Author: Andrew Sullivan

Avent thinks the unemployed are organizing:

What's happening now, with the increase in duration of unemployment, is that you're starting to get large numbers of people with good organisational skills and lots and lots of time on their hands. And they're spending enough time without jobs that they are beginning to self-identify as unemployed, and to form bonds with others in the same situation. This is a phenomenon that I don't think has been seen in America since Martin Luther King's marches against poverty in the 1960s, if not since the Depression, and it will be interesting to see what comes of it.

Damon Linker describes the composition of a purposeful life:

In the Aristotelian tradition of moral thinking, human beings don’t face a zero-sum choice between fulfillment and moral righteousness. They strive, instead, to fulfill a holistic vision of human flourishing that includes both happiness and nobility. Or rather, this vision of human flourishing treats happiness as inseparable from nobility. This is what Martin Seligman and the best of his colleagues in the positive psychology movement have in mind when they speak of the importance of “purpose” in a fulfilling human life.

A life spent in endless pursuit of egoistic self-satisfaction (Kant’s vision of corruption) would end in wretched desolation, but so would a life devoted purely to acts of exalted self-sacrifice (Kant’s moral ideal). A genuinely purposeful life, by contrast, is one in which an individual strives to become a good human being in the fullest sense—contented as much by work, career, and material reward as by devoting oneself to the flourishing of one’s children.

Michael Shermer continues to rebut Deepak Chopra:

Chopra’s use and abuse of quantum physics is what the Caltech quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann calls “quantum flapdoodle,” which consists of stringing together a series of terms and phrases from quantum physics and asserting that they explain something in our daily experience. But the world of subatomic particles has no correspondence with the world of Newtonian mechanics. They are two different physical systems at two different scales, and they are described by two different types of mathematics.

Chopra’s theology notwithstanding, the hydrogen atoms in the sun are not sitting around in a cloud of possibilities waiting for a cosmic mind to signal them to fuse together to form helium atoms and thereby to throw off heat and light for our planet. The ordinary laws of physics are sufficient for these purposes. If large enough, a cloud of hydrogen gas collapsing under the force of gravity reaches a critical point of pressure. Hydrogen atoms then fuse together into helium atoms and give off heat and light — and they would do so even if there were not a single mind in the entire cosmos to observe it.

Jonah Lehrer exercises his free will by writing a blog post.

This week author Anne Rice announced that she is no longer Christian:

I quit being a Christian. I'm out. In the name of Christ, I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist. I refuse to be anti-artificial birth control. I refuse to be anti-Democrat. I refuse to be anti-secular humanism. I refuse to be anti-science. I refuse to be anti-life. In the name of …Christ, I quit Christianity and being Christian. Amen .

Dreher won't accept this:

I'm sorry, but this is weak, and makes me wonder what really happened. Surely a woman of her age and experience cannot possibly believe that the entirety of Christianity, current and past, can be reduced to the cultural politics of the United States of America in the 21st century. Does she really know no liberal Christians? Has she never picked up a copy of Commonweal? Does she really think that if she asked a Christian on the streets of Nairobi or Tegucigalpa what they, as Christians, thought of Nancy Pelosi, they would have the slightest idea what she was talking about? And Christianity, anti-science? Good grief. Has she not noticed that Catholic Church, to which she did belong until yesterday, has affirmed evolution, and embraces science? How can a woman of her putative sophistication really think that Christianity is nothing more than a section of the Republican Party at prayer?

I tend to agree, but it does reveal the impact of Christianism in this culture to swamp and delegitimize actual Christianity. Dreher, of course, remains appalled by the neologism, regarding it as somehow anti-Christian. In fact, it's precisely an attempt to save the message of the Gospels from the menace of Republican cultural politics.

I'm still struck by how big a wave my little profile of more than twenty years ago still makes. If you're wondering who Ben Sherwood, he was, by all accounts, the biggest asshole among Rhodes Scholars in recent history. And I failed to stop his relentless career.

Earlier this week Atul Gawande hosted a live-chat on his article about hospice care:

The fundamental issue I found … was not the percentage of people at the margin who really do want to spend their last days on a ventilator with a feed tube and dialysis machine, or getting knocked down by a fourth round of chemotherapy with a minuscule chance of helping. Perhaps there ARE more of these folks in America than elsewhere. But the crucial problem is that for most people, this is misery. They don’t want this when they really get down to thinking and talking through it. The failure of our system is that we are not good at helping people sort out what is most important to them when they are dying and then helping them achieve it.

Natural law – morality, religion and politics. Bob Wright has a chat with Robby George: