Beyond Rivalry - theology_spirituality_philosophy

What I'm Reading Lately ... Death, Death and Certainty

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 11:21:00 -0400

My irregular annotated link dump:

>> Never Say Die: Why We Can't Imagine Death by Jesse Bering in the 22 Oct. 2008 SciAm:

The crux: "So why is it so hard to conceptualize inexistence anyway? Part of my own account, which I call the 'simulation constraint hypothesis,' is that in attempting to imagine what it's like to be dead we appeal to our own background of conscious experiences -- because that's how we approach most thought experiments. Death isn't 'like' anything we've ever experienced, however. Because we have never consciously been without consciousness, even our best simulations of true nothingness just aren't good enough."

Fun for the Whole Family: "In a 2004 study reported in Developmental Psychology, Florida Atlantic University psychologist David F. Bjorklund and I presented 200 three- to 12-year-olds with a puppet show. Every child saw the story of Baby Mouse, who was out strolling innocently in the woods. 'Just then,' we told them, 'he notices something very strange. The bushes are moving! An alligator jumps out of the bushes and gobbles him all up. Baby Mouse is not alive anymore.'"

What We Can't UnLearn: "Back when you were still in diapers, you learned that people didn't cease to…

Our Sins Will Be Our Glory

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 15:49:00 -0400

I'm re-reading James Alison's Raising Abel: The Recovery of the Eschatalogical Imagination. Alison speaks of the importance of the Resurrection as a subversion of our human story (which is framed by death) -- and not as the abolition of the human story -- and as "including that which is capable of being rescued and transformed: the human story of violence and victimization," and he calls to mind the English mystic Julian of Norwich in this context:

"Julian of Norwich ... affirms that in heaven our sins will be not shame, but glory to us. This seems to me to be the authentically Catholic intuition. I try to make sense of it in terms of the transvestite prostitutes whom I knew in Brazil when they were in the final phrase of their struggle with AIDS. I hope to know them again in heaven, not so transmogrified that their personal life story has been, in each case, abolished, but rather so utterly alive that their fake beauty, arduously cultivated, their sad personal stories of envy, violence, frustration in love, and their illness have become trophies which are not sources of shame, but which add to their beauty and joy."

And oh, that we…

Not What We Deserve

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 18:14:00 -0400

House: People get what they get. It's got nothing to do with what they deserve. (House MD, ep. 5x01, Death Changes Everything)

Reminds me of a (fictional?) poem quoted in a crime novel I read on my vacation:

"People don't die because they're bad.

They die because they're available." (The Falls, Ian Rankin)

enemies, No time for

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 07:10:00 -0400

"'Is this any time to make enemies?'"

-- Voltaire, on his deathbed, on being told to renounce Satan

The Value of Education -- Deciding What to Worship

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 07:55:00 -0400

David Foster Wallace, postmodern author who ended his life last week at the age of 46 (RIP), talks about the real value of education in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement speech.

I'm going to be away until the end of September and won't be posting, but I leave you with Foster's exceptionally honest words to college grads, which include these:

"Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence.

"We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to…

Anarchic Mercy

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 08:35:00 -0400

Love this, from Rowan Williams via Inhabitatio Dei:

"To believe in Jesus' God, the God of unconditional accessibility and even-handed compassion, to believe in an anarchic mercy that ignores order, rank and merit, is to accept that our projects and patterns are the mark of failure, of illusion, of the infantile belief that we can dictate truth and reality. Because it is menacing and painful to be confronted with the knowledge that our constructions of controlled sense are liable to be empty self-serving, we readily turn to violence against the bearers of such knowledge: in Johannine terms, we have decided that we want to stay blind when the light is there before us, claiming we can see perfectly well." -- Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge (1990)

Remembrance of Things Past: Victims

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 08:22:00 -0400

At Overcoming Bias today, report of a study finding that "when we are reminded of when others have victimized us, we are less able to see that we victimize others."

Researchers reminded participants from the U.S. and Canada, and, separately, North American Jewish participants, of various attacks and atrocities, including, variously, the Sept. 11 attacks in the U.S., the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Nazi atrocities in Poland during World War II, a deadly terrorist attack in Sri Lanka, and the genocide in Cambodia.

All the groups were less likely to perceive "the distress the [Iraq] war has caused many Iraqis, and less likely to feel collective responsibility" when they were reminded of an attack in which they felt themselves to be victims.

For U.S. participants, reminders of both the 9/11 attacks and the attack on Pearl Harbor caused participants to feel less guilt or responsibility for the distress of Iraqis than when reminded of the tragedy in Poland. The Jewish volunteers, on the other hand, felt "reduced guilt and responsibility for Israeli actions that cause suffering among Palestinians when they are first reminded about the Holocaust, compared with when they are reminded about the genocide in Cambodia." Canadians showed no…

Are You My Messiah?

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 12:05:00 -0400

This essay, "Messianic Politics: McCain and Obama," by Halden Doerge at Inhabitatio Dei, names the particular kind of drama that U.S. national politics seems to me now -- a battle of "messianic demagogues" vying for power, articulating and simultaneously cloaking their message and personality in Biblical and religio-heroic terms; apparently, it's what they think we want.

"The state of politics in America leads one to wonder, is a non-messianic mode of political discourse possible? Is it possible for America? I tend to doubt it. Both Obama and McCain were not the least bit shy about conjuring up a picture of America that is shrouded in biblical and messianic imagery."

Halden cites excerpts from both McCain's and Obama's convention speeches.

McCain's speech "was rhetorically crafted in such a way that it actually read more like a conversion narrative than anything else. McCain suffered greatly, and through suffering came to believe in the myth of American as some sort of savior. ... America is the savior. America demands total allegiance. As long as McCain is alive he will fight for America. His whole life, his whole being, his whole person has been offered up to her as a living sacrifice."

Likewise, in Obama's…

Ritual quote

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 07:00:00 -0400

I recently read Patricia Highsmith's People Who Knock on the Door (1983), about a teenager and his family in early 1980s small-town middle America: "In a pitiless story of prying suburban self-righteousness, Patricia Highsmith introduces the Alderman family as the descend into moral crisis." The father and his younger son embrace the mores and rules of a moralistic church, while the older son, whose pov we follow, rejects it; "when the church elders start to interfere in [his] love life, events spiral toward violence."

The back cover had me at pitiless and prying (that, and the London Sunday Times' contextless blurb 'Venomously accurate') -- and it was a good read. Highsmith wrote Strangers on a Train (1950), which Hitchcock later filmed, and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), and is a master of creating a sense of disturbance and uneasiness in the most ordinary circumstances - or perhaps of revealing it.

Here is a comment on ritual, as the older son, Arthur, considers it in his mind:

"Ritual, he thought, kept people on an even keel. He remembered thinking this in the days just after Maggie's letter of good-bye to him, remembered making himself do things in the same old way, when…

Curiosity

noreply@blogspirit.com (mmw) — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 06:00:00 -0400

Pema Chödrön talks about the trait or activity of curiosity in Start Where You Are: A Guide to Compassionate Living (1994). There are lots of ways to be curious: one can be intensely curious about one subject or one person, widely curious about everything or many things, curious about new places and experiences, sexually curious, culinarily curious, curious about how machines work, and so on.

I think I am particularly curious about the way people think and behave, individually and in groups, and I'm also curious about the details of stories, the details of experiences that happen to other people, and the details of beings in the natural world -- So I hear myself asking questions about what colour and shape things are, how many there are of each kind, exactly what it felt like, every item they wore, what they ate, what other people thought about what happened, how the factors were related, how they got from A to B, what happened in that small time period you skipped over in your narrative, and so on.

Here is some of what Pema says about curiosity:

She talks about "the burden of maintaining your own private happiness," and suggests that we…