trickgnosis?

David Brooks in the NYT describing the Buddhist conception of the self. Sweet Jesus. What's next? Bill Kristol on Nagarjuna?

Brooks describing what he calls "neural Buddhism," or the result of the "cognitive revolution":

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

He gets the first part, concerning the self, right from a Buddhist perspective. The rest is a bit more speculative. He places all this in the context of the recent jabber about atheism:

In their arguments with Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the faithful have been defending the existence of God. That was the easy debate. The real challenge is going to come from people who feel the existence of the sacred, but who think that particular religions are just cultural artifacts built on top of universal human traits. It’s going to come from scientists whose beliefs overlap a bit with Buddhism.

In unexpected ways, science and mysticism are joining hands and reinforcing each other. That’s bound to lead to new movements that emphasize self-transcendence but put little stock in divine law or revelation. Orthodox believers are going to have to defend particular doctrines and particular biblical teachings. They’re going to have to defend the idea of a personal God, and explain why specific theologies are true guides for behavior day to day. I’m not qualified to take sides, believe me. I’m just trying to anticipate which way the debate is headed. We’re in the middle of a scientific revolution. It’s going to have big cultural effects.

To some extent this sounds like the logical conclusion of the now cliched "I'm not religious I'm spiritual" mantra that one hears so often these days. But that mostly represents a tepid apathy, whereas Brooks, I think, may be getting at something a bit more profound. Maybe.

Maybe something like this from theoretical biologist Stuart Kaufmann:

So the unfolding of the universe - biotic, and perhaps abiotic too - appears to be partially beyond natural law. In its place is a ceaseless creativity, with no supernatural creator. If, as a result of this creativity, we cannot know what will happen, then reason, the Enlightenment's highest human virtue, is an insufficient guide to living our lives. We must use reason, emotion, intuition, all that our evolution has brought us. But that means understanding our full humanity: we need Einstein and Shakespeare in the same room.

Shall we use the "God" word? We do not have to, yet it is still our most powerful invented symbol. Our sense of God has evolved from Yahweh in the desert some 4500 years ago, a jealous, law-giving warrior God, to the God of love that Jesus taught. How many versions have people worshipped in the past 100,000 years?

Yet what is more awesome: to believe that God created everything in six days, or to believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly? I find the latter proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect, that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a reinvention of "God". From it, we can build a sense of the sacred that encompasses all life and the planet itself. From it, we can change our value system across the globe and try, together, to ease the fears of religious fundamentalists with a safe, sacred space we can share.

This is sort of interesting. Kind of a reinvigorated (or maybe just rehashed depending on your perspective) pantheism. You have to read the whole article to see how the biology informs it, but I can see how this holds some appeal. As a crusty old agnostic I have some vestigial God habits and I sometimes entertain the idea of undertaking a Jamesian sort of experiment and deciding that I will believe. But I quickly realize that while I can say quite clearly what I know I cannot believe, I cannot really say what I would believe were I to decide to believe. I can't go in for all the particulars that Brooks talks about, all the theological specifics that make a religion a religion. But something like Kaufmann is proposing, well, I guess it's vague enough, but shit, I don't know, yeah it is awe inspiring and stunning and beautiful and horrifying all at the same time, but...oy. Without a religion would that make me spiritual? Poor tricky can't abide that thought.

prayer for consumers

I saw this credited to Saint Teresa of Avila. I can't vouch for the source but this made me feel good when I read it:

"Thank God for the things I do not own."

That's some wise shit by golly.

I read it not in some self-righteous way, but more as an acknowledgment that it is good that my craving has been frequently thwarted. I am no champion of austerity but I've been around long enough now to realize that if I'd gotten a lot more of what I thought I wanted I'd likely have more troubles than I already do.

Of course some of you are much more subtle and experienced at this prayer business than I am so feel free to enlighten me.

addendum: my south Atlanta sweetie seems to know the words to most every pop country hit of the 90's and she informs me that St. Teresa has a lot in common with Garth Brooks to judge by this song: unanswered prayers. Oy.

6/7/07: God 1(2)

The Fugee responded to my God musing:

One cranky reply: Even when you leave behind the God of the philosophers, you write as if one could stand outside of a way of life centered on some notion of God, separate out a list of truth-claims from the way of life in which they live, decide (empirically?) if they were true, and then base your decision on whether or not to take up the way of life on that determination. But why should - how could - competent judgment precede extensive immersion in practice? (You're the one with pragmatist affinities, after all.) This way of approaching the question is like trying to decide if there are qualitative differences in musical performances just from reading reviews. And going to Candler doesn't count - still second-order. But what if you went to a dying Presbyterian church in South Philly for a decade and shared fully in its life and made yourself an apprentice to some of its aging masters? Then you'd be in a position to make a decision. Practice, participation, and community almost always precede understanding. Why should this case be different?

It has taken me a while to think about a response Fugs. One thing I was not trying to do was formulate an argument. It was more of a brass tacks proposition: what do I really believe? Now one thing this does is make me look like the fundamentalist I claimed I might be, considering truth claims in stark terms without too much context. I suppose I could take refuge in the fact that this is how many of your co-religionists approach their religion, and indeed how lots and lots of folks do. There are often certain creeds and such that one must indicate agreement with in order to join the community in the first place. Particular communities are claiming universal truths that aren't dependent on context. So truth claims often are front and center, and even if they are not always central, they are never irrelevant. Not out there anyway, though maybe in the academy, and that probably indicates why I could be a second-order fish out of water. One doesn't always have the chance to live the life before coming to any sort of decision with regards to these matters. So while this move might be justified, to an extent, it would leave some important things unanswered. No refuge here.

First, it's funny, but one of the reasons I would be reluctant to go to that little community in south Philly, or with the Sufis in Cairo or wherever else, is that I feel like it would be disrespectful of me to go and try to be a part of their community and everything it offers when I can't look them in the eye and tell them that I believe what they believe. I abstain out of respect. Does that sound like a bunch of shit? I don't know, but I feel it. Maybe I feel wrongly. Maybe I am a fundy. Second, I don't think I'm separating these particular truth claims out from any particular community or its way of life as you say. I think this particular question, God, is my question too. I'm laying claim to these truth claims. I'm standing right in the middle of my way of life and having a look. And I think that's valid here, even if it means I've got my head up my ass for the moment. I don't think it is unfair to expect that if I try I might find God in my life, as it stands, however Godless its practices, participations and communities may be (and I don't mean that in a snippy way). Which leads me to my final point: if I were to immerse myself in a religious community and its practices, exactly what decision would I be in a position to make? No doubt I'd find something deep and meaningful down there in south Philly but obviously it would be a simple matter to simply slap the name God on whatever I please. Which is not to deny the possibility that I might just find God. Oy, I don't want this to devolve into a chicken and egg/community and God argument, I'll let you duke that out with Durkheim, but I did want to clarify this because it's important. I'm not sure if I've clarified anything actually, maybe I'll have to try again. Thanks for your thoughtful response.

5/20/07: God

question 1, seeing as it's Sunday : God--yay or nay?

My first thought is to abstain. And in a sense that would be honest enough. If pushed to have to choose one or the other, I would have to say nay. But the question begs another: what do you mean by God? If the question simply means invisible superdude in the sky, then indeed nay. If it's the scholastic sort of God, he of the omni-predicates and puzzling logical paradoxes, well, still nay. I simply don't see the evidence for an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good creator/source of being/first cause/prime mover. Take away the "all-good" and I might start listening intently, but more out of curiosity than anything else. I can't get past theodicy, can't explain away suffering and evil, and can't take very seriously those who want to counter with the free-will argument. Disposing of "all-powerful" would also be interesting but leads to some other philosophical problems.

The question becomes more interesting if we move to scripture. Hebrew Bible God? Well, seems more internally consistent to me in some ways, but not a God I could love. Fear, certainly, but not love. Who's to say I need to love God? Or believe in him for that matter? Though I will say that, empirically, I feel like one could make a case for an angry, vengeful, spiteful, capricious, warlike and often indifferent God. But morally, I feel the need to object to that God. How's about Jesus? Hmmm. There are so many obstacles here. There's the relationship to the aforementioned Hebrew God--philosophically, scripturally, historically. I cannot get around the history. Just can't. I mean that in many ways, ways that need not be elaborated. If it could just be about the love and compassion, the lowest and the meek, the good, dark, bloody narratives, the community and some good music, well damn, it'd be sorely tempting. And I was surprised when I met folks at the seminary for whom that was pretty much it. They had many of the same grave doubts that I did, weren't too sure about miracles and resurrections and the rest, but they were happy to call themselves Christians. The funny thing was, I had no problem with that, but I couldn't do it. I am perhaps a fundamentalist about certain things.

A friend told me once that he'd tried hard to not believe in God, really made an effort, but at the end of the day he just couldn't do it. That made sense to me. I sort around in my head and my gut and my heart, and there's just no belief there in Jesus, or Yahweh or the Trinity. That leaves room for other specific possibilities but I'm not sure they interest me at all. I'm not a polytheist or a pagan or blah blah blah. But neither can I consent to being called an atheist. And this is where it starts to get tricky. I may not believe that Jesus died for my sins, but I'm pretty amazed that I exist at all. And that you do and any of this does. Now don't get me wrong, evolution explains a whole lot and quite simply and elegantly. But it does not get to some very basic questions, despite what Richard Dawkins may say (and I don't have a dog in that fight). Natural selection cannot tell me why anything is. Or perhaps more accurately, why everything is, at all. Do you understand what I'm saying here? Maybe there is no reason, but that still sort of misses the point. That anything is at all is pretty fucking strange. And I don't have an answer for it. And I've yet to hear one that convinced me. But I cannot claim to know with certainty, or even to believe, that there is nothing behind it. I fear I'm stumbling here, but the terrain is treacherous. Oh, it is also worth noting that many atheists can be every bit as annoying as the most overbearing evangelical. So I guess this makes me an agnostic by default. That seems kind of unsatisfying, but so be it.

A postscript to the God question: I sometimes describe myself as a friendly agnostic or a hopeful agnostic. And the truth is, that I think it would be nice if there were a loving Creator and if this world was just an important stop on the way to somewhere better. It would be nice if after I died I got to see all my loved ones who went before me, and got to be with them forever. It would be nice if in the end it was all ok. I just don't believe all that to be the case. For the most part anyway. I suppose the closest I come to being religious is in my occasional sneaking suspicion that somehow, in the end, it'll be ok. Which does not, I should add, mitigate all the real suffering in the meantime.

21st century American theology?

"My God is a God who wants me to have things. He wants me to bling. He wants me to be the hottest thing on the block."
Mary J. Blige

Zizek, atheism, Hume

I meant to note this last week, but neglected to. Hopefully the link still works. It's the ever-odd Zizek making a case for "restoring the dignity of atheism, one of Europe's greatest legacies and perhaps our only chance for peace..."

...the lesson of today's terrorism is that if God exists, then everything, including blowing up thousands of innocent bystanders, is permitted — at least to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies the violation of any merely human constraints and considerations. In short, fundamentalists have become no different than the "godless" Stalinist Communists, to whom everything was permitted since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress Toward Communism.

He makes a couple of interesting points, but he also refers to David Hume as "a believer." This is, um, misleading I think. Any thoughts on that?

Happy Birthday Sam

Today is the birthday of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born November 30, 1835. Have a cigar, shoot some pool, mask your pain with wit.

Man is the Religious Animal. He is the only Religious Ani­mal. He is the only animal that has the True Religion, several of them. He is the only animal that loves his neighbor as himself, and cuts his throat if his theology isn't straight. He has made a graveyard of the globe in trying his honest best to smooth his brother's path to happiness and heaven.

mediums, witches, the dead oh my!

Some good Halloween reading:

Over at National Review there's a nice piece on the Met's exhibit The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult.

The immaterial had been made material, and in a supposedly more skeptical age, that's what counted. In great part, the enormous popularity of spiritualism in the later 19th century was a response to the threat that science increasingly represented to the certainties of traditional belief. Science had made Doubting Thomases of many, but spiritualism, by purportedly offering definitive proof of an afterlife, enabled its followers to reconcile ancestral faith and eternal superstitions with, they thought, fashionable modernity and the rigors of scientific analysis.

That the science was junk, and the evidence bunk, did not, in the end, matter very much. What counted was that old superstitions had been given a new veneer, and, if that veneer soon warped into a bizarre creed all its own, that's something that ought not to surprise anyone familiar with the nonsense in which mankind has long been prepared to believe — and still is. Any visitor to "The Perfect Medium" tempted to feel superior to the credulous old fogies now making fools of themselves on the walls of the Met should take another look at the metaphysical shambles that surrounds him in our modern America of snake churches, suburban shamans, mainstreet psychics, psychic detectives, pet psychics, psychic hotlines, spirit guides, movie-star scientology, alien abductions, celebrity Kabbalah, Crossing Over, Ghost Hunters, Shirley Maclaine, resentful Wiccans, preachy pagans, and (though I know this won’t be entirely welcome) don't even get me started on Intelligent Design.

I appreciate that last sentiment in particular, and I don't have to take a backseat to anyone when it comes to being a skeptical curmudgeon, but I cannot deny that part of me thinks snake churches, suburban shamans, and mainstreet psychics are fun in a sideshow kind of way and of considerable interest in a much less fun academic kind of way.

Also at NR, conservatives try to grasp the appeal of Wicca. Really. Kind of amusing.

Their beliefs are very postmodern — what they believe can be tweaked for each practitioner. They do not believe in absolute good or evil and don't really seem to care about the history of their religion — only the experiences they gain from it.

The author is correct to point out that Wicca, like much that falls under the heading of "new age," is solipsistic and increasingly commercialized. She comes off as being fair and even-handed in claiming that Wicca fulfills a spiritual yearning for young women, but is herself convinced that Christianity, when practiced correctly, can do a better job of satisfying that need.

And finally, in the L.A. Times, Mary Roach, author of Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, wonders why the supposed speech of the dead is so...inane:

HERE'S MY BEEF with the dead — you'd think they'd be bursting to talk about all the things us not-yet-dead are madly curious about. Such as: Hey, where are you now? What do you do all day? What's it feel like being dead? Can you see me? Even when I'm on the toilet? Would you cut that out?

But in medium-brokered exchanges, if the dead come through at all, they come through in cryptic little impressions: a stout woman, a small black dog, the date May 23. When they talk in the background on tape recordings or over the radio — and there are thousands of people who believe that the garbled, echoey words and whispers they can make out on tape or over the airwaves are coming from the Beyond — they say things like "bird songs at night" or "please interrupt" or "industrious!" It's a maddening way to communicate.

Based on such reports, ghosts strike me as quite senile, which I suppose is par for the course when you've been around 200 or 300 years.

Sounds reasonable to me. I'm not quite half that old and I already babble incoherently. Happy Halloween Tricksters.

shaken not interred

Those Europeans are making rapid advances in the field of body disposal:

DEAD bodies could be freeze-dried, shaken to a fine powder and used as compost under proposals to introduce a new, more eco-friendly method of corpse disposal to the UK.

The process, which is known as promession, has been developed in Sweden and aims to address the shortage of burial spaces and reduce the mercury pollution created by dental fillings during cremation.

It involves freezing the coffin and body to -18C before lowering them into liquid nitrogen at -196C, which leaves them extremely brittle.

A vibrating pad is used to reduce the remains to a powder and a magnetic field then removes all traces of mercury and other metal residues from fillings or hip replacements.

The remains are then put into a biodegradable coffin made from vegetable matter and buried in a shallow grave, where they will be absorbed into the earth within six to 12 months.

So far so interesting, but I find this a little puzzling:

A spokesman for the Church of Scotland said: "There do not appear to be any theological implications with this method of disposal, but it sounds like an appropriate thing from an environmental viewpoint."

No theological implications? Really? Oh, wait, they're European.

his father's faith

"Martin touched the pistol in his pocket and took a final look at the yellow rain of leaves, a sunburst of golden symmetry. On a day such as this, God rescued Isaac from his father's faith."

That's from Billy Phelan's Greatest Game by William Kennedy, my current read. I read that line right before I headed off to dreamland last night. It stuck with me--I've been thinking about that story for a long time. Wrote my first paper on it in art school many years ago and have written others since. But never had I thought of reading it in the way Kennedy suggests. A novel interpretation from my perspective, one that plays with the relation between story and context. Or maybe not.

Land of the Lost?

So today there were a bunch of articles (Washington Post, NYTimes, L.A. Times) in the papers about our president being in favor of teaching intelligent design alongside evolution in public schools. This comes as an evangelical protestant group based in North Carolina is succeeding in pushing Bible study into public schools in Texas and elsewhere.

The Christians are depressing me. Again. I know, I know. It's not fair to paint with a broad brush and these particular folks don't speak for all Christians, blah blah etc...But the fact is the fundies are organized, they're vocal, they have an agenda and frankly they're proving quite successful. I'll start being more careful about drawing distinctions with fine lines when I see evidence that other Christians are up in arms over this.

Yes I'm a little distressed about this. It seems to me it's getting worse. Is it getting worse? I don't know--I'm wary of narratives of decline. I need to take a deep breath and tell myself that America is not in danger of becoming an intellectual backwater. You wouldn't know it, however, to gauge by the reading I've been doing today. Yeah, spent a few hours doing some research on Intelligent Design and Creationism. I'm not going to link to it or go into detail. I'll just say it's some pretty depressing shit--we're on the verge of teaching some American children that humans and dinosaurs lived side by side a few thousand years ago. I take a certain comfort in realizing that the only things most of these groups have in common are their enemies, evolution first and foremost. They all seem to despise each other for various theological and political reasons. But, as the Republican party demonstrates, that need not be an impediment to success.

UPDATE: There's an editorial in the WashingtonPost today (Thursday) that takes Bush to task and rightly, I think, places the issue within the context of the broader debate over our tepid cultural relativism.

that curious mania

Terry Eagleton on Wittgenstein's affliction: "Wittgenstein was grotesquely, absurdly, ethical: he was afflicted by that curious mania known as Protestantism, for which everything is a potential sign of salvation or damnation."

This reminds me of something I've mentioned previously, Allen Guelzo on Lincoln's religiosity:

...Lincoln's moralism, far from puzzling, was driven precisely because he was "wholly wanting" in "piety." It was the mark of many Victorian unbelievers who came from pious Protestant households...to imbibe from those households a puritanical demand for earnestness and relentless truthfulness and then turn it on their own Christianity. Duty became the moral surrogate of religion. And often, it was the very high-mindedness of their honesty which led them to reject Christianity as untrue or lapse into unbelief if they felt they could not honestly describe themselves as Christians. The ethics of Protestant Christianity outlasted its theology, and almost as a compensation for the absence of faith, "infidels" like Lincoln redoubled their own pursuit of conscientiousness.

I mention this because, well, I see myself reflected here. Yup, me, Lincoln and Wittgenstein: three of a kind. I'm kidding of course (though don't Lincoln and Wittgenstein seem to bear some sort of family resemblance?). What intrigues me is this Protestant worldview with all the piety removed. Or at least all the theological specifics that we associate with piety: take God out of the picture, mind you this leaves a big hole and an acute sense of absence, and even if you cling to some distant, inscrutable and unknowable God you can still go ahead and forget all about trinities and Christologies and other strange Greek formulas. And what's left? The grotesquely, absurdly ethical? A puritanical demand for earnestness and relentless truthfulness that turns on itself?

Yeah, that, and superstition for the agnostic, always on the lookout for those potential signs of salvation and damnation in a universe seemingly devoid of any such notions.

you mystical sex maniac

Oh this just made me chuckle and I had to share it. It's from a little book of prose poems and photomontage called Carnival Aptitude by Greg Boyd. It is...a prayer, of sorts. (those with delicate religious sensibilities consider yourself warned)

Prayer

Oh God, you mystical sex maniac, give me the patience to fathom the depth of your mosquito fetish, the courage to contemplate you in all your sharp-toothed glory as I try to puzzle out your vampire death cult. In the meantime, I ask you to consider providing me with many decent, long-lasting, and life-affirming erections and the pleasant endings to go with them. Amen.

Come on up to the house

The pope is dead. While eating my usual Saturday afternoon gas station hotdog on my break, I listened to radio commentators ask such insightful questions as "why was this Pope so special?" and "why did young people love this Pope so much?" The answers were as insightful as the questions.

My primary memory of this Pope's papacy is from May of 2001. I was sitting in my living room in Cairo not really watching the BBC world news when I saw a picture of the Pope entering what looked like a mosque. Sure enough, he had just become the first Pope ever to set foot in a mosque. It may not have garnered much attention in America, I don't know as I wasn't here, but it certainly seemed like a big deal in the Muslim world. He got rather ecumenical as he aged and I remember at times he was quite even handed in reminding Israelis and Palestinians of their mutual responsibility for the mess they were in.

But all was not so heart warming. (Hans Kung pulls no punches in detailing the shortcomings of PJP2 here).

And the pressing question now of course is: who will be the new Pope? The answer will impact all of us.

William James on suicide and hope

A timely discovery given recent talk of suicide: I was perusing pragmatism.org and looking through the contents of the journal published by the William James Society when I found a most interesting article. The author, while mounting a convincing defense of James and his defense of religion, discusses James's depression and his reflections on suicide:

In an address to the Harvard YMCA later published
in the volume titled The Will to Believe, James
set out to tend to the “profounder bass note of life” by
addressing the question that became the title of the
essay, “Is Life Worth Living?” His approach here is
simple and direct: what would we say to convince
someone suicidal that life is in fact worth living? James
distinguishes between suicide as the product of genuine
insanity, in which case we can be of no help, and a
more reflective melancholia that results from the studious
life, which may be remedied with yet more reflection.

James identified the hope that life might be anything other than utterly meaningless as a religious impulse. But this was far from any sort of orthodoxy--James, being the good empiricist, believed anyone paying attention to the world would have a hard time assenting to any sort of orthodox theism. The author quotes him:

The visible surfaces of heaven and earth refuse to be
brought by us into any intelligible unity at all. Every phenomenon
that we would praise there exists cheek by jowl
with some contrary phenomenon that cancels all its religious
effect upon the mind. Beauty and hideousness, love
and cruelty, life and death keep house together in indissoluble
partnership, and there gradually steals over us,
instead of the old warm notion of a man-loving Deity, that
of an awful power that neither hates nor loves, but rolls all
things together meaninglessly to a common doom.

Gotta love that James. He looked around at the world and understood perfectly well why someone might want to checkout permanently. But despite his own troubles, James could not allow himself to succumb to despair. He held on to hope and he believed that belief might prove to be self-fulfilling. As the author puts it, both paraphrasing and quoting James:

We have a hand in creating the worlds we inhabit; life is worth living because we have some say in the matter: “believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact.”

Good stuff. I find James a helpful philosophical companion because he does not shy away from difficult truths even while sounding an upbeat note. I take solace from that. But I'm still ok with suicide.

If you want to read the whole article, and it's quite good, it's available as a PDF here.

TAG: Second Coming coming soon?

The She-Creature has started a game of blogger tag. I'm game. Here are her instructions:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

So here's mine. This was the book at hand (I'm at work so I didn't even have a chance to pick a "cool" book from my shelves. I suppose I could have used one of the medical texts here at work, but no, I'm not typing up a paragraph of medical jargon about catscans of lesions of the lung). This particular book was in my bag because I need to copy two chapters to distribute to my students. The three sentences from page 123 in the book make up a full paragraph in the text:

This more fully anticipatory side of Christianity bore resemblance to certain dominant elements of Judaism, which thereby continued to structure the Christian vision. The experience of evil pervading man and nature, the deep alienation between human and divine, the sense of grimly waiting for a definitive sign of God's redeeming presence in the world, the need for fastidious adherence to the Law, the attempt to preserve a pure and faithful minority against incursions from a hostile and contaminating environment, the expectation of an apocalyptic punishment--all these elements of the Judaic sensibility emerged anew in the Christian understanding. That tone of religious vision was, in turn, reinforced and given a new context by the continued delay of Christ's Second Coming, and by the Church's historical and theological evolution accompanying that delay.

Richard Tarnas
The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View

You're it.

creation care

Liberal pantheist environmentalists or right-wing Christian evangelicals? Maybe one and the same?

The Greening of Evangelicals
Christian Right Turns, Sometimes Warily, to Environmentalism

The article notes the growing interest in ecolgocial issues among evangelical Christians. What stands out is the way they frame the language. They won't call it environmentalist because that word is forever associated with radical hippie treehuggers. So they talk about "creation care," to distinguish themselves from environmentalists who are "pretty weird -- with strange liberal, pantheist views." They also make it a point to draw connections between concern for the earth and their ongoing battle for "values". After reading that I was surprised to read this, from the Reverend Leroy Hedman at the end of the article:

"The Earth is God's body," Hedman said in a recent sermon. "God wants us to look after it."

Well friends, the earth as God's body is, as most any seminary student could tell you, liberal pantheist theology.

It would seem the evangelicals aren't all on the same page just yet. And perhaps that is not too much of a surprise as they do come in all different shapes and sizes. But they are good, very good indeed, at providing a unified front that enables them to wield undue influence in contemporary politics. So we shall see how this develops--some of them express ambivalence at contradicting the president's official line on the environment. Which marching orders to follow?

Cairene green

Been reading about the new Al-Azhar park in Cairo, built by the Aga Khan trust. It's in the old city, near Azhar and the Citadel, and is built on what was most recently a trash dump on the even older site of a medieval fortification against the Crusaders. They cleared out all the garbage and uncovered the historical wall. This may sound like a remarkable story to anyone unfamiliar with Egypt, but for anyone who's spent some time there, it's not especially surprising. Hopes are high for this new green space; folks are hoping it will lead to a revitalization of the neighborhood. I do recall reading a critical design review in the NYTimes, however; the article suggested that the designers of the park had squandered an opportunity to put forth a new Islamic architectural vision that could point to a way past the Islamic/Western divide. Not having seen it myself, I'll reserve judgement, but I'd love to get to see it while it's still new. Who knows how long it will be before the social realties of urban Cairene culture transform it into something else?

the world, which looks rather grim

ah, nothing left but the grading, and I can return to paying attention to the rest of the world, which looks rather grim.

If you haven't already read it, you should check out the Seymour Hersh piece on the Abu Ghraib torture. Most of what I've read so far talks about the role (i.e. it's really all their fault) of military intelligence in this whole sordid affair. And while I have no problem believing that this may be a credible explanation, I also find it entirely plausible that a number of individuals were handed some authority without supervision and went batshit. Anyone remember the Stanford Prison Experiment?
___________

I received an interesting email from my Dad today, with an attachment picturing an American flag, an eagle, and the caption "you are the wind beneath my wings." It also included the following text:

This is something to think about! Since America is typically represented by an eagle. Saddam should have read up on his Muslim passages... The following verse is from the Quran, (the Islamic Bible) Quran (9:11) -- For it is written that a son of Arabia would awaken a fearsome Eagle. The wrath of the Eagle would be felt throughout the lands of Allah and lo, while some of the people trembled in despair still more rejoiced; for the wrath of the Eagle cleansed the lands of Allah; and there was peace. Note the verse number!!!!!)

Um...yeah. Well, my Dad was a wee bit skeptical and asked for confirmation. I had a student last semester ask me about this too, as her evangelical mother had told her about this supposed verse. I assured Pa, as I had assured that student, that this was an easily dispelled hoax. A quick glance at the Qur'an shows us that sura 9 verse 11 reads (in Yusuf Ali's translation):

"But (even so), if they repent, establish regular prayers, and practise regular charity,- they are your brethren in Faith: (thus) do We explain the Signs in detail, for those who understand."

Nothing bout no eagles. Of course the purveyor of this nonsense relies, rightly I suspect, on the likelihood that most people aren't going to bother to go to Google or to their local bookstore and discover that it's bullshit.

And while we're on the Islamic front, there's a piece in the times today about the problems that have ensued since a mosque asked a Michigan city council if they could broadcast the call to prayer over a loudspeaker, as is now common throughout the Muslim world. Note the isolationist attitude expressed by one of the Muslim immigrants, which strikes me as self-defeating.

3 and counting

Another divinely ordained murder, this time a mother who bludgeoned two of her children to death in gruesome fashion.

I think it would be of interest, both sociologically and theologically, to keep a running tab of the number of murders that God has ordered. On the basis of just the stories that I've followed here, the total is 3. Keep your eyes and ears open friends, and send along word of any such cases. I think the only criteria should be that the murderer explicitly received his/her orders straight from God, meaning that those who kill in the interest of a political/theological agenda would not be counted here (I'm not sure I can count that high).