for December 2007
Mankind Is More Than the Janitor of Planet Earth
Christian teaching was once concerned with man, meaning and morality, with questions of free will, inner life and human destiny. If the Archbishop of Canterbury is any indication, they now view people as little more than waste managers, ‘caretakers’, eco-binmen, whose job is to sweep up after themselves and keep the planet in good nick.
In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto
Healthy eating habits have been narrowly defined. By “health,” Michael Pollan means avoiding diseases that kill us, but he also means happiness, pleasure, community — factors ignored in studies or marketing plans or by government agencies.
Let’s Hear It For the Lonely Legume
“Without beans, the course of human history might have been entirely different.” No lentils, no Diet of Worms? No sandwich, no Vatican II? Some things we shall never know.
A Rabbi of His Time, With a Charisma That Transcends It
Abraham Heschel, influenced by German phenomenology, was preoccupied with experience rather than fact, with poetic evocation rather than explication.
Was Jesus a Revolutionary?
Perhaps Jesus did not advocate the overthrow of the prevailing power structure, argues Terry Eagleton, because he expected it to be soon swept away by a higher order of justice and peace.
Happy Newton Day!
Richard Dawkins catches the Christmas spirit: “I am no lover of Christianity, and I loathe the annual orgy of waste and reckless reciprocal spending, but I must say I’d rather wish you ‘Happy Christmas’ than ‘Happy Holiday Season.’”
You’d Better Not Lie
Reverend John Horn, a Catholic priest, gave a homily about real versus fictional characters. In it, he dropped the bomb that Santa Claus was a “made-up person.” Several children started to cry, and their parents were furious.
A Jolly, Happy Soul?
They are white, male, fat, phallic, symbols of greed, discriminatory, establishing the outdoors as male space and relegating women to interior domestic space. If only snowmen weren’t so complicated.
Why Doesn’t Anyone Read Dante’s Paradiso?
Dante’s hell flatters us: It allows us to stand in judgment, to delight in the friction between what we know and what the damned don’t—to see things, in other words, from the perspective of God. Paradiso, however…
Just a reminder that postings will be intermittent during the holidays.
Liberalism and Secularism: One and the Same
There are many who are liberal in their political views – they honor free expression, toleration, individual rights, free and frequent elections, and limited government – and are also people of faith. But, says Stanley Fish, the faiths they profess (at least publicly) must be the moderate and undemanding kind liberalism recognizes as legitimate. (ht: James)
Tragic and Comic Visions in The Brothers Karamazov
An essay by Joyce Carol Oates.
from Guatemala
Shelly and I have welcomed a friend from Guatemala to our home for the past few days. He brought with him a self-produced video that describes our work last summer — work we plan to continue this coming summer.
About Facebook! Forward March!
The academic study of social networking is still emerging. Still, every author of every paper cites Danah Boyd.
When You Can’t Say Something Nice
Feeling insulted is not an infallible guide to being insulted; it is not obvious that we can trust the vulnerable always to get the interpretation right. A philosophy of insults might be just as subjective as receiving an insult.
Guests in the Machine
The story of the American Dream does not include a chapter for those who want to take the money they’ve earned and buy a home with a white picket fence and two-car garage in Mexico. The narrative allows no space for transience. (ht: ALdaily)
Google Reader
The finest RSS reader now allows you to share items. Mine are here, which – I kid you not – you can subscribe to. How meta is that? (Answer: quite)
Reading the Signs
Church signs can seem perfunctory at times. No one would miss them if they were absent, and the people who create them are probably a little too intense for humor anyway.
American Transcendentalism
Transcendentalism was a fundamentally democratic and egalitarian impulse founded upon the assertion of the high powers, dignity, and integrity of the soul; its absolute independence and right to interpret the meaning of life, untrammeled by tradition and conventions. Or, in Emerson’s famous saying, “whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist.”
A Twilight of Books
There’s no reason to think that reading and writing are about to become extinct, but some sociologists speculate that reading books for pleasure will one day be the province of a special “reading class,” much as it was before the arrival of mass literacy, in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Fugitive Denim
We spend top dollar on jeans that make us look as if we’ve been rolling around on the floor of the garage. Maybe we should go back to messing up our jeans the old-fashioned way, like we did when we were kids playing in the mud.
The Godless Delusion
To see secularization as simply the separation of church and state, the alienation of truth from power, and the rise of skepticism and worldliness, writes Charles Taylor, is to miss the deeper and more enduring residues of religion and the spiritual life, the true “bulwarks of belief” that have hardly eroded.
Common Grace
Phillip Pullman, imprisoned gang members in Guatemala, and Jesus Christ all have something uniquely in common: a shared disdain for the older brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son, here depicted by Rembrandt in the shadows. This character, sadly, embodies what the Pharisees were and what the church has become.
Pullman’s chief critique in The Golden Compass is that the church is sex-crazed and close-minded. The former isn’t exactly incorrect (Boston diocese, etc.) and the latter has been met – ironically – with censorship and boycotts. Perhaps there are better ways to engage culture, and finding a good articulation of common grace might be a way to start.
