Month: April 2012

Nick Ripatrazone offers a touching remembrance of his namesake, a POW lost in Vietnam:

Belief in surviving POWs “could be regarded as the closest thing we have to a national religion” [according to M.I.A., or Mythmaking in America author H. Bruce Franklin]. Hollywood has sent “saviors such as Gene Hackman, Chuck Norris, Sylvester Stallone, and David Carradine… on quests to rescue imprisoned Vietnam veterans” though they “would have a more realistic chance of success in the United States, where hundreds of thousands are or have been incarcerated in jails and prisons.”

Spring arrives to stunning effect in Kenya:

72h in Kenya, '12 from Claire&Max on Vimeo.

Drew Magary's wife gave birth seven weeks early. He narrates his terror and relief:

It's amazing that, even though the world's seven billion or so people are all unique, there are things that virtually all of them MUST have in common at the anatomical and sub-anatomical level in order to survive. You have chromosomes in your body that map out specific instructions for how your body must be built. You must have two eyes and two ears and a mouth. All your internal organs must be present and connected in a very specific way. Your brain can't be located in your feet. There are a million things that have to go right in order for you to be a functional, working human being. I was very much afraid that my son would not have those million things go right.

Timothy Noah laments how Christianists have distorted "Christian":

A 78-percent majority of Americans is Christian. Only about a third of them self-identify as evangelical, which is a very rough proxy for the Christian conservative minority that increasingly insists on being called, simply, “Christian.” 

Fred Clark is equally incensed:

Millions of white evangelical Protestants voted for Barack Obama in 2008. Millions of them. Millions of us. More than the combined total populations of Alaska, Delaware, Montana, the Dakotas, Vermont, Wyoming, Rhode Island and West Virginia. But for the most part, the fundraisers and vote-herders of the religious right have succeeded in getting the media to play along with the weird idea that these millions of people do not exist.

(Photo:  A supporter of Republican presidential candidate and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (R-GA) waits for his arrival outside Centro de la Familia evangelical church January 28, 2012 in Orlando, Florida. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Daniel Dennett sympathizes with them:

There are many paths into this predicament, we find, but a common thread runs through most of them: a certain sort of innocence and a powerful desire, not for social prestige or riches, but rather the desire to lead a good life, to help other people as much as possible. The tragic trap is baited with goodness itself.

Here is how it often works: teenagers glowing with enthusiasm decide to devote their lives to a career of helping others and, looking around in their rather sheltered communities, they see no better, purer option than going into the clergy. When they get to seminary they find themselves being taught things that nobody told them in Sunday school. The more they learn of theology and the history of the composition of the Bible, the less believable they find their creed. Eventually they cease to believe altogether. But, alas, they have already made a substantial commitment in social capital – telling their families and communities about their goals – so the pressure is strong to find an accommodation, or at least to imagine that if they hang in there they will find one. Only a lucky few find either the energy or the right moment to break free.

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Pamela Haag protests solidarity ribbons:

A ribbon inventory on the Internet turns up 84 solid colors, color combinations, and color patterns, although there are certainly more. The most popular colors must multitask to raise awareness of several afflictions and disasters at once. Blue is a particularly hard-working color, the new black of misfortunes; 43 things jockey to be the thing that the blue ribbon makes us aware of.

(Photo by Flickr user Sister72)

Shulem Deen recounts how an AM/FM radio led to the loss of his faith and the break-up of his marriage. He belonged to "all-Hasidic village in Rockland County, N.Y." where "radio — along with TV, movies, newspapers and other sources of secular influence" were forbidden:

Our dogmas and worldviews, I would eventually find, were inconsistent with my developing views about the world. Soon after purchasing my first computer, I would sign up for a subscription to America Online, and, with a world of information at my fingertips, my faith would be further eroded until, after many years, I would lose it entirely.

How volunteering at a homeless shelter changed Matt Talbot:

That’s the thing about dealing one-on-one with homeless people: they stop being a category – a mental abstraction, a them – and become richly complex individuals with stories as filled with vice and Divine Grace as my own. When I started, I thought I was bringing Christ’s compassion to them – but I realized as time went on that they were really bringing Christ to me. In those weary faces at the tables, I saw Christ staring back at me, asking me where I’d been all this time. He had been out there, in doorways, shivering in cold rains and stumbling in rags and singing to the midnight streets, waiting for me to show up. I feed Him in His Homeless, and in return, in an act of astounding and tender mercy, He shows me the depths of my own brokenness.

Lincoln, Nebraska, 7.01 am

What Socrates teaches us:

He felt it was vitally important to admit that the human condition is one of profound uncertainty, deep doubt. We are in between creatures. On the one hand, we are not ignorant and un-self-aware like most other animals. We can learn much. But on the other hand, we are not omniscient and all-seeing like the gods. This is why the lust for certainty is a sin, as a former Archbishop of York put it, because certainty demands the eradication of doubts and imagining you are a god.