Month: March 2011

A reader writes:

Craig A. Monson writes that "nuns in cloisters had 'had the vote' for a millennium or more, choosing which women might join them and electing sisters to fill convent offices." Seriously? Being able to vote for "Which women might join them and electing sisters to fill convent offices" is not the vote. It's not even slightly analogous to the actual franchise. Could they vote for who became the pope? Could they vote for what sorts of people where allowed to become priests or cardinals? Could they vote on who was beatified or on church dogma? Could they vote on anything of importance to the Catholic Church? No. In fact, they still can't. How could you give that idea any credit?

Another writes:

It seems somewhat unfair to come down so harshly against Benedict. It doesn't really seem consistent with the nuance that so generally characterizes your observations. 

The Church is far too slow to react to shifting realities much of the time, but the very reason for this – its firm commitment to what it believes to be a deeper, unchanging reality of human nature – is not in itself a thing to be laughed at.  We should understand the rarity of an institution that believes there is anything in this existence possessing constancy, and much of modernity's flailing attempt at maintaining a real ethic has to do with its contradicting notion that there is really no foundation to base it on.  We should certainly be critical of an institution like the RC Church, but to say that "in Benedict's church, the only ideas allowed are his," isn't fair. 

You'll find much searching and uncertainty in his own words, and you'll find a great diversity of opinion from top to bottom in the institution as a whole. "Benedict's Church" has time and again throughout the last century alone provided us with some of the most progressive voices.  Indeed, if you ask any of these nuns in Europe, or those in the States who have been criticized for deviating from established norms, if their deviance speaks for or against the Church, they will tell you "for" without a moment's hesitation.  This is called critical participation, and any worthwhile institution experiences it. 

Benedict has never taken cover behind infallibility, and there's a reason for it.  As he said himself, "The Pope is not an oracle; he is infallible in very rare situations, as the world well knows."

 

"Teresa," based on Saint Teresa, by Richard Wilbur, who turned 90 years old this week:

After the sun’s eclipse
The brighter angel and the spear which drew
A bridal outcry from her open lips,
She could not prove it true,
Nor think at first of any means to test
By what she had been wedded or possessed.

Not all cries were the same;
There was an island in mythology
Called by the very vowels of her name
Where vagrants of the sea,
Changed by a word, were made to squeal and cry
As heavy captives in a witch’s sty.

The proof came soon and plain:
Visions were true which quickened her to run
God’s barefoot errands in the rocks of Spain
Beneath its beating sun,
And lock the O of ecstasy within
The tempered consonants of discipline.

(Image: "Saint Theresa In Ecstasy" by Flickr user Giveawayboy. Jessa Crispin has more on Saint Teresa of Avila, the nun versus the philosophy for which she became renowned.)

Mark Changizi predicts that future humans will find amazing powers not from AI or genetic engineering, but from simple evolution – something he calls nature-harnessing:

We’re already Human 2.0, not the Human 1.0, or Homo sapiens, that natural selection made us. We Human 2.0’s have, among many powers, three that are central to who we take ourselves to be today: writing, speech, and music (the latter perhaps being the pinnacle of the arts). Yet these three capabilities, despite having all the hallmarks of design, were not a result of natural selection, nor were they the result of genetic engineering or cybernetic enhancement to our brains. Instead, and as I argue in both The Vision Revolution and my forthcoming Harnessed, these are powers we acquired by virtue of harnessing, or neuronal recycling.

In this transition from Human 1.0 to 2.0, we didn’t directly do the harnessing. Rather, it was an emergent, evolutionary property of our behavior, our nascent culture, that bent and shaped writing to be right for our visual system, speech just so for our auditory system, and music a match for our auditory and evocative mechanisms.

Adam Kirsch reviews Timothy Beal's The Rise and Fall of the Bible: The Unexpected History of an Accidental Book:

While there is no denying that the Bible remains central—Beal quotes polls indicating that “65 percent of all Americans believe that the Bible ‘answers all or most of the basic questions of life,’ ”—he notes simultaneously that Americans are surprisingly ignorant of what is actually in it. “More than 80 percent of born-again or evangelical Christians believe that ‘God helps those who help themselves’ is a Bible verse,” he writes. Less than half of all adults can name the four Gospels; only one-third can name five of the Ten Commandments.

Count me unsurprised. Christianism is not Christianity; it's a rationalization of a certain culture and politics.

Meghan O'Rourke follows it down:

[T]he story of Orpheus, it occurs to me, is not just about the desire of the living to resuscitate the dead but about the ways in which the dead drag us along into their shadowy realm because we cannot let them go. So we follow them into the Underworld, descending, descending, until one day we turn and make our way back.

Now and then, you think you discern glimpses of that other life. Running along a quiet road four months after her death, I thought I felt my mother near me, just to the side. I turned, and saw nothing except a brown bird with a gray ruff and strangely tufted feathers. I did not know its name. She would have.

(Photo by Dal in Cape Town)

A reader writes:

Although my journey of faith has taken me from atheism to Christianity and ultimately back to where I started with atheism, Reverend Gomes was instrumental in me seeing the best of Christianity and set me on the path toward being baptized. Though, as an adult, I have returned to atheism as the only defensible religious stance, I truly cherish my memories of Reverend Gomes, his uplifting sermons, and his enormous personal warmth.

My mother was a secular Jew from the socialist wing of Judaism whose grandfather had turned down his friend Trotsky's invitation to return from New York to build the new Soviet Union. My father was a refugee from fundamentalist Christianity, who was finally able to let go and embrace his doubts when he confronted Paul Tillich in Harvard Yard and learned that Tillich, too, had doubts. By the time I was born, my mother was decidedly agnostic and my father was a committed atheist.

Shortly before entering Harvard myself, I had begun my own secret study of Christianity, a study that continued as I went through Harvard. Though I had never set foot in a church for any reason other than to admire the architecture, in my junior year, I confessed to my girlfriend that I was curious about Easter service at Memorial Church and we decided to go together.

The theme of Revered Gomes' sermon was that the Resurrection's promise of eternal life meant that there was no reason to fear death, and if there was no reason to fear death, then there was no reason to fear life. One's duty to God is to embrace life to the fullest. I was blown away. Here was my first exposure to God as a loving God, who wanted his children to experience fulfillment in the here and now, not only in the world to come. It was a far, far cry from the mean-spirited, exclusionary, and hate-filled messages that I was accustomed to hearing from televangelists and the like. From that point on, for the rest of my time at Harvard, I attended Memorial Church on every Sunday that I could.

With this memory in mind, I eventually found a church in New York that shared Reverend Gomes' vision of Christianity and was baptized. I truly enjoyed my years of church attendance, but over time I found it harder and harder to accept the existence of God, let alone that Jesus was God's son – an outlandish claim made by no other religion on earth that anyone takes seriously.

The final nail in the coffin of my faith, however, was the 2004 presidential campaign, where the specter of so-called Christians spewing bile and hatred against gays, Democrats, anti-war protesters and anyone else who was an "other" so sickened me that I became unable even to attend my liberal New York church. Since I already had doubts over critical points of doctrine, the association in my mind of Christianity with decidedly un-Christian beliefs and behaviors has made it impossible ever to go back. Indeed, I am now convinced that religious faith requires the indoctrination of innocent children to create a faith mindset. I know of few others who were not at least exposed to religion as children who have been able to maintain faith for a long period after conversion as adults.

My doubts about Christianity aside, my sadness at Reverend Gomes' passing is deep. He represented Christianity at its absolute inclusive, healing, inspiring best. It is hard to imagine Harvard and the world without him.

Jesse Bering runs through some of the crazier case studies on nymphomania and concludes:

If a "good" person's brain can be rendered morally disabled by an invasive tumor or an epileptic fuse-shortage, subsequently causing them to do very bad deeds, then isn't it rather hypocritical to assume that a "bad" person without brain injury—whose brain is anatomically organized by epigenetics (the complex interplay between genes and experiences)—has any more free will than the neuroclinical case? After all, perhaps it's just a matter of timing: The "good" are born with brains that can "go bad," whereas the "bad" are hogtied by a morally disabled neural architecture from the very start. And although it may be less common, if a "bad" person behaves in an upstanding manner, could that be the result of fortuitous brain damage or epilepsy, too?

It's all brain-based in the end, including the parameters by which one can contemplate and, especially, execute their free will. Perhaps we're only as free as our genes are pliable in the slosh of our developmental milieus.

Evan Hughes summarizes the theory of "sexual economics" in Premarital Sex in America by Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker:

The rise of “the hookup culture” at colleges, they argue, can be attributed in part to the increasing scarcity of men on campus—an oversupply of sellers works to a buyer’s advantage. Sexual economics also suggests that many women look unkindly on promiscuous members of the same sex out of the same impulse that makes retailers angry when Wal-Mart comes to town: they are being undersold, and now they have to give discounts or lose customers.

Hughes isn't buying it:

Equating an intimate act to a business transaction is not only crass and reductive; it is also analytically misleading. The analogy to commerce implies an adversarial situation wherein the buyer always wants to pay the minimum and the seller wants to get the maximum. But men often find themselves bestowing attention, falling in love, and getting married after they have already been sleeping with the woman in question. Sexual economics has trouble accounting for that. Men willingly overspend, which describes approximately no one who buys a car. Similarly, the pay-for-play hypothesis fails to capture the fact that most women do not want to extract caring and love from a person disinclined to offer it, and they do not see sex as something they wish they could avoid until marriage.

David Thomson reviews The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon by Leo Braudy:

It was in 1923 that the original sign, HOLLYWOODLAND, a gimmick and a brazen caption, was put up near the top of that hill, in letters fifty feet high and thirty feet wide. They were wooden structures, supported by telegraph poles, with tin and white paint facings. The sign advertised a housing development in the area below the slopes of Mount Lee, in the Santa Monica mountains, close to Griffith Park. It was built on rough ground, so the sign was never in type-set alignment. From the start there was a wavery touch of emotion to it …

(Photo by Flickr user Anthony Citrano)