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More Than 39 Articles
When your patron saint is Francis of Assisi, you take an interest in everything from slugs* to stars. Hence, this page's title: More Than 39 Articles, as in The 39 Articles of Religion. The titles in a post link to original articles. Consumer alert: No words of our own are used to make this tumblelog feature. *That's a sea slug top left, a nudibranch winking at you. 
February 21, 2008
by W. H. Auden
Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.
How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
"If God created man, then the laws of man’s spiritual nature must, like the laws of his physical nature, be laws — laws, that is to say, which he is free to defy but no more free to break than he can break the law of gravity by jumping out of the window, or the laws of biochemistry by getting drunk — and the consequences of defying them must be as inevitable and as intrinsically related to their nature as a broken leg or a hangover. To state spiritual laws in the imperative — Thou shalt love God with all thy being, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself — is simply a pedagogical technique, as when a mother says to her small son, 'Stay away from the window!' because the child does not yet know what will happen if he falls out of it."
February 20, 2008
Researchers at the University of Oxford will spend £1.9 million investigating why people believe in God. Academics have been given a grant to try to find out whether belief in a deity is a matter of nature or nurture.
They will not attempt to solve the question of whether God exists but they will examine evidence to try to prove whether belief in God conferred an evolutionary advantage to mankind. They will also consider the possibility that faith developed as a byproduct of other human characteristics, such as sociability.
Researchers at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion and the Centre for Anthropology and Mind in Oxford will use the cognitive science disciplines to develop “a scientific approach to why we believe in God and other issues around the nature and origin of religious belief”.
The cognitive sciences, or the science of mind and intelligence, combine disciplines such as evolutionary biology, neuroscience, linguistics and computer sciences to examine human behaviour.
Some evolutionists contend that morality and religion arise, evolve, and persist according to Darwinian principles. Religion, they say, has survival value for individuals and communities. But this alleged survival value, even if it be real, tells us nothing about the truth or falsity of any moral or religious system. Since questions of this higher order cannot be answered by science, philosophy and theology still have an essential role to play.
Justin Barrett, an evolutionary psychologist now at Oxford, is also a practicing Christian. He believes that an all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly good God crafted human beings to be in loving relationship with him and with one another. “Why wouldn’t God,” he asks, “design us in such a way as to find belief in divinity quite natural?” Even if these mental phenomena can be explained scientifically, the psychological explanation does not mean that we should stop believing. “Suppose that science produces a convincing account for why I think my wife loves me,” he writes. “Should I then stop believing that she does?”
A metaphysics of knowledge can take us further in the quest for religious truth. It can give reasons for thinking that the natural tendency to believe in God, manifest among all peoples, does not exist in vain. Biology and psychology can examine the phenomena from below. But theology sees them from above, as the work of God calling us to himself in the depths of our being. We are, so to speak, programmed to seek eternal life in union with God, the personal source and goal of everything that is true and good. This natural desire to gaze upon him, while it may be suppressed for a time, cannot be eradicated.
A woman believed to be the last native speaker of the
Eyak language in the north-western US state of Alaska has died at the age of 89.
Marie Smith Jones was a champion of indigenous rights and conservation. She died at her home in Anchorage.
She helped the University of Alaska compile an Eyak dictionary, so that future generations would have the chance to resurrect it.
Nearly 20 other native Alaskan languages are at risk of disappearing.
Ms Jones is described by her family as a tiny chain smoking woman who was fiercely independent, says the BBC's Peter Bowes in Los Angeles.
"To the best of our knowledge, she was the last full-blooded Eyak alive," her daughter Bernice Galloway told the Associated Press news agency.
"She was a woman who faced incredible adversity in her life and overcame it. She was about as tenacious as you can get."
She believed passionately in preserving the Eyak language and wanted a written record of it to be kept so for future generations, our correspondent adds.
The Eyak ancestral homeland runs along almost 500km (300 miles) of the Gulf of Alaska.
With her husband, a white Oregon fisherman, Ms Jones had nine children, seven of whom are still alive. But none of them learned Eyak because they grew up at a time when it was considered wrong to speak anything but English, her daughter said. According to Michael Krauss, a linguist and professor with whom she worked, "she was very much alone as the last speaker of Eyak" for the last 15 years.
February 19, 2008
[Above: Aurora over Michigan, Lake Superior] There is always auroral activity somewhere over the earth. But its strength and extent vary hugely, according to what the sun has been hurling at us in preceding days. Flares that release energy bursts as powerful as millions of volcanic eruptions and coronal mass ejections that send hurricane blasts of ten billion tons of plasma into space figure more often during active parts of the solar cycle.
[Left: Aurora over Arizona] The sun, like the earth and most of the planets, is a huge magnet, with its own force field stretching far beyond it. This gets twisted into a spiral by the sun's rotation, and within it the solar wind particles course along magnetic field lines that channel their movements. The eye-catching computer graphics Deehr showed me were an attempt to model the path of that energy from the sun to beyond the Earth.
As they zoom toward near-earth space, the particle streams hit the edge of our planet's own magnetic
sheath — the magnetosphere. Deflected by the magnetosphere, like water meeting a rock, the solar wind swirls past earth and then pushes in again on the night side, squeezing the magnetosphere and elongating it into a comet-shaped tail. On the day side, the magnetosphere grows when the solar breeze is light and shrinks in a solar gale.
[Left: Aurora over Manitoba; Right: Aurora over Alaska] Charged particles that get trapped in the "magnetotail," which may stretch millions of miles, can be sent hurtling back toward earth. Then, in a variety of possible ways not yet fully understood, some eventually rain down into the upper atmosphere over the polar regions—the places where our protective magnetic envelope is most open to space.Auroral light comes largely from electrons hitting oxygen and nitrogen atoms and molecules in the upper atmosphere, the same phenomenon that produces the glow in a neon lighting tube. But in the aurora the illumination can be 600 miles (965.6 kilometers) high, stretch for thousands of miles, and be linked to a magnetospheric power generator churning out three million megawatts or more—about four times the electricity the United States uses at peak summer demand.
February 18, 2008
This book is a piece of sheer heaven. It kicks Richard Dawkins’s self-aggrandising polemic, The God Delusion, into touch with featherlight footwork and is deliciously wise, witty and intellectually sharp into the bargain.
John Cornwell’s mouthpiece is a likeable seraph, who follows the dictum of G. K. Chesterton that angels fly “because they take themselves lightly”. Cornwell clearly believes, as I do, that angels are not wispy, winged beings in ethereal nightgowns, but something far more subtle and profound: archetypal images that dramatise the invisible realities. As such, they can act as symbols for the formless elements of physics; but also for the creative imagination.
The seraph begins by politely nailing Dawkins’s first sleight of hand which, as loads of people have now pointed out, dishonestly bundles all religious belief and practice into one crude bag that supposedly equals fanaticism.
This is rather like suggesting that all science is dangerous because it has brought nuclear weapons; or that all education is mistaken because children have been whipped by so-called educators.
It is child’s play to denounce a subject by pointing to the myriad ways in which it may be misapplied; misuse and misapplication are rife in all areas of human understanding: politics, science, education, medicine, religion. But it is faulty logic to conclude that this is necessarily the fault of the set of ideas being traduced. I attended a primary school where the strap was still applied. Does it follow that I should not have attended primary school? Is psychiatry a bad thing because schizophrenics were once made to take bromide?
February 17, 2008
‘‘Play ethos’’ comes from Peter Smith, a psychology professor at the University of London and a leading authority on play’s effect on children’s emotional development. He uses it as a cautionary term, a reminder that most conclusions about play’s adaptive function have so far been based not on scientific evidence but on wishful thinking.
For Smith to suggest that scientists have fallen under the spell of the play ethos is a kind of apostasy, because some of the earliest bits of evidence used to establish the play ethos in the first place came out of Smith’s own laboratory at the University of London in the late 1970s. But it was in the execution of those experiments, and the follow- up studies that revealed their fatal flaw, that Smith came to understand, more than most, the importance of caution.
In one of his early experiments, Smith and his colleagues put 3- and 4-year-olds in two different play settings. In one group the children were allowed to play, in whatever way they felt like, with several wooden sticks. In the other group they were shown by an adult ‘‘play tutor’’ how to fit two sticks together to make a longer one. Then the children were given two tasks. First they had to retrieve a marble by connecting two sticks. Both groups performed this task, which Smith called ‘‘direct’’ problem solving, about equally well. Then they had to retrieve a marble that had been pushed farther away, so they could reach it only by connecting three sticks, not just two — what Smith called ‘‘innovative’’ problemsolving. The children who had played with the sticks performed this task significantly better than the ones who had been shown how to join together only two sticks.
‘‘At this point I was happy,’’ Smith recalled years later, writing in ‘‘The Future of Play Theory.’’ His findings were taken as evidence that spontaneous free play led to more creative thinking. But then he started to wonder whether he himself had fallen victim to the play ethos.
A single investigator had conducted the entire experiment, serving as both play tutor and evaluator on the problem-solving task. Might the experimenter subconsciously have favored the free-play children, Smith asked himself, maybe by giving subtle nonverbal cues or scoring more leniently? He ran the experiment again, bringing in a second investigator who could test the children without knowing whether they were in the free-play or the tutored group.
This time Smith found no difference in innovative problem solving between the two groups. At first he didn’t believe his new results, thinking that maybe the sample size was too small or that the groups were somehow poorly matched. But further studies bore out this nonfinding, and Smith realized, on reflection, that he and his colleagues had probably been giving inadvertent hints to the free-play group the first time around. He ascribed it to his own subconscious idealization of play.
Idealization is a trap. And it seems most seductive when it comes to play, especially one particular kind: pretend play. This is the kind ethologists tend to ignore, since it is difficult to argue — though a few scientists have tried — that animals are capable of pretending. Yet for humans, pretend play is one of the most crucial forms of play, occupying at its peak at about age 4 some 20 percent of a child’s day. It includes some of the most wondrous moments of childhood: dramatic play, wordplay, ritual play, symbolic play, games, jokes and imaginary friends. And it is the kind of play that positively screams out for hyperbole when outsiders try to describe it. This is where even coolheaded scientists get florid in their prose — and where play advocates like Stuart Brown and play skeptics like Peter Smith engage in their most vivid disagreements about the ultimate purpose of play.
In my quest to find Sir Edmund in New Zealand, I called a journalist there. Might he tell me where I could find someone who had Hillary's telephone number? Just a minute, he said. Oh, have you got it, I asked? No, he replied, it's just right here in the phone book. That's right. Anybody could ring up the greatest citizen of the country, the guy on the five-dollar bill, the hero who stood first on the top of the world.That probably says as much about what Sir Edmund was like as anything does.
The reason the Hillarys were in Katmandu is because after Sir Edmund became famous for conquering the sacred peak that the people there call Chomolungma, he kept coming back to Nepal all his life to help the people and the land. It became his second quest in Nepal.
At first, when he came down from the summit in May of 1953, many Nepalese didn't embrace Hillary, the outsider who had breached their peak. Hillary made sure to say that Norgay had reached the top a few steps before him. Just before he died in 1986, Norgay finally wrote the truth, that Hillary had in fact been first, and Hillary substantiated that.
But, he was quick to tell me, "Believe me, to mountaineers, who's first is not important. We're a team."
In fact, he admitted that he'd felt a little guilty days before when he wasn't sure whether he really wanted his friends, Tom Bourdillon and Charles Evans, to make it to the top first. They had to turn back barely 300 feet short. "I wasn't very proud of my feelings," Hillary admitted to me, ruefully patting the old cat in his lap.
Two days later, Hillary and his teammate made it, and all things considered, I'd have to say that I think God picked the right guy to first stand so close to heaven on earth.
February 16, 2008
The George Washington Birthday Celebration Committee is one of the very oldest community organizations in Alexandria. From the time of the Revolutionary War, the people of this City have celebrated the birthday of George Washington. Whether through marching in parades, reenacting historic events, musical performances, or dancing at the birthnight balls, our citizens consider an annual remembrance of the Father of Our Country to be important and worthwhile.
From David McCullough's 2003 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities
One might also say that history is not about the past. If you think about it, no one ever lived in the past. Washington, Jefferson, John Adams, and their contemporaries didn't walk about saying, "Isn't this fascinating living in the past! Aren't we picturesque in our funny clothes!" They lived in the present. The difference is it was their present, not ours. They were caught up in the living moment exactly as we are, and with no more certainty of how things would turn out than we have...
Those we call the Founders were living men. None was perfect. Each had his human flaws and failings, his weaknesses. They made mistakes, let others down, let themselves down...
Washington had a passionate love of architecture and interior design. Everything about his home at Mt. Vernon was done to his ideas and plans. Only a year before the war, he began an ambitious expansion of the house, doubling its size. How extremely important this was to him, the extent of his esthetic sense, few people ever realized. He cared about every detail—wall paper, paint color, hardware, ceiling ornaments—and hated to be away from the project even for a day....
Washington, though less inclined to speculate on such matters, considered education of surpassing value, in part because he had had so little. Once, when a friend came to say he hadn't money enough to send his son to college, Washington agreed to help—providing a hundred pounds in all, a sizable sum then—and with the hope, as he wrote, that the boy's education would "not only promote his own happiness, but the future welfare of others …." For Washington, happiness derived both from learning and employing the benefits of learning to further the welfare of others.
To hear McCullough on NPR talking about his magisterial book 1776, click here.
Jim Denevan performs drawings—making temporary sculptures on the sandy beaches of Northern California. Using only a stick and a rake, Denevan's work is monumental in scale but as fleeting as any live performance. Spark tails Denevan in San Francisco and Santa Cruz as he composes two sand works and talks about his meditations and his process.It was Denevan's passion for surfing that led to his vision of the beach as a blank canvas. The shapes he fashions—spirals and other simple geometrics—are familiar, yet their scale and location are particular and proportions amazingly precise. The drawings exist for a few precious hours before they are erased by the incoming tides, and one has to view the drawings from 150 feet up or more in order to see them in their entirety.
Denevan considers process an integral part of his artwork and chooses his locations thoughtfully. In his mind, every step is a kind of temporary sculpture.
Denevan then walks for miles, leading his chosen drawing stick in a dance performed to the music of the ocean and the spirit of the place. Denevan says, "My movement has a present. And then where I want to be, that's the future. ... Then the line has a past."
February 15, 2008
The Book of Psalms is the great oasis in which a desert people
gathers to pour out its complaints, fears, hopes; the Psalms are prayers, songs, incantations, and perhaps even soliloquies. In them, the supplicants invoke God as their light, their water, their warrior, their scourge, their buckler, their rod, and their staff. But these images, these human metaphors, also expose the frailty of such supplication, since just as God is conjured into words he seems to disappear: many of the Psalms are like flares sent out into the night sky of appeal. Jesus cried out at his abandonment on the Cross by quoting the opening verse of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” The verses continue:
Far from my rescue are the words that I roar.
My God, I call out by day and You do not answer,
by night—no stillness for me.
The famous beginning of Psalm 19 announces that the heavens declare the glory of God and the sky declares his handiwork. Eighteenth-century deists were fond of these verses, because they seem to argue that we can infer God’s existence from the glorious evidence of his creation. But the psalm uncomfortably changes course a moment later:
Day to day breathes utterance and night to night pronounces knowledge.
There is no utterance and there are no words,
their voice is never heard.
Now the psalmist seems to say that, if the heavens speak anything, it is not language but possibly only a highly visual silence. Almost three thousand years before such modern doubt, we are briefly in the world of Melville, who complained of “that profound Silence, that only Voice of our God,” asking “how can a man get a Voice out of Silence?” This struggle between faith and doubt, hope and despair, is undoubtedly one of the features that have made the Psalms such a help to so many readers and writers, both believers and nonbelievers—and especially to Christians, who have appropriated this book like no other in the Hebrew Bible. The seventeenth-century poet George Herbert perfectly captures this dappled texture in his psalmlike poem “Bitter-Sweet”:
Ah my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.
Like it's done so many times before, U2 has upped the ante in terms of the concert experience—this time on the big screen.
"U2 3D" is a groundbreaking work that translates a live concert to the cinema like no other film that has come before. It's such a thoroughly enthralling production that, in some ways, an actual U2 concert pales in comparison.
There are no revealing backstage moments or insightful interviews like one finds in many concert documentaries, just 85 minutes of terrific songs performed by one of the greatest live bands of all time. Yet, the true victory of this film isn't what's presented as much as it is how its presented.
"U2 3D" is being billed as the "first-ever live-action digital 3-D film" and it's being shown on huge IMAX screens. The combination of all those factors, plus the booming 5.1 surround sound stereo system, makes it seem like Bono and the boys are performing one row in front of you. You simply can't buy an actual concert ticket that would provide the same sensation. There are times when, say, Adam Clayton swings the neck of his bass near the camera lens and the viewer feels like ducking. In other moments, Bono will reach out his hand and it seems possible to grasp it.
That's the basic 3-D part, which is really nothing new for those familiar with such productions. The true innovation comes from how well the live-action digital recording works in 3-D. The images are amazingly vivid and sharp, with absolutely none of the blur associated with old 3-D films. And their ability to convey "depth" is equally impressive. The concert venues—the film was shot at various locations in South America and Mexico during the 2005-06 Vertigo tour—look as real as the movie theater itself. [Jim Harrington, Contra Costa Times]
February 14, 2008
'Food has a strong subconscious link to love, said Kathryn Zerbe, a
psychiatrist who specializes in eating disorders at Oregon Health and Science University in Portland. That is why refusing a partner’s food “can feel like rejection,” she said.
As with other differences couples face, tolerance and compromise are essential at the dinner table, marital therapists said. “If you can’t allow your partner to have latitude in what he or she eats, then maybe your problem isn’t about food,” said Susan Jaffe, a psychiatrist in Manhattan.
Dynise Balcavage, 42, an associate creative director at an advertising agency and vegan who lives in Philadelphia, said she has been happily married to her omnivorous husband, John Gatti, 53, for seven years.
“We have this little dance we’ve choreographed in the kitchen,” she said. She prepares vegan meals and averts her eyes when he adds anchovies or cheese. And she does not show disapproval when he orders meat in a restaurant. “I’m not a vegangelical,” she said. “He’s an adult and I respect his choices just as he respects mine.”
For people who like to cook, learning to bridge the dietary divide can be an enjoyable puzzle. Ms. James, the gluten-averse writer, eventually found a man who did not love by bread alone. On her first date with Daniel Ahern, in 2006, she told him that she was gluten-free; he saw it as a professional challenge.“As a chef, it has given me the opportunity to experiment with new ingredients to create things she can eat,” said Mr. Ahern, 39, who works at Impromptu Wine Bar Cafe in Seattle. Ms. James said she fell in love with him after he made her a gluten-free salad of frisée, poached egg and bacon. They married in September. Since then, Mr. Ahern has given up eating bread at home, though he still eats it when he goes out. For her part, Ms. James has begun eating offal and foie gras, which were once anathema. “We’ve changed each other,” she said.
[The food pictured here, prepared by Chef Ahern, is gluten-free.]
When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true;
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead,
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Love In America
Curiously enough, this fairly new point of view which implies that human relationships are governed by scientific laws has not destroyed the romantic ideal of love. Quite the contrary. Maladjustments, now that they are supposed to be scientifically determined, have become much more unbearable than in the horse-and-buggy age of love. Husbands and wives and lovers have no patience with their troubles. They want to be cured, and when they think they are incurable they become very intolerant. Reformers always are.
Usually, however, various attempts at readjustment are made with devastating candor. Married couples seem to spend many precious hours of the day and night discussing what is wrong with their relationship. The general idea is that —according to the teachings of most modern psychologists and pedagogues —one should face the truth fearlessly. Husbands and wives should be absolutely frank with one another, on the assumption that if love between them is real it will be made stronger and more real still if submitted, at frequent intervals, to the test of complete sincerity on both sides.
This is a fine theory, but it has seldom been practised without disastrous results. There are several reasons why this should be so. First of all, truth is an explosive, and it should be handled with care, especially in marital life. It is not necessary to lie, but there is little profit in juggling with hand grenades just to show how brave one is. Secondly, the theory of absolute sincerity presupposes that if love cannot withstand continuous blasting, then it is not worth saving anyway. Some people want their love life to be a permanent battle of Verdun. When the system of defense is destroyed beyond repair, then the clause of hopeless maladjustment is invoked by one side, or by both. The next thing to do is to divorce and find someone else to be recklessly frank with for a season.
Another reason why the method of adjustment through truth-telling is not always wise is that it develops fiendish traits of character which might otherwise remain dormant. I know a woman whose eyes glitter with virtuous self-satisfaction every time she has had a 'real heart-to-heart talk' with her husband, which means that she has spent several hours torturing him, or at best boring him to distraction, with a ruthless exposure of the deplorable status of their mutual relationship to date. She is usually so pleased with herself after these periodical inquests that she tells most of her friends, and also her coiffeur, about it. 'Dick and I had such a wonderful time last evening. We made a real effort to find out the real truth about each other—or, at least, I certainly did. I honestly believe we have found a new basis of adjustment for ourselves. What a marvelous feeling that is—don't you think so?
[This essay by Raoul De Roussy De Sales appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in May, 1938.]
February 13, 2008
THE director Brett Morgen hails from Santa Monica, Calif., lives and works in Rockaway Park, Queens, and has made feature documentaries about young Brooklyn boxers (“On the Ropes”), the idiosyncratic Hollywood producer Robert Evans (“The Kid Stays in the Picture”) and the trial of protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention (the forthcoming “Chicago 10”).When he was sent to tiny Watersmeet, in the wilds of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, to direct three commercials for a 2004 ESPN promotional campaign, he stumbled into a foreign world far removed from his urban consciousness, where hunting and fishing are popular weekend pastimes, the average winter dumps 13 feet of snow, and high school sports assume overarching importance in the absence of even a single movie theater.
His ads put the quirkily named Watersmeet Township School basketball team, the Nimrods, on the map, with their tag line, “Without sports, who would root for the Nimrods?” (The team is named for the biblical king Nimrod, who was known for his hunting skills, although the word is more commonly used as an insult meaning loser.) Mr. Morgen, meanwhile, knew he had found the long-sought location for a documentary he wanted to make about small-town life. As cold as it was in the winter, he said, “I found it just totally endearing and charming.”
What does it to do our brains to engage in long periods of reading a single text, to try to keep in mind the arc of a narrative that runs hundreds of pages? What kind of neurological work do we do as we strive to keep track of the details that add up to such a large story? Do people who are habituated to such a discipline experience benefits elsewhere in their lives? Are there other kinds of things that they can better concentrate on, like long quiet movies, or symphonies, or extended jazz improvisations? If you read long, complex stories about ordinary human lives, do you become more attentive and sympathetic to the lives of people you meet? (Or, maybe, less so?) If you don’t do this kind of long-form reading, do you miss out on any useful intellectual, or moral, development?
I don’t know the answers to these questions, though I sure wish I did. But Steven Johnson’s essay doesn’t move me one inch closer to such answers. This is what happens when a newspaper asks someone to evaluate work that he or she has an explicit and long-standing interest in refuting. I suspect that the NEA report has some significant problems, and that it’s based on a somewhat romanticized notion of the Good Old Days of reading, but Steven Johnson’s not the guy I would turn to to get the straight dope on the matter.
February 12, 2008
Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field as a final resting-place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.
[To see President Lincoln's handwritten manuscript, click here.]
This book isn’t an argument for more war, more bombing, or more killing, but for more will. In a culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of “suttee” — the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural: “You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours.”
India today is better off without suttee. If you don’t agree with that, if you think that’s just dead-white-male Eurocentrism, fine. But I don’t think you really believe that. Non-judgmental multiculturalism is an obvious fraud, and was subliminally accepted on that basis . . . . But if you think that suttee is just an example of the rich, vibrant tapestry of indigenous cultures, you ought to consider what your pleasant suburb would be like if 25, 30, 48 percent of the people around you really believed in it too. Multiculturalism was conceived by the Western elites not to celebrate all cultures but to deny their own: it is, thus, the real suicide bomb.
Unfortunately, this is the historical context in which it was delivered:
A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a woman who works in an advocacy role for Muslim women in an area that, quite independently of the Bishop of Rochester, she described as a “no-go area” for non-Muslims. Her clients were women in the process of being sectioned into mental health units in the NHS. This woman, who for obvious reasons begged not to be identified, told me: “The men get tired of their wives. Or bored. Or maybe the wife objects to her daughter being forced into a marriage she doesn't want. Or maybe she starts wearing western clothes. There can be many reasons. The women are sent for asssessment to a hospital. The GP referring them is Muslim. The psychiatrist assessing them is Muslim and male. I have sat in these assessments where the psychiatrist will not look the woman patient in the eye because she is a woman. Can you imagine! A psychiatrist refusing to look his patient in the eye? The woman speaks little or no English. She is sectioned. She is divorced. There are lots of these women in there, locked up in these hospitals. Why don’t you people write about this?'
My interlocuter went very red and almost started to cry. Instead, she began shouting at me. I was a member of the press. “You must write about this,” she begged.
“I can’t,” I said. “Not unless you become a whistle-blower. Or give me some evidence. Or something.”
She shook her head. “I can't be identified,” she said. “I would be killed. And so would the women.”
It seems beyond irresponsible for a prelate in his position to build legal castles in the air, assuring us that “if any kind of plural jurisdiction is recognised, it would presumably have to be under the rubric that no ‘supplementary’ jurisdiction could have the power to deny access to the rights granted to other citizens or to punish its members for claiming those rights,” at a time when Her Majesty’s government seems incapable of preventing the spread of a de facto plural jurisdiction that may do exactly that. And it is frankly embarrassing for a man charged with the defense of Christianity in England to behave as though he's more interested in generalizing about religions (“the umma or the Church or whatever …”) than in drawing distinctions between them . . .
February 11, 2008
A frog named Oui sits on her miniature motorcycle in the beach town of Pattaya, Thailand. According to her owner, the black-spotted frog loves playing with human toys and posing for photographs.
Take a piece of A4 paper, just a normal ordinary blank one as it comes out of the copy machine tray. You can write on it, draw on it, but also cut into it. Peter Callesen does so. Since 2004 parallel to his performance practice, he has been transforming two dimensional surfaces into three dimensional sculptures by the means of a paper cutter. From the white surface of ordinary A4 paper, a narrative arises. Or rather, lots of them. Stories, dramas, film clips. In ‘Snowballs’ a small house is erected from the paper. In the background, up the hill, two balls of snow have been set into motion. It is only a matter of time before the house will be smashed to the ground by the force of the rolling balls. At least, this is what I imagine, as the small sheet-like paper sculpture only shows the seconds before the disaster. As a still image, a frozen moment in time full of classic suspense, it shows how a possible catastrophe will take place on the A4 paper, elegantly created by a few cuts and slices.
Other paper cutouts are more intricate, revealing a painstaking craftsmanship. With great care and immense patience, Callesen creates a white, hyper-aesthetic universe of puns-in-paper, often making use of a tragic-comic slap-stick humour with a melancholic tinge. Creating the paper cutouts is basic magic in a way. In stead of drawing, Callesen cuts, folds and suddenly a world appears. 2D becomes 3D, which is quite a heroic gesture in and by itself. A gesture of basic transformation you might call it, initiated by the artist/creator. However, and this is an important point to bear in mind, if the gesture is heroic, the outcome is equally fragile. . . Much can be said about fragility as a formal strategy in artistic practices. In an art historical context, it can be seen as a counter-aesthetical move against 
traditional modernist sculptural practice, most often based, as it is, on volume, monumentality, the trace of manual force or industrial heaviness. Callesen’s sculptures are neither heavy, nor monumental. Rather, through their delicate materiality, their flagrant fragility evokes an ‘aesthetic of possible failure’, as if they are always on the verge of collapsing, of falling apart or being flattened by an awkward hand. In this way Callesen reformulates sculptural practise, querying as well as queering in a way, the monumentality of the medium.
traditional modernist sculptural practice, most often based, as it is, on volume, monumentality, the trace of manual force or industrial heaviness. Callesen’s sculptures are neither heavy, nor monumental. Rather, through their delicate materiality, their flagrant fragility evokes an ‘aesthetic of possible failure’, as if they are always on the verge of collapsing, of falling apart or being flattened by an awkward hand. In this way Callesen reformulates sculptural practise, querying as well as queering in a way, the monumentality of the medium. In ‘Impenetrable Castle’ the castle reappears. Typical of Callesen’s paper cutouts, it is attached to its own negative, the paper from which it is cut. When cutting, Callesen never isolates the figure from the ground, but merely transforms ground into figure. Hence the castle remains a sculptural loop, a self-sufficient construction that cannot be entered as it closes itself off from the outside. As such it can be regarded as an emblem of both longing and enclosure, of “bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation” to quote Berlin one more time. A closed-off world of fairytales and childhood dreams.
This connectedness of figure and ground can be seen as a merely formal matter: as the artist’s way to stage a battle between the flatness of the paper and the volume of the figure, hence creating a certain formal tension between the flat sheet and the elevated sculptural form. Perceived more symbolically, the connectedness of figure and ground seems to propose the inevitability of origin, meaning the impossibility of ever freeing oneself from the past.
[The review of Camilla Jalving is here.]
Jane Austen
Hyacinth and amethyst adorned the landscape of her heart, betrothed to fragrant oakmoss and blazing scarlet within the amorous lovestrokes of an incandescent horizon. In the shade of the gray branches, she put pen to paper. "I love you, Tom Brady," it began. "Though others call you wicked."
Prediction: Handsome Tom 46, Stern Aunt Louisa 9
February 10, 2008 — The First Sunday in Lent
In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis relates that he once heard a Zulu war song—a recording, we must assume. Far from suggesting to him the attack of spearmen, it sounded “wistful and gentle” to him. Lewis doubted that there is a universal musical language in which “certain airs” correlate with “certain emotions.”
Some of Arvo Pärt’s admirers think they hear in his works, in the words of reviewer Jon Andrews, a “floating, timeless quality.” Poet Rika Lesser wrote to Pärt, “Yours is the only music I’ve ever wanted to live inside. Sometimes I wish that the music would stop, congeal, erect a lasting structure around me, one that would silently vibrate and, resonating, enclose me. Forever.”
February 9, 2008
It all depends on asking the right questions at the outset. I can show what I mean with the example of a well-known visual illusion. Consider what you might want to explain about the experience of looking at the object in the picture to the left (Fig. 1), a solid wooden version of the so-called impossible triangle. Since it is at first sight so surprising and impressive, any of us might very well innocently ask the (bad) question: "How can we explain the existence of this triangle as we perceive it?" Only later—indeed only once we have seen the object from a different viewpoint (Fig. 2), and realized that the "triangle as we perceive it" is an illusion—will it occur to us to ask the (good) question: "How can we explain the fact we have been tricked into perceiving it this way?" . . .
Fodor has stated this aspect of the problem bluntly: "There are several reasons why consciousness is so baffling. For one thing, it seems to be among the chronically unemployed. What mental processes can be performed only because the mind is conscious, and what does consciousness contribute to their performance? As far as anybody knows, anything that our conscious minds can do they could do just as well if they weren't conscious. Why then did God bother to make consciousness?"
Fodor is undoubtedly asking the right question: "Why did God—or rather natural selection—make consciousness?" Yet I'd suggest the reason he finds it all so baffling is that he is starting off with the completely wrong premise, for he has assumed, as indeed almost everyone else does, that phenomenal consciousness must be providing us with some kind of new skill. In other words, it must be helping us do something that we can do only by virtue of being conscious, in the way that, say, a bird can fly only because it has wings, or you can understand this sentence only because you know English.
Yet I want to suggest the role of phenomenal consciousness may not be like this at all. Its role may not be to enable us to do something we could not do otherwise, but rather to encourage us to do something we would not do otherwise: to make us take an interest in things that otherwise would not interest us, or to mind things we otherwise would not mind, or to set ourselves goals we otherwise would not set.
To test this idea we will need evidence as to how being phenomenally conscious changes our worldview: What beliefs and attitudes flow from it? What changes occur in the way conscious individuals think about who and what they are?
by Marie Howe
The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.
Even after his bags were packed he still stood, breathing hard and
hawking into his hand. The feeble, the lame, I could hardly look at them:
shuffling through the aisles, they smelled of decay, as if the Star Market
had declared a day off for the able-bodied, and I had wandered in
with the rest of them—sour milk, bad meat—
looking for cereal and spring water.
Jesus must have been a saint, I said to myself, looking for my lost car
in the parking lot later, stumbling among the people who would have
been lowered into rooms by ropes, who would have crept
out of caves or crawled from the corners of public baths on their hands
and knees begging for mercy.
If I touch only the hem of his garment, one woman thought,
could I bear the look on his face when he wheels around?
February 8, 2008
The moral of “Ratatouille” is delivered by a critic: a gaunt, unsmiling fellow named Anton Ego who composes his acidic notices in a coffin-shaped room and who speaks in the parched baritone of Peter O’Toole. “Not everyone can be a great artist,” Mr. Ego muses. “But a great artist can come from anywhere.” [To watch the clip of Ego reviewing the cooking of Remy, the rat-chef, click here.]Quite so. Written and directed by Brad Bird and displaying the usual meticulousness associated with the Pixar brand, “Ratatouille” is a nearly flawless piece of popular art, as well as one of the most persuasive portraits of an artist ever committed to film. It provides the kind of deep, transporting pleasure, at once simple and sophisticated, that movies at their best have always promised.
Its sensibility, implicit in Mr. Ego’s aphorism, is both exuberantly democratic and unabashedly elitist, defending good taste and aesthetic accomplishment not as snobbish entitlements but as universal ideals. Like “The Incredibles,” Mr. Bird’s earlier film for Pixar, “Ratatouille” celebrates the passionate, sometimes aggressive pursuit of excellence, an impulse it also exemplifies.
The hero (and perhaps Mr. Bird’s alter ego) is Remy (Patton Oswalt), a young rat who lives somewhere in the French countryside and conceives a passion for fine cooking. Raised by garbage-eaters, he is drawn toward a more exalted notion of food by the sensitivity of his own palate and by the example of Auguste Gusteau (Brad Garrett), a famous chef who insists — more in the manner of Julia Child than of his real-life haute cuisine counterparts — that “anyone can cook.”
Greetings from Tenwek! Things here have been rather eventful over the past month, to say the least! As most of you will have heard, tension has been very high since the announcement of the Kenyan Presidential election results on December 30. The results have been highly disputed by the two main parties in the election. During the first week of disputes, there was a good deal of violence throughout the country. On several days, we could stand on our front porch and hear gunfire and tear gas cannons being fired in some of the towns within two miles of Tenwek. We were essentially unable to travel, as roads in the area had been closed by roadblocks and protesting crowds. This lasted for about 10 days, and then seemed to settle down. All of us have been hopeful that some political solution would be reached between government leaders to bring peace. Unfortunately, there have been several new waves of violence which have essentially become tribal clashes in nature. Since the political parties tend to split down tribal lines, the violence also tends to be tribally directed in nature.
The situation currently is marked by unpredictability. There have been many days when all seemed to be well, and business was returning to usual. In fact, we traveled to Nairobi as a family just one week ago, and everything was very stable. This past week, however, saw the killings of two politicians, which again sparked significant unrest in our area. To date, there have been no signs of violence coming near Tenwek, although many of our Kenyan staff who are not of the most common local tribal background have decided to leave the area temporarily as we wait to see how the situation will develop.
In the hospital, we are certainly seeing the effects of the violence. Our elective surgery cases have decreased significantly as people find transport to be difficult and unpredictable. On the other hand, our cases of emergency surgery have increased markedly! Our male surgical ward is overflowing with two patients in almost every bed, with more than half of them victims of violence related to this current situation. We seem to have at least one or two patients shot with arrows brought to the hospital every day, along with at least one gunshot victim. You may remember that arrow injuries are not uncommon, but this volume is certainly much more than usual.
However, the Lord has been gracious. Throughout all of this time, we have only had one patient die who had made it alive to the hospital with an injury. Further, we have generally been able to get the hospital supplies we need to keep taking care of patients. Most importantly, we have been able to show Jesus’ love to hurting people in very difficult times.
Please continue to pray for this entire situation, as the stress level is quite high for everyone. Some of our missionaries have had very difficult situations trying to pass through roadblocks and being threatened by large crowds. Many families of our national staff have experienced losses of many different types. We are praying daily that the Lord will bring peace, and that we may be His hands, feet, and mouth as we deal with these dangerous situations. Currently, we have put a temporary hold on new people and visitors coming to help us with work here in Kenya. This is making the work-load more difficult for many. As a group, our World Gospel Mission Kenya field leadership is keeping a close eye on the situation and meeting frequently to keep abreast of the situation. We do not feel a need for any of us to leave Kenya at this time. Please pray for wisdom in all of these difficult decisions. We also have a Crisis/Relief team working on helping the many displaced people within Kenya. Please pray for their safety as well.
There are some bright spots in all of this also. We are now one week into our new surgical residency program here at Tenwek. We had decided to go ahead with beginning this training despite future uncertainties. This has been a dream and hope for many years for many of us here at Tenwek. Many of you have prayed with us for this. We have taken on two great, young Kenyan Christian doctors for formal training in surgery. These tumultuous times make certain aspects of the training difficult, but it is certainly giving them a lot of exposure to management of trauma cases!
The family is doing well, although the stress of uncertainty is wearing a bit on everyone. The picture above was taken Sunday after our service. I was the preacher and I reminded all of us that we are strangers and aliens on this earth, and that our true citizenship is in heaven. We’ll try to keep you updated as the situation develops. We very much covet your prayers, and so appreciate your support of God’s work here at Tenwek.
Christopher Clark went to Strawberry Canyon in Berkeley and got a bad case of poison oak. Then he tried a shoreline park in Albany, where his camera was stolen and sopping-wet dogs covered his field notes with muddy paw prints. Those were a few of the hurdles that Clark and colleague Teresa Feo overcame to produce a paper, just published in a prestigious British journal, exploring the physics of how birds make sound. The title of their UC Berkeley study sums it up: "The Anna's hummingbird chirps with its tail: a new mechanism of sonation in birds."Clark and Feo filmed the birds' plunges and recorded the sound they made at the end of their roughly 50 mph descent from a height of 100 feet or more. High-speed video, at 500 frames per second, showed that the birds started their dives with their tails shut and suddenly spread them at the bottom, for one-twentieth of a second—quicker than a blinking eye. [T]he squeaks and beeps made by the dive-bombing birds are not vocal—as some research has asserted—but instead are created by their tail feathers.
"I found it really interesting just because these birds were basically doing mechanical sounds," said Feo, 22, who played clarinet in the Cal Band for four years. "It sort of speaks to the musician in me."
[Video of the Anna's Hummingbird here.]
February 7, 2008
Taylor's move back to Canada in 1981 marked a new phase in his political career, this time as a leading commentator in debates about the future of the Canadian federation and
Quebec's place in it. He has consistently argued for devolution but against independence—he is as suspicious of tidy answers in politics as in philosophy. His position on Quebec has informed his qualified support for multiculturalism, expressed most famously in an influential 1992 essay "The politics of recognition." Taylor acknowledges that his bilingual upbringing has informed his argument that language cannot be understood, as many scientifically influenced linguists and philosophers have argued, as a purely representational tool. Following Rousseau and Herder, Taylor suggests that language determines what it is possible to think and feel—much like the "background understandings" with which language is intertwined.
Ben Rogers is the author of several books, including Beef and Liberty (Chatto and Windus)
From the Prospect interview
[On becoming religious, and not Voltairian.] I don’t understand it now; I certainly didn’t understand it then. I guess I have a more coherent story now—that there is some very profound level of human life and human potential transformation which the Voltairians had no clue about. When I read Hume or Gibbon now, I’m very beguiled by the style and so on, but then I think: how can you so totally miss the point of what you’re discussing? Take Hume on miracles: he really seems to think that the human approach to the world is that of a detached observer counting up the likelihood of the evidence—which, of course, is true of his epistemology too.
But the great majority of professors understand that the art of teaching consists not only of arousing desire but of redirecting it toward its proper object, from the teacher to the thing taught. Teaching, Yeats said, is lighting a fire, not filling a bucket, and this is how it gets lit.
The professor becomes the student’s muse, the figure to whom the labors of the semester —the studying, the speaking in class, the writing—are consecrated. The alert student understands this. . . . Natural transmission is easy; any animal can do it. Cultural transmission is hard; it takes a teacher. But Socrates also inaugurated a new idea about what teaching means. His students had already been educated into their culture by the time they got to him. He wanted to educate them out of it, teach them to question its values. His teaching wasn’t cultural, it was counter-cultural. The Athenians understood Socrates very well when they convicted him of corrupting their youth, and if today’s parents are worried about trusting their children to professors, this countercultural possibility is really what they should be worried about. Teaching, as Neil Postman says, is a subversive activity — all the more so today, when children are marinated in cultural messages from the moment they’re born. It no longer takes any training to learn to bow to your city’s gods (sex or children, money or nation). But it often takes a teacher to help you question those gods. The teacher’s job, in Keats’s terms, is to point you through the vale of soul-making. We’re born once, into nature and into the culture that quickly becomes a second nature. But then, if we’re granted such grace, we’re born again. For what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his mortal soul?
William Deresiewicz teaches at Yale
February 6, 2008 — Ash Wednesday
Under a juniper-tree the bones sang, scattered and shining
We are glad to be scattered, we did little good to each other,
Under a tree in the cool of day, with the blessing of sand,
Forgetting themselves and each other, united
In the quiet of the desert. This is the land which ye
Shall divide by lot. And neither division nor unity
Matters. This is the land. We have our inheritance.
—T. S. Eliot
Can you imagine a more pitiable fate? Your ship reels broken in the storm. Implacable winds and currents run you aground, but by a miracle, you do not drown. You overcome and drag yourself exhausted onto the sand—and then realize that drowning is not the worst way to go. You cheated death, only to find yourself cast upon one of the harshest places on Earth. You can choose to stay where you are and die of exposure or thirst. Or else you can trek hopelessly into the endless desert, to perish there instead. [narrated slideshow here]