Month: September 2010

The entries for Nikon's Small World photomicrography contest are up and fairly awe-inspiring. Pictured above is soap film, by Gerd Guenther, from Düsseldorf, Germany.

(Hat tip: Betsy Mason)

This is a kind of human assassination, a video I just watched that reveals to me, at least, that fame is a cancer not just on our multi-media society but on the human beings who are caught in its cross-fire. This is really what killed Diana, Princess of Whales Wales. It's really what killed Michael Jackson. Yes, these people choose it in a way. But it should be possible to be a princess or a model or a singer and not be treated this way. And yet nothing can stop it.

I don't know the answer; but I do know the response. In the tiniest way, I have experienced a smidgen of this through the medium of television. It's like acid on the soul. Being off the box for three months or so makes part of me want to be off it for ever.

Peter Montgomery analyzes freedom of religion and ideas of salvation in the era of Beck and his frequent guest David Barton. Here he tackles Beck's obsession with individual rights:

In the Tea Party era, ‘collective’ is a four-letter word. Beck and Barton don’t even like the terms “human rights” or “social justice” because they see them as collectivist. In a televised conversation in April, Barton dismissed social justice, saying “That’s collective rights. Jesus was not into collective rights. He didn’t die for world in large. He died for every single individual.” Beck is spending so much time on collective salvation because he wants people to believe it is behind all the nefarious things he wants them to fear:

Get into your church and demand, demand that your minister, your priest, your rabbi, your pastor talk about individual rights. If they don’t know them, tell them to pick up George Whitefield. Tell them to pick up the sermons. They are available online. They are available in bookstores everywhere. The sermons that led to the American Revolution, on individual rights. Please, I beg of you. These people will take over the Internet. These people will destroy talk radio. These people will take Fox News off.

Larison had some related thoughts during my vacation:

Beck has previously framed his opposition to progressivism in Christianity in terms of ridiculing the idea of social justice. Certainly, some understanding of social justice isn’t the whole of Christian teaching, and social activism certainly isn’t a substitute for faith and participation in the life of God, but one would have a hard time persuading many serious and theologically conservative Catholics and Mennonites, among others, that social justice is not a major Christian priority. His total rejection of social justice doesn’t make any sense within the LDS church’s tradition or within the Christian tradition. If one insists on identifying the idea of social justice with the most political expressions of liberation theology, as Beck wants to do, a broad, rich tradition of the Church’s concern for the poor and dispossessed is simply cast aside, and so is a significant part of his own church’s social teachings. People may be buying Beck’s revivalism right now, but in the process they are selling their birthright for a mess of pottage.

Elegantly put. I remain a deep skeptic of the state's attempts to redistribute income and create social and economic equality. But I am not dumb enough to argue that this concept is not without basis in Catholicism or that the social Gospel is somehow a secular corruption.

Cong, Ireland, 5 pm

"Perhaps if there were large numbers of unequivocal moderates, I wouldn’t need Imam Feisal as a dialogue partner. But there aren’t. And as an Israeli and a Jew, I need him desperately. I need him because large parts of the Muslim world are going the way that large parts of the Christian world went in the 1930s.

Yes, Imam Feisal has advocated a one-state solution, and I’ve spent much time over the last years countering the demonization of Israel generally and the pernicious notion of the“one state” destruction of Israel in particular. Yet he is also a Muslim who is willing to publicly engage with Jews, to unequivocally condemn suicide bombing attacks against Israelis and is open to discussing the religious meaning for Jews of our return home to the land of Israel. That is a basis for engagement and debate.

Rather than seek the telltale quote that will supposedly resolve whether he is a genuine moderate or a closest jihadist, I prefer to treat him with respect and – not as a tactic, as you suggest, but because that is the prerequisite for genuine dialogue.

We need an approach that doesn’t resort to the blinders of the left or the sledgehammers of the right. If the result sounds “confusing,” I’m willing to live with a certain amount of dissonance, at least in my religious conversations," – Yossi Klein Halevi, in a response to Ron Radosh's hostility to Park51. 

Johann Hari is calling on British Catholics to protest the Pope’s upcoming visit:

I know that for many British Catholics, their faith makes them think of something warm and good and kind – a beloved grandmother, or the gentler sayings of Jesus. That is not what Ratzinger stands for. If you turn out to celebrate him, you will be understood as endorsing his crimes and his cruelties. If your faith pulls you towards him rather than his victims, shouldn’t that make you think again about your faith? Doesn’t it suggest that faith in fact distorts your moral faculties?

I know it may cause you pain to acknowledge this. But it is nothing compared to the pain of a child raped by his priest, or a woman infected with HIV because Ratzinger said condoms make AIDS worse, or a gay person stripped of basic legal protections. You have a choice during this state visit: stand with Ratzinger, or stand with his Catholic victims. Which side, do you think, would be chosen by the Nazarene carpenter you find on your crucifixes? I suspect he would want Ratzinger to be greeted with an empty, repulsed silence, broken only by cries for justice – and the low approaching wail of a police siren.

My response tomorrow.

A reader responds to the philosophy of truth in Emily Dickinson's poetry:

[It] seems like the metaphysical equivalent of what stargazers call averted vision. If you are trying to observe a dim object in the night sky, it is better to look a little to one side of it rather than straight on, because the rod cells toward the periphery of the retina gather more light in those conditions than the cone cells at the center. The trade-off is that you won't see color or fine detail, but at least you will know that something is there.