Month: November 2012

Theo Hobson explores the theological project of Rowan Williams, who helped him understand "that Christianity is not essentially a big idea that we must try to spread, by arguing for its truth, but a cultural tradition, centred on the church's ritual":

He presented Christianity as a cultural tradition, the place where a very specific form of meaning is made, shared, passed on; where supreme authority belongs to the "central symbol" of cross and resurrection, which the church performs in the eucharist. When many, such as his Cambridge colleague Don Cupitt, were arguing against traditional metaphysical belief, or defending it in rather dated terms, he changed the subject. The question of what we believe is secondary to the question of what we do, what forms of symbolic communication we participate in, what cultural language we speak. We must rethink our tradition in these semiotic terms. Jesus was "a sign-maker of a disturbingly revolutionary kind", he writes in an essay of 1987. And Christian culture echoes his sign-making. This communal sign-making is, for Christians, the most authentically basic bit of culture. Is it just another bit of human culture? Yes and no: for here, we believe, the true myth is performed, the fullest meaning is made.

More Dish on Rowan Williams here and here.

(Photo by Flickr user avlxyz)

Drew Toal reviews the forthcoming Kurt Vonnegut: Letters:

In his introduction to Kurt Vonnegut: Letters, Dan Wakefield, the book's editor and a longtime Vonnegut karass member, writes of the late author's aspiration to be a "cultivated eccentric." Over the course of six decades of letters to family, friends, admirers, detractors and fellow writers, Vonnegut shows himself to be so much more, both in terms of ambition and accomplishment. In fact, viewed in its totality, the collection — by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and mundane — is striking in just how uneccentric it shows the author to be. Vonnegut himself is a near-perfect example of the same flawed, wonderful humanity that he loved and despaired over his entire life.

Shaun Usher features two letters from the book. From one defending his son's refusal to fight in the Vietnam War in 1967:

This attitude toward killing is a matter between my God and me. I do not participate much in organized religion. I have read the Bible a lot. I preach, after a fashion. I write books which express my disgust for people who find it easy and reasonable to kill.

We say grace at meals, taking turns. Every member of my family has been called upon often to thank God for blessings which have been ours. What Mark is doing now is in the service of God, Whose Son was exceedingly un-warlike.

There isn't a grain of cowardice in this. Mark is a strong, courageous young man. What he is doing requires more guts than I ever had—and more decency.

Clancy Martin reports on schisms in the LGBT evangelism movement:

It’s hard to be Christian and to evangelize. It’s considerably tougher to be gay and to “evangelize”—to spread the word that homosexuality is okay. But imagine having to spread the word both of Christ and of queerness. Because of the religious right’s hostility to homosexuality, gay evangelicals are generally disliked—or even openly despised—not just by straight Christians but by other gays, too. And the LGBT evangelical movement faces its own internal divisions, which threaten to undo all the progress it’s made. Queer evangelicals have the potential to cast homophobia out of the religious right and change the face of American politics—but only if they can keep their own movement alive against the odds.

He focuses on two activists who epitomize that debate, Ralph Blair, founder of Evangelicals Concerned, "probably the oldest queer evangelical organization in the world," and Eunice Coldman:

The crucial difference between their philosophies lies in the question at the heart of all Christian evangelism, gay or straight: what does it really mean to be an evangelical? For Blair, it is the acceptance of the “evangel”—the good news that Christ is God—and the obligation to spread the word of that news. For Coldman, it is the more general idea that anyone can be a Christian, regardless of sexual orientation, gender or race. According to Blair, this represents the introduction of relativism to the evangelical message, threatening its purity and therefore its very Christianity.

Pilsen, Czech Republic, 8.57 am

The novelist Richard Russo reflects on his new memoir, Elsewhere, which considers his complicated relationship with his mother and his childhood in upstate New York:

In the months after my mother’s death, I thought about her constantly, and she was visiting my dreams, as well. All of which suggested there was unfinished business. My last three novels had all featured characters who were puzzled by destiny, asking themselves, “How did I end up here?” Now I found myself puzzling over the same issues with regard to my mother’s life and my own. We shared both a genetic (highly obsessive) nature as well as strikingly similar nurture, having grown up in the same small upstate New York mill town. How could our destinies have diverged so radically? It seemed worth investigating.

Roger K. Miller homes in on Russo's mother's mental illness, which Russo eventually identifies as obsessive-compulsive disorder:

[Russo] believes that in some ways he is like her, that he bears “the same genetic character traits.” He had turned “obsession … and sheer cussedness” to his own advantage. “The same qualities that over a lifetime had contracted my mother’s world had somehow expanded mine.”

Maria Popova digs up another Alan Watts' lecture:

In this hauntingly beautiful animation based on a Watts lecture, produced by Luke Jurevicius and directed by Ari Gibson and Jason Pamment, Watts considers what death might be, exploring the notion of nonexistence and pitting it as “the necessary [counterpart] of what we call being.”

More Watts wisdom here, here and here.

William Deresiewicz sees privacy and solitude as privileges "rare both historically and globally" and notes that most "people in the world are too poor to even have the space to be alone."  He claims that pervasive social media and the frenetic pace of contemporary life are "eliminating our ability to be alone with our thoughts and feelings, and with it, the dense, complex private inwardness of the modern self":

[S]olitude and privacy are not just privileges. They are also compensations. People didn’t have modern selves in traditional society, but they didn’t need them, because they had family and community: extended families, face-to-face communities. They had an intricate structure of relationships, traditions, roles, and expectations to give content to their lives and direction to their efforts, to orient themselves in space and time. They didn’t need to go it alone or make up the world for themselves, so they didn’t need the equipment that enables modern individuals (if they’re lucky) to do so.

Now all we have is ourselves. The modern self is a consolation prize; it’s what we have to cling to—that and friendship, modernity’s central relationship. Intimacy is also a modern phenomenon, because it rests on privacy. When E. M. Forster said “Only connect,” he didn’t mean that’s all we need to do; he meant that’s all we could do: forge our horizontal bonds, because the roots are gone.

Now friendship, too, I think, is under threat. We lost the old things, and now we’re giving up the things we got instead.

Studies have found "sleeping pills on average only make people fall asleep 12 minutes faster and sleep 11 minutes longer during the night." So why the presumed success? It's a combination of the placebo affect and a minor memory wipe:

Drugs like Ambien have the curious effect of causing what is known as anterograde amnesia. In other words, ingesting the drug essentially makes it temporarily harder for the brain to form new short-term memories. This explains why those who take a pill may toss and turn in the middle of the night but say the next day that they slept soundly. Their brains simply weren’t recording all those fleeting minutes of wakefulness, allowing them to face each morning with a clean slate, unaware of anything that happened over the last six or seven hours.