Month: November 2011

Jennifer Fulwiler justifies why she turned to Catholicism:

If everything that we call heroism and glory, and all the significance of all great human achievements, can be reduced to some neurons firing in the human brain, then it's all destined to be extinguished at death. And considering that the entire span of homo sapiens' existence on earth wouldn't even amount to a blip on the radar screen of a 5-billion-year-old universe, it seemed silly to pretend like the 60-odd-year life of some random organism on one of trillions of planets was something special. (I was a blast at parties.) By simply living my life, I felt like I was living a lie. I acknowledged the truth that life was meaningless, and yet I kept acting as if my own life had meaning, as if all the hope and love and joy I'd experienced was something real, something more than a mirage produced by the chemicals in my brain.

Almost zero. 

For many reasons, tracking down artifacts has been an elusive endeavor:

Victims of crucifixion were criminals and therefore not formally buried, likely exposed or thrown into a river or trash heap. It is therefore difficult to identify their bodies, and their exposure to scavenging animals would have hastened the destruction of their bones. Crucifixion nails were believed to have magical or medical properties, so they were often taken from a crucifixion site or victim. Without the smoking gun of a nail in place, it becomes difficult to interpret whether skeletal remains show evidence of crucifixion or were otherwise subject to taphonomic processes, like scavenger activity.

(Photo: The only bioarchaeological example of crucifixion ever found: the remains of Yehohanan ben Hagkol, discovered in 1968 in Jerusalem.)

Caspar Henderson worries that global warming will wreak havoc on various ecosystems:

In the middle ages people believed that every creature in the natural world embodied a religious or moral lesson. Striking testament to this are the bestiaries: books of beasts which approached an art-form as illustrated manuscripts in the decades before the Black Death. In bestiaries, every animal is allegory and symbol. Since at least Hume and Darwin we no longer believe any such thing, but as we increasingly shape the world through science and technology (not to mention our sheer numbers), the animals that do thrive and evolve increasingly become corollaries of our values and concerns. The Enlightenment and the scientific method may, therefore, result in the creation of a world that really will be allegorical because we will have remade it in the shadow of our values and priorities.

"Funeral Blues" by W.H. Auden:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public
    doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

Continued here.

(Video from Four Weddings And A Funeral)

Białowieza, Poland, 7 pm"

The National Catholic Reporter recently conducted a large survey about the Catholic faith and culture in the US. Among the findings:

Large majorities say that a person can be a good Catholic without going to church every Sunday (78 percent), without obeying the church hierarchy’s teaching on birth control (78 percent), without their marriage being approved by the church (72 percent), and without obeying the church hierarchy’s teaching on divorce and remarriage (69 percent).

Jana Bennett uses the survey to reflect on what it means to be Catholic:

I’ve always been suspicious, actually, of a charge of “cafeteria Catholicism” because it seems to suggest that there is such a thing as a “perfect” group of people called “Catholic."  But in fact, I think the tradition would suggest otherwise. We are a collection of sinners – led by Peter, who surely sinned by denying Christ – but sinners always seeking forgiveness and seeking to forgive. Jesus talked about removing the logs from our own eyes in order to see clearly to remove the splinters from others. We are called, I think, to humility and a spirit of forgiveness.

Rabbi David Wolpe contemplates a common misconception:

Leona Medina, a [17^th-century] rabbi, once said very beautifully, if you were standing on the shore of a lake watching a guy pull his boat to the shore, and you were confused about mechanics and motion, you might think that he was pulling the shore to the boat. People make the same mistake when they pray. Whatever they want, they're going to move God to it. But real prayer is when you pull yourself towards God. 

(Photo: Rüdiger Nehmzow photographed clouds from four miles above earth, in a plane with the door open)

Nitsuh Abebe challenges the idea that meaningful music is loud and aggressive:

The truth is that I don't know many music lovers who actually listen like they believe in the myth about revolution and noise– we may have certain tastes and inclinations, but in the end we listen to raw visceral noise when we want to, and swoony pleasantries two hours later, when the mood has changed. But vitality and new ideas can fit into either one of them. And those are things worth demanding even from our "comfortable" listening. It's not like being challenging is incompatible with being beautiful– as far as I can tell, the two tend to go hand in hand.

Russell Davies surveys new projects geared towards life with multiple screens:

[D]esigners are becoming increasingly interested in secondary attention, the stuff you're only half-watching, half-listening to, not even really noticing. They're thinking about this because of the coming superabundance of screens. We're seeing the first trickles already, and new behaviours are starting to emerge — behaviours that need exploiting. It started when media people noticed that TV viewers were often looking at their computers at the same time and realised that there might be an opportunity for "coviewing" applications — apps that complement what is happening on the TV.