All But Dissertation No dissertation--none of the time!
Monday, September 30, 2002
Joseph Epstein, the author of Snobbery [a delicious read I finished this evening], expresses well how I have felt recently, if "dissertation" may be substituted for "book" in the following:
Before I had first done so, writing a book seemed a fine, even grand thing. And so it still seems — except, truth to tell, it is a lot better to have written a book than to actually be writing one. Without attempting to overdo the drama of the difficulty of writing, to be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment, with an accompanying intense wish that one worked instead at bricklaying.
"Of all the orders I've dealt with in the last two decades, St. John's, in the way they've handled this issue, is the darkest of the dark," St. Paul attorney Anderson said before reaching the settlement. Anderson has won tens of millions of dollars on behalf of dozens of sex-abuse victims nationally over nearly two decades.
"It's no accident there's never been a priest prosecuted [at St. John's]," he said. "They have enjoyed a situation of deference and preference in the community and in our culture. The Catholic Church, in particular the abbey, operates above the law and below the law, but not according to it."
..."Part of it is this theological rationalization that forgiveness is superior to everything," he said. "And, of course, forgiveness is important, but forgiveness goes along with reform. They didn't reform."
We don't indulge in much gossip around here. Most of the time we're too bloody serious. So here's a little dish: J. K. Rowling is pregnant! Evidently that is one of the reasons the newest Harry Potter has been delayed.
If you click on the above link, make sure you stay on the site long enough to be attacked by the rhinoceros.
The shortlist for the Booker Prize was announced three days ago. Life of Pi (the only one I have read) is one of the six. This article helpfully gives the list of books, a short synopsis of each, and information about the Booker Prize in general.
Over the last two weeks or so, I've been immersed in Mozart's Requiem. My mother had given my a cassette tape of it, to which I had listened intermittently, several years ago, but it was only when I read about the "rolling Requiem" that took place around the world on September 11 that I really paid attention to the piece.
Frankly, the music that has been produced commemorating 9-11 has been sappy kitsch in the main; unfortunately, sappy kitsch is a fairly accurate representation of our age. According to one report I read in the WSJ, a concert-goer in Seattle noticed this modern musical dearth and mentioned that Mozart's Requiem might be a more profound and ultimately more appropriate way to honor the dead. The idea spread, and soon plans were afoot to play the piece at 8:46 a.m. 9-11-02 all around the world, in time zones ranging from Seattle to NY to Wales, Latvia, Tel Aviv, Australia, and Taipei.
For this reason I've been listening to the Requiem over and over for the last two weeks or so, marveling at it more with every listen. I've had quite a bit of training in musical performance but never any training in music appreciation, if that makes sense. This was brought to my attention a while ago when I read an article quoting Theodor Adorno (an article, unfortunately, that is no longer available on the web) that called pop music "anti-music, a drug, a poison shoved down the throats of consumers." I don't agree totally with that; some pop music is just fun and needn't be taken so seriously but simply enjoyed for what it is. But another thing he wrote really got me thinking. He said that such music "does the listening for you." This was a new idea for me. I certainly had thought about a book "doing the reading for you," even if not in those exact words. My students often are shocked when they have to work at reading a biblical passage or a piece of secondary literature about that passage.
"Work? I have to work to read this? But I've never had any trouble reading anything before. You mean I have to learn how to read? But I already know how to read!" While not one of my students has actually said this aloud, it's sure that they're thinking it from the looks on their faces when I tell them that "you're going to learn how to read in this class." By the end of the course, they do know how to read in a way they have never read before, and some of them even have thanked me for it. Those are the words I treasure.
But back to music. It had never occurred to me that some music, like some books, lays out too much for the listener. Learn how to hear music? But I already know how to hear it. You just sit back and listen, right? Uh, no.
So here's a bit of the Requiem. Of course, if you really want to enjoy it, you must hear it in addition to reading it. Then hear it again. And then again.
Dies irae, dies illa
Solvet saeclum in favilla
Teste David cum Sibylla.
Quantus tremor est futurus
Quando judex est venturus
Cuncta stricte discussurus.
(The day of wrath, that day
will dissolve the world in ashes
as David and the Sibyl witnessed.
What trembling will there be
when the judge is come
who will thresh out all thoroughly!)
Later this afternoon we're going to drive to Chicago, where he is working on a project, to join him for dinner and window-shopping on Michigan Avenue, and perhaps to wander over to Navy Pier.
In the meantime, I must work, work, work. I have enough German to translate to choke a horse. Even a German horse, ein Pferd. Better get to now.
Gore's speech was one no minimally decent politician could have delivered. It was entirely dishonest, cheap, low. It was utterly hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts--bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in smarmy tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate.
American found after 3.5 months adrift in the Pacific.
When the McClusky pulled alongside the battered boat, which had first spotted by a Customs Service reconnaissance plane on Sept. 17, Van Pham was barbecuing a sea gull on a makeshift grill using some of the boat's wooden trim for a fire.
That old "life imitates art" thing again. For those of you who are newer readers here, I'm referring to Yann Martel's Life of Pi, which I reviewed a while back. Good book. Might read it again. Probably should send an email to Van Pham about it. Later, once he recovers.
I've been far too busy to write lately. Hope to get back to it, maybe at the end of the week. Everything is fine here; we're all healthy as usual, but simply much too busy.
Along with Andrew Sullivan's "This is a Religious War," the most memorable article I read in the months following September 11 was about one Rick Rescorla. It appeared in the Washington Post. I saved the link and printed out the article, which, along with Sullivan's, I have read more than once.
Thus it's satisfying to see that Bill Gertz in the NRO remembers Rescorla, too. Although I never met him, Rescorla is near the top on my list of heroes. Gertz's article is short and gets the main points across. The article in the Washington Post helps those of us unfortunate enough never to have known the man to get to know him. Remember him and his family in your grateful prayers.
Novak hits it right on the head when he discusses the crucial role of interpretation in scripture-based religion:
"But how do you argue," another says, a former professor who came home from a Western country to become a brigadier in the field, "when they quote a text from the Koran on amputation according to sharia law, and ask if you believe in that text? We accept the Koran. We are Muslims. But we do not accept an eleventh-century interpretation of Islam. We are twenty-first century people. We are Muslims, in a country with eleven different major tendencies among Muslims, and we are accustomed to tolerance of one another."
...Since its Independence in 1956 the people of Sudan have struggled to maintain the nation's pluralism, and to hold its extremists in check and under social control. But the new regime has tried to install a 20th-century totalitarian regime under the banner of Islamic "fundamentalism," installing a literal version of the sharia law of medieval origin, without any attempt to humanize it through reflection on historical experience and philosophical learning. The extremists lack any gifts for hermeneutics, critical thinking, or even simple common sense in the interpretation of religion in human experience; they have no awareness of a formal principle for the "development of doctrine," whereby a revealed religion remains through critical adaptation and according to sound principles, a living tradition faithful to its purest origins and deepest inspirations, whatever the turbulence of changing times.
It is extremely encouraging to hear that people potentially in a position to abolish a wretched government, and to bring forth real good, are asking these questions. They are some of the most important ones that adherents of "religions of the book" can ever ask, and they are oh-so-difficult to answer, especially if the questioners are engaged in the roiling real world. I don't envy these men. They are in the same position as those who challenged biblical teaching in Europe in the 15th-16th centuries, and they probably risk the same penalties. Therefore my deepest respect goes out to them, as do my prayers.
I try not to post too many things from the WSJ's Opinion Journal Online, because I figure that many people are already reading it. If you're not, you should be. But this one deserves highlighting. In my own words, it gives devastating new meaning to the phrase "fashion statement."
In the words of the WSJ:
You really have to see the photo at the above link, but here's the caption: "Lebanese model Nathaly Fadlallah models the 'Dress of Revolution,' designed by Saudi haute couture designer Yehya al-Bashri. The dress was part of a collection featured at an Arab fashion festival in Beirut on September 17, 2002 to demonstrate solidarity with the Palestinian uprising against Israel."
The dress is covered with faux bloodstains from the waist to the knees, and below the knees it shows an Israeli tank against a background of burning buildings. Reuters, by the way, classifies this as an "entertainment" photo.
I found this after I "unpublished" parts of the post below. Honestly.
Because the Catholic position was given so much publicity at the time, I singled them out for criticism. It was absolutely inappropriate for me to do so. I wish to apologize not only to the Catholic Church but also to the faithful of any religion who may have been offended. Christopher Reeve
The actor said President Bush had paid too much heed to the Catholic church.
"There are religious groups -- the Jehovah's Witness, I believe -- who think it's a sin to have a blood transfusion. Well, what if the president for some reason decided to listen to them, instead of to the Catholics, which is the group he really listens to in making his decisions about embryonic stem cell research?" Reeve was quoted as saying.
Note: I think Reeve is wrong on this issue, but I was wrong in how I wrote of him. Therefore I've edited this post.
It strikes me as more than ghoulish that there's a continual cry for "embryonic" stem cells when research has shown that stem cells from adults are showing just as much promise, if not more, for helping the injured and ill than cells from aborted fetuses. Perhaps abortion supporters are trying to justify their grisly employment, and in addition make even more money, all the while patting themselves on the back for "helping" people?
Ever tried to talk to a child about the first amendment? I did the other day.
"You mean you can say anything you want, and no one can do anything about it?" he asked.
"Uh, no," I responded, thinking about how to communicate the concept of libel in 25 words or less. I'm not a lawyer, and I was struggling. There's nothing like trying to teach something to make you realize how little you may actually know about it.
Rod Dreher gives me some help on learning about the concept of libel, and he gives bloggers everywhere a cautionary tale, namely, the on-going conflict between Michael S. Rose, the author of Goodbye, Good Men, and his most outspoken critic, Fr. Rob Johansen, in his latest article. Blogger, nota bene! Character defamation, in addition to being a sin against charity, may also have unpleasant legal consequences.
The Saudi foreign minister said Sunday the kingdom would be ''obliged to follow through'' if the United States needed bases in the kingdom to attack Iraq under U.N. authority.
The comments to CNN by Prince Saud al-Faisal would mark a significant shift in Saudi policy. In an interview last month with The Associated Press, Saud declared that U.S. facilities in the desert kingdom would be off limits for an attack on Iraq.
...Last week, Foreign Minister Ahmed Maher of Egypt, among the most influential Arab states, said his government would support a U.S. strike on Iraq if it were under U.N. auspices.
The Washington Post has a large list of new books coming out this fall. Some of them look really good, for example:
Pope John Paul II, by Peggy Noonan (Viking, Nov.). The former speechwriter for Presidents Reagan and Bush casts the pontiff as a revolutionary figure in the modern world.
The Vatican's Women, by Paul Hofmann (St. Martin's, Oct.). The New York Times's Rome bureau chief investigates how women have shaped life in Vatican City, from nuns to lawyers, and from St. Catherine of Siena to Mother Teresa.
Spy: The Inside Story of How the FBI's Robert Hanssen Betrayed America, by David Wise (RH, Oct.). Why this mole chose to sell his country's secrets to the Russians, by one of the nation's leading writers on espionage.
Consciousness and the Novel, by David Lodge (Harvard, Oct.). The critic-cum-novelist suggests that literature may be the perfect complement -- not antidote -- to hard science.
There are dozens more listed in all topics, from American history to sports to nature to medicine to current events. Well worth a look.
We spent a few hours as a family at Borders last night. It's one of our favorite weekend activities, whether we go on Saturday evening or Sunday after Mass. My son usually heads for the science fiction section, my husband for the computer magazines, and I for the cultural/religious commentary (journals such as First Things or Commonweal). Last night we wanted to take a look at Lisa Beamer's new book Let's Roll, which was located conveniently at the front of the store on the new hardcover table. While our son did his thing, my husband and I stood reading Beamer's reflections together from the same copy. We read most of the book in this fashion. It must have looked rather odd, the two of us standing at the front of the store reading from the same book, and when my legs got tired we moved to a couch (are there fewer couches than there used to be, or is this just my imagination?).
Most of the book was pretty interesting. Lisa Beamer is an attractive person in many ways, and one instinctively likes her. One can tell, reading this book, that the writing of it must have been therapy for her. I, frankly, don't see how she could have done it. To lose your husband, have a baby, have the care of two other small children, and yet produce a book well before the first anniversary of 9-11? I suppose many people supported her throughout the process.
One thing I so appreciate about the book is how it gives voice to a class of people who usually aren't well represented artistically (that is, in the print and film media): the upper-middle class wife and mother of a successful family. The life of such a person doesn't make for what most people consider good copy: doing the laundry, scraping cheerios off the floor, going on the occasional nice vacation (the Beamers had returned from a trip to Rome several days before the attacks). Of course, the only reason Lisa is writing is because of the extraordinary circumstances of the death of her husband, but even with this, a good deal of the book simply relates the life of the two Beamers, graduates of Wheaton College, employees of a large software company, people who up to that time had done nothing extraordinary but succeed in their business, marriage, and family lives. Nothing more than that.
It gets rather tiresome being presented continually mainly with the "dramatic" stories: mobsters, abused wives or children, hospital dramas, etc. While I picked up Beamer's book to read about the heroism of her husband, it was the extraordinary ordinariness of their lives that has made me think. Except, or course, that even before the crash of Flight 93, their lives were not ordinary, but simply unsung.
My son, the gawky young colt, started organized fencing lessons this week. As the mother of the friend who introduced him to this sport said, in regard to her own son, "It's got just the right mix of fantasy and violence for a pre-pubescent boy." We hope for the best, that is, that he gains coordination, muscle mass, and a sense of fair play while having a heck of a good time playing with shiny sharp weapons. Ouch. It hurts to write that. Fencing is an extremely honorable sport, but a mother can't help but worry.
Mel Gibson's only daughter is turning her back on the world of showbiz to become a Catholic nun. The actor yesterday revealed the news in an interview with an Italian newspaper, saying he was delighted Hannah, 21, had decided to join a religious order. "I believe in God. My love of religion was given to me by my father," he told Il Giornale.
So is this:
He receives [sic] Mass in Latin in a chapel at his Malibu home, which is known locally as "Saint Mel's", and has made speeches condemning abortion and contraception.
This, however, puts a new and unpleasant spin on all of the above:
But yesterday he used the interview to criticise the Vatican, saying he no longer believed in the Church as an institution.
"I agree with everyone who says the Vatican is a wolf in sheep's clothing," he said.
The whole Vatican? Including the Pope? Certainly there are grounds for rejecting certain aspects of the Church today, its "treatment" of the clerical sex abuse crisis not least among them, but get real. The Church as an institution still manages very well throughout most of the world, educating children and adults (at least the ones in universities), running hospitals, offering the sacraments wherever it can. Kudos to Gibson for his strong stance on the tough issues of sexual morality and the evidently terrific job he and his wife did in raising their daughter. Let's pray that his common sense and intellect soon catch up with his personal piety.
A little while ago my husband and I were talking about the passengers of Flight 93, the plane that crashed into the Pennsylvania field and thus saved some target in D.C., perhaps the White House or Capitol building. While some have said that those passengers were "ordinary people who acted in extraordinary ways," others are saying that that may not be quite correct. The hijackers couldn't have chosen a worse flight to hijack, peopled as it was with high-powered type-As, several of whom were champions in sports such as judo and rugby. My favorite Canadian (at least he writes for a Canadian paper) Mark Steyn considers this idea from a different angle:
The Flight 93 hijackers might have got lucky. They might have found themselves on a plane with John Lahr ("You guys are working for Bush, right?") or an Ivy League professor immersed in a long Harper's article about the iniquities of U.S. foreign policy. They might have found themselves travelling with Robert Daubenspeck of White River Junction, Vermont, who the day after September 11th wrote to his local newspaper advising against retaliation: "Someone, someday, must have the courage not to hit back but to look them in the eye and say, 'I love you.' " But, granted these exceptions, chances are any flight full of reasonably typical Americans would have found a group of people to do the right thing, to act as those on Flight 93 did. When you face these terrorists, when you "look them in the eye," you see there's nothing to negotiate. Flight 93's passengers were the first to confront that -- to understand that what they were up against was not "courage" (as I erroneously identified it a year ago) but a psychotic death-cultism in which before committing mass murder one carefully depilates and cleans one's genitalia because paradise is a brothel. They are dangerous only insofar as they're used by wily dictators, cheered on by many of their fellow Muslims and regarded ambivalently by much of the rest of the world.
But, on Flight 93, Todd Beamer, Jeremy Glick, Thomas Burnett, Mark Bingham and others did not have the luxury of amused Guardianesque detachment. So they effectively inaugurated the new Bush Doctrine: When you know your enemies have got something big up their sleeves, you take 'em out before they can do it.
E.G. has a thoughtful response to my post below about war, peace, and the Catholic tradition. Believe it or not, I agree with everything he says. It is terrible when the only way to prevent the attacks of those who would massacre you and your loved ones is to kill them first. Catholic Just War theory teaches that war should be the last resort in any conflict; the parties should try all other means to resolve their problems before moving to armed, violent means.
I believe that this is exactly what Bush tried to emphasize in his speech to the U.N. today: we will only go to war, if we must, because other means have failed thus far. Since 1991 we've sat by while Iraq flagrantly disregards every attempt of the world community to enforce its reasonable edicts peacefully (Iraq was a defeated nation, after all, and agreed to the U.N. demands). Bush was, if one may read between the lines, begging Iraq to show some sign of heeding and acting on the decrees of the U.N.
Who wants to go to war? It costs lots of money and will kill our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters as well as theirs, not to mention the non-combatants. What I find sad is that, if the reports I've heard are correct, Sadam will purposely place non-combatants in military zones. Of course he will do this only because of the horror the U.S. and all right-thinking and feeling people have when an innocent dies.
I don't know the right answer here any more than E. G. does. I don't think anyone does. All we can do is keep praying for peace, praying for peace ...
A note: I read (can't remember where) this wonderful anecdote about the prophet Mohammed. I hope I'm getting the story right here:
Mohammed was about to kill an enemy in a battle. The enemy insulted him in some way.
"I can't kill you now," the prophet said. "I cannot kill you while I feel hate in my heart."
Would that our Muslim enemies would take the words of their prophet to their own hearts!
Rod Dreher tackles the question that is really at the heart of Christian faith: how do we love our enemies? He mentions that yesterday a friend of his walked out of a Mass at which the pastor preached a mawkish "peace at all costs" sermon. I've never walked out on such a homily but have certainly heard them, most notably, and most infuriatingly, on September 11, 2001, on the university quad. I had a most violently unchristian desire to knock some sense into our president as he spoke about love and forgiveness of those who had hours before murdered our countrymen. It was too early to forgive the terrorists at 3:00 p.m. on 9-11. Forgiveness that quick is too cheap. We must forgive; it is a requirement both of our faith and of our very humanness. As human beings we cannot survive boiling with rage; we either implode or explode. But give it some time!
Nevertheless, forgiveness has nothing to do with the actions our country is now contemplating, namely invasion of Iraq. The question is balancing the demands of our faith to protect the innocent with the demands of our faith to love our enemies. Rod Dreher mentioned that
Pope John Paul II denounced the 9/11 attacks as examples of "ferocious inhumanity," but coupled a prayer for the souls of the innocent dead with a prayer for God's mercy on their killers. The Christian religion demands of its followers prayers for their enemies, but still, this was jarring, especially for Americans.
May the Pope's words continue to be jarring to Americans! Americans could use jarring in more ways than this, and it's part of the Pope's job description to jar. I'm going with the Pope on this one and not Dreher. We should pray for those who attacked us. We do not know their eternal destiny, and it is our duty to pray for the dead, all of them.
But what do we do next? Do we stand by and allow our children perhaps to be nuked, gassed, or suffer biological warfare because of Jesus' injunction to "love our enemies?" I believe at this point we need to ask in a very serious way "what would Jesus have us do?"
More later: I'm on campus and someone is waiting to use the computer.
There's a huge amount of very good writing about 9-11, the war on terrorism, Islam, and other pertinent topics today. Peggy Noonan has a good column, as does Michael Kelly, and Andrew Sullivan's refutation of Susan Sontag is a must-read. But at the moment I'm going to post only this bit from Victor Davis Hanson on how things have changed in the last year.
Foreign relations will not be the same in our generation. Our coalition with Europe, we learn, was not a partnership, but more mere alphabetic nomenclature and the mutual back scratching of Euro-American globetrotters — a paper alliance without a mission nearly 15 years after the end of the Cold War. The truth is that Europe, out of noble purposes, for a decade has insidiously eroded its collective national sovereignty in order to craft an antidemocratic EU, a 80,000-person fuzzy bureaucracy whose executive power is as militarily weak as it is morally ambiguous in its reliance on often dubious international accords. This sad realization September 11 brutally exposed, and we all should cry for the beloved continent that has for the moment completely lost its moral bearings. Indeed, as the months progressed the problems inherent in "the European way" became all too apparent: pretentious utopian manifestos in lieu of military resoluteness, abstract moralizing to excuse dereliction of concrete ethical responsibility, and constant American ankle-biting even as Europe lives in a make-believe Shire while we keep back the forces of Mordor from its picturesque borders, with only a few brave Frodos and Bilbos tagging along. Nothing has proved more sobering to Americans than the skepticism of these blinkered European hobbits after September 11.
Note: I'm aware of my violation of proper blogging mores in not linking to all the articles I mentioned. But I have many other things to do today. You've got Google--look 'em up. If you don't want to do that, you can also get the links on Lucianne.
"A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
As you've certainly noticed, I haven't been blogging much lately. I'm heads down on the dissertation. Perhaps I should shut the blog down, but I enjoy it and don't want to give it up yet. Sorry if it isn't as scintillating as I would like it to be; perhaps things will lighten up a bit on the academic side soon.
Almost everybody you talk to considers Patch a favorite to win one of the three seats [on the school board]. He was a teacher for 40 years. He's a plain-spoken, common-sense type who knows the territory. Better yet, he has the Des Moines teachers union behind him.
In their interview, Narcisse asked Patch if he'd be a "champion for accountability."
Patch: "I would like to see us be accountable, but as far as tying graduation to reading, we're going to have a lot of architects and artists and doctors out there who aren't going to graduate from high school if we do that. The fact is, a higher percentage of those three occupations have this word-blindness or dyslexic problem."
Narcisse: So you're saying if a kid can't read, we still ought to consider, if he meets other criteria, giving that kid a high school diploma?
Jonah Goldberg, like many Catholics, muddles the idea of papal infallibility, which is only effective under very specific circumstances. The last of these was 1950. While we owe submission of mind and will to the Magisterium in matters of faith and morals, do we owe it in matters political? Or are matters political indeed matters of faith and morals, only on a large scale? Then again, is a statement from the Vatican's foreign minister a ruling of the Magisterium? I'm inclined to think not.
Unlike several of my colleagues, I'm absolutely no expert in Just War Theory. But it seems to me that eliminating a likely threat is a valid reason to engage in armed conflict. My opinion on this may change as I learn more, however.
Note: Jonah Goldberg is not a Catholic. Read the above like this: "Jonah Goldberg, like many Catholics, ..."
There is no university if Plato is not read, even if it is called a university. Students who go through a university never having read Plato or Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas, among others, are really wasting most of their time and money. Without them — and I add the Bible — they will not have a coherent clue as to what it is all about.
And I am not necessarily an advocate of what are called "great books," not that I am against reading them, however defined. My Another Sort of Learning, in fact, is written because the great books will not do it even though they are "great." I agree with Leo Strauss and Frederick Wilhelmsen, who remark that the great books contradict each other. They can and often do lead to skepticism. Likewise, I agree with Plato in The Republic when he warns us of exposing students to great things too early, before they have lived long enough to recognize what it indeed great. I do not deny that some students are brighter than others. One of the functions of the university is to find out which is which. But I am also aware that learning is very often a question of whether someone has his soul in order, whether he can be attracted by what is. Great things will not be seen by those whose souls are not ordered. I did not say that first. Aristotle did. But I do not mind repeating it as if I were the first to discover it. Indeed, when we are taught something, when we finally see "the truth of things," to use Pieper's great expression, we do "discover" it. It is now we who see.
I've spent the weekend watching lots of sports coverage. First and foremost, of course, ND football. I like Ty. He's just what the demoralised Irish need. Friday evening I was trying to sneak in a few more hours writing in the library, and I heard the band outside. Rushing to the window on the west side, I couldn't resist and followed the Pied Pipers to the Joyce Center, where I became one with over 12,000 roaring fans at the pep rally. It was great. Ty got a standing ovation from the 11,500 or so white bodies that surrounded him. And we won! We didn't play as well as we should have (no offensive TDs?) but we won. Ty needed to win his first home game. Cheer, cheer for old Notre Dame. Wake up the echoes ...
The last few days it's been tennis. I wouldn't normally watch, but I've been down with a 48 hour flu and couldn't do anything but sit in front of the tube or sleep. Sampras Sampras Sampras! He looks kinda like my husband, so I rooted for him. That's a girrrl for ya.
I did read a little, as a matter of fact. I'm finishing up Bernard Lewis' What Went Wrong. Amazing stuff. I've learned so much. The Lewis book is great because it's only about 160 pp. but presents an overview of history, religion, and culture in a very even-handed way. I'm having to modify some of my earlier uninformed opinions about Islam and its role in the world in light of the facts. At the same time, many things I believed have been confirmed. If I feel up to it, I'll share some of the more interesting insights from the book here.
I'm going to grab one from Victor in the comments from last week and let you have a go at it:
Una salus victis nullam sperare salutem. - Virgil
Victor writes,
"And I've yet to hear an english translation which does this justice. "The only hope of the defeated is to hold no hope of being saved" just doesn't cut it."
The new, $190 million Catholic cathedral in Los Angeles is coming under fire as too commercial.
You can sip some Starbucks coffee in the cafeteria or, for about $25, buy a bottle of Our Lady of the Angels wine in the gift shop. And you can buy your own crypt for anywhere from $50,000 to $3 million.
September 11 dubbed "Patriot Day"? Come on! Anyone want to take bets on whether this name sticks? The odds aren't good.
Bush's attempt reminds me of the administration of my undergraduate institution, which tried to christen the beloved "Ghetto" as "the off-campus student neighborhood." The Ghetto it remains to this day.
Whatever possessed our congress to pass this, and our president to sign it?
Throughout history, from the days of Jewish rebels against Rome and Islam’s early and recurrent fractures, through 16th-century Spanish Catholicism alarmed at the advent of alternate paths to salvation, to 19th-century Protestantism startled by Charles Darwin, religions under siege invariably have responded by returning to doctrinal rigor and insisting upon the damnation of nonbelievers. Each major religion has known its share of threats to its philosophical and practical integrity. Our age happens to be a losing era for Islam, when its functionality as a mundane organizing tool has decayed in much of the world—just as European Christianity had done by the beginning of the 16th century.
Islam certainly is not hateful in its essence—but a disproportionate number of its current adherents need to hate to avoid the agony of self-knowledge. The basic problem is daunting: We face a failing civilization in the Middle East. But if we have the least spark of wisdom, we will do all that we can to ensure the failure does not spread from cultures that have made socioeconomic suicide pacts with themselves to lands that still might adapt to the demands of the modern and post-modern worlds.
Religions change, because men change them. Fundamentalists insist upon an ahistorical stasis, but evolution in the architecture of faith has always been essential to, and reflective of, human progress. Certainty is comforting, but a religion’s capacity for adaptive behavior unleashes the energies necessary to renew both the faith and the society in which it flourishes. On its frontiers, Islam remains capable of the changes necessary to make it, once again, a healthy, luminous faith whose followers can compete globally on its own terms. But the hard men from that religion’s ancient homelands are determined to frustrate every exploratory effort they can. The Muslim extremist diaspora from the Middle East has one consistent message: Return to the past, for that is what God wants. Beware, no matter his faith, of the man who presumes to tell you what God wants.
Completely absorbing article about teens in Iran. Did you know some Iranian girls are blogging? Talk about a good reason to post anonymously! If anyone knows where to find these blogs, please let us know.
"This year we had an opening for a scholar of Asian history. We had several candidates but obviously the most qualified one was from Stanford. Yet he didn’t get the job. So I went to the chair of the search committee and asked him what had happened. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘you’re absolutely right. He was far and away the most qualified candidate and we had a terrific interview. But then we went to lunch and he let out that he was for school vouchers."
In his Guardian column this week, our old friend George Monbiot argued persuasively that poverty made people happier: "In southern Ethiopia, for example," wrote George, "the poorest half of the poorest nation on earth, the streets and fields crackle with laughter. In homes constructed from packing cases and palm leaves, people engage more freely, smile more often, express more affection than we do behind our double glazing, surrounded by remote controls."
He's so right. That's why I'm glad I made the effort to attend the opening gala of the Earth Summit, truly a night to remember. The banqueting suite of Johannesburg's Michelangelo Hotel was packed as Bob Mugabe warmed up the crowd with a few gags: "I don't know about you," he said, "but I'm starving millions of people!" The canned laughter - an authentic recording of happy Ethiopian peasants clutching their bellies and corpsing - filled the room.
By the way, my son and husband and I started reading Mitch Frank's Understanding September 11 this weekend on the way to my aunt's Labor Day weekend gathering. We had tried to read it earlier in the week, but we can only do so after school, and my son let me know in no uncertain terms that he didn't want to read it at night. "It might give me nightmares," he explained. He is a pretty big boy now, but this interchange reminded me that he's still a child, and sometimes we need to tread carefully.
I was hoping that the book would spur conversation, and it certainly did. Our general modus operandi is that we take turns reading the text aloud, but the listener may interrupt at any time (other than in the middle of a sentence) to question or comment. Sometimes the conversation can go pretty far afield before we return to the written word, and that's usually just fine. So yesterday we spent a good deal of time talking about Pearl Harbor, Timothy McVeigh, and the seige on Koresh's Waco compound as examples of attacks on Americans. The book didn't mention Waco, but since it was McVeigh's stated reason for the bombing of the Murrah building, I brought it up. My son was fascinated by the whole thing. What is a cult? Were the Branch Davidians a cult? How did Koresh interpret scripture? Why were his interpretations so persuasive? Who attacked whom and when and why? Was the U.S. government a terrorist agent in this attack? Once again we're trying to go beyond the "black hat/white hat" dichotomy, the idea that some people are always right and others always wrong. He's just now maturing to the point that he can begin to think about these things with any amount of sophistication.
A rather negative review of Colleen Carroll's The New Faithful: Why Young Adults Are Embracing Christian Orthodoxy. NB: I haven't read this book and so can't say anything about it. But the reviewer's biography is instructive: Peter Manseau is an editor of the online religion magazine KillingtheBuddha.com, which is definitely an edgy Gen-X thing. Read the "Manifesto" on the left sidebar to get an idea of where Manseau is coming from.
Who is the Lady of Shalott?Click here and find out. Why do I call myself the Lady of Shalott?
In addition to being a blogger, I'm a wife, mother, and Ph.D. student specializing in scripture and the Graeco-Roman world, and I'm just a little bit pregnant with a dissertation (but we're not going to talk about the dissertation, are we? No!). In hopes of receiving tenure someday at a university as wonderful as the one I now attend, this blogger will remain resolutely anonymous. Nothing like yards of politically incorrect off-the-cuff statements to derail the tenure track. But we'll have lots of fun anyway.
