Month: September 2013

From Islamist To Humanist

Michael Moynihan interviews Ahmed Akkari, the “baby-faced religious leader” who played a crucial role in inciting riots during the Danish cartoon controversy. But since then, Akkari has renounced fundamentalism and is now living in Greenland, hiding from his fanatical former friends:

There is no simple explanation for why he flipped, but Akkari’s time in Greenland, having emerged from the swamps of Islamism, was crucial. “In Greenland, I had space and time—and I had the public library. I started reading.” It was there, shrouded in Arctic anonymity, that he confronted his own prejudices, reading books of philosophy, history, and sociology, ultimately consuming—but, he admits, not always comprehending—Danish existentialist philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard.

“In 2011 for the first time I read an Islam critic.” It was the work of Nasr Hamed Abu Zayd, an Egyptian scholar exiled from his homeland and forced by an Egyptian court to annul his marriage for the “crime” of apostasy. His writings transformed Akkari. “He made me move further with my break from Islamism,” a system that he now views as “a way of controlling people. You use God, you use metaphysics, and that’s very strong.”…

During the cartoon crisis, a popular Saudi imam told Al Jazeera that free speech was the enemy of religious faith: “The problem is that [the Danes] want to open up … everything for debate. That’s it. It begins with freedom of thought, it continues with freedom of speech, and it ends up with freedom of belief.”

It now seemed a prescient observation, because it was liberalism, the consumption of dissenting ideas—the very thing he had once dedicated his life to shutting down—that changed Ahmed Akkari. Jacob Mchangama argues that, for Akkari, the Danish tradition of free speech acted as a disinfectant. “The Akkari affairs shows the fallacy of the argument that we need to ‘compromise’ and be ‘pragmatic’ when it comes to free speech and religious sensitivities.”

Must A Writer Live An Exciting Life?

The novelist Robert Boswell doesn’t think it necessary:

On the one hand, there’s Flannery O’Conner, who lived a fairly limited life. She has that great quote—something like…anyone who has survived her childhood has enough material to last the rest of her life. On the other hand, there’s Wallace Stegner. I heard Stegner speak when I was an undergraduate. He addressed a small gathering of creative writing students, and I asked him what advice would give to a young writer. He said, “Acquire a body of knowledge.” I’ve always thought that was a fascinating response.

I don’t think there’s any universal advice that one can give when it comes to experience. There are times I’ve had students who don’t seem to have anything to write about, and I might’ve wished they were involved with something that would provide them with material, but I’m not sure that’s a legitimate way of thinking. I suspect if somebody like Flannery O’Connor were in those same shoes, she would be turning that seemingly dull material into great stories. The key may not be in the life experience you’ve had but in the ability to recognize useful material in the world around you, or as Chekhov puts it, the ability to distinguish good testimony from bad.

A Poem For Sunday

lakecountry

Here’s another selection from Wordsworth’s The Prelude, or Growth of a Poet’s Mind:

Ye Presences of Nature in the sky
And on the earth!  Ye Visions of the hills!
And Souls of lonely places!  can I think
A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed
Such ministry, when ye through many a year
Haunting me thus among my boyish sports,
On caves and trees, upon the woods and hills,
Impressed upon all forms the characters
Of danger or desire; and thus did make
The surface of the universal earth
With triumph and delight, with hope and fear,
Work like a sea?
Not uselessly employed,
Might I pursue this theme through every change
Of exercise and play, to which the year
Did summon us in his delightful round.

(Photo by Glen Bowman of northwest England’s Lake Country, where Wordsworth lived for much of his most productive years.)

Quote For The Day

“I can’t see why anybody — unless he was a child, or an angel, or a lucky simpleton like the pilgrim — would even want to say a prayer to a Jesus who was the least bit different from the way he looks and sounds in the New Testament. My God! He’s only the most intelligent man in the Bible, that’s all! Who isn’t he head and shoulders over? Who? Both Testaments are full of pundits, prophets, disciples, favorite sons, Solomons, Isaiahs, Davids, Pauls — but, my God, who besides Jesus really knew which end was up? Nobody. Not Moses. Don’t tell me Moses. He was a nice man, and he kept in beautiful touch with his God, and all that — but that’s exactly the point. He had to keep in touch. Jesus realized there is no separation from God,” – J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey.

Evil’s Shadowy Existence

Digging deeper than many reflections on the recent film about Hannah Arendt and her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Fr. Robert Barron reminds us of Arendt’s debt to St. Augustine:

The young Hannah Arendt had written her doctoral dissertation under the great German philosopher Karl Jaspers, and the topic of her work was the concept of love in the writings of Saint Augustine. One of the most significant intellectual breakthroughs of Augustine’s life was the insight that evil is not something substantial, but rather a type of non-being, a lack of some perfection that ought to be present. Thus, a cancer is evil in the measure that it compromises the proper functioning of a bodily organ, and a sin is evil in the measure that it represents a distortion or twisting of a rightly functioning will. Accordingly, evil does not stand over and against the good as a kind of co-equal metaphysical force, as the Manichees would have it. Rather, it is invariably parasitic upon the good, existing only as a sort of shadow.

J.R.R. Tolkien gave visual expression to this Augustinian notion in his portrayal of the Nazgul in The Lord of the Rings. Those terrible and terrifying threats, flying through the air on fearsome beasts, are revealed, once their capes and hoods are pulled away, to be precisely nothing, emptiness. And this is exactly why, to return to Arendt’s description, evil can never be radical. It can never sink down into the roots of being; it can never stand on its own; it has no integrity, no real depth or substance. To be sure, it can be extreme and it can, as Arendt’s image suggests, spread far and wide, doing enormous damage. But it can never truly be.

Recent Dish on Arendt here, here, and here.

Daily Life Without A Deity

Kimberly Winston highlights a new documentary, Hug an Atheist, that tries to put “a more human, middle-of-the-road face on American atheism”:

The 90-minute film is the project of Sylvia Broeckx, a 35-year-old Belgian who lives in England and has been an atheist and humanist since her teens. She became interested in America’s perception of nonbelievers when some American friends and fellow atheists shared their own stories of feeling marginalized. “I always assumed America was founded on freedom of religion and was very much like Europe where if you are an atheist it is no big deal,” she said. “When I discovered that in America being an atheist could be a big problem, that was really a shock to me.”

Daniel Fincke emphasizes that the film isn’t about winning arguments:

Hug An Atheist is not a polemic against theism. It’s not filled with arguments against the existence of God or complaints with religious organizations. Supernatural ideas come up more as either nuisances to deal with or paltry suggestions to dismiss than as problems. While occasionally throughout the film, the atheists in it will reflect about when they were religious and make comparisons and contrasts to their current views, there is not much discussion justifying or explaining the thought processes that made them into atheists. The film’s point is neither to justify nor advance non-belief in gods. While they take the time regularly to rebuff familiar religious answers to questions or religious challenges to atheists, the point is to show how atheists think and live in positive and honest terms, how they make sense of their lives and their values, and how they deal with some of the most central and universal questions of human life.

Revelation Begins With Routine

Jamie Quatro explains the value of rituals:

There’s a sense in which we need ritual. We crave it at a physical level; we inhabit a universe that operates according to ritual: sun up, sun down; work, rest, play, work; summer, fall, winter, spring. There is joy in the rehearsal of the known, the familiar. Raising children is a great reminder of this: they thrive on routine, love tradition. And without ritual, there can be no mystery—how can the unexpected enter into a life that is devoid of expectation? Ritual opens the door for revelation. We move through ritual and performance to access the Divine. Yoga teaches this: when we know the poses—when they become habit, motor-memory—we can more quickly access the state of heightened awareness that is beyond the physical. The ecstasy. I find the same to be true with liturgy. The more I practice it—when it becomes part of the fabric of my being—the more quickly and completely I can move through it to approach the Divine.

Curses! Ctd

Colin Burrow reviews Melissa Mohr’s Holy Shit: A Brief History of Swearing:

Mohr ends by welcoming swearing as a good thing. We need to exercise the palaeomammalian brain from time to time, and we should ‘appreciate that our language has so many such useful words that can be employed in such a wide variety of ways’. She also speculates that future swear words will probably come from some of the milder taboo areas in modern life, such as death and disability.

Should we be quite so cheery about swearing or its future? Swear words and oaths often gain their expletive force from the circumstances in which they are uttered. The badness of saying ‘whore’ or ‘God’s wounds’ or ‘bastard’ depends on who you say it to and why – as Queen Elizabeth I’s lord deputy in Ireland Sir John Perrot discovered when his secretary told on him for saying ‘God’s wounds, this it is to serve a base bastard pissing kitchen woman.’ Oaths can carry their potential to hurt or shock into normal conversation, which is why they can be used simply as intensifiers. Maybe we should just say ‘what the hell’ (or the expletive of our choice) and let this happen, because it does happen and will happen.

Previous Dish on swearing here and here.

Just The Money Shots

Amanda Hess explores the growing phenomenon of microporn, “explicit photos, videos, and GIFs that are as short as winks”:

Today, the full-length film experience has been subsumed by short clips that can be chopped, remixed, and compiled into endless sexual combinations. [Novice pornographer] David distills his exploits into six-second loops. Amateur editors cut professional porn flicks into even shorter animated GIFs, then Tumblr curators like Kayla shoot them to all their followers. It used to be that people would “watch porn by fast-forwarding through most of it to get to their favorite parts,” says Fleshbot founder and editor Lux Alptraum. But GIFs “hone in on the hottest part of the action” — on “that perfect cum shot, or those breasts bouncing, or the moment of insertion, or whatever it is that really drives you wild.” And they repeat instantly — no hands necessary.

But it’s causing problems for social networking sites:

Because microporn is so simple to shoot, edit, and share, it’s escaped the seedy bounds of the tube sites and found a home on mainstream social-networking sites. … Platforms like Vine, Tumblr, and Instagram aren’t exactly accepting microporn with open arms. Mainstream social networks are constantly inventing new strategies for blocking users from finding porn through their channels. Search for “NSFW” on Vine, and you’ll find zero results. Tumblr recently caught flak for sweeping the “gay” and “lesbian” tags from its mobile app along with more explicit filters like “porn”; Tumblr founder David Karp publicly lamented the decision, but said those identity tags are just steeped in too much sexual material to keep them active. Facebook — along with its image-sharing site, Instagram — bans nudity entirely.