Politifact on Religion

Politifact recently checked a claim that the founders of the American republic thought religion only referred to Christianity. They deemed this a pants on fire lie based on the following:

“Thomas Kidd, professor of history at Baylor University and the author of God of Liberty: A Religious History of the American Revolution, said ‘the founders were certainly aware of other religions besides Christianity, and discussed them at length in their writings.’

Kidd pointed us to a 1818 letter from John Adams: ‘This country has done much. I wish it would do more; and annul every narrow idea in religion, government and commerce,’ Adams wrote. ‘It has pleased the providence of the first cause, the universal cause, that Abraham should give religion not only to Hebrews, but to Christians and Mohomitans, the greatest part of the modern civilized world.’

Benjamin Franklin also weighed in on the subject. Jan Ellen Lewis, professor of history at Rutgers University, cited Franklin’s autobiography, when he praised a new meeting house built in Philadephia. ‘The design in building not being to accommodate any particular sect, but the inhabitants in general,’ Franklin wrote. ‘So that even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.’

In his autobiography, Thomas Jefferson spoke directly to the debate over the crafting of a Virginia statute for religious freedom. Jefferson describes a proposal to add the phrase ‘the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion. The insertion was rejected by a great majority,’ Jefferson wrote, ‘In proof that they meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and Infidel of every denomination.’”

"Fundamentalist: When Founders Said Religion They Meant Christianity," Politifact - http://bit.ly/1leHdc5

I find it odd that Christian people today seek constitutional rights to oppress other religious groups. It is equally absurd that radical secularists seek to exclude religious groups from all public reason. The form of secularism the founders seem to have had in mind in the above quotations generally promotes the State's even handed-ness towards different groups rather than their total exclusion. The aim seems to be the best way to promote freedom as broadly as possible. That it has turned out to be rather difficult to figure out the best way to foster a reasonably fair expression of religious difference in a practicable manner over the past few hundred years, is beside the point. As it happens, the founders did not say that the task of balancing freedom with equality and fraternity would be easy. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age provides a lengthy recent contextualization of these matters. 

On Writing Routines

“The best inspiration often came while walking. Beethoven always took a pencil and paper with him in the Vienna Woods, and Kierkegaard often came home and started scribbling again still in his hat and coat. Some always wrote standing up - Hemingway and, I think, Virginia Woolf (who is not covered here). Nabokov started standing up, then progressed to sitting and finally lying down. Few seem to have practised any more violent exercise than walking, apart from Byron with his boxing and riding and, rather surprisingly, Joan Miró. The dreamy surrealist was an ardent practitioner of boxing, running and ‘Mediterranean yoga’. He detested going to parties, telling an American journalist, ‘They get on my tits.’”

Christopher Hart, "Rise and Shine" - www.literaryreview.co.uk/hart_12_13.php

Book Scanning Accidents

“A small but thriving subculture is documenting Google Books’ scanning process, in the form of Tumblrs, printed books, photographs, online videos, and gallery-based installations. Something new is happening here that brings together widespread nostalgia for paperbound books with our concerns about mass digitization. Scavengers obsessively comb through page after page of Google Books, hoping to stumble upon some glitch that hasn’t yet been unearthed...

Soulellis calls the Library of the Printed Web ‘an accumulation of accumulations,’ much of it printed on demand. In fact, he says that ‘I could sell the Library of the Printed Web and then order it again and have it delivered to me in a matter of days.’ A few years ago, such books would never have been possible. The book is far from dead: it’s returning in forms that few could ever have imagined.”

"The Artful Accidents of Google Books," The New Yorker - http://nyr.kr/1csSx32

Papyralysis

“But why is a scrolling blur of disembodied letters closer to the supposed essence of literature than a spoken performance or time spent in the presence of charismatic objects? Manuscripts communicate in ways electronic texts, and even printed books, can’t. They speak to presence — to the presence of a person, to the physicality of their body and the instant of their creation. What’s more, the meaning we derive from any text is inextricable from the web of perceptions and impressions that structures our reception of it: the heft of the paper, the smell of the binding, the shape of the handwriting. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze called this tactile intermediary the logique du sens. Pace Parks, there is no ‘essence of literary experience’ that precedes its embodiment.”

Jacob Mikanowski, "Papyralysis," LA Review of Books - http://bit.ly/17R4iAT

Sartre and the FBI

“The irony that emerges from the FBI files on Camus and Sartre, spanning several decades (and which, still partly redacted, I accessed thanks to the open-sesame of the Freedom of Information Act) is that the G-men, initially so anti-philosophical, find themselves reluctantly philosophizing. They become (in GK Chesterton’s phrase) philosophical policemen.”

"The FBI Files on Being and Nothingness," http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/?p=1099013653123741779

Hannah and Her Admirers

“Martin Heidegger, who was both Arendt’s teacher and lover during her student days at the University of Marburg in the mid-1920s, once remarked that there was nothing interesting to say about the life of a philosopher, only about the work. But von Trotta shows how foolish a claim that was. Her film has rightly been praised for portraying thinking on-screen in a manner that isn’t boring in the slightest. To be sure, von Trotta has her tricks: Arendt was a prodigious smoker, and her addiction is used throughout the film as something of a visual gimmick—wisps of cigarette smoke as eye candy, as it were. But first and foremost, von Trotta has Barbara Sukowa playing Arendt, and she is one of the great actresses of our time.”

"Hannah and Her Admirers," The Nation - http://bit.ly/18YZZhN

Gritsch on Luther's Anti-Judaism

“Gritsch... writes to challenge the interpretations put forward by other modern Luther scholars that luther’s opinions towards the Jews can be described as anti-Judiastic, but not anti-Semitic. For Gritisch, the salient difference between these distinctions is that while anti-Judaistic sentiments are rational disagree- ments with Jewish religious beliefs, anti-Semitism is hatred of Jews that is inherently irrational or fanciful. Gritsch argues that luther’s animus was of this latter kind and was ‘against his better judgment’ in the sense that it was internally inconsistent with his broader theological convictions. Gritsch concludes that in his teachings on the Jews, Luther violated his principle that one should only ever be a ‘theologian of the cross.’”

Andrew Kloes, "Book Review: Luther's Hostility to the Jews in His Own Theological Category, Eric Gritsch, Martin Luther's Anti-Semitism: Against His Own Better Judgment, Grand Rapids: WB Eerdmans, 2012," Expository Times, 125(3) 2013.

Kant's Wissenschaft

“When Immanuel Kant called on people to ‘have the courage to use their own understanding,’ to ‘dare to know,’ he had in mind a broad expanse of inquiries, including those in the arts and sciences, and even the testing of truth claims offered in the name of religion. Although Kant wrote before practitioners of the various inquiries distinguished themselves from one another as physicists, historians, chemists, biologists, literary scholars, economists, geologists, metaphysicians, and so on, these several Wissenschaft were nurtured significantly by the same Enlightenment imperative, by the same broad cognitive ideal. That ideal, directing us toward truths that are discovered, not divined, that are grounded in evidence and reasoning rather than tradition or intuition, is the most important common heritage and resource of the entire modern professoriate.”

"Why Can't the Sciences and the Humanities Get Along?" - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education - http://bit.ly/19SFYyD 

Music Difference

“Consider the qualities these high achievers say music has sharpened: collaboration, creativity, discipline and the capacity to reconcile conflicting ideas. All are qualities notably absent from public life. Music may not make you a genius, or rich, or even a better person. But it helps train you to think differently, to process different points of view — and most important, to take pleasure in listening.”

"Is Music the Key to Success?" - http://nyti.ms/15Awe8L 

Arvo Pärt's Gravity

Some years ago Tom Tykwer's Heaven  (2002) inspired my visual and aural awe. Tykwer reworked Krzysztof Kieślowsk posthumous script into his own masterpiece starring Cate Blanchett and Giovanni Ribissi . After watching the trailer for Alfonso Cuarón's recent Gravity, I heard again the haunting soundtrack from Heaven, Arvo Pärt's Spiegel im Spiegel for Violin and Piano. The two films could be understood as mirrors which echo each others' deep humanism. Both evoke the experience of recovering a long forgotten but essential love of life. In any case, these soundtracks have been my writing's inspiration today.