Month: October 2010

James A.K. Smith tries to make sense of Pew's recent survey on religious knowledge

I had two initial reactions to reports about this survey. The first was cynical: the inability of Americans to articulate the particularities of even their own religious faith sort of confirms the isomorphism of American religion—that the “religion” of this “deeply religious” country is, at the end of the day, just a functional deism necessary to sustain American civil religion.

My second reaction was more critical, and perhaps more charitable:

I continue to be suspicious of such surveys and reports precisely because they reduce religion to “knowledge.” … But what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, as per Charles Taylor, a religious orientation is more akin to a “social imaginary,” which functions as an “understanding” on a register that is somewhat inarticulable? Indeed, I think Taylor’s corpus offers multiple resources for criticizing what he would describe as the “intellectualism” of such approaches to religion—methodologies that treat human persons as “thinking things,” and thus reduce religious phenomena to a set of ideas, beliefs, and propositions.

Douthat chews over both theories.

This from the NYT Mag:

HERE’S THE CONCEIT: Build a single wood fire and, over the course of 30-plus hours, use it to roast, braise, bake, simmer and grill as many different dishes as possible — for lunch, dinner, breakfast and lunch again.

That's Michael Pollan (who else?), whose latest essay is characteristically good. One conclusion: "I realize I’ve gotten at least as much pleasure from working together to create these meals as I have from eating them. Sometimes producing things is more gratifying — and more conducive to building community — than consuming them, I decide."

What an Aussie. What a story. And what a beard.

"In terms of sheer passion and vigor, nobody got a bigger reception than Palin, the former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee. She was introduced by conference organizer George Martin as "the next president of the United States. The crowd burst into applause, waving flags, giving standing ovations and snapping flash photos throughout her speech," – Christine Bedell, reporting from the Bakersfield Business Conference in California.

Rome, Italy, 12 pm

Lynn Parramore interviews Internet activist Eli Pariser, board president of MoveOn.org, about the filter bubble our internet habits create:

Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are. …

We turn to these personalization agents to sift through [information] for us automatically and try to pick out the useful bits. And that's fine as far as it goes. But the technology is invisible. We don't know who it thinks we are, what it thinks we're actually interested in.

At the end, it's a set of code, it's not a person, and it locks us into a specific kind of pixelated versions of ourselves. It locks us into a set of check boxes of interest rather than the full kind of human experience. I don't think with this information explosion that you can go back to an unfiltered and unpersonalized world. But I think you can bake into the code a sense of civic importance. You can have a sense that there are some things that we all need to be paying attention to, that we all need to be worried about, where you do want to see the top link on BP for everyone, not just investment information if you're interested in investments.

 

“I was surprised about how many people in room said ‘yes’ when I asked if they could see themselves supporting [Sarah Palin for President]. I was expecting to hear what you mostly hear — ‘I hope she doesn’t do it’ or, ‘She’s more effective doing what she’s doing,’” – an attendee at a Palin "meet-and-greet", sponsored by the far right magazine Newsmax, and attended by, among others, Grover Norquist and Ralph Reed.

Scott Blaine Swenson looks closer at Fred Phelps' own background, and his son Nate Phelps who left the home at 18:

“He’s very narcissistic,” Nate says of his father, “it’s always about him and his personal life. We were instruments to be used. Any concern for our individuality was absent.” Nate explains that the Phelps children (and now grandchildren) were brought up believing the world was evil, everyone and everything outside their family compound was sinful, self-motivated.

The children were routinely humiliated by their father, sent to school with shaved heads for not selling enough candy door-to-door to support the family, or made to leave class during any discussion of history that referred to religion or singing of Christmas carols. Always made to feel different and largely forbidden from socializing outside the family, their alienation became so great it made going home to their father’s violent rage seem safe and normal.

Sounds like a family as abusive cult to me. Which is why we should try not to generalize too much from their unique brand of hatred.

Just so you know where he's coming from. And this is a quote from a speech today to an ultra-orthodox Jewish group in Brooklyn:

"I just think my children and your children would be much better off and much more successful getting married and raising a family, and I don't want them brainwashed into thinking that homosexualtiy is an eqully valid and successful option–it isn't."

Newsday's Reid Epstein tweeted that the following sentence was in the prepared text but was left out in the actual speech:

"There is nothing to be proud of in being a dysfunctional homosexual. that is not how G-d created us."

This in the wake of the Bronx gay-torture case and the recent spate of teen gay suicides. Are there no extremes to which the current Republican party will not just use but embrace?

Richard Bernstein weighs the efficacy of the U.S. strategy of quiet diplomacy with China, using the example of Xue Feng's under-wraps imprisonment. Feng is an American citizen:

The question is whether more aggressive and immediate intervention by the United States in matters like that of Xue Feng would help. Perhaps there is some middle ground between quiet diplomacy as now practiced and China’s politics of bluster and threat—some presidential comment, a statement by the secretary of state, a petition signed by academic specialists on China.

The main reason Xue had been in prison for a year before his case was even reported in the press was his family’s fear that calling any public attention to the matter would only worsen China’s treatment of him. The American embassy in Beijing similarly kept quiet even in the face of China’s violations of the consular convention—in large part, people familiar with the case have told me, out of deference to the Xue family’s wishes, even though Xue himself was saying that he wanted his detention to be made known publicly.