Month: September 2012

Bruce Epperly meditates on our experience of beauty within this "glorious universe," seeing "our meaning-making and moments of self-transcendence as part of a gentle providence working through cells and souls":

Alfred North Whitehead once noted the irrationality of certain scientists having as their purpose the quest to prove that the universe has no purpose.  The very continuity of the evolutionary process suggests that if we are purposive and intentional beings, then this a sense of purpose must be present in simpler as well as more complex organisms than ourselves.  Whitehead, known for his creative work in both mathematics and cosmology, also asserted that the teleology of the universe is aimed at the production of beauty, that is, complexity, diversity, novelty, and intensity of experience.

While scientists cannot prove the existence of what my fellow process theologian Patricia Adams Farmer describes as a “Beautiful God,” the world can be seen as a dynamic and emerging theater of divine beauty, wonder, and glory.  The possibility of artistic, creative, imaginative, and adventurous creatures like ourselves was present in the very beginnings of life (the big birth of the universe) and emerged through the interplay of intentionality and chance, novelty and order, purpose and randomness over the immense journey of the universe.  The character of the evolutionary process was not predetermined but had a variety of possible pathways, emerging as a result of the interplay of wisdom and chance, one of which was the birth of homo sapiens and its ongoing evolution.

(Photo by Flickr user PG Palmer (AU))

John Fischer recounts visiting “continuing care retirement communities," what he calls the "equivalent of organic farming for elder care," with his parents:

The remarkable character of aging is the way it draws each of us towards the same inevitability, the same anonymity, the same identical end. Everyone on the planet will experience it in one form or another, as one of the few rituals we share across our species. Except as tiny people with worries and chores, obligations and hopes, we are painfully ill-equipped to reconcile the distance between the personal and the universal. We perceive our own outline in the facts and empirical evidence, and imagine that we can make things different for our parents or ourselves. Mostly we are wrong. Incontrovertibly and terrifyingly wrong.

So we scramble to control whatever we can, in whatever infinitesimally small measure is possible. The last place you ever live is not really a place. It’s a compromise. It’s a wheelchair or a cane, an argument, a difficult decision, a humiliation to be ignored. It’s a cleaving to the parts that were, and a progressive resignation to the parts that are no longer.

In an interview with The Browser, Nigel Warburton argues that we need to expand our notion of what philosophy can be – and especially urges us to appreciate how poetry can help us understand how to live:

I think professional philosophers often like to make their subject smaller than it really is by setting arbitrary limits. As far as I'm concerned, philosophy is any human enterprise that involves critical thought about basic questions, like how we should live, what is the nature of reality and so on. Those questions can be asked seriously in all kinds of forms. So I don't see the subject as restricted to nerdy philosophical papers in refereed journals. Some of the most important contributions have been literary. If you think of classical philosophy, you have Plato's very literary dialogues, and Lucretius's On The Nature of Things is a poem! Some parts of TS Eliot's poems are very philosophical. Kierkegaard is a poetic writer who uses fictions, and Nietzsche uses aphorisms and poetry. They're all philosophers.

Later in the interview, Warburton provides an idiosyncratic list of five books for philosophical neophytes.

This week the Dish twice noted a newly uncovered 4th century papyrus fragment of a Coptic text that includes Jesus saying the words, "My wife…" – first to mark the initial newstory, and again to air comments from readers. I promised some further reflections. Here they are.

The place to begin, it seems to me, is not the journalistic coverage of the fragment – which quickly became breathless meta-commentary – but Karen King's faculty research page at Harvard dedicated to the discovery. What impresses most about her work is its modesty, restraint, and care. The page includes photos of the papyrus fragment, a helpful Q&A, translations of the text, and, for the truly dedicated, a draft of the paper (PDF) she recently delivered in Rome explaining the find. At every turn, King emphasizes merely that the papyrus teaches us about the diversity of views in early Christianity, rather than "proving" Jesus had a wife. An example from the Q&A she provides:

…this fragment does not provide evidence that Jesus was married. The comparatively late date of this Coptic papyrus (a fourth century CE copy of a gospel probably written in Greek in the second half of the second century) argues against its value as evidence for the life of the historical Jesus. Nor is there any reliable historical evidence to support the claim that he was not married, even though Christian tradition has long held that position. The oldest and most reliable evidence is entirely silent about Jesus's marital status.

The first claims that Jesus was not married are attested only in the late second century CE, so if the Gospel of Jesus's Wife was also composed in the second century CE, it does provide evidence, however, that the whole question about Jesus's marital status arose as part of the debates about sexuality and marriage that took place among early Christians at that time. From the very beginning, Christians disagreed about whether it was better to marry or to be celibate, but it was over a century after Jesus's death before they began using Jesus's marital status to support their different positions. Christian tradition preserved only those voices that claimed Jesus never married, but now the Gospel of Jesus's Wife shows that some Christians claimed Jesus was married, probably already in the late second century.

Ariel Sabar's long Smithsonian Magazine essay is easily the most helpful account of the find, King's work on it, the scholarly debates surrounding it, and the key details, such as where (as best we know) the fragment came from and how King went about trying to authenticate it.

Daniel Wallace also has a very detailed breakdown about the fragment and its import, and airs scholarly – rather than polemical – doubts about its authenticity and significance. It is a must-read for those with a more-than-passing interest in the matter.

The NYT helpfully rounds up the fallout from King's work on the fragment:

A few said that the papyrus must be a forgery. Others have questioned Dr. King’s interpretation of its meaning. Some have faulted her for publishing a paper on an item of unknown provenance. And many have criticized her decision to give the scrap of papyrus the attention-getting title “The Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” as if it had equal weight to other, lengthier texts that are known as Gospels.

But even some of those casting doubt are also applauding her work. Many scholars said in interviews that they were excited by the discovery, because if it is genuine, it suggests at least one community of early adherents to Christianity believed that Jesus was married.

In late-breaking news, a British scholar claims he has proven the fragment a forgery:

Professor Francis Watson, of Durham University, says the papyrus fragment, which caused a worldwide sensation when it appeared earlier this week because it appeared to refer to Jesus's wife, is a patchwork of texts from the genuine Coptic-language Gospel of Thomas, which have been copied and reassembled out of order to make a suggestive new whole.

In a paper published online, Watson argues that all of the sentence fragments found on the papyrus fragment have been copied, sometimes with small alterations, from printed editions of the Gospel of Thomas.

Ross Douthat, predictably, argues that the response to the fragment "tells us much more about the religious preoccupations of our own era, and particularly the very American desire to refashion Jesus of Nazareth in our own image rather than letting go of him altogether, than it does about the Jesus who actually lived and preached in Palestine in the early decades A.D." I think that may be true for some, but King herself seems a very open, honest scholar.

The bottom line for me is that the Gnostic Gospels tell us merely that there was a lot of diversity and argument and division in the early church as memories of Jesus faded. But we knew that already. The Synoptic Gospels and Paul's letters pre-date them and carry far, far more weight. Ross says that "all the evidence still points toward an absolute negative" on Jesus' marital status. I'd replace "absolute" with "very probable." But Ross's instinctive resort to that absoluteness, like the Vatican's, and the conflation of King's modest scholarship with Dan Brown's ludicrous conspiracy theories among others is as telling as the shallow media hype.

A reader explains why:

This text is news because it goes precisely to questions that currently make up some of the weakest and most dubious parts of Church teaching–the notion of priestly celibacy, that women are unsuited to the priesthood or to episcopacy, that no woman was a disciple. These notions are upheld vigorously by the current hierarchy (whose power in an important sense actually rests upon them).

But at the same time, they run strongly counter to the Zeitgeist, they seem increasingly a relic of a long-past society in which women held an inferior status. If Jesus had a wife (which this fragment in no way seriously proves) or if many early Christians believe he did (of which this fragment may be some evidence), that would suggest that these teachings are grave error hammered into dogma. In sum, this fragment could fuel a head-on conflict with the power and institutions of the Vatican, as the Nag Hammadi texts already do. Collectively they tell us that early Christians were far from uniform in their attitudes, that some strains sought reconciliation with Greek philosophy, others accorded a more prominent role to women, but that a misogynistic segment was ultimately dominant.

I am not that interested in whether Jesus was married or celibate. But I am interested in the way in which a patriarchal, male-only hierarchy, which has been exposed as a conspiracy to commit and then cover up child-rape still excludes half of humanity from true equality in a church based on Jesus' teachings. Jesus clearly saw women as total equals, trespassed over gender lines constantly, and told all of us to become like little children if we are to live in God's full love. Paul told us that there is "neither male nor female" in Christ's vision of our equality on His love.

These little moments – and this is a tiny one – help open that reality to the light: that the message and truth of Jesus is tragically being obscured by some of the Pharisees of our time.

(Painting: Magdalen with the Smoking Flame, by Georges de la Tour, c 1640. And Christ with Children, from Matthew 19 by Carl Bloch 1800s.)

Costica Bradatan explains why we're moved by self-immolation:

The experience is so powerful because it is so deeply seated in the human psyche. In front of self-immolation, even the most secularized of us have a glimpse into a primordial experience of the sacred. Originally, the sacred is defined as something set apart, cut off from the rest, which remains profane; what we feel towards such a radically different other is precisely a mix of terror and fascination. Self-immolation is a unique event precisely because it awakens deep layers of our ultimate make-up. In a striking, if disguised fashion, self-immolation occasions the experience of the sacred even in a God-forsaken world like ours.

(Photo: In McLeod Ganj, India, on June 15, 2012, an exiled Tibetan monk holds a picture of Tamdin Thar, a 50-year-old who burned himself to death to protest against the Chinese rule in Tibet. By STRDEL/AFP/Getty Images)

Scott Aikin and Robert Talisse argue that while civility is vital in democratic societies, "the relevant kind of respect is not that of the calm tone and cool demeanor" but instead "has to do with the ways in which we acknowledge our fundamental equality as sharers in self-government":

The moral core of democracy consists in the project of enabling citizens to live together socially as equals, despite the fact that they disagree deeply about fundamental moral and religious matters.  This democratic moral vision can be realized only when citizens recognize a duty to respect each other as fellow citizens, equal sharers in political power.  This respect requires citizens to recognize what John Rawls called the duty of civility, which is the duty to offer one’s fellow citizens public reasons when deliberating with them about the public good.  Knowing that deliberation occurs against the backdrop of deep disagreement, we must on the one hand be willing to recognize the diversity of religious, philosophical, and ethical commitments available to democratic citizens.  On the other hand, we must be able to explain the basis for any policy we advocate with reasons we can expect any of those diverse individuals to endorse as consistent with their status as a fellow free and equal citizen.  That’s the tightrope of democratic justification.  Democratic deliberation, then, requires us to argue from a public perspective.

Previous Dish coverage of their thoughts on respect and civility here.

Hardcore unicycling:

Robert McCrum marvels at the idiosyncratic ways writers try to cajole their creativity:

Writing rituals, like all fetishes associated with creativity, are intrinsically interesting. Jonathan Franzen attracted a lot of attention when he described writing The Corrections in a state of primitive solitude. According to Time magazine, "Franzen works in a rented office that he has stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop … Because Franzen believes you can't write serious fiction on a computer that's connected to the internet, he not only removed the Dell's wireless card but also permanently blocked its Ethernet port."

Then there are other considerations such day versus night, drunk versus sober, or champagne (Harold Pinter) versus benzedrine (Graham Greene) versus coffee (virtually everyone). Some writers are larks; others are owls. Mario Vargas Llosa has an elaborate psychological theory for choosing first light as the best time to write.

An Indian Hindu devotee performs prayers over a cobra during a Nag-Panchami ritual at a Shiva Temple in Jammu on September 20, 2012. The Hindu festival of Nag-Panchami is observed during the monsoon season and devotees give prayers and tributes to snakes. By Strdel/AFP/Getty Images.