Where’s Howard?
I’m on Twitter. One person I followed very early was Howard Rheingold. He’s an amazing guy. We had just a short email correspondence when I asked if I could use some of his social media tips for my PHIL 525 a couple of years ago. Well, I had the sense that I was missing a lot of his Tweets. When I went through my Twitter list today, well, one thing led to another and I found Howard again. Not so great news: a cancer diagnosis.
But as the academic gods would have it, he started a blog about his cancer (scroll down to the end of the page to get the very first post of the blog). I haven’t read it in its entirety, but the beginning part tied in perfectly with the theme of this semester’s PHIL 500 class: Dying, Death, and Immortality. Here’s what struck me — it’s at the very top of this page:
And what about living?Thinking about death led me fairly directly to thinking about living: “What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” is always a good question, but it does come up with a certain vivacity in the afterglow of a cancer diagnosis. My immediate and overriding objective in life, of course, is getting well. But what of the big picture? I don’t feel like defining my existence strictly by my particular medical adventures (and thanks to P+T for “adventure, not predicament.”) Although I am committed to full participation in getting well, as long as I have time and strength for other pursuits, I’m going to pursue them. But first, I needed to rethink my life’s course. I had used about half the fifteen minutes I had left until my friend arrived (remember — my thoughts of life and death took place in my hotel room between the moment I read the pathology report in email and the arrival of my friend for what had been planned as a night of cuisine and conversation in Paris.)
As evidence that I’ve been thinking for some time about Kierkegaard’s prescription that “life is not a problem to be solved but a reality to be experienced,” I doodled the image below at age 17 in 1964, during Professor Deegan’s religion course at Reed. He had Hodgkin’s disease and prohibited smoking in class, which irritated me at the time.
So, please visit his cancer blog as well as his other one. I’ve put off discussing the touchy-feely stuff I’ve been going through since the class started. Seeing his blog has given me a little courage to begin doing so.
When Sociologists Get Religion
As my students know, Durkheim, the “father of sociology”, had a great deal to say about religion. Some of it, from my point of view, helpful.
Sherkat, a professor of sociology at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, no longer has to worry about arguing for the key role of religion as a social force. As a new study has found, there has been a significant increase over the last 25 or so years not only in the quantity of work done by sociologists on religion, but also in how religion is treated in those studies. No longer is it assumed to be only a reflection of some other socioeconomic trend, but increasingly it is treated as the factor that may be central to understanding a given group of people.
When Sherkat published a paper in the 1990’s this was the response he received:
He remembers one telling him “this is garbage” for citing Weber’s views on the significance of religious values. “It can’t be religion” driving human behavior, the scholar told the then un-tenured Sherkat. “It’s got to be something else that caused the religion.”
Big change! Read the article from Inside Higher Ed here.
Religion and online games
I found this fascinating. Many years ago, for my PHIL 525 class, the Nature of Religious Experience, students selected topics and discussed how they thought it related to religious experience. Some made forum groups on Stephen King and the Nature of Religious Experience. Who knew? I clearly didn’t. I’ve never read any King. As far as I recall, no one discussed gaming.
Unsurprisingly, many game developers and publishers would rather stick a fork in a live power outlet than discuss religion in games, much less write it into a game with a role more complex than archetypal good-vs.-evil belief sets.
Minarets of Marseille
This in contrast to the recent Swiss ban on building any new minarets:
The minaret of the new Grand Mosque of Marseille, whose cornerstone will be laid here in April, will be silent — no muezzin, live or recorded, will disturb the neighborhood with the call to prayer. Instead, the minaret will flash a beam of light for a couple of minutes, five times a day.
Normally, the light would be green, for the color of Islam. But Marseille is a port, and green is reserved for signals to ships at sea. Red? No, the firefighters have reserved red.
Instead, said Noureddine Cheikh, the head of the Marseille Mosque Association, the light will almost surely be purple — a rather nightclubby look for such an elegant building.
…Youcef Mammeri, a writer on Islam in France and member of the Joint Council of Muslims of Marseille, says that the debates over minarets, burqas and national identity have angered many French-born Muslims and brought them together in a defensive circle.
This is a tough call. On the one hand, I’m all for religious tolerance. But on the other hand it seems that historical tradition should be respected, too. But then that also cuts both ways. Take Spain and its transformation from Islamic to Catholic rule. If we just go by “who was there first”, this would often thwart the natural flow of history, whether that “flow” came at the end of a sword or not. If Maryland had been settled by Muslims but over the past 50 years a vibrant Christian minority had flourished, should church towers and bells be banned in deference to the over 200 year history of a predominantly Muslim populace? Or if Maryland had been predominantly Catholic (which it was) but now Orthodox Jews were in the ascendancy, should synagogues and payos be banned?
The sad truth is that tensions between different cultures (even those that share the same religion) is practically inevitable especially when there’s a lack of sensitivity and understanding on both sides.
Why church isn’t the same as faith
This isn’t a news flash, but I enjoy seeing issues we discuss in class echoed in the media. Andrew Sullivan posts this quote from Paul Zahl who’s discussing the work of Emil Brunner (d. 1966). A reflection by Brunner’s former student bring this distinguished scholar to life. Here’s a little bit of the quote:
There is a collective dimension to this: all the early Christians experienced the same thing. Like alien abductees, the first Christians had a shattering experience in common. This brought them together. But this experience was not an institution.” – Paul Zahl,
Grace in Practice: A Theology of Everyday Life.
Watch Zahl speak about this book:
Echoes of Schleiermacher
I receive monthly greetings from a Benedictine abbot, Abbot Philip. He’s the Abbot of Christ in the Desert in New Mexico. They were the site of a Discovery Channel show in 2006.
I wrote and asked his permission to quote his recent letter. He said yes! I explained to him that much of his letter reminded me of what we’ve been reading in Schleiermacher’s On Religion. Here’s Abbot Philip’s letter and my comments.
Anne Rice’s return
I’ve re-checked out from the library Anne rice’s Called Out of Darkness: A Spiritual Confession
for probably the third time. This time I’m actually reading the book. I am not a fan of vampires so I “missed out” on the past few decades of Anne Rice hoopla. And, of course, now we’ve got that new “teeny-bopper” vampire trilogy (or more). Here Rice recounts her return to Catholicism.
The first two chapters are precious, in the best sense of the word. It recalls a kind of religious devotion and sensibility that is not at all a part of my religious vocabulary. Yet I can appreciate the palpable reality of her childhood faith. What’s interesting to me is that this period of her life was what she called “preliterate”. While I don’t remember not being able to read, Rice has memories of a rich inner and outer life unadulterated by the text.
The economics of Hell
Well, some may think that Economics is hell. But here’s a twist. Evidence suggests that a society’s belief in Hell affects their economy. Yeah, that’s what I thought!
A pair of Harvard researchers recently examined 40 years of data from dozens of countries, trying to sort out the economic impact of religious beliefs or practices. They found that religion has a measurable effect on developing economies – and the most powerful influence relates to how strongly people believe in hell.
More here. Another here looks at the economic malaise in many Islamic countries and their lack of religious pluralism.
Religion and violence
It’s sad that so much of contemporary discussion about religion centers on violence: the violence that is generated and sanctioned in the name of religion. Some critics of religion have argued that religion is inherent problematic. One such problem is its penchant for promulgating hatred and violence.
Along the lines of the Cohen article I cited, this blog post by Jeffrey Goldberg addresses another aspect of the acceptable range of civil discourse about religion and violence.
I am not arguing, of course, that American Muslims, as a whole, are violently unhappy with America (I’ve argued the opposite, in fact). But I do think that elite makers of opinion in this country try very hard to ignore the larger meaning of violent acts when they happen to be perpetrated by Muslims. Here’s a simple test: If Nidal Malik Hasan had been a devout Christian with pronounced anti-abortion views, and had he attacked, say, a Planned Parenthood office, would his religion have been considered relevant as we tried to understand the motivation and meaning of the attack? Of course. Elite opinion makers do not, as a rule, try to protect Christians and Christian belief from investigation and criticism. Quite the opposite. It would be useful to apply the same standards of inquiry and criticism to all religions.
Islam and creationism
The discovery of “Ardi” supports a creationist perspective? This isn’t what I’d have thought but apparently there is a rise of creationism in some Muslim communities.
But there is another creationist movement whose influence is growing, and which is fueling challenges to science in countries where Christianity has little sway: Islamic creationism. Campaigners in countries like Turkey, Lebanon, Egypt, and Indonesia have fought the teaching of evolution in schools there, sometimes with great success. Creationist conferences have been held in Pakistan, and moderate Islamic clerics are on record publicly condemning Darwin’s ideas. A recent study of Muslim university students in the Netherlands showed that most rejected evolution. And driven in part by a mysterious Turkish publishing organization, Islamic creationism books are hot sellers at bookstores throughout the Muslim world.