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Weekly Meanderings

Weekly Meanderings

Last updated on: October 29, 2011 at 12:01 am by Scot McKnight

Weekly Meanderings 2011-10-28T19:05:28-05:00 Scot McKnight

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Brad Wright: “With presidential elections coming up, we’ll hear a lot more about every aspect of politics, including its link to religion—especially Christianity. I would like to step back and ask a very simple question: Is it possible to derive a distinct political position or affiliation from the tenets of the Bible? My answer is “probably not.” URL is digging into Joel Osteen’s and Al Mohler’s statements about attending a gay/lesbian wedding.

Go Philippa Fawcett!

I really like this post by Fr Rob. Mark Noll remembers Art Holmes. As a college student my philosophy professor, Ron Mayers, took a group to Wheaton’s philosophy conference and it was there that I first heard Art Holmes and I became a reader of his stuff on educational theory. (Speaking of Wheaton folks, there’s a new blog by some Wheaton students called, well, Wheaton Blog.)

Christine Scheller on Obama and black unemployment. Karen has some Q&A with a Mormon, and it’s worth your read. Music and sounds and the brain and health.

Two singles, platonic relationship, by Enuma Okoro: “Desire is beautiful. No denying we are sexual beings, and intellectual and emotional attraction can easily lead to sexual attraction between friends. But being single and feeling something toward someone else who happens to be single does not mean that we should act on our desires. We each come with unique personal histories; sometimes it takes a while to figure out what lies behind certain desires. It may have little to do with the person in front of me and more to do with misdirecting specific unmet needs. Part of the conversation around nurturing male-female friendships has to include how we order and discipline our desires. I believe my friendship with Andrew will have a positive impact on my next romantic relationship. But it is also beautiful for its own sake, without thought of its broader utility. He is teaching me to argue better, to share my discontent in less hurtful ways. I am learning that deepening our friendship means not shying away from difficult conversations. I cannot hide behind verbal jabs offered in pseudo jokes. He speaks forthrightly to me and mirrors his desire for me to be transparent, to say what I mean and to not couch my emotional needs in half-truths. I hear him and often still stifle in defense. It is risky to nurture the kind of friendship that compels us to reach out from our fears and insecurities. Friendship takes courage, even the ones that offer to reminds us of who we are, and who we are created to be.”

I’m not a zombie watcher, but Wade Hodges has some interesting ideas about the fascination with zombies: “I started thinking about why Zombies are so popular. Why can’t we look away from stories about the undead who come either to feast on or infect us? Since I’m not a lifelong Zombie aficionado, I don’t have a working knowledge of the Zombie mythology. I haven’t read any commentary on or critical analysis of the Zombie genre. I’m trying to figure all of this out for myself. I’ve come to the conclusion that Zombie stories are an enduring part of our culture because they teach us life lessons that remain stubbornly hidden until backlit by the macabre.”

Patrick reports on Tom Wright in Dublin for the CS Lewis lecture. And The Burner has a graphic report of Peter Rollins’ time at Fuller. I think she makes her point loud and clear, says I who found that article through a tweet read on my iPad and that I typed on my MacBook.

The Catholic Church is changing, big time: “An overwhelming majority, 88%, say “how a person lives is more important than whether he or she is Catholic,” according to Catholics in America: Persistence and change in the Catholic landscape. The survey, a comprehensive look at the beliefs and practices of 1,442 U.S. adults identifying themselves as Catholics, also finds that 86% say “you can disagree with aspects of church teachings and still remain loyal to the church.” As an anabaptist Protestant I find this kind of report discouraging for all of us. God have mercy on the church.

Speaking of churches changing, I’m tempted to say about five things that I won’t say… And Bill Donahue says of changing churches … flatten the church. Speaking of churches… what happens when a Jew becomes messianic? Read Jewish adventures in Church-land.

And speaking of churches failing, EPIC Fail is back for 2012.

Tom Perez and trafficking in Portland. Cracks in the Occupy Wall Street protests: “The Occupy Wall Street volunteer kitchen staff launched a “counter” revolution yesterday — because they’re angry about working 18-hour days to provide food for “professional homeless” people and ex-cons masquerading as protesters.For three days beginning tomorrow, the cooks will serve only brown rice and other spartan grub instead of the usual menu of organic chicken and vegetables, spaghetti bolognese, and roasted beet and sheep’s-milk-cheese salad.They will also provide directions to local soup kitchens for the vagrants, criminals and other freeloaders who have been descending on Zuccotti Park in increasing numbers every day.”

Meanderings in the News

Like Arafat, Gaddafi was super-rich, maybe the richest man in the world.

If you touch a baby bird…? Mike Truchon: “When I was a kid, our living room opened out onto a back deck through a set of French doors. A pine tree stood over the deck, providing a home for countless birds. Baby birds would regularly fall from their nests onto the deck, and would lie there crying in full view of my brother and me as we sat on the floor watching TV. Our parents always told us that we should never attempt to rescue these birds, no matter how long they were out on the deck, because our scent would cause their parents to reject and abandon them. Some of these babies would get their act together and find their way back into the nest. Some would get dragged off by neighborhood cats. A few got plucked off the deck by hawks (and, once, devoured as I watched). Whatever happened to the birds, though, my brother and I dutifully listened to our mother. These days, I feel bad about that. It turns out my mom is full of baloney.”

The out-of-Iraq decision was a Bush-Iraq decision.

Is Denmark’s “fat tax” helping? Marion Nestle: “THE Danish government’s now infamous “fat tax” has caused an international uproar, applauded by public health advocates on the one hand and dismissed on the other as nanny-state social engineering gone berserk. I see it as one country’s attempt to stave off rising obesity rates, and its associated medical conditions, when other options seem less feasible. But the policies appear confusing. Why Denmark of all places? Why particular foods? Will such taxes really change eating behaviour? And aren’t there better ways to halt or reverse rising rates of diet-related chronic disease? Before getting to these questions, let’s look at what Denmark has done….” [Gotta love that I guy with the name “Nestle” is writing this.]

But this is not Calvinism.

Occupy Wall Street, which I’ve been watching from a safe distance, now has a social theorist in John Rawls who can prop up the praxis. This piece by Stephen V. Mazie: “But to move forward and make a difference, Occupy Wall Street needs specific goals backed by a more coherent, more inspiring vision for American democracy. To their credit, protestors have recently begun debating which specific demands the movement should make, but their conversations appear to be unguided by any deeper wisdom. A perfect intellectual touchstone would be the work of John Rawls, the American political philosopher who was one of the 20th century’s most influential theorists of equality. Rawls named his theory “justice as fairness,” and emphasized in his later writings that its premises are rooted in the history and aspirations of American constitutionalism. So it’s a home-grown theory that is ripe for the picking.

Nature vs. Nurture and Epigenetics. Drugs falling off the patent cliff.

Nathan Jurgenson probes into Chomsky’s claims about Twitter: “But even if we grant Chomsky, Carr and the others that social media is less deep and more instantaneous, the important questions then become: Is instant, digital communication less true? Less worthy? Less valuable? Less linguistically creative? Less politically efficacious? Chomsky, a politically progressive linguist, should know better than to dismiss new forms of language-production that he does not understand as “shallow.” This argument, whether voiced by him or others, risks reducing those who primarily communicate in this way as an “other,” one who is less fully human and capable. This was Foucault’s point: Any claim to knowledge is always a claim to power. We might ask Chomsky today, when digital communications are disqualified as less deep, who benefits?”

Meanderings in Sports

Joe Posnanski nails it with Pujols (and Tiger Woods): “I think Albert Pujols is a good person. I think he cares about people, I think the charity work he does is very much from the heart, I think faith drives his life. But I also think that Albert Pujols has to be a great baseball player; that cuts deep into who he is as a man. And to be a great baseball player, he needs doubts to drive him. So he is not always a NICE person. He is rarely an open person. I think he needs to feel close to the pain, needs to remember that nobody in the game wanted him, nobody drafted him, nobody believed in him. He needs to feel that if he rests for a minute, the media will bury him. I think he needs that the way fire needs oxygen….But do I think Albert Pujols WANTED to prove a point? You bet I do. All of us are driven by countless motivations, many of them unknown even to ourselves. Some of us are trying to live up to our parents’ expectations. Some of us are trying to win over the girl or boy who spurned us years ago. Some of us want to be rich, to be famous, to be loved, to be admired, on and on and on and on, and all combinations in between. Whatever else drives Albert Pujols, I think he wants to prove a point to the doubters out there, every last one of them, real and imagined.

And, David Maraniss on Moneyball: “My biggest problem with “Moneyball” has more to do with aesthetics and the meaning of life. This is my answer to those friends who think that “Moneyball” is some paean to the underdogs. That notion is garbage — it really is an ode to the old Vince Lombardi saying (which was not his, but that is another story), “Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing.” If the moneyball concept worked to perfection, what would it lead to? A team full of Scott Hattebergs who play no defense, hit okay but not great and draw a ton of walks. Nothing against Hatteberg — it was not his fault that he became a symbol; he was just a ballplayer. But what is the beauty of baseball? What is its meaning beyond wins and losses? The thrill of baseball has nothing to do with statistics, as much a part of the game as they are. It has to do with the athletic skill of the players: the rifle throw from right field to third base; the dazzling speed of a runner stealing a base; the grace of a second baseman making the turn on a double play. Perhaps “Moneyball” struck a chord with audiences because it presented what seemed like a fresh, unromantic, realist’s view while also presenting a smart plan of attack for the little guys. But in doing so, it not only perpetrated a fraud, it also glorified statistics over beauty and joy, and that is a trade-off that diminishes life itself.”

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