Beyond Rivalry

Back from away. Thanks for the well wishes. I may do a family update later, or not.

Meanwhile, lots of feeds to read when I got home. Some of the best so far:

1. Funny.  Sarah Vowell Q&A at Daily Intelligencer. Includes this:

Q: How much is too much to spend on a haircut?
A: I cut my own hair. Not to save money but because I never know what to talk about with the hairdresser. The last time I tried it again it was like an hour of hearing about rollerblading routes. 

2. Spiritual. John at Priestcraft on ordinary people living a more eucharistic life. Has a Catholic bent but applicable for people of all faiths. Includes suggestions for making mealtime more eucharistic and following "'the Mass of St John' ... in which you go through some of the prayers of the mass, joining yourself in spirit to the eucharist as it is celebrated around the world."  

3. Animal. Sad elephant news. Despite ivory ban, African elephants reportedly being decimated:

 

"An international effort to halt the illegal killing of elephants for their ivory tusks has all but collapsed in most of Africa, leaving officials and advocates alarmed about the survival of the species. A study released yesterday estimates that as many as 23,000 of the animals were slaughtered last year alone. ...

 

That's 1 in 12 elephants on the African continent, not counting the elephants in Botswana, which are well-protected and overbred.

 

"'Almost half of Africa's elephants had been slaughtered in the eight years before the [1989] ban, but now the situation is even more extreme because the number of animals is so much lower to begin with.' ... And unlike in the late '80s, the public has forgotten about this issue.' ... 'Overwhelmingly, what we have across Africa is a widespread slaughter of elephants that is getting worse by the day.'"

 

What may help: DNA From Ivory May Lead to Poachers: A DNA comparison has shown "that the tusks seized from the black market came from elephants on Africa's broad savannas, primarily from a small area of southern Africa, most likely centered on Zambia."

Some good news: Superfluous hedgehogs in Scotland's Outer Hebrides will be transplanted, not killed.

4. Religious. Simon Barrow's What's Radical About Christianity ... Much here to ponder: 

"The social and political challenge of the Gospel flows, it seems to me, from its radical core. ... By radical (radix, from the Latin) I mean something like 'rooted-to-be-routed' -- a personal, communal and intellectual re-exploration and re-expression of a deep tradition of reading, reasoning and responding to the world which propels us to its most risky frontiers. That is what is at the heart of Christianity. ...

 

"[T]he Christian faith has as its core the conviction that God comes through to us not as a text, a formula or a theory -- but in a person who remains on what I would call 'the disturbing margins' of our attempts at world-construction through empire, religion and rational control.

 

"This is so because God is not a hypothesis in or about the world, but, for those of us who find ourselves believing in(to) God, is discovered in the sheer giftedness of life. ...

 

"God, rather, donates beyond the limits of reciprocity (grace) and offers possibility outwith our capacity to get things right (forgiveness). In this sense God is continual creativity and makes all the difference in the world. ...

 

"As the playwright Dennis Potter said, on the threshold of his own death from cancer, 'I have come to see that religion is the wound not the bandage.' This is not the Gospel we thought we knew, but one given to us in confrontation with our projections. ...

 

"Prayer is not about manipulating a tribal deity to be on our side, it is the language of donation through which we come to understand that the life we share is given to us, not possessed by us. Similarly, worship is the means to identify whose we are and what is really worth-it.

 

"The fruit of the Gospel community, then, is not exclusion but embrace, not detachment but engagement, not credulity but critical thought." 

5. Maineish. All about Maine's Robert Skoglund, aka The Humble Farmer. Some things I didn't know about him:

• He makes only $30 for his half-hour jazz/talk show on Maine Public Radio every week -- and that's after about 30 years of making $0 per show.
• He has a master's degree in linguistics.
• He's doing stand-up for mobile-home park audiences in Florida.
• He "has saved little for retirement, and has large credit-card debt. His wife was recently diagnosed with muscular dystrophy, forcing her to cut back her work hours." 
• And most despair-making, he's been "ordered" by Maine Public Radio's VP Charles Beck to "never again opine on politics, companies, commercial products, or organizations, and to say nothing in public of his affiliation with MPBN without prior approval." 

6. Political. What Iraq Tells Us About Ourselves, by Col. W. Patrick Lang, Jr. (Ret.) in Foreign Policy. Nothing new here but succinctly put:

"To be blunt, our foreign policy tends to be predicated on the notion that everyone wants to be an American. In the months leading up to the start of the Iraq War, it was common to hear seemingly educated people say that the Arabs, particularly Iraqis, had no way of life worth saving and would be better off if all 'that old stuff' -- their traditions, social institutions, and values -- were done away with, and soon.  ... How did Americans come to believe that the entire world is embarked on the same voyage, and that we are the navigators showing the way to a bright future?" ...

 

"Our own culture is a rich blend, brewed from such elements as enlightenment, optimism, Puritan utopianism, a Calvinist tendency to not forgive sinners, and the settler's lack of respect for the weak and 'native' peoples of the world. In the United States, such threads have pushed us to believe that we are all in a melting pot of common ideology. This belief system has been fed to us in the public schools, through Hollywood, and now in the endless prattle of 24-hour news networks. It has become secular religion, a religion so strong that any violation of its tenets brings instant and savage condemnation. So-called neoconservatism isn't some kind of alien ideology; it's merely a self-aware manifestation of the widespread American belief that people are all the same. ... Americans invaded an imaginary Iraq that fit into our vision of the world. We invaded Iraq in the sure belief that inside every Iraqi there was an American trying to get out."