On Bad Parchment

“While the velvety softness of perfect skin can be quite appealing to handle, getting to know imperfect parchment is ultimately more interesting and rewarding. Damage is telling, as this post shows, and it may shed light on such things as the attitude of scribes (who did not necessarily mind holes on the page), the manner in which a book was stored by its owner (with a missing clasp or in a wet environment), and even the state of mind of those looking at it (‘Must cut out golden letters!’). As a book historian it feels good to work with bad skin.”

"The Skinny on Bad Parchment" - http://medievalbooks.nl/2014/10/24/feeling-good-about-bad-skin/

Spiritual Materialism

Interesting London based artist working on the intersection between materiality and spirituality: 

“‘“Spiritual Materialism” is a collection of artifacts from the spaces in-between,’ Lauder explains, ‘reflections on the human hunger for profundity and although at the same time influenced by a number of cultures, pointing the finger in the direction of our common human heritage.’ Drawing on both religious and spiritual iconography, Lauder’s illustration work is complemented by his woodworking prowess... Despite heading to Bali to surf and escape the British summer (i.e. slightly warmer rainy season), Lauder found himself in a familiar location: the studio. ‘It was pretty tough finding a balance between enjoying the island life and making work for the exhibition,’ he says. ‘I basically shut myself away for six weeks in the studio and then when the [work] was done tried to cram in as much time in the water as possible.’”

http://www.coolhunting.com/culture/spiritual-materialism-satta-deus
The exhibition's crafted and material focus is quite interesting to me. It strikes me that the artist is touching on an old nerve related to the making of religious books, which drew upon a similar sense of the spirituality of things.

On Outsourcing

“Recent conversations about online higher education have revolved around how colleges can and should blast their courses out into the wider world. But for institutions that sell an intimate, localized experience, a more-pressing question might be how they can and should integrate courses from elsewhere.”

"At Liberal-Arts Colleges, Debate about Online Courses is Really about Outsourcing" The Chronicle http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/?p=55151

Eichmann's Lies

“As head of the Jewish Department within the Nazi SS, Adolf Eichmann held operational responsibility for the extermination of European Jewry through crucial years of World War II. To his chosen work of murder, Eichmann brought a zeal and commitment that he sustained even through 15 years of exile after the war. At his trial in Jerusalem in 1960, the Nazi leader attempted to present himself as a self-effacing servant of the German state, dutifully following orders from a higher command. The image of Eichmann as a technocratic bureaucrat has endured even as subsequently discovered testimony in his own handwriting and voice have revealed a man ferociously devoted to Nazi racial ideology—and utterly unrepentant for his vast crimes.

Bettina Stangneth, a German philosopher and historian, undertook the daunting task of mastering the Eichmann archive, including his postwar writings and hours of tape-recorded discussions with fellow Nazi exiles in Argentina. Her work was published in Germany in 2011 and released this year in English as Eichmann Before Jerusalem, a title that invites comparison with the classic work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, by Hannah Arendt that did so much to fix and perpetuate the false image of Eichmann as a passionless bureaucrat.”

"The Lies of Adolf Eichmann" The Atlantic - http://theatln.tc/1AqdbOD

A Decade since Derrida

“Any fool can undo things. As he made clear in his last interview, Derrida loved the great cultural and artistic achievements of the past as much as anyone did, but he had the burden of writing about them under the conditions that we regard as postmodern. He positioned himself in his work like the Jewish God, never to be spelled out or pinned down. He played a unique writerly game in the hope that no one could fashion an image of what he meant and so everyone could learn from his lessons of evasion. Nevertheless, deconstruction became in its turn a graven image. Meaning no more than “undo” in today’s mediaspeak, deconstruction has become a banal technical exercise, its historical context for- gotten. Its spirituality has been so utterly displaced that no common user of the term could begin to imagine what it is, or was. The man whom, as he said, we may re-create by reading him after his death remains a plurality of possibilities. There were and there remain many, many Derridas.”

Leslie Chamberlain, "The Sad Rider: A Decade Since Derrida," Common Knowledge vol 20 no 3: pp. 393-401 - http://commonknowledge.dukejournals.org/content/20/3/391.abstract

Daf Yomi

“But in fact, the Gemara goes on to counter, there is a way for a gentile woman to become marriageable: All she has to do is convert to Judaism. Doesn’t this mean that she is legally akin to other forbidden women, who are not forbidden forever and always, but only under certain conditions? But the rabbis deny the parallel. ‘When she converts, she is a different body,’ they say: Conversion creates a new legal person, who did not exist before. It is only this new person who is marriageable, not the old, gentile version of her who has ceased to exist.”

"Converting for Love?" - Tablet Magazine, - http://www.tabletmag.com/?p=186707. Literary critic Adam Kirsch is reading a page of Talmud a day, along with Jews around the world.

Borges on Divine Things

“Ferrari: But we could say that in all poetry there’s an approximation to something else, beyond the words and the subject matter.

Borges: Well, language does not match up to the complexity of things. I think that the philosopher Whitehead talks of the paradox of the perfect dictionary, that is, the idea of supposing that all the words that a dictionary registers exhaust reality. Chesterton also wrote about this, saying that it is absurd to suppose that all the nuances of human consciousness, which are more vast than a jungle, can be contained in a mechanical system of grunts which would be, in this case, the words spoken by a stockbroker. That’s absurd and yet people talk of a perfect language, of a rich language, but in comparison to our consciousness language is very poor. I think that somewhere Stevenson says that what happens in ten minutes exceeds all Shakespeare’s vocabulary [laughs]. I believe it’s the same idea.”

"In March 1984, Jorge Luis Borges began a series of radio 'dialogues' with the Argentinian poet and essayist Osvaldo Ferrari. Forty-five of them have just been translated into English for the first time by Jason Wilson and will be published this month by Seagull Books as Conversations, Volume 1. What follows is Borges’s conversation with Ferrari about the existence of God." - NY Review of Books - http://bit.ly/1y7kyG3

Errol Morris on Peace

Errol Morris has made a series of short films on peace for the NY Times. He chose to focus upon three individuals who ostensibly had little power, influence, means or ability, but who nonetheless changed the world. The first two in particular, explicitly cite faith as crucial to their political perseverance. Morris, as always, simply asks the questions in childlike wonder at the amazing stories they tell. 

• Lemah Gbowee: The Dream - http://nyti.ms/1szfxq6
• Lech Walesa: The Shipyard - http://nyti.ms/1s5ITdL
• Bob Geldof: The Moment - http://nyti.ms/1szgDSy 

God Games

"Kit Eaton reviews Godus, the Sandbox and Godville, three free mobile games that let you control an entire world, not just a single character." - http://nyti.ms/1soP2Ue

It is an open question today whether and how video games foster religious thought. Nonetheless, I wonder if this is not rather the nexus where narcissism and atheism meet as the player displaces divinity.

The Myth of Religious Violence

“The popular belief that religion is the cause of the world’s bloodiest conflicts is central to our modern conviction that faith and politics should never mix. But the messy history of their separation suggests it was never so simple.”

Karen Armstrong, "The Myth of Religious Violence," The Guardian - http://bit.ly/1vBXP5U

Peculiar that she doesn't cite William Cavanaugh's excellent book by that title.