When people talk about problems with science education, they are generally are talking about science as a body of knowledge. If you know certain facts from within that body of knowledge, you know science. There is another definition of science though, and it is antithetical to the body-of-knowledge definition. For lack of a better word, I’m going to call it testing and discovery. … Body-of-knowledge science is about building assumptions. Testing and discovery is about breaking them. These are two different attitudes, and therefore must be kept separate. Otherwise, testing and discovery will be swallowed up by “science” as just more facts to memorize.
Lana Hope, homeschooled in a Christian fundamentalist family, describes the appeal of her former faith:
A few years ago one of my friends had a birthday party, and he invited all the homeschool families he knew to his party. It may seem odd to an outsider to have young children at his 20th birthday party, but it was not the least bit weird to me (parties with my family are the same way; there were as many kids under 13 at my 18th birthday party as there were teens). But after an entire evening of playing board games with people of all ages, washing dishes together, and praying for each other, one of my public school friends (the only person who had attended public school at the party) said to me, “That was so much fun. I never experienced this in my life.” She explained that she never had an evening playing board games with children of all ages. In fact, she never went to someone’s house and had them pray for her either. It was foreign to her, but she liked it.
Fundamentalism offers that kind of community. Yes, the community creates pain and breaks sometimes, but it’s still community that often attracts people to fundamentalism. I was looking through photos of my teen years earlier this week, and every photo of me has a child in the picture.
We’d like to believe that the triumph of secularism is inevitable — how can we fail when we’re going up against such nutty ideas? — but maybe it isn’t, if we neglect social and community and family ideals and pander only to nerdy asocial guys in tech. We really need to wake up to the reasons normal people find value in weird religions.
Morgan Meis visits the Jewish Museum’s new exhibit on Chagall and observes that the artist “had about a five-year period during the Second World War in which he became utterly obsessed with painting Jesus Christ”:
The paintings have little to do with Jesus as we usually see him — the central figure in the Christian Passion narrative. Chagall’s Jesus is a Jewish Jesus through and through. In many of the Crucifixion scenes (like The Artist with Yellow Christ, 1938 and Persecution, c. 1941) Jesus’ nether parts are covered with a tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl. In Study for The Yellow Crucifixion (1942), Jesus is wearing tefillin, little black boxes containing verses from the Torah that are wrapped around the head and arm, with black straps going down to the hand.
The meaning of Chagall’s Crucifixion paintings, in their historical context, is thus pretty clear. From the time of the Nazi rise to power in the 1930s, through the end of WWII, Chagall was preoccupied with the fate of European Jews. He saw Jesus on the Cross as a universally recognizable symbol of human suffering. Chagall hoped that Jews and non-Jews alike would be able to relate to this symbol. By making Jesus unmistakably Jewish, he was highlighting the fact that the Romans crucified Jesus as a Jew. In the midst of the Holocaust, Chagall wanted to make the universality of Jesus’ crucifixion specific again, he wanted the world to look at Jewish suffering.
In his remarkable, much-discussed interview published last month in America, Pope Francis described himself with the phrase, “I am a sinner.” Patrick L. Gilger unpacks the quote:
[F]or those deeply immersed in the spirituality of Ignatius, being a “sinner” does not mean “having done things wrong” (although that is true). It doesn’t even mean that we will always do things wrong in the future (also true). It means that humans are – at root, ontologically – always in need of the living mercy of God. Michael Ives, author of Understanding the Spiritual Exercises, puts it this way: “sin is always considered in the Exercises in the light of mercy … The essential grace [ ] is that of a conversion arising out of the literally heart-breaking experience of being loved and forgiven.”
The literally heart-breaking experience. This is the reason Pope Francis calls himself a sinner. It is the reason he speaks so relentlessly about mercy. It is because he knows what all women and men who live deeply an Ignatian life know, that God’s mercy reframes our interpretation of everything, institutions included. It does so because, having understood the joy of being wrong, we have learned to hold our own plans loosely so as to be better lead by God. This is what St. Ignatius means by another of his famous spiritual terms, “indifference,” he means the ability to be lead by God into the previously unimaginable. The ability to do a new thing. The ability to let mercy be more fundamental than any plans or theo-political categories.
Emily Nussbaum calls Showtime’s new series Masters of Sex, based on the lives of sex researchers William H. Masters and Virginia Johnson, a “serious turn-on”:
[T]he show makes the case, beneath its cinematic lacquer, that [sex] is not something merely exciting or trivial but a deep human necessity. Deprived of intimacy and true release, people shrivel up. “Once you’ve seen Oz, who wants to go back to Kansas?” one heartbroken character asks. In this way, “Masters of Sex” reminded me not of a few other Showtime series, with their mood of anomie and disdain, but of “Orange Is the New Black,” the Netflix series that, for all its comic bounce, takes sex seriously, as pleasure, power, and escape. These stories are humanistic, not cynical, and although they go in for a level of prurience, the nudity isn’t simply there to jump the needle on the viewer’s electrocardiogram. “Masters of Sex” may not be revolutionary TV, but it’s got something just as useful: good chemistry.
Ashley Fetters appreciates that the show “limits its sex to where sex is an important component of the story.” Laura Bennett calls it “the best new fall drama on TV”:
“Masters of Sex” captures the atmosphere of its era better than all of “Mad Men”’s exquisite costumes and scrupulous sets: the sense of being on the brink of a seismic shift in the zeitgeist, as well as the particular courage required to be a sexually liberated woman in the baffling, buttoned-up years after Alfred Kinsey’s ground-breaking studies but before the sexual revolution. And the show does so without condescension, but rather with a winking understanding that times have changed less than we think. “The truth is nobody understands sex,” Masters says wearily. Given that a show set in the ’50s feels like the freshest take on sexual relations in awhile, it’s easy to agree.
Nowhere is Masters of Sex worse than in its unmasterful vision of sex. Rather than treating it maturely, the show exemplifies much of what remains retrograde about premium cable and American pop culture in general — the gratuitous nudity, the squirmingly unsexy lovemaking scenes, the reflexive jokiness that reminds us that sex still makes people very, very nervous. At one point, the show actually cuts from a couple having sex in a car to a shot of a neon sign with a hot dog in a bun.
Maybe such a gag will crack up the 12-year-old boys watching at home, but it’s faintly depressing that half a century after Masters and Johnson helped liberate human sexuality, a TV show about their lives should so often reduce the conversation about it to the ignorant sniggering from which they were trying to set us free.
Tracy Clark-Flory says that Daniel Stern’s Swingland “at moments … reads like a self-discovery memoir à la “Eat, Pray, Love,” only with super-graphic group-sex scenes”:
The most satisfying bits of “Swingland” are also the most fleeting: Stern’s description of an elderly orgy-goer who boasts of a new hip replacement and osteoporosis medication; the Russian husband who leaves a Sylvester Stallone movie playing on TV throughout Stern’s carnal encounter with his wife; the anxious home improvement chatter that inevitably happens between men before everyone’s taken their clothes off; and the deaf swinger who responds to a woman’s loud moans with, “Even I could hear that!” Behind the absurdity and occasional braggadocio, there is a sweetness hidden at the center of the book, encapsulated in Stern’s revelation toward the end: ”I’d escaped that tonnage of performance-hindering anxiety and understood sex for what it was: fun.”
From TCF’s interview with Stern:
What kind of people did you meet in the lifestyle? What are they like in their everyday lives? What cross-section of America are we talking about?
They really run the gamut, everything from people in the police force to teachers to administrative assistants to people you would recognize from being on television. Age-wise, everyone from early 20s to octogenarians. The vast majority of swingers that I’ve met are middle-aged. My theory to explain that is they live long enough to have enough normal experiences when it comes to sex that they seek out something that is different. They’ve been in a marriage or relationship long enough that they want to get a bit of spice.
A recent Journal of Sex Research study asked men and women in committed relationships, “How do you define sexual satisfaction?”:
About half of the 760 responses included “pleasure” in their definition, but not all were referring to pleasure as an orgasm necessarily. Pleasure had a much more fluid connotation, apart from ejaculation or a physical climax in light of satisfaction. “Satisfaction with one’s sexual life as a whole. It does not imply necessarily to reach orgasm, but it means to have as much pleasure as possible,” said one respondent.
For respondents who skewed on the more personal/selfish side of answers, only a few participants in the study mentioned “desire”, “arousal”, or “orgasm” in their definitions of sexual satisfaction—you know, actual stages of the Masters and Johnson sexual response cycle. On the “shared experience” side of the spectrum, “mutuality” was the buzzword in most responses, with a partner’s pleasure being just as key in one’s own pleasure—take that, orgasm gap.
(Image: A word-cloud created from the 760 definitions for sexual satisfaction.)
Rich Bellis comparesBreaking Bad to great works of literature, from Sophocles to Shakespeare. Todd Hasak-Lowy considers the show as a “symptom and cause” of actual literature’s increased marginalization:
[W]hat happens when we convince ourselves and others that Breaking Bad is, artistically speaking, on the level of, say, not just “Midnight Cowboy” and “The French Connection,” but Morrison’s Beloved or Roth’s American Pastoral or Delillo’s White Noise as well? How much better do we feel about regularly watching two or three Good TV shows (i.e. devoting three to six hours of our already too short week to TV) if we believe (and get others to agree with us) that we are participating in the best our culture has to offer? …
We watch Breaking Bad not merely because it is good, but because everyone’s talking about it. Who the hell talks about books anymore? I teach creative writing in an MFA program, and half the time it’s easier to talk about TV than books with my colleagues and students there. Not because no one’s reading there, not at all, it’s just nearly impossible these days for any particular book to become a Thing Of Consequence Happening Right Now In Our Culture.
Adelle Waldman assesses portrayals of female beauty in fiction:
Beauty is often treated as an essentially feminine subject, something trivial and frivolous that women are excessively concerned with. Men, meanwhile, are typically seen as having a straightforward and uncomplicated relationship with it: they are drawn to it. The implication is that this may be unfortunate—not exactly ideal morally—but it can’t be helped, because it’s natural, biological. This seems more than a little ironic. Women are not only subject to a constant and exhausting and sometimes humiliating scrutiny—they are also belittled for caring about their beauty, mocked for seeking to enhance or to hold onto their good looks, while men are just, well, being men.
The reality is, of course, far more complicated, as our best novelists show us. They train our gazes on men at not only their most shallow and status conscious but also at their most ridiculous (the clenched jaw). It’s not always easy to know what to make of these men, who certainly aren’t wholly bad. But in a world where women are so frequently judged by their looks, it’s refreshing to encounter male characters whose superficial thoughts are at least acknowledged by their creators.
The Dish 