Today, in the 21st century, make of it what you will, we have our own Absolut for a better world. 

"It's about the power of narrative. How narrative itself is like a back door to a very deep place inside of us. A place where reason doesn't necessarily hold sway. And you know like all of us, when a story gets inside of us it makes us less crazy."

Just as stories cured the king's madness in Arabian Nights, so too Glass's approach to the news brings his audience in touch with the human beings caught up in what is going on in the world today. In any case, here's a short vimeo of Glass doing what he does best.

Ira Glass at Gel 2007 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

As an aside, the power of narrative to humanize and foster empathy is one made by commentators of the Christian and Jewish scriptures as well. Burton Visotzky's The Genesis of Ethics comes to mind. There, Visotzky writes about the years of experience he has teaching ethics through the narratives in the book of Genesis. Students' ethical aptitude increased not from learning a list of moral precepts, but through engaging the stories where so many ethical connundrums were faced by vividly depicted human beings like Abraham, Sarah and Jacob.

One Christmas Eve [a father] puts into one son's stocking a fine gold watch, and into another son's, a pile of manure. The next morning, the first boy comes to his father and says glumly, "Dad, I just don't know what I'll do with this watch. It's so fragile. It could break." The other boy runs to him and says, "Daddy! Daddy! Santa left me a pony, if only I can just find it!"

When it comes to our happiness, what's real is utterly inextricable from our "adaptations" or "defense mechanisms" which the study deemed so important. The indicators for long term health and happiness came down to healthy adaptations of reality. I'll leave you to the article and Freud journals for more on this, and don't assume that because you know what good adaptations are that you'll necessarily be able to enact them. Rather I'll leave you with a similarly themed recent post on the NY Times which recounts a number of paradoxically happy people who seem to live up to the beatitude, "blessed (happy) are you who weep:"

“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.” The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943, on her way to her death at Auschwitz two months later. Towards the end of his life, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen,” though by then he had already lost his father when he was 7, his first wife when she was 20 and his first son, aged 5. In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed. I’m not sure I knew the details of all these lives when I was 29, but I did begin to guess that happiness lies less in our circumstances than in what we make of them, in every sense. “There is nothing either good or bad,” I had heard in high school, from Hamlet, “but thinking makes it so.”

Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?”

I'll be teaching a course this Autumn on this kind of return of religion in academic discourse and the reasons why so many theorists are drawn to its themes and discourse as they grapple with today's social and political questions.

"Both schools agree on one thing, however. Both believe that banks are too big. Both narratives suggest we should return to the day when banks were focused institutions — when savings banks, insurance companies, brokerages and investment banks lived separate lives."

This is a really important point and offers a helpful supplement to what I cited a few months ago here. Having said that, I'm not convinced, as Brooks argues, that we must in fact choose between these two theories. Rather, it seems to me that policy makers will need to take both into account as they navigate a mix of solutions to prevent similar crashes in the future.

It's important to note that on her website she is not advocating that all religions are the same or that religion has cornered the market on compassion, but rather that compassion can be found in all religions and should be at the forefront of what we most desire to encourage in religious traditions.

On the one hand, it seems to me that this kind of charter does provide a public political statement about the role of religion in civil society today. It provides a vital political symbol of solidarity which challenges the secularists who just wish religion would go away. The response to religious violence cannot be the rejection of religion itself, but rather, the rejection of those who would hijack it for violent ends. Religion can continue to be a source of cohesion, compassion and global integration. We cannot and should not throw the baby out with the bath water. 

On the other hand, however, I think we should be realistic about the nature of religious violence today and the manner in which religious texts and traditions are co-opted in its favor. Armstrong is absolutely right to focus on the compassionate role religious traditions can and must play today. She is right to make it clear for the irreligious population of the west that the majority of religious people are against extremist violence. But this puts the problem all the more bluntly. If the majority of religious people are already against the violence in their name, then will a charter provide the solidarity to stop the violence? It seems to me we should shy away from suggesting that religious traditions themselves will sign onto such a charter in a contractual way that would actually stop extremists from hijacking religion for their own violent ends. The solution to this kind of violence will require much more full bodied social and political work to resolve. Armstrong herself recognizes this, so I suppose I am just emphasizing her point here. People do not kill each other because the Bible or Qur'an says so. They kill each other because it seems the best way out of their difficult economic and political circumstances. The bombs stopped in Northern Ireland when genuine alternatives were presented and people felt that they could achieve their aims through democratic political processes. Until the folks who have hijacked religion for their violent ends can see similar non-violent political alternatives, then the violence will continue, no matter how much compassion is signed up to elsewhere. 

I do not mean to be crass or antagonistic here. I think Armstrong's charter will help foster inter-religious dialogue and clarify the compassionate aims of the vast majority of religious people. But I would suggest that the presentation of this charter must be tempered with some sobriety and the recognition of a broader panoply of approaches to the problem of religious violence and its solution. In this sense she should be seen in light of a much larger group of people working along similar lines. For starters, Tony Blaire's Faith and Globalization Foundation which coordinated with Miroslav Volf at Yale Divinity School to teach a course and provide some excellent resources for those studying the issue today. 

I am well aware of the influence of this return to the fatalism and certitude of Calvininist dictums, and do not mean to suggest that they are unimportant. Neither do I want to suggest that these articles do an adequate job of presenting the nuanced and multifarious ways that the predestination pie has been sliced up over the past five centuries. However, I do have to punctuate Time's proclamation that Neo-Calvinism is the third most important world changing idea with a question mark or two. The article suggests that because the David Crowder Band is top in Christian album sales on iTunes, this now serves as solid sociological data for World Christianity today. If Time had taken the time to look through the census data however, a different idea would most likely have emerged: Pentecostalism.

Peter Berger, a prominent sociologist of post-secularism gave a paper for the Pew Forum on "Religion in a Globalizing World." Here he argued:

In Los Angeles, the Templeton Foundation ran a very successful conference on global pentecostalism, which was fascinating, and it was to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Azusa Street Mission, which was the origin of modern pentecostalism. There were very good papers, and we saw a little movie about the Azusa Street Mission, which was a pathetic little affair where this charismatic black preacher came out of Texas and started preaching. Estimates of the number of followers vary, I guess Pew has the latest. But in terms of worldwide pentecostalism, the estimates range within 250 million and 450 million adherents, which must be the fastest growth of any religious movement in history. It's an unbelievable phenomenon.

This is a really important challenge to Time's suggestion and one which I wish more people would pay attention to. It is a key ingredient in a larger global shift to the southern hemisphere in Christianity and is probably one of the most important factors in the kinds of divisions we are seeing in the Anglican church at the moment (I would suggest that this is just the first of many such socio-political battles which will arise between religious traditions in the northern and southern hemispheres). Furthermore, this emphasis is not a matter of denominational pandering. The folks doing the research are not Pentecostals and have no other interest but to understand what the movement is about and why it is growing so rapidly. In many cases, because Pentecostal social and political values are often out of step with those held within liberal democracies (e.g. gay and abortion rights).

Pentecostal and Charismatic Research InitiativeMore importantly however, major research funding bodies are directing money to this issue. For instance, the Templeton Foundation funded Pew's sensus in 2006 as mentioned by Berger above, but as well, they are now funding research centers like the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. They are offering $3.5 million in grants to scholars working in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the former Soviet Union in one of the largest world collaborations to study Pentecostalism's growth and influence today. Donald Miller, the Executive Director of the CRCC was interviewed for Pew a few years ago on a similar theme which gives some idea of the kinds of issues which will be addressed on a larger scaled in this project.

Lastly, I just want to cite some of the statistical facts Pew posted about the growth of Christianity in the world today. Here, it is projected that by 2050 1.5 billion of the world's 3.1 billion Christians will live in Africa and South America with a further 600 million in Asia. In short, Christianity is shifting to the south of the equator where Pentecostalism has experienced the largest growth. 

BILL MOYERS: And, yet, Secretary Geithner's chief-of-staff is the former lobbyist for Goldman Sachs. How - serious question - how do they make a dispassionate judgment about how to deal with Goldman Sachs when they're so intertwined with Goldman Sachs' mindset?

SIMON JOHNSON: I have no idea. Of course, the administration, the new administration, has a lot of rules about lobbying. And they have rules that basically say, I think, as understood the rules, when they were first presented, I was very impressed. They basically said, "We're not going to hire lobbyists into the administration. There has to be some sort of cooling off period."

BILL MOYERS: And the next day Obama exempted a number of people from that very rule that he had just proclaimed.

SIMON JOHNSON: Yes. It's a problem. It's a huge problem.

Johnson then goes on with his suggestion which, although not brain science, is nonetheless strategically very insightful. Basically, you have to break up the large banks. Currently, the FDIC in the States has a very strong system for intervening with troubled smaller banks. The problem is these large banks, ie those that are too big to fail and have forced the taxpayer to bail them out. The idea is, and I think Geithner agrees with this in principle, is that if a bank is to big to fail then it shouldn't exist. The problem is how to do this politically. One key ingredient Johnson suggests is not currently happening, is that key lobbyists and former CEOs from these large banks should not be influencing the intervention process in favor of their own profit margins.

It's worth a listen.

For most of my life I have lived under the impression that Astroturf was the low maintenance way to keep a field. No mowing, painting or filling in divots from over zealous slide tacklers. But then I noticed a man who appeared to be mowing the green on a sport utility version of those geriatric go-carts you sometimes see racing along the sidewalks at 3.4 mph. Every few minutes my window view is invaded by this peculiar little fire engine red buggy topped by a man aerodynamically hunched towards its handlebars. He wears a dark wind parka, beanie, red ear muffs, and gloves which you can just see maxing out the throttle.

I squint a bit and can just make out that he is not mowing really so much as sweeping. However, his utility vehicle doesn’t seem to pick anything up and every so often the little turf jockey is resigned to dislodge himself from his perch to pick up larger wrappers and knick knacks the footballers have left behind. “Kids these days,” he seems to say.

This little ritual happens three or four times a week I think. It’s like a Zen clock, tick-tocking across my window.

I consider the daunting task of sweeping this grand patch of Astroturf as a kind of metaphor at first. That robust little turf spiffer is me struggling to get my work done this day. Then I begin to wonder what it would be like if all I had to do was putter back and forth across a pitch, perfectly reordering my little patch of reality. Before I can get my imagined cap upon my blissful head however, a young rookie takes my place on the still as yet unswept Astroturf. I am forced to watch as this interloper is called in to finish the elder estate curator’s task. Although not wearing uniforms, they are dressed in identical beanies and parkas. As you can imagine, there wasn’t much to say. One man hopped off his camel as another hopped on. A few little instructions and an encouraging pat on the back and off the newbie went. The elder man stood on the pitch to wave and instruct the rookie on his course, but after just a length and a half he threw up his thumbs in approval and walked away.

It has now been an hour and the Astroturf is looking much the same as it always does from this distance, but I’m sure to our heroic sweeper all the plastic blades of faux lawn are in perfect place. I wonder if tonight’s band of footballers will recognize nirvana when they see it. I wonder why I care. Maybe that common recurring dream for a simple life has found a new metaphor to express itself? Or maybe it’s just a welcome distraction as I imagine my own little project done for the day? Whatever the case, “Go jockey go!”