Month: April 2014

David Berreby spoke with Denise Herzing, a dolphin researcher who recently wrote a paper explaining the need for “a non-human biased definition and measure of intelligence.” How this will help as we explore the universe:

“I was thinking in terms of, Well, why do we want to know this, anyway?” Herzing told me. We might find a splendidly complex creature out there that has no interest in being sociable with its would-be friends from Earth. Grasping this could help us avoid unpleasant misunderstandings—like that moment at the end of Stanislaw Lem’s novel “Fiasco” where an astronaut, having hacked away at some unsightly mounds on the ground, comes to realize that the mounds are the intelligent aliens he was looking for.

Of course, it’s kind of discouraging to think the human race could spend so much hope and effort on the search for life only to find roving wave-lattices and other beings that won’t, or can’t, talk with us. But you can also see the expansion of our quest for intelligence as exhilarating. It raises the possibility that life out there will be interestingly, perhaps shockingly, different. The alternative possibility is that the problems of life and intelligence are the same everywhere, which means that evolution will keep converging on the same answer on Earth and on any other planet—and what could be less encouraging of space travel than the thought that the journey’s end would reveal more of the same? Better to wrestle at the edges of comprehension than to expect, as Wallace Stevens once wrote of Heaven, “that they should wear our colors there, and pluck the strings of our insipid lutes.”

Reviewing Charles Marsh’s Strange Glory: A Life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John G. Stackhouse, Jr. details the anti-Nazi theologian and pastor’s first visit to America and its “dramatic effects on his outlook and career”:

This is Marsh’s own turf: previous scholarship (including the Grawemeyer Award-winning book God’s Long Summer) prepared him well to understand and to relate something of the impact of Bonhoeffer’s encounter with black Christians in Harlem and during his travels in the South. Indeed, Marsh details well the change wrought in the rather fussy, elitist, and insulated young scion of the German haute bourgeoisie as Bonhoeffer encountered the likes of Adam Clayton Powell, Sr., his Abyssinian Baptist Church, and Negro spirituals and blues, as well as the indefatigable campaigner Reinhold Niebuhr; the combination of these forces called Bonhoeffer down from reflection in his ivory tower into action on the street.

This change is the guiding thrust of the book, in fact. Bonhoeffer never stops being the theological Wunderkind, but he is converted to a practical, even pragmatic, Christianity. He never loses his interest in the highest reaches of German idealistic philosophy (he is still reading Kant and lesser lights in Tegel prison), but he increasingly asks questions about religion on the ground, and in the future. “The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask,” Marsh quotes Bonhoeffer saying in one of his most famous lines, “is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live.”

Previous Dish on Bonhoeffer here and here.

(Image via Wikimedia Commons)

“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books. All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook – even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it. Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny. They thought that they were as completely opposed as two sides could be, but in fact they were all the time secretly united – united with each other and against earlier and later ages – by a great mass of common assumptions.

We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century – the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’ – lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H.G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books,” – C.S. Lewis, in his introduction to Saint Athanasius’ On the Incarnation.

Rafaella Marcus began to have doubts about her Catholicism when she was thirteen years old. She shares her experience of losing religion, yet maintaining a different kind of faith:

I grow older still and I realise that though I myself do not believe in the mass, that I utter the creed and the Our Father as a formality only, that formality is important to people around me. I wonder how my mother faith’s makes way for her ready acceptance of my cousin’s coming out, her openly pro-choice stance, her frank (too frank) discussions with me about contraception. When my eighty year old Italian Catholic Nana attends the civil partnership ceremony between my cousin and her wife, loves their children (her great-grandchildren!) with the same unreserved love as she has for any of the others, I can only come to the conclusion that belief is complicated beyond … well, beyond belief. I see now that rules bend for love and that, perhaps, is the grace I was looking for at the age of thirteen on that Saturday evening, in that church.

And I realise, along the way, that it is not God I have outgrown at all, but only the religion I grew up in. Now that I am at least a little grown up, I no longer go to church except at Christmas and Easter, and the transition has been soft and simple and has hurt no-one. … I no longer define my faith – neither an atheist, nor an agnostic, nor a lapsed Catholic – for why would I need to? It ebbs and absorbs the tragedy, it grows as I grow. There is so much more to living well, I find, than simply being good.

As a young man, Nick Ripatrazone considered becoming a Roman Catholic priest, but after meeting his wife in college, he realized his calling was to be a husband and father – and writer. He now sees that writing and faith share more than he once thought:

I want to bear witness to a sacramental vision. I want to admit my life as a sinner. Rather than judge others, I want to use empathy to sketch their imperfect lives on the page, and find the God that I know resides within them. Similar to the life of a priest, there is a space for silence in my writing life, but also a time of engagement with both reader and place.

I write from a Catholic worldview, but don’t often write about clergy or Catholic schools. Father Joe taught me that lesson, and thankfully, I listened. For me, writing is a form of prayer. I recognize that time spent at my desk can devolve into hours of selfishness, so I need to earn those words. Good fiction can be a form of good works. As a Catholic, I recognize that life is a story of continuous revision, of failure and unexpected grace, and of dogged hope. I am comfortable with the white space of ambiguity and mystery. I have faith, not certainty. To approach God in any other manner deflates the divine. I write and I believe in order to better see the world. Now, more than a decade after I left that rectory convinced I was meant to become a father and not a Father, a writer and not a pastor, I finally realize that I have not traded one vocation for another. I have discovered their common source.