‘We Are On Our Own’: Katrina & Race
Today’s Guardian has a powerful piece by Darryl Pinckney about race and the aftermath of Katrina:
5 comments September 3rd, 2005
Archive for 2005
Disaster II
The guys over at Sollicitudo Rei Socialis are doing a good job offering a sane religious commentary in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina–there’s been so much disgusting theology bandied about elsewhere to score points for some cause or other.
In addition to the Red Cross they suggest you can also donate via Catholic Charities. In my shallow trawl of the net there seem to be numerous ways to donate. It’s the harder issues underneath that tax us.
Update: Kenneth Rufo points to a comprehensive list of ways to donate toward hurricane relief.
1 comment September 1st, 2005
Disaster
I was writing something on the Laws of Nature but haven’t the heart to post it right now. There is too much loss around. I have a friend in New Orleans which personalises the tragedy unfolding there and, though he is safe, imagining him standing in the scenes I’ve seen on TV brings the horror home to me.
I don’t know anyone in Iraq so my imagination baulks at the thought of the horror of the mosque stampede. Without the personal connection my mind can’t bring itself to dwell for long on the brutal reality of it.
Both events make me aware of the fragility of our comfort. In the face of the elements our hold on the face of the planet seems so precarious, our attempts at civilisation so ephemeral. But when the social bonds fray it feels even worse, more of a betrayal.
I don’t know what to do about it either. Pray for those dead and endangered? Enjoy my current comfort gratefully and whole-heartedly? The media make me a witness of horror–they entertain me with it–but beyond my capacity for more than compassion, maybe even beyond that.
At least where my compassion fails me there is an economic response. The Red Cross is accepting donations for hurricane relief in the US. I don’t know how to give to ease the suffering in Iraq.
Add comment September 1st, 2005
On Living Well & Dying Well
A beautiful reflection on the work of dying from Larry Zaroff in the New York Times.
2 comments August 30th, 2005
‘The Enemy of My Enemies’
Found this at the end of a reflection by Dan Clendenin for the fourth anniversary of 9/11:
2 comments August 29th, 2005
Objects on the Stack: A Delphi Relic
Now here’s a dangerous and dubious technique for you to try at your own risk–
allocate objects on the stack instead of on the heap. Hey, C++ does it all the
time!
The advantage: object allocation is at least twice as fast on the stack.
Disadvantage: only applicable to objects which are local variables.
Add comment August 28th, 2005
Sunday Week 22 Year A
Though you might not guess it looking at me I’ve never been on a surfboard. I’ve never been a surfer—if you don’t count channel surfing and my mastery of the remote—but I have watched them once or twice and found it stunning— audacious and beautiful and dangerous. The heart of the surfer’s art is an unusual balance—not just the physical balance of walking on water but another balance between bodily grace and crippling calamity. They ride the edge of a wave pushing their skill right to the brink of injury and death in search of the experience of really living. And when they find it they light up: they risk losing their life to find it.
…
We talk about ‘bearing our crosses’ in tones of resignation—fate has dealt me this hand and now I’ll offer it up and find some spiritual meaning in what I can’t avoid…
But Jesus must have been a surfer. When he says ‘renounce yourself and take up your cross’, when he says ‘lose your life and save it’, there’s no resignation in it—he’s talking about seeking out the edge where something is worth dying for, finding the place where death makes life worth living.
Matthew says Jesus was destined to go to Jerusalem to suffer but that makes it seem he had no choice. He did. Go home and die a safe man’s death or carry the cross of his good news into the Holy City riding the edge of his art, hoping for life abundant.
We know the wave broke, and broke him with it, but what a ride it was—audacious and beautiful and dangerous! And what a life came from his death!
Surfers, for all their dopey cool, are addicts and obsessives. Once they have balanced on the edge and tasted the wave they can’t get the thirst from their mouths. They pursue those waves: challenge them, push their luck to the breaking point and beyond.
Jeremiah is protesting and praising just that experience. ‘You have seduced me God and I have let myself be seduced. You have been too much for me but I cannot forget you. I cannot be silent, I cannot un-speak your name, or swallow your words—they throb like a fire in my heart and a burning in my bones.’
…
My advice to you (and to myself) is to go home and stick to channel-surfing. The less you risk the less you feel. The less you feel the less you risk. … Avoid Jesus at all costs. Because if you let him in, if you let him close, if you feel his touch—he will seduce you and you will let yourself be seduced. Better, my friends, not to know him, better not to get the taste for him and his crazy, wonderful life.
…
Of course it may already be too late.
Add comment August 28th, 2005
Nature and Culture, Intelligence and Gender
As if to illustrate my previous post I discovered this via Slashdot:
Richard Lynn, the emeritus professor of psychology at Ulster University, argues that men have larger brains and higher IQs than women, to such an extent that they are better suited to “tasks of high complexity”.
Add comment August 26th, 2005
Cosmology and Cricket (Oh and Evolution Too)
The game of cricket has been a consuming topic in the last few days–not least because one of our visiting retreat givers is a fanatic and another is from the US and rather bemused by it all. We end our midday meal with a brief prayer and today the person leading it began with a carefully confusing account of the rules of cricket–all about being in and being out, etc. After the expected mirth had died down he went on to pray about the presence of God in all the strange customs and cultures of the world and for our ability to find God in all things.
Now… ‘finding God in all things’ is a central Ignatian maxim but–really!–the rules of cricket? You can tell I’m not fond of the game but I doubt that’s the reason the question has been buzzing around for an hour or two now. It touches something more fundamental for me: a matter of cosmology. Where is God to be found in the world? In the natural world? In the worlds of culture? In all of each or only in parts? And how would we tell?
It has been arguedBy David Tracy among others that there is a fundamental parting of the ways between Catholics and Protestants over just this issue. The Catholic imagination–wildly oversimplifying–tends to value the ways the creation can reflect, embody, and reveal God while the Protestant imagination tends to see God as sitting in judgement of just such practises. The Incarnation, then, gets viewed from very different angles either as grounding the capacity of human culture to mediate God or as the way God comes to challenge the idols culture erects. The one is sacramental, the other iconoclastic. I suspect the situation is far more complex than that but there’s a grain of truth there. Compare Karl Rahner for example with Karl Barth.
Perhaps more to the point would be to compare two figures within 20th century Catholicism, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar, himself heavily influenced by Barth. I doubt a close reading of either of them would uphold the polarity some commentators construct between them but the construction is interesting in itself. Rahner, they say, was over-optimistic about the human beings ability to know God and human culture’s capacity to carry God, perhaps most extravagantly manifest in his notion of the ‘anonymous Christian’ . A good Rahnerian could make an anonymous Christian even out of a cricketer. Just being human is being bound for God. The good Balthasarian–and they seem to be in the ascendance right now–thinks that is all too vague and merely baptizes philosophy to look like theology. Christ impresses himself onto the human world and reveals his glory in very particular forms.
The consequences of of this kind of polar construction are very much in evidence in the Catholic Church these days. Was Vatican II a weakening of Catholic identity that now needs to be corrected by a return to our distinctive marks? Or are we still waiting for Vatican II’s vision of a Church open to the world to be implemented and bear its fruit. How should the Church see itself vis-a-vis modern European culture? Are we salt, leaven, and light or are we a separate society offering a counter witness to secularism’s evils? Do we inculturate into our culture, affirming the good we find as a vehicle for the gospel, or do we stand outside and speak an uncomfortable truth?
I could go on but I promise just one more: where do we stand on evolution and design? Cardinal Schönborn’s editorial in the New York Times gets close to setting up science and religion as sparring partners offering conflicting accounts of matters of fact. George Coyne’s response keeps them in separate compartments.’Science is completely neutral with respect to philosophical or theological implications that may be drawn from its conclusions.’ It’s been a while since Ian Barbour explored other ways for science and religion to relate besides conflict and compartmentalisationThere is an extensive treatment here. Once we take a deep breath and deconstruct the dichotomies of which the media are so fond we find that so much of the debate is at cross purposes. The myth of the independence of science and theology has been a safe haven for most theologians. Since science delivers matters of fact with which we can’t argue we can at least satisfy ourselves that we have something to say on matters of value. Running for cover, though, does put you at a disadvantage. Both science and religion(s) offer a cosmology–a view of the whole–that can’t be carved up into pieces: fact and value. Science does us all a disservice when it too runs for cover and claims it is a disinterested pursuit of truth. The atom bomb is not neutral. It isn’t the case that science just produces the facts and others have to decide how to use them. Science offers a view of reality that systematically excludes value. That has been its genius and its deceit. I love science, always have, but I know it lies when it says it is offers a complete vision of reality. It is the very value-neutral ideology of the scientific enterprise which is under attack from the proponents of Intelligent Design. They take the war into the enemies camp proposing purposes and reasons to challenge matters of fact on their own ground. My own belief is that the project is misguided.And guided by the kind of politics I abhor. ID isn’t a scientific theory to be judged by scientific criteria or taught alongside science in schools. It offers no scientific heuristic only metaphysical challenge. But neither are science and religion apples and oranges. Both make cosmological claims–claims about the fullness of what is real–and on that contested territory something interesting might be built to challenge both science and theology.
Bloody cricket!!
12 comments August 26th, 2005
Angels, Ecology, & Virtual Reality
Some time ago I began to be interested in the interface between theology and spirituality and, in particular, the place they meet in cosmology. Theological cosmology, as i think of it, is not in the mainstream of theological study but I believe it deserves to be as it holds the clues to a fresh approach to some common theological impasses.
The paper which follows was written out of a striking experience of ‘spirit of place’. Everyone I’ve asked has their own experiences when a place and time become unexpectedly sacred for them. This is the phenomenon that provoked me to begin to explore what kind of ‘spirit’ makes sense of such experience. I rapidly found it is a conception of spirit that sends roots in two directions: into our theories of the world and into our theories of God. Hence theological cosmology.
Theology is often ridiculed by invoking the mythical question ‘how many angels can dance on the head of a pin’ but i believe there’s an unintended profundity here. It asks how spirit and place are related. That’s a question of intense ecological significance.
If you are interested read on…
Continue Reading 3 comments August 23rd, 2005