“In Britain, by contrast, the trend has been to integrate theology and religious studies, to the extent of questioning the legitimacy of the dichotomy. The wisdom behind this stance might be summed up in the following seven propositions.”
- David Ford, "Theological Wisdom, British Style"
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1976
“Punctuation itself – literally, the act of adding ‘points’ to a text – did not arrive until the third century BC, when Aristophanes of the great Library at Alexandria described a series of middle (·), low (.) and high points (˙) denoting short, medium and long pauses. Over the centuries, this system gave rise to punctuation as we know it: from Aristophanes’ three dots came the colon, the full stop, and many other marks besides. At the same time the paragraphos evolved into the ‘pilcrow,’ a C-shaped mark (¶) placed at the start of each new section in a text. The word space was a late arrival, appearing only when monks in medieval England and Ireland began splitting apart unfamiliar Latin texts to make them easier to read.”
"Maximal meaning in minimal space: the history of punctuation" - http://www.shadycharacters.co.uk/?p=279
I sometimes liken studying humanities at Newcastle to engaging the ocean beaches here. In the beginning of your studies you learn to swim, avoid riptides, and maybe start to body surf a bit in the waves. More advanced students eventually learn to make surfboards with wood lying about and some become quite acrobatic. Later even boats can be made and whole crews join massive research vessels that take off to sail the ocean blue. However, it seems to me that advanced studies in philosophy, religion and theology are something more akin to scuba diving. We study those ships that sink, interrogating their integrity under extreme conditions. Our task includes the various disciplines that surf and sail, maybe even sublating them to draw on Hegel's terminology. However, our aim is to look beneath the waves. It might be called an interest in substance, but probably best to leave it vague given how many ways we've come to think of being since Aristotle first identified metaphysics as such.
To some surfers it's hard to tell what we're doing, as we're invisible below the water. To others who care to peak, it seems rather odd that we might be interested in such de(con)struction. Still the passion for scuba is so strong that I've even known some of my colleagues to sink old ships intentionally and wait for the coral to grow. It's messy at first, but soon, whole new ecosystems develop. New schools of fish come to swim and eek out an existence (new sharks too). I've come to think that some of the new things we're doing in religion and theology at Newcastle require some sinking and settling. But there's a reef waiting for us if our wreck catches those age old ocean currents.
“No matter how they answer the God question, generous-minded people could profit from adopting an attitude of critical sympathy towards religion and maybe even taking the odd dip into it – provided they heed Canon William Vanstone’s warning that the Church is like a public swimming pool, where most of the noise comes from the shallow end.”
"After God: What Can Atheists Learn from Believers?" New Statesman -http://bit.ly/10tPe3D
“The medieval physician and legal scholar Maimonides similarly instructed people to eat and drink less than what filled their bellies (he thought the stomach should be three-quarters full). Moreover, they should eat slowly. Modern science corroborates Maimonides: it takes about 20 minutes for the brain to receive messages from the stomach that it has had enough. Satiety can be achieved with less food than one might think, and it requires more time to reach it.”
“Like most of the world, I don’t know much about Pope Francis, but it’s hard not to be impressed by someone who says he prefers a church that suffers ‘accidents on the streets’ to a church that is sick because it self-referentially closes in on itself.”
David Brooks, "How Movements Recover," - http://nyti.ms/Xh8YVS
An amazing set of photos has been published on the NY Times' Lens blog. It's a sample of Kenro Izu's exhibition "Where Prayer Echoes," at the Howard Greenberg Gallery in Manhatten.
“Another experience nine years later in India changed how — and what — he shot. He was at a temple he had often photographed, Mr. Izu said, when he noticed how the faithful often left the sanctuary to bathe on the beach outside. In all the times he had gone there, he had not documented those rituals followed by thousands of pilgrims. ‘I had just photographed the temple from all angles from inside and outside,’ he said. ‘But without the people, it was just a shell. If you build a temple it does not have to be majestic. You can build a house, but once people come in and make an altar and start to pray, then it becomes a temple or church.’”
"Kenro Izu's Classic Portraits of the Faithful" NY Times - http://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/?p=122957
“G. K. Chesterton had the best advice on suffering fools gladly. He put emphasis on the gladly. When you’re with fools, laugh with them and at them simultaneously: ‘An obvious instance is that of ordinary and happy marriage. A man and a woman cannot live together without having against each other a kind of everlasting joke. Each has discovered that the other is a fool, but a great fool. This largeness, this grossness and gorgeousness of folly is the thing which we all find about those with whom we are in intimate contact; and it is the one enduring basis of affection, and even of respect.’”
David Brooks "Suffering Fools Gladly" - http://nyti.ms/TBSuJn
“Libraries should lead the charge in advancing the values of print culture, just as they need to consider the ways that Internet-based information should be archived and preserved. Print media fills in for the vast limitations of Internet media—serving as its ultimate backup and giving fixity to information. As we drive technology forward, an equally important task is to preserve the best of what’s left behind. We are living in the Internet’s revolutionary generation. The decisions we make now will affect culture for many years to come.”
James Panero, "The Culture of the Copy" - http://bit.ly/S5EQ31
“Starting as early as the 1970s, some cognitive psychologists, philosophers, and linguists began to wonder whether meaning wasn’t something totally different from a language of thought [Call it Mentalese, whichtranslates words into actual concepts: a polar bear or speed limit, for instance]. They suggested that—instead of abstract symbols—meaning might really be something much more closely intertwined with our real experiences in the world, with the bodies that we have. As a self-conscious movement started to take form, it took on a name, embodiment, which started to stand for the idea that meaning might be something that isn’t distilled away from our bodily experiences but is instead tightly bound by them. For you, the word dog might have a deep and rich meaning that involves the ways you physically interact with dogs—how they look and smell and feel. But the meaning of polar bear will be totally different, because you likely don’t have those same experiences of direct interaction.”
Benjamin Bergen, "Embodied Cognition," Scientific American - http://bit.ly/UjP0tQ
“Modern politicians—taking their cues from advertising and business—tend to use words which come attached with an aura of positive buzz, often without having a grip on what they actually mean. ‘Pragmatism’ is a classic example. In this case, however, the harm done goes beyond the annoyance caused to pedants and opponents of ‘political mumbo-jumbo.’ Rather, it allows politicians to subtly stifle dissent, and causes us to neglect the most fundamental questions about what our society ought to look like.
... Is a society ‘working’ if GDP rises steadily but citizens are drastically unequal? What about if people of different races and religions have different access to opportunities and goods? These questions are ineliminably moral, and must be answered in detail before we can have a useable notion of ‘what works.’ The attempt to find some value-neutral standpoint from which to assess what works—the aspiration for an escape from ideology altogether—is an impossible one. Deciding how to weigh up different social benefits and harms is hard; it goes to the core of what we want our society to be like. But these questions are just made harder by reducing a vast swathe of distinct and often competing considerations to a single, sweeping judgment of ‘what works.’”
Alex Worsnip, "Against Pragmatism" - http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/?p=129556
Trending on the NY Times this week is Maureen Dowd's posting of a priest's response to the recent shootings in Newtown. To the question, "Why, God?" he offers the following:
“Implicit here is the question of how we look to God to act and to enter our lives. For whatever reason, certainly foreign to most of us, God has chosen to enter the world today through others, through us. We have stories of miraculous interventions, lightning-bolt moments, but far more often the God of unconditional love comes to us in human form, just as God did over 2,000 years ago.”
Two scriptures always come to mind at these times. Firstly, before the book of Job unfolds into a debate about justice and theodicy, Job's friends respond in silence, presence and empathy: "They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great" (Job 2.13, NRSV). Secondly, notable both for its powerful echo of Job, much more its brevity: "Jesus wept" (John 11.35, KJV). Maybe more theology should begin in tears.
“Whereas I don’t believe I have read a single work by a milkman lamenting that most people now buy their milk from a shop instead of having it delivered, books fretting over the death of print form one of the genres of the moment.”
Andrew Martin, "How We Read," Financial Times - http://on.ft.com/T9MR3h
Interesting short interview of Jürgen Habermas by Francis Fukuyama:
“Allow me to address the normative and empirical aspects of your question separately. The idea of “shared sovereignty” – shared between Europeans in their role as EU citizens and these same people in their role as members of one of the participating nation states – must be developed from the roots of the constitution-building process. This idea has an important implication for how we should conceive of the future shape of a democratized Political Union. If we are to cease shirking the question of the “finalité” of the unification process, we must lay down the correct parameters... For the purpose of democratic legitimation it would be sufficient that a European government be responsible in equal measure to the Parliament and the Council in which the national governments are represented. From an empirical perspective, your question puts a finger on a sore point. It is true that the citizens will always have closer ties to their nation state than to the European Union; however, the fact that, to date, insufficient mutual trust has developed among the European peoples is also a consequence of the failure of the political elites. The latter have so far evaded all European themes; in their national public arenas, they make “Europe” responsible for unpopular decisions in which they themselves have participated in Brussels.”
"The European Citizen: Just a Myth?" The Global Journal - http://bit.ly/VAVTEQ
“Cognitive empathy… is about perspective taking, about stepping into somebody else’s world, almost like an actor looking through the eyes of their character. It’s about understanding somebody else’s worldview, their beliefs, their fears, the experiences that shape how they look at the world and how they look at themselves. We make assumptions about people. We have prejudices about people, which block us from seeing their uniqueness, their individuality. We use labels, and highly empathic people get beyond those labels by nurturing their curiosity about others… I think we need to think about bringing empathy into our everyday lives in a very sort of habitual way. Socrates said that the way to live a wise life was to know thyself, and we’ve generally thought of that as being about being self reflective, looking in at ourselves. It’s been about introspection. But I think that in the twenty-first century we need to recognize that to know thyself is something that can also be achieved by stepping outside yourself by discovering other people’s lives. And I think empathy is the way to revolutionize our own philosophies of life, to become more outrospective and to create the revolution of human relationships that I think we so desperately need.”
“Not all of Derrida’s writing is to everyone’s taste. He had an irritating habit of overusing the rhetorical question, which lends itself easily to parody: “What is it, to speak? How can I even speak of this? Who is this ‘I’ who speaks of speaking?”
Even so, the Cambridge backwoodsmen were wrong. Derrida, who died of cancer in 2004 urging his friends to affirm life, was no nihilist. Nor did he want to blow up western civilisation with a stick of conceptual dynamite. He simply wished to make us less arrogantly assured that when we speak of truth, love, identity and authority, we know exactly what we mean.”
Terry Eagleton, " Derrida: A Biography" The Guardian - http://gu.com/p/3bngv
Wondering how to bring back the joy and excitement of the childhood advent calendar? The clever folks at Masters of Malt have it in one:
“We love Christmas and we love the excitement of advent calendars, but we’ve always longed for something a little more interesting than a small piece of cheap milk chocolate on the other side of each door… Well folks, we’ve got the perfect solution - the Whisky Advent Calendar from Drinks by the Dram.
Behind each of the 24 doors is a different 3cl sample of delicious whisky! We’ll keep the contents a surprise, but we can tell you that behind one of the doors is a sample of 50 year old single malt Scotch whisky, the full-sized bottle of which is worth £350!
Merry Christmas!”
Just read through an interesting review on digital humanities and the emerging shift from literature to data, by Stephen Marche, "Literature is not Data: Against Digital Humanities," LA Review of Books,
http://bit.ly/Rs8F7w. Marche, it seems to me, is not against digital humanities as such. Rather his concern is for the hubristic utopianism that pretends that digitisation of data will save the humanities. This relates to my own research on the theological meaning of the codex book at the moment. As Marche puts it:
“Google Books, in its way, represents an even more profound shift than the printing press, because it ends the relationship to the codex which began much earlier, in the fourth century. Binding together texts into portable libraries was one of the original Christian acts. For the Romans, texts were isolated events contained in scrolls. The ferocious squeamishness of hundreds of librarians and writers and scholars who resist this disbinding of literature today isn’t mere self-interest. The end of the book is a kind of sacrilege to them, and they’re not wrong. Cutting open the book is literally a return to the forms and modes of paganism...
...Meaning is mushy. Meaning falls apart. Meaning is often ugly, stewed out of weakness and failure. It is as human as the body, full of crevices and prey to diseases. It requires courage and a certain comfort with impurity to live with. Retreat from the smoothness of technology is not an available option, even if it were desirable. The disbanding of the papers has already occurred, a splendid fluttering of the world’s texts to the winds. We will have to gather them all together somehow. But the possibility of a complete, instantly accessible, professionally verified and explicated, free global library is more than just a dream. Through the perfection of our smooth machines, we will soon be able to read anything, anywhere, at any time.
Insight remains handmade.”
Recently, I've tried to think through the meaning of writing after Derrida, and Lyotard, etc. What's often missed is the strange set of side comments and footnotes that they made on writing itself. As Derrida recognized, this concern for writing goes back to Plato's record of Socrates' aside on the priority of speech (most famously in the Phaedrus). It's as if the need to record and repeat is part of philosophy itself somehow and digital media is the latest radicalisation of this tendency. Radical both in its change, and in its return to the root (radix) of the problem.
As book historians attest, the codex provided a set of techniques which we developed to make meaning. Pages cut, margins spaced, paragraphs, periods and breaks, all designed to humanise information, aid the memory, and connect us to the infinite abyss poeticized in Gilgamesh all those years ago. And yet, we stand today in a collective amnesia of this history of the book, a blind eroticism of the latest iPhone, or the milliseconds it takes Google to produce its limited results. Little care or concern is voiced for what we are losing in this shift to data.
"Insight remains handmade," Marche writes. A simple summation of the small side comments and technical reviews, which concern themselves with the digital devices' strain upon our eyes and hands. Will these comments lead to some sense of the ease with which these grim data reepers help or hinder the meaning making work which we linguistic animals must labor to achieve?
Let me be clear, I am not a luddite. My aim is simply to point out the need for ancient humanist techniques and not to leave it to a few tech executives and focus groups at Apple or Google. Just as Nietzsche declared God to be dead, which decried our feeble theologies more than the life of transcendent deities, so too, we must remind people that Steve Jobs is dead. It is not his corpse that should concern us, but the spectre of a single magician who would be responsible for the fragile, finite, human struggle we are in.
“… contemplation is very far from being just one kind of thing that Christians do: it is the key to prayer, liturgy, art and ethics, the key to the essence of a renewed humanity that is capable of seeing the world and other subjects in the world with freedom – freedom from self-oriented, acquisitive habits and the distorted understanding that comes from them. To put it boldly, contemplation is the only ultimate answer to the unreal and insane world that our financial systems and our advertising culture and our chaotic and unexamined emotions encourage us to inhabit. To learn contemplative practice is to learn what we need so as to live truthfully and honestly and lovingly. It is a deeply revolutionary matter.”
Archbishop of Canterbury's address to the Synod of Bishops in Rome - http://bit.ly/Q3kErr
“‘I’m finding my literary skills incredibly valuable in software development, which is not something I would have expected. ... My ability to very precisely verbally describe how a reader engages a text, what a reader needs, turns out to be a huge asset in software development.’”
"Why a 17th-Century Text Is the Perfect Starting Point for Reinventing the Book," The Atlantic, http://bit.ly/SKMSNj
