Month: October 2014

Kimberly Winston analyzes Christianity’s “on-again, off-again relationship with the beard”:

St. Augustine wrote: “The beard signifies the courageous; the beard distinguishes the grown men, the earnest, the active, the vigorous.” But around 1000 A.D., the Canons of Edgar forbade clerical beards, declaring “Let no man in holy orders conceal his tonsure, nor let himself be misshaven nor keep his beard for any time, if he will have God’s blessing and St. Peter’s and ours.” And as for cleanliness (of face) being next to godliness, the Franciscans equate the beard with manliness. “The Friars shall wear the beard, after the example of Christ most holy,” their constitution reads, “since it is something manly, natural, severe, despised and austere.”

Ditto for the Eastern Orthodox, where a clergyman’s beard is seen as a sign of his devotion to God.

Orthodox Christians frequently cite Numbers 6:5 for their beards: “a razor shall not come upon his head, until the days be fulfilled which he vowed to the Lord: he shall be holy, cherishing the long hair of the head all the days of his vow to the Lord.” Today, beards are super popular among Christian hipsters. Exhibit A:Bearded Gospel Men, a blog for Christian men with big beards. Last year, Christianity Today published a handy-dandy guide to parsing a Christian man’s theology, denomination and profession by the cut of his beard.

(Photo: This fourth-century mural painting from Rome’s catacombs of Commodilla is one of earliest known images of a bearded Christ. Earlier Christian art in Rome portrayed Jesus as the Good Shepherd disguised as Orpheus: young, beardless, and in a short tunic. During the fourth century, Jesus started to be depicted as a man of identifiably Jewish appearance, with a full beard and long hair, a style not usually worn by Romans. Via Wikimedia Commons.)

Merill Miller asks, “What would it mean for belief – or non-belief – if we discovered the existence of extraterrestrial life?”

This question is central to the premise of a new book, Religions and Extraterrestrial Life: How Will We Deal with It? by David Weintraub, an astronomy professor at Vanderbilt University. The book examines the stances, if any, of the world’s major religions in regards to the possibility of life beyond our own planet. Wintraub reports that one-fifth to one-third of Americans believe that alien life exists, and with the exponential increase in the discovery of new planets, finding one that would harbor living beings seems more and more likely.

However, not all Americans are quick to embrace the idea of extraterrestrials. While Weintraub found that 55 percent of atheists felt that the existence of aliens was possible, his book also states that evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are the least likely of any religious group in the United States to embrace the thought that life may exist beyond Earth. An article on Futurity examines this reticence of fundamentalists Christians to believe in aliens in terms of salvation – Christian concepts of original sin and the need for atonement through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross would be complicated by the existence of otherworldly beings who may or may not require the same redemption.

But as Megan Gannon notes, “some Christians who interpret the Bible quite literally might actually have an easier time incorporating the existence of aliens into their spiritual cosmology”:

Many Seventh-day Adventists, for example, are creationists who believe the Earth was literally created by God in six days some 6,000 years ago and that humans descended — and inherited original sin — from Adam and Eve. In that line of thinking, life could exist on other planets, but beings that didn’t descend from Adam and Eve on Earth wouldn’t be inherently sinful, and effectively, they wouldn’t need Christianity to be saved, Weintraub told Live Science.

Seventh-day Adventism’s flexibility with regard to aliens might be a product of the time in which the religion was founded (the 19th century). During the 1700s and 1800s, there was a strong popular belief in extraterrestrial life, Weintraub said. The telescope (a relatively recent invention) finally allowed astronomers to peek at other planets and moons in our solar system, but scientists didn’t yet fully understand that these celestial bodies were barren. And perhaps it’s no coincidence that the religions that began at that time — Mormonism, Seventh-day Adventism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Baha’i Faith — all have a strong belief in extraterrestrial life, Weintraub said. In contrast, the notion of extraterrestrial life was for the most part irrelevant to religions that began thousands of years ago.

But more ancient religious traditions might be coming around. Last month, the head of the Vatican Observatory Foundation, Guy Consolmagno, declared the discovery of alien life basically inevitable.

Brandon Ambrosino flags a new survey suggesting that “among praying adults [in the US], 1 in 4 say God answers all their prayers, and 37 percent say God answers some of them. Only 3 percent of those who pray think God answers none of them”:

Religious people aren’t the only ones praying. A Pew study from 2013 found that more than 1 in 5 religiously unaffiliated, or “nones,” said they pray daily. This trend is particularly evident among Millennials, as I recently reported. According to a study out earlier this year from Carnegie Mellon University’s Integrated Innovation Institute, while only 52 percent of Millennials look to religion for guidance, 62 percent of them say they talk privately to God. This suggests that Millennials aren’t giving up on God — more of them are just cutting out the middleman and going straight to God with their prayers.

As for what Americans are praying for, LifeWay reports that 74 percent pray for their own needs and difficulties, and 42 percent pray for “my own sin.” The study also found that Americans are generous with their prayers: 82 percent pray for friends and family, and 38 percent pray for those who’ve experienced natural disasters. People who pray seem less concerned with praying for politicians (12 percent) and celebrities (5 percent).

Morgan Lee has more:

One-third of Americans said they pray several times a day, and 17 percent pray once per day. Less than one in five say they never pray. Among Protestants, 61 percent pray at least daily, and 43% several times a day.

Who prays? Men are less likely to talk to God than women: one in five say they never pray (22 percent), vs. 1 in 10 women (11 percent). Roughly 20 percent of whites (19 percent) and Hispanics (20 percent) say they never pray; in contrast, only five percent of African Americans say the same.

Drum snickers that his favorite result “is the 5 percent of respondents who prayed for success in something they knew wouldn’t please God”:

This is great. Apparently these folks are more willing to be honest with a telephone pollster than with God despite the fact that God already knows. If it displeases Him, then that’s that. You aren’t going to fool Him into making it happen anyway. I’m also intrigued by the 20 percent who prayed for success in something they “put almost no effort in.” That’s fabulous! Not that they did it, mind you. That’s just human nature. But that they were willing to fess up to this to a telephone pollster. Is there anything people aren’t willing to confide to telephone pollsters?

John Gray heralds Karen Armstrong “one of our most perceptive and thoughtful writers on religion” in a review of her book Fields of Blood:

Armstrong performs an invaluable service by showing that religion is not the uniquely violent force demonized by secular thinkers. Yet neither is religion intrinsically peaceful—a benign spiritual quest compromised and perverted by its involvement with power. The potential for violence exists in faith-based movements of all kinds, secular as well as religious. Evangelical atheists splutter with fury when reminded that a war on religion was an integral part of some of the 20th century’s worst regimes. How can anyone accuse a movement devoted to reason and free inquiry of being implicated in totalitarian oppression? It is a feeble-minded and thoroughly silly response, reminiscent of that of witless believers who ask how a religion of love could possibly be held to account for the horrors of the Inquisition.

Conventional distinctions between religious and secular belief pass over the role that belief itself plays in our lives.

“We are meaning-seeking creatures,” Karen Armstrong writes wisely, “and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives.” We are unlike our animal kin in another way. Only human beings kill and die for the sake of beliefs about themselves and the nature of the world. Looking for sense in their lives, they attack others who find meaning in beliefs different from their own. The violence of faith cannot be exorcised by demonizing religion. It goes with being human.

In another positive review, David Shariatmadari draws on Armstrong’s writing to interpret the current conflict with ISIS:

Armstrong begins and ends her book with reflections on the scapegoat – the animal burdened with the sins of the community and sent out into the desert. She argues that we, in the secular, rational west, have become incapable of properly acknowledging our own ferocious violence. The madmen are the ones who believe in a man in the sky, who strap on suicide belts imagining that they will be rewarded with virgins in heaven – not we, who debate and legislate and only then slam hellfire missiles into wedding parties.

But what of Islamic State? Theology motivates its actions; that theology derives from the Qur’an. Surely this is religious violence. In a narrow sense, yes. However, it represents a grossly mutated version of a doctrine that survives in much of the world in its original form as a stabilising, communitarian practice. To extend the analogy of the virus: we know that environmental stress accelerates mutation in the natural world. The faith communities subjected to the most stress over the past two centuries are those of Middle Eastern and subcontinental Islam; as Armstrong sets out in grim detail, its members have endured colonisation, the expropriation of land, authoritarian rule and military occupation. Could these stressors come to be seen as the greater cause?

None of which is to excuse the revolting acts of Islamic State fanatics. In this arena, the tendency for attempts to explain and understand to be taken as acts of apology is deeply frustrating. But we must not turn our backs on history, which is the only way the arguments set out by the likes of Sam Harris and Tony Blair make sense. The urge to blame others is strong, and old, as the ritual of the scapegoat shows. The first step towards extirpating it is to acknowledge it. In her efforts to bring this about, Armstrong is doing us a great service.

Previous Dish on Armstrong’s book here and here.

(Video: Tom Sutcliffe interviews Armstrong)

Amena Bakr takes note of a new phenomenon on the hajj:

It’s one of the biggest trends taking over the social media world, and now during the annual Muslim hajj pilgrimage visitors to the holy sites can’t resist the urge to take a selfie. Between calls for forgiveness from God, the word “selfie” echoes through the white marble halls inside the Grand Mosque in Mecca where pilgrims walk around the Kaaba, the black-clad cube towards which the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims face to pray,

“I’m taking a selfie with Kaaba behind me to post on my Facebook so my family and friends can see me. That’s the way we communicate these days – no need to call,” said Mehmet Dawoud, a Turkish student. To many, selfies are just another way to preserve the memory of being in a holy site and also share the experience in the trendiest of ways with loved ones. “Selfies are just a way to make the memory last in the coolest possible way. Hajj is always seen as something very serious and for older people. Selfies make it cool again,” said Amir Marouf, a 30-year-old Egyptian architect.

Antoinette Lattouf ties the trend to to the Saudi government’s decision to allow cell phones at the Holy Mosque. But John Bowman raises an eyebrow, noting that the most widely read article about the “craze” was published before the Hajj even started :

Can #Hajjselfie beat the #OscarSelfie in Retweets ? Lets RT this To infinity #Muslim and say #mashAllah pic.twitter.com/WQANJ5m8Hh

— Somalia Pundit (@SomPundit) April 30, 2014

Here’s now it happened. Saudi photographer Jameel Musleh posted [the above] selfie to Twitter in April. The pilgrims shown in the photo may have been on the lesser pilgrimage, the umrah, that can be performed at any time of year, says Fareed Amin, the president of the Islamic Institute of Toronto. This photo has been retweeted and reposted thousands of times.One Twitter user dubbed it the #selfieoftheyear. Another tried to get the photo more retweets than Ellen DeGeneres’s Oscar selfie. This may be where the hashtag and name #HajjSelfie originated.

The meme was persistent enough that last week, ArabNews.com wrote an article ahead of the hajj, quoting Islamic studies teachers and scholars who advised against “photography without a legitimate reason.” The story used the above umrah photo was illustration. “The Prophet (peace be upon him) when he went for Haj, he said: O Allah, I ask of you a pilgrimage that contains no boasting or showing of. Taking such selfies and videos defy the wish of our Prophet,” said scholar Sheikh Assim Al-Hakeem in that article. This led to a discussion among Muslims on social media. The Twitter account @MuslimMatters put the question to its followers.

What do you think of the #hajj selfie? Ruins tranquility or a sign of the times?

— Muslim Matters (@MuslimMatters) September 30, 2014

When Buzzfeed got a hold of the story, it became Muslim Pilgrims Are Taking “Hajj Selfies” And Clerics Are Not Happy. “‘Selfie fever’ has taken over the hajj,” they wrote, proclaiming it a “craze” before it even occurred.

Meanwhile, Boer Deng looks into another way new media is engaging with ancient tradition:

The prototype for a new app, Mecca 3D, was released this summer, and lets users explore a true-to-scale digital rendition of the Mosque at Mecca. It has been downloaded about 80,000 times on Android and iOS, according to its creator, Bilal Chbib.* He hopes to add interactive lessons and to integrate the program with Oculus Rift, a virtual reality simulator. Going on a technologically mediated pilgrimage might resemble the experience of a flight simulator. “You can never substitute the place where the Prophet stood,” as Chbib says. But virtual participation in religious activities can still give people an authentic experience, though of a different sort. Krystina Derrickson, an Islamic scholar, writes of visiting Mecca in the virtual world program Second Life: “When my ‘avatar’ visits the Mosque, I feel compelled to take off my avatar’s shoes,” she says, “because, really, it’s me visiting that Mosque.” The Mosque is not real, but that does not mean it lacks “a rather noticeable social and cultural reality.” Derrickson thinks that this gives it and other digital religious spaces a kind of “ambiguous” sacredness.

(Photo: Muslim pilgrims pose for a selfie during the Jamarat ritual, the stoning of Satan, in Mina near the holy city of Mecca, on October 4, 2014. Pilgrims pelt pillars symbolizing the devil with pebbles to show their defiance on the third day of the hajj as Muslims worldwide mark the Eid al-Adha or the Feast of the Sacrifice, marking the end of the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca and commemorating Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ismail on God’s command in the holy city of Mecca. By Mohammed Al-Shaikh/AFP/Getty Images)

Like previous critics, Michelle Orange emphasizes the role of grace in Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Lila:

Robinson’s genius is for making indistinguishable the highest ends of faith and fiction, evoking in her characters and her readers the paradox by which an individual, enlarged by the grace of God, or art, acquires selfhood in acquiring a sense of the world beyond the self—the sublime apprehension that other people exist.

Which is to say that Robinson’s animating theme—grace—is also central to her genius. Described as “a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials,” grace is evidenced in both the particular and the abstract: as laughter, a beloved face or voice, or as “playing catch in a hot street . . . leaping after a high throw and that wonderful collaboration of the whole body with itself”; but also in forgetting “all the tedious particulars,” in feeling the presence of a “mortal and immortal being.” “A character is really the sense of a character,” Robinson has written, and hers suggest, above the particulars, how the mysteries of grace persist in human beings, those wanting creatures who move Ames with their incandescence, the presence “shaped around ‘I’ like a flame on a wick, emanating itself in grief and guilt and joy and whatever else.”

Wyatt Mason focuses on how Robinson’s characters approach self-understanding:

She documents how Lila’s mind changes, not owing to the efforts of some external force but out of a righteous need of her own: to understand her husband, to speak his language, to forge a language of her own that will be spoken with, to, and for him and for them.

One of the book’s most telling passages involves watching Lila’s mind as she sits in her house, pregnant, reading the Book of Job, registering the lines and considering them. The act of reading the Bible as high drama may seem unlikely, but through it, Robinson has managed to portray how a mind with no religiosity might meet a book Robinson loves fiercely and, in its pages, find a road to a self that learns a new language: her own language. As it turns out, there is extraordinary drama in the story of how we learn to speak to ourselves.

In a recent interview, Robinson addressed this connection between faith and language:

As you write, do you draw on language found in your faith? What are the strengths of religious language, or what are the limitations of language when it comes to talking about faith and belief?

Language is limited in its nature. It’s like consciousness itself. It’s defective, and you can push at it. You can make it do things you wouldn’t have known it can do. One of the things that is a benefit to me is that, because I have been interested in a particular theology, it makes a coherent language. It’s internally self-referential, in a way. This could be true of anyone who is deeply acquainted with any tradition. This particular tradition was very verbal, so you have a very rich literature that pushes the articulation of certain basic ideas.

We have anxiety about differences. We are different, anyway, so we might as well calm down about it. But one of the things that we have to do is understand that within the system that is anyone’s difference is incredibly enabling. It means people before me have pondered the response to death. People before me have pondered the reality of time in different dialects. This is beautiful. This is not a thing to be anxious about. For my own Calvinistic purposes, I would like to see the tradition that I speak from re-animated, fleshed out. It’s human, it’s experience. Only religion fully realizes the arc of human life, and so much beautiful thought has gone into this over our eons of time.

Recent Dish on Lila here.