Month: June 2013

Sarah L. Courteau looks at the market for self-help books:

Men are a distinct minority of the self-help clientele—only about 30 percent, according to Marketdata. They tend to consult books about how to dominate in the boardroom or be a savvier investor. The typical consumer is a woman who is middle aged and affluent. (By and large, self-help is neither marketed to nor used by the young, who are busy out there making the mistakes they’ll be looking to fix in a few years’ time.) She’s someone who wants to maximize, and she has the luxury of a little money—and perhaps time—to worry about how to take off a few pounds, put her best foot forward at work, improve her relationship or her dating life, get her schedule or her closets more organized, or become a better mother. She is representative of a generation that has made enormous strides, yet she feels dissatisfied with where she is.

It’s easy for women to believe they need all the help they can get. We’re raised on Cosmo and Seventeen, both of which are chock-full of tips on how to pluck our eyebrows, choose a lipstick, or have better sex. We graduate to Real Simple and O: The Oprah Magazine when we have households of our own. The line between fighting for equal footing—that elusive sense of “empowerment” that we’re forever supposed to be grasping for—and the conviction that we could always be doing more is fine, if it exists at all. No surprise that self-help marketers know that their target audience consists of people who have already shelled out money for a self-improvement product within the last several months.

David Swanson rails against the Christianist resistance to taking climate change seriously:

According to a Newsweek poll, 40 percent of people in the United States believe the world will end with a battle between Jesus Christ and the Antichrist. And overwhelmingly, those people also believe that natural disasters and violence are signs of the approach of the glorious battle—so much so that 22 percent of Americans believe the world will end in their lifetime. This would logically mean that concern for the world of their great-great-grandchildren makes no sense at all and should be dismissed from their minds. In fact, a recent study found that belief in the “second coming” reduces support for strong governmental action on climate change by 20 percent.

His broader point:

You see, the problem with theism is not that some of its spin-off beliefs succeed in an undemocratic system. The problem is that theism is anti-democratic at its core. It moves us away from relying on ourselves. It teaches us to rely on someone supposedly better than us.

“The problem of faith is the problem for me. It preoccupies me far more now than it did when I was a believer, perhaps because it wasn’t a problem then but merely a fact. And a fact it was: I wasn’t merely ‘raised’ Catholic in a default sense; I was a believing Catholic, and it was important to me. It seems to me that the big thing that people who don’t understand religious devotion get wrong about it is the assumption that it is grounded in fear or in a desire for certainty. I’m sure this is true in some cases, but my own religious feelings were grounded in a sense of wonder at the mysteries of human existence. I would say that Catholicism trained me to have a particular set of emotional needs — in particular, the need to feel aligned in some way with these mysteries — that at a certain point the Church itself stopped fulfilling for me. An awful lot of my writing emerges from those needs. And I remain suspicious of scientific materialists who insist that there is no underlying mystery, that the sense of mystery is some kind of cognitive holdover from a time when science had not yet explained human existence. If any viewpoint comes from the desire for certainty, it would seem to be that one.

I could say much more on this topic, but I’ll just make one related point. It can be a difficult experience to abandon a strongly held belief. Very often the result is that whatever belief arrives in its place is held on to all the more strongly — the zeal of the convert, etc. What I’ve tried to gain from the process is some negative capability — the talent identified by Keats, ‘of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.’ It’s not easy. But it’s a skill that can be quite valuable to a novelist or a critic. Or to a human being, for that matter. Whatever label applies,” – Christopher Beha.

(Hat tip: Wesley Hill)

After grappling for years with the meaning of prayer, Jan Vallone realized the simplicity of what a priest described to her as “conversation with God”:

I knew, absolutely, that I had felt God’s presence in my life. I’d catch my breath at a tangerine sunrise and whisper, “Thank you, God,” then be moved to smile at everyone I passed along the street. Or I’d be startled by an ambulance siren and think, God, please let that person live, then be prompted to write to my aunt who’d had a heart condition for years. Or I’d shriek when my daughter burned a skillet and wince thinking, God, why am I so testy?, then be spurred to take my daughter out to lunch.

So while I can’t sense Divine presence beyond the clouds or within me, I feel God close, and clearly, in unexpected moments like these—moments of awe, joy, fear, sorrow, or contrition. God captures my attention in these moments. I cry in recognition, feel a surge of heart. I respond with acts of love, often in spite of myself.

Are these exchanges conversations? I’d like to think yes. Thus, they’re no less prayers than the kinds I struggle with.

Ethan Richardson riffs on Marilynne Robinson’s essay from The Death of Adam, “Facing Reality,” a meditation on modern anxiety and the insights of traditional religion:

Robinson thinks…we have lost what the Bible calls “sin.” If every malady can be answered with a palliative, we have lost the depth and seriousness of our condition. By “medicalizing” a condition, we distance ourselves from the meaning of our suffering, as well as any real responsibility we might have in the matter. We do not feel the inner-pangs of Eden–we cotton them off with smaller doses of smaller problems. This makes us all the more anxious. I am reminded here of John Jeremiah Sullivan‘s phrase in his Michael Jackson essay, that we are inheritors of the “pathology of pathologization.” We, the Knowers, must call our sin small, long Latin names, and seek meliorative means to soothe the twitch. As Robinson says, we do need medicine for our anxiety–but we need more. “It may be necessary to offer ourselves palliatives, but is drastically wrong to offer or to accept a palliative as if it were a cure.”

Recent Dish on Robinson here.