Candidate Rick Santorum recently went on record as being against college (or at least against government encouraging it), for fear it will brainwash students into becoming thoughtful liberals, as many of their professors are. This is hogwash. College students are adults who do not brainwash easily -- it would take more than a light rinse -- and most professors are not in the brainwashing business in any case. While it is true that a majority of university professors are political liberals in their personal lives, this is mostly an artifact of being the sort of people who choose interesting and challenging professions that are not very remunerative; it has little or nothing to do with discrimination against those with other perspectives, as some have charged.
But thankfully there are at least some cases where what people learn in college -- not dogmas from their profs, but things like thinking critically, questioning assumptions, discovering the richness and complexity of the world -- opens them up to new and liberatory perspectives. Here is one such story by Frank Bruni in today's Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/opinion/sunday/bruni-a-catholic-classmate-rethinks-his-religion.html?ref=opinion
Sunday, March 25, 2012
(WP) Mad Women
Here's a thoughtful reflection on the current nostalgia in popular culture for the bad old days of gender relations: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/magazine/watching-mad-men-with-my-mother.html?ref=magazine
An excerpt:
"Mad Men" made my mother remember life in her 20s -- too clearly. When the show focused on Don Draper's wife, Betty, a repressed housewife in suburbia, my mom visibly cringed. "During Betty's scenes," she told me, "I felt this pain, right in my gut." She took a breath and explained that she loved her life and her marriage now, but when she watched Betty say she just wants to serve Don, it took her back to when she and my father were first married. "That's the way I thought. I lived to serve. I wanted to make him happy."
It was odd to hear my mom compare her relationship to the Drapers'. My parents split the household duties, held jobs in teaching and systems administration and pursued their interests in meditation and aikido. What I was coming to understand, thought, was that my mother did not come into the world fully formed in 1981, when I was born, that there was a complicated and somehow painful life that predated me.
An excerpt:
"Mad Men" made my mother remember life in her 20s -- too clearly. When the show focused on Don Draper's wife, Betty, a repressed housewife in suburbia, my mom visibly cringed. "During Betty's scenes," she told me, "I felt this pain, right in my gut." She took a breath and explained that she loved her life and her marriage now, but when she watched Betty say she just wants to serve Don, it took her back to when she and my father were first married. "That's the way I thought. I lived to serve. I wanted to make him happy."
It was odd to hear my mom compare her relationship to the Drapers'. My parents split the household duties, held jobs in teaching and systems administration and pursued their interests in meditation and aikido. What I was coming to understand, thought, was that my mother did not come into the world fully formed in 1981, when I was born, that there was a complicated and somehow painful life that predated me.
Monday, March 19, 2012
(WP) Gloria Steinem
Interesting article in Sunday's Times about second-wave feminist leader Gloria Steinem, which is also a meditation on the vagaries of political organizing.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/fashion/in-the-womans-movement-who-will-replace-gloria-steinem.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=sarah%20hepola&st=cse
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/fashion/in-the-womans-movement-who-will-replace-gloria-steinem.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=sarah%20hepola&st=cse
Tuesday, February 28, 2012
(WR) Revelations of Revelation
Critic Adam Gopnik reviews biblical scholar Elaine Pagels's new book on Revelation in the current New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2012/03/05/120305crbo_books_gopnik
An excerpt:
Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the “Left Behind” books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look. “When John says that ‘the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth,’ he revises Daniel’s vision to picture Rome as the worst empire of all,” Pagels writes. “When he says that the beast’s seven heads are ‘seven kings,’ John probably means the Roman emperors who ruled from the time of Augustus until his own time.” As for the creepy 666, the “number of the beast,” the original text adds, helpfully, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.” This almost certainly refers—by way of Gematria, the Jewish numerological system—to the contemporary Emperor Nero. Even John’s vision of a great mountain exploding is a topical reference to the recent eruption of Vesuvius, in C.E. 79. Revelation is a highly colored picture of the present, not a prophecy of the future.
An excerpt:
Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the “Left Behind” books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look. “When John says that ‘the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth,’ he revises Daniel’s vision to picture Rome as the worst empire of all,” Pagels writes. “When he says that the beast’s seven heads are ‘seven kings,’ John probably means the Roman emperors who ruled from the time of Augustus until his own time.” As for the creepy 666, the “number of the beast,” the original text adds, helpfully, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.” This almost certainly refers—by way of Gematria, the Jewish numerological system—to the contemporary Emperor Nero. Even John’s vision of a great mountain exploding is a topical reference to the recent eruption of Vesuvius, in C.E. 79. Revelation is a highly colored picture of the present, not a prophecy of the future.
Wednesday, February 22, 2012
(WP) Masculinity and the Other
Writing about the novelist Russell Banks in the current issue (March 8th) of the New York Review of Books, Diane Johnson observes Banks' preoccupation with the way conventional images of masculinity blight his characters' lives. She then cites Martha Nussbaum:
"The Philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, writing about patriotism, points out how much mischief, even downright evil, is done in the world because of "diseased norms of manliness." In her view, which is informed by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, these arise from primitive emotions of shame and disgust. Disgust stems from our unease with our mortal bodies, because they will 'die and decay,' but it is often projected onto others, either the other sex or other ethnic groups. Most important, says Nussbaum, studies associate the feelings of disgust and shame with 'aggression against the weak and against women,' something that seems an ingredient, if not the root, of a lot of the political and religious ferment we see everywhere in humiliated societies, and is very much one of Banks' concerns."
The full article is not open source, so you will have to pay for it or go to the library if you want to read it, but this excerpt alone gives some perspective on the concrete, practical importance of Beauvoir's existentialist concept of 'the Other.'
"The Philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, writing about patriotism, points out how much mischief, even downright evil, is done in the world because of "diseased norms of manliness." In her view, which is informed by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, these arise from primitive emotions of shame and disgust. Disgust stems from our unease with our mortal bodies, because they will 'die and decay,' but it is often projected onto others, either the other sex or other ethnic groups. Most important, says Nussbaum, studies associate the feelings of disgust and shame with 'aggression against the weak and against women,' something that seems an ingredient, if not the root, of a lot of the political and religious ferment we see everywhere in humiliated societies, and is very much one of Banks' concerns."
The full article is not open source, so you will have to pay for it or go to the library if you want to read it, but this excerpt alone gives some perspective on the concrete, practical importance of Beauvoir's existentialist concept of 'the Other.'
Monday, February 20, 2012
Target on Your Back
Sunday's New York Times Magazine has a fascinating, and rather creepy, article by Charles Duhigg on the science of habit formation and how companies use it and the vast web of data mining, not just to sell you stuff, but to manipulate your behavior. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Charles%20Duhigg&st=cse
Thursday, February 16, 2012
(WR) Christianity as a Response to Jesus
Why should
an intellectually rigorous historical reconstruction of Jesus matter to the
theology of Christianity or the lives of Christians?
Since the
foundings of Christianity as clusters of Jewish sects and Greek neighborhoods in the first century,
every Christian, and every Christian community, has been faced with the
fundamental question of the life, work, and death of Jesus of Nazareth, and how
to respond to it. Theologically, as well as in everyday life, the histories of Christianity's
many strands wholly consist in the working-out of this relationship.
Christian
responses to Jesus have been persistently various and often contrary. Was Jesus an apocalyptic messiah? A
social critic? A magician? The son of God? A rabble-rouser? Was he resurrected
after his death, and if so does this mean his body came back to life, or does
it mean something else? Was he an avatar of God, projected like a hologram into
first century Palestine,
or a flesh-and-blood person with desires, doubts, and fears? All these and many
more have been claimed for him.
If to be a
Christian in any time is, at a minimum, to take seriously the need to respond
to Jesus, then of course one must choose
for oneself among many competing options for how to respond. To take
uncricitally the word of any specific theological or traditional view of Jesus,
however, would be to abdicate this most fundamental query: Who and what was Jesus and
what (if anything) does this mean for our own lives? Thus, perhaps ironically,
we must go outside particular theological interpretations, and behind
traditional narratives, to find what we can reasonably know about Jesus' life,
work, and death before we are in a position to decide how, or whether, to
respond.
In this
sense, the rigorous and ongoing systematic reconstruction of Jesus and his time
is not an antiquarian curiosity or a threat to the spirit of the religion
(though it may at times threaten specific political power blocs and dogmatic
ideologies within the churches). It is, rather, an indispensable basis for
Christianity as a living practice.
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