Kiwis of France

So, I walk into the grocery today and kiwi fruit is on the sale display. I’ve bought kiwis in Manchester, England, in Pasadena, California, in Seattle, Washington, always they come from New Zealand. Surely kiwis taste better here in Newcastle, Australia. I get home and my wife notices the little label, “Product of France.” Are you kidding me? Australians eat kiwis from France? Then I noticed a green plastic spoon in the box, cleverly designed with a knife for a handle. Monkey see, monkey do. I take the implicit advice of the most sophisticated gourmands in the world and cut my kiwi in half and spoon out the nectar. Globalism at its most absurd.

Top 10 Tech Trends in Education: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=35234

Top 10 Metatrends Shaping Educational Technology: http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=35234

Liberal Arts: http://bit.ly/xsx2OC

“You go to a great school not so much for knowledge as for arts or habits; for the art of expression, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual position, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the art of working out what is possible in a given time; for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage, and mental soberness.”

- Erwin Griswold, Dean of Harvard Law School, cited in, “The Liberal Arts as Guideposts in the 21st Century,” The Chronicle, http://bit.ly/xsx2OC

"The Church" http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=28788

A comment on “The Church,” as defined in the recent US Supreme Court case, Hosanna-Tabor:

Most significantly, though, in the current moment, is that there is arguably no analogy to “the church” in its mystical sense outside Christianity. While other religious communities speak of the body of the faithful in various ways, the Court’s opinion would seem to suggest that its doctrine is tightly and very specifically bound to a history of the Christian church and its assertions of its rights in the context of a particular reading of English history.

- Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, The Immanent Frame Blog, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/?p=28788

Eagleton on de Botton's Latest: http://gu.com/p/34t9d

Eagelton on De Botton’s Latest, Religion for Atheists: http://gu.com/p/34t9d

God may be dead, but Alain de Botton’s Religion for Atheists is a sign that the tradition from Voltaire to Arnold lives on. The book assumes that religious beliefs are a lot of nonsense, but that they remain indispensible to civilised existence… De Botton does not want people literally to believe, but he remains a latter-day Matthew Arnold, as his high Victorian language makes plain. Religion “teaches us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober”, as well as instructing us in “the charms of community”. It all sounds tediously neat and civilised. This is not quite the gospel of a preacher who was tortured and executed for speaking up for justice, and who warned his comrades that if they followed his example they would meet with the same fate. In De Botton’s well-manicured hands, this bloody business becomes a soothing form of spiritual therapy, able to “promote morality (and) engender a spirit of community”. It is really a version of the Big Society.

For a more polite comment and review cf: http://gu.com/p/34nmc

Henry Miller's 11 Commandments: http://bit.ly/wn5mN7

Henry Miller, a Writer’s 11 Commandments - http://bit.ly/wn5mN7

Accepting the way you work: http://bit.ly/yEW1O3

Accepting the way you work: http://bit.ly/yEW1O3

2012 Taught Courses

Just preparing for the 2012 teaching year at the Univeristy of Newcastle, and a note on what’s coming:

Semester One

• RELI1010 World Religions: Wed 11-1pm, V107 (also available online)
• THEO3001 Religious Ethics: Tue 2-4pm C124 (also available online)

Semester Two

• RELI2030 Reel Religion: Exploring the Relationship between Religion and Film Tue 1-5pm EAG01 (also available online)
• RELI3060 The New Visibility of Religion Wed 12-2pm EF20 (also available online)

Morpeth Lecture 2012

I’ve agreed to give the Morpeth Public Lecture for 2012. Thought about it a bit and am going to talk about “What Can a Theology Do?” taking Deleuze’s essay “What Can a Body Do?” as some inspiration. In any case, still to write up the details, but it’s scheduled for Tuesday 29 May, 5:45pm for 6pm at Christ Church Cathedral. Further details available by clicking here: http://bit.ly/wdvKCa

APRA Conference 2012

2012 Conference of the Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association (APRA)

Keynote speakers:

• Richard Kearney (Boston College)
• Marilyn McCord Adams (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
• Kevin Hart (University of Virginia & Australian Catholic University)
• Constant Mews (Monash University)

Dates: Friday June 22 – Sunday June 24, 2012

Venue: Australian Catholic University, Melbourne campus (Victoria Parade, Fitzroy)

Conference theme: Religious Diversity and Its Philosophical Significance

The Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association (www.apra.org.au) aims to encourage, publicise and circulate scholarly work within the field of philosophy of religion. Italso hopes to foster greater ties between scholars working in the field by providing a forum for a constructive and critical analysis of religion.

If you would like to present a paper, please submit a title, a short abstract (of up to 200 words), and a brief bio to Nick.Trakakis@acu.edu.au. Proposals relating to the above conference theme are particularly welcome, though the organising committee also welcomes papers on any topic in the philosophy of religion or philosophical theology.

Abstracts are due 10 February 2012.

Enquiries may be directed to: Nick.Trakakis@acu.edu.au, or phone: (03) 9953 3263.

Torturer's Apprentice: http://bit.ly/AbAKcW

“The new science of interrogation is not, in fact, so new at all: ‘extraordinary rendition’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ and ‘waterboarding’ all spring directly from the practices of the medieval Roman Catholic Church. The distance, in both technique and ideology, between the Inquisition’s interrogation regime and 21st-century America’s is uncomfortably short—and provides a chilling harbinger of what can happen when moral certainty gets yoked to the machinery of torture.”

- “Torturer’s Apprentice” by Cullen Murphy, The Atlantic: http://bit.ly/AbAKcW

Superb: http://www.caveofforgottendreams.com

Superb: Werner Herzog’s caveofforgottendreams.com

Ted Talks on Religion

billy_graham_on_technology_and_faith.html (1998)
richard_dawkins_on_militant_atheism.html (2002)
noah_feldman_politics_and_religion_are_technologies.html (2003)
tom_honey_on_god_and_the_tsunami.html (2005)
rick_warren_on_a_life_of_purpose.html (2006)
dan_dennett_s_response_to_rick_warren.html (2006)
a_j_jacobs_year_of_living_biblically.html (2008)
karen_armstrong_makes_her_wish_for_compassion.html (2008)
wade_davis_worldwide_web_of_belief_and_ritual.html (2008)
j_j_abrams_mystery_box.html (2008)

Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars http://bit.ly/xarb41

“Google’s Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars,” in The Chronicle, http://bit.ly/xarb41

Bitter Politics of Envy? http://nyti.ms/xRc5pO

“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own. Nobody. You built a factory out there, good for you. But, I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for. You hired workers the rest of us paid to educate. You were safe in your factory because of police forces and fire forces that the rest of us paid for. You didn’t have to worry that marauding bands would come and seize everything at your factory and hire someone to protect against this because of the work the rest of us did. Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific or a great idea. God bless. Keep a big hunk of it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a hunk of that and pay forward for the next kid who comes along.” Elizabeth Warren, cited in “Bitter Politics of Envy?” - http://nyti.ms/xRc5pO

The Book on In Our Time

Brilliant five part series on “The Written World” by Melvyn Bragg on BBC4’s In Our Time. Part 3 on world religions is particularly good: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/writtenworld

Filter Failure

“There’s no such thing as information overload — only filter failure.” Clay Shirky, http://youtu.be/LabqeJEOQyI

Information Overload?

“Over the past couple hundred years, we’ve had this idea that knowledge is composed of facts about the world, and together we are engaged in this multigenerational enterprise of gathering facts and posting them, and ultimately we’ll have a complete picture of the world. That view of facts as the irreducible atoms of knowledge has some benefit, but we’re seeing a different type of fact emerge on the Net as well. Traditional facts are still there. Facts are facts. But we’re seeing organizations of all sorts releasing their data, their facts, onto the Web as huge clouds of triples [another word for linked data]. They’re a connection of two ideas through some relationship — that’s why they’re called triples — but not only can they be linked together by computers, they themselves consist of links. Each of the elements of a linked atom is a pointer to some resource that disambiguates it and explains what it is.” - Are We On Information Overload? http://www.salon.com/?p=10800301

Colbert?

“The new Colbert has crossed the line that separates a TV stunt from reality and a parody from what is being parodied. In June, after petitioning the Federal Election Commission, he started his own super PAC — a real one, with real money. He has run TV ads, endorsed (sort of) the presidential candidacy of Buddy Roemer, the former governor of Louisiana, and almost succeeded in hijacking and renaming the Republican primary in South Carolina. “Basically, the F.E.C. gave me the license to create a killer robot,” Colbert said to me in October, and there are times now when the robot seems to be running the television show instead of the other way around.”  - “How Many Stephen Colbert’s Are There?” - http://nyti.ms/wi8MPh

The Joy of Quiet: http://nyti.ms/vY2IFn

“Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once… ‘Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,’ the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, ‘and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.’ He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone… The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential. - “The Joy of Quiet,” Pico Iyer, http://nyti.ms/vY2IFn